Showing posts with label Theology of the Body. Show all posts
Sunday, June 28, 2015
TOB: What is original nakedness?
Body
,
Intimacy
,
Love
,
RColeman
,
Theology of the Body
,
TOB
No comments
:
We continue here our explorations into St. John Paul II’s
series of Wednesday Catecheses, which eventually became known as Man
and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (TOB, for short). To
see other posts on this topic, click here.
I will admit upfront that original nakedness, the third of
the original experiences that John Paul II explains in the TOB, has always been
the least clear to me: we have seen man alone, in front of God and the rest of
the world, understanding both his created nature and his unique place in
creation; and we have seen Adam and Eve together, understanding that man does
not live or know himself in isolation, that his finitude and bodiliness are in
fact good. What more does original nakedness “bring to the table,” so to speak?
Let’s first recall the context of original nakedness: the
three original experiences are a meditation by the saint on the subjective
experience of Adam and Eve in the state of original innocence. The experiences
are not step-wise or successive, but in fact a circumencession: all three are
present in the beginning in some sense, albeit in more or less explicit ways at
different points. Original nakedness is intrinsically related to original solitude
and original unity
insofar as it is part of the human experience,
and insofar as it too, like the other experiences opens up another dimension of
what it means to be imago dei.
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| "Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden" by Lucas Cranach the Elder is in the Public Domain. |
Which dimension is that? Our first clue is the word John
Paul II uses to name this experience: nakedness brings the body almost
immediately to mind and thus should be a clue that it may have something to do
with the immanent experience of man as embodied. Once again, we are being
reminded that the body is not something “other” than myself, that in fact I am my body, and my lived experience
occurs, so to speak, nowhere else. Original nakedness, then, reminds us of a
certain transparency the human being should properly have (even if it has been
now distorted) to himself, to others, and to the world.
This does not however mean that in original nakedness we’re
laid completely bare to one another, such that there could be no interiority in
either Adam or Eve that the other did not see. This would be a violation of
man’s integrity, and a violation of his freedom: though there is a proper
transparency in original innocence, there is also a proper boundary with the
other, such that Adam and Eve can choose to reveal themselves to each other in
time. We must not mistake the exteriorization of things for original nakedness;
rather it seems to me that original nakedness is another way to look at what
intimacy really means.
Though intimacy has become a bit of an epithet for sex or
other physical closeness, I think we all know that one can be physically close
to someone and not be truly intimate. That’s because intimacy is in fact first
a kind of knowing. It is a knowing that sees the other person not just for his
body—or for any one-dimensional aspect—but rather sees him as a whole, in all
of his humanity—that is to say, as a subjective/objective whole.
Intimacy is also, as we know, something that takes time. This temporal aspect
is, it seems to me, intrinsic to intimacy because to see and treat someone
holistically means to acknowledge that there is an interiority about him that I
cannot know unless he reveals it to me himself. Human beings are not machines
whose parts can be separated and (literally) objectified—we are persons whose
experience is expressed in and through the body in modes we can choose to
share.
The intimacy that the experience of original nakedness is,
then, helps us understand what knowledge truly is—it is not a running list of
facts and figures, but the space in which we can let someone reveal himself and
in which we can reveal ourselves. Obviously the bodily aspect of intimacy has a
great deal to do with this, but physical intimacy is not the entire telos of
original nakedness, and we risk abridging John Paul II’s vision if we cut it
off at that point. We must remember that the original experiences, and the Theology of the Body itself is not
simply about the relationship (conjugal or otherwise) between male and female,
but about man in the world as incarnated imago
dei.
Original nakedness is then a way of knowing and being known
as God knows and is known. It is God who respects the wholeness of creature so
much that he allows him the freedom to say yes to God or not. And it is God who
reveals himself to his creature gently and appropriately, such that his
creature can come to know him—in time—intimately.
If God gives the gift of identity in original solitude and community in
original unity, then he gives the gift of his vision and care for his creation
in original nakedness.
Saturday, May 30, 2015
The Daily Gift
Gift
,
Marriage
,
Marriage preparation
,
RBudd
,
St. John Paul II
,
Theology of the Body
,
TOB
No comments
:
My
proposal to my fiancée did not go how I planned it. I'm sure plenty of
guys can say the same in today's day and age where proposals are often choreographed with
more extras than a Cecil B. DeMille epic. There is pressure to infuse as much
meaning as possible into the moment. In my case, I proposed, as planned, in
front of the Blessed Sacrament on St. John Paul II’s first feast day. Instead
of being private, however, it ended up being in front of fifteen other random
strangers in the chapel – my fiancée's personal nightmare.
As our
engagement proceeded, I was surprised by the feeling of normality. I had those
periodic “Woah, I'm getting married” moments, but in general, the monumental life change I was
preparing for seemed very much matter-of-fact. “Of course I'm marrying Maureen,
it would be weird to think otherwise.” Now for someone who never ceases to seek
the profound in anything less than the weather, I was alarmed at what I
was feeling about my own betrothal. This should be a time of being overwhelmed
at the depth of what I was entering into with this woman I loved and instead I
felt very matter-of-fact about it all. Something had to be wrong with me, my
maturity, the engagement, something.
As I reflected
and prayed about all of this, two things occurred to me. It was entirely
appropriate for me to feel this way, but it also signaled that I needed to
grow. I thought of two concepts that St. John Paul II wrote in his Theology
of the Body. The first was the sacramentality of the body and the
second was the body as a task.
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| Author's picture. |
A
sacrament, as we all remember from our second grade religious education
classes, is “an outward sign, instituted by Christ to give us grace.”
