COLUMN

THE BODY PROPHETIC

By Laura Garcia

The trouble with utilitarian theories of the human person, in the eyes of the Church, is not that they value the body too highly but that they don't value it highly enough. The human body has a divine mission; it is meant to make love visible in the world.

Nothing succeeds like excess, we're told, and many of our contemporaries seem bent on proving this maxim. To outward appearances, Americans are the last group one would accuse of Manichean contempt for the body. Asceticism is out; big-screen TVs are in. How can a society be guilty of disdain for the body when it bestows such lavish attention on it? The answer is simple: the body has been drained of meaning. It has come to be seen in purely animal terms, as a bundle of appetites demanding to be fed, a mere source of pleasures and pains and sensations. When twentieth century thinkers eliminated the vertical relationship between man and God, they didn't always foresee how far humanity would fall as a result. Without openness to the Absolute, the spiritual dimension of persons gradually withered until it began to seem an embarrassing relic of earlier times. Philosophical garage sales were frequent. Reducing the human person to nothing more than a body, these thinkers reduced the body to nothing more than an elaborate organic machine.

Among the greatest purveyors of thus penurious picture of humanity were the modern utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Since persons are simply bodies, they reasoned, the good for persons is the same as the good for animals in general, namely, pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Good acts maximize pleasure and acts that fail to do so are bad. In our more egalitarian times, descendants of the utilitarians allow for alternative preferences (e.g., for pain over pleasure), and so claim that the human good is simply to maximize the satisfaction of desires, regardless of what these happen to be. Not much guidance can be given within this view as to which desires to promote first, but in practice the most noble tend to lose out to the most urgent. At the least, any attempt to place obstacles in the path to sensual self-fulfillment meets with alarmed outrage. It blatantly interferes with one's right, in fact one's duty, to satisfy one's felt urges.

Some see Christian teaching on sexuality as just this sort of interference, and raise themselves to great heights of moral indignation over Church prohibitions against sexual activity outside of marriage. Celibacy is simply a cipher for those of this self-actualizing mentality. Any satisfying of an appetite that doesn't prevent more urgent or more important appetites from being satisfied has to be good, for the utilitarian. So why would the Church oppose extra-marital sex, masturbation, homosexual acts? The only answer that occurs to some is that the Church abhors the human body, and sexuality along with it. To love the body is to indulge it.

Any author writing under the name "Eurydice" for the July 1996 issue of Spin magazine (published by Bob Guccione, Jr.) voices the hope that "the Church will one day stop despising the human body." In her opinion, "Like a pornographer... the Pope defines sex as degradation." No wonder, then, that the Church produces so many priests who are lost souls, sociopathic sacrifices to the Catholic cause of image control. Clearly the sensible view, for Eurydice, is that maximal license in sexual matters is an unqualified good. On this point, it is she and not the Pope who stands with the pornographers.

The Church does have a response to utilitarianism, of course, but it is also worth noting what the friends of the "just do it" philosophy have wrought in our culture. Leaving aside its tendency to promote superficiality, egoism, and greed, the theory that persons = bodies spells disaster for women. Declare that a woman simply is her body and that pursuing one's felt appetites is a good, even a duty, and women will soon find themselves in the culture from hell. Pornography triumphs as the sober truth about women after all: they are mainly "boy toys."

Even without these sad consequences, the utilitarian view would ring false. Human persons are more than their bodies. They are thinking subjects capable of free decisions, open to internal relations of knowledge and love, even the love of God. Unlike the body of an animal, the body of a human being is "a body that expresses the person," as John Paul II puts it in The Original Unity of Man and Woman (St. Paul Books), p. 109. When the first man is created, according to the Genesis account, it is his body that makes him aware that he is alone, that he is unlike every other creature that God has made. This very awareness of his solitude also reveals his need for an expectation of another like himself. With the creation of the woman, it is as though humanity is formed again, as a communion of persons (p. 76).

The bodies of men and women, in their attraction to and joy in one another, play a prophetic role, according to the Holy Father. Because of their complementarity, our bodies reveal that we are made to be a gift, to express love to another. But the human body also reveals the one standing before me as one like me, a self, a person, whose freedom must also be respected. So the gift of ourselves must be freely bestowed and freely accepted if it is not to violate the dignity of the other. When we raise our eyes from a merely naturalistic account of human beings to their status as creatures of God, we realize that man and woman don't simply desire one another, rather, they are entrusted to one another. "It seems that the second narrative of creation has assigned to man 'from the beginning' the function of the one who, above all, receives the gift. 'From the beginning' the woman is entrusted to his eyes, to his consciousness, to his sensitivity, to his 'heart'.... The man not only accepts the gift, but at the same time is received as a gift by the woman, in the revelation of the interior spiritual essence of his masculinity" (pp. 133-134).

For the Pope, sex is all about giving, not getting. The vendors of degradation are all on the other side. Those who willingly forego marriage for the sake of Christ's kingdom do so not out of contempt for sexuality but out of a desire to give themselves wholly to God, and so wholly to others for God's sake. In its truest form, celibacy is not a refusal to give oneself, but a willingness to be, as it were, nothing but a gift.

The trouble with utilitarian theories of the human person, in the eyes of the Church, is not that they value the body too highly but that they don't value it highly enough. The human body has a divine mission; it is meant to make love visible in the world. In the Incarnation, God chose it for that very purpose, and it is because of this truth that the body has entered theology, as John Paul II puts it, through the front door. It has been taken up into the science of the divine. Sexual union is meant to be a sacrament, a window on the total gift of self among the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A higher role for the human body can hardly be conceived. Eurydice thinks "it's high time for the Vatican to develop a theory of sexuality." Maybe one day she'll catch up with the Pope.

Laura Garcia, a regular Catholic Dossier columnist, is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, wife of Jorge, mother of four, and one of the most eloquent pro-life speakers in the nation.