On the Resurrection of the Flesh 53–63

But some argue that the “animal body” is the soul, in order to draw that body away from the flesh that is to be restored. Now since it is agreed and fixed that the body that will rise is the one that was sown, they will be challenged to produce the thing itself. Either let them show the soul sown after death, that is, dead, that is, dashed to the ground, scattered, dissolved, which God has not decreed against it; let them set out its corruption and dishonour and weakness, so that it may also belong to the soul to rise into incorruption and glory and power. But in Lazarus, the chief example of resurrection, it was the flesh that lay in weakness, the flesh that had almost rotted into dishonour, the flesh that meanwhile stank into corruption; and yet Lazarus rose as flesh, with the soul indeed, but a soul uncorrupted, which no one had bound with linen bands, no one had laid in the tomb, no one had yet perceived to stink, no one had seen sown for four days. The whole condition, the whole end of Lazarus, the flesh of all men experiences today as well; but the soul of none. The one, then, in which the apostle’s pen appears, the one of which it is agreed he speaks, will be both the animal body when it is sown and the spiritual body when it is raised. For, that you may understand it so, he still holds out his hand, likewise going back over, on the authority of the same Scripture, the fact that the first man Adam was made “into a living soul.” If Adam is the first man, and the flesh is the man before the soul, then without doubt it is the flesh that was made into a soul. And being made into a soul when it was a body, it was surely made an animal body. What would they have it called but what it became through the soul, what it was not before the soul, what it will not be after the soul, except when it rises? For when it has received the soul again, it becomes once more an animal body, so that it may become spiritual. For nothing rises except what was. So the ground on which it suits the flesh to be called an animal body is the very ground on which it in no way suits the soul. For the flesh was a body before it was an animal body; it was given a soul, and afterwards was made an animal body. But the soul, even if it is a body, yet because it is not itself an ensouled body but rather an ensouling one, cannot be called an animal body, nor become what it makes. For it makes something else animal by coming to it; but, not coming to something else, how will it make itself animal? As, then, the flesh was first an animal body on receiving the soul, so afterwards it will be spiritual on putting on the spirit. The apostle, setting out this order in Adam and in Christ as well, rightly distinguishes it, so that in the heads of the distinction itself … But when he calls Christ the last Adam, recognize from this that he laboured with all the strength of his teaching for the resurrection of the flesh, not of the soul. For if the first man Adam was flesh, not soul, being the one who was afterwards made into a living soul, then the last Adam, Christ, is Adam because he is man, and man because he is flesh, not because he is soul. And so he adds: “Not first what is spiritual, but what is animal; afterwards what is spiritual,” according to each Adam. Does he not seem to you to distinguish the animal body and the spiritual body in the same flesh, whose distinction he has laid down beforehand in each Adam, that is, in each man? For in what substance are Christ and Adam matched with each other? In the flesh, clearly. In the soul too, admittedly; but it is by the name of flesh that each of them is a man, for the flesh was man first. From that substance they could also admit an order, so that one was reckoned the first man, the other the last, that is, Adam. Things of different kinds, however, cannot be arranged in an order, at least as regards substance; as regards place or time or condition, perhaps they can. But here they are called first and last with regard to the substance of the flesh, just as again the first man is “from the earth” and the second “from heaven”; for although he is from heaven according to the spirit, yet he is man according to the flesh. Therefore, since the order in each Adam fits the flesh, not the soul, their distinction likewise will settle the distinction of the flesh beforehand, so that it was said of the flesh: “Not first what is spiritual, but what is animal; afterwards what is spiritual.” And so the same flesh must be understood above as both what is sown, the animal body, and what rises, the spiritual body, because the first Adam was made into a soul, the last Adam into a spirit. It is all about man, all about the flesh, since it is about man. What then shall we say? Does not the flesh even now have the spirit, by faith? So that we must ask how it is said to be sown an animal body. Clearly the flesh receives the spirit here too, but as an earnest; whereas of the soul it has not an earnest but the fullness. Therefore it was also named an animal body, from the name of the greater substance, in the state in which it is sown, since through the fullness of the spirit it is to be spiritual besides, in the state in which it is raised. What wonder if it is called rather after what it is filled with than after what it is sprinkled with?

So a great many questions are contrived out of the occasions offered by words, as also out of words that share more than one meaning. For since this too is set down in the apostle, “that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (the flesh, of course), they seize on the swallowing as meaning the destruction of the flesh; as if we were not said to swallow bile and grief, that is, to hide and cover them and keep them within ourselves. Indeed, since it is also written, “This mortal must put on immortality,” it is shown how what is mortal is swallowed up by life: when, clothed with immortality, it is hidden and covered and held within, not when it is consumed and lost. “Then death too,” you say, “will be kept safe, when it has been swallowed up.” Therefore distinguish words that share a form according to their senses, and you will understand soundly. For death is one thing and what is mortal is another. So death will be swallowed up in one way and what is mortal in another. Death does not admit immortality, but what is mortal does. Indeed it is written that this mortal must put on immortality. How then does it admit it? By being swallowed up by life. How is it swallowed up by life? By being received and brought back and enclosed within it. Death, on the other hand, is rightly swallowed up into destruction, because it too swallows for that end. “Death,” it says, “swallowed, prevailing,” and therefore “it has been swallowed up into strife. Where, O death, is your sting? Where, O death, is your strife?” So too life, the rival of death, will through strife swallow up into salvation what death through strife had once swallowed up into destruction.

Although, then, in proving that the flesh will rise we thereby prove that no other flesh will rise than the one under discussion, yet the individual questions and their grounds demand encounters of their own, even though they have already been cut down elsewhere. We will therefore explain more fully both the force and the meaning of change, which is what chiefly supplies the presumption that another flesh will rise, as if to be changed were to cease wholly and to perish out of one’s former state. But change must be distinguished from every argument for destruction. For change is one thing, destruction another. Yet they would not be different if the flesh were to be changed in such a way as to perish. And it will perish in being changed if it does not itself remain in the change, the same flesh that was produced in the resurrection. For just as it perishes if it does not rise, so too if it rises indeed but is withdrawn in the change, it perishes equally; for it will not be, just as if it had not risen. And how absurd, if it rises in order not to be, when it could have not risen and so not been, since it had already begun not to be! Things wholly different, change and destruction, will never be confused, differing as they surely do in their workings: the one destroys, the other changes. As, then, what has been destroyed has not been changed, so what has been changed has not been destroyed. For to have perished is wholly not to be what it was; to have been changed is to be otherwise. And while it is otherwise, it can be the very same; for it retains being, since it does not perish; it has undergone change, not destruction. And so a thing can both be changed and nonetheless be itself, just as the whole man in this age is indeed himself in substance, yet is changed in many ways: in bearing, in bodily bulk itself, in health, in condition, in rank, in age, in pursuits, business, craft, means, dwelling, laws, and manners. And yet he loses nothing of the man, nor does he become another so as to cease to be the same. Indeed he does not become another man, but something other. This form of change the divine records also attest. Moses’ hand is changed, and is indeed bloodless like a dead man’s, whitened, cold; but when its warmth is restored and its colour poured back, it is the same flesh and blood. Afterwards the same man’s face too is changed with a brightness that could not be gazed on; but it was Moses all the same, who could not be looked at. So Stephen too had already put on the loftiness of an angel, but it was not other knees that sank down under the stoning. The Lord also, in the seclusion of the mountain, had changed even his garments with light, but had kept features recognizable to Peter; where Moses and Elijah also, the one in the likeness of a flesh not yet received back, the other in the reality of a flesh not yet dead, showed that the same bearing of the body persists even in glory. Instructed by this example, Paul too says: “who will transfigure the body of our lowliness, conformed to the body of his glory.” But if you maintain that transfiguration and conversion mean the passing away of the substance of each thing, did Saul then, when he was “turned into another man,” depart from his own body? And does Satan himself, when he “is transfigured into an angel of light,” lose his own quality? I think not. So too in the event of the resurrection it will be possible to be changed, converted, and re-formed while the substance is kept safe.

