City of God 22.9–22.18

Chapter 9. That all the miracles done through the martyrs in the name of Christ bear witness to the faith in which the martyrs believed in Christ.

To what do these miracles bear witness, if not to this faith, in which Christ is preached as having risen in the flesh and ascended into heaven with the flesh? For the martyrs themselves were martyrs of this faith, that is, witnesses of this faith; bearing witness to this faith they endured a world most hostile and most cruel, and they overcame it not by resisting but by dying. For this faith they died who can obtain these things from the Lord, for whose name they were slain. For this faith their wonderful endurance went before, so that such great power might follow in these miracles. For if the resurrection of the flesh to eternity either did not take place beforehand in Christ, or is not to come as it is foretold by Christ, or as it was foretold by the prophets by whom Christ was foretold, why can even the dead do such great things, who were slain for the faith in which this resurrection is preached? Whether God himself does these things by himself, in the wonderful way in which, being eternal, he works things in time, or through his ministers; and whether the very things he does through ministers he does in some cases through the spirits of the martyrs, as through men still living in the body, or does all of them through angels, whom he commands invisibly, incorporeally, unchangeably, so that what is said to be done through the martyrs is done only by their praying and obtaining, not also by their working; or whether some are done in these ways and some in those, ways that mortals can in no way comprehend: still these things bear witness to the faith in which the resurrection of the flesh to eternity is preached.

Chapter 10. How much more worthily the martyrs are honoured, who obtain many wonders so that the true God may be worshipped, than the demons, who do certain things so that they themselves may be believed to be gods.

Here perhaps they will say that their gods too have done some wonders. Good, if they are now beginning to compare their gods with our dead men. Or will they say that they too have gods made from dead men, like Hercules, like Romulus, like many others whom they suppose received into the number of the gods? But for us the martyrs are not gods, because we know that one and the same God is both ours and the martyrs'. Nor can the miracles said to have been done through their temples be compared in any way with the miracles that are done through the memorials of our martyrs. But if some seem similar, their gods have been overcome by our martyrs as Pharaoh's magicians were by Moses. The demons did those things with the arrogance of unclean pride with which they wished to be their gods; but the martyrs do these things, or rather God does them, with the martyrs either co-operating or praying, so that the faith may advance by which we believe that they are not our gods but have one God with us.

In short, those people built temples to such gods of theirs, set up altars, instituted priests, and made sacrifices; but we build for our martyrs not temples as to gods, but memorials as to dead men whose spirits live with God. Nor do we raise altars there on which to sacrifice to the martyrs, but to the one God, both the martyrs' and ours. At this sacrifice they are named in their place and order, as men of God who overcame the world in confessing him, but they are not invoked by the priest who offers the sacrifice. For he sacrifices to God, not to them, though he sacrifices at their memorial, because he is God's priest, not theirs. And the sacrifice itself is the body of Christ, which is not offered to them, because they themselves too are this body.

Which workers of miracles, then, are rather to be believed? Those who want to be held gods by those for whom they do them, or those who do whatever wonderful thing they do so that men may believe in God, who is also Christ? Those who wanted even their own crimes to be their sacred rites, or those who do not want even their own praises to be their sacred rites, but want all for which they are truly praised to serve the glory of him in whom they are praised? For “in the Lord” their souls are praised. Let us believe them, then, both when they speak the truth and when they do wonders. For by speaking the truth they suffered, so that they might be able to do wonders. Chief among those truths is that Christ rose from the dead and was the first to show in his flesh the immortality of the resurrection, which he promised would come to us either at the beginning of the new age or at the end of this one.

Chapter 11. Against the Platonists, who argue from the natural weights of the elements that an earthly body cannot be in heaven.

