The Mystery of the Human Body, Part 1: Political Control

During Easter, I think a lot about the Resurrection and our own resurrection. Jesus was fully God and fully human as well, having both natures. We are to imitate him; and by taking on a human nature, he showed us how to do that, how to be fully, body-and-soul human. This includes our resurrection: by and through his rising from the dead, we too will rise, soul and body, after our deaths. How mysterious.

In his book Miracles, C.S. Lewis proposes that if human beings can sympathize with children and animals, then it is no impossibility that God could become human or that human beings are both soul and body, that the natural and the supernatural could meet.¹ How God became Incarnate is a mystery; but because we can sympathize with what is other and lower than us (such as, with children or with other animals), we have some, however small, inclination of the connection between the divine and the human. Even with this beginning of an explanation, however, it is no surprise that we find the human soul to be mysterious and a little comprehensible. G.K. Chesterton points out that “there may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind.”² Most simply, you cannot see the human soul. It is not visible except through its activity in the body. Another aspect of the human being that is easy to see as mysterious is the connection between the body and the soul. How can something that is spirit connect itself to something that is physical and material?³ We can delve into Aristotle and talk about form and matter and the soul informing the body, but the element of mystery is not totally eliminated. We cannot quite seem to grasp the totality with our human mind. But that the human body is mysterious just does not enter our minds. We are completely willing to say that the body itself is no mystery at all. If there is any mystery, it is just that all the information is not in yet. The assumption is that we certainly will understand the human body completely in the future. Modern medicine and related sciences will eventually come to understand and explain away what “little” mystery is left in the human body. The mystery is not mystery at all, it is just undiscovered biology or chemistry or physiology or some other modern scientific “-ology.”

But is the mystery of the human body really as little as society today tends to claim? Lewis says that “The body of the reasonable and virtuous man, other things being equal, is a better body than that of the fool or the debauchee.”⁴ Would, then, the better body be the one that is in command? The teacher in command of his students is a better teacher than the students; the general in command of the army is a better soldier than his soldiers. Shouldn’t the body be better at bodily being then something immaterial like the soul? In the vicious man,⁵ the body is in control; such a man chooses what his appetites command. So the vicious man should have the better body, not the virtuous man. But the body of the human being is not the totality of human existence. The human being is a rational being; and rationality is of a higher order than (bodily) sensuality. The better chess player is the one who has a better command of chess and wins games. The better human being is the one who has a better command of his humanity, of himself, not the one who has better bodily being. This involves not just command over the body, but also knowledge of what is good for human beings and the ability to act on that knowledge. The better human being, then, is the virtuous man; he knows that is good and is able to do it (excepting external impediments). And so the body of a virtuous man is a better body, for it is under the control (see below) of the (higher) rational part of the human being. As Lewis says “The brain does not become less a brain by being used for rational thought. The emotions do not become weak or jaded by being organized in the service of a moral will—indeed they grow richer and stronger.”⁶

A Political Control

Here then is one mystery about the body. If we are rational and rationality is higher than sensuality, how is it that the body can command us at all? Why are we not, as René Descartes thought, thinking beings in control of a “machine” body?⁷ We say that the highest power in animals is sensuality (the ability to sense things); and sensuality commands and controls the animal. Instinct, after all, is the automatic response of the animal to the data of the senses. Yet the highest power in human beings, rationality, is not in total control, there is no tyranny of the soul over the body. We cannot simply chalk up this lack of control of the body by the soul to original sin and leave it at that. The body has something similar to the will, and so Thomas Aquinas says that the soul has “political command” (not complete command) over the body.⁸ There is evidence of this in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. God said to Adam and Eve before the Fall “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gn 2:16). Eating is a bodily activity. If Adam and Eve ate because they were hungry, they did it because the body requested it. Hunger is a physical sensation. If they ate because eating was pleasurable, they also did it because the body requested it. Eating can be a physical pleasure. Even before the Fall, the body was not a robot controlled by the soul. That the body of a rational human being has a “will” of its own seems odd and mysterious and not that easily or completely explained by biology or medical science.

Notes

¹ C.S. Lewis, Miracles: How God Intervenes in Nature and Human Affairs (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.), chap. 14, 110–11.

² G.K. Chesterton, “The Everlasting Man,” in G.K. Chesterton: Collected Works, vol. 2 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 170.

³ For an interesting discussion of this, see John Henry Newman, “The Mysteriousness of Our Present Being,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons (1891; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 914–21, esp. 915–17, 921.

⁴ Lewis, Miracles, 127.

⁵ Not in the sense of cruel, though that could certainly be a part of it, but in the sense of Aristotle’s opposite of the virtuous man, that is, vice-filled.

⁶ Lewis, Miracles, 127.

⁷ René Descartes, “Discourse on Method,” in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress, 4th ed. (1637; 1641; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 31–33.

⁸ Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 56, a. 4, ad 3: “the irascible and concupiscible powers do not obey the reason blindly; on the contrary, they have their own proper movements, by which, at times, they go against reason, whence the Philosopher says (Politics, i, 3) that the ‘reason rules the irascible and concupiscible powers by a political command’ such as that by which free men are ruled, who have in some respects a will of their own.”