Exaltation of the Holy Cross

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A pure gaze of lust (some thoughts re: TOB and Christopher West, a letter to a friend)

Dear ***,

Thank you for lending us the recommended by Fr *** books ‘Theology of the Body Made Simple’ by Anthony Percy and ‘Theology of the Body for Beginners’ by Christopher West. I was somewhat surprised with the content of those four public lectures which were announced, as you know, as “Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body”. I have sampled the lectures of Pope JP II in the past; I cannot say I was wildly interested in the topic but nevertheless interested enough to attend the local lectures about TOB, probably out of my habit to attend just anything in our parish that promises some theology, especially if it is something new to me.

The local lectures, while they clarified nothing about the complex ideas of the Pope (as I recalled them), seemed to also introduce something else that I found to be sufficiently at odds with what I remembered from my cursory reading of the ‘The Redemption of the Body and the Sacramentality of Marriage’, the title of the of Pope JP II’s Wednesday Catecheses. Hence I dived into Pope John Paul II’s work again.

Almost everyone comments that his text is extremely difficult to get through. My difficulties with it are that the topic is very wast and the ideas are very many; it is exceedingly difficult to keep them all in mind while moving through the dense text which is his separate lectures presented in chronological order. Some say there are many contradictions in the text as well; I pinned a few. There is nothing surprising about that though, considering that Pope JP II had given his lectures over six years; it is only natural that his thoughts would develop over that time, sometimes abruptly I suspect. At least this is my impression. Hence his talks appear to be anything but the smooth monolith the modern TOB presents.

I think I am almost instinctively drawing the line here, between the ‘The Redemption of the Body and the Sacramentality of Marriage’ and the current TOB movement, via stressing the original title and the character of Pope JP II’s lectures because the character of what is now circulating in the Catholic Church makes it hard to see it as the organic continuation of the Pope’s teaching (please note that when I say “TOB” I always mean the current TOB movement). While Pope John Paul II indeed spoke much about the human body he would always speak of it in the context of the human person. This is, I believe, the #1 important difference between Pope JP II’s thought and the thoughts of the developers of the Theology of the Body (hence referred to as TOB) who tend to consider the body as a separate entity. The body in their take, being separated from the soul, becomes somewhat impersonal. Consequentially, a human being can now be considered as an animal whose bodily functions, sexual in particular, can be observed, studied, and discussed without the slightest consideration of the dignity of his person. Hence comes the #2 important difference between Pope JP II and the TOB-developers, namely that the former, while discussing human sexuality, does it far more broadly, laconically and immeasurably more modestly than the latter.

Hence, in my mind, there is a definite shift of the foci, proportions and vectors which one can clearly observe when comparing the teaching of Pope JP II and the TOB being put side by side. At the same time, the TOB seems to faithfully retain what they call “the ground-breaking approach” of Pope JP II, four original experiences of the human being, Original Solitude, Original Unity, Original Nakedness and Original Sin and following from them the realisations that the human body is symbolic, nuptial, free and fallen. It instructive though what the TOB does with it:

“John Paul II is taking us back to our proper roots. It is only from a proper foundation that you can build anything of worth. To go back to “the beginning” – to Original Solitude, Unity and Nakedness – means to understand that only by opening ourselves up to God, his creation and other human beings can we mature.”[1]

I am quite sure that, even while Pope JP II maintained the utmost importance of the understanding of these “original experiences” for his teaching about marriage, he would not put it in the way that TOB does, i.e. creating an impression that we must somehow run back to Eden – he is a far better theologian than this. The quote above creates a very strong vector “from the New Testament to the Old”, “from the New Adam to the Old”, “from being born in Christ – back to before the Incarnation”. This is just an example of how the handling of the Pope’s work can change its meaning via blowing up some of its parts and reducing other, distorting the proportions.

Before I move on to the discussion of what actually propelled me to write this letter I must say that I have numerous disagreements with the thesis of Pope John Paul II. My major disagreement is that I do not see any need in creating some additional “logical concepts” (like “the original experiences”) for backing up the Church’s teaching about marriage (as it was delivered by ‘Humane Vitae’ by the Pope Paul VI), for a very simple reason: the concept of the Christian marriage (as distinct from human marriage) is a product of revelation hence the former cannot be justified by the latter. Nothing in the created order can explain revelation without reducing that very revelation and without making it trivial. Rather the meaning of creation is itself revealed through the action of the Holy Spirit.