Theology of the Body
August 2002
How does God reveal Himself to us? Through his Word, of course. But “the Word became flesh”, and hence God is also revealed in the body of Christ, corpus Christi. But Christ took on human nature, and his body was just like ours. Thus inescapably we seem to reach the conclusion that God reveals Himself also through our bodies.
That, in a nutshell, is the basic idea of the “theology of the body”. “The body, and it alone,” the Pope said, in a General Audience in 1980, “is capable of making visible what is invisible, the spiritual and divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the invisible mystery hidden in God from time immemorial, and, thus, to be a sign of it”.
“Theology of the body” is the name given to a new way of looking at Christian revelation, developed by John Paul II in his weekly catechetical talks, from 1979 to 1984. It is the first, most fundamental, and most distinctive teaching of his pontificate. Immediately after he is elected Pope, Karol Wojtyla begins articulating this “theology of the body” with passion and intellectual vigor, and, in our current culture, with its challenges to marriage and the family, we’d be fools to brush this off as a mere coincidence. No, familiarity with the “theology of the body” is essential for a contemporary Catholic. It’s what the Holy Spirit has wanted us to ponder.
The best way to learn about the “theology of the body” is simply to read the Pope’s addresses directly. (His catechetical talks are collected in a single volume published by the Daughters of St. Paul.) Of course his writing is dense, but as Samuel Johnson once remarked, “shallow waters are clear; deep waters are obscure”. You’ll find numberless quotable insights. For instance, here is one of my favorites: “This is the body: a witness to creation as a fundamental gift, and so a witness to Love as the source from which this same giving springs.” Or again: “Man and woman, uniting with each other (in the conjugal act) so closely as to become ‘one flesh’, rediscover, so to speak, every time and in a special way, the mystery of creation.”
The “theology of the body” begins as a prolonged meditation on the creation account in Genesis. Why Genesis? Because Christ replies to the Pharisees on divorce by saying “It was not like that in the beginning.” So the Pope turns to Genesis for insights into God’s intention in creating the human body and marriage. And it makes sense that “theology of the body” has to start from Scripture, because the revelation of God in the body is obscured by original sin. We need the Bible to help us interpret “the language of the body”.
How does the body reveal truths to us? In many ways, but here are a few examples, which will give you a sense of the “theology of the body”. The Pope makes the interesting observation that Adam, when he was first created and given the job of assigning names to all the animals, nonetheless felt lonely. Now why should he have felt that way, since animals were all around him? If what his body “said” to him was (as many intellectuals think today) “you’re no different from those chimpanzees over there”, then he ought to have felt surrounded by companions. But in fact his body “told” him that he was different, and it’s not until Eve was created that he found someone who was “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone”.
That refrain of Adam is also revealing. Note that upon seeing Eve for the first time he does not say, “At last, a kindred spirit!” or “A fellow mind, like me!” No, he identifies her as “one flesh” with him, which points to how the body testifies to the “original unity” of man and woman.
It’s an important idea in the “theology of the body” that husband and wife together are an image of God. When God creates human beings, he says, “Let us make Man in our image.” (Note that Scripture uses the plural. Why? To say that it’s the “royal ‘we’” only defers the problem, since one wants to know why kings should use the plural in the first place.) But then Scripture says: “In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them”—a rather curious jump from the singular, him, to the plural, them. The Pope takes this to indicate that human beings are in the image of God in two ways. First, each of us is “in the image of God”, insofar as we have intelligence and freewill. Second, husband and wife are “in the image of God”, insofar as each is a “gift” for the other. For then in their love for each other they mirror the emptying and self-giving love which the persons of the Trinity have for one another.
The body, then, in the fact of its having a gender, “says” that each of us is meant to form a “communion” of persons through the gift of his body. This is what the Pope calls the “nuptial meaning of the body”. It leads directly to a reconceptualization of sexual ethics and a new understanding of consecrated virginity. But those are topics for another day.
Michael Pakaluk, the father of nine, is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Clark University and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard.