ANUARUL ACADEMIC 2003-2004 - Facultatea de Teologie "Andrei ...

the body in the sense Plato or Descartes speak about the body as a different essencefrom the soul. There is a word designating the corpse, but this is no longer a body”.The confusion between the body and the corpse represents the Cartesian error 11Another confusion arouse from the translation of the Hebrew word basar,rendered as sarx into Greek, as caro into Latin, as chair into French. “While for theFrenchman in the 20th century, chair bears the meaning of body, especially asorigin of passions, basar stands for the human integrity, the living person, which inFrench are rendered by ame and corps at the same time” 12 .A more convincing proof that in the Hebrew tradition, the human being isunderstood as an indissoluble psycho-somatic unity is that the functions oraffections which, in a dualist anthropology constitute the attributes of the “body”,represent the attributes of the nephesch in Hebrew: “My soul is hungry” (Ps.107,9), “My soul is thirsty” (Proverbs XXV, 25) 13 . “Nephesch and basar are nottwo distinctive things, two different essences, as psyhe and soma for Plato, but twowords standing for the human being from the point of view of his psychosomaticalorganization 14 .Saint Evangelist John wrote: “The Word became flesh – sarx and not somain order to clearly show that the Logos assumed the entire human nature (soulbody)according to the Jewish conception regarding the human being. The ChurchFathers’ mission at the First, the Third and the Fourth Ecumenical Council was alsothe salvation of the essence of the biblical thinking, looking for its appropriateterms in the Greek language: sarkothenta, enanthrpesanta and so on. Therefore, theChurch Fathers avoided the Platonic and Neo-platonic terminology, whichunfortunately seemed to be present in the western mentality.It is worth mentioning that, unlike the French language, which took overfrom the Latin language the terms corpus and anima with their different meanings,the Romanian language associated them. In order to reflect the psycho-somaticreality, there are the terms corp and reserved for the human being, trup inside ofwhich the heart (inima-from the Latin word anima) beats. The word trupcorresponds to the Jewish basar, expressing corpus and anima at the same time.11 Ibidem, p. 234.12 Ibidem, p. 62.13 Ibidem.14 Ibidem, p. 206.152