0035 The broad nested form may be compared to a specific nested form concerning marriage, where sacramental marriage transubstantiates the judgment rendered by an honest intellect (points 13-21).
0036 Now, I can compare elements in the two nested forms, not as specific as opposed to broad, but as two illuminations shining light upon one another.
0037 Firstness is the monadic realm of possibility. The logics of firstness are inclusive and allow contradictions. In both judgments, firstness associates to what once was regarded as secondness, the realm of actuality. What is moves from secondness to firstness. Pope John Paul II says, “Consider standing on the shoulders of Aquinas.” At the same time, the createdness of male and female must be considered in terms of the possibility of “one flesh”.
0038 The possibilities inherent in male and female stand as the basis of various modern -isms (B) that explicitly abstract one possibility (say, the woman’s role) of a complex whole (the family) in order to theorize an elevation of the feminine to the status of the masculine, such that both are undifferentiated (in the normal context of a pagan spirit) under the label, “human”. With this counter-intuitive labeling, human subjectivity alters, and a permanent, conscious, explicit abstraction is internalized as an implicit abstraction.
For example, a feminist humanist may declare, “If a male behaves like a male, he dehumanizes the female.”
The explicit term, “dehumanize” conjures the implicit abstraction of offense.
The pope’s theology of the body moves the same possibilities inherent in male and female to a divine suprasubjectivity. Our very being steps out of chapter one of Genesis, which, despite all attempts to contain its evolutionary theme, still serves as a sign of our evolutionary heritage. Read the text. If recited by a madman in a lab coat in the halls of academia, the Creation Story would easily be mistaken as an evolutionary vision of the development of our world. Male and female, He created them.
0039 From the view of divine subjectivity, male and female1 constitute a monad, to be actualized as one “flesh”2, in the normal context of the spirit3. Images of actualization are so addictive that pornographers make fortunes by marketing simulacra of the real… um… “thing”. But, the “flesh” is more than what pornographers fixate on. The “flesh” is family. The lesson is precisely located in the story where God, after fashioning Eve from Adam’s rib, introduces her to him as his “helper”.
The irony is profound, because in human evolution, the male adapts to serve as the female’s helper. The Homo genus survives because each male provisions for his female and her children (not completely, but enough that the behavior becomes encoded genetically). In order for that to happen, the female must bear her mate’s children, and not another male’s. Provisioning by the male (as the female’s helper) is a gift. Fidelity by the female (as the one who receives the male’s provisioning) is a gift. The “marriage deal” is so successful, that the female adapts to signaling her fidelity by making the male the one in charge of the family. The male, who is in charge, adapts by becoming emotionally bonded to his female.
0040 From the view of divine subjectivity, the irony mentioned above belongs to the potential of the original innocence of prelapsarian adamah. “Original innocence” is the label that St. Thomas Aquinas attaches to the condition of the prelapsarian Adam, located in the liminality between the Lebenswelt that we evolved in and our current Lebenswelt.
Original innocence points to the gift of our creation. This is no small feat. As Steven Gould noted, if one replayed the history of the Earth with one small change, humans would not have evolved.
Original innocence also points to adamah (or “humanity”, or, using Dugin’s terminology, “ethnos”) as providing a gift back to God, by embodying his image. That is no small feat. In the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, hominins practice hand (and later, hand-speech) talk. Manual-brachial word-gestures image and indicate their referents. No element in the speech-alone phrase, “image of God”, can be pictured or pointed to. So, the application of the term, from a God capable of transubstantiating symbols (the stuff of thirdness) into real things (the stuff of secondness) and potentials (the stuff of firstness), is sacramental. The gift that we give back to God is to be who we evolved to be.