5. “…and man fully alive is the vision of God” (St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, Bk. 4, 20, 7).
An interpretation of the image of God as principally concerning man’s intellect (which, unlike sex, is proper to the intellectual creature, and not common to him and the beasts)–such an interpretation will not tend to express the end of man in the same way as TOB. Indeed, it is very hard to maintain seriously in such a view that sexual “ecstasy,” for instance, is a foretaste of heavenly bliss. It is indeed so, in the sense that it is a good, and all good things are a participation in the supreme good. But it seems that there would be other goods proper to man that would be closer to the joys of Heaven, goods that are at least of the same genus as heavenly bliss, such as the spiritual delights of contemplation, which even Plato and Aristotle considered to be more delightful than bodily pleasures. These delights are not sexual. Strictly speaking, they are not even sensual, they are not bodily, though many of them will have concomitant bodily effects. The fact is, if you can feel it, it’s not God, but some concomitant effect due to the overflow from your contemplation of God. Spiritual delights are the delights of the will in the good of the truth known. The Dan Brownian interpretation of Bernini’s statue of the ecstasy of St. Teresa of Avila is not the guide here.
We all grant that the goal of our striving is some kind of communion with God. But what is that communion with God? Does it mean hugging Him? Does it mean having a barbecue with Him? Does it mean sitting by the fireside with Him? More seriously, does it mean feeling Him? How does the rational creature become united to Him? I am sure many will say (along with Scotus) that it means loving Him. But the fact is, we already have that. At Baptism, we are granted the theological virtue of charity, which attains to God as He is in Himself. Our charity can always grow, but as far as its object is concerned, there is nothing left for it to be perfected. That’s precisely why Faith and Hope pass away in Heaven, for they are per se imperfect, but charity remains. And yet, we still strive after Baptism. There is a union that we still lack, a union toward which charity itself impels us (caritas Christi urget nos). Charity is love; and love in the absence of the beloved desires; in the presence of the beloved, it delights. How do we pass from absence to presence? From desire to delight? From striving to rest? What is the union with God that charity desires?
It is not sex. It is not feeling him emotionally. It is not just loving him more, for even if our charity continued to grow forever in this life (there is no limit to how much it can grow), we would still not pass over to from desire to rest, we would still await something. It is not being somehow closer to Him, for local proximity only has place with regard to bodies. And God is not a body (what about the Incarnation? Well, even if we had our bodies in local proximity to Christ’s body, as we will have in Heaven after the general resurrection, charity would still desire something more. The Apostles were not yet in full union with God when our Lord walked among them, though certainly his presence was a cause of utmost joy). God is a spirit. God is immaterial. How is one united to something that is immaterial? By knowing it. Knowledge is nothing other than a union between the known and the knower. But such a union cannot take place in a material manner. The intellect, itself immaterial, is precisely that power in nature by which things can be united immaterially. Even in the case of our knowledge of material things, knowledge is the possession of the other material thing as other, without taking their matter into ourselves, but abstracting their form from the matter, by the light of the agent intellect, which renders the object immaterial, abstracting the common from the many. Immateriality is the condition required for a thing to be united to our intellect. But immateriality also makes a thing unattainable by our senses. God is supremely immaterial, having absolutely no admixture of potency. He is, therefore, supremely understandable, supremely able to be united to the intellect, but also supremely unattainable by the senses. What the will informed by charity desires is to know God. This is the union we all desire, the goal of our striving. And this union is not an operation of our sensitive powers, but an operation of the intellect, eternally gazing upon the divine essence. This is what it means to see God “face-to-face,” to “see Him as He is.” It is what we mean by the Beatific Vision, for vision is a term denoting cognition.
Certainly, there are some creatures for which the good of sexual intercourse is the highest possible participation in the Supreme Good that they will experience. As a friend of mine pointed out, it’s the closest a barnacle can get, endowed only with the sense of touch. But we who have cognition, we who have intellects should be able to get closer than that, even in this life, endowed as we are with Faith and Charity, which attain to God as He is in Himself, and not to some creaturely participated goodness. If such delights exist, they seem more worthy of being called a foretaste of Heavenly Bliss.
It is no accident that one’s view of the end of man will correspond to one’s view of where the image of God lies. Indeed, as we have said, being created in the image of God is a property of the intellectual creature. And as Aristotle pointed out, a thing’s end is its own proper activity. A knife’s proper activity is to cut, and this is also its end. A house’s proper activity is to shelter, and this is also its end. If we say that the image of God is found in the distinction of the sexes, we will tend to see Heaven and the delights of spiritual contemplation as somehow like sexual delight. But if we place the image of God in the intellect, it is evident that the end of man is an intellectual operation, with its concomitant delight in the will.
This is something the pagans knew. It is a basic foundation in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics and in the newly found Protrepticus. It is the basic conclusion of Plato’s Symposium. In this work, Socrates refuses Alcibiades’ offer to “give himself” in exchange for Socrates’ tutoring for the simple reason that the exchange is not fair: it is “gold for bronze.”
(Of course, one might say that this example proves nothing. Alcibiades offered something that was morally reprehensible, i.e., homosexual intercourse. The argument would not work so well if what was being offered to Socrates was the holy union of matrimony. I agree that this is true. But even in matrimony, there are two aspects: the union itself, and the “matrimonial act.” What Socrates was refusing was sensible delight. In matrimony, this comes with the matrimonial act. The union of matrimony which makes it so much more than mere sensible delight is the maxima amicitia, the greatest friendship that St. Thomas says should exist between husband and wife [Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. III, 123]. And if we cull from the other texts on friendship in Aristotle and Aquinas, friendship is the greater where more spiritual delights are shared. Those marriages are certainly the happiest where husband and wife share the goods of virtue and contemplation. If this were offered to Socrates, perhaps it would have given him pause. But the point is that even this happiest of matrimonies presupposes the primacy of spiritual delights over sensual, and man’s happiness being in his proper activity.)
Now, once again, I admit that TOB in its rigorous form would admit all of the above. But with David Schindler and Fr. Granados and I am sure many others, I cannot help but notice a “pansexualism” that often accompanies TOB. We would do better to inform people of what their true goal is, where their Faith and Charity actually tend, rather than continuing to try to offer them bronze. At some point, we should grant them the meat after the milk, instead of bread and circuses that will certainly tickle their fancy
2 Comments
22 July 2009 at 2:21 pm
Kevin,
I am hoping to use Theology of the Body for Teens by Jason Evert for my middle school students this year. I teach in an ecumenical Christian school, so, of course, some of it will have to be modified or deleted. I gave the book to my principal, and after skimming it, she said her main problem with it–as well as with all the “sex ed.” books we have purchased–was that it treated the body as separate from the person. I know this is not true, but could you please help me show her that it is not? I haven’t read TOB, but we have a copy if there is a particular section to which I should point her….
Thanks for your help! God bless.
22 July 2009 at 5:54 pm
Dear Sr. Rebecca,
I have seen Jason Evert’s book, and I know people who have used it, but I am not familiar with it myself, so I can’t speak for it. As for your principal’s concern, I’m not sure from which angle she’s coming from. Certainly, as a doctrine closely affiliated with personalism, TOB at least hopes to be the antithesis of a dualistic separation of soul and body. For example, in JPII himself, you can see his criticism of Manicheanism in the General Audience for October 15, 1980 (Waldstein translation 44:5-6). And he continues this train of thought in the following audience (45:1-2), where he says that Christ’s words condemning lust are “the affirmation of the body as an element that, together with the spirit, determines man’s ontological subjectivity and participates in his dignity as a person…The body in its masculinity and femininity has been called ‘from the beginning’ to become the manifestation of the spirit. It becomes such a manifestation also through the conjugal union of man and woman when they unite with each other so as to form ‘one flesh.’”
But even stronger for practical purposes, I think, is the Audience of April 15, 1981 (Waldstein 60). There, the Pontiff says: “We cannot consider the body as an objective reality outside of man’s personal subjectivity… Practically all the problems of the ‘ethos of the body’ are at the same time linked with the body’s ontological identification as the body of the person and with the content and quality of subjective experience, that is, at the same time ‘living’ both one’s own body and in interhuman relations, particularly in the personal ‘man-woman’ relation.”
These statements are particularly important in light of what the same Pope would say later in Veritatis Splendor, the only Encyclical in the history of the Church to deal exclusively with the teaching of Moral Theology. A good chunk of that encyclical was written to combat the revisionist moral theorists, who posited that bodily acts and the use of exterior objects were “premoral”; that is, since morality has to do with the will, a particular bodily act can’t be judged as good or bad apart from a consideration of intention; in itself, if does not yet belong to morality. Such thinking led to the denial that various actions in the area of sexuality were really wrong in themselves. They could be right and good, for instance, if the two people really loved each other or something. Veritatis Splendor hits this theory hard. In doing so, these words are included:
“To separate the fundamental option from concrete kinds of behaviour means to contradict the substantial integrity or personal unity of the moral agent in his body and in his soul” (VS 67).
The conclusions that John Paul II comes to are the same as the conclusions that St. Thomas would hold. Since man is lord of his own acts through his reason and will, whenever he performs a voluntary exterior action, if it is disordered,it is sinful by the very fact that the man did it; it’s not as if reason and will only command the spiritual acts of man. JPII goes about it from a very subjective, phenomenological, anthropological approach in TOB. St. Thomas goes about it from the approach of order to an end, acting according to reason, and “faculty psychology” (in Veritatis Splendor, this approach is actually pretty strong, too). JPII’s approach in TOB has the ontological unity of soul and body in the person as one of its most important cornerstones. In fact, morality for him includes a kind of call to constantly become more conscious of this unity in one’s actions (see Waldstein 10:4). This is not so important for St. Thomas. For him, whether you were thinking deeply or not, if you did something that was according to reason, you did good. If you did something that was against reason, you did bad. For St. Thomas, morality is about ordering yourself to your last end, and only accidentally about affirming what you are. But in TOB, the affirmation of the ontology of the human person, in its soul-body unity, is exceedingly important. Thus, I’m not sure how it would be ever able to separate the body from the person. Indeed, the phenomenological approach of TOB rests on the fact that the human body is the only way we can have access to the person experientially; if it turns out that the body is not the person, then TOB has nothing any more to say about morality.