The Body and Society: Toward a Eucharistic Transformation

Paper presented at the Fourth Truth of Love Conference “The Eucharist and the Logic of the Gift,” organized by the Franciscan University of Steubenville and the Veritas Amoris Project, Steubenville, OH, June 22, 2024

The Human Body Challenged in Western Societies

On December 14, 2023, the European Parliament adopted a bill on a “European Certificate of Parenthood,”[1] the aim of which was to ensure, in the words of the President of the European Commission, Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen, that “if you are [a] parent in one country, you are [a] parent in every country.”[2] In its 72 articles, spread over some 65 letter-sized pages, the bill does not contain the word “father” or “fatherhood,” nor the word “motherhood.” The word “mother” still appears four times, although two sentences are repeated so that the different occasions on which the word is used are only two.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, proposes the idea of uploading the contents of our brains to computers to create “backups” of who we are, so that we finally put our destiny in our own hands and are able to live as long as we wish.[3] In an age of digital immortality our bodies are seen as nothing but disposable hardware. As our silicon-based computers are becoming more and more powerful, it is only a matter of time before they reach a level of performance greater than all human intelligence combined, which will be the point at which human and machine intelligence merge, an event which Kurzweil calls “the singularity” and which he estimates will occur around the year 2045.[4] Judging from his arguments and references, it seems that not all scientists in the world consider the idea of mind uploading to be mere science fiction.

Maybe we have lost something somewhere. At least in our Western societies, the body does not appear to have any language and express any meaning. We have it hormonally and surgically treated to the point where biological males begin looking like females and biological females begin looking like males. A not insignificant side-effect of these procedures is that of sterility. Those who undergo these interventions generally forfeit the possibility of ever begetting or conceiving another child. Sterility is the mark, too, of same-sex unions, which by their very ontological constitution will never allow the partners to become father and mother one through the other. Despite being based entirely on private affection, in many Western countries, these unions receive nonetheless public recognition.

The Relevance of the Body for Society

The body’s specific relevance for society lies precisely in the sexual difference inscribed in it. Sexual difference is the biological condition for the continuation of a society in time. Through the union of male and female a society obtains its new members, which explains society’s interest in regulating this kind of union and giving it public recognition corresponding to this union’s significant public relevance.[5] It is through this type of union that life is passed on from generation to generation—through the body in its sexual difference.

There is thus a cycle of generations kept in motion by the organic body, a cycle that imbues society itself with some of the characteristics of a living organism. New members are constantly coming in, old members are constantly going out. The new must be introduced to this world; the old must be accompanied and cared for as they approach the point of their passing. One generation transmits to the next what it has received from the previous one: a heritage, a history. All have their place in this cycle of generations as father or mother, son or daughter, grandfather or grandmother, with specific expectations and tasks attached to each of these relative positions, which still today go on largely to define our identity.

Without the body, in contrast, there is no sexual difference and therefore no fatherhood or motherhood. Without the body, there is no generational difference or cycle of generations, and there are therefore no specific roles, responsibilities and tasks in relation to those who came before and those who come after. Father and mother become “parent #1” and “parent #2.” A generation becomes a simple cohort, a group of people who happen to be born within the same fifteen-year interval.

The Body and the Covenant

“This is my body which is given for you” (Lk 22:19). Here is the transformation that the Eucharist can work in a society like the one just described: The Eucharist gives a language to the body, the language of the gift. The body is a body given and received. As given and received, it is originally embedded in a community. To accept the gift, to accept one’s body in its sexual difference, is to accept one’s origin and destiny in the context of the Church and society. The Eucharist offers a hermeneutics that reads the body in the light of the gift, and inasmuch as it is the sacrament of the new and everlasting covenant, it reads the gift in the light of the covenant. The covenant, in turn, is the foundation of every society, human, ecclesial, or divine: in fact, the Latin societas literally refers to the community of those who are allies: socii. In other words, the Eucharist tells us that body, gift, and covenant belong to the same semantic field. In what follows, we will examine more closely how a hermeneutics of the body in the light of the gift and in the light of the covenant provides a renewed way of understanding the relationship between men and women and the relationship between the generations, which are the relationships upon which a society depends and by which it is constituted as society, whether it wants it or not, whether it admits it or not.

