An Image of the Image

Rome, sometime around the year 260. A philosopher named Plotinus is teaching in a crowded room. His lectures are open to anyone who wants to come, and people do come: senators, doctors, a poet or two, curious rich women, students who follow him around the city. He talks without notes. Once, when a student kept asking how the soul is joined to the body, he spent three straight days answering. He is, by every account, one of the most brilliant minds of the age.

In the back of the room sits a man who is not there to learn philosophy. His name is Carterius, and he is the best portrait painter in Rome. He has come to memorize a face.

This is a secret operation. Plotinus has refused, flat out, to sit for a portrait. His student Porphyry, who later wrote his teacher’s life, opens that book with a sentence that is hard to forget:

“Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body.”

He would not say where he was born. He would not tell anyone his birthday. He would not talk about his parents. And when another student, Amelius, begged him to let a painter make his likeness, Plotinus answered with a question: Is it not enough to carry around this image that nature has shut us up in? Must I also leave behind “an image of the image,” as if it were something worth looking at?

So Amelius went around him. He brought Carterius to the lectures, week after week, until the painter had the face stored in his head. Then Carterius went home and painted it, and Amelius touched it up, and the students got their portrait of a man who thought his own face was not worth keeping.

The portrait is lost now. But the question under it is not. Which one was Plotinus: the mind in the lecture hall, or the face the painter stole?

Plotinus knew his answer. The face was a costume. The body was a kind of embarrassment the real man had to put up with for a while. When he was dying, his last words, as a friend reported them, were a kind of farewell to the costume: he was striving, he said, to give back the divine in himself to the divine in the All.

Most of us, if we are honest, are on his side.

The picture most of us carry

Here is a belief so common it hardly feels like a belief. It feels like the way things are.

You are, deep down, something on the inside. Call it your mind, your self, your consciousness, your soul. Your body is what that inside thing lives in and drives around. It matters, of course. You feed it, wash it, worry about it. But it is not really you. It is more like your house, or your car, or your avatar in a game.

You can feel this belief at work in a hundred ordinary places. Stand at an open casket, and someone will say, kindly, “That’s not really her. She’s not there anymore.” We mean it as comfort, and it works as comfort, because we believe it. The person has gone somewhere. What is left is the shell.

Ask most people, religious or not, what a good afterlife would look like, and the picture follows from there. The real you gets free. No more bad knees, no more hunger, no more being stuck in one place. If you believe in heaven, heaven is where the freed inside part goes: light, clouds, peace, a self with nothing heavy attached. If you don’t believe in heaven, the modern version of the dream is to upload your mind to a computer, which is the same hope wearing a lab coat. Either way, the best version of you is the version with less body.

This picture has serious backing. Plato taught it. In the Phaedo, Socrates, a few hours from his execution, tells his friends that true philosophers are “always occupied in the practice of dying,” because death is just “the release of the soul from the chains of the body.” Descartes, two thousand years later, gave it a modern form. Having doubted everything he could, he found the one thing he could not doubt was his own thinking, and he concluded that the thinking thing was the real him: “even if the body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is.”

And it has religious backing too, or seems to. The Dutch scholar Erasmus, a devout Catholic writing in 1511, said it plainly in his Praise of Folly. Christians, he wrote, “come very near to agreeing with the Platonists that the soul is stifled and bound down by the fetters of the body.” The pious, he said, direct all their effort toward God, “and after him towards what is closest to him, the soul. They have no thought for the body.”

So there you have it. The philosopher, the scientist, the churchgoer, and the tech optimist all agree. You are the pilot, not the plane. Heaven, if there is one, is the pilot finally climbing out.

It is a good picture. It explains why death feels like leaving rather than ending. It explains why a mind feels so different from a meat. It is humane at funerals. It takes the fear of pain and weakness seriously. If you had to bet on which view of the soul the great religious tradition of the West was built on, you would bet on this one.

You would lose the bet.

The view the church fought

Go back to the late Roman Empire, when Christianity and Platonism were arguing in public. You might expect the Christians to be the ones selling escape from the body, and the pagan philosophers to be the ones defending the world of flesh. It was the other way around.

The Platonists thought the Christians were being crude. The philosopher Porphyry, the same student who wrote the life of Plotinus, taught that the soul, to be truly happy, must get away from bodies altogether. Augustine, the great North African bishop, quotes him again and again in The City of God: “a body of every kind is to be escaped from, in order that the soul may dwell in blessedness with God.” To an educated pagan, the Christian idea of getting your body back after death sounded like a peasant’s fantasy. Why would a soul that had finally escaped its prison want to walk back in?

