[Music] W [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Please welcome to the stage Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute, Matthew Petrusic. [Music] Welcome, welcome all to Wonder 2024! It is my great, great pleasure to be here with you.
There has been so much preparation in putting together the space and this marvelous video. Can we give it another round of applause? So, the theme of the conference this year is "Recovering the Natural, Recovering the Human Body.
" It's the first conference that we've had in the Diocese of Rochester, and it's such an important moment for the Word on Fire Institute, especially for all of the Word on Fire Institute members who are joining us today. Now, the nature and purpose of the human body, both female and male, which was once considered so obvious as to not even merit comment—much less an entire conference—is unfortunately entirely up for grabs now. This is something we are even seeing play out in the Olympic Games.
The goal of this conference is to reground the discussion of the human body, to retether it to the real, drawing on rich theological, philosophical, scientific, medical, moral, political, and artistic resources. Wonder 2024 will help us reclaim an authentic understanding of, and deep appreciation for, the body: its resilience and its fragility, its joys and its sufferings, its transcendence and its temporality, its nature and its supernatural—and above all, its wonder, the wonder of the human body. We do not have bodies, nor do bodies have us; we are, in a fundamental way, our bodies.
We are our bodies. To be sure, existing as a body is not an excuse to ignore our moral freedom, which is grounded in our spiritual nature, and live only according to our instincts and desires. God knows that that path only leads to misery—individual and communal misery.
But we also have to be wary of the opposite error: living according to the lie that our bodies are mere physical matter for our own limitless manipulation. Again, our bodies do not belong to us, nor do we belong to them; we are our bodies. This weekend, we will be seeking a greater understanding of what it all means to be human, to be a body, and the moral and cultural implications of that truth.
Here to lay the intellectual foundation and set the table for our discussions this weekend is a man who needs no introduction: Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron is the bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester. He's the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, and he's the most followed Catholic evangelist online and in the media in the world, second only to Pope Francis.
His books, sermons, interviews, and commentaries have had—and continue to have—a tremendous influence on millions of people, both in the Church and in the wider culture. Put succinctly, there is, I believe, no greater evangelist, no greater proponent of the power and the wisdom, and the perennial relevance of the Gospel than Bishop Robert Barron. Please help welcome him to the stage!
[Applause] You [Music] Thank you all. Well, that's very kind. Thank you very much, and I'm really grateful to see everybody here.
You know, this conference is the realization of a dream I had a long time ago, which was to get religious people and scientific people to talk to each other. I remember standing at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress—you know, it's like 40,000 people—and it was so bugging me that in all the studies, it was showing young people are leaving because they think religion and science are incompatible. So I said, "Could all the science teachers please stand?
" and a lot of people stood up. "Could all the religion teachers please stand? " and they stood up.
I said, "You groups need to talk to each other because this is not just a theoretical problem; it's a very serious pastoral problem. " So this conference, which has roots in a Templeton Foundation grant, is the realization of that dream—that we could be thinking together, scientists and religious people, about these issues. And I think, as Matt was saying, it's a natural choice this year to be talking about the body because, as we all know, this has become a major neuralgic point, especially among our young people—the phenomenon of people feeling ill at ease with their own bodies, wanting to change their own bodies.
I read recently someplace that in Gen Z, now upwards of 25% of Gen Z young people are saying, "I'm not at ease with the gender I was assigned at birth. " This is a crisis—it's a crisis peculiar to our time in one sense—but my talk tonight really is going to be about how this is a very old problem. It's a very old problem in the Western intellectual tradition: how to think together body and soul, to use the classical language.
Notice, please, how often young people say some version of this: "Who I really am is out of step with the body that I have. " We let that language kind of slide through our minds without thinking about it. That's a very peculiar thing to say—that there's some kind of real me hidden in here someplace, and then the body is extrinsic to it and can be changed according to the whims of the real self.
That's a strange and, I would say, philosophically incorrect and religiously incorrect way of thinking about the body-soul relationship. So what I'm going to do tonight, in just very brief compass with you, is do a little genealogy of ideas because I think that formulation has a very old pedigree, and it runs right through our tradition back to ancient times. And I want to propose to you a better way of thinking about.
. . Body and soul.
So can I start with the Bible? I stand here as a bishop of the church, as a theologian, and I want to begin with the biblical anthropology: the understanding of the human being. So, the Book of Genesis—again, this is a poetic text that has a theological and spiritual intention.
What do we hear? The first humans made from the dust of the earth. There's no question; the Bible knows that we are of the earth, that we're animals.
I mean, the other animals are our very close cousins, and we look at our chemical makeup and our physiological structure, and so on, as we breathe in and out the atmosphere, as we make our way through the world, as we get hungry and thirsty, as we exalt in the foods that we eat and the beverages we drink. We exalt in the movement of our body, and in all these ways, we show that we are indeed animals, that we're made, as the Bible would put it poetically, from the dust of the earth. I don't know if, when you receive ashes on Ash Wednesday, the minister can now say, "Repent and believe the good news," but I always stay with the old formula: "Remember, you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.
" And that's not some negative, you know, I'm hung up on my death—no, it's stating this great biblical truth that we come from the earth. But then the Bible says, in the Book of Genesis, that the Lord God breathed into Adam's nostrils the ruach, the breath of life, and he became a living thing. Now don't think of that ruach, Elohim, as the Bible puts it, the breath of the Lord, as primarily this air that I'm breathing; we're using symbolic language now to speak of something higher, something beyond the merely physical.
Think of a participation in the mind of God: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; and through that word, all things came to be. " Think of the intelligence that gives rise to the radical intelligibility of the world. Well, this participation in the logos is breathed into Adam.
Ah! We do have the great picture, you know, almost a cliché now—we've seen this image so often—but of course, this is the moment of the ruach, if you want, being communicated to Adam. Notice please, in the crook of God's arm, that's Eve right looking at Adam, but the one we hardly ever pay attention to—go further, see the little child.
The left finger of God is on that child, and then the right finger is connecting to Adam. Well, that child is the logos; that's Jesus, and he's the new Adam, right? When he comes in flesh, look at the facial similarity with Adam, but it's like an electric current running from the logos, through the Father, into the hand of Adam.
Well, that's the communication of this higher, more Heavenly capacity. We're of the earth, and we're also of the ruach Elohim—we're also of the higher, designed to be, if you want, a harmonious hybrid of Heaven and Earth. Another reason why the human being is seen in the Bible as a priestly figure.
What do priests do but reconcile Heaven and Earth? They are bridge figures between these two worlds. You know, here's something too—you can't see it, it's so big—but a recent Michelangelo commentary is noticing how all the drapery and so on, the clouds around God the Father, looks like a cross-section of a brain.
And of course, Michelangelo was doing dissections; we know that, so that's not impossible. And so the mind of God, the logos, being communicated like an electric current into Adam—well, that is a depiction of the creation of the human being, both of the earth and of a higher world. Now stay with the biblical narrative just for a moment.
What happens? Well, the Fall. What's the Fall?
But the falling out of right relationship to God: sin. Our word "sin" comes from "zunde" in German; think of "sundering," think of a breaking, a breaking of relationship to God. What does that cause?
First, it causes a disintegration in us. Watch that all throughout the Bible: this falling apart of what was meant to be a unity. Well, one of those fallings apart is the falling apart of body and soul.
There's now a disassociation between the two. Again, why even today, when a young person might say, "Look, the real me and my body," well, that is a very, very old problem that comes from the disintegration that happens because of the Fall. Notice, I've talked about this a lot before, but one of the names for the devil in the Bible, right?
Diabos; diabal means scattering—to scatter. Well, we become internally scattered, divided, because of sin. You know, at the Sistine Chapel in Rome, I think of Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian.
He said people admire these great athletic figures on the Sistine ceiling, but he said they're kind of twisting and turning, and there's like a struggle going on. Well, that's part of this biblical idea of body and soul at odds with each other—that's a result of the Fall. One of the aspects of the healing that Jesus brings—so one of his basic names is "Healer.
" Our word "Savior" comes from that: he heals all these rifts, external and internal. I'll come back to that at the very end. So what I want to do is, in light of that fact—the fact of the Fall—and this kind of.
. . Disease between the body and soul is to look a little bit at the intellectual tradition, because I think there's a line that runs from Plato all the way to a young person today saying, "I'm out of step with my own body.
