Our culture is enduring an unprecedented assault on the self-evident reality that human beings come into this world as either a man or a woman. Indeed, the possibility of the very existence of man and woman as actual embodied creatures is a subject of heated, often angry dispute. The claims of the gender activists grow increasingly incoherent, their demands more unreasonable and insistent. There are days when it seems the world has contracted some kind of deadly virus, and we look on with trepidation as the illness spreads throughout society, infecting the vulnerable and the unwary.
It is not hyperbole to suggest that the future of the family—indeed, of Western civilization—could be at stake in this conflict. Surely, echoing in our ears is the warning at Fatima’s warning: the final battle between the Lord and Satan, Sister Lucia tells us, will be over marriage and the family. And we wonder: is this that moment? Is our current dispute just an especially intense skirmish—or is it a modern-day Battle of Lepanto? But without question, the situation calls not only for prayer but also for urgent action.
Many have taken up the effort to discern and illuminate the incoherence at the heart of gender ideology and its offshoots. Intellectuals and essayists, lawyers, philosophers and theologians, biologists and doctors—all have articulated irrefutable arguments in an attempt to persuade a confused public. But our opponents seem inoculated against logical argument, the facts of biology, and the evidence of their own senses. We need stronger medicine.
Perhaps it’s time to take the advice of our beloved Pope St. John Paul II: never concentrate on fighting evil, he tells us. Concentrate instead on building something good. The weapon we need is a full-throated, robust account of the nature of man and woman; one grounded in the truths of Scripture and Tradition; one that can illuminate their identities, their genius, and their shared mission. It is the one thing necessary—and, strangely, the one thing missing.
In fact, never in the entire Western intellectual tradition has anyone there been on offer offered an adequate account of the nature of man and woman in relation to each other. And yet it is this very truth that would give us the strong medicine we need. We are fighting this battle from a defensive posture. We need to go on the offense. We need to advance a vision of man and woman as such, to articulate an understanding that bypasses the distortions our culture has wrought.
We need a comprehensive response to the Church’s own question on these issues, one put in simplest terms during the bishops’ 1987 Synod on the Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful: how are we to understand the Creator’s purpose in determining that human beings would always exist as only either a man or a woman? And what are the consequences of that decision?
Arriving at a proper response to these questions has been my pursuit for well over a decade. I have continued St. John Paul II’s effort to derive a meaningful account of the nature of man and woman from the creation accounts in Genesis. And I have learned that John Paul was prophetic in turning our attention to Jesus’ call to “return to the beginning.” Returning to those passages again and again, I believe I have captured a glimpse of the full meaning of God’s purpose in creating us male and female.
Deriving the meaning of man
My investigation began with a claim John Paul II makes in the opening pages of The Theology of the Body. In the second and third audiences, he asserts that we can derive the meaning of man from the two distinct creation accounts found in Genesis 1 and 2, first as an objective reality created in the image of God (Genesis 1) and secondly in the aspect of his subjectivity (Genesis 2). I took up this claim and reexamined the meaning of the original Hebrew, and also looked at it through the lens of both Hebraic and Thomistic anthropology. And in the end, I believe we can say that John Paul II is right.
Indeed, Genesis 1 and 2 illuminate not only the identity of man created male and female but also the genius that characterizes their subjectivity and the nature of their shared mission. An overview of my findings with regard to each of these elements—identity, genius, and mission—will have to suffice.
I regret that, in what follows, in some cases I can only offer assertions, since space does not permit a fuller treatment. (For a more complete account, see my essay “Woman and Man; Identity, Genius, Mission” in The Complementarity of Women and Men, ed. Paul Vitz, 89-131.) And—consider this fair warning—a bit of philosophy will be necessary. But our focus will be on grasping the significance of the moments at which man and woman appear in the order of creation.
Our fundamental identities
The creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 establish that man and woman must be understood to be equally human. They are both composite creatures, embodiments of the same human soul but differentiated in the first instance by their bodies and equally endowed with intellect, will, and freedom. Sexual difference—gender—can be thought of as a special kind of inseparable “accident.” It is one attributable to the composite and is thus an essential property of man and woman.
