On the Resurrection 1.35–1.46

"And so that you too may perceive the difference more clearly, how man, differing wholly and entirely from the other creatures and enrolled in honour second only to the angels, is found to be immortal, come, let us take up this point too according to true and orthodox reasoning. To the other creatures it was given to be animated and to live from breathing in the spirit that is in the air; but to man, from the immortal and superior essence itself. For 'God breathed into his face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.' And the others were commanded to serve and to be ruled, but he to rule and to be master. To them were given different shapes and forms of nature, as many as the solid and visible nature of the earth brought forth at God's command; but to him what is godlike and like God, in all things exactly fashioned after that archetypal and only-begotten image of the Father. For 'God made man,' it says, 'according to the image of God he made him.' That is why he took care for the permanence of his own statue, that it might not easily fall prey to corruption, as sculptors also do for their statues. For they take thought not only for the beauty and comeliness of their statues, that they may be magnificently beautiful, but they also provide, as far as they can, for the immortality of their works, so that they may be preserved for a very long time without being dissolved; as Phidias did. For he, after making the image at Pisa (it was of ivory), ordered oil to be poured out before the feet of the statue, keeping it as nearly immortal as he could. And so, if the makers of things made with hands act in this way, did not God, the best of artists, who can make all things even out of what is not, much more contrive by every necessity that his rational statue, man, should be altogether indestructible and immortal? Or did he allow what he had specially deemed worthy to make with his own hands, forming it 'according to his image and likeness,' the adornment of the world, for whose sake the world itself came into being, to be dissolved so dishonourably and handed over to destruction and corruption? It cannot be said; to think this is to be carried away into folly.

[36] "Perhaps, attending to what has now been said, you will say, Aglaophon: 'And how, if according to you the living creature was immortal from its origin, has it become mortal, since what is immortal must be what it is unchangeably, not falling away or departing into the baser and mortal nature? That is impossible, since it will no longer be immortal.' Because, I shall say, it had been made free to choose the good, and had received this law; and the devil, wickedly standing by, envied it. 'For God created man for incorruption and made him an image of his own eternity'; and 'God did not make death, nor does he delight in the destruction of the living'; 'but through the envy of the devil death entered into the world,' as Wisdom, written by Solomon, also testifies. From where, then, must death be said to come, if God did not make death? If from envy, how then did envy prove stronger than the will of God? But we shall say that this is blasphemous. 'From where, then, does envy come?' the objector will say. 'For if from the devil, why did the devil come to be, if he came to be at all, and is not the one who made him the cause of his being evil? Yet God is wholly blameless of all evils for all. The devil, then, is unoriginate; and if unoriginate, he is also impassible, indestructible and without need, for these must of every necessity belong to the unoriginate. But the devil is brought to nothing and punished; and what is punished is altered and suffers, whereas the unoriginate is impassible. The devil, then, is not unoriginate but originate. And if he is originate, and everything that has come into being came to be from some beginning and has a maker, then there is some maker of the devil. And is that maker unoriginate or originate? But only one must be understood to be unoriginate, God; for there can be no other maker at all besides him ("I," he says, "am the first, and I am after these things, and besides me there is no other God"), nor can anything be reshaped or created contrary to his will. For the Son too will confess that "he can do nothing of himself, unless he sees the Father doing something; for whatever the Father does," he says, "the Son also does likewise." Nor indeed is anything hostile or opposed or contrary to God; for if anything acted against God, it would cease to exist, its constitution dissolved by God's power and strength. For he alone who made them can dissolve even immortal things.'"

"What then is the devil?" you will say. A spirit concerned with matter, as Athenagoras too said, made by God, just as the other angels were made by him, and entrusted with the administration of matter and of the forms of matter. For this was how the angels were constituted: they were made by God to exercise providence over the things he had ordered, so that God might hold the universal and general providence over all things, himself keeping the authority and power over everything and steering the universe unswervingly, like a ship, with the helm of his wisdom, while the angels appointed to this task held the providence over particular things. The others remained in the tasks for which God made and appointed them; but he grew insolent and became wicked in the administration of what had been entrusted to him, conceiving envy against us, as did also those who afterwards fell in love with flesh and consorted with the daughters of men for pleasure. For God ordained that they too should have a will of their own choosing, inclined to either side, as with men, so that either, obeying the Word, they might be with him and enjoy blessedness, or, not obeying, they might be judged. The devil, too, was a morning star, a light-bringer. 'How has the morning star fallen from heaven, he that rose early?' He rose with the angels of light, like a morning star; but he fell and 'was crushed to the earth,' having plotted against man. For the divine always resents 'the proud' and cuts down arrogant thoughts. And it occurs to me to say something in verse too:

O serpent, beginning and end of all evils for all, and you, Error, who bear a heavy treasure of evils, guide of a blind and ignorant life, who rejoice in the laments and groans of mortals: you armed the brother-hating arms of kinsmen for lawless outrages, and persuaded Cain to be the first to defile the earth with murderous gore; and you contrived that the first-formed man should fall from undefiled ages to the ground.

