The Resacralization of the Flesh
(or: A Body Positive Future)
Sadly we are losing the concept of the physical body as vehicle for the soul, and thereby its outward beauty as indication of soulful cultivation. The strange attitudes of negligence and hatred for one’s body and appearance lead further to a desacralization of the environment. For this reason, the disconnection between the body and soul should be considered a heresy.
Without the sacralization of the individual’s physical body, we neglect the cultivation of solar ethics, which require beauty and strength. Beauty and strength require discipline, and self-privation, and the order that comes from indifference to pain and certain pleasures. Sacrilization of the body requires a desire to sculpt, an artistic impulse, but within the limits of what creation has granted you (what unique traits). Beauty in these traits comes from awareness, confidence, and spiritual / intellectual courage. Becoming apathetic to our physical soul-vehicle leads to laziness of thought generally, and a contentedness with the ugliness in our environments to match our monstrous bodies. Thus the desacralization of the flesh leads to the desacralization of one’s surrounding.
Without seeing our bodies as an alchemical vessel, we are no longer interested in the rigors of fitness; we pretend our physicality is a soulless husk of flesh, to be scorned and denigrated, since we either don’t believe in soul or believe soul is entirely separate from the body. Reverence for physical bodies leads to reverence for the physical expression of the soul. Plato himself was a famous wrestler, who could both materially and mentally grapple you into submission.
Without the theological aspect of athletics and physical awareness, we can not be considered serious in our spirituality or mysticism. How can a person develop his soul, if he is physically inactive and lazy? There’s no disconnection between physical development and spiritual development, every moment you are alive is physical and subject to laws of desire and denial and the force of will.
Without physical health and beauty being emphasized as religious and traditional duty we find that we lack beauty, and the masses wallow in vice.
Without clean diets and environments our spiritual lives suffer, as junk food is junk culture, and every capitulation to non-heroic pleasure is a base wallowing for the soul as well as the body. Therefore degradation of one’s diet and environment should be considered a spiritual matter, a supreme heresy. Because there is little distinction between physical health and spiritual health.
How can solar order re-energize our world, if we don’t see the physical flesh as the manifestation of the sacred? It is a temporary garden to be tended by the eternally rational.
“When you make your body robust, don’t forget that your soul will also become robust”
– Ioannis Metaxas
