[This is a rewrite of this post from a few hours ago].
After I banished a certain commenter from my comboxes for the second time, Wade St. Onge writes ...
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Someone who will go unnamed private messaged me with the following quote from JP2's TOB: "In mature purity, man enjoys the fruits of victory over concupiscence". I was asked, "Wade, what do you think this means?"
The implication he was trying to make was clear: "JP2 is saying the man who has achieved mature purity need not practice custody of the eyes because he can look at naked women and not lust".
Of course, there was no attempt to engage what St. Alphonsus said, although that did not surprise me.
Thanks to one non-contextualized quotation from John Paul II, we can not only dispense with everything that all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church taught with regards to custody of the eyes, but we can re-define the scriptural and patristic notion of "spiritual warfare" to mean that we continue to look upon scantily-clad women rather than looking away because the latter can in no way be classified as "fighting temptation".
When will this TOB madness end?
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At first it seemd to me that this was not "one non-contextualized quotation from John Paul II", but a mis-quotation from John Paul II, for EWTN, which carries the full text of JP2's so-called "theology of the body" (TOB) lectures (general audiences), quotes the Holy Father thus ...
"In mature purity man enjoys the fruits of the victory won over lust ..."
This at first looked to me like a huge difference.
But a friend of mine, trained in theology noted, "The problem here is this: the words 'lust' and 'concupiscence' are sometimes theologically interchangeable, and you can't really make the distinctions you try to make in your post on the level of semantics."
So that being the case, I think we need to fall back on context. What is the context of this quote? The simple context, meaning the few sentences surrounding it?
The Holy Father continues in context ...
In mature purity man enjoys the fruits of the victory won over lust, a victory which St. Paul writes of, exhorting man to "control his own body in holiness and honor" (1 Th 4:4). The efficacy of the gift of the Holy Spirit, whose "temple" the human body is (cf. 1 Cor 6:19), is partly manifested precisely in such mature purity. This gift is above all that of piety (donum pietatis) ...
So even within a very narrow context, we can see that this Victory over Lust of which John Paul speaks is a victory of a man who controls his own body in holiness and honor by way of the grace of piety, or reverence toward God.
This is a far cry from what West and the Westians are tyring to make of this phrase.
EWTN publishes the "Theology of the Body" in Bl. John Paul's own words here.
