More Than Mere Bodies

Day 259 of A Year of War and Peace

At first glance it appears that speakers and practitioners of truth, religion and philosophy are often punished for their good works. Jesus Christ was crucified. An assassination plot drove Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were both assassinated. Socrates, of course, was sentenced to death. They burned Giordano Bruno at the stake. Pierre Bezukhov, having just rescued a little girl from death by fire and then defended an Armenian family from an unjust assault, is rewarded for his good deeds with arrest and imprisonment.

This is only the beginning of Pierre’s miseries. We’re now approaching the final stretch of the novel and, for Pierre at least, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. He’ll be starved, shackled and abused. There will be something curious to note though: The more suffering his body endures the closer he approaches a certain type of philosophical enlightenment.

The lesson here is that we are more than our bodies. Perhaps, then, after closer inspection, our favorite speakers and practitioners of truth, religion and philosophy did not truly suffer. For while their flesh was brutalized their ideas endured.

DAILY MEDITATION