The Epistemology of St. John Paul II’s Personal Genius

English speakers first began to notice the term “feminine genius” in the translation of Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Woman), an apostolic letter St. John Paul II wrote in 1988. In this letter, he uses the phrase “mulieris ingenium,” literally “genius of woman,” at least four times, in sections 17, 18, 30, and 31. In the last two sections, the English version translates these words as “feminine genius.” This term and the view of women for which it has become a kind of tagline, has been very effective, but the idea of “feminine genius” has also caused a good bit of consternation among people concerned that it either pigeonholes women or denigrates men as lacking a personal genius. So let me state from the outset, first that John Paul’s understanding of feminine genius does not limit women’s activity to a particular sphere, and second, it does not designate a capacity that is peculiar to women. He thinks that women more easily develop this genius and so have a particular responsibility to display it and to encourage other human beings, men and women, to develop their own capacity for this genius whether expressed as “feminine” or “masculine.”

This clarification was made explicit in 2004, the last year of John Paul’s papacy, in a letter approved by him but written and promulgated by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in his capacity as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.¹ This letter states that in discussion of “feminine genius,” “that which is called ‘femininity’ is more than simply an attribute of the female sex. The word designates [a] fundamental human capacity” (n.14).

Thus it becomes clear that the genius we are discussing is one to which we should all aspire as part of our ongoing human formation. It might perhaps be better for us to think of it as “the personal genius” rather than the feminine genius. Today, after stipulating what feminine (or personal) genius means, I will turn to the epistemology that is entailed by John Paul’s claim that it is an insight into the human being as a person.

Based on two main texts where John Paul describes feminine genius,² we get a phenomenological description to which we can apply Thomistic language: According to John Paul, women somehow learn that people should be recognized and loved for what they are, human persons, and not for secondary characteristics like usefulness or beauty. In Thomistic terms, he is claiming that the human intellect can grasp that the value of a human being is a matter of first act, of existing as a human being, rather than a matter of second act, operating as a human being. According to John Paul, this understanding is manifest in a woman who discovers she is pregnant and welcomes the new life within her as a person. In Thomistic terms, this woman grasps intellectually that she is pregnant with a human being, she grasps intellectually that this human being is a person, and she responds to the object thus known with a will which welcomes and desires the presence of this person in her womb. Building on that encounter, John Paul says, this woman may generalize the attitude of intellectual attention and willing regard to all human beings, and this attitude, this stance of her intellect and will, is the highest expression of the feminine genius.

Feminine or personal genius, then, names the subjective capacity of one’s intellect and will to receive another human being, the “object” whom one encounters, as a person. But, according to John Paul, in order to develop this capacity, one must first “learn” that this is the appropriate response to human beings. How does one learn this truth?

John Paul argues that we learn it only by being the objects of this attitude. Subjective awareness of ourselves as persons has as its precondition that others unconditionally respect the objective reality of our value as human beings. It is only because others recognize us as persons prior to our becoming conscious...