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."
Preceding developments in the history of ideas
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 “distorted ideas and attitudes” 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
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." In addition to the importance of power over nature, Descartes (like Bacon) insisted upon dismissing final cause, stating that “the entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s ‘end,’ I judge to be utterly useless”.
Descartes’ 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: “It 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 matter”. 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. Kant, like Bacon and Descartes, believed that natural science can only progress through the mathematical-materialist determinist study of nature. 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'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 “anti-trinitarian personalism,” which removes the relational character of the Trinity to focus on an autonomous self.
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 “enjoy” another person solely for pleasure and that sexual union involves giving oneself to another. 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.
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". 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 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.
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! No.
! Cycle
! Title
! Date
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|1
|1
|Of the Unity and Indissolubility of Marriage
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|2
|1
|Biblical Account of Creation Analysed
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|3
|1
|The Second Account of Creation: The Subjective Definition of Man
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|4
|1
|Boundary Between Original Innocence and Redemption
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|5
|1
|Meaning of Man's Original Solitude
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|6
|1
|Man's Awareness of Being a Person
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|7
|1
|In the Very Definition of Man, the Alternative Between Death and Immortality
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|-
|8
|1
|Original Unity of Man and Woman
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|9
|1
|Man Becomes the Image of God by Communion of Persons
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|-
|10
|1
|Marriage One and Indissoluble in First Chapters of Genesis
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|11
|1
|Meaning of Original Human Experiences
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|12
|1
|Fullness of Interpersonal Communication
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|13
|1
|Creation as a Fundamental and Original Gift
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|14
|1
|Revelation and Discovery of the Nuptial Meaning of the Body
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|15
|1
|The Man-Person Becomes a Gift in the Freedom of Love
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|16
|1
|Mystery of Man's Original Innocence
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|17
|1
|Man and Woman: A Mutual Gift for Each Other
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|18
|1
|Original Innocence and Man's Historical State
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|19
|1
|Man Enters the World as a Subject of Truth and Love
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|20
|1
|Analysis of Knowledge and of Procreation
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|21
|1
|Mystery of Woman Revealed in Motherhood
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|22
|1
|Knowledge-Generation Cycle and Perspective of Death
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|23
|1
|Marriage in the Integral Vision of Man
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|24
|2
|Christ Appeals to Man's Heart
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|25
|2
|Ethical and Anthropological Content of the Commandment: You Shall Not Commit Adultery
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|-
|26
|2
|Lust is the Fruit of the Breach of the Covenant With God
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|27
|2
|Real Significance of Original Nakedness
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|28
|2
|A Fundamental Disquiet in All Human Existence
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|29
|2
|Relationship of Lust to Communion of Persons
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|30
|2
|Dominion Over the Other in the Interpersonal Relation
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|31
|2
|Lust Limits Nuptial Meaning of the Body
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|32
|2
|The Heart a Battlefield Between Love and Lust
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|33
|2
|Opposition in the Human Heart between the Spirit and the Body
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|-
|34
|2
|Sermon on the Mount to the Men of Our Day
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|35
|2
|Content of the Commandment: You Shall Not Commit Adultery
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|36
|2
|Adultery According to the Law and as Spoken by the Prophets
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|37
|2
|Adultery: A Breakdown of the Personal Covenant
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|38
|2
|Meaning of Adultery Transferred from the Body to the Heart
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|39
|2
|Concupiscence as a Separation From Matrimonial Significance of the Body
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