I would like to thank New Catholic for publishing the following analysis
of Personalism and Theology of the Body.
My thanks also to Brother André Marie for his permission for it, as well
as providing the occasion the interview gave to offer readers a more structured
synthesis of the two systems. I send my priestly blessing to all readers,
wishing them every Grace and happiness in the Lord.
Don Pietro Leone
What’s
Wrong with Personalism and ‘Theology of the Body’?
An
Interview with Don Pietro Leone
by Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M
Bro André Marie
Catholicism Org
May 13, 2020
It was my great pleasure to interview the esteemed
priest-theologian, Don Pietro Leone, on the subject of Personalism and the
“Theology of the Body” (TOB). The interview was carried out via email and was
kindly made possible by his English-language publisher, Loreto Publications.
I became interested in interviewing Don Pietro while
reading his wonderful book, The Family Under Attack, which he
mentions in this interview.
That both the Personalism of Pope John Paul II and his
TOB are fully open to criticism and refutation as non-infallible philosophical
and theological constructions is beyond dispute. Still, the fact is that some
people may take scandal at these criticisms, which, as Don Pietro points out,
are carried out “solely in the light of Faith and Reason: in the light of
Truth, supernatural and natural.” The personal theology and even the “authentic
Magisterium” of any pope are indeed subject to such a critique; inasmuch as the
critique is carried out according to tradition and the analogy of Faith, these
per se non-infallible works are just as open to criticism as are the
excogitations of any other theologians or philosophers. Those confused on this
point are invited to read Amoris Laetitia and the ‘Authentic Magisterium’. *
Aside from his book, which I’ve already linked to, my
Reverend interlocutor also mentions in his replies a five-part essay that was
published by Rorate Caeli. See below for the links to the following
parts:
5. CONCLUSION
Here is the interview.
What’s
Wrong with Personalism and ‘Theology of the Body’?
An
Interview with Don Pietro Leone
by Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M
1.
In your book, you write despairingly of “personalism.” It seems
that there are a number of personalisms — as in different but
related systems — in modern philosophy. How would you define the personalism
you are critiquing? What are its salient features?
The term
‘personalism’ is used of ethical theories which accord pre-eminence to the
person in a given field. We may distinguish two principal types of personalism:
a political and a personal type. The former is the theory that the good of a
person takes priority over the common good; the latter is a theory which we may
express in the words of Pope John Paul II in his book ‘Love and
Responsibility’, as the theory that a human being is ‘a person and not a
thing’, a good which can be adequately treated only with love.
This
second type of personalism, which is the one that we shall be considering, has
been sustained in different forms by different modern philosophers, such as Max
Scheler, Emmanuel Mounier, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and, of course, by Pope
John Paul II himself. We may approach the personalism of the then Pope by way
of that of Max Scheler by whom he was much influenced.
The Personalism of Max Scheler
Apart
from the ethical thesis mentioned above, there are four other central features
to Scheler’s personalism which it will be useful to mention.
i)
Love is the
formal principle of personalism, in other words love is the principle which
determines personalism as an ethical system. In short, it is an ethics of love.
ii)
The love in
question is love as an experience: in effect it is the love of the senses. This
means that his ethics is phenomenological: it concerns experience, how things
are experienced, how they appear.
iii)
Love, according to him, also plays an
epistemological role, revealing the essence and ‘value’ of a person.
iv)
Finally love
plays a further, metaphysical role, determining a person as a person.
In synthesis,
we may understand his personalism in the most general terms as an ethics of
love, namely of the love of the senses which has both an epistemological aspect
as revealing the value of a person, and an active aspect as determining the
self.
We proceed
to criticise these four features of his personalism in turn.
i) Love is the formal principle of his
philosophy, and as such is its starting-point: Scheler’s philosophy proceeds
from the subject, that is to say from the experience of love, which purportedly
reveals truths about persons. Personalism here betrays its descent from the
father of subjectivist modern philosophy, namely Descartes. The philosophy of
the latter also proceeds from the subject, to be precise from the subject in
his act of thinking, from the cogito:
‘I think, therefore I am’.
The
problem with subjectivism is that it ignores or neglects objective reality,
that is ‘Being’ as it is technically known. The Philosophy of Being, by
contrast, proceeds, as from its starting point, from Being.
ii) Sense Love
In
identifying love with experiential love he ignores the other main type of love
which essentially is not experiential at all, namely love as a virtue (i.e. the
love of the will which is oriented to the objective Good). And yet it is this
latter form of love with which any serious ethics of love is concerned: it is
this form of love, which, when elevated by Grace to become the supernatural
love of Charity is the love which God commands of us, and on which alone we
shall be judged on the last day.
iii) Love
in its Epistemological Aspect
He takes
sense love as an epistemological principle, in other words as a guide for
knowing the person. And yet such love is no adequate guide for knowledge since:
a)
experiential love is diffuse, in the sense that it does not clearly reveal its
object - that ‘value’ of which Scheler speaks. In fact it reveals neither its
nature nor its source: does the source of this value, or goodness, which I see
in the other person reside in him or in fact only in myself, who am merely
‘projecting’ onto him something of my own?
b) the
human faculty of knowledge is neither the love of the senses nor that of the
will, but rather the intellect. To claim that love reveals the nature of the
person is in effect to give love priority over knowledge. But the reverse is in
fact true: I must know something or some-one before I love it, him, or
her.
iv) Love
in its Active Aspect
He holds
that the person determines himself as a person by love. He views the person not
as a substance but as an active principle; not as being but as becoming. But
this theory is anti-realist in prescinding from substance and Being.
*
The first
problem we criticised in Scheler’s personalism was its subjectivism. In fact
subjectivism is its root problem, underlying all the others. The three other
problems that we criticised are all subjectivist at base: it is subjectivist to
prefer love as an experience to the love which is oriented to the objective
Good; to give love priority over knowledge; to prescind from substance and
being.
The
Philosophy of Being, by contrast, proceeds from objective reality; it presents
a coherent and precise vision of what that reality is, and in our present field
of interest, of what the person is, what his value is, what love is.
The Personalism of Pope John Paul
II
The Pope
is concerned to provide personalism with a foundation in Faith and in Thomism. In contrast to Scheler, the Pope
distinguishes sense love from the ‘true love’ which subjects our senses to the
true good, or value, of the other person and is realised in self-gift. Here he
is referring of course to the love of the will, the ultimate expression of
which he finds in the love of Christ Who gave Himself up for us on the Cross,
and encourages us to imitate this love in our love for our brothers.
Furthermore he accepts the Thomistic definition of the person as the
‘individual substance of the rational nature’.
And yet
it is undeniable that experiential love plays an important role in the Pope’s
personalism, most remarkably in his entire vision of marital love and union.
Indeed in the area of experiential love, he explicitly distances himself for
Thomism, stating that St. Thomas does not speak of the ‘lived experiences of
the person.’
It should
also be said that the Pope typically does not define love at all as in the lengthy encyclical Familiaris Consortio which primarily
concerns love. He only describes it,
and that in terms of self-gift or, to be precise, as ‘total self-gift’. When
therefore he speaks of ‘love’ in general and in the context of marriage in
particular, it is fair to conclude that he typically understands love according
to its most common sense, that is as experiential love, sense-love. In any
case, however he understands love, this is how the average reader will
understand it, so that, in effect his teaching on love amounts in the end to a
teaching on experiential love.
If the
Pope does not well integrate the personalist and Thomistic doctrines of love,
he does not well integrate their doctrines of the person either. The Pope
frequently speaks of love’s creative role for the person (both for the self and
the other), but does not explain what he means by this creative role: is it
moral or metaphysical? Does he mean, in other words, that by loving I make
myself a person in the moral sense, as a good person? Or does it mean that by
loving I make myself a person in the metaphysical sense, as a person tout court? No explanation is given.