Sacraments are those visible things that not only point to invisible things,
but also really make those invisible realities present or efficacious. For
example, when someone is baptized, the symbol in the rite is one of being
washed. Yet, the physical pouring of or immersion into the water, is not merely
a sign of what God is doing, the physical action actually brings about
the spiritual action. Sacraments efficaciously make present the very things
they signify.
John
Paul takes this truth and then applies it to the body. Man and Woman are made
in God's Image and Likeness. God, who is a Trinity of Persons, exists as a
constant and complete gift of self. Being made in his Image as male and female,
this gift-reality is written precisely into our bodies in our relation to one
another.
Man,
in fact, by means of his corporality, his masculinity and femininity, becomes a
visible sign of the economy of truth and love, which has its source in God
himself and which was revealed already in the mystery of creation. Against this
vast background we understand fully the words that constitute the sacrament of
marriage, present in Genesis 2:24: "A man leaves his father and his mother
and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh." (19, 5)
So, in a
certain sense, there is a sort of “naturalness” to the idea of getting married.
There is a certain matter-of-factness that one should expect with this because
God created us to be a gift to this other. It is in our very nature to be gift,
just as it is in our nature to eat, sleep, exercise, etc. So, there should be a
certain “of course” quality to my betrothal.
And
yet, we know almost by instinct, that there is something wrong with staying
simply in the realm of the “of course.” We know that marriage is on a higher
plane, even if marrying her seems as natural as breathing to me. It is, but we
also need our growth from the sacrament of marriage itself to come close to
grasping marriage's reality. John Paul simultaneously affirms that man already
has written into him this reality of gift, and that the body is also a task for
men and women. Yes, my body, as it was the moment I was born, was given to me
as a sign of my interior reality to be a gift to another, however, my body is
also an assignment. I must grow into the reality that I am:
The
Creator has assigned as a task to man his body, his masculinity and femininity;
and that in masculinity and femininity he, in a way, assigned to him as a task
his humanity, the dignity of the person, and also the clear sign of the
interpersonal communion in which man fulfills himself through the authentic
gift of himself. Setting before man the requirements conforming to the tasks
entrusted to him, at the same time the Creator points out to man, male and
female, the ways that lead to assuming and discharging them. (59, 2)
My task
is to, in a sense, become who I am. I'm not there yet. There is a depth written
into my creation as a man to more fully become a gift and to more fully enter
into this communion of persons with my beloved who also has a depth written
into her creation and must more fully become a gift to me. The body reveals to
me that this is who I am, but it also educates and leads me to a fuller depth
of this mystery. A maturation needs to take place:
In its masculinity or femininity
the body is given as a task to the human spirit. By means of an adequate
maturity of the spirit it too becomes a sign of the person, which the person is
conscious of, and authentic "matter" in the communion of persons. In
other words, through his spiritual maturity, man discovers the nuptial
meaning proper to the body. (59, 4 emphasis mine)
And
so, while it is the most natural of things for me to enter into marriage with my
fiancée, the reality of what we are doing goes to the very heart of what it
means to be made in the image and likeness of God. By entering into this
matrimonial covenant, we continue this “pedagogy of the body” by the revelation
of the communion of persons not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world.
Our wedding and our married life together is a sacrament of this reality of who
and what we are created to be, but also stands as our task to more fully become
that reality.
My plans to infuse meaning into
my proposal to Maureen didn't work and my time of betrothal has been less a
matter of being overwhelmed by the gravity of it all and more an ordinary day to
day affair. From what I know of family life, that's probably an experience most
of us have. We go to work, make the meals, do laundry, mow the lawn, but
written into each of these very normal mundane affairs is this reality that
while doing them, we are being drawn to consider this life as a gift. That
married life, in the normal day to day, is a task given to us to live out more
completely the reality that in these moments of picking the kids up from school
and untangling the Christmas lights I am living for another - and I'm receiving from another. And just
like my proposal, the truth of this reality is already there, it doesn't need a
grand scheme to infuse it with meaning. This gift-quality of life isn't just part
of life, it is life. I am nothing else but gift, and only in pursuing
this as task, can I truly become who I am.
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Concupiwho?
Call to holiness
,
Concupiscence
,
Conversion
,
CTejeda
,
Define Your Terms
,
Forgiveness
,
Parenting
,
St. John Paul II
,
Theology of the Body
No comments
:
For the past two
years I’ve been participating in a men’s ministry entitled That Man is You!
The presenter of each week’s content is
a man by the name of Steve
Bollman. He doesn’t pull any punches
in the sense that he readily shares some of the lesser known aspects of
Catholic theology and spirituality. At
times this means that he loses guys in attendance at the parish hall at 6:15 am
watching the DVD, but it also has the effect of raising important questions for
guys during the post-DVD small group table conversations.
One term that
has come up repeatedly over the sessions is “concupiscence” (kon-kyoo-pi-suh ns).
It is a difficult word to pronounce without some practice, and even with
practice!
The Catechism of
the Catholic Church defines it as “human appetites or desires which remain
disordered due to the temporal consequences of original sin, which remain even
after Baptism, and which produce an inclination to sin.” The U.S. Catholic Catechism for Adults
mentions it as our “inclination to sin which shows itself in what is sometimes
referred to as a darkening of the mind and a weakening of the will, that is,
the inability to know clearly the right or wrong of an action and/or the lack
of strength to resist temptation and always to do the right thing no matter how
hard this is.”
What was new to
me though was what I recently learned by looking in the index of the
2006 edition of the Pauline Books and Media publication of Michael Waldstein’s
translation, introduction and index of Man
and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. Saint John Paul the Great used the word
“concupiscence” 340 times over the course of the four years that he was sharing
his Wednesday catechesis with the world!
That works out to make it the ninth most used word in the whole body of
work.
