Theology of the Body is the topic of a series of 129 lectures given by Pope John Paul II during his Wednesday audiences in St. Peter's Square and the Paul VI Audience Hall between September 5, 1979, and November 28, 1984. It constitutes an analysis on human sexuality. The complete addresses were later compiled and expanded upon in many of John Paul's encyclicals, letters, and exhortations.
In Theology of the Body, John Paul II intends to establish an adequate anthropology in which the human body reveals God. He examines man and woman before the Fall, after it, and at the resurrection of the dead. He also contemplates the sexual complementarity of man and woman. He explores the nature of marriage, celibacy and virginity, and expands on the teachings in Humanae vitae on contraception. According to author Christopher West, the central thesis of John Paul's Theology of the Body is that "the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus to be a sign of it."
At present the Theology of the Body has been widely used and included in the curriculum of the Marriage Preparation Course in the Catholic dioceses of the United States.
The series of addresses were given as a reflection on the creation of man as male and female, as a sexual being. They sought to respond to certain âÂÂdistorted ideas and attitudesâ as fundamental to the sexual revolution. Pope John Paul II addresses how the common understanding of the human body which analyzes it as a mechanism leads to objectification, that is, a loss of understanding of its intrinsic, personal meaning. Pope John Paul's thought is influenced by his earlier philosophical interests including the phenomenological approaches of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, and especially by the philosophical action theory of Thomas Aquinas which analyzes human acts in the context of what is done, freely chosen, and felt, while presupposing that those acts are made possible due to the substantial union of soul and matter as required by hylomorphism. Key pre-papal writings on these topics include Love and Responsibility, The Acting Person, and various papers collected in Person and Community. These themes are continued in John Paul II's theological anthropology, which analyzes the nature of human beings in relation to God. The Theology of the Body presents an interpretation of the fundamental significance of the body, and in particular of sexual differentiation and complementarity, one which aims to challenge common contemporary philosophical views. Nevertheless, the pope's personalistic phenomenology is "echoing what he learned from St. John of the Cross" and is "in harmony with St. Thomas Aquinas".
Francis Bacon was an early empiricist who focused on problems of knowledge. In his Great Instauration, he argued that the current state of knowledge is immature and not advancing. His purpose was for the human mind to have authority over nature through understanding and knowledge. Bacon argued against Aristotle's final and formal cause, stating that "the final cause rather corrupts than advances the sciences." He thought that focusing on formal causality is an impediment to knowledge, because power is gained by focusing on matter that is observable and experienced, not just a figment of the mind. His emphasis on power over nature contributed to the rise of an understanding of nature as mechanism and the claim that true knowledge of nature is that expressed by mechanical laws. Pope John Paul II saw Bacon's conception of knowledge and its proper object as the beginning of the split between person and body, which is his goal to reconcile.
René Descartes furthered a mathematical approach to philosophy and epistemology through skepticism and rationalism, emphasizing the practical value of power over nature. In his Discourse on Method, Descartes said, âÂÂwe can find a practical [philosophy], by which knowing the nature and behavior of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies which surround usâ¦we can employ these entities for all the purposes for which they are suited, and so make ourselves the masters and possessors of natureâÂÂ. In addition to the importance of power over nature, Descartes (like Bacon) insisted upon dismissing final cause, stating that âÂÂthe entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thingâÂÂs âÂÂend,â I judge to be utterly uselessâÂÂ.
Descartesâ practical philosophy also proposed a dualism between the mind and the physical body, based on the belief that they are two distinct substances. The body is matter that is spatially extended, whereas the mind is the substance that thinks and contains the rational soul. Pope John Paul II responded to this dualism in his Letter to Families in 1994: âÂÂIt is typical of rationalism to make a radical contrast in man between spirit and body, between body and spirit. But man is a person in the unity of his body and his spirit. The body can never be reduced to mere matterâÂÂ. Pope John Paul II maintained that the stark Cartesian opposition between body and spirit leads to human sexuality as an area for manipulation and exploitation, rather than wonder and unity as he addresses in the Theology of the Body lectures.
Pope John Paul II admitted that the work of Immanuel Kant was the âÂÂstarting groundâ of many of his reflections. Kant, like Bacon and Descartes, believed that natural science can only progress through the mathematical-materialist determinist study of nature. However, Kant saw danger in those laws of nature if God is excluded because morality and religion are called into question. Kant's solution to that danger was to insist that theoretical reason is limited in regards to morality and religion. Reason and sense-data should not be used to try to answer the question of God. Kant stated, âÂÂI had to do away with knowledge to make room for faithâÂÂ. That faith led to the development of Kant's personalism. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant said, âÂÂthe conviction [of faith] is not a logical but a moral certainty; and because it rests on subjective bases (of the moral attitude), I must not even say, It is morally certain that there is a God, etc., but I must say, I am morally certain, etc." That ideology allows each person to choose their own terms for reality and morality, because they cannot be argued against using theoretical reason.
