Icon of Christ raising Lazarus, Roman Catacombs (3rd century A.D.)
Death is a catastrophe for man; this is the basic principle of the whole Christian anthropology. Man is an "amphibious" being, both spiritual and corporeal, and so he was intended and created by God. Body belongs organically to the unity of human existence. And this was perhaps the most striking novelty in the original Christian message. The preaching of the Resurrection as well as the preaching of the Cross was foolishness and a stumbling-block to the Gentiles. The Greek mind was always rather disgusted by the body. The attitude of an average Greek in early Christian times was strongly influenced by Platonic or Orphic ideas, and it was a common opinion that the body was a kind of a "prison," in which the fallen soul was incarcerated and confined. The Greeks dreamt rather of a complete and final disincarnation. The famous Orphic slogan was: σώμα-σήμα.30 And the Christian belief in a coming Resurrection could only confuse and frighten the Gentile mind. It meant simply that the prison will be everlasting, that the imprisonment will be renewed again and for ever. The expectation of a bodily resurrection would befit rather an earthworm, suggested Celsus, and he jeered in the name of common sense. This nonsense about a future resurrection seemed to him altogether irreverent and irreligious. God would never do things so stupid, would never accomplish desires so criminal and capricious, which are inspired by an impure and fantastic love of the flesh. Celsus nicknames Christians a "φιλοσώματον γένος," "a flesh-loving crew," and he refers to the Docetists with far greater sympathy and understanding.31 Such was the general attitude to the Resurrection.St. Paul had already been called a "babbler" by the Athenian philosophers just because he had preached to them "Jesus and the Resurrection" (Acts 17:18, 32). In the current opinion of those heathen days, an almost physical disgust of the body was frequently expressed. There was also a wide-spread influence from the farther East; one thinks at once of the later Manichean inundation which spread so rapidly all over the Mediterranean. St. Augustine, once a fervent Manichean himself, has intimated in his Confessiones that this abhorrence of the body was the chief reason for him to hesitate so long in embracing the faith of the Church, the faith in the Incarnation.32
Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus, tells that Plotinus, it seemed, "was ashamed to be in the flesh," and from this Porphyry starts his biography. "And in such a frame of mind he refused to speak either of his ancestors or parents, or of his fatherland. He would not sit for a sculptor or painter to make a permanent image of this perishable frame." It is already enough that we bear it now (Life of Plotinus, 1). This philosophical asceticism of Plotinus, of course, must be distinguished from Oriental asceticism, Gnostic or Manichean. Plotinus himself wrote very strongly "against Gnostics." Here, however, there was only a difference of motives and methods. The practical issue in both cases was one and the same, a "retreat" from this corporeal world, an escape from the body. Plotinus suggested the following analogy: Two men live in the same house. One of them blames the builder and his handiwork, because it is made of inanimate wood and stone. The other praises the wisdom of the architect, because the building is so skillfully erected. For Plotinus this world is not evil, it is the "image" or reflection of the world above, and is perhaps even the best of images. Still, one has to aspire beyond all images, from the image to the prototype, from the lower to the higher world. And Plotinus praises not the copy, but the pattern.33 "He knows that when the time comes, he will go out and will no longer have need of a house." This phrase is very characteristic. The soul is to be liberated from the ties of the body, to be disrobed, and then it will ascend to its proper sphere.34 "The true awakening is the true resurrection from the body, not with the body. For the resurrection with the body would be simply a passage from one sleep to another, to some other dwelling. The only true awakening is an escape from all bodies, since they are by nature opposite to the nature of the soul. Both the origin, and the life and the decay of bodies show that they do not correspond to the nature of the souls."35 With all Greek philosophers the fear of impurity was much stronger than the dread of sin. Indeed, sin to them just meant impurity. This "lower nature," body and flesh, a corporeal and gross substance, was usually presented as the source and seat of evil. Evil comes from pollution, not from the perversion of the will. One must be liberated and cleansed from this filth.
