Reflection on March 26, 1980

https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/jp2tb21.htm

I was trying to understand what is being discussed here with the word “knowing”. I understand its meaning as “Adam knew Eve” in the conjugal act, but in the first section JPII also points to the fact that Adam “knew” what to name the animals. Obviously the “knowing” has different meanings, but it is also important that Adam and Eve “knew” what to call the creation they helped to make, “man”. “With it man, male-female, not only gives his own name, as he did when he gave names to the other living beings (animalia), thus taking possession of them, but he knows in the sense of Genesis 4:1 (and other passages of the Bible), that is, realizes what the name "man" expresses: realizes humanity in the new man generated. In a sense, therefore, he realizes himself, that is, the man-person.”

Adam named the animals and thus took a type of possession over them, but I don’t think you would say that Adam and Eve possess Cain or that parents possess their children. It feels like there is something deeper in the act of naming something that I am not grasping and that the use of the word “possession” may not mean exactly what we would first think. Parents do name their children, that name makes them unique. (Something I have thought about before is that the name given to you by your parents is eternal, what you will be called in Heaven. There is a lot of responsibility there. Think about that before you name your kid “Apple” or “Pepsi.com”) And if you stop thinking of a possession as something you own but more as something you would protect with your every being, I think a child would qualify. A possession is something that you have control over (at least you attempt to). God told man to subdue the Earth, thus man takes possession of the Earth. Man named the animals and in doing so, possessed them in a sense by being above them. Man named their reproduction, thus taking possession, responsibility, for them. Man also learned about himself when taking possession of the animals. He learned of his uniqueness, his original solitude. In naming his offspring, man learns more about himself.

He turns from talking about possession of animals and creation to “knowledge” being linked with “possession” of the other, male and female. Like with other ideas that have been brought up so far, we see that this understanding in its original sense was a beautiful thing that allowed Adam and Eve to “possess” each other, but do so in a pure sense and not with any sense of making the other an object. We struggle against this in our fallen nature. We have the conjugal act, allowing us to have a unique “knowledge” of the other, yet in our sinful nature it is comingled with our sense of possession. Our acts of knowledge will bring us to a struggle to see the other with pure subjectivity and not as an object to be possessed. The further you are from that purity, the more the person becomes an object, the more the person becomes a possession for you to control.

Each of these reflections seems to shed more and more light on the world. How much of this idea of the other as a possession do we see in marriages, in pornography? When reflecting early on the idea of children as possessions (in a negative light) doesn’t that speak to the world’s understanding of abortion and contraception, of pre-school beauty pageants, and other types of children’s activities that we see today? The world has moved farther and farther away from the divinity of creation and the further it goes, the more we become objects to be possessed, in its most negative definition.