Living Faith as Embodied Faith:Religious Practice After Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of the Body

J. Leavitt Pearl

Duquesne University

Subverting the Norm II

Drury University, Missouri

04/05/13

1: Introduction

St. Theresa of Avila, responding to concerns raised by her sisters, who lament that they

were incapable of remaining in permanent vigil, once wrote, well, come now, my daughters, don't

be sad when obedience draws you into involvement with exterior matters. Know that if it is in the

kitchen, the Lord walks among the pots and pans helping you both interiorly and exteriorly.1 For

Theresa, the dichotomy of the internal and the external, the spiritual and the secular, was fundamentally

incomplete. It is precisely this deconstructive gesture that animates this present investigation. No

longer content to remain trapped within the polarizing dualism of the internal and the external, the

mental and the physical, it will here be asked if it is possible to think of a faith beyond the realm of the

intellect and belief, if it is possible to think an embodied faith, a faith which is performed, lived, and

experienced, not merely believed.

In order to examine this question, it will be necessary that our investigation follow four distinct

moves. First, we will briefly examine the origin and history of Western dualism and its rejection in the

holistic thought of Nietzsche. Second, we will consider the extension of this holism in the postmodern

turn towards embodied notions of consciousness, particularly within the phenomenological thought of

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his predecessor Martin Heidegger. Third, we will briefly consider the

theological interpretation of this conception of the body as exemplified in Michel Henry's Le Concept

d'ame a-t-il un sense?. Lastly, we will consider the shape that religious practice might take if it absorbs

and utilizes this critique of modernist dualism and the postmodern emphasis upon the irreducible

necessity of a lived embodiment.

2: An All-to-Brief History of Western Dualism

To map the history of philosophical and theological dualism is to, essentially, map the history of

1 St. Theresa of Avila, My Foundations in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Vol 3 (Washington D.C.: ICS

Publications, 2011), 5.

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Western thought as such; for this dualism has infected Western ontology, theology, and epistemology

for most of its recorded history. Even the radically monistic Parmenides strongly distinguishes between

knowledge (gk: ) and opinion (gk: ); the latter of which will be fatefully (mis-?)interpreted as

perception or sensible belief (gk: ) in Plato, who writes:

When [the soul] focuses on something illuminated by truth and what is, it understands, knows,

and apparently possesses understanding, but when it focuses on what is mixed with obscurity,

on what comes to be and passes away, it opines and is dimmed, changes its opinions this way

and that, and seems bereft of understanding.2

This dualism between the purely mental and the perceptual or physical is reiterated in many of the

subsequent middle- and neo-Platonist thinkers, who, like their predecessors above, attempt to think a

radical monism, a single source of all reality (the One), but who repeatedly denigrate the physical

world, including the body, as un-spiritual and corrupt. This tendency is further emphasized, following

the Christianization of Neoplatonism, as this dualism is reinterpreted in the Pauline categories of the

spirit and the flesh.3

Aspects of this dualistic thinking continued throughout the Medieval West, waning with the

emphasis upon Aristotelian thought in Thomism, but returning with vigor in the Early-Modern

philosophy of Descartes. Perhaps the pinnacle of dualistic thinking, Descrates understood reality itself

to be bifurcated into two manifestations: res extensa and res cogitans. Applying this distinction to the

human person he writes, I am not that concatenation of members we call the human body.4 Rather,

the I, for Descartes, is nothing other than a thinking thing, an intellect. The latter is beyond doubt,

the former, as physical, is always suspect.

2 Plato, Republic in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G.M.A. Grube, and rev. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis:

Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 508d.

3 As Galatians writes, what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh;

for these are opposed to each other. Gal. 5.17, NRSV.

4 Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis:

Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 64.

2

While undeniably brief an incomplete, such an sketch of dualistic tendency of Western thought

is necessary for an understanding of the late- and post-modern turn away from dualism and towards a

holistic conception of human life. Speaking simply, what we see in postmodern thought is a recognition

that the overcoming of dualism, particularly its modernist manifestations, requires above all else, a

reunification of the human person, it requires embodied subjectivity.

Moving towards such a unity, in the midst of the 19th century debate between idealism and

materialism,5 arose Friedrich Nietzsche, who rejected both polar perspectives as reductive and

limited. In his text, On the Despisers of the Body, Nietzsche offers an unambiguous critique of

modern dualism. Parodying this perspective, he writes, body am I, and soulthus speaks the

child.6 Continuing, he offers his own counter position, stating, body am I entirely, and nothing

else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.7 Yet, such a turn to the body should

not be confused with a nave materialism. Instead, Nietzsche seeks to craft a conception of the

body which is sufficiently substantive to confront the critiques of both materialism and idealism.

