By Stephen P. White

One sign of our improbably ludicrous times is that the question, "What is a woman?" has become a point of political contention in recent years. The obvious answer (obvious, that is, until just yesterday) has proven unsatisfactory to the keepers of the Zeitgeist for whom the connection between nature and meaning has been thoroughly dissolved.

A world that doesn't know what a man or a woman is, let alone what it means to be a man or a woman, is going to have a very difficult time figuring out what it means to be a good man or a good woman. It is difficult for a world so thoroughly confused about nature to discern the presence and action of grace. Grace, after all, builds on and perfects nature.

There is reason to hope that the fever of gender ideology is breaking - or at least that the stranglehold it has held on our politics and social discourse is loosening. But even if it were to subside completely, there is still reason to worry about what would follow in its wake. The failure of one bad set of ideas is no guarantee that what replaces it will be any better.

Disentangling modern science and medicine from gender ideology would be a very good thing. But it would be a mistake to assume that a more biologically grounded account of male and female would solve the underlying anthropological confusion. It turns out that the meaning of the human person - male and female - is not easily definable in naturalistic or material terms.

Any attempt to account for human nature in purely material terms, even without the thumb of ideology on the scale, will tend to exclude God. Such an account would be inherently a-theistic.

In Gaudium et Spes, the Fathers of Vatican II took direct aim at a kind of atheism "which anticipates the liberation of man, especially through his economic and social emancipation." The Council goes on to declare that the Church, "has already repudiated and cannot cease repudiating, sorrowfully but as firmly as possible, those poisonous doctrines and actions which contradict reason and the common experience of humanity, and dethrone man from his native excellence."

The Council Fathers clearly had Communist ideology in mind with this condemnation, but the fundamental anthropological error of that ideology was rooted in an atheistic-materialist conception of man.

And as Pope John Paul II would later argue, Communism is hardly the only system that is susceptible to such an error. A consumerist society, he insisted, can make the identical mistake, effectively agreeing with the Marxist system, "in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs."

Material science alone, useful as it can be, can't tell us much about what it means to be human. It cannot answer the question of what it means to be a good man or a good woman. The Church offers answers to those questions, but she also forthrightly acknowledges that the questions themselves touch on a mystery.

Here's Gaudium et Spes: "Meanwhile every man remains to himself an unsolved puzzle, however obscurely he may perceive it. . . .To this questioning only God fully and most certainly provides an answer as He summons man to higher knowledge and humbler probing."

All of this may seem rather abstract, or at least incomplete. But the "higher knowledge and humbler probing" to which man is invited and by which man comes to know himself in the light of the Incarnation is fundamentally personal and concrete.

The longing to know oneself, to know one's own origin and purpose, is present in every human heart. And it is a longing often expressed far better in literature and poetry than in philosophical or theological prose.

What does it mean to be a good man? What does it mean to be a good woman? These are pressing questions in every age. They are all the more pressing today for the confusion about what it simply means to be, simply, human. They are not likely to become less pressing as our technology and affluen...