“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. Thus begins the Gospel of John, written around 100 CE, and, with it, a revolution in human consciousness. Only a few decades earlier, Philo of Alexandria had conceived of Logos, the Word, as a kind of divine architect transforming God’s ideas into reality. Now, John was taking it further: The Word was God. With this conceptual leap, John set in motion a theological shift that would drastically alter the course of human thought. What caused him to make it?
John was most likely a member of an early, marginal Christian community that had broken from the Jewish faith and was now antagonistic to it. It was in John’s interest to present Jesus Christ as someone who had transcended the community of Jews. But how could he do this? John had probably read some of Philo’s writings suggesting Logos as the mediator of God’s abstract power with the physical world. Now he had the stroke of genius to equate Jesus Christ with Logos. It was Christ who mediated the two dimensions of existence. This would make Christ a divine figure, an entity apart from normal human existence. As such, it enabled Christ to transcend his Jewish heritage and become an icon for the entire human race. Just a few sentences into the Gospel, John drops his bombshell:
The Word [Logos] became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth…. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
This idea of God manifested in the flesh, the Incarnation, would become a central tenet of Christian faith but is not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament. Previously, Jesus had been described as a human “exalted” by God only upon his death. Now, a new, powerful vision informs the fledgling Christian cosmology as Christ becomes the gateway between the world of humans and God’s eternity. The Neo-Platonists had offered salvation only through rigorous intellectual practice; now, Christ the Savior promised a direct connection to eternal salvation for anyone.
With this dramatic flourish, John hit upon an idea that would engulf the Western world and ultimately the entire globe. The arcane world of Platonic Ideas, previously only available to the elite, was now open to anyone willing to believe in the power of Christ to redeem them. In this chapter, we’ll trace how Plato’s original dualistic speculations became the underpinning for the cosmology that would structure Western thought to the present day.
The “Living Death” of the Body
The early Christian theologians, known as the church fathers, were aware of their debt to the Platonic tradition, particularly the ideas of an unknowable deity transcending the world and a soul independent of the body with the potential to attain eternal salvation. One church father, Clement of Alexandria, claimed that God had given philosophy to the Greeks as “a preparation which paved the way towards perfection in Christ.” He suggested classical Greek philosophy was the “handmaiden” of Christian theology, making it acceptable for Christians to take what was useful in classical thought and discard the rest.
The amalgam of Platonism and Christianity was by no means a top-down process imposed by a few classically trained intellectuals. Rather, it arose from grassroots movements across the ancient world, such as the Gnostic sects that flourished in the second century. These sects saw the physical world as inherently evil and believed the immortal soul could achieve enlightenment (gnosis) through liberation from the body. The Gnostics shared with the Essene and Pharisee sects an extreme loathing for the body, which was seen as nothing more than a jailhouse preventing the soul from reaching salvation. Early Christians readily adopted this viewpoint, seeing the body—in the words of one—as “a filthy bag of excrement and urine.” Monks were prohibited from watching each other eating. Girls were forbidden to bathe so they wouldn’t see their own naked bodies.
These tortured individuals so identified themselves with their souls that they hated their bodies like their worst enemy. “Woe to the flesh that hangs upon the soul! Woe to the soul that hangs upon the flesh!” cries the Gospel of Thomas. The body is frequently associated with death. An early text describes it as “the dark goal, the living death, the corpse revealed, the tomb that we carry about with us.” In the words of one Desert Father, “I am killing it because it is killing me.” This self-destructive approach to the body went beyond metaphor. Ascetics would live for years on top of pillars or loaded with heavy chains. There are frequent approving references to self-castration as preferable to acting impurely.
The Anguish of Paul
Agonizing as these bodily tortures must have been, the mental torment that early Christians put themselves through caused perhaps even greater suffering. None has left a more plaintive declaration of inner anguish than Paul, who occupies such a dominant position in the early church that he has been called the “founder of Christianity.”
