Today the crisis of the human person seems to be reaching a nadir. The apparent successes of efforts to promote confusion about sex and sex difference, which strike at the foundation of the human person, are central factors in our accelerating social decline. Indeed, at a recent audience Pope Francis declared “. . . today the ugliest danger is gender ideology.” It seems there is nothing deeper, nothing more foundational left to attack.
Why do I make this claim? Let me explain. In an earlier CWR essay, I made the argument derived from St. John Paul II’s anthropology, that the very core of every human being is his person and that this “who-ness” is a created analogy of divine Persons (see “A crisis of the human person: St John Paul II’s remedy”). More specifically, I argued that a human person exists as a created relation. I also indicated that this category of being is necessary and helpful for a compelling account of sex difference.
In such an account, sex difference uniquely constitutes the person who can be a human person only as female or male.1 Sex difference defines the structure of love, that is, the hierarchical manner through which human persons relate to one another in love. It is only through authentic relationships of love that man finds his authentic meaning and achieves his fulfillment. So then, to get one’s sex difference wrong will necessarily prevent the person from reaching his fulfillment.
Indeed, adopting characteristics of the opposite sex, which contradict one’s own sex difference will inevitably lead to a person’s deformation. This is the sobering declaration St. John Paul II makes in his Apostolic Letter Mulieris dignitatem (see MD 10) and today it is being clearly demonstrated for those with eyes to see.
The fundamental corruption of man
The contemporary situation in which we find ourselves appears to bring us to the final, fundamental corruption of man and his self-understanding, at least metaphysically speaking. We have regressed well past denying human nature and we are now rejecting the reality of the subject by rejecting sex difference. We are promoting the deformation of the person who possesses his or her nature, undermining the very core of each human’s identity and existence. Getting to this point has been a long time coming.
If one were to perform a sociological inquiry from a Western perspective into the origins of this attack on human personhood there are many events one might find as the starting point. One might identify the sexual revolution, which exploded in the 1960s. If he were an observant student of history, he might point to the decision of the Anglican Communion in the 1930s Lambeth Conference, which disconnected sex from its procreative meaning and thereby fostering a philosophical sanctioning of the sexual revolution. Or, he might see its origins even earlier in the growing sexual and societal libertinism of the so-called Roaring ‘20s, which justified itself as the rejection of what it saw as society’s puritanical oppression of sex.
If one were more philosophically oriented, he might rather see the start of the attack begin with calling into question the efficacy of man’s fundamental spiritual faculties, which make us human. The philosopher might point to the post-modern movement, in which reason is formally rejected and human fulfillment is reduced to sating man’s concupiscent desires hidden within Nietzsche’s “will to power.” Yet, he could easily find it beginning earlier by realizing that post-modernism was a reaction in opposition to the emptiness of so-called Enlightenment Rationalism, itself a rejection of fideism which denied man’s ability to exercise fully his intellectual faculty to know truth through faith and reason.
This erroneous philosophy of fideism was brought to the fore of Western societal consciousness by the Protestant Reformation and Protestant fideism, itself having its origin in late medieval Ockhamism. Ockham was the only scholastic age philosopher Luther thought of any worth.2 Luther’s embrace of Ockham seems perhaps due to Luther’s idiosyncratic take on biblical faith along with fideism’s freeing him to establish a new Christian system of thought unencumbered by a Magisterium or a coherent system of thought such as found in medieval philosophy.
Of course, Ockham’s via moderna battle cry also justified rebellion against the authority of tradition on the grounds of chronological snobbery and the Reformation-sanctioned rebellion against institutional authority by handing over man’s most fundamental authority, that of discerning the authenticity and meaning of divine revelation, to the individual. In light of this turn to a radical individualism, no institutional of a lesser authority could resist the coming waves of subsequent rebellion.
Satan’s attack on the human person
However, if we take a theological view of the matter, it is clear the attack first began at the dawn of man in the Garden of Eden with Satan’s assault on the meaning of the human person and his path to fulfillment. There, the demonic serpent simultaneously attacked man’s meaning as a person created in the image of God and as a person who is created male and female. In the garden, the devil called into question the very possibility of man’s capacity for his fulfillment while he was encumbered by God’s unjust constraints on his liberty. With this distortion, the Evil One sowed the seeds of distrust in man leading him to doubt that that he could really trust God and so be able to choose freely his authentic good. Distrust of God necessarily would lead him to doubt whether he could really know the truth with or without God’s revelation. Man’s surrender to this first assault inaugurates his habitual suspicions about his dignity and the reality of his having been created in the image of God (imago Dei).
