“Body and Soul”
“Love the Lord with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind.”
Jesus of Nazareth
“It is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you. Your body is the home of your soul on earth.” John O’Donahue
Gnosticism. Have you heard that word? It refers broadly to a belief system, common to many of the first followers of Christ, in which there was a sharp distinction made between the body and the soul.
The body was seen as the enemy of the soul. And so among some “Gnostics” the body was treated with disdain, as something to be escaped from, and thus denied food and drink and any pleasure. St. Simon the Stylite was the poster child, if you will, for Gnostics. He sat perched on top of a high pole for a long time, symbolizes his desire to be separated from all that was of the earth.
On the other hand, some Gnostics treated the body with great indifference, or casual disdain, going to the other extreme of indulging the body with whatever was pleasurable. After all, if the body was merely a temporary storage place of the soul, it didn’t need to be cared for. These perspectives, though subtly popular today, are egregiously erroneous.
The Celts, in distinction from the Gnostics, had a far healthier, and one might say more “Christian” perspective, recognizing and embracing the intimate connection between body and soul. The Celtic Christians desired divine intimacy. And it was recognized that true intimacy is a total connection with Another in heart, body, mind, and soul. It is not merely emotional or physical. It involves, yes requires, a complete investment of all the senses, all the parts of the person. What was true for humans was just as true for God. When one practices intimacy with God it is a total participation, perhaps an engulfment, of the whole person.
This, I believe, was what the mystics recognized and desired, and what O’Donahue describes in the book “Anam Cara.”
“Yet in the deepest sense, the body is the most intimate place. It is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you. Your body is the home of your soul on earth.” [1]
“Religion has often presented the body as the source of evil, ambiguity, lust and seduction. This is utterly false and irreverent. The body is sacred.”[2]
Consider for a moment how true this is, not only in general, but for you. I am willing to bet that your religious experience, if you grew up in a “traditional” Christian setting, was similar to mine in that the focus seemed to be on moral teachings and behavior modification. The “hot sins” of the body were distinguished from the “goodness” of the soul. O’Donahue traces this development to the incorporation of Greek philosophy into Christian belief and teaching. in which the body was an anchor preventing the soul from fully experiencing the divine. Thus, according to him, “A great suspicion of the body entered the Christian tradition. Coupled with this is the fact that a theology of sensual love never flowered in the Christian tradition. . . In subsequent Christian tradition, and especially among the Church Fathers, there was a deep suspicion of the body and a negative obsession with sexuality. . . The Christian tradition has often undervalued and mistreated the sacred presence of the body.”[3]
O’Donahue goes on to refer to the body as deserving to be respected and minded carefully due to the fact that it is the receptacle of the soul, a sacrament, a sacred threshold.
So then I invite you to consider the relationship that you have with your body and soul. Is it integrated, or separated? Are both seen as divine, or is there a dualistic perspective you have, similar to those early Gnostics. The question that is put before us and so pertinent for each of us, is “How do I perceive my soul and body?”
[1] “Anam Cara” p. 45
[2] IBID, p. 46
[3] IBID, p. 47