What is the secret of the non-violent revolution that brought down the Soviet empire? Ten years after the Solidarity trade union movement took over as the governing party of a free Poland, the Pope?s biographer gives his explanation. He finds a symbol in the lighted Kinga chapel deep in the Wieliczka salt mine. ACADEMIC reviewers and media commentators reacted with considerable scepticism to my book The Final Revolution: the resistance Church and the collapse of Communism when it first appeared in 1992. In it I claimed that a moral revolution, a revolution of conscience, had preceded and made possible the political revolution of 1989. Surely, the critics argued, there were other, more tangible, explanations for the collapse of Communism in East-Central Europe: the policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl; the new generation of Soviet leadership embodied in Mikhail Gorbachev; the economic impossibility of Communism in the communications age? In fact, I had not suggested that these were insignificant factors in what we now call 1989; all of them, it seemed to me, had something important to do with the Communist crack-up. But if we asked the two great questions ? why did the 1989 revolution happen when it did (rather than in 1999 or 2009 or 2019) and how it did (largely without violence) ? then, I insisted, one had to take sufficient measure of the fact that, during the 1980s, something had happened in the minds and hearts of the people of East-Central Europe that had made 1989 not just possible, but irresistible. That something, I proposed, was best described as a revolution of conscience.

By the time my papal biography Witness to Hope was published a year ago, there was no longer much scepticism about my proposal. Nor was there any significant disagreement with my further claim that the crucial moment in that moral revolution ? the point at which the tinder of conscience was ignited into a hard, bright flame ? was Pope John Paul II?s first pilgrimage to his Polish homeland in June 1979. Those dramatic nine days, reviewers and critics now seemed to agree, were indeed pivotal to the history of the twentieth century.

Why this time-lag between the events of 1989 and the understanding of their deep causes by Western media and Western academics ?

Under a host of influences ? the ideological residue of the French revolution; Marxist concepts of history; the Realist school of international relations theory identified in the United States with Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger ? Western academics and opinion-makers had grown accustomed to thinking of the engine of history as politics (understood as the quest for power, itself conceived as the capacity to impose one?s autonomous will on others), or economics, or some combination of the two. Insofar as grasping history?s internal dynamics was concerned, what counted were measurable, tangible indices of power: armies, navies, and air forces, gross national product, trade, labour force, and so forth. This was the real world, according to Morgenthau and other realist theoreticians, and the real world determined the course of history. Ideas and ideals, moral passions and commitments, the power of the human spirit ? these were of interest to philosophers, not to statesmen. What the Czech playwright and thinker Vaclav Havel, later President of his country, once called the power of the powerless was, to these academic and media realists, no power at all.

Yet beneath the surface of this self-consciously tough-minded and practical way of thinking about the world was an irony. For what we knew as the West during the Cold War was manifestly the product of ideas and ideals: the ideas and ideals that had made the Glorious Revolution in Great Britain in 1688, the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, and the capitalist revolution launched by Adam Smith in the same year that Britain?s American colonies declared their independence. Then there was history a little closer to our own time. It seemed odd, to put it gently, that scholars and commentators who imagined themselves realistic could not grasp the fact that the history of the twentieth century had been shaped primarily by ideas and ideals. Lenin?s and Hitler?s ideas had driven western civilisation to the brink of catastrophe; Churchill?s ideals had brought the West back from the brink. The ideas of Ben-Gurion and Nasser had determined the history of the volatile Middle East for more than half a century. The Fabian socialist ideas of the London School of Economics in the 1930s explained a great deal of the crisis of post-independence Africa, as Gandhi?s ideas and Solzhenitsyn?s ideals had demonstrated the power of spiritual conviction to reshape politics. Then there were the scientists: did anyone seriously doubt that the real world had been dramatically reconfigured by the ideas of Fermi, Heisenberg, Bohr, and other nuclear physicists, or that the world of the future would be dramatically reshaped by the idea of the DNA double- helix? Western political analysts in the early 1990s seemed to have forgotten the wisdom of one of the West?s most influential social scientists, the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who once wrote about history in these terms:

Both when they are right and when they are wrong, ideas are more powerful than is commonly understood. In fact, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. . . . Soon or late, it is ideas . . . . which are dangerous for good or evil.

It took the distinctive character of the revolution of 1989 to remind the West that ideas have consequences in history, and that sufficiently powerful ideas and ideals can bend the course of history in new and once-unimaginable directions. But that accomplishment was itself the product of the distinctive view of history that one learns, particularly, in Poland.

The salt mine at Wieliczka has always seemed to me an apt metaphor for the modern Polish national experience, and indeed for the distinctive vision of history that comes from looking at the world and the way it works from the Vistula river basin. The land above this ancient mine is flat, a natural route for invaders and marauders. Across it, the men of power have ridden back and forth for centuries, on horses or tanks, wreaking havoc. But deep inside the soil of Poland, in the mine at Wieliczka and its Kinga chapel, which radiates light where one expects darkness, one finds the steady heartbeat of a great spiritual culture. Time and again, that culture has proved more powerful in its resilience and its restorative capacities than what the world usually understands by power.

As Karol Wojtyla?s biographer, I am persuaded that he came to a culture-first view of history very early in his life, certainly by the end of the 1940s. This conviction was fed from many sources: his immersion as a student in Polish Romantic literature; his experience in the Rhapsodic Theatre and the cultural resistance movement during the Nazi Occupation; his wrestling with the question of revolutionary violence in his drama, Our God?s Brother; and, above all, his profound Christian conviction that the Word through whom the world was created remains the centre of the world and its history. Because the Word has overcome the world (Jn 16:33), those conformed to the Word can speak words of truth to the world of power. A people in possession of its authentic cultural heritage, Wojtyla came to believe, possessed a freedom that no tyrant could abrogate entirely. The tools of material force were, ultimately, incapable of resisting the weapons of spiritual ? cultural ? resistance.

That was the strategy of resistance that Wojtyla applied during his years as priest and bishop in Kracow, and that is the strategy of change he has applied on the world stage in his 22 years as John Paul II. That, pre-eminently, was what he did in June 1979 in Poland: by restoring to his people their authentic history and culture, by giving them permission to say publicly who they were and what had made them that way, he not only provoked a mass psychological catharsis with long-term political consequences; he created a revolution of conscience that struck the Communist culture of the lie at its most vulnerable point.

This resistance strategy was based on an analysis of the situation in East-Central Europe in the 1970s that seemed parallel to, if independent of, the analysis of Vaclav Havel. In his brilliant 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless (written in the same year as John Paul II?s election), Havel peeled back the cover on the dirty little secret of life under Communism: that the maintenance of Communist power depended on acquiescence ? on not enough people being willing to say No to the thick anti-culture of lies that held the whole sorry apparatus of Marxist-Leninist repression together. Havel?s genius was not simply to recognise this sad fact of life, however. It was to recognise that a critical mass of people capable of resisting the Communist anti-culture of the lie could only gather itself on the basis of a higher and more compelling Yes. Before enough people could say No, they had to have something to which they could say Yes.

That something, the content of that Yes, was what John Paul II provided in Poland between 2 and 10 June 1979. Poles who had said Yes to the truth of who they were as individuals and as a nation were empowered to say No to the culture of the lie. And in saying this No they were also empowered to say another kind of Yes: a Yes to living in the truth. Out of that second Yes grew, over a decade, what we have come to know as the revolution of 1989 ? the non-violent dismantling of a great system of tyranny and the emergence of democracies from under the rubble of totalitarianism.

THAT achievement has important lessons for the West, in which I include the nations of East-Central Europe. That the twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history is now widely conceded. But it is not so broadly understood that the oceans of blood and mountains of corpses were the result of false ideas of history, and ultimately of the human person. The lethal cocktail of Marxism-Leninism (itself a radically secularised caricature of biblical religion) is no longer a plausible project for organising human society. But there is a kind of materialist hangover abroad in the West, to which the new democracies of East-Central Europe have not been immune: the notion that democracy and the free economy are machines that will run by themselves.

As John Paul II has argued in the encyclicals Centesimus Annus, Veritatis Splendor, and Evangelium Vitae, free politics and the free economy ultimately depend on the foundations set by a vibrant public moral culture. You cannot sustain a democracy without a critical mass of democrats ? of men and women who have internalised the habits of heart and mind that turn us from the tyrants we are at birth to civil, tolerant, democratically-engaged citizens who can make freedom serve the ends of human excellence. Unless the explosive energies set loose by the free economy are tempered and disciplined by virtues such as the willingness to sacrifice and defer gratification, prudent risk-taking, and the ability to cooperate with others, the free economy will cannibalise and then destroy itself. Culture ? the realm of the human spirit and its quest for the transcendent ? was the key to the Communist crack-up. Culture is likewise the key to the success of democracies old and new. The revolution of 1989 taught us that the fundamental human sovereignty is not political but spiritual: the spiritual sovereignty of the human person, which expresses itself through the creativity of individuals and the culture of nations and gives rise to a distinctive form of power. That is the sovereignty we are called to cherish, guard, and ennoble, as we seek to build the foundations of a house of freedom capable of meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century.

? This is an edited extract from a paper prepared by George Weigel for a conference held this month at the Krakow Academy of Music on ?The spirituality of central Europe?.

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