Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
18.
The contention that earthly bodies cannot exist in the heavenly regions
These philosophers object that earthly bodies must inevitably be held down on the earth or forced down to the earth by their natural weight; and therefore they cannot exist in heaven.
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Those first human beings did indeed live on earth, in a wooded and fruitful land which was given the name ‘paradise’. Now we must reply to this objection, in view of the body with which Christ ascended into heaven, and the sort of body that the saints are to have at the resurrection. And so I should like them to give a closer examination to this question of earthly weights in themselves.
Now human skill makes possible the construction, by certain methods, of vessels capable of floating, even out of metals which immediately sink when placed in water. How much more credible is it that God should operate more effectively in some unexplained way! Plato tells us that God’s almighty will prevents the disappearance of things which had a beginning and the disintegration of things that were bound together;
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and immaterial things are much more wonderfully linked with material things than bodies are with bodies of any kind. Then surely God’s mysterious operation can ensure that earthly masses should not be pressed down to the lowest regions by any weight and, more than that, can allow the souls themselves, enjoying the highest perfection of bliss, to put their bodies (which though earthly are also incorruptible) wherever they wish, and to move them wherever they wish, thus enjoying complete facility of position or movement.
Well then, if angels can do this, and can carry off any earthly creatures from wherever they please and deposit them wherever they please,
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are we to suppose that they cannot do so without feeling the weight? Then why should we not believe that the spirits of the saints made perfect and happy by God’s bounty can without any difficulty convey their bodies wherever they wish and place them wherever they wish? Now the weight of earthly bodies is in direct proportion to their size, like the weight of burdens we normally feel in carrying
them; and the heavier the weight the more oppressive the burden. And yet the soul finds the limbs of its own body lighter to carry when they are in health and therefore robust than when they are emaciated with weakness; and though a strong and healthy man is heavier for others to carry than a thin and sickly person, still the man himself can move and carry his body more briskly when he is in good health and has more weight to carry than when disease or want of food has left him very little strength. Thus even when we are dealing with earthly bodies, though still liable to corruption and death, it is not their size and weight that matters but their state of health. And words cannot express the immense difference between what we call health in our present condition and the immortality which is to be ours in the future.
Thus our belief is not refuted by the objections of those philosophers about the weights of bodies. And I will refrain from asking them why they do not believe that an earthly body can exist in heaven, although the whole earth is ‘balanced on nothing’.
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It may be, indeed, that an even more plausible argument may be based on the fact of a centre of the universe on which all heavier bodies converge. What I do say is this: Plato entrusted the lesser divinities with the task of creating man, as well as the other animals on earth;
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and they had the power, according to him, to remove from fire the property of burning, while leaving the property of illumination to flash through the eyes.
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And Plato allowed the will of the supreme God to have the power to ensure that things which had a beginning should not perish, and to preserve from any possibility of disintegration and dissolution the connection of material and immaterial substances, for all their diversity and dissimilarity. Shall we then hesitate to allow him to remove the possibility of corruption from the flesh of a man to whom he grants immortality, while leaving its nature unaltered, and to keep the symmetry of its outline and limbs, while getting rid of the inertia of its weight?
But I shall have to discuss in more detail our belief in the resurrection of the dead and their immortal bodies at the end of this work, if God wills.
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19.
Against the doctrine that the first human beings would not have been immortal had they not sinned and the contention that the eternal life of souls is bodiless
Let us continue our discussion about the bodies of the first human beings. They could not have suffered even that death which is said to be good for the good, and which is known not merely to the few who have understanding or faith but to all, if it had not been the merited consequence of sin. This is the death which brings the separation of soul from body, and which certainly brings it about that the body of a living being, which was demonstrably alive, demonstrably dies. And although we must never for a moment doubt that the souls of the righteous and devout live in a state of rest after their departure from this life, yet they would be in a better state if they were living in conjunction with their bodies in perfect health. So true is this that even those who think that to be disembodied is the height of felicity, disprove this theory of theirs by a conflicting opinion.
For none of them will venture to rank wise men, whether already dead or still to die (that is, men who are already bodiless or who are going to abandon their bodies) above the immortal deities to whom, according to Plato, the supreme God promises, as an inestimable privilege, an indissoluble life, that is, an everlasting union with their bodies.
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On the other hand, Plato also thinks that men receive the best possible treatment, assuming that they have passed their lives on earth in piety and justice, when they are separated from their bodies and received into the bosom of the gods – those gods who never forsake their own bodies,
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So that, forgetful, they may seek again
The vault of heaven, and once more desire
To take a mortal body.
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as Virgil says, expressing Plato’s teaching admirably.
Thus Plato certainly does not believe that the souls of mortals can always exist in their bodies. He holds that they are set free by the inevitability of death. Yet he does not believe that they continue for ever without bodies; there is, he thinks, a ceaseless alternation, in which men pass from life to death and from death to life. But there is a difference, apparently, between the destiny of the wise and that of the rest. The wise, on this theory, are borne aloft after death to the stars,
where each of them rests for a considerably longer time on the star appropriate to him; and from there, after he has forgotten his earlier misery and thus has given way to desire for the possession of a body, he returns again to the trials and troubles of mortal men. While those who have lived a life of folly are almost immediately brought back again to inhabit bodies suitable to their deserts, whether bodies of men or of animals.
