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[ 64 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
from the earth and restores and repairs them, as the power which is in the
grain of wheat, after its corruption and death, repairs and restores the grain
into a body having stalk and ear.” To readers in our own times, it will sound as
if Origen is here suggesting that the pre-
and postmortem person are identical
only to the degree that a stalk of wheat is identical with other stalks that are its
ancestors or descendants. And Origen may indeed be suggesting this! Another
possibility is that what he is trying to convey is that just as in the Platonic concep-
tion of personal identity, the vehicle for identity both before and after bodily
death is a person’s immortal soul, in his conception of bodily identity the vehicle
for identity is the person’s “form”: “And so also to those who shall deserve to
obtain an inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, that germ of the body’s restora-
tion, which we have before mentioned, by God’s command restores out of the
earthly and animal body a spiritual one, capable of inhabiting the heavens.”
13
Origen was the first Christian to champion substance dualism, that is, the
idea that humans are composed of an immaterial soul and a material body. But
the battle would not be won without a fight. Methodius of Olympus (fl. 300), one
of Origen’s critics and a materialist, claimed that the body retains all of the same
matter throughout a person’s life, neither changing in amount nor in any other
way, except presumably by being rearranged (e.g., in aging). How he accounted
for bodily growth is a mystery. In any case, he claimed that to resurrect the body,
the same material stuff that the person had throughout his life had to be used. He
assumed that this stuff was rearranged into the “original form” of the person,
which he took to be a mature form, minus any imperfections. An image he used
to illustrate his view is that of a stone temple within which a “tree of sin” grew.
Eventually, the temple falls and the tree is rooted out. Then, the very same stones
that were part of the original temple are collected and arranged just as before.
Only the tree of sin is missing.
Like others of his time, Methodius, especially in his use of imagery, could be
insensitive to the difference between
same body and qualitatively
similar body.
For instance, he imagined that at bodily death, God dissolves each human
into his original materials in order that by remolding, all the blemishes in him might
waste away and disappear. For the melting down of the statue in the former case cor-
responds to the death and dissolution of the body in the latter, and the remolding of
the material in the former to the resurrection after death in the latter; as also sayeth
the prophet Jeremiah, for he addresses the Jews in these words, “And I went down
to the potter’s house; and behold, he wrought a work upon the stones. And the ves-
sel which he made in his hands was broken; and again he made another vessel, as it
pleased him to make.”
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