Although Paul lived contemporaneously with Jesus, he never knew him personally, and his interpretation of Jesus’s life and death was strongly at odds with that of the apostles who had actually witnessed Jesus’s ministry. After his famed conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul became convinced that Jesus was a messiah who had suffered for the sins of all humanity, and he dedicated himself to spreading his vision outside the Jewish community. As such, Paul established Christianity as a universal religion, as in his Letter to the Galatians, in which he asserts: “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus…. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Although such passages are sometimes used to associate Paul with the principle of universal brotherly love, his personality seems to have been quite the opposite, fraught with conflict and division. Before his conversion to Christianity, Paul had been instrumental in persecuting early Christians, and afterward, he found himself in constant conflict with the apostles and those he sought to convert.
Paul’s series of clashes with others seems to have been a reflection of even more severe struggles within himself, conflicts that have since become intrinsic to the very structure of Christian theology. Already steeped in the dualistic creeds of his time, Paul seems to have taken the divisions inherent in their thinking as the basis for his new Christian cosmology. He writes bitterly about the law of God forcing him to acknowledge his own sinful nature. “Nay, I had not known sin,” he says, “but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.” He declares that “all who rely on observing the law are under a curse.”
With his acceptance of the law of God, Paul experiences an inner battle. His consciousness is split apart like two antagonistic personalities fighting each other. He describes his inner anguish:
I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…. It is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me…. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members…. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
In this passage and others like it, Paul seems to experience himself as a split personality, using words fraught with self-loathing.
Paul repeatedly describes his inner conflict as a battle to the death. Either his appetites will win and his soul will end up in eternal torment, or his soul will win and put his appetites to death. There is no room for compromise. “The wages of sin is death,” he writes, “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Of all the physical appetites Paul was battling, sexual desire seems to have been his greatest enemy. “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit,” he writes, “and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would.” He never married and was especially scornful of the “degrading passions” that cause either sex to commit homosexual acts. “Sex,” he tells the Corinthians, “is always a danger.”
Paul’s hatred of sexuality became a clarion call for ensuing generations of Christian theologians who made sexual renunciation a central part of their faith. Countless Christians followed Paul in their fervent rejection of sexuality. Here is Saint Jerome in the fourth century:
O how often, when I was living in the desert, in the lonely waste, scorched by the burning sun…how often did I fancy myself surrounded by the pleasures of Rome…by bands of dancing girls. My face was pale with fasting; but though my limbs were cold as ice, my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling up before me while my flesh was as good as dead.
Paul’s agonizing battle within himself would echo throughout the millennia, reprised over generations through the inner torment of countless devout Christians. His personality, riddled with self-hatred, infused the theology that he would bequeath to posterity.
Christianizing Platonism
While Paul was passionately advocating repression of physical appetites, other church fathers focused their attention on the ideology of the new Christian regime, filling in the details of the abstractions of God and eternal soul they had inherited from Platonism.
Clement helped to construct the idea of a Christian god in the Platonic mold: a formless entity without attributes, beyond space and time. Following Plato, Clement revered the intellect, proposing that humans were made in the image of God through their capacity for rational thought. This separation of humanity from the rest of the world due to the reasoning faculty would become a central part of the Western dualistic tradition. On one side of the dualistic chasm, human conceptual consciousness produces reason; on the other side remains animate consciousness, the instinctual drives that keep the soul bound up in the physical world.
Clement’s initial work in creating a Platonic vision of Christianity was continued by Origen, who also conceived of an eternal God, transcendent in his perfection. The human soul, Origen affirmed, originally created as pure intelligence, was constrained in the body, waiting to be restored to its original purity. It was through contemplation of God that a person’s soul could become united with the divine. To know God completely, it was necessary to have as little as possible to do with the ways of the flesh. Origen took this view so seriously that he is said to have castrated himself in adolescence in order to more perfectly separate his soul from bodily desires.
Augustine, the most prominent church father, who is generally viewed as setting the future pattern of European Christian thought, viewed his religion through the same Platonic lens. Augustine was driven in his early life by a probing search for the source of true spiritual meaning, and his prolific writings on how he found this in Christianity became a cornerstone of the Western tradition: when printing was invented, his works were the first to be published after the Bible.
