Man: A Temple Within a Temple Within a Temple

In what follows, I will propose a simple threefold pattern which I think can be ascertained across a few different levels of the structure of creation, in terms of how God has designed it to function. Because the mysteries of God’s handiwork are so deep as never to be exhausted, I want to emphasize that what I will discuss below is simply one thread in a many-colored garment of divine patterns; and by putting this forward, I do not necessarily intend to displace other views of the matter, for there are many layers of pattern in creation all folded together, most of which I will not even begin to discuss. Just as the colored light reflected off an infinitely-faceted diamond provides endless and complex coherent patterns when viewed from different perspectives, so too the patterns operative in God’s creation can be observed and investigated profitably from many points of view. With that preface in mind, let us continue.

At the climax of God’s creation, “God formed man out of dust from the ground, and breathed in his face the breath of life; and man became a living soul”¹. God’s breath, of course, is His Spirit. It is through His Spirit that He speaks; and it is through His Word that He creates. Reading carefully the account in Genesis of the days of creation, we see that God spoke the world into existence, first by forming it (days 1-3), and then by filling it (days 4-6). The crown of His work was man, whom He not only created by the power of His Spirit, but He breathed that very creative Spirit of life into man as an integral aspect of his being. All of God’s creation, as His handiwork, images Him in some way or another, but with man, we see God’s image in a peculiar way: it is man’s vocation to do the works of God in creation as His priest, king, and prophet. Indeed, man is the creature whom God called into a special relationship of communion with Himself—to participate with Him in the development and management of the cosmos.

To see clearly the structure of creation, of man, and of the relation between the two as an ongoing process, we must first recognize what creation fundamentally is: a temple. Creation is the sacramental medium through which God relates to those creatures within it He has given life, bestowing them with varying capacities to collaborate with Him in serving other creatures. Man—who has the potential to operate at the highest capacity as prophetic priest-king of all creation—is the servant of all². The Man Christ Jesus, of course, is the archetype and perfection of this role. The structure and operation of creation are designed specifically as a vehicle which allows man both to perceive the glory of his Creator, and to worship Him endlessly in thanksgiving, with each other kind of creature having its own unique role in this cosmic liturgy, each one indispensable in reflecting the infinite tapestry of God’s wisdom and beauty. Man is higher than wheat and grapes, for example, but it is through bread and wine that man partakes of the body and blood of Christ. Notice that wheat and grapes serve in the cosmic liturgy, but in a transformed state, through man’s work, as bread and wine. So, God created a temple for Himself in the beginning. Then, He created man to serve and oversee the liturgy in that temple, to ensure the harmonious participation of all other creatures in their collective worship of the Most High.

But the cosmos per se was not the only temple God created. In the Old Testament, God gave instructions to Moses to construct a tabernacle, a place where God would come and dwell with His called-out people, the Israelites. In time, King Solomon, the Son of David, constructed a temple in Jerusalem, which, in a sense, was the perfected form of the tabernacle, and, although impermanent, was relatively more permanent than the tabernacle. Finally, in the New Testament, the Son of God came and died on a cross, rose from the dead, ascended to His Father in heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit to form an eternal and living temple, the Church. So, God created the cosmos as a temple, and, within it, He created the tabernacle in the wilderness, the temple in Jerusalem, and the Church (a Body of people), each of which represents a stage in the development of God’s plan to transform the entire cosmos into an eternal temple. In each of these temples, sacrifices are offered to God in a liturgical mode.

Let's recall Genesis 2:7, quoted above. God breathed His Spirit into Adam; Adam is therefore God’s temple. So are we, in a special sense, when we are baptized, chrismated, and received into the New Testament Church. God created man, both collectively and individually, to be His temple(s), to dwell in and as the Body of His Son and to offer himself to the Father by the indwelling power of the Spirit. In so doing, man is transformed from one degree of glory and likeness to God to another, progressively fulfilling the purpose of his existence through the offering of his will and love to God. In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul asks them, rhetorically: “Do you not know that your bodies are a sanctuary of God, and that God’s Spirit lives in you?”.³ Unsurprisingly, St. Paul made this connection when the Church was in its infancy. With individual man, in addition to the communal and cosmic temples, we have the last of the threefold temple structure of creation.

