On the Soul and the Resurrection 1 part 6/7

then, by divine power, being moved together toward their kindred and proper parts, and fitting into their own joints;

then being covered with sinews and flesh and skins (which the psalmody calls 'being densely covered'), and a spirit quickening and rousing up all that lay there.

And as for the Apostle's array of the marvels concerning the resurrection, since it is ready to hand for those who come upon it, what need is there for one to speak of it? How, the word says, at a certain command and the sound of trumpets, in a moment of time all that is dead and lies there will be wholly changed into immortal nature? But the angelic voices too, as being manifest to all, we have passed by.

For the Lord says that He will raise the dead not by word alone, but He also works the resurrection itself, beginning from the things nearer to us and less able to be disbelieved among His wonder-workings.

For first, in deadly diseases, He shows His life-giving power, driving away the afflictions by command and by word;

then He raises a child just dead; then a young man already being borne to the tombs, having raised him up from the bier, He gives back to his mother;

after this, Lazarus, who had already lain four days dead and was decomposed, He leads out of the tomb by voice and command, having quickened him who lay there;

then He raises His own Man, pierced through with nails and a spear, from the dead on the third day, bringing forward the marks of the nails and the wound of the spear as a testimony of the resurrection.

Concerning which things I think there is no need to go into detail, since not a single doubt has had anything to say among those who accept the things written above as proven examples.

{Gregory:} "But that," I said, "was not the thing sought;

for that the resurrection will at some time be, and that man will be brought under the impartial judgment, the many of those who hear are [persuaded] both through the scriptural proofs and through the things already examined.

It would remain to consider," she says, "whether the thing hoped for will be like the present."

"Which, if it really were so," I said, "the hope of the resurrection would be a thing to be shunned by men."

For if human bodies are restored again to life such as they become when they cease to live,

then surely some endless calamity is hoped for by men through the resurrection.

For what could be a more pitiable spectacle than when, in extreme old age, bodies are shriveled and transformed into something hideous and shapeless—the flesh itself consumed by time, the skin hardened into wrinkles upon the bones? And the sinews drawn together, because they are no longer plumped up by their natural moisture, and on this account the whole body being contracted, an absurd and pitiable spectacle results, the head bent down upon the knee;

while the hand on this side and that is powerless for its natural activity, and ever quivers involuntarily with a tremor.

And again, what of the bodies of those wasted away by chronic diseases? Which differ so far from bared bones only in that they seem to be covered by a thin and already exhausted skin.

And what of those swollen with dropsical ailments? And the shameful mutilation of those gripped by the sacred disease [leprosy]—what discourse could bring it before the eyes, how the putrefaction, creeping upon them little by little, feeds upon all their organic and sentient members? And of those mutilated in earthquakes, or wars, or from some other cause, who survive in this calamity for some time before death; or of those who from birth have been brought forth together with some deformity, in distorted limbs—what could one say? And concerning newborn infants, both those exposed and those strangled and those destroyed by chance, what is one to reckon, if such are again led back to life? Will it remain in infancy—and what is more wretched than that? Or will it come to the prime of age—and with what milk will nature again nurse them? So that if our body is in every respect to live again the same, the thing expected will be a calamity;

but if not the same, then the one raised will be some other than the one who lay there.

For if a child has fallen [in death], but rises as a grown man, or the reverse, how can one say that the very one who lay there has been raised up, when in the difference of age the fallen one is changed?

for one who sees a grown man instead of the child, and the man in his prime instead of the old man, has beheld one thing in place of another; and the whole instead of the mutilated, and the well-fleshed instead of the wasted, and all the rest likewise—lest, by going through each case, one should bring tedium upon the discourse. If, then, the body does not live again such as it was when it was mingled with the earth, it will not be the dead that rises, but the earth will be molded into another man.

What then is the resurrection to me, if some other rises in my place? For how could I recognize my very self, beholding in myself not myself? For I would not truly be myself, unless I were in all respects the same as myself.

For just as, in the present life, if I held in memory the features of someone—let it be supposed, for the argument, that such a one is thin-haired, thick-lipped, snub-nosed, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, gray in hair and wrinkled in body;

and then, seeking such a one, I were to meet a young man, long-haired, hook-nosed, dark-skinned, and in all the rest of his features quite otherwise;

shall I, knowing this one, think him to be that one? But rather, why should one dwell on the lesser of the objections, leaving aside the stronger? For who does not know that human nature resembles a kind of stream, ever advancing from birth to death through some motion, and ceasing from its motion only when it ceases also from being? But this motion is not a local displacement (for nature does not go out of itself), rather it has its advance through alteration.