Augustine’s answer is the first surprise. He did not deny that the body can be a burden. He had read the line in the book of Wisdom, “the corruptible body presseth down the soul,” and he had felt it. But he pointed to one word in that sentence:

“It is not the body, but the corruptibility of the body, which is a burden to the soul.”

In plain terms: the problem was never having a body. The problem is having a body that breaks, ages, aches, and dies. Fix that, and the complaint goes away. Elsewhere Augustine goes further, and it is one of the sharpest pieces of psychology in the whole ancient world. People who say they would rather have no body at all, he writes, are fooling themselves. “It is not their body, but its corruptions and its heaviness, that they hate. And so it is not no body, but an uncorrupted and very light body, that they want.”

Then he turned Plato against the Platonists. In Plato’s own Timaeus, the supreme god makes lesser gods with bodies, and then promises them, as a great gift, that they will never be separated from those bodies. Augustine quotes the promise: “Ye cannot be immortal, but by my will ye shall be immortal.” If being joined to a body is a punishment, Augustine asks, why does Plato’s god hand out eternal bodies as a reward? Either the Platonists must say their own gods are miserable, or they must admit a soul can be perfectly happy in a body. They can’t have it both ways.

That much is history. The deeper surprise comes eight hundred years later, when Thomas Aquinas asked a simple question about a line from the Gospels. Jesus, arguing with people who denied any resurrection, quotes God saying, “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” and adds, “He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” An objector points out the obvious: when God said that, Abraham was long dead. His soul might be alive somewhere, sure. So maybe the living soul is all Jesus meant, and the body can stay in the grave.

Aquinas replies:

“Abraham’s soul, properly speaking, is not Abraham himself, but a part of him.”

That line carries the whole argument. The soul in heaven, according to the most influential theologian of the Middle Ages, is not the person. It is a piece of the person. Abraham, the man who walked out of Ur and argued with God over Sodom, does not fully exist anywhere right now. In his commentary on Paul’s letters, Aquinas says it even more bluntly, in five words that shock people who meet them for the first time: “My soul is not I.”

Even Aquinas’s own followers argue about how far to push this. Some Thomist philosophers today, such as Eleonore Stump, hold that the person does survive death in a thin way, carried by the soul alone until the body returns. Others, such as Patrick Toner, take Aquinas at his word and say the person, strictly speaking, stops existing until the resurrection. But both sides agree on one thing. Neither thinks the soul alone is a finished human being. The argument is only over whether the soul in heaven is a person barely hanging on, or a part waiting for its whole.

This is not a strange private opinion. It is built into the oldest Christian creeds, which do not say “I believe in the immortality of the soul.” They say “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” and in older forms, “of the flesh.” The Westminster Confession of 1646, the charter of the Presbyterian and Reformed churches, is careful about the order. At death, it says, the souls of the righteous go to God, where they “behold the face of God, in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies.” And at the last day, “all the dead shall be raised up, with the selfsame bodies, and none other.”

Waiting. That is the word that breaks the picture. Heaven as most people imagine it, the soul at home with God, is in this tradition a waiting room. The pilot has climbed out of the plane, and he is not relieved. He wants the plane back.

Christians have not all agreed on the rest of the picture either. John Calvin, whose theology sits under the Westminster Confession, sounded a good deal more like Plato about the soul itself, calling it man’s “nobler part.” Some modern Thomists argue that the soul in heaven does keep the person going in a thin way. But on the central point there is no serious split among the historic creeds, Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. The soul without its body is never the end of the story. The afterlife most of us picture, where the freed soul is the finish line, is the position the church spent centuries arguing against. It belonged to the pagan philosophers, and to the Christian splinter groups the church condemned, like the Gnostics and the Manichees, who taught that matter was made by an evil power. Aquinas makes the link himself: every sect that held bodies to be the devil’s work also denied the resurrection. The writer N. T. Wright has spent years trying to get this across to his own church, with a line worth borrowing: heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.

That raises the obvious question. Why on earth would a soul need a body back?

Why a soul would need a body

The easy answer is sentiment. We are fond of our bodies, so we want them back, the way you might want your old house back. If that were all it was, the doctrine would be a comfort and nothing more.

The answer Aquinas gives is harder and stranger. The soul needs the body the way a craft needs its tools. And more than that, the soul needs the body to know things.

