Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [349]
The perfection of the knowledge of faith occupies Clement’s attention, rather than bodily resurrection. It is the consummation of existence and the possession of eternal life: “For herein lies the perfection of the Gnostic soul, that having transcended all purifications and modes of ritual, it should be with the Lord where he is, in immediate subordination to him” (Strom. 7.10.56-57).78
ORIGEN
Origen brings this strand of thinking to perfection. He stakes out his territory between the extremes of the Gnostic and the pagan notions of afterlife and Jewish views of resurrection.79 He and Augustine are clearly the most famous theologians of the ante-Nicene and post-Nicene periods respectively. He had help in the sense that he had to counter the anti-Christian polemic of Celsus. But his solution turns out to be too close to that of Celsus his opponent to be readily accepted by the “orthodox” tradition. Celsus apparently believed:
The idea that God is going to destroy the world in a great fire that only Christians will survive is absurd.
The idea that the dead will rise from the earth in the same bodies in which they were buried is a “hope for worms.”
The soul would not want a rotted body. Besides, there are even Christians who do not believe that the body is raised.
Christians have no answer to the question: “With what sort of body will they return? They merely retreat behind the power of God the creator. But God cannot do what is shameful or contrary to nature.
God can confer immortality on the soul. But to raise the flesh would be contrary to divine reason and character. Nothing could bring God to do something of that sort.80
This short summary makes clear the critical attack on Christianity which Celsus mounted based on the absurd Christian notion of resurrection. Like Galen, Celsus attacked the very fiber of Christianity from the unconquerable height of Greek philosophy, an intellectual discipline of impeccable prestige that included both critique and polemic, skills that demanded long training and an expensive higher education. By now, Christians could field their own intellectual debate team. Origen appears to have fully understood the threat that Christianity posed to pagan philosophy and have countered with a more systematic Hellenizing of the Christian position than any previous Father, creating a true gnōsis of Christianity in the same vein as Clement.
Origen essentially builds on the continuity between life and death. He stresses the spiritual nature of the resurrection body. He begins with the traditional notion that the flesh dies as result of Adam’s sin whereas the soul dies as the result of personal sin. In the Dialogue with Heraclides, he addresses the issue of the immortality of the soul. He admits many different kinds of death and immortality. Because there are many kinds of death, from one point of view we are immortal, yet from others we are not. Certainly the soul that sins is giving up its immortal nature. So in this he differs radically from Platonic thinking and agrees with Philo.
As Origen shows in his First Principles, he goes considerably along the way towards the philosophers. Like the Platonists, he viewed material existence itself as a kind of punishment. Human souls descend into the human body from a preexistent purity (Princ. 1.4.1). When it comes to the issue of resurrection Origen returns to the Pauline idea of spiritual bodies. This allows him to avoid the issues associated with the resurrection of the flesh. He also states that there will be a continuum of resurrection bodies, each with a glory corresponding to its moral status, which echoes the Pauline formulation in 1 Corinthians 15. But the most important thing is that the resurrection body will