world containing the mind, celibacy, and eventually men in the “good” one.7
In his essay “The Body and Spiritual Practice,” James Wiseman explains the influence Greek philosophy, and its trademark dualism, played in the development of religious Gnosticism:
Although it would be grossly unfair to portray Plato as unambiguously anti-corporeal, and although the major Christian authors who respected his thought did not appropriate it in an uncritical way, certain passages from Plato’s own works and from those of some of his disciples did influence the Christian understanding of the body.8
Wiseman cites a section from Plato’s Phaedo as an illustration of this influence:
So long as we keep to the body and our soul is contaminated with this imperfection, there is no chance of our ever attaining satisfactorily to our object, which we assert to be truth . . . It seems that so long as we are alive, we shall continue closest to knowledge if we avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body, except when they are absolutely necessary, and instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it until God Himself gives us deliverance.9
According to Wiseman, this Platonic philosophy was embraced by Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher who lived during the time of Christ. Philo significantly influenced future Christian writers like Origen and Clement of Alexandria. Origen, who believed both his body and sexuality to be his enemy, reputedly castrated himself “for the sake of the kingdom”;10 and Clement taught that Christ didn’t even have a physical body.
One of the bestselling books in Christian history, The Life of Anthony, was written about Anthony of the Desert, who never bathed so as not to expose the surface of his body. In fact no one ever saw Anthony undressed until his clothes were removed to make for a proper burial after his death. Thirteenth-century friar St. Francis of Assisi neglected to properly care for his body in the most basic of ways to avoid “indulging the flesh.”
Gnostic Influence Continues
Despite Jesus’ frequent declarations that marriage is holy, Gnostic influence continued to infect culture with a negative view of sexuality long after his ascension. Gnostics regarded marriage as sinful, and singleness was equated with godliness.
Partly influenced by such attitudes, in the fourth century, Pope Siricius declared it a crime for priests to have sex with their own wives. Both Siricius and his contemporary St. Jerome believed Mary remained a virgin even after giving birth to Christ.
The Gnostics also devalued women, as it was their bodies that tempted men to sin. Ninth-century church father Theodore of Studius forbade monks from having even female animals, insisting that by becoming monks, they had “renounced the female sex altogether . . .”11 In the eleventh century Pope Gregory VII wrote, “The church cannot escape from the clutches of laity unless priests first escape the clutches of their wives.”12
Pope Urban II, a contemporary of Pope Gregory, ordered any priest who violated celibacy to be thrown into prison, and his wife and children sold into slavery.13
To Augustine, one of the most influential extra-biblical writers in Christian history, the body “presseth down the soul.”14 Augustine became the bishop of Hippo, and believed the penis was evil, semen was cursed, and intercourse was infected by sin even in the context of marriage.
To be fair, early Christians saw the body at its worst: the average life expectancy in the Roman world was less than thirty years, malnutrition was rampant, and crime rates exceeded those of modern-day cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, and Oakland. In Antioch so common were missing body parts that they wouldn’t draw much more attention than an untied shoelace would in modern times, and corpses were routinely dumped into the street. This all adds perspective to the contempt with which premodern Christians held their bodies, but certainly doesn’t justify it.
Third-century Platonic philosopher Plotinus was so dismissive of bodily existence that he wouldn’t admit to having parents or a birthday. Similarly, and a little closer to home, my great-grandmother Hattie refused to go out in public for the entire duration of her pregnancy to avoid the shame of strangers knowing that she had had sex.
From Plotinus to Grandma Hattie, the belief that the body and its accompanying sexuality is “bad,” has injected ambivalence into the way we esteem our bodies, our body parts, and our sexuality. Such ambivalence causes us to question the very nature of our embodiment. As Lauren Winner puts it:
We Christians get embarrassed about our bodies. We are not always sure that God likes them very much. We are not sure whether bodies are good or bad . . .15
Carmen Renee Berry writes:
A friend of mine, who is an excellent preacher, recently spoke on Christian sexuality. He said, “I was taught two contradictory things about sex. First, it’s dirty. Second, I should save it for the one I love.” No clearer statement could be made about the dichotomy presented to today’s Christians . . . Where did we get the idea that our bodies—and more specifically our sexuality—are unclean, perhaps even evil? With little clarity, we are often taught a mishmash of dismal decrees on our physical selves: that our “flesh” leads us away from God, and yet Jesus became “flesh” and dwelt among us; that our bodies are separate from our spirits, and yet, as orthodox believers, we hold tenaciously to the bodily resurrection of Jesus; the less sexual we are, the more spiritual we are, and yet God created both male and female with the declaration that it wasn’t good for us to be alone. Contradictions abound in Christian thinking. And we, as individuals trying to live our lives as God would desire, are flipped and flopped as these ideas collide.16
Does the body imprison the soul, or does it set it free? Is it holy, or is it “dirty”? Is it sacred, or is it shameful? Is the body an inherent obstacle to the spiritual life, or is it the very expression of it?
Spiritual “Stuff”
When I think of “spirits,” I think of things that go bump in the night—ghosts and goblins, angels and demons—none of which have bodies. So it makes sense that the word spiritual would seem distant from the body. Clapp plays devil’s advocate on this point: “Angels are bodiless, so we intuit that spirituality must not have anything to do with our physical bodies.”17
To the contrary! Because most of the spiritual realm is unseen, we’ve gotten used to using symbolism to convey spiritual truths; yet the body is the one outstanding exception. The body gives actual physical mass to the spirit. Flesh is the “stuff” that renders spirit visible. Without a spirit we are corpses, yet without a body we are mere ghosts.
Just as a completed ceramic sculpture gives material substance to what was previously only an idea in the molder’s mind, the human body gives substance to the character and creativity of God’s mind. According to Christopher West:
We aren’t spirits “trapped” in our bodies. The [Catholic] Church has always maintained that we are embodied spirits, or spiritualized bodies. Through the profound union of body and soul in each of us, our bodies reveal or “make visible” the invisible reality of our spirits. But the body does even more. Because we’re made in God’s image, our bodies also make visible something of God’s invisible mystery.18
Indeed God’s invisible attributes have been “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made . . .”19 As Pope John Paul II stated, “The body, in fact, and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world, the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God.”20
The body reveals these mysteries by demonstrating
