Animated Flesh, Living Soul
Olivier Clément
Translated From:
Olivier Clément. Corps de mort et de gloire: Petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995.
The almond tree is beginning to snow.
We might gather there
to learn how to smile.
I like to imagine cups of wine
passing from hand to hand.
— Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Fragments, Paris, 1979, p. 98
Today, the man of Western civilization is seeking to return to earth, to catch his breath again, by rediscovering the dense reality of his body. It is the only thing he has left, after so many illusions and disappointments, after exile into the heaven of what Nietzsche called the “moral God.” Countless techniques, often coming from distant Eastern traditions, would like to help us regain awareness of our bodies, in the harmony of cosmic rhythms. These are imagined as remedies — although in the end they are themselves part of the same problematic — to the techniques of instrumental, disembodying reason, for which the body is nothing more than an absence or, medically speaking, a system increasingly well explored in terms of mechanisms. With the fading of the churches, eros “sets itself free,” sometimes grows bitter, sometimes also honestly seeks its truth. Christians, when they do not flee such quests through clumsy demagoguery, rightly warn of the risks: throwing oneself into bodily enjoyment can turn into a narcissism that keeps us from truly encountering others — or even ourselves. But our longings, too, must be weighed.
Christianity, in fact, is the religion of incarnation and the resurrection of the flesh. “I believe […] in one Lord, Jesus Christ, […] who rose from the dead […]. I await the resurrection of the dead,” says the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed; “of the flesh” is preferred according to what is called the “Apostles’ Creed.”
In fallen man, at once royal and mortal, the body simultaneously expresses and masks the person, so that there exists between the person and the body a relationship of identity and difference, tragically ambiguous.
The body expresses the person. It is not merely an object in this world but, fundamentally, someone, the manifestation, the language of a person. It is the breath that carries thought; it is the gait and the balance that shape time and space. It is what I am doing (even though no scholar can explain why, if I wish, I can raise my arm, make a sign forward or backward). It is the very fact that I am present under the gaze of the other. It refers to the full existence of the human being. The experience of embodiment is revealed as that of an immediacy that coincides with presence. Not a thing, not a tool — my body is myself in the world, myself among others.
The biblical distinction between “flesh” and “spirit” has nothing to do with the Hellenistic dualism of “soul” and “body,” despite the countless historical confusions that have often turned Christianity into a kind of “popular Platonism.” Man is composed of “dust of the earth” — perhaps today we might say “stardust” or biochemical particles — and of a personal, unified presence. In the Bible, man is thus described either as “animated flesh,” or as a “living soul.” Man does not have a soul, he is a living soul; he does not have flesh, he is animated flesh. The physiological organs symbolize and, in a way, incarnate this or that dimension of the psyche. The “entrails” — and more precisely the womb — designate compassion, mercy: the compassion a mother feels for her child, from the very depths of her flesh. The “reins” signify that part of man in which desire is formed. The “heart”, the most central center of man, is where fundamental choices are made.
“Flesh” therefore means the whole man — but let us clarify at once, in his limit as a creature. If I am a being of flesh, it is because I am a limited being; I am not God. For that very reason, flesh is man in his fragile freedom. And everything is at stake in relation to God, who “breathed into (the man’s) nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). Animated by “the breath of divinity,” as Saint Gregory of Nazianzus said,1 man is called to open himself freely and consciously to it. The “spirit” in man is not “some thing,” some piece of a construction set for “esotericists”; it is the “deep heart,” where the person gathers himself and opens the created flesh (his own, in continuity with that of the world), so that it might be vivified by the Spirit, the divine Breath. That is why the body, says Saint Paul, can become “spiritual.”
But if man draws back, refuses, seeks within himself alone and in himself alone his identity (“Ye shall be as gods,” promises the symbolic serpent in Paradise [Genesis 3:5]), then “flesh” designates the closed-off finitude, sealed by death, of the separated creature. Then, to use Pauline language, the spirit itself becomes “fleshly.”
