Saturday, February 28, 2015
TOB: What is original solitude?
We continue here our explorations
into St. John Paul II’s series of Wednesday Catecheses, which eventually became
known as Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (TOB,
for short). To see other posts on this topic, click here.
As I wrote in my first
post on this topic, John Paul II’s TOB is often looked at solely
in terms of what it has to say about sex and marriage. This is not without
warrant—indeed, John Paul II placed a great deal of emphasis on marriage and
the family during his papacy—but if looked at only in this light, we miss the
bigger picture. Man and Woman He Created
Them is about, in the simplest terms, what it means to be human—a bodily
creature who comes from and responds to God.
This
method of theological anthropology is evident from the beginning of TOB, After
John Paul II sets up the starting point for his reflections—that is, Jesus’
insistence that we return to “the beginning” in his dialogue with the Pharisees
about divorce—the pope introduces the three “original experiences” based on the
creation accounts in Genesis. These three experiences—solitude, unity, and
nakedness—all help us understand what it is to be both spirit and body. What
does it mean to be in the material world but not entirely of it? There is more
going on in TOB than thoughts on what conjugal love is and means.
This is
reinforced by John Paul II’s reflections on the first of the three original
experiences -- original solitude. Though in the first creation account, male
and female appear simultaneously (“So God created man in his own image, in the
image of God he created him; male and female he created them” Gen 1:27), this
is not the case in the second creation account. Instead we are presented with
Adam, the first human, whose name means something like “humanity.” John Paul II
is careful to note that in this second account, the worlds “male” and “female”
(‘is and ‘issah in the original Hebrew) do not appear until there are two. I’ll
talk about this more when I address original unity, but for now we’ll give our
attention to the solitary Adam.
John
Paul II explains the experience of original solitude in terms of man’s place
and situation in the world—man is neither animal nor pure spirit. As both, man is above the rest of the
creatures. The first indication of this superior place in the created world is
the directive about the garden: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the
garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). Work, then, helps set
humanity apart from everything else in this world; man is the only creature
with the capacity to care for what has been created—to receive it, we can say,
as a gift. This receptivity and capacity
to work, then, is a first step in thinking about original solitude.
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| "For to be a farmer's boy" by Winslow Homer is in the Public Domain |
Another
indication of man’s being set apart is the naming of the animals: “out of the
ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air,
and brought them to the man to see what he would call them” (Gen 2:19). This
too is a form of dominion—to name something is to see and understand its
essence; no other creature in the world has been given this task and privilege.
Though
this multi-faceted dominion is clearly a gift for and to man, making it clear
that the earth is for him, it also
sets the man apart in such a way that it’s not entirely clear to whom or what
he belongs. By tilling the garden and naming the animals, it is evident that
though Adam has a material body like the rest of creation, there is something
more in him as well. Obviously the question of belonging becomes clearer when
Eve is created from Adam’s rib, but we should not pass too quickly over
original solitude, as, for John Paul II, it is the key to other original
experiences.
John
Paul II draws our attention to a third dimension of human existence that occurs
before the original unity of male and female: “And the Lord God commanded the
man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it, you
shall die’” (Gen 2:16-17). John Paul II asks this question of the passage:
“could man, who in his original consciousness knows only the experience of
existing and thus of life, have understood what the words ‘You shall die’ mean?”
(7th Catechesis). Put another way: how could Adam understand death as
death has not yet entered the world?
We tend
to glide over this question because of our familiarity with these passages. But
if the commandment about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil can hold
any weight, so to speak, with Adam, then he must have at least some sense of
the consequence the Lord gives him. What can this mean?
John
Paul II writes: “The words of God-Yahweh addressed to the man confirm a
dependence in existing, so that they show man as a limited being and by his
nature, susceptible to nonexistence.” In other words, because man is a
creature, nonexistence is constitutive to his very being. Though it is somewhat
unfathomable, we all know with certainty that there was a time when we were
not. This is the situation of the creature.
Thus the
commandment, though often viewed in negative terms (likely because we
transgressed it and pay the price), is actually also a gift in line with the
other directives of keeping the garden and naming the animals: it allows man to
know his place in relation to the world and God, in short, it gives him the
capacity to know what he is—a creature.
This,
then, is the main thrust of original solitude: that man can rest in the
knowledge that he is a creature, and not just a creature, but also one to whom
God speaks. The original experience of solitude secures our knowledge of our
selves in this world, that each person is created for his or her own sake by
God, who gives the world to man as a gift.
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