As a youth, Augustine was a follower of the extreme Manichean sect, which held a set of dualistic beliefs so severe that even the Gnostics pale by comparison. The Manicheans saw the material world as uncompromising evil in an endless struggle against the forces of Good. The human body had been designed, they believed, by the forces of evil to imprison the soul. Committed Manicheans took this view so seriously that they removed themselves as far as possible from anything physical, employing others to handle their food and anything else relating to their bodies.
After some years, Augustine found the Manichean obsession with evil too constricting and was drawn toward Platonism, which allowed him to aspire to the sense of divine goodness available to his soul. Platonism offered Augustine a powerful vision of the eternal dimension of the divine, but it didn’t show him how to get there. As he put it, he could “see the country of peace from a hill in the forest,” but he could not find in Platonism the path to that “royal kingdom.” Eventually, he turned to Christianity as “the religion that embodies a universal path to the liberation of the soul.”
After his conversion, Augustine embraced the Platonic conception of Christianity developed by Clement and Origen, adding a new element in the form of original sin: it was because of Adam’s disobedience in eating from the tree of knowledge, he explained, that God had condemned the entire human race to damnation. Adam’s original guilt passed from generation to generation through desire for physical pleasure, with its most extreme and shameless manifestation in the sexual act. Echoing Paul, Augustine relates his own personal struggle with sexual desire, writing how he had begged God to grant him chastity and cure him of the “disease” of sexual craving, “only not yet.” He had feared, he confessed, that God would hear him too soon.
Augustine frequently took a more considered approach to his inner struggle than his predecessors. In his most famous work, Confessions, he describes his path to conversion in a way that is entirely original, exploring his inner life with sensitivity. Many scholars attribute to him the discovery of the “individual” as a conflicted free agent through his nuanced descriptions of interior experience. Augustine himself seems to have been aware of breaking new ground, writing: “Men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of rivers, the ocean that encircles the world, or the stars in their courses. But they pay no attention to themselves.”
Augustine did pay attention to himself, and, in so doing, he developed a conception of the human being that perseveres to this day. “Since it is almost universally agreed that we are made up of soul and body,” he writes, “what we must ask now is what man really is: is he both these constituents, or is he body only or soul only?” Augustine returns to the core metaphor of the soul-body relationship used in both Platonic and Vedic thought: a man riding a horse. Is a human merely the horse, “used by a soul which rules it”? Or is he the soul alone, ruling the body? Perhaps, he surmises, the human being is a compound organism of both soul and body, “just as we call a man a knight…on account of the horse he rides.”
For all his thoughtful inquiry, Augustine could never escape the dualistic paradigm in which his ideas had evolved. Rather, the strength of his intellect only served to expand the scope of the dualistic conception of the universe ever further. With echoes of his Manichean past, Augustine came to see the entire natural world as anathema to the purity of God. He hauntingly describes how he had once loved worldly things— “Late have I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new”—only to realize that this love was misdirected and prevented him from experiencing the true love of God. It was not just the human body but nature itself that could entrap and corrupt the soul with its joyous beauty.
“A Strange Hybrid Monster”
Augustine’s life is often seen as the transition point from the classical world to the beginning of mediaeval Europe, ushering in an era when Christianity would dominate all aspects of Western thought. The inner struggles of the church fathers would set the stage for how virtually all Europeans for the next thousand years tried to make sense of their internal experience and their place in the cosmos.
In his influential book The Great Chain of Being, historian Arthur O. Lovejoy traces how the conception of a dualistic universe forced people to view their own humanness as fundamentally split. If the cosmos consisted of an eternal and a worldly dimension, where did that leave humans, who incorporated both body and soul? The disturbing answer, as Augustine had explored, was straddling the two. This position in the cosmos, Lovejoy observes, gives man “a kind of uniqueness in nature; but it is an unhappy uniqueness. He is, in a sense…a strange hybrid monster.”
The universal enforcement of Christian values on society caused this inner conflict to impinge, often with drastic effect, on the lives of virtually everyone. Paul’s tormented hatred of sexuality energized a particularly vicious view of women, elevating the value of virginity. Women who accepted their own sexuality were seen as temptresses like Eve, who caused the downfall of the human race. “Do you not realize that Eve is you?” snarled one of the more implacable church fathers, Tertullian. “The curse God pronounced on your sex weighs still on the world…. You are the devil’s gateway, you desecrated the fatal tree, you first betrayed the law of God, you who softened up with your cajoling words the man against whom the devil could not prevail by force.”
