|
|
The Destiny of the Soul
William Rounseville Alger
CHAPTER III.
RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH.
A DOCTRINE widely prevalent asserts that, at the termination of this probationary epoch, Christ will appear with an army of angels in the clouds of heaven, descend, and set up his tribunal on the earth. The light of his advancing countenance will be the long waited Aurora of the Grave. All the souls of men will be summoned from their tarrying places, whether in heaven, or hell, or purgatory, or the sepulchre; the fleshly tabernacles they formerly inhabited will be re created, a strong necromancy making the rooty and grave floored earth give up its dust of ruined humanity, and moulding it to the identical shapes it formerly composed; each soul will enter its familiar old house in company with which its sins were once committed; the books will be opened and judgment will be passed; then the accepted will be removed to heaven, and the rejected to hell, both to remain clothed with those same material bodies forever, the former in celestial bliss, the latter in infernal torture.
In the present dissertation we propose to exhibit the sources, trace the developments, explain the variations, and discuss the merits, of this doctrine.
The first appearance of this notion of a bodily restoration which occurs in the history of opinions is among the ancient Hindus. With them it appears as a part of a vast conception, embracing the whole universe in an endless series of total growths, decays, and exact restorations. In the beginning the Supreme Being is one and alone. He thinks to himself, "I will become many." Straightway the multiform creation germinates forth, and all beings live. Then for an inconceivable period a length of time commensurate with the existence of Brahma, the Demiurgus the successive generations flourish and sink. At the end of this period all forms of matter, all creatures, sages, and gods, fall back into the Universal Source whence they arose. Again the Supreme Being is one and alone. After an interval the same causes produce the same effects, and all things recur exactly as they were before.1
We find this theory sung by some of the Oriental poets: "Every external form of things, and every object which disappear'd, Remains stored up in the storehouse of fate: When the system of the heavens returns to its former order, God, the All Just, will bring them forth from the veil of mystery." 2
The same general conception, in a modified form, was held by the Stoics of later Greece, who doubtless borrowed it from the East, and who carried it out in greater detail. "God is an artistic fire, out of which the cosmopoeia issues." This fire proceeds in a certain fixed course, in obedience to a fixed law, passing through certain intermediate gradations and established periods, until it ultimately returns into itself and closes with a universal conflagration.
1 Wilson, Lectures on the Hindus, pp. 53-56.
2 The Dabistan, vol. iii. p. 169.
It is to this catastrophe that reference is made in the following passage of Epictetus: "Some say that when Zeus is left alone at the time of the conflagration, he is solitary, and bewails himselfthat he has no company."3 The Stoics supposed each succeeding formation to be perfectly like the preceding. Every particular that happens now has happened exactly so a thousand times before, and will happen a thousand times again. This view they connected with astronomical calculations, making the burning and re creating of the world coincide with the same position of the stars as that at which it previously occurred.4 This they called the restoration of all things. The idea of these enormous revolving identical epochs Day of Brahm, Cycle of the Stoics, or Great Year of Plato is a physical fatalism, effecting a universal resurrection of the past, by reproducing it over and over forever.
Humboldt seems more than inclined to adopt the same thought. "In submitting," he says, "physical phenomena and historical events to the exercise of the reflective faculty, and in ascending to their causes by reasoning, we become more and more penetrated by that ancient belief, that the forces inherent in matter, and those regulating the moral world, exert their action under the presence of a primordial necessity and according to movements periodically renewed." The wise man of old said, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun." The conception of the destinies of the universe as a circle returning forever into itself is an artifice on which the thinking mind early seizes, to evade the problem that is too mighty for its feeble powers. It concludes that the final aim of Nature is but the infinite perfecting of her material in infinite transformations ever repeating the same old series. We cannot comprehend and master satisfactorily the eternal duration of one visible order, the incessant rolling on of races and stars:
"And doth creation's tide forever flow, Nor ebb with like destruction? World on world Are they forever heaping up, and still The mighty measure never, never full?"
And so, when the contemplation of the staggering infinity threatens to crush the brain, we turn away and find relief in the view of a periodical revolution, wherein all comes to an end from time to time and takes a fresh start. It would be wiser for us simply to resign the problem as too great. For the conception to which we have recourse is evidently a mere conceit of imagination, without scientific basis or philosophical confirmation.
The doctrine of a bodily resurrection, resting on a wholly different ground, again emerges upon our attention in the Zoroastrian faith of Persia. The good Ormuzd created men to be pure and happy and to pass to a heavenly immortality. The evil Ahriman insinuated his corruptions among them, broke their primal destiny, and brought death upon them, dooming their material frames to loathsome dissolution, their unclothed spirits to a painful abode in hell. Meanwhile, the war between the Light God and the Gloom Fiend rages fluctuatingly. But at last the Good One shall prevail, and the Bad One sink in discomfiture, and all evil deeds be neutralized, and the benignant arrangements decreed at first be restored.
3 Epictetus, lib. iii. cap. 13. Sonntag, De Palingenesia Stoicorum.
4 Ritter's Hist. of An. Phil., lib. xi. cap. 4.
Then all souls shall be redeemed from hell and their bodies be rebuilt from their scattered atoms and clothed upon them again.5 This resurrection is not the consequence of any fixed laws or fate, nor is it an arbitrary miracle. It is simply the restoration by Ormuzd of the original intention which Ahriman had temporarily marred and defeated. This is the great bodily resurrection, as it is still understood and looked for by the Parsees.
