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[ 62 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
of karma, which people tend to associate with Eastern religions, coiled like a
worm in the heart of early Christian theology.
Origen’s On First Principles, the main work in which he expressed his views on
personal identity, is preserved mostly in excerpts that were quoted by others who
then went on to discuss his views. Most of his critics accused him of being too
Platonic, in view of his teaching that people, who begin as incorporeal souls, would
return to incorporeality.
9
But some claimed that he brought up the return to
incorporeality as a hypothesis only and that he preferred the alternative
hypothesis of an ethereal resurrection body. This concession was not enough for his
critics. Methodius of Olympus and Jerome, for instance, continued to insist on the
resurrection of a genuinely material body.
More significant for personal-identity theory is Origen’s explanation of how an
improved resurrected body might be the same as the body of a person who had
died. Taking his point of departure from scriptural sources in Matthew and Paul,
he claimed that after bodily death, when we are in heaven, we will have a spiri-
tual and luminous body that is composed of different stuff than any earthly body.
In defense of his claim that such a spiritual body would be numerically the same
as a previously existing material body, he pointed out that even before bodily
death the material out of which our bodies are composed is constantly changing
and is “not the same for even two days.” “ River ,” he said, “is not a bad name for
the body.” What then accounts for the fact that before bodily death peoples’ bod-
ies, despite these material changes, retain their identity from day to day, month to
month, and so on? In Origen’s view, what accounts for this is that “the form [
eidos ]
characterizing [different temporal stages of these bodies] is the same.”
10
Origen claimed that since the body changes so much in life and yet retains its
identity, there is no special problem about its also changing in death and retain-
ing its identity. He reasoned that even if the bits of flesh present at the moment
of death could be reanimated, there is no particular reason why God would want
to reanimate them. It is appropriate that the body should change from this life to
the afterlife. Just as people would need to have gills if they were destined to live
under water, those who are destined to inherit the kingdom of heaven will need
spiritual bodies. Yet, in the body’s transformation to this “more glorious” state, it
retains its “previous form,” that is, its eidos: “The very thing which was once
being characterized in the flesh will be characterized in the spiritual body.”
11
In the light of subsequent developments in personal-identity theory, two
things about Origen’s views are worth noting. The first has to do with how easy
it would have been to object to his solution by raising the possibility of postmor-
tem fission. He stressed that in reconstructing a postmortem spiritual body, God
can preserve the body’s eidos by using matter from any of the previous stages of
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