Hale and Hearty - Health and Beauty in the Human Person, Part 2

Does it help a doctor to treat the patient if he appreciates the beauty of the person and relates to him as a Christian? I think so.

In this article, I argue that the best doctors will be aware of what human health is to be able to treat them. Furthermore, to know what health is requires them to understand what a human person is, which means the study and acceptance of Christian anthropology. I argue that the very best doctor - or health practitioner of any description - will do more than grasp this intellectually, but will relate to the patient as a human person. To relate with a patient fully involves more than simply the adoption of Christian morality. It is a Christian formation, with the liturgy and mystagogical catechesis at its heart that will most powerfully form a good doctor.

In the first part of this article, I tried to establish a good working definition of health. In this part, I discuss why the best doctor, one who can help a patient to achieve this ideal, will be one who relates to others as a Christian. I explain why, in my view, such a doctor will be one who deeply appreciates also the beauty of the human person and is formed supernaturally as a Christian through a mystagogical catechesis with the worship of God at its heart. I begin from the definition of health that established at the end of part one.

Plastic surgery is the response of the modern medical profession to the question of human beauty. The best doctors, I suggest, appreciate the beauty of the human person in a way that is not limited to physical attractiveness.

A proposed definition of health
Reflecting on all of this so far, here is a proposed definition of health: health is the harmony of all aspects of the human person - body, soul, and spirit - in accordance with our freedom to choose happiness both now and in eternity. Healthcare, regardless of what particular aspect of the human person it is focussed on is always concerned, therefore, with the treatment of the whole person and the optimization of that freedom to choose happiness.

Happiness. What is it and how do we get it?
What we all seek is happiness, and as Aristotle points out, every choice we make is done with a view to increasing our happiness. The doctor cannot prescribe happiness, but he can contribute to the freedom of the person to choose it if he knows what happiness is and what is necessary to obtain it. The source of the difficulty in defining precisely well-being and health relate with all its ramifications, I suggest, is at root a reluctance to acknowledge a fundamental truth, that happiness is what we seek in this life and the next, and that God made us that way so that we might seek Him.

Happiness is one of those words that is almost impossible to define without descending into circular definitions of the sort that we have already encountered. An inability to define the word doesn’t mean that we don’t know what it is, however. Most people who could not define it would nevertheless say that we know it when we get it, and we know when we don’t have it. Also, most people can naturally distinguish between various degrees of superficial or temporary happiness. All forms of happiness are desirable and good, but not all fulfill the desire for a deep and permanent happiness that is in our hearts.

I would make the case that happiness is in fact, indefinable - ineffable - that is, beyond words. This is a mystery that need not worry us however, for what we desire is available to all of us. I quote here from the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann (d.1983):

‘The ultimate mystery of the Church consists in knowing the Holy Spirit, in receiving Him, in being in Communion with Him. It is He (and not ‘grace’) that we invoke in prayer and acquire through spiritual effort..‘For in the words of St Seraphim [of Sarov] “when the Spirit of God descends upon man and overshadows him with the fullness of His outpouring, then the human soul overflows with unspeakable joy because the Spirit of God turns to joy all that he may touch.”

‘All this means that we know the Holy Spirit only by His presence in us, the presence manifested above all in ineffable joy, peace, and fullness. Even in ordinary human language these words - joy, peace, fullness - refer to something which is precisely ineffable, which by its very nature is beyond words, definitions, and descriptions. They refer to those moments in life when life is full of life when there is no lack of and therefore no desire for anything, and this no anxiety, no fear, no frustration. Man always speaks of happiness, and indeed life is a pursuit of happiness a longing of life’s self-fulfillment. Thus one can say that the presence of the Holy Spirit in us is the fulfillment of true happiness. And since this happiness does not come from an identifiable and external cause as does our poor and worldly happiness, which disappears with the disappearance of the cause that produced it, and since it does not come from anything in this world, yet results in a joy about everything, that happiness must be the fruit in us of the coming, the presence, the abiding of someone who Himself is Life, Joy, Peace, Beauty, Fullness, Bliss. This Someone is the Holy Spirit.’

The miraculous event at Pentecost is a sign of what is available to us as Christians. The gift of divine wisdom, a gift of the Holy Spirit, is the end of all Christian education, and so ought to be incorporated into the formation of health workers too!

Treating the whole person
Given the profound unity of the human person, a single entity that is body, soul, and spirit and in which each aspect bound up with the other. There is no treating part of the person without treating the whole person, and a doctor’s treatment of the person is incomplete if it is not in accord with our desire for God.

This is about more than medical ethics. It is governed by the first assumptions of what the person is. A doctor may know all the practices of medicine, but he cannot know how to apply them properly if he doesn’t understand what makes a person free to choose happiness.

Getting the heart of the matter: the human heart used to be organ that symbolized the place where we are, as a person, the vector sum of all our thoughts, feelings and actions. Modern medicine treats it as a machine and represents it mathematically as a series of functions. This approach is good for treating heart disease, but it could be better if all this data was understood in relation to the well-being of the whole person. 