The whole system of views out of which it springs, and with which it is interwrought, is a fanciful mythology, based on gratuitous assumptions, or at most on a crude glance at mere appearances. The hypothesis that the creation is the scene of a drawn battle between two hostile beings, a Deity and a Devil, can face neither the scrutiny of science, nor the test of morals, nor the logic of reason; and it has long since been driven from the arena of earnest thought. On this theory it follows that death is a violent curse and discord, maliciously forced in afterwards to deform and spoil the beauty and melody of a perfect original creation. Now, as Bretschneider well says, "the belief that death is an evil, a punishment for sin, can arise only in a dualistic system." It is unreasonable to suppose that the Infinite God would deliberately lay a plan and allow it to be thwarted and ruined by a demon. And it is unscientific to imagine that death is an accident, or an after result foisted into the system of the world. Death that is, a succession of generations is surely an essential part of the very constitution of nature, plainly stamped on all those "medals of the creation" which bear the features of their respective ages and which are laid up in the archives of geological epochs. Successive growth and decay is a central part of God's original plan, as appears from the very structure of living bodies and the whole order of the globe. Death, therefore, which furthermore actually reigned on earth unknown ages before the existence of man, could not have been a fortuitous after clap of human sin. And so the foregoing theory of a general resurrection as the restoration of God's broken plan to its completeness falls to the ground.
The Jews, in the course of their frequent and long continued intercourse with the Persians, did not fail to be much impressed with the vivid melodramatic outlines of the Zoroastrian doctrine of the resurrection. They finally adopted it themselves, and joined it, with such modifications as it naturally underwent from the union, with the great dogmas of their own faith. A few faint references to it are found in the Old Testament. Some explicit declarations and boasts of it are in the Apocrypha. In the Targums, the Talmud, and the associated sources, abundant statements of it in copious forms are preserved. The Jews rested their doctrine of the resurrection on the same general ground as the Persians did, from whom they borrowed it. Man was meant to be immortal, either on earth or in heaven; but Satan seduced him to sin, and thus wrested from him his privilege of immortality, made him die and descend into a dark nether realm which was to be filled with the disembodied souls of his descendants. The resurrection was to annul all this and restore men to their original footing.
We need not labor any disproof of the truth or authority of this doctrine as the Pharisees held it, because, admitting that they had the record of a revelation from God, this doctrine was not a part of it. It is only to be found in their canonic scriptures by way of vague and hasty allusion, and is historically traceable to its derivation from the pagan oracles of Persia.
5 Frazer, History of Persia, chap. iv. Baur, Symbolik und Mythologice thl. ii. absch. ii. cap. ss. 394-404.
Of course it is possible that the doctrine of the resurrection, as the Hebrews held it, was developed by themselves, from imaginative contemplations on the phenomena of burials and graves; spectres seen in dreams; conceptions of the dead as shadowy shapes in the under world; ideas of God as the deliverer of living men from the open gates of the under world when they experienced narrow escapes from destruction; vast and fanatical national hopes. Before advancing another step, it is necessary only to premise that some of the Jews appear to have expected that the souls on rising from the under world would be clothed with new, spiritualized, incorruptible bodies, others plainly expected that the identical bodies they formerly wore would be literally restored.
Now, when Christianity, after the death of its Founder, arose and spread, it was in the guise of a new and progressive Jewish sect. Its apostles and its converts for the first hundred years were Christian Jews. Christianity ran its career through the apostolic age virtually as a more liberal Jewish sect. Most natural was it, then, that infant Christianity should retain all the salient dogmas of Judaism, except those of exclusive nationality and bigoted formalism in the throwing off of which the mission of Christianity partly consisted. Among these Jewish dogmas retained by early Christianity was that of the bodily resurrection. In the New Testament itself there are seeming references to this doctrine. We shall soon recur to these. The phrase "resurrection of the body" does not occur in the Scriptures. Neither is it found in any public creed whatever among Christians until the fourth century.6 But these admissions by no means prove that the doctrine was not believed from the earliest days of Christianity. The fact is, it was the same with this doctrine as with the doctrine of the descent of Christ into Hades: it was not for a long time called in question at all. It was not defined, discriminated, lifted up on the symbols of the Church, because that was not called for. As soon as the doctrine came into dispute, it was vehemently and all but unanimously affirmed, and found an emphatic place in every creed. Whenever the doctrine of a bodily resurrection has been denied, that denial has been instantly stigmatized as heresy and schism, even from the days of "Hymeneus and Philetas, who concerning the truth erred, saying that the resurrection was past already." The uniform orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church has always been that in the last day the identical fleshly bodies formerly inhabited by men shall be raised from the earth, sea, and air, and given to them again to be everlastingly assumed. The scattered exceptions to the believers in this doctrine have been few, and have ever been styled heretics by their contemporaries.
Any one who will glance over the writings of the Fathers with reference to this subject will find the foregoing statements amply confirmed.7 Justin Martyr wrote a treatise on the resurrection, a fragment of which is still extant. Athenagoras has left us an extremely elaborate and able discussion of the whole doctrine, in a separate work.
6 Dr. Sykes, Inquiry when the Article of the Resurrection of the Body or Flesh was first introduced into the Public Creeds.
7 Mosheim, De Resurrectione Mortuorum.
Tertullian is author of a famous book on the subject, entitled "Concerning the Resurrection of the Flesh," in which he says, "The teeth are providentially made eternal to serve as the seeds of theresurrection." Chrysostom has written fully upon it in two of his eloquent homilies. All these, in company indeed with the common body of their contemporaries, unequivocally teach a carnal resurrection with the grossest details. Augustine says, "Every man's body, howsoever dispersed here, shall be restored perfect in the resurrection. Every body shall be complete in quantity and quality. As many hairs as have been shaved off, or nails cut, shall not return in such enormous quantities to deform their original places; but neither shall they perish: they shall return into the body into that substance from which they grew." 8 As if that would not cause any deformity! 9 Some of the later Origenists held that the resurrection bodies would be in the shape of a ball, the mere heads of cherubs! 10
In the seventh century Mohammed flourished. His doctrinal system, it is well known, was drawn indiscriminately from many sources, and mixed with additions and colors of his own. Finding the dogma of a general bodily resurrection already prevailing among the Parsees, the Jews, and the Christians, and perceiving, too, how well adapted for purposes of vivid representation and practical effect it was, or perhaps believing it himself, the Arabian prophet ingrafted this article into the creed of his followers. It has ever been with them, and is still, a foremost and controlling article of faith, an article for the most part held in its literal sense, although there is a powerful sect which spiritualizes the whole conception, turning all its details into allegories and images. But this view is not the original nor the orthodox view.
