The Theology of the Body is not a monograph, but a collection of brief “catecheses,” teaching homilies, delivered toward the beginning of John Paul’s pontificate. Their initiating and recurring text is Jesus’ response to Pharisees who tested him on divorce: “Have you not read, that he who from the beginning created, made them male and female?” (Matthew 19:3-4). Jesus appropriates Genesis’ opening phrase without an object for “created”; in John Paul’s exegesis, this directs us to that absolute beginning where there is only God and his act of creation. Then, without mediation, Jesus adjoins “made them male and female” from a different place in Genesis’ account; according to John Paul, this tells us that to understand man, and man as male and female, we must look to that beginning, before all the vicissitudes of “historical man.” Throughout his reflections, John Paul recurs again and again to the presence and experience of the body at that beginning where “the man” (in Hebrew, there is a definite article with “man” in these passages, and John Paul exploits this) discovers himself as subject precisely by being shown his own unique body, and where as male-and-female body “the man” is made capable of mutual self-giving and so of communion.
As a series of meditations collected after the fact, the volume does not present what the title might suggest, a systematic locus de corpore hominis. And it is not thematically concerned with what are usually called “bioethics”; insofar as the catecheses turn explicitly to ethics, this is usually to sexual ethics. The present assignment, to consider the “significance” for bioethics of John Paul’s reflections, is therefore the appropriate one: I cannot report many explicit answers to particular bioethical problems, but there is surely much here that is relevant to understanding the true nature of these problems.
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