To the thousands of faithful gathered in St Peter’s Square for the Wednesday general audience of 15 April, Pope John Paul delivered the following discourse.

Today’s audience falls in the course of Holy Week, the “great” week of the Liturgical Year, because it makes us relive very closely the paschal mystery, in which “the revelation of God’s merciful love reaches its climax” (cf. Encycl. Dives in Misericordia, n.8).

While I call on each of you to take part fervently in the liturgical celebrations of these days, I form the hope that everyone will recognize with exultation and gratitude the unique gift of having been saved by the passion and death of Christ.  The whole history of humanity is illuminated and guided by this incomparable event: God, infinite goodness, poured it out with inexpressible love by means of Christ's supreme sacrifice. So while we prepare to raise our hymn of glory to Christ, the conqueror of death, we must eliminate from our souls everything that may be in contrast with a meeting with him.  To see him through faith, it is necessary, in fact, to be purified by the sacrament of forgiveness and sustained by the persevering commitment of a deep renewal of the spirit and of that interior conversion which is the start in ourselves of the “new creation” (2 Cor 5:17), of which the Risen Christ is the first fruits and the certain pledge.

Then Easter will represent for each of us a meeting with Christ. 

It is what I earnestly wish for everyone.

Control of the body “in holiness and honour”

1.  In our preceding reflections—both in the analysis of Christ’s words, in which he refers to the “beginning”, and during the Sermon on the Mount, that is, when He refers to the human “heart”—we have tried, systematically, to show how the dimension of man’s personal subjectivity is an indispensable element present in theological hermeneutics, which we must discover and presuppose at the basis of the problem of the human body.  Therefore not only objective reality of the body, but far more, as it seems, subjective consciousness and also the subjective “experience” of the body, enter at every step into the structure of the biblical texts, and therefore require to be taken into consideration and find their reflection in theology.  Consequently theological hermeneutics must always take these two aspects into account.  We cannot consider the body an objective reality outside the personal subjectivity of man, of human beings: male and female.  Nearly all the problems of the “ethos of the body” are bound up at the same time with its ontological identification as the body of the person, and with the content and quality of the subjective experience, that is, of the “life” both of ones own body and in its inter-human relations, and in particular in the perennial “man-woman” relationship.  Also the words of the first Letter to the Thessalonians, in which the author exhorts us to “control our own body in holiness and honour” (that is, the whole problem of “purity of heart”) indicate, without any doubt, these two dimensions.

Dimensions concerning attitudes of persons

2.  They are dimensions which directly concern concrete, living men, their attitudes and behaviour.  Works of culture, especially of art, enable those dimensions of “being a body” and “experiencing the body” to extend, in a way, outside these living men.  Man meets the “reality of the body” and “experiences the body” even when it becomes a subject of creative activity, a work of art, a content of culture.  Although, generally speaking, it must be recognized that this contact takes place on the plane of anesthetic experience, in which it is a question of viewing the work of art (in Greek aisth« nomai:  I look, I observe)—and therefore that, in the given case, it is a question of the objectivized body, outside its ontological identity, in a different way and according to the criteria characteristic of artistic activity—yet the man who is admitted to viewing in this way is a priori too deeply bound up with the meaning of the prototype, or model, which in this case is himself:—the living man and the man and the living human body—to be able to detach and separate completely that act, substantially an aesthetic one, of the work in itself and of its contemplation from those dynamisms or reactions of behaviour and from the evaluations which direct that first experience and that first way of living.  This looking, which is, by its very nature, “aesthetic”, cannot be completely isolated, in man’s subjective conscience, from that “looking” of which Christ speaks in the Sermon on the Mount” warning against lust.

Creating climate favourable to purity

3.  In this way, therefore, the whole sphere of aesthetic experiences is, at the same time, in the area of the ethos of the body.  Rightly, therefore, we must think here too of the necessity of creating a climate favourable to purity; this climate can, in fact, be threatened not only in the very way in which the relations and society of living men take place, but also in the area of the objectivizations characteristic of works of culture, in the area of social communications: when it is a question of the spoken or written word; in the area of the image, that is, of representation and vision, both in the traditional meaning of this term and in the modern one.  In this way we reach the various fields and products of artistic, plastic and dramatic culture, as also that based on modern audiovisual techniques.  In this field, a vast and very differentiated one, we must ask ourselves a question in the light of the ethos of the body, outlined in the analyses made so far, on the human body as an object of culture.

Living human body creates object of art

4.  First of all it must be noted that the human body is a perennial object of culture, in the widest meaning of the term, for the simple reason that man himself is a subject of culture, and in his cultural and creative activity he involves his humanity, including also his body.  In these reflections, however, we must restrict the concept of “object of culture”, limiting ourselves to the concept understood as the “subject” of works of culture and in particular of works of art.  It is a question, in a word, of the thematic nature, that is, of the “objectivation” of the body in these works.  Some distinctions must, however, be made here at once, even if by way of example.  One thing is the living human body, of man and of woman, which creates in itself the object of art and the work of art and the work of art (such as, for example, in the theatre, in the ballet and, up to a certain point, also in the course of a concert); and another thing is the body as the model of the work of art, as in the plastic arts, sculpture or painting.  Is it possible to put also films or the photographic art in a wide sense on the same level?  It seems so, although from the point of view of the body as object-theme, a quite essential difference takes place in this case.  In painting or sculpture the man-body always remains a model, undergoing specific elaboration on the part of the artist.  In the film, and even more in the photographic art, it is not the model that is transfigured, but the living man is reproduced; and in this case man, the human body, is not a model for the work of art, but the object of a reproduction obtained by means of suitable techniques.

Important distinction

5.  It should be pointed out straightaway that the above-mentioned distinction is important from the point of view of the ethos of the body, in works of culture.  And it should be added at once that artistic reproduction, when it becomes the content of representation and transmission (on television or in films), loses, in a way, its fundamental contact with the man-body, of which it is a reproduction, and very often becomes an “anonymous” object, just like, for example, an anonymous photographic document published in illustrated magazines, or an image diffused on the screens of the whole world.  This anonymity is the effect of the “propagation” of the image-reproduction of the human body, objectivized first with the help of the techniques of reproduction, which—as has been recalled above—seems to be essentially differentiated from the transfiguration of the model typical of the work of art, especially in the plastic arts.  Well, this anonymity (which, moreover, is a way of “veiling” or “hiding” the identity of the person reproduced) also constitutes a specific problem from the point of view of the ethos of the human body in works of culture and particularly in the modern works of mass culture, as it is called.
Let us confine ourselves today to these preliminary considerations, which have a fundamental meaning for the ethos of the human body in works of artistic culture.  Subsequently these considerations will make us aware of how closely bound they are to the words which Christ spoke in the sermon on the Mount, comparing “looking lustfully” with “adultery committed in the heart”.  The extension of these words to the area of artistic culture is of particular importance, insofar as it is a question of “creating an atmosphere favourable to chastity”, of which Paul VI speaks in his encyclical “Humanae Vitae”.  Let us try to understand this subject in a very deep and fundamental way.