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| Women turned into men and bodies into souls. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
24. How, I ask,
can you, seeing that your Commentaries contain such doctrines, put them
forward to prove your soundness in the faith, and to confute those
ideas which you reprove? How do your words tend to reprove those women
whom we have spoken of? Besides, has any woman gone so far as to say
what you write, namely, that women are to be turned into men and bodies
into souls? If bodies are to be turned into spirits, then, according to
you, there will be no resurrection not only of the flesh but even of
the body, which you admit to be the doctrine even of those whom you
have set down as heretics. Where are we to look any more for the body,
if it is reduced to a spirit? In that case everything will be spirit,
the body will be nowhere. And again, if the wives are to be turned into
men, according to this suggestion of yours, that there is to be no
difference of sex whatever, by which I suppose you mean that the female
sex will entirely cease, being converted into the male, and the male
sex will alone remain; I am not sure that you would have the permission
of the women to speak here on behalf of their sex. But, even suppose
that they grant you this, then with what consistency can you argue that
the male sex is any longer necessary, when the female is shown not to
be necessary? for there is a natural bond which unites the sexes in
mutual dependence, so that, if one does not exist, there is no need of
the other. And further, if it is man alone who is to receive at the
resurrection the form of clay which was originally given in paradise,
what becomes of that which is written,2864 “He made them male and female,
and blessed them”? And then, if, as both you yourself say, and
also these poor women whom you arraign, there is neither man nor woman,
how can bodies be turned into souls, or women into men, since Paradise
does not allow the existence of either sex, nor does the likeness of
angels, as you say, admit it? And I marvel how you can demand from
others a strict opinion upon the continuance of the diversity of sex
when you yourself, as soon as you begin to discuss it, find yourself
involved in so many knotty questions that to evolve yourself out of
them becomes impossible. How much more right would your action be if
you were to imitate us whom you blame in such matters as these and
allow God to be the only judge of them, as is indeed the truth. It
would be far better for you to confess your ignorance of them than to
write things which in a little while you have to condemn. I should like
to ask my accuser whether he can conscientiously say that he would ever
have found, I do not say in any, even the least, work of mine, but even
in any familiar letter which I might have written carelessly to a
friend, such things as that bodies were to be turned into spirits and wives
into men, were it not that he had put them forward as if he wished them
to be inserted in brazen letters on the gates of cities, and recited in
the forum, in the Senate house and in front of the rostra. If he had
found any such thing in my writings, imagine how many heads of
accusation he would have set down, how many volumes he would have
compiled, how he would be assailing me with all the arms and shafts of
that teeming breast of his; how he would have said: “I tell you
that he is deceiving you by speaking of the resurrection of the body,
for he denies the resurrection of the flesh; or even if he confesses
the resurrection of the flesh he denies that of the members and the
sex: but, if you do not believe me, behold and see the very words of
his letter, in which he says that bodies are to be turned into souls
and wives into men.” Yet, when you write this, we are not to call
you a heretic, but are to give satisfaction to you as though you were
our master. And as for those women whom you have attacked with your
indecent reproaches, they will, when they stand before the judgment
seat of Christ, bring forward what you have taught them in these
Commentaries as well as the things which you have since written, with
insults which show that you had forgotten yourself; and both the one
and the other will be read out there, where the favour of men will have
ceased, and the applause for which you pay by flattery will be silent,
and they will be judged together with their author for these words and
deeds of yours before Christ the righteous judge.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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