The Resurrection Appearances

St. Thomas Aquinas

    In Chapter 3 we had already begun to encounter certain philosophical and theological notions like prime matter that are at the root of even modern theological debates about the resurrection. Now we need to look at these basic concepts in more detail in order to try to forge them into instruments that will help us understand the resurrection body.
     We can gain some idea of how difficult this is by looking at some modern appreciations of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas in the thirteenth century, using the newly introduced philosophy of Aristotle, attempted to clarify the relationship between the soul and the body. He was taken to say that the soul directly informed prime matter so that there was no intermediate form between them. But such a view, while elegant in its philosophical simplicity, set off waves of theological uneasiness because of the repercussions it could have on doctrines like the resurrection. As Caroline Bynum put it, “If the nature of body is carried by soul and can be expressed in any matter that soul activates (matter being pure potency), then one cannot hold that a person’s body or matter waits to be reassembled after death. Once the unica forma has departed, the person’s body or matter will not exist at all. (The cadaver that does exist is second matter – formed matter – but it is informed not by the form of the soul but by the form of the corpse.) Therefore, when the human being rises the body that is matter to its form will by definition be its body.”3

     While such a view of the soul informing matter makes it easier to imagine how a bodily resurrection could take place in general, for the soul would then inform whatever stretch of prime matter it found handy and turn it into the body, this is not really how we think about the resurrection of the body, nor how the vast majority of Christians in the past thought about it either. We want to know about the fate of bodies of our loved ones who have died, and about what the future holds for the bodies we now have. Further, scholars felt that Thomas, himself, had never pursued the radical implications of his own theory, and the awkward questions it led to. Could, for example, the resurrection of the body be seen as a natural event in which the soul from the very fact that it was the form of the body would reinform prime matter to bring into existence a new body?4 And why would Thomas insist that Christ’s body did not decay in the tomb?5 Why not say that the reality of the body resided in the soul, and so if the body decayed, that really didn’t matter, for the soul could and would by its very nature generate a new body? Did Thomas, in fact, lose as much as he gained when he took up Aristotle’s prime matter? Did he make the reality of the body reside in the soul, and yet still try to hold on to our common sense view of the body?6 Did he still, in what Bynum calls “a theoretically incoherent move,” make matter the source of individuation? Theologians in Thomas’ time and after tried to resolve these problems by inserting a bodily form between the soul and prime matter, and by insisting that there was a real relationship between the body in the tomb and the body that was resurrected.