158. Loving your body
158. LOVING YOUR BODY
By nature we love our own bodies for giving us all kinds of pleasures, of course. But can we love our own bodies out of charity? We are commanded to love our neighbors as we love ourselves; and this love, the love that is commanded, must be charity, which is an act of will and free choice and can therefore be commanded, rather than any of the natural instincts, which are not acts of will and free choice and cannot therefore be commanded. But our neighbor, like ourselves, consists of body and soul. It would seem to follow that we can love our own body with charity since we can love our neighbor, body and soul, with charity. But what does this mean? How should we love our own body?
Whether a man ought to love his body out of charity?
Objection 1: It would seem that a man ought not to love his body out of charity. For we do not love one with whom we are unwilling to associate. But those who have charity shun the society of the body, according to Romans 7:24: Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? and Philippians 1:23: Having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ. . . .
Reply: The Apostle did not shrink from the society of his body as regards the nature of his body; in fact in this respect he was loth to be deprived thereof, according to 2 Corinthians 5:4: We would not be unclothed, but clothed over . . . (for) the nature of our body was created not by an evil principle, as the Manicheans pretend, but by God. . . . He did, however, wish to escape from the taint of concupiscence, which remains in the body and. . . . weighs down the soul.
Objection 2: Further, the friendship of charity is based on fellowship in the enjoyment of God. But the body can have no share in that enjoyment. Therefore the body is not to be loved out of charity.
Reply: Although our bodies are unable to enjoy God by knowing and loving Him, yet by the works which we do through the body we are able to attain to the perfect knowledge of God. Hence from the enjoyment in the soul there overflows a certain happiness into the body. . . . Hence, since the body has, in a fashion, a share of happiness, it can be loved with the love of charity (II-II,25,5).
St. Thomas first refutes the heresy that the body is of negative value and to be shunned. This is Manicheeism or Gnosticism or Neoplatonism, not Christianaity. For (1) God willed and created our body. He made us bodily creatures and called that creation “very good” (Gen 1:31). (2) He incarnated Himself in a human nature, body and soul. (3) He saved us by bodily death, not by spiritual advice. (4) He rose in His body. He did not leave it behind in the tomb. (5) In His Ascension He took His human nature, body and soul, hypostatically united with His divine nature in His single divine Person, with Him to Heaven forever. (5) He continues to feed us with His own Body in the Eucharist. (6) And He will give us immortal resurrected bodies in Heaven. Thus St. Paul, in the passage St. Thomas quotes, longs for a more perfect body in Heaven, not for bodilessness; “not to be unclothed but clothed over”. The body therefore is to be loved; it has high and holy value. And this all men instinctively know, for the oldest records and evidences of human habitation are funerary. Even dead bodies are always treated with reverence. What the saints shun is not the body but concupiscence, which is a disorder that begins in the soul, not the body. Concupiscence is disordered desire, and desires are powers of the soul, though only in souls united to and expressed in bodies. Dead bodies, without souls, have no desires.
St. Thomas then refutes the notion that our bodies play no part in our Heavenly joy or our vision of God. Elsewhere (I,12,3) he even says that we will see God face to face not only with our souls but even with our bodily eyes, as happiness—a state of the spiritual soul—is seen with the bodily eyes in a face and in a smile. For this joy, like concupiscence, “flows over” into the body from the soul.
A person is one, though human nature is two-dimensional, body and soul. Charity is not the love of a soul to a soul but the love of a person to a person. It not only can but must include the body.