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resurrected self
[ 63 ]
the person who died. Obviously, then, there is much more matter than would be
needed to fashion just one spiritual person. It is easy to imagine a critic suggest-
ing that God, then, could have fashioned out of the old matter several
qualita-
tively identical spiritual bodies, each of them replicating the body’s eidos
and
hence having an equal claim to being identical with the old body. But there is no
record that any critic actually did suggest this. As we shall see, a similar question
arose among personal-identity theorists first in the eighteenth century, in
the
context of trying to understand resurrection, and then again in our own times, in
a secular context.
The second issue with Origen’s views has to do with the question of whether
assimilation time is required to preserve bodily identity. Origen stressed that
the matter out of which our bodies are composed is constantly changing. But
in the course of everyday life it is not constantly changing all at once. Perhaps,
then, the persistence of one’s body—its remaining the same body in spite of
changes
in the matter out of which it is composed—is compatible only with
the changes that it undergoes being gradual and organic. Some Christian phi-
losophers who were contemporaries of Origen, as well as some who would come
later, seem to have had a worry of this sort. They insisted that in order for God
to resurrect someone who had died, God not only had to reuse the very matter
out of which the person who died was composed, but God had to use only that
matter that was in use at the time of his or her death.
The kind of view for which Origen argued was revived in the eighteenth
century by Isaac Watts, Charles Bonnet, and Joseph Priestley, each of whom
maintained, first, that in each human, there is a unique “germ” embodied in the
constantly changing matter out of which he or she is composed and, second, that
it is the persistence of this germ, and only its persistence, that ensures that the
later stages of a person are both qualitatively similar to and numerically the
same as earlier ones. So far as a person’s bodily persistence over time and through
various changes is concerned, everything about the matter of which the person is
composed other than the persistence of this germ is irrelevant. Both Origen and
these later writers seem to be groping toward what today we would call the
notion of genetic inheritance, to which they then gave pride of place in their
accounts of bodily identity.
For such reasons, Origen’s views may seem quite modern to twenty-first-
century readers.
12
However, it is not clear that Origen is thinking about bodily
identity in the same way that readers today would think of it. For instance, he
imagines a case in which our bodies die, “fall into the earth like a grain,” become
“corrupt,” and then are “scattered abroad.” Yet, he says, “by the word of God,”
that “germ which is always safe in the very substance of the body raises them
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