Examples, Baths, and Exercise

And anyone among you who keeps entirely clear of luxury will train himself, by a frugal upbringing, to endure the hardships he does not choose, since he is constantly using the hardships he does choose as training exercises for persecution. Then, when forced labor and fears and griefs come to him, he will not be out of practice at endurance. That is why we have no country on earth: so that we may look down on earthly possessions. And frugality is rich in the highest degree, for it amounts to a fund of spending that never runs out, laid out on what is needed and to the degree needed — since the second half of the word means expenses. How a husband is to live with his wife; doing your own work; keeping house; the use of household servants; and further, the right time for marriage and what suits a wife — all this we have handled in the discourse on marriage. What belongs to training alone is what we have kept back to describe here, as we sketch the life of Christians. Most of it has been said already and set down in the form of rules of training. What is left we will add now, for examples count for a great deal in turning a person toward salvation. [a]

See what the tragedy says:

In reproaching foul adultery, the poet displayed the beautiful image of purity in a wife’s love for her husband. The Spartans used to force the helots — their slaves; helot is the name they give their slaves — to get drunk, and then put the drunkards’ antics on show in front of themselves, who were sober, as a cure and a correction. Watching that disgraceful behavior, so as not to fall into the same blameworthy conduct themselves, they trained themselves, turning the drunkards’ shame to their own advantage in keeping clear of fault.

For some men are saved by being taught, while others, self-taught, either reach after virtue or search for it. “Best of all is the man who works everything out for himself.” Abraham was such a man; he searched for God. “And good, again, is the man who listens to one who advises him well.” Such were the disciples who obeyed the Word. That is why the one was called God’s friend and the others apostles: the one searching hard, the others announcing one and the same God. Both are good, and each of the two has its hearers — the one profited through seeking, the other saved through finding. “But the man who neither works it out for himself nor takes to heart what he hears from another is a worthless man.” This is the people that does not follow Christ.

All the same, the Instructor loves us and helps in many ways: sometimes he urges, sometimes he reproaches. When others have sinned, he shows us how low they sank and sets out the punishment that followed, drawing us in even as he warns us, meaning in his love to talk us out of evil by putting before us the people who suffered from it earlier. By such examples he plainly checked those who had been set on evil and held back those who were about to dare the same things. Some he brought to a footing of patience; some he pulled up short in their wickedness; and some he cured by having them look at a case like their own, and brought them over to something better. For who, walking behind another man on the road, would not guard against the same danger once the man in front had fallen into a pit, and take care not to follow him into his fall? And what athlete, who has learned the road to glory and has watched the competitor ahead of him take the prize, does not strain for the crown himself, copying the older man?

Images of divine wisdom like this are many. I will mention one case and explain it in a few words. What happened to the people of Sodom was judgment for those who had done wrong and training for those who hear about it. Through great luxury they had fallen into uncleanness, committing adultery without shame and burning with a mad passion for boys; and the all-seeing Word, whom no one who acts irreverently escapes, turned his eye on them. The sleepless guardian of the human race did not watch their loose living in silence. To turn us away from imitating them, and to train us up in his own self-control, and coming down on some sinners so that lust, going unpunished, should not break loose from every restraint of fear, he ordered Sodom to be burned, pouring out a little of that discerning fire on their loose living — so that lust, for want of punishment, should not throw the gates wide open to people rushing into indulgence. So the just punishment of the people of Sodom became for us an image of the salvation that is exactly fitted to us. People who have not committed the same sins as those who were punished will never receive the same punishment: by guarding against sinning, we guard against suffering. “For I want you to know,” says Jude, “that God, having once saved his people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe; and the angels who did not keep their own position but left their own dwelling he has kept for the judgment of the great day, in everlasting chains under the darkness of the savage angels.” And a little later he sets out, in the most instructive way, portraits of those who are judged: “Woe to them! For they have gone the way of Cain, and rushed greedily into Balaam’s error, and perished in Korah’s rebellion.”

For people who cannot reach the standing of adopted sons, fear keeps from growing insolent. Punishments and threats exist for this: that we may keep away from sinning out of fear of the penalty. I could tell you about punishments for love of finery and penalties for love of glory, and not only for loose living; and I could bring up the rebukes pronounced on people whose minds are ruined by wealth, rebukes by which the Word uses fear to hold them back from evil acts. But rather than let this treatise run long, I will set out the following instructions of the Instructor, so that you may be on your guard against his threats.

