The Ship Rebuilt

But look how doggedly they go on piling up their objections against the flesh — above all against its being the same flesh — and how they draw their arguments even from what our limbs do. On the one hand they say those limbs ought to go on forever at their work and their pleasures, as parts belonging to the same bodily frame. On the other they argue that since the work of the limbs will one day come to an end, the bodily frame itself must be destroyed: a body lasting without its limbs strikes them as being just as unthinkable as limbs lasting without their work. [a]

“What use will there be then for the hollow of the mouth and its rows of teeth, for the passage of the throat, the branching of the stomach, the gulf of the belly, the tangled coils of the bowels, once there is no more room for eating and drinking? What will be left for these parts to take in, chew, swallow, pass on, digest, expel? What good will our hands be, and our feet, and all the limbs we work with, when even the whole business of feeding ourselves has stopped? What purpose is served by the loins that know the discharge of semen, and all the other sexual organs in the two sexes, and the workshops where a child is formed, and the springs of milk in the breast, when intercourse and pregnancy and the nursing of infants are over? In short, what use is the whole body, when the whole body has become useless?”

In answer to all this we have already laid down the principle that the arrangement of the world to come is not to be measured against the arrangement of this present world, and that in the interval between them a change will take place. To that we now add this. The work of our bodily limbs will go on supplying the needs of this life right up to the moment when life itself passes out of time into eternity, as the natural body gives place to the spiritual, until “this mortal puts on immortality, and this corruptible puts on incorruption.” So when life itself is set free from every want, our limbs will be set free from their services too, and will no longer be needed.

Still, though discharged from their duties, they will be kept for judgment, “so that each one may receive the things done in his body.” For the judgment seat of God requires that the man be kept entire; and entire he cannot be without his limbs, since he is made up of their substance, not of their functions. Unless, of course, you are bold enough to maintain that a ship is complete without her keel, or her bow, or her stern, or the soundness of her whole frame.

And yet how often have we seen the very same ship, after she was battered by storm and broken up with rot, with all her timbers repaired and put back, riding the waves handsomely again in all the beauty of a made-new hull! Are we then to unsettle ourselves with doubts about God’s skill, his will, his rights? Besides: suppose a rich shipowner, a man who does not grudge money spent merely on his own amusement or display, overhauls his ship from end to end and then decides that she shall make no more voyages. Will you argue that her old shape and finish are no longer necessary to her because she is no longer meant for service, when the mere safety of a ship calls for that completeness whether she serves or not?

So the only question we need consider here is this: when the Lord appoints salvation for man, does he intend it for his flesh? Is it his will that this selfsame flesh be made new? If so, it will not do for you to rule, from the uselessness of its limbs in the state to come, that the flesh cannot be renewed. A thing may well be made new and still be useless, having nothing to do; but it cannot be called useless if it has no existence at all. And if it does exist, it will be quite possible for it not to be useless either — it may well have something to do. For in the presence of God there will be no idleness.

Now, man, you were given your mouth for devouring your food and drinking your drink. But why not for the higher purpose of speech, which marks you off from all the other animals? Why not, better still, for announcing the good news of God, so that you may become even his priest and his advocate before men? Adam gave the animals their several names before he picked the fruit from the tree; before he ate, he prophesied. [e]

Then again, you were given your teeth for getting through your meal. But why not rather for fitting your mouth with a proper defense at every opening of it, narrow or wide? Why not, too, for holding back the impulses of your tongue and keeping your speech from breaking down or running wild? Let me tell you, in case you did not know, that there are people in this world with no teeth at all. Look at them, and ask whether even a cage of teeth is not an honor to the mouth.

In the lower parts of a man and of a woman there are openings by which, no doubt, they satisfy their animal appetites; but why not regard them instead as the outlets by which the body’s fluids are decently got rid of? Women, again, have inside them a vessel where a man’s seed may gather; but is it not also made for discharging the flow of blood which their slower and weaker sex has not the strength to work off?

Even details like these have to be spoken of, because the heretics pick out whichever parts of our bodies suit them, handle them without any delicacy, and, as the whim takes them, pour scorn and contempt on what our members naturally do — all to overturn the resurrection and make us blush at their jeers. What they fail to notice is that before the functions cease, the very causes of them will have passed away. There will be no more food, because no more hunger; no more drink, because no more thirst; no more intercourse, because no more childbearing; no more eating and drinking, because no more labor and toil. Death, too, will cease; so there will be no need of nourishment from food to keep life defended, nor will a mother’s body have to be loaded down any longer with replenishing our race.

But even in this present life the stomach and the organs of generation may have their offices suspended. Moses fasted forty days, and Elijah as well, and they lived on God alone. Even that early the principle was consecrated: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of the mouth of God.” See there the faint outlines of the strength that is coming to us! We too, so far as we are able, excuse our mouths from food and hold our sexes back from union. How many men have made themselves eunuchs by their own choice! How many virgins are betrothed to Christ! How many, both men and women, whom nature has made barren, with bodies built so that they cannot bear children!

Now if even here on earth both the functions of our members and the pleasures of them can be laid aside — with a break which, like the present arrangement itself, can only be temporary — and a man’s safety is not harmed by it, how much more, when his salvation is secure, and above all in an arrangement that lasts forever, shall we stop wanting the very things whose longings even down here we are well used to checking!

But our Lord’s own statement puts an effective end to this discussion: “They will be,” he says, “equal to the angels.” They will not marry, because they will not die; and just so they will not have to give in to any other necessity of our bodily state. In the same way the angels, on their side, were sometimes “equal to” men, eating and drinking and holding out their feet to be washed at the bath — having dressed themselves in human form without losing the nature that was properly their own. [k]

So then: if angels, when they became like men, submitted in their own unaltered substance of spirit to be treated as though they were flesh, why should not men, when they become “equal to the angels,” undergo in their own unaltered substance of flesh the treatment of spiritual beings? In their angelic dress they will be no more open to the usual demands of the flesh than the angels once were, wrapped in human form, to the demands of the spirit.

We will not, therefore, stop continuing in the flesh because we stop being pestered by the flesh’s usual wants — any more than the angels stopped remaining in their spiritual substance because their spiritual doings were suspended for a while.

And note this last point. Christ did not say, “They will be angels,” which would have cancelled their existence as men. He said, “They will be equal to the angels,” so as to keep their humanity untouched. When he granted a likeness to angels, he took nothing away from what the flesh properly is.

And so the flesh will rise again: the whole of it, in every man, itself and no other, in its complete wholeness. Wherever it may be, it is in safe keeping in God’s presence, through that most faithful “mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ,” who will reconcile both God to man and man to God, the spirit to the flesh and the flesh to the spirit. He has already united both natures in his own person; he has fitted them together like bride and bridegroom in the mutual bond of married life. [n]

Now if anyone insists on making the soul the bride, then the flesh will follow the soul as her dowry. The soul will never be turned out of doors, to be taken home by her bridegroom bare and with nothing. She has her dowry, her outfit, her fortune in the flesh, which will go with her like a foster sister, loving and faithful. But suppose the flesh is the bride: then in Christ Jesus, under the contract of his blood, she has received his Spirit for her husband.

What you take to be her extinction, you may be sure, is only her retirement for a time. It is not the soul alone that withdraws out of sight. The flesh, too, has her goings away for a while — into waters, into fires, into birds, into beasts. She may look as though she has dissolved into them, but she is only poured into them, as into so many vessels. And should the vessels themselves fail in the end to hold her, she escapes even from these, goes back to her mother earth, and is taken up once more, as it were, into its secret embraces — to stand forth at last in plain sight, like Adam when he was summoned to hear from his Lord and Maker the words, “See, the man has become like one of us” — knowing thoroughly by then the evil she had escaped and the good she had come into.

Why, then, soul, should you envy the flesh? There is no one, after the Lord, whom you ought to love so dearly; no one more like a brother to you, who was even born along with you in God. You ought rather to have been obtaining her resurrection by your prayers. Her sins, whatever they were, she owed to you.

Still, it is no wonder if you hate her: you have disowned her Creator. You have got yourself used either to denying her existence even in Christ or to altering it — corrupting the very Word of God himself, who became flesh, either by cutting the Scripture about or by twisting its meaning, and above all by smuggling in mysteries nobody can vouch for and blasphemous fables.

But Almighty God, in his most gracious provision for us, by “pouring out his Spirit in these last days upon all flesh, upon his male servants and his female servants,” has checked these frauds of unbelief and perversity. He has brought men’s faltering faith in the resurrection of the flesh back to life, and he has cleared the ancient writings — the writings of both God’s Testaments — of all obscurity and double meaning, by the plain light of their words and their sense.

Now since “there had to be heresies, so that those who are approved might be made plain,” and since these heresies would be unable to put on a bold face without some backing from the Scriptures, it is plain enough that the ancient holy writings have furnished them with various materials for their evil teaching — the very materials which, so distorted, can be refuted out of those same Scriptures.

It was fitting, therefore, that the Holy Spirit should no longer hold back the outpouring of his gracious light upon those inspired writings, so that they might be able to scatter the seeds of truth with no admixture of heretical subtleties, and pull the weeds out from among them. He has accordingly dispersed by now all the perplexities of the past, and their self-chosen allegories and parables, by the open and clear explanation of the whole mystery, through the new prophecy that comes pouring down from the Paraclete. Only draw water from his springs, and you will never thirst for any other teaching. No feverish craving after subtle questions will eat at you again; but by drinking in the resurrection of the flesh evermore, you will have your fill of the refreshing draught.