Ever since the time of that dyspeptic heathen, Plotinus, the saints have
been "ashamed of their bodies." What is worse, they have usually had
reason for the shame. Of the four famous Latin fathers, Jerome describes
his own limbs as misshapen, his skin as squalid, his bones as scarcely
holding together; while Gregory the Great speaks in his Epistles of his
own large size, as contrasted with his weakness and infirmities. Three of the four Greek fathers--Chrysostom, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzen--ruined their health early, and were wretched invalids for the remainder of their days. Three only of the whole eight were able-bodied men,--Ambrose, Augustine, and Athanasius; and the permanent influence of these three has been far greater, for good or for evil, than that of all the others put together.
Robust military saints there have doubtless been, in the Roman Catholic
Church: George, Michael, Sebastian, Eustace, Martin,--not to mention
Hubert the Hunter, and Christopher the Christian Hercules. But these
have always held a very secondary place in canonization. If we mistake
not, Maurice and his whole Theban legion were sainted together, to the
number of six thousand six hundred and sixty-six; doubtless they were
stalwart men, but there never yet has been a chapel erected to one of
them. The mediaeval type of sanctity was a strong soul in a weak body; and it could be intensified either by strengthening the one or by further debilitating the other. The glory lay in contrast, not in combination. Yet, to do them justice, they conceded a strong and stately beauty to their female saints,--Catherine, Agnes, Agatha, Barbara, Cecilia, and the rest. It was reserved for the modern Pre-Raphaelites to attempt the combination of a maximum of saintliness with a minimum of pulmonary and digestive capacity.
But, indeed, from that day to this, the saints by spiritual laws have
usually been sinners against physical laws, and the artists have merely
followed the examples they found. Vasari records, that Carotto's
masterpiece of painting, "The Three Archangels," at Verona, was
criticized because the limbs of the angels were too slender, and
Carotto, true to his conventional standard, replied, "Then they will fly
the better." Saints have been flying to heaven for the same reason ever
since,--and have commonly flown very early.
Indeed, the earlier some such saints cast off their bodies the better, they make so little use of them. Chittagutta, the Buddhist saint, dwelt in a cave in Ceylon. His devout visitors one day remarked on the miraculous beauty of the legendary paintings, representing scenes from the life of Buddha, which adorned the walls. The holy man informed them, that, during his sixty years' residence in the cave, he had been too much absorbed in meditation to notice the existence of the paintings, but he would take their word for it. And in this non-intercourse with the visible world there has been an apostolical succession, from Chittagutta, down to the Andover divinity-student who refused to join his companions in their admiring gaze on that wonderful autumnal landscape which spreads itself before the Seminary Hill in October, but marched back into the Library, ejaculating, "Lord, turn thou mine eyes from beholding vanity!"
It is to be reluctantly recorded, in fact, that the Protestant saints
have not ordinarily had much to boast of, in physical stamina, as
compared with the Roman Catholic. They have not got far beyond Plotinus. We do not think it worth while to quote Calvin on this point, for he, as everybody knows, was an invalid for his whole lifetime. But we do take it hard, that the jovial Luther, in the midst of his ale and skittles, should have deliberately censured Juvenal's _mens sana in corpore sano_, as a pagan maxim!
If Saint Luther fails us, where are the advocates of the body to look
for comfort? Nothing this side of ancient Greece, we fear, will afford
adequate examples of the union of saintly souls and strong bodies. Pythagoras the sage we doubt not to have been identical with Pythagoras the inventor of pugilism, and he was, at any rate, (in the loving words of Bentley,) "a lusty proper man, and built as it were to make a good boxer." Cleanthes, whose sublime "Prayer" is, to our thinking, the highest strain left of early piety, was a boxer likewise. Plato was a famous wrestler, and Socrates was unequalled for his military endurance. Nor was one of these, like their puny follower Plotinus, too weak-sighted to revise his own manuscripts.