The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336

Caroline Walker Bynum

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231546089
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

A classic of medieval studies, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 traces ideas of death and resurrection in early and medieval Christianity. Caroline Walker Bynum explores problems of the body and identity in devotional and theological literature, suggesting that medieval attitudes toward the body still shape modern notions of the individual. This expanded edition includes her 1995 article "Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective," which takes a broader perspective on the book's themes. It also includes a new introduction that explores the context in which the book and article were written, as well as why the Middle Ages matter for how we think about the body and life after death today.

Part One

THE PATRISTIC BACKGROUND

One

Resurrection and Martyrdom: The Decades Around 200

IN THE EARLY THIRD CENTURY, Tertullian of Carthage, the first great theologian to write in the Latin language, penned a polemical treatise on the resurrection of the flesh. Although his style is highly rhetorical and embellished—indeed even turgid and difficult—he speaks of last things explicitly as well as in images. Tertullian asserts:

If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead. For what dead man is entire…. What body is uninjured, when it is dead?…Thus our flesh shall remain even after the resurrection—so far indeed susceptible of suffering, as it is the flesh, and the same flesh too; but at the same time impassible, inasmuch as it has been liberated by the Lord.¹

Such forceful and explicit arguments were necessary. At the end of the second century the resurrection of the body had become a major topic of controversy among Christians and between Christians and their pagan critics. The idea and the images in which it was expressed had a long history.

It is not my intention in this book to give a complete survey of doctrine or metaphor, nor do I want to suggest theories about the origins of resurrection belief, which lie well before the decades of Jesus’s earthly life. In the chapters that follow, I shall focus on various moments in Christian history when the idea of bodily resurrection—already introduced into theological discussion by the Pauline epistles—was debated, challenged, reaffirmed, and/or redefined. Nonetheless, I cannot begin my study of the late second century, which saw the first sustained explorations of the place of body in eschatology, without a brief consideration of the metaphors in which first- and second-century Christians spoke of resurrection. Although I shall focus in this chapter on the decades around 200—decades in which the analogies that became crucial for medieval theological discourse were first elaborated—I must discuss changes in images and assumptions that had crept into theology between the years in which Paul answered the Corinthians and those in which Tertullian faced, with very different arguments, both the intellectual threat of Gnosticism and the physical threat of martyrdom.

Early Metaphors for Resurrection: Fertility and Repetition

Some sort of return of the dead (at least the righteous dead) from Sheol was a staple of Jewish apocalyptic literature in the first centuries before and after the start of the Common Era.² The resurrection of Jesus was, for early Christians, both the central element in their teaching and an animating event for their mission. Resurrection of the dead, whether or not it was clearly connected to a millennial age and material recreation of the universe, thus seems to have been assumed by the sub-Apostolic Fathers, who mention it frequently.³ Our earliest texts also suggest that resurrection was sometimes spiritualized and that there was sometimes opposition to the idea, of the sort we find considered in 1 Corinthians 15.

As many scholars have noticed, the metaphors for resurrection in this early literature are naturalistic images that stress return or repetition: the cycle of the seasons, the flowering of trees and shrubs, the coming of dawn after darkness, the fertility of seeds, the return of the phoenix after five hundred years. The point of the metaphors is to emphasize God’s power and the goodness of creation. If the Lord can bring spring after winter or cause the grape to grow from the vine, if he can create Adam from dust and cause the child to emerge from a drop of semen, surely he can bring back men and women who sleep in the grave.⁴

In these early texts, resurrection (which is, in some cases, the advent of an earthly paradise) is connected to the most extraordinary fertility. Papias, for example, says:

A time is coming when vineyards spring up, each having ten thousand vines…and every grape, when pressed, will yield twenty-five measures of wine. And when anyone of the saints takes hold of one of their clusters, another cluster will cry out: ‘I am better. Take me….’ In like manner, a grain of wheat will grow ten thousand heads…and every grain will yield ten pounds of clean, pure flour; but the other fruit trees, too, as well as seeds and herbs, will bear in proportions suited to each kind; and all animals, feeding on these products of the earth, will become peaceable and friendly to each other, and be completely subject to man.⁵

The author of the fourth similitude of the text known as The Shepherd of Hermas explains that in the world to come the righteous will be like living trees that flower.⁶ The Apocalypse of Peter, drawing explicitly on 1 Corinthians 15 as well as on Ezekiel 37.1–14, Revelation 20.13, and Enoch 61.5, says the righteous will reign in a region outside the earth, where blossoms will never fade and fruit will abound. Beasts and fowl will give up all the flesh they have devoured, and God will do again what he did at creation—that is, join bone to joint, joint to sinew, and sinew to nerve, clothing all with flesh and skin and hair. The house of Israel will flower like the fig tree, and we shall live again and bear fruit, restored by the earth like the dry grain of wheat once entrusted to it.⁷ The letter sent by Clement of Rome to the Christians at Corinth about 96 C.E. exhorts its readers to compare themselves to a tree or vine and uses a plethora of natural images for resurrection, especially the metaphor of the seed (which is explicitly said to die and decay in the earth before rising) and the analogy of the phoenix (which, in Clement’s account, does not immolate itself but rather rises as a worm from its own decaying flesh).⁸