Reading the Body in the Light of the Gift

Commenting the first chapters of the Book of Genesis in his Catecheses on Human Love in the Divine Plan, John Paul II presents this kind of hermeneutics of the body, arguing that the living body is not a mere object, but a personal reality, and that especially sexual difference “expresses” something, which is another way of saying that the body, as sexually differentiated, has meanings. So we read:

“The body, which expresses femininity ‘for’ masculinity and, vice versa, masculinity ‘for’ femininity, manifests the reciprocity and communion of persons. It expresses it through gift as the fundamental characteristic of personal existence.”[6]

The Polish Pope intimately links the discourse of the body and the discourse of gift, with the gift being for him nothing less than the basic category of personal existence. And notably, creation itself is a gift, even the fundamental gift, of which the body is a witness.[7]

For John Paul II the body indeed expresses meanings. He essentially individuates two: the “spousal meaning” and the “generative meaning” of the body. The body has a “spousal meaning” in that it is sexually differentiated and calls for the communion of persons in the mutual gift of self of man and woman.[8] Sexual difference speaks to us of a call to mutual gift.

This mutual gift of the spouses goes beyond the spouses themselves, since in John Paul II’s view, the idea of spouses already includes the idea of potential parents. Thus he writes:

“Genesis 2:24 speaks of the ordering of man’s masculinity and femininity to an end, in the life of spouses-parents. By joining together so closely that they become ‘one flesh,’ they place their humanity in some way under the blessing of fruitfulness, that is, of ‘procreation.’”[9]

While references to the spousal meaning of the body run throughout his catecheses, mentions of its “generative meaning” are less frequent, but no less important. Thus, in a highly significant passage, John Paul II argues that fatherhood is part of the idea of being a man and motherhood is part of the idea of being a woman:

“Man stands, as male and female, with the consciousness of the generative meaning of his own body: masculinity contains in a hidden way the meaning of fatherhood and femininity that of motherhood.”[10]

The sexually differentiated body, itself a gift born of an act of love, speaks to us of our call to fruitfulness. We are called to be fruitful, to become parents, to give life to others.

As the saintly Pope himself emphasizes later in his catecheses, this giving of life to others does not have to be in the flesh. But every true vocation is aimed at giving life to others, in one way or another. It is not without reason that we call a priest a “father” or a religious sister a “mother.” Their vocations find their full realization in spiritual father- or motherhood. And Jesus himself suggests that the source of their spiritual fecundity lies precisely in their bodily renunciation: “Truly, I say to you, there is no man who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive manifold more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life” (Lk 18:29-30).[11] For all human beings, we can say that the desire to be fruitful is deeply rooted in our hearts, and our very masculinity or femininity speaks to us of our vocation to give life.

If the body has a spousal and a generative meaning, then the logical consequence is to find in it a third, namely, a “filial” meaning. While John Paul II did not explicitly develop this notion, Benedict XVI did. Reflecting on the theology of the body and commenting on the Sistine Chapel, he writes:

“The body speaks to us of an origin that we have not conferred on ourselves. ‘You knit me in my mother’s womb,’ the Psalmist says to the Lord (Ps 139:13). We can affirm that the body, in revealing our origin to us, bears within itself a filial significance because it reminds us that we are generated, and leads us back, through our parents who passed on life to us, to God the Creator.”[12]

The body is a gift in that it is created by God and generated by our parents: we are creatures, we are sons or daughters.

