RESURRECTION AND REVIVISCENCE. - Resurrection, that is, the return to full life of an organism that is certainly dead, has at all times been invoked as the greatest demonstration of a power superior to the limits of nature. In fact, resurrection appears episodically in the Old Testament, as a demonstration of the divine mandate 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 a seal of the new religion they preached.
Thus, in the Old Testament, Elijah (I Kings 17:17-24) raises the son of the widow of Zarephath; Elisha (II Kings 4:28-37) calls back from death the son of the Shunammite woman; after his death, his bones, by mere contact, restore life to a man being carried to burial (II Kings 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), the beloved friend Lazarus, a corpse of four days (Jn. 11:1-45). At the instant in which Jesus dies, many bodies of Saints, who had died previously, rise again, appearing to many in Jerusalem (Mt. 27:52-53). Among all of these, the crowning and overwhelming proof of his divinity, his own glorious resurrection at dawn on the third day after death on the cross.
In apostolic times, Peter at Joppa restores life to the deceased Tabitha (Acts 9:36-42) and Paul at Troas raises the young man Eutychus who, having fallen asleep on the window sill during the Apostle's long discourse, had fallen from the third floor (ibid. 20:6-12).
Resurrections from death reappear later also during the history of the Church. A first easy escape route for the deniers of the miracles of resurrection is not to acknowledge their historical existence; if the fact is historically admitted, criticism attempts naturalistic explanations, judging them to be phenomena of awakening from states of lethargy (v.) or of lethargy (v.), or of reviviscence from apparent death (v.). The cases of resurrection are thus assimilated to phenomena well studied and known by biology and medicine, which, however, are quite another thing from true resurrection.
Lethargy is a phenomenon present only in lower mammals, or in even lower species of animals, in the form of estivation or hibernation. From the appearance of a 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 an almost abolition of those of relational life. Its characteristic is to be tied to environmental conditions and to represent a means of allowing the individual to survive in conditions in which a normal life would not be possible; in such a state the reserves, particularly of fat, accumulated in the animal's body are slowly consumed (v. FASTING). In man, phenomena of true and proper lethargy do not occur; but only exceptionally, in particular environmental conditions and with the greatest scarcity of food, phenomena of "life at a minimum" occur, in which the subject reduces to the greatest degree every sort of activity of relational life and of energy dispersion toward the environment. Examples of this kind can be observed during the long periods of starvation to which man may be exposed because of famines or confinement in concentration camps. In such conditions, the periods of daily sleep can be greatly lengthened, during which the economy of internal metabolism is realized to the greatest degree; but the conditions proper to lethargy never come to be established, whether from the point of view of vegetative life or of relational life. It is said that, due to an extreme scarcity of food, Russian peasants and Eskimos can fall into a particular lethargic sleep, their vital manifestations being reduced almost to a latent form (O. Polimanti, Il letargo, Rome 1913).
Quite another thing, instead, are the conditions, particular to man, of catalepsy (v.) and of lethargy. Here we are dealing with true morbid forms, always an indication of neuropsychic abnormality, since these are subjects affected either by organic diseases of the nervous system (encephalitis) or hysteria (v.) or certain forms of neurosis (v.). In such forms the functions of relational life are principally affected, the subject taking on the appearance of a person deeply asleep; the pulse and breathing are slow and in some cases breathing may even stop, prolonged even for some hours, thus giving the appearance of death; appearance only, given that a well-conducted examination of the other functions (circulation, nervous reactivity) shows that the individual is still alive. Some authors speak of cases of lethargy lasting even 32 days (Krauss), as regards the appearance of sleep, while the functions of circulation and respiration nevertheless remain present. In a case of Pfendler (cited by Binswanger) there was a cessation of breathing for 48 hours, while cardiac activity nevertheless remained intact. It is therefore never a matter of death understood in the absolute sense of the word, because the cardinal functions of vegetative life always persist, even if reduced to a minimum that is nearly irrelevant to a crudely conducted examination. In the case in which the last manifestations of life are reduced to cardiac activity, reviviscence is possible only through the intervention of a physician, timely, according to art and prolonged; a spontaneous return to life of the individual in a state of so-called apparent death, in which only cardiac activity persists, is excluded.
The medical literature describes cases of reviviscence obtained, through extraordinary means of resuscitation, even several minutes after the complete arrest of the heart. In such cases, once every activity of vital functions has ceased, it might seem to be a matter of true resurrection from death. Here too, however, the vitality of the muscular and ganglionic cells of the heart persists in the subject, albeit in a state of momentary functional inhibition; but this lasts only a very brief time, after which even the most resistant cells are swept away by death, because of their asphyxia (anoxia) and the accumulation of toxic catabolic products.
