John Paul II's Reconstruction of Man's Primary Experience of Loneliness and Personal Unity

Abstract

In his deliberations John Paul II, taking under consideration the description of creation of man, takes up the important issue of man's loneliness. The problem has an anthropological character. It is Yahweh who recognized that the first human being (a man) is lonely despite his very close relation with the Creator. This is why God brought into being another human being (a woman). The man then sang a song of admiration of the woman. However, creating a woman did not change the situation that God considered wrong for mankind.

The Pope points to man's unconquerable, ontological loneliness resulting from the person's subsistence and subjectivity. The loneliness contains a hidden message. The first married couple mutually complementing each other by strength of the specific mystery of the human being's unity and the duality of the sex comes to their common fall. This event reveals the weakness of human reference that is based on ontic loneliness and contingency of man. An imperfect creature cannot give perfect support to God's image that is craving for perfection. Appearance of another human being, awakening the feeling of gratitude for the gift of her, and at the same time of disappointment with insufficiency of this gift, leads by the way of history of salvation and revelation towards recognizing the final rest and happiness only in God. As a consequence, inter-human loves appear to be a real panacea for personal loneliness, however, not „in itself” but they doubtless point to Absolute Love, that is to God as the only fulfillment of man's longings.