On the Resurrection of the Flesh 1–13

The confidence of Christians is the resurrection of the dead. Believing it, we are what we are; the truth compels us to believe it; God discloses the truth. But the crowd laughs, supposing that nothing survives after death. And yet it makes offerings to the dead, and with the most lavish service, suited to the station of the buried and to the season of the foods, so that it presumes that those whom it denies to feel anything even desire something. But I shall laugh at the crowd all the more when it burns its dead most cruelly and afterwards feeds them most gluttonously, with the same fires both courting their favour and offending them. O piety that makes sport of cruelty! Does it sacrifice or insult, when it burns offerings to the burned? Of course the wise sometimes join their opinion to the crowd's. That there is nothing after death is the school of Epicurus. Seneca too says that everything ends after death, even death itself. It is enough, however, if the no lesser philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles and the Platonists cries out on the contrary that the soul is immortal, and goes further still and affirms that it can even return into bodies: even if not into the same ones, even if not into human ones only, so that Euphorbus is thought to have come back in Pythagoras, Homer in a peacock; yet at least they declared a bodily renewal of the soul, changing its quality, which is more tolerable than denying it, knocking at the truth at least, though not entering. So the world is not ignorant of the resurrection of the dead even when it errs.

But if, even among God's people, there is some sect more akin to the Epicureans than to the prophets, we shall know what the Sadducees hear from Christ. For it was reserved for Christ to lay bare all that was formerly hidden, to set straight what was doubted, to fill out what had been foretasted, to make present what had been foretold, and above all to prove the resurrection of the dead not only by himself but also in himself. Now, however, we are preparing against other Sadducees, partners in part of their opinion: they acknowledge half a resurrection, namely of the soul alone, despising the flesh as they despise the Lord of the flesh himself. In short, none others begrudge salvation to the bodily substance than the heretics of another divinity. And so, being forced to arrange Christ differently too, lest he be held to be the Creator's, they erred first about his very flesh, contending either that it had no reality, following Marcion and Basilides, or that it had a quality of its own, following the heresies of Valentinus and Apelles. So it follows that they exclude from salvation the substance which they deny that Christ shared, well aware that it is armed with the strongest prior ruling for its resurrection if flesh has already risen in Christ. For this reason we too sent ahead a volume on the flesh of Christ, in which we both prove it solid against the emptiness of a phantasm and claim it as human against a peculiar quality, its condition having entitled Christ both man and Son of Man. For in proving him fleshly and bodily we thereby also refute them by a prior ruling that no other god is to be believed besides the Creator, while we show Christ to be such that in him God is recognized as such as is promised by the Creator. Refuted, then, both about God the author of the flesh and about Christ the redeemer of the flesh, they will now be overcome also about the resurrection of the flesh. Fittingly, we say, the debate with heretics should be entered roughly in this way (for order too always demands that one proceed from first principles): that it first be settled about him by whom the thing in question is said to have been arranged. And indeed heretics, conscious of their weakness, never treat things in order. For they know how hard they labour to slip in another divinity against the God of the world, who is known to all by nature from the testimony of his works, certainly prior in the sacraments and plainer in preaching; so, under the pretext of a more urgent case, namely human salvation itself, which must be sought before all else, they begin with questions of the resurrection, because the resurrection of the flesh is believed with more difficulty than one divinity. Thus, having stripped the discussion of the strength of its proper order and loaded it instead with scruples that disparage the flesh, they gradually bring it round to the notion of another divinity out of the very shaking and change of hope. For anyone thrown down or moved from the level of the hope he had received with the Creator is easily turned aside to the author of another hope, even one to be suspected of his own accord. For by a difference of promises a difference of gods is insinuated. Thus we see many ensnared, while they are struck down on the resurrection of the flesh before they are struck down on the unity of the divinity. So, as regards the heretics, we have shown with what wedge we must meet them. And they have already been met, each under its own title too: on the one God and his Christ, against Marcion; on the Lord's flesh, against four heresies as well, chiefly to lay the groundwork for this question; so that now the resurrection of the flesh alone is to be worked through as if it were uncertain among us too, that is, in the Creator's camp (for there are many unlearned, very many doubtful in their faith, and more who are simple, who will need to be instructed, directed, and fortified), because from this side too the unity of the divinity will be defended. For just as it is shaken if the resurrection of the flesh is denied, so it is established if it is upheld. The salvation of the soul, I believe, needs no discussion; for almost all heretics, in whatever way they like, still do not deny it. Let one Lucan see to himself, who does not spare even this substance, but, dissolving it after Aristotle, puts something else in its place, a third something to rise, neither soul nor flesh, that is, not a man, but perhaps a bear, being a Lucanian. He too has from us a very full treatise on the whole condition of the soul. Holding the soul above all to be immortal, we acknowledge the failing of the flesh alone and assert its restoration most strongly, gathering into the regular body of the subject whatever we touched on elsewhere and put off as occasions arose. For just as it is customary to give a foretaste of some things, so it is necessary to postpone others, provided what was foretasted is filled out in its proper body and what was postponed is rendered under its proper name.

