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resurrected self
[ 73 ]
that each person’s soul existed before its becoming associated with body, but
Augustine refused to allow that the soul was put into the body as a punishment
for sin. An important question for him was whether God created each indi-
vidual soul separately or created all souls in Adam’s, so that the souls of subse-
quent people are “handed on” by their parents. An advantage of the latter view
is that Original Sin can be explained as a transmitted stain on the soul. A pos-
sible disadvantage is that for the soul to be handed down, it would seem that it
has to be material. Gregory of Nyssa may have been attracted to the idea that
the soul is handed down and hence is material. Augustine insisted that the soul
is not material.
When Augustine turned to the topic of resurrection, he struck a compromise
between his predecessors, such as Methodius, who emphasized the importance
of remaining the same and
those, such as Origen, who emphasized transforma-
tion, though Augustine leaned toward the former view. He claimed that the
body one gets in heaven has to be composed of exactly the same bits as the body
one had on earth, presumably at death, but the bits do not have to be used in the
same way. For instance, the bits that on earth had composed an arm might in the
afterlife be used to compose a leg, and although the number of one’s hairs had to
be the same, the hairs themselves did not have to be the same. Moreover, the
recomposed body, unlike the earthly body which was made of the same stuff,
would be unchanging, hence, not subject to development or decay.
Augustine considered the case of people who had become deformed and
claimed that, with some exceptions, their deformities would be removed. The
exceptions included the martyrs, whose scars were a badge of honor. The after-
life bodies of those who never grew to maturity, such as aborted fetuses, or those
who grew to maturity but were always deformed, while composed of the same
bits as their earthly bodies, would be beautifully formed and mature.
Although Augustine was horrified by the prospect that some people had been
eaten, he denied that it could be claimed “with any show of reason, that all the
flesh eaten has been evacuated, and that none of it has been assimilated to the sub-
stance of the eater.” He pointed out that emaciated animals have become robust by
eating flesh, “sufficiently indicating what large deficiencies have been filled up
with this food.” However, he claimed, the tiny particles out of which consumed
and assimilated flesh is composed are eventually released into the air due to evapo-
ration, where God retrieves them. In the case of cannibalism, in particular, he
claimed, human flesh “shall be restored to the man in whom it first became human
flesh.” Human flesh consumed by another “must be looked upon as borrowed by
the other person.” Like a loan, it must be “returned to the lender.” The cannibal’s
“own flesh, however, which he lost by famine, shall be restored to him” by God.
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