THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY

in Western Christianity, 200–1336

American Lectures on the History of Religions

 This volume is the fifteenth to be published in the series of American
Lectures on the History of Religions for which the American Council of
Learned Societies, through its Committee on the History of Religions,
assumed responsibility in 1936, and for which the American Academy of
Religion assumed responsibility in 1995.
Under the program the Committee from time to time enlists the services
of scholars to lecture in colleges, universities, and seminaries on topics in
need of expert elucidation. Subsequently, when possible and appropriate,
the Committee arranges for the publication of the lectures. Other volumes
in the series are Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Popular Religion (1940); Henri
Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion (1948); Wing-tsit Chan, Religious
Trends in Modern China (1953); Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of
Religions, edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa (1958); R. M. Grant, Gnosticism
and Early Christianity (1959); Robert Lawson Slater, World Religions and
World Community (1963); Joseph M. Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese His-
tory (1966); Joseph L. Blau, Modern Varieties of Judaism (1966); Morton
Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament
(1971); Philip H. Ashby, Modern Trends in Hinduism (1974); Victor Turner
and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978);
Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (1982);
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renuncia-
tion in Early Christianity (1988); and W. H. McLeod, The Sikhs: History,
Religion, and Society (1989); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of
the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (1995); Wendy Doniger, The
Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (1998); Bruce B. Lawrence,
New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American
Religious Life (2002); and John G. Gager, Who Made Early Christianity?
The Jewish Lives of the Apostle Paul (2015).
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
in Western Christianity, 200–1336

Caroline Walker Bynum

Reprinted with a new introduction and afterword

Columbia University Press

New York
 Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
© 1995 Columbia University Press
Introduction to the 2017 Edition and Afterword © Caroline Walker Bynum
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bynum, Caroline Walker, author.
Title: The Resurrection of the body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 /
Caroline Walker Bynum.
Description: 2017 Edition. | New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. |
Series: American lectures on the history of religion |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017029499| ISBN 978-0-231-18528-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 978-0-231-18529-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-231-54608-9 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Resurrection—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30–600. |
Resurrection—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500. | Human body—
Religious aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines—Early church,
ca. 30–600. | Human body—Religious aspects—Christianity—History of
doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500.
Classification: LCC BT873 .B96 2017 | DDC 236/.809—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017029499

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

Cover image: The Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Introduction to the 2017 Edition:
What’s New about the Medieval? xiii

Preface to the 1995 Edition: Acknowledgments and

Methodological Musings xxix

Introduction to the 1995 Edition: Seed Images,

Ancient and Modern 1

Part One The Patristic Background 19

1. Resurrection and Martyrdom: The Decades Around 200 21
Early Metaphors for Resurrection: Fertility
and Repetition 22
The Second Century: Organic Metaphors
and Material Continuity 27
Irenaeus and Tertullian: The Paradox of Continuity
and Change 34
Martyrdom 43
Burial Practices 51
 vi Contents

2. Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism:

The Debates of 400 and Their Background 59
The Legacy of the Second Century 59
Origen and Methodius: The Seed versus the Statue 63
Aphrahat, Ephraim, and Cyril of Jerusalem:
Immutable Particles in Process 71
Gregory of Nyssa: Survival, Flux, and the Fear of Decay 81
Jerome and the Origenist Controversy:
The Issue of Bodily Integrity 86
Augustine and the Reassembled Statue:
The Background to the Middle Ages 94
Relic Cult 104
Asceticism, the Church, and the World 108

Part Two The Twelfth Century 115

3. Reassemblage and Regurgitation: Ideas of Bodily
Resurrection in Early Scholasticism 117
Herrad of Hohenbourg: An Introduction
to Twelfth-Century Art and Theology 117
A Scholastic Consensus: The Reassemblage
and Dowering of the Body 121
Honorius Augustodunensis and John Scotus Erigena:
An Alternative Tradition? 137
4. Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons:
Images of Resurrection in Spiritual Writing
and Iconography 156
Hildegard of Bingen: The Greening of Person
and the Body as Dust 157
Cistercian Writing: Images of First
and Second Resurrection 163
Peter the Venerable and the Pauline Seed 176
Otto of Freising’s Uneasy Synthesis:
Resurrection “Clothed in a Double Mantle . . .” 180
The Iconography of the General Resurrection:
Devouring and Regurgitation of Fragments
and Bones 186
5. Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos:
The Twelfth-Century Context 200
Fragmentation and Burial Practices 201
Hierarchy, Heresy, and Fear of Decay 214
Miracles 220
 Contents vii

Part Three The Decades Around 1300 227

6. Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia:
Scholastic Debates in the Thirteenth Century 229
The Discourse of High Scholasticism:
The Rejection of Statues and Seeds 232
Bonaventure and the Ambivalence of Desire 247
Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Giles of Rome:
Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Formal Identity 256
The Condemnations of 1277 and the Materialist Reaction 271
7. Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei: The Beatific Vision
Controversy and Its Background 279
Purgatory 280
The Controversy Over the Beatific Vision 283
Otherworld Journeys and the Divine Comedy 291
The Hagiography and Iconography of Wholeness 305
8. Fragmentation and Ecstasy:
The Thirteenth-Century Context 318
The Practice of Bodily Partition 320
Devotional Literature: Body as Locus of Experience
and as Friend 329
Women Mystics and the Triumph of Desire 334
Epilogue 341

Afterword: Why All the Fuss about the Body?

A Medievalist’s Perspective 345

Illustration Credits 383

General Index 385
Index of Secondary Authors 399
 Illustrations

1. “The Crucifixion of Christ and the Creation of the Church,” from

Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hortus deliciarum, fol. 150r.

2. “The Last Judgment and General Resurrection,” from Herrad of

Hohenbourg’s Hortus deliciarum, fol. 251r. Detail.

3. “Hell,” from Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hortus deliciarum, fol. 255r.

4. “The Resurrection of the Dead and Last Judgment,” from Hilde-

gard of Bingen’s Scivias, book 3, vision 12; Wiesbaden, Hessische
Landesbibliothek MS 1, fol. 224r.

5. “The Last Judgment,” by Giotto, Arena chapel at Padua.

6. “The Last Judgment,” the Cathedral, Torcello.

7. “The Last Judgment (Matthew 25.31–46),” MS BN Gr. 74, fol. 51v.

8. “The Crucifixion,” MS Lat. qu. 198, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-

Preussischer Kulturbesitz, fol. 320v.
 x Illustrations

9. “The Crucifixion” MS 4, Hamburg, Stadtbibliothek, In scrinio 85,

fol. 15a.

10. “The General Resurrection,” Anglo-Saxon ivory, the Victoria and

Albert Museum.

11. “The First Resurrection (Revelation 20.4),” Douce Apocalypse, p, 86.

12. “The Damned in Hell,” Winchester Psalter, fol. 39.

13. “The Harrowing of Hell,” MS Douce 293, Bodleian Library, fol. 14r.

14. “Jonah and the Whale,” MS Clm 3900, fol. 82.

15. “The Last Judgment,” tympanum, Church of Saint Faith, Conques.

16. “The Last Judgment and General Resurrection,” the refectory,

Lavra, Mt. Athos. Details.

17. “The General Resurrection,” MS 1903, Stiftsbibliothek, Melk, fol.

109v.

18. “The General Resurrection,” MS Cim 15, fol. 204r.

19. Arm reliquary, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of J. Pierpont

Morgan.

20. Arm reliquary, the Cathedral, Osnabrück.

21. Ostensorium, Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum, Cologne.

22. Reliquary of Thomas Becket, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift

of J. Pierpont Morgan.

23. St. Firmin tympanum, Church of Notre Dame, Amiens.

24. “Last Judgment and General Resurrection” (left) and “Hell” (right),
by Buffalmacco (?), Campo Santo, Pisa.
 Illustrations xi

25. “Heaven,” by Nardo di Cione (?), Strozzi chapel of Santa Maria

Novella, Florence.

26. “Hell,” by Nardo di Cione (?), Strozzi chapel of Santa Maria Novella,
Florence.

27. “Last Judgment,” tympanum, Church of St. Peter, Poitiers.

28. “Last Judgment,” Trinity College Apocalypse, fol. 25r.

29. “Valley of the Homicides,” by Simon Marmion, The Visions of

Tondal, Getty MS 30, fol. 13v.

30. “The Avaricious Devoured by Acheron,” by Simon Marmion, The

Visions of Tondal, Getty MS 30, fol. 17.

31. “Hell,” the Baptistry, Florence.

32. “The Mouth of Hell,” the Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves,

fol. 168v.

33. “Last Judgment,” tympanum, Church of St. Stephen, Bourges.

Detail.

34. “St. Lucy,” Biblioteca Estense Lat. MS 1023, fol. 17v.

35. “The Martyrdom of St. Agatha,” MS BN Nouv. acq. Fr. 23686,

fol. 247v.

36. “The Martyrdom of St. Quentin,” MS BN Nouv. acq. Fr. 23686,

fol. 100v.
 Introduction to the 2017 Edition:
What’s New about the Medieval?

Early in 2016, Justyna Beinek, Director of the Mellon Globalization

Forum at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, con-
tacted me about a conference she had organized that was using my
article “Why All the Fuss about the Body?” as its title and theme. The
subtitle of the forum, “An Interdisciplinary Conference on Local and
Global/ized Bodies,” challenged me to consider whether the “Fuss”
article and my 1995 book The Resurrection of the Body in Western
Christianity on which the article relied still had anything to offer to
conversations taking place twenty years later. After all, the article had
been intended to use medieval concepts and practices as ways of inter-
rogating and in some ways rejecting assumptions that were current in
the early 1990s both about “body” as a category of analysis and about
the course of European cultural history. Both book and article explicitly
and implicitly rejected generalizations then frequently voiced about
Western dualism, medieval privileging of soul over body, and medieval
body-hating.1 How then could either the article or the book be useful to

1. For what was general opinion in the late eighties and early nineties, see Jacques
Le Goff, “Corps et idéologie dans l’Occident médiéval: La Révolution corporelle,” in
L’Imaginaire médiéval: Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), translated in The Medieval
Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
 xiv Introduction to the 2017 Edition

a conference in 2016 on global history or to a feminist analysis that had

become more nuanced in the intervening decades? Had I provided only
a catchy title that scholars could now, with a knowing smile, move
beyond in order to fuss about something else?
Moreover, by 2016, my own perspective had changed. First, like
other cultural historians, I had moved beyond the queries and formula-
tions about identity, sex, and gender that had characterized the 1990s.
Questions about identity had become for me questions about how
narrative might carry personhood and about the nature of hybridity
and metamorphosis, about change itself.2 Second, for me as for other
historians, the category of “body” had provided an impetus toward a
consideration of objects and materiality—a consideration sometimes
denominated “the material turn.”3 The uses of holy matter and of
devotional objects, along with theories of the nature of “matter,” had
become foci of my research. The challenges offered by medieval theo-
ries and practices were bound to be different in 2016 both for my read-
ers and for me.
Yet, oddly enough, the medieval ideas and images I explored in Res-
urrection as well as in “Fuss” seem, upon reflection, more not less
relevant to questions we still explore, however differently formulated.
The conceptions of identity and body medieval theorists really wor-
ried about foreshadow current concerns about gender fluidity and con-
tinuity, about metamorphosis and identity, better than any of us who
wrote about the pre-modern European West realized in the 1990s. Fur-
thermore, the theories and practices I considered in Resurrection as
a context for images of corpus and identitas—practices such as relic
veneration, methods of burial and execution, and theories such as the
theology of Eucharistic transformation or scientific ideas of digestion or
decay—are peculiarly and insistently relevant to historians’ new inter-
est in materiality. In this short introduction, I shall therefore need not
only to return for a moment to what I argued in 1995 (which I shall
address in section 1 below) but also to consider how the medieval mate-
rials I studied then can be understood to address the questions of more
than two decades later (for which, see section 2).
Despite this apology, however, it might still seem as if resurrect-
ing The Resurrection in a republication is, at best, a backward-looking

2. Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books,
2001).
3. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Late Medieval
Religion (New York: Zone Books, 2011). And see n. 15.
 Introduction to the 2017 Edition xv

enterprise. After all, neither “Fuss” nor Resurrection is primarily a the-

oretical work. Nor does either make a simple argument. Neither can be
summarized in a single phrase. Resurrection in particular is a densely
written analysis of medieval theories, practices, and images intended
for readers who would care about those images, practices, and theories
per se, not only about their contemporary resonances. And my purpose
has never been, either in these or in my other writings, to argue that
there are medieval answers to modern questions. Hence I need to offer a
compelling reason for urging readers to consider the substance of medi-
eval ideas and practices in their full complexity and idiosyncrasy. I shall
turn to this in my third section below.
I shall suggest there that it is exactly in the contradictions of what
medieval people seem to have done as well as in the inconsistencies
and even intellectual failures of their theories that we are forced to
encounter issues we also, as scholars and human beings, fail adequately
to address. Current popular writing, to which medievalists have some-
times contributed, tends to reduce medieval thought, art, religious
practice, and social life to either a violence (of colonialism, misogyny,
anti-Semitism, racism, persecution, and inquisition) that, while char-
acteristic of the Middle Ages, is even more characteristic of other peri-
ods in the history of the West, or to a fantasy of upper-class culture
(courtly love, allegory, fairy tale, faith, and beauty) that exists only in
Disney animation. In republishing this book and article in 2016–2017,
I intend to argue that these two moves fail to do justice to what we
might learn from studying the Middle Ages. Although attention to the
medieval roots of modern evils (such as xenophobia) or pleasures (such
as fantasy literature) may induce in students and the general public
a certain curiosity about the period—and there’s nothing wrong with
curiosity!—I argue that encounter with the full complexity of the past
should lead us to a broader consideration of our world and ourselves,
for there is a sense in which (as a recent theorist puts it) “we have
never been modern.”4 And this is true not so much because we think
certain unfortunate things earlier people also thought or because we
can be amused by vestiges of a world they never inhabited except in
the imagination, but instead because life is more complex than any
theory or imagining can render, more shot through with a simultane-
ity of horror and glory. If we are committed to encountering as full

4. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
 xvi Introduction to the 2017 Edition

a range of medieval theory and practice as we can discover in our

sources, then we will encounter people who struggle as we struggle. I
think our scholarship will be more collaborative, honest, humble, and
hence more productive if we see how current issues, practical as well
as theoretical, reflect not only those of recent decades but also a long
European past that struggled with, although it failed to solve, issues
we today also fail to solve.

I.
It would be otiose to summarize the works that are reprinted in full
below. I give here only a few framing words about what I argued in
1995. Three issues should be underlined: body, identity, and method.
In the 1990s, scholars frequently characterized Western thought from
Plato to Descartes as dualist and misogynist because self or person was
understood to be a soul trapped in a body and body was gendered femi-
nine or female. Against this, both Resurrection and “Fuss” asserted
that medieval people understood the self as a psychosomatic unity.
Despite a practical moral dualism that frequently associated bodily
events with temptation and woman with nature, sin, sex, and disobe-
dience, medieval thinkers also frequently located temptation in will
or soul and understood the female as closer to mystical or spiritual
inspiration exactly because it was not so closely bound to reason as
the male. Countering a tendency of 1990s scholarship to use “body”
as a synonym for self while reducing it to sexual orientation or gender
(both of which were sometimes further reduced to performance), I put
a thousand years of writing about, caring for, and living in the body
into the context of daily concerns such as healing and burial practices,
actual religious rituals such as relic cult and Eucharistic devotion, and
philosophical–theological discussions in which the specificity of person
was understood to be carried not by soul but by body. Hence both Res-
urrection and “Fuss” continued arguments I had made earlier in Jesus
as Mother and Holy Feast and Holy Fast that Christian concepts of
person before the early modern period were not fundamentally dualist
nor did they stereotype body only as negative—that is, as a carapace to
be gotten rid of.5 Empowered as well as constrained by a belief in the

5. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the

High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982),
and Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medi-
eval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
 Introduction to the 2017 Edition xvii

resurrection of the body required by the Apostles’ Creed of ca. 200 c.e.
and indeed shared with rabbinic Judaism, Western medieval Christians
saw body, not soul or mind, as carrier of certain basic particularities
of personhood (including sex and gender) that never ceased. As Giles
of Rome said in discussing saints: both relic (i.e., the fragments of the
body here on earth) and soul (i.e., the spirit as it dwells in heaven before
the Last Judgment) are parts, synecdoches. As parts, both may stand
for the whole. But as Thomas Aquinas argued, we do not truly have
a “person” until they are joined. Such ways of understanding “body”
and “person” meant that what we today call “gender” (which is not a
medieval concept) as well as what we call sex were to medieval theo-
rists fundamental not ephemeral aspects of what we call (again it is not
a medieval concept) “the individual.”
The analysis of Western ideas of personhood put forward in Resur-
rection engaged a radically different conception of identity from that
found in feminist writing and more generally in cultural studies in the
early 1990s. Whereas “identity” was usually taken in those years either
to refer to a person’s unique personality or, in a not fully compatible
sense, to what we now call an “identity position” (a kind of grouping
term such as gay or Asian American or senior citizen), to medieval phi-
losophers and theologians the conundrum posed by identity was first
and foremost the question of how someone or something can change
and remain the same thing. Known in antiquity as the problem of “the
ship of Theseus” and in the early modern period as the question of
“the bishop’s socks,” the issue of what must endure in order for an
entity to remain itself was raised for medieval schoolboys by puzzles
about whether toenails and baby teeth must rise from the dead as it
was raised two decades ago by a plethora of movies and popular novels
about body-hopping or teletransportation between galaxies and by seri-
ous brain research.6 The discussion of “identity” in Resurrection and
“Fuss,” although committed to setting the record straight about how
medieval sources actually used terms and concepts, also suggested an
additional and I would argue deeper dimension to 1990s discussions
of identity politics by arguing that such discussion had of necessity to

6. For some examples from the popular culture of the late twentieth century, see
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and
the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 239–97.
On the issue of identity and change, see also Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity,
pp. 15–28.
 xviii Introduction to the 2017 Edition

consider the philosophical issue of change and continuity itself. Hence

my arguments had implications for the substance and the method of
1990s humanities discourse generally.
The substance of Resurrection as of Holy Feast and Holy Fast was
based in years of detailed and comparative research. Contrary to what
was sometimes asserted in analyses of this and of my earlier scholar-
ship, I in no way employed conceptions of female or feminine or sex-
uality that were preconceived or “essentialized” (a word often used
polemically in the early 1990s to dismiss empirical work). As one of
the first feminist writers to attempt to sketch out how labile and com-
plex images such as “mother,” “father,” “woman,” “judge,” “birthing,”
“blood,” “womb,” and “breast” actually were when used by male and
female writers in a wide variety of settings, I did not ask what medieval
writers said about “the female” or “the body,” since they did not ask
about either in a modern sense, essentialized or not. Rather I explored
how authors in a wide variety of settings actually used images, gendered
and nongendered. I asked, for example, how theologians and monastic
contemplatives described the body in heaven. How did female devo-
tional writers use images to express their experiences and desires when
writing for other women? Did male writers who crafted stories of female
devotees use different images or employ the same images differently?
Questions of audience, voice, and reception that have come increas-
ingly and rightly to the fore in feminist work such as that of Catherine
Mooney, Amy Hollywood, and John Coakley were implicit throughout.7
However engaged in these 1990s feminist issues, the method of
“Fuss” and especially of Resurrection thus went beyond the large
amount of earlier scholarship that focused on explicit statements
about femina or identitas to a consideration of images, metaphors,
and asides. As I suggested in my opening use of the story about

7. Amy M. Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechtild of Magdeburg, Mar-

guerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1995); Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands
of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Catherine M. Mooney, ed.,
Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power:
Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press,
2006). And for works that have challenged and changed our use of the categories of
“woman” and “god,” see Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry,
and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003),
and Dyan Elliott, Proving Women: Female Mysticism and Inquisitional Practice in
Late Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
 Introduction to the 2017 Edition xix

Rebecca West as a child burying conkers, literary images (even—or

especially—when used in nonliterary texts) often reveal and betray
conflicts and contradictions that lie deeper than creedal or philosophi-
cal commitments. For example, I argued that a detailed analysis of
language showed how Thomas Aquinas was pulled back from certain
philosophical conclusions by the assumptions to which relic cult was
pinned and how, despite the danger of being charged with deviance
or heresy, spiritual writers such as Mechtild of Madgeburg employed
contradictory metaphors of heaven as both the stasis of crystal and the
labile desire of swimming, even flying fish.8 Thus the basic method
of Resurrection implied that the implicit is often more revealing than
the explicit.9
Although my approach in Resurrection was no doubt influenced in
this direction by the so-called linguistic turn of the 1980s, it was also
a response to a basic characteristic of religion.10 As I see it, only para-
dox (that is, the coincidence of opposites) expresses our fundamental
human need to grapple with the contradictory fragments of existence
that we inevitably inhabit simultaneously: continuity and change, life
and death, suffering and glory, personal perspective and a larger truth.
And paradox is at the heart of religion. For as the anthropologist J. C.
Heesterman says, speaking of sacrifice: “[S]acrifice deals with the riddle
of life and death, which are intimately linked and at the same time
each other’s absolute denial. The riddle cannot be resolved, it can only
be reenacted.”11 What religion does (and one must therefore define the

8. I now feel that in certain places, especially my discussion of the twelfth cen-
tury, I used the focus on images mechanically and simplistically. The discussion of
images in chapter 3 needs some reworking.
9. It also implied, as I have argued elsewhere, that a scholar, no matter how assid-
uous, inevitably sees only fragments and that the reader is always at least in part the
creator of the text, philosophical as well as literary, that he or she discovers or per-
ceives. See Caroline Walker Bynum, “In Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic
Mode,” in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 11–26. See also Rachel Ful-
ton and Bruce Holsinger, “Afterword: History in the Comic Mode,” in History in
the Comic Mode [Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person], ed. Fulton and
Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 279–92.
10. On the linguistic turn, see the classic review article by John E. Toews,
“Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the
Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review 92.4 (October 1987):
879–907. On my own commitment to paradox, see Bynum, “Why Paradox? The
Contradictions of My Life as a Scholar,” The Catholic Historical Review 98.3 (July
2012): 432–55.
11. J. C. Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian
Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 2.
 xx Introduction to the 2017 Edition

phenomenon of religion very broadly) is to enact, assert, confront, live,

and give meaning to such irresolvable contradictions.12
Hence while I have insisted in all my work on a careful and time-
consuming reading of explicit philosophical and theological positions
and have hoped that my readers would find these abstruse discussions
inherently fascinating, I have also tried to dig under the surface of a
wider range of literature, especially through a study of images—that
is, metaphors, analogies, illustrations, examples, asides and anecdotes,
stories, even jokes. But, in the 1990s, what I and most of my colleagues
in cultural studies meant by “image” was the written word. That, like
much else I wrote then, would change.

II.
What then are the larger issues to which both “Fuss” and Resurrection
point today? I isolate two: first, the understandings of body and person
impelled by new attention to issues of LGBTQ identity, and second, the
so-called material turn.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, theorizing of gender and sexual
orientation considered both the evidence for a biological or genetic base
for same-sex desire (and here, for medievalists, John Boswell’s book,
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, and the discussion
it stimulated were fundamental) and a new emphasis (owing especially
to the influence of Judith Butler) on gender orientation and/or identity
as performance.13 Both emphases have, it seems, become more sophis-
ticated in the past twenty years. In medieval scholarship as in cultural
history generally, binaries have given way to multiplicities. The fluidity
of gendered and sexual images I studied, for example, in Jesus as Mother
now seems to us so ordinary that it is hard to remember how difficult
it was, only thirty years ago, to understand or formulate the complexity

12. The category “religion” is not, of course, a simple, self-evident one. A wealth
of ink has been spilled in the past seventy years or so on the question of what we
study when we study religion. See among other discussions, the introduction to
David Morgan, ed., Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (London:
Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–17.
13. John E. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay
People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). The main thesis of Boswell’s
book was that the church before the high Middle Ages had not condemned homo-
sexuality per se. But in raising the question of whether there is such a thing as a
gay lifestyle before the modern period and suggesting in his introduction that there
might be a biological predisposition for same-sex desire, Boswell’s learned and pas-
sionate book was a key factor in putting on the table issues that were fiercely debated
throughout the 1980s and 1990s. I discuss Judith Butler in “Fuss.”
 Introduction to the 2017 Edition xxi

of Julian of Norwich’s idea of God as mother (which was a theory of

ontology, not gender), Gertrude of Helfta’s pairing of punishing acts with
mothering, or Bernard of Clairvaux’s labile and poetic interweaving of
Biblical references to clefts in the rock with bowels, womb, and wound.
Recent studies of medieval masculinity have given us a new understand-
ing of how complicated identity formation of any sort is. Nonetheless
when we consider what led male theologians in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries to puzzle over exactly which aspects of body were
defects to be repaired in resurrection and which were integrities of self
to be maintained, we see that these conundrums mirror conundrums we
still face today. How much of body is or should be excised, maintained,
enhanced, or even rejoiced in? While some understandings of queer iden-
tity make performing of a wide range of personality and physical charac-
teristics liberating, some transgender people urgently desire to transition
not only from one set of behaviors to another but also from one set of
physical attributes to another. The idea of a self as inner desire or con-
ception that can be expressed in diverse clothing or behavior seems inad-
equate to such urgency. Organs and physical structures matter. Oddly
enough then, current understandings see body as less, as well as more,
performative and labile than we admitted in the 1990s.14
No one would suggest that the definitions of scholastic philosophers
such as Durand of St. Pourçain or the poetry of medieval contempla-
tives such as Suso or Hadewijch are sufficient to express current com-
plexities. But we do seem today to approach a rather medieval sense
of body as carrier of personal identity. Body is a grounding as well as a
performance. We tend to see physical details such as genitals, stature,
skin color, and the marks of suffering (such as scars or amputations)
neither as performed nor as infinitely malleable and interpretable but
as aspects of self to be asserted, embraced, and if need be altered. Yet
given the multiple personhoods we all now understand ourselves to
manifest or inhabit, we are in some ways more inclined today to see
self as fluid and performed as well as given. Thus we are more com-
fortable than was an earlier generation of scholars with the labile and
complex bodily images medieval visionaries used to express deep inner
experiences. Conversation about “the body” has not disappeared since
I wrote in 1995. It has become, I would argue, more complex, even para-
doxical. Hence it is more compatible with medieval understandings.

14. For important and innovative study of intersex and transgender in the Mid-
dle Ages, see Leah Devun, “Enter Sex: A History of Hermaphrodites in the Middle
Ages,” work in progress.
 xxii Introduction to the 2017 Edition

Nonetheless it is also true that the past twenty years have seen a
move away from interrogation of “the body” to an interrogation of
what can be seen as underlying it: matter or stuff. This “material turn”
is also related to a shift in what scholars usually mean today when they
refer to “image.” No longer primarily what I meant by “image” when
I referred to the complexities of philosophical discussion and poetic
metaphor, “image” today seems to refer primarily to thing.
In the past decade or so, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists,
and art historians have come together around a new interest in objects.
Sometimes referred to as “thing theory,” sometimes as the “material
turn,” sometimes as “object-oriented ontology,” the new focus broadens
what was once understood as art (painting, sculpture, and sometimes
decorative or decorated objects such as cabinets and altarpieces) to
include all crafted things and indeed some (such as Marcel Duchamp’s
ready-mades) that are not reworked by an artist or craftsman but simply
relocated and relabeled.15 In the latest move by ancient and medieval
historians, even natural objects such as dust or stone (for example, the
bits of rock from the Holy Land now revered at the Vatican as relics) are
included in such theorizing.16
This broadening of the concept of “image” to include—indeed to
denominate—object has been joined to a number of other new direc-
tions in scholarship. The recent interest in global networks, of which
Justyna Beinek’s conference is an example, leads inevitably to questions

15. Proponents of new approaches, such as object-oriented ontology, thing theory,

and various sorts of “new materialism,” do not agree on what this material turn is
or should be. For some examples, see Paul M. Graves-Brown, ed., Matter, Materi-
ality, and Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 2000); Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,”
Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–22; Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object
Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004); Daniel Miller, ed.,
Materiality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Elisabeth Arweck and
William Keenan, eds., Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual
(Oxford: Ashgate, 2006); Morgan, ed., Religion and Material Culture; and Caroline
Walker Bynum, Natasha Eaton, Michael Ann Holly, Amelia Jones, Michael Kelly,
Robin Kelsey, Alisa LaGamma, Martha Rosier, Monika Wagner, Oliver Watson, and
Tristan Weddigen, “Notes from the Field: Materiality,” The Art Bulletin 95 (2013):
11–37. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology and https://
www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_material_turn_in_the_social_sciences.
16. Renana Bartal, Neta Bodner, and Bianca Kühnel, eds., Natural Materials of the
Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500–1500 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate,
2017), to appear. For the stones from the Holy Land, see Alexander Nagel, Medi-
eval Modern: Art Out of Time (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2013), pp. 117–21.
For aniconic, anti-Semitic objects, which have been a major focus of scholarship for
decades, see Bynum, “The Presence of Objects: Medieval Anti-Judaism in Modern
Germany,” Common Knowledge 10 (Winter, 2004): 1–32.
 Introduction to the 2017 Edition xxiii

about how objects connect regions. How, for example, do silk worms
and silk and the textiles woven from it join together far-flung points
not only through the physical contacts of producers, merchants, and
traders but also through the information and the skills that travel with
objects?17
The enthusiasm for studying objects has also intersected with a
cognitive turn in biology, psychology, and natural science. To some
humanists as well as some natural scientists, concepts are now not
merely images or constructions in the brain but once again (as they
were in the medieval and early modern periods) responses that must be
studied in relation to objects that trigger them.18 Some art historians
have recently been fascinated (and some horrified) by claims that reac-
tions in the brain to color, shape, size, texture, etc., might help explain
responses to art.19 In the study of religion, too, some anthropologists
and sociologists have queried how far a nexus of cognitive response
and external object might explain phenomena such as a cross-cultural
tendency to see natural occurrences (for example, thunder or earth-
quakes) as anthropomorphic deities.20 Do primordial fears of shadows,
for example, that evolved to aid survival provide a basis and template
for appearances of gods or demons? (Nicholas Oresme, in the fourteenth
century, by the way, gave a not dissimilar explanation of black cats and
flapping curtains perceived as angels or devils.)21 Moreover, increased
awareness of the complexities of response has led some art historians
to see images and objects as active, attributing an agency once ascribed
to bodies to objects themselves.22

17. See, for example, Laura Weigert, “Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile
Trade, 1500–1800,” The Art Bulletin 97.3 (2015): 342–45.
18. See Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, eds., The Cognitive Life of
Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, McDonald Institute Monographs
(Exeter: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research/Oxbow Books, 2010),
especially “Introduction,” pp. 1–12.
19. For an example of this genre, see Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest
to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the
Present (New York: Random House, 2012).
20. For example, Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds. A New Theory of Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), especially pp. 103–112.
21. Nicole Oresme, De causis, ch. 1, in Bert Hansen, ed., Nicole Oresme and the
Marvels of Nature: A Study of His “De causis mirabilium” (Toronto: The Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985), pp. 160–63.
22. For example, Glenn Peers, “Object Relations: Theorizing the Late Antique
Viewer,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 988, and Joanne Punzo Waghorne, “The
Hindu Gods in a Split-Level World: The Sri Siva-Vishnu Temple in Suburban Wash-
ington, D.C.,” in Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, ed.
 xxiv Introduction to the 2017 Edition

These new emphases are not without problems. I agree with some
current criticisms of thing theory or object-oriented ontology that accuse
it of eclipsing the aesthetic qualities of art. I also agree with rejections
of a cognitive science that reduces art and religion to brain patterns we
still understand far too little about.23 Nonetheless any medievalist will
be heartened by a material turn that broadens the category of art or
object to include much of the material from before 1500 that, whether
crafted or not, carried deep cultural significance: manuscripts, prayer
cards, relics and their containers, liturgical vessels, candelabra, wed-
ding and birthing trays, amulets, stones . . . the list goes on and on.24
Similarly, any medievalist will admit that such objects are clearly in
some sense performative—that is, they have agency. They act. The light
from candles reconfigures space, scraps of cloth that have been pressed
to a holy site carry power to new places, holy water heals, pictures not
only record but also convey indulgences (remission of punishment for
sin). Fear of images—even iconoclasm—was not merely fear of daring to

Robert Orsi (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 128.
Peers’ and Waghorne’s way of looking at religious objects is currently very wide-
spread and tends to be applied across cultures. See Caroline W. Bynum, “Avoiding
the Tyranny of Morphology, or Why Compare?” History of Religions 53 (May, 2014):
341–68, especially 353–54 and 363–64.
23. For critiques, see James Laidlaw, “A Well-Disposed Social Anthropologist’s
Problems with the ‘Cognitive Science of Religion,’” in Religion, Anthropology,
and Cognitive Science, ed. Harvey Whitehouse and James Laidlaw (Durham, N.C.:
Carolina Academic Press, 2007), pp. 211–46; Tim Ingold, “Materials Against Materi-
ality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1–16; Christopher S. Wood, “Image and
Thing, A Modern Romance,” in Representations, “Images at Work: A Special Issue,”
ed. Ittai Weinryb, Hannah Baader, and Gerhard Wolf, 133 (Winter, 2016): 130–151;
and Robert Pippin, “Discipline(s),” in What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason,
Nature, and History, ed. Wendy Doniger, Peter Galison, and Susan Neiman (Berlin/
Boston: de Gruyter, 2016), pp. 171–77.
24. The introduction to Representations, “Images at Work: A Special Issue,”
pp. 1–19, seems to me to err in its description of what objects medievalists have
recently been working on. Despite the statement in the abstract on p. 1 that “miracu-
lous images within Christian cult practices . . . were scholarship’s main foci in recent
years,” the most innovative work on medieval objects and their agency recently
has been on relics and reliquaries, not amulets, miraculous paintings, etc. See, for
example, the works, grounding-breaking in different ways, of Julia M. H. Smith,
“Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c. 700–1200),” Proceedings of
the British Academy 181 (2012): 143–67, and Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues
in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400-circa 1204 (University Park, Pa.:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). Clothes have also been the focus of
much recent work. See Charlotte Klack-Eitzen, Wiebke Haase, and Tanja Weissgraf,
Heilige Röcke: Kleider für Skulpturen in Kloster Wienhausen (Regensburg: Schnell
& Steiner, 2013), and Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renais-
sance Europe (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
 Introduction to the 2017 Edition xxv

depict the sacred; it was fear of the power of objects, of stuff, of matter.25
Hence it is easy to trace a line forward from the study of body and image
I pursued in Resurrection and “Fuss” to the study of object and matter
now popular in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, matter itself—like identity—
is never accessed directly by our analysis.26 A material object is always
particular. As the locus of what something is and yet the locus of its
evolution or decay, the material must be paradoxical. Hence the method
of Resurrection, which involved trying to see in the use of literary and
philosophical images the ways in which medieval thinkers struggled to
retain an understanding of self and stuff as enduring throughout physi-
cal growth, change, and decay, has become for me a larger methodologi-
cal commitment to paradox.
There are complexities to current discussion that I will not enter
into here. These brief paragraphs are only to show how the basic issues
concerning body and identity I examined in the 1990s pointed toward
new yet related issues that agitate scholarship today. One might none-
theless ask why such foreshadowings matter. Does it make any differ-
ence to current cultural studies that medieval concepts of body can
be shown to be more nuanced than they were assumed to be by those
thinkers who, twenty years ago, generalized about Western dualism?
Does it make a difference to any except a few specialists if contempo-
rary understandings of bodies and objects might be enriched by factor-
ing in medieval images in both senses of the word image?

III.
I argue that study of the Middle Ages does matter and that it should
matter more than it seems to at present. It matters, of course, because
thoughtful, careful scholarship on a thousand years of Western history
can provide a model—as does all good scholarship—for the care and
thought we owe to each other as human beings. If there are things we
have gotten wrong about the past or over-simplifications we have per-
petrated, we must waste no time in setting them straight. But more is
at stake than this.

25. See David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory
of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Iconoclash: Beyond the
Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour (Karl-
sruhe, ZKM, and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron
Tugendhaft, eds., Idol Anxiety (Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press, 2011).
26. Bynum, Christian Materiality, pp. 34–36, 278–86.
 xxvi Introduction to the 2017 Edition

Medievalists are faced today, I would argue, with a singular chal-

lenge. It is one we have not risen to as well as we might. A comparison
to the newly energized field of classical studies provides a contrast.
Classicists have engaged recently in a difficult conversation about how
to relate their scholarship to current issues other than genetically or
genealogically. For example, a recent issue of the journal Daedalus
titled “What’s New About the Old?” engages directly with the ques-
tion of how one reads texts such as Antigone as something other than
sources of Western evil or Western freedom, or as puzzles to be glossed
and rejected by current values.27 Neither reception history nor attacks
on the past as politically incorrect seem to get us very far in understand-
ing why we still read Antigone. But we still do. Classicists and ancient
historians are currently struggling with new concepts such as “deep
Classics” or “post-classicism” that might further our understanding of
why the past they study matters.28
We still read Dante, Chaucer, and Thomas Aquinas, admire Chartres
cathedral, and make icons, however ambiguously or even disastrously,
of figures such as the beautiful Uta of Naumburg or Hieronymus Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights. But unlike classicists, medievalists have not
found truly effective ways of asserting the importance of what we do
for the currently embattled humanities. The reasons for our failure are
complex. They partly have to do with the prevalence in popular culture
of the term “medieval” (sometimes called “mid-evil”) as a synonym for
“bad,” “superstitious,” or “violent” (as in “I’m going to get medieval on
you!”). In our media-saturated world, it is hard to shake off stereotypes.
But our failure has partly to do, I think, with our own tendency to take
over popular assumptions more than we need to. Thus we write books
such as the recent studies by the formidably learned medievalists David
Nirenberg and Philippe Buc that seem nonetheless to discourage interest
in the Middle Ages in two ways: first by tracing in the period ideas that
are more typically ancient Mediterranean or early modern than medieval,
and second by assuming that the point of looking at the past is to find,
in the past, roots of modern ideas one wants to condemn or dismiss.29

27. Daedalus 145.2 (Spring, 2016): Special Issue: “What’s New About the Old?”
28. For what is to my mind a successful example of the new classicism, see Shane
Butler, The Ancient Phonograph (New York: Zone Books, 2015). See also www.post-
classicisms.org.
29. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2013); Philippe Buc, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence,
and the West, ca. 70 C.E. to the Iraq War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2015).
 Introduction to the 2017 Edition xxvii

Moreover, for all their laudatory efforts to be relevant and upbeat, jour-
nals such as postmedieval and Studies in Medievalism, creative groups
of young scholars like the BABEL group, enactment clubs such as the
longstanding “Society for Creative Anachronism,” and an array of under-
graduate courses on Tolkien, Star Wars, and video games offered at major
universities in order to lure undergraduates to study the Middle Ages do
not seem to have achieved their goal of inducing widespread interest in
the period or enhancing its appeal.30 Perhaps this is because we do not
take the medieval past per se seriously enough.
Historians do not study the past—any past—primarily in order to
condemn either it in itself or the roots of our modern ills in it. The past
can’t be politically correct. Condemning it is often a cheap shot. But we
do not study the past in order to defend it either. Excavating out of it
modern values or titillating fragments usually gets things a bit wrong
anyway. Rather we study the past for the ways it can shock us into
diagnosing what is oddest, most perplexing, and yet most glorious and
enduring in our own situation. The point of looking at past ideas and
images is what Alexander Nagel has argued in his recent book Medi-
eval Modern: to juxtapose past and present in order to make us more
shocked by, attuned to, and curious about the fact that our own concepts
and creations are very particular, very contradictory and incoherent,
indeed very strange, yet they too stretch toward a kind of confidence
and courage.31 The argument Resurrection makes is that the problems
of identity (am I the same thing through all the changes of my life and,
if so, how?) and of body (how do I factor both pleasure and decay, the
physically given and the inevitably evolving, into a conception of self?)
are enduring questions—not answers but questions. It argues that what-
ever approaches medieval thinkers and artists found rhetorically, philo-
sophically, and metaphorically to such issues were tinged with hope as
well as violence and guilt. Hence it suggests that looking at a medieval

30. For the journal postmedieval, see http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy/postmedieval-

Prospectus.htm For Studies in Medievalism, see http://www.medievalism.net/sim.
html. The nexus between re-enactment and study of the Middle Ages is explicit in
the website for Studies in Medievalism, which states that it is “dedicated to the
study of post-medieval images and perceptions of the Middle Ages . . . with particular
interest in the interaction between scholarship and re-creation.” To say that these
efforts do not seem to have succeeded in mitigating the unfortunate tendency in pop-
ular culture to identify the Middle Ages with violence or fantasy is not to denigrate
their efforts but to suggest that such efforts need to be supplemented, and supple-
mented courageously, by affirming the full range of what concerned medieval people.
31. Nagel, Medieval Modern, especially pp. 7–26.
 xxviii Introduction to the 2017 Edition

tympanum, straining to grasp a mystic’s vision of percolating desire, or

parsing a philosophical debate about risen toenails (that perhaps made
teenage students in the thirteenth century giggle as we giggle today)
puts us in the presence of the paradox of human existence, which is the
simultaneity of life and death, loss and survival, endurance and change.
My argument for studying the Middle Ages seriously in its full com-
plexity thus intersects with larger contemporary concerns. All human-
ists struggle today not only with gloomy prophecies of declining college
enrollments and dwindling numbers of tenure track positions but also
with the challenge of articulating our relevance to the contemporary
world. We often feel forced to defend ourselves by claiming to be the
handmaidens of other professions. An English major will help you get
into medical school, we are supposed to argue, because it will show
your breadth (as long, of course, as your science grades are tops). Learn-
ing how to write clear prose and think through problems will help you
compose legal briefs or software programs (although some humanities
courses purvey a jargon that runs counter to such claims). Yet these
and other similarly utilitarian arguments do not seem very convincing
justifications. They miss the point. As President Drew Faust of Har-
vard stated in her inaugural address, October 12, 2007: the sciences and
social sciences look at the present; the humanities connect the long arc
of the past with the future. In an interview in 2015 with United States
President Barack Obama, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson
made a similar case. We do not value sufficiently what actually hap-
pens between ordinary teachers of the humanities and their students,
she argues, yet it is the bedrock of all our values, our successes, and
our hopes.32 The justification for studying the humanities and for writ-
ing history lies ultimately in the fact that that bedrock, that long arc
between past and future, is where we go when we despair of our now.
The humanities are where we find the courage and the humility to
survive in the contradictions of our existence. Encountering the ways
medieval theorists, artists, poets, and religious writers struggled and
lived with the paradoxes of body and identity helps make us aware of
how contradictory and complicated are our own ideas and ways of being
in the world. Understanding, as they understood, that paradoxes are
paradoxes—that decay and perdurance, pain and joy, life and death are
always simultaneous, not seriatim, and must be lived as such—helps us
to be not only humanists but also fully human.
32. “President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation,” New York
Review of Books LXII.17 (November 5, 2015).
 Preface to the 1995 Edition:
Acknowledgments and
Methodological Musings

This book began as a series of lectures under the auspices of the Amer-
ican Council of Learned Societies’ Committee on the History of Reli-
gions. My idea was to treat several moments in the Western tradition
in which the doctrine of bodily resurrection was debated, challenged,
and redefined by Christian thinkers and to situate those debates in the
context of changing attitudes toward bodies, living and dead. I wanted
to focus not primarily on the formulation of doctrine but on the ways
in which theologians and philosophers argued—on the specific images,
examples, and analogies they employed to express their ideas. The
opportunity to deliver these lectures was thus an occasion to explore
and illustrate several concerns, both methodological and substantive.
Although beginning with a tiny detail—with a few images used by a
few writers to explain and embellish a notion of stunning oddness—I
intended both to tackle large questions about the meaning of embodi-
ment in the Western tradition and to assert my continuing confidence
in the enterprise (sometimes today challenged or rejected) of attempt-
ing to read texts from the past in what we used to call “their own
terms.” The book that has grown from the original lectures is larger and
more complex than they were. But it retains both the focus on certain
moments of tension or debate in the Western tradition and a concentra-
tion on images in lived and literary context.
 xxx Preface to the 1995 Edition

My study is in one sense rather old-fashioned intellectual history. It

is because I am interested in ideas themselves that I have read widely
in modern philosophy of mind and have occasionally explained ancient
arguments with a technical precision derived from modern discussions
of identity and of the mind/body problem. Moreover, I have sometimes
used rather “internalist” explanations for changes in ideas, accepting
the notion that new concepts may be elaborated in response to intellec-
tual deficiencies in earlier concepts. Although I do much to situate the
theology I study against the background of what preachers said about
ill and dying bodies and what ordinary people did when they mourned
for and buried their dead, I begin my study of each period by reading
and ruminating on the ostensible and explicit topics of quite technical
philosophical and theological writing.
In another sense, however, my study moves beyond old-style intel-
lectual history, for it argues that the linguistic trappings of texts are
often more telling than the explicit arguments, particularly for a period
such as the Middle Ages, which placed a high value on conforming to
positions formulated, even canonized as “authority,” in a distant past.
I assume that the technical arguments of philosophical and theological
treatises frequently betray the problems they cannot solve—social and
psychological as well as intellectual problems—in the limiting cases,
examples, and metaphors they use and in the ways they distort or mis-
read conventional tropes and images. I hope I never reduce an argument
to its function or its social context, or treat theology as ideology. But
I do think ideas are sometimes elaborated and sometimes betrayed (in
the several senses of the word betray) in the specific metaphors that
clothe them.
I therefore move into the social and religious context of theology and
philosophy via the examples, limiting cases, and images used by polemi-
cists and theologians. My understanding of what constitutes context is
not determined by a modern theoretical position but by the language
of ancient writers themselves. If I move to a consideration of gender or
power, birth or burial, money or food in an effort to situate the debates I
study, I do so because the authors I am reading slip into analogies drawn
from these aspects of human experience, and slip into such images
especially at points of tension, confusion, fallacy, self-contradiction, or
absurdity. It is, of course, possible that I misread both the texts I study
and my own motives, but it is important to the method I employ that
I start with the text before me and follow its metaphorical connections
rather than choosing a modern theoretical construct that predetermines
 Preface to the 1995 Edition xxxi

what is the context for what. Much about the shape of the book that
follows depends on my determination not to reject but to add to old-
fashioned intellectual history by digging below its surface, via metaphors
and examples, to a surrounding context.
The shape of this book derives also from its origin as a series of
lectures. It retains traces of its original nature as essays, intended to
tell an interconnected story yet to stand each as a separate study in
the relation of theological image to social and religious practice. It did
not begin as a survey of doctrinal development, and I have not revised
it to bring it closer to any pretense of complete coverage. The book
that follows is still a study of the debates of the years around 200, 400,
1100, 1200, 1270, and 1330; no one can be more keenly aware than
I how much it loses by omitting the early Middle Ages in which mate-
rialist conceptions of bodily resurrection were elaborated in new ways
and connected with new subtlety to both eucharistic theology and relic
cult. Had I filled in the years between Augustine and Peter Lombard,
however, I would never have finished.
Nonetheless, the book has departed from its original guise in one
important respect. The medieval section is now much longer than the
patristic one. While this is disappointing for reasons of symmetry, it is
necessary and perhaps even fortunate in other respects. Resurrection
belief was less central, yet more pervasive, in medieval theology than
in early Christian writing. The twelfth century did not produce the
treatises specifically on resurrection characteristic of the years around
200, and it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the doctrinal
pronouncements of councils and bulls in 1180, 1215, 1277, and so forth,
are mere repetitions of earlier legislation or passionate defenses against
current threat. In considering the topic of bodily resurrection in the
high Middle Ages, it is less obvious where to look than it is in the
patristic period; yet many more kinds of evidence are available, includ-
ing a large amount of iconographic material. I have ranged more widely
in medieval than in early Christian evidence and have argued at greater
length not only because, as a medieval specialist, I know the period
better but also because it is in general less well known and less easily
knowable.
One final point about the focus of my study must be stated explic-
itly. This book is not about eschatology or about soul but about body. It
is not a survey of concepts of heaven and hell—a topic to which much
recent scholarship has been devoted. Nor is it a study of millenarianism
or of mysticism. Although I pay attention along the course of my story
 xxxii Preface to the 1995 Edition

to changing ideas about soul, to the emergence of a new eschatologi-

cal place—purgatory—and to fundamental shifts in concepts of time
and self involved in stressing the moment of individual death rather
than the end of the world or the return of a messiah to that world, my
focus is on what we learn about ideas of embodiment through those
discussions that treat it most frontally. I have looked at what theolo-
gians argued about bodily resurrection in order to understand what they
thought about body.
This book thus provides a neglected chapter in the new history of
the body that is being written by historians such as Peter Brown, Dani-
elle Jacquart, Lynn Hunt, Thomas Laqueur, Roy Porter, Marie-Christine
Pouchelle, and Claude Thomasset. Whereas these historians all treat
body as a locus of sexuality, I argue that for most of Western history body
was understood primarily as the locus of biological process. Christians
clung to a very literal notion of resurrection despite repeated attempts
by theologians and philosophers to spiritualize the idea. So important
indeed was literal, material body that by the fourteenth century not
only were spiritualized interpretations firmly rejected; soul itself was
depicted as embodied. Body was emphasized in all its particularity and
physicality both because of the enormous importance attached to proper
burial and because of the need to preserve difference (including gender,
social status, and personal experience) for all eternity. But the “other”
encountered in body by preachers and theologians, storytellers, philoso-
phers, and artists, was not finally the “other” of sex or gender, social
position or ethnic group, belief or culture; it was death. To medieval
theorists, fertility was also decay, the threat lodged in body was change
itself. To make body essential to survival and to person, it was necessary
to redeem not only the difference of particularity but also the difference
of nonbeing.
It may seem almost perverse to focus on one of the partners in escha-
tology, body, rather than soul, while arguing that medieval Christian-
ity is not fundamentally dualistic. Nonetheless it is only by studying
eschatological concepts of the body that we see how imprecise is the
boundary between spiritual and material in most Christian writing and
how psychosomatic is the medieval understanding of self. Soul has
been much studied in the past three hundred years, while body qua
physicality has until recently been ignored. Yet, for medieval thinkers,
body far more than soul raised technical philosophical questions about
identity and personhood. It does so for us as well. I have studied body
in the context of questions concerning burial, social hierarchy, gender,
 Preface to the 1995 Edition xxxiii

digestion, fertility, and selfhood because medieval texts themselves

make these connections. It is a fascinating payoff of my study that a
focus on the neglected eschatological component, body, should (as I
explain in my introduction) bring us far closer than do considerations of
soul to contemporary obsessions about identity and survival.
I am grateful to the History of Religions Committee of the American
Council of Learned Societies, especially to Judith Berling and Frank
Reynolds, for the invitation to deliver these lectures. I am also grateful to
my audiences at the University of California at Berkeley, the University
of Chicago, Harvard University, Oberlin College, and Sarah Lawrence
College, for their perceptive questions and attentive listening. I thank
especially Daniel Boyarin, Laura King, Thomas Laqueur, Don McQuade,
and Anne Middleton at Berkeley; Wendy Doniger, Clark Gilpin, and
Frank Reynolds at Chicago; Clarissa Atkinson, Thomas Bisson, Michael
McCormick, and Catherine Mooney at Harvard; Marcia Colish, Jeffrey
Hamburger, Paula Richman, and Grover Zinn at Oberlin; David Bern-
stein and Pauline Watts at Sarah Lawrence. Mary Beth Lamb was effi-
cient and gracious in helping with arrangements at a time of transition
and confusion for the series. My students Nora Berend, James Jonas
Hamilton, Bruce Holsinger, Susan Kramer, Victoria Velsor and Anders
Winroth provided cheerful and energetic research assistance. Librarians
Beth Juhl and Michael Stoller guided me through the intricacies of the
Columbia University Library.
The topic of this book is enormous; virtually every aspect of social,
religious, intellectual, and political life for more than a thousand years
is relevant to its exploration. If I have had both the time and the audac-
ity to explore many of these aspects, it is because of my extraordinary
good fortune in receiving grants from the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation and the Getty Center for the History of Art and
the Humanities. I am more grateful than I can express to these foun-
dations and to the anonymous nominators and selectors whose confi-
dence in me made it all possible. Their trust at first weighed heavily on
me, but I hope they will feel that, in the end, what they gave me was
not only opportunity but also intellectual courage. I owe a great deal to
my colleagues at the University of Washington and Columbia Univer-
sity, who graciously rejoiced in my good fortune when they might well
have envied or carped at it; I thank especially Wilton Fowler and Jere
Bacharach at Washington and Jack Garraty at Columbia who arranged
for me to take two and a half of my five MacArthur years free from
teaching responsibilities.
 xxxiv Preface to the 1995 Edition

So many friends and colleagues have contributed to the ideas explored

here that I cannot thank them all. But I offer special gratitude to Ann
Douglas, Emily Flint, Jean Howard, Martha Howell, Lynn Hunt, Natalie
Kampen, Steven Marrone, Fred Paxton, Nancy Roelker, Guenther Roth,
Wim Smit, Robert Somerville, Tracey Strasser, and Judith Van Herik.
Roberta Bondi, Peter Brown, Patrick Geary, Rachel Jacoff, Edward Peters,
and Katherine Tachau read the entire manuscript; Elaine Combs-
Schilling, Giles Milhaven, and John Magee each read several chapters;
much of what clarity the argument attains is owing to the trenchant
criticism they offered from their very different perspectives.
I dedicate this book to my father Andrew Jackson Walker and to my
daughter Antonia, who shares his surname, not only because each of
them has helped me to think with new intensity about issues of identity
but also because my love for them lies at the heart of my confidence that
there is, in some sense, survival and even resurrection.
 Introduction to the 1995 Edition:
Seed Images, Ancient and Modern

in her autobiographical fragment Family Memories,

Dame Rebecca West tells the following story from her
childhood in London in the years around 1900.

I remember so well that autumn afternoon when my

father came into the garden down the steps from the French window,
and found me busy at a flowerbed which I had cleared from the yellow
hands of leaves cast by the chestnut trees.
“What are you digging up?” he asked in alarm. . . .
“I’m digging up conkers,” I said.
“I doubt if there’ll be any conkers in that flower bed,” he
objected. “Lettie and Winnie have been clearing them off each
morning because of the spring flowers. Are you sure you’re not
digging up bulbs?”
“I’m sure they’re conkers,” I told him. “I buried them myself.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I am God,” I explained, “and they are people, and I made them
die, and now I am resurrecting them.”
“Oh, you are, are you?” said my father, and sat down on the
iron steps and watched me, drawing on his pipe. Presently he
asked, “But why did you make the people die if you meant to dig
them up again? Why didn’t you just leave them alone?”
 2 Introduction to the 1995 Edition

To that I replied, “Well, that would have been all right for them.
But it would have been no fun for me.”1

The incident reveals much about the impish but religiously sensitive
young Rebecca and about the Anglo-Irish father she adored. It also reflects
one important constant in theological discussions of resurrection from
the early church to the late twentieth century: the resurrection of the
body is always connected to divine power.2 Whatever else the doctrine
of universal resurrection has been said to reveal, those who refer to it
always use it to underline the extraordinary power necessary to create
and recreate, to reward and punish, to bring life from death. But what
actually interest me in this story are the conkers: horse chestnuts—so
called from the children’s game in which each player swings a chestnut
on a string to try to break one held by his or her opponent. For horse
chestnuts are seeds; if left in the ground, they will sprout. Yet to the
young Rebecca they are inert. In this childish fantasy of playing God, the
chestnut-people are buried and resurrected exactly the same, and they
are “the same” in two senses of the word same—that is, “identical”
and “similar.” The child is certain she digs up the identical chestnut
she earlier buried in a given spot in the ground; the chestnut, that is,
continues numerically the same. It retains identity through spatiotem-
poral continuity. And the chestnut the little girl digs up looks similar;

1. Rebecca West, Family Memories: An Autobiographical Journey, edited and

introduced by Faith Evans (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 207. The incident is also
recounted in Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life (New York: Fawcett Col-
umbine, 1987), pp. 19–20; see pp. 39, 197, and 222–24 for West’s sense of God as cruel
and her rather Manichean cosmology.
2. See J. A. MacCulloch, “Eschatology,” in Encyclopaedia of Religions and Ethics,
ed. J. Hastings (New York: Scribner, 1914), vol. 5, pp. 373–91; A. Michel, “Résurrec-
tion des morts,” in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, ed. A. Vacant et al. (Paris:
Letouzey et Ané, 1909–50) [hereafter DTC], vol. 13, pt. 2, cols. 2501–71; Jaroslav
Pelikan, The Shape of Death: Life, Death, and Immortality in the Early Fathers (New
York and Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1961); H. Cornélis, J. Guillet, Th. Camelot, and
M. A. Genevois, The Resurrection of the Body: Themes of Theology (Notre Dame:
Fides, 1964); H. M. McElwain, “Resurrection of the Dead, Theology of,” in New Cath-
olic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), vol. 12, pp. 419–27, especially p.
425; Milton McC. Gatch, Death: Meaning and Mortality in Christian Thought and
Contemporary Culture (New York: Seabury Press, 1969); Joanne E. McWilliam Dew-
art, Death and Resurrection, (Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, 1986); Gisbert
Greshake and Jacob Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum: Zum theologischen Verständnis
der leiblichen Auferstehung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986);
Helmer Ringgren, “Resurrection,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade
(New York: MacMillan, 1987), vol. 12, pp. 344–50; and H. Crouzel and V. Grossi,
“Resurrection of the Dead,” in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, ed. A. Di Berardino,
trans. Adrian Walford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), vol. 2, pp. 732–33.
 Introduction to the 1995 Edition 3

it has not decayed or sprouted. To the eye at least, it is materially and

formally the same conker as before; it has the same bits arranged in the
same way.3
The seed is the oldest Christian metaphor for the resurrection of the
body.4 It is the dominant metaphor in that text which, more than any
other, has determined discussion of resurrection: 1 Corinthians 15.5 Yet
to Paul the seed is not young Rebecca’s conker: inert material, put into
the earth and lifted out of it by divine will. The seed of 1 Corinthians 15
grows: as “bare” grain it dies in the ground, then quickens to new life
in a new body. If it is “the same” at all, it is “the same” in the sense of
numerical identity, not in the sense of similar appearance. Paul wrote:

For by a man came death; and by a man the resurrection of the dead.
And, as in Adam all shall die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.
But every one in his own order; the first-fruits, Christ; then they that
are of Christ. . . .
But some man will say: How do the dead rise again? Or with what
manner of body shall they come?
Senseless man, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it
die first.
And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be;
but bare grain, as of wheat. . . .
But God giveth it a body as he will; and to every seed its proper body.
All flesh is not the same flesh; but, one is the flesh of men, another
of beasts, another of birds, another of fishes.

3. The precision I here introduce into discussions of identity derives from modern
philosophical distinctions; for references, see my “Material Continuity, Personal Sur-
vival, and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and
Modern Contexts,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the
Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Urzone Publishers, 1991), pp. 239–97.
The question of how modern and medieval concepts relate now seems to me some-
what more complex than I argued in that essay, for (as I suggest in chapters 7 and
8 below) the most sophisticated fourteenth-century conceptions emphasize material
continuity less than do either earlier discussions or modern ones. But the general argu-
ment I make in “Material Continuity”—that modern discussion, both popular and
philosophical, tends to require embodiment for personhood and to reject Docetist and
spiritualist positions—still stands. See below nn. 25–28.
4. For an overview of Biblical images, see Cornélis et al., Resurrection, pp. 101–22;
C. Brown, “Resurrection,” in The New International Dictionary of New Testament
Theology (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1978), vol. 3, pp. 259–309; Paul Gooch, “Resur-
rection,” in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David L.
Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), pp. 662–65. For the image of the seed
in the Koran and in rabbinic Judaism, see below, chap. 1, nn. 9, 130, and 132.
5. The Pauline text was often glossed with John 12.24; see Gooch, “Resurrection,”
p. 663.
 4 Introduction to the 1995 Edition

And there are bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial. . . .

. . . For star differeth from star in glory.
So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it shall
rise in incorruption.
It is sown in dishonor: it shall rise in glory. It is sown in weakness: it
shall rise in power.
It is sown a natural body: it shall rise a spiritual body. . . .
Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot possess the king-
dom of God; neither shall corruption possess incorruption.
Behold I tell you a mystery. . . .
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the
trumpet shall sound and the dead shall rise again incorruptible; and
we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption; and this mortal must
put on immortality.
And, when this mortal hath put on immortality, then shall come to
pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory.
(1 Cor. 15.21–54, Douay translation)

These verses are enigmatic, especially if considered in the context

of other Pauline writings. Romans 6–8, for example, seems to suggest
that our resurrection has already begun through baptism.6 Resurrection
is thus the rebirth of embodied person, and it begins in this life. In con-
trast, 2 Corinthians 5.1–10 may be read as implying that we discard body
when we exchange our earthly clothing or tabernacle for habitation in
heaven.7 Whatever it is that survives in paradise, it is not (according to
this interpretation) either accompanied or reclothed by anything physi-
cal or material.
Gospel accounts of Jesus’s resurrection clearly imply the same range
of interpretation, from exaggeratedly physicalist to exaggeratedly spiri-
tualist. They stress the materiality of Jesus’s body, which ate boiled
fish and honeycomb and commanded Thomas the Doubter “Handle
and see” (Luke 24.39, 41–43). Yet they also underline the radical trans-
formation of the resurrected Christ, who passed through closed doors,

6. This is also the viewpoint found in John 6 and 11.

7. On the relationship of the passages in 1 and 2 Corinthians, see C. F. D. Moule,
“St. Paul and Dualism: The Pauline Conception of Resurrection,” New Testament
Studies 13 (1965–1966): 106–23, and Paul Gooch, Partial Knowledge: Philosophical
Studies in Paul (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), pp. 81–83.
 Introduction to the 1995 Edition 5

was sometimes not recognizable to his beloved disciples, and bade his
friend Mary Magdalen “Touch me not!” (Luke 24.16–30, 31, 36, and 51;
John 20.14, 19, and 21.4).8 Moreover, in the Gospel of Luke at least, the
two interpretations exist side by side, as if to complement each other.
Twentieth-century readings of 1 Corinthians 15 have complicated the
issue further. Dominated by the great interpretative insight of the Swiss
theologian Oscar Cullmann, who argued that early Christian ideas drew
on the Jewish notion of the resurrection of the person rather than on a
Greek notion of immortality of soul, most recent studies have under-
stood 1 Corinthians 15 as referring to restoration and redemption of the
person as a psychosomatic unity.9 Some interpretation, both theological
and philosophical, has gone so far as to take the position that Paul did
not mean “body” at all, but rather “self” or “community” or even
“disembodied person” (i.e., a kind of soul).10 (The careful philological

8. On the discrepancies in the Gospel tradition, see Peter Carnley, The Structure
of Resurrection Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 16–19.
9. Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of
Time and History, trans. F. Filson, 3d ed. (London: SCM, 1962); idem, Unsterblich-
keit der Seele oder Auferstehung der Toten? (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1964); idem, “Immor-
tality and Resurrection,” in Immortality and Resurrection, ed. Krister Stendahl
(New York, 1965), pp. 9–53; idem, “Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the
Dead? The Witness of the New Testament,” in Immortality, ed. Terence Penelhum
(Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1973), pp. 53–84. Both of the recent monographs on
Jewish notions of resurrection criticize Cullmann’s interpretation as underestimat-
ing the diversity in Jewish thought; see George W. E. Nickelsburg Jr., Resurrection,
Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, and London: Oxford University Press, 1972); Günter Stem-
berger, Der Leib der Auferstehung: Studien zur Anthropologie und Eschatologie des
palästinischen Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (ca. 170 v. Chr.–100 n.
Chr.) (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1972); and chap. 1, n. 9 below. Some criticism
of Cullmann seems to me rather beside the point, focusing as it does on whether
texts have any traces of Greek body-soul terminology. What Cullmann draws atten-
tion to is the difference between seeing the human being as a person that dies (and
then sleeps) until an end of time and seeing this being as a spirit (a nonmaterial and
nondying element) housed in physicality. Put this way, one immediately sees that
the Christian concept as it emerges by the high Middle Ages is neither.
10. Twentieth-century philosophy has generally rejected any sort of dualism;
on this point, see John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978) and Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Per-
sonal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). (For further discussion, see below n. 28,
and “Material Continuity,” in Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 244–52 and pp.
398–400 nn. 22–43.) This rejection is both the background to Cullmann’s reading of
early Christian texts as referring to a unitary person and a factor in the widespread
acceptance of his views. Following Cullmann, theologians in mid-century tended to
accept that soma in Paul meant “person,” not “body,” (and was therefore related to
the Hebrew notion of nephesh or “individual”); dualistic ideas in the church fathers
were thus taken to be a later and alien importation from Greek philosophy. Building
 6 Introduction to the 1995 Edition

research of Robert Gundry, which establishes that Paul in fact uses soma
[body] to refer to a morally neutral physical body and not just to person,
makes this position largely untenable.)11 But whatever the Pauline oxy-
moron “spiritual body” means, two points are clear. First, to Paul, the
image of the seed is an image of radical transformation: the wheat that
sprouts is different from the bare seed; and that bare seed itself, while
lying in the earth, undergoes decay. Second, the image asserts (perhaps
without any intention on its author’s part) some kind of continuity,
although it does not explicitly lodge identity in either a material or a
formal principle. The sheaf of grain is not, in form, the same as the bare
seed, nor is it clear that it is made of the same stuff. It acquires a new,
a “spiritual” body. But something accounts for identity. It is that which
is sown that quickens. If we do not rise, Christian preaching is in vain,
says Paul; something must guarantee that the subject of resurrection is
“us.” But “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.” Heaven is not
merely a continuation of earth. Thus, when Paul says “the trumpet shall
sound . . . and we shall be changed,” he means, with all the force of our
everyday assumptions, both “we” and “changed.”
At no period has Christian treatment of resurrection entirely aban-
doned the Pauline metaphor of the seed. But the seed metaphor is not
the major image in patristic and medieval discussions of eschatology.
The resurrection of the body is also described by theologians as the flow-
ering of a dry tree after winter, the donning of new clothes, the rebuild-
ing of a temple, the hatching of an egg, the smelting out of ore from
clay, the reforging of a statue that has been melted down, the growth of
the fetus from a drop of semen, the return of the phoenix from its own
ashes, the reassembling of broken potsherds, the vomiting up of bits of
shipwrecked bodies by fishes that have consumed them. These are all
complex images, and they by no means imply in every case the same
set of philosophical or theological assumptions. The growth of seed or
semen or an egg implies numerical identity through spatio-temporal

on this, theologians R. Bultmann and J. A. T. Robinson argued that the Pauline soma
could be read as “community” (R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol.
1 [New York: Scribner, 1951] and J. A. T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline
Theology [London: SCM, 1952]). In Partial Knowledge, the philosopher P. Gooch has
recently argued that Paul can be understood as referring to “disembodied persons.”
Cullmann himself, it is important to note, never suggested that the resurrected per-
son might be immaterial; see above n. 9.
11. Robert H. Gundry, Soma in Biblical Theology with Emphasis on Pauline
Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
 Introduction to the 1995 Edition 7

continuity but not necessarily material continuity. The reforging of a

statue seems to imply continuity of material but may only mean that
exactly the same shape (i.e., continuity of form) accounts for identity.
The image of smelted ore suggests that continuity of self is explained
by continuation of the same material bits at the level of atoms or par-
ticles, whether or not what is reforged has the same form.
This book is intended to explore the plethora of ideas about resur-
rection in patristic and medieval literature—the metaphors, tropes, and
arguments in which the ideas were garbed, their context and their con-
sequences.12 I assume, as I have done elsewhere in my work, that close
analysis of specific images in the context of other images, of theologi-
cal doctrine, and of religious and social practice, can guide us to the
unspoken assumptions, especially the unspoken inconsistencies and
conflicts, at the heart of people’s experience of the world.13 There is a
risk, of course, in such an approach. The examples and limiting cases
I take as significant are, in a sense, both trivial and quaint; my choice
of them may thus seem arbitrary or, worse yet, calculated to shock.
But I have not chosen them in order either to condescend toward medi-
eval naiveté or to titillate modern curiosity. If I examine, for example,
metaphors of cannibalism, debates about eaten embryos, or lyrical
expressions of desire, it is because I find them revealing of the case
being made by medieval authors. Indeed I argue that they are revealing
exactly because they are offhand and oblique, for images often carry
12. My study is thus clearly related to the recent interest among medievalists
in death and eschatology. But with the exception of a few, highly technical studies
in German (see chap. 6, nn. 2 and 10 below), recent work has mostly concentrated
on the experience of the soul or on the nature of the afterlife as a place. See Robert
Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art (New York: Stein and Day, 1968); Philippe
Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans.
Patricia Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); idem, The Hour
of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Jacques
Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984); Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell: Images
of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lucinda Byatt (Univer-
sity Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). Alan Bernstein of the
University of Arizona is at work on a fundamental study of patristic and medieval
conceptions of hell.
13. This was especially the method I employed in Jesus as Mother: Studies in
the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982). For more discussion of some of these methodological issues, see my “In
Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode,” in Fragmentation and Redemption,
pp. 11–26; and “Writing Body History: Some Historiographical and Autobiographical
Observations,” in Disability Studies Quarterly 12, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 14–17.
 8 Introduction to the 1995 Edition

speculation or intuition or hunch far beyond what the technical terms

at the disposal of medieval theorists—terms such as eidos, substantia,
persona—can bear.
My starting point is thus a simple observation about a single image.
Medieval treatments of eschatology, both scholastic and nonscholas-
tic, to a large extent ignore or explicitly reject the seed metaphor of
1 Corinthians 15 and related analogies to organic growth. When they
do use organic images, they (like the young Rebecca West) manipulate
them in such a way as to emphasize material continuity and reassem-
blage. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts, the resurrected body is
a jewel lifted from mire, a rebuilt temple, a vessel recast or reassembled
after wanton destruction. If it is occasionally said to have “flowered”
or “germinated,” the kernel from which it arises is bones or dust, and
the body that reappears is similar in structure and continuous in mat-
ter with the body laid down in the grave. Rare are the ideas of fertility,
rebirth, and metamorphosis that in the ancient Mediterranean world
clustered around the vernal equinox—ideas that surface still today in
tales of the Easter bunny and rituals of dyeing eggs. The locus classi-
cus and the source for medieval discussion—distinctions 43–50 of the
fourth book of Peter Lombard’s theological textbook known as the Sen-
tences—addresses questions of the material reconstitution of the body
such as might have been asked by those Corinthians who challenged
Paul: “With what manner of body shall they come?”
Change is not ignored by twelfth-century discussion, nor is the
glorified body of the blessed understood as just like an earthly body.
But the emphasis is on an identity guaranteed by material and formal
continuity, not on an opportunity for growth, escape, or rebirth. The
graces given to the saved are added on to a body reconstituted from
its previous bones and dust. Change is the enhancement of what is,
not metamorphosis into what is not. By the early thirteenth century,
the standard exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15.42–44 ignores altogether the
image of the seed. “Sown a natural body . . . [raised] a spiritual body” is
taken to refer to one of four gifts or dowries (dotes) bestowed on body,
the bride, by her soul or bridegroom.
Peter Lombard’s discussion, which set the terms in which medieval
theorists treated eschatology, turns out upon further investigation to be
a pastiche of borrowings. These borrowings come mostly from Augus-
tine’s City of God and Enchiridion, with bits from Gregory, Julian of
Toledo, Jerome, Hugh of St. Victor, Honorius Augustodunensis, and the
school of Anselm of Laon thrown in. The Augustinian passages are all
 Introduction to the 1995 Edition 9

lifted from Augustine’s late works or from medieval compilations that

themselves borrow from Augustine’s late works. Nor are the passages
“typical” of Augustine’s eschatology, which sometimes uses naturalis-
tic metaphors of germination or seasonal change to see resurrection as
dynamic process or employs the statue image so as to suggest a reforg-
ing in which full material continuity is not required.
It thus seems as if, during the lengthy and complex patristic debates
over resurrection (focused in the late second and early fifth centuries),
images that imply material and structural continuity—i.e., continuity
of particles and members—became more important. These images were
mediated to the high Middle Ages in part through compilations made
in the sixth to ninth centuries—a process of mediation fascinating in
its own right but one I do not have time to explore in this book.14 Such
images, carrying a powerful and materialist understanding of the after-
life, were then borrowed by twelfth-century schoolmen to focus their
discussion of resurrection.
Images of reforged pots, reconstructed ships, and rebuilt temples
could not, however, be the only images of the redemption promised by
Christ, for they implied a host of philosophical and religious problems.
If my body is reassembled from its dust, which of the many possible
bodies will return—the two-year-old, the young adult, the old woman
of seventy? And why is the return of body, which is a locus of pain (as
well as pleasure), desirable? What makes it morally or religiously sig-
nificant? Why is the reconstitution of my toe or fingernail a reward for
virtue? Material continuity cannot account for self; it cannot be salva-
tion. Neither philosophically nor soteriologically does it seem enough
to argue that a person survives and is redeemed if his or her physical
particles survive. Nor, in view of the biological change we see around
us, is it easy to hold that particles can survive until a far-off resurrec-
tion. Theories and images that suggest survival of the identical body
14. I intend to return in a subsequent study to the concept of resurrection found
in Gregory the Great and the Carolingian theologians. The intense materialism of
their ideas must be set in the context of Western insistence on the special place of
relics in devotion, on the Eucharist as literally the body of Christ, and on the incor-
ruption of the Virgin’s body in death and her perpetual virginity; see chapter 2, nn. 3,
179, below. My decision to jump over the early Middle Ages in this book—a decision
necessitated originally by the five-lecture format—is, however, a defensible one. The
texts utilized by twelfth-century theologians are those of late antiquity. Although
the selection of excerpts these theologians drew on owes something to early medi-
eval intervention, the move to exaggeratedly materialist images and concepts had
occurred already in Tertullian and then again in Jerome and the late Augustine. It
therefore seems acceptable to treat the forging of such notions in antiquity as back-
ground to a study of their use in the high Middle Ages.
 10 Introduction to the 1995 Edition

(idem in numero) as continuity of shape or structure, even as locus of

spiritual response or desire, seem necessary as well.
Yet the two great theologians who forged elegant and philosophically
defensible solutions to the problem of what accounts for personal iden-
tity, Origen (d. ca. 254) and Aquinas (d. 1274), found those solutions
condemned exactly because they obviated the need for body’s material
continuity. Origen’s understanding of the potential of the seed metaphor
for expressing both radical change and a nonmaterial solution to the
identity issue clearly contributed to the metaphor’s decline in popular-
ity. Aquinas’s suggestion (elaborated by Peter of Auvergne, John Quidort
of Paris, and Durand of St. Pourçain) that soul as substantial form
accounts for identity—a theory that makes continuity of the fleshly
stuff of body unnecessary—encountered deep opposition between the
1270s and 1300. From the second to the fourteenth centuries, doctrinal
pronouncements, miracle stories, and popular preaching continued to
insist on the resurrection of exactly the material bits that were laid in
the tomb. When, for example, the German mystic Mechtild of Mag-
deburg (d. ca. 1282) received a vision of John the Evangelist in heaven,
she saw a reclining crystal figure with utterly particularized brown eye-
brows. But John, the beloved disciple, chosen for the special reward of
bodily assumption, was still asleep. Mechtild says he was “buried.” Cer-
tainly John was John, Jesus’s special friend; he was in heaven, and to be
in heaven is salvation. Yet, in Mechtild’s treatment, it is as if body has
ascended to heaven apart from soul. We can understand Mechtild’s theo-
logically somewhat questionable vision only against the background of
practices and beliefs that made the stuff and structures of earthly body
integral to glorified body, and glorified body integral to self.15
The condemnations of Aquinas were removed in 1325, and the bull
Benedictus Deus of 1336 can be seen in a general sense as a victory for
the position that emphasizes soul. By the early fourteenth century, it
was possible—at least for logicians and theologians—to think of sur-
vival and identity of self without continuity of material particles. But
hundreds of years of insistence on bodily resurrection had come to
locate in “soul” much of our commonsense understanding of “body.”
Souls were gendered and ranked, bearing with them the marks of occu-
pation, status, religious vocation, even martyrdom. Moreover, mystical
and theological writing in the years around 1300 spoke repeatedly of
body as a bride, whose absence in heaven distracted or “retarded” soul

15. See below, chapter 8, pp. 337–41, especially nn. 74–78.

 Introduction to the 1995 Edition 11

from full joy in God. Although soul now seemed to carry not only the
particularity of self but also the pattern of body, it needed body as a
place to express that particularity and pattern. Even Dante (d. 1321),
who made technically correct use of the Thomistic notion that soul
accounts for identity, depicted his beloved Beatrice in the last cantos
of the Divine Comedy not simply as soul. Dante the poet gave to his
eponymous self a vision of the heavenly choir in their resurrection bod-
ies even though his poetic encounter was set before the end of time.16
Thus, the basic conclusion of my study of resurrection is that a
concern for material and structural continuity showed remarkable per-
sistence even where it seemed almost to require philosophical incoher-
ence, theological equivocation, or aesthetic offensiveness. This concern
responded to and was reflected in pious practices of great oddness; with-
out it, such late medieval curiosities as entrail caskets, finger reliquar-
ies, and miracles of incorrupt cadavers are inexplicable. The materialism
of this eschatology expressed not body-soul dualism but rather a sense
of self as psychosomatic unity. The idea of person, bequeathed by the
Middle Ages to the modern world, was not a concept of soul escaping
body or soul using body; it was a concept of self in which physicality
was integrally bound to sensation, emotion, reasoning, identity—and
therefore finally to whatever one means by salvation. Despite its sus-
picion of flesh and lust, Western Christianity did not hate or discount
the body.17 Indeed, person was not person without body, and body was
the carrier or the expression (although the two are not the same thing)
of what we today call individuality.
Behind these complex ideas and images lay fear as well as fascina-
tion. The lability and friability of fleshly matter was avoided more than
espoused. If both scientific and theological speculation struggled (in
their different ways) to assert that identity can survive flux, such specu-
lation over the long course of the centuries I explore was fueled more

16. See below, chapter 7, pp. 298–305, and Bynum, “Faith Imagining the Self:
Somatomorphic Soul and Resurrection Body in Dante’s Divine Comedy,” in Imagin-
ing Faith: Festschrift for Richard Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. Wayne Proudfoot and Sang
Hyun Lee, forthcoming.
17. This is the point I have made in a very different way in Holy Feast and Holy
Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987). It is worth repeating here what I say in the epilogue to
that study. To take Western asceticism seriously is not to glorify it. But it makes
no sense to see a deep concern with disciplining and experiencing the body and a
tendency to express religious response in it as hostility toward or discounting of the
somatic. Medieval Christianity is not dualistic in either a Gnostic, a Manichean, or
a Cartesian sense.
 12 Introduction to the 1995 Edition

by horror at decay than by pleasure in fertility. Indeed fertility—biologi-

cal process itself—was often taken as decay. I try, as I move through
ancient and medieval texts, to place their language and concerns in the
context of particular bodily practices, especially those concerning that
paradigm of biological process: the cadaver. But the ultimate context for
the tradition I study is not a particular historical moment but a longue
durée of terror. Whatever ultimate glory medieval thinkers hoped for,
however much they came to understand physicality and individuality
as necessary components of self, they did so at the expense of freezing
much of biological process and sublimating much of sensual desire.18
We might wish it otherwise. But I would point out that the putrefaction
medieval people both denied and transcended is a fact from which we
are not yet, in the late twentieth century, released.19
Of the so-called world religions, only those that emerged in the Mid-
dle East or in the Mediterranean basin—rabbinic Judaism, Christianity,
Islam, and Zoroastrianism—teach the resurrection of the body.20 And,

18. To study medieval notions of body as fertility and decay—even to admit (as
we must) that medieval theorists treated body far more frequently as locus of biologi-
cal process than as locus of sensuality—is not to deny the importance of the topic
of body qua sexuality so popular in recent scholarship. The fundamental works on
this topic are now Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual
Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
and Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle
Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). On
the subject of body history generally, see the excellent review article by Roy Porter,
“History of the Body,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke
(University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 206–32; and
my “Bodily Miracles and the Resurrection of the Body in the High Middle Ages,” in
Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion, ed.
Thomas Kselman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp. 68–106,
especially nn. 1–14.
19. It is important to remember that during the centuries I cover in this book rab-
binic Judaism offered an alternative understanding of the self as embodied—one in
which the paradigmatic physical self was emphasized more as fertile than as decay-
ing; see Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, forth-
coming). It is also important to note that this acceptance of fertility, and thus in a
certain sense of the female body, occurred in a deeply patriarchal context.
20. Ringgren, “Resurrection,” pp. 344–50. On Zoroastrianism, see McDannell
and Lang, Heaven, pp. 12–14. Historian of religion Wendy Doniger reminds me that
Hinduism has many stories of the return, reassemblage, and revival of the body,
frequently after it has been eaten and digested; see her Dreams, Illusion, and Other
Realities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 103–8 and 207ff. Perti-
nent also is the story of Trisanku’s attempt to take his body with him to heaven in
Valmiki, The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India, ed. Robert P. Gold-
man and trans. S. I. Pollock, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), bk.
1, chaps. 56–69, pp. 231–57, esp. pp. 232–38; and the story of the revival of a god and
 Introduction to the 1995 Edition 13

of these, Christianity has defended the idea that body is crucial to self
in the most strident and extensive, the most philosophically and theo-
logically confused (and rich) form. It is in the images through which
resurrection doctrine has been debated, explored, and preached that we
see most clearly the assumption that formal and material continuity is
necessary for the survival of body and that the survival of body is neces-
sary for self. It is also in the images that the costs of these assumptions
are revealed. I hope this book will help us to understand the reasons
why they developed and why they survived as they did.
The story I tell is thus a story of ideas about body, placed against the
background of persecution and conflict, gender and hierarchy, and of
norms and rituals for the care of the dead. But as I said in my preface,
resurrection belief is only part of the full narrative of changing soterio-
logical and eschatological hopes in the centuries between 200 and 1336.
Since resurrection must also be understood against the background of
changing assumptions about the afterlife, the soul, and the end of time,
it will be useful to summarize these briefly here.
During the patristic period, millenarian expectation gradually abated.
The bodily resurrection hoped for by Jews and Christians in the centu-
ries just before and after the beginning of the Common Era was supposed
to occur in a reconstituted universe—a “new heaven and new earth.”
The heroes and heroines of 2 Maccabees 7 and the Book of Daniel, like
those of early patristic writers such as Papias and to some extent Ire-
naeus, were thought to sleep in refrigerium (repose or refreshment) until
God should return to reign over an earthly kingdom. Such hopes had
not disappeared by the fifth century, but few any longer expected the
millenial age to come soon, and eschatological yearning was increas-
ingly focused on heaven, to which soul might go while the bones still
reposed underground. Oscar Cullmann seems to be right that early
Christians, like their Jewish contemporaries, thought primarily of a
unitary person, which slept in the dust between death and resurrection,
whereas by late antiquity Christian theologians held soul to be immor-
tal but defined body as that which falls and must therefore rise again.21

a human after the former has been eaten by the latter; see Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty,
ed., Hindu Myths: A Source Book (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 282–89. The
presence of such stories in a religion that teaches transmigration of souls is a com-
plex phenomenon; it is not, of course, the same as a doctrine of the resurrection of
the body at the end of time.
21. See above, n. 9, and below chap. 2, n. 9.
 14 Introduction to the 1995 Edition

Although the doctrine of a physical return at the end of time was not
discarded by mainstream Christians, hope concentrated increasingly
on the soul’s ascent to heaven. By the thirteenth century, soteriologi-
cal expectation focused on a judgment seen to come at personal death.
The individual’s status for all eternity was determined at the moment
when soul and body separated rather than at the last trumpet when they
rejoined. Moreover, the emergence of the doctrine of purgatory—a third
(and provisional) time and place to which the soul might go after death
for cleansing and penance—lodged change or development in the after-
life, which had been the realm of stasis.
Thus, to put it a little simplistically, the awakened resurrection body
was, to early Christians, the person; to later theologians it was a com-
ponent (albeit an essential component) of the person. Early Christians
expected the body to rise in a restored earthly paradise, whose arrival
was imminent. Most late medieval Christians thought resurrection
and the coming of the kingdom waited afar off in another space and
time.22 Images of physical resurrection were therefore images of a very
different event in the first century and the fourteenth. Yet not only
did the doctrine of resurrection hold continued importance during the
high Middle Ages when increased emphasis on soul, purgatory, and the
moment of personal death might seem to be diverting attention from
it; I shall also argue below, in ways too complex to summarize here,
that body was as important eschatologically at the end of the Middle
Ages as in the second century, because it had, so to speak, somatized
soul. Although this book is a study of bodily resurrection, soul will
come into the story as well—especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries when the doctrine of purgatory provides separated soul with
a place in the afterlife all its own.
Both the literalist interpretation of resurrection popular in rabbinic
Judaism and the early church and the somatized souls that populated
late medieval tales of purgatory seem to modern tastes quite strange.
Contemporary Christians tend to reject the more picturesque elements
of conventional eschatology. Although opinion polls tell us that most
Americans believe in heaven, it is clear that the resurrection of the
body is a doctrine that causes acute embarrassment, even in main-
stream Christianity.23 Thoughts of “life after death” still conjure up for

22. Richard Landes is at work on a study of medieval millenarianism that may

alter our views.
23. James Bowman, review of Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American
Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), in the Times Literary Supplement,
 Introduction to the 1995 Edition 15

most people some notion of a disembodied soul flying, rather forlornly,

through pearly gates and golden streets. Preachers and theologians
(especially Protestants) pride themselves on avoiding soul-body dual-
ism, but pious talk at funerals is usually of the departed person surviv-
ing as a vague, benign spirit or as a thought in the memories of others.
Yet analysis of current philosophical discourse and of contemporary
popular culture suggests that Americans, like medieval poets and theo-
logians, consider any survival that really counts to entail survival of
body. However much late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century the-
ology, psychology, philosophy, and theosophy studied out-of-the-body
experiences and transmigration of souls as clues to survival and identity,
today’s movies and television shows—no less than academic philosophi-
cal discussions of person—consider obsessively the problem of embodi-
ment.24 Movies such as Maxie, Chances Are, Robocop, Total Recall,
Switch, Freejack, and Death Becomes Her gross millions; their drama
lies in the suggestion that “I” am not “I” unless my body, with all it
implies (sex and sexual orientation, race, temperament, etc.), survives.25

March 29, 1991, p. 11; and Timothy C. Morgan, “The Mother of All Muddles,” in
Christianity Today (April 5, 1993), pp. 62–66, on the current debate within evan-
gelical theology between Murray J. Harris and Norman Geisler on the resurrection
body. And see McDannell and Lang, Heaven, pp. 307–52, on contemporary views of
heaven. My interpretation of contemporary concerns differs from that of McDannell
and Lang because they look at images of heaven in those who write explicitly about
heaven whereas what strikes me is the concern for survival of body (whether qua
person or qua component of person) wherever that survival is located spatially and
temporally (that is, in heaven, in space, or here on earth, in future time, present time,
or some alternative temporal dimension).
24. See Mark Silk, “The Limits of Faith,” a review of Thomas Simmons, The
Unseen Shore: Memories of a Christian Science Childhood (Boston: Beacon, 1991),
in the New York Times Book Review, August 4, 1991, p. 14. On the Spiritualist
movement in the early years of this century and its response to death, see David
Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,” in Mirrors of
Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1981), pp. 187–242, especially pp. 227–31 and 234.
25. Two particularly good examples from television are the September 25, 1987,
episode of Max Headroom, “Deities,” in which Christian ideas about resurrection
of the body are parodied, and the May 25, 1991, episode of Star Trek: The Next Gen-
eration, “The Symbiant,” in which the transfer of consciousness (represented as a
physical creature similar to a clam) results in inextricable entanglement of body and
consciousness. A number of other episodes of Star Trek and indeed the entire series
Quantum Leap can be seen as exploring the problem of who the resulting person is
when a consciousness body-hops. The ending of the film Jesus of Montreal makes the
equation of resurrection (or bodily survival) and organ transplant absolutely explicit:
the actor who plays Jesus brings sight to the blind, life to the dead, through the
transplant of his eyes and heart. Even in a movie such as the gentle fantasy Truly,
Madly, Deeply (in some ways a conventional ghost story), it is the physical presence
of the lover who returns from the dead that causes the problem. These stories are
 16 Introduction to the 1995 Edition

Medical sociologists, such as Fox and Swazey, must struggle to provide

guidelines for organ transplants exactly because donors and recipients
often assume that “self” is being transferred—an assumption on which
much recent pulp fiction and journalism eagerly capitalizes.26 The best
of contemporary philosophy of mind tests its understanding of “self”
in thought experiments no less odd than medieval considerations of
risen umbilical cords and fingernails. As Nancy Struever has said, such
philosophical discussions are “stuffed . . . with bizarre examples: there
are split personalities, amoebalike fissions of the body, nuclear fusions
of minds, brain transfusions—a monstrous zoo seems to be the proper
arena of discovery.”27 These discussions tend to conclude that knowing,
surviving, being, must be embodied.28 Thus they struggle still with the
difficulty of asserting joy, identity, and survival in the face of flux and
putrefaction.
I do not intend to take my exploration of eschatology beyond the
1330s. I shall not trace visions of heaven beyond Dante’s, understand-
ings of identity beyond Durand’s, theories of encounter with God
beyond the controversy over the beatific vision and the yearnings of
thirteenth-century women mystics. The images of dowries and jewels

very different from conventional tales of mediums summoning back spirits that have
“crossed over.” In such accounts the spirits reveal personality by their memories or
by verbal quirks; body is not an issue.
This is not to suggest that all recent popular treatments of the survival question
stress the necessity of body. The high-grossing movie Ghost uses a traditional ghost-
story plot.
26. See Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey, The Courage to Fail: A Social View of
Organ Transplants and Dialysis, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974),
pp. 27–32; and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 244–52 and 397–400 nn.
18–43. For the emphasis in recent psychology on the “embodied-ness” of knowing,
see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal
about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Mark Johnson, The
Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
27. Nancy Struever, “Philosophical Problems and Historical Solutions,” in At the
Nexus of Philosophy and History, ed. B. Danenhauer (Athens, Georgia: University
of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 76. For a wonderful compendium of such thought experi-
ments, see Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, eds., The Mind’s I: Fanta-
sies and Reflections on Self and Soul (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
28. See Stuart F. Spicker, “Introduction,” in The Philosophy of the Body: Rejec-
tions of Cartesian Dualism, ed. Spicker (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), pp. 3–23,
a defense of the argument that body switching is logically impossible and that it
is more correct than not to say that a person is his or her body. For a discussion of
recent work in the philosophy of mind, see Jerry Fodor, “The Big Idea: Can There
Be a Science of Mind?” the Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1992, pp. 5–7, which
argues that all current positions are materialist “for much the same reason that
Churchill gave for being a democrat: the alternatives seem even worse.”
 Introduction to the 1995 Edition 17

with which I conclude point forward toward great literary works, such
as The Pearl, which I shall not treat. But one must stop somewhere.
And the fourteenth century images with which I end are, of course,
completely different (in their specific details if not in what they ulti-
mately conjure up) from the images of space travel and mind trans-
plant crucial to the present discussion of survival. Another set of essays
would be necessary to take the story from the fourteenth to the early
twentieth century. I merely suggest here that, whether or not it has
always been the case in the modern centuries, it is certainly today true
that considerations of self and survival take the body with impassioned
seriousness. We face utterly different problems from the schoolmen and
artists of the Middle Ages. Yet the deep anxiety we feel about artificial
intelligence and organ transplants, about the proper care of cadavers,
about the definition of death—an anxiety revealed in the images of
bodily partition and reassemblage that proliferate in our movies and
pulp fiction—connects us more closely than most of us are aware to
a long Western tradition of abstruse discussion of bodily resurrection.
Pa r t O n e

T H E P AT R I S T I C
B AC K G R O U N D
 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 embel-
lished—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 sus-
ceptible 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
1. For the full quotation see n. 88 below. A portion of this chapter was delivered
as my presidential address at the meeting of the American Catholic Historical Asso-
ciation in San Francisco, on January 8, 1994. It will appear in a forthcoming issue of
the Catholic Historical Review under the title “Images of Bodily Resurrection in the
Theology of Late Antiquity.”
 22 the patristic background

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 doc-
trine 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 intro-
duced 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 con-
sideration of the metaphors in which first- and second-century Chris-
tians 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 intel-
lectual 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
2. Arthur Marmorstein, Studies in Jewish Theology, ed. J. Rabbinowitz and M. S.
Lew (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 145–61; Samuel G. F. Brandon, The
Judgement of the Dead: An Historical and Comparative Study of the Idea of a Post-
Mortem Judgement in the Major Religions (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967),
pp. 56–75; Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality; Joseph Ntedika, L’évocation
de l’au-delà dans la prière pour les morts (Louvain and Paris: Nauwelaerts, 1971),
pp. 15–21; Stemberger, Der Leib; Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), pp. 23, 89, 91–103, 220–24.
3. Angelo P. O’Hagan, Material Re-Creation in the Apostolic Fathers (Berlin: Akad-
emie-Verlag, 1968); A. H. C. Van Eijk, “ ‘Only That Can Rise Which Has Previously
Fallen’: The History of a Formula,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 22 (1971):
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 23

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 thou-
sand 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 com-
pletely 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,

517–29; Ton H. C. Van Eijk, La résurrection des morts chez les Pères Apostoliques
(Paris: Beauchesne, 1974). The old article by H. B. Swete, “The Resurrection of the
Flesh,” Journal of Theological Studies 18 (1917): 135–41, is still useful.
4. In addition to the works cited in n. 3 above, see Dewart, Death and Resur-
rection; Michel, “Résurrection”; and R. M. Grant, “The Resurrection of the Body,”
Journal of Religion 28 (1948): 120–30 and 188–208.
5. The text, Papias Frag. 1.2–3, is close to 2 Baruch 29.5; it is quoted in O’Hagan,
Material Re-Creation, p. 39.
6. Hermas, Le Pasteur, ed. and trans. Robert Joly, Sources chrétiennes [hereafter
Sc] 53 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 220–23; and see Van Eijk, Résurrection des
morts, pp. 86–98.
 24 the patristic background

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 flow-
ering 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 resur-
rection 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 attri-
bute 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,

7. M. R. James, ed., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1924; fifth impression with corrections 1953), pp. 508–21. For further discussion of the
imagery of the Apocalypse of Peter, see below, p. 291. For a good general discussion
of the genre of apocalypse, see Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of
Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 1: The Foundations of Western Mysticism (New
York: Crossroad, 1991), pp. 10–11. An exception to the extraordinarily organic images
usual in early second-century material is the apocryphal “Acts of John,” a Docetist
text, which is basically an account of a series of resurrections from the dead (seen as
an extension of healing). It uses images of breaking and reassembling stones and jewels
to talk of restoration of the world. See M. R. James, ed., Apocryphal New Testament,
Latin version, paragrs. 14–17, pp. 257–60.
8. Clement of Rome, Epître aux Corinthiens, ed. and trans. A. Jaubert, Sc 167 (Paris:
Éditions du Cerf, 1971), chaps. 23–26 and 38, pp. 140–45 and 162–65. The letter shows
a deep corporate sense; resurrection of the body here is in some sense a resurrection
of community of the sort Gatch has emphasized in Death: Meaning and Mortality.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 25

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

9. In addition to the works cited in the introduction, n. 9, above, see George Foot
Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of Tannaim
(1927; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 287–392. Jewish texts of
the first century of the Common Era displayed many different notions of resurrection
and immortality, some predicated on a Greek soul-body dualism. See, for example,
The Biblical Antiquities of Philo, trans. M. R. James (London: SPCK, 1917), bk. 3,
chaps. 10, 51, 64, pp. 81–82, 217–18, 240; on problems with the text and its attribution
see Stemberger, Der Leib, pp. 97–117. Basic texts on resurrection from the Babylonian
Talmud (i.e., third to sixth century) retain naturalistic images, including burgeoning
grain, for resurrection (although with a strong sense of material continuity rather than
transformation). See Babylonian Talmud (Soncino edition), Kethuboth, 111b:
R. Hiyya b. Joseph said: A time will come when the just will break through
the soil. . . . And they will blossom out of the city like grass of the earth (Ps.
72.16). . . . R. Hiyya b. Joseph said further: The just in the time to come will
rise [apparelled] in their own clothes. This is deduced a minori ad majus from
a grain of wheat. If a grain of wheat that is buried naked sprouts up with many
coverings how much more so the just who are buried in their shrouds.
See also Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, 91a–91b, which uses the grain analogy, the
idea of the potter repairing his pot, the building analogy, and a parallel to the birth of
a mouse from the earth (a kind of spontaneous generation), and says explicitly that
we rise with our defects, which are then repaired. Somewhat later rabbinic material
argues explicitly that bone is the element of material continuity and elaborates the
embryological analogy for resurrection; Ezekiel 37 is used to suggest that God puts
us back together in a process that parallels (or reverses the temporal order of) the way
the fetus grows in the first instance. See Midrash Rabbah (3d ed. New York: Soncino
Press, 1983): Leviticus Rabbah 18. 1 (Zunz dates to mid-seventh century), Genesis
Rabbah 28.3 (Zunz dates to sixth century), Ecclesiastes Rabbah (probably seventh
century), 1.7.6–8, 3.2.1–2, 3.14.1–15, 5.8.5, 12.5.
Resurrection of the dead was one of the three core beliefs of rabbinic Judaism; see
Cohen, From Maccabees to Mishnah, p. 220.
 26 the patristic background

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 there-
fore forces the question “what survives?”); fifth, the emerging govern-
mental 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,
10. See n. 8 above. On the phoenix myth, see Van Eijk, Résurrection des morts,
pp. 53–55; O’Hagan, Material Re-Creation, p. 95,
11. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3d ed. (New York: David McKay,
1972). According to Crouzel and Grossi, “Resurrection,” p. 732, the belief of the
early creeds contains three components: first, resurrection will occur “on the last
day” at Christ’s second coming; second, everyone will rise; third, the body will be
both identical and new.
12. See J. G. Davis, “Factors Leading to the Emergence of Belief in the Resurrec-
tion of the Flesh,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 23 (1972): 448–55; John G.
Gager, “Body-Symbols and Social Reality: Resurrection, Incarnation, and Asceticism
in Early Christianity,” Religion 12, no. 4 (1982): 345–64.
13. The fifth argument, which has been made most clearly by Gager, “Body-Sym-
bols,” using the interpretations of Elaine Pagels in The Gnostic Gospels, is ulti-
mately Durkheimian and functionalist. See below, chap. 2, pp. 109–113.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 27

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 tan-
gere, that choice requires explanation. One cannot argue that refutation
of Gnosticism or Docetism required bodily resurrection, for the ques-
tion 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 to Paul’s. It often now expresses a rather
crude material continuity. Such continuity, sometimes understood as
the continuity of particles or atoms, is both a defense against and an
articulation of the threat of decay, which is understood as absorption
or digestion. Nutrition (eating or being eaten—especially cannibalism)
is the basic image of positive change and the basic threat to identity.
The context of such images, indicated explicitly by the texts them-
selves, is persecution and an attendant concern for the cadavers of the
martyred. Ignatius of Antioch, writing about 110 on his way to execu-
tion, already expresses much that is at the heart of such assumptions.
Unconcerned in any technical sense with material continuity, Ignatius
sees fragmentation and digestion by the beasts as the ultimate threat
and thus as that over which resurrection is the ultimate victory—so
much so that his endangered body becomes the eucharist and, as Van
Eijk has argued, his martyrdom is resurrection.14 Desiring complete
destruction so that his followers will not be endangered by the need to
bury his remains, Ignatius nonetheless says he will rise “with” or “by”
his chains, which are, he says, “pearls”—an odd phrase, which seems
to mean that whatever it is that rises, Ignatius’s suffering is never to be
lost because it is who he is.15 He writes:

14. Van Eijk, Résurrection des morts, pp. 99–126; see also Virginia Corwin,
St. Ignatius and Christianity in Antioch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960),
pp. 171–72. For a sensitive argument that Ignatius’s response is “mystical” in a broad
meaning of the term, see McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, p. 101.
15. Van Eijk, Résurrection des morts, pp. 122–23.
 28 the patristic background

Let me be the food of wild beasts through whom it is possible to attain

God; I am the wheat of God, and I am ground by the teeth of wild
beasts that I may be found pure bread; instead, entice the wild beasts
that they may become my tomb and leave behind no part of my body
that when I fall asleep, I may burden no one.
. . . Fire and cross, and packs of wild beasts, the wrenching of bones,
the mangling of limbs, the grinding of my whole body, evil punish-
ments of the devil—let these come upon me, only that I may attain
Jesus Christ.16

By the later part of the second century, the concerns Ignatius expresses
here are couched in much more crudely literal language.
Two of the earliest second century treatises on the resurrection—
Justin Martyr’s and Athenagoras’s—have been labeled apocryphal by
some scholars partly because of the presence in them of certain tech-
nical scientific arguments (such as the chain consumption argument)
that concentrate on material continuity and are sometimes thought to
be later.17 I accept these treatises, both because they are accepted in
some recent scholarly considerations and because my study of meta-
phors establishes that the technical arguments at stake are compatible

16. Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans, in Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna,
Lettres: Martyre de Polycarpe, ed. and trans. P. T. Camelot, Sc 10, 3d ed. (Paris: Édi-
tions du Cerf, 1958), pp. 130–33; William R. Schoedel, trans., Ignatius of Antioch:
A Commentary on the Letters…, ed. H. Koester et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1985), pp. 175 and 178. The textual tradition of Ignatius is very complicated, but the
letter to the Romans is accepted as genuine; see J. Ruis-Camps, The Four Authentic
Letters of Ignatius, the Martyr (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studio-
rum, 1980); and Schoedel, Ignatius. These words are later quoted by Irenaeus, Adver-
sus haereses, bk. 5, chap. 28, parag. 4; see Irenaeus of Lyons, Contre les hérésies, bk.
5, ed. and trans. Adelin Rousseau, Sc 152–153 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969), vol. 2,
pp. 360–63, and Schoedel, Ignatius, p. 1 n. 2.
17. On Athenagoras, see R. M. Grant, “Athenagoras or Pseudo-Athenagoras,”
Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954): 121–29; Athenagoras, Legatio and De Res-
urrectione, ed. and trans. William R. Schoedel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp.
xxv–xxxii; L. W. Barnard, “Athenagoras: De Resurrectione: The Background and
Theology of a Second Century Treatise on the Resurrection,” Studia Theologica 30
(1976): 1–42; idem, “The Authenticity of Athenagoras’ De Resurrectione,” Studia
patristica 15 (1984): 39–49; Miroslav Marcovich, “On the Text of Athenagoras, De
Resurrectione,” Vigiliae Christianae: A Review of Early Christian Life and Lan-
guage 33 (1979): 375–82; Crouzel and Grossi, “Resurrection,” p. 732; and P. Nautin,
“Athenagoras,” in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, vol. 1, p. 95. On the authen-
ticity of Justin Martyr’s treatise, see Pierre Prigent, Justin et l’Ancien Testament:
L’Argumentation scriptuaire du traité de Justin contre toutes les hérésies comme
source principale du Dialogue avec Trypho et de la Première Apologie (Paris: Librai-
rie Lecoffre, 1964), pp. 28–67 passim. The best treatments of the whole debate over
chain consumption and cannibalism are Grant, “The Resurrection of the Body,” pp.
120–30 and 188–208; and Barnard, “Athenagoras: Background.”
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 29

precisely in their materialism with contemporary treatises known to be

authentic. With the exception of some fragments recently attributed to
one “Josipos” and the Epistle to Rheginos (both of which see resurrec-
tion as largely spiritual), the major discussions of the resurrected body
from the second half of the second century use predominantly organic
metaphors but express through them material continuity.18
The Acts of Paul (from about 160), which explicitly understands res-
urrection both as victory over persecution and as an extension of—if
you will, an extreme case of—healing, rejects the idea that resurrec-
tion can be generational continuity. Paul’s opponents suggest that we
“rise” in our children. But Paul (in the so-called Third Letter to the
Corinthians, inserted here) objects: resurrection is of all of our particu-
lar flesh; it carries with it our identity.19 We are seeds, which are cast
into the earth bare and rot and then rise again with bodies. But we also
rise as Jonah did from the whale, without a single hair or eyelash lost
(the reference to Luke 21.18 is clear), and the flesh that rises bears the
specific marks of our suffering as Christ’s bore his wounds.20 Similarly
Justin Martyr, writing before 165, uses predominantly organic meta-
phors, which stress the glories of growth and the power of God to effect
it.21 To Justin, we are mud or seeds or semen; we must be healed and
purified as we progress toward God. Thus the bodies we receive back in
resurrection are formally complete (i.e., they possess all their organs);
their defects are repaired.22 Although Justin at times displays an almost

18. See the fragment formerly attributed to Hippolytus, in Pierre Nautin, Hip-
polyte et Josipe: Contribution à l’histoire de la littérature chrétienne du troisième
siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1947), text on pp. 108–27; and see P. Nautin, “Hip-
polytus,” in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, vol. 1, pp. 383–85. On the Epistle to
Rheginos, see W. C. Van Unnik, “The Newly Discovered Gnostic ‘Epistle to Rhegi-
nos’ on the Resurrection,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 15 (1964): 141–52 and
153–67; Malcolm Lee Peel, The Epistle to Rheginos: A Valentinian Letter on the
Resurrection: Introduction, Translation, Analysis, and Exposition (London: SCM
Press, 1969); and Elaine Pagels, “The Mystery of the Resurrection,” Journal of Bibli-
cal Literature 93 (1974): 276–88.
19. Acts of Paul, Coptic MS version, parags. 14, 39, in M. R. James, ed., The Apoc-
ryphal New Testament, pp. 275 and 280.
20. “Third Corinthians,” especially parags. 5 and 24–35, in James ed., The Apoc-
ryphal New Testament, pp. 288–92.
21. Prigent, Justin, argues that Justin’s treatise may be part of his Syntagma
against heresy, cut off and circulated separately, or it may be a rewriting of the
relevant section by Justin himself. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, chap. 80, would
support the second suggestion; see the Dialogue, chap. 80, in Justini Philosophi et
Martyris Opera, vol. 1, pts. 1 and 2, ed. J. K. T. Otto (Wiesbaden: M. Sändig, 1876;
reprint 1969), pp. 287–93.
22. Justin Martyr, I Apology, chaps. 18–21, 51–52, and 66, in Justini Opera, ed.
Otto, vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 56–69, 136–43, 180–83; Dialogue with Trypho, chaps. 80–81
and 107 in ibid., pt. 2, pp. 286–97 and 382–85; and On Resurrection, in Justini Opera,
 30 the patristic background

Pauline sense of change, stressing that God must transform corruption

into incorruption,23 he also shows a concern for formal and material
continuity and confronts directly the identity issue, asserting that what
dies and what rises must be the same.24 He points out that even the
pagan philosophers believe the body decays only into indestructible bits,
which can be reassembled.25 And when he explains how God collects
again our decomposed members, his images become inorganic ones.
God reassembles or recasts us as a statue is reforged or as a jeweler,
making a mosaic, puts the stones back together again.26
Theophilus of Antioch and Athenagoras, writing between 180 and
200, move closer toward understanding survival as material continuity
and employ arguments taken from the science of their day to support
this.27 Theophilus explains resurrection in mechanical, inorganic meta-
phors as the remolding of a vessel so that flaws are removed.28 When he
deploys the standard set of organic metaphors, found in 1 Clement, he
changes them so as to convey a sense that a material element persists;
in his account, true biological change becomes inexplicable.29 Theophi-
lus admits that a seed in the earth rots away before it rises as a sheaf of
wheat and that trees produce fruit out of what is invisible, but then he
goes on to explain that this is like seeds surviving in bird droppings so

vol. 2, ed. Otto, 3d ed. (Jena: Fischer, 1879), pp. 210–49. And see Prigent, Justin, pp.
35–40. Unlike Justin’s other writings, the Dialogue with Trypho has strong millenar-
ian overtones.
23. See especially I Apology, chaps. 19 and 52, pp. 60–63 and 138–43; and On
Resurrection, chaps. 4 and 10, pp. 222–23 and 244–49.
24. On Resurrection, chap. 4, pp. 222–23. Ibid., chap. 3, pp. 216–23, stresses (as
does Jerome later) that all organs will rise, but they will not necessarily be used in
heaven.
25. On Resurrection, chap. 6, pp. 228–33.
26. Ibid. Justin’s pupil Tatian, whose work has been seen as Encratite and/or
Gnostic, gives similar arguments. Tatian says that even if we are consumed by fire,
annihilated in the water, torn to pieces by wild beasts, or vaporized, we are still
“stored up” in God’s treasury (Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments, ed. and
trans. Molly Whittaker [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], chap. 6, p. 11). Tatian holds
that the soul is dissolved at death along with the body; resurrection therefore will
be of both.
27. Grant, “Resurrection,” pp. 188–199; Barnard, “Athenagoras: Background,” pp.
6–12; idem, “Authenticity,” pp. 46–49.
28. Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum, bk. 2, chap. 26, ed. and trans. by
Robert M. Grant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 68–69. And see R. M. Grant,
“Theophilus of Antioch to Autolycus,” Harvard Theological Review 40, no. 4 (1947):
227–56.
29. Theophilus, Ad Autolycum, bk. 1, chaps. 8 and 13, pp. 10–13 and 16–19.
Theophilus also, however, makes use of organic metaphors in a way reminiscent of
1 Clement; see bk. 2, chaps. 14 and 15, pp. 48–53.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 31

that plants appear to rise where none were sown—a surprising (and, to
us, distasteful) analogy that stresses the continuity of a particular bit
rather than the mystery of development.30 Moreover he also says that
resurrection is like the recovery of an invalid from sickness. The sick
man’s flesh disappears, and we know not where it has gone; he recovers
and grows fat, and we cannot tell whence comes the new flesh. We say
it comes from meat and drink changed into blood, but how can such
change occur? It is really the work of God. The argument is so bizarre
that one distinguished modern scholar has simply dismissed it as “con-
fused.”31 But we need to note that it not only protects a constant core
as the body that rises; it also protects that core against change via diges-
tion as natural process—that is, against destruction by eating or being
eaten. Because recovery from illness is a miracle, the invalid’s new
flesh does not come from food but from God. Thus it appears to be sig-
nificant both that Theophilus associates resurrection and incorruption
with God’s care for the bones of the dead (a hard, material element of
continuity)32 and that cannibalism (digestion of human flesh by another
human) is a crucial issue to him. Theophilus sees cannibalism as the
most heinous charge leveled against Christians, and the most heinous
act performed by pagans.33
In their discussions of resurrection, both Theophilus and Justin Mar-
tyr respond to the attacks of pagan critics, who find the idea not only
ludicrous but also revolting. Who would want to recover his body?
asked the pagan Celsus. Corpses are revolting—worse than dung.34
These pagan attacks clearly found an echo in ordinary Christian con-
gregations. Although an early third-century text warned Christians
against what it saw as Jewish notions of corpse pollution,35 two late
second-century apologists, Tatian and Aristides, agreed that decaying
matter was disgusting, even polluting.36 By the time of Athenagoras’s
30. Ad Autolycum, bk. 1, chap. 13, pp. 16–19.
31. Grant, “Theophilus,” pp. 229–34.
32. Theophilus, Ad Autolycum, bk. 2, chap. 38, pp. 96–99.
33. Theophilus, Ad Autolycum, bk. 3, chaps. 4–5 and 15, pp. 102–5 and 118–21.
34. See Grant, “Resurrection,” pp. 188–99.
35. See Arthur Vööbus, trans., The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac, Corpus
scriptorum christianorum orientalium [hereafter CSCO], 402, Scriptures Syri 176
(Louvain: Corpus SCO, 1979), vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 242–47. The Syriac text is made from
a Greek original of the third, possibly the early third, century.
36. For Tatian, see Oratio, chaps. 16–18, 20, and 25, pp. 33–39, 41, 47–49; and
above n. 26. For Aristides, see Apology, chaps. 4–5 and 12, in R. Harris, ed., The
Apology of Aristides (Haverford, Penn.: reprinted from Texts and Studies: Contribu-
tions to Biblical and Patristic Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1891), pp. 38–39 and 45–46. Aristides tackles explicitly the argument that earth is
 32 the patristic background

treatise on the resurrection in the closing years of the second century,

the very choice of images seems to protect “body” from any suggestion
that it might rot or even experience absorption, either above or in the
earth. Athenagoras distrusts organic process. He struggles to establish,
through scientific (basically Galenic) arguments, that body can be bro-
ken and reassembled precisely because it does not, through biological
mechanisms, absorb anything else.37
To Athenagoras, the issue of identity is crucial.38 In chapter 25 of the
De resurrectione he argues that the human being cannot be said to exist
when body is scattered and dissolved, even if soul survives. So “man”
must be forged anew. But it will not be the same man unless the same
body is restored to the same soul: such restoration is resurrection.39 Res-
urrection must involve change, says Athenagoras. Indeed resurrection
is change; judgment is not the basic reason for resurrection because not
all are judged but all rise.40 We have grown from soft seeds into bones
and sinews, and we will decay again into the materials we came from.41
Therefore, for dead and dissolved bodies to rise, they must be changed
into incorruptible bodies; otherwise they would merely dissolve again.42
But Athenagoras mentions the growth and decay of seeds and semen
only to argue against such processes as paradigms of resurrection. Resur-
rection is the reassemblage of parts. God “can reunite fragments” that
have been entirely “resolved . . . into their constituents.” And he can do
this because he knows what nature must be reconstituted and he knows
where the particles are. Even if the body has been divided up among
many animals who have eaten and digested it and “united [it] with their
bodies,” and even if these animals have then decayed or been eaten, God
can still find the human bits to reassemble.43
good because fertile; he argues rather that it is defiled both by excrement and by
corpses. He, however, praises the concern of both Christians and Jews for burying the
dead (chaps. 14–15, pp. 48–50). In his text, ambivalence about natural process is thus
very clear. On Aristides, see Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1: The Beginnings of
Patristic Literature (Utrecht and Antwerp: Spectrum Publishers, and Westminster,
Maryland: Newman Press, 1950), p. 171f., and P. Siniscalco, “Aristides,” in Encyclo-
pedia of the Early Church, vol. 1, pp. 72–73.
37. Barnard, “Athenagoras: Background,” pp. 11–16; and idem, “Authenticity.”
38. Barnard, “Athenagoras: Background,” pp. 14–23.
39. Athenagoras, De resurrectione, in Legatio and De Resurrectione, ed. and
trans. Schoedel, chap. 25, parag. 2, pp. 146–47.
40. Ibid., chaps. 12 and 14, pp. 114–19 and 120–23.
41. Ibid., chap. 17, pp. 128–31. It is important to note how much change Athe-
nagoras admits here. He argues that the form of man is not inscribed on the seed or
on the elements into which the cadaver dissolves; cf. the discussion of Origen and
Gregory of Nyssa in chapter 2 below.
42. Ibid., chap. 15, pp. 122–27.
43. Ibid., chaps. 2–11, 25, pp. 90–113 and 146–49.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 33

This is the famous chain consumption argument that becomes

increasingly important in the third century. And Athenagoras under-
stands it in its full complexity. For the problem is not really the attacks
of carrion beasts or of worms in the grave: the problem is digestion
and cannibalism. If meat and drink do not merely pass through us but
become us, there will be too much matter for God to reassemble; on
the other hand, if people really eat other people, even God may have
trouble sorting out the particles. Athenagoras handles the problem by
asserting, in chapters 5–7, that most food and drink pass through our
bodies without really becoming them. God has designated certain foods
as suitable for each species, and only those can be absorbed. Athenago-
ras then moves on, in chapter 8, to the astonishing argument that it is
impossible for human flesh to absorb human flesh. He even asserts that
we can find empirical verification for this in the fact that cannibals lose
weight and waste away.44
Although some scholars have seen Athenagoras’s earlier treatise, the
Plea or Legatio, as springing from a fundamentally different set of phil-
osophical assumptions, the work—at least on this issue—adumbrates
exactly the same argument. Defending Christians against charges of
cannibalism, Athenagoras argues, as did Theophilus, that pagans are the
real cannibals. He calls them “fish,” for fish were understood in ancient
natural philosophy to be both promiscuous and cannibalistic.45 Chris-
tians cannot be cannibals, asserts Athenagoras, for how can someone
who believes in resurrection “offer himself as a tomb” to “bury within
himself” those who will rise again?46 Thus Athenagoras assumes that
even the eaten dead must rise. But by assimilating stomach and grave
and identifying cannibalism as the fundamental threat to identity,47 he
makes resurrection more a victory over physiological process than a
fulfillment of it.

