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.

St Augustine of Hippo

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.

	Martin Luther King Jr Image: Howard Sochurek/LIFE

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.

©2007 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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