And at this point Christianity brings a new conception of the body as well. From the beginning Docetism was rejected as the most destructive of temptations, a sort of dark anti-gospel, proceeding from Anti-Christ, "from the spirit of falsehood" (I John 4:2-3). This was strongly emphasized in St. Ignatius, St. Irenaeus, and Tertullian. "Not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor. 5:4). This is precisely the antithesis to Plotinus’ thought.36 "He deals a death-blow here to those who depreciate the physical nature and revile our flesh," commented St. John Chrysostom. "It is not flesh, as he would say, that we put off from ourselves, but corruption; the body is one thing, corruption is another. Nor is the body corruption, nor corruption the body. True, the body is corrupt, but it is not corruption. The body dies, but it is not death. The body is the work of God, but death and corruption entered by sin. Therefore, he says, I would put off from myself that strange thing which is not proper to me. And that strange thing is not the body, but corruption. The future life shatters and abolishes not the body, but that which clings to it, corruption and death."37 Chrysostom, no doubt, gives here the common feeling of the Church. "We must also wait for the spring of the body," as a Latin apologist of the second century put it — "expec-tandum nobis etiam et corporis ver est."38 A Russian scholar, V. F. Ern, speaking of the catacombs, happily recalls these words in his letters from Rome. "There are no words which could better render the impression of jubilant serenity, the feeling of rest and unbounded peacefulness of the early Christian burial places. Here the body lies, like wheat under the winter shroud, awaiting, anticipating and foretelling the other-worldly eternal Spring."39 This was the simile used by St. Paul. "So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption: it is raised in incorruption" (I Cor. 15:42). The earth, as it were, is sown with human ashes in order that it may bring forth fruit, by the power of God, on the Great Day. "Like seed cast on the earth, we do not perish when we die, but having been sown, we rise."40 Each grave is already the shrine of incorruption. Death itself is, as it were, illuminated by the light of triumphant hope.41
There is a deep distinction between Christian asceticism and the pessimistic asceticism of the non-Christian world. Father P. Florenskii describes this contrast in the following way: "One is based on the bad news of evil dominating the world, the other on the good news of victory, of the conquest of evil in the world. The former offers superiority, the latter holiness. The former type of ascetic goes out in order to escape, to conceal himself; the latter goes out in order to become pure, to conquer." Continence can be inspired by different motives and different purposes. There was, certainly, some real truth in the Orphic or Platonic conceptions as well. And indeed only too often the soul lives in the bondage of the flesh. Platonism was right in its endeavor to set free the reasonable soul from the bondage of fleshly desires, in its struggle against sensuality. And some elements of this Platonic asceticism were absorbed into the Christian synthesis. And yet the ultimate goal was quite different in the two cases. Platonism longs for the purification of the soul only. Christianity insists on the purification of the body as well. Platonism preaches the ultimate disincarnation. Christianity proclaims the ultimate cosmic transfiguration. Bodily existence itself is to be spiritualized. There is the same antithesis of eschatological expectation and aspiration: "to be unclothed" and "to be clothed upon," again and for ever. And strange enough, in this respect Aristotle was much closer to Christianity than Plato.