44. Ibid., chaps. 5–8, pp. 98–109. For pagan arguments that cannibalism is impos-
sible, see Grant, “Resurrection,” p. 196 n. 109.
45. Athenagoras, Legatio, trans. Schoedel, chap. 34, parag. 3, pp. 82–83, and Athe-
nagoras, Embassy for Christians and Resurrection of the Dead, trans. Crehan (West-
minster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1956), p. 166 n. 298. For an example of ancient
opinion, see Hesiod, Works and Days, l. 277, in Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and
Homerica, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann,
1914), p. 22.
46. Athenagoras, Legatio, chaps. 12–13 and 35–37, pp. 24–29 and 82–87.
47. Ibid., p. 85: “What man who believes in a resurrection would offer himself as
a tomb for bodies destined to arise? For it is impossible at one and the same time to
believe that our bodies will arise and then eat them as though they will not arise, or
to think that the earth will yield up its dead and then suppose that those whom a
man had buried within himself will not reclaim their bodies.”
 34 the patristic background

Irenaeus and Tertullian: The Paradox of Continuity

and Change
Scholars have always viewed the three great treatments of resurrection
from the years around 200—Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses, Tertullian’s
De resurrectione carnis, and Minucius Felix’s Octavius—as deeply
“materialist,” as driven by a powerful need to assert the palpable, fleshly
quality of the body that will be rewarded or punished at the end of time.
And it is true that all three of these authors sometimes employ meta-
phors that suggest, as did those of Athenagoras and Theophilus, that
the resurrection body is exactly the same material body we occupy on
earth, that is, that material continuity accounts for identity. Irenaeus,
for example—without addressing the chain consumption argument or
associating continuity with the survival of particles or bits—nonethe-
less discusses the identity question and lodges identity squarely in
continuity of matter. He asserts that what falls must rise,48 and draws
analogies to the three children in the fiery furnace and Jonah in the
whale.49 He explains that, in the process of grafting, substance lasts
although quality changes, and in healing, the withered and the healthy
hand is the same hand. Indeed he treats resurrection as a special case of
bodily restoration and underlines human materiality by stressing that
the missing eye Christ repaired with a paste of dust was created from
that dust.50 Minucius Felix also explicitly addresses the identity issue.
The pagan interlocutor in his dialogue asks the Christian: with what
body do you rise? It cannot be the same body, for your former body
has dissolved and anything now put together will be new.51 Minucius’s
Christian spokesperson replies, drawing on many of the assumptions
of the pagan position, that bodies can rise the same because things are
not “lost to God.” Whether dust or ashes, moisture or smoke, bod-
ies perdure; their “elements remain in the keeping of God”—that is,

48. See Van Eijk, “ ‘Only That Can Rise Which Has Previously Fallen.’ ”
49. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., bk. 5, chaps. 5 and 12, in Contre les hérésies, bk. 5,
ed. Rousseau, vol. 2, pp. 60–73 and 140–63. Irenaeus’s complete treatise survives
only in a rather literal Latin translation; Syriac and Greek fragments survive, and an
Armenian translation of books 4 and 5; see A. Orbe, “Irenaeus,” in Encyclopedia of
the Early Church, vol. 1, pp. 413–16. See also Godehard Joppich, Salus carnis: Eine
Untersuchung in der Theologie des hl. Irenaeus von Lyon (Münsterschwarzach: Vier-
Türme-Verlag, 1965), pp. 56–78.
50. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., bk. 5, chaps. 9–12, vol. 2, pp. 106–63.
51. Minucius Felix, Octavius, chaps. 5 and 11, in Tertullian and Minucius Felix,
trans. T. R. Glover and G. H. Rendall, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1931; reprint, 1977), pp. 320–27 and 340–45.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 35

their basic bits survive and await reassemblage at the end of time.52
Even when he uses images of natural cycles, such as the seasons, Minu-
cius Felix stresses a material substratum. The body in the tomb is, he
says, like a tree in winter, which is dry but will later put out shoots.
Minucius uses natural analogies to justify the idea that the specific
material components of the body subsist after death. Just as there are
volcanoes and lightning bolts that burn without consuming, so bod-
ies can perdure through the conflagration that ends the world; they
can even survive eternally in the fires of hell. In these arguments, the
words for destruction are “eating,” “consuming,” “digesting” (nutrire,
consumare, pascere); what the risen body triumphs over even in hell
(if eternal punishment can be called a triumph) is feeding or being con-
sumed by fire.53
Tertullian also, as is well known, sees resurrection as reassemblage
of bits.54 In fact, Tertullian—following Stoic metaphysics—holds that
all reality is corporeal. Even soul is composed of very fine material
particles.55 Reassemblage of bits therefore in some sense accounts for
identity. As Irenaeus says, it is what falls that must rise. Tertullian is
the first to use the etymological argument that cadaver is named from
cadendo.56 The whole person must be rewarded or punished, he asserts,

52. Ibid., trans. Rendall, chaps. 14–40, especially chap. 34, p. 421. “Corpus omne sive
arescit in pulverem sive in umorem solvitur vel in cinerem comprimitur vel in nidorem
tenuatur, subducitur nobis, sed deo elementorum custodia reservatur” (p. 420).
53. Ibid., chaps. 34–35, pp. 416–23, esp. pp. 418 and 422.
54. For a general discussion, see Ernest Evans, “Introduction,” to Tertullian’s Trea-
tise on the Resurrection, ed. E. Evans (London: SPCK, 1960), pp. ix–xxxv; and Francine
Jo Cardman, “Tertullian on the Resurrection,” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974). On
the rhetorical structure of the treatise, see R. Sider, “Structure and Design in the De
resurrectione mortuorum of Tertullian,” Vigiliae Christianae 23 (1969): 177–96. On the
dating of Tertullian’s works, see Timothy David Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and
Literary Study, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 30–56; Jean-Claude Fredou-
ille, Tertullien et la conversion de la culture antique (Paris: Études augustiniennes,
1972), pp. 487–88; and Cardman, “Tertullian,” pp. vi–vii, 202–31. For bibliography on
Tertullian and recent critical editions of his works, see Gösta Claesson, Index Ter-
tullianeus (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1974–1975); the Chronica Tertullianea pub-
lished annually by Revue des études augustiniennes (Paris); R. D. Sider, “Approaches
to Tertullian: A Study of Recent Scholarship,” Second Century 2 (1982): 228—60; and
P. Siniscalco, “Tertullian,” in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, vol. 2, pp. 818–21.
55. Tertullian, De resurrectione mortuorum, ed. J. G. P. Borleffs, chap. 17, in
Tertulliani Opera, pt. 2: Opera Montanistica, Corpus christianorum: Series latina
[hereafter CCL] (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), pp. 941–42. Tertullian asserts that soul is,
however, indissoluble; it is not divided into particles at death; De anima, ed. J. H.
Waszink, chap. 51, in Opera, pt. 2, pp. 857–58.
56. Tertullian, De res., chap. 18, pp. 942–44. He attributes the etymological
argument to heretics; see Van Eijk, “ ‘Only That Can Rise Which Has Previously
Fallen,’ ” p. 520–21.
 36 the patristic background

because it was the whole person (soul and body intermingled) that
sinned or behaved with virtue. But only body can rise, for only body is
cast down; soul is immortal. Bodies therefore do not vanish; bones and
teeth last and are “germs” that will “sprout” in resurrection. Jonah was
not digested in the whale. Not even the clothes of the three children
were burned in the furnace.57 In an odd excursus (which David Satran
has recently related to ancient medical lore and Jewish exegesis), Tertul-
lian even argues that when the children of Israel wandered forty years
in the desert, their shoes and clothes did not wear out, nor did their hair
or fingernails grow.58 If God can thus suspend natural laws in order to
preserve shoe leather and garments, how much more can he preserve
flesh or the particles thereof for resurrection? Although Tertullian uses
all the naturalistic images (popular since 1 Clement) that suggest repeti-
tion rather than continuity,59 he also stresses resurrection as regurgita-
tion of undigested bits and employs materialistic images of the body as a
mended pot, a rebuilt temple, or clothing donned anew. He understands
that the need to affirm identity through a change as stunning and para-
doxical as the change to changelessness is a philosophical challenge so
deep as to necessitate a rejection of the standard Aristotelian definition:
“a thing that has changed ceases to be what it is and becomes something
else.” Rather, Tertullian argues, “to be changed is to exist in a different
form”; exactly the flesh that sinned must be rewarded.60 Blessedness or
damnation can only be added “like a garment” to the identical material
body that earned these just deserts.61
Sometimes, to Tertullian, identity lodges more in structure than in
matter. He argues that in the resurrection all of our organs are retained.
Defects are healed, mutilations undone.

Now, if the death of the whole person is rescinded by its resurrection,

what must we say of the death of a part of him? If we are changed for

57. Tertullian, De res., chaps. 42, 43, 53, 58, pp. 976–79, 998–1000, 1006–7. See
also his Apologeticum, ed. E. Dekkers, chap. 48, in Tertulliani Opera, pt. 1: Opera
catholica, CCL (1954), pp. 165–68 (written at least twelve years earlier).
58. De res., chap. 58, pp. 1006–7. See David Satran, “Fingernails and Hair: Anat-
omy and Exegesis in Tertullian,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 40 (1989):
116–20. On Tertullian’s use of Jewish exegesis, see also J. Massingferd Ford, “Was
Montanism a Jewish-Christian Heresy?” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 17, no. 2
(1966): 145–58.
59. Naturalistic images: De res., chaps. 11–12, pp. 933–35; regurgitation images:
De res., chap. 32, pp. 961–63; materialistic images: De res., chaps. 40–44, pp. 973–81.
60. De res., chap. 55, pp. 1001–3; and see Cardman, “Tertullian,” p. 118. Else-
where in his works, Tertullian uses this definition.
61. De res., chaps. 41–42, pp. 975–78.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 37

glory, how much more for integrity? Any loss sustained by our bodies
is an accident to them, but their entirety [integritas] is their natural
property. . . . To nature, not to injury, are we restored.62

Thus we rise “whole” (integer), like a damaged and repaired ship whose
parts are restored though some of the planks are new. Indeed the func-
tions of the risen organs may change or disappear, but no part will be
destroyed.63 Mouths will no longer eat, nor will genitals copulate in
heaven; eating and procreation are aspects of the biological change that
is part of corruption. But some of these organs will have new uses.
Mouths, for example, will sing praises to God. Even the genitals are
good, argues Tertullian, because the cleansing of urination and men-
struation is good in this life.64 Such organs will have no function in the
resurrection, but they will survive for the sake of beauty. We will not
chew in heaven, but we will have teeth, because we would look funny
without them.
Everything intrinsic to what we are must reappear in the resurrected
body, asserts Tertullian, clearly locating particularity in body. Chris-
tians believe they receive back “the self-same bodies in which they
died” (corpora eadem . . . in quibus discesserunt), for it is these details
(i.e., of age, size, manner, etc.) that make bodies who they are.65 In
his treatise on women’s dress, Tertullian even argues that if cosmetics
and jewels were essential to women they would rise from the dead—an
argument echoed by Cyprian fifty years later when he exhorts women
not to wear face powder in this life lest God fail to recognize them
when they appear without it in the resurrection.66 In his two works on
marriage, Tertullian asserts that although there will be no marrying in

62. De res., chap. 57, pp. 1004–5; Holmes, trans., “On the Resurrection of the
Flesh,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, vol. 3 (1885;
reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986), pp. 589–90.
63. De res., chaps. 59–62, pp. 1007–11.
64. De res., chap. 61, pp. 1009–10. This passage makes clear how much more
complex Tertullian’s ideas are than the charge of misogyny (so often made against
him) allows. See F. Forrester Church, “Sex and Salvation in Tertullian,” Harvard
Theological Review 68, no. 2 (1975): 83–101.
65. Tertullian, De anima, chaps. 31 and 56, pp. 828–29 and 863–65; quotation
from chap. 56, p. 864, lines 38–41. See also De res., chaps. 55–63, pp. 1001–12.
66. Tertullian, De cultu feminarum, ed. A. Kroymann, bk. 2, chap. 7, in Opera,
pt. 1, p. 361. Tertullian’s basic argument is that women as well as men must be
prepared for martyrdom; the body in which discipline, suffering, and death happen is
the same body that will be lifted to heaven. Cyprian, De habitu virginum, chap. 17,
in Cyprian, Opera omnia, ed. William Hartel, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum
latinorum [hereafter CSEL] 3, pts. 1 and 2 (Vienna: C. Gerold, 1868), p. 199.
 38 the patristic background

heaven (Matthew 22.23–32), we will rise male and female, and we will
recognize those to whom we have been bound.67
Of the three authors I have just considered, only Minucius Felix, who
draws on standard pagan cosmological notions, sees the resurrected body
merely as the reassemblage of bits or parts. Both Irenaeus and Tertullian—
with the daring inconsistency of genius—join to an extravagantly materi-
alistic notion of the resurrection body an emphasis on radical change that
retains overtones of Paul. Indeed, in contrast to Athenagoras or Minucius
Felix, whose metaphors identify body with subsisting particles and sug-
gest that organic change threatens identity, Irenaeus’s so-called materi-
alistic view of the body is often expressed in metaphors of fertility and
biological transformation. Repeatedly Irenaeus uses the Pauline seed but
stresses, as Paul did not, the putrefaction it undergoes in the earth. It
rots and withers and decomposes.68 The emphasis is especially interest-
ing when we note, as R. M. Grant has done, that ancient writers such as
Theophrastus did understand that what happens to seeds in soil is more
complex than simply death or rot. Moreover the early second-century
Apocalypse of Peter, in its use of the Pauline seed, stresses that grain
is sown dry.69 To Irenaeus, however, our body putrefies like a grain of
wheat. Made from mud or slime, we return to slime again. Even the flesh
of the saints is torn and devoured by beasts, ground into dust, chewed
and digested by the stomach of the earth.70 The paradigmatic body is the
cadaver; flesh is that which undergoes fundamental organic change. The
sprouting of the resurrected seed into the sheaf of wheat is a victory not
so much over sin, or even over death, as over putrefaction.71

67. Ad uxorem, ed. A. Kroymann, bk. 1, chap. 1, parags. 4–6, in Opera, pt. 1, pp.
373–74; De monogamia, ed. E. Dekkers, chap. 10, parag. 6, in Opera, pt. 2, p. 1243.
In De pallio (which may be a late work of Tertullian’s Montanist period or an early
work from just after his conversion), Tertullian connects ostentation with gender
confusion and cross-dressing; upset because sumptuous dressing can efface the differ-
ence between a matron and a brothel keeper here on earth, Tertullian suggests that
we need to keep the marks of particularity in heaven in order to maintain there such
differences of rank. See De pallio, ed, A. Gerlo, chaps. 3–4, in Opera, pt. 2, pp. 738–46.
68. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., bk. 5, chap. 2, parags. 2–3; chap. 7, parag. 2; chap. 10,
parag. 2; chap. 28, parag. 4; chaps. 33–34; ed. Rousseau, vol. 2, pp. 30–41, 88–93,
126–33, 360–63, 404–37.
69. R. M. Grant, “Resurrection,” p. 193. See also Richard Broxton Onians, The
Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time,
and Fate: New Interpretations of Greek, Roman, and Kindred Evidence . . ., 2d ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), pp. 263–70 and 287–90.
70. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., bk. 5, chaps. 14–16 and 28; ed. Rousseau, vol. 2, pp.
182–221 and 346–63.
71. J. Pelikan comes close to the point I am making here when he says that, to
Irenaeus, the problem to which Christ must provide a solution is not sin but death;
see Shape of Death, pp. 101–20.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 39

How can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving . . . life
eternal, which [flesh] is nourished from the body and blood of the
Lord, and is a member of Him?—even as the blessed Paul declares
in his Epistle to the Ephesians, that “we are members of His body,
of His flesh, and of His bones” (Eph. 5.30). He does not speak these
words of some spiritual and invisible man, for a spirit has not bones
nor flesh (cf. Luke 24.39); but [he refers to] that dispensation [by
which the Lord became] an actual man, consisting of flesh, and
nerves, and bones,—that [flesh] which is nourished by the cup which
is His blood, and receives increase from the bread which is His body.
And just as a cutting from the vine planted in the ground fructifies
in its season, or as a corn of wheat falling into the earth and becom-
ing decomposed (cf. John 12.24), rises with manifold increase . . . and
then . . . becomes the Eucharist . . .; so also our bodies, being nour-
ished by it, and deposited in the earth, and suffering decomposition
there, shall rise at their appointed time, the Word of God granting
them resurrection.72

Irenaeus thus suggests that the proof of our final incorruption lies
in our eating of God. The very “truth” of our flesh is “increased and
nourished” in the Eucharist (verum hominem quae ex carnibus . . .
consistit, quae de calice . . . nutritur, et de pane quod est corpus ejus
augetur). We drink blood in the cup; blood can come only from flesh and
veins; we know that our flesh is capable of surviving digestion exactly
because we are able to digest the flesh of Christ. The fact that we are
what we eat—that we become Christ by consuming Christ, but Christ
can never be consumed—guarantees that our consumption by beasts or
fire or by the gaping maw of the grave is not destruction. Death (rot,
decomposition) can be a moment of fertility, which sprouts and flowers
and gives birth to incorruption.73 Because eating God is a transcendent
cannibalism that does not consume or destroy, we can be confident that
the heretics who would spiritualize the flesh are wrong. Flesh, defined
as that which changes, is capable of the change to changelessness.

72. Irenaeus, Adv. haer., bk. 5, chap. 2, paragr. 3; ed. Rousseau, pp. 34–41; trans.
A. Robertson and J. Donaldson, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885; reprint, Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1981), p. 528.
73. At the end of book 5, Irenaeus’s vision of the coming kingdom is of full mate-
rial recreation, ablaze with fertility. The dead will rise to an earth of abundant food,
in which animals will no longer eat animals. Thus the resurrection will bring a
world in which consumption is filling and sustaining, not destructive; the problem
of incorporation (how can one take in, or be taken into, without being destroyed?) is
finally solved in the “new heaven and new earth.”
 40 the patristic background

Tertullian also—for all his stress on reconstitution both of a core of

material particles and of a bodily structure—sees resurrection as radical
transformation. Donning a “new garment” (i.e., adding something to a
core) may be his favorite metaphor for gaining incorruption,74 but he also
uses the Pauline seed metaphor to stress how great is the change that
comes to the flesh in glory.75 Indeed, in many of the works of Tertullian’s
middle period, change (understood basically as rot or digestion) is the
fundamental challenge or scandal, the attainment of changelessness the
final victory. Paradoxically, however, it is exactly the metaphor of change
or growth that must be used to speak of the transition to incorruption.
Tertullian, like Irenaeus, sees the earthly body as that which
changes—especially that which eats, procreates, and rots. Adam’s sin
was gluttony, says Tertullian.76 Even if God had not enjoined fasting,
we would know from Adam’s story how necessary it is. Food is poison,
the primordial cause of death. It threatens what we are.77 Thus those
who fast prepare themselves not only for prison and the arena but also
for the resurrection.78 Slenderer flesh will go more easily through the

74. De res., chaps. 27, 42, 55, pp. 956–57, 976–78, 981–82.
75. De res., chaps. 52–53, pp. 976–79. For a very positive and elaborate meta-
phor of growth, flowering, and fruition, see Tertullian, De virginibus velandis, ed. E.
Dekkers, chap. 1, in Opera, pt. 2, pp. 1209–10, a discussion of the advance of creation
toward the gospel.
76. De ieiunio adversus psychicos, ed. A. Reifferscheid and G. Wissowa, chap. 3,
in Opera, pt. 2, pp. 1259–60; Scorpiace, ed. A. Reifferscheid and G. Wissowa, chap.
5, in Opera, pt. 2, pp. 1076–79.
77. De ieiunio, chap. 3, pp. 1259–60. Eating was a basic metaphor of incorpora-
tion; much of the discussion of food in the ancient world suggests either that the
food we eat destroys us or that we destroy the food we eat. Christians struggled to
find ways of using images of consumption, digestion, cannibalism, etc., to express
an incorporation that does not destroy, that leaves the self separate from God yet
saved by him. It is striking that, in the Scorpiace, chap. 7, pp. 1081–82, where Ter-
tullian defends God against the charge that he wants human sacrifice because he
allows the martyrdoms, the word for “sacrifice” or “destroy” is “eat” or “devour.” If
God really wants martyrdom, says Tertullian, we must count happy the man whom
God has eaten (et non beatum amplius reputasset quem deus comedisset) (p. 1082,
lines 10–11). The martyrs are not really devoured, of course, because they will rise
again. De res., chap. 32, pp. 961–62, equates resurrection with regurgitation: “Sed
idcirco nominantur bestiae et pisces in redibitionem carnis et sanguinis, quo magis
exprimatur resurrectio etiam deuoratorum corporum, cum de ipsis deuoratoribus
exactio edicitur” (p. 962, lines 8–11). On the connection of eating-metaphors with
ancient notions of death, especially as regards Tertullian, see Victor Saxer, Morts,
martyrs, reliques en Afrique chrétienne aux premiers siècles: Le Témoignages de
Tertullien, Cyprien, et Augustin à la lumière de l’archéologie africaine (Paris: Édi-
tion Beauchesne, 1980), pp. 44–46.
78. De ieiunio, chap. 12, p. 1270; Ad martyras, ed. E. Dekkers, chaps. 2 and 3, in
Opera, pt. 1, pp. 3–6. See the interesting discussion of how the early martyrs used
fasting to “train” for prison and execution in Maureen Tilley, “The Ascetic Body and
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 41

narrow gate of heaven; lighter flesh will rise more quickly; drier flesh
will experience less putrefaction in the tomb.79 “An over-fed Christian
will be much more necessary to bears and lions . . . than to God.”80
Asceticism, to Tertullian, prepares us for glory by moving our flesh
away from mutability and toward the incorruptibility and impassibility
of heaven. Fasting and sexual abstinence make us like the children of
Israel who achieved on earth such changelessness that even their nails
and hair avoided growth, as their clothes avoided deterioration.
To Tertullian, as to Irenaeus, the paradigmatic earthly body is the
corpse, and the ultimate indignity suffered by corpses is digestion. Ter-
tullian fulminates against pagan gladiatorial combat as heinous assault
on the beauty of bodies created by God; yet he emphasizes that all
bodies come eventually to the ugliness and destruction of the grave.81
Whether gently laid to rest in the tomb or torn and twisted—eaten by
the “bellies of beasts,” the “crops of birds,” and the “guts of fishes”—we
are all cadavers; we all end up in “time’s own gullet.”82 Thus the final
victory must be the eating that does not consume, the decay that does
not devour, the change that transmutes only to changelessness. The fact
that we eat God in the Eucharist and are truly fed on his flesh and blood
is a paradoxical redemption of that most horrible of consumptions: can-
nibalism.83 And to Tertullian cannibalism is not merely a metaphor for

the (Un)Making of the World of the Martyr” (Paper delivered at the AAR meeting,
November 1990), p. 11.
79. De ieiunio, chap. 17, pp. 1276–77; see also chap. 12, pp. 1270–71. In this late
work (probably from after 213), Tertullian implies that drier flesh will last longer
in the tomb and suggests that this is a good thing. In the slightly earlier De anima
(probably from 208–212), Tertullian stresses that what happens in the tomb does not
matter; see chaps. 51–57, pp. 857–67.
80. De ieiunio, chap. 17, pp. 1276–77. To Tertullian, asceticism is martyrdom
(see De ieiunio, chap. 12) and martyrdom is resurrection (Scorpiace, chaps. 12–13,
pp. 1092–96). He even argues that to pagans, gladiatorial combat is “qualem potest
praestare saeculum, de fama aeternitatem, de memoria resurrectionem” (Scorpiace,
chap. 6, pp. 1079–81, esp. p. 1079, lines 24–26); how much more therefore should
Christians eagerly welcome the true resurrection?
81. De spectaculis, ed. E. Dekkers, chaps. 12, 19, 21–23, in Opera, pt. 1, pp. 238–
39, 244–47; and De anima, chaps. 51–52, pp. 857–59.
82. De res., c. 4, pp. 925–26. Tertullian asks whether the wise man can believe
that something can return whole from corruption, “ . . . in solidum de casso, in ple-
num de inanito, in aliquid omnino de nihilo, et utique redhibentibus earn ignibus
et undis et aluis ferarum et rumis alitum et lactibus piscium et ipsorum temporum
propria gula?” (p. 925, lines 13–17).
83. De res., chap. 8, pp. 931–32. See also Tertullian, Ad nationes, ed. J. G. P. Bor-
leffs, bk. 1, chap. 2, in Opera, pt. 1, pp. 12–13, for charges of cannibalism against
pagans; Apologeticum, chap. 48, pp. 165–68, where Tertullian reports that some
pagans abstain from meat because it might be a relative reincarnated; and De pallio,
 42 the patristic background

threat to identity. In a passage Aline Rousselle has made much of, Ter-
tullian charges that pagans commit it when they eat the bodies of beasts
from the arena who have in turn eaten the Christian martyrs.84
Tertullian stresses, explicitly and paradoxically, that the seed of 1
Corinthians 15 is a guarantee of identity exactly in its radical change.
What decays and rises is the grain, but if there is to be rising, there must
be transformation. The body is “demolished, dismembered, dissolved”
in the ground; like Lazarus, it putrefies and stinks, for it lies more than
three days in the grave.85 Because it is so vile and vulnerable—torn by
execution perhaps and certainly sullied by the uncleanness of nutri-
tion and copulation—flesh must be transmuted in order to rise as a
bride, shining like the angels.86 Thus to Tertullian, the Transfiguration
is inextricably tied to the resurrection. Our bodies will be not only
raised but also glorified, like Stephen who appeared as an angel at his
stoning or Moses and Elias who shone with a foretaste of glory when
they appeared with Christ on the mountain.87

But that you may not suppose that it is merely those bodies which
are consigned to the tombs whose resurrection is foretold, you have it
declared in Scripture: “And I will command the fishes of the sea and
they shall cast up the bones which they have devoured. . . .”(Enoch
61.5) You will ask, Will then the fishes and other animals and car-
nivorous birds be raised again in order that they may vomit up what
they have consumed . . . ? Certainly not. But the beasts and fishes
are mentioned . . . in relation to the restoration of flesh and blood,
in order the more emphatically to express the resurrection of such
bodies as have even been devoured. . . .
If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead. For what dead
man is entire, although he dies entire? Who is without hurt, that is

chap. 5, pp. 746–50, where he tells the story of a pagan who dined indirectly on his
slaves by first feeding them to fish, which he then cooked. Minucius Felix (Octavius,
chap. 30, pp. 191–92) makes a similar charge of cannibalism against pagans. Eusebius
reports that one Attalus, while being burned, accused his persecutors of “eating men,”
something Christians would never do (The Ecclesiastical History, bk. 5, chap. 1, trans.
Kirsopp Lake, Loeb Classical Library [London and Cambridge, Mass.: Heinemann and
Harvard University Press, 1926; reprint, 1980], vol. 1, pp. 431–33). And see n. 132 below.
84. Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia
Pheasant (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 118–19, discussing Tertullian, Apologeticum,
chaps. 8–9 and 50, and Ad nationes, bk. 1, chap. 10, as evidence of (at least indirect)
human sacrifice.
85. De res., chap. 53, pp. 998–1000, esp. p. 998, line 6.
86. De res., chaps. 62–63, pp. 1010–12.
87. De res., chap. 55, pp. 1001–3.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 43

without life? What body is uninjured, when it is dead, when it is cold,

when it is ghastly, when it is stiff, when it is a corpse? . . . Thus, for
a dead man to be raised again, amounts to nothing short of his being
restored to his entire condition. . . . God is quite able to remake what
He once made. . . . Thus our flesh shall remain even after the resur-
rection—so far indeed susceptible of suffering, as it is the flesh, and
the same flesh too; but at the same time impassible, in as much as it
has been liberated by the Lord for the very end and purpose of being
no longer capable of enduring suffering.88

Scholars have criticized Tertullian for rhetorical and theological

excess and most of all for inconsistency—for stressing resurrection
as a prelude to punishment while relating it to the grace provided by
Christ’s rising, for glorifying flesh and creation while indulging in a
castigation of woman that sounds misogynist and a castigation of body
that sounds dualist.89 But surely these inconsistencies—however offen-
sively or incoherently expressed—are exactly the point. What must rise
is the site of our rottenness. It is corruption that puts on incorruption.
Caro salutis est cardo: the flesh is the pivot of salvation.90

Martyrdom
Historians used to assert that the doctrine of the resurrection of the
flesh was established in polemical treatises from the late second century
as part of the contest with Gnosticism.91 We now know, however, that
the question of the nature of the resurrected body continued to come
up in important ways for hundreds of years and (as we shall see) did not
always entail the same issues. Nonetheless, a careful look at the images
and arguments of writings from around 200 helps us to understand what
was fundamentally at stake in the earliest debates.92 The specific adjec-
tives, analogies, and examples used in treatises on resurrection suggest
that the palpable, vulnerable, corruptible body Christ redeems and raises

88. Tertullian, De res., chaps. 32 and 57, pp. 961–62 and 1004–5; trans. Holmes,
The Ante-Nicene Fathers, pp. 567–68 and 590. I quoted a part of this second passage
at n. 1; it is interesting to see how much more complex and rhetorical Tertullian’s
emphasis on “wholeness” seems after extended analysis.
89. For example, Cardman, “Tertullian.”
90. De res., chap. 8, p. 931, lines 6–7.
91. Van Unnik, “ ‘Epistle to Rheginos,’ ” pp. 141–52 and 153–67; Davis, “Factors,”
pp. 448–55; Gager, “Body-Symbols,” p. 345; Kelly, Creeds, pp. 163–66.
92. On the method I employ here, of moving from text to context via image, see
above, “Preface,” pp. xvi–xvii.
 44 the patristic background

was quintessentially the mutilated cadaver of the martyr. Writers such

as Ignatius of Antioch, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Minucius Felix
had a quite specific death in mind—the voluntary, sacrificial death they
both feared and yearned for—when they spoke of literal, physical resur-
rection as victory over it. The paradox of change and continuity that
characterizes theological and hagiographical descriptions of the risen
body seems to originate in the facts of martyrdom.
Recent scholarship has been inclined to downplay the numbers of
Christian martyrs and to underline parallels between the expressionism
and exhibitionism of pagan games and Christian executions.93 And it
is certainly true that both Christian fears of persecution and Christian
pride in the endurance and courage of their cobelievers led to exagger-
ated accounts of the numbers who died and of the extravagant nature of
their suffering. Indeed, Christian apologists and historians paid tribute
to the bravery of pagan gladiators in order to argue that Christians sur-
passed it and suffered in a far worthier cause. Nonetheless, after a lull
in the days of Trajan (d. 117) and Hadrian (d. 138), Christians—called
by their opponents a “third race”—experienced periodic persecution.94
Tales of the martyrdom of Polycarp at Smyrna in the 160s and of the
executions at Lyons in circa 177 circulated in the years around 200 and
strengthened both fear and determination. Some of our earliest discus-
sions of resurrection were penned by Christians who led their commu-
nities during waves of repression or themselves suffered torture. Neither
research that minimizes the numbers of martyrs nor interpretation that
draws parallels between pagan and Christian behaviors should be used
to suggest that fear of martyrdom was an insignificant motive in shap-
ing Christian mentality. Apologists such as Tertullian, Irenaeus, and

93. See G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, “Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution,” Harvard

Theological Review 47 (1954): 75–113; Charles Saumagne, “A Persecution de Dèce
en Afrique d’après la correspondance de S. Cyprien,” Byzantion 32 (1962): 1–29;
Aline Rousselle, Porneia, pp. 108–40; W. Rordorf, V. Saxer, N. Duval, and F. Bisconti,
“Martyr-Martyrdom,” in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, vol. 1, pp. 531–36; David
Potter, “Martyrdom as Spectacle” (Unpublished paper); and Carlin Barton, “The Sac-
ramentum of the Gladiator” (Paper delivered at the meeting of the American Society
of Church History, December 28, 1989). These last two articles take rather different
approaches to the parallels between gladiatorial combat and martyrdom. See now
also Carlin Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the
Monster (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Peter Brown, Power and Per-
suasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, Wis.: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1992), chap. 2, argues that the courage of the martyr can be
understood as analogous to that of the philosopher.
94. R. A. Markus, Christianity in the Roman World (London: Thames and Hudson,
1974), p. 24.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 45

Justin (himself “the Martyr”) spoke of resurrection as God’s gift to all

bodies but especially to those that experienced suffering and partition
in prison or the arena. Their images of stasis, hardening, and reassem-
blage in heaven gave to mortal flesh the promise of victory over what
martyrs, and those who admired them, feared most: excruciating pain
in the moment of dying and dishonor to the cadaver after death. Thus
we should not find it surprising that early exhortations to martyrdom
both express in graphic (even exalted) prose the suffering entailed and
offer hope of resurrection as a protection against it.95 Nor should we be
surprised that early treatises on resurrection stress God’s promise of a
body both transformed and “the same,” both impassible and identical
with the flesh of earth.
Martyred flesh had to be capable of impassibility and transfigura-
tion; suffering and rot could not be the final answer. If flesh could put
on, even in this life, a foretaste of incorruption, martyrdom might be
bearable. Those who watched and feared execution, yet exhorted them-
selves and others toward it, clung to the belief that (as Tertullian said)
“the leg feels no pain in its tendons when the soul is in heaven.”96 “The
bites of wild beasts” could be “glories to young heroes” in part because
the body, disciplined by asceticism, had already “sent on to heaven”
the “succulence of its blood.”97 Our oldest account of a martyrdom
asserts that the fire “felt cold” to those who, under torture, fixed their
thoughts on Christ.98 Later martyr stories are filled with examples of

95. I agree with Carlin Barton (see n. 93 above) that Christian apologists cultivated
and proselytized for the expressionism of suffering. They spoke of martyrs as scaling
pinnacles of pain. At the same time I argue that they held out to potential martyrs the
promise of an “anesthesia of glory” against pain. Such tendencies may appear to be
contradictory. But both are present in the texts. Their combination is found in other
cultural moments in which torture and execution play a crucial role. See, for example,
the discussion of the Aztecs in Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on
General Economy, trans. R. Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 45–61.
96. Ad martyras, chap. 2, p. 5, lines 6–7. The Ad martyras dates from ca. 197.
97. De anima, chap. 58, pp. 867–69; De ieiunio, chap. 12, pp. 1270–71. The pas-
sage in De anima also emphasizes a disjunction between body and soul, suggesting
that the soul can avoid feeling the pain to which the body is subjected if it concen-
trates on heaven. Along similar lines, Maureen Tilley has pointed out that the letters
of Cyprian provide advice to future martyrs about how to avoid terror and pain by
imagining the instruments of torture as means of uniting with Christ’s passion; see
Cyprian, Letters 76, chap. 2, and 77, chap. 3, Opera, ed. Hartel, CSEL 3, pt. 2, pp.
829–30 and 835, and Tilley, “The Ascetic Body,” p. 17.
98. Martyrdom of Polycarp, chap. 2, in Ignatius and Polycarp, Lettres, ed.
Camelot, pp. 244–45; see Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, pp. 76–79; and Helmut Koester,
Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2: History and Literature of Early Chris-
tianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, and Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1982),
pp. 306–8. André Grabar has argued, picking up on the argument of K. Holl, that
 46 the patristic background

saints who do not even notice the most exquisite and extraordinary
cruelties.99 Death for the faith was a necessary and palpable concern
in writing and behavior during the late second century; hence it is not
surprising that the impassibility of the risen body was stressed as a
reward for such sacrifice or that the terror of execution was allayed by
the suggestion that a sort of anesthesia of glory might spill over from
the promised resurrection into the ravaged flesh of the arena, making
its experience bearable. Cyprian, who in life exhorted, comforted, and
advised future martyrs, supposedly appeared after his death to the mar-
tyr Flavian, saying: “It is another flesh that suffers when the soul is in
heaven. The body does not feel [the death blow] at all when the mind
is entirely absorbed in God.”100
But the context of martyrdom, within which so much early theological
writing emerged, made continuity of body important also. Irenaeus and
Tertullian avoided any suggestion that the attainment of impassibility or
glory entailed a loss of the particular self that offered up its own death for
Christ. Identity was a crucial issue. As Tertullian said, all death (even the
gentlest) is violent; all corpses (even the most respectfully buried) rot.101
Resurrection guarantees that it is these very corpses that achieve salva-
tion.102 The promise that we will rise again makes it possible for heroes
and ordinary Christians to face, for those they love and revere as well as
for themselves, the humiliation of death and the horror of putrefaction.

martyrs were called witnesses because at the moment of their execution they had
direct contact with God; see Grabar, Martyrium: Recherches sur le culte des reliques
et l’art chrétien antique (Paris: Collège de France, 1946), vol. 1, p. 28. Eusebius, The
Ecclesiastical History, bk. 5, chap. 1, pp. 433–35, also suggests that God keeps the
martyrs from feeling pain.
99. Tilley, “The Ascetic Body,” p. 14. See also eadem, “Scripture as an Element of
Social Control: Two Martyr Stories of Christian North Africa,” Harvard Theological
Review 83, no. 4 (1990): 383–97.
100. The Passion of Montanus and Lucius, chap. 21, in Herbert A. Musurillo, The
Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 235; see Tilley,
“The Ascetic Body,” p. 17.
101. It is worth noting here that our oldest extant Christian prayer over a corpse
stresses the contrast between an incorruptible God and creatures who must be lifted
from change into changelessness: “God, you who have the power of life and death,
God of the spirits and lord of all flesh . . . you who change and transform and trans-
figure your creatures, as is right and proper, being yourself alone incorruptible, unal-
terable, and eternal, we beseech you for the repose and rest of this your servant….:
refresh her soul and spirit in green pastures . . . and raise up the body in the day which
you have ordained.” See Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of
a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1990), p. 22, who sees the prayer as Jewish in character.
102. De anima, chap. 51–52, pp. 857–59.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 47

A fourth-century Syriac text, the Didascalia of the Apostles, which

is based on an early third-century Greek original, argues: because we
Christians believe in resurrection, we cannot excuse ourselves from
martyrdom.103 Whether thrown into the depths of the sea or scattered
like chaff by the wind, we are still in the world, enclosed in the hand of
God, and not a hair of our head shall perish (Luke 21.18). Christ made
himself a body from the Virgin and raised himself from the dead; so
he will raise all that is laid down, as he multiplied loaves and fishes
or created an eye from clay and spittle.104 Nothing can make the body
unclean—neither nocturnal emissions of semen, nor menstruation and
childbearing, nor even the putrefaction of the tomb. We Christians do
not abominate a dead man because we know he will live again. Assem-
bling in cemeteries, we offer up on the graves themselves the Eucha-
rist, which is—this author asserts—not only Christ’s body but also the
likeness of our bodies in heaven.105 What is striking in this text is not
only the connection between resurrection and martyrdom but also the
understanding of ultimate threat as the scattering and/or dissolution of
the martyr’s corpse.
To place the doctrine of bodily resurrection in the context of martyr-
dom is not to make a novel argument. Historians have long recognized
that belief in resurrection tends to emerge in response to persecution;
for the persecuted want to claim that those who die for their faith will
be rewarded in another life with the good fortune they have clearly
in some sense been denied in this one.106 Yet posed as a rather crude
form of compensation theory, the argument does not seem to work
especially well for Christian teaching. Much as Tertullian, for exam-
ple, stresses reward and punishment in his theology of resurrection,

103. Didascalia Apostolorum, chap. 19, ed. and trans. Vööbus, vol. 2, pp. 167–75.
It is worth underlining that this text is permeated both by a very strong sense of
community created by the adversity of persecution and by an intense need to enforce
hierarchy (husbands over wives, bishops over the people, etc.); see especially chaps.
1–12.
104. Didascalia Apostolorum, chap. 20, pp. 175–83. The passage also mentions
Aaron’s rod and the seed of 1 Corinthians 15.
105. Didascalia Apostolorum, chap. 26, pp. 223–47. The passages cited in nn.
103–5 are also found in the Latin Apostolic Constitutions, based on the Greek origi-
nal and made (probably) between 375 and 400; see Vööbus, “Introduction,” vol. 1,
pp. 27*–28*.
106. See, for example, Gooch, “Resurrection,” in Dictionary of Biblical Tradition;
G. A. Barton and Kaufmann Kohler, “Resurrection,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed.
Isidore Singer et al., vol. 10 (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), pp.
382–85; Frank Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom (London:
Lebus Books, 1979), p. 52.
 48 the patristic background

he does not mention resurrection in his early exhortations to martyr-

dom. There his argument is based on the parallel between Christian
and pagan gladiators. The connection he draws is between faith and
courage, not between faith and reward. If pagans can die for worldly
glory, he argues, surely Christians can die for God.107 He never quite
says: God will reward the martyrs with resurrection and punish their
persecutors, although he draws a singularly unlovely analogy between
hell and the tortures of the arena108 and speaks much of asceticism as
a kind of martyrdom that prepares for resurrection.109 When Tertullian
does treat resurrection or immortality as reward (as, for example, when
he discusses Revelation 6.9 or refers to Perpetua’s vision of paradise
peopled only by martyrs), the context is the question of burial. Like
the author of the Didascalia of the Apostles, Tertullian associates dis-
solution in the arena with dissolution in the grave and finally with the
dissolution of biological process itself.
Tertullian is concerned to refute those who think delay in burial
injures the soul or that persons who die prematurely or violently or
receive no burial, will wander the earth as ghosts or demons. He devotes
much scorn to the pagan idea that souls survive in properly prepared
corpses and carefully explains that Christian opposition to cremation
has nothing to do with a need to preserve cadavers. Christians prefer to
treat corpses gently out of respect, he says, but death is absolute. Resur-
rection is promised to all bodies, no matter how they died or how they
are buried.110 The horror that resurrection overcomes is finally not so
much torture or execution as the dishonor of being treated as a com-
mon criminal after death.
Thus it appears that Lionel Rothkrug is right when he gives a more
profound version of the compensation argument, suggesting that to
Jews of the Maccabean period and to early Christians resurrection was
a substitute for the burial owed to the pious.111 When studied carefully,
both Christian story and Christian polemic can be seen to make the

107. See Ad martyras (from 197) and De Corona militis (from 208 or 211). Ad
martyras, chap. 3, pp. 5–6, does mention attaining an incorruptible crown, and the
Scorpiace (probably 211–12), chap. 6, pp. 1079–81, argues that a special “mansion”
in heaven is a reward for martyrdom. But Tertullian’s major argument is to compare
pagan and Christian self-sacrifice.
108. De spectaculis (from between 198 and 206), chap. 30, pp. 210–12.
109. De ieiunio, chap. 12, pp. 1270–71; De pallio, chap. 6, p. 750.
110. De anima, chaps. 51–58, pp. 857–69.
111. Lionel Rothkrug, “German Holiness and Western Sanctity in Medieval and
Modem History,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 15, no. 1 (1988):
215–29.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 49

connection between resurrection and proper burial absolutely explicit.

For example, the fourth-century church historian Eusebius, incorpo-
rating into his history what we believe to be an authentic account of
the martyrdom at Lyons in circa 177, reports that the Romans scat-
tered and burned the bodies of the executed in order to dash Christian
hopes of resurrection. Whether the account is correct in the motives it
imputes, the fact that it imputes them suggests both horror at corpse
violation and the possibility that some would interpret such violation
as jeopardizing literal resurrection. Indeed in his treatise Octavius,
Minucius Felix argues explicitly against the assumptions attributed to
the Romans in Eusebius’s account. Violating corpses is ineffectual, says
Minucius; divine power can renew even pulverized dust. Thus resurrec-
tion is the ultimate victory, for it brings together the scattered bits of
the church’s heroes and heroines, providing for them the quiet sepul-
chre their executioners might prohibit and prevent.112
Minucius’s reassurances suggest that Christians did worry passion-
ately about the bodies of the martyrs. Other writings offer the same
suggestion. As we have seen (p. 28 above), Ignatius of Antioch prayed
to be totally devoured so that his followers would not be endangered by
their desire to care for and reverence his remains.113 Cyprian, writing in
the middle of the third century, stressed burying the dead, especially the
martyrs, as an act of charity.114 Looking back from the early fourth cen-
tury, Eusebius reported that the Romans had to post guards to prevent
Christians from stealing the ashes or bones of the martyrs in order to
bury them.115 Although there is no evidence that the Romans regularly

112. Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, bk. 5, chap. 1, pp. 435–37. Book 8,
chap. 7, pp. 270–73, makes it clear that denial of burial is an insult. Throughout book
5, chap. 1, book 8, chaps. 7–12, and book 10, chap. 8, Eusebius displays considerable
fascination with the details of torture. In his History, bk. 5, chaps. 1–4, he incorpo-
rates a letter in the name of the Christians of Lyons and Vienne (probably written
by Irenaeus himself shortly after the persecution of 177) describing the martyrs of
Lyons; see P. Nautin, “Letter of the Church of Lyons and Vienne,” in Encyclopedia
of the Early Church, vol. 1, pp. 483–84. And see Minucius Felix, Octavius, chaps, 11,
34, 37–38; pp. 340–45, 416–21, and 426–35; on this passage see Arthur Darby Nock,
“Cremation and Burial in the Roman Empire,” Harvard Theological Review 25, no. 4
(1932): 334.
113. See above nn. 14 and 16.
114. Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques, p. 88.
115. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, bk. 5, chap. 1, vol. 1, pp. 435–37. The Acts
of Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonice, chap. 47, (from the 160s) reports that the Chris-
tians secretly took up and guarded the remains; see Some Authentic Acts of the Early
Martyrs, trans. E. C. E. Owen (London: SPCK, 1927), pp. 42–46, especially p. 46, and
Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, p. 183. For stories of early Christians caring for remains,
see Nicole Hermann-Mascard, Les Reliques des saints: Formation coutumière d’un
 50 the patristic background

denied Christian adherents access to the bodies of the executed,116 the

early martyr stories clearly reflect a Christian fear that the authorities
want to insult cadavers and prevent burial.117 The account of Polycarp’s
martyrdom, for example, asserts that Romans, Jews, and the devil burnt
the body in order to prevent Christians from recovering the sacred flesh
that had remained unconsumed on the pyre of execution.
The author of the Passion of Polycarp did not, however, leave the
victory to the persecutors. Focusing on the body, he told a story with a
different outcome and moral. Hard as it had been for the executioners
to bring death to the Christian hero, they had—so the author tells us—
finally succeeded. Polycarp had expired although his body remained.
But when the forces of evil attacked the body itself, they were without
success. Polycarp’s flesh lasted unchanged, “not like flesh that burns,
but like bread that bakes, or gold and silver glowing in a furnace.”118
The images are exactly those we find in theological treatises about res-
urrection, but here the martyr becomes while still on earth the hard
and beautiful minerals or undigested bread all our bodies will finally
become at the end of time.
Writers such as Tertullian, Minucius Felix, the author of the Didas-
calia, and the church historian Eusebius all connected resurrection and
martyrdom, both in image and in explicit argument. But the connec-
tion had implications beyond the deaths of heroes. The very images
used—images of reforged vessels and rebuilt ships, of gold and jew-
els tempered in the furnace, or of objects undigested in the bellies of
fishes—suggest that what God promised to those willing to die in his
service was victory not so much over the moment of execution as over
putrefaction itself. Resurrection was finally not so much the triumph
of martyrs over pain and humiliation as the triumph of martyrs’ bodies
over fragmentation, scattering, and the loss of a final resting place. And
the resurrection promised especially to heroes and heroines was offered

droit (Paris: Édition Klincksieck, 1975), pp. 23–26, and Alfred C. Rush, Death and
Burial in Christian Antiquity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America,
1941), passim, especially pp. 122, 205–6.
116. See Henri Leclercq, “Martyr,” Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de
liturgie, ed. F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq [hereafter DACL], vol. 10 (Paris: Letouzey et
Ané, 1932), col. 2433.
117. See above, n. 112; Leclercq, “Martyr,” cols. 2425–40.
118. Martyrdom of Polycarp, chaps. 15, 17, and 18, in Ignatius and Polycarp,
Lettres, ed. Camelot, pp. 262–65, 266–69; quoted passage at p. 264. The prayer put in
Polycarp’s mouth refers to sharing “the cup” with Christ and to rising in body and
soul (ibid., p. 262).
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 51

to all Christians as well. Hence the broader context within which the
doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh should be located appears to be
the vast subject of attitudes toward and practices concerning the bodies
of the ordinary dead.

Burial Practices
It is no more novel to connect burial practice and resurrection than it is
to connect resurrection and martyrdom. But once again I do not mean
by this argument quite what previous scholars have meant.
It is well known that the second and third centuries saw basic
changes in Roman burial practices, and twentieth-century scholarship
has debated the relationship of these to Christian doctrine (albeit with
remarkably inconclusive results).119 Older theories held that the change
from cremation back to the earlier practice of inhumation—a change
that began about the time of Trajan (d. 117)—was a result in part of
Christian opposition to cremation. When scholars had to admit that the
chronology of developments made this idea totally untenable, they fell
back on the partially tautological argument that the change in practice
was a change in fashion, with no ideational underpinning.120
This claim is, in one sense, quite plausible. There is much recent,
cross-cultural work in both anthropology and history that suggests that
we can never find a causal relationship between doctrine and burial
practice. Scholars have not, to my knowledge, been able to adduce a
single case where a change in eschatology dictates precise changes in
death rituals or where changing practice immediately entails a new
theory of the afterlife.121 This observation should not, however, lead

119. Franz Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1922); Henri Leclercq, “Incineration,” DACL, vol. 7, pt. 1 (1926), cols. 502–8;
Nock, “Cremation and Burial”; Rush, Death and Burial in Christian Antiquity;
Onians, Origins; J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1971); Jean-Marie Mathieu, “Horreur du cadavre et phi-
losophie dans le monde romain: Le cas de la patristique grecque du IVe siècle,” in La
Mort, les morts, et l’au-delà dans le monde romain (Caen: Centre de Publications de
l’Université de Caen, 1987), pp. 311–20.
120. Nock, “Cremation and Burial,” and Toynbee, Death and Burial.
121. See Paul-Albert Fevrier, “La mort chrétienne,” in Segni e riti nella chiesa
altomedievale occidentale (Spoleto: Presio la sede del Centro, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 881–
942; Bailey Young, “Paganisme, christianisation, et rites funéraires merovingiens,”
Archéologie médiévale 7 (1977): 5–81; and Paxton, Christianizing Death, pp. 3–4. On
the general point, see P. Reinecke, “Reihengräber und Friedhöfe der Kirchen,” Ger-
mania 9, fase. 2 (1952): 103–7; Edward James, “Merovingian Cemetery Studies and
Some Implications for Anglo-Saxon England,” in Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries, 1979: The
 52 the patristic background

us to argue that belief expresses merely the desire to identify with a

privileged class or to conform to prevailing fashion.122 Nor should we
conclude that the content of belief is arbitrary. Whatever causes the
convictions that bring comfort to people in their deepest existential
horrors, these convictions must be expressed in language drawn from
and relevant to everyday experience. The specific images in which
Christian theologians and polemicists spoke of resurrection thus seem
to me to have everything to do with Mediterranean funerary practice,
both with its privileging of hard, dry remains (bones or ashes) and with
its treatment of corpse and grave as “that which eats.”123
In general it is clear that both cremation and inhumation were efforts
to mask, and therefore in some ways to deny, putrefaction.124 Jews tra-
ditionally practiced ossilegium and/or inhumation, privileging bones as
body.125 Romans moved from inhumation to cremation and back to inhu-
mation. But cremation was never, in the Roman world, antithetical to
inhumation; rather it was a version of it. Ashes were frequently buried in
sarcophagi, and a finger (the os resectum) was cut off before cremation to
be buried with the ashes. Infants who had not yet developed milk teeth
could not be cremated—perhaps because there was a question whether
they would leave mineral remains for burial.126 The increased popular-
ity of inhumation in the later second and third centuries expressed, as

Fourth Anglo-Saxon Symposium at Oxford, ed. P. Rahtz, T. Dickinson, and L. Watts

(Oxford: B. A. R., 1980), p. 40; Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Authority, the Family, and the
Dead in Late Medieval France,” French Historical Studies 16, no. 4 (1990): 803–32;
Patricia Ebrey, “Cremation in Sung China,” American Historical Review 95, no. 2
(1990): 406–28; and the works on Jewish ossilegium cited in n. 135 below. For the
difficulties of identifying a collective mentality in antiquity, see Michel Vovelle, “Les
attitudes devant la mort: Problèmes de méthode, approches, et lectures différentes,”
Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 31 (1976): 120–32.
122. Nock may be correct that people moved to inhumation because it was an
upper-class practice; he has not, however, explained why the upper classes preferred
it. It will not do to adduce its expense (a sort of argument from conspicuous con-
sumption) since cremated ashes could be treated in equally expensive ways—and
were.
123. For pioneering work on the relationship between, on the one hand, the ritu-
als and images used by the living and, on the other, the state of the deceased, see Rob-
ert Hertz, “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death,”
in his Death and the Right Hand, trans. R. and C. Needham (Glencoe, Illinois: Free
Press, 1960), pp. 27–86, first published in Année sociologique 10 (1907).
124. In addition to the works cited in n. 119 above, see Louis-Vincent Thomas,
Le cadavre: De la biologie à l’anthropologie (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1980).
125. See below n. 135.
126. See Onians, Origins, p. 267; Toynbee, Death and Burial, pp. 48ff.; Rush,
Death and Burial pp, 241–44; E. Valton, “Crémation,” in DTC, vol. 3, pt. 2 (1938),
col. 2316.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 53

both A. D. Nock and J. Toynbee have pointed out, a growing concern to

treat cadavers gently and to minimize images of violence in the afterlife,
however conceived.127 Burying was seen as less traumatic than burning.
But both were understood to produce hard mineral remains, which were
placed under the earth, not scattered over it.
This desire for quiet sepulchre was in part a response to the ram-
pant sadism of animal shows and public executions and to the growing
moral outrage they generated.128 Concern for a peaceful end was also
expressed in the traditional practice of funerary banquets, celebrated
on tombs and understood as feeding and pacifying the dead.129 Indeed
the Greek and Roman dead were fed in more direct ways as well; food
was left on tombs, libations were poured there, and tubes were some-
times placed in graves directly over the mouths of corpses.130 Stories
circulated of the dead (especially those who died violently or were not
properly buried) roaming abroad in search of food and drink. Both Jews
and Romans spoke of the grave—and of extrapolations from it, such as
Sheol or Hades—as devouring the departed.131 Hence corpses were seen
as eating and as “being eaten by” the earth. Early Christian polemicists
occasionally spoke not only of beasts and pagans eating Christians in
the arena but even of graves “eating” the dead and of soul “being buried
in” or “eaten by” body when a child is conceived.132

127. As Paxton points out (Christianizing Death, p. 20), funerary rituals protected
both the living from the dead and the dead from demons.
128. See Potter, “Martyrdom as Spectacle”; Barton, “Sacramentum”; and eadem,
Sorrows of the Romans. On violence and pain in this period, see Jacques Paul, in
L’église et la culture en occident, ixe–xiie siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1986), vol. 2, pp. 674–83; Michel Rouche, “The Early Middle Ages in the
West,” in A History of Private Life, vol. 1: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed. Paul
Veyne, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1987], pp. 485–517; and Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion, chap. 2, and chap. 3 at
nn. 100–3. And see n. 132 below.
129. See Nock, “Cremation and Burial,” and Toynbee, Death and Burial. On
funerary meals, see Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques, pp. 123–49, and Joan M. Petersen,
The Dialogues of Gregory the Great in Their Late Antique Cultural Background
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), p. 142.
130. Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism, pp. 44–56.
131. In many different layers of the Old Testament, the grave or the underworld
or even Yahweh are spoken of as “eating” the dead; see Nicolas J. Tromp, Primitive
Conceptions of Death and the Nether World in the Old Testament (Rome: Pontifical
Biblical Institute, 1969), pp. 8, 21–32, 107, 172, 191–95, 212.
132. See above nn. 47 (Athenagoras sees cannibalism as making oneself a “tomb”
for others), 77 (Tertullian sees God as “devouring” the martyrs), 103 through 105
(the Didascalia connects celebration of the Eucharist on the grave with not only
survival but also redemption of bodiliness), and below chapter 2, n. 121 (Jerome fears
transmigration of souls as a kind of chain consumption). And see Ariès, Hour of Our
 54 the patristic background

Early Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and the Koran all speak of the
body that rises as bones or a seed.133 Christian exegesis, like rabbinic,
came to read the dry bones of Ezekiel 37.1–14 as referring not to the
nation of Israel but to individuals.134 The early rabbis taught that the
person would rise when the “nut” of the spinal column was watered or
fed by the dew of resurrection and that the bones of the just would roll
through special underground tunnels to be reassembled in Jerusalem
at the sound of the last trumpet—ideas that clearly reflect the Jew-
ish practice of ossilegium and reburial in the Holy Land.135 Without a

Death, p. 58 and passim. The curious polemic of Arnobius (Adversus nationes, ed. A.
Reifferscheid, CSEL 4 [Vienna: C. Gerold, 1875]), which argues that God must bestow
immortality on the soul as well as resurrection on the body, voices violent rejection
of embodiment. See bk. 2, chaps. 39–43, pp. 79–82, which questions whether God
could have sent souls into bodies to “be buried in the germs of men, spring from the
womb, . . . keep up the silliest wailings, draw the breasts in sucking, besmear and
bedaub themselves with their own filth, . . . to lie, to cheat, to deceive . . .,” and details
the horrors of the arena as special proof of human depravity. Amobius says spectators
at the animal shows delight in blood and dismemberment, and “grind with their teeth
and give to their utterly insatiable maw” pieces of animals who have eaten humans
(trans. H. Bryce, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6 [reprint, Eerdmans, 1978], pp. 449 and
450). In bk. 2, chap. 37, Amobius speaks of the embodiment of souls as a process of
going to earthly places, “tenebrosis ut corporibus inuolutae inter pituitas et sangui-
nem degerent, inter stercoris hos utres et saccati obscenissimas serias umoris. . . .”
(CSEL 4, pp. 77–78). Arnobius’s pupil, Lactantius, who also has a strong sense of
body-soul dualism, gives a truly horrific description of the brutality of the arena; see
Institutes, bk. 6, chaps. 20, in Lactantius, Opera omnia, ed. Samuel Brandt, CSEL 19
and 27, pt. 2 (Prague: Tempsky, 1890; reprint, Johnson, 1965), pp. 555–62.
133. Koran, Surah 56.60–61. See Onians, Origins, pp. 287–89, and Ringgren, “Res-
urrection,” p. 349.
134. See n. 9 above.
135. Babylonian Talmud (Soncino ed.), Kethuboth, 111a-111b, in which a discus-
sion of bones rolling through cavities to reach Jerusalem for resurrection is followed
not only by the sprouting wheat analogy to explain our rising but also by extravagant
descriptions of fertility in the afterlife that parallel those of Papias (enormous kernels
of grain, grapes, etc.). For the use of Ecclesiastes 12.5 (“the almond shall blossom”)
to refer to the “nut” of the spinal column growing into the person at the resurrec-
tion, see Midrash: Rabbah (3d ed., New York: Soncino, 1983), Leviticus Rabbah 18.1;
Genesis Rabbah 28.3. On some of these passages, see Moore, Judaism, vol. 2, pp.
377–87. See also Dov Zlotnick, trans., The Tractate “Mourning” (Semahot) (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), especially chaps. 2, 8, 9, 12, and 13, pp. 35–36,
57–60, 71–72, 80–85, which clearly reflects concern about corpse mortification and
scattering and connects this to the practice of ossilegium and return of the bones to
Palestine (the text may be mid-eighth century, but it may be much earlier).
On Jewish ossilegium, see Joseph A. Callaway, “Burials in Ancient Palestine:
From the Stone Age to Abraham,” The Biblical Archaeologist 26, no. 3 (1963): 74–91;
Eric M. Meyers, “Secondary Burials in Palestine,” The Biblical Archaeologist 33,
no. 1 (1970): 2–29; idem, Jewish Ossuaries: Reburial and Rebirth (Rome: Biblical
Institute Press, 1971); Pau Figueras, Decorated Jewish Ossuaries (Leiden: Brill, 1983).
These works make it clear that very different understandings of person and of death
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 55

homeland—a clear sense of holy place to focus eschatological dreams—

Christians projected into heaven their hope of reassemblage and sprout-
ing. But their basic images retained the notion that the person in some
sense survives in hard, material particles, no matter how finely ground
or how widely scattered. The grave will not consume us. It cannot be
irrelevant to such imagery that the funerary practices of Romans and
Jews—both cremation and inhumation—focused on the production of
hard remains (ashes and bones) or that both groups found the idea of
scattering these abhorrent and increasingly emphasized gentle burial.
Nor can it be irrelevant that both practice and polemic in the Med-
iterranean world closely connected ideas of eating and ideas of sep-
ulchre.136 Christians first opposed then adopted the Roman funerary
meal. By the fourth century, the Eucharist was celebrated in graveyards,
and the practice continued at least until the fifth century, despite some
episcopal opposition.137 The custom of placing the bodies of the mar-
tyrs in altars meant that the mass came to be celebrated over the “blood
of the martyrs,” even in churches.138
Moreover, cannibalism—the consumption in which survival of body is
most deeply threatened—was a charge pagans leveled against Christians
and Christians against pagans. Polemicists for both positions assumed
that cannibalism is the ultimate barbarism, the ultimate horror.139 To
eat (if it were really possible) would be to destroy—and to take over—the
power of the consumed.140 Surely the odd assurances of Theophilus and
Athenagoras that this cannot happen suggest their fear that it can.

and resurrection could attach to the bones; they seem, however, to agree that ossi-
legium was compatible with a notion of the human being as a unitary individual
(nephesh) even in death; see Meyers, Jewish Ossuaries, pp. 89 and 92.
136. On the prominence of metaphors of consumption in the Greco-Roman world,
see Wilfred Parsons, “Lest Men, Like Fishes . . .,” Traditio 3 (1940): 380–88, and Bruce
Dickins, “Addendum to ‘Lest Men, Like Fishes…,” Traditio 6 (1948): 356–7. See also
Maggie Kilgour, From Communism to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of
Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 20–62, a suggestive
analysis that nonetheless misses much of the immediate context of the works it
considers. The same is true of Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, which underlines the
connection of eucharistie theology and ideas of the afterlife for a much later period.
For an analysis of funerary meals, and funerary rituals generally, as ritual processes
of separation and incorporation, see Paxton, Christianizing Death, pp. 5–9, 32–33,
and the works cited there.
137. Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques, pp. 123–49.
138. Grabar, Martyrium, vol. 1, p. 35
139. See above nn. 33, 83, 84, and 132, and Grant, “Resurrection,” p. 197ff.
140. On cannibalism as a way of taking over the power of the consumed (with the
concomitant idea that torturing the one who is finally eaten increases his power),
see Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System
 56 the patristic background

Such fears may indeed provide a deeper link than has previously
been noticed between early eucharistic theology and the doctrine of
the resurrection.141 Eucharist, like resurrection, was a victory over the
grave. Tertullian and Irenaeus expressed in paradox what Athenagoras
expressed in (questionable) science: even if executioners feed our bodies
to the beasts and then serve those beasts up on banquet tables, we are
not truly eaten. To rise with all our organs and pieces intact is a vic-
tory over digestion—not only the digestion threatened by torturers and
cannibals but most of all that proffered by natural process itself. Small
wonder then that the funerary Eucharist, at first condemned as a con-
tinuation of pagan piety, came to be seen as a palpable assurance that
our flesh unites with the undigested and indigestible flesh of Christ in
heaven. The Eucharist is a guarantee that the risen body we shall all
become cannot be consumed.
Christianity spread among peoples for whom bodily change was
theoretically inexplicable and to whom corpses were horrifying. For
Romans and Jews (although in different ways), the cadaver that lay rot-
ting in the grave was in some sense the locus of person; its putrefaction
was both terrifying and polluting.142 Moreover, decay was merely the
final permutation in a body that was forever changing (eating, grow-
ing, giving birth, sickening, aging), and the more Christian apologists
adopted the natural philosophy available in the ancient world, the less
explicable such flux seemed.143
Change was the ontological scandal to ancient philosophers. Their
basic effort was to fix identity in a world where (as Tertullian understood
Aristotle to say) change meant ceasing to be one thing and becoming
another. With such a notion of change, bodily process was fundamentally

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) pp. 83–122 and passim; and my Holy
Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 30, 319 n. 75, and p. 412 n. 77.
141. For a fine statement of the importance of early, literalist, eucharistic theol-
ogy (from a point of view different from mine), see A. H. C. Van Eijk, “The Gospel
of Philip and Clement of Alexandria: Gnostic and Ecclesiastical Theology on the
Resurrection and the Eucharist,” Vigiliae Christianae 25 (1971): 94–120.
142. See above, nn. 47, 119, 124, 129, and 132. The Jewish philosopher Philo said:
“The body is wicked and a plotter against the soul, and is always a corpse and a dead
thing. . . . Each of us does nothing but carry a corpse about, since the soul lifts up
and bears without effort the body which is in itself a corpse.” See E. R. Goodenough,
“Philo on Immortality,” Harvard Theological Review 39 (1946): 97.
143. See Grant, “Resurrection,” pp. 120–30 and 188–208; Henry Chadwick, “Ori-
gen, Celsus, and the Resurrection of the Body,” Harvard Theological Review 41
(1948): 83–102; Barnard, “Athenagoras: Background,” pp. 8–12; Alain Le Boulluec,
“De la croissance selon les stoiciens à la résurrection selon Origène,” Revue des
études grecques 88 (1975): 143–55; Ariès, Hour of Death, p. 95 and passim.
 Resurrection and Martyrdom 57

mysterious: upon close examination, either the process or the body

tended to disappear.144 If digestion, for example, was real transforma-
tion, the body was not an entity at all but merely a place or a moment
through which food passed on its way to excrement or rot. If, on the other
hand, the body as entity survived, real absorption of food seemed not to
occur. One could hypothesize that particles of flesh or blood moved far-
ther apart to make room for particles of bread or beef to come in between,
but how could a particle of, for example, cow become Socrates?145
Second-century apologists such as Theophilus of Antioch and Athe-
nagoras answered these arguments by the (to modern taste) unsatisfac-
tory expedient of denying true material change. Irenaeus and Tertullian
tried to sublimate the contradiction into paradox by asserting the power
of God.146 But biological process remained a threat to identity. Resur-
rection therefore had to replace process with stasis, to bring matter
(changeable by definition) to changelessness. It had to restore body qua
body, while transforming it to permanence and impassibility. The prom-
ise of spiritual body or immutable physicality remained an oxymoron.
That oxymoron went back to 1 Corinthians 15.44: “sown a natural
body, raised a spiritual body.” But, as we have seen, both the Pauline
concept and the seed metaphor that expressed it came, by the early
third century, to reflect concerns foreign to Paul. The seed that rises
again as a sheaf of wheat came to express both the idea that material
continuity guarantees identity and the notion that salvation is victory
over partition, rot, decay—over change itself.
The transformation of the Pauline seed metaphor occurred against
the background of other changes in ideas. By the early third century,
polemicists for the resurrection of the flesh assumed a dualist anthro-
pology that saw the human being as a union of soul and body; they

144. Aristotle, of course, understood that digestion and growth threatened the per-
sistence of the corporeal subject. In De generatione et corruptione (1.5 [320a–322a],
trans. E. S. Forster, Aristotle: On Sophistical Refutations . . ., Loeb Classical Library
[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955], pp. 204–21) he tried to system-
atize change so that augmentation and diminution did not affect the body, which
was thus understood to endure. Various Stoic thinkers, picking up on this, tried to
maintain some kind of persisting substance. See Le Boulluec, “De la croissance . . .,”
p. 147. My point here is not to assess how successful the ancient efforts were philo-
sophically but to indicate that the issue continued to be a problem.
145. See below chapter 3 at n. 60, and the passage from Aristotle’s De gen. cited
in n. 144 above.
146. Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Caro salutis cardo: Shaping the Person in Early
Christian Thought,” History of Religions 30, no. 1 (1990): 35, makes the important
point that pivotal concerns tend to appear early in a tradition but are often elaborated
only slowly.
 58 the patristic background

also assumed that soul was in some sense immortal although several
of them held, as had some authors of Jewish apocalyptic literature, that
immortality is a gift from God, not an inherent characteristic of soul.147
Nonetheless neither body-soul dualism nor the assumption of immor-
tality solved the problem of survival of self. A theory of bodily return
was, to these thinkers, essential. What polemicists for physical resur-
rection urged against both pagans and other Christians was a literal,
materialist understanding of body that seemed to some philosophically
untenable and theologically unnecessary. I have argued here that close
attention to the metaphors in which this understanding is expressed
tells us a good deal about what body really meant in the polemics of
the years around 200.
Changes in resurrection metaphors to stress rot and rupture, fol-
lowed by regurgitation and impassibility, suggest that the body that
rises is quintessentially the martyr’s body, in danger not just from pain
and mutilation but also from scattering, dishonor, even cannibalism,
after death. Resurrection is victory over partition and putrefaction; it
is both the anesthesia of glory and the reunion of particles of self. Res-
urrection guarantees not only the justice denied to the living; it guar-
antees the rest and reassemblage—the burial—denied to the dead. The
early third-century understanding of body seems thus to owe a good
deal to the context of persecution. It owes something as well to slow
shifts and deep continuities in attitudes toward the cadaver, and toward
biological process, in the Mediterranean world of the third century.
By 400, the persecutions had been over for almost a century, and few
could remember a time when wealthy and prominent pagan citizens
had cremated their dead. When controversy over the resurrection of the
flesh erupted again, as we shall see in my next chapter, new issues were
at stake and a new context was reflected. But the deep—and deeply
inconsistent—conception of identity as material continuity, charac-
teristic of thinkers as different as Athenagoras and Irenaeus, lasted on
in the disputes of the late fourth and early fifth centuries and set the
agenda for medieval theology.

147. This was the position taken by both Arnobius and Lactantius; see n. 132 above.
 Two
Resurrection, Relic Cult, and
Asceticism: The Debates of 400
and Their Background

The Legacy of the Second Century

in the years around 200, Irenaeus of Lyons (writing
in Greek) and Tertullian of Carthage (writing in Latin)
defended a literal, materialistic understanding of gen-
eral resurrection against those who argued for a spiritual
understanding of the risen body. The particles of our
flesh—nourished and supported in this life by a eucharistic bread that
was literally the flesh of Christ—would be reassembled by God at the
end of time in such a way that no detail of bodily structure was lost,
neither genitals, nor intestines, nor eyelashes, nor toes. Although only
the flesh of the virtuous would don the garment of glory, all flesh would
rise to receive its just deserts. Indeed the torn and twisted bodies of the
martyrs might—at the very moment of execution—begin to shine with
the splendid impassibility of the Transfiguration. Tertullian and Ire-
naeus drew on a host of images to express their conviction that exactly
the flesh that is digested in the arena or the grave is transmuted to
unchanging glory at the resurrection.
Nonetheless a paradox remained. Body is flux and frustration, a locus
of pain and process. If it becomes impassible and incorruptible, how is
it still body? If it remains body, how is its resurrection either possible
or desirable?1 To put it very simply: if there is change, how can there be

1. For the argument that the real attack on resurrection came not from Gnostic
spiritualizing but from pagan notions of body and matter as ludicrous and disgusting,
see Barnard, “Athenagoras: Background,” pp. 8–12.
 60 the patristic background

continuity and hence identity? If there is continuity, how will there be

change and hence glory? Or to rephrase the issue in the images second-
century apologists used far more frequently than technical philosophical
argument: if we rise as a sheaf of wheat sprouts up from a seed buried in
the earth, in what sense is the sheaf (new in its matter and in its struc-
ture) the same as and therefore a redemption of the seed? If we rise as a
statue, which has been broken or melted down and then reassembled or
reforged by the artist who first made it, how similar will the new statue
be to the old in either material or design and why is such similarity sal-
vation? Despite the conceptual and rhetorical power of writers such as
Tertullian and Irenaeus, a problem remained.
We are often told that the doctrine of bodily resurrection did not
become a major topic of controversy again until the irascible Jerome
(egged on by Epiphanius) flailed out at the Origenists in the last years of
the fourth century.2 But theological writing between 200 and 400 makes
it clear that the idea of resurrection continued to generate puzzlement,
confusion, and incredulity in Christianity’s pagan opponents as well as
among the faithful.3 Theologians such as Hilary of Poitiers, Cyril of Jeru-
salem, or Gregory of Nyssa not only summarized and repeatedly refuted
pagan attacks; they also expressed exasperation at the “silly questions”
and “sterile fears” of ordinary believers.4 Duval may be right that Jerome
lifted his references to the queries of Christians (like so much else) from

2. Dewart, Death and Resurrection, and Van Unnik “Epistle to Rheginos,” p.

143. And see chapter 1, n. 91 above. For Elizabeth Clark’s argument that the late
fourth-century debate moves rapidly away from the issue of resurrection, see below
at n. 117.
3. At the end of the sixth century, Gregory the Great still found people who rejected
or doubted the doctrine. In his answer, he underlined the question of identity, pointing
out that I am not “I” if I rise in an aerial body. See Morals on Job, bk. 14, chaps. 55–58,
Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne [hereafter PL], 75 (Paris:
Migne, 1849), cols. 1075–79. Gregory asserts that God can sort out one kind of digested
flesh from another and one kind of dust from another. See Homilies on Ezekiel, bk.
2, homily 8, paragrs. 6–10, PL 76 (Paris, 1849), cols. 1030–34. Gregory devotes much
attention to the seed metaphor, interpreting it so as to make it account for identity
by material continuity; he also lays much stress on dissolution into particles or ele-
ments (which themselves survive) and stresses reassemblage of these particles at res-
urrection. He is fond of the metaphor of the pot and stresses its hardening in glory.
See n. 112 below.
4. Hilary of Poitiers, Sur Matthieu, chap. 5, paragr. 8, trans. and ed. Jean Doignon,
Sc 254 and 258 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1978 and 1979), vol. 1, pp. 157–59. Cyril of
Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, lecture 4, paragrs. 30–31, lecture 18, paragrs 2–18,
in Patrologiae cursus completus: Series graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne [hereafter PG], 33
(Paris: Migne, 1857), cols. 491–94 and 1019–40. Much of Gregory of Nyssa’s On the
Soul and the Resurrection is devoted to answering objections. For his awareness that
some of these are the same as those Paul met from the Corinthians, see Gregory, De
anima et resurrectione, PG 46 (Paris, 1858), cols. 151–54.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 61

Tertullian,5 but the major exponents of bodily resurrection throughout

the period—Methodius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephraim the Syriac,
Macarius Magnes, Ambrose, Augustine—clearly reflect real discussion
with worried believers who continued to raise the sort of objections Paul
and Clement had met from the first-century inhabitants of Corinth.6
Body is worse than dung, asserted the pagan Celsus (quoting Heraclitus);
it is “a disgusting vessel of urine” and “bag of shit,” said the Christian
apologist Arnobius.7 It is perpetual mutation, explained the theologian
Basil. It can be the food of fish or carrion beasts or even of human beings,
said Cyril of Jerusalem and Macarius (quoting pagan objections); how
then will it be reassembled? Who would want it back, asked Ambrose; it
is only a wretched prison for the soul, which aches to escape from pain.8

5. Yves-Marie Duval, “Tertullien contre Origène sur la résurrection de la chair

dans le Contra Johannem Hierosolymitanum, 23–36 de saint Jerome,” Revue des
études augustiniennes 17, nos. 3–4 (1971): 227–78, especially p. 245. See also Henri
Marrou, “La résurrection . . . et les apologists,” Lumière et vie 3 (1952): 83–92, on use
by later thinkers of objections considered by earlier apologists.
6. Basil, In psalmos: In ps. XLIV, paragr. 1, and In ps. CXIV, paragr. 5, PG 29 (Paris,
1857), cols. 387–88 and 491–92, says perpetual bodily mutation is a problem; see
Michel, “Résurrection,” col. 2534. Macarius Magnes [or of Magnesia] in his Apocri-
ticus (which may be from around 400) gives the objections of pagan philosophy (which
may be those of Porphyry); see C. Blondel, ed., Macarii Magnetis quae supersunt ex
inedito codice (Paris; Édition Klincksieck, 1876) and T. W. Crafer, trans., The Apocrit-
icus of Macarius Magnes (London: SPCK, 1919), whose translation reorders the work.
On problems in dating and attributing this text see Johannes Quasten, Patrology,
vol. 3: The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature from the Council of Nicaea to
the Council of Chalcedon (Utrecht, Antwerp, and Westminster, Maryland: Spectrum
and Newman Press, 1960), pp. 486–88. On whether or not the borrowings are from
Porphyry, see T. D. Barnes, “Porphyry Against the Christians,” Journal of Theologi-
cal Studies n.s. 24 (1973): 424–42, especially pp. 424–30, and R. Goulet, “Porphyre et
Macaire de Magnésie,” Studia patristica 15 (1984): 448–52, both of whom argue that
the objections are not to be understood as direct quotations from Porphyry. Macarius
admits (bk. 4, chap. 30, ed. Blondel, p. 220; trans. Crafer, p. 155) that the doctrine
of the resurrection is a difficulty. Ambrose, De excessu fratris Satyri libri duo, bk.
2, chaps. 102, 114, 121, PL 16 (Paris, 1880), cols. 1403, 1407–9, and in Otto Faller,
ed., CSEL 73 (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1955), pp. 305–6, 314, 317–18, warns
against asking foolish and detailed questions about the resurrection and the resurrec-
tion body. On Methodius, Ephraim, and Augustine, see below.
7. For Origen, quoting Celsus, quoting Heraclitus, see Origen, Contra Celsum, bk.
5, chap. 24, PG 11 (Paris, 1857), cols. 1217–18; and trans. Henry Chadwick, Contra
Celsum (reprint with corrections, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979),
p. 282. For similar worry about decay, see Aphrahat, Demonstration 8, paragrs. 1–3,
cited in n. 49 below. On Arnobius, see Adversus nationes, ed. A. Reifferscheid, CSEL
4, bk. 2, chap. 37, pp. 77–78; and chapter 1, n. 132, above. Macarius Magnes, Apo-
criticus, bk. 4, chap. 24, ed. Blondel, p. 205; trans. Crafer, p. 154, gives as a pagan
objection the argument that God cannot do what is impossible, irrational, or evil;
therefore he will not stand by and watch the beautiful heavens melt while restoring
the “rotten and corrupt” bodies of human beings.
8. See nn. 4 and 6 above and Ambrose, De excessu Satyri, bk. 2, chap. 20, PL 16,
cols. 1377–78, and CSEL 73, p. 260. On the theme of body as prison (also trap and
 62 the patristic background

It is important for us to be clear that such discussions and concerns

lasted throughout the third and fourth centuries. The fundamental con-
tradiction between identity and change was not solved by any of the great
fourth-century exponents of bodily resurrection—neither by Hilary of
Poitiers, nor by Gregory of Nyssa, nor by Ephraim the Syriac, nor even
by Augustine. Each—in rhetoric and metaphor, and sometimes (but not
often) in logical argument—simply clung to both sides of the paradox.
There must be something that rises; there is no resurrection without
identity.9 We know we are body; therefore body must rise. But there must
be process and transformation as well, because the risen body must be
radically changed. Unless something can change and still be the same
thing, there can be no rising to glory of the corpse that has gone down
into the grave. The enigmatic figure Macarius Magnes, for example, gives
a vivid picture of the entire creation, groaning forever in flux. He associ-
ates decay, consumption, and fertility, even asserting that cannibalism is
not horrible, for the child in the womb eats its mother in order to live. Yet
Macarius also asserts the permanence of body fragments.10 Resurrected
flesh is simply smelted out by God like bits of gold or silver from clay.

If then the power of fire is so strong . . . that it preserves the essence of

each undestroyed, even though the gold has fallen into countless cavi-
ties and is dissolved into endless fragments and scattered into mire or

tomb) of the soul, see Pierre Courcelle, Connais-toi toi-même: De Socrate à saint
Bernard (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 345–414.
9. See Van Eijk, “ ‘Only That Can Rise Which Has Previously Fallen.’ “ John of
Damascus sums up the argument; his formulation becomes the locus classicus for
scholastic authors of the high Middle Ages (De fide orthodoxa, bk. 4, chap. 27, PG
94 [Paris, 1860], cols. 1219–28, esp. col. 1219).
10. Macarius’s summary of the pagan objections to resurrection is a powerful
statement of the understanding of natural process as perpetual flux (see Apocriticus,
bk. 4, chap. 24 [objection] and chap. 30 [answer], ed. Blondel, pp. 204–5 and 220–227;
trans. Crafer, p. 153–63). Macarius’s position on the cannibalism issue is complex.
In discussing pagan objections to John 6.54 (“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of
Man . . .”), he meets the argument that cannibalism is bestial by asserting that it is
“not strange and horrible” at all, for the fetus eats its mother in order to grow, and
the child drinks her blood in nursing (bk. 3, chaps. 15, 16, 23, and 24, ed. Blondel,
pp. 94–96 and 103–10; trans. Crafer, pp. 78–87). Repeatedly he draws an analogy
between Christ’s body and the earth and the products of the earth, assimilating all
these to fertility. He thus suggests that bodies are really eaten by earth or worms or
beasts; consumption and incorporation are not, to Macarius, charged with quite the
horror they seem to stimulate in other fourth-century writers. Nonetheless, he also
holds that bits are regurgitated for reassemblage (see bk. 4, chaps. 24 and 30, cited
above). This would, of course, suggest (as does the possibly contemporary argument
of Augustine) that on some level digestion does not really digest.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 63

clay, in heaps of earth or of dung; what are we to say about Him who
ordained the nature of the fire? . . . Would he not have the power with-
out even effort to change man . . . who is contained in matter of vari-
ous kinds, and to set before Him safe and sound those who have . . .
been eaten by wild beasts or birds, those who have been dissolved into
fine dust . . . ? Will He be found to be less effective than the fire?11

Gregory of Nyssa holds that we rise like angels, without age or sex.
But he also argues that we are reconstituted from exactly the same
particles we were in life, although it is difficult to see how God can use
such a large number of bits or why he will do so to create such a radi-
cally different body.12
Thus the contradiction between continuity and transfiguration was
not resolved; the technical question of how identity survives through
process was not answered; specific quibbles about exactly which bits
will be reassembled were not met. I stress this because answers were
available. In the first half of the third century, one of the greatest theo-
logians of the ancient world, Origen of Alexandria, gave a highly sat-
isfactory answer to the problem of identity, and he gave it in Pauline
language. Employing in new ways the seed and garment metaphors pop-
ular since the second century, Origen accounted for identity through
dynamic process and built radical change into resurrection.13

Origen and Methodius: The Seed versus the Statue

There is, of course, room for disagreement about what Origen actually
said and what he meant.14 His treatise on the resurrection has been lost,
and some of the relevant passages in his other works survive only in

11. Apocriticus, bk. 4, chap. 30, ed. Blondel, pp. 223–24; trans. Crafer, p. 159.
12. On Gregory, see below, pp. 81–86. Gregory’s position has been much debated;
see Jean Danielou, “La résurrection des corps chez Gregoire de Nysse,” Vigiliae
Christianae 7, no. 3 (1953): 154–70; Gerhart B. Ladner, “The Philosophical Anthro-
pology of Saint Gregory of Nyssa,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1958): 61–94; T.
J. Dennis, “Gregory on the Resurrection of the Body,” in The Easter Sermons of
Gregory of Nyssa: Translation and Commentary, ed. A. Spira and C. Klock (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1981), pp. 55–80; Dewart, Death
and Resurrection, pp. 147–56. For bibliography on Gregory, see Margarete Alten-
burger and Friedhelm Mann, eds., Bibliographie zu Gregor von Nyssa: Editionen,
Übersetzungen, und Literatur (Leiden: Brill, 1988).
13. These were the basic Pauline metaphors of 1 Corinthians 15 and 2 Corinthi-
ans 5 and had been crucial to debate over the resurrection since Tertullian.
14. See, for example, Dewart, Death and Resurrection, pp. 121–22.
 64 the patristic background

Latin translations that revise him in directions his fourth-century editor

Rufinus considered to be more orthodox. Nonetheless, I am convinced
by the recent work of Henri Crouzel and Jon Dechow that Origen saw
himself as treading a middle way between, on the one hand, Jews, mille-
narian Christians, and pagans who (he thought) understood bodily resur-
rection as the reanimation of dead flesh and, on the other hand, Gnostics
and Hellenists who (he thought) denied any kind of ultimate reality
either to resurrection or to body.15 Using the seed metaphor from 1 Cor-
inthians 15, the reference to our angelic life in heaven from Matthew
22.29–33, and the suggestion in 2 Corinthians 5.4 that we are tents or
tabernacles that must take on a covering of incorruption, Origen argued
that we will have a body in heaven but a spiritual and luminous one.
In his commentary on Psalm 1 (a passage that all his recent interpreters
believe to be our best indication of his ideas), Origen says:

Because each body is held together by [virtue of] a nature that assimi-
lates into itself from without certain things for nourishment and, cor-
responding to the things added, excretes other things . . ., the material
substratum is never the same. For this reason, river is not a bad name
for the body since, strictly speaking, the initial substratum in our
bodies is perhaps not the same for even two days.
Yet the real Paul or Peter, so to speak, is always the same—[and] not
merely in [the] soul, whose substance neither flows through us nor has
anything ever added [to it]—even if the nature of the body is in a state
of flux, because the form (eidos) characterizing the body is the same,
just as the features constituting the corporeal quality of Peter and Paul
remain the same. According to this quality, not only scars from child-
hood remain on the bodies but also certain other peculiarities, [like]
skin blemishes and similar things.16
15. The bibliography on Origen is immense; see Henri Crouzel, Bibliographie cri-
tique d’Origène (The Hague: Steenbrugge, 1971), and supplement (1982); and idem,
“The Literature on Origen, 1970–88,” Theological Studies 49 (1988): 499–516. I have
been particularly influenced by Chadwick, “Origen, Celsus, and Resurrection”; Henri
Crouzel, “Les critiques adressées par Methode et ses contemporains à la doctrine ori-
genienne du corps réssuscité,” Gregorianum 53 (1972); 679–716; idem, “La doctrine
origenienne du corps réssuscité,” Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 31 (1980): 175–
200 and 241–66; idem, Origen: The Life and Thought of the First Great Theologian,
trans. A. S. Worrall (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989); Jon F. Dechow, Dogma
and Mysticism in Early Christianity: Epiphanius of Cyprus and the Legacy of Origen
(Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1988); Peter Brown, Body and Society, pp.
160–77; Elizabeth A. Clark, “New Perspectives on the Origenist Controversy: Human
Embodiment and Ascetic Strategies,” Church History 59 (1990): 145–62.
16. Origen, Fragment on Psalm 1.5, in Methodius, De resurrectione, bk. 1, chaps.
22–23, in Methodius, ed. Nathanael Bonwetsch, Die griechischen christlichen Seh-
riftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte [hereafter GCS], 27 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1917),
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 65

Origen here accepts the antique concept of the body as flux, expressed
particularly in his day in the Galenic version of humoral theory. This
fluctuating mass of matter cannot rise, he argues; it is not even the
same from one day to the next.17 And even if the bits of flesh present at
the moment of death could survive, why would God arbitrarily decide
to reanimate those bits as opposed to all the others that have flowed
through the body between childhood and old age?
But, says Origen, there is a body; it survives from the moment of
conception until death, taking on different qualities and adaptable to
different circumstances yet recognizably itself.18 This body is not soul,
for soul—exactly because it is not material—never changes.19 Rather
body, as Origen understands it, changes in life; therefore it certainly
changes after death.20 He writes:

And just as we would . . . need to have gills and other endowment[s] of

fish if it were necessary for us to live underwater in the sea, so those
who are going to inherit [the] kingdom of heaven and be in superior
places must have spiritual bodies. The previous form does not disap-
pear, even if its transition to the more glorious [state] occurs, just as
the form of Jesus, Moses and Elijah in the Transfiguration was not [a]
different [one] than what it had been.
Moreover . . . “it is sown a psychic body, it is raised a spiritual
body” (1 Cor. 15.44). . . . [A]lthough the form is saved, we are going
to put away nearly [every] earthly quality in the resurrection . . . [for]
“flesh and blood cannot inherit [the] kingdom . . .” (1 Cor. 15.50). Simi-
larly, for the saint there will indeed be [a body] preserved by him who
once endued the flesh with form, but [there will] no longer [be] flesh;

pp. 244–48, and Epiphanius, Haereses, bk. 2, tom. 1, haeres. 64, paragrs. 14–15, PG
41 (Paris, 1858), cols. 1089–92; trans. Dechow, in Dogma and Mysticism, pp. 373–74.
17. On Christian use of Galen, see Barnard, “Athenagoras: Background,” pp. 6–18.
On the Stoic idea of the body as flux, see Le Boulluec, “De la croissance . . .,” pp.
152–53; on the importance of natural philosophical ideas about flux as background
to discussion of resurrection, see Grant, “Resurrection,” and Chadwick, “Origen,
Celsus, and Resurrection,” pp. 86–91.
18. For Origen’s explicit attention to the problem of identity, see De principiis,
bk. 2, chap. 10, paragr. 1, and bk. 3, chap. 6; ed. Paul Kötschau, Origenes Werke, vol.
5, GCS, pp. 172–74 and 270–91. 1 Corinthians 15.35–38 was central to the concern
for identity; see Crouzel, “Les critiques,” p. 680.
19. That is, in the sense of corruption. Souls, of course, progress or regress mor-
ally. See Crouzel, “Les critiques,” p. 689.
20. The final goal, however, is changelessness—that is, the transition to a “spiri-
tual body” that cannot become a corpse. See Dialogue with Heraclides, ed. and trans.
Jean Scherer, Entretien d’Origène avec Heraclide, Sc 67 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf,
1960), pp. 66–69.
 66 the patristic background

yet the very thing which was once being characterized in the flesh will
be characterized in the spiritual body.21

This is not the thirteenth-century Thomistic use of hylomorphism,

which (as we shall see in my sixth chapter) lodges identity in Aristote-
lian form or soul and thereby produces both an ingenious solution and
some complex problems in accounting for continuity of body between
this life, the grave, and the life of heaven.22 Rather Origen’s body is, as
Crouzel has argued, a substratum whose identity is guaranteed by a cor-
poreal eidos. This eidos is a combination of Platonic form, or plan, with
Stoic seminal reason (an internal principle of growth or development).23
A pattern that organizes the flux of matter and yet has its own inherent
capacity for growth, it is (although I introduce the modern analogy with
extreme hesitation) a bit like a genetic code.24
Origen thus solved the problem of identity more successfully than
any other thinker of Christian antiquity. And it is important to see
what the solution accomplished. By accounting for the permanence
of a body through material flux but attributing to that body its own
dynamism, Origen’s theory recognized that both the natural world and
the human person really change. Growth now belonged to a self; pro-
cess was fully real and could be fully good. The Pauline seed metaphor
could therefore refer to fertility rather than to decay;25 natural changes,
such as the development of a fetus or the flowering of a fig tree—both
images Origen used—became unambiguously appropriate to describe
the journey toward heaven.26 Yet the heaven to which our selves will
go was understood as very far from earth, and the body, whose identity
was guaranteed, became at the same time more fluid and potential,
indeterminate and changeable.

21. Origen, Fragment on Psalm 1.5; trans. by Dechow, Dogma and Mysticism, pp.
374–75; see above n. 16. See also De principiis, bk. 2, chap. 10, paragr. 2, pp. 174–75,
and n. 25 below.
22. Origen’s body is not Aquinas’s soul as substantial form, nor is it the forma
corporeitatis of Bonaventure or Henry of Ghent. (It allows for more change than the
latter.) It is closer to Aquinas’s second matter. But it is not that either, because it
identifies logos with material substance. See Crouzel, “La doctrine origenienne,” p.
247, and below chapter 6, pp. 256–61.
23. Crouzel, “La doctrine origenienne.” See also idem, Origen.
24. There is always a danger in modern analogies, because they may attribute
more clarity and consistency to ancient thinkers than they actually achieved.
25. See De principiis, bk. 2, chap. 10, paragr. 3, pp. 175–76; and Contra Celsum,
bk. 5, chaps. 18, 19, 23; bk. 7, chap. 32; PG 11, cols. 1205–10, 1215–18, and 1465–68;
and trans. Chadwick, pp. 277–79, 281–82, and 420–21.
26. On these images, see Crouzel, “La doctrine origenienne,” pp. 247–49, quoting
Origen on 1 Corinthians and on Matthew.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 67

Origen indeed vacillated on how far the transformation of the body

would go.27 In his commentary on Matthew (which survives in the orig-
inal Greek), he suggested that the resurrection bodies of the blessed will
become “like the bodies of angels, ethereal and of a shining light”28—
an idea that led the Second Council of Constantinople in the middle
of the sixth century to condemn him for teaching that we will rise as
spheres.29 He argued that our resurrection bodies will be without age
or sex, for certainly we will not grow or excrete or copulate in heaven;
he even suggested that we will lose all memory of the relationships of
earth.30 Origen understood the body to carry through the flux and pro-
cess of life the scars of its experiences; yet it is unclear whether those
scars (or even the remembrance of those scars) are lifted into paradise.31
To Origen, the body that survives and rises is not the pot or statue
or ship of Tertullian; it is not the dry bones of Ezekiel 37 or the dust of
Genesis 3.7 and 2.19. It is not reassembled with all its parts or planks
or organs intact; nor is it called again, as tiny decaying particles, from
the stomach of the earth or the depths of the sea. It is clear therefore
that Origen’s theory of the body could answer the problem of chain con-
sumption or cannibalism.32 It could account for our survival not only
27. In his letter to Avitus, Jerome translated Origen as asserting that the resur-
rection body is intermediate; we will finally therefore achieve incorporeality. It is
not certain that Origen taught this, although some of his followers in the late fourth
century unquestionably did. See Crouzel, “La doctrine origenienne,” pp. 260–61. The
problem passage above all is De principiis, bk. 2, chap. 10, pp. 172–83.
28. Commentary on Matthew, ed. E. Benz and E. Klostermann, Origenes Werke,
vol. 10, GCS (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1935), bk. 17, chaps. 29–30, pp. 667–71; see also De
principiis, bk. 2, chap. 10, paragr. 8, pp. 181–83, and Crouzel, “La doctrine origeni-
enne,” p. 189.
29. On whether Origen taught that the resurrection body was a sphere, see Chad-
wick, “Origen, Celsus, and Resurrection,” pp. 94–102; A. Festugière, “De la doc-
trine ‘Origèniste’ du corps glorieux sphéroïde,” Revue des sciences philosophiques
et théologiques 43 (1959): 81–86; and J. Bauer, “Corpora orbiculata,” Zeitschrift für
katholische Theologie 82 (1960): 333–41. The passage often thought to have sug-
gested the idea is On Prayer, chap. 31 (see PG 11 [Paris, 1857], cols. 551b and 552b).
30. Commentary on Matthew, ed. Benz and Klostermann, pp. 669–72; De principiis,
bk. 2, chap. 10, paragr. 8, and chap. 11, pp. 181–92; Crouzel, “La doctrine origenienne,”
pp. 195–99. Clement of Alexandria also said sexual difference would disappear. Such
phrases are always ambiguous; they can mean either freedom from sexual desire or
bodily change. See Dewart, Death and Resurrection, pp. 120–21, and below at n. 57.
31. The point of Origen’s denial of sexual difference in heaven is clearly that we
should begin to be sexless here on earth by practicing continence. According to Jerome
(In Epistolam ad Ephesios Libri tres, bk. 3, chap. 5, paragr. 28, PL 26 [Paris, 1884], col.
566–67), Origen argued that since we will one day be like angels—i.e., without sex—
we should begin now to be what is promised. For a discussion of whether the stories
of Origen’s own self-castration that circulated in antiquity are reliable, see Dechow,
Dogma and Mysticism, pp. 128–35, and Peter Brown, Body and Society, pp. 167–69.
32. See Crouzel, “Les critiques,” pp. 679–80; and Chadwick, “Origen, Celsus, and
Resurrection,” pp. 85–90.
 68 the patristic background

from birth to old age (with all that digesting and excreting in between)
but also into the glory of the end of time. But it seemed to sacrifice
integrity of bodily structure for the sake of transformation; it seemed
to surrender material continuity for the sake of identity.
Origen’s heady sense of the potency and dynamism of body remained
enormously attractive, particularly to Eastern theologians, over the
next 150 years. Some (such as Gregory of Nyssa) spoke with positive
disdain about the survival of certain of our organs in heaven but used
startlingly naturalistic images for the resurrection. Nonetheless, some-
thing very deep in third- and fourth-century assumptions was unwilling
to jettison material continuity in return for philosophical consistency.33
Identity, it appears, was not finally the question, for that question Ori-
gen could answer. The question was physicality: how will every par-
ticle of our bodies be saved? When Methodius of Olympus launched a
massive attack on Origen’s theory in the later third century, even the
way in which he misunderstood the position he refuted indicates how
far Origen’s corporeal eidos was, for him, an answer to the wrong issue.
As always, the metaphors used for resurrection themselves constitute
an argument for what it entails. Methodius’s rejection of Origen’s the-
ory is a rejection of the image of the burgeoning seed in favor of that of
the reconstructed statue or temple.
We know little about Methodius.34 His treatise Aglaophon or Con-
cerning the Resurrection, although the source of Epiphanius’s under-
standing of Origen and therefore enormously influential in the late
fourth century, survives in its entirety only in an awkwardly literal,
ninth-century Slavonic translation, accessible to most scholars only
in Bonwetsch’s German version.35 A portion of this treatise survives
in Greek in Photius’s analysis of it.36 The Aglaophon is a dialogue

33. By the end of the fourth century, bodily integrity was for many thinkers so
closely connected with material continuity as to be inseparable from it; see below,
on Jerome.
34. On Methodius, see E. Amann, “Méthode d’Olympe,” DTC, vol. 10, cols.
1606–14; Crouzel, “Les critiques”; Dechow, Dogma and Mysticism. Amann, op. cit.,
col. 1611, says: “Avec toutes ses insuffisances et même tous ses défauts, l’Aglaophon
reste le traité le plus considérable et le plus digne d’étude que l’antiquité chrétienne
nous ait laissé sur la résurrection.”
35. See Nathanael Bonwetsch, Methodius von Olympus, vol. 1, Schriften (Erlan-
gen and Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1891) for a German translation of the entire Slavonic
corpus; idem, Methodius, GCS 27 (1917) gives the Greek text with a German transla-
tion of the Slavonic where the Greek is missing. The so-called Apocalypse of Metho-
dius is an apocryphal text of perhaps the late seventh century.
36. See Bonwetsch, Methodius (1917), pp. ix–xvii and xix–xxviii, and Amann,
“Méthode,” col. 1607. For a brief summary of the Aglaophon, see ibid., cols. 1610–11.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 69

between four interlocutors, two of whom (Aglaophon and Proclus)

represent an Origenist position, both empirically and philosophically
argued, and two of whom (Memianius and Methodius) refute this posi-
tion with natural philosophy, with metaphysics, and with Scripture.
Although the anti-Origenists of the 370s to 390s took the arguments of
both Aglaophon and Proclus to represent Origen’s thought, it is clear
that Methodius misrepresents Origen in, among other things, Aglao-
phon’s gloss of the much-disputed passage from Genesis 3.21 concern-
ing the “tunics of skin” with which God clothed Adam and Eve, and
in Proclus’s interpretation of Christ’s Transfiguration as equivalent
to resurrection.37 But Methodius’s treatise is, in itself, a fascinating
indication of what bothered a number of theologians about Origen’s
dynamic sense of body. On every level, from physiological to ontologi-
cal, Methodius feared change. Indeed, so afraid was he of the threat to
integrity as well as to material continuity that he interpreted Origen’s
eidos as external appearance or shape (that is, as a waterskin into and
out of which matter flows), used against it the argument (with which
Origen would have agreed entirely) that appearance in fact changes, and
himself asserted an extravagantly materialistic position (similar to that
of Athenagoras) in which every particle of the body subsists throughout
life, never nourished or excreted or in any way invaded or altered.38
Methodius’s fear of change manifested itself both in the (inappropri-
ate) metaphors he chose to gloss Origen and in the metaphors he himself
preferred and rejected. So wary was he of lodging activity in matter itself
that in his treatise on virginity, the Symposium—his only work that
survives in its entirety in the original Greek—he gives an account of
reproduction designed to attribute all growth to God’s “creative power.”
Generation is, he says, like a large house with a sculptor hidden inside.
Men poke clay through holes in the house, but God goes around inside
it, from hole to hole, and shapes the lumps into statues. It is as if change
can only be good (i.e., be understood as fertility rather than decay) when
it is totally effected by God.39 The argument recurs in the Aglaophon in
Methodius’s suggestion that semen is analogous to a corpse, i.e., both
need God’s power in order to grow into a body.40

37. See Crouzel, “Les critiques,” passim, especially pp. 693 and 697, and Dechow,
Dogma and Mysticism, pp. 349–90.
38. Crouzel, “Les critiques.”
39. Methodius, Symposium (or Convivium Decem Virginum), oratio 2, chaps.
4–6, PG 18 (Paris, 1857), cols. 51–58.
40. De resurrectione, bk. 2, chap. 20, ed. Bonwetsch (1917), pp. 372–74; (1891 ed.),
pp. 234–36.
 70 the patristic background

Throughout Methodius’s work on resurrection, the same anxiety

about change, as a threat both to integrity and to material continuity,
is reflected in a persistent choice of organic metaphors for what is to be
avoided, inorganic metaphors for what is to be saved. Not only does he
reject Origen’s use of the Pauline seed metaphor, both outright and by
misinterpretation (i.e., by taking the eidos as external skin that cannot
be both seed and sheaf); he also makes reassemblage the solution to
flux.41 Thus one of his major images for the body is a stone temple within
which the tree of sin is growing. In death, the temple falls; the tree is
rooted out. Then in resurrection the exact stones are reconstructed in
the exact shape that subsisted before.42 What grows and changes here is
sinister, needing to be curtailed or destroyed; that which is salvageable
is that—and only that—which persists unchanged.
Sometimes Methodius’s two anti-Origenist interlocutors seem to
concentrate on bodily integrity (the survival of organs) to the point of
ignoring matter. In book 3, the image of a recast statue is used in such a
way as to suggest that what counts is a restored and perfect shape, with
all organs present and no mutilation or defect permitted. Recasting the
statue is explicitly preferred to patching it up; the concern is for differ-
entiated parts or organs, not for bits of matter. Memianius, the anti-Ori-
genist interlocutor to whom most of the natural philosophical issues are
delegated, is responding here to what Methodius thinks to be Origen’s
opinion that we will lack teeth in heaven.43 Nonetheless, the discussion
circles back to an emphasis on material continuity. Memianius argues:

If any bronze-artist has destroyed an image made of bronze and wishes

to make another out of gold in place of the destroyed one . . ., anyone
would say that it could be similar to the first one, but not that the
first image had been itself renewed. Therefore when a spiritual body
is resurrected in the old body’s place, so, according to this [Origenist]
opinion, neither is the form nor the element resurrected; it is not the
deceased body but another, similar to it.44

41. De resurrectione, bk. 2, chaps. 24–30 and bk. 3, chaps. 16–7, ed. Bonwetsch
(1917), pp. 381–88 and 398–400; (1891 ed.), pp. 240–49 and 258–62.
42. De resurrectione, bk. 1, chap. 41, ed. Bonwetsch (1917), pp. 285–87; (1891 ed.),
pp. 138–40.
43. De resurrectione, bk. 3, chaps. 3–8, ed. Bonwetsch (1917), pp. 390–401; (1891
ed.), pp. 251–63.
44. Ibid., bk. 3, chap. 6, ed. Bonwetsch (1917), p. 398.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 71

The implication is clearly that both material continuity and complete

bodily integrity are necessary for resurrection. This leaves, of course, the
familiar problem of identity: how can fluctuating flesh remain “the same”?
With what one modern authority has called “lamentable” results,
Methodius entered into the discussion of natural process that engaged
Athenagoras and Macarius as well as Origen.45 Through the character
of Memianius, he denies that digestion really occurs. Trees do not eat
the earth, he argues, for if they did there would be holes around their
roots.46 In contrast to plants, bodies do in some sense process food, as
Aristotle explains; but nutriment replaces only body fluids not bones,
sinews, or flesh. It flows through the body like water through a canal.
Blood, sweat, and menstrual fluid let off by the body are superfluities,
not substance.47 Even scars are simply the closing of old flesh over a gap
or absence; there can be no such thing as new flesh.48 Thus Methodius
takes identity to lie in material continuity, aware that he does so by
simply denying empirical evidence of organic change. Yet the very fact
that the largest portion of his treatise is devoted to explaining away
physiological process as process suggests that what truly concerns him
is preservation of matter per se, not of matter as locus of identity. His
question is not “how does tree continue as tree?” but “how does a tree
particle avoid transformation into an earth particle?”

Aphrahat, Ephraim, and Cyril of Jerusalem:

Immutable Particles in Process
Few writers in the century between Methodius and Jerome followed
either Origen or Methodius very closely. In general, writers in Greek
and Syriac—and certain Latin writers as well (for example, Ambrose
and Hilary of Poitiers)—kept something of Origen’s sense of change and
fluidity although a few (such as Evagrius) jettisoned any claim that the

45. Ibid., bk. 2, chaps. 9–14, ed. Bonwetsch (1917), pp. 346–60; (1891 ed.), pp.
208–22. And see Amann, “Méthode,” col, 1611: “La critique des arguments scien-
tifiques est d’une pauvreté lamentable . . . et les concepts physiologiques . . . sont
littéralement enfantins.”
46. De resurrectione, bk. 2, chap. 9, ed. Bonwetsch (1917) pp. 345–49; (1891 ed.),
pp. 208–11.
47. De resurrectione, bk. 2, chaps. 11–13, ed. Bonwetsch (1917), pp. 353–57; (1891
ed.), pp. 215–21.
48. De resurrectione, bk. 2, chap. 13, ed. Bonwetsch, (1917), p. 358; (1891 ed.),
p. 220.
 72 the patristic background

body is resurrected, and most retained an inconsistent emphasis on the

survival of material bits or particles. These writers made wide-ranging
use of dynamic images drawn from the earth itself. They evidenced
thereby a deep concern with mutability and process, which could either
threaten existence (by utterly destroying that which changes) or redeem
the universe (by transmuting that which changes into changelessness).
In either case, change to them was real, and often it was creative and
good—fertility rather than, or in addition to, decay. Their natural
images were not of cycles of return and repetition (as in, for example,
the first letter of Clement) but of genuine growth. Heaven was far from
earth, and the resurrected body, albeit a locus of particularity, of what
makes us ourselves, did not need to be fully like the body we have here.
Although they almost all insisted on a material continuity that their
most advanced scientific knowledge held to be impossible, these theo-
logians do not really seem to have worried a great deal about identity.
They could therefore see matter as pregnant with potential for other-
ness. Thus they deepened, rather than refuting or rejecting, the paradox
set forth by Tertullian and Irenaeus, for they insisted that the body that
is redeemed in resurrection is a locus of pullulating putrefaction.
In contrast, Latin writers from the late fourth and early fifth centu-
ries avoided dynamic metaphors. They pulled heaven and earth closer
together, freezing each so that there was little process or development.
Change was simply a scattering of static bits (the dust of Genesis 3.19)
that could be restored by reassemblage. The resurrected body might be
agile and beautiful, as was Christ’s body after his resurrection, but such
glory was laid down over it rather like a varnish that fixed its parts and
particles in place. Body was not the Pauline seed, bursting under its
own internal power into the bloom of heaven. For these Latin writers
(especially Jerome and the later Augustine), the traditional inorganic
images of reforged statues, recast vessels, rebuilt temples, or tents with
new tent-cloths conveyed an emphasis not so much on identity as on
material continuity and bodily integrity.
I cannot treat every major writer who addressed the issue of resurrec-
tion between 300 and 400. But before I turn to the new direction set by
Jerome and Augustine in the early fifth century, I want to illustrate the
variety of ways in which fourth-century authors retained something of
Origen’s sense of flux and transformation despite an emphasis on mate-
rial continuity. I begin with two Syriac writers, Aphrahat and Ephraim,
whose treatises, sermons, and hymns show an intense preoccupation
with organic process.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 73

To Aphrahat, the body that rises is the seed of 1 Corinthians; it is also

a corpse.49 Aphrahat stresses that bodies really decay,50 but some locus
of fertility remains in the earth, to flower when the trumpet sounds.
Earth “eats” the dead, says Aphrahat; the worm “devours” them.51 Yet
earth is made by God “teeming” with life. To Aphrahat, the creation of
Genesis 1.20–25 is what we would call spontaneous generation. Thus if
earth can produce what “was not cast into it”—if it can give birth “in
virginity” before seeds are sown in it—surely it can give up again that
which is buried.52

There will always be people who cavil thus: “How do the dead rise
again? Or with what manner of body shall they come?” (1 Cor. 15.35)
For see how the body is decomposed and corrupted. And as time runs
on, even the bones are reduced to dust and are unrecognizable.
If you enter a tomb in which a hundred dead bodies have been bur-
ied, you will find there not even a handful of dust.
. . . [So some say:] “If, of these hundred dead, nothing remains after
a time . . ., surely the dead must be clothed with a new body when they
revive. But it will surely be a celestial body that will clothe them, for
where could a body come from, since there is nothing in the grave.”
One who thinks thus is, however, foolish and ignorant. When the
dead went away, they were something, and when they had been gone
a long time, they became nothing. When the time of the resurrection
comes, this nothing will become something according to its former
condition, and a transformation will be added to its condition. . . .
Be convinced of this, you foolish one. Each seed will receive its own
body. Have you ever sowed wheat and reaped barley? Have you ever
planted a vine and produced figs? No. . . . So the body that is laid in
earth, that very body shall rise again.

49. Aphrahat, Aphraate le Sage Persan: Les Exposés, trans. M.-J. Pierre, Sc 349 and
359 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1988 and 1989), vol. 1, Demonstration 8, paragrs. 1–6
and 15, pp. 441–48 and 460–61; and Aphraatis Sapientis Persae Demonstrationes, ed.
J. Parisot, Patrologia syriaca, ed. R. Graffin, pt. 1, vols. 1 and 2 (Paris: Firmin-Didot,
1894 and 1907), 1.1, cols. 361–72 and 387–92. On Aphrahat, see Robert Murray, Sym-
bols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1975), p. 29 and passim; Sebastian Brock, Syriac Perspectives
in Late Antiquity (London: Variorum, 1984); and idem, Studies in Syriac Christian-
ity: History, Literature, and Theology (London: Variorum, 1992).
50. Aphrahat, Demonstration 22, paragr. 6, in Parisot ed., 1.1, cols. 999–1004.
51. Demonstration 22, paragrs. 4 and 6, in Parisot ed., 1.1, cols. 995–1004.
52. Les Exposés, ed. Pierre, Demonstration 8, paragr. 6, vol. 1, p. 447; and in Pari-
sot ed., 1.1, cols. 371–72.
 74 the patristic background

For it is with the body as with a seed: when it falls into the earth,
it putrefies and rots; and it is from this putrefaction that it sprouts,
burgeons, and gives forth fruit.
Just as ploughed land that is not sown with seed does not give fruit,
even if it drinks much rain, so it is with the grave in which no dead
are buried: no person shall come forth from it at the quickening of the
dead, no matter how loudly the trumpet shall sound.53

In Aphrahat’s interpretation, the seed metaphor expresses a greater

insistence on identity and continuity than it did in Paul’s and a greater
attention to putrefaction.54 Nonetheless Aphrahat also sees resurrec-
tion as fertility, the redemption of process. In his gloss of Ezekiel 37,
for example, the reclothing of dry bones at the end of time is described
as the growth of an embryo rather than as the instantaneous leaping
together of disassembled components.55
There is even a suggestion of earlier millenarian ideas in Aphrahat’s
description of heaven. The righteous shall all come to judgment, he
says, although not all will have the same reward.56 But all bodies will
be light and beautiful there, and we shall have no anger or lascivious-
ness but shall love each other with an “abundant love.” “Male shall not
be distinguished from female.” The old will not die nor the young grow
old. There will be beautiful trees “with fruit which never fails,” and “of
their taste no soul shall ever grow weary.” It is not, of course, clear how
literally all this is meant.57 But even if it is metaphorical, we should
note that the use of eating as an image for blessedness and heavenly

53. Les Exposés, ed. Pierre, Demonstration 8, paragrs. 1–3, vol. 1, pp. 441–44; and
in Parisot ed., 1.1, cols. 361–66.
54. There is also a stress on material continuity and it is associated with martyr-
dom. Aphrahat’s Demonstration 21, “on persecution,” paragrs. 8–9 and 22–23, dis-
cusses the three children in the fiery furnace and the seven brothers of 2 Maccabees
as martyrs; Parisot ed., 1.1, cols. 951–58 and 985–90.
55. Les Exposés, ed. Pierre, Demonstration 8, paragr. 12, vol. 1, pp. 457–58; and
in Parisot ed., 1.1, cols. 383–86. Paragrs. 7–10, pp. 448–56 (and Parisot ed., 1.1, cols.
371–82), stress bones as that from which the resurrected body will come and are very
close to contemporary rabbinic discussion; see above, chapter 1, n. 135. For the same
idea in Ephraim, see Edmund Beck, ed., Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Carmina
Nisibena, CSCO, 218, 219, 240, 241, Scriptores Syri, 92, 93, 102, 103 (Louvain: Cor-
pus SCO, 1961–63), vol. 241.103, hymn 65, pp. 91–92.
56. Demonstration 22, paragr. 19, in Parisot ed., 1.1, cols. 1029–32.
57. Demonstration 22, paragrs. 12–15, in Parisot ed., 1.1, cols. 1013–24. Aphrahat
stresses that there will be “no female, nor generation, nor use of concupiscence . . .
no want, nor any deficiency, . . . nor ending” (paragr. 13, col. 1015–16). All will be
“sons of the Father” (paragr. 12, col. 1015–16). Whether this means that women will
rise physiologically male would seem to depend on whether female sex is seen as a
deficiency.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 75

life finds its complement in Aphrahat’s continued use of digestion as

a metaphor for decay and death. Although Aphrahat discards procre-
ation and (possibly) sexual difference in heaven, he retains (perhaps not
completely allegorically) another pleasurable process (tasting) and other
differentiated organs (teeth and palates).
To Aphrahat’s slightly later Syriac contemporary, Ephraim, the asso-
ciation of digestion with decay and of regurgitation with salvation
became more explicit. Ephraim repeatedly described Sheol or the grave
as “devouring.”58 Yet he also spoke of the earth regurgitating its dead
and described animals, birds, and fish bringing pieces of human bodies
for reassemblage at the moment of Judgment.

Death will be overcome by trembling, and will vomit up all it has

eaten, so that no dead will be left who is not brought to that place of
judgment. And the dust of the earth will be commanded to separate
itself from the dust of the dead; not the tiniest particle of that dust
will remain behind; it will come before the Judge. All whom the sea
has drunk, whom the wild animals have eaten, whom the birds have
ripped asunder, whom the fire has burnt, all these will awaken and
arise and come forth at the twinkling of an eye.59

Prominent among Ephraim’s images for the risen body are Jonah,
spewed up whole from the whale, and the reference in Matthew 17.27
to money found in the mouths of fishes.60

58. Ephraim, Carmina Nisibena, ed. Beck, vol. 241.103, hymn 55, chaps. 14–18,
p. 70.
59. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Sermones III, ed. Edmund Beck, CSCO,
320–21, Scriptores Syri, 138–39 (Louvain: Corpus SCO, 1972), sermon 1, lines 502–
15, vol. 321.139, p. 13. There is a great deal of debate in art historical work over
whether Ephraim’s sermons (the attribution of which is itself in doubt in some
cases) are the source of the tenth- and eleventh-century iconographie program of the
Byzantine Last Judgment, which depicts the regurgitation of parts. See Georg Voss,
Das jüngste Gericht in der bildenden Kunst des frühen Mittelalters: Eine kunstge-
schichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1884), pp. 64–75; Otto Gillen,
Ikonographische Studien zum Hortus Deliciarum der Herrad von Landsberg (Berlin:
Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1931), p. 19; Beat Brenk, Tradition und Neuerung in der
christlichen Kunst des ersten Jahrtausends: Studien zur Geschichte des Weltgerich-
tsbildes (Vienna: Böhlau, 1966), pp. 90–91, and chapter 4, nn. 104 and 106–8 below.
A number of the elements of the program are clearly mentioned in the five sermons
on “last things” edited in Beck’s volume. The motif of fish, beasts, and birds giving
up dismembered parts (and indeed the implication that the idea is scriptural) is not
original with Ephraim, however; see above, chapter 1, n. 88.
60. Ephraim also used the widow’s mite, the lost drachma, and the three children
in the fiery furnace. See Carmina Nisibena, ed. Beck, vol. 241.103, hymn 46, pp.
43–47.
 76 the patristic background

These images were intended to underline material continuity.61 And

Ephraim frequently went even further in stressing the restoration of
every lost bit. For example, in the Nisibean hymns, he associated the
miracle of the loaves and fishes with resurrection, arguing that if Christ
had the apostles take care in this case to gather up every particle, so
much the more would he collect every one of our bones at the end of
time.62 Moreover, Ephraim made ingenious use of the story of Peter’s
ear from Luke 22.51 to stress the restoration of every organ.

For, if the divine one bent down and took the ear that was cut off from
Simon and thrown away, and attached it again so that nothing was
lost, how much more will he then at the resurrection search for every
bit so that nothing of their dust remains behind. And as in the fiery
furnace not a hair of their head perished (Luke 21.18), so he makes
known the care he will practice at the resurrection.63

There is nonetheless nothing mechanistic or dualistic about Ephraim’s

conception of body. Body is sometimes a garment (an additional “some-
thing”) that “we” take up or lay down. But it is far more often a seed,
not the discarded husk heretics hold it to be but a kernel from which
flowers a new stalk and ear. Although Ephraim sometimes speaks of
body and soul as two constituent parts of the self, he often speaks as if
body is person or self. We are laid in the earth only to sprout again, still
our “self,” in glory.64
To Ephraim, we will all rise as adults.

61. Hermann Möllers questions whether Ephraim has an idea of material conti-
nuity, arguing that he places survival more in “personhood” than in physical stuff
(Jenseitsglaube und Totenkult im altchristlichen Syrien, nach den Schriften unter
dem Namen Afrems des Syrers [Marburg: Nolte, 1965], p. 73). This seems to me
essentially correct although if one pays close attention to Ephraim’s own arguments
and metaphors, there is clearly in them also a concern with the survival of physical
bits. See Ephraim, Commentaire de l’Evangile Concordant ou Diatessaron: Traduit
du syriaque et de l’armenien, trans. Louis Leloir, Sc 121 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf,
1966), chap. 8, paragr. 11, pp. 164–65.
62. Carmina Nisibena, ed. Beck, vol. 241.103, hymn 46, chaps. 10–11, pp. 45–46.
63. Ibid., chap. 9, p. 45.
64. Compare Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Fide, ed. Edmund
Beck, CSCO, 154–55, Scriptores Syri, 73–74 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1955), vol. 155.74,
hymn 73, p. 193, with Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen contra Haereses,
ed. Edmund Beck, CSCO, 169–70, Scriptores Syri, 76–77 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1957),
vol. 170.77, hymn 52, chaps. 9–13, p. 180. And see Commentaire de l’Evangile con-
cordant, trans. Leloir, chap. 8, paragrs. 6–12, pp. 161–65.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 77

One who dies in the womb of his mother and never comes to life, will
be quickened at the moment [of resurrection] by [Christ] who quick-
ens the dead; he will then be brought forth as an adult. If a woman
dies while pregnant, and the child in her womb dies with her, that
child will at the resurrection grow up and know its mother; and she
will know her child.65

So we will, in heaven, lose our childishness but not our parents. Ephraim
indeed appears to argue that we will retain our religious statuses and
even the marks of experience. Body expresses what is important about
self. Identifying the attainments of the new ascetic movement with the
earlier sufferings of the martyrs, Ephraim emphasized that risen flesh
reflects who we are and what we deserve. The martyrs will rise with
gifts in their hands and the marks of tortures still on their bodies.

For the works of each will be to him a garment that he bears on his
body. So one will wear the clothing of fasts and watching, prayers and
humility, another the mantel of belief and the crown of chastity. The
members of one will be stamped with the traces of iron teeth, the
rack, and beatings. Another will bear on her shoulder a brand or carry
severed members. . . . So the saints will stand bearing their works
with them . . . and by them you too [will stand] who have cared for
them. For many will appear there clad in the garment of penitence,
which they have practiced.66

For all his emphasis on reassemblage, Ephraim’s imagery is closer

to Origen’s than to Methodius’s. His most powerful and complex met-
aphors are of process and change.67 Indeed his conception of growth
65. Sermones III, ed. Beck, vol. 321.139, sermon 1, lines 517–24, p. 14. The pas-
sage clearly implies that the “defect” of being unborn will be erased by growth but
that other distinctive marks will remain; otherwise the child and mother would not
recognize each other. The sermon continues the theme of difference of gifts in lines
555–74, p. 15.
66. Sermones III, ed. Beck, vol. 321.139, sermon 2, lines 360–93, p. 28. Ephraim is
describing martyrs and ascetics at the moment of the Second Coming. Their bodies
will be clarified and glorified after Judgment.
67. Möllers (Jenseitsglaube, pp. 73–74) argues that Ephraim, like Aphrahat, sees
resurrection as occurring in two stages: first the bodily stuff rises, then it is clothed
with glory for heaven. This is correct, but if one looks at the metaphors Ephraim
uses, the process is more dynamic and complex. On Ephraim’s intense interest (and
that of other Syriac writers) in postlapsarian procreation and domination of the
earth, see Jeremy Cohen, “Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It”:
 78 the patristic background

toward resurrection is so optimistic that he sees cadavers themselves

as fertile.68 The body that rises is the Pauline seed, the egg of a grass-
hopper, a fetus in the womb.69 The dead body “gives birth” to worms,
says Ephraim; it “teems with living beings”; it even breeds in Sheol. How
much more then will it “give birth,” a barren womb miraculously made
fertile, when God calls it to life?70 In famine (asserts Ephraim), mothers
may be driven to the horror of eating their own children. Yet Sheol does
not digest her own; she vomits them up and learns “to fast.”71 In one of
the most extraordinary images of the entire patristic discussion, Ephraim
describes resurrection as incubation and hatching. Eggs, as he understands
them, are born twice, first as dead matter, then as living.72 He writes:

And when the bird hatches her eggs, motionless dead bodies, her love
shelters them; her wings embrace them; she forms voice and life in
their lifelessness; the liquidness of the egg takes on beautiful form;
and she awakens out of the shell the buried ones. Just so the graves
will be split open by the rousing voice [of the Last Judgment].73

The image of Jesus as mother hen found in Matthew 23.37 takes on

startling new intensity here. For all the technical differences Ephraim
(like Aphrahat) would admit to exist between creation, generation, and
resurrection, a sense of teeming stuff seems to lurk behind his natural
images. Whether in the womb, in the stomach, or in the grave, flesh—
like matter itself—seems always both dead and alive, decaying and fer-
tile, inanimate and pregnant with potential. Only a heretic or a fool
would see the egg in its nest or the corpse in its grave as really dead; the
mother bird and the wise Christian know otherwise.74

The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1989), p. 229.
68. Carmina Nisibena, ed. Beck, vol. 241.103, hymn 49, chaps. 4 and 8, pp. 54–55.
He also sees fetuses as buried in wombs; ibid., hymn 65, chaps. 16–19, p. 92.
69. Carmina Nisibena, ed. Beck, vol. 241.103, hymn 46, chaps. 14–17, pp. 46–47;
hymn 49, chaps. 4, 10, 14, pp. 55–56; and Hymnen contra Haereses, vol. 170.77,
hymn 52, chaps. 4–13, pp. 179—80.
70. Carmina Nisibena, ed. Beck, vol. 241.103, hymn 49, chaps. 1–2 and 8, pp.
54–56; and hymn 37, chaps. 1–10, pp. 11–13.
71. Ibid., hymn 67, chap. 7, p. 95.
72. Ibid., hymn 46, chaps. 14–17, pp. 46–47; and see also Hymnen contra Haere-
ses, ed. Beck, hymn 52, chaps. 4–13, pp. 179–80, where the seed of grain with its pod
and the chick with its egg become almost the same image.
73. Carmina Nisibena, ed. Beck, vol. 241.103, hymn 46, chap. 16, p. 47.
74. Hymnen contra Haereses, vol. 170.77, hymn 52, chap. 12, p. 180.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 79

The fourth-century Greek writer Cyril of Jerusalem, like his Latin-

speaking contemporary Hilary of Poitiers, is somewhat more con-
ventional in his use of resurrection imagery than the Syriac authors
Aphrahat and Ephraim, but he too combines organic images of extreme
change with a stress on material continuity.75 Cyril, like Hilary, makes
extensive use of the Pauline seed metaphor: “Cannot He, who brought
what was not into being, raise up again that already in existence which
has decayed? Will He who raises up the corn for us when it dies, year by
year, have difficulty in raising up us, for whose sake the corn has been
raised?”76 Cyril employs the images of natural cycles popular since I
Clement, but because he understands that they imply reanimation or
mere repetition, he glosses them with an emphasis on transformation.
Dormice revive after hibernation, he says, and flies and bees sometimes
rise again after being drowned in water. But resurrection comes not after
quiescence but after decay, and what rises is different from what died.
Bees are born from worms, chickens from eggs, a phoenix from larva,
which itself grows from rotted flesh; humans come from “weak, form-
less, simple elements” and then grow from undifferentiated fetuses into
shipwrights or architects, soldiers or kings. So we will rise changed. We
will be strong not weak, incorruptible not corruptible, and we will need
no food to eat or stairs to walk on. Cyril even adds (a charming touch)
that we will shine like iron in fire or glowworms on a summer night.77

75. See Hilary, Tractatus super Psalmos, PL 9 (Turnhout, 1857), In Ps. 1, chaps.
13–19, cols. 258–61, esp. 259a. Hilary stresses that the ungodly are ground to dust
particles but not annihilated; they continue to exist as particles so they can be pun-
ished. Following Tertullian, Hilary argues that they do not lose existence but merely
change state. In commenting on Matthew, however, Hilary explains resurrection
with the metaphor of a growing plant (Sur Matthieu, bk. 5, paragr. 11, vol. 1, pp.
159–160). The metaphor is Origenist in its sense of internal process; nonetheless it
sounds almost Methodian in stressing that no alien material is taken in. And Hilary
also argues that we have “eternal materiality” (ibid., paragrs. 8 and 12, pp. 157–61).
It is customary to stress that Hilary moved from “materialism” to “spiritualism” in
his conceptualizing of the resurrection; see J. Quasten and A. di Berardino, Patrology,
vol. 4: The Golden Age of Latin Patristic Literature . . ., trans. Placid Solari (1986),
p. 33. My analysis suggests that it was common for elements of both to coexist in
fourth-century thinkers. I find more continuity between Hilary’s earlier and later
works than the above generalization would admit and therefore more internal incon-
sistency in each work.
76. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, lecture 4, paragr. 30, PG 33, cols.
491–94; trans. Leo P. McCauley in The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, vol. 1
[Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1969), p. 134. See also lecture
18, cols. 1017–60.
77. Lecture 18, paragrs. 5–21, cols. 1021–42. To say that we will rise changed does
not mean that we will rise equal or indistinguishable; see especially paragr. 9, cols.
1027–28.
 80 the patristic background

Yet Cyril, again like Hilary of Poitiers, is more concerned than were
the Syriac writers with the permanence of bits, that is, with material
continuity. He even pulls the seed metaphor completely out of shape,
using it to underline the perdurance of particles, not the internal
dynamic of growth. God holds us all in the palm of his hand like a mix-
ture of seeds, writes Cyril; if a farmer can sort through such a variety
of kernels, how much more can God sort out seeds? Instead of standing
for the person who will flower into a new body at the resurrection, the
seed kernel here stands for a piece of body, which must be matched to
its other bits and reassembled at the end of time.78
Cyril makes it quite clear that his concern for bits is a concern for
the fate of cadavers, especially holy cadavers. His reassurance that God
holds us all like seeds in the palm of his hand follows a vivid and pain-
ful description of bodies torn apart and ground to dust by wild beasts
or devoured by carrion birds who might scatter the parts as far away as
India or the land of the Goths.79 He even insists that we condemn grave
robbers because exactly the body they violate is going to rise again.80 He
explains that the Old Testament story of the corpse that rose from the
dead when cast into the grave with the prophet Elisha (4 Kings 13.21)
should encourage us to believe not only that we will rise but also that
a power lies in the bodies of the just even when their souls are not
present. If handkerchiefs and aprons that have touched the saints can
cure disease, surely we should believe that holy bodies themselves can
raise the dead.81
Moreover, we must care for our bodies now, says Cyril, because
exactly the flesh that dies will rise again. Banishing all wantonness and
ornament, it should begin to walk on earth, as it will walk hereafter,
with the Virgin-born Lord.82 The Eucharist is the food for these pilgrim
bodies, journeying to heaven. For Cyril as for Tertullian and Irenaeus
150 years earlier, eating God causes us to bear within our members,
while still on earth, the incorruptible body we will be after the trum-
pet sounds. Through digesting God, we become indigestible to death.83
There is thus throughout Cyril’s writing an attention to physicality, to

78. Lecture 18, paragr. 3, col. 1019–22. Cyril also uses the statue metaphor; see
ibid., paragr. 6, col. 1021–24.
79. Ibid., paragr. 2, cols. 1019–20.
80. Ibid., paragr. 5, cols. 1021–22.
81. Ibid., paragr. 16, cols. 1035–38.
82. Lecture 12, paragr. 34, cols. 767–70.
83. Mystagogical Lectures, lecture 22, paragr. 3, PG 33, cols. 1099–100.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 81

the perdurance of bodily bits, that accompanies (somewhat incongru-

ously) the extravagant metaphors of growth and transformation char-
acteristic of much of the fourth-century understanding of resurrection.

Gregory of Nyssa: Survival, Flux, and the Fear of Decay

My final example of the persistence throughout the fourth century of
an Origenist sense of the changeability of body—indeed my final exam-
ple of the Greek tradition before I turn to the theology of the Latin
Middle Ages and its background in the early fifth century—is Gregory
of Nyssa. Scholarship on Gregory’s treatment of resurrection disagrees
so passionately about how Origenist—and how inconsistent—he is that
I think we must accept that he is, philosophically speaking, profoundly
inconsistent.84 In places, Gregory understood Origen as Methodius rep-
resented him and attacked the idea of the corporeal eidos as external
form or shape, using against it Origen’s own exposition of the reality of
flux. In other places, Gregory himself used a kind of eidos of the body
to explain resurrection. And this eidos was sometimes Methodian—a
seal or tag for bits of matter to protect them, as it were, from inva-
sion or decay—but at other times it was Origenist—an internal prin-
ciple that not only itself changed but also allowed the penetration and
transformation of matter. Thus Gregory seems to have used Origen’s
own arguments against Methodius’s misrepresentation of Origen, but
he used a Methodian insistence on material continuity against what
Origen really said.
The radical incongruity of Gregory’s positions (which may have
become more Origenist late in life but are not, even in his early writ-
ings, consistent) shows up particularly in his images.85 When he
emphasizes the perdurance of particles, he writes of the body as glob-
ules of mercury, which spring quivering into an indistinguishable mass
at the resurrection.86 Like Macarius, he sees God smelting out bits of
body from surrounding clay.87 He uses the familiar image of the potter

84. See Ladner, “Philosophical Anthropology,” pp. 61–94, especially p. 91 n. 149

on Cherniss’s earlier criticisms of Gregory; Danielou, “La résurrection des corps,”
pp. 154–70; n. 12 above and n. 85 below.
85. T. J. Dennis has argued that Gregory’s earliest position almost denied bodily
resurrection and saw death as a kind of Platonic release of the soul; see Dennis,
“Gregory on the Resurrection.” By the time of the De opificio, however, Gregory was
arguing for bodily resurrection.
86. Gregory, De hominis opificio, chap. 27, PG 44 (Paris, 1863), cols. 227c–228c.
87. Gregory, De anima et resurrectione, PG 46 (Paris, 1858), cols. 47–48.
 82 the patristic background

collecting sherds of broken pot.88 Even when he explains that there is a

form of the body that marks the soul so that soul knows how to sum-
mon back what it needs at resurrection, he says (and the analogy does
not quite work to make his point) that pieces of the body are like herd
animals. They join the herd in the morning, at the call of the shepherd,
but in the evening they each know which barn to turn into as they are
driven home.89 This odd image shows how profoundly Gregory needs
to combine perdurance of pieces (the animals remain themselves) with
an internal dynamism in matter (it is the animals who turn homeward,
not the barnyard that exerts the pull).
Other images emphasize body as external form or, alternatively,
internal dynamic pattern. When Gregory treats body as if it were
Methodius’s misunderstanding of Origen’s eidos, he calls it a leaky
bottle, into which material must constantly flow. Or it is a pot with
lead (i.e., sin) inside, which must be broken and reforged, without the
lead, at the resurrection.90 But Gregory also speaks of body as the seed
of 1 Corinthians 15, retaining all the dynamism of the Pauline image
as used by Origen. This body grows from within, taking in food that
stimulates a process it carries in and of itself. It is not bits, for bits con-
stantly change. It is not the external arrangement of the bits, for that
too changes. Gregory stresses repeatedly that we will have neither geni-
tals nor intestines in heaven. It is rather an in-itself-developing program
or seal that shapes matter from within. Body is a stream, constantly
in motion; like the seed, it rots and changes, but the new stalk comes
from the rot that precedes it.91
There is no way to tidy Gregory into consistency. Nor should we see
his version of the paradox of resurrection as a simple continuation of

88. Gregory, De anima et res., PG 46, cols. 45–46; Oratio catechetica magna,
chap. 8, PG 45 (Paris, 1863), cols. 33–38; esp. col. 35b–36b, where Gregory says we
are like a pot that must be dissolved in order to rid itself of stain and defect before
being reformed in resurrection.
89. Gregory, De opificio, chap. 27, PG 44, cols. 225b–226b.
90. Gregory, Oratio catechetica magna, chaps. 8 and 37, cols. 33–40 and 93–98;
see above n. 88. The Great Catechism is from shortly after 380.
91. De opificio, chaps. 25 and 29, PG 44, cols. 215d–218a and 233–40; De anima
et res., PG 46, cols. 153–60. See esp. ibid., cols. 155b–c, 156b–c, where Gregory argues
(as did Origen) that the body is by definition that which is constantly in flux. Greg-
ory extrapolates from this idea to argue in the Treatise on the Dead, PG 46, cols.
521–22, that living is therefore a process of dying: “Quod ad subjectam materiam
pertinet, homo non est idem hodie, qui heri fuit. Aliquid enim ex eo momentis
singulis moritur, et fetet, et corrumpitur, et abjicitur. . . . Quamobrem, ut Paulus
ait, quotidie morimur: [1 Cor. 15.31] quippe qui non idem semper manemus in ipso
corporis domicilio, sed accessione decessioneque continua alii ex alio reddimur, et
in novum assidue corpus immutamur.”
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 83

the paradox explored by Tertullian and Irenaeus. Clinging as stubbornly

as they did to the stuff of the body and insisting more stridently on
the marking of its particles, Gregory nonetheless saw a far greater dis-
tance between heaven and earth than did the polemicists of the early
third century. To Gregory, the body created in Eden ate (although not
as we eat); it would have procreated (although not as we procreate),92
but in heaven, the body will have no organs of generation or nutrition,
no gender or age or passibility.93 Scholars have often suggested that
Gregory’s inconsistency—an inconsistency echoed, as we have seen, in
most fourth-century treatments of resurrection—is a reflection of the
conflict of vast intellectual systems in the ancient world (for example,
Platonism versus Christianity or spiritualism versus materialism).94
But it seems to me that we will understand better why Gregory saw
resurrection as such a contradictory combination of change and conti-
nuity if we consider exactly what body he had in mind when he wrote.
Tertullian’s emphasis on reassemblage of exactly the flesh that suffered
sprang from his assumption that the paradigmatic body was the body of
the martyr. So Gregory’s concern for the survival of bits, marked with
their experience yet transformed into an otherness far from earthly life,
expressed the fact that for him the paradigmatic body was that of the
holy ascetic—and not just any holy ascetic. Much of Gregory’s discus-
sion of resurrection is a discussion of the body of his sister Macrina.
Gregory discussed eschatology in many places in his work (includ-
ing the Treatise on the Creation of Man, the Catechetical Discourses,
a sermon on resurrection, and the Treatise on the Dead), but two of
the major treatments have to do very directly with Macrina. The trea-
tise On the Soul and Resurrection, written early in 380, soon after her
death, is presented as a dialogue in which the dying Macrina comforts
Gregory in his grief for her and for their recently deceased brother Basil.
The Life of Macrina, written between the end of 380 and 383, shows the
actual hopes and fears stimulated in Gregory by a very special cadaver.

92. De opificio, chap. 17, PG 44, cols. 187–92; chap. 18, cols. 195b–196b; chaps.
19–20, cols. 195–202. See also Jeremy Cohen, “Be Fertile,” p. 258.
93. Gregory elaborates this most fully in his late work, the Treatise on the Dead,
PG 46, cols. 531–34, and see Danielou, “La résurrection,” pp. 160–70. See also De
opificio, PG 44, chaps. 18–21, cols. 191–204, and De anima et res., PG 46, cols.
105–60, where Gregory shows concern both to affirm the resurrection of the identi-
cal atoms that die and to argue that all impurity and brutishness (including growth,
eating, elimination, disease, and death) is sloughed off by the resurrected body (cols.
149a–150a). Being fat or thin, or any other characteristic that comes from flux or
growth, has (says Gregory) nothing to do with the resurrection life (ibid.).
94. See above nn. 75 and 85.
 84 the patristic background

As Jean-Marie Mathieu has recently demonstrated, Gregory, like

other writers of the mid-fourth century, felt horror at decay.95 “Mortal
remains [except those of the martyrs] are to most people an object of
disgust,” he wrote, “and no one passes near a tomb with pleasure; if
despite all our care, we find an open grave and cast our eyes on the hor-
ror of the body that lies therein, we are filled with disgust and groan
loudly that human nature should come to this.”96 When the grave of his
parents was opened to receive Macrina’s body, he panicked. Horrified
(as Basil and Gregory Nazianzus were also) at the prospect of disturbing
a putrefying corpse or of mingling bones from several bodies, Gregory
sexualized what he feared by describing it with a reference from Leviti-
cus that actually concerns incest (“The nakedness of thy father, or the
nakedness of thy mother shalt thou not uncover”): “How, I ask myself,
will I be spared . . . condemnation if I look at the common shame of
human nature in the bodies of my parents, which are certainly decom-
posed, disintegrated, and transformed into an appearance unformed,
hideous, and repulsive?”97 Behind Gregory’s hope of resurrection lies
a desperate desire that neither his parents nor his siblings will really
decay, whatever appears to happen to their flesh. When he discusses
the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (frequently problematic for
patristic exegetes), it is very important to him to explain that a soul
between death and resurrection can still have a finger in potentia—that
Lazarus’s finger still “exists” while decomposed.98
But if decay can be transcended, this must be accomplished by the
particular Macrina or Basil who began to transcend it in life. To Gregory
(as to Origen, Aphrahat, and Ephraim), the body of the ascetic begins
already on earth to live the life beyond procreation and nutrition it will
have in heaven. Here on earth we have many needs, writes Gregory; we
are seduced by material things, buried (as it were) under the rubble of
an earthquake.99 But we must begin the journey toward the purity of
heaven, shaking off uncleanness.

95. Jean-Marie Mathieu, “Horreur du cadavre,” pp. 311–20.

96. Oratio laudatoria martyris Theodori, PG 46, col. 737c–d, 738c–d; see Gregory
of Nyssa, Vie de sainte Macrine, ed. and trans. Pierre Maraval, Sc 178 (Paris: Éditions
Du Cerf, 1971), p. 255 n. 2.
97. Ibid., pp. 254–55; and see pp. 86–88 and nn. 1–2. For examples of Gregory’s
horror at decay, see De opificio, chap. 25, PG 44, cols. 219–22, on the raising of
Lazarus—a discussion which describes in detail how revolting the corpse is—and De
anima et res., PG 46, cols. 13–14.
98. De opificio, chap. 27, PG 44, cols. 225–26.
99. De anima et res., PG 46, cols. 97c–98c.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 85

If there be in you any clinging to this body . . . let not this, either, make
you despair. You will behold this bodily envelopment, which is now
dissolved in death, woven again out of the same atoms, not indeed
into this organization with its gross and heavy texture, but with its
threads worked up into something more subtle and ethereal.100

The opening of the Life of Macrina shows Gregory’s inconsistency

not only about the distance a body must travel before resurrection in
heaven but also about the extent to which bodily transformation begins
here. Macrina, he writes, should not even be styled a woman, “for I do
not know whether it is right to describe in terms of nature one who was
raised so far above her nature.” But he also says she began her ascetic
commitment by resolving to remain “espoused” to a fiancé who had
died, claiming he was “only absent on a journey, not dead.”101 Thus,
in Gregory’s account, the living Macrina is already beyond female-
ness because she has reached the heights of human virtue, but she is
also faithful to a suitor who clearly remains not only male but also
betrothed to her—whose death is, “thanks to the hope of the resurrec-
tion,” only an appearance. The resurrection body, which begins to be
rewoven while still on earth, sheds much of what seems specific to its
selfhood here, but Gregory, like Origen, is not fully consistent about
exactly what is shed—either on earth or in heaven.
Gregory’s deep confusion about the shape and substance of the body
that rises reflects not only his conviction that ascetic accomplishment
must be apparent in heaven; it also reflects his confidence that Macrina
and Basil are relics, just like the relics of the forty martyrs their mother
collected to lodge in the chapel where the family was subsequently
buried.102 Gregory tells us that while on his way to visit his dying sis-
ter, he dreamt of a martyr’s relics, from which came a “blinding light,”
and he subsequently understood that Macrina was the relics, “mortal
and unsightly remains,” transfigured “with immortality and grace.”103
But such relics—if they are to perform the cures Gregory believes and
recounts—must carry beyond the grave the power of the living saint;
they must lift up (not erase) the experience they have borne in life.

100. Ibid., cols. 107a–108a; trans. William Moore and H. A. Wilson, Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers, 2d series, vol. 5 (1892; reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
1979), p. 453.
101. Vie de Macrine, ed. Maraval, pp. 140–41 and 154–57.
102. Ibid., pp. 77–78.
103. Ibid., pp. 192–93, 200–1, and 218–25.
 86 the patristic background

Gregory tells of a cancer on Macrina’s breast, which she would not

show to a doctor because of modesty, but both she and her mother
prayed, and she made an ointment of mud and her own tears, and the
tumor disappeared, leaving only a tiny scar. At Macrina’s funeral, she
was so beautiful her sisters had to cover her shining brilliance with
a dark robe, but the scar remained, in death as it had been in life, “a
memorial of the divine intervention, the result and the occasion of per-
petual turning toward God through the action of grace.”104 The body of
Macrina—miraculously healed and made immortal and yet marked by
its own particular experience—seems to be what Gregory has in mind
when he writes of resurrection as the reassemblage of “the identical
atoms” we had on earth “in the same order as before” and yet insists
that “there must be change.”105 The resurrected body is both the ascetic
who becomes a relic while still alive and the relic that continues after
death the changelessness acquired through asceticism.

Jerome and the Origenist Controversy:

The Issue of Bodily Integrity
If relic cult and the ascetic movement of the fourth century are the
context of Gregory of Nyssa’s Origenist sense of body as changing and
changed between earth and heaven, they are also the context for the vitu-
perative attack against Origen and his followers launched in the 370s by
Epiphanius and taken up twenty years later by Jerome. Jerome’s ferocious
polemic against bishop John of Jerusalem, penned in 397, arose from mat-
ters of ecclesiastical politics and personal ambition as well as from long-
standing theological questions.106 The doctrine of bodily resurrection
was by no means the only issue at stake. But a major portion of the appar-
ently unfinished philippic (chapters 23–36) addressed it, and exactly that
portion had considerable influence later in the Middle Ages.107 Jerome

104. Ibid., pp. 242–47.

105. De anima et res., PG 46, cols. 135–54; see esp. col. 137C–138C, where Greg-
ory insists that the body is a “calamity”; unless it is freed from brutishness and ill-
ness, we could not want it returned.
106. See John P. O’Connell, The Eschatology of Saint Jerome (Mundelein, Illi-
nois: Seminary of St. Mary of the Lake, 1948); Duval, “Tertullien contre Origène . . .
dans . . . saint Jerome,” pp. 227–78; J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome (New York: Harper and
Row, 1975), especially pp. 195–296; Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion, p. 138; E.
Clark, “New Perspectives on the Origenist Controversy”; and eadem, The Origenist
Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
107. Duval, “Tertullien contre Origène,” p. 278 n. 221.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 87

attacked bishop John as an Origenist who merely pretended to adhere to

the resurrection of the body but would not admit, when challenged, that
the corpus that rises is true caro (flesh).
Jerome wrote:

I shall explain briefly the teaching of Origen concerning the resurrec-

tion (for you will not be able to understand the power of the antidote,
unless you examine the poisons). Pay careful attention . . . [for] nine
times asserting the resurrection of the body [corpus], he does not even
once insert the resurrection of the flesh [caro]. . . . Origen says in
many places, and especially in his fourth book on the resurrection, his
exposition of Psalm 1, and his Stromatiis, that there is a double error
in the church, ours and that of the heretics. [He says] we would be
simple-minded and flesh-loving to say that these bones and this blood
and flesh—that is, face and members and the whole complex of the
body—will rise again in the last day, that is, that we will walk with
feet, work with hands, . . . and digest food with stomachs. . . . Those
who believe this tell us [he says] that we will then [in the resurrection]
produce feces, give forth humors, take wives, and produce children.
For why are there genitals, if not for marrying? Why are there teeth,
if not for crushing food? . . . For when the soul by the command of
God renounces the cold and mortal body, all things go back little by
little to their matrices or original substances, flesh falls back to earth,
breath mixes in air, moisture reverts to the abyss, heat flies up to
ether. . . . Wine and milk mixed together do not perish, but you cannot
separate again what is fused; so the substance of flesh and blood does
not perish in its original matter, yet it cannot return to its former com-
posite nor can they be again the same whole that they were before. . . .
[Yet, Origen concludes,] we confess the resurrection of the body in
another way [alia ratione], the resurrection of those who have been
placed in the grave and have decayed into ashes, Paul as Paul, Peter as
Peter, individuals as individuals, for it cannot be that souls sin in one
body and are punished in another. . . . Who, hearing this, would think
[Origen] denies the resurrection of the flesh? He says that a specific
reason [ratio quaedam] is placed by the artifice of God in individual
seeds, which reason holds the future materials in the kernel from the
beginning. . . . And as the size of the tree and the trunk, branches, fruit,
and foliage are not seen in the seed but are however in the reason of
the seed . . . so in the reason of human bodies certain ancient princi-
ples remain which will rise. When the day of Judgment comes . . . the
 88 the patristic background

seeds will stir at once and the dead will germinate [germinabunt] . . .
but they will not be restored in the same flesh or in the forms they
had before. . . .
You, [heretic,] say “body” and do not mean “flesh” at the same
time, [for you wish to deceive] the ears of the ignorant. Believe me,
your silence is not simple. For “flesh” has one definition, and “body”
another. . . .
Job said: “And I shall be surrounded again with my skin and in
my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19.26). . . . Does it not seem to you,
then, that Job writes against Origen and for the truth of the flesh in
which he sustained torments? For it grieves him that the suffering is
in vain if another rises spiritually when this flesh has been carnally
tortured. . . . If he is not to rise in his own sex and with the same
members that were thrown on the dung heap, if the same eyes are
not opened for seeing God by which he then saw worms, where there-
fore will Job be? You take away the things in which Job consists and
give me empty words concerning resurrection; for how, if you want to
restore a ship after shipwreck, do you deny a single part [singula] of
which the ship is constituted?108

Jerome’s attack on John did not engage Origen’s true position or even
accurately represent Jerome’s own previous opinion about Origen.109
Jerome was egged on by Epiphanius, who criticized Origen on the basis
of Methodius’s misrepresentation of his ideas. Moreover, as Duval has
shown, a good deal of Jerome’s polemic was borrowed from Tertullian’s
attack on the Gnostics and Docetists, and in some cases the passages
from Tertullian, although used in rhetorically effective ways, were
quite mangled as theology.110 But if we ignore for a moment Jerome’s
response to and use of earlier thinkers and take his heated writing from
the decade 395 to 405 as his own theology of the body, we find that the
images on which I have been focusing in this book have undergone at
his hands some very interesting changes in emphasis.

108. Jerome, Contra foannem Hierosolymitanum, chaps. 25–30; PL 23 (Paris,

1845), cols. 375–82; 2d ed. (Paris, 1863), cols. 392–99.
109. In an early work, Jerome adopts Origen’s opinion about loss of sexual differ-
ence in heaven; In Epistolam ad Ephesios, bk. 3, chap. 5, paragr. 28, PL 26 (1884), col.
566–67. See Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Place of Jerome’s Commentary on Ephesians in
the Origenist Controversy,” Vigiliae Christianae 41 (1987): 154–71. Defending him-
self for the ambiguity of his stance on Origen, Jerome suggests in letter 84 that Ori-
gen’s life and martyrdom for Christ excuse much (Letter 84, paragrs. 7–9, in Jerome
Labourt, ed. and trans., Saint Jerome: Lettres [Paris: “Les Belles Lettres,” 1949–1963],
vol. 4, pp. 132–35; and PL 22 [Paris, 1845], cols. 748–51).
110. Duval, “Tertullien contre Origène.”
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 89

Jerome’s favorite metaphors for resurrection were metaphors of reas-

semblage, such as the image of the ship in the passage I just quoted (an
example, incidentally, of a garbled borrowing from Tertullian).111 Using
the shattered pot of Jeremiah 18.4, which is recast by the potter, Jerome
repeatedly emphasized two aspects of reassemblage: first, the vessel is
remade without defect—that is, without any part missing; second, it is
cooked hard to make it more resistant to corruption.112 Thus Jerome’s
stress was not so much on material continuity as on integrity, not so
much on the salvaging of every particle absorbed by the earth as on the
reconstitution and hardening of the bodily vessel so that every organ
is intact and eternally protected from amputation. Moreover, Jerome
explicitly rejected the seed metaphor from 1 Corinthians 15 because it
expressed too much change between earth and heaven.113 Paul’s sug-
gestion in verse 53 that immutability and immortality are “put on”
(induere) was accepted and used to speak of glory as a garment (indu-
mentum or vestimentum) donned by exactly the body we had before;114
but Jerome expended considerable energy explaining that the seed of
verses 35–44, which dissolves in the earth and draws to itself neighbor-
ing matter in order to rise in glorious foliage unlike the planted germ, is
an inadequate image of the resurrection. The rare passage where Jerome
does admit that we are seeds refers to conception not resurrection and
to souls not bodies, and even there his language sounds oddly like the
passage from Rebecca West I discussed in my introduction. God plants
the soul in the uterus of the mother as seeds are sown in soil, but this
God is a potter or bricklayer, and the seeds are inert objects without
internal dynamic principles of their own. It is a curiously static notion
of both seeds and embryonic development.115
It thus seems clear, as O’Connell has argued in his study of Jerome’s
eschatology, that Jerome assumes material continuity.116 But what

111. Ibid., p. 243.

112. Jerome, letter 84, paragr. 9, ed. Labourt, vol. 4 (1954), p. 136, and PL 22 (Paris,
1842), col. 750d; Apologie contre Rufin, bk. 1, paragr. 25, ed. P. Lardet, Sc 303 (Paris:
Éditions du Cerf, 1983), pp. 71–72; Contra Joannem, chap. 33, PL 23, col. 385; and
see Duval, “Tertullien contre Origène,” p. 257. For a similar emphasis in Gregory
the Great on the hardening of the body in resurrection, see Carole Straw, Gregory
the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),
pp. 54, 154, and 237.
113. Jerome, Contra Joannem, chaps. 23–26, PL 23 (Paris, 1883), cols. 390–95.
114. Ibid., chap. 29, col. 381.
115. Ibid., chap. 22, cols. 372–73.
116. O’Connell, Eschatology of Jerome, pp. 54–59, and Duval, “Tertullien con-
tre Origène,” p. 247. O’Connell considers the one passage in Jerome that might be
taken to mean that the “same” body could arise constituted of different matter and
concludes that it probably means merely that matter can be added by God to infant
 90 the patristic background

really concerns him is integrity. Whereas fourth-century writers on res-

urrection in general clung to a non-Origenist emphasis on continuity
of particles but still saw the body as greatly transformable and trans-
formed in the journey to heaven, Jerome opposes the implication that
sheaf is different from seed not because it threatens matter but because
it permits organs and personal characteristics to disappear.
Elizabeth Clark, who has written brilliantly about the Origenist con-
troversy of the 390s, has argued that attention moved fairly quickly
away from the doctrine of resurrection and toward concern over pro-
creation, sexuality, and sexual difference. Building on the ideas of
Peter Brown, she suggests that Jerome, Theophilus of Alexandria, and
the other anti-Origenists wanted to defend a kind of gender and class
essentialism—that is, to elevate to the courts of heaven the differences
between male and female, married and chaste, leader and follower, that
were found naturally on earth and, in certain ways, enhanced within
the monastic movement.117 Her insight is a helpful one. Writing both
against John of Jerusalem and against his old friend Rufinus, Jerome
devoted much emphasis to the resurrection of our genitals (although he
was also concerned about teeth and intestines).118 In letter 84, written
in 398, he included a misogynistic excursus in his defense of the resur-
rection of every organ:

Neither the rich language of Cicero nor the burning eloquence of Dem-
osthenes is sufficient for my anger against the fraudulent claims of
those heretics who confess the resurrection in words but in their hearts
deny it. Weak women take pleasure in [the heretical teaching that we
will rise without sex], seizing their breasts, patting their stomachs, pal-
pitating their loins, thighs, and smooth chins and declaiming: “What
use is it to us if this fragile body shall be resurrected? We shall be

bodies that must rise adult. The discussion strengthens my conclusion that the basic
issue in this period was less identity than material continuity and bodily integrity
(see O’Connell, p. 58; and letter 108, paragrs. 23–25, ed. Labourt, vol. 5, pp. 190–94,
PL 23, cols. 900–2). For the source of much of this interpretative concern with the
identity issue, see Louis Billot, Quaestiones de Novissimis, 8th ed. (Rome: Pontificia
Universitas Gregoriana, 1946), pp. 149–63.
117. See the works cited in n. 106 above, and Elizabeth Clark, review of Peter
Brown, Body and Society, in Journal of Religion 70 (1990): 432–36.
118. Contra Joannem, chaps. 25–35, PL 23, cols. 392–405; Contre Rufin, bk. 2,
chaps. 5–6, 11–12, pp. 109–11 and 133–35; letter 84, ed. Labourt, vol. 4, pp. 125–39
and letter 108, chaps. 23–25, vol. 5, pp. 190–96, PL 22, cols. 743–52 and 878–906. And
see Peter Brown, Body and Society, pp. 382–84.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 91

like angels and have an angelic nature.” From this one sees that they
disdain to be raised in flesh and bones as Christ himself was raised.119

Jerome was concerned about sexuality as well as sexual difference. It

is as if our genitals must be present in heaven, so that our victory over
them—and our reward for this victory—can continue for all eternity.
In his attack on Rufinus in 401, he states explicitly that amputation of
members in the resurrection would mean we would all come to equal-
ity of condition; the virgin would then be equal to the prostitute.120
Clark is clearly right that Jerome is concerned to maintain gender
inequality and social hierarchy in heaven; she has also convincingly
demonstrated that other issues at stake between Origenists and anti-
Origenists involved anxiety about reproduction and sexual difference.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that Jerome feared more than a loss of
differentiation in heaven. He feared fluidity and possibility because he
feared absorption and decay. In short, what Jerome feared was change
itself. In letter 124 to Avitus, he expressed outrage at the idea that we
might not receive back the differentiated bodies we prepared and earned
in life, but he situated this outrage in the context of a fear that we might
fall all the way out of human bodies into those of animals or fish.121
This reference to the transmigration of souls is not a fair criticism of
Origen, but it clearly shows that, to Jerome, such transmigration is a
kind of chain consumption. And the risk of falling into or being eaten
by lower creatures endangers more than social hierarchy.
It may be that Jerome’s controversy with the Origenists moved
fairly rapidly beyond the issue of resurrection and that it engaged hier-
archy and sexuality in a number of other ways, but it is also true that
Jerome tended to circle back to resurrection. For example, he chose
to bring it up in two letters written in 404. In letter 119, a discussion
of 1 Corinthians 15.51, he underlined his anxiety about the decay of
the cadaver;122 in letter 108, an encomium on Paula addressed to her

119. Letter 84, chap. 6, ed. Labourt, vol. 4, p. 131, PL 22, col. 748.
120. Contre Rufin, bk. 2, chaps. 11–12, pp. 133–35.
121. Letter 124, chap. 4, ed. Labourt, vol. 7, pp. 98–99, PL 22, cols. 1062–63.
122. Letter 119, chap. 5, ed. Labourt, vol. 6, p. 99, PL 22, cols. 968–70. Jerome here
quotes Didymus distinguishing immortality from incorruptibility. Everything mor-
tal is corruptible, but not everything corruptible is mortal. Bodies deprived of souls
are corruptible but not mortal; they cannot “die” for they are not alive. Drawing this
distinction makes decay a separate problem from death and resurrection a triumph
over both. Thus resurrection is clearly stated to be a solution to putrefaction.
 92 the patristic background

daughter, he discussed resurrection at length and stressed the gastroin-

testinal system almost as much as the genitals.123
Moreover, in the same year in which his beloved Paula died, Jerome
waded into a controversy in Gaul over relics. Although he did not
explicitly relate this debate with Vigilantius to his polemic against
the Origenists about eschatology, he nonetheless focused his passion-
ate rhetoric on denying the implication that holy cadavers are merely,
and permanently, vile dust.124 Vigilantius sees bodies as polluting, says
Jerome; he laughs at the martyrs; he doubts their miracles; he deni-
grates asceticism by devaluing the bodies in which it is practiced;125
he denies that the saints can be both in the tomb and with God. But:

Are we sacrilegious when we enter the churches of the apostles? Was

the emperor Constantius I sacrilegious who translated the relics of
Andrew, Luke and Timothy to Constantinople? . . . Are bishops all to
be adjudged sacrilegious, even idiotic, when they carry a vile object
and dissolved ashes in . . . vessels of gold? Are the people of all the
churches foolish who run to the holy relics and receive them with joy
as if they discerned there a living and present prophet? . . . For you
assert that the souls of the apostles and martyrs sit together either in
Abraham’s bosom or in the place of refreshment [refrigerium] or under
the altar of God, and cannot be present away from their tombs and
wherever they wish to be. For they are of senatorial dignity, not buried
loathsomely among homicides. . . . Do you make laws for God? You
chain up the apostles, so that they are held in custody until the day of
Judgment and cannot be with their Lord, concerning whom it is writ-
ten: “they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goes” (Rev. 14.4). If the
Lamb is everywhere, those who are with the Lamb should be believed
to be everywhere. When the devil and demons go about all over the
earth, how can the martyrs, after the pouring out of their blood, be left
waiting, shut up under the altar and unable to go out from thence? . . .

123. Letter 108, chaps. 23–27, ed. Labourt, vol. 5, pp. 190–96, PL 22, cols. 900–4.
Chapters 27–28, pp. 196–97, make it clear that the doctrine of resurrection is a com-
fort to Jerome in his grief at the loss of a friend.
124. Contra Vigilantium, PL 23, cols. 353–68. And see also letter 109, ed. Labourt,
vol. 5, pp. 202–6, PL 22, cols. 906–9.
125. It is significant that Jerome opposes Vigilantius both on relics and on asceti-
cism. To Jerome, the body is valuable because it is where salvation happens. Thus
disciplining it during life and honoring it after death are not contradictory (as they
would be if asceticism were a sort of Platonic denial of the body) but complementary.
See below, n. 135.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 93

The saints are not called dead but sleeping. . . . Hence Lazarus who
was to rise is asserted to have been sleeping (John ii.ii).126

We however refuse cult and adoration not only to the relics of the
martyrs but also to the sun and moon, the angels and archangels . . .
and to every name that is named in the present world and in the world
to come, lest we serve the creation more than its creator. . . . But we
honor the relics of the martyrs that we may honor him whose martyrs
they are. . . . Are the relics of Peter and Paul unclean? Is the body of
Moses unclean, that body which according to Hebrew truth was bur-
ied by the Lord himself? . . . If it is not permissible to honor the relics
of the martyrs, why do we read: “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is
the death of his saints”? If their bones pollute what they touch, how
did the dead Elias raise a dead man; how did that body which, accord-
ing to Vigilantius, is impure give life [to a corpse]? . . . Then all the
troops of the Israelite army and all the people of God were impure,
because they bore through the desert the bodies of Joseph and the
patriarchs and carried to the Holy Land these “unclean” ashes. . . . I
repeat: are the relics of the martyrs impure? Then the apostles merit
punishment for having, in funeral cortege, gone before the “unclean”
body of Stephen and organized a great mourning in which our sorrow
was changed into joy.127

It is important to see that Jerome does not defend relics here by

asserting that they will rise although his contemporaries Victricius of
Rouen and Augustine do connect relic cult and resurrection. Jerome
admits that he himself fears corpses and needs reassurance that the
martyrs are with them as well as in heaven.128 The specter of decay
lurks around the edges of this discussion.129 Like sex, it fascinates
Jerome precisely because it repels him. But decay and mutability are

126. Contra Vigilantium, PL 23, cols. 358–60.

127. Letter 109, chaps. 1–2, vol. 5, pp. 202–5, PL 22, cols. 906–8.
128. Contra Vigilantium, PL 23, chap. 10, col. 363.
129. As an old man, Jerome described visits to the catacombs he and compan-
ions had made on Sunday afternoons when he was young (see In Hiezechielem libri
XIV, bk. 12, commentary on 40.5–13, in Opera: pt. 1: Opera exegetica, vol. 4, ed. F.
Gloria, CCL 75 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1964], pp. 556–57). He found the visits dismay-
ing but fascinating. His account is evidence that Christians were visiting the cata-
combs even before pope Damasus had them cleaned and restored (see Kelly, Jerome,
pp. 22–23, and A. D. Booth, “The Chronology of Jerome’s Early Years,” Phoenix 25
[1981]: 237–59, especially p. 257 n. 65).
 94 the patristic background

finally what Jerome denies. His charge against Vigilantius is that Vigi-
lantius believes body to be vile and changeable. Denigrating the spe-
cial bodies of the martyrs, Vigilantius accepts ordinary earthly bodies
here below. Such a position seems to Jerome totally backward: rather,
earthly bodies should be elevated toward heaven through fasting and
chastity while alive so that they can be revered in the tomb once they
are dead.130 These bodies will rise on Judgment Day exactly the same
as they have been on earth. Sherds of broken vessels, they will be put
together again, just as they were before, and hardened by God to the
immutability that is eternal glory.
In the years shortly after 200 Irenaeus and Tertullian had used
images of sprouting wheat and reforged statues to express the paradoxi-
cal conviction that the body that rises is both profoundly the same
and profoundly changed. Jerome, writing in 404, winnows the imag-
ery and mutes the paradox. His masterful rhetoric moves earth closer
to heaven, but it also moves heaven closer to earth. In his discussion
of relics, the dead body becomes in a sense less dead; its putrefaction
is denied. In his polemic for asceticism, the living body becomes less
fertile and friable, less involved in nutrition, generation, process, and
aging; it becomes, in a sense, less alive. Thus the earthly body, whether
alive or dead, moves toward heaven while still on earth. In this it is like
the body of the martyr at the moment of execution, and Jerome does
not fail to point out that the body of the ascetic here below experiences
both a continuation of the agony of martyrdom and a foretaste of the
angelic life of heaven. But that resurrected body, similar down to its
earlobes and fingernails to the body of this life, seems to provide a mirror
of earth, not an alternative to it.

Augustine and the Reassembled Statue:

The Background to the Middle Ages
Jerome’s polemics against John of Jerusalem and Vigilantius were echoed
and quoted in discussions of resurrection for the next eight hundred or
nine hundred years. But the texts that fundamentally shaped the medieval
130. See Letter 84, chap. 9, ed. Labourt, vol. 5, p. 135, PL 22, cols. 750–51, where
Jerome asserts: “I do not despise the flesh in which Christ was born and resur-
rected. . . . I do not despise the clay which, converted after baking into a vessel
without defect, reigns in heaven. . . . I love chaste flesh, virginal and fasting; I love
of the flesh not the works but the substance; I love a flesh that knows it is going to
be judged; I love that flesh which is, for Christ, at the hour of martyrdom, broken,
torn to pieces and burned.”
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 95

discussion were the works—especially the later works—of Jerome’s con-

temporary Augustine of Hippo. Complex though Augustine’s own position
may have been—influenced as it was by his Neoplatonic training, by
certain emphases of the Cappadocian fathers, and by his deeply felt need
to affirm the goodness of creation against the Manicheans131—it was his
rather straightforward theory of resurrection set forth in the City of God
(especially book 22), the Enchiridion (especially chapter 23), and the De
cura pro mortuis gerenda that provided the questions and answers funda-
mental to the entire course of scholastic debate in the high Middle Ages.132
Although Augustine’s emphases were different from Jerome’s—
chiefly in laying greater stress on change between the body of earth
and the body of heaven—their view was essentially the same: resurrec-
tion is restoration both of bodily material and of bodily wholeness or
integrity, with incorruption (which includes—for the blessed—beauty,
weightlessness, and impassibility) added on. For all his valuing of the
body as, in some sense, the conveyor of individuality as well as of hier-
archy, for all his interest in process and his creative use (not dissimilar to
Origen’s) of Stoic seminal reasons to explain it133—Augustine rejects the

131. See Paula Fredriksen, “Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy: Augustine on Paul
against the Manichees and the Pelagians,” Recherches augustiniennes 23 (1988):
87–114. See also H. Marrou and A.-M. Bonnardière, “Le dogme de la résurrection des
corps et la théologie des valeurs humaines selon l’enseignement de saint Augustin,”
Revue des études augustiniennes 12, nos. 1–2 (1966): 111–36. I see Augustine’s view
of body and creation as less optimistic, more fraught, than do these interpretations,
although I agree with them in placing the ultimate power of Augustine’s position
in its determination to redeem all of the natural world. See also Margaret R. Miles,
Augustine on the Body (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1979); G. Watson, “St.
Augustine, the Platonists, and the Resurrection Body: Augustine’s Use of a Frag-
ment from Porphyry,” Irish Theological Quarterly 50 (1983/84): 222–32; and Gerard
O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987), pp. 70–79. For bibliographies of studies on Augustine, see A. Trapè, “Augus-
tine of Hippo,” in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, vol. 1, pp. 100–1.
132. It has been customary for scholars to stress that Augustine moved from an
earlier position, emphasizing the difference of our angelic body from our earthly
one, to a later, more materialistic position: see, for example, R. M. Grant, “Resur-
rection,” p. 207; Dewart, Death and Resurrection, pp. 164–88; and John A. Mourant,
Augustine on Immortality (Villanova, Penn.: Augustinian Institute, Villanova Uni-
versity, 1969). This is certainly correct. The early, more Platonic Augustine stresses
the “spiritual body” of 1 Corinthians 15; the later Augustine stresses the “flesh and
blood” body emphasized by Tertullian and Jerome. What I suggest here is that under-
lying this difference is a fear of natural change that made both positions—that of the
spiritual resurrection body and that of the material resurrection body—a redemption
and solution. It also made both positions somewhat inconsistent internally.
133. See, for example, Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, ed. John Ham-
mond Taylor (New York and Ramsey, New Jersey: Newman Press, 1982), bk. 5, chaps.
4–5, 18, 20–23, pp. 150–53, 168, 171–76; PL 34 (Paris, 1841), cols. 325–27, 334, 335–38.
 96 the patristic background

Pauline seed metaphor with its attendant implication that body is fluid,
dynamic, potential, open to infinite development. His metaphors for
resurrection are metaphors of reassembled statues or vessels or build-
ings,134 and he stresses (as did Tertullian and Jerome) that all particles
return even if not necessarily to the same organ or part.135 Indeed, when
Augustine looks at change, he sees decay, so much so that he sometimes
equates resurrection with escape from process. In sermon 155, he actu-
ally says: “Take away death [i.e., in this context, corruption or decay]
and body is good.”136 If Adam and Eve had remained obedient in Eden,
they would have come via process (i.e., eating—in this case, eating from
the Tree of Life) to immortality; but once sin entered, process (especially
eating) could result only in decay. God’s grace and wisdom, however,
make our gain greater than our loss, for after death, which is only a
moment in the putrefaction that continues between birth and judgment,

134. See Marrou and Bonnardière, “Le dogme de la résurrection,” pp. 116–17,
which gives references to the parallel use of the statue metaphor in John Chrysostom.
135. Some interpreters have used this as evidence that Augustine did not main-
tain full material continuity; see Michel, “Résurrection,” col. 2542. This interpreta-
tion seems to me a somewhat misguided attempt to make Augustine focus more on
the issue of identity than he actually did. Augustine’s view in the City of God and
the Enchiridion was certainly as “materialistic” as the views of earlier thinkers, such
as Tertullian, and Augustine never used his idea that the matter does not have to
go to the same place as a way of allowing God to get rid of some of the matter (see
Enchiridion, chap. 23, paragrs. 89–90, ed. E. Evans, Aurelii Augustini Opera, pt. 13,
vol. 2, CCL 46 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1969], p. 97). His concern was to retain what was
there at creation, not to make the self lie in something nonmaterial, such as shape
or form. See n. 116 above, for the same issue in Jerome.
Dewart (Death and Resurrection, pp. 164–88) argues that Augustine is closer to
Origen than to Methodius because he concentrates on intellectual, rather than physi-
cal, vision of God in heaven (see De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chap. 29, in B. Dombart and
A. Kalb, eds., Aurelii Augustini Opera, pt. 14, CCL 47–48 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1955],
vol. 2, pp. 856–62). Given Augustine’s intense interest in the retaining of organs in
heaven (an interest at least as powerful as Tertullian’s), this seems to me a misplac-
ing of emphasis. Certainly, compared to their immediate precursors the Cappado-
cians, Augustine and Jerome are far more “materialistic” in their interpretation of
resurrection.
136. Sermon 155, in Augustine, Sermones, PL 38–39 (Paris, 1841), vol. 38, cols.
840–49, quoted passage at 849. The context is, significantly, Luke 21.18 (“Not a
hair . . .”), Romans 7.24 (“Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”), and 1
Corinthians 15.44 and 53. So escape from death and material continuity are linked.
Augustine argues that delivery from the body of death is not delivery from body
but from death. He says: “Detrahatur mors . . . inimica, et erit mihi in aeternum
caro mea amica.” See also Enchiridion, chap. 32, paragr. 91, CCL 46, p. 98, where
Augustine says that the body’s substance will be flesh in the resurrection; it will not,
however, suffer corruption. And see A. Challet, “Corps glorieux,” DTC, vol. 3 (1938),
cols. 1896–97. The remark of Mourant, in Augustine on Immortality, p. 24, to the
effect that Augustine, in such teaching, gives new importance to the body ignores
the similarity of his position to much earlier thinking.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 97

we can rise to incorruption. Once risen, we will truly escape change. We

will have not only the posse non mori and posse non commutari of Eden
but the non posse mori, non posse mutari, of heaven.137 Augustine’s
early sermons may use organic, naturalistic images for many changes,
including (occasionally) resurrection, but the texts of his middle and old
age—the texts that set the course of Western discussion—expressed a
profound fear of development and process. Whereas Syriac and Greek
writing of the decades before Augustine shared this fear of putrefaction
but sublimated process into redemption, the Augustine of the City of
God and the Enchiridion saw salvation as the crystalline hardness not
only of stasis but of the impossibility of non-stasis.138
The passages in Augustine that set the agenda for medieval discussion
considered in even greater detail than had Tertullian or Jerome questions
about exactly what details of the earthly body reappear in heaven. Will
aborted fetuses rise? Will Siamese twins be two people or one in the
resurrection? Will we all be the same sex in heaven? the same height
and weight? the same age? Will we have to eat? Will we be able to eat?
Will deformities and mutilations appear in heaven? Will nail and hair
clippings all return to the body to which they originally belonged? Will

137. Literal Meaning of Genesis, ed. Taylor, bk. 6, chaps. 7–25, bk. 8, chaps. 3–5,
vol. 1, pp. 182–205 and vol. 2, pp. 36–41, PL 34, cols. 342–54 and 374–77; De civitate
Dei, bk. 13, 20–23, CCL 48, pp. 403–8; sermons 361–62, in Sermones, PL 39, cols.
1599–1634, and Mourant, Augustine on Immortality, appendix, pp. 50–126.
138. This is not to forget that the Augustinian notion of desire—particularly of
the desire of soul for body—became in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth cen-
turies a major source of a dynamic vision of heaven. See Literal Commentary on
Genesis, bk. 12, chap. 35, trans. Taylor, vol. 2, pp. 228–29, PL 34, col. 483:
Quia inest ei naturalis quidam appetitus corpus administrandi; quo appetitu
retardatur quodammodo ne tota intentione perget in illud summum coelum,
quamdiu non subest corpus, cujus administratione appetitus ille conquiescat.
Porro autem si tale sit corpus, cujus sit difficilis et gravis administratio, sicut
haec caro quae corrumpitur, et aggravat animam, de propagine transgressionis
existens, multo magis avertitur mens ab illa visione summi coeli: unde neces-
sario abripienda erat ab ejusdem carnis sensibus. . . . Proinde cum hoc corpus
jam non animale, sed . . . spirituale receperit Angelis coaequata, perfectum
habebit naturae suae modum, obediens et imperans, vivificata et vivificans,
tam ineffabilis facilitate, ut sit ei gloriae quod sarcinae fuit.
It took centuries for this part of Augustine’s ideas to come to prominence. It also
took centuries for the “retarding,” distracting desire he speaks of to become, for
his commentators, something like what we mean by love. See below, pp. 132 and
252–53. For a perceptive discussion of how Augustine’s eschatology looks forward to
an end of time and to heaven rather than back toward a Golden Age and restoration
(as did the Greek Fathers), see Kassius Hallinger, “The Spiritual Life of Cluny in the
Early Days,” in Cluniac Monasticism in the Central Middle Ages, ed. Noreen Hunt
(London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 37–38.
 98 the patristic background

men have beards in their resurrected bodies? Will we “see” in heaven

only when our eyes are open? Will we rise with all our internal organs
as well as our external ones?139
These questions were not all equally important to Augustine. Some
were posed merely as examples of the silliness of pagans or of credu-
lous Christians.140 Others were answered in different ways in different
texts. (Augustine was consistent in holding that we rise with gender;141
he was uncertain about our age at resurrection although he suggested
in one passage that we will all rise aged thirty;142 he was inconsis-
tent about whether or not we return with the shape—i.e., height and
weight—we had on earth.143) Still other questions adumbrated, without
fully addressing, deep philosophical issues. For example, Augustine was
not completely consistent about whether the martyrs rise with scars
indicating their tortures, but in at least one passage (City of God, book
22, chapter 19) he equated such scars with personal experience or his-
tory and thereby suggested that body is in some way a necessary con-
veyor of personhood or self.144

139. The crucial passages are Enchiridion, chaps. 23–29, CCL 46, pp. 95–110; De
civitate Dei, bks. 13, 19–22, CCL 48, pp. 385–414 and 657–758.
140. For Augustine’s own references to contemporary discussion, see Enarrationes
in Psalmos, In Ps. 88, vers. 5, PL 37 (Paris, 1841), cols. 1122–23, and ed. E. Dekkers
and J. Fraipont, in Aurelii Augustini Opera, pt. 10, vol. 2, CCL 39 (Turnhout: Brepols,
1956), pp. 1222–23; Enchiridion, chap. 23, paragr. 84, p. 95; De civitate Dei, bk. 22,
chaps, 12–20, pp. 831–41; sermon 361, chaps. 1–6, in PL 39, cols. 1599–1605, and
Mourant, pp. 50–56.
141. De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chaps. 17–18, pp. 835–37; sermon 243, PL 38 (Paris,
1841), cols. 1145–47. Although Augustine discusses repeatedly the need for defects
to be repaired, he never considers female genitals defective. Indeed, he asserts that
the reference in Ephesians 4.10–16 to the “perfect man” includes women (De civitate
Dei, p. 841).
142. De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chap. 15, p. 834. Augustine says he is uncertain
whether the scriptural reference to “the age of the fullness of Christ” means that we
all rise the same age, but (he asserts) the “wisest men” fix the age of the bloom of
youth at thirty. Duval (“Tertullian contre Origène,” p. 269) points out that the age
of Christ at his resurrection was taken as a model for us all. The tradition of thirty
as the age of peak human development was, however, older than Christianity. See
below chapter 3, n. 15.
143. Compare De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chap. 15, p. 834, with Enchiridion, chap.
23, paragrs. 89–90, p. 97.
144. De civitate Dei, pp. 841–42. See Marrou and Bonnardière, “Le dogme de la
résurrection,” p. 129, citing P. L. Landsberg, who has argued that Augustine was
the first to see the importance of this for the issue of individuality. The sugges-
tion is implicit in Augustine’s position, but one should not make too much of it;
Augustine did not set himself the task of solving the problems of identity and/or
individuation.
Jewish discussion of resurrection from about the same period holds explicitly
that we rise with our defects, which are then repaired by God; see Babylonian Tal-
mud (Soncino ed.), Sanhedrin, 91a–91b. In contrast, Augustine held that the blessed
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 99

What is most striking in such discussions is Augustine’s insistence

on keeping minute details of the heavenly body close to the earthly one,
while adding (a crucial addition of course!) stasis.145 Luke 21.18 (“Not
a hair of your head . . .”) caused trouble, as it did for other patristic
exegetes, because hair was known to grow quickly and its exuberance
was associated with wildness, with lack of cultivation and control.146
Hence Augustine suggested in one passage that Luke 21.18 might refer
to the number of hairs (rather than to their material particles).147 His use
of the statue analogy, which states that the material need not return to
the part from which it originally came, can also be taken—as some mod-
ern commentators have taken it—to mitigate the necessity for mate-
rial continuity.148 But in general Augustine required material continuity
as well as integrity or wholeness and shared with Ephraim and other
fourth-century thinkers a tendency to use biblical passages that appear
in fact to refer to intact individuals as if they described the re-collection
of bodily bits. Sermon 127, for example, elaborates John 5.28 (which
speaks of “those that are in the grave”) as referring to scattered bones
and ashes as well as corpses;149 sermon 173 understands the parable of
the lost sheep as a description of the collection of dispersed limbs.150
Emphasizing again and again how beautiful the blessed will be in
heaven and defining beauty with a Neoplatonic emphasis on structure
and harmony,151 Augustine nonetheless assumes in many places that
what is in fact the case here below is beautiful. Men will have beards
in heaven because they must rise as handsome as possible; even the
genitals will rise the same.152 Augustine asserts explicitly that there

rise with defects repaired; we do not know, however—and we should not inquire—
whether the damned rise with defects repaired or unrepaired.
145. See Tractatus 49, paragr. 10, In Joannis Evangelium, PL 35 (Paris, 1845), col.
1751–52.
146. See Satran, “Fingernails and Hair.”
147. De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chap. 19, CCL 48, pp. 837–39; but cf. Enchiridion,
chap. 23, paragrs. 89–90, CCL 46, p. 97, which stresses that no matter is lost.
148. See above nn. 135 and 147.
149. Sermon 127, chap. 10, paragr. 14, PL 38, cols. 712–17. It is important that
Augustine comments that such scattered bodies are yet Deo integra. “Quomodo
expressit carne mortuos? qui sunt in monumentis [John 5.28], quorum jacent sepulta
cadavera, quorum favillae tectae sunt, quorum ossa dispersa sunt, quorum caro jam
non est, et tamen Deo integra est. Veniet hora . . . omne quod periit, imo perisse
putatur, restituetur. Si enim Deus fecit hominem qui non erat, non potest reparare
quod erat?”
150. Sermon 173, chap. 2, paragr. 2, PL 38, col. 938.
151. See De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chap. 24, CCL 48, pp. 846–52; Fredriksen,
“Beyond Body/Soul Dichotomy”; and Dewart, Death and Resurrection, pp. 164–88.
152. Sermon 243, PL 38, cols. 1143–47. See also sermon 155, in PL 38, cols. 840–
49, and De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chap. 19, CCL 46, pp. 837–39.
 100 the patristic background

will be rank and hierarchy in heaven.153 Women and men will rise with
their respective sexes, because there is sexual difference here below and
virtue is achieved (and rewarded) in the context of what is possible for
each particular individual. He assures us, however, that—although God
certainly created women inferior—he did not have to create women in
order to create inferiority. There are varying degrees of excellence even
within the masculine gender.154
Although it is not quite clear to me what Augustine thought about
the internal organs, he is certain they will rise.155 Since nothing will be
hidden in heaven but all will manifest its glory, it seems at least pos-
sible that he thinks the virtuous will be transparent, enjoying the sight
of each others’ harmoniously arranged livers and intestines in paradise.
It is particularly suggestive that Augustine’s consideration of the resur-
rection of inner organs occurs not only in the context of ridiculing the
infantile obsessions of the credulous but also in a serious discussion
(sermon 243) of the noli me tangere, a passage used by other patris-
tic exegetes to underline how distant our spiritual body will be from
earth.156
Augustine’s various discussions of the weightlessness, beauty, impas-
sibility, and incorruption we will gain in heaven form the background
to the doctrine of the dowries of the glorified body developed in the high
Middle Ages. His repeated emphasis on the yearning of the separated
soul for body (an idea he himself traces to Platonic roots but is aware
of inverting for Christian purposes) becomes an important component

153. Sermon 132, chap. 3, paragr. 3, in PL 38, col. 736.

Quanto vos meliores, qui quod erunt homines post resurrectionem, hoc vos
incipitis esse ante mortem? Servate gradus vestros: servat enim vobis Deus
honores vestros. Comparata est resurrectio mortuorum stellis in coelo consti-
tutis. Stella enim ab Stella differt in gloria, ut Apostolus dicit: sic et resurrec-
tio mortuorum [1 Cor. 15.41–42]. Aliter enim ibi lucebit virginitas, aliter ibi
lucebit castitas conjugalis, aliter ibi lucebit sancta viduitas. Diversa lucebunt:
sed omnes ibi erunt. Splendor dispar, coelum commune.
It is important to note that the context is a discussion of proper conduct in mar-
riage; Augustine asserts that men are stronger but that women often surpass them
in virtue.
154. See Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, bk. 9, chap. 5, vol. 2, p. 75,
PL 34 (Turnhout, 1886), col. 396. The central point of Augustine’s discussion here is
that man would have been a better companion for man; therefore woman was cre-
ated for childbearing.
155. Sermon 243, PL 38, cols. 1143–46; and, for a similar argument, see De civi-
tate Dei, bk. 22, chap. 24, CCL 48, pp. 846–52. Augustine’s statement in sermon
243 that we will not be like statues, with only an exterior, parallels Origen’s in On
Prayer, 31.3; see above, n. 29.
156. Cf. De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chap. 12, CCL 48, pp. 831–33.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 101

of the medieval notion of flesh as essential to personhood.157 There is

in Augustine a real stress on body as necessary and beautiful in the
resurrection, on the non posse mori of the end of time as a victory over
earth that would never have come without the felix culpa of Adam
and the incarnation and resurrection of God. But Augustine does not
speak of this victory in metaphors of flowering plants, happy and nur-
turing bodies, fragrant or pregnant or fertile earth. Rather, fascinated
though he is by germination, his accounts of natural process invari-
ably gravitate toward the problem of rot. Although he does not say so
explicitly, he seems unable to imagine a case of growth or change that
is not in some way a deterioration or loss of identity. Only miraculous
growth (for example, the miracle of the loaves and fishes) seems to
him fully good.158 As he says in book 4, chapter 3, of his De Trinitate:
“The body—that is, the ‘outer man’—is such that the longer life lasts,
the more it is corrupted, whether through age, or sickness, or various
afflictions, until it comes at last to the goal that is called by everyone
death.”159 Bodies, to Augustine, are not seeds but inert or (even worse)
rotting earth—the dust of Genesis 3.19.160
A distrust of organic images runs throughout Augustine’s work. In
chapter 1, book 22, of the City of God, he rejects the greening tree as a
metaphor for resurrection because it has only the appearance of perpe-
tuity. In chapter 24 he asserts that fecundity is good, seeds do sprout,
but he seems to feel it necessary to insist (almost as Methodius did) that
it is really God who effects the growth.161 In book 3, chapters 14–17, of
the Literal Commentary on Genesis, his discussion slips quite oddly
from a consideration of creation as a kind of spontaneous generation to
an articulation of horror at the possibility that beasts might eat human
corpses.162 In sermon 361 (from 410–411), one of his most important

157. See the passage quoted in n. 138 above. See also De civitate Dei, bk. 13, chap.
20, pp. 403–4. On Augustine’s understanding of the desire of the soul for God, see
McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, pp. 310 and 329–33.
158. Sermon 130, in PL 38, cols. 725–28.
159. De Trinitate, bk. 4, chap. 3, ed. W. J. Mountain and F. Gloria, Aurelii Augus-
tini Opera, pt. 16, CCL 50 and 50A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), vol. 1, p. 165, lines
17–21.
160. See sermon 242, chaps. 3–5, paragrs. 4–7, PL 38, cols. 1140–41; the context
is a discussion of the problem presented by the “natural place” of the elements; how
can a body made of earth be in the sky after resurrection? See also De civitate Dei,
bk. 20, chap. 20, pp. 733–36.
161. De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chaps. 1 and 24, pp. 699–700 and 744–47.
162. Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, bk. 3, chaps. 14–17, vol. 1, pp. 89–92:
the discussion moves from creation to the food chain and then from beasts eating
cadavers to the promise of Luke 21.18. See also ibid., bk. 5, chap. 4, paragrs. 9–11,
 102 the patristic background

treatments of resurrection, he uses the seed of 1 Corinthians 15 and

asserts that there is renewal in the earth. But he immediately associates
fertility with rot, moves to a discussion of garbage and dung, and states
that when we open graves, we find putrefying flesh and fall into despair.
Insofar as he returns at all in this sermon to the seed and the hope of
resurrection, it serves only as a guarantee that something subsists, not
as a promise of change. Sermon 362 explicitly equates body with flux,
suggests that the need to eat is the proof of our destructive mutability,
and asserts that all dynamism must disappear in heaven if we are to
be redeemed.163 Throughout his writings, Augustine repeatedly equates
living with eating;164 yet he sees redemption as triumph over digestion
and nutrition. Our goal is to be nourished into nonconsumption.

We know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we

shall see him as he is [1 John 3.2]. Behold [you shall] understand what
you will be nourished on and how you will [then] receive what nour-
ishes you by eating. [And you shall understand it] thus: that what is
eaten [then] is not diminished, but whoever eats it is supported in
life. For now food maintains us by eating, but the food that is eaten
is diminished. When however we begin to feed on justice, to eat wis-
dom, to taste that immortal food, we will be supported in life and the
food will not be diminished. For the eye knows how to feed on light
without diminishing the light. . . . When a wonderful food is praised
to you on which you are going to dine, you prepare your stomach;
God is praised to you, prepare your heart.165

For Augustine, there was no easy escape from the horrors of con-
sumption and putrefaction. Not for him the solution of Athenagoras

vol. 1, pp. 150–53, which seems to evidence a fear of “the seeds in things.” Augustine
discusses at great length whether God creates earth from which come trees which
produce seeds, or whether he creates earth with seeds in it from which the trees come.
It seems to be important to him to argue, from Genesis 1.11, that the first alterna-
tive is the correct one. Thus Augustine adduces Scripture against the notion of seeds
in things—i.e., against a view of the world that makes spontaneous generation the
paradigm.
163. For sermons 361 and 362, see PL 39, cols. 1599–1634, and Mourant, Augus-
tine on Immortality, appendix, pp. 50–126.
164. See Enchiridion, chap. 23, paragr. 106, pp. 106–7, and sermon 264, PL 38,
cols. 1212–18.
165. Sermon 127, chap. 5, paragr. 6, in PL 38, cols. 709. The elaboration in ser-
mon 127 is, of course, allegorical, but the idea of being nourished into noneating is a
theme underlying much of Augustine’s discussion of the Eucharist and of the Garden
of Eden. In City of God (bk. 13, chaps. 20–22, pp. 403–4) for example, he argues that
after the resurrection we will not have to eat in order to not-decay.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 103

or Justin Martyr, of Methodius, or of his own contemporary Zeno of

Verona—the denial, that is, that decay really dissolves, that digestion
really consumes.166 Augustine held that cannibalism is the most dif-
ficult objection of all to resurrection, but he absolutely refused to deny
that nutrition and excretion really process flesh.167
Nonetheless Augustine insisted that resurrection is the reassemblage
of bits. His lovely and psychologically perceptive treatise on the care
of the dead reassured people that concern for cadavers is a natural and
pious human instinct but that we need not fear: no destruction, diges-
tion, or dissolution can really destroy the body.168 Augustine repeatedly
asserted that God would reforge or recast or re-collect in heaven (or in
hell) the bits that constituted the person in life.169

For if some one, famishing for want and pressed with hunger, use
human flesh as food—an extremity not unknown, as both ancient
history and the unhappy experience of our own days have taught
us—can it be contended, with any show of reason, that all the flesh
eaten has been evacuated, and that none of it has been assimilated to
the substance of the eater, though the very emaciation which existed
before, and has now disappeared, sufficiently indicates what large
deficiencies have been filled up with this food? But . . . all the flesh
which hunger has consumed finds its way into the air by evaporation,
whence . . . God Almighty can recall it. That flesh, therefore, shall be
restored to the man in whom it first became human flesh. For it must
be looked upon as borrowed by the other person, and, like a pecuniary

166. See Zeno, Tractatus, bk. 1, tractate 16: De resurrectione, PL 11, cols. 371–86,
esp. 385; and Michel, “Résurrection,” DTC, vol 13, col. 2540. Commenting on 1
Corinthians 15, Zeno says: “Unde dubium non est in corporibus nostris, dum mortis
lege seminantur, non substantiam, non imaginem, sed illud tantum quod inutile
est, discuti, quod teritur, demutari, sicut scriptum est . . . corruptivum hoc induere
incorruptionem. . . .” And see above, nn. 10 and 11, for a discussion of Macarius,
who may come close to Augustine in both affirming and denying that digestion
really digests.
167. De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chaps. 20–23, pp. 839–46. Augustine asserts in chap-
ter 22 that cannibalism is the ultimate depravity.
168. De cura pro mortuis gerenda, PL 40 (Paris, 1841), cols. 591–610; and sermons
122 and 123, PL 38, cols. 680–86. And see De civitate Dei, bk. 19, chap. 12, pp.
675–78, where Augustine both expresses horror at putrefaction and chain consump-
tion and asserts that the process is peaceful and harmonious. The moldering body is
“assimilated to the elements of the world, and particle by particle enters into peace
with them” (p. 689).
169. It is worth noting that in both De civitate Dei and the Enchiridion Augus-
tine is quite concerned with the torments of hell, which he sometimes equates with
the grave. But it is very important to him to insist that even bodies in hell are reas-
sembled so that their torture can be perpetual; see De civitate Dei, bk. 19.
 104 the patristic background

loan, must be returned to the lender. His own flesh, however, which
he lost by famine, shall be restored to him by Him who can recover
even what has evaporated. And though it had been absolutely anni-
hilated, so that no part of its substance remained in any secret spot
of nature, the Almighty could restore it by such means as He saw fit.
For this sentence, uttered by the Truth, “Not a hair of your head shall
perish” [Luke 21.18], forbids us to suppose that, though no hair of a
man’s head can perish, yet the large portions of his flesh eaten and
consumed by the famishing [cannibals] can perish.170

Relic Cult
Between Tertullian and Augustine lay the ideas of Origen, which might
have solved the technical problem of identity and established the Pau-
line seed as the image of resurrection. But they did not do so. Instead,
for all the complex, organic, and in certain ways Origenist images of
fourth-century theology, the discussions of the period between 395 and
430 established for the medieval West a very different image of res-
urrection. Jerome and Augustine returned to Tertullian’s idea of the
reassemblage of bits, adding to it a new emphasis on the beauty of
wholeness and on a hardening of the body against change.
As I have already suggested in discussing Gregory of Nyssa with his
more extravagant notions of growth between earth and heaven, relic cult
was an important context for the early fifth-century understanding of
the resurrected body. Even Gregory, who clung to an Origenist sense that
we will shed the specificities of earth (such as sex or age) as we develop
toward heaven, often seems to have had relics in mind when he discussed
resurrection. Thus, he found it hard to relinquish the hope that every
particle would be saved and in some way marked by having been the
particular body it was here below. Jerome coupled an attack on disrespect
for asceticism with a defense of relics as the noble places where virtue is
achieved. Augustine—as a number of recent scholars have established—
not only came in his last years to an enormous respect for relics and a
belief in the miracles they performed but also made them the context for
discussing resurrection as the reassemblage of every bodily bit.171

170. De civitate Dei, bk. 22, chap. 20, pp. 839–41; trans. M. Dods et al, The City
of God (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 844.
171. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967), pp. 408–18; Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques, pp. 238–58; and Petersen, Dia-
logues of Gregory the Great, pp. 91–95. The last book of the De civitate Dei joins a
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 105

In 415 relics of the martyr Stephen—whose discovery played an

important part in the council of Diospolis—were brought to the West
by Augustine’s friend Orosius and began to work miracles. In the win-
ter of 424–25 (just as Augustine was finishing the De cura pro mortuis
gerenda, a year after he had finished the Enchiridion and two years
before he wrote book 22 of the City of God), the relics came to Hippo.
As a young man in Milan, Augustine had been uninterested in relics,
and the council of 401 held under his influence had tried to limit the
practice of moving the dust of the saints. But by 422–23 Augustine had
been convinced by accounts of the cures and visions at Uzalis and Car-
thage; he now ordered Stephen’s miracles at Hippo to be recorded.172 It
is interesting to note that resurrections from the dead are significantly
more frequent in the collection made under Augustine’s supervision
than in other miracle books of the period.173
The discomfort Augustine felt with natural process as akin to decay
was manifest throughout his life; his early sermons agree with the De
cura pro mortuis gerenda (and indeed with the writings of Tertullian
and Irenaeus 200 years before) in expressing concern for pious burial
yet confidence that (whatever horrors God permits to happen to the
cadaver) we will all rise. But the emphasis on integrity—wholeness—in
resurrection, like the repeated considerations of exactly how the bits
return, occurred in Augustine’s late writings. He jettisoned organic
images for the change from earthly to resurrection body at the same
time he discarded his suspicion of relics and their miracles. His concern
in the Enchiridion and the City of God for the salvation of bits seems
to express not only his pastoral obligation to answer the queries of the
faithful but also his own increasing tendency to have relics in mind
when thinking about bodies that would rise from the dead. As Victor
Saxer has brilliantly explained, the dead were materialized by being
divided up and distributed; the more the martyr’s parts were spread

discussion of resurrection to a discussion of miracles performed by relics. Augustine

scholars, especially De Vooght and Courcelle, have paid much attention to Augus-
tine’s change of mind on relics; see Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les ‘Confes-
sions’ de saint Augustin, 2d ed. (Paris: E. de Bracard, 1968), pp. 139–53; D.-P. De
Vooght, “Les miracles dans la vie de saint Augustin,” Revue de théologie ancienne
et médiévale 11 (1939): 5–16; and Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques, pp. 240–44. Cour-
celle has shown that between 390 and 400 Augustine was little inclined to accept
miracles, but after 400 he begins to speak of miracles at tombs, and by 422–23 he
accepts visions.
172. Peter Brown, Augustine, pp. 414–15; Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques, pp.
165–71 and 239–81.
173. Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques, p. 262.
 106 the patristic background

throughout the Mediterranean world, the more he or she came to be

seen as housed within the fragment.174 Augustine’s stress on the return
of every segment or part of the broken statue when God reforges it at
the end of time was surely related to the wonder-working presence in
his own community of parts of the first martyr, parts that seemed in
no religious sense defective, corrupt, or incomplete. If a mere fragment
of Stephen cured the sick and raised the dead, it could not be less than
the whole martyr. And if this tiny bit was already whole in Hippo, how
can we think that any piece will be missing when the trumpet sounds?
The later part of the fourth century was an important period for the
development of relic cult. Imperial legislation and Christian sermons
against moving bodies into the city, dividing, or selling them, attest
that such things were in fact happening and causing intense anxiety.175
Scholars used to claim that Eastern and Western attitudes differed in
this period, with Western theology and practice more horrified by and
resistant to partition and translation. Recent work rightly de-emphasizes
the difference.176 Nonetheless it is perhaps significant that the text that
delineates most clearly the growing tendency to stress wholeness as the
characteristic of relics—and to relate such wholeness to resurrection—
comes from the West. It is a celebration of the arrival of relics in Rouen,

174. Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques, passim, and especially pp. 311ff., and Grabar,
Martyrium, vol. 1, pp. 40–42. On the intense concern in the period of persecutions
to reassemble the bodies of the martyrs for burial, see Leclercq, “Martyr,” DALC,
vol. 10, cols. 2359–2512, especially cols. 2435–57, and Hermann-Mascard, Les Rel-
iques des saints, pp. 23–26. Persecution, of course, divided bodies and often made
it necessary to move them for burial. Christians responded to the dissonance thus
created both by asserting resurrection to be reassemblage and by asserting the part
to be the whole.
On the increasing tendency to speak of the saint as resident both in the grave
and in heaven, see Sabine MacCormack, “Loca Sancta: The Organization of Sacred
Topography in Late Antiquity,” in The Blessings of Pilgrimage, ed. Robert Oust-
erhout (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 7, and Thomas
Head, Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints: The Diocese of Orleans, 800–1200
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
On burial near the saints as a way of protecting the corpse, see Yvette Duval,
Auprès des saints corps et âme: L’inhumation “ad sanctos” dans la chrétienté
d’Orient et d’Occident du IIIe au VIIe siècle (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1988),
pp. 194–201.
175. Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques; Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise
and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981);
P. Sejourné, “Reliques,” DTC, vol. 13, pt. 2, cols. 2330–65; Patrick J. Geary, Furta
Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1978); Hermann-Mascard, Les Reliques des saints; Ariès, The Hour of Our
Death) Leclercq, “Martyr”; and Grabar, Martyrium.
176. See works cited above in nn. 174 and 75 and Petersen, Dialogues of Gregory
the Great, pp. 141–50.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 107

written about 396 by Victricius, who had just received a second shipment
of holy body parts from Ambrose.177 Victricius retains at least a hint of
the organic imagery used earlier in the fourth century to describe resur-
rection. He sees relics as “first fruits” and says that they will “flower” in
heaven. Nonetheless his major image is of holy bodies as the temples or
buildings where the martyrs reside; they are “jewels,” hard and whole.
What Victricius fears is any suggestion that in receiving such a gift he
has contributed to mutilating or disempowering the saints. He insists
that the healings they perform do not drain them any more than shining
dims the sun. Blood is sealed in them; they never change. Shimmering
reflections of eternity, they are complete in every particle.

Let no one, deceived by vulgar error, think that the truth of the whole
of their bodily passion is not contained in these fragments. . . . We
proclaim, with all our faith and authority, that there is nothing in
these relics that is not complete. For where healing power is present
the members are complete.
. . . The Passion of the saints is the imitation of Christ, and Christ
is God. Therefore, no division is to be inserted in fullness, but in that
division which is visible to the eye the truth of the whole is to be
adored. . . .
I touch remnants but I affirm that in these relics perfect grace and
virtue are contained. . . . He who cures lives. He who lives is present
in his relics. . . .
. . . It is toward these jewels that we should set the sails of our souls;
there is nothing fragile in them, nothing that decreases, nothing which
can feel the passage of time. . . . The blood which the fire of the Holy
Spirit still seals in their bodies and in these relics shows that they are
extraordinary signs of eternity.178

For several hundred years after Victricius, Western discussions of

resurrection would occur mostly in the context of relic cult.179 The

177. Victricius of Rouen, De laude sanctorum, ed. Jacob Mulders, CCL 64 (Turn-
hout: Brepols, 1985), pp. 69–93; portions translated by J. N. Hillgarth in The Conver-
sion of Western Europe, 350–750 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 22–27.
178. Victricius, De laude, chaps. 9–12, CCL 64, pp. 83–90, trans. Hillgarth, pp.
24–26 (chapter numbers differ in the translated version). For a continuation of this
motif, see the texts cited by Arnold Angenendt, “Der ‘ganze’ und ‘unverweste’ Leib:
Eine Leitidee der Reliquienverehrung bei Gregor von Tours und Beda Venerabilis,” in
ed. Hubert Mordek, Aus Archiven und Bibliotheken: Festschrift für Raymund Kottje
zum 65. Geburtstag (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 33–50.
179. See nn. 3 and 112 above on Gregory the Great. One of the most extensive
and interesting texts to discuss resurrection in the context of relic cult is Braulio
 108 the patristic background

dominant images would be metaphors of reassembling or hardening.

Such images implied that decay was not really decay; parts were merely
dispersed; even if swallowed, digested, made into alien flesh, excreted,
or rotted, they did not finally become anything else. Increasingly, the
hope of Christians lay in the promise that scattered bones and dust,
marked in some way for their own bodies, would be reunited. It also
lay in the conviction that every part, like every morsel of Christ’s body
eaten at the altar, was a whole. If a martyr was present in every minute
bit of his dust, if he cured the sick and raised the dead, then both decay
and partition could be overcome. The final change to stasis would come
only at the end of time, but the jewellike hardness of the relic (whether
it was to the eye of the beholder a part or a whole) could move the tired
bodies of ordinary believers a little way toward the resurrection while
still on earth.

