Marriage (7)

Father Richard M. Hogan

Chapter 7

The previous cycle (4th cycle) of the Theology of the Body series discussed the question of celibacy and virginity in light of the results of the studies of the human body-person undertaken in the first three cycles. In those first three cycles, as the reader may remember, the Holy Father discussed the human person in the Garden of Eden before sin (1st cycle), the human person after sin, i.e., historical man, (2nd cycle), and the human person after the Second Coming and the final resurrection (3rd cycle). The first three cycles took their beginnings from the words of Christ: his teaching that divorce was not allowed “in the beginning” (1st cycle), that looking lustfully constitutes “adultery in the heart” (2nd cycle), and that after the final resurrection, there is no giving and taking in marriage (3rd cycle). In each of these three conditions of the human person, the human body manifested, revealed and expressed the human person, but in different ways. The results of these analyses illuminated the question of virginity and celibacy.

The fifth cycle, nos. 87-113 applies the results of the first three cycles to marriage. The Pope begins with reference to St. Paul’s teaching on marriage from Ephesians 5:21-33. As he writes, “What is contained in the passage of the Letter to the Ephesians constitutes almost a ‘crowning’ of those other concise key words [i.e., the other “three words” of Christ about marriage regarding divorce, adultery in the heart, and marriage in heaven—the material of the first three cycles]. If there has emerged from them the theology of the body along its evangelical lines, simple and at the same time fundamental, it is in a certain sense necessary to presuppose that theology in interpreting the above-mentioned passage of the Letter to the Ephesians.”[1] The Pope notes that in Ephesians 5, St. Paul speaks of the body, both in its concrete reality as masculine and feminine, i.e., “in its perennial destiny for union in marriage,”[2] and the body as an image of the Church, i.e., the body of Christ. The Pope then proposes to examine these two “meanings” of the human body, most especially in light of Paul’s “great comparison” of marriage and the Church.

John Paul also notes that the passage to the Ephesians has always been understood by the Church in its liturgy to be a reference to the sacrament of marriage. Given this understanding, the passage in Ephesians 5 points the way towards an analysis of marriage as a sacrament. However, understanding marriage as a sacrament depends, too, on the theology of the body because the “great” principle of the theology of the body is sacramental: the body is the expression of the person. A sacrament is a sign which makes visible what is invisible and accomplishes what it signifies, e.g., the pouring of water in Baptism over a child’s head points to a cleansing of the soul and the giving of life. This symbol makes visible the hidden reality of God’s action on the child’s soul. But the sign also is the means by which God effects the change in the soul: the gift of divine grace.

The human body is the expression of the person. It makes visible what is hidden in the mystery of the person, and, at the same time, the visible manifestation of the person involves experiences which affect and change the person. “Therefore, in some way, even if in the most general way, the body enters the definition of a sacrament.”[3] Clearly, the body also “enters” theology by the “front door” in that it is the means Christ chose to reveal Himself, the Father, and the Holy Spirit to us. In Him, the body became par excellence the visible sign of an invisible reality.

Summarizing what he proposes to do in this fifth cycle in no. 87 and then outlining the content of the Letter to the Ephesians in no. 88, John Paul begins his detailed analysis of Ephesians 5 in no. 89. The Pope begins with one of the most difficult issues of the New Testament for modern culture: St. Paul’s admonition to wives to be “subordinate to their husbands.”[4] This admonition also appears in other passages of St. Paul’s writings and is sometimes translated that wives should “be subject to their husbands” or that they should “submit to their husbands.”[5] To many in our era, such language is offensive in the extreme and thought to be the product of what is called the male-dominated culture of Paul’s era. Many would argue that such passages should never again see the light of day, at least not in the liturgy. But these texts are in fact inspired and contain the Word of God. We need to know their meaning. Further, it might be argued that those passages which are most difficult for us to understand and to implement in our lives are precisely the ones we need to try to understand and incorporate into our vocations.

