Chap. LXI. - The Details of Our Bodily Sex, and of the Functions of Our Various Members. Apology for the Necessity Which Heresy Imposes of Hunting up All Its Unblushing Cavils.
Now you have received your mouth, O man, for the purpose of devouring your food and imbibing your drink: why not, however, for the higher purpose of uttering speech, so as to distinguish yourself from all other animals? Why not rather for preaching the gospel of God, that so you may become even His priest and advocate before men? Adam indeed gave their several names to the animals, before he plucked the fruit of the tree; before he ate, he prophesied. Then, again, you received your teeth for the consumption of your meal: why not rather for wreathing your mouth with suitable defence on every opening thereof, small or wide? Why not, too, for moderating the impulses of your tongue, and guarding your articulate speech from failure and violence? Let me tell you, (if you do not know), that there are toothless persons in the world. Look at them, and ask whether even a cage of teeth be not an honour to the mouth. There are apertures in the lower regions of man and woman, by means of which they gratify no doubt their animal passions; but why are they not rather regarded as outlets for the cleanly 593 discharge of natural fluids? Women, moreover, have within them receptacles where human seed may collect; but are they not designed for the secretion of those sanguineous issues, which their tardier and weaker sex is inadequate to disperse? For even details like these require to be mentioned, seeing that heretics single out what parts of our bodies may suit them, handle them without delicacy, and, as their whim suggests, pour torrents of scorn and contempt upon the natural functions of our members, for the purpose of upsetting the resurrection, and making us blush over their cavils; not reflecting that before the functions cease, the very causes of them will have passed away. There will be no more meat, because no more hunger; no more drink, because no more thirst; no more concubinage, because no more child-bearing; no more eating and drinking, because no more labour and toil. Death, too, will cease; so there will be no more need of the nutriment of food for the defence of life, nor will mothers’ limbs any longer have to be laden for the replenishment of our race. But even in the present life there may be cessations of their office for our stomachs and our generative organs. For forty days Moses (Exo_24:8) and Elias (1Ki_19:8) fasted, and lived upon God alone. For even so early was the principle consecrated: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” (Deu_8:3; Mat_4:4) See here faint outlines of our future strength! We even, as we may be able, excuse our mouths from food, and withdraw our sexes from union. How many voluntary eunuchs are there! How many virgins espoused to Christ! How many, both of men and women, whom nature has made sterile, with a structure which cannot procreate! Now, if even here on earth both the functions and the pleasures of our members may be suspended, with an intermission which, like the dispensation itself, can only be a temporary one, and yet man’s safety is nevertheless unimpaired, how much more, when his salvation is secure, and especially in an eternal dispensation, shall we not cease to desire those things, for which, even here below, we are not unaccustomed to check our longings!
Chap. LXII. - Our Destined Likeness to the Angels in the Glorious Life of the Resurrection.
To this discussion, however, our Lord’s declaration puts an effectual end: “They shall be,” says He, “equal unto the angels.” (Luk_20:36; Mat_22:30) As by not marrying, because of not dying, so, of course, by not having to yield to any like necessity of our bodily state; even as the angels, too, sometimes were “equal unto” men, by eating and drinking, and submitting their feet to the washing of the bath - having clothed themselves in human guise, without the loss of their own intrinsic nature. If therefore angels, when they became as men, submitted in their own unaltered substance of spirit to be treated as if they were flesh, why shall not men in like manner, when they become “equal unto the angels,” undergo in their unchanged substance of flesh the treatment of spiritual beings, no more exposed to the usual solicitations of the flesh in their angelic garb, than were the angels once to those of the spirit when encompassed in human form? We shall not therefore cease to continue in the flesh, because we cease to be importuned by the usual wants of the flesh; just as the angels ceased not therefore to remain in their spiritual substance, because of the suspension of their spiritual incidents. Lastly, Christ said not, “They shall be angels,” in order not to repeal their existence as men; but He said, “They shall be equal unto the angels,115 that He might preserve their humanity unimpaired. When He ascribed an angelic likeness to the flesh,116 He took not from it its proper substance.
