Gnostic Enslavement of Good Soul in Bad Body
A key doctrine of the ancient Gnostics was that the human soul is imprisoned in a material body that is hostile, negative, degraded. This concept is an exaggeration of an idea prevalent in Greek thought, specifically Plato, that the soul, the spiritual is alien to the body, the material. Accordingly, the Gnostics detached sexuality from the soul, alternating between an absolute, puritanical celibacy and an antinomian (respecting of no law) license alleged to leave the inner soul untouched.
Escape of Soul from Body: Buddhism and Shakers
This theme runs more broadly through the history of spirituality as a perennial temptation: the compulsion of the spirit to flee, contemptuously, from the body. Buddhism finds a path to enlightenment (not salvation, certainly not of the body) but an escape from the corporeal as "illusionary." So, through meditation one is relieved of the false consciousness of the unenlightened, suffering, embodied self and liberated into a condition that is vague and illusive but certainly free of the vulnerabilities of the body. The Shakers, influenced by the negative, crude sexual experiences of founder Ann Lee in her marriage, renounced sex altogether, pledging lifelong celibacy as a path to spiritual wellness.
Descartes: Intellect and Certainty Independent of the Suspected Body
The father of modern thought, Descartes, started from a posture of absolute suspicion of the body, the physical and specifically the feminine/maternal, to construct a logically perfect, utterly abstract, "hyper-masculine," certitude in thought. Clearly suffering from a disconnect from and hostility to the feminine (see "Flight from Woman" by Karl Stern) he isolated himself from sensation, relationships, and connections to create from his own isolate thought a sterile certainty. We see here the origin of the entirety of modern philosophy, Kant through Hegel and so on, in a pathology of suspicion and isolation. We see here that modernity is pure, absolute, despairing individualism. And so Descartes retrieves the Gnostic self: a soul detesting and fleeing from the natural, material, corporeal as hostile, deceptive, evil.
Transgender: Gnostic Soul
"A woman's soul in a man's body" is what we hear in transgender theory. This is pure Gnosticism: the soul is entrapped in a hostile body. The true, inner self, is oppressed by a body that is random and oppressive and must be reshaped, engineered by the disembodied subject. Here is the Gnostic heart of modernity: the subject/object antagonism. The body is extrinsic to, essentially detached from the soul; it is void of interior meaning or dignity; it is at best neutral clay to be formed coercively and at worst a hostile force to be overcome, chemically or surgically.
The interior subject, technologically, controls, designs, reshapes all things physical, particularly the human body and quintessentially the female form. The key that opened this Frankenstein-like door was the contraceptive pill. Technologically, this tore fertility from sexuality and both of them from marriage and family. The natural, nature, natality (birth) was replaced by the artificial, the technological. Next came the entire monstrosity of "reproductive" technologies: in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, sperm banks, and experimentation on embryos. The organic, generative-gendered-generous, created is displaced by the artificial, "reproduced," engineered.
Contempt for the Body
Gnostic disgust with the human body manifests in a range of modern phenomena: abortion, pornography as objectification, self-destructive eating disorders, rejection of the body as given in obsession with an idealized image of beauty-fitness-health-idealized, plastic surgery, fear of aging, pregnancy reconfigured as disease, maternity/paternity displaced as marginal hobbies deferential to the prioritized production/consumption, rituals for the dead made efficient and economical by cremation, and childbirth itself suspected as toxic for the planet. Concern for the environment itself, as in global warming, often draws not from a creaturely gratitude and reception but from a secular, anxious, lonely, joyless impulse to control. Detached from the Creator, the source of nature and reality, the environmental crusade becomes joyless, despairing and controlling, mirroring the technology of disrespect that provoked it.
Gnostic Universe: Uncreated, Lonely, Despairing, Sterile
In short, the human subject is reduced to an isolated ghost, trapped in an oppressive body and a meaningless material universe, Godless. There is no Creator and therefore no creation; no reception or gratitude or hope; little profound companionship. The human subject lives in a universe without essential logos, meaning, beauty, truth or goodness. It is abandoned to "choice" in a world that itself offers no objective, value laden reality to receive. It is a posture of permanent anxiety and eventual despair.
