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Some Christians, who have a liking for Plato on account of his
magnificent style and the truths which he now and then uttered, say
that he even held an opinion similar to our own regarding the
resurrection of the dead. Cicero, however, alluding to this in his
Republic, asserts that Plato meant it rather as a playful fancy than
as a reality; for he introduces a man who had come to life again, and
gave a narrative of his experience in corroboration of the doctrines of
Plato. Labeo, too, says that two men died on one day, and met at a
cross-road, and that, being afterwards ordered to return to their
bodies, they agreed to be friends for life, and were so till they died
again. But the resurrection which these writers instance resembles
that of those persons whom we have ourselves known to rise again, and
who came back indeed to this life, but not so as never to die again.
Marcus Varro, however, in his work On the Origin of the Roman
People, records something more remarkable; I think his own words
should be given. "Certain astrologers," he says, "have written
that men are destined to a new birth, which the Greeks call
palingenesy. This will take place after four hundred and forty years
have elapsed; and then the same soul and the same body, which were
formerly united in the person, shall again be reunited." This
Varro, indeed, or those nameless astrologers, for he does not give
us the names of the men whose statement he cites, have affirmed what is
indeed not altogether true; for once the souls have returned to the
bodies they wore, they shall never afterwards leave them. Yet what
they say upsets and demolishes much of that idle talk of our adversaries
about the impossibility of the resurrection.
For those who have been or are of this opinion, have not thought it
possible that bodies which have dissolved into air, or dust, or
ashes, or water, or into the bodies of the beasts or even of the men
that fed on them, should be restored again to that which they formerly
were. And therefore, if Plato and Porphyry, or rather, if their
disciples now living, agree with us that holy souls shall return to the
body, as Plato says, and that, nevertheless, they shall not return
to misery, as Porphyry maintains,, if they accept the consequence of
these two propositions which is taught by the Christian faith, that
they shall receive bodies in which they may live eternally without
suffering any misery, let them also adopt from Varro the opinion that
they shall return to the same bodies as they were formerly in, and thus
the whole question of the eternal resurrection of the body shall be
resolved out of their own mouths.
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