(Edit: I have since published an article related to this bog post, specifically on the relevance of this topic to ethics and post-humanism. It can be read here. Let me know if you have trouble accessing it and wish to read it.)
On the Soul and the Resurrection is a dialogue between St Gregory of Nyssa and his older sister St Macrina the Younger. In the dialogue, Macrina assuages some of Gregory’s doubts about the doctrine of the resurrection. Gregory’s faith is wavering since their older brother Basil has just died and Macrina herself is on her deathbed. One of the things Macrina tells Gregory is that our soul hovers over the decomposed atoms or elements (στοιχεῖον) of our body in death, and that in resurrection, we will be reconstituted from those exact same atoms.
One difficulty that arises for us today is: what if my atoms aren’t just my atoms? The matter I am composed of is over 4.5 billion years old (and older still if we think the same basic components had to come together prior to the origin of the Earth itself). The stuff I’m made of has been in rocks, plants, bacteria, other animals, and almost certainly in other humans too. So what does it mean to claim that our exact atoms are going to make-up our body in the General Resurrection?
me, probably
Well, firstly, we might argue that our idea of atoms isn’t the same as the στοιχεῖον that Gregory and Macrina are talking about. While it’s true that what we consider to be an atom bears very little resemblance to what Gregory and Macrina would have thought of as an atom, we know that στοιχεῖον was term used in formal Physics since the time of Plato to mean “the components into which matter is ultimately divisible, elements” (Online Liddel-Scott Dictionary). For our philosophical purposes then, Gregory and Macrina still share the same problem we do – they are concerned with the way our body breaks down into components not recognisable as us.
Secondly, it is unclear to what extent Gregory and Macrina believed that our atoms would be reused in other organisms. Whilst it is clear their scientific knowledge accounts for the decay of our matter into dust. There is insufficient evidence, at least in On the Soul and the Resurrection, to suggest that they believe that those atoms would be reused by plant life, and ultimately become part of animals or humans again. Thus, it is unclear if Gregory and Macrina have the problem that a modern mind does when reading their exposition of the doctrine of resurrection. Our modern concern is: if all of the atoms that make me up return to me in the resurrection, what about all the many other people who have had use of those atoms? How can I physically exist whilst somebody else requires those atoms in order for their physical form to be resurrected? Gregory after all, following the New Testament, is adamant that our physical bodies (though they will be transfigured) will be resurrected. And for Gregory and Macrina that means all the elements of our body (or atomic make-up) will be resurrected.
There are two ways we can start to deal with this difficulty. One solution comes from the text in question itself. While it may be unclear if Gregory is worried about our atoms being in other humans, he is very aware that his body is always changing in its atomic make-up. He believes that his body is not the same as it was yesterday, and that it is always changing:
For who has not heard that human life is like a stream, moving from birth to death at a certain rate of progress, and then only ceasing from that progressive movement when it ceases also to exist? This movement indeed is not one of spacial change; our bulk never exceeds itself; but it makes this advance by means of internal alteration; and as long as this alteration is that which its name implies, it never remains at the same stage (from moment to moment); for how can that which is being altered be kept in any sameness? (p862)
This is most obviously apparent in growth (he asks at what stage in our human lives will we be resurrected), but it also happens on a daily basis that we are changing. So even though Gregory doesn’t ask our precise question, he asks us something similar, which is – given that its not clear which atoms are ours from moment-to-moment, how is whatever is resurrected even said to be us in physical form?
Macrina gives us a very interesting answer. She starts talking about the timelessness of matter in resurrection. She explains that to be resurrected is to have the effect of time and sin drawn out of our body:
Just as if a man, who, clad in a ragged tunic, has divested himself of the garb, feels no more its disgrace upon him, so we too, when we have cast off that dead unsightly tunic made from the skins of brutes and put upon us[…] shall, along with the casting off of that tunic, fling from us all the belongings that were round us of that skin of a brute; and such accretions are sexual intercourse, conception, parturition, impurities, suckling, feeding, evacuation, gradual growth to full size, prime of life, old age, disease, and death. If that skin is no longer round us, how can its resulting consequences be left behind within us? It is folly, then, when we are to expect a different state of things in the life to come, to object to the doctrine of the Resurrection on the ground of something that has nothing to do with it. (p865-6.)
(Macrina believes we’ll be resurrected without sex or gender, but that’s an exciting topic for another day.)
The concept of the growth and decay of atoms is not inherent to who we are. Time will not effect the bodies we are resurrected with. She says that we do not truly know ourselves. And that this is why transfiguration in the resurrection will be both bodily us and yet changed. This helps us a little with our problem, at least in terms of expecting a time-bound consistency to the resurrected body.
To resolve our modern problem (modern because of our scientific understanding of the way that organic matter on entering the ground, not only decays but also becomes a part of of the lifecycles of other animals and eventually humans again), we need to look particularly at Macrina’s point about the timelessness of the resurrected body. In a recent book published on Maximus the Confessor and time, Sotiris Mitralexis describes the place and importance of ‘time’ within Maximus’ work. One of his most important points is that to partake in theosis, that is, to be gathered to God in final communion and to partake of God by grace, is to partake in timelessness, since God Himself is outside time. When we are talking about resurrected bodies partaking of the gift of theosis in the eschaton, we are talking about people existing outside of time. Of matter existing outside of time. Like Macrina’s point about conceiving of the human body in one of its periods of growth, so our question about our atoms existing in one of their moments in a body, becomes illogical. The logic of time, of progression, of the ‘lifecycle’ of the atom being chronological, becomes incomprehensible. As people who are made from matter that was existing in time, we either have to posit the annihilation of all but one incarnation of that matter, which hardly seems consistent with what we are told of the resurrection. Or we are to posit that atoms can exist simultaneously with other instances of themselves from different times, a bit like in most of our time-travel stories in film and literature. The apparent paradox of atoms existing in different people at the same time, is eliminated by the fact that in the General Resurrection (or at the very least, certainly in theosis) time no longer exists.
Two excellent fellows whose atoms are existing in the same place simultaneously and without regard for the laws of time.
Whilst discussion of the eschaton will always be a mysterious place more full of questions than answers, I for one am much more reassured by the idea that the principle problem in my understanding is that I don’t know how time travel works, rather than the worry that only the unshared fractions of my atomic make-up (if any at all) will form my body in the General Resurrection.
Bibliography
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection.
(English: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series II Volume 5. P. Schaff (ed.))
(Greek: Patrologia Graeca 46, 11-160 )
Sotiris Mitralexis, Ever-Moving Repose: A Contemporary Reading of Maximus the Confessor’s Theory of Time. James Clarke & Co, 2018.
Microcosmology 