Paul, the Body and Resurrection By Maria Pascuzzi, C.S.J., S.S.L., S.T.D. Introduction In his 2011 best-seller, The Swerve, Harvard University humanities professor, Stephen Greenblatt, traced the discovery of one of the most influential literary works of all time, entitled On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Naturam). According to Greenblatt, this work presents a view of reality that has always collided with the faith of the Church. A Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius, composed the work in the form of a didactic poem ca. mid-first century BC. However, it was only in AD 1417 that an unemployed papal secretary discovered this text, which Lucretius composed to explain Epicureanism to a Roman audience. 1 Within its pages, Lucretius also provides a profound meditation on the fear of death. Anxiety over death, and especially the lot that would befall a person in the afterlife, was a major human preoccupation in antiquity, which the various philosophical schools sought to address. 2 The Stoics, who along with the Epicureans attracted the most adherents in Paul’s day, taught that the soul would survive death when, at last, it would be freed from the worthless body. For Stoics, death was not something to fear. It was simply part of the natural order. Moreover, to grieve death only reflected one’s lack of wisdom and ignorance of the divine will. The Stoics held that “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things. For example, death is nothing dreadful (or else it would have appeared so to Socrates), but instead the judgment about death is that it is dreadful— that is what is dreadful.” 3 For the Stoic, the ideal wiseman remained unperturbed by life’s ups and downs and accepted that some things in life could not be controlled or changed. 4 The Epicureans, as we learn from Lucretius’ work, also believed that spending one’s life in the grips of anxiety over death was sheer foolishness. This belief was rooted in their physics. They held that the world was made of an infinite number of atoms, randomly moving and clashing through space. They taught that clashing atoms, not supernatural forces, caused every event. The Epicureans believed that everything that exists is involved in an endless process of creation and destruction. Nothing is fixed or predetermined; nothing can escape this process. Some forms of existence may be higher than others, but nothing — not our own species, not the sun, not the moon — lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal. Given this view of reality, the Epicureans insisted that death, the most fearsome of evils, is nothing to us, seeing as when we exist, death is not present; and when death is present, we do not exist. So death is nothing to those who are living or to those who have died, seeing as for the one, it is nothing, and for the other, they are nothing. 5 Since death was just a matter of extinction, the only thing that mattered to Epicurus was to live a life free of anxiety and attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia). To do so, a person needed to practice the virtues, accept death, which is nothing more than extinction, and recognize that the gods do not punish humans according to their deeds. Epicurus advocated the pursuit of pleasure (hēdonē/ hedonism) by which he meant the pursuit of tranquility and a life free of psychological
37