Theology of the Body, Part 6: The Riddle of the Third Way

Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution is my continuing object of fascination (see Theology of the Body, Part 5: the Transformation of Lust and preceding posts for more).

One of the trickiest things to understand about the message of this book is that there is a hidden, divinely aided third way beyond the pair of strategies for sex which initially must seem to exhaust all possibilities: repress lust, or indulge it.

A person who is blind to the third way, as so many are, would say that the sexual urge is a given. If it is not to be repressed — thereby doing us immeasuarable harm — it must be indulged to the fullest. Since religion opposes sexual indulgence, religion must go.

That's true, as far as it goes. If religion is basically about the repression of lust, then it's bad for us. But West tells us in his book that Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body" hates the repression of lust as much as it despises lustful indulgence!

Repression represents "the trap of 'holding to the form of religion' while 'denying the power of it'" — that is, the power of God, if we give him our assent, to change the way we feel and the way our minds and hearts operate inside us (p. 48; the quotation is from St. Paul's Second Letter to Timothy 3:5). Christ through his death and resurrection can redeem our sexuality. "In other words," writes West, "the death and resurrection of Christ is effective. It can change our lives, our attitudes, our hearts — yes — our sexual desires" (p. 48).


Practically speaking, how does this work? The key thing is primarily for us to switch from following the false lure of self-gratification to preferring "the love of total self-donation" (see p. 29).

The "right kind" of sexual desire is accordingly that which is found in the best marriages: in the conjugal bed, as in the rest of married life, each partner is mainly interested in "donating" his or her own selfish gratification to the needs of the other, to ensure the other's fulfillment.

Self-donation on a wider, not-necessarily-sexual scale is accordingly the keynote of all Christian life ... just as Christ's death on the cross to save the entire world from the wages of sin was the ultimate act of self-donation.


But self-donation, when emphasized all by itself, is but one of two co-equal aspects of the hidden third way. The other aspect — the other manner of describing this marvelous change of heart which depotentiates lust and sin — is to recognize that it can't happen without supernatural help. For our sexual nature to be "redeemed" requires, if we are Christian, that we accept the redemption spoken of by Christians when they refer to Christ's saving death on the cross.

Likewise, God's gift of redemption can equally be spoken of as allowing the Holy Spirit admission into our hearts. Whether spoken of as the indwelling of the Spirit or the salvation of Christ's cross, it all comes down to this: "... 'in a certain way we [according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church] have already risen with Christ' ... Here and now we can begin to experience the redemption of our sexual desires, the gradual transformation of our hearts. It is a difficult and even arduous journey, but one that can be accomplished" (p. 34).

Christ's saving cross and the entry of the Holy Spirit into our hearts together enable us to choose to be self-donating in our sexual and communal lives, while our opting for self-donation over self-gratification is what allows Christ's redemption and the indwelling of the spirit to be effective. The two aspects of the Riddle of the Third Way go with one another hand in glove to change our lives radically, over time, to ones of total commitment to God's plan and sincere self-donation to others.