Pope John Paul II is a brave man. Speaking the truth in unstable and unfriendly countries, standing boldly against the popular demise of morality, traveling furiously even when weakened by sickness — no one can deny his courage.
The Real Danger
But the pope does more than just model strength for us: He calls us to it. His apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio (On the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World [1981]), is such a call. This papal document sets out the seemingly impossible mission facing every married couple and every family in the world today: It alerts us to the fact that “the family is the object of numerous forces that seek to destroy it or in some way to deform it” and then reveals strategies for overcoming them. It shows a dying society the root of its problems and offers a renewed vision of human life, marriage, and family that will bring healing to a wounded humanity.
Given its urgent call to action, its sense of impending danger, and the fact that the pope himself has called it a summa of the Church's teaching on the family, it's strange that this document has remained largely neglected since its publication 20 years ago. Why this reaction?
The answer lies in the fact that the teaching of Familiaris Consortio is incompatible with the secular belief system that has deeply affected our culture. The pope shows that there are two incompatible visions of reality. In presenting a biblical vision of man, he challenges the presuppositions of all secular rationalists (whether in society or in the Church) about the nature of man and woman, marriage and the family. In proclaiming “the plan of God for marriage and the family,” the pope calls us all to a fundamental conversion, to the “acceptance of the Gospel.” Implied in this call is a conversion from the secular to the biblical view of reality. In this way, Familiaris Consortio stands out in the modern intellectual landscape as a sign of contradiction. While such signs are rarely welcomed, they are, nonetheless, a source of hope.
Familiaris Consortio gives us a plan of action. First, it identifies the real and present danger: “At the present time, [there are] ideas and solutions which are very appealing, but which obscure in varying degrees the truth and the dignity of the human person…. These views are often supported by the powerful and pervasive organization of the means of social communication, which subtly endanger freedom and the capacity for objective judgment. Many are already aware of this danger to the human person.”
To respond to these ideologies, the pope constructs what is known as a “theological anthropology” — a view of the human person that respects his dignity by respecting his specific created nature. In the early Church, the very nature of salvation was threatened by the Christological heresies: A misunderstanding of Christ's nature led inevitably to a misunderstanding of the nature of salvation. The Church fought vigorously against those early enemies of the truth. Today, the heresies that have arisen are not Christological but anthropological. Now, the very nature of man and our fundamental relationships with one another, as well as with God, are severely threatened. The pope's construction of a theological anthropology is his answer to the modern heresies. Secular ideologies have systematically imposed their vision of reality on society. That vision has included a faulty egalitarianism, a reduction of all sexual differentiation to mere biology, and an understanding of the body and sexual relationships as merely instrumental. In this view, life is devoid of any metaphysical dimension (see the pope's Letter to Families [1994]).
In contrast to these destructive “heresies,” Familiaris Consortio's vision of human nature is based on the revelational witness of Scripture and grounded in the theology of creation. Like the Lord Himself, it takes us back to the beginning” (cf. Matthew 19:1-6). This alone can overcome the false views dominating our society; the enemy must be revealed and a response formulated.
The Enemy Exposed
At the heart of the flawed secular view of reality lies a false notion of freedom. This faulty view leads inexorably to a disintegrative and destructive understanding of the person. Speaking about abortion, divorce, contraception, and other depersonalizing practices, John Paul II astutely reveals their root cause: “At the root of these negative phenomena there frequently lies a corruption of the idea and the experience of freedom, conceived not as a capacity for realizing the truth of God's plan for marriage and the fami!ly, but as an autonomous power of self-affirmation, often against others, for one's own selfish well-being.”
This distinction is difficult for the secular mind to grasp. As with every age, ours has been seduced by the First Temptation, the temptation to reject creaturely obedience to God and replace it with the lordship of “self.” While this grab for power may initially feel liberating, it ends in the isolation of self-captivity. Familiaris Consortio exposes the truth about the autonomous, self-referential individual. In rejecting his dependent relationship with God, man becomes depersonalized and destructive. Only by a fundamental reorientation toward the Creator and the acceptance of the structure, meaning, and purpose of human nature as it is divinely revealed can man discover his true self. For this reason, Familiaris Consortio begins with a fundamental call to conversion and states that “the Church is deeply convinced that only by the acceptance of the gospel are the hopes that man legitimately places in marriage and in the family capable of being fulfilled.” But a sophisticated modern society finds the simplicity and humility required for such a conversion difficult to accept.
Every strong battle plan has a strategy. Familiaris Consortio is no different, but unlike the elaborate designs drawn by generals past, its power lies in its fundamental simplicity. The apostolic exhortation shows that the answer to the modern crisis lies in recovering the theology of creation as a vital part of any anthropological discourse. The fundamental reorientation toward the Creator requires our acceptance of creaturely status. Only in this way can the vertical dimension to human existence be rediscovered.
Of course, in a society that worships “self,” it's extremely difficult to recall people to this saner view of reality — the view that we're not the creators of our own nature. Nevertheless, Familiaris Consortio unabashedly proclaims that only in his relationship to God can man (and hence marriage and family) ever come into fullness of being: “Willed by God in the very act of creation, marriage and the family are interiorly ordained to fulfillment in Christ, and have need of His graces in order to be healed from the wounds of sin and restored to their 'beginning,' that is, to full understanding and the full realization of God's plan.”
The Transcendent Dimension
Human nature, marriage, and family are not social constructs subject to manipulation for the advancement of specific agendas. Rather, they are formed and informed by God's loving plan and interiorly oriented toward Christ. We're called to be faithful to this will — not to any political expediency.
In calling us to battle, the pope isn't leaving us unarmed. Familiaris Consortio provides tools that effectively defeat the destructive hold that secularism has on the modern mind. The document's implicit critique of rationalism is fully developed in Letter to Families. There the pope shows that at the heart of modern rationalism lies its rejection of the metaphysical dimension. “Modern rationalism does not tolerate mystery…. Rationalism provides a radically different way of looking at creation and the meaning of human existence…. What is left except the mere temporal dimension of life?” (emphasis added).
In the destructive framework of secularist thought, human nature and human acts have only temporary, !utilitarian value. Meaning, if attached to any particular phenomenon, is only subjective. Inevitably, in the area of sexuality, the “other” is quickly reduced to a mere object, and the dignity of the human person is lost. The deeper dimensions of the human person, the marital covenant, and the family are incomprehensible to those who think this way. The modern world, having lost the capacity to reject the self-centered secularist framework, has also lost the language of love. Familiaris Consortio counters this by insisting on our essential identity as creatures made in the image of God:
God created man in His own image and likeness…. God is love and in Himself He lives a mystery of personal loving communion. Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.
Man is free only insofar as he is faithful to his created nature. Ultimately, he can only know love to the extent that he realizes his relationship to God. The pope shows that at the heart of human nature itself is the vocation to personal love and communion, which is a reflection of, and participates in, the life of the Trinity. This is possible precisely and only because man is made in God's image. Because of this, human relationships possess a meaning far beyond mere biology. Indeed, “the love of husband and wife is a unique participation in the mystery of life and of the love of God himself.”
Part of our mission in today's world is to recover the sense that there's a profound symbolic dimension to the human person. The prevailing ethos is all against this. As Henri de Lubac noted in Sources of Revelation (1968), “If we said that our age repudiated…every kind of symbolism, we would still be stopping at appearances. What it does, rather, is to institute an anti-symbolism.” In contrast, Familiaris Consortio articulates a profound hermeneutic of reality — one that allows for the intersecting of the physical and the spiritual. This hermeneutic is essential if the nature of human relationships is to be correctly understood. In reflecting on the meaning of the spousal covenant, Familiaris Consortio states: “Their belonging to each other is the real representation, by means of the sacramental sign, of the very relationship of Christ with the Church…the permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross.”
This transcendent dimension to human life has been virtually eradicated by the dominance of scientific rationalism, according to which whatever is not replicable in a laboratory is not real. But human nature, relationships, and actions can never properly be understood as only biological phenomena. They carry meaning far beyond their physical or temporal dimensions. All human reality (and its valuation) is tied to what the pope calls the inscribed “vocation to love,” which is, in turn, linked to the divine nature and reflective of it. All of this depends on man's status as imago dei (the image of God), which John Paul II considers “the most profound truth of man.”
This is incomprehensible to the secular mind. True to its own flawed logic, this view has provided for the development and acceptance of an increasingly depersonalized vision of human sexuality, one that includes contraception, in vitro fertilization, abortion, same-sex unions, embryonic stem cell research, and the like.
Joseph C. Atkinson is assistant professor of Sacred Scripture at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Washington, D.C.
(This article originally appeared in CRISIS Magazine and is used by permission.).