It is indeed allowed to draw wisdom from common notions in the things of God, but as a testimony to the truth, not as an aid to falsehood, so that it accord with the divine arrangement, not oppose it. For some things are known even by nature, as the immortality of the soul to many, as our God to all. I will use, then, the opinion of a certain Plato declaring, “Every soul is immortal”; I will use also the conscience of the people bearing witness to the God of gods; I will use the other common notions too that proclaim God as judge: “God sees,” and “I commend it to God.” But when they say, “Dead is dead,” and “Live while you live,” and “After death all things end, even death itself,” then I shall remember both that the heart of the crowd has been reckoned ashes by God and that the very wisdom of the world has been pronounced foolishness. Then, if a heretic takes refuge in the vices of the crowd or the cleverness of the world, I shall say: “Depart from the heathen, heretic! Even if you are all one, you who invent a god, still, while you do it in the name of Christ, while you think yourself a Christian, you are other than the heathen. Give him back his notions, since he is not taught from yours either. Why lean on a blind guide, if you see? Why take clothing from the naked, if you have put on Christ? Why use another's shield, if you have been armed by the apostle?” Let him rather learn from you to confess the resurrection of the flesh than you from him to deny it; for if it had to be denied even by Christians, it would be enough for them to be instructed from their own knowledge, not from the ignorance of the crowd. So he will not be a Christian who denies what Christians confess, and denies it with arguments that one who is not a Christian uses. Take away from the heretics, in short, the notions they share with the heathen, so that they must rest their questions on the Scriptures alone, and they will not be able to stand. For common notions are commended by their very simplicity, by agreement of opinion and familiarity of views, and they are thought the more trustworthy because they define what is bare and open and known to all. But divine reason lies in the marrow, not on the surface, and is often at odds with appearances.

And so the heretics lay their foundations from there at once and go on building from there, knowing that minds are easily caught by the popular fellowship of common notions. Do you hear anything sooner or more often from a heretic than from a heathen? And is there not at once and everywhere abuse of the flesh: against its origin, its material, its lot, its whole end? Unclean from the beginning, formed from the dregs of the earth, more unclean afterwards from the slime of its own seed; trifling, weak, guilty, burdensome, troublesome, and, after the whole indictment of its baseness, falling back into its origin, the earth, and into the name of corpse, and doomed to perish even from that name into no name at all, into the death of every designation. “Do you wish, then,” says the wise man, “to persuade me that this flesh, snatched from your sight and touch and memory, will one day recover itself whole from corruption, solid from emptiness, full from exhaustion, something at all from nothing, and that when fires and waves and the bellies of beasts and the crops of birds and the guts of fishes and the very gullet of time itself have taken it back? Will the same flesh that perished be hoped for in such a way that the lame and the one-eyed and the leper and the paralytic return, so that one would not wish to have come back to one's former state? Or whole, so that they may fear to suffer such things again? And what of the flesh's consequences? Will everything be needful to it again, and above all food and drink? Will the lungs have to breathe, the bowels to churn, the private parts to be unashamed, and all the members to toil? Again ulcers and wounds and fever and gout? And death to be longed for again? No doubt these will be the marks of the flesh recovered: to wish once more to escape from it.” And we indeed put this somewhat more decently, out of the modesty of the pen; but how far their foul talk may go one can learn in encounters, with heathen and heretics alike.