From the beginning Satan has attacked man’s dignity and sowed suspicion about the imago Dei. If they are embodied spirits, can a husband’s and wife’s nuptial love really be a sublime reflection of the inner Trinitarian life? Could the very thing that makes them lower than the angels, the lowly body, at once make them higher than the angels? While tempting man to deny this great truth, Satan also undermined his confidence in his ability to know God’s will for him and caused him habitually to distrust his freedom to choose it.
A brief look at the Genesis passage (see Gen 3:1-19) of the Fall illustrates the method of attack and the reason for its success. Satan presents his temptation not to individuals but to the married couple and in so doing he purposefully undermines the cosmos’s very structure of authority. St. John Paul II indicates that original sin is ultimately a rebellion against fatherhood, the Fatherhood of God.3 Ultimately this is true about all sin; that it wishes to abolish every fatherhood which finds its name from God’s Fatherhood (see Eph 3:14).
Adam as husband was called to be leader of his family. In this pericope he seems, as some theologians point out, to be at Eve’s side, but remaining silent and cowardly as the demon entices her. Adam abandons his role of leader and protector of his wife and family and permits her to undergo the wiles of Satan’s assault alone. This attack on man is decisive because it is an assault on marriage itself and the structure by which marriage uniquely reflects the Trinity as St. John Paul II points out.4
Doubt and disharmony
At the same time, the temptation is to doubt God’s love and Providence. Adam and Eve give in to doubt of His direct revelation and they doubt the first book of revelation accessible to them through their faculties of reason. With all God has given them, they still succumb to doubt of God’s goodness and His provision for them. The Evil One tempts them to man’s first act of Pelagian rebellion. At the end of the day, they accede to Satan’s enticement to choose a privative knowledge over authentic knowing. They choose the cosmos rupturing decision to “know evil,” suggested by some traditions to be related in some way to the marital act. The biblical terminology perhaps suggests a corruption of the act of love by which Adam was to know Eve in freedom and love. In the end, freedom and love are damaged. The mind is darkened by sin and the burdened, concupiscence-enslaved-will is relentlessly inclined toward the same.
And suddenly, the cosmos is disordered and there is now real, empirical evidence by which Satan can “prove” his lies. Man’s experience of his burdened life seems to warrant his distrust of his ability to know truth and his ability to choose to love with complete freedom. East of Eden, the devil now has evidence that he can use to weave into a systematic doubt of God’s loving Providence in a world now reduced to disharmony with itself and with man. Man’s experience is now suspect and distorts his openness to acceptance of truth and to choosing love. He is easily led astray by fallen experience and often pursues dead-end pathways as he seeks his fulfillment. He must stay close to God in the Covenant, or he will easily be led astray.
Outside of the protection of the Garden, man’s interior life is in disharmony, which the man and woman first notice in their temptation to reduce one another to each’s sexual value and so they experience the shame that they will need to move them toward bodily modesty in order to protect themselves and each other. In addition to this, the woman has the first intense experience of this interior disharmony in childbirth. Minds darkened by sin and a concupiscence distorted heart (of the biblical type) lead to interpersonal disharmony—the man will exercise his “will to power” at his wife’s expense and her response will be to try to even the score. The very earth which was made to nurture man will now yield thorns and thistles, seemingly set at times in opposition to man’s flourishing.
The demonic war aimed at man’s destruction has begun with the first salvos aimed at marriage and man’s capacity for authentic relationships, at his capacities to know truth and choose the authentic good. The woman now has ample evidence that the man is not always worth of trust and the man who is wounded by this loss of his wife’s trust, often responds by coercively demanding it. The foundational human relationship which requires the most intimate and complete mutual submission based on trust now devolves into a reciprocal competition for each’s rights that the other seem unwilling to acknowledge.
This primordial distortion of the person and his relationships is now susceptible to untold corruption.
The annihilation of man?
