On Wednesday, 6 February, the Holy Father delivered the following address to the faithful gathered in the Paul VI Hall for the General Audience.

1. Let us continue the examination of that "beginning", to which Jesus referred in his talk with the Pharisees on the subject of marriage. This reflection requires us to go beyond the threshold of man's history and arrive at the state of original innocence. To grasp the meaning of this innocence, we take as our basis, in a way, the experience of ''historical'' man, the testimony of his heart, of his conscience.

United with innocence

2. Following the "historical a posteriori" line, let us try to reconstruct the peculiarity of original innocence enclosed within the mutual experience of the body and its nuptial meaning, according to Genesis 2:23-25. The situation described here reveals the beatifying experience of the meaning of the body which, within the mystery of creation, man attains, so to speak, in the complementarity of what is male and female in him. However, at the root of this experience there must be the interior freedom of the gift, united above all with innocence. The human will is originally innocent and, in this way, the reciprocity and the exchange of the gift of the body, according to its masculinity and femininity, as the gift of the person, is facilitated. Consequently, the innocence to which Genesis 2:25 bears witness, can be defined as innocence of the mutual experience of the body.

The sentence: "The man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed", expresses precisely this innocence in the reciprocal "experience of the body". It is an innocence which inspires the interior exchange of the gift of the person, which, in the mutual relationship, actualizes concretely the nuptial meaning of masculinity and femininity. In this way, therefore, to understand the innocence of the mutual experience of the body, we must try to clarify in what consists the interior innocence in the exchange of the gift of the person. This exchange constitutes, in fact, the real source of the experience of innocence.

Reciprocal acceptance

3. We can say that interior innocence (that is, righteousness of intention) in the exchange of the gift consists in reciprocal "acceptance" of the other, such as to  correspond to the very essence of the gift; in this way, mutual donation creates the communion of persons. It is a question, therefore, of "receiving" the other human being and "accepting him", precisely because in this mutual relationship, of which Genesis 2:23-25 speaks, the man and the woman become a gift for each other, through the whole truth and evidence of their own body, in its masculinity and femininity. It is a question, then, of an "acceptance" or "welcome" of such a kind that it expresses and sustains, in mutual nakedness, the meaning of the gift and therefore deepens the mutual dignity of it. This dignity corresponds profoundly to the fact that the Creator willed (and continually wills) man, male and female, "for his own sake". The innocence "of the heart", and consequently, the innocence of the experience, means a moral participation in the eternal and permanent act of God's will.

The opposite of this "welcoming" or "acceptance" of the other human being as a gift would be a privation of the gift itself and therefore a changing and even a reduction of the other to an "object for myself'' (object of lust, of misappropriation", etc.).

We will not deal in detail, now, with this multiform, presumable antithesis of the gift. It is already necessary here, however, in the context of Genesis 2:23-25, to note that this extorting of the gift from the other human being (from the woman by the man and vice versa) and reducing him (her) interiorly to a mere "object for me", should mark precisely the beginning of shame. The latter, in fact, corresponds to a threat inflicted on the gift in its personal intimacy and bears witness to the interior collapse of innocence in the mutual experience.

Giving becomes accepting

4. According to Genesis 2:25, "the man and his wife were not ashamed''. This enables us to reach the conclusion that the exchange of the gift, in which the whole of their humanity, body and soul, femininity and masculinity, participates, is actualized by preserving the interior characteristic (that is, precisely, innocence) of the donation of oneself and of the acceptance of the other as a gift. These two functions of mutual exchange are deeply connected in the whole process of the "gift of oneself": the giving and the accepting of the gift interpenetrate, so that the giving itself becomes accepting, and the acceptance is transformed into giving.

Rediscovers herself

5. Genesis 2:23-25 enables us to deduce that woman, who, in the mystery of creation, "is given" to man by the Creator, is, thanks to original innocence, "received", that is, accepted by him as a gift. The Bible text is quite clear and limpid at this point. 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 donation, so that the woman, in giving herself (from the very first moment in which, in the mystery of creation, she was "given" to the man by the Creator), "rediscovers" at the same time "herself", thanks to the fact that she has been accepted and welcomed and thanks to the way in which she has been received by the man.

So she finds herself again in the very fact of giving herself ("through a sincere gift of herself", cf. Gaudium et Spes, 24), when she is accepted in the way in which the Creator wished her to be, that is, "for her own sake", through her humanity and femininity. When there is ensured in this acceptance the whole dignity of the gift, through the offer of what she is in the whole truth of her humanity and in the whole reality of her body and sex, of her femininity, she reaches the inner depth of her person and full possession of herself.

Let us add that this finding of oneself in giving oneself becomes the source of a new giving of oneself, which grows by virtue of the interior disposition to the exchange of the gift and to the extent to which it meets with the same and even deeper acceptance and welcome, as the fruit of a more and more intense awareness of the gift itself.

Real communion of persons

6. It seems that the second narrative of creation has assigned to man "from the beginning" the function of the one who, above all, receives the gift (cf. particularly Genesis 2:23). "From the beginning" the woman is entrusted to his eyes, to his consciousness, to his sensitivity, to his "heart". He, on the other hand, must, in a way, ensure the same process of the exchange of the gift, the mutual interpenetration of giving and receiving as a gift, which, precisely through its reciprocity, creates a real communion of persons.

If the woman, in the mystery of creation, is the one who was "given" to the man, the latter, on his part, in receiving her as a gift in the full truth of her person and femininity, thereby enriches her, and at the same time, he, too, in this mutual relationship, is enriched. The man is enriched not only through her, who gives him her own person and femininity, but also through the gift of himself. The man's giving of himself, in response to that of the woman, is an enrichment of himself. In fact there is manifested in it, as it were, the specific essence of his masculinity which, through the reality of the body and of sex, reaches the deep recesses of the "possession of self", thanks to which he is capable both of giving himself and of receiving the other's gift.

The man, therefore, not only accepts the gift, but at the same time is received as a gift by the woman, in the revelation of the interior spiritual essence of his masculinity, together with the whole truth of his body and sex. Accepted in this way, he is enriched through this acceptance and welcoming of the gift of his own masculinity. Subsequently, this acceptance, in which the man finds himself again through the "sincere gift of himself", becomes in him the source of a new and deeper enrichment of the woman. The exchange is mutual, and in it the reciprocal effects of the "sincere gift" and of the "finding oneself again" are revealed and grow.

In this way, following the trail of the "historical a posteriori"— and above all, following the trail of human hearts—we can reproduce and, as it were, reconstruct that mutual exchange of the gift of the person, which was described in the ancient text, so rich and deep, of the Book of Genesis.