Prison, captive and filth

Meaning

II.3.7 compares humans’ short and painful life amid the world’s impure lees to a criminal confined in a filthy, dark prison, between death and hope, amid infection and vermin and fed spoiled refuse. It is a simile for embodied misery and corrupt nourishment, not yet the explicit heavenly-person/earthly-prison anthropology of II.3.15. The surrounding argument calls substance simple and pure in itself, while ordinary food brings only a small useful portion together with hidden executioners or poisons.

The prison-image should not become an unqualified doctrine that all body is nothing but excrement. II.3.21 explicitly retains bodily bulk as the dwelling and vehicle of the nourishing spirit. Later the heavenly captive and earthly person recast imprisonment in a moral register. The figure marks obstruction and vulnerability, while the work still requires embodiment and ultimately distinguishes purification from the destruction of every proper bodily constituent.