11. We Ought to Cherish the Body [and] Celebrate the “wonderful Communion” of Body and Soul.
11. We ought to cherish the body [and] celebrate the “wonderful communion” of body and soul.11
His whole life long, from his early Commentary on the Sentences written at about twenty-eight years of age to his midlife work De Veritate and to his final work Summa Theologiae, Aquinas waged a fierce battle to rebut the dualism of body and soul, spirit and matter. Throughout his life he never altered his position on this critical and highly debated issue. In so doing, he took on the entire ascetic tradition of the fourth-century church fathers and church councils that, as Rosemary Ruether points out, “tended to equate the dualism of soul or mind over body with the dualism of male over female,” which results in “a fearful view of sex and a fanatical misogyny toward women.”13 Consider what boldness this took on Aquinas’s part—challenging the entire patristic inheritance on so basic a topic as dualism and misogyny! This battle still wages today, of course, because fundamentalism and patriarchy are philosophies that are built on dualism, while a feminist consciousness opts for nondualism. It was on this issue that Aquinas welcomed Aristotle as a liberator from Platonism’s antipathy toward matter. I elaborate on Aquinas’s battle on behalf of non-dualism or what today we call feminism in Sheer Joy as well as his “clay feet” regarding his misunderstanding of women (38-48).
Aquinas fought tirelessly for non-dualism in opposition to the dualism preached by Plato, Augustine, and even St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan colleague in Paris who first supported Aristotle but then reverted back to Platonism. The battle was very contested, and Aquinas lost the battle with the powers that be after his death (see the introduction). It was precisely his non-dualism—expressed as the “consubstantiality of matter and spirit”—that was condemned on March 7, 1277, three years after his death, when the Corporation of Masters of the University of Paris, meeting under the authority of Bishop Étienne Tempier, condemned 219 propositions—of which twenty were aimed at Aquinas’s holistic philosophy of the human person.
Ten years later, the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Kilwardby, censured thirty propositions, most of which concerned Aquinas’s position on the consubstantiality of soul and body, spirit, and matter. It took the canonization of Aquinas in 1323 to remove the cloud of suspicion, but in fact Aquinas’s holism never took hold in mainline Christianity. Dualism is important for patriarchy and for running empires and keeping down others and for consumer capitalism in our day. Dualism does not empower—it flourishes as a control mechanism.
Aquinas’s holism vigorously opposed the traditional position of a dualism of body and soul, a position that originated with St. Augustine but is not found in the Bible. It is not found there because it is in no way Jewish. As Rabbi Heschel explains it: “Asceticism was not the ideal of the biblical man. The source of evil is not in passion, in the throbbing heart, but rather in hardness of heart, in callousness and insensitivity.”14 Biblical scholar Claude Tresmontant points out that nondualism is intrinsic to the Hebrew language itself. “Precisely because it is not dualist, Hebrew, more than any other language, has an understanding, a love of the elements and of the flesh.” He points out how dualism attributes “passions and organic functions to the body, and all that is of a psychological order to the soul. In Hebrew, because there is no dualism, passions, organic functions, sensation, are just as easily related to the soul as they are to the organs and, conversely, thought and sentiments are ascribed to the organs and to parts of the body.”15 Aquinas’s non-dualist position, being deeply Jewish, was therefore deeply biblical.
Aquinas rejected the prevalent view of there being a “superior reason” of the mind and an “inferior reason” of the senses upon which Augustine and others built their dualism. It is in that context that Augustine said “spirit is whatever is not matter,” but Aquinas took the opposite position: spirit is the élan in everything—including matter. “The name ‘spirit’ expresses a kind of ‘élan’ or vital impulse, as when we say that ‘love moves us’ or ‘love urges us’ to do something” (141–42). It is also his respect for matter that caused Aquinas to prefer Aristotle over Plato. Aristotle gave Aquinas a template of form and matter, act and potency, spirit and energy that allowed him to honor the dynamic within all beings—a dynamic, not a dualism.
Aquinas is explicit about why he preferred Aristotle to Plato—it is because Aristotle does not denigrate matter. Significantly, Aquinas wrote commentaries on twelve books of Aristotle and not a single commentary on Plato (or Augustine, for that matter, who was heavily tainted by Plato’s dualism). Indeed, historian Carol Quigley has said that Augustine became a “lightning rod” for right-wing political movements in the West for centuries.
Aquinas says: “It belongs to the notion of humanity to be composed of soul, flesh, and bones. A particular human being is composed of this soul, of this flesh, and of these bones.” Plato taught that “the human being was soul making use of the body,” but Aquinas labels this idea “impossible.” Why? Because “animals and people are natural and sensitive beings. This could not be the case if bodies and bodily organs were not integral to their essence.” He insists that “sensation is not an operation of the soul only. Therefore human beings are not soul only, but something composed of soul and body.”
He elaborates: “No part has the perfection of nature when separated from the whole. … Hence the soul, although it can exist and can understand separated from the body, nevertheless does not have the perfection of its own nature when it is separated for the body.” Furthermore, “by a congruity of relationship that is required between form and matter, spirit fits in with body more than spirit does with spirit since two spirits are two acts, whereas the body is related to the soul as potency is to act.” Indeed, “the soul is more like God when united to the body than when separated from it.”
Aquinas draws practical conclusions from this position saying “We ought to cherish the body. Our body’s substance is not from an evil principle as the Manicheans imagine, but from God. And therefore we ought to cherish the body by the friendship of love, by which we love God.” Here we hear Eckhart’s words, “the soul loves the body.” Matter is not responsible for evil insists Aquinas, our bad choices are and they do “not come to the soul from the body, but to the body from the soul.” It is a law of nature that we should care for our body and it is for this reason that “the sensitive appetite and passion are the subject and seat of the virtues.”
Aquinas, unlike Augustine and so many theologians before and after him, does not regret our bodies. Rather, he urges us to “celebrate the wonderful communion (communio mirabilis) of body and soul. God fashioned the human body in the disposition that is best suited for a rational soul and its activities, for the proximate purpose of the human body is the human soul.” And the soul, since it is integral to human nature “has its natural perfection only as united to the body.” In no way is sensation “an activity of pure soul—sensation is not unique to the human—we share it with animals. But “it is truly human. A person is not just soul, but a compound of body and soul.” And we are made of many elements (today we would say atoms and molecules) that we also share in common with other beings.
Every truth
without exception—
and whoever may utter it—
is from the Holy Spirit.