On the Resurrection of the Flesh

The confidence of Christians is the resurrection of the dead. Believing it, we are what we are; the truth compels us to believe it; God discloses the truth. But the crowd laughs, supposing that nothing survives after death. And yet it makes offerings to the dead, and with the most lavish service, suited to the station of the buried and to the season of the foods, so that it presumes that those whom it denies to feel anything even desire something. But I shall laugh at the crowd all the more when it burns its dead most cruelly and afterwards feeds them most gluttonously, with the same fires both courting their favor and offending them. piety that makes sport of cruelty! Does it sacrifice or insult, when it burns offerings to the burned? Of course the wise sometimes join their opinion to the crowd's. That there is nothing after death is the school of Epicurus. Seneca too says that everything ends after death, even death itself. It is enough, however, if the no lesser philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles and the Platonists cries out on the contrary that the soul is immortal, and goes further still and affirms that it can even return into bodies: even if not into the same ones, even if not into human ones only, so that Euphorbus is thought to have come back in Pythagoras, Homer in a peacock; yet at least they declared a bodily renewal of the soul, changing its quality, which is more tolerable than denying it, knocking at the truth at least, though not entering. So the world is not ignorant of the resurrection of the dead even when it errs.

But if, even among God's people, there is some sect more akin to the Epicureans than to the prophets, we shall know what the Sadducees hear from Christ. For it was reserved for Christ to lay bare all that was formerly hidden, to set straight what was doubted, to fill out what had been foretasted, to make present what had been foretold, and above all to prove the resurrection of the dead not only by Himself but also in Himself. Now, however, we are preparing against other Sadducees, partners in part of their opinion: they acknowledge half a resurrection, namely of the soul alone, despising the flesh as they despise the Lord of the flesh Himself. In short, none others begrudge salvation to the bodily substance than the heretics of another divinity. And so, being forced to arrange Christ differently too, so that He would not be held to be the Creator's, they erred first about His very flesh, contending either that it had no reality, following Marcion and Basilides, or that it had a quality of its own, following the heresies of Valentinus and Apelles. So it follows that they exclude from salvation the substance which they deny that Christ shared, well aware that it is armed with the strongest prior ruling for its resurrection if flesh has already risen in Christ. For this reason we too sent ahead a volume on the flesh of Christ, in which we both prove it solid against the emptiness of a phantasm and claim it as human against a special bodily constitution, its condition having entitled Christ both man and Son of Man. For in proving Him fleshly and bodily we in this way also refute them by a prior ruling that no other god is to be believed besides the Creator, while we show Christ to be such that in him God is recognized as such as is promised by the Creator. Refuted, then, both about God the author of the flesh and about Christ the redeemer of the flesh, they will now be overcome also about the resurrection of the flesh. We say that this is a fitting procedure. The debate with heretics should proceed roughly in this way (for order too always demands that one proceed from first principles): that it first be settled about him by whom the thing in question is said to have been arranged. And indeed heretics, conscious of their weakness, never treat things in order. For they know how hard they labor to slip in another divinity against the God of the world, who is known to all by nature from the testimony of His works, certainly prior in the sacraments and plainer in preaching; so, under the pretext of a more urgent case, namely human salvation itself, which must be sought before all else, they begin with questions of the resurrection, because the resurrection of the flesh is believed with more difficulty than one divinity. Thus, having stripped the discussion of the strength of its proper order and loaded it instead with scruples that disparage the flesh, they gradually bring it round to the notion of another divinity out of the very shaking and change of hope. For anyone thrown down or moved from the level of the hope he had received with the Creator is easily turned aside to the author of another hope, even one to be suspected of his own accord. For by a difference of promises a difference of gods is insinuated. Thus we see many ensnared, while they are struck down on the resurrection of the flesh before they are struck down on the unity of the divinity. So, as regards the heretics, we have shown with what wedge we must meet them. And they have already been met, each under its own title too: on the one God and His Christ, against Marcion; on the Lord's flesh, against four heresies as well, chiefly to lay the groundwork for this question; so that now the resurrection of the flesh alone is to be worked through as if it were uncertain among us too, that is, in the Creator's camp (for there are many unlearned, very many doubtful in their faith, and more who are simple, who will need to be instructed, directed, and fortified), because from this side too the unity of the divinity will be defended. For just as it is shaken if the resurrection of the flesh is denied, so it is established if it is upheld. The salvation of the soul, I believe, needs no discussion; for almost all heretics, in whatever way they like, still do not deny it. Let one Lucan see to himself, who does not spare even this substance, but, dissolving it after Aristotle, puts something else in its place, a third something to rise, neither soul nor flesh, that is, not a man, but perhaps a bear, being a Lucanian. He too has from us a very full treatise on the whole condition of the soul. Holding the soul above all to be immortal, we acknowledge the failing of the flesh alone and assert its restoration most strongly, gathering into the regular body of the subject whatever we touched on elsewhere and put off as occasions arose. For just as it is customary to give a foretaste of some things, so it is necessary to postpone others, provided what was foretasted is filled out in its proper body and what was postponed is presented under its proper name.

It is indeed allowed to draw wisdom from common notions in the things of God, but as a testimony to the truth, not as an aid to falsehood, so that it accord with the divine arrangement, not oppose it. For some things are known even by nature, as the immortality of the soul to many, as our God to all. I will use, then, the opinion of a certain Plato declaring, “Every soul is immortal”; I will use also the conscience of the people bearing witness to the God of gods; I will use the other common notions too that proclaim God as judge: “God sees,” and “I commend it to God.” But when they say, “Dead is dead,” and “Live while you live,” and “After death all things end, even death itself,” then I shall remember both that the heart of the crowd has been considered ashes by God and that the very wisdom of the world has been pronounced foolishness. (Isaiah 44:20) Then, if a heretic takes refuge in the vices of the crowd or the cleverness of the world, I shall say: “Depart from the heathen, heretic! Even if you are all one, you who invent a god, still, while you do it in the name of Christ, while you think yourself a Christian, you are other than the heathen. Give him back his notions, since he is not taught from yours either. Why lean on a blind guide, if you see? Why take clothing from the naked, if you have put on Christ? Why use another's shield, if you have been armed by the apostle?” Let him rather learn from you to confess the resurrection of the flesh than you from him to deny it; for if it had to be denied even by Christians, it would be enough for them to be instructed from their own knowledge, not from the ignorance of the crowd. So he will not be a Christian who denies what Christians confess, and denies it with arguments that one who is not a Christian uses. Take away from the heretics, in short, the notions they share with the heathen, so that they must rest their questions on the Scriptures alone, and they will not be able to stand. For common notions are commended by their very simplicity, by agreement of opinion and familiarity of views, and they are thought the more trustworthy because they define what is bare and open and known to all. But divine reason lies in the marrow, not on the surface, and is often at odds with appearances.

And so the heretics lay their foundations from there at once and go on building from there, knowing that minds are easily caught by the popular fellowship of common notions. Do you hear anything sooner or more often from a heretic than from a heathen? And is there not at once and everywhere abuse of the flesh: against its origin, its material, its lot, its whole end? Unclean from the beginning, formed from the dregs of the earth, more unclean afterwards from the slime of its own seed; trifling, weak, guilty, burdensome, troublesome, and, after the whole indictment of its baseness, falling back into its origin, the earth, and into the name of corpse, and doomed to perish even from that name into no name at all, into the death of every designation. “Do you wish, then,” says the wise man, “to persuade me that this flesh, snatched from your sight and touch and memory, will one day recover itself whole from corruption, solid from emptiness, full from exhaustion, something at all from nothing, and that when fires and waves and the bellies of beasts and the crops of birds and the guts of fishes and the very gullet of time itself have taken it back? Will the same flesh that perished be hoped for in such a way that the lame and the one-eyed and the leper and the paralytic return, so that one would not wish to have come back to one's former state? Or whole, so that they may fear to suffer such things again? And what of the flesh's consequences? Will everything be needful to it again, and above all food and drink? Will the lungs have to breathe, the intestines to churn, the private parts to be unashamed, and all the members to toil? Again ulcers and wounds and fever and gout? And death to be longed for again? No doubt these will be the marks of the flesh recovered: to wish once more to escape from it.” And we indeed put this somewhat more decently, out of the modesty of the pen; but how far their foul talk may go one can learn in encounters, with heathen and heretics alike.

Therefore, since the unlearned are still wise from common notions, and the doubtful and the simple are troubled afresh by the same notions, and everywhere this battering-ram is first swung against us, by which the condition of the flesh is shaken, we too must of necessity first fortify the condition of the flesh, repelling abuse with praise. So the heretics provoke us to play the rhetorician too, just as the philosopher. This futile and trifling little body, which they do not shrink even from calling evil: even if it had been the work of angels, as Menander and Marcus hold, even if the construction of some fiery being, likewise an angel, as Apelles teaches, the patronage of a secondary divinity would suffice for the authority of the flesh. We know the angels come next after God. Indeed, whoever the supreme god of each heretic may be, I would not unjustly derive the dignity of the flesh from Him too, since the will for it to be produced was present with him; for He would surely have forbidden to be made what He knew was being made, if he had not wished it to be made. So even by their account the flesh is equally a thing of God. Nothing is not his work who allowed it to be. It is well, however, that most doctrines, and the more distinguished ones, grant the whole fashioning of man to our God. How great He is, you know well enough, you who have believed in the one God. Let the flesh now begin to please you, since its craftsman is so great. “But the world too,” you say, “is the work of God, and yet ‘the form of this world passes away,' as the apostle too affirms, and the world's restoration is not presumed on the ground that it is the work of God. (1 Corinthians 7:31) And surely, if the whole cannot be refashioned after its passing, what of a part?” Certainly, if the part is equal to the whole. But we appeal to the difference. First, that all things were made by the Word of God, and without Him nothing; but the flesh took its being by the Word of God too, for the sake of form, (John 1:3) so that nothing should be made without the Word (he said beforehand, “Let us make man”), and more, by his hand, for the sake of preeminence, so that it might not be compared with the universe: (Genesis 1:26) “And God formed man,” it says. Without doubt there is reason here for a great difference, according to the condition of the things. (Genesis 1:27) For the things that were made were less than him for whom they were made, since they were made for man, to whom God soon assigned them. Rightly, then, as servants, all things came forth at a bidding and command and by the mere power of the voice; but man, as their lord, was built up for this by God Himself. And remember that it is the flesh that is properly called man, which first took the name of man: “And God formed man, clay from the earth” (already man, while still clay) “and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man” (that is, the clay) “became a living soul; and God placed the man whom He had formed in paradise.” So man was first the thing formed, then the whole. (Genesis 2:7-8) I would stress this so that you may know that whatever at all God has provided and promised to man is owed not to the soul alone but to the flesh as well, if not from partnership in kind, then at least from the privilege of the name.

Let me pursue my purpose, then, if only I can claim for the flesh as much as he who made it conferred on it, glorying already then that this petty thing, clay, came into the hands of God, whatever they are, happy enough had it only been touched. For what if the thing formed had come into being at once from God's touch, with no further work? This material out of which it was being built was not so great a thing. And so it is honored as often as it undergoes the hands of God: while it is touched, pulled off, drawn out, shaped. Consider God wholly occupied with it and devoted to it, with hand, sense, work, counsel, wisdom, providence, and above all with the very affection that drew its lines. For whatever form the clay was pressed into, Christ was in mind, who was to be man, which the clay also was, and the Word flesh, which the earth also was then. For so the Father said to the Son beforehand: “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” And God made man, that is, what He formed; “in the image of God he made him,” that is, of Christ. (Genesis 1:26) For the Word too is God, who, being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God. So that clay, already then putting on the image of Christ who was to be in the flesh, was not only God's work but also his pledge. (Philippians 2:6) What use is it now, to darken the origin of the flesh, to toss about the name of earth as a filthy and lowly element? For even if some other material had been suitable for fashioning man, one ought to consider the eminence of the craftsman, who both judged it worthy in choosing it and made it so in handling it. The hands of Phidias work Olympian Jupiter out of ivory, and it is worshiped, and is no longer the tooth of a beast, and a most stupid one, but the supreme deity of the world, not because it is an elephant but because Phidias is so great. Would the living God, the true God, not have purged whatever cheapness of material by His own working and healed it of all weakness? Or will it remain that man fashioned a god more honorably than God fashioned man? Now, even if the clay is a stumbling block, it is already something else. It is flesh I hold now, not earth, though the flesh too hears: “Earth you are, and into earth you shall go.” It is the origin that is recounted, not the substance. A thing may be nobler than its origin and happier by its change. For gold too is earth, since it comes from earth; yet earth only so far, for once gold it is a far different material, more splendid and nobler, from a humbler womb. So God too was free to refine the gold of the flesh from the dregs, as you think them, of the clay, its lineage excused.

But the authority of the flesh may seem weaker because the divine hand did not handle it in its own right, as it did the clay. Since he handled the clay for this purpose, that it might afterwards become flesh out of clay, he was surely doing the flesh's business. But I would still have you learn when and how flesh blossomed out of clay. For those tunics of skin which Adam and Eve put on when stripped of paradise will not, as some would have it, be themselves the re-forming of flesh out of clay, since somewhat earlier Adam had already recognized the offshoot of his substance in the woman as flesh (“This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”), and the very portion taken from the male into the female was made up with flesh, when it would have had to be made up, I suppose, with clay, if Adam was still clay. (Genesis 3:31; Genesis 2:23) The clay, therefore, was blotted out and swallowed up into flesh. When? When man became a living soul from the breath of God, a hot breath, fit to bake the clay somehow into another quality: as into earthenware, so into flesh. So too a potter can, by a tempered blast of fire, re-embody clay into a sturdier material and draw one form out of another, fitter than the former and now of its own kind and name. For even though it is written, “Shall the clay say to the potter?” (that is, man to God), and though the apostle says, “in earthen vessels,” man is clay because clay before, (Romans 9:20; 2 Corinthians 6:7) and flesh is earthenware because it came from clay through the heat of the divine breath. Afterwards the tunics of skin, that is, skins drawn over it, clothed it; so much so that if you strip off the skin, you lay bare the flesh. Thus what today becomes loot if stripped off was a garment when it was put on. Hence the apostle too, calling circumcision a stripping off of the flesh, affirmed that the skin is a tunic. (Colossians 2:11) This being so, you have both clay made glorious by the hand of God and flesh more glorious by the breath of God, by which the flesh at once laid aside the rudiments of clay and took up the adornments of the soul. Are you more careful than God, that you would set Scythian and Indian gems and the gleaming pearls of the Red Sea not in lead, not in bronze, not in iron, not even in silver, but would sink them in the choicest and most elaborately worked gold; that you would first see to vessels fit for all the most precious ointments; that you would likewise match the dignity of the scabbards to swords of proven steel, while God should have entrusted the shadow of His soul, the breeze of His Spirit, the work of His mouth to some most worthless sheath, and by placing it unworthily surely condemned it? But did He place it, or rather insert and mingle it with the flesh? With so close a union that it may be held uncertain whether the flesh carries the soul about or the soul the flesh, whether the flesh obeys the soul or the soul the flesh. But even if it is rather to be believed that the soul rides and rules, as nearer to God, this too overflows to the glory of the flesh, that it both contains what is nearest to God and makes it master of that very rule. (John 4:24) For what use of nature, what enjoyment of the world, what taste of the elements does the soul feed on except through the flesh? Why not? Through it the soul is furnished with the whole equipment of the senses, sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch; through it the soul is sprinkled with a divine power, accomplishing everything by speech, even when it is sent ahead in silence. For speech too comes from an organ of the flesh. The arts come through the flesh, studies and talents through the flesh, works, business, duties through the flesh; indeed the soul's whole living so belongs to the flesh that for the soul not to live is nothing else than to part from the flesh. So even dying belongs to the flesh, as living does. Moreover, if all things are subject to the soul through the flesh, they are subject to the flesh too. What you use, you must use along with. So the flesh, while it is considered the minister and servant of the soul, turns out to be its partner and co-heir. If in temporal things, why not in eternal?

These things I would have procured in support of the flesh from the public pattern, so to speak, of the human condition. Let us now see, from the particular pattern of the Christian name, how great a prerogative this trifling and filthy substance has with God, even though it would be enough for it that no soul at all can obtain salvation unless it believes while it is in the flesh: so true is it that the flesh is the hinge of salvation. And when the soul is bound to God, it is the flesh that makes it possible for the soul to be bound. The flesh, indeed, is washed, that the soul may be cleansed of stain; the flesh is anointed, that the soul may be consecrated; the flesh is signed, that the soul too may be protected; the flesh is overshadowed by the laying on of the hand, that the soul too may be enlightened by the Spirit; the flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ, that the soul too may be fattened on God. They cannot, then, be separated in reward, whom the work joins together. For the sacrifices pleasing to God as well, I mean the struggles of the soul, fasts, late and dry meals, and the squalor that goes with this duty, the flesh performs at its own cost. Virginity too, and widowhood, and the modest concealment of marriage in secret, and the knowledge of one marriage only, are offered to God as incense from the goods of the flesh. Come now, what do you think of it when, dragged out for faith in the Name and exposed to public hatred, it fights to the end; when in prisons it wastes away, beaten down by that foulest exile from the light, by want of the world, squalor, filth, and abuse, not free even in sleep, since it is bound even on its bed and torn by its very straw; when then in the daylight it is lacerated by every device of torment; when finally it is spent in punishments, striving to repay Christ by dying for Him, and often indeed by the same cross, not to mention still more atrocious inventions of penalty? Truly most blessed and most glorious is the flesh that can repay Christ the Lord so great a debt that it owes Him only this, that it has ceased to owe Him: the more bound, the more set free!