The subject of the resurrection was a prominent theme in the theology of the Middle Age. Only here and there a dissenting voice was raised against the doctrine in its strict physical form. The great body of the Scholastics stood stanchly by it. In defence and support of the Church thesis they brought all the quirks and quiddities of their subtle dialectics. As we take down their ponderous tomes from their neglected shelves, and turn over the dusty, faded old leaves, we find chapter after chapter in many a formidable folio occupied with grave discussions, carried on in acute logical terminology, of questions like these: "Will the resurrection be natural or miraculous?" "Will each one's hairs and nails all be restored to him in the resurrection?" "When bodies are raised, will each soul spontaneously know its own and enter it? or will the power of God distribute them as they belong?" "Will the deformities and scars of our present bodies be retained in the resurrection?" "Will all rise of the same age?" "Will all have one size and one sex?" 11 And so on with hundreds of kindred questions. For instance, Thomas Aquinas contended "that no other substance would rise from the grave except that which belonged to the individual in the moment of death."12 What dire prospects this proposition must conjure up before many minds! If one chance to grow prodigiously obese before death, he must lug that enormous corporeity wearily about forever; but if he happen to die when wasted, he must then flit through eternity as thin as a lath.
8 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. 19, 20.
9 See the strange speculations of Opitz in his work "De Statura et Atate Resurgentium.
10 Redepenning, Origenes, b. ii. s. 463.
11 Summa Theologia, Thoma Aquinatis, tertia pars, Supplementum, Quastiones 79-87.
12 Hagenbuch, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 204.
Those who have had the misfortune to be amputated of legs or arms must appear on the resurrection stage without those very convenient appendages. There will still be need of hospitals for the battered veterans of Chelsea and Greenwich, mutilated heroes, pensioned relics of deck and field. Then in the resurrection the renowned "Mynheer von Clam, Richest merchant in Rotterdam," will again have occasion for the services of the "patent cork leg manufacturer," though it is hardly to be presumed he will accept another unrestrainable one like that which led him so fearful a race through the poet's verses.
The Manichaans denied a bodily resurrection. In this all the sects theologically allied to them, who have appeared in ecclesiastical history, for instance, the Cathari, have agreed. There have also been a few individual Christian teachers in every century who have assailed the doctrine. But, as already declared, it has uniformly been the firm doctrine of the Church and of all who acknowledged her authority. The old dogma still remains in the creeds of the recognised Churches, Papal, Greek, and Protestant. It has been terribly shattered by the attacks of reason and of progressive science. It lingers in the minds of most people only as a dead letter. But all the earnest conservative theologians yet cling to it in its unmitigated grossness, with unrelaxing severity. We hear it in practical discourses from the pulpit, and read it in doctrinal treatises, as offensively proclaimed now as ever. Indeed, it is an essential part of the compact system of the ruling theology, and cannot be taken out without loosening the whole dogmatic fabric into fragments. Thus writes to day a distinguished American divine, Dr. Spring: "Whether buried in the earth, or floating in the sea, or consumed by the flames, or enriching the battle field, or evaporate in the atmosphere, all, from Adam to the latest born, shall wend their way to the great arena of the judgment. Every perished bone and every secret particle of dust shall obey the summons and come forth. If one could then look upon the earth, he would see it as one mighty excavated globe, and wonder how such countless generations could have found a dwelling beneath its surface." 13 This is the way the recognised authorities in theology still talk. To venture any other opinion is a heresy all over Christendom at this hour.
We will next bring forward and criticize the arguments for and against the doctrine before us. It is contended that the doctrine is demonstrated in the example of Christ's own resurrection. "The resurrection of the flesh was formerly regarded as incredible," says Augustine; "but now we see the whole world believing that Christ's earthly body was borne into heaven." 14 It is the faith of the Church that "Christ rose into heaven with his body of flesh and blood, and wears it there now, and will forever." "Had he been there in body before, it would have been no such wonder that he should have returned with it; but that the flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone should be seated at the right hand of God is worthy of the greatest admiration." 15
13 The Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 237.
14 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. 5.
15 Pearson on the Creed, 12th ed., pp. 272-275.
That is to say, Christ was from eternity God, the Infinite Spirit, inheaven; he came to earth and lived in a human body; on returning to heaven, instead of resuming his proper form, he bears with him, and will eternally retain, the body of flesh he had worn on earth! Paul says, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." The Church, hastily following the senses, led by a carnal, illogical philosophy, has deeply misinterpreted and violently abused the significance of Christ's ascension. The drama of his resurrection, with all its connected parts, was not meant throughout as a strict representation of our destiny. It was a seal upon his commission and teachings, not an exemplification of what should happen to others. It was outwardly a miracle, not a type, an exceptional instance of super natural power, not a significant exhibition of the regular course of things. The same logic which says, "Christ rose and ascended with his fleshly body: therefore we shall," must also say, "Christ rose visibly on the third day: therefore we shall." Christ's resurrection was a miracle; and therefore we cannot reason from it to ourselves. The common conception of a miracle is that it is the suspension, not the manifestation, of ordinary laws. We have just as much logical right to say that the physical appearance in Christ's resurrection was merely an accommodation to the senses of the witnesses, and that on his ascension the body was annihilated, and only his soul entered heaven, as we have to surmise that the theory embodied in the common belief is true. The record is according to mere sensible appearances. The reality is beyond our knowledge. The record gives no explanation. It is wiser in this dilemma to follow the light of reason than to follow the blind spirit of tradition. The point in our reasoning is this. If Christ, on rising from the world of the dead, assumed again his former body, he assumed it by a miracle, and for some special purpose of revealing himself to his disciples and of finishing his earthly work; and it does not follow either that he bore that body into heaven, or that any others will ever, even temporarily, reassume their cast off forms.
