RESURRECTION and REVIVISCENCE. — Resurrection, that is, the return to full life of an organism certainly dead, has at all times been invoked as the supreme demonstration of a power surpassing the limits of nature. In fact, resurrection appears episodically in the Old Testament, as proof of the divine commission entrusted to the prophets, and in the New Testament, as the supreme proof given by Jesus Christ to demonstrate his own divinity, or by certain Apostles and Saints as the seal of the new religion preached by them.
Thus, in the Old Testament, Elijah (I Reg. 17, 17-24) restores to life the son of the widow of Sarephta; Elisha (II Reg. 4, 28-37) recalls the son of the Shunammite from death; after his death, his bones, by mere contact, restore life to a man being taken to burial (II Reg. 13, 21). In the New Testament, the three resurrections performed by Jesus: the son of the widow of Nain (Lk. 7, 11-16), the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus (Mk. 5, 22-24, 25-42), and his beloved friend Lazarus, a corpse for four days (Jn. 11, 1-45). At the moment when Jesus dies, many bodies of Saints, who had already died, rise again and appear to many in Jerusalem (Mt. 27, 52-53). Above all, as the crowning proof and overwhelming demonstration of his divinity, stands his own glorious resurrection at dawn on the third day after his death on the cross.
In apostolic times, Peter restores the deceased Tabitha to life at Joppa (Acts 9, 36-42), and Paul at Troas raises the young man Eutychus, who, having fallen asleep on the windowsill during the Apostle’s lengthy discourse, had fallen from the third floor (ibid. 20, 6-12).
Resurrections from the dead also reappear during the history of the Church. A first easy escape for those who deny miracles of resurrection is to refuse to recognize their historical existence; if the event is historically admitted, criticism attempts naturalistic explanations, judging that they are phenomena of awakening from states of torpor (v.) lethargy (v.), death (v.). Cases of resurrection are thus assimilated to phenomena well studied and known to biology and medicine, which, however, are something altogether different from true resurrection.
Torpor is a phenomenon found only in lower mammals, or in still lower animal species, in the form of aestivation or hibernation. Appearing like deep sleep, but substantially quite different from it, it consists in a reduction to a minimum of the principal functions of vegetative life (respiration, circulation, basal metabolism) and the almost complete abolition of those of relational life. Its characteristic is that it is linked to environmental conditions and represents a means of enabling the individual to survive in conditions in which normal life would not be possible; in this state, the reserves accumulated in the animal’s body, particularly fat, are slowly consumed (v. FASTING). True torpor does not occur in human beings; only exceptionally, under particular environmental conditions and in situations of extreme food scarcity, do phenomena of “life at a minimum” occur, in which the subject reduces every kind of relational activity and energy dissipation toward the environment to the greatest possible degree. Examples of this kind may be observed during the long periods of starvation to which a person may be exposed by famine or confinement in concentration camps. Under such conditions, periods of daily sleep may become greatly prolonged, during which internal metabolism is economized to the greatest possible degree; but the conditions proper to torpor, whether from the standpoint of vegetative life or that of relational life, are never established. It is said that, because of extreme food shortages, Russian peasants and Eskimos may fall into a particular lethargic sleep, with vital manifestations reduced almost to a latent form (O. Polimanti, Il letargo, Rome 1913).
Quite different, on the other hand, are the conditions catalepsy (v.) and lethargy. These are genuine morbid forms, always indicative of neuropsychic abnormality, occurring in subjects affected either by organic diseases of the nervous system (encephalitis), hysteria (v.), or certain forms of neurosis (v.). In these conditions, the functions of relational life are chiefly affected, and the subject assumes the appearance of a profoundly sleeping person; the pulse and breathing are slow, and in some cases breathing may even cease, sometimes for several hours, thus giving the appearance of death. It is only an appearance, since a properly conducted examination of the other functions (circulation, nervous reactivity) shows that the individual is still alive. Some authors speak of cases of lethargy lasting as long as 32 days (Krauss), insofar as the appearance of sleep is concerned, while the functions of circulation and respiration remain present. In a case reported by Pfendler (cited by Binswanger), breathing ceased for 48 hours, while cardiac activity remained intact. This therefore never involves death in the absolute sense of the word, because the cardinal functions of vegetative life always persist, even if reduced to an almost negligible minimum on a superficial examination. When the last manifestations of life are reduced to cardiac activity, reviviscence is possible only through the intervention of a physician, provided that it is timely, technically competent, and prolonged; a spontaneous return to life is excluded in an individual in the state of so-called apparent death in whom only cardiac activity persists.
