The Family: At the Heart of John Paul II s Theology of the Body

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1 The Family: At the Heart of John Paul II s Theology of the Body Maria Fedoryka, Ave Maria University Theology of the Body Conference St. Mary s University College, Twickenham London June 4, 2011 Dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus The theology of the body, particularly as a pedagogy of the body, in some way plunges its roots into the theology of the family and, at the same time, leads to it. This pedagogy of the body, whose key today is Humanae vitae, can be explained only in the full context of a correct vision of the value of life and the family. (124:3) The Theology of the Body is a vast exploration of the plan of love to which man is called by God through his creation of marriage. If one were to characterize this project in a nutshell, one could say that they are an attempt to understand how it is that bodiliness is at the very heart of this plan of love, as entering deeply into the constitutive content of spousal love and marriage. And at the heart of this, in turn, says JPII in this passage, is the idea of the family: the idea of the family guides the theology of the body it gives it its beginning and its end. If the body introduces a new possibility for union between the spouses, and allows for the sacramentality of this union, somehow this union itself must be understood in light of another dimension of the body, namely, that through it, man and woman are able to participate in the creation of a new human person. And so in this paper I d like to explore with you how it is that the family is in some sense the key to understanding the body and the bodily union that is realized in marriage. I will discuss two major points in 5 sections: firstly, the special structure of the human body, as truly personal in character because of its union with the personal soul, along the unique place of sexuality within this body-soul unity which is man. And secondly, I will examine the nature of love, as ultimately grounding the Church s teaching on family and the conjugal act. In this connection, I believe that it is its emphasis on the centrality of love that prompts JP to refer to Humanae vitae as containing the key to his pedagogy of the body. 1. The body reveals the personal spirit, and the body as the second dimension of the human person (not just a possession of the person) In his major reflections on the family, in Letter to Families and in Familiaris consortio, John Paul II spends some time establishing, as foundational to his consideration on family, the truth that the body along with the personal soul is also in some real sense the person. In the same way, underlying JPII s analysis of the theology of the body is a metaphysical anthropology, according to which the human person is not a personal soul possessing a body, or a soul living in a body. Rather, the body, along with the personal soul, is constitutive of the very being of the human person. We have to marvel at this unique reality: this means that in the being of man it is as though the boundary that otherwise exists between the material and the spiritual realms is penetrated, and the two unite in one being. Further, insofar as body and soul interpenetrate to form one being, the physical matter of the human body is rendered entirely unique: it is always already a personal body. The body is taken up, as it were, into the personal soul, and is endowed with a way of being that surpasses the way in which mere matter exists.

2 This theory of the body-soul unity in the human person yields two important truths that are central to JPII s theology of the body : firstly as we see in certain justly-famous passages from the text the body in its very being and structure is capable of expressing the person. The body is, as he says, transparent to the immaterial reality of the soul, making it visible in another order of being, the material order. In Donum vitae we find, By virtue of its substantial union with a spiritual soul, the human body cannot be considered as a mere complex of tissues, organs and functions, nor can it be evaluated in the same way as the body of animals; rather it is a constitutive part of the person who manifests and expresses himself through it. 1 This means, secondly, that the body is not something that the person uses as an instrument; rather, the body enters into the being of the human person as subject, and becomes a co-subject with him in his activities. In 7:1 JP writes that [m]an is a subject not only by his selfconsciousness and by self-determination, but also based on his own body. 2. The body reveals the call to live love, to a unique mutual self-donation that is spousal, and metaphysically presupposes male and female persons So, JPII asserts that the body reveals the person. But then he goes on to say that the body also reveals the vocation of the human person. More specifically, it is the body in its masculinity and femininity that constitutes a special revelation of the deepest vocation of man: the vocation to love, and more specifically, to spousal love. Masculinity and femininity as complementary indicate an ordination of the man and the woman to the each other, an ordination of total giving to and full reception of the other. In other words, the complementary structure of man and woman is a complementarity specified from the point of view of a communion of persons in love. The body, which expresses femininity for masculinity and, vice versa manifests the reciprocity and the communion of persons. It expresses it through gift as the fundamental characteristic of personal existence. (14.4) Masculinity and femininity, therefore, have their origin as an invention of God to serve the plan of a uniquely profound and intimate love. For the purposes of our topic, we need to note the following: the deepest meaning of the body is found in its spousal characteristic. It is in spousal union that the deepest giftcharacteristic of the body is fulfilled. The human body, with its sex its masculinity and femininity seen in the very mystery of creation contains from the beginning the spousal attribute, that is, the power to express love: precisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift and through this gift fulfills the very meaning of his being and existence. (15.1) If we think that everything that is must have a reason for its existence, we now see that the reason that God created the human person with a body is for spousal communion. While the body is meant to be in the service of living for others in many ways, it is the spousal realization of the body that grounds its deepest reason for being. The body finds its fundamental justification in the spousal bodily self-giving of man and woman. 