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| What Plato or Labeo, or Even Varro, Might Have Contributed to the True Faith of the Resurrection, If They Had Adopted One Another’s Opinions into One Scheme.
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Chapter 28.—What Plato or Labeo,
or Even Varro, Might Have Contributed to the True Faith of the
Resurrection, If They Had Adopted One Another’s Opinions into One
Scheme.
Some Christians, who have a liking
for Plato on account of his magnificent style and the truths which
he now and then uttered, say that he even held an opinion similar
to our own regarding the resurrection of the dead. Cicero,
however, alluding to this in his Republic, asserts that
Plato meant it rather as a playful fancy than as a reality; for he
introduces a man1668
who had come to life again, and
gave a narrative of his experience in corroboration of the
doctrines of Plato. Labeo, too, says that two men died on one
day, and met at a cross-road, and that, being afterwards ordered to
return to their bodies, they agreed to be friends for life, and
were so till they died again. But the resurrection which these
writers instance resembles that of those persons whom we have
ourselves known to rise again, and who came back indeed to this
life, but not so as never to die again. Marcus Varro, however, in
his work On the Origin of the Roman People, records
something more remarkable; I think his own words should be given.
“Certain astrologers,” he says, “have written that men are
destined to a new birth, which the Greeks call
palingenesy. This will take place after four hundred and
forty years have elapsed; and then the same soul and the same body,
which were formerly united in the person, shall again be
reunited.” This Varro, indeed, or those nameless
astrologers,—for he does not give us the names of the men whose
statement he cites,—have affirmed what is indeed not altogether
true; for once the souls have returned to the bodies they wore,
they shall never afterwards leave them. Yet what they say upsets
and demolishes much of that idle talk of our adversaries about the
impossibility of the resurrection.
For those who have been or are
of this opinion, have not thought it possible that bodies which
have dissolved into air, or dust, or ashes, or water, or into the
bodies of the beasts or even of the men that fed on them, should be
restored again to that which they formerly were. And therefore,
if Plato and Porphyry, or rather, if their disciples now living,
agree with us that holy souls shall return to the body, as Plato
says, and that, nevertheless, they shall not return to misery, as
Porphyry maintains, —if they accept the consequence of these two
propositions which is taught by the Christian faith, that they
shall receive bodies in which they may live eternally without
suffering any misery,—let them also adopt from Varro the opinion
that they shall return to the same bodies as they were formerly in,
and thus the whole question of the eternal resurrection of the body
shall be resolved out of their own mouths.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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