There is No Salvation (Apart from the Body)

Copyright 1995 by John R. Mabry

*This article previously appeared in an issue of _Creation Spirituality_ magazine.*

The body has gotten a bad rap in the West. From the Greek philosophers to modern, conservative, religious theologians, the history of the body in Western thought is grim. A tragic mistranslation renders St. Paul as saying that the body is opposed to the spirit (Gal. 5:17), to the result of two millenia of sincere people mortifying the flesh for "spiritual" purposes. Augustine asserted that "the soul makes war with the body," and Calvin viewed earthly human existence as being no better than a worm. Even St. Francis condescendingly made reference to his own body as "Brother Ass." The magnitude of psychological suffering this has caused in literally millions of people through the ages is criminal. We have been convinced that the physical world, and with it, our physical selves, are corrupt, depraved, and worthy of our scorn and abuse. The body has been viewed as a cruel cage from which the soul longs to escape to some ethereal, nebulous realm.

To most traditions, this despising seems strange. In Native traditions, the body is a gift to be loved, cared for, and celebrated. In the East it is the highest earthly privilege to be born in a human body, for only from it can enlightenment be reached. In fact, for many traditions, salvation apart from the body is impossible. In the rituals of the Hawaiian Kahuna tradition, the intellect and the spirit are incommunicado, and the body alone, through ritual, can serve as message-bearer. In Hinduism, Hatha Yoga promises salvation through the discipline of one's body, and in Buddhism it is the close attention to the "environment" of the body that brings satori, or "breakthrough" for the Spirit. With this weight of opinion from our sister faiths, perhaps it is not inappropriate to reconsider the body in our own, Western, Christian tradition. Is this violence toward the physical truly borne out in scripture, or has our reading of it been prejudiced by a tradition of negative ecclesiastical opinion?

Our Judaic heritage knows little of this prejudice. The Jews have always viewed the world as a blessing, and with it their lives. The pre-exilic Jews did not pine for the afterlife and a non-physical existence. For them, to be human was a noble thing; they felt worthy to stand tall before the Creator. The afterlife was infrequently speculated upon in the time that the Scriptures were written. The Jews focused their energy on the reality of this life, trusting God to do the just thing in the next.

For the Christian, the Incarnation itself should say something. Unless we fall back on docetism, the presence of Christ in human form can be nothing less than God's resounding affirmation on the created order. How could God reside in or bother to redeem the vile and irredeemable? We are even promised an eternal incarnate life in a resurrected body like Christ's "of flesh and bone."

We should even question the validity of the soul-body dualism. William Blake wrote "[The human] has no body distinct from the soul, for that called body is a portion of soul discern'd by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age." Meister Eckhart concurs, saying "The soul loves the body. And consider too how it is that the body is more in the soul than the soul is in the body." St. Thomas Aquinas even tells us that "the soul united with the body is more like God than the soul separated from the body."

We find, when we are willing to search, that the opinion of many throughout the history of Christendom is that it is the body which is the source of our greatest joys and even of our "spiritual" progress. For instance, it is Hildegard's belief that by cultivating the earthly, we create the heavenly. And for Dame Julian of Norwich it is our very sensuality "grounded in Nature" which "enables us to receive gifts that lead to everlasting life."

A more radical, Biblical approach might be suggested by the immanently troublesome verse from John's gospel, where Jesus says "No one comes to the Father except by me." What are we to make of this? It seems that this is the ultimate tribalistic, exlusivist claim for Christianity, but it need not be so. We only run into trouble if we consider the speaker to be Christ in the historic person of Jesus of Nazareth. But just as Christ Jesus is the result of the union of God's Spirit with a specific human body, so also is the Cosmic Christ the result of the union of God's Spirit with the cosmos, all of physical realty. If we are willing to consider Jesus as speaking in this verse from the perspective of his eternal Incarnation as the ground of all being, we hear a very different message, indeed: salvation apart from the physical, the body, is impossible.

This confirms for us in our own tradition what we have heard from our brothers and sisters in other faith traditions: that the body is a means of spiritual progress and a source of blessing and joy. As Nicholas of Cusa affirms, "Only in a finite fashion is the infinite form received."