The Hero's Body by William Giraldi

Christian thinkers, peek inside Augustine and Aquinas, and you’ll spot the odium generis humani , the anti-idealizing of the physical form, the severing of flesh from soul, a belief in the inherent imperfection of the flesh, and a marked preference for the health of the spirit. In his hymn “Pange Lingua Gloriosi,” when Aquinas writes: Now, my tongue, the mystery telling / Of the glorious Body sing , you know whose body he’s talking about.
    Christianity cares about the fallen, filthy body only insofar as it will be resurrected after Christ’s second coming. Even the Renaissance resurgence of Greek ideals in art, so effective at wedding the Hellenic with the Christian, didn’t put a damper on Christianity’s disdain for flesh. That makes sense, doesn’t it, if you consider Nietzsche’s contention that Christianity is for literal losers, for the many weaklings of the world. When you’re a limping asthenic being bashed by imperial muscle, of course you’ll say that muscle doesn’t matter. Of course you’ll elevate the incorporeal, the soul, to thehighest ranking. The secretly envious usually pretend that what they envy isn’t all that enviable. It’s impossible to imagine Atlas offering his aggressor the other cheek to slap, or Hesiod or Homer uttering Christ’s third Beatitude in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”
    But Christianity is meant for, designed for, the meek. It’s the perfect fit for the gimped and depressed, for those who feel beneath one boot heel or another. Don’t worry about your physical, worldly deficiencies and flaws because glory will be yours in life after death. Bodybuilders would rather not wait that long for glory, and they aren’t about to be despotized by anybody, or concede that there’s something hallowed about meekness. They are exceptionally plugged in to the palpable, the carnal, the world as it is and not the world to come.
    You’re probably wondering: Didn’t bodybuilding strike any of us as extremely gay ? It did not. If a mocking sexologist had shown up to point out how gay we were, we would have said that he didn’t get it. The manly code, the manly discipline, the manly sport and art: “ You try it,” we would have told him, right before smacking his glasses off. We would have insisted that our arcane passion resulted from wanting to astonish women. We were all of us suspiciously vocal about wanting lots of women.
    But let’s be honest: despite the skirt-chasing, the real aim of our arcane passion, entirely hidden from us then, was to astonish one another , to gain the attention and affection of other elite men, the grandees of the Edge. And we, the ultra-masculine, had transformed into stereotypical females in order to do it. We repined for the approval of dominant males, shaved and tanned ourselves, wore tiny clothes, were food-obsessed, weight-obsessed, always standing on scales, secretly worried about our brittle images and self-worth, our always tremulous control. With one another at the Edge we made a show of whoops and high-fives, not unlike those syndicates of teenage girls who embrace one another at the mall with shrieking brio.Except for me the show wasn’t merely theatrical. I’d found my tribe among them, a substitute family, the Edge a home more meaningful than what my father provided.
    Many of us also had gynecomastia, what we called “bitch tits”—I still have mine in the left pectoral—nodes of fatty tissue beneath the nipples caused by an excess of synthetic testosterone. Your body is looking for the right testosterone-estrogen ratio, so when you deluge your blood with synthetic testosterone, the body cooks up more estrogen in its quest for homeostasis, and more estrogen means, among other things, the physical traits of a female. It means breasts. They could be moderately painful, to boot,