Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So this is exactly where the heretics start, and exactly what they build on from the outset, and go on interweaving throughout — because they know how easily minds are captured by an appeal that flatters the senses. What do you hear sooner or more insistently from a heretic than from a pagan — and always, everywhere, the same tirade against the flesh? Against its origin, its raw material, its fall, every exit it makes: unclean from the start, being made of the dregs of the earth; uncleaner still afterward, from the slime of its own seed; frivolous, feeble, criminal, troublesome, burdensome — and after the whole catalogue of its disgrace, doomed to collapse back into the earth it came from and take the name of a corpse, and then even that name is to perish, into no name at all, into the death of every word for it. 'Do you really mean to persuade us, wise sir, that this thing — snatched away from your own sight, your own touch, your own memory — will one day get itself back whole from corruption, solid from collapse, full from emptiness, something at all from nothing — and that too when fires and floodwaters and the bellies of beasts and the gizzards of birds and the guts of fish, and time's own appetite besides, will all have to hand it back? Will the very thing that fell apart really be hoped for again just as it was — so that the lame man, the one-eyed man, the blind man, the leper, the paralytic all come back exactly as they were, making the return unwelcome? Or will they come back whole, only to dread suffering the same things all over again? And what then of everything that comes attached to flesh? Will it all be necessary again — food and drink first of all? Must the lungs go back to breathing and the bowels to churning, the private parts go back to their shame, and every limb to its labor? Are sores and open wounds, fevers and gout, to be longed for again along with it? These, surely, will be the prayers of a flesh restored — to want, all over again, to escape from it.' We ourselves put this rather more decently, out of respect for our pen; but as for how far this filthy talk actually goes, let anyone find out who cares to sit in on the debates of pagans and heretics alike.