What is a body?

What it means to be a member of the Body of Christ

By Anthony Esolen*

Christ, the Church and its members, in a 14th century fresco by Giusto de’ Menabuoi, in the dome of the baptistery of the Cathedral of Padua, Italy

I like very much the conversation that Milton’s Adam has with his Creator in Paradise Lost, after the first man has named all the beasts, but, he says, “I found not what methought I wanted still.” The Creator tests him, saying that surely he is not in solitude, what with all the living creatures round about him, for “they also know, / And reason not contemptibly.”

But Adam persists. He seeks fellowship, he says, “fit to participate / All rational delight, wherein the brute / Cannot be human consort.”

God will not let him go at that. “What thinkst thou then of me and this my state?” God asks, since He is “alone / From all eternity,” nor is Adam yet aware of the Father and the Son as distinct persons. And not only is God alone, but even the highest of His creatures are inferior to Him by “infinite descents / Beneath what other creatures are to thee.” How then can God be happy, alone?

God is leading Adam along to consider the divine nature as compared with human nature. Adam then draws a fit distinction between God and man, a distinction implying an infinite distance in being, impassable except by God’s own descent. “Thou in thyself art perfect,” he says, “and in thee / Is no deficience found.”

Milton here expects his more careful readers to understand the inner meanings of the Latinate words perfect and deficient. What is perfect has been made to completion, but what is deficient has been made to lack something. Of course, he does not mean that God is made. Rather, man by his nature, even the innocent Adam in Eden, enjoying communion with his Creator, is made so as to need more than what is in himself, and not just to be raised to heaven, but to live happily on earth. That means he needs other people:

But man by number is to manifest
His single imperfection, and beget
Like of his like, his image multiplied,
In unity defective, which requires
Collateral love and dearest amity.

Man, then, is a social being to the core, and therefore also, though Milton does not draw out the implication, an ecclesiological being to the core. He is to be a member of the body, the Church.

Here we must recapture the fullness of Saint Paul’s more-than-metaphor, when he calls the Church the Body of Christ, and notes that not every gift is given to every member: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:27-31).

First, to be a member in a body is not to be the body as a whole. We are not God; we are not, to return to what Milton’s Adam says of God, “through all numbers absolute, though One.” That implies not only a finiteness in what we know or what we can perform or what we see, but a finiteness with regard to other members of the body. We need them, and for more than practical needs, as Paul suggests.

That is because, second, to be a member in a body is to understand that you do not even exist, properly speaking, except as a member. The lie at the heart of the sin of pride is that we can be ourselves, alone. “I am my own,” says Satan at the bottom of Hell, because that is what the bottom of Hell is – an everlasting existential lie and the ultimate of lies, the refusal of a creature to be a creature and not God, which implies the refusal of a rational creature to be a member in a body.

Third, to be a member in a body implies a special relationship, one that is obscured by our current habit of viewing all things in mechanistic ways. There are two forms this misapplied mechanism assumes. One arises from our forgetting that the parts of a machine are not like the members of a body. A machine, in fact, is but an imitation of an organism, at best a rather clunky and simplistic imitation. The parts of a machine are not aware of one another. If one of the cylinders in your car misfires, your air conditioning knows nothing of it. The parts of a machine do not really interact. They act by contiguity of one sort or another, as a gear with a gear.

In a painting by Francesco Paolo Priolo, St. Paul, during his 4th journey of evangelization, meets the Christian community of Syracuse in Sicily

But in a body, the sorrow of the hand affects the whole system; a bee-sting sets blood and brain and lymph in motion; a cold breeze on the neck is felt also by the heart; in this way, each member cares for all the members. The human members of the Church, moreover, are each in themselves fully endowed with the image of God, and thus are never to be reduced to atoms in a vast collective, no more than the members are replaceable parts of a machine. The Church is social, not socialist; a communion, not communist.

The first mistake is like unto the second, which is to conceive of the body as a mere group, a grab-bag of individuals, with a variety of talents. It is true that no one human being can combine in himself all the talents of every human being in the world; not all can play the violin, not all can conceive of the curvature of space, not all can climb Mount Everest. But that is not what Milton’s Adam is thinking of when he notes the imperfection of man, nor what Paul is thinking of when he notes the diversity of the gifts of the Spirit.

Both, rather, insist that in the fully human life of mutual giving and receiving, we require “collateral love and dearest amity,” as Milton puts it, or Paul’s “more excellent way,” the way of charity which he describes so brilliantly and movingly in the verses that follow the ones I have cited. Such charity cannot thrive when the members treat the Church as a club which they might join or not, according as they enjoy a certain fellowship or a taste of “spiritual” living.

The love that binds the members instructs every man that he is for the others, and that they are for him, so that to insist upon equality, as individuals who join a club are wont to do, is to miss the point entirely. Love tells me not only that it is good that my dear friend is a priest, but also that it is good that I am not a priest, as sometimes God gives us a gift by withholding the gift from us, that we will seek it in someone else, and find it in love.

These reflections, I say, are as far removed from the current chatter about “diversity” as it is possible to be. I am not simply noticing that people who insist upon diversity are often the most intolerant enforcers of conformity you will ever meet.

I say also that any diversity that is but a cover for ideological uniformity imposed from above, as upon human ants in a collective, or that is but a cover for individualism in faith and morals, as we hear from people who would overturn Scripture itself (let alone nature as created by God) to cordon off their habits, usually but not always sexual, from moral scrutiny, is to destroy the meaning of both member and body.

It is as if a member were to say to the body, or the body to the member, “I do not need you,” and thereby lose the good of both.

* Dr. Anthony Esolen, currently a faculty member at Thales College in North Carolina, has been a professor of literature and humanities for 35 years and is the author or translator of more than 30 books, which include a range of English translations, analyses of culture, literary and Biblical criticisms, meditations on modern education, meditations on the Christian life, and original poetry.
Dr. Esolen also serves as a senior editor and regular writer at Touchstone magazine, has published well over 1000 articles in various journals, and publishes a web magazine dedicated to language, music, poetry, and classic films called Word and Song with his wife, Debra.