Letters & Lives of Saints 4 part 3/4

so also in the ratio of human bodies there remain certain ancient principles of rising, and, as it were, a seedbed of the dead is cherished in the bosom of the earth. But when the day of judgment shall have come, and at the voice of the Archangel and at the last trumpet the earth shall have trembled, the seeds shall at once be set in motion, and in the point of an hour shall make the dead germinate—yet they shall not restore the same flesh, nor in those forms which were before. Do you wish to know that what we say is true? Hear the Apostle: 'But someone will say: How shall the dead rise? and with what body shall they come? Foolish man, what you sow is not the body that shall be, but you sow a bare grain—of wheat, for instance, or of the vine, or of a tree.'

And since we have already spoken in part of the grain of wheat and the seed of trees, let us now discourse on the berry of the grape. The seed is small, so that it can scarcely be held with two little fingers. Where are the roots? Where the twisting interlacement of roots and trunk and shoots? Where the shady arbors of the tendrils, and the beauty of the clusters, bringing forth the wines to come? What is held is dry, and barely even discernible; but in that dry grain, by the power of God and by the hidden ratio of the seed, foaming new wines shall be poured out. Will you grant this to wood, and not grant it to man? What is destined to perish is so adorned; will what is destined to abide not recover its former cheapness?

And do you again want flesh, bones, blood, limbs—so that you would need a barber for your growing hair, so that the nose would discharge mucus, so that the growth of nails would have to be cut back, so that through the lower parts either excrement or lusts would flow out? If you bring forward these absurdities of rustics, and, as though the flesh were an enemy in which we cannot please God, you forget it, then forget too the resurrection of the dead: 'It is sown in corruption, it shall rise in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it shall rise in glory; it is sown in weakness, it shall rise in power; it is sown a natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body.' Now we see with eyes, hear with ears, act with hands, walk with feet.

But in that spiritual body we shall, with our whole being, see; with our whole being, hear; with our whole being, work; with our whole being, walk: and the Lord 'shall transfigure the body of our lowliness, to be conformed to the body of His glory.' When He said 'shall transfigure,' that is, the diversity of the members which we now use is denied. Something spiritual and ethereal is promised to us—which neither lies open to the touch, nor is discerned by the eyes, nor is weighed down by heaviness; and it shall be changed according to the variety of the places in which it is to exist. Otherwise, if the flesh and the bodies which were before shall be the same, then again males and females, again marriages; for the men a shaggy brow, a long beard;

for the women smooth cheeks and narrow chests, and the belly and thighs must be enlarged for conceiving and bearing offspring. Infants too shall rise, and old men shall rise: the former needing to be nursed, the latter to be propped up by staffs. Nor let the Lord's resurrection deceive you, O simple ones—the fact that He showed His side and His hands, stood on the shore, walked on the road with Cleopas, and said that He had flesh and bones. That body is endowed with other privileges, since it was not born from a man's seed and the pleasure of the flesh. After His resurrection He ate and drank, and appeared clothed, and offered Himself to be touched, in order that, to the doubting Apostles, He might give assurance of the resurrection. Yet for all that, He does not disguise the nature of the airy and spiritual body.

For He enters through closed doors, and in the breaking of bread vanishes from their eyes. Shall we then also, after the resurrection, have to drink and eat, and after eating have to void excrement? And where will that promise be: 'This mortal must put on immortality'? 27. This is the whole reason why, in the exposition of your faith, in order to deceive the ears of the ignorant, you name the body nine times and not so much as once the flesh—while men think you are confessing flesh in bodies, and that flesh is the same as body. If it is the same, it does not signify something different. For I know you will say this: 'I thought the body was the same as the flesh; I spoke simply.'

Why then do you not rather name the flesh, so as to signify the body, and indifferently sometimes say flesh, sometimes body, so that the body may be shown in the flesh and the flesh in the body? But believe me, your silence is not simple. For the definition of flesh is one thing, that of body another: all flesh is body, not all body is flesh. Flesh, properly speaking, is that which is bound together by blood, veins, bones, and sinews. The body, though it too may be called flesh, is yet sometimes named ethereal or airy, which does not lie open to touch and sight, though for the most part it is visible and tangible. A wall is a body, but not flesh; a stone is a body, but is not called flesh. Hence the Apostle speaks of 'heavenly bodies' and 'earthly bodies.'

