Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics: A Catholic and Antitotalitarian Theory of the Body

Chapter 8: The Wedding Feast of the Lamb

Chapter Eight THE WEDDING FEAST OF THE LAMB Humanae Vitae is best understood as a complex argument drawing upon phenomenology, metaphysics, natural law, speculative theology, biblical witness, and political philosophy (cf. TB, –). Commentary on the text typically supposes that natural law reasoning is front and center and that little else is presupposed.1 In showing the hidden theological depths of the argument, I have also presented the Church’s sexual ethics as an example of Ecstatic Thomism, defending a metaphysics of the body as a self-diffusive good. Commentators have often supposed that Wojtyla’s recent formulation of the Church’s ethics is largely phenomenological because they presume that Wojtyla’s philosophy of the body is basically that of the gendered body as described by Scheler and Stein. I do not doubt that John Paul II thinks that men and women sometimes have different social ‘‘offices,’’ as Gaudium et Spes puts it (GS, ), and, like the Council Fathers, he thinks that these are to a large degree a function of the different natures of men and women (MD,  and ). Without dismissing, or yet deciding the validity of, the Church’s argument upon this point, I do doubt that this aspect of the Church’s thinking is utterly central to a Catholic philosophy of the body. Rather, I have argued for a deep continuity between Aquinas and papal thinking about the body (Paul VI and John Paul II) and thereby shown that an extremely elaborate metaphysical conception of the body is at the root of Humanae Vitae and its recent defense in Wojtyla’s philosophical theology. Actually, I do not see how PAGE 137  ................. 11244$ $CH8 03-18-05 08:28:46 PS  Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics this interpretation can effectively be doubted if an assumption is made: in Fides et Ratio, John Paul II is not engaging in self-criticism. This encyclical emphasizes the centrality of metaphysical thinking in the development of theology. John Paul II clearly warns there that a failure on the part of the theologian to develop a robust metaphysical conception is bound to seriously impoverish any resulting theology. It would be odd, indeed, if John Paul II’s understanding of the Church’s theology of the body did not include a rich metaphysical understanding of the body—and I have shown that it does. On this understanding, John Paul II is both a leading contemporary Thomist and the latest exponent of a papal ecstatic theology. I now want to show how this Ecstatic Thomism has influenced the Church’s teachings on sexual politics, and how these teachings might be defended. The argument of the chapter begins with Wojtyla’s critique of Plato regarding both the metaphysics of desire and the place of the family in the social order. It will end with an elaboration of ‘‘the politics of the family.’’ Such a politics is, I think, somewhat embryonic in Wojtyla’s thinking. The basic idea appears in the  Apostolic Letter Familiaris Consortio, and I understand Fides et Ratio () to be a profound philosophical elaboration of the idea. I will show why this is so in the first part of this chapter, and in the second I will show how the idea can usefully be developed, and well defended, through the social philosophy of Aurel Kolnai. Thus, as before, Wojtyla’s writings form a part of the argument I will present, but the argument also relies heavily upon Kolnai (–). Both thinkers are Eastern Europeans and Catholics, Thomists with a phenomenologist’s sensibility,2 and both wrote doctoral dissertations on Scheler. However, whereas some have started to call John Paul II’s social encyclicals examples of ‘‘progressive Thomism,’’ one would not think to say this of Kolnai’s writings. Ultimately , in chapter , I will show that the primary goals of Catholic social thought might be better attained by Kolnai’s conservative thought than by the ‘‘progressive Thomism’’ started by Maritain and absorbed by the encyclical tradition. In this chapter the argument is made that the ‘‘politics of the family ’’ is a restatement of Augustine’s anti-utopian politics: that the goal of political order is to moderate the lust to dominate but not to seek PAGE 138 ................. 11244$ $CH8 03-18-05 08:28:46 PS The Wedding Feast of the Lamb  its eradication. Familiaris Consortio understands the hospitality of the family to contrast with the city of man’s lust to dominate and to...