Here’s how it
breaks down:
“Body” – 1319 times
“Meaning/Significance/Importance” – 625 times
“Marriage” – 502 times
“Love” – 465 times
“Heart” – 408 times
“Person” – 382 times
“Mystery” – 373 times
“Truth” – 342 times
“Concupiscence” – 340 times
“Body” – 1319 times
“Meaning/Significance/Importance” – 625 times
“Marriage” – 502 times
“Love” – 465 times
“Heart” – 408 times
“Person” – 382 times
“Mystery” – 373 times
“Truth” – 342 times
“Concupiscence” – 340 times
To give you an
idea of some other important words:
“Flesh” – 330 times
“Church” – 326 times
“Dimension” – 297 times
“Creation” – 281 times
“Theology of the Body” – 100 times
“Flesh” – 330 times
“Church” – 326 times
“Dimension” – 297 times
“Creation” – 281 times
“Theology of the Body” – 100 times
So, what really
struck me was that every other frequently used word in the TOB is a positive
term. Concupiscence sticks out like a
sore thumb, and must have a lot to do with our coming to understand the
“adequate anthropology” that St. JPII wanted to impart to us.
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| "Scream and shout" by Mindaugas Danys is licensed under C.C. by 2,0 |
Concupiscence
(and therefore in a reverse engineering kind of way all of TOB and the Gospel
of Jesus Christ) is a universal reality experienced by everyone (Original Sin
anyone?). Spend 20 minutes around any
toddler from any region of the globe and it’s guaranteed that they will all do
the same selfish behaviors that stem from overwhelming inclinations to
dominate, ignore, horde, hit, bite, scream, etc.
Right in line
with this phenomenon is the reality that I experienced as a young boy and
immature man. When no one educated me in
the way of love, understood as “making a sincere gift of myself” (Gaudium et spes 24:3), I used the
powerful gift of my masculinity to turn inward on myself and away from God and
neighbor. Not until I was five years
into living life as a weekly Mass attending, baptized and confirmed Catholic
making use of regular sacramental reconciliation was I
spiritually/socially/physically in a consistently good place with God, others
and myself.
Whenever I share this detail
of my past with other men, I hear, read or see them confirm my reflection. No one had to teach us to lust, dominate,
use, manipulate or waste time, money and energy on ourselves! Rather, all that darkness simply came
flowing out from within us because apart from the divine physician we are truly
ill. We need to be healed from the
inside out (Mk 7:20), we need to be taken back to the beginning of God’s design
for us (Mt 19:8). This is why TOB is so important, beautiful
and life changing if you allow it to be the vehicle for encountering Jesus
Christ risen from the dead today!
If you are intrigued
by this theme, take a look at this article
by Dr. Rick Fitzgibbon (specifically the second to last paragraph from the
bottom of the first page).
Here’s a VERY powerful video
story/testimony/confession by a father about how only his second daughter’s
life was able to invade his selfish-concupiscence-bubble and bring him abundant
life (Jn 10:10). Enjoy and share
widely!
Friday, March 6, 2015
TOB: What is original unity?
We
continue here our explorations into St. John Paul II’s series of Wednesday
Catecheses, which eventually became known as Man and Woman He Created
Them: A Theology of the Body (TOB, for short). To see other posts on
this topic, click here.
“The
looks of human beings were as a whole round, with back and sides in a circle.
And each had four arms and legs equal in number to his arms, and two faces
alike in all respects . . . but there was one head for both faces—they were set
in opposite directions” (Symposium, 189e).
This is
the account of human beings the Greek playwright Aristophanes gives in Plato’s Symposium. In that dialogue, each member
of the dinner party gives an account of love—where it comes from, whether it is
a god, how it affects humans. Aristophanes proposes that we all used to be
double ourselves—two persons, as it were, in a doubled body; this version of
humanity was too strong and threatened the gods, so Zeus decides he will split
humans in half. When Zeus did so, however, the splitted-humans could not
function and wandered around aimlessly on the earth looking for their other
half; this situation was also unacceptable, because the gods needed humans to
offer sacrifices. So Zeus gives humanity physical love so that the
splitted-humans would be satisfied and could then “attend to the rest of their
livelihood” (191b). Thus, the two sexes and love were born at the same time.
Though
Aristophanes was a comic playwright, his creation myth is rather compelling,
which is one of the many reasons it acts as an appropriate foil to John Paul
II’s account of the experience of original unity in his TOB. There does at
times seem to be a lack in us that leads us to another person. But are gender
and sex simply the result of some original wound inflicted upon us, either by
ourselves or some force outside of us? Is my limitedness and need—made evident
by the fact that I cannot be both male and female—evidence of some deep wound,
as Aristophanes articulates?
No! John
Paul II helps us see this in light of the Genesis account, by explicating the original experiences of solitude, unity, and nakedness. Original
solitude is the experience of the human (Adam) coming to terms with what it
means to be a creature, and specifically, a human being, one who is in the
material world, but not entirely of it.
Original
unity is the next experience John Paul II reflects on in the TOB, and this
experience arises out of and also helps us to understand original solitude.
Though Adam is a full human creature who has a relationship to both God and the
world (securing, ultimately, that no human person must be with the opposite sex
in order to be whole), the Lord sees him in his solitude and says, “It is not
good that man should be alone; I will make a helper fit for him” (Gen 2:18).
Why this need for an-other?
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| "Holding hands" is licensed under C.C. by 2.0 |
In my
last post, I pointed out that God gives
the Adam three directives—till the
garden, the commandment about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and
name the animals—and that those directives helped Adam to understand his place
in the world vis-à-vis God and the rest of creation. Still, though, Adam’s
knowledge of himself is not entirely clear.
