Enlightened Contemporaries by Steve Kanji Ruhl

Author:Steve Kanji Ruhl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Published: 2020-09-02T17:26:01+00:00

The Body

Whether the mystical path of the spirit is Christian, Buddhist, or Islamic, struggles and blessings on that path connect intimately with the physical body.

Francis inherited a long tradition of Christian ambivalence about the body: created in the holy image of God, yet prey to lethal temptations of carnality and all the wiles of Satan; a vessel for the shining, eternal spirit, yet made of perishable clay and subject to rot and corruption.

By the time of the Middle Ages, as is well known, it became customary for Christian ascetics to scourge the flesh with mortification and penances. Hungering for God, they starved the obstinate body. Seeking purity, they flailed it and tried to pummel it into submission. Longing for the mystica mors, the mystic death-in-life, they harried the body to its breaking point. They identified the body with “lower nature,” the swinish ego. They feared and despised its intemperate demands, its snorting lusts and greeds and its evil compulsions. They strove to build spiritual strength by fighting its desires. They struggled to emulate the tortured Christ by suffering on crosses of their own devising: ice baths, hair shirts, self-whippings with chains, extremes of fasting. Dragging the filthy rag of a sinful body through life, encumbered by it, cursed by it, they prayed fervently to God to rid them of it, and they awaited deliverance to heaven.

Unfortunately, Francis was no exception. In this instance he does not seem modern to us; he seems a medieval fanatic. Though he was sufficiently flexible to permit moderation in the penances of his friars, and told them that each must set his own reasonable standard of asceticism, Francis drove “Brother Donkey”—as he called his own body—very hard. He slept on the ground in winter. He refused basic comforts. Thomas of Celano reports that Francis rarely indulged in cooked food, but if someone offered it, he would first sprinkle it with ashes. Early in his saintly career, when as a young man he felt tormented by sexual desires, Francis would “immerse himself in a ditch filled in winter with ice, remaining in it until every seduction of the flesh went away.”45 Not surprisingly, “Brother Donkey” responded over the years by deteriorating into a disease-riddled nag of skin and bones, frail and festering with poxes and sores and chronic pain, and at the very end wheezing and blind.

To his credit, at the end of his life Francis realized his mistake. At the age of forty-three, as he lay sightless and emaciated, wracked with fevers and wounds, he asked forgiveness of his body. “Rejoice, brother body, and forgive me,” the bedridden Francis said. “For behold now I gladly fulfill thy desires, and gladly hasten to attend to thy complaints.”46 He began accepting food and medicine—though by then it proved too late.

The drastic austerities of Francis and his scourging of the body were preceded, more than a millennium-and-a-half earlier, by similar measures undertaken by the Indian prince Siddhartha Gautauma, in the years when he lived in a forest with Hindu yogis, before he became the Buddha.

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