John Crosby

The Personalism in John Paul IIs Theology of the Body

Introduction This is life-giving truth, not just an academic exercise. Personalist foundations KW, Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the human being. This is the key to his personalism. It has been said that TOB is difcult to read. That is true of this essay too! KW distinguishes cosmological and a personalist understanding of man. In the former, man is considered from without. In the latter, man is considered from within. That is, as he experiences himself consciously in his being. First, he is experienced in his objectivity. In the second, in his subjectivity, his interiority. In order to get as man as person, we need to look at him not just from without but as he reveals himself from within. KW keeping his balance between the objectivity and the subjectivity. Think about my coming death. Mortality: I am part of this universal mortality. I make no essential distinguishing of my coming death from that of others. It is hard to say I in this cosmological vision of man. Looking at it in a more personalist way, I am pierced with the realisation that I will one day die. I shudder at the thought not at the universal mortality of nature but of my own death. At this point my own subjectivity is awakening. I see my coming death as I will experience it from myself. In this subjective vision of myself I experience myself AS PERSON. The more I experience myself as the subject of my death the more personal is my experience. NB The cosmological approach MUST NOT BE REPLACED. But there is something highly personal that we need to consider. And this is what is involved in the personalist approach. It is a more friendly language: See it in terms of third- and rst-person. Personalist approach is a rst-person approach. Here, I say I with great emphasis and with this I experience myself strongly as subject of e.g. my death. The cosmological approach is third person. It is not lived from the centre of my being but it is a fact. This connection between turning to rst-person perspective and discovering the personal in human beings is so important to KW: Newman said, describing transition of objective to subjective view of human beings, they emerge for us as persons: nothing is more difcult than to realise that every man has a distinct soul, that every one of all the millions ... is as whole and independent a being as if there were no-one in the world but he. 1

John Crosby

... eg in an army each soldier has a soul. General in an army sees it as objective. ... This instance will show how open we all lie to the remark that we do not understand the doctrine of the distinct individuality of a human soul. We collect them in masses... This is what KW calls a REDUCTION in man. Newman continues: every part [of towns] is full of life... we get an ida of opulence and energy. ... He breaks through to the truth that each is person. Newman is turning to the subjectivity of the person. Every being in that great concourse is his own centre.... he has his own hopes, fears, desires, judgments, aims. He has an innite abyss of existence. The scene of which he is part is a gleam of sunshine on its service. Once we turn to the inner centre of where someone lives we lift him out of the crowd in which he was lost. The social scene which had swallowed him up is now relativised. This turn to subjectivity is vindicated. We touch here on the distinctly contemporary side of KWs mind: the philosophy adapted to the personalist perspective (phenomenology) has developed forms of analysis to do with LIVED EXPERIENCE. He compares Aristotelian categories like substance and accidence etc with phenomenological categories like interiority, self-presence, objectication etc an argues that these latter are better suited to rst-person personalism. The personalist basis of TOB This is all borne out in JPs focus on the marriage act. Only if we enter into subjectivity of the marital act do we notice something that has no counterpart in cosmological view. It is found in rst-person view: personalist signicance of the two-in-one esh. For centuries, Christians thought about the meaning and justication of procreation. In twentieth century there was more focus on unitive. If we consider that the rise of the personalist perspective coincides with this enriched understanding, we can surmise a connection between the two: the personalist perspective gives us intellectual resources to do justice to self-donation of spouses in marital intimacy. Reconstruction of JPIIs personalist path: From subjectivity to inter-subjectivity. From I-perspective to we-perspective. Buber: I can come to myself as person only by showing respect for the other. Only if I grant to the other a spiritual space in which to live from his personal centre can I really say I in living my own life. If I take the other as an object to be manipulated then I become more a 2

John Crosby

hardened ego. I found myself only by making a sincere gift of myself, as JPII, building on Gs, says so often. There are different ways of living my intersubjectivity. One way is way in which man and woman love each other. It nds its completion in marriage. This is distinguished from all other human love (even maternal love) through self-surrender: abandoning oneself for just one other. The talk of self-gift sometimes is too quickly identied with man/woman. Mother-child too, but just without the making of oneself BELONG to the other as in a spousal way. Spousal love and human sexuality JP says that in sexual intimacy, man and woman live and enact in an incomparable bodily way their spousal self-surrender. This self-surrender is rst of all and in itself something properly personal. At same time though, this self-surrender is lived in an irreplaceable way in sexual intimacy. Only if lived through the body by becoming one esh. So we see how JPII by means of his personalism discerns in the sexual union of spouses not only procreation but also the enactment of spousal love. He gives a name to the capacity of body to do this: nuptial (spousal) mfeaning of the body. It is the central category (see Newton talk). It is the ability of the body to stand in the service of the full enactment of spousal love. It is important for all of us to understand just how countercultural the thought of NMB really is. JPII thinks that the modern world is not only aficted by materialism that reduces man to body, but also by an aversion to the body! It is a neo-Manichean culture that conceives persons as estranged from their bodies. The real enemy is materialism. In Vs, JPII traces much of the disorder is failure to understand embodiment in persons. Many people see persons as disembodied centres of consciousness. Therefore it is natural that they can only found biological meaning in body and cannot nd NMB. e.g. God doesnt care what we do with each others bodies. He just cares whether or not we respect each other as persons. So therefore homosexual activity is ne, on this reading. Human body has no spousal meaning in this view. The originality of JPII in TOB is that he breathes new life into the truth that we exist as embodied persons. All kinds of personal meanings are inscribed in our bodily meaning.

John Crosby

In TOB he elaborates the truth that the body is not just physical but also sacramental. An expression of the invisible interiority. He says that it is not good for us to be alone and that we can nd ourselves ONLY in a sincere gift of ourselves. Indeed this is best understood in context of man and woman. Christianity hates the body, it is often said. JPIIs view is not this at all. He is the great friend of the human body. The way out of this mischief of not seeing the body correctly is by looking at the bodies thing in a subjective way. We might say that there is a connection between intersubjectivity and bodily being, we experience ourselves as empowered for self-donation. JPII is listening to our bodily subjectivity. On the basis of discerning the deep personal meaning of body, JPII goes on to see trinitarian image of God in each person. Persons ordered to each other Such a triune God may be expected to impart his interpersonal structure. He wont created people as monads: i.e. people who relate only after they have become persons. People come to themselves only after coming through encounter with each other. If this vocation to love takes on one eminent form in man and woman and if it is inscribed in our bodies as male and female, then how can we fail to nd an image of God in man and woman? Nothing reveals dignity of man/woman difference than this ability to image the triune God. This image is not limited to the Spirit in man but comprises the body too. The indispensable basis for recognising this image of God is FIRST recognising the nuptial meaning of the body. A human body whose only meaning is physical/biological does not image God. Only a body personalised by love can image him. In spousal meaning of body we see that in turning to subjectivity, JPII tries to bring to light the eminently personal character of man and woman and their love. JPII comments on Gn 1: its more objective and metaphysical; Gn 2: its more subjective, which talks of man and woman in terms of the solitude that man experiences before woman comes or in terms of shame they felt after sin. These experiences are not simply psychological that can be bracketed out of a consideration. They are involved.

John Crosby

A danger of personalism Once we discover the rst-person perspective and all the personalist riches of subjectivity, there is the temptation to disparage the cosmological perspective as if it were now to be replaced with the personalist. This plays out disastrously in marriage act. Otherwise you dont see connection of unity and procreation. (Its not only about deep spousal selfdonation though!) Seeing every act being open to procreation is too physicalist, some might say. Others, that personalism puts too much emphasis on the subjective. JPII aims only to complement the cosmological with the personal. He nds a way to integrate openness to procreation as a way to found the self-gift so as to support both. JPII argues that consummation which is distinct from procreation is intrinsically connected to openness. Fertility is situated in the realm of personal love. If this is not seen, then it all becomes something for use only. Pro-contraceptionists need to look more at their spousal subjectivity and they will nd connection to procreation, says JPII. Disorders of spousal inter-subjectivity 1. Do we need more realism about way that love of man and woman works out? How does JPII deal with fallenness of man/woman relations His thought here is again eminently personalist. TOB 43 October 8th 1980: this one caused the restorm in the international press. He says that adultery in the heart can be committed even within marriage. If you think that the sexual intimacy of a man and woman is morally ordered just because they are open to children then you are thinking to objectively. There could be a serious moral defect in their intersubjectivity. He could be using her in terms of personal gratication. He may not be looking at her as a subject, as someone who can say I. Her sexual attractiveness is meant to awaken his love for her but that attractiveness may cease to be transparent to her as person with the result that the NMB loses its meaning. JPII is very sensitive to the very ways of LOOKING at the spouse. Some ways honour her; some degrade her. The cosmological approach is to register such distinctions. 2. SHAME. There is of course a shame that we feel by some bad deed. But JPII is thinking about the shame that a woman feels when she is looked at as an object of sexual consumption. She knows she is a subject but she is being looked at as an object. This is not just a mistake at level of cognition. But this way of looking, concupiscible, threatens her. So she defends herself by subduing her attractiveness. This subduing gesture is what shame is. This subduing of her sexual values is not neutering, for in concealing 5

John Crosby

them she conceals them only to a certain extent so that in combination with the value of the person they can still be a point of origin for love. The subduing of them enables her to be looked at properly. Sexual shamelessness is refusing to defend yourself against the lustful look of the other. One abandons ones subjectivity by way of shamelessness. His thought on this subject is always surrounded by hope. JPIIs focus on hope is about the original innocence that man/woman felt. They could see in the body of the other the person of the other. It is not just that they mastered themselves, this is too extrinsic a view of domination of soul over body, rather they were totally taken up with each other. Of course then the rupture appeared. The body now acquired the capacity to obscure, consume the other too. The freedom of original nakedness gave way to experience of shame. JPII derives hope not just by looking back to original innocence but also forward to redemption: the reintegration of bodily and sexual life in personalism. This is the redemption of the body that begins already now. Afrmation of the power of the redemption of the body can make itself shown even now. That is why the danger of adultery in marriage never comes over as a discouraging accusation. He is always calling us beyond our brokenness to the recovery of lost innocence. Hence John Paul II is indeed a witness to hope!