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Microcosm and Mediator

Body, soul and spirit, three in one, man occupies a unique position in the created order.

According to the Orthodox world-view, God has formed two levels of created things: first, the "noetic", "spiritual" or "intellectual" level, and secondly the material or bodily. On the first level God formed the angels, who have not material body. On the second level he formed the physical universe -- the galaxies, stars and planets, with the various types of mineral, vegetable and animal life. Man, and man alone, exists on both levels at once. Through his spirit of spiritual intellect he participates in the noetic realm and is a companion of the angels; through his soul, he moves and feels and thinks, he eats and drinks, transmuting food into energy and participating organically in the material realm, which passes within him through his sense perceptions.

Or human nature is thus more complex than the angelic, and endowed with richer potentialities. Viewed in this perspective, man is not lower but higher than the angels; as the Babylonian Talmud affirms, "The righteous are greater than the ministering angels" (Sanhedrin 93a). Man stands at the heart of God's creation. Participating as he does in both the noetic and the material realms, he is an image of mirror of the whole creation, imago mundi, a "little universe" or microcosm. All created things have their meeting place in him. Man may say of himself, in the words of Kathleen Raine:

Because I love
The sun pours out its rays of living God
Pours out its gold and silver on the sea...
Because I love
The ferns grow green, and green the grass, and green
The transparent sunlit trees...
Because I love
All night the river flows into my sleep,
Ten thousand living things are sleeping in my arms,
And sleeping awake, and flowing are at rest.

Being a microcosm, man is also mediator. It is his God-given task to reconcile and harmonize the noetic and the material realms, to bring them to unity, to spiritualize the material, and to render manifest all the latent capacities of the created order. As the Jewish Hasidim expressed it, man is called "to advance from rung to rung until, through him, everything is united". As microcosm, then, man is the one in whom the world is offered back to God.

Man is able to exercise this mediating role only because his human nature is essentially and fundamentally a unity. If he were just a soul dwelling in a body, as many of the Greek and Indian philosophers have imagined -- if his boy were not part of his true self, but only a piece of clothing which he well eventually lay aside, or a prison from which he is seeking to escape -- then man could not properly act as mediator. Man spiritualizes the creation burst of all by spiritualizing his own body and offering it to God. "Do you not realize that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit that is in you?" writes St. Paul. "...Glorify God with your body...I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God" (1 Cor. 6:19-20; Rom. 12:1). But in "spiritualizing" the body, man does not thereby dematerialize it: on the contrary, it is the human vocation to manifest the spiritual in and through the material. Christians are in this sense the only true materialists.

The body, then, is an integral part of human personhood. The separation of body and soul at death is unnatural, something contrary to God's original plan, that has come about in consequence of the fall. Furthermore, the separation is only temporary: we look forward, beyond death, to the final resurrection on the Last Day, when body and should will be reunited once again.

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