Reflection on October 22, 1980

https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/jp2tb44.htm

In the last reflection, I had to go back and look, SJPII did mention the Scripture in regards to “if your hand makes you sin, cut it off”. That does seem very Manichaean. SJPII makes it very clear that this is not want Christ is saying. We are not supposed to blame the object of the sin for the sin in our hearts. When you look at a woman with reductive desire, you cannot blame the woman for that. (I wonder how that corresponds to pornography. You are never forced to view it and, as I reflected on last time, you cannot know her heart. If she has sin and blame, that is hers to deal with. I guess she cannot blame her sin on you looking on her with lust anymore than you can blame her for being there to look at.) But Christ is pointing to your heart as the place sin is forming and where we need to conquer it. Say pornography is an issue for you. The Manichaean interpretation of Christ would be to cut out your eyeballs so that you couldn’t look on lustful images anymore. SJPII would say that is a loophole around the issue that doesn’t take away the sin at all. You would still have your imagination and with that you could still lust after those images you remember and not have changed at all. Blaming the object (your eyes) is not the answer. You must change your heart, which doesn’t require you to cut your eyes out but to practice restraint in what you view.

When I think of the idea of Manichaean thought, and I am by no means an expert, but if you truly believed it, that your spirit was good and your body was bad, why wouldn’t you commit suicide as soon as you came to believe that. Maybe that is something that happens and I just don’t know enough about it, but that would seem to be the logical conclusion to a theology that felt the body was evil and an entrapment for the soul that is good.

I also wondered if focusing on Manichaean ideas is outdated or at least not as appropriate today as other times. It does sound very Puritan in some aspects, but with the sexual revolution, the body is not seen as evil but has been the object of worship. The soul has become, maybe not evil, but less important or old fashioned. We see a trend that people want to turn their bodies into temples (not in the Biblical sense of our bodies are Temples and should be treated as such). They become the sole focus of a person’s. We have already discussed what entertainment does to photos and images to make us think we need to look a certain way. Whatever the opposite of Manichaeism is, that is what we are dealing with more now. Maybe we will get to that.