The Three Dimensions of Human Life. The First: Bodily Life, its Organs and Needs; Normal Care for the Body and Excessive Preoccupation With It

How many questions you have raised in response to the two preceding letters! This shows you to be a diligent, lively, and receptive student, and promises success. So much the more willingly do I write. But I will not answer all of them now, leaving some answers for later occasions. I will occupy myself with what engages you most of all. You write: «Your words about the aspects, powers, and needs of human nature draw me inward. I enter. I see something, but most of it is either misty or entirely invisible to me. I strongly desire to know what the spiritual, soul, and bodily aspects in a person are, what needs each has, and how they are satisfied. I would very much like to hold myself at the level of true human dignity—as we are appointed to be by the Creator.»

Very good! You are touching on the very foundations of our life, the explanation of which will give us the foundations for all subsequent reflections. For how else is a person to live if not in accordance with how he is made? By establishing sound ideas about how a person is constituted, we shall receive the most reliable indication of how he ought to live. It seems to me that many people do not live as they should precisely because they think that the rules for such a proper life are imposed from without, and do not proceed from human nature itself nor are required by it. If they were convinced that it is so, they would not resist those rules or depart from them. And so, please listen.

Our body consists of various organs, each of which performs its own function, essentially necessary for bodily life. The chief organs are three: 1) the stomach together with the lungs, heart, arteries and veins, lymphatic vessels and many other vessels, small vessels, and glands serving the various secretions from the blood and the body’s fluids—the function of all of these is the nourishment of the body, or the building of flesh; 2) the system of muscles and bones, whose function is movement both internally and externally; and 3) the nervous system, whose center is the brain, the spinal cord, and the ganglionic system located somewhere beneath the abdominal and thoracic diaphragm, with branches penetrating the entire body—its function is sensation. When the workings of these functions and their mutual relations are in order, the body is healthy and life is not in danger; when this order is disturbed, the body falls ill and life is in danger. Each function has its own need, which makes itself keenly felt by the one who lives, demanding satisfaction. The needs of the stomach, or nutritive and flesh-building part, are food, drink, air, and sleep; the need of the muscular-skeletal part is the need to exert the muscles, which everyone feels after sitting for a long time—and more directly, the need for movement, which drives one to walk, go out, work at something; the need of the nervous part is pleasant stimulation of the nerves throughout the body, such as moderate warmth and cold and the like, and in particular the pleasant stimulation of our five senses, through which the nervous system has come to the surface to communicate with the external world.

All of this, as you see, is bodily—what concern could the soul have with any of it? But since the soul, through its most intimate union with the body, has received the body into its own person, it considers all bodily needs as its own. That is why we say: I want to eat, to drink, to sleep; I want to walk, to go out, to work; I want to see a variety of colors, hear a variety of sounds, smell a variety of fragrances, and so on. Having taken upon itself all the bodily needs, the soul considers their satisfaction its own business as well, and busies itself with food, drink, sleep, clothing, shelter, and everything else—always wishing to achieve a state in which the body is at peace and does not trouble it with its importunate demands. This relationship of the soul to the body, which it maintains not by learning but spontaneously, through some inward compulsion, is manifested in it as a kind of instinct—a love of life, a love of the body, a desire to give the body rest and to procure everything needed for that purpose.

The totality of all this is the bodily aspect of human life. But not everything here is equally bodily, or fleshly and sensuous. The nutritive part alone is strongly fleshly; yet even it is ennobled by the adaptation of its satisfaction to the needs and ends that are properly speaking those of the soul. The organs of movement and sensation serve the needs of the soul more than those of the body. And one organ that stands somewhat outside the system of the other organs—namely, the organ of speech—is exclusively an organ of the soul, appointed to serve the soul alone.

The bodily, fleshly, sensuous life—which is reprehensible in a moral sense—is the life in which a person, carried away to an extreme by love of life and love of the body, makes the peace of the body, or the all-round satisfaction of bodily needs alone, his chief end and concern, while forgetting the soul and still more the spirit. In the course of this, each bodily need, which in itself is simple and natural, proliferates into a multitude of acquired needs through habit and attachment to various ways of satisfying it. Take food, or drink, or clothing. What, it would seem, could be simpler in all of this? And yet how many inseparable needs arise: you must have them even if it kills you! Hence we see that some people do not have a free minute, running after what is needed to satisfy these needs, even though dozens of other persons are occupied with the same thing for their benefit. In such people the soul and spirit must inevitably be starved—if they have not already been entirely stifled, trampled down, and submerged in sensuality.

Please think over all of this. About the soul—until my next letter.