Exorcising the Manichean Demon andReclaiming the Sacred Theology of our Bodies

IntroductionIt’s about the catechesis above all. Please READ THE CATECHESES. TOB is not about reading Christopher West’s books. You have to read the audiences.

We need to look at the wound in us which is the Manichean demon. In Witness to Hope, Weigel goes on about this.

We are entering into spiritual battle.

Key text is Ephesians 5,31-32 for understanding theology of the body:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the Church.

It is in some way a summa of all that Christ has revealed about who God is and who we are. JPII: this “great mystery” that is in Eph 5 that is the central theme in the whole of revelation.

It is no coincidence that Eph 6 comes after Eph 5! In Eph 6 we are engaged in a battle:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armour of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled round your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints. Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.

Ephesians 6, 10-20

Christopher West

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It is a battle for man’s soul but the battlefield is the body. We must gird our loins with the truth.

West appeals to BVM as Crusher of heresies.

West appeals to St Joseph as Terror of demons.

John Paul draws out this point about the demonic attack on marriage in his reflections on Tobias and Sarah in marriage. There has been a demonic attack on this from the start. It is a window to heaven. God wants to marry us. The whole of Sacred Scripture is about marriage. John of the Cross: goal of Christian life is the mystical marriage. TofA: nuptial union with the divine. The point is that we are all longing for heaven. There is a demon who is hellbent on blinding us to the theology of our bodies.

One thing is to talk in abstract about theology of body. There are many obstacles on the path.

Evil is not a reality in itself. The devil cannot create its own diabolical world. A black mass is a dark mirror of the true Mass. All the enemy can do is mock the holy. Imagine the difficulty of walking into a Catholic church for that person who has been to these mock masses. The very thing that God provides to save that person is the very thing that pushes them away because of the original mockery of the mass.

Analogy with pornographic culture of today. It is the same thing. The enemy takes that which is supremely holy/sacred and he twists and profanes it.

Those who have been raised in a pornographic mindset have a difficult time with the real nuts and bolts of practical living of reclaiming the sacredness of the body as an image of Christ’s love for the Church. That is what the diabolic plot is!

It is a sobering thing to realise that the pornographic culture has one aim, to blind us to the sacred theology of our bodies. One of the main cards Satan plays is this Manichean devaluation of the body.

The context of the Pope’s teaching on Manicheism is Part 1 of the Catechesis, chapter 2, subsection 4: The Heart: Accused or Called?

How do we understand Christ at Mt 5,27-28?

Is the heart accused by Christ of wrongdoing? How can someone act who accepts Christ’s words? There must be some other way to look! Yes there is!

We need to be pure, yes.

And we need to know how not to be puritanical.

Christopher West

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From puritanical strictness to licentiousness/permissivenessLady Gaga confuses nakedness without shame with shameless nakedness.

Jesus: “You’ve heard the ethic not to commit adultery...”

But laws/rules are not enough to change the human heart. If all abortion laws changed there’d still be abortions.

NT ethos: law is written on the heart. We can fulfil the law not grudgingly buy because it is written on our hearts. In Sermon on Mount the problem is you’ve heard the ethic but not the ethos.

Jesus was to transform our ethos so that the law wells up from within. We no longer need the law. We are free from the law. We are free to fulfil the law because we do not desire to break it. This is the ethos. We are only bitter towards the law (ethic) when we desire to break it.

What’s different about NT is that law came through Moses, but grace upon grace comes through Christ. The law shows us how messed up our ethos is. Instead of bringing law down to our own broken ethos (as most people would want to do today) we have to cry out to grace!

This call to transformation of the heart is what ethos calls for. You can have intellectual orthodoxy but without a transformation of heart this produces a Church of Pharisees. The goal is not just that we get people to accept soundness of Catholic teaching but we get people to be transformed by grace.

Is it possible to live a perfect virtue in the conjugal act? We live in the tension of the already but not yet of redemption. Not fulfilled until the eschaton. Typically in pastoral practice the emphasis is on the not-yet. JPII is at pains to balance out the not-yet with the already.

The biggest obstacle to overcome in order to live that proper transformation of ethos of Sermon on Mount so that we can see another human being in the correct way is this Manicheism.

In Avatar the narvi greet each other, “I see you”.

We long to be seen and loved in being seen! The deepest desire of one’s heart is not to look but to see. The journey is possible but we MUST deal with the deep-seated habits of Manichean thinking.

Manicheism: matter is evil.

Christopher West

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Concupiscence: threefold – eyes, flesh, pride of life. Disordered desire e.g. to eat too many biscuits: that’s concupiscence. When we experience desire to pump up my own ego. This tug to look at someone as object of my selfish pleasure. It inclines us to sin but it is not a sin. To the Manichean, concupiscence is all you have. Manicheism – body is identical with sexual desire.

Often our language is tainted with a Manichean influence. The body though is not the problem. The Manicheism problem is to place the blame on the body itself. This tendency goes back to original sin. The fig leaves were the coverup. We blame the body for the sin rather than its cause, which is our self-will.

