Ethics Finder

Theology of the Body

This expression is associated originally and still primarily with ideas developed by Pope John Paul II in a large series of addresses later expanded and gathered with other writings. The source of these goes back to his time as a student and later as a teacher when he was influenced by both traditional mystical writers such St John of the Cross and by recent phenomenological approaches to anthropology, that is to say philosophical theories (including those of Edith Stein –canonized by him in 1998 as St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) that focus on the experience human persons have of one another as bearers of meaning and value. John Paul II extended this to say that God can be found through a recognition what he has put into the animated being of others. One important and influential application of these ideas is in relation to sexual ethics using the idea of embodied sexual natures to argue for complementarity and the openness of sexual intimacy to the production of new life, thereby cooperating with God’s ongoing creative activity.

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