The Christian Scriptures do not in a single passage teach the popular doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Every text in the New Testament finds its full and satisfactory explanation without implying that dogma at all. In the first place, it is undeniably implied throughout the New Testament that the soul does not perish with the body. It also appears, in the next place, from numerous explicit passages, that the New Testament authors, in common with their countrymen, supposed the souls of the departed to be gathered and tarrying in what the Church calls the intermediate state, the obscure under world. In this subterranean realm they were imagined to be awaiting the advent of the Messiah to release them. Now, we submit that every requirement of the doctrine of the resurrection as it is stated or hinted in the New Testament is fully met by the simple ascension of this congregation of souls from the vaults of Sheol to the light of the upper earth, there to be judged, and then some to be sent up to heaven, some sent back to their prison. For, let it be carefully observed, there is not one text in the New Testament, as before stated, which speaks of the resurrection of the "body" or of the "flesh." The expression is simply the resurrection of "the dead," or of "them that slept." If by "the dead" was meant "the bodies," why are we not told so? Locke, in the Third Letter of his controversy with the Bishop of Worcester on this subject, very pointedly shows the absurdity of a literal interpretation of the words "All that are in their graves shall hear my voice and shall come forth." Nothing can come out of the grave except what is in it. And there are no souls in the grave: they are in the separate state. And there are no bodies in millions of graves: they long ago, even to the last grain of dust, entered into the circulations of the material system. "Coming forth from their graves unto the resurrection" either denotes the rising of souls from the under world, or else its meaning is something incredible. At all events, nothing is said about any resurrection of the body: that is a matter of arbitrary inference. The angels are not thought to have material bodies; and Christ declares, "In the resurrection ye shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but shall be as the angels of heaven." It seems clear to us that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews also looked for no restoration of the fleshly body; for he not only studiously omits even the faintest allusion to any such notion, but positively describes "the spirits of just men made perfect in the heavenly Jerusalem, with an innumerable company of angels, and with the general assembly and church of the first born." The Jews and early Christians who believed in a bodily resurrection did not suppose the departed could enter heaven until after that great consummation.
The most cogent proof that the New Testament does not teach the resurrection of the same body that is buried in the grave is furnished by the celebrated passage in Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. The apostle's premises, reasoning, and conclusion are as follows: "Christ is risen from the dead, become the first fruits of them that slept." That is to say, all who have died, except Christ, are still tarrying in the great receptacle of souls under the earth. As the first fruits go before the harvest, so the solitary risen Christ is the forerunner to the general resurrection to follow. "But some one will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?" Mark the apostle's reply, and it will appear inexplicable how any one can consider him as arguing for the resurrection of the identical body that was laid in the grave, particle for particle. "Thou fool! that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but naked grain, and God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him." "There are celestial bodies, and terrestrial bodies;" "there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body;" "the first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven;" "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God;" "we shall all be changed," and "bear the image of the heavenly, as we have borne the image of the earthy." The analogy which has been so strangely perverted by most commentators is used by Paul thus. The germ which was to spring up to a new life, clothed with a new body, was not any part of the fleshly body buried in the grave, but was the soul itself, once contained in the old body, but released from its hull in the grave and preserved in the under world until Christ shall call it forth to be invested with a "glorious," "powerful," "spiritual," "incorruptible" body. When a grain of wheat is sown, that is not the body that shall be; but the mysterious principle of life, latent in the germ of the seed, springs up and puts on its body fashioned appropriately for it. So, according to Paul's conception, when a man is buried, the material corpse is not the resurrection body that shall be; but the living soul which occupied it is the germ that shall put on a new body of immortality when the spring tide of Christ's coming draws the buried treasures of Hades up to the light of heaven.
A species of proof which has been much used by the advocates of the dogma of a bodily resurrection is the argument from analogy. The intimate connection of human feeling and fancy with the changing phenomena of Nature's seasons would naturally suggest to a pensive mind the idea, Why, since she has her annual resurrection, may not humanity some time have one? And what first arose as a poetic conceit or stray thought, and was expressed in glowing metaphors, might by an easy process pass abroad and harden into a prosaic proposition or dogmatic formula.
"O soul of the spring time, now let us behold The stone from the mouth of the sepulchre roll'd, And Nature rise up from her death's damp mould; Let our faith, which in darkness and coldness has lain, Revive with the warmth and the brightness again, And in blooming of flower and budding of tree The symbols and types of our destiny see."
Standing by the graves of our loved and lost ones, our inmost souls yearn over the very dust in which their hallowed forms repose. We feel that they must come back, we must be restored to each other as we were before. Listening to the returned birds whose warble fills the woods once more, gazing around on the verdant and flowery forms of renewed life that clothe the landscape over again, we eagerly snatch at every apparent emblem or prophetic analogy that answers to our fond imagination and desiring dream. Sentiment and fancy, especially when stimulated by love and grief, and roving in the realms of reverie, free from the cold guidance and sharp check of literal fact and severe logic, are poor analysts, and then we easily confuse things distinct and wander to conclusions philosophy will not warrant. Before building a dogmatic doctrine on analogies, we must study those analogies with careful discrimination, must see what they really are, and to what they really lead. There is often an immense difference between the first appearance to a hasty observer and the final reality to a profound student. Let us, then, scrutinize a little more closely those seeming analogies which, to borrow a happy expression from Flugge, have made "Resurrection a younger sister of Immortality."
Nature, the old, eternal snake, comes out afresh every year in a new shining skin. What then? Of course this emblem is no proof of any doctrine concerning the fate of man. But, waiving that, what would the legitimate correspondence to it be for man? Why, that humanity should exhibit the fresh specimens of her living handiwork in every new generation. And that is done. Nature does not reproduce before us each spring the very flowers that perished the previous winter: she makes new ones like them. It is not a resurrection of the old: it is a growth of the new. The passage of the worm from its slug to its chrysalis state is surely no symbol of a bodily resurrection, but rather of a bodily emancipation, not resuming a deserted dead body, but assuming a new live one. Does the butterfly ever come back to put on the exuvia that have perished in the ground? The law of all life is progress, not return, ascent through future developments, not descent through the stages already traversed. "The herb is born anew out of a seed, Not raised out of a bony skeleton. What tree is man the seed of? Of a soul."
