The western world’s gnostic separation of the human person into a good soul and a bad body has manifested itself in the postmodern transgender movement. This radical, ultimately anti-humanistic form of dualism drives an arbitrary wedge between a person’s physical, biological sex and their so-called gender. To honor their “true” or “authentic” internal sense of gender, no matter how nebulous or confused it may be, many people today, an alarming number of them children, will hire surgeons to mutilate their body so as to bring it into conformity with their “soul.”

Most American Christians are aware that it is an ancient heresy to say that Jesus was man but not God (Arianism); less are aware that there were just as many heretics who promoted the opposite error: that Jesus was God but not man (Gnosticism). The reason Gnostics denied that God became fully man in the incarnation is that they held a low view of matter in general and flesh in particular. For Gnostics, matter and flesh were not products of a good creation that fell; the creation of matter and flesh was itself the fall.

Although there are very few full-blown Gnostics in the church today, many Americans hold to a soft dualism that sees the soul as good and the body as bad. It is because of that theological misunderstanding that many Christians imagine that when we die, we become angels: that is, pure souls. Although Christians affirm in both the Apostles and Nicene Creeds their belief in the resurrection of the body, a suspicion of the flesh persists.

Thankfully, this gnostic, anti-biblical demonization of the flesh was dealt a decisive blow 1600 years ago in Book XIV, chapter 3 of The City of God. Although Virgil seemed to teach, in Aeneid 6, that the body weighs down the soul, Augustine insists that the Christian

faith teaches something very different. For the corruption of the body, which is a burden to the soul, is not the cause but the punishment of Adam’s first sin. Moreover, it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; on the contrary, it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible. Though some incitements to vice and vicious desires are attributable to the corruption of the flesh, nevertheless, we should not ascribe to the flesh all the evils of a wicked life. Else, we free the Devil from all such passions, since he has no flesh. It is true that the Devil cannot be said to be addicted to debauchery, drunkenness, or any others of the vices which pertain to bodily pleasure—much as he secretly prompts and provokes us to such sins—but he is most certainly filled with pride and envy. It is because these passions so possessed the Devil that he is doomed to eternal punishment in the prison of the gloomy air. 

If flesh were the seat of evil, then none of the angels could have fallen. There are sins that rise up from the flesh, but they tend to be less wicked and corrupting than pride and envy, which rise up from the soul (see Mark 7:14-23). Indeed, it is more often the soul that leads the body astray than vice versa.

No, Augustine explains in chapter 4, “the animal man is not one thing and the carnal another, but both are one and the same, namely, man living according to man.” In fact, he continues in chapter 5, it is wrong “to blame our sins and defects on the nature of the flesh, for this is to disparage the Creator. The flesh, in its own kind and order, is good. But what is not good is to abandon the Goodness of the Creator in pursuit of some created good, whether by living deliberately according to the flesh, or according to the soul, or according to the entire man, which is made up of soul and flesh and which is the reason why either ‘soul’ alone or ‘flesh’ alone can mean a man.”

Those who are aware that St. Augustine played the central role in formulating the doctrine of original sin might be surprised to find Augustine here defending the body from its detractors. To be fair, Augustine, who went through a gnostic (Manichean) phase before embracing Christianity and whose pre-conversion years were marked by sexual promiscuity found it necessary to adopt a celibate lifestyle for himself and did sometimes speak in a disparaging manner of the flesh. Still, nowhere in his writings does he equate original sin with sex, nor does he treat the body as inherently fallen. Just as original sin tainted body and soul alike, so Christ’s atoning work on the cross restored body and soul alike.

Read More