What are the possible points of agreement and points of tension between different religious schools of thought on the body, in relation to the Holy Spirit? How might Christians respond to these?
Introduction
Scripture seems to contradict itself with regard to the human body. Sometimes the body is seen as precious, for instance in 1 Cor 6:19-30, and sometimes as a hinderance to unity with Christ, 2 Cor 5:6-8. This seeming ambiguity within scripture has created distinct and conflicting schools of thought among Christian thinkers regarding the body and spirituality. Some advocate that the body is an essential part of our spirituality and should be embraced; others that the body is a hinderance to it, and should be approached with suspicion and contempt.
The subject of the body and spirituality is vast. Therefore, this essay will focus on two differing schools of thought pertaining to the body: Dualism and Holism. After defining each and giving examples from history, the tensions and agreements between the two theories will be discussed. Finally, I will suggest how Christians might respond in a balanced way.
Dualism: The division of a thing into two contrasting or opposed elements. In terms of body Dualism, the separation of the human being into two opposing parts - body and spirit.
The Greek philosopher Plato viewed the body as something which contaminated the soul with it’s imperfection. It was a hinderance to attaining truth and should be avoided except where absolutely necessary. The pursuit was to become purified from it ‘until God himself gives us deliverance’.1
Early Christian writers, such as Philo of Alexandria, were influenced by Plato’s school of thought and, in his attempt to marry Greek and Jewish philosophy, de...
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Nelson, J.B. (1992) Body Theology. (Louisville: John Knox Press).
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Pope Paul VI (1965) Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World - Gaudium et Spes. Available at: http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html [Accessed 24 January, 2014].
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Since the Medieval time period, philosophers have studied the diverse relationship between the soul and the human body. One philosopher in particular, Aquinas, argued that “the soul is interconnected with the body in such a way that without it, the human person cannot be complete” while Descartes argued that the two functioned independently (Viti 109). The novel, Heart of Darkness, and the book of poems called Native Guard proves Aquinas’ theory to be valid by highlighting the outward effect on the human body of the blurred line between morality and immorality as corruption and greed, two prevalent themes, take over. In both expositions, the weakening of one’s physical body represents the enduring moral struggle of one’s soul.
Belief whether or not the mind and the body are distinct substances have split the philosopher community in two: the dualists and the monists. In this essay, I will discuss how the mind and body are not distinct based on Rene Descartes’ arguments in The Meditations Of First Philosophy. First, I am going to introduce a few of Descartes’ arguments and his position on the matter. Then, I will pick the most appealing argument and put it up against logical reasoning with other philosophers’ points of view. Finally, I am going to conclude how the 17th-century philosopher proposes a fallacious argument which tests his Cartesian dualism theory.
2. The body as a subject is evincing humanity beyond cultural construction and linguistic formulation.
The fascinating aspect of theories about the bodies, is that our bodies lie somewhere in the grey area between the physical and the intellectual realm (in itself testifying to the falsity of such dichotomies). On the one hand, they are biological; genetically programmed flesh. On the other, they are continuous sites of signification; embodying (no pun intended) the essentially textual quality of a human subject's identity.
There are high aspects and solid expectations in moral and spiritual parts of non-material substances in personal belief. In other words, I have a belief on a religion; believe Roman Catholic, a part of Christianity religions – where there are ways to judge a person’s decisions, believes and judged for an eternal life after death. For instance, once I have committed an action that opposed to religious regulations or moral standard, I would will feel guilty and make an effort to improve the specific issue, which means I have a soul towards the moral considerations beyond perceiving merely observing visible objects.
In conclusion, Plato and Aristotle present two different conceptions of the soul. By examination of their formulations, and the structure and genre they used, Aristotle's perception of the soul is more convincing. I am more convinced by facts than I am ideals. But his views should not be thrown away, for Aristotle's focus upon the organism as a whole as the proper object of study is a successful approach to the question of the nature of and relationship between mind, body, and soul.
