Your Body is An Inheritance

The Seventh Commandment, Part 1

To name adultery, we must do more than fixate on how a body desires. We must first name what a body is.

Maximus on the Body in the Cosmos

Modern reflections on the body and its desires have been predominately preoccupied with teasing out subjective experience, beginning in a social location particular to one person in time and place. Understanding the body starts with an audience of not-quite-one: we are the one living in this flesh, even if we are not quite sure who the “we” is just yet.

All of this will matter for how we understand adultery. For if adultery is the negative name we give to the body’s delight in one who is not the spouse, it is part because our desire has outstripped our understanding: we desire someone who is not possible for us to have, at least in a way which makes sense to our lives. We desire for particular stories to be heard, even if what will make them make sense is not yet available to reason.

Let me signal that this turn to the subjective, and the embrace of how the body keeps score¹, is somewhat understandable. There is the technological wave of medical advances, in which the patient ceased to be a person, and was viewed as an interlocking set of problems². One of the unintended consequences of medicine no longer operating with a male-centered understanding of anatomy or biological baselines was that everyone became viewed as a set of metrics³. Perhaps it is the result of a world filled with roles which we must inhabit but no longer know how to. Or perhaps we lay our eyes on global economic systems which operate on mass trends and aggregation, systems built on the Big Data Trends. These models are not reckoned true or false by whether certain cities starve but whether the Gross Domestic Product is up, whether the numbers move in the right direction. Such a world treats particular persons as interchangeable parts, not specific words to be listened to.

But we need not embrace the romance of the affair in order to reject the constant submerging of individuals into a statistical model. Let us back out our gaze for a minute, and see the broader stakes. The 9th century Maximus the Confessor—best known for losing his tongue over the question of whether Christ had two wills—puts the collective goodness of humanity before us in this way:

Because the One goes forth out of goodness into individual being, creating and preserving them, the One is many….the many are directed toward the One and are providentially guided in that direction. It is as though they were drawn to an all-powerful center that had built into it the beginnings of the lines that go out from it and that gathers them all together.

Maximus will follow this description of humanity by noting that the greatness of creation is refracted in the particular excellences of the particular human. Because people are created as particular creative “words” of God—the very word which authored creation—humans reflect the magnificence of the cosmos in their own selves:

The fullness of God permeates them wholly as the soul permeates the body, and they become, so to speak, limbs of a body, well adapted and useful to the master. He directs them as he thinks best, filling them with his own glory and blessedness, and bestows on them unending life beyond imagining and free of the signs of corruption that mark the present age. He gives them life, not the life that comes from breathing air…but the life that comes from being wholly infused with the fullness of God.

I bring all of this up because Maximus shows us the stakes of bodily life: it is not that humans are the masters of creaturely life, able to create out of rock the kind of life we wish, but that humans are the icons of that life of the cosmos, and receive from God a more bountiful existence than pure will can account for.

What Maximus highlights is that there are always humans who inhabit a world not of their own design. We inherit not so much immutable law, though, as an inescapable collective motion toward God.

But this collective character of being human cuts both ways.

Photo by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash

My People, My People: Adultery as Collective Condition

Following this insight from Maximus, the connection between adultery as an act of the body and adultery as a metaphor for Israel’s idolatry becomes more clear. The human reflects the life of the cosmos, and in that, is the kind of being who gives and receives the life of God. The human, as an integral, irreplaceable being, refracts and reflects the cosmic love of God down in their bones.

But this connection to supra-personal realities cuts both ways: can we not inherit both good and ill from this relation? Can we say that the human can avoid taking on the liabilities of what they are a part of? This is an ecological reality we are very comfortable with: let us consider that it might be a moral one as well.

Case in point: Israel, throughout the Old Testament, is charged with idolatry, and with a collective idolatry. The harlotry of Israel takes on a moral cast, turning toward ways which lead them from God’s provision, or practices of oppression putting a lie to their claims to being a different kind of people. The title of harlot has little to do initially with the particular inclinations toward Baal that this Zebeddee or that Samson has, and everything to do with them being caught up in a people who are idolatrous.

None of this is to let particular adulterers off the hook, but to say that the stakes of bodily life neither begin nor end with the particular body. Maximus, in the section of the Ambigua quoted above, goes to great lengths to describe how each person is a particular logoi, a distinct word of the Creative Word. In doing so, Maximus stakes out the particularity which name every person, but does so within a common activity of the Word. To say that one is a distinct gift of God does not put God on the hook for the servant who puts the gift in the ground.

Likewise, the common inheritance of harlotry does not work as a collective mea culpa. Nothing about being a part of a people who cheat one another condemns particular people to cheat. Being a man of unclean hands among a people of unclean hands still means that I am have a particular set of unclean hands that are my unwashed utensils. For God’s creative word which brings us into being is not fate or destiny so much as God’s creative word is gift which elevates us from the grave.

What Is A Body For?

In

Sara Hendren

’s book, one of the persistent undercurrents is the way in which our bodies are always and already suffering change, chosen or not. Age, disease, chance: all of these have will find us along the way, and some will leave their mark more profoundly upon us. Her work outlines the ways in which bodily modification can be a saving grace, helping to shape a world unfitted for them into usable spaces.

Early in her book, we are introduced to a woman in search of a podium fit for her stature; through creative design, the woman is given a literal place to stand. As I read this, it struck me how each of the bodies described in her book are both the inheritors and reshapers of the conditions which come to them. For some, the reshaping takes more maximal form, or at least, the temptation toward maximal aid: cybernetic arms, ineventive machines, creations which make use of the latest technical aids even if they are too bulky or hefty.

But for some, the answer is as simple as cardboard, a pulley, bands of cloth deftly used. There are two truths that coinhere in the stories Hendren tells: the world gives in abundance, and the world does not give all of what we wish. This is the twin story Maximus and Scripture tell of the human body: we are inheritors of more passions and gifts and goodness in our mortal frame than we can name, and we are a people of unclean hands among a people of unclean hands.

The inclination to adultery is both that which the person owns, and that which is given to them. It is both that which a spouse owns through habit, desire, and action, and that which comes to them through cultural suggestion, collective apathy, and legal indifference. It is both a world which will not help keep you faithful and the particular desires which take root in the particular heart.

The wound of Israel—to be a person among a people— lays the bed of idolatry, but climbing into that bed is a different matter. For as Maximus reminds us, there is more than one collective story in play in our bodies.

1. Debunked.

2. Long before the rise of the resurgence of hospital chaplaincy, the mostly-forgotten Paul Ramsey wrote about this in his Patient as Person, in 1974.

3. See Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine.