Faith & Spirit Quote by John Owen

Leanness is doing double duty here: it names a physical condition Owen’s readers would recognize in a century of fasting, plague, and periodic scarcity, and it signals a spiritual austerity he thinks can be either salutary or catastrophic. As a Puritan theologian, Owen is obsessed with the invisible interior life and suspicious of the body’s theatrics. The line lands because it refuses the comforting split we like to make between outward circumstance and inward health. He’s warning that deprivation can become a worldview.

The intent isn’t to romanticize hunger as holiness so much as to sketch a grim correlation: a person can be thinned out in every register at once. In Puritan practice, “leanness” could be chosen (fasting, self-denial, rigorous self-examination) as a way to discipline desire and clear space for God. But Owen’s subtext is sharper: an emaciated spirituality can hide inside pious routines. You can be “lean” in soul - starved of joy, assurance, charity - while performing religion with dutiful precision, the way a body can survive on rations without ever flourishing.

Context matters. Owen writes in a Protestant culture that prized inward sincerity over Catholic “works,” yet produced its own anxious metrics: Am I truly converted? Do I feel the right affections? That pressure can create thinness, a spiritual calorie deficit. The line works because it’s a small sentence that collapses two economies - bodily need and spiritual desire - and makes them mutually legible, uncomfortable proof that what we do to ourselves eventually shows up everywhere.