The Spousal Nature of Feminine Beauty in John Paul II Mary Shivanandan |
Feminine
bodily beauty! Is this not a topic more suitable to a fashion magazine
than a serious journal? What does it have to do with theology?
But John Paul II takes feminine beauty
very seriously. Towards the end of the first cycle of his Catechesis
on Human Love, he writes:
“The whole exterior of woman’s body, its
particular look, the qualities that stand with the power of perennial
attraction, at the beginning of the ‘knowledge’ about which Genesis
4:1-2 speaks (‘Adam united himself with Eve’)
are in
strict accordance with motherhood.”[1]
There follows
immediately a reference to the Blessed Virgin: “With the
simplicity characteristic of it, the Bible (and the liturgy following
it) honors and praises throughout the centuries ‘the womb that bore
you and the breasts from which you sucked milk’ (Lk 11:27). These
words are a eulogy of motherhood, of femininity, of the feminine body
in its typical expression of creative love.” Right
away we have a perspective on the feminine body that is not
characteristic of our culture, which either favors the thin straight
silhouette of the fashion model or the dress open and showing curves
to the navel. Woman is presented either without sexual attributes or
as a sex object. How is it even possible to address a culture that
treats the feminine body in this way? John Paul II does not hesitate
to rise to the challenge, elevating feminine beauty to the level of
truth and goodness.
The first mention of beauty in connection with
the body occurs earlier in the Catechesis. “The human body oriented
from within by the ‘sincere gift of the person’[Gaudium
et Spes, 24:3], reveals not only its
masculinity and femininity on the physical level, but reveals such a
value and such a
beauty that it goes beyond the simply physical
level of ‘sexuality’” (TOB15:4) This
is key. It is the interior dimension of the gift of self that somehow
determines the exterior beauty of the body. John
Paul II confirms in a later homily that as
a result of the loss of self-mastery brought about by the Fall, “the
beauty… the human body possesses in its male and female appearance, as
an expression of the spirit, is obscured” (TOB 32:6).
In other words, true
beauty encompasses both body and soul and is oriented to communion but
as a result of original sin it is flawed. The pope finds the search
for what he calls “integral beauty” or “purity free from stain” in the
bridegroom’s search in the Song of Songs. It is a search for
perfection that contains, he says, “the
synthesis of human beauty, beauty of body and soul”
(TOB 112:3). He notes that the Song of Songs refers to the bride as “a
garden closed,” a “fountain sealed,” because, in the pope’s words, she
is “the master of her own mystery.” The authentic gift of the woman,
which is essential to her personal dignity, is revealed in the gift of
self as spouse and mother (TOB 110:5). This way
of approaching feminine beauty is almost entirely foreign to our
culture, which isolates feminine bodily beauty as a thing in itself,
using it to sell products or titillate the senses. Sexual attraction
is often a commodity used to engage in a physical relationship which
may or may not end in marriage. Children may or may not be intrinsic
to this relationship.
To come to a greater understanding of what
the pope is saying, it is necessary to delve more deeply into his
philosophical and theological analysis of sexual attraction.
A Philosophical Account
In his book,
Love and
Responsibility,
the pope writing as the philosopher
Karol Wojtyla is at pains to show above all the
personal
dimension of the attraction between men and women. What is the source
of this attraction, he wonders? Clearly it is bound up with the sex
urge. He seeks to show, (1) the transcendent source of the sex urge,
(2) its relation to the person, and (3) its supra-personal nature in
procreation.
He states
that “the sex urge is something even more basic than the psychological
and physiological attributes of man and woman in themselves, though it
does not manifest itself or function without them”.[2]
So what is the source of the sex urge?
Wojtyla notes that every human being (even the homosexual) is born as
either a man or a woman. And as man or woman, neither is complete in
himself. Each needs the attributes of the other -. From this need for
completion through the other arises the sex urge, Marriage and
procreation are only one manifestation of the transcendence of the
person and exist in this life alone. Friendship is another.
What is more important, the sex urge is not
completely defined by an orientation to the physical attributes of
masculinity and femininity. It normally never arises except in
relation to a specific person. If it is directed to the sexual
attributes alone it devalues the person and is, itself, devalued. It
is this orientation of the sex urge to a
specific
person that enables it to be a
vehicle for love. In fact the sex urge is naturally oriented to
develop into love. Yet it cannot be
equated with
love, for love is not biological. Love depends on the will. The sex
urge therefore in the final analysis depends on the person, who
directs it.
Wojtyla finds another way in which the sex urge
transcends the merely biological. Its proper end, procreation, is
suprapersonal because it deals with
the existence of the human species. The mutual attraction of the
spouses is ordered to something beyond themselves.[3] Thus already in
the writings of the future Pope there is a hint of the intrinsic link
in the sex urge between the unitive and procreative dimensions, on
both the biological and personal levels. Wojtyla
claims that what he calls the sensual response of a man to a woman “is
only incidentally connected with awareness of the beauty of a body,
with aesthetic appreciation.”[4]
This is a pivotal statement. The sensual
response, which is good in itself, nevertheless has what Wojtyla calls
a “consumer orientation.”
It is directed
mainly towards a “body” and only indirectly towards the person. As
such it has only an accidental connection with bodily beauty, for the
latter is first and foremost an object of “contemplative cognition” or
aesthetic enjoyment ( Wojtyla is at
pains to point out that the sensual response is “simply a natural
orientation in which an objective requirement of existence finds
expression.”[5] It is a spontaneous reflex of the body and not
something evil. He also distinguishes between sensuality and the
sexual vitality of the body. Deliberately to exploit natural responses
in order to arouse a sensual response to the human body apart from the
concrete person and the context of spousal love is the aim and the
evil of the pornographer. It differs from the aim of depicting the
human body and human spousal love in art. Far from denigrating such
artistic work, Wojtyla argues that Art has a
right and a duty, for the sake of realism, to reproduce the human
body, and the love of a man and woman, as they are in reality, to
speak the whole truth about them.
The human body is an authentic part of the
truth about man, just as its sensual and sexual aspects are an
authentic part of the truth about human love.[6] The
distinction only becomes blurred when partial aspects are accented at
the expense of the whole.
Attraction, says Wojtyla, goes with an awareness of values. Several
values can be experienced in the meeting of man and woman: physical,
psychological, spiritual. The person must always be valued first and
foremost as a good in herself and not for any specific attribute. No
single value can define a human person. Only if the attraction
encompasses the person as a whole will it truly correspond to love.
Something
attracts because it is pleasing; it is experienced as a good. “The
object of attraction, says Wojtya “which is seen by the subject as a
good, is also seen as a thing of beauty.”[7] Thus the appreciation of
values and beauty go together. Beauty is what Wojtyla calls a
“supplementary” aesthetic value. It always accompanies the good. “Fascination,”
“charm,” “glamour”—these and other similar words serve to describe
this important aspect of love between persons. A human being is
beautiful and may be revealed as beautiful to another human being.
Woman is beautiful in a way of her own, and may attract the attention
of a man by her beauty…. Beauty finds its proper place in the context
of attraction.[8] Wojtyla is
affirming the goodness and beauty of sexual attraction. But he knows
that it is not enough to be attracted to the exterior beauty alone,
for the human being as a person is determined by inwardness rather
than outward appearance. It is necessary to discover the inner beauty.
In the love between a man and a woman it is critical that attraction
goes beyond the physical attributes themselves to a “full and deep
appreciation of the person.”[9]
Beauty and Marriage in Aquinas Wojtyla
is clearly drawing on the thought of Thomas Aquinas concerning the
relationship between beauty and the good (or what he terms value). Why
is it that spousal love is beautiful, while adulterous love, although
it may contain the “glamour of evil,” is by its very nature deformed
and, therefore ugly?
