Admonition X: Castigating the body
St Paul called out: Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? [Rom 7:24]. We need to be rescued from danger, from enemies and from whatever is harmful to us. For Paul, the enemy was his own body. In the tenth Admonition Francis echoes this thought exactly. Francis points out how easy it is to blame someone else when we sin. We can so easily say that so and so tempted me. To say this is to say that we need to be rescued from other people. This is not what Paul said nor is it what Francis says. For Francis we all have an enemy in our bodies and we have to take charge of our bodies. Francis says: 'Each one has the enemy in his power, that is, his body through which he sins'. A person is blessed when he or she holds captive the enemy, namely, one's own body. The body has been given into our charge and we are wise to safeguard ourselves against it. This was advice that Francis put into practice even to an extreme degree. Once when he was tempted by the devil we read that he took off his clothes and whipped himself with a cord saying: 'Come on, Brother Ass, that's the way you should stay under the whip!' Francis tamed a wild wolf, he preached to birds, he brought peace to people but he achieved all this by subjecting his body to discipline, by treating it as his enemy.
