Companion article to “When the Body Learns to Rest, the Soul Can Listen”

In When the Body Learns to Rest, the Soul Can Listen, we reflected on how caring for the body is part of the spiritual life rather than a distraction from it. This second piece steps back and asks how Christians ever came to forget that. Why did the faith that began with “the Word made flesh” drift, at times, toward suspicion of the body? And how are we rediscovering something truer today?

The early misunderstanding

Christianity was born in a world steeped in Greek philosophy. Many of those ideas were noble, but some sat uneasily with the Gospel. Plato imagined the soul trapped in the body, longing for release. Later thinkers described salvation as escape from matter altogether.

The message of Christ runs the other way. God takes flesh and calls it good. Yet traces of that old dualism clung on. Some early writers, such as Origen, inherited a touch of it, and a few strands of monastic life carried the same nervousness about the body. Holiness began to look like flight from the physical rather than its transfiguration.

The Church never taught that officially, but it coloured imagination and language for centuries. Even after Gnosticism was defeated, its instinct of distrust toward the material world lingered quietly inside the walls.

When penitence turned severe

By the Middle Ages, life itself was hard. Poverty, hunger and disease were constant companions. Faith took the same shape: austere, unflinching, ready to suffer. Long fasts, hair shirts, scourges; these were serious attempts to share Christ’s Passion and repair the wounds of sin. They were born of love, but sometimes grew harsh.

Some saints, such as Catherine of Siena and Rose of Lima, practised austerities that even their confessors struggled to approve. Their holiness is beyond question, yet we can now ask whether the holiness came through those acts or in spite of them.

When words were misheard

A part of the problem lay in language. Saint Paul’s talk of “the flesh” fighting “the spirit” referred to our disordered appetites, not to the body itself. Over time that distinction blurred. “Flesh” began to mean the body as such, and “the world” came to sound like everything physical.

The phrase contemptus mundi—“contempt for the world”—originally meant disdain for vanity and greed. Eventually it shaded into disdain for life itself. Spirituality became anti-human without meaning to be.

Grace builds on nature

Through all of this, the Church’s deepest teaching stayed steady. We still confessed “the resurrection of the body.” We still received sacraments that sanctify touch, taste and matter. Thomas Aquinas anchored the whole vision in one line: grace builds on nature; it doesn’t crush it.

Yet piety often runs ahead of theology. The pendulum swung hard toward punishment and away from integration. The saints lived within their cultures; their times were severe, and sometimes their devotions were too. We can honour their courage without copying their extremes. What they sought was freedom from sin’s grip, not hatred of their own flesh.

Rediscovering the body’s goodness

The Second Vatican Council began to recover that balance. Gaudium et Spes taught that nothing genuinely human is foreign to the disciples of Christ. The world, it said, is the place where salvation happens. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, not a prison to escape.

Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body gathered those threads into a luminous whole. The body, he wrote, reveals the person; through it, love becomes visible. That wasn’t a novelty but a return to the logic of the Incarnation itself.

Even the language of mortification changed. Fasting and penance remain, but their meaning is clearer. We do not punish the body; we train it. We fast to make room for God, not to earn His favour. Asceticism becomes a school of freedom rather than a theatre of guilt.

Modern versions of the same mistake

The irony is that secular culture, after rejecting old religious severity, has invented its own. Extreme dieting, obsessive exercise, long workweeks, chronic sleeplessness: the new asceticism serves productivity rather than God. At least the medieval penitent aimed for heaven. The modern perfectionist just aims to keep up.

The result is the same exhaustion, this time without grace to redeem it. Faith still offers the saner vision: discipline that leads to peace, self-denial that opens space for joy.

Discipline that frees

The saints who understood balance still speak clearly.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux understood this. Her "little way" involved real sacrifice—small, hidden acts of self-denial—but they were done with joy, not grimness. She wasn't grinding herself down; she was making herself free. Saint Philip Neri went further: he'd give penitents absurd penances, like wearing a coat inside-out in public, not to hurt them but to kill pride. The body wasn't the target. The ego was. If pride is the root of all evils, this makes sense.
Saint Francis de Sales advised kindness toward oneself: “Be as gentle with yourself as you are with others.”

This is training for freedom, not punishment for failure. It is closer to a musician tuning an instrument than a prisoner serving a sentence. The aim is not a broken body but a heart that can respond freely to grace.

Luisa Piccarreta and the Divine Will

In our own time, the spirituality of Luisa Piccarreta continues that rediscovery. Her writings speak of living in the Divine Will rather than endlessly striving against our humanity. The body is not an obstacle to God’s work but the place where His will unfolds day by day.

For anyone who would like to explore Luisa’s life and spirituality further, I've put together a little article about her available here: Read more about Luisa Piccarreta →.

What remains and what changes

True asceticism still matters. The body needs rhythm and discipline; comfort can dull the soul, and love sometimes asks for sacrifice. But cruelty, guilt and obsession have no place in it. The Church has learned to keep the best of the old spirit and let the rest go.

The mature lesson is simple. The body and soul belong together. When the body is cared for and ordered well, it becomes the ally of holiness rather than its obstacle.

The body’s destiny

All of this finally points beyond the present moment.
Christian hope does not end with death but with resurrection. The body is not left behind; it is fulfilled. In the risen Christ we glimpse our own future: creation restored, matter alive with Spirit.

That promise changes how we live now. Caring for the body, accepting its limits, bearing its wounds—these are ways of moving toward the world that is coming. What grace shapes in this life will find its perfection in the next.

To treat the body with reverence is to live already toward that resurrection, trusting that nothing given to God is ever wasted.

A closing word

If When the Body Learns to Rest reminded us that the body needs care, this reflection explains why the Church sometimes forgot that truth and why it is learning again to rejoice in it.

Christian life has never been about escape from the body but its transformation. The dust of the earth remains the place where God writes His glory.

The body is not the soul’s enemy. It is its lifelong companion: the first vessel of grace and the last to share the light of resurrection.