Andrew Kania explores the balance we need between body and soul
for human wholeness and completeness. And viewing Jesus Christ as the
model for that balance and completeness.
Finding the balance…
In everything we must strike a balance. Too much diligence can lead to
workaholism and illness, too much religion, as St.
Thomas Aquinas teaches in Summa, has a tendency to lead to
fanaticism and superstition.
A fine balance is also necessary in understanding the nature of our humanity.
The Catholic Church teaches that every individual comprises both a physical
form — a body — and a spirit — which animates the body.
Yet sometimes there can be an imbalance at how the body and spirit are
viewed. St. Augustine of Hippo in
one instance warns the Platonists of the early Christian Church: "He
who praises the nature of the soul as the sovereign good and condemns
the nature of the flesh as evil, truly both carnally desire the soul and
carnally shuns the flesh; for his feeling is inspired by human vanity,
not by divine truth". What the great Latin father sought
to stress is that disproportionate and inadequate care for either body
or soul are acts contrary to full humanity. The
human person, is neither body nor soul — they are both, and should
be celebrated unashamedly as such.
Society seeks to encourage the primacy of the body…
Today, society seeks to encourage the primacy of the body, due in part
to a disbelief in God, and from this, a refusal to accept the spiritual
component of humanity. The media saturates our senses with a plethora
of programmes which teach us how to look younger through a series of surgical
mutilations. We are 'nipped' and 'tucked', 'lifted' and 'stretched', all
in aid of not living longer, but appearing not to have lived to the extent
of our years. In this shift toward the glorification of the body, in particular
to that of youth, the perceptions of others has too often become the prime
mover of how we perceive ourselves, rather than the positive force of
the inward spirit animating our bodies. It is this point which is perhaps
the most important for modern man and woman to address — to recapture
the inner sense of who one truly is, physical, yes, but spiritual as well,
with a beauty that extends beyond what time can alter or what gravity
adjusts.
Modern illnesses such as anorexia nervosa, are widely known for their
drastic, self-immolating physical effects, but have inherent, silent spiritual
causes, as the ground-breaking study by Harvard University scholar, Michelle
Mary Lelwica (Starving for Salvation,
2002, Oxford University Press), concludes: "At
school we were hungry and lost and scared and young and we needed religion,
salvation, something to fill the anxious hollow in our chests. Many of
us sought it in food and thinness."
A journey "enjoyed internally" but "expressed
externally"…
Such 'body ideals' are foreign to the spiritual masters of the past,
who consistently emphasised that the true nurturing of the self was a
beautiful journey that should be enjoyed internally, and thus expressed
externally through the body. Such phrases as "the eyes are the windows
of the soul", come from a philosophy that stresses the critical component
of the spirit within the body. Life for these mystics was not meant to
be a vicious struggle against time; for time is nought else but the soundtrack
to one's life. One may spend all one's life worrying about death and decay,
and then eventually after all this perturbation, die. Conversely one may
choose to live life to the fullest, and pass away the better for having
lived, rather than having died a spiritual death many years before the
body ceased to exist, by way of fearing death and senescence. Life is
a gift to be cherished, not an existential trauma; a gift which is only
unravelled with the acceptance of humanity in its fullness: body and spirit.
It was this self-same point which Martin Luther
King Jr. tackled in his work of the 1960's, The
Measure of a Man. Examining the worth of the various elements
which comprise the human person in terms of their then current market
value, King Jr. postulated that in total, the human body would probably
sell for lower than $1.00.
King Jr. concluded that in terms of what constitutes our bodies, the
human person is not so precious a commodity. Yet soon after making this
astonishing conclusion, King Jr. wrote: "But
can we explain the whole of man in terms of ninety-eight cents? Can we
explain the artistic genius of a Michelangelo in terms of ninety-eight
cents? Can we explain the poetic genius of a Shakespeare in terms of ninety-eight
cents? Can we explain the spiritual genius of Jesus of Nazareth in terms
of ninety-eight cent? Can we explain the mystery of the human soul in
terms of ninety-eight cents?" The answer is of course,
no. The full beauty of the human person lies
in the interrelationship of body and spirit — the form created in
the image of God.
Jesus Christ as the model…
The Gospels teach us many things about Christ. He was a great teacher,
a great healer, an ardent lover and friend, and a man with a magnificent
capacity to love. We know all these things, but no Evangelist or disciple
ever gave us the slightest inkling as to His appearance. It seems that
the man with whom they lived and ate, with whom they shared three years
of their lives, impacted on them by the depth of His spirit, rather than
by His physical appearance. Christ was man, yet His body was the temple
of the spirit, and as the lantern is identified by the brightness of its
light, so that which animated Christ's body, His spirit, was the focus
of the attention of all who met Him.
When Pontius Pilate introduced Christ to the baying crowd with the words
'Ecce Homo' (John
19: 5, NRSV), he presented to the world, a man whose bodily
appearance was not so wonderful as the content of the character within.
As Dr. James Allan Francis was to
put so poetically: "Here is a young man
who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew
up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty,
and then for three years He was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote
a book. He never led an office. He never owned a home. He never had a
family. He never went to college. He never put his foot inside a big city.
He never traveled 200 miles from the place where He was born. He never
did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials
but Himself".
The spirit is not the sole element of our humanity, but it is the force
which gives life to the corruptible body, if this were not so, the many
and diverse images we have of Christ's physical appearance would have
been uniform, for the physicality of God made man, would have taken precedence.
Let us work toward our own personal self-realization,
caring for the body as the temple of a well-nurtured, life-giving spirit.
Headline
image credit: The head of Christ used in the headline banner
is of Mark Wallinger's scultpure, Ecce Homo, which was famously erected
on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square in 1999. Further information
can be obtained at Wikipedia.
|
 Andrew
Thomas Kania is a visiting scholar at Blackfriars Hall at the
University of Oxford, where he is completing a book on Dag Hammrskjöld.
He has taken 12 months leave of absence from his position as Director
of Spirituality at Aquinas College, Manning in Western Australia
to complete this task. Prior to this appointment at Aquinas Dr.
Kania was a lecturer for the School of Religious Education at the
University of Notre Dame Australia as well as for the Catholic Institute
of Western Australia at Edith Cowan and Curtin Universities. Dr.
Kania belongs to the Ukrainian Church and is interested in ecumenical
issues as well as contemporary problems facing religious educators.
|
©2007
Dr Andrew Thomas Kania
[Andrew Kania's Archive]
|
Email
this page to a friend
Print
friendly view
Post
your feedback in our forum
