Knocking at the Door of Truth

The resurrection of the dead is the Christian’s confidence. Believing it is what makes us believers. Truth forces us to that belief — the truth God reveals, though the crowd laughs at it, taking for granted that nothing survives death. And yet these same people pay honors to their dead, and pay them lavishly, exactly as the will directed, with the choicest food each season can supply — on the assumption that men they declare incapable of feeling anything still have an appetite. But let the crowd laugh; I can laugh harder — especially when they burn their dead with the most brutal cruelty and then stuff them to bursting immediately afterwards, using the very same fires to honor them and to insult them. What sort of devotion mocks the ones it serves with cruelty? Is it sacrifice or is it insult, when a man burns offerings to those he has already burnt? [a]

But the learned side with the vulgar crowd sometimes. Nothing exists after death, according to the school of Epicurus. After death all things come to an end, even death itself, says Seneca, to the same effect. It is something, though, that the philosophy of Pythagoras and Empedocles and the Platonists — no small philosophy either — takes the opposite view and declares the soul immortal. They go further, in a way that comes nearest to our own teaching, and say that the soul does in fact return into bodies — though not the same bodies, and not always even human ones. Euphorbus is supposed to have passed into Pythagoras, and Homer into a peacock. They stated firmly that the soul’s coming back is in a body; they found it easier to change the quality of the bodily state than to deny it outright. They knocked at the door of truth, even if they did not go in. So the world, for all its errors, is not ignorant of the resurrection of the dead.

There is a sect even inside God’s own church that stands nearer to the Epicureans than to the prophets, and it gives us our chance to see what estimate Christ formed of such men — of the Sadducees, that is. For it was reserved to Christ to lay bare everything that had been hidden: to make the doubtful certain, to finish what men had only tasted, to give present reality to what prophecy had described, and to furnish proofs of the resurrection of the dead not only through himself but actually in himself. The Sadducees we have to arm ourselves against now are other men, though they share the same teaching. They allow half a resurrection — the soul’s only — despising the flesh, exactly as they despise the Lord of the flesh himself. And in fact nobody refuses the substance of the body its rescue from death except these heretics, the inventors of a second god. [g]

Since they are driven to arrange a different scheme for Christ, so that he need not belong to the Creator, their first error is over his very flesh. With Marcion and Basilides they argue that it had no reality at all; or else, following the heretical positions of Valentinus and Apelles, that it had qualities all its own. And so they shut out from any recovery from death the very substance they say Christ did not share — knowing perfectly well where the strongest presumption in the matter lies: the flesh has already risen in Christ. That is why we published our earlier volume On the Flesh of Christ, in which we both prove his flesh solid, against the notion of an empty phantom, and claim for it a human nature with no peculiar condition attached — the kind of nature that marks Christ out as both man and Son of man. For when we prove that he was clothed in flesh and in a bodily condition, we refute the heresy at the same stroke, by establishing the rule that no one but the Creator is to be believed to be God, since we show that Christ, in whom God is plainly seen, is exactly what the Creator promised he would be. Once they are beaten on God as Creator and on Christ as the Redeemer of the flesh, they are at once beaten on the resurrection of the flesh as well.

No method could be more reasonable, and I hold that argument with heretics should generally be conducted this way. Sound procedure requires that conclusions always be drawn from the most important premises, so that agreement is reached first on the essential point, and the particular question under review can be counted as settled by it. That is why the heretics, knowing their own weakness, never conduct a discussion in order. They know how hard a task they have in insinuating a second god at the expense of the Creator of the world — who is known naturally to all men by the evidence of his works, who comes before all others in the mysteries of his being, and who is shown most of all in the prophets. So instead, on the pretext of taking up a more pressing inquiry — man’s own salvation, the question that outweighs every other — they begin with doubts about the resurrection; for it is harder to believe in the resurrection of the flesh than in the oneness of God.

In this way they strip the discussion of its logical order, load it with nagging insinuations against the flesh, and gradually draw the argument toward accepting a second god, after they have destroyed and altered the very ground of our hope. Once a man has fallen away from the sure hope he had placed in the Creator, he is easily carried off to some other object of hope — one he can hardly help suspecting on his own account. It is by a discrepancy in the promises that a difference of gods is insinuated. How many have we seen dragged into that net, beaten on the resurrection of the flesh before they could make their case for the oneness of God!

