It has often been said that the human being is a combination of angel and animal, a spirit imprisoned in flesh, a descent of divinity into materiality, charged with the duty of transforming the gross elements of the lower world into the image of God. Ordinarily this has been taken to mean that the animal and fleshly aspect of man is to be changed out of all recognition. Religious ideals of both East and West have envisaged the transformed human animal as something which has surpassed almost every aspect of the material body except perhaps shape, projecting the perfected man as a humanoid form without sensitivity to pain or passion, shriveled and inert in sexuality, free from death and corruption, immune to disease, and even without weight or solidity. At least, something of this kind appears to be the nature of the resurrected and spiritualized body in traditional Christianity, foreshadowed already in the miraculous lives of the saints. Something of the same kind seems in certain forms of Hinduism to be expected of the jivan-mukta, the fully accomplished yogi delivered from material limitations while still manifesting his existence in the world.

It is possible that this is also the physical ideal of our own technological civilization, with its fixed intent of overcoming the limitations of time and space. Skeptical as we may be of achieving such material miracles by the power of prayer, meditation, and sanctity, we are perhaps some distance on the way to attaining them by medical and psychological techniques, bolstered by all the other powers of science. For we seem to look forward as ever to the total subjugation of hard and heavy substance to the airy rapidity of thought, and to the instant obedience of our weak and tender flesh to the bodiless flight of imagination. If science-fiction is any anticipation of the general direction of science, if the scientist here discloses (perhaps under a pseudonym) his secret intentions and dreams, it is obvious that technological man will not be content with exploring the universe at the insufferable crawl of the speed of light. His machines must eventually respond to the infinitely faster speed of thought if we are ever to get much farther out in space than our solar system, not the mention our single little galaxy.

Over against these spiritual and cerebral dreamers there are, and always have been, unashamedly earth-bound souls who deplore this discontent with materiality. One thinks of the perennial pagan, the delightfully animal human who is not ashamed of his body, the sort of person who - at least in his healthier moments - is the natural conservative, the person who wants to say "Yes" to the physical world with all its limitations of time and mortality, space an distance, weight and solidity.

For centuries these two human types have been at war with each other, and one is constantly being pressed - so as to avoid mere mediocrity - to commit oneself to one side or the other, since "he who is not with us is against us, and whosoever does not gather with us scatters." We seem to like our human types to be black or white, and to despise the kind of person who cannot make up his mind between what seem to be absolutely demanding alternatives, but who vacillates indecisively, now to the ideals of spirit and now to the seductions of matter. Presumably this is just what the average and ordinary human being does. Neither the angel in him nor the animal in him can be repressed, and the strength of the two is so evenly balanced that they tend to cancel one another out to produce the common or garden mugwump, who, as the saying goes, has his mug on one side of the fence and his wump on the other. In the presence of those who have thoroughly committed themselves the average mugwump feels uncomfortable and vaguely guilty. Indecision is such an obvious and easily deplored weakness, such a sure butt for contempt by saint and stanist alike. So the poor mugwump simultaneously admires and is horrified by those who seem to have the strength of will to go one way or the other - those who decide to stand at all costs by the domineering and rational spirit, and those who abandon themselves with glee to the intense pleasure-pain of sensuality.

Especially deplorable is the kind of person who might be called the extreme mugwump - the one who has his extremities very far out on both sides of the fence. This is, for example, the common scandal of the saint-sinner, the individual who appears in public as the champion of the spirit, but who is in private some sort of rake. Very often his case is not so simple as that of the mere hypocrite. He is genuinely attracted to both extremes. Not only does social convention compel him to publish one and suppress the other, but most often he is himself horribly torn between the two. He veers between moods of intense holiness and of outrageous licentiousness, suffering between times the most appalling pangs of conscience. The type is, indeed, especially common in clerical and academic circles, just because these vocations attract highly sensitive human beings who feel the lure of both extremes more strongly than others. Only in the artist is this duplicity more or less accepted, perhaps because beauty is the one attribute shared in common by God and the Devil, because devotion to the beautiful, as distinct from the good and the true, seems to make one a human being who is not altogether serious - neither man nor devil but some kind of elf, consigned in the Day of Judgment neither to heaven nor to hell but to the limbo of souls without moral sense. It is thus that for our society the artist is a kind of harmless clown, and entertainer from whom nothing is expected save proficiency in the realm of the irrelevant, since his function is taken to be no more than the decoration of surfaces. For this reason the artist can get away with a private life that would be scandalous for the priest or the professor.

Now all of this raises the question as to whether the proper outcome of man's dual nature ought to be a victory for one side or the other. Catholic theology, for example, stands at least in theory for a marriage of the spirit and the flesh, for, as St. Thomas Aquinas held, divine grace does not obliterate nature but perfects it. But in practice, the perfection of nature has always meant its total submission to the spirit, and it is only quite recently that Catholic Christians like Eric Gill and G. K. Chesterton have been able to carry off a rollicking spiritual materialism. This made this excellent decoys for prospective converts, but note that one was an artist and the other a writer, and neither is in danger of being canonized. For the fact remains that traditional Christianity will put up with the flesh only so long as its demands are extremely moderate and demure, just so long as the cloven hoof of Pan never puts in an appearance. One suspects that this gesture toward nature and materiality is the same sort of "come-on" as the regular-guy priest, admired out of all proportion for little human traits that would be unnoticed in a layman.

It is high time to ask whether it is really any scandal, any deplorable inconsistency, for a human being to be both angel and animal with equal devotion. Is it not possible, in other words, to be the extreme mugwump without inner conflict, to be mystic and sensualist without actual contradiction? It is hard to see how a human being can be anything but a mediocrity on the one hand or a fanatic on the other unless he can give rein to both sides of his nature, avoiding, however, the deceit and degradation which attach themselves to the animal side of our life when it is associated with shame. The philosophy of the out-and-out pagan, the romanticist of nature and the flesh, is by itself enormously superficial - lacking in wonder at disease and death, which are quite as normal as good health, and deficient in that combination of awe and curiosity which urges on the mystic to marvel at the overwhelmingly odd fact of simple is-ness, to stretch his imagination to the furthest limits of time and space, and to explore the inward mystery of his own consciousness. The logical grammarian's opinion that such inquiries are simply meaningless appears to be nothing more than a new variation on the old psychological type that gets the words but never understands the music. On the other hand, the mystic who has no part in the earthiness and allure of nature is sterile rather than pure, an extreme type of cerebrotonic ectomorph, i.e., skinny abstractionist, who lives in a world of ideas without concrete meanings. Furthermore, the philosophy of the pure spiritist, even when he allows that God created nature, can never explain how the good Lord so forgot himself as to make anything so allegedly impure.

It has often been noted that mysticism expresses itself in the language of natural love and that mystics of the Christian tradition have made particular use of the Bible's great love poem, the Song of Songs. Psychologists with a slant to materialism therefore argue that mysticism is nothing but sublimated sexuality and frustrated fleshliness, whereas the spiritists maintain that the love-imagery is nothing but allegory and symbolism never to be taken in its gross and animal sense. But is it not possible that both parties are right and wrong, and that the love of nature and the love of spirit are paths upon a circle which meet at their extremes? Perhaps the meeting is discovered only by those who follow both at once. Such a course seems impossible and inconsistent only if it can be held that love is a matter of choosing between alternatives, if, in other words, love is an exclusive attitude of an exclusive attitude of mind which cleaves to one object and rejects all others. If so, it must be quite other than what is said to be God's own love, "who maketh his sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and sendeth his rain upon the just and the unjust." Love is surely a disposition of the heart which radiates on all sides like light. At the same time, love may choose one object rather than others, not because that object is innately and absolutely preferable, but because the limitations of human energy require concentration for depth of experience. Polygamy, for example, would be all very well if one had unlimited time to devote to each spouse.

But are God and nature, spirit and flesh - like individual persons - mutually exclusive? "He that is unmarried," said St. Paul, "careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife." Yet this is to say that the divine cannot be loved in and through the things of this world, and to deny the saying that "Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me." If the love of God and the love of the world are mutually exclusive, then, on the very premises of theology, God is a finite thing among things - for only finite things exclude one another. God is dethroned and un-godded by being put in opposition to nature and the world, becoming an object instead of the continuum in which we "live and move and have our being."

Not to cherish both the angel and the animal, both the spirit and the flesh, is to renounce the whole interest and greatness of being human, and it is really tragic that those in whom the two natures are equally strong should be made to feel in conflict with themselves. For the saint-sinner and the mystic-sensualist is always the most interesting type of human being because he is the most complete. When the two aspects are seen to be consistent with each other, there is a real sense in which spirit transforms nature: that is to say, the animality of the mystic is always richer, more refined, and more subtly sensuous than the animality of the merely animal man. For to say that man is both god and devil is not to say that spiritually minded people should spend some of their time robbing banks and torturing children. Such violent excesses of passion are bred from the frustration of pursuing either aspect of our nature to the exclusion of the other. They arise when the ruthless idealism of the spirit is unhumanized by the weakness of the flesh, or when the blind desire of the flesh is unenlightened by the wisdom of the spirit - which knows that the exclusive pursuit of pleasure is as frustrating and absurd as the old quest for perpetual motion. The violent, ultrasatanic devil in man is either the repressed Christ or the repressed Pan, the right and the left hands of God, who said to the prophet Isaiah, "I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all these things."

We noted that our society tolerates the full life, the love of both spirit and nature, only in the artist, but just because it does not take him seriously, because it regards him as an entertaining irrelevance. The man of deep spiritual wisdom is also irrelevant to this society, whether entertaining or otherwise. This has not just recently come to be so; it has been so for centuries, because - for centuries - society has consisted precisely of those human beings who are so deluded by the conventions of words and ideas as to believe that there is a real choice between the great opposites of life - between pleasure and pain, good and evil, God and Lucifer, spirit and nature. But what is separable in terms, in words, is not separable in reality - in the solid relationship between the terms. Whoever sees that there is no ultimate choice between these opposites is irrelevant because he cannot really participate in the politician's and the ad-man's illusion that there can be better and better without worse and worse, and that matter can yield indefinitely to the desires of mind without becoming utterly undesirable. It is not so much that there are fixed limits to our skill and technological power as that there are limits to our own perception: that we cannot see the figure without the background, the solid without the space, motion without time, action without resistance, joy without sorrow.

We have only to imagine what would happen if thought and spirit had their way without hindrance, with God's supposed omnipotence to have every wish granted instantaneously. Nothing would any longer be worth wishing for. There is an old fairy tale of a fisherman who once caught a marvelous golden fish. For the fish spoke, promising him that if he would return it to the water he would be granted three wishes. Having released the fish, he went home to his wife to talk over what the wishes should be, on the assurance that the fish would be waiting for him at the same place the following day. The old lady sent him back with the request that their broken-down cottage be transformed into a mansion with servants and spacious lands. That night, the fisherman came home to find that all had happened as requested. But in the course of only a few days the rapacious wife was hankering to be an arch-duchess with a vast palace equipped with guards and retainers, with terraces and formal gardens, situated in the midst of a great feudal domain. And again the wish was granted. Yet with one wish remaining the wife's greed increased and increased so that she made up her mind to wish for all that could be wished - to be ruler of the sun and moon and stars, of the earth and mountains and oceans, of all birds in the air, fishes in the sea, and of all men in the world. But when the fisherman repeated her desire to the golden fish it replied, "Such a wish is not mine to grant, and, for her arrogance, she shall be returned to the state from which she started." Returning that night, the fisherman found once again the broken-down cottage, and his wife again in rags. And yet, in a way, her wish was granted.

a selection from

This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience

by Alan Watts