Before his admonition to the wives, Saint Paul uses the exact same language for both husbands and wives. He writes in verse 21 that both husbands and wives are to “be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.”[6] Clearly, the “subordination” or the “submissiveness” applies to both husbands and wives, not just to wives. After the general remark on no. 21, verse 22 addressed to wives follows, and then in 25 the Apostle addresses the husbands instructing them to “love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her.”[7]

The “reverence” for Christ is not a cowering fear, but rather an awesome respect for holiness. Christ is God the Son made man. In Him, God is revealed. In Him, God visited His people. Just as Peter, James and John were struck almost dumb at the Transfiguration, so should we always be at the awesome holy mystery of the Incarnation. Since each of the spouses in a marriage are “other Christs” (Paul is speaking here of the marriage of the baptized), they should see in one another the mystery of Christ. The only proper attitude towards that mystery is a reverence and therefore a mutual subordination as they would both give to Christ. As the Pope writes, “The mystery of Christ , penetrating their hearts, engendering in them that holy ‘reverence for Christ’ (namely pietas), should lead them to be subject to one another.”[8] There can be then no domination by one over the other.

In fact, John Paul sees in verse 21 a partial explanation of St. Paul’s instruction to wives in verse 22. A further aspect of the explanation occurs when St. Paul writes that husbands should “love their wives.”[9] “Love excludes every kind of subjection whereby the wife might become a servant or a slave of the husband, an object of unilateral domination. Love makes the husband simultaneously subject to the wife , and thereby subject to the Lord Himself, just as the wife to the husband. The community or unity which they should establish through marriage, is constituted by a reciprocal donation of self, which is also a mutual subjection.”[10]

 Love is of God. In fact, we name Him by this activity because that IS WHAT HE DOES. This love was revealed by Christ, most especially in His passion and death. Analyzing Christ’s passion, we can see five elements: 1. a decision (not my will, but yours be done), 2. founded on knowledge in the mind (redemption was necessary, because of original sin and all the other sins of the human race, if we were to fulfill what God had intended for us “from the beginning”); 3. Christ decided to give Himself (what more could Christ have given than what He gave on the cross); 4. His gift is permanent (He always is our Redeemer who bears the wounds of His death); 5. and His gift is life-giving (it gives us the life of grace).

We are created in God’s image to love as He loves. Our love must have these five characteristics or it is not love. Our love then must be the result of a union of wills. Those who love another say to the other: “I give myself to you. I will what you will. I choose what you choose.” This gift is done in full freedom because the one who loves WANTS to give himself or herself to the other. If it is not done in full freedom, it is not a gift and therefore is not love. Coercion has no part in a loving relationship. Husbands and wives, at the time they say their vows—at the time of the marriage ceremony--freely with full knowledge choose to donate themselves to each other. They choose in effect to say to one another: I choose what you choose. I wish to do what you ask. I wish to be “subject” to you and vice-versa. Therefore, the marital union is one of mutual donation, mutual “subjection.”

Another way of expressing the same truth is that husbands and wives have chosen in full freedom to do what the other asks—to obey their spouse. Obedience is often understood in our culture as what “good” little children do when their parents ask them to do something, e.g., to go to bed. If the children are “obedient,” they do what their parents ask when the parents ask them to do it. But this is not the obedience of the Gospel because the children who “obey,” if they are “little,” i.e., under the age of reason, have not yet learned to love, i.e., to make their own choice in full freedom, with the knowledge necessary to such a choice, to give themselves in a self-donation to their parents and then to do what the parents ask because they have chosen to do what the parents ask. No, the children are not yet capable of such mature behavior. They learn and imitate their parents’ love and affection and gradually as they mature, they will be able to truly obey, i.e., to respond to another because they have given themselves to that person in love. If they do not obey in the sense of the Gospel, what are they doing? They are responding out of a sense of trust that the parents have their best interests at heart—because the parents have always taken care of them or, in some cases, unfortunately, simply out of fear.

As a society, if we have the sense that obedience means what “good” little children do, then it is highly offensive to ask adults to “obey.” But it is our limited sense of “obedience” that is the problem. For husbands and wives to obey each other or to “submit” to one another is not offensive to either. It is only to ask them to do what they promised to do when they said their marriage vows: to love each other by giving themselves freely to each other in a union of wills—to choose in full freedom to do what the other wills. Even obedience towards the precepts of God must be preceded by love. In one of his writings, Saint Augustine asked, “Does love bring about the keeping of the commandments, or does the keeping of the commandments bring about love?” His response was, “But who can doubt that love comes first? For the one who does not love has no reason for keeping the commandments.”[11]

Without love, without a mutual self-donation, i.e., the mutual union of wills, doing the bidding of another would be unworthy of a human person. Machines and animals do what we will (if the machines are working right and the animals are trained properly), but they have no choice, no free will. We dare not offend human dignity and value by reducing another to an object, a thing, a machine or an animal, which does not possess the power of choosing. Human dignity and value rest on the foundation of human personhood and the powers which make us persons are our minds and wills. A human person, sufficiently mature to use the powers of mind and will, to be acting in accord with his or her very being, with his or her dignity, must choose to do what another asks before he or she does it. This choice must be founded on some knowledge, e.g., a superior officer is asking this or that of me for the good of the country. But we dare not, cannot, ask others simply to do our bidding without granting them the dignity of choosing on the basis of some knowledge. In a word, we must treat others as persons.

