A Monkey Couldn't Paint the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Yesterday a group of students and other community members began a summer study of Karol Wojtyla's (Bl. JPII) Love and Responsibility.  A dense and awesome philosophical work by the man who would become pope, L&R explores what it means to be a person and how the reality of who we are as persons effects our relationships with one another, particularly the relationship between man and woman.  The groundwork of what would later be known as the Theology of the Body, L&R heavily discusses the personalistic norm - that persons are not objects to be used by one another, but are subjects possessing inherent dignity and worth meant to receive and give love, not to be used.   Love is to will the good of the other.  So I'll be posting reflections, comments, thoughts, etc. as time permits about the text.  And now, drum roll please, by the grace of God, let us begin:

One of the first things Wojtyla does in L&R is to establish the fact that the human person is essentially different from the rest of the created world.  Man is not simply another animal on the level of dogs, cats, zebras, lions, platypus, etc. There is something different about us. He says, "...man has the ability to reason, he is a rational being, which cannot be said of any other entity in the visible world, for in none of them do we find any trace of conceptual thinking."  Animals cannot grasp concepts like justice, beauty, peace, truth, etc.  It would be utterly impossible for a monkey to ever paint something like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and even further impossible for him to paint it, sit back and marvel at it contemplating the truth, beauty and goodness that it reveals to him and then desire to be more true, beautiful and good himself and ponder the meaning of his existence.  Only the human person is capable of such a thing.  The image that comes to mind is a scene from George of the Jungle that has George's best friend, an ape, wearing glasses on the tip of his nose while reading a classic work of literature and, of course, talking to George like he earned a doctorate at Harvard.  Cute, but totally outside reality.  I mean, really, why do we think it's hilarious when movies show depictions of animals talking and doing things that only humans can do?  Because it's ridiculous so we think it's funny. 

As Wojtyla points out, only the person has an interior life, a spiritual life:

In man cognition and desire acquire a spiritual character and therefore assist in the formation of a genuine interior life, which does not happen with animals.  Inner life means spiritual life.  It revolves around truth and goodness.  And it includes a whole multitude of problems, of which two seem central:  what is the ultimate cause of everything and - how to be good and possess goodness at its fullest.

What immediately comes to my mind here is that the person asks the questions 'who am I?', 'why am I here?', 'how do I find happiness?'.  Animals don't ask these kinds of questions.  He also talks about how the person desires goodness.  How often are we seeking the good even if we often fail in recognizing the true good and falling for a lie?  And if I could just briefly venture into some theology here, I would like to point out that God himself is the Ultimate Good and as St. Augustine famously quoted, "O God, our hearts are restless until they rest in you."  Therefore, being that we are made in the image and likeness of God and that we were made to share in the eternal exchange of love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we can say, yes, God, who is the Ultimate Good, is calling us back to himself and our hearts are ever seeking to dwell in that Goodness - the person desires goodness because the person desires God and we are restless until we rest in him - until we 'possess goodness at its fullest'.

Wojtyla goes on to discuss how the person is a subject who interacts with the world not only on a physical, sensual plane but also on a spiritual plane and that the person possesses free will. 

That's probably enough to chew on for the day.  In the next section he begins to discuss  the "first meaning of the verb 'to use'" and then "'love' as the opposite of 'using'" which I hope to discuss in the next post for the book.