The following guest article is by Raymond B. Marcin, Professor of Law Emeritus, The Catholic University of America, and author of In Search of Schopenhauer’s Cat: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Quantum-Mystical Theory of Justice (CUA Press, 2015). We are grateful to him for submitting it to Tradition & Sanity. —PAK
Introduction
The genesis of this essay lies in a critical thought I entertain about Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical. It seems to me that the main flaw in our Holy Father’s encyclical (curiously entitled Magnifica Humanitas, i.e., magnificent humanity) is that it totally ignores our Catholic Church’s doctrine of Original Sin and the Fall of Humankind in the Garden of Eden. The entire history of humankind has been a chronicle of the aftereffects of that Fall, and our Catholic Church’s doctrine has always centered on salvation through conversion and acceptance of Jesus’ atoning death on the Cross, and not on trustful reliance on the wisdom of “magnificent humanity.”
That critical thought set me on a journey through Biblical analysis and Catholic and other Christian understandings of the spiritual realm and its effects on human nature. The result of that mental journey is the essay that follows: an essay on spirit, soul, and body in the nature of the human being.
Two positions
In terms of Biblical understanding, what constitutes a human being? When asked that question, most Catholics, indeed most Christians, would probably answer that, in Biblical terms, a human being has as a body and a soul. That’s the conventional wisdom.
But there are really two Christian viewpoints: (1) the human being has a body and a soul (called the bipartite viewpoint), and (2) the human being has a spirit, a soul, and a body (called the tripartite viewpoint). Those two viewpoints are in tension with each other.
In the context of the various Christian denominations, the Catholic and so-called mainline Protestant Churches by and large favor the bipartite viewpoint but, as we shall see, the tripartite viewpoint has also made noteworthy appearances within those denominations. The tripartite viewpoint has its strongest following among the Evangelical and Pentecostal Protestant denominations.
Since the bipartite position is pretty much the conventional wisdom and the tripartite is less well-known, let’s first look at the latter.
The tripartite viewpoint
According to God’s own Word in the Bible, God seems to have created us as “tripartite” beings. Two passages are most often cited in support of this position, both written by Saint Paul:
And may the God of peace himself sanctify you in all things; that your whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Thess 5:23)
For the word of God is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two edged sword, and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Heb 4:12)
Both verses endorse the tripartite viewpoint that “spirit, soul, and body” are three entities (in the verse from Hebrews, we’re told that “the word of God” divides “the soul and the spirit” from “the joints and the marrow”—the physical body?).1