Against this great gift of God these reasoners, whose thoughts the Lord knows, that they are futile, argue from the weights of the elements; for they have learned from their master Plato that the two greatest and outermost bodies of the world are coupled and joined by two in between, namely air and water. “And therefore,” they say, “since earth is first counting upward from here, water second above the earth, air third above the water, and heaven fourth above the air, an earthly body cannot be in heaven; for each element is balanced by its own weight so as to keep its own order.” See with what arguments human weakness, which vanity possesses, contradicts the omnipotence of God! What, then, are so many earthly bodies doing in the air, when air is the third from earth? Unless perhaps he who by the lightness of feathers and wings has granted to the earthly bodies of birds to be carried in the air will not be able to grant to the bodies of men, once made immortal, the power to dwell even in the highest heaven. Earthly animals too that cannot fly, among whom are men, ought to have lived under the earth, as fish, the animals of the waters, live under water. Why, then, does an earthly animal draw this life not even from the second element, that is, from the waters, but from the third? Why is it that, though it belongs to the earth, if it is forced to live in the second element, which is above the earth, it is at once suffocated, and lives in the third in order to live? Is the order of the elements wrong here, or rather is it wanting not in the nature of things but in these people's arguments?

I will not repeat what I said in the thirteenth book, how many earthly bodies are heavy, like lead, and yet receive from a craftsman a form by which they can float on water; and is it denied to the almighty craftsman that the human body may receive a quality by which it can be borne into heaven and be in heaven? Further, against what I said above, even when they consider and handle this order of the elements on which they rely, they find nothing at all to say. For if earth is first counting upward from here, water second, air third, heaven fourth, the nature of the soul is above all. For Aristotle said it was a fifth body, and Plato that it was no body. If it were a fifth, it would surely be higher than the rest; but since it is no body, all the more does it surpass all. What, then, is it doing in an earthly body? What is it, the subtlest of all, doing in this mass? What is it, the lightest of all, doing in this weight? What is it, the swiftest of all, doing in this slowness? Will it not be possible, then, through the merit of so excellent a nature, for its body to be raised into heaven; and while the nature of earthly bodies can now press souls downward, will souls not be able one day to raise earthly bodies upward?

Now if we come to their miracles, which they set against our martyrs as done by their gods, will even these not be found to act for us and to serve us entirely? For among the great miracles of their gods, that is surely a great one which Varro records: a Vestal virgin, when she was in danger through a false suspicion of unchastity, filled a sieve with water from the Tiber and carried it to her judges without any part of it dripping. Who held the weight of the water above the sieve? Who allowed nothing to fall from it to the ground through so many open holes? They will answer, “Some god, or some demon.” If a god, is he greater than God who made this world? If a demon, is he more powerful than an angel who serves God, by whom the world was made? If, then, a lesser god, or an angel, or a demon could so suspend the weight of the liquid element that the nature of water seemed to have been changed, will almighty God, who created all the elements themselves, be unable to take away from an earthly body its heavy weight, so that the body, made alive, may dwell in whatever element the life-giving spirit wills?

Then, since they place air in the middle between fire above and water below, how is it that we often find it between water and water, and between water and earth? For what do they take the watery clouds to be, between which and the seas air is found in the middle? By what weight and order of the elements, I ask, does it come about that the most violent and billowing torrents, before they run on the earth under the air, hang in the clouds above the air? Why, finally, is air in the middle between the heights of heaven and the bare earth, wherever the world extends, if its place is set between heaven and the waters, as that of the waters is between it and the earth? Lastly, if the order of the elements is so arranged that, according to Plato, the two extremes, fire and earth, are joined by two means, air and water, and fire holds the place of the highest heaven, and earth that of the lowest, as the foundation of the world, and for that reason earth cannot be in heaven, why is fire itself on earth? For by this reasoning these two elements, earth and fire, ought to have been in their own places, the lowest and the highest, in such a way that, as they will not allow that what belongs to the lowest can be in the highest, so what belongs to the highest could not be in the lowest. As, then, they think that no particle of earth either is or will be in heaven, so we ought to see no particle of fire on earth. But in fact it is not only on the earth but even under the earth, so that the peaks of mountains belch it out; besides which we see that fire is on the earth for the uses of men and is born from the earth, since it is born from wood and from stones, which are without doubt earthly bodies. “But that fire,” they say, “is tranquil, pure, harmless, everlasting; this one is turbid, smoky, corruptible and corrupting.” Yet it does not corrupt the mountains and the caverns of the earth in which it rages continually. But let it be granted that this fire is unlike that one, so as to suit earthly dwellings; why, then, will they not let us believe that the nature of earthly bodies, once made incorruptible, will one day suit heaven, as corruptible fire now suits this earth? They bring forward nothing, then, from the weights and order of the elements by which to set limits to almighty God, to prevent him from making our bodies such that they can dwell even in heaven.