God puts
Adam into a deep sleep, and forms the woman from his rib, and then she is
presented to the man. John Paul II emphasizes that before this, we have only
seen the general word for humanity (in Hebrew: ‘adam) to describe Adam, whereas now we see the words male (‘is) and female (‘issah), signaling that in woman’s creation, man comes to be in a
certain way for the first time as well. One does not make sense without the
other.
Adam
responds with the joyful exclamation we all know so well: “This at last is bone
of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” (Gen 2:23). Remarkably, this is first time
we hear man speak in the creation accounts. It is only in front of an-other
like himself that Adam can say “my”—that is to say, we cannot know ourselves in
isolation, but fully come into the knowledge of what it means to be human (and
specifically, the human that is me),
without the flesh of another. But notice! This original unity is not two humans
stuck together, who were originally meant to have “the same” body—rather, this
true original unity comes from looking at another, seeing that she is actually
other, and knowing that she is also “mine.” The image of a mother and a child
is also very apt here: the child learns, through his mother’s embrace and her
smile, who he is.
Original
unity, then, helps us see more explicitly that to be human means to be for another. Thus, John Paul II writes,
“In the biblical account, solitude is the way that leads to the unity that we
can define, following Vatican II, as communio
personarum” (9th Catechesis). Humanity as communio personarum, or communion of persons, made explicit for the
first time in the presence of Eve, helps us better understand man’s capacity
for gift: man is a gift himself (Eve is entirely unexpected and gratuitous),
and has the inner structure appropriate to receiving a gift (Adam receives Eve
in wonder, awe, and gratitude). The communio
personarum, then, is simply another way to express what the late pope
emphasizes in his work time and again: that our creation is a gift and that we are made to give a
gift of ourselves. The late pope’s reflections on original unity help shine a
new light on this reality that has existed from the “beginning.”
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Frozen, Russell Brand and Pope St. John Paul II
Not long
after Frozen became the highest
grossing animated film of all time, a cyber scandal accusing the masterminds of
Disney of a “gay agenda” blew up all over social media. Whatever the potential
motivations of Disney may or may not have been, the movie actually left me surprised
by hope.
In these
seemingly dark times when the culture of death looms around us, the plan God
has for us written in our hearts, inscribed in and revealed through our human nature (qua embodied souls) is so
undeniable that even adorable cartoon characters get it. When the lead
character, Elsa, tries to repress and suppress her magical powers, she is left
feeling alone, miserable and with a burden she was not meant to bear. When the
pendulum swings the opposite way and she embraces self-centered “freedom”
indulging her icy powers, the entire fairytale kingdom of Arendelle suffers
from an eternal winter. Clearly, we are not made to suppress or repress our
deepest desires, nor should we overindulge. Elsa learns that all is well when
we order our “magical powers,” if you will, to love.
I was floored last week when I read this Life Site News article featuring a recent
YouTube video by Russell Brand, the British comedian, former husband of Katy
Perry and now…outspoken anti-pornography activist?!? The video is worth
watching – though fair warning that it includes Brand’s naked chest and casual
bedroom backdrop. He uses personal experience backed by sociological evidence
to deliver his argument and the best part…he mentions a quote commonly
attributed to Pope Saint John Paul II (he refers to him as a “priest,” we’ll
take it),
“I
heard a quote from a priest that said ‘pornography isn’t a problem because it shows
too much, it’s a problem because it shows too little.”
He denounces the book and film, Fifty Shades of Grey and says, “Our
attitudes towards sex have become warped and perverted and have deviated from
its true function as an expression of love and a means for procreation. Because
our acculturation—the way we’ve designed it and expressed it—has become really,
really, confused.”
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| "Elsa" by Sam Howzit is licensed under C.C by 2.0. |
Whether you are a princess covered from head to
toe in sparkly attire or an outspoken and rugged bloke, clearly you don’t have
to be a graduate of the John Paull II Institute to know that you are made for
more, to know that you are made for authentic, life-giving love. Even in the most unsuspecting places we find
echoes of the call God has written on our hearts.
Taking
a cue from Russell Brand, I leave you with these words from our favorite
“priest’s” 1979 encyclical Redempter
Hominis,
“Man
cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for
himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not
encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he
does not participate intimately in it.”
Fifteen
years later in his Letter to Families, he further
explained,
“The
love which the Apostle Paul celebrates in the First Letter to the Corinthians -
the love which is "patient" and "kind",
and "endures all things" (1 Cor 13:4, 7) - is
certainly a demanding love. But this is precisely the source of its beauty: by
the very fact that it is demanding, it builds up the true good of man and
allows it to radiate to others.”
As a
high school religion teacher, I am aware of how very daunting communicating
this truth is – and I am even more aware of how my task is actually quite
simple. As Disney might put it, I need only awaken them to “their heart’s true
desire.”
Saturday, February 28, 2015
TOB: What is original solitude?
We continue here our explorations
into St. John Paul II’s series of Wednesday Catecheses, which eventually became
known as Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (TOB,
for short). To see other posts on this topic, click here.
As I wrote in my first
post on this topic, John Paul II’s TOB is often looked at solely
in terms of what it has to say about sex and marriage. This is not without
warrant—indeed, John Paul II placed a great deal of emphasis on marriage and
the family during his papacy—but if looked at only in this light, we miss the
bigger picture. Man and Woman He Created
Them is about, in the simplest terms, what it means to be human—a bodily
creature who comes from and responds to God.
This
method of theological anthropology is evident from the beginning of TOB, After
John Paul II sets up the starting point for his reflections—that is, Jesus’
insistence that we return to “the beginning” in his dialogue with the Pharisees
about divorce—the pope introduces the three “original experiences” based on the
creation accounts in Genesis. These three experiences—solitude, unity, and
nakedness—all help us understand what it is to be both spirit and body. What
does it mean to be in the material world but not entirely of it? There is more
going on in TOB than thoughts on what conjugal love is and means.
