Reflection on October 10, 1979 –

http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp2tb5.htm

Christ points back to the beginning while defending the indissolubility of marriage. I thought about that and what any of the Theology of the Body might mean to someone that doesn’t believe in that. Most people have come to accept that marriage is either unnecessary or a commitment until something better comes along. The “lifetime” portion of marriage has lost its foothold. When I thought about that, it worried me that people might think that because the lectures start out there, they might ignore the whole of the teaching because they don’t believe in the premise it starts on. I think that the indissolubility of marriage is not the premise that Theology of the Body relies on but more like the thesis it is going to prove. It appears that JPII has stated his conclusion (more like quoting Christ conclusion) and the rest of the Theology of the Body is going to show us why marriage is indissoluble. It is going to go into much more than that, but will give us a theology to back the belief in marriage for life and why that is how it should be and was “from the beginning”.

Original solitude and its two meanings could get pretty tangled. Both seem obvious. Man is in solitude, apart from, all the rest of creation. That is a very important starting point for us. It gives us our understanding of why we are special, why God created us, why we are unique, and why we cannot become like animals. It is such a modern trend (and probably not that modern, only seems that way to us) to try to reduce us to animals. It is so very obvious that we are not to any one that looks at humans and any other animal with eyes that are not biased and trying to make the connection.

I like the explanation that man’s first conscious act is to name the animals, and by doing so sees he is different and realizes that he is alone (solitude). The first thing man ever does is realize he is different and above all other creation. If that is the first thing he does, God’s first gift, it makes sense that Satan would go there to attack, give us the notion that we are glorified animals. In reading these, I have been thinking about the theory of evolution and Darwin. I think most people think it is just a given, but one thing has always puzzled me. If evolution is completely true, and we came from monkeys, why do we still have monkeys? Things that do not evolve perish, survival of the fittest. Why wouldn’t the first human get rid of all the less intelligent monkeys? There is something utterly and mysteriously unique about humans that separates us from everything else, and Darwin and Science cannot explain it.

But the second meaning, male was alone until God made females, at first appears to be the more apparent reason, but looking at it further, the meaning that goes much more shallow and explains less about separation. It also seems hard to follow when man (human) is formed and then they discuss man (male) with the female.

Words I looked up.

Existential - pertaining to existence.

Proximate Genus – The next above it in a series. This was an interesting one. I didn’t get a clear definition but articles on it. Best way I could describe it is that a parallelogram is the proximate genus of the rectangle which is the proximate genus of the square. I didn’t quite see how that worked into man naming the animals but I came up with two ideas. Either one, he saw how animals related, each building and having a proximate genus, but he was not the proximate genus of any, or two, he is the proximate genus of all of them because he is over and encompassing all. Third, man coming to the conclusion that he is different is the proximate genus from the step of naming the animals. The term comes up when defining something, man was trying to define himself, but could not because he could not locate his proximate genus to connect to.

Nous - mind or intellect. In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the basic understanding or awareness which allows human beings to think rationally

“Linking up with the Aristotelian tradition, it leads to indicating the proximate genus. Chapter 2 of Genesis expresses this with the words: "The man gave names...." There corresponds to this the specific differentia which is, according to Aristotle's definition, nôus, zoón noetikón.”

I couldn’t find “nous, zoon noetikon” anywhere. The closest I came was nous (above) and zoon politikon, which had to do with Aristotle’s belief that man was a social being. If anyone has any better insight on this, please share.