Epidemics – except for the likes of boredom and depression – are organic. They affect the body. They also use the body as means for self-replication and transmission. They also imitate the logic of the body. That logic is somewhat as follows. The body, as autonomous from mind and spirit, becomes mere flesh. The flesh is, by nature, unilateral. It relates to everything in terms of what is good for itself indifferent what harm it inflicts on others.

Body, as body, is a great deal more than flesh. Body exists in holistic union with mind and spirit. When their integrated mutuality is disrupted all three suffer degeneration. One manifestation of it is ‘demon-possession’. Another is affinity to violence and crime. A third is inclination towards self-destruction as in addiction. The worth of the body should not be understood based on its aberration. The flesh is carnal; body is not. It is a marvellous, divine gift. It is, as St Paul says, the temple of the Holy Spirit. In non-religious terms, I’d say, body is the home of our being. It is the medium through which mind and spirit express themselves.

When an instrument gets denatured, it ceases to be helpful and begins to be hurtful. It endangers what it was meant to serve. A surgeon’s scalpel is invaluable. What if it is infected? Instead of saving life, it kills. The same principle applies to the human body when it is reduced to mere flesh. It opens the flood-gates of aberrations and dangers to oneself.Begins to aid and abet forces lethal to itself. The present pandemic offers ample illustrations for this. Our hands are supremely useful. Civilization began, we are told, when human beings learned to coordinate the thumb and the index finger. But, today, we are alienated from our own hands. We are at risk of our hands infecting and killing us! This is no small matter.

Adam and Eve, we are told, realized their nakedness when they undermined their relationship with God. What this points to is that the holistic integration of the three dimensions of their being is in disarray. The body emerges to the fore. What was till then a transparent medium for the mind and the soul becomes, all of a sudden, an end in itself. The essence of self-alienation is the idea that one is no more than a body.

You may wonder what all this has to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. Consider-

It is from the body of others that the virus reaches us. In doing so, it uses our own body. That is why we have to soap-wash our hands every now and then. It attacks and overpowers our body. The means of protecting ourselves from this infection is the virtual imprisoning of the body, as in lock-down. We are to stay bodily distanced from others. So, all of a sudden the whole world is obsessed with the body.

Against this backdrop let’s ask: why is it that western countries are more vulnerable than the rest of the world to this pandemic? (African societies could suffer worse devastation in the near future; but that will happen for a different set of reasons than what concern us here.) The explosive spread of the pandemic in Euro-American societies are attributable to factors like their larger proportion of the aged and ageing population and the prevalence of drug and alcohol abuse which undermines immunity. These are obvious things and it is no good be labouring the obvious. Perhaps even more important is a factor not talked about at all: the centrality of the body in western cultures. The advent of modernity ushered in a return to ‘life in nature’. This put a premium on the body; its instincts, impulses, insatiable thirsts and, above all, its idea of unbridled personal liberty. This aided and abetted the emergence of the post-Christian culture. So, what happened?

The encounters between two human beings –especially the male and the female- became, by and large, encounters between bodies. This reality was highlighted in a poignant manner by the outbreak three and a half decades ago of HIV/AIDS, which was a cocktail of sexuality and mortality.

Let’s return to the book of Genesis. All viruses, I venture to suggest, pertain to the nakedness of man. Their deadliness is derived from the vulnerability immanent in this nakedness. Adam and Eve had a sort of primeval intuition of this. This made them hide themselves. Today we don’t go into hiding. We go about as ample, well-dressed autonomous bodies. So we have to be put in lock-downs. The final irony is this: in respect of individuals whose bodies are mere flesh, the distinction between lock-down and lock-up disappears. This turns homes into prisons, which is what the virus has achieved. Again, wholly unaware of the global hurly-burly it is authoring!

The point is not to despise the body for all that. The thing to do is to love the body all the more. But love is not the nature of the body, but of the spirit. So, to love the body is to bring it under the spirit-principle, which is the principle of holistic integration. Pathogens are ambassadors of disintegration, which is as much spiritual as it is psycho-physical.