This is
reinforced by John Paul II’s reflections on the first of the three original
experiences -- original solitude. Though in the first creation account, male
and female appear simultaneously (“So God created man in his own image, in the
image of God he created him; male and female he created them” Gen 1:27), this
is not the case in the second creation account. Instead we are presented with
Adam, the first human, whose name means something like “humanity.” John Paul II
is careful to note that in this second account, the worlds “male” and “female”
(‘is and ‘issah in the original Hebrew) do not appear until there are two. I’ll
talk about this more when I address original unity, but for now we’ll give our
attention to the solitary Adam.
John
Paul II explains the experience of original solitude in terms of man’s place
and situation in the world—man is neither animal nor pure spirit. As both, man is above the rest of the
creatures. The first indication of this superior place in the created world is
the directive about the garden: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the
garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). Work, then, helps set
humanity apart from everything else in this world; man is the only creature
with the capacity to care for what has been created—to receive it, we can say,
as a gift. This receptivity and capacity
to work, then, is a first step in thinking about original solitude.
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| "For to be a farmer's boy" by Winslow Homer is in the Public Domain |
Another
indication of man’s being set apart is the naming of the animals: “out of the
ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air,
and brought them to the man to see what he would call them” (Gen 2:19). This
too is a form of dominion—to name something is to see and understand its
essence; no other creature in the world has been given this task and privilege.
Though
this multi-faceted dominion is clearly a gift for and to man, making it clear
that the earth is for him, it also
sets the man apart in such a way that it’s not entirely clear to whom or what
he belongs. By tilling the garden and naming the animals, it is evident that
though Adam has a material body like the rest of creation, there is something
more in him as well. Obviously the question of belonging becomes clearer when
Eve is created from Adam’s rib, but we should not pass too quickly over
original solitude, as, for John Paul II, it is the key to other original
experiences.
John
Paul II draws our attention to a third dimension of human existence that occurs
before the original unity of male and female: “And the Lord God commanded the
man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it, you
shall die’” (Gen 2:16-17). John Paul II asks this question of the passage:
“could man, who in his original consciousness knows only the experience of
existing and thus of life, have understood what the words ‘You shall die’ mean?”
(7th Catechesis). Put another way: how could Adam understand death as
death has not yet entered the world?
We tend
to glide over this question because of our familiarity with these passages. But
if the commandment about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil can hold
any weight, so to speak, with Adam, then he must have at least some sense of
the consequence the Lord gives him. What can this mean?
John
Paul II writes: “The words of God-Yahweh addressed to the man confirm a
dependence in existing, so that they show man as a limited being and by his
nature, susceptible to nonexistence.” In other words, because man is a
creature, nonexistence is constitutive to his very being. Though it is somewhat
unfathomable, we all know with certainty that there was a time when we were
not. This is the situation of the creature.
Thus the
commandment, though often viewed in negative terms (likely because we
transgressed it and pay the price), is actually also a gift in line with the
other directives of keeping the garden and naming the animals: it allows man to
know his place in relation to the world and God, in short, it gives him the
capacity to know what he is—a creature.
This,
then, is the main thrust of original solitude: that man can rest in the
knowledge that he is a creature, and not just a creature, but also one to whom
God speaks. The original experience of solitude secures our knowledge of our
selves in this world, that each person is created for his or her own sake by
God, who gives the world to man as a gift.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
What can experience mean?
We continue here our explorations into St. John Paul II’s
series of Wednesday Catecheses, which eventually became known as Man
and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (TOB, for short). To
see other posts on this topic, click here.
The first part of the Wednesday Catecheses, sometimes called
the first “cycle” of TOB, concentrates on what John Paul II calls the “original
experiences”: solitude, unity and nakedness. Each of the three warrants its own
post so for now I’ll just concentrate on opening up the word “experience,” and what
John Paul II is drawing out of it here. Using the creation accounts in Genesis
as his guide, John Paul II contemplates the first experiences of man. In these
reflections, the late pope leads us to an incredibly deep and rich
understanding of man’s place in the world as creature, as worker, and as male
and female. In a word, thinking about the original experiences helps us
understand what it means to be human.
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| Michelangelo's "Creation of Eve" is in the Public Domain. |
It’s important to remember that these original experiences
are not fairy tales. The Genesis accounts are mythic in structure, but mythic
in the sense that they recall something common to all mankind—a memory, so to
speak, that we all have within us. John Paul II speaks of solitude, unity and
nakedness as original not simply because they are first temporally, but because
they are at our origin: these three experiences are common to us in our very
humanity.
John Paul II spends most of his time in this first cycle on
the original experiences exegeting the second creation account in Genesis,
though always keeping the first in view as well. This second account, called
“Yahwist” on account of its using that name to refer to God, is older, and John
Paul II notes, has a more subjective tone. That is to say, in the second
creation account we see creation more from man’s point of view, as it were.
Therefore, John Paul II refers explicitly to this second account more often in
order to contemplate man’s original experience of his body, which in turn helps
man understand his relationship to the world and God.
Let me reiterate that last point: John Paul II is proposing
here that it is mankind’s having a body and his experience in that body, that
allows man to know himself, the world and God. “The body reveals man,” says the
late pope in the 9th Catechesis.
In the very same paragraph, he also says of the person that “man as a
person, that is, as a being that is, also in all its bodiliness, ‘similar’ to
God.” Our lived experience in and through the body opens us up to God. Indeed,
it is also where we are similar to Him.
Perhaps this seems like common sense: of course my
experience is how I know things, since knowledge first comes from the senses.
