Why Bodies?

Why did God create human beings with bodies? Hanna J. Lucas helps us think more deeply about the role of human bodies in the act of knowing God, while inviting us to not merely think about it. Perhaps our inclination to ‘think’ about our bodies is indicative of our propensity to perceive our bodies as something to be navigated rather than embraced. Humans must bodily participate and receive in the liturgy–tasting and seeing, as Hanna will remind us. Also, her response to the question on screens is a poignant challenge to the maladies of the modern acceptance of devices with screens as simply information delivery systems, rather than a message themselves.

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Are human bodies necessary?

My short answer is simply, yes, human bodies are necessary.

An answer to the question ‘why bodies?’, though, is not immediately obvious. There have been all sorts of perspectives regarding the meaning of our embodiment. Perhaps the body is a cumbersome and unfortunate cage for the soul or the ‘true self’ (think ancient and modern gnosticism); or perhaps the physical body is all we are – temporary conglomerations of matter and electrical impulses (which have an odd penchant for useless existential questions!).

To find a Christian answer to the question, I would take my cue from Christ who, when pressed on the question of divorce (Matt.19) pointed his interlocutors back to ‘the beginning’; and he takes them to the creation of Man and Woman in Genesis. Christ’s appeal to ‘the beginning’ – so argues John Paul II in his own ‘Theology of the Body’ – isn’t simply a reference to what is temporally prior. It’s an appeal to ontological origins. And this approach of answering a question by first asking ‘what is it?’ – that is, what has God made it to be? – is the first step in good theological thinking about bodies. About anything.

The body is necessary to who and what God has made us to be and what God has made us for. Share on X

So, God makes Man in His image. God makes humanity Male and Female. In Genesis 2, God makes Man out of the dust of the earth and breathes life into him. And, crucially, God calls what He creates on that sixth day ‘very good’. No caveats or qualifiers, no ‘it’s mostly good, but sorry about that bit’; simply very good.

Is the body necessary to our human nature? God seems to think so. They are part of what God calls ‘good’ in the beginning, and they seem to be sticking around for what glories He promises in the end: ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body’. I would want to use the word ‘necessary’ in the philosophical sense; not as in ‘needful’ but as in ‘it belongs to the reality of the thing’. The body is necessary to who and what God has made us to be and what God has made us for (eschatologically). The traditional Christian perspective sees our human nature as the integrated union of body and soul – to use a technical term: we are a hylo-morphic whole.

Pushing a little further, I would want to say not only that bodies are necessary – part of our given created nature – they are a gift and a sign. What does the body make possible? Encounter, embrace, sensation, presence, communion. More on this below.

How would you explain the body’s role in the human capacity to know God? Is there a connection between the human body and the Imago Dei?

We might think that the body is incidental or even a hindrance to our knowledge of God. Our bodies are often the occasion of temptation and distraction when we desire spiritual growth; and they seem to be the site of our fundamental weakness for carnal things… and merely mundane things.

But let me say something about ‘mundane things’. This is where the body can grow up into its role in knowing the Lord. A positive view of the body in this regard depends upon a prior affirmation: that creation communicates divine truth. Think Psalm 19: the heavens declare the glory of the Lord… day after day they pour forth speech, night after night they display knowledge. If you’re familiar with Hans Boersma’s work, his concept of ‘sacramental ontology’ is relevant here.

Creation is a sign. Creation is speaking. And early Christian theologians affirmed that what creation is declaring is Christ. In humble, rustic, mundane voices the ‘Book of Nature’ is speaking about the Lord, for those with ears to hear. And it’s the body that encounters this ‘book’ through the senses.

Think about the necessities and the delights of bodily life: our dependence on food and water to live, the impulse to sexual communion, delight in sensory goodness: the smell of a baby (any mom will attest), the taste of your favourite food. All of these have a true and inherent Christological meaning. Many church fathers, especially in the context of catechesis, appeal to the phenomenology of sensation and the order of creation to teach theological truth, thereby implying and employing the communicative essence of creation.

This communication – the ‘voice’ that ‘goes out to all the earth’ (Ps.19:4) – is rudimentary. Is it sufficient without the illumination of grace in Christ? No. But does it belong to one divine providence and pedagogy which woos us and calls us to the Lord? Absolutely yes.

