Sunday
I’d never noticed before the similarities between the rib episode from Genesis (today’s Old Testament reading) and Plato’s allegory of how desire came to be. In The Symposium, a drunk Alcibiades tells a story to capture the nature of sexual longing. In his recounting, human beings were once complete in themselves, having two heads, four arms, and four legs. The gods, fearing that this perfection would make them independent, split them in half—with the effect that the two halves, yearning for their lost completeness, spend all their time searching for the other rather than competing with the gods.
Before the great divide, there were men, women, and androgynes. After, men spend all their time searching for their missing man half, the women for their missing woman half, and androgynes for their missing member of the opposite sex half. Thus was desire born, both same sex and opposite sex desire.
The Greek story is a bit more egalitarian than the Genesis story since men and women are raised to the same plane (although they weren’t in actual Greek society). It also regards homosexual desire as natural, which was fine with Socrates and Plato.
As an aside, I note that I see Alcibiades’s allegory at the core of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, where two twins are separated by a lightning bolt (which splits their ship in half). The play goes on to explore various desires, including a man who desires female characteristics (Orsino), two women who desire male characteristics (Viola, Olivia), a man who desires a man (Antonio), and a woman who desires a woman (Olivia, although she thinks Viola is a man).
But back to the Adam and Eve story, which goes as follows:
The Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So 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; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.”Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:18-24)
In Milton’s version of the story in Paradise Lost, it appears to be not God but Adam who thinks that “it is not good that the man should be alone” (although we learn later that this was God’s plan all along). Not wanting to be critical of God’s apparent plan that he remain single, Adam asks for a helpmate in the most diplomatic way possible. After God asks Adam why he isn’t satisfied with having been given dominion over all creation, Adam replies,
Let not my words offend thee, Heavenly Power;
My Maker, be propitious while I speak.
. . . Of fellowship I speak
Such as I seek, fit to participate
All rational delight: wherein the brute
Cannot be human consort: They rejoice
Each with their kind, lion with lioness;
So fitly them in pairs thou hast combined:
Much less can bird with beast, or fish with fowl
So well converse, nor with the ox the ape;
Worse then can man with beast, and least of all.
God, Milton tells us, is not displeased at the request but, like a good teacher, tests Adam a little further until finally telling him he has been in favor of the idea all along; he just wanted Adam to reason it out:
I, ere thou spakest,
Knew it not good for Man to be alone;
And no such company as then thou sawest
Intended thee; for trial only brought,
To see how thou couldest judge of fit and meet:
What next I bring shall please thee, be assured,
Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,
Thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire.
He then proceeds to perform a local anesthetics operation in which Adam is aware of what is going on as it happens (and so is able to report on it):
Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell
Of fancy, my internal sight; by which,
Abstract as in a trance, methought I saw,
Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape
Still glorious before whom awake I stood:
Who stooping opened my left side, and took
From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm,
And life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound,
But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed:
Adam also gets to watch what God does with his rib:
The rib he formed and fashioned with his hands;
Under his forming hands a creature grew,
Man-like, but different sex; so lovely fair,
That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained
And in her looks; which from that time infused
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her air inspired
The spirit of love and amorous delight.
Then comes the desire of which Plato writes:
She disappeared, and left me dark; I waked
To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure…
This being the Garden of Eden, however, there are only seconds between desire and fulfillment. Or as John Wilmot, making use of a lewd pun, puts it in his poem “The Fall,”
Naked beneath cool Shades they lay,
Enjoyment waited on desire;
Each member did their wills obey:
Nor could a wish set pleasure higher.
Here’s Milton:
When out of hope, behold her, not far off,
Such as I saw her in my dream, adorned
With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow
To make her amiable: On she came,
Led by her heavenly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice; nor uninformed
Of nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites:
Grace was in all her steps, Heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love.
Unable to remain silent, Adam bursts into a hymn of thankfulness and praise:
This turn hath made amends; thou hast fulfilled
Thy words, Creator bounteous and benign,
Giver of all things fair! but fairest this
Of all thy gifts! nor enviest. I now see
Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, myself
Before me: Woman is her name; of Man
Extracted: for this cause he shall forego
Father and mother, and to his wife adhere;
And they shall be one flesh, one heart, one soul.
Feminists point out (legitimately in my view) that the rib story is a means for men to regain primacy over women in the critical issue of giving birth: it was first men who birthed women, we are informed, not the other way around. Milton, while he creates an extraordinary three-dimensional character in his Eve, is nonetheless somewhat guilty here. At one point in Book IV he says, in a passage that always makes my students cringe,
Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem’d;
For contemplation hee and valor form’d,
For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,
Hee for God only, shee for God in him…
It’s worth noting that this is not the only version of creation to be found in Genesis, and the other is a bit more egalitarian:
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
But for all its patriarchal faults, there’s some fabulous love poetry going on in Paradise Lost. The Puritan Milton, one might say, was no puritan. Milton’s articulation—”bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, myself before me”—captures for me how Julia and I have become, after all these years and despite our undoubted singularity, a single being. Milton’s body imagery captures this unity.
