"Natura veneranda est, non erubescenda." "No Christian author," it has indeed been said, "has so energetically spoken against the heretical contempt of the body as Tertullian.

Soul and body, according to Tertullian, are in the closest association.

The soul is the life-principle of the body, but there is no activity of the soul which is not manifested and conditioned by the flesh."[56] More weight attaches to Rufinus Tyrannius, the friend and fellow-student of St.Jerome, in the fourth century, who wrote a commentary on the Apostles' Creed, which was greatly esteemed by the early and mediaeval Church, and is indeed still valued even to-day.

Here, in answer to those who declared that there was obscenity in the fact of Christ's birth through the sexual organs of a woman, Rufinus replies that God created the sexual organs, and that "it is not Nature but merely human opinion which teaches that these parts are obscene.

For the rest, all the parts of the body are made from the same clay, whatever differences there may be in their uses and functions."[57] He looks at the matter, we see, piously indeed, but naturally and simply, like Clement, and not, like Augustine, through the distorting medium of a theological system.
Athanasius, in the Eastern Church, spoke in the same sense as Rufinus in the Western Church.