By Matthew Reding
Although St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, or “Human Love in the Divine Plan,” could be considered the centerpiece of his papacy, it ironically remains less well known and possibly even less understood, at least by Catholic laity, than many of his other works. That a prominent and widely available work by such a beloved Pope remains in relative obscurity decades after its inception might simply be explained by our general aversion to addressing the wounded parts of our fallen human nature, especially one that encompasses human sexuality.
St. John Paul II delivered the catechesis on Theology of the Body during his Wednesday General Audiences between September 1979 and November 1984. The catechesis was interrupted for several months during John Paul II’s recovery from the assassination attempt on his life in 1981. In order to appreciate and understand what is at the heart of this teaching in the brief space that we have to review it, it’s first important to understand how it evolved in John Paul II’s early life. During the Nazi occupation of Poland and, when Karol Wojtyla was a young man, Hitler, in an attempt to destroy the religious and cultural fabric of the Polish people, removed most of the priests from their parishes. During this time, Wojtyla met and took spiritual direction from a devout Catholic layman by the name of Jan Tyranowski, a man who John Paul II would later describe as a mystic who introduced him to the writings of St. John of Cross. Wojtyla quickly learned Spanish so that he could read St. John of the Cross in the original. Later he entered an underground seminary and wrote his doctoral thesis on Faith in St. John of the Cross under the direction of Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange at the age of twenty-eight. In his dissertation, Wojtyla quotes at length from the poetry and commentary of St. John of the Cross, especially from his commentary on Living Flame of Love, and it is here that Wojtyla discovers the dynamism of self-giving love that is at the heart of Theology of the Body:
“Since God gives himself with a free and gracious will, so too the soul (possessing a will more generous and free the more it is united with God) gives to God, God himself in God; and this is a true and complete gift of the soul to God….A reciprocal love is thus actually formed between God and soul, like the marriage union and surrender, in which the goods of both (the divine essence that each possesses freely by reason of the voluntary surrender between them) are possessed by both together. They say to each other what the Son of God spoke to the Father through John: ‘All that is mine is yours and yours is mine, and I am glorified in them (Jn 17:10)” (Qtd. in Waldstein 27-28).
Between Wojtyla’s dissertation and the writings of St. John of the Cross, Michael Waldstein identifies points of connection, which he refers to as the “Sanjuanist Triangle: (1) Love implies a cycle of mutual giving, supremely the gift of self. (2) The paradigmatic instance of such self-gift in human experience is the spousal relation between man and woman. (3) The Trinity is the archetype of such love and gift from which the love between God and human persons as well as love between human beings derives as an imitation and participation” (Waldstein 29). In short, human beings were created to enjoy a type of spiritual marriage with God; human marriage is a sort of role play and image of this spiritual marriage to which we are all called, and the love by which we love God and others comes from God himself. From these premises, John Paul II would draw two important conclusions that are reflected in all of his writing for rest of his life. These are principles that show up not only in his book Love and Responsibility that he wrote in 1960 as auxiliary bishop of Kracow but also in the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution Gaudium et Spes, to which Wojtyla is widely known to have made a significant contribution. These are the principles as Waldstein describes them: “First, God wills human beings for their own sake, for their good. Persons should thus not be used as mere means. Wojtyla calls this principle the “personalistic norm.” Second, persons can only find themselves in a sincere gift of self” (Waldstein 23). Eventually, though not explicitly stated, these two principles would influence the drafting of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, which outlined the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception. Although it is commonly held that John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is a defense of the inner logic of Humanae Vitae, the pope himself never adopts an accusatory or polemical tone. Rather, like Christ himself, John Paul structures his teaching as an invitation, a proposal, and a call to follow a more excellent way, and he opens this proposal in a profound and meticulous explication of the words of Christ in Matthew 19:3-8: “Some Pharisees came to him to test him and asked him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?” And he answered them, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator created them male and female and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and unite with his wife, and the two will be one flesh?’ So, it is that they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined let man not separate.” They objected, “Why then did Moses order to give her a certificate and send her away?” Jesus answered, “Because of the hardness of your heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:3-8). Pope John Paul II takes as his queue the words of Christ in the last line “but from the beginning it was not so” and moves the focus to the creation accounts in Genesis chapters one and two. If your catechism lessons growing up were similar to mine, then your study of the creation accounts was brief, maybe pointing out that God created the world in seven days, that he created Adam and Eve and that they existed briefly in some kind of preternatural state, but the majority of the focus was on the original sin of our first parents and all of the negative consequences that ensued: Adam and Eve’s natures become fallen (darkening of the intellect, weakening of the will, disordering of the passions), pain and suffering enter the world, expulsion from Eden (paradise), and so on. What left the deepest impression was that we all inherited the effects of this original sin of our first parents. John Paul II systematically unveils how the effects of original sin and the attitudes surrounding it in the lives of the people of the Old Testament led them to compromise the moral law, particularly in regard to marriage. However, John Paul points out that Christ, in his words, “but in the beginning it was not so” is calling the Pharisees back to the level of moral purity that existed before the fall.
