"Man, with respect to his nature, is most truly said to be neither soul without body, nor, on the other hand, body without soul; but is composed of the union of body and soul into one form of the beautiful." (St. Methodios of Olympus).
Man was created both body and soul. The body alone, though it was created first, is not the human being, and though the soul gave life to the body, neither is it alone the human being. Man became a living human being when body and soul were united together. As our holy and God-bearing father Gregory Palamas says:
"When God is said to have made man according to His image, the word man means neither the soul by itself nor the body by itself, but the two together."
From love, God created the body and in love He bestowed upon it the soul as the force of life, that it might dwell in harmony with the body and function by means of the body, bearing not only His likeness and image, but man being himself like a type and image of the life of the Holy Church. For God created not without wisdom, but that His love and salvation might be made manifest.
The soul and the body, then, are not two separate entities; they are together a single psychophysical whole, mutually serving one another and mutually dependent upon one another for life and functions, as our holy father Ephraim the Syrian says:
"Behold how both the soul and the body look and attest to one another: even as the body must have the soul so as to live, so must the soul have the body to see and hear."
And St Anastasios of Sinai informs us likewise that:
"Accordingly, when the soul is separated from the entire body, it no longer is able to operate, because it operates through the members of the body...."
The soul is not the prisoner of the body, rather the two were created and composed together in a mutual life, each one harmoniously deriving functions and qualities of existence from the other. If the soul departs the body, the body dies. And the soul, when separated from the body is no longer able to function in any
sensual, psychophysical manner, as our holy and God-bearing father Justin the Martyr says:
"For as in the case of a yoke of oxen, if one or other is loosed from the yoke, neither of them can effect anything, if they be unyoked from their communion....For what is man but the rational animal composed of body and soul? Is the soul by itself man? No; but [only] the soul of a man. Would the body be called man? No; but it is called the body of a man....then neither of these is by itself man, but that which is made up of the two together is called man ...."
Thus, the soul and body mutually depend upon, fulfil and provide life and functions to one another. It is sheer carelessness and a great error to misrepresent certain passages of Apostle Paul, using them out of context to establish an idea of a direct conflict between body and soul, and a need for the soul to be liberated from the body. When, for example, the Apostle says, "O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death," he is referring not to the physical body, but to the power of sin lodged parasitically in the "flesh." To understand the Orthodox Christian anthropology in this respect, one must refer to the Scripture and understand Apostle Paul's teachings, not according to the idea and conceptions of pagan Greece, which made a sharp distinction between body and soul, but rather to the uniform concepts of the entire Old and New Testament in which "body and soul" denote the whole living person, and not at all independent parts of him. The Manicheans held the contrary view, and St Titus of Bostra, in refuting them, observes:
"When the living body is dissolved by death and we should look upon its dust or its bones, or wish to say something about the soul, we say that these things are of a man, but we do not say that they are the man."
And St Photios the Great, refuting Origenism, concurs:
"The name `man', according to the most truthful and natural expression, applies to neither the soul without [its] body, nor to the body without [its] soul, but to that composition of soul and body made into a unique form of beauty. But Origen says that the soul alone is the man, as did Plato."
In both Old Testament Scripture and general Hebrew thought, and in New Testament Scripture and Orthodox Christian thought in general, a living person is consistently regarded as a composite entity of body and soul. Death is an unnatural shattering of this psychophysical entity. As our holy father St Titus of Bostra says:
"But though the soul be immortal [by grace], yet it is not the person, and so the Apostle does not consider [death] to differ in any wise from destruction...."