User:Jjtsch16/sandbox

John Paul II's conception of gender flows from his philosophy of the human person. He poses a theistic humanism grounded in Imago Dei: mankind being in the image and likeness of God. From this comes his unique yet phenomenologically based approach to a human being as an integrated body and soul subject. The subjectivity and creation in imago dei give birth to a complimentary union of two genders, male and female.

John Paul II, at the time known as Karol Wojtyla, came out of a phenomenological tradition of philosophy. This signified a turn back to the subjective existence of man and how his culture, language, uprbringing, and biases all affect the way he could see the objective world. A focus on the subject taints man's ability to access the objective world in an ontological sense, that is in relation to being itself. Karol Wojtyla breaks from this to say that there is a metaphysical realism in which human subjects realize themselves and ground themselves in it by acting in freedom. Specifically, the metaphysical realism is God and His creation of man in His own image and likeness. Yet, there is not a divide between man's subjectiveness and his metaphysical reality. Wojtyla will refer to one's own subjectiveness as "lived experience" or "inner life" and one's own conscious perception of this interior life is how one experiences himself as an acting self rooted in a metaphysical reality.

This interior life of a person rooted in the metaphysical reality of Imago Dei is what shapes John Paul II's conception of gender. Being that God is in a triune relation of love, if man is created in His image then man would also be in a relation of love. The complimentary of the two sexes, then, are to be rooted in a relationship of love and the very differences in man and woman allow them to exist in this relationship together. Also rooted in John Paul II's conception of gender is man as a body and soul composite. The body makes visible the invivisble and the very fact that men and womens' bodies physically compliment each other is proof of this. As men and women are both created in Imago Dei they are both equal in dignity yet different. For John Paul II that difference is what allows men and women to exist coherently together as a union of love in reflection of man's deepest identity.