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GENERAL AUDIENCE OF WEDNESDAY, 4 FEBRUARY
During the course of the 4 February weekly audience, held as usual
in the Paul VI Hall, the Pope continued his catechesis on the theology of
the human body, delivering the following address.
1. In our last considerations last Wednesday on purity according to the
teaching of St. Paul, we called attention to the text of the First Letter
to the Corinthians. In it the Apostle presents the Church as the Body of
Christ. That offers him the opportunity to reason as follows about the
human body: "...God arranged the organs in the body, each one of them, as
he chose.... On the contrary, the parts of the body which seem to be
weaker are indispensable, and those parts of the body which we think less
honourable we invest with the greater honour, and our unpresentable parts
are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not
require. But God has so composed the body, giving the greater honour to
the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body, but that the
members may have the same care for one another" (1 Cor 12:18, 22-25).
Man "is" that body
2. The Pauline description of the human body corresponds to the reality
which constitutes it, so it is a realistic description. At the same time,
a very fine thread of evaluation is intermingled with the realism of this
description, conferring on it a deeply evangelical, Christian value.
Certainly, it is possible to describe the human body, to express its truth
with the objectivity characteristic of the natural sciences. But such a
description—with
all its precision—cannot
be adequate (that is, commensurable with its object). It is not just a
question of the body (intended as an organism, in the somatic sense) but
of man, who expresses himself through that body and in this sense is, I
would say, that body. So that thread of evaluation, seeing that it is a
question of man as a person, is indispensable in describing the human
body. Furthermore, it is necessary to say how right this evaluation is.
This is one of the tasks and one of the perennial themes of the whole of
culture: of literature,
sculpture, painting, and also of dancing, of theatrical works, and finally
of the culture of everyday life, private or social. This is a subject that
would be worth dealing with separately.
Not "scientific"
3. The Pauline description in First Corinthians 12:18-25 certainly does
not have a scientific meaning. It does not present a biological study on
the human organism or on human somatics. From this point of view it is a
simple pre-scientific description, a concise one made up of barely a few
sentences. It has all the characteristics of common realism and is
unquestionably sufficiently realistic. However, what determines its
specific character, what especially justifies its presence in Holy
Scripture, is precisely that evaluation intermingled with the description
expressed in its narrative-realistic tissue. It can be said with certainty
that this description would not be possible without the whole truth of
creation and also without the whole truth of the redemption of the body,
which Paul professes and proclaims. It can also be affirmed that the
Pauline description of the body corresponds precisely to the spiritual
attitude of respect for the human body, due because of the holiness (cf. 1
Th 4:3-5, 7-8) which springs from the mysteries of creation and
redemption. The Pauline description is equally far from Manichaean
contempt for the body and from the various manifestations of a
naturalistic cult of the body.
Echo of innocence
4. The author of the First Letter to the Corinthians 12:18-25 has
before his eyes the human body in all its truth, and so the body permeated
in the first place (if it can be expressed in this way) by the whole
reality of the person and of his dignity. At the same time, it is the body
of historical man, male and female, that is, of that man who, after sin,
was conceived, so to speak, within and by the reality of the man who had
had the experience of original innocence. In Paul's expressions about the
unpresentable parts of the human body, as also about the ones which seem
to be weaker or the ones which we think less honourable, we seem to find
again the testimony of the same shame that the first human beings, male
and female, had experienced after original sin. This shame was imprinted
on them and on all the generations of historical man as the fruit of the
three forms of lust (with particular reference to the lust of the flesh).
And at the same time there is imprinted on this shame—as
has already been highlighted in the preceding analyses—a certain
"echo" of man's original innocence itself: a "negative," as it were, of
the image whose "positive" had been precisely original innocence.
Respect springs from shame
5. The Pauline description of the human body seems to confirm perfectly
our previous analyses. There are, in the human body, "unpresentable
parts," not because of their somatic nature (since a scientific and
physiological description deals with all the parts and organs of the human
body in a neutral way, with the same objectivity), but only and
exclusively because there exists in man himself that shame which perceives
some parts of the body as unpresentable and causes them to be considered
such. At the same time, that shame seems to be at the basis of what the
Apostle writes in the First Letter to the Corinthians: "Those parts of the
body which we think less honourable we invest with the greater honour, and
our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty" (1 Cor 12:23).
Hence it can be said that from shame springs respect for one's own body,
respect which Paul, in First Thessalonians (4:4), urges us to keep. This
control of the body in holiness and honour is considered essential for the
virtue of purity.
Interior harmony
6. Returning again to the Pauline description of the body in First
Corinthians 12:18-25, we wish to draw attention to the following fact.
According to Paul, that particular effort which aims at respecting the
human body, and especially its weaker or unpresentable parts, corresponds
to the Creator's original plan, that is, to that vision which Genesis
speaks of, "God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very
good" (Gn 1:31). Paul writes: "God has so composed the body, giving the
greater honour to the inferior parts, that there may be no discord in the
body, but that the members may have the same care for one another" (1 Cor
12:24-25). As a result of discord in the body, some parts are considered
weaker, less honourable, and so unpresentable. This discord is a further
expression of the vision of man's interior state after original sin, that
is, of historical man. The man of original innocence, male and female, did
not even feel that discord in the body. In Genesis 2:25 we read that they
"were naked, and were not ashamed." The Creator endowed the body with an
objective harmony, which Paul specifies as mutual care of the members for
one another (cf. 1 Cor 12:25). This harmony corresponded to a similar
harmony within man, the harmony of the heart. This harmony, that is
precisely purity of heart, enabled man and woman in the state of original
innocence to experience simply (and in a way that originally made them
both happy) the uniting power of their bodies, which was, so to speak, the
unsuspected substratum of their personal union or communio
personarum.
In holiness and honour
7. As can be seen in the First Letter to the Corinthians 12:18-25, the
Apostle links his description of the human body with the state of
historical man. At the threshold of this man's history there is the
experience of shame connected with "discord in the body," with the sense
of modesty regarding that body (especially those parts of it that
somatically determine masculinity and femininity). However, in the same
description, Paul also indicates the way which (precisely on the basis of
the sense of shame) leads to the transformation of this state to the point
of gradual victory over that discord in the body. This victory can and
must take place in man's heart. This is the way to purity, that is, "to
control one's own body in holiness and honour." Paul connects First
Corinthians 12:18-25 with the honour which First Thessalonians 4:3-5 deals
with. He uses some equivalent expressions when he speaks of honour, that
is, esteem for the less honourable, weaker parts of the body, and when he
recommends greater modesty with regard to what is considered unpresentable
in man. These expressions more precisely characterize that honour,
especially in the sphere of human relations and behavior with regard to
the body. This is important both as regards one's own body, and of course
also in mutual relations (especially between man and woman, although not
limited to them).
We have no doubt that the description of the human body in First
Corinthians has a fundamental meaning for the Pauline doctrine on purity
as a whole.
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