Healthy Selfishness

never abandoned and could still do chin-ups even at his advanced age. He is someone who prioritized fostering his own physical health.

This gentleman’s counterpart to my mind was an old religious sister who served in Catholic schools for decades. By the time she reached 70, her diabetes had taken her ability to walk unaided. She could no longer take care of children as she had for decades and this along with the physical distress of it all was taking a toll on her soul.

These two individuals, the vigorous octogenarian and the frail septuagenarian, serve to illustrate a distinction that is not stressed enough when talking about or practicing health. That distinction is between the intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions of health. The extrinsic aspects of health are those things that are manifest and externally oriented. It’s things like being able to help someone move or help out with yard work. It also covers those aspects of health visible to others like body composition, hair, and skin. In short all those aesthetic expressions of health. If you are a Christian, you could also include using your body as an instrument for the Lord’s service as part of this extrinsic dimension of health.

The stark contrast in those extrinsic aspects of health between the octogenarian skater and the diabetic nun hides a more profound difference at the intrinsic level. The skater can still play with the fullness of his very self. He can still be at leisure doing things for their own sake. Leisure falls within this intrinsic realm of health. A flourishing biological life complements an active social life, a robust intellectual life, and a holy spiritual life. A healthy body allows for leisure in those other realms of life. In that way, the body is an instrument but health is good in and of itself. Think of health as simply being the proper ordering of all the different aspects of your biological life, not just movement, but sleep, digestion, temperature regulation, et cetera. This would be a more intrinsic understanding of health, whereas simply prioritizing things that other people can see like being able to do certain things or looking a certain way expresses an extrinsically focused understanding of health.

One of the traps in the fitness realm is to overly focus on one aspect of health, like weight loss. As a result, the sum of health gets reduced to a part of the extrinsic side of health. This happens in an analogous way when one aspect of life gets so over-emphasized that the rest of one’s life suffers. While it is certainly commendable that the generous sister served so many children for so many years, she failed to provide the kind of love and care that she owed to her future self. Overemphasizing one dimension of life or aspect of health is an expression of a disordered self-love. It is a kind of injustice when you deprive yourself of something you ought to have like the ability to walk unaided at age 70. 

While it could certainly be argued that the sister led a better and holier life than the skateboarder who selfishly dedicated so much of his time to taking care of himself, this falls again into the trap of failing to recognize the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. You are not called to be healthier or holier than your neighbor, that would be an external comparison. Rather you are called to live the life that has been granted to you in the most holy and healthy way that is possible, which would be an internally rooted evaluation.

Dedicating the thought, effort, time, and material resources towards growing in health should not be considered a healthy selfishness, but rather a practice of a properly ordered self-love, something more like a holy selfullness.

• Father Athanasius