Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [351]
Gregory himself had considerable difficulty with the notion of resurrection and that difficulty is to be evidenced in his treatise On the Dead. There, with the Greeks, he argues that the soul is what constitutes the human person, that the body is an impediment to the realization of personhood, and that death is the fulfillment of this realization.
By the time of his great treatises, On the Creation of Man and On the Soul and Resurrection, Gregory’s positions had matured considerably. In On the Creation of Man, written between 379 and 380, he presents several arguments for the reality of resurrection. The first is that good must triumph over evil so that we must expect an eventual return to the good of Eden that God made for us at the beginning (21.4). Resurrection itself may be best demonstrated from the miracles of Jesus in the Scripture but the final consummation cannot take place until “the … complement of human nature” has been filled.87 Since these proofs are as much about revivifications as resurrections, Gregory’s discussion risks describing the resurrection as the revivification of the material body. Hence, he goes out of his way to show that the resurrection bodies in the New Testament, including Jesus’ own, had already corrupted, making the miracle of resurrection clear to all as a proof of the general resurrection to come:
And the disciples were led by the Lord to be initiated at Bethany in the preliminary mysteries of the general resurrection. Four days had already passed since the event; all due rites had been performed for the departed; the body was hidden in the tomb; it was probably already swollen and beginning to dissolve into corruption, as the body mouldered in the dank earth and necessarily decayed: the thing was one to turn from, as the dissolved body under the constraint of nature changed to offensiveness. At this point the doubted fact of the general resurrection is brought to proof by a more manifest miracle; for one is not raised from severe sickness, nor brought back to life when at the last breath-nor is a child just dead brought to life, nor a young man about to be conveyed to the tomb released from his bier; but a man past the prime of life, a corpse, decaying, swollen, yea already in a state of dissolution, so that even his own kinsfolk could not suffer that the Lord should draw near the tomb by reason of the offensiveness of the decayed body there enclosed, brought into life by a single call, confirms the proclamation of the resurrection, that is to say, that expectation of it as universal, which we learn by particular experience to entertain. (On the Creation of Man 25.11)88
It is the resurrection of Lazarus and the others, as much as Jesus’, which shows us the truth of the general resurrection. And the contrast with his Origenism in previous writings could not be more complete.
Since then every prediction of the Lord is shown to be true by the testimony of events, and we have not only learned this by his words, but also received the proof of the promise in deed, from those very persons who returned to life by resurrection, what occasion is left to those who disbelieve? Shall we not bid farewell to those who pervert our simple faith by “philosophy and vain deceit,” and hold fast to our confession in its purity, learning briefly through the prophet the mode of the grace, by his words, “Thou shalt take away their breath and they shall fail, and turn to their dust. Thou shalt send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created, and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth” (LXX Ps 104:29-30); at which time also he says that the Lord rejoices in His works, sinners having perished from the earth: for how shall any one be called by the name of sin, when sin itself exists no longer? (On the Creation of Man 25.13)89
To Gregory, resurrection, though it may seem