Chapter XLVIII.

Come now, if some philosopher affirms, as Laberius holds, following an opinion of Pythagoras, that a man may have his origin from a mule, a serpent from a woman, and with skill of speech twists every argument to prove his view, will he not gain acceptance for and work in some the conviction that, on account of this, they should even abstain from eating animal food? May any one have the persuasion that he should so abstain, lest by chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his? But if a Christian promises the return of a man from a man, and the very actual Gaius from Gaius,71    [i.e., Caius, used (like John Doe with us) in Roman Law.] the cry of the people will be to have him stoned; they will not even so much as grant him a hearing. If there is any ground for the moving to and fro of human souls into different bodies, why may they not return into the very substance they have left, seeing this is to be restored, to be that which had been?  They are no longer the very things they had been; for they could not be what they were not, without first ceasing to be what they had been. If we were inclined to give all rein upon this point, discussing into what various beasts one and another might probably be changed, we would need at our leisure to take up many points. But this we would do chiefly in our own defence, as setting forth what is greatly worthier of belief, that a man will come back from a man—any given person from any given person, still retaining his humanity; so that the soul, with its qualities unchanged, may be restored to the same condition, thought not to the same outward framework. Assuredly, as the reason why restoration takes place at all is the appointed judgment, every man must needs come forth the very same who had once existed, that he may receive at God’s hands a judgment, whether of good desert or the opposite. And therefore the body too will appear; for the soul is not capable of suffering without the solid substance (that is, the flesh; and for this reason, also) that it is not right that souls should have all the wrath of God to bear: they did not sin without the body, within which all was done by them. But how, you say, can a substance which has been dissolved be made to reappear again?  Consider thyself, O man, and thou wilt believe in it! Reflect on what you were before you came into existence. Nothing. For if you had been anything, you would have remembered it. You, then, who were nothing before you existed, reduced to nothing also when you cease to be, why may you not come into being again out of nothing, at the will of the same Creator whose will created you out of nothing at the first? Will it be anything new in your case? You who were not, were made; when you cease to be again, you shall be made. Explain, if you can, your original creation, and then demand to know how you shall be re-created. Indeed, it will be still easier surely to make you what you were once, when the very same creative power made you without difficulty what you never were before. There will be doubts, perhaps, as to the power of God, of Him who hung in its place this huge body of our world, made out of what had never existed, as from a death of emptiness and inanity, animated by the Spirit who quickens all living things, its very self the unmistakable type of the resurrection, that it might be to you a witness—nay, the exact image of the resurrection.  Light, every day extinguished, shines out again; and, with like alternation, darkness succeeds light’s outgoing. The defunct stars re-live; the seasons, as soon as they are finished, renew their course; the fruits are brought to maturity, and then are reproduced. The seeds do not spring up with abundant produce, save as they rot and dissolve away;—all things are preserved by perishing, all things are refashioned out of death. Thou, man of nature so exalted, if thou understandest thyself, taught even by the Pythian72    Know thyself. [Juvenal, xi. 27, on which see great wealth of reference in J.E.B. Mayor’s Juvenal (xiii. Satires), and note especially, Bernard, Serm. De Divers xl. 3. In Cant. Cantic. xxxvi. 5–7.] words, lord of all these things that die and rise,—shalt thou die to perish evermore? Wherever your dissolution shall have taken place, whatever material agent has destroyed you, or swallowed you up, or swept you away, or reduced you to nothingness, it shall again restore you. Even nothingness is His who is Lord of all. You ask, Shall we then be always dying, and rising up from death? If so the Lord of all things had appointed, you would have to submit, though unwillingly, to the law of your creation. But, in fact, He has no other purpose than that of which He has informed us. The Reason which made the universe out of diverse elements, so that all things might be composed of opposite substances in unity—of void and solid, of animate and inanimate, of comprehensible and incomprehensible, of light and darkness, of life itself and death—has also disposed time into order, by fixing and distinguishing its mode, according to which this first portion of it, which we inhabit from the beginning of the world, flows down by a temporal course to a close; but the portion which succeeds, and to which we look forward continues forever. When, therefore, the boundary and limit, that millennial interspace, has been passed, when even the outward fashion of the world itself—which has been spread like a veil over the eternal economy, equally a thing of time—passes away, then the whole human race shall be raised again, to have its dues meted out according as it has merited in the period of good or evil, and thereafter to have these paid out through the immeasurable ages of eternity. Therefore after this there is neither death nor repeated resurrections, but we shall be the same that we are now, and still unchanged—the servants of God, ever with God, clothed upon with the proper substance of eternity; but the profane, and all who are not true worshippers of God, in like manner shall be consigned to the punishment of everlasting fire—that fire which, from its very nature indeed, directly ministers to their incorruptibility. The philosophers are familiar as well as we with the distinction between a common and a secret fire. Thus that which is in common use is far different from that which we see in divine judgments, whether striking as thunderbolts from heaven, or bursting up out of the earth through mountain-tops; for it does not consume what it scorches, but while it burns it repairs. So the mountains continue ever burning; and a person struck by lighting is even now kept safe from any destroying flame. A notable proof this of the fire eternal! a notable example of the endless judgment which still supplies punishment with fuel! The mountains burn, and last. How will it be with the wicked and the enemies of God?73    [Our author’s philosophy may be at fault, but his testimony is not to be mistaken.]

CAPUT XLVIII.

