Human Body

Early Classical Greek sculpture — striding god of Artemisium, bronze ±460 B.C.

In Western Modernity, the ideal human body is something the masses strive for but rarely achieve, something they live for vicariously through “the beautiful people” and celebrity “idols”, or something by which they're entertained and distracted with modern Western Bread & Circuses from the actual important real matters of life.

In the modern West, the human body is private property, a possession on which individuals pride themselves, something bought and sold as a commodity of the market. The Western ideal human body is generally not an ideal, but an erotic possession, the best being owned by “the beautiful people”, by which many of them achieve fame and fortune. Achievement of such highly valued celebrity status, particularly that of actor or Fashion model is based on a lie, on pretense (acting) and on photographic manipulation by which imperfections of actual, fallen, temporal life have been “doctored”, distorted or rendered invisible by Western Technology.

Because Love of Money is the master (idolatrous god) of the West, overriding even good “looks” of physical appearance, the wealthy are the pinnacle of “the beautiful people”. If as the saying goes, “clothes make the man” (or woman), then who couldn't be “beautiful” with all the best trappings of Modernity that money can buy — fashion, jewelry, haircuts, styling, manicures, houses, furnishings, cars, yachts, jets, etc.? And because the West cannot exist without Bread & Circuses to keep the masses satisfied and in submission, celebrity status of “the beautiful people” also includes sports idols, most of whom are themselves “beautifully” rich.

Much is revealed about the spiritual condition of Western society in titles sported by Bread & Circuses TV game shows — American Idol, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Wheel of Fortune: America’s Game. Game is the operative word here, from business to sports (itself big business) to politics to sexual relations, because life in the modern West is but a game — “all’s fair in love and war” (and business), so don't take it personally — it’s business, take it materialistically not seriously, not spiritually.

With no unified, public, confession of spiritual beliefs (and hence no real basis for “Culture”), the overarching ideal when it comes to the human body in the modern West is material longevity. In a society that is not rooted in a unified spirituality, only the material matters, which in relation to the human body is age and looks, hence the obsession with fitness, “working out”, health foods, dieting, plastic surgery, and Fashion. A long life is highly esteemed as status symbol of good “health”, while condition of the human soul is completely ignored. Little attention is paid to the debilitating condition of old age, where only a mere handful of people age well, especially into their 90s and over 100 years of age, much less to the ultimate outcome of aging — death. What is particularly ignored is that DNA, more than anything else material, determines health and longevity, and that the spiritual overides all things material. The Living God, who is spirit and so must be worshipped in spirit and Truth, is the actual source of all material life, and only Divine will determines human longevity.

Satyr — half human, half beast

The modern West touts itself as the civilized legacy of Greek and Roman antiquity, but Western Modernity has nothing of ancient Greek value of the Golden Mean (or Middle Way) by which extremes of excess and deficiency are avoided. By ancient Greek cultural standards, Western Modernity is not Civilized, but barbarian and vulgar. Ancient Greeks valued self control as visually represented in Greek art, in sculptures with small phalluses in contrast to huge penises sculpted onto half human, beastly satyrs, fawns, and centaurs, or fools and foreign enemies. Instead of such true Hellenic ancient values, the modern West wallows in great hoarding of wealth (excess) amidst grinding poverty (deficiency), in huge excess of consumption and pornographic extremes of “art” replete with lustful images that glorify oversize penises and frantic fornication as the greatest of human concerns. Truth be known, oversize penises which are a commodified specialty truncated by the pornography Industry, actually represent only an extremely small minority of the actual totality of Human penis size.

Thus in Reality, the sex-crazed West, as product of its Consumer Capitalist Advertising Propaganda for breakdown of social restraint and promotion of indulgent excess, has little of anything of depth in common with classical antiquity. Incidentally, ancient practice of wearing a phallus amulet to ward off envy of the Evil eye is lost on the strictly material, scientifically rationalistic modern West where such is considered superstitious, but where effective form of such protection is more direly needed than ever, since envy is a major driving force behind Western Consumer Capitalism.

Over the aeons, having forgotten Remembrance of God (of The Living God), many of the world’s human cultures instead perpetuated Phallicism, worship of the generative principle as symbolized by human sexual organs or act of sexual intercourse. The powers of creativity that human sexual organs represent (both male and female), rather than the organ itself, are worshipped in order for humans to suck power from nature (Creation) for themselves rather than rely on the power of the Creator (The Living God) for material protection and provision.