Start with what a soul is in this tradition. Aristotle, whom Aquinas followed closely, did not think of the soul as a ghost sitting inside a machine. He thought of it as the thing that makes a living body alive and makes it the kind of thing it is. His favorite comparison was a stamp pressed into wax. The shape and the wax are not two objects glued together. They are one thing: a stamped piece of wax. In the same way, the soul and the body are not two things. They make one living animal. That is why Aristotle said you should no more ask whether soul and body are one than whether the wax and its shape are one.

Aquinas adds a picture of his own. The soul, he says, relates to the body the way a craftsman’s art relates to the thing he makes:

“Whatever appears in the parts of the body is all contained originally and, in a way, implicitly in the soul.”

In plain language: your soul is like a plan folded up, and your body is that plan unfolded into the world. Your hands, eyes, voice, and way of walking are what your soul looks like when it is spread out in matter. A plan that never gets built is not a better plan. It is an unfinished one.

Now the part that turns everything upside down. Plato thought the soul would understand things better once it got free of the body, because the body only clouds the mind. Aquinas asks whether that is actually true, and decides it is not. The human mind, he argues, is the lowest kind of mind there is. Angels, as he imagines them, grasp things in a few huge, clear ideas. Human minds are too weak for that. If a human soul tried to think the way an angel does, it would be like a slow student trying to learn from a genius who only speaks in summaries. Aquinas makes the comparison himself:

“Those who are of weaker intellect fail to acquire perfect knowledge through the universal conceptions of those who have a better understanding, unless things are explained to them singly and in detail.”

So God gave the human soul a body, with eyes and ears and hands, so it could learn the world one thing at a time, from the things themselves. A soul without that body would still be able to know something, Aquinas says, but only in a way that is “confused and general.” And then comes the line that flips Plato over:

“It is clear then that it was for the soul’s good that it was united to a body.”

If the Platonists were right, he adds, the whole arrangement would make no sense. The soul would be worse off in the body and better off out of it, which would mean the soul exists for the body’s sake. But the higher thing does not exist to serve the lower. So the body must be there for the soul.

That is the reverse of the picture we started with. We tend to think the body is the soul’s prison, or at best its vehicle. On this account, the body is closer to the soul’s schoolroom and workshop, the only place where a mind of our kind can do its proper work. The French writer Montaigne, who was nobody’s theologian, landed in the same place by pure common sense:

“Those who want to split up our two principal parts and sequester them from each other are wrong. On the contrary, we must couple and join them together again.”

He even says the soul should “marry” the body and “be a husband to it.”

There is a modern version of this idea too, though it came from a very different direction. Many brain scientists and philosophers now doubt that a mind could ever be neatly lifted out of the body it grew up in. Our thinking is shot through with the body’s own shapes: balance, touch, hunger, the feel of moving through space. You don’t have to accept Aquinas’s metaphysics to feel the pull of his point. The mind we actually have was built to work through a body.

So the soul’s need is not nostalgia. It is structural. Take away the body and you have not freed the soul. You have taken away its tools.

That, though, leads straight into a harder question. If the soul needs the body that badly, what is it doing in heaven right now without one?

Homesick in heaven

The tradition had to face this. Christians believe the dead in Christ go to be with God at death, not centuries later. Paul wrote that he would rather be “absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.” So the souls of the saints are, right now, in the presence of God. They see him. What could be missing?

Aquinas works through this in his great Summa Theologica. Can the soul be happy without the body? Yes, he says. The highest happiness is seeing God, and you do not see God with eyes. So the separated soul really is blessed. But then he adds something that most people have never heard:

“The soul desires to enjoy God in such a way that the enjoyment also may overflow into the body, as far as possible. And therefore, as long as it enjoys God, without the fellowship of the body, its appetite is at rest in that which it has, in such a way that it would still wish the body to attain to its share.”

In plain terms: the soul in heaven is content with God, but not content with itself. It has everything it wants, and still it wants its body to share in it. Aquinas borrows a line from Augustine that says this even more sharply. The soul without the body, Augustine wrote, “has a natural desire to rule the body,” and so it is “held back, so to speak, from tending with all its might” to God.

Held back. The saints in heaven, in the presence of God, are distracted. Some part of them keeps glancing back toward the grave.

The poet Dante turned this into one of the most tender moments in his Paradise. In the heaven of the sun, Dante meets a ring of great teachers who shine so brightly he can hardly look at them. Beatrice asks them a question on his behalf: will this light stay with you forever, and when you get your bodies back, won’t the brightness hurt your eyes? The wise King Solomon answers from inside the light. When the flesh, “glorious and sanctified, shall be clothed on us again,” he says, “our persons will be more acceptable for being all complete.” The body will outshine the soul’s light the way a burning coal outshines its flame.

