The Body as Ground

The Given Body and the Colonized Body

The ancients did not need a philosophy of the body because they had bodies that functioned. Their material conditions — real food, physical labor, darkness at night, silence as the default — produced the substrate on which spiritual practice could build. When monastic rules prescribed fasting and manual work, they were intensifying an already-ordered baseline. When the Sabbath commanded rest, it presupposed six days of genuine exertion. The body was a given, not a project.

We do not have this.

The modern person inherits a body actively disordered by industrial and post-industrial conditions. Not merely neglected — colonized. Hyperpalatable food engineered to override satiety signals. Work that atrophies muscle while exhausting the nervous system. Light environments that scramble circadian architecture. Stimuli designed by teams of engineers to fragment attention and hijack reward circuits. The body that arrives at any spiritual project today is not a neutral vessel awaiting formation. It is a occupied territory requiring liberation.

This changes everything about how we must approach the integration of body and spirit.

The Failure of Separation

Modern Christianity largely abandoned the body to other authorities. Medicine handles illness. The fitness industry handles strength and appearance. Nutrition science handles food. The spiritual domain retreated to the “inner life” — emotions, beliefs, moral decisions — as if these could be cultivated independently of the flesh that houses them.

This separation is neither traditional nor tenable.

It is not traditional because the great spiritual systems never made this separation. Jewish law regulates food, sex, rest, and ritual purity as inseparable from covenant faithfulness. The Rule of St. Benedict choreographs sleep, labor, prayer, and meals as a unified daily order. Orthodox fasting calendars synchronize bodily discipline with liturgical time. Islamic practice binds prayer to physical postures performed at specific hours. The body was always already spiritual; the spiritual was always already embodied.

It is not tenable because the body grounds every higher capacity. A person whose sleep is destroyed cannot sustain attention in prayer. A nervous system dysregulated by processed food and chronic stress cannot hold the stillness contemplation requires. A body atrophied by sedentary work lacks the vital energy from which dedication and sacrifice flow. You cannot build on a cracked foundation.

The wellness industry recognizes this — and exploits it. It offers bodily optimization as its own telos, another consumer identity, another hamster wheel. “Getting healthy” becomes a project of indefinite duration with no end beyond itself. The body is not ordered toward anything; it is simply maintained, optimized, tracked.

We require something different: the ordering of the body as preparation of the ground for what exceeds it.

Resistance and Restoration

The appropriate frame is neither wellness optimization nor traditional asceticism. It is resistance.

The forces disordering the modern body are not neutral features of contemporary life. They are the products of systems designed to extract value from human attention, appetite, and desire. The food engineer optimizing for “bliss point” is not trying to nourish you. The social media platform maximizing engagement is not trying to help you think. The built environment requiring car transport to reach anything is not designed for your flourishing. These systems are hostile to the well-ordered body, not indifferent to it.

Bodily discipline today therefore takes on the character of resistance against occupation. To eat real food is to refuse the engineered slop. To train the body is to refuse atrophy as the default condition. To protect sleep is to refuse the colonization of the night by screens. To cultivate attention is to refuse its capture by those who would sell it.

But resistance alone produces only negation. The body must be restored toward something. Here the older traditions provide the telos that wellness culture lacks: the body as temple, as vessel, as ground for the soul’s work. We restore the body not to optimize it but to prepare it — for prayer, for service, for presence, for the demands that genuine spiritual life will place upon it.

The Three Pillars

Three domains require attention, and in a specific order of priority:

Sleep is foundational because it is the condition for everything else. A person who does not sleep cannot think clearly, regulate emotion, recover from exertion, or sustain attention. Modern conditions assault sleep from multiple directions: artificial light extending the day indefinitely, screens providing stimulation at all hours, caffeine masking accumulated debt, irregular schedules preventing entrainment.

The discipline required: darkness after sunset, screens banished from the bedroom (ideally from the evening), consistent sleep and wake times synchronized to natural light where possible, caffeine restricted to morning hours. This is not optimization advice. This is the minimum necessary to have a body capable of spiritual work.

Food is next because it determines the substrate from which the body builds and maintains itself. The modern food environment is an active adversary. The majority of available calories come from industrial products engineered to maximize consumption, not nutrition. The result is bodies simultaneously overfed and malnourished, inflamed and depleted.

The discipline required: eat real food, recognizable as what it is, prepared from basic ingredients. Meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains in whole form. Avoid engineered products. This is not a “diet” in the modern sense — a temporary restriction followed by reversion. It is a permanent orientation toward food as nourishment rather than stimulation. The community dimension matters here: shared meals of real food, prepared together, normalize what industrial conditions have made to seem extreme.

Movement is third because the body was designed for physical work and deteriorates without it. Sedentary existence is not a neutral baseline but an active harm. Muscle atrophies. Bones weaken. Metabolic function degrades. The energy and vitality that spiritual dedication requires cannot flow from a body that never moves.

The discipline required: regular training that builds and maintains strength, cardiovascular capacity, and mobility. The specific form matters less than consistency and adequate intensity. But here too the communal dimension transforms the practice: training together builds bonds that isolated gym attendance cannot, and mutual accountability sustains what individual willpower cannot maintain.

The Communal Dimension

Individual discipline against industrial-scale disruption is nearly impossible to sustain. The forces are too pervasive, the default too powerful, the willpower required too great. This is why bodily discipline must be communal discipline.

The Table keeps one another accountable. Not through surveillance or shame but through shared commitment and mutual support. When the community eats together, real food becomes the norm rather than the exception requiring constant justification. When the community trains together, movement becomes woven into social life rather than carved out against it. When the community holds rhythms of rest, sleep is protected by collective practice rather than individual resistance.

More than accountability: shared bodily practice becomes a site of bonding. Preparing meals together. Training together. Suffering together in the work of physical restoration. These shared experiences create the thick ties that mere conversation cannot. The body becomes a medium of community, not merely a private project.

Neither Gnosticism nor Materialism

Two errors must be avoided.

The gnostic error treats the body as irrelevant to spiritual life — a prison for the soul, an obstacle to transcendence, something to be escaped or ignored. This error produced the modern Christian abandonment of the body to secular authorities and the reduction of faith to inner states and moral opinions.

The materialist error treats the body as the whole of human existence — reducing persons to biology, wellness to metrics, flourishing to optimization. This error produces the wellness industry’s endless project of bodily management with no telos beyond itself.

The integrated view holds that we are embodied souls or ensouled bodies — not spirits trapped in flesh, not flesh that generates the illusion of spirit. The body is the ground of spiritual life, not its enemy or its totality. To neglect the body is to build on sand. To make the body the final end is to mistake the foundation for the house.

The body is the temple. Not the god worshipped within it, but the sacred space where worship becomes possible. A temple with a collapsed roof cannot host the presence it was built to contain. But a perfectly maintained temple with no presence, no sacrifice, no worship, is just an empty building.

Conclusion: Preparing the Ground

Any spiritual revival that neglects the body will fail. Not because the body is the point, but because the body is the precondition. The modern person seeking to build a genuine spiritual life must first reclaim the ground on which that life will be built — must resist the forces colonizing their sleep, their appetite, their attention, and restore the body to a condition capable of receiving what spiritual practice offers.

This is not a preliminary stage to be completed before the real work begins. It is ongoing, integral, woven into the fabric of communal life. The Table eats together, trains together, holds rhythms of rest together. The body and spirit are formed in tandem, by the same community, through the same committed practice.

The house cannot stand on a cracked foundation. But neither is a foundation a house. We prepare the ground so that something can be built upon it.

Next: