1. Introduction
The human individual and its concomitant, the human body, are idols of secularism. There is a certain irony, perhaps an irony shared with all idols, that such idolatry is so close to, and yet so far from, true Christian worship. C.S. Lewis notes that if we could see our neighbor for who he will one day be, we would be tempted to worship him. That is, “next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ
vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden” (
Lewis 2001b, p. 46). Following Lewis’s direction, we could say that idols and icons are closely related. If this is truly the case, then confronting the idols of secularism may involve re-conception rather than replacement.
There has always been tension in the Church, a Chestertonian red and white, in which we have the St Justin Martyrs and the St Benedicts: those who see the seeds of the
Logos in the surrounding culture and actively go out beyond the walls of the Church and those who cloister to protect and preserve the faith.
1 There is need for both; affirmation
and negation are necessary (see
St Augustine 1997, p. 47).
The tenor of this paper is hopeful; it imbibes and works within St John Paul II’s famous biblical pronouncement, “Be not Afraid”. And in all honesty, it is often out of great concern or even trepidation towards the idols of the age that I hold tightly to St John Paul II’s biblical dictum. But as David Fagerberg wisely writes, “to fear something other than God is idolatry” (
Fagerberg 2021, p. 22). There are many circumstances where we must say “no” to the idolatrous culture of our age, but we should emphasize that the “Christian no” is always in response to the “no” given by secular culture. In other words, our “no” is a rejection of a negation and is therefore affirmation. With this affirmative approach, I want to explore how idolatry of the body can be re-conceived as a step in the right direction, leading away from idolatry of the self, and how the body as an idol can be transformed into an icon. In particular, I will consider how male and female difference, or otherness, can be a catalyst for such an iconic transformation.
2 2. The Context of Idolatry
The religious sense of the human person directs him toward worship. The Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann acutely wrote that before all else, the human person is homo adorans (
Schmemann 1973, p. 15). G.K. Chesterton poetically quipped, “If man cannot pray he is gagged, if he cannot kneel he is in irons” (
Chesterton 2007, p. 106). The human person is a worshipping creature, a creature who cannot help but worship. The human person is also a semiotic creature who lives by signs and creates signs (art); both participate in reality himself (God) and are realized through this participation. Creation, including our own creatureliness, is the result of the overflow of God’s superfluous love. “The creature as creature is not the recipient of a gift; it
is itself this gift” (
Milbank 2005,
2014, p. 48). The response to our ontic reality as a gift is gratitude, is worship. Creation is also symbolic, for it declares the glory of God—“reality is a sign” (
Giussani 1997, p. 140).
3 Thus, the human person, who is a seeing creature, looks to the things of this world to make sense of reality.
As worshipping semiotic creatures, we easily slip into idolatry; it is, in a way, “natural”. That is, idolatry is fallen humanity’s erroneous attempt to engage with the world. In St Paul’s language, it is an exchange for what is real. As fallen creatures, the human person interprets reality askew, replacing God as the subject and object of worship with something he comprehends (
Giussani 1997, p. 138). “This is original sin, the claim of being able to identify the total meaning with something comprehensible” (
Giussani 1997, p. 136). To add to this, not only does the fallen person misapprehend the one he is to worship but he also, without divine guidance, worships incorrectly and succumbs to the same problem. Joseph Ratzinger argues that liturgy cannot simply be the product of our creativity, for then it would be mere self-affirmation (see
Ratzinger 2000, p. 22). Both Giussani and Ratzinger posit that ill-informed worship leads to a type of narcissism or to a primacy of the self. Identifying meaning with what
you understand is to make yourself the arbiter of reality. Here, the individual controls and decides what is ultimate; he becomes judge and jury. Self-led worship, which inherently concerns the comprehensible, is both a mere reflection and an affirmation of the egocentric self.
