For many months now, we have been exploring Pope St. John Paul II’s reflections on “original man” (i.e., man and woman before the Fall).  We have pondered original solitude, original unity, and original nakedness as well as the logic of gift, the spousal meaning of the body, and marriage as the primordial sacrament.  Before we go on to the next major topic of TOB, it may be useful to revisit the overall purpose and structure of the late pope’s reflections.

Through his pastoral ministry as a priest and bishop, John Paul II was well aware of the questions faced by men and women today:  Who am I?  Where did I come from?  Where am I going?  How can I find fulfillment?  What is love?  He was also well acquainted with the myriad ethical dilemmas facing modern man as our technological mastery of nature — including the human body — has grown exponentially in the last 100 years.  In the 1960s, he was deeply involved in the Church’s deliberations regarding contraception and served as a key theological advisor to Pope St. Paul VI who, in 1968, reiterated the Church’s perennial teaching on the immorality of contraception in his encyclical letter Humanae vitae.  However, Paul VI recognized that in order to receive this teaching fully, modern man needs to see how it corresponds to his nature and his good.  In this regard, Paul VI spoke of the need for “an integral vision of man” and sketched some aspects of such a vision.  However, he left it to his brother priests, bishops, and theologians to develop and expound such a vision to support not only the Church’s teaching against contraception but all of her teachings in the area of sexual ethics, which increasingly are held in suspicion or even scorn.

Desiring to help develop such “an integral vision of man” that could answer the existential questions of contemporary men and women and show them the truth and beauty of Catholic moral teaching, Pope St. John Paul II wrote his TOB reflections.  He used the phrase “theology of the body” as a working title for his reflections because it is impossible to understand what it means to be human without pondering the human body, which is intrinsic to who we are.  Even more, he saw in the Incarnation of Christ how the human body plays a central role in salvation history.  That is why he remarked,

“The fact that theology also includes the body should not astonish or surprise anyone who is conscious of the mystery and reality of the Incarnation.  Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh, the body entered theology… I would say, through the main door” (TOB 23:4, italics in original).

In TOB, Pope St. John Paul II followed the example of Christ who responded to questions from the Sadducees about divorce by appealing to “the beginning” and quoted the opening pages of Genesis.  For this reason, the late pope began TOB by going back to the beginning and pondering “original man” (i.e., man and woman before the Fall).  Up to this point, our explorations have focused on this portion of TOB.  However, the late pope’s reflections did not remain there.  To complete his “integral vision of man,” he again followed the example of Christ and reflected on “historical man” (i.e., fallen and redeemed) and “eschatological man” (i.e., in view of the resurrection and eternal glory).  After this three-fold reflection on man, the late pope provided an extensive reflection on the sacramentality of marriage before finally turning to matters of sexual ethics. 

Having highlighted the teachings on “original man” in these articles, we will next be delving into historical and eschatological man.  This deep dive into TOB will not only help us understand and embrace more fully the Church’s teachings on marriage and sexuality but will also show us how to live fulfilled lives in accord with God’s plan.  This is especially true for those called to marriage, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out:

“Those who seek the fulfillment of their own human and Christian vocation in marriage are called first of all to make of this ‘theology of the body’… the content of their lives and behavior” (TOB 23:5).

Let us all — married or otherwise — heed the saintly pope’s words and continue to ponder God’s beautiful design for us through the lens of TOB. 

Note:  This article is part of a series of reflections on Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.”

Continue Reading: The Four Harmonies

Dr. Sodergren’s Introduction to Theology of the Body: A Collection of Articles from the Catholic Telegraph

Written by, Dr. Andrew Sodergren, M.T.S., Psy.D.,
Director of Ruah Woods Psychological Services

(Article originally published in The Catholic Telegraph, September 2022 Issue, the official magazine of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati)

In last month’s reflection, we explored the state of our first parents at the beginning of time, which was marked by what I call the Four Harmonies — between man and God, within man himself, between one another, and with the rest of creation.  When we reflect on our own experiences, we quickly discover that, for each of us, these relationships are not marked by persistent harmony but in fact, significant disharmony.  This difference is the clearest indication that we exist in a different state than our first parents.  The primordial event that separates them from us and radically changed the state of our humanity is what we refer to as original sin. 

