On the Resurrection of the Dead 21–25

If good deeds are honored, the body will clearly be wronged: it shared with the soul the labors of what was striven for, but would not share in the honor for the good deeds; and while the soul often obtains pardon for some faults because of the body's want and need, the body itself would be shut out from any share in the good deeds for which it bore the labors of life. And if faults are judged, justice is not done to the soul if it alone pays the penalty for the wrongs it committed when the body troubled it and drew it toward its own desires and movements: sometimes by snatching and stealth, sometimes by a more violent pull, and at other times by the soul's going along with it out of kindness and care for the body's welfare. How is it not unjust for the soul to be judged by itself for things for which, by its own nature, it has no desire, movement, or impulse at all, such as lust, violence, greed, injustice, and the wrongs that go with them? Most such evils arise because human beings do not master the passions that trouble them, and they are troubled by the body's want and need and by their concern and care for the body. For these are the reason for all acquiring, and, before that, for all using; and for marriage too, and for all the actions of life, in and about which we see what is wrong and what is not. Where, then, is the justice in judging the soul alone for things in which the body is the first to be affected and draws the soul into fellow-feeling and partnership in the actions it needs? Desires and pleasures, and fears and griefs as well, in which everything immoderate is liable to judgment, have their movement from the body; how could the sins arising from them, and the punishments for these sins, fall on the soul alone, which by itself neither needs any such thing, nor desires it, nor fears or suffers anything like what a human being naturally suffers? Even if we suppose that the passions belong not to the body alone but to the human being, and rightly say so, since his life is one life made of both, we will surely not say that they belong to the soul, when we consider its own nature purely. If the soul needs no food whatever, it would never desire things it does not need at all in order to exist, nor would it be drawn toward anything it is naturally unfit to use; nor would it grieve at the lack of money or possessions, since none of these has anything to do with it. And if it is above corruption, it fears nothing whatever as destructive of itself: it does not fear famine, disease, maiming, disfigurement, fire, or sword, since it can suffer nothing harmful or painful from these, as neither bodies nor bodily powers touch it at all. If it is absurd to attach the passions to souls as though they were theirs alone, it is utterly unjust and unworthy of God's judgment to lay the sins arising from those passions, and the punishments for them, on souls alone.

Besides what has been said, how is it not absurd that virtue and vice cannot even be conceived of in the soul by itself (for we know that the virtues are the virtues of a human being, just as the opposing vice belongs not to a soul separated from the body and existing by itself), and yet that the honor or punishment for them should fall on the soul alone? How could one even conceive of courage or endurance in a soul alone, which has no fear of death, of wounds, maiming, loss, or outrage, or of the pains and suffering these bring? How could one conceive of self-control and temperance, when no desire draws the soul toward food or intercourse or the other pleasures and delights, and nothing else troubles it from within or provokes it from without? How prudence, when nothing lies before it to be done or not done, to be chosen or avoided, or rather when there is no movement at all in it and no natural impulse toward anything to be done? And how could justice toward one another, or toward any other being of the same or a different kind, be natural to souls? They have neither the means nor the way nor the manner of giving what is equal according to merit or proportion (apart from the honor due to God), nor any impulse or movement toward using what is their own or refraining from what belongs to others. For using natural things, or refraining from them, is seen in beings naturally made to use them; but the soul needs nothing and is not naturally fitted to use anything or any one thing; and so the so-called “each part doing its own work” cannot be found in a soul in that condition.

