On the Resurrection of the Flesh 35–45

But he also teaches that he is rather to be feared who kills both body and soul in Gehenna, that is, the Lord alone, not those who kill the body but can do nothing to the soul, that is, human powers. So here the soul is recognized as immortal by nature, since it cannot be killed by men, and mortality is recognized as belonging to the flesh, which can be killed; and so the resurrection of the dead too belongs to the flesh, which cannot be killed in Gehenna unless it has been raised. But since here too a quibble is raised over the interpretation of “body,” I understand the body of man to be nothing other than this whole structure of flesh, of whatever kind of materials it is put together and diversified: what is seen, what is held, what, in short, is killed by men. So too I will admit the body of a wall to be nothing other than rubble, stones, and bricks. If anyone brings in some secret body, let him show it, reveal it, prove that it too is what is killed by man, and then it will have been said of that. Likewise, if the body of the soul is put forward, the trick will be empty. For since both body and soul are set forth as killed in Gehenna, the body is distinguished from the soul, and what remains to be understood as body is what is at hand, namely the flesh; which, just as it will be killed in Gehenna if it has not rather feared to be killed by God, so will be made alive to eternal life if it has chosen rather to be put to death by men. Likewise, if anyone takes the killing of flesh and soul in Gehenna as the destruction and end of both substances, not their punishment, as if they were to be consumed rather than punished, let him remember that the fire of Gehenna is proclaimed eternal, for eternal punishment, and from this let him recognize that the killing is eternal, and therefore to be feared before human killing, which is temporal. Then he will also believe the substances eternal whose killing is eternal, for punishment. Certainly, since after the resurrection the body with the soul is to be killed in Gehenna, both points will be established well enough: the bodily resurrection and the eternal killing. It would otherwise be most absurd that the raised flesh should be killed in Gehenna in order to be ended, which it would undergo even without being raised; it would be restored for this purpose, that what had already ceased to be should not be. Propping us up in the same hope, he adds the example of the sparrows as well, that not one of two falls to the ground without the will of God, so that you may believe that the flesh too, which has fallen to the ground, can likewise rise again by the will of the same God. For even if this is not permitted to sparrows, yet we are worth more than many sparrows in that, falling, we rise again; and in declaring that all the hairs of our head are numbered, he surely promises that they are safe. For what reason would have brought into a count things that were to perish? Unless it is this: “that of all that the Father has given me I should lose nothing,” that is, not a hair, just as not an eye or a tooth. Otherwise, where will the weeping and gnashing of teeth come from, if not from eyes and teeth? When, that is, the body too has been killed in Gehenna and thrust into the outer darkness, which is properly a torment of the eyes. If anyone at the wedding is clothed in less worthy works, he is at once to be bound hand and foot, as one who has risen with his body. So too reclining in the kingdom of God, sitting on the thrones of Christ, standing at the right hand or the left, and eating of the tree of life are most faithful indications of a bodily arrangement.

Let us see now whether, in crushing the craftiness of the Sadducees, he has not rather set up our view. The cause of the question was, I think, the overthrow of the resurrection, since the Sadducees admit the salvation neither of soul nor of flesh; and so, from the aspect of the resurrection by which faith is most shaken, they fitted an argument to their problem, namely the flesh's pretext of marrying or not after the resurrection, in the character of the woman who, married to seven brothers, was held in doubt as to which of them she would be restored to. Now let the sense of both question and answer be kept, and the controversy is met. For if the Sadducees rejected the resurrection while the Lord confirmed it, rebuking them as ignorant of the Scriptures (those, that is, which had proclaimed the resurrection) and as unbelieving of the power of God (well able, surely, to raise the dead), and finally adding, “But that the dead rise,” then without doubt, in confirming that what was denied exists, namely the resurrection of the dead with the God of the living, he confirmed it to be such as it was denied to be, that is, of both human substances. For if he denied that they would marry then, he did not thereby show that they would not rise. On the contrary, he calls them sons of the resurrection, as having in a manner to be born through it, after which they will not marry, being raised. For they will be like angels, in that they will not marry, because they will not die either, but also in that they will pass into the angelic state through that clothing of incorruptibility, through a change of substance, a substance nonetheless raised. Besides, the question whether we would marry or die again would not be asked unless the restoration of that substance above all were called in doubt which properly undergoes both death and marriage, that is, the flesh. You have, then, the Lord confirming against the heretics of the Jews what is now denied among the Sadducees of the Christians: a solid resurrection.

