Evidently this subduing discipline is still physical exercise, but in its own way. The haircloth of St. Francis corresponds in fact to the club of Hercules, and serves the same purpose. The monsters which are knocked down by the weapon which Hercules alone could wield torment the saint of Assisi also; only, they are within him. He even tames the wolf, but without club or chains, by the mere exercise of his gentle meekness. These internal monsters are not, properly speaking, in the material body. If they were, the Saint would not need to worry about them any more than about the earth under his feet or the sack on his shoulder. But they are in that body which he feels; they are in that soul which, with the violence of its desires, the 199 din of its harsh and fiercely discordant voices, distracts him from the ideal where his life is. They are in that soul which thrusts so many claims on him, that were he to satisfy them he would have to part company with his Lady Poverty, and become once more the slave of things which are not in his power,—of wealth, which heaps up and blows away; of Fortune, which comes as a friend and departs as an enemy. He would, in other words, return to a materialistic conception of life. His Lernæan hydra is in the depths of his heart, where hundred-headed instinct, with its hundred mouths, tears the roots of his holy and magnanimous will, eager to resemble the Saviour in love and self-sacrifice.
This monster is strangled with the haircloth, when the body is hardened and trained to self-denial, to suffering, to the repression of all animal passions which would keep man away from his goal. This discipline, far from debilitating the body, gives it a new strength, an endurance which enables man to live on a higher plane than he would if he followed natural impulses. For this more difficult manner of living, a robustness and a hardihood are requisite which are beyond the natural means of the body. The system of physical culture which gives this stupendous endurance is called asceticism.
But this system is an abstract one. Man’s life is not poverty, since it is work and therefore wealth. And 200 the mind with its freedom cannot be conceived of as antagonistic to nature. For as body and as sense, in so far as we exist and know of our existence, we belong to this nature. Antagonism and duality import the limitation of each of the opposed terms and exclude freedom which is not to be found within fixed limits; for freedom, as we have said, means infinitude.
The spirit is free only if infinite. It cannot have any obstructing barrier in its path. It can be conceived as freedom only after it has overcome dualism, and when in nature itself and in the body we see the effect of the activity of the spirit. It has no need therefore of walls within which it might feel the necessity of cloistering itself in the effort to renounce the outer world. This is not the way to conquer freedom. A liberty won under such conditions would always be insecure, constantly threatened, always beleaguered, and therefore a mere shadow of freedom. The spirit, if it is free, that is, if it is spirit, must be conterminous with thought, it must extend its sway as far as there is any sign of life to the last point where a vestige of being can be revealed to it. Nothing thinkable can be external to it. Whatever presents itself to it, whether in the garb of an enemy or under the cloak of friendship, can only be one of its creatures, which it has placed at its own side, or in front of itself, or against itself.
This new pedagogical and philosophical view, first disclosed to Humanism, then enlightened by the genius of the Italian Renaissance, appears now to us in the full light of modern thought. Superficially it might seem identical with the classical and naturalistic outlook. In reality, however, it has made its way back to it only in order to confirm and integrate the concept of Christian spiritualism and to bring out its truth. Greek athletics is the training of the body as an end in itself: it surely serves the cause of the spirit, but only in so far as the spirit is grafted on the trunk of the physical personality, and to the extent that it is able to absorb all its vital sap, thereby subjecting itself to generation and decay, the common destiny of all natural beings. The physical culture of the ancients is spiritual discipline, only to the extent that for them the mind too is essentially body. Modern physical education, at least from the time of Vittorino da Feltre, is spiritual formation of the body: it is bodily training for the benefit of the spirit, just as the mediæval ascetic would have it; but of a spirit which does not intend to bury itself in abstract self-seclusion away from the existential world, of a spirit which passing beyond the cloister walls soars over the realm of nature, induing it and subduing it instrumentally to its ends and as a mirror of its will. So that for moderns, too, physical culture is spiritual education, but for the reason that to us the body itself is spirit. Our science is not 202 merely a speculation of ultra-mundane truths, but rather a science of man and of man in the Universe, and therefore also of this nature which is dominated and spiritualised by becoming known, in the same way that every book that is read is spiritualised.
This concrete notion of a spirit which excludes nothing from itself gives concreteness to the Christian conception of physical discipline. For it aims to turn the body into an obedient tool of the will, not however of that will which renounces the world, but of that will which turns to the world as to the field where its battles are fought and won; to the world which it transforms by its work, constantly re-creating it, now modifying one part and now another, but always acting on the entire system, and renewing it as a whole in the intimate organic connection and interdependence of these parts; to the world which forever confronts it in a rebellious and challenging attitude, and which it laboriously subdues and turns into a mirror of its own becoming.
Modern idealism and ancient naturalism both emphasise, though for opposite motives, the importance of a positive education in distinction to the negative discipline inculcated by mediæval asceticism. We said that to-day we develop the body because the body is spirit. This proposition runs counter to common sense. But common sense as such cannot be respected by the thinker unless he first transforms its content. 203 Our body, we must remember, is not one body out of many. If it were actually mixed with and lost in the multitude of material things which surround it, we could no longer speak of any bodies. For all bodies, as psychologists say, are perceived in so far as they modify ours and are somehow related to it. Or to put it in a different and perhaps better way, all other bodies, which we possess as contents of our experience, form a system, a circle, which has its centre; and this centre is our body. These first of all occupy space, but a space which no one of us can think of or intuit otherwise than as a radiating infinity, the centre of which we occupy with our body. So that before we can speak of bodies, we must first cognise our own. It is the foundation and groundwork of all bodies. Justly, therefore, the immanent sense, profound and continuous, which we have of our body, and whose modifications constitute all our particular sensations, was called the fundamental sentiment by our Italian philosopher Rosmini. For our body is ours only in so far as we feel it; and we feel it, at first, confusedly or rather indistinctly, without discerning any differentiated part. We feel it as the limit, the other, the opposite, the object of our consciousness, which, were it not conscious of something (of itself as of something), would not be consciousness, would not realise itself. And it realises itself, in the first place, as consciousness of this object which is the body. Accurately, therefore, 204 was the body defined by Spinoza as objectum mentis, as object of consciousness. Objectless consciousness is not consciousness; and it is likewise obvious that the object of consciousness cannot be such without consciousness.
The two terms are inseparable, for the reason that they are produced simultaneously by one and the same act, from which they cannot be detached and this act is the free becoming of the spirit.
Our body, this first object of consciousness, as yet indistinct and therefore one and infinite, is not really in space, the realm of the distinct, of the multiple, of the finite. It is within our own consciousness. And it is only by recalling this inwardness that we are able to understand how it happens that we (“We”—spiritual activity) act upon our body, animating it, sustaining it, endowing it with our vigorous and buoyant vitality; constantly transforming it, in very much the same way that we act on what we easily conceive to be our moral personality. As we direct our thoughts, and bringing them out of the dark into the luminous setting of our consciousness, submit them to scrutiny and correction, to elimination and selection; when we stifle or feed the fire of our passions; when we cherish ideals, nourish them with our own life’s blood, and sustain them with our unbending resolve; and again when we quench them in the fickleness of our whims, are we not constantly creating and variously reshaping our spiritual 205 life, making it good or bad, that is, eagerly and scrupulously intent on the quest of Truth or slothfully plunged in ignorance and forgetfulness?