lenization positively seeks to bring about/' But whether we know what name to give what we seek or not, the

important thing is to seek openly and to find help wherever we can, in dialogue with our past as well as with the present, for otherwise we risk remaining relatively closed. Hellenism is only one of the things we have to overcome. There is also Cartesianism, Hegelianism, Marxism, Existentialismall the closed conceptual frameworks we have been saddled with. Dehellenizing is not enough, but Plato and Aristotle may be of great help in dehellenizing; and Hegel may be of great help in dehegelianizing and demarxizing our thinking as well. The masters have a way of transcending even their own systems. We cannot give all serious attention to all the masters of the past, but let us begin to give some to one or two of them, even if it be St. Thomas. We have not loved the past too long. Rather we have been infatuated only with our pre-conceived ideas about the past. Let us begin to respect it for what it was in all its originality. In this way we may learn to be original ourselves, for it is only in proportion to our ability to discover the past that we will be inventive in the present and creative for the future. OLIVA BLANCHETTE, S. J.

THE RISEN BODY

The purpose of this Chronicle (which, however undogmatic and tentative, is unlikely to please most readers) is to relate the Resurrection to physical science, as we have already insisted on relating it to history. Is our Lord's risen body still material? How is it linked to the rest of the material universe? Where is it now? These are questions which are bound to occur not merely to any scientist but to any intelligent schoolboy. Are they to have an answer in their own terms, or are we to refuse to descend from our linguistic theological pulpit? I have heard a clergyman saying on the radio that he was not interested in the "mechanics" of the Resurrection. Well and good, but that happens to be precisely the aspect in which thousands of doubtless too mechanically-minded modern men are interested. We are asking them to believe the Easter message. Should it not be at least describable in their own language? The theologian as such does not perceive any difficulty, and loses himself happily in his researches into St. Paul's terminology about the last-day resurrection, sarx, soma, psyche, pneumawould St. Paul have used the same categories to describe the Easter-day happening? In any case his way of using these words is not ours, nor can we try to return to it. For us, a "spiritual body" strictly speaking is a contradiction in terms. When our Lord's body rose reanimated by its soul (if the word "soul" is still allowable) it was not a return to its former mortal life but to a new kind of life altogether, in which the material body, though still fully part of his human nature, was now entirely dominated by the spirit and free 760 / CHRONICLE

from mortality and from all the limitations of materiality and space and time. This makes theological sense, and theologians may think everybody ought to be content with such an account, admittedly somewhat conceptual and negative. Others supplement it by semi-mathematical language centered round the phrase "new dimension," which seems to need a mathematical mind to grasp it, remaining as it does notional and beyond imagination. And yet imagination is needed, if the heart is to be touched by faith. It is chilling, if accurate, to say to the intelligent schoolboy "We can't imagine such things and had better leave them alone." The older theologians did their best, by discussing what they called the four "qualities," quaintly named, of a risen body, especially our Lord's. They are impassibility, glory, agility, and subtility. The first three were perhaps based on a priori considerations, but the fourth was an induction from the circumstances that Christ's body had passed through the stone and the closed doors. It gives us a startingpoint. What is a material body, what is matter, anyway? When I was at school, physics consisted of sound, light and heat, perhaps the laws of gravity, but little more, nor have I enjoyed any scientific discipline since worth mentioning. Physicists now tell us that the criterion for "matter" is tangibility: solids being fully resistant, liquids more yielding, vapors and gases still more, and so on. This reminds me that tangibility was the final proof offered by the risen Christ. He must have known that the sense of touch can be deceived or hallucinated like the other senses, as an expression of that other Thomas, in the Adora Te, reminds us; but presumably it is the most reassuring, perhaps because the very earliest, of our life-experiences. Tangibility means that matter is always in the concrete; if there is any such thing as materia prima no scientists seem to have heard of it. On the other hand, they are overwhelmingly informative about the latest discoveries, not to mention the latest speculations and theories, about the ultimate constitution of matter derived from solid-state physics, or quantum electro-dynamics, vibrational energy, or of the theory of dislocations, or the electro force that binds together the electron and the proton atom of hydrogen. When we get down to what these scientists of 1968 have to say about the basic arrangements in what we call matter, it seems that there are quite a number of what might be regarded as "elementary particles": with names such as electron, proton, muon, neutron, lambda, sigma, or omega resonance, each with its appropriate asterisk letter added. "By their very number," says one scientist, "they forfeit their claim to be considered ultimate constituents of matter." And in fact "we still do not understand the multiplicity of these particles, nor do we have a quantitative theory of their interactions. Perhaps yet another level of discovery awaits us in our search for the constitution of matter." From all this my amateurish conclusion is that the scientists, however deep they delve, never seem able to discover a point where mere energy turns into matter, any more than a point where non-life becomes life. They just go on tracking down ever tinier sub-divisions of matter. I suppose we shall be in order if we add that anything that is possible to a physical 761 / CHRONICLE