So too, if he says that the flesh profits nothing, the sense must be governed by the subject of the saying. For since they thought his word hard and intolerable, as if he had determined that his flesh was really to be eaten by them, he first said, in order to set the state of salvation in the spirit, “It is the spirit that gives life,” and then added, “the flesh profits nothing,” for giving life, that is. He goes on to say what he wants the spirit to be understood as: “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit, they are life”; as also above: “He who hears my words and believes in him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment but passes from death to life.” So, establishing the word as the life-giver, because the word is spirit and life, he also called the same word his flesh, because the Word had also become flesh; and so it is to be sought for the sake of life, and devoured by hearing, chewed over by understanding, and digested by faith. For a little earlier he had also declared his flesh to be the heavenly bread, pressing throughout, by an allegory of necessary foods, the memory of the fathers who had preferred the loaves and the flesh of the Egyptians to the divine calling. So, turning to their thoughts, since he had perceived that they were about to be scattered, he says, “The flesh profits nothing.” What has this to do with destroying the resurrection of the flesh, as if there could not be something which, though it profits nothing, can still be profited by something else? The spirit profits, for it gives life. The flesh profits nothing, for it is put to death. So he has rather set out the proposition about both in our favour. For in showing what profits and what does not, he likewise made clear what profits what: the spirit profits the flesh, namely, as the life-giver of what has been put to death. “For the hour will come,” he says, “when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” What is dead but the flesh? And what is the voice of God but the word? And what is the word but spirit? Fittingly he will raise the flesh, which he himself became, and from death, which he himself suffered, and from the tomb, into which he himself was carried. Finally, when he says, “Do not marvel that the hour will come in which all who are in the tombs will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who have done good will come forth to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment,” no one can any longer interpret the dead who are in the tombs as anything but bodies and flesh, since tombs themselves are nothing but lodgings for corpses. For even the “old men,” that is, the sinners, that is, those dead through ignorance of God, whom the heretics argue are to be understood by the tombs, are plainly proclaimed as coming out of the tombs to judgment. How else will tombs come out of tombs?

After the Lord's sayings, what are we to believe his deeds mean, when he raised the dead from biers and tombs? For what purpose was it? If for a mere display of power, or for the present favour of bringing back to life, it was no great thing for him to raise those who would die again. But if rather to deposit a pledge of faith in the future resurrection, then that resurrection too is determined to be bodily by the form of its proof. Nor will I bear those who say that a resurrection then appointed for the soul alone ran ahead in the flesh as well because the resurrection of the invisible soul could not have been shown except by the raising of the visible substance. They know God poorly who do not think him able to do what they themselves cannot think of; and yet they know he could have, if they know the document of John. For he who set before our sight the souls of the martyrs, still alone, resting under the altar, could surely have shown them to our eyes rising without flesh as well. But I prefer a God who cannot deceive, weak only in respect of falsehood, lest he seem to have sent ahead proofs different from the way he arranged the reality; indeed, lest, if he could not bring in an example of resurrection without flesh, he be much less able to show the fullness of the example. But no example is greater than that of which it is an example. And it would be greater if souls were raised with the body as a proof of rising without the body, so that the salvation of the whole man served as patron for that of half; whereas the nature of examples would rather call for what was held to be less, I mean the resurrection of the soul alone, as a foretaste of the flesh too, which is to rise in its own time. And so, by our true reckoning, those examples of the dead raised by the Lord did commend the resurrection of both flesh and soul, lest this gift be denied to either substance; yet, as examples, they set forth something less. For they were raised not to glory or incorruptibility but to another death.

