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6 ETERNAL FLESH The Resurrection of the Body 176. What is meant by ‘‘the resurrection of the body’’? By ‘‘the resurrection of the body’’ is meant that at the end of the world the bodies of all men will rise from the earth and be united again to their souls, never more to be separated. Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall all indeed rise again. (I Corinthians 15:51) —A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Revised Edition of the Baltimore Catechism, Part 1, Lesson 14 The When of Eternal Flesh Beauty is momentary in the mind— The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body’s beauty lives. —Wallace Stevens, ‘‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’’ In this last question and answer we find, with typical catechismic succinctness , one of the most intriguingly odd of Christian notions: once we correct for the lingering gender bias, we are faced with the notion that human ‘‘immortality’’ is something somatic, or, to put it differently, that human corporeality is something immortal. Here we seem to find no fragmentation at all—indeed, integrity (or ‘‘entirety’’) is one of the signs of the resurrected flesh. But I will argue that we find once more a particular fragmenting of the experience of time, a fragmenting that gives eternity to life. The role of memory here is likewise odd, particularly if 132 T H E R E S U R R E C T I O N O F T H E B O D Y we attend to Augustine, for whom it must loop back, back to the Edenic corporeality that the resurrected body takes up, restores, and yet exceeds. In this chapter I want to look particularly at the ways in which we, corporeally, live the eternal even as we live extended through time; I also want, therefore, to emphasize the corporeality of lived eternity. More exactly, I want to emphasize the recurrent, breaking, or suspended times of the body, in which we may recognize the capacity of the body to be (as those early monists insisted) more than mere matter, yet wholly material; to be, as flesh, more than linear and brief in temporal occupation. Looking at both function and sensation in the living body, we find more than a time that endures: we find a time cut through and transformed by an eternity we can evoke, if not understand,1 in memory. What I would like to do here, to phrase it differently, is to take the ‘‘eternal’’ of eternal life seriously, take it as a nontime that already cuts through our time, or within which our temporality is already enfolded: the outside edge of time that we touch, barely, where staying is impossible . I want to suggest that eternal life in the body tells us more about eternal life as well as about bodies. Nancy quotes Hölderlin as declaring, ‘‘Even in a limited existence, man can know an infinite life, and the limited representation of divinity, stemming for him from this existence, can itself also be infinite.’’ And Nancy goes on to add: ‘‘Even in a limited existence, man can know an infinite life: this is living on, this is exceeding . Infinite life neither succeeds nor brims over life. . . . The infinite brims over inwards.’’2 In the body as it lives, within the limits bounded (imprecisely) by the skin, are the traces of the infinite, the eternal, brimmed over into the flesh. Since, in thinking the resurrection of the body as the materiality of eternal life, I read eternity as a quality and fullness of corporeal life in time and not as indefinite endurance, I would read the ‘‘end of the world’’ (the ‘‘time’’ in or at which the resurrection of the body happens) as language’s struggle with the unsayability in the world of the atemporality that disrupts it; ‘‘end’’ is perhaps no worse a metaphor than ‘‘outside .’’ Somatic eternity is not the endurance of the body but the transfigurative rhythm and rupture of time and the fullness of life, in and through the flesh. The resurrection of the body is declared doctrine in Augustine’s Enchiridion, where he writes, ‘‘Now, as to the resurrection of the body, . . . that the bodies of all men—both those who have been born and those who shall be born, both those who have died and those who shall die—shall be raised again, no Christian ought...

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