God creates man’s body from the earth
and then into the body He breathes the soul. The Bible does not discuss any
span of time between these events. If there was an interval, then there was a
creature that had a human body and did not have a human soul.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa speaks about the
difference in the genesis of body and the genesis of soul in man: God created internal man and formed the external man. To form means to use already created
matter. When making the human body God used some pre-existing material, whereas
when creating the internal man, i.e. the human soul, God created it. It was an
entirely new act that had never happened before.
What was that material God used to make
a human body? What is that earth we are talking about? We will not find the answer
in the Bible because in the Bible, the earth is everything coming from the
ground. The same can be said about the human body, that it is earth; it came
from the ground and will return to the ground. We cannot answer unambiguously
what was the level of internal structure of the earth, the matter which was
touched by God in order to transform it into the human body. As soon as it is
possible to call the human body “earth,” then we can assume the word “earth” in
the biblical story of the creation of man meant a living matter and not some
chunk of clay. It was the earth transformed by the God’s creative act.
God touches previously blessed matter
once again and man receives a special blessing. He touches a previously touched
matter and we have an anthropomorphous creature. We cannot call that creature a
man yet because the human body without a soul is not a man yet, but in a
literal sense, an anthropomorphous humanoid creature.
Bishop Theophan
the Recluse says: “This body — what was it? Some clay
figurine of the grey-hen or a live body? It was a live body, an animal
that looked like a man with the animal soul, and then the Lord breathed in it
His breath...” First a human-like animal creature was created and afterwards it
was endowed with mind. This idea of Bishop Theophan
is not accidental; he would return to it again and again in his anthropological
constructions, contending that man has in himself all other levels of life. For
example he writes: “God’s creatures are so built that the higher classes
contain in them forces of the lower classes and in addition have its own forces
attached to its class specifically.” This is a quite normal and widespread
dialectic. Bishop Theophan concludes that man has an
animal life and animal soul. He refers to the venerable Anthony the Great.
“...According to St. Anthony,” writes Bishop Theophan, “our
soul is not of the same class as an animal’s. What we differ in is mind, which
I call spirit.”
Starting with Descartes, European
thought separates the man and the animal completely. Aristotle, early Church
fathers, and even the Bible itself hold that all the God’s creatures have some
relation: the animals have a soul but the soul is without mind. It is possible
that this was the type of wordless “clay” into which God later breathed His
spirit.
“And
The Lord our God created man from the dust of the
ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7).
The meaning of this text is not so obvious as it first
seems. If we look closer at the literal meaning we read that God breathes the
breath of life not into the face but into the nostrils of man.
According to the Hebraic text of the
Scriptures The Lord “breathed into man breaths of
lives” (nishmat haiiim).
Man has several levels of life in him:
physical, animal, psychic, God-like, spiritual. Bishop Theophan
says that there are five levels, sides or “grades” of life in man: bodily,
emotional-bodily, emotional, spiritual-emotional and spiritual. He explains it
as follows: “Five tiers, but the image (persona) is one, and this one face
lives one and another and a third life...” A Christian follower, while carrying
in himself these five tiers of life, should learn how to be in charge of them
and handle them in a harmonious way, so that the lower tiers' sounds would not
overcome those of higher tiers. This is the task of the ascetics: to learn how
to collect your soul in such a manner that it would sound as a
well-coordinated, unified symphony, whose highest notes are not muted by the
lower.
To summarize
this section, the biblical teaching about man affirms that man in his spiritual
nature profoundly differs from all other earthly creatures, and is incomparably
more perfect and perfectable than they, being himself
made in the image and likeness of God. Man is also the most perfect creation of
God in his bodily nature, the crowning achievement of all earthly creation. In
both his bodily and spiritual/moral nature, man is created in the most perfect
aspect, as the purest intellectual/moral personality. According to his designation,
man was created to live forever — not because his nature was immortal, but
because God gave him access to the Tree of Life.