What resurrection Christ proclaimed the apostolic documents also attest. For the apostles too had no other business, at least among Israel, than to unseal the old covenant and seal the new, and above all to preach God in Christ. So they brought nothing new concerning the resurrection either, except that they announced it too to the glory of Christ; otherwise it was received by a simple and already familiar faith, without any question about its nature, only the Sadducees opposing. So much easier was it to deny the resurrection of the dead altogether than to understand it otherwise. You have Paul before the chief priests, under the tribune, among Sadducees and Pharisees, professing his faith: “Men, brothers,” he says, “I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees; I am now on trial before you concerning the hope and the resurrection,” the common one, surely, lest, since he already seemed a transgressor of the law, he be thought to side with the Sadducees on the chief article of the whole faith, that is, the resurrection. So the faith in the resurrection which he did not wish to seem to rescind he surely confirmed in the Pharisees' sense, rejecting its deniers, the Sadducees. Likewise before Agrippa he says that he puts forward nothing beyond what the prophets had announced. So he kept the resurrection too such as the prophets had announced it. For in recalling what is written in Moses about the resurrection of the dead as well, he knew it to be bodily, one, namely, in which the blood of man will be required. So he preached it such as the Pharisees had received it and the Lord himself had defended it, and as the Sadducees, rather than believe it such, had wished it not to exist at all. Nor did the Athenians understand him to herald any other. In short, they mocked, who would not have mocked at all if they had heard from him of the restoration of the soul alone; for they would have welcomed the quite common presumption of their home-grown philosophy. But when the proclamation of a resurrection never heard of before shook the nations by its very novelty, and a fitting incredulity at so great a thing began to rack faith with questions, then the apostle too took care throughout almost his whole document to strengthen faith in this hope, showing both that it exists and that it has not yet taken place, and, what was most questioned, that it is bodily, and, what was doubted besides, that it is bodily in no other sense.

It is no wonder, however, if arguments are snatched even from his own document, since there must be heresies, which could not exist if the Scriptures could not also be wrongly understood. So the heresies, having come upon the two men set forth by the apostle, the inner, that is, the soul, and the outer, that is, the flesh, have awarded salvation to the soul, that is, to the inner man, but destruction to the flesh, that is, to the outer, because it is written to the Corinthians: “For though our outer man is being corrupted, yet the inner is being renewed day by day.” But neither is the soul by itself man, since it was inserted afterwards into the formed thing already called man; nor is the flesh without the soul man, since after the soul's exile it is entitled a corpse. So the word “man” is in a way the clasp of two substances bound together, and under that word they cannot exist except joined. Moreover, the apostle prefers the inner man to be understood not so much as the soul but as the mind and disposition, that is, not the substance itself but the savour of the substance. For writing to the Ephesians that Christ dwells in the inner man, he signified that the Lord is to be admitted into the inner senses. Then he added, “through faith, in your hearts, and in love,” putting faith and love not as substantial parts of the soul but as its conceptions; but in saying “in hearts,” which are substantial parts of the flesh, he assigned to the flesh even the inner man itself, whom he placed in the heart. Look now at how he alleged that the outer man is being corrupted while the inner is renewed day by day, so that you do not affirm that corruption of the flesh which it suffers from the day of death, to fail forever, but rather that which in the span of this life, before death and up to death, it experiences through vexations and pressures, tortures and punishments, for the Name's sake. For the inner man too is to be renewed here, surely, advancing day by day in faith and discipline by the prompting of the Spirit; not there, that is, not after the resurrection, where we are not to be renewed day by day but once for all, completely. Learn from what follows: “For our present, temporary, and light affliction,” he says, “works for us, beyond all measure, an eternal weight of glory, as we look not at the things that are seen” (that is, sufferings) “but at the things that are not seen” (that is, rewards); “for the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal.” For the afflictions and injuries by which the outer man is corrupted he declares to be light and temporary and therefore to be despised, preferring the weight of eternal, invisible rewards and of glory as compensation for the labours by which the flesh here is corrupted in suffering. So that is not the corruption which they ascribe to the outer man as the perpetual destruction of the flesh, in order to expel the resurrection. So too elsewhere: “if indeed we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him; for I reckon that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the future glory that is to be revealed in us.” Here too he shows the troubles to be smaller than their rewards. Now, if we suffer with him through the flesh, to which it properly belongs to be corrupted by sufferings, what is promised for suffering with him will belong to the flesh as well. And so, intending to assign to the flesh the property of afflictions, as above, he says: “For when we had come into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest”; then, to give the soul too a share in the suffering: “afflicted in everything,” he says, “fightings without” (warring down the flesh, that is), “fear within” (afflicting the soul, that is). So even if the outer man is being corrupted, it is understood to be corrupted not as losing the resurrection but as enduring vexation, and that not without the inner man. So to be glorified together will belong to both, just as to suffer together. The fellowships of rewards must run parallel to the partnerships of labours.