1 Donum vitae 3. The document continues: A first consequence can be deduced from these principles: an intervention on the human body affects not only the tissues, the organs and their functions but also involves the person himself on different levels. 2

3 This is true both of marriage, and also of virginity, in which the sealing off of the sexual dimension, and its special consecration to God, constitutes the virginal marriage between the soul and God. In addition to revealing man s vocation to love, John Paul repeatedly states that masculinity and femininity themselves reveal the human person s origin in love. He says that the very fact of masculinity and femininity witnesses to the human person s having been created out of love: We find in 14:4 that man and woman are created by Love, that is, endowed in their being with masculinity and femininity and This is the body: a witness to creation as a fundamental gift, and therefore a witness to Love as the source from which this same giving springs. Our conclusion here is the following: The vocation of man and woman to spousal love, emerges as the vocation to reflect and as we shall later see participate in the being of God: God who is Love, whose life is made up of a substantial love that finds its culmination in a distinct person within the Trinity; God, whose love overflowed into the creation of man in order to incorporate Him into His own life of love. In fact, through his bodiliness, his masculinity and femininity, man becomes a visible sign of the economy of Truth and Love (19:5) 3. The sphere of sexuality is the special locus of this deepest realization of love While masculinity and femininity are first and foremost spiritual characteristics, we know that they are inseparable from the body. It is the incarnate, embodied person alone who is properly male or female. Indeed, angels have no gender, though in Scripture they come to us in human categories, as masculine. Now, while everything in the human person is characterized by masculinity and femininity, the sphere of sex contains a special culmination of gender; it is the special concentrated locus, we could say, of masculinity and femininity. Thus, it isn t surprising that sexuality is somehow at the very center of the mutual love between man and woman that is called spousal. We must briefly look at the nature of the sexual sphere as we make our way to the main point of this paper. We recall here what was said earlier, namely, that the body is taken up into the personal soul; that the human body is quite different from all other matter that we encounter in the rest of creation, even from the matter of other living things; that it has a personal character in its deepest metaphysical constitution. But within the body-soul unity, we find mysteriously, by God s invention that the sphere of sex contains a special intersection of body and soul, an especially close union of body and soul. Our experience of sexuality already reveals this to us: any entrance into the sexual sphere wakens the soul, and draws it into its own activity. In spite of what people might want to say, there is no such thing as casual sex. 2 This experience witnesses to an important truth about the structure of the sexual act, as unique among bodily acts. The act of waving my hand doesn t have an intrinsic spiritual meaning. It has a meaning that we give to it from the outside and that s why it can mean different things in different cultures. But sex by its very nature is an entirely different kind of 2 See Dietrich von Hildebrand s treatment of this issue in his book Purity. 3

4 bodily act: the conjugal act is an act which does not consist merely in physical movements, but by its very nature in its very structure is tied to the soul, to an act of the spirit. It is objectively structured to embody a particular act of the spirit. This means that as physical, the conjugal act is not a complete reality; rather, it is one dimension of a two dimensional act, the second dimension of which is spiritual. It embodies literally, makes bodily some spiritual act. So, what is this inner soul of the sexual act? The answer is, the spiritual reality of spousal love. The sexual act is, we could say, shaped to house the total and exclusive self-donation of man and woman to one another, in a mutual unconditional affirmation. The sexual act as a bodily act forms a strict unity that is, one single reality with the spiritual act of spousal love. (Indeed, we can see that the physical and psychological structure of the marital act, in the unprecedented closeness that it entails, makes it a fitting bodily second dimension of the spiritual reality of spousal love.) And so as it enlivens it from within, the spiritual act of love is literally embodied the bodily act of sex. This is a very unique reality, in the whole of existence: a spiritual reality is not only symbolized, not only pointed to, but as I have said made into a bodily reality. This means that even though the conjugal act as bodily exists in the realm of matter, unlike in the case of any other material reality, its laws are a direct expression of a spiritual reality. The natural (or physical) laws that govern it are hence quite different in their metaphysical constitution than are the physical laws found in other