An Anthropology of Gaudium et Spes (Part 2)

Elohim (God) Creating Adam, William Blake (c. 1805).

An Anthropology of Gaudium et Spes, Part 2 | Francis Etheredge | HPR

If God freely made us in His image and likeness, then his Word is indispensible to our self-understanding; indeed, “man, male and female” (cf. Gn 1 27), makes “visible” the unfathomable mystery of the Blessed Trinity.

In Part II of this work (Part I is here), there is a continuation of the dialogue with Gaudium et Spes and, subsequently, an increasingly necessary turn to the first chapters of Genesis. It is almost as if, then, the words of Christ are prophetic for our times: “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female” (Mt 19: 8); indeed, the words of Christ are prophetic for understanding who we are in the light of who God is.

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On the one hand, the structure of human nature and the characteristics of human experience are ordered to the humanity of Christ, as his humanity is, as it were, made in the image of God as the new Adam (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 22). But on the other hand, being divine, entails that the humanity of Christ is intrinsically ordered to the mystery of Christ as a divine person. Thus, the Fathers are affirming the intelligibility of the existence of a Creator-God in whom the whole truth concerning man finds its coherent origin and end; indeed, as the document says later: ‘When God is forgotten, however, the creature itself grows unintelligible’ (Gaudium et Spes, 36). In a word, then, if our existence, in the full range of our lived experience, is coherent and intelligible in the light of reason and of Revelation,1 then creation as a communication of the Creator becomes clearer and, if clearer, more obviously in the nature of a created gift communicating the uncreated Gift of God. Thus, this “consciousness of creation”2 is a key to grasping the perception of created reality of a gift of love: “Creation is God’s first advance towards man, the first outflow of his love with a view to giving himself to man and establish{ing} communion with him.”3

Finally, although this essay will not directly pursue the question further, it is noticeable that the Fathers of the Council, having established the “being” of man, male and female, between the two poles of natural and supernatural truth, then go on to specify Chapter Three in the following way: “Man’s Activity in the Universe.” In other words, the structuring principle in the order of these Chapters, particularly 1-3, is philosophical: being manifestsactivity.4

But then, having addressed the characteristic activities of man, male and female, the Fathers then address the interaction of the Church and the World in Chapter 4, culminating with a return to Christ at the end of it: a return to Christ which also announces the Second Coming of Christ and, thus, reinserts us in the eschatological anthropology which is, as it were, constitutive of the very coming of Christ (Gaudium et Spes, 45). It is only after these steps that progressively structure our participation in the progress of man in the history of salvation that we come to the particular question of marriage and, as it were, the restoration of the language of the covenant: the original act of God which differentiates salvation history (Part II of Gaudium et Spes, 48). Thus, there is a brief account of the historical situation in which men and women live (Gaudium et Spes, 47); but then, also, there is a recovery or, better, a realization of the interrelationship between “covenant” and “sacrament.” In other words, there is a renewal of the language of marriage in the light ofthe history of God’s salvation of the human race.

Taking account, then, of an observation of St. John Paul II, there also emerges a clear sense that Christ and the Blessed Trinity are the answer to an existential account and analysis of man’s situation in the world, both as an individual and as a social being.5 An account, however, that is not just doctrinal but is, as it were, inviting us to find the life of Christ “lived” in the liturgical life of the Church, the living help that modern man needs.

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