Friday, March 6, 2015
TOB: What is original unity?
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.
“The
looks of human beings were as a whole round, with back and sides in a circle.
And each had four arms and legs equal in number to his arms, and two faces
alike in all respects . . . but there was one head for both faces—they were set
in opposite directions” (Symposium, 189e).
This is
the account of human beings the Greek playwright Aristophanes gives in Plato’s Symposium. In that dialogue, each member
of the dinner party gives an account of love—where it comes from, whether it is
a god, how it affects humans. Aristophanes proposes that we all used to be
double ourselves—two persons, as it were, in a doubled body; this version of
humanity was too strong and threatened the gods, so Zeus decides he will split
humans in half. When Zeus did so, however, the splitted-humans could not
function and wandered around aimlessly on the earth looking for their other
half; this situation was also unacceptable, because the gods needed humans to
offer sacrifices. So Zeus gives humanity physical love so that the
splitted-humans would be satisfied and could then “attend to the rest of their
livelihood” (191b). Thus, the two sexes and love were born at the same time.
Though
Aristophanes was a comic playwright, his creation myth is rather compelling,
which is one of the many reasons it acts as an appropriate foil to John Paul
II’s account of the experience of original unity in his TOB. There does at
times seem to be a lack in us that leads us to another person. But are gender
and sex simply the result of some original wound inflicted upon us, either by
ourselves or some force outside of us? Is my limitedness and need—made evident
by the fact that I cannot be both male and female—evidence of some deep wound,
as Aristophanes articulates?
No! John
Paul II helps us see this in light of the Genesis account, by explicating the original experiences of solitude, unity, and nakedness. Original
solitude is the experience of the human (Adam) coming to terms with what it
means to be a creature, and specifically, a human being, one who is in the
material world, but not entirely of it.
Original
unity is the next experience John Paul II reflects on in the TOB, and this
experience arises out of and also helps us to understand original solitude.
Though Adam is a full human creature who has a relationship to both God and the
world (securing, ultimately, that no human person must be with the opposite sex
in order to be whole), the Lord sees him in his solitude and says, “It is not
good that man should be alone; I will make a helper fit for him” (Gen 2:18).
Why this need for an-other?
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| "Holding hands" is licensed under C.C. by 2.0 |
In my
last post, I pointed out that God gives
the Adam three directives—till the
garden, the commandment about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and
name the animals—and that those directives helped Adam to understand his place
in the world vis-à-vis God and the rest of creation. Still, though, Adam’s
knowledge of himself is not entirely clear.
God puts
Adam into a deep sleep, and forms the woman from his rib, and then she is
presented to the man. John Paul II emphasizes that before this, we have only
seen the general word for humanity (in Hebrew: ‘adam) to describe Adam, whereas now we see the words male (‘is) and female (‘issah), signaling that in woman’s creation, man comes to be in a
certain way for the first time as well. One does not make sense without the
other.
Adam
responds with the joyful exclamation we all know so well: “This at last is bone
of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” (Gen 2:23). Remarkably, this is first time
we hear man speak in the creation accounts. It is only in front of an-other
like himself that Adam can say “my”—that is to say, we cannot know ourselves in
isolation, but fully come into the knowledge of what it means to be human (and
specifically, the human that is me),
without the flesh of another. But notice! This original unity is not two humans
stuck together, who were originally meant to have “the same” body—rather, this
true original unity comes from looking at another, seeing that she is actually
other, and knowing that she is also “mine.” The image of a mother and a child
is also very apt here: the child learns, through his mother’s embrace and her
smile, who he is.
Original
unity, then, helps us see more explicitly that to be human means to be for another. Thus, John Paul II writes,
“In the biblical account, solitude is the way that leads to the unity that we
can define, following Vatican II, as communio
personarum” (9th Catechesis). Humanity as communio personarum, or communion of persons, made explicit for the
first time in the presence of Eve, helps us better understand man’s capacity
for gift: man is a gift himself (Eve is entirely unexpected and gratuitous),
and has the inner structure appropriate to receiving a gift (Adam receives Eve
in wonder, awe, and gratitude). The communio
personarum, then, is simply another way to express what the late pope
emphasizes in his work time and again: that our creation is a gift and that we are made to give a
gift of ourselves. The late pope’s reflections on original unity help shine a
new light on this reality that has existed from the “beginning.”
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