The ancient Greeks, it appears, had a greater grasp of this idea of the need for the harmony of the parts than the specialists of modern secular medicine. Their general mathematical theory of harmony and proportion began with the consideration of the beauty of things, and the realization that when we recognize that the relationship of the parts to each other is ordered to the whole and to its purpose we see it as both beautiful and good. So the consideration of what things are begins with the recognition of their beauty as a sign of their goodness. This applies to both mankind and creation. Greek medicine considered health to be the balance of the parts and ill-health, it was assumed, could be linked to an imbalance. An example would be their approach to the four ‘humors’ - yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, blood. They understood also the profound unity of the physical and spiritual, so they tried to consider how an imbalance of these humors might lead to an emotional imbalance. It is from this that we still have words in the English language related to mood or character such as bilious, phlegmatic, or sanguine (the last from “sanguis”, the Latin word for blood).

In regard to the moral life, Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics (a book still studied in Catholic liberal arts colleges today), directly links virtuous behavior to a proportional relationship between extremes, citing arithmetic and geometric proportions. Many people read this and think that he is speaking loosely or figuratively, but he uses these terms with precise meanings in mind. (If you want to understand how, you can read of the mathematics of proportion and harmony in Boethius’s De Institione Arithemetica and De Institutione Musica, or my summarization of those principles in The Way of Beauty. These are also taught in my class offered by Pontifex University, called The Mathematics of Beauty.)

In considering the value of what the ancients did in the field of medicine, I am not suggesting that we adopt their scientific understanding of the human person which was inferior to that of the present day. Rather we should think about how this holistic approach to medicine can restore the humane to healthcare. Nor is this an argument for abandoning specialization in medicine. It does seem appropriate for a physician to primarily consider bodily health, but at the same, it seems reasonable to say that he cannot be a good physician without some awareness, at least, of how his specialization relates to the whole.

The modern doctor, for example, very often considers a chemical imbalance and its connection to unhappiness, and prescribes antidepressants. To do this without considering the possibility that a chemical imbalance might be the result of spiritual ills (which is different even from considering it to be a mental problem) could lead to a wrong diagnosis and treatment. Unhappiness, like physical pain, reveals a difficulty and on these occasions treating it with antidepressants might be akin to treating a broken bone with painkillers.

The Sacred Heart, by David Clayton, 20th century. Devotion to the Sacred Heart gives us an appreciation for Christ's humanity. Perhaps also, ironically, by meditation upon the symbol of the heart as the seat of the whole person, it can give us (including those of us who are in the medical professions) an appreciation for the spiritual aspects of man also.

Beauty and Health
Defining health in this way creates a direct connection to our perception of the beauty of the human person. In the traditional Western approach, beauty is the proper ordering of the parts of something in relation to each other, so that the whole is ordered to its purpose. We apprehend that beauty we are discerning this right pattern of the parts to each other and of the whole to its purpose.

Human beauty, therefore, could be defined as the radiance of health.

This definition speaks a deeper recognition of the human person than the superficial recognition of sexual attractiveness, which is a true but incomplete assessment of human beauty. To recognize a person as beautiful in this way - radiantly healthy - is to do more even than to grasp vital information about his health. It must be apprehended by one who appreciates that he is in relation to the person regarded, and is sympathy what those goals are. This is one who loves and who takes delight in the freedom of the other.

There is real value in doctors being formed to see us in this way. For all the blood-pressure readings or vital signs, it is their judgment, formed by experience will tell them in combination with this, just by looking, how healthy a person is. Such a doctor will not only have a heightened sense of when something is wrong, he will naturally look for the restoration of balance and have a sense of how to put the parts together again, so to speak. This requires each doctor and nurse to be, as well as practitioners of medical science, to be mystics and lovers who take an interest in, and ideally even know well the patient as a person.

An education that incorporates a formation in faith and a formation in the apprehension of beauty will increase the chances of the doctor being that person. The best health practitioners will be men and women who strive to be partakers of the divine nature and who can see with the eyes of purity, and so they are kings, priests, and prophets living the life of the Spirit (in common with all Christians). This is why medical training ought not to be separated from a spiritual formation in the Christian life. The good doctor will be a man of love attuned to the beauty of the human person in the way that a mother sees the beauty of her newborn baby.

The Lucca Madonna by Jan Van Eyck, Flemish, 15th century. It is the love of a parent for the child that allows her to see the beauty of a baby in a way that others don't. All people, by virtue of our humanity, are as beautiful as a baby, and it is our lack of love for others that restricts our ability to see it. Nevertheless, the recognition of the beauty of the whole person is an ideal that we can strive for, difficult though it is to achieve.

Clearly, this is asking a lot of our doctors and nurses and something that no training can ever guarantee for them. Medical exams can test knowledge of the information that might aid such a transformation, but they can’t measure the transformation itself. Nevertheless making medical students aware of the principles outlined, and offering them mystagogical catechesis and spiritual guidance directed to these ends should be a matter of policy and I would make it a priority over any other general education, even the traditional Great Books and Liberal Arts programs that American Catholic colleges and universities offer. This is, I suggest, the authentic role of our Newman centers on the university campuses and it is not beyond any of them. I believe that if they were offering this, the uptake would be from a pool far wider than simply medical students!

