Heretical Body Language: Wojtyla's "Theology Of The Body"

 

The Theology of the Body (TOB) is the brainchild of Karol Wojtyla (aka "Pope" John Paul II) leader of the Vatican II sect from 1978 to 2005. There has been much discussion about it and "conservative" sect members/apologists gush of how "Catholic" it is, and allege it is a great development of doctrine. Indeed, his TOB is so convoluted and difficult for the average reader, there are entire books and courses dedicated to explaining TOB. The whole idea is to "sound profound" even when you're not. After all, if it requires a lot to understand it, it must be very cerebral and "our pope is a genius." When Wojtyla is original he's Modernist, and when he says something Catholic, it's never original. 

This post will expose Wojtyla's TOB for the Modernist dung it is, and explain why it is anything but "original" and "a development of Catholic doctrine." (N.B. I have collected this material from many sources, both online and in print, and I take no credit for any of it except for condensing the information into a terse post and adding some commentary.---Introibo).

What is TOB?

It is the teaching of Wojtyla that first grew out of lectures he gave in 1958 and 1959. They were published in book form in 1960 under the title Love and Responsibility. In his lectures he begins the assault on the traditional teaching of the Church about the primary and secondary ends of marriage. The procreation and education of children (primary end) and mutual love and support of the spouses (secondary end) are jettisoned in favor of "interpersonal relations," "love" and "responsibility."

Wojtyla had a disdain for Neo-Scholasticism, and was a proponent of the heretical philosophies of personalism and phenomenology. When he was writing his thesis for his Doctorate in Theology, the great theologian Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange was his advisor. His dissertation on The Doctrine of Faith in St. John of the Cross was so full of error in its first proposed draft, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange wrote "you are not Catholic" on the paper and failed him. Wojtyla's ecclesiastical protector, Adam Cardinal Sapieha, intervened on behalf of the Polish heretic and had the decision reversed when revision was made. (Apologists try and sanitize Wojtyla's background by stating he wasn't actually failed, but only that Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange "disagreed." Yet, those with connections in the Vatican [Fr. DePauw among them] knew the truth). 

His 1953 dissertation for his Doctorate in Philosophy was on philosopher Max Scheler (pronounced SHAY-ler, 1859-1938), a prominent proponent of phenomenology. Phenomenology, in brief, attempts to base human knowledge on the "phenomena," that is, what appears to the human mind, rather than on an exploration of external existing things. Whether a thing truly exists or not is unimportant to a phenomenologist; only what he cogitates exists for him. One can easily see how this philosophy is one of the Modernist "subjectivist" philosophies, basing itself not on an external reality or standard, but upon one's own personal conceptions. Thus, it easily leads to moral relativism and dependence upon personal or subjective opinion ("what feels good") as opposed to external or objective reality (e.g., the Ten Commandments).

As Pope St. Pius X taught about Thomism:

St. Thomas perfected and augmented still further by the almost angelic quality of his intellect all this superb patrimony of wisdom which he inherited from his predecessors and applied it to prepare, illustrate and protect sacred doctrine in the minds of men (In Librum Boethii de Trinitate, quaest, ii, 3). Sound reason suggests that it would be foolish to neglect it and religion will not suffer it to be in any way attenuated. And rightly, because, if Catholic doctrine is once deprived of this strong bulwark, it is useless to seek the slightest assistance for its defense in a philosophy whose principles are either common to the errors of materialism, monism, pantheism, socialism and modernism, or certainly not opposed to such systems. The reason is that the capital theses in the philosophy of St. Thomas are not to be placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or another, but are to be considered as the foundations upon which the whole science of natural and divine things is based; if such principles are once removed or in any way impaired, it must necessarily follow that students of the sacred sciences will ultimately fail to perceive so much as the meaning of the words in which the dogmas of divine revelation are proposed by the magistracy of the Church. (See Doctoris Angelici, June 29, 1914; Emphasis mine).  Wojtyla hated Neo-Scholasticism, especially its Thomistic expression. Keep this in mind when you think about TOB. 

According to a Vatican II sect source in support of TOB:

The “Theology of the Body” is St. John Paul II's integrated vision of the human person. The human body has a specific meaning, making visible an invisible reality, and is capable of revealing answers regarding fundamental questions about us and our lives:

• Is there a real purpose to life and if so, what is it?
• What does it mean that we were created in the image of God?
• Why were we created male and female? Does it really matter if we are one sex or another?
• What does the marital union of a man and woman say to us about God and his plan for our lives?
• What is the purpose of the married and celibate vocations?
• What exactly is "Love"?
• Is it truly possible to be pure of heart?

All of these questions, and many more, are answered in the 129 Wednesday audiences popularly known as the “Theology of the Body,” delivered by St. John Paul II between 1979 and 1984. 

(See theologyofthebody.net)

Therefore, TOB culminated with Wojtyla's speeches, and became a book, (made expanded and "definitive" in 2006) entitled Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body.