Today, the latest phase in Satan’s war against man and his self-understanding calls into question the deepest foundation of the human person; that is, what it means to be a male or female. The primordial distortion in the relationship between husband and wife has facilitated this. The manifold and seemingly loudest public voices today reject those essential human characteristics which reveal the ineffable dignity of the human person, the complementary gifts of femininity and masculinity, initially justified by the corruption of the masculine and feminine relationships. With nothing more fundamental to corrupt, we now seem to have reached the point of the complete annihilation of man.
The permanent givenness of sex difference today is systematically rejected by a majority of public opinion makers, perhaps because those who object to the new orthodoxy are either ignored, reviled, lampooned, or cowed into silence. Those who do attempt to argue against these assaults on the human person seem to be in a losing battle. The longer this continues, the more the confusion will be accepted as fact by increasing percentages of the population.
This seems to be especially true of the younger generations, even of faithful Catholics, who are being led to think that the contemporary, corrupt account of sex difference is just common sense, and any other opinion is motivated by ill will. While the widespread normalization of same-sex attraction and sex identity disorders had not yet reached its current state of—well, insanity is the only word that seems to fit—during John Paul II’s life, his anthropology and theology of sex difference provide the foundation for addressing this latest phase of the attack on the human person.
The post-modern take on modernism’s mistaken view of matter as just “stuff” for man’s manipulation leaves arguments about the reality of sex difference based on biological functionality appear as inconsequential. Our contemporary, naïve philosophical materialism abetted by astonishing advancements in medical techne promote the illusion of a boundless ability to manipulate our bodies according to our wishes. So, it is not sufficient to point to biology as the origin of sex difference. This has been the case since 1973 when the APA removed homosexuality from the DSM-II as a type of mental disorder.
Today a compelling case must go much deeper than the body. It must be metaphysical.
Gift and complementarity
In an earlier CWR article, I outline a metaphysical description of human personhood by which we can start to claw back the proclamation of the truth of sex difference with an account more compelling than those based in biology or metaphysical accidents. In that article, I argued that the analogy of being would seem to demand we reconsider the category of being of the human person to be analogous to that of the divine Persons. While created persons cannot be constituted persons as relations of opposition, created persons still can be created relations whose subsistence is held in existence by the divine will. I also suggested that relation as a category of being provides the framework for a more coherent articulation of sex difference.
Let’s look at this proposal in a little more detail.
We ought to begin with the question: “what is a man”? However, to answer this question we must at the same time ask what is a male and female—an inseparable question because as John Paul says one can only be understood in the face of the other. I provide more detail in my book Viri Dignitatem: Personhood, Masculinity, and Fatherhood in the Thought of John Paul II (Emmaus Academic) but let me provide here a sketch of my proposal based upon the late Holy Father’s thought.
Being a person means being for another, more specifically being a gift for another. This is perhaps the most important lesson we can learn about John Paul II’s personalism,5 derived from Jesus’ revelation about the Trinity.6 This is true for persons per se and also for persons as male and female. The foundational human relationship of marriage has its origin in the Trinity as does the sex complementarity which enables and orders marriage by making possible the integral fruitfulness of marital love. Marital love most fully reveals the character of Trinitarian, self-giving love when it bears fruit in a third person.
St. John Paul II’s personalism also indicates that sex must arise from who we are rather than what we are. Though our sex difference completely permeates our nature, body and soul, it originates in personhood. Nevertheless, it is only because we have a body that complementary sex difference is possible. The fact that we have a soul makes us more like the angels than anything else in the visible world. However, the fact that we are a seamless unity of soul and body enables us to reflect the interior life of the Trinity and Trinitarian love in a manner more perfect than the angels.
Complementarity is the key to understanding sex difference. Complementarity used to be obvious at the level of gross anatomy; it is less so today. But the complementarity of sex difference arises from personhood and the structure of love. Love requires that one partner first offer love and the other actively accept it. Then the reverse must occur in which the actively accepting partner then offers love in return and the first partner actively accepts it. The structure of this interpersonal interchange is ordered by sex difference in which masculinity reveals the first offering partner and femininity the second, who first actively receives. But the structure of exchange is also such because of the category of being of personhood.
