Heaven & Earth are Full of Your Body
Photo by Luigi Boccardo on Unsplash
I have just started trawling through some old essays for tips for a potential project touching on faith and embodiment. One theme that is constantly jumping out is the body operating as a kind of doorway, the tactile yet liminal border between the physical and the metaphysical, the temporal and the eternal.
In art and philosophy, the body comes up as a constant theme of interest as a reference point for the exploration of the things eternal. For these artists and thinkers the body is not mere flesh, but the gateway to the cosmos and beyond.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Salvador Dali’s Corpus Hypercubus are just a couple of artistic examples in which the movement is made from the nobbly, fleshly world of corporeality, to the conceptual purity of geometry and mathematics
Meanwhile in the world of philosophy, we have Emmanuel Mounier’s passage from his 1950 essay Personalism, in which he speaks, often movingly, of the vital link between the universal of being on the one hand and the particularity of his body on the other. Furthermore, Mounier gives us this striking line
I cannot think without being and i cannot be without my body, which is my exposition – to myself to the world, to everyone else: by its means alone can I escape from the solitude of a thinking that would be only thought about thought […] the body takes me constantly out of myself into the problems of the world and the struggles of mankind. By the solicitation of the senses it pushes me out into space, by growing old it acquaints me with duration, and by its death, it confronts me with eternity.
Another figure interested in what might be called a “postmodern theology of the body”, is Oxford University’s Graham Ward. In his Christ and Culture, Ward alerts us to the distinction between two German conceptions of the body which betray the body’s inherent link between biology and eternity.
On the one hand, Ward says, there is Körper to denote the biological reality of the body, a body that merely exists; on the other hand, there is Leib, which denotes not only a biological body, but one where the soul is intermingled with flesh and bone, a body that truly lives. The living of the biological body, therefore, pulls into the muscle and sinew the eternal realm where the soul is located. The living body then, is one where every touch launches the person to the sublime.
From the standpoint of art, philosophy and theology, the body comes to us as an opening reality, a doorway that points us to eternal things. Yet at the same time, we see in the world of policy and commerce attempts to treat the body like an enclosed entity – what Ward calls “the body as mere flesh” – an entity that in being closed in on itself, can become a commodity to be measured, controlled, managed, transported, bought and sold.
One of the great Christian services to the world, therefore, is its constant call to resist the temptation towards the enclosure of systems by keeping both body and world open, whether it is at work, prayer or play. In so doing, the Christian protects the eternal in the biological by suspending the body between heaven and earth.
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