Some long married couples who regularly read this column have asked you to answer the questions: why is it that priesthood is said to be for eternity while a married couple promise each other fidelity until death do us part. Isn't married love also for eternity? Are these not questions of the greatest relevance to us in Christian Malta with its ageing population?
The first question is quite similar to that put to Jesus about what would happen in heavenly life to the man who had married seven sisters in succession. His answer was about the nature of the human body and its transformations. But first since there is a reference to Christian Malta perhaps I should start by recalling that, in 1979, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned us: "Neither the Bible nor the theologians supply us with enough light to be able to describe properly the life that is to come after death."

Nevertheless, the little there is in the Bible is much more than philosophy can provide. St Paul wrote that, at death, the body is "sown as an animal body, but is raised as a spiritual body". Perhaps it might be better to use the word "windy" instead of spiritual, or closer to the Greek "pneumatic" in the sense in which this word is used to refer for instance to the tyres of a motor car. So it is not quite clear what St Paul meant to say.

I take it that what he meant is that there will be a fully human body only after the resurrection. Our present body of flesh and blood in the Apostle's view is only a pale reflection of what a fully human body should be. In his book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis has a character similarly embodied as we are who discovers that he is like a ghost (for instance unable even to bend the grass beneath his feet) in relation to people with resurrected bodies.

This text seems to be inspired by the Gospel account of the Transfiguration. On that occasion, the apostles were able to see Jesus in His true form, which was on other occasions concealed from their eyes that could only see the "fallen" form of a human.

In the second letter to the Corinthians, St Paul, again possibly with the Transfiguration in mind, talking of death says: "That we do not want to be unclothed, but to have more clothes on top of our present clothing, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life." Here there is the implication that nakedness is the sign of humanity's loss of Grace. When Christ is perceived as naked both at birth and on the cross, this is because the robe of Grace, symbolised by the super-white garments of the Transfiguration or of the angels of the Resurrection, are invisible to un-enlightened vision.

The point is that the Christian's desire should not be to slough our (mortal) body away, but rather to have it subsumed into eternal life.

Are you trying to emphasise that the Christian hope is not based so much on the conviction of many philosophers that the soul is immortal, but rather on the article of the Creed which proclaims belief in the Resurrection of the Body?
This opposition between immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body was only focused upon, I suspect, by the great Protestant exegete, Oscar Cullman, the author of the epoch-making treatise Christ and Time. The Fathers of the Church are centrally concerned with the resurrection of the body, but in general they also invoke the survival of the soul as guaranteeing the identity of the resurrected person with the person who died.

Admittedly, many of them were influenced by Plato from whom they derived their basic arguments for the immortality of the soul. The essence of this argument is that thought is indestructible, since it is not made of material parts, and therefore the thinker who produces the thought must also be indestructible, since the maker of something cannot be inferior in energy to the thing that he has made, in this case the thoughts that have been thought and cannot be un-thought.

Nevertheless were it just the (necessarily spiritual) source of thought that survives my death, it would not be myself which continues in existence. As Aquinas put it, "the soul of Peter is not Peter". Likewise it is not my body that dies, while my soul goes marching on.

At the funeral of aunt Ursula, it is not just her corpse who is buried, but she herself. Likewise, my Museum friends do not have the body of San Ġorġ Preca in the same way as another friend of mine is the proud possessor of one of Elvis Presley's T-shirt. What they have is the Saint. In brief, body and soul are not two completely different things. What dies and what resurrects, according to Christian belief, is the person.

What exactly happens to the body at death?
The only hint we have is St Paul's image of "sowing" in the passage quoted and elsewhere his comparison of death to birth. Human unwillingness to die is compared to an embryo that wants to remain in the darkness of the maternal womb. Our future body is as unpredictable as an oak tree by someone who just seized an acorn. There will be some continuity with our present body 'the soul' but not the same type of sexual activity. Love is eternal.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.