I found light and joy at the same moment, and I can say without hesitation that from that time on light and joy have never been separated in my experience. I have had them or lost them together. I was not light myself, I knew that, but I bathed in it as an element which blindness had suddenly brought much closer. I could feel the light rising, spreading, giving form. Since it was not I who was making the light, since it came to me from the outside, it would never leave me. I was only a passageway, a vestibule for this brightness . The seeing eye was in me.
Christianity arrives in a Platonic landscape where the body is a husk around a soul, imperfect and soon to be shrugged off. For some pagans, the Christian notion of a resurrected body was distinctly odd, especially as there was no possibility of floating off somewhere more etheric. In the next life you still had a body, just not that one that slowly became dust... The body is not a tomb, it's a pleasure, and it goes where we go because we're completely bound up with it.