The Christian aspiration for the soul’s eternal life led inevitably to a war against physical nature. Living your life in harmony with the intrinsic needs of the human organism meant condemning your soul to eternal damnation. The Gospel of John aptly sums up the awful dilemma of this dualistic cosmos: “Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
Over the centuries, this dualistic cosmology permeated European cognition. A mystical Christian work, the Cloud of Unknowing, written in the fourteenth century—one of countless examples—describes how, once a person’s soul develops a “true knowing” of God, he discovers “his knowing and his feeling as it were occupied and filled with a foul stinking lump of himself, the which must always be hated and despised and forsaken.” As a result, “so of the goeth nigh mad for sorrow.” A thousand years had passed since Augustine, and still the same loathing of the body racked European consciousness.
During the sixteenth-century Reformation, many dogmas of Catholicism were called into question by revolutionary Christian thinkers. One leader of this movement, John Calvin, disagreed with the Catholic Church about many things, but, when it came to humanity’s place in the cosmos, he demonstrated full agreement with the dualistic tradition. Calvin saw man as “the image of God in respect to the soul,” but, in respect to the body, he expressed the familiar abhorrence, lamenting that “we are all made of mud, and this mud is not just on the hem of our gown, or on the sole of our boots, or in our shoes. We are full of it, we are nothing but mud and filth both inside and outside.” In England, Edmund Spenser shared the same view that “the love of God” brings “loathing…of this vile world and these gay seeming things.”
One and a half millennia had passed since Paul first struggled with his inner conflicts, and the leaders of Western thought were still riven by the same divide.
“Cogito Ergo Sum”
The following century saw the birth of the Scientific Revolution in Europe. One of its preeminent instigators, René Descartes, decided to question all the assumptions he had inherited from the past in his quest for truth. A brilliant philosopher and mathematician, Descartes in his twenties experienced a life-altering vision in which the Angel of Truth appeared and told him that mathematics was the key to unlocking the secrets of nature.
Descartes henceforward resolved to trust only his own intellect in pursuit of a true understanding of reality. This was a courageous path, and Descartes experienced severe existential suffering as a result. His doubts were so serious, he wrote, that “it feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top.”
Descartes was determined not to take anything for granted in his quest to comprehend the nature of existence. He would not rely on his own previously formed opinions, nor even his own senses. “I shall now close my eyes,” he resolved, “stop up my ears, turn away all my senses, even efface from my thought all images of corporeal things, or at least, because this can hardly be done, I shall consider them as being vain and false; and thus communing only with myself, and examining my inner self, I shall try to make myself, little by little, better known and more familiar to myself.”
As he rigorously examined every thought arising in him, Descartes finally seemed to hit pay dirt. He believed he had arrived at something rock solid: the simple and undeniable realization that he was thinking:
I next considered attentively what I was; and I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body, that there was no world, and no place for me to be in, I could not pretend that I was not; on the contrary, from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things it evidently and certainly followed that I existed…. From this I recognized that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think and whose being requires no place and depends on no material thing.
The one fact Descartes could not question was that he was thinking, which became the source of the most famous statement in modern philosophy: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes used this as the foundation for his entire understanding of existence. “I am then,” he concluded, “in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind or intelligence or intellect or reason—words whose meaning I have been ignorant of until now.”
The great irony of this seminal moment is that, while Descartes was attempting to question everything and base his philosophy on an unshakable foundation, he ended up building his ideas on the same dualistic underpinning set in place by Plato two thousand years earlier. The very assumption that he could believe only his reason and not his senses was derived ultimately from Plato’s Pre-Socratic predecessors, such as Democritus, who had called the senses “bastards” and claimed that only reason was “legitimate.” Now, for all his determination not to rely on the received wisdom of others, here was Descartes employing a founding precept from one of the progenitors of Greek philosophy. It never occurred to Descartes that the constructions of his mind and his sensory experience might both offer valid perspectives on reality. The sovereignty of reason was so deeply engraved in the Western tradition that even Descartes was unable to realize it as such.
