God Is Not a Body

I know that some will try to argue that even our own Scriptures say God is a body, because in the writings of Moses they find it said that “our God is a consuming fire,” and in the Gospel of John that “God is a Spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” Fire and spirit, on their view, can be nothing but a body. Now I would like to ask these people what they make of the passage where it is declared that God is light. John writes in his letter, “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” He truly is that light which lights up the whole understanding of those who are able to receive truth, as the thirty-sixth Psalm says: “In your light we will see light.” [a]

For what other light of God could be named — a light “in which anyone sees light” — except a working of God, by which a person is given light and either sees the truth of everything through and through or comes to know God himself, who is called the truth? That is what “In your light we will see light” means: in your Word and Wisdom, who is your Son — in him we will see you, the Father. And because he is called light, are we to suppose he bears any resemblance to the light of the sun? How could there be the slightest ground for imagining that from that bodily light anyone could get the cause of knowledge and come to understand the truth?

If, then, they accept what we have said about the nature of light, which reason itself has demonstrated, and admit that God cannot be understood to be a body in the way light is, the same reasoning will hold for the phrase “a consuming fire.” If God is fire, what is it that he consumes? Are we to think he consumes material stuff — wood, or hay, or straw? And what is there in that worthy of the glory of God, a fire burning up fuel of that kind? Let us consider instead that God really does consume and utterly destroy: he consumes evil thoughts, wicked deeds, and sinful cravings when they find their way into the minds of believers. He makes his home, together with his Son, in the souls that are able to receive his word and wisdom — as he himself declared: “I and the Father will come, and we will make our home with him.” And once all their vices and passions have been consumed, he makes them a holy temple, worthy of himself. [d]

As for those who think God is a body because of the words “God is a Spirit,” I think the answer runs like this. When sacred Scripture wants to point to something opposed to this thick, solid body of ours, it is in the habit of calling it spirit — as in the words, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” There can be no doubt that “letter” there means bodily things and “spirit” means things of the mind, which we also call spiritual. The apostle says as well, “To this day, when Moses is read, the veil lies over their heart; but when it turns to the Lord, the veil will be taken away. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

For as long as a person has not turned to a spiritual understanding, a veil lies over his heart, and it is by that veil — that is, by a coarse understanding — that Scripture itself is said, or thought, to be covered. This is the meaning of the veil laid over Moses’ face when he spoke to the people, that is, when the law was read aloud in public. But if we turn to the Lord, where the word of God also is, and where the Holy Spirit uncovers spiritual knowledge, then the veil is taken away, and with uncovered face we will see the glory of the Lord in the holy Scriptures.

And since many of God’s holy people share in the Holy Spirit, he cannot be understood to be a body — as though he were divided into bodily parts and each of God’s holy people took a piece. He is plainly a power that makes holy, and all those are said to have a share in him who have deserved to be made holy by his grace. To make what we are saying easier to follow, let me take an illustration from something quite unlike it. Many people take a share in the science, or art, of medicine. Are we therefore to suppose that they take to themselves particles of some body called medicine, set out in front of them, and share in it that way? Or should we rather understand that anyone who comes with a quick, trained mind to grasp the art and the discipline itself may be said to share in the art of healing? [e]

These are not to be taken as altogether parallel cases, medicine and the Holy Spirit; the comparison has been brought in only to establish this much — that something many people have a share in need not for that reason be considered a body. For the Holy Spirit differs widely from a method or science of medicine, in that the Holy Spirit is a being of mind, and exists in his own right, in a way of his own, while medicine is nothing of the kind.

But we must move on to the words of the Gospel itself, where it is declared that “God is a Spirit,” and show how that is to be understood in line with what we have said. Let us ask on what occasion the Savior spoke these words, to whom he spoke them, and what was under discussion. We find beyond any doubt that he said them to the Samaritan woman, who thought, as the Samaritans did, that God ought to be worshiped on Mount Gerizim; it was to her that he said, “God is a Spirit.” For the Samaritan woman, taking him for a Jew, was asking him whether God ought to be worshiped in Jerusalem or on this mountain. Her words were: “All our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you say that Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship.” So to this opinion of the Samaritan woman — who imagined that God was worshiped more rightly or less rightly according to the privileges of one place or another, either by the Jews in Jerusalem or by the Samaritans on Mount Gerizim — the Savior answered that anyone who means to follow the Lord must lay aside all preference for particular places, and he put it this way: “The hour is coming when the true worshipers will worship the Father neither in Jerusalem nor on this mountain. God is a Spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” [g]

And notice how logically he joined the spirit and the truth together. He called God a Spirit in order to mark him off from bodies, and he named him the truth in order to mark him off from a shadow or an image. For those who worshiped in Jerusalem were worshiping God neither in truth nor in spirit: they were in subjection to the shadow, the image, of heavenly things — and it was the same with those who worshiped on Mount Gerizim.

Having now refuted, as well as we could, every notion that would have us think of God as in any degree bodily, we go on to say that, strictly speaking, God is beyond our grasp and beyond all measuring. For whatever knowledge of God we are able to reach, whether by perception or by reflection, we must of necessity believe that he is by many degrees far better than what we perceive him to be. Suppose we saw someone who could not bear a spark of light or the flame of a very small lamp, and we wanted to acquaint him with the brightness and splendor of the sun. Since his sight could take in no more light than that, would we not have to tell him that the splendor of the sun is better and more glorious than all the light he has seen, beyond anything he can say or reckon? [h]

In the same way our understanding, shut in by the chains of flesh and blood and made duller and blunter by its share in such material stuff, scarcely holds the place of a spark or a lamp when it tries to examine and see things that are not bodies — even though, compared with our bodily nature, it is reckoned far superior. And among all beings of mind, that is, all beings that are not bodies, what is so far above everything else — so far above that it cannot be said or reckoned — as God, whose nature cannot be grasped or seen by the power of any human understanding, even the purest and brightest?

