TOB Intro: Part I

In the past I never read introductions, or almost never. I usually cut right to the “beginning,” treating the intro as something disposable. This is a mistake in general and most certainly a mistake where the 2006 edition of the Theology of the Body is concerned. Michael Waldstein, who translated the text, offers an introduction that, far from being disposable, could be a book by itself. Roughly the first half is an exploration of the philosophical roots of TOB and the second is concerned with the theological influences. I’ve finished the first part, and have begun the second.

It’s been a long time since I studied philosophy, and when I did I treated it little better than I did book introductions. It was strictly a means to an end. I needed 27 philosophy credits before starting theology study, and the quicker I got done with it the quicker I could begin preparing for ordination. In honesty, I did grow to enjoy it. I have many fond memories of sitting in the Mirage Diner or Mr. Taco with my friends Bill and Matt discussing Aristotle’s teaching on substantial change and how Descartes destroyed metaphysics, over a burrito and a coke. But once I moved on to the Salesians my contact with things philosophical grew less and less. Philosophy had served its purpose, and now it was time to move on to something else, shall we say, more practical.

In time I have come to see that this utilitarian attitude toward philosophy has been damaging. The philosophical moorings that made the content of faith understandable in the past have been torn out by the roots. This makes explaining the content of faith difficult, to put it mildly. Joseph Ratzinger (AKA Benedict XVI) compared the task of the theologian in our times to a clown trying to warn an unsuspecting village of an approaching wild fire. The people see the strange, if familiar, dress and assume it’s all part of the act. Like a clown, religion has been relegated to a particular place in the collective mind; it’s there to comfort and reassure in times of difficulty, maybe, and to be used when some service is needed, like a wedding or a funeral, but is otherwise irrelevant when faced with the deep questions of life and reality. In this way we can say that Nietzsche was right; God is dead and we killed Him.

The Holy Father was writing, as a private theologian, over 40 years ago and in that time the disconnect has only gotten greater. What began as intellectual trends embraced by a certain elite class has trickled down to shape the popular mind. It took several hundred years for this to happen, but it has. Many critics of the contemporary scene like to blame the 1960’s for ruining the world, but in reality all that happened was that these various trends came to flower, not simply in the academy, but on main street, and without us really knowing it. I’ll save the how to the social scientists; I’m more concerned here with the what that changed. It’s that What we’ll look at next time.