Flesh and Spirit

Laurent Gagnebin

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

Innumerable texts and songs by Christian authors set flesh and spirit in opposition. They imagine that in this way they are being faithful to the injunctions of the New Testament, more particularly to those of Paul whose texts are the product of such dualism. Seen through this lens, the human being is composed of two opposed realities: the first is material, corporal, sensual, sexual, inferior and negative; the second is spiritual, superior, heavenly, luminous, positive and almost divine. It has a dignity which the other does not. Such a division between flesh and spirit actualises a spirituality and a religion which are discarnate; it is poles apart from biblical thought, which does not view materiality as negative, unfortunate and shameful.

Christian morality has very broadly accepted this opposition. It has commended mistrust of the physical dimensions of our person and has favoured an existence which is rather ascetic. It has made an exemplary rule of celibacy, of virginity, of chastity, of the rejection of a sexual life; it is only in following this that we would rise to the demands of the gospel. So we fall into a religious alienation where earth is sacrificed to heaven, the body to the soul, the present of earthly nourishment and of history to eternal life.

Augustine (354-430) did not master Greek sufficiently to be able to read the New Testament in the original text and he did not know Hebrew to be able to read the Old Testament. He is very largely responsible for this dualism, because for him original sin was of a sexual nature. He depends more on a Platonist philosophy, read in Latin, and on the Manichaean dualism* of his youth than he does on the authentic teaching of the Bible. He thought of human beings within the framework of a dualism of which the biblical perspective and the Semitic mind-set know nothing. For them the human being is a whole, body and soul (as we say); our being is inherently psychosomatic through and through.

We still often meet people who have been traumatised by an obsessional dualism. Nothing is more foreign to the biblical conception of the human being. However they are convinced that their evanescent spiritualism and their discarnate demands are in keeping with a morality and with values which are often called Judaeo-Christian.

Well, no. For the Bible, flesh means the complete human person, body and soul, who follows his or her own will, their natural inclination, someone who is self-centred, the victim of an exclusive egocentricity, a tyrannical navel-gazing. To avoid misinterpretation, it seems to me that the Bible in contemporary language makes a judicious choice by translating the Greek words of our “flesh” (sarx) by our own “nature”.

As for spirit (pneuma), this is the complete human person, body and soul, possessed by the Spirit of God, a spirit of generosity and of service, and not by an exclusive spiritualism. That is the reason why the spirit becomes the Spirit (with a capital letter).

Galatians 5, 13-17 provides us an example of this. There Paul opposes to the desires of the “flesh” not some sort of spiritualism, but the love of neighbour which permits us to live entirely and in truth according to the spirit, to know the Spirit of God, a spirit of love.

*Mani is the founder in the third century of a dualist religion affirming the co-existence of two opposed principles, that of good (a spiritual substance) and that of evil (a corporal substance). Before his conversion, Augustine was powerfully marked by this religion which promoted an intransigent asceticism.

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