Foul vessel and infected house

Meaning

II.3.15 compares the unpurified human condition to a foul vessel that spoils a fine liquor and to an infected house that endangers its occupant. These ordinary material images make the moral demand for cleansing intelligible: valuable inward life cannot simply be added to an unreformed receptacle without regard for its condition.

The passage accompanies the heavenly captive, earthly enclosure, sobriety and the two means of regeneration taught by Christ, baptismal water and the Holy Spirit’s fire. It is not a technical account of sterilization or a clinical theory of infection. Nor does it mean the proper body must be annihilated. The later insistence on retaining the subject's own earth and fire restricts the target of cleansing to corruption and impurity rather than embodiment as such.