Nature the First Teacher

So much, then, for my praise of the flesh, spoken against its enemies — who are, for all that, its greatest friends as well. Nobody lives so thoroughly by the flesh as the people who deny that the flesh will rise. They think nothing of its discipline because they do not believe in its punishment. There is a shrewd saying that the Paraclete speaks about such people through the mouth of the prophetess Prisca: “They are flesh, and yet they hate the flesh.” [a]

Since, then, the flesh has the best guarantee there could possibly be for securing it the reward of salvation, ought we not to look just as carefully at the power and might and freedom to act of God himself? Is he great enough to rebuild and restore the structure of the flesh once it has fallen in, been swallowed up, and been wrenched out of joint every possible way? And has he published anywhere in the open ground of nature any likenesses of that power — so that no one may be left still thirsting for the knowledge of God, when faith in him has to rest on nothing else than believing that he can do everything?

No doubt you have philosophers among you who maintain that this world has no beginning and no maker. But it is much truer to say that nearly all the heresies allow it an origin and a maker, and put its creation down to our God. So believe firmly that he produced it wholly out of nothing, and you have found the knowledge of God — by believing that he has power as great as that. Some people are too weak to believe all of it at first, because of their views about Matter. They would rather have it, with the philosophers, that God made the universe in the beginning out of matter that was already lying there. Now even if that opinion could be held as true — since it must be granted that in reworking matter he produced substances and forms utterly unlike anything matter itself possessed — I would insist just as firmly that he produced those things out of nothing, because they simply did not exist at all before he produced them.

And where is the difference between a thing being produced out of nothing and being produced out of something, if what did not exist comes into being — when to have had no existence amounts to having been nothing? The reverse holds too: to have existed once amounts to having been something. But if there is a difference, then either alternative supports my case. If God produced everything whatever out of nothing, he will be able to draw the flesh too out of the nothing it had fallen into; and if he shaped other things out of matter, he will be able to call the flesh out from somewhere else, out of whatever abyss it has been swallowed into. And surely the one who created is most competent to create again, since it is a far greater work to have produced than to have reproduced, to have given a beginning than to have kept a thing going. On that principle you can be quite sure that restoring the flesh is easier than forming it in the first place.

Consider now those very likenesses of the divine power. Day dies into night and is buried everywhere in the dark. The glory of the world is blotted out in the shadow of death; the whole of its substance is stained with blackness; everything turns dingy, silent, dull; business stops on every side, and work is laid down. And so the light is mourned as lost. But then it comes back to life again, with its own beauty, its own dowry, its own sun, the same as ever, whole and entire, over all the world — killing its own death, night; opening its own tomb, the darkness; coming out as its own heir — until the night comes back to life as well, with a retinue of its own. For the starlight is kindled again that the morning glow had put out; the distant companies of the constellations are brought back into view that the day’s short interval had taken out of sight; and the mirrors of the moon are polished up again, which her monthly round had worn away. [d]

Winters and summers come round, and springtime and autumn, with their supplies, their routines, their fruits. For the earth takes its instructions from heaven: to clothe the trees that were stripped, to color the flowers over again, to spread the grass afresh, to bring back the seed that was used up — and not to bring it back until it has been used up. What a marvelous method! From a robber to become a keeper: to restore, it takes away; to guard, it destroys; to make whole, it injures; and to enlarge, it first cuts down. It hands us back richer and fuller blessings than the ones it deprived us of — by a destruction that is profit, an injury that is advantage, and a loss that is gain.

In a word, all creation is charged with renewal. Whatever you come upon has existed before; whatever you have lost comes back without fail. All things return to their former state after dropping out of sight; all things begin after they have ended; they come to an end for the very purpose of coming into being again. Nothing perishes except with a view to being saved.

The whole of this revolving order of things, then, bears witness to the resurrection of the dead. God wrote it in his works before he wrote it in the Scriptures; he announced it in his mighty deeds before he announced it in inspired words. He sent you Nature first as a teacher, meaning to send Prophecy afterwards as a second instructor, so that, having been Nature’s pupil, you might believe Prophecy more readily and take its testimony without hesitating when you came to hear what you had already seen on every side — and might not doubt that the God you have found to be the restorer of all things is the reviver of the flesh as well. And since all things rise again for man, for whose use they were provided — and there is no man apart from his flesh — how could the flesh itself perish utterly, when for its sake and for its service nothing at all comes to nothing?

Suppose, though, that all nature only faintly pictures our resurrection; that creation offers no sign exactly like it, since its various happenings can hardly be said to die so much as to come to an end, and are not so much brought back to life as re-formed. Then take a symbol of our hope that is complete and cannot be attacked — for it will be a living creature, and one subject to both life and death. I mean the bird that belongs to the East, famous for being the only one of its kind, marvelous for the life it lives after death, which renews its life by a death it chooses. Its dying day is its birthday: on that day it departs and comes back. A phoenix once more, where a moment ago there was none; himself once more, though a moment ago he had ceased to exist; another, and yet the same. [e]

What could be plainer, or more to the point for our subject? What else could such a thing be a witness to? God even says in his own Scripture, “The righteous will flourish like the phoenix” — that is, will flourish, or come back to life, out of death, out of the grave — to teach you to believe that a bodily substance can be recovered even out of fire. Our Lord has declared that we are “better than many sparrows”; well, if we were not better than many a phoenix too, that would be nothing much. But are men to die once and for all, while birds in Arabia are sure of a resurrection?

Such, then, are the outlines of the divine energies that God has displayed in the parables of nature quite as much as in his spoken word. Let us now come to his actual edicts and decrees, since that is the division we chiefly follow in this subject. We began with the dignity of the flesh — whether it is the kind of thing that can be restored once it has been destroyed. Then we went into the power of God — whether it is great enough for him to be regularly able to confer such a restoration on a thing that has been destroyed. Now, if we have proved those two points, I should like you to look into the question of cause: whether there is a cause weighty enough to make the resurrection of the flesh necessary and in every way reasonable. For there is an objection lying underneath. The flesh may well be capable of restoration, and God may be perfectly able to bring it about, but a cause for the recovery has to exist first. [g]

Then grant a sufficient one — you who are taught about a God who is supremely good and also just: supremely good out of his own character, just because of ours. If man had never sinned, he would have known God only in his surpassing goodness, as a quality of his nature. As things are, he finds him to be a just God as well, because a cause has made it necessary — and God keeps his excellent goodness even in this, at the same time as he is just. For by rescuing the good and punishing the evil he shows his justice, and makes both processes furnish proofs of his goodness at the same time: dealing out vengeance on the one hand, handing out reward on the other. Whether that is the whole character of God you will have a fuller opportunity of learning in what I have written against Marcion.

Meanwhile, our God is perfect enough that he is rightly Judge because he is Lord; rightly Lord because he is Creator; rightly Creator because he is God. Which is how that heretic — I do not know his name — comes to hold that he is not properly a Judge, since he is not Lord; and not properly Lord, since he is not the Creator. And then I am at a loss to see how he is God at all, being neither the Creator, which God is, nor the Lord, which the Creator is. Since, then, nothing is more fitting for the great being who is God and Lord and Creator than to summon man to a judgment on precisely this question — whether he has taken care to acknowledge and honor his Lord and Creator, or has not — this is exactly the judgment that the resurrection will carry out. The whole cause of the resurrection, then, or rather the necessity for it, will be this: the arrangement of the final judgment that best suits God.

Now in making that arrangement, you must consider whether God’s censure oversees a judicial examination of both natures in a man, his soul and his flesh alike. For whatever is a fit object to be judged is a fit object to be raised. Our position is that God’s judgment must be believed to be, first of all, full; then absolute, so as to be final and therefore beyond appeal; also righteous, not falling more lightly on any one part; and moreover worthy of God, complete and settled, in keeping with his great patience. So the fullness and perfection of the judgment consists simply in this, that it represents the interests of the whole human being. And since the whole man is made up of the two natures joined, he must appear in both, since it is right for him to be judged entire; and of course he did not pass through his life in anything less than his entire state. As he lived, then, so must he be judged, because he has to be judged about the way he lived. Life is what causes the judgment, and it must be examined in as many natures as it had while it was carrying out its functions.

Come now: let our opponents break the connection between flesh and soul in the business of living, so that they can be bold enough to break it in the repayment for living. Let them deny that the two were partners in what was done, and then they can fairly deny that they are partners in what is paid. The flesh ought to have no share in the sentence if it had no share in the case. Let the soul be called back alone, if it went away alone. But nothing of the kind ever happened. The soul no more left this life alone than it ran alone the course it left — I mean this present life. [k]

In fact the soul is so far from conducting life by itself that we do not withhold from the flesh even our thoughts, however private they are, however far they are from being carried into act through the flesh. Whatever is done in a man’s heart is done by the soul in the flesh, and with the flesh, and through the flesh. The Lord himself, when he rebukes our thoughts, takes in this part of the flesh — a man’s heart, the citadel of the soul: “Why do you think evil in your hearts?” And again: “Anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” So even a thought, with nothing done and nothing coming of it, is an act of the flesh.

And if you grant that the faculty which rules the senses — the one they call the hegemonikon — has its shrine in the brain, or in the space between the eyebrows, or wherever else the philosophers care to put it, then the flesh is still the place where the soul does its thinking. The soul is never without the flesh so long as it is in the flesh. There is nothing the flesh does not transact in company with the soul, when apart from the soul it does not exist at all. Consider carefully, too, whether the thoughts are not managed by the flesh, since it is through the flesh that they are made out and known from outside. Let the soul merely turn some plan over, and the face gives the sign — the face being the mirror of everything we intend. They may deny that flesh and soul combine in deeds; they cannot deny that they work together in thoughts.

They keep listing the sins of the flesh. Very well: for its sinful conduct, then, it must be handed over to punishment. But we for our part bring up against them the virtues of the flesh — and for its virtuous conduct, then, it deserves a reward to come. Again: as it is the soul that acts, and that drives us in everything we do, so it is the flesh’s office to obey. And we are not allowed to suppose that God is either unjust or slack — unjust, if he shut out from reward the flesh that shared in good works; slack, if he let it off punishment when it had been an accomplice in evil deeds. Human judgment, after all, is reckoned the more perfect the more it uncovers the agents in every deed, sparing none of the guilty and grudging none of the honest their full share of punishment or of praise, along with the principals who used their services.