Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [355]
Augustine is driven to the conclusion from which Paul started: the body that the faithful will enjoy eternally is like a fleshly body but it is not a fleshly body. It is not even a material body. It is perfected flesh:
We shall see the corporeal bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in such a way that, wherever we turn our eyes, we shall, through our bodies that we are wearing and plainly seeing, enjoy with perfect clarity the vision of the sight of God everywhere present and ruling all things, even material things. It will not be as it is now, when the invisible things of God are seen and understood through the things which have been made, in a mirror dimly and in part…. (Civ. 22.29) Either, therefore, God will be seen by means of those eyes because they in their excellence will have something similar to a mind by which even an incorporeal nature is discerned-but that is difficult or impossible to illustrate by an example or testimony of the divine writings-or else, which is easier to understand, God will be so known by us and so present to our eyes that by means of the spirit he will be seen by each of us in each of us, seen by each in his neighbour and in himself, seen in the new heaven and the new earth and in every creature which will then exist. (Civ. 22.29)
For Augustine this means being subsumed into the body of Christ, who is the only member of the trinity to take on human form. Indeed for him, meditating on the trinity is a way to anticipate the last and final consummation, which in The City of God Augustine compares with the Sabbath:
There is no need here to speak in detail of each of these seven “days.” Suffice it to say that this “seventh day” will be our Sabbath and that it will end in no evening but only in the Lord’s day-that eighth and eternal day which dawned when Christ’s resurrection heralded an eternal rest both for the spirit and for the body [emphasis added]. On that day we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise-for this is to be the end without the end of all our living, that Kingdom without end, the real aim and goal of our present life. (Civ. 22, end)
In short, Augustine believes that saved Christians will enjoy eternity as a community of perfected beings, like angels. As opposed to Origen, Augustine sees the final disposition of the soul only at the Parousia, the Second Coming, when all the faithful are resurrected. The living will be transformed but the dead will find their souls reclothed. The soul, rather than hating the body as in Platonism, yearns for the body in order to complete its repentance, just as in late Neoplatonism. The difference, for Augustine, is that repentance must be done in a single lifetime and may only be accomplished by those who believe in the Christ. Augustine himself certainly had plenty of experience with repentance, having been a religious quester himself. Indeed, the interior life of the convert dominates his writings.
The Nicene Creed affirmed that Christians must firmly await the life of the aeon to come. For the Cappadocians, this meant affirming both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead, a formula which was by now the standard way of dealing with the opposing concepts of afterlife in Christian thought. There was certainly a difficulty in affirming both of them simultaneously. But for Augustine, both could be affirmed sequentially. Upon death, the correctly believing and acting soul could attain the immortality of the soul which had originally been the Greek notion. At the end of time, the soul would be returned to a body for the fulfillment that was contemplated by Daniel and the Jewish apocalypticists (of which Christianity was certainly the primary example): Immortality of the soul now; resurrection of the body at the last trumpet.
In Augustine, we find