The Threshold of Original Nakedness

And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman

and brought her to the man. Genesis 2: 22

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, 

and they become one flesh. 

And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed. Genesis 2:24-25

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. Genesis 3:7

John Paul II’s theology on original nakedness can be approached as story. The prologue goes as follows (all quotes from John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them)—

When we speak of original human experiences we have in mind not so much their distance in time, as rather their foundational significance…they are always at the root of every human experience. (169-170)

In the first case, “They were naked, but did not feel shame”; in the second case (after sin) “they realized that they were naked. Does this mean that at first “they did not realize that they were naked?...A comparative analysis of Genesis 2:25 and Genesis 3 necessarily leads to the conclusion that it is not a question of passing from “not knowing” to “knowing,” but to a radical change in the meaning of the original nakedness of the woman before the man and of the man before the woman. (parenthetical mine, 172)

The emergence of shame, and in particular of sexual shame, is linked with the loss of that original fullness. (174)

Therefore, this is an experience regularly experienced by all persons—the good of our original nakedness and shame. Our foundations are as follows.

Gen 2:23-25 allows us to deduce that, due to original innocence, the woman, who in the mystery of creation “is given” by the Creator to the man, is “welcomed” or accepted by him as a gift. …At the same time, the acceptance of the woman by the man and the very way of accepting her become, as it were, a first gift in such way that the woman, in giving herself (from the very first moment, in which in the mystery of creation, she has been “given by the Creator to the man) at the same time “discovers herself,” thanks to the fact that she has been accepted and received by the man. She therefore finds herself in her own gift of self (p. 196).

For the very first time, Eve discovers herself in the giving of a gift that belonged to her from God that she offers to Adam. And her gift has been received. And he gave and she received. They were shaken to their core and became new.

This finding of oneself in one’s own gift becomes the source of a new gift of self that grows by the power of the inner disposition to the exchange of the gift and in the measure in which it encounters the same and even deeper acceptance and welcome as the fruit of an ever more intense consciousness of the gift itself. (197)

Original innocence.

One can say that, created by Love, that is, endowed in their being with masculinity and femininity, both are “naked,” because they are free with the very freedom of the gift. (185)

 The exchange of the gift, in which their whole humanity, soul and body, femininity and masculinity, participates, is realized by preserving the inner characteristic (that is, precisely innocence) of self-donation and of the acceptance of the other as a gift. (196)

But…

If man and woman cease being reciprocally a disinterested gift, as they were for one another in the mystery of creation, they recognize that “they are naked” (see Gen 3:7). It is then that shame about that nakedness is born in them, a shame they did not feel in the state of original innocence (201). 

The woman has “from the beginning” been entrusted to his eyes, to his consciousness, to his sensibility, to his “heart”;  he, by contrast, must in some way ensure the very process of the exchange of the gift, the reciprocal interpenetration of giving and receiving the gift, which precisely through its reciprocity, creates an authentic communion of persons…. The man’s act of self-donation, in answer to that of the woman, is for him himself an enrichment; in fact, it is here that the specific essence, as it were, of his masculinity is manifested, which through the reality of the body and of its sex, reaches the innermost depth of “self-possession,” thanks to which he is able both to give himself and to receive the gift of the other. (197)

If after her giving of a gift from herself to the man he accepts the first gift and then demands a different "gift" (or vice versa from the man), the lack of disinterestedness has destroyed original nakedness. The sin or ignorance questions all the previous innocent gift-giving with a lack of value of the person. The safety is gone and protection of the person is sought.

Sin and death have entered into man’s history in some way through the very heart of that unity that had from the “beginning” been formed by man and woman,  created and called to become “one flesh.” ( 205)