For instance, it was a very special idea of St. Thomas that Man is to be
studied in his whole manhood; that a man is not a man without his body,
just as he is not a man without his soul. A corpse is not a man; but
also a ghost is not a man...St. Thomas stood up stoutly for the fact that a man's body is his
body as his mind is his mind; and that he can only be a balance and
union of the two. Now this is in some ways a naturalistic notion, very
near to the modern respect for material things; a praise of the body
that might be sung by Walt Whitman or justified by D H. Lawrence: a
thing that might be called Humanism or even claimed by Modernism. In
fact, it may be Materialism; but it is the flat contrary of Modernism.
It is bound up, in the modern view, with the most monstrous, the most
material, and therefore the most miraculous of miracles. It is
specially connected with the most startling sort of dogma, which the
Modernist can least accept; the Resurrection of the Body.
-St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox (1932)
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