Until a few years ago, when I began
graduate work in theological studies, I had never heard much about the dangers
of strands in the Christian tradition that more or less define the human being
as a soul living in the shell of an unruly body.
If we think for a moment, many of
us can detect this pulse. We can drum up verses like I Corinthians 9:27 (“I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have
preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize”) and
Romans 8:13 (“…if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you
will live”).
Even after people had pointed out to me
these aspects of biblical scripture and their influence on Christians’ pitting bodily desire
against the health of the soul, it took me a while to see what the urgency of
this discussion might be. And I’m still learning, of course…but
in the past couple of years I’ve certainly begun to see and feel the weight of
this issue.
I say all of this to say that I’ve
lately noticed several Facebook friends posting the following quote from C. S.
Lewis: “You don't have a soul. You are a
soul. You have a body.” I want to take issue with this statement—not only
because I now disagree with it, but also because I am a seasoned C. S. Lewis
fan, so I’d rather give him a fair run rather than simply shake my fist at him.
Also, I would never have taken issue with such statements if I hadn’t been
encouraged to reconsider my stances. I would love to pass on that gift, for it
has certainly proven to be a gift.
I have too much to say about this
topic and too little time to write about it thoroughly (i.e., by drawing in the
voices of the scholars and friends who’ve taught me so much about it)…so
please read with the knowledge that I’m only hitting the highest highlights to
the best of my humble capacities. And, as always, I would love to engage in
further conversation about this topic with any and all.
* * *
When I first ran across Lewis’s statement
above (taken from Mere Christianity,
I believe) indicating that we have bodies
but are souls, I probably thought
that it was well-placed and profound. Of course, I used to think that pretty
much everything C.S. Lewis said was well-placed and profound. When I was 17 my
youth minister suggested that I read Mere
Christianity; I dug up my parents’ 1950s paperback copy and had my nose stuffed in the book for every spare moment until I finished it. So
began a general trend in my late teens and early twenties—in the years that
followed I read (and often re-read) everything of Lewis’ that I could get my
hands on.
I suspect that my reasons for
developing a fond devotion to Lewis are not unlike the reasons of many of my
fellow CoC-ers (as well as others from evangelical-ish traditions who have
found such a connection with Lewis). His work provided me with a much-craved
entre into sustained critical thinking about Christian identity, doctrine,
philosophy, apologetics, etc.
More importantly, this invitation
was packaged in a fashion that, I think, I needed—coming from the religious and
social context that I did, I would have found academic theologians and
sociologists of religion off-putting and inaccessible with their unfamiliar
jargon, tradition, and systematic aims. In Lewis I found a lay apologist with a
prolific mind who produced concise, dryly entertaining prose that stimulated thoroughgoing
reflection upon my religious convictions; he did this while preserving the
confessional impetus of the Christian faith—not blindly, but with artistic
commitment to rationality.
I relied on C. S. Lewis as a mentor
for many years. I still find him one of my favorite reads for the sake of spiritual
rejuvenation and/or re-centering, and I’d put his best fiction up against most
anyone’s (two thumbs up for his sci-fi trilogy and Till We Have Faces. And don’t mess with Narnia or we’ll have issues). However, in the course of my studies
I’ve had to reckon with the hard truth that this beloved teacher of ours is,
well, human—for all of the gifts that
he’s given us, they do not acquit him of human error.
We ought not be overly frightened
by this possibility. As much as I’ve read of his work, I am confident that
Lewis himself would be supremely perturbed if he found that his 21st
century readers were unwilling to refine his insights in preference to clinging
to them as life rafts amidst the sea change of “postmodernity.”
All of this to say that I believe
this particular statement—you are a soul;
you have a body—is in need of refinement. I would argue that the problems
with this notion are implicated in many of the troubling post-Enlightenment
paradigms in Western thought.
Let me (attempt to) explain: Lewis’s operative assumption here is more or less that our bodies are
like vehicles steered by our souls. This notion is akin to broader perspectives
of his day presuming that the soul and body are clearly distinct entities, and
thus must be related either hierarchically
(i.e., the soul/mind is more important than the body/drives) or competitively (the soul/mind is at war
with the body’s impulses).
This way of thinking didn’t surface
only in the soul/body distinction; it was hospitable to other binary
oppositions, such as: discernment vs. instinct, mind vs. matter, inner vs.
outer, light vs. darkness, male vs. female, order vs. disorder.
Notice the hierarchy? Notice
what/who is supposed to win?
We Westerners like to claim that we
are “post”modern, that is, that we have moved beyond all of those oppositional
pairings. But take a moment to observe human behavior—it is hardly the case
that we have adopted utterly new ways of moving through the world. We’ve made
some progress, to be sure, but we still tend
to operate in the terms of these hierarchies, assuming that clear boundaries really exist between soul and body, mind
and matter, male and female, etc. Because we operate this way, we easily fail
to see that such boundaries are always fluid, shifting, impossible to nail
down.
I believe that we tend to behave
this way because, if we’re honest with ourselves, we long for sharp, identifiable
boundaries. Why? Because they make reality more palatable/manageable for us as
we struggle to secure our senses of who we are, what we’ve achieved, and—again,
if we’re honest—who we can control.
As a Christian, I thus believe that
our longing for and establishment of these distinct boundaries facilitates
idolatry (that is, worshipping that which is finite, that which we think we know and can thus control)
rather than authentic worship of the mysterious One who transcends yet
undergirds our strange, exhilarating existence as subjects-in-process.
* * *
Mahatma Gandhi says, “The soul must
languish when we give all our thought to the body.” And who can argue with
Gandhi when it comes to this statement? Perhaps this too is the gift that we
can take from the passages in I Cor. 9 and Romans 8. Like Gandhi, they remind
us that it is no better to give all of our attention to or indulge the “other”
members of those binary pairings—instinct, matter, darkness, female,
disorder, etc. That is certainly
not my purpose here (or elsewhere, for those of you who worry that I’m close to
becoming a feminist vigilante!). I merely want to say that, for the
reasons outlined above, I believe that it is vital that we understand all of
these entities, including body and soul, as deeply
interwoven.
I agree with Lewis that we do not have a soul. But neither do we have
a body. We are embodied souls, as I’ve often heard my professor Doug Meeks say.
I believe that this is a perspective
we cannot take for granted, as "post"moderns, but must work for continuously and deliberately. To this end, let us
attend to the presence of bodies, which take us out of our heads, make demands
upon us. And at the heart of the Christian faith lies a crucified and
resurrected human body: that of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh who dwelt
among us, disrupting our schemes at self-securing in a fashion that addressed
body and soul as one—he preached and laid
hands on the leprous; he taught and fed
hungry people with fish and bread; he prayed and washed dusty feet. He taught us that, in the coming kingdom,
God is making all things new—and that includes humans as embodied souls.
As far as C. S. Lewis is concerned,
I’m forever indebted to him for the ways that he has taught me to think and
re-think that have enriched my life with, I believe, eternal ramifications. Looking
at his work, when it comes to the question of bodies and souls I’d prefer to
share the following passage from The
Screwtape Letters. Herein the demon Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood
regarding how best to distract his human “patient” when praying to God, “the
Enemy.” Screwtape says:
One of their
poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and
bended knees’ but merely ‘composed his spirit to love’ and indulged ‘a sense of
supplication’. That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a
superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are
very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken
in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that
the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must
always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects
their souls.[1]
