It is not good that man should be alone

A homily on man and woman. Also some happy news!

“A lonely man always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.”

-- Martin Luther

This is a joint posting of Matthew Crawford (Archedelia) and Marilyn Simon (Submission).

On June 8 of this year, we married at St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg, a city on the prairies of Canada. It was truly a joyful day. The wedding was officiated by David Widdicombe. The homily he delivered was something magnificent. Many people asked us later for the text of it, and Reverend Widdicombe has graciously permitted us to post it here. It is a meditation on the asymmetries of male/female as they appear in the book of Genesis: the significance of male loneliness and the unique creativity of woman. Reverend Widdicombe also speaks to our collective predicament. The gift of woman to man, if taken up in gratitude and responsibility, can arrest the totalitarian drift of an atomized society.

First, a little scene-setting for this homily, delivered before the whole congregation. St. Margaret’s is Marilyn’s parish church, and it is where Matthew was baptized on the feast of All Saints, 2023. One of the highlights of the ceremony was the choir’s exquisite singing of the Lord’s Prayer in Ukrainian, the first language of Marilyn’s father.

We are honored to share David’s homily on marriage with our readers. We hope it might spark some lovin’,  some marryin’, and some birthin’.

-- Matthew and Marilyn

The Reverend David Widdicombe:

Today Marilyn and Matthew celebrate a great achievement. Doubts and misgivings, obstacles, discouragements, and regrets about the past have all been overcome and now they set out together on the most original and fundamental institution-building enterprise known to man. They will marry. More to the point, they will establish, grow, and maintain a marriage.  They will become mutually responsible for, and toward, each other, their children, their elderly parents, their church, their wider community, and the common good, including their friends, both single and married, and the strangers, the widows and orphans, and the various young people who will need the shelter of their home.

In the face of this awesome and life-giving responsibility they have chosen as their first biblical text the grand statement from the sixth day of creation from the opening chapter of Genesis, the creation of male and female. As the ancient first and authoritative commentary on this text, let us turn to one of the key moments in the parallel and more primitive account of creation found in Genesis Two, Three, and Four, specifically Genesis 2.18: It is not good that man should be alone. This is the Bible’s own commentary on the sixth day of Genesis One.

Whereas the very theological grandeur and meditative profundity of the opening chapter of Genesis may lull us into an uncritical sentimentality on a wedding day, and a romantic-sentimental view of marriage, the cunning complexity of the primitive, child-like second creation account is usefully provocative. My point this afternoon will be that marriage is an institution, a means of grace, a social responsibility, and a personal vocation of the highest order which for most people most of the time is the most reliable path to a secure and happy life. I will suggest that the primitive and complex nature of this second creation account invites or even forces us to view marriage in its world-historical and institutional context.

First, we note that the author of this text has made problematic the relationship between the man and woman even before she, the author, gets around to the problem of the knowledge of good and evil. It is not good that man should be alone.

I am following here the thesis of the late Harold Bloom, the preeminent American literary critic, that the most primitive strands of the patriarchal narratives were written by a woman, a descendent of King David, writing during the literary awakening among intellectuals associated with the court of King Solomon. He further argues that she is the greatest of the Hebrew writers, bearing comparison with Shakespeare. These assumptions might free us to look more deeply into the rip tides of a biting social commentary that lie hidden in the seemingly placid waters of her pretended naivety.

For example, has she brought up the simple notion of loneliness to move forward her charmingly naive account of human origins? It is not good that man should be alone. Or has she told her apparently ingenuous story as a way to mount a sustained and taxing reflection on the perplexing asymmetries of the male/female relationship, the tragically irresolvable paradoxes of moral knowledge, and the pleasure, pain, and power of bearing children in a difficult world? In short, has she given us the original account of the social and political costs of human, and particularly male, loneliness?

It is not good that man should be alone. Why not? The writer appears to be singularly unimpressed with polygamy as an answer to the loneliness of men. She lives in the empire that David created and that in her lifetime now begins its disastrous disintegration under Solomon’s feckless descendants. She remembers a time of political stability but lives in a time of troubles. Her world is the world of the alpha male, men who are adulterous, duplicitous, and violent, their families dysfunctional, their passions disordered, and their pursuit of power and pleasure unbounded. Consequently, when she comes to describe the marital lives of the patriarchs, the writer paints a dismal picture. But with one great exception: if not in reality, yet in his heart, Jacob, unlike Abraham and Isaac, is a monogamous husband. Jacob loves Rachel and Rachel only does he love. This is the great love story of the Hebrew Bible. And behind that love story stands the writer’s haunted, primitive, brutally realistic, yet powerfully affirming story of the creation of the singular woman and her monogamous relationship to her man. There is absolutely no other account of the creation of a woman in any other surviving literature from the ancient Near East, save for Genesis One, day six. In Genesis Two, six times the space is devoted to the woman’s creation as opposed to the man’s. And as Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out in his 1937 commentary on Genesis Two and Three, if the woman is to be a partner and help to the man, she takes up a role that nowhere else in the Bible is ascribed to any being other than God himself. In fact, Bonhoeffer points out, after the first couple have fallen into disobedience and under the curse of death, in an act of “wild exultation, defiance, audacity, and triumph” against the heavy fate that the curse has laid upon them both, Adam calls the woman Eve because, the Hebrew authoress has him say, she is the mother of all that lives. Bonhoeffer even suggest that Adam gives thanks for the curse since it means that Eve now becomes, unambiguously, the symbol of the new life they together will create. If the writer begins by having God say that the woman has the god-like power of being man’s helper and next has the man say that in her tragic/heroic knowledge of pleasure and pain she is the ancient mother of all humankind, she finally has Eve herself say, at the birth of her first child, I have created a man as Yahweh has, words that Mary - with a humility unknown to Eve, certainly - might have repeated to herself on the night she gave birth to Israel’s Messiah.

