X PERSONALITY AS A WHOLE 265 



nature but gives it a quite peculiar and intimate flavour 

 of humanity. Body is not alien and opaque but indeed 

 transparent to spirit. And the body as transfigured by 

 spirit in man is worthy to be the foundation of the most 

 noble and exalted human Personality. The contempt for the 

 body, the conventional degradation of the body do not spring 

 from a true view of human nature. The natural and proper 

 tendency is to look upon the body as clean and wholesome, 

 to rejoice in it as something good and beautiful, to make 

 it twin-sister of the spirit and the embodiment of joyous- 

 ness and wholesome pleasure. That view of the body finds 

 characteristic expression in Greek literature. It may be a 

 pagan view, but in reality it is the human and true view. 

 It led to respect and reverence for the body, and the culture 

 of the body as a worthy companion of the spirit. This 

 natural and wholesome attitude towards the body was 

 poisoned by the morbid, diseased, religious spirit of a later 

 time which heaped contempt and degradation on the body. 

 Degraded religions from the East, born amid the filth and 

 squalor, the moral and social decay of the Oriental world, 

 invaded the Roman Empire and found a congenial soil in 

 the moral and religious confusion which had set in among 

 Roman society. The decline of the Empire, the ruin which 

 followed the barbaric invasions, the slow but sure decay of 

 Roman civilisation, and the growing spirit of dejection and 

 despair which was inevitable under these calamities made 

 men turn a ready ear to the base superstitions of the East, 

 which outraged the human spirit and degraded the human 

 body into an instrument of evil. Even the pure spirit of 

 Christianity succumbed to some extent to this perversion, 

 and instead of the body being regarded as " the Temple of 

 the Holy Spirit " it came to be looked upon as a fitter 

 tabernacle for the devil. Mediaeval civilisation succumbed 

 to and accentuated this horror of the flesh; the monastic 

 ideal with its monkish practices and morbid celibacies 

 bears eloquent testimony to the great fall of the body. 

 The flesh became synonymous with sin. And it was not 

 till the revolution in the human standpoint brought about 