In the philosophical interpretation of its eschatological hope, Christian theology from the very beginning clings to Aristotle.43 On this point he, the writer of prose amid the throng of poets, sober among the inspired, points higher than the "divine" Plato. Such a biased preference must appear altogether unexpected and strange. For, strictly speaking, in Aristotle there is not and cannot be any "after-death" destiny of man. Man in his interpretation is entirely an earthly being. Nothing really human passes beyond the grave. Man is mortal through and through like everything else earthly; he dies never to return. Aristotle simply denies personal immortality. His singular being is not a person. And what does actually survive is not properly human and does not belong to individuals; it is a "divine" element, immortal and eternal.44 But yet in this weakness of Aristotle is his strength. Aristotle had a real understanding of the unity of human existence. Man is to Aristotle, first of all, an individual being, an organism, a living unit. And man is one just in his duality, as an "animated body" (τό εμψυχον); both of the elements in him exist only together, in a concrete and indivisible correlation. Into the "body" the matter is "formed" by the soul, and the soul realizes itself only in its body. "Hence there is no need to inquire whether soul and body are one, any more than whether the wax and the imprint (τό σχήμα) are one, or, in general, whether the matter of a thing is the same with that of which it is the matter" [De anima, 417b 6]. The soul is just the "form" of the body (εΐδος και μορφή, 407b 23; λόγος τις και ειδος, 4lla 12), its "principle" and "term" (αρχή and τέλος), its very being and "actuality."45 And Aristotle coins a new term to describe this peculiar correlation: the soul is εντελέχεια "the first actuality of a natural body" (εντελέχεια ή πρώτη σώματος φυσικού, 412a 27). Soul and body, for Aristotle they are not even two elements, combined or connected with each other, but rather simply two aspects of the same concrete reality.46 "Soul and body together constitute the animal. Now it needs no proof that the soul cannot be separated from the body" (4l3a 4). Soul is but the functional reality of the corresponding body. "Soul and body cannot be defined out of relation to each other; a dead body is properly only matter; for the soul is the essence, the true being of what we call body."47 Once this functional unity of the soul and body has been broken by death, no organism is there any more, the corpse is no more a body, and a dead man can hardly be called man at all.48 Aristotle insisted on a complete unity of each concrete existence, as it is given hie et nunc. The soul "is not the body, but something belonging to the body (σώματος δέτι), and therefore resides in the body and, what is more, in a specific body (και έν σώματι τοιούτω). Our predecessors were wrong in endeavoring to fit the soul into a body without further determination of the nature and qualities of that body, although we do not even find that of any two things taken at random the one will admit the other (του τυχόντος ... το τυχόν). For the actuality of each thing comes naturally to be developed in the potentiality of each thing; in other words, in the appropriate matter" (4l4a 20: τη οικεία ΰλη).
The idea of the "transmigration" of souls was thus to Aristotle altogether excluded. Each soul abides in its "own" body, which it creates and forms, and each body has its "own" soul, as its vital principle, "eidos" or form. This anthropology was ambiguous and liable to a dangerous interpretation. It easily lends itself to a biological simplification and transformation into a crude naturalism, in which man is almost completely equated with other animals. Such indeed were the conclusions of certain followers of the Stagirite, of Aristoxenus and Dikaearchus, for whom the soul was but a "harmony" or a disposition of the body (αρμονία or τόνος, "tension") and of Strata etc.49 "There is no more talk about the immaterial soul, the separate reason, or pure thought. The object of science is the corporate soul, the united soul and body."50 Immortality was openly denied. The soul disappears just as the body dies; they have a common destiny. And even Theophrastes and Eudemus did not believe in immortality.51 For Alexander of Aphrodisias the soul was just an "είδος ενυλον."52 Aristotle himself has hardly escaped these inherent dangers of his conception. Certainly, man is to him an "intelligent being," and the faculty of thinking is his distinctive mark.53 Yet, the doctrine of Nous does not fit very well into the general frame of the Aristotelian psychology. It is obviously the most obscure and complicated part of his system. Whatever the explanation of this incoherence may be, the stumbling-block is still there. "The fact is that the position of νους in the system is anomalous."54 The "intellect" does not belong to the concrete unity of the individual organism, and it is not an εντελέχεια of any natural body. It is rather an alien and "divine" element, that comes in somehow "from outside." It is a "distinct species of soul" (ψυχής γένος έτερον), which is separable from the body, "unmixed" with the matter. It is impassive, immortal and eternal, and therefore separable from the body, "as that which is eternal from that which is perishable."55 This impassive or active intellect does survive all individual existences indeed, but it does not properly belong to individuals and does not convey any immortality to the particular beings.56 Alexander of Aphrodisias seems to have grasped the main idea of the Master. He invented the term itself: νους ποιητικός. In no sense is it a part or power of the human soul. It supervenes as something really coming in from outside. It is a common and eternal source of all intellectual activities in individuals, but it does not belong to any one of them. Rather is it an eternal, imperishable, self-existing substance, an immaterial energy, devoid of all matter and potentiality. And, obviously, there can be but one such substance. The νους ποιητικός is not only "divine," it must be rather identified with the deity itself, the first cause of all energy and motion."