I relate all of this as a way of saying that while not every person should or can enter this procreative partnership and while not every marriage will succeed or will necessarily repeat this pattern in all its details, nevertheless this partnership of the man and the woman is the original, creative, procreative, god-like, monogamous, tragic yet utterly and absolutely meaningful, necessary, unsurpassable, and irreplaceable foundation of civilisation and of individual human happiness. And it is the normative form of marriage from which all other forms and instances of marriage take their shape and draw their life, even the chaotic and deformed marital pluralism and patriarchalism of the Israelite kings.

Does this sound eccentric? Is the potential loneliness of the undifferentiated human/male freighted with all that much importance in the mind of the Hebrew writer? I will turn to one modern text in an effort to persuade you that among all the matters that press upon us, marriage and children matter the most. I am especially concerned to offer the church’s support to the young people here today who would say that a traditional, catholic, faith-oriented and family-centered institutional marriage is something to which they aspire. Not everyone here will aspire to that, but for those of you who do, consider this example.

In 1951, the great Jewish political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, published The Origins of Totalitarianism, considered by many to be one of the most important books of the Twentieth Century. Three pages from the end of this massive three-volume work, she makes her only mention of Luther, quoting his little known but supremely important reference to the text: it is not good that man should be alone. “A lonely man”, writes Luther, “always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.” Luther, she says, understood solitude and loneliness probably better than anyone ever has. Arendt goes on to say that “What prepares men for totalitarian domination … is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience … has become an everyday experience” for the mass of humanity in the modern age. Your local bookstore will probably have several recent books arguing that that everyday experience has by now become an epidemic.

Was this biblical reference just a last-minute thought for Arendt? Hardly, for the answer to this loneliness is given in a quotation from Augustine in the last three sentences of the book. Hope and freedom, she says, reside in this: that whenever political life ends in disaster, a new beginning can be made. “[T]hat a beginning be made, man was created” says Augustine. And, says Arendt, in her final sentence, “This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth….”

We are here to celebrate the new life, the new beginning that Marilyn and Matthew embark upon today. They are a couple, I think, who can tolerate, and perhaps even prefer, communication that is blunt and plain spoken. Perhaps they will agree with me then that their marriage, although a second marriage for each of them, takes its essential meaning from the foundational and therefore normative understanding of marriage outlined in the ancient texts of Israel and more fully developed by the Jewish disciples of Jesus, the Messiah of Israel. So my message to those young people here today who want to be married is this: it is not good that man should be alone. To put it bluntly and as plainly as I can: get married, plan to stay married, raise children, educate and financially support what will become the next generation of competent adults, honour your father and your mother and care for the elderly, honour and respect one another in the quest for the domestic peace that is at the heart of all political peace, participate as fully as possible in the rituals and community life of the temple or mosque or church or synagogue where your elders worship – places of worship are not perfect but they create more stable marriages than any other alternative, create homes that are open to friends and strangers who have no family of their own or are separated from their families or are otherwise in distress.  If you are or are becoming or would like to be a Christian, then, above all else, let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts and the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you seek together the Kingdom of God. Do not discount your feelings of romantic love – remember that Jacob loved Rachel and Rachel alone did he love – but also do not worry about them overmuch. As Bonhoeffer, that great descendent of Luther, said in a wedding sermon for his niece delivered from his Nazi prison cell in 1943,

In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind…. marriage is … a status, an office. … it is marriage … that joins you together in the sight of God and man. … As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of marriage above the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.

As Bonhoeffer wrote those words to his niece, so I say them to Marilyn.

To Matthew I say, it is not good that man should be alone. But remember and always honour and respect this reality, namely, that according to the author of Genesis Two, however that writer may undervalue the role of the man in her story, she grants him this: that he is profoundly aware that the gift of the woman is his most secure access to reality, his best protection against overthinking and thinking things to their worst, and that the gift of the woman must never to be taken for granted. That gift in his case was, and in your case is, formidable.