realms of man s bodily existence, and even more, from the laws governing the activities of the animal world, and specifically reproduction. The physical laws in the realm of human sexuality are the manifestation of the reality that sex is ordained to embody, namely, the reality of love. To anticipate, we must mention more specifically that sex embodies both dimensions of love: union and fruitfulness. By comparison with the physical laws governing the spousal exchange, the physical laws of nature are a world apart, only a very pale reflection of these laws. In fact, we should say that the fertility of animals, the fertility of plants, is merely a distant analogy in the world of nature of the spousal union between husband and wife more dissimilar than similar to it. This point is at the very center of the Theology of the Body; in a way as Karol Wojtyla writes in Love and Responsibility everything depends on it. 3 It means that the biological laws found in the sexual sphere are not primary, but are governed by, determined by, a spiritual reality superior to themselves. They are what they are because the spirit, if you will, spills into the realm of the body, forming it and giving it its structure and dynamism. Thus these biological laws are subordinated to the laws of the spirit that forms and shapes them. This is why John Paul can say, in an astonishing statement, that the inner structures of the organism, of somatic and psychosomatic reactivity (125:1) found in the sphere of sex are an 3 As we see, everything depends on the premise that there exists a close connection between the order of nature and the person, the realization of personhood. It must be acknowledged that people have difficulty in understanding and accepting the order of nature as an abstract value: it is generally confused with the biological order and so deprived of all importance. It is much easier to understand the power of the natural order (and its constitutive significance for morality, and for the development of the human personality) if we see behind it the personal authority of the Creator. (Love and Responsibility, 230) 4

5 expression of masculinity and femininity, and thus enter into the dialogue of persons. 4 It is only because of this that there can even be a theology of the body The language of the body Indeed, this understanding of the body and of sexuality is at the foundation of the concept of the language of the body. The fact that the body and soul are one, and that the spousal act in particular is knitted together with a spiritual meaning, is why the body has the power to unite persons, and not only bodies. (Aside: This, as we shall see, is why the human body can be the co-agent of the coming into existence of another personal being.) There are passages from the TOB that are justly famous, in which JPII expresses the marvelous truth that the body not only points to or indicates the communion of the spouses, but actually constitutes it in the spousal exchange: In this way the perennial and ever new language of the body is not only the substratum, but in some sense also the constitutive content of the communion of persons. (103:5) 6 John Paul goes further, and specifies that God s invention of the human spousal relation, is such that the love cannot be realized without the body: Yet, man is in some sense unable to express this singular language of his personal existence and vocation without the body. He is constituted in such a way from the beginning that the deepest words of the spirit words of love, gift, and faithfulness call for an appropriate language of the body. And without this language, they cannot be fully expressed. (104:7) And in 105:6 In this sense, man male and female does not merely speak with the language of the body, but in some sense he allows the body to speak for him and on his behalf : I would say, in his name and with his personal authority. Once again, let us focus on this key point in our discussion: We see here that it is not simply that the person is made of body and soul, and so needs both to fully express love. In God s mysterious plan, the specifically spousal self-giving has in some sense the body as its special locus. It is, of course, the body as animated by the personal soul by masculinity and femininity in their spiritual features and the conjugal act as having its roots and end in the spiritual act of love, but it is nevertheless the body that has this special role to play in the human spousal self-giving. This is reflected, for example, in the fact that technically speaking the vows themselves are not sufficient to render a marriage indissoluble, but only the consummation of the marriage in the spousal act John Paul writes in this connection: 103:6 Thus, the sacrament of Marriage as a sign allows one to understand the words of the new spouses, words that confer a new aspect on their life in the strictly personal (and interpersonal, communio personarum) 4 One should keep in mind that the body speaks not only with the whole outer expression of masculinity and femininity, but also with the inner structures of the organism, of somatic and psychosomatic reactivity. All this should find its fitting place in the language with which the spouses dialogue as persons called to communion in the union of the body. 125:1 5 John Paul II expresses this deep connection of sexuality with the spiritual dimension of the person when he says in Familiaris consortio par. 11 that sex is by no means something purely biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. And in 123:2 of TOB, The human body is not only the field of reactions of a sexual character, but it is at the same time the means of the expression of man as an integral whole, of the person, which reveals itself through the language of the body. 6 As an incarnate spirit, that is, a soul which expresses itself in a body and a body informed by an immortal spirit, man is called to love in his unified totality. Love includes the human body, and the body is made a sharer in spiritual love. 5