The real failure of Aristotle was not in his "naturalism," but in that he could not see any permanence of the individual. But this was rather a common failure of the whole of ancient philosophy. Plato has the same short sight. Beyond time, Greek thought visualizes only the "typical," and nothing truly personal. Personality itself was hardly known in pre-Christian times. Hegel suggested, in his Aesthetics, that Sculpture gives the true key to the whole of Greek mentality.58 Recently a Russian scholar, A. F. Lossev, pointed out that the whole of Greek philosophy was a "sculptural symbolism." He was thinking especially of Platonism. "Against a dark background, as a result of an interplay and conflict of light and shadow, there stands out a blind, colorless, cold, marble and divinely beautiful, proud and majestic body, a statue. And the world is such a statue, and gods are statues; the city-state also, and the heroes, and the myths, and ideas, all conceal underneath them this original sculptural intuition… There is no personality, no eyes, no spiritual individuality. There is a "something," but not a "someone," an individualized "it," but no living person with his proper name… There is no one at all. There are bodies, and there are ideas. The spiritual character of the ideas is killed by the body, but the warmth of the body is restrained by the abstract idea. There are here beautiful, but cold and blissfully indifferent statues."59 And yet, in the general frame of such an impersonalist mentality, Aristotle did feel and understand the individual more than anyone else. He got closer than anybody else to the true conception of human personality. He provided Christian philosophers with all the elements out of which an adequate conception of personality could be built up. His strength was just in his understanding of the empirical wholeness of human existence.60
Aristotle’s conception was radically transformed in its Christian adaptation, for new perspectives were opened, and all the terms were given a new significance. And yet one cannot fail to acknowledge the Aristotelian origin of the main eschatological ideas in early Christian theology. Such a christening of Aristotelianism we find in Origen, to a certain extent in St. Methodius of Olympus as well, and later in St. Gregory of Nyssa. The idea of εντελέχεια itself now receives new depth in the new experience of spiritual life. The term itself was never used by the Fathers, but there can be no doubt about the Aristotelian roots of their conceptions.61 The break between intellect, impersonal and eternal, and the soul, individual but mortal, was healed and overcome in the new self-consciousness of a spiritual personality. The idea of personality itself was a great Christian contribution to philosophy. And again, there was here a sharp understanding of the tragedy of death also.
The first theological essay on the Resurrection was written in the middle of the second century by Athenagoras of Athens. Of the many arguments he puts forward, his reference to the unity and integrity of man is of particular interest. Athenagoras proceeds from the fact of this unity to the future resurrection. "God gave independent being and life neither to the nature of the soul by itself, nor to the nature of the body separately, but rather to men, composed of soul and body, so that with these same parts of which they are composed, when they are born and live, they should attain after the termination of this life their common end; soul and body compose in man one living entity." There would no longer be a man, Athenagoras emphasizes, if the completeness of this structure were broken, for then the identity of the individual would be broken also. The stability of the body, its continuity in its proper nature, must correspond to the immortality of the soul. "The entity which receives intellect and reason is man, and not the soul alone. Consequently man must for ever remain composed of soul and body. And this is impossible, if there is no resurrection. For if there is no resurrection, human nature is no longer human.62
Aristotle concluded from the mortality of the body that the individual soul, which is but the vital power of the body, is also mortal. Both go down together. Athenagoras, on the contrary, infers the resurrection of the body from the immortality of the reasonable soul. Both are kept together.63 The resurrection, however, is no mere simple return or repetition. The Christian dogma of the General Resurrection is not that "eternal return" which was professed by the Stoics. The resurrection is the true renewal, the transfiguration, the reformation of the whole creation. Not just a return of what has passed away, but a heightening, a fulfillment of something better and more perfect. "And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel... It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body" (I Cor. 15:37, 44). A very considerable change is implied. And there is here a very real philosophical difficulty. How are we to think of this "change" so that "identity" shall not be lost? We find in the early writers merely an assertion of this identity, without any attempt at a philosophical explanation. St. Paul’s distinction between the "natural" body (σώμα φυσικόν) and the "spiritual" body (σώμα πνευματικόν) obviously needs some further interpretation (cf. the contrast of the body "of our humiliation," της ταπεινώσεως ημών, and the body "of His glory," της δόξης αύτοΰ, in Phil. 3:21).
