Theology of the Body as it was in the Beginning

Posted: 21 December 2011

People ask a lot of questions of the Catholic Church, especially in regards morality. “What is the problem with sex outside of marriage?” Why is contraception immoral?” “Why does marriage have to be between one man and one woman?” People used to challenge Jesus with similar questions. At one point a group of Pharisees came up to Christ to ask him if divorce was permissible. To their surprise though He did not simply point them to the written law but instead he invited them to consider that “from the beginning God made them male and female” and created a marriage bond that could not be broken. The Pharisees complained that Moses had allowed them to divorce, but even though this had happened, Christ looked deeply at them and said “but from the beginning it was not so.”

Why direct the people to the beginning and not just the written law? Because Christ was directing them to the law written on their hearts. We exist in a fallen world, in a world where we struggle to do what is right, where the body and the spirit battle one another. However, it was not always like that, there was a time when humanity knew what it was to love God, love others and love themselves rightly. This time was before Original Sin entered the world and we read about it in just a few short passages in the book of Genesis. Thirty years ago a young Pope John Paul II began to give a series of addresses that delved back into the beginning so that we would know better the answer to the questions, ‘Who am I’ and ‘What does it mean to be human’. These addresses are known today as the Theology of the Body.

Pope John Paul saw such importance in the beginning, because he believed that even though humans now lived in a world marred with Original Sin, they carried within their hearts the remnants of what it was to live without sin, before Adam and Eve ‘ate the apple’ (there really was no apple, check your bible). In his catechesis, John Paul named three original experiences that existed before the Fall. He called them Original Solitude, Original Unity and Original Nakedness. After Original Sin these three became ruptured but when Jesus points the Pharisees back to the beginning he is saying that this is the way they are called to live. No longer does he want us to live under the weight of the law but rather to understand that when we know who we are as human persons, the knowledge of what is right and wrong wells up from within us.

In the experience of solitude, God had created only one person and God recognises it was not good that the human person be alone. This person was invited to name all the animals and through that find someone similar for himself. Yet after giving names to all the animals of land, sea and sky, the human discovered there was no one like him. Why? The human had a body and all the animals had bodies so what was lacking? The difference was that the body of the human was symbolic; it contained a person, a spiritual being. The human realised that he was not an animal or an object but he was a subject with reason and free will.

In the experience of unity God created a second being from the rib of the first being and creation was completed with male and female, equal in dignity. At the sight of the woman, the man cried out with a great joy because here was a body that also represented a human person. Their bodies had differences but it was their diversity that made true unity possible. The man and woman realised that their bodies called them to love and that they were created to be a gift to one another.

In the experience of nakedness the man and the woman enjoy a total trust and defenselessness before each other. They rest in the knowledge that the other person would never use them as an object but always see them as a person to be loved. There was a total unity between the spiritual and the physical sides of the human person.

This was the paradise we were created for but we all know something changed.

That change was Original Sin and it ruptured all the future generations understanding of what it was to be a human person. It was as if a great amnesia came over humanity. It has become hard to sense God in our lives and recall that we are spiritual as well as bodily. The differences between men and women became seen as obstacles and causes for blame. There became a tendency to use one another, in their lusts men dominate women and in a confused desire for love women allow themselves to be used. Everything has been turned upside down.

When Christ is speaking to the Pharisees he is also speaking to every human person and he invites us to simply remember who we are. Every moral question has an answer at the dawn of creation. This was the whole reason Christ came; to point the way out of amnesia and remind us that that “in the beginning it was not so.”