Theology of the Body, Part 7

This post represents a re-taking up of my Theology of the Body series from three years ago. The focus of the series is the "theology of the body" espoused by the late Pope John Paul II, as described in Christopher West's book Theology of the Body for Beginners.

In previous installments, I indicated how conflicted I was about what I'll abbreviate as TOB. On the one hand, I felt deeply drawn to it; on the other, repelled by it as a sure way to drive a wedge between true believers and everyone else.

The basic idea of TOB is that there is really nothing more fundamental, in terms of our life in this world, than sex in all its ramifications, and therefore nothing more capable of serving as the taproot of sin than sex. When our original desire to share ourselves fully with one another, man-to-woman and woman-to-man, was perverted into lust, it became our "original sin." Christ's death on a cross and resurrection to life everlasting have redeemed that sin and all its follow-on transgressions fully, assuring us of a place in heaven, but we have to appropriate that redemption willingly, and at some great difficulty, in this life.

The theology of the body, laid out by John Paul II in a series of talks early in his pontificate, is a discourse in how we do that.


Herein, rather than try to lay out the entire complex subject in one blog post, I'd like to try to relate the Holy Father's theology of the body to Jungian psychology.

In my long recent series on Jungian Wholeness and its Addressing the Anima subset, I discussed Jung's ideas about the hidden powers of the unconscious mind: the archetypes, including the Shadow, the Anima, and the Self. The Shadow, I said, betokens the repository of aspects of the psyche that we don't like about ourselves. We don't particularly want to see our sexual avidity as "lust," for instance, so we park "lust" in the unconscious depths, where it becomes part of the Shadow complex.

Jung held that deeper than the Shadow in men lies the archetype called the Anima (the Animus in women). As a feminine component in a masculine personality, the Anima represents a man's ideal for members of the opposite sex. The Animus in women, as a masculine component in a feminine soul, does the same in return. True psychic health demands that at some point the Anima/Animus should be confronted, internally and consciously, but even before that happens, the Anima/Animus typically gets projected outward on a member of the other sex. As a result, we fall in love.

The way we treat our Anima/Animus figure, once we have done so, is intended to be the opposite of lust.

If the healthy sexual desire we have for our beloved turns to lust, or gets smothered by the lust we have for other women or men, we lose the ability to "address the Anima." But addressing the Anima allows "her" (or "him," as the Animus in women is referred to) to guide us in our ultimate search for the Self.

The Self is the one archetype which can unify the psyche. It has a number of aspects which I discussed in earlier posts, including the capability of being symbolized as a Christian cross. For purposes of this post, the Self represents the imago Dei, the "image of God" within us.

Stripped of excess detail, we need to move from being slave to the Shadow (lust) to full expression of the "better angels of our nature" when we address the Anima, either in the guise of our beloved spouse or internally and consciously. That leads us onward to some sort of union with God.

So the Jungian scheme of things would seem to be consistent with John Paul II's theology of the body!