City of God 22.19–22.23

Chapter 19. That all bodily defects contrary to human beauty in this life will not exist in the resurrection, where, the natural substance remaining, quality and quantity will combine in one beauty.

What am I now to answer about hair and nails? Once it is understood that nothing of the body will perish in such a way that nothing in the body is deformed, it is understood at the same time that whatever would have made a deforming excess will be added to the mass as a whole, not to the places where the form of the members would be disfigured. As if a vessel were made of clay, and was reduced again to the same clay and made again, whole from whole, it would not be necessary that the part of the clay that had been in the handle should return to the handle, or that what had made the bottom should make the bottom again, as long as the whole returned into the whole, that is, all that clay returned into the whole vessel with no part of it lost. So if hair cut so often, or nails pared, would return to their places in a deforming way, they will not return; and yet they will not perish for anyone who rises, because they will be turned into the same flesh, to hold whatever place in the body, the proportion of the parts being preserved, by the changeableness of matter. Although what the Lord says, “Not a hair of your head shall perish,” could much more fittingly be understood as said of the number of hairs, not their length; hence he also says elsewhere, “The hairs of your head are numbered.”

Nor would I say this because I think that anything that was naturally present will perish from any body, but that whatever was born deformed (for no other reason, surely, than that from this too it might be shown how penal this condition of mortals is) will be restored in such a way that the deformity perishes while the whole substance is preserved. For if a human craftsman can melt down a statue which for some reason he had made deformed, and make it most beautiful, so that nothing of its substance perishes but only the deformity, and, if anything in that former figure stuck out unbecomingly and did not agree with the proportion of the parts, he can, without cutting it off and separating it from the whole he had made it from, sprinkle and mix it through the whole so as neither to make ugliness nor lessen the quantity, what are we to think of the almighty craftsman? Will he not be able to take away and do away with every deformity of human bodies, not only the usual ones but also the rare and monstrous, which suit this miserable life but are abhorrent to that future happiness of the saints, so that whatever excrescences of bodily substance they produce, natural though unbecoming, are removed without any lessening of it?

And so the thin and the fat need not fear that there too they will be such as, if they could, they would not have wished to be even here. For all beauty of body is a proportion of the parts together with a certain sweetness of colour. Where there is no proportion of the parts, something offends either because it is crooked, or too little, or too much. So there will be no deformity caused by lack of proportion of the parts, where what is crooked will be corrected, and what is less than is fitting will be supplied from where the Creator knows, and what is more than is fitting will be taken away while the whole of the matter is preserved. And how great will the sweetness of colour be where “the righteous shall shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father”! This brightness in Christ's body when he rose must be believed to have been hidden from the eyes of the disciples rather than to have been lacking. For human and weak sight could not have borne it, when he had to be looked at by his own in such a way that he could be recognized. To this purpose also belonged his showing the scars of his wounds to those who touched him, and even taking food and drink, not from need of nourishment, but by the power by which he could do this too.

When something is not seen, though it is present, by those by whom other things equally present are seen, as we say that brightness was present but not seen by those by whom other things were seen, it is called in Greek aorasia, which our translators, not being able to say it in Latin, rendered in the book of Genesis as “blindness.” For the Sodomites suffered this when they looked for the righteous man's door and could not find it. If it had been the blindness by which nothing can be seen, they would have looked not for a door by which to enter but for guides to lead them away from there.

But somehow we are so moved by love of the blessed martyrs that we would wish to see in that kingdom, on their bodies, the scars of the wounds they endured for the name of Christ; and perhaps we shall see them. For there will be no deformity in them, but dignity, and a certain beauty will shine, of virtue, not of the body, though in the body. Yet it does not follow that if any members were cut off and taken away from martyrs, they will be without those members in the resurrection of the dead, to whom it was said, “Not a hair of your head shall perish.” But if it is fitting in that new age that the marks of glorious wounds be seen in that immortal flesh, then where members were struck or cut so as to be cut off, there the scars will appear, but with the same members restored, not lost. So although all the defects that befell the body will not exist then, the marks of virtue are not to be reckoned or called defects.

Chapter 20. That in the resurrection of the dead the nature of bodies, however scattered, will be recalled whole from wherever it is.

Far be it from us to think that the omnipotence of the Creator cannot, in order to raise bodies and restore them to life, recall all that beasts or fire have consumed, or that has fallen into dust or ashes, or been dissolved into liquid, or breathed out into the air. Far be it from us to think that any recess or hiding place of nature receives anything withdrawn from our senses in such a way that it is hidden from the knowledge or escapes the power of the Creator of all things. Cicero, so great an authority of theirs, wishing to define God as best he could, says, “He is a certain mind, unfettered and free, separated from all mortal combination, perceiving and moving all things, and itself endowed with everlasting motion.” This he found in the teachings of great philosophers. To speak, then, in their own terms, how can anything either be hidden from him who perceives all things, or escape irrecoverably from him who moves all things?

Hence that question too is now to be solved which seems more difficult than the rest, where it is asked, when the flesh of a dead man becomes also the flesh of another who is living, to which of them it is to be restored in the resurrection. For if someone, worn out and driven by hunger, eats the corpses of men, an evil that has happened at times, as both ancient history testifies and the unhappy experiences of our own times have taught, will anyone contend with truthful reasoning that it was all digested and passed through the lower passages, with nothing of it changed and turned into his flesh, when the very thinness that was and is no longer shows well enough what losses were made up by that food? I have already put forward a little earlier some things that ought to serve to untie this knot too. For whatever flesh hunger has wasted has certainly been breathed out into the air, from which, we said, almighty God can recall what has escaped. That flesh, then, will be restored to the man in whom it first began to be human flesh. For it must be reckoned as borrowed, as it were, by that other man; and like a debt it must be paid back to him from whom it was taken. And his own flesh, which hunger had wasted, will be restored to the second man by him who can recall even what has been breathed away. And even if it had perished in every way, and none of its matter remained in any hiding place of nature, the Almighty would restore it from wherever he willed. But because of the saying of the Truth, “Not a hair of your head shall perish,” it is absurd to think that, when a man's hair cannot perish, so much flesh eaten and consumed by hunger could perish.

When all this has been considered and handled according to our small capacity, the conclusion is this: in the resurrection of the flesh to eternity the size of bodies will have the measurements that the principle of youth, implanted in each body, had, whether it was yet to be completed or already complete, with fitting beauty preserved also in the proportions of all the members. And if, to preserve this beauty, something is taken from some unbecoming largeness set in some part, to be spread over the whole, so that it does not perish and the proportion of the parts is kept everywhere, it is not absurd to believe that something may thereby be added even to the stature of the body, when what would certainly be unbecoming if it were excessive in one part is distributed among all the parts to keep their beauty. Or if it is contended that each will rise in the stature of body in which he died, we need not resist it combatively; only let there be absent all deformity, all weakness, all slowness and all corruption, and anything else that does not befit that kingdom in which the children of the resurrection and of the promise will be equal to the angels of God, if not in body, not in age, certainly in happiness.

Chapter 21. On the newness of the spiritual body into which the flesh of the saints will be changed.

So whatever has perished from living bodies, or after death from corpses, will be restored, and together with what remained in the tombs it will rise, changed from the oldness of the natural body into the newness of the spiritual body, clothed with incorruption and immortality. But even if by some grave accident or by the savagery of enemies it is wholly ground to dust and scattered into the air or the waters, so that, as far as possible, it is allowed to be nowhere at all, it can in no way be withdrawn from the omnipotence of the Creator; but not a hair of its head shall perish. The spiritual flesh, then, will be subject to the spirit, but it will still be flesh, not spirit; just as the carnal spirit itself was subject to the flesh, but was still spirit, not flesh. Of this we have experience in the deformity of our punishment. For those to whom the apostle says, “I could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal,” were carnal not according to the flesh but certainly according to the spirit; and a man is called spiritual in this life in such a way that he is still carnal in body and sees another law in his members warring against the law of his mind; but he will be spiritual in body too when the same flesh has risen in such a way that what is written comes to pass: “It is sown a natural body, it will rise a spiritual body.”

But what the grace of the spiritual body is, and how great, I fear that every word spoken about it may be rash, since it has not yet come into experience. Yet because the joy of our hope is not to be kept silent, for the praise of God, and it was said from the inmost marrow of burning holy love, “Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house,” let us, with his help, infer as we can, from the gifts he bestows on good and bad in this most troubled life, how great that thing is which, not having experienced it, we certainly cannot worthily express. For I pass over the time when he made man upright; I pass over that happy life of the two spouses in the fruitfulness of paradise, since it was so short that it did not even reach the awareness of those born afterwards. In this life which we know, in which we still are, whose temptations, or rather which, as a whole, is one temptation, we do not cease to endure as long as we are in it, however much we advance, who can set out what signs of the goodness of God there are toward the human race?

