LESSON 8: Nakedness and Shame

28th General Audience, May 28, 1980
The shame found in humanity itself, both immanent and relative - manifests itself in human interiority and the other, respectively.

SEXUAL SHAME
Suggests that “man of concupiscence” in the act of the knowledge of good and evil experienced that he had simply ceased, also through his body and his sex, to remain above the world of living beings.

As if he had experienced a specific fracture of the personal integrity of his own body, particularly in that which determines its sexuality and which is directly linked with the call to that unity in which man and woman will be one flesh (Gn. 2:24).
Birth of human concupiscence.
Human heart possesses both desire and shame. The birth of shame, when man is closed to what comes from the Father, and opens himself to what comes from the world.

CORRUPTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS -- LOSS OF UNITIVE MEANING OF THE BODY.
29th General Audience, June 4, 1980
The original power of communicating themselves to each other had been shattered.
Radical change in the original meaning of nakedness, a negative change in the whole personal interpersonal relation between man and woman.

The purity and simplicity disappears from their original experience, which had helped to bring about a singular fullness of mutual self-communication
After original sin, man had lost the sense of the image of God in himself, a loss manifested by shame.

That shame, invading the man-woman relation as a whole, was manifested through the imbalance of the body as a specific “substratum of the communion of persons.

This communion was given up for the mere sensation of sexuality with regard to the other, as if sexuality became an obstacle in man’s personal relationship with woman.

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