But let all those that seek thee be joyful and glad in thee, and let all such as delight in thee say always The Lord be praised. (Psalm 70 (69), 4)

Hippocrates (460-370 BC)

Hale and Hearty - Health and Beauty in the Human Person, Part 1

What is health? What does it mean to be healthy? We use the word all the time, but could you define it? And does it even matter?

In this article, I argue that the best doctors will be aware of what human health is to be able to treat them. Furthermore, to know what health is requires them to understand what a human person is, which means the study and acceptance of Christian anthropology. I argue that the very best doctor - or health practitioner of any description - will do more than grasp this intellectually but will relate to the patient as a human person. To relate with a patient fully involves more than simply the adoption of Christian morality. It is a Christian formation, with the liturgy and mystagogical catechesis at its heart that will most powerfully form a good doctor. The article will be presented in two parts. In today's I try to establish a good working definition of health and why it is important to do so. In part two, which will be posted on Thursday, I discuss why the best doctor, one who can help a patient to achieve this ideal, will be one who relates to others as a Christian. I explain why, in my view, such a doctor will be one who deeply appreciates also the beauty of the human person and is formed supernaturally as a Christian through a mystagogical catechesis with the worship of God at its heart.

A Visit to the Quack, by Hogarth, English 18th century. We can expect better today as the treatment of bodily ailments has improved dramatically, but to what end?

Given that health is something we all desire, one would imagine we could say what it is, but in fact and perhaps surprisingly, it’s not that easy. When I looked up the word in an online dictionary it defined it as a negative: a state of being free from illness or injury. This, surely, is inadequate? For while it tells us what we don’t want - illness and injury - it doesn’t define the good that we do want, health.

Philosophically, it seems to be an inversion: the usual approach is to define the good as an entity and consider evil to be a distortion that restricts or reduces what is good. So by this approach, illness, and injury, as human evils, would be defined as privations of health. But if we cannot say what health is, we cannot say what a privation of health is, and accordingly, we can’t say what illness is either. So a definition of health-based upon an absence of something argument is a circular definition, effectively health is the absence of ill-health!

The right wing of Rogier van der Weiden’s Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments, ca. 1445-50, depicting Holy Orders, Matrimony, and the Anointing of the Sick. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons, cropped.)

Perhaps we might suggest that health is an attribute of the human person that can be equated to a wholeness of being? This seems to be better, but still, it doesn’t quite fit. We can imagine a situation where we have an amputee or a blind man, for example, who would not be considered a whole person, could nevertheless be considered healthy.

Looking further, the World Health Organization - which, given their name, you would think ought to know - defines health as follows: Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Similarly, Medical News Today, in an article aptly entitled, What is Good Health?, defined health as a state of complete emotional and physical well-being. Healthcare exists to help people maintain this optimal state of health.

The Barber Surgeon by Adriaen Brouwer, Flemish, 17th century. If we view limit our idea of the human person to body-as-machine, then aren't our modern doctors just glorified and highly-trained barbers? I would argue so, except that at least the barber is usually sufficiently interested you as a person to ask you where you're going for your holidays. No doctor has ever asked me that! 

These seem to be getting closer, but in order to understand what these definitions really mean, we need to have a clear understanding of what we mean by physical, mental, social or emotional well-being and unless we can do that, we are still stuck. Well-being is described in the dictionary as a state of health, happiness, and prosperity. This still leaves us floundering somewhat with another circular definition: health is well-being and well-being is health.

Well-being as a state of happiness, the second part of the definition above, does seem to be a better starting point; however. I think we can disregard serious consideration of prosperity - success in material terms - which is only important to the degree that it contributes to happiness, as it seems reasonable to assume that the happy person possesses all the prosperity they need.

So while happiness is not the same thing as health, there is a strong connection, and this will be our starting point in the consideration of what health is. In order to establish what that connection is, we need to consider first why it is important to know what health is.

Why worry about the definition of health?
This matters. Unless our healthcare providers have a clear answer as to what health is, precisely, then every time we go to the doctor’s surgery or the hospital we cannot be sure that he really is trying to make us healthy! Try asking your doctor what he thinks health is and you may be disturbed to find out that he doesn’t really know.

I first learned about this anomaly through my own GP, who told me that throughout his medical training he was never formally taught exactly what health is, and that after many years of practicing, it had dawned on him how detrimental this was to healthcare provision in the country.

Most commonly the goal of a doctor’s treatment today is about relief from illness. So the doctor does not assist the patient in his search for the Good, but rather aids his escape from something bad without really concerning himself with where he is going. This is better than nothing, but it does lead to problems. At best each doctor decides for himself what health is, perhaps in consultation with the patient. We cannot establish what the Good is for a human being without consideration of him as a person, body, soul, and spirit. A physician who is trained to treat the body as a mechanical device to be repaired and often it will not occur to him to consider how it relates to the whole person, especially the spiritual aspect.

