What is feeling — that part of our affective life that is immersed in the flesh and intrinsically dependent on it? We feel as the animals do, said a Father of the Church; but we think with the angels. The remark is ambiguous. Neither the animal life nor the spiritual exists in us in a pure state. Our feeling is that of a spiritual being, our mind is that of a sensuous being; the deepest law of our nature lowers our spirit towards the flesh, but at the same time it exalts the flesh towards the spirit. This ontological law is convincingly verified in the domain of action. Strictly speaking, we are aware of neither sensuous nor spiritual activities, but only human activities. The most brutish actions of the flesh (the act of eating, for example) implies a certain consent and delectation of the mind; conversely, the loftiest spiritual activity is dependent on a minimum of sensuous co-operation. Even the night of the senses is something “sensed”. There is an experience of absence. Psychologically all we can state about the matter is this: no human act, whether of the senses or of the mind, is performed in complete isolation; but among these human acts, all of them compounded of feeling and spirit, some are inclined and polarised towards the senses, others towards the spirit.
The Antagonism
The most fundamental of our interior experiences shows two realities in apparent contradiction: the mysterious unity of feeling and, with the inseparable synthesis of all their manifestations, and on the other hand their mutual antagonism. From the individual and collective history of mankind we learn how the freedom, power and purity of the spirit cost a bitter discipline of the life of the senses. Human greatness is inseparable from asceticism. More than any other ideal of wisdom or heroism, Christianity, seeking the growth of the spiritual life into the divine, accentuates this antagonism between the soul and the flesh, between the old unregenerate man and the new. It is with good reason that the history of Christianity, to an idolatrous apostle of “life” like Nietzsche, seems a vast crucifixion of all the delights and loves of the senses. The teachings of many Christian ascetics and teachers, taken as a basis for speculation, readily lend themselves to a dualist interpretation of human nature.1 In fact, we have become so used to this paradox that we tend to be blind to its deeper meaning. Fundamentally there is something baffling in this conflict at the very heart of an absolute solidarity. How can there be so radical an antagonism between two forces that are really inseparable, interdependent and substantially one?
Some put the blame upon original sin. Far be it from us to extenuate its misdeeds! But it is too like indolence to explain the whole of human conflict by the fall. If Adam’s state was above all conflict, this was not so much due to the integrity of his nature as to the supernatural gifts in which his nature was clothed. Per peccatum homo fit tantum homo.2 The conflict between sense and spirit does not arise solely for moral reasons (the original fall); its roots are ontological, in the human constitution. We have no idea what man would be like in a state of pure nature, equally unaffected by the evils of sin and by the benefits of grace; but we can be certain that in a being so complex and unequal — a converging-point of all the elements of the sensible world and of immaterial thought — a certain tension between sense and spirit would be inevitable. And in fact, by analogy, the idea of conflict can be recognised at every stage of material creation.3 It would be easy to multiply examples: positive and negative electricity in physics, the tension between the autonomic and sympathetic nerves, and that at the very heart of the endocrine system in biology. But conflict is not a final and independent reality; it is merely a subordinate “moment” of existence. Normally in every substantial whole the antagonisms and oppositions are dominated by a central peace and harmony. When limited and integrated, the conflict is healthy and profitable. But when the substantial unity of the being disintegrates, when the internal tension is no longer moderated and harnessed by some higher finality, the individual becomes the victim of anarchy and perishes. We can therefore distinguish between two kinds of conflict: the one positive and organic, the other negative and “corrupting”; the first has a tendency to preserve the vital synthesis, the second to destroy it.
What do we learn now from Christian dogma? That human nature has been wounded by original sin. Wounded: that means given over, not only physically, but in the very depths of its spiritual and moral being, to the attractive force of death, to succumb to all that is baneful in conflict, to everything that is negative and dissolvent. This war between the spirit and the life of the senses, which in normal conditions should make for the purifying of the senses and the tempering of the will, ends in man’s degradation and the prostituting of the spirit to all his lower appetites. The conclusion is that original sin has perverted and “denatured,” turned to corruption and disorder, that tension between sense and spirit which we have seen to be essentially inherent in human nature.
From What God Has Joined Together: An Essay On Love, London: Hollis and Carter, 1952, pp 41-45.
Many religious heresies and philosophical aberrations proceed from the fact that their authors, theoretically at any rate, have never surmounted the difficulty of human conflict. Those who took sides with the spirit saw the world of the senses as obscene and demon-ridden (e.g. the Manicheans and other heretics); those who sided with the senses treated the spirit as a “parasite of life” (Freud, for instance, and in a finer and deeper sense, Nietzsche and Klages).
This Augustinian aphorism does not deny the deep wounds inflicted on nature as a result of the withdrawal of original grace. Actually, man who is “no more than a man” is already less than a man.
Aristotle and St Thomas have presented the negative side of this problem, emphasising the tendency to dissociation in every corruptible compound. But they paid too little attention to the positive and constructive element in conflict. It is one of the chief things to Nietzsche’s credit that he contrived to some extent to rehabilitate war. Unfortunately the metaphysic of the “Will to Power” stops short at conflict as though it were a final reality. The logical result is that he makes a divinity of chaos. The whole of this metaphysic of war could be taken up again from the Christian standpoint. War is not, as Heraclitus and Nietzsche proclaimed, the “mother of all.” The true root of the world is love. But terrestrial harmony thrives on war that is latent and subjugated. All its peace contains an element of the armed peace. Much could be said, in connection with this general law of corruptible nature, concerning some aspects of modern pacifism, tragically unrealistic both in the political order (the sheeplike cult of peace) and in the moral (the ideal of an inner peace and harmony secured without asceticism).
You had me at the beret and cigarette.