Augustine in His Own Words
On the City of God 365 posed. Supposing a starving man eats the body of a fellow man, whose body will belong to whom in the resurrection?73 It became the flesh of the starving man who fed upon it, as was clear when his emaciated frame became filled out. This case is often used not only to make fun of our faith in the resurrection, but also to bolster either the Platonic theory of human souls alternately living in real miseries and imaginary blessedness, or the Porphyrian idea that the soul transmigrates from body to body, but finally, after many vicissitudes, ends all miseries, never to return to them. Of course, in Porphyry's view there was no question of an immortal body, but only of a disembodied spirit.
(13) Such, then, in summary, are the objections to our faith in the resurrection. With God's grace aiding my efforts, I shall reply to them.74
God the Artist
The heart of Augustine's reply is that God's approach will be like that of a master artist. In Augustine's view, a God who could create the world from nothing could remake the world he had made—and remake it more gloriously than it was originally. From On the City of God, Book 22:
(19) I still think that nothing that is a natural part of the human body will be lost. As for deformities—which have the purpose of reminding us of the penal conditions of mortal life—they will be so integrated into the substance of the whole that no deformity will appear in any part. After all, if a human artist happens to make a flawed statue, he can always recast it and restore its beauty without losing any material. If there happens to be something out of proportion in that original figure, or something that does not fit in with the rest, he does not have to chisel it off or separate it off from the matter. Instead, he simply melts the whole thing down and remolds the same mass of material so as to remove the ugly defect and not lose any of the substance. So what are we to think about an omnipotent Artist? Can He not eliminate any deformity in the human body, not only normal ones, but especially those that are rare and monstrous, which may be congruent with the miseries of this life but not with that future happiness enjoyed by the saints? . . . Therefore, let those who, on earth, are too thin or too fat take comfort. They would not choose to be that way now if they could avoid it. They will certainly not be that way in eternity. For what makes a human body beautiful is its harmoni-
73. The issue of cannibalism, while meant as a mocking objection by pagans, may well have been a real issue. Jerome reports in ep. 127.12 that during Alaric's siege, incidents of cannibalism took place.
74. Civ. Dei 22.12-13 (CCL 48:832–33); trans. Walsh and Honan, FOTC 24:457–60 (modified).