As, therefore, there is a measure of each single part, so of the whole body, which consists of all its parts, there is assuredly a measure of fullness, concerning which it was said: 'Unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ.' This fullness he also called to mind in that place where he says of Christ: 'And Him He gave as head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.' But if this were to be referred to the form of the resurrection, in which each one will be, what would hinder us, when 'man' is named, from understanding woman also, so that we take 'man' as put for 'human being'? Just as in that which is said, 'Blessed is the man that fears the Lord,' there too are surely included the women who fear the Lord.
[XIX] What now shall I answer concerning hair and nails? Once it has been understood that nothing shall perish from the body in such a way that anything be deformed in the body, it is at the same time understood that those things which would have made a deformed excess will accrue to the mass itself, not to the places in which the form of the members would be made unsightly. Just as if a vessel were made from clay, which, reduced again to the same clay, were made wholly anew from the whole, it would not be necessary that that part of the clay which had been in the handle should return to the handle, or that which had made the bottom should again make the bottom—provided only that the whole returned into the whole, that is, that all that clay returned into the whole vessel with no part of itself lost.
Wherefore, if the hairs so often shorn and the nails so often clipped were to return to their places in an unsightly manner, they shall not return thus; nor yet shall they perish for anyone rising again, since they shall be turned into the same flesh—into whatever place of the body they may hold there—by a changing of the matter, with the fitting proportion of the parts preserved. And yet what the Lord says, 'A hair of your head shall not perish,' may much more fitly be understood as spoken not of the length but of the number of the hairs; whence He also says elsewhere: 'The very hairs of your head are all numbered.' Nor would I say this because I think that anything will perish from any body which naturally belonged to it;
but that what had been born deformed (assuredly for no other reason than that hence too might be shown how penal this mortal condition is) shall so return that, with the integrity of its substance preserved, the deformity shall perish. For if a human craftsman can melt down a statue which for some reason he had made deformed, and render it most beautiful, so that nothing of the substance but only the deformity perishes; and if anything in that former figure stood out unbecomingly and did not agree with the symmetry of the parts, he does not cut off and separate it from the whole from which he had made it, but so distributes and mingles it throughout the whole that he neither makes any ugliness nor diminishes the quantity: what is to be thought of the almighty Craftsman?
Shall He, then, not be able so to take away and destroy any deformities of human bodies—not only the usual ones, but even those rare and monstrous ones which suit this wretched life but are abhorrent to that future felicity of the saints—so that whatever of them produce the unseemly, though natural, excrescences of bodily substance may be removed with no diminution of it? And by this the lean and the fat have nothing to fear, lest there too they be such as, if they could, they would not have wished to be even here. For all beauty of body is a harmony of the parts with a certain agreeableness of color. But where there is no harmony of parts, something offends either because it is distorted, or because it is too little, or because it is too much.
Accordingly, there will be no deformity, such as is produced by the incongruity of the parts, where both what is distorted shall be corrected, and what is less than is fitting shall be supplied from whence the Creator knows, and what is more than is fitting shall be taken away, with the integrity of the matter preserved. Moreover, how great will be the agreeableness of color, where the just shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father! Which brightness in the body of Christ, when He rose again, is to be believed to have been hidden from the eyes of the disciples rather than to have been lacking. For human and infirm sight could not have borne it, at the time when He had to be gazed upon by His own in such a way that He could be recognized.
To which end it also served that He showed to those who touched Him the scars of His wounds, and that He even took food and drink, not from need of nourishment, but by that power whereby He was able to do this also. But when something is not seen, although present, by those to whom other things which are equally present are seen—as we say that that brightness was present unseen by those to whom other things were seen—it is called 'aorasia' in Greek, which our translators, unable to render it in Latin, in the book of Genesis interpreted as 'blindness.' For the Sodomites suffered this, when they sought the door of the righteous man and could not find it.
