The War against the Flesh

"...I am sure you are all familiar with the commandment of St. Paul to "make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof" (Rom. 13:14). You are probably also aware that the flesh is not the body. St. Paul opposes flesh, not to mind, but to spirit, and especially to the spirit of God. Perhaps the simplest way to understand the flesh is that it is self-love. It is our innate tendency to seek our own comfort and security rather than acting, feeling, and thinking in a way that is permeated with the love of God. It manifests itself through the whole range of sins and passions: hatred, anger, gluttony, lust, sloth, and all the others.
Now the Fathers were well aware that the flesh is not the body. However, they thought that the surest way to conquer the flesh is, in fact, by disciplining the body. The reason is that the flesh manifests itself at the most elemental level as love for one's own body. To meet it on its home turf, so to speak, one must confront the body and its power of domination. This does not mean neglecting the body. It means habitually denying one's bodily urges and replacing them with urges of the spirit. The desire for food must be met by fasting; the desire to let the mind coast--to do what we do today when we plop down in front of the T.V.--must be met by prayer and study of Scripture; the desire for sleep must be met by vigils; the desire for material security must be met by almsgiving; the desire for distraction and idle chatter must be met by silence and solitude. And all of this must be done regularly enough so that the new, spiritual urges come to be habitual—so that you actually want to pray more than you want to plop down in front of the T.V.
This is very difficult. It is especially difficult to do alone. That is why practices such as regular hours of communal prayer and regular periods of required fasting were so important in the early Church. Difficult though it may be, ascetic struggle is necessary if one's most basic habits and inclinations are to be reoriented away from love of self and toward love of God. Jesus said that "from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matt. 11:12). This is a cryptic saying, but for the Church Fathers its meaning is clear: it refers to the violence one must do to the flesh and the passions.
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from "Christianity East and West" by David Bradshaw. Dr. Bradshaw's homepage where the entire article is published is here: http://www.uky.edu/~dbradsh