The Human Body in Eternity:
Matter and the Resurrection
By scientist and priest Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

According to our Faith, the risen Christ exists now in a new way. This is also the type of existence that awaits us at the end of time, but that only Christ and Mary enjoy ahead of the universal resurrection of the dead. This new mode of existence applies even to the very matter of the human body the freedom from space and time constraints that is proper of a spirit, that is not limited by those parameters (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 645) but it is rather a new life "outside of time and space" (Ib. no. 646).

Christ's Resurrection is not some kind of pious symbol, nor a mythical expression of some kind of psychological "experience" of the primitive Christian community. It is a historical event, verified by witnesses who saw, heard and touched a living Person they had seen and touched as a dead corpse three days earlier. They proved their certainty and sincerity with their martyrdom.

And if seeing a corpse is sufficient proof that the person died, seeing somebody alive after leaving the dead body in a tomb is equally a proof of resurrection, even if there are no witnesses of the moment of death or of returning to life. To deny this obvious logic with word plays about a "meta-historical" event is to leave behind the most basic rationality.

We have only the Gospel narratives to get a glimpse of how a body -a material, organic structure- can exist "like a spirit". But to better grasp what the Resurrection really means -for Christ, for Mary, for all human beings at the end of time- some ideas from modern Physics and Biology might be quite helpful, even if our acceptance of our Faith does not depend upon science at any time in history, be it the simple views of twenty centuries ago or the most recent hypothesis of Quantum Mechanics.

But if Theology is the effort to comprehend Revelation, and truth can never admit contradictions, anything true in our view of nature can be at least worth knowing in so far as it deals with something as intimate to each one of us as the organic structure each calls "my body".

BASIC CONCEPTS: MATTER AND SPIRIT

Physics is the science that explicitly searches for a deep and comprehensive description and a basic understanding of matter. As an experimental science, it cannot approach its subject except by recognizing its activity that is evident in simple observations and in experiments that can be the source of measurements of some parameters.

Consequently, every definition that is acceptable in Physics will be an "operational definition", that indicates how some activity can be observed that identifies an object. There are no essential intuitions that might suffice for an abstract definition of any parameter or component of the material world.

The study of matter begins by classifying the amazing variety of observable activities, from the behavior of elementary particles to the evolution of the Universe as a whole. It might seem surprising that every activity known to present science can be attributed to one of only four "forces" or interactions (even if it always remains as a possibility the discovery of some new process that would require the acceptance of a fifth force):

• Gravitational. It is always attractive, reaching unlimited distances, affecting everything material. Present understanding, based on the General Theory of Relativity, expresses it as the curvature of space-time due to the presence of mass, an effect that cannot be absent and for which there can be no barrier or insulator. It is, by many orders of magnitude, the weakest of all forces. But it dominates in the cosmic scale.
• Electromagnetic. Attractive or repulsive, also with unlimited reach, but affecting only particles that have something extra besides mass: a "charge" that can exist only in two types. Similar charges repel each other, unlike charges attract. Its strength (for instance, between two electrons) is over a trillion, trillion, trillion times greater than their gravitational attraction. It is responsible for the hardness, rigidity and apparent impenetrability of common objects, as well as for all of chemistry (including biology.)
• Strong Nuclear. Attractive for nuclear particles, with or without electric charge, but of minimal reach, thus acting only in the atomic nucleus or in particle collisions. It is 137 times stronger than the electromagnetic.
• Weak Nuclear. Active only within particles, that are changed into different ones. Associated with the emission or absorption of a neutrino. Responsible (most likely) for the final destruction of super-massive stars (Supernovae Type II).

All those activities take place within the framework of space and time, either when dealing with particles in any level of structure or with the physical vacuum that is not to be confused with philosophical nothingness. The vacuum has measurable properties, both electromagnetic and geometric, and it is considered to be in a constant state of activity where its energy briefly synthesizes particle-antiparticle pairs, that revert to energy almost immediately. This affects in a measurable way the energy levels of the hydrogen atom.

Physical space is distorted by mass (this is how gravity is explained in General Relativity) and every physical change by which we can detect the passage of time is also affected by a gravitational field, so that any process is perceived as being slower than in the absence of such a field. This is expressed by saying that "time flows more slowly" under such circumstances. Thus space and time cannot to be absolute realities independently of matter, either philosophically or scientifically, and the origin of the Universe is a total beginning without previous "before" or "where".