Chapter 22. On the miseries and evils to which the human race is subject by the deserving of the first transgression, and from which no one is freed except by the grace of Christ.

For as to the first origin, that the whole progeny of mortals was condemned, this life itself, if it is to be called life, filled with so many and such great evils, bears witness. For what else is shown by a certain dreadful depth of ignorance, from which all error arises, which receives all the sons of Adam into a kind of dark bosom, so that a man cannot be freed from it without toil, pain, and fear? What else is shown by the very love of so many vain and harmful things, and from it gnawing cares, disturbances, griefs, fears, mad joys, discords, lawsuits, wars, plots, angers, enmities, deceit, flattery, fraud, theft, robbery, treachery, pride, ambition, envy, murders, parricides, cruelty, savagery, wickedness, luxury, insolence, shamelessness, unchastity, acts of sexual immorality, adulteries, incests, and so many acts of sexual immorality and uncleanness against nature by both sexes, which it is shameful even to name, sacrileges, heresies, blasphemies, perjuries, oppressions of the innocent, slanders, circumventions, collusions, false witness, unjust judgments, violence, robberies, and whatever evils of this kind do not come to mind and yet do not depart from this life of men? These, indeed, belong to wicked men, yet they come from that root of error and perverse love with which every son of Adam is born. For who does not know with how great an ignorance of the truth, already plain in infants, and with how great an abundance of vain desire, which begins to appear in boys, a man comes into this life, so that, if he were left to live as he likes and do whatever he likes, he would come to all or many of these crimes and outrages which I have mentioned and which I could not mention?

But because the divine government does not wholly desert the condemned, and God does not shut up his mercies in his anger, prohibition and instruction keep watch in the very senses of the human race against these darknesses with which we are born, and are set against these impulses, though they themselves too are full of toil and pain. For what is the purpose of the many kinds of fears that are used to restrain the follies of little children? What of tutors, masters, canes, straps, rods, and that discipline by which, as holy Scripture says, the sides of a beloved son are to be beaten, lest he grow up untamed and, once hardened, can scarcely be tamed or perhaps not at all? What is done by all these punishments except that ignorance may be overcome and depraved desire bridled, the evils with which we come into this world? For why is it that we remember with toil and forget without toil; learn with toil and are ignorant without toil; are energetic with toil and idle without toil? Does it not appear from this to what, as by its own weight, our flawed nature is inclined and prone, and how much help it needs to be freed from it? Sloth, sluggishness, laziness, negligence are surely vices by which toil is avoided, since toil itself, even useful toil, is a punishment.

But besides the punishments of childhood, without which what their elders want cannot be learned, elders who scarcely want anything useful, by how many and how great punishments is the human race harassed, punishments that belong not to the malice and wickedness of the unjust but to the common condition and misery, who can set them out in any speech? Who can grasp them in any thought? How great is the fear, how great the calamity, from bereavements and mourning, from losses and condemnations, from the deceptions and lies of men, from false suspicions, from all the violent crimes and wickedness of others! For from these often come plundering and captivity, chains and prisons, exile and tortures, the cutting off of limbs and the loss of the senses, the violation of the body to satisfy the obscene lust of the violator, and many other horrible things. What of the countless accidents feared for the body from without: heat and cold, storms, rains, floods, lightning, thunder, hail, thunderbolts, earthquakes and chasms, being crushed by falling buildings; from the stumbling or fright or even the viciousness of beasts of burden; from so many poisons of plants, waters, airs, animals; from the merely troublesome or even deadly bites of wild beasts; from the madness that comes from a rabid dog, so that even a creature gentle and friendly to its master is sometimes feared more violently and bitterly than lions and serpents, and makes a man it happens to infect, by its pestilent contagion, so rabid that he is dreaded by parents, wife, and children worse than any beast! What evils sailors suffer! And those who travel by land! Who walks anywhere without being exposed to unexpected accidents? A man returning home from the forum on his sound feet fell, broke his foot, and from that injury ended this life. What seems safer than a man sitting? Eli the priest fell from the chair on which he sat and died. How many and how great accidents from sky and earth, or from destructive animals, do farmers, or rather all men, fear for the crops of their fields! Yet they are usually secure about their grain once it is at last harvested and stored. But for some, as we know, an unexpected river swept away and carried off an excellent harvest of grain from the granaries, while the men fled.

