When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 6 - Waldorf Research Institute

Sport – A Surrogate Religion?
A Current Medical and Educational Concern*
GISBERT HUSEMANN
What can possibly be the link between such contrasting activities as
physical and religious exercises? There is none; they have nothing in common
except when physical exercises are practiced in an entirely one-sided way that
begins to have counter-religious implications.
The physical body has not been brought into being solely by material
laws; its physical substances and laws are subject to a higher spiritual plan.
The shape adopted by the physical body belongs in the sphere of thinking.
This was known in antiquity when the Olympic Games were established and
organized as a public festival. The physical exercises of the Greeks served to
make the body as supple as possible so that it could be the servant of the
spirit. The need to practice the supremacy of the spirit over the body was
deduced from the fact that the body is organized in accordance with the
logos (kala logon, kai noun).
In this respect, sport has developed one-sidedly so that physical exercise
has now become an end in itself and even the object of commercial
enterprise. This needs a body that functions as perfectly as that of an animal
whose instincts are focused entirely on the body. Animals swim, fly, build in
trees or underground, and so on. In return, they have had to relinquish the
ability to determine their own destiny with the help of thinking; otherwise
they could not have achieved the bodily capacities that now dominate them.
In earlier times, people were able to speak about the body as a temple. This
gave an image of its divine origin, an image that allowed for a sense of
responsibility towards its healthy development for higher purposes. Now
that physical exercise has become an end in itself the opposite situation
obtains.
By using the limbs one-sidedly—especially the legs, as in football—we
are going against the original Olympic ideal of making the body obedient
to the spirit. A world-class tennis player once said after a match: “My head
*Original title: Der Sport – ein Religionsersatz? Eine medizinisch-pædagogische
Zeitbetrachtung. Der Merkurstab 1996; 49: 222-5. English by J. Collis, MIL.
52