The medical literature describes cases of reviviscence achieved, through extraordinary means of resuscitation, even several minutes after the complete cessation of the heart. In such cases, with all vital functional activity having ceased, it might appear that this was true resurrection from death. Here too, however, the muscle and ganglion cells of the heart retain their vitality, even if in a state of temporary functional inhibition; but this persists only for a very brief period, after which even the most resistant cells are overcome by death, owing to their asphyxia (anoxia) and the accumulation of toxic catabolic products.
The nervous elements of higher functional dignity, proper to the cortical and subcortical regions, die even more rapidly. After a certain period of time—actually a very brief one—following the suspension of breathing and circulation, even if the extraordinary means employed succeed in reactivating and restoring the aforementioned functions to their automatic operation for a certain time, the individual remains irretrievably dead in his sensory-conscious and voluntary motor activity. Every bond of intelligence, affectivity, and will with the environment is destroyed in him: what was once a human being is reduced to the condition of an experimental animal whose cerebral hemispheres have been destroyed (Goltz’s dog). Among the most recent cases, which clearly demonstrate the limited hopes of a full reviviscence, see the one that occurred to and was described by E. Scavo. La riviviscenza, paper delivered on 5 May 1952 at the G. Marconi International University in Rome.
The nervous system, an indispensable instrument of every activity of the organism’s internal coordination and of its relations with the external world, very rapidly falls into absolute death. Richet observed that after only three minutes the spinal cord of a dog, rendered bloodless, dies irreversibly; Stewart sets the maximum limit at seven minutes, while Weinberger and his associates stated that life cannot be restored except for a few hours if the circulatory arrest lasts more than 8 minutes and 45 seconds (v. BIBLICA). The various elements of the nervous system resist prolonged lack of oxygenation (anoxia) in inverse relation to their degree of functional dignity, and absolute death irreversibly proceeds from the more elevated structures to the more elementary ones. Anoxia produces loss of consciousness in 10 seconds and cessation of the electrical waves of the electroencephalogram in 20–30 seconds; within 3–5 minutes the higher nervous structures (beginning with the cortical neurons, followed by the basal nuclei, particularly the lenticular nucleus, and the cerebellum) undergo destructive alterations that are no longer reversible. Much more resistant, though still only within limits, are the bulbar cardiocirculatory centres (15–20 minutes) and the respiratory centres (30–60 minutes). Resistance is greater in young individuals (greatest in asphyxiated newborns) than in adults and in those whose brains are fully active (v. BIBLICA). For these reasons, attempts to resuscitate an individual affected by simple respiratory arrest, followed shortly by cardiac arrest, or by simultaneous cardiorespiratory arrest, may offer a hope of reviviscence all the greater the more rapidly and energetically the means of resuscitation are put into operation: artificial respiration, manual or by means of mechanical lungs; rhythmic electrical stimulation of the phrenic nerve; cardiac excitation by intracardiac injections (adrenaline, barium chloride, etc.); mechanical irritation of the pericardium; direct cardiac massage; intravenous injections or infusions of medicines, artificial physiological solutions, blood plasma, or donor blood; artificial circulation using external mechanical devices for circulation and oxygenation, directly connected to the circulatory system of the subject to be resuscitated.
It must therefore be clearly emphasized that, in an individual affected by respiratory arrest and cardiac syncope, reviviscence is always a complex and difficult undertaking, requiring first-rate technical organization, operator skill, and the utmost promptness of action,
and that its ultimate results must always be regarded as uncertain, both with regard to the lasting restoration of the automatic activity of breathing and the heart, and even more with regard to a full recovery of the activity of the higher nervous system. In all cases, including the most recent, in which reviviscence was achieved by extraordinary means after cardiac arrest lasting more than a few minutes (three and a half), actual death subsequently occurred within a few hours or days; and in every case, during such a period of survival, the individual displayed no recovery of the higher neuropsychic faculties.
A particular form of suspension and return to vital activity is that discussed with regard to the fakirs (v.), who are said to be capable of presenting themselves as dead, remaining buried for a certain period, and then returning to life through suitable manoeuvres. Similar facts might be invoked in support of a rationalistic explanation of the miracle of resurrection; in fact, however, the descriptions of such phenomena given by eyewitnesses (C. Godard, op. cit. in bibl., p. 46; J. De Bonniot, op. cit. in bibl., pp. 172–74) are incomplete and contradictory, and therefore cannot serve as scientifically valid evidence; they also invite denial and accusations of trickery. If one wishes to accept certain more seriously documented cases, the occurrence of such complete and prolonged suspensions of every manifestation of life appearing in glaring contrast with the biological characteristics of living tissues, and their manifestation in the course of magical rites, it is necessary to admit that here we are on the borders of nature and to envisage the intervention of a supernatural cause.