" Beginning with Plato, obviously one of the consummate geniuses in our philosophical tradition, someone who's massively influenced the way we think about so many things, he wrestled with this problem of body and soul, and the way he resolved it has been extremely influential up to the present day. Go back to Plato's Republic and the great parable of the cave. Right?
People chained in place in this cave and his great metaphor, and all they can see are the flickering images and the shadows on the wall cast by puppets that are being moved behind them. One of them manages to escape from this imprisonment and turn around and see what's happening, and then to make his way up out of the cave into the light of the real world. Well, as we all know, that's Plato's metaphor for the escape from the body, which has chained us to this world of passing, evanescent things.
And it's true, isn't it? I mean, our bodies and our sensorium orient us to a world that's always in flux and always changing. Things come and go, they live and they die.
Think even of the movement of time; there's this moment right now that we're sharing, and now it's over—it's in the past. This world is insubstantial, and our bodies tie us to it. How do we escape?
By this great move of the mind, Plato thinks, where the mind is able to escape from the constraints of the body and move into this higher realm of the forms. Right? So, I mean, that great metaphor runs from Plato all the way to the Matrix movies.
It's told over and over again how we escape from a fallen, limited world to a higher world. Look now in the dialogues, the Apology and the Phaedo, dealing with the trial and death of Socrates. What do you find?
This explicit language that the body is like a prison; the soul is imprisoned in it. And the whole point of the philosophical life, Socrates says, is to manage a prison break—to escape from the confines of the body to a higher world. This explains why, in the Phaedo, as Socrates's disciples are weeping around him, he insufficiently takes the hemlock, and he says, "Well, look, my whole life has been a preparation for my escape from the prison of the body so I can move into this higher spiritual realm.
" Now, can you see, everybody, in a way, it is congruent with the biblical idea that after the fall, there's a great tension between body and soul. But the way Plato conceptualizes that, the real me, the higher me, is in an awkward relationship to this lower physical self, and the whole point actually is to escape from it—get up and away from it. I wonder if any of that sounds familiar, and can we hear overtones of it even in the rhetoric used of today?
As I say, this Platonic style is remarkably durable in Western thought. One of its most powerful expressions is in the so-called Gnostic tradition. I would say, as a Catholic, in the Gnostic heresy.
Flourishing in the early centuries of the Christian era are the Gnostics, who claimed there's the high God, the source of all reality, and then by a series of emanations, there's a clEnum from that high God ever lower forms. Toward the bottom of it, there's this very fallen, compromised God, who then gives rise to this material world. So, the Gnostic vision is very negative on the world that we experience.
Like Plato, they'd see it as a fallen, compromised place. In all of us, they would say there's a spark of divinity—kind of spark from a higher world. Think of that as soul, and by a specialized gnosis, or knowledge—hence the name "the Gnostics"—by a specialized knowledge, I seek to escape from the confines of this fallen body and fallen world to return to the spiritual source.
St. Irenaeus in the 2nd century mightily did battle with Gnosticism. If you want all the details, four volumes of the "Adversus Heresies" of Irenaeus is his way of dealing with this Gnostic problem.
Did it go away? No, it endured. Think of just a few centuries later; it meets the philosophy of Mani, who was a Persian religious figure—Manichaeism, so-called.
The view that there are two realms: light and dark, the light associated with spirit, the dark with matter, and there's a constant warfare between these two elements. Again, mind you, there is something biblically grounded here that there is, in fact, a tension between spirit and matter, but it's born of sin, it's born of the fall. But Manichaeism?
Do you want to see a contemporary version of it? Watch any of the Star Wars movies—it is contemporary Manichaeism: the dark side of the Force, the light side of the Force. Right?
But it's a reiteration of the Platonic Gnostic tradition. A trivial matter? No, the very smartest man in late antiquity, Augustine of Hippo, fell under its spell for nine years.
The great Augustine, Father of the Church, was a Manichean for nine years. Did it go away? No.
Move up now to the end of the 12th, beginning of the 13th century. In the south of France, we find the Albigensian heresy. Any Dominicans here?
