In the late 1990s and early 2000s, theology of the body was seen as the Catholic Church’s answer to Evangelical purity culture. It was a third way between the sexual revolution’s “sex for pleasure” and the Puritan “sex for procreation”.

Pope St John Paul II believed both of these ideas were utilitarian, using persons as a means to an end. That conviction is an integral part of his book Love and Responsibility, which served as a precursor to his Wednesday audiences that formed the text of Theology of the Body.

Many popular Catholic speakers, most notably Christopher West, took this teaching and ran with it. They started presenting it to young men and women living somewhere between Puritanism and sexual liberation, wondering how their faith fitted in. West presented theology of the body as an answer.

Christopher West has done a lot of good work, but the popular understanding of theology of the body paints an incomplete picture that sometimes does damage to the theology it’s trying to popularise.

The problem with Christopher West, and with pop theology of the body more broadly, is confusion of the sign with the thing.

In Ephesians 5, St Paul draws an analogy between the love of husband and wife and Christ’s love for the Church. When he calls it a “great mystery”, he isn’t talking about the spousal union itself. The great mystery is Christ’s love for His Church (Eph 5:32). The marital union is a sign of that greater reality of Christ’s love for His Church.

In drawing this analogy, Paul elevates the natural union of a man and a woman into something supernatural. Marital love is sanctified and elevated because it signifies a higher thing. Popular proponents of theology of the body often miss this, and this is especially evident when they compare sacred things to sex.

Christopher West and others have suggested finding sexual imagery in things like the Paschal candle being dunked in the baptismal font at the Easter Vigil. West stretches the etymology of the word “seminary”, linking it to semen, using phrases like “inseminating the Church”. Christopher West is a good man with good ideas and some bad ideas, like all of us. This is one of those bad ideas.

These analogies suggest we will learn more about sacred things the more we study them in the light of human sexuality. On the contrary, we will understand the true meaning of sexuality if we study it in the light of higher things.

Natural things are all imbued with signs of higher things. When something natural is associated with the divine, it is elevated and becomes sacramentalised. But pop theology of the body runs the argument in reverse. It compares sacred things to the sexual act. It makes the sacred thing the sign of the natural thing and renders the sacred profane.

One facet of Pope St John Paul II’s teaching is that sex has become a sacred thing in the sacrament of marriage and carries theological weight. It is more than appropriate to find theological significance in aspects of the marital act. These images, for the sake of prudence, shouldn’t be shouted from the rooftops, but they are real and they are there. The problem isn’t that sex is spoken of as sacred. The problem is running the wire the other direction, and treating the sacred as illustrated by sex.

It is much like a road sign that points to an airport. The sign tells you a lot about where the airport is, but the sign itself is limited. It only works in the one place it’s posted. It would be ridiculous to stand at the airport and say, “This airport is a lot like that sign I saw.” Additionally, once you become familiar with the way to the airport, you don’t need the sign any more.

That’s the mystery human sexuality points towards. Once we have complete knowledge of God, the beatific vision, we have no more need of the sign.

So which direction should married people look? Not towards the body, searching liturgy and theology for hidden sexual images to help them understand sex better.

Instead, married people should look to the sexual union and find there the analogies that point towards something greater: total, complete, mystical spousal union with Christ. The marital union is a leaping-off point for discovering the divine. You don’t need to search the divine to understand sex. Sex, rightly understood, is what leaps you towards the divine.

Married people also should not stop at the one sign most readily available to them. There’s a greater sign: the mystery of celibacy. The celibate is attempting to live in such a way that they experience spousal union with God on earth without it being mediated through the sign of sexual union, a sign so easily corrupted by sin and the desires of the flesh. Celibacy, when we can comprehend it, is a more tangible sign of the divine.

Celibacy, not marital love, is the ultimate sign of heaven. Marital love is the penultimate sign, which in a way points to celibacy, too.

Consider a celibate’s first encounter with spousal love as a child. A child’s first encounter with spousal love is the love between their mother and father. From the perspective of a child, the love between their mother and father is a celibate love. The child has no idea about the sexual union behind it. All they see is the chaste gift of self, the sacrifice, the love.

This chaste love informs the catechetical foundation for their mystical marriage to Christ that they will experience in celibacy. In short, marriage is a sign of celibacy, which is itself a sign of heaven.

To reorient theology of the body, popular speakers ought to reflect on this series of signs. We cannot let theology of the body remain as Catholic sex ed. Rather, we need to return to Pope St John Paul II’s original vision for understanding the spousal meaning of the body – as a sign for mystical union with Christ that fades once that union is experienced.

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