Raising the body as it was when it died

The first of these accounts is this:

• RB1 (=Resurrection Body 1) A person's resurrected body will consist of all and only those bits of matter of which that person's body was composed at the point of death.

This account was very popular with the Church Fathers,Footnote ²⁰ and was still being endorsed in early modern times by English divines like William Lupton,Footnote ²¹ John Pearson,Footnote ²² and William Wilson.Footnote ²³ Proponents of this account, including all three aforementioned divines, often cited certain passages of scripture in support of it, for instance Matthew 27.52–53 and John 5.28, which refer to the dead rising from their graves, and Revelation 20.13, which refers to the sea giving up its dead. The interpretation of these passages favoured by Lupton, Pearson, and Wilson was that it is the body as it was when it died which is to be brought back, such that the resurrected body of each individual is mathematically or numerically identical with that individual's body as it was when the individual died.Footnote ²⁴

No doubt satisfied by what were perceived to be its solid scriptural credentials, proponents of RB1 generally did not attempt to make a philosophical case for their chosen view, though it is easy to see how they could have done. After all, RB1 entails that there will be material continuity (that is, continuity of constituent materials) between resurrection and pre-resurrection bodies, and such continuity is often considered sufficient to ground claims of identity. For instance, a watch which is disassembled and its parts scattered about a workshop may, it is often said, be the very same watch once again if its parts are gathered together again and arranged as they were prior to its disassembly.Footnote ²⁵ As Lupton, Pearson, and Wilson envisage the same thing occurring with human bodies at the resurrection, it seems they have a prima facie defensible conception of how resurrection and pre-resurrection bodies can be deemed the same.

Despite the aforementioned advantages, RB1 did not find favour with many early modern thinkers and was subjected to a variety of objections. For instance, Samuel Bold wrote:

To the best of my knowledge, no adherent of RB1 ever formulated a response to this epistemological objection. But then it is doubtful that they would need to, since the objection is applicable to many other definitions of ‘same body’, as will become clear over the course of the paper.

A much greater worry for adherents of RB1 came in the form of the cannibal problem. Samuel Drew suggested that RB1 is ill-equipped to tackle the cannibal problem because for all to be resurrected with the same body as defined by RB1, it would have to be the case that no-one dies while containing any matter from the body of another person, a scenario apparently ruled out by the exploits of cannibals.Footnote ²⁷ So how did adherents of RB1 respond to the cannibal problem? The short answer is: they didn't. For instance, William Lupton did not mention the cannibal problem at all in his sermon on the resurrection. Nor did John Pearson in his lengthy discussion of the same subject. And William Wilson states very firmly in his large treatise on the resurrection that he will ‘not examine those curious Questions, with which vain Men endeavour to perplex this Doctrine’.Footnote ²⁸ It would be rash to speculate on the motives behind Lupton's, Pearson's, and Wilson's decision not to address the cannibal problem, but had they attempted to do so it is likely they would have quickly realized how little room for manoeuvre was afforded them by their endorsement of RB1. Indeed, in order to show that it is possible for all to be resurrected with the same body as defined by RB1, Lupton, Pearson, and Wilson would need to show that no two human bodies will contain the same bit of matter at their respective times of death.

Interestingly, the early modern period was awash with theories that could serve to do just this. For instance, John Edwards, Anthony Fleury, and Bernard Nieuwentijt suggested that there was no proof that human flesh is actually assimilable by other humans.Footnote ²⁹ François Feller went one step further and argued that human flesh is not assimilable by its very nature,Footnote ³⁰ while Hugo Grotius and Robert D'Oyly claimed that it is not assimilable because of God's intervention, i.e. whenever one person is eaten by another, God intervenes to ensure that no part of the former's body ever becomes part of the latter's.Footnote ³¹ Another alternative was put forward by Humphrey Hody, who claimed that while human flesh is assimilable, in the event that parts of one person's body found their way into the body of another, God would intervene to ensure that the latter did not die until the parts of the eaten person had passed out of the system of the cannibal.Footnote ³² The adoption of one or other of these theories may have enabled adherents of RB1 to neutralize the cannibal problem, though arguably the extra baggage would not have made RB1 more plausible to most early modern thinkers, especially given the relatively widespread belief that human flesh is assimilable by other humans.