Of course, Dominicans were founded in many ways to deal—there they are—to deal with the Albigensian heresy. It was a reemergence of the sort of Gnostic Manichean strain—the battle, the struggle. between spirit and matter, Dominicans did pretty well against the Albigensians, but did this problem go away?
Uh-huh, I think it's very interesting to see its reemergence in the early modern philosophers. So, all of us in Philosophy 101 would have read René Descartes' "Meditations" and "Discourse on Method. " Descartes says, "Well, look, the world that I can see, you know, with my senses, that's so dubious it's not the source of truth; it's the source of illusion and deception.
" It frustrated him: How could he base his philosophy on something as even transient as this passing world? See how Platonic that is. He really saw the world as just shifting, unreliable forms.
But famously, he retreats into himself and formulates the famous Cogito, right? "Cogito, ergo sum"—I think, therefore I am. And I know that's true; that's indubitable.
If I doubt everything, at least I exist as someone who doubts. But watch the move; it's very interesting. Going deep down within, inside himself, so to speak, he finds this place of certainty—the Cogito.
The outside realm remains this realm of doubt, and he makes a sharp distinction, Descartes does, between what he calls the "res cogitans," the thinking thing (that's the soul or the self buried deep down), and "res extensa," which means extended things out there in the shifting world. Well, because my body, Descartes says, I can see it, and it's subject to illusion and change; the body must belong to that outside world. But the Cogito that belongs to the inner world, they are metaphysically distinct realms.
Again, I would say born of the Fall, but now philosophically expressed as a tension between body and soul. Famously, Descartes thinks that he could effect a union between them through the pineal gland in the brain; he thought that's where the soul and the body meet. But see, he was wrestling with this problem of the battle between the two: what's the real self, and then what's the body?
Did it go away? No; Descartes influenced all of modern thought. I think a really interesting example is in Immanuel Kant, maybe the greatest of the modern philosophers.
What do you find in Kant's moral theory? He says the only thing that can be called good without restriction is a good will. So Descartes found a place to stand in the Cogito, in "I think, therefore I am.
" Kant finds it in the goodness of the will. And he also says what happens in the outside world as a result of my moral action is less relevant to the moral act; what matters is the goodness of his will. Again, the primacy of the interior over the exterior realm.
Oh, you know, I should mention it was Gilbert Ryle, the 20th-century philosopher, who gave us the famous phrase describing Descartes' view of body and soul as the "ghost in the machine. " So the body's like a machine, and somehow, weirdly, there's a ghost in there—there's a spiritual something in there. And how do you think the ghost in relation to the machine becomes a problem for modern philosophy?
Just one more stop in the modern period: think of Jean-Paul Sartre, the founder of modern existentialism: "Existence precedes essence. " That's how Sartre described it. What he meant was my freedom precedes any definition that I give to myself or to the world—that the world doesn't define me; my body doesn't define me.
My freedom comes first, and then my freedom imposes whatever order it wants on the world. Notice again this mark that I would argue goes right back to Plato, comes roaring up through the tradition I've described all the way to our time: there's a deep, hidden real me, and then there's this outside area that's awkwardly related to it, whether it's the ghost in the machine or the prisoner in the prison. The freedom that comes first, and then the world that gets defined.
Can I suggest, everybody, what we hear when a young person says, "You know, the real me, my real self, is out of step with my body; my body doesn't correspond to what's who I really am? " That young person is speaking out of this very long tradition, which I would characterize as a philosophical articulation of the problem bequeathed to us by the Fall, by our loss of contact with God, which has led to this disintegration of body and soul. Okay, that's a very rapid little Plato to NATO, as they say, you know, a little overview.
But I think it is a recognizable strain in our thinking. And it's funny to me how we take so for granted that language: "Oh, yeah, yeah, your real self doesn't correspond to your body. " But that's a very, very weird and peculiar way to talk.
Now, what I want to do—don't worry, I won't go beyond 6:30; don't worry, we'll have dinner at 6:30—I want to propose very briefly an alternative view, which I think is more philosophically coherent and more in line with the biblical anthropology I was describing. And to do it, I'm going to go back—we did Plato to NATO; let's go from NATO back to Plato and to Plato's greatest disciple, namely Aristotle. Aristotle loved Plato and took in his thought in many ways, but he also was sharply critical of Plato, and in one area particularly—here I'd say in this anthropology—Aristotle was never at home with the idea that the soul is somehow a prisoner stuck inside a prison.