We are all familiar with the story in Genesis 3 in which the serpent tempted the woman to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, how she succumbed and induced the man to do likewise, and how their situation before God and before each other was altered for the worse.  We know that, prior to this tragedy, the man and woman did not experience the inclination to sin that we now experience.  They experienced the Four Harmonies and were filled with God’s grace.  How is it that they could fall into sin?  What was the nature of their sin? 

In our experience, temptations to sin come from a variety of sources, which Scripture and Tradition have summarized as the flesh, the world, and the devil.  That is, temptations to sin come from within our fallen human nature, from the negative influence of others, and from demonic influences.  However, our first parents, being filled with grace and possessing a fully integrated human nature, could only experience temptations from external sources.  Scripture identifies the source of their temptation as the “serpent” (Gen 3:1) who is later revealed to be “the great dragon… that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Rev 12:9) and whom Jesus refers to as “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44).  Satan and his demons, who were created good and “endowed with knowledge and freedom had been ‘put to the test’ so they could make their choice commensurate with their purely spiritual nature” (John Paul II, Sept. 10, 1986).  At the outset of creation, Satan and his demons “radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign” (CCC 392), preferring themselves to God out of pride.  In their consequent exile from heaven, they seek to subvert God’s reign wherever they can, and so tempted our first parents into sin.

The tempter succeeded in his effort to provoke humanity’s fall from grace by inducing doubt of God’s goodness.  In Genesis 3:4-5, Satan distorts the words of the Creator and sows seeds of suspicion and rebellion in our first parents.  Specifically, he plants the idea that God’s law, rather than being an expression of His wisdom and love, is merely an arbitrary imposition to ensure our subordination.  If we rebel, as the lie goes, we can become “like God,” no longer dependent on our Creator.  Rather, we can become gods ourselves.  It is as if Satan is saying to our first parents — and to all of us — that God is holding you back and you will never be fulfilled unless you take what you want and ignore His presumptively false warnings and apparently arbitrary rules.  Under Satan’s influence, God no longer looks like a loving Father and the bestower of gifts more numerous and immense than we could ever deserve.  Rather, He looks — in this demonic distortion — like an evil tyrant who is uninterested in our fulfillment, seeking only to control us while keeping His greatest blessings for Himself.

The tempter succeeded in undermining our first parents’ trust in their loving Father.  Through their disobedience, they rejected God’s love as well as their status as creatures, seeking rather to supplant the Creator.  As Pope St. John Paul II said, they gave in to “love of self to the point of contempt of God” and in so doing, “became the slave and accomplice of the rebellious spirits” (Sept. 10, 1986).  In subsequent reflections, we will continue to explore the tragedy of sin, especially its impact on the relationship between the sexes, as well as God’s unrelenting pursuit of our redemption. 

Continue Reading: The Tragedy of Sin: Part 2

Note:  This article is part of a series of reflections on Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.”

Dr. Sodergren’s Introduction to Theology of the Body: A Collection of Articles from the Catholic Telegraph

Written by, Dr. Andrew Sodergren, M.T.S., Psy.D.,
Director of Ruah Woods Psychological Services

(Article originally published in The Catholic Telegraph, November 2022 Issue, the official magazine of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati)

In our last two reflections, we have explored the nature of the sin that occurred at the beginning of human history when Satan tempted our first parents to mistrust their Creator and seek to supplant Him.  Being deceived, they grasped at divinity, thinking they could determine right from wrong and become gods themselves.  In so doing, they broke faith with God, rejected their creaturely status, and allowed sin to enter the visible world.  Let us reflect on the effects that this original sin had on our first parents and continues to have on their children.

Prior to the Fall, our first parents existed in a sinless state marked by the four harmonies.  When they accepted Satan’s lies and rebelled against God, those four harmonies were all disrupted.  As the fathers of the Second Vatican Council said, “refusing to acknowledge God as his beginning, man has disrupted also his proper relationship to his own ultimate goal as well as his whole relationship toward himself and others and all created things” (Gaudium et spes, no. 13). 