Regarding the question of the relation of the body to the Imago Dei, I would say that the body is an icon of the divine communion. This is pre-eminently obvious in our gendered bodies and the sign of marriage. We are ordered toward the other, made for community and communion, we image plurality and unity. It’s important to read these signs in the right direction. We don’t say that the communion of the Godhead is like a human marriage, or that our embodiment tells us that God is material. Rather, our embodiment and embodied realities image – in a partial and finite manner – truths that are infinite and full.

How did you come to understand the body’s importance to one’s knowledge of God?

My interest in this question comes out of my research surrounding early Christian ‘mystagogy’. What the heck is that? In short, mystagogy is the portion of the catechetical instruction given to new converts that covers the content and meaning of the sacraments – or, as they were called in the early church, the ‘mysteries’; hence, myst-agogy: leading someone through the mysteries.

It was normally a bishop giving this kind of instruction. And I found that, alongside the scripturally based explanations of the sacraments and some hearty moral exhortations to the newly-baptized, there was this persisting thread of teaching that had to do with the physical senses. These catechizing bishops would say things like, notice that the oil of anointing feels like this, think about your body’s need for food and water, attend to the physical experience of light and darkness, sunrise and sunset.

And what I came to realize is that what we see particularly clearly in mystagogy are ascending and overlapping layers of divine instruction – a universal divine pedagogy – where God’s self-revelation and the offer of salvation echoes down to us, all the way down, through matter and sense. In my own writing I call this ‘the tutelage of the creation’. And the liturgy – which is what mystagogy seeks to interpret for us – is kind of the perfect place to have this humble, earthy pedagogy of God come to our attention.

On a more personal level, I was moved to discover that this ancient Christian teaching illuminated my own experience. It invited me to recognize, ponder, and receive the profundity and sacramentality of ordinary things – cups of tea, summertime, embracing my children – and it gave me the true hermeneutic key that made sense of them all. Spoiler: it all in the end points to Christ.

What is the telos of being human and how does the body fit in with that?

Telos, I love this word. What’s our ultimate purpose written into our nature from the very beginning? I would answer: eternal union with God. I would call to mind what Jesus says in his ‘high priestly prayer’ in John 17: ‘this is eternal life that they may know You, the only True God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent’. We know that this isn’t mere head knowledge. So, frankly, I would be bold and say that our telos as human beings is communion with Christ the Bridegroom. I am deeply convinced that a fundamentally nuptial teleology sits beneath all of creation.

The telos of a union of love and new (or eternal) life is written into our nature as male and female. Share on X

What does the body have to do with this? To steal a phrase from Christopher West (a Catholic theologian who writes and speaks on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body) “our bodies tell God’s story”.[1] West often says, “the bible begins with a marriage, and it ends with a marriage.” It begins in Genesis with the creation of Man and Woman, Adam and Eve; and it ends with Revelation and the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. The telos of a union of love and new (or eternal) life is written into our nature as male and female.

Returning to what I said above about the body receiving the divine tutelage of creation, we can learn to hear the echoes of the gospel that reverberate through everything God has made as we learn to receive and interpret even our mundane experience of embodied life.

What makes it easy for people to dismiss the importance of the body, especially as it relates to knowing?

I want to be cheeky and just say, ‘Descartes’ mind-body dualism’ and leave it there. Though it’s not only (or even primarily) Descartes’ fault; and it is admittedly lazy to pin all our epistemological malaises on him. But I digress.

We stand today on the far side of several metaphysical moves that have left us with some profound epistemological wounds. And by and large these have taken the form of dis-integrations and ruptures between different aspects of our human nature or between components in the process of knowing. These ruptures fragment and frustrate the metaphysical whole affirmed in the classical Christian vision of reality and truth. These ‘epistemological wounds’, as I call them, have seriously confused our relationship with our own bodies, and they have problematized to the point of nearly obliterating any idea of a relationship between embodiment (or matter) and truth.

We’ve got the Cartesian dualism between mind and body, which not only fractures the integrated vision of a body-soul unity that belonged to classical Christian thought, but it also elevates and isolates reason (and a very modern version of reason) to a distorted degree. At the same time, you have the empirical turn of modernity, which swings the other way while still maintaining that same mind-body fracture, prioritizing sensation and empirical data as the raw stuff of knowledge while denying that matter bears any inherent meaning. Finally, you’ve got the advent of subjectivism which deconstructs the relationship between the human intellect and creation, reducing so-called ‘knowledge’ to an arbitrary imposition of meaning structures upon an in different, neutral order of nature.