Kant's personalism extends from faith and applies to moral dignity, autonomy, and freedom. Pope John Paul II agreed with some aspects of personalism but criticized Kant as believing in âÂÂanti-trinitarian personalism,â which removes the relational character of the Trinity to focus on an autonomous self. Kant's views on the autonomous self placed each human's conscience acting as a personal âÂÂlawmakerâ for subjective morality, but John Paul II argued that a human's conscience cannot create moral norms, rather it must discover them in objective truth.
The difference between Kant's view and Pope John Paul II's view of personalism is made clear throughout the Theology of the Body in arguments about sex, marriage, and polygamy. Kant had two principles of sexual ethics: that one must not âÂÂenjoyâ another person solely for pleasure and that sexual union involves giving oneself to another. Pope John Paul II agreed on those principles, yet disagreed on the meaning and reasoning behind the principles. Kant believed that people lose their autonomy and dignity in sexual acts, because they are reduced to things being used for pleasure. Marriage resolves that by giving the spouses âÂÂlifelong mutual possession of their sexual characteristicsâÂÂ. However, Kant's explanation of marriage still does not transform the objectifying nature of sex, it merely permits it as legal. On the other hand, Pope John Paul II explains the sexual act in marriage as fulfillment of the natural law of spousal love. Rather than objectifying and depersonalizing, it is enriching for a person because it is a sincere gift of the self in love. Pope John Paul II highlights conjugal love, whereas Kant does not acknowledge it.
Pope John Paul II's basic beliefs on love, when he was establishing his Theology of the Body, was derived from Saint John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz), a Spanish mystic and Doctor of the Church. Karol WojtylaâÂÂbefore he became Pope John Paul IIâÂÂdefended his doctoral dissertation, later translated in a book titled Faith According to Saint John of the Cross, in June 1948 at the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In that work, John of the Cross's influence is shown in his belief that relationship with God is a unifying process in which its elements actuated dynamically. Other influence is that he values love over faith, and that love "draws the person into a real ontological and psychological union with God".
The "Sanjuanist triangle" of love consists of three points: 1) Love is self-giving; 2) Filial love to God and conjugal love in marriage are the self-giving paradigm; 3) Relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit within the Trinity is the model of self-giving love. Through pure love, a person experiences God in the "mutual exchange of self-donation".
Thomas Petri O.P. writes, "We may also note Wojtyla's observation that for John of the Cross, God is objective but not objectivizable to the intellect, which naturally lends itself to the personalistic norm that will eventually hold pride of place in Wojtyla's thought. Like the person of God, no human person can ever be a mere object of our actions but must be understood in relationship."
Theology of the Body is the topic of a series of 129 lectures given by Pope John Paul II during his Wednesday audiences in St. Peter's Square and the Paul VI Audience Hall between September 5, 1979 and November 28, 1984. It constitutes an analysis on human sexuality, and is considered as the first major teaching of his pontificate. Denis Read, O.C.D. says that, by means of the Theology of the Body, "John Paul II gave the Church the beginning of a mystical philosophy of life." The complete addresses were later compiled and expanded upon in many of John Paul's encyclicals, letters, and exhortations.
The delivery of the Theology of the Body series did have interruptions. For example, the Wednesday audiences were devoted to other topics during the Holy Year of Redemption in 1983.
The work covers such topics as the unified corporeal and spiritual qualities of the human person; the origins, history and destiny of humanity; the deepest desires of the human heart and the way to experience true happiness and freedom; the truth about man's need and desire for loving communion derived from the revealed understanding of humanity in the image of a Triune Creator; the truth about God's original design for human sexuality and thus the dignity of the human person, how it was distorted through sin, and how it has been restored and renewed through the redemption of Jesus Christ; and Catholic teachings about the sacramentality of marriage.
The central thesis of John Paul's Theology of the Body, according to author Christopher West, is that "the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus to be a sign of it."
The work consists of two halves and five cycles. The first half, entitled "The Words of Christ" consists of three cycles in which John Paul II establishes an "adequate anthropology." Cycle 1 looks at the human person as we were created to be "in the beginning" (original man); Cycle 2 addresses human life after original sin, unredeemed and redeemed (historical man). Cycle 3 treats the reality of our life at the end of time when Christ comes back again and history reaches its fulfillment (eschatological man). John Paul II also places his reflections on virginity for the kingdom within the context of Cycle 3. In the second half, entitled "The Sacrament" (which refers to the sacrament of marriage), John Paul II addresses the sacramentality of marriage in Cycle 4 and the responsible transmission of human life in Cycle 5.
Some consider the very first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est (God is Love), with its exposition of the relation between agape and eros, to be the culmination of John Paul II's Theology of the Body. For John Paul II's theology, eros has an inherent nuptial meaning but that its role is a sustaining theme for the body if logic is followed.