In the period of the early controversies with the Docetists and Gnostics, a careful and precise answer became urgent. Origen was probably the first who attempted to give one. Origen’s eschatology was from the very beginning vigorously denounced by many, indeed with good reason, and his doctrine of the Resurrection was perhaps the chief reason why his orthodoxy was challenged. Origen himself never claimed any formal authority for his doctrine. He offered merely some explanation, to be tested and checked by the mind of the Church. For him it was not enough to refer simply to Divine omnipotence, as the earlier writers sometimes did, or to quote certain appropriate passages of Holy Scripture. One had rather to show how the doctrine of the Resurrection fitted into the general conception of human destiny and purpose. Origen was exploring a via media between the fleshly conception of the simpliciores and the denial of the Docetists: "fugere se et nostrorum carries, et haereticorum phantasmata," as St. Jerome puts it.64 And both were dissatisfied and even offended.65
The General Resurrection is an article of faith indeed. The same individuals will rise, and the individual identity of the bodies will be preserved. But this does not imply for Origen any identity of material substance, or identity of status. The bodies indeed will be transfigured or transformed in the Resurrection. In any case, the risen body will be a "spiritual" body, and not a fleshly one. Origen takes up the simile of St. Paul. This fleshly body, the body of this earthly life, is buried in the earth, like a seed that is sown, and disintegrates. And one thing is sown, and another rises. The germinating power is not extinguished in the dead body, and in due season, by the word of God, the new body will be raised, like the ear that shoots forth from the seed. Some corporeal principle remains undestroyed and unaffected by the death. The term Origen used was obviously Aristotelian: "το είδος," "species," or "form." But it is not the soul that Origen regards as the form of the body. It is rather a certain potential corporeality, pertaining to each soul and to each person. It is the forming and the quickening principle of the body, just a seed capable of germination. Origen also uses the term λόγος σπερματικός, ratio seminalis.66 It is impossible to expect that the whole body should be restored in the resurrection, since the material substance changes so quickly and is not the same in the body even for two days, and surely it can never be reintegrated again. The material substance in the risen bodies will be not the same as in the bodies of this life (το ύλικόν ύποκείμενον ουδέποτε έχει ταυτόν). Yet the body will be the same, just as our body is the same throughout this life in spite of all changes of its material composition. And again, a body must be adapted to the environment, to the conditions of life, and obviously in the Kingdom of Heaven the bodies cannot be just the same as here on earth. The individual identity is not compromised, because the "eidos" of each body is not destroyed (το εΐδος το χαράκτηριζον το σώμα). It is the very principium individuationis. To Origen the "body itself" is just this vital principle. His είδος closely corresponds to Aristotle’s εντελέχεια. But with Origen this "form" or germinative power is indestructible; that makes the construction of a doctrine of the resurrection possible. This "principle of individuation" is also principium surgendi. In this definite body the material particles are composed or arranged just by this individual "form" or λόγος. Therefore, of whatever particles the risen body is composed, the strict identity of the psycho-physical individuality is not impaired, since the germinative power remains unchangeable.67 Origen presumes that the continuity of individual existence is sufficiently secured by the identity of the reanimating principle. This view was more than once repeated later, especially under the renewed influence of Aristotle. And in modern Roman theology the question is still rather open: to what extent the recognition of the material identity of the risen bodies with the mortal ones belongs to the essence of the dogma.68 The whole question is rather that of metaphysical interpretation, not a problem of faith. It may even be suggested that on this occasion Origen expresses not so much his own, as rather a current opinion. There is very much that is questionable in Origen’s eschatological opinions. They cannot be regarded as a coherent whole. And it is not easy to reconcile his "Aristotelian" conception of the resurrection with a theory of the pre-existence of souls, or with a conception of the periodical recurrent cycles of worlds and final annihilation of matter. There is no complete agreement between this theory of the Resurrection and the doctrine of a "General apokatastasis" either. Many of Origen’s eschatological ideas may be misleading. Yet his speculation on the relation between the fleshly body of this life and the permanent body of the resurrection was an important step towards the synthetic