Against the thousand-formed assaults of demons, who trusts in his own innocence? For, so that no one should trust in it, they sometimes so harass even baptized little children, than whom certainly nothing is more innocent, that in them especially, God permitting it, the lamentable calamity of this life and the desirable happiness of the other is shown. Further, from the body itself arise so many evils of diseases that not all are contained even in the books of physicians; and in many, indeed almost all of them, the very aids and medicines are tortures, so that men are rescued from the destruction of punishments by a help that is itself punishment. Has not burning thirst driven men to drink even human urine, even their own? Has not hunger driven them to be unable to keep from human flesh, and to devour not men found dead but men killed by them for this purpose, and not strangers only, but mothers their own children, with an incredible cruelty which ravenous hunger produced? Finally, sleep itself, which has properly received the name of rest, who could explain in words how often it is unquiet with the visions of dreams, and with what great terrors, though of false things, it troubles the wretched soul and senses, presenting and in a way expressing them so that we cannot distinguish them from real things? By such false visions even the waking are more miserably agitated in certain diseases and from poisons; though malignant demons sometimes deceive even healthy men with such visions, with manifold varieties of deception, so that, even if they could not lead them over to their side by these means, they still delude their senses by the mere desire of persuading them of falsehood in any way at all.

From this so miserable life, a kind of hell, nothing frees us but the grace of the Saviour Christ, our God and Lord (for this is the very name Jesus; it means Saviour), above all so that after this life we may not receive a more miserable and everlasting one, which is not life but death. For in this life, though there are great consolations of healing through holy things and holy people, still these benefits are not always given to those who ask for them, lest religion be sought for their sake, when it ought rather to be sought for the sake of the other life, where there will be no evils at all; and grace helps the better people in these evils so that they may be endured with a heart the stronger the more faithful it is. For this purpose, the learned of this world say, philosophy too is of use, the true philosophy which, as Tullius says, the gods have given to a few; and no greater gift, he says, has been given to men by them, or could be given. So far even those against whom we argue have been compelled in some fashion to acknowledge divine grace in having, not any philosophy whatever, but true philosophy. Further, if the only help of true philosophy against the miseries of this life has been given by divine gift to a few, it is clear enough from this too that the human race has been condemned to pay the penalties of miseries. And as, by their own admission, there is no greater divine gift than this, so it must be believed that it is given by no god except by him than whom even those who worship many gods say none is greater.

Chapter 23. On the things that belong specially to the toil of the righteous, besides the evils common to good and bad.

Besides these evils of this life, common to good and bad, the righteous also have in it certain toils of their own, in which they fight against vices and are involved in the temptations and dangers of such battles. For sometimes more violently, sometimes more slackly, yet without ceasing, the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, so that we do not do what we would, by consuming all evil desire; but we subdue it to ourselves, as far as we can with divine help, by not consenting to it, keeping watch with continual vigilance: lest an opinion that looks like the truth deceive us, lest crafty speech mislead us, lest the darkness of some error spread over us, lest what is good be believed evil or what is evil good, lest fear call us back from what should be done, lest desire hurl us into what should not be done, lest the sun go down upon our anger, lest enmities provoke us to render evil for evil, lest unseemly or immoderate sadness swallow us up, lest an ungrateful mind bring on sluggishness in bestowing kindnesses, lest a good conscience be worn out by slanderous rumours, lest our own rash suspicion of another deceive us, lest another's false suspicion of us break us, lest sin reign in our mortal body so that we obey its desires, lest our members be offered to sin as weapons of iniquity, lest the eye follow lust, lest the desire for revenge overcome us, lest sight or thought linger on what gives evil delight, lest a wicked or indecent word be willingly heard, lest what is not lawful be done even if it is pleasing; lest in this war, so full of toils and dangers, we either hope that victory will be won by our own strength or attribute it, once won, to our own strength, rather than to the grace of him of whom the apostle says, “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ”; who also says in another place, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

Yet let us know that, with whatever courage in battle we resist vices, or even overcome and subjugate them, as long as we are in this body we cannot lack reason to say to God, “Forgive us our debts.” But in that kingdom where we shall be for ever with immortal bodies, we shall have neither battles nor debts; and these would exist nowhere and never, had our nature remained as it was created, upright. And so even this conflict of ours, in which we are in danger and from which we long to be freed by a final victory, belongs to the evils of this life, which we prove to be condemned by the testimony of so many and such great evils.