What we spontaneously conceive as particles, with the imaginary picture of small solid bodies that should be impenetrable and clearly localized in a single place, does not really correspond to our common experience reflected in that description. It is true that in many experiments things happen in a way that seems to confirm that view, but in some others we find that particles cannot be precisely localized and that they do not show either impenetrability or even a unique identity.

They behave like "waves", not because we can observe any known medium vibrating, but because there are physical effects that are well established and that are incompatible with something solid like a miniature billiard ball. The particle-wave duality lacks a satisfactory representation in terms of our daily experience reflected in our use of words, but its consequences are quite clear and very well established:

• Particles going through a thin slit are affected in their path by other slits nearby. In some way, they behave as if they were going simultaneously through several slits, even if their spacing seems much larger that the supposed "size" of each particle. This is the basis for the electron microscope, where the image is obtained through the diffraction and interference of electrons, both effects proper only of waves.
• A particle, enclosed in a "potential well", that lacks the necessary energy to escape, appears - unpredictably, but with known probability- outside the well, with no loss of energy and without being detectable in the intermediate space. This is the "tunnel effect", in frequent use in modern electronic devices.
• Particle-particle interactions (with identical particles) cannot be correctly described if we expect to know which particle is which before and after they interact. They seem to have no proper identity.
• There is no limit to the amount of matter that can be compressed into a given volume. In stellar evolution, the final "copse" of a star can reach densities of many millions of tons per cubic centimeter.
• In a "black hole" any amount of matter can disappear (it behaves like a bottomless pit) and then becomes inaccessible to any experimental observation, "outside of the space and time" that we can check.
• All particles can be changed into pure energy, and the opposite is also true. Even the brute energy of an impact can synthesize all kinds of particles and anti-particles. This happens constantly when a cosmic proton hitting a nucleus in the high levels of the atmosphere causes a "secondary cosmic ray shower" covering over a square kilometer with thousands of particles, many of them more massive than the proton itself. It is the same process that was previously mentioned as taking place in the physical vacuum.

It might be plausible to suggest that the intimate nature of matter is equivalent to a set of distortions of the structure of empty space (the "physical vacuum"). Tightly localized distortions (like eddies in a pond) would appear as particles, while more diffuse changes we would consider "waves" or "force fields". The collision of two eddies could generate diffuse waves or other eddies or both, and the converse could also happen.

While this is just an effort to give visual support to those ideas, it is true that the most recent theories, involving "superstrings", try to explain the most elementary components of matter in terms of one-dimensional elements that vibrate in a 10-dimensional space-time, giving the variety of known particles and reducing the four known forces to one. This would only happen at such high energies that no experimental support for the theory has been obtained as yet.

If this description of matter seems so abstruse that we cannot relate it to the "matter" of our daily experience, we should remember that even the basic structure of atoms and molecules -established without any doubt as real- forces us to admit (even against our senses) that our own body is a swarm of moving particles, ruled by attractive and repulsive forces, and separated by empty spaces that are comparable (to scale) to distances of the planets in our solar system.

And all those particles can be changed into energy. In the words attributed to Richard Feynmann, "nobody in the world understands Quantum Mechanics", but we can't deny that it describes correctly the behavior of those minimal entities.

Matter cannot be defined by its "obvious" properties shown by sense experience, even if we have the use of an optical microscope. We must resort to the basic operational definition: Matter is all and only that which can have some interaction or activity through at least one of the four forces previously described. This includes particles, energy, the physical vacuum, space and time: the entire realm of whatever is (in principle) observable through some experiment, directly or indirectly. Physical science deals only with those interactions.

The full ensemble of material beings came into being in a unique event -the "Big Bang" of scientific Cosmology- in a state of extreme density and temperature. Not in a previously empty space, since there was no "before" and no space. Any supposed previous state of contraction or anything else, is just speculation that cannot be subjected to experimental verification.

Whatever might exist that is naturally independent from any space-time framework, and consequently is not affected by the four physical interactions, will not be matter. The meaning of the word "spirit" is precisely this: not-matter, and its first use in philosophy and theology is to refer to the Cause of the very existence of matter, to the Creator, eternal without time connotations and immense without space dimensions.

In a positive way, the creating spirit must be all-knowing to be able to weigh all the possible ways to adjust the physical parameters of the reality to be created, and free to choose among them according to a plan to be carried into being. And only a truly Omnipotent cause can bridge the gap between nothingness and reality. This description implies a Personal being whose intelligence and free will are realized in a supreme form of conscious life.

