Our obsessiveness about exercise and health seems supremely anti-gnostic.
But the opposite is the case. Consider the imagery: “Buns of steel” and “Abs of iron” and “Cable-like biceps.”
The bodybuilder aims to exercise himself to robothood. His goal to exercise until he’s elevated to a state beyond human. He wants to escape his inevitably soft and pliable, penetrable and vulnerable, fleshliness.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
The trouble with blogging …
The trouble with blogging, RJN, is narrative structure. Or maybe voice. Or maybe diction. Or maybe syntax.…
