Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The general audience also renovated the ancient tradition of the bishop as a teacher. In the first centuries of the Church, bishops were not primarily administrators (deacons took care of the Church’s temporal affairs) but preachers, teachers, theologians, and spiritual guides. Such great thinkers as Ambrose (bishop of Milan), Augustine (bishop of Hippo in North Africa), and John Chrysostom (bishop of Constantinople) worked out major parts of their theologies as preachers and teachers before large congregations of Christians. This was the tradition revived in the papal general audience, although Pius IX and his successors did not view the general audience as the place for imaginative theological exploration, usually limiting themselves to reflections on familiar themes.

  John Paul II had something different in mind. In September 1979, he began using his weekly general audience—broadcast throughout the world on Vatican Radio and printed in the six weekly foreign-language editions of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper—as a forum for weaving a richly complex theological tapestry based on a single overarching theme. The very idea of a series of “thematic audiences” was another innovation that caused eyebrows to be raised in the Roman Curia: What was this?15 The subject matter was even more explosive. Beginning on September 5, 1979, John Paul II spent four years’ worth of general audiences developing an idea he had first proposed in Love and Responsibility—that human sexual love is an icon of the inner life of God, of the Holy Trinity.

  One Act or Two?

  The drama of John Paul’s pontificate is often divided into two acts. In Act One, the Pope struggles against communism and is eventually vindicated by the Revolution of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In Act Two, the Pope rejects many aspects of the new freedom he helped bring about, the sharpest confrontation coming at the Cairo World Conference on Population and Development in 1994. There is a grain of truth here. John Paul II certainly spent more time on the affairs of east central and eastern Europe in the first thirteen years of his pontificate than he did afterward. This conventional division of the story into two parts finally fails, though, because it reads the pontificate primarily through the prism of its impact on world politics, which for John Paul has always been a derivative set of considerations. Moreover, dividing the story this way does scant justice to the numerous public initiatives John Paul II took in the 1980s that were global in character, or had little or nothing to do directly with his native region. Most importantly, the “two-act” model of the pontificate of John Paul II fails to grasp the distinctive imagination that Karol Wojtyła brought to the papacy.

  As he had written Henri de Lubac in 1968, Wojtyła believed that the crisis of modernity involved a “degradation, indeed…a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person.”16 Communism was one obvious, dangerous, and powerful expression of this crisis, as Nazism and fascism had been. But the dehumanization of the human world took place in other ways, and it could happen in free societies. Whenever another human being was reduced to an object for manipulation—by a manager, a shop foreman, a scientific researcher, a politician, or a lover—the “pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person” was taking place. What Wojtyła used to describe to his social ethics classes as “utilitarianism,” making “usefulness to me” the sole criterion of human relationships, was another grave threat to the human future. It was not a threat with nuclear weapons, secret police, and a Gulag archipelago, but it was dangerous, and part of the reason was that it was less obvious.

  Challenging whatever “pulverizes” the unique dignity of every human person is the leitmotif that runs like a bright thread through the pontificate of John Paul II and gives it a singular coherence. His papacy has been a one-act drama, although different adversaries have taken center stage at different moments in the script. The dramatic tension remains the same throughout: the tension between various false humanisms that degrade the humanity they claim to defend and exalt, and the true humanism to which the biblical vision of the human person is a powerful witness.

  In developing his idea of human sexual self-giving as an icon of the interior life of God, John Paul II was working out the implications of the very same concept of human dignity and human freedom with which he challenged communism in east central Europe. In his mind, it was, and is, all of a piece.

  A New Galileo Crisis

  When he was elected to the papacy, Karol Wojtyła knew that the Church’s last effort to address the sexual revolution and its relationship to the moral life, Pope Paul’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, had been a pastoral and catechetical failure—however correct he thought it was on the specific question of the morally appropriate means of regulating fertility. Humanae Vitae’s teaching on that question had been rejected by vast numbers of Catholics around the world. Many who rejected it felt that their experience of sexual love had been ignored or demeaned by their religious leaders. That feeling of rejection led to the conclusion that the Church had nothing of consequence to say about any aspect of human sexuality.

  Paul VI, a deeply pastoral man, had no intention of demeaning the vocation of marriage. But a situation had been created in which anything the Church had to say about human sexuality after the “birth control encyclical” was viewed with suspicion and, in the case of Western elites, with active hostility. Since the sexual revolution sharpened the issues on which the definition of “freedom” was most hotly contested in the developed world, this communications chasm was a crisis of major proportions for the Church. It was another Galileo case, this time involving not arcane cosmological speculations but the most intimate aspects of the lives of the Church’s people.

  John Paul II believed it was the time to put the entire discussion on a new footing.