In the
Summa
Theologiae (I 39, 8) Aquinas
attributes three characteristics to beauty: “integrity
or perfection, since those things
which are impaired are by that very fact ugly; due
proportion or harmony;
and lastly brightness or clarity,
whence things are called beautiful which have a bright colour.” Thus
within the Trinity, the Son is beautiful because he shares the perfect
nature of the Father, is his accurate image, and is in himself the
light and splendour of the intellect. Beauty and
goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally, for they are based
upon the same thing, namely form; and this is why goodness is praised
as beauty. But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to
appetite (goodness being what all things desire), and therefore it has
the aspect of an end (appetite being a kind of movement towards a
thing.) On the other hand, beauty belongs to a cognitive power, for
those things are said to be beautiful which please when seen. Hence
beauty consists in due proportion, for the senses delight in things
duly proportioned, as in what is like them—because the sense too is a
sort of reason, as is every cognitive power. Now since knowledge is by
assimilation, and likeness relates to form, beauty properly belongs to
the nature of a formal cause.[10] Everything is
good and therefore beautiful in so far as it is perfect, and something
is perfect if it “lacks nothing according to its mode of perfection.”
In order to be perfect and good it must have a form together with all
that precedes and follows upon the form.[11] Therefore
goodness and beauty are inseparable, and both are related to the
perfection of form.[12]
A Contemporary Theological Account
This notion of the
form
of spousal love and marriage is
something Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Paul II and Angelo Scola have
developed further. For Balthasar, the perfect archetype of the couple
is Christ and the Church. This is the fullest meaning of the human
couple both in a final (eschatological) and in a primordial sense.
Christ generates his bride in the total self-gift of the cross, and
continues his relationship with her through the sacraments. Thus only
through the mystery of Christ and the Church is the mysterious dual
unity of man and woman attained. We can speak this way, says Scola in
his book
The Nuptial Mystery,
because of the logic of the Incarnation. The dual unity of Christ and
the Church arises from the unity of the two natures in Christ, while
the incarnation gives us a glimpse of the ultimate dual unity of the
Trinity,
The components of the nuptial mystery – love,
sexual difference and procreation – have, in this perspective, says
Scola, a much wider and deeper meaning, which helps to illuminate the
family as the “domestic church.” The family is not just a cell in the
body of Christ. “What is at issue here is the possibility of living
every day more deeply and thus participating in the sacramental sign
of marriage, which is the total and joyous gift of oneself to the
other, whose goodness and beauty redound back to and thus fulfill the
‘I’.”[13] The dual unity of husband and wife comes to completion
ideally in the birth of the child, creating according to Balthasar “an
authentic imago Trinitatis.[14]
Within this understanding of the form of
marriage John Paul II gives a theological account of the perennial
attraction of masculinity and femininity through the spousal meaning
of the body in his Wednesday Catechesis. Again he wants to emphasize
the primacy of the person in the love between the man and woman. Adam
is created first and alone (existentially not chronologically), in
what John Paul II calls “original solitude,” that is, possessing the
uniqueness of a human person, different from the other animals. It is
his body that reveals to him his superiority and uniqueness. When Eve
is created equal in her humanity but different in gender he discovers
who he is as a masculine person.
Adam’s exclamation, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my
flesh” (Gen. 2:23) expresses his
fascination
and wonder
at the sight of Eve (108, 5). The man and woman see each other with
God’s vision, and accept each other in full integrity as another “I.”
That is the meaning of the phrase, “original nakedness.” It is this
encounter that brings about Adam’s fulfillment precisely as a person.
He discovers that only through a “sincere gift of self” can he find
happiness. The one-flesh union he is called to share with Eve
establishes an indissoluble and fruitful bond.