But maybe it’s not so evident to us—we have a tendency, I think, to regard our
day-to-day lives and experiences as having little to do with the laws of the
universe or the truth of the world. What could my body help me to understand
about those things? Well, John Paul II avers, everything. Without the body,
there would be no experience, and therefore nothing to know.
We tend to think in a false dichotomy of subjective vs.
objective. My subjective experiences only accidentally connect with what is
objectively true, but the two aren’t intrinsically connected to each other. In
fact, “subjective” has become a bit of an epithet.* But if what is objectively
true about the world, man and God doesn’t have everything to do with how I
(subjectively) experience such things, then the world (and man and God) becomes
foreign to me, a place in which I don’t really belong. That is problematic and
deeply divisive, but it’s the situation we find ourselves in when we pit
subjective against objective and vice versa.
John Paul II is trying to cut through this dichotomy by
recovering experience as a means to know the true, good and beautiful, rather
than as something incommunicable that traps us in ourselves. Experience and
meaning are not opposed. The original experiences help us to see this more
fully because they are at the basis of every other experience, and therefore
something which we all share. Solitude, unity and nakedness, as John Paul II
articulates them in TOB, are the abiding presence of “the beginning” in the
midst of our lives. And as we have this deep memory of creation within us
simply because we are human (and therefore bodily), surely our lived, bodily
experience is also what helps us to understand the transcendent.
*the Dude abides.
Friday, February 13, 2015
TOB: What is meant by "beginning"?
Jesus Christ
,
Marriage
,
RColeman
,
Scripture
,
St. John Paul II
,
Theology of the Body
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TOB
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:
We continue here our explorations into
St. John Paul II’s series of Wednesday Catecheses, which eventually became
known as Man and Woman He Created Them: A
Theology of the Body (TOB, for short). To see other posts on this topic,
click here.
As I said in my first post on TOB, my aim in this series has been
and will be to highlight some less commonly written about aspects of the
Wednesday Catecheses. One, I think, is that the entirety of TOB is scriptural
exegesis. Indeed, we could describe John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them as an incredibly in-depth and rich
exegesis on the Gospel passages in Matthew and Mark that describe the encounter
Christ has with the Pharisees in which they ask him about divorce. The late
pope starts with the Gospels and only turns to the Genesis accounts in light of
Christ’s words. This is, first of all, an indication of how we should be
reading all of Scripture all of the time—in and through the Word that is Jesus
Christ. This is perhaps John Paul II’s first lesson in his Wednesday Catecheses,
albeit an implicit one.
Let’s then, as the saint did, look at
this passage in Matthew (19:3-8):
Some Pharisees came to him, and to test
him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?” He
answered, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made
them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father
and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So
they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together,
let no one separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses
command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?” He
said to them, “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you
to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.
Let’s also look at the first comment
John Paul II makes on this passage: “Christ does not accept the discussion on
the level which his interlocutors try to introduce it.” This is also a key
aspect of John Paul II’s writings, though again one which I think is often
passed over—that is, John Paul II is communicating a method here: we cannot
accept the given framework (of a problem, of a discussion, of a culture) if it is
not given in the fullness of what is true, good and beautiful. In a word: we
must reject that which does not come from God.
 |
| "The Birth of Christ" by Henri Fantin Latour is in the Public Domain |
But is Christ’s response to the
Pharisees a simple rejection? I would say no. What Christ rejects is the
hardness of their hearts, the sinfulness of Israel, but he does not reject Israel
outright. What he does is go back to “the beginning,” a beginning that Israel
knows well, and to Scriptures that the Pharisees know and must acknowledge to
be true. This is not, then, a simple reference; it is a directive: go back to
the Scriptures and try to understand and read with faith.
Many times in the Gospels we encounter
this phrase about Jesus: “He spoke with authority.” What does this mean? Surely
it conveys something more than tone of voice, and we also know that Christ did
not go around proclaiming he was the Son of God in so many words. Rather, this
authority comes from Christ himself; he radiates understanding of the
Scriptures, and has since he was a child: “all who heard him were amazed at his
understanding and his answers” (Lk 2:47). He is no Pharisee but rather lives
the Scriptures from the inside out, as it were. And this living of the
Scriptures is palpable in his presence and the way he speaks about the Word of
God.
Thus, when Christ tells the Pharisees,
“from the beginning it was not so” in distinction from the Law of Moses, he is
also signaling that a return to the beginning is possible in a way that has not
before been available to man. By rejecting the Pharisees’ question and pointing
to the beginning, Christ is helping us to see that through him man can regain his original disposition in front of
God, the world, and his fellow man.
This, I must emphasize, is more than a
moral or juridical issue: Christ is not simply an example to us, showing us we
can live more holy lives, nor does he inject us with some spiritual strength so
that we finally have the endurance to stay with our spouses. Rather, this is on
the level of being, on the ontological level. Christ is the beginning—John’s Gospel does not start the way it does
accidentally. Man is created in Christ’s image and likeness. Therefore, the
incarnation of the Son brings the beginning back to us: it is a re-creation of
man, again in Christ’s image, again in his likeness. Christ has the authority
to speak of such things to the Pharisees because he is the authority, the Word made flesh, who makes it possible for
all of man to again become Adam, albeit in a way greater than even the first
Adam could have ever imagined.
This comes, however, with implications
for our lives. Hardness of heart is no longer an excuse. The beginning has been
given to us again, in a way we could not anticipate. Therefore, John Paul II
helps us to see, we must reject all frameworks other than that of Christ
himself, and live in the authority of the Word once more. This is man’s true
beginning, and it is one he never leaves behind.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
TOB: What is a gift?
We continue here our explorations into
St. John Paul II’s series of Wednesday Catecheses, which eventually became known
as Man and Woman He Created Them: a Theology of the Body (TOB, for short). To see other
posts on this topic, click here.