Therefore, since the unlearned are still wise from common notions, and the doubtful and the simple are troubled afresh by the same notions, and everywhere this battering-ram is first swung against us, by which the condition of the flesh is shaken, we too must of necessity first fortify the condition of the flesh, repelling abuse with praise. So the heretics provoke us to play the rhetorician too, just as the philosopher. This futile and trifling little body, which they do not shrink even from calling evil: even if it had been the work of angels, as Menander and Marcus hold, even if the construction of some fiery being, likewise an angel, as Apelles teaches, the patronage of a secondary divinity would suffice for the authority of the flesh. We know the angels come next after God. Indeed, whoever the supreme god of each heretic may be, I would not unjustly derive the dignity of the flesh from him too, since the will for it to be produced was present with him; for he would surely have forbidden to be made what he knew was being made, if he had not wished it to be made. So even by their account the flesh is equally a thing of God. Nothing is not his work who allowed it to be. It is well, however, that most doctrines, and the more distinguished ones, grant the whole fashioning of man to our God. How great he is, you know well enough, you who have believed in the one God. Let the flesh now begin to please you, since its craftsman is so great. “But the world too,” you say, “is the work of God, and yet ‘the form of this world passes away,’ as the apostle too affirms, and the world's restoration is not presumed on the ground that it is the work of God. And surely, if the whole cannot be refashioned after its passing, what of a part?” Certainly, if the part is equal to the whole. But we appeal to the difference. First, that all things were made by the Word of God, and without him nothing; but the flesh took its being by the Word of God too, for the sake of form, so that nothing should be made without the Word (he said beforehand, “Let us make man”), and more, by his hand, for the sake of preeminence, so that it might not be compared with the universe: “And God formed man,” it says. Without doubt there is reason here for a great difference, according to the condition of the things. For the things that were made were less than him for whom they were made, since they were made for man, to whom God soon assigned them. Rightly, then, as servants, all things came forth at a bidding and command and by the mere power of the voice; but man, as their lord, was built up for this by God himself. And remember that it is the flesh that is properly called man, which first took the name of man: “And God formed man, clay from the earth” (already man, while still clay) “and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man” (that is, the clay) “became a living soul; and God placed the man whom he had formed in paradise.” So man was first the thing formed, then the whole. I would stress this so that you may know that whatever at all God has provided and promised to man is owed not to the soul alone but to the flesh as well, if not from partnership in kind, then at least from the privilege of the name.

Let me pursue my purpose, then, if only I can claim for the flesh as much as he who made it conferred on it, glorying already then that this petty thing, clay, came into the hands of God, whatever they are, happy enough had it only been touched. For what if the thing formed had come into being at once from God's touch, with no further work? This material out of which it was being built was not so great a thing. And so it is honoured as often as it undergoes the hands of God: while it is touched, pulled off, drawn out, shaped. Consider God wholly occupied with it and devoted to it, with hand, sense, work, counsel, wisdom, providence, and above all with the very affection that drew its lines. For whatever form the clay was pressed into, Christ was in mind, who was to be man, which the clay also was, and the Word flesh, which the earth also was then. For so the Father said to the Son beforehand: “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” And God made man, that is, what he formed; “in the image of God he made him,” that is, of Christ. For the Word too is God, who, being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God. So that clay, already then putting on the image of Christ who was to be in the flesh, was not only God's work but also his pledge. What use is it now, to darken the origin of the flesh, to toss about the name of earth as a filthy and lowly element? For even if some other material had been suitable for fashioning man, one ought to consider the eminence of the craftsman, who both judged it worthy in choosing it and made it so in handling it. The hands of Phidias work Olympian Jupiter out of ivory, and it is worshipped, and is no longer the tooth of a beast, and a most stupid one, but the supreme deity of the world, not because it is an elephant but because Phidias is so great. Would the living God, the true God, not have purged whatever cheapness of material by his own working and healed it of all weakness? Or will it remain that man fashioned a god more honourably than God fashioned man? Now, even if the clay is a stumbling block, it is already something else. It is flesh I hold now, not earth, though the flesh too hears: “Earth you are, and into earth you shall go.” It is the origin that is recounted, not the substance. A thing may be nobler than its origin and happier by its change. For gold too is earth, since it comes from earth; yet earth only so far, for once gold it is a far different material, more splendid and nobler, from a humbler womb. So God too was free to refine the gold of the flesh from the dregs, as you think them, of the clay, its lineage excused.