In this context, marriage involves a mutual “subjection,” a mutual “obedience.” Clearly, this is Paul’s intent because he asks that both husbands and wives to “reverence” one another. He then specifies that wives should love their husbands and husbands should love their wives. These admonitions are founded on the entire Bible, especially on how the reality of marriage was created by the Father “in the beginning.”

After commenting on the question of mutual subjection and obedience, John Paul takes up the “great analogy” between marriage and the Church which Paul sketches in Ephesians 5:22-25: “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her.” There are actually four components in Paul’s structuring of the analogy. First, Paul instructs wives to be subordinate to their husbands. The next component provides the motive for the wife: the husband is Christ. As Christ is the head of the Church, so the husband is the head of his wife. The third component turns the elements of the second around. The second began with the husband and stated that he was Christ. The third component begins with the Church as subject to Christ and ends with the wife as subordinate to their husbands. The fourth component turns the first one around. The first one began with wives as subordinate to their husbands. The fourth one speaks of husbands as loving their wives as Christ loved the Church. The structure in these four lines is complicated. It is ABB1A1 where B1 and A1 turn the terms of A and B around.

It is also vital to notice, as the Pope does, that not only is Christ compared to husbands and wives to the Church and vice-versa, the relationship of Christ to the Church is compared to a marriage and a marriage is compared to the relationship of Christ to the Church. Of course, in comparing husbands to Christ and wives to the Church, it would be impossible to avoid the further image of the union of Christ and the Church as a marriage. Nevertheless, this is a further element in the “great analogy.” It is also important to notice that the spousal image of the relationship of Christ to the Church exists in St. Paul’s analogy simultaneously and together with the image of the Church as the body of Christ since St. Paul speaks of Christ as the “head” of the Church. “It seems . . . that this [spousal] analogy [of the relationship between Christ and the Church] serves as a complement to that of the Mystical Body.”[12]

The comparison of marriage to the relationship of Christ to the Church moves in both directions. In other words, marriage is illumined and better understood through the relationship of Christ to the Church. However, the comparison also works the other way: the relationship of Christ to the Church can be better understood through marriage. John Paul insists that the analogy of Ephesians 5 moves from the Christ-Church relationship to the husband-wife relationship. In this sense, the Christ-Church relationship is a model for the husband-wife relationship. “The call of the author of the Letter to the Ephesians, directed to spouses, [is] that they model their reciprocal relationship on the relationship of Christ to the Church . . .” [13] Most often, Paul’s words have been read as teaching that the Church’s relationship with Christ was illumined by the husband-wife relationship. John Paul insists that the analogy works in the other direction as well. “Christ’s “love is an image and above all a model of the love which the husband should show to his wife in marriage, when the two are subject to each other ‘out of reverence for Christ’.”[14]

One of the profound mysteries of marriage is that they “become one flesh.” Yet, they remain individuals. Saint Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians seems to acknowledge the “one flesh” aspect of marriage when he speaks of the husband as the head of the wife. The same aspect is applied to Christ who is “head of the Church,” but he is also a “husband.” These two characteristics (“one flesh” and still bride-bridegroom) must always be kept in mind when studying St. Paul’s analogy. “In a certain sense, love makes the ‘I’ of the other person his own ‘I’: the ‘I’ of the wife, I would say, becomes through love the ‘I” of the husband. The body is the expression of that ‘I’.”[15] “The wife, being the object of the spousal love of the husband, becomes ‘one flesh’ with him: in a certain sense, his ‘own’ flesh.”[16] In a startling insight, the Pope even suggests that the a wife’s “submissiveness” to the husband “signifies above all the ‘experiencing of love’ “ in the conjugal embrace.”[17] Obviously, if this interpretation is accepted, the “submission” of the wife is even more the result of the commitment of love made in the marriage vows!

“Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church” (Ephesians 5:28-29). In this passage, of course, St. Paul again emphasizes the “one flesh” union, but in this context, the emphasis is on how the husband is to “care for” “his own flesh,” i.e., the body of his wife. These lines help us “to understand, at least in a general way, the dignity of the body and the moral imperative to care for its good.”[18] In the “one flesh” union of marriage, love is expressed in part by the care of the spouse’s body, i.e., the care of his or her flesh.

After the emphasis on the care of the body, St. Paul in verse 5:31 quotes Genesis 2:24: “For this reason a man shall leave [his] father and [his] mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." John Paul sees in this phrase a linkage between the revelation of God in Genesis through Adam and Eve and the definitive revelation of God in Christ. Since marriage, established by God at the dawn of creation, revealed something of the love of the Trinity (because as images of God united in marriage, Adam and Eve manifested something of divine love) and marriage can be compared to the union of Christ and the Church, then there is obviously a link between the revelation of God’s love through marriage and the definitive revelation of God in Christ. “St. Paul sets in relief the continuity between the most ancient covenant which God established by constituting marriage in the very work of creation, and the definitive covenant in which Christ, after having loved the Church and given Himself up for her, is united to her in a spousal way, corresponding to the images of spouses. This continuity of God’s salvific initiative constitutes the essential basis of the great analogy contained in the Letter to the Ephesians.”[19] God manifested Himself through Adam and Eve, individually, (since they were each images of God) and through their marriage, a reflection of the Trinity. God completed this revelation in Christ who is also “married” to the Church. (Although we can never lose sight of the other “image” of the Church, also taught by St. Paul: that Christ and the Church are one and form one “mystical” body, i.e., one mystical person.[20])

The image of the marriage of Christ and the Church in Ephesians takes up an analogy present in Isaiah:[21] “Fear not, you shall not be put to shame; you need not blush, for you shall not be disgraced. The shame of your youth you shall forget, the reproach of your widowhood no longer remember. For he who has become your husband is your Maker; his name is the LORD of hosts; Your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel, called God of all the earth. The LORD calls you back, like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, A wife married in youth and then cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great tenderness I will take you back. In an outburst of wrath, for a moment I hid my face from you; But with enduring love I take pity on you, says the LORD, your redeemer. This is for me like the days of Noah, when I swore that the waters of Noah should never again deluge the earth; So I have sworn not to be angry with you, or to rebuke you. Though the mountains leave their place and the hills be shaken, My love shall never leave you nor my covenant of peace be shaken, says the LORD, who has mercy on you.” In this passage, God refers to Israel as wife and Himself as husband. However, writes the Pope, “the analogy of spousal love and of marriage appears only when the ‘Creator’ and the ‘Holy One of Israel’ of the text of Isaiah is manifested as ‘Redeemer.”[22] And the Redeemer, as revealed by the New Testament, is Christ. John Paul notes that the beginning of the St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians speaks of God’s love for humanity in a paternal way. Paul begins his letter to the Ephesians in verse 1:3 with the acknowledgement that God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” In the beginning, God’s love was paternal, the love of a Father. But then, in Christ, in the Redeemer, it has a spousal character because the love is revealed in and through a human body, in and through Christ’s body. Just as Adam and Eve revealed something of God’s love, so in the incarnate Son, we see God’s love revealed in the flesh and so paternal love is in a way transformed and completed by the “spousal,” i.e., revealed in and through a human body, love of Christ. In the full understanding of the Trinity revealed in the New Testament, the image of Isaiah is deepened and made clearer. Only in Christ the Redeemer can the “spousal” love of God be seen clearly. He, Christ, makes visible what has been in hidden in God. His body is a sign revealing the invisible, as were the bodies of Adam and Eve. A sign which reveals an invisible reality is in a generic sense a sacrament.

