In Part 1 of this series, I worried that Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body" — his doctrine on sexual love — might work, in these sex-saturated times, against compassionate social solidarity, which I consider the prime directive of the faithful Christian. In a world in which millions engage in unencumbered sex and truculently defend their right to do so, religion's calls for chastity and strict marital fidelity can be a turn-off for many.
"[T]he Pope doesn't need to nor does he attempt to force assent to his proposals," responds West (p. 16). (He uses the present tense; John Paul II was still alive when the book appeared.) "Rather, he invites man and women to reflect honestly on their own experience of life to see if it confirms his proposals." For, West has earlier said, the Pope anchors his philosophical stance in human experience, not cut-and-dried, legalistic, my-way-or-the-highway "objective categories" (p. 13).
"Those who have been turned off by judgmental moralizers will find this approach delightfully refreshing," opines West. He continues:
The Pope imposes nothing and wags his finger at no one. He simply reflects lovingly on God's Word and on human experience in order to demonstrate the profound harmony between them. Then, with utmost respect for our freedom, he invites us to embrace our own dignity. It doesn't matter how often we've settled for something less. This is a message of sexual healing and redemption, not condemnation.
With this compassionate approach — the Gospel approach — John Paul shifts the discussion about sexual morality from legalism to liberty. The legalist asks, "How far can I go before I break the law?" Instead, the Pope asks, "What's the truth about sex that sets me free to love?"
Part of that truth about sex and love, says West, quite unfortunately, is a "spiritual battle" in which we are the battlefield, the actual combatants being God and "the enemy."
"The body and sex are meant to proclaim our union with God," writes West (p.12). Specifically, per Genesis 1:27-28, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. And God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply ... '" (see p. 5).
Notice that our male-female gender difference is, on this view, part and parcel of our having been made in God's "own image." This is why right and proper sexual relations on our part "image," in turn, God's interior love as Three Persons of one Holy Trinity; they also image God's exterior love for us, which has prompted Christ's redeeming death on the cross.
"The body, in fact, and it alone ... is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine," West quotes John Paul II as saying (p. 5). The body is itself a sacrament. So, says the Pope, there's a lot riding on our getting sex right.
But given that the foundation-stone for the Pope's theology of the body is our heart's inmost subjective experience, not "objective categories" of truth, it is hard to see why the category whom West calls "the enemy" — a.k.a. the Devil, Satan — needs to be brought immediately into the theological picture, in order to explain why we don't often think of the body and sexual union in this "profound" way:
The enemy is no dummy [writes West]. He knows that the body and sex are meant to proclaim the divine mystery. And from his perspective, this proclamation must be stifled. Men and women must be kept from recognizing the mystery of God in their bodies. ... [T]his is precisely the blindness that original sin introduced at the serpent's prompting. (p. 12)
I am put in mind of a woman friend who I will identify only as "Ms. V. V.", since I met her when we served together as VISTA Volunteers — in Volunteers In Service To America — back in the early 1970s. During that two-year period we were girlfriend and boyfriend, but, beyond that, Ms. V. V. taught me a lot.
Ms. V. V., along with several of her women roommates, introduced me to feminism, or women's liberation, as it was called then. Before their letting me in on what the phrase "male chauvinist pig" suggested, I had no clue that women were being systematically treated as second-class citizens. That was wake-up call number one for me.
Wake-up call number two came when, during a meeting of all of us VISTA volunteers, Ms. V. V. held forth on the need for heterosexual people such as most of us presumably were to respect the rights of gay and lesbian people.
Later, after our VISTA service was over, Ms. V. V. paid me a visit in my hometown of Bethesda. Maryland, with her female lover in tow! That was wake-up call number three.
Some years after that, Ms. V. V. paid me a visit in Baltimore, during which she told me that she had had a brief, unplanned affair with a man whom she had wanted to console over an emotional loss that he had sustained. She said she was not exclusively lesbian, but bisexual — which didn't shock me, since we two had been sexually intimate, a year or so before. Unfortunately, Ms. V.V.'s sexual encounter had resulted in a pregnancy ... and an abortion. That was wake-up call number four.
As a result of the great respect and liking I had (and still have) for Ms. V. V., I long ago internalized many of her values: pro-women's rights, pro-gay rights, pro-abortion rights. I think it fair to say that she is one of the best people I have ever known, in terms of her caring for and about others. In many ways, though she is not a practicing Christian, Ms. V. V. exemplifies the compassionate outlook which lies at the heart of Christian experience.
Yet, according to the Pope's theology of the body, she would seem to be a "sinner" on at least three counts, engaging in other than purely heterosexual sex, having unmarried sex with a man, and having an abortion ... and possibly morally wrong on a fourth count also, if her brand of feminism doesn't pass muster.
On top of that, West seems to hold, one is to call Ms. V. V.'s "blindness" the upshot of satanic activity!
That's very hard for me to take.
Not only that, but it would seem to make it a slam dunk that Ms. V. V. could never be persuaded of the rightness of John Paul II's theology of the body. I mean, it's hard enough to convince an unbeliever that God exists — much less the Devil. After all, I, a regular churchgoer, can't even remember the last time I heard Satan mentioned from the Catholic pulpit.
When theology is based not on objective notions that are demonstrable to reason, but on subjective human experience, something like satanic machinations would, admittedly, seem to be an explanation for why so many people are blind to the truth of that theology. But saying so takes the button of personal inner experience — confusion, resistance, willfulness — and promptly sews a vest of "objective categories" on it — "the enemy," the wily serpent in the Garden of Eden story.
That's putting the cart well before the horse, and West has no business bringing it up at the very outset of his discussion of John Paul II's theology of the body. It's a stumbling block to belief, not a help.
In "The Body & the Spiritual Battle" (pp. 12-13), the section in which he brings up "the enemy," West alludes to John Paul II's writing that "the union of the sexes 'is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love.'" He should have stuck to just that, and left out the archaic stuff about "the enemy"!
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