Body-Poetics of the Virgin Mary

Mary's Maternal Body as Poem of the Father

Jane Petkovic

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781532699245
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología mariana

The Judeo-Christian scriptures understand humans as being made in the image of God. What exactly does this mean? Basic agreement is that it means humans can only know and understand themselves in relation to God. If, however, this God is pure uncreated spirit, where does human embodiment fit in? Is it an obstacle to understanding? Or is it in some way instructive? John Paul II comes down decisively in favor of the body's value and importance. In his catechetical series, widely known as the Theology of the Body, John Paul II analyzes what is distinctive about human beings. He undertakes a "reading" of the body.This book reflects on John Paul II's interpretation, extending his findings to the Virgin Mary. Her specifically female, maternal body is seen to offer insights into how the body images God--in how it "speaks." The transformations of the female body parallel the transformations of language in poetry. The reconfigurations and accommodations of the gestational body are, this book suggests, poetic incarnations of God-likeness. Body-Poetics of the Virgin Mary offers a Mariological slant on theological anthropology and a new way to think of how humans poetically image God.

1

Of Bodies and Words

Meaning and Mattering

High on the end wall hangs / the Gospel, from before He was books

—Les Murray, “Church”

At his Wednesday general audiences, held between 1979 and 1984, Pope John Paul II delivered a sequential catechetical series on the human person in relation to God; a theological anthropology. The weekly instalments were adapted from an unpublished book manuscript he had written prior to his papal election in 1978. Originally given the title, Man and Woman He Created Them, a direct citation of Genesis 1:27, it has become generally known, and referred to, by a phrase that recurs more than one hundred times in the text: a “theology of the body.”1 As the subject of Wednesday audiences, John Paul’s catechetical series was unusual for its duration, content, and register. Attendant pilgrims and visitors at Wednesday audiences, often at that time numbering in the thousands, would customarily expect to receive a papal greeting, short address, prayer, and blessing. Weighty catechetical instruction was not what they expected but was what they received. Substantial in content and academic references, John Paul’s talks fused pastoral occasion and catechetical intent—implicitly, a call to conversion—with grounding in biblical texts, philosophy, and theology.

It may be surprising that a series of talks on the meaning of the human body gives no simple definition of its key term. Michael Waldstein’s edition lists four index headings for body; each entry having multiple subheadings. The first entry deals with “fundamental concepts.” These are: that the person is an embodied entity who does not have a body but is a body among other bodies; that the body “determines man’s ontological subjectivity and participates in the dignity of the person”; and that the body expresses the person. These concepts were identified by John Paul II in scriptural exegesis. The pope saw his task in writing a theology of the body to, in Waldstein’s words, “unfold and explain” the scriptural revelation of the body, “helped by reflecting upon human experience.” John Paul II therefore had two broad foci: the meaning of the body, and the human experience of the body. The experience of being embodied is how we experience the body’s meaning; an experience John Paul refers to as “(re)-reading the meaning of the body.”

A foundational premise of John Paul’s Theology of the Body is that the body in its natural state functions as a sign. This natural body has objective meanings, against which any cultural construal can be measured. John Paul recognizes that prevailing cultural norms may proclaim a different meaning for the body or claim the body’s meaning is alterable by cultural fiat. If, though, the body has objectively true meanings, then deviation from these is a falsification. If, as John Paul argues, the body’s meanings are objectively, so invariantly true, then it is not possible to subscribe to a theory of the body’s being a social construct, unstable and variable in meaning. John Paul recognizes how social paradigms, within which bodies are situated, shape societal attitudes toward the body. These attitudes, in turn, shape ethical codes pertaining to how persons are treated socially and legally. The overarching motivation for John Paul’s theological anthropology was to repudiate social attitudes which he saw as damaging to persons through their misrepresentation of the body’s meaning.

The pope’s immediate intention in writing was to defend Paul VI’s 1969 Encyclical, Humanae Vitae. That encyclical’s reception had been neither smooth nor uniform. Its continuing, and for some, unexpected and unwelcome, proscription against artificial contraception had alienated large numbers, not only outside the church, but within it. The controversy it aroused contributed to a growing disconnect between the sexual praxis of increasing numbers of Roman Catholics, and church teaching, as became clear to John Paul in the exercise of his priestly pastoral duties. He therefore sought not only to defend church teaching from the infiltration of opposing ideas from without, but to reaffirm the coherence and strength of catholic teachings, more particularly those concerned with sexual ethics, to those within the church who did not see their value, or continued relevance. To achieve this aim, he followed Jesus’s gospel lead by going back to “the beginning”; to the first book of holy scripture, the first story of which deals with the starting point of creation. John Paul likewise began his talks with extensive meditations upon the mythological creation narratives of Genesis, using them to contextualize church doctrine. By comparing the biblical vision of “the beginning” with the contemporary alternative vision, the pope invited thinking into how the one differs from the other, what difference this makes, and why such difference matters. This method also served John Paul’s wider purpose of providing the intellectual and faith resources to defend Roman Catholic sexual ethics. He presented a robust theological anthropology, underpinned by the Western philosophic tradition, along with scholarship more recent to his time of writing.

Theological anthropology—the study of man in relation to God—has tended to rely upon intellectual disciplines as its chief way of knowing. Anthropology, a social science, seeks knowledge through a study of all aspects of human existence; material and organizational, as well as intellectual. John Paul draws upon both approaches, constantly referring to trends in philosophical and theological discussion, contemporary to his time of writing, as well as describing experiences common in daily living. This balancing of different ways of knowing has been strongly present within the Roman Catholic Church, which tests intellectual knowledge against the church’s collective memory. The Catechism of the Catholic Church recognizes several sources which accessibly store this collective memory: holy scripture, tradition, the magisterium, sacramental liturgy, prayer, the ministries and charisms of the church, the signs of apostolic and missionary life, and the witness of the saints (CCC 688).

John Paul draws upon this collective repository in his scriptural exegesis. He freshens scriptural revelation by putting it in dialogue with the experience of living. In this way, he hopes to assist his audience and readership towards a truer and deeper understanding of what it means to be human. His method draws upon the internal intellectual resources of memory and imagination as a way to make sense of, and process, external sense data gleaned from living. This is the phenomenological method: studying how phenomena disclose themselves through being concretely experienced. As John Paul’s immediate aim was to defend Humanae Vitae, his major task is to set out how, in the experience of love, man realizes his meaning. The expression of love he focuses on is sacramental marriage, including its sexual dimension. This is not because he considers marriage to be determinative of human existence, but because it is what he calls the “primal sacrament” (TOB 96:6, inter alia). Present since the beginning of the world, it confirms the nature of man’s origin in perfect love.

Hermeneutics—the analysis and interpretation of texts—is central to John Paul’s endeavor. His extensive interpretation of the two creation myths of Genesis is interspersed with many other wide-ranging scriptural references. His commitment to the phenomenological method extends the range of his interpretative field, so that ordinary life experiences, such as speaking and other acts, provide a potentially huge volume of material for analysis. Through this method, John Paul tries to kindle an imaginative spark of understanding about how the body is meaningful, and what truths it manifests. Although John Paul’s Theology of the Body is a multi-faceted exercise in hermeneutics, that discipline is not his primary interest; hermeneutics and phenomenology are put to the service of theology.

The fact of embodiment determines how man knows anything of the world, including knowing what kind of creature he is; what he means. This knowledge is radically available for all persons, as everyone is embodied. Church teaching would add that scriptural revelation leads persons to arrive at right understanding of themselves. Additionally, although the body is the means of man’s knowing, the body itself also knows. It has an innate awareness of itself. A primary life task of the person is to correctly interpret his or her own meaning, in the light of divine revelation. The key phrase John Paul repeatedly uses to express this hermeneutical task is: “rereading the body in truth.”2 In this phrase, John Paul expressly connects the body with language, treating the body metaphorically as text. Two different types of things: literary text, and the human body, are related to each other by the cognitive practice of interpretation; each treated of as text to be decoded. In thinking of the body in this way, John Paul’s hermeneutic enters the domain of body-poetics. The body, that is, communicates on a metaphorical level as a sign, pointing to its own nature, and to its origin beyond itself. Metaphor and poetics are not an alien imposition upon John Paul’s theological anthropology but are intimately entwined in it.

The key findings of John Paul’s theological anthropology, his hermeneutic strategy of “reading the body in truth,” and his reliance upon phenomenology to clarify and confirm his findings, form the basis of the claims made in this book. These claims are that John Paul’s two-pronged method of reading scripture as revelatory of the body, and treating the body as a revelatory text to be read, support the idea that reality can be accessed through poetics. Poetic articulations may be literary, as in the case of scripture, for example, or physical, as in the case of the body. Related to this claim is one that proceeds from it: that fruitful theological reflection can take place in the experience of reading literature and/or in the experience of embodiment. If, as upheld by this author, poetics may disclose some aspects of reality that literalist, or scientific approaches alone cannot, then a hermeneutic of body-poetics is a legitimate resource to expand theological knowledge. On the basis of the three preceding claims, it is further claimed that the maternal body of the Virgin Mary is given for Christ’s body and that her body is well-expressed as “poem of the Father.”

These four claims are addressed by first of all, contextualizing John Paul’s theological anthropology with the philosophic ideas which shaped it, and w...