But the “spousal” character of Christ’s love has its source not just in the “continuity” between the visible sign of the human body (in Christ and in Adam and Eve) expressing the hidden reality of God, but also because Christ’s love confers grace, sanctifying grace, or holiness. Adam and Eve were “elected” in Christ Jesus before the world began. Adam and Eve as the first spouses were “graced” before original sin and Christ restores grace to us living after sin. “To the marriage of the first husband and wife, as a sign of the supernatural gracing of man in the sacrament of creation, there corresponds the marriage, or rather the analogy of the marriage, of Christ with the Church, as the fundamental ‘great’ sign of the supernatural gracing of man in the sacrament of redemption.”[23] Further, John Paul writes “So the mystery hidden in God from all eternity – the mystery that ‘in the beginning,’ in the sacrament of creation, became a visible reality through the union of the first man and woman in the perspective of marriage – becomes in the sacrament of redemption a visible reality of the indissoluble union of Christ with the Church, which the author of the Letter to the Ephesians presents as the nuptial union of spouses, husband and wife.”[24] The “spousal” character of Christ’s love is fundamentally on the foundation of making the mystery hidden in God from all eternity visible in and through a human body and, secondarily, on the gracing which Christ accomplished as compared with the gracing of our first parents. We might say that making visible in and through a human body what has been hidden from all eternity in God is the “means” of the sacrament of Creation (the marriage of Adam and Eve) and the sacrament of the Redemption (Christ). The effect of the sacrament of Creation and the effect of the sacrament of Redemption is the gracing of humanity.

Marriage then is, as the Pope writes, the primordial sacrament because its method and its effect were renewed and taken up in the sacrament of Redemption and in its continued presence through the Church. Founded on the analogy with the sacrament of Creation (the marriage of Adam and Eve), the Church can be said to be the bride of Christ because as “one flesh” with Christ, the Church reveals God and confers grace on humanity. Marriage, the sacrament of Creation, was the foundation of how God works in the world.

But marriage is also one of the seven sacraments because Christ raised this blessing “not forfeited by original sin”[25] to the level of one of the seven sacraments in order to make it possible for all human beings to live marriage in the way it was “from the beginning.” The graces of the sacrament of marriage help couples to overcome the wounds of sin and love each other as Adam and Eve loved each other in the Garden of Eden before sin entered their world. “As much as ‘concupiscence’ darkens the horizon of the inward vision and deprives the heart of the clarity of desires and aspirations, so much does ‘life according to the spirit’ (that is, the grace of the sacrament of marriage) permit man and woman to find again the true liberty of the gift, united to the awareness of the spousal meaning of the body in its masculinity and femininity.”[26] Living according to the spirit, i.e., in the life of grace, spouses are capable of loving as they should and through that same grace have the hope of heaven in and through Christ. They also, by the generous will of God, have the possibility of granting new life to new persons who will populate both this world on earth and eventually, God willing, the Kingdom of Heaven. Marriage, because it is a sacrament, engenders joy (because spouses love each other and are loved in return), and hope for eternity with God in heaven. Parents also find joy in the earthly life of children, and hope for them to live with God (and with the parents) for all eternity.

The sign of the sacrament of marriage is constituted by the intention of the spouses, indicated by their vows, to give themselves to each other in and through their masculinity and femininity. The “material” element of the sacrament of marriage are the bodies of the two spouses. Their flesh and blood, as a gift to one another, can be compared to the water in Baptism or the bread and wine of the Eucharist. 

Their bodies speak a language—the language of mutual self-donation to one another. If this language is expressing truth—if they give themselves to one another in and through their bodies—the husband and wife are living out the sacrament: their bodies become the visible sign of an interior reality. If the language of their bodies expresses a falsehood, they are “lying.” One lie spouses sometimes speak with their bodies is adultery where one or both of the spouses tries to “speak” a self-donation through his or her body with someone who is not his or her spouse. Conjugal fidelity is truth and adultery is non-truth, “a falsity of the ‘language of the body.’ . . . We can then say that the essential element for marriage as a sacrament is the ‘language of the body’ in its aspects of truth. It is precisely by means of that that the sacramental sign is, in fact, constituted.”[27]

After a pause for over fifteen months (occasioned by the 1983 Holy Year of the Redemption) John Paul continued the fifth cycle of the Theology of the Body on May 23, 1984. In nos. 109, 110 and 111, the Pope comments on the Song of Songs. In no. 112, he takes up the story in the of Sarah and Tobiah in the Book of Tobit. No. 113 constitutes the conclusion of the fifth cycle. He writes at the very beginning of no. 109, “What I intend to explain in the coming weeks constitutes as it were the crowning of what I have illustrated.”[28]

John Paul’s three addresses on the Song of Songs is almost poetry in itself. The Pope uses all of his poetic and dramatic skill (and, of course, in the Pope this talent is substantial because John Paul is an accomplished poet and playwright) to demonstrate that the bride and the groom in the Song of Songs are depicted as they speak the “language of the body” according to the truth of their mutual love. The bride, the Pope writes, speaks to the groom “through every feminine trait, giving rise to that state of mind that can be defined as fascination, enchantment. This female ‘I’ is expressed almost without words; nevertheless, the ‘language of the body’ expressed wordlessly finds a rich echo in the groom’s words, in his speaking that is full of poetic transport and metaphors, which attest to the experience of beauty, a love of satisfaction.”[29] No other Pope has ever spoken this way!

