Hart and Crossan on the Soul
About a month ago I sent away for two books by David Bentley Hart, and still they haven't arrived. So, scavenging online, I found an article by him that I hadn't yet read - The Soul of a Controversy from the Wall Street Journal (2005).
The subject of the article is the death of Terri Schiavo, but Hart writes not of euthanasia but the soul. Here's some of what he has to say ...
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Terri Schiavo has now died, but of course the controversy surrounding her last days will persist indefinitely .... I heard three people on the radio last week speculating on the whereabouts of her "soul."
One opined that where consciousness has sunk below a certain minimally responsive level, the soul has already departed the body; the other two thought that the soul remains, but as a dormant prisoner of the ruined flesh, awaiting release. Their arguments, being intuitive, were of little interest. What caught my attention was the unreflective dualism to which all three clearly subscribed: The soul, they assumed, is a kind of magical essence haunting the body, a ghost in a machine.
This is in fact a peculiarly modern view of the matter, not much older than the 17th-century philosophy of Descartes. While it is now the model to which most of us habitually revert when talking about the soul--whether we believe in such things or not--it has scant basis in either Christian or Jewish tradition.
The "living soul" of Scripture is the whole corporeal and spiritual totality of a person whom the breath of God has wakened to life. Thomas Aquinas, interpreting centuries of Christian and pagan metaphysics, defined the immortal soul as the "form of the body," the vital power animating, pervading, shaping an individual from the moment of conception, drawing all the energies of life into a unity.
This is not to deny that, for Christian tradition, the soul transcends and survives the earthly life of the body. It is only to say that the soul, rather than being a kind of "guest" within the self, is instead the underlying mystery of a life in its fullness ....
Granted, it is easiest to sense this mystery when gazing at the Sistine Chapel's ceiling or listening to Bach. But it should be evident--for Christians at least--even when everything glorious and prodigious in our nature has been stripped away and all that remains is frailty, brokenness and dependency, or when a person we love has been largely lost to us in the labyrinth of a damaged brain. Even among such ravages--for those with the eyes to see it--a terrible dignity still shines out.
I do not understand exactly why those who wanted Terri Schiavo to die had become so resolute in their purposes by the end .... Of this I am certain, though: Christians who understand their faith are obliged to believe that she was, to the last, a living soul. It is true that, in some real sense, it was her soul that those who loved her could no longer reach, but it was also her soul that they touched with their hands and spoke to and grieved over and adored ....
**************
Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is not alone in this idea of the soul - even Jesus Seminar fellow JD Crossan agrees ...
... one of the most fundamental decisions we have to make, going back to dear old Plato, is whether the human being is a dialectic, in the same sense as before, of body and spirit, or if somehow that spirit or soul is only temporarily, possibly even unfortunately, joined to what is either a flea bag hotel or a magnificent palace called the body. But in either case the soul is only temporarily embodied until it goes home to its true spiritual abode. I think that this is the most radical question in Western philosophy. Whichever way you come down on this question, everything else will follow. If you think that human beings are actually incarcerated, entombed spirits, that we're simply renting bodies out, then everything else will follow. But if you think along with the Bible that somehow or other the body/soul amalgam is a dialectic, that you can distinguish but not separate them, then everything else will follow differently ...
- link
An interesting page on the soul from the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science lies here
The subject of the article is the death of Terri Schiavo, but Hart writes not of euthanasia but the soul. Here's some of what he has to say ...
**********************
Terri Schiavo has now died, but of course the controversy surrounding her last days will persist indefinitely .... I heard three people on the radio last week speculating on the whereabouts of her "soul."
One opined that where consciousness has sunk below a certain minimally responsive level, the soul has already departed the body; the other two thought that the soul remains, but as a dormant prisoner of the ruined flesh, awaiting release. Their arguments, being intuitive, were of little interest. What caught my attention was the unreflective dualism to which all three clearly subscribed: The soul, they assumed, is a kind of magical essence haunting the body, a ghost in a machine.
