The Pope's Divisions.

• Author: Billington, James H.
• Position: Review

George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999), 992 pp., $35.

AMIDST ALL the ink spilled over the coming of a new Christian millennium, remarkably little has been written in the mainstream media about the leading Christian spokesman of our era. Pope John Paul H's life and thoughts have, however, now been fully chronicled in George Weigel's magisterial and well-written biography, a work that will both broaden and deepen our understanding of the man he calls a "witness to hope."

Weigel describes this "Pope from a far country" as "the man seen by more people than any man who ever lived", yet who remains "the least understood major figure of the twentieth century." Weigel rejects the political categories of liberal and conservative usually relied on in characterizing John Paul II. In a brilliant prologue he sets the stage for his own more nuanced and theology-centered exposition by laying out a series of paradoxes. The Pope is both a simple, pious Pole and a sophisticated, intellectual polyglot; both a mystic and a sportsman. He is "a celibate with a remarkable insight into human sexuality, especially as viewed from the perspective and experience of women." He is "arguably the most well informed man in the world, yet he rarely reads newspapers."

The great renaissance mystic, Nicholas of Cusa, defended medieval faith against rising skepticism in the early modern era by characterizing God as coincidentia oppositorum, "the union of opposites" -- what an earlier mystic, Dionysius the Aereopagite, had called "the superessential Darkness that is hidden in the light of existing things." John Paul appears at the end of modernity as himself such a "union of opposites": fusing a passionate humanist defense of freedom and rights with an unremitting call for traditional Christian obedience and obligations.

This Pope has meditated deeply on the darkness of the last century, which produced more human suffering and martyrdom than any in history, but he sees flickers of light tying to get through the darkness from diverse corners of the world. He has served all the while as a "witness to hope" that the new millennium will bring the renewal we need rather than the retribution we deserve. In the last of his many memorable tableaux, Weigel recounts how some of the Pope's oldest Polish friends asked the aging "Wujek" (his old nickname and the Polish word for Uncle) in the late summer of 1997 why he always gets up before dawn. He replied simply, "I like to watch the sun rise."

THIS BIOGRAPHY has three distinctive characteristics that are rarely found--let alone woven together--in current historical writing. First, Weigel has essentially revived and blended together two of the oldest and most forgotten forms of biography: hagiography and the epic. This is an unabashedly admiring study by someone who has had substantial personal contact with a man that he clearly considers saintly. At the same time, it is an epic account of the global odyssey of a man whom he also considers a larger-than-life figure in pursuit of a sacred mission, facing many trials--including some from other, more timid custodians of the cause he is serving.

The book was written as if in response to the Pope's comment to Weigel in 1996 about previous biographers: "They try to understand me from the outside. But I can only be understood from the inside." Like the Pope himself, Weigel sees important events in the external world--such as the fall of communism, which is central to this epic--as essentially caused by internal, moral forces. There is a providential cast to Weigel's narrative. Thus, he suggests that the religious-based, bottom-up movement of Solidarity in Poland posed (to use Arnold Toynbee's terms) the terminal challenge to which a Leninist empire could find no adequate response. Weigel's account of the Pope's consistently religious approach to the transforming events in his beloved native land will annoy those who believe that material causes are decisive in history and that the Pope had to be involved in some kind of political conspiracy for...