The Estrangement of Persons From Their Bodies

John F. Crosby The Estrangement of Persons From Their Bodies "God does not care what we do witii each other's bodies; He only cares whetiier we treat each other as persons." With this utterance an American commentator succeeded in giving succinct expression to a certain personalist sensibility: the supreme moral norm is to respect persons, and bodily actions derive all their meaning from the presence or absence of such respect. At first glance this may seem to be nothing other than the personalism so often expressed by John Paul II. Recall the firestorm he created in the world press in 1980 when he said in an address that die "adultery in die heart" condemned by Christ can be committed even within marriage.^ It is not enough if the man and die woman are married ; they may, he said, still not be respecting each other as persons, they may be only using each other for their gratification. In that case the moral substance of their marital intimacy is "adulterous." John Paul will hear nothing of the idea tiiat the mutual using is legitimated by openness to offspring. Such using is morally intolerable no matter how many children the man and the woman bring Logos 1:2 1997 126 Logos into the world and raise. Persons must simply never use each other. "God does not care what we do widi each otiier's bodies; He only cares whether we treat each otiier as persons." And yet this commentator said tiiat"God does not care what we do widi each other's bodies" by way of expressing her rejection of many of the moral norms based on the fifth and sixtii commandments . How is tiiis? We might understand such a rejection coming from a hedonist, but this utterance does not express hedonism. As I say, there are some sexual things that, according to those subscribing to this dictum, you ought not do; you must never use persons in die exercise of your sexuality, however pleasurable. How does it happen that this worthy concern with respecting persons can get turned against traditional Christian morality?2 Is there something depersonalized about tiiis morality? How does it happen that John Paul affirms the person in such a way as to rethink and enrich traditional moral teachings on sexuality and respect for life, whereas many affirm die person in such a way as to make shipwreck ofthese teachings? 1 In the last few centuries the personhood of human beings has been experienced and understood as never before. Karol Wojtyla has captured the truth found in this rising personalism in his seminal little essay, "Subjectivity and die Irreducible in Man."3 He says diat for centuries die image ofman inWestern thought was onesidedly "cosmological." Man was tiiought to fit snugly into nature. Some of the Roman jurists spoke of the "law of nature" as one law that comprises both the moral law governing human beings and those natural laws describing animal instincts. They ran together in what for us are two radically incommensurable orders of law (die one prescriptive, the other descriptive). When one approached cosmologically the sexual union ofman and woman, what one pri- The Estrangement of Persons From Their Bodies marily noticed was die procreative power of their union, a point in which human sexuality strongly resembles animal sexuality. This is whyWojtyla says that cosmologically man was seen too much"from without" and too little "from within," that is, too little in terms of his self-experience, or his subjectivity. Wojtyla goes on to say that the cosmological view ofman began to yield to a more personalist view when people began to notice in a new way their subjectivity or interiority. With this they experienced each person not as a snugly-fitting part of nature but as a "world for himself," his own center, existing in a sense as ifthe only person. The so familiar personalist idea tiiat each person is his own end and no mere instrumental means is born of tiiis awakening to die inwardness of personal subjectivity. People experienced in a new way what it is to act dirough oneself in freedom, to possess oneself, to determine oneself. They could no longer...