Tractates 1.16.1–2.5.2

Whoever denies the resurrection condemns his own life himself: for why should one deserve to see the happiness of the future age whom you see detracting from God's power by sacrilegious unbelief? But they do this from love of their crimes, so that they think what they do secretly will go unpunished: for if they noticed that the course of the day of judgment is already approaching, they would beyond doubt both hate the present and believe the future, and fear it as well: for no one is so starved even of the taste of this world's wisdom as to dare say that souls perish with bodies, that heavenly things are consumed with earthly; especially since the wisest of them says that this is death, when the mind is held shut up in the body as in a prison; and that is true life, when the same mind, freed from the custody of the prison, returns to the place from which it came. If, then, he who did not know Christ thought this, why should the Christian doubt, who both hears of the future resurrection, and hopes for it, and presumes it is laid up for him by Christ?

So first of all I think it must be proved that our souls, stripped of their bodies, are not dissolved with the decay of this fleshly dwelling in this first death; but that, according to the quality of their deeds, some are banished to places of punishment, some refreshed in peaceful abodes: so that then at last it may be believed that what is plain to all does not wholly perish rises again. The Gentiles, who do not believe these things, nevertheless run to the tombs with ill-omened libation, and maintain that food is sometimes requested of them by the dead whom they have recognised in the quiet of silent night; and so they give credit to the thing they reject. The philosophers have said various things about the soul; but that it is immortal they prove, refuting by plain argument the folly of Epicurus, Dicaearchus and Democritus. The poets did better, who place a twofold way in the underworld: one of the wicked, which leads to Tartarus; another of the pious, which leads to Elysium; adding the stronger point that there not so much the forms as the deeds of the dead are known, and they necessarily receive according to what they carry in their acts of earthly conduct, rightly saying: 'Each of us suffers his own shades.'

But we, brothers, whom no ingenious conjecture but God our teacher has instructed, proving in himself for our sake what he taught, are able not so much to say as to prove by things seen with our eyes that the souls of the dead live. In short, wandering and unclean spirits break into the bodily houses of the living of both sexes, by the deceitful capture of flatteries or by violence, and seek a hiding place for themselves in their ruinous captivities. But when it comes to the field of the divine contest, and they begin to be struck by the weapon of the sacred name, then you see one whom you know, and pity another who is being made to fight. The colour changes from moment to moment, the face loses its natural shape, the orbs of the eyes turn madly into oblique horrors, the row of teeth, bristling with foaming bubbles, gnashes between livid lips, all the limbs, twisted everywhere, shake with trembling; he groans, weeps; he dreads the announced day of judgment and laments that he is being driven out: he confesses his sex, confesses the time and place of his assault, confesses his own name and his departure; or shows by plain signs who he is, so that we often recognise some of them to be persons whom we remember lately living in idolatry and especially dying by some violence. Here now answer me, you who maintain that nothing of a man survives after death: how did that dead man whom you knew speak through another? But you say: 'The demons pretend these things.' The proof is all the better, because even deceivers bear witness to the truth. And why should they pretend names, when their confession is true in all else, or for what reason should they rely on this argument, which draws men, whom they desire lost, rather to the fear of God, and profits them nothing? Indeed they would be thought to do this rightly if under the pretext of another's name they could have kept what they had seized. But since by the divine adjuration, on the spiritual rack, they declare against their will who they are and depart unwillingly, they are beyond doubt what they confess themselves to be to everyone.

Take other examples too, and more certain ones. First, in the book of Words, Samuel, that distinguished priest, already discharged by the law of death, not only shows his presence without ambiguity to King Saul, who desired him, but also answers his questions, and the dead man prophesies more freely than he had been accustomed to prophesy while alive; so one may cry out: this man has departed rather than died. In the Gospel too Peter and the sons of Zebedee see by the freedom of the spirit Moses and Elijah standing shining with the Lord, whom because of the hindrance of the flesh they could not then see, understanding from this that what is seen to perish for a time in this world rests safe, deposited in nature's treasury. Likewise in the underworld that most tenacious rich man, whom an immense chasm separates from the poor man's happiness, imploring refreshment in his burning, recognises too late Lazarus as the truly rich man, and dead longs to be touched even with one finger by those hands to which living he had refused a coin. He now hates without cause what he loved before; he proves happier what he had hated. He groans that the pressing punishment cannot be relieved by any of his well-known resources, ready without delay to offer them all, if it were allowed, for one moment of rest. He longs at least for his surviving brothers to be cared for. He earnestly begs father Abraham that some messenger may go to make them certain of so great a matter; to whom Abraham answered: 'They have Moses and the prophets; if they do not believe them, neither will they believe one sent from here'; plainly showing that the truth lies not in the eyes of the flesh but in the faith of believers.

For the Lord too, confirming these examples, said to one of the robbers who believed in him, who were hanging with him from the gibbet on the right and the left: 'Amen, amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.' So if a dead man perishes for ever, then the Lord lied, who promised paradise to a man who would afterwards be nothing. And the man himself whom the Lord had assumed perishes, if Jesus has not risen. But if he has risen, he has given a pattern to the human race, since God tasted the law of death for man for this purpose, that man through God might recover the right of immortality which he had lost. For this reason the most blessed Paul says: 'We do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, about those who sleep, that you may not grieve as the others who have no hope: for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so too God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.' For God too speaks through the prophet Ezekiel, saying: 'Behold, I open your tombs and will bring you out of your tombs, and lead you into the land of Israel: I will give my spirit into you, and you shall live.'

Since this is so, why, Christian, do you not believe in the future resurrection? Why do you mourn so stubbornly those who pass from the ruin of this world to better things? Oh, the wickedness! Here a mother, her garment torn, her hair torn, her cheeks torn too, her whole breast bruised with frequent blows, raves madly with Gentile vanity around the body of the one she has lost, and does not recall the memory of the Maccabean mother, who, girded with hope of the future, while Antiochus raged, gladly at one time, I will not say buried, but rather herself happily slew her seven sons by her exhortations, trusting religiously that she had borne her sons for God, not for the world. Here a wife testifies that she cannot bear the desolation of her lost husband; she complains of her cold side under a roof made too wide; with envious words she stirs up envy against God; she sometimes breaks with profane wailings the divine rites themselves, by which those at rest are customarily commended by God's priests; disfiguring all her attire with foul squalor, she embraces the corpse already mourned; she warms its cold lips with frequent kisses; she washes the whole body with showers of tears, covering it with the loss of her hair; with pitiable addresses she kindles into fuller weeping even those whom the cause does not touch, the more ostentatious in grief the richer she is; and indeed, wretched woman, after a moment (and would it were only once) she will marry from excessive grief. Here, here I do not see how anyone can excuse himself; for there is no lack of someone who can say: 'If there is a resurrection, why do you mourn? If you do it from love of your husband, why do you marry afterwards?' It is a detestable thing, brothers, to keep neither love for one's spouse nor faith for God. This rebuke awaits men too.

So the Christian must not doubt at all that the dead are raised to their former state, and that on the lawful day they are brought out from that secret of nature before the sight of God such as each was received, according to his quality, as the Apostle says: 'We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive the deserts of his body according to what he has done, whether good or evil.' For, brothers, it is easier to re-form what has been than to make what was not before: if what was not now is, much more can what was be again; especially since it is the very practice of that most powerful craftsman, the founder of all things, to assert the possibility of the impossible, to make what is out of what is not, to create nature outside nature, to find nothing at all difficult, and to lack only this, that he should not will to be; for this is the property of God, to do what cannot be believed.

So not men only, but almost all things live by their deaths. Hence I will touch on a few things out of many, so as to set out without doubt the proof of all in a few. The stars fall headlong from heaven, and with a long trail of whitening flames behind them, with the solemnity of a funeral torch, they are led to their settings as if in a kind of funeral procession: if you look for them across the regions from which they were unfixed, you will recognise that they have risen again to their seats by the law of reviving light. The sun is born every day, and on the same day on which it is born it dies; and yet it is not frightened by the lot of its approaching end so as to slow its course, to prolong hours and moments, to linger a little longer at least in the life of its day; but always faithful, always fearless, it hastens to the tomb of its kindred night, knowing that in it it has what makes it live: in short, its rising is taken from it if its setting is taken away. The moon too, which truly paints in itself all the lines of human reckoning, born in blood-red tenderness, first appears with a doubtful horn as if from the cradle, and growing little by little, now a girl, now a maiden, advancing with the increase of her daily age, she spins the world's tasks in the windings of her wanton course. But when, mature, burning with the golden fire of the light-bringing charioteer, equal to her brother's labours, she has completed her silver globe in august circles, she gradually declines into old age, until, consumed in the last old age, reviving by her death, the solemn seed of her monthly fire kindled, she takes again a beginning from her end.

