On the Resurrection of the Flesh.
Chapter 45. The Old Man and the New Man of St. Paul Explained
But in their blindness they again impale themselves on the point of the old and the new man. When the apostle enjoins us “to put off the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; and to be renewed in the spirit of our mind; and to put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness,” (they maintain) that by here also making a distinction between the two substances, and applying the old one to the flesh and the new one to the spirit, he ascribes to the old man—that is to say, the flesh—a permanent corruption.
Now, if you follow the order of the substances, the soul cannot be the new man because it comes the later of the two; nor can the flesh be the old man because it is the former. For what fraction of time was it that intervened between the creative hand of God and His afflatus? I will venture to say, that even if the soul was a good deal prior to the flesh, by the very circumstance that the soul had to wait to be itself completed, it made the other really the former. For everything which gives the finishing stroke and perfection to a work, although it is subsequent in its mere order, yet has the priority in its effect. Much more is that prior, without which preceding things could have no existence.
If the flesh be the old man, when did it become so? From the beginning? But Adam was wholly a new man, and of that new man there could be no part an old man. And from that time, ever since the blessing which was pronounced upon man’s generation, the flesh and the soul have had a simultaneous birth, without any calculable difference in time; so that the two have been even generated together in the womb, as we have shown in our Treatise on the Soul. Contemporaneous in the womb, they are also temporally identical in their birth. The two are no doubt produced by human parents of two substances, but not at two different periods; rather they are so entirely one, that neither is before the other in point of time. It is more correct (to say), that we are either entirely the old man or entirely the new, for we cannot tell how we can possibly be anything else. But the apostle mentions a very clear mark of the old man. For “put off,” says he, “concerning the former conversation, the old man;” (he does) not say concerning the seniority of either substance. It is not indeed the flesh which he bids us to put off, but the works which he in another passage shows to be “works of the flesh.” He brings no accusation against men’s bodies, of which he even writes as follows:
“Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor: for we are members one of another. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: neither give place to the devil. Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands (the thing which is good), that he may have to give to him that needeth. Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good for the edification of faith, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.
And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: but be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ hath forgiven you.” Why, therefore, do not those who suppose the flesh to be the old man, hasten their own death, in order that by laying aside the old man they may satisfy the apostle’s precepts? As for ourselves, we believe that the whole of faith is to be administered in the flesh, nay more, by the flesh, which has both a mouth for the utterance of all holy words, and a tongue to refrain from blasphemy, and a heart to avoid all irritation, and hands to labour and to give; while we also maintain that as well the old man as the new has relation to the difference of moral conduct, and not to any discrepancy of nature. And just as we acknowledge that that which according to its former conversation was “the old man” was also corrupt, and received its very name in accordance with “its deceitful lusts,” so also (do we hold) that it is “the old man in reference to its former conversation,” and not in respect of the flesh through any permanent dissolution. Moreover, it is still unimpaired in the flesh, and identical in that nature, even when it has become “the new man;” since it is of its sinful course of life, and not of its corporeal substance, that it has been divested.
Chapter XLVI.—It is the Works of the Flesh, Not the Substance of the Flesh, Which St. Paul Always Condemns.
You may notice that the apostle everywhere condemns the works of the flesh in such a way as to appear to condemn the flesh; but no one can suppose him to have any such view as this, since he goes on to suggest another sense, even though somewhat resembling it. For when he actually declares that “they who are in the flesh cannot please God,” he immediately recalls the statement from an heretical sense to a sound one, by adding, “But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit.” Now, by denying them to be in the flesh who yet obviously were in the flesh, he showed that they were not living amidst the works of the flesh, and therefore that they who could not please God were not those who were in the flesh, but only those who were living after the flesh; whereas they pleased God, who, although existing in the flesh, were yet walking after the Spirit. And, again, he says that “the body is dead;” but it is “because of sin,” even as “the Spirit is life because of righteousness.”
When, however, he thus sets life in opposition to the death which is constituted in the flesh, he unquestionably promises the life of righteousness to the same state for which he determined the death of sin. But unmeaning is this opposition which he makes between the “life” and the “death,” if the life is not there where that very thing is to which he opposes it—even the death which is to be extirpated of course from the body. Now, if life thus extirpates death from the body, it can accomplish this only by penetrating thither where that is which it is excluding. But why am I resorting to knotty arguments, when the apostle treats the subject with perfect plainness? “For if,” says he, “the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Jesus from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies, because of His Spirit that dwelleth in you;” so that even if a person were to assume that the soul is “the mortal body,” he would (since he cannot possibly deny that the flesh is this also) be constrained to acknowledge a restoration even of the flesh, in consequence of its participation in the selfsame state.
From the following words, moreover, you may learn that it is the works of the flesh which are condemned, and not the flesh itself: “Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh: for if ye live after the flesh ye shall die; but if ye, through the Spirit, do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” Now (that I may answer each point separately), since salvation is promised to those who are living in the flesh, but walking after the Spirit, it is no longer the flesh which is an adversary to salvation, but the working of the flesh. When, however, this operativeness of the flesh is done away with, which is the cause of death, the flesh is shown to be safe, since it is freed from the cause of death. “For the law,” says he, “of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death,” —that, surely, which he previously mentioned as dwelling in our members.
Our members, therefore, will no longer be subject to the law of death, because they cease to serve that of sin, from both which they have been set free. “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and through sin condemned sin in the flesh,” —not the flesh in sin, for the house is not to be condemned with its inhabitant. He said, indeed, that “sin dwelleth in our body.” But the condemnation of sin is the acquittal of the flesh, just as its non-condemnation subjugates it to the law of sin and death. In like manner, he called “the carnal mind” first “death,” and afterwards “enmity against God;” but he never predicated this of the flesh itself. But to what then, you will say, must the carnal mind be ascribed, if it be not to the carnal substance itself? I will allow your objection, if you will prove to me that the flesh has any discernment of its own. If, however, it has no conception of anything without the soul, you must understand that the carnal mind must be referred to the soul, although ascribed sometimes to the flesh, on the ground that it is ministered to for the flesh and through the flesh. And therefore (the apostle) says that “sin dwelleth in the flesh,” because the soul by which sin is provoked has its temporary lodging in the flesh, which is doomed indeed to death, not however on its own account, but on account of sin. For he says in another passage also: “How is it that you conduct yourselves as if you were even now living in the world?” where he is not writing to dead persons, but to those who ought to have ceased to live after the ways of the world.