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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
According to classical Christian doctrine, the human body is not a container for the soul but its “form”. In defending a form of this view, I suggest that the resurrected body of Christ represents the truth of human flesh. In the light of the resurrected and glorified body of Christ, who still bears his wounds, death can be understood as the loss of something irreplaceable and therefore mourned as a horrific deprivation of life; that is, because eternal life consists in the vision of God by our whole selves, and not just a separated soul, a proper Christian anthropology that began in some sense with the glorified body of Christ as the “truth of the physical” might suggest a very different biomedical practice than that with which we are familiar, which often proceeds from a methodological materialism underwritten by a dualistic metaphysics.
1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, tr. Anscombe, G.E.M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), p. 178Google Scholar.
2 DeVries, Peter, The Blood of the Lamb (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 182–3Google Scholar.
3 John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 25 March 1995, §1
4 I owe this expression to Eugene McCarraher, who apparently borrows it from William Blum.
5 “Criticisms … regarding the ordering principles and methods of modern science/technology are typically set aside today as at best arcane, in light of modernity's evident successes in enhancing human health and comfort and in reducing suffering—through medicine and medical technology, for example. Modern science, in other words, has “worked,” and this “practical” criterion is taken to suffice, a priori, to render moot any critical scrutiny of science and its method(s) in their constitutive order as such. Moral questions as a matter of principle are deflected away from the question of the cosmological/cognitional order embodied in scientific technology, toward the question of how this technology is used or applied.
What it is crucial to see, however, … is that such a deflection changes the nature of the moral question. It reduces morality as it bears on science and technology to a form of positivism. Insofar as moralists grant the order of nature and of knowledge as assumed in modern science and technology, they—eo ipso—lose the non-arbitrary “foundation” in nature and knowledge necessary for raising the moral question in its proper sense at all, that is, as a reasonable matter integral to the truth of things. The modern order of intelligence as sketched above implies denial of the givenness of nature as (“transcendentally”) true and good (and beautiful!), and its replacement by the idea of verum/ bonum/ pulchrum quia factum. Indeed, this order implies loss finally of the very notion of nature itself, the ratio of which includes both nature's givenness and its immediate-intrinsic demand on us (that is, both its being-given and also, by virtue of being-given, its being-good). We have, in other words, the replacement of premodernity's being/nature and the good with modernity's “fact” and “value”: “fact” is now an (empirically-accessed) mechanism whose intelligibility is elicited through human control, while “value” is the human will's imposition on “fact” of what is now only nonnaturally “good”—i.e., “good,” not as given first-intrinsically by nature, but only as posited, instrumentally-arbitrarily, by man.” David L. Schindler, “Biotechnology and the Givenness of the Good: Posing Properly the Moral Question Regarding Human Dignity”, Communio 31 (Winter 2004), pp. 612–45, at 617. Further, “Biotechnological practices…involving as they do knowledge, control, and manufacturing, just so far involve—are mediated by and indeed themselves instantiate—a definite mix of philosophical (ontological) cosmology, anthropology, and theology.” Moreover, “A putatively purely technical or empirical biotechnological practice, in short, is, precisely as a practice, (also) a distinct (albeit often unwitting) theory of nature and knowledge (mechanism), which in its turn implies a distinct theory of the universe in its entirety: of (human) life and its goodness (nonnaturalism), and of God (a-theism). Acceptance of a practice so conceived, therefore, logically requires, and in the end can only permit, an ethics consistent with such a theory” (pp. 625–6).
6 Jacob, François, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, trans. Spillman, Betty (New York: Pantheon, 1973), p. 299Google Scholar.
7 Henry, p. 263.
8 Walker, Adrian J., “'Sown Psychic, Raised Spiritual’: The Lived Body as the Organ of Theology”, Communio 33 (Summer 2006), p. 26Google Scholar.
9 Michel Henry, I am the Truth, p. 262.
10 In The Hauerwas Reader, ed. Berkman, John and Cartwright, Michael G. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 596–602Google Scholar.
11 Spaemann, Robert, Persons: The Difference Between “Someone” and “Something”, tr. O'Donovan, Oliver (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 148Google Scholar.
12 Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, p. 350. “Like all creation, man is an alloy of being and nonbeing; and the latter raises its head and is actualized whenever his ontological equilibrium is shaken. This equilibrium can be definitively established only by the universal absoluteness and fullness of the life revealed in the God-Man, who even in His human nature overcame the weakness of creatureliness. Original sin is an actual and universal violation of ontological equilibrium in all of humankind and in each human individual. This equilibrium is restored only in Christ. Therefore, God's judgment upon every individual is not an externally imposed punishment, but expresses the ontological consequence of the violated equilibrium and the bared creatureliness: ‘dust thou art.'” (Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich, The Bride of the Lamb, tr. Jakim, Boris ((Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002)), p. 352.Google Scholar)
13 Ibid.
14 Aquinas explains this passage at ST I-II.85.6, resp.: “But God, to Whom every nature is subject, in forming man supplied the defect of nature, and by the gift of original justice, gave the body a certain incorruptibility, as was stated in the I, 97, 1. It is in this sense that it is said that ‘God made not death,’ and that death is the punishment of sin.”
15 Thomas Aquinas, On the Power of God, 5.10, ad 5., p. 149. See Rémi Brague, “The Soul of Salvation”, Communio 14 (Fall 1987), pp. 215–22, at 228: “the idea of soul as the form of the body allows for a philosophical expression of an intuition which we have seen was consubstantial with Christianity. Salvation is not the renunciation of an ‘inferior’ stratum of reality, but its recapitulation. The soul, in parallel fashion, is the recapitulation of the body: it gives to the body a unity which puts it on a level superior to the sum of its parts. The idea of the soul is thus the very negation of salvation as escape. Affirmation of the soul is what allows us to take seriously the ‘faithfulness to the earth’ which the dogma of the Resurrection expresses.”
16 In De generatione et corruptione, 1.15,108, in Conway, Pierre, and Larcher, R.F., tr., Exposition of Aristotle's Treatise on Generation and Corruption, Book I, cc. 1–5. (Columbus OH: College of St. Mary of the Springs, 1964)Google Scholar.
17 Council of Vienne, 1311–12: “Moreover, with the approval of the said council, we reject as erroneous and contrary to the truth of the catholic faith every doctrine or proposition rashly asserting that the substance of the rational or intellectual soul is not of itself and essentially the form of the human body, or casting doubt on this matter. In order that all may know the truth of the faith in its purity and all error may be excluded, we define that anyone who presumes henceforth to assert defend or hold stubbornly that the rational or intellectual soul is not the form of the human body of itself and essentially, is to be considered a heretic.”
18 John Paul II, Veritatis splendor § 48.
19 Spaemann, Persons, p. 123.
20 Bonaventure, Collations on the Six Days of Creation, V. 3, p. 75.
21 Summa Theologiae, Ia.75.4, resp.
22 Summa Theologiae IIIa.5.1, resp.
23 Summa contra gentiles, IV.79, 10.
24 Spaemann, Persons, p. 114.
25 McCabe, Herbert, Faith within Reason, ed. OP, Brian Davies (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 124Google Scholar.
26 A friend with whom I attended the funeral remarked on the peculiarity of the fact that the ceremony was held in the funeral home, conducted by the pastor of the Methodist church to which the deceased belonged, and which was directly adjacent to the funeral home. The oddity of the fact that the ceremony was held in the funeral home, under the auspices of the managerial bureaucracy of death, as opposed to the church next door, was not lost. This episode is, I think, indicative of the extent to which the Church has evacuated death and left its carcass for the funeral industry—an act of convenience, to be sure, but one which betrays a loss of faith in the older Christian liturgies of death and a resignation to newer, more superficially consoling ones.
27 Saramago, José, Death with Interruptions, tr. Costa, Margaret Jull (New York: Mariner, 2009)Google Scholar.
28 Ibid., p. 10.
29 O'Connor, Flannery, The Habit of Being: Letters, ed. Fitzgerald, Sally (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), p. 100Google Scholar.
30 Shakespeare, William, Measure for Measure (New York: Penguin, 2000), IV.3, p. 80Google Scholar.
31 Curiously, the term “casket”, originally “a small box or chest for jewels, letters, or other things of value, itself often of valuable material and richly ornamented” (OED), only began to replace the older term “coffin” in the middle of the nineteenth century. The origins of the term are poetic, having been employed by Shakespeare in King John V.i.40: “They found him dead…An empty Casket, where the Iewell of life…was rob'd and tane away.”
32 Schmemann, Alexander, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's, 2004), pp. 99–100Google Scholar.
33 Pascal, Pensées I.36, in Pensées and Other Writings, tr. Levi, Honor (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 10Google Scholar.
34 Cunningham, Conor, Darwin's Pious Idea (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), p. 417–8Google Scholar.
35 Revelation 9:6
36 Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality, p. 36.
37 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1998), p. 247CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 Ibid.
39 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, The Glory of the Lord, Volume V: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, tr. Davies, Oliver, et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), pp. 615ffGoogle Scholar.
40 Hart, David Bentley, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), p. 394Google Scholar.
41 Job 14.7,10.
42 Col. 3.3.
43 “If we are to grasp the concept of creation, we must expose the limitations of the subject/object schema, the limitations of ‘exact’ thought, and we must show that only when the humanum has been freed of these limitations will the truth about humankind and the real world come into view. And yet we must not try to overstep the limitations by denying God, because that would also be the denial of humankind—with all its grave consequences. In fact, the question at stake here is: “Do human beings really exist?” The fact of human beings is an obstacle and irritation for ‘science’, because they are not something science can exactly ‘objectify’. Pope Benedict XVI, ‘In the Beginning… A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, tr. Boniface Ramsey, OP (San Francisco: Ignatius 1995), p. 86.