Likewise the phoenix, that precious bird, plainly teaches us the laws of resurrection; it does not receive the nobility of its race from parents, nor hand it on to offspring: it is itself both sexes to itself, it is every affection, it is its race, its end, its beginning: it is not born from intercourse, nor nourished by another's service: it does not die unwilling or unaware, but when the ripe time of death has come, it is most gladly burned up by itself in sacred fires it has invited. Its tomb is its nest, its embers its nurses, its ash the seed for propagating its body, death its birthday. In short, after a moment it exults in a festal tomb, not a shadow but the reality, not an image but the phoenix, not another, but, though better than another, yet its former self. Blush, Christian conscience; from so many and such great things at least learn how you will again be the same as you are, and better.

Besides, the grain of every kind of wheat, buried in the earth, dies, and yet what is within it revives; it does not take death to the marrow, but breathing out into its own generative shoot, the surface of the old body destroyed, or rather transferred into the laws of a better nature, it lifts its happy head, crowned with green tresses, into the upper world as if it had come up from the underworld, to hold the glory of perpetuity in a teeming harvest; as Paul confirms: 'Fool, what you sow is not given life unless it dies.' And he added, saying: 'So also is the resurrection of the dead: it is sown in destruction, it rises in perpetuity; it is sown in lowliness, it rises in glory; it is sown in weakness, it rises in power; it is sown an animal body, it rises a spiritual one.' The truth of the resurrection, I think, is clear enough to all.

But it must necessarily be discussed what distinction there is in it between the unjust and the just, lest the generality of the name drag down the glory of Christian happiness by comparison with the wicked. So there is a twofold form of rising: the first, of the saints, in which, summoned by the royal watchword of the first trumpet, they will take that kingdom of blessedness with great triumph under Christ the eternal king; the second, which destines the ungodly, with sinners and all the unbelieving nations, to everlasting punishment, as the Holy Spirit says in the psalms: 'Therefore the ungodly do not rise in the judgment, nor sinners in the council of the just; for the Lord knows the way of the just, and the path of the ungodly will perish.'

It follows that we should know in what condition this man of ours who strives toward heaven will reign, lest perhaps he perish with the flesh by vain hope, if he is caught by the perishable and carnal flesh of which the Apostle says: 'Flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God.' But on the other side I seem to hear someone cry out: 'If this is the condition of the flesh, what is it then that we believe in the church, the remission of sins and the resurrection of the flesh?' This conflict is easily reconciled, brothers, and the quality of the future state is opened, if the faith is held unimpaired. So I will set the matter out in a few words. All flesh, as long as it is driven by the shameful enticements and deadly darkness of this world, is surely a beast's, and lives under a wretched, fragile and detestable law. But when, by the pure faith of the believer, it has been put to death by saving baptism, it rises new from the flood of the Father's sacred font, now pure, now free, now a stranger to the conduct of this world, now superior to death, now aspiring to heavenly things, now despising, I will not say the mockeries of the age, but itself, so as to be more honoured, now seeking the truth, not the image, now desiring spiritual things, not its own; of which Paul says: 'Not all flesh is the same flesh: there is one of man, another of beasts, another flesh of birds, another of fishes. There are heavenly bodies and there are earthly ones.' So by the seed of immortality, of which even the wisest poet had a presentiment, saying, 'Fiery is their vigour, and heavenly their origin, for the seeds', namely by the conception of the Holy Spirit implanted in it, it is made fruitful beforehand, so that when the times of its dissolution and lawful restoration have come, answering to its seed, it may by right deserve what we believe. Nor is the matter in doubt; for just as that prince of iniquity, by his seed, through envy brought the first-formed from angels down to men, so the Lord by the seed of the Holy Spirit will raise all who believe in him from the dead again, glorious, into angels.

