Home » Dualism

Tag: Dualism

That By Which He Would Be Delivered

Ken Myers shared this quote in a recent talk (HERE). The author is referring to Marcion’s early dualistic Christological heresy, which stands in direct opposition to the truth:

Human nature, or the condition of having a material body and participating in the change and suffering of the creation, was that from which man had to be delivered, but not that by which he would be delivered.

-Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, p. 76

I have noted elsewhere the notion of so-called religious asceticism which is actually worldly. You could call it dualism as well. This quote rings true to that idea. While Christians should yearn for the life of heaven, because it is life in the immediate presence of God, and while they should denounce the works of the sinful nature, we should never think that physical matter is innately bad. We can say with Paul, ‘Who shall deliver me from this body of death?’, but we must not forget that it was God taking on a body and dying that brings life to this dead body.

In other words, when you start to look down on this early existence, the frailness of life, and the persistence of suffering, rather than thinking that these things are somehow evil or unfitting, remember that it was through these very same means that Jesus Christ redeemed you. And so thank God for them. Thank him for the fact that he has given you a body, and that his Son took on a body that your body will not stay in the grave.

We feel the need to be delivered from our flesh, it was a man in the flesh who delivered us. We feel a need to be saved from suffering, but it was suffering that saved us. Take comfort in the gospel.

Not Quasi-Physical

Put your arm around somebody. Give someone a hug:

The New York Review of Books of February 3, 1994, for example, carried a review of the correspondence of William and Henry James along with a photograph of the two brothers standing together with William’s arm around Henry’s shoulders. Apropos of this picture, the reviewer, John Bayley, wrote that ‘their closeness of affection was undoubted and even took on occasion a quasi-physical form.’ It is Mr. Bayley’s qualifier, ‘quasi-physical,’ that sticks in one’s mind. What can he have meant by it? Is this prurience masquerading as squeamishness, or vice versa? Does Mr. Bayley feel a need to assure his psychologically sophisticated readers that even though these brothers touched one another familiarly, they were not homosexual lovers?

The phrase involves at least some version of the old dualism of spirit and body or mind and body that has caused so much suffering and trouble and that raises such troubling questions for anybody who is interested in health. If you love your brother and if you and your brother are living creatures, how could your love for him not be physical? Not spiritual or mental only, not ‘quasi-physical,’ but physical. How could you not take a simple pleasure in putting your arm around him?

– Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, p. 92