Nothing of bodily life can be lived as though detached from the soul’s existence.Įven more to the point, bodily pursuits inevitably engage the will. But that unity of body and soul is precisely the point and the issue of importance in asceticism.
We are an inseparable unity of body and soul as human persons, and bodily life has a sacred dimension, a truth that has far-reaching consequences in morality. It does not propose a denigration of bodily life to the point of destroying or damaging it. The Christian perspective in this matter, when it is healthy, advocates a balanced approach. The Gospel recounts that Saint John the Baptist, in his desert, along with his consumption of the unpalatable locusts, survived also on honey. Even the desert monks of the early Christian centuries, who took on extreme physical hardships, no doubt preferred the taste of one cooked leaf to another or found one cool spring of water a better choice over another. The human experience of sense satisfaction is unavoidable.
For Saint John of the Cross, it is not simply the pleasures and enjoyments of the senses in themselves that are the crux of the problem.
0 kommentar(er)
