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resurrected self
[ 67 ]
the person one was—might be someone else: “How, then, will the Resurrection
affect myself, when instead of me some one else will come to life? . . . for how could
I recognize myself when, instead of what was once myself, I see someone not
myself? It cannot really be I, unless it is in every respect the same as myself.”
17
Macrina answers that the resurrection matters not because it is a return to the self
you were on earth during your state of corruption but because it is a restoration of
your true, uncorrupted self. She wards off the objection that without emotions the
resurrected self will not be able to experience love by pointing out that love in the
afterlife, unlike earthly love, is not born of desire but of an attraction of like for like,
and so does not need a corrupted body.
A curious feature of Gregory’s view, as expressed in the dialogue by Macrina, is
the apparent suggestion that in resurrecting we all return to the same nature. He
says that we learn from Paul
not only that our humanity will be then changed into something nobler, but also that
what we have therein to expect is nothing else than that which was at the begin-
ning. . . . The first man Adam, that is, was the first ear [of wheat]; but with the arrival
of evil human nature was diminished into a mere multitude; and, as happens to the
grain on the ear, each individual man was denuded of the beauty of that primal ear,
and moldered in the soil: but in the Resurrection we are born again in our original
splendor; only instead of that single primitive ear we become the countless myriads of
ears in the cornfields.
18
On one interpretation of these remarks, it seems that it is only the qualitatively
similar but numerically different matter out of which we are composed at the
resurrection that will distinguish among us. Hence, this would be all that is left of
our individuality. But in Gregory’s view, to preserve the person’s identity it is still
necessary that the “identical individual” particles out of which the person’s body
was composed at death be collected and reassembled. If, instead of the identical
particles, merely some particles of the same kind are used, then the result “will
cease to be a resurrection and will be merely the creation of a new man.”
19
To this view that in the resurrection we will all be returned to an original, more
perfect state, Gregory makes an exception. He believed that after much prayer,
Macrina was cured miraculously by God of a fatal illness, the cure leaving a scar on
one of her breasts. Gregory says that this scar is the handiwork of God and so
Macrina will retain it when she is resurrected.
Looking beyond Gregory, the issue of bodily defects underwent an interest-
ing transformation in the first four centuries of the Christian era. In the earliest
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