We could consider as a logical possibility that the spiritual Creator might bring into being other spiritual realities that would also be endowed with intelligence and free will, but of a finite nature. They would be free from space and time constraints and be totally independent of material interactions. In Theology this is the meaning of the term "angel". Less probable might appear that something totally different from the creating spirit might also come to be, subject to a constant change of space and time parameters, incapable of abstract knowledge and devoid of free will: this is the concept of matter.

A final mystery is the possibility of a compound being where matter and spirit are intimately joined, with the properties of a conscious personality endowed with intelligence and free will, but limited to a physical environment where all activity depends upon the forces of matter and takes place normally in the space-time framework. This is the description of Man, a true microcosm where one finds every level of created existence, and even -when talking about Christ in the Incarnation- also the supreme level of being a divine Person.

The first chapter of the book of Genesis calls our first parents "images and likenesses" of God. Since God is spirit, this can only be true at the spiritual level -intelligence and free will- and not because of any bodily shape. But Man is also made from the ashes of stars, on this Earth that provides the necessary matter for all life, be it vegetal or animal.

And Man is related to other living forms by an evolutionary process, being classified as a primate and having over 90% of the DNA material in common with other modern primates. We must take this into account when we ask what is the totality of a human being, both now and in eternity.

THE CONCEPT OF MAN: ESSENTIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The essence of any being is manifested by its activity, and in Philosophy we call "nature" the essence of any being in so far as it is the basic principle of activity. In the case of Man, there are two levels of activity, clearly different, but both attributed to one unique subject, the "I" that knows itself as the root agent of both biological and psychological processes.

Whatever we have in common with other animals can be attributed to an inherited genetic program, whether we talk about unconscious physiological changes (we must study Anatomy to know what organs we possess and what they do) or about instinctive behavior, conscious or not. In so far as the final product of this programming is a chemical agent or a physical activity, a sufficient reason to explain it is to be found in the electromagnetic forces of matter (gravity and nuclear forces do not intervene directly in organic processes.) And we have no reason to invoke a non-material cause: the properties and laws of matter should explain a purely material outcome.

On the other hand, when we speak about intelligence in the strict sense of the word, the power to use abstract concepts and to be conscious of that activity (not a way of behaving, but of knowing) the end result of the process no longer pertains to the physical realm. Thoughts have no experimentally verifiable parameters: no mass, dimensions, electrical charge or the ability to influence matter external to the human body. They do not fall under the definition of matter that is accepted in the physical sciences; they are not equivalent to any form of energy or particles.

Therefore it is totally illogical to seek in the forces of matter a sufficient reason for their existence, their informational content, their logical rigor, their truth or beauty: material activity produces ONLY material effects. To do otherwise would be equivalent to analyze in the laboratory the book of a Shakespeare play to determine its literary value or to try to express with an equation the artistic perfection of a painting or the ethical assessment of a way of acting.

Similarly, the free acts of the will occur in a way that goes beyond the power of the laws of nature to give a total explanation, even when we describe actions that are performed through material forces in our own body. I can explain in full detail how I bend my arm, changing chemical energy of the muscles into mechanical energy, but I still don't explain why the arm bends when I want.

The social aspects of human life, from family ties to the international level, and even our relationship to God, would be impossible without accepting what our own conscience clearly indicates: that we are free and responsible for our acts, and thus subjects of rights and duties. Even those who profess (at least as a psychological tenet) a denial of human freedom, will demand an account based on responsibility for the behavior of other human beings, and without such a basis it would be impossible to have a social group at a level above the herd behavior of other animals.

The physical description of matter offers nothing adequate to explain consciousness or free will. Whoever claims that the human person is just a playground of physico-chemical forces should be required to specify how those realities arise from forces that have nothing to do with the end result This is why any "emergentism" -that seeks an explanation in a mere evolutionary enlargement of the brain with billions of neurons acting in a complex super-computer- ends up by being a play of words without any concrete logical basis.

Such materialistic reductionism denies in Man any spiritual element created by God, and it implies the total destruction of the human person at the moment of death, when the organic structure decays to dust. This is theologically absurd and philosophically illogical, even if it is presented as scientifically valid in spite of arising from a conception of matter that does not correspond to the concept accepted by the experimental sciences.

Some efforts to find a merely physical explanation for the informational content of human activities end up proving the lack of logic of the attempt. To say that a TV show is only due to electrical currents in the receiver would imply that a boring show should be blamed upon the electric power supplier, or the poor quality of the transistors or the electrons: we all know that the electrical impulses are only means to convey information consciously controlled at the TV studio, and we blame the producer for the lack of interest or the errors of the program.

Again, we do not blame the circuits in a computer if a poem we write lacks literary value. The electromagnetic interactions in both cases are nor responsible for the meaning of images or words, just as the ink and the cellulose of a printed page do not explain a great novel. In the words of Einstein (when asked if Physics could someday explain everything): "It would make no sense. A graph of atmospheric pressure changes when an orchestra plays cannot be considered the same as a Beethoven sonata".

Thus, by the strict logic imposed by the definition of matter and the principle of sufficient reason we are obliged to accept in Man a non-material reality, a spirit -the soul- that is the reason why we are images of God, by knowing and loving even realities inaccessible to the senses (with or without instrumental help.) A soul that forms a unique subject with a material body, a human subject, conscious of itself and able to act with freedom and responsibility, at a level that is specifically human. Man is not an angel imprisoned in matter, nor an animal with a slightly better genetic programming.

Even the matter of our brain is not conscious of itself, and we do not know what is happening in the eye when we read a poem or enjoy the beauty of a flower: we are conscious of the external object but not of the biology of seeing.

The two elements of Man, spirit and body, form a single unit, a person, and there are undeniable and profound ties of mutual dependence between both of them. We can say that the spirit exists conditioned by the body, in a "quasi-material" way, in a concrete space and at a given time, and needing the proper functioning of the body even for the loftiest activities, that also presuppose a learning development through sense impressions.

And purely material biological functions, like digestion, blood circulation, sweat, are influenced by joys, concerns, ideas, of a purely intellectual order, so that our bodily well-being cannot be attained independently of psychological problems.

PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

Aristotelian Philosophy, used centuries later by St. Thomas Aquinas and a large number of Scholastic followers, conceived the intimate nature of matter in general, and of biological entities in particular, as comprising two basic elements, one of a purely passive nature and the other the principle of activity: matter and form.

Both terms have a meaning that is different from the content we give them in ordinary language and that -applied to inanimate matter- has very little likelihood of being acceptable in modern science. Because they are still used when we speak about the special duality found in Man, it might be useful to explain them in some detail, remembering that they have no dogmatic value.

In the philosophical theory of Hylemorphism, the passive element (hyle) is called "prime matter", and it is considered to be the same for all material things, since it is pure potentiality, without any real property: simple possibility of becoming a real object by its union with the form (morphe) and thus incapable of existing by itself or doing anything. It cannot be identified with even the most elementary particle or quantum of energy, and seems to be more a theoretical construct than a part of the physical world, even if its proponents want to consider it as a real part of nature.

The "substantial form" is not a shape (accidental form), but an active element that cannot exist by itself either, but that is necessarily meant to be united with prime matter, thus giving birth to a real entity (secondary matter) with properties that determine the activities that characterize each chemical element. A "substantial change", in the primitive understanding of chemistry -like the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water- was explained in terms of the destruction of the original "forms" of those two elements and the acquisition of the "form" of water.

Surprisingly, the new form -pure activity- is extracted from the potentialities of prime matter which is defined as pure passivity. It is the secondary matter that science studies and classifies by its properties at different levels.

Living things are also understood as composed of matter and the suitable living "form" that also changes the nature of inanimate food to make it into a living being. And in its original way of speaking, this hylemorphic theory asserts the uniqueness of only one form at any given moment modifying prime matter to constitute the real entity.

Something that is impossible to reconcile with the known fact that each atom in our body still has exactly the same properties (including radioactive decay) that it has before assimilation. Still more unlikely is the disappearance of the living forms of cells from a laboratory skin sample when they are implanted into a human patient and become a part of that living structure.

In a human person the hylemorphic theory is adapted to explain the union of body (matter) and soul (spirit) expressing their mutual relationship by saying that the spirit "informs" the body, constituting together the full reality that is Man. In this case, there are still two distinct levels of activity, as we have said, and both types can be found outside the human person, independently giving rise to animal life (with the same biological processes) or to the purely spiritual life of angels and God himself.

In this case, one cannot argue that "matter" and "form" cannot exist by themselves, and it becomes reasonable to accept that after death, the human soul can still live as a spirit even without the body.

