Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [352]
Having established the nature of the New Testament doctrine, Gregory begins a more significant attempt at synthesis. He uses the Platonic concept of eidos (form, idea) as the one element of the earthly body to be preserved for the resurrection. This was Origen’s opinion as well; no doubt Gregory learned from him. Gregory explicitly uses this concept as the principle of identity, which allows for the reassembling of the body’s atoms. Gregory uses the eidos, not as the form itself, but as a spiritual organ by which an individual’s soul imprints the individual’s identity on material (27.2-5). This is a complex and sophisticated attempt to combine immortality with resurrection, realized, transcendent humanity with personal identity.
Even Plato was of the opinion that the body affects the soul. Without demonstrating that it is the individual who is resurrected, Gregory had risked proving resurrection by losing the individuality of the resurrected person. This is quite similar to the philosophical problem involved in demonstrating that the soul that survives death is the same as the individual who lived. Is the soul personal enough to be the principle of identity for the living person or is the soul merely a general rational principle that is immortal? In the same way, by combining the soul with resurrection of the body, Gregory risks failing to demonstrate that the person resurrected is the same as the one that died.
This concretization of the eidos is Gregory’s attempt to resolve that problem. In chapter 28, armed with this Origenist argument, Gregory refutes aspects of Origen’s notion of reincarnation. Thus, though the ostensible subject of the treatise is the making of the human body, we find that Gregory uses it as a way to try to synthesize the primitive Christian notion of resurrection with a sophisticated, philosophical notion of the immortality of the soul.
Armed with these arguments, Gregory goes to the main event: His treatise On the Soul and the Resurrection is precisely what the title suggests. It is an attempt to reason with each concept to make a consistent description of the Christian message, both in terms of scriptural background and philosophical acumen. The problem, however, is not just academic. He and his sister Macrina are dealing with the overwhelming loss of their older brother Basil. At the beginning of the treatise, Gregory relates that he has gone to his sister in search of consolation but she brings him clarity on intellectual issues as well.90 Gregory expresses his difficulty in demonstrating the immortality of the soul while Macrina explains the relation of the soul to the body and, in doing so, raises the issue of the resurrection of the body. And she immediately raises the issue of the identity of the raised individual:
One hears people … asking how, since the dissolution of the elements according to their kinds is incomplete, the element of heat [the soul] in a person, once it is mingled generally with its own kind, can be withdrawn again for the purpose of reforming a man. For, they would say, unless the very same element returns the result would be a similar being and not the indvidual himself, that is to say, another person would come into being and such a process would not be a resurrection, but the creation of a new man. But, if the original is to be reconstituted, it is necessary for it to be entirely the same, taking up its original nature in all the parts of its elements. (De Anima 230)91
With this argument, one might easily turn to the resurrection of the body as the principle of identity, admitting that the soul is the life-force but not the individuality of the person. However, that would lead into its own difficulties about the condition of the resurrected:
If our