Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
City of God (Penguin Classics) (175 page)
18.
Christ, the perfect man; and the Church, his Body and his fulfilment
To proceed: St Paul speaks about the attainment of perfect manhood by all, and we should notice the whole context of this saying.
The one who descended is the very same as the one who rose up above all the heavens to fill all things. And his gift to some was that they should be apostles; others were to be prophets; others, evangelists; others, pastors and teachers; so that the saints should together make a complete unity in the activity of service, for the building up of the Body of Christ; until we all arrive at unity in the faith and in our knowledge of God’s Son, and reach the perfection of manhood, the stature of the perfect maturity of Christ. Then we shall no longer be children, or tossed to and fro and carried off our feet by every passing wind of doctrine, as the playthings of human cleverness in the devising of deception. Instead, we shall practise the truth in love and thus we shall grow up in Christ in every way; and Christ is the head, through whom the whole Body is fitted and joined together, with strength
supplied through every joint, while each separate part performs its orderly function. Thus the body develops towards the building up of its complete structure, in love.
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Here we see what is meant by the ‘perfection of manhood’, the union of head and body, which consists of all the members, and they will be completed in due time. Meanwhile the members are being added to this body every day, while the Church is being built up. And this Church is addressed in the words, ‘You are the Body of Christ, each of you being a separate part’; and in another place we read, ‘on behalf of his Body, that is, the Church’;
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and again, ‘We are many; but we are one loaf, one Body.’
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And about the building up of this Body, St Paul says in the present passage, ‘to make a complete unity in the activity of service, for the building up of the Body of Chris’,
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then adding the words which concern us at the moment, ‘until we all arrive at unity in the faith and in our knowledge of God’s Son, and reach the perfection of manhood, the stature of the perfect maturity of Christ’ and so on. Then he explains how we are to understand ‘stature’ here and the Body to which it refers, when he says, ‘Thus we shall grow up in Christ in every way; and Christ is the head through whom the whole Body is fitted and joined together, with strength supplied through every joint, while each separate part performs its orderly function.’
Thus there is a measure, an orderly function, of each separate part, and, correspondingly, a measure, or stature, of the whole body, which consists of all its parts. And this is the ‘stature of fulfilment’ in the phrase, ‘the stature of the perfect maturity of Christ’. This fulfilment, or maturity, is mentioned also in the place where St Paul says of the Church, ‘And he (God) has made him (Christ) the supreme head of the Church, which is his Body, the fulfilment of him who reaches complete fulfilment in the whole creation.’
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If, however, this passage is to be referred to the form of the resurrected body, what is there to prevent our supposing that the mention of ‘man’ implies ‘woman’ also,
vir
being used here for
homo
(‘human being’)? There is a similar use in the verse, ‘Blessed is the man (
vir
) who fears the Lord’,
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which obviously includes the women who fear him.
19.
The perfection of the resurrected body
Now what reply am I to make about the hair and the nails? If we take it that the promise, ‘not a hair will perish’, means that there will be no deformity in the body, it follows at once that any constituents which would produce deformity if uncontrolled will go to make up the whole bulk of the body, but they will not be in places where they would disfigure the proportions of the parts. There is an analogy in pottery. If clay is used to make a pot, and then the material is brought back to the original lump to make a completely fresh start, it is not essential that the piece of clay which formed the handle should make the handle in the second attempt; and the same with the bottom of the pot, and so on. All that is required is that the whole pot should be re-made out of the whole lump, that is, that all the clay should go back into the whole pot, with nothing left over.
Now the hair has been cut, and the nails have been pared, again and again. And if the restoration of what has been cut would disfigure the body, then it will not be restored. But that does not mean that anything will ‘perish’ from the person at the resurrection. Such constituents will be returned to the same body, to take their place in its structure, undergoing a change of substance to make them suitable for the parts in which they are used. And yet, in fact, when the Lord said, ‘Not one hair of your head will perish’,
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he can be understood to refer to the number of hairs, not to length of the hair. This more plausible interpretation is supported by the statement elsewhere that ‘all the hairs of your head are numbered.’
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What I mean by saying this is not that I think that anything will perish which is present in any body as belonging to the essential nature of that body; but that anything in that nature that is deformed – and, of course, the sole purpose of the deformity is to give yet another proof of the penal condition of mortals in this life – anything of this kind will be restored in such a way as to remove the deformity while preserving the substance intact. An artist who has for some reason produced an ugly statue can recast it and make it beautiful, removing the ugliness without any loss of the material substance. And if there was any displeasing excess in some parts of the first figure, anything out of proportion to the rest, he does not have to cut it off or throw away any part of the whole; he can simply moisten the whole of the material and remix it, without producing any ugliness or diminishing the quantity of material. If a human artist can do this, what are we to think of
the Almighty Artist? Can he not remove all the deformities of the human body, not only the familiar ones but also the rare and the monstrous, such as are in keeping with the miseries of this life, but are utterly incongruous with the future felicity of the saints? Can he not get rid of them, just as the unpleasant products of the waste matter of the body, ugly though natural, are removed without any loss of substance in the body?
This means that fat people and thin people have no need to fear that at the resurrection they will be the kind of people they would not have chosen to be in this life, if they had had the chance. For all physical beauty depends on a harmony between the parts of the body, combined with an attractive complexion. When there is not this harmony and proportion the appearance is displeasing, either because of distortion, or because of some excess or deficiency. Thus there will be no ugliness, which is caused by such disharmony, when distortions have been corrected and unpleasing deficiencies supplied from resources known to the Creator, and unprepossessing excesses reduced without loss of essential substance. Moreover, imagine the beauty of the complexion, when ‘the righteous will shine like the sun in their Father’s kingdom’.
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In the Body of Christ, after his resurrection, this splendour, we must believe, was hidden from the eyes of the disciples; it was not lacking in that body, but the weak eyes of human beings could not have borne to look upon it, and at that time it was essential that his disciples should direct their gaze on him, so that they might recognize him. That was the purpose of his showing the scars of his wounds for them to touch, and of his taking food and drink; it was not that he needed nourishment but that he had the power to take it. Now it sometimes happens that something which is present is still not seen by people who see other things that are there, as that lustre of Christ’s Body was there, as I said, but unseen by those who saw other details of the scene. This condition is called in Greek
aorâsia
(‘sightlessness’) which in the book of Genesis is represented in our translation by
caecitas
, (‘blindness’) since the translators could not find an adequate Latin equivalent. This is what happened to the men of Sodom, when they were looking for the door of the righteous Lot, and failed to find it.
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If their condition had been true blindness, preventing them from seeing anything, they would have looked for guides to lead them back home, not for a door to give them entrance to a house.
Now we feel such extraordinary affection for the blessed martyrs that
in the kingdom of God we want to see on their bodies the scars of the wounds which they suffered for Christ’s name; and see them perhaps we shall. For in those wounds there will be no deformity, but only dignity, and the beauty of their valour will shine out, a beauty
in
the body and yet not
of
the body. And if the martyrs have had any limbs cut off, any parts removed, they will not lack those parts at the resurrection; for they have been told that ‘not a hair of your head will perish.’ But if it will be right that in that new age the marks of glorious wounds should remain in those immortal bodies, for all to see, then scars of the blows or the cuts will also be visible in places where limbs were hacked off, although the parts have not been lost, but restored. And so the defects which have thus been caused in the body will no longer be there, in that new life; and yet, to be sure, those proofs of valour are not to be accounted defects, or to be called by that name.
20.
The restoration of the whole body at the resurrection, no matter how its parts have been dispersed
As for bodies that have been consumed by wild beasts, or by fire, or those parts that have disintegrated into dust and ashes, or those parts that have dissolved into moisture, or have evaporated into the air, it is unthinkable that the Creator should lack the power to revive them all and restore them to life. It is inconceivable that any nook or cranny of the natural world, though it may hold those bodies concealed from our detection, could elude the notice or evade the power of the Creator of all things. Cicero, the great pagan author, attempted to define God, as well as he could; and this is what he says: ‘A kind of Mind, free and unconstrained, remote from any materiality and mortality, conscious of all things, and moving all things, endowed with everlasting movement.’
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This is what Cicero found in the teaching of the great philosophers. And so, to speak in their terms, what can be hidden from one who knows everything? What can escape irrevocably from the power of one who moves the universe?
And now we must offer a solution to the problem that seems the most difficult of all, the question to whom a body will be restored at the resurrection when it has become part of the body of another living man. Suppose that someone under compulsion of the last straits of starvation eats human corpses. This terrible thing has happened, as we know from the testimony of ancient history and even from the
unhappy experiences of our own times.
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Now surely no one is going to maintain, with any show of truth or reason, that the whole of a body so eaten passes straight through the intestinal tract without any change or conversion into flesh of the eater? The former emaciation of the eater and its subsequent disappearance are sufficient indication that physical deficiencies are supplied by such nutriment. But what I have just said by way of premise should be enough to untie this knot.
Any flesh that starvation stripped from the hungry man evidently exhaled into the air, and the Creator, as I said, has power to bring it back from the air. And so that other flesh will be restored to the man in whom it first began to be human flesh. We must reckon the other man to have borrowed it; and like borrowed money, it has to be given back to the place from which it was taken. And this man’s flesh, which starvation had stripped from him, will be restored to him by the one who can bring back even what has been exhaled into the air. Indeed, even if that flesh had completely disappeared, and none of its material had remained in any cranny of the natural world, the Almighty would reproduce it from what source he chose. But seeing that the Truth stated that ‘not a hair of your head will perish’, it would be absurd of us to imagine that so much flesh could disappear completely when it has been eaten away and destroyed by starvation, whereas a man’s hair cannot so disappear.
When all these arguments have been examined and weighed to the best of our ability, we reach this conclusion: that in the resurrection of the body for eternal life the body will have the size and dimensions which it had attained, or was to attain, at maturity, according to the design implanted in the body of each person, with its appropriate beauty preserved also in the proportions of all the parts. If, in order to preserve this beauty, something has been taken from a part displeasing by excessive size, and if this is dispersed throughout the whole body, in such a way that this material is not lost, while the congruence of the parts is kept, then there is no absurdity in believing that there may be some addition to the stature of the body as a result of this, provided that the material is so distributed in all parts as to preserve the beauty of the whole, which would be spoilt if it were concentrated disproportionately in one place.
On the other hand, if it is maintained that every person is to rise again with the precise stature he had when he departed this life, there is no occasion for violent opposition to such an opinion, provided only
that all ugliness must disappear, all weakness, all sluggishness, all corruption, and anything else that is inconsistent with that kingdom in which the sons of the resurrection and of the promise
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will be equal to the angels of God, in felicity if not in body or in age.