Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
God will save the whole and perfect man, made up of body and soul joined together, once the Word has taken possession of him and adorned him with the gifts of the Holy Spirit — for our bodies are temples, and God fits and conforms his own handiwork to his own child. For it is through the Father's own hands — meaning by the Son together with the Spirit — that man comes to be shaped after the likeness of God, and not merely some part of man. Soul and spirit can be a part of man, but they are by no means the whole man; the perfect man is the mingling and union of the soul, which receives the spirit of the Father, together with the flesh that was fashioned according to the image of God. Perfect is the title given to those who have taken in God's Spirit and, through that same Spirit, speak in tongues, just as the Apostle says: We speak wisdom among the perfect — he himself was speaking this way. In the same manner we have heard of many brothers in the Church who possess prophetic gifts, and who through the Spirit speak in every kind of tongue, and bring men's hidden things to light for their benefit, and expound the mysteries of God; these the Apostle calls spiritual, in that they are spiritual by participation in the Spirit, not by any defrauding or removal of the flesh. For if someone takes away the substance of the flesh, that is, the created handiwork, and understands the spirit alone by itself, what remains is no longer a spiritual man but merely a human spirit, or else the divine Spirit itself. Yet once that spirit is blended with the soul and joined to the created handiwork, then, through the Spirit's outpouring, a spiritual and complete man results — and it is this man who bears the image and takes on the likeness of God. But if the Spirit is lacking to the soul, such a one remains merely a natural man and, being left carnal, will be imperfect: possessing the image in his created form but not receiving the likeness through the Spirit. In the same way, if someone takes away the image and rejects the created handiwork, he can no longer be understood to mean a man, but only some part of man, as we said before, or something other than man altogether. For the mere fashioning of the flesh by itself is not a perfect man, but only the body of man, a part of man. Nor is the soul by itself a man, but the soul of man, a part of man. Nor is the spirit man, for it is called spirit, not man. It is the mingling and union of all these that makes the perfect man. For this reason the Apostle, explaining himself, set forth the perfect and spiritual man of salvation in his first letter to the Thessalonians, saying: May your whole spirit, soul, and body remain without fault until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ. And what reason would he have had to pray for the whole and perfect preservation of these three — soul, body, and spirit — at the coming of the Lord, unless he knew that their reunion and union into one was one and the same as their salvation? For this reason he calls those perfect who present all three blameless to the Lord. Those, then, are perfect who both have the Spirit of God abiding steadfastly in them, and have kept their souls and bodies blameless — keeping, that is, their faith toward God and their charity toward their neighbor.
For this reason he also says that this created handiwork is God's temple: Do you not know, he says, that you are God's temple, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, and that temple is you — plainly calling the body a temple, since the Spirit dwells in it. In the same way the Lord also said of himself: God of peace sanctify you wholly and blamelessly in spirit and soul and body; and again: Tear down this sanctuary, and within three days I will build it up again. And this, he adds, he said of his own body. And it is not only that our bodies are called a temple, but also the temple of Christ, as he says to the Corinthians: Do you not know that your bodies belong to Christ as limbs belong to a body? Am I therefore to strip Christ of his limbs and hand them over to a prostitute? He is not talking here about some separate, spiritual man, since such a man could never join himself to a prostitute. What he means is that our body — the flesh that abides in purity and holiness — belongs to Christ, and that once it joins a prostitute it becomes hers instead. This is exactly why he said: If anyone tears down God's sanctuary, God will bring ruin on him. So then, to claim that the dwelling-place of the Father's Spirit, the very limbs of Christ, have no part in salvation and are handed over to destruction — could anything be more blasphemous? And since it is not by their own inherent power but through God's might that our bodies are raised, he tells the Corinthians: The body exists not for fornication but for the Lord, just as the Lord exists for the body. And God has raised up the Lord, and he will also raise us up by his power.