Rather, what does he say? He says the soul is the first principle of life in a living thing. That's a cool little definition: the soul, "soul" (he would have called it), becomes "anima" in Latin.
Soul in. . .
English is the first principle of life in a living thing; it doesn't mean some spiritual thing stuck inside, imprisoned by the body. It is not a ghost in the machine by any means; it's the animating principle of a living thing. Can you, I, me?
Even as I say those words, I feel the health of that language—that it's just a much saner way to speak. It's the pattern; if you want the principle, the energy, you'd be at home with that language of enera energy that makes a living thing to be what it is. It's in line, of course, with Aristotle's idea of matter and form, right?
So, we're all made up of matter—these bodies—but bodies in a particular form or according to an organizing pattern, right? So, what makes us who we are is the organizing pattern that brings the matter of my body together as one. Well, the first principle of life, or the first enera energy of a living thing, we call a soul, which is why Aristotle felt that plants have souls.
They're vegetative souls, the first principle of life in a plant—that which allows it to take in nutrition and to grow and so on and so forth. It's why he thought animals had a distinctive soul; he called it a sentient soul, enabling them to move about, to take in sense data, and to organize it, and so on. And we have a soul—a rational soul—that enables us to engage in intellectual acts and acts of will and freedom.
Plato's view: a prisoner inside the prison, leading to the ghost of the machine, leading, I think, ultimately to the real me versus my body, which has to be adjusted. Aristotle: the inseparable union of body and soul. And I would say, indeed, hearkening back—although not in his own mind—but hearkening back to the Genesis idea of dust and the ruach Elohim coming together.
Can I go now from Aristotle to my intellectual hero, to his greatest disciple within the church? I'm talking about Thomas Aquinas. So, Thomas Aquinas, as you know, as a young man, is studying at the University of Naples.
On the streets of Naples at that time were the very, very new Dominicans—this new religious order of beggars, mendicants—decided to hand their lives over to God's Providence. They would beg for their food and they would preach on the streets. So, unlike the Benedictines, who were sequestered in their monasteries, the Dominicans, like the Franciscans, were out in the world—the Dominicans, the Order of Preachers.
Well, young Thomas Aquinas is enamored of the Dominicans, and he joins this kind of revolutionary band of, I'd call them, back-to-basics evangelicals—men of the Gospel of the Bible. And Thomas Aquinas is, above all, a man of the Bible. Now, at the same time, young Thomas Aquinas, at the University of Naples, falls under the influence of—and I say it, probably as an Irishman, Peter of Ireland.
Peter of Ireland was one of the very few people in Europe at the time who was teaching Aristotle because Aristotle's works were seen as suspect and they were just making their way into the West. But one of these underground Aristotelians was Peter of Ireland, and to his classroom comes this young, brilliant kid, Thomas Aquinas. So, he's a Dominican and he's an Aristotelian.
I think he took in those two traditions in a very creative way, and what he liked about Aristotelian anthropology was that it was closer to the biblical imagination because of Aristotle's reading of body and soul together so tightly. The first principle of life in a living thing, young Aquinas sees that not just as a more coherent philosophy; he sees it as more in touch with the Bible. Here's a line now.
I want this to be maybe burned into your minds for this weekend: as opposed to the “who I really am” being out of step with my body, here's what I want you to keep in your mind: Aquinas says the link between soul and body is so tight that "anima mea, sum ego," Latin for "I am not my soul. " It's interesting. Stay with me here because I think it's a very telling distinction.
I'm not my soul; I am the hybrid of body and soul. The real me is not my soul; the body is not something extrinsic to it. The body's not a prison for the soul; the body isn't a machine that a ghost is floating around inside of.
So, I don't say, "Oh, there's the real me," and then "there's my body. " No, I am the hybrid of body and soul—this matter, now animated by a living principle. So again, anima, non ego.
Thomas knows about the soul, but don't identify the soul with who you really are. No, no, you're inescapably body and soul. Can I give you this?
This is a weird little moment in the Western intellectual tradition, but I think it's worth reflecting on. The year is 1270. So that kid from the University of Naples now has become a great theologian.