This is the difference between an authentic Catholic sacramental view of the body and one that tends towards heresy.

There is no such thing as a dirty body-part.

Manicheism gives evil far more weight than it has.

Manicheism expresses an ontological principle to evil. It gives it being.

Evil does not exist. It is very real, of course. But it is not some parallel to God’s good world. Christianity explains the essential good of existence.

If something exists, it is good.

In Christian view, evil refers to a good.

Sin twists and distorts good. So we chuck out the distorted good. Throwing baby out with bathwater. The temptation to Manicheism is rooted in sloth. Sloth is a resentment that the good is difficult.

Rather than chucking out body we need to unravel the problems. And that is difficult.

People have mistakenly seen a condemnation of sex in the Gospel.

We can note that the Manichean condemnation of the body might and may always be a loophole to avoid the requirements of the Gospel. You can’t help it. So you don’t need to change.

We need to interpret Christ’s words not as the negation of the body and sex but their affirmation.

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Christ’s teaching has nothing to do with Manichean condemnation of the body.

Christopher West

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We have lost sight of the clear sense of the spousal meaning of the body. If we are to reclaim the erotic for Christ it must undergo a radical restoration. The enemy is a plagiariser.

Many Christians are content to let the devil have his way.

But we must be very patient and gentle in helping others reclaim this precisely because we are so wounded.

TOB 45.3 – the pearl of the TOB:

The appropriate interpretation of Christ’s words according to Matthew 5:27-28, as well as the praxis in which the authentic ethos of the Sermon on the Mount will be subsequently expressed, must be absolutely free of Manichaean elements in thought and in attitude. A Manichaean attitude would lead to an “annihilation” of the body – if not real, at least intentional – to negation of the value of human sex, of the masculinity and femininity of the human person, or at least to their mere toleration in the limits of the need delimited by the necessity of procreation. On the basis of Christ's words in the Sermon on the Mount, Christian ethos is characterized by a transformation of the conscience and attitudes of the human person, both man and woman. This is such as to express and realize the value of the body and of sex, according to the Creator's original plan, placed as they are in the service of the communion of persons, which is the deepest substratum of human ethics and culture. For the Manichaean mentality, the body and sexuality constitute an “anti-value”. For Christianity, on the contrary, they always remain a value not sufficiently appreciated, as I will explain better further on. The second attitude indicates the form of ethos in which the mystery of the redemption of the body takes root in the historical soil of human sinfulness. That is expressed by the theological formula, which defines the state of historical man as status naturae lapsae simul ac redemptae (the state of fallen, but at the same time redeemed, nature).

Wednesday Audience, 25th October 1980

Christian ethos is characterised by a transformation of a person’s conscience and attitudes according to the Creators original plan.

Anti-value or value not sufficiently appreciated?If we are to overcome the evil of lust we must reclaim the authentic beauty and splendour of the body. The real solution is not to look away but to see the full beauty of the body. Yes, of course that’s true at the beginning of the journey. I look away because I cannot handle the glory! There’s a profound difference in approach.

Christopher West

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We must never assign evil to the body itself, or to the person who occasions the arousal of our concupiscence. Victory over evil must consist in detachment from that evil. One must detach oneself from one’s lust not from the cause of my own problems IN ME.

TOB 45.4:

Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Mt 5:27-28) must be interpreted in the light of this complex truth about man. If they contain a certain “accusation” leveled at the human heart, all the more so they appeal to it. The accusation of the moral evil which desire, born of intemperate lust of the flesh, conceals within itself, is at the same time a call to overcome this evil. If victory over evil consists in detachment from it (hence the severe words in the context of Matthew 5:27-28), it is only a question of detaching oneself from the evil of the act (in the case in question, the interior act of lust), and never of transferring the negative character of this act to its object. Such a transfer would mean a certain acceptance – perhaps not fully conscious – of the Manichaean “anti-value”. It would not constitute a real and deep victory over the evil of the act, which is evil by its moral essence, and so evil of a spiritual nature. On the contrary, it would conceal the great danger of justifying the act to the detriment of the object (the essential error of Manichaean ethos consists in this). It is clear that in Matthew 5:27-28, Christ demanded detachment from the evil of lust (or of the look of disorderly desire). But his enunciation does not let it be supposed in any way that the object of that desire, that is, the woman who is looked at lustfully, is an evil. (This clarification seems to be lacking sometimes in some Wisdom texts.)

Wednesday Audience, 20th October 1980

Modesty can be so often an excuse not to look at our issues.

Modesty should be a veil to guard and protect the holy. Just like we veil a tabernacle. Out of a sense of reverence for what is holy.

We are not defined by our weakness and sinfulness. We are defined by our sacred reality.

Man is to be called to realise the spousal meaning of the body. Christ’s words are an invitation to a pure way of respecting others.

Chastity comes when we see the beauty of the flower and rejoice in its glory and we have no desire to trample on it. That is called Christian ethos. Man redeemed by Christ is what is at stake. Christ has redeemed us. This means he has given us the possibility of realising the entire truth of our being. Man not capable but it is to the man to whom the Holy Spirit has been given.

Christopher West

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