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GENERAL AUDIENCE OF WEDNESDAY, 3 FEBRUARY
At the general audience on Wednesday, 3 February, held
in the Paul VI Hall, Pope John Paul continued his explanation of Pauline
theology of the body with regard to the resurrection of the dead.
1. From the words of Christ on the future resurrection of the body,
reported by all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), we have
passed to the Pauline anthropology of the resurrection. We are analyzing
the First Letter to the Corinthians 15:42-49.
In the resurrection the human body, according to the words of the
Apostle, is seen "incorruptible, glorious, full of dynamism, spiritual."
The resurrection is not only a manifestation of the life that conquers
death—almost
a final return to the tree of life, from which man had been separated at
the moment of original sin—but
is also a revelation of the ultimate destiny of man in all the
fullness of his psychosomatic nature and his personal subjectivity. Paul
of Tarsus—who
following in the footsteps of the other apostles, had experienced in
his meeting with the risen Christ the state of his glorified body—basing
himself on this experience, Paul announces in his Letter to the Romans
"the redemption of the body" (Rom 8:23) and in his Letter to the
Corinthians (1 Cor 15:42-49) the completion of this redemption in the
future resurrection.
In the perspective of an eternal destiny
2. The literary method Paul applies here perfectly corresponds to his
style, which uses antitheses that simultaneously bring together those
things which they contrast. In this way they are useful in having us
understand Pauline thought about the resurrection. It concerns both its
"cosmic" dimension and also the characteristic of the internal structure
of the "earthly" and the "heavenly" man. The Apostle, in fact,
in
contrasting Adam and Christ
(risen)—that is, the first Adam with the second Adam—in
a certain way shows two poles between which, in the mystery of creation
and redemption, man has been placed in the cosmos. One could say that man
has been put in tension between these two poles in the perspective of his
eternal destiny regarding, from beginning to end, his human nature itself.
When Paul writes: "The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the
second man is from heaven" (1 Cor 15:47), he has in mind both Adam-man and
also Christ as man. Between these two poles—between
the first and the second Adam—the
process takes place that he expresses in the following words: "As we have
borne the image of the man of earth, so we will bear the image of the man
of heaven" (1 Cor 15:49).
Man completed
3. This "man of heaven"—the
man of the resurrection whose prototype is the risen Christ—is
not so much an antithesis and negation of the "man of earth" (whose
prototype is the first Adam), but is above all his completion and
confirmation. It is the completion and confirmation of what corresponds to
the psychosomatic makeup of humanity, in the sphere of his eternal
destiny, that is, in the thought and the plan of him who from the
beginning created man in his own image and likeness. The humanity of the
first Adam, the "man of earth," bears in itself a particular potential
(which is a capacity and readiness) to receive all that became the second
Adam, the man of heaven, namely, Christ,
what he became in his resurrection. That humanity which all men,
children of the first Adam, share, and which, along with the heritage of
sin—being
carnal—at
the same time is corruptible, and bears in itself the potentiality of
incorruptibility.
That humanity which, in all its psychosomatic makeup appears ignoble, and yet bears within itself the interior desire for glory, that is, the
tendency and the capacity to become "glorious" in the image of the risen
Christ. Finally, the same humanity about which the Apostle—in
conformity with the experience of all men—says
that it is "weak" and has an "animal body," bears in itself the aspiration
to become full of dynamism and spiritual.
Potential to rise again
4. We are speaking here of human nature in its integrity, that is, of
human nature in its psychosomatic makeup. However, Paul speaks of the
body. Nevertheless we can admit, on the basis of the immediate context and
the remote one, that for him it is not a question only of the body, but of
the entire man in his corporeity, therefore also of his ontological
complexity. There is no doubt here that precisely in the whole visible
world (cosmos) that one body which is the human body bears in itself the
potentiality for resurrection, that is, the aspiration and capacity to
become definitively incorruptible, glorious, full of dynamism, spiritual.
This happens because, persisting from the beginning in the psychosomatic
unity of the personal being, he can receive and reproduce in this earthly
image and likeness of God also the heavenly image of the second Adam,
Christ.
The Pauline anthropology of the resurrection is cosmic and universal at
the same time. Every man bears in himself the image of Adam and every man
is also called to bear in himself the image of Christ, the image of the
risen one. This image is the reality of the "other world," the
eschatological reality (St. Paul writes, "We will bear"). But in
the meantime it is already in a certain way a reality of this world, since
it was revealed in this world through the resurrection of Christ. It is a
reality ingrafted in the man of this world, a reality that is developing
in him toward final completion.
The vision of God
5. All the antitheses that are suggested in Paul's text help to
construct a valid sketch of the anthropology of the resurrection. This
sketch is at the same time more detailed than the one which comes from the
text of the synoptic Gospels (cf. Mt 22:30; Mk 12:25; Lk 20:34-35). But on
the other hand it is in a certain sense more unilateral. The words of
Christ which the synoptics report open before us the perspective of the
eschatological perfection of the body, fully subject to the divinizing
profundity of the vision of God face to face. In that vision it will find
its inexhaustible source of perpetual virginity (united to the nuptial
meaning of the body), and of the perpetual intersubjectivity of all men,
who will become (as males and females) sharers in the resurrection. The
Pauline sketch of the eschatological perfection of the glorified body
seems to remain rather in the sphere of the interior structure of the
man-person. His interpretation of the future resurrection would seem to
link up again with body-spirit dualism which constitutes the source of the
interior system of forces in man.
6. This system of forces will undergo a radical change in the
resurrection. Paul's words, which explicitly suggest this, cannot however
be understood or interpreted in the spirit of dualistic anthropology, (1)
which we will try to show in the continuation of our analysis. In fact, it
will be suitable to dedicate yet another reflection to the anthropology of
the resurrection in the light of the First Letter to the Corinthians.
NOTE
1. "Paul takes absolutely no account of the Greek dichotomy between
'soul and body'.... The Apostle resorts to a kind of trichotomy in which
the totality of man is body, soul and spirit.... All these terms are alive
and the division itself has no fixed limit. He insists on the fact that
body and soul are capable of being 'pneumatic,' spiritual" (B. Rigaux,
Dieu l'a ressuscité.
Exégèse
et Théologie
biblique [Gembloux: Duculot, 1973], pp. 406-408).
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