11: Critique of the Resurrection of the Flesh

Apocrit. IV.24

Returning to consider again the matter of the resurrection of the dead: For what purpose should God intervene in this way, completely and arbitrarily overturning a course of events that has always been held good -- namely, the plan, ordained by him at the beginning, through which whole races are preserved and do not come to an end.

The natural law established and approved by God, lasting through the ages, is by its very nature unchanging and thus not to be overturned by [the God] who fashioned it. Nor is it to be demolished as though it were a body of laws invented by a mere mortal to serve his own limited purposes. It is preposterous to think that when the whole [race] is destroyed there follows a resurrection; that [God] raises with a wave of his hand a man who died three years before the resurrection [of Jesus] and those like Priam and Nestor who lived a thousand years before, together with those who lived when the human race was new.

Just to think of this silly teaching makes me light-headed. Many have perished at sea; their bodies have been eaten by scavenging fish. Hunters have been eaten by their prey, the wild animals, and birds. How will their bodies rise up?

Or let us take an example to test this little doctrine, so innocently put forward [by the Christians]: A certain man was shipwrecked. The hungry fish had his body for a feast. But the fish were caught and cooked and eaten by some fishermen, who had the misfortune to run afoul of some ravenous dogs, who killed and ate them. When the dogs died, the vultures came and made a feast of them.

How will the body of the shipwrecked man be reassembled, considering it has been absorbed by other bodies of various kinds? Or take a body that has been consumed by fire or a body that has been food for the worms: how can these bodies be restored to the essence of what they were originally?

Ah! You say: "All things are possible with God." But this is not true. Not all things are possible for him. [God] cannot make it happen that Homer should not have been a poet. God cannot bring it about that Troy should not fall. He cannot make 2 x 2 = 100 rather than 4, even though he should prefer it to be so. He cannot become evil, even if he wished to. Being good by nature, he cannot sin. And it is no weakness on his part that he is unable to do these things -- to sin or to become evil.

[Mortals] on the other hand may have an inclination and even an ability for doing a certain thing; if something interferes to keep them from doing it, it's clear that it is their weakness that's to blame. [I repeat]: God to be god is by nature good: he is not prevented from being evil. It is simply not in the divine nature to be bad.

There is a final point: How terrible it would be if God the Creator should stand helplessly by and see the heavens melting away in a storm of fire -- the stars falling, the earth dying. For no one has ever imagined anything more glorious than the beauty of the heavens.

Yet you say. "He will raise up the rotten and stinking corpses of men," some of them, no doubt, belonging to worthy men, but others having no grace or merit prior to death. A very unpleasant sight it will be. And even if God should refashion the dead bodies, making them more tolerable than before, there is still this: it would be impossible for the earth to accommodate all those who have died from the beginning of the world if they should be raised from the dead. [70]

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Notes:

70. This critique of the resurrection of the dead (flesh) derives from the belief that only mind and spirit can know God -- hence the reconstitution of the decomposed flesh would serve no purpose. In the Platonic scheme the body is the chief hindrance of the soul in search of God, as Christian teachers from Athenagoras (2nd cent.) onward were aware. In his treatise "On the Resurrection of the Dead," Athenagoras makes the points (a) that resurrection is not impossible; (b) that the God who created the world can raise the dead; (c) that the resurrected body is different from the physical body; and (d) that the judgment of the world "requires" humanity to stand before God in bodily form, since accountability for actions, good and bad, must have reference to the agent through which they were performed. In dealing with certain objections to the doctrine already current in the second century, Athenagoras launches (Apology IV) into a discussion of the processes of digestion which prevent the victims of plague, shipwreck and war "who have become the food of animals [and are deprived of burial]" from undergoing the natural process of decomposition. His discussion leads him to conclude that the ingestion and digestion of human flesh by animals is a "refining" process whereby whatever is harmful, useless and hurtful to the nature of the animal (i.e., whatever is essentially human) is expelled through excretion or vomiting. Athenagoras does not seem to perceive that his lengthy description contradicts his premiss that the resurrected body is fundamentally different from the one susceptible of decay.

Celsus had charged that the Christians misunderstood Plato's theory of reincarnation, "and believe the absurd notion that the corporeal body will be raised and reconstituted by God, and that somehow they will actually see God with their mortal eyes and hear him with their ears and be able to touch him with their hands" (Hoffmann, Celsus, p. 110). Early apologists, such as Justin Martyr in the second century, had based their defense of the resurrection almost exclusively on scriptural passages; cf. 1 Apology 19.

The Christian position was dichotomous: to the extent that a good God had created humankind and had undertaken to redeem it, the body was "equipped" for salvation as a temple of the spirit. The ideals of self-denial, sexual abstinence and celibacy, and the more basic question of what sort of body could be raised given the role of the body in the perdurance of human sinfulness, combined to produce various ingenious answers to pagan commonsensical objections to the doctrine of bodily resurrection. A fifth-century Christian teacher assured a friend stricken with arthritis that at the resurrection God "would make our nature translucent ... [human flesh will] turn molten to regain its solidity," as a base metal turned gold in an alchemist's crucible.

On the subject of Christian ambivalence toward the body in general, see Peter Brown's excellent discussion, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), here citing p. 441.

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