In no. 110, the John Paul reminds his readers (and listeners at the time the audience was given) that the bride and the groom are both responding to a set of values, the values pertaining to human personhood in all the truth of an individual’s masculinity or femininity. He insists that the values the bride and groom see in one another are constituted not just by the body, but by the personhood of both. Each responds to the person revealed in and through their bodies---not just to the body itself. The groom calls his beloved, “sister” and this term connotes a shared history, as though both were of the same family. “The groom’s words, through the name ‘sister,’ tend to reproduce, I would say, the history of the femininity of the person loved. They see her still in the time of girlhood and they embrace her entire ‘I,’ soul and body, with a disinterested tenderness.”[30] The term ‘sister’ also connotes a certain responsibility which both have for one another. This responsibility to a brother or sister reminds us that the Pope has previously taught that spouses have entrusted themselves, their entire beings, to one another and that their human dignity is in a certain sense “assigned” as a responsibility to their spouse. Each spouse is to insure that the dignity of the other is not violated or harmed, most particularly in their marital life.

In an interesting interpretation of the words, “You are an enclosed garden, my sister, my bride, an enclosed garden, a fountain sealed,”[31] the Pope sees an affirmation that the bride is “master of her own mystery.” “The ‘language of the body’ reread in truth keeps pace with the discovery of the interior inviolability of the person.”[32] The Pope reminds us in this passage that even in the intimate “belonging” of spouses, the individual person which is at its deepest point incommunicable, remains. Although spouses belong to one another through their mutual self-donation, their own personhood never disappears in the other. Their own individual mysteries as images of God always remain. The inviolability of the person leads to a continual and constant mutual discovery and re-discovery. If there were not always something new, something fascinating, about the other, i.e., if everything about the other could be known and “possessed” in the first week or year, marriage would be agony. But even after decades, spouses still discover and re-discover each other because each of them retains (and cannot help but retain) his or own personhood which can never be fully communicated. John Paul re-iterates this point in his next address when he writes, in the dynamic of love painted in the Song of Songs, “there is indirectly revealed the near impossibility of one person’s being appropriated and mastered by the other. The person is someone who surpasses all measures of appropriation and domination, of possession and gratification.”[33] Since the ‘language of the body’ spoken in the Song of Songs seems, on the one hand, to tend towards possession, but, also, on the other hand, recognizes the impossibility of such possession, there is a tension not entirely resolved in this text. John Paul sees the resolution of the tension in St. Paul’s words about love: “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”[34] The “language of the body” recognizing the personal dignity and inviolability of the other person, requires that romantic (the Pope uses the term “eros”) love be taken up into the selfless love which was clearly revealed to us by Christ. Only in that refined love, characterized by purity, can the “assignment” of the dignity of each spouse to the other be fulfilled.

This “assignment” of each spouse’s dignified personhood to the other means that love has objective requirements which each “lover” must subjectively embrace. Love is as the Holy Father mentions “stern” as death. This point is explicitly made in the Book of Tobit where Tobiah faces death on his wedding night. Tobiah married Sarah whose previous seven husbands had all died before consummating their marriages with her. Therefore, Tobiah and Sarah, before speaking the “language of the body” in the marital embrace ask God’s blessing on their union. They pray together. “They see with the glance of faith the sanctity of this vocation in which – through the unity of the two, built upon the mutual truth of the ‘language of the body’—they must respond to the call of God himself . . . .”[35] There is an objective content of love which must be spoken by spouses. Otherwise the “language of the body” does not correspond to the truth of the dignity of the spouses. Further, this “objective” content is set by God Himself. Of course, the spouses must make this “objective” content part of each of their subjective attitudes towards themselves and one another. In other words, the romantic aspects of the “language of the body” revealed in the Song of Songs must be merged with the objective “givens” of human dignity in each of the spouses’ attitudes towards themselves and the other.

