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[ 58 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
and for the idea that the body is essential to the person. His view was that per-
sonal survival of bodily death requires that the same body be restored to the
same soul. In considering the possibility of humans who are eaten by animals,
who are then eaten by other humans, with the result that some of the same mat-
ter that was once part of the earlier humans became part of the later ones, and
also in considering cannibalism, Athenagoras was among the first to face the
possibility that the same material stuff might become part of the bodies of more
than one human.
The fact that Athenagoras brought up these difficulties at all is impressive.
However, his response to them left something to be desired. He asserted that
human flesh is not “the natural and proper food of men”2 and hence when eaten
cannot be digested and converted into new human flesh. Instead, he said, if one
human were to consume matter that was once part of another human, the mat-
ter would be expelled or excreted. To illustrate the point, he said that if as a
consequence of a shipwreck some humans were eaten by fish, which were then
caught and eaten by other humans, the human material that had become part of
the flesh of the fish would not become part of the flesh of the humans who ate
the fish, but would be excreted by them. This early example of a thinker’s using
Christian theology to do science nicely illustrates the poverty of the strategy.
As we shall see, it was not the last time Christian theorists would employ this
strategy. In fact, in one way or another, for the next fifteen hundred years a great
deal of the Western discussion of the self and personal identity was an exercise
in this dubious practice. Even so, Athenagoras, in spite of the poverty of his
answer, made a contribution by drawing everyone’s attention to the problem,
which others then tried to resolve differently. Scholars refer to the worry that he
raised as the chain-consumption argument .
About the year 200, there were three major treatments of resurrection, by
Irenaeus (130?-203?), Minucius Felix (fl. 200), and Tertullian (160?-230?), the
last of the apologists. All three of these thinkers were materialists and so all three
tied both personal and bodily identity to material continuity. All three also
exhibit that curious property characteristic of so many of the patristics: they insist
in their discursive accounts on the importance of the difference between same
person (or same body) and mere replica but then in their imagery and examples
somehow reveal that they are not fully sensitive to that very issue.
In Against Heresy, Irenaeus discusses at length the resurrection of the body,
with special attention to the bodies of martyrs. Claiming that resurrection
requires that the body that rises is the same as the one that fell, he defended
materialism against those who argued for a spiritual understanding of the resur-
rection of the body. This was not the first time that anyone had considered the
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