It will not seem absurd if we use another comparison to make the matter clearer. Our eyes often cannot look at the nature of light itself — that is, at the substance of the sun; but when we see its brightness, or its rays pouring in, perhaps through windows or through some small opening made to let light in, we can work out how great the supply and the source of that bodily light must be. In the same way the works of divine providence and the plan of this whole world are a kind of ray, as it were, of the nature of God, compared with his real substance and being. So, since our understanding is unable of itself to see God himself as he is, it comes to know the Father of the world from the beauty of his works and the loveliness of the things he has made. [i]

God, then, is not to be thought of as being either a body or as existing in a body, but as a nature of pure mind with no parts, admitting within himself no addition of any kind; so that he cannot be believed to have a greater and a lesser within him, but is in every part a Monad and, so to speak, a Henad, and is the mind and the source from which every nature of mind, every mind, takes its beginning. But a mind, for its movements or its work, needs no physical space, no measurable size, no bodily shape, no color, none of the other things that belong to body and matter. And so that nature which is simple and wholly mind can admit no delay or hesitation in its movements or its work; otherwise the simplicity of the divine nature would seem to be fenced in, or in some degree hampered, by such additions, and what is the beginning of all things would be found to be composite and made of different parts, and what ought to be free of any mixture with body — being, so to speak, the one sole kind of divinity — would prove to be, instead of one thing, many.

That the mind does not need space in order to carry on the movements proper to it is certain from watching our own mind. If the mind stays within its own limits and takes no harm from anything, a change of situation will never hold it back from doing its work; nor, on the other hand, does it gain any addition or increase of quickness from the nature of particular places. And here, if someone were to object that people at sea, tossed by the waves, have noticeably less vigor of mind than they usually have on land, we are to understand that this comes not from the change of situation but from the shaking and upset of the body the mind is joined to. For it seems to be against nature, as it were, for a human body to live at sea; and for that reason, thrown out of balance in its own way, the body takes up its mental work sloppily and unevenly and performs the acts of the intellect with a duller edge — as much so as people on land who are laid flat by a fever.

In their case it is certain that if the mind does not do its work as well as before, because illness has struck, the blame is to be laid not on the place but on the sickness of the body: the body has been disturbed and disordered, and so it renders the mind its customary services under conditions that are anything but the familiar and natural ones. For we human beings are living creatures made of body and soul joined together, and only in that way was it possible for us to live on the earth. But God, who is the beginning of all things, is not to be regarded as made up of parts — otherwise there might be found to exist elements older than the beginning itself, out of which everything composite, whatever it may be, is put together.

Nor does the mind need bodily size in order to perform any act or movement, the way the eye widens when it gazes at larger objects and is pressed together and narrowed in order to see smaller ones. What the mind needs is size of a mental kind, because it grows the way intelligence grows, not the way a body grows. The mind is not enlarged along with the body by bodily additions up to the twentieth or thirtieth year of life; rather, the intellect is sharpened by exercises of learning, the powers planted in it for the work of understanding are called out, and it is made capable of greater mental effort — not increased by bodily additions, but carefully polished by learned exercises. But it cannot take these in straight from boyhood, or from birth, because the framework of limbs which the mind uses as its instruments for exercising itself is weak and feeble, and unable to bear the weight of the mind’s own work or to show any capacity for training.

If there are any now who think that the mind itself, the soul, is a body, I wish they would tell me by way of answer how it takes in reasoning and statements about matters of such importance — matters so difficult and so fine-drawn. Where does it get the power of memory? Where does the contemplation of things that cannot be seen come from? How does a body possess the ability to understand things that are not bodies? How does a bodily nature look into the workings of the various arts and consider the reasons of things? How, too, is it able to perceive and understand divine truths, which plainly are not bodily? [k]

Unless, of course, someone happens to be of the opinion that, just as the bodily shape and form of the ears or the eyes contributes something to hearing and to sight, and just as the individual members God formed have some fitness, from the very quality of their shape, for the purpose they were naturally appointed to, so the shape of the soul or mind is to be understood as made on purpose and by design for perceiving and understanding particular things and for being set in motion by the movements of life. I do not see, however, who will be able to describe or state what the color of the mind is, considered as mind and acting as a being of understanding.

Further, to confirm and explain what we have already said about the mind or soul — that it is better than the whole of bodily nature — these remarks may be added. Under every bodily sense there lies a particular kind of perceptible thing on which that sense exerts itself. For example, colors, shape, and size lie under sight; voices and sound under hearing; smells, good or bad, under the sense of smell; flavors under taste; heat or cold, hardness or softness, roughness or smoothness under touch. Now among the senses listed above, it is plain to everyone that the sense of the mind is by far the best.

How, then, should it not appear absurd that under the senses which are inferior there should be things placed for them to exert their powers upon, but that under this power which is far better than any other — the sense of the mind — there should be nothing at all of the nature of a real thing, and that a power belonging to mind should be an accident, something that merely follows upon bodies? Those who assert this no doubt run down the better substance within themselves; indeed, in doing it they even do wrong to God himself, when they imagine that he may be understood by way of a bodily nature, so that on their view he is a body, and something that may be understood or perceived by means of a body. And they are unwilling to have it understood that the mind bears a certain kinship to God, and is itself God’s image in the realm of mind, and that through this it may come to some knowledge of the nature of divinity — especially if it has been purified and separated from bodily matter.