“And you, Lord God, compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and most merciful, and true” (Ps 85:15)–because hanging on the cross, he said, “Father, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing” (Lk 23:34). Whom did he pray? For whom did he pray? Who was it that prayed? Where did he pray? The Son prayed his Father; the one crucified prayed for the wicked; amid all those insults not just of the words but of the death inflicted; hanging on the cross as if he was stretching out his hands in order to pray for them, so that his prayer might be directed as incense in his Father’s sight and the lifting up of his hands be like an evening sacrifice (Ps 140:2). “Long-suffering, and most merciful, and true.” (EnPs 85, 20; PL 37, 1096)

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No part of Christian faith is more contradicted than the resurrection of the flesh. To meet such a denier, he who was born to be a sign of contradiction (see Lk 2:34) raised his own flesh, and he who could have so healed his members that their wounds would not appear preserved the scars on his body in order to heal the wound of the heart’s doubt.  But there is nothing in the Christian faith that is so vehemently, so persistently, so obstinately and contentiously opposed as its faith in the resurrection of the flesh. Many Gentile philosophers debated at length about the immortality of the soul and in many and varied books they have left arguments that the human soul is immortal. But when it came to the resurrection of the flesh, they did not waver but quite openly denied it, arguing that it is impossible for this earthly flesh to ascend into heaven. (EnPs 88[89]/2, 5; PL 37, 1134)

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Augustine, after speaking about the warfare between the flesh and the spirit:

I want the whole to be healed, because I am the whole. I don’t want my flesh to be eternally separated from me, like something foreign; I want it to be entirely healed with me. If you do not want this, I don’t know what you think of the flesh; I guess you think it comes from some unknown place, as if from an enemy nation. That’s false; its heretical; its blasphemous. Mind and flesh have a single artisan. When he created man, he made them both, joined them both; he subjected the flesh to the soul and the soul to himself. (Augustine, Sermon 30, 4)