So, to go over it again: the flesh which God built with His own hands in the image of God; which He animated with His own breath in the likeness of His own life; which He set over His whole work to dwell in, to enjoy, and to rule it; which He clothed with His sacraments and His disciplines; whose purity He loves, whose chastenings He approves, whose sufferings He counts precious to himself: shall this not rise again, so many times God's own? Far be it, far be it, that God should abandon to everlasting destruction the work of His hands, the care of His genius, the sheath of His breath, the queen of His building, the heir of His generosity, the priest of His religion, the soldier of His testimony, the sister of His Christ! We know that God is good; from His Christ we learn that He alone is the best. He who commands love for one's neighbor after love for Himself will Himself do what He has commanded. (Matthew 22:37-40) He will love the flesh, his neighbor in so many ways: though weak, yet “power is made perfect in weakness”; though feeble, yet “only those who are ill need a physician”; though dishonourable, yet “on the less honorable we bestow the greater honor”; though lost, yet “I came,” He says, “to save what was lost”; though sinful, yet “I prefer,” He says, “the salvation of the sinner to his death”; though condemned, yet “I will strike,” he says, “and I will heal.” (2 Corinthians 12:9; Luke 5:31; 1 Corinthians 12:23; Luke 19:10; Ezekiel 18:23) Why reproach the flesh with the very things that wait for God, that hope in God? Those he helps are honored by him. I would dare to say: if these things had not happened to the flesh, kindness, grace, mercy, and every beneficent power of God would have had nothing to do. (Deuteronomy 32:39)

You hold the Scriptures by which the flesh is darkened; hold also those by which it is brightened. When you read where it is pressed down, turn your eyes also to where it is lifted up. “All flesh is grass.” Isaiah did not declare this only, but also: “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Isaiah 40:7) In Genesis God is recorded as saying, “My Spirit shall not remain in these men, because they are flesh”; (Isaiah 40:5) but through Joel he is also heard: “I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.” Do not know the apostle, (Joel 3:1) either, from the one stroke of the pen with which he mostly stings the flesh. For although he denies that any good dwells in his flesh, although he affirms that those who are in the flesh cannot please God, because the flesh lusts against the spirit, (Romans 8:18; Romans 8:8; Galatians 5:17) and although he puts other things so that not so much the flesh's acts as its substance seems dishonoured (we shall say elsewhere that nothing ought properly to be charged against the flesh except to the discredit of the soul, which subjects the flesh to its own service), yet meanwhile Paul is in those letters too, when he bears the marks of Christ in his body, when he forbids our body, as the temple of God, to be defiled, when he makes our bodies members of Christ, when he urges us to lift up and glorify God in our body. (Galatians 6:17; 1 Corinthians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 6:15) So if the disgraces of the flesh drive out its resurrection, why should its honors not rather bring it in? For it befits God more to bring back to salvation what he has sometimes rejected than to hand over to destruction what He has also approved.

So far the praise of the flesh against its enemies, who are nonetheless its greatest friends. For no one lives so carnally as those who deny the resurrection of the flesh; denying it, they despise both punishment and discipline. Of them the Paraclete too has spoken plainly through the prophetess Prisca: “They are flesh, and they hate the flesh.” If so great an authority protects the flesh, as great as can plead for it toward the merit of salvation, must we not also review the might and power and freedom of God Himself, whether He is great enough to be able to rebuild and restore the tabernacle of the flesh, dissolved and devoured and snatched away in whatever manner? Or whether He has published for us any examples of this right of His in the open field of nature? In case some should still suppose they know God, who is to be believed on no other terms than that He is believed able to do all things: you certainly have among the philosophers those who maintain that this world is unborn and unmade. But it is much better that almost all the heresies, granting that the world was born and made, ascribe its founding to our God. Be confident, then, that He brought forth this whole out of nothing, and you have known God by trusting that God is so powerful. For some, too weak to believe this first, would rather have the universe produced by him out of an underlying matter, following the philosophers. Yet even if that were really so, since He would be said to have brought forth, by reshaping matter, substances far different and forms far different from what the matter itself had been, I would no less maintain that He brought them forth from nothing, if he brought forth things that had not existed at all. For what difference does it make whether something is brought forth from nothing or from something, so long as what was not comes to be, since even “not to have been” is to have been nothing? So, conversely, “to have been” is to have been not nothing. Now, even if there is a difference, both still support me. For if God constructed all things out of nothing, He will be able also to draw out of nothing the flesh reduced to nothing; or if He shaped them from other matter, He will be able also to call forth the flesh from something else, wherever it has been swallowed up. And surely He who made is fit to remake, since it is more to have made than to have remade, to have given a beginning than to have given back; so you may believe the restoration of the flesh easier than its first making.

Look now at the very examples of divine power. Day dies into night and is buried everywhere in darkness. The world's splendor goes into mourning; every substance is blackened. All things are dingy, silent, stunned; everywhere business stands still. So the lost light is mourned. And yet again, with its adornment, its dowry, its sun, the same, entire and whole, it comes back to life for the whole world, slaying its own death, night, tearing open its own tomb, darkness, becoming its own heir, until night too comes back to life, it too with its own array. For the rays of the stars are rekindled, which the morning's kindling had put out; the absent constellations are brought back, which the season's division had removed; the mirrors of the moon are adorned again, which its monthly count had worn away. Winters and summers revolve, springs and autumns, with their powers, their ways, their fruits. Indeed the earth too takes its discipline from heaven: to clothe the trees after they have been stripped, to color the flowers anew, to spread the grass again, to bring forth the same seeds that were consumed, and not to bring them forth before they are consumed. A wonderful principle: from a defrauder, a preserver; to give back, it takes away; to keep, it loses; to make whole, it damages; to enlarge, it first diminishes. For it restores things richer and finer than it destroyed, truly with profit out of ruin, interest out of injury, gain out of loss. To say it once for all: the whole creation is recurrent. Whatever you meet has been; whatever you lose will be. Nothing is that is not again. All things return to their state when they have gone; all things begin when they have ceased. They end so that they may come to be; nothing perishes except for its preservation. This whole revolving order of things, then, is a testimony to the resurrection of the dead. God prescribed it in works before He did in letters; He preached it by powers before by words. He sent nature ahead as your teacher, intending to send prophecy after, so that as the pupil of nature you might more readily believe prophecy, might admit at once what you hear when you have already seen it everywhere, and might not doubt that God is the raiser even of the flesh, whom you know to be the restorer of all things. And surely, if all things rise again for man, for whom they were provided, and not for man unless for the flesh too, how can it be that the flesh itself should perish entirely, for whose sake and for which nothing perishes?

If the universe is too slight a figure of the resurrection, if creation signifies nothing of the kind, because its several parts are said not so much to die as to cease, and are thought not to be revived but reshaped, take the fullest and strongest example of this hope,⁠a since it is a living thing, subject both to life and to death. I mean that bird found only in the East, famous for its uniqueness, prodigious in its posterity, which willingly makes its own funeral and so renews itself, departing and succeeding itself at an end that is a birthday: again a phoenix where there is none any more, again itself which is no longer, another and the same. What could be more expressive and more to the point for this cause? Or of what else is it such a proof? God too says in His Scriptures: “For you shall flourish like the phoenix,”⁠b that is, out of death, out of the funeral, so that you may believe that the substance of the body can be recovered even from fire. The Lord declared that we are worth more than many sparrows: if not more than phoenixes too, it is no great thing. (Matthew 10:33) But shall men perish once for all, while the birds of Arabia are sure of their resurrection?

Such, meanwhile, are the outlines of the divine powers, God having worked in parables no less than he has spoken; let us come now to His very edicts and decrees, by which above all we are arranging a just division of the subject. For we began from the authority of the flesh, whether it is such that salvation befits it after it has decayed; then we went on to the power of God, whether it is great enough to be able to confer salvation on a thing that has decayed. Now, if we have proved both, I would have you inquire also about the cause, whether there is one so worthy as to claim the resurrection of the flesh as necessary and in every way owed to reason; for it remains to say: even if the flesh is capable of restoration, even if the divinity is able to restore it, a cause for restoration must also be at hand. Receive, then, the cause as well, you who learn that with God there is both the best and also the just: best of His own, just on our account. For had man not sinned, he would have known God only as best, from the property of His nature. But now he experiences Him as just as well, from the necessity of the cause; yet in this very thing God is best, while He is also just. For in showing justice both by helping the good and by punishing the evil, He makes both sentences serve the good, avenging the one, rewarding the other. But with Marcion you will learn more fully whether this is the whole of God. Meanwhile, He is rightly judge because Lord, rightly Lord because author, rightly author because God. Hence that heretic too, whoever He is: “Rightly not judge, for not Lord; rightly not Lord, for not author.” I do not know now whether He is God, who is neither author, which God is, nor Lord, which the author is. If, then, it is most fitting for God, as Lord and author, to appoint a judgment upon man concerning this very thing, whether or not he took care to acknowledge and observe his Lord and author, that judgment will surely be carried out. This will be the whole cause, indeed the necessity, of the resurrection, most fitting, of course, to God who appoints the judgment. Consider, as to how it is arranged, whether the divine sentence presides over the judging of both human substances, the soul as well as the flesh. For what is fit to be judged will be fit also to be raised. We say, first, that the judgment of God must be believed full and complete, since it is final and thereafter everlasting; so that it is also just, lacking in nothing; so that it is also worthy of God, full and complete in proportion to His great patience. But the fullness and completeness of judgment consists only in the presentation of the whole man. And the whole man appears from the union of both substances, and therefore he must be presented in both, since he must be judged whole, who certainly did not live except as whole. As he lived, then, so will he be judged, because he must be judged concerning what he lived. For life is the cause of judgment, to be assessed through as many substances as it was carried out by.

Come now, let our adversaries first sever the bond of flesh and soul in the conduct of life, so that they may then dare to sever it in the reward of life too. Let them deny partnership in the works, so that they may rightly deny it in the wages also. Let the flesh have no share in the sentence if it had none in the cause. Let the soul alone be recalled, if it alone departs. But it no more departs alone than it alone ran through that from which it departs, this life, I mean. So far is the soul from passing through life alone that we do not remove even thoughts, though alone, though not carried into effect through the flesh, from partnership with the flesh, since what is done by the soul in the heart is done in the flesh, with the flesh, and through the flesh. This very part of the flesh, the citadel of the soul, the Lord also takes to task when he rebukes thoughts: “Why do you think evil in your hearts?” and “Whoever has looked in order to lust has already committed adultery in his heart.” (Matthew 9:4) So thought, even without deed and without effect, is an act of the flesh. (Matthew 5:28) But even if the governing seat of the senses, which is called the ἡγεμονικόν, is enshrined in the brain, or in the space between the eyebrows, or wherever the philosophers please, the whole thinking-place of the soul will be flesh. The soul is never without the flesh, as long as it is in the flesh; it does nothing without that without which it does not exist. Ask further whether thoughts too are not carried on through the flesh, since they are discerned outwardly through the flesh. Let the soul turn something over: the face gives the sign; the expression is the mirror of all intentions. Let them deny partnership in deeds to that to which they cannot deny partnership in thoughts. They, indeed, list the misdeeds of the flesh: then as a sinner it will be held for punishment. We, however, set against them the virtues of the flesh as well: then, having done well, it will be held for reward. And even if it is the soul that acts and impels in all things, the obedience belongs to the flesh. It is not lawful to believe God either an unjust or an idle judge: unjust if He bars the partner in good works from the rewards, idle if He separates the partner in evil ones from the punishments; since human justice is held the more complete the more it demands also the agents of each deed, neither sparing nor grudging them, but letting them share with the principals the fruit of either penalty or favor.

But when we assign command to the soul and obedience to the flesh, we must take care that they do not overturn this too with another argument, wishing to place the flesh in the soul's service in some other way, not as a minister, so that they are not forced to acknowledge it as a partner too. For they will say that ministers and partners have the choice of serving and of sharing and power of their own will in both, being men themselves; that they therefore share merits with the principals to whom they have freely lent their work; but that the flesh, knowing nothing and feeling nothing by itself, having no willing or unwilling of its own, appears rather as a vessel of the soul, as an instrument, not as a minister. So, they say, the judgment concerns the soul alone, how it used the vessel of the flesh, while the vessel itself is not liable to sentence, since neither is a cup condemned if someone has mixed poison in it, nor a sword sentenced to the beasts if someone has committed robbery with it. So then the flesh is innocent in that respect, that evil works will not be charged to it, and nothing prevents it from being saved under the title of innocence. For even if good works are not credited to it, any more than evil ones, it better befits divine kindness to set the innocent free. For reward he owes to those who do good; but it belongs to the best to offer even what is not owed. And yet a cup (I do not say a poisoned one, into which some death has belched, but one tainted by the breath of a lewd woman, or a chief priest of Cybele, or a gladiator, or an executioner), I ask, do you condemn it less than their kisses? Even one clouded with our own dirt, or not mixed to our liking, we are used to dashing down, the more to vent our anger on the slave. And a sword drunk with robberies: who would not banish it from his whole house, not to say from his bedroom, not to say from its place at his head, presuming, of course, that he would dream of nothing but the grudges of the souls pressing on and troubling the bedfellow of their blood? But on the other hand, a cup with a good conscience, commended for the diligence of its service, will be adorned with its drinker's garlands too or honored with a sprinkling of flowers; and a sword bloodied in war, a better killer, will be repaid with praise by consecration. So one can fix a sentence even on vessels and instruments, so that they too share in the merits of their masters and principals. So much to satisfy this argument too, although the difference of things empties the example. For every vessel or instrument comes into use from outside, a material wholly foreign to the substance of man; but the flesh, conceived, formed, and born together with the soul from the beginning in the womb, is also mingled with it in every operation. For although it is called a vessel by the apostle, which he bids us possess in honor, yet it is also called by him the outer man: that clay, namely, which was first engraved with the title of man, not of cup or sword or any vessel. (1 Thessalonians 4:4; 2 Corinthians 4:16) It is called a vessel by reason of its capacity, by which it receives and contains the soul; but man from the fellowship of nature, which makes it not an instrument in operations but a minister. So it will be held to judgment, though it knows nothing of its own, because it is a part of that which knows, not a piece of furniture. The apostle too, knowing that the flesh does nothing by itself that is not charged to the soul, nevertheless judges the flesh a sinner, so that, since it seems to be driven by the soul, it is not thought free from judgment. (Romans 8:3) So too, when he enjoins praiseworthy works on the flesh (“Glorify and lift up God in your body”), sure that these efforts also are carried out by the soul, he still commands them to the flesh because he promises it the fruit as well. (1 Corinthians 6:20) Otherwise neither reproach would have befitted it if the fault were another's, nor exhortation if the glory were foreign to it; for both reproach and exhortation would be empty as regards the flesh if the reward too were empty, which is looked for in the resurrection.

The simpler supporter of our view will think that the flesh must be presented at the judgment for this reason too, that otherwise the soul, being incorporeal, could not undergo the experience of torment or of refreshment. So the crowd thinks. We, however, both declare here and have proved in its own volume that the soul is corporeal, having its own kind of solidity, by which it can both feel and suffer something. For that souls even now are tormented and comforted in the underworld, though naked, though still exiles from the flesh, the example of Lazarus will prove. I have given the adversary occasion, then, to say: “So the soul, having a bodiliness of its own, will suffice of itself for the capacity to suffer and feel, so as not to need the flesh presented.” Yes, it will need it to this extent: not because it cannot feel anything without the flesh, but because it must also feel with the flesh. For as far as it suffices of itself for acting, so far does it suffice for suffering. But for acting it is less than sufficient of itself; for it has of itself only thinking, willing, desiring, and planning, but for carrying out it waits for the work of the flesh. So too for suffering it requires partnership with the flesh, that it may suffer as fully through the flesh as it could not act fully without it. And therefore, for the things in which it suffices of itself, desire, thought, and will, it pays the penalty meanwhile. Now, if these were enough for the full measure of deserts, so that deeds were not required as well, the soul would be wholly sufficient for the completion of judgment, being judged for the things for whose doing it alone had sufficed. But since deeds too are bound up with deserts, and deeds are carried out through the flesh, it is no longer enough for the soul to be comforted or tortured without the flesh for the works of the flesh as well. Even if it has a body, even if it has members, these no more suffice for it to feel completely than to act completely. Therefore it suffers in the underworld in proportion to the way it acted, tasting judgment first, as it was first to lead on to the offense, yet waiting for the flesh as well, so that through the flesh it may also pay for the deeds to which it committed its thoughts. This, in short, will be the reason for the judgment appointed at the last end: that by the presentation of the flesh the whole divine sentence may be completed. Otherwise there would be no waiting until the end, since even now souls receive their foretaste in the underworld.

So far I have used preliminary arguments to fortify the sense of all the Scriptures that promise the renewal of the flesh. Since so many authorities of just pleading support it (I mean the honors of the substance itself, then the powers of God, then examples of them, then the reasons and the necessities of the judgment itself), the Scriptures must surely be understood according to the prior verdicts of so many authorities, not according to the ingenuity of the heretics, which comes from unbelief alone: because it is held incredible that a substance removed by death should be restored, not because it is undeserved by the substance itself, or impossible for God, or unsuited to judgment. Incredible indeed, if it had not been divinely proclaimed; except that even if it had not been proclaimed by God, it ought to have been presumed of our own accord, so that it would have gone unproclaimed only because so many authorities had already decided it. But since it resounds in divine utterances too, it is all the further from being understood otherwise than those authorities require, by which one is persuaded even without divine utterances. Let us see first, then, under what title this hope has been posted. One edict of God, I think, hangs before all: the resurrection of the dead. Two words, ready, clear-cut, clean. I will address these very words and examine to what substance they assign themselves. When I hear that resurrection awaits man, I must ask what part of him has been allotted to fall, since nothing will expect to rise again except what has first fallen down. He who does not know that the flesh falls through death may not know either that it stands through life. Nature pronounces God's sentence: “Earth you are, and into earth you shall go,” and he who does not hear it sees it: (Genesis 3:19) there is no death that is not a collapse of the limbs. This lot of the body the Lord too expressed when, himself clothed in the substance, He said: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” For He showed to what it belongs to be destroyed, to be dashed down, to lie, and also to be lifted up and raised again (though He was also carrying about a soul troubled even to death, yet not falling through death), for the Scripture says He had spoken of His body. (John 2:19; Matthew 26:38) And indeed it is the flesh that is overthrown by death, so that from falling (cadendo) it is thereafter called a corpse (cadauer). (John 2:21) The soul, however, does not fall even in name, since it does not collapse in its condition. On the contrary, it is the soul that brings ruin on the body when it is breathed out, as it is the soul that raised it from the earth when it entered. What raised by entering cannot fall; what dashes down by departing cannot collapse. I will put it more closely: the soul does not fall with the body even into sleep; it is not laid low with the flesh even then, but in sleep it is stirred and tossed about; yet it would rest if it lay down. So it does not fall in the reality of death, since it does not collapse in its image. Now consider likewise the next word, “of the dead,” in what substance it resides. Although in this subject we sometimes grant that heretics assign mortality to the soul (so that if a mortal soul is to obtain resurrection, that prejudges that the flesh, no less mortal, will share in resurrection), yet now the proper sense of the word must be claimed for its own lot. By this very fact that resurrection belongs to a thing that falls, that is, the flesh, the same will hold for the name “dead.” So we learn also from Abraham, the father of faith, a man in God's friendship. For when he asked the sons of Heth for a place to bury Sarah, he said: “Give me, then, possession of a tomb among you, and I will bury my dead,” the flesh, of course. For he would not have wanted room to bury a soul, even if the soul were believed mortal and deserved to be called dead. (Genesis 23:4) But if “the dead” is the body, then the resurrection, when it is called “of the dead,” will be of bodies.

This examination of the title and of the proclamation itself, defending the plain sense of the words, should serve this purpose: that if the other side causes confusion under cover of figures and riddles, the plainer passages prevail and the more certain rule over the uncertain. For some, having seized on the very customary form of prophetic speech, which is usually allegorical and figurative, though not always, twist even the resurrection of the dead, plainly announced, into an imaginary meaning, asserting that death itself too must be understood spiritually. Death in truth, they say, is not the one in plain view, the separation of flesh and soul, but ignorance of God, through which man, dead to God, has lain in error no less than in a tomb. And so the resurrection too must be claimed as that by which one, having come upon the truth, is re-animated and brought to life again for God, and, the death of ignorance shaken off, breaks out as from the tomb of the old man, since the Lord too likened the scribes and Pharisees to whitewashed tombs. From then on, therefore, those who have obtained the resurrection by faith are with the Lord, since they have put Him on in baptism. (Matthew 23:27) With this cleverness they have often been accustomed to deceive our people even in conversation, as though they too admitted the resurrection of the flesh. “Woe,” they say, “to him who has not risen in this flesh,” so as not to strike them at once by denying the resurrection outright. But silently, in their own minds, they mean this: “Woe to him who has not come to know the heretical secrets while he is in this flesh”; for this is resurrection among them. And many too, claiming the resurrection from the moment of the soul's departure, interpret coming out of the tomb as escaping from the world, since the world too is the dwelling of the dead, that is, of those who do not know God; or even as coming out of the body itself, since the body too, like a tomb, keeps the soul shut up in the death of worldly life.

Because of conjectures of this kind, then, I will first overthrow their basic assumption, by which they would have the prophets preach everything in images. For if that were so, not even the images themselves could have been distinguished unless realities had also been proclaimed from which the images were drawn. Indeed, if everything is figure, what will that be of which they are figures? How will you hold up a mirror if there is no face anywhere? But so far is everything from being images that there are also realities; nor is everything shadows, there are also bodies; so that even about the Lord Himself the most notable things were proclaimed more clearly than daylight. For the virgin conceived in her womb not figuratively, and bore Emmanuel, God with us, not obliquely. And though it was said obliquely that he would receive the power of Damascus and the captured wealth of Samaria, it was said plainly that He would come into judgment with the elders and rulers of the people. (Isaiah 8:4) For the nations raged in the person of Pilate, and the peoples imagined vain things in the person of Israel; the kings of the earth stood up, Herod, and the rulers were gathered together, Annas and Caiaphas, against the Lord and against His Christ. (Isaiah 3:13) He too was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb before the shearer, namely Herod, without a voice (so He did not open His mouth), giving His back to the scourges and His cheeks to blows, and not turning His face from the darts of spittle; (Isaiah 53:7) counted also among the lawless, pierced in hands and feet, suffering the casting of lots for his garment, bitter drinks, and the nodding heads of mockers, valued at thirty pieces of silver by the betrayer. (Isaiah 53:12) What figures are these in Isaiah, what images in David, what riddles in Jeremiah? Did they foretell even His mighty works in parables? (Zechariah 11:12) Or were the eyes of the blind not opened, the tongue of the dumb not made clear, the withered hands and loosened knees not strengthened, the lame not leaping like a deer? Even if we are accustomed to interpret these spiritually as well, by comparison with the vices of the soul healed by the Lord, yet since they were also fulfilled in the flesh, they show that the prophets preached in both senses; granted that many of their utterances can be defended as bare and simple and clear of every cloud of allegory: as when they proclaim the downfall of nations and cities, of Tyre and Egypt and Babylon and Idumaea and the ships of Carthage; as when they declare the plagues or pardons of Israel itself, its captivities, its restorations, (Isaiah 35:5) and the outcome of its final dispersion. Who will interpret these rather than recognize them? The events are contained in the writings, as the writings are read in the events. So the form of prophetic speech is not always, nor in everything, allegorical, but sometimes and in some things.

“If, then, sometimes and in some things,” you say, “why not also in the edict of resurrection, so that it is to be understood spiritually?” Because a great many reasons stand in the way. First, what will so many other divine documents do, which testify to a bodily resurrection so openly as to admit no suspicion of figurative meaning? And surely it is fair, as we laid down above, that the uncertain be judged by the certain and the obscure by the plain, so that amid discord between the certain and the uncertain, the plain and the obscure, faith is not scattered, truth is not endangered, and the divinity itself is not branded as inconsistent. Then, it is not likely that that part of the sacrament on which the whole faith is staked, on which the whole discipline rests, should appear ambiguously announced and obscurely set forth, since the hope of resurrection, unless it were plain about both peril and reward, would persuade no one, least of all to a religion of this kind, exposed to public hatred and hostile indictment. No work is sure whose wage is uncertain; no fear is just whose danger is doubtful. And both the wage and the danger hang on the event of the resurrection. And if prophecy has launched God's decrees and judgments, limited in time, place, and person, against cities, nations, and kings so openly, how could His eternal and universal dispositions for the whole human race have fled from their own light? The greater they are, the clearer they ought to be, so that they might be believed great. And I think neither envy nor deceit nor inconstancy nor seductive artifice can be ascribed to God, the usual means by which the announcement of great matters is made captious.

After this we must look also at those Scriptures which do not allow the resurrection, as these “soul-men” (not to say “spiritual men”) would have it, either to be presumed already here in the recognition of the truth or to be claimed immediately upon departure from life. For since the times of the whole hope have been fixed by the sacred pen (at the coming of Christ, I think), and it may not be settled before then, our prayers sigh for the setting of this age, for the passing away of the world too, for the great day of the Lord, the day of anger and retribution, the last and hidden day, known to none but the Father, and yet foreshown by signs and portents, shakings of the elements and conflicts of the nations. I would unroll the prophecies if the Lord Himself had been silent (except that the prophecies too were the Lord's voice); but it is more that He seals them with His own mouth. Asked by the disciples when the things would come about that He had just then burst out with concerning the end of the temple, He sets out the order of the times: first the Jewish times up to the destruction of Jerusalem, then the common ones up to the close of the age. For after He declared, “And then Jerusalem will be trodden down by the nations, until the times of the nations are fulfilled” (the nations, that is, to be chosen by God and gathered with the remnant of Israel), from there He goes on to proclaim for the world and the age, in accord with Joel and Daniel and the whole council of the prophets, signs to come in the sun and moon and stars, distress of nations, with bewilderment at the roar of the sea, and men fainting for fear and expectation of what threatens the earth. (Luke 21:24) “For the powers of the heavens,” he says, “will be shaken, and then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. (Luke 21:25-26) But when these things begin to happen, you will come up and lift up your heads, because your redemption has drawn near.” Yet he said that it draws near, not that it is already present; and “when these things begin to happen,” not “when they have happened,” because when they have happened, then our redemption will be present, which until then is said to draw near, lifting and rousing our minds meanwhile to the fruit of hope now close at hand; and to this is joined the parable of the trees growing tender into shoots, the forerunner of the flower and then of the fruit. “So you too, when you see all these things happen, know that the kingdom of God is near. Watch, then, at all times, that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things and to stand before the Son of Man,” surely through the resurrection, (Luke 21:36) when all these things have first taken place. So although it sprouts in the recognition of the mystery, it flowers and bears fruit at the Lord's appearing. Who, then, has roused the Lord so untimely, so prematurely, already from the right hand of God to shatter the earth, as Isaiah says, which, I think, is still whole? Who has already put Christ's enemies under His feet, as David says, as though quicker than the Father, while the whole throng of the populace still shouts, “Christians to the lion!”? Who has seen Jesus descending from heaven such as the apostles saw Him ascending, according to the angels' declaration? To this day no tribe after tribe has beaten its breast, recognizing Him whom they pierced; (Isaiah 2:19; Acts 1:11) no one has yet welcomed Elijah; no one has yet fled from the antichrist; no one has yet wept over the fall of Babylon: (Malachi 4:5; 1 John 4:3) and is there already someone who has risen, unless it be a heretic? He, no doubt, has already come out of the tomb of the body, though still liable to fevers and ulcers; he has already trampled his enemies, though he still has to wrestle with the powers of the world; (Revelation 18:2) and of course he already reigns, though he still owes to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Matthew 22:21

The apostle does indeed teach, writing to the Colossians, that we were once dead, alienated and hostile in mind toward the Lord, when we were engaged in the worst works; then buried with Christ in baptism and raised together in Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead: (Colossians 1:21) “And you, when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses”; (Colossians 2:12) and again: “If you have died with Christ from the elements of the world, why do you pass judgment as though living in the world?” But while he makes us dead spiritually in this way, so as still to acknowledge that we shall one day die bodily too, surely in reckoning us raised in the same way spiritually he equally does not deny that we shall rise bodily too. In short: “If you have risen with Christ,” he says, “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God; set your mind on the things above, not on those below.” So he shows that we rise in mind, by which alone we can as yet reach heavenly things. (Colossians 3:1-2) We would not seek them or set our minds on them if we possessed them. He adds too: “For you have died” (to sins, that is, not to yourselves) “and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” What is hidden, then, has not yet been grasped. So too John: “And it has not yet been made manifest,” he says, “what we shall be. We know that when He is made manifest, we shall be like him.” So far are we from already being what we do not know; we would surely know it if we already were. (1 John 3:2) So in this interval it is a contemplation of hope through faith, not a presentation of it; not possession, but expectation. Of this hope and expectation Paul says to the Galatians: “For we through the Spirit, by faith, await the hope of righteousness.” He does not say “we hold”; (Galatians 5:5) and he speaks of the righteousness of God that comes from the judgment by which the reward will be judged. Hanging on this himself, he writes to the Philippians: “if by any means I may attain to the resurrection that is from the dead; not that I have already received it or am perfected.” And certainly he had believed and come to know all the mysteries, the chosen vessel, the teacher of the nations; and yet he adds: “But I press on, if I may grasp that for which I was grasped by Christ.” And further: “I do not think, (Philippians 3:11-12) brothers, that I have grasped it; but one thing: forgetting what lies behind and stretching out to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, for the prize of the calling, by which I may attain”: to the resurrection from the dead, surely, yet in its own time, as he says to the Galatians: “And let us not grow weary in doing good, for in its own time we shall reap”; as also to Timothy about Onesiphorus: “May the Lord grant him to find mercy on that day.” For that day and time he also charges Timothy himself to keep the commandment spotless and irreproachable until the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ, “which in His own times the blessed and only Sovereign and King of kings will show,” speaking of God. (Galatians 6:9; 2 Timothy 1:18) Of these times Peter too says in the Acts: “Repent, then, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come upon us from the presence of God, and He may send the Christ appointed beforehand for us, whom heaven must receive until the times of the restoration of all things, of which God spoke by the mouth of the holy prophets.” Acts 3:19-21

What these times are, learn with the Thessalonians. For we read: “how you turned from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, Jesus.” And again: “For what is our hope or joy or crown of exultation, if not you also, before our Lord Jesus Christ at His coming?” Likewise: “before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints.” (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10) Teaching them that those who had fallen asleep should be mourned less, he at the same time sets out the times of the resurrection: “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so too God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep through Jesus. (1 Thessalonians 3:13) For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of our Lord, shall not go before those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a command, and with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.” What voice of an archangel, what trumpet of God has yet been heard, unless perhaps in the bedrooms of the heretics? For even if the word of the gospel, which has already called them, can be called the trumpet of God, yet either they will already be dead bodily, so as to have risen (and how are they alive?), or snatched up into the clouds (and how are they here?). Most miserable indeed, as the apostle declared, will they be considered who hope in this life only, shutting themselves out, by snatching it beforehand, from what is promised after it, gone astray about the truth no less than Phygelus and Hermogenes. (1 Thessalonians 4:13-17; 1 Corinthians 15:19) And therefore the majesty of the Holy Spirit, seeing through thoughts of this kind, suggests in that very letter to the Thessalonians: “But concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, there is no need to write to you. (2 Timothy 1:15) For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When they say ‘Peace' and ‘All is safe,' then sudden destruction will come upon them.” And in the second letter, with fuller concern, to the same: “I beg you, brothers, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering to Him, not to be quickly shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word” (that is, of false prophets) “or by letter” (that is, of false apostles) “as if from us, as though the day of the Lord were at hand. (1 Thessalonians 5:1-3) Let no one deceive you in any way; for unless the departure comes first” (of this empire, surely) “and the man of sin is revealed” (that is, the antichrist), “the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above everything that is called god or worship, so that he sits in the temple of God, declaring himself God. Do you not remember that when I was with you I told you these things? And now you know what restrains, so that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of iniquity is already at work; only he who now restrains, until he is taken out of the way.” Who is this but the Roman state, whose departure, divided among ten kings, will bring on the antichrist? “And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to nothing by the appearing of His coming, whose coming is according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with every deceit of unrighteousness for those who are perishing.” (2 Thessalonians 2:1-7) 2 Thessalonians 2:8-10

In the Apocalypse too the order of the times is laid out, which the souls of the martyrs under the altar, crying out for vengeance and judgment, learned to wait for: that first the world must drink its plagues from the bowls of the angels, and that harlot city receive its fitting end from the ten kings, and the beast antichrist with his false prophet make war on the church; and so, the devil meanwhile being banished to the abyss, the privilege of the first resurrection be ordered from the thrones; then, the devil given to the fire, the sentence of the universal resurrection be judged from the books. (Revelation 6:9-10; Revelation 20:2) Since, then, the Scriptures both mark out the state of the last times and place the whole harvest of the Christian hope at the close of the age, it is clear either that the whole of whatever God promises us is fulfilled then, and what the heretics claim already here is empty; or, if the recognition of the mystery is also a resurrection, that is surely believed without prejudice to the one proclaimed at the end. And it follows that by the very fact that this spiritual one is claimed, the bodily one is already decided; because if none were announced for then, this one alone, and that only spiritual, would rightly be claimed; but since one is also proclaimed for the last time, it is recognized as bodily, since a resurrection of the same condition, that is, spiritual, would not also be announced for then, when it ought to be completed either now, without any distinction of times, or then, at the close of all times. So it suits us rather to defend a spiritual resurrection as well, from the entrance of faith, since we acknowledge its fullness at the end of the age.

One thing more I will answer to their earlier proposition about allegorical Scriptures: that we too may claim the bodily resurrection with the support of the figurative style of prophetic speech. For see: the divine sentence at the beginning, pronouncing man earth (“Earth you are, and into earth you shall go”), according to the substance of the flesh, of course, which had been taken from the earth and had first been called man, as we have shown, gives me a rule for interpreting of the flesh too whatever anger or favor God has decreed upon the earth; since the earth, properly speaking, is not liable to His judgment, having committed nothing good or evil. It was indeed cursed because it drank blood; but even this was a figure of the murderous flesh. (Genesis 3:19; Genesis 4:11) For if the earth too is to be helped or harmed for man's sake, so that he may be helped or harmed through the fortunes of his dwelling-place, how much more will he himself pay for what even the earth will suffer for his sake? So when God threatens the earth, I will say that He rather threatens the flesh, and when He promises anything to the earth, I will understand that he rather promises it to the flesh. As in David: “The Lord has reigned, let the earth rejoice,” that is, the flesh of the saints, to which the fruit of the divine kingdom belongs. “It saw and the earth was shaken; the mountains melted like wax before the face of the Lord”: the flesh of the profane, that is; for “they will look on Him whom they pierced.” Otherwise, if both are thought to be said simply of the element earth, how will it fit that it is shaken and melts before the face of the Lord, at whose reign it rejoiced above? So too in Isaiah: “You shall eat the good things of the earth”: the good things of the flesh will be meant, which await it in the kingdom of God, re-formed and made like the angels, and about to obtain what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered the heart of man. (Zechariah 12:10; Isaiah 1:19) Otherwise it would be quite empty for God to invite to obedience with the fruits of the field and the food of this life, which He shares even with the irreligious and blasphemers, the condition having been assigned once for all to man, raining on the good and the evil and sending His sun on the just and the unjust. A happy faith indeed, if it is to obtain what the enemies of God and Christ not only use but abuse, worshiping the creation itself against the Creator! Will you count onions and truffles among the good things of the earth, when the Lord declares that man shall not live even by bread? So the Jews, hoping only for earthly things, lose the heavenly, not knowing of the bread promised from heaven, the oil of divine anointing, the water of the Spirit, and the wine that invigorates the soul from the vine that is Christ. (1 Corinthians 2:9; Matthew 5:45; Romans 1:25; Matthew 4:4) So too they reckon the holy land itself to be properly the soil of Judaea, when it should rather be interpreted as the Lord's flesh, which thereafter is holy land also in all who have put on Christ: truly holy through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, truly flowing with milk and honey through the sweetness of that very hope, truly Judaea through intimacy with God (for he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, but he who is one inwardly), so that the same flesh is both the temple of God and Jerusalem, hearing from Isaiah: “Awake, awake, Jerusalem, put on the strength of your arm; awake as on the day of the beginning,” that is, in the integrity it had before the sin of transgression. (Romans 2:28-29) For how will words of such exhortation and summons fit that Jerusalem which killed the prophets and stoned those sent to it and at last did away with its own Lord? But salvation is not promised to any land at all, since land must pass away with the form of the whole world. Even if anyone dares to argue that the holy land is rather paradise, which may be called the land of the fathers, namely of Adam and Eve, then too a restoration to paradise will be seen to be promised to the flesh, which was allotted to dwell in it and keep it, so that man may be called back there such as he was when driven out.

We can also allegorize the mention of garments in the Scriptures in favor of the hope of the flesh, since the Apocalypse of John too says: “These are they who have not defiled their garments with women,” meaning, of course, virgins and those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. So they will be in white robes, that is, in the brightness of unmarried flesh. (Matthew 19:12; Revelation 3:5) And in the gospel the wedding garment can be recognized as the holiness of the flesh. So Isaiah, teaching what fast the Lord has chosen, when he adds concerning the reward of goodness, “Then,” he says, “your early light will break forth, and your garments will spring up quickly,” meaning, surely, not a silk tunic or a cloak but the flesh, proclaimed the rising of the flesh that is to rise again from the setting of death. (Matthew 22:11-12) So we too have an allegorical defense of the bodily resurrection at hand. For when we read, “My people, go into your storerooms for a little while, until my anger passes by,” the storerooms will be the tombs, in which those who at the end of the age have departed under the last anger, through the violence of the antichrist, will rest for a while. (Isaiah 26:20) Or why did He use the word “storerooms” rather than that of some other place of shelter, unless because in storerooms flesh that has been salted and laid up for use is kept, to be brought out from there in its time? For just so bodies too, treated with the spices of burial, are set apart in mausoleums and monuments, to come forth from there when the Lord commands. Since it is fitting to understand it so (for what refuges of storerooms will save us from the anger of God?), by this very phrase, “until the anger passes by,” the anger that will destroy the antichrist, he shows that after the anger the flesh will come forth from the tomb into which it had been brought before the anger. (Isaiah 26:20) For nothing is brought out of storerooms but what is brought in. And after the rooting out of the antichrist the resurrection will take place.

We know, moreover, that prophecy was made by things as well as by words; the resurrection is proclaimed by deeds as much as by sayings. When Moses hides his hand in his bosom and brings it out dead, and puts it back again and draws it out living, does this not foreshow something concerning the whole man? For the threefold power of God was indicated in order by those three signs: first, that it would subject the devil, the serpent, however fearsome, to man; next, that it would draw the flesh back from the bosom of death; and so, that it would exact all blood in judgment. (Exodus 4:6-7; Exodus 4:2-9) Of this God says through the same prophet: “For I will require your blood too from all beasts, and from the hand of man and from the hand of a brother I will require it.” Now nothing is required except what is demanded back; nothing is demanded back except what will also be given back; and surely what will be demanded back and required in the name of vengeance will be given back. (Genesis 9:5) For what does not exist at all cannot be avenged. But it will exist when it is restored, so that it may be avenged. Whatever is proclaimed about blood, then, is directed at the flesh, without which there will be no blood. The flesh will be raised so that the blood may be avenged. There are also some things said in such a way that they lack the cloud of allegory and yet thirst for the interpretation of their very plainness, as in Isaiah: “I will kill and I will make alive.” Certainly, after He has killed he will make alive. So, killing by death, He will make alive by resurrection. But it is the flesh that is killed by death; so it is the flesh also that will be made alive by resurrection. Surely, if to kill is to snatch the soul from the flesh, to make alive, its opposite, is to give the soul back to the flesh; the flesh must rise, to which the soul, snatched away by killing, must be given back by making alive.

So if allegorical Scriptures, and the evidence of things, and simple sayings give glimmers of the resurrection of the flesh, though without naming that substance itself, how much less should those passages be brought into question which fix this hope on the bodily substances themselves by explicit mention? Hear Ezekiel: “And the hand of the Lord came upon me,” he says, “and the Lord brought me out in the spirit and set me in the middle of a plain; it was full of bones. And He led me round over them in a circle, and look, there were many on the face of the plain, and look, they were very dry. And He said to me, ‘Son of man, will these bones live?' And I said, ‘Adonai, Lord, you know.' And He said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones and say: Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord Adonai to these bones: Look, I bring spirit into you, and you shall live; and I will put sinews on you and bring flesh back upon you and cover you with skin and put spirit in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.' And I prophesied according to the command; and look, a sound as I prophesied, and look, a movement, and the bones came together, bone to bone. And I looked, and look, sinews on the bones, and flesh came up, and flesh was laid around them, and there was no spirit in them. And He said to me, ‘Prophesy to the spirit, son of man, prophesy and say to the spirit: Thus says the Lord Adonai: Come from the four winds, spirit, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.' And I prophesied to the spirit as He commanded me, and the spirit entered them, and they lived and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost; we are cut off in them.” Therefore prophesy to them: Look, I open your tombs and will bring you up out of your tombs, my people, and I will bring you into the land of Israel, and you shall know that I the Lord have opened your tombs and brought you out of your tombs, my people; and I will give you spirit and you shall live, and you shall rest in your land, and you shall know that I the Lord have spoken and done it,' says the Lord.” Ezekiel 37:1-14

I know how they shake this prophecy too into an argument for allegory: because by saying, “These bones are the whole house of Israel,” He made them an image of Israel and transferred them from their proper condition, and so, they say, it is a figurative, not a real, prophecy of resurrection. For the state of the Jews, they say, is portrayed as in some way dead and dried up and scattered over the plain of the world; and so the image of resurrection is allegorized of it, because it is to be gathered again and fitted together bone to bone, that is, tribe to tribe and people to people, and re-embodied with the flesh of resources and the sinews of kingship, and so brought out of the tombs, that is, out of the saddest and foulest dwellings of captivity, to breathe again under the name of refreshment and thereafter to live in its own land, Judaea. And what after this? They will die, no doubt. And what after death? No raising again, I suppose, if it is not this very one that is revealed to Ezekiel. But resurrection is proclaimed elsewhere too. So this one too will be it, and they rashly turn it to the state of Jewish affairs. Or if the one we defend is another, it makes no difference to me, so long as there is a resurrection of bodies as well as of Jewish affairs. Indeed, by the very fact that the renewal of the Jewish state is figured by the re-embodiment and re-animation of bones, it is proved that this will also happen to bones. For a figure could not be composed out of bones if this very thing were not also going to happen to bones. For even though the representation of the truth is in the image, the image itself is true in itself: it must first be something for itself, in order to be shaped to represent another. A likeness is not drawn from emptiness; a parable does not fit nothing. So we must believe also in the re-fleshing and re-breathing of bones, such as is described, from which the re-forming of Jewish affairs, as they imagine it, could be expressed. But it is more religious to defend the truth from the truth of its own plainness, which the sense of the divine declaration demands. For if this vision looked to Jewish affairs, as soon as the place of the bones had been revealed He would have added, “These bones are the whole house of Israel,” and the rest. But when, after the bones have been shown, he says something about their own hope before Israel is named, and tests the prophet's faith (“Son of man, will these bones live?”), so that he answered, “Lord, you know”: surely God would not have tested the prophet's faith about a thing that was not to be, which Israel had never heard of, which ought not to be believed. But since the resurrection of the dead was indeed being proclaimed, while Israel, distrustful through its unbelief, stumbled, and, looking at the appearance of burial growing old, despaired of the resurrection, or did not direct its mind to it but to its own circumstances, therefore God both prepared the prophet, since he too was in doubt, for steadfastness in preaching by revealing the order of the resurrection, and commanded the people to believe what He had revealed to the prophet, saying that they themselves were the bones that were to rise, who did not believe they would rise. Finally, in the conclusion: “And you shall know,” he says, “that I the Lord have spoken and done it,” intending, surely, to do what He had spoken; otherwise he would not be doing what He had spoken, if he were to do otherwise than He had spoken.

Certainly, if the people too had been muttering allegorically that their bones were dried up and their hope lost, complaining of the outcome of their dispersion, it might rightly seem that God had also comforted a figurative despair with a figurative promise. But since the injury of dispersion had not yet happened to the people, while the hope of resurrection had very often been sung among them, it is plain that they were undermining their confidence in the resurrection because of the destruction of bodies. So God was rebuilding the faith that the people were tearing down. And even if Israel was then caught in some struggle over present affairs, the purpose of the revelation should not on that account be taken as a parable, but as a testimony to the resurrection, to raise them to that hope, of eternal salvation, that is, and of a more necessary restoration, and to turn them away from regard for present affairs. For to this end other prophets too say: “You shall go out” (from the tombs) “like calves loosed from bonds, and you shall tread down your enemies”; and again: “Your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall spring up like grass,” since grass too is re-formed out of the dissolution and decay of the seed. (Malachi 4:2-3; Isaiah 66:14) In sum: if the image of the rising bones is contended to apply properly to the state of Israel, why is the same hope announced not only to Israel but to all nations as well, of remains to be re-embodied and re-animated and of the dead to be raised from their tombs? For of all it is said: “The dead shall live, they shall rise from the tombs; for the dew that is from you is healing to their bones.” Likewise elsewhere: “All flesh shall come to worship in my sight, says the Lord.” (Isaiah 26:19) When? When the form of this world begins to pass away. For above it says: (Isaiah 66:23) “As the new heaven and the new earth which I make stand in my sight, says the Lord, so shall your seed stand.” Then, therefore, what he adds will also be fulfilled: “And they shall go out” (from the tombs, surely) “and they shall see the limbs of those who acted wickedly, for their worm shall not die and their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be a spectacle to all flesh”: that flesh, namely, which, raised and gone out of the tombs, will worship the Lord for this grace. (Isaiah 66:24)

But so that the resurrection does not seem to be proclaimed only of those bodies that are committed to tombs, you have it written: “And I will command the fishes of the sea, and they will bring up the bones they have eaten, and I will join joint to joint and bone to bone.”⁠a “So,” you say, “the fishes too will be raised, and the other beasts and the flesh-eating birds, so that they may vomit up those they devoured, since in Moses too you read that blood is required from all beasts?” Surely not. But beasts and fishes are named for this reason, with regard to the giving back of flesh and blood, so that the resurrection even of devoured bodies may be the more clearly expressed, when the demand is decreed upon the devourers themselves. And I think Jonah a fit proof of this divine power too, when he is rolled out of the belly of the fish unharmed in both substances, flesh and soul; and surely the stomach of the whale would have sufficed to digest flesh in three days as well as a coffin, a tomb, or the decay of some burial long at rest and closed; granted that the beast also figured men savage above all against the Christian name, or even the very angels of iniquity, from whom blood will be required by a vengeance to be paid out. Who, then, more inclined to learn than to presume, more careful to believe than to dispute, more reverent toward divine wisdom than eager for his own, hearing something appointed by God for flesh and skin and sinews and bones, will interpret these as something else, as though what is proclaimed for these substances were not appointed for man? For either nothing is appointed for man, not the generosity of the kingdom, not the severity of the judgment, not whatever the resurrection is; or, if it is appointed for man, it must be appointed for those substances of which the man is built for whom it is appointed. I ask this too of these most subtle transformers of bones and flesh and sinews and tombs: why, whenever something is said about the soul, do they interpret the soul as nothing else and do not transform it into a figure of some other thing, but when something is declared about some bodily kind, they assert that it is anything rather than what is named? If bodily things are parables, so are things of the soul; if things of the soul are not, neither are bodily things. For man is body as much as soul, so that one kind cannot admit riddles while the other excludes them.

Enough of the prophetic documents. I now appeal to the Gospels, here too first meeting the same cunning of those who contend that the Lord likewise spoke everything in parables, because it is written: “All these things Jesus spoke in parables, and without a parable He did not speak to them,” that is, to the Jews. (Matthew 13:34) For the disciples too say, “Why do you speak in parables?” And the Lord: “For this reason I speak to them in parables, that seeing they may not see and hearing they may not hear,” according to Isaiah. But if to the Jews in parables, then not to all; if not to all in parables, then not always, nor is everything a parable, but some things, when spoken to some; and to some, namely to the Jews; now and then, admittedly, to the disciples too. But consider how Scripture reports it: “And He told them also a parable.” So He also spoke without parables, since it would not be noted when he spoke a parable if he always spoke so. And yet you will find no parable that was not either explained by Himself, as that of the sower, of the ministry of the word; or lit up beforehand by the Gospel's narrator, as that of the proud judge and the persistent widow, of perseverance in prayer; or open to conjecture, as that of the fig tree spared in hope, after the pattern of Jewish unfruitfulness. But if not even the parables darken the light of the Gospel, much less do sentences and definitions, whose nature is open, mean anything other than they sound. And it is by definitions and sentences that the Lord declares the judgment, or the kingdom of God, or the resurrection: “It will be more tolerable,” He says, “for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment”; and, “Tell them that the kingdom of God has drawn near”; (Matthew 11:22) and, “It will be repaid to you at the resurrection of the just.” (Matthew 10:7) If these are the absolute names of things, that is, of judgment, the kingdom of God, and resurrection, so that none of them can be squeezed into a parable, then neither can the things proclaimed about the arrangement and conduct of the kingdom and the undergoing of judgment and resurrection be forced into parables; (Luke 14:14) and so they will be defended as bodily, as appointed for bodily beings, that is, not spiritual, because not figurative. For this is why we laid down beforehand that the body of the soul as well as that of the flesh is liable to the rewards to be paid for their common work: so that the bodily nature of the soul, providing an opportunity for figures of speech, does not exclude the bodiliness of the flesh, since both must be believed partners in the kingdom, the judgment, and the resurrection. And now we go on to show that it is properly the bodiliness of the flesh that the Lord signifies in every mention of resurrection, without prejudice to that of the soul, which few have accepted.

First, when He says that He came for this, to save what was lost, what do you say was lost? (Luke 19:10) Man, without doubt. Whole or in part? Whole, surely, since the transgression which is the cause of human perdition, committed as much by the soul's impulse out of desire as by the flesh's act of tasting, inscribed the whole man with the charge of transgression and so filled him with the desert of perdition. So the whole man will be saved who perished wholly by sinning; unless that sheep too is lost without its body and brought back without its body. For if its flesh too, together with its soul, which makes the whole animal, is carried on the shoulders of the good shepherd, it is surely an example of man to be restored in both substances. Or how unworthy of God to bring half a man back to salvation, to do almost less than that, when even the pardon of worldly princes is always claimed as full! Will the devil be understood to be stronger in injuring man, dashing him down whole? Will God be declared weaker, not raising him up whole? Yet the apostle too suggests that where sin abounded, there grace has superabounded. How, finally, will he be held saved who can also be called lost? Lost in the flesh, of course; except that the soul too must be placed among the lost, so that it can be made safe, for what must be made safe is what was lost. (Romans 5:20) Now, however, we accept the immortality of the soul, so that, when lost, it is believed lost not to destruction but to punishment, that is, to Gehenna. And if so, salvation will no longer look to the soul, safe by its nature through immortality, but rather to the flesh, which all agree is perishable. Or if the soul too is perishable, that is, not immortal, like the flesh, then that rule by which the Lord will save what perishes must equally benefit the flesh, being likewise mortal and perishable. I do not wish now to drag out with a contentious rope whether perdition claims man this way or that, so long as salvation, levelled equally over both substances, claims him from both sides. For see: in whichever substance you suppose man to have perished, in the other he does not perish. So he will be safe in the one in which he does not perish, and will be made safe no less in the one in which he perishes: you have the restoration of the whole man, since the Lord will save whatever of him perishes and surely will not lose whatever does not perish. Who will any longer doubt the safety of either substance, when one is to obtain salvation and the other is not to lose it? And yet the Lord expresses the matter still more plainly, saying: “I have come not to do my own will but the will of the Father who sent me.” What will, I ask you? “That of all that He has given me I should lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day.” (John 6:38) What had Christ received from the Father but what He had also put on? Man, without doubt, the fabric of flesh and soul. So he will not let either of those He received perish, nor anything of either, nor even a little. If the flesh is a little, then not the flesh either, because not even a little. And yet, if He does not raise the flesh too on the last day, He will let not a little of man perish but, I would say, since it is so large a part, nearly the whole. Adding further, “This is the will of the Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day,” He builds up the fullness of the resurrection. For He distributes the reward of salvation to both substances according to their proper functions: to the flesh, through which the Son was seen, and to the soul, through which He was believed. “So,” you will say, “the promise will belong to those by whom Christ was seen.” Let it be so, provided the same hope has flowed from there to us as well. For if the works of flesh and soul were fruitful then to those who saw and therefore believed, much more to us. For more blessed are those who do not see and yet believe; so that even if the resurrection of the flesh were denied to those others, it would surely have belonged to the more blessed. (John 20:29) But how are they blessed if they are to perish in part?

