“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Overview

• The meaning of “original nakedness”: “The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame” (Gen 2:25)
• The man and the woman truly see each other’s personal goodness with the eyes of the body
• The body itself is the “place” of the communio personarum: it is the personal reality that allows me to enter into communion with others
• The experience of shame as proof of a person’s dignity, and as proof of wounded relationships
• “They felt no shame” does not indicate a lack, but a fullness: a mysterious experience of each other’s goodness, seeing each other in the way God sees them

In this group of audiences, Pope John Paul II reflects on a curious line in the Genesis text: “The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame.” This “boundary” experience, according to him, is not something belonging to a distant and inaccessible past, but is rather a “foundational experience” that is present in all of our experiences, whether or not we know it. In fact, he says that “original nakedness” is the “key” for understanding both original solitude and original unity.

This lack of “shame,” he says, is a “reciprocal” experience: each experiences the sexual identity and differentiation of the other simultaneously. The “fullness” of this original state of innocence is lost at the fall, a loss that is indicated with the small word “then”: “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they realized that they were naked” (Gen 2:25). Importantly, John Paul II says, this isn’t the gaining of new information, that is, coming to know something previously unknown, but rather, “a radical change in the meaning of the original nakedness of the woman before the man and of the man before the woman” (11.5). In other words, it is a loss of a clarity of vision of each other.

With this loss enters “shame,” a “complex” experience, to use John Paul II’s word. It is complex in that it is multi-faceted. On the one hand, it indicates a “fear” before the face of another subject (i.e., a being endowed with free will and intellect, who alone in the visible world therefore can recognize my true value, but who, because also wounded by sin, remains prone to reduce me to an object). On the other hand, this “fear” indicates indirectly that there is something of value being threatened: this fear indicates that I have worth, and that I deserve to be loved for my own sake. Shame is therefore an important reality for properly governing relations between men and women in the world in which we live.

As a negative experience, again, shame points to a fullness originally possessed by the man and woman. Their original solitude, as we saw, was perfected by their original unity; and this original unity, in turn, is made possible because of their original nakedness: “one can say that the man and the woman were originally given to each other precisely according to this truth inasmuch as ‘they were naked'” (12.3). Even more: not only was the man given to the woman and the woman to the man, but the purity of their knowledge of each other, mediated through the body, was part and parcel of the purity of their knowledge of the rest of the visible world. Their innocence, in other words, allowed them to perceive all things truly, to perceive the value and goodness of all things as God sees them, before Whom we are all “naked,” in the sense that God sees to the “heart” (see 12.5). This “innocence” of perception was accompanied by “an original depth in affirming what is inherent in the person, that is, what is ‘visibly’ feminine and masculine” (12.5; see also 13.1).

Key Terms

• The communio personarum
• A “lack” vs. a “fullness”
• Original innocence
• Original nakedness
• Shame
• The “spousal” meaning of the body

Assignment

Pages 169-178 (Audiences 11-13:1)

Resources

• N/a

Discussion Questions

Does John Paul II think we can have any knowledge of what it would have been like for Adam and Eve before the fall? How, or why not?

Who sees the body “more truly”? Adam and Eve before the fall, or Adam and Eve after the fall, when they “realized they were naked”?

What does John Paul II mean when he says that the body expresses the person, not simply the “individual”?

What does John Paul II mean by “shame?” Is it the same thing as what our culture means when it says, “Don’t ‘shame’ me!” Why or why not?

How did their knowledge of each other in they body help Adam and Eve before the fall to know the rest of the visible world?