It is no secret that John Paul II was
both involved in and influenced by the Second Vatican Council. Though his attendance
at the Council was occasionally spotty, due to the then Cardinal Wojtyła’s passport being revoked by the Communist
government in Poland, he participated in many of the planning committees through
written interventions and the like. When he was elected to the papacy, it is
clear that the late pope took seriously the task of propagating and
interpreting the teachings of Vatican II. The documents appear often in his writing,
and even if there are no direct references, there is usually some reflection on
a theme that emerged from the ecumenical council.
One theme that is interwoven
throughout John Paul II’s writing is that of gift. One of the most-quoted lines
by the saint is from Gaudium et spes (GS) 24:
The likeness [between the communion of men and the communion of the Persons of the Trinity] reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself, except through a sincere gift of himself.
Looking back through his writings,
it becomes clear that this line is special to John Paul II. It’s included in
almost every one of his encyclicals, and much of his other writing as well. TOB
is of course no exception here. And “gift” carries here some meaning both
beyond and below, as it were, the presenting of another person with a token. It
has more depth as it is used by the Council Fathers in GS and in John Paul II’s work,
including TOB. Let’s try and unpack that a bit.
In the Wednesday Catecheses, the
first place gift appears is not with respect to man giving himself to woman, or
vice versa, but with respect to God giving man the gift of creation. This language
is radical, even if it may seem trite to us today.
**Reader beware:
generalizations and simplifications in the next couple of paragraphs, though I
think none of it false. It just needs more nuance after further discussion.**
Pre-Christian philosophical man had two
choices (more or less) when it came to understanding the divine: either there was
a god or gods who were very close to man, creating man because he somehow needed
him—man’s sacrifices, man’s offerings were some source of power or pleasure,
for example—or there was a god who was absolutely indifferent to the world, who
created unknowingly or didn’t care at all. There were attempts to bridge the
gap between these two pictures of divinity with the image of an indifferent god,
a demi-urge, subordinate to the supreme being..
This demi-urge was responsible for making the world and consequently in some sense, needed his creatures. In
the end, even this alternative takes us back to the perennial philosophical
seesaw of the necessity of the world to God or the absolute indifference of God
to the world.
Can we say that God needs his
creatures, or that creation was necessary? We cannot. To do so would be to put God
at the mercy of his creatures, and ultimately would make him just a more
powerful version of ourselves. But can we say that God is indifferent to us?
That he created the world arbitrarily, through some sort of spasmodic will? . .
. This doesn’t seem quite right either, especially in a Christian worldview.
This is, after all, the Father who sent his Son for us, and the Son who
suffered and died for us. There is a lot at stake there for a God who is simply
indifferent to his creation.
So how do we cut through this
dialectic of need and arbitrary will in God? By trying to understand the logic of
gift. Let’s think about this a bit: one never truly needs to give a gift, one
just wants to. But when you decide to give a gift, you’re not simply indifferent
to what happens to it after you’ve given it away, nor are you indifferent to how
the person receives it. But you do give it in all freedom, meaning there are no
claims or qualifications on how the person is to use it; rather, you hope that they
enjoy it, receive it well, and use it well. True gifts are not perfunctory things.
This all points to there being such
a thing as a logic of gift. In a way, when I give a gift, I’m giving part of
myself. I’ve put thought into it, time and/or money, etc., so this thing is not
entirely different from myself, and yet, here I am, giving it away freely to
another person, to do with it what they will. Indeed, I don’t diminish myself in
giving a gift, even if it is part of me. In fact, the opposite is likely true.
The gift in some sense unites the giver and the receiver: the giver is really
giving part of himself, while the receiver really receives it into himself.
 |
| "Creation of Adam" is in the Public Domain. |
So too with creation. The logic of
creation is gift: God is entirely free to give, and we, in some sense, are
entirely free to either receive it well, or to reject it. It is there for us,
so that it may serve us, and we may serve it. And God is not entirely
indifferent to whether we choose to receive or reject His gift.
But just as a gift tells something
about the one who gives it, so too can creation tell us about our Creator. If
the logic of creation is gift, then that logic in an analogical sense is also
within our Creator. Now, if a gift really does unite the giver and receiver, we
might be able to say that the logic of gift looks a bit like communion, and
that this logic could be carried up—again, analogically—into God. And of course
we already know this to be true: the Trinity is a communion of life and love. The
point then is that the logic of creation is not outside of or extrinsic to the logic
of the life of the Trinity. The Creator is not foreign to his creation.
But the stakes of this gift, the gift of creation, are raised higher
than any gift we could possibly give or receive because in the gift of creation,
not only is the gift given, but the receiver is given too. That is to say, man
is created, and he is created as the receiver of the gift of creation. Thus,
the logic of gift is written into him as well, into his very being, his very
body. Therefore, the logic that enables (so to speak) creation in the first
place, a logic of gift and communion that already exists in the Trinity, can be
seen in the flesh of man himself.
But what does this mean for man’s existence
and his existence-as-embodied creature? First, it seems to me that gratitude is
then the disposition of our existence, and that gratitude always directs us to
another—we’re always directed out of ourselves, and again, our bodies help us to
see this. This gratitude is not, however, simply how we react to God, rather,
as an existential disposition, it means that that is how we’re disposed to
everyone and everything. If creation is a gift, if my very existence is a gift,
along with the existence of everything else, gratitude has to be how we first look
at the world.
But(!) look at the radicality of this:
it immediately communicates a different way of relating to the rest of the created
world, God and each other. Gratitude is not bitter: one doesn’t view a gift in light
of one’s own neediness—that is, we don’t hold it against the giver that he sees
something we need or desire and then gives it to us. In this logic of gift and reciprocal
gratitude—in this logic of communion—our embodiment and corresponding finitude is
not something about which we should be ashamed; it is rather the space to allow
a gift to be given in the first place. The limitedness of my body is not a curse
I must master or overcome, but precisely the place at which I am open to generosity.
