body & soul as they relate to new age thinking - by fr. greg

Some notes on the nature of body and soul, and new age internet trends.

I am often asked whether reincarnation is real or possible. I assume this is because the the Hindu concept of Samsara is often nebulously applied in modern astrology, which is a hobby of mine, and people want to know the Catholic view on these beliefs; which, by now, seem almost inexorable from astrological interpretation. This misappropriation of belief seems to happen especially often in synastry, which is the study of two natal charts in relation to each other for the purpose of determining interpersonal compatibility. Any contacts to the south node, the imum coeli, Chiron, Pluto and so on are commonly explained with the simultaneously dismissive and weighty pronouncement: "it's a past life connection" or "it's karmic". Never mind the fact that "karmic" in these contexts is shorthand for "bad, toxic and abusive" while "past lives" can be translated to "twin flames". It's a mess. Let's stop taking religious beliefs out of context, for one thing. But that's a topic for another post.

My view on the nature of the soul can best be aligned with that of the Theologian, St. Maximus:

"Maximus has an interesting discussion of the unity of body and soul in human beings, a matter of some importance since it was through the flesh of Christ that God renewed fallen human beings. It is foolish to think, as the Origenists claim, that souls existed before bodies. Body and soul are parts of man and as parts each necessarily has a relation to the other. Even the body, after separation from the soul 'is not simply called body, but the body of a man, indeed the body of a certain man, even though it will decompose and be broken down into the elements of which it was composed. . . . Therefore the human being is composed of soul and body, for soul and body are indissolubly understood to be parts of the whole human species.' The issue is so crucial to his correction of Origenism that Maximus resumes a lengthy discussion of it in Ambiguum 42, where he describes the distinctive but connected origins of body and soul, and their synthesis in a single human species, and more importantly, the assumption by the New Adam of the first Adam’s soul-body constitution.

In the incarnation, the Logos who created universal humanity fashioned his own manhood in a (prelapsarian) Adamic perfection; he himself modeled the perfect co-existence of intelligent soul and material body." - excerpt from "On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ", Paul Blowers & Robert L. Wilkin

And, from Maximus himself:

"The soul, as our teacher Gregory clearly states, originates not from underlying matter, like bodies, but, ineffably and unknowably, from a divinely willed vital inbreathing comprehended only by the soul’s Creator himself. The soul arises at conception simultaneously with the body to form one complete human being. The body, of course, is created from the underlying matter of another body at conception, and at once enters into synthesis with the soul to form one species with it."

"The first birth, in which we receive being itself, is bodily birth, a single appearance of both together—soul and body—according to their coexistence as parts simultaneous with each other, distinguished as two only by the different modes of origin proper to each."

And as for the soul's persistence after death: " For the soul, after the death of the body, is not simply called soul, but the soul of a human being, indeed the soul of a certain human being. Even after it has departed the body, the whole human is predicated of it as part of its species according to its condition." -A Concise Reflection for Those Who Say that Souls Either Preexist or Post-exist Bodies, Maximus

So that's it. The body and soul are consubstantial, each has its proper subsistence (ὑπόστασις) as part of the one species, in perfect, natural synthesis with the other. The body is soul, the soul is body, the body and soul is human.