Man is an embodied spirit

By: Marilouise Claire B. Ty

Grade 11-Bl. Mary Bagnesi

Man is created by God to be unique and to possess a soul wherein this soul is enclosed
inside a shell like shield called the body; which is the external part of a human person.
Man was born with the highest intellect of the living things here on Earth therefore allowing
us to enrich our spirit with the likeness of God; at which is our purpose that we are born in
this world.

Man is an embodied spirit. All of us are spirits, naturally- not in the supernatural sense.
From the verb “embody” it is correlated to the infamous postulate “Man is created in the
image and likeness of God” therefore it is within us that we are embodying the virtues of
God and it is up to us to spread what God is. Embodied spirit is the living, animating core
within each of us, the driving force behind all that we think, say and do. Meaning that, each
of us has an embodied spirit therefore there is something controlling our movements
besides the systematic part of our body which are the internal organs but also the mind-
the embodied spirit that we have.

“Every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.” What we feel isn’t
always open, this doesn’t mean that every sensation, every emotion that we feel is
published and made known to everyone. This isn’t really that bad because there is still
some privacy in ourselves. We can’t let everyone see through our emotions because that
would make us too vulnerable and if someone does invade our privacy that is supposedly
just placed in the cells of our minds, it is crossing boundaries. We can know someone’s
experiences; we can know what they felt at those times, but we can never feel the same
feeling and go through the same whole scenario and pass through that memory with our
own physical body because we are never that person. Even in the case of families, we are
all unique and we have ourselves to which we call ‘island universes’.

An embodied spirit is what we also call as the soul. The soul wherein we shape it as we
grow and how we have the ‘expression’; how we will express our soul. We have the
natural moral law wherein we have our own freedom but this freedom is enclosed in the
moral law, “Do good avoid evil” that says we can do whatever we want as long as it is
morally good. We do evil based on our desires, but naturally, we humans have always
leaned on to the good and moral. Us as human with souls unlike those of the material
souls of animals, we have the strength to teach, spread, listen, and read and a lot of other
actions that only our order can do.

As St. Thomas Aquinas have said, his own total vision of man would be a “embodied spirit”
wherein its intellectual nature is joined In natural unity with a material body saying that this
unity is man as a rational animal with the highest of intellect but a body capable of doing
physical extremities.