The spiritual theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662), writing long before the introduction of Aristotle to the medieval West, likewise insisted that soul and body together constitute the human being. Taking as his basis the Incarnation of the divine Logos, he argued that the genesis of soul and body is strictly simultaneous. â??The soul arises at conception simultaneously with the body to form one complete human being. . . . There is no temporal hiatus (diastema) of any kind within the nature itself or among the reciprocal parts of which it is constituted.â?? This, by the way, is why it may be said that the Annunciation, not Christmas, is the chief feast of the Incarnation. If the individual human being is an integrated, composite whole, then this is how he must be from the very moment of his existence. In this conviction Maximus was more certain than the Scholastic philosophers, who held the view that an embryo becomes human only after it has attained â??a sufficiently advanced state of bodily development.â??
For Thomas, any purely philosophical judgment on whether the soul is created at the moment of conception had to conform to what could be ascertained by empirical means. Given the limits of medieval physiology, Thomas was constrained to accept the Aristotelian theory of the soulâ??s progressive generation and avoid any absolute, categorical affirmation that the soul is created at precisely the same moment as physical conception. Such reluctance was entirely in keeping with his theory concerning the limits of rationally attainable knowledge. Of course, he knew that there exists a higher form of knowledge, namely, divine revelation, by which one can affirm, specifically on the basis of the miraculous conception of the incarnate Word, that at least Christâ??s body and soul coexisted from the moment of their coming into being.
Even so, medieval philosophy left it to Maximus to draw far-reaching conclusions about the nature of every single human being on the basis of Christâ??s human constitution. But it would be wrong to conclude that his thoughts on the matter were derived exclusively from religious belief. For he asserts that even at death, when the soul and body are temporarily separated, the fundamental principle of generation (logos geneseos), by which from their inception soul and body are simultaneously constituted as parts of a whole in a permanent and natural relation (pros ti), remains intact. Here Maximus is clearly drawing on philosophical categories derived from Aristotle, most likely via the sixth century Neoplatonic commentators. On this basis, when speaking of a personâ??s body or soul in the separated state after death, he argues that neither may be referred to simply as soul or body but always as the soul or the body of this or that person: someoneâ??s body, someoneâ??s soul, each an essential part of an irreducible, personal whole. In sum, â??the relation between them is immutable.â??
Adam Cooper Redeeming Flesh (First Things subscription required)
Adam Cooper The Body in Saint Maximus: Holy Flesh Wholly Deified
