In two previous posts, I observed that what is true of a
husband and wife—what God has joined man must not put asunder—holds to for
others important ideas and unions in the modern world. It was not only the marriage of a man and his
wife that was to be permanent, but the marriage of other things as well. Yet, all often, man does break asunder those
things that God joined. He puts apart
what should never have been separated and breaks to pieces what ought to be
united. For this reason, not only the
divorce of husband and wife is common in the modern world, but also the divorce
between love and responsibility, between faith and reason, and between the body
and soul.
Like the divorce between love and responsibility and faith
and reason, the divorce between body and soul is not unique to the modern
world. The ancient Greek philosophers
professed the uselessness of religion, while the Christian Tertullian asked
"what accord has Athens with Jerusalem or Christ with Baliol." Likewise, others in history separated the
body soul, some by giving primacy to one over the other and some by denying one
all together. This was not necessarily
divided along purely religious lines.
Plato, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, taught that the
body was the prison of the soul, which lay captive in its dark dungeon until
freed by death (1).
Others in the ancient word went the other way, denying the
soul and giving primacy to the body.
Such was the case with the Lucretius who, in The Nature of Things, ridiculed
the idea of any sort of soul or afterlife and the Epicureans who denying the
soul, decided the best man could hope for was to orient his life around pursuit
of pleasure (2). It is to this attitude
that St. Paul seems to have referred when he wrote to the Corinthians that if
Christ has not been raised, "let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow
we die."
The modern world is the same way. Some give primacy to the soul denying the
body. N.T. Wright refers to some of
these in his important book, Surprised by
Hope (3). These include even the
modern Christian who thinks that the final Christian hope is nothing more than
leaving the body behind and going to heaven or the Eastern religion where the
soul tries to escape from the cycle of this world.
More common, though, is the materialism of a modern world
that denies man a soul. In this world
without God man is only matter, an animal, who though perhaps cleverer than
other animals has the same fate. The
author of Ecclesiastes depressingly put it, "the fate of men and beasts is
the same." Lacking a soul, moderns
believe, man has no soul to feed, it is enough to feed his body. It is the error of the Marxist's heir, the
modern secular liberal who thinks it enough to feed man's body, but do no
more. It is the error of those who claim the Church
should sell its art and Church decorations to feed the poor. As if the poor do not need beauty and spiritual food as much as
physical! It is the error of the West
when they think that supplying corn and condoms to Africa will solve its
problems. It suffices, so the West
thinks, to provide for man's two main appetites, food and sex. It is the error of a pagan West when thy
ridicule the Pope for calling on Africa to experience a renewal of faith,
friendship, and spiritual awakening.
Nonsense, says the West, Enlightened persons know that Africans, like
all modern man, are only animals. Feed
their bellies and leave the souls, which they do not possess, alone.
One need not be a Christian to recognize the absurdity of
this view. Matthew Paris, in his
article, "As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God"(4), showed
that Christian aid organizations do good that purely secular ones cannot. When two such different people as the
Twentieth century atheist Matthew Paris and the medieval Dominican Thomas
Aquinas agree, the world should pay attention.
For Aquinas, man was not his body, nor did he "have" a
soul. Instead, he was body and
soul. C.S. Lewis, I think, wrote that a
corpse is not a man, but then neither is a ghost. Another writer observed that a body without a
soul is a zombie; a soul without a body is a ghost, but neither of these is a
man.
Just as when love and responsibility or faith and reason are
divorced, they lose all meaning, so too the body and the soul. God has joined them for a reason, for when
one side of a coin is separated from another, the coin loses all value, so the
body and soul when divided are the same.
God has joined them, but man puts them asunder only at his own
peril.
(1) The Manicheans too, who counted St. Augustine among
their adherents for a time, professed the body, along with the whole physical
world, to be the work of the devil. The
body was not a necessary part of man; it was not a part of man at all.
(2) By pleasure, they largely meant not a gross hedonism,
but the absence of pain, a somewhat depressing view.
(3). N.T. Wright, Surprised
by Hope: Rethinking Heaven and the Resurrection.
(4)http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2155465/posts
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