In his slim and punchy little book, Acedia and its Discontents: Metaphysics of Desire in an Age of Boredom,¹ R.J. Snell suggests that the common experience of the loss of meaning in the modern world can be attributed to the vice of acedia. Relying on Evagrius of Pontus, as well as the Angelic Doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, Snell defines acedia as a rejection of life itself and an antipathy with one’s place in the world. It is the unhappy rejection of one’s supernatural end, union with the Triune God.

As Snell describes it, contemporary people experience a reality that has ceased to have any meaning beyond its usefulness to human persons, and as such things in themselves, including the body, are viewed and understood merely as things, brought together by power or coincidence. This view of reality is expressed articulately by the pragmatist philosopher and educationalist, John Dewey: “things are what they can do and what can be done with them.”²

Snell engagingly examines a tendency within (post)modern culture to view things as merely the sum of their parts and how they function, and shows how this pragmatic approach to reality has become habitual for the contemporary person, eclipsing questions concerning the meaning of things. And while he certainly acknowledges that this capacity to bracket questions of meaning does, in fact, have a great many benefits – particularly in the fields of engineering and technology – Snell is concerned that this capacity to bracket questions of meaning in order to more closely examine function no longer exists for the modern person as a capacity, but as a necessity.

Snell’s book traces the impact of this, demonstrating that for contemporary people, reality itself is now lacking any depth or interiority and as such it is devoid of meaning prior to any human engagement with it. Things themselves cease to have an inside, so to speak – they are merely constituted of smaller things, such that when we break things open to see what is inside, we are left looking at more outsides, and this process continues ad infinitum. And when things themselves no longer have an ‘inside’, they become profoundly uninteresting. Indeed, for something to be interesting, it would by necessity need an inside – inter, meaning ‘between’ or ‘among’, esse, meaning ‘be’ or ‘to be’. Hence, as is the argument of Snell’s book, the common experience of boredom with reality as experienced by a great many contemporary people.

This restriction in the way that we see and experience reality – which is concomitantly both an epistemic and ontological reduction – is most often not something that is consciously adopted, but is rather imbibed in the air that we breathe. Not only does this explain the relative thinness of our everyday contemporary reality and the kind of existential boredom or listlessness that is experienced by so many, but it also goes a way to contribute to an increasingly altered understanding of our own embodiment.

According to Michael Hanby, there now exists “a dualism between a mechanistic and malleable body and the affective dimension, [which is] taken as the true locus of ‘identity.'”³ Not only does this modern dualism allow for a kind of disengagement from our own embodiment, it fails to adequately appreciate the gift-quality of the body, and the importance of the body as a constitutive element of human personhood, and for the human capacity of reason. No longer is the body understood as a gift, and therefore as given (and received), and as an inextricably constitutive of the person. Instead, the body is now seen and experienced to be mere dumb stuff that is external to the self, and can now only come to be known by means of my manipulation of it.

On one hand, this is a novel understanding of the body, but on another this attitude toward the body echoes a certain Platonic approach to the body. For example, in his Phaedo, Plato has Socrates argue that the body is a hindrance to the pursuit of knowledge, stating that, ‘if we are ever going to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and survey things alone in themselves’ (97). This disembodied approach to knowledge is similar in many ways to the contemporary view noted above, with the exception that, for the modern person, knowledge is to be gained in the exercise of power over an object – and this extends to the body, which is no longer a subject of knowledge but is now exclusively an object.

Both the ancient and contemporary view of the body as somehow external to the person is challenged by an authentically Christian understanding of the person as a body/soul composite. This finds its roots in the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism (i.e. that every physical object is a composite of both matter and form), but is elevated in the Christian dispensation such that, because of the fact of the Incarnation, the body now becomes a legitimate locus of knowledge, both philosophical and theological.

This understanding of the body radically challenges contemporary conceptions of embodiment that view the body as ultimately manipulable and somehow external to the self. This is developed in a most compelling way by the Thomistic personalist and phenomenological philosopher Karol Wojtyła, who was to become St Pope John Paul II. He writes, “The fact that theology [and here we can add philosophy] also includes the body should not astonish or surprise anyone who is conscious of the mystery and reality of the Incarnation. Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh, the body entered theology – that is, the science that has divinity for its object – I would say, through the main door.”⁴

Wojtyła’s Catholic Personalist conception of embodied human person is different from both the Platonic attempt at disembodied and therefore supposedly objective contemplation of ideal truth and the contemporary experience of disembodied identity. He argues that the human person is a body-soul unity not, as Plato had postulated, a soul entrapped within a body from which he must escape if he is to have real knowledge; nor is the human person a distinct identity apart from their body. Wojtyła’s concept of the truth of the embodied human person stands in stark contrast to what Plato’s Socrates speaks of when in the Phaedo he claims that access to the truth of the human person is found only in the transcendence of the body by the soul. Further, it offers a robust refutation of the contemporary anthropological dualism which treats the body as a secondary and accidental property the human person. The fetishization of the body as it is experienced in contemporary society is then, a kind of photographic negative to the flight from embodiment as was experienced in the ancient world.

For Wojtyła, the human person is able to come to an understanding of who he or she is, and the meaning of his or her existence in and through their embodied experience, specifically through the embodied action of the sincere gift of self. The category of action as a mode of understanding the person and for personal self-knowledge is crucial.⁵ Human embodiment, action, and experience are constitutive of the human person. The body in itself is imbued with meaning and thus reveals the person. Wojtyła writes, “[f]or us action reveals the person, and we look at the person through his action. For it lies in the nature of the correlation inherent in experience, in the very nature of man’s acting, that action constitutes the specific moment whereby the person is revealed. Action gives us the best insight into the inherent essence of the person and allows us to understand the person most fully.”⁶

If Snell is correct, and the contemporary human person suffers from a kind of ontological boredom to the point that even his or her body fails to have a meaning of its own, then the embodied rationality of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II’s Thomistic personalism could offer a useful mode, not only of understanding our own embodiment as a constitutive element of our person and rationality, but of coming to know reality in itself as inherently meaningful and interesting.