“Men with chests”—what it really means + how to tell if you are one
Issue #144
Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in saying, “Repent ye, etc.,” intended that the whole life of his believers on earth should be a constant repentance.
If you can name who said this and why it matters, you are an impressive specimen of historical-theological knowledge. But every man ought to know, because it is literally the statement that started the Reformation.
It is the first thesis of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses.
Although our lives will sometimes require special moments of repentance for particularly serious sins, as we see in the example of David in Psalm 51, the life to which Christ calls us is not a life punctuated by occasional repentant acts—it is rather a life saturated with continual repentant action. It is a life of mind-change, or heart-transformation, or spiritual renewal—these all mean repentance, and repentance refers to them. Indeed, it is impossible to truly distinguish repentance and sanctification, because repentance is simply the process by which the Spirit empowers us to work at changing our minds and hearts and souls, so that they turn from sin and toward Christ, and gradually become minds and hearts and souls that look like his.
It is easy to appreciate the significance of this in theory—but it is a difficult thing to lay hold of and to actually get better at doing. It is easy enough to say that the whole of life should be a constant repentance, a constant renewal of our minds and transformation of our hearts—but it’s much harder to do.
Fortunately scripture does not leave us guessing.
One of the great pieces of instruction it gives us is in Philippians 3:7–4:9. Much could be said about this passage, but here let’s focus on one small and often-overlooked detail:
…for many walk of whom many times I told you—and now also weeping tell—the enemies of the cross of Christ whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame; who the things on earth are minding. for many walk of whom many times I told you—and now also weeping tell—the enemies of the cross of Christ whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame; who are minding the things on earth. For our citizenship is in the heavens, whence also a Savior we await—the Lord Jesus Christ—who shall transform the body of our humiliation to its becoming conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working of his power, whereby he is able even to subject to himself all things.(Phil 3:18–21)
Notice the comparison Paul makes. His God is Christ—it is Christ upon whom he fixes his attention; Christ who is his glory; and because of this, his end is resurrection and transformation. But there is another kind of man, whose end is destruction; whose shame is their glory; who fix their attention on the things of earth—and whose god is their belly.
We might say, Paul is a son of God; these enemies of the cross, by contrast, are sons of the belly.
But what does it mean? What is a “son of a belly?” Why does Paul describe these men in terms of their bellies? Why does scripture speak this particular way?
One sense of it is obvious—but much of the meaning is lost to the modern mind. Today, we associate the belly only with food. But in the ancient world, the creational symbolism of our anatomy was much more keenly observed. Anyone who takes seriously the design of the human body can see that it is divided into three parts, and these teach us something about ourselves.
At the top is the head, which of course does the thinking. The head perceives and considers; it reasons and is responsive to reason, to rational persuasion, to ideas, to the light of the heavenly realms.
At the other end of the body, at the bottom, is the belly—which means not just the stomach, but also everything below it. The belly does not think; it simply wants. The belly desires, the belly craves; it is the place where our animal needs and appetites dwell. Again, not just needs and appetites for food, but for anything that the body must do, or wants to do.
Now, it hardly bears mentioning how easily the belly can turn the head. You experience every day the great power that your animal drives have over you. In theory, the head rules over the whole body, including the belly. Yet in reality, the head is often not in charge at all, and is just along for the ride. To take a relatively benign example, if you have ever found yourself opening the fridge and looking inside and finding nothing to eat, and then a few minutes later doing the exact same thing, you know what it is like for your belly to be controlling your actions. If your head was in charge, it would know perfectly well that food doesn’t spontaneously appear in the fridge, and there is nothing in there now that wasn’t in there a few minutes ago, and there is therefore no point opening the fridge and looking again.
The head knows this, and yet the belly does it anyway.
This helps us to understand what it means to be a son of a belly—to have your god as your belly. A less benign example is the number of men “addicted” to porn. That is also the belly at work.
But we have left out one part of the body still.
Between the head and the belly we have the chest. This is the hardest part of the body for us to understand in the modern day because we are not accustomed to thinking in symbolic terms. But in ancient thinking, the chest was naturally understood to be the bridge between the head and the belly—between angel and animal, as it were, between the spirit and the beast that together make us what we are. The chest mediates between rationality above, and appetite below; it is the center of man just as man is the center of the cosmos, joining together heaven and earth. Man is a microcosm.
This makes the chest in one sense the most important part of us—which is why scripture uses the heart rather than the brain as the symbol of our innermost selves. As C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man,
It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
The life of our blood flows from the chest to both the head and the belly. The chest draws in air that animates both the head and the belly.
This helps us to understand the role of the chest, symbolically speaking—the spiritual meaning of the chest: it is associated in ancient thinking with what can roughly be translated as spiritedness. The Greek term is thumos, and it has connotations of both breath and blood. If you think of having a spirited ballgame, or a spirited round of boxing, and how your chest feels while you are engaged in it, and how that feeling feeds into the way you play or fight, into how you perceive the game, you have a good idea of what thumos means.
This is the place of the chest.
(Or, to make it a bit more relatable to our honored lady readers, if you think of how you feel when someone says something that is completely unfair and untrue, the sudden flush, the intake of breath, the quickened heart-rate, the sense of indignation and outrage—that spirited sensation is thumos.)
These examples are at the more extreme end, simply to make it easier to see what the chest is about. They are “peak thumos.” As obvious examples of times when we really feel our affections and passions in our chests, they are helpful for seeing that the chest, symbolically speaking, is about our emotions. But of course, we have emotions in a lower-key way all the time. So the chest is really about emotion in general. This is why, again, scripture associates the heart with emotion and affection and passion so often.
Needless to say, these affections can be dangerous. Just like the rest of our nature, our passions are not naturally ordered toward virtue. The heart is corrupt above all things. A spirited boxing match quickly turns into a brawl because our rage bubbles over when we get hit in the face. Our righteous indignation quickly turns into unrighteous rage because we do not keep it in check.
In other words, to say that the chest mediates between the head and the belly, between rationality and appetite, is not to say that the chest is a sort of independent, impartial judge over both. The chest is part of us, and so it is subject to corruption as much as the rest of us. Not only that, but it is not rational like the head is, so it is very easily turned toward evil. If you think of the phrase “blind emotion,” that is the chest. It feels—it does not think. So it does not mediate between the head and the belly as an impartial referee between them. Rather, the chest is the intermediary, the bridge, the midway point between the head and the belly.
As the bridge, the chest is somewhat like the head, like our intellect, and it is somewhat like the belly, like our appetites.
In fact, it is enough like the belly to control the belly…and enough like the head to be directed by the head.
Consider firstly how it is like the head. Even though the chest does not think, it can respond to reason. No doubt you can remember many times even this week when you have had to make your emotions respond to reason. The chest responds to the head in a way that the belly does not and can not. No matter how hard you want to, no matter what rational arguments you can muster, you will never convince your stomach, let’s say, not to be hungry if you haven’t eaten for a couple of days. You can tell yourself as much as you like that there is no point feeling hunger because there is nothing to eat—but your stomach will not respond to those arguments. It will continue to be hungry. But your chest, your affections, your passions—they will respond. When you get hit in the face, you can tell yourself, “He didn’t mean to hurt me.” You can work at calming yourself down. When someone says something untrue, you can tell yourself, “They might have made a sincere mistake.” You count to ten and take a deep breath—into your chest.
And when you do, especially as you practice doing this, you find that your chest learns to follow your head: your emotions become trained to respond to your intellect.
What you feel becomes more malleable, and easier to shape and control and direct.
Rather than your passions ruling over you, you rather start to rule over them.
Yet at the same time, they do remain passions. This is how they are like the belly: they have a power that is like the power of the belly. The head cannot match this. If you work in marketing, or really if you just live long enough, you will hear that people don’t buy things for rational reasons, but for emotional ones. No one reasons that the most rational vehicle to buy is a motorbike. He wants a motorbike. That’s his chest at work.
I mention marketing because this is something I have taught in that capacity. See for instance this lesson of Copywriting Night School:
Now this can be good or bad. A motorbike stirs the passions. Those of us who have spent time on them know what a spirited ride feels like, and it feels really good. That is something God has built into us. It’s not a corruption of our natures, as feminists would like us to believe—it is a good part of them, that God gave us as a blessing.
But we also know what happens if our chest gets the better of us; when our passions overrule our intellect. Too much emotion and not enough reason is a very dangerous thing on a motorbike—and, indeed, in all of life.
Letting our emotions direct us, rather than having our heads in charge, is spiritually dangerous, even if not always physically dangerous.
Still, the fact that the chest has this power makes it strong enough to also keep the belly in check. It is enough like the head to respond to reasons from the head, and enough like the belly to reign over the desires of the belly. This makes it a mediator, so to speak, or an intermediary if you prefer, between the head and the belly.
It can be shaped by the head, so that it will respond to the head—and impose the head’s will down into the whole body.
But without a well-trained chest between your belly and your head, your belly will turn your head. Worse, in fact, without a well-trained chest, your chest and your belly will gang up on your head, because your passions are always going to be directed somewhere—either somewhere good and fruitful, or somewhere bad and futile.
Your chest will either be directed by your head, or by your belly.
Either you will shape your emotions and passions and affections to reflect what you know to be right and good…or those affections will be shaped by what your body craves and desires.
That’s really all most addictions are, which is why I used scare-quotes with porn “addiction” before. The word addiction is vastly overused today to refer not to things that you have become truly physically dependent on—these do exist of course—but just to things that you want badly. Things that your belly has trained your chest to desire so strongly that your head no longer has any charge over them. Your animal appetites have conditioned your affections, and now your head is helpless.
But…when the opposite is true—when your chest is well-trained by your head, when it is strengthened by practice in virtue—it will follow the head and rule over the belly, bringing your natural appetites into submission to wisdom and virtue.