Chap. LXIII. - Conclusion. The Resurrection of the Flesh in Its Absolute Identity and Perfection. Belief of This Had Become Weak. Hopes for Its Refreshing Restoration Under the Influences of the Paraclete.
And so the flesh shall rise again, wholly in every man, in its own identity, in its absolute integrity. Wherever it may be, it is in safe keeping in God’s presence, through that most faithful “Mediator between God and man, (the man) Jesus Christ,” (1Ti_2:5) who shall reconcile both God to man, and man to God; the spirit to the flesh, and the flesh to the spirit. Both natures has He already united in His own self; He has fitted them together as bride and bridegroom in the reciprocal bond of wedded life. Now, if any should insist on making the soul the bride, then the flesh will follow the soul as her dowry. The soul shall never be an outcast, to be had home by the bridegroom bare and naked. She has her dower, her outfit, her fortune in the flesh, which shall accompany her with the love and fidelity of a foster-sister. But suppose the flesh to be the 594 bride, then in Christ Jesus she has in the contract of His blood received His Spirit as her spouse. Now, what you take to be her extinction, you may be sure is only her temporary retirement. It is not the soul only which withdraws from view. The flesh, too, has her departures for a while - in waters, in fires, in birds, in beasts; she may seem to be dissolved into these, but she is only poured into them, as into vessels. And should the vessels themselves afterwards fail to hold her, escaping from even these, and returning to her mother earth, she is absorbed once more, as it were, by its secret embraces, ultimately to stand forth to view, like Adam when summoned to hear from his Lord and Creator the words, “Behold, the man is become as one of us!” (Gen_3:22) - thoroughly “knowing” by that time “the evil” which she had escaped, “and the good” which she has acquired. Why, then, O soul, should you envy the flesh? There is none, after the Lord, whom you should love so dearly; none more like a brother to you, which is even born along with yourself in God. You ought rather to have been by your prayers obtaining resurrection for her: her sins, whatever they were, were owing to you. However, it is no wonder if you hate her; for you have repudiated her Creator.117 You have accustomed yourself either to deny or change her existence even in Christ118 - corrupting the very Word of God Himself, who became flesh, either by mutilating or misinterpreting the Scripture,119 and introducing, above all, apocryphal mysteries and blasphemous fables.120 But yet Almighty God, in His most gracious providence, by “pouring out of His Spirit in these last days, upon all flesh, upon His servants and on His handmaidens,” (Joe_2:28-29; Act_2:17-18)121 has checked these impostures of unbelief and perverseness, reanimated men’s faltering faith in the resurrection of the flesh, and cleared from all obscurity and equivocation the ancient Scriptures (of both God’s Testaments122) by the clear light of their (sacred) words and meanings. Now, since it was “needful that there should be heresies, in order that they which are approved might be made manifest;” (1Co_11:19) since, however, these heresies would be unable to put on a bold front without some countenance from the Scriptures, it therefore is plain enough that the ancient Holy Writ has furnished them with sundry materials for their evil doctrine, which very materials indeed (so distorted) are refutable from the same Scriptures. It was fit and proper, therefore, that the Holy Ghost should no longer withhold the effusions of His gracious light upon these inspired writings, in order that they might be able to disseminate the seeds of truth with no admixture of heretical subtleties, and pluck out from it their tares. He has accordingly now dispersed all the perplexities of the past, and their self-chosen allegories and parables, by the open and perspicuous explanation of the entire mystery, through the new prophecy, which descends in copious streams from the Paraclete. If you will only draw water from His fountains, you will never thirst for other doctrine: no feverish craving after subtle questions will again consume you; but by drinking in evermore the resurrection of the flesh, you will be satisfied with the refreshing draughts.
Elucidations.
I.
(Cadaver, cap. xviii.)
The Schoolmen and middle-age jurists improved on Tertullian’s etymology. He says, - “a cadendo - cadaver.” But they form the word thus:
Caro data vermibus = Ca-da-ver.