Blood-letting in the 14th century. Medical science has undoubtedly improved since then, but has the medical profession lost a sense of how to treat the whole person in the process?

As Christians know, the human person is a profound unity of body, soul, and spirit. Modern medical training studiously avoids taking any position on the spiritual well being of the person, and this has profound consequences because there can be no neutrality in this. As in all things, either we are for God, or we are against Him. A philosophy of medical treatment that takes a position of spiritual ‘neutrality’ as one of its foundational premises will inevitably be anti-spiritual, and will undermine the spiritual health of man, leading us to misery.

Doctors today, it seems to me, are trained experts who treat best the particular slice of human nature they are trained to examine, but they do not have sufficient knowledge of how that slice relates to the whole. To be able to make this connection most likely requires a study of Christian anthropology and the integration of this study with their medical training.

A way of summarizing the situation is that modern doctors are able to analyze well but are less able to synthesize. They can treat the parts in isolation, but they are less competent when putting all those parts together.

To illustrate how this can have an impact on physical health alone (without any thought for the spiritual needs of the person at this point), here are two examples. First, in the appendix of my book The Way of Beauty, entitled Liturgy and Intuition, I describe how on a number of occasions nurses in intensive care wards predicted that a patient was going to have a heart attack. The specialist cardiologist would come in to check the readings of all the vital signs, and say, on the contrary to what the nurse was saying, that there was no risk, because all readings were within the defined limits of healthy function. When asked to explain why they were worried for the patient, the nurse couldn’t say, it was simply a conviction that came from intuition. So typically, the doctor ignored the warning; then, as often as not, the patient had a heart attack. Later, it was discovered that while individual readings of heart function were within the limits of safety, there were certain combinations of such readings that were dangerous. The nurses were picking up intuitively the pattern of readings an unhealthy heart, because of their great experience of being with patients. Their experience and intuition were overriding the knowledge given to them in their training.

Here is another example, given to me by a practicing cardiologist. There are four atria in the heart and sometimes a diseased heart can reveal enlarged or diminished atria. In their training, the doctors are taught the ‘healthy’ range of sizes of each individual heart atria. However, he told me, very often there will be situations where one or more of the atria are outside the range of health, but an experienced cardiologist will ignore the reading if they judge, in light of their experience, the pattern of the relationships between one atrium and the three others to be healthy.

So just as all the parts of the heart ought to be in right relation to the others, the heart should be in right relation to the body as a whole, and the body, therefore, should be in right relation to the soul and the spirit. Then each part is in right relation with the whole.

Hugh Laurie in House. The idea of the doctor who is brilliant at what he does but seems to despise his patients and colleagues makes for great drama. But in truth, could such a doctor be even better if he was joyous and Christian? I believe so.

A proposed definition of health
Reflecting on all of this so far, here is a proposed definition of health: health is the harmony of all aspects of the human person - body, soul, and spirit - in accordance with our freedom to choose happiness both now and in eternity. Healthcare, regardless of what particular aspect of the human person it is focussed on is always concerned, therefore, with the treatment of the whole person and the optimization of that freedom to choose happiness.

Part two of this article will be posted on Thursday. ...

Painting the Nude: The Theology of the Body and Representation of Man in Christian Art

I am delighted to announce that Pontifex University Press is publishing my new book on the place of the nude in Christian art. With a foreword written by Dr Christopher Blum (of the Augustine Institute), Painting the Nude: The Theology of the Body and Representation of Man in Christian Art will be of interest to artists and non-artists alike. It contains a discussion on the place of the nude in the Christian tradition historically and what its place ought to be today.

In his writing on the human person and art, St John Paul II created a renewed interest among Catholics in the nude in art generally, and particularly in sacred art. His call for artists to represent the human form ‘naked without shame’ has given many artists the inspiration to paint nude figures in service of the Church, with varied results and, frankly, not all of them good.

The 10,000-word essay contained in this booklet compares his writings on the representation of the human form with the traditions of the Church in order to assess how artists and patrons ought to respond. I conclude that far from representing a new Catholic permissiveness (as some have interpreted), John Paul II is reaffirming a very traditional line.

The book is broken down into three sections:

REMOVING THE FIG LEAVES uses the case of the recent renovations of the Sistine Chapel, completed in 1994, as a starting point to examine how Christian art should portray nudity so as to avoid licentiousness on the one hand and to reveal the full beauty of a creature made by God on the other.

THE THREE TRADITIONS OF FIGURATIVE LITURGICAL ART looks at the ways in which the authentic liturgical traditions in Christian art, the iconographic style, the Gothic and the Baroque, have dealt with the dilemma in the past. These traditions each deviate from perfect realism and stylistically depict essential truths that are not always visible to the naked eye. It is the invisible truths that the artist chooses to reveal that distinguish one style from another. Given this, as I demonstrate, they are not all equally appropriate for portraying the nude.

