[In the following review, Briggs discusses John Paul's views on love and sexuality as delineated in Love and Responsibility.]

Pope John Paul II has often spoken about sex and marriage during his nearly three-year reign. The impression left by these utterances, portraying the Pontiff as simply a pillar of traditional Catholic moral theology, does an injustice to the wider scope of his thinking. When he makes public statements, the well-developed conceptual underpinnings for his views unfortunately get left behind.

Moreover, the Pope is often a better teacher than disciplinarian, as this book, a revised version of a series of lectures on sexuality and love he gave over 20 years ago to Polish university students, aptly illustrates. A respected philosopher, he is at ease at the head of the class, carefully and rigorously building his case, projecting a positive stance against his intellectual opponents, such as Freud, who are often cited in support of a more sexually permissive standard. In no other book does he emerge more clearly as a thinker of independent bent, grounded in both an ethic that places the individual above rules and in a system of ideas that can affirm the church's doctrine with integrity.

When John Paul II made the comment at a Vatican audience that a man who lusts after his wife commits a sin, ridicule and scorn gushed forth from a variety of “liberated” critics. The essential idea behind his somewhat archaic wording was that exploitation in any form is wrong, a concept that presumably anyone could gladly endorse. He deserves a hearing, although the same difficulty that the Pope has had in translating complex concepts into the language of public pronouncements sometimes obscures his book's sensitive, though tough-minded arguments.

The theme that runs through Love and Responsibility is that although sexuality is God-given, it may be degrading unless it is transcended by love. The Pope suggests that there are many aspects to love between two people, including physical attraction, emotional attachment, tenderness and comradeship, but that sensuality is dominant unless these are integrated by a love for the “truth of the person.” People must learn that they are masters of their own sexuality, not slaves to instinct; unless they enhance love by ethical truth it lapses into “subjectivism,” an unreliable guide.

Though human love, in the Pope's view, cannot be reduced simply to any of its psychological or physical components, all the elements play a constructive role. Sexual pleasure, apart from procreation (which John Paul II, like his predecessors, sees as the supreme purpose of sexuality), can be good and necessary for married couples; the body serves more than only a utilitarian goal. He asserts that “there exists a difference between carnal love and ‘love of the body'—for the body as a component of the person may also be an object of love and not merely of concupiscence.” He further cautions against seeing “pleasure itself as evil—pleasure in itself is a specific good,” though he warns of the “moral evil involved in fixing the will on pleasure alone.”

On the subject of love, the Pope's romanticism often soars above the colder dictates of logic. At other points, his logic founders on the need to reinforce doctrine, and he can come across as a stern naysayer who trades only in prohibitions. As would be expected, he solidly supports Roman Catholic teachings against premarital sex, extramarital sex, artificial birth control and divorce. But his personalistic philosophy appears to put him in tension with at least the last two stands. He holds out an ideal of a totally self-giving, committed marriage that benefits from sex without being dependent upon it for a marriage's survival. He talks constantly and sensitively about the need to value the dignity of the other person. He sets forth, sometimes with poetic flourish, a picture of marital perfection that may seem far beyond the capabilities of most people.

In many respects, Pope John Paul II has written a courageous apologetic. Aware that some might question the conclusions of a celibate male, he goes ahead with aplomb and authority; he shies from nothing, but avoids arrogance. He ponders a range of issues, from the Old Testament's accounts of polygamy (the effect, he says, was to degrade women), to the need for men to better serve the sexual needs of their wives, to the case for chastity. Love and Responsibility is a high-minded rejoinder to the sexual revolution, pervaded by an implicit commandment: “Thou shalt not use another for thine own sake.”