This accords with the theological view -through twenty centuries of Christianity- teaching that those who die in union with God enjoy eternal life in Heaven even before the final day of Resurrection, while the body suffers corruption in the tomb. From the promise of the crucified Christ to the repentant thief, "Today you will be with me in Paradise" (Lk 23, 43) to the most recent documents of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (nos. 997, 1005, 1022, 1023) the idea of a true life of the soul after death is a teaching of Catholic Faith that is implied and explicitly taught when a new saint is proclaimed.

Still, it is true that the soul by itself is not a true, complete, human person, even if it is the source of its noblest activities that set Man above other animals, and constitute the reason for its being a Person. For this reason there have been interpretations of human death that try to avoid the apparent contradiction found in the idea of a personal subject that can be split and exist only in part.

The proposed solutions either claim the total annihilation of the human person at death, followed by a new creation on the last day, or a personal resurrection is affirmed at the moment of death, but with a non-material body. Both explanations are incompatible with the logic of philosophy and with theological dogmas. A brief analysis will show that this is so.

A "total death" is absurd, since a spirit cannot die. The supposed "new creation" at the end of time, would produce a human being from nothing, thus totally unrelated to the one that died, without a reason in that previous existence to be responsible for acts that deserve reward or punishment. And the solemn proclamation of saints, whose protection and intercession for us is sought in prayer, would be totally empty of real content.

From the letters of St. Paul to the present, the Church would have been in error regarding one of the most valued tenets of our faith and hope. The assistance by the Holy Spirit, promised by Christ to the apostles and their successors, would have been only empty words.

A personal resurrection with a "non-material body" is a contradiction in terms, like a square circle. A body can only be a material structure, and it is matter from this planet Earth the substance of Christ's body when in the Incarnation "the Word became flesh". If one denies that the risen Christ has a real body, then the resurrection becomes a play of words, totally contradicting the Jewish ideas of the Apostles and the contents of the gospels about Christ insisting upon his human reality (not a ghost) even to the point of being touched and eating with his followers several times after his resurrection (in NOTE no. 1 at the end of this paper it is shown also that this view is incompatible with the reality of the Eucharist.) In the list of references one can find a more complete source of viewpoints and their discussion.

PERSONAL IDENTITY -"MY BODY"

The profession of Christian Faith contains the belief in the sameness of our personal identities now and after the resurrection, when the soul is joined to its proper body (Catechism, no.997) and this assertion has no meaning except within the anthropology -Christian and philosophically coherent- that deals with the material reality we call "my body". But we need to delve more deeply into the meaning of this common expression, with the insights obtained from the data provided by modern science, physiology and physics, to extend and refine the ideas previously presented.

Otherwise it is easy to fall into apparent contradictions, at least when we talk about the universal resurrection at the end of time, when the dead, who perhaps never attained their full biological development, or were born and died with sundry physical limitations and defects, must recover their same bodies now free from such handicaps.

Christ's resurrection, with the meaningful fact of the empty tomb, does not present a problem concerning personal identity (not only specific). He wanted to be touched by his disciples, and seen with the marks of his wounds as a clear proof that it was the same crucified body that was alive before them: a body that, in spite of all the tortures of the passion, was the body of a man in the fullness of his development. When Mary was taken to Heaven (even if she did die) there seems to be still no reason to suppose that her body was subject to corruption, and consequently there is no problem either with her identity, even if we can suppose a partial decay due to aging, something we must also address.

Every human being, in an uninterrupted development, grows from the single cell of the fertilized ovum to the unimaginably complex structure of about 100 million-million cells in the adult body. Throughout this entire process, personal identity is maintained, while there is a constant exchange and renewal of atoms and molecules within each cell, as well as of cells in the different tissues and organs (with the possible exception of some neurons.)

This requires that we think in terms different from a concrete ensemble of elementary units -cells, molecules, atoms- when we want to define what we mean by "my body". We cannot require either a concrete number or an individualized identification of the different basic elements that will join the soul to constitute the personal "I" that remained the same throughout a lifespan when all the components were renewed many times.

Modern medical techniques underline this fact even more clearly. As mentioned before, pieces of healthy skin are frequently allowed to grow in a lab and then are used to cover the damaged tissues of extensive burns. In the lab, each cell lives independently as a tiny animal, but then it becomes part of the body of the patient. The same can be said when speaking about blood or medullar transfusions and in cases of organ transplants, whether from a living donor or from a recent corpse.