And then the whole ring of spirits cries out “Amen” all at once, so quickly and eagerly, Dante says,

“that truly they showed desire for their dead bodies, perhaps not only for themselves, but also for their mothers, for their fathers, and for the others who were dear before they became eternal flames.”

That is the picture of heaven-now in this tradition: glorious, and missing something. The blessed are waiting to be whole, and waiting to see the faces of the people they loved. Not their souls. Their faces.

Aquinas himself seems to have gone back and forth on how much the body would add. In the Summa, written late in his life, he says the return of the body will make happiness greater in “extent” but not in “intensity,” as if the soul’s joy were already full and the body just widens it. In the Supplement, the section that covers the resurrection, a stronger claim appears: that the soul’s joy will actually grow in intensity too, because the soul “naturally desires reunion with the body,” and while it waits, “its operation by which it is borne towards God is less intense.”

There is a story behind that difference. Aquinas never wrote the Supplement. In December 1273, while saying Mass in Naples, he had some experience he never fully explained, after which he stopped writing. “All that I have written,” he told his secretary Reginald, “seems to me like straw.” He died a few months later. After his death, his students, traditionally said to be led by Reginald himself, finished the Summa by pulling together passages from a commentary he had written as a young man. So the most detailed account of the resurrected body in the Middle Ages was assembled after its author’s death, out of his own earlier words, by other hands. The two versions disagree about how much the waiting costs. They agree that the waiting is real.

So the picture we started with fails a second time. On this account the soul in heaven is not you set free. It is you in pieces. The body in the ground is not you either. And the thing that was you, the whole person that walked around and laughed and got angry, is not anywhere right now. It is on hold.

So the tradition puts all its weight on the day the pieces come back together. Which means it has to answer a question that sounds like a riddle but is actually the hardest problem in the whole doctrine: when you come back, will it really be you?

The same body, and none other

Imagine the soul gets a body back, but not its old one. A fresh body, perfect, made from new material. Is that a resurrection?

Aquinas says no. And he says it without any wiggle room:

“If it is not the same body which the soul resumes, it will not be a resurrection, but rather the assuming of a new body.”

This is the point where the doctrine becomes fiercer about your body than almost any other view people hold. Think about how much most modern people would give away here. A new body, just like the old one, with all your memories and habits and loves, sounds good enough to most of us. That is the whole logic of the upload dream: copy the pattern, and the pattern is you.

The best way to see why Aquinas refuses this is to look at a story that takes the pattern view all the way. In the TV series Battlestar Galactica, the human-looking Cylons can’t really die. When one is killed, its memories are downloaded into a fresh, identical body waiting in a tank on a ship they call the Resurrection Ship. The new copy wakes up gasping, with every memory right up to the moment of death. The show calls this resurrection. The characters treat it as survival. And for a while, so does the audience.

By Aquinas’s rule, the show has the word exactly wrong. A Cylon waking in a new body is “the assuming of a new body,” which is his precise description of what resurrection is not. The show’s resurrection is Porphyry’s view with better lighting. The pattern is what counts, and bodies are interchangeable containers. Aquinas would say the thing in the tank is someone new who remembers being someone else.

That is why the old creeds keep insisting on the word “same.” Job, in the oldest cry of hope in the Bible, does not say he will see God in some body. He says, in the line Calvin fought to defend:

“Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.”

Not another. The Westminster Confession says the same thing: “the selfsame bodies, and none other.”

Some Christian philosophers today go even further than Aquinas. Peter van Inwagen, for one, doubts there is any soul that can exist apart from the body at all. On his view there is nothing of you in heaven while you wait, and so everything rides on the body coming back. That only sharpens the point. Whether the soul waits in heaven or nothing waits at all, the tradition’s hope is pinned to the body.

But insisting on the same body walks straight into a wall, and the old writers saw the wall clearly. Bodies do not stay in one piece after death. They rot, burn, scatter, feed worms and plants, and sometimes, in famine or on a battlefield, feed other people. Augustine faced this head on. The human body, he wrote,

“although changed into the substance of other bodies or even into the elements, although it has become the food and flesh of any animals whatsoever, even of man, will in an instant return to that soul which previously animated it.”

Even of man. He is not hiding the ugliest case. If a man is eaten, and his flesh becomes part of another man, whose body does it go back to?