Giussani insightfully notes that “if the human being claims to define the total meaning, he can only end up exalting his own point of view, one point of view. He cannot avoid claiming
totality for a particular, inflating a detail to define the whole” (
Giussani 1997, p. 136). Inevitably, this leads to a clash; the point of view held by each person smashes against that of his mirrored monadic neighbor, Thomas Hobbes’ “the war of everyman against everyman”. Hence, idolatry—a reflection and affirmation of the self—is the root of violence. Coming at this from a different angle, Hans Urs von Balthasar argues that without grounding our freedom in God and recognizing that this freedom is indebted to someone other than me, “the degree of give and take and self-surrender on the part of each… is limited and calculated. Either intersubjectivity is seen as a secondary (and obscure) mode of the one sovereign subject, or else the subjects remain monads, impenetrable to one another” (
Ratzinger et al. [1986] 2006, p. 103). Locked within the imminent horizon of idolatry, one is closed off to the divine Other and therefore to the human other. “If the human relation diminishes or fails then so does the supernatural relation, and vice versa” (
Donati 2020, p. 29). This is powerfully symbolized by the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah—the weeping prophet. God commands Jeremiah not to take a wife and thus not to have sons or daughters (Jer 16:1–2). His singleness is a living prophetic sign that God has removed from his people his divine peace, mercy, and love. God reveals to Jeremiah how he is to explain this to the people:
Because your fathers have forsaken me, says the Lord, and have gone after other gods and have served and worshiped them, and have forsaken me and have not kept my law, and because you have done worse than your fathers, for behold, every one of you follows his stubborn evil will, refusing to listen to me; therefore I will hurl you out of this land into a land which neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you shall serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor.
God, in anger, does not simply abandon his people. Rather, he leaves them to their idols, so that they may eventually be brought back (Jer 16:14–15). By showing them “no favor”, he shows them his favor. Through serving other gods, idolatry, the people will return to the one true God. Giving them over to idolatry is God’s form of punishment, and punishment is always good. An unjust punishment is, by definition, not punishment.
5 To be clear, God’s punishment is to allow Israel to experience the consequences of idolatry. It is noteworthy that Jeremiah embodies the sign by negation: he is
not married and does
not have children. The negation naturally points to its opposite, nuptiality. Thus, in a paradoxical fashion, Jeremiah’s singleness is an icon as an idol.
As the true archetype of prophets, Jesus recapitulates all of Israel’s prophets. The most obvious example is Moses, who is recognized as the greatest of prophets because he spoke to God as if face to face (Exodus 33:11). In fact, Moses is only given a glimpse of the back of God, a compromise because man cannot see God’s face and live (Ex 33:20), whereas Jesus, the Son of God, actually communes face to face with the Father. Moses leads the people into the promised land, but the promised land is only a foreshadow of the eternal city to which Jesus Christ will eschatologically bring to the people. Hence, Jesus is portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew as the new Moses.
Jesus is also the new Hosea, the new Jeremiah, and so forth. He embodies the prophecies as the prophets who came before him did, and he also fulfils the prophecies. Jeremiah is particularly important in this regard because of his prophecy about the new covenant:
Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah… I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
(Jer 31:31, 33–34)
Like Jeremiah, Jesus remains unmarried. At the same time, he embodies all the other prophets who are married, for Jesus is the fulfilment of the nuptial reality. He is the reality that marriage points to, whether it be as set out in the life of Hosea and Gomer or poetically expressed in the Song of Solomon. In his virginal nuptiality, Jesus takes up the anti-sign and fills it with nuptial life (communion with God the Father). To reiterate, what was once a sign of idolatry is now paradoxically transformed into an icon. Singleness, as a loss of otherness, is cracked open to God, the absolute Other.
Returning to Moses, we can see another salient example of idolatry in the story of the golden calf:
And Moses turned, and went down from the mountain with the two tables of the testimony in his hands, tables that were written on both sides; on the one side and on the other were they written. And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables … And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tables out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.
(Ex 20:15–17, 19)
Note how the tables “were written on both sides”. Approaching this passage using the spiritual sense of interpretation, we could say that the tablets are complete or whole. The commandments present to us moral reality in its complete form. Written into stone, the Ten Commandments reveal the unchanging permanent grain of the universe. Upon seeing his people in the act of idolatry, Moses throws the tables and breaks them at the foot of the mountain. Moses’ angry act of violence reflects what the Israelites have done. In their idolatry, the Israelites threw reality back against God, denying it, smashing it. Misplaced worship violates reality.
Earlier in the same chapter of Exodus, we find the exposition of the Ten Commandments and therein the prohibition of images: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Ex 20:4–5). Again, we see that reality has been set before us: there are no other gods but the God of Israel.
Giussani, Ratzinger, and Jeremiah highlight that idolatry is a curving inward of the self (incurvatus in se), and in the book of Exodus, we see that idolatry is the misperception of reality. With these two notions of idolatry kept in mind, let us examine the worship of self, specifically a disembodied sense of self, the worship of self that excludes the body.
3. Worship of ‘Self’
In
The Christian Mystery, Louis Bouyer provides an insightful statement about the idolatrous danger of retreating from external reality:
At first, ecstasy, the flight from the world into a pure interiority, might seem safer. It is, however, laden with still more formidable dangers, if we suppose that the worst idolatry is that of the first fallen angel, the idolatry of oneself. For in any other there remains the certainty that God is different. And an apparent salvation found in a detachment in which only the self remains is dangerously close to the most radical idolatry, for which there is no cure.
“God is
different.” God is Other; God is the absolute Other. In liturgical terms, “if what we think does not produce awe in us, it is not God we are thinking” (
Fagerberg 2021, p. 21). This is arguably the most demanding aspect of reality to accept. Schmemann wisely notes that the most difficult petition to fully affirm in the Lord’s Prayer is “Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done” (
Schmemann 2003, pp. 45–52). The emphasis is on the word
Thy; it is not
my Kingdom come, nor
my will be done. We struggle enough with the recognition of the human other as an other let alone recognizing the divine Other. It is only Mary, the Mother of God, who fully embraces this line of
Our Father. When the angel of the Lord appears to Mary, she trembles in fear but remains before the angel and listens attentively. Her recognition of this profound mystery is expressed in her question “How can this be since I have no husband?” (Luke 1:34). Her fiat is the perfect response to the
thy: ‘”Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.’ And the angel departed from her” (Luke 1:38). The angel departs from her; he is no longer needed. Mary has heard the message and becomes the message. In sporting terms, the angel has passed the baton to her. She carries the message in her person and is the icon of receptivity. She is the open-self, total receptivity. In her, we see that there must be a death of the enclosed self and a radical re-posturing—the radical opposite of incurvatus in se. The theology of grace that runs throughout the Old Testament in female figures such as Sarah, Ruth, and the mother of Samson reaches its perfection in Mary. She fulfils the theology of grace through her
self, but her
self is absolutely oriented toward God—“Thy will be done”; it is reorientation that overcomes idolatry of the self.
This way of being or posturing aligns with reality. Redemption does not save us
from our humanness but saves
our humanness. Joseph Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict XVI, wrote, “The human being is made for gift, which expresses and makes present his transcendent dimension. Sometimes modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society. This is a presumption that follows from being selfishly closed in upon himself, and it is a consequence—to express it in faith terms—of original sin” (
Pope Benedict XVI 2013, p. 34). Can there be a disembodied sense of self that is not turned inward, that is not selfishly closed in upon itself? Mary clearly reveals that the answer is “no”. It is through her body that Mary is open. Through the body, the human person communicates. The body individuates—
my body is not
your body—and unites—verbal speech, body language, touch, etc. It is the body that reveals to us that we are made for gift; I will return to this.
The secular narrative of individualism, speaking broadly, involves a recognition of self that is disconnected from bodily existence. What is primary to individualism is the will, a will that is, ideally, unconstrained by relations (history, culture, embodiment).
6 Here, we encounter the almighty “I”: “
I will decide”; “who are you to tell
me who
I should be”; “it is
my life”. Each individual person is a King or Queen imprisoned within his or her own individual tower.
7 Freedom, in this situation, is identified with desire rather than alignment with the good.
8Inherent to such individualism is a type of Gnosticism or Manichaeism, a rejection of the body; for the body, by its very nature, undermines radical individualism. The body is undeniably contingent and relational. Even at the base level, embodied creatures need nourishment and therefore depend upon others at all stages of life, the beginning and ending of life being the most obvious. The body reminds me that I have a genealogy, which both highlights my physical contingency—my inherited DNA—and my relationality—I am a grandson, son, nephew, brother, uncle, husband, and father. Our solipsistic inward gazing is constantly interrupted by bodily existence.
9 Not only do I have physical needs and wants that I am unable to fulfill on my own but I also have responsibilities for the physical needs of others. It should be no surprise that the legalization of abortion and euthanasia have arisen in Western society, the home of disembodied individualism.
10 Worship of the untethered self leads to violence.
4. Worship of the Body
The dominant narratives found within secular postmodernity are anything but coherent. On the one hand, broadly speaking, the West has taken up the narrative of radical individualism and rejected the body. On the other hand, it is obsessed with the body, as evidenced by fitness frenzy culture; a plethora of drastic diets (paleo, keto, carnivore, etc.); a pathological yearning for youth; and, most notably, the excessive sexualization of society. As disconnected as these narratives appear, there is a thread that links the postmodern rejection of the body with its apparent opposite, the worship of the body. To make sense of this, we must briefly look at Trinitarian theology.
The human person was made
from relation—Trinitarian superfluous love—and
for relation—
theosis. We are beings-with-the-other and beings-for-the-other. There is no “I” without a “Thou”, nor without a “We”. Redemption restores the relationality of the human person that was fractured in the Fall and thereby restores our personhood. Christianity is a religion of the person (
Ratzinger 2004b, p. 45). We worship a Triune God, una substantia tres personae, a perfect communion of persons (see
Ratzinger 1990). Trinitarian doctrine reveals to us that personhood is relational, and by being drawn into the Trinitarian life, we become altogether relational and thereby fulfill our personhood. Relation is what we are made for, and as gifts, we are only true to our ontic selves if we step beyond ourselves by gifting ourselves to the other and ultimately to the Divine Other. The other half of the reciprocal equation is that we must receive the other as gift. In this manner, we image Jesus Christ, who is absolutely
from the Father and
for the Father (John 17).
The human person naturally intuits her relationality. Consciously or unconsciously, all humans strive toward the fulfillment of personhood—relationality (everyone seeks love, whether it be romantic or platonic). This connatural recognition of relationality drives us toward bodily existence, for it is as embodied creatures that we communicate. Since we are relational creatures, disembodied individualism is the undoing of our very nature. Thus, existentially pricked, prodded, and poked, the individual is driven outward to the idolatry of the body. To put it differently, starving for the otherness of relationality, the disembodied individualist ravenously turns to the closest and most natural thing in his proximity to satiate his hunger, i.e., the body of the other sex. And, as Bouyer points out, this exterior idolatry is a less destructive form of idolatry than an idolatry of “pure interiority”. With the idolatry of the body, specifically idolatry of the other sex, contingency and difference is encountered. One meets someone or “something” that is other than the self. However, the problem is that the other easily moves from being an object
and subject—body and interiority—who I have encountered to an imagined object that only exists within
my subjectivity—the danger of subjectivity is always present.
11 Male and Female: Communio Personarum
Idolatry of the body can be a stepping-stone away from idolatry to true worship but only if it leads one to encounter the other as other. How do we do this? Somehow, we must move from seeing the other as an object (I want to be like him—fitness culture—or I want her—hook-up culture) to seeing the other as a person.
