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The Goodness and Beauty of Our Fragile Flesh: Moral Theologians and Our Engagement with “Disability”

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The Goodness and Beauty of Our Fragile Flesh: Moral Theologians and Our Engagement with “Disability” Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 6, Special Issue 2 (2017): 206-253 The Goodness and Beauty of Our Fragile Flesh: Moral Theologians and Our Engagement With “Disability” Miguel J. Romero “The starting point for every reflection on disability is rooted in the fundamental convictions of Christian anthropology.” – Pope Saint John Paul II, “On the Dignity and Rights of the Mentally Disabled Person,” no. 2. “It is essential that man should acknowledge his inherent condition as a creature …. Only by admitting his innate dependence can man live and use his freedom to the full. [S]uffering and death … these are a part of human existence, and it is futile, not to say misleading, to try to hide them or ignore them.” – Evangelium Vitae, nos. 96-97. “God fashioned the human body in that disposition which was best, befitting [optima dispositione secundum convenientiam]…the soul and its operations.” – St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I q. 91, a. 3, co. HE RECOGNITION THAT WE ARE COMPOSITE creatures, a spiritual and corporal unity, is basic to the Christian understanding of the human being. For this reason, Christian T doctrine on our integral dignity has always included an affirmation of the goodness of the human body and, likewise, an affirmation that the innate vulnerability of our bodies coincides with the harmony of our specific place in the good order of God’s creation.1 In other words, Christians believe that the vulnerability and coordinate dependencies of the human body are essential creaturely goods, enduring aspects of our original nakedness, which are not in themselves a cause for shame.2 Those gifts are among the natural goods that predicate our greatest good and final perfection, as incarnate intellectual creatures formed in 1 See, for example, Genesis 1:26-27, 2:7, 18-25; Psalm 8; Gaudium et Spes, nos. 12, 14; Evangelium Vitae, nos. 96-97; Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1934-8. 2 Pope Saint John Paul II, “The Presence of Evil and Suffering in the World,” June 4, 1986, nos. 5-7; See John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), 154-156, 238-242. The Goodness and Beauty of Our Fragile Flesh 207 the image and likeness of the triune God.3 In that vein, at the proclamation of St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) as doctor ecclesiae (2012), Pope Benedict XVI remarks on the understanding of the human being given in St. Hildegard’s “eminent,” “penetrating,” and “comprehensive” theology: Hildegard’s anthropology begins from the biblical narrative of the creation of man, made in the image and likeness of God…a unity of body and soul … a positive appreciation of corporeity and providen- tial value is given even to the body’s weaknesses. The body is not a weight from which to be delivered … human beings are weak and frail … [and our] bodies, like the body of Christ, are oriented to the glorious resurrection.4 This distinctively Christian understanding of human nature and human dignity flows directly from the Good News of God’s love for the world, revealed in and through Jesus Christ. That is to say, Christian theological anthropology is regulated by Christian belief in the origin, history, status, and destiny of the human being, amid the ongoing act of creation: the utter gratuity of our specific dignity, original innocence, original sin, the Fall, the Incarnation of God in Christ, reconciliation, bodily resurrection, and final beatitude.5 3 In the words of Aquinas, the human being is created a “mortal rational animal” (animal rationale mortale). Aquinas, Sententia libri Metaphysicae VII.5, 1378–9. This does not mean that the human being is merely a ‘mortal rational animal,’ nor does this mean our innate vulnerability and coordinate dependencies are all that God intends for the human being. Rather, it means that whatever our potential to exceed our nature and whatever God might intend for the human being, Christians believe that our natural corporeal vulnerability to impairment, illness, and injury is integral to the specific nature that is perfected and the creaturely dignity that is elevated. 4 Pope Benedict XVI, “Proclaiming Saint Hildegard of Bingen, professed nun of the Order of Saint Benedict, a Doctor of the Universal Church,” October 7, 2007, no.5, w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_letters/documents/hf_ben-xvi_apl_ 20121007_ildegarda-bingen.html. Throughout her eighty-one years of life, from her early childhood, St. Hildegard constantly experienced ‘potent infirmities,’ including debilitating migraines, synesthesia, seizures, chronic pain, partial blindness, periods of complete blindness, partial deafness, recurring bouts of severe paralysis (including thirteen years of complete paralysis). See Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life (New York: Routledge, 2002), 146-161. See also Anna Silvas, Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999). 