The pope reserves some of his most profound
reflections on marriage and the beauty of spousal love for his
exegesis of Ephesians 5: 21-33. He makes reference especially to the
Church “as
a bride all beautiful in her body”,
for this witnesses to the importance
of the body in the analogy of spousal love (TOB 92, 2). It is Christ’s
love, his giving himself up, that makes the Church his body. The love
that binds the bridegroom to the bride commits him not only to seek
the good of his wife but to desire her beauty, to be conscious of it
and to care for it. The pope emphatically states that what is at issue
includes visible physical beauty. That is part of the good that his
love must find in her. That good is a measure and a test of his love,
which however must never go beyond the limits of being a disinterested
self gift (TOB 92, 4). In reflecting
on Matthew 5: 27-28, the pope has already considered the way in which,
as a result of original sin, the perennial attraction of man and woman
has been disordered, compromising the disinterested gift of self. As a
result of that first sin, the perennial attraction is no longer
experienced in the heart calling them to communion. Instead it is
reduced to a biological attraction towards procreation. The body has
“almost lost the power of expressing love.” Concupiscence attacks the
freedom of the gift and the relations of man and woman are determined
more and more by the body only. The dignity of the person is obscured,
as each becomes a mere object for the other (TOB 32, 4, 5). This
desire is a deception of the heart, diminishing the very attraction
between the eternal “feminine” and eternal “masculine.” But even in
the historical state of sin the human heart seeks to free itself from
this concupiscence, which so demeans the dignity of the person (TOB
40:2). “Desire” is a
legitimate part of the attraction between the sexes. It would be
contrary to the authentic tradition of Christianity and closer to the
Manichaean heresy to question the goodness of the sexual urge, which
was created by God to build up the communion of man and woman, and
ordered to procreation (TOB 41, 4). When it intentionally focuses on
the sexual values alone, to the exclusion of the other values of the
person, it ceases to contribute to their communion (TOB 41, 3, 4). But
redemption in Christ brings about a transformation of the human heart
so that the rich values of the eternal attraction of masculinity and
femininity may again be expressed in all their many layers – physical,
psychological and spiritual (TOB 45: 3).
The Song of Primordial Love
In the “beginning” all these values were able to
be expressed effortlessly and harmoniously by Adam and Eve in the
grace of original innocence. John Paul II finds an expression of that
consummate love in the Song of Songs. He does not interpret this
within the spousal analogy of God’s love for
The lovers in the Song of Songs engage in a duet
in which the language of the body predominates. The source of their
mutual wonder is the bride’s femininity and the bridegroom’s
masculinity as visibly expressed in the body. “Love
unleashes a special experience of the beautiful,
which focuses on what is visible, although at the same time it
involves the entire person. The experience of beauty gives rise to
pleasure, which is reciprocal” (TOB 108, 6). The words “beauty” and
“beautiful” appear frequently in the song.
Your cheeks are beautiful between pendants Equally
noticeable in the text is the summation of their relationship in the
word “friend.”
So the bridegroom:
Your two breasts are like fawns, And the bride:
Sweetness is his palate
This language of spousal love, so full of
metaphors of the beauty of the beloved, which is echoed in all the
great literature of the world, John Paul II says, contains a
“primordial and essential sign of holiness” (TOB 109, 2). Their love
is a spousal union of
eros and
agape
which alone can be called truly beautiful. (Benedict XVI picked up
this theme in Deus Caritas Est.)
Chastity, marital chastity, is an
essential dimension of the perennial attraction of the sexes. “Through
self mastery,” the pope says, “man rediscovers the spiritual beauty of
the sign constituted by the human body in its masculinity and
femininity,” in a mature spontaneity that does not suffocate but
liberates the heart’s noble desires and aspirations (TOB 48, 5).
