On the Soul and the Resurrection

When our great brother Basil had completed his earthly course and departed to that life which has no evening, I came to my sister Macrina under the pressure of an overwhelming grief.

§1-3 (¶1)

She was lying not upon a bed or a couch, as the sick usually lie, but upon the floor, on a plank covered with sackcloth, and another plank raised a little served as a pillow to support the neck.

§1-3 (¶2)

She said: Will you weep and groan like the unbelieving? Will you show yourself unacquainted with the reasons which lead those who are wise not to grieve for those who depart this life?

§1-3 (¶3)

I asked her what the soul is. She replied: Among those who have investigated this question, there have been many opinions. Some have said the soul is a harmony of the bodily elements, nothing more than the attunement of…

§4-10 (¶4)

The proof of the soul's incorporeality, she continued, lies precisely in the nature of intellectual activity. Material things interact with material things; matter moves matter by contact and impact.

§4-10 (¶5)

But, I said, if the soul is incorporeal, how is it united to the body? If the soul has no body and the body has no soul independently, what is it that brings them together and keeps them together?

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And what happens, I asked, when the body dies and dissolves into its elements? Does the soul dissolve with it, as the harmony of an instrument dissolves when the instrument is destroyed?

§4-10 (¶7)

The idea that the soul ceases to exist when the body ceases is the great error of the materialists, and it is an error that can be refuted on their own terms.

§4-10 (¶8)

She then turned to the question of the soul's origin. Some, she said, have taught that souls exist before their bodies -- that they are pre-existent intelligences who fall into matter and must find their way back out.

§4-10 (¶9)

And the soul, once created, is immortal. Not immortal by accident, or by some external sustaining power, but immortal by nature -- since it is immaterial, and immaterial things are not subject to the dissolution that…

§4-10 (¶10)

I raised the question of the passions -- the desires and fears and pleasures and griefs that seem so fundamental to human life -- and asked whether they belong to the soul essentially or accidentally; whether they are…

§11-14 (¶11)

The problem is not the passions themselves but their direction. When desire is directed toward what is truly good -- toward God, toward wisdom, toward virtue -- it is the energy of the spiritual life.

§11-14 (¶12)

Consider what happens to anger when it is rightly directed, she continued. Anger is the natural movement of the soul against what threatens to harm it or those it loves.

§11-14 (¶13)

The deified soul -- the soul that has been fully transformed by the grace of God -- does not feel less than the unformed soul; it feels more truly. Its desires are not weaker but purer.

§11-14 (¶14)

How, I asked, will the scattered elements of the body be reassembled at the resurrection? The body dissolves into earth and water and air; animals eat it and are themselves eaten; the elements are dispersed across the…

§15-22 (¶15)

But more than this, she continued: the soul is the key to the resurrection. The soul is not simply one component of the human being that happens to survive while the other component perishes.

§15-22 (¶16)

But will it be the same body? I asked. After death and dissolution and centuries of dispersal, in what sense will the resurrection body be the same as the body that died?

§15-22 (¶17)

The transformation is the crucial word. The resurrection body is not the resuscitation of a corpse. It is not the simple reversal of death, putting back together what death took apart.

§15-22 (¶18)

The model of the resurrection body is the resurrection body of Christ. He rose in the same body that was crucified: the disciples recognized Him; He showed them His wounds; He ate with them; He was not a ghost.

§15-22 (¶19)

I asked about those who have lived wicked lives -- whether their resurrection would be the same as the resurrection of the righteous. She answered: The resurrection is universal.

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For consider what evil is. Evil is not a substance; it is not a thing that God created. Evil is the absence and the privation and the perversion of good.

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This is the hope of the apocatastasis -- the restoration of all things to their proper end in God. I say "hope" rather than "certainty," because I do not know, and the Church does not define, the final fate of those who…

§15-22 (¶22)

As the discourse drew toward its close, I noticed that the day had ended while we were speaking; the light in the room was the light of candles now, not sunlight, and I had not noticed the transition.

§23-26 (¶23)

She said: The investigation of these matters is inexhaustible in this life. We see now as through a glass, darkly; we know in part. What we have said tonight is true as far as it goes, but it does not go as far as the…

§23-26 (¶24)

During the night that followed, she spoke little but prayed much, and the prayers were not petitions but pure praise and thanksgiving -- the praise of one who has seen what is to be praised and the thanksgiving of one…

§23-26 (¶25)

I wrote down everything, as carefully as I could remember it, partly so that the wisdom of my teacher would not be lost, and partly because I could not otherwise honor what had been given to me.

§23-26 (¶26)