…It was a very special idea of St. Thomas that Man is to be studied in his whole manhood; that a man is not a man without his body, just as he is not a man without his soul. A corpse is not a man; but also a ghost is not a man. The earlier school of Augustine and even of Anselm had rather neglected this, treating the soul as the only necessary treasure, wrapped for a time in a negligible napkin. Even here they were less orthodox in being more spiritual.
-G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 17
The phrase “less orthodox in being more spiritual” is a gem, but that is not necessarily why I share the quote.
I have heard more than one preacher say things like this: ‘the body is just a shell containing the real self.’ I once heard a preacher try to make the point at a funeral like this: ‘Don’t you dare think that this body is the real [so and so]. This was only a shell.’
That was not Jesus’ perspective at the tomb of Lazarus, and it shouldn’t be ours. Death is the great tragedy, and the great enemy, of mankind. Any separation of soul from body is unnatural. And so the souls of holy martyrs cry out in heaven, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Rev. 6:10). They are not content to be spirits while others remain in the body. They would be further clothed (2 Cor. 5:10).
We look not just for heaven, but for new heavens and a new earth – and a great resurrection. For ‘a corpse is not a man,’ but neither is a ghost.
Thank you for this quote. It has helped me, both in furthering the development of a fictional story I am working on, as well as in bringing further healing from that Gnostic-fable that “we will all die and become shiny gasses in the clouds one day”… That idea never appealed to me in Sunday school when I was a child… I was happy to rid myself of it when the time came.
You’re welcome. I’ve had the same issue. I also wrote a little post about one way C.S. Lewis helped me that you might enjoy:http://tidesandturning.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/one-cant-be-a-ghost-in-ones-own-country-c-s-lewis-the-silver-chair/