Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [354]
For Augustine, the vocabulary has to agree with Paul, it is a “spiritual body.” It further will all become clear at the end of history, at the eschaton, when the earthly realm will be perfected. Augustine describes the intermediary realm in which the faithful dead live. At the Second Coming, nature itself will change and be perfected. To have the form of a body, without the flesh of corruption, means for Augustine (as for Macrina before him), that none of the acts of the flesh (eating, drinking, begetting, etc.) will continue in heaven. Human beings will finally achieve the status of angels (stars) in the afterlife and this will become the model for a perfected earth in the eschaton:
[The heavenly body] will be called a body and it can be called a celestial body. The same thing is said by the Apostle when he distinguishes between bodies: “All flesh is not the same flesh: but one is the flesh of men, another of beasts, another of birds, another of fishes. And there are bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial” (1 Cor 15:39-40). However, he certainly would not say celestial flesh; although bodies may be said to be flesh but only earthly bodies. For all flesh is body; but not every body is flesh. (Serm. 362.18.21)95
Augustine must explain why, when souls can contemplate God in heaven, it should be necessary for them to have a body at all. For Augustine, the answer is more scriptural than philosophical. The purpose of having a spiritual body in heaven has to do with the identity of the believer and also with its purpose in heaven, to meditate upon God. The spiritual body is both infinitely superior to the soul and, at the same time, only complete when it has become a spiritual body. Augustine analogizes with the incarnation. If God can be incarnate, then the perfected soul can be embodied as a spiritual body.
This solves the question not by reason but by scriptural passage and analogy but it creates a whole slew of other questions. Augustine settles the issue with Scripture but, conveniently, he uses Paul’s writing and not the Gospels to settle the question. He would have had a much harder time demonstrating how body and soul go together without Paul’s notion of the “spiritual body.” It would have been almost impossible to make his point from the Gospels alone. He more or less settles the issue of corporeality by using the word “body” to mean an intelligible rather than a material object, as he interprets Paul. So in some sense, his body is not really a body but rather a garment for the soul, simply an ornament for it.
Augustine does not here resolve all the issues satisfactorily for himself. But he relies on the experience of leaving the body in ecstasy as demonstration that the soul will achieve the intermediary state. He then says that even after we have reached the felicity of bodiless existence there is the further felicity of returning to a perfected body, so that wise and ascetic men in this world live as if they are already in the perfected world to come. It may be correct to say that humans may have the experience of leaving the body. It is a real and quite intense experience. But, it is another thing to say that this demonstrates the immortality of the soul (see ch. 8).
In his most extensive treatment of our final disposition, The City of God, Augustine locates the ultimate good in being reincorporated without the evils of corporeal life. But he also uses that peculiar future state to demonstrate that hellfire and punishment for the damned will be real. How else could the soul be punished except in a body (Civ. 19.1-17)? The saved have precisely the converse issue. They will be souls together in salvation, a community of those saved, just as the church creates a community on earth. They will need an incorruptible body for their reward:
So,