Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 85/87

When all these things have been considered and discussed according to our small measure, this sum is reached: that in the resurrection of the flesh the magnitude of bodies shall everlastingly have those dimensions which the formative principle of youth, implanted in each body, possessed—whether the body was yet to be brought to perfection or had already been perfected—the fitting comeliness being preserved also in the proportions of all the members. And in order that this comeliness be preserved, if anything shall have been taken away from some unseemly excess situated in any one part, so that it be scattered throughout the whole, in such a way that neither is it lost nor is the harmony of the parts anywhere broken: it is not absurd that we should believe that something can thereby even be added to the stature of the body, when that is distributed to all the parts, so that they may keep their seemliness, which, if it were heaped monstrously in one part, would surely not be becoming.

But if it be maintained that each one shall rise in that stature of body in which he died, one need not contend stubbornly against it; only let all deformity, all weakness, all sluggishness, and all corruption be absent, together with anything else that does not befit that kingdom in which the sons of the resurrection and of the promise shall be equal to the angels of God—if not in body, not in age, yet certainly in felicity. CHAPTER 21. On the newness of the spiritual body, into which the flesh of the saints shall be changed. There shall therefore be restored whatever perished from living bodies or, after death, from corpses; and together with that which remained in the tombs, it shall rise, changed from the old condition of the animal body into the newness of the spiritual body, clothed in incorruption and immortality.

But even if by some grievous accident or by the savagery of enemies the whole be utterly ground into dust and dispersed, as far as it is possible, into the air or into the waters, and be suffered nowhere at all to remain: in no way can it be withdrawn from the omnipotence of the Creator, but not a hair of its head shall perish. The flesh shall therefore be made subject to the spirit—a spiritual flesh, yet nonetheless flesh, not spirit; just as the spirit itself was once made subject to the flesh—a carnal spirit, yet nonetheless spirit, not flesh. Of this we have proof in the deformity of our punishment. For those were carnal not according to the flesh but assuredly according to the spirit, to whom the Apostle says: 'I could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to carnal';

and a man is in this life called spiritual in such a way that he is yet carnal in body and sees another law in his members warring against the law of his mind; but he shall be spiritual even in body, when this same flesh shall have so risen that what is written may come to pass: 'It is sown an animal body, it shall rise a spiritual body.' But what the grace of the spiritual body may be, and how great, since it has not yet come into our experience, I fear lest every utterance that is brought forth concerning it be rash. Yet nevertheless, because the joy of our hope must not be kept silent, for the sake of God's praise, and because it was said out of the inmost marrow of burning holy love: 'Lord, I have loved the beauty of thy house':

let us, with His own help, conjecture as best we can from His gifts, which He lavishes upon good and evil alike in this most calamitous life, how great that gift is which, not yet having experienced it, we are indeed unable worthily to express. For I pass over the time when He made man upright; I pass over that life of the two spouses, happy in the fruitfulness of paradise, since it was so brief that not even their offspring came to perceive it: in this life which we know, in which we still are, whose temptations—nay, which is wholly a temptation, so long as we are in it, however much we may advance—we cease not to endure, who shall be able to unfold what the tokens are, around the human race, of the goodness of God? CHAPTER 22.

On the miseries and evils to which the human race is justly subject through the first transgression, and from which none is delivered except by the grace of Christ. For as concerns the first origin, that the whole offspring of mortals was condemned is attested by this very life—if it ought to be called a life—so full of so many and so great evils. For what else does that horrible depth of ignorance indicate, out of which every error arises, and which receives all the sons of Adam into a kind of dark bosom, so that man cannot be freed from it without toil, grief, and fear?

What of love itself for so many vain and harmful things, and from this the biting cares, perturbations, sorrows, fears, mad joys, discords, quarrels, wars, plots, fits of anger, enmities, deceit, flattery, fraud, theft, robbery, treachery, pride, ambition, envy, murders, parricides, cruelty, savagery, wickedness, lust, wantonness, impudence, shamelessness, unchastity;

fornications, adulteries, incests, and against the nature of either sex so many defilements and uncleannesses which it is shameful even to name, sacrileges, heresies, blasphemies, perjuries, oppressions of the innocent, calumnies, circumventions, prevarications, false witnessings, unjust judgments, violences, robberies, and whatever evils of such a kind do not come to mind and yet do not depart from this human life? These indeed are the evils of men, yet coming from that root of error and perverse love with which every son of Adam is born.

For who is ignorant with how great an ignorance of the truth—which is already manifest in infants—and with how great an abundance of vain desire—which begins to appear in children—a man comes into this life? So that, if he be allowed to live as he wills and to do whatever he wills, he would arrive at all or many of those crimes and outrages which I have mentioned and which I could not mention. But since the divine governance does not in every way abandon the condemned, and since God does not, in His anger, withhold His mercies, prohibition and instruction keep watch against those darknesses with which we are born, in the very senses of the human race, and are set against these onslaughts—though they themselves too are full of toils and sorrows.

For what is the meaning of the manifold fears that are employed to restrain the vanities of little ones? What of the tutors, what of the masters, what of the rods, what of the straps, what of the canes, what of that discipline by which Holy Scripture says that the sides of a beloved son are to be beaten, lest he grow up untamed and, when already hardened, be tamed either with difficulty or perhaps not at all? What is accomplished by all these punishments, except that ignorance be vanquished and depraved desire bridled, the evils with which we come into this world? For why is it that what we remember with toil we forget without toil; what we learn with toil we are ignorant of without toil; what we are vigorous in with toil we are sluggish in without toil?

Does it not appear from this whither, as by its own weight, our vicious nature is so prone and inclined, and how great a help it needs in order to be freed from this? Sloth, laziness, idleness, negligence are surely vices by which toil is shunned, since toil itself, even that which is useful, is a punishment. But besides the childish punishments, without which what their elders—who scarcely will anything usefully—desire cannot be learned, by how many and how great punishments is the human race driven, which pertain not to the malice and wickedness of the unjust, but to the common condition and misery? Who can recount it in any speech? Who can comprehend it in any thought?

How great is the fear, how great the calamity, from bereavements and mourning, from losses and condemnations, from the deceptions and lies of men, from false suspicions, from all violent crimes and the misdeeds of others! Since from these come plundering and captivity, chains and prisons, exiles and tortures, the amputation of limbs and the deprivation of the senses, the abuse of the body to satisfy the obscene lust of one who abuses it, and many other horrible things that often occur. And what of the innumerable accidents which are feared for the body from without—heat and cold, storms, rains, floods, lightning, thunder, hail, thunderbolts, the quakings and gapings of the earth?

the crushings of ruins, the buttings and terror or even the malice of beasts of burden, the so many poisons of shrubs, waters, airs, and beasts, the bites of wild animals merely troublesome or even deadly, the madness which comes from a rabid dog—so that even a beast gentle and friendly to its own master is sometimes feared more violently and bitterly than lions and serpents, and renders the man whom it has perchance contaminated so rabid by the pestilential infection that he is dreaded worse than any beast by his parents, spouse, and children! What evils do seafarers suffer! What those who travel by land! Who walks anywhere not subject to unforeseen accidents? A certain man returning home from the forum fell, though his feet were sound.

He broke his foot, and from that wound he ended this life. What seems safer than one sitting? Eli the priest fell from the chair on which he was sitting, and died. Farmers—nay rather all men—how many and how great accidents do they fear, from heaven and earth and from destructive animals, for the fruits of the fields! Yet they are wont at last to be secure concerning the grain once gathered and stored. But for certain men, as we know, an unforeseen river cast out and carried off from the granaries the best harvest of grain, while the men fled. Against the thousand-shaped assaults of demons, who trusts in his own innocence?

Since indeed, lest anyone should presume to trust, they sometimes so torment even baptized infants—than whom assuredly nothing is more innocent—that in them especially, God permitting this, there may be shown forth both the lamentable calamity of this life and the felicity of another to be longed for. But now, concerning the body itself, so many evils of diseases arise that not even in the books of physicians are they all comprehended; and in very many, indeed in almost all of them, the very aids and medicines are themselves torments, so that men are rescued from the destruction of their pains by a painful help. Has not raging thirst driven thirsting men to this, that they drank even human urine, or even their own?

