I watched a very interesting talk by a Trappist monk, Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO, which you can watch here. I highly recommend it. He is a man whose wisdom outstrips my own (and whose wisdom is born of that genius of monasticism–silent contemplation). But the thread I want to take up here is his notion of the Mystical Body of Christ.
The notion of the Mystical Body comes by way of Christ, ensconced in Roman Catholic doctrine by Pius XII in his encyclical Mystici Corpus Christi. In it, the Holy Father contends that
14. That the Church is a body is frequently asserted in the Sacred Scriptures. “Christ,” says the Apostle, “is the Head of the Body of the Church.”[13] If the Church is a body, it must be an unbroken unity, according to those words of Paul: “Though many we are one body in Christ.”[14] But it is not enough that the Body of the Church should be an unbroken unity; it must also be something definite and perceptible to the senses as Our predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII, in his Encyclical Satis Cognitum asserts: “the Church is visible because she is a body.[15] Hence they err in a matter of divine truth, who imagine the Church to be invisible, intangible, a something merely “pneumatological” as they say, by which many Christian communities, though they differ from each other in their profession of faith, are untied by an invisible bond.
15. But a body calls also for a multiplicity of members, which are linked together in such a way as to help one another. And as in the body when one member suffers, all the other members share its pain, and the healthy members come to the assistance of the ailing, so in the Church the individual members do not live for themselves alone, but also help their fellows, and all work in mutual collaboration for the common comfort and for the more perfect building up of the whole Body.
To His Holiness, Pope Pius XII, the mystical body is the collection of individuals united by baptismal promises that constitute the very contours of Christ’s body on Earth. This idea is expressed beautifully in the prayer of St. Teresa of Avila, another great contemplative, when she says that “Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours….” So the idea is that we come together as Church to form the mystical body of Christ.
But Fr. Keating OCSO calls us to think about the Mystical Body of Christ more radically. There’s a passage in the catechism that orients us to this line of thinking. “It is in the Church that Christ fulfills and reveals his own mystery as part of God’s plan: ‘to unite all things in him” (CCC 772). This last line is from Ephesians 1:9-10, where St. Paul writes that “For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” So the Catechism already takes the thinking on the Mystical Body even further: the divine purpose is not to unite all humans into one body, but all things in heaven and on earth.
This is where Fr. Keating picks up. He proposes that, far from a community of believers, the Mystical Body of Christ implies a oneness of all being united in the oneness of God. I’ve transcribed a bit of his interview, but I suggest you watch the whole thing (in large part because he is a gifted speaker and an even more gifted thinker):
It is not just our spirit that is being transformed, but the whole of our human nature, including our social side. So our happiness or our oneness is somewhat dependent on everybody else being one too. Because the human family is one. It is one species. What happens to you you happens to me. My virtues are yours, or I should say my vices are yours and your virtues are mine (laughter). Everything is held in common. And everybody is equal. There is a good deal of evidence, certainly the Buddhist thing, that all living creatures are one. That everything is our brother, our sister, or us. So this commonality is totally against his common idea of individual that penetrates all of Western culture and probably all the other cultures as they become Westernized too. So what does that mean? It means that since the Enlightenment, which itself was a reaction to over-dependence on communities, and roles, and groups, that it was necessary to overcome that. But now it’s gone so far that is hard for people to feel their solidarity or oneness with others and without that we don’t perceive the Oneness of God in everybody else. It’s not just a private project and transformation, however wonderful and however it contributes to the transformation of others, still remains incomplete. In Christianity this is called the Mystical Body of Christ. Some of the cells are fairly new, fairly immature, or downright damaging, have a virus, or something else. This is a living happening, a living thing, that is going on. But it is an insight not only into the oneness of humans but also into their interrelatedness
Fr. Keating seems to suggest that the Mystical Body of Christ is closer to the Buddhist notion that all living creatures are one, that all life is gathered into the oneness of being which is the oneness of God. And this makes intuitive sense (at least to me). If God is the one creator of the heavens and the earth, all things by their nature must proceed from God and return to God. And so all creation vibrates to the same harmony in the same oneness of God.
This also suggests that our responsibility is to this oneness of creation, to this oneness of God. As Saint Basil wrote in his book On the Holy Spirit,
As a preparation for life after the resurrection, our Lord tells us in the gospel how we should live here and now. He teaches us to peaceable, long-suffering, undefiled by desire for pleasure, and detached from worldly wealth. In this way we can achieve, by our own free choice, the kind of life that will be natural in the world to come (LOTH, Vol II, p. 763).
I’m no theologian, but I am a theorist. And It seems to me that we can draw from this these quips a theory of human action. We are accountable to this oneness of creation. We are are each called to detach ourselves from the pleasures, prides, and desires that destroy or upend the of oneness of God’s creation by freely choosing to instruments in the beatific vision of the oneness of creation. Christ, in his infinite wisdom, has already given us a blueprint for this mode of action in the Beatitudes. It is a radical call to be Christ’s agent on earth, to heal that which has been destroyed by Western modernity. And it is a call to universalism. This is not only to help a Christian or a Jew but to help ALL of God’s creation, regardless of who they are or what they worship. We are all bound together by God’s fiat. And so we are, finally, responsible to one another. And as Jewish philosophy would have it, this responsibility to the other (to God’s creation) is infinite.
God’s peace and love upon you, through Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. Alleluia!
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