Asceticism, the Church, and the World

In the later fourth century, relic cult and the doctrine of bodily resur-
rection were complementary ways of emphasizing the triumph of integ-
rity over partition, of stasis and incorruption over decay.180 Yet there are
other ways of expressing victory over moral and physical putrefaction,
and even the ascetics who strove to begin their victory while in this life
differed in tactics and teaching. For example, some followers of Origen,

of Saragossa, letter 42, in Iberian Fathers, vol. 2, Fathers of the Church, vol. 63,
trans. Claude W. Barrow (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press,
1969), pp. 88–95. Writing in 649–50, Braulio responds to a query about whether all of
Christ’s blood rose at the resurrection. His interlocutor worries that, if it did, the sup-
posed relics of Christ’s blood venerated in churches are false. Braulio uses Augustine
to argue that superfluous blood need not rise; therefore, the supposed blood on a col-
umn seen by St. Jerome is perhaps genuine. But Braulio urges his correspondent not
to worry about such matters; he should place his faith in the blood of the Eucharist,
which is surely Christ’s. Braulio feels it important to underline that we do receive
back our blood in our resurrection, and he uses Luke 21.18 to stress that “the Lord
remembers and includes the smallest and most remote of our limbs when he speaks
of the hair” (p. 91). Braulio clearly has a notion of a core of material that accounts for
identity in resurrection. On Braulio, see Charles H. Lynch, Saint Braulio, Bishop of
Saragossa (631–651): His Life and Writings (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University
of America, 1938), especially pp. 94–109. For liturgical texts from the early Middle
Ages that stress material continuity, see Michel, “Résurrection,” col. 2545.
180. See also the suggestive remarks of Peter Brown in Body and Society, pp.
222–24, 293–94, 382–84, and especially pp. 440–43; and Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and
Christians (New York: Knopf, 1987), pp. 445–48.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 109

such as Evagrius, rejected entirely the notion that the body is maintained
in resurrection.181 Others, such as Gregory of Nyssa or Hilary of Poitiers,
saw the fluid, dynamic body of 1 Corinthians 15 as winning out over the
pull of corruption by leaving behind much of the specificity of the flesh
we inhabit here on earth. Why then did some fierce ascetics, such as
Jerome and, in his own way, Augustine, strain so to lift every organ and
particle into the crystalline hardness of heaven? Why did propaganda for
the monastic movement sometimes insist (as did Athanasius in his Life
of Anthony) that “this body” shall rise, or argue (as did John Climacus)
that we become incorruptible already in this life if we keep ourselves
pure and glorify God?182 Why bring heaven so close to earth? With this
final question I return to an interpretative issue I raised in my first chap-
ter and to much of the most creative scholarship done in the last ten
years on late antiquity.
Using a model borrowed from Durkheimian anthropology and medi-
ated through feminism, Elaine Pagels, John Gager, and Elizabeth Clark
have recently argued that both the triumphant, institutional church
of the fourth century and the branch of the ascetic movement that
opposed Gnosticism, Platonism, and Origenism, projected into escha-
tology their newly achieved ecclesiastical and ascetic hierarchies.183
This interpretation recognizes that figures such as Augustine and
Jerome were profoundly uneasy with the culture of upper-class pagans;
nonetheless, it sees them rejecting and inverting worldly distinctions
of class and gender only to inscribe another version in an ascetic or

181. See the works by Elizabeth Clark cited in nn. 15, 106, and 117 above.
182. Athanasius, The Life of Anthony, chap. 92, trans. Robert C. Gregg, in The
Life of Anthony and the Letter to Marcellinus (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 97.
John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, chap. 15, in PG 88 (Paris, 1860), col.
892d–893a; trans. C. Luibheid and N. Russell (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), p. 179:
“such a man [i.e., one of astonishing chastity] has already risen to immortality before
the general resurrection.” See also Anthony, Letter 1, in The Letters of Anthony the
Great, trans. D. J. Chitty (Oxford: SLG Press, 1977), p. 5, where he says that the pure
body here on earth receives “a portion of that spiritual body which it is to assume
in the resurrection of the just.” For a brilliant and evocative discussion of this, see
Peter Brown, Body and Society, pp. 222–40.
183. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979);
eadem, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988); John Gager,
“Body-Symbols”; and E. Clark, “New Perspectives on the Origenist Controversy.”
To summarize such complex argumentation in a single sentence is, of course, unfair.
Gager, drawing on Pagels, speaks more of Christianity in general, Clark of asceti-
cism. But the arguments of all three work essentially the same way. A very helpful
discussion of asceticism is Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 199–211.
 110 the patristic background

ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth that carries over, in its every detail,

into heaven. John Gager, drawing on Mary Douglas, has indeed argued
that conceptions of the body always reflect conceptions of society. He
suggests that notions of the earthly body as transformable and the heav-
enly body as spiritual are expressions of rebellion against the world as it
is, while notions of resurrection as involving both material continuity
and bodily integrity undergird the power of ecclesiastical or moral hier-
archy. The materialistic reading of resurrection is thus interpreted as a
way of perpetuating sexual, social, and religious difference for eternity.
The argument is a problematic one. Applied to the details of histori-
cal change and to specific theological texts, it does not really work. It
cannot explain, for example, why the powerful bishop Ambrose should
have such a dynamic, open-ended, and spiritual conception of the resur-
rection body whereas Jerome, who for all his authoritarian personality
was in many ways a rebel, projects almost every bodily distinction and
function into heaven.184 Nor does it take sufficient account of what
was the greatest fear to late fourth- and early fifth-century elites: fear
of absorption by an invading other whom they called the barbarians.185
But in a general way, the argument is palpably accurate. Augustine
and Jerome tell us that the doctrine of the resurrection is basically a
doctrine of punishment and reward. It maintains hierarchy—not secu-
lar hierarchy but ecclesiastical and moral hierarchy—in heaven. Virgin
and prostitute will not be equal, even if both repent; in God’s house
there are many mansions. What is lifted to heaven is what is earned on
earth by a specific human person. Ascetic attainments, projected thus
into heaven, become an undergirding of perpetual inequality, although
we must not forget how profoundly asceticism, whether Origenist or
anti-Origenist, rejected the gender and class inequalities of secular soci-
ety. (Jerome wanted every molecule of Paula rewarded and understood
those molecules to be unchangeably female, but Paula’s superiority

184. Ambrose, De excessu Satyri, bk. 2, chaps. 53–70, PL 16 (Paris, 1880), cols.
1386–93, and in CSEL 73, pp. 276–88, and nn. 6 and 8 above. See also Ambrose,
De Isaac, chap. 79, PL 14 (Paris, 1845), cols. 532–34, and in CSEL 32, pt. 1, ed. C.
Schenkl (Vienna, 1896), pp. 698–700. Ambrose has a very Platonic notion of the self
as a soul trapped in a body; his understanding of bodily resurrection stresses change
and flowering; his images are astonishingly organic for the fourth-century West. For
a few general comments on Ambrose’s notion of bodily resurrection, see Frederick
Holmes Dudden, The Life and Times of St Ambrose (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935),
vol. 2, pp. 665–68, and McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, p. 272.
185. This fear was implicated in Christian uses of the cannibalism motif. As Mag-
gie Kilgour has recently shown, “being eaten” was a fundamental image in classical
literature for “being absorbed by a foreign culture—what we call ‘going native.’ ”
From Communion to Cannibalism, p. 23.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 111

came from rebellion—with Jerome’s help!—against the model of the

privileged Roman matron.)186
With the partial exception of Jerome, however, the most material-
istic of fourth- and fifth-century writers on bodily resurrection do not
focus on maintaining distinctions owing to gender, sexual restraint,
charismatic ability, or moral achievement.187 The fate of fingernails
and hair clippings, of aborted fetuses, and of the gastrointestinal system
command greater attention. It is chain consumption in its most fright-
ening form—cannibalism—that is taken to be the ultimate threat, the
empirical fact that must be overcome. Eucharist is central to salvation
because by digesting it we become indigestible to natural process.188
In the theological literature of late antiquity, the fear that our self will
perish is not expressed in elaborate metaphors (or natural philosophi-
cal discussions) of hermaphrodites, cross-dressing, gender transgres-
sion, sexual intercourse, and so forth, but rather in metaphors (and in
technical treatments) of digestion and nutrition.189 Athenagoras and
Methodius insisted that human flesh could not be digested; Tertullian
and Augustine insisted it could be. But all agreed that God could tri-
umph over that which eats human beings—whether it be the whale
that swallowed Jonah, the grave that eats the properly buried, or the
desperate cannibal mother who devours her baby (a recurring image
of depravity in late antique literature).190 Both Augustine and Gregory

186. See Anne Yarborough, “Christianization in the Fourth Century: Roman

Women,” Church History 45, no. 2 (1976): 1–17. Some of Yarborough’s conclu-
sions have recently been questioned, on the basis of evidence from inscriptions, by
Michele R. Salzman, “Aristocratic Women: Conductors of Christianity in the Fourth
Century,” Helios 16, no. 2 (1989): 207–20.
187. Maintaining sexual difference in heaven in order to maintain his triumph
over sexuality was clearly a special concern of Jerome’s. When Augustine connects
difference in heaven with difference on earth, he manages to imply both that differ-
ence lasts and that its moral import may be reversed—e.g., weak women may gain
more merit than strong men. See above, nn. 118 through 120 and n. 153.
188. See the discussion of Ignatius, Irenaeus, and Tertullian in chapter 1 above;
and Augustine, Confessions, bk. 7, chap. 10, ed. L. Verheijen, Sancti Augustini
Opera, vol. 13, pt. 1, CCL 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), pp. 103–4.
189. We do occasionally find patristic discussions in which gender or sexuality
function as images for social transgression and confusion; see above, chapter 1, nn. 67
and 103. Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, p. 7, argues that in this period
sexual intercourse is a “less totalizing but still bodily image for incorporation.”
190. Augustine, De civitate Dei, bk. 22, c. 22, p. 844; see above nn. 169, 170, 172,
and 175. Jerome, letter 127, paragr. 12, ed. and trans. Labourt, vol. 7, pp. 146–47, and
PL 22, col. 1094, refers to cannibalism as part of the horror of the barbarian invasions.
On the cannibalism libel, hurled back and forth between pagans and Christians, see
above, chapter 1, nn. 44, 77, 83, 84, 132, 136, and 140. And compare the discussion
of Macarius in nn. 10 and 11 of this chapter. Ambrose, De excessu Satyri, bk. 2,
 112 the patristic background

of Nyssa devote more attention to the question of how Adam and Eve
in paradise would have grown through eating into an immortality that
made eating unnecessary, than they do to the topic of sex in Eden that
so interests modern scholars. The situation of the triumphant and hier-
archical church of the years around 400 is unquestionably reflected in
its technical theological discussions of bodily resurrection. But I would
suggest that the frenetic concern to forge an eschatology that retains
every organ and particle in heaven reflects more than a need to support
the authority of hardworking ascetics and bishops, more even than a
defense of elite culture against the invading barbarians.
As several recent commentators have noticed, the literature of late
antiquity throbs with fear of being fragmented, absorbed, and digested
by an other that is natural process itself.191 Second-century apologists
had projected fertility into the millennium and even into heaven.
Tertullian had written in glorious rhetoric of the beauties of creation
although he too feared cannibalism. But by the time of Gregory of Nyssa
and Augustine, procreation and nutrition—ways in which the world
renews itself—were increasingly assimilated to putrefaction and death.
The extraordinary bodily discipline of the ascetic movement, in both
its Origenist and anti-Origenist branches, was directed toward making
the body static and incorruptible. Change itself was the problem.
Yet, the theology of late antiquity rejected what were, philosophi-
cally speaking, the best solutions available. Instead of admitting flux,
of allowing otherness, of lodging self in some sort of internally coherent
and dynamic pattern (as did Origen), the majority of patristic theolo-
gians focused increasingly on material bits. They were willing to sacri-
fice philosophical coherence for the oxymoron of incorruptible matter.
Jettisoning the glorious images of the natural world used by the sub-
Apostolic writers and retained, in combination with darker images of
decay, by the Greek and Syriac writers of the mid-fourth century, they

chap. 58, CSEL 73, pp. 280–81, says pagans worry about corpses that are eaten. The
tendency of one culture to charge another, alien culture with cannibalism is so wide-
spread that anthropologists have questioned whether cannibalism actually occurs;
for varying views, see Marvin Harris, Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology
and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford, 1979); Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger.
191. Three recent studies that suggest this (although in very different ways) are
Mathieu, “Horreur du cadavre”; Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily
Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. T. Croft-Murray and
H. Elsom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Kilgour, From Com-
munion to Cannibalism.
 Resurrection, Relic Cult, and Asceticism 113

were determined nonetheless to redeem the physical and material—to

lift up to God its every fragment, particle, and atom.
The doctrine of bodily resurrection was not, then, a displaced dis-
cussion of power or of status, of sensuality, gender, or sex, of cultural
encounter and otherness; it was a discussion—exactly as its proponents
said it was—of death. And death was horrible, not because it was an
event that ended consciousness, but because it was part of oozing, dis-
gusting, uncontrollable biological process. Such process, beginning at
conception and continuing in the grave, threatened identity itself. As
Origen said, “river is not a bad name for the body”; yet in the topos
known since Heraclitus, “you cannot step into the same river twice.”192
How then (asked ancient authors) do we survive the rushing stream of
death within us? How can we be and remain ourselves? Jerome, Augus-
tine, and Victricius of Rouen answered that question by asserting God’s
power to freeze every moment and sustain every particle of the flux
that is “us.” Resurrection made decay incorruptible. To ask why people
in late antiquity had the stubborn courage to face the putrefaction that
joins death to life is to ask for causal explanation at a level no mod-
ern theory addresses.193 But to ask what that courage confronted, it is
enough to read the texts themselves and follow their images as well as
their arguments.
The extraordinary materialism of early fifth-century eschatology set
the course of discussion for hundreds of years. It became the basis for the
renewal of theological consideration of the body in the twelfth century.
By the time of works such as Hugh of St. Victor’s treatise on the sacra-
ments, the textbook of Peter Lombard, and Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hor-
tus deliciarum, the Pauline seed was almost forgotten; theological focus
was squarely on the preservation of organs and bits. Augustine’s City of
God and Enchiridion (mediated through the compilations of Julian of
Toledo and others) had become authoritative on the issue of judgment
and resurrection. Even more than at the time of Gregory of Nyssa and
Jerome, the paradigmatic body was the body of the saint, purified in life
by denying those natural processes (especially nutrition and procreation)
that threaten stability and glorified in death by becoming a jewel-like

192. See n. 16 above on Origen, and Heraclitus, On the Universe, fragment 41,
trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 483. See
also fragment 78: “When is death not within ourselves? . . . Living and dead are the
same, and so are awake and asleep, young and old” (trans. Jones, p. 495).
193. Even the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents provides not so much an
answer to this question as an alternative description of the courage.
 114 the patristic background

relic that miraculously protects the living against the decay of illness
and death. Many of the most colorful miracles of the high Middle Ages
can be explained and understood only in the context of this theology of
resurrection inherited from the years around 400.
It is to the theology of the early twelfth century—the high point of
Western materialist assumptions about the body—that I shall turn in
my next chapter.
plate 1. In this late twelfth-century miniature, painted under the
direction of the learned abbess Herrad of Hohenbourg, Christ’s salvific
death on the cross is associated both with the establishment of church and
eucharist and with the resurrection of the dead. The figure below the cross
is Adam, progenitor and exemplar of all persons, whom popular legend held
to be buried at Golgotha. The miniaturist associates the still-quite-dead
Adam with the saints mentioned in Matthew 27.52, who awaken at the
moment of the crucifixion. Herrad, Hortus deliciarum, fol. 150r (from a
nineteenth-century tracing, made from the now-destroyed manuscript).
plate 2. Illustrating the Last Judgment with themes drawn from
Byzantine iconography, this miniature depicts the moment of resurrection
as one in which whole bodies (labeled in the inscription “the bones of the
dead”) rise from coffins while birds, beasts, and fish regurgitate parts for
reassemblage. The saved are depicted here, and in an accompanying
miniature, not as an indistinguishable mass of humanity, but in groups,
the members of which are garbed and labeled so as to signal their
particular religious statuses. Hortus deliciarum, fol. 251r (from a tracing).
plate 3. Recapitulating and reversing the regurgitation motif in fol. 251r,
this elaborate depiction of the damned locates punishments of cooking,
eating, and bodily partition in the lowest levels of hell. Below the
reprobate boiled in cauldrons, Satan holding anti-Christ sits on a throne
that eats sinners and rolls their decapitated heads under its feet. Hortus
deliciarum, fol. 255r.
plate 4. This miniature, painted under the direction of Hildegard of
Bingen about 1165 to accompany one of the final visions of her Scivias,
shows in the lower left-hand corner the bones that rise again at the sound
of the last trumpet. Although the text of the vision speaks of the blessed
wafted up to heaven, the miniature itself seems to show detached heads
of both saved and damned rolled together in preparation for resurrection.
The motion from bottom to top in the miniature is thus from confusion
to order, part to whole. Hildegard, Scivias, book 3, vision 12, plate 33;
Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, MS 1, fol. 224r (made from a
colored photograph; manuscript lost since 1945).
plate 5. In Giotto’s monumental depiction of the Last Judgment in
the Arena chapel at Padua (ca. 1305–1310), the General Resurrection
is only a subordinate element and the motif of bodily partition has
disappeared. At the bottom left, the dead rise intact and fully enfleshed.
On the right, eating is a prominent motif among the tortures of hell,
but the body parts so noticeable in earlier depictions are absent.
detail of plate 5. In a tiny scene at the bottom of Giotto’s great
painting, the dead climb naked from the bare earth and from sarcophagi
when the trumpet sounds. Above these small figures, the blessed,
clothed in the garments of glory, enter into paradise.
plate 6. The eleventh-century mosaic on the west wall of the cathedral
at Torcello, near Venice, is the best-known Western example of Byzantine
Last Judgment iconography. The triumph of whole over part is illustrated
here not only in the two ovals of the middle register but also in the
structure of the entire composition. In the top zone, the blessed rise whole
from the tomb, while below them the saints in paradise shimmer in glory.
At the bottom right, Satan sits on a throne that devours sinners while
vengeful angels prod separated heads, marked with the regalia of various
secular and religious statuses. Below this, the damned appear as naked
bodies and torsoes, and even further below, we find worm-eaten skulls,
severed heads, and body parts. Thus, despite the orthodox doctrine that all
rise intact for judgment, the damned are shown in a state of fragmentation
that is a symbolic expression of their sins.
detail of plate 6. In the left portion of the middle register of the
Torcello Last Judgment, birds and beasts regurgitate body parts for
resurrection. Just above, several of the dead awaken, still in their shrouds.
In the right-hand oval, fish vomit up the dead. The eye of the viewer is
carried from the bones and body fragments in hell (lower right), upward
past the depictions of regurgitation (middle register), to the resurrection of
the blessed, intact, in the presence of Christ. The mosaic is a powerful
depiction of the idea that salvation is wholeness, hell is decay and
partition, redemption is regurgitation and reassemblage.
plate 7. This eleventh-century Greek gospel adds to the account of
Judgment in Matthew 25.31–46 a visual gloss that has no parallel in the
text. Although the gospel author speaks of the Son of Man on the throne
of glory judging the nations of the earth, the miniature depicts body
fragments in the lowest chambers of hell, above which Satan rides a
voracious beast. To his left, fish regurgitate body parts, while above him
the dead rise from sarcophagi and beasts vomit up torsoes and limbs.
Crowning the miniature, Christ in glory sits with the elect. MS BN Gr.
74, fol. 51v.
plate 8. In this drawing of the crucifixion, from about fifty years before
the similar depiction in the Hortus deliciarum (see plate 1), the dead who
rise below the cross are Adam, Lazarus, and the saints of Matthew 27.52.
MS Lat. qu. 198, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz, fol.
320v (ca. 1132).
plate 9. In many twelfth- and thirteenth-century depictions of the
crucifixion, Adam buried beneath the cross becomes a skeleton, a skull,
or a heap of bones. MS 4, Hamburg, Stadtbibliothek, In scrinio 85, fol.
15a (twelfth century).
plate 10. This eighth-century
Anglo-Saxon ivory, now in the
Victoria and Albert Museum,
depicts resurrected bodies at
various stages of resuscitation.
Some lie inert, fully wrapped in
grave clothes; others struggle out
of their shrouds. On the left a
sitting figure receives his soul as a
dove flying in at the mouth. In
the bottom right-hand corner, the
damned are swallowed by the
mouth of hell.

plate 11. This illustration of Revelation 20.4 shows those who will not rise
at the first resurrection as shrouded bodies in various stages of decay. Those
who do rise point to the mark of Christ’s favor on their foreheads or hands;
even they, however, appear babylike, with rounded, undifferentiated bodies,
which seem only at that moment to have acquired flesh. MS Douce 180,
Bodleian Library, Oxford, p. 86 (ca. 1260–1275).
plate 12. In this fine twelfth-century miniature of an angel locking
the souls of the damned into hell, the artist plays with and underlines
the notion of hell as a mouth by placing tiny mouths at its corners and
apex. Winchester Psalter, British Lib. MS 1846 Cott. Nero, c. 4, fol. 39
(ca. 1150–1160).
plate 13. In another twelfth-century English psalter, Christ harrows hell
by forcing the cross into Leviathan’s mouth. The image parallels the
words of the contemporary monastic author, Peter of Celle, who wrote
that penitence and prayer, grasped like “the horns of the cross,” can force
hell to vomit up souls from its belly or shatter the molars in the mouth of
death. MS Douce 293, Bodleian Library, Oxford, fol. 14r (ca. 1170–1183).
plate 14. Throughout the Middle Ages, the
resurrection of Christ, and the promise of
resurrection to all humankind, were associated
with the story of Jonah, swallowed and regurgitated
intact by the whale. In this historiated initial S, the
whale vomits up an undigested Jonah while above
reigns a serene and majestic Christ. MS Clm 3900,
fol. 82 (from about 1250).
plate 15 (whole and detail). The tympanum of the west portal of the church of
Saint Faith at Conques (ca. 1135) shows, in the bottom register, the dead rising
from coffins just above a small Christ, who welcomes the blessed through the door
of paradise. Opposite these blessed, a hideous mouth pokes through the door of
hell and swallows the reprobate into a space populated by twisted and tormented
bodies. In the larger composition, the association of devouring and disorder with
hell (on the right), wholeness and order with paradise (on the left) is clear.
plate 16 (detail of lower wall). In Greece, the Balkans, and Russia,
motifs of swallowing and regurgitation continued down into modern
times to be used to depict Last Judgment and General Resurrection.
In this detail from the sixteenth-century refectory fresco at Lavra on
Mt. Athos, hell or Leviathan swallows a beast that, in turn,
swallows the damned.
plate 16 (detail of upper wall). Above and to the right of Leviathan,
a veritable menagerie of creatures vomits up limbs and torsoes for
reassemblage. Next to the trumpeting angel can be seen a bird, a
beast, and a reptile presenting resurrected parts. It is hard not to
wonder how the monks who took their meals before this gigantic
fresco understood the use of eating as an image of destruction and
dissolution, regurgitation as an image of salvation.
plate 17. In this thirteenth-century miniature from Bamberg-
Eichstätt, salvation is clearly represented as triumph over
fragmentation and decay. A corpse rises in its shroud,
disentangles itself, and receives the garment of salvation, while
other corpses receive their missing parts from the beasts who
have devoured them. MS 1903 (olim 1833), Stiftsbibliothek,
Melk, fol. 109v (ca. 1255).
plate 18. This initial from a Würzburg psalter, contemporary
with the Bamberg-Eichstätt psalter reproduced in the previous
plate, shows bodies rising from large sarcophagi at the sound of
the last trumpet. One of the men is missing his arm below the
elbow, and a doglike creature offers the severed member for
reattachment. Close examination reveals that the original form
of the initial showed the arm whole. MS Cim 15, fol. 204r.
 plate 19. In the later Middle Ages, reliquaries
came increasingly to underline the nature of
the body parts contained within. The sheathing of
gold and jewels suggested, however, that the
bones inside possessed already something of the
incorruptibility of heaven. This thirteenth-
century silver arm reliquary with cabochon
crystals sheaths the bone fragment with
precious metal and gems.

plate 20. Although earlier than the

container in the previous plate, this
twelfth-century reliquary from the
cathedral at Osnabrück provides an even
more elaborate covering for the body part
contained within. The opening at the back,
which gives a partial glimpse of the
wrapped relic, is a later addition.
plate 21. In the thirteenth century, the practice
emerged of displaying relics in ostensoria or
monstrances, such as this fourteenth-century
example from Cologne. These containers, used
interchangeably for displaying relics or the
eucharistic host, sheathed the body of the saint or
of Christ in the crystalline permanence of heaven
while at the same time revealing that it was of the
stuff of earth.

plate 22. The reliquary of Thomas Becket, made

between 1173 and 1180 probably by a Rhenish
goldsmith in England, is in the traditional casket or
box form, with a gabled lid that suggests a roof.
Such houselike containers deny the fragmentary
nature of the relics housed inside, and even suggest
that the parts are gathered into a whole, as
believers are incorporated into the body of Christ,
the church. In this case, however, the simulated
ruby on the lid has been constructed of clear glass
and foil to signal the nature of the relic contained
within—the precious blood of the martyred bishop.
plate 23. By the thirteenth century, both text and sculpture sometimes
conflated relic and resurrection, implying that the body at the end of time
would be exactly the incorrupt particles that reposed in the grave. The left
doorway of the west portal of Notre Dame cathedral at Amiens, made in the
1230s, depicts scenes from the life of the local saint, Firmin. The central
scene in the middle register depicts the inventio, or discovery, of the saint’s
incorrupt body in such a way that the saint appears to be rising from the tomb.
plate 24. The earliest depictions of the afterlife known to be influenced by Dante’s Divine
Comedy show only heaven and hell, not purgatory. The monumental wall painting at the
Campo Santo in Pisa from about 1330, now attributed to Buffalmacco, shows judgment
and resurrection at the left, while, on the right, the wicked are tortured in the
recognizable circles of Dante’s hell. The presence of a judging Christ, avenging angels,
and bodies rising from the earth makes it clear that the human figures shown
here in full particularity of status and moral condition are embodied persons, not souls.
plate 25. Wall paintings from about 1357 in the Strozzi
chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, now attributed
to Nardo di Cione, show Dante’s heaven and hell. In the
depiction of paradise, the ranks of the blessed, with angels
interspersed among them, swell upward toward the thrones
of the queen and king of heaven. The presence of angels
blowing the last trumpet suggests that the human figures
are resurrected persons, not the souls inhabiting aerial
bodies about whom Dante wrote in his Comedy.
plate 26. In the Strozzi chapel depiction of Dante’s hell,
details of the Inferno are clearly recognizable. Satan devours
the very worst of the damned in the lowest circle.
plate 27. The great tympanum of the west portal at St. Peter’s church in
Poitiers, from the 1130s, is typical of twelfth- and thirteenth-century
scenes of General Resurrection and Final Judgment. In the lowest register,
the dead rise intact and beautiful; just above this, they are divided forever
into the blessed, who throng through the gate of paradise, and the damned,
driven or pulled in chains toward the devouring mouth of hell.
plate 28. In this magnificent miniature, probably from the second
quarter of the thirteenth century, demons fling the damned into the
mouth of hell, while just above this, the saved, clearly differentiated
anatomically into men, women, and children, contemplate a Christ in
majesty at the very moment of their escape from the watery deep and the
mouth of Leviathan. Trinity College Apocalypse, R.16.2, fol. 25r.
plate 29. The Visions of Tondal, written in south Germany in the
mid-twelfth century by an Irish monk named Mark, was by far the
most influential tale of a journey to the otherworld written before
Dante’s Divine Comedy, yet it was illustrated, so far as we know, only
once. In this miniature from the later fifteenth century, we see the
“valley of the homicides” depicted as a pot, in which a “great
multitude of damned souls . . . were burned and roasted . . . then
liquified and strained through the burning lid like a sauce strained
through a canvas sieve.” Getty MS 30, fol. 13v (from the 1470s,
attributed to Simon Marmion of Valenciennes).
plate 31. In this detail from the ceiling mosaic in the Baptistry at
Florence (probably from the second half of the thirteenth century), the
conflation of digestion and damnation is clear. Satan’s devouring throne
is almost reduced to a pair of biting snakes, while from his ears spring
two more snakelike heads that chew sinners. The man eaten by the left
throne-head is also bitten by lizards; to his right another figure has
been almost completely swallowed by a toad. Below the right throne-
head, a figure lapped by flames appears as a disembodied head.

plate 30. A second miniature from the fifteenth-

century illustrated manuscript of the Visions of Tondal
shows the avaricious devoured by the beast Acheron. In
the text, Tondal’s soul, dragged into the jaws of Acheron
by fiends, is mauled there by the biting of lions, dogs,
serpents, and “other horrible beasts he could not
recognize.” Getty MS 30, fol. 17.
plate 32. In this fifteenth-century illustration of hell, from the Book
of Hours of Catherine of Cleves, the artist underlines the threat of
being swallowed and digested by placing mouths inside mouths. The
Pierpont Morgan Library M. 945, fol. 168v.
plate 33. (Detail) On the central tympanum of the west portal of St.
Stephen’s church at Bourges (ca. 1240), the dead rise from their sarcophagi
clearly male and female. All except prelates are naked, but social status is
indicated by headgear. Above them, the souls of the just are seen reposing
in Abraham’s bosom, represented as a large napkin.
plate 34. When late medieval artists depicted the saints outside a
narrative context, they often showed them carrying their own body parts.
These severed limbs and mutilated fragments are more, however, than
mere attributes—i.e., aids to the identification of the saint. They are also
testimony to the power of God, who reassembles in resurrection the
bodies of those who die for the faith, but does not erase, even in the glory
of heaven, the marks (or aurioles) of their special courage. In this initial L
from a fourteenth-century manuscript, for example, the martyred Lucy
appears serene and beautiful, with her eyes both in their normal position
on her face and in the dish she carries. Modena, Biblioteca Estense Lat. MS
1023, fol. 17v.
plate 35. This thirteenth-century miniature shows executioners cutting
off the breasts of St. Agatha in the third frame. In the fourth, her soul—a
small naked figure, its hands crossed in prayer—escapes toward heaven,
but the naked corpse is shown with its breasts intact. Paris MS
Bibliothèque nationale, Nouv. acq. Fr. 23686, fol. 247v (ca. 1270–1280).
plate 36. Another miniature in the manuscript seen in plate 35
shows St. Quentin being beheaded by soldiers in the fourth frame. In
the fifth, we see soldiers throwing his body into the Somme, but it
appears to be reassembled under its shroud. Three folios later, in an O
initial (not shown), Eusebia discovers Quentin’s body, which is clearly
intact. Paris MS Bibliothèque nationale, Nouv. acq. Fr. 23686, fol. 100v.
Pa r t Tw o

THE TWELFTH
CENTURY
 Three
Reassemblage and Regurgitation:
Ideas of Bodily Resurrection in Early
Scholasticism

Herrad of Hohenbourg: An Introduction to

Twelfth-Century Art and Theology
toward the end of the twelfth century (probably between
1175 and 1185), Herrad, the learned abbess of Hohenbourg,
presided over the compilation of a massive encyclopedia
or summa, called the Hortus deliciarum, which told the
story of salvation from the Creation, through the Incarna-
tion and life of Christ, to the end of time.1 This encyclopedia, produced
on enormous vellum folios and illustrated with hundreds of pictures
that were not only elaborately colored but also labeled with detailed
inscriptions, was not, as far as we know, copied; it had little influence
in the later Middle Ages. It was destroyed when the library of Strasbourg
was burned in 1870 and has only recently been reconstructed in a fac-
simile edition based on nineteenth-century tracings, which reduce its
glory to a series of misleading, cartoonlike sketches.2 Nonetheless the
1. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green et al., Commen-
tary (London and Leiden: Warburg Institute/University of London and Brill, 1979),
p. 25. See also Herrad, Hortus deliciarum: Recueil de cinquante planches . . . avec
texte d’introduction historique, littéraire, et archéologique, suivi du catalogue complet
des 344 miniatures et du commentaire iconographique des cinquante planches, ed.
Joseph Walter (Strasbourg: Le Roux, 1952); Otto Gillen, Ikonographische Studien
zum Hortus deliciarum; and Gérard Cames, Allégories et symboles dans l’Hortus
deliciarum (Leiden: Brill, 1971).
2. Herrad, Hortus, ed. Green, Commentary, p. 18; J. Rott, “L’Ancienne biblio-
thèque de Strasbourg, détruite en 1870: Les catalogues qui en subsistent,” Refugium
 118 the twelfth century

Hortus deliciarum can provide a starting point for my consideration of

twelfth-century ideas of bodily resurrection because it graphically dem-
onstrates, in both its miniatures and its text, their extreme materialism
and literalism.3
Herrad’s lengthy passages on judgment and resurrection—borrowed
either directly from Augustine’s Enchiridion or from Honorius Augus-
todunensis and Peter Lombard, who themselves borrowed from Augus-
tine or from compilations based on him—discuss the physical state of
the resurrected (their sex, size, color, age, etc.) and the details of their
reassemblage or revivification. Much is made of the questions concern-
ing aborted fetuses and pared fingernails that Augustine considered
but also warned against as diverting curiosity from nobler matters.
The chain consumption argument is elaborated with all the enthusi-
asm shown by opponents of bodily resurrection in the early church,
although it is cheerfully refuted again and again with the assurance
from Luke 21.18: “But a hair of your head shall not perish.”4
Accompanying these lengthy discussions are two illustrations of the
general resurrection, each as part of a larger composition. The first asso-
ciates Christ’s crucifixion with the creation of the church and the res-
urrection of the dead: below the cross are three sarcophagi, containing
three figures who are alert and revivified (although one is still entangled
in a shroud) and the quite dead skeleton of Adam (see plate 1).5 The
second is a Last Judgment, whose overall composition is unclear from
the surviving tracings. Resurrection here is depicted both as enfleshed
figures rising from tombs when an angel sounds the final trumpet and
as bodily parts regurgitated by animals, birds, and fish, while another

animae bibliotheca: Mélanges offerts à Albert Kolb (Wiesbaden: Guido Pressler,

1969), pp. 426–42; idem, “Source et grandes lignes de l’histoire des bibliothèques
publiques de Strasbourg détruites en 1870,” Cahiers alsaciens d’archéologie, d’art, et
d’histoire 15 (1971): 145–80; and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 12–13.
3. On the literalism of medieval ideas of resurrection, see T. S. R. Boase, Death
in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgment, and Remembrance (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1972), pp. 19–59.
4. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus deliciarum, chaps. 850–52, 855, 887, 1090, ed.
R. Green et al., Reconstruction (London and Leiden: Warburg Institute/University of
London and Brill, 1979), pp. 423–35, 447, and 481.
5. Herrad, Hortus, fol. 150r, Reconstruction, plate 93, drawing 212, p. 267; see also
Commentary, p. 173. The reviving figures are certainly meant to represent the saints
mentioned in Matthew 27.52, which is inscribed on the picture; see ibid., p. 174.
The coffin containing the single figure may also be intended to signify Lazarus. See
below, chapter 4, n. 113. See also Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus deliciarum (Garden
of Delights), ed. and trans. A. D. Caratzas, commentary by A. Straub and G. Keller
(New Rochelle: Caratzas Brothers, 1977), pp. 150–53.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 119

angel rolls up the sky (see plate 2).6 The choirs of blessed who appear
before God for their reward stand not as an indistinguishable mass of
humanity but attired (and labeled) with the specific characteristics of
their religious statuses.7 Inscriptions stress the wholeness and individ-
uality of even those who rise in fragments. Below the naked figures
emerging from sarcophagi, we read: “The bones of the dead will breathe
anew [resuscitabunt denuo], and in their flesh they will see the Lord.”
An inscription above the regurgitated parts informs us:

The bodies and members of people once devoured [olim devorata] by

beasts, birds and fish are brought forth by God’s command [nutu Dei
repraesentantur], because the members of the saints will rise incorrupt
as if of whole humanity, and not only via beasts as is depicted here [ut ex
integra humana massa resurgant incorrupta membra sanctorum, que
non tantum per bestias], and they will be presented at God’s command.8

Moreover, salvation as regurgitation, reassemblage, and reclothing is

matched by damnation as nudity, eternal digestion, and partition. In
yet a third miniature, the bottom layer of a very unpleasant hell shows
Satan holding Antichrist and sitting on a monstrous throne that eats and
crushes sinners (see plate 3).9 The most unfortunate of the damned are
here depicted as detached skulls ground under cruel claws and as body
pieces grasped in swallowing mouths—the visual recapitulation and
opposite of the regurgitated parts found in the resurrection miniature.
As we shall see, the iconography of the Hortus deliciarum is no more
original than the image of the reassembled pot or statue that Herrad
borrowed from Honorius and Peter Lombard, who, in turn, borrowed it
directly or indirectly from Augustine. The iconographic tradition appro-
priated by Herrad or her artist-collaborators was, however, Eastern and
Greek rather than Western.10 This appropriation, from the East, of a visual
tradition that stresses salvation as reassemblage and the combination of

6. Herrad, Hortus, fol. 251r, Reconstruction, plate 141, drawings 326 and 327,
p. 427. See also Caratzas, Straub, and Keller, ed., Hortus, pp. 224–31.
7. Ibid., drawing 325, p. 427.
8. For the inscription, see Herrad, Hortus, fol. 150, Reconstruction, plate 93,
drawing 211, p. 267, and Caratzas, Straub, and Keller, ed., Hortus, p. 224 n. 2.
9. Herrad, Hortus, fol. 255r, Reconstruction, plate 146, drawing 338, p. 439. Satan
holding Antichrist is parallel to Abraham holding souls in his bosom: fol. 263v, plate
152, drawing 344, p. 460. This parallel is generally present in Byzantine Last Judgment
iconography. See also Caratzas, Straub, and Keller, ed., Hortus, pp. 234–35 and 242–43.
10. See below, chapter 4, pp. 188–97.
 120 the twelfth century

such iconography with a Western textual tradition of extreme literal-

ism, is striking—and all the more so because a very different treatment
of resurrection was available in the West. Indeed Honorius Augustodu-
nensis, the source of much of Herrad’s discussion, himself also wrote of
resurrection in a highly Origenist vein, using very different metaphors
and concepts from those he bequeathed to Herrad. In Honorius’s Clavis
physicae, an abridgment of John Scotus Erigena’s De divisione naturae
that treats last things in a spiritualized fashion, we find both the organic
metaphors of sprouting seeds and flowers familiar from 1 Corinthians 15
and the notion of transformation of the resurrected self beyond bodily
particularities, such as size or sex, that is in the patristic period usually
associated with the Pauline image. But the Origenist/Erigenist aspect of
Honorius was condemned, probably in his own day and certainly later
on. The choices made by Herrad and her collaborators were those made
generally in twelfth-century theology, iconography, spiritual writing,
and popular story. In her text, as in most other twelfth-century treat-
ments, the resurrected body is a jewel or a translucent glass, a shining
garment, a rebuilt temple, or a statue reforged from its original material;
dead and living are described as dust—assembled by God on the sixth
day of creation, scattered in the long wait between death and the end of
time, collected or swept together again by divine power when the judg-
ment comes. In such accounts, the corporeal component of the self is
stressed, and its identity (i.e., its survival through time) is equated with
continuity of both matter and members.
In view of what historians of science, of art, of education, and of
religious reform have told us about the twelfth-century enthusiasm for
organic nature as metaphor—an enthusiasm seen perhaps most clearly
in the proliferation of contemporary characterizations of the age as a
“flowering” or “rebirth”—it is surprising to note such caution in escha-
tology.11 Why did the age that supposedly re-discovered nature, “man,”
and “the individual” prefer to lift to heaven the details of earthly physi-
cality, rejecting metaphors of process and open-ended development?
What bothered twelfth-century theologians about images of the germi-
nation or flowering or re-nascence of the body at the end of time? In
search of answers to these questions, I turn in this, my third chapter, to
an exploration of the language in which scholastic writers spoke of res-
urrection. In chapter 4, I proceed to a consideration of the resurrection
11. Gerhart Ladner, “Terms and Ideas of Renewal,” in Renaissance and Renewal
in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 1–33.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 121

images found in spiritual writing and in iconography. In chapter 5, I treat

the context of all these images (scholastic, monastic, and iconographic)
in pious practice. I thus treat the revival of eschatological discussion in
the twelfth century in the same way I treated debates of the second and
fourth centuries: by moving from specific tropes, examples, and argu-
ments to religious and social behavior, in particular the care of the dead.

A Scholastic Consensus: The Reassemblage

and Dowering of the Body
Resurrection was one among many theological topics discussed in the
schools of the early and mid-twelfth century. The discussion was mostly
pieced together from passages in Augustine’s late writings or from flo-
rilegia—such as Julian of Toledo’s—made from Augustine’s works.12
Although, as we shall see, there was probably more disagreement
on eschatological issues than most scholars have realized, scholastic
writing showed an underlying predilection for metaphors of reassem-
blage and immutability to describe the resurrected and glorified body.
To illustrate this, I shall begin with the work that became by the late
twelfth-century the locus classicus for discussion of the resurrection:
distinctions 43–50 of the fourth book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences.13
Although almost pictorial in its vividness, the Lombard’s treatment
of eschatology is neither original nor coherent. It follows roughly the
events of the end of time, from the trumpet blast to the glory of the

12. See Nikolaus Wicki, “Das ‘Prognosticon futuri saeculi’ Julians von Toledo
als Quellenwerk der Sentenzen des Petrus Lombardus,” Divus Thomas 31 (1953):
349–60; J. N. Hillgarth, “El Prognosticon futuri saeculi de San Julián de Toledo,”
Analecta sacra Tarraconensia 30 (1957): 5–61; idem, “Julian of Toledo in the Middle
Ages,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958): 7–26.
13. Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, ed. Collegium S. Bonaven-
turae (Grottaferrata: Collegium S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971–1981), vol. 2
(3d ed.), pp. 510–60. Nikolaus Wicki characterizes Peter Lombard’s Four Books of
Sentences as the first synthesis of eschatological sentences, but one that is lacking in
cogency (Die Lehre von der himmlischen Seligkeit in der mittelalterlichen Scholastik
von Petrus Lombardus bis Thomas von Aquin [Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1954]
[hereafter Wicki, Seligkeit], p. 11). On the Lombard’s sources, see ibid., pp. 12–14. For
a useful and clear discussion of how Peter Lombard’s Sentences became a textbook
in the universities, see M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, trans.
A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), pp. 267ff. For detailed
information both on the Lombard’s sources and on parallel discussions in his scho-
lastic contemporaries, see the notes to the Grottaferrata edition. F. M. Henquinet
points out that the Lombard does not connect eschatology with the event of Christ’s
resurrection—an omission that thirteenth-century commentators would feel it nec-
essary to fill (“Les questions inédites de Alexandre de Hales sur les fins dernières,”
Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 10 [1938]: 56–59).
 122 the twelfth century

blessed before the throne of God, but if this is the principle of orga-
nization (and it is the only discernible one), a number of topics are
treated out of order or considered, dropped, and considered again almost
at random. What is striking, however, is the way in which the dis-
cussion gives pride of place to questions of the material reassemblage
or reconstitution of the body.14 Beginning with the admonition (bor-
rowed from Augustine) that not all questions can be answered, Peter
Lombard devotes distinction 43 to a discussion of whether those alive
when the trumpet sounds must die before being raised. In distinction
44, he turns to such questions as the following: what age, height, and
sex will we have in the resurrected body?15 Will all matter that has
passed through the body at any point be resurrected? Must bits of mat-
ter return to the particular members (for example, fingernails or hair)
where they once resided? Will the bodies of the damned as well as the
saved rise with their defects repaired? Are aborted fetuses resurrected?
How can the bodies of the damned burn without being consumed? Will
demons (although incorporeal) suffer from corporeal fire in hell? Dis-
tinction 45, after considering where souls reside between death and
resurrection and asserting (without explaining) that the blessed will
experience an increase of joy in bodily resurrection, turns to a lengthy
consideration of the usefulness of prayers for the dead. Distinctions 46
and 47 explore in detail God’s justice, especially the punishment of the
damned. Distinctions 48 and 49 discuss specific questions concerning
what we might call the topography and demography of blessedness:
where exactly will Christ descend as judge? Of what quality will light
be after the Last Judgment? Will all the elect shine with the same glory,
see with the same clarity, and rejoice with the same joy? Distinction 50
returns to details of the condition of the damned and, after considering
14. Marcia Colish, in her forthcoming book on Peter Lombard, argues that he
shows what we might call pedagogical or didactic coherence—that is, a consistent
tendency to work out moderate positions that reconcile earlier divergent opinions.
See n. 16 below.
15. Lombard, Sentences, bk. 4, d. 43, c.7, and d. 44, chaps. 1–2, vol. 2, pp. 515–18.
The Lombard explains that “to rise incorruptible” means to rise “without diminu-
tion of members.” He then uses Ephesians 4.13 to assert that all will have the same
age but not the same stature. Each person will receive the stature he had (or would
have had) in youth. All will rise at the age to which Christ had come, which was,
Augustine says, “about thirty”; for “thirty-two years and three months was Christ’s
age when he died and rose.” Scripture does not say vir to indicate that all will rise
male but to indicate that all will rise perfect.
The Lombard seems here to follow Julian of Toledo, who adapts Augustine’s
Enchiridion. The same material appears in Hugh of St. Victor’s De sacramentis, bk.
2, pt. 17, chaps. 13–20; PL 176 (Paris, 1854), cols. 601–6. Note that Hugh says that
“learned men” define “youth” as being achieved at about age thirty; after that, the
process of decay sets in (col. 605B).
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 123

the question of how the finger of Lazarus (Luke 16.22–26) could touch
the tongue of the rich man when both (having died) were without body,
repeats Augustine’s warning that certain answers cannot be discovered.
As even such brief summary makes clear, the Last Judgment is pri-
marily, to the Lombard, a matter of punishment and reward of exactly
the same material stuff that constituted the body during life.16 Thus
it is not surprising that his basic image of the resurrected body is of
particles or bits re-collected into a whole; even defects are seen—not
as decay or old age flowering into youth and health—but as gaps to
be filled in or as surpluses of material to be excised. As he writes in
distinction 44, chapter 3, article 2, (borrowed in large part from Augus-
tine’s Enchiridion):

Nor will anything perish of the substance of which the flesh of man
is created but the natural substance of the body will be reintegrated
by the collection of all the particles [particulae] that were dispersed
before. And the bodies of the saints will rise without any defect, shin-
ing like the sun, all deformities they had here being cut off [praecisis
cunctis deformitatibus].17

The extended metaphor used to explain resurrection is the case of a

statue that is destroyed, or melted down, and reforged from the same
material in such a way that the particles do not necessarily return to
the same portion (or member) of the statue but are all incorporated into
the remade whole (d. 44, chaps. 1–2).18 When forced to consider images
of sowing and growth by the apparent contradiction in 1 Corinthians
15 between resurrection in “the twinkling of an eye” and the necessity
that all, like seeds, must die before quickening, the Lombard’s exegesis
simply equates “being sown” with “dying” and continues to describe
resurrection as the reassemblage of “the dust of old cadavers” (d. 43,
chap. 6, art. 2).19
16. In her forthcoming book, Colish argues that the Lombard takes a middle posi-
tion in twelfth-century debates over eschatology between those (such as Honorius)
who are curious about materialist details and those who wish to hold back from such
speculation. She sees much of the materialist curiosity as emanating from Augus-
tine and reads the Lombard’s position as an implicit criticism of this. Although her
interpretation is different from mine, it is not completely incompatible since my
argument concerns not so much the extent of the Lombard’s curiosity as his inter-
pretation of the body as physical. Colish agrees that there is an anti-Origenist thrust
in Peter and in much other early twelfth-century interpretation.
17. Lombard, Sentences, vol. 2, p. 519.
18. Ibid., pp. 516–17, borrowed from Augustine, Enchiridion, chap. 89.
19. Lombard, Sentences, vol. 2, p. 514, borrowed from Augustine, De civitate Dei,
bk. 20, chap. 20.
 124 the twelfth century

Throughout this discussion, Peter’s fundamental concern is to avoid

both dissolution and deformity: the “same matter that becomes a
cadaver when the soul departs” must be restored—but to a perfect body,
one “without corruption or burden or difficulty.”20 Thus God will, if
necessary, return particles of hair or nails to other members or make
up defects; “for [He] takes care lest anything indecent occur.”21 It is at
least as important to Peter Lombard that the reforged statue have no
missing members (and no members of indecent size) as it is that all
particles be used in its reconstitution.22
Although eschatology is tacked onto the end of Lombard’s Sentences
almost as an afterthought, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body
has considerable importance in the textbook, for it figures in crucial
ways in discussions of other than eschatological issues. Described as
clothing that is put on and off, as a temple, a burden, an object of desire,
or as dust or clay,23 the resurrected body is considered both in con-
nection with Christ’s sojourn during the triduum and his resurrection
and in connection with God’s creating and sustaining of humankind in
the Garden of Eden. To the modern reader’s astonishment, the major
conceptual problem Peter Lombard treats in these contexts is the prob-
lem of growth and nutrition. How can all humankind descend from
the drops of Adam’s semen—indeed how can any embryo grow into a
child or any child into an adult—without taking in so much food that it
becomes roast pig or bread instead of human nature? If we eat and grow
and excrete for a lifetime, cutting our hair and fingernails and spilling
our blood, how can God bring back all our particles when the trumpet
blows? If food adds nothing to human substance, how do we grow? And

20. Lombard, Sentences, bk. 4, d. 44, chap. 2, art. 2, vol. 2, p. 518 (borrowed from
Augustine, Enchiridion, chap. 89), and chap. 3, art. 1, p. 518 (borrowed from Enchi-
ridion, chap. 91).
21. Bk. 4, d. 44, chap. 2, art. 3, vol. 2, p. 518.
22. See n. 15 above. Peter Lombard sees resurrection as retaining differences of
sex, height, and probably weight, but eliminating differences of age. A number of
factors appear to be at work. There was an ancient tradition concerning the perfect
age, but apparently no traditional “perfect stature.” Technical concerns are clearly
also involved; individual height is retained because if we all rose with Christ’s height
some would lose matter; individual age is not retained because both youth and senil-
ity can be seen as defects of matter. Theologians were comfortable with the addition
of matter but unhappy with eliminating it unless the excrescence were clearly a
deformity (as in the case of a second head). This is perhaps related to the discomfort
with decay and diminution that is one of the major points of my discussion here. I
return below to reasons behind the retention of biological sex.
23. Peter Lombard does sometimes speak of flesh as flowering; see, for example,
bk. 3, d. 18, chap. 1, art. 5 (borrowing from Psalm 27.7), vol. 2, p. 112.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 125

why did God provide the tree of life in the Garden of Eden to sustain
us?24 If food does add to human substance, how can we avoid becoming
what we eat? How, in cases of cannibalism or attacks by wild animals,
can we remain ourselves when digested by others? What will happen to
superfluity when we rise?
In considering these matters, the Lombard struggles to hold incom-
patible positions simultaneously. He asserts both, on the one hand, that
growth really occurs (sometimes via food and sometimes without it),
and on the other hand, that a perfect and material core of human nature
for each one of us descends from Adam, continues throughout life, and
rises at the end of time. He also maintains (with Augustine and Hugh
of St. Victor) that the need to eat and to grow are not defects of human
nature; indeed, eating from the tree of life in Eden would over time
have produced immortality. But feeling the need to eat (i.e., hunger) is
a defect, and, of course, there will be no eating or growing in heaven.
We find these opinions in book II, distinction 30, chapter 14, where
Peter considers how all humankind can be in Adam when “there were not
even so many atoms [atomi] as the number of men descended from him:”

It can be answered that, materially and causally not formally, every-

thing is said to have been in the first man which is naturally in
human bodies; and it descends from the first parent by the law of
propagation; in itself it is enlarged and multiplied with no substance
from the exterior going over into it; and the same will rise in the
future. Indeed it has help from foods but foods are not converted into
human substance.25

Continuing the discussion in chapter 15, Peter quotes Matthew 15.17

as proof that we are not what we eat (“whatsoever entereth into the
mouth goeth into the belly and is cast out into the privy”) and then
argues backward in time from the miraculous formation of a full human
body for each individual at the resurrection to the possibility of human
procreation and embryological expansion without the addition of alien
substance.
24. The discussion comes from Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis, see
above, chapter 2, nn. 137 and 162. In Augustine’s discussion as well, the prominence
of digestion is striking and not explained, at least to a modern reader, by the scrip-
tural passage being glossed. The idea of eating one’s way into a state where nutrition
is not needed seems to reflect a deep need to transcend the physiological process of
digestion.
25. Bk. 2, d. 30, chap. 14, art. 2, vol. 1, p. 504.
 126 the twelfth century

A boy who dies immediately after being born will be resurrected in that
stature which he would have had if he had lived to the age of thirty,
impeded by no defect of body. From whence therefore would that sub-
stance, which was small in birth, be so big in resurrection, unless of itself
in itself it multiplied? From which it appears that even if he had lived,
the substance would not have come from another source but it would
have augmented itself, just as the rib [of Adam] from which woman was
made and as the loaves of the gospel story [were multiplied].26

In such argumentation, the organic processes of nutrition and growth

are treated as threatening to the nature of things.
Peter Lombard had at hand, of course, in Augustine’s notion of seminal
reasons, a model of growth in which the essential nature of something
is maintained. And he sometimes made use of the idea that there is an
unfolding pattern within a seed or particle of matter.27 But even in the
Augustinian idea of a seed, there were questions that disturbed Peter and
his contemporaries. How was the unfolding induced? How far might it
go? If development was impelled by food, then the essence of the thing
seemed threatened. Might it not become food or unfold into something
so dissimilar it was no longer itself? If development was not impelled
by food, then the empirical evidence that connects eating and growth is
denied. Divine power must then be invoked as an efficient cause in a star-
tlingly large number of cases—as Hugh of St. Victor recognized in the De
sacramentis, when he asserted that even ordinary growth is a miracle.28
In short, behind much of the Lombard’s discussion of creation and resur-
rection lies both an inability to understand by what mechanism some-
thing can grow and change and an inability to accept that, if it does grow
and change, it can still be the same thing. Given such inadequate mod-
els for change, growth must be seen as the replication of exactly similar
particles; resurrection must involve the reassemblage in exactly similar
form of the identical pieces first gathered together to form the body.29
Peter Lombard’s discussion of the Garden of Eden, of Christ’s resur-
rection, and of last things is mostly borrowed from Augustine, Gregory,

26. Vol. 1, pp. 504–5.

27. For example, bk. 2, d. 18, chap. 5, vol. 1, pp. 418–19.
28. Hugh, De sacramentis, bk. 1, pt. 6, chap. 37; PL 176, cols. 285–88; and see
the translation by Roy J. Deferrari, Hugh of St. Victor On the Sacraments of the
Christian Faith (De Sacramentis) (Cambridge, Mass.: The Mediaeval Academy of
America, 1951), pp. 118–20. The position also meant that Augustine’s opinion that
food actually produces growth was rejected.
29. And see Hugh, De sacramentis, bk. 2, pt. 17, chaps. 14–15; PL 176, cols. 602–4;
trans. Deferrari, pp. 458–60.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 127

Jerome, Bede, and Julian of Toledo—mediated through early twelfth-

century summae and sentence collections, chiefly those of Honorius
Augustodunensis, Hugh of St. Victor, and the cluster of scholastics
gathered around Anselm of Laon and William of Champeaux. Both in
their choice of metaphors and in the course of their argumentation,
these early-twelfth-century texts, like the Lombard’s Sentences, treat
the body as particles, all of which must continue so that they may
finally be reassembled into a whole; organic growth—understood to
be in some sense necessary because living entities in fact increase in
size—is inexplicable and disturbing change and thus a challenge to
identity.
Several of the sentences collected in the Liber Pancrisis, for exam-
ple, discuss whether food is changed into body.30 One fragment, which
has been attributed to Anselm of Laon, clearly finds digestion an inter-
esting topic and (quoting Matthew 15.17) details where exactly in the
body the four parts of food go before they are excreted. But Anselm
concludes, using a striking inorganic image, that the body does not rise
with any increment gained from food:

Thus is solved the [problem] of [the cannibal] who, from infancy, is

fed with human flesh. For in the resurrection he will have that natu-
ral body of his own [i.e., what was in his first substance] and the oth-
ers by whose flesh he has been fed will rise in the bodies that were
naturally theirs.
It is not irrational [to say this], because just as fire is fed by the
food of pieces of wood but the wood is not however changed into
the nature of fire, so the body is fed by the nourishment of food
but this [food] is not converted into body.31

Indeed to this scholastic author, the particles of body remain in some

way marked for their soul:

After the dissolution of soul and body, there remain certain connec-
tions [nexus] which make them one person. We call it a nexus because

30. The Libei Pancrisis is a late twelfth-century compilation, probably by Peter

Comestor, of early sententiae and quaestiones; see Odon Lottin, “Pour une édition
critique du Liber Pancrisis,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 13
(1946): 185–201.
31. Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, vol. 5: Problèmes
d’histoire littéraire: L’école d’Anselme de Laon et de Guillaume de Champeaux
(Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1959), no. 36, pp. 35–36. And see idem, Psychologie et morale,
vol. 4, Problèmes de morale, pt. 1, pp. 15–58.
 128 the twelfth century

the soul of Peter has more concern and desire for [plus respicit et
exspectat] the body of Peter than it does for the body of Paul; accord-
ing to this connection his soul and body [i.e., Peter’s] are called one
person [persona una]32

Hunger, eating, and wasting are central issues in many early sen-
tence collections. One sentence fragment argues that Christ is superior
to Adam not only because he does not have to die but also because
he does not have to eat. Another uses the resurrection text from Luke
21.18 to argue explicitly that “substance does not perish” and bodies
are not really “wasted from hunger” because God restores all flesh.33 A
set of anonymous questions De novissimis gives, as the major argument
against resurrection, the impossibility of reassembling dust or halting
organic process. It concludes that even Christ (who did not decay in the
tomb) and those who are alive at the Judgment Day must, in “the twin-
kling of an eye,” put aside “whatever they have from exterior food.” But
once the extraneous is put aside, not a hair of our heads will perish; we
will be put back together like a reforged statue.34 A similar, anonymous
set of sentences found in a Bamberg manuscript (Bamberg Can 10) cites
Matthew 15.17, Augustine, and Bede on the problem of growth, dis-
cusses the healing of the martyrs’ wounds into visible but shining scars
in the resurrection, and draws a detailed analogy to a wax statue.35

32. Ibid., vol. 5, no. 91, p. 78. The argument is essentially that of Gregory of Nyssa.
33. Sentences attributed to the school of Anselm of Laon in ibid., no. 347, p. 265,
and no. 499, p. 321; see also no. 500, pp. 321–22.
34. Ibid., nos. 496–98, pp. 319–21. And see the rather similar but more sophis-
ticated argument in the De resurrectione (Clm 14 508, fol. 62vb–63vb) of Peter of
Capua (d. 1242), edited in Richard Heinzmann, Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die
Auferstehung des Leibes: Eine problemgeschichtliche Untersuchung der frühscho-
lastischen Sentenzen- und Summenliteratur von Anselm von Laon bis Wilhelm von
Auxerre [hereafter Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit], Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philoso-
phie und Theologie des Mittelalters [hereafter BGPTM): Texte und Untersuchungen
40.3 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1965), pp. 202–7. Peter says, at lines 9–12 and 18–22:
Praeterea cibi convertuntur in veritatem humanae naturae, ergo et cibi resur-
gent. Et ita non tantum carnem humanam sed etiam brutorum animalium
carnem tenemur credere resurrecturam. Respondeo: quidquid est de veritate
humanae naturae resurget quidem. . . . Cibi autem non convertuntur in veri-
tatem humanae naturae licet forte convertantur in carnem humanam quia
aliqua caro est in homine quae non est de veritate humanae naturae, fovetur
tamen eis et multiplicatur humana natura, nec sine illa posset subsistere. Sicut
caro parvuli fovetur aqua quae tamen numquam transit in carnem parvuli.
Similar arguments were made earlier by Robert Pullus, Robert of Melun, Peter of
Poitiers, and Simon of Tournai; see Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit, pp. 145–225.
35. Lottin, Psychologie, vol. 5, no. 530, pp. 393–400.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 129

Even outside the schools of the continent, the dominant metaphors

in compilations concerning eschatology were ones of reassemblage and
regurgitation. For example, a Middle Irish text from the late eleventh
or early twelfth century that draws on Julian of Toledo says the dead
will be “smelted and purified by the fire of Doom,” then “[re]cast into
a form more beautiful.”

Those that have been dissolved . . ., who have been devoured by wild
beasts and dispersed in different places, will arise according to the
counsel of the Lord, who will gather them and renew them, out of
the place that He desires. . . . [I]t is [likely] in this case that they will
arise there where they have been devoured and dispersed, for that is
what is counted as their tomb.36

Neither the seed image of 1 Corinthians 15, nor the second-century

argument that natural cycles of diurnal and seasonal change foreshadow
the resurrection, disappear entirely from twelfth-century discussion.
For example, Marbod, bishop of Rennes (d. 1123) gives a brief compen-
dium of patristic opinion in his poem De resurrectione corporum. He
speaks of the sun rising from burial under the earth (sub tellure sepul-
tus), compares our resurrection to that of grasses clothed again after the
nakedness of winter, and at least hints at an analogy to embryological
growth by speaking of flesh and skin and bone rising from the grave.37
Hugh of St. Victor in his De sacramentis, book II, part 17, chapter 13,
uses similar metaphors of cycles and burgeonings and growth.38 The
so-called Munich summa (which is related to the Summa sententiarum
and to Hugh’s De sacramentis) says that the growth of a resurrected
body from a dead child is like the multiplication of loaves in the gos-
pel, the growth of Eve from the rib, or the emergence of a sheaf of grain
from its seed.39 Nonetheless Marbod’s basic synonym for the cadaver
is earth (tellus), ashes (cinis), cinders (favilla). His understanding of our
seed-bodies is that found in the passage from Rebecca West with which

36. Selections from the Book of the Dun Cow, pp. 34a–37b, ed. Whitley Stokes, in
“Tidings of the Resurrection,” Revue celtique 25 (1904); 232–59, esp. 234–41, and see
n. 40 below. Note the similarity to the passage from Hugh of St. Victor cited in n. 43.
37. Marbod of Rennes, Liber decem capitulorum, chaps. 9 and 10 (on “the good
death” and “the resurrection of bodies”), PL 171, cols. 1712–17. On Marbod, see Régi-
nald Grégoire, “Marbode,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique, et mystique,
doctrine et histoire, ed. M. Viller et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1932ff.), vol. 10, col. 241–44.
38. De sacramentis, PL 176, cols. 601–2; trans. Deferrari, p. 457.
39. Lottin, Psychologie, vol. 5, pp. 374–75.
 130 the twelfth century

I began this book: we are sown in furrows and pop up again revivified.
The body that rises is the body that was buried—the same although not
now dissolvable (idem sed non resolubile corpus).40 Similarly, the point
of the discussion in the Munich summa is not change of nature but
continuity of matter. The whole body at the resurrection will be made
up of little bits of itself—not a hair lost but not a single cell of roast pig
added either!41 As Hugh of St. Victor put it, decay is dissolution into
tiny particles; but “what falls must rise [i.e., be constituted] again.”42

Earthly material from which the flesh of mortals is created does not
perish before God, but into whatever dust or ashes it is resolved, into
whatever breath or breezes it disperses, into whatever substance of
other things or elements themselves it is converted, into the food and
flesh of whatever animals or men it withdraws and is changed, to that
human soul which animated it in the beginning so that it was made
man and grew, at the moment of time it will return. . . .
For if a man, an artificer, can produce a statue, which for some
reason he had made deformed, and render it very beautiful, so that
nothing of the substance but only the deformity perish, and . . . can
so scatter and mix all [the material] that he does not cause deformity
or diminish quantity, what must we think about the Omnipotent?43

40. An Anglo-Norman poem (probably from the mid-thirteenth century) that

gives a very free translation of the Prognosticon of Julian of Toledo (see n. 12 above)
makes similar use of the dossier of patristic natural analogies. See P. Meyer, “Frag-
ment du Dialogue entre l’évêque saint Julien et son disciple,” Romania: Recueil Tri-
mestriel . . . 36 (1907): 502–15; text on pp. 506–15. Verses 480–500 argue that if God
can make trees to green and grain to produce fruit a thousandfold, he can certainly
reassemble the flesh that has been destroyed. Verses 368–71 insist: it is our flesh and
no other that returns. Verses 386–89 repeat that God makes and unmakes; if he can
form (fourmer) earth into body and make (mettre) body into earth, so he can certainly
“remettre” “la cher a terre.” Verses 504–40 repeat the chain consumption argument
in a form transmitted from Gregory the Great through Julian of Toledo; the point is
that God can sort out what is man and what is beast even if a lion eats a wolf, who
has eaten a man, and the lion dies and decays into dust. See also F. J. Tanquerey,
“Originalité du Dialogue entre saint Julien et son disciple,” Mélanges de philologie
et d’histoire offerts à M. Antoine Thomas par ses élèves et ses amis (Paris: Librairie
ancienne Honoré Champion, 1927), pp. 437–43.
41. See above n. 39. See also the fascinating discussion in the anonymous summa
in Cod. Vat. lat. 10754, fol. 47ra–48rb, edited in Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit, pp.
209–13, especially pp. 209–10, lines 8–68, which uses Augustine’s image of the statue
to lead into a discussion of whether hair is “of the truth of human nature,” and p.
211, lines 69–85, to question whether human flesh, if eaten, is converted into animal
flesh. And see below n. 56.
42. De sacramentis, bk. 2, pt. 17, chap. 13; PL 176, cols. 601–2; trans. Deferrari,
p. 457.
43. De sacramentis, bk. 2, pt. 17, chaps. 14 and 16; PL 176, cols. 602–3 and 604;
trans. Deferrari, pp. 459 and 460.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 131

When Hugh quotes 1 Corinthians 15 verse 44 (“sown natural, raised

spiritual . . .”) or verse 50 (“flesh and blood shall not inherit . . .”),
he does so to emphasize continuity and identity, not transformation:
“Now insofar as pertains to substance, even then [i.e., in heaven] there
will be flesh.”44 Thus the distance or dichotomy that is underlined by
1 Corinthians 15.44 is not a metaphor for growth or process; what is
suggested is that exactly the same body we have here below will be
endowed in heaven with certain additions that make further change
impossible. If the healthy body is lighter and more agile than the sick
one (says Hugh), can we not understand that God will make our earthly
bodies subtle and swift enough to rise to heaven?45 Indeed, so con-
cerned is Hugh with the permanence of the corporeal after the end of
time that he devotes considerable attention to explaining how the fires
of hell can devour the risen bodies of the damned without either the
fire or the flesh it tortures being consumed.46 Although Peter Lombard
is more interested in the psychological pain of infernal torture than in
the worm and fire, he too stresses the incorruptibility—and thus the
perpetual torture-ability—of the risen bodies of the damned.47
Hugh’s suggestion that gifts of unchangeability are added to the glo-
rified body, as delights are added to the blessed soul, builds on the idea
(expressed earlier by Eadmer and Anselm of Canterbury) that God will
give seven benefits to the risen bodies of the elect: beauty, swiftness,
strength, liberty, health, pleasure, and everlasting life.48 Similar notions

44. De sacramentis, chap. 17; col. 604; trans. Deferrari, p. 460; passage borrowed
from Augustine.
45. De sacramentis, bk. 2, pt. 17, chap. 21; cols. 606–07; trans. Deferrari, p. 463.
46. De sacramentis, bk. 2, pt. 16, chap. 5; cols. 587–92; trans. Deferrari, p. 441–46;
borrowed from Gregory the Great and Augustine.
47. Claude Carozzi sees a difference in emphasis between the Lombard and Hugh
(“Structure et fonction de la vision de Tnugdal,” in Faire Croire: Modalités de la dif-
fusion et de la réception des messages religieux du XIIe au XVe siècle: Table Ronde
organisée par l’École française de Rome, en collaboration avec l’institut d’histoire
médiévale de l’Université de Padoue [Rome, 22–23 juin 1979] [Palais Farnese, Rome:
École française de Rome, 1981], pp. 223–34). And it appears to be true that Peter Lom-
bard sees the tortures of hell more in psychological terms whereas Hugh details the
physical tortures at considerable length: De sacramentis, bk. 2, pt. 16, chaps. 4–5, PL
176, cols. 586–93, and pt. 18, chaps. 1–15, cols. 609–13. Hugh’s account is, however,
somewhat inconsistent, and both thinkers see the bodies of the damned as material.
Both also follow Augustine in refusing to decide whether these bodies are restored
without defect (see Lombard, Sentences, bk. 4, d. 44, chap. 4, vol. 2, p. 519; Hugh, De
sacramentis, bk. 2, pt. 17, chap. 20, PL 176, cols. 605–6).
48. Eadmer of Canterbury, Liber de beatitudine coelestis patriae, PL 159, cols.
587–606, and Anselm, Proslogion, chap. 25, in S. Anselmo d’Aosta: Il Proslogion, le
Orazioni, e le Meditazioni, ed. F. S. Schmitt and trans. G. Sandri (Padua: CED AM,
1959), pp. 128–30. In light of the points I make in chapter 6 below, it is important to
note that Anselm here uses 1 Corinthians 15.44.
 132 the twelfth century

are found in Honorius Augustodunensis’s Elucidarium and in distinc-

tions 44 and 49 of book 4 of the Lombard’s Sentences. By the early
thirteenth century, this idea becomes the doctrine of the four dowries
(impassibility, subtlety or penetrability, agility, and clarity or beauty)
with which the beatified soul endows the body it receives back at the
end of time.49 The contrast between earth and heaven suggested by the
idea of the dotes is one of change and changelessness. What blessedness
adds to matter is stasis. Despite hints that the departed soul craves its
body in order to enjoy the full voluptas of the celestial kingdom,50 the
final victory—to Peter Lombard and Hugh of St. Victor as also to Jerome
more than seven hundred years before—is neither the development of
a refined sensibility nor the replacement of matter by spirit. It is rather
the restoring of exactly the body we have here below in such a way that
its particles can nevermore suffer dissolution, its instability nevermore
divert the soul from its reward. As Peter Lombard said (borrowing from
Augustine):

There is no doubt that the human mind, rapt away from corporeal
senses and having shed its flesh after death, is not able to see the
incommutable substance as the holy angels see it, either from some
more hidden cause or because there is present in it a certain natural
desire to administer the body [appetitus corpus administrandi], by
which desire it is retarded [retardatur] so that it does not continue
uninterruptedly to the highest heaven until that desire is stilled [con-
quiescat]. For if the [living] body is such a burden because its gover-
nance is difficult and serious, by so much more is the mind diverted
from vision of the highest heaven when the flesh is corrupted. Con-
sequently when it receives not an animal but a spiritual body [1 Cor.
15.44], equal to the angels, it will have the perfect expression [modum]
of its nature, obedient and ruling, vivified and vivifying, with such
ineffable ease that what was to it a prison will be to it a glory.51

Although called “spiritual not animal,” the resurrected body is to Peter

Lombard both materially and formally the body we possess on earth.
49. A. Challet, “Corps glorieux,” DTC, vol. 3 (1938), cols. 1879–1906, and Wicki,
Seligkeit, pp. 202–37 and 280–97.
50. Anselm, Proslogion, chap. 25, ed. Schmitt and Sandri, S. Anselmo, pp. 128–30;
Lombard, Sentences, bk. 4, d. 50, chap. 1, p. 553.
51. Lombard, Sentences, bk. 4, d. 49, chap. 4, art. 3, vol. 2, p. 553 (borrowed from
Augustine, Literal Commentary on Genesis, bk. 12, chap. 35, PL 34, col. 483). See
above, chap. 2, n. 138.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 133

Its rising is victory over all instability, not merely that of digestion and
partition, but that of desire as well.52
By the later twelfth century, theologians such as Magister Martin,
Praepositinus, and William of Auxerre explored issues of eating, change,
identity, and resurrection with much greater philosophical sophistica-
tion than did the early school texts of Honorius, Anselm, Hugh, and
Peter Lombard. The basic questions concerning the resurrected human
body were two. First, what is the core that will rise, the veritas huma-
nae naturae? Second, is the resurrection natural or supernatural?53
In the context of these discussions, organic metaphors for resurrection
were not just bypassed but explicitly rejected as inadequate accounts
both of identity and of divine power. For example, the author of the
little summa Breves dies hominis, edited by Heinzmann, argued that
resurrection is not natural; thus organic metaphors are inappropriate for
it. Bodies are not seeds, he explained; they do not sprout by an internal
law of development. When the gospel speaks of seeds falling into the
earth and dying in order to grow, this is an image for the soul’s rise from
sin. Where corpses are concerned, natural fertility is defective, even
repulsive. We read in Ecclesiasticus that cadavers give birth to beasts
and worms, but such birthing comes from a defect of nature; the power
of nature would be for like to give rise to like. Thus the generation of
cadavers is not generation but de-generation; it is, however, all the body
can do without the power of God. Carefully underlining the conven-
tional position that the veritas humanae naturae does not include what
comes from food, the author of this little eschatological summa thus
prefers to speak of the risen body as a golden image reforged by God or
as ashes and bones collected from hidden places for reassemblage.54
Later in the century, another anonymous treatise on the resurrection
insisted that resurrection is not natural. A seed may give rise to a seed,
but man is not a phoenix; man is dust. According to nature, man can
only decay and give rise to decay, as a putrefying tree gives birth to flies.55
In such discussion, organic analogies are rejected not only because they
52. Thus Peter Lombard and Hugh of St. Victor tend to treat the vision of God as
completion rather than yearning. For the very different treatment this idea receives
from the mystics, see below chapter 8.
53. See Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit, and Hermann J. Weber, Die Lehre von der
Auferstehung der Toten in den Haupttraktaten der scholastischen Theologie von
Alexander von Hales zu Duns Skotus (Freiburg: Herder, 1973) [hereafter Weber,
Auferstehung].
54. Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit, pp. 187–96. See Ecclesiasticus 10.11, 19.3.
55. Cod. lat. Bibl. Univ. Erlangen 260, fol. 74rb–vb, edited in Heinzmann, Unster-
blichkeit, pp. 221–23, especially pp. 221–22, lines 36–50.
 134 the twelfth century

detract from divine power but also because the birth of one thing from
another involves such change (and sometimes repulsive change) that
two individuals seem involved rather than one individual in two condi-
tions. The appearance of a worm from slime is not a resurrection.
Thus, reforged statues or pots, resumed clothing, and rebuilt temples
were acceptable images for resurrection in a way seeds were not. The
reuniting of bits into their previous shape seemed to express the recre-
ation of the same thing that had existed before. But as the image of the
reforged statue was given further consideration, it too came to present
problems. Scholastic discussion agreed with Augustine that it was nec-
essary only for the statue to be reforged from its original material in its
original form, not that each particle occupy the same place. To Augus-
tine, such a position seemed to take care both of the issue of divine
power (surely a statue does not reforge itself or naturally regenerate its
parts) and of the issue of identity (surely it is the same statue if it has
the same shape and the same material). Augustine was more interested
in explaining the perfection of the resurrected body, restored without
lack or superfluity, than in accounting for identity; thus he suggested
that bits of fingernails might well become toes in the resurrection. By
the later twelfth century, however, scholastic theologians were quite
puzzled about whether a statue reforged from the same material but
distributed in different places was the same statue. An anonymous
summa (Cod. Vat. lat. 10754) from mid-century debated the question of
the returning particles of dust and concluded:

[Thus] no member of my body will be what it was just before and so

I will have another body.
But this is false, as Job attests: [for] “in my flesh I shall see my
God” (Job 19.26). Therefore we say, with Augustine and Job, that
it will be the same body because it will be made from the same
matter and it is only accidental whether that matter makes a hand
or a foot. And we are not cheating in this conclusion. . . . It is bet-
ter to be a simple catholic than a facile heretic.56

Indeed, by the turn of the century, William of Auxerre, who orga-

nized and handed down much of early scholastic discussion, argued
that resurrection cannot be natural because nature cannot solve the
identity problem. Job says we rise the same, but nature cannot remake

56. Cod. Vat. lat. 10754, edited in Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit, p. 210, lines
52–59. Note that the statue in this text has been not just melted down but pulverized!
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 135

the same body; it can generate only similar bodies through the multi-
plication of individual cases. God, however, raises the exact ashes that
lie in the earth: the resurrected body of Paul is made from Paul’s ashes,
not Peter’s. These ashes are, moreover, Paul’s veritas humanae naturae,
containing every element necessary for perfection but not a superfluous
particle, and this core of human nature, although formed from food,
rises as flesh not as food.57
As schoolmen of the mid-thirteenth century were to stress, such dis-
cussion leaves a number of philosophical, physiological, and theologi-
cal questions unsolved. In fact, so unsatisfactory did it seem that by the
early fourteenth century debate shifted away from issues of material
continuity and body. Partly because of the developing doctrine of pur-
gatory, partly because of increasing insistence that the beatific vision
could be received before the Last Judgment, partly because of the adop-
tion by at least some theologians of a fully Aristotelian idea of form,
eschatological discussion in 1300 tended to focus on soul, although
material continuity as a component of bodily resurrection was not dis-
carded.58 But in the twelfth century, scholastic accounts of last things
emphasized body. Six aspects of their highly problematic conclusions
are worth underlining.
First, theologians generally agreed that body is necessary for person-
hood. Although certain early thinkers such as Hugh of St. Victor and
Robert of Melun used Platonic concepts that made the soul the person,
schoolmen after mid-century usually understood “person” as a compos-
ite of body and soul.59 According to this definition, a self is not a soul
using a body but a psychosomatic entity, to which body is integral. The
philosophical challenge was not therefore to state the necessity of body;

57. Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit, pp. 239–45, especially p. 243 n. 11.

58. See below chapters 6 and 7.
59. Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit. The burden of Heinzmann’s argument is to show
the emergence in the twelfth century with Gilbert de la Porrée of a more Aristotelian
conception of person over against the Platonic definition of man as soul found, for
example, in Hugh of St. Victor and Robert of Melun. This argument is, however,
to some extent misleading. Although technical definitions may have shifted from
Platonic to Aristotelian, thinkers such as Hugh and Bernard of Clairvaux actually
treated the human being as an entity composed of body and soul (see chapter 4 below
and Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 123ff.). So indeed did the Fathers. Among patristic
treatises on the resurrection, I find only Ambrose’s De excessu Satyri, bk. 2, chap. 20,
adhering to a strictly Platonic definition; see above chapter 2, n. 8. For recent revi-
sionist opinion about Augustine’s anthropology, see Miles, Augustine on the Body;
Peter Brown, Body and Society; Joyce Salisbury, “The Latin Doctors of the Church
on Sexuality,” Journal of Medieval History 12 (1986): 279–89; Fredriksen, “Beyond
the Body/Soul Dichotomy”; and Stroumsa, “Caro Salutis Cardo.”
 136 the twelfth century

it was rather to state what body is that it can return after death and what
it adds to person that separated soul lacks. In other words, the challenge
was to explain philosophically and theologically why body is necessary,
not merely to assert that it is so by defining person as a composite.
Second, scholastic accounts assume that body is flesh. What returns
at the Last Judgment is a material, fleshly, human body. Although the
gifts of impassibility, agility, and clarity might make that body far more
beautiful than it was on earth, scholastic authors stressed that it rises
with all its matter and members.
Third, there was great anxiety to account for the identity of the origi-
nal and the resurrected body. No matter how important soul might be
in accounting for person, thinkers assumed that continuity of material
and of shape or structure was necessary for identity. Unless the same
particles returned in the same structure, body was not the same; if body
was not the same, person was not the same.
Fourth, since death was the fragmenting of the physical body into
dust or particles, resurrection was return of exactly these physical par-
ticles. Thus resurrection was reassemblage. Issues of part and whole
were important components of issues of identity.
Fifth, organic processes, especially those, such as eating, in which one
substance disappeared into another, were both mysterious and threat-
ening. Such processes were mysterious because there was no adequate
scientific model available to account for organic change, and Joan Cad-
den’s recent research has taught us that the recovery of Aristotle’s work
on nutrition and generation did not solve any problems in this regard.60
The processes were threatening because much of the change in the nat-
ural world (e.g., aging, decay) was negative and because even positive
change (such as pregnancy or germination) seemed clearly to divide one
instance from another or to replace one individual with another rather
than to guarantee continuity. Because natural process could not pro-
duce—or even account for—identity, resurrection had to be victory not
merely over fragmentation but over biological change itself.
Sixth, the resurrected body was structurally as well as materially
identical with the body of earth. Thus, resurrection resulted in immor-
tality, not equality. Although all defects were repaired in rising (even
the defect of babyhood or senility), the virtuous would not all shine

60. Joan Cadden, “The Medieval Philosophy and Biology of Growth: Albertus
Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Albert of Saxony, and Marsilius of Inghen on Book I, chap.
V of Aristotle’s De Generatione et Corruptione, with Translated Texts of Albertus
Magnus and Thomas Aquinas” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1971).
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 137

with the same glory. Never losing its sex or size or the scars of its suffer-
ing, the body that returned was a conveyor of status and experience; it
was rewarded for its particular sacrifices and achievements.61 As Hugh
of St. Victor put it: “Nor is it of consequence that . . . individuals com-
ing to life again have different statures, because they [were] so when
living.” “This is in the plan of the Creator, that the peculiarity and
likeness [to God] of each [person] be preserved in his own image . . .,”
for there will be “in the bodies of those rising again . . . a reasonable
inequality, just as there is among voices which combine in song.”62

Honorius Augustodunensis and John Scotus Erigena:

An Alternative Tradition?
The metaphors of reforged statues, of temples and garments, used in
scholastic discussions of eschatology were not mere embellishments.
They served as limiting cases in technical philosophical argument.
Indeed, as the complex quotations concerning Augustine’s recast statue
indicate, they sometimes became the subject of a writer’s investigation.
I have thus suggested that they may show us the fundamental materi-
alism of twelfth-century philosophical assumptions more clearly than
the explicit (and confused) statements about “substance” and “flesh”
we find in the texts.
Yet the account I have given here of a scholastic consensus on issues
of resurrection and identity could be questioned. We have recently
learned to see scholastic discussion more as pragmatic (and hence
inconsistent) response to a host of pressing questions about daily liv-
ing than as abstract philosophical solution to ontological queries.63

61. Thus not only is there a great gulf fixed between the damned and the elect,
there are also great differences among the rank and file within the two groups. For
twelfth-century examples of an emphasis on different gifts even in heaven, see
Wicki, Seligkeit, pp. 238–55. The pseudo-Augustinian text In dispari claritate erit
par gaudium (PL 45, col. 1892) was crucial. In a fascinating new study, Philippe
Buc shows that there was debate about whether inequality in heaven was simply
moral or a matter of worldly status as well; see Philippe Buc, L’Ambiguité du livre:
Prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible (Paris: Beauchesne,
1993), chapter 2.
62. De sacramentis, bk. 2, pt. 17, chap. 15; PL 176, col. 603; trans. Deferrari, pp.
459–60 (emphasis mine). And see De sacramentis, bk. 2, pt. 18, chaps. 5–10 and 20;
PL 176, cols. 610–11 and 616–17; trans. Deferrari, pp. 467–68 and 474–75, which
stresses difference in rewards among the souls in heaven.
63. See Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas; Valerie I. J. Flint, “The
‘School of Laon’: A Reconsideration,” in Ideas in the Medieval West: Texts and Their
Contexts (London: Variorum Reprints, 1988).
 138 the twelfth century

Moreover, we must also confront arguments by French scholars, espe-

cially Claude Carozzi, that the early twelfth century saw fierce debate
over the nature of the person after death.64
Responding to Jacques Le Goff’s groundbreaking work on purgatory,
Carozzi has argued that there were in the early twelfth century two
“diametrically opposed” positions on the afterlife. The first was a liter-
alizing position found in Hugh of St. Victor’s De sacramentis, Bernard
of Clairvaux’s sermon 42 De diversis,65 William of St. Thierry’s Trea-
tise on the Nature of Body and Soul, and the Irish “Vision (or Visions)
of Tondal.” The second or spiritualizing stance was found in Hono-
rius Augustodunensis’s Elucidarium, Guibert of Nogent’s De pignori-
bus, and to some extent in Peter Lombard’s Sentences,66 According to
Carozzi, the literalist position tended to make the soul corporeal even
before the Last Judgment and won out in the large number of medieval
accounts of people returning to earth after death with vivid stories of
the tortures of hell and purgatory or the delights of heaven. The spiri-
tualizing position, based on ideas derived from John Scotus, surfaced
around 1100 but survived only very partially in the notion that damna-
tion and salvation are, respectively, the absence and presence of God.
There are problems with accepting Carozzi’s argument as stated.
Given the sic et non structure of scholastic texts, it is very difficult
to tell how much controversy there was in the early twelfth century
either over the literal nature of heaven and hell or over the nature of
the separated soul or over the corporeality of the resurrected body (and
these are not, of course, the same issue).67 It is true that Peter Lombard

64. Carozzi, “Structure et fonction de la vision de Tnugdal.” Carozzi differs from

Le Goff in certain ways; see Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, p. 389 n. 2, and appendix
4, p. 370.
65. Although its authenticity has been questioned, the sermon is probably genuine;
see Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq, H. M. Rochais, and C. H. Talbot (Rome:
Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–77), vol. 6, pt. 1, pp. 255–61; H.-M. Rochais, “Enquête
sur les sermons divers et les sentences de saint Bernard,” Analecta sancti ordinis
cisterciensis 18 (1962): 16–17; idem, “Saint Bernard est-il l’auteur des sermons 40, 41,
et 42 ‘De diversis’?” Revue bénédictine 72 (1962): 324–45; and Le Goff, Birth of Pur-
gatory, pp. 160–65.
66. Honorius’s Elucidarium is probably from before 1099–1102, his Clavis phy-
sicae from before 1123/33; William’s Treatise on the Body and Soul dates from the
1120s; Guibert’s De pignoribus is from about 1125; the relevant portion of Hugh’s
De sacramentis was written between 1135 and 1140; Peter Lombard’s Sentences is
from 1148–1152; the “Visions of Tondal” is from 1149.; Otto of Freising’s Two Cities,
composed between 1143 and 1146, is extant in a revised version dated 1157.
67. Carozzi tends to confuse or conflate these separate elements of eschatology,
even where his medieval authors do not. For example, some of the treatments he
cites as corporealizing the soul after death (especially those of Bernard of Clairvaux
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 139

and Hugh of St. Victor, Honorius Augustodunensis and Otto of Freising,

each quote incompatible views on these matters. Moreover, each refers
to disagreement (“some say . . . others say . . .”), and it is significant that
in Honorius’s Elucidarium and Otto’s Two Cities—neither of which is a
school text—these issues are almost the only ones treated as matters on
which there is a significant difference of opinion.68 But was there really
controversy, rather than simply confusion, over eschatology? Those
early twelfth-century passages that quote conflicting authorities on last
things are often borrowed in toto from Augustine or Julian of Toledo or
John Scotus (just as Jerome’s references to contemporary debate were in
fact often lifted from Tertullian). And what are we to make of the fact
that those figures, such as Guibert, Honorius, and Otto, who not only
at times spiritualize heaven and hell but also take an almost Origenist
stance, speak of the resurrected body in extremely materialist terms as
well? The greatest contradictions in the early twelfth century are not
between writers but within writers.

and William of St. Thierry) are merely reflections or direct quotations of Augustine’s
assertion that the separated soul yearns for the body it will receive in resurrection
(see above n. 51); they are therefore in no sense incompatible with notions of purga-
tion after death as psychological and spiritual experience. There was certainly con-
fusion in the twelfth century, as attention began to focus on a purging stage for the
soul between death and Last Judgment, but the idea that the soul yearns for the body
does not mean (any more than it did for Augustine, from whom the twelfth century
borrowed discussion of these matters) that the soul was corporealized before resur-
rection or the body spiritualized afterward. I do, however, argue below—in agreement
with Carozzi, Zaleski, and Morgan—that the increased attention to (and particular-
ization of) a somatomorphic soul in otherworld-journey and vision literature tended
to corporealize the soul. I also agree that the notion of soul’s yearning for body grew
stronger in the later Middle Ages; this development tended to underline person as
psychosomatic unity.
68. Yves Lefevre notes that Honorius only twice gives alternative opinions (bk. 1,
q. 161, and bk. 3, q. 80) (see L’Elucidarium et les lucidaires: Contribution, par
l’histoire d’un texte, à l’histoire des croyances religieuses en France au moyen âge
[Paris: Boccard, 1954], p. 206). Both relate to resurrection: the first concerns whether
Christ was in hell for the full three days between his death and Resurrection; the
second concerns whether we all rise at age thirty and of the same stature. Otto of
Freising in his Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus (ed. Adolf Hofmeister,
Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae
Historicis separatim editi [Hannover and Leipzig: Hahn, 1912), bk. 8, chaps. 18–27,
pp. 416–36) gives contrasting opinions about how literal torture is in hell and about
the meaning of I Corinthians 15. Much of this is borrowed from Honorius and does
not therefore indicate that the debate continued in Otto’s day. A similar problem of
interpretation arises, for example, in Helinand of Froidmont, Les Vers de la mort,
ed. F. Wulff and E. Walberg (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1905), pp. 31–33, verses
34–36, where the poet comments that those who think there is no afterlife argue that
we should live like pigs and enjoy ourselves here on earth. The verses do not neces-
sarily mean that anyone articulated a fully skeptical position in the twelfth century.
 140 the twelfth century

Guibert of Nogent, for example, fulminates against the claims of the

monks of St. Médard to possess Christ’s tooth, finds deeply offensive
the idea that the body of the Virgin might have decayed in death, and
insists shrilly that the body we eat in the Eucharist is whole in every
fragment. He argues that our resurrection is threatened unless every
particle of Christ rose from the tomb. Yet Guibert completely allego-
rizes heaven and hell as ecstasy and loss.69
Honorius’s Elucidarium, from which Herrad of Hohenbourg bor-
rowed some of her most materialist passages, argues that those eaten
by animals will be restored “from the same matter” so that not a hair
of their heads perishes;70 those born with two heads will rise with two
bodies as well; those aborted in the womb before quickening will return
to the father and mother from whom the matter of the seed came.
Honorius explains that the blessed will rise naked and unembarrassed,
translucent like beautiful glass (ut splendidum vitrum perlucida) but
colored with the particular colors appropriate to their different religious
statuses. He asserts that individuality will last in heaven, for an eye
cannot be a foot or a man a woman; Peter, who can never again be a
virgin, will have virginity in John.71 Yet the same Honorius who here
insists on individuality and materiality in the resurrection also insists
(in a short text discovered and published by Endres) that “after the final
resurrection of all people, the bodies both of the good and of the evil

69. Guibert of Nogent, De pignoribus sanctorum, especially bks. 1 and 4, PL 156

(Paris, 1853), col. 611–30 and 666–80. For Guibert’s concern with the bodily assump-
tion of the Virgin, see bk. 1, chap. 3, cols. 623–24; for the argument that there are
no bodily pains in hell nor are there corporeal glories in heaven, see bk. 4, chaps.
4 and 7, cols. 673–75 and 677. On Guibert, see John F. Benton, “Introduction,” in
Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent,
ed. John F. Benton and trans. C. C. S. Bland (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1970),
intro., pp. 26–31; Klaus Guth, Guibert von Nogent und die hochmittelalterliche
Kritik an der Reliquienverehrung, Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des
Benediktiner-Ordens und seiner Zweige, Supplement 21 (Augsburg: Winfried, 1970);
Marie-Danielle Mireux, “Guibert de Nogent et la critique du culte des reliques,”
in La Piété populaire au moyen âge, Actes du 99e Congrès National des Socié-
tés Savantes Besançon 1954: Section de philologie et d’histoire jusqu’à 1610, vol. 1
(Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1977), pp. 293–301; and Bynum, “Bodily Miracles,”
pp. 77–78 and 99–100.
70. Elucidarium, ed. Lefevre, bk. 3, q. 45, p. 456. On Honorius, see Joseph A.
Endres, Honorius Augustodunensis: Beitrag zur Geschichte des geistigen Lebens im
12. Jahrhundert (Kempten and Munich: Jos. Koesel, 1906); Eva Matthews Sanford,
“Honorius: Presbyter and Scholasticus,” Speculum 23 (1948): 397–425; and Flint,
Ideas in the West, chaps. 5, 6, 7, 8, and 12.
71. Elucidarium, ed. Lefevre, bk. 3, qq. 104–6 and 116–18, pp. 467–69 and 472–
74. Honorius even suggests that there will be sweet smells, lovely tastes, etc., in
heaven.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 141

will be spiritual, and nothing thereafter will be corporeal, for God will
be all in all as light is in air or iron in fire.”72 In the Clavis physicae, he
uses images of natural growth to stress the transformation of the resur-
rected body into spirit, ridicules those who think bodies rise with sex
or age or stature, and rejects the idea that there will be any difference
in glory among those present in heaven.73
Even Otto of Freising, whose Two Cities achieves a remarkable syn-
thesis of divergent traditions, argues that the Last Judgment occurs on
earth and restores exactly the heavy, earthly, particular bodies we have
here; but he holds as well that blessedness in heaven is a spiritual vision:

For we must not suppose that souls, after they have been stripped
from the body, or after they have taken up spiritual bodies and are
not inferior to the angelic spirits in purity and rank, find delight in
external things as men do in this life. Accordingly, whenever Holy
Scripture says that their spirits are refreshed and affected by flower-
ing and verdant meadows, by pleasant places, by the singing of birds,
by fragrant things (such as cinnamon and balsam), such expressions
should, it is clear, be interpreted spiritually rather than carnally.74

The examples of Guibert, Honorius, and Otto suggest that it is not

quite right to see a controversy with carefully delineated positions
in the early twelfth century. Rather there was deep confusion (often
within the ideas of individual thinkers) over how materially to take a
number of different components of eschatology: soul, resurrected body,
the place of purgation, heaven and hell. Nonetheless, if we focus on
treatments of resurrection, it does appear that Carozzi—and earlier
scholars such as Endres—are right to see a curious survival of Origenist,
spiritualizing views in certain texts. Although it is not clear how well
those who initially repeated it understood it, there was an alternative
tradition. This tradition went back to the great Carolingian philoso-
pher, John Scotus Erigena.
72. Endres, Honorius, pp. 152–53; and see Honorius, Clavis physicae, ed. Paolo
Lucentini (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1974), chaps. 301–8, pp. 243–61.
73. Honorius, Clavis physicae, ed. Lucentini, chaps. 271–73, pp. 218–22; see also
chaps. 480, 481, and 487, not edited by Lucentini but (he indicates) borrowed liter-
ally from John Scotus Erigena; see Lucentini, ed., Clavis physicae, appendix, p. 286.
74. This presumably refers to the saints after the resurrection; Otto of Freising,
Historia de duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, chap. 33, p. 451; trans. Charles Christopher
Mierow, The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A.D.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), p. 508. Otto does hold a resurrected
body to be necessary; see my discussion below, chapter 4, pp. 180–86.
 142 the twelfth century

On the issue of the resurrection of the body, the De divisione natu-

rae of the ninth-century Irish philosopher and theologian John Scotus
seems to realize the full brilliance of the Origenist position that is in
its complexity of detail irretrievably lost to us with the loss of Origen’s
texts. By the time he began the De divisione naturae in 862, John Sco-
tus Erigena had already elaborated some of Augustine’s ideas in a dis-
tinctly Neoplatonic way. At the request of the Carolingian ruler, he had
translated the Pseudo-Dionysius and other major works of Greek the-
ology—Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and Epiphanius—
works that made the terms of the Origenist position clear whether or
not they sympathized fully with it.75 Erigena’s view of the cosmos,
derived from Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa, is profoundly
monistic; body is the final spilling forth or expression of a reality that
emanates from God and will ultimately return. Produced by the coming
together of the elements, which are an ontological level above it and
therefore not material, our material, fleshly body is accidents or quali-
ties not substance. Where John does speak of body as substance (ousia),
he means an underlying pattern (like Origen’s eidos) not a corporeal
body, a collection of particles.76 Erigena is aware that his position is
Greek rather than Latin, and he states repeatedly that there is much
disagreement over eschatology, although he insists that among Western
thinkers Ambrose at least agrees with him.77

75. Maïeul Cappuyns, Jean Scot Érigène: Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée (Brussels:
Culture et civilisation, 1964), p. 189. On Erigena, see also Henry Bett, Johannes Sco-
tus Erigena: A Study in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1925); John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); I. P. Sheldon-
Williams, “A Bibliography of the Works of Johannes Scottus Eriugena,” The Journal
of Ecclesiastical History 10, no. 2 (1960): 198–224; and M. Brennan, A Bibliography
of Publications in the Field of Eriugenian Studies, 1800–1975 (Spoleto: Centro ital-
iano di studi sull’altro medievo, 1977). Erigena’s spiritualist ideas of body of course
have their own context, which I cannot treat here. Carolingian spirituality had in
general a very materialist concept of the body; see above, “Introduction,” n. 14.
76. John Scotus Eriugena [or Erigena], Periphyseon (De divisione naturae), ed. I. P.
Sheldon-Williams with Ludwig Bieler, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 7, 9, 11 (Dublin:
The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1978–1983), bk. 1, vol. 1, pp. 113–23,
143–57 (PL 122 [Paris, 1853], cols. 475C–480A and 489B–495B); and see John the Scot,
Periphyseon: On the Division of Nature, trans. Myra Uhlfelder with Jean A. Potter
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), pp. 44–49 and 60–66. See also Sheldon-Williams’
summary of John’s summary of his argument, in Periphyseon, trans. Sheldon-Williams,
vol. 3, pp. 8–22.
77. Periphyseon, bk. 5, chap. 8, PL 122, cols. 876C and 878D; see trans. Uhlfelder
and Potter, bk. 5, p. 288. See also bk. 5, chap. 37, PL 122, col. 987B; trans. I. P. Sheldon-
Williams and John J. O’Meara, Eriugena: Periphyseon (The Division of Nature)
(Montreal and Washington, D.C.: Bellarmin and Dumbarton Oaks, 1987), p. 672.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 143

What is striking, for my interests, is the fact that John Scotus elabo-
rates, as did Origen, naturalistic imagery for the resurrection, making
full use of Clementine cyclical metaphors and of the Pauline seed. The
resurrection of the phoenix from ashes or the beetle from dung, the
gradual unfolding of seeds in things, the turn of the seasons from win-
ter to spring, all become analogies for a return to God that is transfor-
mation.78 In direct contrast to Western patristic arguments (both in
their original context and in their use by twelfth-century schoolmen),
Erigena treats the continuing growth of fingernails and hair as a prom-
ise and symbol of resurrection, not as a problem for material reassem-
blage.79 He uses Galatians 3.28 (“neither male nor female”) to argue
that Christ rose without biological sex, and so shall we.80 John 14.2 (“in
my Father’s house are many mansions”) and Ephesians 4.13 (“till we
all come . . . unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”),
used in the Western tradition to guarantee the survival of difference in
heaven, become arguments that all spiritual bodies will be the same.
For, asserts Erigena, all bodies will become spiritual bodies and all spiri-
tual bodies souls, as moisture becomes steam or the seed the sheaf.81
The image of the potter and the recast pot, so popular in patristic and
twelfth-century scholastic texts, is explicitly rejected; in that passage,
says Erigena, Paul “is not discussing bodily resurrection.”82 But Erigena
again and again uses 1 Corinthians 15 to explain that “animal” is not
“spiritual,” to stress that we are a self that flowers into an other that is
inherent in the original pattern, and to underline that all bodies rise as
spirit.83 In one of his most radical passages, John says:
78. Periphyseon, bk. 4, PL 122, cols. 800–15; see trans. Uhlfelder and Potter,
pp. 263–65; bk. 5, PL 122, cols. 871–85, 899–907, and 952–55, see trans. Uhlfelder and
Potter, pp. 282–91, 302–6, 323–25.
79. Periphyseon, bk. 5, chap. 23, PL 122, col. 900A–B; see trans. Uhlfelder and
Potter, p. 303: “God has made in us symbols of resurrection in our two sets of ten
nails, providing evidence about our hope. But also by the crown of the head, our
hair. . . . For what seems in us dead body, i.e., hair daily cut and nails, grow again
and symbolize the hope of resurrection.” John is here giving (by quoting Epiphanius)
what he understands to be the Greek arguments for resurrection as natural; he says
this is a position he has since discarded.
80. Periphyseon, bk. 5, chap. 20, PL 122, cols. 892–94; see trans. Uhlfelder and
Potter, pp. 295–96; see also, cols. 898–99, trans. Uhlfelder and Potter, p. 298.
81. Periphyseon, bk. 5, chaps. 36 and 38, PL 122, cols. 982C and 994C; see trans.
Uhlfelder and Potter, pp. 339 and 342.
82. Periphyseon, bk. 5, chap. 37, PL 122, col. 985C; trans. Sheldon-Williams and
O’Meara, p. 670.
83. Periphyseon, bk. 4, chaps. 5–6 and chaps. 12–15, PL 122, cols. 760–62 and 800–12,
and see trans. Uhlfelder and Potter, pp. 229–31 and 263–65; bk. 5, chaps. 13, 23, and
 144 the twelfth century

It is more tolerable indeed to those who think carnally to believe that

earthly bodies will be changed into heavenly bodies than to believe
in the annihilation of all corporeality. And I think the Apostle was
speaking in the same mode of condescension [to the carnally minded]
when he said of the resurrection of the earthly body: “It is sown an
animal body, it shall be raised a spiritual body,” For this was as if
he said: The earthly and animal body, which is sown in the ground
and undergoes the dissolution of corruption, shall rise up a spiritual
and heavenly body; that is to say briefly, . . . it will change from
earthly into heavenly, from corporeal into spiritual, but it will still
however be body. From heaviness it will be changed into subtlety . . .
as smoke is changed into flame. For whoever studies the writings of
St. Ambrose or Gregory the Theologian, or his commentator Maxi-
mus, will discover that it is not a matter of a change from earthly into
heavenly body, but a complete passing into pure spirit, and not into
that which is called ether, but into that which is called mind [intel-
lectus]. Ambrose indeed said that after resurrection, body and soul
and mind are one. . . . And Gregory likewise said that at the time of
resurrection, body shall be changed into soul, soul into mind, mind
into God, so that God will be all in all, as air is changed into light. . . .
For they should not be listened to who say that after the future
resurrection human bodies will shine in splendor in such a way
that each will receive brightness to correspond to the merit of his
earthly life whether good or bad; on the contrary . . . all human
bodies will share the same glory and power in the same future,
spiritually and immortally and eternally. . . . For the glory of the
righteous will consist not in brightness of body, but in purity of
contemplation, in which they shall see God face to face; nor shall
the dishonor of the impious lie in ugliness of members but rather
in deprivation of the vision of God.84

I cannot here deal with the full complexity of Erigena’s position,

and I deliberately avoid the question of his pantheism, to which most
scholarly discussion of him has been directed.85 But several points

36, PL 122, cols. 883–85, 899–907 and 978–83, and trans. Uhlfelder and Potter, pp. 290,
305, and 334–40. And see bk. 5, PL 122, cols. 985C–990A, trans. Uhlfelder and Potter,
pp. 340–41, and trans. Sheldon-Williams and O’Meara, p. 670–75.
84. Periphyseon, bk. 5, chap. 37, PL 122, cols. 987A–987D, my translation; see
also trans. Sheldon-Williams and O’Meara, pp. 672–73.
85. See below n. 95.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 145

should be made about the conception of resurrection he bequeathed to

the twelfth century. First, his understanding of corporeal body as quali-
ties and quantities—i.e., accidents existing in ousia—allowed for full
acceptance of bodily change by sacrificing (as had Origen) both mate-
rial continuity and continuity of external form or physiological struc-
ture as elements of identity. Second, death—the separation of soul and
body and the dissolution of body into the four elements from which it
came (elements that are ontologically above it)—was genuinely a step
upward. The resurrection in which body returns cannot be material
reassemblage, although some underlying substance survives death and
according to it a spiritual body is constructed or expressed at the end of
time. Third, Erigena sees that his conception implies resurrection to be
fully natural (and therefore appropriately expressed in natural, cyclical
images) although he pulls back from this, stating that resurrection, the
greatest of miracles, is probably owing to grace as well.86
Finally, Erigena understands that his idea of return undercuts earthly
differences of rank and gender and even religious accomplishment. It is
ridiculous, he asserts, to think we rise with limbs or innards, weight or
height, sex or age. How can “physical advantages” matter in heaven?87
Yet Erigena wishes to retain some difference. The good will have joy,
the evil sadness. And these good will be filled not consumed by God, as
air is irradiated not dissolved by light.88 At one point John even hints
that something we might think of today as gender (in contradistinction
to sex) survives eternally. Humanity was created in the image of God
entirely without difference of sex, he says, but “the spiritual sexes are
understood to exist in the soul—for nous, that is intellect, is a kind of
male in the soul, while aisthesis, that is sense, is a kind of female.”89
86. There is, he asserts, no miracle contrary to nature! Periphyseon, bk. 5, chaps.
22–23, PL 122, cols. 898–907, esp. col. 902C–D, and see trans. Uhlfelder and Potter,
pp. 302–09, especially p. 306.
87. Periphyseon, bk. 1, trans. Sheldon-Williams, vol. 1, pp. 56–59 (PL 122,
cols. 450C–451C); bk. 2, trans. Sheldon-Williams, vol. 2, pp. 21–27 (PL 122, cols.
531D–535A); Periphyseon, bk. 5, chaps. 13–20, PL 122, cols. 883–97; see trans. Uhl-
felder and Potter, pp. 290–300.
88. Periphyseon, bk. 5, PL 122, cols. 944B–45 and 952–53, see trans. Uhlfelder and
Potter, pp. 322–25.
89. Periphyseon, bk. 2, trans. Sheldon-Williams, vol. 2, pp. 29–40, especially p. 39
(PL 122, cols. 536B–542B). It is interesting to note that the passage would support
the arguments of Judith Butler and Thomas Laqueur that what we call gender (i.e.,
socially constructed roles) is in some sense more basic than sex (biological differ-
ence). See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1990), especially pp. 66–72, and Thomas Laqueur, Making
Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1990), especially pp. 7–10.
 146 the twelfth century

Erigena sees that his conception denies a certain commonsense reality

to evil and to matter. What is punished eternally is only the wills of the
evil, which are strictly speaking no-thing. Neither heaven nor hell can
be a place, because spirit cannot be localized. Thus, although avoiding
the most extreme implications of his monistic position, John is aware of
the extent to which he dissolves the threat of hell by dissolving differ-
ence. Indeed, he espouses explicitly the moral as well as the metaphysi-
cal vision implicit in monism. A literal heaven and hell are ludicrous
not only because all accidents must be shed as spirit progresses toward
God but also because those who argue that risen bodies retain their
shape do so in order to imagine those bodies experiencing torment. A
universe that returns to a One beyond difference is a universe whose
basic rhythm is the throbbing of grace; a universe bifurcated into groups
of people, forever unequal in the particularities they possessed on earth,
is one dominated, says John, by “the severity of a vindictive judge.”90
In the 1120s, toward the end of his literary career, the puzzling figure
Honorius Augustodunensis summarized Erigena’s De divisione naturae
in a work called the Clavis physicae. As I indicated above, certain short
treatises by Honorius, probably from a slightly earlier period (the Scala
coeli and the Quaestiones on the descent and ascent of Christ), also
take a spiritualizing stance borrowed from Erigena.91 Yet Honorius’s
Elucidarium, written about 1100 and closely related to the teaching of
Anselm of Canterbury, presented a remarkably materialist position on
the resurrected body and became a major source for later materialist dis-
cussion, both in Latin and in the vernacular. Recent interpretations of
Honorius as a rather pragmatic polemicist and pedagogue interested in
educating the clergy and in the rights of monks to the clerical role92 do
not really explain what one scholar has politely called “the bewildering
variety” of his output.93 Why does he contradict himself so fundamen-
tally? If his goal was to educate priests for pastoral responsibilities, the
abstruse philosophy of John Scotus Erigena hardly seems appropriate.94

90. Periphyseon, bk. 5, chaps. 37–38, PL 122, cols. 984–91, see trans. Uhlfelder
and Potter, pp. 340–41.
91. Endres, Honorius, and see n. 72 above.
92. Sanford, “Honorius, Presbyter and Scholasticus,” p. 403; and Flint, Ideas in
the West, chapter 12, who follows Sanford’s interpretation.
93. Flint, Ideas in the West, chap. 12, p. 97. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 136–38,
comments on Honorius’s inconsistency.
94. It is worth noting that the other compilations of Erigena from the twelfth
century seem to come from the schools. Simon of Tournai (d. ca. 1203) made use of
him, and there is a florilegium of Erigenist texts in Paris Nat. lat. MS 16603; on this,
see Cappuyns, Jean Scot Érigène, p. 246 nn. 6 and 7. Bett argues that Abelard and
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 147

Moreover—owing partly to the fact that the Clavis physicae has only
recently been edited and partly to the continued focus of interpretation
on the question of pantheism—scholars have not decided how Erigenist
Honorius really was.95
I cannot here solve any of the mysteries surrounding Honorius. But
on the specific issue of bodily resurrection, it is clear that the Clavis
physicae simplifies but does not fundamentally alter Erigena’s ideas
or metaphors.96 Honorius occasionally sidesteps articulations that sug-
gest absorptions of self into the Godhead and sometimes elaborates
metaphors in such a way as to underline the individuality of souls.
For example, in chapter 53 he adds to the image of lamps joining in
brightness the idea that each lamp, if removed, takes away its own, but
only its own, light.97 But Honorius clearly retains Erigena’s sense that
all the particularities of the body (age, sex, rank) appear as a result of
sin, that Christ rose, as will we, “non in sexu corporeo sed in homine
tantum”;98 that “the dissolution of flesh which is called death should
more reasonably be called the death of death” for it is the beginning of
a growth toward spirit.99 Erigena’s metaphors of unfolding seeds and of
returning spring continue, in Honorius’s hands, to describe a cosmic
movement that is transformation, not reassemblage.100
It is also clear that the Clavis physicae does contradict the Elucidar-
ium both in its view of body and in its metaphors for salvation. Where
the Clavis physicae spiritualizes the material, the Elucidarium mate-
rializes the spirit. Where the Clavis uses images of natural cycles and
growth, the Elucidarium speaks of partition and reassemblage, diges-
tion and regurgitation. Where the Erigenist treatise sees salvation as

Gilbert of Poitiers were influenced by him (Johannes Scotus Erigena, pp. 171ff.). See
also O’Meara, Eriugena, pp. 216–17.
95. Both Endres and Sanford (cited above in n. 70) see the Clavis physicae as side-
stepping the most extreme pantheistic statements of Erigena. Lefevre, L’Elucidarium
et les lucidaires, p. 197, argues that the Elucidarium is not pantheistic.
96. Honorius knew Erigena was problematic: “In quo opere quedam minus ratione
exercitatis videbuntur absona, que tamen veritatem considerantibus summa aucto-
ritate et vera ratione constabunt subnixa,” he says at the beginning of the Clavis
physicae; see Lucentini ed., p. 3.
97. Honorius, Clavis physicae, ed. Lucentini, pp. 34–35.
98. Ibid., chaps. 69–80, 273–75 and 293, pp. 49–57, 221–24, and 239; and chaps.
347, 350, and 354–60 (which are Erigena, Periphyseon, cols. 894A–C, 896B–C,
898D–902D; see Lucentini ed., pp. 279–80). Quoted passage at Clavis physicae, ed.
Lucentini, chap. 75, p. 52.
99. Honorius, Clavis physicae, ed. Lucentini, chap. 307, p. 260.
100. See, for example, ibid., chaps. 80, 212, and 273–74, pp. 57, 168, and 221–23;
and chap. 354 (which is Erigena, Periphyseon, cols. 898D–900A).
 148 the twelfth century

a transcending of difference, the pastiche of Western texts in the Elu-

cidarium stresses resurrection of the body as maintenance of rank.
In the Elucidarium, Honorius shares the uneasiness with natural
process—especially digestion—found in other early twelfth-century
texts and borrowed, in part, from Augustine’s Literal Commentary on
Genesis. Humankind needed the tree of life in paradise, he says, as a
defense against aging, eating, and pain.101 Violent, fragmenting death—
especially being eaten by animals—is the paradigm of destruction;
indeed death (mors) is named from bite (morsus), and sin is “burial” in
the body.102 The evil are analogized to the effluvia and excrement of the
body; heretics are snot, says Honorius; and the wicked, who “burden
the stomach [ventrem] of mother church” and are devoured by demons
through “the wasting of death” [per mortis egestionem], are “shit for
the stomach of pigs.”103
Yet eating is the sign of humanness.104 Christ ate after the resur-
rection as an indication to his disciples that he really rose in body.105
101. Honorius, L’Elucidarium et les lucidaires, ed. Lefevre, bk. 1, qq. 69, 76, 78,
pp. 373–75.
102. L’Elucidarium, ed. Lefevre, bk. 2, q. 96, p. 440; and bk, 3, q. 39, p. 455. Note
that Caesarius of Heisterbach, writing in the early thirteenth century, gives the same
etymology: mors named from morsus and also from amaritudo. See Caesarius of
Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. Joseph Strange (Cologne: Heberle, 1851), dis-
tinctio 11, chap. 1, vol. 2, p. 266; and Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts
of Near-Death Experiences in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford, 1987),
p. 49. This etymology, or at least the reasoning and assumptions it represents, seems
to lie behind the image of death in the De disciplina claustrali, written by the Bene-
dictine abbot Peter of Celle (d. 1183). We also seem to hear echoes of the iconography
of the harrowing of hell, in which Christ shoves the cross into death’s gullet and
forces it to vomit up souls; see below, chapter 4, nn. 118, 121, and 139. Peter writes:
Depict death before your eyes. . . . What tasks each of its members will fulfill
in each of a person’s members. Whatever strength and vigor there is in the
souls and bodies of the damned, they will devour and feed on, as though they
were tender sprouts. Thus the psalm declares: “Death will feed on them” [Ps.
49.14]. That the Lord may take us out of the belly of this whale, let us pres-
ent ourselves . . . in confession. . . . The divinity which lay hidden in Jesus’
flesh shattered the molars in death’s mouth, when it rashly bit at the flesh of
the Word. (Peter of Celle, Tractatus de disciplina claustrali chap. 23, PL 202
[Paris, 1855], cols. 1132–33; trans. Hugh Feiss, Peter of Celle: Selected Works
[Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1987], pp. 112–113.)
Peter speaks further of the “jaws” of death in the same chapter; see col. 1134.
103. L’Elucidarium, ed. Lefevre, bk. 1, q. 179, p. 394. Footnotes 1–4, p. 394, indi-
cate that the text of this quaestio is confused; I take the reading of MS B here,
because Flint has argued for the B family of manuscripts as the best. See Flint, “The
Original Text of the Elucidarium . . .,” in Ideas in the West, chap. 8, pp. 91–94.
104. See L’Elucidarium, ed. Lefevre, bk. 2, q. 78, p. 435: “Fames est una de poenis
peccati. . . . Indidit ergo ei Deus famem, ut hac necessitate coactus laboraret et ad
aeterna hac occasione redire queat.”
105. L’Elucidarium, bk. 1, q, 174, p. 392.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 149

What we eat in the Eucharist is so truly the flesh born of Mary that we
might indeed see it bleed and be then “horrified to touch it with our
lips.”106 “Just as food being eaten is turned into flesh, so whoever of the
faithful eats is turned into the body of Christ by consuming this food
[per comestionem hujus cibi in corpus Christi convertitur].”107 Resur-
rection is therefore triumph over the food chain: “even if devoured by
beasts or fishes or birds, member by member, all are reformed by resur-
rection in such a way that not a hair perishes.”108 It provides “gather-
ing” “in the womb of the church” for those pieces cast to the winds or
eaten by monsters.109 It unites us to Christ’s body, which is integer in
heaven, however much we masticate it here on earth.110 It restores us

106. Ibid., bk. 1, qq. 180–82, especially q. 181, pp. 394–95; and see pp. 135–36. The
idea is found in Paschasius Radbertus.
107. Ibid., bk. 1, q. 182, p. 395; and see p. 262 for the Dominican inquisitor Nicolas
Eymeric’s accusation (at the end of the fourteenth century) that this idea is heretical.
108. L’Elucidarium, ed. Lefevre, bk. 3, q. 45, p. 456.
109. Ibid., bk. 2, q. 103, pp. 441–42: “D. Obest justis aliquid si in cimiterio eccle-
siae non sepeliantur? M. Nihil prorsus. Totus namque mundus est templum Dei,
quod dedicatum est sanguine Christi et sive in campo seu in silva vel in palude vel
quovis loco sepeliantur vel projiciantur aut a bestis vel a belluis devorentur, semper
in gremio Ecclesiae confoventur, quae per latitudinem terrae diffunditur.”
110. Ibid., bk. 1, q. 183, p. 395; and see p. 136.
Guibert of Nogent makes a parallel argument. Because Christ is a literal synecdo-
che (says Guibert), we receive the whole Christ in each eating, but he loses no part.
In his De pignoribus Guibert points out that if I destroy a fingernail, I claim that I,
not merely a part of me, am hurt. We call friends or relatives “ourselves.” How much
more is all of Christ included in the me of Qui manducat me (John 6.58)? Those
who eat the Eucharist eat the totus Christus; they eat not a part of Christ but the
universitas of the substance (bk. 2, chap. 2, PL 156, cols. 632–34).
Quod si particulas illas ilium esse negas, partem pro toto, et totum pro parte
poni posse forsitan ignoras, synecdochice nempe non solum loqui Scripturas,
sed ipsos quosque illitteratos et vulgares hac figura sermonum uti, nulli non
perspicuum. . . . Qui manducat me vivit propter me. . . . Est enim dicere: Qui
exterius meum, carnem videlicet et sanguinem, manducat, vivit ex eo ipso
quod interiorem hominem illuminando vivificat. Cum ergo fieri non possit ad
litteram, ut totus ab aliquo manducetur, nisi pars pro toto accipiatur, secun-
dum interiorem sensum indifficulter id agitur, praesertim cum fides corporis
ita habeatur ut quod minutatim porrigitur, totum in suis minutiis teneatur.
(Ibid., col. 632a–c)
Guibert was concerned to avoid a eucharistic theory that equates the sacrifice of
the mass with the crucifixion. Hence he emphasized that the body on the altar was
the body of the Resurrection; Christians should not be reminded of the dividing of
Christ’s body (see De pignoribus, bk. 2, chap. 6, col. 648; also bk. 3, chap. 2, obj. 6,
col. 654). The concern may stem partly from Guibert’s horrified fascination with
details of bodily torture (ibid., bk. 4, chap. 1, cols. 668–69).
Such arguments seem to echo those put forth as early as the second century
(by Ignatius, Irenaeus, and Tertullian) that eating Christ is an inverse cannibalism:
consuming the body that cannot be consumed will make our own preeminently
consumable bodies indigestible to hell and assumable to heaven.
 150 the twelfth century

as the potter restores his vase de eadem materia and places us in a para-
dise where stasis conquers change so completely that water becomes
crystal and the flowers that rise from the earth never wither again.111
Just as was true in late antiquity, materialistic images of resurrection
tend to accompany a stress on social or religious difference. A large part
of book II of the Elucidarium is a description of the variety of statuses
in society and a scathing indictment of their occupants—topics not
treated at all in the Clavis physicae. The idea of the church as Christ’s
body is elaborated in such a way as to underline a hierarchy both of
roles (teachers are bones; biblical commentators are teeth; peasants are
feet) and of moral statuses (the obedient are ears; the discrete are the
nose; heretics are snot).112 Moreover, the heaven of the Elucidarium
contains “a multitude of beautiful men and women,” organized in the
ranks of earth: “patriarchs, prophets, confessors, monks, virgins, and
saints.” They will appear with their “eyes and faces” and “all their inte-
rior and exterior members.”113 Luke 20.36 (“they will be . . . equal unto
the angels”) is quoted only to emphasize that there will be differences
in glory.114 We cannot become Peter; we can only become “like Peter.”
“For what one does not have in himself he will have in another,” but
it has not been promised that a foot can “become an eye, or a hand an
ear, or a man a woman.”115 We will have full joy in heaven only when
both our bodies and our friends arrive.116
There is no way to reconcile the divergent eschatological views
found in Honorius’s works nor, in the absence of any clear biographical
111. L’Elucidarium, bk. 3, qq. 46, 49, 78 and 106, pp. 456, 457, 462, and 467–70.
Honorius’s description of the flowers and crystals of heaven parallels his descriptions
of the bodies of the saints. In book 3 (q. 81, p. 464) Honorius says the different colors
(signifying different virtues) in which the saints will rise will serve as their clothing;
in q. 106, p. 469 (much of which is borrowed from Eadmer, De beatitudine caelestis
patriae, PL 159, cols. 592–93), he speaks of the saints as clothed. See below, n. 113.
112. L’Elucidarium, pp. 405–42, and see n. 101 above.
113. Ibid., bk. 3, q. 106, pp. 467–70:
Hic est voluptas multitudinem virorum ac mulierum speciosarum videre,
vestes pretiosas, . . . dulcem cantum . . . audire, thymiama et alias diversi
pigmenti species odorare. . . . [Q]ui regem gloriae in decore suo cernent, omnes
angelos et omnes sanctos interius et exterius conspicient, gloriam Dei, gloriam
angelorum, gloriam patriarcharum, . . . gloriam virginum, gloriam omnium
sanctorum videbunt, suos oculos, suas facias, omnia membra sua interius et
exterius cernent, cogitationes singulorum intuebuntur. . . . Olfactio qualis. . . .
qualis gustus. . . . Voluptas tactus qualis. . . . Ecce tales sunt deliciae beatorum.
For all its oddness, the passage is a striking affirmation of the survival of indi-
vidual characteristics in the saints.
114. Ibid., q. 118, p. 473. Further along in the passage (p. 474), he refers to one
house and many mansions (John 14.2).
115. Ibid., q. 116, p. 472.
116. Ibid., q. 27, p. 451.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 151

information about him, any way of understanding his motives in sum-

marizing John Scotus. But it is worth noting that in Honorius’s work
metaphors of natural processes that are clearly positive—the burgeon-
ing of a seed into flower, the return of spring, the triumph of the phoe-
nix—are all connected with a sloughing off of what we mean, in a
commonsense way, by body or matter. Not only are they about radical
transformation; they are about transformation that moves away from
individuality. Where resurrection is change in a Pauline sense, that
which rises is spiritualized and de-particularized. In contrast, images of
processes that are negative and threatening—digestion, decay, spontane-
ous generation from cadavers—tend to describe actual, tangible bodies.
The Elucidarium refers repeatedly to fear of death, of putrefaction, of
improper burial; it warns that even proper burial cannot save the evil
from attacks by demons on their bones.117 The resurrection imagery
that accompanies these descriptions halts decay and retains difference.
Thus, whether body is to be transmuted into spirit or lifted as it is into
heaven, body is a locus of difference and of destruction. Understanding
this does not, perhaps, help us to understand Honorius, but it does sug-
gest some factors in the fate of his various works and of those of Erigena.
The history of Honorius’s works indicates that later thinkers were
very hesitant about Erigena’s conceptions of self, cosmos, and salva-
tion. Although the Elucidarium—in its Latin version and especially in
numerous vernacular translations and adaptations—was enormously
popular in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, the Clavis physicae was
rarely cited or copied, and the short treatises on the descent and ascent
of Christ are known in only a single manuscript. Bertold of Moosburg
in his commentary on Proclus cited the Clavis; Amo of Reichersberg,
writing between 1142 and 1160, used it in his Hexameron; Endres has
seen a reference to it in an interpolation in Heinrich of Melk’s work on
death.118 But it was generally neglected. And there are hints of active
disapproval as well. Gilbert of Poitiers, in a commentary on Boethius’s
work on Christ’s natures, refers to the erroneous idea that the resurrec-
tion will bring all the elect to a state beyond humanness, where they
will be godly with God; he attributes this teaching to a man “who could
have been branded a heretic if he had given his name.” Honorius made

117. Ibid., bk. 2, q. 105, p. 442.

118. Ibid., pp. 47–48 and 331–36; Clavis physicae, ed. Lucentini, pp. v–xxxii
passim; Endres, Honorius, pp. 64–67 and 123–26; Max Manitius, Geschichte der
lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, vol. 3 (Munich: Beck, 1931), p. 364; Sanford,
“Honorius, Presbyter and Scholasticus”; and Flint, Ideas in the West. Sanford argues
that Honorius puts some of the most questionable Erigenist opinions in the mouth
of the “disciple” and thus avoids pantheistic heresy in a technical sense.
 152 the twelfth century

a point of concealing his identity and origins; Endres has argued that
the man Gilbert refers to is Honorius.119
Even the Elucidarium came in for suspicion. Two twelfth-century
manuscripts contain marginal notes (in one case from the twelfth cen-
tury, in the other from the thirteenth) indicating that certain of its
ideas are questionable. It is difficult to find the reasoning behind such
comments, but their focus suggests that what was bothersome were
Erigenist traces in this very non-Erigenist work. Of the eleven passages
annotated in the twelfth century, eight have to do with the transcen-
dence of the resurrected body, Christ’s or ours; of the seven passages
marked in a thirteenth-century hand, two are specifically about Christ’s
risen body.120 By the late fourteenth century, an inquisitor found Ori-
genist overtones even in Honorius’s most materialist passages.121
Nicolas Eymeric in his Elucidarius elucidarii read Honorius’s citation
of Augustine’s metaphor of the recast vase as an argument that God
makes for us “non . . . illud sed aliud corpus” at the resurrection.122 He
also objected to Honorius’s idea that Peter will have virginity in John.
Even this concession to community seemed, to Nicolas, to violate dif-
ference. “That the glory of all will be the glory of each is false and a
heresy . . . if it means that the essential glory of all will be equal. . . .