Stillingfleet's ‘true and real parts’

It is notable that while belief in ‘the resurrection of the same body’ was almost unanimous in early modern times, most of those who expressed an opinion on the matter flatly denied RB1, and it is no less notable that those who did deny RB1 generally did so with one eye on the cannibal problem, the force of which seems to have convinced numerous thinkers that humans are not necessarily resurrected with numerically the same bits of matter their bodies had at the point of death. The following interpretation of ‘the resurrection of the same body’ is a case in point; found in the work of Edward Stillingfleet, that erstwhile disputant of Locke, it was developed with the threat of the cannibal problem very much in mind. Stillingfleet claims that:

The moral Stillingfleet draws from this is that as long as a person's resurrection body is composed of bits of matter that were at one time or another parts of that person's body during normal life (i.e. were ‘true and real parts’ of that person's body), then that person can be said to be resurrected with the same body. He offers two examples to bolster his case; one involves a victim of cannibalism, the other ‘a corpulent Man’ who dies anything but corpulent, having fallen victim to consumption. In the case of the cannibal victim, Stillingfleet supposes that the parts eaten by the cannibal will not be returned to the victim, but that this will not result in any deficiency in the victim's resurrection body because the missing parts will be made up with bits of matter which were part of the victim's body before the cannibal struck. In the case of the consumption victim, Stillingfleet suggests that it is not unreasonable to suppose that he will be resurrected with all the parts his body had just before the consumption really took hold. In both cases, Stillingfleet thinks that the resurrection bodies will be considered the same as the ones the two individuals had during normal life. Stillingfleet's view thus amounts to this:

• RB2 A person's resurrected body will consist of bits of matter which were parts of that person's body at some point during normal life.

Although it is not explicit, in formulating RB2, Stillingfleet seems to ground the identity of resurrection and pre-resurrection bodies on the fact that there is material continuity between the two, in that the former only consists of bits of matter which were once part of the latter.

Yet such a manoeuvre did not convince Samuel Drew, who argued that RB2 contains at least one barely concealed absurdity, which is that ‘there may be as many distinct identities, as there are parts which are capable of constituting them’. Drew's point, which is scarcely clear from this brief summary, draws its force from the fact that, during normal life, a person's body is composed of different bits of matter at different times. This means that there will be a relatively large quantity of matter which, on RB2, will qualify as ‘true and real parts’ of that person's body. Drew then supposes that God fashions a person's resurrection body by indiscriminately selecting from the bits of matter which once formed part of that person's body; according to RB2, the resultant resurrection body will be the same as the one that person had during normal life. Drew then points out that the bits of matter ‘inhering in the body … when it dropped into the grave, will have the same right’, i.e. will also have the right, according to RB2, to be deemed ‘the same body’ as that person had during normal life. The upshot, writes Drew, is that ‘This second number may also constitute another identity of the same body, and we shall then have two identities of the same body, which is an absurdity that surpasses, if possible, a palpable contradiction.’Footnote ³⁴ According to Drew, however, the situation is even worse than that; instead of licensing two ‘identities of the same body’, RB2 licenses a countless number, since there are countless possible arrangements of ‘true and real parts’ of a person's body, each of which will give rise to ‘the same body’. Drew thus offers what he takes to be a reductio of RB2, namely that it allows different bits of matter in different arrangements to be termed the same.

The body raised as it was in any period of life

A variation of RB2 is to be found in other thinkers, such as Samuel Chandler, who writes:

Chandler here supposes that a person's resurrected body will feature the very same bits of matter that together composed her body at some particular point during life. So, on Chandler's view, a person may be resurrected with the very same bits of matter her body had at the age of twenty, or at thirty, or at any other age. We can summarize Chandler's view as follows:

• RB3 A person's resurrected body will consist of all and only those bits of matter which together composed that person's body at some point during that person's life.

In advancing RB3, Chandler presumably intends to secure the identity of a person's resurrection body and pre-resurrection body on the fact that there will be material continuity between them (or rather, continuity between the resurrection body, and the pre-resurrection body as it was at one particular time). Moreover, RB3 is framed in such a way as to defend the possibility of a universal resurrection against the cannibal problem. For RB3 allows victims of cannibalism to be resurrected with the matter their bodies had prior to being eaten, and/or cannibals to be resurrected with the matter their bodies had prior to becoming cannibals. So no-one need go short at the resurrection; cannibals and victims alike may be resurrected with the same body (as defined by RB3), together with everyone else.

Given its apparent success in resolving the cannibal problem, it is perhaps surprising that RB3 was not advanced more often. Its apparent lack of popularity cannot be traced to any critical onslaught it received either, as no such onslaught occurred. To a large extent this may have been due to the relative obscurity of the works in which it appeared. For instance, we can only assume that in framing his objection to RB2, Samuel Bold was unaware of RB3, because his objection surely applies to the latter as well as the former. For it seems clear enough that God could, if He so desired, resurrect the body of a person as it was at the age of ten, or at the age of twenty, or at the age of thirty and so on, each of which would have an equal right to be deemed ‘the same body’, according to RB3, despite each differing in terms of material content and arrangement. And as this is precisely the corollary Bold found so absurd with RB2, it is safe to suppose that he would have had no greater sympathy toward RB3, had he known of it.

The introduction of new matter

Another suggestion touted in the early modern period of how to understand the ‘resurrection of the same body’ can be found in the writings of Winch Holdsworth, who outlines his view as follows:

But why would God, when fashioning a person's resurrection body, bring together some materials which were formerly part of that person's body, and add to them some other materials that never were? An answer can be found in the work of another proponent of Holdsworth's view, John Edwards:

Both Edwards and Holdsworth appear to hold that God will seek to resurrect each body with the same numerical bits of matter it had when it died,Footnote ³⁸ but the fact that this will not be possible in some cases – specifically those in which there is a problem of ownership thanks to the exploits of anthropophagi – seems to have been in no small way responsible for them formulating their conception of ‘the same body’ which allows for the introduction of new matter where necessary. The suggestion put forward by both Edwards and Holdsworth can be summarized as follows:

• RB4 A person's resurrected body will consist of all and only those bits of matter of which that person's body was composed at the point of death, or, if this is not possible, then it will consist of as many such bits of matter as are available, together with some new bits of matter which were previously not part of that person's body at all.

But why should it be thought that cannibals are resurrected with the same bodies, given that their resurrection bodies consist of some of the matter possessed by their bodies at the time of death along with some matter which had never before been part of them? Holdsworth explains that, in normal life, human bodies are subject to a constant ebb and flow of materials – some bits of matter are added, while other bits are lost – without it ever ceasing to be the case that each body is the same. In Holdsworth's view, it follows from this that the introduction of new matter does not deleteriously affect the diachronic identity of a human body, and so God can introduce new matter to a person's resurrection body without thereby destroying its identity. Many early modern thinkers were generally sympathetic to the first part of this argument, namely that the introduction of new matter does not deleteriously affect the diachronic identity of a human body during normal life, but concerns were raised over the second part.

Robert D'Oyly, for instance, argued that the introduction of ‘foreign matter’ into a person's resurrection body would undercut the core idea that what is brought back in the resurrection is something that was once alive: ‘nothing can be said to be Dead but what once had Life, and is now deprived of it; which cannot, without the most palpable Falshood, be said, either of the Soul, or a Body consisting of foreign Matter’.Footnote ³⁹ To seal his critique, D'Oyly claimed that RB4 also undermines the broader notion that resurrection involves a bringing back of something that existed before: ‘the proper Notion of a Resurrection as here understood imports only the recovery, or raising again of a Body corrupted, into its former State’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Implicit here is the requirement that, to qualify as a resurrection at all, it must be the same body that is returned; D'Oyly also assumes that any resurrection body incorporating ‘foreign matter’ does not qualify as ‘the same’. So if, as licensed by RB4, a cannibal's resurrection body includes some ‘foreign matter’, then, according to D'Oyly, it cannot be ‘the same body’ and hence cannot be said to have been resurrected at all.