But the authority of the flesh may seem weaker because the divine hand did not handle it in its own right, as it did the clay. Since he handled the clay for this purpose, that it might afterwards become flesh out of clay, he was surely doing the flesh's business. But I would still have you learn when and how flesh blossomed out of clay. For those tunics of skin which Adam and Eve put on when stripped of paradise will not, as some would have it, be themselves the re-forming of flesh out of clay, since somewhat earlier Adam had already recognized the offshoot of his substance in the woman as flesh (“This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”), and the very portion taken from the male into the female was made up with flesh, when it would have had to be made up, I suppose, with clay, if Adam was still clay. The clay, therefore, was blotted out and swallowed up into flesh. When? When man became a living soul from the breath of God, a hot breath, fit to bake the clay somehow into another quality: as into earthenware, so into flesh. So too a potter can, by a tempered blast of fire, re-embody clay into a sturdier material and draw one form out of another, fitter than the former and now of its own kind and name. For even though it is written, “Shall the clay say to the potter?” (that is, man to God), and though the apostle says, “in earthen vessels,” man is clay because clay before, and flesh is earthenware because it came from clay through the heat of the divine breath. Afterwards the tunics of skin, that is, skins drawn over it, clothed it; so much so that if you strip off the skin, you lay bare the flesh. Thus what today becomes a spoil if stripped off was a garment when it was put on. Hence the apostle too, calling circumcision a stripping off of the flesh, affirmed that the skin is a tunic. This being so, you have both clay made glorious by the hand of God and flesh more glorious by the breath of God, by which the flesh at once laid aside the rudiments of clay and took up the adornments of the soul. Are you more careful than God, that you would set Scythian and Indian gems and the gleaming pearls of the Red Sea not in lead, not in bronze, not in iron, not even in silver, but would sink them in the choicest and most elaborately worked gold; that you would first see to vessels fit for all the most precious ointments; that you would likewise match the dignity of the scabbards to swords of proven steel, while God should have entrusted the shadow of his soul, the breeze of his Spirit, the work of his mouth to some most worthless sheath, and by placing it unworthily surely condemned it? But did he place it, or rather insert and mingle it with the flesh? With so close a union that it may be held uncertain whether the flesh carries the soul about or the soul the flesh, whether the flesh obeys the soul or the soul the flesh. But even if it is rather to be believed that the soul rides and rules, as nearer to God, this too overflows to the glory of the flesh, that it both contains what is nearest to God and makes it master of that very rule. For what use of nature, what enjoyment of the world, what taste of the elements does the soul feed on except through the flesh? Why not? Through it the soul is furnished with the whole equipment of the senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch; through it the soul is sprinkled with a divine power, accomplishing everything by speech, even when it is sent ahead in silence. For speech too comes from an organ of the flesh. The arts come through the flesh, studies and talents through the flesh, works, business, duties through the flesh; indeed the soul's whole living so belongs to the flesh that for the soul not to live is nothing else than to part from the flesh. So even dying belongs to the flesh, as living does. Moreover, if all things are subject to the soul through the flesh, they are subject to the flesh too. What you use, you must use along with. So the flesh, while it is reckoned the minister and servant of the soul, turns out to be its partner and co-heir. If in temporal things, why not in eternal?

