#480: TOB 3: What is the body?

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Now: on with reflections about the body!

“He answered, ‘Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ^‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.’” — Matthew 19:4-6

What is the body? At a minimum, it is a spatiotemporal arrangement of matter, which might or might not be animate. The body is an object: it is the kind of material substance that can be measured or quantified through all manner of scientific instruments. When the body is living, it is an organism with unique, independent motion: it subsists outside our consciousness, digesting food and processing oxygen beneath and behind the subterranean levels of our minds—until something goes awry and we suddenly recognize its existence, that is.

Alternately, the body is a vector, a home for our subjective awareness. The “person” is simply a series of conscious experiences or continuous process of willing ourselves into the world. The ‘body’ is little more than the means by which we sound our barbaric yawp and assert ourselves.

The modern world has more or less bifurcated these two perspectives on the body. The tradition of philosophy that John Paul is working out of—phenomenology—has tried to bring them together, with more or less degrees of success. It is not quite accurate to say that John Paul II sees these two perspectives at work within Genesis’ two creation accounts. After all, the first account is properly metaphysical, not physical, and underscores humanity’s transcendent orientation toward God. Yet there are hints that something like it is at work: the first account is objective, while the second account has a psychological depth and sense of subjectivity. These two accounts correspond to each other—a claim that John Paul II asserts, and which is (I suspect) almost impossible to defend.

Jesus’s turn back to the “beginning” in Matthew 19:8 as a source of theological knowledge of the body poses a fundamental problem, though: we are barred from the original innocence that Genesis 2 describes by the reality of sin. In quoting Genesis 2:24, Christ takes us right to the boundary between innocence and sin. As John Paul notes, Genesis 2:25 anticipates the presence of shame by underscoring the original couple’s freedom from it. There is a gap between the “state of integral nature” and the “state of fallen nature.”

Yet this gap does not prevent us from seeing within our original nature a source for moral norms. As John Paul notes, Christ does not approve of Moses’s legislation permitting divorce, but appeals to the words of creation and humanity’s condition in our innocence. Despite humanity’s sin, the norms that govern human life are still grounded in creation. As John Paul writes, “Christ’s answer is decisive and clear,” which means we “must draw the normative conclusions from it.” This is a crucial principle. The theological revisionist James Brownson [once wrote that the] “fact that the Bible uses the language of ‘one flesh’ to refer to male-female unions normally does not inherently, and of itself, indicate that it views such linkages normatively.” Such a claim cannot be sustained, though, in the face of Christ’s manner of moral reasoning in Matthew 19.

The precedence and priority of origins for ethics here is not necessarily one we should simply assume. Christ’s position is that the beginning sets the pattern for human relationships—that we can assess what is right in light of the way things were established at the outset. Note that Christ’s formulation is particular. He does not embrace a modal claim, that divorce is not the way things “ought to have been,” as though the fundamental order of creation were lost beneath the history of human sin and transgression. Moses’ accommodation to the hardness of our hearts does not obviate the reality of what God established at creation: “it was not this way from the beginning.” It was another way ‘from the beginning,’ and that other way has persisted despite the disparate social forms that have been inscribed or overlaid upon it.

Still, we must be able to access this “way” that marital relations have been from the beginning if it is to be binding upon us. We must be able to discern what we are if we are going to be obligated to live in conformity with such a reality. One possibility is that the hints and glimmers of that original creation still shine through beneath our sin, that the integrity of our natures remains continuous and that we can access their content despite our judgments being marred by our transgressions. Alternatively, these hints and glimmers might be there—but we might be deaf to them, blinded to their force by our own recalcitrance to reason. The gap between these two options is significant, and which path we decide to take will determine how evangelical our theology of the body really is.

Responses to Readers: Religious Liberty

“I'm not sure the idea of compensation here is really all that helpful. Am I damaging someone when I refuse to offer a readily available service? Perhaps we can come up with a hypothetical where a service is offered only by Christians and thus those outside the fold would be excluded entirely (and thus suffer a harm), but that is certainly not the case when speaking of web designers or cake decorators or photographers or any other service related business in 21st century America. The case of the postal worker is more interesting, because his actions materially affected the other workers in his delivery unit. This is a case where it may be possible to build goodwill by demonstrating that you are willing to be an "above and beyond" type of employee 6 days a week. What could be done to ease the burdens of others on those six days while undoubtedly creating an extra burden on the seventh? But even that is likely to be seen as little more than special pleading by those who don't share a foundational commitment to both the validity and importance of religious observance.” — a reader, responding to my explanation of Augustine, burdens, and religious liberty

I am not entirely comfortably with the notion of ‘dignity harms’ that my friend John Corvino has invoked, but there’s something to it. Even if services are widely available elsewhere, it is easy to see how walking into a shop and being refused service (for any reason) might be taken as an affront—even when those reasons are explained patiently and graciously. You’re right that it’s easier to see in the postal-worker case. But I’m not sure why compensatory efforts need to be reduced to “special pleading” or why we should expect everyone to recognize the validity and importance of religious importance. If I can’t come in to work because it’s the Sabbath, but I take someone else’s shift that they don’t want because of it, I don’t think I need them to recognize the intrinsic value of my religious performance for everyone to be happy. I think they need only see that I am trying to not unduly inconvenience them.

Around the Web

It turns out that age-gates on porn websites might….work? This would be terrific news, if so.

This is a crazy interview about Barack Obama which, if true, is a serious indictment on contemporary journalists. (What’s that, you say? Not surprised, eh?)

The Penultimate Word

“Knowing all this, when we have committed some wickedness, let us not wait for misfortunes and difficulties or dangers and fetters, but every hour and every day let us stir up this court [of conscience] in ourselves. Let us cast our vote against ourselves and try in every way to make our defense before God. Let us not ourselves dispute about the resurrection and the judgment, nor endure patiently when others speak, but in every way let us stop their mouths with our words. For if we were not going to undergo punishment for our transgressions hereafter, God would not have set up such a court in us here. But this also is evidence of His love for mankind. Since He is going to demand from us hereafter an account of our transgressions, He has set in us this impartial judge. By judging us here for our sins and making us better, this judge may rescue us from the judgment to come.” — Chrysostom