Sir Thomas Browne, after others, argues for the restoration of man's body from the grave, from the fancied analogy of the palingenesis or resurrection of vegetables which the magicians of the antique East and the mystic chemists of the Middle Age boasted of effecting. He having asserted in his "Religion of a Physician" that "experience can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall it into its stalk and leaves again," Dr. Henry Power wrote beseeching "an experimental eviction of so high and noble a piece of chemistry, the reindividuality of an incinerated plant." We are not informed that Sir Thomas ever granted him the sight. Of this beautiful error, this exquisite superstition, which undoubtedly arose from the crystallizations of certain salts in arborescent forms which suddenly surprised the early alchemists in some of their experiments, we have the following account in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature:" "The semina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the blood of man. The ashes of roses will again revive into roses, though smaller and paler than if they had been planted unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grew on rose trees, but their delicate apparitions; and, like apparitions, they are seen but for a moment. This magical phoenix lies thus concealed in its cold ashes till the presence of a certain chemical heat produces its resurrection." Any refutation of this now would be considered childish. Upon the whole, then, while recurrent spring, bringing in the great Easter of the year, typifies to us indeed abundantly the development of new life, the growth of new bodies out of the old and decayed, but nowhere hints at the gathering up and wearing again of the dusty sloughs and rotted foliage of the past, let men cease to talk of there being any natural analogies to the ecclesiastical dogma of the resurrection of the flesh. The teaching of nature finds a truer utterance in the words of Aschylus: "There is no resurrection for him who is once dead." 16
The next argument is that based on considerations of reason and of ethics. The supporters of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body have often disingenuously evaded the burden of proof thrown upon them by retreating beneath loud assertions of God's power. From the earliest dawn of the hypothesis to the present time, every perplexity arising from it, every objection brought against it, every absurdity shown to be involved in it, has been met and confidently rebutted with declarations of God's abundant power to effect a physical resurrection, or to do any thing else he pleases, however impossible it may appear to us. Now, it is true the power of God is competent to innumerable things utterly beyond our skill, knowledge, or conception. Nevertheless, there is a province within which our reason can judge of probabilities, and can, if not absolutely grasp infallible truth, at least reach satisfactory convictions. God is able to restore the vast coal deposits of the earth, and the ashes of all the fuel ever burned, to their original condition when they covered the world withdense forests of ferns; but we have no reason to believe he will do it.
16 Eumenides, 1. 648, Oxford edition.
The truth or falsity of the popular theory of the resurrection is not a question of God's power; it is simply a question of God's will. A Jewish Rabbin relates the following conversation, as exultingly as if the quibbling evasion on which it turns positively settled the question itself, which in fact it does not approach. A Sadducee says, "The resurrection of the dead is a fable: the dry, scattered dust cannot live again." A by standing Pharisee makes this reply: "There were in a city two artists: one made vases of water, the other made them of clay: which was the more wondrous artist?" The Sadducee answered, "The former." The Pharisee rejoins, "Cannot God, then, who formed man of water, (gutta seminis humida,) much more re form him of clay?" Such a method of reasoning is an irrelevant impertinence. God can call Nebuchadnezzar from his long rest, and seat him on his old throne again to morrow. What an absurdity to infer that therefore he will do it! God can give us wings upon our bodies, and enable us to fly on an exploring trip among the planets. Will he do it? The question, we repeat, is not whether God has the power to raise our dead bodies, but whether he has the will. To that question since, as we have already seen, he has sent us no miraculous revelation replying to it we can only find an answer by tracing the indications of his intentions contained in reason, morals, and nature.
One of the foremost arguments urged by the Fathers for the resurrection was its supposed necessity for a just and complete judgment. The body was involved and instrumental in all the sins of the man: it must therefore bear part in his punishment. The Rabbins tell this allegory: "In the day of judgment the body will say, The soul alone is to blame: since it left me, I have lain like a stone in the grave. The soul will retort, The body alone is sinful: since released from it, I fly through the air like a bird. The Judge will interpose with this myth: A king once had a beautiful garden full of early fruits. A lame man and a blind man were in it. Said the lame man to the blind man, Let me mount upon your shoulders and pluck the fruit, and we will divide it. The king accused them of theft; but they severally replied, the lame man, How could I reach it? the blind man, How could I see it? The king ordered the lame man to be placed upon the back of the blind man, and in this position had them both scourged. So God in the day of judgment will replace the soul in the body, and hurl them both into hell together." There is a queer tradition among the Mohammedans implying, singularly enough, the same general thought. The Prophet's uncle, Hamzah, having been slain by Hind, daughter of Atabah, the cursed woman cut out his liver and gnawed it with fiendish joy; but, lest any of it should become incorporated with her system and go to hell, the Most High made it as hard as a stone; and when she threw it on the ground, an angel restored it to its original nature and place in the body of the martyred hero, that lion of God.
