317. The resurrection of the body
317. THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
What is God’s reason for giving us a resurrected body?
The members should be conformed to the head. Now our Head lives and will live eternally in body and soul, since Christ rising again from the dead dieth now no more (Rom 6:8). Therefore men who are His members will live in body and soul; and consequently there must needs be a resurrection of the body. . . .
The soul is compared to the body not only as a worker to the instrument with which he works, but also a form to matter. Wherefore the work belongs to the composite and not to the soul alone, as the Philosopher shows. And since to the worker is due the reward of the work, it behooves man himself, who is composed of soul and body, to receive the reward of his work. . . .
Other things being equal, the state of the soul in the body is more perfect than outside the body, because it is a part of the whole composite. . . . Because, strictly speaking, a thing is more conformed to God when it has all that the condition of its nature requires. . . (S75,1).
The ultimate reason for all things human is Christ, Who is perfect man as well as perfect God, and Who “truly reveals man to himself” (Vatican II). Thus the ultimate reason for the resurrection of the body is that “the members [us] should be conformed to the Head (Christ)”; and Christ has a human body now in Heaven (a material body but not a mortal body), since the Ascension was not the undoing of the Incarnation. If we did not have bodies in Heaven, we would not be like Christ. If we had no bodies we could not be “members” of His (Mystical) Body. Angels don’t have that privilege! (The Greek word translated “members” means “organs in an organism”, not the “members” of a club or a class.)
Our bodies are not merely instruments of our souls, as a tool is an instrument of a worker. We are not spiritual substances, like angels, which merely use material bodies. Nor are we two substances, bodies and souls, like ghosts in haunted houses. We are a single though composite substance which is both material and spiritual. The soul is the form of the body and the body is the matter of the soul, somewhat as the meaning of a book is its form or soul and the words are its matter or body. They are not two things but two dimensions.
When I hit you or hug you, it is not just my hand or my arms that do the work. Nor is it just my mind, will, or emotions. It is me, the whole me. And when I hit you or hug you, I do not do that just to your body. I do it to you, the whole you. Since all the good and bad works we do on earth are done by the whole self, their just rewards (and punishments) are whole-self rewards (and punishments), bodily as well as spiritual.
Platonists, Gnostics and Hindus all believe that the soul is better without the body than with it. They are wrong. A human soul without a body is not a complete self, like an angel, but an incomplete self, rather like a program in a computer, or sheet music that is not played. It is physically paralyzed, since it has no body or senses to express itself. So even though the nature of God is spiritual and not material, our souls are more like God when they are in a material body, since “a thing is more conformed to God when it has all that the condition of its (God-designed and God-created) nature requires.”
We will succeed in being more fully human in Heaven than we ever were on earth. And that includes our bodies. They will be more bodily bodies, not less. We tend to imagine human bodies in Heaven as ghostlike, but it is actually our present bodies that are more ghostlike, more thin and faded, less solid and substantial and real, compared with our Heavenly bodies.
Take care of your body; it is the sketch of something far more real and more glorious than itself. Remember C. S. Lewis’ image: he says they are like ponies give to schoolboys to prepare them to manage stallions.
This is why St. Paul says that sins against the body are so serious (1 Cor 6:18-20).