As for the heretics, then, we have shown what weapons to meet them with. We have in fact already met them in separate treatises: on the one and only God and his Christ, in our work against Marcion; on the Lord’s flesh, in our book against the four heresies, written for the express purpose of opening the way to the present inquiry. So we have now only to discuss the resurrection of the flesh — treating it as though it were uncertain for us too, that is, within the Creator’s own system. Many people are uneducated, more are unsteady in faith, and a number are weak-minded; they will have to be taught, guided, and strengthened, since the oneness of God is defended along this flank as well. If the resurrection of the flesh is denied, that prime article of the faith is shaken; if it is asserted, it stands.

There is no need, I think, to argue for the soul’s rescue. Nearly all the heretics, however they conceive of the soul, at least stop short of denying it. We can leave aside a certain Lucan, who does not spare even this part of our nature: he follows Aristotle in reducing it to dissolution and puts something else in its place. Some third nature, he says, is what rises again — neither soul nor flesh; in other words, not a man, but perhaps a bear. Lucan himself, for instance. He has had a full notice from us already in our book on the whole condition of the soul, where we maintain the soul’s own immortality, acknowledge the dissolution of the flesh alone, and insist on its restoration. Whatever points I had to hold back elsewhere under the pressure of the matter in hand were gathered into that work. It is my habit to touch a question lightly where it first comes up, and then to put it off until the outline can be filled in with the whole detail and the deferred points taken up on their own merits.

A man may certainly be wise in the things of God out of his own natural powers — but only as a witness to the truth, not in support of error; only when he moves along with God’s arrangement of things and not against it. Some things are known even by nature. Many hold the immortality of the soul; the knowledge of our God is possessed by everyone. So I may use a Plato’s opinion when he declares, “Every soul is immortal.” I may use a whole nation’s conscience when it testifies to the God of gods. I may use every other common perception of our shared nature when it pronounces God a judge — “God sees”; “I commend you to God.” But when they say, “What has undergone death is dead,” and “Enjoy life while you are alive,” and “After death all things come to an end, even death itself,” then I have to remember, on the one hand, that in God’s estimate “the heart of man is ashes,” and on the other that “the wisdom of the world is foolishness,” as the inspired word calls it. [s]

So if even a heretic takes refuge in the crowd’s corrupt thinking, or in the world’s imaginings, I have to say to him: part company with the heathen, heretic! You may all agree in imagining a God, but you do it in the name of Christ; and so long as you count yourself a Christian you are a different man from a heathen. Give him back his own opinions, since he does not take his from you. Why lean on a blind guide, when you have eyes of your own? Why be dressed by a naked man, when you have put on Christ? Why use somebody else’s shield, when the apostle has given you armor of your own? It would be better for him to learn from you to acknowledge the resurrection of the flesh than for you to learn from him to deny it. If Christians really must deny it, their own knowledge ought to be enough for the purpose, without any lessons from an ignorant crowd. A man will not be a Christian, then, if he denies what Christians confess — and denies it on grounds a man who is not a Christian supplies.

Take away from the heretics the wisdom they hold in common with the heathen, and make them support their inquiries out of the Scriptures alone: they will not be able to hold their ground. What recommends common human opinion is its very simplicity, its share in the same feelings, its community of views; and it is trusted all the more because its statements lie bare and open and are known to everyone. God’s reasoning, on the other hand, lies in the pith and marrow of things, not on the surface, and very often it is at odds with appearances.

That is why the heretics start from this very point, sketch the first draft of their teachings from it, and add the details afterwards. They know how easily men’s minds are caught by its pull, and how far that common human feeling works in their favor. Is there anything you hear from a heretic — or from a heathen — earlier in time or wider in extent than this? From the beginning and everywhere, their theme is an attack on the flesh: on its origin, on its substance, on the accidents that come to it and the one end that never fails to come. Unclean from the moment it was first formed out of the dregs of the ground, and uncleaner afterwards from the slime of its own transmission by seed; worthless, weak, guilt-covered, misery-laden, full of trouble; and after that whole record of degradation, dropping back into the earth it came from and into the name of corpse, and destined to dwindle even out of that loathsome name into no name at all — into the very death of every designation. [w]

So — you are a shrewd man, no doubt. Will you really persuade yourself that once this flesh has been taken out of sight and touch and memory, it can never be brought back from decay to wholeness, from broken to solid, from empty to full, from nothing at all to something? That the devouring fires, and the waters of the sea, and the maws of beasts, and the crops of birds and the bellies of fish, and time’s own great gullet, will of course give it all up again? And if the same flesh that fell to pieces is to be recovered, does that mean the lame and the one-eyed and the blind and the leper and the paralyzed come back as they were, though there can be no pleasure in returning to their old condition? Or will they be whole, and so have to fear being exposed to such sufferings?

And what about the consequences of taking the flesh up again? Will it be subject once more to all its present needs, food and drink above all? Are we to float with our lungs, and ache in our bowels, and carry the organs of shame without shame, and set every limb to toil and labor? Must there be ulcers again, and wounds, and fever, and gout, and once more the wish to die? Of course — those are the longings that would come with recovering the flesh: nothing but a fresh set of desires to get out of it. Now we have put all this in very restrained and delicate language, as our own manner of writing requires. If you want to know what license of ugly speech these men actually allow themselves, you must try them in their own discussions — heathen and heretic alike.

Since all the uneducated form their opinions along these common-sense lines, and since the unsteady and the weak-minded have their perplexities stirred up again by the same lines of thought, and since the first battering-ram brought against us is the one that batters the standing of the flesh, we have to arrange our defenses so as to guard the standing of the flesh first of all, meeting their abuse of it with praise of our own. The heretics have challenged us to use our rhetoric no less than our philosophy. [aa]

Take, then, this frail, poor, worthless body, which they do not even hesitate to call evil. Suppose it were the work of angels, as Menander and Marcus like to think, or the making of some fiery being, an angel, as Apelles teaches: that alone would be enough to win the body respect, since it would have the backing and protection of at least a secondary divinity. The angels, as we know, rank next to God. And whatever the supreme God of any given heretic may be, I would not be unfair in deriving the dignity of the flesh from him too, since the will to have it produced was present in him. Of course, if he had not willed its production, he would have forbidden it, once he knew it was under way. So even on their own principle the flesh is just as much God’s work. No work fails to belong to the one who has allowed it to exist. It is a happy circumstance that most of their teachings — even the harshest of them — grant our God the entire formation of man. How mighty he is you know well enough, you who believe he is the only God. Let the flesh start to give you pleasure, then, since the one who made it is so great.

But the world is God’s work too, and yet “the fashion of this world is passing away,” as the apostle himself testifies; and it must not be settled in advance that the world will be restored simply because it is God’s work. Surely, if the universe is not to be formed again after its ruin, why should a part of it be?

You would be right, if a part were on an equality with the whole. But we maintain that there is a difference. In the first place, all things were made by the Word of God, and without him nothing was made. The flesh too had its existence from the Word of God, on the principle that nothing was to exist without that Word. “Let us make man,” he said before he made him, and he added, “with our hand,” because of man’s pre-eminence, so that he should not be lumped in with the rest of creation. And “God formed man,” says the Scripture.

There is certainly a great difference in the procedure, and it comes from the nature of the case. The creatures that were made were inferior to the one they were made for; they were made for man, and God afterwards put them under him. So it was right that creatures intended for subjection should come into being at the bidding and command and bare power of the divine voice, while man, who was destined to be their lord, was formed by God himself, so that he might be able to exercise his mastery, having been created by the Master, the Lord himself.

Remember, too, that man is properly called flesh, and that the flesh held the name of man first. “And God formed man of the clay of the ground.” He became man then, who up to that point had been clay. “And he breathed on his face the breath of life, and man” — that is, the clay — “became a living soul; and God placed the man he had formed in the garden.” So man was clay first, and only afterwards man complete. I want this fixed in your mind, so that you will know that whatever God has purposed or promised for man at all is owed not to the soul only but to the flesh as well — if not from any community in their origin, then at any rate by the privilege the flesh holds in its name.