PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH All resurrected bodies will be perfect and beautiful: the resurrection will involve cosmetic surgery on a cosmic scale Deformities and blemishes will be removed; amputated limbs will be restored to amputees Shorn hair and nail clippings will return to form part of the body of their original owners, though not in the form of hair and nails ‘Fat people and thin people need not fear that in that world they will be the kind of people that they would have preferred not to be while in this world’ (DCD XXII 19) Augustine raises a problem that continued to trouble believers in every century in which belief in a Wnal resurrection was taken seriously Suppose that a starving man relieves his hunger by cannibalism: to whose body, at the resurrection, will the digested human Xesh belong? Augustine gives a carefully thought-out answer Before A gets so hungry that he eats the body of B, A must have lost a lot of weight—bits of his body must have been exhaled into the air At the resurrection this material will be transformed back into Xesh, to give A the appropriate avoirdupois, and the digested Xesh will be restored to B The whole transaction should be looked on as parallel to the borrowing of a sum of money, to be returned in due time (DCD XXII 30) But what will the blessed with these splendid risen bodies? Augustine confesses, ‘to tell the truth, I not know what will be the nature of their activity—or rather of their rest and leisure’ The Bible tells us that they will see God: and this sets Augustine another problem If the blessed cannot open and shut their eyes at will, they are worse oV than we are But how could anyone shut their eyes upon God? His reply is subtle In that blessed state God will indeed be visible, to the eyes of the body and not just to the eyes of the mind; but he will not be an extra object of vision Rather we will see God by observing his governance of the bodies that make up the material scheme of things around us, just as we see the life of our fellow men by observing their behaviour Life is not an extra body that we see, and yet when we see the motions of living beings we not just believe they are alive, we see they are alive So in the City of God we will observe the work of God bringing harmony and beauty everywhere (DCD XXII 30) Though it is dependent on the Bible on almost every page, The City of God deserves a signiWcant place in the history of philosophy, for two reasons In the Wrst place, Augustine constantly strives to place his religious worldview into the philosophical tradition of Greece and Rome: where possible he tries to harmonize the Bible with Plato and Cicero; where this is not possible he feels obliged to recite and refute philosophical anti-Christian 15