The Second Word, Part 4

Dealing with objections and opponents

05/14/2024

We pick up again our theological fork to take a third bite of the elephant of chapter two of Pope St. John Paul II’s groundbreaking theology of the body. In sections four and five (out of seven total sections) the pope feels the need to address important objections to Christ’s teaching about adultery in Mt. 5:27-28. Right off the bat, John Paul acknowledges Christ’ words about adultery in the heart are “demanding” – recall how the heart work is truly hard work – but he insists it should not, for that reason, be dismissed as impossible or irrelevant. I once heard a golf pro say that there are a hundred ways to hit a golf ball wrong, but only one way to hit it right. Likewise, there are many ways to misunderstand Jesus’ words about adultery in the heart but only one way to understand it correctly, namely, what John Paul proposes in the theology of the body. The pope will identify six such ways to get adultery in the heart wrong while defending the only way to get adultery in the heart right. In this way, the pope-saint follows in the footsteps of one of his intellectual masters, St. Thomas Aquinas. In Aquinas’ masterpiece, the Summa Theologica, the Angelic Doctor first lists the objections to the truths of the faith – to give the Devil his due – and then proceeds to debunk them. John Paul II, then, in sections four and five, turns to meet such objections, or we might say, to deal with his opponents.

The first objection (or opponent) is his most formidable foe and rears his ugly head repeatedly throughout the theology of the body, namely, Manichaeism. The pope explains: “Manichaeism, which sprang up in the Orient from Mazdean dualism, that is, outside the biblical sphere, saw the source of evil in matter, in the body, and therefore condemned all that is bodily in man.” Have you heard of the modern phenomenon of “cutting,” where teenagers have the habit of cutting their arms or legs as a way of mitigating the deeper anxieties they feel? They punish the body as if it were the culprit for their problems. Cutting is one manifestation of Manichaeism which see the human body as the root of human evil. Today’s teenagers practicing cutting blame the body (like modern-day Manicheans) for their problems. But just like the Jews erred in crucifying innocent Jesus, teens, too, condemn the innocent body when they should point an accusing finger at the guilty party, namely, concupiscence.

Next John Paul II considers three objections (or opponents) together, a trifecta of trouble-makers, that is, the modern thinkers Friederich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Each thinker reduces a person to one or another critical component of what it means to be a human, but also fails to see the whole picture of the person. Their predicament is like the Indian folklore of the six blind men who tried to learn what an elephant was. One touched its side and declared: “It is smooth and solid, the elephant is a wall!” The second grabbed its limber trunk and said, “An elephant is a giant snake!” The third touched its pointed tusk and exclaimed: “An elephant is a deadly and pointed spear.” The fourth felt the elephant’s leg and decided: “We have here an extremely large cow!” The fifth found its large ear and determined: “An elephant is a huge fan or maybe a flying carpet.” And the sixth touched the tail and pronounced: “Why this is nothing more than a piece of old rope.” In other words, like so many modern philosophies, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud missed the forest for the trees.

The Holy Father translates the thinking of this trifecta back into biblical terms in 1 John: "In Nietzschean hermeneutics, the judgement and the accusation of the human heart corresponds in some way to what biblical language calls “pride of life”; in Marxist hermeneutics, to what it calls “concupiscence of the eyes”; in Freudian hermeneutics, by contrast, to what it calls “concupiscence of the flesh." Put simply, one man sees people only in terms of power, the second judges man as he deals with money or material goods, and the third only concerns himself with human sexuality and ignores the rest. There is, to be sure, some truth in each philosophical system, but that also turns out to be their critical flaw. There is “some” truth but they surmise it is the whole truth. The theology of the body, by contrast, presents the whole truth about the human person in a panoramic perspective that leaves out nothing. The theology of the body comprehends the whole elephant from trunk to tail.

The fifth objection the pope confronts is “eros” or the “erotic.” In modern usage, we associate the erotic only with what is both sexual and shameful, euphemistically called “adult entertainment.” But John Paul wants to rescue eros and recover its more ancient meaning which is quite sublime and even hints at the holy. He explains: “According to Plato, ‘eros’ represents the inner power that draws man toward all that is good, true, and beautiful.” The pope cautions us in two directions: on the one hand, not to dismiss all sexual desire as disordered and evil – like the Manicheans did, throwing the baby out with the bathwater – nor, on the other hand, glorifying or exaggerating its value like Freud did. Rather, like in the case of the body being basically good, so man’s deepest impulses, especially his strong sexual desire for the opposite sex, is fundamentally good, as long as it is not tainted with concupiscence. John Paul insists: “Further, if the words of Matthew 5:27-28 represent such a call [to the true, good, and beautiful] then this means in the erotic sphere, ‘eros’ and ‘ethos’ do not diverge, are not opposed to each other, but are called to meet in the human heart and to bear fruit in this meeting.” It is hard to miss the conjugal connotations the pope implies in that statement. That is, the ethical and the erotic are called to become one in the heart, like a bride and groom become one on their honeymoon. Thus both couples are called to bear fruit. I will let you decide which spouse symbolizes “eros” and which one is “ethos.” Thus, the pope lays the objection of eros, as the exaggerated and exclusively erotic, to bed.

The sixth opposition the Holy Father faces is called “the problem of erotic spontaneity.” The pope puts the problem succinctly: “People often maintain that ethos takes away spontaneity from what is erotic in human life and behavior; and for this reason they often demand detachment from ethos ‘for the benefit’ of eros.” Again, as he showed with the shallow and one-sided understanding of the body, and also with eros, so he will demonstrate in the case of erotic spontaneity: such objections are spurious and “superficial.” It may help to compare the truly spontaneous man and the only apparently spontaneous person with someone who can have two or three alcoholic drinks versus the alcoholic who has no self-control. The alcoholic may claim to be more “spontaneous” when he drinks himself under the table. But such spontaneity is a farce and fools no one who is sober. The pope points to a more mature spontaneity, arguing: “At the price of mastery over these impulses, man reaches that deeper and more mature spontaneity with which his ‘heart,’ by mastering these impulses, rediscovers the spiritual beauty of the sign constituted by the human body in its masculinity and femininity."

What is ultimately at stake in the question about sexual spontaneity is who acts freely and who is simply a slave to his passions. A slave cannot be spontaneous because he is shackled to his sins. John Paul elaborates: “In addition, [the man overcoming concupiscence] gradually experiences the freedom of the gift…” In the final riveting scene from the movie “Flight”, Denzel Washington plays an alcoholic pilot who has had his license revoked and is sentenced to prison for crashing landing a plane while inebriated. Seated before other inmates, Captain Whip Whittaker humbly acknowledges: “But at least I am sober. I thank God for that. I’m grateful for that. And this is going to sound real stupid coming from a man locked up in prison, but for the first time in my life, I’m free.” Only the fully free man is truly spontaneous. That glorious freedom from slavery to all forms of addition, especially concupiscence, is precisely the hope of the theology of the body.

Praised be Jesus Christ!