Chapter 89.—But This
Material May Be Differently Arranged in the Resurrection
Body.
And this earthly material, which
when the soul leaves it becomes a corpse, shall not at the
resurrection be so restored as that the parts into which it is
separated, and which under various forms and appearances become
parts of other things (though they shall all return to the same
body from which they were separated), must necessarily return to
the same parts of the body in which they were originally situated.
For otherwise, to suppose that the hair recovers all that our
frequent clippings and shavings have taken away from it, and the
nails all that we have so often pared off, presents to the
imagination such a picture of ugliness and deformity, as to make
the resurrection of the body all but incredible. But just as if a
statue of some soluble metal were either melted by fire, or broken
into dust, or reduced to a shapeless mass,
and a
sculptor wished to restore it from the same quantity of metal, it
would make no difference to the completeness of the work what part
of the statue any given particle of the material was put into, as
long as the restored statue contained all the material of the
original one; so God, the Artificer of marvellous and unspeakable
power, shall with marvellous and unspeakable rapidity restore our
body, using up the whole material of which it originally consisted.
Nor will it affect the completeness of its restoration whether
hairs return to hairs, and nails to nails, or whether the part of
these that had perished be changed into flesh, and called to take
its place in another part of the body, the great Artist taking
careful heed that nothing shall be unbecoming or out of
place.