You know how it is, every now and then while reading, a word or phrase hits you. Instead of slipping right past it, you come to a full stop—and you look it carefully and think about it.
Well, that’s what happened to me last year on All Souls Day! During the Office of Readings of The Liturgy of the Hours, I was really struck by the second reading, from a book on the death of his brother Satyrus by St. Ambrose of Milan (340-397).
It began with Ambrose asserting, “We see that death is gain, life is loss” quoting St. Paul’s famous, “For me life is Christ, and death a gain.”
It was followed by what seemed, at first, an ordinary reflection on the dichotomy, the tension between the desires of the soul and those of the body:
“. . . our soul must learn to free itself from the desires of the body. It must soar above earthly lusts to a place where they cannot come near, to hold it fast.”
However, However, although Ambrose cautioned, “Though we are still in the body, let us not give ourselves to the things of the body,” his next words managed to avoid the extremism sometimes associated with Paul’s thought.
“We must not reject the natural rights of the body,” Ambrose wrote, “but we must desire before all else the gifts of grace.”
Ambrose avoided advocating the rights of the soul at the price of disparaging the body. So to speak, he saw the goodness of both, but simply prioritized one over the other.
However However this was not the way the world was turning.
Christianity had developed initially in the pagan Greco-Roman world with its ideals about physical fitness and sexual moderation, but, perhaps in reaction to excesses of that world, was beginning to stress more the dangers of the body and its desires and to esteem sexual abstinence over sexual moderation.
Towards the end of Ambrose’s life, controversies about the roles played by free will and original sin in human behavior weren’t leaving much room for considering “the natural rights of the body”.
As centuries passed, from the early exaltation of the heroism of the martyrs and the development of a theology of “original sin” to the establishment of monasticism and religious and clerical celibacy, a certain disparagement of the body gradually became enshrined as the new ideal.
The early development of psychology in the nineteenth century, especially the work of Sigmund Freud, opened a door to a radically different way of looking at human nature and behavior—especially traditional Western attitudes about sexuality. It impacted and challenged traditional church teachings and customs, and still does.
Extremism, no matter what kind, tends to provoke a counter-extremism. No surprise, then, that centuries of extreme disparagement of the body had been leading to a modern over-emphasis on its “rights”.
Extremism in rejecting or defending “the natural rights of the body” seems to underlie many of the social and moral issues polarizing our contemporary society—for example, contraception, abortion, the nature of marriage, different- and same-sex relations, and LGBT rights, to name a few.
We need Ambrose’s moderation, balance, and priorities. A person is more than a body, and everyone’s rights include more than the rights of the body. Some rights are more important than others—for example, the “inalienable rights” of the Declaration of Independence to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
30 August 2020
(Available in
Spanish translation)