As long as John Paul II speaks about the dignity and the rights of the person, many agree with him and praise him for his original Christian personalism. But not a few of these sympathizers are perplexed by his teachings on sexual morality; they think that here he betrays his personalism. They particularly are perplexed by his landmark encyclical on moral first principles, Veritatis Splendor, for here they find both his personalism and his reaffirmation of the controverted sexual teachings. They do not know it, but precisely this encyclical could take away all their perplexity, for it also contains the middle term that shows how his personalism underlies his teachings on sexual morality.
Looking for the Body
Let us begin with John Paul In personalism, which is written all over this encyclical. In one place we read, “This heightened sense of the dignity of the human person and of his or her uniqueness, and of the respect due to the journey of conscience, certainly represents one of the positive achievements of modern culture.” He entirely means what he says here; he is not just trying to defuse the hostility that he anticipates in modern readers. He deeply believes that certain modern thinkers have broken through to a deeper understanding of man as person.
Let us go back to one of his most important philosophical papers, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man.” Here the future pope claims that the whole metaphysics of human nature deriving from Aristotle runs the risk of “reducing man to the world,” of failing to do justice to what is distinctive of man, to what makes him a person. Wojtyla says there is a cosmological emphasis in the Aristotelian tradition, by which he means a tendency to look at human beings not from within, as they experience themselves, but rather from the outside.
In this approach to human beings one thinks of them in terms of “substance” or “potency” and one stresses their resemblance with certain nonhuman beings. He says the Aristotelian tradition needs to be completed by developing a more personalist emphasis, that is, by looking at human beings from within, which means understanding them through their self-presence, interiority, self-giving, and the like.
Only in this inner (or “subjective”) way can human beings be understood in terms of what distinguishes them from, or makes them irreducible to, all nonpersons. He thinks that as a matter of historical fact the turn to interiority (which is what he means here by “subjectivity”) in the last few centuries has enabled many thinkers to achieve a more adequate vision of man as person.
One sees from this philosophical paper how closely he has thought about what it is for each human being to be a person—so closely, in fact, that he has criticized certain elements in the philosophical tradition that he inherits.
Why do people suspect John Paul II of undermining his own personalism with his teachings on sexual morality? Because they charge him with what they call “physicalism,” by which they mean an excessive moral respect for biological facts and tendencies, treating them as if they pointed us in the direction in which we morally ought to go. It would, for instance, be a physicalist explanation of the wrong of suicide if one were to say that we human beings, along with all natural substances, have a natural inclination to preserve ourselves in being; whoever takes his or her life acts against this natural inclination, acts unnaturally, and so acts immorally.
Such an ethical analysis finds very little support today, because it has no answer to the question: Why not act against our natural inclinations for the sake of some higher good? Why should these inclinations be normative?
Beyond Biology
Now the critics of John Paul II think that traditional Christian teachings on contraception, sterilization, artificial insemination, homosexual activity, autoeroticism, premarital sex are all incurably physicalistic; they think you cannot make sense of these teachings except by exaggerating the moral importance of certain biological tendencies. They think that when John Paul II reaffirms them he takes over a mass of physicalist teaching from the tradition. And they allege that with this he betrays his personalism; for the main objection to physicalism is clearly a personalist objection. Are not persons and their welfare more important than letting bodily instincts unfold unimpeded? Do persons not suffer a particular indignity when they bind themselves in conscience to what are nothing more than natural biological facts and tendencies? Should spouses not be entitled to interfere with the physiological events leading to conception if, according to their conscientious judgment about the good of their family, a pregnancy should be avoided? By exaggerating the moral significance of these physiological events, does one not fall prey to that one-sidedly cosmological view of man that Wojtyla deprecates?
How can the author of “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man” defend moral teachings that stand or fall with ethical physicalism? Thus in Veritatis Splendor the critics of John Paul II find that his personalism is strangely divided against itself.
Of course, John Paul II understands the antagonism existing between personalism and physicalism. This is why we find the Holy Father taking great care in this encyclical to avoid anything that could be taken for physicalism, as when he says, “The origin and the foundation of the duty of absolute respect for human life are to be found in the dignity proper to the person and not simply in the natural inclination to preserve one’s own physical life.” Here he explicitly rejects the naturalistic way of arguing against suicide. Only if you go beyond this natural inclination and take account of the dignity proper to the human person can you begin to explain the wrong of suicide.
It is true that he mentions a number of times in the encyclical the “natural inclinations” of the Thomistic tradition, but he never lets them, taken by themselves, establish any moral norm; they always have to be taken together with something far more important than they are, namely with considerations of personal good and personal value.
John Paul II also must know that just this physicalistic argument against suicide that he here criticizes has been used by many Catholic authors in their analyses of suicide, including St. Thomas Aquinas, who employs it as the first of his three arguments against suicide. Thus John Paul II is aware of a certain vulnerability to naturalism in his own tradition, and he knows how to make the moves needed to secure his tradition against this weakness.
I might add that whenever John Paul II in his many official teachings explains some point of morality, he never employs arguments that smack of ethical physicalism. Thus the argument he most frequently uses to show the moral disorder of artificial contraception is, whatever one thinks of it, a thoroughly personalist argument. It is the argument that the self-donation of the marital act cannot help becoming defiled with a selfish “using” attitude when the procreative potential of the act is actively sterilized.
To my knowledge he has never used anything like the old “perverted faculty” argument, an entirely naturalistic argument, in discussing contraception. This is the argument that since sexual union sets in motion physiological causes that naturally tend to conception, it is unnatural to interfere actively with them so as to prevent conception.
