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<\/p>\nIt is standard fare for Christians to believe that human beings are made of body and soul, physical stuff and a mysterious \u201cnon-physical\u201d something called the soul\u2014which turns out to be the most important part of what we are.\u00a0I often put my students\u2014many of whom are products of twelve years of Catholic parochial education\u2014in groups and ask them to come up with a definition of the word \u201csoul.\u201d Their collective definitions always indicate that the soul is the part of the human being that is responsible for thought, many of our emotions, and most importantly is the part of the human being that survives physical death\u2014meaning that the soul is a \u201cnon-physical\u201d thing (whatever that means). Where did we get this notion from? Newsflash\u2014it isn\u2019t from scripture.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhat exactly am I?\u201d is a basic human question, one that each of us has strong intuitions about. One popular intuition is \u201cI am a physical thing plus something more.\u201d In philosophy, this intuition feeds a model of the human person called dualism<\/strong>, according to which the human being is a tenuous and temporary union of two very different things, soul\/mind and body. Dualism has a long and powerful philosophical pedigree; Plato is one of its most eloquent advocates in the ancient world, while Descartes is a powerful and influential advocate of dualism two thousand years later.<\/p>\n Dualism is\u00a0both highly influential and highly problematic. The sharp separation between mind and body is both psychologically disturbing, in that it provides little guidance as to how integration between the various parts of a person is to be accomplished, and philosophically incoherent, in that it divides reality into camps that not only are different in substance but are actually often at crossed purposes.<\/p>\n Dualism lays the groundwork for a science that ignores the spiritual, a philosophical materialism that belittles the notion of anything other than what is directly in front of us within the reach of our senses, and a spirituality that downgrades the physical or even considers it as evil. Christianity developed in the atmosphere of Plato\u2019s radical dualism; the structure of a good deal of traditional Christian doctrine continues to carry dualistic scars.<\/p>\n Consider, for instance, dualism\u2019s influence on one of the early founders and shapers of such doctrine.\u00a0I am occasionally responsible for introducing a bunch of freshmen to Augustine of Hippo, a lecture usually followed later in the week by two-hour seminar investigations of his thought. Augustine is second only to the apostle Paul in his influence on the development of early Christian doctrine and belief. I am not a fan. Augustine is one of those influential figures who cannot be ignored, although I would love to. I often deflect the \u201cIntroduction to Augustine\u201d lecture to a theology or literature colleague on whatever team I am a member of in the interdisciplinary program I teach in. But occasionally there is no one else to turn to, and it is up to me to provide a \u201cfair and balanced\u201d introduction to a guy I really don\u2019t like. Oh well, if college professors earned the big bucks, this would be one of the reasons why.<\/p>\n The assignment for the particular day I have in mind was Books I-III of Augustine\u2019s Confessions<\/em>, one of the most influential works in the vast sweep of Western literature. With it Augustine invented a genre of literature as well as a method of theological investigation infused with philosophical acumen. These early books of Confessions<\/em> are Augustine\u2019s selective memoir of his years from infancy to early adulthood.\u00a0 As I reviewed the text I was reminded of why I find Augustine so disturbing.<\/p>\n The focus of Augustine\u2019s attention is always on the dark side of human nature, on whatever it was inside of him that caused him to always be attracted to what is wrong rather than what is right, evil rather than good. Ranging from his belief that he showed signs of maladjustment to the good from birth (as all infants do), through his obsession with the simple theft of a bunch of pears during his adolescence, to his withering self-criticism over his attraction to the theater as an early adult, Augustine never moves far from an obsession with what John Calvin, many centuries later, will describe as \u201cutter depravity.\u201d<\/p>\n I told my freshmen that Augustine was actually the first Protestant, one thousand years early. To seal the deal, I likened Augustine\u2019s attitude concerning human nature to Martin Luther\u2019s likening of God\u2019s grace applied to human nature as similar to a fresh layer of new fallen snow covering a pile of shit. Divine grace covers a multitude of sins, and a sufficient amount of snow can cover an awful lot of shit. And guess who the pile of shit is?<\/p>\n Augustine seriously bothers me because I grew up in a family, community and world infused with Augustine-like energies. Negative, suspicious, self-absorbed and obsessed with even the slightest aroma of sin, particularly of the sort that involved the body. My problem always was that I didn\u2019t feel like a bifurcated being\u2014my mind and body seemed to work together pretty well\u2014and I sort of liked things made of matter. I didn\u2019t find out until college that the debate about the relationship between soul and body is at the heart of philosophy from the beginning, with Plato arguing for dualism and his star pupil Aristotle saying \u201cnot so much.\u201d<\/p>\n As challenging as these issues are in philosophy, they become even more pressing when considering the relationship between humans and what is greater than us. Dualism not only offers a skewed and problematic map of reality, but also fundamentally contorts and deforms the very heart and soul of Christian belief\u2014the Incarnation. If believing that God became human means anything, it means that the greatest and most cosmic dualistic split of all\u2014the one between human and divine\u2014has been healed. The divine response to human failings is not to cover them up but rather to transform the human by infusing it with the divine. The mystery of transcendence and immanence remains, but the promise of the Incarnation\u00a0is all about immanence\u2014God with (and in) us.<\/p>\n At its core, the Christian faith proposes that God is both immanent and transcendent, both intimately with us and wholly other. But as Diana Butler Bass observes in\u00a0Finding Jesus<\/em>, \u201cAs much as Christians have claimed immanence and transcendence, humans are notoriously bad with paradox, and immanence has typically been pushed aside for transcendence,\u201d just as dualism tends to push body aside in service to the mind\/soul. And yet we are both mind\/soul and body, just as the divine is both right here and way out there. Perhaps we need to develop some comfortability with paradox. Stay tuned for more in coming posts.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is standard fare for Christians to believe that human beings are made of body and soul, physical stuff and a mysterious \u201cnon-physical\u201d something called the soul\u2014which turns out to be the most important part of what we are.\u00a0I often put my students\u2014many of whom are products of twelve years of Catholic parochial education\u2014in groups […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":26793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,21,35,40,48,52,68,1251,73,84,94],"tags":[169,1248,242,1245,383,463],"class_list":["post-32865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-belief","category-christianity","category-faith","category-god","category-human-nature","category-incarnation","category-mystery","category-paradox","category-philosophy","category-science","category-teaching","tag-christianity","tag-dualism","tag-god","tag-paradox","tag-philosophy","tag-teaching"],"yoast_head":"\n