Even more rapid to die are the nervous elements of higher functional dignity, proper to the cortical and subcortical zones. After a certain period of time, in truth quite brief, following the suspension of breathing and circulation, even if the extraordinary means employed succeed in reactivating and restoring to their automaticity for a certain time the aforementioned functions, the individual remains irremediably dead in his sensitive-conscious and motor-voluntary activity. Every bond of intelligence, of affectivity, of will with the environment is destroyed in him: what was a man is reduced to the conditions of an experimental animal whose cerebral hemispheres have been destroyed (Goltz's dog). Among the latest cases, well demonstrative of the limited hopes of a full reviviscence, see the one that occurred and was illustrated by E. Scavo. La riviviscenza, report of 5 May 1952 at the International University G. Marconi in Rome.
The nervous system, an indispensable instrument of every activity of internal coordination of the organism and of relation with the external world, falls very rapidly into absolute death. Richet observed that after only three minutes the spinal cord of a dog, reduced to a bloodless state, dies irremediably; Stewart sets seven minutes as the maximum limit; Weinberger and colleagues have affirmed that life cannot be restored except for a few hours if the arrest of circulation lasts beyond 8 minutes and 45 seconds (v. M. D. Mercier Fauteux, op. cit. in bibl.). To prolonged lack of oxygenation (anoxia) the various elements of the nervous system resist in inverse relation to their degree of functional dignity, and absolute death irremediably completes its course from the highest structures to the most elementary. Anoxia produces loss of consciousness in 10 seconds, arrest of the electrical waves of the electroencephalogram in 20-30 seconds; in 3-5 minutes the highest nervous structures (beginning with the cortical neurons, followed by the nuclei of the base, particularly the lenticular, and the cerebellum) undergo destructive alterations that are no longer reversible. Far more resistant, though always to a limited extent, are the bulbar cardiocirculatory centers (15-20 minutes) and the respiratory ones (30-60 minutes). Resistance is greater in young individuals (maximal in asphyxiated newborns) than in adults and in those with a brain in full activity of action (v. Sidney C. Wiggin, etc., op. cit. in bibl.). For such reasons the attempts at resuscitation of an individual struck by simple respiratory arrest, followed shortly by cardiac arrest, or struck by simultaneous cardio-respiratory arrest, can give a hope of reviviscence all the greater the more rapidly and energetically the means of resuscitation are put into operation: artificial respiration, manual or with mechanical lungs; rhythmic electrical stimulation of the phrenic nerve; cardiac excitation with intracardiac injections (adrenaline, barium chloride, etc.); mechanical irritation of the pericardium; direct massage of the heart; intravenous injections or perfusions of medicaments or of artificial physiological solutions or of blood plasma or of donor's blood; artificial circulation with external mechanical devices of circulation and oxygenation, directly connected to the circulatory network of the subject to be resuscitated.
It must therefore be clearly emphasized how, in an individual struck by respiratory arrest and cardiac syncope, reviviscence always represents a complex and difficult undertaking, which requires technical organization of the first order, skill of operators, maximum promptness of action and which must always be considered uncertain in its final results, both as regards the lasting restoration of the automatic activity of respiration and of the heart, and even more so as regards a full resumption of the activity of the higher nervous system. In all cases, even the most recent, in which reviviscence was obtained by extraordinary means, after an arrest of the heart longer than a few minutes (three and a half), real death followed thereafter within a few hours or days, and in every case, during such a period of survival, the individual manifested no recovery whatever of the higher neuro-psychic faculties.
A particular form of suspension and return to vital activity is that spoken of with regard to fakirs (v.), capable, it is said, of appearing as dead, remaining buried for a determined time and then, with suitable maneuvers, returning to life. Similar facts could be invoked for a rationalistic explanation of the miracle of the r., but, in fact, the descriptions of such phenomena made by eyewitnesses (C. Godard, op. cit. in bibl., p. 46; J. De Bonniot, op. cit. in bibl., pp. 172-74) are incomplete and contradictory, so that they cannot serve as evidence of scientific value and lay themselves open to denial and to the accusation of trickery. If one wishes to accept some cases more seriously documented, since the fact of such complete and long suspensions of every manifestation of life appears in strident contrast with the biological characteristics of living tissues and because of their manifesting themselves in the course of magical rites, it is necessary to admit that here we are at the boundaries of nature and to think of the intervention of a preternatural cause.