Right at the end of the Catechesis, in his
treatment of conjugal chastity in the context of
Humanae
Vitae, John Paul II
links the virtue of continence to the gift of reverence,
donum
pietas. Through reverence for God’s
design in joining the unitive and procreative dimension of the
conjugal act, the spouses come to understand the difference between
emotional and sensual reactions to the other sex. While the body
arouses sensual reactions, masculinity and femininity draw forth
emotional reactions relating to the whole person which issue in
“manifestations of affection.” Continence enables the person to
maintain an equilibrium between these two reactions, and frees it from
constraint. Such reverence for the work of God, he says, goes along
with the capacity for deep pleasure in both the visible and invisible
beauty of the other as gift (TOB, 129-130). The grace of
Redemption enables self-mastery for self-gift, so that it is possible,
says John Paul II, “ to rediscover “the meaning of the whole of
existence, of the meaning of life,” which includes also the meaning of
the body as spousal (TOB 46, 6). This is the antithesis of Freudian
libido. The body lived in this way becomes through a “communion of
persons” the “deepest substratum of human ethics and culture” (TOB 45,
3).
A Civilization of Love In his
“Letter to Families,” John Paul II states that man has received the
task of shaping life in the image and likeness of its Creator, God.
The fulfillment of this task gives rise to civilization, which, in the
final analysis, he says, is the “humanization of the world.” At the
end of the Letter, he goes further. “The history of mankind, the
history of salvation, passes by way of the family.”
A broken family can, for its part,
consolidate a specific form of “anti-civilization,” destroying love in
its various expressions, with inevitable consequences for the whole of
life in society.[15]
Beauty, feminine beauty, which, as John
Paul II says, is in strict accordance with motherhood, is both a
source and fruit of spousal love lived sacramentally in the family.
From it radiates the beauty of the civilization of love.
It is to protect this “civilization of love”
that Scripture issues such harsh warnings on the danger of feminine
beauty, yet praises it in the faithful wife, as in Proverbs 31:30.
Beauty, above all, is oriented to the
home (and our
ultimate homeland in God).[16]
Sirach praises the beauty of a good wife
(26:16-18), yet warns (9:8), “Turn away your eyes from a shapely
woman, and do not look intently at beauty belonging to another; many
have been misled by a woman’s beauty, and by it passion is kindled
like a fire.” There are many other such warnings about the beauty of
woman tempting both to vanity and adultery. The prophet Isaiah speaks
against the daughters of
The
values of a civilization are revealed especially in its literature and
art. These are the
specific spheres in
which feminine beauty is most often portrayed, as John Paul II notes.
So extensive is the literature in praise of feminine beauty in
relation to spousal love in Western art, steeped in the underlying
values of Christianity, that one of the most famous examples will
suffice, from Dante’s
Divine Comedy.
In Book Two,
Purgatorio,
Canto XXXI, Beatrice confronts Dante on his betrayal of her chaste
beauty in favor of numerous passing feminine allurements.
She upbraids him: . . . . .
“In the desire for me
In the Uffizi Museum in Florence two paintings
stand side by side, both by Sandro Botticelli: a portrait of the birth
of Venus arising from the sea, and “The Madonna of the Magnificat”,
which is in continuity with a rich portrayal of Mary holding the
Christ-child since early Christian times (the earliest icon of Mary
discovered in Western Christian art, dating from the early third
century, is a fresco on the walls of the catacombs of St Priscilla in
Rome). Venus represents feminine attraction on the natural level, good
in itself but not directed to a personal love. There is another famous
depiction of Venus in Botticelli’s panel, also in the Uffizi, called
“Spring.” Above the head of Venus the boy Cupid (from which the Latin
word
cupiditas
“possessive desire” comes) shoots his arrows. He is blindfolded,
indicating that there is no rhyme or reason to the target of blind
desire. Both were painted in the latter half of the fifteenth century,
when the humanist values of the Renaissance were revolutionizing art
and culture. A new interest in human
eros
was beginning to eclipse the depiction of maternal love, the
conventional theme in Christian art.
When John Paul II links the visible bodily
aspect of a woman with its power of perennial attraction “in strict
accordance with motherhood,” he may seem to be limiting the often
wondrous visible beauty of woman to one dimension. In reality he is
opening up what
Gaudium et Spes
calls “vistas closed to human reason” (24). For “the
mystery of femininity manifests and reveals itself in its full depth
through motherhood” (TOB, 21, 2).
This mystery, as he
explains in his Apostolic Letter
Mulieris Dignitatem,
involves “a special openness to the new person” on the part of woman
through which she discovers her own identity precisely as woman (no.
18). It is the great challenge of our time to recover this sense of
feminine beauty as intrinsically spousal. In the consecrated virgin
the spousal form is also present but expressed in a different way, as
signifying the priority of personhood over bodily sexual attraction.
Espoused to the Lord, she points to the
eschaton
where there is no giving in human marriage. Thus the woman has to be
affirmed in her role as person,
oriented to self-gift, spouse and mother in a correct order. If we do
not honour earthly relationships in all their bodiliness we shall
never know how to live them in the spiritual dimension. Feminine beauty
is a great gift, and like all great gifts comes with a corresponding
responsibility. That responsibility is best expressed in the homily
that sums up John Paul II’s theology of the body: The body,
in fact, only the body, is capable of making visible what is
invisible: the spiritual and divine…. Through his bodiliness, his
masculinity and femininity, man becomes a visible sign of the economy
of Truth and Love, which has its source in God himself and was
revealed already in the mystery of creation.
Against this vast background, we fully
understand the words in Genesis 2:24 that are constitutive of the
sacrament of Marriage: “For this reason a man will leave his father
and his mother and unite with his wife, and the two will be one
flesh.” (TOB, 19, 5)
Mary Shivanandan
is Professor of Theology at the
John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at the
Catholic University of America and is the author of
Crossing the Threshold of Love
(CUAP). This article was published in Second Spring,
Issue 12 (2010).
NOTES [1] John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body trans. Michael Waldstein, (Pauline, 2006) no. 21, 5. Hereafter in the text this will be cited as TOB with the number of the homily and section. Dr Waldstein has provided an invaluable aid to research with his comprehensive index. [2] Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (Ignatius Press, 1981) 49. [3] Ibid., 51. [4] Ibid., 105. [5] Ibid., 106-107. [6] Ibid., 192. [7] Ibid., 79. [8] Ibid., 79-80.
[9] Ibid., 80.
[10] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I 5, 4, ad 1.
[11] Ibid., I 5, 6.
[12] Aquinas applies these ideas on perfection to the marriage of Mary and Joseph as follows. A marriage is said to be true by reason of its attaining a twofold perfection. “The first perfection of a thing consists in its very form, from which it receives its species; while the second perfection of a thing consists in its operation, by which a thing attains its end” (ibid., III 29, 2). The form of matrimony consists in a “certain inseparable union of souls,” and the end is the bearing of children, for which conjugal intercourse is normally necessary, and the rearing of them, which requires a common life together. The first perfection (union of souls) belongs to the marriage of Mary and Joseph. With regard to the second perfection, while obviously carnal intercourse did not pertain, the mutual rearing of the child was present. Thus their marriage had the indissolubility of a sacrament. The form of marriage is to be an indissoluble union of man and woman ordered to procreation.
[13] Angelo Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, trans. Michelle K. Borras (Eerdmans, 2005), 99.
[14] Ibid., 103.
[15] John Paul II, “Letter to Families” (1994), nos. 23, 13. This is not to say that God, in his goodness, cannot bring good out of any situation. Human failure can point to deficiencies in understanding and living the form of marriage and family life, and so bring about the necessary changes, especially through the redemptive suffering of the faithful spouse. Christ came to heal sinners. He showed mercy to the woman caught in adultery summoning her to sin no more.
[16] The Lord
delights to adorn
[17] Dante Alighieri,
Purgatorio,
trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Bantam, 1982), 287-9.
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