That is to say, rather than reducing the material to consciousness or consciousness to the

physical, Nietzsche attempts to craft an understanding of the human being as embodied, as both

consciousness and body no longer conceived as radically distinct, but as moments in a single

self. But sense and spirit, that is, material and consciousness, Nietzsche writes, would

persuade you that they are the end of all things: that is how vain they are. Instruments and toys

5 19th century Germany saw one the greatest confrontations to arise out of this dualism, as dualism split into two schools.

On the one hand stood idealism and on the other materialism. Both views attempted to reconcile the dualism of modern

thought through a reduction of one pole into the other, the idealists biasing consciousness (i.e. the mind/soul) and the

materialists biasing the physical (e.g. the body). By reducing and biasing in this manner, both perspectives appeared to

offer an incomplete picture of reality, particularly an incomplete picture of the human being.

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin

Books, 1984), 146.

7 Ibid.

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are sense and spirit: behind them still lies the self.8

3: Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of the Body

20th century continental thought has consistently sought to re-articulate and sharpen this

anti-dualistic reaction against modernity. Key to this movement was Martin Heidegger's 1927

publication Being and Time. This text is largely centered around Heidegger's notion of human

being as being-in-the-world [in-der-Welt-sein]. As he writes, being alongside the world never

means anything like the Being-present-at-hand-together of Things that occur. There is no such

thing as the 'side-by-side-ness' of an entity called 'Dasein' with another entity called 'world'.9

Cutting through the dense Heideggerian jargon, this is simply to say that there are not two fully

distinct things, a human mind or consciousness and a world which is perceived as fully distinct

from ita subject and an object. Rather, Heidegger argues, it is the very nature of the human

person to be embedded within a meaningful world. Being-in-the-world, he writes, stands for a

unitary phenomenon. This primary datum most be seen as a whole.10

Unfortunately, this Heideggerian analysis merely prepared, but did not follow through with

a holistic unification of the human person. While Heidegger remained consistently concerned

with the reunification of the subject and its world, embodiment and the concrete physicality of

the flesh seldom figure into his analyses. Although he clearly frames the question, writing the

critical question must face the Being of the whole man [sic], who is customarily taken as a unity

of body, soul, and spirit,11 the fulfillment of this task will be left to our primary interlocutor,

Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

8 Ibid.

9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 81.

10 Ibid., 78.

11 Ibid., 73-74.

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Describing the embodied turn of Merleau-Ponty, Richard Kearney writes:

For Merleau-Ponty phenomenology made possible the recognition that the body is not an

object amongst objects, to be measured in purely scientific or geometric terms, but a

mysterious and expressive mode of belonging to the world through our perceptions,

gestures, sexuality and speech.12

For Merleau-Ponty, the Heideggerian turn to the human person as embedded in the world, was

certainly a move in the right direction, beyond the abstract transcendental I of Idealistic

philosophy and phenomenology for instance. But, this turn failed to fully reincorporate the spatial

element of human existence: viz. the body. Although Heidegger identified the primacy of our

embeddedness in the world, how one is concretely, materially invested in the world remains

unclear. The answer, for Merleau-Ponty, is only through the Body. As he writes, the ambiguity of

being-in-the-world is translated by the body.13

On the other hand, as a phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty likewise seeks to avoid the

reductive character of a strict materialism. The body, for him, must not be reduced to its physical

manifestation, to its mechanical or causal nature; there is not first an objective body and only

secondarily a subjective experience of the world. The union of soul and body, Merleau-Ponty

writes, is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object,

brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence.14

The experience of the body can be as little described by a purely abstract active consciousness, a

transcendental I, as by a purely passive material conglomeration. The bodyand perhaps this is

what sets it apart from other objects in the worldis always that which both perceives and is

12 Richard Kearney, Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Modern Movements in European Philosophy (New York: Manchester

University Press, 1994), 73-74.

13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972),

98.

