Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
ous contours combined with a pleasing color. Now this harmony is lacking whenever some part or other of the body is ugly in itself or is disproportionate with the rest. All ugliness arising from any lack of harmony, however, will disappear in that age. There every deformity will be corrected, and every lessthan-fitting element will be readjusted as God-knows-how from what is supplied, and every larger-than-fitting element will be removed without altering the integrity of the body as a whole.75
Women and the Resurrection
of the Body
A widespread view in antiquity was that only men were fully human, that women were "misbegotten men," as Aristotle would put it. Thus certain Christians had speculated that the saved would all be raised as men. Augustine strongly disagreed. His principle was based, in part, on his reading of Genesis: as in the beginning, so in the end. From On the City of God, Book 22:
(17) There are some who think that in the resurrection all will be men, and that women will lose their sex. This view springs from an interpretation of the texts: "Until we all attain . . . to perfect manhood, to the mature measure of the fullness of Christ" (Eph 4:13) and "conformed to the image of the Son of God" (Rom 8:29). The interpretation is based on the fact that the man alone was made by God out of the "slime of the earth," whereas the woman was made from the man. For myself, I think that those others are more sensible who have no doubt that both sexes will remain in the resurrection. After all, there will then be none of that lust which is the cause of shame in connection with sex, and so all will be as before the first sin, when the man and the woman were naked and felt no shame (Gn 2:25). In the resurrection, the blemishes of the body will be gone, but the nature of the body will remain. And certainly a woman's sex is her nature and no blemish; only in the resurrection, there will be no conception or childbearing associated with her nature. Her members will remain as before, with the former purpose sublimated to a newer beauty. There will be no concupiscence to arouse, and none will be aroused, but her womanhood will be a hymn to the wisdom of God, who first made her a woman, and to the clemency of God, who freed her from the corruption into which she fell. . . .
God, then, who made us man and woman, will raise us up as man and
75. Civ. Dei 22.19 (CCL 48:838–39); my trans. Cf. Enchiridion 88–91 (CCL 46:97–98). On this issue, see Brian Schmisek, "Augustine's Use of 'Spiritual Body,' " Augustinian Studies 35 (2004): 237–52.