From this foundational belief in the intellect as the essence of human existence, Descartes preserved and even strengthened the unyielding dualism of the Christian cosmology he had inherited. As if to emphasize this, the full title of his famous work Meditations is “Meditations concerning First Philosophy, in which God’s existence, & the Human Soul’s distinction from the Body are demonstrated.”
Descartes took two crucial steps in his work that would shape Western thought thereafter. The first of these was to identify himself exclusively with the soul rather than the body. In contrast to Augustine, who had suggested that a human being was a composite of body and soul, Descartes finally freed the soul entirely from the body. “This ‘me,’” he wrote, “that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from my body…and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is.” Descartes identified himself not as a composite soul-body entity but only as the soul.
Descartes’s second crucial step was to unobtrusively substitute the traditional Christian notion of the soul with the more modern concept of the mind. The dualistic chasm remained impassable as ever, only now the dichotomy of soul and body was reborn into the modern age as a dichotomy of mind and body. “The substance,” he wrote, “in which thought immediately resides is called mind. I use the term ‘mind’ rather than soul since the word ‘soul’ is ambiguous and is often applied to something corporeal.”
With the rise of the scientific worldview in modern times, the notion of “soul” has been segregated into purely theological territory, while the idea of “mind” has become ubiquitous, reinforcing the same dualistic split in the conception of a human being that was established by the Platonic-inspired church fathers.
Our Cartesian Legacy
It is almost impossible to overstate the profound impact Descartes has had on modern cognition. Along with Plato and Augustine, Descartes was a prime architect of the structures of thought so pervasive in the modern world that they are frequently viewed as self-evident truths: that our thoughts constitute our essence and that the mind is separate from the body and is what makes us human.
Descartes’s dualism also forms the basis for the modern view of our relationship with the natural world. According to Cartesian logic, if the mind is the source of our true identity, then our bodies are mere matter with no intrinsic value. And if that is true of our own bodies, it must be equally true of the rest of nature—animals, plants, and everything else—since no other entity possesses a mind capable of reason. In Descartes’s own words: “I do not recognize any difference between the machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature alone composes.”
With this step, Descartes completed the process, begun by monotheism, that eliminated any intrinsic value from the natural world. With nothing sacred about nature, it became available for the human intellect to use remorselessly for its own purposes. The scientific project, just getting off the ground in the seventeenth century, would henceforth view every aspect of the material world as free game for inquiry, investigation, and exploitation. As the Scientific Revolution gained steam in Europe, a split emerged between religious and rationalist thinkers, but in neither case did the dualistic presumption ever get questioned. The one fundamental truth everyone could agree on was the sanctity of the mind/soul in contrast to the rest of nature.
Faithful Christians, meanwhile, continued to be tormented by their loathing of the body. New England clergyman Cotton Mather wrote in his diary how debased he felt by the need to urinate, which puts man “on the same level with the very dogs” and resolved to think only noble and divine thoughts during this “beastly” practice. The Protestant movement put its own unique stamp on the split between reason and emotion by emphasizing the importance of cognitive control as proof of God’s favor. The Puritans believed that the “natural state” of humanity was impulsive and untamed; those who were successful in restraining their passions demonstrated they were God’s chosen, predestined for heaven. This formed the foundation of the so-called Protestant ethic, which created the moral underpinning for modern American society with its emphasis on systematic rationalization and goal orientation.
In much of today’s world, the beliefs of Christian dualism remain strong. Polls in the United States show nearly 90 percent of respondents believing in God, with 84 percent believing in the survival of the soul after death and 82 percent in the existence of heaven. The split in human consciousness that the Christian fathers inherited from the ancient Greeks remains a central part of our modern reality.
(This article is an excerpt from Jeremy Lent‘s masterly work, The Patterning Instinct. The purpose of reproducing this excerpt from his book is purely for the educational purpose and to encourage critical thinking regarding theology. We do no, by any means, intend to infringe the intellectual property of the book. Rather, we intend to promote the idea of the author and salute his endeavour. More about the author and the book can be accessed by clicking the aforementioned links.)
