“The body,” I was taught growing up, “is just the shoebox for the soul.What matters are the shoes, not the box. So when it’s time to go to heaven, we throw the box away.”
Along with this good solid dose of gnostic thinking came a certain aesthetic that regarded the human person as a ghost in a machine. Of course, I didn’t live as though I was a ghost in a machine. Nobody does, except perhaps a victim of extreme mental illness. Practically speaking, I lived as you do: in the instinctive awareness that I am a unity of body and soul. That’s why when Susie stuck out her tongue at me when I was four, I knew that her soul was, in union with her body, expressing the thought that I was yucky. And when I cried as a result, it was not the tear ducts of my bio-envelope that were sad. It was me—the union of body and soul—that felt rejected.
None of that changed as I grew up. When I was nine, I wrote my name all over my older brother’s TV screen with an eraser. Mike would not have been persuaded of my innocence had I been precocious enough to exclaim, “Do not take out your wrath on my bottom by spanking me in a fury, for the actions of the body are disconnected from the purity of the soul!” Nor, indeed, was my brother’s firm bottom-swatting something my soul quickly forgot.
Still and all, despite the constant reminder of experience, gnosticism remains one of the most perennially popular forms of nonsense. Gnostics think like Yoda: “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” They assume that the way to figure out what constitutes a human being is to saw the person into two components: worthless body and valuable soul. This notion has infected Christian thought like a virus since the birth of the Church—and it still wreaks havoc today.
So, for instance, some people attempt moral reasoning about abortion by asking questions like “What’s the difference between human life and human tissue?” Beneath that question lurks the idea: “The spirit of Joe Smith is what makes him a person. The valueless bag of genetic chemicals that is the body of Joe Smith is just the shoebox. When we separate the one from the other, we’ll know when Joe Smith comes into existence and when it is OK to abort him or manipulate those chemicals in a lab.”
The problem is, no part of the created order is valueless. Rather, God calls all creation “good” (see Genesis 1) and, as St. Thomas Aquinas observed, God’s grace (the grace that brings every baby into existence) perfects nature rather than destroying, supplanting, or ignoring it.
Grace creates a hierarchy of goodness in which each created thing remains itself while becoming part of something greater than itself. So in the creation of every human being, God raises atoms to participate in molecular existence, yet atoms remain atoms. Likewise, molecules are raised to participate in organic chemistry yet remain molecules. And so on with organic chemicals, DNA, single-celled and multicellular organisms. Each is, by the power of God, raised to participate in something higher, yet each thing remains what it is. And at the pinnacle of the hierarchy, one multicellular species is raised by grace to participate not merely in a new level of natural life but in the supernatural life of God himself. Thus, humans are animals with a rational soul in the image and likeness of God (see Genesis 1:27, 2:7). Yet we’re not thereby “spiritualized” out of our bodies and into the ether. Rather, we retain our hair, fangs, claws, and DNA. So we are, to be sure, dust. But this dust is—not merely “contains”— a person.
This is not to say it’s impossible to separate soul and body. Indeed, it happens thousands of times every day. It’s called “death.” And death is precisely the bitter fruit of the fall from which Christ saves us. Thus the sought-for separation of soul and body can never show us the beginning of human life, only its end—leaving only a corpse and a ghost. In a grim way, even sin and death show the essential unity of flesh and spirit.
The real way to approach the question is sacramentally, by asking, “What is the relationship, not the difference, between body, soul, and spirit?” Christianity doesn’t tell us that human soul and body are related not as milk to milk bottle but as Mona Lisa to paint. Human beings are not souls poured into disposable, finely tuned bags of genetic chemicals. We are, as Scripture says, an inseparable unity of body, soul, and spirit (see Genesis 2:7, 1 Thessalonians 5:23). And if you want to know when a human being begins life, ask yourself, “At what moment did the Son of God become the Son of Man, the paradigm of the human race?” The answer of two thousand years of unbroken Catholic tradition is plain: In the supreme instance of his identification with the human person—by the life-giving power that loved creation into being, blessed the hierarchy of goodness, and came to save the world from sin and death—God the Son of Man was conceived by the Holy Spirit (see Matthew 1:20, Luke 1:35).
The Incarnation of the Son of God is why the Christian tradition has always hallowed the body, not only in life but even in death. For the body does not derive its holiness, significance, and worth simply from being associated with a soul. It derives it from God, who made the body as the temple not only of the human soul but of the living God himself. It is sacred in death, even as the ruins of the temple in Jerusalem and the dead body of Jesus were sacred. For in the risen Christ that body shall be rebuilt.
This sanctity of the body is something that has been intuited since the very dawn of humanity. With the dawn of humankind we see the very first occurrence of something that does not occur in all the three billion years of life on earth before us: the grave. Suddenly we find not merely animal carcasses strewn on the ground but the bodies of persons laid with reverence in the ground, buried with flowers, entombed with tokens of things they loved in life, decked with art that speaks of some groping hope that this is not the end for them, surrounded with the love, respect, or awe their fellows had for them.
Of which more next time.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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One Response
I love seeing the logic that if Jesus became incarnated at conception, and we consider him worthwhile, so are we all worthy from conception, all of us a kind of miracle, one of a kind, beloved by not just our human parents, but beloved by God.