He's in the intellectual capital of the world at that time—Paris—and in 1270 he has a disputatio, so a kind of public debate with a guy named John Peckham. John Peckham was a Franciscan scholar. What was the matter of the debate?
Whether there are three souls in us or one soul. Now remember what Aristotle said: plants have souls, animals have souls, we have souls, right? So, John Peckham, he's an Aristotelian of sorts, says, "Well, we must have three souls because there are things in us that are kind of like plants"—think of our digestive system and respiratory system and our automatic.
. . you know, it's a bit like the.
. . Way a plant organizes its life, and there's an animal dimension to us.
We see things, and we move around, and so on. So I must have a vegetative soul; I must have a sentient soul. And then finally, I can think these really high thoughts and all that, so I have a rational soul.
Thomas Aquinas, in his famous disputatio, said, "No one soul, one soul; the one rational soul is the organizing pattern and principle of the whole of your life. " Now, you say, "Okay, that's a bit of medieval hair-splitting; why does that matter? " Well, here's why.
If you say, with John Peckham, that the intellectual soul is radically different from the vegetative and sentient parts of my body, they kind of have their own souls, and then there's the rational soul. In that arrangement, it's far easier to say, "Oh, the real me, the rational soul, the high, the real me is different from the body. The body's got its own kind of thing going on.
" Thomas Aquinas roared, and it's a very interesting debate. The language used—Aquinas roars his disapproval of this—insisting upon the unity of the soul. What was he saying?
"No, no, the body, the body in all of its elements is patterned according to this one unifying principle. " He was afraid that we would split apart in that sort of Platonic manner if we start talking about three souls— the one soul animating the one body, making me who I am. See, that's what Aquinas took from both the Bible and Aristotle.
Okay, let me bring it to a close with this. As you're following this conversation, you're saying, "Okay, I get the Platonic thing is problematic; that it really hyper-emphasizes body and soul in tension with each other. And I get how Aristotle kind of solved that and really brought body and soul into a tight union.
I understand that, and how Aquinas took that in. But has it gone out so far the other direction that the soul looks like it's just kind of part of our biology, that there's nothing really spiritual or immortal about the soul? " And to be fair, I think Aristotle didn't believe the soul was immortal.
He compared it to wax and the shape of wax. You know, I mean, the shape doesn't mystically survive the dissolution of the wax. So, okay, has Aquinas solved the Platonic problem but opened up another problem?
Here's the answer: Aquinas believes in the immateriality of the soul. Why? Because the soul, in its intellectual capacity, unites itself to a sheerly immaterial reality, such as an abstraction, such as a mathematical formula, such as the patterns and forms that we can find in the intelligible world.
When the mind knows—not a particular human being; I can know you through my senses and my imagination—but when I know humanity, I've moved beyond anything particular or sensible. I've moved to the level of pure pattern. When I know not, "Oh, here I can count seven things," but I know the number seven in itself, I'm beyond the material world.
Plato was right about that. I've moved to a higher realm when I know the quadratic formula in itself as a pure pattern. So since the mind is capable of that, Thomas says the mind, or rather the soul, is essentially immaterial.
Okay, you say, "All right, I kind of get that, but aren't we back with Descartes' problem now? How does this immaterial thing relate to the matter of the body? How can we talk about this intimate union?
" Here's where Aquinas comes in: Don't think of matter and spirit as like two things existing within the same context. There are these kind of substantive things we call matter and then these kind of ghostly things we call spirit. Think of it rather this way: What we call the spiritual or the immaterial is at a higher dimension of existence.
It's at a higher pitch of existence. Let me give an example from math and geometry. Think of a point—it's like a one-dimensional point.
Now think of a line—right, two dimensions. How many points can be contained in the line? Well, an infinite number of points, because the line is, as it were, above the point.
Now think of the line, and we're going to draw—or like a square; we'll make it a cube. We go from two dimensions to three dimensions. How many squares can fit inside the cube?
Well, an infinite number. The cube contains what's at a lower dimension. Does that make sense?
The cube is not at the same dimension as the square; it's at a higher dimension and is inclusive of the square. What's the soul now? And in some ways, friends, I'm trying to bring this whole thing together around this idea: What's the soul?
