CHAP. LVI. — THE PROCEDURE OF THE LAST JUDGMENT, AND ITS AWARDS, ONLY POSSIBLE ON THE IDENTITY OF THE RISEN BODY WITH OUR PRESENT FLESH.
For how absurd, and in truth how unjust, and in both respects how unworthy of God, for one substance to do the work, and another to reap the reward: that this flesh of ours should be torn by martyrdom, and another wear the crown; or, on the other hand, that this flesh of ours should wallow in uncleanness, and an- other receive the condemnation! Is it not better to renounce all faith at once in the hope of the resurrection, ^ than to trifle with the wisdom and justice of God?^ Better that Marcion should rise again than Valentinus. For it cannot be believed that the mind, or the memory, or the conscience of existing man is abolished by putting on that change of rai- ment which immortality and incorruption sup- plies; for in that case all the gain and fruit of the resurrection, and the permanent effect « of God's judgment both on soul and body," would certainly fall to the ground. If I re- member not that it is I who have served Him, how shall I ascribe glory to God? How sing 7 With Marcion. 8\Vith Valentinus. 9 Statu, 'o Utrobique.
to Him " the new song, " " if I am ignorant that it is I who owe Him thanks? But why is exception taken only against the change of the flesh, and not of the soul also, which in all things is superior to the flesh? How happens it, that the self-same soul which in our present flesh has gone through all life's course, which has learnt the knowl- edge of God, and put on Christ, and sown the hope of salvation in this flesh, must reap its harvest in another flesh of which we know nothing? Verily that must be a most highly favoured flesh, which shall have the enjoyment of life at so gratuitous a rate! But if the soul is not to be changed also, then there is no resurrection of the soul; nor will it be believed to have itself risen, unless it has risen some different thing.
CHAP. LVII. — OUR BODIES, HOWEVER MUTILAT- ED BEFORE OR AFTER DEATH, SHALL RECOVER THEIR PERFECT INTEGRITY IN THE RESURREC- TION. ILLUSTRATION OF THE ENFRANCHISED SLAVE.
We now come to the most usual cavil of unbelief. If, they say, it be actually the self- same substance which is recalled to life with all its form, and lineaments, and quality, then why not with all its other characteristics.^ Then the blind, and the lame, and the palsied, and whoever else may have passed away with any conspicuous mark, will return again with the same. What now is the fact, although you in the greatness of your conceit" thus disdain to accept from God so vast a grace? Does it not happen that, when you now admit the salvation of only the soul, you ascribe it to men at the cost of half their nature? What is the good of believing in the resurrection, unless your faith embraces the whole of it? If the flesh is to be repaired after its dissolu- tion, much more will it be restored after some violent injury. Greater cases prescribe rules for lesser ones. Is not the amputation or the crushing of a limb the death of that limb? Now, if the death of the whole person is re- scinded by its resurrection, what must we say of the death of a part of him? If we are changed for glory, how much more for integ- rity!" Any loss sustained by our bodies is an accident to them, but their entirety is their natural property. In this condition we are born. Even if we become injured in the womb, this is loss suffered by what is already a human being. Natural condition '+ is prior to injury. As life is bestowed by God, so is '2 Qualiscunque.
'3 Or the recovery of our entire person.
'4 Genus.
ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.
[chap, lviii.
it restored by Him. As we are when we re- ceive it, so are we when we recover it. To nature, not to injury, are we restored; to our state by birth, not to our condition by acci- dent, do we rise again. If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead. For what dead man is entire, although he dies entire? Who is without hurt, that is without life? What body is uninjured, when it is dead, when it is cold, when it is ghastly, when it is stiff, when it is a corpse? AVhen is a man more infirm, than when he is entirely infirm? When more palsied, than when quite motion- less? Thus, for a dead man to be raised again, amounts to nothing short of his being restored to his entire condition, — lest he, forsooth, be still dead in that part in which he has not risen again. God is quite able to re- make what He once made. This power and this unstinted grace of His He has already sufficiently guaranteed in Christ; and has dis- played Himself to us (in Him) not only as the restorer of the flesh, but as the repairer of its breaches. And so the apostle says: "The" dead shall be raised incorruptible " (or unim- paired).' But how so, unless they become entire, who have wasted away either in the loss of their health, or in the long decrepitude of the grave? For when he propounds the two clauses, that " this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality,"- he does not repeat the same statement, but sets forth a distinction. For, by assigning immortality to the repeating of death, and incorruption to the repairing of the wasted body, he has fitted one to the raising and the other to the retrieval of the body. I suppose, moreover, that he promises to the Thessalonians the integrity of the whole sub- stance of man. 3 So that for the great future tiiere need be no fear of blemished or defec- tive bodies. Integrity, whether the result of jneservation or restoration, will be able to lose nothing more, after the time that it has given back to it whatever it had lost. Now, when you contend that the flesh will still have to undergo the same sufferings, if the same flesh be said to have to rise again, you rashly set up nature against her Lord, and impiously contrast her law against His grace; as if it were not permitted the Lord God both to change nature, and to preserve her, without subjection to a law. How is it, then, that we read, " With men these things are impossible, l)Ut with God all things are possible;"" and again, " God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise?" ^ Let me ask you, if you were to manumit your slave (seeing that the same flesh and soul will remain to him, which once were exposed to the whip, and the fetter, and the stripes), will it therefore be fit for him to undergo the same old sufferings? I trow not. He is instead thereof honoured with the grace of the white robe, and the favour of the gold ring, and the name and tribe as well as table of his patron. Give, then, the same prerogative to God, by virtue of such a change, of reforming our con- dition, not our nature, by taking away from it all sufferings, and surrounding it with safe- guards of protection. Thus our flesh shall remain even after the resurrection — so far indeed susceptible of suffering, as it is the flesh, and the same flesh too; but at the same time impassible, inasmuch as it has been lib- erated by the Lord for the very end and pur- pose of being no longer capable of enduring suffering.
CHAP. LVIII. FROM THIS PERFECTION OF OUR RESTORED BODIES WILL FLOW THE CONSCIOUS- NESS OF UNDISTURBED JOY AND PEACE.
"Everlasting joy," says Isaiah, "shall be upon their heads."* Well, there is nothing eternal until after the resurrection. "And sorrow and sighing," continues he, "shall flee away."^ The angel echoes the same to John: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;"* from the same eyes in- deed which had formerly wept, and which might weep again, if the loving-kindness of God did not dry up every fountain of tears. And again: "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death," 5 and therefore no more corruption, it being chased away by incorruption, even as death is by immortality. If sorrow, and mourning, and sighing, and death itself, as- sail us from the afflictions both of soul and body, how shall they be removed, except by the cessation of their causes, that is to say, the afflictions of flesh and soul? where will you find adversities in the presence of Gcd? where, incursions of an enemy in the bosom of Christ? where, attacks of the devil in the face of the Holy Spirit? — now that the devil himself and his angels are " cast into the lake of fire." '° Where now is necessity, and what they call fortune or fate? What plague awaits the redeemed from death, after their eternal pardon? What wrath is there for the reconciled, after grace? What weakness, after their CHAP. LX.]
ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.
renewed strength? What risk and danger, after their salvation? That the raiment and shoes of the children of Israel remained un- worn and fresh for the space of forty years;' that in their very persons the exact point- of convenience and propriety checked the rank growth of their nails and hair, so that any ex- cess herein might not be attributed to inde- cency; that the fires of Babylon injured not either the mitres or the trousers of the three brethren, however foreign such dress might be to the Jew«;^ that Jonah was swallowed by the monster of the deep, in whose belly whole ships were devoured, and after three days was vomited out again safe and sound;" that Enoch and Elias, who even now, w^ithout experiencing a resurrrection (because they have not even encountered death), are learn- ing to the full what it is for the flesh to be ex- empted from all humilation, and all loss, and all injury, and all disgrace — translated as they have been from this world, and from this very cause already candidates for everlasting life;^ — to what faith do these notable facts bear witness, if not to that which ought to inspire in us the belief that they are proofs and docu- ments of our own future integrity atid perfect r esur recti 071 "i For, to borrow the apostle's phrase, these were "figures of ourselves;"^ and they are written that we may believe both that the Lord is more powerful than all natural laws about the body, and that He shows Him- self the preserver of the flesh the more em- phatically, in that He has preserved for it its very clothes and shoes.
CHAP. LIX. OUR FLESH IN THE RESURRECTION CAPABLE, WITHOUT LOSING ITS ESSENTIAL IDENTITY, OF BEARING THE CHANGED CON- DITIONS OF ETERNAL LIFE, OR OF DEATH ETERNAL.
But, you object, the world to come bears the character of a different dispensation, even an eternal one; and therefore, you maintain, that the non-eternal substance of this life is incapable of possessing a state of such differ- ent features. This would be true enough, if man were made for the future dispensation, and not the dispensation for man. The apos- tle, however, in his epistle says, "Whether it be the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours: "^ and he here constitutes us heirs even of the future world. Isaiah gives you no help when he says, "All flesh is grass;"* and in an- ' Deut. xxix. 5. = Justitia.
Other passage, " All flesh shall see the salva- tion of God." ' It is the issues of men, not their substances, which he distinguishes. But who does not hold that the judgment of God consists in the twofold sentence, of salvation and of punishment? Therefore it is that " all flesh is grass," which is destined to the fire; and "all flesh shall see the salvation of God," which is ordained to eternal life. For my- self, I am quite sure that it is in no other flesh than my own that 1 have committed adultery, nor in any other flesh am I striv- ing after continence. If there be any one who bears about in his person two mstru- ments of lasciviousness, he has it in his power, to be sure, to mow down'" "the grass" of the unclean flesh, and to reserve for himself only that which shall see the sal- vation of God. But when the same prophet represents to us even nations sometimes esti- mated as "the small dust of the balance," " and as "less than nothing, and vanity,"" and sometimes as about to hope and "trust in the name " '^ and arm of the Lord, are we at all misled respecting the Gentile nations by the diversity of statement? Are some of them to turn believers, and are others accounted dust, from any difference of nature? Nay, rather Christ has shone as the true light on the nations within the ocean's limits, and from the heaven which is over us all.'* Why, it is even on this earth that the Valentinians have gone to school for their errors; and there will be no difference of condition, as respects their body and soul, between the nations which be- lieve and those which do not believe. Pre- cisely, then, as He has put a distinction of state, not of nature, amongst the same nations, so also has He discriminated their flesh, which is one and the same substance in those nations, not according to their material structure, but according to the recompense of their merit.
CHAP. LX. ALL THE CHARACTERISTICS OF OUR BODIES SEX, VARIOUS LIMBS, ETC. WILL BE RETAINED, WHATEVER CHANGE OF FUNCTIONS THESE MAY HAVE, OF WHICH POINT, HOWEVER, WE ARE NO JUDGES. ANALOGY OF THE RE- PAIRED SHIP.
But behold how presistently they still ac- cumulate their cavils against the flesh, especi- ally against its identity, deriving their argu- "^ Demetere.
'2 Ver. 17. The word is sMttle, which ihe LXX. uses in the fifteenth verse for the " dust ' of the Hebrew Bible.
13 Isa. xlii. 4, Sept.; quoted from the LXX. by Christ in Matt, xii. 21, and by St. Paul in Rom. xv. 12.
'4.Vn allusion to some conceits of the Valentinians, who put men of truest nature and fit for Chriu's grace outside of the ocean- bounded earth, etc.
ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.
[CHAr. LXl menu even from the functions of our limbs; on the one hand saying that these ought to continue permanently pursuing their labours and enjoyments, as appendages to the same corporeal frame; and on the other hand con- tending that, inasmuch as the functions of the limbs shall one day come to an end, the bodily frame itself must be destroyed, its permanence without its limbs being deemed to be as in- conceivable, as that of the limbs themselves without their functions! What, they ask, will then be the use of the cavity of our mouth, and its rows of teeth, and the passage of the throat, and the branch-way of the stomach, and the gulf of the belly, and the entangled tissue of the bowels, when there shall no longer be room for eating and drinking? What more will there be for these members to take in, masticate, swallow, secrete, digest, eject? Of what avail will be our very hands, and feet, and all our labouring limbs, when even all care about food shall cease? What purpose can be served by loins, conscious of seminal secretions, and all the other organs of generation, in the two sexes, and the labora- tories of embryos, and the fountains of the breast, when concubinage, and pregnancy, and infant nurture shall cease? In short, what will be the use of the entire body, when the entire body shall become useless? In reply to all this, we have then already settled the principle that the dispensation of the future state ought not to be compared with that of the present world, and that in the interval be- tween them a change will take place; and we now add the remark, that these functions of our bodily limbs will continue to supply the needs of this life up to the moment when life itself shall pass away from time to eternity, as the natural body gives place to the spiritual, until "this mortal puts on immortality, and this corruptible puts on incorruption:"' so that when life shall itself become freed from all wants, our limbs shall then be freed also from their services, and therefore will be no longer wanted. Still, although liberated from their offices, they will be yet preserved for judgment, "that every one may receive the things done in his body. " = For the judg- ment-seat of God requires that man be kept entire. Entire, however, he cannot be without his limbs, of the substance of which, not the functions, he consists; unless, forsooth, you will be bold enough to maintain that a ship is perfect without her keel, or her bow, or her stern, and without the solidity of her entire frame. And yet how often have we seen the same ship, after being shattered with the storm and broken by decay, with all her timbers repaired and restored, gallantly riding on the wave in all the beauty of a renewed fabric! Do we then disquiet ourselves with doubt about God's skill, and will, and rights? Be- sides, if a wealthy shipowner, who does not grudge money merely for his amusement or show, thoroughly repairs his ship, and then chooses that she should make no further voy- ages, will you contend that the old form and finish is still not necessary to the vessel, al- though she is no longer meant for actual ser- vice, when the mere safety of a ship requires such completeness irrespective of service? The sole question, therefore, which is enough for us to consider here, is whether the Lord, when He ordains salvation for man, intends it for his flesh; whether it is His will that the selfsame flesh shall be renewed. If so, it will be improper for you to rule, from the inutility of its limbs in the future state, that the flesh will be incapable of renovation. For a thing may be renewed, and yet be u.se\ess/rc>?u /lavi'n nothing to do; but it cannot be said to be use- less if it has no existence. If, indeed, it has existence, it will be quite possible for it also not to be useless; // may possibly have some- thing to do; for in the presence of God there will be no idleness.
CHAP. LXI. THE DETAILS OF OUR BODILY SEX, AND OF THE FUNCTIONS OF OUR VARIOUS MEMBERS. APOLOGY FOR THE NECESSITY WHICH HERESY IMPOSES OF HUNTING UP ALL ITS UNBLUSHING CAVILS.
Now you have received your mouth, O man, for the purpose of devouring your food and imbibing your drink: why not, however, for the higher purpose of uttering speech, so as to distinguish yourself from all other animals? Why not rather for preaching the gospel of God, that so you may become even His priest and advocate before men? Adam indeed gave their several names to the animals, before he plucked the fruit of the tree; before he ate, he prophesied. Then, again, you received your teeth for the consumption of your meal: why not rather for wreathing your mouth with suitable defence on every opening thereof, small or wide? Why not, too, for moderating the impulses of your tongue, and guarding your articulate speech from failure and vio- lence? Let me tell you, (if you do not know), that there are toothless persons in the world. Look at them, and ask whether even a cage of teeth be not an honour to the mouth. There are apertures in the lower regions of man and woman, by means of which they gratify no doubt their animal passions; but why are they not rather regarded as outlets for the cleanly CilM' CilM' I. XIII.]
ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH, discharge of natural fluids? Women, more- over, have within them receptacles where human seed may collect; but are they not de- signed for the secretion of those sanguineous issues, which their tardier and weaker sex is inadequate to disperse? For even details like these require to be mentioned, seeing that heretics single out what parts of our bodies may suit them, handle them without delicacy, and, as th*eir whim suggests, pour torrents of scorn and contempt upon the natural functions of our members, for the purpose of upsetting the resurrection, and making us blush over their cavils; not reflecting that before the func- tions cease, the very causes of them will have passed away. There will be no more meat, because no more hunger; no more drink, be- cause no more thirst; no more concubinage, because no more child-bearing; no more eat- ing and drinking, because no more labour and toil. Death, too, will cease; so there will be no more need of the nutriment of food for the defence of life, nor will mothers' limbs any longer have to be laden for the replenishment of our race. But even in the present life there may be cessations of their office for our stom- achs and our generative organs. For forty days Moses ' and Elias ^ fasted, and lived upon God alone. For even so early was the principle consecrated: " Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. " ^ See here faint outlines of our future strength! We even, as we may be able, excuse our mouths from food, and withdraw our sexes from union. How many voluntary eunuchs are there! How many virgins espoused to Christ! How many, both of men and women, whom nature has made sterile, with a structure which cannot procreate! Now, if even here on earth both the functions and the pleasures of our members may be suspended, with an intermission which, like the dispensation itself, can only be a tem- porary one, and yet man's safety is nevertheless unimpaired, how much more, when his salva- tion is secure, and especially in an eternal dis- pensation, shall we not cease to desire those things, for which, even here below, we are not unaccustomed to check our longings!
CHAP. LXII. — OUR DESTINED LIKENESS TO THE ANGELS IN THE GLORIOUS LIFE OF THE RE- SURRECTION.
To this discussion, however, our Lord's declaration puts an effectual end: " They shall be," says He, " equal unto the angels. " '• 2 I Kings xix. 8.
3H As by not marrying, because of not dying, so, of course, by not having to yield to any like necessity of our bodily state; even as the angels, too, sometimes were "equal unto" men, by eating and drinking, and submitting their feet to the washing of the bath — having clothed themselves in human guise, without the loss of their own intrinsic nature. If there- fore angels, when they became as men, sub- mitted in their own unaltered substance of spirit to be treated as if they were flesh, why shall not men in like manner, when they be- come "equal unto the angels," undergo in their unchanged substance of flesh the treat- ment of spiritual beings, no more exposed to the usual solicitations of the flesh in their an- gelic garb, than were the angels once to those of the spirit when encompassed in human form? We shall not therefore cease to continue in the flesh, because we cease to be importuned by the usual wants of the flesh; just as the angels ceased not therefore to remain in their spiritual substance, because of the suspension of their spiritual incidents. Lastly, Christ said not, " They shall be angels," in order not to repeal their existence as men; but He said, "They shall be equal unto the angels, ^ that He might preserve their humanity unimpaired.
When He ascribed an angelic likeness to the flesh, '^ He took not from it its proper sub- stance.