His body was a cage...

"My Body is a Cage"

(Arcade Fire & Once Upon a Time in the West)
(Sara Lov)

made me think of...



Saint Augustine and Saint Monica (1846), by Ary Scheffer

"Augustine's mother had followed him to Milan and he allowed her to arrange a marriage, for which he abandoned his concubine. It is believed that Augustine truly loved the woman he had lived with for so long and was deeply hurt by ending this relationship. In fact, there is evidence that Augustine may have considered his relationship with the concubine to be equivalent to marriage, though not legally recognized as such.^[32] In his Confessions, he admitted that the experience eventually produced a decreased sensitivity to pain over time. He had to wait two years until his fiancée came of age, and he soon took another concubine. Augustine eventually broke off his engagement to his eleven-year-old fiancée, but never renewed his relationship with either of his concubines."

Angelico, Fra. The Conversion of St. Augustine

"Alypius of Thagaste steered Augustine away from marriage, saying that they could not live a life together in the love of wisdom if he married. Augustine looked back years later on the life at Cassiciacum, a villa outside of Milan where he gathered with his followers, and described it as Christianae vitae otium – the Christian life of leisure.^[33] Augustine had been awarded a job of professor of rhetoric in Milan at the time he was living at Cassiciacum around 383."

St. Augustine in his cell - Sandro Botticelli

"Augustine was one of the first Christian ancient Latin authors with very clear anthropological vision.^[49] He saw the human being as a perfect unity of two substances: soul and body. In his late treatise On Care to Be Had for the Dead, section 5 (420 AD) he exhorted to respect the body on the grounds that it belonged to the very nature of the human person.^[50] Augustine's favourite figure to describe body-soul unity is marriage: caro tua, coniunx tua — your body is your wife.^[51][52][53] Initially, the two elements were in perfect harmony. After the fall of humanity they are now experiencing dramatic combat between one another. They are two categorically different things. The body is a three-dimensional object composed of the four elements, whereas the soul has no spatial dimensions.^[54]

From elephantinthehottub

^"His feast day is 28 August, the day on which he died. He is considered the patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians, sore eyes, and a number of cities and dioceses.^[10]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo