City of God (Penguin Classics) (174 page)
Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
12.
A reply to the calumnies with which unbelievers pour scorn on the Christian belief in resurrection
It is the habit of the pagans to subject our belief in a bodily resurrection to a scrupulous examination and to ridicule it with such questions as, ‘What about abortions? Will they rise again?’ and (seeing that the Lord says, ‘Make no mistake, not one hair on your head will perish’
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) they ask, ‘Will all bodies be the same height and size? Or will there be different shapes and sizes? And if they are all the same, what about abortive births? If they rise again, how will they have the bulk they never had in this world? If abortions do not rise, because they were not born, but slipped, then the same question is transferred to little children, ‘How can they attain the size which they have not reached when they the at that early age?’ Now we are not going to say that those infants will not rise again; for they are capable not only of being born, but also of being reborn. The unbelievers then ask, ‘What
will be the exact height and size of the resurrected body?’ And if all men are destined to be as tall and as big as the largest and tallest men that ever were on earth, then, they ask, not only in respect of infants, but about the majority of mankind, ‘How are they to have added to them what they lacked here, if each one receives precisely what he possessed here?’ On the other hand if we take the words of the Apostle, that we shall all attain ‘to the stature of the full maturity of Christ’,
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and his other statement about being ‘predestined to be shaped into the likeness of his Son’;
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and if we are to take this to mean that all human beings who will be in his kingdom will have bodies of the same size and shape as Christ’s body, then, say the pagans, ‘many people will need a reduction in size and height of body; and then what happens to that promise that “not a hair will perish”, if such a great amount of the actual body is to be removed?’ And indeed, in this matter of hair, one might ask whether all that the barber has cut off is to be restored! And if so, the ugliness of the sight would be enough to horrify anyone! And what of the fingernails? It seems to follow of necessity that all that has been removed in manicure must be replaced! And then what happens to the body’s comeliness, which ought surely to be greater, in that immortal condition, than it could be in the state of decay? And yet, if all this is not restored, it follows that it will perish; and then, they say, what about that assurance that ‘not a hair will perish’? They produce similar arguments about fatness and thinness. If all are to be equal then obviously there will not be some thin ones and some fat ones. Then some will need an addition, others a subtraction; and in that case there will not be a restoration of the former body as it was. Sometimes it will receive what was not there before; sometimes it will lose what it formerly possessed.
Our opponents then pass on to the actual decay and dissolution of bodies. Some in part are turned into dust, and in part evaporate into the air; some people are consumed by wild beasts, others by fire; others again perish by shipwreck or meet some other watery end, and their flesh decays and dissolves. These considerations influence these thinkers in no small degree, and they cannot believe that all such bodies can be collected and restored to their integrity. They then make play with deformities and defects, either accidental or congenital; they talk with a mixture of horror and derision about monstrous births, asking what kind of resurrection is in store for such unpleasantness. If we reply that nothing of this kind will reappear in the resurrected body, then flatter themselves that they will rebut our answer by quoting the
marks of the wounds, since we give it out that Christ rose from the dead with those marks on his body. But among all those posers the most difficult question they confront us with is this: ‘When someone’s body has been eaten by another man, who turns to cannibalism on the compulsion of hunger, into whose body will it return?’ For it has been converted into the flesh of the man who has been nourished by such food, and it has supplied the losses which the emaciation of hunger had produced. Is it then to be returned to the man whose body it had been originally? Or to the man whose flesh it became? The reason for their inquiry is to throw scorn on the belief in the resurrection; and what they themselves offer to the human soul is either the promise of an alternation of genuine unhappiness and false felicity – the prospect offered by Plato – or, with Porphyry, the assurance of an eventual end to misery, with no return to that state, after passing through repeated changes of body;
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but this end does not come with the possession of an immortal body, but by the escape from any kind of body.
13.
The problem of abortive births
To all these points, apparently contradictory to my position, which the opposing party has deployed against me, I shall reply, if God in his mercy supports my efforts. As for abortions, which have been alive in the mother’s womb but have died there, I cannot bring myself either to affirm or deny that they will share in the resurrection. And yet, if they are not excluded from the number of the dead, I cannot see how they can be excluded from the resurrection of the dead. For either it is not all the dead that will rise again, and there will be some souls eternally without bodies, although they had human bodies, even if only in the mother’s womb, or else all human souls will receive again the bodies which they had, when those bodies rise again, wherever the bodies they left lived and died. And in the latter case I do not see how I can say that all those who died in the mother’s womb have no share in the resurrection of the dead. But whichever of these views be held, what I am now going to say about newly born infants is to be taken as applying also to abortions, if they take part in the resurrection.
14.
The question whether infants at the resurrection will have the body they would have had at maturity
As for little children, I can only say that they will not rise again
with the tiny bodies they had when they died. By a marvellous and instantaneous act of God they will gain that maturity they would have attained by the slow lapse of time. For we may be sure that in the Lord’s statement that ‘not a hair of your head will perish’ he promises that what was already there would not be lacking; but that does not deny that what was lacking will be supplied. Now the infant at death lacked its perfect bodily development; even a perfect infant, to be sure, has not the perfection of full bodily development – it has not attained the limit of its potential stature.
All human beings possess that limit of perfection, in that they are conceived and born with it. But they have it in potentiality, not in its material realization, in the same way as all parts of the body are already latent in the seed, although a number of them are still lacking even at birth, the teeth, for instance, and other such details. There is thus, it seems, a kind of pattern already imposed potentially on the material substance of the individual, set out, one might say, like the pattern on a loom; and thus what does not yet exist, or rather what is there but hidden, will come into being, or rather will appear, in the course of time. And so in respect of this pattern or potentiality an infant can be said to be short or tall in that he is destined to be the one or the other.
In view of this pattern we evidently have no need to fear any loss of body at the resurrection. Even if there were a destined equality of all bodies, so that all would attain the stature of giants, to ensure that those who were tallest in this life should not have their stature diminished (for such a loss would contravene the promise of Christ that ‘not a hair will perish’); even so, as we are well aware, it could not be beyond the resources of the Creator, who made everything from nothing, to make the additions that he, the Supreme Artist, knew to be required.
15.
Will all resurrected bodies attain the stature of the Lord’s body
?
However, Christ himself undoubtedly rose again with the same bodily stature as he had when he died; and we are forbidden to suggest that when the time comes for the general resurrection his body will attain a size that it did not have when he appeared to the disciples in the form that was so familiar to them; the idea being that he should equal the height of the tallest of mankind. Now if we insist that all the larger people must have their bodies reduced to the same size as Christ’s
body, then a great deal will ‘perish’ from the bodies of many, although Christ has promised that ‘not one hair will perish’. It remains, therefore, that each person will be given the stature which he had in his prime, even though he was an old man when he died, or, if he died before maturity, the stature he would have attained. As for the Apostle’s statement about ‘stature of the full maturity of Christ’,
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this is either to be taken in a different sense, namely that Christ’s ‘full stature’ is reached when, with Christ as the head, all the members of his body come to maturity, represented by the peoples who accept the Christian faith; or else, if the words refer to the bodily resurrection, we must take them to mean that the bodies of the dead will rise neither younger nor older than Christ. They will be of the same age, the same prime of life, which Christ, as we know, had reached. For the most learned authorities of this world define the age of human maturity as being about thirty years; they say that after that period of life a man begins to go downhill towards middle age and senility. And that is why, on this interpretation, the Apostle speaks not of ‘the full bodily stature’ but ‘the stature of the full maturity’ of Christ.
16.
The meaning of ‘shaped into the likeness of God’s Son
’
Now St Paul talks of being ‘predestined to be shaped into the likeness of God’s son’.
