On the one hand, many passages of the Hebrew Bible—such as in the Psalms, Isaiah, or the Song of Songs—testified to the Judaic experience of God’s mercy, goodness, and intimate love. Jewish religious literature was distinguished above all for its pronounced sense of God’s personal relation to and concern for man and his history. Yet on the other hand, so much of the spirit and narrative of the Old Testament was dominated by the figure of a jealous God of stern justice and ruthless vengeance—arbitrarily punitive, obsessively self-referential, militantly nationalistic, patriarchal, moralistic, “an eye for an eye” and so forth—that God’s cherished compassionate qualities were often difficult to discern. Trust in God was constantly balanced against fear of God. In certain crucial encounters with Yahweh, it was only man’s plea for an equitable or merciful judgment that mitigated the full brunt of God’s wrath against those he perceived as disobedient. On some occasions it was as if the Jew’s own sense of moral justice surpassed that of Yahweh; yet the former evidently emerged from the encounter with the latter.11 The sacred covenant between God and man paradoxically required both autonomy and compliance from the human partner, and on the basis of that tension the Judaic ethos evolved.
Tension was central to the Judaic religious experience, for despite significant exceptions, the Hebrew God generally disclosed himself as intransigently “Other.” Duality pervaded the Judaic vision: God and man, good and evil, sacred and profane. But God’s nearness, counterbalancing his otherness, was visible in history. And in the Judaic vision, the presence of the divine in the world was especially manifested through and measured by Israel’s obedience to Yahweh, an obligation in which it alternately triumphed and faltered. Everything rested on that drama. The Judaic dialectic between God’s fearsome omnipotence and man’s ontological separateness from God was resolved through God’s historical plan of salvation, and this plan required man’s total submission. Thus the divine command for unswerving obedience tended to outweigh the divine outpouring of reconciliatory love.
Yet that love was experienced nonetheless, especially as a perceived numinous presence drawing forward the Jewish nation to fulfillment, to the Promised Land in its various and constantly evolving forms. The redemptive and unitary aspect of God’s love for man seemed to be more of a fervently awaited condition that would be realized by a messiah in a future era, while the present age was distressingly colored by the darkness and desolation of man’s sin and God’s anger. The Jewish experience of divinity was inextricably bound up with an unyielding sense of judgment, just as man’s love for God was fully entwined with scrupulous obedience to God’s law. This combination was in turn inherited and reasserted by Christianity, for which Christ’s redemption did not altogether eliminate God’s vengeful nature.
The writings of Paul, John, and Augustine all expressed a peculiar mixture of the mystical and the juridical, and the Christian religion of which they were principal shapers reflected those divergent tendencies. God was an absolutely good supreme being, but that good God could act toward the disobedient man, as in the apocalyptic Last Judgment of John’s Revelation, with the most relentless and unforgiving severity. (It was not theologically insignificant that the “O felix culpa!” passage of the Easter liturgy was expunged by certain medieval churches and monasteries.) As in Judaism, the Christian experience of God oscillated between that of a sublime love relationship, indeed a divine romance, and that of a horrifically punitive antagonism and juridical condemnation. Thus did Christian hope and faith coexist with Christian guilt and fear.
Further Contraries and the Augustinian Legacy
Matter and Spirit
The inner conflict in Christianity between redemption and judgment, and between the unification of God with the world and a highly charged dualistic distinction, was especially prominent in its attitudes toward the physical world and the physical body—a fundamental ambivalence that Christianity never entirely resolved. More explicitly than other religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity asserted the full reality, grandeur, beauty, and Tightness of God’s original freely willed creation: not an illusion, a falsehood, a divine error; not an imperfect imitation or a necessary emanation. God created the world, and it was good. Moreover, man was created, body and soul, in the image of God. But with man’s sin and fall, both man and nature lost their divine inheritance, and thus began the Judaeo-Christian drama of man’s vicissitudes in relation to God, amidst a backdrop of a spiritually destitute and alienated world. As exalted as was the Judaeo-Christian vision of the original pristine creation, so much the more tragic was its view of the world’s fall.
The Christian revelation, however, asserted that in Christ, God had become man, flesh and blood, and after his crucifixion had risen again in what the apostles believed was a full spiritual transfiguration and renewal of his physical body. In these central miracles of the Christian faith—the Incarnation and Resurrection—was founded the belief not only in the soul’s immortality, but even in the redemption and resurrection of the body, and of nature itself. Because of Christ, not just the human soul but the human body and its activities were being changed, spiritualized, and made holy again. Even the conjugal union was here seen as a reflection of Christ’s intimate bond with humanity, and therefore as possessing sacred significance. Christ’s incarnation had effected the restoration of God’s image in man. In Jesus, the archetypal Logos had merged with its derivative image, man, thereby restoring the latter’s full divinity. The redemptive triumph was a new man in his entirety, not just a spiritual transcendence of his physicality. In its teaching that “the Logos was made flesh,” and in its faith in the rebirth of the whole man, lay an explicitly material dimension that distinguished Christianity from other, more exclusively transcendent mystical conceptions.
This redemptive Christian understanding reaffirmed and brought new meaning to the original Hebrew view of man as created body and soul in the image of God, a conception parallel to the later Neoplatonic idea of man as microcosm of the divine, but with Judaism’s decisively greater stress on man—body and soul—as an integrated unit of vital power. The body was the vessel of the spirit, its temple and incarnate expression. In addition, Jesus’s ministry had been centrally involved with the act of healing, body and soul considered together. In the early Church, there was repeated reference to “Christ the physician,” and the apostles as well were often recognized as charismatic healers. The primitive Christian faith perceived the nature of spiritual salvation in explicitly psychosomatic terms. Paul’s dominant image for mankind’s resurrection was that of the one body of Christ, all humanity composing its members, matured into the fullness of Christ who was its head and consummation. Yet not just man was being restored to divinity, but also nature, which had been riven by man’s fall and longed for its salvation. Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” Early Church fathers believed that as Christ would restore the severed relation between man and God, so would he restore that between man and nature, which since the Fall and man’s misuse of freedom had been subject to man’s selfish arrogation.
Christ’s incarnation into and redemption of the world were here seen not just as exclusively spiritual events, but rather as an unparalleled development within temporal materiality and world history, and as representing the spiritual completion of nature—not nature’s antithesis, but its fulfillment. For the Logos, the divine wisdom, had been present in the creation from its beginning. Now Christ had made the implicit divinity of the world explicit. Creation was the ground of redemption, just as birth was the precondition of rebirth. In this view, nature was regarded as God’s noble handiwork and the present locus of his self-revelation, and was thus worthy of reverence and understanding.
But equally characteristic of Christian thinking was an opposing view, especially dominant in later Western Christianity, in which nature was perceived as that which must be overcome to attain spiritual purity. Nature as a whole was
corrupt and finite. Only man, the head of creation, was capable of salvation, and in man only his soul was essentially redeemable. In this understanding, man’s soul was in direct conflict with the base instincts of his own biological nature and was endangered by the potential entrapment of carnal pleasures and the material world. Here the physical body was often deplored as the residence of the devil and the occasion of sin. The early Judaeo-Christian belief in redemption of the whole man and the natural world shifted in emphasis, especially under the influence of the Neoplatonist Christian theologians, to a belief in a purely spiritual redemption in which man’s highest faculties alone—the spiritual intellect, the divine essence of the human soul—would be reunited with God. While the Platonic element in Christianity overcame the divine-human dualism by conceiving of man as directly participating in the divine archetype, it simultaneously encouraged a different dualism between body and spirit. The focus for the Platonic divine-human identity was the nous, the spiritual intellect; the physical body did not participate in this identity, but rather impeded it. In its more extreme forms, Platonism encouraged in Christianity a view of the body as the soul’s prison.
As with the physical body, so with the physical world. Plato’s doctrine of the supremacy of the transcendent reality over the contingent material world reinforced in Christianity a metaphysical dualism that in turn supported a moral asceticism. Like Plato’s Socrates, the devout Christian perceived himself as a citizen of the spiritual world, and his relation to the transitory physical realm was that of a stranger and pilgrim. Man had once possessed a blissful divine knowledge but had fallen into dark ignorance, and only the hope of recovering that lost spiritual light motivated the Christian soul while detained in this body and this world. Only when man awakened from the present life would he attain true happiness. Death, as a spiritual liberation, was more highly valued than mundane existence. At best the concrete natural world was an imperfect reflection of and preparation for the higher spiritual kingdom to come. But more likely the mundane world, with its deceptive attractions, its spurious pleasures and debasing arousal of the passions, would pervert the soul and deprive it of its celestial reward. Hence all human intellectual and moral effort was properly directed toward the spiritual and the afterlife, away from the physical and this life. In all these ways, Platonism gave an emphatic philosophical justification to the potential spirit-matter dualism in Christianity.
Yet this later theological development had numerous antecedents: Stoicism, Neopythagoreanism, Manichaeism, and other religious sects such as the Essenes all possessed marked tendencies toward religious dualism and asceticism that affected the Christian view. And Judaism itself, with its characteristic imperative against worldly and fleshly defilement of the divine and holy, lent support to such tendencies from the outset of the new religion. But it was certain streams of dualistic Gnosticism, probably originating from the penetration of mystical Judaism by Zoroastrian dualism, that were the most extreme in this regard during Christianity’s first centuries, holding an absolute division between an evil material world and a good spiritual realm. The resulting syncretistic Gnostic theology radically transformed the orthodox Christian conception by maintaining that the creator of the physical world, the Old Testament Yahweh, was an imperfect and tyrannical subordinate deity, who was overthrown by the spiritual Christ and the compassionate Father of the New Testament revelation (which the Gnostics augmented with other texts and edited to remove the remnants of the Hebrew faith which they considered false). Man’s spirit was entrapped in an alien body in an alien material world, which could be transcended only by the esoterically knowledgeable, the Gnostic elect. Such a vision amplified related tendencies in John’s Gospel stressing the divisions between light and darkness, between Christ’s kingdom and the world under Satan, between the spiritual elect and the worldly unredeemed, as well as between Yahweh and Christ, Old Testament and New. Although the earliest authoritative orthodox Christian theologians, such as Irenaeus, argued forcefully for the continuity of the Old and New Testaments, for the divine plan’s unity from Genesis to Christ, much of the tenor of Gnostic dualism left its traces in later Christian theology and piety.
