Hi Group:
Is the Pope a Pirsigian?
It would seem so if one believes George Weigel in his new book,
�Witness of Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II:� He writes:
�How might we realize our humanity in an age in which the artifacts
of our intelligence threaten the very existence of the human project?
As he (Karol Wojtyla later to be Pope John Paul) pondered that
problem under the shadow of the Holocaust and at the beginning of
the cold war, certain convictions grew in him. One was that morality
is not a culturally constructed appendage to what is, essentially, a
human cipher. To be human is to be a moral agent. Because of that,
the human universe we inhabit has a dramatic structure, and the
great drama of any life is the struggle to surrender the �person I am�
to the �person I ought to be.�� (Parens added).
Not only does this passage remind me of Lila�s struggle for sanity
which, according to Pirsig, was essentially a moral struggle, but the
sentence, �To be human is to be a moral agent� sounds as if it could
have come from the mouth of Pirsig himself.
Further, I believe Pirsig sees the universe as having �dramatic
structure� with the moral levels struggling for supremacy in a series
of acts with the final act yet to played. As Ken Clark has pointed out
several times, Quality has played the leading role in the history of
the universe. It has suffered many setbacks, but continues to be
triumphant.
For Pope John Paul, Quality is centered in the Christ figure. Weigel
writes:
�That struggle meant confronting the reality of evil. Evil had made
itself manifest in the world, in such distinctly modern enterprises as
the Holocaust and the gulag archipelago; in daily life, in the
exploitation of one human being by another, economically,
politically, or sexually. But he believed that evil did not have the final
word, because at the center of the human drama is Christ, whose
entry in the human condition and whose conquest of death meant
that hope was neither a vain illusion nor a defensive fantasy
constructed against the fear at the heart of modern darkness. Karol
Wojtyla believed that Christ-centered hope to be the truth of the
world.�
Pirsig probably wouldn�t go as far as the Pope in placing the center
of Quality in Jesus Christ. More likely he would say there is no
�center� as such. Rather Quality is dispersed throughout the
patterns of value that make up the universe, with Quality possessing
some patterns more than others.
Still, Pirsig identifies Dynamic Quality with religious mysticism (Lila,
Chap. 30), and it surprised me to learn that John Paul is a mystic.
Weigel writes:
�Moreover, he is a mystic who would find it virtually impossible to
describe his deepest religious experiences. Those who have heard
him groaning in prayer in his private chapel know that there is a
dimension of Karol Wojtyla�s life in which God is his sole
interlocutor, in a conversation literally beyond words.�
We metaphysicians must account for the religious impulse in man
and determine authentic sources of moral authority. I think Pirsig
accounts for the religious impulse by making indefinable Quality the
creative force of the universe. But he leaves the question of moral
authority unanswered, allowing religious mystics such as John Paul
free rein to fill the gap�a conclusion I�m not entirely happy about
although I have nothing to offer in its place. Apparently, neither does
Pirsig.
Platt
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