A Catholic philosopher who almost destroyed Catholic philosophy. A Pope who told his priests to stay out of politics but who had a political impact of epic proportions.

A man who met personal suffering with tremendous dignity but whose dogmas at times added to the sufferings of others. A despiser of the culture of celebrity who was himself a great star of the mass media age.

A great communicator who remained almost entirely silent in the face of the devastating moral crisis of clerical child abuse. If great personalities incorporate contradictions, Pope John Paul II was a very great man. The source of those contradictions may be found in a sermon he delivered for All Soul's Day in 1984.

He described Saint Charles Borromeo in terms that were, as the Vatican watcher Peter Hebblethwaite pointed out, eerily autobiographical. Referring ostensibly to the saint, an Italian patrician who chose the priesthood over his family's riches, he remarked that: "Becoming the only son in his family, many people insisted that he marry in order to continue the Borromeo line. Instead, the death of his brother opened his eyes to the poverty of human realities."

The young Karol Wojtyla lost his elder brother when he was nine years old, shortly after his mother had also died. By the age of 20, he was the only surviving member of his family, the only one who could continue the Wojtyla line.

Instead of marrying, he too chose the priesthood.

Alongside his personal tragedies, he was in the midst of a historic catastrophe, the Nazi invasion of Poland, the construction of Auschtwitz close to his familiar Krakow, the dark night of the European soul. And this would always be the core of the man: that he chose the priesthood out of a sense of the poverty of human realities.

Therein lay the source both of his greatness and his weakness. The decision that the human world is contemptible and that truth can be sought only in eternal verities is perfectly understandable for a man coming to adulthood as an orphan in a place of unspeakable suffering.

On the one hand it gave John Paul his luminous personal presence, that sense of a spirit that has been tempered in the fires of affliction, leaving it hard and pure. It was manifest in the grace with which he met the physical pain and psychic shock of his near-assassination at the hands of Mehmet Ali Agca in 1981, and in the dignity with which he persevered in his last years of palpable infirmity.

It lay behind the steely political impact summed up by Timothy Garton-Ash: "Without the Pope, no Solidarity. Without Solidarity, no Gorbachev. Without Gorbachev, no fall of Communism." On the other hand, a belief in the poverty of human realities also implied a deep contempt for history. Vatican Two's opening of the church to the modern world was inspired by a perceived need to address the human realities of contemporary life. If you see those realities as a poor thing, you will also see that whole notion as an irrelevance.

The task that John Paul set himself was to restore a clear allegiance to what he saw as essentially timeless truths which occupy a realm outside of history. Too often that was simply an exercise in denial. He rejected inconvenient realities and suppressed those who wished to engage with them. As early as 1971, the then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, addressing the Polish Congress of Theology, warned that the function of theologians was not to question the faith but to "guard, defend and teach" in strict subordination to the church authorities.

It was not surprising that when he became Pope he would move to enforce this view by putting a stop to the vigorous debate that had been licensed by Vatican Two. Especially after he appointed Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1982, the aim was not to argue with dissident theologians but to silence them.

The victims of this determination to impose orthodoxy were almost all on the liberal side of the argument. While the far-right followers of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre who rejected the entire process of Vatican Two, were appeased, challenges from the left were crushed.

In 1979, Hans Kúng, widely regarded as the greatest theologian of post-war Christianity, was banned from teaching as a Catholic theologian at Tubingen University.

In 1987, the Vatican decreed that Prof Charles Curran could no longer teach Moral Theology at Catholic University in Washington, DC. Other victims of the purge included the Flemish Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx, and the liberation theologians Leonardo Boff of Brazil and Gustavo Guttierez of Peru.

The consequences of this tragic alienation of many of the church's best minds were profound. Kung, a passionate believer who might have equipped the church with a powerful intellectual armoury for the late 20th century, ended up denouncing John Paul for a "rigid stagnating and despotic rule in the spirit of the Inquisition".

By contrast, mediocre clerics willing to toe the orthodox line, either through conviction or careerism, were promoted to positions where their inability to respond to human realities did immense damage to the church.

John Paul's apocalyptic frame of mind, in which everything was understood as part of a titanic struggle of good against evil, made him careless of the detail and diversity of goodness among actual human beings. He could not imagine that, for example, it might be possible to be both a sexually active unmarried person (especially a gay person) and a good Catholic.

Keeping things in their timeless place meant that there could never be women priests because, as he argued, there were no women at the Last Supper. A priest who wished to marry was simply a deserter from the great apocalyptic struggle.

And so on through a wide range of issues in which he set poor human realities against eternal truth and found them to have no weight at all. And among those human realities was, perhaps, his own. It was hard to remember in his later days of despotic rule that he had once been an actor, a playwright and a poet, a man, in other words, who took pleasure in exposing his living imagination to the human reality he later came to despise.

The distinguished Papal historian, Eamon Duffy, once told the story of a friend of his, a young theologian who had dinner with John Paul II. Nervously searching for something to say to the great man he piped up: "Holy Father, I love poetry and I've read all your verse. Have you written much poetry since you became Pope?"

John Paul looked at him stiffly and said: "I've written no poetry since I became Pope." When he asked why, John Paul coldly turned away and talked to another guest.

Twenty minutes later, however, he turned suddenly to the young theologian, leaned towards him and said quietly: "No context." That, perhaps, is the tragedy of a man and a papacy. At a time when his church needed the open, imaginative side of this complex man as much as his stern unyielding courage, he himself could find, in the institution he governed, no context for poetry.

One wonders whether, in whatever time he had to himself, he ever thought back on the young priest who in the 1950s published in various Polish religious and philosophical journals, under the pseudonym Andrzej Jawien, poems as self-questioning as the one - entitled Actor - in which he asked himself:
Did not the others crowding in,
distort the man that I am?
Being each of them,
always imperfect,
myself to myself too near,
he who survives in me,
can he ever look at himself without fear?