The Body

The human body—the “thing” that accompanies us wherever we go—is central to most of the burning questions in our culture’s collective mind. The body is just there. And, for that very reason, we are putting it to the test as we reject, starve, exploit, re-build—chemically, surgically, digitally, cybernetically—and finally incinerate it. Though we have been at this for centuries, what has become clearer in recent years is that the dominion of nature at large has at last become the dominion of our nature, especially there where it puts us in relations we have not chosen—with our origin (mother and father), with the opposite sex, and with our children. This is precisely why we have turned on the body.

Over thirty years ago, French feminist Luce Irigaray, wrote: "Sexual difference is one of the important questions of our age, if not in fact the burning issue. According to Heidegger, each age is preoccupied with one thing, and one alone. Sexual difference is probably that issue in our own age which could be our salvation on an intellectual level." There is no question that Irigaray was right, especially now that the old debate about the relation between the sexes has been brought up into the more recent one about the relation between our “selves” and our bodies. Both debates, of course, stand or fall together, which is why we unite them in this single issue.

As the late political philosopher Augusto Del Noce said, the sexual revolution was the most revolutionary because it was “not only against civilization and values but also against the very principle of reality.” By separating the “inseparable meanings,” as Humanae vitae puts it, mother was set against child, woman against man, and finally, children against their mothers and fathers, and with them their Creator. This issue is about the inescapable reality of sex, the inseparable link between sexual love and children which always reasserts itself, even as we try to escape it.

To be embodied is to be vulnerable. Vulnerability strikes us as negative and with reason, rooted as it is in the word “wound.” But the ability to be wounded is also the capacity to be affected—moved—by another. To be vulnerable is to be in need of help, in attaining something, in growing up, or just in being. “I am wounded with love,” says the Bride of her Bridegroom. Our bodies open us to the world and to God, even though that openness also makes us susceptible to a host of wounds in the more obvious, negative, sense. This issue takes up the full range of that vulnerability in man.