“For those dominated by lust, what I hold out is impossible. But those who enter the “effectiveness” of redemption discover “another vision of man’s possibilities” (TOB 46:6).”

This is so true. I have discovered in my own coversations with people about TOB that they have a hard time distiguishing between lust and admiring the beauty of God’s creation of the human body. Many have told me that TOB is an “ideal” that is too hard for the average person to live out. How sad! TOB may be the very thing that brings love back to a loveless marriage, or hope back to a promiscous young person, or life to those yet unborn! It is a life-filled and love-filled presentation of church teaching that speaks in modern language what it means to be sexual from God’s persepective not man’s. For those with eyes to see, and ears to hear, open your hearts to this most beautiful and life- changing world view.

Oh, how I wish I would have heard this message when I was young!

The deep dive is in the series of John Paul II’s Wednesday audiences from 5 September 1979 to 28 November 1984. When people say, “Theology of the Body,” this is what they refer to. EWTN has a page that compiles all 129 audiences: http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/JP2TBIND.HTM . The Vatican publishes all of JPII’s audiences (Wednesday and otherwise) at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/audiences/index.htm . You’ll have to pick through the material at the Vatican website, and they are not all translated into English, but you can at least check the source materials with the original there.

Christopher West’s work and the work of others has been to present the Holy Father’s work. As Mr. West notes in this article, his presentation has both its successes and shortcomings, but it is the honest work of a gentleman presenting the authentic teaching of John Paul II. There are many others doing similar presentations of JPII’s Theology of the Body, notably Mary Beth Bonnacci (www.reallove.net); Jason Evert (www.chastity.com); Fathers Richard Hogan and Dan McCaffrey (www.nfpoutreach.org); and others.

Your question also seems to go at whether the Theology of the Body is something brand new or if it has history in the Church. In fact, it is both. TOB is soundly rooted in Natural Law, a point you can understand by reading Familiaris Consortio. Another work to peruse if you want a really deep dive into the JPII’s thinking before he formally presented Theology of the Body is Karol Wojtyla’s Love and Responsibility (ISBN 0898704456). John Paul wrote this around 1960 as bishop of Krakow, and it influenced Pope Paul VI’s writing of Humanae Vitae.

Now whether TOB is an authentic doctrinal development or merely a re-presentation of what the Church has always taught is a matter for more learned minds than mine to decide. The fact is that it is rooted in Natural Law, so the thoughts JPII presents in TOB will not contradict the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. If you see such contradictions, check your understanding of what has been presented to you. Then, you might offer a charitable explanation to your presenter, who may have made an honest mistake.

That some people misunderstand TOB as contradicting Natural Law simply indicates the confusions that exist in human society due, of course, to concupiscence, and perhaps even moreso, due to limitations of humans in expressing theology to others (as Mr. West alludes to in this article). What comes through loud and clear for one person is a muddle for another. That is why we need many, many presenters in order to reach all people.

But TOB, like the human personalism that John Paul articulates in Love and Responsibility swings on a dual hinge: it is both rooted in Natural Law and in the theological idea of Man as a living image of God, which latter is the subject matter of the first three chapters of Genesis. Indeed, the first several of the Wednesday audiences that would become TOB are spent examining these first three chapters and seeking to understand why Jesus returns to “the beginning” when articulating His teaching on the permanence of marriage (Matthew 19). John Paul also presents the human person as something of an inseparable duality: each person is simultaneously and indivisibly an object and a subject, both in the philosophical sense and the real sense. JPII’s introduction to Love and Responsibility goes into great detail here, but a summation is that each human person is the object of actions done by another and an actor whose actions affect others. This is one of the most significant philosophical roots of TOB. It is also one of the primary sources of TOB confusion. John Paul spends a great deal of time speaking of the human person as a subject, which is a departure in presentation from the object-centered language often associated with St. Thomas’s philosophy. Thus, there is a tendency in certain circles to dismiss TOB as subjective, but this is false. There are TOB presentations which overemphasize the reality of the human person as subject, but if you are to be a proper student of TOB, you must keep in mind that it is both deep and broad — and that only Jesus can present the entire Truth all at once (and do so in his very Person). The rest of us are stuck in presenting the Truth a bit at a time, and so we might get hung up on one part of it (like the human person as subject) without ever dismissing other simultaneous aspects of the Truth (as in the human subject never ceases to be an object as well).

But I am already diving deep into philosophical language. Object here is not “thing” but the reality of a living image of God who receives the actions of other subjects (who are themselves objects of his own actions). Subject here is not “subjective” or “utilitarian” or “relativism”; rather it refers to the fact that every human person is necessarily an actor whose actions are also directed at other human persons as objects of his actions. And now, I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a bind on this matter. Better to leave my muddling and go ready JPII’s introduction to Love and Responsibility.

Suffice it to say that Theology of the Body has been compared (by Father Hogan) to St. Augustine’s work, The City of God and to St. Thomas’s work as a synthesis of philosophy and theology. Where Augustine relied on the philosophy of Plato and informed it with Scriptures and teachings of the Church. Thus, Augustine unified the good of pagan philosophy with the revealed Truth to come up with what Fr. Hogan calls a synthesis. St. Thomas did a similarly expansive synthesis, still relying on the Scriptures and teachings of the Church, but the philosophy that informed his work is that of Aristotle. In composing TOB, John Paul also relies on the Scriptures and teachings of the Church, but the philosophy that explicitly informs his synthesis is phenomenology, from which JPII gets many of his philosophical notions of subject. But TOB goes further than this, incorporating the Thomistic notions of Natural Law and even the Augustinian notion of Original Sin. Thus, there is a lot to study when looking at TOB.

That also can help explain the length of this post, which barely scratches the surface of what there is to learn.