On the Resurrection 1.1–1.11

Translated by Claude from N. Bonwetsch's German translation (1917) of the Old Church Slavonic; neither is shown

And Sistelius answered and said: "You do not speak well, Memianus, in wanting to hold the discussion simply like this, without investigation. For in a public discussion everyone feels constrained and dresses up his speech so as to show it off, caring not at all for the truth and for what is useful, but only to show those present how skilful he is, since it is natural to everyone to love what is his own out of prejudice. But one must not listen to the man who too busily commends his wares; one must investigate and test, for sellers are in the habit of lying about the things they sell. So that we too may not fail and be deceived in the discussion by coming to it without examination, I propose (for each of us is to make his understanding known in turn, and to set it before Theophilus) that one man, the heterodox, should first bring forward the questions, having investigated them fully and exactly, leaving out none of the opposing problems but binding everything together with the deepest thoughts. So the contest will be fought vigorously, and they will have nothing beyond what is said here to bring forward in support of their argument. Then another, in turn, opposing the subtleties that have been put forward and showing with much insight, will prove that the teaching of the catholic Church is true. In this way our discussion will not be in vain but carried out with the greatest care, so that it leaves nothing unexamined and unrefuted, whether that person sets out the understanding of the Church, or a foreign one, or the one that suits each; and it will strive after truth, saying nothing idle from a presupposition of what is already fixed, but seeking the best discussion by putting the arguments together. That is truly wise, and the way of one who thirsts to see the truth." This pleased those present, and we all praised it.

[2] Theophilus agreed and directed that Aglaophon, who was also a physician, should speak about the nature of the body. In order that the matter might be better learned, he prompted him first to raise what the opponents say, which I would then answer in turn, so that through the contest of the discussion the truth might shine out like living gold tested in the fire. "And if anyone is angry, thinking it improper that heretical teachings should be made known in this way, we will refute him with gentle instruction: in the books of the prophets too the Holy Spirit, just as he describes the person of the godly, so also gives the wicked their fitting form, giving each its form in words according to its deserts, and setting out the various kinds of deceit. So Solomon among them depicts the harlot in words. Let him who can see, see! Has he not openly, as though speaking of some heresy, set everything before our eyes, and shown words and ways dressed up exactly in the manner of a harlot? As when he says, 'She sat at the door and calls to herself the senseless'; or again when he says, 'The woman meets him, with a harlot's appearance, who makes the hearts of the young burn. Then she seized him and kissed him; with a shameless face she spoke to him'; or this: 'Come, let us enjoy love until morning; come, let us give ourselves up to love. For my husband is not at home; he has gone on a long journey. He has taken a bag of gold in his hand, and after travelling many days he comes to his house.' It is unfitting to explain all this as it stands; it was written so that it might make the hearers wise. For when an image is shown, and the explanation is given spiritually through a picture, with rebuke, the reader is taught virtue, being instructed not to be deceived by lying words and so robbed by the seductive arts of the harlot.

[3] "One also finds him using this method in the Wisdom. For here too, distinguishing the kinds of wisdom, assigning them to their persons and keeping the order of each, he has carried out a true examination of the matter. For the saying, 'Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no healing at a man's end, and no one has appeared who brings back from Hades. For we were born by chance, and afterward we shall be as though we had never been; for the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark in the movement of our heart; when it is quenched, our body will become ashes, and the spirit will be scattered like a light wind,' is a picture of those who say that everything has come to be of itself and has been arranged without providence. Against this zeal steps in, which draws toward the truth and is provoked by the presupposition of these teachings. So it is not at all improper that we too should examine the philosophies of the heretics in order to destroy the lie. For they have spewed out untruth, speaking up to heaven. So from now on it is your task, Aglaophon, to begin and to carry the discussion through to the end."

Translated by Claude from N. Bonwetsch's German translation (1917) of the Old Church Slavonic; neither is shown

Aglaophon, hearing this, blushed as Theophilus spoke, and looked at me so darkly that I wanted to take flight. Then he began to speak: "If, according to you, there is a resurrection of these dead bodies and a change of them into immortality, tell me, why did God from the beginning create man without the rag of the body, as Scripture itself teaches? For the 'garments of skins' which he made for Adam and Eve after the transgression are plainly the bodies with which we have been clothed after transgressing the commandment, clothed with such a fetter for punishment's sake. That is why they are fittingly called skin: because this body is a fetter, and also, as a sign, a tomb for the soul, which was condemned to be buried in it, so that, being mortal for so long a time, it might not leave us to suffer everlasting pain. For God did not make garments for the first-created as a leather-worker does, flaying four-footed beasts from their dead bodies; he made heavy earthly bodies for us as 'garments of skins.' The prophet Jeremiah too, in the Lamentations, calls them fetters, calling human beings for this reason 'the bound of the earth'; and David calls them 'the bound', since God bound us, because of Adam's transgression, with fetters of the dust of the earth, so that, receiving food from the earth with much labour, we might not lift up our heads to see the fruit of life. For he says: 'And now, lest he stretch out his hands and take from the tree of life and live forever. And the Lord sent them out of the paradise of delight to till the earth from which he was made. And he sent Adam out.' For the flesh causes much toil for the sake of food. All wars and battles happen for the sake of possessions; for possessions' sake we are compelled to gather, serving the body and agreeing with its desires, since it fills us with love and desire and sickness and fear and other evils, which do not allow the soul to strive after the good, nor allow anything of what is imperishable and good to be known by it. For even if we undertake to do some good, the body confuses and confounds us and darkens the mind; it does not allow us to see clearly what truly is, like the cuttlefish, a creature of the sea that spews out black water. And in truth, unless the soul is first set free, as though released from fetters, it does not become able to see and to grasp what truly is. For our eyes are full of error in seeing, our ears full of error, our other senses full of error. We cannot see or touch wisdom, or the greatness or the essential form of the soul; they are beyond our grasp so long as we are in the body.

Translated by Claude from N. Bonwetsch's German translation (1917) of the Old Church Slavonic; neither is shown

"Moreover, it is not incorruption that is the cause of sins and blasphemies and errors, since the soul cannot sin by itself, apart from the body. But if, according to you, union with the flesh is good for man, then he ought to have been in the flesh from the beginning, in paradise, before Adam's sin, when he beheld wisdom and the angels and received from the tree of life, being incorruptible. But at that time he evidently lived an untroubled and incorruptible life; now he lives a very toilsome and sorrowful one, because he is clothed in a garment of skin. So Paul too taught, saying, 'I was once alive apart from the law.' Come now, for I will try to explain it to you more exactly: 'For I know,' he says, 'that nothing good dwells in my flesh. For to will is present with me, but to do the good I do not find,' that is, obedience to the Spirit, which is enslaved by fleshly desires, because the flesh cannot receive the good. So he also confesses that the flesh becomes death and destruction to the soul; and he thirsts to be quickly freed from it, saying, 'Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of death?' So the body is a kind of torture chamber and prison because of the transgression, since God placed us in it so that we might receive a very painful punishment for disobedience.

Translated by Claude from N. Bonwetsch's German translation (1917) of the Old Church Slavonic; neither is shown

"One must also examine whether what is said in the Psalms, 'You have tested us, O God; you have refined us by fire as silver is refined by fire; you brought us into the snare; you laid afflictions on our heads; we went through fire and water, and you brought us out into rest,' was not said of the souls placed in the body, as in a snare and a kind of torment, so that those who overcome it might receive honour in paradise after they have risen. But you, through ignorance, say that even after the fetters have been loosed, and the man has been freed from the punishment and has gone from here to rest, the soul takes up the yoke again, so that even in the kingdom of light we should be forever bound to corruption: always carrying this compound clay, decked out with beauty outside to deceive, but inside full of worms and maggots and stench; heavy, dragging the soul's inclination down with it toward pleasures, pressing down the mind of the heavily burdened man, burning up with pleasures the spiritual wing of reason, not permitting the spirit and the soul to behold the tree of life, being the substance and source of all that is bold and sorrowful and wrathful.

Translated by Claude from N. Bonwetsch's German translation (1917) of the Old Church Slavonic; neither is shown

"Consider how foolishly you speak when you say that man will once more be subject to such passions! For if, according to you, the same members of the flesh rise in the same form, so that each appears the same, bearing the same form, one must admit that he must also have the same needs; and it follows that he eats and drinks and has intercourse again, life circling round like a drone, and the heavenly life of the saints is destroyed. Yet Christ clearly taught a manner of resurrection worthy of it, that we shall be 'like the angels in heaven,' when the Sadducees were testing him. But the angels are not yoked to flesh; they are 'ministering spirits,' which need spiritual food. Whether you even dare to call the angels fleshly, tell yourselves, when they are in such great blessedness and glory, beholding God, the sea of incorruption, on whom no flesh can look. For the corruptible cannot have fellowship with the incorruptible.

Translated by Claude from N. Bonwetsch's German translation (1917) of the Old Church Slavonic; neither is shown

"Again, while heaven 'grows old like a garment' and the earth 'passes away,' and all things are 'rolled up like a cloak' and pass away, you maintain that these corruptible bodies do not pass away along with these great things, but are greater than heaven and the most enduring of all. Are you not ashamed, as though God prized what is as nothing compared with the whole creation? Do you not know that when those pass away, bodies cannot remain? For if the words of Christ and of the prophets are true (Christ teaches that heaven and earth will pass away, and the prophets that the earth passes away), then bodies too must pass away with the elements from which they were formed. For hear the prophetic Spirit crying: 'Look up to heaven above, and look down on the earth below; for heaven has been made firm like smoke, and the earth will grow old like a garment, and its inhabitants will perish like them,' since 'the form of this world passes away,' according to the apostle Paul, that is, through the passing away of the whole bodily nature, so that everything that is spiritual by nature, while all matter drags downward, may become fleshless and attain the perfection of holiness. But if anyone says that while heaven and earth and the whole creation pass away, as I have said, the bodies of men do not pass away, he is guilty of irrational blasphemy. Tell me: when the spring perishes, can the river still exist and flow in its bed? Nor otherwise can the body abide among the bodiless, any more than wax can in fire; for it perishes, melted by the purest essential substance. Moreover, bodies need a place to stand. There is a place for bodies: the air for birds, the water for fish, the earth for land creatures. But when these have passed away, in what order will the bodies be, when there is neither air nor earth nor water, nor the firmament itself, nor the stars? For Plato says that time corresponds to heaven, so that, having come into being together, they may also be dissolved together.

Translated by Claude from N. Bonwetsch's German translation (1917) of the Old Church Slavonic; neither is shown

"And there is still more to discuss openly. For consider other objections too, now that these arguments are finished, so that you may see into how great an evil you fall by teaching that the flesh rises. For since the substance itself is altogether in flux, indistinct and changeable, coming and going like the current of a river, so that it can never be taken to be the same even for the briefest moment, which body will rise? That of the youth, or of the old man, or of the child? How do the same bodies remain to us, when the first ones are often carried away by the stream of food flowing within? For the flesh of newborn children is one thing, that of youths another, that of old men another; and having first had one, we pass over into another, from the child's into the youth's and from that into the old man's, changing our ages like garments when the first are worn out. For of the food taken in, the heavy and husk-like part goes out of the belly dried up, while the fine and light part passes through the adjoining veins, which receive the juices, and becomes blood, which pours through the veins into the whole body, flowing upward and downward and increasing, and so produces the flesh. With such wisdom God, the good artist and first potter, prepared the nature of our body. First he draws the juices up from below, so that, raised above the marrow, they may moisten the living creature, sprinkling it with blood. That is why all the residue of food, if it does not dry up, flowing down through the veins and rising as vapour with the blood, produces festering sores in the places where the vapour rises. For rising as vapour, to speak with Aristotle ... floating in the air above us, which is cold, what has been dried out by heat gathers, becomes watery, and comes down elsewhere; and since the earth changes in many ways, and changes the forms of air and of fire, what has become moist becomes dry. For fire, that is, flame, changes into the smoke of the air, air into water, water into earth, earth into the tree, the trees into fire, fire into air. So the body too increases and decreases and admits every change, like the nourisher and nurse of all.