From what has been said, there therefore emerges the very clear difference between true death and the mere appearance of it; even where the life of the individual is reduced to an intensity almost imperceptible, at the level of the great organic functions of respiration, of circulation, of the irritability and reflexivity of the nervous system. On the other hand, biological experiment and clinical observation clearly demonstrate how the nervous system is endowed with an extreme lability and is affected in the most absolutely lethal manner by the lack of oxygen (anoxia): a few minutes of asphyxia suffice to destroy irremediably not only the organ of the most human faculties (cortical and subcortical zones), but also those bulbo-spinal nervous centers indispensable for life to be preserved and to unfold in the consensus partium (Hippocrates) of the structures and functions of our organism. Brief therefore and fatal is the step between apparent death and definitive real death, all the briefer the more the two states become confoundable with one another. Conversely, an insurmountable barrier absolutely separates the phenomenon of reviviscence from that of the r.; while the former is an awakening and re-empowerment of functions lulled and weakened to the limit of extinction, the latter represents a new creation of a life completely annulled. Practically, from the standpoint of the causality of the two facts, we observe in the first event the complicated equipment, the multiplicity and variety of means, the pressing succession of maneuvers bound to the attempt to lead the subject back from the thresholds of death to life lived anew in its integrity and durability: in the second, the simplicity of the means, the power of the results proper to the re-creative act of the r.!
Examined objectively, in the eyes of an unprejudiced criticism, the r. of the Old and New Testament clearly present a double note: the certainty of an absolutely accomplished death, the marvelous simplicity and human disproportion of the means employed for the recall to life.
The son of the widow of Zarephath, dead from a "most grave" illness, and that of the Shunammite, from a violent cerebral congestion, were certainly dead, if they succeeded in destroying every last human hope, every mad illusion from the trembling heart of their respective mothers. The son of the widow of Nain was so certainly dead in the estimation of all as to be already being carried to burial; the daughter of Jairus, having grown progressively worse in her illness to the point of bending the pride of a ruler of the Synagogue in despair at the feet of Jesus, certainly was not sleeping amid the din of weeping and lamentations, but appeared certainly dead to all those present scientes quod mortua esset (Lk. 9:53); Lazarus, dead and shut in the tomb for four days, is by now a corpse in full putrefaction (iam foetet: ibid. 11:39).
Such a growing certainty of death reaches its highest degree in the case of Jesus' death. He, in fulfillment of his Passion, underwent an execution, the torment of the Cross (v.), which both the historical experience of cases of crucifixion and the experimental scientific investigations conducted by scholars of the Passion and of the Holy Shroud (v.) prove to be certainly mortal. The fact, certainly, has been explained in various ways from the point of view of the pathogenetic mechanism. Thus, various authors have admitted as the determining cause of death: hunger, thirst, sunstroke, the impediment to respiratory movements due to the stretching of the crucified arms, cardiac arrest from reflex syncope, blood hyperalkalosis with muscular tetany and asphyxia (Hynek), and various other causes as well. The experimental investigations (suspensions of persons by the arms, with the legs either free or supported) conducted by U. Modder (communication to the International Congress of Studies on the Holy Shroud, Rome 1950) would give as the cause of death of the crucified the "orthostatic collapse," that is, the fall of arterial pressure with progressive acceleration of the pulse due 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 cavities of the heart.
Whatever the mechanism may be, it is certain, however, that crucifixion must be considered a surely mortal execution. In the case of Christ, moreover, in particular, although it must be held as certain that death occurred by an act of his will at the predestined instant, in the mechanism of natural causes the grave moral and physical sufferings that accompanied Jesus from the Supper to Calvary contributed largely to the effect of the final execution. Thus: the anguish of the prayer in the garden of olives, the external and internal organ injuries produced by the flagellation, the most acute pains of the crowning with thorns, the exhausting fatigue, the repeated hemorrhages (v. G. Judica-Cordiglia, Cristo: l'Uomo, in Perfice Musus, Medicina e Morale, Turin, Sept. 15, 1951, no. 18, pp. 164-69). Furthermore, the centurion's lance thrust, tearing through the fifth right intercostal space the corresponding atrium of the heart, while it was the legal proof of the death that had occurred, would by itself alone have been sufficient to cause it.
Unless one were to deny the entire historical reality of the Gospels and the demonstrated objectivity of their narration, no honest and intelligent criticism could maintain that the death of Christ was a case of lethargy or apparent death.
Turning attention to the other noted characteristic of the resurrections of the Old and New Testaments, the simplicity and human inadequacy of the means used for the recall to life shows the most strident gap between the human work of reviviscence and the divine work of the resurrection. This characteristic appears particularly in the resurrection of Christ, which occurs by the very power of him who "seipsum suscitavit occisum" (St. Augustine, In Johannis evangelium tract., XII, nn. 10-11; PL 35, 1489).
Bibliography14 works
Giuseppe de Nismo