Reading the Gift in the Light of the Covenant

All three meanings of the body, filial, spousal and parental, have in common that they express a dimension of gift, a gift we have received and are called to pass on. And the Eucharistic body is precisely this: a body given. And here enters the notion of the covenant. That the gift and the covenant are related, we can see when reflecting on creation. For John Paul II “creation constitutes the fundamental and original gift.”[13] He immediately clarifies that for this affirmation to be true, human beings had to be present. While one can correctly say that “every creature bears within itself the sign of the original and fundamental gift,” it is also true that “in the account of the creation of the visible world, giving has meaning only in relation to man. In the whole work of creation, it is only about him that one can say, a gift has been granted: the visible world has been created ‘for him.’”[14]  In other words, without Adam, the creation of the visible world would still have meant that God called things into being out of nothing, but it would not have had the character of a “gift.”

Why then cannot creation be called a gift for lions, tigers, and bears, but only with reference to human beings? John Paul II clarifies that the giving of a gift “indicates the one who gives and the one who receives the gift, as well as the relation established between them.”[15] If, as John Paul II says, a gift is about establishing a relationship between the giver and the receiver, then there must be some kind of active, free and conscious response on the part of the receiver, that is, there must be some kind of reciprocity.

At this point, an excursion into cultural anthropology may be helpful. In his famous study of the gift in traditional societies, the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss describes an archaic practice that he calls the “opening gift,” which is “the starting point, one that irrevocably commits the recipient to make a reciprocating gift.”[16] The French philosopher Marcel Hénaff interprets the ritual of opening gifts described by Mauss as a “procedure of recognition” and ultimately as the offering of a pact.[17] Thus, the opening gift is the first gift that invites the recipient into a relationship of reciprocity with the giver, ultimately proposing an alliance. Combining Marcel Mauss’ and Marcel Hénaff’s analyses of the gift with John Paul II’s reflections, we can see creation itself as a kind of “opening gift”—a gift given in a dynamic interaction between two parties, in which the one invites the other to a reciprocity through the gift, with the goal of establishing an alliance between the two. In this sense, strictly speaking, a gift can only be given to someone who is able to enter a covenant, someone who is able to reciprocate. And while cats and horses can receive their being, they cannot recognize the giver as the giver, and they cannot make a return. Only a “someone” who can answer for himself or herself—someone who is “responsible”—can do this. With the creation of that someone, something new happens: the world becomes a gift, creation becomes a covenant.

Now, in a highly significant affirmations in his Wednesday Catecheses, John Paul II asserts that “there is a strong link between the mystery of creation as a gift born of love and the beatific ‘beginning’ of human existence as male and female.”[18] He thus links sexual difference to the very covenant of creation. To understand the logic that allows him to do so, we can turn to his Meditations on the Gift, written in 1994 but published only posthumously in 2006. Here he asks, “Can one man say to another, ‘God has given you to me’?”[19]  The entire text is a reflection on this one question. The answer is an emphatic “yes.” John Paul II points out that “people live not only alongside one another, but also in manifold relationships. They live for each other … Not only do they give themselves to each other, but God also gives them to one another.”[20]

Commenting on Adam’s experience when he first saw Eve, the Polish pontiff surmised that the first man surely thought: “God gave you to me.”[21]  According to Mauss’ anthropological account of the gift, “by giving, one is giving oneself.”[22] For Marcel Hénaff, reading Mauss, the thing given is “a guarantee and substitute of the giver. It is the means—the symbol—of an alliance or pact.”[23]  The gift is at the service of the bond. And it does not always have to be a “thing,” it can even be a person. According to the French philosopher, the highest expression of a gift given to establish an alliance between two parties is “the wife who moves to the allied group, following the exogamic rule.”[24] Hénaff’s point of reference here is Claude Lévi-Strauss, for whom the norm of exogamy is the positive formulation of what the incest taboo formulates in the negative: it is the requirement of marriage outside the kinship group. Exogamous marriage, understood as a pact between families, means that one family gives its daughter or sister to another family. For Lévi-Strauss, exogamy is “the supreme rule of gift.”[25]