But He also teaches that He is rather to be feared who kills both body and soul in Gehenna, that is, the Lord alone, not those who kill the body but can do nothing to the soul, that is, human powers. (Matthew 10:28) So here the soul is recognized as immortal by nature, since it cannot be killed by men, and mortality is recognized as belonging to the flesh, which can be killed; and so the resurrection of the dead too belongs to the flesh, which cannot be killed in Gehenna unless it has been raised. But since here too a quibble is raised over the interpretation of “body,” I understand the body of man to be nothing other than this whole structure of flesh, of whatever kind of materials it is put together and diversified: what is seen, what is held, what, in short, is killed by men. So too I will admit the body of a wall to be nothing other than rubble, stones, and bricks. If anyone brings in some secret body, let him show it, reveal it, prove that it too is what is killed by man, and then it will have been said of that. Likewise, if the body of the soul is put forward, the trick will be empty. For since both body and soul are set forth as killed in Gehenna, the body is distinguished from the soul, and what remains to be understood as body is what is at hand, namely the flesh; which, just as it will be killed in Gehenna if it has not rather feared to be killed by God, so will be made alive to eternal life if it has chosen rather to be put to death by men. Likewise, if anyone takes the killing of flesh and soul in Gehenna as the destruction and end of both substances, not their punishment, as if they were to be consumed rather than punished, let him remember that the fire of Gehenna is proclaimed eternal, for eternal punishment, and from this let him recognize that the killing is eternal, and therefore to be feared before human killing, which is temporal. Then he will also believe the substances eternal whose killing is eternal, for punishment. Certainly, since after the resurrection the body with the soul is to be killed in Gehenna, both points will be established well enough: the bodily resurrection and the eternal killing. It would otherwise be most absurd that the raised flesh should be killed in Gehenna in order to be ended, which it would undergo even without being raised; it would be restored for this purpose, that what had already ceased to be should not be. Propping us up in the same hope, he adds the example of the sparrows as well, that not one of two falls to the ground without the will of God, so that you may believe that the flesh too, which has fallen to the ground, can likewise rise again by the will of the same God. (Matthew 10:29) For even if this is not permitted to sparrows, yet we are worth more than many sparrows in that, falling, we rise again; and in declaring that all the hairs of our head are numbered, He surely promises that they are safe. For what reason would have brought into a count things that were to perish? Unless it is this: “that of all that the Father has given me I should lose nothing,” that is, not a hair, just as not an eye or a tooth. (Matthew 10:30; John 6:39) Otherwise, where will the weeping and gnashing of teeth come from, if not from eyes and teeth? When, that is, the body too has been killed in Gehenna and thrust into the outer darkness, which is properly a torment of the eyes. If anyone at the wedding is clothed in less worthy works, he is at once to be bound hand and foot, as one who has risen with his body. So too reclining in the kingdom of God, sitting on the thrones of Christ, standing at the right hand or the left, and eating of the tree of life are most faithful indications of a bodily arrangement.

Let us see now whether, in crushing the craftiness of the Sadducees, he has not rather set up our view. The cause of the question was, I think, the overthrow of the resurrection, since the Sadducees admit the salvation neither of soul nor of flesh; and so, from the aspect of the resurrection by which faith is most shaken, they fitted an argument to their problem, namely the flesh's pretext of marrying or not after the resurrection, in the character of the woman who, married to seven brothers, was held in doubt as to which of them she would be restored to. Now let the sense of both question and answer be kept, and the controversy is met. For if the Sadducees rejected the resurrection while the Lord confirmed it, rebuking them as ignorant of the Scriptures (those, that is, which had proclaimed the resurrection) and as unbelieving of the power of God (well able, surely, to raise the dead), and finally adding, “But that the dead rise,” then without doubt, in confirming that what was denied exists, namely the resurrection of the dead with the God of the living, He confirmed it to be such as it was denied to be, that is, of both human substances. (Luke 20:37) For if he denied that they would marry then, he did not in this way show that they would not rise. On the contrary, He calls them sons of the resurrection, as having in a manner to be born through it, after which they will not marry, being raised. For they will be like angels, in that they will not marry, because they will not die either, but also in that they will pass into the angelic state through that clothing of incorruptibility, through a change of substance, a substance nonetheless raised. Besides, the question whether we would marry or die again would not be asked unless the restoration of that substance above all were called in doubt which properly undergoes both death and marriage, that is, the flesh. You have, then, the Lord confirming against the heretics of the Jews what is now denied among the Sadducees of the Christians: a solid resurrection.

So too, if he says that the flesh profits nothing, the sense must be governed by the subject of the saying. (John 6:63) For since they thought His word hard and intolerable, as if He had determined that his flesh was really to be eaten by them, He first said, in order to set the state of salvation in the spirit, “It is the spirit that gives life,” and then added, “the flesh profits nothing,” for giving life, that is. He goes on to say what He wants the spirit to be understood as: “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit, they are life”; as also above: “He who hears my words and believes in Him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment but passes from death to life.” So, establishing the word as the life-giver, because the word is spirit and life, He also called the same word his flesh, because the Word had also become flesh; and so it is to be sought for the sake of life, and devoured by hearing, chewed over by understanding, and digested by faith. (John 5:24; John 1:14) For a little earlier He had also declared His flesh to be the heavenly bread, pressing throughout, by an allegory of necessary foods, the memory of the fathers who had preferred the loaves and the flesh of the Egyptians to the divine calling. (John 6:51) So, turning to their thoughts, since He had perceived that they were about to be scattered, He says, “The flesh profits nothing.” What has this to do with destroying the resurrection of the flesh, as if there could not be something which, though it profits nothing, can still be profited by something else? The spirit profits, for it gives life. The flesh profits nothing, for it is put to death. So He has rather set out the proposition about both in our favor. For in showing what profits and what does not, He likewise made clear what profits what: the spirit profits the flesh, namely, as the life-giver of what has been put to death. “For the hour will come,” He says, “when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” What is dead but the flesh? And what is the voice of God but the word? And what is the word but spirit? Fittingly he will raise the flesh, which He Himself became, and from death, which He Himself suffered, and from the tomb, into which He Himself was carried. Finally, when He says, “Do not marvel that the hour will come in which all who are in the tombs will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who have done good will come forth to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment,” no one can any longer interpret the dead who are in the tombs as anything but bodies and flesh, since tombs themselves are nothing but lodgings for corpses. For even the “old men,” that is, the sinners, that is, those dead through ignorance of God, whom the heretics argue are to be understood by the tombs, are plainly proclaimed as coming out of the tombs to judgment. (John 5:25; John 5:28-29) How else will tombs come out of tombs?

After the Lord's sayings, what are we to believe His deeds mean, when He raised the dead from biers and tombs? For what purpose was it? If for a mere display of power, or for the present favor of bringing back to life, it was no great thing for Him to raise those who would die again. But if rather to deposit a pledge of faith in the future resurrection, then that resurrection too is determined to be bodily by the form of its proof. Nor will I bear those who say that a resurrection then appointed for the soul alone ran ahead in the flesh as well because the resurrection of the invisible soul could not have been shown except by the raising of the visible substance. They know God poorly who do not think him able to do what they themselves cannot think of; and yet they know he could have, if they know the document of John. For he who set before our sight the souls of the martyrs, still alone, resting under the altar, could surely have shown them to our eyes rising without flesh as well. (Revelation 6:9-11) But I prefer a God who cannot deceive, weak only in respect of falsehood, so that he does not seem to have sent ahead proofs different from the way he arranged the reality; indeed, so that, if He could not bring in an example of resurrection without flesh, He is not much less able to show the fullness of the example. But no example is greater than that of which it is an example. And it would be greater if souls were raised with the body as a proof of rising without the body, so that the salvation of the whole man served as patron for that of half; whereas the nature of examples would rather call for what was held to be less, I mean the resurrection of the soul alone, as a foretaste of the flesh too, which is to rise in its own time. And so, by our true reckoning, those examples of the dead raised by the Lord did commend the resurrection of both flesh and soul, so that this gift is not denied to either substance; yet, as examples, they set forth something less. For they were raised not to glory or incorruptibility but to another death.

What resurrection Christ proclaimed the apostolic documents also attest. For the apostles too had no other business, at least among Israel, than to unseal the old covenant and seal the new, and above all to preach God in Christ. So they brought nothing new concerning the resurrection either, except that they announced it too to the glory of Christ; otherwise it was received by a simple and already familiar faith, without any question about its nature, only the Sadducees opposing. So much easier was it to deny the resurrection of the dead altogether than to understand it otherwise. You have Paul before the chief priests, under the tribune, among Sadducees and Pharisees, professing his faith: “Men, brothers,” he says, “I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees; I am now on trial before you concerning the hope and the resurrection,” the common one, surely, so that, since he already seemed a transgressor of the law, he would not be thought to side with the Sadducees on the chief article of the whole faith, that is, the resurrection. (Acts 23:6) So the faith in the resurrection which he did not wish to seem to rescind he surely confirmed in the Pharisees' sense, rejecting its deniers, the Sadducees. Likewise before Agrippa he says that he puts forward nothing beyond what the prophets had announced. So He kept the resurrection too such as the prophets had announced it. (Acts 26:22) For in recalling what is written in Moses about the resurrection of the dead as well, he knew it to be bodily, one, namely, in which the blood of man will be required. So He preached it such as the Pharisees had received it and the Lord himself had defended it, and as the Sadducees, rather than believe it such, had wished it not to exist at all. (Genesis 9:5-6) Nor did the Athenians understand him to herald any other. In short, they mocked, who would not have mocked at all if they had heard from him of the restoration of the soul alone; for they would have welcomed the quite common presumption of their home-grown philosophy. (Acts 17:32) But when the proclamation of a resurrection never heard of before shook the nations by its very novelty, and a fitting incredulity at so great a thing began to rack faith with questions, then the apostle too took care throughout almost his whole document to strengthen faith in this hope, showing both that it exists and that it has not yet taken place, and, what was most questioned, that it is bodily, and, what was doubted besides, that it is bodily in no other sense.

It is no wonder, however, if arguments are snatched even from his own document, since there must be heresies, which could not exist if the Scriptures could not also be wrongly understood. So the heresies, (1 Corinthians 11:19) having come upon the two men set forth by the apostle, the inner, that is, the soul, and the outer, that is, the flesh, have awarded salvation to the soul, that is, to the inner man, but destruction to the flesh, that is, to the outer, because it is written to the Corinthians: “For though our outer man is being corrupted, yet the inner is being renewed day by day.” But neither is the soul by itself man, since it was inserted afterwards into the formed thing already called man; nor is the flesh without the soul man, since after the soul's exile it is entitled a corpse. (2 Corinthians 4:16) So the word “man” is in a way the clasp of two substances bound together, and under that word they cannot exist except joined. Moreover, the apostle prefers the inner man to be understood not so much as the soul but as the mind and disposition, that is, not the substance itself but the savor of the substance. For writing to the Ephesians that Christ dwells in the inner man, he signified that the Lord is to be admitted into the inner senses. Then He added, “through faith, in your hearts, and in love,” putting faith and love not as substantial parts of the soul but as its conceptions; (Ephesians 3:17) but in saying “in hearts,” which are substantial parts of the flesh, he assigned to the flesh even the inner man itself, whom he placed in the heart. Look now at how he alleged that the outer man is being corrupted while the inner is renewed day by day, so that you do not affirm that corruption of the flesh which it suffers from the day of death, to fail forever, but rather that which in the span of this life, before death and up to death, it experiences through vexations and pressures, tortures and punishments, for the Name's sake. For the inner man too is to be renewed here, surely, advancing day by day in faith and discipline by the prompting of the Spirit; not there, that is, not after the resurrection, where we are not to be renewed day by day but once for all, completely. Learn from what follows: “For our present, temporary, and light affliction,” he says, “works for us, beyond all measure, an eternal weight of glory, as we look not at the things that are seen” (that is, sufferings) “but at the things that are not seen” (that is, rewards); “for the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal.” For the afflictions and injuries by which the outer man is corrupted he declares to be light and temporary and therefore to be despised, preferring the weight of eternal, invisible rewards and of glory as compensation for the labors by which the flesh here is corrupted in suffering. (2 Corinthians 4:17-18) So that is not the corruption which they ascribe to the outer man as the perpetual destruction of the flesh, in order to expel the resurrection. So too elsewhere: “if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with him; for I reckon that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the future glory that is to be revealed in us.” Here too he shows the troubles to be smaller than their rewards. (Romans 8:17-18) Now, if we suffer with him through the flesh, to which it properly belongs to be corrupted by sufferings, what is promised for suffering with him will belong to the flesh as well. And so, intending to assign to the flesh the property of afflictions, as above, he says: “For when we had come into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest”; then, to give the soul too a share in the suffering: “afflicted in everything,” he says, “fightings without” (warring down the flesh, that is), “fear within” (afflicting the soul, (2 Corinthians 7:5) that is). So even if the outer man is being corrupted, it is understood to be corrupted not as losing the resurrection but as enduring vexation, and that not without the inner man. So to be glorified together will belong to both, just as to suffer together. The fellowships of rewards must run parallel to the partnerships of labors.

He pursues the same thought still, preferring rewards to vexations: “For we know,” he says, “that if the earthly house of our tabernacle is dissolved, we have a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”; that is, in return for our flesh being dissolved through sufferings, we shall obtain a dwelling in the heavens. (2 Corinthians 5:1) He remembered the Gospel's definition: “Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Yet he did not deny the restoration of the flesh if he set against its dissolution the compensation of reward, since the compensation is owed to that to which the dissolution is charged, namely the flesh. (Matthew 5:10) But since he had called the flesh a house, he elegantly chose to use the word “house” also in the comparison with the reward, promising to the house itself, which will be dissolved through suffering, a better house through the resurrection. For the Lord too promises many mansions, as houses, with the Father. Although it can also be understood of the dwelling of the world, on whose dissolution an eternal seat is promised in the heavens, since what follows, plainly referring to the flesh, shows that what precedes does not refer to the flesh. (John 14:2) For the apostle makes a distinction when he adds: “For in this we groan, longing to be clothed over with our dwelling that is from heaven, since, having been stripped, we shall not be found naked”; that is, we wish to put on the heavenly power of eternity over us before we are stripped of the flesh. (2 Corinthians 5:2-3) For the privilege of this grace awaits those who at the Lord's coming will be found in the flesh and, because of the harshness of the times of the antichrist, will deserve, by a shortcut of death accomplished through change, to join those who rise, as he writes to the Thessalonians: “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who remain until the coming of the Lord, shall not go before those who have fallen asleep; for the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a command and the voice of the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first; then we together with them will be caught up in the clouds to meet Christ, and so we shall always be with the Lord.” 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17

He explains the change of these, extended to all, in the first letter to the Corinthians, saying: “We shall not all rise, but we shall all be changed, in an atom, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” Having first looked at this statement, you will refer the rest back to the earlier sense. For when he adds, “For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal put on immortality,” this will be that dwelling from heaven which, groaning in this flesh, we long to put on over it, over the flesh, that is, in which we shall be found; because he says that we who are in the tabernacle are burdened, since we do not wish to be stripped but rather to be clothed over, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life, while, that is, it is changed by putting on over it what is from the heavens. (1 Corinthians 15:51-53) For who will not desire, while he is in the flesh, to put on immortality over it and to continue life, death being gained by a substitute change, so as not to experience the underworld, which will exact the last penny? But even he who has already experienced the underworld will obtain the change after the resurrection. For from this we define that the flesh will in every case take on the angelic condition from the change that will come upon it. Or if it must be changed only in those who will be found in the flesh, so that the mortal may be swallowed up by life, that is, the flesh by that heavenly and eternal over-garment, then those who are found dead will not obtain life, being already deprived of the material and, so to speak, the food of life, that is, the flesh; or else they too must receive it back, so that in them too the mortal can be swallowed up by life, if they are to obtain life. “But in the dead,” you say, “this mortal will already have been swallowed up.” Not in all, surely. For how many may be found who died only the day before, corpses so fresh that nothing in them can seem to have been swallowed up? For surely by “swallowed up” you mean nothing other than intercepted, abolished, snatched from every sense, what has ceased to appear in any way at all. Nor will the most ancient corpses of the giants be shown to have been swallowed up, whose frames still survive. We have spoken of this elsewhere. But recently too, in this very city, when the foundations of the Odeum were being laid sacrilegiously over so many old burials, the people shuddered at bones some five hundred years old still moist, and hair still smelling. It is agreed that not only do bones endure but teeth too last uncorrupted, which are kept as seeds of the body that will sprout in the resurrection. Finally, even if at that time the mortal is found swallowed up in all the dead, it will be swallowed up by death, surely, by time, by age: but is it by life, by the over-garment, by the putting on of immortality? Now, he who says the mortal will be swallowed up by these has denied that it will be by the others. And surely it will be fitting for this to be accomplished and effected by divine powers, not by natural laws. So since what is mortal is to be swallowed up by life, it must by all means be presented so that it may be swallowed up, and be swallowed up so that it may be changed. If you say that a fire must be kindled, you cannot affirm that what it is kindled with is necessary in one place and not in another. So too when he inserts, “since, having been stripped, we shall not be found naked” (of those, namely, who at the day of the Lord will be found not in life nor in the flesh), he denied that those whom he had spoken of as stripped would be naked only because he wished them to be understood as reclothed in the same substance of which they had been stripped. (2 Corinthians 5:3) For they will be found naked when the flesh has been laid aside, or partly torn or worn away (for this too can be called nakedness); then they will receive it back, so that, reclothed with the flesh, they may also be clothed over with immortality. For being clothed over can only suit one who is already clothed.

