SPIRIT AND FLESH. - Antithesis of biblical anthropology between the perishable and the enduring in man, analogous to the antithesis between man and God already clear in Is. 31:3.
In the psychological-ethical language of the New Testament, two elements compose man: one external and one internal (Mt. 15:17-20); the first, the body (σῶμα), to which the animal life (ψυχή) is connected, is without moral importance, and can be considered in itself indifferent for justification and salvation (I Cor. 6:12-13), while the second, the seat of thoughts and feelings (καρδία, νοῦς), is fundamental and decisive before God. "The outer man" tends toward corruption, "the inner man" toward eternity (II Cor. 4:16-18); being "flesh and blood," the outer man is excluded from the Kingdom of God (Mt. 16:17; I Cor. 15:50).
To the first, derived from the old Adam, sin is connected, and death, which is its "wages" (Rom. 5:12-21; 6:23); the new Adam, Christ, brings remedy for this, renewing man in Baptism, immersing him in his mystery of death and resurrection (ibid. 6:1-13). But there remains in man here below, dramatically, the struggle between the outer man and the inner man, between the old man of sin and the new man of righteousness (ibid. 7:5-25). The first, called the "body of sin, of death" (ibid. 6:6; 7:24), which tends toward moral and physical disintegration, is usually called "flesh" in the pejorative sense that already appears in Gen. 6:3, 12 (cf. Is. 40:6; Eccl. 14:18; I Cor. 1:20) and that was widespread among the Stoics. The "flesh" is human nature abandoned to itself, therefore fragile, because deprived of God, and death-bearing, because vitiated by sin which nests in it its seed, concupiscence (Io. 1:13); it is connected to sin by origin and by tendency (Rom. 6:12-18, 13). The opposite of the flesh, or animated matter (σάρξ) enclosing the ψυχή, was the invisible dynamism of man called "spirit" (πνεῦμα; I Cor. 5:5); the "fragile flesh" resists the "willing spirit" (Mt. 26:41; Mc. 14:38) in which God or the Spirit of God (Sap. 1:6-7; Iob 10:12; Proc. 8:31) works with mysterious efficacy (Io. 3:6-8; 6:64). The spirit-flesh dualism (πνεῦμα-σάρξ) is one of the great antitheses of Pauline preaching.
To the "flesh of sin" (Rom. 8:3) the πνεῦμα ("spirit") is opposed; ibid. 8:1-15; Gal. 5:13-25. The flesh with its vices and concupiscences (Gal. 5:24) is the antagonist, often personified, of the spirit (ibid. 5:17). The spirit, which is fundamentally the divine Holy Spirit, in the interior of the regenerated man is the new spirit introduced by God (foretold by Ez. 11:19-20; 36:26-27; cf. Ps. 50:12), which constitutes the new man or new creature (Eph. 4:22-24; Col. 3:9-10; II Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15); it removes "the body of the flesh" or carnal body (Col. 2:11).
The term spirit is used 145 times by St. Paul; although the general sense is undoubted, the precise sense of spirit is debatable in about 70 instances, there being an intimate interpenetration between the thinking principle of man (called spirit in I Cor. 2:11; 5:3; 7:34; etc.) or his way of thinking (ibid. 2:12 "spirit of the world"; etc.), and the activity of the Holy Spirit in man (ibid. 14:12, 32; I Thess. 5:16; II Thess. 2:2: the charisms) or man under the influence of the Holy Spirit (I Cor. 14:14-16; "with your spirit"; Gal. 6:18; Phil. 4:23; II Tim. 4:22; Philem. 25), and the person of the Holy Spirit. A typical case of the intersection of these three semantic aspects is Rom. 8:2-16, where spirit occurs 17 times in various senses, difficult to pinpoint; the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate writes Spiritus with a capital letter there only 4 times, while R. Cornely understands the Holy Spirit 11 times; in Gal. 5:16-25 the Vulgate, out of 7 instances, considers Spiritus a proper name only once, R. Cornely never, J. B. Lightfoot always. In general, the expressions "Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ, Holy Spirit" are equivalent for designating the divine Person; but "Holy Spirit" sometimes indicates rather its influence or charism (Act. 6:5; 10:38; 11:24; 13:52; II Cor. 6:6); the surest criterion is to examine whether personal functions are attributed to the Spirit or whether it is distinguished from the other two divine Persons. Rival of the flesh, the spirit is, more than the Person of the sanctifying Spirit, its action in the soul or, better, the soul itself vivified by him.
In the New Testament, the divine personal Spirit is the force that presides over the Incarnation, the foundation and the development of the Kingdom of God (Lc. 1:15, 35, 41, 67; 2:25-27; Mt. 3:16; 4:1; 10:20; 12:28; Lc. 4:1, 14; Io. 14:17; 16:7-15). The Acts of the Apostles constantly highlight the action of the divine Spirit, the supreme messianic gift (Act. 2:17) in the primitive Church (Act. 1:2, 8; 2:2-33; 4:8; 8:17-19; 10:44-47; etc.; I Cor. 12-14).
St. Paul, especially, teaches insistently that the divine Spirit is reflected in the spirit which, within every Christian, is the dynamic principle of a supernatural life: it is a heavenly gift and is the transformed human spirit, it is the ontological justification in divine adoption, pledge of eternal life (Rom. 5-8). In Pauline style, life in Christ is identified with life "in the spirit." Hence the continuous exhortation to live according to the spirit and to flee the life of the flesh from which the baptized have been "washed, sanctified, justified" (I Cor. 6:11). As in Johannine pneumatology, in St. Paul the spirit is in intimate relationship with life; it is the source of life; "we must not live according to the flesh, because if you live according to the flesh, death; but if you put to death through the spirit the works of the body (Vulg.: 'flesh'), you will live" (Rom. 8:12-13). The vitality of the spirit will be communicated in the final resurrection also to the body of the faithful (I Cor. 15:44), who are with Christ one body and one spirit (Eph. 4:4).
Men are therefore divided into two categories: the carnal, the spiritual. "Those who live according to the flesh (κατὰ σάρκα) tend toward the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the spirit (κατὰ πνεῦμα) tend toward the things of the spirit; the impulse of the flesh is death, whereas the impulse of the spirit is life and peace" (Rom. 8:5-6). The irreducible antagonism between flesh and spirit is also described by Gal. 5:16-17 ("the flesh has desires opposed to those of the spirit," and vice versa); 6:8. With the flesh are connected the Mosaic law with the "letter that kills" (II Cor. 3:6), Judaism and its external circumcision (Rom. 2:29; Gal. 4:20), sin, death; with the spirit, faith in Christ, holiness, life. The spirit is opposed, consequently, to the natural life of the flesh, the ψυχή, and St. Paul contrasts the "animal" man (ψυχικός) with the "spiritual" man (πνευματικός); the first follows "the wisdom of this age," the second "the mysterious wisdom of God" (I Cor. 2:10-3:3).
The contrast between Judaism and Christianity is summarized in II Cor. 3:17: the Mosaic law ("letter") is servitude that leads to death, while Christianity is "spirit," that is, freedom (from the Mosaic veil), which leads to life. Therefore one must know nothing, not even Christ, according to the flesh (II Cor. 5:16; J. Dupont [v. bibl.], pp. 180-86). The "letter-spirit" antinomy (Rom. 2:27-29; 7:6; II Cor. 3:6, 7, 17) is transposed to worship "in spirit" as opposed to external Jewish worship (Io. 4:24).
Among the ancient Greek thinkers, especially the Stoics, πνεῦμα (warm, fiery breath) has four fundamental meanings: divine, psychic, divinatory, dynamic. a) It is the immanent divinity, which is identified with the soul of the world. b) It is the vital principle of animals and the hegemonikón of the human soul (in Seneca the spiritus sacer that designates the rational faculty, like the δαίμων of Posidonius, is considered a particle of the divine breath that pervades the cosmos). c) It is the inspiration of the prophets, connected by Chrysippus, Posidonius, and Plutarch with the breath that rises from the earth. d) It is a divine force that communicates itself to man in order to direct his life and to make him perform actions that surpass his natural power. This last meaning rises in Wis. and Philo to designate a transcendent reality, a divine gift, which in the revelation of the New Testament, especially in St. Paul, ascends to a participation in the divine life in the intellect and the will. Christianity, flanked by the Platonism represented by Wis. and Philo down to Origen and St. Augustine, was the principal factor in the evolution of ancient pneumatology in the purest spiritualistic sense, because it applied the term πνεῦμα to the transcendent divinity and to the immortal soul. Wrongly does H. Leisegang (Pneuma Hagiom, Leipzig 1922, pp. 5, 32 ff.) affirm that the pneumatology of Luke and Paul is of Hellenistic origin, based principally on the πνεῦμα προφητικόν of Philo and the πνεῦμα μαντικόν of Plutarch. Unlike the Stoic and Neoplatonic conception, the New Testament πνεῦμα transcends the material world, to which it is in fact totally opposed in order to express a conceptual category previously unknown: the supernatural in the moral overcoming of infirm nature.
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Antonino Romeo