318. The personal identity of the resurrection body
318. THE PERSONAL IDENTITY OF THE RESURRECTION BODY
Will I get my same body back in Heaven?
Whether in the resurrection the soul will be reunited to the same identical body?
It is written (Job 19:26): In my flesh I shall see God. . . .
On this point the (pagan) philosophers erred . . . for they held that when the soul while existing in the body had led a life contrary to the ordering of reason . . . it passed after death from the body of a man into the body of some other animal to whose manner of living it had conformed in this life, for instance into the body of a dog on account of lust, into the body of a lion on account of robbery and violence, and so forth. . . .
This opinion arises (because) they said that the soul is not united to the body essentially as form to matter, but only accidentally, as mover to the thing moved, or as a man to his clothes. Hence it was possible for them to maintain that the soul pre-existed before being infused into the body begotten of natural generation, and also that it is united to various bodies (S79,1); (“Reincarnation”)
Whether it will be identically the same man that shall rise again?
The necessity of holding the resurrection arises from this: that man may obtain the last end for which he was made. For this cannot be accomplished in this life . . . otherwise man would have been made in vain if he were unable to obtain the end for which he was made. And since it behooves the end to be obtained by the selfsame thing that was made for that end, lest it appear to be made without purpose, it is necessary for the selfsame man to rise again. And this is effected by the selfsame soul being united to the selfsame body. For otherwise there would be no resurrection properly speaking, if the same man were not re-formed. Hence to maintain that he who rises again is not the selfsame man is heretical, since it is contrary to the truth of Scripture which proclaims the resurrection.
This argument affords a very good proof against those who held a distinction between the sensitive and rational soul in man (i.e., that we had two souls, one animal and one spiritual), because in that case the sensitive soul in man would not be incorruptible, as neither is it in other animals. And consequently in the resurrection there would not be the same sensitive soul, nor consequently the same animal, nor the same man. But if we assert that in man the same soul is by its substance (essence) both rational and sensitive, we shall encounter no difficulty in this question (S79,2).
This last issue is crucial for abortion. If we have two souls, (1) the animal (“sensitive”) soul that keeps the animal body alive and (2) the rational, spiritual soul that makes us more than an animal; and if the animal soul appears in the unborn child before the rational soul does; then it could be argued that abortion does not kill a human being but only an animal if the child is aborted early enough, when there is only the animal soul there.
That’s essentially the same as saying that you can’t call a fetus human just because it’s biologically and genetically human. But you can, because that same single human soul that’s causing the biological growth is also the spiritual, immortal, rational soul that is God’s image and God’s child and destined for eternal union with its Heavenly Father. It’s not able to perform rational operations yet, but it’s there. It’s not a second soul. Even the one—celled zygote, at the moment of conception, before any differentiation into organs that can think or feel pain, before the zygote replicates and explodes into millions of cells, like the universe expanding after the Big Bang—even that single—celled thing is a human person, the same human person you are today. For only a human soul can direct the human growth of a human body, from the very beginning. That’s not just “life”, that’s an individual human being.