119. See Endres, Honorius, p. 125; and see ibid., n. 1 for the text of Gilbert’s
remark. Bett, Erigena, pp. 172–73, argues that Gilbert was, however, influenced by
Erigena’s De divisione naturae.
120. L’Elucidarium, ed. Lefevre, pp. 252–58.
121. Ibid., pp. 259–67.
It is important to note that a thirteenth-century vernacular adaptation of the
Elucidarium, the Lumiere as lais of Peter of Peckham (which is actually as much an
adaptation of a commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences as of Honorius) retains
the materialist focus of the Elucidarium and understands as materialist the passages
that Eymeric later sees as heretical and spiritualist. See Ch.-V. Langlois, La Vie spiri-
tuelle: Enseignements, méditations, et controverses d’après des écrits en français à
l’usage des laïcs (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1928), pp. 66–122. For an Anglo-Norman
poem that parallels this text, see Meyer “Fragment du Dialogue entre l’évêque saint
Julien et son disciple”; and F. J. Tanquerey, “Originalité du Dialogue entre saint
Julien et son disciple.” Book 6, chapter 3, of La Lumiere as lais argues that we will
all rise at age thirty-two years and three months; see extracts in Langlois, La Vie spi-
rituelle, pp. 111–12. Book 6, chapter 4 (in ibid.) applies to the question of fingernails
and hair the example of a master recasting a bronze; it asserts that he does so from
“the same materials” but makes a “similar statue,” as God will make a “new man.”
Book 6, chapter 12 (ibid., pp. 112–13) argues that all the elect will have the common
joy of seeing God, but there will be special honors for special ranks; “each will have
good in the other, I yours and you mine.” In book 4, chapter 8 (ibid., pp. 106–7), the
author takes up the question of the Eucharist and expresses doubt about Honorius’s
literalism; he argues that Christ’s body is “our nurture,” but to say it is absorbed (i.e.,
corrupted) by our bodies is to confuse nature and supernature.
122. L’Elucidarium, ed. Lefevre, p. 266; for the text of Eymeric’s censure, see p. 517.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 153

John 14.2 says ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’ because there
is diversity of rewards.”123
Erigena’s own text had a similar fate.124 Excerpted and quoted by a
number of figures in mid-century, it was already at that time suspect;125
William of Malmesbury defended it as “very useful” but admitted that
John was rumored “to be a heretic” because he deviated from “the well-
trodden way of the Latins.”126 Pope Honorius III found it widespread
in monasteries and schools in the early thirteenth century and seems
almost certainly to have condemned it to be burned for “heretical per-
versity” in 1210. The condemnation was repeated in 1225.127
What disturbed authorities in the early 1200s was the appearance at
Paris of a group that seemed to spiritualize or allegorize a number of
Christian doctrines and to rely in part on the works of John Scotus. The
exact teachings of this group—known as the Amauricians from their
leader Amaury of Bene—are unknown.128 They had Joachite elements
123. Ibid., p. 266; for the text of Eymeric, see p. 519. Eymeric also uses 1 Corin-
thians 15.41 to refute Honorius and argue for diversity.
124. I leave aside here the issue, which is surely relevant, of the citation and
condemnation of Erigena’s eucharistie teaching; see Cappuyns, Jean Scot Érigène,
pp. 86–91 and 242, and Johannes Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena: Ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters (Munich: J. J. Lentner, 1861), p. 432ff.
125. On John’s influence in the mid 1100s, see Bett, Johannes Scotus Erigena, pp.
171ff.; Cappuyns, Jean Scot Érigène, pp. 241–56; Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena,
pp. 432–39.
126. “Composuit etiam librum . . . propter perplexitatem quarundam quaestio-
num solvendam bene utilem, si tamen ignoscatur ei in quibusdam, quibus a Lati-
norum tramite deviavit, dum in Graecos acriter oculos intendit; quare et hereticus
putatus est” (see Cappuyns, Jean Scot Érigène, p. 247 n. 4).
127. Cappuyns, Jean Scot Érigène, pp. 247–8, especially nn. 1 and 2 on p. 248;
G. C. Capelle, Autour du Décret de 1210, 3: Amaury de Bene: Étude sur son panthé-
isme formel, Bibliothèque thomiste 16 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1932), pp. 13–15 and 89 (for the
text of the condemnation); Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena, p. 438; G. Théry, Autour
de Décret de 1210, 1: David de Dinant: Etude sur son panthéisme materialiste,
Bibliothèque thomiste 6 (Le Saulchoir, Belgium: Revue des sciences philosophiques
et théologiques, 1925), p. 7; Bett, Johannes Scotus Erigena, pp. 174–84. M.-Th.
d’Alverny does not think there was a condemnation of Erigena in 1210; see “Un
fragment du procès des Amauriciens,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire
du moyen âge 25 and 26 (1950–1951): 325–36, esp. p. 335; see also H.-F. Dondaine,
“L’objet et le ‘medium’ de la vision béatifique chez les théologiens du XIIIe siècle,”
Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 19 (1952): 99.
128. The University of Paris condemned Amaury’s teaching in the early thir-
teenth century; he appealed to Innocent III, who decided against him. Amaury died
soon after, probably in 1206. Soon after his death, a group of followers appeared, who
seem to have gone beyond his teaching. The synod of Paris in 1210 excommunicated
him and removed his bones to unconsecrated soil, burned ten members of the sect,
and imprisoned the rest for life—with the exception of a few women who were not
considered responsible. See Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena, pp. 434–35; and Capelle,
Autour du Décret: Amaury, pp. 90–111. The teacher David of Dinant, who used to
 154 the twelfth century

and close similarities to later Free Spirit ideas; like the later Free Spirits,
the Amauricians were seen as libertines, allowing all sorts of license
to the body because they denied its reality.129 Charges in the cartulary
of the University of Paris and in the Contra Amaurianos, a thirteenth-
century tract written against them, assert that they taught that the
indwelling of the Holy Spirit was the resurrection.130 They were there-
fore charged with denying the resurrection of the body and with hold-
ing that what the Parisian authorities taught about resurrection was “a
fable.”131 The fullest account we have of the doctrine of the Amauri-
cians is that of Henry of Ostia in 1260;132 it may be that it confuses
Amaury and Erigena.133 But wherever the idea comes from, one element
of what Hostiensis reports as heretical is the idea that humanity will
rise with the two sexes united as they were in the first creation and
as Christ was after his resurrection.134 Thus whether or not Hostien-
sis’s account of Amaury is an accurate reporting of Amaury’s ideas, it is
clear that ecclesiastical authorities in 1210 condemned the position that
there is no resurrection of the material and particular body we possess
on earth.135 The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 required Cathars and

be thought an Erigenist as well, was probably influenced by very different ideas; see
Théry, Autour du Décret: David de Dinant.
129. Thus, although their metaphysical position (which denied reality to any-
thing except spirit) was supposedly diametrically opposed to that of the Cathars, who
saw flesh as a second, evil reality, authorities feared the same result in both groups:
a failure to discipline the flesh and to retain its particularity as part of the person.
See below, chapter 5. For other aspects of the positions of Erigena and Amaury that
worried authorities, see Dondaine, “L’objet et le ‘medium’ de la vision béatifique,”
pp. 63–75 and 98.
130. For the texts of these documents, see Capelle, Autour du Décret: Amaury,
pp. 89–93.
131. See the condemnation of the University of Paris in Capelle, Autour du
Décret: Amaury, p. 89; and Contra Amaurianos, especially chap. 7, in Capelle, op.
cit., p. 92.
132. It is repeated by Martin of Poland; see Capelle, Autour du Décret: Amaury,
p. 105.
133. Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena, p. 436; Capelle, Autour du Décret: Amaury,
pp. 27–30.
134. Huber, Johannes Scotus Erigena, p. 436.
135. Those who opposed the spiritualist position were clearly arguing that body
must be redeemed as body; it cannot become God because that—in their view—
would deny both divinity to God and bodiliness to body. They therefore saw the
diametrically opposed spiritualist and Cathar positions as having the same conse-
quence—i.e., denying bodily resurrection. Contra Amaurianos, chap. 9, charges the
Amauricians with teaching that God is all in all. The author of this tract against
them then makes the rather odd move of arguing that such a tenet implies that God
is body; therefore, since body is corruptible, God is corruptible. For the text, see
Capelle, Autour du Décret: Amaury, p. 92.
 Reassemblage and Regurgitation 155

other heretics to assent to the proposition that “all rise with their own
individual bodies, that is, the bodies which they now wear.”136 It is also
clear that by the early thirteenth century the spiritualist and Origenist
implications of Erigena’s ideas were understood—and rejected—and that
one of the most threatening elements in the Erigenist position was the
claim that with the loss of materiality and integrity there would be a
blurring of the sexes at the end of time.137
In my fifth chapter, I shall return to the question of gender and con-
sider—as I did in my discussion of Jerome—how far the rejection of
spiritualist interpretations of the resurrected body was a rejection of
the possibility of transcending difference, either in eternity or on earth.
I shall do so by treating with great care the specific language in which
polemicists drew the line between heterodox and orthodox belief. Such
treatment will impel me into a consideration of twelfth-century anxiet-
ies about biological processes, cadavers, and burial. Before I do so, how-
ever, I want to explore two other sorts of evidence of twelfth-century
concern with body and last things: spiritual writing and iconography.
Such evidence clearly manifests the twelfth-century emphasis on body
as physicality, but it also introduces the tendency that in the course of
the thirteenth century revolutionized eschatology by moving much of
what we mean by body into soul.

136. See Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declara-

tionum de rebus fidei et morum, 31st ed., ed. Karl Rahner on basis of C. Bannwart
and J. Umberg (Freiburg: Herder, 1957), pp. 200, 216. The Second Council of Lyons in
1274 reaffirmed this formulation.
137. It is also worth noting that on the matter of the equality of joy in the vision
of God (par gaudium in dispari claritate) the years around 1200 saw a shift back
toward emphasizing difference; see Wicki, Seligkeit, pp. 25off.
 Four
Psychosomatic Persons
and Reclothed Skeletons:
Images of Resurrection in
Spiritual Writing and Iconography

the complicated fate of the writings of Erigena and

of his twelfth-century disciple Honorius shows the extent
to which scholastic theologians in the later twelfth and
thirteenth centuries clung to materialist, literalist inter-
pretations of resurrection. The rejection of Erigena’s De
divisione naturae and of Honorius’s Clavis physicae was not only rejec-
tion of the idea that heaven and hell are spiritual states; it was also
rejection of the notion of redemption as almost limitless transforma-
tion of self toward spirit. In other words, it represented a fear that iden-
tity cannot survive the loss of bodily structure or of physicality, that a
sheaf of wheat sprouting in heaven might not be the same as the seed
sown on earth. Twelfth-century devotional writing and iconography
reflect, in subtle and surprising ways, the same fear.
It is true that we find images of resurrection as flowering and devel-
opment in certain spiritual works by cloistered authors. But these
images are not Origenist or Erigenist; they carry no implication that
there will be a loss of difference in heaven. Rather than eclipsing or
transcending physicality or matter, they begin to lift into soul much of
the specificity and capacity to experience that was located in body by
earlier thinkers. And the link between survival and material continuity
does not disappear. The overriding impression left by twelfth-century
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 157

eschatological discussion therefore is one of materialism and literalism.

It was Jonah vomited up whole by the whale or the bones of saints reas-
sembled at the trumpet’s blast that provided the fundamental image of
bodily resurrection.

Hildegard of Bingen: The Greening of Person

and the Body as Dust
In twelfth-century scholastic treatises, such as Peter Lombard’s Sen-
tences, Hugh’s De sacramentis, Honorius’s Elucidarium and Clavis
physicae, metaphors are scarce but significant. Never merely stylistic
flourishes, they are sometimes a basic tool of philosophical investi-
gation. When we turn to the spiritual and exegetical writing of clois-
tered authors, we find that metaphors are anything but scarce. Yet in
this highly ornate prose, images and analogies are once again not mere
embellishment. Because of their prominence in the Bible, metaphors
themselves often provide the subject of exegetical discussion, and in the
visions some cloistered authors claimed to receive, metaphors became
a living text around which theological interpretation was elaborated.
Thus for cloistered authors as for scholastic ones, a consideration of
images takes us to the heart of basic concerns.1
Monastic writing was so deeply impregnated with biblical language
and especially with the natural imagery of the Song of Songs, the psalms,
the epistles, and the gospel parables that organic analogies were very
common. Questions of grace and of sin were often spoken of in images
of fertility and decay. The soul’s growth toward God in this life, and
after, was described as flowering or germination. Hence it is all the more
1. We must remember that a number of monastic writers (such as Guibert of
Nogent, Otto of Freising, and Herrad of Hohenbourg) were deeply influenced by scho-
lastic texts or training. Indeed for many of the greatest figures of the eleventh and
early twelfth centuries, the monastic/scholastic distinction is misleading. For exam-
ple, Honorius Augustodunensis was a monk, deeply committed to defending monas-
tic privileges, including the right to teach and preach. He only occasionally writes in
the fully scholastic sic et non form. Yet, as Valerie Flint has pointed out, his motives
are close to those of the early twelfth-century teachers at Laon (see above, chapter 3,
n. 63), and I included his works in my chapter on the schoolmen. Thus, like Anselm
of Canterbury and Otto of Freising, Honorius is fully scholastic and fully monastic.
Such figures illustrate how artificial is the division between monks and schoolmen
that has entered into secondary literature through Jean Leclercq’s great study, The
Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, 3d ed., trans.
Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), Where Leclercq’s
characterization is helpful and moving is in evoking the experiential quality of devo-
tional writing and in reminding us how stridently writers of the period themselves
used the contrast of school and cloister. See also n. 75 below.
 158 the twelfth century

surprising to find in monastic authors as in scholastic ones a tendency

to refer to the human body (both living and dead) as dust and ashes, a
preference for inorganic images of the risen and glorified body, and a
basic sense of bodily resurrection not as transformation but as reunion
of scattered particles, which, once assembled, will shine with glory and
never again undergo alteration. In the spiritual writings of Benedic-
tines and of the so-called new monks, positive images of organic, natu-
ral transformation tend to be used to describe spiritual change; bodily
change is treated in images either of rot and decay or of re-collection
and reconstruction. Monastic descriptions of soul in the twelfth century
tend to physicalize it and pull it toward body.2 But monastic images for
body lift toward heaven, in the second or general resurrection, exactly
the physical locus of experience we inhabit on earth.
I begin my exploration of spiritual writing in the twelfth century
with the polymath Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179)—Benedictine abbess,
natural philosopher, theologian, dramatist, and visionary—who might
in view of her biological interests be expected to use fully developed
organic images for every aspect of human experience.3 Indeed, Hil-
degard has recently been celebrated (responsibly by the scholar Peter
Dronke, less responsibly by creationist theologians such as Matthew
Fox) for her holistic response to the cosmos and her tender concern for
the human body.4

2. This is Carozzi’s point in “Structure et fonction de la vision de Tnugdal.” In

his analysis of sermon 42 De diversis, Carozzi argues that Bernard’s discussion of the
five regions in which the elect seek God is a prolongation after death of the region
of dissimilitude (ibid., pp. 223–34). To Carozzi, the continuation of the struggles,
punishments, and growth of this life into the hereafter (purgatory or hell) is a physi-
calizing of the spiritual. But we should also note that Bernard is quite clear that
what is in question in the in-between period before the Last Judgment is the soul;
the body returns at the end of time. On the attribution of the sermon, see above,
chapter 3, n. 65.
3. Katharina M. Wilson points out that women religious writers tend to use
mechanical metaphors for their acts of writing to convey that they are instruments
or conduits for God, whereas secular women writers use organic images to suggest
growth of their creativity from within (“Introduction,” in her Medieval Women
Writers [Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984], pp. xx–xxi).
4. Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of
Texts from Perpetua(+ 203) to Marguerite Porete (+ 1310) (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), pp. 144–202; Matthew Fox, Illuminations of Hildegard of
Bingen (Santa Fe: Bear and Co., 1985). Two excellent recent books on Hildegard are
Barbara J. Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of
Bingen, 1098–1179: A Visionary Life (London: Routledge, 1989). A good overview is
provided by Barbara Newman in her “Introduction,” to Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias,
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 159

Hildegard did speak frequently of the person as a garden or field, a

tree that must be dug about and pruned in order to bear fruit.5 If putre-
fying matter that gives birth to pus and worms is her favorite metaphor
for sin,6 Hildegard also has a strong sense that soil, seeds, and plants in
fact give rise to life. To Hildegard, therefore, fertility is the other side of
putrefaction, and organic growth (for example, the flowering of plants
into blossoms and seeds, from whence come bread) can be an image
of positive transformation. In contrast to the scholastic authors I con-
sidered in chapter 3, Hildegard—as befits someone who was a medical
practitioner and gynecological theorist as well as a theologian—has a
strong sense that something organic can change and still be itself, that
alien substances can be incorporated without threatening identity.7 She
describes Christ as dry grain that grows like a stalk of wheat; his effect
on his children is to “sow” and “water” in them the “greenness” [viri-
ditas] of virtue.8
Indeed Hildegard says that humankind fails when it does not take
in and give forth; it fails, for example, when it sees and smells but
does not eat and digest obedience.9 In such metaphors, the organic and
bodily processes of germination and nutrition are used unambiguously
to describe that which is good, and the person is presented as a psycho-
somatic unity.10 Hildegard speaks of soul running through body like sap

trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York and Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press,
1990), pp. 9–53.
5. See, for example, Scivias, bk. 1, vision 2, chap. 32, in Hildegardis Scivias, ed. A.
Führkötter and A. Carlevaris, 2 pts., Corpus christianorum continuatio mediaevalis
[hereafter CCCM] 43 and 43A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978), pp. 34–37 (the person here is
also a sheep and a pearl); bk. 2, vision 1, preface and chap. 7, pp. 110–12 and 115–16;
bk. 3, vision 8, chap. 8, pp. 484–92.
6. See, for example, bk. 3, vision 8, chap. 8, p. 486–87.
7. Hildegard represents the older Benedictine tradition, in contrast to the Cister-
cians I discuss below. The so-called “old Benedictines,” however, often agree with
Cistercians in using organic imagery in positive ways. See the discussion of Peter
the Venerable, below. Like the Cistercians, these “old monks” use positive images
of growth primarily to describe spiritual progress from the region of dissimilitude to
that of similitude.
8. Scivias, ed. Führkötter, bk. 3, vision 10, chap. 7, pp. 553–55. See also vision 9,
chap. 20, pp. 532–33, where she says (speaking in the voice of one of the prophets
voicing God’s judgment) that those who seek their own wills rather than God’s will
be punished “quia me in hoc non quaesierunt. Et quid hoc eis prodest, quia in hoc
non viriditatem sed ariditatem habent, et quoniam hoc non plantaui? Sed inutilis
herba nascitur in eis absque trunco.”
9. Bk. 2, vision 1, chap. 8, p. 153.
10. See, for example, her discussion of suicide. She writes, speaking with God’s
voice: “Sed ego de terra formaui hominem ut ab inferioribus ad superiora ascenderet
 160 the twelfth century

through a tree—a metaphor which suggests that it is the nature of soul

to invigorate body (book 1, vision 4, chapter 26).11 But we must note
that Hildegard’s images of flowering and “greening” usually refer to the
spiritual progress of the whole human person, not to the body alone or
to physiological process understood literally.
Even in Hildegard, insensate or inanimate particles—earth or mud,
dust or ashes—provide one of the basic images for the human being.
Bodily fertility is seen not primarily as a natural process but as a gift
from God. Left to itself, matter remains inert or decays.12 It is God who
ensouls the fetus in the womb, God who gives life and fertility to the
mud or dust that is humankind: “Hear me, the Son of Man, saying to
you: Oh human, regard what you were when you were just a lump in
your mother’s womb! You were mindless and powerless to bring your-
self to life; but then you were given spirit and motion and sense, so that
you might . . . come to fruitful deeds.”13 Even when fertility serves as

et ut incipiendo et perficiendo bona opera sursum praeclaras uirtutes ad ardua aedi-

ficaret. Quapropter homo qui et corpus et animam habet, cum bona operari potest et
cum paenitere ualet, semetipsum non occidat. . . .” (Bk. 2, vision 5, chap. 60, p. 223).
There is no suggestion at all in the Scivias that redemption is escape from body or
that salvation could be complete without body.
For a similar view, see Peter of Celle, another Benedictine author and a con-
temporary of Hildegard. Peter stresses that we should see the person as a psycho-
somatic unity. In his De disciplina claustrali he speaks with feeling of the body as
the “brother” of the soul: “O anima sine corpore ubi est modo corpus tuum? ubi est
Abel frater tuus? Ecce vermes, ecce tinea, ecce putredo quondam in ossibus tuis. Tu
autem quid? Petisne ab Abraham ut mittat Lazarum, et intinguat extremum digiti
sui in aqua, et refrigeret linguam tuam?”(chap. 23, PL 202, col. 1133C–D) And see
above, chapter 3, n. 102.
11. Scivias, ed. Führkötter, p. 84. In writing of baptism, Hildegard says: “ . . . spirit
without the bloody material of the body is not the living person, and the bloody
material of the body without the soul is not the living person; and these two are not
strengthened unto life . . . except through the water of regeneration” (see bk. 3, vision
7, chap. 8, p. 471; trans. Hart and Bishop, Scivias, p. 417).
12. One of Hildegard’s favorite images for sin and evil is the decayed corpse; see,
for example, bk. 2, vision 6, chap. 56, ed. Führkötter, p. 275.
13. Ibid., bk. 3, vision 10, chap. 1, p. 547; trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 473. See also
bk. 2, vision 5, chap. 46, ed. Führkötter, p. 214:
Viridem agrum in potestate mea habui. Numquid, o homo, dedi tibi illum, ut
eum germinare faceres quemcumque fructum te uelles? Et si in illum semen
seminas, num potes illud in fructum producere? Non. Nam tu nec rorem das,
nec pluuiam emittis, nec umiditatem in uiriditate tribuis, nec calorem in
ardore solis educis, per quae omnia competens fructus producendus est. Ita
etiam auditum hominis uerbum seminare potes, sed in cor illius quod ager
meus est nec rorem compunctionum, nec pluuiam lacrimarum, nec umorem
deuotionum, nec calorem Spiritus sancti infundere uales, in quibus omnibus
fructus sanctitatis germinare debet.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 161

an image for spiritual growth, Hildegard often stresses that it is not

natural but infused. She writes:

“As the apple tree among the trees of the woods, so is my beloved
among the children. . . .”(Song of Songs 2.3). . . . He is the most beau-
tiful fruit of the fruitful tree; which is to say that the son of the Vir-
gin comes forth from virginal modesty as its fruit, giving refreshing
food to those who hunger and sweet drink to those who thirst. And
thus He excels all the trees of the woods, which is to say the human
children who are conceived and live in sin, not yielding the fruit He
yielded; for He came from God bearing the fruit of the sweetness of
life, while others have no fruit or fecundity [viriditatem] of their own,
but only that derived from Him.14

Although Hildegard frequently combines organic and inorganic images

for the embodied person (we are seeds and mud, gardens and pearls,
tree-wood and stones), the body by itself is the dust and ashes of Gen-
esis 2.7.15 It is a tabernacle of filth in which the globe of the soul is
trapped, a vessel buried in the earth, a lump of mire surrounded with
jewels clutched to the breast of God, an unplowed field that can be made
to bear only by Christ.16 It is threatened by incisions and breaches.17

14. Hildegard, Scivias, ed. Führkötter, bk. 3, vision 8, chap. 16, pp. 501–2; trans.
Hart and Bishop, pp. 439–40.
15. See, for example, Scivias, ed. Führkötter, bk. 3, vision 7, chap. 8, p. 472.
16. Contrast, for example, ibid., bk. 1, vision 2, chap. 32, pp. 34–37, where the
whole human being is seen as a garden (which must be cultivated by Christ), a lost
sheep, and a pearl that has slipped into the mud (thus both kinds of images are used)
with bk. 1, vision 4, pp. 61–92, where the soul is a globe that falls into the body
(which is seen as mud or a building). Even in vision 4, however, the impact of soul
on body is seen as creating a fertile and developing whole; body is like the wood
of the tree to which soul is sap (ibid., chap. 26, p. 84). In bk. 2, visions 1 and 2, pp.
110–32, the human being is repeatedly spoken of as a clod of mud, warmed to life by
God; by the time we reach vision 2, chap. 4, p. 127, the human being formed from
mud is a pearl. In bk. 3, vision 1, we are “ut cinis cinereae putredinis et sicut puluis
instabilitatis,” “limum nigrum et lutulentum . . . circumdatum lapidibus pretiosis
atque margaritis” (pp. 329 and 331–32). In vision 10, chaps. 6–7, pp. 551–55, we are
fields, dust, and ashes that must be plowed and sowed by God.
17. For Hildegard’s distress at the idea of bodily breaches (which can nonetheless
be made fertile by God), see her complex discussion of sexual intercourse and men-
struation in bk. 1, vision 2, chaps. 20–21, pp. 27–28. See also the image of the pierced
body of the church in bk. 2, vision 3, chaps. 4–6, pp. 138–39, and the discussion of
suicide in bk. 2, vision 5, chaps. 59–60, pp. 222–24 (“so one who throws himself
into bodily death, not waiting for the separation I appoint for everyone but dividing
himself without hope of mercy, will fall into perdition. . . . For one who separates
from a person what I have placed in the person incurs great guilt.” [trans. Hart and
Bishop, pp. 233–34]).
 162 the twelfth century

Without the irradiating of God’s grace, it tends toward rot and fragmen-
tation.18 The same body is stabilized and hardened in glory; in heaven,
it is gold or a pearl or a finely cut gem.19
Thus, despite her strong sense of process and fertility, Hildegard does
not apply such imagery to the resurrection of the body.20 Indeed she
scarcely speaks of last things at all. She does mention in passing the
problems concerning bodily reassemblage so dear to Peter Lombard and
other scholastics; she asserts that people rise in two sexes, without
deformities or mutilation or deficiencies of matter (even if they have
been victims of cannibalism);21 she speaks of glorified bodies as “light,”
appropriate containers for the “fiery” souls of heaven.22 But Hildegard
actually says very little about the end of time and almost nothing about
paradise. It is as if her language of growth and process has no way to
describe heaven, which she simply calls glorious and changeless.23
Nonetheless what little she does say of last things agrees exactly
with Peter Lombard’s scenario.24 The earth will shake and human bones
will come together from wherever they lie to be covered with flesh. The
bodies that will rise are precisely the bodies we have in this life.

And behold, all the human bones in whatever place in the earth they
lay were brought together in one moment and covered with their
flesh; and they all rose up with limbs and bodies intact, each in his
or her gender, with the good glowing brightly and the bad manifest
in blackness. . . .
And suddenly from the East a great brilliance shone forth; and
there, in a cloud, I saw the Son of Man.25

18. See, for example, Scivias, ed. Führkötter, bk. 2, vision 6, chap. 43, pp. 268–69.
19. See bk. 3, vision 8, chap. 8, pp. 489–90, where the good are seen as flowers,
gems, and pruned trees, but the greatest emphasis is on the image of finely cut stones
and that is the image that is explicitly related to the heavenly Jerusalem.
20. An exception is bk. 2, vision 5, chap. 31, pp. 201–2.
21. Bk. 3, vision 12, especially preface and chaps. 3, 7–8, 13–16, pp. 604–13.
22. Ibid., pp. 605, 609–10, and 612. And see bk. 2, vision 6, chap. 52, p. 273,
where Hildegard says that those who take the Eucharist will appear in heaven post
resurrectionem in the “same bodies” they have on earth (in eodem corpore suo) only
brighter, just as their souls also are “enkindled by the fiery gift of the Holy Spirit”
(atque in anima sua igneo dono Spiritus sancti transfunduntur).
23. See above, nn. 21 and 22.
24. See bk. 3, visions 12–13, pp. 604–36. Book 3, vision 12, calls the saints “flow-
ers” (p. 610), but stresses jewels and fire; in vision 13, where the whole of the blessed
person is described, both flowers and jewels figure prominently in the imagery. Hil-
degard sees the person as an impartible whole; thus I would in no way suggest that
soul is flower and body jewel. Nonetheless, it seems important that her specific
references to body are to jewels.
25. Bk. 3, vision 12, p. 605, and see plate 33; trans. Hart and Bishop, p. 515.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 163

The miniature that accompanies this vision suggests, even more

graphically than Hildegard’s words, that scattered pieces of human
beings come together when the trumpet sounds (see plate 4). Below the
shining blessed (on Christ’s right hand) are the bones from which they
rise. Although the text describes a whirlwind that wafts to the throne
of God the “blessed who are signed,” the miniature shows detached
heads of both saved and damned (light and dark) curling in the blasts
of the four winds. The words seem to refer to whole figures, but the
artist has painted body parts rolled together in preparation for rising.
The resurrection depicted here is reassemblage and glorification, not
transformation.

And when the judgment was ended, the lightnings and thunders and
winds and tempests ceased, and the fleeting components of the ele-
ments vanished all at once, and there came an exceedingly great calm.
And then the elect became more splendid than the splendor of the
sun. . . . And all the elements shone calm and resplendent, as if a
black skin had been taken from them; so that fire no longer had its
raging heat, or air density, or water turbulence, or earth shakiness.
And the sun, moon and stars sparkled in the firmament like great
ornaments, remaining fixed and not moving in orbit, so that they no
longer distinguished day from night. And so there was no night, but
day. And it was finished.26

Hildegard’s confidence in organic change, in the beauty of the natural

world and of the human body, is at the service of her understanding of
spiritual change; her glorious images of growth and process describe the
soul, or the person as psychosomatic unity. But the body tends toward
decay and partition. Thus in resurrection, it must become subtle, crys-
talline, perfect, and impassible; its triumph is the attainment of whole-
ness and stability in that final moment that is “finished” and still.

Cistercian Writing: Images of First and Second Resurrection

When we turn to Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and other Cistercians,
such as William of St. Thierry (d. 1148) and Guerric of Igny (d. 1157), we
expect to find—even more than in Hildegard—metaphors of flowering
and fertility. The Cistercians were, after all, “new monks”—reformers
who retreated both to the literal wilderness of poverty and hardship
26. Scivias, ed. Führkötter, bk. 3, vision 12, p. 606; trans. Hart and Bishop, pp. 515–16.
And see plates 33 and 34 in Führkötter ed.
 164 the twelfth century

and to the figurative wasteland of spiritual solitude. Not only their con-
temporaries but historians of our own day as well have marveled at
the skill with which they made both deserts flower. Widely admired
by recent scholars for their sensual prose, they have long been studied
and enjoyed for their ideas about contemplation, interior journey, and
spiritual self-awareness.27 Thus we are not surprised to find in twelfth-
century Cistercian writers extremely complex organic imagery. Deci-
phering what such imagery tells us about Cistercian concepts of the
body and of resurrection is not, however, easy. Two general observa-
tions are necessary to establish the context.
First, as John Sommerfeldt has recently argued, the body is absolutely
crucial in Bernard’s anthropology.28 Souls cannot receive the beatific
vision until they regain their bodies at the end of time.29 “For it is not
fitting that complete beatitude [integram beatitudinem] be bestowed
before the human being to whom it will be given is whole [integer]—any
more than it is fitting that perfection be given to an imperfect Church
[Ecclesiasm imperfectam].”30 Although Bernard occasionally asks in
puzzlement why souls desire the body—“miserable flesh,” “foul and
fetid flesh”31—he answers that souls must crave body not for its merits
27. For the association of Cistercians with affective spirituality (now a com-
monplace in scholarly literature), see R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle
Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 219–57; Leclercq, The Love of
Learning; and Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200, (1972; pbk.
reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1973). For an example of the new scholarship
on Cistercians, which emphasizes the same aspects (although from a very different
point of view), see Ann Astell, “The Mark of Gender in Saint Bernard’s De diligendo
Deo,” Romance Languages Annual (forthcoming). On William of St. Thierry, who
became a Cistercian only late in life, see below, n. 37.
28. John R. Sommerfeldt, “The Body in Bernard’s Anthropology” (Unpublished
paper). Sommerfeldt’s paper is on Bernard, but his observations apply even more
convincingly to other early Cistercians.
29. See Sommerfeldt, “Body in Bernard.” For a different interpretation of Bernard’s
position, see Marc Dykmans, Les sermons de Jean XXII sur la vision béatifique
(Rome: Università Gregoriana Editrice, 1973), pp. 40–43. The matter is a complex
one, and Sommerfeldt may go a bit too far in making the body crucial. It is impor-
tant to note that Bernard does hold that the souls of the saints are admitted to rest
as soon as they leave their bodies. What they await (in waiting for their bodies) is
“full glory,” not admission to any sort of blessedness. The central texts are Bernard,
Sermons for All Saints, especially sermons 3 and 4, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, vol. 5
(1968), pp. 349–60; and De diligendo Deo (see n. 34 below). See also chapter 8, n. 43
below. For a similar position to Bernard’s, see Achard of St. Victor, sermon 12, paragr.
8, in Sermons inédits, ed. Jean Chatillon (Paris, J. Vrin, 1970), p. 129.
30. Bernard, Third Sermon for All Saints, paragr. 1; Opera, vol. 5, p. 350.
31. Ibid., paragr. 2: “Sed unde hoc tibi, o misera caro, o foeda, o foetida, unde tibi
hoc? Animae sanctae, quas propria Deus insignivit imagine, quas redemit proprio san-
guine, te desiderant, te exspectant, et ipsarum sine te compleri laetitia, perfici gloria,
consummari beatitudo non potest.” See also “On Conversion,” chap. 6, paragr. 11,
and chap. 8, paragr. 15, in Opera, vol. 4 (1966), pp. 84–85 and 89: “Insanus siquidem
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 165

but because without it they are not complete persons.32 The desire of
soul for body is a contortion, a twisting; it is the “wrinkle” of Ephesians
5.27.33 Without body, souls can be a “glorious church, without spot”
of sin, but they cannot be completely happy, for they are not free from
the “wrinkle of distraction” until they are embodied again at the end
of time. Bernard here draws on the same passage from Augustine that
led Peter Lombard to assert that bodily resurrection brings something
without which a self cannot be happy; as for Peter, this happiness is the
removal of longing or discontent. But to Bernard the return of body is
more than the end of disquiet; it is also an increase of joy.

Do not be surprised if the glorified body seems to give the spirit some-
thing, for it was a real help when man was sick and mortal. How true
that text is which says that all things turn to the good of those who
love God (Rom. 8.28). The sick, dead and resurrected body is a help to
the soul who loves God; the first for the fruits of penance, the second
for repose, and the third for consummation. Truly the soul does not
want to be perfected, without that from whose good services it feels
it has benefited . . . in every way. . . . Listen to the bridegroom in the
Canticle inviting us to this triple progress: ‘Eat, friends, and drink;
be inebriated, dearest ones.’ He calls to those working in the body to
eat; he invites those who have set aside their bodies to drink; and he
impels those who have resumed their bodies to inebriate themselves,
calling them his dearest ones, as if they were filled with charity. . . .
It is right to call them dearest who are drunk with love.34

Bernard does not quite say it, but there is the suggestion here that body
adds greater capacity for ecstasy to the soul.35 Although he stresses that

labor pascere sterilem quae non parit . . ., omittere curam cordis et curam carnis agere
in desiderio, impinguare et fovere cadaver putridum, quando paulo post vermium esca
futurum nullatenus dubitatur” (p. 89). And see Bernard of Clairvaux, Selected Works,
trans. G. Evans (New York and Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 75 and 78.
32. See Bernard, “On Conversion,” chap. 12, paragr. 24, Opera, vol. 4, p. 97,
where—in a dialogue between will and the members of the body—Bernard has the
body say: “I am your body; your own self. [Tuum est corpus, tuus ego ipse.] There is
nothing to fear or to dread.” See Evans trans., Selected Works, p. 84. See also sermon
10 on Psalm 90, paragr. 3, Opera, vol. 4, p. 445.
33. Third Sermon for All Saints, Opera, vol. 5, pp. 349–53.
34. Bernard, De diligendo Deo, section 11, paragrs. 30–33, in Opera, vol. 3 (1963),
pp. 144–47; trans. Robert Walton, The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 5: Trea-
tises, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Cistercian Publications, 1974), pp. 122–24. See also
Bernard’s Sermons for All Saints cited in n. 29 above and sermon 8 on Psalm 90 in
Opera, vol. 4, pp. 426–35.
35. Bernard never does quite say that body adds to the capacity to experience in
heaven although Sommerfeldt may be right to suggest that this idea is implicit in
 166 the twelfth century

visio Dei brings peace and “tranquillity” to those who love God—a
tranquillity indeed that spills over from soul into body in the anesthe-
sia of glory—he also speaks of “intoxication” in the resurrection.

Do we not think that the holy martyrs received . . . grace while they
were still in their victorious bodies—at least in part? They were so
moved within by the great force of their love that they were able to
expose their bodies to outward torments and think nothing of them.
The sensation of outward pain could do no more than whisper across
the surface of their tranquillity. . . .
It is not in dispute that they want their bodies back. . . . Until death
is swallowed up in victory (1 Cor. 15.54) . . . so that heavenly glory
gleams even in bodies, these souls cannot wholly remove themselves
and transport themselves to God. . . . [They are still too much bound
to their bodies]. . . . They do not wish to be complete without them.
[But] . . . when our bodies are resurrected, we are intoxicated by
immortal life, abounding in wonderful plenty.36

Nor is Bernard the only Cistercian writer with a profound sense of

the person as psychosomatic unity and of the earthly body as a means
to glory and ecstasy. William of St. Thierry,37 who displayed an interest
in physiology parallel to Hildegard’s and who was deeply influenced by
Gregory of Nyssa (read in Erigena’s translation), also saw the body as an
expression of, and an enhancer of, the soul. William, it is true, spoke in
conventional language of soul regaining body in order that the partner
who shares the labor of a life may share equally in its rewards. He repeat-
edly described the earthly body as a “living statue” forged by God.38

his anthropology. He certainly does emphasize the tight union of soul and body as a
source of spiritual advance in this life. And he does argue explicitly that the glorified
body adds peace, freedom, and beauty in heaven: “So, to the thought of judgment is
added that of the kingdom, in which kingdom we think on what we shall be: first
on the state of the body when it will be immortal and impassible, then on its glory
when it will be of ineffable beauty and splendor, as it is written: The just will be as
resplendent as the sun’ [Matt. 13.43].” See Parabola 6: De Aethiopissa, in Opera, vol.
6, pt. 2, pp. 291–92; and see Sommerfeldt at n. 94.
36. Bernard, “On Loving God,” chap. 10, paragr. 29 through chap. 11, paragr. 33,
in Opera, vol. 3, pp. 143–47, and in Selected Works, trans. Evans, p. 197–99.
37. William of St. Thierry (d. 1148) was a black Benedictine and abbot of his house
from 1119; he became a Cistercian only in 1135, toward the end of his life. His two
philosophical works, On the Nature and Dignity of Love and On the Nature of Body
and Soul, were written early in his career—long before he became a Cistercian but
after he had met and been influenced by Bernard of Clairvaux.
38. William of St. Thierry, On the Nature of Body and Soul, bk. 2, PL 180, cols.
707–26, esp. cols. 710 and 717; trans. by J.-M. Déchanet in Oeuvres choisies de
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 167

But occasionally William’s statue not only lives; it also grows toward
perfection as an expression of the morally developing soul. William’s
suggestion that the body would have grown perfect in paradise had not
sin intervened is close to Augustine’s idea of acquiring the non posse
mori through eating from the tree of life; it is not a notion either that
general resurrection is flowering or that the voyage of the separated
soul is manifested in body. But there is at least a hint that soul needs
body—throbbing, sensing, experiencing, growing body—as a revelation
and expression of itself.39
A second point must be made as a context for understanding Cis-
tercian resurrection imagery. Following Revelation 20.6, Cistercian
authors, like many patristic writers, spoke of two resurrections, one of
the soul and one of the body. Thus, as M.-N. Bouchard has emphasized,
resurrection was often, to Cistercian authors, a process of cleansing
in which asceticism played a role; life was seen as a long struggle of
the soul to die to sin or to rise up from it—a process made possible by
Christ’s death and resurrection.40 As Bernard put it: the soul is nobler
than the body; it was the first to fall and is the first to rise. We should
therefore devote ourselves to souls, which Christ came first to heal, and
postpone all concern for our bodies until Christ comes again to reform
them.41 The monk Herman of Reun, who delivered a series of sermons
based on Bernard between 1170 and 1180, summarized the Cistercian
conception of first and second resurrections in a way that makes their
different natures and temporal dimensions clear.42 First resurrection is
of soul and is now; second resurrection is of body and is future.

Hearts and bodies rejoice together because, Christ rising, our inner
man is freed from the death of sin and our exterior man is confirmed
in the hope of his resurrection, of which he gives us an example. . . .
Both are right to rejoice, because each co-resurrects with Christ, the
inner [man] in fact and the outer [man] in hope. And we say that the

Guillaume de Saint-Thierry (Paris: Aubier, 1943), pp. 100–1 and 120–21. There is
an English translation by Bernard McGinn in Three Treatises on Man: A Cistercian
Anthropology (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1977), pp. 101–52.
39. On the Nature of Body and Soul, bk. 2, cols. 710–12; trans. Déchanet, pp.
100–7.
40. Marie-Noël Bouchard, “La résurrection dans la spiritualité des premiers
auteurs cisterciens,” Collectanea cisterciensia 37 (1975): 114–29.
41. Bernard, Sixth Sermon for Advent, in Opera, vol. 4, pp. 191–95.
42. On Herman, see Edmund Mikkers, “Hermann de Reun,” Dictionnaire de
spiritualité, vol. 7, pt. 1 (1969), col. 278.
 168 the twelfth century

interior man rises in fact because sin, which is the death of the soul,
is remitted . . . and the exterior man rises in hope because, by the
example of the Lord’s resurrection, we are given an indubitable certi-
fication of the re-formation of the new man from the dust of the earth
[ex terrae pulvere]; and this showing in the present makes confident
our expectation of the future.43

From two deaths we say there are two resurrections: . . . the resurrection
of souls in the church through the word of God, when the revivified rise
up from the death of iniquity through grace, . . . and the [resurrection] of
the body at the end of time. . . . For now [we] rise in mente through the
word of the son of God and then [we] will rise in carne through the word
made flesh. And the bodies of the saints will rise to glory without any
defect or deformity. . . . [A]ll infirmity . . . and corruption and poverty
and want and all unsuitable things . . . will be far from them, who will
be equal to the angels of God in the resurrection.44

Although Cistercians such as Bernard, Guerric, and Herman of

Reun often mentioned both resurrections in their Easter preaching, ser-
mons on Christ’s resurrection usually concentrated on first resurrec-
tion—that of the soul. To discover Cistercian attitudes toward bodily
or second resurrection, we need to turn to sermons where actual holy
bodies are discussed—such as those for All Saints or for the dedication
of churches—or to sermons on the Ascension, which was sometimes
seen as an analogue to the second resurrection. We also sometimes find
extended treatment in contexts where we would not expect it—con-
texts where the image itself conjures up the body—as, for example, in
Bernard’s sermons on Psalm 90 where references to “tabernacle” and
to “seeing the reward of the wicked” become occasions for an extended
examination of the resurrection of the body.45
Like writers of the older Benedictine tradition, Cistercians do occa-
sionally use language of flowering or growth for bodily resurrection.
Gilbert of Hoyland, speaking of St. Lawrence on the griddle, makes the
43. Herman de Runa [Reun], Sermones festivales, ed. Edmund Mikkers et al.,
CCCM 64 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), sermon 24, p. 97.
44. Herman, sermon 25, Sermones, ed. Mikkers, pp. 102–3. And see Bernard (?),
sermon 116, De diversis, PL 183 (Paris, 1854), col. 741.
45. Bernard, Eighth Sermon on Psalm 90, Opera, vol. 4, pp. 426–35. For another
example, see Guerric of Igny, Sermon 54 for Devotion at Psalmody (below, at n. 47),
which contains a long discussion of resurrection that is not referred to in any of the
indices to his works. Because of the odd places where general resurrection tends to be
discussed, sermon titles, rubrics, and even indices are not a good guide to discussions
of eschatology in twelfth-century sermons.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 169

griddle into a garden and says Lawrence’s flesh will flower again when
it becomes like Christ’s body.46 In a discussion of the psalms, Guerric
of Igny elaborates a contrast between tombs and gardens, drawing on
Song of Songs 8.13:

[Tombs] are full of every filth and of dead men’s bones, [gardens] are
full of flowers or fruits in all their sweetness and grace. What if tombs
are sometimes seen in gardens? For the Lord was buried in a garden.
If there are tombs in a garden surely there are not gardens in tombs.
Yet perhaps there are, but in the tombs of the just. There indeed a cer-
tain most agreeable pleasantness which belongs to gardens will flour-
ish as in spring, the springtime, that is, of their resurrection when
their flesh will blossom again. Not only the bones of the just man will
sprout like grass but also the whole of the just man will spring up like
a lily and bloom forever before the Lord. Not so the godless, not so.
They are buried with the burial of an ass . . . subject to corruption.47

Thomas the Cistercian, who uses much imagery of germination in

his commentary on the Song of Songs, speaks of Christ’s flesh as a grain
of wheat sown in the Virgin’s belly and emphasizes that Mary’s own
body, one with Christ’s body, will flower in resurrection.48 Herman of
Reun draws an analogy between Christ’s flesh and Aaron’s rod, saying:
“the body of the Lord, truly our priest, placed in the aridness of death
burst forth into the flower of resurrection.”49 Bernard sometimes speaks

46. See Bouchard, “La résurrection, “ p. 125.

47. Guerric of Igny, Sermo ad excitandum devotionem in psalmodia, in Guerric,
Sermons, ed. John Morson and Hilary Costello, trans. Placide Deseille, Sc 166 and 202
(Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970 and 1973), vol. 2, pp. 516–18; Guerric of Igny: Liturgical
Sermons, trans. Monks of Mount St. Bernard Abbey (Shannon, Ireland: Irish Univer-
sity Press, and Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1971), sermon 54, vol. 2, pp.
213–14.
48. Thomas the Cistercian, In cantica canticorum eruditissimi commentarii, PL
206 (Paris, 1855), cols. 698 and 369–72 respectively. For similar language, see Alan of
Lille (d. 1202), who became a Cistercian at the end of his life: Compendiosa in cantica
canticorum ad laudem Deiparae Virginis Mariae Elucidatio, PL 210 (Paris, 1855), cols.
64 and 69. And see the Augustinian canon William of Newburgh (d. ca. 1199), who
speaks of Christ’s body ripening in the grave, which he glosses as the flowery bed (lectu-
lus floridus) of Song of Songs 1.15; John C. Gorman, ed., William of Newburgh’s Expla-
natio sacri Epithalamii in Matrem Sponsi: A Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles
(12th-C.) (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1960), pp. 109–10. On Thomas the
Cistercian, Alan of Lille, William of Newburgh, and the Marian interpretation of the
Song of Songs generally, see Rachel Fulton, “The Virgin Mary and the Song of Songs in
the High Middle Ages” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, in progress).
49. Herman, Sermones, ed. Mikkers, sermon 25, p. 102. We should note here,
however, that only Christ’s body flowers; what is emphasized for our bodies is their
rotting in the tomb.
 170 the twelfth century

of flesh as a “fertile” “dungheap,” urges the spirit to “sow and reap” in

the flesh, or suggests that the body in this life, when disciplined, may
renew and multiply like a seed rather than rotting in a granary.50
Such images are, however, rare. References to general resurrection,
and to the resurrections of Christ and the Virgin, tend in Cistercian
writing to stress triumph over change and fragmentation more than
the germination of glory. Thomas the Cistercian, indeed, sees Mary as
a garden, but one closed to rot as well as to sin.51 The Virgin’s triumph
is that, flesh of Christ’s flesh and bone of his bone, she shares in his
resurrection, safe and immune from the law of corruption.52 Since the
threat was decay, images of flowering, when they occurred, expressed
the victory of changelessness in heaven, attained by the identical body
possessed on earth.
Moreover, the most elaborate images of flowering and fertility in
connection with resurrection described the first resurrection—that of
the soul. A close reading of Guerric’s discussion of tombs and gardens,
for example, makes it clear that—although he has second resurrection
partly in mind—he is really discussing spiritual death and rebirth. The
tombs he speaks of are the “bodies of sinners” in which their evil souls
are “buried.”53 When he draws out at considerable length the idea,
which goes back to Plato, that man is an inverted tree with the roots
of his nervous system in his head, Guerric uses it to describe spiritual
resurrection. “Even when his roots in the earth have grown old and
his trunk has turned to dust, at the fragrance of the living water in the

50. Bernard, Sermon 10 on Psalm 90, paragr. 3, Opera, vol. 4, p. 445: “Quomodo
dicunt nobis carnales homines: ‘Crudelis est vita vestra; non parcitis carni vestrae?’—
‘Esto, non parcimus semini. In quo ei magis parcere poteramus? Annon melius est
illi renovari et multiplicari in agro, quam in horreo putrefieri? . . . Siquidem etiam
nunc caro nostra requiescit in spe . . .” And see Sermon 5 for the Ascension, paragr.
13, Opera, vol. 5, p. 157.
51. Thomas the Cistercian, In cantica canticorum, PL 206, col. 457. William of
Newburgh also stresses resurrection as victory over decay: because the worm does
not consume him, Christ’s death is not in vain; Gorman, ed., William of Newburgh’s
Explanatio, pp. 109–10. See also ibid., pp. 130–31 and 133–34.
52. As Rachel Fulton, “The Virgin Mary and the Song of Songs,” makes clear,
twelfth-century discussion of the Bodily Assumption laid great emphasis on both
the Virgin’s and Christ’s complete freedom from bodily decay. Authors repeatedly
stressed the union of Mary and her son as a guarantee that neither experienced any
putrefaction or bodily change in the grave.
53. “Corpora enim peccatorum quid sunt nisi sepulchra mortuorum?” See above
n. 47. Guerric concludes: “[The unjust are] without any hope of a better resurrection.
[T]hey are subject to corruption as a foretaste of their future fate. Concerning their
tombs I had begun to say that as great as is the difference between their filth and
the beauty of gardens in flower incomparably greater is the difference between the
delight of spiritual men and the pleasure of carnal joys” (Sermons, ed. Morson and
Costello, vol. 2, p. 518; trans. in Liturgical Sermons, vol. 2, p. 214).
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 171

resurrection, that is, in the renewal of the just, [the just man] will grow
like the lily and will blossom forever.”54 When Guerric discusses the
resurrection of a child performed by Elisha (4 Kings 4.32), he sees it as a
gradual process: “first . . . [his] flesh grew warm, then he yawned seven
times, and finally he opened his eyes.” But “the child’s flesh is the
fleshly heart [i.e., the evil desires] of one who is little in Christ.” The
story is an analogy to spiritual rebirth: “first then there is the warmth
of returning life when good works are performed; the second stage of
resurrection is the extending of affections through prayer; perfection
is reached when understanding is enlightened so as to contemplate.”55
Even when discussing spiritual resurrection, Guerric sometimes trans-
mutes organic images into inorganic ones. In his second Easter sermon,
for example, he speaks of “sowing” the body and draws on 1 Corinthi-
ans 15, but the full text reads:

It is indeed profitable trading to despise the things which weaken and

defile you in order to gain Christ . . . [and] to recover yourself with . . .
a generous interest of immortality and glory. Who would hesitate to
regard it as a profitable trade to sow a body, mortal, natural, unhon-
ored, that it may rise immortal, spiritual, glorious.56

Moreover, Guerric’s images for the body are often the images of gar-
ments, buildings, and jewels familiar since the early church. For exam-
ple, he uses Song of Songs 5.14 to speak of Christ’s “flesh of ivory”
taken from Mary’s “ivory womb,” and comments: “We dwell to be sure
in houses of clay, but what are of clay by reason of their material, come
to be of ivory through the virtue of continence.” Bodies are “sinks filled
with dust,” but if disciplined, they can become sanctuaries. “The ivory
bodies of the saints are the house of Christ, they are Christ’s garments,
they are Christ’s members, they are a temple of the Holy Spirit.”57
54. Guerric, First sermon In nativitate beatae mariae, in Sermons, ed. Morson
and Costello, vol 2, pp. 478–85; trans. in Liturgical Sermons, sermon 51, vol. 2,
pp. 195–97, esp. p. 197. The comparison of man to an inverted tree, embedded in a
general description of the just as trees (based on Jeremiah 17.8), is also found in the
second sermon In festivitate sancti Benedicti, chaps. 5–7, in Sermons, ed. Morson
and Costello, vol. 2, pp. 64–73.
55. Guerric, Third Sermon for Easter, chap. 5, in Sermons, ed. Morson and
Costello, vol. 2, p. 258; trans. in Liturgical Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 96–97.
56. Second Sermon for Easter, chap. 3, in Sermons, ed. Morson and Costello, vol.
2, pp. 236–38; trans. in Liturgical Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 88–89. Note that Guerric goes
on then at considerable length about the evil returning to vomit, losing fertility,
being barren ground, etc. (ed. Morson and Costello, pp. 238–40).
57. First Sermon for the Annunciation, chaps. 3–6, in Sermons, ed. Morson and
Costello, vol. 2, pp. 112–25; trans. in Liturgical Sermons, sermon 26, vol. 2, pp. 34–38.
 172 the twelfth century

In general, Bernard’s imagery is darker, less optimistic than Guer-

ric’s. His most elaborate use of metaphors of flowering and fertility in
connection with resurrection comes in On Loving God and refers to
the first resurrection, the flowering of virtue in the soul.58 But even his
discussions of spiritual growth make surprisingly little use of language
of germination and flowering.59 And when he applies images of organic
change specifically to the body, they are usually negative images of rot
and decay: the body—usually but not always in this context called the
flesh—is a mass of pus, a cesspool, a heap of feces, or food for worms.60
The glorified body we will receive at the end of time is endowed quite
precisely with the gifts of imperviousness to change.61 Bernard specifies
that it will possess immortality so it does not become dust, impassibil-
ity so it does not experience suffering or disorder, lightness so it will
have none of the downward pull of weight, and beauty so it will be clear
and shining, with no spot of shadow or dirtiness.
Although eating and growth are sometimes positive images in his
sermons, Bernard makes it quite clear that the body contains within
itself no ability to flower. When he speaks of bodily resurrection
in particular—and not of the general spiritual progress of the soul’s
rebirth—his favorite images are inanimate. The body is spoken of as a
vessel, a lantern, or a treasure; it is the bed in which the palsied man of
the gospel languished until told to take it up and walk (Mark 2.9–11);
it is a garment (especially the white robe of Rev. 6.11) or a building
(either the tabernacle of Ps. 90.10 or the temple of the Holy Ghost from
1 Cor. 6.19).62 Most frequently of all, the body that will arise is called

58. Bernard, “On Loving God,” chap. 3, paragrs. 7–10, in Opera, vol. 3, pp. 124–27
and in Selected Works, trans. Evans, pp. 179–82.
59. His Easter sermons are much less impregnated than are Guerric’s, for exam-
ple, with language of natural change.
60. See, for example, Bernard, “On Conversion,” in Opera, vol. 4, pp. 69–116, esp.
75–79, 83–91, 94–95, 106–7; “On Consideration,” bk. 5, chap. 4, paragr. 9, Opera, vol.
3, p. 473, lines 24–25; Sixth Sermon for Advent, in Opera, vol. 4, pp. 191–95; and
Third and Fourth Sermons for All Saints (see n. 29).
61. See Sermon 4 for All Saints, Opera, vol. 5, pp. 354–60, and Sommerfeldt,
“Body in Bernard.” Bernard does not use the term dotes, but the idea that will later
become that teaching is present in his writing, see Wicki, Seligkeit, pp. 202–9. See
also, Herman of Reun, sermons 25 and 107, Sermones, ed. Mikkers, pp. 103 and 501.
62. Vessel or Lantern: Third Sermon for the Ascension, paragr. 3, in Opera, vol.
5, p. 132 (the reference here is to Christ’s body). Treasure: Sermon on St. Malachy,
ibid., vol. 5, p. 418, line 25. Bed: Sermon 4 for the Dedication of a Church, paragr. 4,
ibid., vol. 5, p. 385. Garment: Sermon 10 on Psalm 90, paragr. 3, ibid., vol. 4, p. 445;
sermon 34 in De diversis, chaps. 4–6, PL 183, cols. 632–34. Building: Sermon 10 on
Ps. 90, Opera, vol. 4, pp. 442–47; Sermons 1, 2, and 4 for Dedication of a Church,
ibid., vol. 5, pp. 370–78 and 383–88; Second Sermon for the Feast of the Assumption,
ibid., vol. 3, pp. 238–44.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 173

earth.63 But this “earth” of the body refers neither to decaying mire or
dung, pregnant only with pus or filth, nor to a garden or a sown field,
fertile with life. The earth taken up at resurrection is dust. In his first
sermon for All Saints, Bernard reads “blessed are the meek for they shall
inherit the earth” (Matt. 5.5) as a reference to soul (“blessed”), which shall
reign over the “earth” of the body; in his fourth sermon for the same day,
he reads “earth” as “body” in Psalm 84.10 “that glory may dwell in our
earth” and Psalm 71.19 “the whole earth may be filled with the majesty
of the Lord.”64 In his sermon on the death of St. Malachy, he describes the
holy man as depositing at Clairvaux “the earth of his body.”65
To Bernard, body is not per se negative, although he (like Guerric)
occasionally calls it a prison or a tomb. What is evil is sin, the respon-
sibility for which lodges in the will (a part of the soul). But the change
to which the body is subject is, to Bernard, primarily negative: of itself
body is more often subject to decay than to positive transformation.
This dark view of body is even more pronounced in Herman of Reun,
Bernard’s disciple. In a sermon for Advent Herman wrote:

How can one who is going to die from the worm boast? . . . “Why
is earth and ashes proud?” (Ecclesiasticus 10.9). . . . A child is con-
ceived; perhaps it grows, perhaps it is aborted; nothing is certain. . . .
Perhaps it is rich, perhaps poor . . . perhaps it grows sick, perhaps not;
perhaps it is persecuted by the serpent, perhaps not; perhaps devoured
by beasts, perhaps not. . . . With respect to every evil thing it is thus:
perhaps it is so, perhaps it is not. But can you say: perhaps he dies,
perhaps he does not? When we are born we begin at once to sicken.
The sickness ends only with death. . . .
Do you think man grows ill when he has a fever and is healthy
when he is hungry? He is said to be healthy. But do you want
to see how evil it can be to be hungry? Send him away without
medicine. . . . If you refresh yourself too much you feel a deficit;
too much drinking is worse than too little. . . . What therefore is
this health, brother? Transitory, fragile, about to perish, vain.66

63. See, for example, Second Sermon for Christmas, paragr. 1, Opera, vol. 4,
pp. 251–52: “Nam in primo quidem opere conditionis nostrae de limo terrae plasmavit
hominem Deus. . . . Qualis artifex, qualis unitor rerum, ad cuius nutum sic conglu-
tinantur sibi limus terrae et spiritus vitae. . . . Est tibi cum mundo corpus, sic enim
decet eum qui constitutus est super universam huius creaturae corporae molem ex
parte aliqua ei similari.”
64. Sermon 1, paragr. 9, and sermon 4, paragr. 6, for All Saints, in Opera, vol. 5,
pp. 334 and 359.
65. Sermon on St. Malachy, in Opera, vol. 5, pp. 417–23, esp. 417, line 17.
66. Herman, sermon 67, sections 4–5, in Sermones, ed. Mikkers, pp. 307–10.
 174 the twelfth century

To Herman, as to Bernard, change—even change (e.g., eating) that satis-

fies lack (e.g., hunger)—leads to further want. The basic model of bodily
process is putrefaction; to live is to rot.67 Glory means the absence of
pain, want, putrefaction—that is, the absence of change. The body that
rises is therefore described as a garment, put down at death and taken
up again at the Last Judgment, uncorrupted by moth or decay. It is par-
ticles of dust, which can be joined together again into the temple they
formed before. But the temple is now unchangeable, unthreatened by
any organic process, any craving or want. It is in fact the same thing
as the earthly body; but in its reassemblage it is purified, etherealized,
beautified, and hardened into immutability.
In such images of re-collection and lightening, triumphant body con-
quers the decay to which matter is all too prone. Such images empha-
size divine power as well; for they contain no suggestion that the body
could, of itself, grow into glory. Bernard’s actual use of language thus
parallels scholastic rejection of the theory of resurrection as natural.
His images also emphasize, as does scholastic debate, that material
continuity is necessary for identity: exactly the body we have now will
return. Bernard writes about St. Malachy:

O good Jesus, that holy body is yours, put aside and entrusted to us.
It is your treasure, deposited to our care. We shall keep it safe, to be
returned to you in that time when you decide to demand its return.
Only grant that it shall not go forth [to meet Christ] without its com-
panions [i.e., the monks of Clairvaux], but let us have him as a leader
whom we have had as a guest.68

67. See Bernard, Sermon 81 on the Song of Songs, chap. 3, paragr. 5, in Opera,
vol. 2 (1958), p. 287: “Ego Dominus, et non mutor. Vera namque et integra immor-
talitas tam non recipit mutationem, quam nec finem, quod omnis mutatio quaedam
mortis imitatio sit. Omne etenim quod mutatur, dum de uno ad aliud transit esse,
quodammodo necesse est moriatur quod est, ut esse incipiat quod non est. Quod si
tot mortes quot mutationes, ubi immortalitas?”
68. Bernard, Life of St. Malachy, chap. 31, paragr. 75, Opera, vol. 3, p. 378. In
chap. 30, paragr. 67, Opera, vol. 3, p. 371, Bernard represents Malachy as saying that
if he dies in Ireland, he wants to be able to rise again at the place where Patrick died;
if he dies abroad, he wishes to await the resurrection at Clairvaux. After Malachy’s
canonization in 1191, he was buried beside Bernard.
Stephen Wilson points out that Bernard’s request to be buried with the relic of
St. Jude, recounted in his vita, was based on the hope that he would rise with the
bone of the saint at the last day (“Introduction,” in Saints and Their Cults: Studies
in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, ed. S. Wilson [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983], p. 10).
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 175

In his description of his abbey’s most precious possession, Bernard

not only makes it clear that the relic is the resurrection body; he also
speaks as if the relic is the saint.69
Bernard, moreover, goes beyond his patristic sources in stressing not
just the necessity of body for personhood but also the necessity that the
risen body be the material body of earth, numerically identical with it.
Commenting on Psalm 90.8, he explicitly disagrees with Augustine,
arguing that we will see God in the beatific vision with our bodily eyes.
Without eyes, the soul cannot see fully even in heaven, and the eyes
must be these eyes with which we see on earth.

“But thou shalt consider with thy eyes, and shall see the reward of
the wicked.” . . . [H]ere, in this short verse, the Prophet is manifestly
proclaiming the immortality of the soul and confirming our faith in
a bodily resurrection. For he clearly intimates that I shall survive to
see the downfall of the demons, and shall contemplate with these
eyes of flesh their final retribution. For it is not said simply, “Thou
shalt consider with thy eyes,” but “Thou shalt consider with thine
own eyes,” with those very eyes which now languish. . . . Think not
that new organs of sight shall be given thee; no, but the former shall
be restored . . . according to the promise of Truth itself, [that] not a
single hair of our heads shall perish. . . .
. . . For at the resurrection, the eye shall be able to take in more
than the ear, or even the mind takes in at present. It is, as I think, on
account of the soul’s most ardent desire to see what she already has
heard of and believes, that another illustrious herald of the future
resurrection has also made particular reference to the eyes: “I shall
be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see my God.”70

Thus, to Hildegard, Herrad of Hohenbourg, Bernard, William of St.

Thierry, Guerric, and Herman of Reun, resurrection was a lifting toward

69. This is not, of course, to deny that he argues in other passages that the sepa-
rated soul experiences joy beyond this life and before resurrection or indeed that he
sometimes speaks as if it is the saint. He speaks, for example, of Malachy going to
God when he dies. And in his hymn for Malachy (Opera, vol. 3, p. 525), he says that
“today” heavy flesh is lifted to heaven. In the later thirteenth century, Giles of Rome
gave a useful explanation of both ways of speaking as synecdoche; see chapter 6, n.
116, below. For some perceptive remarks on this issue see Head, Hagiography and
the Cult of Saints, pp. 144, 268.
70. Sermon 8 on Ps. 90, paragrs. 2–3, Opera, vol. 4, pp. 427–28; trans. by a
Priest of Mount Melleray in St. Bernard’s Sermons for the Seasons and Principal
Festivals of the Year, (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1925), vol. 1, pp. 197–98 (with
minor changes).
 176 the twelfth century

heaven of the body we possess on earth with all its specificity and reli-
gious attainment. The resurrection body was a recast vessel, a temple
reconstructed from its scattered stones, a golden statue reforged from
its original metal; it was flesh and bones reassembled from the particles
and pieces of itself earlier dispersed by the four winds or by marauding
beasts. Its resurrection and glorification at the end of time were guar-
anteed by divine power, which was strong enough not only to reconsti-
tute it and reunite it with its soul when the trumpet blew but also to
preserve it, during all the intervening years, from the decay or digestion
that might threaten its being.
There is very little hint in the writings of Hildegard or Herrad, Ber-
nard or William, that resurrection—either Christ’s or ours—might be
an open-ended transformation, a flowering of the Pauline seed into a
different and glorious sheaf in heaven. Soul might flower, and its flow-
ering might be expressed in body; indeed, soul needed body to be perfect
and expressive and happy with God. But the body in which soul would
reside at the end of time was the same body we possess on earth, reas-
sembled or recast in the same shape and from the same particles.

Peter the Venerable and the Pauline Seed

The Pauline seed did not, however, vanish completely from twelfth-
century spiritual writing. As we have seen, Cistercian authors some-
times used it to describe first resurrection. And as Guerric of Igny’s
extended metaphor of tomb as garden suggests, such descriptions of the
soul’s progress occasionally slip over into descriptions of the body as
well. Located firmly in an ascetic context where discipline of the body
is assumed and the moral attainments of earth are therefore projected
into life after the grave, notions of germination and change no longer
express an Erigenist implication that difference, particularity, and iden-
tity will be lost, that sheaf is different from seed. Now they are some-
times used, as they were in the second century, to describe the return
at the end of time of the same body, made vastly more beautiful by the
power of God. The sprouting seed, borne by a plant, gives rise to the
same plant as before. We find such use of the Pauline seed metaphor, for
example, in the beautiful letter written by the Cluniac abbot Peter the
Venerable about the death of his mother and in Otto of Freising’s vision
of last things at the end of his historical work The Two Cities. In these
works, confidence that person is really psychosomatic unity seems to
win out, for a moment at least, over fears of decay and process, fears
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 177

that identity and attainment will be lost. The vision is of person (soul
and body) growing into grace.
It is perhaps no accident that Peter the Venerable’s magnificent use
of 1 Corinthians 15 occurs in a panegyric to a mother who was deeply
loved and whose ascetic attainments could not be faulted.71 Raingard
had entered the monastery of Marcigny in 1117 after the death of her
husband; her son Peter says her entry there was a burial. So “buried,”
she served as cellarer and as an example of holiness to her sisters until
her death in 1135. In writing to his brothers about her ascetic accom-
plishments, Peter holds up her monastic (and metaphorical) burial and
her final (and actual) one as inducements to hope and trust in God. He
urges his brothers to see in the actual death of their mother the death
of sin they languish in and therefore their need to die to the world. Your
bodies cannot revivify unless they die, he says; they must putrefy so
they can rise, dry (arescere) so they can flower. “The winter of this pres-
ent life is to be tolerated and the harshness of rain and snow borne”; for
the “fruitful sweetness of trees” has not yet appeared. You are not yet
what you will be; your life is hidden with Christ. But “the time will
come when the air will be clear and eternal spring will follow the cold.”
The earth, made fertile with marvelous warmth, will give forth in new
flowers and fruits “the seeds of your bodies.” “The corruptible will put
on the incorruptible and the mortal immortality,” writes Peter, “[there-
fore] . . . let her who was mother of your body generate your souls . . .
lest you be like her in body [i.e., rotting] and dissimilar in soul.” In such
a passage, the literal and spiritual levels of discourse fuse, as do body
and soul. Peter clearly speaks here of the woman who will rise again;
her body will be transformed but identical, glorious but herself. But the
Pauline seed refers also to first death and resurrection—that is, to the
sin and redemption of the souls of his brothers existing still in their
bodies of earth.72
There is one other important passage in Peter’s writing that makes
use of 1 Corinthians 15. In it, images of flowers and seeds appear along-
side images of jewels and temples, vessels and clothes; resurrection is
germination as well as reassemblage, the lability of plants as well as the
hardness of crystal. But Peter’s emphasis is more on stasis, continuity,
and re-collection than on open-ended transformation. He is concerned
about proper burial and about caring for every dispersed particle of the
71. Letter 53 in The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 153–73, and vol. 2, pp. 132–35.
72. See especially ibid., vol. 1, pp. 172–73.
 178 the twelfth century

dead. The passage is closer to Victricius of Rouen than to Erigena and

Origen. And the context is relic cult. Peter writes to honor the relics of
St. Marcellus, possibly on the anniversary of their translation to Cluny
(sometime before January 6, 1109) or on the occasion of their transfer
to a new reliquary.73

The divine dignity divides his martyr into equal parts, so that he
may retain his soul for himself among the mass of the blessed and
give, with marvelous largess, the relics of his sacred body to be ven-
erated by the faithful still living in the flesh. But suppose someone
says: “what does it profit us to honor a lifeless body; what does it
profit us to frequent with hymns and praise bones lacking in sense?”
Let this kind of thinking be far from the hearts of the faithful. . . .
God, the creator of spiritual and corporeal things, . . . established
the human creature and, in an excellent operation, joined it together
from rational spirit and flesh . . ., one person of man conjoined from
[two] diverse substances. And glorifying the unity of the wonderful
conjoining with felicity appropriate to the proper nature of each [of
the diverse substances], he bestowed justice on the soul and incor-
ruptibility on the body. . . . Therefore we know the spirits of the
just will in the meanwhile live happily in the eternal life which we
expect through faith, which he promises who is faithful in his words,
and we anticipate for them a future resurrection in their bodies with
immortality and in every sense incorruptibility. For this reason we do
not debase as inanimate, despise as insensate, or trample under foot
like the cadavers of dumb beasts the bodies of those who in this life
cultivated justice; rather we venerate them as temples of the Lord,
revere them as palaces of divinity, hoard them as pearls suitable for
the crown of the eternal king, and, with the greatest devotion of
which we are capable, preserve them as vessels of resurrection to be
joined again to the blessed souls. . . .
Behold whose bodies you venerate, brothers, in whose ashes
you exalt, for whose bones you prepare golden sepulchres. They

73. Giles Constable, “Petri Venerabilis Sermones Tres,” Revue bénédictine 64

(1954), pp. 224–72, especially p. 231. Constable says that the fact that the sermon
refers to corpus and beata ossa might mean it was not actually written for St. Marcel-
lus since Cluny possessed only his head. But we should remember that John Beleth
says in the twelfth century that a person was considered to be buried where his head
was interred. We should also remember the tendency to use synecdoche to refer to
the saints. A head might well be called “body” and “bones.”
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 179

are sons of God, equal to angels, sons of the resurrection. Hence

you should receive them reverently as sons of God, extol them as
equal to the angels with suitable praises, and expect that they will
rise in their own flesh as sons of the resurrection. And in this hope
I have confidence more certainly than in any human thing that
you ought not to feel contempt for the bones of the present mar-
tyrs as if they were dry bones but should honor them now full of
life as if they were in their future incorruption. . . . Flesh flowers
from dryness and youth is remade from old age, and if you do not
yet see this in your martyr it is supported by sacred authorities;
do not despair of the future. Having therefore, dearest brothers,
the author of the old law and the new grace, Jesus Christ, who
promises to his servants the resurrection of the flesh and the glo-
rification of human substance totally, first through the saints of
old and afterwards through himself, and demonstrates [this resur-
rection] in his own body, we ought to reverence with due honor
the body of this blessed martyr as about to be resurrected, as it
will be clothed in immortal glory, although we see it as dead. . . .
. . . I say that the bodies of the saints live with God. . . . And that
they live with God innumerable miracles everywhere on earth
demonstrate, which miracles are frequently experienced by those
who come to venerate their sepulchres with devout minds. . . . Isa-
iah says: “Your bones shall flourish [germinabunt] like an herb.”
Therefore because the bones of the present martyr shall flower like
an herb, rising to eternal life, because the corruptible shall put on
the incorruptible and the mortal the immortal, because this body
of a just man snatched up to meet Christ shall always remain with
him, who will not, with full affection, bring to be honored in this
life what he believes will be elevated in the future glory.74

Peter can speak of bones germinating because he is sure those bones

are the resurrection body. Any flesh that grows upon them will be simi-
lar to the flesh they wore here below. A “something” that continues
undestroyed in the reliquary will “green” and “germinate” (germinare)
at the end of time; even now it throbs with a potentiality that can spill
over into miracles. Without body, there is no person to be redeemed,
and Peter is certain that body is numerically one between earth and
heaven because its hard particles lie undissolved in the earth until they
74. Peter the Venerable, “Sermo in honore sancti illius cuius reliquiae sunt in
presenti,” edited in Constable, “Petri Venerabilis Sermones Tres,” pp. 265–72.
 180 the twelfth century

rise again, sprouting into fullness of structure and matter, when the
trumpet sounds. First Corinthians 15 becomes, in his usage, a text that
underlines material continuity and structural integrity in heaven.

Otto of Freising’s Uneasy Synthesis: Resurrection

“Clothed in a Double Mantle . . .”
In 1133 Otto of Freising, who had studied at Paris with Hugh of St.
Victor and possibly with Abelard, suddenly joined the Cistercians.75
Ten years later, he began to compose his great universal chronicle The
Two Cities, which survives in his own revision of 1157. The eighth
book, undertaken during Easter season (after a hiatus in which Otto
was occupied with administrative duties), deals with the resurrection
of the dead and the end (in both senses of the word) of history. Although
Otto reports disagreements over eschatological matters and is himself
far from fully consistent—manifesting as he does both literalist, mil-
lenarian ideas and a tendency to spiritualize—his eighth book is none-
theless a synthesis of scholastic and Cistercian concepts. Writing fifty
years before Erigenist ideas were condemned, Otto was perhaps more
comfortable than thirteenth-century thinkers would be with stressing a
radical difference between spiritual and earthly bodies. Indeed so subtle,
agile, and vaporous will we be in heaven that it is hard to see how we
can be called material at all. But it never occurred to Otto that resurrec-
tion could mean loss of individuality or of identity: although ethereal,
the risen body retained full structural integrity (no organs missing!) and
full material continuity (no particles lost!). Thus the spiritual body we
regain at the Last Judgment could now be spoken of (somewhat hesi-
tantly) in metaphors of flowering and fertility; the Pauline seed and the
embryological reading of Ezekiel 37 no longer seemed to imply either
that bodies changed under their own impetus or that they changed so
completely as to threaten survival of self. Body—earthly or spiritual—
was the locus of difference (i.e., of inequality, above all, moral inequal-
ity) and of experience. Soul, which itself grew in life and beyond life in
purgatory, was understood to need body to be fully itself; it needed body
in order to inhabit heaven in its own particular “mansion” and in order
to experience God as it deserved.
Otto’s synthesis was an uneasy one. He vacillated both on how liter-
ally to take heaven and hell and on how the resurrection body was to
75. Otto is thus an excellent example of the combination of scholastic and
monastic tendencies.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 181

be understood. Toward the beginning of book 8, he asked what it could

mean for heaven and earth to “pass away” and concluded, as had Ter-
tullian hundreds of years before, that there could be change other than
the transition “from being to nonbeing.” Change could mean a “trans-
figuration from a present state to one far more beautiful.” When Paul
says (1 Cor. 7.31) that the fashion [figura] of the world “passes away,”
he means fashion, not nature, says Otto. Otto seems here to envision an
earthly millennium in which the world is perfected and beautiful but
not, so to speak, dematerialized.76
A little further along in his discussion, Otto grants that Greek theo-
logians take such passages spiritually (that is, only “as similes”).77 But
Otto asserts that it is better to take certain last things literally. Some
think the valley of Jehosaphat is an allegory, he says, but it is prefer-
able to hold that the Last Judgment occurs on earth: “It is more reason-
able that bodies that were made of earth and that, because they were
evil, were not changed to incorruption [i.e., the bodies of the damned],
should be placed on earth for judgment than that they should be car-
ried aloft to a rarer element with that weight.”78 Toward the end of
book 8, Otto warns that heaven is not literally a place; “for what else is
life eternal than purest blessedness?”79 Elsewhere, however, Otto takes
hell literally. He reports that “some” think the wicked in hell are tor-
mented by fire and the worm; “others” take the worm of hell to mean
“the sting of conscience” while the fire is understood literally; still
“others” believe both tortures are spiritual. But “the more reasonable
belief seems to be the view of those who say that the body is tormented
by real flame, the soul by conscience.”80
Just as Otto reports disagreement over how literally to under-
stand heaven and hell, so he evidences inconsistency over the nature

76. Otto of Freising, Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, paragr. 9,
pp. 403–4; Two Cities, trans. Mierow, p. 465. This seems to be what Otto means by:
“Erit igitur non abolita substantia, sed mutata figura caelum novum, et terra nova,
novo usui novo decore, novis corporibus decenter preparata omnique inequalitate ac
squalore deterso ad instar paradisi Dei purificata.”
77. De duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, paragr. 20, p. 419.
78. Ibid., paragr. 18, pp. 416–17; trans. Mierow, Two Cities, p. 478.
79. De duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, paragr. 33, p. 451; trans. Mierow, Two Cities,
p. 509; and see above, chapter 3, nn. 68 and 74. See also De duabus civitatibus, bk.
8, paragr. 26, p. 436, where Otto says, about Rev. 21.18–21 (“the city is gold with
twelve gates of pearl”): “If such things are beautiful and comely when they are inter-
preted literally, how much more are they found to be joyous and delightful far beyond
compare when they are spiritually interpreted!” (trans. Mierow, Two Cities, p. 495)
80. De duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, paragr. 21, p. 424; trans. Mierow, Two Cities,
pp. 484–85.
 182 the twelfth century

of resurrection bodies.81 As modern scriptural exegetes still do, Otto

focuses on 1 Corinthians 15.44 and 1 Corinthians 15.50 as the cru-
cial texts.82 He tells us that “some”—drawing on Paul—argue that the
blessed will be transformed into spiritual substances; “others” argue
that the saints will be bodies not spirits, but bodies of such fineness
they cannot be handled or imagined. “But . . . we believe that our actual
bodies shall rise in the actual substance of the flesh, after the likeness
of our Lord, who said to his disciples after the resurrection, ‘Handle me
and see.’ . . .” Thus Paul did not mean that the second Adam is without
actual flesh; he meant rather that the body, which is “sown natural,”
will “rise spiritual” “because its defective substance is taken away, its
true nature left.” Although this particular gloss of Paul could be taken
in an almost Origenist sense, Otto immediately again asserts that “true
nature” means literal body; the saints “shall have in that City [i.e., the
City of God—in this case, heaven] real bodies of the actual substance
of flesh, but cleansed of all corruption.”83
Otto makes it clear that the separated souls of the elect subsist and
are purified after death; they are reembodied with spiritual bodies that
will not taste or smell (although they will see).84 These spiritual bodies
have such purity and refinement and agility that they can be wherever
they wish to be; indeed, says Otto (again sounding almost Origenist), we
“ought not to ask where they are” since they are like the Lord after the
resurrection, who entered through doors that were shut and was wher-
ever he desired to be, in earth or in heaven.85 Yet Otto also insists—
following Augustine—that resurrection bodies have both structural
integrity and material continuity. He repeats the standard catalogue of
disasters and assures us that bodies return to the substances [i.e., per-
sons] they were on earth whether “swallowed by waters, destroyed by
flames, reduced to ashes in the bowels of the earth, devoured by beasts
and incorporated in them, or scattered and spread abroad over various
regions of the earth.” He cites Augustine’s accounts of disputes over

81. As I pointed out in chapter 3 above (at nn. 68–69), many of these accounts of
disagreement are taken in toto from Augustine; such borrowing indicates that Otto
and his predecessors have not made up their minds, and indeed Otto’s own inconsis-
tency indicates this as well. But such reports of ancient disputes do not necessarily
mean that disputes were going on between figures in the schools although they may
have been.
82. De duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, paragr. 27, pp. 436–37.
83. Ibid.; trans. Mierow, Two Cities, pp. 496–97.
84. De duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, paragr. 33, pp. 452–54; and see below, n. 86.
85. Ibid., paragr. 27, p. 438.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 183

whether we rise in one sex or two and whether we rise at Christ’s age or
at the age of our individual deaths; in both cases, he takes Augustine’s
solution but without dogmatism.86 He mentions explicitly problems of
dwarves and giants, the lame and the mutilated, the fat, the thin, the
blemished, hermaphrodites, monsters, Siamese twins, abortions and
stillbirths, and those of “disagreeable” color.87 He explains that death is
dissolution; thus those caught up in the “twinkling of an eye” must in
that instant be dissolved and recalled to life (although Otto also asserts
that that verse can be given an allegorical meaning). Following Augus-
tine, he defines beauty as “harmony of parts”; therefore, there can be
no “defect or excess” in heaven. “Misshapen parts” must be corrected;
lacunas must be supplied; “and that which is more than comely shall be
removed, though the integrity of the matter is preserved.” Thus, to Otto,
the resurrection body is the same bits assembled in the same structure,
however subtle, agile, and beautiful that reassemblage may be.88
Otto understood the implications of Augustine’s discussion of “see-
ing” in heaven (City of God, book 22, chapter 29). And he went beyond
Augustine, taking instead the position, implied by Bernard and Wil-
liam of St. Thierry, that body must add something in heaven.89 “Some”
think, he says, that God will be seen “with the heart only”; for Augus-
tine argues that even if we close our eyes in heaven, we will see God.
But Augustine “says many things in a nonauthoritative manner.” Some
therefore object to what he says and argue that God is seen in heaven in
both ways. They argue that blessedness is seeing God; if therefore bod-
ies are denied the vision, then the saints do not attain supreme bless-
edness. Indeed, Otto asserts, if vision of the heart alone were enough,
heaven would not differ from our present condition; for “even now,
when their bodies are moldering in the ground, the spirits and souls of
the just behold God in heaven.” To behold with both kinds of vision
is to see “to the greater increase of blessedness, as though clothed in
a double mantle, namely the flesh and the spirit.” Such seeing is the
eighth day that never ends. It has no evening. For the “rest of the saints”
is “not terminated but doubled by the receiving of bodies.”

86. Ibid., paragrs. 12–13, pp. 407–11. Augustine was himself, of course, undogmatic.
87. These latter are, he says explicitly, the Ethiopians. Ibid., p. 408.
88. Ibid., paragr. 12, pp. 407–9.
89. Ibid., paragr. 33, pp. 451–54; see above, chapter 2, p. 96, n. 135, on Augustine.
Otto also goes beyond Hugh of St. Victor’s De sacramentis, bk. 2, part 18, chap. 18,
PL 176, col. 615, which says (following Augustine) that open eyes are not necessary
for the vision of God.
 184 the twelfth century

There is, however, no equality in the heavenly rest. All receive a

single shilling; all inhabit the same house, but “there are many man-
sions.”90 “The blessedness [will] be one . . . but there are differences in
the enjoyment of that blessedness . . . even [as] in the present life, . . .
in one Church we behold in the varying grades of honors one more
glorious than another.” “And even as when many together flock to one
fountain, . . . he that is thirstier drinks more. . . . Therefore, in accor-
dance with the diversity and capacity of individuals, the blessed glory
of the saints will be varied and yet . . . one.” As Gregory the Great
preached in his Homilies on the Gospel, “separate individuals” will be
“taken out of the elect” and lifted up higher into the “separate orders of
the blessed spirits” according to their “rank of advancement.”91
Like Peter the Venerable, Otto makes confident use of 1 Corinthians
15 to describe resurrection; he even adds to it the passage from Ezekiel
37 (“o ye dry bones . . .”) so popular in the early church and in rabbinic
exegesis but quite infrequent in twelfth-century texts. Ezekiel 37 is
read as if it describes the formation of the embryo in the womb; the
Pauline seed, the arid bones, the earth in winter, are all seen as dryness
that must be freshened, watered, by God in order to sprout into life.
The passage is about divine power; it is also about the appearance of
incorruption from death and decay.

That the dead will rise again is not only affirmed by the Gospels and
the Apostles and the teachers of the new law, but the fathers of old
also foretold it. . . . In the book of Job we read: . . . I believe “that
my Redeemer liveth, and on the last day I am to arise out of the
earth’’ (Job 14.14 and 19.25). Note too the saying of Ezekiel: “O ye dry
bones . . .’’ (Ezek. 37.7 and 12). . . . What, I ask you, what could be said
more clearly and more plainly of a matter so mystical, so profound, so
obscure? For he foretells that bones—and bones that are dry because
they no longer have in them the power of life, but have physically lost
their freshness—grow sinews, are clothed with flesh, are covered with
skin, are spiritually reanimated and finally are by divine power led
forth from the tombs. And yet by that argument of which Paul makes
mention when he says, “that which thou . . . sowest is not quickened
except it die first” (1 Cor. 15.36), we are also led to believe in the

90. De duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, paragrs. 29–32, pp. 439–48. This agrees exactly
with Peter Lombard, bk. 4, distinctio 49, chap. 1, paragrs. 1 and 2, pp. 547–49.
91. De duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, paragrs. 29–32, pp. 439–48, esp. 440 and 448;
trans. Mierow, Two Cities, pp. 499 and 506.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 185

resurrection, since every year we see the earth warmed by summer’s

heat, and after being so warmed, dried by the autumn’s drought, and
thus dried, dying in the winter’s cold but aroused as from the dead
when its freshness is revived by the kindly moisture of spring.92

Otto assumes that the sprouting seed, the reclothed bones, are the
return of the same body, clad now in a glory and stasis that will prevent
slime and rot from ever occurring again.
Otto, like Peter the Venerable, employs such language of growth and
transformation in the context of discussing first as well as second res-
urrection. Indeed he connects the two resurrections as closely as do
Guerric of Igny and Herman of Reun. Germination of a glorified body,
changed to full incorruption and impassibility from the rotting body
of earth, happens only for the just. John 5.28 (“the hour cometh . . .”)
means, says Otto, that Christ “can recall bodies that are ashes out of
tombs.” All will rise as reassembled ashes; for just and unjust alike, the
identical body will return. But only the elect will be transformed. In
this transformation, they will attain moral as well as physical immu-
tability. They will be impassible as well as impartible, satiated and
satisfied as well as eternal. At the heart of the glory of heaven is “incor-
ruption.” “Whosoever . . . shall have been raised in the first resurrec-
tion from the death of the soul shall in the second be changed and pass
from corruptible to incorruption.”93
Otto’s images seem to reflect the same assumptions we find in his
monastic and scholastic contemporaries. His basic eschatological meta-
phors are of triumph over decay, process, and digestion. They evoke
change to a clear, subtle, crystalline version of the original body. Glori-
fied body is an expression of the attainment of blessedness; it is also
an expression of self. The sheaf, to Otto, is the return of the seed. Thus
Otto’s use of 1 Corinthians 15 or Ezekiel 37 is closer to the inorganic
imagery of Honorius’s Elucidarium than to the more Origenist language
in the Clavis physicae. His plants are like the flowers in Honorius’s
heaven. And we do well to remember that when the Elucidarium says
the blessed are like flowers, the analogy does not stress their difference
from earth; it stresses their difference from each other. The elect have
exactly the bodies they had in life, clothed over their nakedness with

92. De duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, paragr. 11, pp. 406–7; trans. Mierow, Two Cities,
pp. 468–69.
93. De duabus civitatibus, bk. 8, intercisio and paragrs. 8–11, pp. 400–6, esp. 406;
trans. Mierow, Two Cities, p. 469.
 186 the twelfth century

the colors of their virtues (the white of lilies for virgins, the red of roses
for martyrs, etc.). A rose cannot be a lily even in paradise.

The Iconography of the General Resurrection: Devouring

and Regurgitation of Fragments and Bones
Both scholastic and monastic writers in the twelfth century agreed that
to be a “person”—that is, a “complete human being”—body is required
as well as soul.94 Although theological and devotional emphasis slowly
shifted toward the experiences of an increasingly corporealized soul in
the in-between period of purgation that came to be called “purgatory,”
resurrection could not be altogether ignored.95 Body had to return. Scho-
lastic writers mostly avoided organic imagery to describe this return,
stressing instead the reconstruction of the body as temple or statue,
the re-collection of body particles or dust. Monastic writers were more
inclined to emphasize spiritual progress from time into eternity and
to use, in discussing this, images of flowering or process. But when
they spoke of body qua body, they often spoke of bones and bits. When
verbs such as reflorescere or germinare were used of caro or corpus, “to
flower” was the opposite of “to rot.” What flowered was still the per-
during dust or particles that had been laid in the earth. The resurrected
body that was necessary for a person to be a person in heaven (or in
hell) was fully continuous in both structure and matter with the body
of earth. In monastic prose the metaphors used for body still saw it as
bits and pieces, scattered abroad by death but re-collected at the end of
time. Thus, neither monastic nor scholastic images suggested that body
is anything other than physical or individual or integral in the resurrec-
tion or that there can be identity of body apart from material continuity.
Iconographic evidence reinforces our sense that the resurrection of
the dead is, in the twelfth century, the regurgitation or reassemblage
of exactly the body we possess on earth. From the Carolingian period
to the early thirteenth century, depictions of resurrection frequently
show the rising dead as bones still in their coffins or regurgitated body
parts.96 Damnation is eternal swallowing and digestion, eternal parti-
tion; the mouth of hell is a real mouth; second, final, definitive death
is mastication. Redemption therefore is triumph over fragmentation,
digestion, and rot—over natural process itself. In the miniatures of the
94. See above, chapter 3, n. 59.
95. See below, chapter 7, pp. 280–83.
96. See below, nn. 116, 117, and 134.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 187

Hortus deliciarum (with which I began my third chapter), those who

rise include skeletons still lying prone in their coffins, bodies emerging
from sarcophagi entangled in shrouds, and body parts vomited up by
birds, beasts, and fish in a visual setting forth of the chain consumption
argument repeated so often in scholastic treatments of last things (see
plates 1 and 2).97
By the late Middle Ages, matters were of course very different.
Depictions of Christ’s resurrection, such as the fifteenth-century Sien-
nese altarpieces that show an ethereal Christ with wounds glowing like
neon, present a transformed Savior.98 The well-known Isenheim altar
from the sixteenth century contrasts the hideously decaying cadaver of
Christ on the predella with a pale, shining, almost wraithlike figure ris-
ing from the tomb.99 Renaissance portrayals of the general resurrection
of humanity at the end of time, such as Giotto’s Arena chapel frescoes
or Signorelli’s San Brizio chapel at Orvieto, stress the ethereal splendor
of the glorified body or the natural beauty of regenerated flesh.100 In late
medieval depictions of the resurrection, fully formed and even elegant
bodies climb gracefully from the earth or from sarcophagi or receive
rosy and attractive flesh as if it were growing on their bones (see plate
5). Indeed, despite the fascination with skeletons and death, bones are
almost never depicted as rising, but if they are (as in Signorelli’s mag-
nificent fresco or in Jean Bellegambe’s sixteenth-century panel painting
of an angel reassembling parts), they are shown not naked but in the
process of acquiring flesh.101

97. See above, chapter 3, nn. 4–9.

98. Keith Christiansen, Laurence B. Kanter, and C. B. Strehlke, eds., Painting in
Renaissance Siena: 1420–1500 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988),
pp. 134–35 and 142–43.
99. Ruth Mellinkoff, The Devil at Isenheim: Reflections of Popular Belief in
Grünewald’s Altarpiece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 8–11.
100. For Giotto’s Last Judgment in the Arena chapel, see Dorothy C. Shorr, “The
Role of the Virgin in Giotto’s Last Judgment,” Art Bulletin 38 (1956): 207–14, espe-
cially plate 2. For Signorelli, see Massimo Carra, Gli Affreschi del Signorelli ad
Orvieto (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri, and Geneva: Skira, 1965), pp. 24–29, and my Frag-
mentation and Redemption, plate 7.16, p. 292. For a list of the principal represen-
tations of the Last Judgment from the sixth to the fourteenth century, see Alison
Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), pp. 199–200.
101. See above n. 100 on Signorelli. On Bellegambe, see Hans Posse, Die Gemäl-
degalerie des Kaiser-Friedrich-Museums: Vollständiger beschreibender Katalog . . .,
pt. 2: Die Germanischen Länder (Berlin: Julius Bared, 1911), pp. 147–48; and Frag-
mentation and Redemption, plate 7.17, p. 293. And see the sixteenth-century paint-
ing by Giorgio Ghisi, in Richard Cavendish, Visions of Heaven and Hell (London:
Orbis, 1977), p. 60.
 188 the twelfth century

Twelfth-century depictions of the general resurrection, like later

ones, are usually subordinated to other iconographic themes, such as
the Last Judgment or the crucifixion.102 Like later ones, they frequently
show whole bodies rising from the earth in that scene conjured up by
the brief scriptural accounts of resurrection.103 But as Herrad’s min-
iatures suggest, resurrection in twelfth-century iconography is also a
scene not suggested by Scripture at all: the vomiting up of parts.
The iconography of the Hortus deliciarum is not original. Herrad’s
depiction of general resurrection is drawn from the so-called Byzantine
Last Judgment, a complex iconographic program whose origins have
been much disputed by art historians.104 This program is best known in
the West from the monumental eleventh-century mosaics at Torcello
near Venice (see plate 6)105 although a wall painting at Salonica from
1028 is probably the earliest example.106

102. Hubert Schrade, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst: Die Sinngehalte und
Gestaltungsformen,: vol. 1 Die Auferstehung Christi (Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter,
1932); Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, vol. 3: Die Auferste-
hung und Erhöhung Christi (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1971); and the works by Brenk cited
in n. 104 below.
103. Revelation 20; Matthew 25; Mark 13. On Matthew, see Yves Christe, La
vision de Matthieu (XXIV-XXV): Origines et développement d’une image de la seconde
Parousia (Paris: Édition Klincksieck, 1973).
104. See G. Voss, Das jüngste Gericht; Gillen, Ikonographische Studien zum
Hortus Deliciarum; Cames, Allégories et symboles; Beat Brenk, “Die Anfänge der
Byzantinischen Weltgerichtsdarstellung,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 57 (1964): 106–26;
idem, Tradition und Neuerung; and Selma Jónsdóttir, An Eleventh-Century Byzantine
Last Judgement in Iceland (Reykjavík: Almenna Bókafélagið, 1959).
105. Renato Polacco, La Cattedrale di Torcello: Il Giudizio Universale: Torcello
Cathedral: The Universal Judgement (Canova: L’Altra Riva, 1986); Wilhelm Paeseler,
“Die römische Weltgerichtstafel im Vatikan (Ihre Stellung in der Geschichte des
Weltgerichtsbildes und in der römischen Malerei des 13. Jahrhunderts),” Kunstge-
schichtliches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 2 (1938): 311–94, especially plates
275, 276, and 282; Jónsdóttir, Byzantine Last Judgement in Iceland, pp. 16–20; and
Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 286–87. One of the leading experts on
the Torcello mosaics, Irina Treadgold, has assured me that the portion that interests
me is genuinely eleventh-century, not a restoration.
106. Brenk, “Die Anfänge,” p. 119; idem, Tradition und Neuerung, p. 83. For
other early examples, see Jónsdóttir, Last Judgement in Iceland; Kurt Weitzmann,
“Byzantine Miniatures and Icon Painting in the Eleventh Century” (1966), reprinted
in H. L. Kessler, ed., Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illuminations
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp.271–313, especially plates 303 and
304; John Galey, Sinai and the Monastery of St. Catherine, introductions by K.
Weitzmann and G. Forsyth (New York: Doubleday, 1980), especially plates 104–6;
André Grabar, La Peinture religieuse en Bulgarie (Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul
Geuthner, 1928), vol. 1, pp. 54–85; Deoclecio Redig de Campos, “Eine unbekannte
Darstellung des jüngsten Gerichts aus dem elften Jahhundert,” Zeitschrift für Kunst-
geschichte 5 (1936): 124–33; Paeseler, “Die römische Weltgerichtstafel im Vatikan.”
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 189

An eleventh-century Greek Gospel now in the Bibliothèque Natio-

nale (BN Gr. 74) and the great Torcello west wall show us the various
elements of the Hortus tracings assembled into a narrative whole.107
The Greek Gospel illustrates Matthew 25.31–46 with a scene not, it
is important to note, described in the text.108 In the lowest level of
hell we see body fragments. The artistic zone just above depicts fish
regurgitating limbs and torsos while angels drive some of the damned
toward Satan, who rides a beast just in the process of swallowing one
of the unfortunate reprobate headfirst. In the next artistic zone an angel
sounds the trumpet, while clothed dead rise from tombs, and beasts
vomit up bodies and limbs. At the top, Christ in majesty sits with the
elect, below whom to the left appear other groups of the blessed attired
so as to indicate their earthly status and gender (see plate 7).
In the Torcello mosaic, the elements are arranged somewhat differ-
ently (see plate 6). Fragmented bodies appear at the very lower right,
representing the most atrocious tortures of hell; just above them, Satan
sits on a throne that devours sinners, and the damned, driven toward
that throne by fierce angels, are depicted as decapitated heads. Halfway
up the wall, beasts, birds, and fish in opposing and balanced oval spaces
regurgitate parts, while four figures struggle out of their shrouds. At
the top of the mosaic, poised above a Christ in majesty, an even larger
Christ leads Adam out from hell, and the blessed rise whole from their
tombs, clothed in the garments of glory.109 Orthodox doctrine taught,

107. For the Torcello mosaic, see n. 105 above. For BN Gr. 74 see Sirarpie der
Nersessian, “Two Slavonic Parallels of the Greek Tetraevangelia: Paris 74,” The Art
Bulletin 9, no. 3 (1927): 223–74; Henri Omont, Évangiles avec peintures byzantines
du Xle siècle, vol. 1: Reproduction des 361 miniatures du manuscrit grec 74 de la
Bibliothèque nationale (Paris: Berthaud Frères, 1908), pp. 7, 11, 41, and 81; Brenk,
Tradition und Neuerung, plate 24; and Gérard Cames, Byzance et la Peinture romane
de Germanie: Apports de l’art grec posticonoclaste à l’enluminure et à la fresque
ottoniennes et romanes de Germanie dans les thèmes de majesté et les Évangiles
(Paris: A. and J. Picard, 1966), pp. 61, 94–98, 114–17, 158–59, and plate 204. We do
not know, of course, exactly how the elements were assembled in the original from
which the Hortus tracings were made, but it was probably closer to BN Gr. 74 than
to Torcello. At some point a drawing of Satan in chains was inserted between the
pages. See Walter, ed., Hortus, pp. 99–101 and plate 43.
108. BN Gr. 74, fol. 51v, illustrating Matthew 25.31–46, has the regurgitation of
body parts, although the Matthew text does not speak of this. It is important to note
that fol. 93v, which illustrates Mark 13.26–37 (a text that likewise does not mention
regurgitation and reassemblage), has elements of the Byzantine Last Judgment, but
does not include the body-parts motif. See Omont, Évangiles, vol. 1, pp. 41 and 81.
109. It is also important to note that the blessed grouped around Christ are highly
individualized, clearly male and female and of different earthly roles. The decapi-
tated heads driven toward hell are individualized as well. In the Byzantine ivory in
 190 the twelfth century

as we have seen, that all are reassembled at the Last Judgment, damned
as well as saved, but this is not the visual message given by either
the Gospel miniature or by the even more narratively coherent west
wall.110 What is illustrated is the association of wholeness with salva-
tion, fragmentation with hell. The Torcello mosaic lifts the eyes of the
viewer from decapitated heads, worm-eaten skulls, and body fragments
(representing sins), through the moment of regurgitation and reassem-
blage,111 up to the place where intact and incorrupt bodies rise shining
into the presence of God. Salvation is the triumph of whole over part.
In addition to associating resurrection with Judgment, the Hortus deli-
ciarum associates resurrection with crucifixion. The moment of death
on the cross is presented not as defeat but as victory, because it is both
the birth of church and the raising of the dead. Below the dying Christ,
Herrad or her artist-collaborators show three coffins; from two rise those
whom Christ resuscitated, in the third lies the skeleton of Adam.112
Once again the iconography is not original. For example, in a depiction
of the crucifixion from a medical text of 1132—about fifty years before
the Hortus—the dead who rise beneath the cross, still in their shrouds,

the Victoria and Albert Museum, the throne has four devouring mouths that swallow
the damned in pieces; see Brenk, Tradition und Neuerung, plate 23; Alice Turner
and Anne Stainton, “The Golden Age of Hell: A Guided Tour Through the Brilliant
Inferno of the Twelfth Century,” Art and Antiques (January 1991): 57.
110. There was disagreement, however, over whether the defects of the damned
were repaired; see below chapter 6, pp. 265–66. For a discussion of the implications
of this question for medieval drama, see Meg Twycross, “ ‘With what body shall they
come?’: Black and White Souls in the English Mystery Plays,” Langland, the Mystics,
and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey, ed.
Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 271–86.
111. The depiction of events associated with the Pauline “twinkling of an eye”—
that is, the sounding of trumpets and the rolling up of the heavens—underlines the
impression that zone three depicts the moment of resurrection in the larger drama
of the Last Judgment.
112. The rubrics tell us that the central grave is Adam’s: “Sepulchrum Ade;
Jheronimus refert quod Adam sepultus fuerit in Calvarie loco ubi crucifixus est
Dominus.” The other dead, now awakening, seem to be the saints referred to in
Matthew 27.52, for the passage is inscribed here: “Monumenta aperta sunt et multa
corpora sanctorum surrexerunt” (Herrad, Hortus, fol. 150, Reconstruction, plate 93,
drawing 212, p. 174). See above chapter 3, n. 5. As Anna Kartsonis points out, the
Anastasis (harrowing of hell) and the crucifixion sometimes merge in the Byzantine
iconographic tradition; in such cases, the kings of the Old Testament can be shown
rising beneath the cross alongside Adam and Eve. See the eleventh- or twelfth-cen-
tury ivory book cover from Leningrad that depicts David and Solomon rising together
with Adam and Eve (Anastasis: The Making of an Image [Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1986], pp. 146–50 and plate 49). See also Beat Brenk, “Auferstehung
der Toten,” Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, vol. 1 (Rome, Freiburg: Herder,
1968), cols. 219–22, especially col. 221.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 191

are Lazarus, the saints referred to in Matthew 27.52 (which is inscribed

here), and Adam (see plate 8).113 In many twelfth-century crucifixions,
Adam, lying below the cross, becomes simply a bone or two (see plate
9).114 Such iconography illustrates the popular legend that Christ was
executed in the very spot where Adam was buried and on the same tree
that had led the first man into sin.115 But more is involved. In Herrad’s
depiction, Christ’s death is the reanimation of others, and the humanity
under the cross is bones. We should remember that the figures who rise
from sarcophagi in her Last Judgment are drawn enfleshed but labeled
ossa mortuorum, and that the membra olim devorata rise incorrupta.
What we see in the Hortus drawing of the crucifixion are the moments
of resurrection occurring simultaneously—death, bones (or fragmenta-
tion), and restoration (or reassemblage).
Such presentations of resurrection as the various stages of reanima-
tion of a corpse are not infrequent in earlier English, Carolingian, and
Ottonian art. In an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon ivory, for example,
we find bodies at various stages of resuscitation: lying, still wrapped
in grave clothes; sitting or standing, entangled in shrouds; fully alive
again, with their souls (shown as doves) flying in at the mouth (see
plate 10). The mid-ninth-century ivory used on the cover of the Book of
Pericopes of the German emperor Henry II depicts the general resurrec-
tion with the same motifs. One of the earliest artistic representations
of the resurrection of Christ (the tenth-century Cross of the Scriptures
at Clonmacnois in Ireland) shows the body of Jesus still shrouded and
prone in the tomb with its soul entering its mouth as a dove.116 Even in

113. Staatsbibliothek MS lat. qu. 198, fol. 320v, in Gerard Achten, ed., Das christ-
liche Gebetbuch im Mittelalter: Andachts-und Stundenbücher in Handschrift und
Frühdruck, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz: Ausstellung, 29. Mai–14.
August, 1980, und Katalog (West Berlin: Staatsbibliothek, 1980), pp. 61–63.
114. For Adam as bones, see Arthur Haseloff, Eine thüringisch-sächsische Mal-
erschule des 13. Jahrhunderts (Strassburg: Heitz and Muendel, 1897; Kraus Reprint,
1979), plates 87, 96, and 112; Hanns Swarzenski, Die lateinischen illuminierten
Handschriften des XIII. Jahrhunderts in den Ländern an Rhein, Main, und Donau
(Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1936), vol. 2, plate 938. For Adam
rising under the cross, see idem, Vorgotische Miniaturen: Die ersten Jahrhunderte
deutscher Malerei (Leipzig: Karl Robert Langewiesche Verlag, 1931), p. 62; Gertrud
Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 2: The Passion of Jesus Christ, trans.
Janet Seligman (Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1972), pp. 113–
14 and plates 365, 377, 381, 387, 409, 410.
115. See Walter, ed., Hortus, p. 88.
116. See Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 284 and 289, plate 7.13. For the
Pericopes of Henry II, see Schiller, Iconography, vol. 2: Passion, plate 365; and cf.
plates 371, 373, 377. A similar example is the cover of the psalter from Aldersbach
(mid-thirteenth century); Swarzenski, Die lateinischen illuminierten Handschriften,
 192 the twelfth century

the thirteenth century there is sometimes something skeletal (or only

partially revived) about rising bodies (see plate 11).117
Moreover, in Herrad’s depiction of the preparation for crucifixion,
located in the Hortus just above the picture of Christ’s death on the
cross, an inscription describes that death as victory over the mouth
and stomach of Leviathan. Using a passage borrowed from the Specu-
lum ecclesiae of Honorius Augustodunensis, the artist explains that
the first man was “lost in the sea of the world”; Leviathan “digested”
[absorbuit] him. He is, however, saved when Christ pierces the mon-
ster’s throat with the tip of the tree of life and forces him to “vomit
up” those whom he has unjustly devoured [evomeret quos . . . devoras-
set].118 The theme of salvation as regurgitation, found in the Last Judg-
ment composition, thus continues here in word if not in image. The
colorful and graphic depiction of hell in the Hortus also associates its
torments with tearing, dividing, masticating, and swallowing (see plate
3). Antichrist’s throne eats sinners, and decapitated heads are pressed
under its claws; a demon forces money into the mouth of a greedy man;
Jews are boiled in a cooking pot; a woman eats her child.
This use of eating to represent destruction is no more original than
Herrad’s other literary and iconographic motifs. The devouring throne
on which Satan sits is a standard element of Byzantine iconography of
the Last Judgment, and the depiction of hell as a mouth or a monster
that swallows and is forced by Christ at the harrowing to regurgitate
souls, is found in many twelfth-century manuscripts.119 An English

vol. 1, p. 109, and vol. 2, plate 326a (bottom panel). On the Clonmacnois High Cross,
see Roger Stalley, Irish High Crosses (Dublin: Eason and Son, 1991), plate 25; the
panel in question is the first scene above the base on the crucifixion side. Similar
scenes appear on the contemporary high crosses at Kells, Durrow, and Monasterboice.
117. Apokalypse: MS Douce 180 der Bodleian Library, Oxford (Graz: Akade-
mische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt, 1981), miniature accompanying Rev. 20.4, p. 86.
See also the casket of St. Servatius (1170–80) on which the newly resurrected, still
naked justi are shown being clothed by angels with the robes of immortality. An
inscription reads: Indue immortalem. In the gilded copperwork, the torsos and arms
of these justi appear to be depicted as rib cages and unfleshed upper-arm bones. See
Suzanne Collon-Gevaert, Jean Lejeune, and Jacques Stiennon, A Treasury of Roman-
esque Art: Metalwork, Illuminations, and Sculpture from the Valley of the Meuse,
trans. S. Waterston (New York: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 242–44 and plates. For another
example in which the rising dead appear surprisingly cadaverous, see the Bamberg
psalter in Swarzenski, Die lateinischen illuminierten Handschriften, vol. 2, plate 792.
118. Herrad, Hortus, fol. 150, Reconstruction, plate 93, drawing 211, p. 173. See
also Caratzas, Straub, and Keller, ed., Hortus, p. 150.
119. On the motif of the mouth of hell and its connection with the Leviathan of
Job 41, see Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art, pp. 175–201. See also Campo-
resi, The Fear of Hell, chapters 12 and 13, and Joyce Ruth Galpern, “The Shape
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 193

psalter from mid-century, for example, shows an angel locking damned

souls into a yawning mouth;120 a contemporary miniature shows the
risen Christ forcing a staff into hell’s gullet in order to induce vomiting
(see plates 12 and 13).121 Apocalypse manuscripts sometimes show the
same mouth for descent into and escape from hell.122 Jonah, swallowed
but not digested by the whale, was a symbol of death and resurrection
throughout the Middle Ages (see plate 14). The regurgitated prophet
served as symbol of the risen Christ as early as the third century;123 the
sculpture, stained glass, moralized Bibles, and Biblia pauperum of the
twelfth to fourteenth centuries regularly associated the entombed and
rising Christ with Jonah’s loss overboard and his miraculous return.124

of Hell in Anglo-Saxon England” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley,

1977), pp. 119–54 and figures 2–4, 7, 11–13, 16–21, and 23–25.
120. Leaf from the Winchester Psalter of 1150–60, British Library MS 1846 Cott.
Nero, chap. 4, fol. 39; see Turner and Stainton, “The Golden Age of Hell,” pp. 46–57,
especially plate on p. 47. Note that the motif of mouths repeats itself; both the corners
and the center of the big mouths are little mouths. For other examples of hell’s mouth
and of damnation as mastication, see Shorr, “The Virgin in Giotto’s Last Judgment,”
plates 7 and 9; Morgan, Dante and the Other World, pp. 15–16 and 23, plates 2, 3, and
6; and Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art, pp. 175–201.
121. Harrowing of hell from English Psalter of ca. 1170–1183, MS Douce 293, fol.
14r; see also Haseloff, Eine thüringisch-sächsische Malerschule des 13. Jahrunderts,
plates 16, 42, and 109; and Swarzenski, Die lateinischen illuminierten Handschriften,
vol. 2, plate 768. For a literary treatment that suggests the same association of images,
see below n. 139. For the theme in Mannerist architecture, see Hughes, Heaven and
Hell in Western Art, p. 199: a reproduction of the bocca d’Inferno, built by Pierfran-
cesco Orsini in the mid-sixteenth century. Stone stairs lead up to a large and fearsome
mouth-entrance, inside which is a dining room.
122. See, for example, The Dublin Apocalypse, ed. Montague Rhodes James (Cam-
bridge: Printed for the Roxburghe Club by the Cambridge University Press, 1932),
plates 63, 69, 70, and pp. 18–19; Peter H. Brieger, The Trinity College Apocalypse: An
Introduction and Description (London: Eugrammia Press, 1967), p. 48 and folio 25r
(from 1225–50); and see Turner and Stainton, “The Golden Age of Hell,” plate on p. 55.
123. The Gold-Glass Collection of the Vatican Library with Additional Cata-
logues of Other Gold-Glass Collections, ed. Guy Ferrari, Catalogo del Museo Sacro
della Biblioteca apostolica vaticano, vol. 4 (Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica vati-
cana, 1959), number 421 (Inv. 991), pp. 68–69.
124. The theme is common in pulpit sculptures and mosaics from the mid-elev-
enth to mid-thirteenth centuries; see Dorothy Glass, “Sicily and Campania: The
Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” Acta, vol. 2: The Twelfth Century (Binghamton:
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Bing-
hamton, 1975), pp. 140–42. Examples of manuscript illumination include a psalter
from mid-thirteenth-century Würzburg (Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm
3900, fols. 8iv and 82) and a mid-thirteenth-century historiated Bible (Windsor: Eton
College Library, MS 177, fol. 5v) from the English Midlands, related to lost glass
paintings in the Chapter House at Worchester cathedral. In the former, the three
Maries at the empty tomb face an elaborate floral design in which Christ sits trium-
phant above a regurgitated Jonah (see plate 14 in this volume and Swarzenski, Die
lateinischen illuminierten Handschriften, vol. 2, plates 946–47). The latter shows
 194 the twelfth century

In the famous Last Judgment tympanum from Conques, the associa-

tion of being-devoured with hell and disorder (on the right) and of
rising-whole with order (left) is obvious (see plate 15).125 Nor should
we forget the puzzling allegories of the battles of vice and virtue found
on Romanesque columns and capitals (for example, the famous beast-
column in the crypt of Otto’s own church at Freising).126 In such sculp-
tures, the vices are depicted as especially threatening insofar as they
actually eat the good.
The iconographic motif of resurrection as regurgitated parts and hell
as a swallowing mouth finds its fullest development in the East and
continues down into modern times in Greek, Bulgarian, and Russian
frescoes.127 In such depictions, the river of fire, which runs down from
Christ’s throne, becomes more river than fire; Jonah’s whale becomes
hell. In a splendid sixteenth-century example from the refectory at

Jonah vomited up before Nineveh, the three Maries at the tomb, a lion resuscitating
another lion with its breath, and portraits of Job and Jonah, the two prophets of res-
urrection. See Montague Rhodes James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts
in the Library of Eton College (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895), pp.
100–1, and Neil Ripley Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969–77), vol. 2, p. 772. An early fourteenth-century Biblia paupe-
rum that came to Weimar from Peterskloster in Erfurt draws a parallel between the
entombment of Christ and the casting overboard of Jonah on folio 7v, and on folio
8r a parallel between the resurrection and Jonah emerging from Leviathan’s mouth
(Hans von der Gabelentz, ed., Die Biblia pauperum und Apokalypse der grossher-
zogl. Bibliothek zu Weimar [Strassburg: Heitz and Muendel, 1912], pp. 16, 28–29, and
plates 14–15); see also p. 48 for a table listing other Bibles with the same depiction.
125. For the difficulties in dating the church and tympanum, see Jean-Claude
Bonne, L’Art roman de face et de profil: Le tympan de Conques (Paris: Le Sycomore,
1984), pp. 313–17.
126. See Albert Elsen, “Die Bestiensäule in der Freisinger Domgruft,” Festschrift
Kardinal Faulhaber zum achtzigsten Geburtstag, dargebracht vom Professorenkol-
legium der philosophisch-theologischen Hochschule Freising (Munich: J. Pfeiffer,
1949), pp. 249–74; Wolfgang Stammler, “Die Freisinger Bestiensäule und Bischof
Otto II,” Studien zur deutschen Philologie des Mittelalters: Friedrich Panzer zum
80. Geburtstag am 4. September 1950 dargebracht, ed. Richard Kienast (Heidelberg:
C. Winter, 1950), pp. 38–44; Franz Dietheuer, “Die Bestiensäule in der Freisinger
Domkrypta,” Oberbayerisches Archiv für Vaterländische Geschichte 101 (1976):
339–80; Anton Legner, Deutsche Kunst der Romanik (Munich: Hirmer, 1982), p. 155
and plate 93.
127. See Nersessian, “Two Slavonic Parallels of the Greek Tetraevangelia”;
Grabar, La Peinture religieuse en Bulgarie, pp. 291–92, 324, 333–34; Paul A. Under-
wood, “Third Preliminary Report on the Restoration of the Frescoes in the Kariye
Camii at Istanbul by the Byzantine Institute (1956),” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1958), pp. 235–65, especially pp. 241, 243, 256, 259–60;
The Frescoes of the Church of the Savior at Nereditsa (Leningrad: Russian State
Museum, 1925), plates 73–75; and n. 128 below.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 195

Lavra on Mount Athos, for example, the entire flood (containing within
it Satan on his devouring throne) is swallowed by a huge fish’s mouth;
just above it, a veritable menagerie of beasts, occupying more than half
of an enormous wall, are busy vomiting up parts for reassemblage (see
plate 16).128 Such motifs drop out of Western art after the early thir-
teenth century.129 They are, however, found in a number of twelfth-
century Western examples, which often recombine the elements of the
Byzantine Last Judgment quite creatively or even utilize non-Byzantine
motifs of salvation as regurgitation.
For example, a tempera painting of disputed date,130 now in the
Vatican museum, shows the head of a damned person attacked by the
mouth of a snakelike monster in zone five and depicts both regurgi-
tated parts and rising corpses in zone four. The parts, called by the
Latin inscription menbra [sic] vorata, are here drawn so schematically
that they appear to be bones and skulls rather than the enfleshed body
fragments usual in such Last Judgments; moreover, the inscription also

128. See Gabriel Millet, Monuments de l’Athos relevés avec le concours de

l’Armée française d’Orient et de l’École françaises d’Athènes, vol. 1: Les Peintures
(Paris: Librairie Leroux, 1927), plate 149; and Charles Diehl, Manuel d’art byzantin,
vol. 2 (2d ed., Paris: Picard, 1926), p. 854. The presence of the theme of damnation
as swallowing, resurrection as regurgitation, on a refectory (!) wall is striking. In the
narthex of the monastery of Docheiariou, also on Mount Athos, there is an equally
detailed sixteenth-century resurrection scene in which dozens of animals, birds, and
fish regurgitate parts with the heads outward, while a few skeletal yet whole figures
break out from the earth. In the flood of hell, bodies are devoured headfirst (i.e., the
feet are outward), and detached heads roll in the waves. See Millet, Monuments, vol.
1: Les Peintures, plate 247.
129. The thirteenth-century Greek and Latin psalter, known as the Hamilton
psalter (Hamilton 119 [Beckford 511], fols, 110v and 111r, illustrating Ps. 49.4), now
in Berlin, may be one of the latest examples; see Paul Wescher, ed., Beschreibendes
Verzeichnis der Miniaturen: Handschriften und Einzelblätter des Kupferstichkabi-
netts der Staatlichen Museen Berlin (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1931), pp. 25–30. I have
examined this psalter under special light and the motif of regurgitated parts is clearly
visible. The fourteenth-century fresco in Santa Maria del Casale in Brindisi appears
to me, from the photographs I have been able to consult, to depict enfleshed bodies
swimming out of the waves, bones and skulls in a cavity in the earth, and animals
rendering up parts. Other elements of the Byzantine Last Judgment are present in the
iconography, and the moment is clearly resurrection, for we see angels blowing the
final trump and rolling up the skies. See Alfredo Petrucci, Cattedrali di Puglia, 2d
ed. (Rome: Carlo Bestetti, 1964), pp. 113, 115, 117, and plate 239.
130. Dates for the painting range from the late eleventh to the early thirteenth
century; see De Campos, “Eine unbekannte Darstellung des jüngsten Gerichts,” and
Paeseler, “Die römische Weltgerichtstafel im Vatikan.” Chiara Frugoni, “La femme
imaginée,” in Histoire des femmes en occident (Paris: Plon, 1991), pp. 371–75, argues
that the painting was commissioned by a woman and shows a woman’s sensitivity
to “sins of word.”
 196 the twelfth century

names the figures rising from the sarcophagi as the painters Nicolaus
and Johannes and states that they rise de pulvere terrae.
The motif of restored body parts turns up as far afield as Iceland in
a wood carving from Flatatunga, dated about 1070. In the surviving
fragments, a seallike creature seems to carry a head. Two fish, one with
the overshot upper jaw found in other such Last Judgments, bring a foot
and a hand for restoration. As we find in some other Western examples
(indeed in the Hortus deliciarum itself), the figure emerging from the
mouth of the devouring animal-headed throne has been reversed so that
it almost appears to be vomited up rather than eaten, but destruction is
still suggested by the fact that teeth pierce it.131
The theme of reconstituted body parts shows up, divorced from the
Byzantine iconographic program, in two thirteenth-century German
psalters, one from Würzburg, the other from Bamberg-Eichstätt. The
Bamberg-Eichstätt psalter seems to combine earlier Ottonian depic-
tions of reviving corpses with the motif of reassemblage. In the center of
the miniature, a cadaverous figure rises in a shroud, disentangles itself,
and dons the garment of glory. To either side in the bottom register
appear bodies with parts missing—something not found in Byzantine
examples—while just above them are animals who carry exactly the
bits needed for reattachment (plate 17).132 In the little-known Würzburg
example, which occurs on the other side of a folio giving prayers for the
dead, two naked figures rise from a large coffin, below which appears
a rather cheerful beast with a hand in its mouth. One of the men is
missing his arm below the elbow and the creature obligingly offers a
replacement with the cut part up for easy reassemblage. Examination
of the original manuscript reveals that the artist first painted a whole
arm and then reworked the little picture to show the beast offering a
severed part (see plate 18).133
There are, moreover, two early Apocalypse manuscripts—probably
dating from the early ninth and tenth century, respectively—in which
the motif of reassembled fragments is depicted in a fashion that may
derive from earlier models but appears unconnected to the Byzantine

131. Jónsdóttir, Last Judgement in Iceland.

132. Psalter from Bamberg-Eichstätt, MS 1903 (olim 1833), fol. 109v, Stiftsbib-
liothek, Melk (ca. 1255); Swarzenski, Die lateinischen illuminierten Handschriften,
vol. 1, p. 163, especially n. 8, and Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 284, 288, and
414.
133. Psalter and Breviary from Würzburg, MS Cim 15, fol. 204r Universitätsbib-
liothek, Munich.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 197

Last Judgment composition.134 In the earlier, Trier Apocalypse, the parts

are clearly to be understood as given up by the sea, and the presence
of three hands suggests that more than one body is being reassembled.
Art historians used to trace such motifs back to early Christian
models. They even suggested—despite the complete absence of an ico-
nography of the Last Judgment before the early eleventh century—that
Byzantine eschatological motifs had their origins in the writings of
Ephraim, or pseudo-Ephraim, the Syriac. More recent work, however,
attributes the creation of these visual themes to the posticonoclastic
East and the Carolingian-Ottonian West.135
There were, of course, occasional depictions in ancient pre-Christian
and Christian art of the dry bones of Ezekiel 37. The third-century
paintings of Dura-Europos are well known.136 Moreover, certain natu-
ral symbols on sarcophagi (for example, the cock, the egg, the tree, the
eagle, the phoenix) may indeed have been symbols of resurrection, as
art historians used to assert. But it is very difficult to be sure what an
isolated and probably allegorical figure on a sarcophagus means. And it
is clear from the work of Schrade, Dobschütz, Brenk, and others that
depictions of the general resurrection of humankind begin to appear
only in the eighth century and only as part of other scenes (chiefly the
crucifixion and Last Judgment); the mysterious moment of the resur-
rection of Christ was not directly depicted in art before the twelfth

134. Trier Apocalypse, MS 31, fol. 67r, Stadtbibliothek Trier (ninth century);
see Richard Laufner and Peter Klein, eds., Trierer Apokalypse: Vollständige Fak-
simile-Ausgabe im Originalformat des Codex 31 der Stadtbibliothek Trier: Kom-
mentarband (Graz: Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt, 1975); James Snyder,
“The Reconstruction of an Early Christian Cycle of Illustrations for the Book of
Revelation: The Trier Apocalypse,” Vigiliae Christianae 18 (1964): 142–62; and Frag-
mentation and Redemption, pp. 284, 289, and 415. On the closely related Cambrai
Apocalypse, see Henri Omont, “Manuscrits illustrés de l’Apocalypse aux IX et X
siècles,” Bulletin de la Société de Reproductions de Manuscrits à Peintures 6 (1922):
62–64, 84–86, 93–94 and plate 31.
135. See Voss, Das jüngste Gericht; Gillen, Ikonographische Studien zum Hortus
deliciarum, p. 19; Paeseler, “Die römische Weltgerichtstafel im Vatikan”; Brenk, “Die
Anfänge”; and idem, Tradition und Neuerung. On the theme in Ephraim, see above
chapter 2, nn. 59–63.
136. See Brenk, “Auferstehung der Toten,” cols. 219–220; E. von Dobschütz, “Die
Vision des Ezekiel (cap. 37) auf einer byzantischen Elfenbeinplatte,” Repertorium für
Kunstwissenschaft, ed. H. Thode and H. von Tschudi (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1903;
reprint, 1968), pp. 382–88; and see the miniature of Gregory Nazianzus preaching
on Ezekiel’s vision of the bones in MS BN Gr. 510, fol. 438v, reproduced in Henri
Omont, Facsimiles des miniatures des plus anciens manuscrits grecs de la Biblio-
thèque Nationale du VIe au XIe siècle (Mss. Supplement grec 1286; Grecs 139 et 510;
Coislin 79; Supplement grec 247) (Paris: Leroux, 1902), plate 58.
 198 the twelfth century

century.137 Iconographic evidence strongly supports the sense we derive

from scholastic debates and contemporary devotional and exegetical
writing that the eleventh and twelfth centuries forged from earlier
materials a strikingly materialist conception of the fate of humankind
at the end of time.
Pictures of the devouring mouth of hell and the resurrection of eaten
hands and feet, schoolroom debates over the destiny of cannibalized
flesh, prayerful pleas to God to raise up the ordinary worshiper when
he calls to himself the bodies of his saints—all this evidence suggests
that partition, decay, and digestion were the most fearful destruction
twelfth-century writers could imagine. “Death” (mors) was named
from “bite” (morsus), as Honorius pointed out. The noun for place or
container of burial (sarcophagus) meant “to eat” “flesh”—or so the lit-
urgists John Beleth and Sicard of Cremona asserted.138 Small wonder
then that the defeat of death was depicted as a whale casting up its
swallowed (but not digested) victim, a bird returning a stolen arm that
is still an arm to its previous body, a victorious Son of God leading
souls out from the mouth (literally the mouth) of hell to await clothing
by their bodies when the trumpet sounds.
The scholastic, monastic, and iconographic representations of death
and redemption discussed in this chapter and the previous one were in
many ways very different. Schoolmen focused on issues of identity and
integrity and stressed resurrection as reassemblage both of body and of
person; monks and nuns focused more on affective growth and empha-
sized the resurrection of the spirit from sin; visual artists stressed bones
and bodies and depicted revivification and judgment at the end of time.
But behind these specific emphases lay a common fear—the fear of cor-
ruption, physical as well as moral. Thus the Benedictine author Peter
of Celle, when he writes metaphorically of the power of prayer to defeat
death, gives a description so specific and graphic it seems almost a gloss
137. Schrade, Ikonographie, vol. 1: Die Auferstehung; Brenk, “Die Anfänge”;
idem, Tradition und Neuerung; and the works cited in n. 136 above. The panel on
the Clonmacnois cross that I take to depict the moment of resurrection (see n. 116
above) is not, to my knowledge, found on the continent.
138. See chapter 3, n. 102, above, and Johannes Beleth, Summa de ecclesiasticis
officiis, ed. H. Douteil, CCCM 41 and 41A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), chap. 159, vol.
2, p. 305: “Sarcophagus dicitur a sarcos, quod est caro, et phagin, quod est comedere,
quia ibi consumitur caro.” See below chapter 5, n. 4. The idea is repeated by Sicard in
his Mitrale, bk. 9, chap. 50, PL 213 (Paris, 1855), col. 429. The etymology comes from
Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, bk. 15, chap. 11, paragr. 2, ed. José Reta, Etimologías:
Edicion Bilingüe, vol. 2 (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1983), p. 250. For
the connection between hell and digestion, especially in the early modern period, see
Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, chapters 12 and 13.
 Psychosomatic Persons and Reclothed Skeletons 199

on the iconography of the harrowing of hell. I close this chapter with

Peter’s words, for they sum up many of its themes:

That the Lord may take us out of the belly of this whale, let us pres-
ent ourselves . . . in confession, so that He who pierces its jaw with a
ring may free us from eternal death. The divinity which lay hidden in
Jesus’ flesh shattered the molars in death’s mouth, when it rashly bit
at the flesh of the Word. Even if it bites us like a snake or a horned
serpent, if we have the horns of the cross in our hands . . . then all that
horrible armor described in Job will be destroyed. . . . For there are
remedies which alleviate death. . . . Death is afraid of the power of the
cross. . . . It remembers that true confession and penitence have force-
fully extricated countless souls from its womb and hellish belly. . . .
Let us ball up all [our prayers] into lumps to burst the innards of the
devil, of death, and of hell, and with Daniel let us throw them into
the mouth of the dragon.139

In such powerful language, the belly of death—metaphorical though it

is—is no “mere metaphor.” To be regurgitated is to be saved. The threat
is sin and death, evil and putrefaction, process itself.
139. Peter of Celle, Tractatus de disciplina claustrali, chap. 23, PL 202 (Paris,
1855), cols. 1132–33; trans. Hugh Feiss, Peter of Celle, pp. 112–13. And see above,
chapter 3, n. 102.
 Five
Resurrection, Heresy, and
Burial ad Sanctos:
The Twelfth-Century Context

in the late fourth and early fifth centuries when Gregory

of Nyssa, Jerome, and Augustine wrote of resurrection,
ascetic notions of bodily discipline and the growing popu-
larity of the cult of relics suggested that body expressed
self. The controlled, lightened, and hardened bodies of
hermits and holy virgins were understood to move during life toward
the subtlety and impassibility they would have in paradise. Yet, after
death, they would rest in the earth until the sound of the trumpet. Puri-
fied already and hinting therefore at the glory to come, the bodies of
the saints were a locus where divine power could be encountered and
received. The resurrection body of which the Cappadocians and Augus-
tine spoke was the body of the saint, which would rise in all its indi-
viduality because it had begun to be a relic while still alive.
The raised and glorified body of which monks, nuns, poets, and
schoolmen spoke in the twelfth century was described in words bor-
rowed from Jerome and Augustine. As in the fifth century so in the
twelfth, the resurrection body was the body of the saint. What twelfth-
century theologians, artists, and spiritual writers envisioned when they
thought of selves in heaven were the reliquaries that glowed in cathedral
treasuries and the holy people whose sanctity shone through the bodies

1. The phrase is Guerric of Igny’s; see above, chapter 4 at n. 57.

 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 201

“of ivory” they wore on earth.1 The context of twelfth-century eschatol-

ogy was relic cult and asceticism, because both ascetic and relic were
understood to express victory over the rot and fragmentation we live in
(as Herman of Reun said) from birth to the grave, from womb to tomb.2
But much had changed between the fifth and the twelfth centuries.
For by the twelfth century the faithful were enthusiastically fragment-
ing bodies for burial, confident that each jewellike part was its own
victory over corruption. In the miracle stories told in the years around
1200, bodies—living and dead—began to behave on earth as if they
were already glorified in heaven. Twelfth-century ideas of resurrection
reflected, rejected, and answered contemporary burial and cultic prac-
tices, just as rabbinic and early Christian notions responded to and tri-
umphed over persecution of the martyrs and violation of their bones.
But by 1200 the fragmentation over which resurrection triumphed was
practiced by pious Christians on their own dead.

Fragmentation and Burial Practices

The culture of ancient Rome had possessed strong taboos against vio-
lating tombs, burying close to human habitation, moving or dividing
corpses—taboos that were overcome only over the course of hundreds of
years. But by the twelfth century, the practice of dividing and distributing
bodies in burial was widespread.3 Although major liturgical manuals of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries insisted that it is logically impossible
for one body to be buried in two places, this is exactly what happened.4
The bodies of the saints were divided up to provide relics.5 Division
of the saints resulted not merely (as it had in antiquity) from the kinds
2. See above, chapter 4, nn. 43, 66, and 67.
3. R. Naz, “Cimetière,” Dictionnaire de droit canonique (Paris: Letouzey et Ané,
1935–65), vol. 3A, cols. 729–41; Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death, pp. 14–18;
idem, The Hour of Our Death, pp. 27–92.
4. See Johannes Beleth, Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis, ed. H. Douteil, chaps.
159–61, vol. 2, pp. 303–19 (probably written shortly after 1165), part of which is bor-
rowed almost verbatim about 1200 by Sicard of Cremona in book 9, chapter 50, of his
Mitrale and in the thirteenth century by William Durand in book 1 of his Rationale.
See Sicard, Mitrale, bk. 9, chap. 50, PL 213 (Paris, 1855), cols. 424–30, and J. Mason
Neale and Benjamin Webb, Du Symbolisme dans les églises du moyen âge, trans. M.
V. O. and ed. J. Bourasse (Tours: Mame, 1847), pp. 352–60. These theologians insisted
therefore that the person was buried where his or her head was buried; see Beleth,
Summa, chap. 159, vol. 2, p. 304: “Religiosus dicitur secundum leges et instituta
Romanorum omnis locus, in quo sepelitur corpus hominis siue caput tantum. Caput
ideo dico, quia nullus homo potest habere duas sepulturas, sed ubi caput, ibi dicitur
esse sepultura eius.” And see Sicard, Mitrale, col. 428.
5. On the spread of relic cult, see P. Sejourné, “Reliques,” cols. 2330–65; Hermann-
Mascard, Les Reliques des saints; Geary, Furta Sacra, pp. 152–54; Petersen, Dialogues
 202 the twelfth century

of execution martyrs suffered at the hands of their tormentors or from

the natural dissolution cadavers undergo during long years in the tomb;
division was now also deliberately practiced immediately after death.
Holy bodies were cut up so that parts could be given to religious com-
munities that wished to share in the saint’s power and presence. Cadav-
ers were eviscerated, then boiled to remove the flesh, so that bones were
more quickly available for distribution.
The shape of the containers in which these parts were kept began
to change. Most reliquaries from the early Middle Ages were gorgeous
caskets, often of gold and jewels and sometimes made in the shape of
churches. Such vessels both in their form and in their material divert
attention from the precise nature of the broken and decaying fragments
within and symbolically associate them with Christ’s assembled body,
the church. After 1150, however, what German historians call expres-
sive or “speaking” reliquaries became popular—reliquaries (shaped like
fingers, feet, ribs, heads, etc.) that indicate by their form the nature of
the fragment. In the twelfth century, such containers were still sheaths
of gold and jewels, which revealed fragmentation but masked decay (see
plates 19 and 20).6 By the thirteenth century, they began to contain win-
dows of crystal through which shards of tibia or bits of finger could be
viewed. The same period saw the emergence of ostensoria—containers,

of Gregory the Great, pp. 140–50; Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Death and the Human
Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of
the Corpse,” Viator 12 (1981): 221–70, esp. pp. 223–24; and Wilson, “Introduction,”
in Saints and Their Cults, pp. 9–11. For the argument that German attitudes toward
relics differed in important ways from the Western European relic cult, see Rothkrug,
“German Holiness and Western Sanctity.”
6. On the reliquary from Osnabrück shown in plate 20, see Joseph Braun, Die
Reliquiare des christlichen Kultes und ihre Entwicklung (Freiburg: Herder, 1940),
plate 119, number 445, and p. 389, and Walter Boschers, Der Osnabrücker Doms-
chatz (Osnabrück: Kommissionsverlag H. Th. Wenner, 1974), p. 46, plate 34. On such
reliquaries generally, see Braun, Die Reliquiare, part 3, chap. 7, pp. 38off., and plates
117–26, numbers 434–81; Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle
Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. M. Bartusis and
R. Meyer (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1990), pp. 203–13; Erich Meyer,
“Reliquie und Reliquiar im Mittelalter,” in Eine Gabe der Freunde für Carl Georg
Heise zum 28. IV. 1950, ed. E. Meyer (Berlin: G. Mann, 1950), pp. 55–66; and Bynum,
Fragmentation and Redemption, plates 7.2–7.4. As Stephen Wilson has pointed out,
the Middle Ages saw the proliferation of ex-votos made in the shape of body parts.
The relationship of these to “speaking” reliquaries needs study. It seems clear, how-
ever, that the ex-voto (the object shaped like a body part and offered to the saint who
has healed it) represents both the illness and the cure. It stands for the specific part
and the healed, whole person who offers the gift in thanksgiving. See Wilson, “Intro-
duction,” in Saints and Their Cults, pp. 21–22.
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 203

parallel to and sometimes identical with eucharistic monstrances, that

were made especially for displaying bits of holy bodies or even the flu-
ids they produced before or in death (see plate 21).7
Enthusiasm for bodily partition affected not just the saints. By 1200,
especially north of the Alps, the bodies of prominent ecclesiastics or
nobles were often eviscerated, boned, or boiled after death, and the
resulting parts were buried in several places near several saints. (The
practice was known as the mos teutonicus.) Between 1151 and 1573,
the cloister of Ebrach in Oberfranken, for example, held the hearts of
thirty-three deceased bishops of Würzburg while their bones rested in the
church and their intestines in the castle chapel. A collegiate church in
Magdeburg had a special “tripe chapel,” where the bowels of the canons
were buried.8
The anonymous, ordinary dead were also disturbed and divided. As
the practice of reusing graves became more common, the charnel house
or ossuary (carnarium) developed to provide a resting place for the bones
and skulls that inevitably floated to the surface when older graves were
reopened. Our first reference to a charnel house comes from the 1160s;
by the thirteenth century, councils in Germany required churches to pro-
vide for ossuaries in burial grounds.9 In the later Middle Ages, chapels
were sometimes decorated with bones from the bonehouse; the walls of
the so-called Golden Chamber at St. Ursula’s in Cologne are covered with
geometrical designs and inscriptions made from gilded tibias, fibulas,
7. Braun, Die Reliquiare, pt. 3, chap. 6, pp. 301–78, and plates 88–117, numbers
291–435; and Meyer, “Reliquie und Reliquiar,” pp. 61ff.
8. On Würzburg and Magdeburg, see Johannes Schweizer, Kirchhof und Fried-
hof: Eine Darstellung der beiden Haupttypen europäischer Begräbnisstätten (Linz:
Oberösterreichischer Landesverlag, 1956), p. 50.
9. In general, see Boase, Death in the Middle Ages, which has disappointingly
little on cemeteries and the actual practice of burial; Henri Leclercq, “Cimetière,”
DACL, vol. 3 (1919), cols. 1625–65, especially 1625–30; R. C. Finucane, “Sacred
Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages,”
in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Whaley, pp.
40–60; E. Brown, “Authority, Family, and the Dead”; eadem, “Death and the Human
Body,” pp. 221–70; and Schweizer, Kirchhof und Friedhof. Information on the devel-
opment of the charnel house is surprisingly difficult to find. See Donald Bullough,
“Burial, Community, and Belief in the Early Medieval West,” in Ideal and Reality
in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill,
ed. P. Wormald (Oxford, 1983), pp. 177–201; Ariès, Hour of Our Death, pp. 40–62,
which is somewhat misleading; Friedrich Zoepfl, “Beinhaus,” in Reallexikon zur
deutschen Kunstgeschichte, ed. O. Schmitt (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1937ff.), vol.
2, cols. 204–14; Camille Enlart, Manuel d’archéologie française depuis les temps
merovigiens jusqu’à la renaissance, pt. 1, vol. 2, 3d ed. (Paris: Picard, 1929), pp.
909–17; and Warwick Rodwell, The Archaeology of the English Church: The Study
of Historic Churches and Churchyards (London: B. T. Batsford, 1981), pp. 131–61.
 204 the twelfth century

and skulls. Ossuaries were sometimes located within churches in such

a position that the bones could watch the liturgy being celebrated. A
few late medieval paintings even depict the bones (usually said, in these
cases, to represent the “poor souls” in purgatory) attending mass.10
Much about the development of the charnel house is obscure.11 But
it surely responded to both a new sense that bodies could be moved and
a new insistence on the burial of all Christians in consecrated ground.
The fact that our earliest texts for blessing or consecrating cemeteries
come from the tenth century suggests that the practice is of Carolingian
origins. Once consecrated ground was clearly set off as the only accept-
able place for interment, pressure for reusing this very small area (some
limited it to thirty feet around the church) greatly increased.12 Donald
Bullough has recently argued that the Carolingian period saw both a
weakening of taboos on tomb violation and a growing tendency for ordi-
nary folk to be buried adjacent to churches, crowded into the porch or
atrium (from which the French word for cemetery—aître—comes).13 By
the twelfth century, it is clear that burial outside consecrated ground
usually marked one as a sinner or a nonperson. Honorius in his Elu-
cidarium and John Beleth in his treatise on the liturgy (probably writ-
ten shortly after 1165) related moral and worldly status closely to place
of burial. Beleth even suggested that when women die in childbirth, the
fetuses—which had not been and could not be baptized—should be cut
out of their bodies and buried outside the graveyard.14 Christian bones
therefore—even in reburial—had to be preserved in consecrated build-
ings. Following Augustine, Beleth and Honorius both protest that God
does not really care where our remains are buried, but both mention
that demons might attack unprotected (or evil) bones and scatter them
far from the saints.15
The disturbing, dividing, and distributing of body parts practiced
so enthusiastically in the twelfth century was an indication—not a

10. Philipp Maria Halm, “Armeseelen,” Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstge-

schichte, vol. 1, col. 1084–88.
11. Zoepfl, “Beinhaus.”
12. Beleth, Summa, chap. 159, ed. Douteil, vol. 2, p. 306.
13. Bullough, “Burial, Community, and Belief,” pp. 177–201; Ariès, Western Atti-
tudes Toward Death, pp. 18–22.
14. Beleth, Summa, chap. 159, vol. 2, p. 309, and Sicard, Mitrale, bk. 9, chap. 50,
PL 213, col. 430; see also A. Bernard, La Sépulture en droit canonique du décret de
Gratien au Concile de Trent (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1933), pp. 134–35, and
Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion,” p. 55.
15. Beleth, Summa, chaps. 159–61, vol. 2, pp. 303–19, especially pp. 307 and 318–
19. See also Ariès, Hour of Our Death, p. 41–42.
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 205

denial—that body is integral to person. The heart of a king or the finger

of a holy virgin made the earth where he or she resided fertile with
saintly or royal power. When monks and canons squabbled over the
relics of saints or the entrails of kings and cardinals, they were fighting
for possession of more than the revenues associated with masses for the
dead. The greater the number of parts and places in which noble or holy
figures rested after death, the more far-flung their presence.16
But precisely because bones and entrails were integral to person, the
practice of bodily partition was fraught with ambivalence, controversy,
and profound inconsistency. The practice of dividing royal corpses
(although accepted in Germany since the tenth century as having ritual
significance) was still characterized by anxiety in twelfth-century Eng-
land and France. When Henry I died in Normandy in 1135, his body
was disembowelled for hygienic reasons and his viscera presented to a
nunnery he had founded; chronicle accounts disapproved, however, of
the act, remarking that one of his attendants died from contact with the
decaying remains. The historian Roger of Wendover suggests that Rich-
ard I’s grant of his entrails to the abbey of Charroux was taken as a sign
of disdain rather than a benefit.17 In the mid-thirteenth century, when
Blanche of Castile directed that her body be divided, it was first bur-
ied intact; only three and a half months after her death did the abbess
to whose convent she had bequeathed her heart succeed in getting it.
When Louis IX’s son Pierre d’Alençon decreed that his body be split up
for burial, he spoke (as Elizabeth Brown has recently reminded us) of his
“filthy flesh” and “evil heart.”18 Such stories suggest both that parti-
tion is acceptable and that it is offensive, that body is both a locus of
16. See Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 270; Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Pro-
fane Carrion”; and Boase, Death in the Middle Ages, p. 197 and plate 85.
17. Elizabeth M. Hallam, “Royal Burial and the Cult of Kingship in France and
England, 1060–1330,” Journal of Medieval History 8, no. 4 (1982): 359–80. A parallel
Irish case is worth noting. After the assassination of Hugh de Lacy by decapitation,
his body was removed in 1195 to the monastery of Bective in Meath, but his head
was deposited (then or earlier) in St. Thomas’s, Dublin. The two monasteries engaged
in lengthy litigation (resolved in 1205 in favor of St. Thomas’s) for possession of the
complete remains. It is significant that two things were at stake: the possession of
a reassembled cadaver rather than its partition between two houses and the fate of
certain lands that had been bestowed on Bective along with the body. See A. B. Scott
and F. X. Martin, notes to Expurgatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland by Gerald
of Wales, ed. Scott and Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), p. 354 n. 480;
Goddard Henry Orpen, Ireland Under the Normans, 1169–1333, (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1911–20), vol. 2, p. 70; Register of the Abbey of St. Thomas, Dublin, ed. John
T. Gilbert, Rolls Series 94 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889), pp. 348–50.
18. E. Brown, “Authority, Family, and the Dead,” pp. 810–11. I am also indebted
to an unpublished paper by Edward Peters, “Courtly Death” (1986).
 206 the twelfth century

putrefaction and a locus of self. If disemboweling or division of impor-

tant bodies is necessary—either because corpses have to be transported
over long distances or because their economic, political, and religious
power has to be distributed and shared—the full horror and insult of
decay must be denied in rituals and texts that present bodily division
as fragmentation without alteration.19
Even the saints sometimes opposed their own fragmentation. When
fragmented, they sometimes reassembled themselves or remained
incorrupt in their parts.20 Accounts of translations and discoveries of
relics from eleventh- and twelfth-century England, for example, stress
the wholeness of holy cadavers. The martyred king St. Edmund (d. 870),
pierced by arrows and beheaded, was first found in his coffin with no
trace of the attack except for a thin red line around his neck. Audacious
and unwise tests of the body during an early translation found that the
head could not be pulled from the torso, although the presumptuous
perpetrator of the tests was punished; later investigation of the body
revealed that all the toes were still on the feet. By the late twelfth
century, abbot Samson—remembering earlier events—limited his own
tests to feeling the body through the shroud. A twelfth-century account
of the translation of St. Etheldreda, based on Bede, stresses that the
saint was incorrupt after sixteen years and that a tumor on her neck had
healed; enhancing the motif of wholeness, the twelfth-century account
adds that the sarcophagus itself became intact, so that no gap or seam
could be found in it.21

19. Outside of the high aristocracy in Germany, real confidence in bodily partition
did not develop until the thirteenth century; even in the fourteenth, it was not very
popular in Italy; see Schweizer, Kirchhof und Friedhof, pp. 50–52, and below, p. 323.
20. On incorruption, see Herbert Thurston, The Physical Phenomena of Mys-
ticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), pp. 233–82, esp. pp. 246–52; Michel Bou-
vier, “De l’incorruptibilité des corps saints,” in Les Miracles, miroirs des corps, ed.
Jacques Gélis and Odile Redon (Paris: Presses et Publications de l’Université de Paris-
VIII, 1983), pp. 193–221; and the works cited in my “Bodily Miracles,” p. 89 n. 17. A
related issue concerning incorruptibility is the incorruptibility of the bodies of great
sinners; see Ariès, Hour of Our Death, p. 360, and Thomas, Le cadavre, pp. 39–44
and 199, who, however, underestimates the positive value given to incorruptibility
in the Western Middle Ages. Thus it is to the bodies of great saints (Jesus, Mary, and
John the Evangelist) and great sinners that the earth is reported to refuse the normal
process of decay. A particularly good example of the ambivalence that must underlie
such stories is Guibert of Nogent, who argues in the De pignoribus that decay is hor-
rible and should not therefore be allowed to touch the bodies of Christ and Mary; on
the other hand, it is return to “mother earth” and should not be inhibited by elabo-
rate coffins. See especially De pignoribus, bk. 1, chaps. 3 and 4, PL 156 (Paris, 1853),
cols. 623–30. On Guibert see also Mireux, “Guibert de Nogent et la critique du culte
des relics.” And see above chapter 4, nn. 48, 51, and 52, on the Bodily Assumption.
21. For the St. Edmund story, see Abbo of Fleury, Life of St. Edmund, in Three
Lives of English Saints, ed. Michael Winterbottom (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 207

The Dialogue on Miracles, written in the early thirteenth century by

the continental Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach, contains a number
of stories of relics resisting division (although it recounts as well cases
of bones inviting disturbance). Caesarius also reports cases of bones
that sort themselves out so that false relics are eliminated.22 Fifty
years after Caesarius, the learned and saintly bishop of Lincoln Robert
Grosseteste seems to have forbidden the deathbed division of his own
corpse.23 Accounts of the Flemish holy woman Mary of Oignies, a con-
temporary of Caesarius, show the full range of ambivalence about parti-
tion. According to her hagiographers Thomas of Cantimpré and James
of Vitry (who were themselves anxious to possess pieces of her body
after her death), Mary fragmented herself while alive by pulling out a
large hunk of her hair to use as a device to cure the sick.24 After her

Mediaeval Studies, 1972), pp. 82–87; Memorials of St. Edmund’s Abbey, ed. Thomas
Arnold, Rolls Series 96 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1890–96), vol. 1, pp. 53–54
and 133–34; Jocelin of Brakelond, The Chronicle . . ., ed. and trans. H. E. Butler (Lon-
don: Nelson, 1951), pp. 111–15 (Jocelin’s account is from about 1200); and Ronald
C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Totowa,
N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), pp. 27–28. For Etheldreda, see Liber Eliensis, ed.
E. O. Blake, Camden, 3d series 92 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1962), pp. 45, a
mid-twelfth-century account adapted from Bede. These two examples are discussed
in Monika Otter, “Inventiones: Spatial Metaphors and Narrative Self-Awareness in
Medieval Historical Writing” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991), pp. 88–92,
which provides a complex and sensitive analysis of motifs of discovery and whole-
ness in such accounts. Twelfth-century inventiones in England still show a prefer-
ence for finding whole bodies, although there were body parts and part reliquaries
around. See ibid., p. 140; Otto Lehmann-Brockhaus, Lateinische Schriftquellen zur
Kunst in England, Wales, und Schottland vom Jahre 901 bis zum Jahre 1307 (Munich:
Pestelverlag, 1955–60); and Denis Bethell, “The Making of a Twelfth-Century Relic
Collection,” Studies in Church History 8 (1972): 61–72. It is important to note that
this stress on wholeness was not a distaste for the body per se; on the enthusiasm for
touching holy bodies that could go along with fear of testing or dismantling them,
see Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion,” p. 53.
22. Caesarius, Dialogus, ed. J. Strange, dist. 8, chaps. 53 and 60, vol. 2, pp. 125–26
and 133, for resisting division; ibid., dist. 8, chap. 88, vol. 2, p. 155–56, for bones
sorting themselves into true and false relics; ibid., dist. 8, chaps. 85–87, vol. 2, pp.
151–55, for bones that invite disturbance. Guibert of Nogent in his De pignoribus
tells several earlier tales (including the story of St. Edmund), which are intended to
indicate that relics do not wish to be dismembered (see De pignoribus, bk. 1, chap. 4,
PL 156, cols. 626–30). E. Brown points out that Godfrey of Fontaines, arguing in 1291
against division of bodies, admits that Edmund of Pontigny commanded his heart to
be buried apart from his body (“Death and the Human Body,” p. 243). But Godfrey
says people were “horrified” when the monks severed the arm from the corpse and
asserts that Edmund’s body was miraculously preserved. For late thirteenth-century
debates over bodily partition, see below, chapter 8.
23. See E. Brown, “Death and the Human Body,” pp. 227 and 243.
24. Thomas of Cantimpré, Supplementum [to the Life of Mary of Oignies], chap.
1, paragr. 6–7, Acta Sanctorum, 3d ed., ed. J. Bollandus and G. Henschenius, June,
vol. 5 (Paris: Palmé, 1867), pp. 574–75. On Mary, see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy
 208 the twelfth century

death the hairs continued to effect cures, and on one occasion “came
alive” for a whole hour.25 Mary herself nonetheless castigated the prior
of Oignies for “cruelly” extracting the teeth of a holy cadaver, and after
her own death she supposedly clenched her teeth when the same prior
tried to extract them as relics. When he humbly asked her pardon, how-
ever, she shook out a few teeth from her jaw for his use.26
Triumph over partition or putrefaction was sometimes understood
per se as an expression of sanctity. Caesarius tells of a robber who was
revered as a saint after his death simply because his body was seen in a
vision as reassembled.27 In folktales and vernacular hagiography, saints
were frequently said to effect miracles of healing or of temporary resur-
rection of corpses, but they sometimes reassembled cadavers without
bothering to reanimate them.28 In a twelfth-century life of St. Barbara,
for example, a decapitated head asks a priest for communion and is
reunited with its body through the power of the saint although both
parts remain lifeless.29 The popular story of a leg transplant performed
by the physician saints Cosmas and Damian changes in its medieval
retelling to emphasize not only the grafting of a black leg onto a sick
white man but also the attaching of the gangrenous white leg to the
corpse of the Moor from whom the original graft had been taken. There
are even miracle stories in which dismembered parts survive incorrupt
while remaining dismembered. According to later legend, the little fin-
ger of the tenth-century saint Adalbert of Prague, which was swallowed
by a fish, survived and shone like a candle in the fish’s belly.30

Fast, pp. 115–24, and Laura Dushkes, “Illness and Healing in the Vitae of Mary of
Oignies” (M.A. Thesis, University of Washington, 1988).
25. Thomas, Supplementum, chap. 1, paragr. 7, p. 575.
26. Ibid., chap. 3, paragr. 14, p. 577. For a miracle worked by Mary’s finger, see
ibid., chap. 3, paragrs. 15–17, pp. 577–78.
27. Caesarius, Dialogus, dist. 7, chap. 58, vol. 2, pp. 76–79. In the vision, five
matrons appeared at night, fitted his head back on his shoulders, and laid him out
whole on a sumptuous bier.
28. It is important to note that medieval authors sometimes poked fun at such
“resurrections.” Accounts of the resurrection of donkeys in the Miracles of Saint
Faith, for example, may be tongue-in-cheek. Walter Map produced a series of what
Otter calls “uncharitable and sometimes off-color” jokes, including an account of an
unsuccessful miracle attempt by Bernard of Clairvaux, in which Walter points out
that boys do usually “rise up” when monks lie down upon them. See Monika Otter,
“Inventiones,” pp. 254–57. And see n. 84 below.
29. See Brigitte Cazelles, Le Corps de sainteté d’après Jehan Bouche d’Or, Jehan
Paulus, et quelques vies des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Geneva: Droz, 1982), pp. 55–56.
30. Judith-Danielle Jacquet, “Le Miracle de la jambe noire,” in Gélis and Redon,
eds., Les Miracles, miroirs, pp. 23–52. For other examples of miracles of restoration,
see C. Grant Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian
Legend (Cambridge, Mass.: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1948), pp. 82–86.
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 209

The intactness of fragments was a theme in art as well. The very reli-
quaries that announced fragmentation clothed the parts they displayed
in crystal and gold. For example, the reliquary of Thomas Becket from
1175–1780, which contains the blood of the saint and bears on its roof
a large red stone, both manifests what it contains and in the precise
nature of the manifestation hardens the fluid into crystalline perma-
nence (see plate 22).31 The shining stone—not a priceless ruby at all
but simply glass and foil assembled to present sparkling yet frozen red-
ness—signals the blood but in heavenly form.32 Even the arm, rib, and
head reliquaries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries deny putre-
faction by covering the bits they contain in gold and crystal sheathing
while simultaneously displaying in their shapes and transparency the
body’s partition. Thus artists as well as canon lawyers and theologians
were concerned to guard against not the expressionism involved in relic
display, or a sense of familiarity with the bodies of the saints, but rather
an association of the body bits with those biological processes that sig-
nal decay or decomposition. When the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215
legislated against “naked” display of relics for money, their disapproval
may have been directed against more than simply the threat of theft
offered by the unprotected showing of such precious possessions.33
Ellert Dahl, who has written so knowledgeably about these reliquar-
ies, emphasizes that medieval theologians were careful to see them as
memoria of the saints, reminders of the glorified bodies we will receive
in heaven.34 Abbot Suger, for example, distinguished the “sacred bones”
of the martyrs at St. Denis—covered “with the most precious metal
we possibly can [find], with refined gold and a profusion of hyacinths,
emeralds, and other precious stones”—from their “venerable spirits,

Some of these miracles are stories of regurgitation of undigested parts: for example,
an eye is swallowed by a bird, disgorged, and reattached (ibid., p. 84). For the finger
of Adalbert, see ibid., p. 70; and Miracula sancti Adalberti martiris, chap. 1, PL 137
(Paris, 1853), col. 889.
31. See English Romanesque Art, 1066–1200, Hayward Gallery, London, 5
April–8 July, 1984, ed. George Zarnecki, Janet Holt, and Tristram Holland, Catalogue
published in association with the Arts Council of Great Britain (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1984), p. 282.
32. Cf. the words of Victricius of Rouen almost 800 years before; see chapter 2,
n. 178.
33. See Hermann-Mascard, Les Reliques des saints, pp. 212–17; Pierre Duparc,
“Dilaceratio corporis,” Bulletin de la Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France
1980–1981 (Paris: Boccard, 1981), pp. 360–72; and my “Bodily Miracles,” p. 81. On
expressive reliquaries, see nn. 6 and 7 above.
34. Ellert Dahl, “Heavenly Images: The Statue of St. Foy of Conques and the
Signification of the Medieval Cult-Image in the West,” Acta ad archaeologiam et
Artium historiam pertinentia 8 (Rome 1979): 175–92, esp. p. 186.
 210 the twelfth century

radiant as the sun.”35 Hagiographers, however, frequently spoke as if

the bodies and bones of the saints were already jewels, in life and in
death as they would be in resurrection.
Walter Daniel wrote that Aelred of Rievaulx shone like a sun while
still a baby in the cradle; in death his flesh was “clearer than glass,
whiter than snow,” shining “like a carbuncle.” Peter Damian described
Saint Romuald as, on earth, “a neglected pearl of heaven”; thus, in
death, he “shines ineffably among the living stones of the celestial
Jerusalem.”36 James of Vitry reported that after the death of Mary of
Oignies, her body appeared in a dream “as if transformed into a very
brilliant precious stone.”37
To some, the association of spirit and bone was closer still. Theo-
dore of Echternach wrote (about 1104) that “those who reign as kings
in heaven should be gloriously housed on earth.” He even argued that
the bodies of the saints, which were dominated by the spirit already in
life, were ipso facto resistant to worms and decay after death. The unity
of body and soul, lost in paradise because of sin, is (says Theodore)
restored in the saints by asceticism. Hence body, subject “by nature”
to decay, can by grace and merit remain incorrupt and repel the attacks
of rot and worm.

No substance of flesh is more noble than the flesh of the saints, for
the more it is subject to the spirit the more it is free and glorious in
the very resolution of corruption. It is born to labor and misery, but in
death it is born to peace and glory. To glory it is born, I say, although
what is conceived and engendered from the worm is eaten by worms,
and dust reverts to dust. . . . [B]ut it is one thing from nature and
another from grace and merit. From nature it is putrid and corrupt-
ible, but from grace and merits it remains for a long time without rot
even contrary to nature, and it repels the greedy worms. . . . [F]or he
who puts away from himself worms (that is, nasty thoughts) will not
be sweet to the worm. . . . Sanctified flesh, through nature clothed
with rottenness . . . (Job 12.5) . . . rises again from the dust through
grace and merit. . . . And this is greatly to be marveled at, for it feeds

35. Dahl, “Heavenly Images,” p. 184.

36. Walteri Danielis Vita Ailredi abbatis Rievall, trans. F. M. Powicke (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 22–23, 50–51, 52–54, 62–63, and 71, quoted
passage at pp. 62–63; cited in Dahl, p. 186. And Peter Damian, Life of St. Romuald,
chap. 69, PL 144 (Paris, 1853), col. 1006C, cited in Dahl, p. 184. See also p. 338 below
on Mechtild of Magdeburg’s vision of John the Evangelist’s body in heaven.
37. James of Vitry, Life of Mary of Oignies, bk. 2, chap. 12, paragr. 109, Acta
Sanctorum, June, vol. 5, p. 572.
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 211

worms yet heals men, it is putrid yet it puts off putrefaction . . . it

is crushed into ashes yet it shines among the stars of the morning.38

In the late eleventh-century account of the inventio of St. Ivo, Gos-

celin of St. Bertin states explicitly that the relic is the resurrection
body. Goscelin not only associates it with Christ’s resurrection and
with the fertility of spring, he also connects its “resuscitation” with a
new heaven and a remade earth.

His inventio took place in the year 1001 . . . on April 23. “Aprilis” or
“aperilis” is derived from “aperire,” “to open,” when the sky opens
up more brightly toward the summer sun, and the earth is enlivened
with flowers and fruit. . . . Then plants break out in bloom, birds in
song, and all things in joy over Christ’s resurrection and the day of
Easter: for it was fitting that at such a time the holy relics were dis-
covered, which shall be resurrected to heavenly glory [in aeternam
gloriam . . . resuscitari] with a new heaven and a new earth.39

Since reliquaries and texts presented the saints as perlucid and glo-
rious, incorrupt and impassible, lifted to a new heaven, it should not
really surprise us that the St. Firmin portal at Amiens, from the 1230s,
depicts the inventio of the saint’s incorrupt remains in such a way
that they appear to be rising from the tomb (see plate 23).40 Relic and
resurrection body become visually the same. Nor should we be sur-
prised to find on a reliquary bust from fourteenth-century Utrecht an
inscription that announces that “I” (which presumably means both the
skull and the saint) have been taken from the tomb and “renewed.”41
38. Theodore of Echternach, Flores epitaphii sanctorum, bk. 1, chap. 3, and bk.
2, chap. 1, PL 157 (Paris, 1854), cols. 324–26 and 337–41, quoted passage at cols.
324C–325A. See also Dahl, “Heavenly Images,” p. 184; and Guth, Guibert von
Nogent, pp. 110–27, esp. p. 117.
39. Goscelin, Life of Ivo, Acta Sanctorum, June, vol. 2, pp. 286–87; trans. Otter,
“Inventiones,” pp. 142–44. For another early example, see Rudolph’s Life of Boniface,
which reports that Boniface wished the bones of Lioba to rest next to his in the tomb
“so that they who had served God during their lifetime with equal sincerity and zeal
should await together the day of resurrection”; Elizabeth Alvida Petroff, Medieval
Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 112; see
also p. 86. And see the Life of Aethelwold cited in n. 79 below.
40. See Stephen Murray’s account in Notre Dame, Cathedral of Amiens: Cre-
ativity and the Dynamics of Change (New York: Architectural History Foundation,
forthcoming), typescript p. 47 n. 41. It is also worth noting that the contemporary
text describing this inventio uses much imagery of flowering; Acta Sanctorum, Sep-
tember, vol. 7 (Antwerp, 1760), p. 34.
41. Middeleeuwe kunst der noordelijke Nederlanden (Amsterdam, 1958), p. 229.
The inscription reads: “A(n)no D(omi)ni M CCC LXIII Decan(us) (et) cap(itu)l(u)m
s(anc)ti Saluator(is) T(ra)i(e)ctten(sis) me ex tu(m)ba p(ro)tu(n)t i(n)nouaca ex(tra)hi
 212 the twelfth century

Such renewing of the bone in the reliquary foreshadows its renewing in

heaven and suggests not only that the bone is the saint but also perhaps
that the reliquary is the relic.42
The charnel house itself—although in some sense a perpetuation of
the division and scattering of bones that inevitably accompanied the
moving of skeletons—was also a counter to such fragmentation. It gath-
ered the fragments together into a community of saints, safe (as Hono-
rius said) from molestation by demons.43 Liturgical manuals, such as
those of John Beleth and Sicard of Cremona in the twelfth century and
William Durandus in the thirteenth, stress place of burial as indicator
of moral and worldly attainment. Not only were the evil or excom-
municate to be buried outside consecrated ground; nobles and prel-
ates were allowed closer to the altar than those of lower orders.44 All
Christians were to be buried in clothing appropriate to their rank and
shod for the walk to Jerusalem; clergy were to be interred in their vest-
ments and furnished with small wooden chalices as a sign of office.45

(et) fi(eri) feceru(n)t p(er) Elya(m) Scerpsvvert aurifabru(m).” Presumably p(ro)tu(n)t is

a mistake for p(ro) tu(lerun)t. Finucane notes that a twelfth-century bishop of Paris
had himself buried with the following words pinned to his body: “I believe that . . .
on the last day of the world I shall be resurrected” (“Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion,”
p. 44 and n. 13).
42. Not only were the bodies of the saints sometimes understood to be already
the jewels of the resurrection, but the bodies of the evil could also be taken to be
already in hellfire. Megan McLaughlin discusses a fascinating ninth-century text
that refers to a soul and body condemned to the flames before the Last Judgment;
the body is subsequently discovered to have disappeared from the tomb! See Megan
McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). As Finucane puts it: “The fate of the soul
was linked to that of the corpse in all classes, not just among saints” (“Sacred Corpse,
Profane Carrion,” p. 60). Finucane also expresses this by speaking of the body’s
“function” as being a “symbol for the soul” (ibid.)—a formulation that seems to me
to limit unduly the significance of such stories as these in which the body is symbol
in a literally metonymic sense.
43. See Honorius, Elucidarium, bk. 2, questions 103–4, in ed. Lefevre, p. 164.
44. Roger E. Reynolds, “Death and Burial, in Europe,” Dictionary of the Middle
Ages, ed. J. Strayer, vol. 4, pp. 118–22, and the works cited in nn. 8 and 9 above.
Sicard of Cremona, Mitrale, bk. 9, chap. 50, PL 213, col. 427, stresses that cadavers
should be clothed secundum statum et ordinem suum, lay people in hairshirts and
ashes for penitence, clerics in the robes of their orders. Both John Beleth (Summa,
chap. 159, ed. Douteil, vol. 2, pp. 308–10) and Sicard hesitate to state categorically
that we will be clothed after the resurrection, for it is sufficient to believe “quod
in salvandis non erit infirmitas nec ulla deformitas” (Sicard, Mitrale, col. 427). But
whereas John simply gives opposing opinions, Sicard seems to lean in the direction
of concluding that we will be clothed.
45. It seems ironic that the old pagan practice of grave goods survives especially
for the clergy! On the way in which the fate of the corpse reflected the fate of the
soul, see Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion,” especially pp. 44 and 60, and
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 213

Against such a background, second burial might seem a leveling; in the

bonehouse all bones were equal, as an occasional inscription from the
later Middle Ages points out.46 Yet even in the carnarium, there was
personal, differentiated survival. Skulls were sometimes labeled with
their names—a particularly important practice in view of the insistence
by contemporary theologians that a person was buried where his or her
head was interred. The skulls of clergy were occasionally laid outside
the common heap, preserving their special status even in second burial.
Cases are recorded of cheekbones with cords attached in which knots
were tied every time a prayer was said for that particular skull.47
Religious and social practices surrounding the bodies of both the
holy and the ordinary dead thus provide a context for understanding
twelfth-century discussions of resurrection. Irenaeus and Tertullian, in
the early third century, had particularly in mind the body of the martyr
when they wrote of peaceful and triumphant reassemblage and trans-
figuration in heaven. Two centuries later, Gregory of Nyssa and Jerome
saw heaven as a glorious company of the ascetics and virgins of earth,
marked with their virtues and attainments. When Bernard, Hugh, Peter
Lombard, Hildegard, and Herrad stressed salvation as the reassembling
and reanimating of dust and bones, the restoration of every organ and
fingernail, the bestowing of crystalline hardness on every process,
motion, or desire, they were speaking of the contents of reliquaries,
entrail caskets, and charnel houses. Images of resurrection as regur-
gitation, reassemblage, and stasis reflect a new enthusiasm for bodily
partition that was made possible by the confidence in ultimate victory
over it. By the twelfth century, bodies were divided in order to bestow
their power more widely, to associate them with disparate human com-
munities; they were divided because they were crucial to, and there-
fore distributed, self. But because they were crucial, their partition was

Schweizer, Kirchhof und Friedhof, pp. 53–69, 72–74, and 79–80. For a warning against
concluding too much from the nature of grave goods, see Luc Buchet and Claude
Lorren, “Dans quelle mesure la nécropole du haut moyen âge offre-t-elle une image
fidèle de la société des vivants?” in La Mort au moyen âge: Colloque de la Société
des Historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public, 1975 (Strasbourg:
Université de Strasbourg, n.d.), pp. 27–48.
46. Schweizer, Kirchhof und Friedhof, p. 72: for example, “hie ligen bir all geleych
ritter edel arm und reich;” “so ist’s recht, da liegt der Meister bei seinem Knecht.”
Although the message is that all bones come to the same end, the bones are still
understood to be Rich and Poor, Master and Servant, etc.
47. See Schweizer, Kirchhof und Friedhof, p. 72, and Johannes Beleth, Summa,
chap. 159, ed. Douteil, vol. 2, pp. 303–10, esp. pp. 304 and 308–10, repeated by Wil-
liam Durand.
 214 the twelfth century

fraught with ambivalence. Redemption had finally to be the fulfillment

of Christ’s promise that not a hair of our heads shall perish.

Hierarchy, Heresy, and Fear of Decay

I pointed out in chapter 2 that much recent work on late antiquity has
seen an underlining of status (both moral and worldly) and of hierarchy
(especially ecclesiastical hierarchy) in the tenets of orthodox Christian-
ity. The same interpretation is found in the most recent work on the
twelfth century. For the past forty years, historians of spirituality, such
as Charles Dereine, Jean Leclercq, M.-D. Chenu, and Giles Constable,
have emphasized that the period saw not only a proliferation of new
forms of religious life but also an increasing determination to define
their differences and stake out their respective claims.48 Much atten-
tion has been paid to squabbles over revenues and rights among monks,
canons, and wandering preachers; historians have argued that the com-
peting claims of religious groups sharpened rhetoric, legal definitions,
and even self-awareness.49 In the past decade, scholars such as R. I.
Moore and Michael Camille have seen the much vaunted intellectual
flowering of the twelfth century—its new philosophical precision and
sophistication, its expanding bureaucracy, the growth of its schools and
libraries—as a drawing of boundaries that excluded and repressed. They
have interpreted the new visibility of groups such as Jews, women, and
homosexuals—and the proliferation of heresy itself—less as a flourish-
ing of divergent and dissident values than as the construction of an
“other” by an increasingly powerful clergy.50

48. See, among others, M.-D. Chenu, La théologie au douzième siècle (Paris: J.
Vrin, 1957); Charles Dereine, “Chanoines,” Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie
ecclésiastiques, vol. 12 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1953), cols. 353–405; Jean Leclercq,
“La crise du monachisme aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Bulletino dell ‘Istituto storico
italiano per il Medio Evo 70 (1958): 19–41; M.-H. Vicaire, L’Imitation des apôtres:
Moines, chanoines, mendiants (IVe–XIIe siècles) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1963);
Giles Constable, “Introduction,” in Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus
qui sunt in aecclesia, ed. G. Constable and B. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972),
pp. xi–xxvii; and the works I cite in Jesus as Mother, pp. 22–33.
49. See my “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as
Mother, pp. 82–109.
50. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in
Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); idem, “Postscript: The
Peace of God and Social Revolution,” in The Peace of God: Social Violence and
Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard
Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 308–26; and Michael Camille,
The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989). John E. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 215

There is much truth in such an argument. The twelfth century was

characterized by extraordinary concern with boundaries, definitions,
self-definitions, and classifications. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century
polemics—especially polemics against heresy—were less a quarrel with
a clearly existent “other” than a process by which groups defined them-
selves through the creation of an “other.” By 1210, as we have seen,
denial of bodily resurrection was understood to be an aberration serious
enough that people as well as books went to the flames for it. Some at
least of those who characterized and countered the beliefs of the Amau-
ricians saw their denial of literal resurrection as a denial of differenti-
ated moral attainments and of gender difference. It is worth asking, first,
how far the frenetic concern over Cathar (or dualist) and Waldensian (or
evangelical) heresy on the part of Christian leaders around 1200 was
owing to their perception (correct or not) that these groups espoused an
aberrant eschatology, and second, whether denial of hierarchy and dif-
ference was perceived as central to denial of resurrection.
The evidence we have for medieval heresy comes mostly from its
opponents and tells us therefore much more about what these opponents
feared than about what the so-called heretics taught.51 This evidence sug-
gests that until the late twelfth century persecuting clergy focused little
on denials of resurrection. The Waldensians were required at the Council
of Lyons (1180 or 81) to accept resurrection of “this flesh and no other,”
but the formula was not new; what was added was the statement that the
flesh in which Christ “truly ate and drank” was the flesh that ascends
into heaven and the affirmation that alms, masses, and other good works
are of benefit to the dead.52 By the early thirteenth century, denial of
resurrection was underlined as an element in Catharism but usually
in connection with Cathar denial of marriage, of transubstantiation, of

Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian
Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), points
out the growth of repression in the period around 1200 but also argues for a flowering
of gay culture in the twelfth century.
51. See, for example, Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Introduction, Her-
esies of the High Middle Ages: Selected Sources Translated and Annotated, ed. W.
Wakefield and A. Evans (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 1–67; Georg
Schmitz-Valckenberg, Grundlehren katharischer Sekten des 13. Jahrhunderts: Eine
theologische Untersuchung mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Adversus Catharos
et Valdenses des Moneta von Cremona (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1971), pp. 1–4.
52. Waldes of Lyons, Profession of Faith, in Antoine Dondaine, “Aux origines
du Valdéisme: Une profession de foi de Valdes,” Archivum fratrum praedicatorum
16 (1946): 231–32; trans. Wakefield and Evans, Heresies, number 32, pp. 206–8; see
discussion in ibid., pp. 204–6.
 216 the twelfth century

meat eating, and of the full humanity of Christ. Dualist (and evangeli-
cal) denial of the redemption of the physical by Christ was sometimes
construed as a denial of (and revolt against) social difference. Twelfth-
century chroniclers and preachers liked to accuse heretics of attracting
women and those of the lower orders to their followings.53 The authors
of thirteenth-century tracts against heretics pointed out that their teach-
ings implied that gender difference might vanish, either on earth (women
might celebrate the sacraments!) or in heaven (we might be unisex in our
spiritual bodies!).54 Salvo Burci in his Liber supra Stella, written about
1235, emphasized that “this flesh” rises. He accused heretics of making
everyone equal by denying resurrection. But what disturbed him was
moral equality. Heretics deny that there is any hell other than the suf-
fering of this life, he says; therefore the difference they remove is that
between reward and punishment, good and evil.55
Close reading suggests that the opponents of heresy were indeed con-
structing their own interpretation of the importance of body by project-
ing onto an “other” that which they feared and opposed. But they did
not construe heretical denial of body primarily as an undercutting of
hierarchy and gender (although this was certainly an element). Precisely
because moralists, church lawyers, and chroniclers felt so comfortable
articulating misogyny and underlining status differences, we must take
seriously the fact that their polemics against heresy concentrated on
other aspects of physicality and individuality.56 What they emphasized

53. Eleanor C. McLaughlin, “Les Femmes et l’hérésie médiévale: Un Problème

dans l’histoire de la spiritualité,” Concilium 111 (1976): 73–90. And see Bernard of
Clairvaux, Sermon 65, paragr. 4, in Opera, ed. Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, Ser-
mones super Cantica Canticorum, vol. 1 (1957), pp. 174–75.
54. See Bernard of Fontcaude, Adversus Waldensium sectam liber, chap. 8, in PL
204 (Paris, 1855), cols. 825–28; Rainerius Sacconi, Summa de Catharis et pauperibus
de Lugduno, in Antoine Dondaine, Un traite néo-manicheen du XIIIe siècle: Le
Liber du duobus principiis, suivi d’un fragment de rituel cathare (Rome: Istituto
storico domenicano, 1939), pp. 64–78, especially p. 78, trans. in Wakefield and Evans,
Heresies, number 51, chap. 28, p. 345; and Moneta of Cremona, Adversus Catha-
ros et Valdenses Libri quinque (Rome, 1743: reprint, Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press,
1964), bk. 1, chap. 2, sect. 4, p. 121, and bk. 4, chap. 7, sect. 1, p. 315.
55. Salvo Burci, Liber supra Stella, in P. Illarino da Milano, “Il ‘Liber supra Stella’
del Piacentino Salvo Burci contro i catari e altre correnti ereticali,” pt. 4: “Le dottrine
catare,” Aevum 19, nos. 3–4 (1945): 281–341; see chaps. 17–18, fols. 85vb–91rb, ed.
Illarino da Milano, pp. 319–20. See also Ign. von Döllinger, Beiträge zur Sektenge-
schichte des Mittelalters, pt. 2: Dokumente vornehmlich zur Geschichte der Vald-
esier und Katharer (Munich, 1890; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), pp. 52–85.
56. On medieval misogyny, see among others, Diane Bornstein, “Antifeminism,”
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. J. Strayer, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner, 1982),
pp. 322–35; R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western
Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and pt. 1: “Les Normes
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 217

in connection with heretical notions of eschatology was disrespect for

proper burial, denial of purgatory, and disbelief in prayers for the dead.57
Guibert of Nogent, writing about 1114 of the heretics at Soissons,
accused them of denying the difference between consecrated cemeteries
and other ground. In the early 1130s Peter the Venerable said the heretic
Peter of Bruys rejected prayers for the dead; Eberwin of Steinfeld in the
early 1140s claimed that some of the heretics at Cologne denied purga-
tory, rejected prayers and offerings for the departed, and put no reliance
in the cult of saints.58 At the end of the century, the Waldensians and
other evangelical groups were regularly attacked for denying purgatory
and intercessions for the dead.59 Cathars were said to tell “unheard-of
fables,” according to which we fall into terrestrial bodies and at death
return again to bodies of ether in heaven; they were accused therefore
of rejecting prayers for the deceased and differentiation of rewards in
heaven. According to Salvo Burci, James Capelli, and Rainier Sacconi,
all writing in the early thirteenth century, heretics held that Christ had
no real body and did not die or rise; thus, the bodies of the saints remain
dead, as did the rotting corpse Christ left behind; burial rites and con-
secrated cemeteries are therefore irrelevant or even offensive; the only
resurrection is the rebirth of the soul in this life.60
As many historians have argued, the reasoning behind heretical posi-
tions is often unclear from the documents. Opposition to cemeteries,
for example, can stem from antisacerdotalism or from dualist rejection

du controle,” in Histoire des femmes en occident, ed. G. Duby and M. Perrot, vol. 2:
Le moyen âge, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Paris: Plon, 1991), pp. 25–169. There
is, of course, a deeper sense in which the abhorrence of bodily fertility, prevalent (as
I explain below) in both mainstream and dualist Christian religiosity, is especially
an abhorrence of female flesh and of female sexuality. For a very sophisticated study
of the way in which scholastic disputes, and especially glosses on 1 Corinthians 15
(in this case 1 Cor. 15.24], could become loci for controversy over hierarchy versus
equality of statuses, see Buc, L’Ambiguité du livre, chapter 2.
57. Despite what Christians charged, there is no evidence that heretics lacked
concern and respect for the bodies of their dead. See Walter L. Wakefield, “Burial of
Heretics in the Middle Ages,” Heresis 5 (December 1985): 29–32.
58. See Wakefield and Evans, Heresies, pp. 102–3, 120, and 130–31.
59. For example, Bernard of Fontcaude, Adversus Waldensium sectam, chaps. 9–11,
PL 204, cols. 828–35, trans. in Wakefield and Evans, Heresies, p. 213; and Ermengaud of
Béziers (?), Manifestatio haeresis Albigensium et Lugdunensium, ed. in Antoine Don-
daine, “Durand de Huesca et la polémique anti-cathare,” Archivum fratrum praedi-
catorum 29 (1959): 268–71, esp. p. 270, trans. in Wakefield and Evans, Heresies, pp.
233–34, which accuses heretics of equating resurrection with transmigration of souls.
See also Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 171–73, 278–80, and other bibliography there.
On later hostility to purgatory on the part of heretics, see ibid., pp. 331–33.
60. Wakefield and Evans, Heresies, pp. 269–74 and 301–46; Moneta of Cremona,
Adversus Catharos…, bk. 4, chap. 8, pp. 346–70; and see n. 55 above.
 218 the twelfth century

of matter. Opposition to purgatory can express anticlerical resistance

to the cult of saints or dualist horror at the enshrining of relics; it can
spring from antinomian conviction that redemption is the indwelling
of the spirit. But what is clear, by the early thirteenth century, is that
orthodox opponents thought heretics denied body because they saw it
as rot. Salvo Burci accused Cathars of “dealing most slightingly with
human bodies after death.”

You lay them secretly in pits here and there as best you can. This
was not done with Christ’s body, which was composed of the four
elements. You say it was a spiritual body, but take note to the con-
trary that it was buried according to the Jewish rite. Hence you may
clearly apprehend that it was a material body, for the Jews were not
spiritual beings, but flesh and blood, and they performed burials in
the earthly sense.61

Elsewhere he wrote:

We want to show that the Apostle believed and preached the Son of
God to be both God and man—that is, that he had and received human
flesh. . . . But the heretics say: O blind church of Rome, put far away
the conviction that the Son of God received flesh of the seed of David,
of David’s carnality, which flesh is full of worms and vermin; but
that flesh of the Son of God was beautiful and clean—that is, it was
spiritual not material flesh. . . . And what was the seed of David . . .?
[I]t was spiritual seed . . . whence the Apostle said that he came “in the
likeness of sinful flesh.” And note that he said “likeness” . . . I reply:
O malignant heretics!62

James Capelli said Cathars denied the Eucharist because they thought
food was evil, “having its origin from earth.” They held (he said) that
“the devil divided the elements” and “gave fertility to the earth.”63
Rainier Sacconi wrote of one group of dualists: “All the Cathars who
profess that Christ assumed a true human body deny that that body
was glorified. . . . They say that Christ on the day of his ascension

61. Burci, Liber supra Stella, in op. cit., chap. 9, pp. 314–16; trans. Wakefield and
Evans, Heresies, p. 274.
62. Burci, Liber supra Stella, in op. cit., chap. 19, fols. 93vb–94rb, pp. 320–21.
63. James Capelli, Summa contra haereticos, trans. in Wakefield and Evans, Her-
esies, pp. 304–5.
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 219

laid it aside in the shining sky and will resume it again on the Day of
Judgment, and after the Judgment it will be resolved into pre-existent
matter like a putrid corpse.”64 Thus, whether or not the historian M. D.
Lambert is right in claiming that the heretical sense of body expressed
disgust at organic process, it seems clear that orthodox opponents of
Catharism understood Cathar rejection of body as an interpretation
that equated body with putrefaction.65
Inconsistent though it may seem, the cannibalism libel that sur-
faces repeatedly against many varieties of heretics from the eleventh
to the thirteenth centuries reflects the same perception. Heretics (say
the orthodox) think the body is filth. They equate fertility with decay.
They think therefore that nothing important can happen to the body;
they deny that body is self. Thus they fornicate and eat the products of
fornication; they cast the bodies of their dead into pits; they deny that
any glory can be attained by flesh—ours or God’s.
Although there is no reason to accord any credence to the cannibal-
ism libel, it seems likely that some heretics actually held at least some
of the opinions attributed to them by their orthodox opponents;66 it is
certain that the opponents abhorred the opinions. Yet there is reason to
suspect that heretics articulated what the orthodox feared and believed.
The art, spiritual writing, and scholastic debate I examined above sug-
gest that orthodox discussion in the twelfth century was also domi-
nated by a profound dis-ease with organic change, an association of
nutrition and growth with decay.67 Waldensian denial of cemeteries and
64. Rainerius, Summa de Catharis . . ., in Dondaine, Un traité neo-manicheen,
pp. 76–77; trans. in Wakefield and Evans, Heresies, number 51, chap. 25, p. 344.
65. M. D. Lambert, “The Motives of the Cathars: Some Reflections…,” Religious
Motivation: Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian, Stud-
ies in Church History, 15 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Soci-
ety, 1978), pp. 49–59. See also Jacques Dalarun, “Regard de clercs,” in Histoire des
femmes, ed. Duby and Perrot, vol. 2: Le moyen âge, ed. Klapisch-Zuber, pp. 31–54,
especially p. 37, which perceptively relates a feeling of disgust at the birth process
and at decay to the elaboration of misogyny and situates such an elaboration par-
ticularly in the years around 1100. See also H. Crouzel, “Origène est-il la source du
catharisme?” Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 80 (1979): 3–28.
66. See, for example, P. P. A. Biller, “Birth Control in the West in the Thirteenth
and early Fourteenth Century,” Past and Present 94 (February 1982): 3–26, esp. p.
10, which argues that heretics really held what Moneta of Cremona said they held.
67. See above, chapter 4, nn. 47, 66, 67, and 138. Eleanor Heningham, “An Early
Latin Debate of the Body and Soul Preserved in MS Royal 7A III in the British
Museum” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1939; printed by George Banta Publish-
ing Company, Menasha, Wisconsin, 1939), p. 26, stresses the obsession with decay
in the twelfth-century Latin Debate contained in the Royal manuscript and in the
work of Anselm of Canterbury on which it draws. For a reflection of obsession with
decay in the twelfth-century “Visions of Tondal,” see below, chapter 7, pp. 293–94.
 220 the twelfth century

prayers for the dead, Cathar denial of Christ’s humanity and of literal
resurrection, orthodox insistence on the reassemblage of a body imper-
vious to change—all these positions (at least as expressed by orthodox
writers) see redemption as triumph over process, digestion, and putre-
faction. Heretical denial and orthodox assertion of bodily resurrection
solved the same problem.
The orthodox thought heretics denied resurrection because heretics
saw body as rot. These same orthodox wanted to see body as potential.
They wanted to see the person as a self that expressed its selfhood in
materiality; they sometimes even spoke of heaven as a flowering of
flesh. But their flowers were really crystals. The bodies they envisioned
in heaven were still reassembled bits. Resurrection was still, to twelfth-
century theologians, proof that we are not what we eat nor what we
generate. To rise was to return, like Rebecca West’s conkers, numeri-
cally and formally and materially “the same.” The fear of decay that
Piero Camporesi has seen lying like a fog over early modern sensibility
was never more present than in the antiheretical writing of the years
around 1200.68 Such fear of decay was also reflected in the numerous
stories of miraculous victory over it.69

Miracles
When persecuting clergy accused heretics of denigrating the body, of
identifying it with rot, of denying that it can be healed or glorified, they
had powerful weapons. In addition to the Scripture they so often cited,
the orthodox had (or believed they had) miracles. Moneta of Cremona,
for example, argued against the Cathars that Christians have empirical
proof of resurrection. They know bodies can be reassembled, healed,
and raised from the dead because they see it happen.70 The saints do not
decay, in life or in death. They appear to us in visions, whole and shin-
ing; they move while yet alive toward the jewellike hardness of glory.

68. For Camporesi, see “Introduction,” n. 12, and chapter 2, n. 191, above.
69. Recent important studies of miracles in this period include Finucane, Miracles
and Pilgrims; Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and
Event, 1000–1215 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Gélis and
Redon, eds., Les Miracles, miroirs; and Pierre-André Sigal, L’Homme et le miracle
dans la France médiévale (XIe–XIIe siècle) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1985).
70. Moneta suggests that to deny Christ’s bodily resurrection and ours is to deny
miracles. For resurrection is only an extreme case of healing, but (he says) we see lots
of healing miracles. Moneta, Adversus Catharos . . ., bk. 1, preface, pp. 2–7, trans. in
Wakefield and Evans, Heresies, pp. 310–13.
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 221

Among the miracle stories that proliferated in Europe around 1200 were
many that graphically expressed the idea that redemption is triumph
over biological process, glory is the change to changelessness.
Prominent among twelfth- and thirteenth-century miracles were
tales of living without eating (or by eating only the Eucharist) and of
dying without decay. These miracles of miraculous media and incorrupt
cadavers were especially characteristic of the bodies of saintly women,
probably because both medical literature and misogynist tracts charac-
terized the female body as more changeable than the male. Closer to
decay because colder and wetter than men’s bodies, the female body
was also closer to being food for worms because it was in all ways closer
to food. Women were seen not only as more voracious and greedy than
men but also as being themselves nutrition—for fetuses in the womb
and infants at the breast. Although all body was feared as teeming,
labile, and friable, female body was especially so. Out of it came fluids
and excrescences, and such products were seen more as putrefaction
than as growth and new life. To theologians, hagiographers, and medi-
cal writers, fertility itself became decay.71 Yet women could triumph
over organic process. In desperate danger from digestion and rot, the
female body could nonetheless be protected by the Eucharist from need
for food; in death it could be protected from putrefaction (i.e., giving
birth to worms) by the presence of its soul in paradise.72 Thus closed
to ordinary excretions, it might produce extraordinary effluvia (miracu-
lous lactations, stigmatic bleeding, sweet oil and manna from graves)
that cured diseases and assuaged pain.
Mary of Oignies, Alpaïs of Cudot, Christina the Astonishing, and
Alice of Schaerbeek, for example, lived without eating. Hagiographers
and chroniclers such as Thomas of Cantimpré, James of Vitry, and Roger
Bacon were fascinated by the physiological details of their inedia and
emphasized the beauty of what were in fact starving, gangrenous, or
leprous bodies. A number of female saints were understood to be mirac-
ulously closed to ordinary female exudings, emanations, and breaches,
both in life and in death.73 The stigmatic Elisabeth of Spalbeek was

71. See my discussion of Herman of Reun above, chapter 4 at n. 66. Marie-Chris-

tine Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie à l’apogée du moyen âge: Savoir et imaginaire du
corps chez Henri de Mondeville, chirurgien de Philippe le Bel (Paris: Flammarion,
1983), discusses the medieval fear of the openings and exudings of the female body.
72. See my “The Female Body and Religious Practice,” in Fragmentation and
Redemption, pp. 181–238.
73. See my Holy Feast and Holy Fast, esp. pp. 88–93, 115–86, 196, and 274.
 222 the twelfth century

described by her hagiographer as giving forth “neither saliva nor spu-

tum . . . from her mouth nor any mucus or other fluid from her nos-
trils.”74 Lutgard of Aywières, who cured the sick with sweet oil that
dripped miraculously from her fingers, did not menstruate or eat.75 In
the thirteenth century, we begin to hear tales of female bodies mirac-
ulously insensate and lightened. Douceline of Marseille levitated to
astonishing heights; Beatrice of Nazareth and Lukardis of Oberweimar
became rigid and impervious to any sensation when possessed by the
spirit.76 Herbert Thurston, the modern expert on somatic miracles, has
shown that proponents of female canonizations in the late Middle Ages
came to assume that women’s cadavers would be found incorrupt.77
Triumph over process was not, however, limited to the female body.
Spiritual writers from the early eleventh to the early thirteenth centu-
ries told stories that emphasized the hardening and beauty all saintly
bodies might achieve on earth. William of St. Thierry and the early
thirteenth-century author of the Ancrene Wisse assumed that the bodies
of ascetics would reflect the beauty, clarity, and agility of their souls.78
The Life of Aethelwold, written by Wulfstan of Winchester about the
year 1000, tells us that those present at the saint’s death saw his corpse
suddenly renewed with whiteness and rosiness, “in which observed
change of the flesh appeared even on earth some hint of the glory of the
resurrection [in quo . . . quaedam resurrectionis gloria per ostensionem
mutatae carnis apparuit].” Theodore of Echternach, in a florilegium
from around 1104, argued that the saints are impervious to corruption
after death because they are with God. Like Guibert of Nogent, Theo-
dore recounted a number of cases of holy bodies resisting disturbance
or decay, including one horrifying incident of a temple that burned
when incorrupt bones were removed from it.79 In such tales, the saints’
power to resist change extends from their bones even to the buildings or
tombs that house them. A century later, Caesarius of Heisterbach not

74. Ibid., pp. 119, 120, and 122.

75. Ibid., pp. 122–23, 274.
76. Ibid., pp. 161–63 and 203–4.
77. Thurston, Physical Phenomena, pp. 246–52; and see Fragmentation and
Redemption, p. 372 n. 32.
78. See above, chapter 4 at n. 39, and below, chapter 8 at n. 60.
79. Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St. Aethelwold, ed. Michael Lapidge and
Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 62–63. Theodore of Ech-
ternach, Flores epitaphii sanctorum, bk. 1, chap. 3, bk. 2, chap. 3, and bk. 3, chap.
4, PL 157, cols. 324B–326A, 345A, and 375B. Guibert, De pignoribus, bk. 1, chap. 4,
PL 156, cols. 626–28, and idem, Self and Society in Medieval France, bk. 3, chap. 20,
p. 225, which repeats the story of the abbot whose hands were paralyzed because he
investigated the remains of St. Edmund. See also Guth, Guibert von Nogent.
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 223

only repeated tales of relics opposing their own fragmentation; he also

told stories in which incorruption or other miraculous marks touched
only part of a body. A master who had copied many books was found,
when disinterred, to have his right hand undecayed although the rest of
his body had crumbled into dust.80 A pious man who said his prayers
while walking returned after death in a vision with the words Ave Maria
written on his boots; God, says Caesarius, puts “the mark of glory most
of all on those members by which it is earned.”81
The capacity to defeat change or to appear to change without truly
changing was also reflected in innumerable folk motifs of food that is
eaten without diminishing or that replenishes itself after consumption.
As is well known, the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw
several adaptations of the Grail legend for religious purposes;82 miracles
of food multiplication and replenishment were common.83 At least one
twelfth-century saint’s life suggests that hagiographers were conscious
of the connection of such motifs with eschatology. In the life of St. Mol-
ing, a miracle is recounted in which a cat eats a bird that eats a fly, and
each creature is then regurgitated unharmed. The hagiographer says
explicitly: “In this [miracle] I saw the resurrection of the dead from a
narrow sepulchre.”84
The twelfth century was the high point of literalism and material-
ism in treatments of resurrection.85 Images found in art, theology, and
80. Caesarius, Dialogus, dist. 12, chap. 47, vol. 2, p. 354. As Carol Zaleski points
out, the theme of bodies (including dead bodies) marked by the experience of soul
is an old one in medieval literature (Otherworld Journeys, p. 79). See below, chapter
7, pp. 294–98.
81. Caesarius, Dialogus, dist. 12, chap. 50, vol. 2, pp. 355–56. See also ibid., chap.
54, p. 358. It is interesting to note that one of Caesarius’s stories is, in modern terms,
about a real body; the other is about a vision. To him there is little difference—so
close had separated soul, body in the tomb, and person become.
82. See Etienne Gilson, “La mystique de la grace dans La Queste del San Graal,”
Romania 51 (1925): 321–47; M. I. Valory-Radot, “La Queste del San Graal: Roman
cistercien,” Collectanea ordinis cisterciensium reformatorum 18 (1956): 3–20, 199–
213, 321–32; Nancy Freeman Regalado, “Le Chevalerie Celestiel: Spiritual Transfor-
mations of Secular Romance in La Queste del Saint Graal,” in Romance: Generic
Transformations, eds. Kevin and Marina Brownlee (Hanover: Dartmouth University
Press, 1984), pp. 91–113.
83. See Holy Feast and Holy Fast, passim. For other miracles in which saints
provide food or drink, or in general induce fertility, see Loomis, White Magic,
pp. 37–39, 62, 78–81, 84–88, and 95.
84. Charles Plummer, Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1910), vol. 2, p. 200; and see Loomis, White Magic, p. 63. For other examples of
miracles of the restoration of animals, see ibid., p. 85. Loomis comments that in such
miracles skin and bones usually serve as the basis for the restoration.
85. Brian Patrick McGuire, building on some of my work, has stressed the materi-
alism of late medieval spirituality: see, “Spiritual Life and Material Life in the Middle
Ages: A Contradiction? The Example of the Cistercians in Northern Europe,” Mensch
 224 the twelfth century

hagiography all suggest that salvation is reassemblage or regurgitation

of exactly the bodies we have on earth; heaven is changelessness. Mira-
cles of inedia and incorruption simply enact these ideas in more graphic
form. Even in the twelfth century, however, we also find organic images
for the redeemed self. William of St. Thierry wrote that flesh flowers
when fertilized by spirit; Peter the Venerable thought the bones of his
mother would grow to new life in the resurrection; Hildegard of Bingen,
Guerric of Igny, and Thomas the Cistercian spoke of bodies not only
as pearls but also as gardens. Thus it is not surprising to find that the
years around 1200 saw new and extravagant tales of bodily process.
Such miracles, like the popular miracles of stasis, expressed triumph
over decay. Like the miracles of stasis, they too were recounted espe-
cially of the labile and friable bodies of women.
Some of these miracles, such as stigmata and miraculous lacta-
tion, were genuinely new; others, such as oil-exuding (from cadavers
and from living ascetics), were known but infrequent before. Mary of
Oignies and Gertrude of Delft wept and bled copiously in imitation of
Christ; Christina the Astonishing and Lutgard of Aywières exuded heal-
ing oil and saliva; Dorothy of Montau swelled with mystical pregnancy
in the presence of the Eucharist; Alice of Schaerbeek and Lidwina of
Schiedam shed bits of fragrant skin as they lay paralyzed and dying. The
bodies that experienced these emanations and breaches were those that
were also wonderfully closed; they did not eat or waste away, excrete or
menstruate, sicken or stink when death arrived.86 Such miracles were
therefore denial—and redemption—of ordinary organic process. Bodies
that live without excreting or eating display death in life; corpses that
exude sweet odors or flower into youthful beauty despite the assault of
worms evidence life in death. What both the living (that is, the incor-
ruptible) dead and the unchanging (that is, undecaying) living avoid is
corruption.87 Miracles of stasis and of process not only lodge in the
same bodies; they express the same hope.
Twelfth-century images, whether lived in miracle or recounted
in learned argument, were primarily metaphors of reassemblage and

und Objekt im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit: Leben—Alltag—Kultur: Inter-

nationaler Kongress Krems an der Donau 27. bis 30. September 1988 (Vienna: Verlag
der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1990), pp. 285–313.
86. I have discussed this at much greater length in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, in
“Bodily Miracles,” and in Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 181–238. See also now
the article by Danielle Régnier-Bohler, “Voix littéraires, voix mystiques,” in Histoire
des femmes en occident, vol. 2: Le moyen âge, ed. Klapisch-Zuber, pp. 444–500.
87. For a similar point, see João de Pina-Cabral, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve:
The Peasant World of the Alto Minho (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 230–38,
and Wilson, “Introduction,” in Saints and Their Cults, p. 10.
 Resurrection, Heresy, and Burial ad Sanctos 225

changelessness. Where images of process were used, they frequently

expressed the hope that God would triumph over it. The lovely lan-
guage of florescence and germination suggested by the Song of Songs or
by gospel parables of wheat and tares was usually applied only to spiri-
tual progress. And even notions of spiritual growth carried no impli-
cation of open-ended transformation. The Pauline seed, as developed
by Origen and Erigena and recapitulated by Honorius and (possibly)
Amaury of Bene, was firmly rejected by the majority of twelfth-century
writers. The sheaf in heaven would (they argued) merely reproduce the
seed-body of earth. By the early decades of the thirteenth century, only
heretics thought the elect would leave body behind in the ascent to
salvation. Only heretics were willing to jettison the individuality body
might express—in even its fingernails and its boots.
Yet the awkward materialism of theological discussion, the hesitant
images of change without transformation, the odd miracles of static
cadavers and bleeding but anorexic saints somehow express a sense of
person as inextricably flesh and spirit. They express the conviction that,
as Bernard said, we will not be happy in heaven until we are embodied
again.88 If miracles, pictures, and stories insisted that we must be vom-
ited up by the tomb with every fingernail intact—i.e., that the ultimate
threat is putrefaction, the ultimate victory changelessness—what was
at stake was not finally fingernails.89 It was self. The orthodox came
closer than they suspected to agreeing with heretics that the devil cre-
ates fertility; process is threatening. But, in arguing that literal body
must rise, the orthodox were assuming—as heretics did not—that body
is integral to self.
When we turn to the late thirteenth century, we find a new focus
on soul. Discussion is more philosophically agile; materialism abates.
But, as we shall see, the conviction that self is by definition embodied
had become lodged too firmly in Western Christian ideas to disappear.
88. See above, chapter 4 at n. 36. Peter Lombard and Otto of Freising agreed.
89. Thomas, in Le Cadavre, argues that all burial practices are an effort to mask
and/or deny putrefaction. See also Camporesi, Incorruptible Flesh, on fear of decay.
Pa r t T h r e e

T H E D E CA D E S
AROUND 1300
 Six
Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and
Abundantia: Scholastic Debates
in the Thirteenth Century

in christian antiquity, debates over the resurrection

of the flesh were more central to efforts at self-definition
than they have ever been since. Nonetheless the mean-
ing of bodily resurrection remained an important issue
in theological discussion and debate throughout the Mid-
dle Ages. Whether the body in heaven was understood to continue and
sublimate or to change, reject, and reverse the body of earth, images
of the afterlife were major loci in which theologians puzzled out and
expressed notions of human destiny and of the self. In the acrimonious
debates over Origenism in the early fifth century, as in twelfth- and
thirteenth-century polemics against Cathar dualists or Erigenist antino-
mians, materialist conceptions of bodily resurrection were significant
elements of the positions that triumphed as mainstream Christianity.
Philosophical and aesthetic distaste for flux, as well as commonsense
disgust with disease and putrefaction, surfaced again and again, but
dead bodies remained central to religious practice, and the oxymorons
“impassible body” and “incorruptible matter” were repeatedly defended
as being at the heart of the Christian promise.
As we have seen, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 required
Cathars and other heretics to assent to the proposition that “all rise with
their own individual bodies, that is, the bodies which they now wear,”
 230 the decades around 1300

and the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 reaffirmed the requirement.1

Although standard histories of scholasticism have seen the immortal-
ity of the soul as the major issue of the 1270s,2 it is clear that conser-
vative theologians in the last decades of the thirteenth century were
equally concerned that new Aristotelian ideas might make it impos-
sible to conceptualize bodily resurrection.3 Of the thirteen propositions
condemned in 1270, one concerns soul (that soul, “which is the form
of man according to which he is man,” corrupts when body does), one
concerns body (that God cannot give “immortality or incorruption” to
a corruptible or mortal thing), and one the relationship between corpo-
real and incorporeal (that the “separated soul” after death cannot suffer
from “corporeal fire”).4 By 1277 condemned propositions included not
only an explicit and technically precise denial of resurrection (“that the
corrupted body does not return one and the same, that is, does not rise
numerically the same”) but also other positions in which the issue of
bodily identity is implicated: for example, “that God cannot give perpe-
tuity to a mutable and corruptible thing,” “that man, through the pro-
cess of nutrition, can become another numerically and individually,”

1. See chapter 3, n. 136.

2. See, for example, Wicki, Seligkeit, Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit; and Etienne
Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random
House, 1955). It is indicative that David Knowles, in his textbook on medieval intel-
lectual history, chooses to treat the issue of the immortality of the soul as the exem-
plary case of thirteenth-century scholastic debate; see Knowles, The Evolution of
Medieval Thought (London: Longmans, Green, 1962), chap. 17, pp. 206–18. For the
modern, neo-Thomist position that lodges identity in soul, see Billot, Quaestiones
de Novissimis, especially pp. 149–63.
3. A candidate’s guide to examinations, composed by a Parisian Master of Arts
in the 1230s, proposes that philosophy has nothing to say concerning resurrection
because resurrection is a miracle not corresponding to natural laws; see Fernand Van
Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West: The Origins of Latin Aristotelianism, trans.
Leonard Johnston (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1955), pp. 95–99, esp. p. 99 n 1. A similar
position was condemned in 1277 in Paris: see Chartularium universitatis Parisien-
sis . . ., ed. H. Denifle and A. Chatelain, vol. 1 (Paris: Delalain, 1889), proposition
18, p. 544; and Roland Hissette, Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le
7 Mars 1277 (Louvain and Paris: Publications universitaires de Louvain and Vander-
Oyez, 1977), p. 309. As Hissette points out, there need be nothing heretical about the
assertion. It does suggest, however, that philosophical analysis is of no assistance to
resurrection belief.There is also some evidence from this period of religious doubt
concerning resurrection. See, for example, the story of a dying student who wants to
be persuaded of personal resurrection by rational argument: Alexander Neckham, De
naturis rerum, bk. 2, chap. 73, Rerum britannicarum medii aevi scriptores, vol. 34,
p. 297; John H. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150–1309 (London: Long-
man, 1973), pp. 523–24; and above chapter 5, n. 28.
4. Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis . . ., propositions 7, 13, and 8 respec-
tively, pp. 486–87.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 231

“that one should not take care for the burying of the dead,” and “that
death is the end of all terrors” (namely, that there is no eternal punish-
ment of the damned).5 It is true that by the early fourteenth century,
the body-soul nexus (rather than the question of identity in resurrec-
tion) had become the crucial disputed issue in eschatology; nonethe-
less, the decades around 1300, like those around 200, 400, and 1215,
were a period of Christian history in which the relationship of body to
self became the place where preachers, artists, theologians, and ordi-
nary folk explored what they meant by salvation.
The major discussions of resurrection in the later thirteenth cen-
tury were highly technical philosophical and theological exercises—
primarily either commentaries on the last part of book IV of Peter
Lombard’s Sentences6 or so-called quodlibetal questions (written ver-
sions of disputations in which masters considered subjects proposed
at random by members of their scholastic audience).7 Such discussion
was, of course, utterly unlike the highly rhetorical treatises in which
Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Jerome attacked adversaries—pagan, hereti-
cal, or Christian—or the monastic exegesis of the twelfth century in
which a pastiche of Biblical metaphors evoked the terrors of hell or the
delights of heaven. But it was also quite unlike the works of Honorius,
Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter Lombard, from which it often borrowed
formulations, issues, and examples. The acquisition and appropriation
in the early thirteenth century of key Aristotelian concepts, such as
substance, meant that basic ideas of nature and human nature had to
be reconsidered. For example, once Aristotle’s analysis of generation
and corruption was understood and adopted, no theologian would any
longer hold that the much-discussed veritas humanae naturae can be a
core of matter, handed down from Adam to his descendants, multiplied
by itself into the adult body, and preserved in the grave until the end of
time.8 Biblical and patristic images of resurrection as reassemblage or

5. Ibid., propositions 17, 25, 148, 155, 178, pp. 544–53, and Hissette, Enquête sur
les 219 articles condamnés, pp. 187, 294, 307–8.
6. See Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, pp. 267–69, on Sentence com-
mentaries. On the Lombard see above chapter 3, n. 13.
7. See ibid., pp. 280ff.; Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thir-
teenth and Fourteenth Centuries: An Institutional and Intellectual History (New
York: Wiley, 1968), pp. 163–74; and Palémon Glorieux, La Littérature quodlibetique
de 1260 à 1320, Bibliothèque thomiste 5 and 21 (Le Saulchoir: Kain, 1925, and Paris:
J. Vrin, 1935).
8. Aristotle’s analysis did not actually solve the problem of how one molecule can
change into another via digestion or reproduction; see Cadden, “Medieval Philosophy
and Biology of Growth.” What it did was to make it clear that when something decays,
is digested, or reproduces, it does not retain a material core that accounts for identity.
 232 the decades around 1300

return—images borrowed with enthusiasm by the early schoolmen—

had to be rethought in the light of this new scientific vocabulary.9 The
seeds, statues, and whales that had dominated discussion of resurrec-
tion for a thousand years were thus in the mid-thirteenth century either
thrown out or radically redefined.10
Nonetheless metaphor did not entirely disappear. Even in the refined,
adroit, and highly self-conscious theological discourse of the decades
around 1300, images and examples crept in—examples that reveal far
more than their authors intended. I begin my analysis of thirteenth-
century ideas of resurrection by returning to the Pauline text with
which I began this book. For 1 Corinthians 15.42–44 had a remarkable
fate in scholastic discussion and exegesis. “Sown in corruption, . . .
raised in incorruption; sown in dishonor, . . . raised in glory; . . . sown
in weakness, . . . raised in power; . . . sown a natural body, . . . raised a
spiritual body” was not, in the Sentence commentaries and quodlibetal
discussions of the mid-thirteenth century, a description of a seed at all.
Rather it was an enumeration of the “dowries” (dotes) given by the
blessed soul to the glorified body in a process of “flowing over” (redun-
dantia or abundantia) that arose from something some authors called
ordinatio or inclinatio, affectus, or even desiderium.

The Discourse of High Scholasticism: The Rejection of

Statues and Seeds
Sometime between 1259 and 1265, the highly controversial theologian
Thomas Aquinas commented on all the epistles of Paul. At the end of
his life he took up again the task of Pauline commentary and probably
wrote out his own exposition. He died just after reaching 1 Corinthians
10. After his death, Reginald of Piperno (who had written up the text of
Aquinas’s first Pauline exegesis) put together a commentary on 1 Corin-
thians from what Thomas had completed, his own earlier transcript, and
some supplementary material.11 The commentary on 1 Corinthians 15
9. The rethinking was of course going on already in the later twelfth century. See
above, chapter 3 at nn. 56 and 57, especially the example of William of Auxerre, who
explained quite clearly that the material continuity of the bits of a broken statue or
temple cannot account for identity even if they are reassembled, because they will
have a new form.
10. On theories of bodily resurrection in this period generally, see Greshake and
Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum; Michel, “Résurrection”; Comélis et al., Resurrec-
tion; Emile Mersch, “Corps mystique et spiritualité,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité,
vol. 2, cols. 2378–97; and Weber, Auferstehung.
11. Aquinas, In epistolam I ad Corinthios commentaria, chap. 15, lectiones 2, and
5–9, in Opera omnia, vol. 21, ed. S. E. Fretté (Paris: Vives, 1876), pp. 33–34, 41–52.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 233

that has come down to us is thus not Thomas’s own draft but rather a
report of his early classroom teaching made by a close disciple.12 The
precision, clarity, and forcefulness with which Thomas marches through
the text may be characteristic, but the content of his commentary is not
original. Thomas uses 1 Corinthians 15 exactly as do such predeces-
sors and contemporaries as William of Auxerre, Grosseteste, Albert the
Great, and Bonaventure.13 His clear but conventional readings can serve
to introduce the issues and images characteristic of scholastic discus-
sion in the 1250s and 1260s. Thomas takes 1 Corinthians 15 as raising
two issues: that of the identity of the earthly and risen body and that of
the nature of the additions to body in glory.14 In the course of discussion,
he rejects the seed image of verses 36–38 and 42–44, restricts the cloth-
ing image of verses 53–54, and introduces two images not present in the
Pauline text at all—the image of gifts or dowries (dotes) and the image
of spillover, overflow, or expression (abundantia).
Aquinas begins his exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15 with the admission
that the seed metaphor might seem to imply that resurrection is natu-
ral—an unfolding of a preordained pattern from within the organism.15
It might also imply that the second organism in question (the sheaf) is
different from the first (the seed) not only in appearance (that is, acci-
dental characteristics or qualities) but also as an individual or instance
(that is, numerically—numero—as technical scholastic vocabulary put
it). Making use of Aristotle in a way that goes back to the later twelfth
century,16 Aquinas comments that nature reproduces species, not num-
ber—that is, it reproduces the same kind of thing (like produces like),
but it cannot produce again the same instance once that instance has

12. See James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Life, Thought, and
Works (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), p. 372–73; Chenu, Toward Understand-
ing St. Thomas, p. 248.
13. Wicki, Seligkeit; Joseph Goering, “The De Dotibus of Robert Grosseteste,”
Mediaeval Studies 44 (1982): 83–109; and Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 314–42.
14. Weber, Auferstehung, says these are the two central issues for thirteenth-
century discussion of resurrection. See also Wilhelm Kübel, “Die Lehre von der
Auferstehung der Toten nach Albertus Magnus,” in Studia Albertina: Festschrift für
Bernhard Geyer zum 70. Geburtstage, ed. Heinrich Ostlender, BGPTM, Supplement-
band 4 (Münster: Aschendorf, 1952), pp. 279–318.
15. The position he spells out only in order to refute is, of course, exactly the
understanding of the seed on which Origen and Erigena drew to forge their very
different notions of resurrection and body. The question of whether resurrection is
natural, which so concerned thirteenth-century Sentence commentators, was first
brought up in the twelfth century by Magister Martin and elaborated by William of
Auxerre, using 1 Corinthians 15.52; see Kübel, “Auferstehung nach Albertus Mag-
nus,” pp. 288–92 and 302–6.
16. See nn. 9 and 15 above. Aquinas takes the standard position that resurrection
is natural in its goal.
 234 the decades around 1300

disappeared or corrupted. So the exegetical and philosophical challenge

confronting Aquinas is to make the Pauline seed imply exactly what
it appears at first glance not to imply. It must suggest both that resur-
rection is, in its cause, supernatural not natural, and that the body that
returns is identical numerically (numero) and specifically (in speciem),
not qualitatively.17
Aquinas accomplishes this ingenious reinterpretation of Paul by
arguing that the apostle faced two sorts of opponents: “some” who
think there can be no resurrection, because resurrection is not natural,
and “some” who think that, because resurrection is natural, exactly
the same body will return.18 It is in answer to these positions that Paul
raised the two questions of verse 35: how can resurrection occur? What
kind of body will rise? But (says Aquinas) Paul answered the second
question first. Therefore the seed metaphor of verses 36–44 is intended
to illustrate the nature of the resurrection body, in its difference from
the body of earth, not to indicate its cause. Resurrection is not a natural
process. There is no force (no “seminal reason” or “virtue”) in things
that directs them toward return. Body dissolves into a dust that has no
more power or fertility than any other dust. Resurrection is thus exactly
the opposite from germination. Grain returns as an adult sheaf similar
to the sheaf that bore the dissimilar seed; it returns by natural (internal
or organic) process as a like but numerically nonidentical instance.19

17. It is significant that the issue of numerical identity is also central to Aquinas’s
commentary on one of the other major “resurrection texts”: Job 19. 23–29; “ . . . yet
in my flesh shall I see God” means, says Thomas, that the man who sees will be
idem numero, not merely in species. Thomas Aquinas, Expositiones in Job, chap. 19,
lectio 2, in Opera omnia, vol. 18, ed. S. E. Fretté (Paris: Vives, 1876), pp. 119–20; see
n. 117 below. For the same argument, see Summa contra Gentiles, bk. 4, chap. 81,
in ibid., vol. 12, ed. Fretté (Paris: Vives, 1874) [hereafter SCG], pp. 593–96; and see
Quaestiones de anima, q. 19, in Aquinas, Quaestiones de anima: A Newly Estab-
lished Edition of the Latin Text, ed. James H. Rob (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1968), pp. 245–52.
18. In I Cor., chap. 15, lectio 5, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 21, p. 41. We find the same
argument in the Supplementum to the Summa theologica [or theologiae], quaestio
79, art. I, obj. I and reply to obj. I, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis doctoris angelici
opera omnia iussu impensaque Leonis XIII p.m. edita, vol. 12 (Rome: S. C. de Pro-
paganda Fide, 1906) [hereafter Sup. (Leonine ed.)], p. 178; trans. Fathers of the English
Dominican Province, Thomas Aquinas: Summa theologica, vol. 3 (New York: Ben-
ziger, 1948), pp. 2889–90. The Supplementum was put together after Aquinas’s death
(probably by Reginald of Piperno) from his early Sentence commentary.
19. In I Cor., chap. 15, lectio 5, Opera, vol. 21, pp. 41–43. See Sup., q. 79 art. 1, obj.
1 (Leonine ed.), p. 178; trans. English Dominicans, vol. 3, p. 2889: “ . . . the Apostle is
there [verse 37] comparing death to sowing and resurrection to fructifying. Therefore
the same body that is laid aside is not resumed.” And reply to obj. 1, (Leonine ed.)
p. 178; trans. English Dominicans, vol. 3, p. 2890: “A comparison does not apply to
every particular. . . . For in the sowing of grain, the grain sown and the grain that is
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 235

Body returns not naturally but by divine power (“But God giveth it a
body . . .”); it returns identical in number and species (“and to every
seed his own body”), but it rises with the new qualities of glory.20
To Aquinas, the four pairs of contrasts in verses 42–44 refer not to the
substance or species of the risen body but to its qualities: claritas, agili-
tas, subtilitas, and impassibilitas. These had been known at least since
William of Auxerre as the dotes (dowries or gifts) of the glorified body.21
It would be silly, argues Aquinas, to say we are air or light; rather we
have subtlety—lightness or airiness—added to our bodies, spilled over
or infused from the beatified soul.22 The verb “to clothe” (induere) of
verses 53–54 and of 2 Corinthians 5.2–4 does not mean that the body
is a garment, donned on earth and discarded or replaced in heaven; it
means rather that immortality (a quality) is added to what we are—i.e.,
“this soul” and “this body, repaired from the same dust into which it
was dissolved.”23 In Aquinas’s interpretation, verses 42–44 refer to con-
trast and diversity: the contrast of earthly and heavenly body, the diver-
sity of gifts. Verse 41 (“one star differeth from another star in glory”)
is associated with verses 42–44 to suggest that although all rise, the
dowries differ from saint to saint. There is no equality in heaven.24

born thereof are neither identical, nor of the same condition . . . and the body will
rise again identically the same, but of a different condition.”
20. Aquinas uses Job 29.27 here; In I Cor., chap. 15, lectio 5, Opera, vol. 21, p. 42.
He makes the same argument in the Expositio on Job; see above, n. 16.
21. See Wicki, Seligkeit, pp. 202–12; they were developed from the seven qualities
of the glorified body elaborated by Anselm and Eadmer in the early twelfth century.
22. In I Cor., chap. 15, lectio 6, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 21, pp. 44–46. For other
places where Thomas uses verses 42–44 to mean the dotes or “qualities” of the glori-
fied body, see SCG, bk. 4, chaps. 79, 84 and 86, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, pp. 591–92,
602–3 and 604–5; and Sup., qq. 82–85 (Leonine ed.) pp. 187–200.
23. In I Cor., chap. 15, lectio 9, Opera, vol. 21, p. 51. Question 5 De potentia Dei,
art. 10, also rejects the idea (which he here calls Platonic) of body as a garment or
tool, because it implies something added on; see Quaestiones disputatae de potentia,
in Aquinas, Opera omnia (Parma 1853–73 ed. with new intro, by V. J. Bourke), vol.
8 (New York: Musurgia, 1949), pp. 120–22, esp. p. 121 col. 2, and On the Power of
God (Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei), vol. 2 (qq. 4–6), trans. the Dominican
Fathers (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1933), p. 147. In Summa theologiae,
[hereafter ST], ed. Blackfriars (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–81) 3a, quaestio 25,
art. 6, vol. 50, pp. 202–5, treating relics, Aquinas does use the garment image from
Augustine’s City of God; he also uses the image of body as temple or dwelling place.
But it is important to note that he says (agreeing with Augustine) that body is “more
important to us” than a treasured garment. We should also note that the context
is discussion of the cadaver (which to Aquinas—as we shall see—is not really the
body). In his commentary on Job (see n. 16 above), Aquinas uses the idea of body as
garment or covering in explaining 19.23–29 but seems specifically to mean that we
will receive back flesh to cover bone.
24. In I Cor., chap. 15, lectio 6, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 21, pp. 43–44.
 236 the decades around 1300

Aquinas hints at the Platonic argument from desire as a proof of res-

urrection: God would not leave soul forever with its desire either for
immortality or for body unfulfilled.25 Nonetheless he is quite uneasy
with any notion of yearning toward completion. Several times in his
exegesis he returns to refute the idea that there is a force (vis) or incli-
nation (inclinatio) in the dust to which we decay. Dust is not seed
(although Aquinas does suggest that, in order for the same body to rise,
there must be some ordinatio of our particles for return). Like his con-
temporaries, he quotes Augustine’s letters 56 and 118 to suggest that
the dotes are a spilling over (abundantia) from the soul to the body, but
he prefers to call them additions rather than infusions, and he never
refers to redundantia as love.26 When he uses (as did Peter Lombard and
Bernard) Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis, book 12, chapter
35, to describe the separated soul, he says only that soul without body is
imperfect and ignores the powerful image of the retardatio of desire so
emphasized by some of his contemporaries.27 Thomas explicitly rejects
the sensual heaven of wives and banquets promised to “Saracens”; he
takes the much disputed verse 50 (“flesh and blood cannot inherit . . .”)
to exclude from paradise not only flesh as sinfulness but also flesh as
sensuality and striving. The goal of impassibilitas is freedom from “nox-
ious passions, internal and external”—a stasis (quies) that includes the
stilling of any yearning between soul and body or matter.28
In rejecting the fructifying seed as an analogy to the event of resur-
rection, Aquinas was accepting a fully Aristotelian analysis of natural
change and, precisely because of this, rejecting eschatological meta-
phors of rebirth and return. Other mid-thirteenth-century theologians
agreed. Bonaventure in his Sentence commentary (written a little ear-
lier than Thomas’s commentaries on the Sentences and on 1 Corinthi-
ans) argued that reconstituting the body is contra naturam; reuniting

25. Aquinas prefers the more Aristotelian—and anthropological—version of the

argument, which suggests that if homo is by definition soul and body, these two
principles cannot be left separated for all eternity; see In I Cor., chap. 15, lectio 2,
Opera, vol. 21, pp. 33–34.
26. In I Cor., chap. 15, lectio 5, pp. 42–43. See also ST 3a, qq. 14–15, esp. q. 15 art.
10, vol. 49, pp. 170–221; and Sup., q. 92, art. 2, reply obj. 6 (Leonine ed.), p. 222, on
redundantia, and trans. English Dominicans, vol. 3, p. 2965. Albert the Great does
not hold the dotes to be a spillover but does see them as added to the body because
of the soul; Kübel, “Auferstehung nach Albertus Magnus,” p. 305.
27. Sup., q. 93, art. 1 (Leonine ed.), pp. 224–25, mentions (but does not really uti-
lize) the idea of removing the retardation of desire.
28. In I Cor., chap. 15, esp. lectiones 6 and 7, pp. 44 (the discussion of impassibili-
tas) and 47. See also Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 64–65, who suggests that Franciscans
are more apt to see the dotes as redundantia, Dominicans to see them as additions;
this is true, but both groups use both sorts of metaphors.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 237

the body with the soul is secundum naturam (because man is body and
soul); uniting soul and body inseparably so that the incorruptible comes
from the corruptible is supra naturam.29 Thus Job 14.7, which com-
pares resurrection to the germination of a tree, 1 Corinthians 15.37,
which compares it to a sprouting seed, and Exodus 7, which tells of the
birth of serpents from rods, certainly show the power of nature, which
can produce life even from slime and decay. But they are not good anal-
ogies for resurrection.30 Although Bonaventure goes further than most
other thirteenth-century thinkers in locating yearning not only in soul
but even in the particles of dust to which we decay, he does not make
the fulfilling of such yearning a natural process: “such is the human
body that it cannot be organized naturally unless both seed and womb
[vas suscipiens, scilicet matrix] are present.”31 Bonaventure’s analogy
for yearning toward completion and incorruption is, as we shall see, not
biological but psychological: the love (amor) of a man for a woman.32
Some of Thomas’ contemporaries or disciples, who were more inter-
ested than he in biological change for its own sake, found additional
problems with the seed metaphor. Albert the Great (d. 1280) not only
pointed out (citing Aristotle’s On Generation) that it raised the ques-
tion of numerical identity; he also commented that a seed does not die
but rather lives and germinates. So the fructifying seed signifies neither
death (“the corruption of the life of the same individual numerically”)
nor resurrection (“the second rising [as Damascene says] of that which
fell”).33 Giles of Rome (d. 1316), who argued that resurrection cannot
be entirely natural,34 rejected the seed metaphor even as an analogy to
29. Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences, in Opera omnia, ed. A. C. Pel-
tier, vol. 6 (Paris: Vives, 1866), bk. 4, dist. 43, art. 1, q. 5, pp. 459–62. And see Michael
Schmaus, “Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die Auferstehung des Leibes nach
Bonaventura,” L’Homme et son destin d’après les penseurs du moyen âge, Actes du
premier Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale, 1958 (Louvain and Paris:
Nauwelaerts, 1960), pp. 505–19, esp. p. 512.
30. Sentence Commentary, dist. 43, art. 1, q. 5, pp. 459–62, esp. contra 1 and 5.
31. Ibid., art. 1, q. 5, conclusio, p. 461. For the complexity of Bonaventure’s posi-
tion on yearning in matter, see Schmaus, “Unsterblichkeit nach Bonaventura,” and
below, pp. 249–51. See also Bonaventure, Breviloquium, pt. 7, chap. 5, in Opera
omnia, ed. A. C. Peltier, vol. 7 (Paris: Vives, 1866), pp. 336–38; and in The Works of
Bonaventure, trans. Jose de Vinck, vol. 2: The Breviloquium (Paris: Desclée, and Pat-
terson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1963), pp. 294–98.
32. See n. 62 below, and cf. n. 56.
33. Albert, De resurrectione, ed. Wilhelm Kübel, in Alberti Magni Opera omnia,
ed. Institutum Alberti Magni Coloniense, vol. 26 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1958) trac-
tate 1, qq. 1–2, pp. 237–43, esp. reply to obj. 8, pp. 241–42.
34. Giles of Rome, Quaestiones de resurrectione mortuorum, ed. Kieran Nolan,
in The Immortality of the Soul and the Resurrection of the Body According to Giles
of Rome: A Historical Study of a Thirteenth-Century Theological Problem (Rome:
Studium Theologicum “Augustinianum,” 1967), pp. 69–75, 90–96, 105–13, 124–30,
 238 the decades around 1300

human reproduction (both the ordinary reproduction of copulation and

the extraordinary reproduction of the Garden of Eden) because wheat
(unlike woman) can germinate by itself. It is for this reason, says Giles,
that ants cut off the radicals when they store grain.35
What thirteenth-century intellectuals rejected in the seed anal-
ogy was exactly what Origen and Erigena had seen its power to be: a
sense of body as an unfolding internal principle that might flower in
an expression of self utterly different from the self of earth.36 In reject-
ing this understanding of body, they continued the suspicion of natural
analogies and open-ended process that their twelfth-century teachers
had expressed in notions of reunited particles, reconstructed statues,
or a perduring core or “truth” of human nature. But thirteenth-century
schoolmen also rejected the images of reassemblage of which early
scholastics had been fond. While they all maintained a conception of
the resurrection body as integral—as retaining all aspects and elements
of its earthly structure (the fingers and toes of the statue)—they all held
that the analogy of body to statue must for highly technical reasons be
discarded or radically revised.37
The more Aristotelian among the schoolmen move, as we shall
see, to a formal understanding of identity and use analogies of the sort
Methodius attributed to Origen. The identity of a thing depends on
what it is (its form or, in some sense, structure) continuing over time.
As Giles of Rome explains (borrowing the analogy from Aristotle, On
Generation and Corruption, 1.5), liquid is taken into and poured out of

see esp. q. 2, p. 92, lines 82–84. And see Nolan’s discussion in ibid., pp. 65–141 pas-
sim. Giles thinks the Aristotelian position on identity makes it impossible for resur-
rection to be natural; uniting soul with body in resurrection cannot be the same as
uniting soul with body in the womb.
Giles of Rome’s Sentence commentary never reached bk. 4; the Quaestiones
edited by Nolan are therefore his major statement on resurrection. Giles’s position
on identity clearly foreshadowed Durand’s but did not go all the way to it; see Nolan,
Giles, pp. 88 and 120, and Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 234–36.
35. M. Anthony Hewson, Giles of Rome and the Medieval Theory of Concep-
tion: A Study of the De formatione corporis humani in utero (London: University of
London, Athlone Press, 1975), p. 73.
36. As we shall see, the notion of an internal principle (even one with a certain
dynamism) was not rejected; to some Franciscan thinkers, it was crucial. What was
threatening clearly was the idea that the body of heaven might not be fully integral,
possessing all the details and particularities of the earthly body.
37. Albert the Great, for example, argued that the statue analogy is about integrity
not matter. If it is useful, it is useful because it emphasizes that all members return.
It does not mean that all matter must return and go to the same place it occupied
at death. See Albert, De resurrectione, ed. Kübel, tractate 1, q. 6, art. 11, p. 257. And
see Aquinas, Sup., q. 79, art. 2, obj. 4 and reply to obj. 4 (Leonine ed.), pp. 179–80.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 239

a waterskin but the skin remains; similarly the soul and form of man
remain the same although his flesh secundum materiam waxes and
wanes (fluit et refluit).38 As Aquinas says, a city remains a city even if
the population turns over through birth, death, and migration;39 a fire
remains a fire if one keeps feeding it logs, even if all the logs are con-
sumed.40 It does not remain the same city if it is razed or the same fire
if it is allowed to go out and is then relit.
Such analogies, in which internal structure or external container
remains and contents change, suggest that the case of the statue is
exactly backward;41 the reforged statue is the same material but not
the same structure or container.42 Thus Aquinas says in his Sentence
commentary that a remade statue is in a certain sense not the same
even if it is recast from the same brass, because it has a second form,
not the original one.43 Fifty years later, John Quidort of Paris made use
of these Aristotelian distinctions to argue:

There is no analogy between man and a statue, because an artificial

thing has its being [esse] from its matter, but a natural thing from
form, and the former is the same thing from identity of matter but
the latter is the same from identity of form. And . . . with regards to
Ezekiel 37, . . . it is true that the formed bones go back to their own
place and their own joints. But it is not necessary that they be formed
from the same matter.44

38. Giles, Quaestiones, ed. Nolan, q. 3, p. 110, lines 184–97.

39. Sup., q. 80, art. 4 (Leonine ed.) pp. 182–84, esp. 183 col. 2, lines 60–75.
40. ST 1a, q. 119, a. 1, reply obj. 5, vol. 15, pp. 172–73.
41. The wineskin analogy is the cruder analogy, philosophically speaking.
42. For this argument in Albert, see Kübel, “Auferstehung nach Albertus Mag-
nus,” pp. 297–98.
43. Aquinas, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 44, art. 1, quaestiuncula 2, obj. 4,
and quaestiuncula 3, Opera omnia (Parma 1852–1873 ed. with intro, by Bourke), vol.
7 (New York: Musurgia, 1948), pp. 1072–75. The argument is complicated because
Aquinas, here following a standard Aristotelian argument, holds that a statue (as an
artificial thing) belongs to the genus of substance by reason of its matter; therefore,
it is the same statue when remade if we consider it as a particular substance. But
it is not identically the same (idem numero) because its form has been destroyed.
A person is not, however, a statue; “the form of the human being, that is the soul,
remains when body perishes.” Indeed the human body has no substantial form other
than the rational soul. Since that substantial form survives, the body it animates at
the end of time is the same body (idem homo numero). Aristotle and his commenta-
tors had clearly established that “the matter of a statue ranks higher in the statue
than the matter of a man does in man.” Being formed from the same dust or ashes
does not in any sense make something the same person.
44. See John Quidort, Quaestio on the Sentences, bk. 4, dist. 45, ed. by Weber,
Auferstehung, pp. 376–77.
 240 the decades around 1300

In other words, to John, both Augustine’s statue and Ezekiel’s dry bones
are useful analogies to resurrection only if they refer to structure and
integrity, not to material continuity.45
Franciscan thinkers such as Bonaventure, Richard of Middleton, and
Peter of Trabes do not assert a formal principle of identity; they are
therefore more comfortable with the image of the statue, to which they
assimilate the image of the rebuilt ark (which is, in fact, Tertullian’s
ship). They use it, as the Lombard did, to suggest both material continu-
ity and integrity (or continuity of structure).46 Bonaventure comments:
“If an ark dissolves and is remade from the same planks according to
the same order, we do not say it is another ark but the same.”47 In the
case of human death, soul and body are separated from each other, and
body is “incinerated” into “dust”; but God “like a good craftsman” col-
lects the ashes and unites them into idem corpus—idem because it has
the same perfectio (that is, integrity) as before.48
Bonaventure clearly worries, however, that this is not a sufficient
solution. If we follow his reasoning closely, we see that he proceeds
to analyze the analogy out of existence. “Corruption is of two types,”
he argues. One is dissolution into particles; the other is destruction of
form. Body appears to undergo both; its form (which, for Bonaventure,
is not the soul) seems to dissolve in the grave, and new forms emerge
in the decaying cadaver.

It is certain that the form of human flesh is corrupted, and there is

generated from it worms and serpents; and just as it can be corrupted
into the flesh of serpents and other animals, so it can be resolved (like
that of an animal) into the four elements, and these elements can be

45. Aquinas agreed. But at least in the relatively early position of his Sentence
commentary (see n. 43 above), he assumed that we, like the statue, will in fact be
made again of the same dust—although matter does not account for identity. Indeed,
he even considered it probable (although not necessary) that the dust will return to
the part (that is, the organ or structure) from which it came.
46. See Bonaventure, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 43, q. 4, conclusio, p. 457,
and Weber, Auferstehung, p. 245. Tertullian used the ship analogy to assert integrity,
not material continuity, although he assumed material continuity in other places.
See above chapter 1 at n. 63.
47. Aquinas would not disagree; see above, n. 43.
48. Bonaventure, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 44, dub. 4, p. 475. Bonaven-
ture asserts clearly that, “if a statue has a soul,” then it is the same statue because
its matter and final form are the same, if not its intermediate forms. The position
comes fairly close to a formal principle of identity; Bonaventure even says here “the
whole reason of personhood comes from soul.” But he goes on to say that if the flesh
(which is an intermediate form) must be the same, it is beyond nature to restore this;
hence it is the same statue only supra naturam.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 241

corrupted into others and the corrupted forms thus mixed; therefore
it is necessary that it become other elements numerically and other
flesh. . . . But resurrection must be the same numerically or it is not
resurrection.49

We see here vestiges of the old fear of decay and fertility that twelfth-
century thinkers such as Hugh and Peter Lombard dealt with by assert-
ing some sort of unchanging caro radicalis or perduring particles of
matter—by denying, that is, that human flesh truly grows and decays
in life or in the tomb. Bonaventure, however, good Aristotelian that he
is, accepts the reality of flux.50 Thus he solves the problem of identity,
first, by asserting divine power: the same form can be restored after
corruption per virtutem divinam although not per naturam.51 Second,
he develops the Augustinian notion of seminal reasons to suggest that
the form of the body is latent in some way in the particles. Nature can-
not draw it out, for nature acts by flowing in or imparting (influendo,
impertiendo), but God can reform—draw out of the particles—the iden-
tical form that existed before.52
The solution is an ingenious if incoherent one—and it bears some
similarities to the way in which Origen hundreds of years earlier coped
with the need to admit flux (although the internal dynamic pattern it
implies is teleological and determined, not open-ended, and the role of
divine action is much more carefully delineated). What is clear, how-
ever, is that Bonaventure (almost as effectively as Albert and Thomas)
has undercut any notion that the resurrection body is a rebuilt ark or
statue although its structure and matter may be the same. Reassem-
bling bits of matter after destruction is no longer a useful analogy for
explaining the process of resurrection. If the resurrection of the body
involves bringing particles together, the particles are not, to Bonaven-
ture, bits of inert stuff; they are dynamic—pregnant with something
akin to feeling.
In general, therefore, images of the resurrection body as re-born,
regurgitated, or reassembled fell out of thirteenth-century discussion.
Images of body itself as a prison or house, stole or garment also became
unimportant, although images of beauty or glory as a garment or gift
or endowment added to body became, as we have seen, very common.
49. Bonaventure, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 43, q. 4, conclusio, p. 457.
50. Ibid., q. 4, contra, p. 456. I accept the position of Van Steenberghen, Aristotle
in the West, that Bonaventure made full use of Aristotelian concepts.
51. Bonaventure, Sentence commentary, q. 4, conclusio, p. 457.
52. Ibid., pp. 457–58.
 242 the decades around 1300

The images that emerge into new prominence, building on twelfth-

century uses of Augustine, suggest however a far closer union of soul
and body. Soul is said to need, to desire, to love, and to yearn for body,
as a man loves a beautiful virgin.53 Peter of Trabes glosses the “cry” of
souls under the altar (Rev. 6. 9–10) as desire for the body’s return [desid-
erium animarum sanctarum ad corporum resumptionem].54 Richard of
Middleton comments that the saints in heaven desire our completion
as well as their own, because only when the number of the elect is filled
up will the trumpet sound: “because of their natural desire to resume
their own bodies, they pray more efficaciously for us.”55 Theologians
such as John Quidort, who disdain erotic metaphors for technical rea-
sons, nonetheless speak of an orientation (ordinatio) or aptitude toward
body (if not toward the particular body possessed before, at least toward
body as species). Such inclination must be answered in order that the
disturbance of incompleteness can come to rest (quies).56 Aquinas even
suggests that body is the product of soul, its expression or unfolding:
“whatever appears in the parts of the body is all contained originally
and, in a way, implicitly in the soul . . . so neither could man be perfect

53. For the analogy in Richard Fishacre and Albert the Great, see Kübel, “Aufer-
stehung nach Albertus Magnus,” esp. pp. 300–2 and n. 153. For Giles of Rome, see
Nolan, Giles, pp. 130–31; for Godfrey of Fontaines, see John F. Wippel, The Meta-
physical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century
Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1981), p. 365; on
Augustinus Triumphus, William of Ware, and Eustace of Arras, see Weber, Auferste-
hung, pp. 257–370.
54. Weber, Auferstehung, p. 213 n. 235.
55. Richard, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 43, art. 5, q. 1, cited in Weber,
Auferstehung, p. 304 n. 197: “propter naturale desiderium resumendi corpora sua
efficacius orent pro nobis.”
56. On John Quidort, see Quaestio on the Sentences, bk. 4, dist. 49, ed. by Weber,
Auferstehung, pp. 378–83; and see Weber’s discussion, p. 239. John rejects the anal-
ogy to love of a woman, because he says it makes resurrection natural; he asserts
explicitly:
Anima separata non habet maiorem inclinationem ad hanc materiam quam
ad aliam. Anima enim non appetit corpus nisi ut perificiatur in specie
humana. . . . Sed aliqui dicunt, quod ante infusionem bene indifferens erat, sed
per colligantiam factam iam tollitur indifferentia, sicut ponunt exemplum:
Video tres mulieres. . . . Sed certe si istud esset verum . . . concludo necessa-
rio resurrectionem esse naturalem. . . . Ita dico, quod anima ante infusionem
indifferens est ad hoc et illud corpus, sed per opus divinum introducitur in
isto, et iterum separetur anima, non poterit dici, quod propter hoc quod fue-
rit colligata cum illo corpore, naturaliter inclinetur ad illud et non ad aliud,
immo ratione suae indifferentiae numquam unietur corpori pernaturam, sed
solum per virtutem divinam. (Quaestio on dist. 49, in ibid., pp. 379–80.)
On whether John has any notion of material continuity, see Franz Pelster, “Ein
anonymer Traktat des Johannes v. Paris O.P. über das Formenproblem in Cod. Vat.
lat. 862,” Divus Thomas 24 (1946): 26–27; and my Fragmentation and Redemption,
p. 262.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 243

unless the whole that is contained enfolded in the soul be outwardly

unfolded in the body.”57
These metaphors of love, production, or unfolding thus express an
ontological point. To speak of the desire of separated soul for body is
another way of saying that to be a human being (homo) is to be embod-
ied, that soul without body is not a person. The notion of bodily per-
fection as a manifestation, or spilling over (redundantia), of soul is a
means of underlining the intrinsic necessity of every particular detail
of the risen body. Henry of Ghent argued that the separated soul is
“retarded” or “dragged down” not by “a natural desire for the body”
but by something even deeper: its “imperfect personhood.” For while
separated, it subsists only in imperfecta personalitate and cannot be
“perfectly borne by its own action to the object of fruition.”58 Aquinas
wrote: “Beatitude is the perfection of man as man. And since man is
man not through his body but through his soul, and the body is essen-
tial to man insofar as it is perfected by soul, it follows that man’s beati-
tude does not consist chiefly otherwise than in an act of soul and passes
from the soul on to the body by a kind of overflow.”59 “Since then at
the resurrection it behooves man’s body to correspond entirely to the
soul . . . it follows that man also must rise again perfect.”60
Thinkers as different in philosophical orientation as Richard Fish-
acre, Bonaventure, and Giles of Rome even suggest some inclinatio or
yearning in matter.61 Bonaventure writes:

For the rational soul, because it is soul, differs from an angel . . . and
has an inclination [inclinationem] toward the body; because it is

57. Sup., q. 80, art. 1, respondeo (Leonine ed.), p. 181; and trans. English Domini-
cans, vol. 3, p. 2894. See also Sup., q. 85, art. 1, reply obj. 4 (Leonine ed.), pp. 198–99
(where Aquinas also speaks at length of Gregory the Great’s image of the glorified
body as gold and crystal); Sup., q. 92, art. 2, reply obj. 6 (Leonine ed.), p. 222; and SCG,
bk. 4, chap. 86, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, pp. 604–5.
58. Henry, Quodlibet 6, q. 5, cited in Weber, Auferstehung, p. 206 n. 201. Godfrey
of Fontaines argues slightly differently but to a similar conclusion. A part enjoys a
more perfect being when it exists within its whole, he says (Quodlibet 9, q. 8). The
separated soul retains an inclination or appetite for the body; it is not a full suppositum
because this inclination is not fulfilled. Therefore, separated soul does not have full
blessedness, not because it lacks body but because it lacks the personhood it cannot
have without body (Quodlibet 2, q. 1). See Wippel, Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 246–48.
59. Sup., q. 92, art. 2, reply obj. 6 (Leonine ed,), p. 222; trans. English Dominicans,
vol. 3, p. 2965; see also ibid., q. 85, art. 1 (Leonine ed.) pp. 198–99.
60. Sup., q. 80, art. 1 (Leonine ed.), p. 181; trans. English Dominicans, p. 2894; see
also SCG, bk. 4, chaps. 86–88, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, pp. 604–6.
61. See Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 223–25, for Henry of Ghent and Richard of Mid-
dleton, who have a sense that matter retains some kind of special potential to be a
particular body.
 244 the decades around 1300

rational [its inclination is] toward the human body . . . and it inclines
toward one more than another because of the conjoining it had to it
[before]. An example is this: if someone wants to marry [contrahere]
two virgins equal in beauty and goodness and all other conditions,
the choice would be indifferent. But if he is united to one—and it is
through love [ex amore]—then he will not want another even more
beautiful. . . . Thus the soul is united with love [affectus] to the
substance of the flesh which first it vivified, because it is not com-
pletely satisfied unless it is joined to her wherever she may have
been hiding. And so it appears that the soul has an orientation and
desire [orientationem et appetitum] through which it is ordained
[ordinatur] to this body, however much it might be conformed to
others. But the body [too] has an orientation [ordinationem] by rea-
son of divine providence. What however it might have through some
other orientation that is of and in itself, coming from that out of
which it was dissolved, I do not dare assert, because neither reason
nor authority nor faith compels a position. But because this could
be what God gives, I do not obstinately deny it. . . . For whether or
not there is a yearning in the dust [in pulveribus appetitus] even if
it is dissolved into the tiniest particles, something [aliquid] however
does not perish which has respect to the resurrection. . . . But into
whatever dust or ashes it is turned, . . . into the substance of what-
ever other bodies, or into the elements, or into whatever food, it will
return, at that [last] moment of time, to the soul which animated
it at first.62

Richard Fishacre, writing in the 1240s, speaks of body feeling an affec-

tio for its elements:

The body having been dissolved in ultimate dissolution and into

the purest elements, there remains however a greater disposition
[major affectio] toward the same elements, numerically speaking
[numero], than toward others because of the preceding union. . . .
And indeed unless the same elements are united to it again its
appetite [appetitus] is not satisfied and it remains indeed wretched
[misera].63

62. Bonaventure, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 43, q. 5, conclusio, p. 462. For
Giles of Rome, see Nolan, Giles, pp. 130–36.
63. See Kübel, “Auferstehung nach Albertus Magnus,” p. 302 n. 153, citing Rich-
ard Fishacre, Cod. Oxford Balliol 57, fol. 337ra.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 245

In such discussion, not only body but also desire is fraught with
remarkable ambivalence.64 Desire is love, expression, a creative spill-
ing over [abundantia] from soul into body. It is surely no accident that
the word chosen for the impact of soul on body is dos, the marriage gift
from bridegroom to bride.65 But desire is also a retardatio—a downward
pull—that keeps the soul from heaven.66 Hence resurrection should
bring quies or satietas—a stilling of desire that corresponds to the ces-
sation of heavenly motion that will come with the final trumpet.
Such ambivalence rings, for example, through the short treatise on
the resurrection written by Augustinus Triumphus of Ancona in the
early fourteenth century.67 There are, says Augustinus, five reasons (or
arguments) for resurrection: the first is the argument from desire (that
is, that our appetite and need for blessedness must be filled); the second
is from Christ’s merits; the third from the integrity of human nature, to
which body pertains; the fourth is from punishment and reward (that
is, that they are owed to body as well as soul); the fifth from divine
justice, which will reward its saints. In explaining his third argument,
Augustinus treats the problem of identity:

Man cannot be identical in number unless he has body as well as soul,

for these two make the integrity of human nature. For although soul
separated from body may be more perfect as what it is [quantum ad
aliquod] than when joined to body, because it can more freely carry
out its intellectual operations, however, speaking simply, the soul is
more perfect joined to the body than separated from it, because body
is an integral part of man.

It is hard not to read these words as heavy with regret; Augustinus

appears puzzled about what body could really contribute to blessed-
ness, saddened by the need to call soul back from the “freedom” of its
unencumbered rationality.
64. Part of the ambivalence stems from an ambivalence far older than these
texts—one that is at the heart of the Platonic notion of desire that Augustine adopted.
65. Bonaventure, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 44, art. 2, q. 1, reply 3, p. 481,
uses marriage (understood as a contracted relationship) as an analogy to explain the
orientation of matter toward soul: “et ideo, sicut matrimonium legitime contractum
cum aliqua non potest solvi, si ilia contrahit de facto cum aliquo, sic nec caro potest
ordinationem ad primam carnem perdere.”
66. We should note that the relationship of soul to body is sometimes called
administration, so that what soul is seen as missing while separated is, so to speak,
someone to boss around. See Bonaventure, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 49, pt.
2, art. 1, sectio 1, q. 1, p. 579.
67. Augustinus Triumphus of Ancona, Tractatus sive theoremata de resurrec-
tione mortuorum, ed. Weber, in Auferstehung, pp. 359–62.
 246 the decades around 1300

Nonetheless, in explaining his first argument, Augustinus waxes

lyrical. Aristotle tells us that everyone possesses a natural desire to be
blessed; but here on earth such desire cannot be assuaged. Thus there
must be another life in which “we shall be satiated and replete . . .
beyond all evil, in the fruition of all good.” For in this earthly life we
suffer from infirmities and are weakened by ignorance; we find “no joy
without sadness, no rest without motion, no sweetness without bitter-
ness.” Thus we must be freed from punishment, liberated to achieve
our destiny, transferred to a life of resurrection, healed (here Augusti-
nus quotes the City of God, book 22) from the illnesses of the flesh by
the grace of Christ.
In these words, desire or love has become an expression of self, lift-
ing the whole human being toward heaven. But it is worth noting that
even here Augustinus almost forgets the body. Although intended as
an argument for resurrectio mortuorum, the text in fact speaks almost
exclusively of beatitudo. The one reference to resurrectio could indeed
refer to first, or spiritual, resurrection. And within a few years after
Augustinus’s death in 1328, the papal bull Benedictus Deus would
define such beatitudo as coming to the separated soul before it regains
its body at the end of time.68
The images of reassemblage and regurgitation that were so popular
in twelfth-century art and theology were replaced in thirteenth-century
discussion by images of perduring structures (fire, city, or waterskin), of
additions and infusions (the dotes of the glorified body), and of yearning
for completion (the affectus of soul and even of matter). The change was
philosophical and theological, not aesthetic. Thirteenth-century trea-
tises on resurrection turned to new issues. From the time of Magister
Martin in the late twelfth century, it came to seem increasingly impor-
tant to determine whether resurrection was “natural”—implicit, that
is, in human ontology—or “supernatural”—an overriding of normal
organic process by the power of God.69 Beginning with the summae of
Alexander of Hales and Albert the Great, resurrection was placed much
more carefully in a christological context than it had been in Peter
Lombard’s Sentences.70 William of Auxerre, Grosseteste, and Albert
established the tradition of focusing not only 1 Corinthians 15.42–44
but a major portion of Sentence commentary as well on the nature of

68. See below chapter 7, pp. 284–91.

69. Kübel, “Auferstehung nach Albertus Magnus,” p. 289.
70. Ibid., pp. 279–306; F. M. Henquinet, “Les questions inédites de Alexandre
de Hales sur les fins dernières,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 10
(1938): 56–57.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 247

the glorified body.71 With Albert and Thomas, the issue of identity,
implicit in earlier discussion but given new urgency by the adoption of
Aristotelian definitions of change, came increasingly to be the crucial
philosophical question raised in quodlibetal debates.
In one sense therefore the shift in metaphor simply recapitulates the
story of a shift in philosophy familiar to us all from the work of the
great French and German historians of scholasticism. The new sophis-
tication with which the Pauline seed was treated stemmed from the
complexity of the debate over “nature” and from the fascination felt by
thinkers such as Thomas of Cantimpré, Roger Bacon, Albert, and Giles
of Rome with biological phenomena for their own sake.72 The rejection
or reformulation of Tertullian’s ship and Augustine’s statue arose from
the struggle over definitions of identity. The new metaphors of over-
flow, of endowment, of ordinatio and desire, reflected the retention and
elaboration of Augustinian understandings of self and world. It will now
be necessary to treat some of these developments in greater detail, with
more attention to the positions of individual thinkers. I do so, however,
not merely to retell the story of thirteenth-century philosophy and the-
ology, but also to suggest that there is a wider context for the shift in
metaphors. For in another sense the story of eschatological debates and
images around 1300 is not so much a story of scholasticism as of pious
behavior and belief. Growing enthusiasm for the practice of fragmenting
the cadaver, development of the doctrine of purgatory and the tales it
spawned of otherworld journeys and visions, elaboration of a rhetoric of
desire in devotional and mystical literature—these too were the back-
ground to the late thirteenth-century understanding of body and resur-
rection. They prepared the way for what was, from one point of view,
an eclipsing of body by soul but was, from another, the emergence of an
eschatology in which body and soul truly became the person.

Bonaventure and the Ambivalence of Desire

Bonaventure’s major theological writing was done between 1248 and
1255 when he was a relatively young man. He was born in 1221 and
entered the Franciscan order, of which he later became Minister General,
in about 1238.73 His chief statements about eschatology occur, as one

71. Wicki, Seligkeit, pp. 202–36 and 280–96.

72. See Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 224–28.
73. See generally Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, trans. I. Tre-
thowan and F. J. Sheed (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1965); J. Guy Bougerol,
Introduction à l’étude de saint Bonaventure (Strasbourg: Université de Strasbourg,
 248 the decades around 1300

would expect, in his lengthy commentary on book 4 of the Sentences,

and in his short summa of theology, the Breviloquium. Bonaventure is
often explored merely as a mid-thirteenth-century alternative to the
positions of Aquinas. For example, he maintained universal hylomor-
phism—that is, that all substances (including angels and human souls)
are composed of form and matter—whereas Thomas did not. Unlike
Thomas, he accounted for self through the doctrine of the plurality of
forms—that is, that every being assumes as many forms as it has dif-
ferent properties. On some of these issues, his position would be con-
siderably more popular in the decade after his death (he and Thomas
both died in 1274) than Aquinas’s own. But what is important for my
purposes is not so much his use of technical notions from Aristotelian
metaphysics as his development of the Augustinian idea of desire. For
his discussion—with all its power and confusion—not only influenced
other thinkers well into the fourteenth century but also seems to mark
the limits of what was possible, at least to a scholastic theologian, in
positive conceptions of body.74
Desire is crucial to Bonaventure’s eschatology because, as Schmaus
has explained, he wants to make resurrection supernatural (that is,
effected by God) but grounded ontologically and functionally in the
nature of the human being. Thus he argues that soul as what it is has
the function of quickening, administering (that is, directing and domi-
nating), and perfecting body.75 A complete substance composed of its
own form and matter, soul nonetheless needs body for completion;
longing for body (appetitus, desiderium, inclinatio ad corpus)76 is thus
lodged in its very being.77

1961); Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Z. Hayes
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971); and S. Bonaventura, 1274–1974, vol. 4:
Theologia (Grottaferrata: Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1974). On Bonaventure’s eschatol-
ogy, see E. Randolph Daniel, “St. Bonaventure: Defender of Franciscan Eschatology,”
in ibid., pp. 793–806, and esp. Schmaus, “Unsterblichkeit nach Bonaventura.”
74. Some might argue, of course, that Thomas’s conception of body is more posi-
tive (see Greshake, pt. 2, chap. 1, section 2, in Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio
mortuorum, pp. 216–39); it depends on whether one sees body as absorbed into soul
in Thomistic metaphysics. For the continuation of Bonaventure’s sense of Augustin-
ian desire in later thinkers such as Eustace of Arras, see Weber, Auferstehung, pp.
220–38 and passim.
75. See Schmaus, “Unsterblichkeit nach Bonaventure”; and Gilson, History of
Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, pp. 331ff.
76. Bonaventure, Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 45, dub. 1, p. 507; ibid., dist.
49, pt. 2, art. 1, sectio 1, q. 1, p. 579; ibid., dist. 43, art. 1, q. 1, p. 451.
77. See Schmaus, “Unsterblichkeit nach Bonaventure,” pp. 512–15. He comments
that Bonaventure thinks there can be a desire built into nature that is not filled
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 249

Several problems are, however, attendant upon this conception of

desire. The first is that Bonaventure seems sometimes to assert and
sometimes to deny that matter yearns also.78 In the passage from his
Sentence commentary quoted above, he says that matter is marked by
God for the soul that loves it, but he does not dare assert that such
marking is natural. Elsewhere, discussing the vexed issue of digestion
and material continuity, he refuses to adopt the position of “some”
who hold that there is, planted eternally in dust, an appetitus that
will not permit it to be vivified by another immortal soul.79 Yet in
the Breviloquium (pt. 7, chaps. 5 and 7) he asserts: “the completion of
nature requires that man be body and soul, because form and matter
need and seek each other.” God created body and soul in “a natural
and mutual relationship” but “assigned the government of the body to
the soul, willing that in the state of wayfaring the soul should incline
to the body.” For this reason, “soul cannot be fully happy unless body
is returned to it, for the two have a natural ordinatio to each other.”
Body, intended thus for union with the blessed soul, must even on earth
“bend and submit” as much as body “is able to conform to spirit.”80
These passages are especially moving because they contain one of the
rare hints—in this period of individualistic spirituality—that the union
of matter and form, body and soul, might also signify a gathering of
community. Bonaventure says that the rising of body for union with
soul is like the restoring of Christ’s dead body (the church) to life and
likeness with its head through grace.81
Nonetheless, Bonaventure remains unwilling to decide how far
matter or body yearns for soul. This unwillingness is connected to an

naturally. See also Bonaventure’s First Sermon on the Assumption, which argues
that Mary’s happiness would not be complete unless she were bodily assumed into
heaven. “The person is not the soul; it is a composite. Thus it is established that she
must be there [in heaven] as a composite, that is, of soul and body; otherwise she
would not be in perfect joy” (Sermon De assumptione B. Virginis Mariae 1, sect. 2,
in S. Bonaventurae Opera omnia, ed. Collegium S. Bonaventurae, vol. 9 [Quarrachi:
Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1901], p. 690).
78. Schmaus, “Unsterblichkeit nach Bonaventure,” p. 515.
79. Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 43, art. 1, q. 5, conclusio, p. 461. But see
also ibid., dist. 44, pt. 1, art. 2, q. 1, conclusio, pp. 479–81, where he speaks of a dispo-
sitio or ordinatio of flesh secundum speciem toward the soul that vivified it before.
80. Breviloquium, pt. 7, chap. 5, par. 5, ed. Peltier, pp. 336–38, and trans. de Vinck,
pp. 296–98; and chap. 7, par. 4, ed. Peltier, pp. 340–41, and trans. de Vinck, p. 305.
81. Ibid., pt. 7, chap. 5, par. 2, p. 295. On the unimportance of a communal element
in this period, see Greshake in Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, p. 236 n.
220. See Aquinas, Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, chap. 4, lectio 4,
trans. Matthew Lamb (Albany, N. Y.: Magi Books, 1966), pp. 162–67, for another example.
 250 the decades around 1300

even more consequential ambivalence in his thought. Desire itself is to

him both negative and positive, both a retardatio or need that must be
removed and stilled for completeness of joy (gaudium) and a diffusion
or expression of love (redundantia, abundantia, influentia, delectatio)
that is joy itself.82 Bonaventure begins his discussion of resurrection
(Sentence commentary, d. 45, article 1, q. 1) with the classic Greek defi-
nition of happiness: beatitudo est quies omnium desideriorum. There-
fore body must return to soul in order for soul to be perfectly blessed.
When Bonaventure turns to the gifts of the glorified body (d. 49, pt 2,
art. 1, sect. 1, q. 1), he repeats this definition and quotes both Bernard’s
On Loving God and Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis,
stressing not only that unfulfilled desire weighs down the soul but also
that in resumption of body the soul is inebriated by God.83 As he says
elsewhere, “privation of love is a great affliction”; moreover, “quiet is
more noble than motion.”84 “Therefore if the world after the resurrec-
tion will be in the most perfect disposition, all bodies [then] will rest
in [God].” Desire is desire for completion, or, to put it another way, the
goal of desire is its own cessation. As the celestial spheres will cease to
rotate at the end of time, so too the soul will cease to yearn; stasis is
the condition of heaven. The return of body is the end of psychological,
emotional, interior motion.

Body must rise, that it may be blessed through co-participation in

[comparticipatio] and overflowing of [redundantia] blessedness. And
so it is with grace, for if grace exists in the soul in the rational power
it flows over into the sensible power, and the more it quiets that
power through its abundance the greater the pleasure [delectatio], as
the Psalmist says: My soul thirsts for thee [Ps. 62.2]. Thus when there
is perfect, overflowing abundance [abundantia] and delight [delecta-
tio] in glory, we should not marvel if it flows over [redundat] into
body; and no one doubts this unless he has never known it.85

Yet, as this passage suggests, the yearning or love the soul feels
toward the body is not merely a retarding or dulling of its capacity for
heaven. Desire is not merely an impediment. It is also a manifestation

82. Sentence commentary, dist. 49, pt. 1, art. 1, q. 3, p. 573, and pt. 2, art. 1, sect.
1, q. 2, p. 581.
83. Ibid., pp. 451 and 579.
84. Ibid., d. 44, pt. 2, art. 3, q. 2, p. 501; d. 48, art 2, q. 2, pp. 561–62.
85. Ibid., dist. 49, pt. 1, art. 1, q. 3, p. 573.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 251

of the soul’s experience of God.86 Bonaventure concludes his Brevilo-

quium with words he borrowed more than once from Anselm:87

My body, what do you love? My soul, what do you seek? Anything

you love, anything you seek, is here. . . . Is it swiftness and might,
and . . . a bodily freedom no barrier can contain? The elect will be as
angels of God [Matt. 22.30] for what is sown a natural body rises a
spiritual body [1 Cor. 15.44]. . . . Is it inebriation? You will be inebri-
ated with the plenty of His house. Is it melody? Here the choirs of
angels sing. . . . Is it pleasure . . . ? Thou, O God, shalt make them
drink of the torrents of thy pleasure [Ps. 35.9]. Is it friendship? Here
the elect shall love God more than they love themselves, and one
another as much as themselves.88

These phrases surely suggest that blessedness is not the cessation but
the expression of desire, that love moves and seeks even in heaven,
that body can be the probe, the taster, the instrument of heavenly
experience.89
Such assumptions about body and emotionality are reflected in the
astonishing passage of the Breviloquium devoted to the crucifixion.90
There Bonaventure suggests (and the idea is not original with him) that
the more perfect a body is, the more fully it experiences.91 Because
Christ’s body was untainted by sin, unhampered by weakness, it suf-
fered “in every part . . . and in every power of his soul.” “As his body
was in perfect health and his senses thus to the highest degree alive,
as his soul burned with perfect love for God and supreme concern
for neighbor, his anguish in both body and soul was immeasurable.”
Bonaventure does not, of course, hold that Christ’s divinity suffered
or that suffering is blessedness; rising from the dead, Christ assumes

86. The subject of blessedness is, says Bonaventure, the human being (homo);
blessedness—joy in the good—is in the soul by inherence (per inhaerentiam), in the
body by overflow (per redundantiam). As Augustine says, blessedness is not of bod-
ies, but it flows over from souls into bodies. Ibid., p. 572.
87. He also uses this passage at the end of the Soliloquium and at the end of the
Perfection of Life; see p. 311 n. 39 of de Vinck’s translation of the Breviloquium.
88. Breviloquium, pt. 7, chap. 7, par. 7, ed. Peltier, p. 342, and trans. de Vinck,
pp. 308–9.
89. On the senses in heaven, see nn. 98 and 99 below.
90. Breviloquium, pt. 4, chap. 9, ed. Peltier, pp. 292–94, and trans. de Vinck, p. 172.
91. The idea is also found in the Ancrene Wisse, pts. 2 and 7; see The Ancrene
Riwle (The Corpus MS.: Ancrene Wisse), trans. M. B. Salu (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1956), pp. 49–51 and 173; see below, chapter 8 at n. 54.
 252 the decades around 1300

“the same body he had quickened before . . . but what was subject to
pain and death rises impassible and immortal to live forever.”92 None-
theless, the odd contradiction remains—the suggestion that Christ’s
capacity to experience pain more deeply than we do lay exactly in the
closeness of his earthly body to glory (and not merely, as some theolo-
gians held, in a miracle that blocked the impact of glory).93
Bonaventure’s detailed discussions (which are commonplace by the
1250s) of the dowries of agilitas and subtilitas further underline the
inconsistency at the heart of his conception of both body and desire.94
If soul expresses in the glorified body a quies that is the cessation of all
yearning, a stasis that is the psychological reflection of the stillness of
the spheres once the world of generation and corruption has ended—
why is the body in heaven gifted with motion?95 The inconsistency
becomes acute and explicit when Bonaventure considers the beatific
vision. This visio Dei can, he says, come as soon as the good soul sepa-
rates from body; it need not wait—as Bernard suggested it should—
until the resurrection. Yet if the separated soul in possession of the
beatific vision still yearns for body, that soul has hope for something
it does not possess. There cannot however, says Bonaventure, be hope
(which is a recognition of incompleteness) where there is completion.96
There cannot be any need or lack where there is possession of God. The
contradiction persists.
Thus, Bonaventure is led finally to ask whether there is greater joy
after the resurrection. He answers: “we must say ‘yes.’” For (as Peter
Lombard said, drawing on Augustine):

92. Breviloquium, pt. 4, chap. 10, par. 1, ed. Peltier, p. 294, and trans. De Vinck,
p. 174.
93. See Aquinas, ST 3a, q. 14, art. 1, obj. 2 and reply to obj. 2, vol. 49, pp. 170–77,
where he says that glory flows over into the martyrs’ bodies and blocks their pain.
(This idea had been around, as we have seen, since Tertullian.) See also ST 3a, q. 15,
art. 5, obj. 3 and reply to obj. 3, vol. 49, pp. 204–07, and ibid., q. 54, vol. 55, pp. 18–35.
Aquinas argues that in the case of Christ God blocks the blockage, in order to permit
him to suffer the agony of the Passion. Otherwise Christ’s body, in possession of the
visio Dei because of his divinity, would constantly manifest both the transfiguration
and the anesthesia of glory.
94. Bonaventure assumes that 1 Corinthians 15.42–44 is a “summary” of the
dowries and the defects they remove. Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 49, pt. 2,
art. 2, sect. 2, q. 1, p. 583.
95. Bonaventure explains that animals and plants, which have birth from and
roots in matter, are not suited for eternal life and will not be renewed. The heavens
however, which are “disposed to incorruption,” will be renewed in glory. Sentence
commentary, bk. 4, dist. 48, art. 2, q. 4, pp. 564–65.
96. See Schmaus, “Unsterblichkeit nach Bonaventure,” p. 512.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 253

there is no doubt that the human mind, . . . having shed its flesh
after death, is not able to see the incommutable substance, that is
God, as the holy angels see it, either from some more hidden cause
or because there is present in it a certain natural desire to adminis-
ter the body [appetitus corpus administrandi], by which desire it is
retarded [retardatur] so that it does not continue uninterruptedly to
the highest heaven until that desire is stilled [conquiescat]. For . . .
the body is . . . a burden. . . . [But] when it receives not an animal but
a spiritual body . . ., it will have the perfect expression [modum] of its
nature, . . . with such ineffable ease that what was to it a prison will
be to it a glory.97

The Lombard’s text, like Augustine’s before it, is a curiously pallid,

cautious, even vacuous description of glory. So is the discussion of
blessedness with which Bonaventure glosses it. He concludes that the
glorified body adds nothing “substantially” although it adds “exten-
sively” (that is, a second component of person—body—now shares the
experience) and “intensively” (that is, the impediment of desire for
body is removed).98 Even the agilitas gained in glory is a kind of stabil-
ity; the body does not incline to any place determined for or by it but
moves instantaneously everywhere as the soul wishes.99 In Bonaven-
ture’s description of the glorified body, language of stasis—of gold and
crystal—abounds.100
Nonetheless more may be implicit in the notion of a “certain appe-
titus” or even a “hidden cause” (the phrases come originally from
Augustine) than Bonaventure is able to articulate. Desire is at the
heart of person; it is the metaphysical cement binding body to soul (as

97. Sentence commentary, dist. 49, pt. 2, p. 578, expositio of the text of Peter
Lombard, Sentences, bk. 4, d. 49, chap. 4, art. 3, vol. 2, p. 553, which in turn quotes
Augustine, Literal Commentary on Genesis, bk. 12, chap. 35, PL 34, col. 483. See
above chapter 3, n. 51. Bonaventure adds id est, Deum after incommutabilem sub-
stantiam in the Lombard’s text.
98. Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 49, pt. 2, art. 1, sect. 1, q. 1, p. 579. Bonaven-
ture goes on to argue (sect. 3, qq. 1–2, pp. 584–89) that only the senses of sight and
touch (and possibly hearing) will be in act in heaven. For we are sure that the media
of seeing (light) and touching (the subjoined flesh) are present in heaven, but not of
the other senses.
99. Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 49, pt. 2, art. 2, sect. 4, q. 2, p. 599: “Quon-
iam igitur corpus gloriosum totam suae existentiae, et nobilitatis, et stabilitatis ratio-
nem trahit ab anima, ideo inclinatio ejus est ad animam, non ad aliquid extra. . . .
Unde agilitas non inclinat ad aliquem locum determinatum . . . sed est promptitudo,
ut corpus moveatur in omnem locum ad quem vult movere anima.”
100. Sentence commentary, dist. 49, pt. 2, art. 2, sects. 2–4, pp. 591–99.
 254 the decades around 1300

hylomorphic union is for Aquinas). Thus, it is significant that Bonaven-

ture devotes so much of his commentary on the Lombard to delineat-
ing the nature of the glorified body, so little to the beatific vision that
comes before resurrection. However curious and imprecise his asser-
tion that body adds something to blessedness, the description of body
that follows is the description of a heavenly self.101 It may be gold and
crystal, but fire of many colors shines in it. “We will recognize people
in the heavenly country, for they will have the countenances they had
in life . . . just as a sword does not lose its color through cleaning but
rather has splendor added to it . . . and a brand is more luminous in
the flame.”102 What Bonaventure describes in the last folios of his Sen-
tence commentary is not a soul-self to which a house or garment or
tool has been unaccountably or adventitiously added, nor even a soul-
self expressing that self in body. It is a body-soul-self: a particularized,
experiencing, glowing, and, at least partially, sensual person, moving
ever deeper into delight.
Much of what Bonaventure says in describing the risen body fol-
lows the Lombard closely. Like Peter, he is concerned with material
continuity and structural integrity: every particle, every organ, will
be restored, and Bonaventure is more insistent than Augustine ever
was that matter will indeed return to the organ from which it came.
We will be colored and luminous (like a polished sword or a burning
candle) but not transparent, for if we became so subtle that we did
not stop the rays of sight, an eye would be indistinguishable from a
nose.103 More clearly than for Peter Lombard, however, the resurrec-
tion body reflects for Bonaventure the moral, emotional, experiencing
self. The elect will rise with all deformities corrected, but the scars of
the martyrs will shine forever as “signs of merit and triumph.” The
damned will have mutilations repaired and excrescences removed, but
other deformities will rise with them, for God will not give to the evil
any beauty they lacked on earth.104 We will rise with our own stature
and shape (Ephes. 4.13), two in gender, for “vir in the Bible often means
person and can be said of woman.” Nor is Aristotle right that a woman

101. Bonaventure is careful to preserve the role of God in the bestowing of glory.
Joy does not merely spill over from soul into body; God prepares and disposes.
Indeed, Bonaventure’s doctrine of the plurality of forms seems relevant here, for he
holds that the forma corporeitatis prepares body for the flowing over of glory; ibid.,
art. 1, sect. 2, q. 2, pp. 580–81, and Weber, Auferstehung, p. 314ff.
102. Sentence commentary, bk. 4, dist. 49, pt. 2, art. 2, sect. 2, q. 1, p. 592.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid., dist. 44, pt. 1, art. 3, qq. 1–2. pp. 482–85.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 255

is a defective (occasionatus) man, for woman—although colder than

man and closer to death—nonetheless was intended by nature. Men
and women rise with their genitals—as with their humors, hairs, and
intestines—“because of perfection.”105
Thus we will rise perfect and beautiful, but particular as well. Star
differs from star (1 Cor. 15.41), and God’s house has many mansions
(John 14.2). Because we will not rest in heaven until all the elect are
gathered up, we will finally rejoice in the joy of others as much as in
our own delight. But we carry with us forever our individuality and
merit: Peter will not be able to rejoice in Linus’s joy with Linus’s capac-
ity but only with his own.106 The dotes are a locus of inequality: “the
fullness of delights, the raptures of bliss, flow from God down upon
the skirt of the garment, [which is] the body of man,” but “different
members of Christ receive these gifts in different amounts.” The robes
or dowries of glory come diversely to the bodies of preachers, of virgins,
and of martyrs.107 Our resurrection bodies express our individuality to
each other and our merit to God; the crowns, stoles, and dowries they
bear in heaven differ as much as did their suffering, service, and status
on earth.108

105. Ibid., dist. 44, pt. 1, dub. 2, p. 473. For the same position in Richard of
Middleton, see Hewson, Giles of Rome and Conception, p. 46. Prudence Allen sees
the rise of Aristotle as a victory for sexism but argues that medieval teaching on
the resurrection of the body, with its assertion that human beings rise in two sexes,
undercuts the negative Aristotelian position (The Concept of Woman: The Aristote-
lian Revolution, 750 B.C.–A.D. 1250 [Montreal and London: Eden Press, 1985]). As
my discussion in chapter 2 above suggests, the commitment to resurrection in two
sexes was established long before the thirteenth century and does not have much to
do with Aristotle.
106. Sentence commentary, dist. 49, pt. 1, art. 1, q. 6, p. 577.
107. Breviloquium, pt. 7, chap. 7, par. 4, ed. Peltier, p. 341, and trans. de Vinck, p.
306. And see Sentence commentary, dist. 49, pt. 2, art. 1, sect. 2, q. 2, p. 584.
108. I should point out that thirteenth-century thinkers such as Bonaventure and
Thomas were only beginning to make steps toward distinguishing individuality from
numerical difference—i.e., distinguishing what we moderns mean by individuality
(individual distinctiveness) from the fact that there is more than one instance of
something. In general, medieval philosophy moved (although slowly) from a concern
with individuation (what accounts for the occurrence of more than one instance of
a universal?) to a concern with the individual (what is the ontological status of the
distinctiveness of cases?). But neither question was explored primarily within escha-
tology. See Jorge J. E. Gracia, Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the
Early Middle Ages (Munich and Washington, D.C.: Philosophia Verlag and Catholic
University of America Press, 1984), esp. pp. 255–78. It is clear, however, that by the
later thirteenth century there was no “person” without body. It is also clear that
some distinctive characteristics that to us moderns would be “individuality” (such as
height, weight, sex, appearance, etc.) were associated with body (whether as expres-
sion of the substantial form soul, as included in forma corporis or corporeitatis, or
 256 the decades around 1300

Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Giles of Rome:

Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Formal Identity
As a number of Bonaventure’s contemporaries recognized, there was
a philosophical problem with lodging desire at the heart of anthropol-
ogy. To see body as a mass of particles yearning for soul, to understand
the person as a marriage of soul (bridegroom) to body (beloved virgin),
maintains the importance of body that seems required by the doctrine
of resurrectio carnis; it maintains in ontology something of our com-
monsense understanding of matter as tactile, unstable, fertile “stuff,”
constantly in flux. But it makes the person a partnership (or, depending
on how far one carries the notion of plurality of forms, a committee)
rather than a unity.109
No theologian in the mid-thirteenth century held, as Hugh of St. Vic-
tor and Robert of Melun had done in the early twelfth, that the person
is a soul using a body.110 All conceived of person as, by definition, a psy-
chosomatic whole. Nonetheless some went considerably further than
Bonaventure in using Aristotelian concepts of substance, form, and mat-
ter to account for this unity. Rejecting universal hylomorphism (that is,
the theory that every subsisting entity must be understood as composed
of form—structure or definition—and matter—potency), thinkers such
as Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Giles of Rome denied that
body is an entity composed of a form of bodiliness and the potency it
activates; they also denied that soul activates its own spiritual mat-
ter or potentiality.111 Rather, with portentous consequences for their
understanding of resurrectio carnis, they limited hylomorphism to the

as accidental forms) and were thought to return in resurrection. But nothing that
was understood as a defect would return in the blessed. For example, persons would
rise male or female but not hermaphroditic (see below, n. 143). Medieval thinkers
apparently wanted to preserve identifiability in heaven (see n. 102 above). But it is
clear that they saw many fewer differentiating characteristics as ultimately worth
preserving than would modem people.
109. See Daniel A. Callus, “The Problem of the Plurality of Forms in the Thir-
teenth Century: The Thomist Innovation,” in L’Homme et son destin, pp. 577–
85; Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, pp. 416–20; and
Greshake in Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, p. 225ff.
110. See Heinzmann, Unsterblichkeit. See also Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 123ff.;
Greshake in Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, pp. 217ff.; and chapter
3, n. 59 above.
111. Giles’s basic work on resurrection is the Quaestiones edited by Nolan; see
above, n. 34. Albert treated resurrection in his Sentence commentary from the mid-
1240s and in a treatise De resurrectione (composed prior to 1246), which was proba-
bly intended as a conclusion to his Summa de creaturis. For the complex problems of
the relationship of the De resurrectione to the De creaturis, see A. Ohlmeyer, “Zwei
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 257

material world and maintained that there is a single form in man.112 Body
thus became matter to the soul, its form; death became the severing of
the metaphysical components of the subsisting individual homo; resur-
rection was guaranteed not by the desire of soul for its partner but by the
necessity for ontological completeness. Soul was understood to be able
to subsist without body (because it is a “substantial form”), but in that
subsistence soul is by definition incomplete: a form should inform mat-
ter.113 Thus body must rise in order to provide matter to form; until the
resurrection “I” am not truly “I.”114 Or, to put it another way, “There is
no act of man [homo] in which body does not take part,” because soul
alone is not man.115 Giles of Rome pointed out in a quodlibetal ques-
tion: “The vulgar say [that Peter is in Paradise]. We can however verify

neue Teile der Summa de creaturis Alberts des Grossen,” Recherches de théologie
ancienne et médiévale 4 (1932): 392–400; O. Lottin, “Commentaire des Sentences
et Somme théologique d’Albert le Grand,” in Recherches de théologie ancienne et
médiévale 8 (1936), pp. 117–53; F. M. Henquinet, “Vingt-deux Questions inédites
d’Albert le Grand dans un manuscrit à l’usage de S. Thomas d’Aquin,” The New
Scholasticism 9 (1935): 283–329; and Kübel, “Auferstehung nach Albertus Magnus.”
On Albert generally, see Albertus Magnus, Doctor Universalis, 1280–1980, ed. G.
Meyer and A. Zimmermann (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald, 1980).
112. Albert said: “quia error pessimus est dicere unius subiecti plures esse sub-
stantias, cum illae substantiae non possunt esse nisi formae” (Callus, “Plurality of
Forms,” p. 580 n. 12).
113. This, of course, implied problems for the immortality of the soul, which
Aquinas solved by holding that soul is both the form of body and a subsisting immor-
tal spirit; it is a form that has and bestows substantiality. See Greshake in Greshake
and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum (p. 225) who points out that this is not a fully
Aristotelian conception of form because, to Aristotle, form cannot subsist without
matter. For an excellent brief statement of Aquinas’s position that differs some-
what from my own in emphasis, see Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 207–20.
114. Aquinas, In I Cor., chap. 15, lectio 2, Opera, vol. 21, p. 34: “anima autem,
cum sit pars corporis homini, non est totus homo, et anima mea non est ego; unde,
licet anima consequatur salutem in alia vita, non tamen ego vel quilibet homo.”
See also ST 1a, q. 75, art. 4, reply obj. 2, which argues that the soul is no more the
person than a hand or foot is the person; vol. 11, pp. 20–21: “non quaelibet substantia
particularis est hypostasis vel persona, sed quae habet completam naturam speciei.
Unde manus vel pes non potest dici hypostasis vel persona, et similiter nec anima,
cum sit pars speciei humanae.” In general, see Theodor Schneider, Die Einheit des
Menschen: Die anthropologische Formel anima forma corporis im sogenannten Kor-
rektorienstreit und bei Petrus Johannis Olivi: Ein Beitrag . . . , BGPTM: Texte und
Untersuchungen, n.F. 8 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1973); and H. Seidl,” “Zur Leib-Seele-
Einheit des Menschen bei Thomas von Aquin,” Theologie und Philosophie 49 (1974):
548–53.
115. Aquinas, Quodlibet VII, q. 5, art. 11, ad 3, in Quaestiones quolibeticas,
in Opera omnia (Parma 1852–1873 ed. with intro, by Bourke), vol. 9 (New York:
Musurgia, 1949), p. 561: “nec tamen est verum quod aliquis actus sit hominis in
vita praesenti in quo corpus non communicet.” And see Greshake in Greshake and
Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, pp. 227–28.
 258 the decades around 1300

that this is said by synecdoche . . . because it is his soul that is there.

And we say of any dead man that he is in the tomb; but this is also by
synecdoche, because it is his body that is there.”116 Aquinas argued, in
commenting on Job 19:

There are those who assert that we will rise with celestial bodies,
but Job excludes this when he says: “And my skin will surround me
again.” . . . For in this way of speaking he gives the reason of the
resurrection, that the soul not remain denuded forever of its proper
clothing. And there are others who say that the soul will resume the
same body it laid down but according to the same condition—that is,
that it will long for food and drink and will carry out the other works
of this life. But this is excluded by the words “yet in my flesh I shall
see God.” For it is clear that the flesh of man according to the state of
the present life is corruptible, as Wisdom 9.15 says: “The corruptible
body weighs down the soul.” So no one living in this mortal flesh can
see God. But the flesh the soul resumes in resurrection will be the
same in substance and will through divine gift have no corruption, as
the Apostle says in 1 Corinthians 15.53. In this condition it cannot
impede soul. . . . And so Porphyry was ignorant when he said that the
soul is blessed when it is in flight from all body. Because [if this were
so] then it would be the soul and not the human being [homo] that
would see God. But the passage says: “whom I myself shall see.” It
does not say “my soul”; it says “I.” And “I” subsists from soul and
body. . . . Because the repaired human being, the same in number
[idem numero] not merely in species, is the one who sees God, [Job]
adds “and no other,” which means no other numerically. Thus we do
not expect the kind of repairing of life Aristotle refers to in book 2 of
On Generation, saying that if the substance of things is corruptible
then what is repeated is the same in species not in number.
These things being said concerning cause, time and means of
resurrection, and the glory and identity of the risen, [Job] adds
“My hope reposes in my breast” to show that this hope is held not
in words only but hidden in the heart.117
116. Giles, Quodlibet 4, q. 4, fol. 47va; cited in Nolan, Giles, p. 60 n. 49.
117. Aquinas, Expositiones in Job, chap. 19, lectio 2, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 18,
pp. 119–20. The use of the metaphor of body as clothing, which is not usual with
Thomas (although the dowries are fairly frequently said to be clothing), is suggested
(Aquinas himself tells us) by verse 20. On this commentary, Chenu remarks (Toward
Understanding St. Thomas, p. 246) that it is devoted to the literal sense and “not as
carved up into subtle distinctions” as are Aquinas’s other biblical commentaries. In
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 259

Implicit in the concept of matter as pure potency and of soul as the

single form of body is a new solution to the problem of identity—a
problem that had lurked in discussions of resurrection (whether at the
center or on the fringes) at least since Celsus and Origen debated the
consequences of material flux for immortality. If soul is the one form
of body (unica forma corporis) and bears the nature of homo (includ-
ing, as it must, the nature of bodiliness, because it is man’s only form),
then soul guarantees self. What self is (including what body is) will be
packed into soul; body will be the expression of that soul in matter.118
As Aquinas said: “It is more correct to say that soul contains body [con-
tinet corpus] and makes it to be one, than the converse.”119
A full spelling out of the consequences of such a position—known
technically as formal identity (that is, the idea that a thing’s form or
“whatness” accounts for its being the same thing)—obviates the mate-
rialist questions of risen fingernails and foreskins popular since Tertul-
lian. If the nature of body is carried by soul and can be expressed in any
matter that soul activates (matter being pure potency), then one cannot
hold that a person’s body or matter waits to be reassembled after death.
Once the unica forma has departed, the person’s body or matter will
not exist at all. (The cadaver that does exist is second matter—formed
matter—but it is informed not by the form of the soul but by the form
of the corpse.)120 Therefore, when the human being rises the body that
is matter to its form will by definition be its body. As Durand of St.
Pourçain put it, we may not say that God can make the body of Peter
out of the body of Paul, because this is, technically speaking, nonsense;

De potentia Dei Aquinas takes the criticism of Porphyry further, arguing that soul
has more happiness when it repossesses body; see n. 23 above.
118. In addition to the works by Weber, Michel, and Greshake and Kremer, cited
above in n. 10, see Norbert Luyten, “The Significance of the Body in a Thomis-
tic Anthropology,” Philosophy Today 7 (1963): 175–93; Wolfgang Kluxen, “Anima
separata und Personsein bei Thomas von Aquin,” in W. P. Eckert, ed., Thomas
von Aquino: Interpretation und Rezeption: Studien und Texte (Mainz: Matth-
ias Grünewald, 1974), pp. 96–116; Bernardo C. Bazan, “La Corporalité selon saint
Thomas,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 81, 4 ser. 49 (1983): 369–409; J. Giles
Milhaven, “A Medieval Lesson on Bodily Knowing: Women’s Experience and Men’s
Thought,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57, no. 2 (1989): 341–72;
and Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986),
pp. 299–306, esp. n. 9.
119. ST 1a, q. 76, art. 3, vol. 11, pp. 60–61 (my translation). And see Greshake in
Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, p. 227 n. 190.
120. Those who hold this position are aware how closely the living body and the
cadaver resemble each other. They explain this by arguing that the two forms are
indistinguishable to the eye—not a very satisfactory solution. See Wippel, Godfrey
of Fontaines, pp. 218–24.
 260 the decades around 1300

if it is the body of Paul it is the body of Paul.121 But God can make the
body of Peter out of dust that was once the body of Paul.122
A number of historians and theologians have recently made much of
the theory of formal identity—including Hermann Weber, whose mag-
isterial study (1973) of thirteenth-century eschatological treatises and
quodlibetal questions must be the basis for all future work, and Gisbert
Greshake, whose theological reinterpretation (1986) of the doctrine of
bodily resurrection draws heavily on Weber’s conclusions. But interest
in the Thomistic solution to the identity problem goes back in this
century to the work of Segarra in the 1920s.123 Indeed, the theory has
received attention ever since the work of Suarez in the seventeenth
century. Suarez argued incorrectly that Durand was the first to artic-
ulate the position, but by so arguing he paved the way for study of
other figures (such as Giles of Rome, Peter of Auvergne, John Quidort
of Paris, and James of Metz) by whom the idea was developed.
What is interesting for my purposes, however, is less the intellectual
breakthrough the theory undoubtedly represents than the nonevent it
turned out to be. Although scholars have fiercely debated how far Aqui-
nas understood and espoused the implications of his own ideas, it is
clear that throughout his career (and not just in his early period, when
he held a kind of predisposition of matter for resurrection) he some-
times spoke in ways that implied material continuity.124 Moreover he
121. Durand of St. Pourçain, In Sententias theologicas Petri Lombardi commen-
tariorum libri quatuor (Lyon: Apud Gasparem, 1556), dist. 44, q. 1, fol. 340v–341r:
“Utrum ad hoc quod idem homo numero resurgat, requiratur quod formetur corpus
eius eisdem pulueribus in quos fuit resolutum.” (The printed edition of the com-
mentary is the third and last redaction, moderate in comparison to earlier ones; see
Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, p. 774 n. 81.)
122. In answer to the question whether the soul of Peter can be in the body of
Paul (which he says is misformulated), Durand argues (In Sententias, dist. 44, q. 1,
paragrs. 4 and 5, fol. 341r): “ . . . quaestio implicat contradictionem: quia corpus Petri
non potest esse nisi compositum ex materia et anima Petri . . . ergo anima Petri non
potest esse in corpore Pauli nec econverso, nisi anima Petri fiat anima Pauli. . . .
Restat ergo quod alio modo formetur quaestio . . .: supposito quod anima Petri fieret
in materia quae fuit in corpore Pauli, utrum esset idem Petrus qui prius erat.” He
concludes (ibid., paragr. 6, fol. 341r): “cuicumque materiae vniatur anima Petri in
resurrectione, ex quo est eadem forma secundum numerum, per consequens erit
idem Petrus secundum numero.”
123. Weber, Auferstehung; Greshake in Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mor-
tuorum; Francisco Segarra, De identitate corporis mortalis et corporis resurgentis:
Disputatio theologica (Madrid: “Razón y Fe,” 1929). For the argument that Durand’s
originality was overestimated, see Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 217–53 and 76–78, and
Michel, “Résurrection,” cols. 2561–65.
124. In a famous passage of the Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas appears to pull
back from a purely formal theory and assert the conventional position that peo-
ple do not have to receive all their previous matter in resurrection; God can make
up the difference: SCG, bk. 4, chaps. 80–81, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, pp. 593–96.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 261

worried—as did thinkers after him—about the theological consequences

of jettisoning a more commonsense understanding of matter.125 Indeed,
the implications of the unicity of form, and the idea itself, were con-
demned in the late thirteenth century before they were fully elaborated.
A number of major figures, such as Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus,
continued to hold that some kind of form of bodiliness was necessary
to explain resurrection and glorification.126 And even after Peter of
Auvergne, John Quidort, and Durand had articulated its philosophical
attractiveness so clearly, the theory of formal identity was not so much
rejected as ignored.127
It thus seems important, in looking at figures such as Aquinas who
used Aristotelian metaphysics in new ways, to concentrate not merely
on the technical philosophical solutions implicit in their work but also
on the explicit confusions and tensions. For there is much in the lengthy
treatments of resurrection by Albert, Thomas, and Giles of Rome that
is very similar to the concerns of Peter Lombard and Bonaventure, how-
ever differently the Lombard, Bonaventure, and Thomas may have con-
ceived of body and person. Albert, Thomas, and Giles continued the
discussions of risen fingernails and embryos, of the fate of genitals and
intestines in heaven. Like Bonaventure, they were deeply concerned
about the wholeness of the resurrection body. Although they discarded
images of reassemblage and rebirth, using instead analogies (such as
those of the waterskin or fire) that imply self to be structure not mat-
ter, they all spoke as if the body will in fact be remade from the identi-
cal dust into which we fall (identical in the sense of spatio-temporal
continuity). They all suggested some kind of ordinatio in matter and
abundantia in the soul.128 Like Bonaventure, they were fascinated and
confused by the body-soul nexus, and, paralleling the ambivalence in
his notion of desire, they held body to be a drag that retards soul, an

Interpretation of this passage has been controversial. See Weber, Auferstehung,

p. 229; and E. Hugueny, “Résurrection et identité corporelle selon les philosophies
de l’individuation,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 23 (1934):
94–106. Hugueny argues that Thomas’s thought developed away from the idea of
material continuity and toward formal identity.
125. See below at n. 138 on the body of Christ.
126. On Scotus, see Michel, “Résurrection,” cols. 2559–62. On Henry of Ghent,
see Wippel, Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 261–66.
127. Greshake in Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, pp. 237–39. See
below at n. 186.
128. They all, of course, reject any idea of seminal reasons in matter; the nature of
a thing is determined by its substantial form actuating a matter that is pure potency.
But they all argue that matter, once it has been formed into body, retains some sort
of direction (not naturaliter but by divine gift) toward receiving that form again. On
Giles, see Hewson, Giles of Rome and Conception, pp. 43–46.
 262 the decades around 1300

instrument that improves its performance, and an unfolding that is its

expression.
Although there has been an immense amount of scholarly debate
over the question, it seems clear that Albert, Thomas, and Giles all
adumbrate the idea of formal identity, however unclear some of their
formulations. Arguing that the risen body could be constituted by God
out of matter other than that which it possessed in this life, Aquinas
explained: “Corporeity, however, can be taken in two ways. In one way,
it can be taken as the substantial form of a body. . . . Therefore, corpore-
ity, as the substantial form in man, cannot be other than the rational
soul.”129 All three thinkers raise the problem of the veritas humanae
naturae (Albert calls it id quod resurget) and embrace full natural pro-
cess, procreation as well as nutrition, with real enthusiasm. They not
only reject the Lombard’s argument that food never becomes “of our
substance” but passes through (as Matthew 15.17 says) on its way to
the privy; they also deny any possibility of specific particles tagged or
determined for reassemblage. All three thus argue that it must be struc-
ture or definition—that is, form—that accounts for survival through
time.130 And since all three deny the plurality of forms and therefore a
form of bodiliness (Giles only after real hesitation), all imply that iden-
tity lies with rational soul.131 Albert explains that a cut-off hand is not
really a hand, nor is a dead tree a tree.132
Indeed all three authors devote attention to the problem of explaining
death once life is understood to be full biological process.133 If there is

129. SCG, bk. 4, chap. 81, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, p. 594: “Corporeitas autem
dupliciter accipi potest: Uno modo secundum quod est forma substantialis corporis,
prout in genere substantiae collocatur; et sic corporeitas cujuscumque corporis nihil est
aliud quam forma substantialis ejus, secundum quam in genere et specie collocatur. . . .
Oportet igitur quod corporeitas, prout est forma substantialis in homine, non sit aliud
quam anima rationalis.” See Bazan, “La Corporalité selon Thomas,” pp. 407–8.
130. Aquinas ST 1a, q. 119, art. 1, vol. 15, pp. 162–73; and Sup., q. 80 (Leonine
ed.), pp. 180–85. Also Albert, De resurrectione, ed. Kübel, tractate 1, q. 6, pp. 248–57,
esp. art. 9, pp. 254–57. And see also Nolan, Giles, pp. 115–23. There is some ques-
tion whether Giles fully understands or espouses the Aristotelian argument about
matter and species.
131. Giles came to unicity only slowly; he wrote his attack on plurality in 1278;
see E. Hocedez, “La condemnation de Gilles de Rome,” Recherches de théologie
ancienne et médiévale 4 (1932): 34–58; Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in
the Middle Ages, p. 418. After the condemnation of the unicity thesis in the 1280s,
Giles waffled on the question; see esp. his Fifth Quodlibet of 1290. Flewson, Giles of
Rome and Conception, pp. 11–12.
132. Albert, De resurrectione, tract. 1, q. 6, art. 1, solutio, par. 3, p. 249; and Cal-
lus, “Plurality of Forms,” p. 582. Thomas explains that we survive as does the fire
whose logs are replaced while it burns on; Giles compares identity to the waterskin
whose contents empty and fill. See above, nn. 38 and 40.
133. Giles of Rome is especially interested in this; see Nolan, Giles, pp. 42–46.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 263

no core of matter that survives (and ages) while the stuff around it waxes
and wanes and no forma corporeitatis that accounts for what body is
apart from the immortal rational soul, how do we explain the fact that
the body weakens and decays? If it has only one, rational form that
informs potency, why does it not remain in an eternal balance of intake
and excretion?134 And why is resurrection not natural? If a single sub-
stantial form accounts for identity and any stuff is in potency to it, could
not the act by which God regenerates us idem numero at the end of time
be a fully natural actuating of matter by form just as is the ensouling
of the fetus in the womb? The answers are less important than is the
novelty of the questions, generated as they are by understanding matter
as pure potency, identity as lodged in a single form.135 More important
still, however, is the fact that despite such sophisticated analysis all
three authors continue to speak as if God does at the end of time reas-
semble the same bits of dust that constituted the body before.
Albert, Thomas, and Giles devote a good deal of attention (although
less than Peter Lombard had) to the fate of the bits God will reassemble.
All three debate the cannibalism question, detailing exactly where the
matter will go if a father or mother who eats only embryos passes on
to progeny material that is crucial for the constitution of the eaten per-
son.136 Aquinas explains carefully that a relic, although not identical
to the living body of the saint “on account of its difference of form—
viz., the soul, is the same by identity of matter, which is destined to
be reunited to its form.”137 Concentration on the rational soul as self

134. See Nolan, Giles, pp. 50–57, especially the notes, for extensive quotations
from Giles’s Sentence commentary, bk. 2, q. 19. See also Richard of Middleton, De
gradu formarum, “expositio objectorum: rationes theologicae,” and “responsio, in
homine,” in Richard de Mediavilla et la controverse sur la pluralité des forms:
Textes inédits et étude critique, ed. Roberto Zavalloni (Louvain: Études de l’Institut
Supérieur de Philosophie, 1951), pp. 61 and 90–91. Richard, who holds the plurality
of forms, reports arguments against the position.
135. Indeed, in order to answer these questions, the three thinkers have to revert
either to some sense of material continuity as involved in identity or to an Aristote-
lian understanding of form that makes the Thomistic substantial form problematic.
Albert holds that matter has a potential for perfection up to age thirty, after which
it—and we—pass our peak. Giles argues that our regeneration at the end of time is
miraculous because it is the same act as before, whereas according to Aristotelian
analysis of the formation of matter, a second act after an interval of time, even by the
same form, is a second act not an identical one. See Albert, De resurrectione, tract.
2, q. 6, solutio, par. 4, p. 264; and Nolan, Giles, pp. 96–104.
136. See Michael Allyn Taylor, “Human Generation in the Thought of Thomas Aqui-
nas: A Case Study on the Role of Biological Fact in Theological Science” (Ph.D. diss.,
Catholic University of America, 1982); Albert, De resurrectione, tract. 1, q. 6, art. 9,
pp. 254–57; Nolan, Giles, pp. 114–23; and Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 243–44.
137. ST 3a, q. 25, art. 6, vol. 50, pp. 202–5. And see q. 15, art. 10, obj. 3, vol. 49,
pp. 218–19, which says the saints have souls in heaven and (dead) bodies in the tomb.
 264 the decades around 1300

should have suggested that what happens in the tomb (and the womb) is
unimportant, but Thomas emphasizes that Christ’s body did not decay
in the grave (nor did it—conceived perfect in form—undergo any devel-
opment in Mary’s womb other than increase in size). Moreover, every
particle of it is now in heaven. Thomas argues that the blood of Christ
displayed in churches comes from abused crucifixes or miraculous
hosts, not from the corpus that hung on the cross.138 Despite implying
that identity is formal, Aquinas thus stresses that Christ and the mar-
tyrs rise materially the same.139
Moreover there are hints in Thomas’s treatment—as in Albert’s—
that matter, if not marked or inclined naturally toward its own soul, is
nonetheless ordained by God for resurrection. Albert assumed that our
present particles carry with them something latent that ordains them to
constitute our body, although he emphasized that they do not guarantee
self or personhood.140 In his Sentence commentary and Supplementum
(the works by which he was best known to thinkers who followed him),
Aquinas also held some sort of ordaining of matter by indeterminate
dimensions—a position that not only suggested material continuity in
resurrection but also some “actuality” in matter by which it individu-
ates form.141 Giles of Rome, like Aquinas, admitted that the desire of
soul to administer matter might imply a desire in matter itself,142 but
Giles went further. Corruption (that is, change) comes because matter

138. On Christ’s body in the tomb: ST 3a, q, 51, art. 3, vol. 54, pp. 146–49; on
Christ’s body in the womb: ST 3a, q. 33, arts. 1–2, vol. 52, pp. 56–65; on Christ’s blood:
ST 3a, q. 54, art. 3, esp. reply obj. 3, vol. 55, pp. 26–31, esp. p. 31. Cf. the argument of
Braulio of Saragossa in the seventh century; see above chapter 2, n. 179.
139. He explains his position in the case of Christ by stressing the union of Christ’s
body in the grave with his divinity—an argument later thinkers such as Giles, Henry
of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines would find inadequate. They held that philosophi-
cal interpretations of identity must be the same for our bodies and Christ’s. See Wip-
pel, Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 329–30. Thomas’s argument was not new.
140. Kübel, “Auferstehung nach Albertus Magnus,” p. 303.
141. See Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 228–29. According to most interpreters, Aqui-
nas does not go all the way toward seeing matter as potency. In his early work
(chiefly the Sentence commentary), he holds that individuated matter in some sense
subsists after soul and body are separated. It is not that this matter is individuated
by determined dimensions; rather, it retains in flux a certain relation (undetermined
dimensions) to the individuality it had when it was formed by the human soul. See
Michel, “Résurrection,” cols. 2557–58, and Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 220–21. On
the influence of the Sentence commentary, see Chenu, Toward Understanding St.
Thomas, p. 270; Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 267–68, asserts the importance of
the Supplementum, despite the fact that it was put together after Thomas’s death by
disciples who rigidified his early formulations.
142. Aquinas, Sup., q. 78, art. 3, and q. 79, arts. 1–2 (Leonine ed.), pp. 177–80; he
asserts that there is no inclinatio and no natural ordinatio but only one given by
God. Nolan, Giles, pp. 130–33.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 265

desires another form, he argues; therefore, the desire of matter must,

like the soul’s desire, be “satiated.” The stilling (quies) that comes when
the heavens cease to turn is a filling of matter so completely with form
(i.e., beatified soul) that it can never change again.
The concern for the wholeness of body in the afterlife displayed by
Albert, Thomas, and Giles is less a concern for the fate of material par-
ticles, however, than a concern for integrity. Whether or not the resur-
rection body is put together from exactly the bits it possessed on earth,
it must retain every organ and fragment. Stasis—the inability to lose any
particle—is the guarantee of perfection; fragmentation is evil, wholeness
good. The fundamental argument is not any longer—as it had been with
Hugh and Peter Lombard—that body (a partner and tool of self) comes
along with bits of matter and is put back together with them. Rather
the argument is that self, contained in form, is expressed in the details
of body. Thus sex difference of course continues in heaven,143 as do dif-
ferences in stature and shape; the scars of the martyrs also remain, as
their special glory.144 If we all rise the same age, it is not in order to
efface our particularity, but because each person reaches his or her own
peak of perfection at age thirty (or thirty-three) and rises therefore in the
moment at which self is most fully manifest.145 Thomas is concerned
to emphasize that there will be no loss of matter even in hell where the
damned will weep dryly, with no “dissolving” into tears, and will gnash
their teeth without losing any enamel.146 Moreover he and Albert hold
that all defects (not merely mutilations, as Bonaventure argued) will be
repaired for damned as well as elect. The restoration comes, however,

143. See above, n. 105. Also Augustinus Triumphus, De resurrectione, theorema

7, quoted in Weber, Auferstehung, p. 258 n. 479:
Non omnes resurgentes eundem sexum habebunt, nam masculinus sexus et
femininus, quamvis non sint differentiae formales facientes differentiam in
specie, sunt tamen differentiae materiales facientes differentiam in numero.
Et quia in resurrectione quilibet resurget non solum quantum ad id quod est
de identitate specifica, secundum habet esse in specie humana, verum etiam
resurget quantum ad id, quod est de identitate numerali, secundum quam
habet esse in tali individuo. Ideo oportet unumquodque cum sexu proprio et
cum aliis pertinentibus ad integritatem suae individualis naturae resurgere,
propter quod femina resurget cum sexu femineo et homo cum masculino,
remota omni libidine et omni vitiositate naturae.
144. SCG, bk. 4, chap. 88, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, p. 606, and ST 3a, q. 54, art.
4, vol. 55, pp. 30–35. See also Sup., q. 96, art. 10 (Leonine ed.), p. 238, on whether the
scars of the martyrs are an aureole. In general, thirteenth-century theologians drew
on Augustine, City of God, bk. 22, chap. 17 (“vitia detrahentur, natura servabitur”)
on this matter; see Weber, Auferstehung, p. 79 n. 194.
145. Albert, De resurrectione, tract. 2, q. 6, pp. 263–65; Aquinas, Commentary on
Ephesians, chap. 4, lectio 4, p. 167.
146. Aquinas, Sup., q. 97, art. 3 (Leonine ed.), p. 241.
 266 the decades around 1300

not in order to conceal their past experience but because their bodily
defects might be adventitious, not truly reflecting moral character. This-
worldly defects such as blindness or fever have nothing to do with guilt
or merit. Hence in heaven and hell, the damned and the blessed will
be repaired in order to manifest the perfection of the species human.
But the blessed will have gifts and crowns that reveal their individual
achievements, and even in purgatory they will reside in receptacles
appropriate to their status and merit.147 In hell, the damned will reflect
their moral disorder and blindness in bodies that are dark, heavy, and
infinitely passible. Nothing in what Thomas says precludes the idea
that they will suffer in ways appropriate to the nature of their crimes
although he rejects any implication that in purgatory punishments are
proportional to sin on earth.148
The concept of body implicit here is not entirely coherent or con-
sistent. The same ambivalence we found in Bonaventure creeps in. But
whereas Bonaventure’s ambivalence lodges in desire (and in this, Giles
of Rome follows him), Aquinas is ambivalent about body itself.149 Body
is the expression, the completion, and the retardation of soul.150
Aquinas is adamant that soul is capable of the vision of God as soon as it
sloughs off body. “There is no reason for deferring punishments or rewards
after the moment in which the soul is capable of receiving them.”151

[The Apostle] says: . . . Knowing that while we are in the body, we

are absent from the Lord. (For we walk by faith and not by sight.)
But we are confident, and have a good will to be absent rather from
the body, and to be present with the Lord [2 Cor. 5.6–8]. Now there
would be no use in our desiring to be absent, that is separated, from

147. Albert, De resurrectione, tract. 3, q. 1, p. 305; Aquinas, Sup., q. 93, art. 3 (Leo-
nine ed.), pp. 225–26; and q. 96 art. 13, pp. 239–40. On the dotes as loci of inequality,
see Wicki, Seligkeit, pp. 238–49; on the importance to Aquinas of preserving differ-
ence in purgatory, see below, n. 163.
148. Neither Albert, Thomas, nor Giles suggests that the torture of the damned
“fits” their crimes in the sense in which otherworld visions imagined it to do. But as
the three theologians all hold both that the tortures are merited and that the damned
are treated differentially not equally, there is nothing in their views incompatible
with the more graphic visions of the poets and mystics. On Thomas’s rejection of pro-
portionality of punishment in purgatory, see Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 273–74.
149. Giles of Rome uses the conventional argument that desire to administer the
body retards the separated soul from blessedness; see Nolan, Giles, p. 46.
150. Sup., q. 80, art. 1 (Leonine ed.), p. 181; q. 92, art. 2, reply obj. 6, p. 222; q. 93,
art. 1, pp. 224–25; q. 96, art. 10, p. 238; De potentia Dei, q. 5, art. 10 (Parma 1852–1873
ed.), vol. 8, pp. 120–22.
151. SCG, bk. 4, chap. 91, paragr. 1, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, p. 609.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 267

the body, unless we were to be at once present with the Lord. But we
are not present, unless He is present to our sight. . . . Therefore as soon
as the soul of the just man is separated from the body, it sees God; and
this is final beatitude. . . . This disposes of the error of certain Greeks
who deny purgatory and say that souls, before the resurrection of the
bodies, neither ascend into heaven nor are cast into hell.152

It is thus unclear why soul might be retarded or distracted—as Augus-

tine says it is—by the wait for body, because it is unclear what body
could add to visio Dei.153
Yet Aquinas insists that it is unfitting, unnatural, and imperfect for
soul to remain forever without body.154 In his De potentia Dei, he argues
that soul is happier when body is restored; in his De anima and Sentence
commentary, he insists, although hesitantly, that body adds capacity for
knowing.155 The sensitive powers of the separated soul are restricted;
they expand in resurrection. Both Albert and Thomas argue (in contrast
to Bonaventure) that all five senses will be in “act” once body is restored
in paradise, although they are unsure how far to allegorize such experi-
ences as the odor of sanctity or the taste of heavenly sweetness.156

152. Ibid., p. 611; trans. by the English Dominican Fathers, The Summa Contra
Gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1929),
p. 310.
153. Sup., q. 93, art. 1 (Leonine ed.), pp. 224–25. Cf. ST 1a2ae, q. 4, art. 5, ad 5,
vol. 16, pp. 100–7, esp. p. 101.
154. SCG, bk. 4, chaps. 79, 80 and 82, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, pp. 591–93 and
596–98.
155. See Quaestiones de anima, ed. Rob, esp. qq. 15–21, pp. 206–73; Sup., q. 70,
arts. 2–3 (Leonine ed.), pp. 148–51. See also ibid., q. 71, art. 11, pp. 157–58, on burial
practices where he says (p. 158 col. 2, lines 40–45): “ . . . quia caro est pars naturae
hominis, naturaliter homo ad camem suam afficitur.”
156. Aquinas held that risen bodies will have the capacity for touch; see SCG, bk.
4, chap. 84, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, pp. 602–3. Risen bodies will not, however, eat:
see SCG, bk. 4, chap. 83, ibid., pp. 598–602. In Quaestiones disputatae de potentia,
q. 6, arts. 5–10 (Parma 1852–1873 ed.), vol. 8, pp. 132–46, Aquinas argues that Christ
willed to eat after the resurrection in order to show the reality of his body; angels
cannot, however, really eat and speak (i.e., move the organs and the air or divide
food and send it throughout the body). The analysis makes it quite clear that the
human body-soul nexus is far closer than that suggested by any model of a spirit
using a material object (as the angels do). See esp. article 8, reply to obj. 8, p. 142,
where Aquinas explains why Christ’s eating after the resurrection is different from
the angels’ eating even though in neither case can food be changed into flesh and
blood. See also ST 3a, q. 55, art. 6, vol. 55, pp. 56–65. Albert the Great (De resurrec-
tione, tract. 2, q. 8, art. 5, p. 278) argues that, in order to demonstrate his resurrected
body, the resurrected Christ ate without the food becoming of his substance; we
too could eat that way in the glorified body but have no need to, since we need not
demonstrate the resurrection. See also Albert, De sensibus corporis gloriosi, ed. F. M.
 268 the decades around 1300

When discussing epistemology, Aquinas argues that body pulls soul

“toward inferior things.” “When the soul is separated from the body,
its vision is directed to higher things alone, and from these it receives
an influx of universal intelligible species.” But the separated soul will
know through species “only generally and indistinctly in the manner
in which things are known through universal principles.” It cannot
know “individually and determinately.” This explanation appears to
imply that resumption of body by soul in paradise would add a mode of
knowing—that is, the capacity to grasp the particular as particular. It
is significant, however, both that Aquinas does not ask explicitly what
the resurrection body adds to soul and that he asserts:

With respect to the knowledge the souls of the saints possess through
grace, [it] is not the case [that they do not know natural things individ-
ually]. For as regards that knowledge the saints are made equal to the
angels inasmuch as they, like the angels, see all things in the Word.157

Having espoused an epistemology that implies that resumption of body

brings noetic improvement (or at least difference), Aquinas seems to all
but deny the implication.158
The fundamental contradiction in Aquinas’s thought thus rests in
exactly the place where philosophers have seen his greatest creativity:
his use of the Aristotelian notions of substance and hylomorphic union.
For it is not finally clear whether Thomas places primary emphasis on
soul as substantial form, united with God in beatific vision and spilling

Henquinet, “Une pièce inédite du commentaire d’Albert le Grand sur le IVe livre des
sentences,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 7 (1935): 273–93. Weber
shows how thirteenth-century theologians vacillated in their treatments of whether
there is tasting in heaven (Auferstehung, pp. 259–60). Basic principles conflicted: on
the one hand, vegetative functions were seen as eliminated in heaven; on the other
hand, as Albert said: “Nulla potestate nobili destituentur.”
157. Quaestiones de anima, ed. Rob, q. 18, p. 240; trans. J. P. Rowan, Aquinas:
The Soul (London: Herder, 1951), p. 237; and see Milhaven, “Bodily Knowing.”
158. See SCG, bk. 4, chap. 95, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, p. 613–14, where Aquinas
clearly states that angels are higher than we are (even when we are separated souls)
because they do not need the senses or discursive reasoning. The hierarchy of ways
of knowing is clear, and bodily knowing is at the bottom. It is also significant that
Aquinas maintains it took a miracle for Christ’s human body to overcome the anes-
thesia of glory and experience the Passion whereas Bonaventure at least hints that
the very perfection of Christ’s body might have made it more open to sensation. See
above, nn. 90–92. Aquinas also argues that the visio Dei flows over into the body and
enables the martyrs to bear up under pain; ST 3a, q. 15, art. 5, obj. 3 and reply obj. 3,
vol. 49, pp. 204–7, and ibid., q. 14, art. 1, obj. 2 and reply obj. 2, pp. 170–77.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 269

forth its glory in an expression of self we call body, or whether he gives

first importance to the substance homo, whose component parts are
each incomplete without the other. On the one hand, Aquinas suggests
that soul is a self that carries all our structure and integrity packed
into it; it is thus in perfect joy when it attains visio Dei. The body we
will achieve at the resurrection is only an expression of its glory—an
expression that must indeed be kept under rather strict control by soul
if it is not to slip away again into changeability or murkiness.159 As
Albert the Great says in his Sentence commentary, the dotes of the
soul cause those of the body; the clarity of the risen body is an “effect
of mind,” a “clear glass” through which rich color (soul) shines.160 On
the other hand, Thomas argues that soul without body is a fragment.
“When separated from the body, [it] is, in a way, imperfect, even as any
part is when severed from its whole; [for] the soul is naturally part of
human nature.”161 “Not every particular substance is a hypostasis or a
person, but that which has the complete nature of its species. Hence a
hand or a foot cannot be called a hypostasis or a person; nor likewise is
the soul so called, since it is a part of the species human being.”162 Thus
soul is a fragment, mute and limited; without body, it is blocked up.
The blueprint of all we are—our shape and size, our gender and intel-
lectual capacity, our status and merit—may be carried in soul, but it is
realized in body. Without bodily expression, there is no human being
(homo), no person, no self. Aquinas can be read both as eclipsing and as
guaranteeing the ontological significance of body.
Exactly through this contradiction, Aquinas solved—as Origen had
done centuries before—the problem of identity: resurrection of body
was necessary because soul (form) must inform something, and possible

159. On this sense that body’s essential lability might erupt again, see SCG, bk.
4, chap. 95, cited above in n, 158.
160. Albert the Great, Sentence commentary, in Opera omnia, ed. A. Borgnet
(Paris, 1890–1899), bk. 4, dist. 44, art. 30, vol. 30, p. 582; and Wicki, Seligkeit, p. 288
n. 32.
161. SCG, bk. 4, chap. 79, Opera, ed. Fretté, vol. 12, p. 592:
Adhuc, Ostensum est supra naturale hominis desiderium ad felicitatem ten-
dere. Felicitas autem ultima est felicis perfectio. Cuicumque igitur deest aliq-
uid ad perfectionem nondum habet felicitatem perfectam, quia nondum ejus
desiderium totaliter quietatur; omne enim imperfectum perfectionem conse-
qui naturaliter cupit. Anima autem a corpore separata est aliquo modo imper-
fecta, sicut omnis pars extra suum totum exsistens; anima enim naturaliter
est pars humanae naturae. Non igitur homo potest ultimam felicitatem con-
sequi, nisi anima iterato corpori conjungatur, praesertim quum ostensum sit
quod homo in hac vita non potest ad felicitatem ultimam pervenire.
162. ST 1a, q. 75, art. 4, reply to obj. 2, vol. 11, pp. 20–21; and see n. 114 above.
 270 the decades around 1300

because a substantial soul accounts for identity through its subsistence.

Moreover, by packing body into soul—that is, into a form that defined
and stabilized, rather than a seminal reason that unfolded—Aquinas
retained the particularity of self without threat to heavenly hierarchy
and differentiated rewards.163 What he sacrificed by understanding mat-
ter as potency (a position that tends to force matter’s characteristics
into form) was our commonsense experience of body as presence—
labile, fertile, and therefore threatening presence—not merely lack or
absence.164 It was this sense of matter and body that later thinkers, such
as Richard of Middleton, Eustace of Arras, Henry of Ghent, even Giles
of Rome and John Quidort (who, as we have seen, followed Thomas on
many theoretical points), tried to retain, either by arguing that there
is a form of bodiliness or by lodging in matter some kind of inclinatio
or yearning for form.165 Indeed, Thomas himself retained something of
commonsense notions when—in a theoretically incoherent move that
has puzzled later philosophers—he lodged individuation in matter.166
Moreover, as we have seen, Aquinas sometimes spoke as if there
were continuity of matter in resurrection. Indeed, where earlier think-
ers, such as the seventh-century theologian Braulio of Saragossa, had
admitted that not all of Christ’s physical flesh need be in heaven, Aqui-
nas spoke as urgently as had Guibert of Nogent about the necessity that
every particle of his body ascend.167 The empty tomb was an empty

163. Retaining the particularity of souls even in purgatory was important to Aqui-
nas; he argued that there were a large number of different receptacles for them, cor-
responding to their different statuses and merits; see Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp.
270–72.
164. Greshake in Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, pp. 237ff.; L.
Hoedl, “Neue Nachrichten über die Pariser Verurteilungen der thomasischen Form-
lehre,” Scholastik 39 (1964): 178–96; Schneider, Die Einheit des Menschen, pp.
127ff.; and Seidl, “Zur Leib-Seele-Einheit,” pp. 548–53.
165. See Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 406–7 nn. 69, 75; Wippel, Godfrey
of Fontaines, p. 262. For efforts by Duns Scotus to retain an explanation of bodili-
ness see Greshake in Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, pp. 238–39.
See also Richard of Middleton, De gradu formarum, ed. Zavalloni, pp. 38, 59–61, 64,
74–75, 135. Much of Richard’s discussion has to do with accounting for the fact that
the cadaver appears similar to the living body in color, physical marks, etc. Both the
cadaver and the living body decay, and our experience of this must also be accounted
for, says Richard; see ibid, pp. 90–99, 139, and passim. John Quidort of Paris, in
his De unitate formae, dealt explicitly with the objection that the unicity of form
threatened the belief that Christ’s body was Christ’s in the triduum; see Pelster, “Ein
anonymer Traktat des Johannes v. Paris,” pp. 26–27.
166. See n. 141 above. By about 1300 James of Metz, who followed Thomas on
the unicity of form and moved explicitly toward a formal identity theory, saw that
treating matter as the principle of individuation does not work philosophically; see
Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, p. 472.
167. See above, n. 138.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 271

symbol unless the body that had occupied it rose to earth, and then
to heaven, totally untainted by decay. Relic cult was the veneration
of mere mementos unless the dust enshrined in reliquaries itself rose.
Religious concerns held Aquinas to the position that there is material
continuity in the bodies of heaven and hell. Later thinkers such as God-
frey of Fontaines, who saw the implications of formal identity more
clearly than did Aquinas, gave explicitly theological reasons for hesi-
tating to accept it.168 And even before its philosophical or theological
consequences were understood, a conservative reaction in the schools
of Paris and Oxford questioned and condemned it.