The Roman Catholic Church endorses the representation that the body must be raised to be punished. In the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which is an authoritative exposition of Romanist theology, we read that the "identical body" shall be restored, though "without deformities or superfluities;" restored that "as it was a partner in the man's deeds, so it may be a partner in his punishments." The same Catechism also gives in this connection the reason why a general judgment is necessary after each individual has been judged at his death, namely, this: that they may be punished for the evil which has resulted in the world since they died from the evil they did in the world while they lived! Is it not astonishing how these theologians find out so much? A living Presbyterian divine of note says, "The bodies of the damned in the resurrection shall be fit dwellings for their vile minds. With all those fearful and horrid expressions which every base and malignant passion wakes up in the human countenance stamped upon it for eternity and burned in by the flaming fury of their own terrific wickedness, they will be condemned to look upon their own deformity and to feel their fitting doom." It is therefore urged that the body must be raised to suffer the just penalty of the sins man committed while occupying it. Is it not an absurdity to affirm that nerves and blood, flesh and bones, are responsible, guilty, must be punished? Tucker, in his "Light of Nature Pursued," says, "The vulgar notion of a resurrection in the same form and substance we carry about at present, because the body being partaker in the deed ought to share in the reward, as well requires a resurrection of the sword a man murders with, or the bank note he gives to charitable uses." We suppose an intelligent personality, a free will, indispensable to responsibleness and alone amenable to retributions. Besides, if the body must be raised to undergo chastisement for the offences done in it and by means of it, this insurmountable difficulty by the same logic confronts us. The material of our bodies is in a constant change, the particles becoming totally transferred every few years. Now, when a man is punished after the general judgment for a certain crime, he must be in the very body he occupied when that crime was perpetrated. Since he was a sinner all his days, his resurrection body must comprise all the matter that ever formed a part of his corporeity, and each sinner may hereafter be as huge as the writhing Titan, Tityus, whose body, it was fabled, covered nine acres. God is able to preserve the integral soul in being, and to punish it according to justice, without clothing it in flesh. This fact by itself utterly vacates and makes gratuitous the hypothesis of a physical resurrection from punitive considerations, an hypothesis which is also refuted by the truth contained in Locke's remark to Stillingfleet, "that the soul hath no greater congruity with the particles of matter which were once united to it, but are so no longer, than it hath with any other particles of matter." When the soul leaves the body, it would seem to have done with that stage of its existence, and to enter upon another and higher one, leaving the dust to mix with dust forever. The body wants not the soul again; for it is a senseless clod and wants nothing. The soul wants not its old body again: it prefers to have the freedom of the universe, a spirit. Philip the Solitary wrote, in the twelfth century, a book called "Dioptra," presenting the controversy between the soul and the body very quaintly and at length. The same thing was done by Henry Nicholson in a "Conference between the Soul and Body concerning the Present and Future State." William Crashaw, an old English poet, translated from the Latin a poem entitled "The Complaint: a Dialogue between the Body and the Soul of a Damned Man."17 But any one who will peruse with intelligent heed the works that have been written on this whole subject must be amazed to see how exclusively the doctrine which we are opposing has rested on pure grounds of tradition and fancy, alike destitute of authority and reason. Some authors have indeed attempted to support the doctrine with arguments: forinstance, there are two German works, one by Bertram, one by Pflug, entitled "The Resurrection of the Dead on Grounds of Reason," in which recourse is had to every possible expedient to make out a case, not even neglecting the factitious assistance of Leibnitz's scheme of "Pre established Harmony." But it may be deliberately affirmed that not one of their arguments is worthy of respect. Apparently, they do not seek to reach truth, but to bolster up a foregone conclusion held merely from motives of tradition.
17 Also see Dialogue inter Corpus et Animam, p. 95 of Latin Poems attributed to Walter Mapes.
The Jews had a favorite tradition, developed by their Rabbins in many passages, that there was one small, almond shaped bone, (supposed now to have been the bone called by anatomists the os coccygis,) which was indestructible, and would form the nucleus around which the rest of the body would gather at the time of the resurrection. This bone, named Luz, was miraculously preserved from demolition or decay. Pound it furiously on anvils with heavy hammers of steel, burn it for ages in the fiercest furnaces, soak it for centuries in the strongest solvents, all in vain: its magic structure still remained. So the Talmud tells. "Even as there is a round dry grain In a plant's skeleton, which, being buried, Can raise the herb's green body up again; So is there such in man, a seed shaped bone, Aldabaron, call'd by the Hebrews Luz, Which, being laid into the ground, will bear, After three thousand years, the grass of flesh, The bloody, soul possessed weed called man."
The Jews did not, as these singular lines represent, suppose this bone was a germ which after long burial would fructify by a natural process and bear a perfect body: they regarded it only as a nucleus around which the Messiah would by a miracle compel the decomposed flesh to return as in its pristine life. All that the Jews say of Luz the Mohammedans repeat of the bone Al Ajib.
This conceit of superstition has been developed by a Christian author of considerable reputation into a theory of a natural resurrection. The work of Mr. Samuel Drew on the "Identity and General Resurrection of the Human Body" has been quite a standard work on the subject of which it treats. Mr. Drew believes there is a germ in the body which slowly ripens and prepares the resurrection body in the grave. As a seed must be buried for a season in order to spring up in perfect life, so must the human body be buried till the day of judgment. During this period it is not idle, but is busily getting ready for its consummation. He says, "There are four distinct stages through which those parts constituting the identity of the body must necessarily pass in order to their attainment of complete perfection beyond the grave. The first of these stages is that of its elementary principles; the second is that of an embryo in the womb; the third is that of its union with an immaterial spirit, and with the fluctuating portions of flesh and blood in our present state; and the fourth stage is that of its residence in the grave. All these stages are undoubtedly necessary to the full perfection of the body: they are alembics through which its parts must necessarily move to attain that vigor which shall continue forever."18 To state this figment is enough. It would be folly to attempt any refutation of a fancy so obviously a pure contrivance to fortify a preconceived opinion, a fancy, too, so preposterous, so utterly without countenance, either from experience, observation, science, reason, or Scripture. The egg of man's divinity is not laid in the nest of the grave.
Another motive for believing the resurrection of the body has been created by the exigencies of a materialistic philosophy. There was in the early Church an Arabian sect of heretics who were reclaimed from their errors by the powerful reasonings and eloquence of Origen.19 Their heresy consisted in maintaining that the soul dies with the body being indeed only its vital breath and will be restored with it at the last day. In the course of the Christian centuries there have arisen occasionally a few defenders of this opinion. Priestley, as is well known, was an earnest supporter of it. Let us scan the ground on which he held this belief. In the first place, he firmly believed that the fact of an eternal life to come had been supernaturally revealed to men by God through Christ. Secondly, as a philosopher he was intensely a materialist, holding with unwavering conviction to the conclusion that life, mind, or soul, was a concomitant or result of our physical organism, and wholly incapable of being without it. Death to him was the total destruction of man for the time. There was therefore plainly no alternative for him but either to abandon one of his fundamental convictions as a Christian and a philosopher, or else to accept the doctrine of a future resurrection of the body into an immortal life. He chose the latter, and zealously taught always that death is an annihilation lasting till the day of judgment, when all are to be summoned from their graves. To this whole course of thought there are several replies to be made. In the first place, we submit that the philosophy of materialism is false: standing in the province of science and reason, it may be affirmed that the soul is not dependent for its existence on the body, but will survive it. We will not argue this point, but merely state it. Secondly, it is certain that the doctrine which makes soul perish with body finds no countenance in the New Testament. It is inconsistent with the belief in angelic spirits, in demoniac possessions, in Christ's descent as a spirit to preach to the spirits of departed men imprisoned in the under world, and with other conceptions underlying the Gospels and the Epistles. But, thirdly, admitting it to be true, then, we affirm, the legitimate deduction from all the arrayed facts of science and all the presumptive evidence of appearances is not that a future resurrection will restore the dead man to life, but that all is over with him, he has hopelessly perished forever. When the breath ceases, if nothing survives, if the total man is blotted out, then we challenge the production of a shadow of proof that he will ever live again. The seeming injustice and blank awfulness of the fate may make one turn for relief to the hypothesis of a future arbitrary miraculous resurrection; but that is an artificial expedient, without a shadow of justification. Once admit that the body is all, its dissolution a total death, and you are gone forever.
18 Drew on Resurrection, ch. vi. sect. vii. pp. 326-332.
19 Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. lib. vi. cap. xxxvii.
One intuition of the spirit, seizing the conscious supports of eternal ideas, casts contempt on "The doubtful prospects of our painted dust,"and outvalues all the gross hopes of materialism. Between nonentity and being yawns the untraversable gulf of infinity. No: the body of flesh falls, turns to dust and air; the soul, emancipated, rejoices, and soars heavenwards, and is its own incorruptible frame, mocking at death, a celestial house, whose maker and builder is God.
Finally, there remain to be weighed the bearings of the argument from chemical and physiological science on the resurrection. Here is the chief stumbling block in the way of the popular doctrine. The scientific absurdities connected with that doctrine have been marshalled against it by Celsus, the Platonist philosopher, by Avicenna, the Arabian physician, and by hundreds more, and have never been answered, and cannot be answered. As long as man lives, his bodily substance is incessantly changing; the processes of secretion and absorption are rapidly going forward. Every few years he is, as to material, a totally new man. Dying at the age of seventy, he has had at least ten different bodies. He is one identical soul, but has lived in ten separate houses. With which shall he be raised? with the first? or the fifth? or the last? or with all? But, further, the body after death decays, enters into combination with water, air, earth, gas, vegetables, animals, other human bodies. In this way the same matter comes to have belonged to a thousand persons. In the resurrection, whose shall it be? We reply, nearly in the language of Christ to the Sadducees, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the will of God: in the resurrection they have not bodies of earthly flesh, but are spirits, as the angels of God."
The argument against the common theory of a material resurrection, on account of numerous claimants for the same substance, has of late derived a greatly increased force from the brilliant discoveries in chemistry. It is now found that only a small number of substances ever enter into the composition of animal bodies.20 The food of man consists of nitrogenized and non nitrogenized substances. The latter are the elements of respiration; the former alone compose the plastic elements of nutrition, and they are few in number and comparatively limited in extent. "All life depends on a relatively small quantity of matter. Over and over again, as the modeller fashions his clay, are plant and animal formed out of the same material." The particles that composed Adam's frame may before the end of the world have run the circuit of ten thousand bodies of his descendants: "'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands." To proclaim the resurrection of the flesh as is usually done, seems a flat contradiction of clear knowledge.21 A late writer on this subject, Dr. Hitchcock, evades the insuperable difficulty by saying, "It is not necessary that the resurrection body should contain a single particle of the body laid in the grave, if it only contain particles of the same kind, united in the same proportion, and the compound be made to assume the same form and structure as the natural body." 22 Then two men who look exactly alike may in the resurrection exchange bodies without any harm!
20 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, sect. xix.
21 The Circulation of Matter, Blackwood's Magazine, May, 1853.
22 The Resurrection of Spring, p. 26.
Here the theory of punishment clashes. Does not the esteemed author see that this would not be a resurrection of the old bodies, but a creation of new onesjust like them? And is not this a desertion of the orthodox doctrine of the Church? If he varies so far from the established formularies out of a regard for philosophy, he may as well be consistent and give up the physical doctrine wholly, because it rests solely on the tradition which he leaves and is every whit irreconcilable with philosophy. This device is as wilful an attempt to escape the scientific difficulty as that employed by Candlish to avoid the scriptural difficulty put in the way of the doctrine by the apostolic words "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." The eminent Scottish divine affirms that "flesh and bones" that is, these present bodies made incorruptible can inherit the kingdom of God; although "flesh and blood" that is, these present bodies subject to decay cannot.23 It is surely hard to believe that the New Testament writers had such a distinction in their minds. It is but a forlorn resource conjured up to meet a desperate exigency.
At the appearing of Christ in glory,
"When the Day of Fire shall have dawn'd, and sent Its deadly breath into the firmament," as it is supposed, the great earth cemetery will burst open and its innumerable millions swarm forth before him. Unto the tremendous act of habeas corpus, then proclaimed, every grave will yield its prisoner. Ever since the ascension of Jesus his mistaken followers have been anxiously expecting that awful advent of his person and his power in the clouds; but in vain. "All things remain as they were: where is the promise of his appearing?" As the lookers out hitherto have been disappointed, so they ever will be. Say not, Lo here! or, Lo there! for, behold, he is within you. The reason why this carnal error, Jewish conceit, retains a hold, is that men accept it without any honest scrutiny of its foundations or any earnest thought of their own about it. They passively receive the tradition. They do not realize the immensity of the thing, nor the ludicrousness of its details. To their imaginations the awful blast of the trumpet calling the world to judgment, seems no more, as Feuerbach says, than a tone from the tin horn of a postillion, who, at the post station of the Future, orders fresh horses for the Curriculum Vita! President Hitchcock tells us that, "when the last trumpet sounds, the whole surface of the earth will become instinct with life, from the charnels of battle fields alone more than a thousand millions of human beings starting forth and crowding upwards to the judgment seat." On the resurrection morning, at the first tip of light over acres of opening monument and heaving turf, "Each member jogs the other, And whispers, Live you, brother?"
And how will it be with us then? Will Daniel Lambert, the mammoth of men, appear weighing half a ton? Will the Siamese twins then be again joined by the living ligament of their congenital band? Shall "infants be not raised in the smallness of body in which they died, but increase by the wondrous and most swift work of God"? 24
23 Candlish, Life in a Risen Savior: Discourse XV.
24 Augustine, De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. xiv.
Young sings, "Now charnels rattle; scatter'd limbs, and all The various bones, obsequious to the call, Self moved, advance; the neck perhaps to meet The distant head; the distant head the feet. Dreadful to view! see, through the dusky sky Fragments of bodies in confusion fly, To distant regions journeying, there to claim Deserted members and complete the frame."
The glaring melodramatic character, the startling mechanico theatrical effects, of this whole doctrine, are in perfect keeping with the raw imagination of the childhood of the human mind, but in profound opposition to the working philosophy of nature and the sublime simplicity of God.
Many persons have never distinctly defined their views upon the subject before us. In the minds even of many preachers and writers, several different and irreconcilable theories would seem to exist together in confused mixture. Now they speak as if the soul were sleeping with the body in the grave; again they appear to imply that it is detained in an intermediate state; and a moment afterwards they say it has already entered upon its final reward or doom. Jocelyn relates, in his Life of St. Patrick, that "as the saint one day was passing the graves of two men recently buried, observing that one of the graves had a cross over it, he stopped his chariot and asked the dead man below of what religion he had been. The reply was, 'A pagan.' 'Then why was this cross put over you?' inquired St. Patrick. The dead man answered, 'He who is buried near me is a Christian; and one of your faith, coming hither, placed the cross at my head.' The saint stepped out of his chariot, rectified the mistake, and went his way." Calvin, in the famous treatise designated "Psychopannychia," which he levelled against those who taught the sleep of souls until the day of judgment, maintained that the souls of the elect go immediately to heaven, the souls of the reprobate to hell. Here they tarry in bliss and bale until the resurrection; then, coming to the earth, they assume their bodies and return to their respective places. But if the souls live so long in heaven and hell without their flesh, why need they ever resume it? The cumbrous machinery of the scheme seems superfluous and unmeaning. As a still further specimen of the arbitrary thinking the unscientific and unphilosophical thinking carried into this department of thought by most who have cultivated it, reference may be made to Bishop Burnet's work "De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium," which teaches that at the first resurrection the bodies of the risen will be the same as the present, but at the second resurrection, after the millennium, from the rudiments of the present body a new spiritual body will be developed.
The true idea of man's future destiny appears to be that no resurrection of the flesh is needed, because the real man never dies, but lives continuously forever. There are two reasonable ways of conceiving what the vehicle of his life is when he leaves his present frame. It may be that within his material system lurks an exquisite spiritual organization, invisibly pervading it and constituting its vital power. This ethereal structure is disengaged at last from its gross envelope, and, unfettered, soars to the Divine realms of ether and light. This theory of an "inner body" is elaborately wrought out and sustained in Bonnet's "Palingenesie Philosophique." Or it may be that there is in each one a primal germ, a deathless monad, which is the organic identity of man, root of his inmost stable being, triumphant, unchanging ruler of his flowing, perishable organism. This spirit germ, born into the present life, assimilates and holds the present body around it, out of the materials of this world; born into the future life, it will assimilate and hold around it a different body, out of the materials of the future world.25 Thus there are bodies terrestrial and bodies celestial: the glory of the terrestrial is one, fitted to this scene of things; the glory of the celestial is another, fitted to the scene of things hereafter to dawn. Each spirit will be clothed from the material furnished by the world in which it resides. Not forever shall we bear about this slow load of weary clay, this corruptible mass, heir to a thousand ills. Our body shall rather be such "If lightning were the gross corporeal frame Of some angelic essence, whose bright thoughts As far surpass'd in keen rapidity The lagging action of his limbs as doth Man's mind his clay; with like excess of speed To animated thought of lightning flies That spirit body o'er life's deeps divine, Far past the golden isles of memory."
What man knows constitutes his present world. All beyond that constitutes another world. He can imagine two modes in which his desire for a life after death may be gratified, a removal into the Unknown World, or a return into the Known World. With the latter supposition the restoration of the flesh is involved.
Upon the whole, our conclusion is, that in the original plan of the world it was fixed that man should not live here forever, but that the essence of his life should escape from the flesh and depart to some other sphere of being, there either to fashion itself a new form, or to remain disembodied. If those who hold the common doctrine of a carnal resurrection should carry it out with philosophical consistency, by extending the scheme it involves to all existing planetary races as well as to their own, should they cause that process of imagination which produced this doctrine to go on to its legitimate completion, they would see in the final consummation the sundered earths approach each other, and firmaments conglobe, till at last the whole universe concentred in one orb. On the surface of that world all the risen races of being would be distributed, the inhabitants of a present solar system making a nation, the sum of gigantic nationalities constituting one prodigious, death exempted empire, its solitary sovereign GOD. But this is pure poetry, and not science nor philosophy.
25 Lange on the Resurrection of the Body, Studien und Kritiken, 1836.