If we now look at the creation account from the perspective opened up by John Paul II’s Meditations on the Gift, together with the anthropological observations of Mauss and Hénaff, we can say that if Eve is God’s gift to Adam, then she herself is a symbol of the Giver. The Giver is present in her. By giving her to Adam, God is inviting him to a covenant. If she is the covenant pledge, the symbol of God’s covenant offer, then marriage is indeed a natural sacrament. It is the sign and instrument of God’s first covenant with humanity. The creation of Eve as God’s gift to Adam is the confirmation and consummation of the covenant of creation, of which sexual difference—the creation of human beings as male and female—becomes the sign and symbol. God invites Adam and Eve to enter a covenant with him. It is God who gives the spouses to each other; each is God’s gift to the other. In accepting and loving each other, they accept and love God the Giver who, in making this gift, also gives himself in his gift.

Making a Return

Now the question asked by the Psalmist arises: “What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me?” (Ps 116:12). Since the gift is an offer and at the same time a request for recognition and an invitation to enter an alliance, some kind of return is necessary in order to accept the offer and enter the logic of the covenant. For St. Thomas Aquinas, reading Seneca, a first kind of return is grateful acceptance: “Who receives a favor gratefully, has already begun to pay it back.” [26] Giving thanks, in Greek eucharistéō, is the primordial way of making a return, of recognizing the Giver as the Giver and oneself as the beneficiary. In this way, one confirms the Giver’s loving intention in giving the gift; one says “yes” to the gift and to the Giver and makes room for him in one’s affection.[27]

When we speak of the gift of life, however, there is a further, most congruous way of giving back, the deliberate refusal of which is tantamount to a refusal of the givers. How can a son or daughter show gratitude to his or her parents and to God for the gift of life received? One way, of course, is to observe the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and mother” (Ex 20:12), which for young children means obedience, and for adult children a willingness to take care of their parents in their old age. And yet the fulfillment of this commandment would seem to entail still more than that. As the Psalmist has it, “No man can … give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice” (Ps 49:7-8). What holds for the relationship between God and human beings in this case also holds for the relation between parents and their children: children cannot “pay” the price of their life to their parents—they have received their life from their parents, but they cannot give life to their parents; it is a matter of strict logical impossibility. Is there, however, a gesture by which children can, in some way, give something in return to their parents, by recognizing and accepting them as parents, by accepting the gift of their own life and expressing their gratitude by a most appropriate gift in return?

Asking this question, we naturally move from a discussion of sexual difference to the other fundamental principle of social organization: generational difference. Let us return to Marcel Mauss and Marcel Hénaff. Both interpret the relationship between the generations as possibly governed by the law of gift, at least in traditional societies. In these, what is transmitted from one generation to the next, beginning, of course, with life itself, and then including knowledge, virtues, symbolic and material goods, ideas, values, all of these take on the character of gift.

The cycle of generation thus means that as one generation generates the next, it passes on to it the gift of life and all the goods associated with it. When the generated generation in turn generates its sons and daughters, it not only prolongs the transmission of life in a linear movement, but also returns the gift to the previous generation, in what Mauss calls an “indirect alternating reciprocity,”[28] where A gives to be B and B reciprocates to A by passing the gift on in return, but not to A, but to C. The gift that sons and daughters give to their parents to “return” the gift they received from them is to become fathers and mothers themselves, making their parents grandparents. The individual life cycle is placed in the context of this cycle of generations. From this perspective, children are the sign of the covenant between the generations. Here is the acceptance of the offer of the covenant; here is the saying “yes” to the gift of life received in the body. Here is the body’s significance for society.

The Eucharist: Entering into the “Yes” of Jesus Christ

Now, there is no denying the fact that today we are a long way from all of this. It is not surprising that Mauss and Hénaff find their deepest insights into the gift in their observation of what they call “traditional” or even “archaic” societies. Nothing, it seems, could be further from the mindset of our contemporary Western societies than to see the body in its sexual difference as a gift and even as God’s covenant pledge to humanity. Nothing, it appears, could be further from the way most of our contemporaries understand the relationship between the generations than as one governed by the logic of gift and guided by the principles of an alliance, the sign of which are our sons and daughters. We can deplore how far we have fallen, how the body, no longer a gift, no longer a pledge, has become a piece of disposable matter without rhyme or reason, how generations have become cohorts without any covenant between them, how individuals have become isolated, without origin or destiny, homeless in space and time; how entering into inherently sterile unions or submitting to necessarily sterilizing practices ultimately means consciously or unconsciously rejecting those to whom one owes the gift of one’s living body, how it means saying “no” to the pact of mutual recognition between generations. And deplore all this we must indeed.

But as Christians, as Church, we must do more. In fact, the Eucharist, Christ’s body given and received, has the power to transform even our Western societies. We must continue to give thanks (eucharistéō), uniting our own feeble “yes” to the “yes” of Jesus Christ,[29] given by him once and for all on behalf of our fallen humanity. It is a “yes” to the gift and to the covenant of which his body is the sign and instrument: “This is my body, given for you.”

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2023-0481_EN.html

[2] Ursula von der Leyen, State of the Union Address at the European Parliament Plenary, September 16, 2020.

[3] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer. When We Merge with AI, Viking, New York 2024, 193.

[4] Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer, 2.

[5] See for instance, by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, Robert P. George, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, Encounter Books, New York 2012.

[6] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, Pauline Books and Media, Boston 2006, 183, General Audience, January 9, 1980, n. 4.

[7] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 183: “This is the body: a witness to creation as a fundamental gift, and therefore a witness to Love as the source from which this same giving springs” (General Audience, January 9, 1980, n. 4).

[8] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 183: “This beatifying ‘beginning’ of man’s being and existing as male and female is connected with the revelation and the discovery of the meaning of the body that is rightly called ‘spousal’” (General Audience, January 9, 1980, n. 5).

[9] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 184 (General Audience, January 9, 1980, n. 6).

[10] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 217 (General Audience, March 26, 1980, n. 6).

[11] This renunciation does not imply the renunciation of the spousal meaning of the body but anticipates its eschatological fulfillment. See Livio Melina, Building a Culture of the Family: The Language of Love, St. Paul, Staten Island 2011, 91: “Virginity is a fulfillment of the nuptial meaning of the body that is different from the way this meaning is fulfilled under the sign of marriage. It is a form of fulfillment that anticipates its definitive mode under the mysterious sign of a renunciation.”

[12] Benedict XVI, Discourse, May 13, 2011.

[13] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 181 (General Audience, January 2, 1980, n. 4).

[14] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 180 (General Audience, January 2, 1980, n. 4).

[15] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 180 (General Audience, January 2, 1980, n. 4).

[16] Marcel Mauss, The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies [1925], Routledge, London 2002, 33.

[17] Marcel Hénaff, The Philosopher’s Gift. Reexamining Reciprocity, New York, Fordham University Press 2019, 40.

[18] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 183 (General Audience, January 9, 1980, n. 4).

[19] John Paul II, “A Meditation on Givenness,” Communio 41 (2014), 871.

[20] John Paul II, “A Meditation on Givenness,” 871-872.

[21] John Paul II, “A Meditation on Givenness,” 873.

[22] Mauss, The Gift, 59.

[23] Hénaff, The Philosopher’s Gift, 25.

[24] Hénaff, The Philosopher’s Gift, 25.

[25] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship [1949], Beacon, Boston 1969, 481.

[26] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, 106, 3, ad 5.

[27] Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, 103, 6, ad 5: “Sicut enim beneficium magis in affectu consistit quam in effectu, ita etiam et recompensatio magis in affectu consistit.”

[28] Cf. M. Mauss, “La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires” [1931], Œuvres, vol. III, Minuit, Paris 1969, 11-26, as cited by Hénaff, “Le lien entre générations et la dette du temps,” in Esprit (2018) 48.

[29] Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ: Spiritual Exercises in Faith, Hope, and Love [1989], Crossroads, New York  2005.