# Book Review IV: Man and Woman He Created Them

> Only Love creates the good, and in the end it alone can be perceived in all its dimensions and its contours in created things and, above all, in man.

I was never going to read Theology of the Body and all its different versions:

Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary on John Paul II’s “Gospel of the Body” (2003), Theology of the Body Explained: Revised Edition (2007), Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II’s Sexual Revolution (2004), Theology of the Body in One Hour (2005), Theology of the Body for Kids (2019)

If one is to truly understand the core of one's message one must go straight to the source, no matter how difficult it is to penetrate.

I wish I stuck strong by my words because John Paul's work is indeed rather difficult to understand in isolation.

As I read, I began to understand that JPII was not talking about some obscure Adam, who was cast out of some distant Garden in some distant time. He was talking about me and how I could understand myself as one of God's most beloved creations.

> Already in the light of the Bible’s first sentences, man can neither be understood nor explained in his full depth with the categories taken from the “world,” that is, from the visible totality of bodies.

JPII makes you understand the very logic and structure of the metaphysical world surrounding us. How is man alone (or lonely) if he is surrounding by people and things?

> Man is alone because he is “different” from the visible world, from the world of living beings.

We existed from nothing, and God's constant happiness flows from Him and through our image He can exist in us, how then can we understand that creation is a gift through our own understanding. JPII explains this fact that we can understand creation as a gift from our very existence.

> creation is a gift, because man appears in it, who, as an “image of God,” is able to understand the very meaning of the gift in the call from nothing to existence.

Then this is where JPII really struck me as he eludes to the purpose of the Woman: That constant troubling partnership of negotiations, compromises, mistrusts, dramas and more. Despite all of this, it is *not* good that man is alone. The sky is good, the earth is good, the animals and trees are good. The day and the night are good. But for the first time in all of God's creation, God declares and identifies the one thing that is not good: that man in his image is alone.

> it is necessary to note that for the first time there clearly appears a certain lack of good, “It is not good that the man” (male) “should be alone,”

> he affirms that, “alone,” the man does not completely realize this essence. He realizes it only by existing “with someone”—and, put even more deeply and completely, by existing “for someone.”

> There is a linear dimension to God's love. His love points the way and carries with Him straight through Adam, "made in His image", to the point that even to His purpose is represented in Adam's existence. His existence is for others: Adam's purpose is to love someone and someone must be brought forth in order for His purpose to maintain His path.

After original sin....

> On the other hand, we know that, due to the tendency toward sin contracted as a consequence of original sin, man and woman must reconstruct the meaning of the reciprocal disinterested gift with great effort.

On the subject of lust, JPII lays out a concrete explanation what appropriation will do.

> If a man relates to a woman in such a way that he considers her only as an object to appropriate and not as a gift, he condemns himself at the same time to become, on his part too, only an object of appropriation for her and not a gift.

> From possessing, the next step is “enjoyment”: the object I possess gains a certain significance for me inasmuch as it is at my disposal and I put it to my service, I use it.

Where does man go after Original Sin?

> Christ orders man to return in some way to the threshold of his theological history! He orders him to place himself at the boundary between original innocence-happiness and the inheritance of the first fall.