The good news of Theology of the Body

The good news of Theology of the Body
Our world is mired in sexual confusion, which St John Paul II anticipated and provided a remedy for in his Theology of the Body, writes Jason Osborne

Recent weeks saw the announcement of the first transgender athlete to compete in the Olympics, a development which resulted in an outpouring of anger, outrage, confusion and criticism from many quarters. New Zealand’s Laurel Hubbard (born Gavin Hubbard) qualified to compete in the women’s 87kg weightlifting category at the Tokyo Olympics. While many were shocked by the decision to admit the New Zealand athlete, others praised the move as a step towards greater inclusivity at the Olympic games.

Regardless of an individual’s reaction to the news, the topic has proved polarising, divisive and confusing, symbolic of our world’s current approach to sexuality and gender. The need, and desire, for clarity on the issue is becoming increasingly evident from the Church’s perspective. Seeing this coming decades ago, St Pope John Paul II provided the Church with a gift of continuing relevance: Theology of the Body.

As mentioned, ours is a world in a state of dire confusion. There was, and is, no widespread agreement on the questions of where we come from, where we find ourselves, or where we’re going. Still less is there agreement over the nature of the world, or the human place in it. St John Paul II spoke into this storm of perplexity with his Theology of the Body series – its delivery coming right as the world grappled with the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960’s through to the 1980’s in the US.

Unintelligible

He took his lead from the intuition of the Second Vatican Council, which insisted that, “When God is forgotten…the creature itself grows unintelligible”. He foresaw when few others did that forgetting God necessarily results in forgetting the meaning and purpose of the human body.

While Theology of the Body was composed before this confusion reached the fever-pitch it has today, it was written in anticipation of it, the Pope seeing the debates of his day and understanding the direction they were moving in.

So what is Theology of the Body? It is the title given to a series of 135 reflections written by St John Paul II. Originally intended to be released as a book during his time as a cardinal, he was elected pope, and chose instead to deliver them using his Wednesday audiences during the first five years of his pontificate. While this all seems thoroughly ordinary, a Pope using his position to espouse the Church’s teachings and reflections on them, the reaction to this particular teaching was and continues to be fiery and explosive. It begs the question as to what is so divisive about a collection of theological reflections on the body?

Misunderstanding

It’s worth considering the fact that misunderstanding the nature of the body (and trying to change it as a result) is not a solely modern phenomenon. In order to see the relevance of John Paul II’s teachings on the body to the situation today, it’s useful to look at some of the varied ways in which the human body has been viewed throughout history.

St John Paul II aimed to set out a ‘total vision’ of man that would encompass his beginning, history and destiny”

The Gnostics thought that a person’s true self was trapped or imprisoned inside their body, and that secret knowledge had to be obtained in order to set it free. A particular Gnostic sect, of which St Augustine was once a part, the Manicheans, understood that the goal of life was to set the spiritual ‘essence’ of the person free from the pollution of the body. Both Gnostics and Platonists thought that matter was inferior to the spirit, and more than that, that matter wasn’t just ‘low’, but ultimately evil because of its distance from pure spirit.

Centuries after Gnosticism and Platonism passed out of popularity, puritanism viewed the ‘impure’ body as a threat to the ‘pure’ soul, with René Descartes crowning this thought with his notion of the soul being like a “ghost in a machine”. The common thread running through all of these philosophies is that the body and soul are in some form of conflict, that they don’t belong together. However, what John Paul II sought to communicate in his Theology of the Body is that these notions couldn’t be further from the truth – the Church holds that we don’t just ‘have’ bodies, we are our bodies, or as he puts it, our bodies reveal us.

Tendency

A more common tendency these days is to argue that the human person is nothing more than their body – no soul or spirit to be found. In keeping with this, they argue that the body has no meaning. While these may seem like purely academic disagreements, the influence they hold over culture and popular thought isn’t to be underestimated.

If a person buys into the idea that their body is holding them back in some way, whether from personal fulfilment or maximum pleasure, or if they come to the understanding that they should be set free from it, the results can be disastrous for an individual, as well as for a culture. They grow suspicious and resentful towards the body, and may seek to harm it or detach themselves from it.

Conversely, if a person holds that they are no more than their body, with no soul or spiritual dimension, what is to separate them from an animal? The issue is that if a person is no more than their spirit, they become completely detached from objective reality, whereas if they are no more than their body, there is nothing higher to aspire to than mere animality and baseness. Uncertainty around these issues has resulted in large-scale confusion in our times, and John Paul II remedied this with a clear picture of the human body.

In his Theology of the Body, St John Paul II aimed to set out a “total vision” of man that would encompass his beginning, history and destiny. Understanding the adage well that rules without relationship create rebellion, he invited people to seek the truth about reality by reflecting on their own human experience – rather than offering them another set of rules to be followed.

Communicate

He chose to communicate not what man should do, but who man is, understanding that if he made that obvious, people would know how to live. St John Paul II understood that laws alone don’t change hearts, and that a new re-presentation of the Church’s teachings on human sexuality and sexual ethics was needed. As such, he sought to communicate not a defence and recitation of what was already in the public sphere, but a true unveiling of the beauty of God’s plan for human love and sexuality; something that would speak to the deepest desires of the human heart.

Theology of the Body reminds the Faithful that, properly speaking, sex is not something humans do, but is something they are as male and female persons. It reminds people who they are, as well as what it means to be human and how they should live, while clearing up other misconceptions along the way.

