The Crucifix as Marriage's Template: Peter Kreeft on Why Spousal Love Is Paschal

Peter Kreeft is 88. His wife of 63 years, Maria Antoinette Kreeft, died on May 31, 2026. Days later, the Boston College philosopher sat down with Matt Fradd on Pints with Aquinas and, asked what advice he'd give a newly married couple, answered with the scene that had been sitting in him since her death: "The last view I had of my wife about an hour after she died... I fell in love with her again. Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled, suffering body. It's as beautiful as a crucifix. Because that body ain't gonna last, but the soul is. So, if you don't love her soul but just love her body, then don't get married."[^1]

That is not a sentiment about romance surviving hardship. It is a specific theological claim: a body worn down by decades of poured-out love becomes, in death, the clearest image available of what marriage was for all along.

The ecclesial vocation

Scripture calls marriage a sign of the union between Christ and the Church, a love total, self-emptying, and fruitful, not merely resembling that union but participating in it.[^2] That participation has a specific shape. The love that binds Christ to the Church is the love of the cross: total, costly, oriented entirely toward the good of the other. A wedding vow does not describe a single day. It opens onto the whole paschal arc — incarnation, self-emptying, death, new life — as the shape the marriage itself is meant to take.

The body as sign of total self-gift

John Paul II's Theology of the Body supplies the mechanism that makes this coherent rather than merely poetic. Marital union, on his account, is a complete and total gift of self, in which both spouses give their entire being (history, embodied identity, everything constitutive of the person) to each other.[^3] The body is not the container of that gift. It is the sign that makes the gift legible. That is exactly what Kreeft saw in his wife's body an hour after her death: sixty-three years of a gift the body had been making visible the whole time, now completed.

The cross is the fulfillment of that same language. Christ's self-offering on Good Friday is the body's most complete act of self-gift: everything given, nothing withheld, for the life of the Bride. Marriage does not borrow this image from human experience and project it onto the cross. The cross establishes what love actually is, and marriage is constituted to participate in it.

The beauty of kenosis

Kreeft's instinct that a wasted, dying body could be beautiful has a rigorous theological defense in Hans Urs von Balthasar's account of Christian beauty. Balthasar argued that Christ's suffering and death are not an embarrassing exception a worldly aesthetic would rather look past. They are the model, because divine glory is manifest precisely in the kenosis, the self-emptying, of the Word made flesh.[^4] Where a Platonic aesthetic ascends from visible form toward an immaterial good, Balthasar's Christian aesthetic descends: beauty is revealed from above, in the form of self-emptying love made flesh. A dying body is not a failure of beauty that faith rescues by looking past it. It can be, as Kreeft insisted, the fullest expression of beauty available to human perception.

The pastoral reframe

What does this offer a couple at the kitchen table at eleven o'clock, exhausted and at odds, or a widower recalling his wife's last hour?

The standard therapeutic account of marital difficulty treats suffering as a signal that something has gone wrong: a symptom requiring diagnosis, a deficit requiring repair. That account is not false, but it is incomplete, and the incompleteness has pastoral consequences. Couples who carry only that framework measure their marriage by the ratio of good moments to hard ones, and read a difficult season as evidence the relationship is failing.

Amoris Laetitia states that the sacrament of marriage flows from the incarnation and the paschal mystery, and that neither spouse faces what comes alone, because both can invoke the Holy Spirit who consecrated their union.[^5] Hard seasons are not interruptions of the sacrament. They are occasions in which its graces become most necessary and most operative. Fidelity, the exhortation adds, "is a matter of the heart," renewed each morning by a free decision, not a law endured under compulsion.[^5] Naming a season paschal does not remove its weight. It gives the weight a meaning that endurance alone cannot supply.

Charity as the architecture of spousal love

Aquinas places charity, love of the good of the other, at the summit of the virtues precisely because it moves the one who loves toward the beloved's genuine good, at cost to oneself. Titus, Vitz, and Nordling, in the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, treat charity as the unifying factor of the whole Christian life, the virtue that coordinates the interpersonal, emotional, rational, and volitional dimensions of the person into a single ordered movement toward the good.[^6] In marriage, charity takes the specific form of spousal love: exclusive, fruitful, indissoluble, "love formalized in a monogamous marriage" open to new life and to the full flourishing of the other.[^7] The cross is not a metaphor borrowed to describe that love. It is charity's own highest expression, made visible in the body of Christ, and marriage draws couples into a real participation in it through grace.

What this means for those who accompany couples

For counselors, spiritual directors, and parish ministers, the question a couple brings to accompaniment is rarely abstract. It is usually something like: is what we're going through normal, or does it mean we're failing? The paschal frame answers at a register neither reassurance nor problem-solving can reach: it locates the difficulty inside a vocation whose defining act was the cross. A couple who understands their hardest seasons as exercises of charity, rather than evidence of failure, carries a different posture into them. The difficulty does not shrink. It stops being opaque.

Kreeft's wife is gone. What he saw in her body an hour after her death was not despair. It was sixty-three years of a gift completed, visible at last in full. The beauty is in the self-giving, and the self-giving reaches its fullest form precisely where it costs the most.

References

[^1]: Murphy, A. (2026, July 15). 'As beautiful as a crucifix': Peter Kreeft on love, loss, and the soul of marriage. National Catholic Register. https://www.ncregister.com/blog/matt-fradd-dr-peter-kreeft-marriage

[^2]: Ephesians 5:25–32; Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1617, on marriage as sign of the union of Christ and the Church.

[^3]: Bransfield, B. (2010). The human person: According to John Paul II. Pauline Books & Media. (On the spousal meaning of the body and total self-gift.)

[^4]: Schindler, D. L. (Ed.). (1991). Hans Urs von Balthasar: His life and work. Ignatius Press. (On Balthasar's theological aesthetics and the manifestation of divine glory in Christ's kenosis.)

[^5]: Francis. (2016). Amoris laetitia [Post-synodal apostolic exhortation] (§§74–75, 319). Vatican Publishing House.

[^6]: Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., McWhorter, M., & Gross, C. (2020). Fulfilled in virtue. In P. C. Vitz, W. Nordling, & C. S. Titus (Eds.), A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice (pp. 249–305). Divine Mercy University Press.

[^7]: Titus, C. S., Vitz, P. C., & Nordling, W. J. (2020). Interpersonally relational. In P. C. Vitz, W. Nordling, & C. S. Titus (Eds.), A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health practice (pp. 306–330). Divine Mercy University Press.