And alteration, so long as it is that which it is called, never remains in the same state;

(for how could that which is being altered be preserved in self-sameness?) But just as the fire upon the wick, to appearance, ever seems to be the same (for the perpetual continuity of its motion shows it to be unbroken and united with

itself); but in truth, altogether and at all times succeeding itself, it never remains the same (for the moisture drawn up by the heat is at once kindled into flame and, being burnt up into smoke, is transformed; and ever, by the altering power, the motion of the flame is at work, altering through itself the underlying substance into smoke);

just as, then, when one touches the flame twice at the same point, it is not possible to touch the same flame twice;

(for the swiftness of the alteration does not wait for the one who touches it again a second time, however quickly he does so), but the flame is ever new and fresh, perpetually coming to be, and ever succeeding itself, and never remaining the same;

something of this kind is the case also with the nature of our body.

For the inflow of our nature and its outflow, ever proceeding through the altering motion, then ceases from being moved when it also ceases from life;

but so long as it is in life, it has no rest.

For either it is filled up, or it is breathed out [emptied], or by both alike it is forever passing through [exchange].

If, then, one is not even the same as he was yesterday, but becomes another by the change, when the resurrection brings our body back again to life, surely the one will become a whole multitude of men, so that nothing of the one raised may be lacking—the babe, the infant, the boy, the youth, the man, the father, the old man, and all the stages in between.

And since temperance and licentiousness are wrought through the flesh, and since some endure the painful punishments for the sake of piety, while others, again, grow soft toward these things through bodily sensation—since both of these are displayed through the body—how is it possible for justice to be preserved at the judgment? Or, when the same man has at one time done wrong, but afterward has cleansed himself by repentance, and even if it should happen that he again slips into wrongdoing, and the body, both defiled and undefiled, is, according to the sequence of nature, exchanged, and neither of these has endured continuously—what kind of body will be punished together with the licentious man? The one shriveled in old age, near death? But this was different from the one that wrought the sin—rather it was the body defiled by the passion; and where is the old man? For either he will not rise, and the resurrection is ineffectual;

or this one will be raised, and the subject [guilty one] will escape the penalty.

Let me state yet another of the things brought forward to us by those who have not accepted the doctrine.

Nature, they say, has made nothing idle [purposeless] among the parts in the body.

For some have within us the cause and power of living, without which our life through the flesh cannot be constituted—such as the heart, liver, brain, lung, stomach, and the rest of the inward parts;

and others are assigned to the sense-perceptive movement;

and others are of the secretory and locomotive activity;

and others are well suited for the succession of those who are added on [reproduction].

If, then, the life after these things is to be among the same things [functions], the transition comes about for nothing;

but if the word is true (as indeed it is true), which determines that neither marriage has its place in the life after the resurrection, nor that life then is sustained through eating and drinking, what use will there be of the parts of the body, since the members are no longer hoped for on account of the things for which they now exist in this life? For if the members for marriage are for the sake of marriage, when that is no more, neither do we need the things pertaining to it.

So the hands are for work, the feet for running, the mouth for the reception of food, the teeth for the service of nourishment, the inward parts for digestion, and the outlets of the passages for the casting off of what has become useless.

When, then, those things are no more, how or for what will the things made for their sake exist? So that there is a necessity: either, if the bodily parts are superfluous, destined to contribute nothing to that life, none of the things that now make up our body should exist (for the life is in other things), and one should no longer call such a thing a resurrection, since the individual members, on account of their uselessness for that life, do not rise together with the body; or, if the resurrection is to be plain through all these things,

[then] He who works the resurrection will have fashioned them for that life in vain and to no profit.

But surely one must believe both that the resurrection exists, and that it is not in vain.

Therefore one must attend to the discourse, in order that for us, in all respects, what is fitting in the doctrine may be preserved.

{Macrina:} And when I had gone through these things, "Not ignobly," says the Teacher, "have you, after the manner of so-called rhetoric, made your attack upon the doctrines of the resurrection, having, in a plausible way, run circles around the truth with refutative arguments, so that those who have not very closely examined the mystery of the truth might in some way be affected, as regards the appearance of probability in the argument, and might suppose that the difficulty raised by what has been said was not brought forward beyond what is fitting.

But the truth," she says, "is not so, even if we are unable to counter the argument with rhetoric of like kind; rather, the true word concerning these matters is stored up in the hidden treasuries of wisdom, to come forth into the open then, when we shall be taught the mystery of the resurrection by deed, when there shall no longer be need of words for us, for the manifestation of the things hoped for.

But just as, at night, while many words are stirred among those who keep vigil concerning the brightness of the sun, what it is like, the mere appearing of the ray's grace makes the verbal description idle, so every reasoning that touches the future state only by conjecture shows itself to be worth nothing, when the thing expected comes to us in actual experience.

But since we ought not to leave wholly unexamined the objections brought against us, we shall take up the discussion concerning these matters in this manner.

We must first understand what is the aim of the doctrine concerning the resurrection, and for what reason this has been both spoken by the holy voice and believed.

Therefore, as one might describe such a thing, comprehending it within a certain definition, we shall speak thus:

that the resurrection is the restoration of our nature to its ancient state.

But in the first life, of which God Himself became the Maker, there was, as is likely, neither old age, nor infancy, nor the sufferings caused by manifold diseases, nor any other thing of bodily wretchedness (for it was not likely that God should fashion such things), but human nature was a kind of divine thing, before mankind came to be in the impulse toward evil.

But all these things broke in upon us together with the entrance of evil.

Therefore the life without evil will be under no necessity to be among the things that have come about on account of these [evils].

For just as it follows for one journeying through frosts that his body is chilled, or for one going through hot rays that his surface is blackened—but if one comes to be apart from either of these, he will surely be rid both of the blackening and of the chilling, and one would not reasonably inquire into the thing that results from some cause when the cause is not present;

so our nature, having become subject to passion, was carried along with the things that necessarily follow upon the passible life.

But running back again toward the passionless blessedness, it will no longer be carried along with the things that follow upon evil.

Since, then, all that was mingled into human nature from the irrational life was not in us before mankind fell into passion through evil, we shall, of necessity, having left behind the passion, leave behind together with it also all that is contemplated along with it.

So that one would not reasonably seek, in that life, the things that have come about for us from passion.

For just as, if someone wearing a tattered tunic about him were stripped of his garment, he would no longer behold upon himself the unseemliness of the thing cast off, so we too, having put off that dead and ugly tunic which was cast upon us from the skins of the irrational creatures (and by 'skin' I think I should understand the form of the irrational nature, with which we were clothed when we were made familiar with passion), shall, in the putting off of the tunic, cast off together with it all that of the irrational skin was about us.

And these are the things which it took on from the irrational skin: intercourse, conception, childbearing, filth, suckling, nourishment, evacuation, the gradual growth to maturity, the prime of life, old age, disease, death.

If, then, that [skin] will not be about us, how shall the things from it be left remaining for us? So that it is in vain

—when some other state is hoped for in the life to come—to set oneself against the doctrine of the resurrection by means of the things that have nothing in common with that [life].

For what has shrivelledness, or corpulence, or wasting away, or plethora, or anything else that befalls the fluid nature of bodies, in common with that life, which is estranged from the flowing and transitory course of life [in this world]? The doctrine of the resurrection seeks one thing only: that man be brought into being through generation;

or rather, even as the Gospel says, whether a man has come to be in the world—but whether his life was long or short-lived, or that the manner of his death befell in this way or in another, it is idle to bring under joint examination with the doctrine of the resurrection.

For however we may suppose this to be, by way of hypothesis, it is in every case on the same footing, there being neither difficulty nor ease regarding the resurrection arising from such a difference.

For he who has begun to live must by all means live, the dissolution that has befallen him in the interval through death being set right in the resurrection.

But as to how or when the dissolution comes about, what is that to the resurrection? For the consideration concerning this looks toward another aim: such as how one lived—in pleasure or in grief, according to virtue or to vice, praiseworthily or blameworthily, whether he passed his time pitiably or blessedly.

