WITHIN THE CHRISTIAN tradition, the Incarnation and ascension of Christ and the eventual perfection of all human bodies at the Resurrection push the conception of the body itself to the edge of the imagination. In his De fide et symbolo, or On the Faith and the Creed, Augustine engages with the very idea of body through these issues. The De fide is an exposition of the Creed of the Christian faith offered by a young Augustine to his superiors in the African church. Within it, Augustine engages with various ways of conceiving of the body of God and the bodies of the elect at the end of time. In this discussion, he reveals what he saw as a possible route to the perfection of the human body, while at the same time insisting on the disembodiment of all aspects of God except the body of Christ.

In the larger context of conversations regarding the body and its fluids from antiquity to the eve of modernity, Augustine's attempts to imagine the perfection of the human body illustrate the profound connection between the human body and human identity, and how this connection tends to provide an imaginative limit to the possibility of human transformation. Within this tradition, while the soul may be able to endure, at least for a time, without the body, the body consistently remains an essential part of personhood. Changing the body too much threatens to transform a human being into someone else or something else, as Caroline Walker Bynum has found in her study of changing conceptions of the Christian resurrection. Augustine's changing ideas regarding the resurrection body provide an example in miniature of the tug-of-war between change and continuity that defines Western attempts to imagine a perfect human. In his final argument, Augustine found that a human body needs blood. Despite the strong association of this fluid and its motion with change and the post-lapsarian inevitability that change leads to corruption and decay, removing blood entirely proved too much of a change to endure.

The route towards perfection charted by the young Augustine abstracts or spiritualizes the body to a high degree and would prove unacceptable to him in his old age.