An Instruction for the Friday of the First Week of Great Lent: On the Human Body

“Your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit living in you” (1 Cor. 6:19).

Beloved brethren! At this present time, when we prepare ourselves to become partakers of the most holy Body and most holy Blood of the God-man, it is fitting that we consider what significance our own body has. Its significance is extraordinarily important. The holy Apostle Paul depicted this significance thus: “Your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit living in you”.

Brethren! Have we given due attention to the significance of our body? Have we not regarded this matter lightly and superficially, as a matter needing no consideration? Meanwhile God proclaims to us through the Apostle’s lips: “Your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit living in you”.

The human body was taken from the earth, but it was not created for the earth. It has fallen into corruption—it was not created for corruption. Created, beautifully adorned by the Creator for eternity and eternally, immediately upon its creation it was animated by an immortal and holy soul; together with it, it was snatched up from earth into the bright paradise to dwell there, for spiritual activity, for spiritual enjoyment; it was incapable of carnal pleasures. It could not have come from the hands of the All-holy Creator except as fully pure and holy; later sin disfigured and deformed it. Its eye was so immaculate that it did not see the nakedness of other members, which, in turn, presented nothing that needed to be covered. The soul was not agitated and troubled by passions; nor was the body troubled by them. The blood did not boil from anger nor grow cold from sorrow and despondency. Death was foreign to this body; diseases were foreign to it; it had no need to be guarded from the influence of the elements; it was not bonds and a prison for the soul: it was for her a wondrous, eternally new garment.

Man fell. Sin struck with death both his soul and his body. The realm of death over humanity is so universal and so mighty that not one of the multitude of the human family has escaped it; every man is born already with the beginning of death in him, is subject to it every hour during earthly life, and inevitably suffers it at his appointed hour. We can say without error that all earthly sojourners are moving corpses! What is our life on earth but a constant struggle with death? From such a state we cannot in any way infer what state was natural to man before his fall; from our bodies we cannot in any way judge the bodies of the first-created. The original blessed and immortal state we can contemplate only in Divine Revelation. We can see experimental, complete proof of it in our Lord Jesus Christ and partly in those chosen of God who manifested not only in their souls but also in their bodies the power of the redemption granted by the God-man to humanity.

The body of Adam did not sink in waters, was not consumed by fire, was impervious to death. Such was the body of the New Adam, our Lord Jesus Christ; it tasted death, but tasted it solely by the will of the God-man: having tasted death, it did not cease to be alive, because, though separated from the soul, it was not separated from Divinity. It ascended to heaven, repeating abundantly the rapture of Adam’s body into paradise. Thither it will draw the bodies of true Christians: “where the body” most holy, “there” the spiritual “eagles gather” (Lk. 17:37). Though we see that now the bodies of the departed fathers and brethren descend into the dark grave and are covered with earth; though we expect that the same fate will befall our bodies; yet we believe and know that these bodies will not remain forever in the earth. They will rise. Nay more: the risen righteous and the living righteous—I call true Christians righteous—will not remain on earth: in the last day of this passing age of the world, at the beginning of the day without evening of eternity, they will be caught up with their bodies in the air to meet the Lord, and thus always there—in heaven—will remain with the Lord (1 Cor. 15:51–52; 1 Thes. 4:15–17). Sown in the grave in corruption, the body will rise in incorruptibility, will rise in glory, will rise in power; the earthly body will become a heavenly body, the natural body will become a spiritual body (1 Cor. 15:42–44).

Such is the destiny of the human body. It is born infected with death and sin, born into death, after the manner of that body which the first man, created from dust and returned to dust, made it to be—a perished man; but it is reborn in the font of baptism to salvation after the manner of the body which the Heavenly Man assumed, conceived and born of the Holy Spirit and the Most Pure Virgin: “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Gal. 3:27). Through the wondrous sacrament of the Eucharist our body is united with the body of Christ Himself—body is united with Divine body, blood with Divine blood. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood”, the Lord said, “remains in me, and I in him” (Jn. 6:56). He who eats the most holy body of Christ and drinks the most holy blood of Christ, by means of such fullness of communion, comes into perfect union with the God-man: his body becomes the body of the God-man, his blood becomes the blood of the God-man. The true Christian rests in the Lord, and the Lord rests in him; the Christian is clothed in Christ, and again in the Christian—Christ. Contemplating this greatness of Christians, the Apostle cries out to us: “Your bodies are members of Christ” (1 Cor. 6:15). “The body is not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” (1 Cor. 6:13). “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh” (Rom. 13:14). “The gifts of the Holy Spirit,” said a certain great servant of God, “are already natural to renewed nature.” It is already natural for the body, which constitutes one with the body of Christ, to be the temple of the Holy Spirit: where Christ is, there inseparably and unconfusedly with Christ is also the Holy Spirit.

Many true servants of God manifested during their earthly life the presence of the Holy Spirit in their bodies and thus experimentally proved that the bodies of Christians should and can be the temple of the Holy Spirit. The shadow of the holy Apostle Peter healed the sick (Acts 5:15); articles of cloth which the holy Apostle Paul handled for his use were brought to the sick—and the sick were healed from touching them, and unclean spirits left those they tormented (Acts 19:12). A viper, this most venomous of serpents, struck the Apostle; but he remained unhurt, as if wholly unbitten by the snake. Some Saints walked upon waters, flew, as if winged, considerable distances in the shortest time; in their prayers they were lifted up by their bodies from the earth, as if prefiguring, in the expression of a certain holy writer, the future rapture into the air and showing their capacity for such rapture. Not only in their souls, but in their very bodies the Holy Spirit worked! Just as in human bodies degraded to the likeness of senseless beasts, various passions boil up: so, conversely, in sanctified bodies Divine grace boils up and overflows, delighting the body with heavenly and spiritual sweetness, and at the same time mortifying it for sin. After the soul departs from such a body, corruption does not dare to touch it: because, despite the absence of the soul, the Holy Spirit remains present to it, manifesting His presence by various signs worthy and proper to the Spirit.

Why are our bodies foreign to spiritual sanctification? Why are our bodies capable only of sensations akin to beasts, when the Holy Spirit has testified that “there is one kind of flesh for humans, another for animals” (1 Cor. 15:39)? It is because we do not heed the warning of our Lord, who said: “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life” (Lk. 21:34). Our hearts have grown heavy, our souls have clung to the earth: such a state of spirit drags the body down into density, and we remain strangers to experiential knowledge that “my flesh” “rejoices in the living God” (Ps. 83:3). Let us lift our hearts on high, and the body will follow thither after the heart. Let us love the Lord as He commanded us to love Him, “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mk. 12:30), which cannot be fulfilled without the participation of the body. Let us make our bodies spiritual, heavenly! Let us deliver them from the sorrowful transition from one dungeon to another: from the dungeon of the grave to the dungeon of hell. An absolute obligation lies upon us to accomplish this: we were originally created for heaven; subsequently, after the fall, we were redeemed for heaven. We belong wholly to God, not to ourselves. “You are not your own”, the Apostle says to us; “you were bought with a price”, the priceless price of the blood of the Son of God. “Glorify God therefore in your body and in your spirit, which belong to God”, “for your bodies”, not only your souls, “are temples of the Holy Spirit living in you” (1 Cor. 6:19–20). Amen.

St Macarius the Great, Homily 4, Chapter 3.

The Great Sisoes. See the Scetic Patericon.

Kallistos and Ignatios Xanfopuloi on Stillness and Prayer, Chapter 25. The Philokalia, Part 2.