One word of a humble man painfully born from the depths of his heart has greater worth than a bunch of clever sayings of an external man that come out quickly from his educated mouth.
G.K. Chesterton, with his usual gentle audacity, once criticized Rudyard Kipling for his “lack of patriotism.” Since Kipling was renowned for glorifying the British Empire, this might have seemed one of Chesterton’s “paradoxes”; but it was no such thing, except in the sense that it denied what most readers thought was obvious and incontrovertible.
Chesterton, himself a “Little Englander” and opponent of empire, explained what was wrong with Kipling’s view: “He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reason. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.” Which implies there would be nothing to love her for if she were weak.
Of course Chesterton was right. You love your country as you love your mother — simply because it is yours, not because of its superiority to others, particularly superiority of power.
This seems axiomatic to me now, but it startled me when I first read it. After all, I was an American, and American patriotism typically expresses itself in superlatives. America is the freest, the mightiest, the richest, in short the greatest country in the world, with the greatest form of government — the most democratic. Maybe the poor Finns or Peruvians love their countries too, but heaven knows why — they have so little to be proud of, so few “reasons.” America is also the most envied country in the world. Don’t all people secretly wish they were Americans?
There is more, and more interesting, to read here: worth the time to read.
It is a great mistake to be afraid of God your Father and to act in His presence like a timid and craven slave, trembling with fright before his master. True, He is infinite Majesty, but He is also infinite Goodness and infinite Love. There can be no greater Lord than God; neither can there be a more ardent lover than He. Therefore, it is a great mistake to think that to converse with God is wearisome and bitter. No, it cannot be. If your God is wearisome and bitter he is false: you commit idolatry.
Acquire the habit of speaking to God as if you were alone with Him, familiarly and with confidence and love, as to the dearest and most loving of friends. Consider that no one - whether friend or brother, father or mother, lover or spouse - loves you more than your God.
Your God is ever beside you: He is even within you. The heart of man is, so to speak, the paradise of God.
The answer to human suffering must be someone, not just something. For the problem (suffering) is about someone (God—why does he... why doesn't he ...?) rather than just something. To question God's goodness is not just an intellectual experiment. It is rebellion or tears. It is a little child with tears in its eyes looking up at Daddy and weeping, "Why?" This is not merely the philosophers' "why?" Not only does it add the emotion of tears but also it is asked in the context of relationship. It is a question put to the Father, not a question asked in a vacuum.
The hurt child needs not so much explanations as reassurances. And that is what we get: the reassurance of the Father in the person of Jesus, "he who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9).
The answer is not just a word but the Word; not an idea but a person. Clues are abstract, persons are concrete. Clues are signs; they signify something beyond themselves, something real. Our solution cannot be a mere idea, however true, profound, or useful, because that would be only another sign, another finger, another clue—like fingers pointing to other fingers, like having faith in faith, or hope in hope, or being in love with love. A hall of mirrors.
Besides being here, he is now. Besides being concretely real in our world, he, our answer, is also in our story, our history. Our story is also his-story. The answer is not a timeless truth but a once-for-all catastrophic event, as real as the stories in today's newspapers.
It is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world. Yet it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe, and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at. And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs. We needed a surgeon, and he came and reached into our wounds with bloody hands. He didn't give us a placebo or a pill or good advice. He gave us himself.
He came. He entered space and time and suffering. He came, like a lover. Love seeks above all intimacy, presence, togetherness. Not happiness. "Better unhappy with her than happy without her"—that is the word of a lover. He came. That is the salient fact, the towering truth, that alone keeps us from putting a bullet through our heads. He came. Job is satisfied even though the God who came gave him absolutely no answers at all to his thousand tortured questions. He did the most important thing and he gave the most important gift: himself. It is a lover's gift. Out of our tears, our waiting, our darkness, our agonized aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, out of our cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" he came, all the way, right into that cry.
In coming into our world he came also into our suffering. He sits beside us in the stalled car in the snowbank. Sometimes he starts the car for us, but even when he doesn't, he is there. That is the only thing that matters. Who cares about cars and success and miracles and long life when you have God sitting beside you? He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected? Do people despise us not for our evil but for our good, or attempted good? He was "despised and rejected of men." Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost? Do we ever say, "Oh, no, not again! I can't take any more!"? He was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us? They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper. Is our love betrayed? Are our tenderest relationships broken? He too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved. "He came unto his own and his own received him not." Does it seem sometimes as if life has passed us by or cast us out, as if we are sinking into uselessness and oblivion? He sinks with us. He too is passed over by the world. His way of suffering love is rejected, his own followers often the most guilty of all; they have made his name a scandal, especially among his own chosen people. What Jew finds the road to him free from the broken weapons of bloody prejudice? We have made it nearly impossible for his own people to love him, to see him as he is, free from the smoke of battle and holocaust.
How does he look upon us now? With continual sorrow, but never with scorn. We add to his wounds. There are nineteen hundred nails in his cross. We, his beloved and longed for and passionately desired, are constantly cold and correct and distant to him. And still he keeps brooding over the world like a hen over an egg, like a mother who has had all of her beloved children turn against her. "Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you." He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn his face from us, however much we turn our face from him. He endures our spiritual scabs and scars, our sneers and screams, our hatreds and haughtiness, just to be with us. Withness—that is the word of love.
Does he descend into all our hells? Yes. In the unforgettable line of Corrie ten Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp, "No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still." Does he descend into violence? Yes, by suffering it and leaving us the solution that to this day only a few brave souls have dared to try, the most notable in this century not even a Christian but a Hindu. Does he descend into insanity? Yes, into that darkness too. Even into the insanity of suicide? Can he be there too? Yes he can. "Even the darkness is not dark to him." He finds or makes light even there, in the darkness of the mind—perhaps not until the next world, until death's release.
For the darkest door of all has been shoved open and light from beyond it has streamed into our world to light our way, since he has changed the meaning of death. It is not merely that he rose from the dead, but that he changed the meaning of death, and therefore also of all the little deaths, all the sufferings that anticipate death and make up parts of it. Death, like a cancer, seeps back into life. We lose little bits of life daily—our health, our strength, our youth, our hopes, our dreams, our friends, our children, our lives—all these dribble away like water through our desperate, shaking fingers. Nothing we can do, not our best efforts, holds our lives together. The only lives that don't spring leaks are the ones that are already all watery. The only hearts that do not break are the ones that are busily constructing little hells of loveless control, cocoons of safe, respectable selfishness to insulate themselves from the tidal wave of tears that comes sooner or later.
But he came into life and death, and he still comes. He is still here. "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Mt 2 5:40). He is here. He is in us and we are in him; we are his body. He is gassed in the ovens of Auschwitz. He is sneered at in Soweto. He is cut limb from limb in a thousand safe and legal death camps for the unborn strewn throughout our world, where he is too tiny for us to see or care about. He is the most forgotten soul in the world. He is the one we love to hate. He practices what he preaches: he turns his other cheek to our slaps. That is what love is, what love does, and what love receives.
Love is why he came. It's all love. The buzzing flies around the cross, the stroke of the Roman hammer as the nails tear into his screamingly soft flesh, the infinitely harder stroke of his own people's hammering hatred, hammering at his heart—why? For love. God is love, as the sun is fire and light, and he can no more stop loving than the sun can stop shining.
Henceforth, when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our hearts, we can know—we must know—that he is here with us, taking our blows. Every tear we shed becomes his tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but he makes them his. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or his tear-filled ones? He came. He is here. That is the salient fact. If he does not heal all our broken bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished. And he shows us that we can henceforth use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love. Since we are his body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our very failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love. When those we love hang up on us, he keeps the lines open. His withness with us enables us to be with those who refuse to be with us.
Perhaps he is even in the sufferings of animals, if, as Scripture seems to say, we are somehow responsible for them and they suffer with us. He not only sees but suffers the fall of each sparrow.
All our sufferings are transformable into his work, our passion into his action. That is why he instituted prayer, says Pascal: to bestow on creatures the dignity of causality. We are really his body; the Church is Christ as my body is me. That is why Paul says his sufferings are making up in his own body what Christ has yet to endure in his body (Col 1:24).
Thus God's answer to the problem of suffering not only really happened 2,000 years ago, but it is still happening in our own lives. The solution to our suffering is our suffering! All our suffering can become part of his work, the greatest work ever done, the work of salvation, of helping to win for those we love eternal joy.
How? This can be done on one condition: that we believe. For faith is not just a mental choice within us; it is a transaction with him. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone... opens the door, I will come in and eat with him" (Rev 3:20). To believe, according to John's Gospel, is to receive (Jn 1:12), to receive what God has already done. His part is finished ("It is finished," he said on the cross). Our part is to receive that work and let it work itself out in and through our lives, including our tears. We offer it up to him, and he really takes it and uses it in ways so powerful that we would be flattened with wonder if we knew them now.
You see, the Christian views suffering, as he views everything, in a totally different way, a totally different context, than the unbeliever. He sees it and everything else as a between, as existing between God and himself, as a gift from God, an invitation from God, a challenge from God, something between God and himself. Everything is relativized. I do not relate to an object and keep God in the background somewhere; God is the object that I relate to. Everything is between us and God. Nature is no longer just nature, but creation, God's creation. Having children is procreation. My very I is his image, not my own but on loan.
What then is suffering to the Christian? It is Christ's invitation to us to follow him. Christ goes to the cross, and we are invited to follow to the same cross. Not because it is the cross, but because it is his. Suffering is blessed not because it is suffering but because it is his. Suffering is not the context that explains the cross; the cross is the context that explains suffering. The cross gives this new meaning to suffering; it is now not only between God and me but also between Father and Son. The first between is taken up into the Trinitarian exchanges of the second. Christ allows us to participate in his cross because that is his means of allowing us to participate in the exchanges of the Trinity, to share in the very inner life of God.
Freud says our two absolute needs are love and work. Both are now fulfilled by our greatest fear, suffering. Work, because our suffering now becomes opus dei, God's work, construction work on his kingdom. Love, because our suffering now becomes the work of love, the work of redemption, saving those we love.
True love, unlike popular sentimental substitutes, is willing to suffer. Love is not "luv." Love is the cross. Our problem at first, the sheer problem of suffering, was a cross without a Christ. We must never fall into the opposite and equal trap of a Christ without a cross. Look at a crucifix. St. Bernard of Clairvaux says that whenever he does, Christ's five wounds appear to him as lips, speaking the words, "I love you."
In summary, Jesus did three things to solve the problem of suffering. First, he came. He suffered with us. He wept. Second, in becoming man he transformed the meaning of our suffering: it is now part of his work of redemption. Our death pangs become birth pangs for heaven, not only for ourselves but also for those we love. Third, he died and rose. Dying, he paid the price for sin and opened heaven to us; rising, he transformed death from a hole into a door, from an end into a beginning.
That third thing, now—resurrection. It makes more than all the difference in the world. Many condolences begin by saying something like this: "I know nothing can bring back your dear one again, but.. ." No matter what words follow, no matter what comforting psychology follows that "but," Christianity says something to the bereaved that makes all the rest trivial, something the bereaved longs infinitely more to hear: God can and will bring back your dear one again to life. There is resurrection.
What difference does it make? Simply the difference between infinite and eternal joy and infinite and eternal joylessness. Resurrection was so important to Christ's disciples that when Paul preached the good news in Athens, the inhabitants thought he was preaching two new gods, Jesus and resurrection (anastasis) (Acts 17). The same Paul said, "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. ... If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied" (1 Cor 15:14, 19).
Because of resurrection, when all our tears are over, we will, incredibly, look back at them and laugh, not in derision but in joy. We do a little of that even now, you know. After a great worry is lifted, a great problem solved, a great sickness healed, a great pain relieved, it all looks very different as past, to the eyes of retrospection, than it looked as future, as prospect, or as present, as experience. Remember St. Teresa's bold saying that from heaven the most miserable earthly life will look like one bad night in an inconvenient hotel!
If you find that hard to believe, too good to be true, know that even the atheist Ivan Karamazov understands that hope. He says,
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
Why then does Ivan remain an atheist? Because though he believes, he does not accept. He is not a doubter; he is a rebel. Like his own character the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan is angry at God for not being kinder. That is the deepest source of unbelief: not the intellect but the will.
The story is the oldest and best known of stories. For it is the primal love story, the story we most love to tell. Tolkien says, "There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true." It is suggested in the fairy tales, and it is why we find the fairy tales so strangely compelling. Kierkegaard retells it beautifully and profoundly in chapter two of Philosophical Fragments, in the story of the king who loved and wooed the humble peasant maiden. It is told symbolically in the greatest of love poems, the Song of Songs, favorite book of the mystics. And the very loveliness of it is an argument for its truth. Indeed, how could this crazy idea, this crazy desire, ever have entered into the mind and heart of man? How could a creature without a digestive system learn to desire food? How could a creature without manhood desire a woman? How could a creature without a mind desire knowledge? And how could a creature with no capacity for God desire God?
Let's step back a bit. We began with the mystery, not just of suffering but of suffering in a world supposedly created by a loving God. How to get God off the hook? God's answer is Jesus. Jesus is not God off the hook but God on the hook. That's why the doctrine of the divinity of Christ is crucial: If that is not God there on the cross but only a good man, then God is not on the hook, on the cross, in our suffering. And if God is not on the hook, then God is not off the hook. How could he sit there in heaven and ignore our tears?
There is one good reason for not believing in God: evil. And God himself has answered this objection not in words but in deeds and in tears. Jesus is the tears of God.
What is different about tonight? What makes Good Friday different from any other day, that was or will be? A God on the cross: that ghastly and tragic paradox; that is my only theology.
Tonight, my Lord and my God died for me. He suffered and died - was murdered - because of my sins. Even just for my sins: His love is so great, if I were the only person to ever have existed on earth, He still would have done this:
St. John's account of the Passion with Gregorian chant.
Let’s be open and clean. Let’s drag this out into the light and discuss. Let’s not be shocked and resentful; let’s love the lonely. Perhaps, coming from a fanatic, the message of God’s love will regain some of its wonderful outrageousness: "Listen. I have a secret. I eat God, and I have His life in me. It’s the best thing in the world; it leads to everlasting life. But first, you have to die to yourself."
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
Listen to carrion -- put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
Cardinal Newman once said, surveying the history of the Church, that the popes have usually not taken the initiative in theological inquiry—that it has usually been others who have given the impetus for doctrinal development. The genius of the Church of Rome shows itself mainly in a negative way, namely by critically testing what others propose. Though Newman was able to produce much historical evidence in support of this generalization, he would have surely admitted that the pontificate of John Paul II represents a great exception. He would have seen in John Paul a pope who has taken the initiative in theological and philosophical inquiry: one who has rethought traditional teachings with great originality, and broken much new ground with his Christian personalism.
John Paul leads the Church, not only as the guardian of the deposit of the faith, but also as one who has inspired some of the most fruitful developments in the understanding of the faith. This rare dimension of papal leadership is nowhere so clearly in evidence as in John Paul’s teaching on man and woman. Here we have one of the richest legacies of his pontificate.
And yet this is a legacy that is not easy to understand fully. On the one hand, the critics of John Paul denounce him as an obstinate old man who only knows how to say no; they think that in all sexual and marital matters he is only holding the line in a rigid and pastorally insensitive way. They are completely innocent of the originality of his personalist vision of man and woman. On the other hand, the friends and supporters of John Paul—while they do indeed listen respectfully to him and notice the boldness of his teaching on man and woman—are often taken aback and in some cases even slightly scandalized, as they were when John Paul announced his commitment a few years ago to a "new feminism." The hostile critics need to be challenged to listen to the Pope, and his supporters need to be helped in understanding him. In this essay I hope to offer something of the needed challenge to the one group as well as something of the needed help to the other.
Karol Wojtyla has had a special affinity for the love between man and woman from the very first days of his priestly ministry. In his Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he writes:
As a young priest I learned to love human love [that is, the love between man and woman]. This has been one of the fundamental themes of my priesthood. . . . If one loves human love, there naturally arises the need to commit oneself completely to the service of "fair love," because love is fair, it is beautiful.