For how absurd, and indeed how unjust, and both how unworthy of God, that one substance should do the work and another be paid the reward: that this flesh should be torn apart in martyrdom and another be crowned; and conversely, that this flesh should wallow in filth and another be condemned! Would it not be better to lead all faith away from the hope of resurrection once and for all than to trifle with the gravity and justice of God, raising Marcion in place of Valentinus? For it is not credible that the mind, the memory, and the conscience of the present man will be abolished by that changing garment of immortality and incorruption; otherwise the gain and fruit of the resurrection and the standing of the divine judgment on either side would be void. If I do not remember that I am the one who deserved it, how shall I give glory to God? How shall I sing him a new song, not knowing that I am the one who owes him thanks? And why is the change applied to the flesh alone, and not to the soul as well, which presided over the flesh in all things? What kind of thing is it that the same soul which ran through the whole course of life in this flesh, which in this flesh learned God and put on Christ and sowed the hope of salvation, should reap the harvest in some other flesh, I know not which? Truly that would be a most favoured flesh, to which life would come free of charge! But if the soul is not also to be changed, then there is no resurrection of the soul either; for the soul itself will not be believed to have risen either, if it is not another soul that has risen.

From this comes that familiar quibble of unbelief: “If,” they say, “the very same substance is recalled with its form, lineaments, and quality, then also with its other marks. So the blind and the lame and the paralysed, and however anyone was marked when he departed, so he will return.” What then? Even so, do you disdain to obtain so great a grace from God, whatever your state? For do you not even now, by admitting the salvation of the soul alone, assign the same salvation to men cut in half? What is it to believe in resurrection, if not to believe in it whole? For if the flesh is to be restored from dissolution, much more will it be recalled from injury. The greater things settle the lesser. Is not the cutting off or maiming of any limb the death of that limb? If universal death is cancelled by resurrection, what of partial death? If we are changed into glory, how much more into soundness? The impairment of bodies is an accident; wholeness is proper to them. In wholeness we are born; even if we are injured in the womb, it is already a human being who suffers: kind comes before mishap. As life is conferred by God, so it is conferred again. As we receive it, so we receive it back. We are restored to nature, not to injury; we come to life again as what we are born, not as what we are harmed. If God does not raise men whole, he does not raise the dead. For what dead man is whole, even if he dies whole? Who is sound who is lifeless? What body is unharmed when it has been slain, when it is cold, when it is pallid, when it is stiff, when it is a corpse? When is a man more disabled than when he is wholly so? When more paralysed than when he is motionless? So for a dead man to be raised is nothing else than for him to be made whole, lest he still be dead in that part in which he has not risen. God is able to remake what he made. This power and generosity of his he has already sufficiently pledged in Christ, indeed shown, as not only the raiser of the flesh but also its restorer to wholeness. And so the apostle too says: “and the dead will rise incorrupt.” How, unless whole, they who before were corrupted as much by the defects of ill health as by the decay of the grave? For above too, setting out both, that “this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality,” he did not repeat the statement but committed a difference to us. For by assigning immortality to the cancelling of death and incorruption to the blotting out of corruption, he fitted the one to resurrection and the other to restoration. And I think he also promised the Thessalonians the wholeness of the entire substance. So in the future the defects of bodies will not be feared either. Wholeness, whether preserved or restored, will be able to lose nothing; from the moment when even what it had lost is given back to it. But when you lay it down that the flesh will still undergo the same sufferings if it is said to rise the same, you rashly defend nature against its Lord and impiously assert law against grace, as though the Lord were not free both to change nature without law and to preserve it. For why do we read, “What is impossible with men is possible with God,” and, “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wisdom of the world”? I ask you: if you change the state of your slave by freedom, must the same flesh and soul, because they remain which were once exposed to whips and fetters and brands, therefore suffer the same things? I think not. On the contrary, he is honoured with the brightness of the white garment, the honour of the gold ring, and the name, tribe, and table of his patron. Allow God too this power, by the force of that change, to re-form the condition, not the nature, while sufferings are taken away and protections conferred. So the flesh will remain, even after the resurrection, passible insofar as it is itself, insofar as it is the same; yet impassible insofar as it has been manumitted by the Lord for this very purpose, that it may no longer be able to suffer.

“Everlasting joy,” says Isaiah, “upon their head.” Nothing is everlasting except after the resurrection. “Pain,” he says, “and sorrow and groaning have fled from them.” So too the angel to John: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes,” surely from the same eyes that once wept and that could still weep, if the divine kindness did not dry up every shower of tears. And again: “For God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more”; therefore corruption shall be no more either, put to flight by incorruption as death is by immortality. If pain and sorrow and groaning and death itself arise from injuries to both soul and flesh, how will they be taken away unless their causes cease, namely the injuries of flesh and soul? Where are misfortunes in the presence of the Lord? Where are hostile assaults in the presence of Christ? Where are demonic attacks in the presence of the Holy Spirit, when the devil himself with his angels has already been plunged in fire? Where is necessity, or what is called fortune or fate? What blow for the raised after pardon? What wrath for the reconciled after grace? What weakness after power? What frailty after salvation? That the garments and shoes of the children of Israel remained unworn and unwasted for those forty years; that in their very bodies a just measure of fitness and seemliness fixed the easy growth of nails and hair, lest even excess be reckoned corruption; that the Babylonian fires did not harm the three brothers’ turbans or trousers, though these were foreign to Jews; that Jonah, swallowed by the sea monster in whose belly shipwrecks were digested, was spat out unharmed three days later; that Enoch and Elijah today, not yet discharged by resurrection because they have not undergone death, but translated from the world and by this very fact already candidates for eternity, are learning the flesh’s exemption from every defect, every loss, every injury and insult: to what faith do these set their seal as witnesses, if not to that by which we must believe that they are proofs of the wholeness to come? For these things, on the apostle’s authority, were figures of us, and were written that we might believe the Lord to be mightier than every law of bodies, and all the more the preserver of the flesh, since he protected even its garments, even its shoes.

“But the coming age,” you say, “belongs to another arrangement, an eternal one; therefore the substance of this age, which is not eternal, cannot possess things so different.” Clearly so, if man were made for the future arrangement and not the arrangement for man. But the apostle, writing, “whether the world or life or death or things to come or things present, all are yours,” makes the same men heirs of things to come as well. Isaiah grants you nothing when he says, “All flesh is grass,” since elsewhere he also says, “And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” He distinguished outcomes, not substances. For who does not set the judgment of God in a double sentence, of salvation and of punishment? So “all flesh is grass” is the flesh destined for fire, and “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” is the flesh appointed to salvation. I know that I did not commit adulteries in one flesh and now strive after continence in another. If anyone carries around two sets of private parts, he may well cut away the grass of the unclean flesh and keep for himself only the flesh that is to see the salvation of God. But since the same prophet shows the nations now reckoned as dust and spittle, and now about to hope and believe in the name and in the arm of the Lord, are we mistaken about the nations too? Are some nations to believe and others reckoned as dust because of a difference of substance? But Christ also shone as the true light to the nations within the ocean and from this sky that lies over us (even the Valentinians learned to err here), nor will the believing nations have any other form than the unbelieving, that of flesh and soul. As, then, he distinguished the same nations not by kind but by lot, so also the flesh, which is one substance in those very nations: he separated it not by its material but by its reward.

But see how, to heap the controversy still higher against the flesh, and especially against the same flesh, they argue also from the functions of the members: either saying that these too must remain in their works and fruits, as belonging to the same bodily frame; or else, since it is agreed that the functions of the members will cease, they would erase the bodily frame as well, whose continuance is surely not to be believed without members, since the members are not to be believed without functions. “What use then,” they say, “will this cave of the mouth be, the station of the teeth, the slide of the gullet, the crossroads of the stomach, the whirlpool of the belly, the tangled length of the intestines, when there will be no place for eating and drinking? What use are members of this kind, which take in, work over, roll down, divide, digest, and void? What use the hands themselves and the feet and all the working limbs, when even the care of food will cease? What use the kidneys, privy to the seed, and the rest of the genitals of both sexes, the stalls of conception and the fountains of the breasts, when intercourse and offspring and nursing will depart? Lastly, what use the whole body, since the whole will surely be idle?” To this, then, we have already laid the foundation that the arrangements of the future and the present must not be set against each other, since a change will then intervene; and now we build on it that these functions of the members exist for the necessities of this life only until life itself is transferred from time into eternity, as the animal body into the spiritual, when “this mortal shall put on immortality and this corruptible incorruption.” And when life itself is then freed from necessities, the members too will be freed from their functions; yet they will not for that reason be unnecessary. For though they are freed from their functions, they are kept for judgment, “that each may receive through the body according to what he has done.” For the tribunal of God requires the man whole; but he cannot be whole without the members, of whose substances, not functions, he consists; unless perhaps you will also maintain that a ship is whole without keel, without prow, without stern, without the soundness of its whole framework. And yet we have often seen a ship broken up by a storm or decayed with rot, with all its members brought back and repaired, the same ship, even glorying in the title of its restoration. Are we tormented about the craft, the will, and the right of God? Now if a rich and generous master, bestowing it out of affection or for his own glory, should wish to carry out only the restoration of the ship, and no more, will you therefore deny that its former framework is necessary to him, as being idle from then on, since only the preservation of the ship, without its being worked, is what he intends? It is enough, then, to learn only this: when the Lord destined the flesh by destining man for salvation, does he will it to be the same again? And you ought not to lay it down, from the future idleness of the members, that it cannot be again. For a thing may exist again and nonetheless be idle. Indeed it cannot even be said to be idle if it does not exist. But if it exists, it may also not be idle; for with God nothing will be idle.

But, O man, you received a mouth for devouring and drinking: why not rather for speaking, that you may differ from the other animals? Why not rather for proclaiming God, that you may be foremost even among men? In fact Adam uttered names for the animals before he plucked from the tree; he also prophesied before he ate. But you received teeth for gnawing the meat market: why not rather for crowning the whole opening and gape of your mouth? Why not for regulating the strokes of the tongue, for marking the articulations of the voice by the tongue striking against them? In fact, listen to the toothless and look at them, and you will be looking for the dignity of the mouth and the instrument of the teeth. The lower parts are pierced in man and woman, no doubt so that lusts may flow out: why not rather that fluids passing down may be strained off? Women also have a place within where seed is gathered: or is it where the burdens of blood depart, which the more sluggish sex is not able to throw off? For these things too must be said, since they bark mockingly at the functions of the members (which ones they like, of whom they like, and in what way they like) deliberately to cover the resurrection with shame, not reflecting that the very causes of necessity will first be idle then: hunger for food, thirst for drink, generation for intercourse, livelihood for work. For once death is taken away, neither the props of food for the defence of life nor the provision for the race will be a burden to the members. Besides, even today the intestines and private parts may be idle. Moses and Elijah fasted for forty days and were fed by God alone; for even then this was being consecrated: “Man shall not live by bread but by the word of God.” See the outlines of the power to come. We too, as far as we can, excuse the mouth from food; we also withdraw sex from union. How many voluntary eunuchs are there? How many virgins married to Christ? How many of both sexes are barren, built with fruitless genitals? For if even here the functions and the profits of the members may already be idle, with a temporary idleness, as in a temporal arrangement, and yet the man is no less whole, then, the man being whole, and indeed more whole then, as in an eternal arrangement, all the more shall we not desire what we are accustomed already here not to desire.

But the Lord’s pronouncement puts an end to this dispute: “They will be,” he says, “like angels.” If not by marrying, because not by dying either, then surely not by falling under any similar necessity of bodily condition either; for angels too were once like men, eating and drinking and holding out their feet for washing; for they had put on a human outward appearance while their own substance within was kept safe. If, then, angels, made like men, took on a fleshly way of life in the same substance of spirit, why should not men too, made like angels, undergo a spiritual arrangement in the same substance of flesh, no more subject to the customary usages of the flesh under the angelic garment than the angels then were to the customary usages of the spirit under the human one? Nor will men therefore fail to remain in the flesh because they are not also in the usages of the flesh, since the angels did not therefore fail to remain in spirit because they were not also in the usages of the spirit. In fact he did not say, “They will be angels,” lest he deny that they are men, but “like angels,” so as to keep them men. He did not take away the substance to which he attributed the likeness.

The flesh, then, will rise: all of it, the very same, and whole. Wherever it is, it is in deposit with God, through the most faithful trustee between God and men, Jesus Christ, who will restore God to man and man to God, the spirit to the flesh and the flesh to the spirit. He has already joined both in covenant within himself; he has matched the bride to the bridegroom and the bridegroom to the bride. For even if someone contends that the soul is the bride, the flesh will follow the soul at least by way of dowry. The soul will not be a prostitute, to be received naked by the bridegroom. She has her equipment, she has her adornment, she has her own servant, the flesh; it will accompany her like a foster-sister. But the flesh is the bride, which in Christ Jesus also received the Spirit as bridegroom through blood. What you think is its destruction, know to be its withdrawal. It is not the soul alone that is set aside; the flesh too has its retreats for a time, in waters, in fires, in birds, in beasts. When it seems to be dissolved into these, it is as though it were poured over into vessels. If even the vessels themselves fail, when it has flowed out of them too into its own mother, the earth, it is reabsorbed, as by a roundabout way, so that from her Adam may again be presented, to hear from the Lord: “Behold, Adam has become like one of us,” truly then possessed of the evil he has escaped and of the good he has laid hold of. Why, O soul, do you envy the flesh? There is no one so near to you, no one you should love more after the Lord; no one more your brother than the one who is born together with you even in God. You ought rather to have pleaded for its resurrection; it was through you, if at all, that it sinned. But no wonder if you hate it, since you have also rejected its author, and are accustomed either to deny it or to change it in Christ, and so to corrupt the very Word of God, who became flesh, either by the pen or by interpretation, bringing in besides the secrets of apocryphal writings, fables of blasphemy. But almighty God, against these contrivances of unbelief and perversity, pouring out by his most provident grace “in the last days of his Spirit upon all flesh, upon his servants and handmaids,” has both put life into the struggling faith in the resurrection of the flesh and cleansed the ancient instruments of every obscurity and ambiguity by the clear light of words and meanings. For since there had to be heresies, so that those who are approved might be made manifest, and these could not venture without some occasions from the Scriptures, the ancient instruments therefore seem to have supplied them with certain materials, though materials that can be refuted by the same writings. But since it was not fitting that the Holy Spirit should hold back from overflowing with utterances of such a kind as would scatter no seeds for the cunning of heretics, but would rather tear up their old turf, he has therefore now dispelled all past ambiguities, and the parables they like so much, by the open and clear preaching of the whole sacrament through the New Prophecy that flows abundantly from the Paraclete. If you drink from its springs, you will be able to thirst for no other teaching; no heat of questions will burn you; by drinking in the resurrection of the flesh as well, through and through, you will be refreshed.