Sport is Good for You But Digging is Better
Physical exercise is good for the health. But not only that: while it stimulates the desire to care for bodily vigour, it stimulates the same desire for vigour of soul. Exercise is extremely useful therefore, assuming it does not distract us from more important activities.
Some enjoy wrestling, others like to play ball in the sunshine. For some it is enough to go for a walk in the countryside or the city. If they were to wield a spade, however, they would be doing an exercise that is useful even from an economic point of view.
The King of Mitylene would grind grain; it was one way, a tiring one, of practising gymnastics. Other ways would be to draw water or chop wood.
Wrestling, it goes without saying, should not simply be a matter of competition, but a way to make you work up a sweat.
In any case, we must always keep a balance: neither doing nothing nor killing ourselves with exhaustion.
Clement of Alexandria, The Teacher, 3, 10 (PG8, 620)
Using Illness Well
When you are ill, you can call the doctor. Not for nothing have there always existed in nature medicines from which human experimentation has derived healing.
If you are too preoccupied with your physical illnesses, however, it is a sign that your soul is still too enslaved to the body.
Your soul is mourning for the time when everything was going well; it considers it a great misfortune that illness prevents its tasting the pleasures of life.
If on the other hand, the soul accepts suffering by giving thanks to the Lord, you could say it has reached the point almost of mastering the feelings, of hardly noticing the physical illness any more.
Then the soul is ready to accept with joy even the fact of eventual death, knowing that after death there awaits a more real life.
Diadochus of Photica, Spiritual Works, 53 (SC 5b, p.115)
Let the Body be no Hindrance to the Soul
God has placed the spirit in the body. The more the body puts on weight, the more it drags the soul down; it transfers its own heaviness to the soul and impedes its flight.
If, on the contrary, an individual by the steady practice of self-control lessens the weight of the flesh, he finds he has been purified. That is to say, the body on the one hand gives clarity and joy to the soul, on the other hand it is readily obedient to the wishes of the soul.
The soul in fact takes the body where it likes and the body does not resist: more than that, its weight does not prevent it from making its abode wherever it pleases the soul.
Philoxenus of Mabbug, Homily 10, 357ff. (SC44, pp.32 4ff.)
~Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain: A Patristic Breviary, Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