Primary sexual rituals of Phallicism are those where intercourse is believed to promote fertility, to release a flood of creative energy by breaking boundaries and by returning a culture to the state of primeval and powerful chaos (e.g. orgy during New Year festivals), or those that symbolically bring together opposites (e.g., alchemy or Tantrism, a Hindu esoteric meditation system). Phallicism was certainly practiced by the Caananites, whom the ancient Hebrews warred against to drive them from the land as commanded by their god Yaweh. Hebrew prophets were forever calling the Israelites away from the Canaanite cult of fertility worship and back to worship of The Living God. When the Israelites saw the Canaanites doing well and their crops flourishing, it was a great temptation to go along to get along in order to materially thrive like the Canaanites appeared to be, just as superficial “Christians” today go along with the dictates of Western Consumer Capitalism, not just in order to get along, but to thrive materially in the modern world.

GigantX snake oil

In truth, modern Westerners (“Christian” or not) are not all that different from ancient (or contemporary) phallus worshippers. Moderns think and act like there's nothing more important than sexual copulation and orgasm, or consumption, the “Good Life” of materialistic Consumer Capitalism. Through modern Technology, modern Westerners worship power and seek to arrogate power to themselves at expense of the natural world (Creation) through exploitation of it, not through humility and repentance before their Creator, The Living God. As such, the modern West (along with the westernized and westernizing) bows down in worship of human autonomy and self-sufficiency (of the almighty self) instead of The Living God (the one, true and only God), in like manner to age old idolatrous human worship of phalluses and Man-gods. The modern West adores Love of Money by which it is mastered, mastered by the material rather than the spiritual, by mammon (materialism).

Despite finger pointing at others as threat to its “national security”, the modern West is its own worst enemy, pumping out Pollution that is ultimately destroying the Earth and everyone and everything in it. Pollution, the byproduct of Western invention of Industrial Technology, causes species extinction, including extinction of the West’s own beloved oversize phalluses, extinction which will eventually make the modern West a thing of the past. With little to none of the value of antiquity, Western Modernity is exposed for the sham it is, as neither classical, Greek nor Roman, much less Christian, but the product of the barbarian invasion of Western Europe and apostasy from Traditional Christianity that afterward ensued, apostasty that is ushering in the end of the world.

Then, as now, there's nothing new under the sun, as says wise King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 1:9). The more things appear to change, the more they actually remain the same. Ancient Greek worship of perfect human proportions as highest cultural ideal of cosmic balance, of ideal human form as divinity, was Christianized, transfigured from Old Hellenic culture into New Hellenism by Cosmos of Interconnectivity, interdependent relationship of the created with the uncreated Creator by human participation in Divine uncreated energies (grace). But that profound transformation from old to New, from delusion to Truth was to be undone, essentially unraveled by apostasy beginning in Western Europe, apostasy away from New Hellenism (Traditional Christianity) toward eventual return (like a dog to its vomit) to phallus worship as modern type of barbarism.

Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus!

Beautiful Savior

See —
Reason, Trump Penthouse, Classical Connection
Oil (Petroleum), Babylon, The Beast, Modernity
Pinocchio, Addiction, Desire, Identity, Sexuality

Human penises are shrinking because of pollution, warns scientist
Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race | Amazon
Average-Size Erect Penis: Fiction, Fact, and the Need for Counseling | NIH National Library of Medicine
Human penis size | Wikipedia

the beautiful people | Cambridge Dictionary
beautiful people | Urban Dictionary

“And we saw that He had no form nor comeliness” (Isaiah 53:2).
This, the prophet speaks about Christ the Lord as a man: “He had no form nor comeliness!” How is it that He Who gave form to every created thing and who created the beautiful angels of heaven and all the beauty of the universe, that He did not have form and comeliness [beauty]? Brethren, this need not confuse you. He was able to appear in the manner in which He willed. But he did not want to appear in angelic beauty as He did not want to appear in royal power and in the luxury of the wealthy. He who enters a house of sorrow does not dress in the most beautiful clothes, neither does a doctor dress in his best clothes when he visits the gravely ill. But the Lord entered a house of sorrow and into a hospital. The body is the garment of the soul. He dressed in a simple garment to impress us, not by His dress but rather by the power of the spirit. We do not know exactly what His appearance was. According to tradition, His face was swarthy and His hair was of a chestnut color. When King Abgar sent Ananias his artist to paint the face of the Lord, he was not able to draw even a line on the cloth for, it is said that, Christ's face shown with an unusual light.
After all, even if Christ had clothed Himself in the most beautiful body, such a body as only He is able to fashion, what would that physical beauty of His be in comparison to the immortal beauty of His Divinity? The greatest earthly beauty is merely only a shadow of the heavenly beauty. The Prophet Daniel was a young and handsome man but when an angel of God stood before him, he himself said: “...there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness turned in me into corruption” (Daniel 10:8). What is the face of man from earth in comparison to the likeness of an immortal angel of God? As darkness in comparison to the light! Of course, even the prophet looking at Christ the Immortal King in the flesh of man and comparing His earthly likeness with His Immortal likeness, had to cry out: "He had no form nor comeliness."
O Gentle and All-gentle Lord, Who for our sake was clothed in our miserable physical garment to serve us and not to frighten us, to You be glory and thanks, to You be glory and thanks.
To You be glory and thanks always. Amen.
— Bishop Nikolai Velimirović, Prologue from Ohrid Aug 28, Homily: About the forms of the Messiah

