Augustine in His Own Words
On the City of God 363
(6) You who are a philosopher here, that is, on this earth (for the sake of a name, I mention Pythagoras, Plato, Porphyry, or some other of the philosophers), why do you philosophize? He answers: "Because of the happy life." And when will you possess that happy life? He replies: "When I shall have abandoned this body on earth.". . .
(7) Porphyry, a later but important member of that group of philosophers, one who lived in the Christian era, was a bitter enemy of the Christian faith.70 Although through shame he abjured his mad ravings to a certain extent, yet, when censured by the Christians, he said and wrote: "Every kind of body must be avoided." He said "every kind of body" as if every body were a wretched prison of the soul. And certainly, if we must escape from every kind of body, there is no opportunity for one to praise that body to him and to say that, according to the teaching of God, our faith praises the body, because, although we draw punishment from sin from the body which we now possess, and although "the corruptible body is a load upon the soul" (Wis 9:15), nevertheless, the body has its own beauty, its own arrangement of members, its differentiation of senses, its erect posture, and other qualities which evoke admiration from those considering it. Furthermore, it is destined to be completely incorruptible, completely immortal, completely agile and quick in movement. Porphyry, however, says: "You praise the body to me without good reason. No matter what kind of body it is, you must escape from it if you wish to be happy." Philosophers say this, but they are wrong; they are raving.71
Pagan Objections to the Resurrection
of the Body
Augustine, both in this sermon series and again in On the City of God, lists pagan arguments against the core Christian doctrine of the resurrection. Many were stock objections cited and replied to by the earlier apologists Athenagoras and Origen.72 Like them, Augustine cites objections (the issues raised by miscarriages, deformities, and cannibalism) posed by Platonists who held that eternal life meant only a disembodied soul. From On the City of God, Book 22:
70. On Porphyry, see note 45 above. Here Augustine quotes Porphyry's lost On the Return of the Soul, a work he also discusses in civ. Dei 10.29 and 22.26.
71. S. 241.1–7 (PL 38:1136–37); trans. Muldowney, FOTC 38:255–62 (modified). See Pierre Courcelle, "Propos antichrétiens rapportés par S. Augustin," Recherches augustiniennes 1 (1958): 149–86.
72. See, for example, Athenagoras, De resurrectione 8.4, and Origen, De principiis 1.6.4 and Contra Celsum 5.18. For a selection of texts, see Joanne E. McWilliam Dewart, Death and Resurrection, Message of the Fathers of the Church 22 (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1986). For an analysis, see Brian Daley, Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); on Augustine, pp. 131–50.
(12) Under the pretense of scrupulous inquiry, the pagans have a trick of ridiculing the belief in the resurrection of the body. Thus they will ask with mock seriousness: Do miscarried fetuses share in this resurrection? And taking a cue from our Lord's words, "Not a hair of your head shall perish" (Lk 21:18), they ask whether strength and stature of body are to be the same for all or different. For if all bodies are to be the same, and if miscarriages are to be resurrected, where will they get the stature they lacked on earth? And even if miscarriages are not to rise inasmuch as they were not really born, the same difficulty arises in regard to small children. How are they to make up the full measure of stature which they lack by reason of dying in childhood? (And, of course, Christians will not deny the resurrection of children who were not merely born but reborn in baptism.) How, then, can equality of stature be achieved? If all are to have the stature of the tallest and broadest specimens of humanity, then not merely children but many besides will have to make up for what they lacked on earth; and, it will be asked, how can this be possible if each of us is to have the stature he had on earth? . . .
And the matter of hair may be urged: Will all the hair cut off by the barbers be restored? And if it is, is there anyone who will not dread such a deformity? And then there are the fingernails that have been clipped. Must not everything be restored that was sacrificed to personal appearance? And, then, where will be the physical beauty which, in immortal life, should be greater than in this corruptible life? And if the fingernails are not to be restored, they will have perished. How, then, can it be true that not a hair of the head is to perish? And as with stature, so with skinniness and plumpness. If we are all to be the same, then there can be no one who is thinner or fatter than others. Some then must be reduced and some must put on flesh. Hence, not all can be as they were on earth. Some must gain and some must lose.
Then there is the serious and perplexing problem of physical disintegration after death. Some parts of the body turn to dust and other parts are exhaled off into the air. Some bodies are devoured by wild beasts and others are consumed by fire. Some perish by shipwreck and others are drowned, and such bodies rot and dissolve into liquid. Many who reflect on such facts refuse to believe that all these elements will be reintegrated into the original bodies. The pagans like to recall the blotches and blemishes that occur at birth or later, all the human monstrosities that are born, and then mockingly ask: "What kind of resurrection will there be in cases like these?" If we say that no such blotches are to reappear, they will confound us by boldly asking: "What did we hear you say of the place of the wounds with which the Lord Christ rose from the dead?"
In the whole matter, there is one very difficult problem that can be pro-