This dialectic of flesh and spirit is thus revealed, from this perspective, as an existential dualism, but not an ontological one. The Apostolic Fathers of the second century, still close to biblical thought, clearly affirmed that man was created in the image of God — or, more precisely, of Christ — in the totality of his being. “It is the whole man and not just a part of him who is according to the image,” writes Irenaeus of Lyons: “The completed man is a unity composed of the soul, which receives the Spirit of the Father, and which is one with the flesh shaped in the image of God.”2
Thus oscillating between “flesh” and “spirit,” bāśār (בָּשָׂר) and nephesh (נֶפֶשׁ), my body is me and, at the same time, it is not. Often, in fact, it conceals the person instead of revealing him… I carry something that imposes itself on me from outside, a portion of cosmic energy given to me and gradually exhausted; a legacy shaped by family conditioning, society, culture, language, and modes of expression — the law — meant to humanize me by channeling, more or less, my impulses. Sociology, biology, and especially psychoanalysis claim to hold the power of the keys. Keys to my nothingness — or rather, to my irresistible slide into nothingness. It is well known that a small European child raised in Japan takes on an East Asian appearance, because of the habitual disposition of smooth muscles in speech or silence. Masks… It is an illusion — and often a rich man’s illusion — to see in our illnesses, or more broadly in our sufferings, the imprint of a spiritual destiny. Let us leave that to the sects and the “gurus.” There are occupational illnesses (like miners’ silicosis), illnesses inscribed in our genetic heritage, illnesses of civilization. More fundamentally, the chaotic dimension of existence — which we well know is “fallen” — can inscribe itself in the cells of an innocent person: children afflicted with cancer. The Gospel frees us from such magical or guilt-ridden reveries. The eighteen people killed by the collapse of the tower of Siloam were no more guilty than the others: it is separated existence that is precarious (Luke 13:4–5). Neither the man born blind nor his parents sinned — the work of God is to heal him (John 9:1–3).
Between our deepest “self,” that abyss from which droplets of light continually spring, and our bodily existence, there slips in — calling us to unity, to true healing — a resistance, an opacity, a rift, a risk of stagnation. Modesty expresses this displacement. In the paradisiacal condition, says the symbolic narrative of Genesis, “the man and the woman were naked and were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25). But shame enters the moment when the light within is obscured (and can flare up again in true love or in passion): “their eyes were opened and they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7).
I recognize myself and, at the same time, I do not recognize myself in my body. I recognize myself, otherwise I would not blush under another’s gaze; we do not blush for what is foreign to us. But I fear that my person does not shine through in my body, I fear being mired in what is most impersonal in me, and what first corresponds to the species. I sense that the gaze of the other that clings to me — whether by chance, or in the grandiose or violent surge of purely vital life — is not the gaze of trust in which I could, in all innocence, exist. It is the gaze of a stranger, who despises or desires, or both at once — a gaze that therefore subtracts from me my true identity.
To use that gaze as a profession (in prostitution, for example) — whether indulged through greed (especially in man), or through the desire to be desired (especially in woman) — implies a true rupture in being. Hence, for most, the veiling that leaves only the borders of the body visible — the parts most directly expressive of the person: the hands and the face.
Clothing veils the impersonal even as it manifests taste, the mark of the person, the best of a culture, so that the entire silhouette becomes meaningful, becomes “face.” Clothing, by its symbolism, partakes both of the “tunics of skin” mentioned in Genesis (3:21) and the “garment of light” of Paradise. It is true that certain childlike or youthful nudes remain clothed in light, and that the “fissure of the gaze” in the “tunics of skin” — as a Jewish mystical interpretation quoted by Claude Vigée3 puts it — sometimes reveals the spiritual corporeality of the origin.