"Of the food that is brought in, this is the first work: a mixing of the watery with the dry and with the juices, which, like a cooking in the body, is called concoction. The second is a moisture, scarlet in colour, in the veins, and is called blood. The third is distributed through the whole body, and is called the making of flesh. So there are also three kinds of residue. The first concoction receives the food, and as the concoction takes place in the body the husks are excreted ... From the second come the blood in the veins, the moisture, and the two kinds of bile: the moisture, as whey runs off from the cheese mat; the yellow bile, which is like the colour of wine; and the black, which is like lees. Through the whole body there is an imperceptible breathing out. The cause of this is the natural heat in us, as the sun's heat is for the world. By it the food is drawn from the belly through the veins and, as it were, cooked within it, made sweet and frothy and scarlet. It is as with fruits: at first they are thin and watery in consistency, white in appearance and sour in taste; through the sun and its rays they grow sweeter and become sweet and red. So too the warmth in us changes the food, which is brought into us plain and simple, into different forms: sometimes into white, that is, phlegm and seed and milk; sometimes again into scarlet, that is, blood and flesh; sometimes into black, that is, black bile and liver and spleen. For the veins are nourished from their moisture, that is, from the juicy part; the fleshy parts from another, that is, from the bloody; and the marrowy parts from another, that is, from the phlegmatic. That is why Hippocrates said that the stomach is to living creatures what the earth is to trees. For as trees spring up from the earth and become earth again, when fruits and leaves come out, and the fruits become earth, and those again become earth, so too food rises from the earth, goes into the body, and comes back to the earth, fulfilling God's command: 'You are earth, and to earth you shall return.' For flesh and bones and veins change into hair and nails and phlegm and tears and other moisture of the body; and these into earth, earth into food, food into blood, and that again into bones and hair and veins, when it is brought to a living creature.

Translated by Claude from N. Bonwetsch's German translation (1917) of the Old Church Slavonic; neither is shown

"So it is not possible for the same body to be preserved. For the one is destroyed and departs as it ages, in hair, flesh, blood and bones; and the other, which constantly comes from food to take the place of the old that has departed, preserves the bodily form, so that the very same body is always changing and never is, nor has what is its own within itself, even though it appears the same. From where, then, would the wasted flesh of the sick be filled up again, or what is buried in the earth after blood-letting, or the blood that flows out of a wound? It comes, rather, from food, poured into all the members by the third concoction and changed into other elements, as the earth rises through the root into the branches, the leaves and the fruits, the substance of the earth being entirely transformed. So stop accepting impossible things. Hope, which according to you digs in the clay, must set its mind on 'the things above,' and look up to that place 'where Christ is,' and not to the earth or to corruption, where corruption soon comes, setting its mind on what belongs to earthly things and is unworthy of the glory of God."

Translated by Claude from N. Bonwetsch's German translation (1917) of the Old Church Slavonic; neither is shown

"Further, tell me, which body is to rise? The one exhausted by loss of blood and other wounds, or another, new one that has come in its place? For the same flesh does not always remain; it often departs as food is added. Can you then say what God raised up, and that nothing perishes because he preserves everything? And what if someone who was purified a year or more ago commits sexual immorality, and again, after abstaining, commits sexual immorality, and has done this often, after the first bodies have passed away and been changed, as the discussion has shown, so that they are no longer the same bodies with which he lived purely and with which he committed sexual immorality: in the resurrection, which body, or how many bodies, will the soul wear in order to be judged, those with which it practised purity or those with which it committed fornication? But now you say that only the last body rises and receives punishment for all the deeds. And to allow you to speak of this too: what fine judge, judging according to justice, rules that while one has committed sexual immorality another should suffer? Or what good general, that while one has shared in the victory another should be crowned?"