Phenomenology

I know that I’ve been going in a bunch of different directions in the last couple of weeks, but I’ll try to get back on track here.  We were beginning to look at the Theology of the Body (TOB) by examining it’s philosophical roots.  I really don’t want to get too bogged down in the philosophy, but to mention that John Paul II taught philosophy and was very familiar with the contemporary philosophical currents about him.  He was a man of his times, while also being firmly rooted in the Church’s Tradition.  The branch of philosophy that the late pope is most associated with is phenomenology, which developed in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century and arguably reached its peak about the mid 1900s.  

There is a lot of debate about how much John Paul II really was a phenomenologist since it can be argued that it’s more a way of doing philosophy than an intellectual movement with a set of firmly held beliefs.  For example there are a wide variety of thinkers who are sometimes called phenomenologists whose views are very different.   You have John Paul II and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (AKA Edith Stein) on one side and the likes of Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida on the other.  The first two stood firmly on the side of faith, the other two were atheists (to be fair, Derrida was a bit coy on the issue).  So the argument is that John Paul used the language and method of Phenomenology, but little more.

I must admit, that entire discussion is above my intellectual pay grade.  What I do know is that in TOB John Paul looks at scripture and tries to analyze it from the standpoint of experience, much like a phenomenologist would.  Contemporary philosophy had become more and more subjective, while traditional Catholic thought emphasized objective truth.  John Paul used this very contemporary method to bridge the gap between the two, showing how our personal experience points us to the universal truths of faith.

Like I wrote at the beginning, I don´t want to get too caught up in the philosophical part of the story.  As we move along I´ll try to point out where John Paul is using phenomenology as a springboard for  his teaching. But there is just one more stop we have to make before beginning TOB.  It’s a look at one of the great mystics in the history of the Church, and I must admit, one of my heroes, John of the Cross.  It is he who supplies the theological and spiritual foundation to TOB.