Gender-altering surgeries. Abortion on demand. “Swingers Break”, offering spring breakers “a personal paradise where you can explore and enjoy all your hedonistic desires” (yes, all one’s hedonistic desires). Pope John Paul II warned us that by abandoning God as a culture, we will inevitably find ourselves entangled in a culture of death. The prophetic nature of his warning is today more salient than ever.
What lies at the heart of our wayward culture is a false notion of what it means to be human. In forgetting our identity as creatures made by God, like God, and for God, we have wandered off the true route to real and lasting happiness. Above all, as Alasdair MacIntyre has assessed, we have become “forgetful” of the sacred meaning of the human body.
Yet, at a glance, it may seem that precisely the opposite is true. Are we really forgetful of the body? For one might rightly wonder whether there has ever been a civilization more obsessed with the body. Biohacking, bodybuilding, tattoos, piercings, breast implants, Botox injections, Neurolink, gender reassignment procedures, radical and invasive weight loss treatments—such things have become norms within contemporary society and seem to suggest we are anything but neglectful of our embodiment. Well, to be sure, we have not forgotten that we have bodies. One thinks here of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s colorful remark that if anyone were to doubt the existence of their own body, “I should take him to be a halfwit.”
What we have forgotten, on the other hand, is what our bodies are and what they are for. This is perhaps most patently clear, as Pope Benedict XVI has pointed out, in our sex-crazed “anything goes” culture where the human body has been mutated into a sort of plaything to be enjoyed, manipulated, even abused, according to one’s preference. Pope Benedict writes,
The contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man’s great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless.
Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor contends that the secularization of our culture—and the secularization of the anthropological framework upon which it operates—is constituted by more than a decline of religious belief and practice. It is also the result of a deep-seated secular social imaginary—a sort of subconscious intuition—by which people picture their lives and their world through a particular imaginative lens. The social imaginary is something like a worldview, colored implicitly by particular philosophical, historical, and social assumptions. And it tints every mind, even the minds of Catholics.
What is included in the current cultural social imaginary? One dominant aspect is the prevailing presupposition that the human body is fundamentally instrumental. It rejects the Aristotelian notion of the body as an integral good of the human person, instead viewing the living body as a sort of add-on to the person, which can be manipulated at will for utility or pleasure. This body-person dualism, rooted in the seventeenth century “substance dualism” of René Descartes, and with philosophical roots still deeper in Plato, is in direct contrast with the Catholic vision of the human person. The Catholic stance insists that the body is intrinsically personal. Your body isn’t something you have, in other words, it’s something you are. To separate the body from the person is, in fact, to die.
But what exactly does it mean to be your body? It doesn’t mean—or at least it doesn’t necessitate—that you are just a body.
For one thing, the living human body exists simultaneously as subject and object. All living human beings experience the natural world—and always through the body—in a personal way. When my eyes see, I see. When my skin is touched, I am touched. We live in the world as a distinct “me, myself, and I.” But the body is a physical, space-occupying object too. As such, it is bound by physical laws, as all material things are in the natural world. And it is an amalgam of parts, all of which perform their specific functions in service of the whole and never independently of the whole.
In my professional work as a chiropractor (and the same goes for any health care provider), it is tempting to see the human being as hardly more than a dynamic combination of interrelated parts. Chiropractors are experts in human movement who specialize in the diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of conditions involving bones, muscles, nerves, and joints. Thus, as a mechanic (so to speak) of the human body, I am compelled to look upon my patients as biological mechanisms. In a sense, that is what we are as natural bodies.
But that, of course, is not the whole story of what it means to be human. The human being is more than the sum of his parts. His soul makes it so. And this fact behooves me to see through even a sore finger to the person whose finger it is, who suffers not solely as a finger, but as a person. When we fail to see the living (and suffering) human body as a person, then we will fail to treat our bodies—and those of others—with the dignity of a person.
The human being is, in fact, an embodied soul. We are not combinations of body and soul, but a composite. What’s the difference? To combine is to unite two independently existing things without a total union into one complete, fully integrated thing. Fabric and thread combine to make a shirt. Oil and vinegar combine to make vinaigrette salad dressing. But to “make” a human being, the body and soul together make a single complete-in-itself substance—a far more profound union.
It is important to understand that the soul and body do not simply “touch” or interact: they marry into one. Think of combination and composition as two degrees of union; whereas combination is an incomplete union, composition is total. Since the body is material and the soul is immaterial, they are capable of a union far more complete than any integration of two material things.
Further, the soul is the lifespring of the body. This is how the intellectual giants of the Catholic tradition like Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure thought of the soul, and this is how the Catholic Church thinks of it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “It is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body” (365).