Catholic View of Body/Soul
The human person is created as a body/soul composite: they are united intrinsically to each other; distinct but not separate; they define and order each other, interiorly, harmoniously, as a single unity.
In this they follow Aristotle in his more biological, "hylomorphic" understanding of the soul as the form of the body, not as a separate, even alien occupant of a temporary shelter. So, all things have interior forms: animals, vegetables, and even artwork is material informed by the form imagined by the artist. In harmonious union, the body and soul mutually indwell each other, the one visible and the other invisible, the one material the other spiritual, in the unified human person as embodied spirit.
Even more important is the Scriptural, Old Testament understanding of the person as a unity of flesh and spirit, without the Platonic-Gnostic separation of body and soul. In the earlier books there is little evidence of life after death. There emerged, however, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body which we know was accepted by the Pharisees and rejected by the temple Sadducees. On this Jesus is a Pharisee.
There was also, however, in the course of time, a Platonic, but not Gnostic, influence in the belief of the immortality of the soul. While the body dies and corrupts, the soul (this logic indicates) as destined for eternal life with God, must be created for immortality. So the soul lives after death.
But Scripture, sympathetic to Aristotle, clearly sees the soul-body unity in the human person. And so our doctrine has it that each person is destined, eventually, for the resurrection of the body, a new and glorified body-soul union, at the end time, already actual in Jesus and Mary, but quite mysterious for us. We are then, in the words of Christopher West: angimals, both angels (in immortal soul) and animals (in perishable but eventually glorified) flesh.
Which is more accurate: I am my body? or: I have a body? The first, of course affirms the unity of the two but obscures the distinction and the crucial immortality of the soul and tends to materialism. The second upholds both the distinction and the immortality of the soul but compromises the unity, indicating a separation of the two and a propensity to angelism, Platonism and possibly Gnosticism. The Catholic answer is, of course: both: I am my body which is intrinsic, not extrinsic, is essential, not accidental to who I am. But I also have a body as I am an immortal soul, in union with the body but distinct and capable (somehow...in God's mysterious plan) of existence beyond the body.
Every person is an utterly unique and infinitely valued masterpiece of body and flesh, the two mutually infusing each other in a perfect "marriage." Even more, the person is destined for union with God and so the body itself is truly a Temple of the Holy Spirit. And so, while this specific, contingent, temporary body is mortal, my entire person, specifically my soul, will live forever as a glorified body. And so, each human body is itself sacred, precious, illuminated with intrinsic meaning, truth, beauty, goodness, identity and destiny. Here we have no soul trapped in a hostile body; no female spirit in hostile male flesh.
Creation: Natural World as Iconic and Sacramental
The entire material universe comes from the Creator's loving hands as expressing, in finite always defined ways, the Beauty-Goodness-Truth of the diversity-in-unity of the Trinity of infinite persons. Every interior has an interior. Every existent, every reality, every thing-vegetable-animal-human carries intrinsic identity, dignity, value. Each images the Trinity upon whom it depends in its contingency, finitude, and neither-necessary-nor-random gratuity.
In the Catholic world there is a love affair between spirit and flesh, between soul and body: are distinct but not separate as they desire each other to be full; they indwell each other in harmonious communion; the spirit craves flesh to exult itself; the flesh longs to be indwelt to become and express meaning.
And so the physical becomes iconic: transparent of the eternal. The material becomes sacramental, signifying the transcendent and effecting what it signifies; the natural is revered, cherished and protected, as it is transformed into the culture as meaningful-true-good-beautiful and the spiritual as revelatory of the heavenly and the divine.
And so, before the created the creature is not first chosing, active and engineering. First it is receptive, grateful, reverent and adoring. Within that prior creaturely passivity, the human person responds, participates and creates in an agency that remains grateful and worshipful.
Conclusion
The contrast could hardly be more sharp:
The Gnostic, progressive, "choosing," Self is sovereign, lonely, anxious, despairing in a hostile body and material world.
The Catholic, created self is little, received, grateful, collegial, happy in the marriage of spirit and flesh (notwithstanding the wounds of sin), exhuberant with joy and hope, admiring of the "Given," adoring of the Great Giver, and a collaborative participant in the ongoing creation of the Good-True-Beautiful.
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