Seeds and cores

The inclusion of foreign matter in a resurrection body was also endorsed by, or at least permitted by, our fifth response to the question of how humans retain the same bodies in the resurrection. Very popular in the early modern period, this response borrows heavily, as many of its proponents acknowledged, from 1 Corinthians 15. There, St Paul notes that, in the case of wheat, what is sown is not wheat itself but rather a seed, with God giving a body to every seed. The vague analogy that many saw here between human bodies and wheat was subsequently enriched by a doctrine drawn from seventeenth-century alchemy, namely that the seed of a plant lives on even when the rest of the plant dies, and is in fact indestructible (proved, it was often thought, by the fact that a plant burned to ashes later grows again).Footnote ⁴¹

The combination of St Paul and alchemical thinking gave rise to the view that every human body has an ‘essential’ seed or core which remains with it throughout the whole of its life and stays intact after death. Moreover, the durable core was thought to be the source of a body's identity, such that irrespective of whichever ‘accidental’ bits of matter it happened to be joined at any given time, the resulting body was always the same one (as any and all changes that a body underwent were merely to its accidental features, not to the essential core). According to this theory, then, all God needs to do to bring everyone back with the same body is locate the essential core of each body and build it back up with whatever bits of matter he likes. This view can be summed up as follows:

• RB5 A person's resurrected body will consist of some kind of essential core, which remains numerically the same core that person's body had during life, together with other bits of matter of which the latter may or may not have been composed during life.

But what, we might ask, is this ‘essential’ core? To this question we find a bewildering variety of answers. Robert Boyle famously identified the bones as being the obvious candidate, partly on account of a passage from Ezekiel (37.7–8) which tells of the bones of the dead being raised up and furnished with new sinews (which Boyle took to mean skin, nerves, tendons, and ligaments),Footnote ⁴² and partly because his own experiments had shown that human bones were ‘of a stable and lasting texture’, and ‘not apt to be destroyed by the operation either of earth or fire’.Footnote ⁴³ Despite Boyle's status, his view was not without its critics. Even John Tillotson, an Anglican archbishop and therefore presumably not in the same league as Boyle on scientific matters, was aware that the bones are not stable features of the human body ‘because they grow, and whatever grows is nourish'd and spends’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This fact was clearly unknown to Humphrey Hody who identified, like Boyle, the bones as ‘integrant and necessary Parts’, but to them added ‘the Skin, the Nerves, the Tendons, the Ligaments, and the Substance of the several Vessels’.Footnote ⁴⁵ According to Hody, as long as these remained, then a body was truly whole, and could be built up again with new material while still retaining its identity.

But these were not the only suggestions as to what constitutes the essential core of the body. Both Bernard Nieuwentijt and Charles Drelincourt suggested that it is the bones and nerves,Footnote ⁴⁶ while Henry Felton opted for the ‘Solid parts, the Substratum, that supports the Accidents’,Footnote ⁴⁷ (though what exactly that is he did not say). Samuel Johnson, whose forays into philosophy apparently extended beyond kicking stones in an attempt to refute Berkeley, claimed that in every human body there is ‘a certain Stamen, a Root, a Principle, or Seed of Life’,Footnote ⁴⁸ and the survival of this guaranteed the identity of the body. Johnson, however, neglected to mention which part of the human body qualified as this vital ‘stamen’. And in this he was not alone. Samuel Drew refused to be drawn on ‘the dimensions, the texture, the configuration, and the place of residence’ of what he termed the body's ‘immovable matter’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The naturalist Joseph Priestley spoke of an essential ‘stamina’ or ‘germ’,Footnote ⁵⁰ a view he cheerfully admitted he had lifted from the philosopher Isaac Watts, who had in fact been a bit more forthcoming in arguing that the core of the body is its ‘essential and constituent Tubes, Fibres or staminal Particles’ which were to be found especially in the bowels and bones.Footnote ⁵¹

Although proponents of RB5 disagreed on which part(s) of the body qualified as its essential core, most were of the view that it was indigestible, i.e. not assimilable into other human bodies (which thus neutralized the threat posed by the cannibal problem) and/or indestructible,Footnote ⁵² though supporting evidence for this claim was typically not provided. Yet the lack of evidence for the oft-claimed indigestibility/indestructibility of the body's essential core was not the biggest concern among critics of RB5, which instead focused on the broad suggestion that the identity of a person's resurrected body is secured by the recovery of its essential core to which other bits of matter can then be added. ‘For this is not to assert’, wrote William Wilson, ‘a Resurrection of the same Body, but only of some small part of it’.Footnote ⁵³