14 Ibid., 102.

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perceived, is both active and passive. My body, Merleau-Ponty writes:

is recognized by its power to give me 'double sensations': when I touch my right

hand with my left, my right had, as an object, has the strange property of being able

to feel too. When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two

sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an

ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of 'touching' and

being 'touched'.15

Such a holistic view of the human person as body must not be limited solely to the realm of

perception and knowledge. For all aspects of human personhood find themselves situated within

the lived body. Let us take language as an example. Language has often been construed as a

radically a-bodily phenomenon. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology for instance,

radically distinguishes between the physical manifestation of an expression (e.g. its audible

sound) and its sense or meaning. The physical phenomenon, he writes, relates to what is

objective [i.e. its meant object]. This objective somewhat can either be actually present through

accompanying intuitions, or may at least appear in representation, e.g. in mental image, and

where this happens the relation to an object is realized.16 To once again cut through the jargon,

language, for Husserl, is the process by which abstract or ideal meanings are correlated to

physical manifestations. Yet, such a distinction is, for Merleau-Ponty, entirely problematic. It is

impossible, he writes, to superimpose on man [sic] a lower layer of behavior which one chooses

to call 'natural', followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world.17 The ideal meaning and

the physical manifestation of an expression are equally constructed and equally natural, there is

no unambiguous demarcation between two. Rather, the entirety of experience is always already

saturated with meaning, including our expressions. Our words do not simply point beyond

15 Ibid., 106.

16 Edmund Husserl, The Shorter Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Routledge, 2001), 109.

17 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 220.

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themselves to an abstract meaning, they are themselves the embodiment of meaning. How many

times have I been unaware of what I wished to say until I said it? How often do my thoughts seem

ambiguous and unclear until I begin to write them down? It is not simply the case that there

exists an internal world of clarity and transparency which must be merely converted into words.

Rather, our words themselves speak meaning into existence. Even lingusitic meaning is embodied.

If we might take a second example, in a similar manner, sexuality too must be recognized

as a bodily phenomenon. As Merleau-Ponty makes clear, understanding this relationship requires

a tentative and careful approach. On the one hand, the subtlety of sexual phenomena, the fact that

they are often masked by general phenomena (as Freud sought to expose) should not lend itself

towards the rejection of the relationship between the body and sexuality. Sexuality is not strictly

reserved for an a-bodily abstract unconscious as certain nave readings of psychoanalysis suggest,

nor on the contrary, to an absolute reduction of sexuality to brute physicality, as certain

evolutionary psychological perspectives argue. Rather, the relationship is more complex and

more dialectical. We live in a world that is saturated by sexuality. How we move, act, dress, think,

talk, and feel, are all products of our sexual body. Sexuality is neither a strictly animal

phenomenon, a necessary product of our reproductive needs, nor a cultural construct with no

grounding in the lived body. We live our sexuality, just as we live all meaningful aspects of our life:

through our bodily dispositions. Sexuality too is embodied.

Without belaboring ourselves with further examples, it might simply be said that, for

Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are the way in which our being-in-the-world manifests itself; our body

functions as our presence in the world and our connection to the world. Moreover, this world is

not strictly the abstract physical world of positivism, but the sum of all our meanings, the location

of a meaningful life. As Husserl writes:

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This world is not there for me as a mere world of facts and affairs, but, with the same

immediacy, as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world. Without further effort

on my part I find the things before me furnished not only with the qualities that befit their

positive nature, but with value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or

disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant.18

Furthermore, the body also manifests itself as the unity of the seemingly distinct regions of our

life. Why, if the physical is fully distinct from the mental, do fears and anxiety often manifest as

pain, rash, or ulcer? Why, as Merleau-Ponty considers at length, is the phenomenon of phantom

limb syndrome irreducible to either physiology (damage to the nervous system) or psychology

(mental distress)? The answer, from a Merleau-Pontian perspective, is that these realms are not

fully distinct, for they are both situated in relationship to a single synthesizing entity: the body. As

he writes, all human functions, from sexuality to motility and intelligenceand, it might be

suggested, spiritualityare rigorously unified in one synthesis.19

4: Michel Henry on the Soul and the Body

While Merleau-Ponty, in the common vein of early French Existentialism, understands the

human condition, and correlatively his conception of embodiment, in purely atheistic terms, the

theological import of this conception of the body is not unprecedented. In fact, Merleau-Ponty's

conception of the embodied subject, and in particular his differentiation between the subjective

body that we have been discussing and the purely physical or material body (what he and others

call the objective body) runs through the entirety of the later so-called theological turn of

French phenomenology: appearing most conspicuously in the conception of the flesh in the

work of Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion. As the Catholic theologian and phenomenologist

Jean-Yves Lacoste writes, for example, echoing the Merleau-Pontian paradigm precisely, the

18 Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Bryce Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 53.