For all these and the like things are found from the measure of life and from the manner [form] of one's living, and so, for the judgment of the things lived, it would be necessary for the Judge to examine passion, and mutilation, and disease, and old age, and the prime of life, and youth, and wealth, and poverty;

namely, how each man, having passed through each of these, well or ill traversed the life allotted to him, and whether he became receptive of many good things, or of many evil things, in a long span of time, or did not at all from the very start lay hold of either of these, having ceased to live in an imperfect understanding [in infancy]? But when God, through the resurrection, brings nature back to the first fashioning of man, it would be idle to speak of such things, and to suppose, by means of such objections, that the power of God is hindered toward its aim.

And His aim is one: that, when the whole fullness of our nature has been brought to perfection through each individual man—some having been immediately cleansed from evil already in this life, others having been healed afterward through fire at the appointed times, and others having been ignorant, during the life here, of the experience alike of good and of evil—He may set before all the participation in the good things that are in Him, which, the Scripture says, neither eye has seen, nor ear received, nor has it become attainable by reasonings.

And this is nothing else, at least according to my reasoning, than to come to be in God Himself;

for the good that is above hearing and eye and heart would be that very thing which transcends the whole.

And the difference between the life lived according to virtue or vice will, in the hereafter, be shown chiefly in this: in the partaking of the hoped-for blessedness sooner or more slowly.

For surely the prolongation of the healing will be proportioned, in every case, to the measure of the evil that has come to be in each.

And the healing of the soul would be the purging away of evil;

but this is not possible to accomplish without a painful condition, as has been examined in what preceded.

But one might rather recognize the superfluity and impropriety of the objections, by stooping to look into the depth of the apostolic wisdom.

For when, to the Corinthians, he makes clear the mystery concerning these things—perhaps with those very people too putting forward to him these same things which are now brought forward by those who attack the doctrine to overthrow what has been believed—checking the boldness of their ignorance by his own authority, he speaks thus:

'How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come? Fool,' he says, 'what you sow is not made alive unless it dies; and what you sow, you do not sow the body that shall be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of some one of the other seeds;

but God gives it a body as He has willed.' For here he seems to me to stop the mouths of those who are ignorant of the proper measures of nature, and who set the divine power over against their own strength [measure it by their own capacity], and who suppose that just so much is possible to God as

human comprehension allows;

but that which is beyond us also surpasses the power of God [in their reckoning].

For he who asks the Apostle, 'How are the dead raised?'—as though declaring it to be impossible for the scattered elements of the body to come again into concurrence;

and, on the ground that this is impossible, and that no other body remains apart from the concurrence of the elements, this one, after the manner of the clever among debaters, concludes by a certain logical sequence what he had assumed: If a body is a concurrence of elements, and the reuniting of these a second time is impossible, what kind of body will those who rise again use? This thing, then, which seemed to be woven together for them by some technical cleverness, he [Paul] named folly—the folly of those who have not perceived, in the rest of creation, the surpassing greatness of the divine power.

For, leaving aside the loftier wonders of God—by which he could have brought the hearer into perplexity, such as: what is the heavenly body, and whence; what is the body of the sun, or that of the moon, or that which appears among the stars; the aether, the air, the water, the earth?—he refutes the inconsiderateness of the objectors from the things familiar to us and more common.

'Does not even agriculture teach you,' he says, 'that he is a fool who measures the surpassing greatness of the divine power against his own measure? Whence come the bodies that grow around the seeds? And what leads the way for their sprouting? Is it not death—if indeed death is the dissolution of that which is compounded? For the seed would not come up into a shoot unless it were dissolved in the soil, and became loose and full of pores, so as to be mingled, by its own quality, with the moisture lying near it, and thus to be transformed into root and shoot, and not even to remain in this, but to change into a stalk, girded, by the joints in between, as by certain bands, so as to be able to bear up the ear, weighed down with fruit, in an upright form.'

Where, then, were these things concerning the wheat, before its dissolution in the soil? But surely it is from there [from that very seed] that this comes.

For if that one had not first existed, neither would the ear have come to be.

Just as, then, the body in the ear appears from the seed, the divine power fashioning this out of that very thing, and it is neither in every respect the same as the seed, nor altogether other;

so also, he says, the mystery of the resurrection is already interpreted to you beforehand through the wonders worked in the seeds—since the divine power, in the abundance of its authority, not only gives back to you again that very thing which was dissolved, but adds great and beautiful things, by which nature is fashioned for you into something yet more magnificent.