For this let us bring forward one further plain example, although a likeness cannot have as much force as the truth. The wild olive is unhappy and bitter in its nature; but when it has been cut down by the hand of a most skilled farmer-craftsman with necessary foresight, it is made pregnant by the nobility of a foreign seed, and is nourished by the very thing it nourishes, until, taken up by the adoptive richness of the guest shoot, or rather made richness itself, and wholly transferred into the honour it has received, adorned with branches rising again by the advance of new foliage, it is no longer a wild olive but an olive; though it is a wild olive, and yet even itself in a way marvels that it is not a wild olive. So if man can make a tree be what it was not, saving what it was, how much more will God be able to raise man to what he was before he sinned in paradise? This reasoning about seeds the most blessed Paul too subtly set out, saying: 'He who sows according to the flesh will reap destruction from his flesh; but he who sows in the spirit will reap eternal life from the spirit.' And the Lord, plainly teaching this, says thus to the disciples: 'The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed weeds on top among the wheat.'

But perhaps someone may still say: 'If the flesh perishes, how is the one who rises recognised?' The flesh, brothers, is like a kind of mirror filled with the fullness of the one who looks into it, which bears not so much its own image as that of the one whose use it serves. In short, it makes as many faces as the inner man makes sad or cheerful movements; Paul teaches us this reasoning: 'We see now,' he says, 'through a mirror in an enigma, but then it will be face to face.' Hence there is no doubt that in our bodies, while they are being refined by the law of death, not the substance, not the image, but only what is useless is shaken off, what is worn is changed, as it is written: 'For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality'; for that robe of immortality is not otherwise put on unless first this fleshly spoil, the flattering poison of the soul, is poured back, according to God's sentence, where it was taken from; for God says to Adam: 'Cursed will the earth be in all your works; in the groaning of sorrow you will eat of it all the days of your life: it will bring forth thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the fodder of the field: in the sweat of your face you will eat your bread until you return to the earth.' And the Lord too, in the person of the man he had assumed, says: 'My soul is sorrowful to death.' This saying is not so much of one fearing as of one exulting and teaching. Surely; for he could fear nothing, he who raised the dead, who had power to lay down his life and to take it up again; but he said it to teach that while the just man lives in this world, he is always in tribulation, always in suffering. But when death, which is thought fearsome, is tasted, then the promised happiness of eternal glory in blessed abodes is shown to him, never again to feel the hardships of the world, as holy David says: 'Return, my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has done good to me, for he has delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from falling: I will please the Lord in the land of the living.' This happiness awaits us, this gift expects us. So let us live that, adorned with good works, we too may deserve to please God the Father, with the help of our Lord Christ, who is blessed for ever and ever.

Men of carnal mind, dearest brothers, are scandalised, not from zeal to know but to frustrate the truth, whenever God the Son of God, who is the Father's greatest glory, is preached by the Catholics as equal to the Father. In short, this is why, despising the foundations of the law, with cunning disputation, passing over God going forth from God, they hasten to the common human names of Father and Son, which can be reached by arguments; and they do not understand that at the beginning of the sacred song God, compared with God in his own divinity and name, excludes all the opinions of human sense: since he says, 'Let us make man in our image and likeness'; he does not say, 'Make him in yours,' but he says, 'Let us make him in ours,' lest the Son, who was to put on man, should seem to suffer injury. Do you see, dearest brothers, that here no one expressly commands the other, no one is idle in the work? O holy equality of the undivided Godhead, most worthy of itself alone! One man is formed in the image and likeness of two, and yet in him it is not found what belongs to whom. If, then, the sacred equality cannot be distinguished in an external work, how can God be inferior in another to himself? For whatever you take away from one of two who in all things are indistinguishably like each other, you do not know from which you have taken it.

'But he to whom he gives commands,' you say, 'is inferior.' What? From that very thing he is proved not to be inferior: because the one from whom he proceeded is the executor of his Father's heart; for it is no less to do great things than to say them. Although whatever has been said or can be said by the Father is not without the Son, because the Son is the Word; and whatever has been done or can be done by the Son is not without the Father's consent, because the Son is not without the Father, as he himself says: 'If I do not do the works of the Father, do not believe me; but if you will not believe me, believe the works, and know that the Father is in me and I in him.' It is established, then, that he is equal, since they hold each other mutually, together with the Holy Spirit.

