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resurrected self
[ 59 ]
continuation of bodily identity (which for Irenaeus was the same as personal
identity) through the dissolution of the original body and its reconstitution later.
However, when the issue had come up for early classical pagans, for instance in
the remarks by Epicharmus and by Plato in the Symposium, all that was at issue
was the preservation of the same person through the sorts of bodily changes that
normally occur to everyone while
they are alive. That issue was difficult enough.
But the challenge
that Irenaeus and his fellow apologists faced was of a different
order. It was not just normal bodily changes that had to be bridged but the chasm
of total bodily dissolution to its subsequent reconstitution.
Surprisingly, that issue had come up in Stoic thought, which may have influ-
enced these particular church fathers, all three of whom were Stoics. Pagan Stoics
believed in a kind of eternal recurrence in which the whole world is completely
destroyed by a huge conflagration and then reassembled, replete with qualita-
tively similar individuals. According to Chrysippus these individuals are numeri-
cally the same as their preconflagration counterparts. But apparently other Stoics
disagreed. This doctrine was also known to Origen, who was not a Stoic but who
thought it interesting enough to discuss briefly.
3
In any case, the three earlier
church fathers responded in a Christian context to the challenge of whether
someone could retain numerical identity through dissolution and reconstitution
by addressing issues that continue to echo in the most recent discussions of bodily
and personal identity.
For instance, Irenaeus, to illustrate what he meant by the body that rises
being the same as the one that fell, uses the example of a statue that melts and
then is recast. But as we now would understand it, the recast statue is only a
replica of the original, not the same statue, even though it is made from the
same material. In Minucius Felix’s dialogue Octavius, the pagan interlocutor
asks the Christian whether Christians “rise again with bodies” and, if so,
“whether with the same or with renewed bodies?” He continues, “Without a
body? Then, as far as I know, there will neither be mind, nor soul, nor life.
With the same body? But this has already been previously destroyed. With
another body? Then it is a new man who is born, not the former one restored.”
4
In Minucius’ discursive account, where it is clear that he understood the pagan’s
questions and, hence, to that extent was sensitive to the distinction between
same
and similar, he answered that God keeps track of the matter, regardless of
how it is dispersed, and then reassembles it. But, then, as a way of helping his
readers to understand resurrection, he immediately suggested the following
analogies: “the sun sinks down and rises, the stars pass away and return, the
flowers die and revive again.”
5
But while the sun and stars remain the same,
this year’s flowers are not the same as last year’s. Minucius, it seems, was not
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