NO GREATER LOVE: THE TENSION BETWEEN FLESH AND SPIRIT

A tension which is basic to the human condition is the tension between flesh and spirit. We definitely are creatures of flesh living in a material world. Yet, we are more than matter. We also have a spiritual component to our nature. This tension affects our approach to contemplative prayer. We can flee from the flesh and even consider it to be an illusion as some Eastern systems of thought would teach, or we can recognize the reality of our fleshly nature and subject this fleshly nature to the spirit. Theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar deals in detail with this tension in his book Prayer. The tension between flesh and spirit which characterizes man in particular (and not creation as a whole) brings out the starkest contrasts in the way contemplation is viewed. If God is pure spirit, and if contemplation is a matter of encountering God, it seems to follow that the contemplative's task is to purify himself and lift himself into the purely spiritual sphere by slowly detaching himself from the external world of sense. This tradition of ascent to God in prayer is definitely a part of Christian tradition. However, there is a danger here. If we flee from the senses and the Divine Revelation we receive from the senses in order to find the being of God in our own soul or in the world, we can easily fall into a pantheistic attitude where God’s Being is not differentiated from the being of the world and even our own being. Instead of ourselves striving to conform to the image of God, God becomes an image of ourselves.

If we believe that God has revealed Himself authoritatively in scripture and tradition, this revelation has come to us through the medium of the senses. We cannot simply reject this revelation because it comes to us through the senses. Theologian Von Balthasar explains this idea. We can see how the Old and New Testament order of salvation in the flesh fits in with this teaching on contemplation in the simple words of the Christmas Preface: "In him we see our God made visible, and so are caught up in love of things unseen." God, who is pure spirit, condescends to become man in order thus to lead us up to him. For Christ is both God and man: in the flesh he not only manifests the reality and the power of the soul, the spirit: he even manifests the divine in the medium of flesh. Through the sacraments and salvific message, addressed to the senses, he pours into us, in a hidden manner, the "medicaments of immortality".  . . . God did not descend to the level of flesh simply so that we should "ascend" from flesh to spirit; the revelation of his agape, of his self-sacrificing and self-emptying love (kenosis) is not solely or primarily intended to assist our natural religious eros to reach its goal. "In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins" (1 Jn 4:10). In other words, God's entering into flesh must not be seen as a mere means to our redemption, nor as a preliminary stage on the way to our "divinization"; it is not something that passes away, as it were, is extinguished, is canceled by the Risen Lord's return to the Father. The Risen One returns to the Father with his whole humanity, including his body. This is what makes him the "firstborn" of many brethren. But what kind of body is his? Is it not a glorified body, adopted into the Spirit's mode of existence? And does not this imply that in our contemplation of God, practically speaking, we need to turn our backs on this mortal fallen flesh of ours? In this case the body of the resurrection will be a gift of grace from above, given to the spirit which has conquered the flesh.

We must inquire more deeply at this point. Is not creation as a whole, and man in particular, created and designed with a view to Christ? And is not he the perfecter of the cosmos, the divine fullness built into creation from the very beginning, filling heaven and earth as their head? And in that case surely he is more than simply the Redeemer from sin? He who was destined to assume flesh at the turning point of time is as such (and not as a fleshless Logos) the Original Idea, the "ultimate Source of God's creation" (Rev 3:14); it is in him and oriented toward him that man has been set in existence as a being of spirit and body. In this context the Platonic myth according to which only man's soul comes directly from God, whereas his body comes from elsewhere (from below, from natura naturans), both principles having eventually to return to their mutually opposed sources, loses all credibility. For it is God who took clay and formed man, and who breathed life into his nostrils (Gen 2:7); it is God who has given this human being, with his unity of body and soul, the power to hear him and sense his presence, the ability to walk with him and respond obediently to him. So much so that God's revelation to man could never take place anywhere else but in the realm of the world and its history, if God the Redeemer were not to deny and disqualify the word of God the Creator.

Even if we accept that we are a composite of body and spirit, this does not mean that the two are just equal. Von Balthasar tells us that the spirit must rule the flesh.  . . .  in the perfect man the corporal world is governed and fashioned by the spiritual. This relationship of master and servant also shows that the soul is more than merely the "form" of the body; i.e., it is ordered to the Infinite, to God, in whom there is neither materiality nor quantitative multiplicity. Here, for the first time, we can discern the mysterious boundary (confinium, the Fathers called it) between the world and God. Here we see man in his Janus-destiny: he is called to order and fashion the world according to his own nature with its unity of body and soul; but at the same time he must look up to the God who is beyond the world, whom he is to fear and love, and whose transcendence he is to reproduce in himself as lord of creation. This is a difficult task: man has to apply himself to his affairs in the world with all his senses, yet he must not lose himself in them.

Even though the spirit must rule the senses, this does not mean that the spirit abandons the senses. The spirit must use the senses to ascend to God. Here, Von Balthasar, who was a Jesuit, shows his preference for Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s method of contemplation in his Spiritual Exercises which uses the senses and the imagination in order to contemplate God. On the one hand the proponents of a Platonic contemplation strive to encounter "naked" truth, to "touch" God's essence directly, even if it be in the night of the senses and of the spirit, even if it involve the total absence of concepts in a simple awareness of God's presence. They attempt to construct degrees of abstraction from the world of sense; first they renounce the external senses, then the mind's inner images, and finally finite concepts, bound to the world as even they are. On the other hand, there are those who put forward a contemplation based on the sense-images and concepts of the gospel and of all the saving events. Among the latter, to some extent, are Bernard and Francis, but first and foremost it is Ignatius who opposes the whole weight of tradition and demands a concrete contemplation with the aid of imagination and, explicitly, the five senses. . . . .In the first place, when he contemplates the gospel, he is not concerned with imagining some historical past event but with a personal encounter with the incarnate Word of God, who discloses himself in historical uniqueness and summons believers to discipleship. Thus the concrete object of contemplation is not meant to yield mere dry knowledge: what the contemplative is aiming at is a "feeling and tasting of things from within", that exercise of spiritual taste which is traditionally seen as our faculty of discerning the supernatural and the divine (for sapientia comes from sapere, "to taste"). Consequently Ignatius demands more of the five senses in contemplation than a merely earthly functioning: they must discern the reality of God making himself present in the earthly activity of the imagination: "Smell the indescribable fragrance and taste the boundless sweetness of the divinity" (Exercises, 124). Finally, in mystical experience, Ignatius has been touched by God in a way he describes as direct ("with no previous occasion", i.e., not mediated by anything in the world) and hence free from the possibility of illusion (Exercises, 330, 336). Of course, as Von Balthasar has already pointed out to us, no method can compel God to “touch” us. We can only use the Divine Revelation He has given us to allow Him to give us more if He so chooses. Our bodily existence is a gift from God. We need to use this gift in the way it was intended. – Jim Nugent, CFP