conception of the Resurrection. His chief opponent, St. Methodius of Olympus, does not seem to have understood him well. St. Methodius’ criticisms amounted to the complete rejection of the whole conception of the είδος. Is not the form of the body changeable as well as the material substance? Can the form really survive the body itself, or rather is it dissolved and decomposed, when the body of which it is the form dies and ceases to exist as a whole? In any case the identity of the form is no guarantee of personal identity, if the whole material substratum is to be entirely different. For St. Methodius the "form" meant rather merely the external shape of the body, and not the internal vital power, as for Origen. And most of his arguments simply miss the point. But his emphasis on the wholeness of the human composition was a real complement to Origen’s rather excessive formalism.69
St. Gregory of Nyssa in his eschatological doctrine endeavored to bring together the two conceptions, to reconcile the truth of Origen with the truth of Methodius. And this attempt at a synthesis is of exceptional importance.70 St. Gregory starts with the empirical unity of body and soul, its dissolution in death. And the body severed from the soul, deprived of its "vital power" (ζωτική δύναμις),71 by which the corporeal elements are held and knit together during life, disintegrates and is involved into the general circulation of matter. The material substance itself, however, is not destroyed, only the body dies, not its elements. Moreover, in the very disintegration the particles of the decaying body preserve in themselves certain "signs" or "marks" of their former connection with their own soul (τα σημεία του ημετέρου συγκρίματος). And again, in each soul also certain "bodily marks" are preserved, as on a piece of wax — certain signs of union. By a "power of recognition" (γνωστική τη δυνάμει), even in the separation of death, the soul somehow remains nevertheless near the elements of its own decomposed body (του οικείου εφαπτομένη). In the day of resurrection each soul will be able by these double marks to "recognize" the familiar elements. This is the "είδος" of the body, its "inward image," or "type." St. Gregory compares this process of the restoration of the body with the germination of a seed, with the development of the human foetus. He differs sharply from Origen on the question as to what substance will constitute the bodies of the resurrection, and he joins here St. Methodius. If the risen bodies were constructed entirely from the new elements, that "would not be a resurrection, but rather the creation of a new man," και ούκέτι αν είη το τοιούτον άνάστασις, άλλα καινοΰ ανθρώπου δημιουργία.72 The resurrected body will be reconstructed from its former elements, signed or sealed by the soul in the days of its incarnation, otherwise it would simply be another man. Nevertheless, the resurrection is not just a return, nor is it in any way a repetition of present existence. Such a repetition would be really an "endless misery." In the resurrection human nature will be restored not to its present, but to its normal or "original" condition. Strictly speaking, it will be for the first time brought into that state, in which it ought to have been, had not sin and the Fall entered the world, but which was never realized in the past. And everything in human existence, which is connected with instability, is not so much a return as a consummation. This is the new mode of man’s existence. Man is to be raised to eternity, the form of time falls away. And in the risen corporeality all succession and change will be abolished and condensed. This will be not only an άποκατάστασις, but rather a "recapitulatio." The evil surplus, that which is of sin, falls away. But in no sense is this a loss. The fullness of personality will not be damaged by this subtraction, for this surplus does not belong to the personality at all. In any case, not everything is to be restored in human composition. And to St. Gregory the material identity of the body of the resurrection with the mortal body means, rather, the ultimate reality of the life once lived, which must be transferred into the future age. Here again he differs from Origen, to whom this empirical and earthly life was only a transient episode to be ultimately forgotten. For St. Gregory the identity of the form, i.e. the unity and continuity of individual existence, was the only point of importance. He holds the same "Aristotelian" conception of the unique and intimate connection of the individual soul and body.
The very idea of uniqueness is radically modified in Christian philosophy as compared with the pre-Christian Greek. In Greek philosophy it was a "sculptural" uniqueness, an invariable crystallization of a frozen image. In Christian experience it is the uniqueness of the life once experienced and lived. In the one case it was a timeless identity, in the other it is a uniqueness in time. The whole conception of time is different in the two cases.
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