Lesson 4 – Original Nakedness

10th General Audience, November 21, 1979

​1. The function of sex, of being male or female, which is in some ways constitutive of the person, man with all his spiritual solitude, uniqueness and unrepeatability proper to the person, is constitutive of the body as he or she.  
The Unity of Becoming “One Flesh”
 
2. The unity of Gen. 2:24 “the two will be one flesh” refers to the unity that is expressed and fulfilled in the conjugal act, the sexual union between man and woman. The union of male and female, by becoming one flesh, places the whole of their humanity under the blessing of fruitfulness.
 
The context does not allow us to stop at the surface of human sexuality; we cannot treat the body and sex outside this full dimension of man and woman and the “communion of persons”
 
The “one flesh” imposes on us from the “beginning” an obligation to see the fullness and depth proper to this unity, the unity that man and woman must constitute in the light of the revelation of the body.
 
In the sexual union of man and woman where the two become one flesh, the mystery of creation is rediscovered, “flesh from my flesh and bone from my bones” They recognise each other reciprocally, and to call each other by name, as they did the first time. This means also reliving the original virginal value of man.
 
Sex is more than the power of human bodiliness that acts by human instinct.
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