This is in fact a peculiarly modern view of the matter, not much older than the 17th-century philosophy of Descartes. While it is now the model to which most of us habitually revert when talking about the soul--whether we believe in such things or not--it has scant basis in either Christian or Jewish tradition.
The "living soul" of Scripture is the whole corporeal and spiritual totality of a person whom the breath of God has wakened to life. Thomas Aquinas, interpreting centuries of Christian and pagan metaphysics, defined the immortal soul as the "form of the body," the vital power animating, pervading, shaping an individual from the moment of conception, drawing all the energies of life into a unity.
This is not to deny that, for Christian tradition, the soul transcends and survives the earthly life of the body. It is only to say that the soul, rather than being a kind of "guest" within the self, is instead the underlying mystery of a life in its fullness ....
Granted, it is easiest to sense this mystery when gazing at the Sistine Chapel's ceiling or listening to Bach. But it should be evident--for Christians at least--even when everything glorious and prodigious in our nature has been stripped away and all that remains is frailty, brokenness and dependency, or when a person we love has been largely lost to us in the labyrinth of a damaged brain. Even among such ravages--for those with the eyes to see it--a terrible dignity still shines out.
I do not understand exactly why those who wanted Terri Schiavo to die had become so resolute in their purposes by the end .... Of this I am certain, though: Christians who understand their faith are obliged to believe that she was, to the last, a living soul. It is true that, in some real sense, it was her soul that those who loved her could no longer reach, but it was also her soul that they touched with their hands and spoke to and grieved over and adored ....
**************
Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is not alone in this idea of the soul - even Jesus Seminar fellow JD Crossan agrees ...
... one of the most fundamental decisions we have to make, going back to dear old Plato, is whether the human being is a dialectic, in the same sense as before, of body and spirit, or if somehow that spirit or soul is only temporarily, possibly even unfortunately, joined to what is either a flea bag hotel or a magnificent palace called the body. But in either case the soul is only temporarily embodied until it goes home to its true spiritual abode. I think that this is the most radical question in Western philosophy. Whichever way you come down on this question, everything else will follow. If you think that human beings are actually incarcerated, entombed spirits, that we're simply renting bodies out, then everything else will follow. But if you think along with the Bible that somehow or other the body/soul amalgam is a dialectic, that you can distinguish but not separate them, then everything else will follow differently ...
- link
An interesting page on the soul from the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science lies here
posted by crystal | 9:19 PM
3 Comments:
Crystal Watson - Scourge of Gnostics everywhere! You and Elaine Pagels better not ever get into the same room together. :-)
I love Crossan's line dissing the notion of the the soul being trapped in a flea-bag hotel of a body. Are we a soul trapped inside of a body, or a body animated by a soul?
Here is a bit of a text I once saved on a review that NCR had done on Crossan's book "The Birth of Christianity":
God’s kingdom is here, among the poor, as radical resistance to the injustice and violence of Roman commercialism. Greek culture, built on a cosmic dualism between spirit and matter, is the poisonous justification for separating people’s spiritual welfare from their physical fate. An unjust world can starve the poor, keep slaves, accept inequality, by compensating victims with religion now, heaven later.
Communities that resist such exploitation and reject such dualism, not with force but through their refusal to participate in it at all, threaten the system far more than open rebellion, as Gandhi would later demonstrate in India.
To understand Jesus’ death, Crossan again stakes his analysis on the importance of an early hypothetical core tradition he calls the Cross gospel, contained in the second century extra-canonical Gospel of Peter, and the claim that this core predates and influences the editing of the synoptic accounts of the death and resurrection of Jesus. This Death Tradition, if it in fact reflects the earliest attempts to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death, is the basis for Crossan’s contention that the resurrection must first be seen within the Jewish belief in God’s promise of communal vindication after persecution, resurrection after execution rather than a unique miracle about Jesus only.
What does all this mean? For Crossan, to whom this reviewer apologizes for risking the above condensation, the Jesus who emerges from a rigorous examination of the record is, along with whatever else we believe about him, a figure inseparable from God’s insistence on justice in the world.