For if it had been the blindness by which it comes about that nothing can be seen, they would have sought not the door by which to enter, but guides for the way by whom they might be led away from there. But somehow we are so affected by love of the blessed martyrs that we would wish, in that kingdom, to see in their bodies the scars of the wounds which they bore for the name of Christ; and perhaps we shall see them. For in them there will be no deformity, but dignity; and a certain beauty will shine forth—though in the body, yet not of the body but of virtue. Nor, however, if some members have been cut off and taken from the martyrs, shall they on that account be without those very members in the resurrection of the dead, to whom it was said: 'A hair of your head shall not perish.'
But if it will be seemly in that new age that the marks of glorious wounds be seen in that immortal flesh, then where the members were struck or cut so as to be severed, there the scars will appear—yet with those same members restored, not lost. Although, therefore, all the defects which befell the body will then not exist, nevertheless the marks of virtue are not to be reckoned or called defects. [XX] But far be it that, for the raising up of bodies and their restoration to life, the omnipotence of the Creator should not be able to recall all that either beasts or fire have consumed, or that has collapsed into dust or ash, or been dissolved into moisture, or exhaled into the air.
Far be it that any recess or secret place of nature should so receive anything withdrawn from our senses that it should either escape the knowledge or elude the power of the Creator of all things. Cicero, that great authority among the pagans themselves, wishing to define God as best he could, says: 'It is a certain Mind, loosed and free, separated from all mortal admixture, perceiving and moving all things, and itself endowed with everlasting motion.' This, moreover, he found in the teachings of the great philosophers. That I may therefore speak according to them: how can anything either lie hidden from Him who perceives all things, or irrevocably flee from Him who moves all things?
Hence now also that question is to be resolved, which seems more difficult than the rest, where it is asked: when the flesh of a dead man becomes even the flesh of another living man, to which of them rather shall it be restored in the resurrection? For if anyone, wasted by famine and driven to it, feed upon the corpses of men—an evil which both ancient history attests has sometimes happened, and the unhappy experiences of our own times have taught—will anyone by truthful reasoning contend that the whole of it was digested through the lower passages, and that nothing thereof was changed and converted into his flesh, since the very leanness which was and is no longer sufficiently indicates what losses were made good by those foods?
And so I have already set forth a little before some things which ought to avail for resolving this knot too. For whatever flesh famine has consumed has surely been exhaled into the air, whence we said that Almighty God can recall what has fled. That flesh, therefore, shall be restored to the man in whom human flesh first began to be. For by the other man it is to be reckoned as taken on loan, as it were; and this, like a debt, must be repaid to him from whom it was taken. But his own flesh, which famine had emptied out, shall be restored to him by Him who can recall even what has been exhaled. And yet, even if it had perished in all ways and no matter of it had remained in any hiding-places of nature, the Omnipotent would repair it from whatever source He willed. But because of the sentence of Truth, whereby it was said:
'A hair of your head shall not perish,' it is absurd that we should think that, since a hair of a man cannot perish, such great quantities of flesh eaten and consumed by famine could have perished. All these things having been considered and treated according to our small measure, this sum is drawn: that in the resurrection of the flesh the magnitude of bodies shall have forever those measures which the constitution of youth, implanted in each body to be perfected or already perfected, was having; with the fitting comeliness preserved also in the proportions of all the members. And that this comeliness may be preserved, if anything be taken from some unbecoming largeness situated in some part, which may be spread throughout the whole, so that it neither perish and the harmony of the parts be everywhere maintained:
it is not absurd that we should believe something can thence even be added to the body's stature, when it is distributed among all the parts—so that they may keep their comeliness—which, if it were enormously in one part, would surely be unbecoming. Or if it be contended that each shall rise again in that stature of body in which he died, we need not strive contentiously against it; only let there be absent all deformity, all infirmity, all sluggishness, and all corruption, and whatever else 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.
[XXI] 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 again, changed from the oldness of the animal body into the newness of the spiritual body, clothed with incorruption and immortality. But even if by some grievous chance or by the savagery of enemies it be utterly ground into dust and scattered into the air or into the waters, so that, as far as can be, it be nowhere suffered to exist at all: in no way shall it be able to be withdrawn from the omnipotence of the Creator, but a hair of the head therein shall not perish. There shall therefore be flesh subject to the spirit, spiritual flesh, but yet flesh, not spirit; just as the spirit itself was carnal, subject to the flesh, but yet spirit, not flesh.
Of this we have proof in the deformity of our penalty. For they 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 unto spiritual, but as unto carnal'; and a man is called spiritual in this life in such a way that in body he is still carnal and sees another law in his members warring against the law of his mind; but he shall be spiritual also in body, when the same flesh shall so rise again that what is written may be fulfilled: 'It is sown a natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body.' But what and how great the grace of the spiritual body may be, since it has not yet come into experience, I fear that every utterance which is put forth concerning it may be rash.
Nevertheless, since the joy of our hope must not be kept silent, for the sake of God's praise, and since it was said from the inmost marrow of ardent holy love, 'Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy house,' let us, with His help, conjecture from His gifts, which in this most toilsome life He bestows upon good and evil alike—as best we can, how great is that which, not having yet experienced it, we are assuredly 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 fecundity of paradise, since it was so brief that it did not even reach the awareness of those born of them:
in this life which we know, in which we still are, whose temptations—nay, which is itself wholly a temptation—as long as we are in it, however much we advance, we do not cease to endure: who shall be able to unfold what are the tokens of God's goodness toward the human race? [XXII] For as to what pertains to our first origin, that the whole progeny of mortals has been condemned, this very life—if it is to be called life—full of so many and so great evils, bears witness. For what else does that horrible depth of ignorance indicate, from which all error arises, which has received all the sons of Adam into a certain dark bosom, so that man cannot be freed from it without toil, pain, and fear?
What of that very love of so many vain and hurtful things, and from this the gnawing cares, disquietudes, sorrows, fears, insane joys, discords, strifes, wars, plots, angers, enmities, deceit, flattery, fraud, theft, rapine, perfidy, pride, ambition, envy, murders, parricides, cruelty, savagery, wickedness, luxury, insolence, impudence, shamelessness, fornications, adulteries, incests, and against nature so many defilements and impurities of both sexes which it is shameful even to name, sacrileges, heresies, blasphemies, perjuries, oppressions of the innocent, calumnies, circumventions, prevarications, false witness, unjust judgments, violences, robberies, and whatever of such evils does not come to mind and yet does not depart from this life of men?
But these are the evils of men, coming nonetheless from that root of error and perverse love with which every son of Adam is born. For who does not know 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—man comes into this life, so that, if he be permitted to live as he pleases and to do whatever he pleases, he would arrive at either all or many of those crimes and disgraceful deeds which I have mentioned, and which I could not mention?
But since divine governance does not in every way abandon the condemned, and since God does not, in His anger, withhold His mercies, in the very senses of the human race prohibition and instruction keep watch against those darknesses with which we are born, and are set against these assaults—yet these too are full of toils and pains. For what do those manifold terrors mean, which are applied to restrain the vanities of little children? What of pedagogues, what of masters, what of rods, what of straps, what of switches, what of that discipline whereby Holy Scripture says that the sides of a beloved son are to be beaten, lest he grow up untamed and, when already hard, be either scarcely tameable, or perhaps not at all?
What is accomplished by all these penalties, except that ignorance be conquered and depraved desire be bridled—the evils with which we come into this world? For what is the reason that with toil we remember, without toil we forget; with toil we learn, without toil we remain ignorant; with toil we are diligent, without toil we are sluggish? Does it not hence appear toward what our corrupt nature is inclined and prone, as by its own weight, and how great a help it needs in order to be freed therefrom? Idleness, sloth, laziness, negligence are surely vices by which toil is shunned, since toil itself, even that which is useful, is a penalty.
But besides the punishments of childhood, without which what elders wish cannot be learned—elders who scarcely wish anything usefully—by how many and how great penalties is the human race harassed, which pertain not to the malice and wickedness of the unjust, but to the common condition and misery? Who can set forth in any discourse, who can comprehend 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 the violent misdeeds and crimes of others?
seeing that from these there often befall 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 the abuser, and many other horrors. What then?
What of the countless mishaps which are feared for the body from without—heats and colds, storms, rains, floods, lightning-flash and thunder, hail and thunderbolt, the movements and gapings of the earth, the crushings of collapsing buildings, the shocks and terror or even malice of beasts of burden, the many poisons of shrubs, waters, airs, and beasts, the bites of wild animals whether merely troublesome or even deadly, the rabies which comes from a mad dog—so that even a fawning and friendly animal, dear to its own master, is sometimes to be feared more vehemently and bitterly than lions and dragons, and makes the man whom it may perchance have infected so rabid by its pestilent contagion that he is dreaded by his parents, spouse, and children worse than any beast!
What evils do those who sail endure! What evils those who go by land journeys! Who walks anywhere without being subject to unforeseen mishaps? A certain man returning home from the forum on his own sound feet fell, broke his foot, and from that wound ended this life. What seems safer than one sitting? Eli the priest fell from the seat on which he sat, and died. Farmers—nay rather all men—how many and how great mishaps to the fruits of their fields do they fear from heaven and earth or from destructive animals! Yet they are wont at last to be secure about their grain once gathered and stored. But from some, as we know, a sudden river cast forth and swept away an excellent yield of grain from the granaries, while the men fled.
Against the thousand-fold assaults of demons, who trusts in his own innocence? Since indeed—that no one might trust—they sometimes so vex even baptized little ones, than whom surely nothing is more innocent, that in them especially, God permitting this, may be shown both the lamentable calamity of this life and the desirable felicity of the other. Now indeed from the body itself there arise so many evils of diseases that not all of them are comprehended even in the books of physicians; and in most of these, and almost in all, the very aids and medicines are torments, so that men are rescued from the destruction of their penalties by a penal remedy. Has not fierce burning thirst driven thirsting men to the point of drinking even human urine, or even their own?
Has not famine driven them to the point that they could not abstain from human flesh, and devoured not men found already dead, but those slain for this purpose—and not merely strangers, but even mothers their own children, with an incredible cruelty which raging hunger produced? Finally, sleep itself, which has properly received the name of rest—who can unfold in words how unquiet it often is with 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 falsity of visions even the waking are more miserably agitated in certain diseases and poisonings;
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 through these to their own ends, they nonetheless delude their senses merely by the appetite for somehow persuading them of falsehood. From this life so wretched, as from a kind of hell, none frees us save the grace of the Savior Christ, our God and Lord (for this very name is Jesus; indeed it is interpreted 'Savior'), especially lest after this life a more wretched and everlasting one receive us—not life, but death.
For in this life, although there are through holy things and holy persons great solaces of healings, nevertheless even these benefits are not always granted to those who ask, lest religion be sought for the sake of this, whereas it is to be sought rather for the sake of that other life, where there will be no evils at all; and to this end grace helps all the better ones amid these evils, that they may be borne with a heart the stronger the more faithful it is. To which matter the learned of this world say that philosophy too is profitable, which the gods, says Tully, have given true to certain few; nor, he says, has any greater gift been given to men by them, nor could any be given.
To such a degree are even those against whom we contend somehow compelled, in acknowledging not any philosophy whatever, but the true one, to confess divine grace. Furthermore, if to a few it has been divinely given to have in true philosophy the sole aid against the miseries of this life, from this too it sufficiently appears 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, than whom even those who worship many gods say there is none greater.
