Blog Archives
I Ain’t Got No Body: Embodiment (or not)
Here we talked about the creation of the material world and embodied intelligences (us) by God. Over here we looked at how truly free creatures must be created at a certain “distance” from God’s perfection, with the (probably inevitable) corollary that at least some, if not most, of them will fall away to one degree or another. Let us now start connecting these two threads and see where this leads us.
First, it is worth pointing out a slight nuance in the concept of the Fall. To the orthodox, the Fall of mankind came after embodiment. That is, humans were originally created as embodied souls. Since humans were, in this narrative, primordially innocent, there was thus nothing “wrong” with embodiment. Had the Fall not occurred, humans would have lived embodied lives in innocent perfection. Embodiment is a feature, not a bug, so to speak. The Fall distorted the relationship of body and soul; but that relationship in and of itself is fundamentally good. It is also important to point out that in this model, we don’t have a body; that is, we are not actually a spirit that just inhabits a corporeal form. Rather, we are a body; or better, we are a holistic combination of body and soul making up one single hypostasis (person).
C. S. Lewis puts it in somewhat mystical language in Chapter 14 of The Great Divorce:
I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking up on it. And on the table were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet of some one of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimickry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in the world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women.
Thus the body and the soul are in a sense different manifestations of the same thing, merely seeming different (puppet vs. giant) because of our perception of time.
In the Gnostic mythos, the body, along with the rest of the material cosmos, is created by the evil and/or ignorant Demiurge, who makes it as a sort of imperfect, Bizarro-world copy of the dimly perceived Pleroma (the perfect spiritual world of the Aeons, the angelic intelligences created by God). Thus, embodiment is a bad thing, as the material world itself is a bad thing, at best a pale reflection of the true Good, at worst a cesspit of suffering and limitation. Some versions of the Gnostic mythos posit embodiment as a theft of the Light–the spiritual essence that comes from the Pleroma–by the Demiurge and his Archons; in some versions, Sophia (the Aeon whose sin led to the existence of the Demiurge in the first place) deliberately “seeds” the human body with the Light, as a long-term “time bomb” that will defeat the Demiurge and ultimately bring about the end of the material cosmos. In this reading, embodiment is a good thing for the goal it will ultimately achieve; but it is still bad for us at the present. Our goal is to escape embodiment and return to the Pleroma.
Thus, the Gnostic perspective holds embodiment to happen after the Fall, or perhaps to be a sort of Fall itself; and the antagonism of the spirit and the body is not an accident, but it is baked into the cake, so to speak. We are not a body-soul amalgam, as in orthodoxy, but a soul–our true self–which is unfortunately connected to a body (or possibly many bodies–some forms of Gnosticism posit reincarnation) as a result of the entrapment of the Light in matter.
For Labor Day
I posted these a few years ago for Labor Day Weekend. Pete Seeger died early this year, so this is both a tribute to him and an expression of support for working people as only Pete could do it.
Susanna Hoffs with Matthew Sweet, and Also Solo!
Because it can’t always be heavy theology, but mostly because–well, Susanna Hoffs!
Some Nik Kershaw for the Weekend
He’s in the top ten of my favorite 80’s singers (though IMO he’s had a lot of good stuff since then, too; e.g. the video here).
Some 80’s for the Night: Joe Jackson
A few years ago a local radio station started a new format and started billing itself as an 80’s music station. I listened to it for awhile, but it was a disappointment. It didn’t play the weird or quirky stuff from that decade, which didn’t surprise me. Most oldies stations do that–they do sort of a Top 10 version of the decade in question. This one didn’t even do that–it was a subset of a Top 10 station, playing some artists–Michael Jackson, the B-52’s, the Eurhythmics, and such–in heavy rotation, with a smattering of others; while many other songs and artists that were very prevalent in the 80’s were nowhere to be heard. Joe Jackson is a case in point–I clearly remember that in the early 80’s, he was wall-to-wall over the airwaves. I don’t think I ever heard him on the station I mentioned. It eventually changed to a generic oldies, playing mostly 70’s with a bit of other stuff. Anyway, I heard “Steppin’ Out” on a grocery store’s sound system this morning, not having heard it in years, and thought it deserved a post. Enjoy!
Some Late-Night Psychedelia
“Only a Northern Song”–my favorite trippy sequence from Yellow Submarine (“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” is a very close second).
