The Body as Gift

Pope St. John Paul II’s American biographer, George Weigel, once called the pope’s Theology of the Body “a kind of theological time bomb” destined to go off in the 21st century. That “explosive” quality, though, was not that John Paul II changed Catholic teaching. Rather, he gave Catholics a new way to see the depth of what the Church had always taught about the body, marriage, sexuality, and the person. 

The Theology of the Body refers to John Paul II’s general audience catecheses that were delivered every Wednesday with little interruption from September 5, 1979, to November 28, 1984. Every Wednesday, the Polish pope faithfully advanced Church teaching on man, woman, love, marriage, and sexuality all built on Sacred Scripture and tradition while acknowledging the depths of human experience. Pope John Paul II’s concern was pastoral as much as philosophical and theological: the faithful could not live the truth well if they could not see why it was beautiful and truly human. Share on X

It was not the case that the man elected pope less than a year before had only then begun to consider the importance of a theology of the body for a Christian understanding of marriage and sexuality. In fact, it’s well-documented that as a young priest, Karol Wojtyła befriended many families, particularly young families, and from them learned the joys and complexities of married life. 

Laying the Groundwork for Theology of the Body

In 1960, when he was an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Kraków, he published Love and Responsibility, a sustained defense of Catholic sexual ethics and the theology of marriage. Polish lay Catholics at the time noted that it was the first time they read a bishop who wrote so forthrightly about marriage and sexuality. Pope Paul VI was aware of the book and later appointed Wojtyła to the papal birth-control commission established to examine the morality of the recently invented birth-control pill. 

While the Polish Communist government prevented him from attending the commission’s final meeting in Rome, by the time Humanae Vitae appeared in 1968, Wojtyła had already spent years thinking through precisely the questions Paul VI would address: conjugal love, responsible parenthood, the dignity of the person, and the inseparability of love and life.

After Humanae Vitae, Wojtyła didn’t simply repeat the encyclical’s conclusions, particularly that of paragraph 12 which insisted that there is an “inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.” Paul VI concluded, therefore, that any action specifically intended to render the conjugal act infertile is immoral. Paul VI stated the teaching clearly, but he didn’t develop at length the theological and philosophical anthropology that would make the teaching more intelligible to modern readers. 

Wojtyła spent the next decade defending and deepening the conclusions Paul VI had come to. He did so by showing the Church’s teaching presupposes an integral vision of the human person. In his own research to prepare a unified translation of the catecheses, Austrian-American theologian Michael Waldstein discovered in the Vatican archives a manuscript for a book that Wojtyła had prepared before his papal election in 1978. The title of the book was Man and Woman He Created Them and it became the basis for the Wednesday catecheses now known as the Theology of the Body.

The twentieth-century debate over the morality of contraception wasn’t simply about one disputed practice. The fact that contraception could now be achieved by a pill, rather than a physical barrier, exposed a deeper theological problem at the time: how to relate person and nature, subjective experience and objective moral truth. Some argued that presentations of Catholic morality had become too exterior and too focused on the physical structure of acts. Those who thought that the human person rather than human nature should be the focus of moral consideration were eventually called, collectively, “personalists.” 

Some personalists, however, maintained an approach that became too subjective. Wojtyła, on the other hand, wanted to defend the Church’s teaching in a way that was neither subjectivist nor rigidly exterior: one that acknowledged human experience while respecting the existence and nature God had given man and woman.

After reading Humanae Vitae, he saw that an integral vision of the human being, a vision of man and woman as persons, was absolutely necessary. We don’t merely have bodies; we are embodied persons. Share on X He believed that Humanae Vitae was a first step. One way of reading the Theology of the Body is to read it as Karol Wojtyła’s attempt, now as Pope John Paul II, to move the Church’s teaching toward that vision. He was unwilling to disconnect the philosophical category of the human person from the category of human nature. He cannot be accused of subjectivism however much he regards subjective experience.

Pope John Paul II’s concern was pastoral as much as philosophical and theological: the faithful could not live the truth well if they could not see why it was beautiful and truly human. 

A Theology of the Body

In 2006, Waldstein published his translation of the catecheses under the title Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (published by Pauline Books and Media). Man is created not to be dominated by his body but to express himself through his body. Share on X For the first time, readers could approach the Theology of the Body not as a work of disjointed talks (each offered by different Vatican translators) but as a unified whole with one translator. The manuscript Waldstein discovered revealed systematic headings for the talks as well as texts that were previously unknown and never publicly delivered at a Wednesday audience. This translation is the closest thing to a critical translation of these important catecheses that’s available in any language.

The catecheses unfold in two large movements. First, the pope focused on Jesus Christ’s appeals to the beginning (Matthew 19:3-9), to the human heart (Matthew 5:27-28), and to the resurrection (Matthew 22:23-33), including Christ’s words about celibacy for the kingdom. The second half concerns the sacrament of marriage itself: covenant and grace, the language of the body, and finally love and fruitfulness in light of Humanae Vitae. 

Perhaps the concept most closely identified with the Theology of the Body is John Paul II’s notion of the spousal meaning of the body. In the garden created for him, Adam’s body helps him discover that he is not merely one animal among others. He learns this by recognizing the structure of his body, through which he recognizes his own difference, interiority, freedom, and vocation. The body was, therefore, a visible sign of man’s transcendence. This is a theme that runs throughout Wojtyła’s early writings on sexuality: the body expresses the person.

For John Paul II, the body is not a problem to be escaped, even though it experiences the effects of original sin. The body manifests the person’s desires, abilities, limits, vulnerability, uniqueness, and capacity for communion. We don’t merely have bodies; we are embodied persons.

John Paul combines this claim with a broader theology of creation: creation and human existence are themselves gifts from God. Without God’s creative power, there is only nothing. The pope sees creation as inherently directional: from nothingness into existence, from existence toward the other, and finally toward God. Human existence, therefore, also has a trajectory, an inherent direction to the other. The life of man is thus characterized by a drive to self-gift. This drive is manifest in the human body just as much as it is written in man’s very existence. 

The procreative faculties of the body make this outward directionality especially visible inasmuch as they require a person of the opposite sex to achieve their purpose. However, the procreative faculties do not exhaust the outward direction. The body points beyond the self because the person is gifted in order to become a gift. Share on X The body points beyond the self because the person is gifted in order to become a gift: gifted with existence to be given first to another human person and finally to God who is Himself a communion of three Divine Persons. 

Sexual difference certainly matters deeply in the Theology of the Body, but being an embodied person is more fundamental than simply being male and female. When Eve is brought to Adam, he first recognizes not their physical differences, but that she is like him. She is a person. “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). Man and woman are two reciprocal ways of being an embodied human person. For John Paul II, they are two complementary dimensions of self-knowledge and self-determination. The human body participates in this spousal character of human existence. The spousal meaning of the body is this direction toward gift, expressed complementarily and equally in both a masculine and feminine manner.

In other words, the pope moves from original solitude to original unity. Man first discovers that he is unlike the animals. Then, in woman, he discovers another who is like himself, another embodied person capable of communion. 

Pope John Paul II doesn’t reduce complementarity to biological function. Procreation matters, but complementarity is personal before it is reproductive. Man and woman encounter one another as persons, not as biological mechanisms. Man first discovers that he is unlike the animals. Then, in woman, he discovers another who is like himself, another embodied person capable of communion. Share on X Put simply, in the pope’s worldview, the body is a sort of primordial sacrament. It makes the invisible person visible to the world. Man is created not to be dominated by his body but to express himself through his body. He writes, “The body, in fact, and only the body is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine” (TOB 19:4). 

This is why the spousal meaning of the body can’t be reduced only to marriage, even though marriage is its most obvious earthly sign. The body reveals that the human person is made to receive himself as gift and then to become a gift.

A Practical Theology of the Body

The Theology of the Body is not simply speculative, it’s practical and pastoral. The whole project prepares the reader to see why the unitive and the procreative meanings of the conjugal act belong together. Meaning is not arbitrary but is dependent on the nature of our creation and existence. Ontological truths of our existence precede anything that is subjective or psychological. 

For John Paul II, the truth that’s communicated in the conjugal act is the very same truth expressed in marital consent in the presence of God: a self-offering of the whole person. Precisely because the spousal meaning of the body communicates complete self-gift, the conjugal act is inherently procreative and unitive. The attempt to have the unitive without the procreative, or the procreative without the unitive, falsifies the language of the body rather than expressing the gift for which we were created. 

The Theology of the Body offers a biblical and experiential anthropology to Catholics everywhere. John Paul II never rejected the value of natural theology, metaphysics, or natural law. In these catecheses, he’s not romanticizing the body or marriage and he’s not simply speaking metaphorically or lyrically. Grounded in the Church’s immemorial theological and philosophical teachings, he offers a way to see the body anew: as the visible sign of the person, created in love, wounded by sin, redeemed by Christ, and called to become a gift. 

Photo Credit: Erik Mclean