What does it mean to be
“Male and Female
He Created Them”
The absolute equality of men and women—and why they are
fundamentally different—is revealed in the “powerful metaphysical
content” of the Genesis creation accounts.
Dr. Deborah Savage
“S o God created man in his own image, in the image
decades of misunderstanding concerning the nature
of God he created him; male and female he created
of love and the authentic meaning of human sexuality.
them” Genesis 1:27.
C
Though both women and men have come
ontemporary culture is undeniably
to regard the use of contraceptives as essential
characterized by a profound confusion
to the exercise of their “freedom,” the result has
about the nature of the human person
actually been a kind of progressive slavery that has
and of what constitutes right relationships between
manifested itself in the on-going horror of abortion,
men and women. This is due in no small part to the
the insidious spread of pornography, failed
introduction of the birth control pill in 1965, which
marriages, loneliness, and despair. But the sexual
held out the promise of sex without consequences;
revolution’s most significant impact has been the
its advent created a fissure between the unitive and
damage it has caused to our understanding of the
procreative dimensions of the sexual act and led to
proper relationship between men and women.
Complementary By Nature
Instead of regarding one another
as persons, deserving of love and
ordered toward the total gift of
self, it is now an acceptable social
norm for men and women to view
each other merely as objects, to be
used as instruments of pleasure and
discarded when “used up.” Absent
from our collective consciousness
is a recognition of something that,
though unspoken, used to be taken
for granted: Men and women are
complements of one another, both
in the design of their bodies and in
8
their ways of being in the world. It is
this theory of “complementarity” that
MOSAIC
Pope St. John Paul II considers in the
teaching that became the Theology of
the Body (TOB). In the thought of St.
John Paul, this very complementarity,
which is both physical and
ontological—in our very natures—is
what gives us our mission: to create,
not only human families, but human
history itself.
Return to the Beginning
The late Holy Father’s stated aim
in the text of the TOB is to understand
the sacramental meaning of the
human body. Following Jesus’s own
instruction to the Pharisees, he returns
to the “beginning,” to the creation
accounts in the first two chapters of
Genesis, deriving from those texts a
profound account of the real meaning
of human love. And he provides us
with the signposts of a theory of the
complementarity of man and woman.
The aim of this essay is to
provide a sketch of such a theory; it
is intended to point more properly
toward a theology of complementarity,
an investigation that might do much