(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World.)
In his Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul writes, “Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like.” This quote helps to situate what we mean when we say that one of the three enemies of the soul is the flesh. Perhaps when we hear “sins of the flesh” we are inclined to narrow down the temptations of the flesh to lust and gluttony, with a nod toward other excesses of alcohol or drug consumption. But the tradition sees the danger here at a deeper level because of the subtle corruptions of our intellect and will that come about from an undue search for pleasure, comfort, and safety.
In our posts last year, we looked at the three traditional enemies of the soul, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. We saw that they correspond to three parts of the human soul. The Flesh is a distortion of the concupiscible part of the soul, that which seeks health, self-preservation and procreation. The World distorts the irascible part of the soul, that which governs anger, sadness, and to a certain extent vainglory. The Devil operates primarily on our intellect, distorting our notion of ourself and of God.
Jesus’s temptations in the desert also typify these three battles. The temptation to turn stones into bread is clearly a temptation of the hungering and fatigued flesh. The temptation to exercise power over all the nations is a world-related one, and the temptation to tempt God, to force God’s hand, is specifically diabolical.
So let’s begin with Jesus’s fast of forty days. The first interesting aspect of this is that Our Lord’s fast was a provocation. He is forcing the battle against the flesh out into the open. Later on, I will be making a brief comparison between the Christian understanding of the flesh versus the Stoic version. One of the important contrasts is here, that Jesus deliberately chooses prolonged hunger in order to get the Tempter to manifest himself on the pretense of the flesh.
Jesus is teaching us that it is a good practice to choose, for a season, what is uncomfortable, whether it be the discomfort of hunger, of a hard chair without a cushion, which is a typical monastic discipline, or hard manual labor. The goal is to get the flesh to mumble and complain against us and then to respond with a simple “no.” This has the eventual effect of freeing us from unthinking sensuality, which often operates at a subconscious level.
When we attempt these things, we can now see that the Tempter will use our discomfort as a pretext. Jesus’s response is interesting: “Man does not live on bread alone.” This is to say that our survival does not depend on comfort and ease.
One of the tempting ideas that the modern world has put into our minds is that these ascetical practices of the great saints of old—wearing hair shirts, sleeping on the ground, eating once every other day—will make us unhealthy, cause us to wither into resentful Feraponts. But in fact the Christian tradition, and more specifically the monastic tradition has always made a distinction between causing pain or discomfort and causing injury and harm. Not all pain is associated with damage.
And indeed, relaxation has its place. A story is told of Saint Antony the Great one of the champions of extreme ascetical practices. A farmer, having heard about Antony incredible feats of self-denial, was scandalized when he saw the great man from a distance, talking and even joking with a group of younger monks. When he confronted the saint Anthony had him string his bow and shoots a series of arrows. After a few bowshots, the farmer objected: if he continued to stretch his bow in this way, it would break. So too, said Saint Anthony, with the monk. It is not healthy to practice asceticism without relaxation.
This is also true when our health is compromised. Sometimes survival and the restoration of health requires treating the body gently. The pain and discomfort of sickness or age, when borne well, are penance in and of themselves.