There are four reasons why we go to the baths — and this is the point I broke off from: cleanliness, warmth, health, or, last of all, pleasure. Bathing for pleasure is to be dropped, for shameless pleasure has to be cut out at the roots. Women are to bathe for cleanliness and health, men for health alone. Bathing for warmth is unnecessary, since a man can thaw what the cold has frozen in other ways. Constant bathing also weakens strength and slackens the body’s energy, and often brings on faintness and collapse. For in a way the body drinks like a tree — not only through the mouth, but over its whole surface while bathing, through what they call the pores. In proof of this, thirsty people have often gone into the water afterward and found their thirst relieved. Even if the bath is of some use, then, we ought not on that account to go limp in it. The ancients called the baths fulleries for people, since they wrinkle the body sooner than they should and, by cooking a man, force him into an early old age. The flesh, like iron, is softened by the heat, and so we need cold to temper it and give it an edge. Nor are we to bathe at all hours. If a man is very empty, or on the other hand stuffed full, the bath is to be forbidden him, with an eye to the age of the body and the season of the year. The bath is not good for everyone, or at all times, as the people who know these things admit; but the due proportion we call in as our helper in life at every point is enough for us. We must not stay in the bath so long that we need someone to lead us out by the hand, nor bathe constantly and many times a day the way we go to the marketplace. And to have several people pour the water over us is an outrage on our neighbors, done out of a fondness for luxury by people who refuse to understand that the bath belongs equally to everyone bathing in it. [l]

But above all the soul has to be washed in the cleansing Word — and sometimes the body too, because of the dirt that gathers and clings to it, and sometimes to relieve fatigue. The Lord says: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs. On the outside the tomb looks beautiful, but inside it is full of dead men’s bones and every kind of uncleanness.” And again he says to the same people: “Woe to you! For you clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of uncleanness. Clean the inside of the cup first, so that the outside may be clean too.”

The best bath, then, is the one that scrubs off the pollution of the soul; it is the bath that belongs to the spirit. Prophecy speaks of it in so many words: “The Lord will wash away the filth of the sons and daughters of Israel, and will cleanse the blood out from among them” — the blood of crime, and the murders of the prophets. And the Word added how the cleansing is done: “by a spirit of judgment and a spirit of burning.” Bathing of the flesh, that is, of the body, is done with water alone, as it often is in the country, where there is no bathhouse.

The gymnasium is enough for boys, even where a bath is within reach. And for men to prefer exercise in the gymnasium far above the baths is perhaps not a bad thing either, since in some ways it serves the health of young men and produces effort — a rivalry aimed not only at a healthy condition of body but at courage of soul. Done without dragging a man away from better occupations, it is pleasant and not unprofitable. Nor are women to be left without bodily exercise. But they are not to be urged into wrestling or running; they are to exercise themselves in spinning and weaving and, where necessary, overseeing the cooking. They are to fetch from the storeroom with their own hands whatever we need, and it is no disgrace for them to put their hands to the mill. Nor is it any reproach to a wife — the keeper of the house, her husband’s helper — to busy herself with the cooking, so that the food may suit her husband’s taste. And if she shakes up the couch, hands her husband a drink when he is thirsty, sets the food out on the table as neatly as she can, and in this way gives herself exercise that tends toward sound health, the Instructor will approve of a woman like that: a woman who “stretches out her arms to useful work, rests her hands on the spindle, opens her hand to the poor, and reaches out her wrist to the beggar.” [p]

A woman who takes Sarah for her model is not ashamed of that highest of services, waiting on travelers. For Abraham said to her, “Hurry and knead three measures of fine flour, and make cakes.” “And Rachel, Laban’s daughter, came,” it says, “with her father’s sheep” — and that was not enough; to teach humility it adds, “for she was pasturing her father’s sheep.” The Scriptures supply countless examples like these of frugality, of doing your own work, and of exercise as well. As for men, let some strip and wrestle, and let some play at the small ball, especially the game they call pheninda, out in the sun. For others, who walk out into the country or go down into town, the walk is exercise enough. And if they were to take up the hoe, this stroke of thrift in farm work would not be beneath a free man.

I had almost forgotten to say that the well-known Pittacus, king of Mytilene, practiced the hard exercise of grinding at the mill. It is respectable for a man to draw his own water and to cut the firewood he means to use himself. Jacob pastured the sheep of Laban that were left in his charge, and his royal staff was “a rod of storax,” which by its wood set out to change and improve nature. And reading aloud is often exercise for many people. But let the wrestling we have allowed not be taken up for the sake of useless contentiousness, but for the sake of sweating like a man. We are not to wrestle with tricks and showing off, but in a standing bout, working the neck, hands and sides free; for a contest of that kind, with graceful strength, is more fitting and more manly, undertaken as it is for health that is useful and does some good. But those who make a profession of the postures of the gymnasium that no free man should take are to be sent away. We must always aim at moderation. Just as it is best that work should come before food, so working beyond measure is very bad, very exhausting, and likely to make us ill. We should be neither wholly idle nor completely worn out. What we have laid down about food is what we are to do everywhere and in everything: our way of life is not to accustom us to indulgence and loose living, nor to the opposite extreme, but to the middle between them — the life that is balanced and self-controlled and free of both evils, luxury and stinginess.

And now, as we have said before, attending to your own needs is an exercise free of pride: putting on your own shoes, for instance, washing your own feet, and rubbing yourself down when you have been oiled. To do the same service in return for the man who has rubbed you down is an exercise in mutual justice. And to sleep at a sick friend’s bedside, to help the weak, and to supply a man in need are proper exercises. “And Abraham,” it says, “set out a meal for the three of them under the tree, and waited on them while they ate.” So too with fishing, as with Peter, if we have leisure to spare from the necessary teaching of the Word. But the better enjoyment is the one the Lord assigned to his disciple when he taught him to “catch men,” as fish are caught in the water.