And the young Father Wojtyla not only possessed this special affinity for the love between man and woman; early on he also showed an unusual ability to reflect on man and woman and the love between them. His first book, Love and Responsibility, born of his pastoral experience with young couples, is a deep and original study of "fair love." As bishop of Krakow he set up an institute for marriage and family, as he did later in Rome in the first years of his pontificate. He had hardly been elected pope when he began his famous five-year cycle of Wednesday addresses on man and woman. While he himself was personally called to the celibate life of a priest, which required the sacrifice of renouncing "fair love" in his own life for the sake of the kingdom of God, he was given a rare gift for understanding this love and even for becoming a kind of prophet of it.
The personalism of John Paul II
Personalism is the only possible point of departure for understanding his thought on man and woman. His personalism underlies and informs all his teaching on "fair love," as it underlies and informs all the other areas of his teaching. When John Paul speaks of the "anthropological basis" for his teachings, he is referring to this underlying personalism. Much that seems puzzling in John Paul’s teaching on man and woman becomes intelligible as soon as it is traced back to its personalist foundations.
His own way of introducing his personalism is to quote the following sentence from the Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 24: although man is "the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake," it is nevertheless true that man "can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself." This passage expresses a fundamental polarity of self-possession and self-donation in the makeup of the human person.
On the one hand, God wills each human being for his own sake—which means that God recognizes each human person as a being of his own, existing in self-possession, as one who cannot exist as a mere part of some whole, or as a mere instrumental means of achieving some result. This is why God would never use persons in a merely instrumental way, as we can see from the way in which he appeals to and respects our freedom. When we respect each other as persons, giving each other the "space" in which each can be his own end, and abstaining from all "using" in our relations to each other, then, the Pope says, we share in God’s vision of human persons.
On the other hand, each human person is made for self-donation, for communion with other persons; this is why he can only find himself by making a sincere gift of himself. We are not only beings of our own, belonging to ourselves, as if we were in the end completely closed in upon ourselves, but we are also beings for others, made to exist not only with but for others, as John Paul puts it. Since God exists as a community of three divine persons, he cannot create an image of himself in a person who can thrive in solitude; he can only create persons who thrive living in the communion of love with one another.
John Paul adds that there is a genuine polarity here: the self-possession of persons does not interfere with their vocation to interpersonal communion, but rather makes it possible. If persons did not belong to themselves, then their union would be sub-personal. Persons are empowered precisely by their self-possession to enter into communion with others. Not only that, but they are never so much themselves as beings of their own as when they share their lives by self-donation.
Equality of man and woman
Now that I have introduced John Paul’s personalism, I can proceed to introduce his teaching on man and woman. I begin with the equality of man and woman as persons, which follows directly from his personalism. Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy had denied this equality, teaching that the standard case of a human being was the man, and that the woman was a "deformed male." Aristotle explained himself in terms of his metaphysics of matter and form, saying that at the conception of a man, form dominates matter in the right way, whereas when matter interferes with the due dominance of form the deficient result is the conception of a woman.
John Paul disagrees with Aristotle, not only because he knows more about the biology of conception than Aristotle could have known, but above all because he thinks of man and woman in terms of a category unknown to Aristotle: the category of the person. He says that man and woman are both equally persons; the formula of the person used by the Second Vatican Council, which brings together self-possession and self-donation, applies no less to woman than to man. In fact, John Paul has gone so far in this direction as to say that the relation of man and woman in marriage is one of "mutual submission." He has even raised some eyebrows among his supporters by speaking not only of a submission performed by the wife towards her husband, but rather of a mutual submission of husband and wife to each other.
Some critics charge that John Paul has betrayed the equality of man and woman by solemnly teaching that the Church has no authorization to ordain women to the priesthood. He responds that the reservation of the priesthood for men is in no way based on any supposed superiority of man over woman, as in Aristotle. We have here a diversity of roles, which does not imply an inequality of personhood. The fact that God entrusts the conceiving, gestating, and nurturing of a new human being to women rather than to men does not imply that men are inferior as persons. And so if he chooses to entrust a certain sacerdotal function to man rather than to woman, he does not thereby cast woman into a position of inferiority.
This truth about the equality of man and woman has to be balanced by the truth about the complementarity of man and woman. The very principle of their equality, namely their personhood, is decisively modified by their gender, so that we have masculine and feminine persons. Each gender has its own "genius." As a result, man and woman, for all their equality, are called to complete each other in a unique kind of unity. Nothing could be farther from the mind of John Paul than to affirm equality at the expense of this difference and the complementarity that is based on it. (We return below to this theme of complementarity.)
Respecting man and woman as persons
Let us now apply to man and woman the first part of the conciliar statement about the polar structure of the person: the idea that each person exists in a sense for his own sake and is therefore willed by God for his own sake. What violates this "selfhood" of the person is any and every instrumental attempt to "use" a person. Thus whenever John Paul asks whether this or that form of man-woman relation involves any using of the one by the other, he is basing his argument on this article of his personalism.
One may recall the firestorm of ridicule leveled at John Paul in the international press in 1980 when he said in an address that the "adultery in the heart" condemned by Christ can be committed even within marriage. From the point of view of his personalism this is so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. The fact that a man and a woman are married to each other is no guarantee at all that in their marital intimacy the one will not use the other as a mere object of gratification. If one does use his spouse in this way, he violates her as a person; if their using is mutual then they violate each other. The fact that they are married, and even open to the procreation of children, does not necessarily make this violation impossible. Sexual intimacy is not personalized until in and through it each person affirms and loves the other for his own sake.
This much-reviled address of John Paul is closely akin to his personalist rethinking of the old idea that one of the purposes of marriage is the remedium concupiscentiae, or the relief of concupiscence. This phrase was all too often interpreted to suggest that marriage provides the only setting in which selfish sexual concupiscence can be "legally" lived out, or burned off and in some way "relieved." It is not too much to say that John Paul abhors any such interpretation. Given his personalism, he cannot abide the idea that marriage exists in part to legalize lust. The true "relief of concupiscence," he says, is something altogether different. It is a work of love whereby the sexual energy of a man or woman is deprived of its selfish sting and made to express and serve spousal love. Only in this way is sexual love personalized, formed in such a way that man and woman do not sin against the respect due to each other as persons.
I could offer many other examples of John Paul explaining in this personalist way the rights and wrongs of sexual behavior. But instead I would like to consider the other part of the conciliar definition of the human person: the part dealing with our vocation to self-donation.
John Paul thinks that the call to self-donation is in scribed in our very being by the fact that we are divided into man and woman. There is a complementarity of man and woman that predestines them to a unique kind of love: spousal or conjugal love. In fact, the man-woman difference is for John Paul so intimately connected with the capacity of each human being to love, that he is led to make a bold theological move. He sees the image of the triune God in the man-woman difference. Previously theologians had looked for this image in the soul of each individual human being, commonly following St. Augustine in looking at various triads within each individual soul. It is an entirely new idea to look for the image of God in interpersonal relation, and not just in the most spiritual forms of interpersonal relation, but in the man-woman relation. As far as I know, no pope before John Paul ever spoke of the image of God in this way: "Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion"—and especially in the communion based on the complementarity of man and woman.
The human body and pagan detractors
When I cited the Council as teaching that each human person—while being his own—is called to self-donation, I made no mention of the human body. Now in the personalism of John Paul it is vitally important to understand and to affirm the embodiment of each person. In his view the modern world is not only afflicted by a materialism that reduces man to the body, recognizing nothing else in man but the body; it is also afflicted by a certain aversion to the body—John Paul speaks of a widespread "neo-Manichaean culture"—that conceives of persons as estranged from their bodies, and merely using their bodies in an instrumental way. This may be a new idea for many Christians, who perhaps take it for granted that the only real enemy is materialism, but in his great encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, John Paul traces much of the disorder in present-day moral theology back to the failure to do justice to the embodiment of persons.
Too many of our contemporaries think of the body as raw material available for instrumental use and manipulation by persons. They think that man is at liberty to impose on the body, or abolish from it, whatever meaning he wants. One can see what results when they apply this disparagement of the body to our subject of man and woman. They can think of the gender difference only as an evolutionary product which just happened to come out as it did; compared with the fact that all human beings are persons, the gender difference sinks to the level of the accidental. Man and woman are properly studied in an empirical way by the natural and social sciences, they believe, so that all that can be known about man and woman is of a neutral, factual nature; there is no metaphysical nature expressed in man and woman, nor any intrinsic value. We persons can make of man and woman whatever we like; we can take the physical givens of male and female and can construct masculine and feminine any way we like.
While no Catholic teacher could accept such an account of man and woman, John Paul is distinguished by the depth at which he has overcome it and by the originality with which he has unfolded the truth: that our personhood is embodied, and embodied as man and woman, so that all kinds of personal meanings are inscribed in our sexuality. He has given a personalist rereading of the truth that the body is not just something physical but something sacramental—a sign, an expression of the person—and that from the beginning the body in all its masculinity and femininity participates in the life of the person. Indeed the body is a dimension of the being of each human person. With this I come to the heart of my essay.
John Paul’s theology of the body
In his rich "theology of the body," presented in the first years of his pontificate (although the material was written before his election), John Paul unfolds the idea that the vocation of persons to self-donation, as discussed above, is expressed in the bodies of man and of woman. The truth that it is not good for us to be alone—that we can find ourselves only through a sincere gift of ourselves—has its fundamental bodily expression in our existing as man and woman, and in fact cannot really be understood apart from the difference and complementarity of the sexes. It is as man and woman that we are first raised out of our solitude, and ordered one to another, and called to self-donation. The capacity of the masculine body and of the feminine body to serve self-donation is called by John Paul the "nuptial meaning" of the human body. This is a concept that stands at the center of his theology of the body. Through this nuptial meaning the body is more than biological, more than an object of biological science; it is rather inserted with all its maleness and femaleness into the life of the person and so made to be something as truly personal as it is biological.
It follows that John Paul’s approach to the image of God in man is even more original than we have indicated above. Traditionally one not only looked for this image in each individual person, but in the soul or spirit of each; John Paul finds it not only in interpersonal communion, but also in the bodily masculinity and femininity of men and women. Even the human body images the triune God, and does so through its nuptial meaning. Only a God who exists as a communion of divine persons would create embodied persons who are turned toward each other as man and woman.
John Paul unfolds the self-donation for which man and woman are made by the masculinity and femininity of their bodies. He says that this love, which he calls spousal or conjugal love, is distinguished from all other human love, including even maternal love, by the gesture of self-surrender that belongs to it. In spousal love self-donation takes the form of self-surrender—that is, of abandoning oneself in love to the other and willing to make oneself belong to the other. Hence spousal love is exclusive; there is no room in the human heart for living this self-surrender toward more than one person at the same time. The nuptial meaning of the body stands in the service of this mutual self-surrender. It also stands in the service of non-spousal love, according to John Paul, conditioning as it does all interpersonal communion; but in a unique way it serves spousal love. This is why we can say, in arguing against the Manichaean personalism mentioned above, that the body is not something merely biological, merely factual and value-free; it is also made for personal love. Its spousal meaning has not been constructed by us, but has been established by God at the creation of man and woman.
Conjugal union
With this recognition we are led to the sexual intimacy of man and woman. It is in their sexual intimacy that they live and enact, in an incomparable way, their spousal self-surrender. Indeed one can hardly understand just what this self-surrender is without referring to the sexual union of man and woman. It is not that spousal self-surrender is nothing more than its sexual enactment; it is rather that this self-surrender, in itself something properly personal, finds an irreplaceable expression when man and woman be come one flesh. Anyone who abstracts from the bodily being of man and woman and from their bodily union is in no position adequately to understand what spousal self-surrender is, so intimately do the bodily and the spiritual, the biological and the personal, interpenetrate here.
Notice that John Paul speaks here of a meaning of the marital act that is altogether distinct from procreation. For centuries Catholic teachers explained the meaning of the marital act almost exclusively in terms of procreation; only in this century did they begin to explain it in terms of the enactment of spousal love as well. Pope Pius XII was, as far as I can determine, the first pope who strongly affirmed the love dimension, or as Paul VI called it, the unitive dimension, of the marital act. John Paul has gone well beyond his great predecessors in explaining how this dimension is grounded in the nuptial meaning of the body. Of course, John Paul also rethinks the procreative meaning of the marital act in his theology of the body, as we shall soon have occasion to note.
John Paul has not only explored the nuptial meaning of the body, but also, and with great realism, the way in which this meaning gets lost in man-woman relations. As a result of the fall, the body can so thoroughly obscure the person that it becomes an impediment to interpersonal communion. With extraordinary depth and originality John Paul analyzes the way in which a man looks lustfully at a woman, seeing her body without experiencing its nuptial meaning and without seeing the feminine person who should be revealed in it. The body of the woman ceases to be expressive of that woman as person and so ceases to invite the man to self-donation. In this lustful perception, men see women—and in an analogous way women see men—as an object of selfish consumption rather than as a person to be loved; their look violates the personal selfhood of the other and ignores the fact that each other person is "an enclosed garden," and "a fountain sealed"—to use a pair of expressions taken by John Paul from the Song of Songs, 4:12, and applied to men and women as persons.
Inspired by Max Scheler’s study of shame, John Paul goes on to show that there is a noble sexual shame which is a kind of "personalist instinct," whereby women protect themselves from the lustful concupiscent look of men. His idea is that when a woman realizes that she is an object of male lust, she naturally tries to subdue all that could be sexually provocative about her appearance—not because she fears or despises her sexuality, but because she wants to defuse the male concupiscence which she feels threatening her. The same woman who knows how to feel this sexual shame, will have no such reserve about revealing herself to the man who loves her, for she can trust him to look at her so as to see her as person. Of course, the man can also feel shame in this way, but for obvious reasons John Paul gives particular attention to the shame felt by the woman.
In order to retrieve the nuptial meaning of the body for fallen, concupiscent men and women, John Paul in his theology of the body goes back "to the beginning," back to man and woman as they lived their bodily being before the fall. This leads him to his profound analyses of the "original innocence" and the "original nakedness" of man and woman. He says that the first man and woman did not experience any shame in their nakedness because each could see in the body of the other another person, and because the attraction of masculinity and femininity stood completely in the service of love. It is not merely that they mastered this attraction by strong self-control and made a right use of it by their will; this would express for John Paul an unduly extrinsic dominion of soul over body. Rather, the person dwelt so intimately in the body that the body expressed to the other nothing but the worth and splendor of the person; bodily sexuality was completely absorbed in the energy of spousal love. But with the sin of our first parents a rupture appeared in the body-soul unity; the body now acquired the capacity to obscure the person as well as to reveal him; it could now awaken the selfish desire to consume as well as the desire to give oneself in spousal love; the freedom of original nakedness gave way to the anxiety of feeling shame.
The "redemption of the body," about which John Paul has much to say in his theology of the body, refers to the restoration of the lost integrity of our being. It refers to the re-integration of bodily sexuality and personhood, to the radical "personalization" of masculinity and femininity. The redemption of the body, although it will be consummated in eternity, begins already now in time. Man and woman as they existed in the beginning, and as they will exist in the end, constitute a fundamental norm for men and women now living on earth.
John Paul gives much thought to the eschatological aspects of the theology of the body. In reflecting on the fact that there will be no marriage in the world to come, he asks whether the masculinity and femininity of the body will also be abolished. He answers that it will not; the glorified human bodies will retain their masculinity and femininity and they will retain their nuptial meaning, even if this meaning will not be lived out in the form of marriage. And here we have one of the keys to John Paul’s thought on consecrated virginity. He affirms emphatically that the consecrated virgin does not turn away from his or her body with all its nuptial meaning. The renunciation of marriage does not lead to a "neutering" of human beings, for the masculinity and femininity of the body, and its nuptial meaning, are more fundamental than marriage, and can serve love in other than marital ways. If space permitted I might illustrate this with reference to John Paul himself; we could explore the very convincing fatherhood that he radiates.
Studying the person through personal subjectivity
In explaining the nuptial meaning of the body and other aspects of man and woman, John Paul is constantly speaking of the "subjectivity" of persons. I doubt that any previous pope ever spoke of "subjectivity." With this John Paul is referring to the self-experience of persons. But you may ask, why does he make this turn towards self-experience? Why should he make concessions to the culture of experience, when the task before us is to restore a sense of objective reality, as he has himself stressed in the encyclical, Fides et Ratio? We have to answer these questions if we are to understand the thought of John Paul regarding man and woman.
