The Theology of the Body: Towards a Pastoral Renewal

Picture: Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), The Creation of Eve, Wikimedia Commons, PD-old-100-expired

In its 2018 Letter Placuit Deo, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned against two currents of thought found in contemporary culture that contradict a correct understanding of Christian salvation.

The first of these currents is what Pope Francis has on several occasions referred to as neo-Pelagianism. In this view, the human person is seen as an autonomous individual who can save him or herself without God. Salvation is possible through the strength of the individual alone or through human structures. In this context, Christ could be an inspiration through his words and actions, but he would not be the Redeemer who transforms our human condition and incorporates us into a new existence. Furthermore, neo-Pelagian salvation is purely internal. It is seen as something that awakens a strong inner sense of union with God, but our relationships with others and with the created world remain excluded from salvation. In this view, these relationships are not assumed, healed, or renewed by salvation.

The second current is what Pope Francis calls neo-Gnosticism. Here, too, we find a purely interior salvation, understood as the subjective elevation of the human intellect to the mysteries of an unknown divinity. For neo-Gnostic salvation, it is necessary to free oneself from the body and the material cosmos, in which the traces of the Creator can no longer be discovered. In them we see only a reality devoid of meaning, unrelated to the ultimate identity of the person and therefore manipulable according to the arbitrary interests of the individual.

These two ways of understanding salvation are contrary to the Christian faith because of their autonomous subjectivism and their disregard for the body. Salvation cannot be reduced to the material well-being that humans achieve on their own, since their hearts are destined for communion with God. Salvation includes our corporeality and the richness of relationships that come from it. In order to save us, Christ willed to become incarnate and take on our human history. The origin of evil is not in the material and corporeal world, but in the human heart wounded by sin.

Christian salvation is based on our incorporation into the life of Christ, who communicates his Spirit through the mediation of the Church. According to the Christian understanding, salvation consists neither in the self-realization of the isolated individual, nor in a mere inner fusion with the divine, but in the incorporation into a community of persons who share in the communion of the Trinity. The Letter Placuit Deo concludes its reflection with a reference to the “language of the body”:

“The human body was shaped by God, who inscribed within it a language that invites the human person to recognize the gifts of the Creator and to live in communion with one’s brothers and sisters. By his Incarnation and his paschal mystery, the Savior re-established and renewed this original language and communicated it in the economy of the sacraments” (n. 14).

This reference to the “language of the body” can be interpreted as an invitation to turn to the “theology of the body” that Pope John Paul II left us as one of his most precious legacies. By exposing the inconsistency of neo-Pelagianism and neo-Gnosticism, the “theology of the body” shows its enormous potential and its relevance for understanding the faith today.

1. The Prophetism of the Body

Pope John Paul II spoke of the “prophetism of the body.” The body is much more than matter; it is our way of being in the world. Understanding the language of the body is the best defense against any form of Gnosticism. Because of the body, I cannot define myself as an individual isolated from the world and from others. I cannot pretend to live like an island. The body lets me experience that I am part of the world. Thanks to my body, I can make myself present to other people, I can open up to them and feel welcomed and accepted by them.

1.1. Original Solitude

Thanks to my body, I know that I was born, that I did not give existence to myself. My body reminds me of a Creator who gave me life and thus invites me to a relationship with him (the filial meaning of the body). In this, I differ from all other living beings. They, too, have received their life from the Creator, but they do not ask themselves about the meaning of life. Like Adam, I am amazed that God wants to speak only to me, that he wants to converse only with me. In this sense, I experience myself as alone in creation. Saint John Paul II calls this experience “original solitude,” which is not negative, it is not isolation, but openness to the transcendent and the sacred.

Thus, the human body is not a limit to freedom, as the Gnostics think. My body tells me that I have received life as a gift and that I am called to respond with gratitude to this invitation to love. This is what freedom is: responding to love. To be free is not to live without limits. I do not have to flee my body to be free. On the contrary, my body is entrusted to me as a mission to express love for God and for others and to transform the world through work.

1.2. Original Unity

The body is the place where love is revealed. Sexual difference awakens my attraction to another person. Through the feelings and the affectivity of the body, I can enter into the intimacy of the other person and contemplate reality through his or her eyes. This shared experience of the world, between a man and a woman, is what John Paul II calls “original unity.” God’s hands have completed their masterpiece by modelling the human person as a unity of two beings who, through love, set out on the journey towards the communion of persons.