Now, as a brief aside, let’s consider the relationship between individual human temples and the collective human Church. Individual humans are meant to be members of the Church, forming one Body, but each being a microcosmic part of the whole, and actively to perfect each other through the Spirit of Love in community. The Church, as it is properly called, is the Body of Christ, the Son of God, in whom the Spirit dwells eternally, and through whom the Spirit works in man and, through him, all the rest of creation.

To summarize, the general picture I have thus far sketched involves three levels: creation as a whole, the Church (and in the Old Testament, the tabernacle and Jerusalem temple), and man. Interestingly, we can map each of these levels onto the threefold structure of the physical tabernacle and temple in the Old Testament and the threefold structure of the physical Church in the New Testament, and both of these to each other. In the Old Testament temple, starting with the outermost area and moving inward, we have the outer courtyard, the holy place, and the holy of holies; correspondingly, in the New Testament Church building, we have the narthex, the nave, and the sanctuary. Following the structure of these divisions, we can view the whole creation as the courtyard or narthex, the Church as the holy place or nave, and man as the holy of holies or sanctuary. And even with man himself, also having a body (outer) and a soul (inner), the Spirit of God comes to dwell within the innermost part of his being, the heart. In my view, there are various legitimate ways to describe the structure of man, which I won’t delve into here, but one of those ways is the following: his outermost part, the body, the middle part, the soul⁴ (where his thoughts and emotions live) and the heart (the innermost seat of his consciousness and will). Loosely, the idea here is that the body mediates between man and the external world, the soul mediates between the body and the heart, and the heart mediates between the person as a whole and God. There is doubtless constant interchange and communication occurring between these three levels of man; for example, when a person decides to do something, that decision is arrived at through various mental and emotional forces, and is then executed through the body. But, of course, those thoughts and emotions are certainly influenced by things and circumstances in the external world apprehended through the body, and the external circumstances at play in a given situation are also to some extent the product of previous acts of the will formulated in the heart. And so, activity at each of these three levels move through a person in a constant multi-directional feedback loop.

The foregoing might appear at first to be somewhat of a tangent; however, I think the point about energy flowing in a complex feedback loop between the three levels of man is crucial to the more general threefold temple structure of creation. Persons exist as members of the Church, and the Church exists within the cosmos. But because persons, the Church, and the cosmos are all communal by nature—that is, the very ontology of creation, in all its facets, is communal and interconnected—the telos of the cosmos is to become Church, and the telos of man is to enact this transformation. A similar kind of energetic feedback loop as occurs in man also occurs across the levels of the threefold temple structure I have described above. Persons in the Church work to gather the cosmos within themselves and bring it into the Church to be sanctified by the Spirit; having submitted their human wills to God, decisions are made in accordance with God’s will, and those decisions direct the action of the members of the Church outside the Church. In the other direction, the Spirit likewise works through the Church to sanctify persons to empower them to go forth from the Church into the cosmos to do the work mentioned above. Finally, the bodies of the persons doing this Spiritual work are made up of the very same stuff of the cosmos they are working to transform. Between these levels, the throughline of continuity allows for the seamless interaction necessary for this feedback loop to cycle and God’s creation to be transformed—sanctified—by His human images in the world and be brought to perfection as the holy, living temple He intended from the beginning. This is so because God made men to be temples which, together, are built into another temple—the Church—into which the individual human temples work together to transform the entire cosmos. Man is a temple within a temple within a temple, the holy of holies in which dwells the Spirit of God, through Whom Christ speaks out the perfection of the creation through man, to the eternal glory of the Father. But, really, there is ultimately only one archetypal Temple, after whose image the other temples are constructed: the Word of God made flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ.

1. Genesis 2:7, OSB

2. A possible exception here is the angels, who were created to serve man, and not to be served by him.

3. 1 Corinthians 3:16, EOB

4. This terminology can become quickly tangled and confused. By ‘soul’, as I’m using it here, I’m referring not in general to the non-physical aspect of man, but rather to the sensory, mental, and emotional faculties of man, as opposed to the deeper level of his unified consciousness and will. Properly speaking, if we are describing man as a twofold being composed of body and soul, the heart would be the deepest level of the soul, but here I’m simply drawing a distinction between those of the soul’s faculties that are more closely related to the bodily life of man and those that are more closely related to his communion with God. I want to emphasize that in drawing this distinction, I do not mean to imply that these aspects of man are not wholly integrated and unified; I just think that, in distinguishing in this way, we can see more clearly the structure of how they operate together.