"So much for the devil. But death was devised for conversion, just as blows are for the correction of children who have newly begun to learn their letters. For death is nothing other than the separation and parting of the soul from the body. 'What then? Is God the cause of death?' you will say; for the same argument comes round to us again. God forbid; for teachers too are not primarily the cause of children's being pained by blows. Death, then, is good, if it was devised for conversion, like blows for children: not the death of sin, most wise friends, but the death that is the separation and parting of the flesh. For man was free and his own master, and had received, as I said, a will of his own and self-chosen for the choice of the good. He heard, 'From every tree that is in the paradise you shall eat; but from the tree of knowing good and evil you shall not eat of it; in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.' Yet he gave in to the devil, who persuaded him in various ways to disobedience with a beguiling wisdom, so that he ate of it; and he set aside God's commandment, and this became for him a stumbling-block and a snare and an offence. For God did not make evil, nor is he in any way at all the cause of evil; but whatever has been made free by him in this way, for keeping and guarding the law that he justly ordained, and does not keep it, is called evil. And the gravest harm is to disobey God, overstepping the bounds of the justice that belongs to free will. Hence, since man had been defiled and polluted by turning away from God's decree, and had taken on the stains of much wickedness which the ruler of darkness and father of error brought forth, having 'conceived toil,' as Scripture says, so as always to have the means of stirring up and moving man toward injustice, God the Almighty, seeing that by the devil's plot he had become an immortal evil, as the devil too was a deceiver, made the garments of skins for this reason, clothing him as it were with mortality, so that through the dissolution of the body all the evil begotten in him might die.

[39] "It has already been raised as a question and shown that the garments of skins are not the bodies. Nevertheless let us speak of it again, for it must not be said only once. Before they were made, the first-formed man himself acknowledges that he has both bones and flesh, when, seeing the woman brought to him, he cried out: 'This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken from her man. For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' I will not put up with some who talk nonsense and shamelessly do violence to Scripture, so that their notion that the resurrection is not of the flesh may succeed: they suppose bones and flesh to be only figurative, and turn them now one way and now another, up and down, by allegories. Yet Christ confirms that these words are to be taken as they are written, where, when the Pharisees ask him about the putting away of a wife, he answers: 'Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother,' and so on. For how could 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth' be understood of souls alone, or 'God took dust from the earth and formed man,' which plainly refers properly to the body? For the soul did not get its substance from dust and the heavier elements. So it is established most truly on every ground that man was embodied before the garments of skins. For all these things were said before his fall, and what concerns the garments after the fall. Let us go, then, to consider again the matter in hand, having sufficiently shown that the garments of skins are not the bodies but the mortality made from the irrational animals; for that is what remains. It is indeed for this reason that he is moved out beyond the bounds of paradise. For it was not because God did not want him to reach out to the tree of life and eat that he cast him out (for he could have lived forever, if he had eaten again of the tree of life), but so that evil might not become immortal, as we have laid down. Otherwise why did he send Christ from heaven to earth, if he wanted man to die altogether without tasting life? And if the objector should say that God did this out of repentance, his argument is weak, since it brings in a God who changes his mind. But God is neither ignorant of the future nor a doer of evil; he is supremely good and foreknows what is to come. So it was not to keep him from being preserved forever by eating from the tree of life that he cast him out, but so that sin might first be put to death by death, and that thus, after sin had wasted away in death, man might be raised pure and eat of life.

[40] "Let no one, in his foolishness, run the risk of thinking that these things were said in any other sense. For whoever altogether defines this flesh as incapable of immortality is truly guilty of folly, and how great is his blasphemy! For why is Adam cast out after the making of the garments of skins, prevented from eating of the tree of life and living, if it was altogether impossible for man to live forever with a body? The prohibition is made because he could have escaped death, if he had taken and tasted of life. For it says: 'And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins and clothed them. And God said, Behold, Adam has become like one of us, in knowing good and evil; and now, lest he stretch out his hand and take of the tree of life and eat and live forever. And the Lord God sent him out of the paradise of delight to till the earth from which he was taken, and he cast Adam out.' The body, then, could have lived forever and been immortal, if it had not been prevented from tasting of life. But it was prevented so that sin, being killed together with the body, might die, and the body might be raised after sin had perished. So, in order that man might not be an immortal or ever-living evil, as I said, having sin prevailing in him, since it had sprung up in an immortal body and had immortal nourishment, God for this reason pronounced him mortal, clothing him with mortality. For this is what the garments of skins were meant for: that through the dissolution and division of the body, sin might be wholly destroyed from below, root and all, so that not even the smallest part of a root might be left from which new shoots of sins might spring up again.

