Our obsessiveness about exercise and health seems supremely anti-gnostic.

But the opposite is the case. Consider the imagery: “Buns of steel” and “Abs of iron” and “Cable-like biceps.”

The bodybuilder aims to exercise himself to robothood. His goal to exercise until he’s elevated to a state beyond human. He wants to escape his inevitably soft and pliable, penetrable and vulnerable, fleshliness.