6 dimension on the basis of the language of the body. Marriage as a sign of the indissoluble union between God and man requires the participation of the body in the constitution of the union. 5. Closer to look at what it means that love is the soul of the conjugal act, and that the body participates in the act of love between the spouses So, we have seen that the person is called to living the gift, and that the body, as that which is constitutive of the conjugal love culminating in marriage, is central to this vocation. Our next task is to examine closely how this sheds light on the nature of the communion between the spouses that constitutes the reality of marriage. Another way of stating our next task, is to ask the following question: If the body has a language, what is it, more exactly, that it says when it speaks spousally? We have already answered this generally, as being love. Now we want to look at this more closely. I begin with a quote: John Paul writes in 19:3-4, Man appears in the visible world as the highest expression of the divine gift, because he bears within himself the inner dimension of the gift. And with it he carries into the world his particular likeness to God, with which he transcends and also rules his visibility in the world, his bodiliness, his masculinity or femininity Thus, in this dimension, a primordial sacrament is constituted, understood as a sign that efficaciously transmits in the visible world the invisible mystery hidden in God from eternity. The body and its special act of communion in spousal love communicates to the world the invisible mystery of God. Even more, the human person truly participates in this mystery; that is, man not only reflects the mystery, but is in some way taken up into it. So, what is this mystery of God s being? John Paul completes the above passage by telling us: And this is the mystery of Truth and Love, the mystery of divine life, in which man really participates. St. John tells us the deepest secret of God s existence, as if to complete the statement of God s revelation to Moses: God is one who is Love. He is not simply one who loves, but one whose being is love. Indeed, through the revelation of Christ we discover that the very identity of the persons within the Trinity is constituted by mutual self-donation and mutual reception the two gestures that make up the essence of love; as theologians tell us, each person is a substantial relation. In and through the substantial self-giving of the Father to the Son and the Son s return to the Father, the love between them becomes once again substantial, in the person of the Spirit as the completion of their mutual self-donation. 7 Love is the ground of life within the Trinity, it is the ground of being within the Trinity. And just as it is the ground of life within the Trinity, it is everywhere and always the origin of creation, which is pure gift, pure overflow. John Paul II writes in 16:1, The reality of the gift and of the act of giving, which is sketched in the first chapters of Genesis as the constitutive content of the mystery of creation, confirms that the irradiation of Love is an integral part of this same mystery. Only Love creates the good, and in the end it alone can be perceived in all its dimensions and its contours in created things and, above all, in man. 7 In the communion of the Blessed Trinity no person is named for himself. There is here neither in itself nor for itself : terms that among us are signs of barrenness and death. In the communion of the living God, the mystery of each person is to be for the other: O! Thou. Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of the Liturgy, p. 30 6

7 And so to understand the content of the language written into the structure of the conjugal communion culminating in the spousal act, we have to examine the nature of love itself, as the reality at the center of the divine life in which man and woman are called to participate. Love is, at its innermost core, union. In love accomplished, two persons give their very selves to each other, and come to occupy a single mutual heart-space, as Kierkegaard calls it. Each welcomes the other s self-donation, and enthrones the other in affirmation; each rests in the other in a contemplative gaze, and rejoices in the other in his/her uniqueness; each becomes for the other the center of his/her existence; mysteriously, indeed, each comes to belong to the other. Marriage, then, as a reflection of the Trinity, is the vocation in which each person lives no longer for himself, but for the other in the deepest way possible between human persons. From this unity, already on a natural level, a new life begins for the spouses in this becoming one to the extent that each partner is prepared to die to himself for the sake of the other. But just as integral to love is another element: inseparably tied to the union of love, is fruitfulness. The unity of two persons that we have described above is such that by its very nature it overflows, and gives rise to some new reality beyond itself. We could say that the inner law governing love is superabundance; there is an exigency in the very core of love that it be creative, that it go beyond itself. It s sure that any of us who have experienced genuine love of any kind, and especially of spousal love, know that fruitfulness belongs just as much to love as does the union. Simply to experience the way in which the soul soars in a deep experience of love is to experience the overflow of love; think of the happiness that one experiences in love, or the rebirth in the moral realm that lovers often experience, or a discovery of new energies in oneself think of the way in which persons who are touched by a genuine and deep love often become better human beings more selfless, more otherdirected. In short, we could say that love is not itself if it isn t more than itself. And so we see that union and fruitfulness are two dimensions that make up the one reality of love. While they are distinct aspects of love, they are integrally connected; neither