Most fundamentally, original sin effected a fundamental break in our first parents’ graced friendship with God.  “In that sin man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned Him” (Catechism, no. 398).  As representatives of the entire human race, our first parents’ act of rebellion resulted in the loss of divine grace and the preternatural gifts not only for themselves but also for their descendants. As John Paul II taught,

“The first human being (man and woman) received sanctifying grace from God not only for himself, but as founder of the human family, for all his descendants.  Therefore, through sin which set man in conflict with God, he forfeited grace (he fell into disgrace) even in regard to the inheritance of his descendants” (Sept. 10, 1986).

The first and most important wound of original sin, then, is our alienation from God.  However, the legacy and effects of our first parents’ sin remains extending to our very essence for we now inherit a human nature that is not only deprived of grace but is itself deeply wounded.  As the Catechism describes, original sin damages the essence of man in the unity of his body and soul.  In our fallen human nature, man’s intellect is darkened, his will is weakened, and his passions become rebellious.  Even the unity of body and soul is wounded such that we are now vulnerable to a myriad of sicknesses and disorders and will ultimately succumb to the separation of body and soul, which we call death.  Due to the uncorrupted quality of human nature and the abundance of God’s grace and gifts prior to sin, man was immune to these maladies and the inevitability of death. Clearly, our situation after the Fall is radically different. 

All of us inherit this fallen (i.e., wounded) human nature.  We experience sickness, decay, and eventual death.  We experience interior conflict rather than harmony and struggle to know what is right, freely choose it, and follow through in action while our impulses and desires pull us to go astray.  St. Paul expressed well our conflicted, fallen existence in his lament: 

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do…. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:15, 18b, 22-24).

All is not lost.  Our human nature, though wounded, is not wholly corrupt.  It is still essentially good and capable of being redeemed, sanctified, and glorified.  Just as we can join in St. Paul’s lament over our fallenness, we can also join with him when he immediately exclaims, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 7:25). For God did not abandon us to the power of sin and death but pursued man down the centuries, sparing nothing to bring about our Redemption, even taking up our human nature to heal and restore it and through His resurrection, re-open the path to eternal life. 

Note:  This article is part of a series of reflections on Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.”

Continue Reading: Original Shame – Part 1

Dr. Sodergren’s Introduction to Theology of the Body: A Collection of Articles from the Catholic Telegraph

Written by, Dr. Andrew Sodergren, M.T.S., Psy.D.,
Director of Ruah Woods Psychological Services

(Article originally published in The Catholic Telegraph, January 2023 Issue, the official magazine of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati)

As described in my previous article, Pope St. John Paul II regarded the emergence of shame in the wake of the original sin committed by our first parents as a “boundary experience” that demarcates original man and historical man.  Prior to this experience, man and woman were naked and felt no shame, but after their rebellion and fall from grace, they hid themselves from God and from each other.  Last month, we looked especially on the impact of original shame on man’s relationship with God.  Let’s now look at how it has impacted the relationship between the sexes. 

Original shame reflects a decisive shift in the relationship between man and woman.  Prior to original sin, we have seen that our first parents experienced a “fullness of consciousness of the meaning of the body” reflected in their experience of being naked without shame (TOB 12.3).  The purity of vision they enjoyed enabled them to see the inner reality of the person made in God’s image revealed through the body and moved them to affirm the dignity of the person in all their interactions.  Their desires, including for sexual union, were fully integrated with this purity of vision and intention toward one another.  Being in the state of original innocence and filled with God’s grace, their interior and interpersonal lives were fully ordered toward love and respect for the person. 

After their fall from grace, the situation of our first parents radically changed.  The man begins to experience shame in regard to the woman and vice versa.  This “reciprocal shame” “compels them to cover their nakedness, to hide their own bodies, to withdraw from man’s sight what constitutes the visible sign of femininity and from woman’s sight what constitutes the visible sign of masculinity” (TOB 28.1).  Pope St. John Paul II attributed this sexual shame to the emergence of concupiscence. 

Concupiscence refers to the inclination to sin that all of us experience because we inherit a fallen, wounded human nature.  It emerged in our first parents after original sin, which damaged the harmonious integration they had experienced within themselves and in their relationships with God, each other, and the rest of creation.  In particular, after original sin, “the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman become subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination” (CCC, 400). 

The disharmony within the human person naturally leads to disharmony between man and woman.  Their desires for one another are no longer properly ordered and instinctively guided by truth and love.  Rather, when they see one another’s bodies, they now see primarily the exterior features rather than the interior reality of the person.  The purity of vision that previously enabled them to always behold the dignity of the person now gives “up its place to the mere sensation of ‘sexuality’” (TOB 29.3).  With concupiscence, man and woman are now prone to see each other as objects of use.  Indeed, we struggle to see the inner reality and dignity of the person revealed by the body and tend to settle merely on the exterior features, judging and evaluating according to our selfish purposes. 

This situation gives rise to shame between man and woman in two ways.  First, we experience shame because we are aware that we are not in control of our desires toward each other and the bodily manifestations of these.  We experience sexual feelings and respond to sexual signals even when we do not will it.  Shame moves us to hide this inner state of disorder and the bodily manifestations of it from one another.  Secondly, shame emerges to protect us from the now disordered gaze of others.  Sensing that others may see us in a disordered way, shame takes on a protective function, moving us to conceal the sexual features of our bodies and exercise modesty.  We will delve more into this positive, protective aspect of shame next time.

Note:  This article is part of a series of reflections on Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.”

Continue Reading: Original Shame – Part 3

Written by, Dr. Andrew Sodergren, M.T.S., Psy.D.,
Director of Ruah Woods Psychological Services

(Article originally published in The Catholic Telegraph, March 2023 Issue, the official magazine of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati)

In recent articles, we have explored the emergence of shame in our first parents and all subsequent human beings after original sin.  We saw how the emergence of concupiscence results in the experience of reciprocal shame by man and woman, which moves us to conceal the sexual features of our bodies from one another.  Because concupiscence has been born in man’s heart, we are aware that when we look on each other’s bodies, we do not easily and immediately see the person in his or her fullness.  Our eyes have, in a sense, been darkened by sin such that our vision may only take in the exterior features of the body, which we judge and evaluate as to the potential pleasure or usefulness it may bring.

This awareness of our concupiscence gives rise to shame, which moves us to conceal the sexual features of the body so that we do not become objects of others’ disordered desires.  This experience of shame has nothing to do with seeing sexuality as bad or dirty. Rather, shame understood in this way reminds us of our dignity and the sacredness of human sexuality by protecting us from being used as mere objects.  This form of shame is a healthy building block for the virtue of modesty.

Understanding the important role of shame in the lives of fallen human beings also sheds light on the problems of shamelessness so evident today.  One form of shamelessness involves the normalization of lust (i.e., disordered sexual desire).  When lustful actions and attitudes are given approval or even celebrated, an attitude of shamelessness is being expressed and promoted:  the human body is seen only as a sexual object for use without any regard for the person.  Another form of shamelessness is when the human body is portrayed in such a way that its sexual appeal is accentuated above and beyond the value of the person.  This can be in forms of dress, behavior, and in artistic representations.  The most common example of this today is pornography.

In TOB, Pope St. John Paul II contrasts pornographic representations of the human body with other artistic uses of the nude human form (see TOB 60-63).  The difference between porn and an appropriate artistic rendering of a naked human being originates in the intention of the artist.  In the latter case, the intention is to depict the human person revealed through his body in a dignified way whereas in the former, the intention is merely to present an anonymous human body as an object of lustful desire.  Indeed, pornography obscures the reality of the person and overaccentuates the sexual features of the body.  In this way, it turns the human body — and therefore the human person — into a mere object (i.e., an impersonal thing) to be used for selfish pleasure and even a commodity to be bought and sold. 

The Catechism condemns pornography in no uncertain terms saying that it “offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act.”  It goes on to say that pornography

“does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public) since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others.  It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense” (no. 2354). 

Indeed, the Church’s opposition to pornography is so absolute, that the Catechism exhorts governments to make it illegal:  “Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials” (no. 2354).  Given all that Pope St. John Paul II has taught us about the dignity of the human person and the spousal meaning of the body, this should come as no surprise.  Next month, I will further diagnose the problems of pornography with the help of modern psychology.

Note:  This article is part of a series of reflections on Pope St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.”

Continue Reading: Why all the Fuss Over Porn?

Written by, Dr. Andrew Sodergren, M.T.S., Psy.D.,
Director of Ruah Woods Psychological Services

(Article originally published in The Catholic Telegraph, May 2023 Issue, the official magazine of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati)