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| Of the Burial of the Dead: that the Denial of It to Christians Does Them No Injury.
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Chapter 12.—Of the Burial of the
Dead: that the Denial of It to Christians Does Them No Injury.61
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Augustin expresses himself more fully on this
subject in his tract, De cura pro mortuis
gerenda. |
Further still, we are reminded that
in such a carnage as then occurred, the bodies could not even be
buried. But godly confidence is not appalled by so ill-omened a
circumstance; for the faithful bear in mind that assurance has been
given that not a hair of their head shall perish, and that,
therefore, though they even be devoured by beasts, their blessed
resurrection will not hereby be hindered. The Truth would nowise
have said, “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able
to kill the soul,”62
if anything whatever that an enemy could do to the body of the
slain could be detrimental to the future life. Or will some one
perhaps take so absurd a position as to contend that those who kill
the body are not to be feared before death, and lest they kill the
body, but after death, lest they deprive it of burial? If this be
so, then that is false which Christ says, “Be not afraid of them
that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can
do;”63
for it seems
they can do great injury to the dead body. Far be it from us to
suppose that the Truth can be thus false. They who kill the body
are said “to do something,” because the deathblow is felt, the
body still having sensation; but after that, they have no more that
they can do, for in the slain body there is no sensation. And so
there are indeed many bodies of Christians lying unburied; but no
one has separated them from heaven, nor from that earth which is
all filled with the presence of Him who knows whence He will raise
again what He created. It is said, indeed, in the Psalm: “The
dead bodies of Thy servants have they given to be meat unto the
fowls of the heaven, the flesh of Thy saints unto the beasts of the
earth. Their blood have they shed like water round about
Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them.”64
But this was said rather to
exhibit the cruelty of those who did these things, than the misery
of those who suffered them. To the eyes of men this appears a
harsh and doleful lot, yet “precious in the sight of the Lord is
the death of His saints.”65
Wherefore all these last offices
and ceremonies that concern the dead, the careful funeral
arrangements, and the equipment of the tomb, and the pomp of
obsequies, are rather the solace of the living than the comfort of
the dead. If a costly burial does any good to a wicked man, a
squalid burial, or none at all, may harm the godly. His crowd of
domestics furnished the purple-clad Dives with a funeral gorgeous
in the eye of man; but in the sight of God that was a more
sumptuous funeral which the ulcerous pauper received at the hands
of the angels, who did not carry him out to a marble tomb, but bore
him aloft to Abraham’s bosom.
The men against whom I have
undertaken to defend the city of God laugh at all this. But even
their own philosophers66
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Diogenes especially, and his followers. See also
Seneca, De Tranq. c. 14, and Epist. 92; and in
Cicero’s Tusc. Disp. i. 43, the answer of Theodorus, the
Cyrenian philosopher, to Lysimachus, who threatened him with the
cross: “Threaten that to your courtiers; it is of no
consequence to Theodorus whether he rot in the earth or in the
air.” |
have despised a careful burial; and often whole armies have fought
and fallen for their earthly country without caring to inquire
whether they
would be left exposed on the
field of battle, or become the food of wild beasts. Of this noble
disregard of sepulture poetry has well said: “He who has no
tomb has the sky for his vault.”67
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Lucan, Pharsalia, vii. 819, of those whom
Cæsar forbade to be buried after the battle of
Pharsalia. | How much less ought they to insult
over the unburied bodies of Christians, to whom it has been
promised that the flesh itself shall be restored, and the body
formed anew, all the members of it being gathered not only from the
earth, but from the most secret recesses of any other of the
elements in which the dead bodies of men have lain hid!E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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