  The Church had not found a voice with which to address the challenge of the sexual revolution. John Paul thought that he and his colleagues in Lublin and Kraków had begun to do that, in the understanding of human sexuality expressed in Love and Responsibility and in the work of the archdiocesan family life ministry under his leadership. Now it was time to deepen that analysis biblically and bring it to a world audience. The results were the 129 general audience addresses, spread over four years, that make up John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.17

  The audiences took place in four clusters. The first, entitled Original Unity of Man and Woman, began on September 5, 1979, and included twenty-three catecheses, concluding with the general audience of April 2, 1980. Drawing its theme from a phrase in Christ’s dispute with the Pharisees about the permissibility of divorce—“Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female… ?” (Matthew 19.4)—Original Unity explored some of the most profoundly personal aspects of the human condition through the story of Adam and Eve in the first three chapters of Genesis. The second cluster of addresses, Blessed Are the Pure of Heart, began on April 16, 1980, and concluded on May 6, 1981, after forty catecheses. As the title indicates, its biblical inspiration was the Sermon on the Mount. In exploring “purity of heart,” John Paul undertook a lengthy analysis of Christ’s saying that “everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5.28)—a crucial, if widely misunderstood, text for resisting the kind of sexual utilitarianism that turns another person into an object.18

  The third cluster of audiences in John Paul’s Theology of the Body began on November 11, 1981, and included fifty catecheses under the title The Theology of Marriage and Celibacy. The biblical foundation for this series, which concluded on July 4, 1984, was the dispute between Christ and the Sadducees about the resurrection. What, John Paul asks, does the idea of the “resurrection of the body” to a heaven in which “they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Mark 12.23) tell us about our sexual embodiedness as male and female, here and now?19 The fourth and final cluster of sixteen addresses, Reflections on Humanae Vitae, began on July 11, 1984, and concluded on November 28, 1984.

  The 129 texts in John Paul II’s Th
eology of the Body did not make easy listening and do not make easy reading. They are highly compact theological and philosophical meditations into which the Pope tried to fit as much material as possible into a fifteen-minute catechetical talk. The difficulties notwithstanding, however, these texts repay careful study. In them, John Paul II, so often dismissed as “rigidly conservative,” proposed one of the boldest reconfigurations of Catholic theology in centuries.

  Original Unity of Man and Woman

  Cardinal Wojtyła had conceived the project that eventually became the first part of the Theology of the Body in Kraków. As he recalled years later, he brought his research materials into the conclave that elected Pope John Paul I in August 1978 and worked on the draft texts there.20 In addition to his pastoral concerns, Wojtyła the philosopher continued to find the fact that God had created humanity male and female a fascinating intellectual puzzle, an “interesting problem” in its own right, as he once put it. What did a humanity that expressed itself through maleness and femaleness tell us about the human condition in general, and about men and women in particular?21 Then there was the confusion in the Church after Humanae Vitae. Something had to be done to explain the Church’s sexual ethic in a more persuasive way. Characteristically, Wojtyła decided to write a book about all this. The book he was drafting at Conclave I in 1978 unexpectedly became the material for his general audiences as Pope.

  Original Unity of Man and Woman began with the polemics between Jesus and the Pharisees on the question of divorce.22 Why, John Paul asks, did Christ, in rejecting the Mosaic practice of divorce, put so much emphasis on the fact that God had created human beings as male and female “in the beginning”—a phrase that recurs twice in the biblical story (Matthew 19.3–12)? This leads the Pope into the creation stories in Genesis, which he treats as profound reflections on enduring truths about the human condition, conveyed through the device of mythic stories about human origins. The first creation story, he writes, links the mystery of man’s creation as an “image of God” to the human capacity to procreate (“Be fruitful and multiply….”). The second creation account, emphasizing human self-awareness and moral choice, is the “subjective” counterpart to the “objective” truth in the first account—we are also images of God in our thinking and choosing. From different angles of vision, the two creation accounts testify to the dignity of being human, in which sexuality, procreation, and moral choosing are intimately linked.

  John Paul had always liked to do philosophy from the standpoint of Adam in the Garden of Eden: to try to see the world fresh, to recapture the wonder and astonishment that Aristotle believed was the beginning of philosophy.23 In Original Unity, he reflects on Adam’s wondrous sense of solitude, which reveals important things about the human condition. Adam’s “original solitude,” his being-alone, has two meanings. First, he is alone because he is neither an animal nor is he God—this is the solitude of human nature that he shares with Eve and every other human being throughout history. Thinking about this way of being-alone, we come to know ourselves as persons. We are different because we are thinking, choosing, acting subjects, not merely objects of nature. With this self-knowledge comes free will, the capacity to determine how we shall act. This means, at the most profound level, choosing between good and evil, life and death. In this choosing, we come to know ourselves as embodied persons, for there is no human choosing or acting without a body. The body is not a machine we happen to inhabit. The body through which we express who we are and act out the decisions we make is not accidental to who we are.

  Second, Adam experiences himself as being-alone because there is no other human creature like him. Thus, for John Paul, the “complete and definitive creation of ‘man’” only occurs when God creates Eve, and Adam recognizes Eve as a human creature like himself, although different.24 His joy at this discovery suggests that this aspect of our “original solitude” is overcome by that remarkable process in which I am genuinely united to another while finding my own identity not only intact, but enhanced.

