Nothing God Cannot Gather

Alongside every teaching and every argument that holds to the truth of things, some falsehood grows up beside it. It does not grow naturally out of some underlying principle, or out of anything belonging to the matter itself. It is cultivated on purpose, by men who have set a value on the unlawful sowing for what it does: it corrupts the truth. [a]

You can see this, first, in the people who in earlier times gave themselves to such inquiries, and in how far they disagreed with their own predecessors and with the men of their own time; and no less in the sheer confusion of the debates now going on. Such men have left no truth free of their slander — not God’s being, not his knowledge, not his working, not what follows from these in unbroken order and traces out for us the teaching of reverence for God. Some give up on the truth about these things entirely and once for all; some twist it to fit what suits them; and some make a practice of doubting even what is plainly in front of them.

So I think anyone who works at these subjects needs two kinds of argument: one for the truth, and one about the truth. The argument for the truth is aimed at those who do not believe and those who are unsure; the argument about the truth is for those who are fair-minded and take the truth in with goodwill.

That being so, whoever wants to look into these matters must keep his eye on what the situation requires each time, and measure his arguments by that. He must fit the order in which he treats them to what the occasion calls for, and not, for the sake of always seeming to keep to one method, neglect what is fitting and the place that properly belongs to each topic. As far as proof and the natural sequence go, arguments about the truth always come first and arguments for it second. But as far as usefulness goes, the order is reversed: the arguments for the truth come before the arguments about it.

A farmer could not properly cast his seed into the ground without first clearing out the wild growth and whatever would ruin the cultivated seed he is sowing. A doctor could not put any healthy medicine into a body that needs treatment without first purging the trouble inside it, or checking the trouble that is coming on. And a man who wants to teach the truth cannot persuade anyone by talking about the truth while some false opinion is nesting in his hearers’ minds and standing in the way of what he says.

So, with an eye to what is more useful, I too sometimes put the arguments for the truth ahead of the arguments about it; and as I look at what is needed now, it seems no waste to do the same in speaking of the resurrection. For here as well we find some who do not believe at all, some who are unsure, and even among those who have accepted the first principles some who are as much at a loss as the ones who are unsure. The most unreasonable thing of all is that they are in this state without having a single ground for their unbelief in the matters themselves, and without being able to name one sensible reason why they disbelieve or are perplexed.

Then let us look at the subject the way I have said. Suppose unbelief never arose in anyone offhand, or from some opinion he had never examined, but always with some strong reason behind it and the sureness that belongs to truth — for unbelief keeps the look of being fair only when the thing disbelieved really does look unbelievable. To refuse belief to things that do not deserve to be disbelieved is the act of people whose judgment about the truth is not healthy. [d]

So people who do not believe in the resurrection, or who are unsure of it, ought not to form their view of it offhand from whatever seems right to them, or from what pleases people who want no restraint on their appetites. They should either hang the origin of human beings on no cause at all — which is very easy to refute — or, if they assign the cause of everything that exists to God, they should keep the principle of that belief steadily in view and use it to show that the resurrection deserves no credit from any side.

They will manage that if they can show that it is either impossible for God, or against his will, to unite and gather back together bodies that have died, or even been completely dissolved, so as to make up the same human beings again. If they cannot show it, let them give up this godless unbelief and stop speaking against what no one has the right to speak against. That they are not telling the truth when they call it impossible, or against God’s will, will be clear from what I am about to say.

Strictly speaking, a thing is known to be truly impossible for someone either because he does not know what has to be done, or because he does not have power enough to do properly what he does know. A man who is ignorant of something that needs doing cannot even attempt, much less carry out, what he does not know. And a man who knows perfectly well what has to be made, and out of what, and how, but has no power at all to make the thing he knows, or not enough power, will not even begin, if he is sensible and has taken the measure of his own strength; and if he did begin without thinking it through, he would not finish.

But God cannot be ignorant of the nature of the bodies that are to be raised, whole limb and smallest particle alike; nor of where each of the dissolved parts has gone, and which portion of the elements has received what was dissolved and passed into what it belongs with — however impossible it may look to human beings to pick out again what has been joined back into the whole universe according to its own nature. Before each thing was put together in its own form, he was not in the dark about the nature of the elements human bodies would be made of, or about which parts of them he would take what suited him from, for building the human body. Plainly, then, after the whole is dissolved he will not be in the dark about where each of the parts has gone that he took to complete each person.

Measured by the order of things that holds among us now, and by the way we judge other matters, knowing beforehand what has not yet happened is the greater thing. But measured by God’s own greatness and his wisdom, both are according to nature, and knowing beforehand what does not yet exist is exactly as easy as knowing what has been dissolved.

And that his power is enough to raise dead bodies is shown by the coming into being of those same bodies. If he made human bodies and their first elements at their original formation, when they did not exist, then when they have been dissolved — however that happens — he will raise them again just as easily; that too is equally within his power. [f]

It does no damage to the argument if some suppose the first beginnings to be from matter, or human bodies to come from the elements as their first material, or from seed. The power that could give shape to what they consider shapeless, and adorn what had no form or order with many different forms; that could gather the scattered parts of the elements into one, divide the seed that was one and simple into many, put structure into what had none, and give life to what had no life — that same power can unite what has been dissolved, raise what is lying down, bring the dead to life again, and change what decays into what cannot decay.