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This can be taken as referring to the inner man. The Apostle says elsewhere, ‘Don’t model yourselves on the world’s pattern. You have a new outlook; remodel yourselves accordingly.’
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When we remodel ourselves to avoid being modelled on the world’s pattern, then we are shaped into the likeness of God’s son. We can also take it in this way: that as Christ was made like us in the condition of mortality, so we will be made like him in the condition of immortality. This obviously has reference to the resurrection of the body. But if these words are meant to instruct us also about the form of the resurrected body, then this likeness to Christ is to be understood (like the ‘stature’) of the age, not the size of that body.
Thus all human beings will rise again with a body of the same size as they had, or would have had, in the prime of life. And yet, to be sure, it would be no disadvantage even if the form of that body were that of an infant or an old man; for in the resurrection no weakness will remain, either of mind or body. And so, if anyone maintains that every person will rise again with the same kind of body that he had
when he departed this life, we need not go to great lengths to contravert this position.
17.
Will women retain their sex in the resurrected body
?
Because of these sayings, ‘Until we reach the perfection of manhood, the stature of the full maturity of Christ’,
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and ‘Being shaped into the likeness of God’s Son’,
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some people suppose that women will not keep their sex at the resurrection; but, they say, they will all rise again as men, since God made man out of clay, and woman out of man. For my part, I feel that theirs is the more sensible opinion who have no doubt that there will be both sexes in the resurrection. For in that life there will be no sexual lust, which is the cause of shame. For the first human beings, before their sin, ‘were naked, the man and the woman, and they were not ashamed’.
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Thus while all defects will be removed from those bodies, their essential nature will be preserved. Now a woman’s sex is not a defect; it is natural. And in the resurrection it will be free of the necessity of intercourse and childbirth. However, the female organs will not subserve their former use; they will be part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder – there will be no lust in that life but will arouse the praises of God for his wisdom and compassion, in that he not only created out of nothing but freed from corruption that which he had created.
Now in creating woman at the outset of the human race, by taking a rib from the side of the sleeping man, the Creator must have intended, by this act, a prophecy of Christ and his Church. The sleep of that man clearly stood for the death of Christ; and Christ’s side, as he hung lifeless on the cross, was pierced by a lance. And from the wound there flowed blood and water,
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which we recognize as the sacraments by which the Church is built up. This, in fact, is the precise word used in Scripture of woman’s creation; it says not that God ‘formed’, or ‘fashioned’ a woman but that ‘he built it (the rib) up into a woman’.
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Hence the Apostle also speaks of the ‘building up’ of the Body of Christ, which is the Church.
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The woman, then, is the creation of God, just as is the man; but her creation out of man emphasizes the idea of the unity between them; and in the manner of that creation there is, as I have said, a foreshadowing of Christ and his Church.
Thus he who established the two sexes will restore them both. And indeed, Jesus was questioned by the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection; and they asked to which of seven brothers a wife would belong, to whom they had all been married (since each of them wished to produce descendants for his dead predecessor, according to the Law’s instructions); and Jesus replied, ‘You are on the wrong track, because you do not understand the Scriptures, or the power of God.’ And though he might have said, ‘The woman you are asking about will not be a woman; she will be a man’, he did not say this. What he said was, ‘For in the resurrected life men and women do not marry; they are like the angels of God in heaven.’
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That is, they are like them in immortality and felicity, not in body; nor are they like them in their resurrection, since the angels, being unable to the need no resurrection. Thus Christ denies the existence of marriage in the resurrected life; he does not deny the existence of women in heaven. If he had foreknown that there would be no female sex in that life he could quickly and easily have disposed of the Sadducees’ question by saying as much, whereas in fact he expressly stated that there would be both sexes, when he said, ‘they are not married’, referring to woman, and ‘they do not marry wives’, referring to men. It follows that there will be in that life those who in this life normally marry, and those who are taken in marriage; but they will not do so in heaven.