These things I would have procured in support of the flesh from the public pattern, so to speak, of the human condition. Let us now see, from the particular pattern of the Christian name, how great a prerogative this trifling and filthy substance has with God, even though it would be enough for it that no soul at all can obtain salvation unless it believes while it is in the flesh: so true is it that the flesh is the hinge of salvation. And when the soul is bound to God, it is the flesh that makes it possible for the soul to be bound. The flesh, indeed, is washed, that the soul may be cleansed of stain; the flesh is anointed, that the soul may be consecrated; the flesh is signed, that the soul too may be protected; the flesh is overshadowed by the laying on of the hand, that the soul too may be enlightened by the Spirit; the flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ, that the soul too may be fattened on God. They cannot, then, be separated in reward, whom the work joins together. For the sacrifices pleasing to God as well, I mean the struggles of the soul, fasts, late and dry meals, and the squalor that goes with this duty, the flesh performs at its own cost. Virginity too, and widowhood, and the modest concealment of marriage in secret, and the knowledge of one marriage only, are offered to God as incense from the goods of the flesh. Come now, what do you think of it when, dragged out for faith in the Name and exposed to public hatred, it fights to the end; when in prisons it wastes away, beaten down by that foulest exile from the light, by want of the world, squalor, filth, and abuse, not free even in sleep, since it is bound even on its bed and torn by its very straw; when then in the daylight it is lacerated by every device of torment; when finally it is spent in punishments, striving to repay Christ by dying for him, and often indeed by the same cross, not to mention still more atrocious inventions of penalty? Truly most blessed and most glorious is the flesh that can repay Christ the Lord so great a debt that it owes him only this, that it has ceased to owe him: the more bound, the more set free!

So, to go over it again: the flesh which God built with his own hands in the image of God; which he animated with his own breath in the likeness of his own life; which he set over his whole work to dwell in, to enjoy, and to rule it; which he clothed with his sacraments and his disciplines; whose purity he loves, whose chastenings he approves, whose sufferings he counts precious to himself: shall this not rise again, so many times God's own? Far be it, far be it, that God should abandon to everlasting destruction the work of his hands, the care of his genius, the sheath of his breath, the queen of his building, the heir of his generosity, the priest of his religion, the soldier of his testimony, the sister of his Christ! We know that God is good; from his Christ we learn that he alone is the best. He who commands love for one's neighbour after love for himself will himself do what he has commanded. He will love the flesh, his neighbour in so many ways: though weak, yet “power is made perfect in weakness”; though feeble, yet “only those who are ill need a physician”; though dishonourable, yet “on the less honourable we bestow the greater honour”; though lost, yet “I came,” he says, “to save what was lost”; though sinful, yet “I prefer,” he says, “the salvation of the sinner to his death”; though condemned, yet “I will strike,” he says, “and I will heal.” Why reproach the flesh with the very things that wait for God, that hope in God? Those he helps are honoured by him. I would dare to say: if these things had not befallen the flesh, kindness, grace, mercy, and every beneficent power of God would have had nothing to do.

You hold the Scriptures by which the flesh is darkened; hold also those by which it is brightened. When you read where it is pressed down, turn your eyes also to where it is lifted up. “All flesh is grass.” Isaiah did not declare this only, but also: “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” In Genesis God is recorded as saying, “My Spirit shall not remain in these men, because they are flesh”; but through Joel he is also heard: “I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.” Do not know the apostle, either, from the one stroke of the pen with which he mostly stings the flesh. For although he denies that any good dwells in his flesh, although he affirms that those who are in the flesh cannot please God, because the flesh lusts against the spirit, and although he puts other things so that not so much the flesh's acts as its substance seems dishonoured (we shall say elsewhere that nothing ought properly to be charged against the flesh except to the discredit of the soul, which subjects the flesh to its own service), yet meanwhile Paul is in those letters too, when he bears the marks of Christ in his body, when he forbids our body, as the temple of God, to be defiled, when he makes our bodies members of Christ, when he urges us to lift up and glorify God in our body. So if the disgraces of the flesh drive out its resurrection, why should its honours not rather bring it in? For it befits God more to bring back to salvation what he has sometimes rejected than to hand over to destruction what he has also approved.