And it belongs to the same Being, and to the same power and wisdom, to sort out what has been broken up and scattered among a crowd of animals of every kind — the animals that are in the habit of running to such bodies and eating their fill of them — to sort it out, I say, and unite it again with its own limbs and parts, whether it has passed into one animal or into many, or from those into others, or has been dissolved along with them and carried back to the first elements, resolved into them by the law of nature. This is the very thing that seems to have thrown some people badly off balance, even some admired for their wisdom, who somehow counted the objections passed around by the crowd as strong ones.

What these people say is this. Many bodies of those who died hard deaths in shipwrecks and rivers have become food for fish, and many of those killed in war, or robbed of burial by some other harsh cause or turn of events, lie out as carrion for whatever animals happen upon them. Since bodies are consumed like this, and the limbs and parts that make them up are broken apart among a great crowd of animals and, by way of nourishment, joined to the bodies of the animals that feed on them, they say, first, that separating them again is impossible. And on top of that they bring a second point, harder still.

Some of the animals that have grazed on human bodies are of the kind fit for human food. They pass through people’s stomachs and are joined to the bodies of those who have eaten them. So, they say, it is an absolute necessity that the parts of human bodies which became nourishment for those animals should cross over into other human bodies, since the animals fed on them in the meantime ferry the nourishment they took from those bodies over into the men whose nourishment they become.

Then they add the tragic touches: the eating of children dared in famine and madness, the children eaten by the parents who bore them through the scheming of enemies, that famous Median table, the tragic dinners of Thyestes — and they string together other atrocities of the same freshly invented kind from among Greeks and foreigners. From all this they establish, as they suppose, that the resurrection is impossible, on the ground that the same parts cannot rise with one set of bodies and with another as well: either the bodies of the first owners cannot be put back together, since the parts that made them up have crossed over into others, or, if those parts are given back to the first owners, the bodies of the later ones will come up short.

It seems to me that such people are, in the first place, ignorant of the power and wisdom of the one who made and manages this universe. He has fitted to the nature and kind of each animal the nourishment that suits and matches it. He has not decreed that every substance in nature shall unite and blend with every kind of body, and he is not at any loss to separate what has been united. He allows the nature of each created thing to do or undergo what it is made to do or undergo, and at other times he blocks it; and everything he wills, and toward whatever end he wills, he either permits or turns aside. Besides all that, they have not looked at the power and nature of each of the things that nourish and are nourished. [h]

Otherwise they would have known that not everything a person takes in under outside pressure turns out to be nourishment that suits the animal. Some things are ruined the moment they touch the folds of the stomach; they are vomited up or passed out or carried off some other way, so that they do not undergo even a little of the first, natural digestion, let alone get blended into the body being nourished. In the same way, not everything that has been digested and has taken the first change reaches the parts that are to be nourished. Some of it is separated from the nourishing power in the stomach itself. Some is separated at the second change, in the digestion that takes place in the liver, and crosses over into something else that has lost the power to nourish. And even the change that takes place in the liver does not all go into nourishment for people; part of it is separated off into the residues it naturally becomes. And the nourishment left behind in the very parts and members that are to be nourished sometimes changes into something else, according to which is dominant — whatever is present in greater quantity, or in excess — since it tends to spoil what comes near it, or to turn it into itself.

Since, then, there is great natural difference among all animals, and the nourishment that agrees with nature varies with each kind of animal and with the body being nourished; and since in the nourishing of every animal there is a threefold cleansing and separation — it follows that whatever is foreign to that animal’s nourishment must be destroyed outright and carried off where it naturally goes, or else changed into something else, since it cannot be blended in. It follows too that the power of the nourishing substance must fit the nature of the animal to be nourished and agree with its powers; and that this substance, once it has passed through the body’s own filters and been thoroughly cleaned by the body’s natural means of cleaning, becomes the purest possible addition to the body’s substance. That is the only thing anyone calling things by their right names would call nourishment at all, since it throws off everything foreign and harmful to the make-up of the animal being nourished, along with that whole bulk of surplus food taken in merely to fill the stomach and gratify the appetite. [j]

No one would dispute that this nourishment is united to the body it feeds, woven through and molded around every one of its parts and members. But nourishment of the other kind, the kind that is against nature, is quickly ruined if it meets a stronger power, and easily ruins whatever it overpowers, turning into bad humors and poisonous qualities, because it brings nothing that belongs to the body it should be feeding, or is friendly to it.

The clearest proof of this is that in many of the animals being nourished, pain or danger or death follows from such things, if a too-keen appetite drags in, mixed with the food, something poisonous and against nature. That would certainly destroy the body meant to be nourished, since what is nourished is nourished by what belongs to it and agrees with its nature, and is destroyed by the opposite.

If, then, the nourishment that agrees with nature is divided up to match the differences between animals that differ in nature; and if not even all of that nourishment, nor just any part of what the animal takes in, is blended into the body being nourished, but only the part that has been cleaned by complete digestion and changed purely for union with a body of that particular kind and fitted to the parts that are to receive it — then it is quite plain that nothing contrary to nature could ever be united with bodies for which it is not suitable and matching nourishment. It either passes straight out of the stomach before it breeds some other humor, raw and corrupted, or, if it settles in longer, it produces suffering or a disease hard to cure, destroying along with itself the natural nourishment, or even the very flesh that needed the nourishment. And even if it is driven out at last, beaten by some medicine or by better food or by the body’s own natural powers, it does not flow out without doing considerable harm, since it brings nothing peaceful to what is natural, because it cannot blend with nature.