We are in Eastertide, and not only do we rejoice in Christ’s Resurrection, but we rejoice too in what this means for our own bodies: at the Final Judgement our bodies too will finally be released from their graves to be restored to our souls. This is an article of faith (the eleventh), one we reaffirm every Sunday in the Creed when we repeat: ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body.’ And yet there is something a bit vague about this; what does this mean in practice? It is also, according to St Augustine, quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the most challenged article of faith: ‘On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body’ (CCC §996).
This is a pity, because in some ways the most immediately alluring thing about heaven is what happens there to the body, not to the soul. We know well that the primary joy of heaven is the beatific vision: ‘Those who die in God’s grace and friendship and are perfectly purified live for ever with Christ. They are like God for ever, for they “see him as he is,” face to face’ (CCC §1023). But that is so ethereal as perhaps to leave us little moved.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not go into much detail about the qualities of the risen body, telling us only that the risen body will be spiritualised and transfigured in Christ. But in truth that is still a bit too ethereal to get us very excited. We have to go back to the Roman Catechism, also known as the Catechism of the Council of Trent, from 1566, to get – fittingly – into the meat. Among other things it quotes St Augustine to the effect that after the resurrection of the body:
‘There shall then be no deformity of body; if some have been overburdened with flesh, they shall not resume its entire weight. All that exceeds the proper proportion shall be deemed superfluous. On the other hand, should the body be wasted by disease or old age, or be emaciated from any other cause, it shall be repaired by the divine power of Christ, who will not only restore the body unto us, but will repair whatever it shall have lost through the wretchedness of this life. In another place he says: Man shall not resume his former hair, but shall be adorned with such as will become him, according to the words: “The very hairs of your head are all numbered.”’
Finally, this is what we want to hear. All those excess pounds which snuck up on us and ‘overburden’ us now will be gone, and we will not be saddled with the sad tuft of hair we died with, whose thinning we lamented for years, but rather we will have all the hair God wants for us (presumably thick and lustrous, given that this is heaven after all). This surely will be one of the great delights of heaven: for ever ogling one unbelievably beautiful body after another – and of course we will not mind one bit being the object of a little ogling ourselves.
Of course, when we are (with the grace of God) in heaven, we shall actually be so caught up in the beatific vision that weight, hair and all the rest will pale into insignificance… but not now. We do not think as much about the beatific vision as we should, but we do think a lot about our thinning manes, our expanding midriffs, the slow crinkling of that skin which had been so perfect in our childhood (alas, if only we had appreciated it then), and all the rest of the body in decline. And it is not as if we only think about it: we do almost anything to shed those pounds, get ‘ripped’, keep (or recover) that wayward hair, stretch away those wrinkles – all, in a word, to look beautiful. And that is as it should be, because we were made by God not just to be spiritually holy, but physically beautiful – really beautiful.
In this life, after a certain point, we are fighting a losing battle on the beauty front. The ‘outer man’ is wasting away, as St Paul puts it (2 Cor 4:16). But that said, one day each person will – having fought the good fight – be beautiful beyond their wildest imaginings.