Think of the body-soul unity as something like the relationship between the eye and its vision. Just as vision makes the eye “come alive” as an eye, so too does the soul make the human body a living human body; and indeed a living human body. As the life principle of all living bodies (including plants, animals, and humans), death results when body and soul are separated. On this view, the living human body cannot make sense—indeed, the very notion is incoherent—apart from understanding it as ensouled.
But if plants and animals also have souls, what’s so special about the human soul? What kind of life does it actualize, that in so doing sets human life apart from the rest? It gives rational life. So, while human life can be spoken of and studied strictly in biological terms, we can neither speak nor study except in the context of being rational. We can contemplate the world and its causes, physical and spiritual—a uniquely human capability, but we do this via the rational powers of intellect and will. We are not merely speculative beings, “stuck in our heads,” as it were. We can act upon our understanding freely—so freely, in fact, that we can override our animal instincts and act for reasons despite our irrational impulses. The powers of mind and free will, though spiritual powers, are fully integrated with our bodies so as to make our bodies intelligent and free. As D.Q. McInerny writes, “Mind transforms everything it touches.”
It’s tempting to imagine the soul to be a sort of ethereal, perhaps vapory, substance that spreads out and fills the body like air in a balloon. But here the imagination tempts to do us an injustice. The imagination, in fact, only stores physical images derived from past sense experience. But the immaterial soul is not in the sensible category. So, our imagination can only provide analogical images of a soul apart from the body. Only by an act of abstraction, that is, only by an act of the immaterial intellect, can we make sense of how the soul and body unite wholly as one.
Here’s one final consideration. The whole soul is present in the whole body, and in each of its parts. Contrary to how physical substances fill their containers, all of the soul is contained by every part of the living body. As Saint Augustine puts it, “In each body the whole soul is in the whole body, and in each part is entire.” Saint Thomas cites this quotation from Augustine, then adds,
If the soul were united to the body merely as its motor, we might say that it is not in each part of the body, but only in one part through which it would move the others. But since the soul is united to the body as its form, it must necessarily be in the whole body, and in each part thereof.
This is a hard one to understand; but we must remember that we are not talking in strictly physical terms here. We shouldn’t therefore impose the same limitations on metaphysical (meta is Greek for “beyond”) entities like souls that we would on material things. The soul is utterly unlike anything we can see and touch. We cannot impose on it the same boundaries that we would on air, water, or any other material substance.
How can the whole soul be “in the whole body, and in each part is entire”? Speculatively, this pushes up against the threshold of mystery. Yet our common experience reveals how intuitive and true it is. If I (for instance) look at only my hand, I look at me. This remains true if I look at my foot, or my elbow, and from any angle whatever. Every part of my living body is, in the fullest sense, a manifestation of me, myself, and I. And if I see only the eyes and forehead of my child peeking at me sneakily through a window, I playfully shout “I see you!” even though I only see a small fraction of his body.
To be sure, all I have said here is barely a sketch of a complete, full-bodied Catholic anthropology. I have hardly yet begun to take into account the theological reality of the human person as the divine “image-bearer” and as one destined for bodily resurrection. A solely philosophical account of human nature is always inadequate because “the truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”
But we are now in an era where, to reclaim what has been forgotten about the human person and to thereby reconstruct the social imaginary according to the truth, we must return to the basics (or what Edward Feser has called “pre-Christian apologetics”). And the first step in such a program is to unveil the broken and destructive dualistic metaphysics that underlies much of our modern ills; to build again from the ground up in hopes that we can, with God’s help, transform what has become a post-Christian culture into (at the very least) a pre-Christian one.
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A favorite statue. Mine’s as well as many many others. Like Rodin’s thinker my thought is, Are we bodies? [the other question is where was Matthew Nelson when I injured my back?].
“For one thing, the living human body exists simultaneously as subject and object. All living human beings experience the natural world—and always through the body—in a personal way. When my eyes see, I see”. We distinguish ourselves from what we see and touch. Perfect. Nelson then postulates that we must go deeper than what we initially see so as to develop a plausible anthropology. Sense perception, the body’s natural, first faculty, which in Man is actualized with the apprehension of the intellect. Nelson accents Aquinas’ understanding of the human form, the soul, as permeating the entire body [Key to the Eucharistic miracle].
Man capable of reflective knowledge of self in the act of perceiving things possesses that capacity given by intellect that distinguishes him as a person distinct from all animal life. And as such able to distinguish between what is good and what is evil. What is besmirched and what in its pure state is beautiful.
We read: “The human being [person] is, in fact, an embodied soul.” Yes, an embodied soul, rather than even a body with a soul.
We also read about a: “…deep-seated secular social imaginary—a sort of subconscious intuition—by which people picture their lives and their world through a particular imaginative lens.”
Yes, and elaborating on such pre-conceptions—authenticity is violated by: “fundamentally different cognitional, ethical and religious premises that we choose, not prove. If these premises do not correspond to reality (and contradictory premises cannot all correspond to what is—some must be wrong), neither will the conclusions that flow from them [….] Why does sin obscure perception of religious and moral truth? [!][….] We have [already] made fundamental choices that color the specific evidence we see so that we see them one way rather than another” (Thomas Dubay, “Authenticity,” Ignatius, 1997).
I wish this would have acknowledged that, in a real way, we still do not know exactly what a body is. As one obvious example, we do not know exactly what a human body is, which is why there are paradoxes of long standing regarding, for example, a human body that is entirely absorbed by cannibals. Obviously GOD knows the answer to such paradoxes, but I am not sure any mere human who has not experienced death knows the answer. These are important because we know we will receive the same bodies back after the general resurrection.
As a physicist, I will also say that physics, as we currently know it, does not even know exactly what it means to be “a material or corporeal body”. Nor do I think the folks over in the departments of philosophy or theology have solid answers to that — though each of us can probably say something about what it is NOT. These are probably questions to which we will never have the answer in this world, yet it is interesting to ask all the same.
WHAT ABOUT THE ECONOMY OF THE BODY?
This article declares “the theological reality of the human person as the divine ‘image-bearer’.”
Then the article adds this poignant statement:
“The Catholic stance insists that THE BODY is intrinsically personal. YOUR BODY isn’t something you have, in other words, it’s something YOU ARE.”
Given that each person on the earth IS his/her body, and that each human body bears the divine image of God, doesn’t this logically follow:
Each image-of-God-bearing human body is intrinsically involved in all earthly economic activities and relations?
PRIVATE PROPERTY AND BODILY PRIVACY
Haven’t various philosophers and political activists, of both the right and the left, analogized the status of PRIVATE PROPERTY to the private status of the HUMAN BODY?
I.e., just as, under English common law, no one can legally engage in unauthorized touching of another person’s body (traditionally there were exceptions for parents and children, teachers and students, husbands and wives, masters and slaves), so no one can legally engage in unauthorized use or possession of another person’s private property.
NO SURVIVAL ON THE EARTH WITHOUT A BODY AND PROPERTY
And yet, does not each human body absolutely require the use or possession of some property, beyond his or her own body, in order to survive, reproduce, and raise children on this planet?
Now, let us return to the line from this article:
“…the theological reality of the human person as the divine ‘image-bearer’.”
So, what are the divine, God-given rights of economically dispossessed human bodies? (i.e., persons who own no property other than their own bodies)
When a few citizens in a free economy gain control of most of the valuable land and useful infrastructure, and many citizens cannot gain access to even a tiny bit of such private property in order to survive, and cannot get hired at even a bare survival wage by such private property owners, what then?
It this just a matter of: “Too bad, too sad.”
It is just a matter of heading over to Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army and begging for handouts?
And if they are currently out of handouts, then is it just a matter of: “Too bad, too sad.”
Doesn’t the human body have a social dimension?
Isn’t that reflected in the concept of the Body of Christ as referring to the collective known as the Church?
Isn’t the social dimension of the body also somewhat reflected too in the Catholic concept of each heterosexual married couple becoming one body that is forever inseparable?
And didn’t Pope John Paul II (drawing largely from paragraph 22 of Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution of Vatican II) preach constantly and plainly about the essential unity of the whole body of humanity living on the earth?
“MY BODY, MY CHOICE” & “MY PROPERTY, MY CHOICE”
After all, one of the reasons that the “My body, my choice” slogan of the Pro-Abortion Rights crowd morally fails is because it denies the social dimension inherent in the relationship between the human fetus and his/her mother and the relationship between the human fetus and the larger human community.
But don’t we have, in the pro-Laissez-Faire Capitalist community, a similarly immoral slogan: “My property, my choice.”
And doesn’t that slogan, when taken as a moral absolute without any limits or qualifications, fail morally for the same reason that “My body, my choice” fails:
Both slogans fail because they are refusals to acknowledge the inescapable social dimension of the human body.
None of us can survive alone.
Benjamin Franklin spoke a variation on this in 1776: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
And Benjamin Franklin was no socialist, Marxist, or Neo-Marxist Post-Modernist!
NO TO MARXISM, COMMUNISM, NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Now, one who recognizes the inescapable social dimension of the human body must never become a socialist, Communist, Marxist, or National Socialist, since those philosophies refuse to recognize the inescapable God-given PRIVATE dimensions of every biological human body and of the extended “body” (private property).
