Friday, January 30, 2015
TOB: What does “Language of the Body” mean?
We continue here our explorations into St. John Paul II’s
series of Wednesday Catecheses, which eventually became known as Man and Woman He Created Them: a Theology of
the Body (TOB, for short). To see other posts on this topic, click here.
The phrase “language of the body” doesn’t appear
systematically until the third part of St. John Paul II’s TOB, but when it
does, it carries a good deal of significance. In fact, the late pope built the
first two parts of TOB—dedicated to theological anthropology and
sacramentality—such that he could introduce this phrase intelligibly. “Language
of the body,” then, could be understood as a key to help open up all of TOB’s meaning
a bit more for us.
We are almost all, I think, familiar with the term “body
language,” as well as the corresponding factoids about something like 60% of
human communication coming through that rather than our words. Clearly, if I
say “everything is fine” with a sharp tone, my arms akimbo and a dark look on
my face, everything may not, in fact, be fine. Most people understand this on
an intuitive level.
We might say, as well, that the body has another kind of
language, in the realm of medicine or health. Aches and pains plus a fever
probably indicate the flu, while this throbbing below my eye may have something
to do with my propensity for sinus headaches. Indeed, the body seems at times
to exert its own authority over ourselves in the form of pain: you think you
can run a mile in the time it took when you were 18? Well, your left knee, your
heart, and your lungs beg to differ. No running for you today. Or any other
day.
So let’s start by acknowledging that the body is
communicative “of its own accord,” so to speak. It’s not always the mind
reading an intelligibility onto the lifeless matter of our body. Rather, this
intelligibility is built right in, as it were. The body is not dumb stuff we
have to pick apart in order to learn anything about it; it talks to us on its
own. Basic principle, then: the body is intelligible, and therefore,
communicative.
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| John Paul II (AFP Photo/Alberto Pizolli) |
This is not actually a new idea. St. Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Making of Man uses the form of
man’s body compared to everything else in the created world, as a sign that man
is meant for reason, or vice versa:
1. But man's form is upright, and extends aloft towards heaven, and looks upwards: and these are marks of sovereignty which show his royal dignity. For the fact that man alone among existing things is such as this, while all others bow their bodies downwards, clearly points to the difference of dignity between those which stoop beneath his sway and that power which rises above them: for all the rest have the foremost limbs of their bodies in the form of feet, because that which stoops needs something to support it: but in the formation of man these limbs were made hands, for the upright body found one base, supporting its position securely on two feet, sufficient for its needs.
2. Especially do these ministering hands adapt themselves to the requirements of the reason: indeed if one were to say that the ministration of hands is a special property of the rational nature, he would not be entirely wrong; and that not only because his thought turns to the common and obvious fact that we signify our reasoning by means of the natural employment of our hands in written characters. It is true that this fact, that we speak by writing, and, in a certain way, converse by the aid of our hands, preserving sounds by the forms of the alphabet, is not unconnected with the endowment of reason . . . (from Book VIII)
In this Cappadocian Father’s understanding, our bodies
indicate our supremacy over the rest of creation in and through our
intellectual soul; even our hands are reasonable by this account. This is
obviously still the case, and certainly not something St. John Paul II takes
for granted, but it is also not his emphasis.
What St. John Paul II emphasizes in looking at the structure
of the body as its own language is the body’s inherent relationality. Yes, the
intellectual soul defines man (what is man? “A rational animal,” answers
Plato), but if we don’t look at the whole of what that intellect means, we’re
missing a big part of the picture; part of it, the late pope helps us to see,
is this relational structure.
My body didn’t pop out of nowhere, fully formed as an adult.
Rather, I came from someone, in fact,
grew in someone before I was ever in
born. I come from another, am related to another, from the first moment of my
existence; there is then, a certain neediness or vulnerability built in to being
human. I need other people, and other things outside of myself in order to
survive. Even as a fully formed adult, this remains true; hunger and thirst are
not simply biological mechanisms, rather if we take the unity of body and soul
seriously, they also help communicate something about what it means to be
human: to need things, to be needy, and therefore to have to relate to others.
This inbuilt vulnerability and relationality is not in the
idealized version of man with which we are commonly presented today. That man would probably look something
like a powerful man who needs nothing and no one—he gets to choose how he
relates to anything or anyone, if he chooses to have a relationship at all.
Maybe some idealized version of a cowboy? You get the picture.
If that’s true though, this cowboy doesn’t have a belly
button. By that I mean, again, that our own bodily structure points us to the
relationships that both constitute us and precede our choosing them. The
relation we have to our parents is pretty clear—it’s natural, and it truly must
precede us and truly does constitute us—but if we trace these relationships
back through the generations, we may start to understand that something or
someone preceded all of them at the beginning: our Creator.
The body’s inherent vulnerability then, is not something
about which we must be ashamed, but rather the first place we can start to
contemplate what it means to have a relationship with our Creator, in a word,
what it means to be a creature. This is what St. John Paul II helps to reminds
us of in the Wednesday Catecheses: that rationality doesn’t just define us, it
is also first and foremost a gift from the Creator; a gift that is inscribed
into our very flesh. And if that is
true, then surely the body has a language of its own.
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