But this principle of life, this participation in the Divine Logos, this organizing pattern and principle that contains and lifts up matter to a new level of complexity. Now let me give you a little Zen from Thomas Aquinas, and it's really—again, burn this one into your minds for the weekend. Thomas says this in one of his mysterious texts: "The soul is in the body not as contained by it, but rather as containing it.
" Ah, that's what I'm driving at. Does that make sense? "Hey, where's my soul?
" Yeah, the soul's in the body, but it's not a ghost in the machine. It's not a prisoner inside a prison. It's in the body not as contained by the body, but rather as containing it, the organizing principle of life that raises matter up and gathers it as one living thing.
Now do you see how we're solving this tension? This battle between Body and Soul—the real me and the body. No, no, I am not my soul; I am this hybrid of body and soul.
And we're right back to the Book of Genesis and the dust that is gathered up and organized according to this principle that comes from the great logos and mind of God. I'll give you one more, then I promise I'm going to stop. What is it?
Six? Okay, good, I got six minutes. Um, I might have referenced this fellow before; I'd love to do a whole Wonder conference around his thought.
I'm referring to John Polkinghorne. Do you know that name? Uh, he died just a few years ago now.
John Polkinghorne was a Cambridge particle physicist, so he was a scientist at the highest level of the academic world. About midlife, he becomes a priest—an Anglican priest—and then proceeded to write, I think, some of the best books on religion and science. Here's Polkinghorne's version of exactly what I've been talking about.
I’ll do it in terms of my own life; it might be a little clearer. Think of—if I showed you a picture of my first communion—seven-year-old Bobby Baron in this little kid in a white suit and a shock of blonde hair—and I remember that day very well. Oh yeah, I received first communion.
I remember that day. Now fast forward to when I was 26; I’m ordained to the priesthood, and I remember that day very well: I was ordained to the priesthood the same. I’m standing before you now, but John Polkinghorne would insist there's not one single cell of the body of that little kid or of that 26-year-old that's now before you, right?
Every single cell of the body of that kid has been replaced, in fact, many times over, right? So why in the world do I feel the same? Why would I confidently say, "Oh yeah, there I am back in, you know, 1960, whatever it was, and there I was in 1986, and here I am now"?
Why do I say that? Polkinghorne’s answer was—and he goes right back to Aristotle—the form, the organizing pattern, the pattern remains the same even as the matter has changed dramatically over those decades. The form, the pattern, the organizing principle, the first principle of life, the soul—that's not in the body but rather animates the body.
And then Polkinghorne speculates: when Paul talks about a spiritual body, remember in those mysterious texts a somatic thumos, right? A spiritual body—what does he mean? God, who grounds and knows the pattern of my life and your life, knows this organizing form and principle and can now use it to animate and to elevate a new matter—this spiritual body—in continuity.
Sure, just as the body of that little kid and the body of that 26-year-old are in continuity with me, even though the cells have all changed, might we hope for this spiritual body to receive according to the same animating principle? Anyway, I think he's a good example of what Aquinas means when talking about the body-soul relationship. So, I mean, just contrast this entire weekend: the real me that's out of step with my body and Aquinas' anima.
No, no, I am not my soul; I'm this hybrid of body and soul. And then one last thing—just a Biblical image. Um, we start with Genesis in the Gospel of Mark, so the first of the Gospels: the account of Jesus in the desert.
You know the temptation; you don't have all the details you find in Matthew and Luke of the temptations. Here's what you find: listen, he was in the wilderness 40 days, tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him. That's the description.
Hold that picture in your mind: Jesus—there he is, right? The logos. There's this power going into Adam.
He's the new Adam; he's the one who reestablishes the connection between Heaven and Earth. He's the high priest; therefore, he's the one, salvator, savior, who heals the division between body and soul. What do you see in this beautiful Markan sort of icon?
Jesus in the desert, the animals are around him; yes, the dust of the Earth, the animal realm—our bodies. Yes, and the angels waited on him. He stands as the bridge between Heaven and Earth.
We're all called now to participate in Christ, to be healed by him, to find in him the unity of body and soul. I hope that image stays clearly in your hearts and minds this weekend, and God bless you all. Good talking to you tonight.
Thank you!
