Spirit and Flesh
“Other religions have their ways of coping with the division [division between spirit and flesh]. Most of them, one way or another, set the unseen realm over against the seen and end up denigrating the latter. For them, release, or salvation, comes when we are set free from the prison of this flesh and fly away into the Aether, or the Oversoul, or the All.
Christianity, on the other hand, throws up roadblocks to any such itinerary. It is heavy with physical, and even clinical, details. For thousands of years of human history, according to Christianity, the way was prepared for our salvation, not by the Lord God’s weaning men away from their physical life and teaching them to be spiritual, as the Buddha and Plato and other sages have urged. Rather, the way He laid out was crowded with altars of stone, and bloody pelts, and entrails and great haunches of lamb and beef, and gold and incense and fine-twined linen, and immense gold bulls holding up the brazen sea in the Temple. Doves, heifers, bullocks, rams—it was very crowded.
But that was all primitive. Surely something spiritual would emerge from those elementary lessons. Surely thoughtful men might anticipate the day when all of this would be put behind and be replaced with elevated thoughts and spirituality.
Indeed it was all put behind. There came an end to those gory altars and all that slaughter. But it was not a tissue of elevated thoughts that replaced them. Rather, an angel appeared to a woman and said, ‘Hail!’ What we now had, far from the summons away from the physical realm that highminded men might have wished, was gynecology, obstetrics, and a birth. Whatever we may imagine about the spiritual rhapsody that might have attended this angelic visitation to the Virgin, the one thing we know to have occurred was a conception. The Virgins womb teemed.
It was embarrassing to the religious mind. It proved a scandal. The whole ensuing story bothered and even enraged religious men, and it has continued to do so. Christian history is littered not only with the bones of martyrs who have died at the hands of enemies who hated this story but also with the confused and heretical attempts of Christians themselves to skirt it. Seizing on Saint Paul’s vocabulary and wrenching it about, they have tried to pit the spiritual against the physical and have tried to make Christianity like Buddhism, a religion that summons us away from earthly, earthy life.”
~Thomas Howard
Christianity, on the other hand, throws up roadblocks to any such itinerary. It is heavy with physical, and even clinical, details. For thousands of years of human history, according to Christianity, the way was prepared for our salvation, not by the Lord God’s weaning men away from their physical life and teaching them to be spiritual, as the Buddha and Plato and other sages have urged. Rather, the way He laid out was crowded with altars of stone, and bloody pelts, and entrails and great haunches of lamb and beef, and gold and incense and fine-twined linen, and immense gold bulls holding up the brazen sea in the Temple. Doves, heifers, bullocks, rams—it was very crowded.
But that was all primitive. Surely something spiritual would emerge from those elementary lessons. Surely thoughtful men might anticipate the day when all of this would be put behind and be replaced with elevated thoughts and spirituality.
Indeed it was all put behind. There came an end to those gory altars and all that slaughter. But it was not a tissue of elevated thoughts that replaced them. Rather, an angel appeared to a woman and said, ‘Hail!’ What we now had, far from the summons away from the physical realm that highminded men might have wished, was gynecology, obstetrics, and a birth. Whatever we may imagine about the spiritual rhapsody that might have attended this angelic visitation to the Virgin, the one thing we know to have occurred was a conception. The Virgins womb teemed.
It was embarrassing to the religious mind. It proved a scandal. The whole ensuing story bothered and even enraged religious men, and it has continued to do so. Christian history is littered not only with the bones of martyrs who have died at the hands of enemies who hated this story but also with the confused and heretical attempts of Christians themselves to skirt it. Seizing on Saint Paul’s vocabulary and wrenching it about, they have tried to pit the spiritual against the physical and have tried to make Christianity like Buddhism, a religion that summons us away from earthly, earthy life.”
~Thomas Howard
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