And this is the most unreasonable thing of all: that the laws God enacted are given to human beings, yet the penalty for what was done lawfully or unlawfully should be turned on souls alone. If the one who received the laws would justly also receive the penalty for breaking them, and it was the human being who received the laws, not the soul by itself, then it is the human being who must pay the penalty for sins, not the soul by itself. For God did not command souls to abstain from things that have nothing to do with them, such as adultery, murder, theft, robbery, dishonoring one's parents, and in general every desire that leads to injustice and harm to one's neighbors. “Honor your father and your mother” does not fit souls alone, since such names do not belong to them; souls do not beget souls and so claim the title of father or mother; human beings beget human beings. Nor could “You shall not commit adultery” ever properly be said or understood of souls, since there is no distinction of male and female in them, nor any aptitude for intercourse or desire for it. Where there is no such desire, intercourse is impossible; where there is no intercourse at all, there is no lawful intercourse either, that is, marriage; and where there is no lawful intercourse, there can be no unlawful desire for or intercourse with another man's wife, that is, adultery. Nor is the prohibition of theft or of coveting more than one's share fitting for souls. For they do not need the things that people, because of natural want or need, commonly steal or rob: gold or silver, an animal, or anything else suited to food, shelter, or use; for everything that the needy desire as useful is useless to an immortal nature. But let a fuller treatment of these things be left to those who wish to examine each point more seriously, or to contend more ambitiously with opponents. For us, what has just been said, and what confirms the resurrection in agreement with it, is enough, and it would not be timely to dwell longer on the same points. Our aim has not been to leave out nothing that could be said, but to show in summary to those gathered here what they ought to think about the resurrection, and to fit the arguments for it to the capacity of those present.

Having examined the points proposed to some extent, it remains to consider the argument from the end. It already appears in what has been said, and needs only enough attention and addition that we may not seem to leave unmentioned anything we said briefly, and so harm our subject or the division we made at the beginning. For these reasons, and for what will be added to them, it will be enough simply to point out that everything, whether constituted by nature or made by art, must have its own proper end. The common notion of all people teaches us this, and the things before our eyes bear witness to it. Do we not see that farmers have one end before them and physicians another, and again that the plants that grow from the earth have one end, and the animals nourished on it and born in a natural sequence another? If this is evident, and a natural end must follow natural or artificial powers and the activities that come from them, then the end of human beings too, since their nature is distinctive, must be set apart from what is common to the others. For it is not right to suppose the same end for beings that have no share in rational judgment and for those who act according to the innate law and reason, living an intelligent life and practicing justice. Freedom from pain, then, would not be their proper end, since this would belong also to beings wholly without sensation; nor the enjoyment of what nourishes or delights the body, and an abundance of pleasures; otherwise the life of cattle would have to rank first, and the life of virtue would be incomplete. That, I think, is the proper end of cattle and grazing beasts, not of human beings, who have an immortal soul and rational judgment.

Nor is the end the blessedness of the soul separated from the body. For we have not been considering the life or end of either of the parts of which a human being consists, but of the being composed of both. Such is every human being who has received this life, and his life must have some proper end. If the end belongs to the composite, and this end cannot be found while people are still alive in this life, for the reasons already given many times, nor when the soul is separated, since such a human being no longer exists once the body has been dissolved or even completely scattered, even if the soul remains by itself, then it is absolutely necessary that the end of human beings should appear in another constitution of the composite, of the same living being. And since this follows necessarily, there must by all means be a resurrection of bodies that have died or even been entirely dissolved, and the same human beings must be constituted again. For the law of nature sets the end not in a general way, nor for any human beings at random, but for those very people who lived the former life; and it is impossible for the same human beings to be constituted again unless the same bodies are given back to the same souls. And it is impossible for the same body to receive the same soul in any other way; it is possible only by the resurrection. When that takes place, the end suited to human nature follows as well. One would not be wrong to say that the end of an intelligent life and of rational judgment is to live forever, undistracted, with those things to which natural reason is chiefly and primarily fitted, and to rejoice unceasingly in the contemplation of the One who is and of his decrees; even if most human beings, being too passionately and violently attached to the things of this world, go on missing it. For the great number of those who fall short of the end proper to them does not cancel the lot common to all, since each is examined individually, and to each is measured out the honor or punishment for a life lived well or badly.