The personality of the patient is not altered by such additions, or by the implant of a metallic replacement of a hip joint or even a full artificial heart. This clearly means that we cannot just talk about the material aspects of each part to think that our identity depends upon it.

"My body" can be defined only in terms of its intimate union with the human spirit that joins matter to constitute the personal subject, Man. The spirit will have a life through the material organs that provide data for knowledge -there is nothing in our mind that was not received through the senses- and that react to the environment, allow a constant interaction of mind and will with other individuals, and that are also the way the spirit manifests its most intimate experiences.

Body and soul are together, attuned to each other in a profound and mysterious way, that does not depend upon a concrete atom or molecule, and this is the reason why a given material structure -even if constantly changing- is always "my body" (See NOTE no. 2 ).

This is also coherent with the views of modern physics holding that elementary particles of the same type cannot be distinguished individually, whether we talk about protons, neutrons or electrons. It becomes more acceptable if the particles are visualized as localized "eddies" in the physical vacuum that would constitute the most basic material reality.

With such ideas, applied to enlarge our "common sense" views of matter, it ceases to be a philosophical or theological problem the question of how each one of us can rise again with the same body, but without requiring that each atom at a given point of life, or those that were there at the moment of death, be present in the risen body. The baby who dies shortly after birth doesn't need to be forever an unfinished and frustrated adult, and the worn-out old man will not have to drag forever the handicapped body of his last years.

We do not know how to apply an ideal canon of human beauty to the variety of millions and millions of different persons of all ages and races, but we can think that those bodies will, like the stars in the sky, be different from each other, while all of them are beautiful and sources of light.

LIFE AFTER THE RESURRECTION

The Gospel accounts of the experiences of the apostles visited by the risen Christ give us a very concise and limited basis to know how a human being exists after that marvelous revival. We are not dealing with a simple return to ordinary life for a few years more, as was the case in Christ's miracles of raising Lazarus from the tomb or the son of the Naim widow from the bier where the corpse was being carried.

We are now presented with a new way that the human spirit has of relating to the matter of the body, and of the whole human reality to interact with the physical environment of our daily experience.

The Apostles identified themselves as "witnesses of the resurrection", testifying to their experience of seeing and touching the Lord and taking meals with him after seeing him dead and buried (Lk 24, 30, 39-40, 41-43; Jn 20,20 & 27; 21,9, 13-15.) Against their deeply ingrained prejudice, they have to admit that the same Jesus who died is now alive, in a new way. They cannot clearly interpret their experiences, a constant source of amazement, but they can never doubt what they saw and touched, and they uphold this certainty to the point of giving their lives for it, and upon it they establish the Church against all world powers.

Given the almost crass frame-of-mind evident throughout the Bible when referring to human existence (evident also in the reactions of the apostles themselves) it is impossible to explain belief in the resurrection as a pious self-deception: nothing less than an overwhelming evidence is required to convince them that the living Christ is the same they saw dead on the cross, with the same wounds as identifying marks.

The very word "resurrection" would become an absurd twist of meaning if a real body, that could be touched, were not present (coming back to life can only apply to whatever died, not the soul.) And it would be an obvious contradiction if we take as the starting point the position that reduces Man to just matter and then we say that after the resurrection there is no matter at all.

But the risen Christ acts with total freedom from physical constraints. He becomes present in a closed room, and also leaves without visible motion or breaking obvious barriers. He is visible or not, whenever he wants, and when not seen it is impossible to assign a location to him. He can be touched; he speaks and listens, he moves and eats, with his own gestures, recognized by the disciples.

He clearly proves that he has a real body, made of flesh and bones: he is not a ghost (Lk 23, 39). But his body does not require food or the common space-time environment of earthly life. In this sense, it is a "spiritual body", that exists the way the spirit does, but that is still capable of acting with the properties of real matter.

Those who consider that the description found in the Gospels contradicts the concept of matter are, consciously or unconsciously, basing their reaction upon the common idea of matter derived only from our daily experience of it at the level of sense impressions. It has been shown already that modern science, especially Quantum Mechanics, requires us to admit that discontinuous motion, multi-location, absence from verifiable space, are actually observed in the behavior of elementary particles, true material units.

And what a particle can do, many can also do -at least by God's power- without contradicting the concept of matter, even if the probability of ever observing it for macroscopic bodies in the laboratory is vanishingly small. We are not talking of technological problems, but rather of an essential possibility, and at this level there is nothing absurd in admitting that the risen body is truly material (there can be no other kind of "real" body) since it still has the possibility of acting according to the normal laws of physics.

THE HUMAN PERSON IN ETERNITY

If we have described the way the human spirit acts during earthly life as "existing in the way matter does" with space-time constraints and dependence upon bodily processes, we can now reverse the statement to say that the risen body will exist "the way the spirit does", totally subjected to the spirit and acting with independence of space and time. As such, the totality of the human person will not need a place: Heaven does not have any spatial coordinates in the Universe of galaxies, and we should not suppose "other dimensions" for it: God does not exist in any material dimension, nor do the angels, and the risen members of Christ, partaking of the glory of the Head, will be "like the angels" (Mt 22, 30.)

There can be no aging or physical change in an eternity that will not be an endless time, but a no-time that we cannot imagine or comprehend, just as we cannot understand how God is pure activity without any change. This truly can be said to apply to a "new Heaven and a new Earth", not necessarily meaning that new stars and planets will be created, but rather that there will be a totally new way of existing.

Scientific Cosmology can only forecast the future of the Universe extrapolating its evolution to the point of exhausting all the nuclear energy resources of the stars to end in a final state of emptiness, darkness and cold. A prediction that might seem dismal and frustrating, when we think that all the beauty we now admire will be finally destroyed. Science cannot offer an alternative view based on physical laws. Theology does not explain either how God will "bring together all things in Christ" (Col 1, 12) and it would be an exercise in "theology fiction" to try to fill the gap.

If merely material activity cannot be important for the infinite Creator, and there is no clear reason why hot structures should be preferable to cold ones, it is also true that God became Man on this planet Earth, endowed with the necessary conditions to sustain life. Christ appreciated the beauty of wild flowers and a drink of fresh water: he can also make that everything good found in nature will -in some way- endure also into eternal life.

Physical laws do not limit the free Omnipotence of the Creator who wanted to raise matter to the level of Trinitarian glory, where the humanity of Christ is adored by angels and where matter is saved from futility, as St. Paul says, when in our own bodies the evolution of the Universe will be shown to have been a marvelous requirement for the fulfillment of God's plan to bring all created things under the power of Christ.

WAITING FOR THE RESURRECTION?

The final point to be discussed about the resurrection and the change to the new way of existing would be the question regarding the state of the soul after the moment of death and before the end of time. As explained when analyzing the ideas of hylemorphism, there is no logical inconsistency in accepting the possibility of a continued life for the soul without the body, even if the human spirit is essentially destined to be joined to it.

The way the Church has explained our dogmas through the centuries, and the fact that saints are canonized, only imply the assertion that the soul enjoys the presence and happiness of God even without the body. Nothing else is required to give meaning to our faith in the reward that the holy ones receive even before the end of time, after the personal judgment that takes place at the moment of death.

Any discussion of this "intermediate state" is automatically restricted by the idea of time, a concept that appears in everything we try to develop rationally, but that cannot be applied to God or to any spiritual reality, at least univocally. In modern science the idea of a discontinuous time - the supposed Planck's time limit- appears as a possible reality that implies that between one time and the next one, there is no time, even if the very statement seems contradictory.

If we admit that there is an accidental physical reality that places matter in a given time (just as a similar parameter would place it in a space that would also be discontinuous, quantized) then we would arrive at the logical conclusion that the concept of time can only be applied to matter. This would be the meaning of the statements found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the risen body, as previously mentioned.

In Theology we accept that God exists in a "now" without changes or waiting intervals, even if such times are so obviously real for us as the interval between birth and death. If we apply the same idea to the dead person, we should say also that for us there is a waiting period between death and resurrection at the end of time, but for God there are no waiting periods for anything. And if the soul is outside of time, there is no waiting either for it: one could say, therefore, that from the viewpoint of a spirit the soul never exists and acts without the body, even if such a state seems obvious for our way of thinking.

Perhaps this sounds like a play of words, which seems impossible to clarify satisfactorily. It is meant not to muddle our thinking, but to apply to a spirit the theological view of God's non-temporal presence in history and in eternity, an eternity that is an unchanging no-time.

Many things are difficult to understand, both in science and in philosophy, but none becomes so impossible to even define or discuss as the nature of time. In the divine immunity from time we face the deepest mysteries, again and again, whether we look at the beginning of the Universe -without a "before"- or at the endless future of its evolution, at the total knowledge of our free acts present always to God or at the hope of a future existence that cannot be measured by any time interval. If we are going to be like God (1 Jn 3, 2) when we see him as He is, it seems logical to expect that our existence then will also place us outside of time.