Consequently
one assumes that he understands the concept in its most obvious sense: the
latter, personalist sense that we have examined above. The same is true for
other important concepts for him such as value and freedom. They are not
defined and therefore one assumes that he understands them in their most
obvious sense: ‘value’ being understood as the value I ascribe to things;
‘freedom’ as the freedom to do what I desire: a personalist, subjectivist sense
in both cases.
We see in
conclusion that Pope John Paul II, although keen to provide a Catholic
metaphysical basis for his personalism, in practice fails to so. The cause is
probably to be found in his underlying personalist vision of reality.
In the
final analysis, then, his personalism differs little from Scheler’s as we have
outlined it above: Apart from the basic tenet of personalism (that a human
being is a person to be treated with love, and not a thing), he typically: a)
takes love as his philosophical starting-point; b) understands love (at least
marital love) as sense love; c) he holds that love reveals the value of a person;
and d) holds that love makes the person a person. In fact he differs from
Scheler essentially in holding this quadruple position not explicitly but
implicitly.
In so far as he shares in Scheler’s
personalism, he also falls prey to the essential error of that system which is
subjectivism. This was the error, indeed, for which he was criticised by the
master of his doctoral thesis in Rome, perhaps the greatest Thomist theologian
of the 20th century, Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP.
2. Does personalism have any first principles? If
so, what are they?
I would
consider the first principle to be the ethical one noted above: that the human
being is a person and not a thing, and that (s)he must be treated with love.
3. Is there anything personalism gets right?
Clearly
this first principle is correct, although it is important to specify which form
of love we are talking about. In fact the form of love relevant here is the
latter one that I specified above, namely the virtue of love, the love of the
will: seeking the good of the other, having an attitude of good will towards
all mankind.
4. How would you contrast personalism with the
traditional Aristoteleo-Scholastic anthropology of Saint Thomas?
Aristotelian-Scholastic
anthropology is part of the Philosophy of Being, and as such is objective in
character. It views man in the light of his nature, that is of human nature,
and of his final end; it equally views his love in the light of that same human
nature, and in the light of the final end of the love in question. I would,
then, contrast this anthropology with the personalist one by saying that the
former is objective and the latter subjectivist.
5. Does personalism
also stand in contrast with the earlier Platonic-Patristic anthropology of the
Fathers? How?
At first
sight personalism has more in common with this earlier tradition than with
Aristotelian-Scholasticism, since both for Plato and St. Augustine (the Church
Father most influenced by Plato) love and the heart hold a position of great
prominence. We recall the Platonic doctrine of eros and St. Augustine’s famous phrase: ‘Love and do what thou
wilt’, Dilige et quod vis fac.
And yet
any similarities that there may be between personalism and this tradition are
less marked than their respective divergences. Both for Plato and St. Augustine
love is rooted in objective reality. For Plato love (eros) is of two types: sense love (experiential love) and the love
of Truth. His description in the Symposium of the ascent of the soul to God
charts the transformation of the lower love into the higher one. Putting it
more generally, he is not interested primarily in feeling but in the will
(which is why the ascent is also regarded as an ascetic process) and in Truth
(which is why he calls the ascent a ‘Dialectic’). For St. Augustine the heart
has its own Law, and bears indelibly inscribed upon itself the ‘Laws of the
Good’.
We also
observe that both Plato and St. Augustine are interested above all in the
transformation of earthly love into the love of God: in the detachment from all
that is good and beautiful in this world, whether people or things, in order to
adhere to the unchanging and eternal essence of all goodness and beauty which
is God. With Plato this vision is connected to his primary metaphysical
principle of the ‘Ideas’, with St. Augustine it is connected with his profound
Faith and sanctity.
Of course
Pope John Paul as a Catholic, a Pope, and a man of God shares this vision, but
we are here talking of him as a personalist, and personalism is concerned in
the first instance with interpersonal ethics.
