What makes us people? It’s a profound question that is always more difficult to answer that we first think. Our personhood is not defined by our physical traits, such as by the uniqueness of the human body among other biological life forms on our plant, or by our baseline interactive skills, such as our ability to communicate and follow instructions (an ability we share even with animals and robots).
One thing that makes us unique from other life forms is that we are endowed with wisdom and rationality, enabling us to make complex decisions. No animal or robot draws up a list of pro’s or con’s before making an important decision, whereas people are capable of make decisions in which short term sacrifices are weighed up against long term successes, and a range of outcomes are considered before the necessary sacrifices are made for a future good. As Catholic students, we have all experienced this when facing big decisions such as:
Yet when faced with questions such as these, our broken understanding of what makes us people, and especially our concept of how we relate to God, can often lead us astray and discourage us. We shall confront this here by considering the important role played by a sound understanding of the relationship between our spirit, mind, and body.
We live in a culture today that argues that the mind and body are separate, despite existing parallel to each other. Nowadays, you might hear someone describing themselves as a “man trapped in a woman’s body,” or vice-versa; in other words, ‘my mind/spirit has one identity, my body another’, despite the fact that the two exist side-by-side. You can’t escape your physical identity, and you can’t escape your mental/spiritual identity either, but both are core elements of what constitutes your identity. For those who view the two as separate and irreconcilable identities, the result is interior dissonance and insecurity.
But our spirit, mind and body are not separate entities; they are co-dependent and co-existent.
We Catholics see a similar crisis playing out in our spirituality, too. Many fall into the trap of seeing the spirit as pure and belonging to God, separate from the body, which is often viewed as just sinful and belonging to the earth. Some of us live under the impression that, in our spiritual lives, the sinful body drags us down and keeps our feet on the ground, whilst our ethereal spirit drifts off into heaven in moments of prayer. This leads inevitably to the compartmentalisation of our spiritual lives and the perspective that, in particularly ‘holy’ and mindful moments, my spirit is raised into communion with God, but then falls back down when I return home and go back to interacting with my real, earthy, broken world.
This was something that I really struggled with, as I felt I was called to live a life of integrity and action. If the different parts of me (mind and body) were not living in harmony with each other, then how could I find the balance in my identity between my pure, eternal spirit (which becomes the antithesis of me the moment anything goes wrong) and the lustful, sinful, arrogant person I saw in myself? It’s a simple question that we must all consider; to what extent do we define ourselves by our corporeal and earthly flaws, and how often do we see in ourselves the holiness that dwells within, and inharmony with, our physical bodies?
Learning to understand the crucial interaction and interplay between mind and body has played a big part in my academic research as a student. Studying systems engineering at university, I have had the chance to learn all about the development of artificial intelligence and machine-learning principles. When first developing the concept of AI, scientists tried to build a mind, a highly functioning processing computer that could mimic human thought and then communicate via an output to a screen. What they produced, however, was useless. Yet whilst all this was happening, a group of experiments was being run with simple electric circuits, sensors and computers that aimed to mimic human responsory behaviours to physical conditions. Experiments included getting robots to move away from sunlight (like people with fair skin might doin the summer), and moving from a cold area to a warm area (you don’t stand outside on a cold winter’s day if you can avoid it), and other similar behaviours. The concept of using the ‘body’ to think was central to these experiments, and rapid advances were made in the research. Scientists started to train robots to understand the concepts of success versus failure and taught them to aggregate successful inputs in order to produce an optimum result. This is very similar to the way in which you might train a child to think and interact with the world around them by responding physical, external stimuli. The robots could only ‘think’ and develop an idea of growth and improvement because they had been embodied.
If we start to acknowledge this interdependence of mind and body, we can distance ourselves from the baseless “I think therefore I am,” idea and move towards more transubstantive theology: I am fully spirit, fully mind, fully body. These core elements are inseparable from each other in a similar capacity to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (as defined in Trinitarian theology). If I am spirit and mind and body, then my humanity and personhood is defined by my bodily interaction with them and is incomplete without them. We can understand this better if we compare it with the way that man is defined by woman, and woman by man, in that one ceases to make sense without the other. Therefore, what makes me a person is defined by my interaction with external stimulus in a corporeal way, and in its highest expression, in my interaction with other people. Thanks to having a body capable of expressing what my mind perceives and wants to communicate, my mind can interact with my friend’s mind thanks to our corporeality.
I am fully spirit, fully mind, fully body.
If we are interconnected with Jesus in the way that we, and Him, are all embodied minds and souls, then our identity, whilst separate from those of the people that surround us, is simultaneously inseparable from them. With this understanding, the idea of Jesus bearing the sin of the world suddenly made much more sense to me. I am fully integrated with society whilst being fully me, Ben, an individual person. Jesus, being fully God and fully man, allows the weight of the world to be carried on his shoulders, in a literal sense, on the cross. In being fully part of our society, whilst being fully divine, Jesus dignifies each member of this society (by which I mean all of humanity) and invites us to share in his perfect embodiment (the resurrection of the body).
When we negatively influence each other, and drag each other down, the weight of that sin is what Jesus takes to the cross, dignifying the sinner whose weight he bears in his ultimate sacrifice. I find this seriously beautiful, especially when I think what we might be without it. Jesus, sharing in our humanity, gives our physical humanity dignity and value in an irreplicable way.
Jesus’ redemptive nature is therefore tightly bound to his transubstantive nature. Our redemption is born from his sacrifice. If I perceive Jesus to be either not fully God, or not fully man, then I cannot fully understand the nature of his sacrifice. In the same way, I cannot understand the complexity and beauty of my own humanity, and the radicality and totality of its redemption by Jesus, if I reduce it to the separate sections of mind, spirit and body. And it is this error that then leads me astray in moral and spiritual matters. If I view my identity as largely constituted by my spirit, which I perceive as separate from my body and hence good and pure, then my physical acts are of no consequence to my spirit, and I can commit any physical sins I want and they won’t jeopardise my soul. Likewise, if my identity is founded in my mind, and my mind has a higher level of goodness than my body and soul, then my life should be spent in pursuit of lofty ideas in order to lift me up to the heavenly life whilst on earth. Alternatively, if my identity is entirely expressed in my physical body, then what would be the harm in chasing and satisfying all my immediate physical desires? But our spirit, mind and body are not separate entities; they are co-dependent and co-existent. We must learn to be transubstantive; in other words, we must learn to live in a way that reflects the harmony of these constituent elements of ourselves. Without being transubstantive, our concept of sacrifice falls apart and we cannot understand the fullness of Jesus’ sacrifice for us. Without sacrifice, our concept of agape, or indeed of love in any sense, falls apart. If we cannot embody sacrifice through engaging our spirit, mind and body, then we cannot live sacrificial love. Our relationships are doomed, our lives animalistic, our hope is misplaced, and our faith pointless. By the grace of God, we can stand confidently in opposition to this hopelessness, and our concept of the depths of love can be redefined as we witness to Jesus’ own transubstantiation every Sunday and receive the Eucharist.
This is the truth I see in the Eucharist and transubstantiation. In my search to define who I am as human; I discovered the answers laid bare in the Eucharist. My value as an embodied person stems from the sacrifice of Jesus.
Therefore, all I can conclude is that I am defined by love. I’ll just have to remember that when I’m grumpy.
Ben Plimmer is a trustee and a founding member of the Catholic Student Network.
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