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[ 68 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
work of the church fathers, it was assumed that the body that gets resurrected is
the same as the body one had at the end of life. Pagans objected that this was a
repugnant idea. The example of the martyrs added fuel to the fire since at death
their bodies were badly mangled or worse. So, in later thinkers, it tended to be
assumed that defects would be repaired. Initially, the new idea was that people
are restored to the physical condition they had in the prime of their lives. That
emendation, however, took care only of the physical defects of those who had
achieved their prime physical condition. What about babies who die young or
are born with physical defects? In their cases, it was suggested, they would be
restored to the condition they would have achieved had they been able to reach
prime physical condition. What, then, of spiritual defects? To correct for them,
in Gregory’s view, one would have to be restored to the condition that Adam had
been in prior to the Fall. So Gregory arrived at the view that everyone is restored
to the condition of Adam. However, if he meant that literally, it would seem that
all resurrected people wind up having qualitatively identical bodies!
In working out such details, dualists had an easier time than materialists. For
materialists, the body was the vehicle for preserving identity, so one had to be
careful about suggesting that the body of the resurrected person differed from the
body of the person who died. For dualists, such as Origen and Gregory, personal
identity had already been secured by the persistence of the soul. The question that
remained was merely that of accounting for the resurrection. They still had to be
careful to ensure that the body that rose was the same one as the body that fell, but
over time they allowed themselves great latitude in satisfying this requirement, to
the point where, in what may have been Gregory’s view, the body that rises is the
“same” as the one that fell by being qualitatively identical to Adam’s body.
Such departures from more pristine versions of the resurrection scenario pro-
voked a predictable reaction from critics, including from some dualists. For
instance, Jerome (345-420), taking Origen as his target, argued against the pre-
existence of human souls, claiming that souls are created when their associated
bodies are created.
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On the state of the body after the resurrection, he asserted
that in the case of everyone, including Jesus, there is restoration of the flesh as it
actually was during the person’s lifetime. He also accused Origen of only pre-
tending to adhere to the resurrection of the body: “Mark well that, though he
nine times speaks of the resurrection of the body, he has not once introduced the
resurrection of the flesh, and you may fairly suspect that he left it out on pur-
pose.” In Jerome’s view, all flesh is body, but not all body is flesh: “Flesh is prop-
erly what is comprised in blood, veins, bones, and sinews.” Body may be “ethereal
or aerial” and “not subject to touch and sight.” In making this point, Jerome
distinguished, first, between actual human bodies, which are material in the way
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