Body and soul

The teaching of the Church on sexuality and marriage has been developed by Pope John Paul II in daring ways. Here are better answers than secular culture gives. A departmental head of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, author of many books on the Church in the modern world, expounds the Pope?s thought.

IN the very first year of his papacy, Pope John Paul II planted a time bomb in the Church that is not likely to go off until about 20 years from now. Beginning in September 1979, he devoted 15 minutes of each weekly general audience over a five-year period until November 1984 to sustained, dense and rigorous meditations on human sexuality. Reflecting on key biblical passages, the Pope began by wondering what it meant to Adam, walking in the garden, to discover that he was alone, underneath the trees, as an embodied self. He asked what it means to Karol Wojtyla, and the rest of us, to be embodied selves.

Even during the papal conclave that elected him, Cardinal Wojtyla had been working on these lectures, intending to use them in his teaching in Krakow. He was dissatisfied with the reception of Paul VI?s encyclical of 1968, Humanae Vitae, and dissatisfied, too, with the state of the argument in the Church about sexuality, thinking that it did not go as far as it could in answering certain basic puzzlements that humans have about themselves.

In particular, certain passages in the Bible about male and female, love and lust, matrimony and divorce, are not transparent in their meaning, and stirred Wojtyla?s wonder. What on earth could they mean? To get to the bottom of the mystery that we are to ourselves, must we not go down more deeply into a philosophy of the human self, that is, the human subject?

Here is an example, from a recent American writing, of the kind of thinking Wojtyla found most unsatisfactory: God does not care what we do with each other?s bodies; he only cares whether we treat each other as persons. Absent is the insight that our souls penetrate every aspect of our bodies, and that our bodies in every part shape and reflect the entirety of our soul: that we are one.

Sometimes, I confess, I do find myself slipping into some such point of view. Sometimes I can feel, rather as in Plato?s philosophy, as though I am a soul inhabiting a body, at times imprisoned in it, at times carried away by it, as though my body is a separate thing from me. It has happened often to me that I have willed one thing, my body another; and my body is terribly strong.

Is our sexuality a joke perpetrated by our Creator? Does it mock us? Was it intended to humble us? It does seem at times like an implacable fate, utterly baffling, difficult to mollify.

Why do we so often experience ourselves as divided, separated, at times inwardly at war, nearly always alienated part from part? Strangers to ourselves. Brooding mysteries.

In the 129 public addresses that Pope John Paul II delivered over those five years, he began with Adam in his solitude. Adam walked alone as a species, neither vegetable nor mineral, neither God nor animal, and not an angel, either. He stood alone in all creation. Neither had he company of his own kind, so he was unable to procreate and assure the continuation of his species. His was a poignant solitude, a truly silent solitude. It was not, the Bible tells us, good. It lacked an essential part.

And so from Adam?s flesh to underline the oneness of the human essence God created Eve: not just woman, but a person with a name, face, shape, and personality. One inescapable point of this account is that the human being is two-in-one: Male and female He created them in the beginning. Twice the Bible repeats in the beginning. Jesus, too, recalls the exact words (Mt. 19:3) in the beginning. To make man two-in-one was God?s intention, from before even time began.

Further, if the human being is made in the image of God (the second point the Bible insists upon), it is as male and female together. Something in our male-and-femaleness-together pulls back the veils on what God is like. The distinctness of our being male and female is revelatory of God?s own being and inner life. It is in our communion with one another that we are images of God. Each gender alone is incompletely human. We are made for the communion of male with female.

Why then, so soon, did Adam and Eve become aware of their nakedness and filled with shame? That this shame is not due to their bodies, or merely to their being naked, is made plain by one glaring fact: shame had no part in their original being; it is not of their essence. On the contrary, the shame arises only when Adam and Eve violate the will written into their natures by their Creator, when they use each other to suit their own individual appetites, wishing to put self in the place of God. Their shame arises when they become enemies of one another, through the war for dominance on the part of each. Then they must hide from one another, and in order to become master, learn the arts of seduction.

Their sexed individuality was given to Adam and Eve so that, in becoming one, they might heal their essential incompleteness, and come into existence as the one essence God intended from the beginning. The gift of one is matched by the gift of the other, freely given ? their love is mutual. To speak of Adam and Eve as in communion is to capture their gift of each to each. Their beings come to rest in one another.

Thus, however imperfectly, our sexuality reveals to us that, whatever else he might be like, our Creator lives in self-giving communion. This experience of communion between woman and man, self-giving, in mutuality, and without either?s dominance, is more like the inner life of God than anything else that we encounter in creation. To self-giving communion, in accord with the creative will of the Creator, nothing else in the experience of the human race comes close. It has in it the taste of the eternal and divine, and the Song of Songs is its internal music. Wojtyla?s views on sex reflect the riches of the Catholic tradition ? erotic, poetic, profound. In two of the deepest, most lovely lines in the poetry of any language, Dante captures the essence of this love and all its range:

E?n la sua volontate ? nostra pace . . .
(In His will is our peace . . .)
L?amor che move il sole e l?altre stelle
(The love that moves the sun and the other
stars).

Propelled by its most divine-like energies, that love of which Dante speaks is sexual, erotic, physical, and in that form its communion is procreative. From two-in-one there comes a third. From the love of two there comes the miraculous and startling creativity of birthing, pushing forth a newborn child, not just a child, but a girl or boy.

For the young priest and later Pope, even celibacy is understood in the light of matrimony, the sacrament by which the Creator revealed to humankind the communion of His own nature. Thus, the second set of the Pope?s meditations, begun in 1980, concerns the trick question the Sadducees put to Jesus: if a woman was married and widowed seven times, with which husband shall she be joined in Paradise? Jesus answered that the Sadducees misapprehended Paradise. It is not that humans there are bodiless but that communion comes to the fore, communion with the love that moves the sun and other stars, in whose will is our peace.

This is the love that enflames the woman or the man who commit their lives, for that kingdom of heaven?s sake, to celibacy. They will totally will what God wills. Their communion does not falsify, it vindicates, the love that a man offers to a woman, a woman to a man, in its total self-givingness. The two kinds of love, matrimonial and celibate, shed a kind of light upon each other. Matrimony reminds us of the earthiness of human clay, breathed upon by God?s love, and of the completed, united twoness of our essential nature. (When I ask my married friend if he can come with me to the ballgame tonight, he always answers me that first he must consult his wife: there are two of him.) But celibacy dramatises for us that the source of unity in love is the total giving of two wills, focused on the good of the other. Married and celibate teach each other depths of love.

In this perspective, the Pope thoroughly re-fashioned the standpoint of Humanae Vitae. Instead of visualising the moral task in married love as endurance, the Pope asks: how can married love grow into the fullness of human nature? Instead of focusing on birth control, the Pope turns to the first of the cardinal virtues, practical wisdom or prudence, and speaks of the excellence of prudence in deciding, in God?s presence, how many children to have ? how to regulate fertility. Practical experience teaches a couple that, willy-nilly, they will need to practise abstinence at times, just as they at times enjoy ecstasy ? and the tension of that drama is a large part of human excellence. Prudence, temperance, justice, courage ? excellence in all four cardinal virtues heightens excellence in married love.

The Pope suggests that married couples regard sexual love in marriage as a school, always bringing out in them new excellences, and bringing them deeper into participation in God?s own love within them.

Four things are novel in Wojtyla?s thought on love and responsibility (to allude to a title of another of his books). First, there is a turn to interiority, to subjectivity, beyond the Thomistic focus. He could not have done this without the experience of modernity, and the simultaneous turn of some phenomenologists to both the subject and the real. (From 1917 to 1945, they had had enough of ideology and madmen?s dreams; they sought desperately for livable ground to build a life upon.)

The second was the refusal to separate the person from the body. Wojtyla refuses to adopt a physicalist theory of sexual love. He refuses to be a Manichee. He refuses to be gnostic. He loves the human body, has always enjoyed the strength and vitality which his used to give him, climbing in the mountains, pulling his kayak?s oar in silver mountain waters, until an assassin?s bullet and the will of God through other maladies made him bear the cross of the body?s infirmities. He loves the sights and smells and sounds of the liturgy of the Mass. He loves the oils of the sacraments. Everywhere he sees the ways that spirit and body are made for one another, enter into one another, interpenetrate in the secret recesses of our being. Embodied selves, indeed. No other religion but Christianity would dare to believe in the resurrection of the embodied self.

The third is the insight that the unity of man and woman comes in the giving of the will, each to each. The unity of bodies tells the truth when the bodies being one express giving of each self. In matrimony, human beings are one in both their bodies and their selves.

The fourth is the insight that in our sexuality glimpses of the Godhead lie. Marriage between man and woman is the most beautiful, as Thomas Aquinas put it, of all friendships known to us. God is more like the communion of persons than he is like anything else we know of. That, at least, is the way he has revealed himself to us, not only in Scripture and in his Son, but also in the way our embodied selves are joined in matrimony.

At the very head of the Bible it is written: Male and female, he made them from the beginning. He made them in his image. If we miss the point of that, it?s hard to believe we?d get much right about the rest. At least since 1969, and no doubt even since much earlier, say the 1930s, when the secrets of human fertility began to be broken into at last by scientists, Western culture has been in a fever of free love, contraception and the Pill. Doing what we will with our bodies has become a worldwide passion, the acme of fulfilment. The project cannot be going very well, however, or else why would there be so many self-help books on sex, so many manuals, so many grapplings to understand the widespread disappointment?

That is why I began this essay by describing what the Pope has worked out as a ticking time bomb, two or three decades yet from going off. Who among us is ready for it? Who among us would dare to admit he learned the humanness of sexuality from a Pope? That would be preposterous. Just wait. Boredom is as boredom does. Disordered sexual love and death are partners in a deathly dance. There will come a time when minds will be open, when women and men will begin to wonder: when God wrote Eros into our embodied selves, what did he intend? In the mountain passes of the soul, they will not find many guides as daring as Karol Wojtyla, climber in the snow-tipped Tatras.