“Several times in his writing, Thomas shows his impatience with Origen’s view that the soul was united to a body as a sort of punishment for sin. This theory, he thinks, flies in the face not only of the biblical witness that God made all things good but also of the philosophical intuition, so deeply felt by Aquinas, that soul and body belong together. Were bodiliness a penalty for sin, the soul would continually chafe against the flesh (as in Michelangelo’s sculptures), longing to be rid of it. But for Aquinas just the opposite is the case: the soul is more itself and most at home in a body, better, “with” a body. Against Origen Thomas Aquinas says that “we ought to celebrate the wonderful communion of body and soul” (S. Th. 1a, q. 91, art. 3)
The implication of this radical view for the spiritual life are profound. First, we must make peace with our bodies. The theoretical dualism of our tradition has had some devastating practical consequences, forcing people to be suspicious of pleasure, of the instinctual life, of the sensations associated with sexuality. Especially in those cultures marked by puritanical forms of Protestantism or Jansenist Catholicism, there is a tendency to demonize the body and its passions as necessarily “fallen”, as inimical to the purposes of God. It was interesting to me that there was such a negative outcry among Christians when the movie version of Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ appeared. The film suggested that Christ might have felt an attraction to married life and to the sensual pleasures of sex, even going so far as to depict his sexual fantasies in some detail. For many Christians this constituted a blasphemous outrage, a compromising of the purity of Christ’s vocation and religious sensibility. To me the reaction proved only that many purportedly staunch defenders of the faith are in fact subtle heretics who practically deny the real concrete embodied humanity of Christ. It also showed that dualism is still very much alive in the general Christian consciousness. That the body and its pleasures might be intertwined with the “things of the spirit” is unthinkable to the dualist.”
— Fr. Robert Barron, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master, The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 1996.
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