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| That the Flesh Now Resting in Peace Shall Be Raised to a Perfection Not Enjoyed by the Flesh of Our First Parents.
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Chapter 20.—That the Flesh Now
Resting in Peace Shall Be Raised to a Perfection Not Enjoyed by the
Flesh of Our First Parents.
Thus the souls of departed saints
are not affected by the death which dismisses them from their
bodies, because their flesh rests in hope, no matter what
indignities it receives after sensation is gone. For they do not
desire that their bodies be forgotten, as Plato thinks fit, but
rather, because they remember what has been promised by Him who
deceives no man, and who gave them security for the safe keeping
even of the hairs of their head, they with a longing patience wait
in hope of the resurrection of their bodies, in which they have
suffered many hardships, and are now to suffer never again. For
if they did not “hate their own flesh,” when it, with its
native infirmity, opposed their will, and had to be constrained by
the spiritual law, how much more shall they love it, when it shall
even itself have become spiritual! For as, when the spirit serves
the flesh, it is fitly called carnal, so, when the flesh serves the
spirit, it will justly be called spiritual. Not that it is
converted into spirit, as some fancy from the words, “It is sown
in corruption, it is raised in incorruption,”605
but because it is subject to the
spirit with a perfect and marvellous readiness of obedience, and
responds in all things to the will that has entered on
immortality,—
all reluctance, all corruption,
and all slowness being removed. For the body will not only be
better than it was here in its best estate of health, but it will
surpass the bodies of our first parents ere they sinned. For,
though they were not to die unless they should sin, yet they used
food as men do now, their bodies not being as yet spiritual, but
animal only. And though they decayed not with years, nor drew
nearer to death,—a condition secured to them in God’s
marvellous grace by the tree of life, which grew along with the
forbidden tree in the midst of Paradise,—yet they took other
nourishment, though not of that one tree, which was interdicted not
because it was itself bad, but for the sake of commending a pure
and simple obedience, which is the great virtue of the rational
creature set under the Creator as his Lord. For, though no evil
thing was touched, yet if a thing forbidden was touched, the very
disobedience was sin. They were, then, nourished by other fruit,
which they took that their animal bodies might not suffer the
discomfort of hunger or thirst; but they tasted the tree of life,
that death might not steal upon them from any quarter, and that
they might not, spent with age, decay. Other fruits were, so to
speak, their nourishment, but this their sacrament. So that the
tree of life would seem to have been in the terrestrial Paradise
what the wisdom of God is in the spiritual, of which it is written,
“She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.”606
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