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Search - Health & Holiness; A Study Of The Relations Between Brother Ass, The Body, And His Rider, The Soul

Health Holiness A Study Of The Relations Between Brother Ass The Body And His Rider The Soul
Author: Francis Thompson

Health and Holiness The Science of Lifc Series - PREFACE - IT is dangerous treading here, says the author p. 26, yet with reverence I venture. For whether as a defence, or as a criticism of the ascetical tradition of Christianity, what he says will perhaps raise objections on this side or on that. Else it were not worth saying. Let it first be c... more »learly noted that he is not dealing with the austerities of sanctity so far as they are inspired by the purely religious and - mystical motives of atonement and expiation. His theme is Asceticism, which is to the psychic man, to the passions and desires, what athletics are to the physical man, to the limbs and muscles. It is an instrument or method for the perfecting of our whole nature by the due subjection of the lower to the service of the higher for the harmonious subordination of the psychic to the pneumatic or spiritual. It is therefore for building-up and not for destruction. In the Saints, the ascetical tendency is frequently complicated with the sacrificial and self - destructive tendency. Thir latter is a problem apart, a problem for mystics rather than for moralists. But if at times the mystic may transcend, yet he may never transgress the clear dictates of moral reason and so he too may meditate with profit on these pages. The crippling of Brother Ass is eventually as fatal to the mystical as to the moral life, both of which require the free use of unimpaired faculties. Midway between an exagge rated pessimistic spiritualism on the one side, and the nalve animalism against which it is the equally nalve reaction on the other, stands the Great Physician of soul and body alike, with healing on his wings, the Giver of the meat which perisheth no less than of the meat which endureth. Christian asceticism has ever been in . h Preface principle and in aim a synthesis, a tempering of contraries. , But if, as an imperishable principle of conduct, asceticism comes more directly under the jurisdiction of divine tradition, yet its application changes with ever changing conditions of life and - - society, and still more with our growing understanding of the functions of soul and body, a n t o f the precise degree and nature of their interdependence. T o adhere rigidly and blindly not merely to the ascetical principles of the Past, but to their old-world applications, were to ignore the bewildering changes that have since swept over the face of society, and to deny all value to the light which has been given us from the Giver of all light through the progress of Physiology and Psychology. An asceticism whose zeal is untempered by such knowledge may easily defeat itself by inducing those very same nervous and mental disorders which proverbially dog the heels of indulgence, and whose root in both cases is to be found in the violation of the due balance of sense and spirit...

ISBN-13: 9781408611814
ISBN-10: 1408611813
Publication Date: 1/31/2008
Pages: 80
Rating:

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Publisher: Read Books
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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