Wojtyla said his purpose in putting forth TOB was "born principally of the need to put the norms of Catholic sexual morality on a firm basis, a basis as definitive as possible, relying on the most elementary and incontrovertible moral truths and the most fundamental values or goods," most especially the good of the person within the context of "love and responsibility." (See Love and Responsibility, [1981], pg. 16). The implication is crystal clear: the Church had to wait over 1,900 years for Wojtyla to put Catholic morality on a solid basis because the Natural Law, Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and Magisterial teaching were inadequate. That's blasphemous (at best) and a denial of the Church's ability to teach the faithful (at worst). 

The Main Heretical Teachings of TOB

There are three (3) fundamental heretical teachings of TOB:

• a false idea of Man as Imago Dei (Image of God) opposed to the true idea
• the ends of marriage are changed
• the false notion of "total giving" in marriage

 There are more than these, but in my opinion, these are the three most deadly errors. Each will be examined.

Man in no longer the Image of God, but the Outline of God.

For St. Thomas, the soul is superior to the body—more noble, possessing its act of being and sharing it with the body—such that man is constituted a person by his spiritual nature. Wojtyla, however, specifies in the notes to his Audience of November 14, 1979, that, “In the conception of the oldest books of the Bible, the dualist opposition ‘body-soul’ does not appear. As we have already pointed out, we may rather speak of a complementary combination ‘body-life.’ The body is the expression of the personality of man.”

This failure to distinguish explicitly the soul and its operations as superior to the body means that the TOB redefines the notion of man as “image of God.” Thus, St. Thomas’s statement, citing Augustine, that man is in the image of God by his mind only, has no place in a heretical phenomenological system, which philosophy Wojtyla embraces. He must therefore redefine “image of God” into an object of phenomenological study: it is a picture, an external representation of God. Better still, it is an experience. (Vatican II-speak). The full awareness of the meaning of the body takes place in the mutual “knowing” of man and woman; their physical union(sex) becomes a "language," expressing the nature of God to the world and to themselves: “This language of the body becomes so to speak a prophecy of the body.” (See Wojtyla's audience of Aug. 22, 1984). 

Man is capax Dei (has capacity for God) by his soul, by nature, by “creation” as Augustine says. This openness of nature allows for the entry of grace into his soul, and a new manner of being “to the image of God” by a union of theological virtue: imperfectly, as image of grace, and perfectly, as image of glory. (See Summa Theologica I, q. 93, a. 4) This properly theological union is impossible in a “theology of the body” precisely because the soul is not clearly distinguished as being, by nature, the place of encounter with God. Nor is there possibility of distinction between natural image and image by grace or glory. 

In Wojtyla's phenomenological TOB, humans approach God by a purer union with another human; by becoming "more fully gift to another," humanity more fully resembles God. A recovery of the image of God and of the original “innocence of heart” depend on living in marriage as "mutual gift." (See Wojtyla, April 2, 1980, “Marriage in the Integral Vision of Man”: “Those who seek the accomplishment of their own human and Christian vocation in marriage are called, first of all, to make this theology of the body... the content of their life and behavior.”). 

Changing the Ends of Marriage.

Wojtyla was greatly influenced by Fr. Herbert Doms, also an admirer of Max Scheler. Doms was a censured theologian. In 1935, he wrote a book entitled About the Meaning and Purpose of Marriage. In his book, Doms claimed that since every act of sexual intercourse does not result in a child being conceived, the primary purpose of marriage is not procreation but rather in the personal fulfilment of men and women as persons. Doms wrote:

In the perfect act, worthy of human beings, the two partners grasp each other reciprocally in intimate love; that is spiritually they reciprocally give themselves in an act which contains the abandonment  and enjoyment of the whole person and is not simply an isolated activity of organs. (As cited in John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, [1965], pg. 497). 

In 1939, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office condemned Doms book and prohibited it from being used in any Catholic institution. It was placed on The Index. 

According to theologian Sola, in the 20th century there arose certain authors (e.g., theologians Doms and Krempel) who proposed a theory that the essence of marriage consists it the mutual perfection of the spouses. For these (censured) theologians, the primary purpose of marriage is the spiritual coming together of the spouses. Therefore, from the union various "goods or fruits" are the result: personal fulfilment, and in the biological order, procreation and education of children, resulting in the total perfection of marriage. 

Hence, the Holy Office published this decree:

[In certain writings it is asserted] that the primary purpose of matrimony is not the generation of offspring, or that the secondary purposes are not subordinate to the primary purpose, but are independent of it.

In these works different primary purposes of marriage are designated by other writers, as for example: the complement and personal perfection of the spouses through a complete mutual participation in life and action; mutual love and union of spouses to be nurtured and perfected by the psychic and bodily surrender of one’s own person; and many other such things.

In the same writings a sense is sometimes attributed to words in the current documents of the Church (as for example, primary, secondary purpose), which does not agree with these words according to the common usage by theologians.