For primitive Christianity itself, like its Judaic progenitor, tended ambiguously toward a matter-spirit dualism and a negative view of nature and this world. The New Testament referred to Satan as the prince of this world; thus Christian trust in a world ruled by Providence was juxtaposed with Christian fear of a world ruled by Satan. Moreover, to distance itself from the highly sexualized contemporary pagan culture, much of early Christianity stressed the need for a spiritual purity that held little room for nature’s spontaneous instincts, particularly sexuality. Celibacy was the ideal state, and marriage- a necessary allowance for human cupidity so that it be kept within defined boundaries. Communal and charitable forms of Christian love were instead emphasized—agapē rather than eros. Especially important here was the expectation of Christ’s imminent return, which dominated the early Church sensibility and which made procreative and marital considerations seem irrelevant. The arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven, an event most early Christians expected would take place in their own lifetime, would eliminate all material and social forms of the old order. More generally, the desire to overcome the perceived materialistic excesses of pagan culture, as well as Christianity’s repeated encounter with state-sanctioned persecutions, impelled early Christians to negate the values of the present world in favor of the next. Withdrawal from and transcendence of this world, whether in the manner of the desert hermits or, more absolutely, through martyrdom, held great attraction for the fervent Christian. Apocalyptic expectations often arose from and engendered intensely negative evaluations of the present world.
The need to keep holy and blameless in anticipation of Christ’s imminent coming was the foremost imperative for the early Christian. And the nature of that holiness and moral purity was defined in Paul’s radical opposition of “flesh” to “spirit,” with the former evil and the latter good. It is true that Paul made a distinction between “flesh” (sarx) as unredeemed nature, and “body” (soma) as something connoting the whole man—less part of a Greek body-soul dichotomy and more the biblical unity, susceptible to sin yet open to redemption. He suggested a positive evaluation of “body” in such images as the body of Christ, the body of Church members, the resurrection of the body, the body as temple of the Holy Spirit. He often employed “flesh” to refer less to the physical per se than to man’s mortal weakness, and specifically to a principle of narrow self-elevation that caused a moral inversion of the proper human personality, a subjection of the human soul and body to lower negative forces at the expense of a loving openness to the greater spiritual reality of God. Sin was not so much mere carnality—though the sinful life was carnal in its obsessions—as it was the perverse elevation over God of that which, good in itself in proper measure, was rightly subordinate to God.
Yet Paul’s flesh-body distinction was often ambiguous, both in his doctrinal statements and in his practical ethics. And his choice of “flesh” as the constellating term for such authoritative moral and metaphysical disparagement was a consequential one. It was not without Paul’s assumed support that many subsequent Christians characteristically viewed the physical, the biological, and the instinctual as inherently prone to the demonic and responsible for man’s fall and continued corruption. In Paul’s flesh-spirit polarity, compounded by similar tendencies in other parts of the New Testament, lay the seeds of an antiphysical dualism in Christianity that Platonic, Gnostic, and Manichaean influences would later amplify.
Augustine
What was implicit in Paul was made explicit by Augustine. And here we must focus more directly on that individual whose effect on Christianity in the West would be uniquely pervasive and enduring. For in Augustine all these factors—Judaism, Pauline theology, Johannine mysticism, early Christian asceticism, Gnostic dualism, Neoplatonism, and the critical state of late classical civilization—
combined with the peculiarities of his own character and biography to define an attitude toward nature and this world, toward human history, and toward man’s redemption that would largely mold the character of medieval Western Christianity.
Son of a pagan father and a devoutly Christian mother, Augustine was endowed with a character the intensity of which further charged his biographical polarities. Highly sensual by nature, living the life of a young bon vivant in the libidinous environment of pagan Carthage, fathering an illegitimate child by his mistress, pursuing the worldly career of a professor of rhetoric, he was nevertheless progressively drawn to the supersensible and spiritual by philosophical preference and religious aspiration, and, not least, by maternal concern. In a series of psychologically dramatic experiences, Augustine moved away from his earlier, secularly oriented existence through a sequence of stages holding considerable meaning for his later religious understanding: first espousing the higher life of philosophy after reading Cicero’s Hortensius; then a long involvement with the highly dualistic semi-Gnostic sect of Manichaeism; followed by an increasing attraction to philosophical Neoplatonism; and finally, after encountering Ambrose, the Neoplatonist Christian bishop of Milan, ending his search in a full embrace of the Christian religion and the Catholic Church. Each element in this sequence left its mark on his mature vision, which in turn left its mark on subsequent Christian thinking in the West through the medium of his extraordinarily compelling writings.
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