Flee fornication. Every sin that a man does is outside the body; but he that commits fornication sins against his own body.
All Commentaries on 1 Corinthians 6:18 Go To 1 Corinthians 6
Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
Flee fornication. Because, as Anselm, Cassian, and the Fathers generally teach, other vices are conquered by resistance, lust alone by flight, viz, by fleeing from women, from the objects and occasions of lust, by turning aside the eyes and the mind to see and think of other things. For if you oppose a temptation to some lewdness, or fight against some impure thought, you only excite the imagination by thinking of such things, and then inflame still more the innate lust of the flesh, that is naturally disposed to such acts as fornication.
Every sin that a man doeth is without the body. Does not stain or pollute the body.
It may be said that if a man kills or mutilates or castrates himself he sins against his body, and therefore it is not a fact that every sin distinct from fornication is without the body.
I reply that every sin, i.e, every kind of sins which men commonly and ordinarily commit is without the body. For there are seven capital sins, which theologians, following S. Paul, divide into spiritual and bodily or carnal. Those that are carnal are two—gluttony and lust; the spiritual are five—pride, covetousness, anger, envy, sloth. Of these anger and envy tend directly of themselves towards murder of one"s neighbour, but not except by accident towards murder of one"s self, and that in few and extraordinary cases. The angry Prayer of Manasseh , therefore, does nor ordinarily and necessarily sin against his body, but against that of another, by assaulting him or killing him. The Apostle"s meaning then Isaiah , that all the sins in general which men ordinarily and commonly commit are without the body. "Every sin" therefore does not include mutilation or suicide, which happen rarely, and as it were accidentally; nor does it include gluttony as I will show directly.
But he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body. S. Jerome (Ep. ad Amand. tom. iii.) gives two explanations of this passage, of which the first is—the fornicator sins against his wife, who is his own body; the second is—he plants in his body the seeds of sexual passion, which, even after his sin, remain, when he wishes to repent, to spring up into active life. S. Jerome says that "other sins are without, and after being committed are repented of, and though profit urge to them yet conscience rebukes. Lust alone, even in the hour of repentance, suffers under the whips and stings of the past, and under organic irritation, and under incentives to sin, so that material for sin is supplied again by thoughts of the very things which we long to see corrected." S. Jerome confesses ( Ephesians 22ad Eustoch,) that he knew this from own experience. S. Mary of Egypt found the same true in her own case, who endured under penance these whips and stings for as many years as she had formerly given to sexual passion, viz, seventeen, as Sophronius, Patriarch if Jerusalem, related in her life.
Å’cumenius has ten other explanations of this passage, as has also Isidorus Pelusiota (lib. iv. Ephesians 129 ). But the true and genuine sense is: Whoever commits fornication does injury to his own body, 1. because he polluted and disgraces his body, as Gregory of Nyssa says in his oration on these words.
2. Because by fornication he weakens and exhausts his body, and often destroys it, by contracting venereal disease. So S. Athanasius, quoted by Å’cumenius. In both these ways the glutton and drunkard sin against their body, because the first disgraces it by subjecting it to unhealthy humours, to vomiting, and other disgusting things, while the latter weakens, injures, and finally ruins its natural heat and strength. Hence under the name of fornication, here gluttony and drunkenness, as being akin to it, or rather its mother, may be understood. It was for this reason that the Apostle, in ver13 , spoke of gluttony. For these two sins, gluttony and lust, are vices peculiar to the body, and are thence called sins of the flesh: other sins belong to the spirit alone, as I have just said.
3. The fornicator dies injury to his own body, inasmuch as he alone brings his body, which was created free, pure, and noble, under the jurisdiction, service, and power of the mist degraded harlot, so that he becomes as one thing with her. In the same way that, if any one were to bind his own body, that was noble, healthy, and beautiful, to the body of some loathsome leper, he would be said to do his body a great wrong, so does he who unites to a common, base, and infamous harlot his body, that was created by God pure, noble, and free, and redeemed and washed by the blood of Christ, do to it grievous injury. In all these verses the Apostle lays stress upon this wrong.
4. The fornicator does injury to his body, because he excites in it a foul and shameful lust, which so absorbs the mind that in carrying it out into action the man can think of nothing else. He makes his body, therefore, the slave of his lust, in such a way that he is wholly ruled by it. Neither gluttony nor any other sin in the body excites such shameful and vehement lust as this is. Impurity alone then holds sway over the body, and by its lust and outward action stains, subjugates, and destroys it.
