The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 by Caroline Walker Bynum

Abstract

The Resurrection of Body in Christianity, 200-1336 By Caroline Walker Bynum. [Lectures on History of Religions Sponsored by American Council of Learned Societies, New Series, Number 15.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 1995. Pp. xii, 368. $29.95 clothbound; $17.50 paperback.) This volume presents, in printed form and with careful scholarly elaboration, ACLS Lectures on History of Religions delivered by Caroline Walker Bynum, who is Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor at Columbia University and author of several books that have decisively shaped recent study of Middle Ages, including Jesus as Mother and Holy Feast and Holy Fast. As those books and her other writings have documented, Professor Bynum has become a leading figure in the new history of that is being written by historians such as Peter Brown, Danielle Jacquart, Lynn Hunt,Thomas Laquer, Roy Porter, Marie-Christine Pouchelle, and Claude Thomasset (p. xviii). choosing as her topic specifically of she emphasizes that book is eschatology or but (p. xvii). But it is about in sense that of means the continuity of self (p. 309); for was at stake was finally fingernails. It was self (p. 225). And though it is not soul as such, it is obliged to pay much attention to soul, especially when is physicalized (p. 158) or, conversely, when dominant tendency of time ispacking into soul (p. 270), subsuming of [body] into soul (p. 283). Christian theology, understanding of term body is fundamental to doctrine of Incarnation, to doctrine of Real Presence in Eucharist, to doctrines of Immaculate Conception and bodily Assumption of Virgin Mary, to cult of relics, and to a host of moral issues including sexuality. Christian art, iconography of age inevitably expresses its guiding presuppositions body, whether it be of Christ or of Virgin or of other saints; and in monuments of Christian literature, such as Divine Comedy, to which any study of eschatology must (p. 291), portrayal of bodies is key to poem's meaning. Despite its title, this is a continuous history of development of idea of of from 200 to 1336. Its terminus a quo is indeed 200, especially the daring inconsistency of genius (p. 38) in Tertullian and Irenaeus; and its terminus ad quem is controversy over beatific vision involving hapless Pope John XXII, which was really and resurrection (p. 279), together with what Jacques Le Goff has called the birth of purgatory and other fourteenth-century phenomena. But between its terminus a quo and its terminus ad quem, late patristic and early-to-middle medieval periods receive far less than their share of attention; as author herself acknowledges,no one can be more keenly aware than I how much it loses by omitting early Middle Ages (p. xvii). She is also aware how much it loses by concentrating, almost but quite exclusively, on what title calls Western Christianity. For in fact Eastern Christian tradition-or traditions-do come into view: Syriac writers Aphrahat and Ephraim (pp. 71-78), Gregory of Nyssa as her final example of Greek (p. 81), visual tradition from East (pp.119-120) and Byzantine iconography of Last Judgment (p. 192) including also Mount Athos (p. 195 n. 128), and above all Origen of Alexandria. many ways, Origen emerges as unacknowledged hero of piece, or at rate as leitmotiv that recurs at almost every crucial juncture. The introduction to discussion of his thought announces leitmotiv: In first half of third century, one of greatest theologians of ancient world, Origen of Alexandria, gave a highly satisfactory answer (p. …