“So fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection; lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”
St. John records in the Fourth Gospel that Jesus taught his Apostles that God the Father so loved the world that he gave his only Son up for the life of the world. But then this same John, in his first epistle, tells us to “love not the world” and if you do love the world, the love of God the Father is not in you. If we keep reading John’s first epistle he reveals the solution to this apparent contradiction when he declares that the world is passing away and to fix one’s desires upon that which is passing away leads to personal misery and nothingness. Apart from God the world, the material world, as well as the intellectual, cultural world, and the values that arise from the world — all that will pass into non-existence. It is good, all potentially very good, but only as the world and the things of the world are created and sustained and correspond to God’s finality for the world. This is a cardinal Apostolic doctrine: God is committed to the material world, to flesh, and he intends to bring it to fruition in his Messianic Kingdom. St. Paul is speaking of the mystery of Flesh and Spirit in the epistle for this Septuagesima Sunday.
Please note that St. Paul was not presumptuous concerning his own salvation and even though he was an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ that did not guarantee his seat at the Messianic banquet. It is also clear from the Epistle that St. Paul understood his body of flesh to be not only worthy of salvation, but in light of its salvation he understood that he was to behave responsibly toward his own body. St. Paul did not despise his body, he did not wish to be rid of it, he did not hope for a disembodied salvation, but rather he was attentive to his body, he loved his body, and so he intelligently, reasonably, and responsibly imposed discipline, restraint, and self-control upon himself. And why did he do that? He says he did so:
“lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”
Today’s epistle comes at the very end of Chapter 9. Paul begins the chapter with four questions in the very first verse. By the time we get to verse twenty-four, Paul has posed a total of nineteen questions. Why? Because Paul was in a rhetorical fit and it is easy to see him in your mind’s eye pacing before his amanuensis and barking questions that clarify and sharpen the crucial points he must make to the Corinthians. Then in the last verse he leaves the questions behind and declares the upshot:
“So fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection; lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”
So much of I Corinthians is about the human body and our complex relationship to it. Paul speaks as a man, an Apostle of Christ, concerning his own body, in the context of personal salvation — but he also speaks as teacher providing an example to his students, as a father providing an illustration to his children, or even as a coach instructing one of his potential athletes.
“I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection…”
What is the body brought into subjection to? When I say, “my body” what is the “my?” Is the owner of this body something other than this body? Is my body something like an automobile that has a “my” in the driver’s seat? Is the body just a component part of the human person?
Certainly, there are those who take St. Paul to mean not only that the body is a temporary component part and the opposite of the soul, but also that the body is our enemy and some of them go so far as to deny the flesh of Jesus Christ. They believe the body is animalistic, earthy, corruptible, wild and dangerous, while the soul is human, heavenly, reasonable, incorruptible, in tune with God and free. But that is a denial of reality. Paul is no Gnostic who considers the body to be evil. Paul does not regard the body as our enemy, but he does regard the body to be a poor master of the person. Paul knows that man, body and all, is in fact the Crown of Creation; the most beautiful form of all of God’s creatures. And in fact the destiny of all of God’s creations and creatures is bound to the destiny of our bodies of flesh.
In Genesis we are told that God created all living creatures by fiat; He called them forth from the sea or from the ground – “let the earth bring forth cattle and creeping things and the beasts of the earth and it was so.” But He did not create man by fiat. No. God is pictured as a Sculptor taking dirt into his hands and after forming the body of man first, he bent over and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” The creature man is God’s Crown of Creation. Paul knows all of that. But Paul is identifying a problem and he goes about dealing with it by focusing on the body. Paul knows that the body is strengthened by exercise and proper nutrition; and he knows that an athlete, in this case a fighter, trains his body; he practices bobbing and weaving, throwing a punch, going toe to toe, and he learns that getting knocked down isn’t the same as getting knocked out – so you get back up!
