Aquinas and Barth on the Human Body

AQUINAS AND BARTH ON THE HUMAN BODY* XWE CELEBRATE both the 50th anniversary of the founding of The Thomist and the centennial of Karl Barth's birth there can be no question about the appropriateness of reflecting on some part of a theological conversation which may even now-we may dare to imagine as a kind of pious whimsy-be going on between St. Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth. About the conversation topic I have assigned them, however, something more may need to be said. "Theology of the body", after all, has hardly figured as a major locus in the greater body of Christian Divinity. Modernity has brought with it profound changes in the attitudes Western culture leads us to adopt toward the human body. In his remarkable study, Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian, Benedict M. Ashley characterizes it as a change from a " sacramental " to a non-sacramental, " desacralized " view of the human body. This change he argues, involves an objectivized view of matter in general " as a collection of things to be used for their utility rather than to be contemplated as a mirror of the Creator." In this desacralized view the human person is " seen more and more as a self-determining subject isolated from a world of alien objects that had to be controlled and dominated by force of will ..." 1 Clearly Thomas is a theologian of the " sacramental " view of the body. What about Barth? For all of his "prophetic" denunciations of apostasy in modern culture and in the theology it has dominated, Barth is himself inescapably a modern *The Walter Farrell Lecture delivered as part of a convocation marking the 50th .Anniversary of The Thomist at the Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C., on November 8, 1986. 1 The Pope John Center, Braintree, Massachusetts, 1985, p. 164. 648 644 DAVID H. KELSEY theologian deeply shaped by his culture. Furthermore, he selfconsciously adopted theological motifs from his Reformed heritage which Ashley explicitly identifies as developments in theology that reflect and support the "desacralized" view of the human body. Particularily important here are the decisions , first, that the relation between God's grace and sinful human being is not to be thought of in ontological terms as a relation between two natures, but in legal terms as an extrinsic relation between Sovereign Will and the creaturely will; second, that this extrinsic relation is established by God on conditions God sets which, third, are best elucidated using the Biblical images " election " and " covenant ". Does Barth, by adopting these themes from his Calvinist heritage, as well as by the inescapable influences of his cultural setting, end up, however unwittingly, a theologian of the "desacralized" view of the human body? A useful way to open up the contrasts between Thomas and Barth on this topic will be to focus on their respective answers to the question, " How are our bodies involved in our engagement by God's prevenient and redeeming grace?" Exploration of their answers to that question will surface remarkable similarities in their theologies of the body beneath enormous conceptual and methodological differences. The similarities, however, make the points at which they differ all the more important. I. Placement of the Question and Its Subject. Perhaps the decisive similarity between Thomas and Barth lies in a common judgment about where in the larger context of Christian doctrine to place questions about who we are and how grace engages us. It is their similarity on this point that makes them overlap enough for their theological views of the body to be worth comparing. The significance of their common move here can be brought out by recalling a familiar picture of a contrasting and more conventional way of placing anthropological questions. AQUINAS AND BARTH ON THE HUMAN BODY 645 To put the matter schematically: At least from the 16th century until quite recently, Western theology conventionally followed Augustine's lead and located anthropological topics in the context of discussion of the relation between sin and redemption . It was simply assumed that the relevant authoritative Scripture was Genesis 1-8. "Sin" and "redemption" were both discussed in terms of " creation ". " Sin " was understood as a corruption of what...