His solitude was not discovered in isolation.

One of Elizabeth’s statements for discussion from March 4 struck me: “His solitude was not discovered in isolation, but in an encounter with the world.”  For one, it points out the power of this strange and ancient story to bear truly on the world and humanity.  John Paul draws much more meaning out of Genesis than the merely literal. 

The world of Genesis 1 and 2 is so contrary to the way we moderns view the world.  We see the world through the inward turn pioneered by one of the prophets of modernity, the mathematician/philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650). He famously said, “I think, therefore I am.”  That interior turn to the thinking subject splits the world in two, looking for the deepest authenticity and truth inside the thinking individual, thereby separating the subject from the world.  John Paul II surely had Descartes’ view in mind when he gave his teaching.  By way of stark contrast in Genesis 2, the “man-of-the-earth” Adam learns about who he is by looking outward, through his encounter with God and through his encounter with the world.  The created world has an inherent order to it--an intrinsic character--that is to be seen, discerned, and explored, not turned away from as foreign.   

Adam as he looks inward knows himself as a subject in relation to what is outside him.  The world comes to him as a gift, not as something from which he is alienated in his own interior.  He encounters the world as it is given, and he encounters it through his body.  He also encounters God.  Adam sees that there is something there that he did not make, yet that he can name.  He names the animals and knows that he is different from them.  Naming is a creative act that differentiates and orders. To name is to utter a word, an act that mirrors, in however small a way, the creative speaking by God that brought the world into existence.  To be human is to be able to speak, to be aware of an external world that makes sense, to grasp that world through the unity of mind and body in a way that comprehends it yet transcends and orders it by naming it.  When the breath of God came upon the human being he had formed, that embodied creature, bearing God’s image, speaks. Adam’s words reflect a profound discontinuity in the world—the embodied “creature from the earth” now standing transcendent between the material order of the world and the spiritual order of God.  Yet speaking and naming things is not enough.  Adam in his original innocence perceives himself in his subjectivity as alone, and God sees that it is not good.  But that is a story for another day.