woman to Adam, he exclaims, "This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman because from her man (andros) she was taken." In the Ephesians text, the reason referred to is that Christ provides and cares for his own flesh, the Church, because we are parts of his body.

The Genesis text continues to speak of a man leaving father and mother, which is an aspect ignored by Paul who puts the accent on being joined to his wife so the two become one flesh. The physical union between Christ and the Church is precisely the great Mystery, as the author explicitly says, and it is precisely that union, which forms the model for husband and wife, and is itself the living source of the love that binds them together. As Pierre Benoit expresses it:

In this union (between Christ and the Church), which is the model for human marriage, and which is not endowed with any less physical realism, the "mystery" of the Genesis text is fully realized and definitively clarified.26

We may ask why, after citing the Genesis text with the intention of applying it primarily to the union between Christ and the Church, the author calls it a "mystery." Some commentators point to the fact that raz and sod, the semitic terms that lie behind the New Testament mysterion, can sometimes mean the secret meaning of a text and they apply that meaning here.27 But the author's point is that the mysterion is an aspect of God's plan now revealed. He is insisting on the analogical relation between the union of husband and wife, who become one flesh and the union of Christ and the Church who form one flesh. The "mystery" is not primarily in the text but in the realities it is mediating to us. To employ Augustine's phrase: "In ipso facto, non solum in dicto, mysterium requirere debemus. "28

With the creation of the New Man/Adam by Christ's act on the cross (see Eph 2:15) it becomes apparent, as Heinrich Schlier expresses it, that, "In Adam as the original (ursprünglichen) man, the creation of God, the future Christ is already hidden, but really present. Christ is the revealed,

26 "Corps, Tête et Plérôme dans les Épîtres de la Captivité," in Exégèse et Théologie 2 (Paris: Cerf, 1960), 107-53, at 135. 27 This is the position of Raymond Brown in his fine study, The Semitic Background of the Term "Mystery" in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968), 65. 28 On Psalm 68 (Patrologia Latina 36,858). For a number of patristic texts on this same theme, see Henri de Lubac, Catholicism. Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot Sheppard and Sister Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 165-70.

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The Holiness of the Church: Communio Sanctorum and the Splendor of Truth

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