Love and Responsibility
Love and Responsibility is a book written by Karol Wojtyła before he became Pope John Paul II and was originally published in Polish in 1960 and in English in 1981.[1][2][3] A new translation was published in 2013.[4] Fr. Wojtyła was inspired to write the book when he was a professor at the Catholic University of Lublin,[5] through the experiences he had while teaching young Catholics.
Author
H. T. Willetts
Roxanne Mei Lum
Polish
Love and Human Sexuality
1960
Poland
1981
319
241/.66 20
BT708 .J6313 1993
Background[edit]
While at the university, Fr. Wojtyła gathered a group of about 20 young people, who began to call themselves ‘Rodzinka’, the "little family". They met for prayers, philosophical discussions, and helping the blind and sick. The group eventually grew to approximately 200 participants, and their activities expanded to include annual skiing and kayaking trips.[6] The insight he gained from these meetings and discussions helped him develop the raw material for the text.
Insights into gender[edit]
Wojtyła's conception of gender flows from his philosophy of the human person. He posits a theistic humanism grounded in Imago Dei: mankind in the image and likeness of God.[15] A human being is an integrated body and soul, with a complementary union of two genders, male and female.[16]
Wojtyła's philosophy is based on the phenomenological tradition, which deals with the subjective experience of humans and how culture, language, upbringing, and biases all affect the way individuals see the objective world. The ethical system he presents appears heavily centered on actions and deeds.[17] However he argues that there is a metaphysical reality in which human subjects realize themselves and ground themselves in it by acting in freedom.[17] Specifically, the metaphysical realism is God and His creation of man in His own image and likeness. Yet, there is not a divide between man's subjectiveness and his metaphysical reality. Wojtyla refers to one's own subjective experience as "lived experience" or "inner life" and argues that an individual's conscious perception of this interior life is the experience of oneself as an acting self rooted in a metaphysical reality.[15]
This interior life of a person rooted in the metaphysical reality of Imago Dei is what shapes John Paul II's conception of gender. He argues that since God is in a triune relation of love, if man is created in His image then man should also be in a relation of love. The complementarity of the two sexes, then, is rooted in a relationship of love, and the very differences between men and women allow them to exist in this relationship together.[16] Since man is a composite of body and soul, and since the body makes visible the invisible nature of the soul, the very fact that men's and women's bodies physically complement each other is proof of their relationship of love.[16] As men and women are both created in Imago Dei they are both equal in dignity, although they are different. For Wojtyła, those differences are what allows men and women to exist coherently together in a union of love, reflecting man's deepest identity.