I wrote a couple of days ago about the idea, common among Christians but incompatible with traditional Christian theology, that the body after death is "just an empty shell" and that the "real person" is completely absent from the body. (Christian orthodoxy, on the other hand, looks forward to "the resurrection of the body" and teaches that the human person is the union of body and soul.)
The Anchoress (Elizabeth Scalia) has a story that illustrates another logical consequence of this sort of belief: the idea that a mentally ill spouse (in this case, a person with advanced Alzheimer's disease) can be "not the person I married" and therefore that the marriage vows are no longer binding.
The comments on this article are very, very worth reading, as some people challenge Ms. Scalia's conclusions and others step up to explain them. One commenter responds to the idea that those who remain with a seriously mentally ill spouse are only keeping up a "front" of devotion:
Yes, it's easy to chalk up calls to fidelity to a highly romantic belief that one can maintain unswerving devotion in the midst of a devastating kind of alienation. However, I generally give the people commenting here more credit that than. I believe that what's being said is that fidelity to the marriage is paramount even when it's hard — even when the internal feeling doesn't match the external performance of duty.
BTW, if the person is maintaining a constancy toward the debilitated spouse, that is no "illusion." The difference between feelings and performance is not equal to the difference between reality and illusion. The devotion is still being shown, and most significantly, the violation … is still refrained from.
Emphasis mine. This is a point that far too few people recognize.
Anyway, it's just an example of how supposedly arcane details of theological belief, like whether "the body" is part of "the person," have real-world logical consequences. If "the person" is reduced to "the consciousness alone, and only as long as memory and reason remain intact," we have a very different moral calculus towards those who have been struck by mental illness than we do if "the person" is "the consciousness as it is, and the body before us." Care and disposition of a person's physical body, during life and after death, is a kind of care of the person.
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