What Is a Human Being? The Orthodox View of Body and Soul
Christianity does not view the human person as a soul temporarily trapped inside a disposable body. Scripture presents human beings as embodied creatures made in the image of God, while the early Church consistently defended the goodness of the body against movements that treated matter as inherently inferior. Death separates body and soul, but that separation is not humanity’s final state. The Christian hope is resurrection: the restoration and glorification of the whole person.
More Than a Soul in a Body
What exactly is a human being?
Many people instinctively answer, “a soul that lives inside a body.” There is some truth there: Christianity certainly distinguishes the soul from the body. Jesus can speak of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul (Matthew 10:28).
But that description can become misleading if we imagine the body as merely a container that the “real person” eventually escapes.
Genesis gives us a more integrated picture:
“The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”
— Genesis 2:7
Humanity belongs simultaneously to the material creation and to the rational, spiritual order.
St. Gregory the Theologian described humanity as a creature formed from both the visible and invisible creation. St. John of Damascus similarly called man a kind of “second microcosm”: bodily and spiritual, earthly and heavenly.
The Body Is Part of the Person
The body is not evil.
Genesis repeatedly describes creation as good, culminating in:
“God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.”
— Genesis 1:31
St. Irenaeus strongly defended this point against Gnostic movements that depreciated the material world. For Irenaeus, the complete human being involves the union of body and soul; salvation cannot simply mean throwing away the body God created.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem made the same point when warning Christians not to blame the body itself for sin. The body can become an instrument of sin, but it can also become a “temple of the Holy Spirit,” echoing 1 Corinthians 6:19.
That gives Christianity a very different anthropology from philosophies in which matter itself is the problem.
The problem is not that we have bodies.
The problem is that humanity has become subject to sin, corruption, suffering, and death.
Then What Happens at Death?
Scripture clearly distinguishes soul and body, and Christianity has always confessed that physical death involves their separation.
But separation is precisely why death is an enemy.
Christianity does not celebrate death because the body was worthless all along. Paul calls death “the last enemy” to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26).
The Christian answer to death is therefore not permanent disembodiment.
It is resurrection.
Paul writes that Christ:
“will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body.”
— Philippians 3:21
And in Romans 8:23 Christians await “the redemption of our body.”
St. Irenaeus argued explicitly that because Christ rose bodily, our mortal bodies are also destined to be raised.
What About “Body, Soul, and Spirit”?
Some biblical passages use language such as “spirit and soul and body” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Other passages speak more simply of body and soul.
Orthodox theology has therefore not generally required Christians to imagine three detachable pieces inside a human being.
The important point is simpler: a human person possesses both a bodily and a spiritual dimension, and salvation concerns the entire person.
We were not created as ghosts.
We were created as human beings.
Reflection
Christianity does not promise that one day we will finally escape being human.
It promises something much greater.
Christ became fully human, died, rose bodily, and glorified the human nature He assumed. Our hope is therefore not the abandonment of our humanity but its healing.
The body matters because the human person matters.
And God intends to save the whole person.
Sources
Scripture: Genesis 1:26–31; 2:7; Matthew 10:28; Romans 8:18–23; 1 Corinthians 6:19–20; 15:20–57; Philippians 3:20–21; 1 Thessalonians 5:23.
St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies V.6–7.
St. Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38, §11.
St. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith II.12.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 4, §§22–23, 30–31.
Orthodox Church in America, “Man.”