In the final address of this fifth cycle, John Paul integrates Paul’s vision of marriage in Ephesians 5 with his analysis of the Song of Songs and of Tobit. He also links both of these with the sacrament of marriage as a renewal of the sacrament of creation. The liturgical language of the sacrament of marriage “assigns to both, the man and the woman, love, fidelity and conjugal honesty through the ‘language of the body.’ It assigns them the unity and indissolubility of marriage in the ‘language of the body.” It assgins them as a duty all the ‘sacrum’ (holy) of the person.”[36] The holiness, the mystery of each person, is the result of God’s creative action because each of us is created in the image and likeness of God. Each of us reflects an infinitesmal aspect of the mystery of God Himself. Each of us is an image of God, a “spark of the divine.” “The ‘language of the body,’ as an uninterrupted continuity of liturgical language, is expressed not only as the mutual attraction and mutual pleasure of the Song of Songs, but also as a profound experience of the ‘sacrum’ (the holy), which seems to be infused in the very masculinity and femininity through the dimension of the ‘mysterium’ (mystery): the ‘mysterium magnum’ [the great mystery] of the Letter to the Ephesians, which sinks its roots precisely in the ‘beginning,’ that is, in the mystery of the creation of man: male and female in the image of God, called from ‘the beginning’ to be the visible sign of God’s creative love.”[37]

The “language of the body” is liturgical because liturgy is the language of sacraments. The “language of the body” is the language of the sacrament (in the generic sense) of the body, i.e., of the body’s capability of making visible what has been hidden for all eternity in God. Thus, the Pope can teach that the “language of the body” is an “uninterrupted continuity of liturgical language.” This “language of the body,” the language of the sacrament of the body, is spoken in the romantic “words” of the Song of Songs, but it also must speak the dignity and mystery of the human person, of the human spouses. The profound mystery of each human person, the source of his or her dignity, is inscribed into each human person when God created him or her in the image and likeness of Himself.

But in order for spouses to speak the “language of the body” in truth, not just through its “romantic words,” but also and more importantly by incorporating the dignity and value of both of them into their “language of the body,” they need to be purified from the effects of sin, from concupiscence. They are made able to speak the “language of the body,” affirming in their mutual mysteries, the ‘great mystery’ of the Letter to the Ephesians, through the gift of grace given in the sacrament of Matrimony.

As one can see, the Pope’s conclusion to his fifth cycle of the Theology of the Body addresses, set in prose, is almost poetry. The “word painting” is more descriptive then discursive. Yet, we grasp his main line of thought. There can be no doubt that the Church has never given such a vision of marriage. The union of romance and true love in the “language of the body,” essential to marriage, is a call to all spouses to live their marriages as Adam and Eve lived theirs before sin. Spouses are asked by the Pope to make the objective content of love part of their subjective “language of the body,” and so to express truth through their bodies. Part of this truth is that life is always part of love. Since the life-giving characteristic of love is under attack in our culture, the Pope devotes the last cycle, the sixth one, to this one characteristic of the truth of love.

[1] See no. 87, Theology of the Body, July 28, 1982: “Martial Love Reflects God’s Love For His People,” L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, no. 31. 

[2] See no. 87, Theology of the Body, July 28, 1982: “Martial Love Reflects God’s Love For His People,” L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, no. 31. 

[3] See no. 87, Theology of the Body, July 28, 1982: “Martial Love Reflects God’s Love For His People,” L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, no. 31. 

[4] See Ephesians 5:22. 

[5] See Colossians 3:18. 

[6] See Ephesians 5:21. 

[7] See Ephesians 5:25. 

[8] See no. 89, Theology of the Body, August 11, 1982: “Reverence for Christ the Basis of Relationship Between the Spouses,”L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, nos. 33-34. 

[9] See Ephesians 5:25 and 28. 

[10] See no. 89, Theology of the Body, August 11, 1982: “Reverence for Christ the Basis of Relationship Between the Spouses,”L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, nos. 33-34. 

[11] See Pope John Paul II, The Splendor of the Truth, Veritatis Splendor, August 6, 1993, no. 22, where the Pope cites the pertinent passage from St. Augustine. 

[12] See no. 90, Theology of the Body, August 18, 1982: “Deeper Understanding of the Church and Marriage,” L’Osservatore Romano(English Edition), vol. 15, no. 35. 

[13] See no. 90, Theology of the Body, August 18, 1982: “Deeper Understanding of the Church and Marriage,” L’Osservatore Romano(English Edition), vol. 15, no. 35. 

[14] See no. 91, Theology of the Body, August 25, 1982: “Saint Paul’s Analogy of Union of Head and Body Does Not Destroy Individuality of the Person,” L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, no. 35. 

[15] See no. 92, Theology of the Body, September 1, 1982: “Sacredness of the Human Body and Marriage,” L’Osservatore Romano(English Edition), vol. 15, no. 36. 

[16] See no. 92, Theology of the Body, September 1, 1982: “Sacredness of the Human Body and Marriage,” L’Osservatore Romano(English Edition), vol. 15, no. 36. 

[17] See no. 92, Theology of the Body, September 1, 1982: “Sacredness of the Human Body and Marriage,” L’Osservatore Romano(English Edition), vol. 15, no. 36. 

[18] See no. 92, Theology of the Body, September 1, 1982: “Sacredness of the Human Body and Marriage,” L’Osservatore Romano(English Edition), vol. 15, no. 36. 

[19] See no. 93, Theology of the Body, September 8, 1982: “Christ’s Redemptive Love Has Spousal Nature,” L’Osservatore Romano(English Edition), vol. 15, no. 37. 

[20] Pius XII in his encyclical, Mystici Corporis, taught that the Church and Christ “form but one mystical person,” no. 66. When St. Paul uses the term, “body,” he intends to indicate a living human body. A living human body is the expression of a person. If the Church is the body of Christ, it is also His person. See Richard M. Hogan and John M. LeVoir, Faith For Today, 2nd ed., Boston: St. Paul Books and Media, 1995), p. 154. 

[21] See Isaiah 54:4-10. 

[22] See no. 95, Theology of the Body, September 22, 1982: “Relationship of Christ to the Church Connected with the Tradition of the Old Testament Prophets, Especially Isaiah,” L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, no. 39. 

[23] See no. 98, Theology of the Body, October 13, 1982: “Loss of Original Sacrament Restored With Redemption in Marriage-Sacrament,”L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, no. 42. 

[24]See no. 98, Theology of the Body, October 13, 1982: “Loss of Original Sacrament Restored With Redemption in Marriage-Sacrament,”L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, no. 42. 

[25] See Roman Ritual, Rite of Marriage, Nuptial Blessing A. 

[26]See no. 102, Theology of the Body, December 1, 1982: “Marriage Sacrament An Effective Sign of God’s Saving Power,” L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 15, no. 49. 

[27] See no. 105, Theology of the Body, January 12, 1983: “The ‘Language of the Body in the Structure of Marriage,” L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 16, no. 3.

 [28]See no. 109, Theology of the Body, May 23, 1985: “Pope John Paul Returns to Subject of Human Love in the Divine Plan,”L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 17, no. 22. 

[29] See no. 109, Theology of the Body, May 23, 1985: “Pope John Paul Returns to Subject of Human Love in the Divine Plan,”L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 17, no. 22. 

[30] See no. 110, Theology of the Body, May 30, 1985: “Truth and Freedom: The Foundation of True Love,” L’Osservatore Romano(English Edition), vol. 17, no. 23. 

[31] See Song of Songs 4:12. 

[32] See no. 110, Theology of the Body, May 30, 1985: “Truth and Freedom: The Foundation of True Love,” L’Osservatore Romano(English Edition), vol. 17, no. 23. 

[33] See no. 111, Theology of the Body, June 6, 1985: “Love is Ever Seeking and Never Satisfied,” L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 17, no. 24. 

[34] See 1 Cor. 13:4-8 

[35] See no. 112, Theology of the Body, June 27, 1985: “Love Is Victorious In the Struggle Between Good and Evil,” L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 17, no. 27. 

[36]See no. 113, Theology of the Body, July 4, 1985: “ ‘Language of the Body:’ Actions and Duties Forming a Spirituality of Marriage,”L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 17, no. 28. 

[37] See no. 113, Theology of the Body, July 4, 1985: “ ‘Language of the Body:’ Actions and Duties Forming a Spirituality of Marriage,”L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), vol. 17, no. 28.

Posted April 12, 2004 ---- Fr. Richard Hogan