John Paul II’s “theology of the body,” which he laid out in 130 general audience addresses between 1979 and 1984, is arguably the most creative Christian response to the sexual revolution and its “pulverization” of the human person to be articulated in the twentieth century. Its philosophical core is Wojtyla’s claim that what we might call a “Law of the Gift” is built into the very structure of human being-in-the-world. Because of that, self–giving, not self–assertion, is the royal road to human flourishing.
This deep truth of the human condition, which John Paul believed could be demonstrated by a careful analysis of human moral agency, had enormous implications for meeting the challenge of the sexual revolution. Sex, as often experienced in today’s sexual free-fire zone, is instinctive and impersonal. But that kind of sex does not rise above the level of animal sexuality, which is also instinctive and impersonal. Sex that is an expression of self–giving love, not a use of the other for temporary gratification, is the only sex worthy of human beings. Chastity, on this analysis, is what John Paul called the “integrity of love,” the virtue that makes it possible for one to love another as a person. We are made free, Wojtyla argues, so that we can make a free gift of ourselves to others; we are free so that we can love freely, and thus love truly. Genuine freedom—the freedom that disposes of itself in self–giving—is the context of a genuinely humanistic sexual ethic.
The theological core of John Paul’s “theology of the body” is his profoundly sacramental apprehension of reality. Our embodiedness as male and female is not an accident of evolutionary biology, he insists. Rather, that embodiedness and the mutuality built into it express some of the deepest truths of the world, and teach us something about the world’s Creator. John Paul even goes so far as to propose that sexual love within the bond of marital fidelity is an icon of the interior life of God the Holy Trinity, a community of mutual self–donation and mutual receptivity. Thus sexual love, within the bond of Christian marriage, is an act of worship.
George Weigel John Paul II and the Crisis of Humanism
Pope John Paul’s lectures on the theology of the Body have been re-published as Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body
If JP II’s Theology of the Body is completely new to you, you could try Christopher West or even Peter Kreeft
