Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II:
City of God: Chapter 12

Chapter 12.—Against the Calumnies with Which Unbelievers Throw Ridicule Upon the Christian Faith in the Resurrection of the Flesh.

But their way is to feign a scrupulous anxiety in investigating this question, and to cast ridicule on our faith in the resurrection of the body, by asking, Whether abortions shall rise?  And as the Lord says, “Verily I say unto you, not a hair of your head shall perish,” 1628 shall all bodies have an equal stature and strength, or shall there be differences in size?  For if there is to be equality, where shall those abortions, supposing that they rise again, get that bulk which they had not here?  Or if they shall not rise because they were not born but cast out, they raise the same question about children who have died in childhood, asking us whence they get the stature which we see they had not here; for we will not say that those who have been not only born, but born again, shall not rise again.  Then, further, they ask of what size these equal bodies shall be.  For if all shall be as tall and large as were the tallest and largest in this world, they ask us how it is that not only children but many full-grown persons p. 494 shall receive what they here did not possess, if each one is to receive what he had here.  And if the saying of the apostle, that we are all to come to the “measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,” 1629 or that other saying, “Whom He predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son,” 1630 is to be understood to mean that the stature and size of Christ’s body shall be the measure of the bodies of all those who shall be in His kingdom, then, say they, the size and height of many must be diminished; and if so much of the bodily frame itself be lost, what becomes of the saying, “Not a hair of your head shall perish?”  Besides, it might be asked regarding the hair itself, whether all that the barber has cut off shall be restored?  And if it is to be restored, who would not shrink from such deformity?  For as the same restoration will be made of what has been pared off the nails, much will be replaced on the body which a regard for its appearance had cut off.  And where, then, will be its beauty, which assuredly ought to be much greater in that immortal condition than it could be in this corruptible state?  On the other hand, if such things are not restored to the body, they must perish; how, then, they say, shall not a hair of the head perish?  In like manner they reason about fatness and leanness; for if all are to be equal, then certainly there shall not be some fat, others lean.  Some, therefore, shall gain, others lose something.  Consequently there will not be a simple restoration of what formerly existed, but, on the one hand, an addition of what had no existence, and, on the other, a loss of what did before exist.

The difficulties, too, about the corruption and dissolution of dead bodies,—that one is turned into dust, while another evaporates into the air; that some are devoured by beasts, some by fire, while some perish by shipwreck or by drowning in one shape or other, so that their bodies decay into liquid, these difficulties give them immoderate alarm, and they believe that all those dissolved elements cannot be gathered again and reconstructed into a body.  They also make eager use of all the deformities and blemishes which either accident or birth has produced, and accordingly, with horror and derision, cite monstrous births, and ask if every deformity will be preserved in the resurrection.  For if we say that no such thing shall be reproduced in the body of a man, they suppose that they confute us by citing the marks of the wounds which we assert were found in the risen body of the Lord Christ.  But of all these, the most difficult question is, into whose body that flesh shall return which has been eaten and assimilated by another man constrained by hunger to use it so; for it has been converted into the flesh of the man who used it as his nutriment, and it filled up those losses of flesh which famine had produced.  For the sake, then, of ridiculing the resurrection, they ask, Shall this return to the man whose flesh it first was, or to him whose flesh it afterwards became?  And thus, too, they seek to give promise to the human soul of alternations of true misery and false happiness, in accordance with Plato’s theory; or, in accordance with Porphyry’s, that, after many transmigrations into different bodies, it ends its miseries, and never more returns to them, not, however, by obtaining an immortal body, but by escaping from every kind of body.

Footnotes

Luke 21.18.

Eph. 4.13.

Rom. 8.29.