Aquinas worked hard on this. He did not think every particle you ever had would come back. Your body swaps its material over and over during life, and you stay you through all of it, because what holds you together is the living form that runs through the material, not the particular bits. So the same body does not have to mean the same atoms. But it does have to mean real continuity with this body, this matter, and not a copy. How exactly that works when the matter has been scattered, he admits, is not something nature can do. Then he says the thing that should settle any worry that this is a comfortable doctrine:

“In those ashes there is no natural inclination to resurrection, but only by the ordering of Divine providence.”

In plain words: dust does not remember whose it was. There is nothing in your remains that wants to become you again. And this matches his broader verdict. The resurrection, he writes, “strictly speaking, is miraculous and not natural.”

Put the pieces side by side. Everything so far has shown that the soul needs the body by its own nature. The soul was made to be joined to a body. Separated, it is incomplete and it longs to be whole. That is a natural need. But the only thing that could meet the need is something nature cannot do. Reason can show you the hunger. It cannot show you the meal.

That is exactly why the old theologians put the resurrection under faith and not under proof. Aquinas thought reason could show the soul survives death. He never thought reason could show the body comes back. That part rests on a promise.

Now line up the choices. The materialist says you are your body, and when it goes, you go. The Platonist and the uploader say you are the pattern, and any body will do. The classical Christian says you are this body and this soul together, and you will get back this body and no other, and admits that only God can pull it off. Of the three, only the Christian view refuses both the loss and the copy. It will not accept a copy. It will not accept a soul alone. It holds out for the original.

It is fair to ask what that original will be like. The answer turns out to be even less like the picture we started with.

A body that still takes up room

If you asked most people what a perfect body would be like, you would probably hear something like this: weightless, painless, able to pass through walls, able to be anywhere in an instant. Basically, a body so perfect it’s hardly a body at all. A body that has stopped getting in the way.

The medieval theologians thought about this in amazing detail. The Supplement has whole sections on what they called the gifts of the glorified body: it can’t be hurt, it is fully obedient to the soul, it can move with ease, and it shines. Some of their answers match what most people would guess. The resurrected body won’t get sick. It won’t need food. It will move where the soul wants it with almost no effort.

They even let the glorified body hide itself from sight when it wants to. But on the questions that make a body a body, size, place, and travel, they refused to turn it into a ghost.

Can a glorified body pass through another body, the way Jesus came into a locked room? Not by its own nature, Aquinas says. Only by a special act of God. Can it shrink and grow at will? No:

“The glorified body will always be in a place equal to itself.”

In other words, it takes up room. It has a size, and it stays that size. Can it move from one place to another in an instant, the way a thought jumps from Paris to the moon? No. Aquinas argues this carefully. A body moving from one spot to another must pass through all the places in between, or it hasn’t really moved. And then:

“So long as it retains the nature of a body, it can in no way be moved instantaneously … Now the glorified body will never lose its corporeity, and therefore it will never be possible for it to be moved instantaneously.”

The saints will be fast, he says, very fast, so fast the time it takes can’t be noticed. But not instant. Even in glory, getting somewhere will take time, however little.

That can sound like hair-splitting. It is actually the most important thing the tradition says about what perfection means. Aquinas was not trying to make the body as free from limits as he could. He was trying to make it as fully a body as he could. A body that could be everywhere at once, that took up no room, that never had to travel, would not be a better body. It would have stopped being a body. And then, by the rule we just saw, it would not be you.

And here is the detail that gives this its warmth. Why would the saints move at all, if they already have God? Aquinas’s answer is almost playful. They will move

“that their vision may be refreshed by the beauty of the variety of creatures, in which God’s wisdom will shine forth with great evidence; for sense can only perceive that which is present.”

The glorified eye, he adds elsewhere, will see much farther and sharper than ours. The glorified nose will pick up “the minutest differences of odours.” But the senses still only work on what is near. So the saints will travel. They will go and look at things. Heaven, on this account, has distance in it, and places worth going to, and trips.

There is even a hint of the old practice-makes-perfect idea here. Aquinas notes that in this life, people who have trained their bodies to obey feel less strain when they move. The glorified body is that, carried to the end: the athlete’s ease, the craftsman’s steady hand, the dancer’s lightness, made permanent. Not freedom from the body. Freedom in it.

He even keeps the wounds, or at least some of them. Would the martyrs carry their scars into glory? Augustine hoped so, and Aquinas quotes him:

“Perhaps indeed we shall see them, for this will not make them less comely, but more glorious. A certain beauty will shine in them, a beauty though in the body, yet not of the body but of virtue.”