In one of his pre-papal studies Karol Wojtyla distinguishes between what he calls a predominantly cosmological understanding of man and a predominantly personalist understanding. In the former, man is considered from the outside; one stresses the analogies between man and subhuman beings, and tries to understand man in terms of categories that are taken from nature and comprise man along with all kinds of other beings. In the personalist approach, by contrast, one takes man as irreducible to all other beings and explores his identity through those categories that are appropriate precisely to man but not to other beings. Now John Paul teaches that in order to get at that which distinguishes man from everything else—and this is, of course, for him the personhood of man—one must stop looking at man from without and consider how he reveals himself to us from within—how he lives his own being from his own inner center. But this means that we adequately understand man as person only in understanding him in terms of his self-experience, or in other words his interiority.
We can render his thought more concrete by connecting it with our present theme of man and woman. Considered cosmologically the meaning of the marital act is primarily procreation; from this point of view one will be struck by its likeness to subhuman sexual union. Only if we enter into the subjectivity of the marital act do we notice something that has no counterpart in the subhuman animals, namely the enactment of spousal love. This love dimension of the marital act is not a cosmological fact but a personalist fact; it is found in the self-experience of spouses, in their spousal subjectivity, and it reveals the deep personalist significance of the two in one flesh. Even the procreative meaning of the marital act reveals new and specifically personal dimensions of itself when considered from the point of view of spousal subjectivity.
We find John Paul doing this again and again in his teaching on man and woman. He brings out the personal by consulting the evidence of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Thus in his magnificent commentary on the Genesis accounts of the creation of man and woman, he notices that one of the two accounts in Genesis 2 is more subjective than the other; it explains man and woman, for instance, in terms of the solitude of man before the creation of woman, or in terms of the shame they felt before each other after sinning. John Paul centers his commentary primarily on this subjective account; he finds it more congenial to his personalist reading of man and woman. Or recall his analysis of depersonalized sexuality in terms of a certain kind of lustful looking; John Paul is here exploring the subjectivity of fallen sexuality as it expresses itself in this way of looking.
We see, then, that in turning to personal subjectivity John Paul does not fall into subjectivism, but rather finds an all-important resource for developing his profound Christian personalism.
Contraception and the "new feminism"
I cannot omit mentioning John Paul’s approach to contraception, since he tells us that one main incentive for him in developing the theology of the body was the desire to understand more deeply and to give a more convincing account of the Church’s controverted teaching about the wrong of contraception. John Paul teaches that the consummation of spousal love in the sexual intimacy of the spouses, while in itself distinct from procreation, is intrinsically connected with openness to procreation. The fertility of man and woman is also not merely biological; it too is situated in the realm of their personal love. He proceeds to explain exactly how it is connected with the personal.
The bodily expression of spousal love is so intimately united with possible procreation that whenever the marital act is deliberately sterilized it suffers as an expression of spousal love, and it begins to be replaced with selfish using. The original insight of John Paul is that openness to new life is not only important for the sake of new life, it is also indispensable for the integrity of the spousal self-donation. Critics of the Church’s teaching on contraception typically say that this teaching, when lived, cramps the expression of spousal self-surrender; John Paul responds that this teaching in fact guarantees the personalist character of spousal self-surrender.
Some Catholic teachers have been suspicious of the growing recognition of not one but two meanings of the marital act, fearing that the door is opened to contraception if the marital act has some meaning over and above its procreative meaning. They also say that if we must have two meanings of the marital act, then at the very least the procreative meaning must be clearly ranked above the unitive meaning, and they are very worried that John Paul does not even do this—that he simply speaks of them as two equally fundamental meanings. John Paul responds to their concern by saying that the unitive meaning is so thoroughly interrelated with the procreative meaning that union is compromised if the spouses do not remain open to procreation; spouses have to remain open to new life, not only for the sake of new life itself, but also for the sake of the integrity of their union. This is why his teaching on the unitive meaning of the marital act does not undermine, but rather supports, the Church’s teaching on contraception.
The Holy Father thinks that people have such a hard time understanding this because, being so accustomed to treating the body as raw material that can be instrumentally manipulated for human purposes, they cannot help treating bodily fertility in the same way. If only they can recover a sense of their embodied personhood, and hence of their masculine and feminine personhood, and hence of their paternal and maternal personhood, they will learn to see their fertility in a new personalist light.
Just when his followers thought they had caught up with John Paul and his many original insights into man and woman, he leapt out ahead of them again a few years ago when he announced his commitment to a "new feminism." This important new theme of his teaching should not pass unmentioned in this essay, especially since many women fear that his teaching on contraception undermines the legitimate concerns of a real Christian feminism.
In his feminism the Pope calls attention to and celebrates what he calls "the genius of woman." He ex plains this genius in personalist terms, just as we would expect. He says that woman is gifted with a special sense for the concrete person; she is less inclined than man to think of people in terms of stereotypes or of achievements. By nature woman is more sensitive to the being rather than the having of persons. John Paul makes his own the idea that modern technological civilization is unilaterally masculine and needs nothing so much as the "genius of woman" to protect it from becoming ever more depersonalized.
John Paul thinks that it is the maternal vocation of woman, whereby she can receive a new human being into herself, that disposes her to see the person in others. He says that men need to learn this sensitivity to persons from women. He thinks that all the regions of human life, including the life of the Church, will be vastly enriched when the "genius of woman" makes itself much more strongly felt within them. This is why he encourages women to become more present with their femininity in society and in the Church. Of course, in accordance with the whole Catholic tradition, he reminds women that their contributions to society and the Church should not be made at the expense of their vocation to maternity. Yet he brings something new out of this tradition by saying that the maternal vocation should not be lived at the expense of these contributions. He wants Catholic women to be first of all wives and mothers, but then also to be bearers of the "genius of woman" in the contemporary world.
John Paul has gone so far as to apologize to women for the complicity of many Catholics in the neglect and disparagement of the genius of woman over the centuries. In the great ecclesial self-examination that he has initiated as a preparation for the new millennium, he has found something to repent in the way members of the Church have conducted themselves toward women. He thinks that people in the Church have to be converted from certain patterns of thinking and evaluating, if they are going to do justice to the equality of man and woman and to the genius of woman. He speaks of the immeasurable gain that he expects for the Church from a greater presence of woman with her genius.
We see, then, that the pope’s teaching on contraception has nothing to do with confining women to childbearing and child-rearing, as if they had no other meaningful task.
Now the reader can see for himself why I said at the outset that John Paul has exercised a kind of leadership that the popes have rarely exercised. He has led the people of God in deepening their understanding of man and woman and in bringing to light aspects of man and woman that have not yet received their due. His critics often caricature him as insensitive and inflexible simply because he does not grant them all the sexual license that they want. Too many of them are like ill-mannered children, clamoring for some permission from their parents; they have ears only for the Yes or No and are incapable of hearing anything, however thoughtful, that the parents might be saying in explanation of their No.
If these critics could only bring themselves really to listen to John Paul on man and woman, they would marvel at the freshness and originality of his personalist rereading of sexual and marital morality. They would be astonished at how positive and winning the traditional teachings, reread in John Paul’s personalist vein, can become. They had thought that personalism led away from these teachings; now they have to deal with the challenging fact that in the hands of John Paul personalism leads back to these teachings. The critics of whom I speak, if they were once really to take this Pope seriously, would be forced to admit that he really does understand some of their own deepest concerns and that, as a result of this shared understanding, he convincingly challenges some of their dearest sexual freedoms. They may still not agree with all of his teaching, but they will have to admit that he has done for sexual and marital morality exactly what Vatican II wanted to do for the whole Church: to let her enter into closer relation with the "joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men and women of our time" (Gaudium et Spes, 1). They may even begin to understand those of us who venerate him as a prophet of the mystery of "fair love."
Dr. John F. Crosby is a professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville and author ofThe Selfhood of the Human Person (Catholic University of America Press).