Locke made a similar point: if the identity of human bodies is secured by the identity of some kind of ‘seminal part’ contained within them, then this seminal part alone must be judged the same thing as the seminal part joined to one other particle of matter, or a thousand, or a million. Thus on this view, Locke notes, ‘a Body may be enlarged by the addition of a Hundred or a Thousand times as much bulk as its own matter, and yet continue the same Body, which I confess, I cannot understand’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Even Humphrey Hody, a proponent of RB5, saw this fault in versions of the essential-core doctrine other than his own; after outlining Boyle's claim that the bones alone were essential for bodily resurrection, Hody wrote: ‘This is not to defend the Doctrine of the Resurrection, but to give it up to it's Adversaries, and to advance another Doctrine instead of it. For it is not true that a Body so made up, may be call'd the same with that which died.’Footnote ⁵⁵

The flower of substance and ‘little ethereal machine’

The idea of an indestructible essential core also appeared under a different guise in the early modern period, in the youthful writings of Leibniz. He too argued that the body contains a seminal part or core, which he dubbed its ‘flower of substance’:

To get a better understanding of Leibniz's doctrine it is helpful to note at the outset that he conceives the majority of matter in a human body as a sort of common or rude ‘stuff’ through which runs the animal spirits. The animal spirits were considered by many in early modern times to be the soul's instrument or agent in the body, and although intermediary between incorporeal soul and corporeal body they are themselves very much corporeal, consisting of a subtle form of matter, akin to a thin fluid, which originate in the brain and circulate through the nerves of the body. This is Leibniz's view also, though he makes the further claim that within the spirits lies ‘a subtler part’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This ‘subtler part’ is the flower of substance. If the spirits are a subtle form of matter, like a thin fluid, then the even more subtle flower of substance is perhaps best conceived as a kind of smoke or vapour running throughout them.

Now according to Leibniz, the flower of substance serves as the seat of a person's soul. In fact it is ‘substantially united’ to a person's soul,Footnote ⁵⁸ which itself exists in a mathematical point possessing location but no extension.Footnote ⁵⁹ During life, this point is to be found in ‘the very centre of the brain’,Footnote ⁶⁰ although a person's flower of substance is not restricted to this point but instead ‘diffuses itself’ throughout the remaining matter of that person's body.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet despite being corporeal and spread throughout the body, the flower of substance is all of a piece, that is, it exists as a single unified thing incapable of being divided but capable of contracting itself back into its originating point, which, according to Leibniz, is what it does when a person dies. When this happens the flower of substance will persist unharmed, its indestructibility being secured by the fact that it is located in an indivisible point, which makes it impervious to fire (‘For who will be able to burn a point?’),Footnote ⁶² the activities of cannibals (it ‘cannot be diminished by teeth, or dissolved by the acid of the stomach, nor likewise can it be converted into nourishment’),Footnote ⁶³ and anything else that can be thrown at it. So every other part of the body may decay, be eaten, or be destroyed in some other way, but the flower of substance will persist until the time of the resurrection, when it will suddenly be in a position to diffuse itself through a greater quantity of matter once again.

Key to this theory is Leibniz's belief that the soul contains a kind of blueprint of the body within it: ‘the … unity of the body comes from the mind … the idea or essence or the body – namely of this body … survives in the mind’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Consequently, whenever the soul's instrument, the flower of substance, is diffused through a quantity of matter, irrespective of how large or small this quantity may be, it diffuses its identity to it as well. Hence the body a person has at birth is, on this theory, the same as the one that person has at adulthood, old age, death, and at the resurrection, the identity being secured on the continuity of the only essential material part, the flower of substance. Leibniz's idea can be summarized as follows:

• RB6 A person's resurrected body will consist of a ‘flower of substance’, which is a subtle form of matter into which the person's soul is permanently implanted, and which remains numerically the same ‘flower of substance’ that person's body had during life, together with a quantity of other matter through which the aforementioned flower of substance is diffused.