can be itself without the other. Further, there is, on the one hand, an order between them: union has priority from a causal point of view: it is the source and foundation of fecundity. On the other hand, fecundity is where the union of love reaches its completion. The union of is itself, paradoxically, only if it goes beyond itself, and is creative. If no overflow is present in some relation, it would be an infallible indication that no union of love was ever present. In 123:4, already speaking of the spousal act, John Paul says about the two dimensions of love that The one is realized together with the other and, in a certain way, the one through the other. What does all of this entail for the meaning of the spousal act? Here, we need to briefly summarize what we already in part covered: As we saw, the soul of marriage is the spiritual reality of love, which is realized in the context of embodied persons. Further, we saw that on the basis of their embodiment as masculine and feminine persons, the human spouses discover within themselves a unique power for unity (the first dimension of love we looked at), in the conjugal act. JPII states that from the beginning this body contains the power to express love: precisely that love in which the human being becomes a gift and through the gift fulfills the very meaning of his being and existence. (15:1) Though the union of persons in love is a spiritual reality, because the body exists as taken up into the personal soul, this act of the body truly makes real the personal unity of the spouses; that is, the power to unify persons is truly found within the body. The spiritual reality of love as it were stamps the bodily 7

8 being of the spouses, such that the body can now be the agent of unity. As we have seen, even more, it is mysteriously the body that precisely makes possible the special kind of personal union that is conjugal union. Even though the spiritual act of spousal love is the principle and definition of the unity, it is through the very bodily dimension itself understood as personal-bodily that the unique reality of spousal unity is accomplished. But the spouses discover something else: that the bodily act of union is stamped with love not only in the dimension of union, but is also in the dimension of the fruitfulness of love. The spouses discover that, by God s design, this pinnacle of the expression of spousal union contains also the pinnacle of the other dimension of love the pinnacle of the fruitfulness of spousal union: that is, the coming to be of a new human person. 8 It is here that the spousal love has reached its completion, in overflowing into its fruit: the love between the spouses has become substantial, as it were, in the child. Love has expanded into a new agent of love, which in turn expands the circle of love for the husband and wife now become father and mother. This is why Gaudium et spes speaks of the child as the ultimate crown of and supreme gift of marriage and of marital love. 9 The elements that our analysis has put together of the body-soul union in the human person, of the nature of sexuality, and of the nature of love reveal that even if conception does not result from every act of intercourse, the full meaning of spousal exchange between the couple is found only in the concept of parenthood. The coming to be of the child cannot be understood merely as a consequence of the union between the spouses, standing in a merely external relationship to their love for each other. The child stands in an integral metaphysical relation to the unity of the spouses with each other as its fruit. 10 Here, I would add, we discover the true depth of spousal love: it is a love so great, that its fruit is nothing less than the creation of a new human person. We could almost say that we find in the child a physical correlate of the spiritual fruitfulness proper to spousal love and thus an indication of how great that union is. In Familiaris consortio a document, as we know, very dear to John Paul II we find this alluded to in paragraph 28: Fecundity is the fruit and the sign of conjugal love, the living testimony of the full reciprocal self-giving of the spouses And with this we come to the heart of my paper: it is in and through the body the personalized body, and it alone that this particular kind of fecundity becomes possible. Something wonderful occurs in the connection between the spousal act and the coming to be of the child. Earlier we examined the remarkable truth that the physical matter of the human person is informed by the soul, so as to be taken up into a personal mode of existence. But in the case of procreation, there is also a perhaps even more surprising causality in the opposite direction: because of the body, the soul is expanded in its own capacities. It is as if a marvelous exchange took place: once the body has been incorporated into the personal soul, it can give new possibilities to the spiritual act of love. Swiss theologian Martin Rhonheimer writes that through the spirit, the body acquires a new dimension but then 8 Thanks to this [i.e., the willingness for parenthood], both persons in the union act in accordance with the inner logic of love, respect its inner dynamic, and prepare to accept a new good, an expression of the creative power of love. Love and Responsibility, p and Donum vitae II, A, 1: The parents find in their child a confirmation and completion of their reciprocal self-giving: the child is the living image of their love, the permanent sign of their conjugal union, the living and indissoluble concrete expression of their paternity and maternity. 8

9 adds that through the body the spirit acquires a new dimension as well. 11 There s a remarkable statement in paragraph 5 of Deus caritas est. Pope Benedict writes there, Christian faith [ ] has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. (Emphasis mine.) Here, in the most exalted moment of love between human persons, we also found the most exalted meaning of the human body. Through it, the human person can participate in the creative love of God. The body thus becomes a sign and a sacrament in a way that would have been unimaginable for us, did we not actually witness it. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the love between the Father and the Son; the child proceeds from the love between the parents. In Familiaris consortio a document, as we know, very dear to John Paul II we find a beautiful formulation of this point: With the creation of man and woman in His own image and likeness, God crowns and brings to perfection the work of His hands: He calls them to a special sharing in His love and in His power as Creator and Father, through their free and responsible cooperation in transmitting the gift of human life. (28) I would venture to say that perhaps we have discovered the most foundational reason that man was given a body; indeed without attempting to guess at the motives of God maybe this is the reason that God chose to create matter at all. Thus it becomes apparent that if we do not continue on to speak of the significance of family within marriage, we have only completed a partial theology of the body. Only because in he is made up of spirit and matter can a creature s love become co-creative. The contingent, finite person cannot give new being out of nothing; but he also cannot communicate his own soul: the only thing he has to give is his of his body. Angels, for all of the perfection of their being, for all of their closeness to God in the hierarchy of being, cannot procreate because they have no bodies. (recall Benedict s statement: body brings spirit to a new nobility ) What we are saying here illuminates what the Church has meant in holding that children are the primary end of marriage. The soul of marriage is the spousal love that finds its fullest expression, its completion, its culmination, in a union between the spouses resulting in its own proper fruit, the coming into existence of a new human person. Since the child is pure gift, and since the spouses do not directly bring about the existence of the child, there is an element of surprise in their first discovery of this marvelous fecundity proper to their love. But if they experience the true meaning of the extraordinary reality of mutual self-donation in which each spouse lets go of himself in order to live for and belong wholly to the other, they will not remain surprised that another soul should be created as an irradiation of their love; they will not remain surprised that another soul should come into existence and be incorporated into and widen the circle of love between them. In Love and Responsibility Wojtyla writes, Thanks to the [willingness for parenthood], both person in the union act in accordance with the inner logic of love, respect its inner dynamic, and prepare to accept a new good, an expression of the creative power of love. (230) Where a genuine spousal love exists between a husband and wife, where they enter purely and rightly into spousal intimacy, their unity will by its very nature hasten to flower in the coming to be of another, 11 Rhonheimer, Contraception, p. 33. (Emphasis in the original.) 9

10 independent agent of love. This love, if it is truly itself, insists on flowing out, on sharing itself with another, on expanding its breadth. 12 In this vein, in the beautiful final section on Conjugal Spirituality in the Theology of the Body, John Paul tells us the conditions under which the Church s teaching on contraception can be fully entered into by the married couple: only a chaste love can unite the two meanings of the spousal act. A chaste human love, transformed by the love poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit, through the Sacramental life of the Church, has sufficient power not only to bring the couple to obey the teaching, but for them to experience its rightness in their psychosomatic subjectivity or in their subjective masculinity and femininity (126:5). John Paul says that in this case, the knowledge we attain of the body actually takes it out of the realm of passive matter, and brings it into its true metaphysical state in the awareness of the couple, of being imbued with a personal character. Once this happens, the couple are able to become aware of fatherhood and motherhood as being intrinsically bound up with the spousal use of the body. He writes in 21:4: In everything that is determined by both body and sex, knowledge inscribes a living and real content. Consequently, knowledge in the biblical sense signifies that man s biological determination, on the part of his body and his sex, is no longer something passive but reaches a level and content specific to self-conscious and self-determining persons; therefore, it brings with it a particular consciousness of the meaning of the human body bound to fatherhood and motherhood. And so the true measure of a fully achieved conjugal chastity is whether or not the couple is in this way conscious of the specifically spousal fecundity flowing from their love; selfcontrol, says the former pope, is only the lowest level of chastity. (128:3): If conjugal chastity manifests itself at first as an ability to resist the concupiscence of the flesh, it subsequently reveals itself as a singular ability to perceive, love, and realize those meanings of the language of the body that remain completely unknown to concupiscence itself and progressively enrich the spousal dialogue of the couple by purifying, deepening, and at the same time simplifying it. 12 These, then, are the means infallible and indispensable to form the Christian spirituality of conjugal and familial life. With their help, that essential and spiritually creative power of love reaches human hearts and, at the same time, human bodies in their subjective masculinity and femininity. Indeed, this love allows the spouses to build up their whole life together according to the truth of the sign, by means of which marriage is built up in its sacramental dignity, as the central point of the encyclical shows. (HV 12). 126:5 10