On the sixth day, God created Man out of dust, breathing life into him. As the spectacular crown to creation, He made this final creature as a fusion of body and soul. He made Man in His Image and to honor It, and when man failed, he fell into a turmoil of disharmony with nature and with himself. His fallen spirit and flesh now war fiercely, battling for individual precedence instead of abiding in the inseparable unity ordained by God, which only He can tear asunder for a time at death.
As human beings, everything we do is both spiritual and physical. There is no true separation; for even the immaterial thoughts we ponder are controlled by electric impulses in the brain. Our body and soul are inextricably united, and the acceptance of this fact helps us make more sense of the reality which we inhabit. This fact is illustrated all over humanity, from daily life to health, from literature to the Sacred Scriptures.
When Man fell, toil in labor was given him as consequence. Labor is a word rarely viewed all rosy-colored. Whether the hard labor of a prisoner, Adam’s labor in bringing forth stones and dirt from the ground, or Eve’s labor in bringing forth children from the womb, labor involves blood, sweat, and penitence.
In childbirth, the labor of Eve, there is a simple concept behind the management of pain. It is not just chemical medicine or brute will-power, but simply relaxation and rest. It is the acceptance of pain, not strained resistance. While hard to achieve in this fallen age, in an unfallen experience of birth, the body would be relaxed and labor pains would be greatly reduced (Genesis 3:16). It is possible to pursue this kind of relaxation and reduction of pain, which is a traditional focus of midwifery: the proper and natural way of birth.
In this common pain of Eve’s toil, there lies a directly spiritual solution: it is the confiding of trust, or the giving into rest and the surrendering of tension and stress, that results in health. It is the same with the soul: resting and trusting in God and His design for reality frees the soul and relaxes the person. That person, in a state of greater innocence, becomes more receptive to God’s Grace and refinement, more spiritually healthy, or, in short, more holy. Likewise, in labor pain, it is the body’s ability to trust in God’s design for reality that affects this relaxation. It is a fearsome act of trust to cease resistance to Divine refinement, but only then can the fire of God’s Love truly burn away our imperfection and leave us at peace.
In the human person, God has united the spiritual and physical; man is not a walking contradiction, but a unity, a harmony. The recognition of this fact is essential for living life abundantly and with an honest view of reality. We might consider specifically the concepts of physical healing by spiritual means and the connection between unholiness and unhealth.
In Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, the titular character is a self-absorbed and unholy man. In a risky maneuver, Ivan sacrifices his life for vanity, taking a small tumble while hanging a curtain in his new and expensive home and inaugurating the illness that leads to his death. Throughout this illness, Ivan puts off not only the recognition of his condition and responsible care for his body, but he also refuses to confront his mortality and to prepare responsibly for the Last Things. He neglects both his spiritual and physical health, and each act of negligence exacerbates the other. In the absence of humility, he neglects medical action that might supplement his weakness and lengthen the little time he has, in which he could consider the state of that life. Instead, he wiles away his time playing Bridge and gambles his soul along with it. Fortunately for him, Grace intervenes and the design of long suffering wins its way in his life, its sanctification persisting on his soul long enough for him to finally accept it. It is only when he is so incapacitated by his suffering that he can do nothing but contemplate it, with his fear the only thing preventing him from giving into That Sleep, that all the sanctification offered in his forty-five years in the Vale of Tears finally floods him. Ivan’s soul pivots from lifelong pride to humility before the caritas that has called to him for all his life. In this total repentance, the perfecting spiritual grace is at last delivered into the man—body and spirit— and his body and soul go to eternal rest.
Here, Ivan is not restored to physical health by his spiritual restoration, except in the sense that with death he is freed from all past physical pain. Ivan Ilych illustrates the negative relationship between sickness and wickedness, or more precisely, between unhealth and unholiness; the latter two are one and the same, as they relate to man’s sanctification. Christ redeems the sufferings of Ivan by bettering his death, but throughout the Gospel, even prior to redeeming all suffering with His own Death, He redeems the sufferings of many through bettering their lives.
Christ heals in the Scriptures through a combination of prayer and work—through His spiritual Will and the physical actions He takes to deliver them, whether it be laying on of hands or the application of saliva and dust (see Matthew 8:1-9, for another example). This is the essential mission of God Incarnate: to redeem Man, who is body and spirit. Would any deny that Christ’s life was a constant prayer, a constant incarnate unity of spiritual and physical acts of love (of God and of neighbor) within each singular action? Through His suffering on the Cross and His example of holiness as a Man, Christ has shown us the path of perfect love, and ultimately, the path of sanctification. It is suffering that He has allowed for our redemption.
This is not to contradict Job, to claim that physical sufferings are always the direct result of particular sins. However, it is the case that physical sufferings are all the result of one particular sin—Original Sin. Sickness and death came into the world through sin, everything in reality being knocked askew by the mad desire for that fated fruit. But by divine Mercy, those sufferings are left to linger, precisely for our sanctification.
Thus, we must seek to recognize the constant unity of spirit and body in this incarnate life , to live authentically the life that our good Lord has granted us. We must do this through the devout and loving utterance of prayer, through the gracious acceptance of suffering and service to others, but most essentially, through a unity of these things. In erasing nonsensical boundaries between body and spirit, knowing very well that in Man we are both, we shall achieve this, not through compartmentalizing our secular work and our spiritual prayer but through infusing the love and adoration of God into all that we do. This is why St. James says in his epistle that faith without works is dead; such dichotomies dictate an unreal separation in God’s design of Man. We must adore our Lord with all that we are and all that we have. It is in the proper unity of body and soul that we can most perfectly glorify God. And that is liturgy.