Some time ago I began worrying about the way standard Catholic teaching on the subject of sex and marriage is being presented. It seemed to me both less profound and less effective than what was current when I was courting and when I was first married. Concerns of this kind are not unusual among people my age, so I might have written this one off as mere curmudgeonliness. But before doing so, I decided to see if I could retrieve some of the material that I remembered from the old days, and compare it with some comparable material that is current today. This essay is the result. In putting it together, I have worked with two or three books from each period, without making any attempt at exhaustive research. While I am an academic, and have worked with theological material on occasion, I am here well out of my field. My perspective on this particular aspect of Church teaching is that of a consumer.
The two elements I remembered from the earlier teaching were a solid body of practical advice on the maintenance of sexual purity by the unmarried, and a developing body of somewhat cutting-edge reflections on love, marriage, and the unitive power of sex. In the first category, I took a pamphlet called The Difficult Commandment — Notes on Self-Control Especially for Young Men by C.C. Martindale, S.J.1 In the second category, I took Marriage2 and Man and Woman3 by Dietrich von Hildebrand, and pieces of The Allegory of Love4 and The Four5 by C.S. Lewis.
Martindale's is the kind of pamphlet that used to be sold from racks in the backs of churches. It is very simple and straightforward. It is addressed to young unmarried men who are believing Catholics, and who would like to live chastely as the Church calls them to, but who experience difficulties in doing so. It is not at all polemical or apologetic. It offers a few considerations to strengthen the reader's good resolutions, or to dispel various rationalizations, but it does not attempt to present systematic arguments in support of church teaching or to explain why people who are not chaste ought to be. It is not at all repressive. It would not have you resist sexual temptations by pretending sex is not pleasurable any more than you resist the temptation to steal groceries by pretending not to like food.6 And it is not at all judgmental. It simply assumes that if you have not sinned you want to go on not sinning, and that if you have been sinning you want to stop. It provides the same firm, quiet encouragement in either case.
Martindale treats homosexuals in the same way as he does everyone else. A temptation is a temptation. There are no doubt reasons why some people are tempted by their own sex, but the reasons are irretrievably obscure: "In the abstract such a temptation may be as unnatural and perverse as you please; but in the concrete it cannot but exist."7 So he tells the homosexual merely to "control your special temptation just as other men have to control their straightforward ones."8
Central to Martindale's strategy for controlling temptations of whatever kind are three sections of his pamphlet entitled "Thoughts," "Words," and "Deeds," with the first underpinning the other two. As he says, "The root of the whole matter is the mind."9 But thoughts are constantly coming to us unbidden. The trick as regards thoughts of illicit sex is not to accept them, dwell on them, take pleasure in them. On the other hand, you cannot simply will them away: "The more I tell myself not to think about a thing, the more, obviously, I am thinking about it."10 The way to get rid of the thought is to think about something else. Martindale suggests, for example, "composing a cricket eleven of the eleven fattest men you know."11 But anything will do.
The concern throughout is not with any kind of psychological explanation of thoughts and feelings, but with a rational ordering of thoughts and feelings that more or less randomly arise. There are situations where you can cut them off at the source, but you will never be able to cut them all off. You have to know what to do about them when they appear.12 If there is nothing legitimate for you to do with them, you call on the team of fat cricketers to drive them away. This is very traditional Catholic teaching. St. Benedict, writing in the five hundreds, uses a metaphor drawn from one of the more bloodthirsty psalms to tell his monks to take hold of their thoughts while they (the thoughts) are still young and dash them against Christ.13
Among the motives Martindale offers for living chastely, he devotes no more than a sentence to the sacrament for which most of his readers are headed:
You are right in having a high ideal of the girl you hope to marry, and of the most beautiful thing that Love is, or can be, and of the true union of lives and hearts that a perfect married life should imply.14
Having said this much, he immediately turns to broader forms of unity and love, the family, the community, the Eucharist.
We can think of von Hildebrand as taking up where Martindale leaves off. The true union of lives and hearts is his whole subject. He sees it as the divinely ordained response to the complementarity of male and female. For him, the difference between the sexes is metaphysical — not reducible to the biological or to the social or to any combination of the two. Man and woman, he says, "are two different expressions of human nature."15
It is . . . important to see that this difference has a specifically complementary character. Man and woman are spiritually oriented toward each other; they are created for each other. First, they have a mission for each other; second, because of their complementary difference, a much closer communion and more ultimate love is possible between them than between persons of the same sex.16
Sexual intercourse tends to establish and reinforce a permanent bond between two individuals embodying this complementarity. In Christian moral teaching, it is reserved for such an effect.
Thus, instead of saying that the sinful satisfaction of sexual desire becomes legitimate through marriage we should say that the sexual act, because it is destined to be the consummation of this sublime union and fulfillment of spousal love, becomes sinful when desecrated by isolation.17
The bonding effect seems to be inherent in the act. St. Paul refers to it when he tells the Corinthians that a man who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her.18 If a sexual encounter is to be ephemeral, the effect must be evaded or suppressed, and the evasion or suppression is part of the destructiveness of the ephemeral encounter. By the same token, if the bond is not evaded or suppressed, it will arise. That accounts for the success of arranged marriages in some cultures, where the spouses may be scarcely acquainted before the wedding.
Von Hildebrand does not specifically address the subject of homosexuality. But he provides an effective rationale for Catholic teaching on the subject. The complementarity that is central to his doctrine can exist only between a man and a woman because it instantiates the metaphysical complementarity of male and female as constituent forces in the universe. Accordingly, homosexual acts are morally objectionable not because they are unprocreative or otherwise biologically inappropriate, but because sexual acts are reserved for a kind of love that is metaphysically incapable of arising between persons of the same sex.
Unfortunately, when he comes to be specific about the difference between the sexes, von Hildebrand (like a good many other authors) falls into gender stereotypes, all of them questionable, some of them offensive. But he does not rest his case on any of them. The difference between men and women is metaphysical, not social: it does not depend on any particular distribution of social roles or attitudes. Men and women take sufficient account of it simply by being themselves:
Man and woman both must simply strive for the right and the God-willed, and . . . the difference between the sexes, in fact, becomes quite distinct all by itself.19
Von Hildebrand's doctrines were, as I say, a bit cutting edge when he wrote. They were widely — but far from universally — accepted by courting and newly married Catholics in the days when my wife and I were among them. Their heavy emphasis on love and unity tended to undermine a prevailing official view that procreation was the "primary end" of marriage, the unitive end being secondary. This hierarchy of ends had been affirmed as recently as 1930 in Pius XI's Encyclical Casti Connubii.20 Although it was beginning to be contested, and was to be pretty well laid to rest in the Second Vatican Council,21 von Hildebrand did not try to meet it head-on. In one of his books, he distinguished between the primary end and the primary meaning.22 In another, he distinguished between an "instrumental" end and a "superabundant" end.23 Either way, he managed to maintain his own claims about the spiritual and metaphysical significance of marital union without directly confronting the Magisterium.
What he did confront directly was the claim, which he encountered in various forms among the Catholic writers of his day, that the love of man and wife is in some way reducible to common friendship plus sex.
And here, let us be frank, we touch on a kind of scandal in Catholic writings on marriage. In them, one finds much discussion of the will of the flesh, the remedy for concupiscence, mutual help and assistance, and procreation; but one hears very little of love . . .24
Recently, a famous Christian philosopher in this country even went so far as to claim that this type of love is nothing but a disguised sex instinct, and that only insofar as agape exists between the spouses does their relationship deserve to be called authentic love. Most authors, however, ignore the existence of this love entirely, simply omitting it when speaking of marriage.25
Whoever the famous philosopher is, von Hildebrand meets his claim head-on:
A combination of friendship and sensuality is repugnant. It would be a juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, and the sensual sphere would in no way be sanctified by a discordant combination of this kind. Only in conjugal love . . . does this relation to the sensual sphere become intelligible.26
Even a friendship that takes full account of gender differences is for von Hildebrand radically different from the love that is fulfilled in marriage. Men and women are meant to be friends because they have a mission to one another: an adequate view of what the world is must incorporate both kinds of experience. That friendship may rest on the same metaphysical complementarity that supports conjugal love, but it is still a very different kind of affection.27
Where von Hildebrand presents a philosophical and theological approach to conjugal love, C.S. Lewis's approach is literary. In The Allegory of Love, he traces the romantic ideal from the twelfth century Provencal poets, who believed it was inconsistent with marriage, through Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1589), which taught that it could be fulfilled only in marriage. In The Four Loves, he explores different forms of love that appear in the culture and the literature, with one chapter on a form that he calls Eros: "that state which we call 'being in love'; or, if you prefer, that kind of love which lovers are 'in.'"28 His conception of Eros in the one book corresponds pretty well with his conception of romantic love in the other.
Lewis's tracing of the literary tradition is specialized work, and not universally accepted. My wife, who has worked in the field, is skeptical. But whatever you think of Lewis's analysis, his conclusion is right. The conventions of medieval courtly love did in fact become the conventions of honorable courtship.29 You can find them in Shakespeare, in Jane Austen, in Henry James, or in any movie that came out while the Production Code was in force.
They have added two important elements to our understanding of the subject. One is a perception of courtship as a process of moral and spiritual growth. Lovers learn to pursue their object by striving to become worthy of it. In this way, love and marriage can play a major part in a general Christian spirituality.
The other element is a conceptual separation of the erotic — the unique attraction that draws lovers to one another; what Lewis calls Eros — from the merely physical. The courtly love tradition was not platonic, but it did recognize the possibility, and in some cases the necessity, of loving without any serious hope of a bodily consummation. That recognition is part of what the tradition contributed to the romanticism of later times. While the courting couples of the twentieth century generally expected to marry in due course and consummate their marriage in the usual way, they had generations of sighing courtiers to remind them that their feelings for one another were not reducible to the desire for sex, or even defined by it. Lewis, in his analysis of Eros, makes the point this way:
There may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and then gone on at a later stage to "fall in love with her." But I doubt if this is at all common. Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved — a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasn't leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person . . . And when at a later state the explicitly sexual element awakes, he will not feel . . . that this had all along been the root of the whole matter.
In fact, what Lewis calls Eros leads occasionally not to sex or marriage, but to the religious life. In the story of St. Pelagia the Harlot in the Vitae Patrum,30 it is surely an erotic affinity that unites the bishop Nonnos, who is shamed by Pelagia because she works so much harder to please men than he does to please God, and Pelagia, whose appetite for pleasure is overwhelmed by the bishop's preaching. And the story of St. Francis giving St. Clare her habit and cutting off her hair31 seems to me as happily erotic as any story I know.
Taken in combination, the works I have been describing and others like them made an attractive synthesis. For those whose vocation was to Christian marriage, that synthesis provided an effective combination of moral, spiritual, and emotional support. It gave them a tradition and a language through which they could form and express powerful emotional attachments, and expect to become better and wiser people by doing so. It allowed them to integrate their lives as courting couples into their lives as Christians, to bring their love for one another before God, and to receive the sacraments together. It taught them to focus their thoughts and feelings on the marital union for which they were preparing, and to situate their physical attraction for one another within that focus. It laid the foundation, I believe, for a particularly smooth transition from courtship into marriage.
With this synthesis in mind, I will try to pin down my misgivings about current teaching. I will concentrate on two books; Pope John Paul II's The Theology of the Body32 and Germain Grisez's Leading a Christian Life.33 The pope's book, aside from three encyclicals appended, consists of a series of "general audiences" between September, 1979 and November, 1984. The audiences read like short sermons — two or three pages each. But they are not freestanding: they come together to form a coherent doctrine. Together they give an attractive and sophisticated account of love and marriage with a heavy reliance on Scripture for support. Grisez's book is an ambitious compendium of moral doctrine. It has a chapter on "Marriage, Sexual Acts, and Family Life," in which the author gives a coherent and tightly reasoned account of traditional doctrine.34
What I find lacking in both these works is the vision— central to the earlier works — of a love between a man and a woman that is ennobling, that elicits an aspiration to increased worthiness, and that is not reducible to a desire for sex. Neither author adequately distinguishes this love from friendship on the one hand and sexual desire on the other. Grisez, if I read him correctly, thinks of the "erotic" (and the "romantic", which he seems to regard as about the same thing) as primarily directed to a sexual consummation, and only secondarily to a union of minds and hearts.35 He says in a footnote that Lewis's treatment of Eros "too sharply distinguishes it from its nucleus of sexual instinct."36 Seeing erotic love as he does, Grisez calls for suppressing it where marriage is not an immediate prospect. On the other hand, "Couples considering marriage . . . may and should express and elicit erotic affection . . ."37 But they must "limit such activity to what is necessary for its legitimate purpose and firmly commit themselves to blocking the natural dynamism of the erotic process."38 When the couple marry, erotic love subsumes the bonding effect to which I referred earlier.39
For Grisez, in other words, any erotic or romantic affection is inseparably connected with the desire for physical sex. If one's vocation is to marry, one cannot seek to be rid of such affection, but one cannot give it full scope until one is actually married. One has to hang onto it while keeping it under rigorous control, and release it a little bit at a time as courtship progresses toward marriage.
John Paul sees "erotic" and "eros" as terms with multiple meanings:
According to Plato, eros represents the interior force that drags man toward everything good, true, and beautiful . . . In the common meaning, on the contrary — as also in literature — this attraction seems to be first and foremost of a sensual nature.40
Meditating on the words in the Sermon on the Mount about adultery in the heart, the pope calls for an integration of eros and ethos, the erotic and the ethical:
It is necessary to rediscover continually in what is erotic the nuptial meaning of the body and the true meaning of the gift. This is the role of the human spirit, a role of an ethical nature. If it does not assume this role, the attraction of the senses and the passion of the body may stop at mere lust devoid of ethical value. Then man, male and female, does not experience that fullness of eros, which means the aspiration of the human spirit toward what is true, good and beautiful, so that what is erotic also becomes true, good and beautiful. Therefore it is indispensable that ethos should become the constituent form of eros.41
The reference to the "nuptial meaning of the body" is developed further in meditations on the first chapters of Genesis42 and on the Song of Songs.43
John Paul seems to see Eros in two senses, which we can call Eros[1] and Eros[2]. Eros[1] is the platonic turning toward what is good, true, and beautiful. It may include the aspiration to marital union and its physical expression, but it is not specifically sexual at all. Eros[2], on the other hand, is inseparable from sexual desire, indeed, from lust. It must be transformed so that it will not "stop at mere lust," but will be conformed to Eros[1], and to the nuptial meaning of the body. By using the word "stop," the pope seems to imply that love between man and woman begins as mere lust and has to be transformed into something better.
Grisez presents a good, honest, comprehensive, and well-reasoned statement of moral doctrine, and John Paul presents a profound and moving Scripture-based spirituality of love and marriage. But I am convinced that when it comes to ethos and eros they have things backward. The primordial attraction between male and female is not a mere physical instinct that has to be limited to its proper place or it will be an occasion of sin, or that has to be controlled so it will not stop at mere lust. I grant that it can be corrupted into mere lust, but, as Lewis points out in the passage quoted above, few who have experienced it will say that it starts that way. There is a poem by George Meredith, "Love in the Valley," which, I think, makes the point I have in mind:
Brave is her shape, and sweeter unposses'd. Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking Whisper'd the world was; morning light is she. Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless; Fain fling the net, and fain have her free.44
My claim here is that the metaphysical is prior to the physical — that romantic or erotic attraction arises from a fundamental intuition of the metaphysical complementarity of male and female, and of one's own incompleteness in the face of that complementarity. To fall in love is to experience the embodiment of that intuition in a particular person. Sexual desire is a result of that experience, not the source of it. This metaphysical priority is what I find central to the earlier material I have been discussing, and lacking in the later.
This displacement of the metaphysical has seriously undercut the social support of honorable courtship. Professors Amy and Leon Kass, introducing a book of readings on the subject, say:
The very terms — "wooing," "courting," "suitor" — are archaic; and if the words barely exist, it is because the phenomena have all but disappeared. Today, there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony . . . Even — indeed, especially — the elite, those who in previous generations would have defined the conventions in these matters, lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage.45
Such a cultural script presupposes in some way the metaphysical intuition I have described. Without that intuition, there is no place for an emotional attachment that is at once fully chaste, fully and erotically focused on the beloved, and sufficiently intense to sustain the lover through the vicissitudes of an arduous courtship. Setting out to win the heart and hand of the person one has fallen in love with is a major Christian ascesis, and neither Grisez nor John Paul provides it with the metaphysical foundation it requires.
