In the 5th Century BC, a Greek sculptor known as Polyclitus wrote a now-lost treatise about sculpture in which he described his innovative approach to the artform. Polyclitus designed his nudes using an intricate theory of ideal proportions, based on a principle of symmetria, which expressed both balance (isonomia) and rhythm (rhythmos) together. His treatise has been lost to the sands of time, but other ancient writers have quoted him as saying, “Perfection (in the human form) comes about little by little, through many numbers (i.e. on the basis of carefully designed mathematical ratios).” Polyclitus’s most enduring contribution to the world of art is the famous “contrapposto” pose which we see in so many Greek statues from the 5th Century onwards, the well-known pose of an athlete balanced between movement and repose, with the hips tilted and the weight poised.
It wasn’t just Polyclitus, of course, who believed back then that the human form could be used to represent an idealized vision of divine beauty. The ancient Greeks in general held this thought dear. They were “fixated with the human body,” and believed that “the perfect body was an athletic body.”[1] The gods of ancient Greece came in human form, after all, and so the temples of ancient Greece—where you went to worship the divine—were filled with life-sized, life-like representations of human bodies, all of them carefully proportioned, beautifully sculpted, and perfectly balanced.
Some historians refer to this the “cult of the body,” the prevailing idea in ancient Greece that a beautifully-formed human body—or at least a representation of it—could be an object of worship. The worship of the body didn’t stop when you left the temple, either. The Greeks were the ones who invented the gymnasium, after all, where you went to keep your own body perfectly proportioned. They also invented the Olympics, where you worshipped the gods through a festival of athletic endeavors designed to push the human body to its limits.
In the Greek view of the body we glimpse something we might think of as “the dark side” of exercise, the idealization, the fixation, even obsession with the body that sometimes accompanies it. Those of us who have spent any consistent amount of time going to the gym will probably be nodding along at this point. It is possible—and this is especially true if our exercise is detached from a healthy self-image and a satisfying world-view that keeps it in perspective—for exercise to become a neurotic form of self-worship.
I had a friend a few years back who had become so obsessed with going to the gym that it began to negatively affect their mental well-being, their relationships, their family, and their health. He had come through that dark season, by the time I met him, and he used the term “big-ism” to describe it. “It’s like reverse anorexia,” is how he explained it to me, “where you are so obsessed with your body-size that you always look ‘too small’ when you look in the mirror and are driven to continually ‘bulk-up.’”
It turns out “bigism” is an actual disorder, known in the literature as “muscle dysmorphia,” and defined as “the delusional or exaggerated belief is that one's own body is … insufficiently muscular" [2]. It may be unfair or inaccurate to connect this modern psychological disorder to the ancient Greek cult of the body, but if there is a connection between the two, it is probably this: a distorted belief that the body itself is a source of ultimate meaning, which leads to an obsessive quest to perfect its shape.
We have been exploring the “theology of exercise” over the last few weeks here at terra incognita. We’ve looked at themes of incarnation, stewardship, embodiment, and the exercise routines of Jesus himself. Any honest theology of exercise, however, will have to face squarely this “dark side” of the topic, the dangers of narcissism, body-worship, neuroticism and even muscle dysmorphia that an unhealthy view of exercise can lead us into.
This isn’t to say that there’s not something theologically rich to be discovered in physical exercise. If anything, I would say it’s the opposite. The reason it’s crucial to take a theological view of exercise is the same reason it’s crucial to take a theological view of any aspect of human life: because when we look at something theologically, we put it in its proper place in relation to God.
I said earlier that exercise can become a neurotic form of self-worship, if it is detached from a healthy self-image and a robust world-view that gives it meaning. That “if” was the crucial word in that sentence. A Christian’s self-image is based, or at least it should be based on the fact that her or she is the fearfully-made child of God, unconditionally affirmed as his beloved, regardless their weight, their BMI, or how much they can bench-press. A Christian world-view is one where God is at the centre, giving joy and delight to his creatures, who in turn do all things for his glory.
This worldview has the power, I think, to transform how we think of physically exercise, and why we do it in the first place. When we are truly able to see ourselves as God’s beloved creatures, living in and though and for his glory alone, we are set free to enjoy all aspects of a good, godly life, including the joy of using our body to move and lift and run and play. A theological perspective on exercise, in other words, has the power to deliver us from any “cult of the body” that might distort or corrupt it for us, and frees us instead to do it for God’s glory, as creatures delighting in the body he gave us, however it may look and whatever its shape.
0 comments:
Post a Comment