Post by priest

Mind, body, spirit is an expression used by St. Paul: "May the God of peace himself make you perfectly holy and may you entirely, spirit, soul, and body, be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thess. 5:23).

From a footnote on the same passage: "Another possible translation is, 'May the God of peace himself make you perfectly holy and sanctify your spirit fully, and may both soul and body be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.' In either case, Paul is not offering an anthropological or philosophical analysis of human nature. Rather, he looks to the wholeness of what may be called the supernatural and natural aspects of a person’s service of God."

As for a philosophy of man, man is comprised of body and soul. The body is flesh, the soul is spirit. They are opposed to one another in so far as both have different desires. Since the spirit is the part of man that is most like God, who is pure spirit, it desires contemplation of God. The body, on the other hand, desires its own preservation, e.g. the body craves food to sustain itself. Socrates lamented the fact that he has to interrupt his contemplation to eat or go to the bathroom or sleep. One of these desires is of a higher order. The body is a temporary thing, the soul is eternal, therefore, the desire of the soul is the greater of the two. This is what led the ancients to conclude that the body is evil and the soul good, which is called dualism.

The ancients used to look at the flesh as evil and the soul as good. In the Catholic Church, this was determined to be heretical because everything God creates is good. Our mission in life is to master the flesh through the exercise of virtue and use the things of the earth in so far as they help us attain heaven.