On this subject see a most interesting discourse of the (paradoxical and sophistical, nay the whimsical) Count Joseph de Maistre, in his Soirées de St. Pétersbourg.123 He 595 remarks on the happy formation of many Latin words, in this manner: e.g., Cæcus ut ire = Cæcutire, “to grope like a blind man.” The French, he says, are not without such examples, and he instances the word ancêtre = ancestor, as composed out of ancien and être, i.e., one of a former existence. Courage, he says, is formed from cæur and rage, this use of rage being the Greek θυμος. He supposes that the English use the word rage in this sense, but I recall only the instance:
“
Chill penury repressed their noble rage,”
from Gray’s Elegy. The Diversions of Purley, of Horne-Tooke, supply amusing examples of the like in the formation of English words.
II.
(His flesh, the Bread, cap. xxxvii.)
Note our author’s exposition. He censures those who understood our Lord’s words after the letter, as if they were to eat the carnal body. He expounds the spiritual thing which gives life as to be understood by the text: “the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” His word is the life-giving principle and therefore he called his flesh by the same name: and we are to “devour Him with the ear and to ruminate on Him with the understanding, and to digest Him by faith.” The flesh profits nothing, the spirit imparts life. Now, was Tertullian ever censured for this exposition? On the contrary, this was the faith of the Catholic Church, from the beginning. Our Saxon forefathers taught the same, as appears from the Homily of Aelfric,124 a.d. 980, and from the exposition of Ratramn, a.d. 840. The heresy of Transubstantiation was not dogmatic even among Latins, until the Thirteenth century, and it prevailed in England less than three hundred years, when the Catholic doctrine was restored, through the influence of Ratramn’s treatise first upon the mind of Ridley and then by Ridley’s arguments with Cranmer. Thus were their understandings opened to the Scriptures and to the acknowledging of the Truth, for which they suffered martyrdom. To the reformation we owe the rescue of Ante-Nicene doctrine from the perversions of the Schoolmen and the gradual corruptions of doctrine after the Ninth Century.
III.
(Paradise, cap. xliii.)
This sentence reads, in the translation I am editing, as follows: “No one, on becoming absent from the body, is at once a dweller in the presence of the Lord, except by the prerogative of martyrdom, whereby (the saint) gets at once a lodging in Paradise, not in Hades.” But the original does not say precisely this, nor does the author use the Greek word Hades. His words are: “Nemo enim peregrinatus a corpore statim immoratur penes Dominum nisi ex martyrii proerogativa Paradiso silicet non Inferis diversurus.” The passage therefore, is not necessarily as inconsistent with the author’s topography of the invisible world, as might seem. “Not in the regions beneath Paradise but in Paradise itself,” seems to be the idea; Paradise being included in the world of Hades, indeed, but in a lofty region, far enough removed from the Inferi, and refreshed by light from the third Heaven and the throne itself, (as this planet is by the light of the Sun,) immensely distant though it be from the final abode of the Redeemed.
FOOTNOTES
115 ἰσάγγελοι.
116 Cui.
117 In this apostrophe to the soul, he censures Marcion’s heresy.
118 Compare the De Carne Christi.
119 See the De Præscript. Hæret. ch. xxxviii. supra, for instances of these diverse methods of heresy. Marcion is mentioned as the mutilator of Scripture, by cutting away from it whatever opposed his views; Valentinus as the corrupter thereof, by his manifold and fantastic interpretations.
120 See the Adv. Valentinianos, supra.
121 [See the last sentence. He improves upon St. Peter’s interpretation of this text (as see below) by attributing his own clear views to the charismata, which he regards as still vouchsafed to the more spiritual.]
122 We follow Oehler’s view here, by all means.
123 uvres, Tom. v. p. 111.
124 See Soames’ Anglo Saxon Church, cap. xii. p. 465, and cap. xi. pp. 423-430. See also the valuable annotations of Dr. Routh’s Opuscula, Vol. II. pp. 167-186.