This revolutionary way of thinking and speaking aims to foster errors and uncertainties, to avoid which the Most Eminent and Very Reverend Fathers of this supreme Sacred Congregation, charged with the guarding of matters of faith and morals, in a plenary session, on Wednesday, the 28th of March, 1944, when the question was proposed to them “Whether the opinion of certain recent persons can be admitted, who either deny that the primary purpose of matrimony is the generation and raising of offspring, or teach that the secondary purposes are not essentially subordinate to the primary purpose, but are equally first and independent," have decreed that the answer must be: In the negative.

(See Sacrae Theologiae Summa, IVB,[1956], pg. 154). 

Since TOB's marital and sexual ethics are an "ethics of love," spousal love becomes the unique goal of marriage and sexuality. This however excludes the goal to which marriage and sexuality have been oriented by the Creator, namely procreation. In scholastic terms the finis operantis (the goal of the worker) ousts, or at least casts into shade, the finis operis (the goal of the work). TOB comes into conflict with Church teaching concerning the order of the ends of marriage. This teaching holds that the first end of marriage is the procreation (and education) of children, and that the second is the love of the spouses. 

It was Vatican II that rehabilitated the censured theologians, and put this heretical tenet into the sect's teachings. The perennial teaching of the Church is enshrined in the 1917 Code of Canon Law: “The primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children; the secondary [end] is mutual support and a remedy for concupiscence” (Canon 1013, section 1). Beginning with the document Gaudium et Spes ("Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World"), Church teaching was undermined regarding Holy Matrimony. For the first time, instead of teaching about the "ends of marriage," the "benefits and purposes" of marriage are discussed. These "benefits and purposes" are written about without any distinction between which are primary and secondary, and no mention of any particular one(s) being subordinate to others. 

This led up to the memorialization of the heretical tenet in Wojtyla's 1983 Code of Canon Law with the ends of marriage inverted:

The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring, has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptized. (Canon 1055, section 1). 

Marriage as "total giving."

This stems from Wojtyla's personalism. Personalism is defined as follows: "Personalism posits ultimate reality and value in personhood – human as well as (at least for most personalists) divine. It emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and inviolability of the person, as well as the person’s essentially relational or social dimension." (See plato.stanford.edu/entries/personalism/#WhaPer). Personalists like Wojtyla in his TOB, sees marriage as "total self-giving." 

Catholic Tradition does not view marital and sexual love in such a way. Marital love is a love of the will, more particularly as a love of friendship and companionship involving mutual assistance to the point of self-sacrifice, which encompasses sexual love. Tradition views the latter love as a love of the senses disordered by Original Sin, which must accordingly be moderated by, and as much as possible assumed into, the love of the will. Both forms of love must for Christians be elevated by Grace to the supernatural love of Charity. Moreover, you must love GOD with all your might, mind, soul, etc. and your neighbor (other humans) to the LESSER degree that you love yourself.

TOB: Possibly Undermining the Sacredness of Human Life

Wojtyla would always trumpet his pro-life credentials as a way to win support from gullible members of the Vatican II sect that he was a "conservative pope." To give credit where credit is due, Wojtyla always did say the right things about the evil of abortion. Ironically, his personalism can potentially undermine pro-life principles. Wojtyla makes a distinction between human beings and personhood. 

A human being is an individual with a human nature. Human nature is a part of external, objective reality. Human nature is also shared. Every human being has the same nature as everybody else. Finally, human nature gives every human being a certain amount of dignity. A person, for Wojtyla, is a subject of lived experience. Personhood, unlike human nature, is part of the internal subjective world. Also, unlike human nature, personhood is not shared. Every person has unique personhood, given by his entirely unique interiority and self-reflective experience. This unique personhood raises the person’s dignity to an even higher level than that of a mere human being. 

Personism is a moral framework that ties ethical rights to the concept of "personhood"—defined by capabilities like self-awareness, rationality, and desiring to continue existing—rather than species membership. It originated with the detestable philosopher Peter Singer (b. 1946). According the personists, many human beings are not persons. Unborn children, for example, are human beings but not persons because they lack self-awareness. Personists, such as Peter Singer, use personism to justify abortion and even infanticide. Singer says that persons have great value and should be protected, but mere human beings have less value. So killing non-self-aware infants (who aren’t persons) is not such a big deal.     

To his credit, Wojtyla disagrees, but on what basis when he agrees with most of Singer's basic principles? The infusion of the soul? Is the soul self-aware at animation of the body? To the best of my knowledge and belief, Wojtyla never addressed this point. TOB with its personalism and phenomenology seems to undercut Church teaching in this area.

Conclusion

The "Theology of the Body" is more Modernist theology from John Paul the Great Apostate. How can you even have such a "theology" when the animating principle of the body is the soul, without which the body is but a mere corpse? Many people think it upholds traditional teaching when, in fact, Church teaching is denied and/or undermined. In exalting the body, Wojtyla is corrupting minds and souls. "And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in Hell." (St. Matthew 10:28).