We have very little hope of appreciating the body’s role regarding knowledge – let alone the hope of ‘knowledge’ being a meaningful concept at all – while operating under the auspices of such a metaphysic. The body recovers its rightful place and its given and gifted capacities to mediate truth to us when our understanding is healed by and in light of Christ.

What do you think are the effects of the modern insertion of screens as mediators of experience for humans when it comes to the telos of knowledge?

I will perhaps reveal my troglodyte tendencies here! I’m not sure I would confer upon screens the term ‘mediator’. I think this is part of the problem with modern communication technology. We often think of screens (namely the capacities of the smartphone, and the culture-production industry they occasion) as mere extensions of our physical senses and bodies. We can see, now we can see farther and more. We can hear, now we can hear farther and more. We can speak and converse with those near us in our embodied and bounded community; now we can shout into the void of boundless online ‘communities’. It’s just the same human faculties, but more, bigger, faster; isn’t it?

No, it’s not. The analogy of technology being a mere extension of our natural powers assumes that these are neutral tools. I would point us to the perennially relevant phrase coined by Marshall MacLuhan: ‘the medium is the message’. The screen is a medium, to be sure, but let us not naïvely think that it merely mediates ‘me’ (necessarily disembodied, by the way) to others, and others to me. The screen, regardless of content, also mediates certain metaphysical claims to the user. Thinking particularly of social media, the screen profoundly amplifies the modern schism of body and mind, and it prioritizes constructed and curated communities to the neglect of the local, helping us to escape the annoying askesis of your real concrete self, family, and neighbours.

Coming back to knowledge, the illusion of efficiency that the overwhelming access to information elicits – only exacerbated with the insertion of AI ‘augmentation’ (again, a term that needs interrogation) – is disastrous for epistemology. There’s something irreplaceable about the wilderness of the struggle, the discipline, of thinking. When technologies are doing the hard lifting for us, we may arrive at an ‘answer’; but we will not have received the hard-fought virtues of patience, humility, attentiveness, and wisdom that are part of the spoils of battle. Neither will we unearth the unforeseen treasures that lay down useless rabbit holes. These too, are actually indispensable to the maturity of the knower and the wholeness of knowing. These treasures are likewise indispensable to the telos of knowledge, which, I would argue, is communion between knower and known.

You have written that there are certain “incapacitations” which affect our ability to know God as we ought. What are examples of these and how do they affect the human body?

Yes, in Sensing the Sacred, I talk about maladies of thought that ‘incapacitate’ our ability to receive the sanctifying teaching of God. I wanted to draw our attention to particular moves that have been made, mostly in the wake of modernity, that put forward propositions that attack our faculties for receiving truth – that is, they deconstruct the prospect of knowing creation, knowing God through creation, knowing anything at all.

One of the ‘incapacitations’ I highlight is what I called the thesis of superfluity. This is the idea that matter, creation (therefore embodiment, the senses, and experience) are inherently neutral; read: meaningless. Or, at the very least, they are so chaotically shrouded with superimposed meanings that any real knowledge of a thing becomes an impossibility. What we are left with when we encounter the world with our bodies and attempt to ‘read’ the Book of Nature is a kind of epistemological short-circuit in the face of the absolute instability of superfluous projections of meaning upon the blank tableau of experiential phenomena. This perspective suggests a cosmos that is mute – it’s not speaking a transcendent testimony; a cosmos that is opaque, it rebuffs real encounter with meaning.

How would you encourage our readers to think Christianly about bodily senses in the liturgy?

I wouldn’t encourage you to think about it. I would encourage you to partake! Taste and see.

The liturgy is not a lecture. We are not floating brains who gather to absorb a treatise so we can get our theologizing hit, or even our warm emotional fuzzies, for the week. We are not Gnostics who meet up to discuss how we can escape the body and live the pure ‘spiritual’ life. The ancient Christian liturgies that you find in the early church, and which are still prayed today, affirm and envelop the integrated whole of the human person; formed in the beginning out of humble matter and called to union with Christ.

