Easter

John Henry Newman:

Among the wise men of the heathen ... it was usual to speak slightingly and contemptuously of the mortal body; they knew no better. They thought it scarcely a part of their real selves, and fancied they should be in a better condition without it. Nay, they considered it to be the cause of their sinning; as if the soul of man were pure, and the material body were gross, and defiled the soul ... Accordingly their chief hope in death was the notion they should be rid of their body. Feeling they were sinful, and not knowing how, they laid the charge on their body; and knowing they were badly circumstanced here, they thought death perchance might be a change for the better. Not that they rested on the hope of returning to a God and Father, but they thought to be unshackled from the earth, and able to do what they would. It was consistent with this slighting of their earthly tabernacle, that they burned the dead bodies of their friends, not burying them as we do, but consuming them as a mere worthless case of what had been precious, and was then an incumbrance to the ground ...

Far different is the temper which the glorious light of the Gospel teaches us. Our bodies shall rise again and live for ever; they may not be irreverently handled. How they will rise we know not; but surely if the word of Scripture be true, the body from which the soul has departed shall come to life ... The dust around us will one day become animate. We may ourselves be dead long before, and not see it. We ourselves may elsewhere be buried, and, should it be our exceeding blessedness to rise to life eternal, we may rise in other places, far in the east or west. But, as God's word is sure, what is sown is raised; the earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, shall become glory to glory, and life to the living God, and a true incorruptible image of the spirit made perfect.

Comments

"(I)t was usual to speak slightingly and contemptuously of the mortal body; they knew no better. They thought it scarcely a part of their real selves, and fancied they should be in a better condition without it. Nay, they considered it to be the cause of their sinning; as if the soul of man were pure, and the material body were gross, and defiled the soul..."

Not to break the Easter reverie or anything, but I'd be interested to see how this allegedly crucial disconnect between Christian and pre-Christian thought can be reconciled with the extreme anti-sexual message that's played a large part in so many Christian schools of thought for centuries.

Posted by fumphis | March 23, 2008 12:30 AM

I have that painting on my computer right now. I probably will have little else to say here from now on.

Posted by Thomas R | March 23, 2008 2:10 AM

(Applauses enthusiastically)

Thank you, Ross.

Posted by Matthew Struhar | March 23, 2008 2:25 AM

Caravaggio and Newman, good choices.

Happy Easter.

Posted by Matthew Stinson | March 23, 2008 8:01 AM

Fumphis,

I only have time for a brief reponse as I need to go to church.

Essentially, Newman is illustrating the fact that the greatest rival to orthodox Christianity in the first few centuries of its existence was from heretical Christians who held that the material world was essentially evil, and the creation of the Devil. Many of these Christian heretics also held that sexuality was essentially evil, since it led to the propagation of the material world. Read Borges to get some flavor of the dualist heresies, his stories are saturated with them. Christianity affirmed the material world _in contradistinction to_ the heretics such as the Marcionites, Bogomils, Manichaeans, etc., and compared to them it is a very world affirming religion. Of course compared to a modern materialistic outlook, it seems overly ascetic.

I'm more sympathetic than most Christians to the arguments of some of the dualist heretics, as it seems to me that they were never adequately answered. The modern 'scientific' materialist, of the Hitchens mode, seems to me to be simply foolish- the idea that the material world is all there is, is to paraphrase Orwell, something so silly only a modern man could believe it. And I say this as a graduate student in the hard sciences.

Posted by Hector | March 23, 2008 9:28 AM

Hector -

The quote says "heathens", not "heretics."

It sounds to me like Newman is badly misreading most everyone from Aristotle to Seneca, not talking about the theory of the body developed in the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy.

Posted by DivGuy | March 23, 2008 10:30 AM

DivGuy,

Sounds from your blog title like you know more about this than me?

I should have said "orthodox Christianity affirmed" since of course the heretics were also Christians, by their own lights. I should also have noted, yes, the quote mentions heathens, not heretics- sadly I don't know enough about Seneca and Aristotle to know what they thought about the material world. But Plato, or at least the neo-Platonists, thought that the world was essentially evil, did they not?

Posted by Hector | March 23, 2008 11:55 AM

Re: I'm more sympathetic than most Christians to the arguments of some of the dualist heretics, as it seems to me that they were never adequately answered.

IMO, Genesis gives us all the answer we need: God made the world (quite obviously the material world) and said that it was good.