He pursues the same thought still, preferring rewards to vexations: “For we know,” he says, “that if the earthly house of our tabernacle is dissolved, we have a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”; that is, in return for our flesh being dissolved through sufferings, we shall obtain a dwelling in the heavens. He remembered the Gospel's definition: “Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Yet he did not deny the restoration of the flesh if he set against its dissolution the compensation of reward, since the compensation is owed to that to which the dissolution is charged, namely the flesh. But since he had called the flesh a house, he elegantly chose to use the word “house” also in the comparison with the reward, promising to the house itself, which will be dissolved through suffering, a better house through the resurrection. For the Lord too promises many mansions, as houses, with the Father. Although it can also be understood of the dwelling of the world, on whose dissolution an eternal seat is promised in the heavens, since what follows, plainly referring to the flesh, shows that what precedes does not refer to the flesh. For the apostle makes a distinction when he adds: “For in this we groan, longing to be clothed over with our dwelling that is from heaven, since, having been stripped, we shall not be found naked”; that is, we wish to put on the heavenly power of eternity over us before we are stripped of the flesh. For the privilege of this grace awaits those who at the Lord's coming will be found in the flesh and, because of the harshness of the times of the antichrist, will deserve, by a shortcut of death accomplished through change, to join those who rise, as he writes to the Thessalonians: “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who remain until the coming of the Lord, shall not go before those who have fallen asleep; for the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a command and the voice of the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first; then we together with them will be caught up in the clouds to meet Christ, and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

He explains the change of these, extended to all, in the first letter to the Corinthians, saying: “We shall not all rise, but we shall all be changed, in an atom, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” Having first looked at this statement, you will refer the rest back to the earlier sense. For when he adds, “For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal put on immortality,” this will be that dwelling from heaven which, groaning in this flesh, we long to put on over it, over the flesh, that is, in which we shall be found; because he says that we who are in the tabernacle are burdened, since we do not wish to be stripped but rather to be clothed over, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life, while, that is, it is changed by putting on over it what is from the heavens. For who will not desire, while he is in the flesh, to put on immortality over it and to continue life, death being gained by a substitute change, so as not to experience the underworld, which will exact the last penny? But even he who has already experienced the underworld will obtain the change after the resurrection. For from this we define that the flesh will in every case take on the angelic condition from the change that will come upon it. Or if it must be changed only in those who will be found in the flesh, so that the mortal may be swallowed up by life, that is, the flesh by that heavenly and eternal over-garment, then those who are found dead will not obtain life, being already deprived of the material and, so to speak, the food of life, that is, the flesh; or else they too must receive it back, so that in them too the mortal can be swallowed up by life, if they are to obtain life. “But in the dead,” you say, “this mortal will already have been swallowed up.” Not in all, surely. For how many may be found who died only the day before, corpses so fresh that nothing in them can seem to have been swallowed up? For surely by “swallowed up” you mean nothing other than intercepted, abolished, snatched from every sense, what has ceased to appear in any way at all. Nor will the most ancient corpses of the giants be shown to have been swallowed up, whose frames still survive. We have spoken of this elsewhere. But recently too, in this very city, when the foundations of the Odeum were being laid sacrilegiously over so many old burials, the people shuddered at bones some five hundred years old still moist, and hair still smelling. It is agreed that not only do bones endure but teeth too last uncorrupted, which are kept as seeds of the body that will sprout in the resurrection. Finally, even if at that time the mortal is found swallowed up in all the dead, it will be swallowed up by death, surely, by time, by age: but is it by life, by the over-garment, by the putting on of immortality? Now, he who says the mortal will be swallowed up by these has denied that it will be by the others. And surely it will be fitting for this to be accomplished and effected by divine powers, not by natural laws. So since what is mortal is to be swallowed up by life, it must by all means be presented so that it may be swallowed up, and be swallowed up so that it may be changed. If you say that a fire must be kindled, you cannot affirm that what it is kindled with is necessary in one place and not in another. So too when he inserts, “since, having been stripped, we shall not be found naked” (of those, namely, who at the day of the Lord will be found not in life nor in the flesh), he denied that those whom he had spoken of as stripped would be naked only because he wished them to be understood as reclothed in the same substance of which they had been stripped. For they will be found naked when the flesh has been laid aside, or partly torn or worn away (for this too can be called nakedness); then they will receive it back, so that, reclothed with the flesh, they may also be clothed over with immortality. For being clothed over can only suit one who is already clothed.

Likewise, when he says, “So we are always confident, knowing that while we dwell in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight,” it is plain that this too does not serve to darken the flesh as if it separated us from the Lord. For here too an exhortation to disdain this life is set before us, since we are away from the Lord as long as we live, walking by faith, not by sight, that is, in hope, not in reality. And so he adds: “But we are confident and think it better rather to be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” that is, so that we may walk by sight rather than by faith, in reality rather than in hope. You see how here too he refers contempt of bodies to the excellence of martyrdom. For no one who goes away from the body is at once at home with the Lord except by the privilege of martyrdom, lodging, that is, in paradise, not in the underworld. Had the apostle lacked words to signify departure from the body? Or does he speak unusually for a reason? Wishing to signify a temporary absence from the body, he said that we are away from it as travellers, since he who travels abroad will also return home. Then, of all: “We are eager,” he says, “whether away or at home, to be pleasing to God; for we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ Jesus.” If all, then whole; if whole, then both inner and outer, that is, souls as well as bodies: “so that each one,” he says, “may receive back through the body according to what he has done, whether good or bad.” How you read this, I now ask; for he has constructed it somewhat confusedly, by hyperbaton. Is it the things to be received back through the body, or the things done? But if they are to be received back through the body, the resurrection is beyond doubt bodily; and if it is the things done, they must surely be repaid through the body through which they were also done. So this whole treatment by the apostle from the beginning, woven to such a conclusion, by which the resurrection of the flesh is shown, must be understood in keeping with what agrees with the conclusion.

If you look back further to the earlier verses, from which the mention of the outer and inner man was introduced, will you not find both the dignity and the hope of the flesh intact? For when, speaking of the light that God has made shine in our hearts for the illumination of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Christ, he says that we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that is, in the flesh: will the flesh be destroyed because it is earthenware by its origin in clay, or exalted because it is the storehouse of a divine treasure? And indeed, if that true light itself, which is in the person of Christ, contains life in itself, and that life together with the light is entrusted to the flesh, is that to which life is entrusted to perish? Suppose so: is the treasure itself to perish too? For perishable things are entrusted to perishable things, like new wine to old wineskins. Likewise, when he adds, “always carrying about in our body the dying of Christ Jesus,” what sort of thing is this which, after being the temple of God, can now be called the tomb of Christ as well? And why do we carry about the dying of the Lord in the body? “So that the life too,” he says, “may be manifested.” Where? “In the body.” In what body? “In the mortal.” In the flesh, then: mortal indeed through guilt, but living through grace; see how great a grace, that the life of Christ should be manifested in it! In a thing foreign to salvation, then, in a substance of perpetual dissolution, will the life of Christ be manifested, eternal, unbroken, incorrupt, the very life of God? Or of what time is the life of the Lord that will be manifested in our body? That which he lived up to his passion was not only open to view among the Jews but has now been published to all nations as well. So he means that life which broke the adamantine gates of death and the bronze bars of the underworld, and which thereafter is ours. In short, it will be manifested in the body. When? After death. How? When we rise in the body, as Christ did. For lest anyone argue that the life of Jesus is to be manifested in our body now, through the discipline of holiness, patience, righteousness, and wisdom in which the Lord's life flourished, the apostle's most provident purpose adds: “For if we who live are delivered to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life too may be manifested in our mortal body.” So he says that this will happen in our body when we are dead. And if then, how except in the body raised? So too in the conclusion: “knowing,” he says, “that he who raised Jesus will raise us also with him.” But he has already risen from the dead; so “with him” can only mean “like him”; and if like him, then surely not without flesh.

But again, with another blindness, they stumble on two men, the old and the new, since the apostle warns us to put off the old man, who is corrupted through deceitful desire, and to be renewed in the spirit of the mind and to put on the new man, who is created according to God in righteousness and the holiness of truth; so that here too, dividing them between the two substances, the oldness to the flesh and the newness to the soul, they maintain perpetual corruption for the old, that is, the flesh. But if it goes by substances, neither is the soul the new man because it came later, nor the flesh old because it came first. For how little time was there between God's hand and his breath? I would venture to say: even if the flesh was long prior to the soul, by the very fact that it waited to be filled by the soul, it made the soul prior. For every completion and perfection, though later in order, comes first in effect. That is more truly prior without which the prior things cannot be. If the flesh is the old man, since when? From the beginning? But Adam was wholly new, and no one is old from new. And from then on, from the blessing of generation, flesh and soul come to be together without reckoning of time, since they are also sown together in the womb, as we have taught in the treatise on the soul. They are contemporaries in the embryo, coeval at birth. These two men, of a double substance indeed, but not of a double age, are brought forth as one, since neither is prior. It is more correct that we are wholly either old or new; for how we could be one and the other we do not know. But the apostle clearly marks what the old man is: “Put off,” he says, “according to your former way of life, the old man”; not according to the age of some substance. For he does not command us to put off the flesh, but what he elsewhere too shows to be carnal, accusing works, not bodies, of which he adds here: “Putting away lying, speak the truth each to his neighbour, since we are members of one another. Be angry and do not sin. Let not the sun set on your anger, and give no place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labour, working with his hands, so that he may have something to share with the needy. Let no foul word come out of your mouth, but only what is best for the building up of faith, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and clamour and blasphemy be taken away from you, with all malice. But be kind to one another, merciful, forgiving one another, as God also has forgiven you in Christ.” So those who think the flesh the old man, why do they not hasten their own death, so that by putting off the old man they may fulfil the apostle's commands? For we, who believe that the whole faith is to be carried out in the flesh, indeed through the flesh, to which belong the mouth for bringing forth all the best speech, the tongue for not blaspheming, the heart for not being indignant, and the hands for working and giving, maintain that both the oldness and the newness of man belong to a moral, not a substantial, difference. And so we likewise acknowledge that the man who was old according to his former way of life is the same one who is said to be corrupted according to deceitful desire, just as he is called old according to his former way of life, not according to the flesh through perpetual destruction. For the rest, he is safe in the flesh and the same man, having put off his vicious rule of life, not his bodiliness.