[41] "For just as, when a fig tree has sprung up in the beautiful buildings of a temple and has grown well in extent and size, and has spread with many-branched roots over all the joints of the stones, it does not stop growing until it is entirely torn out, the stones in the places where it sprouted being loosened (for once the fig tree is removed the stones can be fitted again into their own places, so that the temple is preserved, no longer bearing within itself any of the evils that would destroy it, while the fig tree, torn out root and all, dies), in the same way God the craftsman dissolved his own temple, man, when he had sprouted sin like a wild fig tree, by the temporary assaults of death, 'killing,' as it is written, 'and making alive,' so that the flesh, after sin has withered and died, may be raised again from the same parts, like a renewed temple, immortal and unharmed, sin having perished completely from its foundations. For while the body is still living, before it has died, sin must live along with it, hiding its roots within us, even if outwardly it is checked by the prunings of corrections and admonitions; otherwise it would not happen that we do wrong after being enlightened, since sin would have been taken away from us altogether and completely. But now, even after believing and coming to the water of purification, we are often found in sins. For no one will boast of being so free from sin as not even to think of injustice at all. So it is established that sin is now restrained and lulled to sleep by faith, so that it does not bear harmful fruits, but it is not taken away down to the roots. For now we restrain its shoots here, such as evil thoughts, 'lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble,' not allowing the closed mouths of its buds to open and unclose into shoots, while the Word, like an axe, cuts its roots that grow below; but then even thinking about evil at all will disappear."

"For the argument is not without the witness of the Scriptures for those who wish to speak the truth sincerely, since the apostle too knew that the root of sin had not yet been wholly removed from men, saying at one time, 'For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but to accomplish the good is not. For the good that I will, I do not do; but the evil that I do not will, that I practise. But if I do what I do not will, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me'; and at another, 'I delight in the law of God according to the inner man; but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and taking me captive to the law of sin that is in my members.' So it has not yet come about that sin is cut off root and all, from its roots; it lives (for it has not died completely; how could it, before man was clothed with death?), so that, withering and wasting away together with him, it may itself be utterly destroyed and perish like a plant once that in which it was preserved, hiding its roots, as I said, has been dissolved, and man may be raised up again like a temple, no longer having 'a root of bitterness' lurking within him. For death was adopted by God, our true helper and physician, like a remedy, for the uprooting and destruction of sin, so that evil might not be everlasting and immortal in us, having sprung up in immortal beings, and so that we ourselves, maimed and fallen away from our own virtue like the sick, might not spend a long time nursing the great disease of sin in bodies that always subsist and are immortal. That is why God fittingly devised this death for the salvation of both soul and body, like a medicinal purging, so that we might thus be made entirely blameless and unharmed.

[43] "Come, then, since many examples are needed in such matters, let us consider them from this point especially, not desisting until the argument first arrives at a clearer explanation and proof. It appears, then, as if a master craftsman were to melt down again a beautiful statue, made by him of gold or some other material and with all its members proportionately arranged for beauty, upon suddenly seeing it mutilated by some most wicked man who, unable from envy to bear that the statue should be beautiful, damaged it, reaping the vain pleasure of his envy. (For note, most wise Aglaophon, that if the craftsman wished that what he had laboured on with such zeal and care should not be damaged at all or open to blame, he will be impelled to melt it down and make it such as it was before. But if he did not recast it or remake it, but let it remain, repairing and mending it, then the statue, heated in the fire and hammered, could no longer be kept the same, but would be altered and diminished.) For this reason, if he wished the work to be wholly beautiful and blameless, it must be broken up and recast, so that all the disfigurements and alterations that came upon it from plotting and envy may perish through the remaking and recasting, while the statue is restored to its own form, unharmed and unalloyed, as like itself as possible. (For the statue cannot perish under the same craftsman, even if it is poured back into its material, but it can be restored; whereas the disfigurements and injuries can perish, for they melt away, but cannot be restored, because in every art the best craftsman looks not at what is ugly or hateful but at what is proportionate and right in the thing he makes.) This, then, seems to me to be what God has also arranged in our case. For seeing man, his most comely work, damaged by the envious plots of jealousy, he could not bear, being a lover of man, to leave him so, lest he be blemished forever, having the blame in himself immortal; but he dissolved him again into his material, so that through the remoulding all the blemishes in him might melt away and vanish. For the recasting of the statue there corresponds to the death and dissolution of the body here; and the reshaping or re-adorning of the material there to the rising here. So the prophet Jeremiah too, who already recommends the same things in these words: 'And I went down,' he says, 'to the potter's house; and behold, he was making a work on the stones, and the vessel which he was making fell apart in his hands, and he made it again into another vessel, as it pleased him to make it. And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Shall I not be able to do to you as this potter does, house of Israel? Behold, as the clay of the potter, so are you in my hands.'"

