Shelf Life: A Man of the Gospel

TO call the new book by Pope John Paul II a valediction is, in the most obvious sense, premature: Its author, though devastated by illness, has a famously strong constitution, and may well continue his earthly pilgrimage for years to come. But Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (Rizzoli, 192 pp., $19.95) is indeed a valedictory work in that it attempts to make Christian sense of the century just passed: to say Goodbye to All That, in a way that sets up signposts for the future.

Central to the Pope’s vision in this book is the Thomistic theological insight that the mystery of evil-manifested so starkly in the 20th-century ideologies of Nazism and Communism-is essentially parasitic on the mystery of the good, and that it is a category mistake to elevate evil into an absolute principle. “The Lord God allowed Nazism twelve years of existence,” he writes, which was “the limit imposed by Divine Providence” on this particular chastisement; Communism lasted longer, but it too eventually collapsed. In both cases, man’s attention should be drawn beyond the phenomenon of evil to the phenomenon of the limit on evil: a limit that “is constituted by good-the divine good and the human good that have been revealed in that history.” This limit is set not just in a seemingly erratic way, instance by instance all the way down through the chronicles of human slaughter, but most fundamentally in the Redemption worked by Christ, whereby

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

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TO call the new book by Pope John Paul II a valediction is, in the most obvious sense, premature: Its author, though devastated by illness, has a famously strong constitution, and may well continue his earthly pilgrimage for years to come. But Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (Rizzoli, 192 pp., $19.95) is indeed a valedictory work in that it attempts to make Christian sense of the century just passed: to say Goodbye to All That, in a way that sets up signposts for the future.

Central to the Pope’s vision in this book is the Thomistic theological insight that the mystery of evil-manifested so starkly in the 20th-century ideologies of Nazism and Communism-is essentially parasitic on the mystery of the good, and that it is a category mistake to elevate evil into an absolute principle. “The Lord God allowed Nazism twelve years of existence,” he writes, which was “the limit imposed by Divine Providence” on this particular chastisement; Communism lasted longer, but it too eventually collapsed. In both cases, man’s attention should be drawn beyond the phenomenon of evil to the phenomenon of the limit on evil: a limit that “is constituted by good-the divine good and the human good that have been revealed in that history.” This limit is set not just in a seemingly erratic way, instance by instance all the way down through the chronicles of human slaughter, but most fundamentally in the Redemption worked by Christ, whereby