"bone of my bones, & flesh of my flesh"

Week 1, Engage Paper, Trinity Forum Academy

“But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object as it stands stripped of every relations, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

“The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate.’” Genesis 3:12

I always wondered whether Eve rolled her eyes when Adam tried that line. “The woman? You mean me? You mean your wife, moron?” In addition to deflecting all blame for the original sin, Adam’s very language is distant and depersonalizing, and even goes so far as to indict God. Gone is the poetry of their first meeting: “This at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” By referring to his wife as an abstraction, Adam tries sever their one-flesh attachment, and remove any trace of his involvement. If she is truly bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, then Adam not only has skin in the game, but half of himself.

In our Living Speech reading, James Boyd White analyzes Simone Weil’s essay, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” White describes Weil’s Empire of Force as, “the ideology, the way of imagining the world and oneself and others within it—that is always present in war and required by it, but present also in our lives whenever people deny the humanity of others whom they destroy manipulate, or exploit.” War is the most concrete example. “If one is not a psychopath,” White says, “one can engage in war only by denying the full humanity of those one is trying to kill.” For a solider to dwell on the “world of possibility” or “web of relationships of caring and concern” that surround every human being would be “unendurable.” In the same way that Adam abstracted his wife in order to throw her under the bus, the language of war abstracts our enemies (both innocent and guilty) into indivisible swaths of animate matter, to which we have no responsibility or attachment.

Abstraction allows us to keep our hands out of the messiness of embodied human interaction. Dostoyevsky’s famous quote from The Brothers Karamazov captures this perfectly: "I love mankind…but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular." Abstract humanity has no draining friendships, annoying relatives, or untidy neighbors. Abstract humanity never asks us to stay up until 2 AM, counseling a distraught friend. Abstract humanity never overstays its welcome. Abstract humanity’s dog never poops on our lawn. We are never responsible for, or adversely affected by, humanity in the abstract.

The E. Bradley Beevers article seemed to come at this issue from a different angle, calling it “neutralization.” “The world diverts its attention from its sin by seeking a neutral description of the experience.” When I am trying to shift responsibility, I always revert to the passage voice, or depersonalize the source of my anger by cutting myself out of the equation. “The stress of the day made me explode.” But in doing so, am I not saying that I am a purely appetitive animal that can’t make a rational, intentional decision about my reaction? That was Adam’s response—“The woman…gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate”—implying that he was powerless against her seductive, fruit-wielding charm!

“The word became flesh and made its dwelling among us.” The Word. The Logos. Human language himself became incarnate. Christ didn’t come to earth as an abstraction, but as bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh. He came as a particular person, to a particular location, at a particular time. Christ didn’t just speak theoretically about “poverty reduction,” “alternative lifestyles,” or “interfaith dialogue.” He healed the paralytic, called the Samaritan woman out of sin, and bid Nicodemus be born again. Christ calls to me personally, not as an idea, but as Meredith. He carries me in my weakness and gets his hands dirty in my wretchedness. And one day, when I stand before God and he asks me, “What is this that you have done?”, Christ, in his broken, bloody, incarnated body, will answer him.