What does it mean, for a Christian, to be in the body?

Christ did not come to this world to form a school of philosophy but a body of salvation. And yet this believing body finds itself in a world of diverse creeds, some of which it finds, after reflection, to be incompatible with its proclamation.

The people of God is not partial. It is willing to sanction the creativity of human thought and its products, as long as it does not find these in conflict with the gospel. But very often man does, in fact, conceive ideas which are not compatible with the message of salvation. For this reason believers must test everything and reject what is not good; and this is applicable to the philosophy of embodiment as it is to anything else, perhaps especially so, because it touches the heart of Christian faith both as it is believed and as it is lived.

The Christian confession is the confession of God become man. The ineluctable bedrock and life-giving fountain of theology is the fact of the Incarnation, that heaven met earth for our sake. Any doctrine, then, which drives a wedge between earth and heaven, denying the essential and intimate connection between them to which the Incarnation gives refulgent witness, must be spurned by the children of the Gospel. We reject a monism of matter, any immanentzing materialism that denies the world its transcendent source and its transcendent destiny. We reject any monism of spirit or Gnosticism that makes the world to be a mistake, without positive role in the plan of creation and salvation. We reject dualism, which divides the universe into separated realms each with their own autonomous nature and destiny. God became flesh! Whoever denies spirit or denies body, denies Christ; whoever divides spirit and body, divides Christ.

The children of the gospel, then, should be well aware of what is not good. But Christians are human beings, and they must philosophize. More – they are believers, and they must theologize. But what is lawful to them?

One powerful option is that offered by the philosophy of Aristotle. Man is a living organism with the unity of a substance; it is no more difficult to explain the unity of the body and soul as to explain the unity of wax and seal. Attractive, yes – it can easily be seen that this philosophy presents a stout alternative to dualism or to Gnosticism. Man is a composite, but an intimate sort of composite; body and soul are not a conjunction, but a substantial unity. Although this philosophy does contain a sort of temptation towards mortalism – a path some of its most renowned exponents, such as Alexander of Aphrodisias or ibn Rushd, have in varying degrees taken – yet it is capable of being purified of this, as the master himself suggested and as Thomas Aquinas concluded.

We must be wary of simple answers here. From this happy consonance between the faith and the Aristotelian view, at least with respect to the things that they both reject, many have concluded that Aristotelianism is the only option or at least the only safe option for Christians. This conclusion is as hasty as it is unwise. Hasty, because it excludes the possibility of other options, not only which might be fruitfully used by Christian theology, but which have in fact been so used and which may very well continue to bear fruit in the future. Unwise, because it is never right to tie down the organic development of Christian thought with any stricture except an internal one. It is one thing to say that a certain path will not be a profitable one for Christian theology to follow – even, or perhaps especially, the most liberal theologian must hold that there are some things which can never be reconciled with Christ’s message. It is quite another thing to demand that one philosophy rather than another be the only way forward for the development of doctrine, especially when there may be genuine reasons to suspect that that philosophy may be somewhat inadequate to the full power of the faith.

“Shall there be no progress in the Church? Certainly; all possible progress. Yet on the condition that it be real progress, not alteration of the faith.”¹ And we know that the most bountiful fruits are nourished by the deepest roots. What I mean to propose is that we reevaluate Christian Platonist heritage of the Fathers, of the men and women who in the first centuries responded to the call of Christ with heart as well as mind.

I am aware that Platonism has become something of a bad word amongst Christians. Protestants may associate it with the hellenization of Christian thought, a move away from a more Hebraic holism. Catholics may associate it with a departure from the Christian Aristotelian orthodoxy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Both might associate it broadly with that perversion of the faith we recognize as Gnosticism. But the Fathers, the pioneers of our faith knew as well as the Platonist philosophers themselves that Gnosticism is as far from Platonism as the fable of an evil world created as a divine mistake is from the beautiful and good cosmos produced by a generous providence which is presented to us in the Timaeus.

To understand Platonism as a sort of bifurcating dualism or a crude hatred of the physical is to reverse its very central message, that the universe is the multivalent outshowing of the goodness of the God who wants all things to be like him. It was this thought that the people of God recognized as congenial and fundamentally compatible with the Christian message: that the lower is a sign and sacrament of the higher, the world is the outshowing of God’s goodness, and the body is the image of the soul.

It is a well-worn adage that the ancients should not be regarded as old men, but as children. One might just as easily suggest that our own time represents something of a senile old age, and antiquity the vigor of youth. Neither image, though, is really worthy of the Church, which has always looked upon the ages in which it finds itself with the wisdom of maturity, and yet also has within itself an everlasting youthfulness.

Let us be serious. The Fathers were not children, and much less were they fools. These were men and women who lived and breathed Scripture, for whom the rhythm of life was the rhythm of the liturgy, and who knew well the life of prayer and the wisdom of the monastic cell. They looked upon a world in which Gnosticism, Aristotelianism, and Platonism were all very much present. The first they rejected vehemently; they learned from the second, but did not embrace it with great enthusiasm; the last they – not uncritically, but earnestly – took up as friendly to Christian truth. If they did this then I think we owe them, if not a believing ear, at least a sympathetic one.

With this in mind let us approach the Platonic Christian philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, as it presents itself in his On the Soul and the Resurrection, also known as the Dialogue with Macrina. In it the saintly nun represents the Christian wisdom which, in a beautiful harmony of philosophical and biblical themes, stills a grieving Gregory’s doubts over the fate of his late brother’s soul.

It would be out of place here to give a commentary on the Dialogue, which could easily run several volumes. For my present purpose I will illustrate Gregory’s use and approval of two cardinal Platonic doctrines: first, in anthropology, that the soul is independent from the body both in its existence and operation; second, in morals, that the soul ought so far as possible to detach itself from the body’s cares and be about its own business.

Gregory has Macrina say quite explicitly that the soul “exists, with a rare and peculiar nature of its own, independently of the body with its gross texture.”² “She is an immaterial and spiritual thing”³ which moves the organized body, but is not part of it: “The soul is an essence created, and living, and intellectual, transmitting from itself to an organized and sentient body the power of living and of grasping objects of sense, as long as a natural constitution capable of this holds together.”⁴ In Macrina’s reasoning, “the soul’s separate existence as a substance” is the ground of its immortality; the body is corruptible because it is a composite, and any composite may dissolve; if the soul is to be immortal, it must be another substance, a simple one. Further, the soul is independent not only in its existence, but also in its operation: echoing Socrates in the Theatetus,⁵ Macrina asserts, “Verily, it is most true what one of heathen culture is recorded to have said, that it is the mind that sees and the mind that hears.”⁶

Macrina follows this in morals as well: “those still living in the flesh must as much as ever they can separate and free themselves in a way from its attachments by virtuous conduct.”⁷ Why? Because the soul is presented with a choice, to love sensible pleasures, or eternal things; it is this choice which separates two classes of men. Macrina approves the opinion of the one class, that “only that which is perceptible by intelligence is good and deserves that name.”⁸ They strive to purify themselves, and “become free from any emotional connection with the brute creation,” so that “there will be nothing to impede its contemplation.”⁹ But Gregory is no Gnostic; like Plato, he holds that the body is something positively willed by God, and that the soul has a kind of mission towards it, being appointed to move it and make it live; the relationship that results from this mission is so intimate, Gregory reasons, that the soul will remember even the individual atoms that once belonged to it, after the body is dissolved.

But what do we take from this? A Christian was also a Platonist – so what? Someone may very well have followed both Christ and Plato; this does not establish that Christ and Plato are in harmony. But I believe that it is important here to note that philosophies do not “belong” to those who first introduced them to the world: Aristotelianism, Platonism, Epicureanism, even before they are the systems of particular persons, represent perennial philosophical options which are available to all thinking people. Gregory is not a Christian Platonist merely because he follows both Christ and Plato, but because he finds that philosophy, which was at one time in history espoused by Plato, to be the intelligible system in which the doctrine of Christianity is best and most naturally expressed and defended.

In other words, Gregory is a Christian theologian, one who begins with Christian starting points; when he elaborates them philosophically, he finds that they require – or, better, imply – a metaphysics that is much like Platonism. Why is the soul independent from the body? Because Scripture tells us that it is immortal, and receives rewards and punishments after death. Why does the soul have this mission to the body, so that it remembers even its own atoms? Because Scripture tells us that the soul will one day take up its own body again, to which it is intimately united even in heaven. Why must the soul liberate itself from bodily cares? Because Scripture teaches this in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. When Macrina, the image of biblical, not pagan, wisdom, asserts that the soul must separate itself from the cares of the flesh, she begins the sentence with, “I think our Lord teaches us this…”¹⁰

I think that we can say without too much exaggeration that if Gregory, the Christian, had not found Platonism already available in his present culture, he would have been obliged to invent it.