I believe that the same displacement of the metaphysical has brought on a general confusion in our society regarding what is and is not sexual. Eros is no longer effectively distinguished from common friendship on the one hand and physical desire on the other. Instead of Lewis's specific state of being "in love," it becomes a vague mist floating over a person's whole affective life. Groping in this mist, it is especially easy for people to mistake their own or others' feelings.
The danger cuts two ways. On the one hand, if one is not aware of the erotic as a metaphysical category, one may fail to notice it as a temptation unless it is accompanied by an explicit desire for physical sex. As the erotic attraction is both intense and exclusive, it can undermine a marriage even when it is not explicitly adulterous. In an environment where men and women are thrown together in many different ways, one may be caught unaware by it if one is not on one's guard against it. The consequences may be serious for everyone involved.
The opposite danger lies in supposing that profound feelings for another person are sexual, when in fact they are only profound. For instance, Martin Seymour-Smith, in a comprehensive and thoughtful biography of Rudyard Kipling,46 treats him as a homosexual even though there is no evidence that he ever had or desired to have physical relations with any other man. The conclusion is based almost entirely on the character and intensity of male friendships in Kipling's life and in his writing. Perhaps there is no great harm in biographical speculations of this kind — they are not rare — but if people engage in similar speculations about their own sexuality, they will be in danger either of avoiding deep friendship lest they appear homosexual or of believing themselves to be homosexual on account of their deep friendships. If the erotic is cut loose from its dependence on the metaphysical duality of male and female, there is no adequate protection against such thinking.
The separation of the erotic from the metaphysical seems to me also to have a lot to do with the disappearance from the backs of churches of Fr. Martindale's good, practical advice on how to be chaste. While Martindale does not pay a lot of attention to the metaphysical attraction between the sexes, he does include the prospect of marriage among the significant motives for living chastely. That being the case, Eros can be seen as a rational ordering of a person's sexuality toward its metaphysical complement, and being in love will enhance one's commitment to chastity rather than undermining it. Unchaste thoughts, feelings, and desires, therefore, are radically false to the central reality of love, and we are never more true to that reality than when we summon Martindale's fat cricketers to drive them off.
For Grisez and for the Pope, by contrast, there is no metaphysical, non-physical erotic attraction between the sexes. The sentiment that develops into conjugal love and the sentiment that becomes an occasion of sin are for these authors one and the same. Accordingly, where the earlier synthesis pointed to two distinct sets of thoughts and feelings, one to be encouraged as leading to nobility of thought and action, and, through such nobility, to Christian marriage; the other to be resisted by thinking about something else; the best of today's writers on the subject are pointing to a unified set of thoughts and feelings, to be partly but not wholly checked according to Grisez, or to be sorted out and transformed according to John Paul.
The checking or sorting out requires a level of introspection that Martindale would have wanted to spare us. It is generally self-defeating. As Martindale was aware, if you examine your mind to determine whether it is thinking the wrong kind of thoughts, you will probably find that it is. We are still taught to control our thoughts by simply thinking about something else, but we are no longer offered a metaphysical basis for doing so. The difference between acceptable and unacceptable thoughts has become too subtle for that. Instead, we are reduced to looking into our minds to see what is going on there, and hoping without too much confidence that we will approve of what we see.
What seemed to me a particularly poignant example of this move toward introspection appeared a year or so ago in a 60 Minutes program on homosexuals. Among the people interviewed was a young man who had tried, indeed tried desperately, to overcome his homosexual inclination by a combination of prayer and will power — and even at one point an exorcism — and had finally given up. The one thing he did not try was overcoming temptation by thinking about something else. All the time he was trying to resist his sexual thoughts and feelings, he was focusing on them almost to the point of obsession. Granted, many people will say that it is impossible for homosexuals to change, whatever they do. Still, if the man was going to try, it is too bad that no one exposed him to the one way of doing it that might have worked. I believe that heterosexuals who aspire to live chastely these days are often shortchanged in the same way.
This brings me to the end of these reflections on how things are worse now than they were when I was young. I said at the outset that my perspective on Catholic moral teaching is that of a consumer. I probably sound like the kind of consumer who makes a fuss when his grocery store stops carrying his favorite breakfast food. Fair enough, but I still believe that the moral teaching I grew up on is better than what is on the shelves today. You can find it if you go looking for it, and see for yourself. Try it. Read von Hildebrand. Read Fr. Martindale's pamphlet if your library has it, and try to follow his advice. Read Jane Austen. Read "Love in the Valley." Read "How We Met" stories in Ann Landers columns. Watch old movies. If you can honorably do so, fall in love.
Notes
1 C. C. Martindale, The Difficult Commandment, rev. ed. (New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1937).
2 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Marriage — The Mystery of Faithful Love, rev. ed. (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Inst. Press, 1984). The original edition in English was published by Longmans, Green & Co. in 1942.
3 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Man and Woman (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1966). A revised edition (Manchester. N.H.: Sophia Inst. Press, 1992) makes minor, but felicitous, changes in some of the wording, so that is the edition I have quoted. Citations are to the 1966 edition, followed by citations to the 1992 edition in parentheses.
4 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford U. Press, 1936).
5 C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1960), 131-160.
6 Martindale, 22.
7 Ibid., 72.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 27.
10 Ibid., 25.
11 Ibid., 26.
12 Ibid., 23.
13 St. Benedict, Rule, Prologue. Cf. Psalm 137 (136):9.
14 Martindale, 68.
15 Man and Woman, 14 (37).
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 90 (56).
18 1 Cor. 6:16
19 Man and Woman, 61 (87).
20 Pius XI, Casti Connubii (1930), especially #11 and #54.
21 See especially Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, #50.
22 Marriage, 20
23 Man and Woman, 94 (62).
24 Ibid., 79 (33).
25 Ibid., 86 (51).
26 Marriage, 15.
27 Man and Woman, 58-74 (83-100).
28 The Four Loves, 131.
29 The Allegory of Love, 360: "In the history of sentiment [Spenser] is the greatest among the founders of that romantic conception of marriage which is the basis of all our love literature from Shakespeare to Meredith."
30 James the Deacon, "The Life of Saint Pelagia the Harlot" in The Desert Fathers, ed. and trans. Helen Waddell (Ann Arbor: U. Mich. Press, 1957), 177-188.
31 "The Versified Life of the Virgin Clare of Assisi" lines 228-299, in Clare of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. Regis J. Armstrong (St. Bonaventure, N.Y: Franciscan Inst. Pub., 1993), 194-97.
32 John Paul II, The Theology of the Body (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1997).
33 Germain Grisez, Living a Christian Life (Quincy, Ill.: Franciscan Press 1993).
34 Ibid., 553-752.
35 Ibid., 429. He recognizes a broader sense of the erotic, applicable to all affection for others, and therefore to be distinguished from the romantic, but in his treatment of preparation for marriage, ibid., 737-52, he seems to use the two terms interchangeably.
36 Ibid., 429n.
37 Ibid., 746.
38 Ibid.
39 Id., 634.
40 The Theology of the Body, 169. "Drags" would seem to be either a misprint or a mistranslation. The word should probably be "draws."
41 Id., 171.
42 Id., 25-102.
43 Id., 103-88.
44 George Meredith, Love in the Valley, Stanza 6.
45 Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass, Introduction to Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar (Notre Dame, Ind.: U.N.D. Press, 2000), 2.
46 Martin Seymour-Smith, Rudyard Kipling (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
Professor Robert E. Rodes, Jr., is Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corporation Professor of Legal Ethics at the Notre Dame Law School. He has written extensively on the relation between law and theology. His most recent book is Pilgrim Law (1998). His wife, Jeanne, to whom he owes his interest in the subject of this article, holds a Master's degree in Comparative Literature, and teaches English at St. Mary's College. They have been married since 1953, and have seven grown children and four grandchildren.
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