“He [Christ] does not approve what Moses had allowed ‘because of the hardness of…heart’ and appeals to the words of the first divine order, expressly linked in this text with man’s state of original innocence. This means that this order has not lost its force, although man has lost his primeval innocence. Christ’s answer is decisive and clear. For this reason, we must draw the normative conclusions from it, which have an essential significance not only for ethics, but above all for the theology of man and the theology of the body, which, as a particular aspect of theological anthropology, is constituted on the foundation of the word of God who reveals himself” (TOB 3:4).
John Paul II says that Christ is implying that the Pharisees, and by extension, all human beings, have the remnants of “historical man” in them and, therefore, have the ability through grace to attain something of the level of purity of heart and uprightness that Adam and Even enjoyed in their state of original innocence. “Yet, in every man without exception, this state—the “historical” state—plunges its roots deeply into his theological “prehistory,” which is a state of original innocence (TOB 4:1)….He is thus not merely shut out from original innocence due to his sinfulness, but also at the same time open to the mystery of redemption realized in Christ and through Christ” (TOB 4:3).
Now that John Paul has lifted us up with the hope that much of what was “partially” lost in the beginning can be recovered even in this life, he turns his attention to Adam in his preternatural state to show us what that looks like. After Adam is created, he exists briefly in a state of original solitude, meaning that he surveys all that was made and, not encountering another human being, realizes that he is alone. John Paul notes that with the creation of Eve, original unity becomes possible as she is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” At this point, they are “naked and without shame,” and they discover the spousal meaning of the body, that they are a communion of persons that reflect the image of God, and that they are a gift to each other:
“Man appears in the visible world as the highest expression of the divine gift, because he bears within himself the inner dimension of the gift. And with it he carries into the world his particular likeness to God with which he transcends and also rules his “visibility” in the world, his bodiliness, his masculinity or femininity, his nakedness. A reflection of this likeness is also the primordial awareness of the spousal meaning of the body pervaded by the mystery of original innocence” (TOB 19:3).
John Paul points out that this relationship in which Adam and Eve exist with one another in original innocence and original happiness is brought about by their participation in the divine life of “Truth and Love” and that it constitutes the primordial sacrament. As such their bodies are the visible sign by which the mystery of the invisible world is made present. Then he explains that this original innocence is holiness: “Original innocence, connected with the experience of the spousal meaning of the body, is holiness itself, which permits man to express himself deeply with his own body, precisely through the ‘sincere gift’ of self. Consciousness of the gift conditions in this case ‘the sacrament of the body’: in his body as man or woman, man senses himself as a subject of holiness” (TOB 19:5).
John Paul sets up Chapter Two of Part One, by indicating that in order to fully answer questions about marriage, we have to shift our focus from the “beginning” to the Sermon on the Mount where Christ appeals to the human heart and the possibility of overcoming the concupiscence of the body (TOB 23:6). In turning to the Sermon on the Mount, John Paul points out Christs words: “You have heard it that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you: Whoever looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt 5:27-28). In this section, John Paul discusses how a three-fold concupiscence (eyes, flesh, pride of life) came as a result of the fall and how shame comes from concupiscence. He notes how the heart is the battleground or the place where the “fracture of the human person’s interior” is most deeply experienced and how this extends into each person’s sexuality where it is felt as shame. Specifically, he says that it is here where historical man fights concupiscence. “I joyfully agree with the law of God in my innermost [being], but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind” (Rom 7:22-23). When concupiscence prevails, man and woman “instead of being ‘together with the other’—a subject in unity, or better, in the sacramental ‘unity of the body’—man becomes an object for man, the female for the male and vice versa” (TOB 32:4). On the other hand, although John Paul says that “self-possession” has been “shaken to its foundations,” this self-mastery is what Christ is calling us back to, and self-mastery is what leads us to rediscover and embrace the beauty of the spousal meaning of the body, which always “corresponds to and provides the measure for ‘purity of heart’” (TOB 63:5). By grace, self-mastery, and living out the spousal of meaning of the body in all that it encompasses—the communion of persons and the inseparability of the procreative and unitive dimensions of conjugal intercourse—leads to the “redemption of the body,” which, ultimately, finds its fulfillment in the resurrection of the body and eternal union with the Holy Trinity. In Part 1 of Chapter Three John Paul describes how this will happen:
“The reciprocal gift of oneself to God—a gift in which man will concentrate and express all the energies of his own personal and at the same time psychosomatic subjectivity—will be the response to God’s gift of self to man. In this reciprocal gift of self by man, a gift that will become completely and definitively beatifying as the response worthy of a personal subject to God’s gift of self, the “virginity” or rather the virginal state of the body will manifest itself completely as the eschatological fulfillment of the ‘spousal’ meaning of the body, as the specific sign and authentic expression of personal subjectivity as a whole” (TOB 68:3).
In Chapter 1 of Part 2, John Paul II shifts his focus from Christ’s teachings about the heart in Matthew to the great mystery of the Church as the bride of Christ in Ephesians 5:22-33 and not only how marriage is an analogy for this mystery but also how this mystery enlightens the spousal meaning of marriage as well. To show the sacramentality of marriage, John Paul II goes back “to the beginning” in Genesis, then traces the spousal imagery of God’s relationship with his Chosen People from the words of the prophets of the Old Testament to the words of Paul in the New Testament.
“The analogy of spousal love and of marriage appears only when the ‘Creator’ and the ‘Holy One of Israel’ manifests himself as ‘Redeemer.’ Isaiah says, ‘For your Creator is your husband, Lord of hosts is his name; the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer’ (Isa 54:5)….And thus the gift of self for the Church is equivalent to the fulfillment of the work of redemption. In this way, the ‘Creator, the Lord of hosts’ of Isaiah becomes ‘the Holy One of Israel’ of the ‘new Israel’ inasmuch as he is Redeemer. In Ephesians, the theological perspective of the prophetic text is preserved and at the same time deepened and transformed (TOB 95:6).
The indissoluble nature of marriage denotes the complete gift of self that is inherent in the sacrament and at the same time helps us to penetrate into the great mystery “hidden from all ages” of how Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her to make her holy. It is through this act carried out as the New Covenant in his blood that we as members of the Church, the bride of Christ, become partakers of the divine nature.
In Chapter 2 of Part 2, Dimension of the Sign, John Paul II outlines the nature of marriage between man and woman. He describes how the man and woman administer the sacrament to each other in the presence of witnesses, the primary of which is the priest who also blesses the marriage. He states that the words spoken by the man and woman are fulfilled when the marriage is consummated. He indicates that when both of these elements are present marriage reflects God’s covenant bond with his people and that the bodies of the couple speak the language of the prophets, a language which they read but of which they are not the author. He says that only when this language is reread in the truth does it speak the spousal language of the body and reflect God’s love for his people and Christ’s love for the Church, the pre-eminent mystery of which human marriage is a visible reality. He states that to reread the language of the body in truth also means to embrace the “procreative meaning of the body.” The man of concupiscence is the one who fails to do this, and he lives in all of us; however, we are capable of living out this truth of the language of the body because we are called by the redemption of Christ (TOB 107:4).
In the final section, Chapter 3: He Gave Them the Law of Life as Their Inheritance, John Paul II underscores the necessity of recognizing and observing the inseparability of the procreative and unitive dimensions of the conjugal act as indicated in Humanae Vitae: “Nothing else is at stake here than reading the “language of the body” in the truth, as has been said several times in the earlier biblical analyses. The moral norm, constantly taught by the Church in this sphere, recalled and reconfirmed by Paul VI in his encyclical, springs from reading the ‘language of the body’ in the truth” (TOB 118:6). It is also significant that John Paul II points out that Humanae Vitae calls “human beings back to the observance of the norms of the natural law” (HV 11) because, as Waldstein notes in his introduction, the desire to dominate nature, even the natural processes of one’s own body, is at the center of the whole Baconian program that was expanded upon by Descartes and other so-called progressive philosophers and scientists after him, and at the heart of this desire is the belief in a dark dualism that separates bodies from persons and reduces them simply to matter that is, like all other matter in the physical world, to be subjected to and manipulated by the latest scientific knowledge.
Matthew Reding received his Masters in Applied Catholic Theology from the University of Mary in 2023 and a Masters in Educational Theory and Practice from Arkansas State University in 2015. He is a member of the Missouri State Teachers Association and has spent his career in public education. However, his real education has come from twenty-eight years of marriage and raising five children. He has a particular love and interest for the work of St. John Paul II.
Works Cited
Catholic Church. Pope (1963-1978 : Paul VI), and Pope Paul VI. Of Human Life: Encyclical Letter of Paul VI. Pauline Books & Media, 1968.
John Paul II, Pope. Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. Translated by Michael Waldstein, Pauline Books & Media, 2006.
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