Four Properties of a Glorified Resurrected Human Body

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Four Properties of a Glorified Resurrected Human Body

Sacred Scripture teaches that our glorified resurrected bodies will experience four properties as an outflow of the beatified soul enjoying the vision of God’s essence:

1. Impassibility – the glorified body will no longer suffer physical sickness or death, as Saint Paul teaches regarding the glorified body in 1 Corinthians 15:42, “It is sown in corruption, it shall rise in incorruption.”
2. Subtlety meaning that we will have a spiritualized nature in the sense of a spiritual body as did our Lord as we learn at 1 Corinthians 15:44: “It is sown a corruptible body, it shall rise a spiritual,” i.e. a spirit-like, “body.” We see that Christ’s glorified body was able to pass through closed doors.
3. Agility – the glorified body will obey the soul with the greatest ease and speed of movement as we read in 1 Corinthians 15:43: “It is sown in weakness, it shall rise in power,” that is, according to a gloss, “mobile and living.” Saint Thomas Aquinas says, “But mobility can only signify agility in movement. Therefore the glorified bodies will be agile.” We define agility to be as our Resurrected Lord’s ability to bilocate and travel great distances in an instant.
4. Clarity (Beauty) – the glorified body will be free from any deformity and will be filled with beauty and radiance as we read at Matthew 13:43: “The just shall shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father,” and Wisdom 3:7: “The just shall shine, and shall run to and fro like sparks among the reeds.”
   St. Thomas Aquinas at Summa Contra Gentiles, IV, 86 summarized: “thus also will his body be raised to the characteristics of heavenly bodies — it will be lightsome (clarity), incapable of suffering (impassible), without difficulty and labor in movement (agility), and most perfectly perfected by its form (subtlety)”. For this reason, the Apostle speaks of the bodies of the risen as heavenly, referring not to their nature, but to their glory.
   The Bodies of the Damned
   For the sake of completeness, some mention should be made in regards to the bodies of the dammed. As heaven and hell are direct opposites, the bodies of the damned will be just the opposite of those glorified bodies of the saints. It is left to the reader’s imagination to provide further details concerning their description.

We can, however, recall the words of St. Bonaventure who said: “if the body of a single reprobate were to appear on earth, the stench that it would omit, would so taint the air around it as to cause the death of any living beings that would come near to it”.
Writing about the fires of hell, St. Thomas, says that this fire is a corporeal fire, of the same nature as fire on earth, differing from it only accidentally, since it has no need of terrestrial fuel. It is dark, without flame, lasts forever, and burns bodies without destroying them.