As we get started, it is important to have some basic definitions so that we start on the same page. This post, as with all future posts, will have two components to it: a spiritual/theological component and a nutritional component.
Our goal here is to get health, spiritually and physically. It is often easier to understand health by means of its opposite. Sin, for the Fathers, is the disease of the soul. And just as we speak of obesity as being a disease of the body, so too we need to consider the disease of the soul. Many view obesity as a taboo subject and are timid about assigning blame. But I think it is important for all of us to ask ourselves to what extent is my obesity related to my bad choices. This is important, even though it is true that there are some health conditions which can contribute to obesity, as well as limited access to good foods.
In a future post, I intend to discuss more profoundly the connection between the health of the body and the health of the soul. This will help to explain why my posts will always consider spiritual health and nutrition together.
Let us begin with some theological definitions. I think it is important that we understand what sin is. But in order to know what sin is, we have to know what goodness and evil are.
Goodness is the fullness of being appropriate to the kind of thing something is. This is an old idea which is not just a Christian one, but from a Christian point of view one proof of this is the story of creation itself. The revelation that the being of all things is good, and all that exists is good. If we were not to admit this definition, we would be left to admit that God creates things that are evil.
Evil, in contrast, is non-being. In other words, it is a deficiency or negation.
This means that sin is the deliberate failure to live up to the standard of fullness of being which is proper to man. The Greek word for sin, ἁμαρτία (amartia), means to "miss the mark". It is a failure to achieve the standard or purpose for which man was created.
In sinning, you are choosing the limitation of something unreal, non-being, instead of the actual fulfillment, which is rooted in God Himself.
Closely related to this is the discussion of the passions. While the term "passion" can mean many things, I am going to turn to Maximos the Confessor for our definition here: an unreasonable affection or senseless hate for sensibly perceived objects or images. It is the inclination to sin which is rooted in the sensible aspects of our nature.
Other Christian thinkers meant something different by the word "passion." For instance St. Thomas Aquinas' defined it as a movement of one of the sense appetites.
The Eastern tradition, typified by Maximos, used the term to mean something different. Aquinas uses the term to refer to something morally neutral, where as Maximos' uses the term to refer to a disease of the soul. In fact, the Greek word for passion, πάθος (pathos), is related to the medical term "pathology", the study of disease.
This is by no means the end of our discussion on sin and the passions, but is merely our foundation for our discussion.
We now turn to our health definitions. Before we discuss what "health" is, I would like to define nutrition and metabolism. I think it is important to understand these first before we delve further, since these are the foundation for health of the human body.
Nutrition, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is simply the process of providing or obtaining the food necessary for health and growth. The WHO narrows the definition to the "intake of food, considered in relation to the body's dietary needs." It goes further to say that good nutrition is "an adequate, well balanced diet combined with regular physical activity--[good nutrition] is a cornerstone to good health."
A calorie is "the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1° C" (Mosby's Medical Dictionary). When we speak of calories in food, we are actually speaking of a kilocalorie or "large calorie" which is used "to denote the heat expenditure of an organism and the fuel or energy value of food" (Mosby's Medical Dictionary).
Metabolism is "the aggregate of all chemical processes that take place in living organisms. resulting in growth, generation of energy, elimination of wastes, and other body functions as they relate to the distribution of nutrients in the blood after digestion" (Mosby's Medical Dictionary). To put it another way, it is how your body takes energy (calories) in its various forms, breaks it down and uses it. To complete the various functions within the body, only a certain amount of calories are needed. If we put in too many or too little calories, we end up with various medical problems from weight issues to malnutrition.
Next time we will discuss health.
Peace!
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