Purity allows us to see as God sees —
to see others, not as objects
to be used, but as sons and daughters of God.

Theology of the body and purity of heart

By David Vincent Meconi

In one of the more renowned nights of revelry, the Greek playwright Aristophanes used his turn to speak about eros to illustrate how sexual differentiation was the result of human arrogance. There used to be a type of human person, he recounted, “made up of both male and female. These beings were great in strength and power and had heavenly ambitions. They made an attempt on the gods . . . So Zeus and the other gods and goddesses met to discuss what had to be done. They could not just strike the humans with thunderbolts and wipe them off the face of the earth, because that would eliminate the worship and sacrifices they receive . . . Zeus spoke up with an idea: ‘I have a plan that would save the humans but also stop their misbehaving, they will give up their misdeeds and lose their strength against us. I shall cut each of them in two.’” With one clever stroke, Zeus thus enervated humanity’s rebellious nature as well as doubled the sacrifices offered to Olympus! Instead of worrying about the things of heaven, “humans now longed for their other half, throwing their arms around each other . . . seeking the other half that matches.”1 Unlike Genesis 1:27, “God created man in his image, in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them,” the Greeks saw “male and female” as the consequence of hubris, a result of impiety.

Hans Urs von Balthasar once argued that, “Because of her unique structure, the Catholic Church is perhaps humanity’s last bulwark of genuine appreciation of the difference between the sexes.”2 In the following article, I would like to show how this “genuine appreciation” for the human person as male and female finds a splendid voice in John Paul’s reflections on the human person. His theology of the body represents a Christian anthropology aimed against much of contemporary culture’s disavowal of the goodness of gender. As John Paul sees it, male and female are God’s intended “ways of ‘being a body . . . which complete each other. They are two complementary dimensions of self-consciousness and self-determination and, at the same time, two complementary ways of being conscious of the meaning of the body.”3 The pope’s metaphysics of the human person has clear ethical implications. If true communion is made possible only through the beloved’s otherness, lust discards this otherness and reduces the “beloved” to an object to be used solely for one’s interests. Lust, on the other hand, echoes Aristophanes’ myth in that disordered sexual desires and consequent acts arise when fallen sexual libido sees the other solely as an extension of self; the lustful man seeks not a wholly other but a way merely to slake his own self. The gift of purity of heart is thus needed to restore the original communion intended for humanity. Thus the first part of this essay will examine what John Paul means by a theology of the body and, second, how his thinking has shaped recent teaching on the virtue of purity. The 21st century no doubt holds many battles but perhaps none more important than the purity of heart to which John Paul implores all people of good will.

John Paul’s Theology of the Body
Surely more than an interesting historical footnote, John Paul II chose to dedicate the first years of his pontificate to deepening the Church’s understanding of the human body. From 1979 to 1984, he used the Wednesday Address to reflect on the human incarnation as evidenced in Genesis.4 With von Balthasar, John Paul realized early on that the Church was swiftly becoming the “last bulwark” in defending the goodness and irreducibility of male and female against those who maintain that there are no objective natures, only capricious names given to things by those with the power to do so. In other words, to use the distinction first expressed by Plato in his critique of the self-seeking sophists who wandered through Athens separating reality from concept and thereby making the “weaker argument the stronger,” there is no reality independent of the human mind (physis), only labels imposed by the cunning of those who control language (nomos). This distinction is evident throughout much of today’s academic jargon, especially when it comes to discussion of gender and human sexuality. Take, for example, feminist author Julia Kristeva’s statement that “Woman is a valid concept politically, but not philosophically. There are still many goals which women can achieve: freedom of abortion and contraception, daycare centers for children, equality on the job, etc. Therefore we must use ‘we are women’ as an advertisement or slogan for our demands. On a deeper level, however, a woman cannot ‘be.’”5 That is, “woman” may in fact prove to be a convenient moniker in the political sphere (nomos) but reflects nothing in nature (physis). Against this type of reductionism, John Paul offers the world a view of human embodiment that sees male and female as complementary and irreducible gifts from which human dignity and freedom spring.

He accordingly opened his pontificate by searching the first pages of Genesis because there, he believes, are found the truths every human carries within. The drama depicted in Genesis is replayed in every human life and, as such, is not some story describing a past event but an ongoing narrative expressing the deepest realities of each human person [TB 85]. Let us likewise turn to Genesis where John Paul sees three original experiences of the human person: solitude, unity, and nakedness.

Adam, made in God’s image, finds himself alone and thus experiences a unique solitude hitherto unknown. Despite the obvious goodness of the Creator and the expressed goodness of the rest of creation, Adam is not yet secure; ironic, even in Eden Adam is not fully at home. A spirit like God but embodied like the other animals, Adam finds himself singularly isolated. Paradoxically, the one God made to be like him (Gen. 1:27) is not satisfied with him. What sense does one make of the fact that the man made flesh experiences a certain “lack” in his spiritual relationship with God: “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18)? This original solitude, stresses the Holy Father, is not one “caused by the lack of woman” [TB 35] and as such, is not dependent on gender; both men and woman, each and every human person, experiences this solitude in Adam.

This isolation from the rest of reality is due to the human person’s unique status as a border creature between heaven and earth: a person, and thus spiritual and hence capable of thought and deep interpersonal communion like God; but also carnal and embodied, “formed out of the ground” (Gen. 2:19) like the other animals over which he has been given stewardship. Adam’s loneliness is due not to his spiritual nature, for God and the angels could in no way ever said to be lonely; nor is his loneliness due to his carnal flesh, for the other animalia around him are apparently unable to know such profound solitude. Only as an embodied spirit, can Adam be “in search of his own entity. It could be said he is in search of the definition of himself” [TB 36]. In this desire for wholeness, Adam first comes to realize that his longing for completion arises out of a prior self-determination and self-possession.

Adam experiences that only he wants and that no one else can search for him. In this search for wholeness, Adam realizes that he is the “highest expression of the divine gift, because he bears within him the interior dimension of the gift. With it he brings into the world his particular likeness to God, with which he transcends and dominates also his ‘visibility’ in the world, his corporality, his masculinity or femininity, or nakedness. A reflection of this likeness is also the primordial awareness of the nuptial meaning of the body, pervaded by original innocence” [TB 76]. Adam’s interiority is realized as an inviolability. He comes to realize that everything he names and rules can be used for another’s benefit, but that as embodied subject, as the enfleshed imago Dei, he is solely “made for himself” and can thus never be used as an object.6 In his solitude Adam comes to see that, in the words of a younger Cardinal Wojtya, the human person is an alter incommunicabilis, that is, “not capable of transmission, not transferable .…The incommunicable, the inalienable, in a person is intrinsic to that person’s inner-self, to the power of self-determination, free will.”7 This experience of the solitary self prepares Adam to love Eve and not to use her, as he had been using the rest of creation before her arrival; his solitude readies him to receive Eve as another subject [TB 36]. In his search, Adam comes to sees that the part of himself that distinguishes him from the rest of creation, his longing to share who he is (communicatio), is completed only by another like him (communio).

From within his solitude, Adam realizes an insecurity, manifested in a desire to give himself fully, to give himself in both body and soul. He realizes that he, “willed by the Creator in this way from ‘the beginning,’ can find himself only in the disinterested giving of himself” [TB 64]. With Eve, then, the second original experience is inaugurated: unity. To show Adam how and for whom he is made, God creates another embodied person from within his search. Or, as Kenneth Schmitz has put so well, “God breaks open the original solitude, not from without, as the parade of animals had failed to do, but from within humanity itself .… The solitude that distinguishes man from other creatures remains, but man will receive appropriate filling from within that solitude. And so, God forms another being who possesses that same mark of solitude which bears the image and likeness of God: He fashions Woman.”8 It is thus through and with this woman that Adam comes to understand that the “I” he realized in his solitude is consummated only through another.

This is why John Paul insists that the human person is made for marriage [TB 75]. That is, the human person finds true fulfillment only in the other, in the communio personarum for which Adam’s search yearned: “at last, this one is bone of my bones and the flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). Adam now sees what his solitude was for, what imaging the Tri-Personal God truly means: communion. Henceforth, “finding of oneself in giving oneself becomes the source of a new giving of oneself” [TB 71]. As this reciprocal other, Eve is not only the answer to Adam’s solitude, it is she, through her femininity, who also shows him the meaning of his masculinity.

Genesis depicts this distinguishing of humanity into male and female as the only distinction among the first humans originally willed by God. Why? Through John Paul’s eyes, Scripture shows a deepening awareness in its new term for Adam after the arrival of Eve. He is no longer merely ’adam, the human person, but he now understands himself as ’is, man, and she as ’issah, woman [TB 43]. It is Eve, the other enfleshed person, which brings Adam to this new awareness: “The body which expresses femininity manifests the reciprocity and communion of persons. It expresses it by means of the gift as the fundamental characteristic of personal existence. This is the body — a witness to creation as a fundamental gift, and so a witness to Love as the source from which this same giving springs. Masculinity and femininity — namely, sex — is the original sign of a creative donation and an awareness on the part of man, male-female, of a gift lived in an original way” [TB 61-62]. Gender distinction is thus the way God originally provided for humanity to enjoy the deepest, most intimate relationship knowable. It is in this way that the original experience of unity is inextricably linked to God’s first commandment to humanity, “Be fertile and multiply,” as well as to his second, “and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). Adam and Eve’s communio has a teleological significance outside of themselves: pure love is intended to point to the begetting of new others, of new loves. The communion of persons is intended not only for procreation but will also prove to be the basis upon which a civilization of love is built. 

This first human love is realized in a complete self-giving and transparency between persons. John Paul sees this deferential love represented by the first couple’s nakedness, the mark of original innocence and the third original experience: “The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). The absence of shame indicates that in their nakedness, Adam and Eve see each other precisely as enfleshed others worthy of nothing other than love. They see each other as integral harmonies between body and soul and in no way desire to separate the two. John Paul calls this the “pure value” of the body and sex. This purity allows one to intuit the nuptial meaning of the human body and live in a state free from shame which “does not know an interior rupture and opposition between what is spiritual and what is sensible. It does not know a rupture and opposition between what constitutes the person humanly and what in man is determined by sex — what is male and female” [TB 57]. Without the clouds of sin, the human person sees the other as he or she is: an incarnate subject exacting a response of love.

The nakedness of Adam and Eve represent humanity as it is intended to be: two incarnate manifestations of the divine image. Adam and Eve are unashamed of their mutual openness and vulnerability because they know they are not being reduced to an object in the other’s eyes. They know that their bodies are not seen as something to be used and they, in this confidence, are thus able to share all they are with the other. This is how the incommunicability Adam knew in his solitude is now realized communally. In their communion, Adam and Eve not only maintain their otherness, they fulfill their individuality. Bodily sex is what marks the other precisely as other and it is this irreducible difference between “male” and “female” which makes original unity, communion, possible. Adam and Eve are able to see each other as “other” because lust had not yet corrupted them to see one another as a mere object. 

But how did the loss of purity destroy this communio personarum? With these three original experiences in mind, one can more easily see the deleterious effects of lust. It will thus be valuable to conclude by examining how lust disordered our original innocence and, more importantly, to see how the virtue of purity seeks to restore harmony between the sexes. Our first parents knew an original purity recoverable only in the Second Adam and Eve and it is here that all Catholic teaching on the human body tends.

Purity of heart and lust as the denial of the other
Corresponding to the three original experiences outlined above are three primary effects of lust. The first is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s stress on lust’s opposition to the incommunicability Adam comes to experience in his search for self-identity. The Catechism treats “The Purification of the Heart” primarily under the Ninth Commandment [CCC 2514-33] and sums up purity this way: “Purity of heart requires the modesty which is patience, decency, and discretion. Modesty protects the intimate center of the person” [CCC 2533]. After the fall, modesty is required to “protect” that untransferable “center” of the human person, that place of deep awareness and intimacy with God which Adam realized in his solitude. Purity of heart enables the human person to see the other as inalienable; it allows a man to see his beloved as “made for herself” and not only for him.

Lust, on the other hand, destroys the beloved’s “otherness” and, like Aristophanes’ primal hermaphrodite, sees the other person as a mere extension of itself. Or as John Paul states, lust forces the other to become “only an object of appropriation, and not a gift” [TB 128]. How so? Lust literally denies the other status as a unique individual in that it desires not what it can do for “the other” but what can be done for itself. It disorders the mind in such a way that male and female are no longer irreducible natures to which one’s desires must properly correspond in love, but convenient objects for one’s sexual wants [TB 151]. Profaning and sweeping the intended beloved away, lust becomes an end unto itself. C.S. Lewis describes this disorder bluntly: “We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus.”9 Only pure love can want “the other” with all of his or her desires, hopes, dreams, fears and fragility.

It is in this way that lust is moribund and thus opposed to the life-giving unity intended for human love, the second original experience. Unlike true love which seeks nothing for itself (1 Cor.13:5a), lust seeks only itself; lust seeks no end other than its own insatiable cravings. Against the divine command to order all sexual activity toward a mutuality open to new life, lust wants nothing but its own self. Coming out of the same phenomenological tradition as the Holy Father, the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, treats lust as a voluptuosity which “does not come to gratify desire; it is this desire itself. This is why voluptuosity is not only impatient, but is impatience itself, breathes impatience and chokes with impatience, surprised by its end, for it goes without going to an end.”10 This is what the Catechism means when it defines lust as the “disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes” [CCC 2351]. It soon becomes obvious how purity of heart’s protection of the inalienability of the other is intimately related to its ability to see the true nature of sexual union.

Only purity of heart is able to recapture and respect humanity’s original unity. Refusing to reduce the other to a mere extension of its own wants, purity recovers the nuptial meaning of the body. The pure of heart see original unity as “closely bound up with the blessing of fertility” [TB 78]. In Familiaris Consortio, for example, John Paul situates the sin of artificial birth control here: “Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life, but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called to give itself in personal totality” (§32). Thus one way to understand lust is any sexual act that reduces the other to an object and thereby separates sexual pleasure from sexual procreation. Is this not exactly how the Catechism treats offenses against purity: the seeking of sexual satisfaction apart from the nuptial, fecund, nature of sexual activity? After all, this is what lustful eyes, masturbation, fornication, pornography, homosexual sex, and artificial contraception [CCC 2351-59] all have in common: intending to or not, the persons involved destroy the true meaning of the body and thus of male and female by seeing sexual activity in terms of their own disordered pleasure and not in terms of a mutual, life-giving gift between embodied subjects [CCC 2337]. In denying the intended “otherness” of sexual relations, the sterility of these actions becomes obvious. Lust implodes, thereby destroying the nuptial meaning of the human body, exploiting the “other” by reducing him or her to a mere extension of a self-centered libido.

Finally, it is obvious how lust thus sees in human nakedness, not an incarnation of personhood, but an opportunity for its own satisfaction. Nakedness is no longer a sign of self-giving and complete transparency between husband and wife but an occasion of fear and shame. Lust first manifests itself as a distrust pitting human persons, originally made for each other, against each other. Contrast the purity of Genesis 2:24-25: “. . . and the two become one body. The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame” with the understanding of nakedness after the Fall: “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself” (Gen. 3:10). Whereas lust distorts human vision so as to see the body apart from its intended role as the spirit’s manifestation, purity allows us to see “according to God, to accept others as ‘neighbors’; it lets us perceive the human body — ours and our neighbor’s — as a temple of the Holy Spirit, a manifestation of divine beauty” [CCC 2519]. Whereas lust sees in nakedness an outlet for its own pleasure, purity sees the “flesh” and the “person” as one. The pure of heart see the flesh for what it is intended to be: a sign of the spirit (TB 335). As a gift of the Holy Spirit, purity allows us to see as God sees: to see others not as objects to be used but as sons and daughters of God.

