Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [353]
Arguing in this way then leads to a different dilemma about the possibility of living eternally in a material body. So it is not to the body that Macrina turns to express the principle of identity, propounding, as Gregory did above, that the soul picks up and retains the individuality of a person’s moral life (260). This is rather like the Philonic solution to the problem and, indeed, one is left with the feeling that the body is denigrated by means of Platonism so as to fit the New Testament’s requirements. Gregory, too, admits Origen’s notion that salvation will eventually be universal, after what punishments are meted out beyond the grave. The philosophical and logical necessity for the resurrection of the body at the final consummation will indeed fall to Augustine to express most fully, though he is even more negative about sexuality and the body’s role in this life.
Augustine
THOUGH PERHAPS not the intellectual equal of the Cappadocians in philosophical discussion, Augustine was certainly the most influential Christian thinker in the West until Aquinas. He significantly transmuted Christian views of grace and law, determination and free will, love, charity, and sin and Original Sin by gathering them up into a huge synthesis. There is no way to do justice here to the huge corpus of writing left by this towering and maddening figure or the intellectual synthesis that he effected. We have already seen how Origen, in attempting to conquer philosophy, was himself conquered by it, in the opinion of his successors. Seeking a true Christian gnōsis, his successors judged him a Christian Gnostic, as Clement had argued, and condemned him for it as well.
For Augustine, the Christian notion of resurrection might be entirely subsumed into Greek categories but it would only remain resurrection if it was also material. It must be material because the sin of the first man was material. In a real sense, Augustine is returning to the Pauline observation that, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor 15:22). But, in doing so, he redesigns the notion of Original Sin so that it is a much stronger and foregrounded belief than in any other Church Father:
The law of death is that by which it was said to the first man, “You are dust and unto dust you shall return,” for we are all born of him in that state because we are dust and we shall return to dust as a punishment for the sin of the first man. (Fort., 22)92
Augustine denies Origen’s solution to the seeming contradiction between Hebrew and Greek thought, making a brave, seemingly backward move. He returns to the primacy of the body and insists that it is the seat of our fullest identity:
“Spiritual body” does not mean “not a body” any more than “animated body” means “life.” … “Spiritual body” means a body obeying the spirit. (Serm. 242.8.11)93
He returns on many occasions to the issues as Paul defined them. But, while Paul was an apocalypticist throughout his life, Augustine was only one at the beginning of his career. He moves more and more into the notion that humans are preempted from perfecting themselves without God’s special grace. The body is only necessary to guarantee our identity. Therefore, it is to the body that humanity will return. Augustine’s most extensive treatment of the resurrection before his City of God is in Sermon 362, dated to about 410. He tries to explain Paul’s text “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God”:
Your body does not possess anything, but your soul, through the body, possesses that which belongs to the body. If, therefore, the flesh resurrects in order not to possess but to be possessed, not to have but to be had, what wonder then if flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom, since they will certainly be possessed by another…. In so far as we will be resurrected, it is not we whom the flesh carries, it is we who