Ethos, Person and Spirit – Principles of Cultural and Social Renewal
Ethos, Person and Spirit – Principles of Cultural and Social Renewal

Summary/Abstract: The Author claims that we must attempt to see the “whole man” or what John Paul II refers to as “the whole truth about man,” not man measured by partial or illusory standards. He wants us to keep in view the idea of a “total vocation” and an “integral humanism.” With this in view, we can understand why he challenges the contemporary civilization with its focus on things and the realm of “having.” It is not that we do not need things, or that we must understand our lives in terms of both being and having - he is not preaching a strict ascetism or railing against the productivity of modern economies. But he is warning of the danger that we can lose our interiority and our freedom as we our swamped by the externals, the acquisition and having, and become enslaved in new ways to the very things that we hoped would free us from drudgery and pain. John Paul II preaches Christian liberty. The way of Christ is the way of liberty. The message should have a special appeal in modern culture as people begin to experience the hazard of enslavement to products, systems, false expectations and envy. The root of the error is the lack of an appreciation of human interiority and the life of spirit. It is a problem of a materialistic philosophy of life, articulated in very different ways in Marxism and in capitalism. The founders and pioneers of modern civilization championed human freedom and liberation. But they could not sustain nor fulfill what they originally promised. A root is the anthropological question, what is to be human, but an anthropology that is historical and cultural, not an abstract.

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