André Malraux, de Gaulle’s Ministère de la Culture, is reported to have anticipated that, “The 21st century will be religious, or it will not be at all,” and purity of heart is proving to be the needed virtue of this century.11 Whether it be as private as the Internet or as public as the Oval Office or the United Nations, this century will witness further attempts to erode human dignity as well as concentrated legal efforts to redefine gender, sexuality, and marriage, by destroying the vital meaning of the human body. With a sterile sex based on selfish cravings slowly becoming the accepted norm, the true meaning of the human person and human sexuality must be renewed and defended. This has to be done in a variety of ways but it is clear that this task to purify and safeguard the social climate [CCC 2525] falls primarily to all parents, as well as to intellectuals, religious, priests, and anyone who labors on behalf of human life.

Alone, the self is sterile. Only in communion is life encountered: from the Trinity to the human, it is only in mutual self-giving that persons know goodness and love. Thus the foundation of the moral life consists in the ability to see enfleshed subjects as others and to respect this otherness and incommunicability of the human person. Lust seeks to destroy this dignity, reducing the other to a commodity whose value is appropriated by my interests and desires; it is this kind of lust, Aquinas knew, that “above all debauches the human mind.”12 Lust is unable to see the other for who he or she truly is; it denies the hetero, the otherness, constitutive of true communion.

John Paul II has bequeathed us a rich and profound understanding of human love. Fortunately this vision has taken root in many encyclicals as well as in the Catechism, the guiding lights for Christian thought in the upcoming centuries. His theology of the body seeks to recover what was lost through human lust, presenting purity as the way to rediscover true meaning of human sexuality and the communio personarum intended from the beginning. Purity of heart thus enables the human person to see as God sees, to become one with Him in thought and deed. All great thought has maintained that temperance in the area of sexual impulse and desire is the foundation upon which the other virtues are developed; as such, it may not be the greatest virtue but it is necessary for building the others. As Plato in the Republic knew, without self-mastery, the proper understanding and use of food, drink, and sex — but, above all, sex (449d) — as its foundation, a city and the people therein will no doubt crumble. We must build the foundations of the moral life not on the shifting sand of accepted trends but on rock (Luke 6:46-49). As the rock of this New Millennium, the Holy Father invites us to look at the original experiences of the first Adam and Eve to understand not only who human persons and human communion were intended to be, but what is now attainable in the New Adam and the New Eve. 

1. Plato’s Symposium, 190b-191d.
2. “Women Priests? A Marian Church in a fatherless and motherless culture,” as in Communio 22 (Spring, 1995) 168-69.
3. John Paul II, Theology of the Body (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1997) 48; hereafter, all references from these talks will be given in the body of the essay as [TB] and page number.
4. George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II (New York: Harper Collins, 1999) 326-43.
5. From an interview with Kristeva as found in New French Feminisms, ed., Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981) 157. Unfortunately, Kristeva wants to be “named” woman whereas in the Christian account, Adam’s “naming” of Eve (Gen. 3:20) is a result of the fall and man’s unjust tendency to dominate and control woman.
6. Gaudium et Spes 24 is a key to much of what John Paul II says in these reflections and is the key to the principle of personalism; or as he states in Mulieris Dignitatem §29: “Only a person can love and only a person can be loved. This statement is primarily ontological in nature, and it gives rise to an ethical affirmation. Love is an ontological and ethical requirement of the person. The person must be loved, since love alone corresponds to what the person is.” 
7. Karol Wojtya, Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Ignatius Press [1960] 1993) 24. For more, see John Crosby’s excellent, “The Incommunicability of Human Persons,” The Thomist (July, 1993) 403-42 and Mary Shivanandan, Crossing the Threshold of Love: A New Vision of Marriage (Catholic University of America Press, 1999).
8. Kenneth L. Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama: The Philosophical Anthropology of Karol Wojtya/John Paul II (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993) 101. TB 65 as well
9. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960) 134-35. 
10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) 259-60.
11. See Robert Royal’s wonderful commentary, “The New Maturity,” Crisis (July/August, 2000) 56-57.
12. Summa Theologiae, II-II, 153, 1.