Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [348]
Tertullian is able to allegorize the preferred connection between flesh and soul. The bride is the flesh and the bridegroom is the soul, led together by the spirit. Note the gender identification of flesh and spirit; it is based on a social hierarchy of male and female, not the grammatical gender of the two words. The flesh can be summoned again, just as Adam was summoned by God at creation. The body will be complete and perfect, even containing the genitalia, which will have no possible purpose in the resurrection body. They were important for the purposes of excreting in this life, necessary for the health of the body. Same with the teeth, they were necessary in this life for eating and have no future purpose. But they will be retained in the future body, not because the reconstructed world will have sexuality or eating but because the body would look peculiar without them.76 Thus, at the end of his life when Tertullian became a Montanist, an apocalyptic movement which expected the end of the world immediately, he took his notions of fleshly resurrection with him into apocalypticism. Indeed, anyone who starts from Stoic principles can end up in apocalypticism because Stoicism itself posited that the world would end in fire, an ekpyrosis. Certainly Tertullian would have interpreted Stoicism as most consonant with the Biblical tradition in this respect.
Tertullian decides that the resurrection body will be like the angels (Res., 62). The importance of this statement is not in the identity between the two but in the immortalizing of the perfected believer. The emphasis on the fleshly nature of the resurrection is a mark of the importance of this early battle between Gnosticism and orthodoxy over the nature of the body. We have seen that this is just as certainly an argument over human identity, gender, and transcendent significance. Behind it, the nature of the believer’s responsibility regarding martyrdom was being expressed as well.
THE ALEXANDRIAN SCHOOL
Clement of Alexandria and Origen, forming an Alexandrian school that was deeply influenced by Philo Judaeus and Hellenistic Jewish philosophy, attempt a very different kind of synthesis between the two cultures. Though Clement preceded Tertullian, it is more convenient to treat him together with Origen for that reason. It is the two seemingly mutually exclusive doctrines of immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body that are the most illuminating battlefield for the Alexandrian fathers. Clement’s treatise on the resurrection is lost and was, no doubt, “heretical” from the perspective of more “orthodox” eyes. But we should see it as an attempt to combine the two doctrines in such a way as to build the truth of one upon the other, instead of seeing in them obvious clash and mutual disconfirmation. That is the dominant strategy of the Alexandrian writers from Philo forward.
Clement attempted to define the good Gnostic as the true Christian who is pious in every respect. The Stromata (carpets or miscellanies) has several depictions of the Christian who can resist pleasure and desire, grief and anger, and in general maintain complete composure through the strengths of the Christian life. Philosophy too purges the soul and prepares it for faith. In this, Clement attempted to reclaim the term gnōsis and “Gnostic” for Christianity-even using the term for saving knowledge to represent the center of the church’s teaching: “For God created man for immortality, and made him an image of his own nature (Wis 2:22), according to which nature of [God] who knows all, he who is a Gnostic, and, righteous and holy with prudence, hastens to reach the measure of perfect manhood” (Strom. 6.12.97). It is not possible to take the full measure of Clement’s thinking on the matter because of the missing document. But it does look as if Clement affirmed resurrection