41. This last article, which affirms the Resurrection of the Flesh, concludes the sum of all perfection with succinct brevity. Although on this point also the faith of the Church is impugned, not only by Gentiles, but by heretics likewise. For Valentinus altogether denies the resurrection of the flesh, so do the Manicheans, as we shewed above. But they refuse to listen to the Prophet Isaiah when he says, “The dead shall rise, and they who are in the graves shall be raised,”³⁴¹⁰

3410 Is. xxvi. 19

or to most wise Daniel, when he declares, “Then they who are in the dust of the earth shall arise, these to eternal life, but those to shame and confusion.”³⁴¹¹

3411 Dan. xii. 2

Yet even in the Gospels, which they appear to receive, they ought to learn from our Lord and Saviour, Who says, when instructing the Sadducees, “As touching the resurrection of the dead: have ye not read how He saith to Moses in the Bush, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob? Now God is not the God of the dead but of the living.”³⁴¹²

3412 Mark xii. 26, 27

Where in what goes before He declares what and how great is the glory of the resurrection, saying, “But in the resurrection of the dead they will neither marry or be given in marriage, but will be as the angels of God.”³⁴¹³

3413 Matt. xxii. 30

But the virtue of the resurrection confers on men an angelical state, so that they who have risen from the earth shall not live again on the earth with the brute animals but with angels in heaven—yet those only whose purer life has fitted them for this—those, namely, who even now preserving the flesh of their soul in chastity, have brought it into subjection to the Holy Spirit, and thus with every stain of sins done away and changed into spiritual glory by the virtue of sanctification, have been counted worthy to have it admitted into the society of angels.

E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH