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Quintessence of DustDONALD DEMARCOChemistry, for the ancient Greeks, dealt not with 92 natural elements, but with a mere four: earth, air, fire, and water. Yet there was an added mystery to their chemistry.
They
believed that the stars were composed of an imperishable element. Beyond their
quartet of perishable elements, then, was a fifth, or a quinta essentia,
which soared majestically above the world representing a higher kind of being
and a visible image of immortality. This fifth essence, therefore, was the quintessence,
or the purest manifestation of anything that existed.
Shakespeare's Hamlet
spoke masterfully and metaphorically when he said of the human being: "What a
piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and
moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension
how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" And then, at
the climax of his panegyric, framed him in a most exquisite paradox as the "quintessence
of dust."1
"Quintessence of dust" embraces the most disparate
poles of that creature whom Medieval philosophers called "homo duplex"
and Genesis described as both made in the image of God and compounded of dust.
Man is a mixture of starlight and earthdust. His being is a synthesis of the uncreated
and the created. He is eternal like the stars and as ephemeral as dust. He bears
within himself a tension that establishes both his drama and his destiny.
"Truth consists of paradoxes," wrote the American poet Carl Sandburg, "and
a paradox is two facts that stand on opposite hilltops and across the intervening
valley call each other liars." Throughout history, man has oscillated between
polarities that seemingly contradict each other. He aspires to angelic status,
but all too often descends to the realm of the bestial. His soul takes flight;
his body remains below. He is an enigma, claiming to be both the special creation
of God and the accidental product of chance. His ancestry is either sovereignty
or slime. It is small wonder that human sexuality, that demands the integration
of both the creative and the corporeal, has so long been a source of confusion
and one-sidedness. Indeed, of exasperation and shame!
The "sexual revolution"
of the sixties was more an enslavement to the flesh than a liberation from moral
constraints. Pope Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae, not surprisingly,
was greeted, by and large, with indifference, incomprehension, and hostility.
Paul VI's statement that birth regulation must be understood in the light of the
"total vision of man" (n.7) meant little, if anything, to most people. A world
that embraced specialization, convenience, and simplistic solutions was hardly
disposed to grasping the paradoxes inherent in this "total vision." John Paul,
understanding both the fundamental importance of this "total vision" and the rift
in the Church that followed Humanae Vitae, was determined to set things
right. From September 5, 1979 to November 28, 1984, Pope John Paul II delivered
to Wednesday audiences in Rome a series of 130 allocutions that presented this
total vision of man, applying it to the nature of the human person, sexuality,
masculinity and femininity, and marriage. Altogether, the totality of these talks
constitutes the Pope's "Theology of the Body," "Theology of Masculinity and Femininity,"
or "Theology of Marriage."
George Weigel has stated that "If it is taken
with the seriousness it deserves, John Paul's Theology of the Body may
prove to be the decisive moment in exorcising the Manichaean demon and its deprecation
of human sexuality from Catholic moral theology."2 There is nothing
"conservative" or "moralistic" in the notion of human sexuality that the Pope
elaborates. Men and women are embodied persons. The human body is an integral
feature of their concrete personhood. The body is not a container or an inferior
apparatus for the "soul" of the person, as some contemporary separatists claim.
It is that through which men and women express who they are and enact their existence.
The human being is a psycho-somatic entity, an integrated, self-possessed person.
John Paul, who has a great love for languages, emphasizes the meaning of the
Hebrew words in Genesis that describe humanity, the man and the woman.
In the Priestly text in Genesis, which is the first account of the creation
of the human being, the word 'adam is used: "God created man ('adam)
in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male (zakar -masculine)
and female (uneqebah - feminine) He created them" (Gn 1:27). Here the Hebrew
term 'adam expresses the collective concept of the human species, "corporate
personality," or humanity.
In the term 'adam and 'dama
(soil, ground) there is an evident play on words, a practice the Bible shares
with other ancient literature. In no way is this an instance of punning. To the
Hebrew mind names were not merely identification labels, but symbols, magic keys,
as it were, that opened to the essence of the beings they signified. The humble
origin suggested by the notion of being molded from the earth, from dust ('apar),
conveyed a seal of humility that man would ignore at his own peril. Human beings
are, indeed, "earthlings."
The question is not so much, "what must I
avoid doing?" but "how do I express my sexuality in a way that is consistent with
my dignity as a person and as an image of a loving God?"
| According
to the second or Yahwist account of the creation of the first human beings, God
creates Adam initially and then the woman. "It is also significant," states the
Holy Father, "that the first man ('adam, created from 'dust from the ground')
is defined as 'male' ('ish) only after the creation of the first woman"
('ishshah).3 In Genesis 2:23, we find for the first time
the distinction between 'ish (man) and 'ishshah (woman). "We can
conclude," John Paul writes, "that the man ('adam) falls into that 'sleep'
in order to wake up 'male' and 'female'."4
Human creation
is not complete, then, until man and woman stand in loving partnership with each
other. The image of God is reflected in the mutual self-giving that man and woman
express to each other. The nuptial or marital significance of the body is an icon
of the Law of Gift built into the core of human personhood that reflects the inner
dynamism of God's own life. Through love and gift, dust attains its quintessence.
There is never the remotest hint of prudery in the Pope's discussion of the body.
"The human body," he state, "oriented interiorly by the sincere gift of the person,
reveals not only its masculinity or femininity on the physical plane, but reveals
also such a value and such a beauty as to go beyond the purely physical dimension
of sexuality."5
Nor does he ever associate human sexuality
with rules. He wisely repositions the discussion of sexual morality within the
context of the human person as set forth in Genesis and then reaffirmed
and broadened in the New Testament. The question is not so much, "what must I
avoid doing?" but "how do I express my sexuality in a way that is consistent with
my dignity as a person and as an image of a loving God?"
George Weigel
believes that the Pope's 130 catechetical addresses "constitute a kind of theological
time bomb set to go off, with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millennium
of the Church."6 The "Theology of the Body" is, indeed, faithful to
the "total vision of Man" that inspired it. It integrates and harmonizes the Yahwist
and Priestly accounts in Genesis, the Old and New Testaments, subjective experience
with objective reality, theology with philosophy, faith with reason, the masculine
with the feminine, and anthropology with ethics. It makes plausible the paradox
that dust and diamond, dirt and divinity, characterize the essence of the same
being.
"Earthlings though we are," writes Ralph McInerny, "unimaginable
without feet and arms and ears, all of which will one day turn to dust, we are
diamonds whose facets give off light and darkness."7 Or, as Gerard
Manley Hopkins expresses it in his own inimitable way: This
Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal
diamond.8 Endnotes:
- Act II, Scene 2.
- George Weigel, Witness to Hope (New York,
NY: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 342.
- John Paul II, The Theology of the
Body (Boston, MA: Pauline Books & Media, 1997), p. 35.
- Ibid.,
p. 44.
- Ibid., p. 65.
- Weigel, op. cit., p. 343.
- Ralph
McInerny, "Persons and Things," Crisis, Jan/Feb 1997.
- Gerard Manley
Hopkins, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection."
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT DeMarco,
Donald. "Quintessence of Dust." The Catholic Faith (January/February
2002).
Reprinted with permission of The Catholic Faith.
THE
AUTHOR
Donald
DeMarco is Professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, CT and
Professor Emeritus at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo Ontario. He has written
hundreds of articles for various scholarly and popular journals, and is the author
of twenty books, including The
Heart of Virtue, The
Many Faces of Virtue, Virtue's Alphabet: From Amiability to Zeal
and Architects
Of The Culture Of Death. Donald DeMarco is on the Advisory Board of The
Catholic Educator's Resource Center. Copyright © 2002 The
Catholic Faith
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