The heavenly body is that of the sun, the moon, the stars. The earthly is that of fire, air, water, earth, and the rest, which without a soul are reckoned among these elements. Do you see that we understand your subtleties and the secrets which you speak in inner chambers and among the perfect, and which the common people, standing outside, do not even deserve to hear—do you see that we bring them out into the open? This is that which, with your hand drawn back to your ear and your fingers snapping, you laughingly say: 'All the glory of the king's daughter is within.' And 'The king has brought me into his chamber.' It is plain why you said the resurrection of the body and not of the flesh: namely, so that we untrained folk might think you were saying flesh in the body, while those who are perfect would understand that flesh in the body is being denied.

Finally, the Apostle in his Epistle to the Colossians, wishing to show the body of Christ to be fleshly, and not spiritual, airy, and thin, spoke pointedly, saying: 'And you, when you were once alienated from Christ and enemies in mind by your evil works, He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death.' And again in the same Epistle: 'In whom you were also circumcised with a circumcision not made by hand, in the putting off of the body of the flesh.' If 'body' signifies only flesh, and is not an ambiguous word, nor can be drawn to different meanings, then it is quite superfluous that he says 'bodily' and 'fleshly,' as though flesh were not understood in the body. 28.

In the Symbol of our faith and hope, which was handed down by the Apostles, written not on paper and with ink but on the fleshly tablets of the heart, after the confession of the Trinity and the unity of the Church, the whole mystery of Christian doctrine is concluded with the resurrection of the flesh. And do you so dwell on 'body,' and again 'body,' and a third time 'body,' and even nine times 'body,' whether in speech or in number, that you do not once name the flesh—which those men always name as flesh, while keeping silent about the body? But that too which you shrewdly stitch in, and, prudently taking precaution, dissemble—know that we understand it.

For by these testimonies you prove the truth of the resurrection—the very ones by which Origen denies it; and, confirming uncertain things out of doubtful ones, you overturn by a sudden tempest the sure house of faith. 'It is sown,' he says, 'a natural body; it shall rise a spiritual body. For neither shall they marry nor be given in marriage, but they shall be like the Angels in the heavens.' What other examples would you adduce, if you were denying the resurrection? You wish to confess the resurrection of the flesh in truth and not in mere semblance, as you say. After those things by which you have flattered the ears of the ignorant—that we rise in the very bodies in which we have died and been buried—add rather this, and say:

「Just as the Lord after His resurrection showed the marks of the nails in His hands, displayed the wound of the lance in His side, and to the doubting Apostles, who thought they were seeing a phantasm, replied, 'Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see Me to have,' and specifically to Thomas, 'Put your finger into My hands, and your hand into My side, and be not unbelieving, but believing'; so we too after the resurrection shall have the same members which we now use, the same flesh and blood and bones, whose works—not whose nature—are condemned in the holy Scriptures. Finally it is written in Genesis: 'My Spirit shall not remain in these men, for they are flesh.'」

And the Apostle Paul, concerning the perverse teaching and works of the Jews, says: 'I did not consult flesh and blood.' And to the Saints, who were assuredly in the flesh, he says: 'But you are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.' For in denying that those were in the flesh, who plainly were in the flesh, he was condemning not the substance of the flesh, but its sins. 29. This is the true confession of the resurrection, which so gives glory to the flesh as not to take away its truth. But what the Apostle says, 'this corruptible' and 'this mortal,' shows this very body—that is, the flesh which was then seen.

And that which he joins, 'to put on incorruption and immortality'—that garment, that is, that clothing—does not mean to abolish the body which it adorns in glory, but to make glorious what was before inglorious; so that, the cheaper vesture of mortality and infirmity being laid aside, we may be clothed with the gold of immortality and, so to speak, with the blessedness of firmness and power; wishing not to be stripped of the flesh, but to be over-clothed in glory, and desiring to be over-clothed with our dwelling which is from heaven, that the mortal may be swallowed up by life. Surely no one is over-clothed who was not first clothed.

So also our Lord was transfigured in glory on the mountain—not so as to lose His hands and feet and the rest of His members and suddenly be rolled up into the roundness of the sun or of a sphere, but so that those same members, glowing with the sun's brightness, dazzled the eyes of the Apostles; whence too His garments were changed into whiteness, not into air—lest perhaps you should assert that His clothes too are spiritual. 'And His face,' it says, 'shone like the sun.' Now where the face is named, I judge that the other members too were beheld. Enoch was translated in the flesh; Elijah was caught up into heaven in his flesh: not yet dead, and already dwellers of paradise, they have the members with which they were caught up and translated. What we imitate by fasting, they possess by fellowship with God.

