Some, it seems, imagine that Augustine and others slavishly adopted Platonic philosophy, and therefore disdained our bodily existence and abandoned any hope in the resurrection of the body. So I was glad to find the following extract from Augustine’s City of God in Alister McGrath’s The Christian Theology Reader. Here it is, in the widely-available NPNF edition (emphases added):
Thus the souls of departed saints are not affected by [McGrath: ‘not troubled by’] the death which dismisses them from their bodies, because their flesh rests in hope [Psalm 16:9], no matter what indignities it receives after sensation is gone. For they do not desire that their bodies be forgotten, as Plato thinks fit, but rather, because they remember what has been promised by Him who deceives no man, and who gave them security for the safe keeping even of the hairs of their head [Luke 21:18], they with a longing patience wait in hope of the resurrection of their bodies, in which they have suffered many hardships, and are now to suffer never again. For if they did not ‘hate their own flesh,’ [Ephesians 5:29] when it, with its native infirmity, opposed their will, and had to be constrained by the spiritual law, how much more shall they love it, when it shall even itself have become spiritual! For as, when the spirit serves the flesh, it is fitly called carnal, so, when the flesh serves the spirit, it will justly be called spiritual. Not that it is converted into spirit, as some fancy from the words, ‘It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption,’ [1 Corinthians 15:42] [McGrath: ‘It is sown as a natural body, it will rise as a spiritual body’, similarly in R. W. Dyson’s 1998 translation] but because it is subject to the spirit with a perfect and marvellous readiness of obedience, and responds in all things to the will that has entered on immortality, all reluctance, all corruption, and all slowness being removed. For the body will not only be better than it was here in its best estate of health, but it will surpass the bodies of our first parents ere they sinned (Book XIII, Chapter 20).
In other words, while our hope for the future goes beyond mere restoration of the original creation, we do not hope for less than that. Our bodies will be raised and glorified, not abandoned to decay.