Christia Mercer claims that Leibniz's doctrine of a flower of substance is ‘enormously clever’ for its ability to explain how a human body is able to remain the same while undergoing considerable changes.Footnote ⁶⁵ It is difficult to disagree with this assessment, and its apparent cleverness no doubt explains why different versions of the doctrine were put forward by other thinkers. Samuel Clarke, for instance, independently advanced a remarkably similar theory, albeit much more tentatively and with much less detail.Footnote ⁶⁶ More notably, from a historical standpoint, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Charles Bonnet, inspired by Leibniz, claimed that the germ of the body and seat of the soul is an indestructible ‘little ethereal machine’ located in the human brain,Footnote ⁶⁷ and that ‘the resurrection will be nothing but the prodigiously accelerated development of this germ, presently sealed within the corpus callosum’.Footnote ⁶⁸ And in the Jewish midrashic tradition we find the doctrine of the luz bone, which holds that the resurrection is to be effected from a small almond-shaped bone residing at the base of the spine (or nape of the neck, according to some), which is the seat of the soul.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to the seventeenth-century rabbi, Menasseh Ben Israel, ‘in the spine there is a particular small bone which is never destroyed; from that small bone alone, after the destruction and annihilation of the other parts of the body, man is restored and brought back’.Footnote ⁷⁰

The parallels between the luz bone and Leibniz's flower of substance are many: both are considered to be the seat of the soul, and both are considered to be indestructible (Menasseh relates the story, found in numerous Jewish commentators, of the failure of Emperor Hadrian's attempts to destroy a luz bone by grinding it, burning it, immersing it in water, and finally striking it with a hammer on an anvil).Footnote ⁷¹ Common to all such theories, however, is the problem of maintaining the indestructibility of whatever part of the body is identified as being the seat of the soul in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary. Léonard Euler, for instance, noted that the head did not seem to offer much protection to the ‘little ethereal machine’ Bonnet located in the brain, as a blow to the head can lead to memory loss and other psychological problems.Footnote ⁷² If such damage could occur at a time when the germinal organ was supposedly protected by the rest of the brain and the skull, there seemed to be slim grounds for thinking that it would be resistant to damage or destruction when such protection was lacking, as it would be after death. Arguably the same concern looms over other versions of the doctrine behind RB6, such as the luz bone and Leibniz's flower of substance.

Scholasticism

Leibniz's doctrine was of course heavily indebted to the Scholastic tradition of which he was arguably a part. A more typical proponent of the Scholastic view was Kenelm Digby, who endorsed the Scholastic conception of substances as a combination of substantial form and matter. Of the latter he had this to say: ‘Matter considered singly by it selfe, hath no distinction: All matter is in it selfe the same; we must fansie it, as we doe the indigested Chaos, It is an uniformely wild Ocean.’Footnote ⁷³ So according to Digby, in itself it makes no sense to speak of a bit of matter retaining its identity over time, because matter is by its very nature undifferentiated. In the idiom of the Schools it is just pure potentiality, and only exists insofar as it is organized by a form. As Digby explains, a physical body can only be said to retain its identity if the substantial form which organizes it remains the same: ‘that which giveth the numerical individuation to a Body, is the substantiall forme. As long as that remaineth the same, though the matter be in a continuall fluxe and motion, yet the thing is still the same.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Human bodies are no exception. For the Scholastics, the substantial form of a human body is the soul, which remains numerically the same soul throughout a person's life and even afterwards, because the soul continues to exist after death, albeit in a disembodied state. When God brings about the resurrection, the soul is once more joined to a quantity of undifferentiated matter which at that point becomes the resurrected body of the person in question. And since that person's soul has remained the same, and since only substances or (in the case of humans) their substantial forms can be said to retain identity, the matter organized by that person's soul in her resurrection body is therefore by definition the same matter organized by her soul during her normal life. Thus, her resurrection and pre-resurrection bodies will be the same. Digby nicely illustrates this as follows:

Thus, Digby's view amounts to this:

• RB7 A person's resurrected body will consist of a quantity of undifferentiated matter organized by that person's soul (substantial form).

Contemporary commentators are split on whether RB7 resolves the difficulty of how individuals are raised with the same body. While Caroline Walker Bynum calls it ‘an elegant solution’,Footnote ⁷⁶ Udo Thiel claims that ‘[a]lthough authors like Digby subscribe to the doctrine of the sameness of the resurrection-body, their position is really a thinly veiled version of the view that the identity of the body is not required for the restoration of the same self at the resurrection.’Footnote ⁷⁷ I think such a gloss fails to capture the subtlety of Digby's position, and in doing so it reveals just how alien Digby's views are to the modern mind, especially on the issue of matter being undifferentiated in itself.

