Joinery: Body and Soul (Hugh #3)
I’m posting this blog on September 21, the feast day of St Matthew the Evangelist. This picture is from a page in the Lindisfarne Gospels. The Lindisfarne Gospels are a beautiful work of scribal art, the work of several people to carefully assemble a work that might speak the gospel to a range of people, with their different literacies and sensibilities. And I admire this gospel writer in particular for the ways he carefully joined stories and teachings regarding Jesus to speak with the various groups and tendencies of the early christian community as Matthew knew it. It’s a good reminder of the pace at which to take our craft, sometimes feeling our way along in the dark.
I’m in the middle of several little projects, all involve some pretty simple joinery. The table is coming along, and include some mortise and tenon joints, and some rabbet joints to fit the shelf and table legs together. Once they are all fit and glued, this should be a sturdy and stable little table.
I’m also making some toy pounding benches. These would be a project for apprentices and others who want to learn and improve, something to return to, repeat, attempt more complex things from, then return to again. It’s good to keep practicing the basic skills, and not fix our minds on things far beyond us. I’m marking the end joints. Eventually I’ll use a drill and chisel to cut mortises where the pegs will go.
As I read along in Hugh of St Victor, I see him as also engaged in some joinery. With his tools, he is fitting together a picture of the human soul and body, and how this whole composite fits within heaven and earth. As I read along, I began to see how carefully Hugh had planned, marked, and fit this together.
Hugh makes use of tools from a large cabinet of thought and spirit known as ‘neo-platonism.’ It exercised a distinct influence on Christianity from an early age, and various theological writers and prayers have pulled from the neoplatonic tool cabinet in their scholarly efforts in knowing and un-knowing things. Among the ways this appears in Hugh’s work is his division of things into three kinds, and the discussions that are fit and joined into this. There are things that have no beginning and no end, things that have a beginning but no end, and things that have a beginning and an end.
Now you know about the three kinds of things there are!
The human being in fit together body, soul and spirit that s/he exists in relationship to all three kinds of things. Hugh seems to simplify this into two parts, the part that relates to the divine (God, and things like the basic patterns of reality and angels) and the part that exists amidst time and change. The first part has suffered serious damage (original sin), and requires to be restored. The second part changes, grows, matures, ages, suffers injury and weakness, needs to eat, needs medicine, needs comfort. Hugh looks at the human being in two aspects with respect to the whole of the arts.
“Into these things we have digressed somewhat more broadly in order to explain how man, in that part in which he partakes of change, is likewise subject to necessity, whereas in that in which he is immortal, he is related to divinity. From this it can be inferred, as said above, that the intention of all human actions is resolved in a common objective: either to restore in us the likeness of the divine image or to take thought of the necessity of this life, which, the more easily it can suffer harm from those things which work to its disadvantage, the more does it require to be cherished and conserved.” (Book 1, Ch.7)
Hugh views all of human activity as originating in the effort to remedy both of these. Certain arts aid the human to restore their inner capacity for relationship to the divine. These include contemplative activities of soul and body that renew and build our senses of such things as beauty and goodness. The human being is also involved in things of time, things which have beginnings and endings, and undergo change. We are born, we live, and we die. We do so in bodies. Those arts that Hugh calls ‘mechanical’ (more in next few blog posts) go to the care and strengthening of human bodies that change and suffer weakness in the course of life on earth.
The arts, by which human-kind lives and contemplates, find their origin in the way we have been made by the Creator. Hugh accounts for how we are made with his neo-platonic tools. But the purpose of arts and knowledge is squarely within a spiritual worldview with Christ at the center, guiding the journey toward union with God and the renewal of all things. The arts are not for the domination of nature. They are not for rendering our bodies flawless and immortal, or attaining technologically directed all-knowing-ness, or managerial control of markets and workers. They are the ways we have to love more fully, and live better on earth with our fellow humans and other-than-human creatures.
This may be the real wisdom we need in our age. We are soul-body units on our way to a greater fullness of soul and body, a body and creation we can’t presently imagine. But we can see, feel and care for our present bodies and souls. It is a blessed struggle to incarnate, to let our soul manifest in body, even in this short life.
As we grow in awareness of the wisdom fit within our human frames, we might find within us a sturdier hope that lifts us into wonder, and also a place where we can rest our weakness within God.
By Anonymous - 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica volume 15, "Joinery" article; pages 477 ff. Modified from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41055/41055-h/41055-h.htm#ar152, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92066333