Ancient Greece

Johann Joachim Winckelmann | Wikipedia
Winckelmann Introduction
— “The only way for us to become great, or even inimitable if possible, is to imitate the Greeks.”
“Winckelmann’s classification scheme was largely responsible for advancing the notion of Greco-Roman supremacy in human culture and aesthetic achievement, an opinion that persists even within more comprehensive art historical frameworks today.”

Golden mean (philosophy) | Wikipedia
— “The golden mean or golden middle way is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency.”

Contrapposto | Wikipedia
Art of Ancient Greece | Rick Steves’ Europe — “For the Greeks, the human body epitomized the balance and order of the cosmos. The balanced contrapposto pose — again, weight resting on one leg — is found on countless statues. They were looking for the perfect balance between opposites, between stillness and motion — like this athlete as he coils — pausing just before unleashing the discus. The correct proportions of these perfect humans echoed the order of the Greek cosmos and symbolized their highest ideals. The optimistic Greeks portrayed their gods as humans with perfect anatomy.”
Art of Ancient Rome | Rick Steves’ Europe

Why Ancient Greek Sculptures Have Small Penises
— “Historian Paul Chrystal has also conducted research into this ancient ideal. “The small penis was consonant with Greek ideals of male beauty,” he writes in his book In Bed with the Ancient Greeks (2016). “It was a badge of the highest culture and a paragon of civilization.”...
Lustful, depraved satyrs, in particular, were rendered with very large, erect genitals, sometimes almost as tall as their torsos. According to mythology, these creatures were part-man, part-animal, and totally lacked restraint—a quality reviled by Greek high society. “Big penises were vulgar and outside the cultural norm, something sported by the barbarians of the world,” writes Chrystal. Indeed, across many an amphora pot and frieze, well-endowed satyrs can be seen drinking and pleasuring themselves with abandon.
In Greek comedy, fools also routinely sported large genitals—“the sign of stupidity, more of a beast than a man,” according to Chrystal. So, too, did artistic representations of the Egyptians, says Lear, who were long-time enemies of the Greeks.
In this way, satyrs, fools, and foes served as foils to male gods and heroes, who were honored for their self-control and intelligence (along with other qualities requiring restraint, like loyalty and prudence). If large phalluses represented gluttonous appetites, then “the conclusion can be drawn that the small, flaccid penis represented self-control,” explains Lear.”

Phallicism

Phallus Religion | Wikipedia
— see religious use of phallus for cult of fertility, power, and to ward off the Evil eye
“The evil eye is a supernatural belief in a curse brought about by a malevolent glare, usually inspired by envy. The belief in the evil eye among humans has existed since prehistory, and amulets to protect against it have been found dating to about 5,000 years ago. It is estimated that around 40% of the world's population [still] believes in the evil eye.”

Phallicism | Britannica
What is phallic worship?
Stone phalluses and ancient fertility cults
Stone Age Phallus Found in Israel

History of human sexuality Ancient Greece | Wikipedia
History of human sexuality Ancient Rome | Wikipedia
Sexuality in ancient Rome | Wikipedia
Naked Power: The Phallus as an Apotropaic Symbol in the Images and Texts of Roman Italy
Priapus | Wikipedia
Stone Phalluses of Pompeii
The Phallus in Ancient Greece – A Long Read

How and Why Bhutan Came to Worship the Phallus
Penis, Cock and Meat Rifle – Bhutan’s Phallus Cult

Illustrating phallic worship: uses of material objects and the production of sexual knowledge in eighteenth-century antiquarianism and early twentieth-century sexual science

The Passions

The Passions (suffering) are a condition of human spiritual sickness, transmitted via the human senses of the material human body with its desires of the flesh.

See — Divine Liturgy