6.
Pope John Paul II and other personalist philosophers were profoundly
affected by the vying totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, most notably
Nazism and Soviet Communism. Do you think that their personalist philosophy was
to some extent an over-reaction to the brutally de-personalizing nature of
these materialist and statist ideologies?
This is
surely correct. Marxist communism of course views the human being not as a
person but as an ‘individual’ without any value in himself, and totalitarian
regimes in general view man as an object. The personalist Dietrich von
Hildebrand was of course one of Hitler’s most outspoken opponents, and Pope John
Paul II suffered under Soviet Communism. The totalitarian background to the
last century was and is an invitation for us all to meditate seriously upon
love and the dignity of the person, as indeed is the totalitarianism that we
are witnessing in China to this day and in the Masonic-driven European Union
with their vision of man as an object, and their furtherance of impurity and
the slaughter of the unborn on a mass level.
And yet
there is no need to elaborate any new philosophical theories to understand such
facts. The Faith together with theology, patristics, and the perennial
philosophy provide us with the deepest understanding that there is of man, his
dignity, and of love.
7. Regarding the so-called Theology of the Body
(TOB), does it, and how does it, logically flow from personalism?
We might
first note where the Pope’s writings on personalism and TOB are to be found.
The former may be found particularly in his publications prior to his election
to the Papacy (for example in ‘The Acting Person’ and ‘Person and
Responsibility’) and the latter in his Angelus Addresses from 1979 to 1984,
although both doctrines characterise his authentic Magisterium generally, as in
the New Catechism.
Theology
of the Body is the name given to the Pope’s system of sexual ethics. His sexual
ethics must be viewed as part of his marital ethics, and his marital ethics, in
their turn, as part of his personal ethics, that is ‘personalism’. We see then that Theology of the Body and the
marital ethics in which it is situated are personalist systems of thought.
As
personalist systems of thought, the Pope’s sexual and marital ethics have love
as their formal principle. In other words sexual love is what determines his
sexual ethics and marital love is what determines his marital ethics. In Familiaris Consortio (n. 11) he
describes these two forms of love respectively (together with their
relationship one to the other) as: ‘a total bodily self-giving, the sign and
fruit of a total personal self-giving’.
8. What features of TOB stand most in contrast with the Catholic
philosophical and theological tradition?
Let me
present ten such features. For further features and detail I refer the reader
to my book ‘Family under Attack’ and the subsequent essay ‘The Church and
Asmodeus’ on the site ‘Rorate Caeli’.
i) The
first feature of TOB (and of the marital system to which it belongs) which
contrasts with Catholic Tradition is that it makes love its formal principle:
it teaches that love determines ethics.
Tradition
supposes rather that ethics determines love. The objective reality of human
nature and sexuality with their finalities as expressed in the natural law
determines how man should love. This is expressed in scholastic terms by saying
that knowledge is logically prior to love: the knowledge of objective reality,
of Truth, shows us what to love and how to love it.
ii) A
second feature of TOB (and its marital ethics) which contrasts with Tradition
is that it characteristically treats the love of the spouses alone to the
exclusion of the love between the parents and the children.
This
represents a break with former magisterial teaching which has always treated
two types of love in marriage: both that between the spouses and that between
the parents and the children.
iii)
Another problem is that of the goal(s) of marriage. Since the Pope’s marital
and sexual ethics are an ethics of love, spousal love becomes the unique goal
of marriage and sexuality.
This
however excludes the goal to which marriage and sexuality have been oriented by
the Creator, namely procreation. In scholastic terms the finis operantis (the goal of the worker) ousts, or at least casts
into shade, the finis operis (the
goal of the work). The Pope to be accordingly described the conjugal act
essentially as an act of love ‘with the possibility... of procreation’ (Person
and Community ch. 19).
Hereby
TOB comes into conflict with Church teaching concerning the order of the ends
of marriage. This teaching holds that the first end of marriage is the
procreation (and education) of children, and that the second is the love of the
spouses.
