A new translation of John Paul II's Theology of the Body has been produced - the faults of the original translation lay in part in the fact that the talks JPII gave during those Audiences were translated in the news service offices, by several different translators over time, and there's no consistency in the language and terminology. And then there's the matter of headings:
There is a second reason why we need a new edition. It is even more important.
The current translation does not contain John Paul II's own headings. Just imagine reading a complex work like Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" with all the headings gone. You would get lost like someone in the fog. You wouldn't know where you are or where you are going. The headings help to organize the work as a whole.
Q: Why did earlier editions not have these headings? Where did you find them?
Waldstein: I found them at the John Paul II archives in Rome. It was an exciting discovery.
Like many people, when I began reading the "Theology of the Body" I felt disoriented. A deep argument seemed to be going on, but its overall structure was not clear to me.
Some people say the "Theology of the Body" is like this because John Paul II was a phenomenologist rather than a Thomist, or a mystic rather than a theologian, or a Slav rather than a Western European. In the work for my book, I thought I had made some real progress in understanding the overall structure.
Still, I wanted to know how John Paul II himself thought of it. I felt sure he must have had an outline when he wrote the work.
So about half a year ago I went with a Polish friend to the Dom Polski, the Polish Pilgrim House in Rome, on the Via Cassia, where the John Paul II Archives are kept.
We looked through the Italian materials, but found nothing. We were disappointed, but asked the director of the archives if he had anything else. Yes, he said, we have the materials of the Polish translation, but you will not find anything there that is not in the Italian, because the Italian is the original text.
We decided to take a look nevertheless and found a Polish text that had a five level division with headings I had never seen before. It turns out that Cardinal Wojtyla wrote the theology of the body in Polish before his election in 1978. It seems to have been ready for publication.
We became fully sure about the priority of the Polish text only when we managed to contact the sister who actually typed the manuscript in Krakow before John Paul II's election.
In the archives we also found a handwritten note from John Paul II to his secretary that explains that the structure of the theology of the body would remain exactly the same when he adapted it for the series of catecheses.
Having these headings is a revelation. It opens up the text in amazing ways. You see how rigorous John Paul II's writing really is.
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