Chapter 12. Against the slanders of unbelievers, with which they ridicule Christians for believing in the resurrection of the flesh.

But they are in the habit of inquiring most scrupulously, and by inquiring of ridiculing the faith by which we believe that the flesh will rise: whether aborted fetuses rise; and, since the Lord says, “Truly I say to you, not a hair of your head shall perish,” whether stature and strength will be equal for all, or bodies will be of different sizes. For if bodies are to be equal, where will those aborted ones, if they too rise, get what they did not have here in bodily bulk? Or if they will not rise, because they were not born but cast out, they turn the same question to little children: where will the measure of body come to them that we now see they lacked, when they die at that age? For we are not going to say that they will not rise who are capable not only of generation but also of regeneration.

Then they ask what standard this equality will have. For if all are to be as big and as tall as the biggest and tallest who ever lived here, they ask, not only about little children but about most people, where what they lacked here will come to them from, if each one receives what he had here. But if what the apostle says, that we shall all come “to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,” and that other saying, “Those whom he predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son,” are to be understood to mean that the stature and measure of Christ's body will be that of all human bodies that will be in his kingdom, then “much,” they say, “will have to be taken away from the size and height of many bodies; and where then will be ‘not a hair of your head shall perish,’ if so much of the very size of the body perishes?” Although a question might be raised about the hairs themselves too, whether everything that fell away under the barber returns. If it is to return, who would not shudder at that deformity? For the same would seem necessarily to follow for the nails, so that all that the care of the body has cut away would return. And where will the comeliness be which in that immortality ought surely to be greater than it could be in this corruption? But if it does not return, then it will perish. How then, they say, will a hair of the head not perish?

They argue similarly about thinness and fatness. For if all are to be equal, surely some will not be thin and others fat. Something, then, will be added to some and taken from others; and so what was is not to be received back, but in some places what was not is to be added, and in others what was is to be lost. They are also greatly troubled about the very decay and dissolution of dead bodies, since some are turned to dust, some breathed out into the air, some consumed by beasts, some by fire, and some perish by shipwreck or in any waters in such a way that decay dissolves their flesh into liquid; and they do not believe that all these can be gathered back into flesh and made whole again. They also pursue every ugliness and defect, whether it happens by accident or from birth, recalling monstrous births with horror and ridicule, and asking what resurrection each deformity will have. For if we say that nothing of the kind returns to a man's body, they presume that they will refute our answer by the places of the wounds with which we preach that the Lord Christ rose.

But among all these, the most difficult question is put forward: into whose flesh will that flesh return by which the body of another man is nourished when hunger drives him to eat human flesh? For it has been turned into the flesh of him who lived on such food, and has made up the losses that his thinness had shown. Whether, then, it returns to the man whose flesh it was first, or rather to the one whose flesh it became later, they ask in order to mock the faith in the resurrection, and so either promise the human soul, as Plato does, an alternation of true unhappiness and false blessedness, or admit, as Porphyry does, that after many revolutions likewise through different bodies it nevertheless at last ends its miseries and never returns to them; not, however, by having an immortal body, but by fleeing every body.

Chapter 13. Whether aborted fetuses do not belong to the resurrection, if they belong to the number of the dead.

To these objections, then, which seem to me, as I set them out, to be raised by the opposing side, let me answer, the mercy of God aiding my efforts. As for aborted fetuses, which, having already lived in the womb, died there, I dare neither affirm nor deny that they will rise; though I do not see how the resurrection of the dead does not belong to them, if they are not excluded from the number of the dead. For either not all the dead will rise, and there will be some human souls without bodies for ever, which bore human bodies, though within their mothers' wombs; or, if all human souls will receive their bodies rising again, the bodies they had, wherever they left them living and dying, I do not find how I can say that the resurrection of the dead does not belong to any who died, even in their mothers' wombs. But whichever view anyone holds of these, what we shall say of infants already born is to be understood of them too, if they rise.

Chapter 14. Whether infants will rise in the bodily condition they would have had with the growth of age.

What, then, shall we say of infants, except that they will not rise in the smallness of body in which they died, but will receive by that wonderful and most swift work of God what time would have given them more slowly? For in the Lord's saying, “Not a hair of your head shall perish,” it is said that what was will not be lacking; it is not denied that what was lacking will be present. Now the infant who died lacked the full size of his body; for even a perfect infant lacks, of course, the perfection of bodily size, which, once added, allows no further growth in stature. All have this measure of perfection in such a way that they are conceived and born with it; but they have it in principle, not in bulk, just as all the members themselves are already hidden in the seed, even though some are still lacking in those already born, such as teeth and anything of that kind. In this principle, implanted in the bodily matter of each one, what does not yet exist, or rather what is hidden but will exist, or rather appear, with the passage of time, seems already, so to speak, woven into the warp. In this principle, then, an infant who is to be short or tall is already short or tall.

According to this principle we certainly do not fear losses of the body in the resurrection of the body; because, even if all were to be equal, so that all reached giant size, lest those who were largest should have anything less in stature which would perish for them against the saying of Christ, who said that not even a hair of the head would perish, how could the Creator, who created all things from nothing, lack the means of adding what he, the wonderful craftsman, knew must be added?

Chapter 15. Whether the bodies of all the dead will rise to the measure of the Lord's body.

But certainly Christ rose in the measure of body in which he died, and it is not right to say that, when the time of the resurrection of all has come, a size will be added to his body that it did not have when he appeared to the disciples in the body in which he was known to them, so that he could become equal to the tallest. But if we say that the larger bodies of any people are to be reduced to the measure of the Lord's body, a great deal will perish from the bodies of many, though he promised that not even a hair would perish. It remains, then, that each will receive his own measure, the one he either had in youth, even if he died an old man, or would have had, if he died before. And as for what the apostle mentioned about “the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,” we must understand either that it was said with another meaning, namely, that the measure of his age is completed when the perfection of all the members among the Christian peoples is added to that head; or, if it was said of the resurrection of bodies, we should take it to mean that the bodies of the dead will rise neither below nor beyond the form of youth, but in the age and strength to which we know that Christ came here (for even the most learned men of this world have set youth at about thirty years; and when it has run its proper span, a man from then on declines toward the losses of heavier old age). And so it was said not “to the measure of the body” or “to the measure of the stature,” but “to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ.”

Chapter 16. How the conforming of the saints to the image of the Son of God is to be understood.

What he says, too, that the predestined are “conformed to the image of the Son of God,” can also be understood of the inner man (hence he says to us in another place, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind”; where, then, we are reformed so as not to be conformed to this world, there we are conformed to the Son of God). It can also be taken to mean that, as he was made conformed to us in mortality, so we are made conformed to him in immortality; and this indeed belongs to the resurrection of bodies itself. But if these words too teach us in what form bodies will rise, then, like that “measure,” this “conforming” is to be understood not of size but of age. So all will rise as large in body as they either were or would have been in the age of youth; though it will do no harm even if the form of the body is that of an infant or an old man, where no weakness of mind or of the body itself will remain. So even if anyone maintains that each will rise in the measure of body in which he died, we need not fight him with laborious contradiction.

Chapter 17. Whether the bodies of women will be raised and remain in their own sex.

Some, because it is said, “until we all come to the perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,” and, “conformed to the image of the Son of God,” believe that women will not rise in the female sex, but say that all will rise in the male, since God made only the man from clay, and the woman from the man. But those seem to me wiser who do not doubt that both sexes will rise. For there will be no lust there, which is the cause of shame. For before they sinned, they were naked, and the man and the woman were not ashamed. So defects will be taken away from those bodies, and nature preserved. The female sex is not a defect but nature, which will then be free both from intercourse and from childbearing; yet the female members will remain, suited not to their old use but to a new beauty, by which the lust of the beholder, which will not exist, is not enticed, but the wisdom and mercy of God is praised, who both made what was not and freed from corruption what he made.

For that at the beginning of the human race the woman was made from a rib taken from the side of the man while he slept was fitting, since by such a deed Christ and the church were even then to be prophesied. For that sleep of the man was the death of Christ, whose side, as he hung lifeless on the cross, was pierced with a lance, and from it flowed blood and water, which we know to be the sacraments by which the church is built up. For Scripture used this very word, where we read not “he formed” or “he fashioned,” but “he built it into a woman”; hence the apostle too speaks of the building up of the body of Christ, which is the church. The woman, then, is God's creature just as the man is; but her being made from the man commends unity, and her being made in that way, as has been said, prefigured Christ and the church. He, then, who established both sexes will restore both.

Finally, Jesus himself, when he was asked by the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, whose wife the woman would be whom the seven brothers had each had, while each of them wished to raise up seed for the deceased, as the law had commanded, said, “You are wrong, knowing neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” And though there was an opening for him to say, “For she about whom you ask me will herself be a man, not a woman,” he did not say this, but said, “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor take wives, but are like the angels of God in heaven”: equal to the angels, that is, in immortality and happiness, not in flesh; nor in resurrection either, which the angels did not need, since they could not die. So the Lord denied that there would be marriages in the resurrection, not women; and he denied it where such a question was being discussed that he would have settled it more quickly and easily by denying the female sex, if he foreknew that it would not exist there. Indeed, he even affirmed that it would exist, by saying, “they do not marry,” which refers to women, “nor take wives,” which refers to men. There will be, then, those who here are accustomed either to be married or to take wives; but there they will not do so.

Chapter 18. On the perfect man, that is, Christ, and his body, that is, the church, which is his fullness.

Accordingly, as for the apostle's saying that we shall all come to the perfect man, we must consider the context of the whole reading, which runs thus: “He who descended is the same who also ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. And he gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to the perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in the scheming of error; but, doing the truth in love, we may grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint of supply, according to the working in the measure of each part, makes the growth of the body for its own building up in love.” See who the perfect man is: head and body, which consists of all the members, which will be complete in their own time, yet are daily being added to the same body while the church is being built, to which it is said, “But you are the body of Christ and its members,” and elsewhere, “For his body,” he says, “which is the church,” and likewise elsewhere, “We, though many, are one bread, one body.”

Of the building up of this body it is said here too, “for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ”; and then is added what we are now dealing with, “until we all come to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to the perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,” and so on, until he showed in what body that measure was to be understood, saying, “that we may grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint of supply, according to the working in the measure of each part.” As there is, then, a measure of each part, so there is surely a measure of the fullness of the whole body, which consists of all its parts, of which it is said, “to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ.” He mentioned this fullness also in the place where he says of Christ, “And he gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who is filled all in all.” But if this were to be referred to the form of the resurrection in which each will be, what would prevent us from understanding the woman too when “man” is named, taking “man” as put for “human being”? As in the saying, “Blessed is the man who fears the Lord,” women who fear the Lord are certainly included.