Does Christianity encourage a positive or negative understanding of the body?Christianity, at its heart encourages a positive and fully restored view of the entire human person- a body-soul composite which God Himself declared was "
very good". However, in the enforcement by fallen human persons of certain tenets of Christianity, certain attempts to teach truth ultimetely cancel themselves out. What I mean by this is, for example, with the belief that the Church holds that sex before marraige is both damaging to the understanding of the human person, the language of sexuality
and damaging to the life of grace, it becomes very easy for those in authority to give a misguided understanding of the human body itself, pleasure, etc. To illustrate this idea, take the example of the toddler who gets to close to a fire or a stovetop. Usually, out of fear for his life, his parents will punish him, perhaps yell at him, etc. as a sortof instictive survival response on the parents part. He may soon view fire as bad or very bad. Similarly, the Christian, may subconsciously start to see the body itself as evil. Ultimetely, we know the fire itself is not evil, it just needs to be properly utlized and respected or it becomes dangerous and harmful. So, the same way with the body needs to be properly understood as having great potentiality for harm. Similar to the toddler analogy, it is very simple for Christians to come to the perception of their bodies as bad or inherently detrimental to the life of grace.
Do practises such as asceticism and celibacy affirm or deny the goodness of the body? Can you think of other distinctly Christian practices that affirm and promote the goodness of embodiement?
It is very easy to see the practise of denying oneself and the body's natural inclinations as degrading. A monk's self-flagellation or Origen's castration quickly come to mind as ascetic practises which could be denying the goodness of the body. Extreme ascetic practise seems to disregard possibility of balance between free will and grace. However, Christ did warn that if the hand causes one to sin, it should be cut off and cast away. It seems to me from a proper Christian view that there needs to be an order of priority. If one is "harming" the body to avoid sin, it should never be from the motive that the body is EVIL
in itself, but because sin is realized as THE
greatest of all evils; greater than the loss of a hand is the loss of the life of grace, the loss of God's dwelling in the soul. Many influential Christians, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis of Assisi, saw avoiding sin as a higher good then maintaining unmolested flesh. It is better for the hand to not function that for the soul to be dead in sin, from their perspective. This seems to be the ultimate priority of self-denial. Ideally, one should understand the inherent goodness of both the
pneuma and the
hyle, and the will, infused with
love not fear, is strong enough to maintain the life of grace within (
without castration)!
The Incarnation and the Sistine chapel ceiling (and all good art) strike me as a powerful testaments to the Christian understanding of the goodness of the human body.