Original unity is a union in difference. In the Genesis account, Eve is formed by God’s initiative, without Adam’s participation in her creation. Both have the same dignity, both were formed by the same hands, but each expresses this same dignity in a different way. Sexual difference shows that I need the other in order to be myself, that I don’t have in myself everything I need to be happy. It is impossible to understand one sex without knowing the other. In this way, the language of the body warns us against any Pelagian search for self-sufficiency. The body is not a simple fact devoid of meaning that I can shape at will, according to my project of self-realization.

Sexual difference invites me to follow a path of ascent in love that goes from sexual attraction and affectivity to the affirmation of the value of the person for him or herself. When this happens in mature love, the “we” of love is born. Now, affirming the other person does not mean turning him or her into an idol. The other person can never fully fill my heart, which is made for God, but I do not have to do without that person in order to go to God; rather, I have to make the journey to God together with that person. Here too it becomes clear that freedom is not mere autonomy or independence, but the ability to build an ever fuller communion.

1.3. The Hermeneutics of the Gift and Original Nakedness

As we have said, the body is the place where love is revealed, where an ascending path begins that leads to the building of a communion of persons. What John Paul II calls the “hermeneutics of the gift” is fundamental to this journey. A gift is not simply an object to be exchanged, but each gift contains something of the giver. Giving a gift is always a way of giving oneself. The recognition that the beloved is a gift from the Creator is at the heart of all true love. This means that the lover recognizes the special relationship that the Creator has with the beloved, while at the same time recognizing that the Creator gives himself to the lover through the beloved.

In accordance with this logic of gift, spouses are able to feel a call in their bodies to make a reciprocal gift of themselves. This call, inscribed in masculinity and femininity, is what Pope John Paul II called the spousal meaning of the body. The body is “nuptial”: it contains an invitation to love that unites the spouses to each other and to God, who is the source of love.

The presence of the Creator in the love of the spouses completes their love and gives them the possibility of conceiving a child (the procreative meaning of the body). As John Paul II says, procreation is rooted in creation and in a certain way reproduces this mystery (cf. Catechesis 10). In this sense, the presence of a certain Pelagianism is evident in the pretense of those lovers who want to create a separate world for themselves, excluding God and everyone else. This attempt distorts the nature of true love, separating it from its source and from its own driving force.

As the Letter Mulieris Dignitatem affirms, in the reciprocal gift that spouses make of themselves to build up the communion of persons, they reflect the love that is God himself (cf. n. 7). Indeed, the image of God in the human person is found not only in the powers of the soul or in the ability to subdue the earth, but also in the union of man and woman, who, embraced by the love of the Creator, can bear fruit far beyond their expectations and possibilities, as is the case of the child.

According to John Paul II, the ability to perceive the image of God in the human body is another of the original experiences, that of “original nakedness.” Genesis account tells us that Adam and Eve were naked, but that they were not ashamed of each other (cf. Gen 2:25). They did not feel shame because they were pure in heart, because they saw the body as an integral part of the person and as an expression of their dignity.

2. The Redemption of the Heart

The various forms of Pelagianism are characterized by a denial of original sin. In Pelagian salvation, Christ acts as a moral inspiration, but he is not the Redeemer who renews our human condition, wounded by sin, and incorporates us into a new existence. According to Pelagian and Gnostic theories of salvation, the incarnation of the Word is an accidental and secondary event. The “theology of the body” of John Paul II responds very incisively to this important question.

As a result of original sin, human beings experience within themselves a force that we call concupiscence, which seeks to separate everything that love is capable of uniting. The book of Genesis explains that the origin of this disintegration is to be found in the sin of our first parents, who preferred independence and autonomy to a life drawn from God’s fatherhood. Adam’s sin can be described as a denial of the Father. This denial changes the vision of our body, which is no longer seen as a gift to be respected, but as a source of utilitarian pleasure, as an instrument to be used and manipulated, or as a limit to our freedom.

