JPI 951
Body, Love, and the Person: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives
The consideration of the body is of crucial importance for the development of an adequate anthropology, i.e., an anthropology of love. Theology, inasmuch as it takes the Incarnation as its point of departure and as its continual foundation, is concerned in a particular way with the body. As Tertullian put it: “The flesh is the hinge of salvation.” On the other hand, the twentieth-century witnessed several efforts to reconsider again this philosophical topic, somehow forgotten during the course of Modernity, from the time in which Descartes made a sharp distinction between the res cogitans and the res extensa. Thus, in the body we find a particular point of that encounter between human experience and divine revelation which constitutes the key of John Paul II’s method in his catecheses on human love. In the light of this consideration, the course examines the contributions of several philosophers (Maurice Merleau Ponty, Gabriel Marcel, Hans Jonas) and theologians (Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac) for a better understanding of the meaning of the human body.
