Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [350]
Because if they believe the apostle [Paul], that a body which arises in glory, and power, and incorruptiblity, has already become spiritual, it appears and contrary to his meaning to say that it can again be entangled with the passions of flesh and blood, seeing that the apostle manifestly declares that “flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God, nor shall corruption inherit incorruption.” But how do they understand the declaration of the apostle [Paul] “We shall be changed?” This transformation certainly is to be looked for, according to the order which we have taught above; and in it, undoubtedly it becomes us to hope for something worthy of divine grace; and this we believe will take place in the order in which the apostle describes the sowing of the ground of a “bare grain of corn, or of any other fruit,” to which “God gives a body as it pleases Him,” as soon as the grain of corn is dead. (Princ. 2.10.3)81
Origen claims that he is merely restating the Pauline concept of spiritual bodies. But he has traveled, in reality, a great distance from the apocalyptic mysticism of Paul. Origen’s notion of a “spiritual body” has taken its lead from Paul but, like Valentinianism, the concept is the immortal soul of Platonism in disguise. He sees souls as the stuff of the stars and the perfected souls as the heavenly bodies.82 Origen allows everything but the natural immortality of the soul. For him, it is the saving work of God which immortalizes the soul, just as it was for Philo. This is certainly a possible and consistent way for Christianity to have moved. As it turned out, it was rejected. However, it was taken up by Gnosticism and later by Manichaeanism.
Evidently one problem with his perception is that it threatened the personal identity of the believer: “Yet the form (eidos) of the earlier body will not be lost, even though a change to a more glorious condition takes place in it.” For this Origen returns yet again to the Pauline term, “spiritual body” but he loads it this time with a different ammunition.83 This time, he fills the term with the implications of the spermatic “Logos” of Stoicism. Thus, he forges yet one more link between Christianity and Greek philosophy. His notion of personal identity is the pagan notion of the soul.
We have come an enormous distance from the apocalypticism of the early Jesus movement, which claimed (as all movements of that type did) that they alone were faithful enough to merit God’s future rewards. Origen’s system is clearly the farthest that one can take the notion of resurrection into Greek philosophy. It represents the cynosure of coexistence or, more exactly, the subsumption of resurrection into the notion of the immortal soul of Plato. But it is a perfect harmonization that future fathers were to view as too radical. Origen was called “heretic” while Augustine’s view returns to Tertullian’s approach.84
Gregory of Nyssa and the Cappadocians
JAROSLAV PELIKAN wrote a magisterial study of the Cappadocian fathers, Christianity and Classical Culture, whose theology represents the high point of philosophical thinking after Origen and before Augustine.85 As thinkers, the power of their arguments surpasses that of Augustine but does not have the same dogmatic authority. Pelikan sees the major enterprise of these fathers as attempting to resolve the differences between Greek natural philosophy and Christian revelatory explanations of life. This is entirely compatible with the approach I have been taking. So let me resume his development of the chapter on life after death among the Cappadocians-Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzius, and Macrina, in many ways the most sophisticated teacher of them all, who was the older sister of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa.
Gregory of Nyssa made a significant contribution to the synthesis of the doctrines of resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul.86 It is unclear how much of his thinking is actually his and how much belongs to his extremely adept sister Macrina; in his most important