To better understand this model, we must first examine how bodies have been viewed and affected within the Christian religion framework of our western culture. Christianity has a long tradition of focusing on embodiment. Its basic practices and ideas of incarnation, Christology, the Resurrection, and the Eucharist, even the metaphor of the church being the body of Christ, all involve embodiment in some way (McFague, 1993). Yet, with these embodiment characteristics of Christianity, this religion still devalues nature and women’s bodies. It has set up a patriarchal framework for western culture of devaluing the body, and women. “Western culture and religion have a long, painful history of demeaning the female by identifying her with the body and with nature, while elevating the male by identifying him with reason and spirit” (McFague, 1993). This idea reinforces stereotypes that oppress women and separates the body from the mind and soul. Until we reconcile this disconnect of the body and mind, we cannot fully love all bodies; this leads to the inability to love the “body” of the earth (McFague, 1993). Without this love, we cannot fully appreciate ...
In everyday life it appears that the body is overlooked in its relation to the mind. This notion of body and mind separation is not something that necessarily sits well with people. The debate can sit on either scientific knowledge or religious beliefs. Currently this is what we deal with when this sort of debate occurs. With the various belief structures prevalent in humans we can’t assume argument is stronger than another.
Surprisingly dualism has become synonymous with Rene Descartes that often times it is many just referred to by many as Cartesian dualism, as if this was the decisive line of attack to the issue. The theory behind dualism is that the mind and the body, that mind and matter, are two distinct things. Descartes well-thought-out the difficulty of the location of the mind and came to the conclusions that the mind was a completely separate entity from the body. Descartes stated that he is a subject of conscious thought and experience and thus cannot be nothing more than spatially extended matter. The fundamental nature of the human being, or the mind, are unable to be material but are obliged to be no...
body, containing within it the key to understanding what it means to exist in this world
...of the body, and no problem arises of how soul and body can be united into a substantial whole: ‘there is no need to investigate whether the soul and the body are one, any more than the wax and the shape, or in general the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter; for while “one” and “being” are said in many ways, the primary [sense] is actuality’ (De anima 2.1, 12B6–9).Many twentieth-century philosophers have been looking for just such a via media between materialism and dualism, at least for the case of the human mind; and much scholarly attention has gone into asking whether Aristotle’s view can be aligned with one of the modern alternatives, or whether it offers something preferable to any of the modern alternatives, or whether it is so bound up with a falsified Aristotelian science that it must regretfully be dismissed as no longer a live option.
The body is the physical agent of the structures of everyday experience. It is the transmitter of cultural messages…a repository of memories, an actor in the theatre of power, a tissue of affects and feelings. Because the body is at the boundary between biology and society…in terms of power, biography and history, it is the site 'par excellence' for transgressing the constraints of meaning (Richard, 208).
There are two major religious beliefs on the soul, and though they may seem diametrically opposed, we must remember that our ideas on the soul exist only because of the conditioned acceptance of these religiou...
RECALL: The writer makes several important points in “Body and Mind” from “Problems from Philosophy”. The writer discusses the idea of the body being a material entity and the mind as an immaterial entity. The mind and body problems arise due to the different types of facts and their relation with each other. The concept of mind body dualism is an attempt to solve this conflict between these two entities and the main points discussed in the chapter are: 1) According to the ‘Conceivability Argument for Dualism’, presented by Descartes, the mind and the body cannot exist without each other and if they were to do so, they would not be the same thing; 2) Physical facts are proven through observations but mental states are private and cannot be
But, “human persons have an ‘inner’ dimension that is just as important as the ‘outer’ embodiment” (Cortez, 71). The “inner” element cannot be wholly explained by the “outer” embodiment, but it does give rise to inimitable facets of the human life, such as human dignity and personal identity. The mind-body problem entails two theories, dualism and physicalism. Dualism contends that distinct mental and physical realms exist, and they both must be taken into account. Its counterpart (weak) physicalism views the human as being completely bodily and physical, encompassing no non-physical, or spiritual, substances.