Gift, then, indicates an entire way
of understanding and responding to God, the world, my own body, and everything
in between. We were created as gifts to ourselves and to each other, in the
image and likeness of the Trinity, an image and likeness to which our corporeal
form is not incidental. To give oneself, as John Paul II highlights often in his
quoting of GS
24, allows one to enter into the logic and life of God himself.
Friday, January 30, 2015
TOB: What does “Language of the Body” mean?
We continue here our explorations into St. John Paul II’s
series of Wednesday Catecheses, which eventually became known as Man and Woman He Created Them: a Theology of
the Body (TOB, for short). To see other posts on this topic, click here.
The phrase “language of the body” doesn’t appear
systematically until the third part of St. John Paul II’s TOB, but when it
does, it carries a good deal of significance. In fact, the late pope built the
first two parts of TOB—dedicated to theological anthropology and
sacramentality—such that he could introduce this phrase intelligibly. “Language
of the body,” then, could be understood as a key to help open up all of TOB’s meaning
a bit more for us.
We are almost all, I think, familiar with the term “body
language,” as well as the corresponding factoids about something like 60% of
human communication coming through that rather than our words. Clearly, if I
say “everything is fine” with a sharp tone, my arms akimbo and a dark look on
my face, everything may not, in fact, be fine. Most people understand this on
an intuitive level.
We might say, as well, that the body has another kind of
language, in the realm of medicine or health. Aches and pains plus a fever
probably indicate the flu, while this throbbing below my eye may have something
to do with my propensity for sinus headaches. Indeed, the body seems at times
to exert its own authority over ourselves in the form of pain: you think you
can run a mile in the time it took when you were 18? Well, your left knee, your
heart, and your lungs beg to differ. No running for you today. Or any other
day.
So let’s start by acknowledging that the body is
communicative “of its own accord,” so to speak. It’s not always the mind
reading an intelligibility onto the lifeless matter of our body. Rather, this
intelligibility is built right in, as it were. The body is not dumb stuff we
have to pick apart in order to learn anything about it; it talks to us on its
own. Basic principle, then: the body is intelligible, and therefore,
communicative.
 |
| John Paul II (AFP Photo/Alberto Pizolli) |
This is not actually a new idea. St. Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Making of Man uses the form of
man’s body compared to everything else in the created world, as a sign that man
is meant for reason, or vice versa:
1. But man's form is upright, and extends aloft towards heaven, and looks upwards: and these are marks of sovereignty which show his royal dignity. For the fact that man alone among existing things is such as this, while all others bow their bodies downwards, clearly points to the difference of dignity between those which stoop beneath his sway and that power which rises above them: for all the rest have the foremost limbs of their bodies in the form of feet, because that which stoops needs something to support it: but in the formation of man these limbs were made hands, for the upright body found one base, supporting its position securely on two feet, sufficient for its needs.
2. Especially do these ministering hands adapt themselves to the requirements of the reason: indeed if one were to say that the ministration of hands is a special property of the rational nature, he would not be entirely wrong; and that not only because his thought turns to the common and obvious fact that we signify our reasoning by means of the natural employment of our hands in written characters. It is true that this fact, that we speak by writing, and, in a certain way, converse by the aid of our hands, preserving sounds by the forms of the alphabet, is not unconnected with the endowment of reason . . . (from Book VIII)
In this Cappadocian Father’s understanding, our bodies
indicate our supremacy over the rest of creation in and through our
intellectual soul; even our hands are reasonable by this account. This is
obviously still the case, and certainly not something St. John Paul II takes
for granted, but it is also not his emphasis.
What St. John Paul II emphasizes in looking at the structure
of the body as its own language is the body’s inherent relationality. Yes, the
intellectual soul defines man (what is man? “A rational animal,” answers
Plato), but if we don’t look at the whole of what that intellect means, we’re
missing a big part of the picture; part of it, the late pope helps us to see,
is this relational structure.
My body didn’t pop out of nowhere, fully formed as an adult.
Rather, I came from someone, in fact,
grew in someone before I was ever in
born. I come from another, am related to another, from the first moment of my
existence; there is then, a certain neediness or vulnerability built in to being
human. I need other people, and other things outside of myself in order to
survive. Even as a fully formed adult, this remains true; hunger and thirst are
not simply biological mechanisms, rather if we take the unity of body and soul
seriously, they also help communicate something about what it means to be
human: to need things, to be needy, and therefore to have to relate to others.
This inbuilt vulnerability and relationality is not in the
idealized version of man with which we are commonly presented today. That man would probably look something
like a powerful man who needs nothing and no one—he gets to choose how he
relates to anything or anyone, if he chooses to have a relationship at all.
Maybe some idealized version of a cowboy? You get the picture.
If that’s true though, this cowboy doesn’t have a belly
button. By that I mean, again, that our own bodily structure points us to the
relationships that both constitute us and precede our choosing them. The
relation we have to our parents is pretty clear—it’s natural, and it truly must
precede us and truly does constitute us—but if we trace these relationships
back through the generations, we may start to understand that something or
someone preceded all of them at the beginning: our Creator.
The body’s inherent vulnerability then, is not something
about which we must be ashamed, but rather the first place we can start to
contemplate what it means to have a relationship with our Creator, in a word,
what it means to be a creature. This is what St. John Paul II helps to reminds
us of in the Wednesday Catecheses: that rationality doesn’t just define us, it
is also first and foremost a gift from the Creator; a gift that is inscribed
into our very flesh. And if that is
true, then surely the body has a language of its own.
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