The liturgy is not a lecture…The ancient Christian liturgies affirm and envelop the integrated whole of the human person. Share on X

The gospel is proclaimed in our worship, indeed; and not only from the pulpit. It is also communicated to us through our senses: through our orientation to the East, the place of sunrise; through the speech of the body humbled in kneeling for confession or standing at attention for the gospel-reading and the Creed; through the physicality of the kiss (fine, the handshake) of peace; through the outlandish gift of receiving Christ’s Body and Blood in the simplicity of bread and wine through that humble mundanity of eating.

I would encourage people to renounce the dichotomy between the body and the spirit. The gospel preached through a sermon, spoken aloud in the Scripture reading, communicated through the narrative of the liturgy, that same gospel is also being spoken to us – yes in a more earthy, kind of ‘babbling’ way (as Evelyn Underhill would say)[2] – through the very matter we are made of and the materiality of the liturgy.

How would you describe the importance of our body in receiving the initial sacrament of baptism and then regularly in the Lord’s Supper?

When researching early Christian initiation and catechesis, I was reading some of these texts in Syriac. And there is a lovely Syriac idiom which has stayed with me; and it highlights the beautiful place of the body in our worship. Theodore of Mopsuestia says we are “led by these symbols to the participation in the realities.”[3]We are touched, literally, by God’s grace in the sacraments. The touch itself is speaking to us through the stuff of creation, the stuff we take in through our senses. Share on XThere is a Syriac idiom used here that communicates when something is the means by which a thing is accomplished. Where it says in English we are ‘led by these symbols’, the Syriac will use the word b’yad – literally ‘by the hand of’. So, we are ‘led by the hand of these symbols’ to participation in the realities themselves. There’s something very tactile about this turn of phrase. It reminds us to attend to our bodily experience of the liturgy. We are touched, literally, by God’s grace in the sacraments. The touch itself is speaking to us through the stuff of creation, the stuff we take in through our senses: water, oil, incense, bread and wine, the posture of the body. That humble, sensory, experiential level speaks in agreement and cooperation with the gospel proclaimed and the grace communicated through the sacraments.

I also want to reiterate how the body relates to love, presence, and embrace. With the church fathers you have a high eucharistic theology. They are all about the Real Presence of Christ. In the early centuries, you don’t have scholastic theologizing about the mechanics of the mystery – you simply have effusive joy as the mystagogue tries to articulate the gift of eucharistic union with Christ. It won’t surprise readers to learn that there is a very strong nuptial theme in patristic teaching on the eucharist. For example, Chrysostom writes, “and to show the love [Christ] has for us he has made it possible for those who desire, not merely to look upon him, but even to touch him and to consume him and to fix their teeth in his flesh and to be commingled with him; in short, to fulfil all their love.”[4]

Some may find Chrysostom’s language a little uncomfortable. I find it to be a moving affirmation that all of our being – even humble, silly, awkward, bodies – are ultimately ordered toward Christ. And all their striving and sensing comes to rest in this union which, through sensuous signs, sustains our life in Him here and now and points us to a consummate eschatological promise: the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.

I know I’ve waxed a bit poetical here about the role of the body. However, I don’t endeavour to project the role of the body or the role of creation in our knowledge of God in competition with the explicit revelation of Christ we find in Scripture, or the distinctive articulation of theological truth that we get in Christian doctrine. I am simply interested to affirm the completeness of God’s call to repentance and the completeness of the redemption that encompasses all of creation. The gospel of Christ is sounding from every nook and cranny of the universe; it comes into focus especially in the liturgy, and it is consummated in ‘the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting’.

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Notes:

[1] This is actually the title of his 2020 book, Our Bodies Tell God’s Story: Discovering the Divine Plan for Love, Sex, and Gender(Brazos Publ., 2020).

[2] Evelyn Underhill, Abba: meditations on the Lord’s Prayer, (Longmans, 1952), 18. “St. John of the Cross says that creation babbles to us, like a child which cannot articulate what it wants to say; for it is struggling to utter the one Word, the Name and Character of God.”

[3] Theodore of Mopsuestia, Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer and on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, (Gorgias Press, 2009), 52.

[4] John Chrysostom, On the Gospel of John, homily 46, quoted in Lucas, Sensing the Sacred, (Cascade, 2023), 189.

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Photo Credit: Rafael Leão