How the Spousal Meaning of the Body Is a Corrective to the Technological Mindset

Technology has become the paradigm of the horizon of meaning. It has such an impact on human life that it is actually an upheaval, the keywords of which can be summarized in matter, making and futurity. In fact, by reducing reality to brute facticity, so that it can be easily manipulated, making has become paramount and drives man in endless and reckless progress toward futurity. The spousal meaning of the body – as John Paul II’s Catechesis on Human Love explains – in its filiality, fruitfulness and sense of time is a corrective to the technological mindset. Indeed, the spousal dimension, constantly open to receiving the gift and making itself a gift, values man’s aspiration to development (matter and making), which gradually impels him to settle in and, at the same time, to transcend the reality he inhabits (futurity).