 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
resurrected self
[ 57 ]
believe that the actual bodies that people had on earth would or could be raised or,
supposing that they could, that this would be a good thing. After all, many people
when they die are old or injured, and all of them are dead! The pagan philoso-
pher Celsus (fl. 175), paraphrasing Heraclitus, questioned why anyone would
want to recover his body. Corpses, he said, are more revolting than dung. 1
Everyone could see for themselves that the human body dies and decays. To
pagan critics, and even to many of the apologists, it seemed prima facie that there
is no way that the same
body—not just a similar
body, but
the
very same one —that
dies and decomposes is later raised from the dead. The apologists devoted entire
treatises to responding to this worry. Their standard responses claimed that the
body that is resurrected is somehow spiritualized, glorified, or at least repaired.
Such responses led immediately to two questions: How is the body that dies reas-
sembled to form a new body, especially if the old body had been eaten by animals
or its ashes scattered to the winds? And, how is the construction of a new body
compatible with its being the very same body as the one that died?
In discussing how the apologists dealt with these issues, it is helpful to distin-
guish among three views about personal identity: first, that personal identity
depends only on the continuation of an immaterial soul; second, that it depends on
the continuation both of an immaterial soul and a material body; and third, that it
depends only on the continuation of a material body (which was thought by those
apologists who were materialists to include a material soul). Some Christian
thinkers, such as Origen, who had Platonic views of survival, adopted something
like the first of these options; others, like Tertullian, who under the influence of
Stoicism became a materialist, adopted something like the third. Eventually, most
gravitated toward the second: that personal immortality requires the continua-
tion of the very same immaterial soul and the very same material body.
One of the earliest Christian philosophical accounts of resurrection was that
of the apologist Justin Martyr (100?-165?), who was already an enthusiastic Pla-
tonist when he converted to Christianity. Justin was eager to point out analogies
between Plato’s views and Christian dogma. In discussing resurrection, Justin
stressed the necessity of bodily purification, but of a sort that preserves personal
identity, asserting that what dies and what rises must be the same. He pointed
out that even in the views of pagan materialists, the parts into which the body
decomposes at death are indestructible and hence available to be reassembled
later. He assumed without question, and without argument, that if the parts
were reassembled into a body that is qualitatively exactly similar to the original,
then that reassembled body would be numerically identical to the original.
Athenagoras (fl. 180), who wrote a little later than Justin and was also a dual-
ist, argued against the Platonic view that a person is simply a soul using a body
 |