The Beauty of Marital Love in the Thought of Saint John Paul II

Saint John Paul II is one of the two greatest Catholic realist phenomenologists of the twentieth century. While we rightly revere his papacy and its magisterial works (e.g., Fides et Ratio, Veritatis Splendor, Theology of the Body and above all the new Catechism), we should remember that his pre-papal years were spent as a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin. His important works of this period—Love and Responsibility,1 The Acting Person,2 and many powerful essays—are realist phenomenology at its best. One of his most important contributions is his rich understanding of marital love. Like Dietrich von Hildebrand, the other phenomenological thinker of his stature, Saint John Paul II employs the tools of a realist and personalist phenomenology of the marital embrace to reach the traditional moral conclusions—for instance, about the nature of the human person, the problem of contraception, and the meaning of marriage—in a more attractive and powerful manner than the sometimes sterile manuals of the past. In what follows I shall use sections of Theology of the Body3 as well as his pre-papal work since these sections contain philosophy as such, rather than theology, and can therefore stand on their own. In this paper, I present Saint John Paul II’s understanding of the beauty of marital love and suggest some fruitful avenues for further research.