Something else: it would be a foolishness to think Paul is suggesting that he actually practiced self-flagellation. No, he did not! There have been groups of well-meaning Christians over the centuries, and even today, who practice some form of violence to the body in order to get control over it, but that is not what Paul is recommending. What Paul is recommending, what he is actually describing very well, is spiritual formation. What I am calling “spiritual formation” others have called “cultivation” which work goes back to husbandry or farming, which goes back to our original vocation at creation. But our present age cares so little for farming or cultivation or anything for that matter that requires an investment of time and patience and self-denial that we miss his point.
But why do we need spiritual formation in the first place? Simply put, we need spiritual formation because of the Fall. When Adam ignored God’s love for him and went his own way he brought upon himself and everyone else what the Church calls the Fall. Adam experienced four self-inflicted wounds and these wounds are the inheritance of all of his progeny. These are the wounds of the Fall:
1) The first wound of the Fall is blindness or ignorance, which has spoiled our intellectual capacity to form correct judgments about anything — spiritual things or material things.
2) The second wound is “malice” and it is a wound to the faculty of the will. We don’t know what is good for us. A little child wants sugar. She will eat all the sugar you give her till she makes herself sick. When Mom says, “No more sugar, sugar,” the child thinks that Mom is being mean. We have the same disposition toward God that the child has toward her mother: Malice hinders our ability to realize God’s good intentions for our life.
3) The third wound is what we call concupiscence. Concupiscence is the disordered desire for the gratification of sensual needs, but notice that the wound is the disordered desire; the wound is not sensual need itself. Now this is a wound that we experience in our body. People need and benefit from sleep, food, drink, warmth in winter, clothing, sexual love, the caress of a loved one, physical exercise – and a little bit of sugar. How much one needs differs from person to person. Most people need sexual love and physical exercise while other people seem to live perfectly happy and full lives without them. But it is important to realize that sensual needs are not sinful. Adam and Eve are presented as having sensual needs before and after the Fall. The problem is that after the Fall what was once a need became the driving force in life.
4) The fourth wound is weakness, which means the failure of will to mount and maintain a personal offense against evil. The first two wounds touch upon what used to be called the spiritual faculties: the intellect and the will. The last two, concupiscence and weakness, touch upon our passions. Life is hard and the good is hard to attain and once attained it is hard to sustain. It requires a good deal of energy and will to lay hold of the good, but we want to get everything the easy way and this is a hallmark of original sin. “I want what I want when I want it.”
Prior to the Fall, in a state of original blessedness, man’s faculties – intellect, passion and will – were in harmony. Sensual needs were subordinated to the intellect and the will and yet enjoyed and man was able to rightly order his faculties. He was not a slave to his physical needs. His mind and his love of God, aided by the Holy Spirit, were at the center of his life ordering all his other faculties. But man wounded by the Fall, in his natural state of being, is in no condition to master the faculties. But here is the twist: St. Paul isn’t addressing man in his natural state, is he? He is addressing Christians who have had their minds renewed by the Spirit of God in Holy Baptism; Christians for whom Jesus is Lord and Saviour. He is addressing Christians who have been infused with heavenly virtues. He is addressing the Children of God who have, by the grace of Christ, become “partakers of the Divine nature” and they are not at the beck and call of the oh-so urgent whimpering of the excessive desire to fulfill our sensual needs.
Look, St. Paul does not hate his body; he loves his body. He said so:
“For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church…”
So Paul is actually showing us how to love ourselves. That little girl learns to love herself when she finally gets it that her Mom isn’t being mean. We learn to love ourselves when we finally get it that God only has good intentions for our life and that he has placed us in a universe that is on our side. And one way to do that, practically, is to detach a little bit and treat your felt need, sensual or not, like that Mom treated her little girl. Try being a good parent to your self. Look to Holy Mother Church for help: in a few weeks all of us will be called to fasting and abstinence, to extraordinary acts of charity and exercises of devotion, to thinking less of ourselves and more of others. Some of you may find it useful and healing to privately open up the grief of your heart to one of our priests. But listen: you cannot text a confession or a pastoral conversation. You cannot email it or phone it up. You cannot do a drive through. You will have to park your car and get out. You will have to do all of this, acts of charity, devotion, confession and abstinence – you will have to do this face-to-face, toe-to-toe, person-to-person – in the flesh.