The Treatise on the Resurrection

The Treatise on the Resurrection

[A letter of instruction to one named Rheginos on the meaning of the resurrection.]

My son Rheginos, there are some who wish to learn many things, and they have their aim when they meet questions that have no answer. If they succeed in these, they think highly of themselves; but I do not think they have stood within the word of truth. They seek rather their own rest, which we have received through our Savior, our Lord the Anointed.

How did the Lord make use of things while he was in the flesh, and after he had revealed himself as Son of God? He lived in the place where you dwell, speaking of the law of nature — but I call it death. The Son of God, Rheginos, was a son of man, and he embraced them both, possessing humanity and divinity, that he might conquer death through his being Son of God, and that through the Son of Man the restoration to the fullness might come; for he was first from above, a seed of the truth, before this structure of the world came to be, in which lordships and divinities have become many.

The Savior swallowed up death. He laid aside the world that perishes; he changed himself into an imperishable aeon, and raised himself up, having swallowed the visible by the invisible, and he gave us the way of our immortality. As the Apostle said, we suffered with him, and rose with him, and went to heaven with him. Now if we are made manifest in this world wearing him, we are his beams; and we are held fast by him until our setting, which is our death in this life. We are drawn upward by him like rays by the sun, and nothing holds us down. This is the resurrection of the spirit, which swallows the resurrection of the soul together with the resurrection of the flesh.

Do not suppose the resurrection is an illusion. It is not illusion; rather, the world is the illusion, and the resurrection is the truth, the revelation of what is, the changing of things, a passing over into newness. For imperishability descends upon the perishable, and light flows down upon the darkness, swallowing it; and the fullness fills up the lack. These are the symbols and the images of the resurrection; it is this that makes the good.

Therefore, Rheginos, do not live according to this flesh for the sake of agreement, but flee from the divisions and the chains, and already you have the resurrection. For if the one who will die knows that he will die — even if he spends many years in this life, he is brought to this — why then do you not consider yourself risen, and already brought to this? If you have the resurrection yet go on as if you were to die — though that one knows he has died — why do I overlook your lack of training? Each one should practice in many ways, and be released from this element, that he may not wander, but receive again what at first was his.