'It is sown,' he says, 'in corruption, it is raised in incorruption;

it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power;

it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory;

it is sown a natural [psychical] body, it is raised a spiritual body.' For just as the wheat, after being dissolved in the soil, having left behind the smallness in its quantity and the peculiarity of its shape in quality, did not abandon itself, but, remaining in itself, becomes an ear, differing very greatly from its own self in size, and beauty, and variety, and shape;

in the same way, human nature too, having let go in death all the properties about it which it had acquired through the passible condition—I mean dishonor, corruption, weakness, the difference according to age—does not abandon itself, but, as into a kind of ear, is transformed toward incorruption, and glory, and honor, and power, and perfection in every respect, and toward the no longer having its life administered by the natural properties, but passing over into a certain spiritual and passionless state.

For this is the property of the natural [psychical] body: ever, through some flow and motion, to be altered from the state in which it is, and to change into another.

For the things which we see not in men only, but also in plants and in cattle, none of these will be left behind in that life.

And it seems to me that the apostolic word in all respects supports our supposition concerning the resurrection, and shows that very thing which our definition

contains, when it says that the resurrection is nothing other than the restoration of our nature to its ancient state.

For since, in the first creation of the world, we have learned this from the Scripture, that first the earth brought forth the herb of grass, as the word says, then from the shoot came the seed, which, when it had fallen down upon the earth, the same kind that grew from the beginning ran up again;

and the divine Apostle says that this also comes to pass in the resurrection.

And not only this do we learn from him—that the human race is transformed toward what is most magnificent—but also that the thing hoped for is nothing other than that which was in the first state.

For since, in the beginning, it was not the seed [that came] from the ear, but the seed [came] from there [from the first plant];

but afterward this [ear] grows around the seed, the sequence of the example clearly shows that all the blessedness that is to sprout up for us through the resurrection returns to the grace that was from the beginning.

For being, in the beginning, in a certain way ourselves an ear too, since by the scorching heat of evil we were withered, the earth, having received us when we were dissolved through death, will again, in the spring of the resurrection, display as an ear this bare grain of the body—large, and ample, and upright, and stretching up to the heavenly height, adorned in incorruption and in the rest of the God-befitting marks, instead of a stalk or a beard.

For this corruptible must put on incorruption (1 Cor 15:53). And incorruption, and glory, and honor, and power are confessed to be proper to the divine nature, which formerly belonged to him who was made according to the image, and is hoped for again hereafter.

For the first ear was the first man, Adam.

But since, by the entrance of evil, nature was divided into a multitude—as the fruit comes to be in the ear;

so we, each individually stripped of that form belonging to the ear, and mingled with the earth, are again, in the resurrection, grown up anew according to the primal beauty, having become, instead of one first ear, countless myriads of harvest-fields.

And the life lived according to virtue has, in this, its difference from vice: that those who in this life, during their lifetime, have cultivated themselves through virtue, appear at once in the perfect ear;

but for those in whom, through vice, the grain has become faded and wind-blasted during this life—the power in the psychical seed—just as those skilled in such matters say that the things called 'horn-struck' [seeds spoiled by frost] come to be;

so these too, even if they sprout up through the resurrection, will have great severity from the Judge, inasmuch as they are not strong enough to run up to the form of the ear, and to become that which we were before the fall upon the earth.

But the remedy of the one who has charge of the produce is the gathering of the tares and the thorns that have sprung up together with the seed, all the power that nourishes the root having flowed off to the spurious growth, through which the genuine seed remained unnourished and unfruitful, entangled with the unnatural growth.

When, then, all that is spurious and alien has been plucked out from the nourishing [stock] and has come to vanishing—the fire having consumed away that which is contrary to nature, when it is delivered over to the eternal fire—then nature will thrive well in these too, and will be ripened into fruit through such tending, having at length, after long cycles, received back the common form which was laid upon us at the beginning from God.

And blessed are those for whom the perfect beauty of the ears of grain springs up at once together with the things that grow through the resurrection.

And we say these things not as though some bodily difference will appear in the resurrection between those who have lived according to virtue or vice—so as to think the one imperfect as regards the body, and to suppose the other to have the perfect body;

but just as, in this life, the prisoner and the free man have their bodies in like manner, yet there is a great difference between the two as regards pleasure and pain;

so, I think, one ought to reckon the difference between the good and the evil in that intervening time.

For the perfecting of the bodies that grow up out of corruption is said by the Apostle to come to be in incorruption, and glory, and honor, and power;

but the diminution of such things does not