We must move from desire to love, and by “desire”, I mean the natural sexual drive (biological and existential). Desire tends toward objectification and utility, whereas love, argues Karol Wojtyla, is the opposite of using. Why? Because love is based on a common good, which requires a common end. This shared bond is both external and internal and it makes both persons equal, for both are subordinated to the good. Wojtyla maintains that the human person has a natural propensity and capacity for love, but this does not arise from instinct but from free will. That is, the human person has the freedom to subordinate himself for the good of the other. He can will the good of the other for the other: “Only persons can love” (
Wojtyla 2013, p. 13). Yet this will not naturally arise; one must freely choose the good of the other. Love alone can liberate us from a utilitarian ethic, from turning everything into consumption that serves the self.
Nevertheless, in the love relationship between a man and woman, love is not simply reasoned and ordered to an end but is in conjunction with the sexual drive. The sexual drive can indicate a direction to a specific person and can even assist in overcoming the fear of the other. Out of the natural desire for the other sex arises the possibility of spousal love. That is, the possibility of love arises because the natural desire is directed toward a particular person (not an idea but a concrete human person) and love characterizes the realm of persons. Nevertheless, love is different from sexual drive. While sexual drive is natural and occurs without will, love is an act of will. Sexual drive provides material for our actions, but this drive is dependent on what the person does with it.
To be clear, what I want to emphasize is that sexual drive can be a first step that pushes us toward otherness. Livio Melina writes, “The affective dynamic, which is rooted in our physicality and is at the origin of human action, is a call to open up to others, even a call to self-giving, to accept others and come out of solitude” (
Melina 2020, p. 667). The idolization of the body of the other sex points toward otherness, albeit in a confused manner. The deepest thirsts or desires are the necessary ingredients for love (see
Pieper 1997, p. 223). Beginning from the recognition of the other sex as other, one is often led to the initial romantic stages of love. In this stage of love, which largely falls under love as
eros, the lover and the beloved naturally make promises of total commitment. Ironically, these promises are made from within the ficklest of feelings. “To be in love is both to intend and to promise lifelong fidelity. Love makes vows unasked; can’t be deterred from making them. ‘I will be ever true,’ are almost the first words he utters. Not hypocritically but sincerely… Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform” (
Lewis [1960] 1988, pp. 113–14).
12 These immature promises point to the real and firm promises that make us persons. A promise is an inter-subjective reality; it is always a promise
to someone (see
Kampowski 2018, p. 93). We do not make promises to ice cream cones or blue marbles. Promises personalize the promiser and the recipient of the promise. The one who promises is opened to the other and is opened to a greater extent than the simple recognition of the other sex as other. He has entered the moral realm by desiring and upholding the good of his beloved (fidelity). Likewise, the one who receives the promise is acknowledged as a person, as another who is owed fidelity.
13 Is this not an inchoate transformation from idol to icon?
The apogee of love between the sexes is marriage because it is the institution that justly preservers the good of each person, safeguarding the personalist norm: the person is never to be an object of use but is a subject to be loved.
14 Furthermore, marriage points beyond itself. It is at the height of creaturely love that one obtains a glimpse of divine love. The human body is the “only one capable of pronouncing in conjugal love the word that lasts until death, the only one that can hope beyond hope and bring to the world the personal newness of each birth… this human body possesses the key to recovering the symbolism of the cosmos and of history” (
Granados 2021, pp. 144–45). Marriage is an icon of love, a sacrament, that makes present the love of Christ for his bride the Church. The indivisibility of the unity of marriage, argues Ratzinger, is only an understandable reality in light of God’s indivisibility (see
Ratzinger 2004a, p. 114). Ultimately, there can be no naturalistic explanation. The pathway of the idolatry of the body of the other sex can, if logically followed to its end, lead beyond idolatry to God himself—the idol can become an icon. Even though idolatry is sinful and dangerous, idols and icons are closely related, albeit the distance between the two is so vast that the divine width of the Cross is needed to transverse from the former to the latter.