19 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 197.

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problem of the body is that it is an I: not some thing that we may or may not possess, but something

we are.20

Perhaps the clearest recognition of the theological fecundity of Merleau-Ponty's

conception of the body can be found in Michel Henry's article Le Concept d'ame a-t-il un sense?

(Does the Concept of the Soul Mean Anything?) In this text, Henry attempts to counter Immanuel

Kant's paralogisms of the rational psychology, found in his Critique of Pure Reason. In this text,

Kant sought to discredit rational psychology, that is, any attempt to theorize the nature of a

human soul or ego, beyond what could be strictly deduced as a necessary transcendental

structure of consciousness. For Kant, one could only speak of the soul by means of its effects, the

unity of apperception and the pure form of time. As he writes, thus the whole of rational psychology,

as a science transcending all the powers of human reason, collapses, and nothing is left except to study

our soul following the guide lines of experience, and to remain within the limit of those questions that

do not go beyond that whose content can be provided by possible inner experience.21 In essence, for

Kant, the soul cannot be known, because it cannot be studied, and it cannot be studied, because it does

not appear within the manifold of intuition; we do not see the soul in sensibility; it is an empty form

with no content, a mere idea.

Countering this critique, Henry argues for a direct intuition of the self (i.e. soul) by means of

self-affectivity. One experiences the soul to the extent that one experiences the living pathos of

affective life; simply, we feel ourselves as living beings, as vivants. As he writes in his I am the

Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity:

The content of Lifewhat it experiencesis Life itself, [this] refers back to a more

20 Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, trans. Mark Raftery-Skeban (New York: Fordham University Press,

2004), 7.

21 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1998), A387.

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fundamental condition, to the very essence of Living, to a mode of revelation whose

specific phenomenality is the flesh of a pathos, pure affective material, in which any

cleavage, any separation, finds itself radically excluded.22

That is to say, it is not that we lack an experience of the soul, but quite to the contrary, this soul is

everywhere present; it saturates our experience, manifesting as the very pathetique (pathos-filled)

experience of life. For Henry, our anxiety, boredom, joy, and sorrow are the very means by which we

experience ourselves as living, and this experience is not simply an abstract experience of a

transcendental I, but is felt in the very core of our flesh: it is embodied. It is for this reason that

Henry's refutation of Kant in Le Concept d'ame concludes, explicitly, with a turn to Merleau-Ponty's

conception of the body. As Henry writes:

It may seem paradoxical, in order to legitimize the concept of radical interiority, and in

the same way, the concept of soul, to appeal to the body. This paradox is attenuated by

the emergence of the subjective body. When the body, in effect, is interpreted, no longer

in a naive and unilateral way as an object, but also as a subject, and perhaps as the true

subject, as the source of our sensible consciousness, and when this sensible

consciousness, in turn, instead of being treated as an inferior form of consciousness, is

seized as the ground and foundation of all possible knowledge, then analysis of the body

thus understood in its original subjectivity might seem to lead us to this interiority which

we seek.23

What is buried beneath these waves of subclauses is the simple claim that, when the body is properly

understood as the seat of subjectivity and the location of affectivity, i.e. as the flesh, then it may be

recognized as nothing other than the soul. When we seek the soul, a radically immanent core of our

being, Henry argues, we need not bracket the body, but on the contrary, it is our very body which

provides access to true internality.

Having posited an identification of the body and the soul in this way, Henry seeks to reorient the

relationship between theological thought and the soul. Rather then constituting something a-

22 [emphasis added] Michel Henry, I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 2003): 30.

23 [Translation my own] Michel Henry, Le concept d'ame a-t-i1 un sens? Revue philosophique de Louvain 64 (1966): 21.

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theological, neutral, or even corrupt, the body rightly understood constitutes the very core of

theological thought. A truly theological turn, is equally a turn to a radical notion of embodiment.

5: Embodied Faith as Living Faith

Considering this phenomenology of radical embodiment, as well as its theological

interpretation in Henry, we must now ask ourselves what can be said regarding the Christian

faith. Or more specifically: what shape should religious practice take, in light of the postmodern

rejection of a disembodied consciousness?

In order to answer this question, we must first recognize that faith is seldom understood

in practical terms, as embodied. Rather, faith is generally taken as belief, and more specifically,

belief in certain Christian dogmas. Salvation is marked, particularly in its Western protestant

conceptions, as something to be known or embraced mentally. Depending upon ones tradition,

certain dogmas may be moved to the foreground or the background, added or subtracted, but the

fundamental structure remains the same: Christianity is principally something one is by way of

what one believes. Of course, this model has certain precedence within the scriptures. The Epistle

to Titus opens with the seeming identity of faith and knowledge, being written for the sake of the

faith of Gods elect and the knowledge of the truth.24 Similarly, in 1st Corinthians, Paul writes, if there

is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then

our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.25 Faith here appears, at least at face

value, to be a relationship of correspondence, that is to say, of knowledge. True faith, like justified

knowledge, is the correspondence of ones beliefs with the truth of the resurrection event. But such a

reading of Christian faith, while predominant in modern Christianity, is not the only available. For, if

24 Titus 1.1-2 NRSV.

25 1 Cor. 15.13-14 NRSV.

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Christian faith was truly a matter of knowledge in the traditional sense, than religious faith would

merely stand beside other forms of objective knowledge, exposed to the same criteria of validity and

falsification.26

Yet, this notion of faith as belief rests upon a decidedly modernist understanding of reality. It

stands upon the bracketing of the subjective, the emphasis upon the measurable and the quantifiable,

and most of all, upon the elevation of the objectively and rationally knowable. As Henry writes, it is

the belief that the Galilean science of nature is the only possible knowledge and the only real truth,

such that there is no other reality, as true reality, besides the objects of science. an ideology

scientism and positivism.27 Such an understanding of reality and knowledge fears the imprecise nature

of the perspectival, the untestable, and the bodily. Even in its most materialistic and empirical

manifestations, emphasis upon the objectivity of repeatability seeks to eliminate the stain of

perspective.28 Furthermore, the bodily is construed as imprecise or fallible, as limited, and most

damningly in the eyes of modernism, as changing. Like the nave Platonism from which they arose,

these understandings of Christian faith seek the eternity of Being against the frightening instability of

becoming; they fear, above all else, the abyss of relativism.

But there may be an even greater danger to be found within this modernist preoccupation with

the eternal. In his Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche speaks out against this fascination with the

unchanging within Western thought, critiquing philosophers for:

Their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They

think that they show their respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeterni

26 Were this so, then the critiques of such thinkers as Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, for instance would be completely

appropriate; and as it stands, are completely appropriate, when directed against a certain notion of faith as knowledge

and belief in a state of affairs.

27 Michel Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Contiuum, 2012), 106-107.

28 That is to say, there is no great divide between the empiricist and rationalistic branches of modernity. Both rest upon the

same understanding of reality as objective, knowable, and in a certain sense, unchanging (for the empiricists this bias for

the unchanging can be found in the consistent recourse to laws,).

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when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have

been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honorable idolators

of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they

worship.29

For Nietzsche, change is growth, and to live is to grow. If, therefore, the concepts of philosophy

and theology have refused all change, if they worship the unchanging and the objective, then they

bring only death to what once had life. It is for this reason that Nietzsche must proclaim, in the

face of Christianized (platonized) West, the Death of God. What then can be said of the Christian

faith that is reducible to correlation and knowledge, to the hierarchical dualism of modernity? It

is a dead faith.

But could the same be said of an embodied faith? For, the body is, above all else, change. It

grows, learns, feels, and senses; it is temporal to the greatest degree. An embodied faith, I would

like to argue, could not take the form of a dead faith, but rather, is the very emergence of life; an

embodied faith is a living faith.30 It is perhaps not coincidental that Henry's positing of the unity

of the soul and the body appears within the context of a phenomenology of life. For Henry, the

primordial praxis of life, as singular and individual, is our Body. My immanent Body is

absolutely subjective and absolutely alive.31 But, to advocate such an embodied faith, it is

necessary to do more than describe it negatively as merely a movement beyond or against

29 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin

Books, 1984), 479.

30 And the church could certainly use some life. Postmodernity has seen the Western world largely turn from the Christian

faith. Of course there are small centers of growth, but the overwhelming trends in mainline Christianity have been

decidedly negative, not for years, but decades. As Episcopal priest Tom Ehrich writes, the most inconvenient truth [is]

that mainline denominations began to decline in 1965, not because of liberal theology, but because the world around

them changed and they refused to change with it. Not least among these changes was a radical shift in self-

consciousness, the turn away from the modern conception of the world. Tom Ehrich, Despite doubters, mainline

Protestant churches are poised for success, Episcopal News Service, July 18, 2012. Accessed April 3, 2013,

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2012/07/18/despite-doubters-mainline-protestant-churches-are-poised-for-

success/.

31 Henry, Barbarism, 45, emphasis added.

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modernity. The question what is embodied faith? must be positively answered.

First, embodied faith does not address itself solely to the intellect or to belief in dogma. In

theological jargon, it is defined by a turn away from mere orthodoxy and toward the fullness of

orthopraxis. An embodied faith, it might be said, is a practical faith; it is a faith which does, a

faith of the I can (Merleau-Ponty) rather than the I am (Descartes). Second, embodied faith is

not limited to a single sphere of human experience. Rather, as we have seen in Merleau-Ponty, a

movement beyond modernist reductionism is a movement towards holism. An embodied faith is

not restricted to the realm of the traditionally religious, it incorporates the full multifaceted

complexity of meaningful life. Embodied faith is spiritual, but it is equally ethical, intellectual,

ethnic, sexual, economic, interpersonal, political, social, narrative, romantic, and racial. It does not

carve out a region for itself beyond the reach of life, or bracket out the pains and traumas of

human being. Third, like the human subject, who is unavoidably thrown into the world,32 who is a

being-in-the-world, an embodied faith remains in dialogue with the world. It is not sectarian; it

does not lock itself within its church doors. As liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez writes, by

preaching the Gospel message, by its sacraments, and by the charity of its members, the Church

proclaims and shelters the gift of the Kingdom of God in the heart of human history. It isat

least ought to bereal charity, action, and commitment to the service of others.33 Fourth, an

embodied faith is sensual; it is not simply spoken and heard. While it is certainly proclaimed, as

Christian faith is always a Word and a gospel, it is also touched and held; smelled; tasted,

breathed, and ingested. In sum, an embodied faith, as a lived faith, can be found everywhere that

life is found. It is not separate from experience, but saturates experience. It is not above

32 See: Heidegger, Being and Time, Falling and Thrownness, 219-224.

33 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973), 9.

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immanent reality, in a transcendental or metaphysical beyond, but embedded in the dirt and the

complexity of everyday life, it is the depth dimension of lived reality.

Though its influence, at least in the West, has been diminished, such an embodied faith is

not entirely foreign to the Christian tradition, but remains always present at the periphery of

religious practice. The Christian liturgy, with its synchronized movements, meditative silences,

incense, prayer, and spoken word, has always born the traces of an embodied faith, blending

together the diverse senses into a holistic unity. The Eurcharist, its predecessor in the love feast,

and even the modern day coffee-hour, all speak to the priority of the shared meal. Eating together

is an essential component of embodied religious practice, because it is an essential component of

human life. It is not simply the physical necessity of consumption that brings the home or the

church together for a meal, eating is a time of shared community (do we not call the Eucharist

communion?). Lastly, embodied religious practice can be found in the contemplative traditions of

Christian mysticism. As Gutierrez writes, this point of view was exemplified in the mixed life

(contemplative and active) of the mendicant orders and was expressed in the formula:

contemplata aliis tradere (to transmit to other the fruits of contemplation).34 While the

extremity of mystical practice, unio mystica, can be understood as a radically a-temporal and a-

bodily experience, the mystic does not remain within this deepest contemplation, but must

always return to everyday life. As the German mystic Meister Eckhart writes:

It is not that we should abandon, neglect or deny our inner self, but we should learn

to work precisely in it, with it and from it in such a way that interiority turns into

effective action and effective action leads back to interiority and we become used to

acting without any compulsion. For we should concentrate on this inner prompting,

and act from it, whether through reading or praying orif it is fittingsome form of

external activity.35

34 Ibid., 6.

35 Meister Eckhart, The Talks of Instruction in Selected Writings trans. Oliver Davies (New York: Penguin Books, 1994),

45.

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The embodied world of daily life is not divested from the spiritual depth of religious practice.

Rather, they feed one another, enlighten one another, and work together to produce a meaningful

life. Embodied faith, as a living faith, does not render the meaningful world of everydayness

unimportant, but rather opens this world to its greatest spiritual depth. Returning full circle, as

St. Theresa wrote, don't be sad when obedience draws you into involvement with exterior

matters. Know that if it is in the kitchen, the Lord walks among the pots and pans helping you

both interiorly and exteriorly.36

36 St. Theresa of Avila, My Foundations, 5.

16

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