The Easter Enigma
By CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS
ptie challenge of Easter raises two quite I separate questions. First, did Christ rise from the dead? Is it true that he died on Good Friday and that from Easter Sunday onwards the Tomb was empty and His dead body not to be found anywhere on earth? Secondly, was He still on earth during those forty days after Easter and did He appear to people? The two questions are quite separate. There is no inherent reason why God should not have raised Him up from the dead and have assumed Him directly, why the Resur- rection and the Ascension should not have been coincident. It is simply a question of what the evidence shows to have happened.
I excuse myself from comment on the obser- vations on the first question made by Mr. Perry in his most excellent work The Easter Enigma* —partly because I entirely agree with them— partly because I have already written on the subject in the Spectator. As to the second, it is, of course, undeniable that the disciples thought that Our Lord had appeared to them, that their belief in these appearances had the most pro- found and far-reaching psychological effect on their lives, that they were not vulgar frauds. It was not much fun being an early disciple. A death on the cross or by burning oil or by the sword was almost certainly your final fate after a life of great hardship. No one would have been a disciple unless he was at least profoundly sin- cere in his faith. All this Mr. Perry freely admits and cogently argues.
'But,' he most fairly asks, 'what was the post- Resurrection Christ?' The question is by no means simple. Since the beginning of time the incon- clusive debate about man's survival had been carried on. The arguments had prOved tolerably evenly balanced, and those who supported sur- vival tended to fall into two schools of thought, neither of them wholly satisfactory. According to the Greek tradition, what survived was the soul—disembodied spirit—and he who was offered such a prospect was inclined to answer, 'In what sense is such an mantilla vagula blandula me?' According to the Jewish tradition, where survival was accepted at all, what was proclaimed was not so much a resurrection of the body as a resurrection of the corpse—a reassembly of all the detailed parts of the body as it was in life— and this the critic was apt to reject as materialistic, ridiculous and manifestly untrue. Christianity under St. Paul, in this as in so many other re- spects, offered a synthesis of two imperfect ideas which, combined, made a perfect idea. On the authority of Christ's revelation St. Paul offered an immortality which was much more than the mere immortality of the spirit but which was also something quite different from a merely ridiculous resurrection of the corpse. He drew, the distinction between body and flesh, between *Faber, 21s. corpus and c•rn•a, between soma and .sari. The corruptible body would perish and we should be raised up with an incorruptible body, which would indeed bear a relation to the corruptible body similar to that which the crop bears to the seed, but which would in no way be made up out of a mere collection of its members. Later Christian writers, in their anxiety to distinguish themselves from the Docetists, sometimes slipped back into materialistic beliefs in the resurrection of the corpse, but these beliefs have no place in St. Paul's teaching.
Now St. Paul held, of course, that the assur- ance that these things were so was the historical fact of Christ's Resurrection—a fact which he was so exceptionally well placed to verify, but the Christ Whom he had himself seen on the road to Damascus and on other occasions was the post-Ascension Christ, a Christ gloriously regnant, whose appearance it was neither possible nor legitimate to describe in detail. The Christ Whom the Disciples saw between Easter and Ascension was indeed a Christ Who in some mysterious and triumphant way carried with Him the sense that He had triumphed over death. He was by no means the poor wounded creature Who in some Venturini-like fashion might have crawled just alive out of the Tomb. But at the same time He still bore upon Himself both the physical marks of His Passion and also the phy- sical features of life with which His friends were familiar. He called attention to them in challenge. He was the same, yet not the same, as He had been before His death. Those who knew Him and loved Him always recognised Him in the end, but always had difficulty in recognising Him. St. Paul, on the road to Damascus, was at first uncertain who had appeared to him, but he was not inclined to think that it was a gardener.
What exactly then was the nature of this Risen but not yet Ascended Christ? To try to answer this question, which is admittedly a difficult and mysterious question, Mr. Perry, calls in aid modern parapsychological speculations. He does so with learning and reverence, scornfully reject- ing extravagances and follies, reminding us how different is our age from that of a hundred years ago with its almost clear-cut division between Bible-worshippers and sceptics, both of them con- fident that all these questions could be answered in a single word as either 'true' or 'false.' Today we are indeed conscious how much more there is that we do not know, and that is a good thing.
Mr. Perry therefore considers what light tele- pathy, apparitions and phantasms of the dead can throw on the problem. He suggests that the Risen Christ was perhaps not a reality but an apparition, sent by God by an unique act to the disciples as reassurance to their faith. He re- assured them in this way because thus alone were they capable of accepting reassurance, Now there do seem to me two serious objec- tions to Mr. Perry's suggestion. The first is that it is really an explanation of obscurum per obscurius. The precise nature of Christ's Resur- rection Body is indeed a profound mystery, but, when you have suggested that it was an apparition, that you do not very well know what an apparition is, that apparitions are sometimes and in some way tangible, that it was, if an apparition, then an uniquely God-provided apparition and that it had several qualities which are not to be found in any other known apparition, I do not see that any particular purpose is served by bringing in the hypothesis of apparition at all if it is to be banged about in this way. It seems to me simpler merely to say that we do not exactly know what Christ's Resurrection Body was.
The other objection is, of course, the words of Our Lord to St. Thomas in which he speci- fically states that He is flesh and blood and not a spirit. I should make much more of those words than does Mr. Perry. Mr. Perry argues that it is the percipient of the apparation who puts words into the apparition's mouth. These words there- fore prove only that the disciples thought that Our Lord was flesh and blood and not a spirit. Now, as admittedly there is no recorded case of the percipients of other apparitions having put long discourses into their mouths such as Our Lord is recorded to have uttered on a number of occasions, we really have no evidence how Our Lord would have talked had He been an appari- tion. But, if we are to suppose that His words to St. Thomas and all His other words were sub- conscious inventions of those who imagined them- selves to be talking to Him, the value of His appearances seems largely destroyed. If we are to suppose that God deceived the disciples by send- ing to them an apparition which they believed to be the Lord and then again by putting into their heads words which they then imagine to be His words, this does seem to me to ascribe a course of action to God in which I find it hard to believe. It is a theory for which there is much less evi- dence and which is intrinsically much less prob- able than that of conventional orthodoxy.
We should certainly call in aid anything that parapsychology or any other science has to tell us about religious truth, and the tone in which Mr. Perry introduces his speculations is unex- ceptionable. He is careful to remind us that any- one who imagined that by some glib scientific formula he had resolved all the mysteries of the Resurrection would merely write himself down a fool, and I welcome such speculations as those of Mr. Perry because at the end of everything. as he himself would agree, they teach us how much there is that we cannot know about the nature of Christ's appearances. One of the most important tasks of Christian teaching is to remind us—sometimes in opposition to the preachers of new faiths and sciences—how- little we know about the details and furniture of the future life. The poet or the painter or even the preacher may fill out those details. Provided that he reminds himself and us that he is drawing on his imagination he does no harm, but one of the great lessons which revelation has to teach is the lesson of the abundance of mystery. Very little, in proportion to the whole, has been re- vealed, and of this Mr. Perry is most notably aware.
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