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[ 60 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
clear on the distinction between a generational replica and the persistence of the
original thing.
Tertullian is famous for having asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”
From our present vantage point, he is the most highly visible of those who at
least at one point in their careers opposed the move to integrate Christianity
with pagan philosophy. Later, however, he succumbed to the philosophical urge
and drew upon the resources of Stoic materialism. During this period, he
wrote
A Treatise on the Soul
and
On the Resurrection of the Flesh, in both of which
he saw the resurrection in terms of the reassembly of the parts into which the body
had decomposed, stressing that the very same flesh that sinned must be punished.
In his view, everything, including God and the human soul, is corporeal. He
pointed out that if a human soul is to suffer in hell, it has to be a bodily substance.
He also said that the soul of the infant is derived from the father’s seed like a kind
of sprout.
In Tertullian’s view, “the flesh is the very condition on which salvation hinges.”
He claimed that “if God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead.” But, he
said, in the case of the dead, to raise a man entire
is
to repair him if he needs repair,
say, by restoring him to some earlier period of his life when he was in better condi-
tion: “For what dead man is entire, although he dies entire? Who is without hurt,
that is without life? What dead body is uninjured?” For “a dead man to be raised
again amounts to nothing short of his being restored to his entire condition.”
6
Even though the materialism of these three early Christian thinkers would be
rejected by most subsequent Christian thinkers, their contributions changed
personal-identity theory by highlighting the problem of explaining how the
body, which decomposes at death, is reconstituted in a way that preserves per-
sonal identity. For, if you try to understand survival of bodily death on material-
istic grounds, as did Irenaeus, Minucius Felix, and Tertullian, and you admit, as
anyone must, that the body decomposes at death, then you have to explain how
it can be recomposed in a way that sustains the identity of the person who died.
These three did this by proposing what would later be known as a relational
view of personal identity. What that means, in the case of resurrection, is that
what ensures personal persistence is not the persistence of an underlying sub-
stance but t he way in which the body that decomposes and the resurrected body
are related to each other. In a full-blown relational account, what ensures the
persistence of one’s self, or at least of one’s body, from moment to moment, day
to day, and so on, even during one’s earthly life, is the way in which one’s con-
stantly changing body is related to earlier and later stages of itself.
Plato’s project was simpler, in a way. As a dualist who thought that people are
essentially immaterial, unchanging substances, he was not committed to the
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