It is also true that the face itself can become mask, boundary, alienation from oneself and from the other. Derision, hatred at times. “You don’t love me anymore; you look at me now like an old ashtray full of cigarette butts.” The petrified mask of the Gorgon. Or the gaze that sees nothing: in Antiquity, the slave was called aprosōpos, faceless. Slaves are not looked at, not counted, but struck. Or, the latest avatar of our modernity: a purchased or stolen body is cut up for the trafficking of its organs…
Fatigue — that goddess of contemporary life, irremediable aging despite so many remedies — weighs us down and withers us, and, depending on the soul’s inner state, depending on one’s stance toward death, becomes the occasion of opacity or of transparency. Wrinkles carry weight or lightness; if man, as Irenaeus of Lyons said,4 unites breath and clay, then they are the cracks of the cell wall, the splitting of the chrysalis. But it is above all pain that carries to the extreme this possible otherness of the body. It is in me a stranger. If its intensity is not too great, I can live with it — it quietly reminds me of my limit. Some thus inhabit their suffering body like a monastic cell. But if the pain sharpens, it turns the body into an enemy, an obsession. Man curls up at the sound of his body; he is its prisoner, his body is an other. Extreme pain makes the body truly a tomb, according to the Platonic wordplay (sōma, the body = sēma, the tomb), or worse — a chamber of torture. When man reaches “the zone of the beast that howls,” he can no longer bear even the slightest dissonance. Then only abandonment remains — for some, a kind of unspeakable surrender that identifies them with the suffering Christ — for what final resurrection?
Thus the body represents within me the whole ambiguity of the world. The world, on the one hand, is the creation of God, wholly good, wholly blessed; and the body, in the simplicity of pleasure, joins in the celebration of the universe, in the great blessings (and therefore benefactions) of Genesis: “And God saw that it was good” — tob, that is to say, good and beautiful; the Septuagint translates it as Kalon, beautiful. But the world is also the place of death — of all the cosmic, historical, and daily forms of death. The body-world (“this world,” says the Gospel), in contrast to “world” — without the article, meaning God’s creation — appears, to borrow the expression of Paul, as a “body of death”: “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24).
Man is only in the world through his bodily reality, and yet he sometimes exceeds it: the person proves irreducible, a calling traverses and shapes him to the point that it may ask him to sacrifice — if necessary — his own body. Man is fulfilled as personal vocation in “laying down his life for his friends.” Solzhenitsyn showed this emergence of conscience well: when man, for instance, triumphs over his hunger, his desire to survive, by a gesture of compassion that puts his whole being at risk. In the camps, the writer first saw the revelation of “beastial humanity,” becoming visible in certain thugs who terrorized the “politicals”: “No, these are not faces, no more than the faces of monkeys — a monkey’s face, that’s still more or less the image of man — no, these were masks, cruel, ignoble, expressing nothing but greed and mockery.” Not a definitive condition, to be sure, because “the dividing line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. From good to evil, there is only a step, says the proverb. And then, from evil to good.”5 But still — in some situations, that step is not taken. In the camp described in The Love-Girl and the Innocent, it is taken by Grania, when she refuses a “stash” from the bread distribution — to accept it would be to stay warm and eat despite her hunger. But the law of the camp dictates that the holder of such a stash must divert part of the bread for the benefit of the thugs who have already tried to co-opt her into their power. Hence Grania’s refusal: “What kind of soul must one have to deceive a prisoner over food, even just a gram?” In The First Circle, Gvérassimovitch also crosses that threshold when he refuses to fine-tune the surveillance gadgets he's asked to develop, and so plunges into far more infernal “circles.” And Innocent Volodin, a successful diplomat, when he warns someone — at the risk of his life — is a man who knows he will be arrested… The choice may have nothing spectacular about it; it can be inscribed in the humility of daily life. A character like Ivan Denisovich, or the janitor of the charachka, Spiridon, knew how not to cross that final boundary beyond which one becomes a “man-eater.” And Solzhenitsyn evokes those men of duty or fidelity for whom conscience and respect for others transcend the instinct for self-preservation and the pursuit of pleasure.
The person seeks to “break through” his conditioning, modifying himself in the very process. He is self-transcending, autexousia, say the Fathers of the Church. This carries him deep into himself, into that desire that nothing here below can satisfy — into those “palaces of memory” explored by the young Augustine, that mysterious unity which, over the course of life, synthesizes and integrates moments of time and the “dust” of the earth. In the mortal temporality of the body, a drop of eternity gives fullness to the instant when all our veins fill with existence.
This dialectic is inscribed in the relation of the body and of the other, just as it is in the person’s relation to the world.
The other is desirable/undesirable — and I am too, for him. In his Essay on Hebrew Thought, Claude Tresmontant wrote, with Claudelian accents: “In love, one soul immediately recognizes another soul; there is no body that stands between them; the body — it is the soul. […] How could one be separated from the very self that one is? What separates is not the body, it is falsehood. Two living souls come to know this flavor they share, this secret flavor that is part of the ‘name’ ‘that no one knows save he that receives it’ (Revelation 2:17).”6
But we also know that to be body is to be exposed — to wounding, to destruction. It is to be vulnerable to torture and violation. For each person, in facing the other, there is finally only that irreducible face that calls us to respond, as Emmanuel Levinas never ceased to emphasize. Some respond — that is to say, they become responsible. Others kill — there are many ways of killing, and of killing oneself — or torture in order to transform the difficult relation to the person into a violation of their secret. Torture is the suffering man inflicts on himself, in a vertigo of guilt and annihilation; and it is above all the suffering inflicted on others in order to violate their secret, to tear away the face that questions us, calls us into account — ah! gouge out the eyes of the innocent who judges me! — to annihilate in them, knowingly or not, the image of God. So long as man is born to die, he will be tempted to turn the other into a slave or an enemy. A slave, to think himself God, in the sovereign mastery of life, of pain, of the death of the other. An enemy, to find relief from his own anguish in the sacrifice of a scapegoat.
But the other takes refuge in death at the very moment when my power over him is at its height.
Hence Maurice Blanchot’s remark about Robert Antelme’s book L’Espèce humaine:
“Man is indestructible, and this means that there is no limit to the destruction of man.”7
One could make similar observations about the relationship between the cosmos and the body. Man is called to take responsibility in his own body — and in the collective body of humanity, of the universe — in order to liberate it from what Paul calls “vanity,” that is, emptiness, the pull toward nothingness, and instead to vivify it, to sanctify it — here too, to breathe the Spirit into the clay.
Through work, art, and celebration, the body is meant to express the theophanic and dialogical character of the world: it is the resonance, the echo, of all its genius, of all its wonder and gratitude — the gratitude that Adam, and through him all of us, is called to embody in “naming the living.” Something of that vocation has survived, or glimmers still, in those archaic cultures where man, even while tilling the earth, danced with the cosmic life and participated through it in the play of the gods. His body then aligned itself with universal existence, with a kind of cosmic psychism, through “subtle” modalities that — except among certain individuals drawn to mediumship or magic — have now faded or disappeared. Modalities such as the Kabbalah, certain yogas (especially Tantra), and Far Eastern medicine — acupuncture, for instance — have sought, or still seek, to make use of them.8 But man, in thus “cosmizing” himself, runs the risk of losing himself, or of ignoring himself, as a properly personal existence — one called to communion, not to fusion.
Individuation, over the long span of prehistory and history, has rendered the body opaque and led to the development of a predatory relationship with the world. In the Paleolithic era, man saw animal figures in the constellations and “cosmized” his caves — and the cave of his heart — by representing in them those slender beasts. Today, he drives many species to extinction and heaps others into a kind of concentration camp to stuff them with hormones. He makes the world his prey, and the world returns the favor. The momentum of the body, if not carried through, becomes an involuntary ecstasy of death, because it no longer brings predation to an end, nor limits depredation; and yet the person who is weighed down in flesh paradoxically disincarnates, rather than transfigures, all flesh. In its “skin sack” doomed to sickness, to withering, to decomposition, the body seems like a seed that fails to bear fruit; the impulse toward dialogue — unfulfilled because the absolute Other is rejected or ignored — fails to bloom. A call, then. From now on, we can only advance this reflection by placing ourselves in the response — that is to say, in the revelation — to which, moreover, we have never ceased to allude.
Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmen 1.1.8, PG 37, 452. English translation in Poemata Arcana, ed. Claudio Moreschini, trans. D. A. Sykes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Against Heresies V, 6,1.
Claude Vigée, La Faille du regard, Paris, 1987.
Op. cit., III, 22, 1; V, 6,1
Alexandre Soljénitsyne, L’Archipel du Goulag, trad. fr. (Paris: Seuil, 1974), t. 2, 459.
Claude Tresmontant, Essai sur la pensée hébraïque (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1953), 105.
Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 200.
Editor’s note: Indigenous shamanic western traditions, whose remains may be seen from megaliths to folklore, have also sought the same harmony.