Despite the apparent success of the Scholastic account in being able to explain what it means to be resurrected with the same body, it is interesting to note that it has not been historically popular, even among those who devised it! Many Scholastics were instead in favour of view expressed by RB1,Footnote ⁷⁸ despite the problems involved with that. Their reluctance to endorse RB7, which their metaphysics would seem to demand, may in part be due to their adherence to the principle that a privatione ad habitum non dari regressum [there is no return from privation to possession], the upshot of which is that, pace Digby, reintroducing the same substantial form into a quantity of undifferentiated matter does not automatically bring about numerically the same thing; for that to occur, the thing has to go through the same process of generation and corruption it did the first time around. Leibniz notes that their loyalty to the aforementioned principle made it difficult for the Scholastics to grasp how the same flesh can be returned in the resurrection (which is supposed to be an instantaneous rather than lengthy process),Footnote ⁷⁹ while more unsympathetic opponents, like the Cathars, argued that it ruled out the possibility of resurrection altogether.Footnote ⁸⁰

Such concerns with the principle that a privatione ad habitum non dari regressum were not, however, responsible for RB7's lack of popularity in the early modern period. For many early modern thinkers the problem lay not with that principle, but with the acceptability of RB7's metaphysical underpinnings. The philosophical credibility of hylomorphism, that is, the doctrine that things are composed of matter and form, was severely eroded with the advent of the mechanistic worldview ushered in by Galileo and Descartes. Crucial to the mechanical philosophy was the rejection of substantial forms, and a reconceptualization of matter as extension (that is, something which occupies space) rather than pure potentiality. Considered to have great explanatory success, the mechanical philosophy became so firmly embedded that, for many, it was difficult to see what grounds there could be for repopulating the world with substantial forms, even if doing so would allow for elegant solutions to otherwise thorny philosophical problems.

Descartes

And it is to a proponent of the mechanical philosophy – Descartes – that we now turn for our final attempt to explain how humans can be said to retain the same body. Perhaps surprisingly, Descartes' view is in essence very similar to that advanced by Scholastics such as Digby, though arguably it ought not to have been. On the question of the identity of material things, Descartes offers an unambiguous answer:

So for a material thing to retain its identity, it must continue to be composed of the very same matter in the very same arrangement. But according to Descartes, such a criterion is not applicable in the case of a human body:

Although the above remarks are made in the context of the Eucharist rather than the resurrection, they undoubtedly commit Descartes to the following position on the latter:

• RB8 A person's resurrected body will consist of the same soul united to a quantity of matter.

This is a fair extrapolation from Descartes' view that sameness of soul guarantees sameness of body, for such a principle leaves no scope for Descartes to adopt any position on the identity of the resurrection body bar RB8. Its similarity to the Scholastic view, encapsulated in RB7, is clear enough, though given Descartes' understanding of matter as extension rather than potentiality, and the fact that he has a clear criterion of identity for material things in general, his claim that sameness of a human body hinges on the sameness of its soul has more of an ad hoc feel to it. Nevertheless, RB8 is obviously immune to the cannibal problem, as for Descartes it will make no difference what (or even how much) matter is united to a soul to form a person's resurrection body; so long as the soul is the same, the body will be so too. As such, there are no grounds for disputes over ownership of bodily matter.

The ability to sidestep the cannibal problem did not, however, immunize RB8 against critical attack. Menasseh Ben Israel, for instance, objected: ‘But this opinion is completely absurd, because on this view there would be no resurrection, but only a transmigration of souls into new and different bodies.’Footnote ⁸³ Implicit here is the assumption that the identity of human bodies is determined independently of whether they are united to this or that soul or any soul at all. This assumption was shared by many in the early modern period, and ironically it was the undermining of Scholasticism by the mechanical philosophy, of which Descartes was a key figure, that helped to make this so. Nevertheless, by making this assumption, which Descartes did not share, Menasseh reveals himself to be operating from an entirely different philosophical perspective, and one more in accord with modern intuitions than arguably Descartes was.