Women Turned into Men and Bodies into Souls

How, I ask, can you put forward these commentaries to prove your soundness in the faith, and to refute the ideas you rebuke, when they contain such doctrines? How do your words serve to rebuke those women we have spoken of? Besides, has any woman gone so far as to say what you write, that women are to be turned into men and bodies into souls? If bodies are to be turned into spirits, then by your account there will be no resurrection, not only of the flesh but even of the body, which you admit is the teaching even of those you have listed as heretics. Where are we to look for the body any longer, if it is reduced to a spirit? In that case everything will be spirit, and the body will be nowhere. And again, suppose the wives are to be turned into men, according to this suggestion of yours that there is to be no difference of sex at all. By this I suppose you mean that the female sex will cease entirely, being changed into the male, and that the male sex alone will remain. I am not sure you would have the women’s permission to speak here on behalf of their sex. But even supposing they grant you this, how can you consistently argue that the male sex is needed any longer, once the female is shown not to be needed? For there is a natural bond that unites the sexes in dependence on each other, so that if one does not exist, there is no need of the other. And further, if it is man alone who is to receive at the resurrection the form of clay that was first given in paradise, what becomes of the words that are written, “He made them male and female, and blessed them”? And then if, as both you yourself say and these poor women whom you put on trial, there is to be neither man nor woman, how can bodies be turned into souls, or women into men, since paradise does not allow either sex to exist, nor, as you say, does the likeness of the angels admit it? [a]

I marvel that you can demand from others a precise opinion on whether the difference of sex will continue, when you yourself, as soon as you begin to discuss it, get so tangled in knotty questions that you cannot work your way out of them. How much better it would be if you imitated us, whom you blame, in matters like these, and let God be their only judge, as indeed is the truth. It would be far better for you to confess that you do not know about them than to write things which a little later you have to condemn. I should like to ask my accuser whether he can honestly say that he would ever have found, I do not say in any work of mine, even the least, but even in some personal letter I might have written carelessly to a friend, such things as that bodies are to be turned into spirits and wives into men: things he himself has put forward as though he wanted them carved in bronze letters on the gates of cities and recited in the forum, in the Senate house, and in front of the speakers’ platform. If he had found any such thing in my writings, imagine how many counts of accusation he would have drawn up, how many volumes he would have compiled, how he would be assailing me with every weapon and arrow from that teeming breast of his. Imagine how he would have said: “I tell you, he is deceiving you when he speaks of the resurrection of the body, for he denies the resurrection of the flesh; or, even if he confesses the resurrection of the flesh, he denies that of its members and its sex. If you do not believe me, look and see the very words of his letter, where he says that bodies are to be turned into souls and wives into men.” Yet when you write this, we are not to call you a heretic, but are to make our answer to you as though you were our master.

As for those women you have attacked with your indecent reproaches, when they stand before the judgment seat of Christ they will bring forward what you taught them in these commentaries, as well as what you have written since, with insults that show you had forgotten yourself. Both the one and the other will be read out there, where the favor of men will have ceased and the applause you pay for with flattery will be silent; and both will be judged together with their author, for these words and deeds of yours, before Christ the righteous judge.