St John Paul II comprised his Theology of the Body of two parts; the first focusing on three passages from Scripture and the second focusing on “The Sacrament”, which is the sign of Christ’s love for the Church and the love between a husband and wife. It’s essential to look at the Scriptural passages, the three “words” of Christ, that the Pope focused his reflections on if the sense of Theology of the Body is to be grasped.

Christ appeals to the beginning

As with all solid Church teaching, St John Paul II grounded his reflections on the human body in Christ’s words. More specifically, he drew from three passages in which Christ referred to man’s beginning, his history, and then forward to the resurrection, the understanding being that a comprehensive and total view of humanity is required to undo much of the confusion people experience today.

He began with Christ’s “appeal to the beginning”, which centred on the Gospel passage in which Jesus debates the pharisees concerning divorce. Matthew 19:3-8 sees the Pharisees testing Jesus by asking him under what conditions it is lawful to divorce one’s wife, to which he responds:

“Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So, they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”

St John Paul saw in this response a referral back to Genesis, so that the misunderstanding Pharisees might have the origins of man explained to them. While the Genesis account of man’s creation is pre-scientific and archaic, he understood that it’s a mistake to consider it unscientific or outdated.

The pontiff explains that in Genesis, God intended to communicate essential spiritual truths to man, rather than a scientific picture. He saw in Jesus’ response to the Pharisees a roadmap for explaining the rational behind God’s plan for human sexuality. He reasoned that the Pharisees could only ask such questions if they had forgotten, or lost sight of, God’s design or plans, and so they needed to hear a re-statement of what John Paul II referred to as an “integral vision of man”.

Man’s state in the Garden of Eden was composed of “original solitude”, “original unity” and “original nakedness”, according to John Paul. Original solitude refers to the fact that it was evident in the Garden that man is ultimately alone before God, the human person being absolutely unique in the pantheon of creation.

Original unity indicates, in the Pope’s view, that it was also evident from the beginning that man was made for another. The male and female form belie an incompleteness by their very nature – all of the systems of the human body, from the nervous system to the digestive system, work perfectly well on their own. There is only one exception: the reproductive system. Only the reproductive system requires a member of the other sex in order to serve its purpose. That the male and female bodies are made for each other are the obvious conclusion, the Pope wrote.

Finally, the Pope drew “original nakedness” from Christ’s reference to the Genesis narrative. St John Paul II observed that before the fall, Adam and Eve were naked without shame or lust, a state that the Pope also referred to as original innocence. He reflected that without sin clouding man’s heart, he is free to see and receive the other person as a gift, rather than as an object to be grasped.

All of this reflected, according to St John Paul II, what is now known as the “spousal meaning of the body”. What this means is that the human body has “the power to express the love by which the human person becomes a gift, thus fulfilling the deep meaning of his or her being and existence”.

Christ appeals to history

St John Paul II then turned from Christ’s reference to Genesis to his reference to man’s current state: “historical man”. The first passage John Paul II focused on saw Jesus debating the Pharisees, but this one sees Christ diagnosing the ills in the human heart today:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

Severity

The severity, and apparent impossibility, of these words are often off-putting to modern ears, but St John Paul II asked: “Should we fear the severity of these words or rather have confidence in their salvific content, in their power?” While to most these words sound like a condemnation, John Paul observed that God does not command the impossible.

Therefore, he argued, Jesus’ teachings against adultery in the heart show that acquiring a pure love is possible and realistic. St John Paul II went on to explain that the reason people sometimes think otherwise is because they become so attached to sin and its ensuing bad habits that they often identify with them and come to normalise it.

It is often assumed that lust is natural, and that to sin is simply to be human. This train of thought is what has compelled society to suggest that the Church is out of touch with reality in the realm of sexual ethics. However, Theology of the Body argues that nothing could be further from the truth; rather, the Church is where society should go to be put back in touch with reality.

Christ appeals to the resurrection

The final passage St John Paul II referred to was Jesus’ discussion with the Sadducees in the Gospel according to Mark:

“‘There were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and when he died left no children; and the second took her, and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; and the seven left no children. Last of all the woman also died. In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.’”

St John Paul II understood that Jesus’ words on Genesis show humanity where it comes from and its purpose, his words from the Sermon on the Mount show where people are going wrong in their hearts that they might correct their course, and his words about “eschatological man” hint at the final destination of men and women.

Heavenly reality

Theology of the Body holds that the body is an essential component of heavenly reality. The lack of marriage in heaven doesn’t diminish its importance, but emphasises it in the Pope’s view. Leading into his discussion on ‘The Sacrament’, St John Paul II wrote that from the beginning, marriage on earth is intended as a heavenly sign. The nature of marriage is communal, intended to draw the spouses out of each other in love. In that sense, the Pope taught, marriage is a shadow and sign of what man has been created for: union with the Trinity in heaven.

Theology of the Body teaches that the human body reveals that man is created for communion, and heaven is the ultimate fulfilment of this. Heaven will see the perfect realisation of the spousal meaning of the body. As Pope John Paul II explained, “The absolute and eternal spousal meaning of the glorified body will be revealed in union with God himself, by seeing him ‘face to face’”. Marriage was instituted by God so that we would see the shape of this heavenly reality while still on earth.

As the world sees greater and greater levels of confusion in the area of human sexuality, St John Paul II showed us in his Theology of the Body that the desire for heaven has never left us, and our bodies testify to this.