449. The Love of One's Body
The love of one's body is not to be confounded with the love of self; for man loves his body, inasmuch as it is linked with his soul for the purpose of that soul's propagation and multiplication therein, the soul being continually conceived and multiplied. From this love flows the love of nourishing oneself, the sense of taste, the love of protecting 1 oneself from surrounding vapors, whence comes the sense of smell; also sight, and even pain whenever violence and injury is inflicted upon the body. Without this love the aforementioned ends and loves could not be obtained. But a man can love his own body and yet love his comrade as himself; for when he loves his comrade as himself, he loves his own body because of love of himself, and, at the same time, because of love toward his comrade. He does not hate his body, but for the sake of society is willing to lose it rather than that society should perish, and infinitely willing for the sake of God. Heavenly society is a single body, the soul whereof is God, and because he loves God, and this heavenly body, he does not love himself and his body any more than as a part of that society, and this to the end that he may be a constitutive part.
Footnotes:
1. Reading tutandi for timendi (of fearing).
