Idealistic anthropologies consider the human being to be basically spirit, his physical body foreign to his real nature. We find this view in ancient Greek philosophy; according to Plato, for example, what is real about man is his or her intellect or reason, which is actually a spark of the divine within the person that continues to exist after the body dies. The human body, however, partakes of matter, which is of a lower order of reality; it is a hindrance to the spirit, and one is really better off without it... We must remember, however, that often non-Christian notions have crept into so-called Christian anthropologies. For example, the scholastic view of man prominent in the Middle Ages, though accepted as Christian, was actually more of a hybrid anthropology. It attempted to synthesize the idealistic view of man found in Aristotelian philosophy with the Christian view. The results of this mismating of two diverse anthropologies are, unfortunately, with us to this day. For e...