People often talk about Catholic guilt, but I’d say gym guilt is at least as prevalent. I meet people all the time who feel like a moral failure if they miss a workout or, in a moment of weakness, cave in and eat carbs after 7:00 p.m. And in almost comical parody of religious devotion, the health god beckons its shamefaced disciples to run back to the gym and confess to the trainer: “That’ll be ten push-ups and ten sit-ups; now make a good act of contrition.”
Don’t get me wrong, physical health is a good thing because the human body is a good thing. The human person is a hylomorphic unity, which is just the philosophical way of saying that it’s composed of both body and soul, matter and form: The soul is the form of the body, Aristotle would say. So the body is not simply a gangly collection of disparate organs but a living human person, with a principle that accounts for its organic unity and growth. The body is not a mistake or ill-conceived tool, either. The soul does not simply make use of the body like an underpaid and underappreciated intern who goes home every night in tears. No, the definition of man includes flesh and bones.
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