Pope Pius
XII defended the traditional doctrine and explicitly condemned the inversion of
the ends of marriage both in de Finibus
Matrimonii of 1944 and in the ‘Address to the Midwives’ of 1951. In the
former he rejects the theory that ‘the mutual love and the union of the spouses
should be developed and perfected by bodily and spiritual self-gift’; in the
latter he adds that ‘such ideas and attitudes contradict clear, deep, and
serious Christian thought.’
The
vision condemned by Pope Pius XII, like so many other heterodox positions,
later inveigled itself into the Magisterium in an oblique manner through the
Second Vatican Council. Thereafter it entered the New Code of Canon Law, the
New Catechism, and various encyclicals, finding its starkest expression to date
in Amoris Laetitia. It has been much
furthered and popularised by the Theology of the Body.
iv) If
spousal love is considered as the unique end of marriage and of sexuality
and the procreative end is ignored, then
the two spouses will be placed on the same level, on an equal footing, in the
marriage. We find the Pope maintaining such a position for instance in Familiaris Consortio. This contradicts
the perennial teaching of the Church that the husband is the head of the wife
and of the family.
v) A
further feature of TOB (and the marital system to which it belongs) which
stands in contrast to Catholic Tradition is the type of love that it is: namely
the personalist love of ‘total
self-giving’.
Catholic
Tradition does not view marital and sexual love in such a way. Rather it views
marital love as a love of the will, more particularly as a love of friendship
and companionship involving mutual assistance to the point of self-sacrifice,
which characteristically, but not essentially, encompasses sexual love.
Tradition views the latter love as a love of the senses disordered by Original
Sin, which must accordingly be moderated by, and as much as possible assumed
into, the love of the will. Both forms of love must for Christians be elevated
by Grace to the supernatural love of Charity.
There are
two reasons why Tradition cannot regard marital or sexual love as total
self-giving in the proper sense of the term. The first is metaphysical and
resides in the incommunicability of the human person: it is impossible for one
human person to give himself to another; the second reason is moral and resides
in the Commandment to love God in a total sense, that is to say with the whole
heart and the whole soul etc., but the neighbour only to a lesser degree,
namely as oneself.
Some-one
might of course reply (at least in the case of marital love in general) that
spouses should love each other with a totally sacrificial love after Our Lord’s
injunction: “Love one another as I have loved you”, and that this is of course
both in accordance with Tradition and with the Pope’s theology. However such a
totally sacrificial love cannot possible be said to find its expression in a
radically sensual act such as the act of conjugal union. The sort of act that
is ‘the sign and fruit’ of a totally sacrificial love, of a life of total
self-giving, must be something of the order of martyrdom.
There is
a further reason why Tradition cannot regard sexual love in particular as total
self-giving, and that is that sexual love involves not only giving but also
taking: the taking possession of the other person, and the taking of pleasure -
without which the act of love would indeed be impossible.
vi) Total
self-giving love is inadequate as the formal principle of marital and sexual
ethics because it is too wide in its scope, in permitting contraception for
instance, as well as relationships between couples unmarried or of the same
sex. The Pope understands the totality of the love as excluding contraception
but it clearly cannot exclude all other sins of impurity such as that of
extramarital cohabitation. To show how all acts contrary to the Sixth
Commandments are wrong, it is necessary to have recourse to doctrines such as
that of the procreative end of marriage, of the marriage bond and of the
sacrament.
vii) One
particular consequence of regarding marital and sexual love as ‘total
self-giving’ is to divinise them, in the sense of elevating them to the level
of man’s love for God. For total self-giving love is the love that Our Lord
commands us to exercise towards Him, as we have just recalled, and indeed is
only possible towards Him. Here then the Pope boldly amalgamates two types of
love which, according to Tradition are entirely different: sense love and
divine love (here in the sense of man’s love for God).
viii) An
effect of idealising marital and sexual love in this way is that they can no
longer coherently be viewed as imperfect in any respect. This can explain why
the Pope neglects the concupiscence essentially inherent to sexual love, the
disorder that it has inherited from Original Sin, sometimes speaking indeed of
‘Original Innocence’ as a state to which it is possible to return.
ix) His
idealisation of marital and sexual love also explains how the Pope (in Familiaris Consortio and the New
Catechism for example) is able to place the married and the celibate states on
the same level, contrary to Church Tradition (cf. Council of Trent s. 24 can.
10). For the Church has always taught that the celibate state is the only state
which enables a man or woman to love with a total self-giving love, but if
marriage offers the same possibility, then the two ways life turn out (at least
in this respect) to be equivalent.
x) There
are two other ways in which the Pope divinises the love of the spouses, and
that is in presenting sexual love as an expression (that is an image) of the
love of God for man (that is of Christ for His Church) and as an expression
(image) of the love of God for Himself within the Most Holy Trinity.
This purely
natural type of human act is, however too different from the supernatural love
of God for man, let alone from His love for Himself, to be said to be an
expression (or image) of it. Moreover it should be said that the divinisation
of such acts is entirely foreign to Catholic thought. Physical generation,
although on the purely natural level it promotes the greatest human good,
namely the conservation of the human species, on the supernatural level passes
on death, both physical and spiritual (if the offspring is not reborn with
baptism and ends his life in the state of Grace). For this reason St. Gregory
of Nyssa describes Consecrated Virginity as a triumph over death. The
divinisation of such acts belongs indeed not to the Catholic, but rather to the
Gnostic tradition, manifest particularly in Freemasonic lore and symbolism. The ground for their divinization is nothing more
profound or edifying than the Masonic view that man is divine, which entails
that the act which passes on man's life must also be divine.
Let us
conclude these comments on TOB with a word about its inherent naturalism and
subjectivism in which its fundamental theological and philosophical errors
respectively lie.
Naturalism
By
identifying total self-giving love, a love of the natural order, as the formal
principle of marital and sexual ethics, the Pope in effect brackets out the
supernatural order and the givens of Faith.
In his
presentation of TOB, as TOB, the Pope
ignores much of Church marital teaching, both philosophical and theological, as
we have already seen in the following cases: the nature of married love; the
fact that it encompasses not just the love between the spouses but also their
love for the children; the fact that it is called to become the supernatural
love of Charity; the spiritual bond of marriage; the sacrament of marriage; the
ends of marriage in their traditional order, that is procreation, mutual
assistance, and the remedy of concupiscence; the doctrine of concupiscence and
its source in Original Sin; the role of the man as head of the wife and of the
family.
A further
important Church doctrine closely related to marital and sexual ethics which is
ignored is that of the supernatural dignity of man deriving from his exercise
of Charity. We see the Pope insisting in contrast on the purely natural dignity
of man, both here and more generally in the New Catechism.
Naturalism
is evident moreover not only in the neglect of the supernatural order but also
in the attempted naturalisation of supernatural doctrines, most notably that of
the Most Holy Trinity. It is in naturalism, then, that we situate the
fundamental theological error of TOB.
We might
indeed wonder whether this very attribution of truths of Trinitarian theology
to interhuman ethics, (concerning the total self-gift of the Divine Persons and its constitution of their Personhood) –
were not the point of departure for the Pope’s personalism as such. Total
self-gift and its constitution of personhood are indeed two of the axioms of
his personalism, as we have indicated in our answer to the first question
above. These two elements become particularly evident in TOB.
Subjectivism
The
Pope’s marital and sexual ethical system, being personalist, proceeds from the
subject; love is its formal principle: love of the good rather than knowledge
of the true; it thereby detaches from objective reality, that is to say
concretely from the Catholic philosophical and theological Tradition: from the
doctrines enumerated in the previous section. It absorbs into itself the
doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity in a naturalising sense, thereby reversing
the roles of handmaid and mistress belonging to philosophy and theology
respectively. It is essentially spousal love rather than the love primarily
directed to children; it is characterised by experience; also by the
apprehension of the value of the other and by freedom, both of which, in the
absence of definitions, are understood in a subjective sense. TOB in
particular, as an ethics of sexual love, is characterised by pleasure; this
love is divinised. All the elements listed in this paragraph are marks of
subjectivism, the principal characteristic of TOB, and that which we would
describe as its fundamental philosophical error.
Looking
at TOB in its historical context, we may say that it aims to transpose elements
of the World’s love into a Catholic context so as to purify it, and yet the
love remains excessively worldly and self-regarding: something essentially for
the spouses, a goal in itself. A similar attitude is shown by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, who, while laudably
condemning contraception, speaks explicitly of a ‘personalist’ and ‘subjective’
evaluation of marriage, offering ‘responsible parenthood’ as a new ideal for
couples as opposed to parental generosity
9. Is TOB, like other faddish, so-called “theologies
of the genitive case” not properly a theology at all because it does not
have God for its end? Is it too man-centered and carnal to be even
considered a “theology”?
The Pope
uses the term ‘Theology of the Body’ in the first instance because he understands
the body as an image of God. Here he stands in opposition to the whole Catholic
Tradition which understands man as made after the image and likeness of God
rather in man’s possession of a spiritual soul (see for instance St. Thomas Summa I Q. 93). The body, by contrast,
like everything created, is rather to be regarded as a vestige of God, in its derivation from the Creator.
The Pope
equally understands conjugal union as
an image of God. St. Thomas by contrast sees the joy in the possession of a
good shared with a companion (I Q. 39) (eminently true of marital love) and
procreation itself (I Q. 93) only as vestiges
of the Most Holy Trinity.
One may
conclude that the relation between God and the body is too remote to justify
speaking of a ‘Theology of the Body’.
10. Many Catholics claim to have been helped by
TOB because by it they broke away from certain vices or erroneous
world-views and began to live a Catholic life. Some claim TOB helped their
marriage. These people, it should be noted, were generally caught up in
the sexual vice and associated errors of the sexual revolution. What would
you say to such people who are offended at your critique of a thing they
find helpful?
I have no
intention to offend any-one, nor indeed to lack in piety towards the Holy
Father Pope John Paul II, a great and admirable man in many ways. Much of
his teaching on marriage and sexuality is simply a re-iteration of Catholic
Revelation and of the Natural Law. It is such
teaching that can help people truly to overcome vices, to live chastely,
and to live a Catholic marriage virtuously.
As for
his teaching which goes beyond, or even contrasts with, Catholic Tradition, I
have attempted to criticise it solely in the light of Faith and Reason: in the
light of Truth, supernatural and natural. If people find that one or other of
my conclusions is erroneous, then they should set it aside, but if it is
correct, they should accept it, for Our Blessed Lord came so that we should
know the Truth, the Truth that shall ‘set us free’.
11.
How would you respond to the facile accusation that criticism of TOB is
“Puritanical,” “Victorian,” or “Jansenist”?
If the
criticism of TOB is made in the light of the Catholic Faith, then it is
unassailable. The Church already has a system of marital and sexual ethics:
faithfully lived it brings happiness and joy. If any-one doubts it, let him or
her try to live it coherently. It is true that the personalist Dietrich von
Hildebrand maintained that Catholic marital ethics underestimated spousal love,
and yet in our present climate, what is more urgently, and indeed most urgently,
required, in my view, is an understanding of objective reality, or Being: God
and His Will as expressed in creation, and a life that conforms to it
radically.
12.
If TOB is not the cure to what ails Catholics being viciously assailed
by the ongoing and ever-worsening sexual revolution, what is?
Purity
and chastity, within marriage but particularly within the consecrated life: a
witness, a light to shed into the darkness of a Fallen World.
References:
