Quote of the Week
“Several times in his writing, Thomas shows his impatience with Origen’s view that the soul was united to a body as a sort of punishment for sin. This theory, he thinks, flies in the face not only of the biblical witness that God made all things good but also of the philosophical intuition, so deeply felt by Aquinas, that soul and body belong together. Were bodiliness a penalty for sin, the soul would continually chafe against the flesh (as in Michelangelo’s sculptures), longing to be rid of it. But for Aquinas just the opposite is the case: the soul is more itself and most at home in a body, better, “with” a body. Against Origen Thomas Aquinas says that “we ought to celebrate the wonderful communion of body and soul” (S. Th. 1a, q. 91, art. 3)
The implication of this radical view for the spiritual life are profound. First, we must make peace with our bodies. The theoretical dualism of our tradition has had some devastating practical consequences, forcing people to be suspicious of pleasure, of the instinctual life, of the sensations associated with sexuality. Especially in those cultures marked by puritanical forms of Protestantism or Jansenist Catholicism, there is a tendency to demonize the body and its passions as necessarily “fallen”, as inimical to the purposes of God. It was interesting to me that there was such a negative outcry among Christians when the movie version of Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ appeared. The film suggested that Christ might have felt an attraction to married life and to the sensual pleasures of sex, even going so far as to depict his sexual fantasies in some detail. For many Christians this constituted a blasphemous outrage, a compromising of the purity of Christ’s vocation and religious sensibility. To me the reaction proved only that many purportedly staunch defenders of the faith are in fact subtle heretics who practically deny the real concrete embodied humanity of Christ. It also showed that dualism is still very much alive in the general Christian consciousness. That the body and its pleasures might be intertwined with the “things of the spirit” is unthinkable to the dualist.”
– Fr. Robert Barron, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 1996.
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I remember the foolish scandal that a painting of a very young, very pregnant Mary caused at one Catholic spiritualty center about a decade or so ago.
Examples like this and yours are many.
I believe gnosticism has plagued popular practice of the faith from probably Christianity’s inception.
Good food for thought.
One could be perturbed (and so would Aquinas) at the film for non sexual reasons relating to the sexual details… i.e….having to do with further promoting the “Christ did not know His vocation” line of thinking and was therefore exploring other options. In such a paradigm, people like Therese of Lisieux knew their vocation before Christ knew His…even though when found at the temple teaching at 12, He seemed quite at home with His role and told his mother so and implied that it included separation from family and being about His real “Father’s” business which word..Father… He instantly (and that is the astounding thing)..juxtaposed to Mary’s noting of Joseph as being His father…check the text.
Origen remains an enigma for me; refreshingly spacious in some respects, Hellenically crabbed in others. It seems gnosticism is the perennial Christian heresy, forever desirous of locating our salvation in something less messy than the body embedded in Creation. Once again, Barron displays his prodigious gift for getting to the heart of the matter.
I’ve often been confused as to why folks are shocked when they hear things such as: “The spirit is superior to the flesh.”
It doesn’t mean that the flesh is bad, just that the spirit is better.
As a side note, I fully support increased quoting of Fr. Barron at this blog, especially by MM ;-)
THe “flesh” in Paul does not mean the body per se. He is with this term referring to something like the self-conflicted state of fallen (corporeal) desire.
I love Fr. Barron’s work… I’m happy to see we have *something* in common, MM. :-)
Indeed!
MD:
You are, of course, correct. Paul’s sarx (flesh) is not equivalent to soma (body), which Paul famously uses in 1 Corinthians 12 as an image of the Church. The conflicted, fallen nature of sarx in some ways resembles John’s kosmos (world), though John, like Paul, is not condemning Creation as such. It’s worth remembering that Paul and John wrote in Greek but were themselves Semitic, and less likely to fall prey to gnostic devaluations of the body than those who followed.