When the meaning of the body is obscured in this way, human beings are divided in their hearts. The body is no longer subject to the spirit but resists it. And those who do not live in an integrated way can no longer give themselves to others according to the truth of love. Breaking the relationship with the Creator divides human beings from within and also breaks their relationship with others. The “logic of the gift” is replaced by the “logic of domination.” Love is reduced to a sexual impulse or an emotion that imposes itself on us, almost robbing us of our freedom. In the end, we are enslaved by desire or passion, and this disorder, or concupiscence, is transmitted from generation to generation.

At this point we understand the importance of the redemptive incarnation of Jesus Christ. By becoming man, God took on a body and brought its filial and spousal meaning to its fullness. In fact, no one has experienced like Christ the dependence on the Father and the acceptance of his gifts. He is the Son par excellence. And no one has lived communion with human beings like Christ, to the point of giving himself to them as the Bridegroom of the Church. According to what John Paul II affirms in Catechesis 23, “through the fact that the Word of God became flesh, the body entered theology through the main door,” theology being “that science whose subject is divinity.”

By becoming incarnate, Christ came to restore the original experiences of humanity and to reawaken in our hearts the call to true love. As Adam and Eve were able to accept each other as a gift before they sinned, so it is between Christ and his Church. Christ knows that each person is a gift from the Father (cf. Jn 17:6). In the same way, human beings are called to accept Christ as the greatest gift they can receive from the Father: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16). In this way, in Christ the Son and Spouse, the dynamic of gift and the connection between solitude and original unity are restored.

This redemption wrought by Christ must reach the heart of every human being so that Christ may inscribe there the new law of love. This is possible thanks to the gift of the Holy Spirit, with whom charity, the mother and form of all virtues, is given to us. Charity, which demands a response from us, leads us to integrate all the dimensions of love through the virtue of chastity, with which we learn “the art of loving.” As John Paul II affirms in Catechesis 122, chastity, together with the gift of piety, transforms the human body into a temple, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.

3. Marriage, Virginity and the Ultimate Destiny of the Body

In reference to the union of Adam and Eve as established by God at the beginning of the world, John Paul II speaks of the “sacrament of creation.” The redemption of Christ as Son and Spouse brings this union to its fulfillment, making it a “sacrament of the New Covenant,” a visible and effective sign of his infinite love. The love of man and woman conceals an even greater mystery than that on which we have commented so far: this love makes present the total gift of Christ to his Church, a gift offered in fidelity and leading to new fruitfulness.

The revelation of God’s love in his Son opens unexpected horizons for human love. The sacrament of marriage does not eliminate the threefold dimension of this love—filial, spousal and paternal—revealed in the body. On the contrary, it completes this love by making it a vehicle for the communication of divine life itself. The sacrament of marriage confers on the spouses the grace of conjugal charity, which enables them to communicate Christ’s own divine love to one another through their union in one flesh, in a true journey of holiness within the Church.

Christ’s redemption not only offers a new dimension to spousal love but also inaugurates another way of walking in love: consecrated virginity, a way of life that he himself chose during his human existence. Consecrated virginity does not eliminate the spousal meaning of the body; on the contrary, it affirms and fulfills it. Christ, by giving himself in a unique and special way for each person, became the spouse who gave birth to the Church and united her to himself on the Cross. And through the Sacrament of Baptism, he begets children for God in the womb of the Church.

In the Church, those who receive the call to consecrated virginity are conformed to Christ in his way of living his bodily existence, and they find in the Virgin Mary the model to imitate and follow. John Paul II saw in the body of the person who lives in consecrated virginity a new meaning, namely an eschatological meaning: consecrated virginity anticipates the end of history insofar as it is a participation in and a witness to the fullness of love that flows from the risen body of Christ.

Salvation, then, is not a fusion with the divinity outside the body, as Gnosticism holds. Our bodies are called to be resurrected. In this sense, we can say that the body speaks two languages. On the one hand, the language of decadence through illness and old age, which herald death. On the other hand, the body also announces the ascension to the Father. Thanks to the resurrection of Christ, the path of love that our body reveals to us is not interrupted by death. Our body is called to be resurrected and perfected, because “love is as strong as death, passion as intense as Sheol” (Song of Songs 8:6).

And to conclude: Neo-Pelagianism and Neo-Gnosticism are currents of thought that are widespread in our culture and that devalue the meaning of Christian salvation. As we have seen, John Paul II’s “theology of the body” is a powerful response to this falsification, confirming the old saying of Tertullian: “caro salutis est cardo—the flesh is the pivot of salvation.”