THE PROBLEM OF THE NUDE MODEL guides Christian artists towards an understanding of their responsibility to avoid the occasion of sin while producing the art and learning to draw and paint in the studio.

Some people that Pope St John Paul II’s work shifted the balance from an outdated “prudishness” toward a genuine openness to the beauty of the human body. This is certainly true to some degree, but I argue this aspect has been exaggerated. His writings can not be understood apart from a deep awareness of the Christian artistic traditions of sacred art. In truth, his ideas are a fresh presentation of deeply a conservative approach — far from being radical and new, they reconnect us to centuries of authentic Christian anthropology and tradition, and breathe new life into the contemporary conversation around body, soul, and spirit.

In his foreword, Dr. Christopher Blum (Academic Dean and Professor of History and Philosophy at the Augustine Institute) writes:

In addressing the topic of the nude in sacred art, David Clayton has performed an act requiring considerable courage. The temper of our spirituality today is highly emotional, to say the least. We are quick to accuse earlier ages of Jansenism and slow to admit that the mortification of the senses has a permanent place in the Christian way of life. Moreover, our tastes have been permanently affected by more than one artistic revolution. Clayton’s reminder that Christian art has always had a much higher purpose, then, is a call that asks us to swim against a very strong tide. 

Clayton takes us on a journey of rediscovery, anchored in a careful reading of St. John Paul II. With his help, we can newly appreciate the essentially iconic nature of Christian sacred art. 

Deacon Keith Fournier, General Counsel Director of Diaconal Formation for the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, wrote the following review of this book: 

Between September 5, 1979 and November 28, 1984, Pope St. John Paul II delivered a series of 129 catechetical instructions called “Human Love in the Divine Plan”. It is popularly referred to as a “Theology of the Body”, a phrase the late Pope called a “working term.” The term has led to a minimization of the depth of the theological anthropology of the integrated human person as gift which the late Pope presented. The thought of the late Pope was not new; it is rooted in the Patristic Tradition and must be seen in a hermeneutic of continuity.

One of the problems arises from an oversimplification of this body of teaching in some popular presentations, and which presents the work as a break with the teaching of the Church on modesty, purity, chastity and the virtuous life – particularly as it relates to the depiction of the human body in art. This is incorrect and in this respect a disservice to the four years of teaching of this great Saint.

David Clayton has demonstrated a deep knowledge and understanding of Christian sacred art, and of the writings of John Paul II on both anthropology and art. In this book, Clayton provides us with a synthesis that places all within the context of the greater tradition of Catholic thinking on these topics and shows how, far from being a radical departure from it, the Theology of the Body is reinforcing a traditionally Christian and conservative approach to the nude in art.

Catholic Kenesiology - How We Can Evangelize Through Sports Psychology

Last month I spoke at the annual conference of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, which took place at Montreal in Canada. While there I met Dr David Cutton, who teaches in the Department of Health and Kinesiology at Texas A&M University, Kingsville.

Kinesiology is the study of the mechanics of body movements, and it incorporates not only the purely physical aspects, but also the related psychological aspects, especially in relation to improving performance through motivation.

This is not a Catholic university, and the field is not taught from a particularly Catholic perspective, but David has been telling me how his study of Christian anthropology has given him deeper insights into what is taught there, and why certain aspects of it work so well. I wanted to know more about this. I have a growing conviction that greater recognition of the unity of body, the soul and the spirit in the human person, especially in relation to people’s general health and happiness, could be the driving force for the evangelization of the West. We have to see it more clearly first ourselves, I think, before we can articulate it to others. My hope is to see the development of a Body, Soul, Spirit movement founded in Christian principles that supplants the neo-pagan Mind, Body, Spirit movement that began the 1970s that has driven much of what passes for spirituality in the West today. I wrote about this recently here. So much “wellness” and yoga-inspired meditation, for example, comes out of this. People are searching for God - even if they don’t know it - in order to escape the dullness, and the fear, anxiety, even dread, that goes with an atheist materialist worldview. We can give them what they truly desire if we can communicate the Good News to them in a way that can understand.

When I asked David for some examples from his experience, he directed me to a paper he had written for the winter 2019 edition of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly entitled Interior Dialogue, or Self-Talk: Psychological and Theological Foundations. He describes how sports psychologists recognize that we dialogue with ourselves. The dialogue takes place because there are thoughts that occur to us first, and then there is part of us that observes those thoughts and responds to them. “Self-talk” is the name given to this interior dialogue. In a book to which he refers in the paper, Charles Fernyhough’s The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (New York: Teachers College Press, 2016), the author even describes how so many people attribute the source of this natural process of inner dialogue to divine inspiration.

In the context of sports psychology, this dialogue is then directed so as to help the motivation of the sportsman and enhance performance, perhaps, or to aid in the motivation to complete rehabilitation. In very simple terms, this method teaches the person to distinguish good thoughts from bad thoughts, and then to reinforce the good while discarding the bad. In this context, good is a thought that will help a weightlifter, for example, to lift more weight - perhaps a strong internal affirmation that it is possible for him to do it. A bad thought might be a doubt that it is possible. It is broadly accepted that these techniques have measurable effects on the performances of sportsmen and women.

