Against Celsus 7.32

The doctrine of the resurrection is vast and hard to interpret, and needs, more than any other doctrine, a wise man of great attainment to show what is worthy of God and the grandeur of the doctrine, which teaches that what Scripture calls the tent of the soul, in which the righteous “who are” in it groan “being burdened,” not wishing “to be unclothed but to be further clothed,” has the principle of a seed. Since Celsus did not understand it, and mocks what is said because he has heard about it from unlearned people who can explain it by no reasoning, it is useful, in addition to what we said above on this subject, to note only this in answer to his argument: that it is not, as Celsus thinks, from misunderstanding the transmigration of souls that we speak of the resurrection, but because we know that the soul, which is by its own nature incorporeal and invisible, when it is in any bodily place, needs a body suited to the nature of that place. Sometimes it wears this body after putting off the former one, which was necessary but is superfluous for the second state; sometimes it puts it on over what it had before, needing a better garment for the purer, ethereal, and heavenly places. When it came to birth here, it put off what was useful in the womb of the mother while it was in her, the chorion; and it put on under that what was necessary for one who was going to live on earth. Then again, since there is a “tent,” an earthly house, somehow necessary to the tent, the Scriptures say that the earthly house “of the tent” is destroyed, but that the tent puts on “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” And the men of God say that “the corruptible” itself “puts on incorruption,” which is different from the incorruptible, and “the mortal puts on immortality,” which is other than the immortal. For as wisdom is to the wise, and righteousness to the righteous, and peace to the peaceful, so incorruption is to the incorruptible and immortality to the immortal. See, then, to what the word urges us, when it says we are “to put on” “incorruption” and “immortality,” which, like garments for one who has put them on and is wrapped in such garments, do not allow the one who wears them to be corrupted or to die. Let us have ventured to say this much on account of one who did not understand what we mean by the resurrection, and for this reason laughs at and mocks a doctrine he does not know.