Age jam, si quis philosophus affirmet, ut ait Laberius 0521A de sententia Pythagorae, hominem fieri ex mulo, colubram ex muliere, et in eam opinionem omnia argumenta eloquii virtute detorserit , nonne consensum movebit et fidem infiget etiam ab animalibus abstinendi? proptereaque persuasum quis hoc habeat, ne forte bubulam de aliquo proavo suo obsonet. At enim christianus, si de homine hominem ipsumque de Caio Caium reducem repromittat, statim illic vesica queritur , lapidibus magis, nec saltem caestibus a populo exigetur. 0522A Quasi non, quaecumque ratio praeest animarum humanarum in corpora reciprocandarum, ipsa exigat illas in eadem corpora revocari; quia hoc sit revocari, esse quod fuerant. Nam si non id sunt quod fuerant, id est, humanum et id ipsum corpus indutae, jam non ipsae erunt quae fuerant. Porro, quae jam non erunt ipsae, quomodo redisse dicentur? Aut aliud factae non erunt ipsae , aut manentes ipsae non erunt aliunde . Multis etiam jocis et otio opus erit, si velimus ad hanc partem lascivire, 0523A quis in quam bestiam reformari videretur. Sed de nostra magis defensione, qui proponimus, multo utique dignius credi, hominem ex homine rediturum , quemlibet pro quolibet, dum hominem, ut eadem qualitas animae in eamdem restauretur conditionem, etsi non effigiem, certe quia ratio restitutionis destinatio judicii est, necessario idem ipse qui fuerat exhibebitur, ut boni seu contrarii meriti judicium a Deo referat. Ideoque repraesentabuntur et corpora, quia neque pati quicquam potest anima sola sine stabili materia, id est carne; et quod omnino de judicio Dei pati debent animae, non sine carne meruerunt, intra quam omnia egerunt. Sed quomodo, inquis, dissoluta materia exhiberi potest? Considera temetipsum, o homo, et fidem rei invenies. Recogita quid fueris, antequam esses: utique nihil; meminisses enim, si quid fuisses. Qui ergo 0524A nihil fueras priusquam esses, idem nihil factus cum esse desieris, cur non possis esse rursus de nihilo, ejusdem ipsius auctoris voluntate, qui te voluit esse de nihilo? Quid novi tibi eveniet? qui non eras, factus es; quum iterum non eris, fies. Redde si potes rationem qua factus es, et tunc require qua fies. Et tamen facilius utique fies quod fuisti aliquando, quia aeque non difficile factus es, quod nunquam fuisti aliquando. Dubitabitur , credo, de Dei viribus, qui tantum corpus hoc mundi de eo quod non fuerat, non minus quam de morte vacationis et inanitatis composuit animatum spiritu omnium animarum animatore, signatum et per ipsum humanae resurrectionis exemplum in testimonium vobis. Lux quotidie interfecta resplendet , et tenebrae pari vice decedendo succedunt , sidera defuncta reviviscunt , 0525A tempora ubi finiuntur incipiunt, fructus consumuntur et redeunt; certe semina non nisi corrupta et dissoluta foecundius surgunt, omnia pereundo servantur, omnia de interitu reformantur. Tu, homo, tantum nomen , si intelligas te, vel de titulo Pythiae discens, dominus omnium morientium et resurgentium , ad hoc morieris ut pereas? Ubicumque resolutus fueris, quaecumque te materia destruxerit, hauserit, aboleverit, in nihilum prodegerit, reddet te. Ejus est nihilum ipsum, cujus et totum. Ergo, inquitis, semper moriendum erit, et semper resurgendum. Si ita rerum dominus destinasset, ingratis experireris conditionis tuae legem. At nunc 0526A non aliter destinavit, quam praedicavit. Quae ratio universitatem ex diversitate composuit, ut omnia ex aemulis substantiis sub unitate constarent ex vacuo et solido, ex animali et inanimali, ex comprehensibili et incomprehensibili, ex luce et tenebris, ex ipsa vita et morte; eadem aevum quoque ita destinata ac distincta conditione conseruit, ut prima haec pars ab exordio rerum, quam incolimus, temporali aetate ad finem defluat, sequens vero, quam expectamus, in infinitam aeternitatem propagetur. Cum ergo finis et limes medius , qui interhiat, adfuerit, ut etiam mundi ipsius species transferatur aeque temporalis, quae illi dispositioni aeternitatis aulaei vice oppansa 0527A est ; tunc restituetur omne humanum genus, ad expungendum quod in isto aevo boni seu mali meruit, et exin dependendum in immensam aeternitatis perpetuitatem. Ideoque nec mors jam, nec rursus ac rursus resurrectio, sed erimus iidem qui nunc, nec alii post: Dei quidem cultores apud Deum semper, superinduti substantia propria aeternitatis; profani vero et qui non integri ad Deum, in poena aeque jugis ignis, habentis ex ipsa natura ejus, divinam scilicet subministrationem incorruptibilitatis. Noverunt et Philosophi diversitatem arcani et publici ignis. Ita longe alius est qui usui humano, alius qui judicio Dei apparet, sive de coelo fulmina stringens , sive de terra per vertices montium eructans ; non enim absumit quod exurit, sed, dum erogat, reparat, Adeo 0527B manent montes semper ardentes, et qui de coelo tangitur, 0528A salvus est, ut nullo jam igni decinerescat . Et hoc erit testimonium ignis aeterni, hoc exemplum jugis judicii poenam nutrientis. Montes uruntur et durant: quid nocentes et Dei hostes?