"For observe how, as I said, after man had transgressed, the great Hand did not consent to leave its own work as a trophy of victory to the wicked one, who had unjustly damaged it for envious reasons, as something counterfeit; but it melted it down and turned it back again into clay, as a potter remoulds a vessel, so that through the remoulding all the disfigurements and bruises in it might vanish, and the whole might be made anew, blamelessly pleasing. 'Or does the potter not have authority over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honour and another for dishonour?' That is to say (for this is plainly what the apostle seems to me to show): has God no authority, having remoulded and re-adorned each of us individually from the same material of each, to raise us either to honour and glory or to dishonour and condemnation? To dishonour the one who lived wickedly in sins, and to honour the one who lived in righteousness. As was revealed to Daniel too: 'And many of those who sleep in the mound of the earth,' he says, 'will awake, these to everlasting life, and these to reproach and everlasting shame; and those who understand will shine like the brightness of the firmament.' For it is not in our power to destroy the root of wickedness completely, but only not to let it grow to its full extent and bear fruit. For its general and total removal and destruction, roots and all, is brought about by God at the dissolution of the body, as has been said; but the partial removal, so that it may not put out a shoot, is brought about by us. And for this reason the one who has nourished it to growth and size, instead of making it barren and keeping it down as far as lay in him, must pay the penalty, because, being able to do so and having the authority, he chose to honour what harms rather than what profits."

"So let no one, being himself the cause, blame the divine nature with unbridled tongue, as though it did not justly distribute to each the wages of vice and virtue. 'For who are you, O man, who answer back to God? Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, Why did you make me thus or thus?' How could it, when it chose evil by its own self-governing will? Therefore it will not say to God, who judges by the unvarying decrees of justice, 'Why did you make me thus,' when it has been condemned to suffer pain. For observe how the apostle, like a skilled javelin-thrower, casting compact words into the midst, makes the working-out of what he writes obscure and veiled in depth, yet most true and orthodox, with nothing in it careless or ill-spoken. To those who stoop over his words not earnestly but carelessly he sometimes seems to say things disconnected and discordant; but to those who read earnestly and with sober reason, how full of order and truth they are! To go through these matters with exactness now would be a sufficient task by itself; and it would be ridiculous to leave the inquiry for whose sake we set out and to pass on to other things. These things have been said by us because of the punishment that justice inflicts on those who choose to be evil. Since, then, it has been shown most clearly that death was devised for man not for any evil but for good, whoever studies these matters without carelessness must now consider the resurrection of the body. For how is death not beneficial, since it destroys what plunders our nature, even if it is hateful at the time when it seems to be applied, like a most bitter medicine to the sick? And so that we may not discuss the same things often about the same matters, come, let us confirm the argument from the song in Deuteronomy as well, and go on to take up what follows."

"For the saying of God, 'I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal; and there is no one who will deliver out of my hands,' what else does it mean to teach than that the body is first killed and dies for this reason, so that it may rise again and live? It is first struck and shattered, so that it may be formed again whole and sound; and nothing at all has the strength to snatch it out of his great and mighty hand for destruction and ruin: not fire, not death, not darkness, not chaos, not corruption. 'For who,' he says, 'will separate us from the love of Christ?' (who is interpreted as the Father's hand and Word) 'Tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, For your sake we are being put to death all the day long; we are reckoned as sheep for slaughter. But in all these things we more than conquer through him who loved us.' Most truly, so that, as I said, the saying may be fulfilled, 'I will kill and I will make alive; I will strike and I will heal; and there is no one who will deliver' us 'from the love of God which is in Christ' for destruction. That is why 'we are reckoned as sheep for slaughter,' so that, having died 'to sin,' we may live 'to God.' Let these things be considered thus far; what follows from them must be taken up again as follows."