Concerning the body, CS Lewis suggests that Christians have tended to oscillate uneasily between contemptuous denigration and extravagant deification, whereas what is required is glad and obedient acceptance. In his book The Four Loves, he says that broadly speaking there are three different views of the body. There are “the Neo-pagans—the nudists and the sufferers from the Dark Gods, to whom the body is glorious”. Then there are those ascetic Pagans who called it the “tomb of the soul”, along with some Christians to whom the body is “a sack of dung”. And, thirdly, we have the view of Francis of Assisi, expressed by calling his body “Brother Ass”—useful and sturdy, but obstinate and in need of the stick.
Tag Archives: Gnostics
How to deal with heretics
Couldn't Help Noticing, Life, Sola Panel
The early church father, Irenaeus, was certainly not afraid to critique error. I was browsing through his Against Heresies the other day (as one does, in the Greek, without a dictionary, shortly before dictating my latest article for The Ivory Tower Review), and I came across the following passage that I felt bound to share. Irenaeus was arguing against the heresy of the Gnostics, who had an incredibly elaborate, and elaborately incredible, account of how the world came to exist. One of Irenaeus’ chief polemical methods was simply to describe in detail what the Gnostics were actually teaching, with only a few minor comments being required to point out how absurd it all is.