They feed on heavenly bread and are satisfied with every word of God, having the same Lord whom they also have as their food. Hear the Savior saying: 'And My flesh shall rest in hope.' And in another place: 'His flesh did not see corruption.' And again: 'All flesh shall see the salvation of God.' And do you always reiterate 'body'? Bring forward rather Ezekiel, who, joining bones to bones and leading them out of their sepulchres, and making them stand upon their feet, binds them together with flesh and sinews and covers them over with skin. 30. Let Job thunder—the conqueror over torments—and, scraping with a potsherd the gore of his putrid flesh, let him solace his miseries by the hope and the truth of resurrection: 'Who will grant me,' he says, 'that my words be written?'

'Who will grant me that they be engraved in a book with an iron stylus and a plate of lead, or carved with a chisel in flint? For I know that my Redeemer lives, and on the last day I shall rise from the earth, and again I shall be clothed with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see God: whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and no other. This my hope is laid up in my bosom.' What is more manifest than this prophecy? No one after Christ speaks so openly of the resurrection as this man before Christ. He wishes his words to endure forever; and so that they can be effaced by no antiquity, he wishes them to be engraved on a plate of lead and carved in flint.

He hopes for the resurrection—nay rather, he knows and has seen that Christ his Redeemer lives, and that on the last day He will rise from the earth. The Lord had not yet died, and the Athlete of the Church saw his Redeemer rising from the dead. But that which he adds, 'And again I shall be clothed with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see God,' I judge that he speaks it not as a lover of the flesh, which he beheld putrid and stinking, but out of confidence in rising again he despises present things by the consolation of things to come. Again he says, 'I shall be clothed with my skin.' Where here is the ethereal body? Where the airy, like to spirit and to breeze? Surely where there is skin and flesh, where bones and sinews and blood and veins, there is the structure of the flesh, there the property of sex.

'And in my flesh,' he says, 'I shall see God.' When all flesh shall see the salvation of God, and Jesus who is God, then I too shall see my Redeemer and Savior and my God. And I shall see in this very flesh which now tortures me, which now drips for very pain. For this reason I shall behold God in the flesh, because by His resurrection He has healed all my infirmities. Does it not seem to you that even then Job is writing against Origen, and, on behalf of the truth of the flesh in which he endured his torments, is waging another contest against the heretics? For he grieves if he has suffered so much in vain, and if, while another rises spiritually, this flesh has been tormented carnally. Hence he drives it home and amplifies it, and concludes with manifest voice all the secrets of a slippery confession, saying:

'Whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and no other.' If he is not to rise in his own sex, if not with the same members which lay in the dung, if he does not open the same eyes to see God with which he then saw the little worms, then where will Job be? You take away the things in which Job consisted, and grant me an empty name of one rising; just as if, after a shipwreck, you should wish the ship restored, yet deny the individual parts of which the ship is built. 31. I will speak freely, and though you twist your mouths, tear your hair, stamp your foot, and seek the stones of the Jews, I will most openly confess the faith of the Church. The truth of the resurrection cannot be understood without flesh and bones, without blood and members.

Where there is flesh and bones, and blood and members, there it is necessary that there be a diversity of sex. Where there is diversity of sex, there John is John, Mary is Mary. Do not fear the marriages of those who, even before death, lived in their own sex without the work of sex. When it is said, 'In that day they shall neither marry nor be given in marriage,' it is said of those who are able to marry and yet shall not marry. For no one says of the Angels: 'They shall not marry nor be given in marriage.' I have never heard that marriages of the spiritual Powers are celebrated in heaven; but where there is sex, there are man and woman. Whence you too, though unwilling, compelled by the truth, have confessed and said:

'Either to be crowned in the body, in that it acted chastely and justly, or to be condemned in the body, in that it served pleasures and iniquity.' Take away 'body' and put 'flesh,' and you have not denied man and woman. For who lives with the glory of chastity who has no sex through which unchastity could have been committed? For who ever crowned a stone because it remained a virgin? The likeness of the Angels is promised to us—that is, that blessedness in which the Angels are without flesh and sex shall be granted to us in our flesh and sex. My rusticity so believes, and so understands, that sex is confessed without the works of the sexes: that men rise, and are thus made equal to the Angels.

Nor will the resurrection of the members at once seem superfluous because they are to lack their function; for while we are still set in this life, let us strive not to fulfil the works of the members. Now the likeness to the angels is not a transformation of men into angels, but an advancement to immortality and glory. 32. But those arguments of yours about children and infants, and old men, and food, and excrement, which you employ against the Churches, are not your own: they have flowed from the fountain of the Gentiles. For the heathen bring forward the very same objections against us. You who say that you are a Christian, lay down the weapons of the Gentiles. Let them rather learn from you to confess the resurrection of the flesh, than that you should learn from them to deny it. Or if you too belong to the number of the enemy, show yourself openly an adversary, that you may receive the wounds of the heathen.

I grant you your nurses, lest the infants wail; I grant you the decrepit old men, lest they be shrivelled with winter's cold. In vain too have barbers learned their craft, since we know that the people of Israel for forty years felt no growth of either nails or hair: and, what is greater than these, their garments were not worn out, nor did their shoes grow old. Enoch and Elijah, of whom we spoke a little while ago, remain through so long a time in the same age in which they were caught up. They have teeth, a belly, organs of generation, and yet they need neither food nor wives. Why do you slander the power of God? who is able out of that marrow and out of your seed to bring forth not only flesh from flesh, but a body, and to make one thing out of another;

and from water, that is, from the worthlessness of the flesh, to change the precious wines of an aerial body: assuredly the same power by which He fashioned all things out of nothing can restore what once was: for it is far less to restore what has been than to make what was not. Do you marvel if from infants and old men the resurrection takes place into the stature of the perfect man, when out of the slime of the earth, without any increments of ages, man was made complete? A rib is changed into a woman; and by a third mode of human condition, the base and shameful elements of our birth are changed into flesh: they are bound to the members, they course through the veins, they are hardened into bones. Do you wish to hear also a fourth kind of human generation?

The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee. Therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. Adam came into being in one way, Eve in another, Abel in another, the man Jesus Christ in another. And in all these diverse origins, the one nature of man does not differ. 33. If I were willing to prove the resurrection of the flesh and of all the members, and to add expositions to each testimony, there would be need of many books: but the present case does not require it. For I have set before myself not to answer Origen in all things, but to lay open the mysteries of his fraudulent satisfaction.

Nevertheless, because I have been long in the contrary assertion, and fear lest, while I strive to expose deceits, I have left a stumbling-block for the reader, I shall heap up testimonies and run rapidly over them, that we may contend against the venomous argumentation with the whole weight of the Scriptures. He who has not a wedding garment, and has not kept that command, Let thy garments be always white, is bound hand and foot, that he may not recline at the banquet, sit on a throne, stand at the right hand of God; he is cast into Gehenna, where is weeping of eyes and gnashing of teeth. The very hairs of your head are numbered. If the hairs, I think more easily the teeth. But numbered in vain, if they are at some time to perish.

The hour shall come, in which all who are in the tombs shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and shall come forth. They shall hear with ears, they shall come forth with feet. This Lazarus too had already done before. And they shall come forth from the tombs, that is, those who had been carried into tombs, the dead shall come and rise from their sepulchres. For the dew that is from God is medicine to their bones. Then shall be fulfilled what the Lord speaks through the Prophet: My people, enter into thy chambers a little while, until my wrath pass over. The chambers signify the sepulchres, from which assuredly that is brought forth which had been laid up. And they shall come out of their sepulchres, like fawns loosed from their bonds. Their heart shall rejoice, and their bones shall spring up like the sun:

all flesh shall come into the sight of the Lord, and He shall command the fishes of the sea, and they shall belch forth the bones which they had devoured, and He shall make joint to joint, and bone to bone: and those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall rise: some unto life everlasting, some unto reproach and everlasting confusion. Then the righteous shall behold the punishments and torments of the wicked: for their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be in the sight of all flesh. As many of us therefore as have this hope, just as we presented our members as servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, so let us present them as servants to righteousness unto sanctification: that rising from the dead, we may walk in newness of life.