So far the praise of the flesh against its enemies, who are nonetheless its greatest friends. For no one lives so carnally as those who deny the resurrection of the flesh; denying it, they despise both punishment and discipline. Of them the Paraclete too has spoken plainly through the prophetess Prisca: “They are flesh, and they hate the flesh.” If so great an authority protects the flesh, as great as can plead for it toward the merit of salvation, must we not also review the might and power and freedom of God himself, whether he is great enough to be able to rebuild and restore the tabernacle of the flesh, dissolved and devoured and snatched away in whatever manner? Or whether he has published for us any examples of this right of his in the open field of nature? In case some should still suppose they know God, who is to be believed on no other terms than that he is believed able to do all things: you certainly have among the philosophers those who maintain that this world is unborn and unmade. But it is much better that almost all the heresies, granting that the world was born and made, ascribe its founding to our God. Be confident, then, that he brought forth this whole out of nothing, and you have known God by trusting that God is so powerful. For some, too weak to believe this first, would rather have the universe produced by him out of an underlying matter, following the philosophers. Yet even if that were really so, since he would be said to have brought forth, by reshaping matter, substances far different and forms far different from what the matter itself had been, I would no less maintain that he brought them forth from nothing, if he brought forth things that had not existed at all. For what difference does it make whether something is brought forth from nothing or from something, so long as what was not comes to be, since even “not to have been” is to have been nothing? So, conversely, “to have been” is to have been not nothing. Now, even if there is a difference, both still support me. For if God constructed all things out of nothing, he will be able also to draw out of nothing the flesh reduced to nothing; or if he shaped them from other matter, he will be able also to call forth the flesh from something else, wherever it has been swallowed up. And surely he who made is fit to remake, since it is more to have made than to have remade, to have given a beginning than to have given back; so you may believe the restoration of the flesh easier than its first making.

Look now at the very examples of divine power. Day dies into night and is buried everywhere in darkness. The world's splendour goes into mourning; every substance is blackened. All things are dingy, silent, stunned; everywhere business stands still. So the lost light is mourned. And yet again, with its adornment, its dowry, its sun, the same, entire and whole, it comes back to life for the whole world, slaying its own death, night, tearing open its own tomb, darkness, becoming its own heir, until night too comes back to life, it too with its own array. For the rays of the stars are rekindled, which the morning's kindling had put out; the absent constellations are brought back, which the season's division had removed; the mirrors of the moon are adorned again, which its monthly count had worn away. Winters and summers revolve, springs and autumns, with their powers, their ways, their fruits. Indeed the earth too takes its discipline from heaven: to clothe the trees after they have been stripped, to colour the flowers anew, to spread the grass again, to bring forth the same seeds that were consumed, and not to bring them forth before they are consumed. A wonderful principle: from a defrauder, a preserver; to give back, it takes away; to keep, it loses; to make whole, it damages; to enlarge, it first diminishes. For it restores things richer and finer than it destroyed, truly with profit out of ruin, interest out of injury, gain out of loss. To say it once for all: the whole creation is recurrent. Whatever you meet has been; whatever you lose will be. Nothing is that is not again. All things return to their state when they have gone; all things begin when they have ceased. They end so that they may come to be; nothing perishes except for its preservation. This whole revolving order of things, then, is a testimony to the resurrection of the dead. God prescribed it in works before he did in letters; he preached it by powers before by words. He sent nature ahead as your teacher, intending to send prophecy after, so that as the pupil of nature you might more readily believe prophecy, might admit at once what you hear when you have already seen it everywhere, and might not doubt that God is the raiser even of the flesh, whom you know to be the restorer of all things. And surely, if all things rise again for man, for whom they were provided, and not for man unless for the flesh too, how can it be that the flesh itself should perish entirely, for whose sake and for which nothing perishes?

If the universe is too slight a figure of the resurrection, if creation signifies nothing of the kind, because its several parts are said not so much to die as to cease, and are thought not to be re-animated but re-formed, take the fullest and firmest specimen of this hope, since it is a living thing, subject both to life and to death. I mean that bird peculiar to the East, famous for its uniqueness, prodigious in its posterity, which willingly makes its own funeral and so renews itself, departing and succeeding itself at an end that is a birthday: again a phoenix where there is none any more, again itself which is no longer, another and the same. What could be more expressive and more to the point for this cause? Or of what else is it such a proof? God too says in his Scriptures: “For you shall flourish like the phoenix,” that is, out of death, out of the funeral, so that you may believe that the substance of the body can be recovered even from fire. The Lord declared that we are worth more than many sparrows: if not more than phoenixes too, it is no great thing. But shall men perish once for all, while the birds of Arabia are sure of their resurrection?