Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II:
City of God: Chapter 20

Chapter 20.—That the Flesh Now Resting in Peace Shall Be Raised to a Perfection Not Enjoyed by the Flesh of Our First Parents.

Thus the souls of departed saints are not affected by the death which dismisses them from their bodies, because their flesh rests in hope, no matter what indignities it receives after sensation is gone.  For they do not desire that their bodies be forgotten, as Plato thinks fit, but rather, because they remember what has been promised by Him who deceives no man, and who gave them security for the safe keeping even of the hairs of their head, they with a longing patience wait in hope of the resurrection of their bodies, in which they have suffered many hardships, and are now to suffer never again.  For if they did not “hate their own flesh,” when it, with its native infirmity, opposed their will, and had to be constrained by the spiritual law, how much more shall they love it, when it shall even itself have become spiritual!  For as, when the spirit serves the flesh, it is fitly called carnal, so, when the flesh serves the spirit, it will justly be called spiritual.  Not that it is converted into spirit, as some fancy from the words, “It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption,” 605 but because it is subject to the spirit with a perfect and marvellous readiness of obedience, and responds in all things to the will that has entered on immortality,— p. 256 all reluctance, all corruption, and all slowness being removed.  For the body will not only be better than it was here in its best estate of health, but it will surpass the bodies of our first parents ere they sinned.  For, though they were not to die unless they should sin, yet they used food as men do now, their bodies not being as yet spiritual, but animal only.  And though they decayed not with years, nor drew nearer to death,—a condition secured to them in God’s marvellous grace by the tree of life, which grew along with the forbidden tree in the midst of Paradise,—yet they took other nourishment, though not of that one tree, which was interdicted not because it was itself bad, but for the sake of commending a pure and simple obedience, which is the great virtue of the rational creature set under the Creator as his Lord.  For, though no evil thing was touched, yet if a thing forbidden was touched, the very disobedience was sin.  They were, then, nourished by other fruit, which they took that their animal bodies might not suffer the discomfort of hunger or thirst; but they tasted the tree of life, that death might not steal upon them from any quarter, and that they might not, spent with age, decay.  Other fruits were, so to speak, their nourishment, but this their sacrament.  So that the tree of life would seem to have been in the terrestrial Paradise what the wisdom of God is in the spiritual, of which it is written, “She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.” 606

Footnotes

1 Cor. 15.42.

Prov. 3.18.