St. Augustine is famous for warning us not to lose ourselves in the world outside and for admonishing us to turn within, to enter into the inner man. He explores the interiority of man like no one before him did.

A rock has an inner side, which is revealed when the rock is split, but this inner side has nothing to do with interiority. For the only way the inside of the rock can be experienced is as the object of someones experience, it does not experience itself from within itself. The inside of the rock is as external as the outer surface of it; the rock is incapable of that dimension of being that we call interiority.

Only the exploration of interiority that begins with St. Augustine discloses the mystery of each human being as Person.

Here we have the explanation of Pope John Paul IIs interest in that movement of thought known as phenomenology. As a student of philosophy he immersed himself in the German phenomenologist, Max Scheler (1874-1928), whose work deeply formed his mind in certain ways. While it is not easy to explain phenomenology in a few words, we can say this much: The phenomenologist practices in a disciplined way an unconditional respect for all that is revealed in experience; he therefore takes very seriously the experience of subjectivity, or interiority.

Man is not deceived when he regards himself as superior to bodily things and as more than just a speck of nature or a nameless unit in the city of man. For by his interiority he rises above the whole universe of mere objects.