These texts of the late first and early second century depend in their resurrection imagery on Pauline metaphors of seeds and first fruits. But they do not mean at all what Paul means. By and large these images stress not the change from corruption to incorruption, or the difference between natural and spiritual, between the dry, dead seed and the flowering sheaf; rather, they make the world to come a grander and more abundant version of this world. Expressing enormous optimism about the goodness of creation, they draw such a close analogy between resurrection and natural change that they either make resurrection a process set in motion by the very nature of things, or they make all growth dependent on divine action.

Like 1 Corinthians, these texts suggest a kind of continuity but attribute it to no principle. Identity is not yet an explicit issue. As is true in some contemporary Jewish texts and in later rabbinic material as well, the natural metaphors mean that the whole person returns—changed, perfected, pure, and fertile like a green tree, but still himself or herself.⁹ Both Christian and Jewish texts reproduce and refute the carping of critics. They admit that we do not see cadavers rise up whole. But the answer they give to this objection is the answer of divine power: we cannot doubt that God raises the dead, for in his creation he does many wondrous things. Neither in philosophical argument nor in image is the question yet raised: What would account for the “me-ness” of the “me” that returns? If we look more closely at the use of the phoenix analogy in 1 Clement, we can see quite clearly that identity is not at stake. To later authors, the phoenix immolates itself and rises from the ashes the same bird, as the three children survived in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3.19–24, 91–94). To Clement, the bird dies; its flesh decays; a worm or larva is born from this putrefying flesh and feeds on it. Eventually the worm grows wings and flies to the altar of its triumph carrying the bones of the old bird, now stripped clean. Modern readers immediately worry that there appear to be two birds in this story; how therefore is it an analogy to resurrection? But Clement focused not on what accounts for the survival of the individual but on the return of phoenix from death and putrefaction. For him, individual, community, and generic nature fuse.¹⁰

By the end of the second century, however, things had changed. “Resurrection” was no longer simply a minor theme of discussion and apologetics; it became a major element in disputes among Christians and in Christian defenses against pagan attack. Entire treatises were devoted to the topic. Resurrection not of “the dead” or “the body” (soma or corpus) but of “the flesh” (sarx or caro) became a key element in the fight against Docetism (which treated Christ’s body as in some sense unreal or metaphorical) and Gnosticism (which carried “realized eschatology” so far as to understand resurrection as spiritual and moral advance in this life and therefore as escape from body). The statements of belief for catechumens that appeared around 200 and soon after gave rise to various local creeds (one of which, the old Roman, became the so-called Apostles’ Creed) required assent to the doctrine of resurrectio carnis not mortuorum or corporum.¹¹

Scholars have tended to explain the acute concern for resurrection of a palpable, fleshly body as owing to several factors: first, the model of Jesus’s own resurrection; second, the impact of millenarianism (which assumes reanimation, at least of the righteous); third, the conflict with Gnosticism (which saw flesh as evil and therefore Christ’s body as in some sense unreal); fourth, Christian adoption of Hellenistic dualist anthropology (which assumes an opposition of soul and body and therefore forces the question “what survives?”); fifth, the emerging governmental structure of the third-century church (which was enhanced by the stress on difference or hierarchy entailed in the stress on body).¹² None of these arguments is wrong. But I would suggest that all except the fifth (to which I shall return in my next chapter) are to some extent tautological.¹³ One cannot say that Christians taught literal, material, fleshly resurrection because Christ rose thus; there is a full range of interpretation of Jesus’s resurrection in the Gospels and Paul, and if Christians chose eating the honeycomb rather than the noli me tangere, that choice requires explanation. One cannot argue that refutation of Gnosticism or Docetism required bodily resurrection, for the question is exactly: why not Docetism? Why did powerful voices among the Christians of the later second century reject more spiritual or gnostic interpretations of the resurrection body? A consideration of the images used for bodily resurrection may help us to understand more clearly what was at stake.

The Second Century: Organic Metaphors and Material Continuity

Careful study of the images used in major treatises on resurrection from the years around 200 reveals that the seed metaphor continues but in a sense almost antithetical t...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction to the 2017 Edition: What’s New about the Medieval?
• Preface to the 1995 Edition: Acknowledgments and Methodological Musings
• Introduction to the 1995 Edition: Seed Images, Ancient and Modern
• Part One: The Patristic Background
• Part Two: The Twelfth Century
• Part Three: The Decades Around 1300
• Afterword: Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective
• Illustration Credits
• General Index
• Index of Secondary Authors
• Illustrations