As the life also of the Lord Jesus is manifested in our mortal body: and He who raised up Jesus Christ from the dead shall quicken also our mortal bodies, because of His Spirit that dwelleth in us. For it is just that we who have always borne about the dying of Christ in our body, should have the life also of Jesus made manifest in our mortal body, that is, in the flesh that is mortal according to nature, but eternal according to grace. Stephen too saw Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father, and the hand of Moses was changed into the whiteness of snow, and afterward restored to its former colour. In both the diversities it was a hand.

That potter of Jeremiah, by whose hardness of stones the vessel which he had made was broken, out of the same mass and out of the same clay re-made what had fallen: But the very word resurrection signifies not that one thing falls and another is raised: and that which is added, of the dead, demonstrates the flesh's own self: for that which dies in man, this also is quickened. That wounded man of the Jericho road is wholly carried back to the inn, and the wounds of his transgressions are healed by immortality. 34. The sepulchres also were opened at the Lord's passion, when the sun fled, the earth trembled, and many bodies of the Saints rose, and were seen in the holy city. Who is this, says Isaiah, that ascends from Edom:

His garments resplendent, from Bozrah, so comely in a white robe? Edom is interpreted either 'earthly' or 'bloody.' Bozrah, either 'flesh' or 'in tribulation.' In few words he demonstrates the whole mystery of the resurrection, that is, both the reality of the flesh and the increase of glory. And the sense is: Who is this that ascends from earth, ascends from blood? Whose garments, according to the prophecy of Jacob, who bound his foal to the vine, and trod the winepress alone, are red with new wine from Bozrah, that is, from the flesh, or from the tribulation of the world: for He Himself overcame the world. And therefore His garments are red and resplendent; because He is comely in form beyond the sons of men: and on account of the glory of His triumph they were changed into a white robe;

and then it was truly fulfilled concerning the flesh of Christ: Who is this that comes up made white, leaning upon her kinsman? And what is written in the same book: My kinsman is ruddy and white. Him do they imitate who have not defiled their garments with women; for they remained virgins who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. Therefore they shall be in white garments. At that time the sentence of the Lord, perfected in deed, shall be shown forth. Of all that the Father has given me, I shall lose nothing, but I shall raise it up at the last day. Plainly the whole man, whom He had wholly received by being born. Then the sheep that was lost, and was straying in the lower regions, shall be carried whole on the shoulders of the Saviour:

and she who was faint with sins shall be sustained by the clemency of the Judge. Then shall those behold Him who pierced Him, who cried out: Crucify, crucify such a one. Tribe by tribe shall they beat their breasts, themselves and their women. Those women, to whom the Lord spoke as He bore the cross: Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not over me, but weep over yourselves, and over your children. Then shall be fulfilled the prophecy of the angels, who spoke to the astonished Apostles: Men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, in like manner as ye have seen Him going into heaven.

But what kind of thing is it to say that the Lord after the resurrection ate with the Apostles for forty days, lest He be thought a phantom; and yet to affirm that this very thing—that He ate, and was seen in flesh and in members—was done in phantom? Either what was seen is true, or false. If it is true, then He truly ate, and truly had members. But if false, how did He wish to show false things, in order to prove the truth of the resurrection? For no one proves the true by the false. Therefore, you will say, shall we too eat after the resurrection? I do not know. For it is not written: and yet if it be asked, I think we shall not eat.

For I have read that the kingdom of God is not food and drink, promising us what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have they entered into the heart of man. Moses and Elijah fasted forty days and nights. This man's nature does not endure, but what is impossible to man is not impossible to God. Just as for one who foretells things to come, it makes no difference whether he proclaims them as future after ten years or after a hundred, since the knowledge of things to come is one: so he who is able to fast forty days and live—nay rather, is not able to fast, but lives by the power of God—will be able to live for eternal time without food and drink. Why did the Lord eat the honeycomb? To prove the resurrection; not to allow honey to your gullet.

He asked for a fish roasted on coals, to confirm the doubting Apostles, who did not dare to approach Him, because they thought they were seeing a spirit, not a body. The ruler of the synagogue's daughter is raised, and receives food: Lazarus, four days dead, rises, and is brought in dining: not because he was hungering among those below, but because the difficulty of the work required scrupulous care of faith. As He showed true hands and a true side: so He truly ate with the disciples: truly walked with Cleopas: truly spoke with His tongue to men: truly reclined at the supper: with true hands took bread, blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them. But that He suddenly vanished from their eyes, that is the power of God, not of a shadow or a phantom.