Crossan, with a teacher’s skill for framing the facts, brackets his detailed research between two essays as prologue and epilogue. It is helpful to read these together before and after reading the rest of the book. The prologue, “The Content of Your Vision” is about the Gnostic tendency that infects Western culture and Christianity. Separating flesh from spirit, a dualism not present in the Judaism that resisted Hellenization, is the root problem in every other kind of separation of the world into physical and spiritual realms. Such dualism opens up the possibility of rejecting the flesh or making it inferior to spirit, a profound assault on human dignity that further opens up ideological distinctions and hierarchies among people and about their intrinsic value and worthiness. Resisting this, if we are all bodies (enfleshed spirit) together here and now in this world, then justice is about basic equality, fundamental rights to share the world’s resources, to eat, be healthy, receive and contribute within community through celebration and meaningful work. Justice is always about here and now bodies.
Crossan charges Paul with fudging on this dualism when appealing to the Greco-Roman world he sought to convert. God proclaims a new equality between “Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free in Christ” (Galatians 3). Greeks and Romans now share in the life once offered only to Jews. But then Paul stops short of applying the same de facto equality for gender and class that he declared for ethnicity. Race is cancelled, but patriarchy and servitude are not. Equality of gender and class, the revolutionary scandal and heart of resistance in the gospel is spiritual only. For Crossan, the radical gospel was postponed, evaded, the first of many accommodations and compromises based on Platonic dualism.
This is why it is essential for Crossan, despite charges to the contrary, to insist on a bodily resurrection for Jesus: “Bodily resurrection means that the embodied life and death of the historical Jesus continues to be experienced, by believers, as powerfully efficacious and salvifically present in the world. That life continued, as it always had, to form communities of like lives.”
The epilogue: “The Character of Your God,” restates the Jewish practice of regularly leveling the economic playing field with debt cancellation every seven years, Jubilees every 50 years, and even with the Sabbath, which imposed an equality of rest on everyone. The practice was based on the belief that God demands such equality among us, that in the total community of gift and need, all, despite physical or social advantage, have the same right to share the bounty of the earth, and no individual or group is to accrue wealth at the expense of others. Such an ethic, backed by the God of justice and righteousness, lay at the faultline between Jewish faith, Greek culture and Roman commercialism. Resistance was necessary, inevitable.
Crossan the scholar exegete is restrained in drawing out the hermeneutic, but it is not hard to see again the radical claim such a belief makes on the Christian world today. The parable of the rich man living sumptuously while Lazarus dies destitute within sight of his table is a kind of prophetic epitaph on the current global economy, with the radical gospel as resistance to the false gospel of extractive capitalism generating wealth for the few, destitution and death for the many.
Our repentance and conversion is an urgent matter of avoiding this pervasive indictment. If churches can be seen as true communities of resistance to what is wrong in the dominant culture, if our Eucharist can be the communal meal that commits us to justice for all, we may escape judgment and find life. The historical Jesus and the Christ of faith need no more scholarship to confront us more clearly.
Jeff,
thanks for the informative comment ... i love that Crossan quote - it rings true to me. He sounds almost like a Liberation Theologian.
I also have problems with Paul for all those reasons - his acceptance of slavery and attitude towards women (and homosexuality), and his "spiritual bodies"
So Crossan did believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus? Did he write that maybe Jesus was not resurrected but dumped after death and eaten by wild dogs, or am I mixing him up with someone else?
Being Crossan's kind of christian would be very hard, but I think his standards might be closer to what Jesus may have had in mind.
I think the resurrection is something Crossan would try to finesse by saying that "he was resurrected in the hearts of his followers", or something like that. I think he would insist, though, that whatever happened, it was very real to his followers, and that they believed in it absolutely.
Even for all of his skepticism and disbelief in the supernatural and miracles, etc, I think Crossan is a wonderful Christian. I think he "gets" the ethical teachings of Jesus more than some traditional believers do.
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