Cutton then goes on to point out that some traditional methods of Christian contemplative prayer are techniques whereby we do just this, and it can help us to strive for virtue.

As I read the paper, I could immediately see possibilities for engagement with the secular world through this. It occurs to me that we could offer the sportsman techniques in Christian contemplative prayer (perhaps without even letting them know initially that they are Christian, if this is likely to arouse prejudice) as a technique for developing within us that faculty of good self-talk.

If we get this far, we are already making great progress, for this is introducing what will be very likely to be perceived as just another meditation technique, but one that is crucially different from the usual techniques that come from Eastern non-Christian religions and philosophies. This is not a process of no-thought, or even one of indifference to thought; rather, it is one that recognizes a distinction between good and bad thoughts. This is opening the door in their hearts to the recognition of objective truth and leading them away from the relativism that New Age movements encourage. Even if there is no discussion beyond this as to what the good is, or no explicit introduction of the Christian message, it is still good; it is sowing mustard seeds that might germinate and grow into trees of faith in time.

A mustard tree

Furthermore, the recognition of this internal dialogue is consistent with the person who is not just aware, but aware that he is aware. The faculty of this self-observation is the spirit of man, as it is understood in Christian anthropology. So when we explain to the person why it works, we can start to talk of a Christian and scriptural anthropology of body, soul, and spirit.

Where it goes from there will depend on the situation. But I could envisage, for example, a situation in which the sports psychologist or coach could go on to introduce discerningly and by degrees a steadily deeper description of the authentic spiritual life. We might gradually introduce the idea, for example, that this is not exclusively a conversation within ourselves; some of those thoughts, especially the good ones, are the result of openness to inspiration from beyond. As they are spiritual in nature, the source, it might be argued, is a spiritual being that is good and divine. If the research referred to is correct, the seeds of such ideas are likely to be occurring to them intuitively already.

Going further, one can imagine that we could get to the point where we say that the most powerful encounter with that source of inspiration and which will encourage the most beneficial “self-talk” is the worship of that being, God, whereby the whole person - body, soul, and spirit - is engaged in the greatest conformity to an attitude of receptivity... “And would you like to come to Vespers with me this evening?”

What will make non-Christians take notice is a positive experience of this prayer. The reason that people immerse themselves in yoga is that they feel better for doing it, and they are curious as why. While wanting to do well at sport is not the noblest goal in life, it need not be a bad one, and it might be the first step that leads to the best end in life, God.

I see no reason why such techniques might not just aid in their physical performance but simultaneously lead to a greater and more general sense of well-being. It is this that will stimulate their yearning for something nobler also.

This is the pattern of my own story of conversion. As described in my book The Vision for You, I was offered a series of generic “spiritual” exercises in order to help me to be an artist. I had no interest in God whatsoever. Even as I noticed that these exercises were helping me in my goals, and began to see that some sort of Loving Power was in my life, I first thought of this newly found God as a means, not an end. This changed in time, however, as I started to desire more the happiness that it gave me. Ultimately, this led to my conversion and reception into the Catholic Church. However, while my reason for doing so might have changed over the 30 years since I started this journey, I have never stopped wanting to be an artist.

Postscript on St Thomas and the Spirit of Man

Thank you to all those who chipped in with comments on Tuesday’s article on the subject. All very helpful and interesting.

I wanted to pass on a comment that was made in a private group that discussed this question in te wake of that posting; it is quite long so I thought I would add it as a separate post. This came to me as a jpeg via text, and I don’t have access to the original, so I am sharing in jpeg format here. I haven’t credited the writer of the comment because it came to me via someone other than the writer; if the person who wrote this sees this post, and would like to identify himself, I will be happy to credit you; otherwise, thank you for your insights!

I had never heard of Rosmini before, but this does sound worthy of investigation to me! I found this book of his on Amazon, which may be a starting point for any who are curious.

The Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas, by Andrea di Buonaiuto di Firenze, 1366-7, in the Spanish Chapel of the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Does Thomism Disregard the Spirit?

Am I wrong, or does the Roman Church, and Thomists in particular, have a tendency to neglect discussion of the spirit of man?

While in the Eastern Church, it seems to be taken for granted that this is part of the anthropology, it is not always the case in the West. I have come across Roman Catholics who omit mention of it when discussing the nature of man, or skip over it quickly with a remark such as, “I’m a Thomist, so I’m not sure what the spirit is.”

The Catechism is vague. In the section “Body and Soul But Truly One” (362-368) it stresses the unity of body and soul in man, but mentions the spirit almost as an afterthought without clearly defining it.