Personalism Without Dualism
At this point the critics of John Paul II are completely perplexed. He rejects physicalism in ethics as much as they do, and he affirms personalism in ethics as much as they do; and yet he affirms traditional Christian sexual morality, which they reject. Their large area of agreement would seem to preclude this point of sharp disagreement. And so we are led to ask whether there is perhaps some middle term in the teaching of John Paul II of which they are ignorant. Is there, after all, a way of making personalistic sense of traditional Christian sexual morality? There is indeed such a middle term, as the encyclical clearly teaches; it is John Paul II’s understanding of the embodiment of the human person.
Those philosophers and theologians whose personalism leads them to call into question the just-mentioned moral teachings of the Church typically presuppose some far-reaching separation of “person” and “nature,” which has the effect of estranging the person from his body. Let me show this dualism in a particularly blunt expression of it.
A well-known American “Catholic” feminist recently called into question all of the moral teachings of the Church in the area of sexuality saying, “God does not care what we do with each other’s bodies, he only cares whether we treat each other as persons.” As if men and women could do anything they like with each other’s bodies as long as they show respect for each other as persons. In other words, there are no definite bodily ways of showing respect or disrespect for persons; showing respect to another is an interior and disembodied act, and thus any use of another’s body can in principle be connected with the inner stance of respect. This detachment of personal respect from its bodily expression is a sign of the dualism of person and body.
On the basis of this dualism one cannot salvage a single teaching of traditional Christian sexual morality. With respect to any prohibited action, the Church will be open to the apparently personalist objection that we human beings can perform the action while doing the only thing that it is morally important to do, namely to preserve a stance of respect for persons. If the Church persists in teaching the pro¬hibition, then this is possible only on the basis of some kind of physicalism, such as exaggerating the moral importance of not interfering with biological fertility, or exaggerating the moral importance of the genital organs fitting each other.
John Paul II has been a keen critic of this dualism; he understands why personalism, when joined to the person-body dualism, makes Catholic moral teaching appear to be through-and-through physicalistic. But this misfortune befalls personalism not because of personalism as such, but because of the spiritualistic distortion of it by the dualists. And so he had the wisdom in Veritatis Splendor to address the embodiment of the human person.
Indeed, from the beginning of his papacy John Paul II seems to have understood the crucial importance of a right understanding of personal embodiment for the proclamation of the Gospel in our time. Between 1979 and 1984 he devoted almost all of his Wednesday addresses to elaborating a philosophy and theology of human embodiment. He is drawing on this earlier work of his when we hear him in the encyclical challenging those who:
Frequently conceive of freedom as somehow in opposition to or in conflict with material and biological nature, over which it must progressively assert itself,” and for whom “nature becomes reduced to raw material for human activity and for its power . . . [so that] nature needs to be profoundly transformed, and indeed overcome by freedom, inasmuch as it represents a limitation and denial of freedom.
This extreme dualism of person and nature, when applied to man, can only have the effect of “treating the human body as a raw datum, devoid of any meaning and moral values until freedom has shaped it in accordance with its design.”
John Paul II proceeds to express succinctly the truth that is obscured by such dualism: “It is in the unity of body and soul that the person is the subject of his own moral acts.” He thinks that if we affirm this unity in the right way, then we can make nonphysicalistic sense, indeed personalist sense, of Catholic sexual teachings; we can explain them without making any concessions to physicalism.
For example, the Church is asked why genital sexuality should not be treated as a kind of raw biological material to be elaborated by the intentions of persons. She is asked why persons should not be at liberty sometimes to make it to mean light entertainment, and sometimes to make it mean committed spousal love—to give it whatever personal meaning one wants.
The answer according to the mind of John Paul II is that sexuality already is situated deep in the inner life of the person, in advance of all subjective intentions that men and women might bring to it; from the beginning it is more than merely biological; it is what it is in relation to the most intimate center in each person. We did not confer the meaning of intimate on physical sexuality; it is intimate by nature.
Even in the most irresponsible use of sex, this intimacy is presupposed, as one can see from the self-squandering that inevitably accompanies such sexual activity, as well as from the dishonesty of which men and women make themselves guilty as a result of saying more with their bodies than they subjectively mean. We have no power to undo or to annul the sexual embodiment of our intimate selves, no power to exercise our sexuality without engaging and exposing them, no power to exercise our sexuality casually without at the same time acting dishonestly.
As soon as we understand this we will understand the teaching of John Paul II about the inherent, inescapable moral disorder of certain kinds of sexual activity. It will become easy to see why there is no interior attitude that can keep us from defiling ourselves when we indulge in them. We will avoid them, not because we are obsessed with the physical intactness of our sexuality, but because we are drawing the moral consequences of existing as embodied persons.
Where many of the critics of Veritatis Splendor see John Paul II as still encumbered by physicalism and so as being inconsistent with his own personalism, John Paul II sees himself, and we too should see him, as announcing a Christian personalism that takes seriously the embodied condition of human persons.
Notice what follows once we retrieve the neglected middle term of John Paul II’s moral teaching. It becomes clear once and for all that the Catholic Church does not slander the human body, as so many allege; neither does she malign the sexuality of men and women: Just the contrary, she knows far better than any of her modern gnostic detractors just how intimately the body participates in the inner lives of persons and shares in the dignity of persons. It is they who malign the human body, treating it as something merely physiological, as something to be used and manipulated by persons: she alone knows how to witness to the truth that human persons are bodily persons.
Thus the Church not only opposes the materialism of the contemporary world, as everyone knows, but she opposes no less a certain spiritualism of it—a fact about her teaching that far too few people appreciate. The human person cannot be reduced to the material, but the human person can just as little be spiritualized and estranged from the material dimension of his being.
It is on the basis of this Christian personalism that John Paul II teaches the nations about right and wrong, good and evil.