Life by Flesh

In his contribution to Galatians and Christian Theology, Oliver O’Donovan explores the flesh-Spirit opposition in Paul’s theology. He observes that flesh is associated with the law and with the elements, and glosses:

“A moral law with multiple demands enslaves us. That is the truth of polytheism, explored long ago by the great poets of Greek antiquity, by Homer and the Attic tragedians: a world at odds with itself, its perpetual strife fought out across the field of our human actions, leaving us no scope for self-direction and responsibility. The ordering of worldly norms, a coherence that can authorize human agency, is essential to practical reason. Precisely that coherence is given us through the neighbor who is as ourself, in relation to whom every directive that the world can issue is ordered” (281). By directing toward love of neighbor, the “Spirit supplies the missing meaning and coherence.”

On flesh in particular, O’Donovan suggests that “life according to flesh may be thought of as the conventional life, governed by the perceptions of the unreflective understanding. . . failing to reveal the meaning of things beyond the immediate communications of the senses.” Thus, the flesh is governed by “passions,” the “immediate emotional responses to stimuli.” With law, flesh “stands for instinctive reactions to successive and unconnected demands, not only of the body’s needs but also of the emulative strife of society, the opaque symbolism of peremptory tradition, the chilling unknowns of nature, and the ominously threatening future” (283).

To deal with ethics under the rubric of flesh v. Spirit is also to abandon any natural ethics because the opposition projects “across the field of moral life a narrative of liberation,” liberation precisely from conventional morality, from the common sense of survival and of social norms. O’Donovan argues that “ethics was not given complete and entire in the created order, only to be worked out and applied in varying circumstances; instead, ethics had to come to fulfillment in history, not, as in the dreary historicism of modernity, through an immanent dynamics of progress, but through the saving intervention of God in his Son” (283-4).