Chapter XIII: Sins Committed Against the Body and Outside the Body, § 82.
CHAPTER XIII: ON SINS COMMITTED AGAINST THE BODY
AND OUTSIDE THE BODY
Some sins are committed outside the body; some, against one’s own body.
§ 82. The ninth division of sins is given in 1 Cor. 6:18: “Every sin which a person commits is outside the body, but he who commits fornication sins against his own body.” How is a sin against one’s own body committed only by fornication when it would also appear that a sin is committed against one’s own body with drunkenness, suicide, and other sins? The Glossa ordinaria provides four responses:
(1) No sin dishonors and defiles the body as that one does.
(2) Every other sin is outside the body, that is, outside the wife, who is said to be one body with her husband.
(3) Whoever sins criminally is said to be wild, not a man, and sins outside his own body, that is, outside the church, because we are not separated from the church because of venial sins. But he who fornicates sins outside his own body, that is, outside the church, so that he is cast out of it.
(But the apostle is not speaking about a mystical or metaphoric body but about each person’s own body).
(4) Other sins, though committed through the body, do not yet cause the soul to become so bound and subject to carnal concupiscence as happens only in the work of carnal fornication.
Lyra comments in this way:
Other sins commonly taint the soul alone, because they are not perfected in the pleasure of the body, such as greed, hatred, envy, and sins of that type. But fornication defiles not only the soul but also the body, because it is perfected in the pleasure of the body to such an extent that the intellect becomes absorbed for that time and man becomes like a horse or a mule. Although gluttony is completed in the pleasure of the body, yet that pleasure is not so great as to absorb the intellect. Yet it can be said that the apostle means [to include] gluttony under fornication, because gluttony prepares the raw material for lustful living.
Others look for the reason behind the apostle’s words in the fact that because of the constant involvement with very lustful and shameless prostitutes, the health of the body is terribly upset and ruined. The blood, the marrow of one’s bones, and the brain itself are dried up by that frenzy of passion, and from this arise very disgusting and serious ailments. Ecclus. 19:[2–]3: “Decay and worms will take over the man who consorts with harlots.” Some Greek versions add: “and he will be dried up as an example to many.”
Frisius (Speculum medicinale, part 2, bk. 1, ch. 9) relates that a young man of Paris died in the very act of fornication with a prostitute, and that in his skull was found not even a particle of brain. As Eobanus sings correctly:
In many ways Venus drains the powers and spirits.
She consumes noxious bodies in a thousand ways.1
These statements are absolutely true concerning the very ugly sin of consorting with harlots. Meanwhile, since other sins also bring down the health of the body, we respond very simply on the basis of the apostolic text that, according to the apostle, one sins against his own body by fornication for only this reason: “He who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her” ([1 Cor. 6:]16), and “He takes the members of Christ and makes them members of a prostitute” (v. 15). In this sense, the apostle declares that the sin of fornication is committed against one’s own body, for though it is directed also toward the partner in fornication, yet from her it is “turned back” (so to speak) toward his own body, always with terrible hideousness.
1 Helius Eobanus Hessus, Operum farragines duae (Halae Suevorum, 1539), fol. 85v.