Summary Against Modern Thought: The Damned

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It’s one way—or the other.

ON THE QUALITY OF THE RISEN BODIES AMONG THE DAMNED

1 From these points one can, of course, reasonably consider what sort of condition there will be in the risen bodies of those to be damned.

2 For those bodies, too, must be proportioned to the souls of those to be damned. Of course, the souls of the wicked have a good nature, indeed, since it is created by God, but they will have a disordered will which will be failing its very own end. Their bodies, then, so far as nature is concerned, will be restored to integrity; because, as one can see, they will rise in the perfection of age, without any members diminished, without any deficiency or corruption which the error or the weakness of nature has introduced. Hence, the Apostle says: “The dead shall rise again incorruptible” (1 Cor. 15-52); and clearly this ought to be understood of all, both the good and the evil, according to what precedes and follows in his text.

3 But because in its will their soul will be turned away from God, and deprived of its own end, their bodies will not be spiritual, that is to say, entirely subject to the spirit; rather, by its affection their soul will be carnal.

4 Nor will their bodies have agility obeying the soul, so to say, with no difficulty, rather, they will be burdensome and heavy, and in some way hard for the soul to carry, just as their very souls are tamed away from God by disobedience.

5 They will also remain capable of suffering, as they now are, or even more so; in such wise, nonetheless, that they will indeed suffer affliction from sensible things; and, for all that, no corruption; just as their souls also will be wracked, frustrated entirely in their natural desire for beatitude.

6 Their bodies also will be dense and darksome, just as their souls will be foreign to the light of divine knowledge. And this is what the Apostle says: “We shall all indeed rise again we shall not all be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51). For the good alone shall be changed for glory; it will be without glory that the bodies of the wicked shall rise.

7 There is a chance, of course, that someone may see an impossibility in the fact that the bodies of the wicked are capable of suffering and, for all that, are not corruptible, because “every passion when intensified takes something away from substance.”

For we see that a body, if it remains in a fire a long time, is finally consumed; and sorrow, if it be too intense, separates the soul from the body.

But this entire process takes place on the basis of the transmutability of matter from form to form. But after the resurrection the human body will not be transmutable from form to form, in the case of the good or of the wicked; for in each class the body will be entirely perfected by the soul so far as its natural being is concerned. Thus, it will no longer be possible to remove this form from such a body, nor to introduce another form, when the divine power is subjecting the body entirely to the soul.

Hence, also, that potency for every form which is in prime matter will be somehow bound by the power of the soul, lest it be able to be reduced to the act of another form. But, in regard to some conditions, the bodies of the damned will not be entirely subject to the soul; therefore, they will be sensibly afflicted by the contrariety of the sensibles. For they will be afflicted by bodily fire, so far as the quality of fire by its own excellence is the contrary of the equal balance and harmony that is connatural to the sensibility although it is unable to dissolve it. Nevertheless, such an affliction will not be able to separate the soul from the body, since the body necessarily must persist under the same form.

Notes This does not sound pleasant.

8 Now, just as the bodies of the blessed, by reason of the newness of their glory, will be lifted above the heavenly bodies, so also the lowest place, one of darkness and punishment, will in proportion be set aside for the bodies of the damned. Hence the Psalmist says: “Let death come upon them and let them go down alive into hell” (Ps. 54:16). And the Apocalypse (20:9-10) says that “the devil who reduced them was cast into the pool of fire and brimstone where both the beast and the false prophet shall be tormented day and night for ever.”