Re: And I say this as a graduate student in the hard sciences.

Anyone who studies modern physics and comes away thinking that reality is only "matter in motion" (the old Democritean claim) has not understood anything we've learned in the last century. Modern physics does not in any way prove God certainly, but it absolutely does disprove old-fashioned deterministic materialism.

Re: I should have said "orthodox Christianity affirmed" since of course the heretics were also Christians, by their own lights.

I'm not sure the Gnostics qualified as Christians, since the movement arose outside of Christianity and its origin dates to the immediate pre-Christian era, a weird mix of Judaic mysticism and dumbed-down Platonic philosophy. The Gnostics later comandeered Jesus for their pantheon, but their core theology is not Christian; it's not even monotheist.

Re: But Plato, or at least the neo-Platonists, thought that the world was essentially evil

"Evil" is too strong a word. "Imperfect" or "inferior" would be better.

Posted by JonF | March 23, 2008 12:29 PM

Frumphis, there is nothing in Christ's teaching that denigrates the body. John Paul II has made this briiliantly clear in his theology of the body, which is summarized as follows by Christopher West following Mary Rousseau:

... when spouses live an authentic spirituality, "the love that marks their marital bed spreads . . . into the kitchen, the yard, the supermarket, the workplace, and beyond. Their love eventually spreads throughout the world, into the realms of politics, work, education, entertainment, health care, and international relations. Such is the exact process by which the civilization of love comes to be" (Chicago Studies, Vol. 39:2, p. 175).

This one flesh lifelong union of a man and a woman taught by Genesis and Christ has both physical and theological dimensions.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | March 23, 2008 12:37 PM

JonF,

I agree for the most part. Yes, God created heaven and earth and therefore, for the most part, they are good....However it does seem to me that there are aspects of the material world which can't really be descibed as 'good' even in the broadest sense of the word. Viruses? Black holes? People born with pedophilic desires? Are these things not evil by nature?

While the free will argument does a convincing job of explaining why _moral_ evil must necessarily exist, at least in some degree, I'm not convinced that it does a whole lot to explain the origin of _natural_ evil which remains a troubling conundum.

Some of the Gnostic sects had nothing Christian about them, certainly. But I think it would be fair to call the Marcionites, for example, or some of the medieval dualists, Christian heretics. As far as I know they based their theology on fragments of the New Testament such as 'the devil sinneth from the beginning' and not really on Greek mysticism.

yes I agree that modern physics disproves deterministic materialism, that's why I put 'scientific materialism' in scarequotes.

Posted by Hector | March 23, 2008 3:05 PM

Re: Viruses? Black holes? People born with pedophilic desires? Are these things not evil by nature?

I'm not sure anything can be evil "by nature" because I don't think evil has a nature (that would be dualism). Rather evil is flaw in the good, not a positive reality in itself.
Also, what's wrong with black holes? I wouldn't want to fall in one, but then I would want to fall into an icey sea, though I don't think icey seas are evil. Black holes appear to be a recycling mechanism. Contrary to what you may have read, they gradually transform old matter into fresh energy, evaporating as they do so.

Re: I'm not convinced that it does a whole lot to explain the origin of _natural_ evil which remains a troubling conundum.

I'm not convinced there is evil in nature. To me that's a hubristic POV, judging things as if the universe existed to serve us, and not its Creator, and calling it evil when it works against us. IMO, evil is a human invention through our free will. Auschwitz is evil; the bubonic plague simply is what it is.

Posted by JonF | March 23, 2008 4:49 PM

i'm not religious, but i love caravaggio. and my fellow man, of course. happy belated easter.

Posted by joshua | March 27, 2008 4:01 PM

Newman reads well, the bodily resurrection did lie at the center of Paul's gospel (though not Jesus's). But Newman should have attended to Paul's reference to "first fruits" in the crucial passage in I Corinthians. For Paul, the resurrection signalled that since Jesus had risen, so also would his followers rise on Jesus's return to earth to establish the kingdom of God. Newman doesn't do chronology, if he had he might have dealt with the interesting fact that Paul's timing as to the return of Jesus and the coincident resurrection of his followers was off by many years. To be exact, assuming Corinthians was written in 56, and that the lifetimes within which Paul saw the parousia occurring extended twenty years, off by at least 1932 years.
If Paul was orthodox, believed correctly, how can Newman and Douthat also be orthodox?

Posted by Doubtful | March 30, 2008 1:04 PM