Has not hunger driven them to this, that they could not abstain from human flesh, and devoured men found dead—nay, men slain for this very purpose—and not just any strangers, but even mothers their own children, with incredible cruelty which raging famine wrought? Lastly, sleep itself, which has properly received the name of rest—who can in words unfold how unquiet it often is through the visions of dreams, and with how great terrors, though of false things, which it so presents and in a manner expresses that we cannot distinguish them from true ones, that it disturbs the wretched soul and the senses? By which falseness of visions even waking men, in certain diseases and poisonings, are more miserably agitated;

although, by a manifold variety of deceit, malignant demons sometimes deceive even sound men with such visions, so that, even if they cannot lead them over to their own side through these, they nevertheless delude their senses by the mere appetite of in some way persuading them of falsehood. From this so wretched life, as from a kind of hell, none is delivered save the grace of our Savior Christ, our God and Lord (for this is the very name Jesus; for it is interpreted Savior), chiefly lest after this it receive a more wretched and everlasting one—not a life, but a death.

For although in this life there are, through holy things and holy persons, great consolations of cures, yet these very benefits are not always granted even to those who ask, lest for the sake of this religion be sought, which is rather to be sought for the sake of another life, where there will be no evils at all; and to this end grace assists all the better in these evils, that the more faithful, the more brave-hearted they may be borne. To which thing the learned of this world say that philosophy also is profitable—which, says Tully, the gods have granted in its true form to certain few; nor, he says, has there been given to men, or could there be given, any greater gift from them:

to such a degree that even they themselves, against whom we contend, have been in some way compelled to confess that divine grace is to be found in possessing philosophy—not any sort of philosophy, but the true one. Furthermore, if to a few it has been divinely granted to possess the one and only help of true philosophy against the miseries of this life, this too sufficiently shows that the human race has been condemned to pay the penalties of its miseries. But just as this, as they confess, is no greater divine gift, so it is to be believed to be given by no god save by Him whom even those who worship many gods say to be greater than none. CHAPTER 23. On those things which, besides the evils common to the good and the evil, pertain especially to the labor of the righteous.

Besides these evils of this life common to the good and the evil, the righteous have in it also certain labors of their own, by which they wage war against vices and are engaged in the temptations and perils of such battles. For sometimes more vehemently, sometimes more remissly, the flesh ceases not to lust against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, so that we do not do the things that we will—by consuming all evil concupiscence—but rather, so far as we can with divine help, we subdue it to ourselves by not consenting to it, keeping watch in continual vigils.

lest a probable-seeming opinion deceive us, lest a cunning discourse mislead us, lest the darkness of some error spread itself over us, lest what is good be believed evil or what is evil be believed good, lest fear call us back from the things that are to be done, lest desire cast us headlong into the things that are not to be done, lest the sun go down upon our wrath, lest enmities provoke us to the repayment of evil for evil, lest dishonorable or immoderate sadness absorb us, lest an ungrateful mind bring on torpor in the bestowing of benefits, lest a good conscience be wearied by slanderous rumors, lest rash suspicion about another deceive us with our own judgment, lest another's false opinion about us break us, lest sin reign in our mortal body to obey its desires, lest our members

be presented to sin as weapons of iniquity, lest the eye follow concupiscence, lest the desire of avenging conquer us, lest the gaze or the thought linger upon that which delights wickedly, lest a base or unseemly word be willingly heard, lest that be done which is not lawful even if it pleases, lest in this war most full of labors and perils victory be hoped to be won by our own strength, or, once won, be attributed to our own strength, but rather to the grace of Him of whom the Apostle says:

'But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ'; who also in another place says: 'In all these things we more than conquer through Him who loved us.' Let us nevertheless know that, with however great valor of fighting we resist the vices, or even overcome and subdue the vices, so long as we are in this body there cannot but be wanting to us some ground on which we may say to God: 'Forgive us our debts.' But in that kingdom, where we shall be forever with immortal bodies, there will be for us neither any battles nor any debts; which would nowhere and never have existed, if our nature had remained as it was rightly created.

And by this our very conflict, in which we are imperiled and from which we desire to be freed by the final victory, pertains to the evils of this life, which by the testimony of so many and so great evils we prove to be condemned. CHAPTER 24. On the good things with which the Creator has filled even this life that is subject to condemnation. Now it must be considered with what good things, and how many, the goodness of Him who administers all that He has created has filled this very misery of the human race, in which the justice of Him who punishes is praised. First, that blessing which He had pronounced before sin, saying, 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth,' He willed not to withhold even after sin, and the fruitfulness once granted remained in the condemned stock;

nor could the fault of sin take away that marvelous power of seeds—nay, even more marvelous, that by which seeds themselves are produced—implanted in human bodies and in a manner interwoven into them, the fault by which the necessity of death was also fastened upon us; but both run together, as it were in that river and torrent of the human race: the evil which is drawn from the parent, and the good which is bestowed by the Creator. In the original evil there are two things, sin and punishment; in the original good there are two others, propagation and conformation. But as far as our present intention is concerned, of the evils—of which one comes from our boldness, that is, sin, the other from the judgment of God, that is, punishment—we have now said enough.

Now I have set out to speak of the good things of God, which He has bestowed, or even up to now bestows, upon a nature even thus vitiated and condemned. For neither in condemning did He take away the whole of what He had given—otherwise it would not exist at all—nor did He remove it from His own power, even when He penally subjected it to the devil; since He does not estrange even the devil himself from His own dominion; seeing that, in order that the nature even of the devil himself may subsist, He brings it about who supremely is and brings it about that whatever in any way exists should exist. Of those two things, therefore, which we said to be good things flowing, as it were, from a certain fountain of His goodness even into a nature vitiated by sin and condemned by punishment, He bestowed propagation by the blessing among the first works of the world, from which works He rested on the seventh day;

but conformation lies in that work of His by which He works even until now. For if He should withdraw His efficacious power from things, they will neither be able to advance and to accomplish their times by their allotted motions, nor will they persist at all to any degree in that which they have been created to be. Thus, then, God created man in such a way that He might add to him a certain fertility, by which he might propagate other men, begetting in them also the very possibility of propagating—not the necessity: from which men, however, whom He willed, God took it away, and they were barren; yet He did not take it away from the human race, the blessing once given to the first two spouses by a general grant. This propagation, therefore, although it has not been taken away by sin, is nevertheless not itself such as it would have been, had no one sinned.

For since man, having been placed in honor, after he transgressed, was compared to the beasts, he generates in like manner; yet in him a certain spark, as it were, of reason has not been utterly extinguished, in which he was made to the image of God. But if to this propagation conformation were not applied, neither would it proceed into the forms and modes of its own kind. For if men had not had intercourse and God nonetheless willed to fill the lands with men, just as He created one without the commingling of male and female, so He could create all; but those who have intercourse cannot be begetters unless He creates. As, therefore, the Apostle says concerning spiritual instruction, by which a man is formed to piety and righteousness:

'Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase': so also here it may be said: 'Neither he who has intercourse nor he who sows is anything, but God who forms; nor is the mother, who carries the conceived and nourishes the offspring, anything, but God who gives the increase.' For by that very operation by which He works even until now, He brings it about that the seeds unfold their numbers and evolve from certain hidden and invisible wrappings into the visible forms of this beauty which we behold; He, joining and connecting in marvelous ways the incorporeal and the corporeal nature—the one set above, the other made subject—makes a living being.

This work of His is so great and marvelous that not only in man—who is a rational animal and on this account more excellent and more outstanding than all earthly living things—but even in any most minute little fly, it brings astonishment to the mind of one who considers it well, and engenders praise of the Creator. He, therefore, gave to the human soul a mind, in which reason and intelligence are, as it were, asleep in the infant, as though they were nothing, to be awakened and brought forth, namely, with the advance of age, by which it may be capable of knowledge and learning, and apt for the perception of truth and the love of the good;

by which capacity it may drink in wisdom and be endowed with the virtues, by which prudently, bravely, temperately, and justly it may contend against errors and the other inborn vices, and overcome them by the desire of nothing save that supreme and immutable good. And even if it does not do this, who can fittingly express or conceive how great a good, how marvelous a work of the Almighty, is that very capacity for such goods, divinely established in the rational nature?

For besides the arts of living well and of arriving at immortal felicity—which are called virtues and are granted by the sole grace of God which is in Christ to the children of promise and of the kingdom—have not so many and such great arts been discovered and exercised by human ingenuity, partly necessary, partly for pleasure, that this so excellent power of mind and reason, even in those things which it seeks as superfluous, nay even as dangerous and pernicious, bears witness how great a good it has in its nature, whence it could either discover or learn or exercise such things? To what marvelous, what stupendous works of clothing and of buildings has human industry attained; what progress it has made in agriculture, what in navigation;

what it has devised and accomplished in the making of vessels of every kind, or even in the variety of statues and paintings; what marvels for spectators in the theaters, things incredible to hear, it has contrived to be done and exhibited; what and how great things it has discovered in capturing, killing, and taming irrational animals; against men themselves how many kinds of poisons, how many of weapons, how many of engines of war, and for the protection and restoration of mortal health how many medicines and aids it has comprehended; for the pleasure of the palate how many seasonings and incitements of gluttony it has discovered; for indicating and persuading thoughts what a multitude and variety of signs, in which words and letters hold the chief place;

for delighting minds what ornaments of eloquence, what abundance of diverse poems; for soothing the ears how many musical instruments, what modes of melody it has devised; how great a skill of measurements and of numbers, and with how great sagacity it has comprehended the courses and orders of the stars; with how great a knowledge of worldly things it has filled itself—who could utter it, especially if we should wish not to heap all things together in a mass, but to dwell upon them singly? Finally, in the very defending of errors and falsehoods, how great the talents of philosophers and heretics have shone forth, who could sufficiently estimate?

For we are now speaking of the nature of the human mind, by which this mortal life is adorned, not of the faith and the way of truth, by which that immortal life is acquired. Since the Founder of so great a nature is assuredly the true and supreme God, who administers and possesses supreme power and supreme justice over all that He has made, never in truth would it have fallen into these miseries, and would not, out of these, have gone into eternal ones—save only for those who shall be freed—had not an exceedingly great sin gone before in the first man, from whom the rest sprang. But now even in the body itself, although it is common to us with the beasts in mortality and is found weaker than many of them, how great the goodness of God, how great the providence of so great a Creator appears!

Are not the places of the senses and the other members so disposed in it, and the very appearance and figure and stature of the whole body so fashioned, that it shows itself to have been made for the ministry of the rational soul? For man was not created prone toward the earth, as we see the animals devoid of reason to be; but the form of his body, erect toward heaven, admonishes him to relish the things that are above. Furthermore, the marvelous mobility which has been bestowed upon the tongue and the hands, apt and fitting for speaking and writing and for accomplishing the works of very many arts and offices, does it not sufficiently show to what kind of soul such a body has been joined that it might serve it? Although, even apart from the necessities of working, there is so great

a harmonious proportion of the parts, so numerous, and it answers to itself with so beautiful a parity, that you would not know whether in its forming greater regard was had for usefulness than for comeliness. For assuredly we see nothing created in the body for the sake of usefulness which does not also have a place of comeliness. And this would appear to us more, if we knew the numerical proportions of the measurements by which all things are connected and fitted to one another; which perhaps, with respect to those things which stand out on the surface, human ingenuity could investigate with set labor; but those which are hidden and removed from our sight—such as the great intricacy of veins and nerves and viscera, the secrets of the vital parts—no one can discover.

For although the diligence of certain physicians whom they call anatomists has cruelly cut up the bodies of the dead, or even, among the hands of one cutting and probing, the bodies of the dying, and has searched out all the hidden things in human flesh inhumanly enough, in order to learn what and in what manner and in what places it should be treated: nevertheless those numerical proportions of which I speak—by which the fitting-together which is called harmonia in Greek, as of some instrument, both outwardly and inwardly stands constituted of the whole body—what shall I say? No one has been able to discover them, which no one has dared to seek?

And if they could have been known, then even in the inner viscera, which display no comeliness, the beauty of the rational principle would so delight that it would be preferred, by the judgment of the very mind which uses the eyes, to every apparent form which pleases the eyes. There are, however, certain things so placed in the body that they have only comeliness, not also use; as the male breast has nipples, as the face has a beard, which the smooth faces of women—who, being assuredly the weaker, it would be safer to protect—show to be not for protection but for manly adornment. If, therefore, there is no member—among those at least which are conspicuous (whereof no one doubts)—which is so accommodated to some function that it is not also comely;

There are, moreover, some things which have only beauty and no usefulness; and from this, I think, it is easily understood that in the constitution of the body dignity was preferred to necessity. For necessity will indeed pass away, and a time will come when we shall enjoy one another's beauty alone, without any lust; and this is above all to be ascribed to the praise of the Creator, to whom it is said in the psalm: 'You have clothed yourself with confession and comeliness.' Now as for the remaining beauty and usefulness of creation, which has been granted by divine bounty to be beheld and made use of by man—even though he is cast forth and condemned to these labors and miseries—by what discourse can it be encompassed?