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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Resurrection Judgement and the Hereafter Lesson Thirteen: The Resurrection of Man in Both His Dimensions Now let us see what the nature of life will be in the hereafter. Will resurrection be exclusively corporeal, so that man is restored to life in the material form that characterizes his body, or will his eternal life be exclusively in the realm of the spirit, without any kind of attachment to the material body?

Or will his return to life have on the contrary both dimensions, spiritual and semi-corporeal? Our use of the word “semi-corporeal” implies that what comes to life is a subtle body, one that may be regarded as the essence of his present form.

Finally, since the nature of man is a compound of body and spirit, will man's life after resurrection embrace both these dimensions, so that neither will his body that element which gives rise to a whole series of physical and chemical reaction perish completely, nor will his spirit be the separated from his bodily form? All these represent various theories put forward concerning the nature of resurrection; let us now examine each one in turn.

Some scholars espouse the first theory and say that when death overtakes the body and its physical and chemical reactions are brought to an end, everything reaches its point of termination. However, when resurrection takes place, the scattered form of man is reassembled out of the particles that have been buried in the earth, scattered in the air, or drowned in the ocean.

When the body thus begins its new life, the spirit which counts as one of the properties of the mechanism of the body is bound also to come back to life. The second theory has also been espoused by many philosophers. They believe that since the spirit represents both the source and the essence of human existence and its very structure predisposes it to continual life, it bids eternal farewell to the material body when death occurs for the structure of the body predisposes it to perishing.

After enjoying for a brief time the life-giving rays of the spirit, the body finds that its role is at an end. The compound nature of the body permitted it to house the abstract spirit only for a limited time, after which it inevitably fell prey to decay and death. The spirit, by contrast, being ultimately free of the body and its properties, remains eternal and immortal, and it is therefore the spirit alone which appears on the plain of resurrection.