INFINITE WISDOM, POWER AND LOVE

If we cannot understand matter in our earthly life, and we do not understand our own nature with the mysterious joining of matter and spirit, it would certainly be presumptuous to require that we should understand God and the final plans of his omnipotent Providence. We should rather expect that when an infinite Love can act with infinite Wisdom and Power, all our philosophical efforts and all we can imagine will be utterly inadequate.

We have the data of our Faith regarding the true Resurrection of Christ: our entire belief depends upon this dogma, without which, in the words of St. Paul, we would be deserving of ridicule as "the most miserable of men". Both Christ and Mary exist now outside of space and time limits, with a truly human body, that could become visible and tangible at God's will, as attested to by the Gospels (we do not claim that he same takes place in other mystical experiences, even those considered by the Church to be of a true supernatural nature.)

The same transformation of the body of Christ, already applied to the body of Mary, is promised to those who are his members and die in his grace. The Head of the "mystical Body" has entered into his Kingdom, and the sharing of his glory is the final state that we hope for through his infinite generosity.

To our way of thinking, a truly human existence must maintain the possibility of an interaction between body and spirit, the interplay that we experience in all our emotions. We do not know how this will take place in eternity. We might be satisfied, echoing the humble amazement of St. Paul, repeating with him, "eye has not seen or ear heard, nor can human intellect comprehend, what God has decreed for those who love Him".

NOTE no. 1

Catholic Theology, supported by a multi-secular Tradition and dogmatic definitions in many Councils, teaches that at the Last Supper Christ fulfilled his promise (cfr. c. 6 of St. John's Gospel) to give us his Body to eat and his Blood to drink. Before his Apostles, he took a piece of bread in his hands and simply said "This is my Body which is given up for you" Then, with a cup of wine, "This is my Blood that will be shed for you".

Such utterances can have no other meaning than the statement of perfect identity between the thing in his hands -that still looks and tastes like bread- and the Body the Apostles are seeing at table with them (there is no other Body of Christ.) And the Blood that is going to be shed cannot be anything but the same Blood that is flowing through the veins and arteries of Christ: there is no other. This is the teaching of the Church throughout history.

When in a Eucharistic celebration a priest -impersonating Christ- repeats those words, the faithful adore a host that still looks and tastes like bread, and a liquid in the chalice that looks and tastes like wine, knowing that before them the same action of Christ in the Last Supper is taking place in our time. It is the same Body of Christ that the Apostles were seeing and that they ate in a hidden presence, just as we now do.

We adore the same living Blood that was going to be shed and that the Apostles drank. To say that after the resurrection Christ has no body, just as he did have it at the Last Supper, is to deny any real meaning to the sacramental life of the Church, which is centered upon the Eucharist as the proclamation of the Death and Resurrection of the Lord.

NOTE no.2

In the Eucharist nothing physically observable has changed due to the words of consecration. Perhaps it might be possible to speak of a change in the relationship between Christ's soul and the matter of the bread and wine, so that the same attuned state that makes a given ensemble of particles into "my body" has now been obtained with respect to the matter of the hosts and the wine everywhere that the words of Christ exercise his infinite power to subject all things to himself. It is not simply a symbol, or a new "meaning" (trans-signification?) but a real union of spirit and matter of the same order that makes into my body whatever I eat or develop in my organic growth.

The presence of Christ in multiple places throughout the world is not a problem within the ideas of Quantum Mechanics, and the same can be said of the statement that considers that the full reality of Christ's Body and blood is found in each smallest piece of the sacramental species.

Bibliography

• ACOSTA V., COWAN C., GRAHAM B., Essentials of Modern Physics, Harper & Row, New York, 1973.
• CARREIRA M. Metafísica de la Materia, Univ. Comillas, Madrid, 1993.
• JAKI, S., Brain, Mind and Computers, Herder and Herder, New York, 1969.
• PENROSE R., The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989
• POPPER K., ECCLES J., The Self and its Brain, Springer-Verlag, New York 1977
• POZO, C., María en la Escritura y en la Fe de la Iglesia, BAC Popular, Madrid, 1979.
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• " Teología del Más Allá, BAC, Madrid, 1980
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• " " , La Pascua de la Creación, BAC, Madrid 1996.

Appendix - The Turin Shroud

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