CATHOLI DOCTRINE: THE ALTERNATIVE TO SOCIALIM AND LAISSEZ FAIRE CAPITALISM
Correct me if I’m wrong, but:
Doesn’t Catholic doctrine make clear that Catholics must, in their private actions and in their roles in governing the whole society, acknowledge, integrate, harmonize, and balance both PRIVATE and SOCIAL dimensions of the biological body and of the extended “body” (private property)?
Yet, in most “pro-life” writings, do we not see a seeming contradiction?
The seeming contradiction is this:
ON THE ONE HAND, pro-life people say that the biological body, when in the womb, or when weak and vulnerable at the end of life, or when being potentially subjected to mutilating transgenderizing surgery, has divine, God-given rights that may not be violated, and those rights must be protected by state and federal law.
ON THE OTHER HAND, many or most pro-life people, by their silence on the matter, seem to imply that the biological body in economic relations is nothing more than a soulless, mostly rights-less cog, free to be bought, sold, hired, fired, excluded, or rejected in the free economy, provided that these actions do not violate the principle of individual consent.
Let me quote here again part of the quote Pope Benedict XVI that this article quotes, to show how BXVI is lamenting the commodification of the body under the philosophy of Laissez-Faire Capitalism:
“The contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a COMMODITY, a mere “thing” to be BOUGHT and SOLD, or rather, man himself becomes a COMMODITY. This is hardly man’s great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be USED and EXPLOITED. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a MERE OBJECT…”
BXVI is writing there about the economy of erotic goods and services. But surely what he wrote applies to the economy more generally, doesn’t it?
In fact, didn’t both BXVI and JPII (especially in his mostly ignored 1981 encyclical on workers’ rights called “Laborem Exercens”) regularly lament the commodification of persons in the modern free market economies of the West?
Yes, abortion and euthanasia involve the direct killing of human beings, and so these crimes against humanity and God are unquestionably more urgent matters.
CONSISTENT PHILOSOPHY MATTERS, DOESN’T IT?
But isn’t being philosophically coherent and consistent also an important matter for people who believe that:
–God is real.
–God is intelligible.
–God is reasonable.
–God is philosophically coherent and consistent.
(I.e., we are people who are not merely cynically using the concept of God as a tool/weapon in a battle against political and economic rivals; such cynical activists are out there, but surely are not to be found among the faithful writers and readers of CWR.)
If we are being philosophically incoherent and inconsistent, doesn’t that weaken about ability to persuade fellow citizens, and doesn’t that weaken our efforts to end once and for all the horrific, Godforsaken, monstrous modern customs of abortion and euthanasia?
FINAL QUESTION:
Sexuality is now commonly detached from the meanings of love, commitment, marriage, family, and procreation.
In the same way,…
…aren’t business management, employment, gig work, and financial investment now commonly detached from the meaning of brotherly love, the common good, solidarity, and human dignity?
Instead, isn’t our society, at the practical level, becoming suffused in the attitudes and philosophies of:
–“Dog eat dog.”
–“To the victor goes the spoils.”
–“The new Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.”
–“Might makes right.”
This article proclaims that “the HUMAN PERSON is the DIVINE ‘image-bearer’.”
Isn’t that philosophically true and real at ALL times and in ALL contexts, including the ECONOMIC context and the REPRODUCTIVE/GENDER context and the END-OF-LIFE context?
Or was JPII’s slogan “civilization of love” just an airy-fairy, pie-in-the-sky, pious sentiment that we all are supposed to know will always be ignored in hard-ball worlds of the factory, Wall Street, car dealer showrooms, the NFL playing fields, and corporate CEO offices?
Do you have the right to assume that, if someone is “silent” on a topic, or too silent for your taste (as though you have any right to judge, something about which you might want to check Scripture), that person’s thoughts and/or actions must be evil?
No, you do not. It’s not just that you lack the authority to judge, though you do lack the authority. It’s not just that you lack the knowledge of a person’s thoughts and actions, though you also lack that. (Seriously, if you are like most people, you don’t remember what you had for breakfast a week ago, you don’t remember what phase the moon is in, you don’t remember if it rained on this day last month, and you don’t remember the car you were stuck behind last time at a red light. Much less do you know all the acts of kindness or cruelty of your neighbors. You don’t even know them about yourself. This is one of the reasons St. Paul did not dare to judge himself.) Beyond authority and knowledge, you also lack the wisdom to judge anyone else’s soul. I’m not saying you are especially foolish; I’m saying that only God has the wisdom, as well as only God having the knowledge and authority.