Colloquia Maruliana ..., Vol. 12 , 2003.
Original scientific paper
Body and Senses: a Contribution to Marulić's Anthropology
Branko Jozić
orcid.org/0000-0003-2490-148X
; Marulianum, Split
Abstract
Someone’s experience of the world and of his own being is marked by a dichotomy, antagonism even, between body and spirit. The writing of Marko Marulić, widely known as a moral and didactic writer, could not have sidestepped this relationship. We do not, it is true, find him in any special work in which, like some of the medieval or Humanist writers, he spoke de dignitate / miseria conditionis humanae. However, his whole oeuvre is actually permeated with this topic. In his Second Epistle to Katarina Obirtića, he deals with the five senses; in his Dialogue on Hercules who was surpassed by the worshippers of Christ, he opposes to the corporeal heroic deeds of the famous hero the virtuous works of Christians; he dealt with corporeality in more detail in several chapters of Evangelistary, the Institutione, in the 20th Parable and in some of his verses.
He did of course rely on a tradition that reflects a spectrum, ranging from the cult of the body to contempt of it as enemy of the soul. Personally he followed the Pauline/Origen tripartite conception of man: the body derives from Adam, who sinned, and hence it is apt to sin; the spirit, which we received not from Adam but from God aspires to what is dear to God; the soul is between the spirit and the body and in freedom can lean towards body or spirit. Since inner man is created in the shape of God, and since the body, source of imagination and lust, leads him to evil, it is clear that in his vision the body is not at all the better part of man.
For the understanding of Marulić’s attitude to the body it is important to recall the eschatological perspective in which he looks at things and according to which he orders life as a whole: everything quite simply should be directed to-wards and subordinate to the attainment of eternal bliss. For this reason it is necessary to live virtuously, to “model oneself on Christ”.
But while in part of the Christian tradition the body is the ally of the devil, with whom it wars against the soul, in Marulić we do not come upon this kind of radicalism. He does know of the fatal inclinations of the body and calls for it to be restrained, but for him it is vice that is the main enemy, and not the body and its needs. Marulić hence is not an advocate of extreme Encratism, and when he calls for self control, he very clearly states that restraint and abnegation are not ends in themselves. On the contrary, the aim of discipline is freedom (it is not enough to refrain from food, if we do not also refrain from sin; refraining from food and drink has the aim of arriving as soon as possible at that spiritual fast which is acceptable to God, i.e., the relinquishment of vice and the acceptance of virtue).
Marulić’s thinking always has a practical dimension; it is both instructive and inspiring, and wishes to be affective help to human living and thinking in the endeavour to achieve blessedness. According to this goal, the body and the senses do not have to be dangers and stumbling blocks for Marulić, but can also be an opportunity and an aid on the road towards God. For the sensuous perception of the beauty of creation, as in the thinking of St Bonaventure, can be the way to-wards the Creator. This is one more confirmation of the universality of Marulić’s thinking, and its current validity in the eyes of today’s globalisation - and ecology-sensitive readers.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
7977
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2003.
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