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This then is the excessively harsh condition which Plato has imposed even on good and wise souls; for they were not assigned bodies with which they could live for ever in immortality. Consequently they could neither continue in their bodies, nor live without them in eternal purity. I have already mentioned in an earlier book
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that Porphyry, in the Christian era, was embarrassed about this Platonic dogma; and I have shown how he refused to allow the union of animal bodies and human souls, and how he went further, in holding that the souls of the wise are so thoroughly released from connection with the body that they shun a body of any kind and are kept in the Father’s presence in endless bliss. Thus to avoid appearing to be surpassed by Christ, with his promise of eternal life for his saints, Porphyry also established purified souls in a state of everlasting felicity, without any return to their former miseries. And he carried on his opposition to Christ by denying the resurrection of imperishable bodies, asserting that souls would live for all eternity not only without earthly bodies but without bodies of any sort.
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And yet in proposing this theory, for what it was worth, Porphyry stopped short of teaching that those souls should not submit themselves in religious homage to the embodied deities. Why was this, unless it was because he did not believe that those souls, although not associated with a body, were superior to those deities? Therefore, if those philosophers will not venture (and I do not think they will) to rate human souls above gods who are in the height of bliss and yet incorporated in eternal bodies, why does it seem to them ridiculous that the Christian faith should proclaim that the first human beings were so created that, if they had not sinned, no death would have sundered them from their bodies? In fact, that faith declares that as a reward for preserving obedience, they would have received the gift of immortality and would have lived for ever, united with those bodies; and that at the resurrection the saints will inhabit the actual bodies in which they suffered the hardships of this life on earth; yet these bodies will be such that no trace of corruption or frustration will affect their
flesh, nor will any sorrow or mischance interfere with their felicity.
20.
The flesh of saints, now resting in hope, will be restored to a better state than that of our first parents before their sin
In the same way, the souls of departed saints do not find death grievous, when it has separated them from their bodies; and for this reason, that their flesh ‘rests in hope’,
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whatever the insults that flesh may seem to have received after it has been bereft of sensation. It is not, as Plato imagined,
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through forgetfulness that they long to have their bodies again. In fact it is just because they remember the promise of him who never lets anyone down, who gave them the assurance that even the hairs would remain intact;
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remembering this, they look for the resurrection of their bodies with patient longing, for though they suffered much hardship in those bodies, they will experience nothing of the kind hereafter.
To be sure, if they did not hate their own flesh
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when in its weakness it resisted their mental resolve, when they had to discipline it by the law of the spirit, how much more do they love it now, when it too is to become spiritual! For just as the spirit is quite appropriately called carnal when it is the servant of the flesh, the flesh will with equal propriety be called spiritual, when it serves the spirit. This is not because the flesh will be converted into spirit (a notion which some people derive from the scriptural text: ‘It is sown as an animal body: it will arise as a spiritual body’)
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but because it will submit to the spirit with a ready obedience, an obedience so wonderfully complete that the body will fulfil the will of the spirit in such a way as to bring perfect assurance of indissoluble immortality, free from any feeling of distress, and relieved of any possibility of corruption, any trace of reluctance.
Not only will the body be different from the body as it is now even when in perfect health; it will not even be such as it was in the first human beings, before their sin. For though they would not have been destined to die, if they had not sinned, still, as human beings, they took nourishment, since the bodies they bore were not yet spiritual but animal, still bodies of earth. Those bodies were not indeed growing old and senile, so as to be brought in the end to an inevitable death. This condition was granted to them by the wonderful grace of God, and was
derived from the tree of life which was in the middle of paradise, together with the forbidden tree. For all that, they took other kinds of food, except from that one tree which had been banned, not because it was an evil in itself, but in order to emphasize the good of pure and simple obedience which is the great virtue of a rational creature set under the authority of the Lord his creator. For where nothing evil was touched it is obvious that, if something forbidden was touched, the sin consisted solely in the disobedience.
Thus the purpose of the other foods was to prevent their animal bodies from experiencing any distress through hunger or thirst, whereas the reason for their tasting of the tree of life was to prevent death that might come on them unawares from any source, or the death that would come in extreme old age after their lives had run full course. It could be said that other foods served as nourishment, but that from the tree of life was a kind of sacrament. On this interpretation the tree of life in the material paradise is analogous to the wisdom of God in the spiritual or intelligible paradise; for Scripture says of wisdom, ‘It is the tree of life to those who embrace it.’
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21.
The spiritual interpretation of the paradise of Eden does not conflict with its historical truth
Hence a number of interpreters give a symbolic meaning to the whole of that paradise, in which dwelt the first parents of mankind, according to the truthful narrative of holy Scripture. They give a spiritual reference to those fruit-bearing trees, and the others, turning them into symbols of virtues and moral qualities. They take it for granted that those were not visible and material objects, but were thus described in speech or writing to stand for spiritual and moral truths.