Bully's Blog

With Biblical Horizons, nothing is sacred. Or everything is.

Peter Leithart, Creation: Purity

Athanasius’ letter to Amun (354) is a meditation on purity. Defilement, he argues, occurs “when we commit sin, that foulest of things.”That is what Jesus meant when He said that we are defiled by what comes out – out of the heart.

Bodily functions, by contrast, do not defile in the least. Athanasius rivals Luther in his unabashed affirmation of the goodness of bodies and bodily secretions: “what sin or uncleanness,” he asks, is there “in any natural secretion – as though a man were minded to make a culpable matter out of the cleanings of the nose or the sputa from the mouth. And we may add also the secretions of the belly, such as are a physical necessity of animal life.”

There can be no sin in natural bodily functions if “the Master who made the body willed and made these parts to have such passages.” We are made by God’s hands, and “how could any defiled work proceed from a pure power?”

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Mike Bull responds to my comments on Athanasius’ discussion of purity and bodily secretions:

“I agree with Luther, but isn’t the point more that what comes out is ‘worthless”? Moving beyond the Old Testament pedagogical purpose of ceremonial uncleanness, affirming the goodness of bodies does not necessarily include any goodness of bodily secretions. We still judge them to be a stench, not incense. Our food, for instance, like Adam, is ‘broken in two’ to make something new. The sewer, as designated scapegoat, carries the unclean to the abyss. The scapegoat, thus, and every condemned soul at the last day, are the “exhaust” from the process of resurrection. The fact that we believers are not so is incredibly humbling. We get the crystal sea.”