It appears more and more that the theology of the body is not just something worth understanding for its own sake, though it is certainly that; but it also is a key to a deeper understanding of many of the mysteries of the faith.
To begin, it is a key to understanding the central mysteries of the Incarnation and the Redemption. The question has been raised and disputed as to whether the Incarnation or the Redemption is the greater event. It has been suggested more than once that the Incarnation was only for the sake of the Redemption. But these questions and suggestions can be seen, in light of the theology of the body, to be superficially motivated. For if it is true that the meaning of the body is essentially nuptial, and that the nuptial meaning is essentially bound up with the concept of a gift, then we can understand that to be a gift is inscribed in the very essence of human personhood. Man and woman give themselves to each other in marriage, and the full fruition of this mutual gift is the person of the child. The child is the living gift. In this man is in the image of God, Who in the Person of the Holy Spirit is gift.
The Incarnation of the Christ-child is therefore the fullest possible fruition of man’s nature as gift, and it is the fullest gift both of God to man and of man to God. Further, as Pope Benedict has noted, it is impossible to understand the heart of Christ without understanding him as belonging to a family, and as having a mother; any attempt to do so results in an abstract and inadequate conception of Who Christ is.
What then of the view that the Incarnation was essentially just for the sake of the Redemption? This opinion, held in one way at least, appears to be steeped in a corrupt utilitarianism. For the truth emerges that the Incarnation and the Redemption must be understood fully in relation to each other. Christ was the greatest gift, and the greatest conceivable gift, of God to man. Christ’s Passion was, precisely and essentially, man’s rejection of that gift. It was man’s unwillingness to acknowledge that such a gift was possible and suitable. The Redemption was God’s overcoming of this unwillingness.
How does Christ’s passion overcome this unwillingness? The customary view has been that there must be payment for transgression. But how can suffering pay for transgression? How does an evil rectify the disorder caused by another evil? The thought of René Girard, combined with the theology of the body, seems to open new vistas where only unintelligible convention existed before. It has long been the custom among men, as Girard notes, to hold that someone must pay for the sins of man; or more precisely to hold that there must be a victim. A victim is not only somone who suffers; it is someone who represents, bears in his or her person, the evil to which man is subject. Girard’s view is that Christ’s passion took place not so much in order to fulfill this requirement that there be a victim – since that after all appears to be only necessary according to the invention of man – but rather in order to overcome it, by placing Divine Love in the midst of the human invention of vindication through suffering.
Yet it seems that this can be understood still more fully if it is true that gift lies at the very heart of the meaning of man. For it then becomes possible to see that sin itself is essentially a rejection of this truth. The original sin, most notably, was a rejection of this truth; it was man’s choice to rely on himself, rather than on the generosity of God. Yet if humanity is essentially gift, and cannot be otherwise understood, then fallen and sinful man naturally finds himself compelled to make of himself some sort of payment for what he has done through sin – as if the reality called commutative justice were separately intelligible as a principle; as if man really were autonomous, and could therefore pay for himself. As Girard observes, the victim is a representation of what man has both rejected and lost; it is as if, through the victim, man tries to give back what he has refused. This, however, is also an attempt to turn what is essentially gratuitous into what is demanded and imposed; to turn mercy into justice, to use the usual terms. The Divine atonement rectifies a desire which is otherwise essentially vain, by restoring Divine generosity at the very heart of man’s desire to “repay.”
It seems, in light of this interpretation, all the more pathos-inspiring that in some times and places, the victim men have preferred for themselves is a virgin or a child: someone in whom the reality of giving is most beautifully and vulnerably present. One suspects that on a subconscious level this was deliberate.
