Is Christianity Hostile
To Physical Appetites?
Part 2

Editor's Note:  This article is the second of a two-part essay, the first part of which was published in the last issue of Paraklesis.  The entire essay was first presented in Dutch as the keynote lecture at a theological reflection afternoon on the topic "Is Christianity hostile to physical appetites?" held at the Pauluskerk (St. Paul's Church) in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 1996.  The article was also printed in Dutch in Onbegrepen Intimiteiten (Rotterdam: KSA, 1996, pp. 78-90). For its first English appearance here it has been lightly revised, taking into account ensuing responses.

By Donald H. Mader

If, then, celibacy, and belief in immortal souls which are separate from vile bodies, and ultimately, hostility to the body and its appetites are not Hebrew, where do they come from? The answer is: the Greeks, and in specific, Plato - or, more precisely, the Neo-Platonists who represented the dominant force in Greek philosophy during the first few centuries after the time of Christ, while Christianity was taking its form.

But it was Plato who got the mischief rolling, with his doctrine of ideals, positing that this world was only an imperfect reflection of another, ideal world.  The ideal world was the world of essences, while our world is a world of transient "accidents," the reflection of the essences in time and space.  Initially, in the dialogues of Plato, these two worlds were not that distant from one another: although in the Phaedrus and Symposium, it is clear that a true philosopher loves a beautiful young man because of the ideal beauty of his soul, as reflected in his body, and not for his physical beauty itself, nonetheless his physical beauty is a clear and immediate expression of his beautiful soul.

It did not take long, however, before these two worlds began to increasingly diverge, and the physical world came to be thought of as increasingly less beautiful, devalued in comparison with the ideal, which after all was eternal, essential, more "real" than the real world.  Bishop John A.T. Robinson, in his study of the development of Christian thinking about the body, describes the conception of man in the late Hellenic world as "an angel in a slot machine, a soul (invisible, spiritual, the essential 'I') incarcerated in a frame of matter, from which it trusts eventually to be liberated. The body is non-essential to the personality; it is something which man possesses - or rather, is possessed by" (The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology, p. 14).

In the swirl of pre-Christian religions, Plato's ideal world became identified with the spiritual realm.  By the time Christianity was founded, we begin to find language in Paul's letters which reflects this sharpening split.  Paul maintains a complex set of four terms, arranged in two polarities, "flesh" and "spirit" and "body" and "soul".  "Flesh" was that in mankind which drew one away from God, while "spirit" was that which longed for God and was receptive to Him; "body" was the physical envelope in which eternal "soul" was clothed.

Although Paul quite clearly separates these (for instance, it is always the "body" which will be resurrected, never the "flesh"), in time, under the continuing influence of developments from Platonic idealism, these two polarities began to telescope into each other.  With the passage of time, in Christian theology it became the body itself (and its appetites) which drew us away from God, and as this body was already viewed as an unnecessary encumbrance to the immortal and valuable soul, it became the focus of hostility and degradation, leading, first among the Christian "desert fathers" of Egypt and Syria and then among the Irish monks who took their inspiration from them, to the kind of asceticism and denial of the body which we began by describing.

This was not a process which was happening only within the emerging church; indeed, the church was merely reflecting the developments in late Greek philosophy, now sufficiently changed from Plato's original idealism that it comes to be termed Neo-Platonism.  In 415 CE, in Alexandria, there occurred one of those events which is exemplary for a whole era:  the murder of the Neo-Platonist philosopher Hypatia by a mob instigated by St. Cyril, Christian archbishop of the city.

The story is told by Suidas in his Lexicon.  Hypatia's father Theon was the last professor of philosophy at the Alexandrian Museum, and she followed in his footsteps in that study, becoming a popular lecturer herself. Her attitude toward the body, as a Neo-Platonist, is shown in the report that, when a fellow student declared his love for her, she impatiently raised her dress and said to him, "This symbol of unclean generation is what you are in love with, and not anything beautiful."  Though less extreme, this response is not unlike that made by St. Derville in Ireland a century or so later, and like Christian female saints, Hypatia is reported to have remained a virgin throughout her life.  St. Cyril, who had already contrived the expulsion of the Jewish community from Alexandria, began to view her as an enemy of the church, and organized her brutal murder.  In terms of moral attitudes, one suspects she was perhaps less an enemy than a competitor.

However that may be, it is obvious that attitudes unfriendly to the body and its appetites were in wide circulation, not just in the Church, but in the whole culture of late antiquity, and it is from that source that they entered Christian tradition, as the church distanced itself increasingly from its Jewish roots.  To the extent that all Western culture and society-- "Christendom"--was as shaped by the Church, it became the conduit by which these hostile Neo-Platonist attitudes have become our common property today.

Parenthetically, it may be worth noting that a compelling argument can be made (and has been made by the American Reformed theologian A. Charles van der Beek, in his The Immortality of the Soul vs. the Resurrection of the Body) that this same Neo-Platonist devaluation of the body and its needs, in comparison with the immortal and valuable soul, is the main impediment to the church taking seriously its responsibility to minister to the poor, homeless and hungry.  The temptation is always to "save souls," to minister to the "immortal" part of man, at the expense of the needs of the body, which is, after all, believed to be transient.  It is perhaps not only in morals, but in ministry, that the church has suffered for taking on Hellenistic baggage.

There is one additional important aspect to the question of the hostility of Christendom to bodily appetites which we must also note.  Beside the general hostility to the body and "lusts" in the sense of appetites, there has been and is a hostility in Christendom to specific sexual "lusts," in the more pejorative sense of the word.  Among these are, as we would identify them today, homosexuality, transvestitism, sadism, masochism, pedophilia, and other so-called "perversions."