In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God Amen!
I would like to consider the dogmatic aspects of Sin, Death and the Fall which are the basis of man’s estrangement from God, and the cause of our needing a Saviour. We will look at these different aspects in turn, and we will begin in the Garden of Eden, when God gave Adam a simple command which he was to obey or face dire consequences. We read in Genesis 2:7 how it was that beyond simply making man another one the animals which he had created, God breathed into him his own life, the Holy Spirit of God, so that he might be able to enter into an experience of communion with God, sharing by grace some aspects of the divine character. It says…
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
This idea of Adam as a living being has always been understood to mean more than simply his having an animal existence. And there is no other creature of which it is said that God breathed the breath of life into him. St Gregory of Nazianzus says of this in one of his Dogmatic Hymns…
The soul is the breath of God, a substance of heaven mixed with the lowest earth, a light entombed in a cave, yet wholly divine and unquenchable…. He spoke, and taking some of the newly minted earth his immortal hands made an image into which he imparted some of his own life. He sent his spirit, a beam from the invisible divinity.
And Tertullian says of this breath of life…
The soul has its origin in the breath of God and did not come from matter. We base that statement on the clear assertion of divine revelation, which declares that “God breathed the breath of life into the face of man, and man became a living soul.”
And St Basil the Great says…
And he breathed into his nostrils,” that is to say, he placed in man some share of his own grace, in order that he might recognize likeness through likeness. Nevertheless, being in such great honor because he was created in the image of the Creator, he is honored above the heavens, above the sun, above the choirs of stars. For which of the heavenly bodies was said to be an image of the most-high God.
It is especially of this breathing life into man that we are to understand that man is made in the image of God, when the Holy Trinity says in Genesis 1…
Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
It is necessary to remind ourselves of this state in which man was created before we begin to consider what has been lost and how we have come to the condition in which we now find ourselves. Man was created to be in the image of God, and he received a life which was more than animal, and was in some sense a divine gift, the breath or Spirit of God. It is not that some part of God has been changed into the soul of man, but that the soul of man is created directly by God, by his own breathing life into us. Tertullian says…
Thus you read the word of God, spoken to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” If God forms us in the womb, he also breathes on us as he did in the beginning: “And God formed man and breathed into him the breath of life.” Nor could God have known man in the womb unless he were a whole man.
The Fathers speak of the qualities of this divinely created soul as being immortality, rationality, and the possibility of union and communion with God. If we think of the soul as only being the thinking aspect of man, the mind and brain, then we will wonder what it means for the soul to have an existence apart from the body and brain. We will also wonder what it means when some Fathers speak of body, soul and spirit. We will also wonder why others speak only of the body and soul. We see this different approach to the same human nature in the Scriptures.
Ecclesiastes 12:7, for instance describes a dichotomy, and speaks of the body and the spirit, saying…
Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.
The dust here refers to that dust from which the body of Adam was created, and the spirit refers to the non-material aspect of man. And in Matthew 10:28, our Lord Jesus speaks of this dichotomy, saying…
Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.
While in 1 Corinthians 7:34, the Apostle Paul writes…
The unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit.
In these examples, and others from the Scripture, we can see that there is a description of human nature as being body and soul or body and spirit, so that the word soul and spirit seem to be referring to the same reality. But there are also passages in the writings of St Paul which speak of three aspects of human nature, and adopt a language of trichotomy.
In 1 Thessalonians 5:23 we read…
Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
This seems to categorise three aspects of human nature, the body, the soul and the spirit. In Hebrews 4:12 we also find the words…
For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
This seems to discriminate between the soul and the spirit of a man and therefore represents a trichotomy. The reflection which developed in the patristic Church on the nature of man was therefore rooted in a varied use of language in the Scripture. Is man body and soul or spirit, or is he body, soul and spirit?
It was a subject that many of the early Fathers discussed. Sometimes the same Fathers speak in different ways. St Ignatius of Antioch, for instance, says in his letter to the Philadelphians…
The love of the brethren at Troas salutes you; … in whom they hope, in flesh, and soul, and spirit, and faith, and love, and concord.
Here he describes a trichotomy of flesh, soul and spirit. But elsewhere, in his letter to St Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, he says…
Therefore, you are made of flesh and spirit.
Glory to God
