“Purity of heart is to will one thing”. – Soren Kierkegaard
Christians are promised people. Some of the earliest biblical stories tell of God calling Israel to follow him alone. This was not an act of fiat, but an invitation. “You will be my people, and I will be your God” (Gen 6:7) is a promise but moreso, a pledge. Israel would have to be bound to this particular god. They’d need to choose this one thing.
To choose this god would be to deny themselves the benefits of that one. Israel would miss out on a lot of other things; other gods promised pyrotechnics and instant wealth and even protection against natural threats. It might be better to keep the household gods close at hand, under their garments, to retain the benefits of foreign gods. But to belong to Israel’s god was to belong to him alone. You’d have to forsake all others.
Israel’s story can be told through this pattern of call and response, though it frequently comes off more like one missed opportunity after another. There are Adam and Eve, who cannot bear to abide just one rule. Then there is Abram, who receives the promise of a son and immediately goes out to break his own marriage vow to ensure it. Just one chapter after God’s covenant with Abram, in Genesis 15, he takes Hagar as his concubine. A few chapters later, in an attempt to keep God’s covenant, he nearly sacrifices his own son.
Israel was a promised people who wasn’t any good at keeping promises. It was this promise-keeping that becomes the story of their own life with God. To follow Israel’s God was by definition to limit your options. But in doing so, you would become a people to whom God kept his promise.
The Christian vision of personhood prioritizes an active vow. But instead of being a choice that expands options, this vow intentionally limits them. It is not surprising that the covenantal imagery of the Hebrew Bible slowly becomes bridal imagery in the New Testament. Keeping God’s commandments brings with it its own reward, which is being kept.
Christian marriage is a dim and somewhat foggy envisioning of God’s covenant with his people, and as with Israel, the difficult part of Christian marriage is almost always the promise-keeping.
There are after all so many interesting ways to break a promise. When a young adult takes a spouse, the choice of this one person is equally a choice against any others. To all of the lives that might have been, it is the closing of a door.
Limiting one’s choice through marriage has long been how people became adults. But adulthood now is prioritized at the expense of marriage, and seen as a season of expanding choice rather than limiting it. To become an adult now seems to entail everything other than marriage—travel, experiences, acquiring wealth and a house, getting to know yourself and living precariously. Marriage, which was once seen as an important rite of passage into adulthood, now is thought to compete with the things that actually make adults.
Limiting one’s options has always been a risk, but now in our age of digital technology it is perhaps even moreso. As each person reaches the age where they approach adulthood, they are handed a phone. Phones, of course, allow for young adults to be constantly distracted and entertained. They provide also the means to avoid eye contact and miss the opportunity for stolen glances, casual introductions, and most of all—flirting.
Personhood and the Ordinal Society
Historians note that already in the seventeenth century numbers were seen to have “special virtues.” Unlike people, they could not lie. Numbers, therefore, were thought to be especially useful in organizing a population. Through procedures of counting, individuals could be tabulated without being identified. Once persons were reduced to numbers, it was thought they could be assessed in terms of their behavior alone, without the pesky distractions of demographic identifiers coming into play.
But as manual counting machines gave way to electronic and then digital methods of data collection, new ways of assessing individual behavior were developed. These relied on collecting the digital “traces” that their individual choices left behind. These traces are “left on everything from social media to credit bureaus, shopping websites and fidelity programs, courthouses, social welfare agencies, pharmacies, and the content of emails and chats.” Every purchase you make electronically and everything you search for online could contain a trace.
All of this information comes to form a “data double.” Data doubles are the false spouses of modern personhood. In The Ordinal Society, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy describe how these doubles work:
“While you exist as a physical person in the world, your data double is the representation of you, your tastes, and your actions that can be reconstructed in whole or in part from the records and traces you leave behind.”
Over time, these digital traces became more than just evidence of human behavior. They came to have value, too, as an assessment of an individual’s trustworthiness. When corporations rely on these assessments and use them to assign things like insurance rates and mortgage opportunities, these benign digital traces come to have a predictive power. The false spouses of modern personhood create other lives. Their power threatens and predicts our own futures.
Because these algorithmic evaluations of our data doubles are invisible, we have the sensation of full liberated choice as we move about the world. But we are all bound in ways we cannot see. The tools of digital capitalism have come to have a predictive power far beyond the power of counting. It is ironic that the view of human persons as equal and “self-propelled” has developed in tandem with the tools that would allow persons to be sorted and constrained.