Persons are relations, which might be pictured as arrows going outward toward other persons. But there is greater resolution we can introduce into this picture. The person can more accurately be pictured as two “arrows;” one with an arrowhead going outward to another and the other with a sort of receptor to receive another person. But our picture has even more resolution possible, which is revealed by the interpersonal structure of masculine-feminine love. A masculine person has the outward arrowhead first, or on top reflecting he first offers himself in love, and the receptive arrow on the bottom because he secondarily receives another person. The feminine person is the complement of this picture.
But our picture is not of what a person has, this would be to envision relations as another kind of substance. Rather, these arrow pictures are of that which constitutes a person (i.e., created relations), either as a male person or a female person. Everything we see of complementarity, in terms of gross anatomy, brain structure, endocrinology systems, bone density, musculature type and distribution, gametes, as well as the psychological, emotional and spiritual experiences, etc. are an integrated manifestation of this core reality of sex difference. If a human male person possesses his human nature, the nature takes on the mode of masculinity and all of its varied constituent characteristics of the initiation of love take prominence. His nature takes on the mode of a male body and soul. The same of course is true of a feminine person possessing her feminine nature, with active receptivity being the prominent manifestation of the feminine genius.
The very subject of each human being, I would say his very existence, is a person who is a sort of compound relation ordered by complementary love. The subject is a person whose very existence as a relation, orders him to the task of personal fulfillment through authentically relating to others through authentic relationships of love.
The degree to which human experiences have led to flourishing societies and healthy family life is the degree to which they have conformed themselves to the theological and metaphysical truth of complementary, sex difference. Western society has left the Covenant, the Christian Home, which has kept it in truth and more or less flourishing for a little short of two millennia. On the current path that the “new orthodoxy” is taking us, we are likely to see very soon the increasingly severe, negative societal consequences for the type of progress we are pursuing to become undeniable.
As a result, it is possible our bold new world may find it will want to take another look at the new orthodoxy concerning human personhood and sex difference. We should have a compelling alternative account ready for them.
Endnotes:
1 See John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), 166.
2 In fact, Luther calls Ockham “my dear master” (see Exhortation to All Clergy Assembled at Augsburg, 1530, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 65 vols in 127 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883–1929), Abteilung 1: Schriften vol, 30.2, 300.
3 See John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, ed. Vittorio Messori, trans. Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1994), 227–28.
4 See John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), 163.
5 John Paul says: “To say that man is created in the image and likeness of God means that man is called to exist ‘for’ others, to become a gift. This applies to every human being, whether woman or man, who live it out in accordance with the special qualities proper to each” (Mulieris dignitatem, §7).
6 See e.g. John 5:19-20; 8:42; 10:15-30; 14:9-14; 16:27-28; 17:20-26.
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Nature reveals to us that sex is a purely utilitarian construct which MUST have a survival advantage, and it’s clear what that advantage is… enhanced resistance to diseases and parasites through greater genetic diversity. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. This is the only reason we have man and woman in the first place, because you could just otherwise reproduce asexually if there was no disadvantage in doing so.
Nature reveals a Divine plan that is much greater than anything having to do with diversity acting as a guard against disease.
If you are saying that marital relations are primarily for procreation then you are in agreement with Catholic teaching, Andrew.
🙂
God could have engineered everything differently it’s true. But this is what we got.
Andrew, thank you for your insight. Four comments:
FIRST, many early theologians also thought that before the Fall, mankind did “reproduce asexually.” Is this why, on Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, Adam’s equipment looks so diminutive while his erect left calf takes on the form of a woman?
SECOND, no matter. But your brilliant comment reminds me of another genius. Surely readers are reminded of the theoretician, John Nash, who in 1990 received the Nobel Prize in economics for transcending the utilitarianism of Adam (!) Smith (portrayed by Russell Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind,” 2001). At the beginning, so to speak, he propositions a babe toward personal intimacy as nothing more than “fluid exchange.”
Oh, wait, Nash was schizophrenic…
THIRD, about your “resistance to disease and parasites,” perhaps this is why “marriage” is correctly affirmed as a monogamous relationship between a man and a woman. The case in point would be ubiquitous STD, but especially HIV. At the beginning, so to speak, HIV was confined to homosexual and bisexual men, only then to be spread to the general population https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8493153/
So, YES, to real genetic diversity, and NO to the political ideology of LGBTQ “diversity.” But, then, this about ideology…
FOURTH, some might ask: why do Fiducia Supplicans and Dignitatis Inifinatis—coupled together?—oppose the abstract “ideology” of gender theory, while also semi-blessing “irregular couples”? Especially alongside a pattern of signaling, photo-ops, interviews, appointments and such effectively enabling homosexuality? As, what, a pre-moral and non-ideological exemption for sexual activity at the level of concrete individuals?
Just a question, but, who are we to judge?
The husband-wife pairing is essentially a relationship. This relationship is reinforced and cemented by ‘becoming one flesh’ through marriage, consummation, and strengthening of bonds by the fruitfulness of children. The common good and the growth of the larger community strengthens as a result.
A utilitarian construct of survival does not account for transcendental goods and reduces sex to only one or two aspects of its power to purpose.
Relationships are important to survival. What relationship holds greatest influence? Woman, created from man’s matter, and man, together with the Being who created all matter and all relationship ex nihilio. The Being also maintains life and relationship, IF man is willing and cooperates.
If our relationships are troubled, disordered, minimal, and reduced to utilitarian constructs, the starting point to long-term survival seems clear. We must open up and reach out for Him.
“This is the only reason we have man and woman in the first place…”
In other words, it’s all an accident. Ergo, so is Andrew. Congrats, Andrew.
The fundamental corruption is this: Atheistic modernism views man’s purpose as one of self pleasure. Those who follow the Judeo-Christian God view man’s purpose as love of an Other. Everything, then, flows from these two distinctions. It is binary i.e. your purpose is one or the other.
In any case, the invisible God’s spousal Love in His Kingdom aka the paradise is materialised by male-female love, while His paternal love for His sinner childrens, aka His Mercy lets the freedom of each one to opt the everlasting spousal love of paradise or the power over other sinners till death.
Before we imagine that we have the ability to “speak for God” or to liken human relationships today to the idea of the trinity, we need to recognize the role of psychological projection and the distorted view of humanity that males have imposed upon the rest of us. Remember that even slavery was “justified” by good christian men. Tomorrow’s world (after much struggle) will recognize the spectrum of maleness/femaleness, dominance/submission, head/heart as something that exists within each individual. Half the human population is not required to behave in robotic ways to please the desire of the other half of that population. Population itself has overgrown its natural boundaries and balance is required for future dynamic stability of any kind.
“Before we imagine that we have the ability to ‘speak for God’…”
Proceeds to speak for God. Strange. And not convincing at all.
One assumes that Andrew has considered
evolution in relation to Biblical history. Perhaps he has even blended faith and science together in his mind.
Mustn’t it be paramount to any faith to be able, at times, to see outside of it. It is vital in my opinion to any group to reflect on the group with honestly, or else you might make decisions while “knowing not what you do.”
Show us the ‘good Christian men’ who justified slavery!
America’s founders COMPROMISED on the slavery issue INJUSTICE rectified less than a because two or three southern states refused to join the developing effort of the British colonies to throw off the shackles of unfair British dominance. All colonies were needed to fight G. Britain.
The INJUSTICE of slavery was recognized from the nation’s inception but was put on a back burner to be rectified in the Civil War. Do you suggest the Civil War to have been unjust?
Edit: ‘slavery issue [delete “INJUSTICE rectified less than a”] because…
Still asleep, suffering from Covid, in the dreary PNW Coast.
Deacon Delaney’s article is excellent and deserves rereading and further thought.
His account of the fall from grace in the Garden is peerless. The ramifications through history and marriage are well considered. Regretfully John Paul’s Personalism confines love to the individual as soul requiring a body to love another.
While John Paul is correct in identifying our corporeal existence within the confines of the sensual, and the soul within the angelic spiritual, he neglects the reality that masculine and feminine are not confined to the body, rather are primarily spiritual features of the person. Additionally Man now comes under the physicist’s being in relation to being, and in consequence the anthropological descript as man in relation. It seems while this has a degree of relevance it confines the marital relationship to the body.
Delaney resolves John Paul’s Personalism, the who we are individual requiring a body for love [John Paul’s it is only because we have a body that complementary sex difference is possible] Delaney adds “His [man’s] nature takes on the mode of a male body and soul”. I would add that since masculine and feminine, male and female transcend matter, the physical body, that were it occasioned a male spirit would by nature of his maleness be attracted to a female spirit, as well as the converse, since the two are complementary to each other by God’s design.
We read: “Regretfully John Paul’s Personalism confines love to the individual as soul requiring a body to love another.” JPII’s “Personalism,” or maybe a lesser personalism of someone else?
Pope John Paul II makes a distinction between the reality of (spiritual) love and its “expression.” Is this the way, “in a sense,” that we should read the following?
“In the texts of the prophets the human body speaks a ‘language’ which it is not the author of. Its author is man as male and female, as husband and wife–man with his everlasting vocation to the communion of persons. However, man cannot, in a certain sense, express [!] this singular language of his personal existence and of his vocation without the body. He has already been constituted in such a way from the beginning, in such wise that the most profound words of spirit—words of love, of giving, of fidelity—demand an adequate language of the body. Without that they cannot be fully expressed [your “attracted,” as distinct from fully “expressed,” yes?]. We know from the Gospel that this refers both to marriage and also to celibacy for the sake of the kingdom” (Audience of January 12, 1983, “The Language of the Body in the Structure of Marriage,” In “The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan [your “design”],” Pauline Books, 1997, p. 359).
Certainly spiritual. While in this world we’re body and spirit and our love is expressed with our body. What I allude to is not an abjuration of John Paul’s deep spirituality and his wonderful theology of the body. I would have expected that’s not what you would have elicited from what I wrote. What I mean is precisely what I said, that John Paul II proposed that we must have a body to embrace mutual love. The nuance in that suggests we do not retain a sexual, although non venereal attraction to the opposite sex in paradise. Granted after death we’re angelic-like yet retaining our masculine and feminine features.
Indication of that is in the very feminine depiction of the Virgin Mother, beautifully feminine in appearance with a rose on each foot [Lourdes]. Saints who were men in this world appear as men. In heaven the body will be resurrected. The same masculine feminine features of men and women will be retained before the resurrection of the body when in our purely spiritual presence. A natural, non venereal, pure and blessed attraction would seem natural. Our masculinity and femininity are also embedded in our spiritual nature.
“Without that they cannot be fully expressed [your ‘attracted,’ as distinct from fully ‘expressed,’ yes?]”. Yes. However Peter, the distinction between an intrinsic attraction retained after death is not met with the example given of full expression with the body. Not to say John Paul did not hold to what I propose, rather that it’s not explicit in his theology of the body.
If I may add this to the discussion. If I were to love a woman in this life, and I have, without having physical relations with her might not grace enable me to fulfill my love for her? Similarly, if I were to have married her rather than becoming a priest, would I be able to fulfill my love for her in heaven? I should believe so.
Thank you for the thoughts and kind words. I apologize in advance for the length of this response, but I think it is worth it to discuss the real wealth of our late Holy Father’s anthropological insights. It is true that St. John Paul II is often seen as over-emphasizing the body. He certainly can be read that way, and the quote provided by Dr. Beaulieu is one that well illustrates this (though I would strongly recommend Dr Michael Waldstein’s excellent critical translation, also from Pauline Books and Media and published in 2006). Reading St. John Paul II, I would argue, is much like reading St. Thomas Aquinas on two accounts. The first is that JPII relies heavily on St. Thomas’ metaphysics and anthropology. The second is that both expect that their readers will hold together everything they have presented up to any particular point, including being attentive to all the manifold implications of what has been said. Waldstein shows the context of the aforementioned passage is what John Paul calls the prophetism of the body, and this is important for seeing what he means. He assumes his readers will recognize all he has presented to this point in the text which is that man can only be understood adequately if one considers simultaneously his theological, philosophical, and moral meaning.
Theologically, God has created man as a special creation with a unique, irreplaceable vocation. Man is, in a sense, at the middle of creation in what he is–a seamless unity of body and soul (and JPII expects that we will be attentive to the manifold implications of hylomorphism here). But at the same time, man is at the top of creation, because he is created as man and woman who have the unique ability to reflect inner Trinitarian life. His meaning is as much to be found in the fact that within himself he seamlessly unites the spiritual and material orders of creation as the fact that he has the capacity for procreative love. Man is uniquely suited for his vocation of introducing Trinitarian love into the cosmos in a new, more profound manner.
The philosophy of hylomorphism helps us to express the implications of this. The late W. Norris Clarke provides a very helpful articulation of hylomorphism in terms of co-principles. The unity of body and soul is such that neither have a separate existence. The soul is the spiritual principle of man and the body his material principle, but neither exists as a separate entity. Each provides separate principles to the whole. The entire entity seamlessly participates in each and every aspect of the spiritual and material principles. The body for example is the principle of individuation, the body in this way demands the soul. It is a great mystery that the parents provide their children with their bodily principle directly, but also indirectly provide them with all that with which they will begin their lives. They are really and truly co-creators with God.
Hylomorphism, JPII reminds us, means that the body expresses the soul, it expresses the person. When one sees the body, he sees the soul, when one touches the body, he touches the soul. The unity is such that there is no such thing as the spiritual without the material. In terms of the prophetism of the body, the body manifests all of this truth about human nature. At the same time, it expresses the moral choices of the person and all that he chooses to make of himself. One requires his body to express anything of love, even if those expressions of love involve no direct physical contact. And even without physical contact the person experiences love of others simultaneously body and soul. So, while we certainly describe the spiritual and material in distinct terms, the lived human experience is never separate. At the very least, we need the body for life, consciousness and functioning of the spiritual faculties (God’s concession of the death of the body and what our experience will be after death and before the final resurrection is another matter). The body has much greater dignity and importance than our post-Enlightenment influenced habits of thought indicate. It is nearly impossible for those in the west to avoid gravitating towards the reduction of the body in our thinking, and reintegrating the body and soul along with attending to the implications of this for the human person is central to St. JPII’s project.
St. JPII’s does not explicitly explain the origin of sex difference in his thought. He does not explicitly depart from the Thomist position as a substantial accident. However, he need not do so to locate it more deeply…in the person himself. In fact, he discusses sex difference not in terms of substance, but he relates it to the person without developing a metaphysical account. My book proposes a metaphysical account that I believe must underlie his phenomenological account.
Deacon Delaney I’m appreciative of your well articulated response to an issue I was involved in with Fr Norris Clarke SJ when I took graduate courses at Fordham. St Thomas Aquinas taught that only in God are essence and existence identical. While there is unity between body and soul there is also distinction, in that we do not find causality for this unity called man in the formal act of man’s existence. Aquinas established the term esse, an act of existence that comes from God. Our essence as a unity of body and soul is due to God’s act of existence, that supersedes the act of the form. What we are does not answer that we are. Fr Clarke argued Aquinas was mistaken. What we are is determined by God rather than the act that unites body and soul. That may be understood as the primacy of God’s intention in creating man moreso than his determination as a unity of body and soul.
Quentin Lauer SJ, my doctoral advisor also taught at Fordham at that time, Lauer an Aristotelian as well as Thomistic scholar whose views on the same subject differed from the venerable Fr Clarke. Although You are correct that man finds his fulfillment in love for a woman sexually, it must be held that the spiritual dimension, our love for each other, is by nature primarily spiritual.
Adding to all of the above (thank you, both), and as a non-theologian, I also notice the following….three Quotes and an Observation:
FIRST: is the Song of Songs more than poetry, and also partly a vision of heaven? “What was expressed in the second chapter of Genesis (vv. 23-25) in just a few simple and essential words, is developed here in a full dialogue, or rather a duet [!], in which the groom’s words are interwoven with the bride’s as they complement each other” (“Theology of the Body,” Pauline Books, for May 23, 1984).
“Duet”? While consistent with the above, but also meaning something more than the celibate St. Cyprian who seems to list in paradise only other close relatives:
SECOND: “Well, we look upon paradise as our country, and a great crowd of our loved ones awaits us there, a countless throng of parents, brothers and children longs for us to join them” (“Liturgy of the Hours,” 34th Week of Ordinary Time).
Spouses, too (?), and while no longer limited to the terrestrial unity of earthy marriage?
THIRD: John Paul II: “Speaking of the body glorified through the resurrection to the future life, we have in mind man, male-female, in all the truth of his humanity….This will be a completely new experience. At the same time it will not be alienated in any way from what man took part in from the beginning, nor from what, in the historical dimension of his existence, constituted in him the source of the tension between spirit and body, concerning mainly the procreative meaning of the body and sex. The man of the future world will find again in this new experience of his own body precisely the completion [!?] of what he bore within himself perennially and historically [….]
[The] nuptial meaning of being a body will be realized, therefore, as a meaning that is perfectly personal and communitarian at the same time” (“Theology of the Body,” Pauline Books, for Jan 13, 1982).
OBSERVATION: Early heresies attempted to dismember the mysterious and self-disclosed unity of the Triune One (Arianism), and then the mysterious, incarnate and concrete unity of Jesus Christ (Nestorianism).
The reductionism of today is to dismember the unity of Man, himself, that is, the dignity of each transcendent human person. For example, by confusing the indissoluble and mutually-conferred unity of “marriage.” By blessing a range of “irregular couples,” especially those anti-binary cases pretending to negate the created, binary-unitive truth of personal, sexual and fecund complementarity.
Fr. Peter and Dr. Delaney have raised some interesting and thorny issues. I believe you are both correct but simply speak in different dialects with different inflection points.
Fr. Clarke’s 1993 Aquinas Lecture discusses Thomas’ metaphysical AND anthropological (more at Thomistic existentialism?) definitions of the ‘person’, from which Clarke forges a creative delineation. He posits Thomas would find it adequate: “A ‘person’ is ‘an actual existent [i.e., with its own act of existence], distinct from all others, possessing an intellectual nature, so that it can be the self-conscious, responsible source of its own actions. A ‘human’ person would be an actual existent, distinct from all others, possessing only a human intellectual nature (i.e., as embodied spirit). (p. 29, Person and Being, Marquette U. Press, 1993)
Clarke discusses implications for human dignity later in the lecture. Basically, man’s essential attributes of person/hood: “…when being is allowed to be fully itself as active ‘presence,’ it ipso facto turns into luminous ‘self-presence and self-possession, i.e., self-consciousness in the order of knowledge and self-determination in the order of action.” (p. 25)
Do you have this Clarke work? Could Dr. Delaney write an OP for us at CWR which looks at these ideas?
Deacon Delaney, meiron what appears reconcilable to the requisite primacy of the spiritual in Theology of the Body is John Paul’s preference of love over faith, according to Fr Thomas Petri’s analysis ‘Aquinas and the Theology of the Body’. “He values love over faith, and that love draws the person into a real ontological and psychological union with God”. Petri holds that John Paul II initiated this theology in his doctoral treatise on St John of the Cross at the Angelicum, ‘Faith according to Saint John of the Cross’. Personally I’ve always thought a living faith is initiated by desire, as that which motivates us to believe. Faith understood as such permeates the perfect relationship between man and woman when it reflects the mutual selfgiving of love in the beatific vision, when the love that we give is in effect the love that is given.
That is a beautiful reflection!
“Anti-human” you say, now that’s good. What about an ideology which says:
1. You need to apologize for being born, as per your inherited guilt
2. You can be “thankful” for suffering
3. You don’t own your own body
4. You’re “free” to do what a totalitarian authority says, or else
Oh also, add to that list a literal implementation and prosecution of thought crime. Would it be reasonable to call such an ideology “anti-human”? Absolutely.
The troll strikes again! Do you get paid for posting your bigotries here or do you do that for free? Just curious. Don’t feed the troll everyone.
for free. my mission is to help as many people escape from this scam as possible.
Well, keep up your futile attempts. No one here is buying what you’re selling. You’ll see things differently from the lake of fire someday.
You are wise
Thank you Deacon David for a beautiful reflection.
Yes. Great essay. Thank you.
I add this here apart from the above discussion as relevant to what Deacon Delaney and Beaulieu perhaps envision. St Thomas Aquinas held that the conjugal act between man and woman would have brought greater pleasure and fulfillment if it were not for the fall from grace. He adds this would have occurred due the the clarity and depth of the intellect’s understanding, which he says became blurred, a kind of sensual intoxication due to sin.
A point well and succinctly made, but did Pascal have something to say about reason plus the reasons-of-the-heart, and that might surely apply here…
So, “greater pleasure and fulfillment”–as in being totally, permanently, and exclusively united to one chosen person, very other than oneself and yet complementary and, before the fall, not quite blurred by “sensual intoxication.” But, might it be that the mystery of nuptial/interpersonal communion has even greater clarity and depth than “the intellect’s understanding”?
OR, yes, maybe the deep heart and clear reason, together, ARE the “intellect’s” full understanding.
Vive la difference!