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

The word suflet (soul) comes from the Latin verb sufflare, verb which suggestsmovement, life and makes a close connection to the body 15 .Bishop Kallistos Ware states that the majority of the Christian authors at thebeginning think in Platonic terms, making a more or less strict separation betweenthe soul and the body, and identifying the real person with the soul, which isperceived as the unique, indestructible and eternal element in each and every man.Although they do not reject the body as something bad and ceaselessly assert theold-testamentary belief in the resurrection of the body, they seem to present thehuman being in dichotomical terms, the holistic vision being thus compromised. Inconclusion, instead of perceiving the body as the “way” of existence of the entireperson, its manifestation to the outside world –as well as to ourselves - of theenergies of our nature as a whole, many Patristic writers see the body just as a partof the person, a separable and inferior component. But as time progresses, one canremark clues regarding a holistic conception. As proofs there are some textsbelonging to Saint Gregory of Nazians or Saint Maxim the Confessor, unjustlyconsidered “Platonic Christians” in the sense that they would put into contrast thesoul and the body. 16Making a generalization, J.C. Larchet writes that the Church Fathers haveoften insisted upon the fact that the human being is neither merely soul, nor merelybody, but one and the other at the same time, a unity impossible to dissociate. 17Stating that the body takes integral part in the very man’s being, acknowledgingthat it shares a equal dignity with the soul, and refusing to attach to it a differentorigin and destiny from that of the soul, they contradict the spiritualist conceptionsaccording to which the body would only be an avatar of the soul, the sign of itsdecay, a source of corruption for it, a grave (the play on words: soma=body –sema=grave) 18 which would imprison it, an extra-additional and unessential15 Ibidem, p. 234.16 Kallistos Ware, The unity of the human person according to the Greek Fathers, in: “Persons andpersonality, A contemporary inquiry”, edited by Arthur Peacocke and Grant Gillett, Ian RamseyCentre Publication no. 1, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, p.198.17 Jean-Claude Larchet, Terapeutica bolilor mintale.Experienţa Răsăritului creştin, Bucureşti, EdituraHarisma, 1997, p. 32.18 Cf. Plato, Gorgias, 493a; Cratylos, 400c.153