Likewise, when he says, “So we are always confident, knowing that while we dwell in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight,” it is plain that this too does not serve to darken the flesh as if it separated us from the Lord. (2 Corinthians 5:6-7) For here too an exhortation to disdain this life is set before us, since we are away from the Lord as long as we live, walking by faith, not by sight, that is, in hope, not in reality. And so he adds: “But we are confident and think it better rather to be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” that is, so that we may walk by sight rather than by faith, in reality rather than in hope. You see how here too he refers contempt of bodies to the excellence of martyrdom. For no one who goes away from the body is at once at home with the Lord except by the privilege of martyrdom, lodging, that is, in paradise, not in the underworld. Had the apostle lacked words to signify departure from the body? Or does he speak unusually for a reason? Wishing to signify a temporary absence from the body, he said that we are away from it as travelers, since he who travels abroad will also return home. Then, of all: “We are eager,” he says, “whether away or at home, to be pleasing to God; for we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ Jesus.” If all, then whole; if whole, then both inner and outer, that is, souls as well as bodies: (2 Corinthians 5:9-10) “so that each one,” he says, “may receive back through the body according to what he has done, whether good or bad.” How you read this, I now ask; for he has constructed it somewhat confusedly, by hyperbaton. Is it the things to be received back through the body, or the things done? But if they are to be received back through the body, the resurrection is beyond doubt bodily; and if it is the things done, they must surely be repaid through the body through which they were also done. (2 Corinthians 5:10) So this whole treatment by the apostle from the beginning, woven to such a conclusion, by which the resurrection of the flesh is shown, must be understood in keeping with what agrees with the conclusion.

If you look back further to the earlier verses, from which the mention of the outer and inner man was introduced, will you not find both the dignity and the hope of the flesh intact? For when, speaking of the light that God has made shine in our hearts for the illumination of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Christ, he says that we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that is, in the flesh: will the flesh be destroyed because it is earthenware by its origin in clay, or exalted because it is the storehouse of a divine treasure? And indeed, if that true light itself, which is in the person of Christ, contains life in itself, and that life together with the light is entrusted to the flesh, is that to which life is entrusted to perish? Suppose so: is the treasure itself to perish too? For perishable things are entrusted to perishable things, like new wine to old wineskins. Likewise, when he adds, (2 Corinthians 4:6) “always carrying about in our body the dying of Christ Jesus,” what sort of thing is this which, after being the temple of God, can now be called the tomb of Christ as well? And why do we carry about the dying of the Lord in the body? “So that the life too,” he says, “may be manifested.” (2 Corinthians 4:10) Where? “In the body.” In what body? “In the mortal.” In the flesh, then: mortal indeed through guilt, but living through grace; see how great a grace, that the life of Christ should be manifested in it! In a thing foreign to salvation, then, in a substance of perpetual dissolution, will the life of Christ be manifested, eternal, unbroken, incorrupt, the very life of God? Or of what time is the life of the Lord that will be manifested in our body? That which He lived up to His passion was not only open to view among the Jews but has now been published to all nations as well. So he means that life which broke the adamantine gates of death and the bronze bars of the underworld, and which thereafter is ours. In short, it will be manifested in the body. When? After death. How? When we rise in the body, as Christ did. For so that no one argues that the life of Jesus is to be manifested in our body now, through the discipline of holiness, patience, righteousness, and wisdom in which the Lord's life flourished, the apostle's most provident purpose adds: “For if we who live are delivered to death for Jesus' sake, so that His life too may be manifested in our mortal body.” So he says that this will happen in our body when we are dead. And if then, (2 Corinthians 4:11) how except in the body raised? So too in the conclusion: “knowing,” he says, “that He who raised Jesus will raise us also with Him.” But He has already risen from the dead; so “with Him” can only mean “like Him”; and if like Him, then surely not without flesh.

But again, with another blindness, they stumble on two men, the old and the new, since the apostle warns us to put off the old man, who is corrupted through deceitful desire, and to be renewed in the spirit of the mind and to put on the new man, who is created according to God in righteousness and the holiness of truth; so that here too, dividing them between the two substances, the oldness to the flesh and the newness to the soul, they maintain perpetual corruption for the old, (Ephesians 4:22-24) that is, the flesh. But if it goes by substances, neither is the soul the new man because it came later, nor the flesh old because it came first. For how little time was there between God's hand and His breath? I would venture to say: even if the flesh was long prior to the soul, by the very fact that it waited to be filled by the soul, it made the soul prior. For every completion and perfection, though later in order, comes first in effect. That is more truly prior without which the prior things cannot be. If the flesh is the old man, since when? From the beginning? But Adam was wholly new, and no one is old from new. And from then on, from the blessing of generation, flesh and soul come to be together without reckoning of time, since they are also sown together in the womb, as we have taught in the treatise on the soul. (Genesis 1:28) They are contemporaries in the embryo, coeval at birth. These two men, of a double substance indeed, but not of a double age, are brought forth as one, since neither is prior. It is more correct that we are wholly either old or new; for how we could be one and the other we do not know. But the apostle clearly marks what the old man is: “Put off,” he says, “according to your former way of life, the old man”; not according to the age of some substance. (Ephesians 4:22) For he does not command us to put off the flesh, but what he elsewhere too shows to be carnal, accusing works, not bodies, of which he adds here: “Putting away lying, speak the truth each to his neighbor, since we are members of one another. (Galatians 5:19) Be angry and do not sin. Let not the sun set on your anger, and give no place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands, so that he may have something to share with the needy. Let no foul word come out of your mouth, but only what is best for the building up of faith, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and anger and clamor and blasphemy be taken away from you, with all malice. But be kind to one another, merciful, forgiving one another, as God also has forgiven you in Christ.” So those who think the flesh the old man, why do they not hasten their own death, so that by putting off the old man they may fulfill the apostle's commands? For we, who believe that the whole faith is to be carried out in the flesh, indeed through the flesh, to which belong the mouth for bringing forth all the best speech, the tongue for not blaspheming, the heart for not being indignant, and the hands for working and giving, maintain that both the oldness and the newness of man belong to a moral, (Ephesians 4:25-32) not a substantial, difference. And so we likewise acknowledge that the man who was old according to his former way of life is the same one who is said to be corrupted according to deceitful desire, just as he is called old according to his former way of life, (Ephesians 4:22) not according to the flesh through perpetual destruction. For the rest, he is safe in the flesh and the same man, having put off his vicious rule of life, not his bodiliness.

Recognize the apostle to be like this everywhere: condemning the works of the flesh in such a way that he seems to condemn the flesh, but taking care, so that no one thinks so, through the prompting of other or adjoining statements. For in saying that those who are in the flesh cannot please God, he at once calls it back from a wrong understanding to a sound one by adding: “But you are not in the flesh but in the spirit.” For by denying that those who plainly were in the flesh were in the flesh, he showed that they were not in the works of the flesh; and so those cannot please God, not who are in the flesh, but who live carnally; while those please God who, placed in the flesh, walk according to the spirit. (Romans 8:8-9) And again he says that the body is dead, but because of sin, just as the spirit is life because of righteousness. And setting life against the death established in the flesh, he without doubt promised life from righteousness in the very place where he fixed death from sin. Otherwise he would have set life against death in vain, if it is not there where that death is to which he opposed it, which must surely be driven out of the body. Now, if life drives death out of the body, it cannot do so without entering where that is which it drives out. But why am I more knotty when the apostle is more straightforward? “For if,” he says, “the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Jesus from the dead will also raise your mortal bodies, because of His Spirit dwelling in you”; so that even if someone presumes the soul to be the mortal body, since he cannot deny that the flesh is so too, he is forced to acknowledge the raising of the flesh as well, by fellowship in the same condition. (Romans 8:11) From what follows you may learn further that the works of the flesh are condemned, not the flesh itself: “So, brothers,” he says, “we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh; for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh, you will live.” Now, to answer point by point: if salvation is promised to those set in the flesh but living according to the spirit, it is no longer the flesh that is opposed to salvation, but the working of the flesh. And when the working of the flesh, which is the cause of death, is removed, the flesh is shown to be safe, lacking the cause of death. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” he says, “has set me free from the law of sin and death”: the law, surely, which he said before dwells in our members. So our members will no longer be held by the law of death, since they are no longer held by that of sin, from which they have been set free. “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin, and through sin, condemned sin in the flesh”: not the flesh in sin; for the house will not be condemned with its inhabitant. (Romans 8:3) For he said that sin dwells in our body. But when sin is condemned, the flesh is acquitted, just as, while sin was uncondemned, the flesh was bound to the law of death and sin. (Romans 7:20) So even if he called the mind of the flesh death, and then enmity toward God, he did not so call the flesh itself. (Romans 8:6) “To what, then,” you will say, “will the mind of the flesh be charged, if not to the substance itself?” To it, certainly, if you prove that the flesh has any mind of its own. But if without the soul it has no sensation, understand that the mind of the flesh is to be referred to the soul, though sometimes assigned to the flesh because it is carried on for the flesh's sake and through the flesh. And therefore he says that sin dwells in the flesh, because the soul too, by which sin is brought in, is the flesh's lodger; the flesh is put to death, indeed, but not in its own name, rather in that of sin. For elsewhere too he says: “How is it that even now, as though living in the world, you pass judgment?” writing not to the dead, but to those who ought to cease living in a worldly way. (Colossians 2:20)

For this will be the worldly life which he calls the old man crucified with Christ: not bodiliness, but conduct. Otherwise, if we do not take it so, (Romans 6:6) our bodiliness has not been crucified, nor has our flesh suffered the cross of Christ; but, as he added, “that the body of sin may be done away with,” by amendment of life, not by destruction of substance, as he says, “so that we may no longer serve sin,” and that on this account, having died with Christ, we may believe that we shall also live with Him. “So you too,” he says, “reckon yourselves dead.” To what? To the flesh? No, but to sin. So they will be safe as to the flesh, “but alive to God in Christ Jesus”: through the flesh, surely, to which they will not be dead, being dead to sin, not to the flesh. For he presses further: “Let not sin, then, reign in your mortal body, so that you obey it and present your members to sin as weapons of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as living from the dead” (not as living, but as living from the dead) “and your members as weapons of righteousness.” And again: “As you presented your members as slaves to uncleanness and iniquity for iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification; for when you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness. What fruit, then, did you have from the things of which you are now ashamed? For their end is death. But now, having been set free from sin and become slaves of God, you have your fruit leading to sanctification, and the end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” So throughout this whole series of statements, tearing our members away from unrighteousness and sin and joining them to righteousness and holiness, and transferring them from the wages of death to the gift of eternal life, he surely promises the flesh the reward of salvation. It would not have been fitting at all to command it to keep a discipline of holiness and righteousness of its own, if the reward of the discipline were not also its own; nor even to entrust baptism itself to it, if through regeneration it were not also being consecrated for restoration. The apostle presses this too: “Or do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried with Him, then, through baptism into death, so that, as Christ rose from the dead, so we too may walk in newness of life.” And so that you do not think this said only of this life, which is to be lived in newness from faith through baptism, he most providently adds: “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of Christ's death, so shall we be also of His resurrection.” (Romans 6:3-4) For in baptism we die through a likeness, but we rise in reality in the flesh, as Christ did too, “so that, as sin reigned in death, so grace also may reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” How so, if not equally in the flesh? For where death is, there too is life after death, because where death came afterwards there was life before. (Romans 5:21) For if the reign of death works nothing but the dissolution of the flesh, then life, the opposite of death, must work the opposite, that is, the reintegration of the flesh; so that, as death by prevailing had swallowed up what is mortal, so it too, swallowed up by immortality, may hear: “Where, death, is your sting? Where, death, is your strife?” For so grace too will superabound where iniquity abounded; (1 Corinthians 15:55) so too power will be made perfect in weakness, saving what was lost, making alive what was dead, healing what was struck, curing what languished, redeeming what was snatched away, freeing what was enslaved, calling back what was led astray, raising what was dashed down; and indeed from earth to heaven, where the Philippians too learn from the apostle that our citizenship is, “from which also we await our Savior, Jesus Christ, who will transform the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory”: without doubt after the resurrection, since Christ Himself too was not glorified before his passion. (Romans 5:20; 2 Corinthians 12:9; Philippians 3:20-21) These will be our bodies which he beseeches the Romans to present as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God. How living, if they are to perish? How holy, if they are profane? How pleasing, if they are condemned? Come now, how will these people who flee the light of the Scriptures take what was written to the Thessalonians, which I would think written with a ray of the sun itself, so bright it is: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly”? (Romans 12:1) Is that not enough? But it goes on: “and may your whole body and soul and spirit be kept blameless at the coming of the Lord.” You have the whole substance of man destined for salvation, and at no other time than at the coming of the Lord, which is the key of the resurrection. (1 Thessalonians 5:23)

“But flesh and blood,” you say, “cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” We know that this too is written. But we have deliberately put it off until now, so that what our adversaries throw up at once in the front line we might overthrow in the last engagement, after all the questions, its auxiliaries as it were, (1 Corinthians 15:50) had first been knocked down. But even now it will help to review what precedes, so that its origin may settle the sense of this too. The apostle, as I think, having set out for the Corinthians every point of church discipline, had summed up both his gospel and their faith in the commission of the Lord's death and resurrection, so as to derive the rule of our hope too from the point on which it rests. So he adds: “But if Christ is preached as having risen from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? And if there is none, neither has Christ risen. If Christ has not risen, our preaching is empty, our faith is vain. For we shall be found false witnesses of God, having testified that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise. For if the dead do not rise, neither has Christ risen. If Christ has not risen, your faith is vain, for you are still in your sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.” By these words, what does he seem to be building us up to believe? “The resurrection of the dead,” you say, “which was being denied.” Surely wishing it to be believed on the pattern of the Lord's resurrection. (1 Corinthians 15:12-18) “Surely,” you say. Now, is a pattern made from difference or from likeness? “From likeness, of course,” you say. But how did Christ rise? In the flesh, or not? Without doubt, if you hear that He died and was buried according to the Scriptures in no other way than in the flesh, you will grant equally that He was raised in the flesh. For the very thing that fell in death, that lay in the tomb, is what also rose: not so much Christ in the flesh as the flesh in Christ. So if we shall rise after the pattern of Christ, who rose in the flesh, we shall not rise after the pattern of Christ if we too do not rise in the flesh: “because through a man,” he says, “came death, and through a man the resurrection,” so as to separate the authors, Adam of death, Christ of resurrection, but to establish that the resurrection is of the same substance as the death, by comparing the authors themselves under the name “man.” “For if as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive,” they will be made alive in Christ in the flesh, as in Adam they die in the flesh. (1 Corinthians 15:22) “But each in his own order,” that is, because each in his own body too. For the order will be arranged by merits; and since merits are ascribed to the body as well, an order of bodies too must be arranged, so that there can be an order of merits. “But if some are also baptized for the dead,” we shall see whether with good reason. Certainly he indicates that they instituted this out of the presumption by which others thought that a vicarious baptism would benefit the flesh too for the hope of resurrection, which, unless it were bodily, would not be pledged in a bodily baptism. Why does he say that they themselves are baptized for the dead if the bodies that are baptized do not rise? For the soul is consecrated not by the washing but by the answer. “Why,” he says, “are we too in danger every hour?” Through the flesh, surely. “I die daily”: (1 Peter 3:21; 1 Corinthians 15:30) in the perils of the flesh, surely, in which he also fought with beasts at Ephesus, those beasts, namely, of the affliction in Asia, of which he speaks in the second letter to the same: “For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of our affliction in Asia, that we were weighed down beyond measure, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life.” All this, unless I am mistaken, he lists for this purpose: not wishing the struggles of the flesh to be thought vain, he wishes the resurrection of the flesh to be believed beyond doubt. (2 Corinthians 1:8) For the struggle of that which will have no resurrection must be held vain. “But someone will say: How are the dead raised? And with what body will they come?” Here he now discusses the qualities of bodies, whether the very same are taken back or others. (1 Corinthians 15:35) But since a question of that kind is held to be secondary, it will suffice meanwhile that the resurrection is defined as bodily by this too, that the question is about the quality of bodies.

We come now to flesh and blood, the real crux of the whole question. Under what condition the apostle has disinherited these substances from the kingdom of God is likewise to be learned from what precedes. “The first man,” he says, “is from the earth, earthy,” that is, of clay, that is, Adam; “the second man from heaven,” that is, the Word of God, that is, Christ; yet man in no other sense, though from heaven, than that he too is flesh and soul, which man is, which Adam is. (1 Corinthians 15:47) For even if above He is called “the last Adam,” he drew the sharing of the name from the sharing of the substance, since Adam too was flesh not from seed, as Christ also was. “As is the earthy, so are the earthy; as is the heavenly, so are the heavenly.” Such in substance? Or first in discipline, then also in the dignity which discipline has won? For in substance the earthy and the heavenly, once called men by the apostle, (1 Corinthians 15:48) will in no way be separated. For if Christ too, alone truly heavenly, indeed super-heavenly, yet man, as flesh and soul, is in no way distinguished by this condition of substances from the earthy quality, then likewise those who are heavenly after his pattern will be understood to be proclaimed heavenly not from their present substance but from their future glory; since earlier too, from where this distinction flowed, a difference of dignity was shown: one glory of the super-heavenly, another of the super-earthly, and one of the sun, another of the moon, another of the stars, since star differs from star in glory, yet not in substance. (1 Corinthians 15:40) Finally, having first set out the difference of dignity in the same substance, to be pursued now and to be grasped then, he adds an exhortation too, that here we may pursue the character of Christ by discipline and there attain its height by glory: “As we have borne the image of the earthy, let us also bear the image of the super-heavenly.” For we have borne the image of the earthy through partnership in transgression, through fellowship in death, through exile from paradise. For even if the image of Adam is borne here in the flesh, yet we are not told to put off the flesh; if not the flesh, then the way of life, so that likewise we may bear the image of the heavenly in ourselves, not now of God, nor now set in heaven, but walking according to the lineaments of Christ in holiness and righteousness and truth. And indeed he directs all this to discipline, so that he says here that the image of Christ is to be borne in this flesh and in this time of discipline. For in saying “let us bear,” in the mood of command, he speaks to this time, in which man is no other substance than flesh and soul. Or even if this faith looks to some other, that is, heavenly, substance, still it is promised to that which is commanded here to labor toward it. Since, then, he places the image both of the earthy and of the heavenly in conduct, the one to be renounced and the other to be pursued, and then adds, “For this I say” (that is, because of what I said above; for “for” is a conjunction that completes the sense from what precedes) “that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” he bids us understand by flesh and blood nothing other than the image of the earthy mentioned above. And if that image is expressed in the conduct of oldness, and the conduct of oldness does not attain the kingdom of God, then flesh and blood, in not attaining the kingdom of God, are reduced to the conduct of oldness. (1 Corinthians 15:50) Plainly, if the apostle has never put the substance for the works, let him not be taken to do so here either. But if he denied that those still set in the flesh were in the flesh, denying that they were in the works of the flesh, you ought not to overturn his pattern: it is not the substance but the works of the substance that estrange from the kingdom of God. (Romans 8:9) Having set these works out plainly to the Galatians too, he declares that he forewarns and has forewarned that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God, not bearing, that is, the image of the heavenly as they had borne that of the earthy; and therefore, by their old way of life, they are to be considered nothing but flesh and blood. (Galatians 5:21) And yet even if the apostle had suddenly burst out with this definition, that flesh and blood are to be shut out of the kingdom of God, without any preparation of the sense beforehand, would we not likewise interpret these two substances as the old man given over to flesh and blood, that is, to eating and drinking, whose saying it is against faith in the resurrection: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”? For in inserting this too, the apostle rebuked flesh and blood by their fruits of eating and drinking. (1 Corinthians 15:32)

But even setting aside interpretations of this kind, which censure the works of flesh and blood, we may claim for the resurrection the substances themselves, understood as nothing other than what they are. For it is not resurrection that is directly denied to flesh and blood, but the kingdom of God, which falls to the resurrection (for there is also a resurrection to judgment); indeed, the general resurrection of the flesh is confirmed when a particular one is excepted. For while it is declared to what state it does not rise, it is implied to what state it does rise. And so, since the distinction within the resurrection according to merits concerns the conduct of the substance, not its kind, it appears from this too that flesh and blood are kept from the kingdom of God on the ground of guilt, not of substance, yet rise to judgment on the ground of their nature, since they do not rise to the kingdom. I will say more: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God”; rightly, alone and by themselves, to show that the Spirit is still needed for them. (1 Corinthians 15:50) For it is the Spirit that gives life for the kingdom of God; the flesh profits nothing. Yet something else can profit it, that is, the Spirit, and through the Spirit the works of the Spirit too. (John 6:63) So all flesh and blood rise equally in their own quality. But those whose part it is to enter the kingdom of God will have to put on the power of incorruptibility and immortality, without which they cannot enter the kingdom of God, before they can obtain it. Rightly, then, as we have said, flesh and blood alone fail to attain the kingdom of God. But now, since this corruptible, that is, the flesh, is to be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and this mortal, that is, the blood, by immortality, after the resurrection, through change, then rightly flesh and blood, changed and swallowed up, can inherit the kingdom of God; yet not without being raised. (1 Corinthians 15:53) There are some who would have flesh and blood taken as Judaism, because of circumcision, which is itself foreign to the kingdom of God, since it too is attributed to oldness and is marked under this title by the apostle elsewhere as well, who, after the Son of God was revealed in him to be preached among the nations, did not at once refer to flesh and blood, that is, to circumcision, that is, to Judaism, as he writes to the Galatians.

But what we have reserved for the conclusion will now stand in place of everything, even on behalf of the apostle himself, who would truly be convicted of the greatest thoughtlessness if, as some would have it, he had so abruptly, with eyes shut, as they say, without distinction, without condition, thrust all flesh and blood indiscriminately out of the kingdom of God, and surely out of the very palace of heaven, when Jesus still sits there at the right hand of the Father: man, though God; the last Adam, though the primal Word; flesh and blood, though purer than ours; yet the same in substance and form as when He ascended, and such as he will also descend, as the angels affirm, to be recognized, namely, by those who pierced Him. (Mark 16:19; 1 Corinthians 15:45; Acts 1:9) He, called the mediator between God and men, from the deposit of both parties entrusted to him, keeps in himself the deposit of the flesh too, the earnest of the whole sum. For as He left us the earnest of the Spirit, so he has received from us the earnest of the flesh and carried it into heaven as a pledge that the whole sum will one day be brought there. Be at peace, (2 Corinthians 5:5) flesh and blood: you have taken possession of both heaven and the kingdom of God in Christ. Or if they deny that you are in Christ, let those who have denied you heaven deny that Christ is in heaven. “Nor will corruption,” he says, “inherit incorruption”: not so that you should think flesh and blood are corruption, since they are rather subject to corruption, through death, that is; for it is death that not only corrupts flesh and blood but consumes them. (1 Corinthians 15:50) But since he had declared that the works of flesh and blood cannot obtain the kingdom of God, to heighten this he took away the inheritance of incorruption from corruption itself too, that is, from death, to which the works of flesh and blood lead. For a little later he also expressed, in a way, the death of death itself, saying: “Death has been swallowed up in strife. Where, death, is your sting? Where, death, is your power? The sting of death is sin” (this will be the corruption), “and the power of sin is the law”: that other law, without doubt, which he placed in his members, warring against the law of his mind, namely the very force of sinning against the will. (1 Corinthians 15:54-56; Romans 7:23) For even if above he says that the last enemy, death, is to be abolished, in this way corruption does not obtain the inheritance of incorruption, that is, death will not last. (1 Corinthians 15:26) When and how will it fail? When “in an atom, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, the dead too will rise incorrupt” (who are these but those who were corrupted before, that is, bodies, that is, flesh and blood?) “and we shall be changed” (from what condition, if not the one in which we shall be found?); “for this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal put on immortality.” What is mortal but the flesh? What is corruptible but the blood? And so that you do not think the apostle means something else, he provides for you and taking pains that you understand it as said of the flesh: when he says “this corruptible” and “this mortal,” he says it touching his own skin. Certainly he could not have said “this” except of something at hand, something visible. It is a word of bodily pointing. But the corruptible will be one thing, corruption another; the mortal one thing, mortality another. For that which suffers is one thing, that which makes it suffer another. So the things that suffer corruption and mortality, namely flesh and blood, must also undergo incorruption and immortality.

Let us see now with what body he argues the dead will come. And it is good that he broke out at once to show it, as though someone were asking such a thing. “Fool,” he says, “what you sow is not brought to life unless it dies.” From the example of the seed, then, let this now be established: that no other flesh is brought to life than the very flesh that has died; and so what follows will shine out clearly. (1 Corinthians 15:36) For nothing may be understood against the rule of the example, so that, because there follows, “and what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be,” you should not therefore think that a different body will rise from the one that is sown in dying. Otherwise you have fallen away from the example. For never, when wheat has been sown and dissolved in the earth, has barley sprung up, rather than the very same kind of grain, with the same nature, quality, and form. In short, where would another come from, if not from this very one? For even its corruption is itself, since it is the corruption of this. But he also indicates how it is not the body that is to be that is sown, saying: “but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of some such kind; but God gives it a body as he wills.” To that grain, surely, which he says is sown bare. “Surely,” you say. Then that to which God is to give a body is preserved. But how is it preserved if it is nowhere, if it does not rise, if it is not the very same that rises? If it does not rise, it is not preserved; if it is not preserved, it cannot receive a body from God. But it is agreed to be preserved in every way. For what purpose, then, will God give it a body as he wills, when it certainly has its own bare body, unless that it may rise no longer bare? So what is built on to the body will be an addition; nor is that on which it is built destroyed, but increased. And what is increased is preserved. For the grain is sown alone, without the clothing of the husk, without the foundation of the ear, without the defense of the beard, without the pride of the stalk. But it rises enriched with abundance, built up in structure, arranged in order, defended by its array, and clothed on every side. These are for it a different body from God, into which it is changed not by abolition but by enlargement, so that then that too is its own which it acquires from God from outside. “And to each of the seeds its own body”: not its own, that is, not its former one. (1 Corinthians 15:38) Keep to the example, then, and keep its mirror for the flesh: you will believe that the same flesh will bear fruit that was sown, the very same, though fuller; not another, though returning in another way. For it too will receive the array and adornment which God wills to put upon it according to its merits. Without doubt it was to this that he directed the words, “Not all flesh is the same flesh”: not to deny community of substance but equality of privilege, bringing the body into a difference of honor, not of kind. To this end he adds figurative examples of animals and elements too: “one flesh of man,” that is, of the servant of God, who is truly man; “another of beasts,” that is, of the heathen, of whom the prophet too says, “Man has been likened to the senseless beasts”; “another flesh of birds,” that is, of martyrs, who strive toward higher things; “another of fishes,” that is, of those for whom the water of baptism is enough. So too he brings arguments from the super-heavenly bodies: “one glory of the sun,” that is, of Christ; “and another of the moon,” that is, of the church; “and another of the stars,” that is, of the seed of Abraham; (1 Corinthians 15:39) “for star differs from star in glory”; “and bodies earthly and heavenly,” the Jew, that is, and the Christian. Otherwise, if not figuratively, he quite pointlessly set the flesh of mules and kites and the bodies of the heavenly lights beside human bodies, when they bear neither on a comparison of condition nor on the attainment of resurrection. (1 Corinthians 15:41) Finally, when by these he had concluded a difference of glory, not of substance, “So too,” he says, “is the resurrection of the dead.” How? Differing in nothing else but in glory alone. For again recalling the resurrection to the same substance, and looking back to the grain: “It is sown,” he says, “in corruption, it rises in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it rises in glory; it is sown in weakness, it rises in power; it is sown an animal body, it rises a spiritual body.” Certainly nothing else rises than what is sown, nor is anything else sown than what is dissolved in the ground, nor is anything else dissolved in the ground than the flesh. For this is what God's sentence struck down: “Earth you are and into earth you shall go,” since it had also been taken from the earth. (Genesis 3:19) Hence the apostle too conceived the idea of saying that it is sown when it is given back to the earth, since the earth is also a depository for seeds, to be laid down there and sought back from there. And therefore he also seals it, pressing it home: “for so it is written,” so that you do not think that to be sown means anything other than “into the earth you shall go, from which you were taken”; and so it is said of nothing other than the flesh. (1 Corinthians 15:45)

But some argue that the “animal body” is the soul, in order to draw that body away from the flesh that is to be restored. Now since it is agreed and fixed that the body that will rise is the one that was sown, they will be challenged to produce the thing itself. Either let them show the soul sown after death, that is, dead, that is, dashed to the ground, scattered, dissolved, which God has not decreed against it; let them set out its corruption and dishonour and weakness, so that it may also belong to the soul to rise into incorruption and glory and power. But in Lazarus, the chief example of resurrection, it was the flesh that lay in weakness, the flesh that had almost rotted into dishonour, the flesh that meanwhile stank into corruption; and yet Lazarus rose as flesh, with the soul indeed, (1 Corinthians 15:42-43) but a soul uncorrupted, which no one had bound with linen bands, no one had laid in the tomb, no one had yet perceived to stink, no one had seen sown for four days. The whole condition, the whole end of Lazarus, the flesh of all men experiences today as well; but the soul of none. The one, then, in which the apostle's pen appears, the one of which it is agreed he speaks, will be both the animal body when it is sown and the spiritual body when it is raised. For, that you may understand it so, he still holds out his hand, likewise going back over, on the authority of the same Scripture, the fact that the first man Adam was made “into a living soul.” If Adam is the first man, and the flesh is the man before the soul, then without doubt it is the flesh that was made into a soul. And being made into a soul when it was a body, it was surely made an animal body. What would they have it called but what it became through the soul, what it was not before the soul, what it will not be after the soul, except when it rises? For when it has received the soul again, it becomes once more an animal body, so that it may become spiritual. For nothing rises except what was. So the ground on which it suits the flesh to be called an animal body is the very ground on which it in no way suits the soul. For the flesh was a body before it was an animal body; it was given a soul, and afterwards was made an animal body. But the soul, even if it is a body, yet because it is not itself an ensouled body but rather an ensouling one, cannot be called an animal body, nor become what it makes. For it makes something else animal by coming to it; but, not coming to something else, how will it make itself animal? As, then, the flesh was first an animal body on receiving the soul, so afterwards it will be spiritual on putting on the spirit. In setting out this order in Adam and Christ, the apostle rightly distinguishes the two, as the representatives of that very distinction. But when he calls Christ the last Adam, recognize from this that he labored with all the strength of his teaching for the resurrection of the flesh, not of the soul. (1 Corinthians 15:45) For if the first man Adam was flesh, not soul, being the one who was afterwards made into a living soul, then the last Adam, Christ, is Adam because He is man, and man because he is flesh, not because he is soul. And so he adds: “Not first what is spiritual, but what is animal; afterwards what is spiritual,” according to each Adam. (1 Corinthians 15:46) Does he not seem to you to distinguish the animal body and the spiritual body in the same flesh, whose distinction he has laid down beforehand in each Adam, that is, in each man? For in what substance are Christ and Adam matched with each other? In the flesh, clearly. In the soul too, admittedly; but it is by the name of flesh that each of them is a man, for the flesh was man first. From that substance they could also admit an order, so that one was counted the first man, the other the last, that is, Adam. Things of different kinds, however, cannot be arranged in an order, at least as regards substance; as regards place or time or condition, perhaps they can. But here they are called first and last with regard to the substance of the flesh, just as again the first man is “from the earth” and the second “from heaven”; for although He is from heaven according to the spirit, yet he is man according to the flesh. Therefore, since the order in each Adam fits the flesh, not the soul, their distinction likewise will settle the distinction of the flesh beforehand, so that it was said of the flesh: “Not first what is spiritual, but what is animal; afterwards what is spiritual.” And so the same flesh must be understood above as both what is sown, the animal body, and what rises, the spiritual body, because the first Adam was made into a soul, the last Adam into a spirit. It is all about man, all about the flesh, since it is about man. (1 Corinthians 15:44-45) What then shall we say? Does not the flesh even now have the spirit, by faith? So that we must ask how it is said to be sown an animal body. Clearly the flesh receives the spirit here too, but as an earnest; whereas of the soul it has not an earnest but the fullness. Therefore it was also named an animal body, from the name of the greater substance, in the state in which it is sown, since through the fullness of the spirit it is to be spiritual besides, in the state in which it is raised. What wonder if it is called rather after what it is filled with than after what it is sprinkled with?

So a great many questions are contrived out of the occasions offered by words, as also out of words that share more than one meaning. For since this too is set down in the apostle, “that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (the flesh, of course), they seize on the swallowing as meaning the destruction of the flesh; as if we were not said to swallow bile and grief, that is, to hide and cover them and keep them within ourselves. (2 Corinthians 5:4) Indeed, since it is also written, “This mortal must put on immortality,” it is shown how what is mortal is swallowed up by life: when, clothed with immortality, it is hidden and covered and held within, not when it is consumed and lost. (1 Corinthians 15:53) “Then death too,” you say, “will be kept safe, when it has been swallowed up.” Therefore distinguish words that share a form according to their senses, and you will understand soundly. For death is one thing and what is mortal is another. So death will be swallowed up in one way and what is mortal in another. Death does not admit immortality, but what is mortal does. Indeed it is written that this mortal must put on immortality. How then does it admit it? By being swallowed up by life. How is it swallowed up by life? By being received and brought back and enclosed within it. Death, on the other hand, is rightly swallowed up into destruction, because it too swallows for that end. (1 Corinthians 15:53) “Death,” it says, “swallowed, prevailing,” and therefore “it has been swallowed up into strife. Where, death, is your sting? Where, death, is your strife?” So too life, the rival of death, will through strife swallow up into salvation what death through strife had once swallowed up into destruction.

Although, then, in proving that the flesh will rise we in this way prove that no other flesh will rise than the one under discussion, yet the individual questions and their grounds demand encounters of their own, even though they have already been cut down elsewhere. We will therefore explain more fully both the force and the meaning of change, which is what chiefly supplies the presumption that another flesh will rise, as if to be changed were to cease wholly and to perish out of one's former state. But change must be distinguished from every argument for destruction. For change is one thing, destruction another. Yet they would not be different if the flesh were to be changed in such a way as to perish. And it will perish in being changed if it does not itself remain in the change, the same flesh that was produced in the resurrection. For just as it perishes if it does not rise, so too if it rises indeed but is withdrawn in the change, it perishes equally; for it will not be, just as if it had not risen. And how absurd, if it rises in order not to be, when it could have not risen and so not been, since it had already begun not to be! Things wholly different, change and destruction, will never be confused, differing as they surely do in their workings: the one destroys, the other changes. As, then, what has been destroyed has not been changed, so what has been changed has not been destroyed. For to have perished is wholly not to be what it was; to have been changed is to be otherwise. And while it is otherwise, it can be the very same; for it retains being, since it does not perish; it has undergone change, not destruction. And so a thing can both be changed and nonetheless be itself, just as the whole man in this age is indeed himself in substance, yet is changed in many ways: in bearing, in bodily bulk itself, in health, in condition, in rank, in age, in pursuits, business, craft, means, dwelling, laws, and manners. And yet he loses nothing of the man, nor does he become another so as to cease to be the same. Indeed he does not become another man, but something other. This form of change the divine records also attest. Moses' hand is changed, and is indeed bloodless like a dead man's, whitened, cold; but when its warmth is restored and its color poured back, it is the same flesh and blood. Afterwards the same man's face too is changed with a brightness that could not be gazed on; (Exodus 4:6-7) but it was Moses all the same, who could not be looked at. So Stephen too had already put on the loftiness of an angel, but it was not other knees that sank down under the stoning. (Acts 6:15; Acts 7:59-60) The Lord also, in the seclusion of the mountain, had changed even His garments with light, but had kept features recognizable to Peter; where Moses and Elijah also, the one in the likeness of a flesh not yet received back, the other in the reality of a flesh not yet dead, showed that the same bearing of the body persists even in glory. (Matthew 17:2-4) Instructed by this example, Paul too says: “who will transfigure the body of our lowliness, conformed to the body of His glory.” But if you maintain that transfiguration and conversion mean the passing away of the substance of each thing, did Saul then, when he was “turned into another man,” depart from his own body? And does Satan himself, when he “is transfigured into an angel of light,” lose his own quality? (Philippians 3:21; 1 Samuel 10:6; 2 Corinthians 11:14) I think not. So too in the event of the resurrection it will be possible to be changed, converted, and re-formed while the substance is kept safe.

For how absurd, and indeed how unjust, and both how unworthy of God, that one substance should do the work and another be paid the reward: that this flesh should be torn apart in martyrdom and another be crowned; and conversely, that this flesh should wallow in filth and another be condemned! Would it not be better to lead all faith away from the hope of resurrection once and for all than to trifle with the gravity and justice of God, raising Marcion in place of Valentinus? For it is not credible that the mind, the memory, and the conscience of the present man will be abolished by that changing garment of immortality and incorruption; otherwise the gain and fruit of the resurrection and the standing of the divine judgment on either side would be void. If I do not remember that I am the one who deserved it, how shall I give glory to God? How shall I sing Him a new song, not knowing that I am the one who owes Him thanks? And why is the change applied to the flesh alone, and not to the soul as well, which presided over the flesh in all things? What kind of thing is it that the same soul which ran through the whole course of life in this flesh, which in this flesh learned God and put on Christ and sowed the hope of salvation, should reap the harvest in some other flesh, I know not which? Truly that would be a most favored flesh, to which life would come free of charge! But if the soul is not also to be changed, then there is no resurrection of the soul either; for the soul itself will not be believed to have risen either, if it is not another soul that has risen.

From this comes that familiar quibble of unbelief: “If,” they say, “the very same substance is recalled with its form, lineaments, and quality, then also with its other marks. So the blind and the lame and the paralysed, and however anyone was marked when he departed, so he will return.” What then? Even so, do you disdain to obtain so great a grace from God, whatever your state? For do you not even now, by admitting the salvation of the soul alone, assign the same salvation to men cut in half? What is it to believe in resurrection, if not to believe in it whole? For if the flesh is to be restored from dissolution, much more will it be recalled from injury. The greater things settle the lesser. Is not the cutting off or maiming of any limb the death of that limb? If universal death is cancelled by resurrection, what of partial death? If we are changed into glory, how much more into soundness? The impairment of bodies is an accident; wholeness is proper to them. In wholeness we are born; even if we are injured in the womb, it is already a human being who suffers: kind comes before mishap. As life is conferred by God, so it is conferred again. As we receive it, so we receive it back. We are restored to nature, not to injury; we come to life again as what we are born, not as what we are harmed. If God does not raise men whole, He does not raise the dead. For what dead man is whole, even if he dies whole? Who is sound who is lifeless? What body is unharmed when it has been slain, when it is cold, when it is pallid, when it is stiff, when it is a corpse? When is a man more disabled than when he is wholly so? When more paralysed than when he is motionless? So for a dead man to be raised is nothing else than for him to be made whole, so that he is not still dead in that part in which he has not risen. God is able to remake what He made. This power and generosity of His He has already sufficiently pledged in Christ, indeed shown, as not only the raiser of the flesh but also its restorer to wholeness. And so the apostle too says: “and the dead will rise incorrupt.” How, unless whole, they who before were corrupted as much by the defects of ill health as by the decay of the grave? For above too, setting out both, that “this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality,” he did not repeat the statement but committed a difference to us. (1 Corinthians 15:52; 1 Corinthians 15:53) For by assigning immortality to the cancelling of death and incorruption to the blotting out of corruption, he fitted the one to resurrection and the other to restoration. And I think he also promised the Thessalonians the wholeness of the entire substance. So in the future the defects of bodies will not be feared either. Wholeness, whether preserved or restored, will be able to lose nothing; from the moment when even what it had lost is given back to it. But when you lay it down that the flesh will still undergo the same sufferings if it is said to rise the same, you rashly defend nature against its Lord and impiously assert law against grace, as though the Lord were not free both to change nature without law and to preserve it. For why do we read, “What is impossible with men is possible with God,” and, “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wisdom of the world”? I ask you: if you change the state of your slave by freedom, must the same flesh and soul, because they remain which were once exposed to whips and fetters and brands, therefore suffer the same things? I think not. On the contrary, (Matthew 19:26; 1 Corinthians 1:27) he is honored with the brightness of the white garment, the honor of the gold ring, and the name, tribe, and table of his patron. Allow God too this power, by the force of that change, to re-form the condition, not the nature, while sufferings are taken away and protections conferred. So the flesh will remain, even after the resurrection, passible insofar as it is itself, insofar as it is the same; yet impassible insofar as it has been manumitted by the Lord for this very purpose, that it may no longer be able to suffer.

“Everlasting joy,” says Isaiah, “upon their head.” Nothing is everlasting except after the resurrection. (Isaiah 35:10) “Pain,” he says, “and sorrow and groaning have fled from them.” So too the angel to John: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes,” surely from the same eyes that once wept and that could still weep, if the divine kindness did not dry up every shower of tears. (Revelation 7:17) And again: “For God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more”; therefore corruption shall be no more either, put to flight by incorruption as death is by immortality. (Revelation 21:4) If pain and sorrow and groaning and death itself arise from injuries to both soul and flesh, how will they be taken away unless their causes cease, namely the injuries of flesh and soul? Where are misfortunes in the presence of the Lord? Where are hostile assaults in the presence of Christ? Where are demonic attacks in the presence of the Holy Spirit, when the devil himself with his angels has already been plunged in fire? Where is necessity, or what is called fortune or fate? What blow for the raised after pardon? What anger for the reconciled after grace? What weakness after power? What frailty after salvation? That the garments and shoes of the children of Israel remained unworn and unwasted for those forty years; that in their very bodies a just measure of fitness and seemliness fixed the easy growth of nails and hair, so that even excess is not considered corruption; that the Babylonian fires did not harm the three brothers' turbans or trousers, though these were foreign to Jews; that Jonah, swallowed by the sea monster in whose belly shipwrecks were digested, was spat out unharmed three days later; that Enoch and Elijah today, not yet discharged by resurrection because they have not undergone death, but translated from the world and by this very fact already candidates for eternity, are learning the flesh's exemption from every defect, every loss, every injury and insult: to what faith do these set their seal as witnesses, if not to that by which we must believe that they are proofs of the wholeness to come? For these things, on the apostle's authority, were figures of us, and were written that we might believe the Lord to be mightier than every law of bodies, and all the more the preserver of the flesh, since He protected even its garments, even its shoes. (Deuteronomy 29:5; Daniel 3:27; 1 Corinthians 10:6)

“But the coming age,” you say, “belongs to another arrangement, an eternal one; therefore the substance of this age, which is not eternal, cannot possess things so different.” Clearly so, if man were made for the future arrangement and not the arrangement for man. But the apostle, writing, “whether the world or life or death or things to come or things present, all are yours,” makes the same men heirs of things to come as well. (1 Corinthians 3:22) Isaiah grants you nothing when he says, “All flesh is grass,” since elsewhere he also says, “And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Isaiah 40:7) He distinguished outcomes, not substances. For who does not set the judgment of God in a double sentence, of salvation and of punishment? So “all flesh is grass” is the flesh destined for fire, and “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” is the flesh appointed to salvation. I know that I did not commit adulteries in one flesh and now strive after continence in another. If anyone carries around two sets of private parts, he may well cut away the grass of the unclean flesh and keep for himself only the flesh that is to see the salvation of God. But since the same prophet shows the nations now regarded as dust and spittle, and now about to hope and believe in the name and in the arm of the Lord, are we mistaken about the nations too? Are some nations to believe and others regarded as dust because of a difference of substance? (Isaiah 40:15) But Christ also shone as the true light to the nations within the ocean and from this sky that lies over us (even the Valentinians learned to err here), nor will the believing nations have any other form than the unbelieving, that of flesh and soul. As, then, He distinguished the same nations not by kind but by lot, so also the flesh, which is one substance in those very nations: he separated it not by its material but by its reward.

But see how, to heap the controversy still higher against the flesh, and especially against the same flesh, they argue also from the functions of the members: either saying that these too must remain in their works and fruits, as belonging to the same bodily frame; or else, since it is agreed that the functions of the members will cease, they would erase the bodily frame as well, whose continuance is surely not to be believed without members, since the members are not to be believed without functions. “What use then,” they say, “will this cave of the mouth be, the station of the teeth, the slide of the gullet, the crossroads of the stomach, the whirlpool of the belly, the tangled length of the intestines, when there will be no place for eating and drinking? What use are members of this kind, which take in, work over, roll down, divide, digest, and void? What use the hands themselves and the feet and all the working limbs, when even the care of food will cease? What use the kidneys, privy to the seed, and the rest of the genitals of both sexes, the stalls of conception and the fountains of the breasts, when intercourse and offspring and nursing will depart? Lastly, what use the whole body, since the whole will surely be idle?” To this, then, we have already laid the foundation that the arrangements of the future and the present must not be set against each other, since a change will then intervene; and now we build on it that these functions of the members exist for the necessities of this life only until life itself is transferred from time into eternity, as the animal body into the spiritual, when “this mortal shall put on immortality and this corruptible incorruption.” And when life itself is then freed from necessities, the members too will be freed from their functions; yet they will not for that reason be unnecessary. (1 Corinthians 15:53) For though they are freed from their functions, they are kept for judgment, “that each may receive through the body according to what he has done.” For the tribunal of God requires the man whole; (2 Corinthians 5:10) but he cannot be whole without the members, of whose substances, not functions, he consists; unless perhaps you will also maintain that a ship is whole without keel, without prow, without stern, without the soundness of its whole framework. And yet we have often seen a ship broken up by a storm or decayed with rot, with all its members brought back and repaired, the same ship, even glorying in the title of its restoration. Are we tormented about the craft, the will, and the right of God? Now if a rich and generous master, bestowing it out of affection or for his own glory, should wish to carry out only the restoration of the ship, and no more, will you therefore deny that its former framework is necessary to him, as being idle from then on, since only the preservation of the ship, without its being worked, is what he intends? It is enough, then, to learn only this: when the Lord destined the flesh by destining man for salvation, does he will it to be the same again? And you ought not to lay it down, from the future idleness of the members, that it cannot be again. For a thing may exist again and nonetheless be idle. Indeed it cannot even be said to be idle if it does not exist. But if it exists, it may also not be idle; for with God nothing will be idle.

But, man, you received a mouth for devouring and drinking: why not rather for speaking, that you may differ from the other animals? Why not rather for proclaiming God, that you may be foremost even among men? In fact Adam uttered names for the animals before he plucked from the tree; he also prophesied before he ate. But you received teeth for gnawing meat from the market: why not rather for crowning the whole opening and gape of your mouth? Why not for regulating the strokes of the tongue, for marking the articulations of the voice by the tongue striking against them? In fact, listen to the toothless and look at them, and you will be looking for the dignity of the mouth and the instrument of the teeth. The lower parts are pierced in man and woman, no doubt so that lusts may flow out: why not rather that fluids passing down may be strained off? Women also have a place within where seed is gathered: or is it where the burdens of blood depart, which the more sluggish sex is not able to throw off? For these things too must be said, since they bark mockingly at the functions of the members (which ones they like, of whom they like, and in what way they like) deliberately to cover the resurrection with shame, not reflecting that the very causes of necessity will first be idle then: hunger for food, thirst for drink, reproductive capacity for sex, livelihood for work. For once death is taken away, neither the props of food for the defense of life nor the provision for the race will be a burden to the members. Besides, even today the intestines and private parts may be idle. Moses and Elijah fasted for forty days and were fed by God alone; (Exodus 24:8; 1 Kings 19:8) for even then this was being consecrated: “Man shall not live by bread but by the word of God.” See the outlines of the power to come. We too, as far as we can, excuse the mouth from food; we also withdraw sex from union. How many voluntary eunuchs are there? How many virgins married to Christ? How many of both sexes are barren, built with fruitless genitals? For if even here the functions and the profits of the members may already be idle, with a temporary idleness, as in a temporal arrangement, and yet the man is no less whole, then, the man being whole, and indeed more whole then, as in an eternal arrangement, all the more shall we not desire what we are accustomed already here not to desire.

But the Lord's pronouncement puts an end to this dispute: “They will be,” He says, “like angels.” If not by marrying, because not by dying either, then surely not by falling under any similar necessity of bodily condition either; for angels too were once like men, eating and drinking and holding out their feet for washing; for they had put on a human outward appearance while their own substance within was kept safe. If, then, angels, made like men, took on a fleshly way of life in the same substance of spirit, why should not men too, made like angels, undergo a spiritual arrangement in the same substance of flesh, no more subject to the customary usages of the flesh under the angelic garment than the angels then were to the customary usages of the spirit under the human one? Nor will men therefore fail to remain in the flesh because they are not also in the usages of the flesh, since the angels did not therefore fail to remain in spirit because they were not also in the usages of the spirit. In fact He did not say, “They will be angels,” so that He would not deny that they are human, but “like angels,” so as to keep them men. He did not take away the substance to which he attributed the likeness.

The flesh, then, will rise: all of it, the very same, and whole. Wherever it is, it is in deposit with God, through the most faithful trustee between God and men, Jesus Christ, who will restore God to man and man to God, the spirit to the flesh and the flesh to the spirit. (1 Timothy 2:5) He has already joined both in covenant within himself; He has matched the bride to the bridegroom and the bridegroom to the bride. For even if someone contends that the soul is the bride, the flesh will follow the soul at least by way of dowry. The soul will not be a prostitute, to be received naked by the bridegroom. She has her equipment, she has her adornment, she has her own servant, the flesh; it will accompany her like a foster-sister. But the flesh is the bride, which in Christ Jesus also received the Spirit as bridegroom through blood. What you think is its destruction, know to be its withdrawal. It is not the soul alone that is set aside; the flesh too has its retreats for a time, in waters, in fires, in birds, in beasts. When it seems to be dissolved into these, it is as though it were poured over into vessels. If even the vessels themselves fail, when it has flowed out of them too into its own mother, the earth, it is reabsorbed, as by a roundabout way, so that from her Adam may again be presented, to hear from the Lord: “Look, Adam has become like one of us,” truly then possessed of the evil he has escaped and of the good he has laid hold of. (Genesis 3:22) Why, soul, do you envy the flesh? There is no one so near to you, no one you should love more after the Lord; no one more your brother than the one who is born together with you even in God. You ought rather to have pleaded for its resurrection; it was through you, if at all, that it sinned. But no wonder if you hate it, since you have also rejected its author, and are accustomed either to deny it or to change it in Christ, and so to corrupt the very Word of God, who became flesh, either by the pen or by interpretation, bringing in besides the secrets of apocryphal writings, fables of blasphemy. But almighty God, against these contrivances of unbelief and perversity, pouring out by His most provident grace “in the last days of his Spirit upon all flesh, upon His servants and handmaids,” has both put life into the struggling faith in the resurrection of the flesh and cleansed the ancient instruments of every obscurity and ambiguity by the clear light of words and meanings. For since there had to be heresies, so that those who are approved might be made manifest, and these could not venture without some occasions from the Scriptures, the ancient instruments therefore seem to have supplied them with certain materials, though materials that can be refuted by the same writings. (1 Corinthians 11:19) But since it was not fitting that the Holy Spirit should hold back from overflowing with utterances of such a kind as would scatter no seeds for the cunning of heretics, but would rather tear up their old turf, he has therefore now dispelled all past ambiguities, and the parables they like so much, by the open and clear preaching of the whole sacrament through the New Prophecy that flows abundantly from the Paraclete. If you drink from its springs, you will be able to thirst for no other teaching; no heat of questions will burn you; by drinking in the resurrection of the flesh as well, through and through, you will be refreshed.