29. There Is a Double Resurrection.
29. There is a double Resurrection.29
Thomas Aquinas surprises us when he teaches that there are two resurrections: The first is waking up within this lifetime. And he implies that if we do this correctly, we need not worry about the second.
I have not heard such a teaching in any Christian writer before. Aquinas explains the “first resurrection” this way: “First, let us try to rise spiritually from the soul’s death, brought on by our sins, to that life of justice obtained through penitence: ‘Rise, you who sleep, and rise from the dead; and Christ shall enlighten you’ (Eph 5:14). This is the first resurrection: ‘blessed and holy is one who has part in the first resurrection’ (John 20:6).’”
Being asleep is a kind of death from which we need to rise up and resurrect. The first resurrection is about Waking Up. He cites Paul’s letter to the Romans: “’As Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also must walk in newness of life’ (Rom 6:4). The new life is the life of justice renewing the soul and leading it to the life of glory.”
How prevalent is sleepfulness? Kabir, the fifteenth-century Indian mystic, tells us: “You have been sleeping for millions and millions of years. Why not wake up this morning?” Aquinas invokes the apostle Paul with an image found in Isaiah 60:1: “‘Arise, be enlightened, O Jerusalem; for your light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you. ‘Rise from a neglect of good works, you who sleep. ‘How long will you sleep, O sluggard?’ (Prov. 6:9). ‘Shall he that sleep rise again no more?’ (Ps 41:9).”
Says Aquinas: “There is a double resurrection, one of the body, when the soul rejoins body, the other spiritual, when soul reunited to God. Christ’s bodily resurrection produces both in us—though he himself never rose again spiritually, for he had never been separated from God.” Our being asleep is being separated from God. It is also succumbing to acedia, the capital sin often translated as sloth but with a far richer meaning that includes depression, despair, passivity, boredom—and also couchpotatoitis. Aquinas defines acedia as “the lack of energy to begin new things.” We find it everywhere today, it is a “sign of our times,” and that is why we created a new word for it—namely, couchpotatoitis.
Its cure is Waking Up. But how does that happen? Aquinas offers the medicine when he observes that zeal comes from an intense experience of love or beauty or goodness (114). Yes, beauty and falling in love are the cure for acedia and being asleep. The Via Positiva requires our attention. I wrote in my book Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth of the need to fall in love at least three times per day. Of course, such falling in love is not into an anthropocentric kind of love—it is falling in love with creation itself and its many expressions of beauty and of the divine. Why not fall in love with wild flowers and elephants and trees and flowers, as well as music and poetry and pottery and films and the rest?
When we fall in love with life, we live this life fully as both mystics and prophets. Then we are awake and risen and have undergone our first resurrection. Upon dying, then, the second resurrection takes care of itself.
Aquinas believes that Christ explicitly calls us to both the first and second resurrection: “Our Lord promises both resurrections, for he says: ‘Amen, Amen, I say to you that the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God and they that hear shall live.’ And this seems to pertain to the spiritual resurrection of souls. … But later, it is the bodily resurrection he expresses, saying: ‘The hour is coming when all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God’ (John 5:25, 28). For, clearly souls are not in the graves, but bodies. Therefore, this foretells the bodily resurrection.”
Nor is resurrection restricted to believers, but a “new creation “and a “common resurrection” happens to all and has already begun. “On that day on which the resurrection took place a kind of new creation, as it were, began. As the psalmist says ‘Send forth your Spirit, and they will be created, and you will renew the face of the earth’ (104:30). And as Galatians puts it: ‘In Christ Jesus neither does circumcision nor uncircumcision have any value, but a new creation does. … The life of the risen Christ is spread to all humanity in common resurrection. Christ’s resurrection is the cause of newness of life which comes through grace or justice (6:15)”. As humans awaken, a new creation emerges.
God is
a Fountain of
Total Beauty,
the most beautiful
and the superbeautiful.