scientist is possible also to the creator of the physical universe; in fact, He could not only split up a given assembly of matter into its smallest particles, but would presumably be able to reassemble them just as instantaneously; and this indeed without doing anything which could be called "unnatural" to the nature of matter itself, or "unnatural" in regard to its creator, although more than natural to the human powers even of a thousand Rutherfords andBohrs. The alert reader will have seen what I am leading up to: namely, that what the old theologians call the supernatural gift of "subtility" in Christ's glorified body can be understood, or imagined, much more easily in the context of modern physics. If we affirm (as I think the Church always has meant to affirm) that the risen body was still (and still is) entirely material, and yet living an entirely new kind of life, we have got to have an answer, not necessarily a dogmatic answer but at least a credible theory in their own language to give to scientists or schoolboys when they silently accuse us of religious double-talk. It makes sense to say that since our Lord's risen body was now fully dominated by his returned spirit, there could be no difficulty about its passing through a stone, or through wood; this could be simply a case of deassembling its constituent particles, to pass between the constituent particles of the stone, and reassembling them instantaneously. It is still a miracle if you insist on the word, but a miracle described in the language of science, and therefore not so scandalous to the undeniable, however ephemeral, phenomenon, the "modern mind." F. X. Durrwell in his well-known book, The Resurrection, protests against some "liberal exegetes" who interpret St. Paul's idea of Christ's risen humanity as being "some impersonal power or fluid sprinkled about for the Christian to bathe in." For St. Paul, says Durrwell, Christ's risen body is no immaterial substance: "it always remains in his thought, the physical body of the Savior." Quite so, yet personally, I see no difficulty in imagining that the risen body, being still "matter" not spirit, though now entirely spiritdominated, could de-assemble its material particles and re-assemble them at will. (No doubt it could even spare some to be communicated somehow to every member of the Church, and if the mystics can persuade the Church to favor such a matter-of-fact view, I would not be among the opposition.) There seems to me no reason why we should not go further, and imagine that this de-assembled state would be the normal or usual state of Christ's body, from the moment of the Resurrection onwards, always of course subject to the will of the unmistakably visible and tangible risen Christ we read of in the gospels. All too evidently such a way of imagining things can give rise to irreverent comments and comparisons; but so can any other way of rendering the Resurrection into concrete details. There is another approach which perhaps makes the difficulty stand out more clearly: the approach through locality. Our Lord is now "in heaven," the catechisms tell us. And the next question, not in the catechism but in the mind of every child and teen-ager and philosopher, is: Where is "heaven"? Not a place but a state, one says: the beatific vision. In other words, heaven is nowhere in particular. But when people ask where is heaven, what they 762 / CHRONICLE

mean is where is the risen Lord now. Even glorified bodies must be somewhere, surely. Such was the problem, never fully faced because of the emotional hangover of the Galileo case. In pre-copernican days everything was simple, heaven was as material as the earth, just above us. At first, even after Galileo, Catholics clung to the idea of a local heaven somewhere in the material universe; but this notion was always a dead end, and space-travel has shown up its imaginative weakness. We can picture a material heaven after the last day, but not now. Where then is the risen body? It is not limite! by space of course, but must we say it does not even occupy space? If so, in what sense is it a body, or material? For this post-copernican difficulty, as for the older question which St. Paul was already meeting from his converts at Corinth, it seems to me this modernized rendering of the theological "gift of subtility" provides a sufficient answer. It also has the advantage of bringing home to the man of today (who is no doubt too scientistic-minded, but not unwilling to entertain the notion of God's "supernatural" action if its effects are describable in scientific termiology) what precisely it is that he is being invited to believe. The alternatives, as far as I can see, would be either to abandon the body in the tomb to its death and corruption, or else to affirm for "eschatological" purposes a rather Gnostic-style transformation of matter into spirit; which last (I should have thought) would be equally unacceptable to the materialistic scientist and to the Catholic philosopher. Finally, I can imagine a reader of this Chronicle saying: But after all, if the normal condition of our Lord's risen body was so extremely etherealized, reassembling only for definite occasions, where is the difference between such a risen body and the other kinds such as astral or ectoplasmic, or divinelysent visions? Well, the difference is that the one is really Resurrection, and the others are not. Resurrection is what our Lord himself promised, Resurrection is what men need to have faith in to reassure them, against the worst that sin and death can do, that there is indeed a God of justice and love; and therefore Resurrection is what God has done for us in the person of his Christ. After all, if you are talking about sign-value, it was that body in the tomb that redeemed us. Resurrection is what the Church has always believed and proclaimed. It seems that nothing else would do. The point was put well by Fr. Martin C. D'Arcy in an article published on Easter day, 1966: "The truth of Christianity rests on the fact of the resurrection. If Christ be not risen, as St. Paul wrote, our faith is in vain. Those who assume that genuine Christianity can by-pass this fact or omit it are like those simple folk in China who used to swallow the paper prescription of the doctor, taking it to work like the real medicine. They may have a private religion of their own, but it is not Christianity." F. H. DRINKWATER

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