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resurrected self
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flesh is material, and spiritualized or ideal bodies; second, between the “form” of
actual, human bodies, which include eyes, teeth, genitals, and so on, and the
form of idealized bodies that may lack some of this equipment; and, third,
between the very body that one has when one dies and a reconstructed body.
Jerome complained that in Origen’s view, rather than God’s restoring our
actual bodies, God would “transfigure the body of our humiliation and fashion it
according to His own glorious body.” He said that in Origen’s “saying transfig-
ure, he affirms identity with the members which we now have. But a different
body, spiritual and ethereal, is promised to us, which is neither tangible, nor
perceptible to the eye.” Moreover, the changes that
one’s body “undergoes will be
suitable to the difference in its future abode. Otherwise, if there is to be the same
flesh and our bodies are to be the same, there will again be males and females,
there will again be marriage; men will have the shaggy eyebrow and the flowing
beard; women will have their smooth cheeks and narrow chests.”
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Jerome, thus,
seemed to have wanted not only that humans keep their same bodies in their
afterlife, but that they also maintain the same sorts of social relationships, includ-
ing the same male and female roles. However, in the cases of infants and old
people, he allowed that the bodies they get in heaven will not be the ones they
had when they died. Infants will be resurrected as the mature men or women
they would have become, old people as they were in their prime. In the end,
whereas for Origen dead human bodies would be transformed into new “glori-
fied” bodies, better suited to a heavenly environment, for Jerome, dead human
bodies would be restored to their prime human condition.
The Augustinian Synthesis
Augustine (354-430) made seminal contributions to an enormous number of issues
that continued to be central sources of concern not only throughout the Middle
Ages but into the Reformation and beyond. These included the Trinity, the prob-
lem of evil, human freedom, the nature of time, the soul, human psychology, and, of
course, resurrection. He is more impressive intellectually than any other church
father. In his
Confessions , he bequeathed to posterity a vivid and compelling portrait
of himself, in effect doing for himself what Plato earlier had done for Socrates. In
sum, as a consequence of the profundity and depth of his thought and the enduring
impression of his personality, on most questions on which he had an opinion he
became an authority among Latin Christian thinkers second only to the Bible.
Augustine’s
Confessions, the first Western autobiography of any significance,
became the model of that genre for a thousand years. In it, he portrayed himself
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