One easy trick for telling the difference between your soul and your body

My first post! And I already nailed the title! I’m going to be good at this!

Your soul and your body are one. You are one person. You probably already know this. The problem might be, though, that you know this too easily.

For a very long time in the Christian West, Platonic dualism played a central role, emphasizing that the human person was composite in nature — composite, that is, of two different natures, soul and body. St. John Damascene (8th c.) makes this very explicit in his Fount of Knowledge, summarizing Christian teaching to that point. The soul and the body are of two different natures. The body is material; the soul is not.

When the Christian faith is waxing strong, this differentiation of soul and body is not an obstacle to achieving oneness in one’s person. To the contrary, it is in truth a vehicle to such unity. As with a marriage — or the Incarnation of Christ (the real archetype here) — it takes two to make one.

For the last thousand years in the West, however, the Christian faith has been waning in the hearts of men, not waxing. The lack of balance incurred by the Holy Spirit’s subsequent withdrawal for a long time favored the dualism over the unity. It’s a typical critique on behalf of Eastern Orthodox Christians to call classic post-Schism Western culture Nestorian in character. Nestorianism is the fifth-century heresy that emphasized the duality of Christ to a fault. In the first Christian millennium, see, the restless Hellenic mind already cycled through every dialectical variation of theological and anthropological error possible, at least in type. When it comes to cosmological matters in a Christian context, Nestorianism is the name pegged to overemphasis on duality; Monophysitism is the name given to overemphasis on unity. Classic post-Schism Western culture — from the 11th- and 12th-century Renaissance, through the 15th-century Renaissance and Baroque periods, up to the Enlightenment and Romanticism — in its emphasis on dualism fits the type of Nestorianism.

But about a hundred years ago, a change that had been brewing came to a head. In the trenches of World War I, classic Western humanism died. Its dualities failed. From the “no man’s land” between the opposing trenches emerged a phenomenological perspective that collapsed all dualities in an emphasis on oneness: subject and object, man and his tools, man and his ideas — these all become wrapped in singular identities.

Skillfully applied, this phenomenological perspective can be a useful corrective to old dualistic heresies. It becomes markedly less useful, however, the more and more it yields to its own monomaniacal madness. The symbolic dualities upon which the cosmos is built collapse only with great peril: heaven and earth, good and evil, body and soul, male and female, God and human. The West’s Nestorian phase was horrifically schizophrenic, and destructive enough as it was. But its Monophysite phase has been bloody apocalyptic.

Your soul and body are two. Husband and wife must acknowledge and respect their differences as persons before they can be united in love. Likewise within every human being, the difference of soul and body must be recognized in order to fulfill one’s personal oneness. But if your mindset is a product of the modern West — which if you’re reading this, it is — your learned phenomenological perspective on the oneness of your soul and body is a source of psychological confusion and disturbance. You won’t be able to negotiate how your soul and body should relate with each other if you can’t tell them apart.

The confusion of soul and body most visibly falls on the materialist side of things, and therefore much Christian apologetics these days is angled against materialism. Indeed the general thrust of science is to treat everything materialistically. But I call materialism merely the most visible; I don’t know if it’s actually the most common. Less visibly, but quite commonly, the confusion of soul and body falls on the… let’s call it “intellectualizing” side of things. “Spiritualist” could also work in some contexts. This occurs when our personal identity becomes dematerialized, when our body is treated like an idea because our soul is trapped in our own headspace. The eternal appetites of cyber media encourage this behavior in us. Of course, it is natural that our confusion of soul and body would take on two different forms like this, materialist and intellectualizing; the actual difference in nature between our soul and body will make itself felt regardless if we’re confused about it.

So let’s get unconfused! I’ve promised in the title an easy trick to tell the difference between your soul and your body, and here it is. It comes from St. Maximus the Confessor’s Ad Thalassium 43, but I’ll put it in my own words.¹

There are two discerning powers to be identified in the human person, each a human activity, one proper to the soul and one proper to the body. By observing these different activities, a heretofore phenomenologically informed soul can begin to tell the difference between itself and its body. The body, you see, through the senses, has the power of discernment between pleasure and pain. The soul, however, through the mind, has the power to discern between spiritual and material — which is another way of saying it can discern between different layers of ontological reality; it can discern between that which lasts and that which doesn’t. This is the basis of truth and falsehood; the truth is that which lasts, like a friend that remains “true,” or “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8), whereas if something doesn’t last it is deemed “false.” But the terms of truth and falsehood do not exhaustively describe this discerning power. St. Maximus speaks here about discriminating between intelligible and sensible things, between the eternal and the ephemeral.

Now, briefly, there is a fundamental difference in nature to these two discerning powers, in accordance with the fundamental difference in nature between soul and body. Pleasure and pain may have vectors pointing in opposite directions, but they coexist on the same horizontal spectrum and, like two sides of a coin, can not be separated. The spiritual and the material, on the other hand, are arranged in a hierarchical pattern according not to a horizontal linearity but to a vertical, ontological circumscription. The cosmos is arranged this way to teach us ultimately of the hierarchy of God and man, and how they are intended to be united in love. Pleasure, if properly used, is meant to be a material symbol of this love, pain a material symbol of transgression against this love.

St. Maximus describes the fall of humans specifically in terms of the confusion of these separate discerning powers. If the soul takes thought to parse pleasure and pain, so as to enjoy the one and avoid the other, as if they could possibly be parsed hierarchically, the way the mind is designed to discern things.... Or if the body presumes to treat the hierarchy of heaven and earth, ultimately of God and man, as if they coexisted on a horizontal plane, the way the senses are designed to discern things.... Well then, either way — and the two errant activities go hand in hand — this confusion functions as a precise description of the fall of man.

But if you can observe with attention the body’s discernment via the senses between pleasure and pain, and observe also the soul’s discernment via the mind between the sensible and the intelligible, the material and the spiritual, then you have already learned to differentiate between the two. And this is what must be done before forging a conjugal union between soul and body, thus becoming a whole person.

That’s it, though, the first step, which is as much as I can cover for now. I told you it was easy!

1. Well, here at least is a sample of what St. Maximus says: “The intellect has the power to discriminate between intelligible and sensible things, between the temporary and the eternal — or rather, insofar as the intellect is a discriminating power of the soul, it persuades the soul to adhere to the former while passing beyond the latter. Sensation, on the other hand, has the power to discriminate between bodily pleasure and pain — or rather, insofar as sensation is a power of animate and sense-perceptive bodies, it persuades sensation to embrace pleasure while rejecting pain” (St. Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, td. by Fr. Maximos Constas [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018], p. 247).