Statements were made by Plato and Porphyry singly, which if they could have Seen their way to hold in common, they might possibly have became Christians.Plato said that souls could not exist eternally without bodies; for it was on this account, he said, that the souls even of wise men must some time or other return to their bodies.Porphyry, again, said that the purified soul, when it has returned to the Father, shall never return to the ills of this world.Consequently, if Plato had communicated to Porphyry that which he saw to be true, that souls, though perfectly purified, and belonging to the wise and righteous, must return to human bodies; and if Porphyry, again, had imparted to Plato the truth which he saw, that holy soul, shall never return to the miseries of a corruptible body, so that they should not have each held only his own opinion, but should both have hold both truths, I think they would have seen that it follows that the souls return to their bodies, and also that these bodies shall be such as to afford them a blessed and immortal life.For, according to Plato, even holy souls shall return to the body; according to Porphyry, holy souls shall not return to the ills of this world.
Let Porphyry then say with Plato, they shall return to the body;let Plato say with Porphyry, they shall not return to their old misery:
and they will agree that they return to bodies in which they shall suffer no more.And this is nothing else than what God has promised,--that He will give eternal felicity to souls joined to their own bodies.For this, I presume, both of them would readily concede, that if the souls of the saints are to be reunited to bodies, it shall be to their own bodies, in Which they have endured the miseries of this life, and in which, to escape these miseries, they served God with piety and fidelity.
CHAP.28.--WHAT PLATO OR LABEO, OR EVEN VARRO, MIGHT HAVE CONTRIBUTEDTO THE TRUE
FAITH OF THE RESURRECTION, IF THEY HAD ADOPTED ONE ANOTHER'S OPINIONSINTO ONE
SCHEME.
Some Christians, who have a liking for Plato on account of his magnificent style and the truths which he now and then uttered, say that he even held an opinion similar to our own regarding the resurrection of the dead.Cicero, however, alluding to this in his Republic, asserts that Plato meant it rather as a playful fancy than as a reality; for he introduces a man(2) who had come to life again, and gave a narrative of his experience in corroboration of the doctrines of Plato.Labeo, too, says that two men died on one day, and met at a cross-road, and that, being afterwards ordered to return to their bodies, they agreed to be friends for life, and were so till they died again.But the resurrection which these writers instance resembles that of those persons whom we have ourselves known to rise again, and who came back indeed to this life, but not so as never to die again.Marcus Varro, however, in his work On the Origin of the Roman People, records something more remarkable; I think his own words should be given."Certain astrologers," he says, "have written that men are destined to a new birth, which the Greeks call palingenesy.
This will take place after four hundred and forty years have elapsed;and then the same soul and the same body, which were formerly united in the person, shall again be reunited." This Varro, indeed, or those nameless astrologers,--for he does not give us the names of the men whose statement he cites,--have affirmed what is indeed not altogether true; for once the souls have returned to the bodies they wore, they shall never afterwards leave them.Yet what they say upsets and demolishes much of that idle talk of our adversaries about the impossibility of the resurrection For those who have been or are of this opinion, have not thought it possible that bodies which have dissolved into air, or dust, or ashes, or water, or into the bodies of the beasts or even of the men that fed on them, should be restored again to that which they formerly were.And therefore, if Plato and Porphyry, or rather, if their disciples now living, agree with us that holy souls shall return to the body, as Plato says, and that, nevertheless, they shall not return to misery, as Porphyry maintains, --if they accept the consequence of these two propositions which is taught by the Christian faith, that they shall receive bodies in which they may live eternally without suffering any misery,--let them also adopt from Varro the opinion that they shall return to the same bodies as they were formerly in, and thus the whole question of the eternal resurrection of the body shall be resolved out of their own mouths.
CHAP.29.--OF THE BEATIFIC VISION.