A similar “movement” can be seen with the idolatry of one’s own body. The more one turns to the mirror, the more one is unsatisfied. This is wonderfully set out for us in the classic story of Snow White and the Queen who repeatedly turns to her magic mirror to affirm her own beauty: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” We know how that turned out: the Queen sees that she is not the most beautiful, and her dissatisfaction drives her to murder. Looking beyond the exaggerated drama of fairy tales, the dissatisfaction of vanity can push one to look past the mirror, to look for affirmation from another person.
When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about praise at all, you have reached the bottom. That is why vanity, though it is the sort of pride that shows most on the surface, is really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants too much praise, applause, and admiration and is always angling for it. It is a fault but a childlike and even (in an odd way) humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely content with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human (
Lewis 2001a, p. 126).
While vanity can awaken one to otherness, the idolatry of one’s body is not as jarring as idolatry of the other sex. Otherness is not the immediate experience of vanity; rather, it begins with the self, and a second step must be taken toward the other.
If marriage is the fulfillment or the re-ordering of the worship of the body, then the consecrated virgin is the iconization of vanity. As I already set out, Jesus Christ’s singleness is the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s. Christ transforms singleness into a new form of nuptiality. This form of nuptiality is incarnated today in the life of the consecrated virgin. She is the eschatological sign of life to come, of perfected unity with Christ. She, too, looks for her reflection but not in a mirror. She sees her transformed self mirrored in the eyes of Christ.
5. Restoration: Benedictine and Justinian
The Catholic philosopher Robert Sokolowski argues that “grace builds on nature, and if nature is left in need of repair, it is difficult for grace to build on it” (
Sokolowski 2006, p. 124). Nature is not to be shunned but to be shined and polished so that it reflects the light of Christ and once again becomes symbolic, declaring the glory of the Lord. Therefore, just like the supernatural, the natural must be proclaimed. They go together. Furthermore, “nature itself is healed by the gospel, and one of the ways in which the truth of the gospel is made evident to people is found in the way the gospel
restores nature to what it ought to be” (
Sokolowski 2006, p. 125. Emphasis is mine). The restoration of nature is the transformation of idols into icons, re-ordering and putting created reality back in the place that it belongs. To do this, we cannot abandon nature. Rather, we need to highlight it, emphasizing its sacramentality. Idolatry of the body is a good example of this because the human person, in all her beautiful embodiment, was declared at the outset not simply “good” but “very good”.
The “very good” of the human person has been dragged down by the Fall but not obliterated. As John Paul II would argue, the human body has a language. It calls forth for love; it highlights the personhood of men and women; it points to Christ’s love for the Church. The language of the body needs to be restored, and it is the word “restored” that links the Justinian and the Benedictine approaches as I set out at the beginning of this piece. St John Henry Newman noted that St Benedict’s modus operandi was “
restoration, rather than a visitation, correction, or conversion… by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a city” (
Newman 2020, p. 37. Emphasis is mine). Benedict did not retreat into the woods to hide from the world but to protect the good of culture and to cultivate the land. Both are acts of restoration. In the sixth century, Benedict protected the seeds of the Word (
spermatikos logos), as Justin Martyr would put it, by cloistering for the purpose of one day restoring culture. Regarding the land, Benedictines cultivate it to restore it to its original intention, a garden for human flourishing. Like Jeremiah, the Benedictine negation, the stepping away from the world, is for restoration. In fact, so too is the positive, stepping toward the world, the Justinian path, an act of restoration. It restores by revealing the
logos that is often hidden within culture. Both ways are theologically rooted in the doctrine of creation, and both seek to bring to light the redeeming grace that is inherent within the order of creation.