5 See Gaudium et Spes, nos. 12, 14: “Endowed with light from God, [the Church] can offer solutions…so that man’s true situation can be portrayed and his defects explained, while at the same time his dignity and destiny are justly acknowledged …. Though made of body and soul, man is one. Through his bodily composition he gathers to himself the elements of the material world; thus they reach their crown through him, and through him raise their voice in free praise of the Creator. For this reason man is not allowed to despise his bodily life, rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and honorable since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day. Nevertheless, wounded by sin, man experiences rebellious stirrings in his body.” 208 Miguel J. Romero Considered by way of that revealed history, the various postlapsarian disclosures of our innate vulnerability are rightly regarded as privations of a relative corporeal good. Those “defects” and “infirmities,” however, do not diminish our incarnate, creaturely dignity and cannot displace the fittingness of our composite nature.6 Rather, in the light of the Gospel, as discussed below and following Aquinas, the “defects” and “infirmities” of the human body manifest the goodness of corporeality and the fitting beauty of our fragile flesh.7 Our fragility is revealed as beautiful in the light of the truth of “wounded Beauty,” where the defects assumed by Christ and the infirmities he bore summon us away from deception toward a beauty we must learn to see.8 The Christian affirmation of our specifically incarnate intellectual dignity, the fittingness of our vulnerability, and the enduring goodness of corporeality in light of the Fall—these three doctrines—function as anthropological principles for distinctively Christian theological consideration of the integral good proper to the human being and moral theological descriptions of human happiness. My interest in this essay is the way those three particular anthropological principles—our specific dignity, the fittingness of our vulnerability, and the enduring goodness of corporeality—are navigated in contemporary Christian theology. The particular, animating concern is a somewhat consistent, recurring tendency to avoid or muddle this constellation of anthropological principles in moral theological and Christian ethical discourse. Indeed, in some quarters of Christian theology, the suggestion that our corporeal 6 See Salvifici Doloris, no. 7: “Christianity proclaims the essential good of existence and the good of that which exists, acknowledges the goodness of the Creator and proclaims the good of creatures. Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation or distortion of good. We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share…. He particularly suffers when he ought—in the normal order of things—to have a share in this good and does not have it. Thus, in the Christian view, the reality of suffering is explained through evil, which always, in some way, refers to a good.” 7 A preliminary point is called for concerning the distinctively Christian theological use of words like ‘defect’ (de- “away” + facere “to do, make”) and ‘perfect’ (per- “complete” + facere “to do, make”): Even if there are absolute goods (concerning the whole of us) that follow from the privation (an absence of something expected) of a relative corporeal good (concerning only the bodily part of us), the relative corporeal ‘defect’ (an ‘away-from-doing’ that only concerns the body, in the semantic range of ‘impairment’) does not diminish the integral creaturely dignity or ‘perfection’ (the integral goodness of the whole person) of the person whose body is impaired nor does the relative corporal ‘defect’ redefine the corporeal good that is impaired. I’ll return to this in section four, when I discuss impairment, healing, and the non-competitive transcendence of God. 8 Joseph Ratzinger, “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty,” August 2002, www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_ cfaith_ doc_20020824_ratzinger-cl-rimini_en.html. See also ST III q.14 & 15, where Aquinas treats the defects assumed by Christ in the Incarnation. The Goodness and Beauty of Our Fragile Flesh 209 vulnerability is an essential and fitting creaturely good might be regarded as inconsistent with Christian doctrine on original sin and the Fall—supposing that the vulnerability of our bodies to external effects is a primeval curse which corrupts human nature and undermines human dignity.9 In other quarters of Christian theology, the mention of “evil,” “sin,” or “defect” in relation to bodily impairment, illness, and injury might be regarded as having elitist and chauvinistic, if not dangerously eugenic implications, that threaten to undermine the dignity of persons who have some form of impairment—supposing that the Christian affirmation of our inalienable dignity remains intelligible when abstracted from the particulars of the Gospel.10 The breadth and depth of this contemporary problem is struck in high relief when we consider how the topic of “disability” is theologically conceived and navigated, engaged and avoided, in contemporary Catholic systematic, moral, and ethical discourse.
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