I’m wondering why this is? After all, the idea of the spirit of man is rooted in Scripture. St Paul refers to man as body, soul, and spirit, as does the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews. (I understand that Scripture scholars, following Ronald Knox, are now coming back to the idea that St Paul wrote this epistle too.) However, the concept of the spirit does not arise naturally out of philosophical anthropology, and is not referred to by Aristotle. I’m wondering if this apparent neglect is a reflection of this fact. Another factor may be that historically, in seminarian formation in the West, there has been a higher focus on philosophy, and relatively less focus on Scripture than in the seminary formation of priests in the Eastern Church. St Pius X commented on the adverse effects of this in Quoniam in Re Biblica.

Here are some thoughts that I have about the importance of following Scriptural anthropology:

I was first presented with the idea of the spirit when learning to paint. When I was studying iconography, we would sometimes paint a separated shape in a furrowed brow, between the eyebrows. This is not present in all icons, but I was told that this can be and is considered a symbolic representation of the “spiritual eye” by which we “see” God, and that this is the spirit, the highest aspect of the soul.

From my contact with Eastern Christians, here is my simple understanding of how the spirit relates to the soul: the spirit is the highest part of the soul. It is that part of the soul which touches God, a portal for the grace that pours out from God, ‘transfiguring’ us into the image and the likeness of God. The divinely created order of the human person is the spirit, which is closest to God, rules the rest of the soul, which in turn governs the body. All move together in union and communion with God. This does not introduce a duality into the soul; rather it distinguishes between the highest and lowest parts of a single entity. The higher parts liken us to angels and the lower to animals.

Here is Ephraim the Syrian, who is a Doctor of the Church, saying it far more eloquently in his Hymns of Paradise:

Far more glorious than the body is the soul, and more glorious still than the soul is the spirit, but more hidden than the spirit is the Godhead.

At the end, the body will put on the beauty of the soul, the soul will put on that of the spirit, while the spirit shall put on the very likeness of God’s majesty.

For bodies shall be raised to the level of souls, and the soul to that of the spirit, while the spirit shall be raised to the height of God’s majesty.

The account of precisely which faculties are proper to the spirit alone and which are proper to the rest of the soul does vary from commentator to commentator. What complicates the matter further in the East is that even when writing in Greek, the Church Fathers did not always use the same word when referring to the spirit. I’m not a Greek scholar, but they seem to switch between psyche and nous. I’m guessing that the meanings of particular words had migrated over centuries, and so they wrote for their own time. Nevertheless, a common thread that seems discernible is that the spirit is the highest aspect of the soul by which we “see” God.

Consistent with this, a Melkite Catholic priest gave us three simple Lenten exercises this year (in addition to the Lenten fast). First was some additional physical exercise to help the body, second engaged the intellect with some elevating reading or study, and third was to add something to our prayer lives.

The threefold anthropology is present in the Western tradition and even in the writing of St Thomas. In the Letter to the Hebrews (4, 12) we read:

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

And in his commentary on this passage St Thomas wrote:

According to the Apostle there are three things in man: body, soul, and spirit: ‘That you wholly spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless in the coming of our Lord.’ (1 Thess. 5, 23). For we know what the body is. But the soul is that which gives life to the body; whereas the spirit in bodily things is something subtle and signifies immaterial substance: ‘Egypt is man and not God: and their horses, flesh, and not spirit.’ (Isa. 31, 3) Therefore, the spirit in us is that by which we are akin to spiritual substances; but the soul is that through which we are akin to the brutes. Consequently, the spirit is the human mind, namely, the intellect and will. This has led some to assert that there are different souls in us: one which perfects and vivifies the body and is called a soul in the proper sense; another is the spirit, having an intellect by which we understand and a will by which we will. Consequently, those two are called substances rather than souls. But this opinion was condemned in the book, The Dogmas of the Church. Therefore, we must say that the essence of the soul is one and the same, and by its essence it vivifies the body, and by its power, which is called the intellect, it is the principle of understanding eternal things. (Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews 222)

This last point, that recognition of the existence of the spirit does not introduce a duality into the soul, is also emphasized in the Catechism (CCC 367).

St Thomas’ analysis is consistent with that of the Eastern Fathers, in respect to his consideration of the spirit as the highest aspect of the soul (although it might differ in other ways). This makes the reluctance of Thomists to engage with the subject all the more surprising to me.

Some recent commentators in the Roman Church are addressing the subject, but they tend to be outside the Thomist mainstream. So for example, in 2001, the late Stratford Caldecott presented a paper at a Liturgical conference at Fontgombault in France called, Towards a Liturgical Anthropology. Caldecott suggested that the diminishment of the importance of the spirit in Catholic anthropology has led, in part, to the rise of the error of dualism in the West, and to an incomplete participation in the liturgy at least since the 19th century; and this, in turn, has led to the Catholic cultural decline that we are all so well aware of. The passage from St Ephraim suggests that the spirit is a special place in us that is in primary contact with God’s majesty, and that it is itself raised to God’s majesty and is transfigured. Thereffore, this indicates a special place for the spirit in our participation in the liturgy, for the liturgy is the primary encounter with God by which we ascend by degrees in this life to union with God and which is complete, as St Ephrem puts it ‘at the end’ in paradise. It reinforces an idea that Caldecott described in his essay, for example:

In his essay on “Tripartite Anthropology” in the collection Theology in History, Henri de Lubac traces the rise and fall in Christian tradition of the idea that man is composed not simply of body and soul, but of body, soul and spirit (1 Thess. 5, 23). Of course, in much of the tradition the soul and spirit are treated as one, yet traces of the distinction remain, whether in St Teresa’s reference to the “spirit of the soul” or (arguably) in St Thomas’s intellectus agens. It is certainly present in The Philokalia, where the eastern fathers contrast the nous dwelling in the depths of the soul with the dianoia or discursive reason. Jean Borella also writes of this topic of the “human ternary,” making clear its roots in the Old Testament. For the philosopher who became John Paul II, the “third” in question seems to be that “reflexive” consciousness by which we experience the drama of human existence as acting persons.

The spirit is the “place” within us where we receive the kiss of life from our Creator (Gen. 2, 7), and where God makes his throne in the saints. Thus when St Paul appeals to the Romans (12, 1-2) to present their bodies as a living sacrifice in “spiritual worship” (logike latreia), he immediately continues: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind [nous], that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Paul implies that the “logic” of Christian worship — a logic of self-sacrifice that conforms us to the will of God - corresponds to a new intelligence. Discussions of the liturgy in the immediate postconciliar period may not have taken enough account of this fact – with the results we have already noted.

Sitting on the panel of speakers at that conference and listening to the presentation was Cardinal Ratzinger. He has written and spoken about the importance of the spirit both before and since. For example, speaking in a general audience on St Gregory of Nyssa, he described this anthropology of body, soul, and spirit as part of the tradition of the Church.

Much earlier, he wrote an article on the nature of the human person entitled Retrieving the Tradition - Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology, published in the Fall 1990 edition of Communio. His approach was, as the title suggested, theological, and it describes how the notion of the human person has arisen from the development of a theology of the persons of the Trinity. From this, he identifies the human spirit as that part of us that makes us distinct from other, lower, creatures, as it enables us to be in relation to others and in relation to God, and to be self-aware in a unique way:

It is the nature of spirit to put itself in relation, the capacity to see itself and the other. Hedwig Conrad-Martius speaks of the retroscendence of the spirit: the spirit is not merely there; it goes back upon itself, as it were; it knows about itself; it constitutes a doubled existence which not only is, but knows about itself, has itself. The difference between matter and spirit would, accordingly, consist in this, that matter is what is “das auf sich Geworfole” (that which is thrown upon itself), while the spirit is “das sich selbst Entwerfende” (that which throws itself forth, guides itself or designs itself) which is not only there, but is itself in transcending itself, in looking toward the other and in looking back upon itself. However, this may be in detail - we need not investigate it here - openness, relatedness to the whole, lies in the essence of the spirit. And precisely in this, namely, that it not only is, but reaches beyond itself, it comes to itself. In transcending itself it has itself; by being with the other it first becomes itself, it comes to itself. Expressed differently again: being with the other is its form of being with itself. One is reminded of a fundamental theological axiom that is applicable here in a peculiar manner, namely Christ’s saying, “Only the one who loses himself can find himself.”

It is the faculty of love by which we relate to God. God loves us, we accept that love and then return it to him. Only then are we, in turn, able to relate to and love other persons. The dynamic of love that originates with God stimulates a special form of knowing and a special form of desiring. If this is indeed the influence of the spirit, it is not so much a seperate entity that can be isolated, but rather one that is influenced by the divine, and in turn impinges upon all aspects of our humanity. It engages all other human faculties, purifies, transforms and elevates them all. We are exalted and directed to our highest end in a unity of the human person.

The desire to love God and to worship him - the virtue of religion - is something that differentiates us from the animals and likens us to angels. It is also the highest expression of the love of God. It is easy to see how the neglect of consideration of the spirit of man might indeed affect our liturgical life profoundly, with all the ramifications that will have on the Christian life and society as a whole.

To think of just once example: the flawed New Age spirituality promoted an anthropology of Mind, Body, Spirit. One wonders if this arose out of a misdirected but instinctive sense of what was right. Perhaps we should be relaunching a Body, Soul, Spirit spirituality to supplant this. This would be a richer spirituality rooted in the Church Fathers, liturgically oriented and founded on a correct understanding of man.

These New Age philosophies, be they the self-indulgent spirituality of California Buddhism or superstitious crystal gazing, fail to deliver what people really want. Christianity - or more particular Christ - is what we yearn for, and Christianity contains all that we need to get it.

However, few are likely to take this path unless we Christians are capable of offering to them, and that begins by grasping it ourselves. So, here is a call for help! All those involved in the creative retrieval of Thomism, of the sort engaged in by figures in the recent past, such as Norris Clarke and Cornelio Fabro, perhaps you could turn your thoughts to the Pauline threefold anthropology? The alternative is to look at the Eastern Fathers for inspiration, and be prepared to pass that on, perhaps giving it a Thomistic spin in the process in order to encourage others in the West to look at it! Wherever we get it from, I think it matters.

Oh no...