The great irony of the modern world is that the self-propelled individual has not been aided by the technological arm but has instead found itself co-opted by it. Even as modern man imagines himself autonomous, he is, like Promethus, bound.
The very means that were thought to serve as the engine of man’s own propeller have instead gummed up the gears. Our agency, always an illusion, has now been impeded by the very means that were thought to liberate us. There is no escaping these data doubles. We now live in the age of no-fault divorce, and yet in a perverse inversion of marriage we find that we cannot rid ourselves of our data doubles. They are stuck to us, ‘til death do us part.
To Will One Thing
The Christian riddle of modern life is that we have a tradition whose very own story is that of an oath and with it a chosen constraint. But we must inhabit that tradition in a world whose society is based on the myth of endless choosing, and that has developed the tools to impede our choices, even as we imagine ourselves to be free. We don’t want the thing that is good for us to want—an oath, a permanent vow—and the thing we are trained to want is the thing that leads us to be further constrained.
Sound familiar?
Our modern condition is a version of the divided will that originated the Western church’s teaching on original sin. Concupiscence, the post-Fall human condition, speaks of the way the will does not follow desire; indeed, we may desire things we ought not to desire, and we may will to act in ways that are against our desired actions. This theological reflection on Paul’s “wretched man!” of Romans 7 becomes even further embedded as digital tools more deeply plow the furrows of human desire. As the opportunities to develop lust and greed are digitally enhanced and mediated, the western teaching on original sin increasingly gains relevance. But it is needed just as it is falling out of fashion.
The Christian answer to the problem of man’s bound will comes in the form of grace. Through grace, we might receive aid so that our wills can be assisted toward the good. Grace can take many human forms, and I’d suggest that the form we must encourage is the simple good of marriage. Though not recognized by most Protestants as a sacrament, marriage might be still seen as a means of grace in the way that it tells a truer story about human life. If it is not only the case that the self-propelled man is an illusion, but that data has made him doubly so, might there be a way to respond to this lie of autonomy with its opposing, but truer story- that the bound life is the freer one?
Asceticism has always found a home within Christian practice. It is ordinarily associated with grand gestures like fasting, going to the desert, and standing on a pole. But in an age as saturated with choice as our own, even the vow to belong to only this one might be seen as ascetical. Marriage might be the asceticism we need most.
Like an ascetical vow, in marriage you promise to forsake all others. But in order to forsake all others, you must also forsake all other lives.
To bind yourself to another necessarily narrows your options. Nowadays this strikes an ugly chord. Self actualization just is how we think about adulthood. Expanding choices, opportunities, and experiences is how we judge a cultured individual. We parent our children with the stated goal of gaining for them a glut of experiences and opportunities that they can actualize by becoming a certain kind of successful person. For the most part, we don’t parent them to keep their promises.
This might be because our own lives in midlife are often marked by regret over lost opportunities, opportunities that we remember and imagine and turn into phantasms and dreams of lives that never were. We treasure these imagined other loves and fondle them like rosary beads. We imagine ourselves greater and grander than we are. The Queen of all such rosaries, Miranda July, has been getting rich and fat off of our misplaced grief by fictionalizing it in the story of a woman who in midlife runs away from her family to chase the things she’d lost. Everyone’s reading it.
The irony of Christian marriage may be that in the face of the pressure toward endless choice, it is this constraint that really makes adults, because it is with this constraint where we find the grace of limits. By limiting our freedom to choose, we are bound to just one thing. To choose one thing, or in this case one person and one life, you risk having only that one thing. In this constraint we resist the optimization and ordinalization of our worlds. When we bind ourselves to just one thing, we refuse to imagine ourselves as the sum of all of our choices. We might then become persons who have received grace, not made but given.
To have at the end of your life one single story, a promise that was kept, would gesture to all the things you did not choose. It might leave their shadow in its wake. But it might reveal as well the One who in fire and blood made himself known as Covenant-keeper, as a promise-making God. In forsaking all others, you’d be choosing this one thing, marriage as the shadow of the oath made in smoke and fire.
originally published in the spring 2025 Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To become a member and receive future issues, join today.
