From our childhood we are taught that we must take more care of our souls than of our bodies, that where their interests clash or come into opposition, preference must be given always to the soul. Our Lord Himself has repeated this for us on many occasions, with His "What doth it profit a man to have gained the world and lost his own soul?" and His exhortation to fear rather those who can hurt the soul than those whose power is limited merely to the body. But all this proves more than the simple supremacy of the soul, for it implies as surely that to the body as well certain duties are of divine command. If I am ordered to pay more attention to my soul than to my body, then at the same time it is clear that I am expected to pay at least a certain amount of attention to the body. Indeed, this is also evident from other reasons, for my body too was given me by God. It is the most intimate gift from His hands, and the influence that it bears upon my whole life and upon the conduct and even temptations of the soul is so enormous that no one can neglect it without peril of great loss. The account that I shall one day have to render to God for all the gifts of which He holds me the steward must include as of very great importance the care and culture that I have bestowed upon my body. Wonderful it is, too, in all its ways. Compacted together, intricate and marvellously made, there is nothing that man has invented that comes near to his own frame in the delicacy and refinement of its texture, its mechanism, its perfect form, its colouring. When some genius has constructed an automaton, the world wonders; yet how few stop to think of the still more marvellous thing that they possess from the hands of God.
Now it is a strange thing that with all the asceticism that Christianity has taught, it has probably done more for the reverencing of the body than any other forms of religion. The old pagan creed was, it might seem, an absolute worship of the flesh. It exalted the present time, it made the pleasures of life to be the purpose of life, it repeated that joy was the end of all things and that the gods themselves had delight in their godhead because it freed them from the responsibility of any other claim than that of their own desire. The crimes of the gods were more terrible than had ever been the crimes of men, just because the gods could give free rein to the cravings of the flesh. With all the poetry of their mythology there was a degradation about it that shocked the better type of minds and made them find mystical interpretations for what was obviously merely bestial. Yet in spite of this wonderful worship of the human form divine, we turn the pages of pagan history written by pagans and we find it one long lament. The historians of the Greek cities and of the Roman Empire are all full of the terrors and the horrors of life. They might have deified the joys of the body as the sacred instincts of man, but they found in actual life that these joys could not be found, precisely because they were sought. They had meant to exalt the body, they succeeded only in defiling it; they began by worship, they ended by profanation. They considered the physical side of life as the most perfect, but they degraded it by a filthiness which has hardly been equalled and never been surpassed. Even men like Socrates and Plato have left records that make us almost despair of the noble character of man.
Then came our Blessed Lord with His gospel of mortification, of self-denial, and of the renunciation of the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life; and suddenly we find as a paradoxical result that never since the world began has more been done for the body than has been done in Christian times. The very existence of hospitals is a thing that the followers of the Crucified have originated. The whole modern worship of charity and philanthropy, which with all its absurdities has been on the whole nobly meant, is a legacy of Christ. The care of the sick, of those in sorrow, of the fallen - the care taken to improve the physical well-being of the people - date precisely from those times when first the Cross was hoisted as the ideal of human life. After all, the Master Himself, who upheld suffering in His own life as the most perfect expression of love, was also the most eager to remove it from the lives of others. He went about always doing good; He forgave their sins, but He healed their bodies: nay, in His wonderful description of the Last Judgement He seemed to make the whole future of the soul to depend more on the corporal than on the spiritual works of mercy. He began the splendid tradition that has done more than anything else to defend the Christian name. And the reason for this apparent worship of the body? It is because the most splendid thing that has ever been said about it is the Christian belief in it as the temple of the Holy Spirit. This body of ours, with all its fleshly feelings and instinctive desires, is yet the very dwelling-place of God. It is the shrine of Divinity, a shrine He Himself did not disdain to inhabit. Duties, then, of cleanliness, exercise, health, are of obligation. Yet to pamper it is to profane it, to mortify is to make it alive, to make the very glory of God shine through its transfigured radiance.
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.