It will even, over time, shape the appetites of the body to some extent. Obviously there are things the body will always want and need by nature, but these sensations can be attenuated by our chests.
More importantly, many of the corruptions of our bodies can be greatly diminished or even crushed into nothing by rightly-ordered affections. Think of drunkenness, for instance. Modern secular wisdom says that some people are just “alcoholics” and there’s nothing they can do. The best they can hope for is to know (that’s their head) never to touch a bottle again—because if they do, they won’t be able to help drinking the whole thing. This is what C.S. Lewis meant when he talked about modern society creating men without chests. In The Abolition of Man he describes how we train men’s minds without training their affections, saying,
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
In other words, men without chests are wicked and lazy, because they are men without affections that have been trained into settled sentiments. They are men who have not been brought up in the right way to direct their affections and passions toward the right things—and because their passions have not been trained in virtue, these men are therefore slaves to their passions and their appetites as they exist in their natural, untrained state.
Their bodies, naturally, do not want to work.
Their souls, naturally, do not want to do good.
So these men without chests are lazy and wicked.
This is why Lewis labors the point that,
…no [intellectual] justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
He goes on to give a couple of examples:
I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that “a gentleman does not cheat,” than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.
In battle it is not [logical arguments] that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism … about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use…
This brings us back to what any of this has to do with the life of repentance. Lewis, of course, was also thinking in biblical categories about Christian virtue. He knew that whereas the world says you’re just an alcoholic, and tries to train your head to just avoid the bottle, scripture says, “Such were some of you.”
Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God. (1 Co 6:9–11)
We know, of course, that all of these sins begin in the heart. To stop being a thief, for instance, does not just mean merely to stop thieving, but to stop coveting (cf. Mt 5:21ff). So we read this passage and think, isn’t it great how the thieves stopped thieving and the idolaters started worshiping the true God, and the adulterers stopped adultering—so they are no longer those things?
But what about the sodomites? What about the drunkards? What about the fornicators?
Fornication certainly includes lusting after women—the Greek word porneia includes all kind of sexual immorality. You mean the fornicators just stopped lusting? The sodomites weren’t attracted to men any more? The drunkards didn’t have a problem with the bottle after they were saved?
Well, there’s no reason to think they “just” stopped. It wasn’t that easy. We know that Paul rebukes some of these brothers just five chapters later for still getting drunk at the Lord’s Supper; and we know from one chapter earlier that such dodgy things were going on at Corinth that one guy had to be excommunicated for having his father’s wife.
So it does not seem that Paul can mean these people were instantly transformed. But what has happened is they have received the Spirit of God, and they have had their most basic and fundamental affections changed from hating God to loving him. They have been given new chests, so to speak—or, as scripture would say, new hearts. They no longer serve their bellies, they no longer worship their appetites, they are no longer slaves to corrupt passions; they serve God, they worship Christ, and they are slaves to the Holy Spirit.
Their affections have started to be re-ordered, in such a way and with such power, that with the right instruction they are capable—not naturally but supernaturally in the Spirit—they are capable of continuing that reordering until it is not merely synthetically true that “such were some of you,” but it is analytically true.
In other words, it is not merely that God has legally justified them in Christ, and so because they are in Christ, they are no longer counted drunkards and sodomites. That is true, but it is not the end of the story. It is not merely a matter of imputation. Rather, through the life of repentance, of having their hearts continually changed, they are actually being turned into what God already sees in Christ.
A drunkard who has been transformed by the Spirit of God can no longer look at alcohol in the same way. He is able, and is required, to re-order and train his affections to feel differently about alcohol than he did before. And in time, he will no longer want to become drunk in the way he used to, because, in fact, that will be a detestable thought to him. The idea disgusts him now, because his affections are set upon Christ.
The same is true of fornicators, idolaters, thieves—even sodomites, who the world assures us can never be liberated from their “sexual orientation.”
This should give us great confidence.
Even supposedly crippling “addictions,” which the world thinks can never truly be overcome but only managed; even supposed “orientations,” which the world claims are just the way a man is made…these can in fact be completely removed by the Spirit of God training a man’s affections and passions to want different things, and to therefore rule over the belly.
We all have affections that we need to re-order. So if you can see and believe that this is possible with affections that you know are harder to re-order than your own, then you can have great confidence and faith that the Holy Spirit will provide what you need also.
Let us all be men with chests—new chests provided by the Holy Spirit, and trained by his word.
Notable:
Last year I noted the turn towards a reenchanted world. One way to understand the appeal of Peterson is the way that his ideas are aligned with this way of thinking. Unearthing the Jungian collective unconscious and such are not unlike what people are seeking when they go to South America for an ayahuasca trip. Both are about looking for spiritual meaning and a spiritual encounter without an actual God or a real religion. Both are also a quest for therapeutic personal transformation - the quest for self-actualization - without sanctification.
“People don’t care about others, then they are surprised when they find out it’s mutual.” —Some guy on YouTube
Talk again soon,
Bnonn