From what has been said, therefore, the very clear difference between true death and its mere appearance emerges—even where the individual’s life has been reduced to an intensity that is almost imperceptible, at the level of the major organic functions of respiration, circulation, and the irritability and reflex activity of the nervous system. On the other hand, biological experiment and clinical observation clearly demonstrate that the nervous system possesses extreme lability and is affected in the most absolutely lethal manner by lack of oxygen (anoxia): a few minutes of asphyxia suffice to destroy irreversibly not only the organ of the most human faculties (cortical and subcortical zones), but also those bulbospinal nervous centres indispensable for the preservation and functioning of life in the consensus partium (Hippocrates) of the structures and functions of our organism. The passage, therefore, between apparent death and definitive real death is brief and fatal, all the briefer as the two states become more difficult to distinguish from each other. Conversely, an insurmountable barrier absolutely separates the phenomenon of reviviscence from that of resurrection; while the former is the awakening and re-empowerment of functions that have become dormant and weakened to the point of extinction, the latter represents the new creation of a life that has been completely annihilated. In practical terms, as regards the causality of the two events, in the first we observe the complicated equipment, the multiplicity and variety of the means, and the succession of manoeuvres connected with the attempt to bring the subject from the threshold of death back to life, once again lived in its integrity and durability; in the second, the simplicity of the means and the power of the results proper to the recreative act of resurrection!
Objectively examined, under the gaze of an unprejudiced critic, the resurrections of the Old and New Testaments clearly present a twofold characteristic: the certainty of a death that had absolutely occurred, and the marvellous simplicity and human disproportionality of the means employed to recall the dead to life.
The son of the widow of Sarephta, who died of a «very serious» illness, and that of the Shunammite woman, from a violent cerebral congestion, were certainly dead, since they succeeded in destroying every last human hope and every mad illusion in the anxious hearts of their respective mothers. The son of the widow of Naim was so certainly dead in everyone’s estimation that he was already being carried to burial; the daughter of Jairus, whose illness had progressively worsened to the point of bringing the pride of a synagogue official down in despair at Jesus’ feet, was certainly not asleep amid the uproar of weeping and lamentation, but appeared unquestionably dead to all those pre-
sent, scientes quod mortua esset (Lc. 9, 53); Lazarus, dead and shut in the tomb for four days, was by then a corpse in full decomposition (iam foetet: ibid. 11, 39).
Such growing certainty of death reaches its highest degree in the case of Jesus. At the completion of his Passion, he undergoes an execution, Cross (v.), which both the historical experience of cases of crucifixion and the experimental scientific investigations conducted by scholars of the Shroud (v.) demonstrate to be certainly fatal. The fact, it is true, has been explained in various ways from the standpoint of the pathogenetic mechanism. Thus, various authors have acknowledged as the determining cause of death: hunger, thirst, sunstroke, the hindrance to respiratory movements caused by the stretching of the crucified arms, cardiac arrest through reflex syncope, blood alkalosis with muscular tetany and asphyxia (Hynek), and various other causes. The experimental investigations (suspension of persons by the arms, with the legs either unsupported or supported) conducted by U. Modder (communication to the Convegno internazionale di studi sulla S. Sindone, Rome 1950) would indicate “orthostatic collapse” as the cause of death of the crucified: that is, a fall in arterial pressure with progressive acceleration of the pulse, owing to blood stasis in the lower parts of the body and the emptying of the upper parts, thus making it impossible for the blood to return to the right chambers of the heart.
Whatever the mechanism may have been, it is certain, however, that crucifixion must be regarded as an execution that is certainly fatal. In the case of Christ, moreover, and more particularly, although it must be held certain that death occurred through an act of his will at the predestined instant, in the mechanism of the natural causes contributing to the final effect of the execution, the grave moral and physical sufferings that accompanied Jesus from the Supper to Calvary played a considerable part. These included: the anguish of prayer in the Garden of Olives, the external lesions and those of the internal organs produced by the scourging, the acutest pains of the crowning with thorns, exhausting fatigue, and repeated hemorrhages (v. G. Judica-Cordiglia, Cristo: l'Uomo, in Perfice Musus, Medicina e Morale, Turin 15 Sept. 1951, no. 18, pp. 164–69). Furthermore, the centurion’s spear-thrust, which, through the fifth right intercostal space, tore open the corresponding atrium of the heart, while constituting legal proof that death had occurred, would in itself already have been sufficient to cause II.
Unless one were to deny the entire historical reality of the Gospels and the demonstrated objectivity of their account, no honest and intelligent criticism could maintain that Christ’s death was a case of lethargy or apparent death.
Turning attention to the other characteristic feature of the resurrections of the Old and New Testaments, the simplicity and human inadequacy of the means used to recall someone to life reveal the most striking gulf between the human work of resuscitation and the divine work of resurrection. This feature is especially evident in Christ’s resurrection, which occurs through his own power, since he “seipsum suscitavit occisum” (St. Augustine, In Johannis evangelium tract., XII, nos. 10–11; PL 35, 1489).