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Every few years (or every few seconds) a meme gets circulated around the internet that claims C.S. Lewis said, "You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
Many social media users like the image, share it, and move on with their day.
But did C.S. Lewis actually say or write those words? And are they true?
False quote
The C.S. Lewis Foundation firmly lists this as a "misattributed" quote, saying it comes from, "a paraphrase of a George MacDonald quote in Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood."
C.S. Lewis did not say it. Furthermore, the quote does not accurately portray his own religious beliefs.
Matthew Block explains in an article for First Things how the quote, "arises out of a Spiritualist, not Christian, framework."
He concludes his article with a perfect summary of why the quote is spiritually harmful:
For Christians, it should never become a question of either/or when it comes to the soul and the body; it’s both/and. Matthew Lee Anderson puts it well: “You are a body. But you’re a soul too. And your human flourishing is contingent upon being a soul-bodied thing.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church also helps us understand what a true Christian view of the soul and body should be like:
The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual.
The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.
Our own nature is both body and soul. The body is not a prison, with our soul trying to escape.
Death produces an unnatural divorce, where body and soul are temporarily separated.
This is why the resurrection of the dead is so important. Our souls will be reunited with our bodies for all eternity in a union that God designed.
We are a body, and we are a soul. The quote that makes the rounds on social media does not have any basis in Christian theology or in the works of C.S. Lewis.
