A Plea for the Christians 36

Who, believing in a resurrection, would offer himself as a tomb for bodies that are going to rise? For it is not consistent both to be convinced that our bodies will rise and to eat them as though they will not rise, and to believe that the earth will give back its own dead, but that those whom one has buried inside oneself will not be demanded back. On the contrary, it is likely that those who think they will give no account of their present life, whether bad or good, and that there is no resurrection, and reckon that the soul perishes with the body and is, as it were, extinguished with it, will stop at no outrage. But those who are convinced that nothing will go unexamined before God, and that the body which served the irrational impulses and desires of the soul will be punished together with it, have no reason to commit even the slightest sin. If it seems to anyone utter nonsense that the body which has rotted, been dissolved, and vanished should be put together again, we could not reasonably, on account of those who do not believe, be thought wicked, but only simple; for by the arguments with which we deceive ourselves, if we do, we wrong no one. That bodies will rise, not only according to us but also according to many of the philosophers, it would be superfluous to show at present, lest we seem to bring in arguments foreign to the matter at hand, speaking of intelligible and perceptible things and their constitution, or of how incorporeal things are older than bodies and intelligible things precede perceptible ones, even though we come upon perceptible things first, bodies being constituted from incorporeal things by the combination of intelligibles, and perceptible things from intelligible ones. For according to Pythagoras and Plato nothing prevents bodies, once they have been dissolved, from being put together again from the same elements from which they were constituted in the first place. But let the discussion of the resurrection be deferred.