A body that is still located, still limited, still takes time to cross a room, and still carries the marks of what it went through. That is the medieval idea of a perfect body. It is not the weightless ghost most of us imagine. It is a person with nothing wrong with them, still standing somewhere in particular.

Which leaves one last question, and it is the biggest. If the perfected body still needs a place, still travels, still needs things near enough to see, then what exactly will it be standing on?

A world built to fit a body

In the common picture, the afterlife means leaving this world for another one. The body stays behind, and so does the earth. Heaven is somewhere else, up and away.

The medieval theologians had no choice but to reject that, once they had committed to the body. If the body comes back, it needs somewhere to be. And not just any somewhere. Aquinas puts the principle in six words:

“The dwelling should befit the dweller.”

So the world itself, on this view, gets remade. Not thrown away and replaced, but renewed, the way the body is. The Bible’s language is “a new heaven and a new earth,” and Aquinas takes it seriously. He even gives a reason from human nature. A human being, the old writers said, is “a little world,” with something of stone and plant and animal and angel in him. Because of that likeness, Aquinas says, a person “loves the whole world naturally and consequently desires its good.” You can’t fully fix a lover of the world without fixing the world too.

What is the renewed world for? The saints will see God directly with their minds. Their eyes can’t see God directly, because God is not a thing with color and shape. So what will their eyes do? Aquinas answers with a comparison from ordinary life, borrowed from Augustine:

“God will be perceived in things seen with the eye of the body, even as life is perceived in speech.”

When you hear a friend talk, you don’t reason your way to the conclusion that your friend is alive. You just see it. The life is right there in the voice. Augustine says we will see God in the bodies of the new world the same way: “as when we see men … we do not believe but see that they live.” The whole physical world, remade, becomes something like a face. You will look at matter and see God in it, the way you look at a person and see that they are alive.

This is the far end of the argument, and it is the exact opposite of where we started. The picture we started with said the best version of you is the version with less body, in a place with no matter. The tradition says the best version of you has your own body back, in a world rebuilt around bodies, where matter itself has become the place you see God.

It would be dishonest not to say that the medieval details of this picture have aged badly. Aquinas believed the heavens were made of crystal spheres that turn around the earth and drive all change below them. When the world is renewed, he thought, the spheres would stop turning, time as we measure it would end, and since nothing would be born or die anymore, the plants and animals would not come back. Only the stars, the elements, and human beings would last. The earth’s surface, he thought, would become “as transparent as glass.” All of that rests on an astronomy nobody holds now, and many later Christian thinkers, reading Paul’s line that “the whole creation groaneth” and waits to be set free, have found Aquinas’s empty, animal-free new earth hard to accept. Even in his own time the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, whom Aquinas calls “Rabbi Moses,” read the Bible’s promises of a new heaven and earth as poetry, and argued the universe was not made for human use at all. Aquinas answered him, but the argument was never really settled.

What survives the outdated physics is the principle under it. The body is not scaffolding to be thrown away once the building is done. It is part of the building. And if the body is part of the building, the world the body lives in is too.

The face, again

Go back to the lecture room in Rome, and the painter at the back, memorizing a face.

Plotinus was not a fool, and he was not a hater of the world. He wrote one of his most passionate works against people who despised the physical universe, and he praised its beauty as a reflection of something higher. He just could not believe that the particular face he walked around in was worth keeping. It was an image of an image. The real Plotinus was elsewhere.

His students disagreed with him in the only way they could. They stole his face. Something in them could not accept that the man they loved was only the mind in the lecture hall and not also the face that said the words.

The Christian thinkers who came after him disagreed with him far more radically. The students wanted a picture of the face. Augustine and Aquinas wanted the face itself, the same one, back, forever, and never taken away again. They believed that the soul that argued in the lecture hall was only part of the man, and that the part in the grave was waiting for it. They believed that when the face came back, it would still take up room, still be somewhere in particular, still take time to cross a room to greet a friend. They believed the world would be rebuilt so that such a face could see God in it.

When we stand at a casket and say, “That’s not really her,” we are speaking Plotinus’s language. We mean it kindly, and in one sense it’s true. But the tradition we usually think we are quoting says something harder. It says that isn’t really her, and neither is the soul that left. She isn’t anywhere, not all of her. She is waiting to be put back together.

And the body in the box, the one we are so quick to call a shell, is the one thing the promise refuses to give up on.