Man and woman are both essentially human and instantiated in one of two different types of body. They are human and either male or female, distinct instantiations of the species, made as they are of different matter and animated by souls that are adapted to the individual person. In Genesis 2, we are no longer speaking of man in the abstract but as individual persons. At this point, matter (dust, man’s rib) enters the picture, and thus we enter the philosophical realm of accident. (St. Thomas Aquinas explains gender as a type of [inseparable] accident; see De Ente et Essentia, ch. 6, 5).
The account that emerges from Genesis concerning the equality and difference that characterize man and woman reveals that neither the male nor the female can be considered normative for the human species. Why? Because at the level of man or woman per se, we are differentiated in the same way. The union of body and soul that comprises both the composite creature man qua male and the composite creature woman qua female reflects the same human nature united substantially to two different types of bodies.
Man and woman express two different ways of being human in the world. Their collaboration, wherever it takes place, is between equally human persons who are at the same time different from each other. Man and woman are complementary creatures who embody two essential principles of creation—one essentially active, one essentially receptive—without which the human community would never have taken its place in history.
The order in which God creates reveals a hierarchy, one that is ordered from lower creatures to higher. This is evident in both accounts. In the first, it culminates in the creation of man per se; in the second, it culminates in the creation of woman (Gen. 2:22). It is only at this moment in Genesis 2 that the sacred author refers to man and woman for the first time as real, existing persons; only now are they ish (man) and ishshah (woman). Here we learn that there is no concretely existing man without a concretely existing woman; humans as such exist in the concrete only as man or woman.
Indeed, it is only when we come to the making of woman that we see the final significance of the order introduced in the first account and brought to completion in the second. Man is made from earth (adama), but woman is made from man. Woman is not created “second”; she is created last—and on the way up God’s hierarchy. She is, in fact, the pinnacle of creation.
Human community is born
This proposition is reinforced when we consider that the Hebrew word usually translated as “helper” is ezer and actually does not mean servant or slave. When this word appears elsewhere in Scripture, it has the connotation of divine aid. (For example, Psalm 30:11b: “The LORD will be a helper (‘ezer) to me”; or Psalm 121:1: “I will lift up my eyes to the mountains, whence comes my help (‘ezrî).” Used here to express helper or partner, it is a word that indicates someone who is most definitely not a slave or even subservient. Woman is partner, help sent by God; she is not built to be man’s servant but someone who can sustain him, who can help him live.
But balance in the hierarchy returns when we consider that the full text is ‘ezer kenegdo. Kenegdo is a preposition that means “in front of,” “in the sight of,” “before,” in the spatial sense. The sacred author wishes us to understand that while Eve is not “below” Adam in the order of creation, neither is she above him. She stands in front of him, before him, meeting his gaze as it were and sharing in the responsibility for the preservation of all that precedes them.
Here we come to the most important conclusion concerning the identity of man and woman. Surely we can say that, with the creation of woman, human community appears for the first time and for the first time enters into human history. And it is suddenly clear that while it may be true that without man woman has no place, it is equally true that without woman, man has no future. Scripture tells us that man leaves his mother and father and “cleaves to his wife” (Matt. 9:5). She is his future. And here we see that man and woman each occupy a certain pride of place in the created order. They need each other, and they are made for each other.
The genius of man
But there is still more to be derived here; we can now say something about their genius and mission. My analysis begins in the fact that the man is (apparently) in the Garden alone with God for some period before the appearance of woman. This has important implications for the place he occupies in the created order and the traditional understanding of man as the head of the household. But aside from this special relationship with the Creator, the man’s first contact with reality is of a horizon that contains only lower creatures, what we might call “things” (Latin, res). This leads God to conclude that the man is alone and incomplete and leads to the creation of woman.
Now, man’s orientation toward things is clearly a part of God’s design. In fact, it may provide a point of departure in Scripture for the well-documented evidence that men seem more naturally oriented toward things than toward persons. Man is tasked with naming all the things God brings him (including woman); it is in naming them that he takes dominion over them. Indeed, Aquinas argues that Adam received an additional preternatural gift, infused knowledge, to be able to name all the animals brought before him (Summa Theologiae I, q. 94, a. 3). It can thus be said that man knows things in ways that woman simply does not.
And here we come to the core of what I propose is man’s genius: he learns that he excels at discovering what things are, how they are to be distinguished from one another, and their purpose. This is his gift. And so, I would argue it is man’s capacity to name things, to determine what can be predicated of something and what cannot, and an ability to arrive at a systematic way of judging the matter that constitutes the primordial gift men bring to the tasks of living. It is man who in Genesis 2:15, well before the fall sets him at odds with creation, is put in the garden to “till it and to keep it.” Man is the only one who gets a specific job. This is his work, his mission.
It seems evident that man is oriented toward the external. He acts on the world, creates outside of himself. And his genius originates in his capacity to know and to use the goods of the earth in the service of authentic human flourishing. The masculine inclination toward things and their uses is an aspect of the charism of men and, in many ways, accounts for the building up of human civilization. It has led throughout history to human flourishing and has made and still makes possible the preservation of families and of culture. The truth is, if it weren’t for men, we would still be living in caves. The proper response to the manifestation of the “genius” of men is not ridicule or resentment but gratitude for their dedication to their mission.
The genius of woman
In contrast to man and of special significance is the legitimate claim that, since woman comes into existence after man, her first contact with reality is of a horizon that, from the beginning, includes man—that is, includes persons. One can imagine Eve, a person also endowed with reason and free will who, upon seeing Adam, would recognize another like her, an equal, while the other creatures and things around her appear only on the periphery of her gaze. This exegetical insight seems to provide a starting place in Scripture for the equally well documented phenomenon that women seem more naturally oriented toward persons.
In On the Dignity and Vocation of Women (Mulieris Dignitatem), St. John Paul argues that the feminine genius is grounded in the fact that all women have the capacity to be mothers, and that this capacity, whether fulfilled in a physical or spiritual sense, orients her toward other persons. There is plenty of evidence, scriptural and otherwise, to demonstrate this claim.
But the point is, that in addition to her capacity to conceive and nurture human life—indeed, prior to it—woman’s place in the order of creation reveals that from the beginning the horizon of all womankind includes persons, includes the other. This may explain why girls and women seem to know from the beginning that they are meant for relationship. It takes men a bit longer to look up and realize they are lonely for something they only just realized was missing and to look for the one who can complete them.
The genius of woman is found here. While man’s first experience of his own existence is of loneliness, from the start woman’s horizon is different. From the first moment of her reality, woman sees herself in relation to the other. But this capacity to include the other does not compromise woman’s fundamental intelligence, her competence, her ability to get things done. It is in fact the force that seeks to make life more human for all.
Woman is fundamentally oriented toward the inner life. Her most essential creative act takes place on the inside. And her genius is to keep before us the fact that the existence of living persons, whether in the womb or walking around outside of it, cannot be forgotten while we engage in the frantic tasks of human living.
Woman is responsible for reminding us that all human activity is to be ordered toward authentic human flourishing. This is her gift and her mission. And unless she fulfills it, humanity will only continue its downward spiral.
Our human mission
Perhaps in these brief sketches one can discern the outline of a robust account of man and of woman. Indeed, in this analysis, we discover an astonishing convergence of Scripture and Tradition, philosophy and theology, and science. Of course, we cannot forget what happens in Genesis 3. The account of the Fall has enormous significance for our concerns here. But that must be a topic for another time.
I conclude by echoing St. John Paul II’s declaration that the complementarity that characterizes the relationship between man and woman is what constitutes their mission: to create not only human families but human history itself (Letter to Women, 8).
No doubt the complementarity of man and woman is more evident within the context of the family, while its significance in the creation of human history is perhaps less obvious. Nonetheless, if John Paul is right, men and women must confront the very real challenges we face with full awareness of our status as partners, not adversaries, both in the home and in the public arena.
We need to demonstrate the integrity and strength of real men and real women as we engage the issues of our day with intelligence and courage. We need to be prepared to give witness to an account of man and woman that reveals the beauty and meaning of authentic masculinity and femininity in all its subtlety and complexity. Above all, we cannot be afraid or hesitant to hold fast to what is good. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.