A man of the Gospel.

To call the new book by Pope John Paul II a valediction is, in the most obvious sense, premature: Its author, though devastated by illness, has a famously strong constitution, and may well continue his earthly pilgrimage for years to come. But Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (Rizzoli, 192 pp., $19.95) is indeed a valedictory work in that it attempts to make Christian sense of the century just passed: to say Goodbye to All That, in a way that sets up signposts for the future.

Central to the Pope's vision in this book is the Thomistic theological insight that the mystery of evil--manifested so starkly in the 20th-century ideologies of Nazism and Communism--is essentially parasitic on the mystery of the good, and that it is a category mistake to elevate evil into an absolute principle. "The Lord God allowed Nazism twelve years of existence," he writes, which was "the limit imposed by Divine Providence" on this particular chastisement; Communism lasted longer, but it too eventually collapsed. In both cases, man's attention should be drawn beyond the phenomenon of evil to the phenomenon of the limit on evil: a limit that "is constituted by good--the divine good and the human good that have been revealed in that history." This limit is set not just in a seemingly erratic way, instance by instance all the way down through the chronicles of human slaughter, but most fundamentally in the Redemption worked by Christ, whereby "evil is radically overcome by good, hate by love, death by resurrection." The world is clearly broken; in Hamlet's phrase, it is "out of joint." The theological term most commonly used to describe the fixing of this brokenness is "justification." The Pope reflects on the "superabundant measure" in which God has accomplished this justification: The sacrifice and victory of Christ do not merely repair the damage wrought by original sin--the ruined world in which Hitlers and Pol Pots thrive, however briefly--but elevate man to an even higher destiny.

This destiny is an enjoyment of, and participation in, the divine nature. "In God's plan of salvation," the Pope writes, "it is only by agreeing to be grafted onto Christ's divine Vine that man can become fully himself. Were he to refuse this grafting, he would effectively condemn himself to an incomplete humanity." This is John Paul's explanation of "the drama of the European Enlightenment": In marginalizing Christ's role in history, Enlightenment ideologies helped pave the way for the dehumanization that reached its zenith in 20th-century totalitarianisms. But this Pope's criticism of the Enlightenment is very different from the anti-Enlightenment views of reactionaries nostalgic for the days of throne and altar. "The European Enlightenment not only led to the carnage of the French Revolution," he writes, "but also bore positive fruits, such as the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, values which are rooted in the Gospel. Even when proclaimed independently, these ideas point naturally to their proper origin. Hence, the French Enlightenment prepared the way for a better understanding of human rights.... This was the time when human rights began to be properly acknowledged and put into effect more forcefully, leaving behind the traditions of feudalism."

The idea of a Pope praising "liberty, equality, and fraternity" would have horrified 19th-century ultramontanes; but John Paul II's understanding of that era is deep, judicious, and devoid of sectarian spirit. Memory and Identity is, finally, a call to Christians to remember who they are: people with a mission to bring the good news of Christ and His Redemption, the whole truth about man, to their fellow men and women. "When he was instituting the Eucharist during the Last Supper, [Christ] said, 'Do this in memory of me.' ... Christians, as they celebrate the Eucharist in 'memory' of their Master, continually discover their own identity. The Eucharist highlights something more profound and at the same time more universal--it highlights the divinization of man and the new creation in Christ.... At the beginning of the third millennium, Christians, though divided among themselves, are conscious that unity and not division belongs to the most profound essence of the Church."

This short book is a message of hope for our time, a reminder--after an especially brutal century--that "all human suffering, all pain, all infirmity contains within itself a promise of salvation, a promise of joy."