Eternal Life: What You Need to Know About Death, Judgment, and Life Everlasting by Romano Guardini

Author:Romano Guardini [Guardini, Romano]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Published: 2011-11-08T02:00:00+00:00

We have not yet finished with our thoughts on the risen body. The natural body is not only a fixed, spatial form, but it has also had a history. From its origin to its decay, it goes through an endless number of forms. Which of these is properly its own? Is it the child’s, the mature man’s, the elderly man’s? The answer can only be: all are essential. The individual form does not exist only that the next should take its place, and so on, one after the other, in order that the last one, death, might appear. Each phase is the man, and each is indispensable to his life as a whole. That endless series of configurations which is the human body must be included in the resurrected body. It must have a new dimension, that of time, but time raised to the power of eternity with the result that its history is included in its present, and all the successive moments of its past exist in an absolute now.

Besides man’s history, in the sense of successive developments, in the sense of what he has done or what has happened to him, there must be present also his joys, sorrows, frustrations, liberations, victories, defeats, and love, and hatred. All the unending experiences of the soul were expressed in and by the body and have become part of it, contributing either to its development or to its crippling and destruction—all are present and retained in the risen body. The pattern of the life is there with all that befell the man, for the resurrection of the body means the resurrection of the life that has been lived, with all its good and all its evil.

And what are the limits of a man’s body? Surely his clothes belong to it since they performed the double function of protection and expression. What of his work tools, the articles he kept about him, his house, and his much-loved garden. What of the whole sphere of his life? Let us not be too fanciful; yet it is certain that the body goes beyond its mere anatomical limits. Fundamentally it is limitless. It is the essence of man’s earthly existence in visible form. In the resurrection, form, substance, and life will all rise. Nothing that has been is annihilated. Man’s deeds and his destiny are part of him, and, set free from the restrictions of history, will remain for eternity, not by any power of his own, not as a final phase of an inner development, but at the summons of the Lord Almighty, and in the strength of His Spirit.

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