[XXIII] But besides these evils of this life common to good and evil alike, the just also have in it certain labors of their own, by which they war against the vices and are engaged in the temptations and perils of such conflicts.
For sometimes more fiercely, sometimes more remissly, yet without ceasing, the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, so that we do not do the things that we would, by wholly consuming all evil concupiscence, but rather subdue it to ourselves, as far as by divine aid we can, by not consenting to it—keeping watch with continual vigils, lest an opinion resembling truth deceive us, lest crafty speech beguile us, lest the darkness of some error be spread over us, lest what is good be believed evil or what is evil be believed good, lest fear recall us from the things that must be done, lest desire hurl us into the things that must not be done, lest the sun go down upon our wrath, lest enmities provoke us to return evil for evil, lest unseemly or
immoderate sadness swallow us up, lest an ungrateful mind bring sluggishness in bestowing benefits, lest a good conscience be wearied by slanderous rumors, lest rash suspicion (about another) deceive us in what is our own, lest the false suspicion of others about us break us, lest sin reign in our mortal body to obey its desires, lest our members be presented as weapons of iniquity unto sin, lest the eye follow after concupiscence, lest the desire of vengeance overcome us, lest in that which delights us evilly either the sight or the thought linger, lest a wicked or unseemly word be willingly heard, lest that be done which is not lawful even if it please, lest in this war most full of toils and perils victory be either hoped to be won by our own strength or, when won, be attributed to our own strength, but to His grace, of whom the Apostle says:
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ; who in another place also says: 'In all these things we more than conquer through him who loved us.' Yet let us know that, however great the valor of combat with which we fight back against our vices, or even overcome and subdue them, so long as we are in this body there cannot but be lacking to us that for which we say to God: 'Forgive us our debts.' But in that kingdom, where we shall be forever with immortal bodies, there will be for us no battles at all nor any debts; which would nowhere and never have existed, if our nature, just as it was created upright, had continued so.
And therefore this very conflict of ours, in which we are imperiled and from which we desire to be delivered by the final victory, belongs to the evils of this life, which by the testimony of so many and so great evils we prove to be condemned. It must now be considered how, in this very misery of the human race—in which the justice of him who punishes is praised—the same goodness of him who administers all that he created has filled it with what kind and how many good things. First, that blessing which he had uttered before sin, saying: 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth,' he did not wish to withhold even after sin, and the fecundity once bestowed remained in the condemned stock;
nor could the fault of sin—by which even the necessity of death was inflicted on us—take away that marvelous power of seeds, or rather the still more marvelous power by which the seeds themselves are produced, implanted in human bodies and in a certain way woven into them. But both run together, as in this 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, another two, propagation and formation. But so far as concerns our present purpose, of the evils—one of which comes from our own audacity, that is, sin, the other from the judgment of God, that is, punishment—we have already said enough.
Now I have set myself to speak of the good things of God, which he has bestowed, or even until now bestows, upon this very vitiated and condemned nature. For neither in condemning did he take away all that 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 did not even estrange the devil himself from his dominion; seeing that, in order that the very nature of the devil may subsist, he brings this about who supremely is, and who makes to be whatever in any way is. Of those two things, then, which we said are good things flowing even into a nature vitiated by sin and condemned to punishment, as it were from a certain fountain of his goodness—the propagation he lavished by a blessing among the first works of the world, from which works he rested on the seventh day;
but the formation is in that work of his by which he works even until now. For if he were to withdraw his effective power from things, they would neither be able to advance and complete their appointed motions in their measured courses, nor would they in any degree continue at all in that which they were created to be. Thus therefore God created man, so as to add to him a certain fertility by which he might propagate other men, begetting together with them the very possibility of propagating—not the necessity: yet from those men whom he willed God took this away, and they were barren; nevertheless he did not take it from the human race, once given by a general blessing to the first two spouses. This propagation therefore, although it was not taken away by sin, yet is not itself such as it would have been if no one had sinned.