Human beings are persons with bodies. Of all the bodied beings, the animals and the plants, and us, we are the only ones who are persons. Human beings, human persons, are the only enfleshed spirits or spiritualized bodies. (Either term is accurate. One emphasizes the spiritual aspect and the other emphasizes the bodied aspect.).

Our bodies are to express or manifest our persons: what we know and choose. The most important principle of the theology of the body is that human beings, body and soul, have a dignity and value unparalleled and unequaled on earth. The body participates in the dignity and value that we all have because the human body is the expression of the person. Healthy human bodies express each of us as they were given to us. Except for medical intervention to restore health, we should never alter a healthy, major, functioning system of our bodies. To do that is to claim that a healthy human body is in someway faulty and “out of order.” It is, in effect, an attack on the human person—even if it is done to oneself.

All of us have experience of these principles. Think what it is to lose a loved one. The loss is profoundly felt. That person is no longer here. That person can no longer make herself or himself present in and through his or her body because that body and soul have been separated in the agony of death. We cry at funerals. We long for that presence—and we long for it in ways which completely transcend the way we might long for a favorite pet. Even though we may describe a dog or cat as a “member of the family,” we all know the absolute profound difference between the death of a pet and the death of another human person.. In our daily living, we experience the truths which form the foundation for the theology of the body: each human person is unique. Further, as a species, as persons with bodies, the human race is unique. Only we have bodies which are the expression or outward manifestation of a person.

In life here on earth, the body cannot be separated from the human person. If we do something to someone's body we do it to that person. When we shake hands with someone, we touch the person. Therefore, there is no possible way that we can use someone's body and not use the person. Since we cannot use human beings (because human beings are created for their own sakes), we should never use someone's body or treat it like a thing. The human body should never become an object of use. To use the body is to use the person.

Since we dare not use another human person, the only adequate stance towards another human person is one of love. When we enter a relationship with another, we are called to love—to wish the absolute best for the other. In a loving relationship with another, e.g., the intimate relationship of marriage, we express and manifest our affection and love in and through our bodies. Even in a friendship we express our love, but in marriage, the bodily expression of love is the unique aspect of this intimate union. It is absolutely critical the bodily expression of married love be complete and honest. We dare not falsify the gift of ourselves to our spouses by “holding back,” by refusing to give ourselves completely to the other, even physically.

Of course, contraception is precisely the withholding of fertility in the midst of expressing a total self-gift, body and soul, to our spouses. To withhold anything in this total self-surrender is a falsification of the love-act. Such an act, falsified as it is, is no longer love, a self-gift. Rather, it becomes a using of oneself and one’s partner. But we dare not use ourselves or another human person.

The theology of the body and the theology of the family offer a new and very interesting way of looking at the human person as an individual and in relationships.

(Rev.) Richard M. Hogan

October 8, 2001

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