Unless one defeats the enemy who attacks him, he can never enjoy his goods securely: for there are many who try to assert that chaos was in the beginning, that is, a shapeless and undigested mass of hidden nature, remaining by itself in itself in a heap of its own magnitude; and that afterwards God divided it and from it constituted the world and adorned it. If then, as they would have it, God did not make the matter he used, but it is eternal as he is, then there are two principles, and opposed ones at that; and so we shall necessarily have to ask which of the two is stronger, that which has sense or that which lacks sense. But who would doubt that that is stronger which feels, which knows, which thinks, which moves, which is moved, which by wonderful providence made chaos itself cease to be chaos, which separated its members, arranged them by reason, decorated them with colours, defined them by measure, and commanded them to serve their duties more fittingly? Hence that is not a principle which grows old; which is a work made by another; which is not placed in its own power; which is taken away from its own substance; which is changed; which is moved by another's impulse; which can never perceive what it is, what it was, what it will be. So God alone is the principle, who gave himself his own principle from himself. He alone is before all things and after all things, since all things are enclosed in his hand; he is from himself what he is. He alone is conscious of himself, how great and what he is. He alone is perfect, because nothing can be added to him or taken away. He alone is almighty, because he constituted all things from nothing, rules them by his power, guards them by his majesty. He alone is unchangeable and always equal, because he admits no age in himself. He alone is everlasting, because he is the Lord of immortality. This is our God, who unfolded himself into God. This is the Father, who, his own state remaining whole, gave himself back wholly into the Son, so as to take nothing from himself. In short, each exults in the other, shining with the fullness of the Holy Spirit in one original co-eternity. As (if it is fitting to say so) two seas which lean on each other, joined by a strait that brings their alternate tides into one, which, although by their property they are distinct in place and name, yet have one force, one substance, one nature of bounding the threefold deep; nor can the incomprehensible magnitude of the common water be divided, as it flows abundantly from each into each, proper to both, private to neither: for they would suffer loss of abundance and grace if what makes each beautiful from the other in one and the same tide were taken away.

The Beginning, dearest brothers, is without hesitation our Lord Christ, whom before all ages the Father embraced in the depth of the secret of his sacred mind, in an unsuspected consciousness known to himself alone, not without the affection of a Son, but without unveiling. So that ineffable and incomprehensible Wisdom propagates Wisdom, Omnipotence Omnipotence. God is born of God, the Only-begotten of the Unbegotten, the Only of the Only, the Whole of the Whole, the True of the True, the Perfect of the Perfect. Having all that is the Father's, taking nothing from the Father. He who was before he was born proceeds into birth, equal in all things in the Father; because the Father begot into him another self from himself, from his own unbegettable substance, in which, remaining blessed for ever, he begot a Son having all that he has, equal, who is God blessed for ever and ever.

As holy Scripture testifies, before all things there was God, abiding one and the same, other to himself, from himself into himself, alone conscious of his secret; from whose mouth, that the nature of things which was not might be formed, came forth the only-begotten Son, the noble indweller of his heart, thereafter necessarily made visible, because he himself was to make the world and to visit the human race, otherwise equal in all things to the Father: for whatever the Father commanded to be done, the Son, as being the power of God and the wisdom of God, completed all of it with wonderful work together with his word. Now the curious try to violate this with vain opinions; now the wretches understand that curiosity makes one guilty, not skilled.

The Beginning, brothers, is without hesitation our Lord Christ, whom before all ages the Father, still God in both ways in himself, in the undivided fullness of the spirit of blessed perpetuity, embraced veiled in some consciousness of his own, not without the affection of a Son, but without distinction. But to set in order the things he had conceived, that ineffable power and incomprehensible wisdom belches forth a Word from the region of the heart; omnipotence propagates itself. God is born of God, having all that is the Father's, taking nothing from the Father. Each shines in the other; the glory of either is a common honour, because what is the Son's is the Father's, what is the Father's is both's. The Father rejoices in another self whom he begot from himself. But how he who came forth was begotten, it is madness to suppose; for the Son tempers himself for the sake of the nature of things, lest the mediocrity of this world be unable to bear the Lord of unveiled majesty. When the Father commands the world to be made, the work is completed by the Son together with the word. But how, how great or what it should be made, no one instructs, no one asks; for it could not be without injury to the Father, if he had need of this who, dwelling in the Father's bosom, had not learned the perfection of his will but possessed it.

So, the world completed, last of all man is formed from the clay of the earth by the finger and hand of God. A movable image is built, wholly ignorant of itself; and, to be the image of God, it is breathed into a living soul by God. It likewise conceived a spirit which it does not know; it does not see it entering; it cannot prevent it leaving: and does anyone think he can know God's secret, who does not know the secret of his own body? Therefore, brothers, for the purpose for which we were made and born, let us fear, love and honour the God whom we have found. Let those indeed seek him who do not have him with them.