What is John Paul II's theology of the body and personalism, in essence?
Mr. Chan asks about John Paul II's philosophy of personalism, which he hears called anthropocentric, and about the theology of the body, and what it is in essence.
Answer
The theology of the body is not official Church teaching; it is the philosophical musings John Paul II delivered in his Wednesday addresses between 1979 and 1984, over two hundred and fifty of them. It flows from his personalism, which flows from his personality: warm, congenial, reacting against the austere, ontological, Thomistic theology that concentrated on being. His basis is phenomenology, the philosophy of experiencing something firsthand rather than reading about it, in the line of the mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. His good contribution was to lift the marital sexual relationship out of a primitive 'reproduction only' view and show it as an expression of love, the unitive, since sex without love gets exploited. But there are real problems. The thesis that the body alone makes the invisible visible is too absolute, and it leaves out the angels, the souls in heaven, the elderly, widows, the celibate, priests, and nuns, because it is built around spousal sexuality. And John Paul did not like the biblical teaching, taught in five New Testament contexts, that the wife is subordinate to the husband, which I think you cannot have a genuine theology of the body without. Followers like Christopher West have pushed it into excess.