  This, John Paul contends, is what “creation” is for—and that tells us something important about who God the creator is. Men and women are images of God, not only through intellect and free will, but above all “through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning…. Man becomes the image of God…in the moment of communion.”25 This yearning for a radical giving of self and receiving of another, which Adam symbolically affirms by recognizing Eve as “flesh of my flesh,” is at the foundation of our humanity. It carries with it, “from the beginning,” the blessing of fertility, another way human persons are images of God, for procreation reproduces the mystery of creation.

  Thus, “from the beginning,” our creation as embodied persons and as male and female is a sacramental reality, an icon of the life of God. The body makes visible the invisible, the spiritual, and the divine. In the Genesis stories, we meet the extraordinary side of the ordinary, this time through our embodiedness and our sexuality.

  If our sexuality is built into us “from the beginning,” why did Adam and Eve become ashamed of their nakedness? John Paul suggests that “original nakedness,” with “original solitude” and “original unity,” is the third part of the puzzle of who we are “from the beginning.” “Shame” is, essentially, fear of the other, and we become afraid of the other when he or she becomes an object for us. Adam and Eve were not ashamed of their nakedness when they were living in a mutuality of self-giving, in a truly nuptial relationship expressed through their embodiedness as male and female. They were not ashamed when they were living freedom-as-giving. The “original sin” is to violate the Law of the Gift built into us, to turn the other into an object, a thing to be used. And this is a sin, not because God unilaterally and arbitrarily declares it to be so, but because it violates the truth of the human condition inscribed in us as male and female.

  Read carefully, the stories of the creation of the human world in Genesis reveal that human flourishing depends on self-giving, not self-assertion. Mutual self-giving in sexual love, made possible by our embodiedness as male and female, is an icon of that great moral truth.

  Blessed Are the Pure of Heart

  John Paul begins the second series of audience addresses in his revolutionary theology of the body with another biblical scene. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is laying out the moral implications of living a life of beatitude—a life that includes “purity of heart”—and says, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5.27–28). It has seemed, for centuries, a very difficult, even impossibly high, standard. Yet for John Paul, this text is just as much a “key” to the theology of the body as Christ’s reference to our being created male and female “from the beginning.”26

  Sin, the Pope explains, enters the world as a corruption of genuine self-giving, which is motivated by love. When that self-giving is experienced as restraint rather than fulfillment, love decays into lust, and the icon of created goodness (and of the Creator) that was sexual love “in the beginning” is broken. Human beings lose their “original certainty” that the world is good and that we are fit for living in it in communion with others. The difference between male and female, once a source of identity in communion, becomes a source of confrontation. “The world” becomes a place of fear and toil, and there is a basic rupture in the relationship between creature and Creator. The human heart becomes a battlefield between love and lust, between self-mastery and self-assertion, between freedom as giving and freedom as taking—which is often at the expense of the woman, the Pope notes. All of this, to go back to Genesis, is the result of acquiescing to the satanic temptation to redefine the humanity built into us as male and female. On this papal reading of the text, “the serpent” in Genesis is the first and most lethal purveyor of a false humanism.

  Christ’s words about the “adultery of the heart�
� now come into clearer focus. Lust, the Pope suggests, is the opposite of true attraction. True attraction desires the other’s good through the gift of myself; lust desires my own transitory pleasure through the use (and even abuse) of the other. The woman at whom a man gazes lustfully is an object, not a person, and sex is reduced to a utilitarian means to satisfy a “need.”27 This “adultery of the heart” can even take place within marriage—not because the object of a man’s lust is not his wife, but because the lustful look turns a wife into an object and shatters the communion of persons.28

  This suggestion of the possibility of adultery-within-marriage set off a firestorm in the world media, which was not assuaged when the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, sniffed in response that some of those complaining lacked an “adequate cultural background” to understand what John Paul was saying.29 Yet the Pope’s description of adultery-in-marriage paralleled statements that had been made by feminists for years, and was clearly implied by the theology of the body he had been developing for more than a year. If one assumed that John Paul II was a Polish Manichaean who found sex distasteful and dirty, one might conclude that his reflection on adultery-within-marriage was a particularly odd expression of his neuroses. To those who had taken seriously the Pope’s argument that sexual love within marriage is an icon of the interior life of God because it expresses a communion of persons, the Pope’s statement about adultery-within-marriage made perfect sense.

  The Christian sexual ethic, John Paul taught, redeemed sexuality from the trap of lust. Far from prohibiting eros, the Christian ethic liberates eros for a “full and mature spontaneity” in which the “perennial attraction” of the sexes finds its fulfillment in mutual self-giving and a mutual affirmation of the dignity of each partner.30 The “new ethic” of the Sermon on the Mount and Christ’s teaching about the beatitude of the “pure of heart” is an ethic of “the redemption of the body,” a rediscovery in history of the truth of self-giving as the truth of the human condition “from the beginning.”31