The Condemnations of 1277 and the Materialist Reaction

The available evidence for the conservative reaction of the 1270s is
hard to interpret. The doctrine of unicity of form was not condemned
in 1277 at Paris when 219 propositions, including twenty taken directly
from Thomas Aquinas, were condemned.169 Roger Marston reported
that the opinion was “excommunicated” in solemn assembly about
1270 with Aquinas present; what this means is not clear.170 Giles of
Lessines suggested to Albert the Great in 1278 that the condemnations
of 1270 had included the thesis of the equivocality of body (the argu-
ment that—because there is a single form accounting for the person—
the dead body and the living body cannot be the same numerically),
but there is no evidence this was so.171 Henry of Ghent and William
of La Mare attempted to give the impression in Paris in the 1280s that
unicity had been condemned in 1277, but Henry was forced to admit
that it had not.172 The investigation of Giles of Rome some time before
1279 and his forced retraction about 1285 was not (as older scholar-
ship claimed) directed primarily at the unicity doctrine but rather at
Aristotelian-Averroist notions of evil and the eternity of creation.173

168. Wippel, Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 319–48.

169. Five of the propositions taken from Thomas had to do with the related
issue of the individuation of species. The condemnation of Aquinas’s positions was
removed in 1325, just after his canonization, but the rest of the condemnation of
1277 lasted until the fifteenth century. See Hocedez, “La condamnation de Gilles de
Rome,” esp. p. 57.
170. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, p. 417.
171. Weber, Auferstehung, pp. 76–78, 150–51; and Fragmentation and Redemp-
tion, p. 407 n. 75.
172. Hocedez, “Condamnation de Gilles de Rome,” p. 40; Wippel, Godfrey of
Fontaines, p. 318 n. 89 and pp. 345–46.
173. Hocedez, “Condamnation de Gilles de Rome.”
 272 the decades around 1300

Nonetheless there is much to suggest that religious and philo-

sophical anxiety was triggered by the theory that one substantial form
accounts for the nature and thus the identity of person. Questions con-
cerning identity (including the identity of living persons through bio-
logical change) were raised in the Parisian condemnations of 1277;174
and proposition 17 seemed to require adherence to material continuity
in resurrection. To believe that the corruptible body does not “return”
and “rise” “the same numerically” was condemned as error.175 Clearly
the issue of unicity was what Gilson has called a “zone of tension” in
the 1270s.176 Its narrow escape in Paris was followed not only by its
condemnation in 1277 at Oxford—a condemnation that was repeated
in 1286—but also by a flood of theological writing devoted to enforc-
ing the idea of some kind of actuality or seminal reasons in matter and
some multiplicity of form, at least to the extent of a second form—that
of bodiliness—to account for the human person.
The debate over unicity/plurality involved of course a number of
theological and scientific issues other than eschatology. The nature of
the body-soul, matter-form nexus had obvious implications for tran-
substantiation, the transmission of original sin, the growth of the fetus
in the womb, the processes of nutrition and decay; theologians of the
1280s did not fail to explore these questions at new and great length.177
But a crucial element of what historians have called the conservative
reaction of 1277 was a concern to preserve some materiality (in a com-
monsense understanding of the term) in the resurrection body and,
paradoxically, an insistence on the completeness of the separated soul
as well. The reactions of the 1280s in favor of some actuality in matter,
some material continuity in resurrection, and some form of corporeity
to account for the cadaver or relic, can be seen as materialist whereas
the last eschatological controversy of the Middle Ages—the debate over
the beatific vision in the 1330s—seems at first glance to eliminate body
from eschatological significance and lodge self squarely in soul. Both
are however implicit in the anti-Thomist reaction of the 1270s.

174. Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis, vol. 1, p. 552. Hissette, Enquête sur

les 219 articles condamnés, p. 187.
175. Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis, vol. 1, p. 544; see Hissette, Enquête
sur les 219 articles condamnés, p. 308. And see above, n. 5.
176. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, pp. 416–20.
177. For new interest in embryology, see Hewson, Giles of Rome and Conception,
p. 46 n. 21, and Richard of Middleton, De gradu formarum, ed. Zavalloni, pp. 70ff.
and 81ff.; for Richard’s interest in the cadaver, see n. 165 above.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 273

In response to the condemnations at Paris and Oxford, several Fran-

ciscan theologians seized the opportunity to compose and circulate
“corrections” of the errors of Thomas Aquinas.178 Those drawn up by
the Englishman William of La Mare sometime before 1279/80 are espe-
cially instructive in indicating what implications of Thomas’s escha-
tological position distressed conservative theologians and seemed to
them to offer a rallying point in the schools. William objects not only
that Aquinas’s version of hylomorphism denies the physicality of the
body and the lability of matter in earthly life but also that it makes
the separated soul too partial, too intellectual as it were, after death.
Thomas holds, says William, that neither soul nor matter are com-
posites; rather, matter is potency (which cannot therefore be “made”
even by God without form) and soul is a single, intellective form.179
From this, William claims, follow propositions 13 and 16 condemned
by Kilwardly at Oxford in 1277: “that the living body and the dead
body are body equivocally” and “that the intellective soul is united to
prime matter in such a way that that which corrupts proceeds toward
prime matter.”180 Several heresies follow as well: that Christ’s body
living and dead is “not the same in number”; that a new substantial
form and also new accidental forms had to be introduced into Christ’s
body during the triduum because it had become prime matter; that
Christ did not take his body, but only prime matter, from Mary; that
the bread on the altar is not Christ’s body; and that there is no origi-
nal sin in man.181 The fact that William returns again at the end of
178. I agree with R. Zavalloni (Richard de Mediavilla et la pluralité des formes,
preface, p. i) when he rejects earlier interpretations that saw the controversy largely
as a matter of competition between orders.
179. William de la Mare, Declarationes Magistri Guilelmi de la Mare O.F.M. de
Variis Sententiis S. Thomae Aquinatis, ed. Francis Pelster (Münster: Aschendorff,
1956), pp. 19, 22. On the date of William’s Corrections, see Valens Heynck, “Zur
Datierung des ‘Correctorium fratris Thomae’ Wilhelms de la Mare: Ein unbeachtetes
Zeugnis des Petrus Johannis Olivi,” Franziskanische Studien 49 (1967): 1–21.
180. William, Declarationes, p. 19; William comes back to the problem of Aqui-
nas’s view of the equivocality of body in chap. 107, p. 30, and says that Thomas
claimed he retracted this position, but the retraction is nowhere to be found in his
writings. He repeats that the idea follows from the unicity of form and involves
several heresies. On the condemnations of 1277 at Oxford, see Chartularium univer-
sitatis Parisiensis, vol. 1, pp. 558–59.
181. William, Declarationes, pp. 20–21. The argument behind the last two is
not explained; one can see what is involved in Richard of Middleton’s treatise on
the plurality of forms. The idea seems to be that there must be a form of bodiliness
to account for the replacement of the form of bread by the form of hoc corpus and
to convey the taint of sin from parent to offspring (since the intellective soul is not
added to the fetus in the womb until weeks after conception). See Richard, De gradu
formarum, ed. Zavalloni, pp. 100–1 and 105.
 274 the decades around 1300

his treatise to argue that equivocality of body follows from unicity of

form and involves error concerning Christ’s body in the tomb suggests
that he is particularly troubled by the threat to the continuity of body
between life and grave.182 He is also troubled, however, by a suspicion
that Aquinas’s view of the soul as a single, substantial, intellective
form limits soul’s ability to know, and to suffer, and to contain (so to
speak) our individuality. According to Thomas, the separated soul—like
the angels and God himself—would not know particulars. Therefore it
would not know Christ’s passion or its own individual sins; its suffer-
ing from the “corporal fire” required by Scripture would be allegorized
into mere mental impediment. The separated soul would be similar—
even equal—to other souls, for it would be an intellect knowing itself
and other souls as intellects.183
Thus William seems to object both that Thomas’s theory does not
explain how bodies (Christ’s and ours) in the grave are crucial to self
and that it does not make the separated soul able to know and suf-
fer and experience joy as completely and “corporeally” as it will after
the Last Judgment. While there is surely something inconsistent in the
attack, both prongs reject the tight union of form and matter crucial to
Thomas’s conception of person. William assumes that both the cadaver
and the separated soul are hylomorphic compositions, that physical-
ity and lability should lodge in both. He seems to want perfect bliss
(including full sensual knowledge and full individuality) guaranteed for
the separated soul without body; yet he wants resurrection guaranteed
for the cadaver in the grave (both by the forma corporeitatis and per-
haps by some sort of material continuity as well). Like the majority of
theologians at the end of the thirteenth century, he assumes a form for
body but also packs much of bodiliness into separated soul. His concern
for correct understanding of both soul and body stems explicitly from
theological and devotional considerations—that is, from the implica-
tions of philosophical definitions for pious practices such as the Eucha-
rist and the care of the dead.
Objections to equivocality of body thus seem to follow from con-
cern about the relationship of cadaver to resurrection. To suggest this
is not mere speculation on my part. Scholastic theologians seldom dis-
cuss devotional practices, but in the condemnations of 1277 and 1286

182. See n. 180 above.

183. William, Declarationes, pp. 21, 22, 26–28. William’s attack probably misrep-
resents Thomas; see above, n. 157. But Thomas’s position was inconsistent.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 275

and in dozens of quodlibetal questions from the decades around 1300,

resurrection, relics, and burial practices were explicitly connected.184
Theologians repeatedly objected to unicity and formal identity because
the position implied that cadavers in the tomb and relics in reliquar-
ies do not rise from the dead. A forma corporeitatis or corporis—even
some sort of seminal reason, inclinatio, or yearning in the bones of
carnarium and casket—seemed required to underscore the appropriate-
ness of the cult of martyrs.
John Peckham, renewing in 1286 the Oxford condemnations of 1277,
argued that equivocality denied that the living and dead bodies of Christ,
the saints, and indeed all persons, were the same in number before they
were changed by putrefaction into dust or elements.185 Henry of Ghent
explicitly rejected Thomistic unicity of form (toward which he was
drawn as a philosophical solution) because it suggested that the relic
is not really the saint.186 John Quidort of Paris had to defend himself
against critics who charged that formal identity removed all justifica-
tion for pious cult. In his answer, John not only argued, as theologians
had since Augustine, that relics are to be honored because they bring
before our memories the life and suffering of the martyrs; he also held—
in what almost amounts to a concession to material continuity—that
the “first matter” (which does not quite mean mere potency) in relic
and living holy person is the same and glorified in the body.187
Godfrey of Fontaines, who made repeated arguments against numeri-
cal identity in dead and living bodies for philosophical reasons, held
back from espousing unicity of form. Arguing that Thomas’s position
and (as he analyzed it) that of Henry of Ghent made Christ’s body

184. Proposition 155, condemned in 1277, stated that care should not be taken
for burial of the dead; Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis, vol. 1, p. 552. His-
sette, Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés, p. 294, connects the idea to denial
of personal immortality and says its source has not been identified; he suggests that
material continuity in resurrection provided support against the proposition and that
a challenge to it was therefore perhaps also involved. He fails to note that the idea
was a standard charge against heretics in this period, see chapter 5, pp. 216–19, above.
And see below on scholastic discussions of burial practices, chapter 8 at n. 37.
185. Registrum epistolarum fratris Johannis Peckham, archiepiscopi cantuarien-
sis, ed. C. T. Martin (London: Longman, 1882–1885), vol. 3, pp. 921–23, and Wippel,
Godfrey of Fontaines, p. 345 n. 183. Note that the argument here is for a forma cor-
poris not material continuity, which was clearly becoming increasingly difficult to
defend theoretically for the period after full-scale putrefaction had set in.
186. Wippel, Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 320, 330; and see E. Brown, “Authority,
Family, and the Dead.”
187. Pelster, “Ein anonymer Traktat des Johannes v. Paris,” p. 26; Gilson, History
of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, pp. 413–16; and see n. 165 above.
 276 the decades around 1300

exceptional, Godfrey urged repeatedly that whatever solution one finds

to explain continuity between living body and cadaver must apply to
all bodies. Some sort of forma corporeitatis explains decay more sat-
isfactorily than does a single substantial form, says Godfrey. Christ’s
body might have escaped putrefaction naturally by the spices used in
the tomb or by the sort of miracle that, even in Godfrey’s own day, pre-
served many saintly bodies incorrupt, but to attribute to the hypostatic
union the fact that his body in the triduum was “his body” threat-
ens our salvation and our personhood because it leaves no explanation
for our material continuity in resurrection. In debate with Oliver of
Tréguier in the early 1290s, Godfrey opposed the French aristocratic
practice of corpse division by arguing both that whole burial is more
consonant with whole resurrection (although God can, of course, unite
fragments) and that it is “horrible” to mutilate a body that “still retains
its form.”188 Philosophically sympathetic to lodging identity in one
substantial form, Godfrey was thus drawn toward some sort of plurality
by considerations arising from burial practice; he even suggested that
matter retains some inclinatio to be informed with its own body while
soul is separated from it after death.189
No mainstream theologian of the late Middle Ages denied the doc-
trine of bodily resurrection. None—not even those who held the theory
of formal identity—denied that, under normal circumstances, God will
reassemble and reanimate at the end of time the same material particles
(eadem in numero) of which body was composed on earth. As we have
seen, a concern for literal, material resurrection led some philosophi-
cally very astute theologians to shy away from the elegance and coher-
ence of Thomas’s theory of a single substantial form. Down into the
seventeenth century, and even beyond, sermons and hymns that offered
to Christians the hope of resurrection spoke of it in images of reunited
fragments reminiscent of Tertullian’s.190 I shall turn in chapter 8 below
to the context of such intellectual positions and pious promises in the
practices of the late thirteenth century.

188. E. Brown, “Death and the Human Body,” p. 243.

189. Wippel, Godfrey of Fontaines, chap. 8.
190. See, for example, John Donne, “Sermon No. 3. Preached at the Earl of
Bridgewater’s House in London at the Marriage of his daughter, the Lady Mary,
November 19, 1627, on Matthew 22.30,” in The Sermons of John Donne, vol. 8, ed.
Evelyn Simpson and George Potter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956),
pp. 94–109. The theme is a common one with the Metaphysical Poets, who use it
with great subtlety.
 Resurrection, Hylomorphism, and Abundantia 277

But before I do, I must acknowledge that the story of intellectual

developments does not end with the conservative reaction of the 1270s
and 1280s. Whatever censure (and narrow escape from censure) the unic-
ity doctrine saw in the decades before 1300, the formal theory of iden-
tity was not itself condemned. As I explained above, it gained ground
steadily in the second and third decades of the fourteenth century.191
Condemnation of those Thomistic notions that implied it was lifted
in 1325.192 Durand of St. Pourçain’s identity theory (which spelled out
clearly the implications of Thomas’s) was not condemned when other
aspects of his teaching were extracted from his Sentence commentary
for censure.193 Although discussion stayed in the narrow confines of the
university and theologians indeed remained uncomfortable with some
of its ramifications, unicity of form and formal identity became fairly
widespread assumptions by 1330. For example, Dante used the notions
quite correctly in the Divine Comedy to account for both aerial and
resurrection bodies.194
In university circles of the early fourteenth century, attention turned
increasingly to soul. The confusion that resulted from the plurality-
of-forms doctrine led in 1311–1312 to condemnation of the view that
the intellective soul can relate to body only through lower levels of
soul. But this was not (as recent scholars have realized) a victory either
for unicity or for body.195 Nonetheless, the increasing focus on soul
led some to ask whether body contributes anything to blessedness. As
Dondaine has demonstrated, discussion of soul’s encounter with God
in visio—unimportant in thirteenth-century summae—played a major
role, in some cases the major role, in quodlibetal debates around 1300.196
The last important eschatological controversy of the Middle Ages—the
controversy over the beatific vision in the early 1330s—established
that full enjoyment of God might come to the separated soul before it
received its body back. Although a pope himself supported the claim
that vision “face to face” will be delayed until “person” is reestablished
with resurrection, the claim was defeated.

191. The position remained, however, a narrowly philosophical one. See the
appended texts in Weber, Auferstehung.
192. See above, n. 169.
193. Weber, Auferstehung, p. 242 n. 404.
194. See below, chapter 7, p. 302.
195. Greshake in Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, pp. 237–38.
196. H. F. Dondaine, “L’Objet et le ‘medium’ de la vision béatifique chez les théol-
ogiens du XIIIe siècle.”
 278 the decades around 1300

The beatific vision controversy can thus from one point of view be
seen as a rearguard and unsuccessful action by the partisans of the body.
It was, however, in a deeper sense an indication of how far the separated
soul had (as William of La Mare suggested) come to contain the particu-
larity and capacity for experience earlier treatments had lodged in body.
The soul that was defined in the bull Benedictus Deus of 1336 was not
a self for which body is the completion or housing or garment, but a self
of which body is the expression (abundantia or refluentia).
I therefore turn in my next chapter to the controversy over visio Dei,
and to twelfth- and thirteenth-century notions of somatomorphic soul
that provide the background to it. I turn to beatific vision not in order
to shift attention to the topic of soul but in order to explore the final
episode in the story of medieval concepts of the resurrection body: the
point at which even separated soul becomes in some sense “embodied.”
 Seven
Somatomorphic Soul and
Visio Dei: The Beatific Vision
Controversy and Its Background

the beatific vision controversy of the 1330s was

an event of some importance in the history of theology.
Three popes, a king, an emperor, and dozens of theologians
participated.1
The debate concerned the experience of separated soul
between death and Last Judgment. It focused on that eschatological
period and place in which body is absent, still asleep in the tomb await-
ing resurrection. Thus the controversy might seem, at first glance, to
have nothing to do with body and therefore nothing to do with the topic
of this book. But in fact the debate was really about body and resur-
rection. For to suggest that visio Dei can come to separated soul—that
the final bliss of heaven might be given before the Judgment—is to
suggest that body adds little if anything to blessedness. The visio Dei
controversy was thus the final episode in medieval discussions of the
ontological and soteriological importance of body.
Behind the controversy lay the idea of purgatory and the antihereti-
cal polemic of the thirteenth century. Before I consider the events of the

1. On the importance of the controversy over the beatific vision and the number
and status of the people involved, see Decima Douie, “John XXII and the Beatific
Vision,” Dominican Studies 3, no. 2(1950): 154–74. For background, see X. Le Bach-
elet, “Benoît XII,” DTC, vol. 2, col. 653–96, and Wicki, Seligkeit.
 280 the decades around 1300

1330s, I must therefore turn briefly to changing notions of the afterlife

in the preceding two hundred years.

Purgatory
Jacques Le Goff’s popular and important history of purgatory has been
much criticized for dating the appearance of the belief to the late
twelfth century, for spatializing the concept, and for relating it closely to
Dumézil’s theories about threefold social structures in the Indo-European
tradition (and therefore to the emergence of the bourgeoisie).2 Nonethe-
less much of Le Goff’s analysis is subtle, perceptive, and convincing,
especially his demonstration that—between the later twelfth and four-
teenth centuries—preaching as well as formal theology paid increasing
attention to an “in-between” time and place for the separated soul.3
As Le Goff explains it, the doctrine of purgatory located an experi-
ence of suffering and expiation between personal death and general judg-
ment. In the course of the thirteenth century this experience was both
“infernalized” and “tilted toward heaven.”4 Purgatory became, that is,
the location of horrid punishments, often indistinguishable from those
of hell, but theorists made it clear that no change in ultimate soterio-
logical status could be effected there. Purgation was consequent upon a
prior decision that the soul was destined for heaven; it was unavailable
to those destined for hell.
Thus the doctrine of purgatory rapidly came to be important both for
devotional purposes and for social control. It made prayers for the dead
effective—but not too effective! Some development was possible for the
souls of ancestors, relatives, and even holy people after death (as long
2. See, for example, Adrian H. Bredero, “Le moyen âge et le Purgatoire,” Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique 78 (1983): 429–52; Aaron J. Gurevich, “Popular and Schol-
arly Medieval Cultural Traditions: Notes in the Margin of Jacques Le Goff’s Book,”
Journal of Medieval History 9 (1983): 71–90; Alan E. Bernstein, review of Le Goff in
Speculum 59 (1984): 179–83; Jean-Pierre Massaut, “La Vision de l’au-delà au moyen
âge: A propos d’un ouvrage récent,” Le Moyen Age 91 (1985): 75–86; Graham R.
Edwards, “Purgatory: ‘Birth’ or Evolution?” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36
(1985): 634–46. Since Le Goff has been criticized by theologians for too much atten-
tion to social setting and by students of popular culture for too much attention to
formal theology, he must have done something right.
3. Purgatory was first defined as doctrine at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274;
the definition was repeated with slight modification at the Council of Florence in
1439; see Denzinger, Enchiridion (1957 ed.), pp. 216, 252–53. The first official pon-
tifical pronouncement on purgatory was in 1254; it actually goes beyond the Second
Council of Lyons in giving a name, purgatorium, to the place of purgation and asso-
ciating it with fire, see Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 284–86.
4. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 4–7, 204–8, 310–15, 358–59, and passim.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 281

as they were destined for heaven as well as in need of cleansing).5 But

the moment of dying was determinative. It decided one’s place in the
afterlife. There could be neither hope nor terror that one might change
beyond the borders of death into a self unrecognizable, in moral terms,
as a continuation of the self of earth.6 Purgatory reinforced rather than
undercut age-old concerns with reward and punishment.
It has sometimes surprised modern scholars that the “in-between”
period of purgation was imagined by poets and visionaries in such strik-
ingly somatic terms or that theologians insisted (as did both Thomas
Aquinas and William of La Mare, who accused him of denying it) that
the separated soul in purgatory experienced corporeal fire.7 They have
therefore tended to resort to theories of the imagination drawn from
comparative religion, psychology, or literary analysis to explain the large
number of eleventh-, twelfth-, and thirteenth-century visions in which
corporealized souls undergo complex journeys after death but before
resurrection.8 This is a subject to which I shall return below. What is
relevant here is simply the observation that preachers, hagiographers,
and schoolmen saw nothing fundamentally inconsistent in depicting
the bodily tortures of disembodied spirits although they sometimes
admitted it was odd.9 Purgatory and resurrection were different (and not
fully compatible) eschatological emphases, but medieval theorists did
5. My emphasis here is a little different from Le Goff’s; he stresses purgatory as a
victory for the idea of progress—growth—beyond this life and says it makes death a
“bogus boundary” (Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, p. 288). There is truth in this, and Le
Goff is right to point to the fact that Greek theologians accused Westerners of being
“Origenist” in their view. But it seems to me that the emphasis on death as decisive
was fundamental.
6. See the discussion of Hadewijch at n. 39 below. See also the perceptive remarks
of Jean-Claude Schmitt in “La Fabrique des saints,” Annales: Économies, sociétés,
civilisations 39 (1984): 296–97.
7. Thomas’s account does tend to psychologize the experience of fire, however,
suggesting that it somehow limits the soul. The proposition that the separated soul
does not suffer ab igne was condemned in Paris in 1277; see Chartularium universi-
tatis Parisiensis . . ., proposition 19, p. 544; and Roland Hissette, Enquête sur les 219
articles condamnés, pp. 309–10.
8. Carol Zaleski tends to reduce somatomorphism either to a literary reaction—
what she calls a “law of the imagination” that leads writers in many religious tradi-
tions to picture the soul as body—or to a psychological or even neurological reaction
related to the “phantom limb” syndrome (see Otherworld Journeys, pp. 51ff., 117,
and 192ff). For further discussion of this issue, see my “Faith Imagining the Self:
Somatomorphic Soul and Resurrection Body in Dante’s Divine Comedy.”
9. See Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, p. 6, and below, pp. 291–307. Robert W. Acker-
man argues that the thirteenth-century Middle English Debate between the Body
and the Soul reflects “popular belief” in its idea that the soul has a “material body,”
depicted in art as a homunculus (“The Debate of the Body and the Soul and Parochial
Christianity,” Speculum 37 [1962]: 549 and 564).
 282 the decades around 1300

not see them as contradictory. As Thomas Aquinas’s objection against

Greek theology (quoted above, p. 267) suggests, those who polemicized
against heresy or error connected denial of resurrection, denial of pious
burial, and denial of purgatory.10 Cathars, who were accused of abhor-
ring the body and rejecting its resurrection, were thought to be equally
hostile to a period of purgation in which self is soul.11 A Latin transla-
tion of a thirteenth-century Greek work presented to pope John XXII
in 1326 or 1327 associated the Greek “error” that souls will not go
immediately to heaven or hell at death with the Cathar opinion that
souls linger “in the air” until a final judgment.12 Polemics against dual-
ists and Amauricians in the first two decades of the thirteenth century,
debates over eschatology in the 1230s, efforts at reconciliation with
the Greek church in the 1250s, the Second Council of Lyons in 1274,
and the Parisian condemnations of 1277 all maintained that both the
doctrine of purgatory and the doctrine of resurrection were necessary to
a theology in which death is decisive, prayers for the dead are effective,
and self is a psychosomatic unity.13
Purgatory implied an afterlife in which significant moments might
occur before the end of time.14 It thus prepared for the view, which
triumphed in 1336, that the beatific vision might come to the blessed
whenever they were spiritually cleansed.15 Resurrection and the resur-
rection body were not necessary in order to see God.16

10. See chapter 5, nn. 57–67, and chapter 6, n. 152.

11. See Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 168–73, 278–80, 331–33; and Dykmans,
Sermons de Jean XXII, pp. 12–18. Moneta of Cremona and Durand of St. Pourçain,
for example, argued that Cathars deny immediate entry into paradise or hell at the
moment of death. Thus Cathar denial of purgatory is seen as a denial that death is
decisive and a preference for some notion of sleep until the end of time. Cathars were
also, of course, held to deny resurrection.
12. Dykmans, Sermons de Jean XXII, p. 30.
13. See Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 237–88.
14. See Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 254 and 269, for Bonaventure and Thomas
arguing that release from purgatory can come before the end of time.
15. Dykmans (Sermons de Jean XXII, pp. 17–20) cites a forged letter concerning
Jerome’s miracles, purportedly from Cyril of Jerusalem to Augustine, that was circu-
lating in Europe about 1300. It asserted that Greek heretics denied not only that the
beatific vision came before the end of time but also that any punishment or reward
was bestowed before the body was resumed. Dykmans suggests that it could have
been forged by the enemies of John XXII anxious to associate his position on the
beatific vision with the denial of any personal judgment at death. The fact that denial
of purgatory, of personal judgment, and of immediate beatific vision were associated
suggests that making the moment of death the decisive eschatological transition was
close to the heart of the issue in the early fourteenth century.
16. The idea that we do not see the divine essence in visio Dei but rather some
sort of theophany—as Dionysius and Erigena were taken to suggest—was already
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 283

This view was, however, less a rejection of body than a subsuming

of it into soul. Although separated soul was by definition, of course,
without body, a good deal of the theological squabbling of the 1320s and
1330s involved the condemning of positions that implied any epistemo-
logical lack, even lack of quasi-corporeal experience, in soul. Whereas
those who argued for postponed visio Dei spoke of body as a garment or
stole added at the end of time, those who supported immediate beatific
vision spoke of body as a manifestation or flowing out that appears
almost timeless. It thus seems probable that the position of Benedictus
Dens gained ground steadily in the thirteenth century and prevailed in
the fourteenth, at least in part because theologians, poets, and visionar-
ies imagined the soul that achieved beatitude as if it already in some
way possessed, or expressed itself in, its body.

The Controversy Over the Beatific Vision

The controversy over the beatific vision began in the fall and early win-
ter of 1331 when pope John XXII preached two sermons asserting that
the souls of the saints now rest “under the altar” (Rev. 6.9) in contem-
plation of Christ’s humanity but will at the general resurrection and
final Judgment be raised above the altar to the perfect joy of visio Dei.
Drawing on Augustine and Bernard as well as on gospel parables of the
talents and the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20 and 25), John argued
that the separated soul is imperfect; it is therefore incapable, until
reunited with its body, of attaining the goal of all desire: full vision
of the divine essence “face to face.” By Epiphany, 1332, John seems to
have asserted (these sermons survive only in fragments and may have
been censored) that final damnation of the wicked and full revelation of
Christ in his divinity will be deferred until the Last Judgment.17

condemned in 1241, Thus direct encounter was important. See Dondaine, “L’Objet
et le ‘medium’ de la vision béatifique chez les theologiens du XIIIe siècle.”
17. Douie, “John XXII and Beatific Vision”; Le Bachelet, “Benoît XII”; N. Valois,
“Jacques Duèse: Pape sous le nom de Jean XXII,” in Histoire littéraire de la France,
vol. 34 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1914), pp. 551–627; J. E. Weakland, “Pope John
XXII and the Beatific Vision Controversy,” Annuale mediaevale 9 (1968): 76–84;
Dykmans, Sermons de Jean XXII; Robert of Anjou, La Vision bienheureuse: Traité
envoyé au pape Jean XXII, ed. Marc Dykmans (Rome: Presses de l’Université Gre-
gorienne, 1970); Marc Dykmans, Pour et contre Jean XXII en 1333: Deux traités
avignonnais sur la vision béatifique (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vati-
cana, 1975); Katherine Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar and Primate: Richard
Fitzralph in Oxford, Avignon, and Armagh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp.
89–107; and Lucy Freeman Sandler, “Face to Face with God: A Pictorial Image of
the Beatific Vision,” in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985
 284 the decades around 1300

John’s own position in the opening decades of the fourteenth century

appears to have been the one popular since the 1240s—that is, that full
beatific vision can come before the end of time.18 Bulls of canoniza-
tion he promulgated in the 1310s and 1320s (including that for Thomas
Aquinas) spoke of the saints seeing God “face to face.” But the issue
had clearly begun to puzzle the pope in the 1320s when he made mar-
ginal notations in a copy of Gerard of Abbeville’s quodlibetal questions
exactly where Gerard adduced a number of skillful arguments for the
position that resumption of body must add to blessedness because full
beatitude is promised to the psychosomatic unit “person,” not to the
soul. John himself saw the matter as having devotional and pastoral
implications; he defended his later notion of postponed visio by com-
menting that the Mass implies the possibility of improvement when it
exhorts us to pray for the dead.19
Several chroniclers tell us that John’s sermons of 1331–32 “scandal-
ized many.” But it was a year before opposition was articulated—by the
English Dominican, Thomas Waleys, preaching at Avignon—and Waleys
was soon accused of heresy and imprisoned. The pope’s opinions were
widely discussed in the universities of Paris and Oxford, where they
met with no favor, and the French king openly sided with the Parisian
theologians. The new Minister General of the Franciscans, Guiral Ot
(Geraldus Odonis), then delivered a disputation at Paris in the autumn
of 1333 that supported the pope but moved discussion toward a theory
of three different kinds of vision, the most perfect of which (the visio
eterna) was delayed until after the Last Judgment. When John requested

Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1986),

pp. 224–35. Much of the outrage over the pope’s opinion was owing to its (Nestorian)
implication that the humanity and divinity of Christ were separable and that the
separated soul received a vision of the humanity without the divinity; see Walsh,
Richard FitzRalph, p. 90.
18. In general, thirteenth-century theologians raised the question of visio Dei in
discussing Peter Lombard, Sentences, bk. 4, dist. 49, q. 1, art. 4: “Whether the beati-
tude of the blessed is greater after the resurrection than before.” The standard answer
was “yes.” Debate was over the nature of “greater.” Aquinas, for example, gave up
the notion that blessedness would increase in intensity, although he maintained that
it would increase “in extension.” See Dykmans, Pour et contre Jean XXII, p. 50. For
Bonaventure’s opinion, see above, chapter 6 at n. 98.
19. John’s opponents also appealed to pastoral and devotional concerns. An anon-
ymous De visione beata of 1333–34 (Paris BN lat. 3170, edited by Dykmans) argues
that those who deny immediate beatific vision are in effect denying purgatory, pro-
faning the martyrs, and rejecting prayers for the dead. The implication is that to
postpone any aspect of heavenly reward is to postpone all postmortem experience
and judgment until body is restored (Dykmans, Pour et contre Jean XXII, pp. 40–54).
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 285

an opinion from Durand of St. Pourçain and received (in 1334) a vindica-
tion of the idea of immediate vision, he submitted Durand’s treatise to a
tribunal of theologians, who found eleven errors. Jacques Fournier—the
most renowned thinker among the cardinals and the future Benedict
XII—then, however, vindicated Durand on several of his alleged errors
and presented to the pope his own De statu animarum, which defended
the idea of immediate vision but allowed for the possibility of a still
more perfect and complete visio after the resurrection.20 A consensus
was clearly building around an intermediate opinion. John retracted
his most extreme formulations on his deathbed, asserting (still with a
strong hedge concerning the significance of body): “the holy souls see
God and the divine essence face to face and as clearly as their condition
as souls separated from their bodies allows.”21
On January 29, 1336, Jacques Fournier, now Benedict XII, issued
Benedictus Deus, which defined doctrine on four of the five issues that
had emerged at the heart of the controversy. Pure souls (asserted the
pope) see the divine essence nude, clarte, et aperte before the end of
time; this vision is true beatitude and full repose (requies). Because of
its presence, the theological virtues of faith and hope, which involve
anticipation, cease; because it continues forever, no other visio Dei will
come to replace it after the resurrection. Benedict did not settle the
issue (on which a number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century theolo-
gians were unclear) of whether there is increase in the intensity of the
beatific vision after the Last Judgment, although his personal opinion
was that there was.22 He did use the bull to affirm both personal and
general judgment: the wicked descend to hell at death (he asserted); yet
they must appear again with all humankind when the trumpet sounds
so that body as well as soul can receive recompense.

20. Douie, “John XXII and Beatific Vision,” p. 168; Le Bachelet, “Benoît XII,” col.
665; Thomas Käpelli, Le Procès contre Thomas Waleys O.P.: Études et documents
(Rome: Istituto storico domenicano, S. Sabina, 1936); Joseph Koch, Durandus de S.
Porciano, O.P.: Forschungen zum Streit um Thomas von Aquin zu Beginn des 14.
Jahrhunderts, BGPTM 26 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1927), pp.173–76; Anneliese Maier,
“Die Pariser Disputation des Geraldus Odonis,” and “Zwei Prooemien Benedikts
XII,” in Ausgehendes Mittelalter: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte des
14. Jahrhunderts, Storia e Letteratura, 97, 105, and 138 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e
Letteratura, 1964–77), vol. 3, pp. 327–33 and 447–89; Dykmans, “A propos de Jean
XXII et de Benoît XII: La libération de Thomas Waleys,” Archivum Historiae Ponti-
ficiae 7 (1969): 115–30; and Walsh, Richard FitzRalph, p. 92.
21. Douie, “John XXII and Beatific Vision,” p. 157; Walsh, Richard FitzRalph, p.
103 n. 69.
22. Le Bachelet, “Benoît XII,” cols. 669–72; for the text of Benedictus Deus, see
cols. 657–58, and Denzinger, Enchiridion (1957 ed.), pp. 229–30.
 286 the decades around 1300

A number of the treatises and documents produced in the course

of this controversy have recently been edited by Anneliese Maier and
Marc Dykmans.23 Much is at stake in them, as we have seen: matters
of Christology, epistemology, and soteriology, of pastoral care and papal
authority. For my purposes they provide a final dossier of many of the
metaphors, images, and biblical phrases used by schoolmen to discuss
the resurrected body. Skillful and often tendentious in their deploy-
ment of scriptural references to attack opponents, these polemicists
and theologians were fully aware of the contradiction in their own ideas
between the goal of repose or stasis (requies aeterna) and the active
pull of appetitus or retardatio; they understood the ambiguity of their
inherited concepts of desiderium and of corpus itself.
If we look, for example, at Gerard of Abbeville’s quodlibetal ques-
tion “whether beatified souls see the uncreated light more clearly when
they have resumed their bodies than they did before”—a thirteenth-
century work that influenced John XXII—we find Gerard fully aware of
the ambivalence in Augustine’s idea of a naturalis inclinatio ad corpus
retarding the soul before resurrection.24 Gerard points out that Hugh
of St. Victor concluded from the notion of the drag of corruptibility
that soul is better off without body. Nonetheless, he tries to solve the
dilemma by making the affectus for body “natural” (and therefore posi-
tive) and by arguing that it is only the decaying body that distracts the
soul by “busying” it with the need to “manage” corruption. He sub-
sumes the removal of impediment into the satisfaction of inclinatio as
a final act that makes the soul more perfect.
To Gerard, body, like perfection, is something added to soul. Such a
conception of body appears to be at the heart of the arguments of John
XXII as well. Using 2 Corinthians 5.1–10, John describes the resurrection
body as resumed clothing, a rebuilt house or tabernacle, a stole put on.
It would be odd, asserts John, if body added nothing, for it adds at least
“the eyes of the body” for seeing. It would be similarly odd if final reward
were bestowed before final Judgment. Most of all it would be perplexing
if a soul at rest could incline anywhere, let alone downward. How can a
soul in possession of full vision of God be distracted by anything? How,

23. For Dykmans’ contributions, see above, n. 17. Anneliese Maier’s studies and
editions have been reprinted in Ausgehendes Mittelalter, vol. 3, pp. 319–590.
24. Gerard, a secular master at the University of Paris, died in 1272. His quodli-
betal question on the separated soul and the beatific vision is edited in Dykmans,
Sermons de Jean XXII, pp. 45–49.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 287

in other words, can a soul so beatified even notice—in the blinding light
of God’s presence—that its body is missing?25
Those who disagreed with John disagreed, of course, with the devo-
tional and pastoral consequences of delaying full delight for the good
soul until a distant resurrection.26 But they also seem to have disagreed
with the notion that body is something added on, and with the ambi-
guity implicit in thirteenth-century notions of retardatio or desid-
erium. Thomas Waleys, preaching against the pope, used Ecclesiastes
2.23, Ecclesiasticus 34.11, and Isaiah 57.20 to argue that John’s posi-
tion meant there was no rest for the separated soul, which would ebb
and flow, drawn by sadness, like a troubled sea.27 Durand of St. Pour-
çain, replying in the summer of 1334 to John’s request for an opinion,
devoted much attention to the pope’s metaphor of the body as garment
or stole (derived from the parables, Rev. 6.11, and 2 Cor. 5) but argued
that workers in the vineyard need not wait for an outer garment in
order to receive their reward.
Durand’s position is not, however, a rejection of body. In full phil-
osophical accord with his espousal of formal identity, Durand (like
Waleys) spoke as if glory spills forth from soul into body as soul’s
expression—an image that in a certain sense makes the bond between
the two far tighter than the biblical metaphor of a second stole or gar-
ment added to a first.28 Another of John’s opponents, the future Benedict
XII, agreed most strongly with the censuring of Durand at that point
where Durand himself seemed to hold back some “bodily” experience
from separated soul. Durand argued that soul before resurrection but in

25. John, Sermon 2, pars. 26–27, 29, 72–74 and 76, in Dykmans, Sermons de Jean
XXII, pp. 114–15, 115–16, 138–39, 142–43; see also the discussion of sermon 6 on
the Ascension in ibid., p. 59. It is interesting that John uses a reference to Bernard
to argue that soul cannot enter the joy of the Lord without body any more than a
prelate can enter without his people (sermon 1, paragr. 10, in ibid., p. 97); he thus
shows some awareness of the social implications of resurrection—an aspect that was
usually ignored in this period.
26. The anonymous treatise De visione beata even argues that the pope is the
equivalent of a Waldensian heretic in his denial of purgatory; De visione beata, pt. 2,
reason 9, ed. Dykmans, in Pour et contre Jean XXII, p. 49.
27. See Waleys’ sermon, edited in Käpelli, Le Procès contre . . . Waleys, pp. 95–96.
28. Douie, “John XXII and Beatific Vision,” pp. 167–69. This position also, of
course, tends to remove the temporal dimension; spilling over has overtones of Neo-
platonic emanation. To say this is not to suggest that Durand thought the body was
resumed or expressed before resurrection; it is only to point out that once one moves
to this conception of body, there is no clear reason why whatever “body” means
could not be expressed or resumed before. See Greshake in Greshake and Kremer,
Resurrectio mortuorum, pp. 237–39. See also Waleys’ sermon and the charges against
him; Käpelli, Le Procès contre . . . Waleys, pp. 93–108 and 109.
 288 the decades around 1300

receipt of beatific vision would be unable to delight in corporal things

because it lacked sense organs. Benedict XII was willing, it seems, to
grant it even such delight.29
Just after the death of John XXII and before the issuing of Benedic-
tus Deus, Robert of Anjou—king of Naples and titular king of Jeru-
salem, brother of St. Louis bishop of Toulouse, and great-nephew of
St. Louis king of France—sent to Benedict XII a treatise he had pre-
pared to refute John’s opinions. In Robert’s analysis, the ambiguity of
thirteenth-century concepts both of desire and of body is dealt with by
moving body into soul. No longer a vessel or house reassembled from
fragments and inhabited anew, no longer a resumed garment or a sec-
ond stole added to glory, body becomes a flowering or expression of the
soul’s blessedness (refluentia beatitudinis animae).
Robert argues that there cannot be any significant unrest after death
for good souls. Waiting or becoming or desiring is a kind of violence; it
cannot be inflicted on the blessed. The unrest of desiring the beatific
vision would be far greater than that of desiring the body.30 Such unrest
must be stilled; beatific vision must come immediately after death to
those who are ready and to others as soon as they can be cleansed. If any
waiting for body, any becoming or change, remains possible after visio,
it must be unimportant. Souls in beatitude are not subject to time or
mutation; blessedness is stasis or quies. If, therefore, there is any appe-
titus or desiderium for body in blessedness, it is only per accidens not
per se.31 Robert eliminates most of the ambiguity in the Augustinian
and Bernardine concept of desire by eliminating the body as object of
desire; desire for body is now neither a negative retardation nor a posi-
tive love, for it is not really desire at all. True desire is for the soul’s
blessedness, and it will be quieted long before the end of time.
Body may add something, Robert asserts, but soul’s operation is per-
fect without it. It is foolish to argue, as Bernard appears to do, that sepa-
rated souls will see Christ “in his humanity,” not his divinity. Separated
souls are spiritual, as is God; how could they have a special object of
blessedness that is corporeal? Separated souls have “essentially perfect”

29. See n. 20 above.

30. Robert, La Vision bienheureuse, ed. Dykmans. The position is similar to
Albert the Great’s; see Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, p. 257–58. Albert argues that
souls in purgatory desire not their bodies but God; hence deprivation of the beatific
vision is the punishment inflicted in purgatory.
31. Robert, La Vision bienheureuse, ed. Dykmans, pt. 1, paragr. 12, lines 15–22,
pp. 11 and 68*. Robert admits that some kind of unimportant inclinatio for body
may remain in souls “under the altar,” pt. 5, paragr. 1, p. 68 n. 2 and p. 80*.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 289

contemplation.32 Moreover, Thomas Aquinas did not say that we must

have the disposition or sensation of body in order to have essential hap-
piness. Body is necessary on earth, for the imperfect knowing of earth;
it is necessary after resurrection, for the expression of soul’s glory. But
“essential blessedness is principally in the soul; then by consequence
it flows over [redundat] into the body and the senses.”33 Once body is
restored, there is more glory, asserts Robert; and this glory perhaps has
greater unity although it is not changed in essence. But body is merely
the fullness or expression of soul.
Robert explains what this means only by metaphor. Body is to soul as
a gesture is to one who prays, as alms-giving is to one who possesses the
virtue of charity, as act is to someone who has the habitus for it.34 These
metaphors, combined with the technical concept of habitus, imply a
greater impulsion, a greater need to express or flow out or act, than does
the technical theological analysis. Body is clearly not rejected. We are
in the presence, however, of the same contradiction we found lodged
at the center of Thomas’s use of hylomorphic union. Body is packed
into soul. On the one hand, then, some impulsion of that soul-form to
inform something, to express itself in act, is built into the concept itself;
on the other hand, however, such expression or gesturing or flowering of
soul is far away from the commonsense notion of body as matter—that
which eats, sickens, decays, and therefore seems to cry out for salvation.
The majority opinion among thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
theologians stressed the afterlife as stasis, blessedness as the stilling of
desire, purgatory as a temporary period to which admission was granted
by one’s moral state at the moment of death. Although they insisted
that souls were passible in purgatory, they also insisted that the beatific
vision, once bestowed, spilled out from impassible souls into a gift of
impassibility for body. Visio Dei had to come before the end of time lest
souls remain tossed in a sea of longing—longing both for body and for
God—until a distant resurrection.
Theologians of the high Middle Ages were curious and worried about
the aerial bodies souls in purgatory might assume in order to appear on
32. Robert, La Vision bienheureuse, ed. Dykmans, pt. 1, paragrs. 25–26, pp. 17–18
and 69*–70*.
33. Ibid., pt. 5, paragr. 58, p. 98: “beatitudinem . . . qualis erit post resurrectionem
propter refluentiam beatitudinis anime in corpore et in sensus corporeos. . . . [Q]
uod beatitudo essentialis principaliter est in anime, deinde consequenter redundat
in corpus et sensus.”
34. Ibid., pt. 1, paragrs. 27–30, pp. 18–19, and 69*. In paragr. 29, Robert attributes
to Aquinas (ST 2a2ae, q. 83, art. 12) the idea that interior devotion should express
itself in the outward gestures of prayer.
35. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, p. 269.
 290 the decades around 1300

earth.35 Thomas Aquinas, for example, devoted an inordinate amount

of attention in his quodlibetal question on miracles to stories of incubi,
succubi, and ghosts.36 But as far as possible these theologians tended
to make the experience of passible souls in purgatory psychological or
spiritual while suggesting both that soul might function as if it had cor-
poreal senses once it attained the stasis of beatific vision and also that
the postresurrection soul-body unit (gifted with repose and impassibil-
ity) would have all five senses. Thus requies aeterna displaced spiri-
tual development, and soul gained resurrection body, or aerial body, or
body-likeness, at those points where its characteristics were farthest
from what common sense assumed body to be—that is, experiencing
and changeable.
Visions and tales of the afterlife that had circulated widely since
the eleventh century had, however, a somewhat different emphasis. In
them, separated soul was more corporeal, purgatory more progressive.
As Le Goff has stressed, the notion of purgation after death did intro-
duce a hope for change in the afterlife.37 In some miracle stories told
around 1200, such as those of Caesarius of Heisterbach or the vision of
the monk of Evesham, the separated souls who hope to be saved by pur-
gation and the prayers of the living are not very precisely located; the
place of torment in which they reside sounds in some cases more like
hell than purgatory.38 The thirteenth-century Flemish mystic Hadewi-
jch was convinced that she had succeeded, by Christ’s special favor
toward her, in praying four souls out of hell although she knew it to be
theologically incorrect even to offer such prayers let alone to believe
that escape from hell is possible.39 Doctrinal pronouncements and
antiheretical polemic concerning purgatory, resurrection, the beatific
vision, and prayers for the dead make it clear that all these elements
were part of a theology in which ultimate reward and punishment
36. Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de potentia, q. 6: “De miraculis,” arts.
5–10, in Aquinas, Opera omnia, vol. 8, pp. 132–46; and see my Fragmentation and
Redemption, p. 226.
37. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, rightly connects this to the growth of narrative in
the twelfth century. We might also connect it to what Robert Lerner calls the growth
of “progressivism”—that is, of the idea that society changes in a positive direction
here on earth; see Lerner’s work in progress.
38. Caesarius, Dialogus, distinctiones 11–12, vol. 2, pp. 266–364. The vision of
the monk of Evesham (1197) is, among other things, propaganda for prayers for the
dead. It leaves the impression that everyone the monk meets in the afterlife is able
to work his or her way toward reward. On the early medieval notion of “provisional
damnation”—that is, that souls are released from hell by the prayers of the living—
see Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints.
39. Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 235.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 291

are determined at the moment of death; in such a theology, the goal

of separated soul is to attain as soon as possible to the quies of visio
Dei. Nonetheless, mystics, visionaries, and ordinary pious folk became
increasingly interested in the progress and experience of the period
between death and beatific vision. Moreover, if theologians such as
Albert, Thomas, Durand, and Benedict XII packed bodiliness into soul
in certain careful and technical ways, preachers and visionaries gave
separated soul a body with considerably greater abandon. In order to
understand the concept of the resurrection body in the early fourteenth
century, we must consider what Carol Zaleski has called the somato-
morphic soul of visions and otherworld journeys.40
In so doing, we come at last—where any study of eschatology must
come—to Dante, who was a brilliant theorist not only of the somato-
morphic soul but of the resurrection body as well.

Otherworld Journeys and the Divine Comedy

Visions of heaven and hell date back to the early days of Christian-
ity, and stories of travel to the afterlife—from which journey the soul
returns penitent and armed with warnings for the living—are also very
old. The earliest Apocalypses and otherworld journeys display the con-
cern with fertility, consumption, fragmentation, and reassemblage that
becomes so powerful a theme in medieval resurrection imagery down
through the twelfth century. In the second-century apocalypses of Peter
and Paul, to which I referred in my first chapter, heaven is a flower-
ing garden, watered by rivers of milk and honey, although its central
stronghold is surrounded by wall after wall of crystal, jewels, and gold.
The punishments of hell are dismemberment and digestion: hands and
feet are cut off, tongues are ripped out, flesh is devoured by beasts. The
greatest horror is the corruption of fertility and nutrition themselves:
milk from women’s breasts hardens into vipers, which turn on them to
40. Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys. And see Frances Foster, “Visions of the
After-Life in Middle English,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English: 1050–
1500, by the MLA Middle English Group (based on John Edwin Wells, Manual [1916]
and Supplements) vol. 2, ed. J. Burke Severs (Connecticut: Academy of Arts and Sci-
ences, 1970), pp. 452–55; Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form
in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1983); Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 96–132, 154–208, and passim; McDannell and
Lang, Heaven; Eileen Gardiner, ed., Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante (New
York: Italica Press, 1989); Morgan, Dante and the Other World; Carozzi, “Structure
et fonction de la vision de Tnugdal,” pp. 223–34; and Ronald C. Finucane, Appear-
ances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (London: Junction Books, 1982).
 292 the decades around 1300

consume them. Resurrection is regurgitation: God will force the beasts

that have eaten human flesh to vomit it up again.41
In the visions recounted by Gregory the Great and Bede, as well as
in the eleventh-, twelfth-, and thirteenth-century otherworld voyages,
heaven hardens and the attention of the visionary or traveler turns
increasingly toward hell. Although the “Voyage of Brendan” and “Pat-
rick’s Purgatory” retain a sense of heaven as a fertile and luxurious
place, where trays of delicious food are served and grapes grow to enor-
mous size,42 the emphasis is increasingly on golden walls and jeweled
barricades, on protection and stasis. Images of growth and fertility, of
odors and tastes, are relegated to the outskirts of paradise; the visions of
Tondal (1149) and Thurchill (1206) place at heaven’s center gem-studded
and golden chapels, tents, or fortresses. In contrast, the somatomorphic
soul in hell or purgatory (it is often unclear and unimportant which is
in question) becomes the victim of generation and corruption. It is pun-
ished not only by dismemberment but also by perverted nutrition and
fertility—horrid consumptions, digestions, impregnations, excretions,
vomitings, and birthings.43 Guibert of Nogent recounts his mother’s
vision of the dead “with the appearance of ghosts,” their hair “seem-
ingly eaten by worms.”44 Thurchill sees several types of sinners—sol-
diers, priests, proud men—whose limbs are cut off and fried before they
are reassembled for further torture—as well as thieves and cheats who
are forced to eat and vomit up burning money.45 Mechtild of Magdeburg
sees Satan as one who “makes himself of great size” and “swallows”
devils, Jews, and heathen into his “paunch” “body and soul,” “eating”
Sodomites and “gnawing” the greedy.46 She writes:

41. See above chapter 1, n. 7, and Gardiner, Visions, pp. 1–45.

42. The emphasis is perhaps Irish, but see chapter 1, nn. 23–26 above, for such
ideas in early Christian texts.
43. See Gardiner, Visions, pp. 51–196, 219–35; Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp.
177–208.
44. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 181–86; Guibert, Self and Society in Medieval
France, p. 93.
45. Gardiner, Visions, pp. 219–35. The mid-twelfth-century Vision of Alberic sees
hell as guarded by an enormous dragon whose fiery throat devours “countless souls”
(Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, p. 187). E. T. Becker, The Medieval Visions of Heaven
and Hell (no publication place, 1899), p. 11, notes the prominence of eating and
mangling imagery in Christian versions of the otherworld-journey story. For the con-
nection of hell with digestion and some perceptive remarks on how this relates to
eucharistic theology, see Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, chapters 12 and 13; see also
chapter 4, nn. 119–121 above.
46. Mechtild of Magdeburg, Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit, bk. 3, chaps. 15
and 21, in Mechtild of Magdeburg: “Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit” Nach der
Einsiedler Handschrift in kritischem Vergleich mit der gesamten Überlieferung,
ed. Hans Neumann (Munich: Artemis, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 94–97 and 100–4; see also
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 293

What each one takes with him from earth

he must there [in hell] eat and drink!
....
high up on hell is a mouth ever open,
those who enter in experience everlasting death.47

In the “Visions of Tondal”—by far the most popular otherworld story

before Dante and indeed a text that rivaled Dante’s own in the north
of Europe throughout the fourteenth century—the carefully organized
tortures of hell or purgation seem to reflect the dreaded putrefaction
of the grave, whose contents are devoured by the very worms to which
they spontaneously (so people thought) give birth.48 Tondal—himself
called “food” for the fire because of his sins—sees the greedy eaten by
a huge beast, murderers and persistent sinners “cooked and recooked”
in skillets or cauldrons until they are liquid, gluttons and fornicators
forced into a mountain “like an oven where bread is baked,” their geni-
tals chewed by worms that gush from within.49 Other fornicators (both
male and female) are digested in the stomach of a monster, then vomited
or defecated forth pregnant with vipers.50 These vipers, devouring the

Das flies-sende Licht, trans. Margot Schmidt (Einsiedeln/Zurich: Benziger, 1955), pp.
153–62; and The Revelations of Mechtild of Magdeburg (1210–1297) or the Flowing
Light of the Godhead, trans. Lucy Menzies (London: Longmans, 1953), pp. 81–88. It
is unclear why Mechtild refers here to “body and soul.” By the later thirteenth cen-
tury, several mystics see visions of the whole psychosomatic unit (i.e., the person)
in hell and heaven; on the significance of this, see below pp. 334–41. In a vision of
purgatory, Mechtild sees souls “stewing and roasting” together; Das fliessende Licht,
ed. Neumann, bk. 3, chap. 15, pp. 95–96. For a different translation of pt. 3, chap. 21,
see John Howard, “The Flowing Light . . .,” in Medieval Women Writers, ed. Katha-
rina M. Wilson, pp. 173–77.
47. Mechtild, Das fliessende Licht, ed. Neumann, p. 104; Revelations, trans. Men-
zies, p. 88.
48. On the way in which images for the afterlife parallel and reflect the process
of putrefaction, see Thomas, Le Cadavre, and Hertz, “Collective Representation of
Death.” The association of tomb with womb and belly is, of course, standard in
medieval devotional literature; see for example the text from Peter of Celle quoted
above in chapter 3, n. 102. For other evidence of extravagant concern with decay in
the twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries, see below pp. 331–32.
On the popularity and diffusion of the “Visions of Tondal,” see Becker, Medieval
Visions, p. 82; Roger S. Wieck, “The Visions of Tondal and the Visionary Tradition in
the Middle Ages,” in Wieck and Kren, eds., The Visions of Tondal from the Library
of Margaret of York (Malibu, California: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990), pp. 3–4; and
Carozzi, “Structure et fonction de la vision de Tnugdal.”
49. Visio Tnugdali: Lateinisch und Altdeutsch, ed. Albrecht Wagner (Erlangen:
Deichert, 1882), p. 10, lines 6–7, and pp. 16–23, especially p. 23, line 9.
50. Visio Tnugdali, ed. Wagner, p. 27, line 20–p. 28, line 2: “[animas] . . . redi-
gerentur ad nihilum, pariebat [bestia] eas. . . .” Gardiner, Visions, p. 169, interprets
this as “vomited.” Madeleine McDermott and Roger Wieck, on the basis of the Old
 294 the decades around 1300

entrails within, then pecking their way out all over the body with razor-
sharp beaks, are hooked into the flesh from which they are “born” and
double back upon it, consuming it “down to the nerves and bone.”51 In
the deepest part of hell, Satan squeezes souls with dozens of hands, then
inhales, devours, and exhales them forever, so that for all their suffering
they can never achieve the release that would come from annihilation.52
In some of these visions, a living person descends through an opening
in the earth; in others—and this form became more common—a soul
voyages while its body appears asleep or gravely ill to those left behind.53
When the hero of the voyage or recipient of the vision is a separated
soul, some authors call attention to their decision to embody it.54 Par-
ticularly in early visions, soul is sometimes depicted as a bird, a bubble
or spark; both Tondal and the monk of Evesham, who usually see souls
fully corporealized, occasionally describe them as sparks; Caesarius of
Heisterbach reports three cases in which soul is seen as a sphere with
eyes before and behind.55 But by the thirteenth century souls almost
invariably appear with highly individualized bodies in highly individual-
ized raiment. Caesarius, for example, portrays a ghostly visitor from the
afterlife with the prayers he had offered written on his boots.56

French version, interpret it as “defecated”; see Visions of Tondal, Wieck and Kren,
eds., p. 49.
51. Visio Tnugdali, ed. Wagner, pp. 28–29. The genitals also become vipers and
double back to consume the body.
52. Visio Tnugdali, ed. Wagner, pp. 35–39.
53. See Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, pp. 45 and 51, and Le Goff, Birth of Pur-
gatory, pp. 177–208. In the stories of “St. Patrick’s Purgatory” and the “Voyage of
Brendan,” for example, the whole person journeys or descends: in the “Visions of
Tondal,” the soul travels while the body sleeps.
54. Dinzelbacher, in an important recent study, has pointed to a basic change in
the nature and structure of vision literature about 1200. In the early Middle Ages,
visions are more apt to involve travel outside the body and personal transforma-
tion; after the mid-thirteenth century, the visionaries (now usually women) seem
more passive and their visions are more frequent and less transformative. See Peter
Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann,
1981); Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, p. 6; and Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast,
p. 418 n. 51.
55. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, pp. 45–55; Morgan, Dante and the Other
World, pp. 54, 68, 73.
56. See above chapter 5, n. 81. Caesarius’s story of the man with Ave Maria on
his boots is paralleled by a story in the Golden Legend of an unlettered Cistercian
who could learn only the Ave Maria; after his death his fellow monks cleared his
grave to find growing from his mouth a lily on whose petals the two words of the
prayer were inscribed in gold. See James of Voragine, Legenda aurea vulgo historia
lombardica dicta, 3d ed., ed. Th. Graesse (Breslau: Koebner, 1890), p. 221, and James,
The Golden Legend, trans. and adapted by Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (New
York-London: Longmans, Green, 1941; reprint, 1969), p. 207.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 295

More is at stake in such cases than merely the visionary’s (and the
author’s) need to express his insight in visible form. Caesarius suggests
that we have to experience souls as bodies when we are in the body;
once we are free of flesh, we will see them as spheres. Others suggest
that souls need bodies not only to return to earth and warn the living (a
theme as old as the biblical story of Dives and Lazarus) but also in order
to experience torture or reward and to be fully particularized as selves.
The seventh-century vision of Barontus says the separated soul is like a
tiny bird; it has the five senses but cannot speak or travel until it gets a
body of air.57 Guibert of Nogent recounts his mother’s vision of a spirit
(her dead husband) who will not give his name; the suggestion is that
without a body he lacks in some way his identity.58 Dante plays with
the close association of body with identity, or at least identifiability, in
canto 33 of the Inferno. There Dante the pilgrim initially fails to rec-
ognize Friar Alberigo, whose body is still in the world but whose soul
freezes in hell for the sin of treacherous hospitality. Although the pas-
sage certainly suggests that, without somatomorphic soul at the least,
person is unrecognizable, the poet also indicates through the incident
that those in the world who trust in appearances may be misled; there
are in fact persons so evil that their souls have already gone before them
into hell, leaving behind bodies occupied by demons.59
Those who return from near death are sometimes said to manifest in
their resumed earthly bodies the marks of what has happened to them
on their voyage beyond this life. Bede tells of a soul that returns to a
body scarred on shoulder and jaw; for “what soul suffered in secret,
flesh showed openly.”60 James of Voragine, drawing on an earlier mir-
acle collection, tells of an evil judge who was tortured before the judg-
ment seat of God by Saint Lawrence “in great wrath”; allowed to return
from death for thirty days to make restitution, he found that “his arm
was black and burnt, as though he had suffered this punishment in the

57. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, 45–55. As Le Goff points out (Birth of Purga-
tory, pp. 98–99), the idea that the soul has a similitudo corporis that enables it to feel
the fire of hell goes back to Augustine and Julian of Toledo.
58. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 182 and 185.
59. It should be pointed out that Dante also fails to recognize a number of figures
who are consigned to hell after their deaths, and that Fra Alberigo, although alive, is
fully in hell, his body on earth “taken from [him] by a devil who thereafter rules it.”
Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, Inferno, I: Text, Bollingen
Series 80 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, second printing with corrections,
1977), canto 33, lines 130–32, p. 357.
60. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, p. 78; Gardiner, Visions, p. 55; Le Goff, Birth
of Purgatory, p. 113.
 296 the decades around 1300

flesh; and this mark remained upon him as long as he lived.”61 The
monk of Evesham speaks of a leg that was healed in the other world; in
this case (as in the healing of the tumor on St. Etheldreda’s body after
death) the disappearance of a mark in the earthly body provides proof
of what has happened beyond.62
Although authors sometimes called attention to somatomorphic
souls as metaphors or images, they were far more apt to use “as if”
when representing souls as spheres or sparks.63 The soul’s body was
increasingly treated as the conventional and obvious way of present-
ing its experience and individuality, its exact moral state and social
status.64 Indeed the soul’s body was sometimes seen as more real (in a
moral and ontological sense) than the body of earth. In the early thir-
teenth-century vision of Thurchill, for example, souls appeared to the
voyager black, white, or spotted, depending on their degree of guilt;
their color in the afterlife thus reflected their true nature far more accu-
rately than their color on earth.65 James of Voragine, retelling in the
later thirteenth century the stories of the martyrs, reported that holy
Agatha said to the persecutor Quintianus, who threatened to cut off
her breasts: “Impious and cruel tyrant, who would dare to amputate
in a woman that which sustained you in your own mother! But I have
within my soul whole breasts [mamillas integras] from which I nour-
ish all my senses, which I have from infancy consecrated to God.”66
Mechtild of Magdeburg told of a deceased lay brother who appeared
in a vision with a blemish on his face because of his “sternness.” She
removed the mark with a simple sigh.67
61. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 494–95, and Golden Legend, trans. Ryan and
Ripperger, p. 444, drawing on the Miracles of the Virgin. Saints’ lives often empha-
size the survival of scars after healing in this life; the scars provide proof that the
ordinary person has been touched by the power of a saint. For example, in the Golden
Legend account of St. Francis, a little “T” remains where the saint cured a diseased
leg, because “with this letter Francis had been wont to sign his name”; Legenda
aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 673; Golden Legend, trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 609. The
scar is thus explicitly, in this case, the saint’s signature; to cure is to write on the
body of the diseased.
62. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, pp. 78 and 83, and see above chapter 5, n. 21.
We should note that incorrupt holy bodies obey the same principle—that is, they
manifest corporeally on earth the state of their souls in paradise.
63. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, p. 51.
64. Peter Dinzelbacher, “Klassen und Hierarchien im Jenseits,” Miscellanea
Medievalia 12 (1979), pp. 20–40; idem, “Reflexionen irdischer Sozialstrukturen in
mittelalterlichen Jenseitsschilderungen,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 61 (1979),
pp. 16–34; and Morgan, Dante and the Other World, p. 54.
65. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, pp. 296–97; Morgan, Dante and the Other World,
pp. 230–31.
66. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 171 (my translation).
67. Mechtild, Revelations, trans. Menzies, p. 248.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 297

Almost all early visions particularize souls by gender and religious

status. There are very few that do not mention prelates or clerics as a
separate group. But expressing rank and affiliation was a much more
important concern of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century visions.68 Par-
alleling the emerging theological discussion of the inequality of dowries
and crowns, an English vernacular sermon, “Soul’s Ward,” from about
1200 carefully sketched the variety of moral and ecclesiastical statuses
in paradise.69 In the later thirteenth century Mechtild of Magdeburg
not only saw holy women occupying the highest rung of heaven, above
martyrs and apostles; she also pointed out that hell was (except for prin-
cesses) entirely peopled by powerful males, secular as well as ecclesi-
astical.70 By the mid-fourteenth century, we find a Franciscan vision
listing the numbers of various religious orders who make it to heaven:
20,000 hermits and monks of St. Anthony, 100,000 Benedictines, 50,000
Dominicans, and “many thousand” Poor Clares and Franciscan tertiaries
as well as 100,000 Franciscan friars.71 As Peter Dinzelbacher has pointed
out, otherworldly reflections of the ordines of secular society go back as
far as the ninth-century vision of Wetti but are unimportant until the
later Middle Ages. By the fifteenth century, Francesca Romana—in an
unusually detailed vision—saw the occupants of hell divided not only
according to types of crimes but also according to worldly occupation.72
The somatomorphism of medieval visions was thus something more

68. See above, n. 64. According to Zaleski (Otherworld Journeys, p. 51), the Nar-
rative of Zosimus (third century, although the surviving versions are more recent)
tells of Zosimus’s visit to the Earthly Paradise where he sees souls as shapes of light,
“perfect in all the body apart from the distinction of male and female.”
69. McDannell and Lang, Heaven, p. 107. In general, of course, the issue of
whether we will all be equal in heaven was for medieval thinkers a question about
whether moral difference will be leveled; see Anne H. Schotter, “The Paradox of
Equality and Hierarchy in Pearl,” Renascence 33 (1981): 172–79, and n. 72 below.
70. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 242. Mechtild stresses that the “merit” of each
will be “ordered” in heaven “according to their works” (Mechtild, Revelations, trans.
Menzies, p. 206; Das fliessende Licht, trans. Schmidt, p. 323). She includes worldly
rank in her description of heaven but not, interestingly enough, strictly hierarchi-
cally. Under the first arch will be the patriarchs, Stephen and the martyrs, and mar-
ried folk with their children; under the second, popes and spiritual fathers; under the
third, Christ’s humanity, Mary, knights and “the whole empire down to the poorest
peasants,” and many martyrs (Revelations, trans. Menzies, p. 207; Das fliessende
Licht, trans. Schmidt, p. 325). This suggests that we will be recognizable in heaven
by worldly status but not ranked according to it. Even on moral difference in heaven,
Mechtild is quite subtle; she asserts that reward (according to works), merit (accord-
ing to virtues), and crown (according to love) are not the same (Revelations, trans.
Menzies, p. 153).
71. Dinzelbacher, “Reflexionen irdischer Sozialstrukturen,” p. 25.
72. Ibid., pp. 16–34. Dinzelbacher points out that family ties are mostly left
behind in visions, that concern for moral differentiation always outweighs concern
 298 the decades around 1300

than a literary device: if souls appeared with breasts and scars, crowns
and cowls, it was because they were assumed to be male or female, Fran-
ciscan or Dominican, aristocratic or rustic in heaven.
Such intense particularity characterizes the somatomorphic souls of
Dante’s Divine Comedy. Our ranks and merits differ in heaven, just as
does the color of our hair (Paradiso, canto 32, lines 70–72). Yet so glori-
ous and necessary is body to Dante, in all its fullness and complexity,
that the aerial body is not enough. We “yearn” for the “luster” and
“ripeness” of a resurrection that completes rather than overcomes fer-
tility—and we desire it not only in order to know but also in order to
love. In cantos 22 and 30 of the Paradiso (where, significantly, angels
are “sparks” and souls are “flowers”) Dante sees (before the trumpet
sounds!) the resurrection body.73
The Divine Comedy was completed shortly before Dante’s death
in 1321, a decade before the opening of controversy over the beatific
vision. It uses with consummate sophistication and subtlety many of
the technical concerns of scholastic theology as well as the themes
of the otherworld-journey narrative, and the two enrich each other.74
Awareness of the implications of unicity of form and an intense self-
consciousness about somatomorphic representation enable Dante to
solve the identity problem and quell the ambivalence at the heart of
the Augustinian notion of yearning for body.75 He is thus able to weave,
from the traditional and powerful contrast of digestion-mutilation with
reassemblage-wholeness, an afterlife in which fear of fertility no longer

for underlining secular status, and that along with the late medieval tendency to
detail status differences comes a more accessible and friendly heaven and a God open
to appeal from even the humblest peasant.
73. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Singleton, Paradiso, I: Text, pp. 245–55 and
335–45. Dante also sees the blessed as spheres and as light. It is worth noting that
Dante, having washed his eyes in a river of sparks, sees details more clearly after
canto 30; thus perception of individual features is treated as progress in “seeing.”
74. On Dante’s relationship to earlier literature, see Morgan, Dante and the Other
World, pp. 5–10.
75. A recent study of Dante’s idea of the resurrection body that differs in approach
from my own is Kevin Marti, “Dante’s ‘Baptism’ and the Theology of the Body in
Purgatorio 1–2,” Traditio 45 (1989–1990): 167–90. Marti lays great emphasis, as I
do, on Pauline images of clothing and plants as important for discussion of resur-
rection. An older study is Etienne Gilson, “Dante’s Notion of a Shade: Purgatorio
XXV,” Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967): 124–42. On desire in Dante, see Rachel Jacoff,
“Transgression and Transcendence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante’s Comme-
dia,” Romanic Review 29 (1988): 129–42; reprinted in The New Medievalism, ed. M.
Brownlee, K. Brownlee, and S. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991), pp. 183–200.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 299

permeates the imagery. The physicality and particularity we associate

with body becomes an expression of self. Love is desire, not stasis.76
Like the author of the “Visions of Tondal,” Dante uses mutilation-
mastication of body as a basic image for evil and its punishment. Frag-
mentation becomes worse as one descends through the circles of hell.
At the very bottom, the three most vicious sinners of history provide
Satan’s eternal dinner, Judas differentiated from Brutus and Cassius
only in that he is “champed,” “bitten,” and “clawed” in Satan’s maw
head-first.77 Cantos 32–33 of the Inferno associate evil and cannibal-
ism in complex ways. Two conspirators who betrayed each other are
depicted frozen together “in one hole so close that the head of the
one was a hood for the other; and as bread is devoured for hunger, so
the upper one set his teeth upon the other where the brain joins with
the nape” (Inferno, canto 32, lines 125–29). In life one has starved the
other to death with his sons; now they are fused together as gnawer
and gnawed for all eternity.78 The pathos of the dying children’s cry to
their father that he should eat the miserable flesh he has put upon their
bones (through procreation) is not mere pathos; these figures are deep
in evil, and the cannibalism the sons suggest is heinous sin, a twisting
of fertility and generation, an expression of despair.
In certain ways, then, Dante continues the powerful and literal use
of somatomorphic soul characteristic of the otherworld journey tradi-
tion. As Rachel Jacoff has pointed out, body in the Inferno is often not
problematized at all. It receives and expresses evil. Scars and deficien-
cies manifest sin; rippings and mutilations are simply painful; sinners
are dark and ugly, dwelling in a darkness that contrasts to the light
and lightness of heaven.79 Yet these bodies are aerial bodies; Dante and
76. A number of fine recent studies relate the issue of body (and the physical
nature of language) to Dante’s understanding of his task as poet; see, for example,
Guiseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine
Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), John Freccero, “Manfred’s
Wounds and the Poetics of Purgatorio,” in Dante’s Poetics of Conversion, pp. 195–
208; and Joan Ferrante, “Word and Images in the Paradiso: Reflections of the Divine,”
in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S.
Singleton, ed. Bernardo and Pellegrini (Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1983), pp. 115–32.
77. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Singleton, Inferno, I: Text, canto 34, lines
54–60, p. 365. And see R. Durling, “Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell,” in
Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980), pp. 61–93.
78. Inferno, trans. Singleton, pp. 339–55, esp. p. 347.
79. For example, in Inferno, trans. Singleton, canto 32, lines 97–106, p. 345, Dante
yanks out a tuft of hair from a “shade.” I am drawing here on a grant proposal by
Rachel Jacoff for a book to be entitled: “ ‘Treating Shades as Solid Things’: The Dis-
course of the Body in Dante’s Divine Comedy.”
 300 the decades around 1300

Virgil “set their feet” upon an “emptiness” that only “seems” real body
(Inferno, canto 6, lines 34–36).80 Even in the Inferno, Dante provides an
elaborate comment on embodiment, making it clear that aerial body is
temporary, that aerial body is not “real” body (that is, the physical body
of earth and resurrection), and that “real” body is good.81
In cantos 24–25, thieves are punished by losing even the ghostly bod-
ies that are their own: they fuse with the bodies of other humans and
reptiles in a hideous parody of embryological development as well as of
the phoenix’s immolation and return. In cantos 9–10, the basic error of
those heretics who deny immortality is to think soul is body; for thus
repudiating both components of person, such heretics are enclosed in
tombs of pain, their souls treated as if they were cadavers. But at the
resurrection (says Virgil) the bodies that have been “left above” will be
restored, and the whole person denied by these heretics will be shut up
in the grave eternally.82 In canto 13, the souls of suicides are not bodies
but trees that must be eaten and ripped in order to speak at all. Sprout-
ing up from the seeds (or “grains”) of their souls, these plant-bodies are
torn completely to pieces in punishment, then reassembled for further
torture. Although all souls will resume their earthly bodies at Judgment
Day, “it is not just that a man have what he robs himself of” (line 105).83
These suicide-souls will not be reclothed with bodies but will receive
them again only as skins or coverings—additions not fully integrated
into self—to drag through the “mournful wood” and hang forever on the
“thornbushes” of their “nocuous shades” (lines 106–108).84 Dante the
traveler may sometimes forget that those he encounters are mere shad-
ows, but Dante the poet never lets the reader forget that these are not
the bodies of earthly or of eternal life. Neither does he let us conclude
that fertility itself is sinister, that process erases integrity or identity.
Even the perverted generatings and digestings of hell do not prevent
body from (perverted) wholeness and from expressing (perverted) self.
In the Purgatorio, it becomes much clearer that the bodies the
travelers see are the ghostly bodies of the period between death and

80. Inferno, trans. Singleton, p. 61.

81. Singleton in Inferno, II: Commentary, p. 100, says that the further down in
hell souls are, the more “substantial” and “corporeal” they are; this is true. But
Dante’s position on embodiment is considerably more complicated than this obser-
vation implies. As I note below, he considers it worse to have a nonhuman than a
human body. In the Purgatorio he delineates yearning for body, and the regaining of
body is triumph in the heaven of the Paradiso.
82. Inferno, trans. Singleton, p. 99.
83. Ibid., p. 135.
84. Ibid.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 301

resurrection. The opening and closing cantos call attention to the dif-
ference between Dante the traveler, who retains his earthly body and
therefore casts a shadow (cantos 1–3 and 26), and the souls in purga-
tory, who are mere “shades” “treated as solid things” (canto 21, line
136). Indeed Dante the poet now draws the contrast—familiar in Chris-
tian theology at least since Augustine’s De cura pro mortuis gerenda—
between what happens to the body after death and the fate of the soul.
He gives to Dante the voyager our natural human concern about the
cadaver but makes such concern problematic. Manfred (canto 3) and
Buonconte da Monte Feltro (canto 5) recount to the curious traveler
the abuse inflicted on their dead bodies as if such information were a
matter of importance. But in canto 31, Beatrice berates her lover for
abandoning her once she has died, grieving for the body that went to
earth and forgetting her soaring spirit.
The somatomorphic soul of purgatory thus both is and is not an
advance on the psychosomatic self of earth. In canto 10, Dante sees
the proud coming toward him “not . . . persons, but what it is I do not
know” (lines 112–13). Virgil warns him that we are worms or larvae
“born to form the angelic butterfly” that flies naked to judgment.85
The point is clearly that the body of earth rots, releasing the butterfly
of the soul; these dim figures crushed under stone do not look like
men and women; in whatever aerial body they suffer, it is temporary
and passible, not the body either of this life or of heaven. Toward the
end of the Purgatorio, Virgil reassures the traveler Dante about purga-
tion by saying he can traverse the “belly” of flame (l’alvo di questa
fiamma) because God promises “it could not make you bald of one
hair” (canto 27, lines 25–27). The traditional resurrection text (Luke
21.18) reminds us that the pilgrim is still in an earthly body, vulnerable
to pain and destruction.86 To cross the fire, he must be assimilated not
to the ghostly body but to the risen one. The text thus subtly under-
lines how much more the two “real” bodies have to do with each other
than either has to do with the aerial body of the period of transition.
Nonetheless, however imaginary (in every sense) the aerial body may
be, it is an expression of the separated soul—the same soul that is grub
on earth and butterfly in heaven. By the time the fleshly traveler from
this world finally asks about the aerial body and receives in answer a
disquisition from Statius (Purgatorio, canto 25), it is clear—poetically
as well as philosophically—that images of fertility and change do not

85. Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Singleton, Purgatorio, I: Text, p. 197.
86. Ibid., p. 293; and see Singleton, Purgatorio, II: Commentary, p. 652.
 302 the decades around 1300

threaten identity.87 Why are these shades thin and hungry when they
are not even bodies (asks Dante)? Virgil begins to answer with reference
to reflections of self other than body (for example, the image in a mir-
ror), but Statius immediately gives a summary of theological embry-
ology of the sort we might find in Albert or Giles of Rome. Just as a
unitary soul develops in the fetus giving it shape, so after death this one
substantial soul impresses itself on air, like flame from a fire, making a
shade-body with an organ for every sense.
Self in the Divine Comedy has thus nothing to do with survival of
material particles; the bodies of Manfred and Beatrice are still dust (Pur-
gatorio, cantos 3 and 31). Yet even aerial flesh reflects in some way the
individuality and wholeness of earthly flesh; Dante does in most cases
recognize his friends and acquaintances, and even the souls in trees
and tombs are forever reassembled for continued torment. Identity and
integrity are, in a fully Thomistic sense, packed into and guaranteed by
soul.88 Because of this guarantee, intensely developmental imagery can
be used for the generation of a child in the womb, the expression of self
in aerial body, and the resumption of body in resurrection. The Garden
of Eden is imagined in canto 28 of the Purgatorio as possessing all the
fertility of spontaneous generation; heaven itself is an enormous rose
to whose petals the angels fly like a swarm of fertilizing bees (Paradiso,
canto 31, line 7).89
Yet the body we will finally resume is not the shade-body of pur-
gation but the beloved and whole body of earth, expressing the per-
son in its every detail and sensual experience. In canto after canto, the
imagery itself has suggested that it is natural for soul to express itself
in body, but that shades are not enough. Despite earlier instances in
the poem of shade touching shade, Statius clutches only air when he
stoops to embrace Virgil.90 It is therefore hardly surprising that Dante
the poet, who foreshadowed the resurrection even in hell, should give

87. Purgatorio, trans. Singleton, pp. 269–277; and see Commentary, pp. 591–619.
88. See also Purgatorio, trans. Singleton, canto 18, lines 49–54, p. 193.
89. Paradiso, trans. Singleton, p. 347; on the bee metaphor, see Commentary,
pp. 512–13.
The seeds that flower in Dante’s paradise are not Pauline or Origenist; they are
the seeds of Thomas and Albert the Great. To Dante, the flowers (bodies) of heaven
reproduce exactly the flowers of earth, but these plants are now (in that wonderful
mixed metaphor of the thirteenth-century dotes tradition) endowed with the bridal
gifts of agility, subtlety, beauty, and impassibility. On the rose as an erotic symbol in
later thirteenth-century literature, especially the Roman de la Rose and the mystical
Zohar, see Jeremy Cohen, “Be fertile,” p. 312, and Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and
the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–1966), vol. 1, pp. 75.
90. Purgatorio, trans. Singleton, p. 233. And earlier, in Purgatorio, canto 2, lines
76–81, pp. 17–19, Dante fails three times to embrace his friend Casella. But cf.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 303

Dante the traveler a glimpse of the risen and glorified body in para-
dise even before the end of time. Nor is it surprising that, speaking
of resurrection in images of resumed clothing, ripening seeds, glowing
coals, fertile wombs, and love, he puts these images in the mouths of
Solomon (author of that erotic paean to heavenly marriage, the Song of
Songs), Bernard (theorist of the Augustinian yearning for body), and his
own Beatrice, beloved in her fleshly femaleness.91
In canto 14, Solomon assures us that—with flesh resumed—we will
see more; and with more sight, we will gain more fervor, winning by
such fervor greater radiance. Like living coals that keep their shape in
the midst of flame, we will add “brightness” to the luster we now pos-
sess when we resume the flesh “which the earth still covers.” Thus not
only for ourselves but also for all those we love, we yearn to welcome
back the body of earth (corpi morti), its resurrected organs stronger for
heavenly joys (ché li organi del corpo saran forti/ a tutto ciò che potrà
dilettarne).

So sudden and eager both the one and the other chorus seemed to me
in saying “Amen,” that truly they showed desire for their dead bod-
ies—perhaps not only for themselves, but also for their mothers, for
their fathers, and for the others who were dear before they became
eternal flames.92

In canto 22, Benedict assures Dante that his “high desire” to behold
the blessed in their “uncovered shapes” will find final attainment there
where all desires “are fulfilled,” “perfect, mature, and whole.” And
in that last sphere alone “is every part there where it always was.”93
Explaining the resurrection in canto 7, Beatrice tells Dante that he will

Purgatorio, canto 6, line 75, p. 59, where Sordello embraces Virgil; and Inferno, canto 3,
line 19, p. 25, where Virgil puts his hand on Dante’s.
91. Two recent studies on the Song of Songs in medieval literature are E. Ann
Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Chris-
tianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), and Ann W. Astell,
The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). And
see Bernard McGinn, “With ‘the Kisses of the Mouth’ Recent Works on the Song of
Songs,” The Journal of Religion 72 (1992): 269–75. On the significance of Beatrice,
see Astell, Song, p. 121 n. 4 and p. 141 n. 13, and Dronke, Medieval Latin and Love-
Lyric, vol. 1, pp. 75, 87–97.
92. Paradiso, trans. Singleton, canto 14, lines 45–69, pp. 155–57. The relatively
rare notion of heaven as a place where we share joys and the connection of this to
restoration of the body is found also in Bonaventure; see above, p. 249. For a percep-
tive discussion of the question of the social joys of heaven, see McDannell and Lang,
Heaven, pp. 89–100.
93. Paradiso, trans. Singleton, canto 22, lines 53–72, p. 249.
 304 the decades around 1300

surely decay into the elements, but the pattern of wholeness perdures;
by it we will be reformed in resurrection in a manner we can “infer” if
we remember how “human flesh” was made “then when the first par-
ents were both formed.”94 The same Beatrice later reminds the traveler
that the saints are a “fair garden which blossoms beneath the rays of
Christ,” the Virgin a “womb which [is] the hostelry of our desire.”95
In the final cantos of the poem, body, fertility, and desire come
together. Bernard guides the gaze of Dante deep into the ranks of the
heavenly rose beyond “sorrow, or thirst, or hunger”—beyond, that is,
any contingency—to the place where the Virgin sits, she who is already
bodily assumed into heaven.96 There Dante finds, not the requies
aeterna—the stasis—of the scholastic theologians, but the great wheel-
ing motion of love. Unlike Tondal and Thurchill, whose heaven was
barricaded with jewels and immobilized in crystal, Dante sees heaven
as a flower. And that flower itself, like the souls who people it, spins
and whirls with desire.

Thus my mind, all rapt, was gazing, . . . ever enkindled by its gazing . . .
. . . [M]y own wings were not sufficient . . ., save that my mind
was smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it. Here power
failed . . . but already my desire and my will were revolved, like
a wheel that is evenly moved, by the Love which moves the sun
and the other stars.
(Paradiso, canto 33, lines 97–99 and 139–45)97

There was thus, in the early fourteenth century, more than one
solution to the deep ambivalence with which a religious thinker such
as Bonaventure expressed desire. Longing could be enhanced as well

94. Ibid., canto 7, lines 121–48, pp. 79–81. Although not spelling out an embryo-
logical image for resurrection, the lines suggest it, particularly in light of the Statius
canto (canto 25) in the Purgatorio.
95. Paradiso, trans. Singleton, canto 23, lines 71–75 and 103–5, pp. 261–63. On
the problematic nature of female desire in Dante, see Jacoff, “Transgression and
Transcendence.”
96. Ibid., canto 32, lines 52–54, p. 363.
97. Paradiso, trans. Singleton, cantos 32 and 33, pp. 359–81. Dante also speaks,
as did scholastic theologians, of terminating, or stilling, desire by fulfilling it, but
his notion of quieting and filling clearly includes enkindling anew. See, for example,
Paradiso, canto 31, lines 65–66, where Bernard is sent to Dante by Beatrice “A ter-
minar lo tuo disiro”; canto 32, lines 61–63, where Bernard warns that no will dares
desire more love or delight than there is with Christ; and canto 33, lines 46–48,
where Dante, drawing near “al fine di tutt’ i disii,” finds the ardor of his longing
heightened to the utmost. See below, pp. 334–41, on this idea in the mystics.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 305

as stilled. Just at the moment when theorists such as Durand, Robert

of Anjou, and Benedict XII were preparing to solve the ambiguity of
love by bestowing visio Dei on the soul before the spheres cease to
turn, the author of the Divine Comedy prolonged yearning until the
resurrection—perhaps even into eternity—and projected the motion of
desire onto heaven itself.
I shall return below to the significance of Dante’s conception of
desire. But first I must consider a little further the theme of fragmenta-
tion and wholeness that was crucial not only to the Divine Comedy but
also, as we saw in chapter 4 above, to the iconography and hagiography
of the high Middle Ages.

The Hagiography and Iconography of Wholeness

In the imagery of the Divine Comedy, as in the “Visions of Tondal,”
the contrast between heaven and hell is still a contrast of disorder and
order, fragmentation and wholeness, darkness and light. In hell, the
damned are reassembled only for perpetual partition, mutilation, and
mastication; in heaven, the blessed rise beautiful and whole, individual-
ized one from the other by appearance, experience, merit, and spiritual
capacity but every one jeweled and shining amidst the splendor of flow-
ers and thrones. Dante is more comfortable than were twelfth-century
artists, poets, and hagiographers with describing resurrection in images
of fertility and germination exactly because he is certain that identity
is guaranteed by substantial soul. His imagery no longer assimilates
change to putrefaction; process per se is no longer, as it had been for
the Tondal author and for twelfth-century scholastics, a challenge to
identity and survival.98 The description of souls as sparks or flowers
in the Paradiso is not, however, a suggestion that self escapes from
body in heaven or that heavenly body will grow beyond the particular-
ity of earth. The reclothing of bones with sinews and flesh when the
trumpet sounds will not obscure a single mark or characteristic of the
earthly body. Even aerial body provides access to bliss or torture, but
body in heaven and hell will finally be not aerial but real—identical (in
a numerical sense) to the body of this life.
The shades Dante the pilgrim meets on his journey are mere adum-
brations of the resurrection body, more “fictive” in the Purgatorio than
in the Inferno.99 Dante the poet comments self-consciously on the
98. See above, pp. 121–37, and Bynum, “Faith Imagining the Self.”
99. See above, n. 81.
 306 the decades around 1300

process of poetic creation by calling attention to the failure of Dante

the pilgrim to understand that his whole journey occurs in the between-
time of nonembodiment. The obtuseness of the traveler to the fact that
the visible but nonmaterial world in which he moves is imagined by his
eponymous poet-creator underlines, of course, the imagining; the reader
comes to see that poetry making itself is a process of giving body.100 At
the end of canto 21 of the Purgatorio, it is a poet, Statius, who forgets
that he and Virgil are shades; it is also a poet, Virgil, who understands.
Dante’s genius aside, such self-consciousness is made possible both
by the poetic tradition of the somatomorphic soul and by the nature of
literary creation, which visualizes in words.101 For painters and sculp-
tors, however, the aerial body and indeed the whole period of purgation
(which was, by definition, limited to the in-between and therefore non-
embodied) offered more problems than opportunities. Thus, as recent art
historians have pointed out, the first paintings influenced by the Divine
Comedy drop purgatory entirely and add a Last Judgment (see plates 24,
25, and 26).102 They situate in the resurrection period of embodiment
the hell and heaven discovered by Dante the pilgrim in their aerial man-
ifestations. Not so much illustrations of the Comedy as interpretations
100. See above, n. 76.
101. See Rudolf Arnheim, “Notes on the Imagery of Dante’s Purgatorio,” Argo:
Festschrift für Kurt Badt zu seinem 80. Geburtstag . . ., ed. Martin Gosebruch and
Lorenz Dittmann (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1970), pp. 57–61; and Zaleski, Oth-
erworld Journeys, pp. 45–55.
102. See Hans Belting and Dieter Blume, eds., Malerei und Stadtkultur in der
Dantezeit: Die Argumentation der Bilder (Munich: Hirmer, 1989), passim and espe-
cially plates 10, 11, 13, 93, 97, 110, 111, 124; Hans Belting, “The New Role of Narra-
tive in Public Painting of the Trecento: Historia and Allegory,” Studies in the History
of Art 16 (1986): 151–68; Morgan, Dante and the Other World, pp. 199–200; and
Hughes, Heaven and Hell, p. 159. None of the northern Italian representations of
heaven and hell I have been able to find from the fourteenth century includes a depic-
tion of purgatory (whether or not the painting is supposedly influenced by Dante).
All include the Last Judgment. This association with the Last Judgment makes it
clear that the bodies painted are resurrection bodies (i.e. “real,” or paintable, bodies)
not the aerial bodies Dante describes. See Giotto’s Arena chapel at Padua, painted
by 1305 (plate 5, and chapter 4, n. 100 above); Buffalmacco(?)’s Campo Santo at Pisa,
which recent opinion dates to about 1330 (plate 24); the Strozzi chapel of Santa Maria
Novella, Florence, by Nardo di Cione(?) from about 1357, which Boccaccio says is
influenced by Dante’s Comedy (plates 25 and 26); the “Road to Heaven” by Andrea
da Firenze in the Spanish chapel of Santa Maria Novella, from 1366–68; the frescoes
in Santa Croce, Florence, of uncertain attribution, which Vasari says are copies of
ones at Pisa; and Taddeo di Bartolo’s “Hell” at San Gimignano, from about 1396. The
“Bridge of Trial” in the fourteenth-century fresco in S. Maria in Piano, although it
represents purgation, is not, it seems, a full-scale depiction of Purgatory; see Morgan,
Dante and the Other World, p. 36, plate 11. Le Goff (Birth of Purgatory, pp. 367–68)
describes what he claims are three fourteenth-century depictions of purgatory: two
are French miniatures, one a Spanish fresco.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 307

that telescope it back into earlier otherworld-journey traditions, they

emphasize two elements in Dante that continue earlier resurrection
iconography: the contrast of darkness and disorder with order-light-
wholeness and the specificity of the bodies of the resurrected (especially
of the blessed) in terms of gender, status, and personal beauty.
These elements of Dante’s vision and of the early frescoes that
illustrate it are striking but not unique. They are present in the great
west wall at Torcello, the Hortus deliciarum miniature, and the Vati-
can panel painting I discussed in chapter 4—each of which stresses the
wholeness and particularity of the blessed. What is in noticeable con-
trast, however, to the Byzantine iconographic tradition of Torcello and
the Hortus manuscript is the absence of the theme of regurgitation and
reassemblage.
By the early thirteenth century, the Byzantine theme of resurrection
as the vomiting up of parts in a context of cosmological renovation had
faded from Western art to be replaced by the tradition, created in the
post-Carolingian West and spreading rapidly in the twelfth century, of
resurrection as return from the grave under the watchful eye of Christ
the judge.103 The great tympana of twelfth- and thirteenth-century
cathedrals—St. Faith at Conques, St. Stephen at Bourges, St. Peter at
Poitiers, St. Andrew at Bordeaux—subordinate resurrection to judgment
by focusing attention not on disentombment but on the division into
saved or damned. They invariably depict the resuscitated dead (usually
in a smaller register below a monumental Christ-Judge) emerging whole
(sometimes naked, sometimes clothed) from tombs (see plate 27).104
Only a few (albeit important) vestiges of the twelfth-century fear of
mastication and digestion survive into high medieval resurrection ico-
nography: the continued prominence (especially in manuscript illumi-
nations) of the image of Jonah vomited up from the whale, the standard
treatment of hell as a mouth that swallows the damned, and the promi-
nence of tortures of cooking and chewing in hell (see plates 28 to 32).105

103. See above, chapter 4, nn. 104–106, and plates 5, 10, and 15.
104. See Willibald Sauerländer, Gothic Sculpture in France 1140–1270, with pho-
tographs by M. Hirmer, trans. J. Sondheimer (London: Thames and Hudson, 197a), pp.
506–8; see also ibid., pp. 504–5 and 510–11, for Bourges and Bordeaux. For Conques,
see above, plate 15. See also Richard Cavendish, Visions of Heaven and Hell (London:
Orbis, 1977); and David Bevington, et al., Homo, Memento Finis: The Iconography
of Just Judgment in Medieval Art and Drama (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1985), plates 2–17.
105. See above, chapter 4, nn. 119–24; Hughes, Heaven and Hell, pp. 175–89,
196–99, and 207; Morgan, Dante and the Other World, p. 23; and Getty MS 30, fols.
13v and 17, in Wieck and Kren, eds., The Visions of Tondal, pp. 41 and 45. Note also
 308 the decades around 1300

With occasional exceptions, resurrection in Western art is no longer

the regurgitation, or the reconstitution, or the reclothing of bones.106
Yet the dead who rise whole from either coffin or earth are increasingly
particularized by haircolor, sex, age, and (when clothed) by raiment that
expresses details of worldly rank and power. Indeed, on the tympanum
at Bourges where the dead rise naked, headgear—crowns, helmets, and
miters—is added to indicate a variety of social statuses (see plate 33).107
The development of iconography thus parallels that of literature. In
the thirteenth century, images of resurrection as reassemblage drop out
of art, scholastic discourse, and poetry. Fragmentation continues as an
image of evil and pain, and wholeness as an image of paradise. But
wholeness is no longer so much a victory over partition, a patching
together of dispersed bits, as a reflection of what human nature is. The
Divine Comedy continues the association of mastication-partition with
hell found in the “Visions of Tondal,” but such images seem no longer
to be a comment on the dangers of fertility.108 Whereas the Tondal text
removed flowers, grasses, and fountains to the outskirts of paradise and
protected the saints behind wall upon wall of gold and gems, Dante’s
heaven is a rose. Whereas the figures Tondal meets on his travels are
more particularized (and somatized) in hell, to Dante heaven is peopled
not by rank upon rank of “martyrs” and “virgins” but by a Beatrice and
a Bernard. The glory of wholeness is for Dante—as it is for Bonaventure

the prominence of hell’s mouth in the resurrections found in plates 2, 12–14, and 17
of Bevington et. al, Homo, Memento Finis.
106. See above, chapter 4, nn. 100 and 101. A fifteenth-century woodcut of the
Last Judgment from Syon convent (Bodleian Library MS Rawl. D.402) is another
striking exception (see Bevington et al., Homo, Memento Finis, plate 18). The wood-
cut depicts Christ the Judge above two zones, in the lowest of which appear scattered
bones and a shrouded figure from whom worms crawl. These body parts would seem
to signify the dead, clearly still dead and fragmented. In the zone above, two torsos
(nicely rounded off at the middle) seem to represent saved and damned. They appear
to be the resurrected, but they are still (at least visually) parts. It is particularly strik-
ing that Christ the Judge (who is shown with lavishly bleeding wounds) is flanked
by two banners, on one of which the five wounds are depicted; hence even Christ is
here divided and fragmented. The image appears to be related to Birgitta of Sweden’s
devotion to the Five Wounds, for it says “Arma beate Birgitte.”
107. Sauerländer, Gothic Sculpture, pp. 504–5. The anatomical specificity of the
resurrection bodies depicted in the Trinity College Apocalypse is also worth noting;
see plate 28 above, and chapter 4, n. 122, also n. 117.
108. Even a quick glance at the Buffalmacco and Nardo di Cione paintings from
mid-century (plates 24, 25, and 26) shows that the lowest rungs of hell are no lon-
ger characterized by images of body parts although tortures of devouring and being
devoured continue to be prominent.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 309

and Thomas—an expression of person. The issue is not so much the

continuity of material particles as the continuity of self.
When we turn to late thirteenth-century hagiography, we find a sim-
ilar tendency to assert wholeness. The theme of reassemblage is not
supplanted; hagiography is a very conservative genre. But even here, in
the midst of a multitude of mutilations and tortures, triumph over evil
is not only the gathering of scattered bones for quiet sepulchre but also
an assertion that the corruptible is incorrupt, the part is the whole.109
As many recent scholars have pointed out, both the vernacular
saints’ lives of the high Middle Ages and the new Latin collections of
legends made for the use of mendicant preachers agreed in their archaiz-
ing tendencies.110 Looking to distant events in Christian history and
choosing heroines or heroes singularly unsuitable for pious imitation,
hagiographers filled their pages with stories of torture and execution.
For example, the Golden Legend of James of Voragine (d. 1298), by far
the most popular compendium of these racy yet moral tales, seems
obsessed with bodily division.111 Of the 153 chapters devoted to saints’
days, at least 75 have dismemberment as a central motif; James details
81 kinds of torture.112 But as was true in the early martyrologies from

109. I have discussed this in Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 285–94, and
“Bodily Miracles and the Resurrection of the Body in the High Middle Ages,” pp. 68–
106 especially pp. 79–83.
110. Cazelles, Le Corps de sainteté, pp. 219–20 and passim, and G. Philippart, Les
Légendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques, Typologie des sources du
moyen âge occidental, 24–25 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1977), pp. 40, 47.
111. On the popularity of the Golden Legend, see Brenda Dunn-Lardeau, ed.,
Legenda Aurea: Sept siècles du diffusion: Actes du colloque international . . . à
l’Université du Quebec à Montréal, 11–12 mai 1983 (Montreal and Paris: Bellarmin
and J. Vrin, 1986), and Konrad Kunze, “Jacobus a (de) Voragine,” Die deutsche Lit-
eratur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983), vol. 4, col. 454.
On James’s interest in torture and mutilation, see Giselle Huot-Girard, “La jus-
tice immanente dans la Légende dorée,” Cahiers d’études médiévales 1 (1974): 135–
47; Alain Boureau, La Légende dorée: Le systeme narratif de Jacques de Voragine
(+1298) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984); Sherry L. Reames, The Legenda Aurea: A
Reexamination of Its Paradoxical History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985); and Marie-Christine Pouchelle, “Représentations du corps dans la Légende
dorée,” Ethnologie française 6 (1976): 293–308. Pouchelle underlines the fear of divi-
sion in James’s stories; she also emphasizes the role of body as avenue to God—a
point rather similar to my interpretation in Holy Feast and Holy Fast. André Vau-
chez, “Jacques de Voragine et les saints du XIIIe siècle dans la Légende dorée,” in
Legenda Aurea: Sept siècles de diffusion, ed. B. Dunn-Lardeau, pp. 27–56, gives an
interpretation opposed to that of Boureau and Reames.
112. Of the 153 chapters (many of which tell several stories), 91 chapters treat
martyrs; the majority of the martyrs discussed are not merely killed but in some
way dismembered. For further discussion see my “Bodily Miracles,” p. 101 n. 78,
 310 the decades around 1300

which medieval legendaries copied, the point is not the presence but
the absence of suffering. There are only one or two references in all of
James’s hideous stories to the fact that being cut apart might hurt.113
When he discusses the tortures of purgatory, James underlines the
pain they cause; he points out that a female saint giving birth in prison
experienced all the ordinary horrors of labor.114 In martyrdom, how-
ever, the saints receive the anesthesia of glory. As James reports blessed
Agnes to say: Christ’s body is already with the bodies of the saints; even
during torture they rest already in the “embrace of his pure arms.”115
Indeed Thomas Aquinas, writing just as James was compiling his
Golden Legend, explained that the martyrs bear up under pain exactly
because the beatific vision flows over naturally into their bodies.116
Contemporary artists repeatedly depicted saintly heroes and heroines
as unaffected psychologically (and even physiologically) by graphic and
remarkable tortures.117
Owing in part to the development of relic cult, the attitude of
thirteenth-century hagiographers toward decay and bodily division
was far more complex and ambivalent than that found in the stories of
Tertullian’s day or even Jerome’s. James of Voragine (like Caesarius of
Heisterbach earlier) tells of relics that protest division and of those that
welcome it, of frantic and courageous efforts to bury the martyrs and of
saints who resist honorable sepulchre, of incorruption that manifests the

and Boureau, La Légende dorée, p. 116. There is real sadism in James’s accounts. He
seems to enjoy detailing the mutilations suffered by the saints; see, for example, his
accounts of Vincent, Juliana, and Eugenia (the latter under Saints Protus and Hya-
cinth); Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 117–20, 177–78, 602–5; Golden Legend, trans.
Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 114–17, 166–67, 536–39. He puts in the mouth of Dominic
a masochistic speech asking for fragmentation a little at a time; Legenda aurea, ed.
Graesse, p. 468; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 415.
113. See Boureau, La Légende dorée, pp. 60–61 and 115–33.
114. For James’s recognition of pain in purgatory, see the stories he borrows from
Peter the Chanter in Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 731–32; Golden Legend, trans.
Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 650–51. For a woman’s pain in labor contrasted with the
absence of pain during martyrdom, see Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 798–99; trans.
Ryan and Ripperger, p. 736.
115. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 114: “jam amplexibus ejus castis adstricta
sum; jam corpus ejus corpori meo sociatum est. . . .”
116. Thomas, ST 3a, q. 15, art. 5, obj. 3 and reply to obj. 3, vol. 49, pp. 204–7; and
see also ST 3a, q. 14, art. 1, obj. 2 and reply to obj. 2, pp. 170–75. Bernard of Clairvaux
expresses the same opinion in De diligendo Deo, section 10, paragr. 29, Tractatus et
opuscula, p. 144.
117. See Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 231–33 and plates 6.14 and
6.15. And see below, nn. 129 and 130.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 311

glory of body and of failure to decay naturally that signals evil, even the
work of devils.118 But whatever complicated cultural attitudes toward
body and burial such stories betray, wholeness is their crucial theme,
whether expressed in tales of reassemblage, in metaphors of fertility, or
in miracles of metonymy. James often describes heroic efforts to gather
bones for burial; he occasionally recounts—and gives unabashed reli-
gious significance to—division and scattering. But in the latter cases he
118. When king Clovis breaks off the arm of St. Denis, he is punished by insanity
(Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 686; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 622); a cloth relic
bleeds when cut (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 198; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p.
186); Julian the Apostate’s plan to scatter the body of John the Baptist is called a “sec-
ond martyrdom” (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 568–73, esp. p. 569; trans. Ryan and
Ripperger, p. 504). Persecutors are said to be denied decent burial (Legenda aurea, ed.
Graesse, p. 145; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 167) or to suffer decay or violent frag-
mentation while alive (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 33, 69, 203–4; trans. Ryan and
Ripperger, pp. 41, 71, and 592). But dividing up St. Augustine for relics is presented
as perfectly acceptable (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 562–63; trans. Ryan and Rip-
perger, p. 498). The faithful are said to strive to collect the bones of John the Baptist
(Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 566–67, 569; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 502 and
504), Denis’s companions (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 685; trans. Ryan and Rip-
perger, p. 620), Bartholomew (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 543; trans. Ryan and
Ripperger, p. 482), Hadrian (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 600–I; trans. Ryan and
Ripperger, p. 534–5), Boniface (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 318; trans. Ryan and
Ripperger, p. 286), and Petronilla’s companions (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 343;
trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 300). Even when scattered, martyred flesh is said to be
“untouched” by scavenger beasts or is collected by divine means for burial (Legenda
aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 345–46 and 602; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 304 and 536).
The body of St. Paul is said to turn in its coffin, grateful to be rejoined to its skull
(Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 385; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 345). But James
stresses that St. Marcellinus is so humble he does not want burial (Legenda aurea,
ed. Graesse, p. 271; trans, Ryan and Ripperger, p. 245); Mary of Egypt asks to become
dust (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 247–49; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 229–30);
the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus refuse the golden coffins offered by the emperor and
ask instead to lie in the earth (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 438; trans. Ryan and
Ripperger, p. 386): “et cum [imperator] jussisset fieri loculos aureos, in quibus mit-
terentur, in ipsa nocte apparuerunt imperator dicentes, ut, sicut hactenus in terra
jacuerunt et ex terra resurrexerant, ita eos dimitteret, donec dominus iterum eos
resuscitaret.” A miracle attached to the life of Benedict even recounts that a monk
who deserted the monastery and died was rejected by the earth and could not decay
until his parents buried a consecrated host with him (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse,
p. 211; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, ibid., p. 201). Yet the bodies of Christ and Mary
the Virgin are said not to decay because they are not tainted with sin (Legenda aurea,
ed. Graesse, pp. 239 and 504–17; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 220 and 450–57).
And incorruption in the grave, occasionally a sign of evil, is frequently presented as
a sign of the purity of the body (Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 441; trans. Ryan and
Ripperger, p. 389).
The attitudes behind these stories are not fully consistent, but in general violent
fragmentation and disrespect for bones is evil, quiet burial and decay is good; incor-
ruption (when it is a sign of genuine purity) is even better than gentle reception by
the earth. Reassemblage is an act of piety, but where reassemblage and sepulchre are
not possible, the part is treated as if the whole were present there.
 312 the decades around 1300

almost invariably asserts the part to be the whole, denying in metaphor

the very partition he chronicles in fact. James’s legends thus suggest—
not (as we are sometimes told) that the body is the saint—but that saints
are present wherever any fragment of them is found.119
So extravagant, indeed, is James’s denial of fragmentation that, as
several modern students of hagiography have pointed out, it is hard
to say why he finally allows one among a series of lengthy tortures
to dispatch his hero or heroine; in any case the actual death is often
singularly anticlimactic.120 What is underlined repeatedly is either
a reassembling of body parts for burial or (particularly in the case of
virgin women) the victory of intactness over division. Although sun-
dered limb from limb, female saints are said to be “whole” because
they avoid sexual violation. Despite frightful methods of execution,
the bodies of both male and female martyrs triumph miraculously
over disintegration.121 For example, the story of St. Margaret, bound
on the rack, beaten with sharp instruments until her bones were laid
bare, burned with torches, and plunged into water, describes her body
as “unscathed.”122 The beheaded martyrs Nazarius and Celsus are
found “intact” [integrum et incorruptum cum capillis et barba] in
the tomb—a description that makes a claim not for reassemblage but
for incorruption!123 Burned on the pyre, St. Theodore renders up his
soul, but his body is “unharmed” (ab igne illaesum).124 St. Chris-
tina bleeds milk without her severed breasts and speaks without her
amputated tongue.125 Left by the emperor Diocletian to wolves and
dogs, the bodies of two martyrs survive “intact” (intacta) until the
faithful can collect them for burial.126 James (or a later inter-polator)

119. See my “Bodily Miracles,” p. 81 and nn. 90–91.

120. Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. V. M. Crawford, West-
minster Library (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), pp. 97 and 130–34;
René Aigrain, L’hagiographie: Ses sources, ses méthodes, son histoire (Paris: Bloud
and Gay, 1953), p. 146; Baudouin de Gaiffier, “La Mort par le glaive dans les Pas-
sions des martyrs,” in Recherches d’hagiographie latine, Subsidia hagiographica, 52
(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1971), pp. 70–76; Cazelles, Le corps de sainteté,
pp. 50–60; Boureau, La Légende dorée, pp. 126–33; Alison Goddard Elliott, Roads to
Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover and London: University
Press of New England, 1987), pp. 14–15, and 151.
121. See my “Bodily Miracles,” p. 79 and nn. 77–78.
122. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 400–3; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 351–53.
123. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 441; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 389.
124. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 740–41; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 662.
And see the similar account of St. Mark in Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 267; trans.
Ryan and Ripperger, p. 240.
125. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 421; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 366.
126. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 601–2; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 535–36;
see also Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 345–46; trans. Ryan and Rippenberger, p. 304.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 313

describes as “unharmed” and “unhurt” Sophia’s three daughters, who

were fried in a skillet, had their breasts torn off, were stretched on
the rack and finally beheaded. In contrast, the emperor Hadrian, who
presided over the torture of the three young girls, is said to have
“withered away, filled with rottenness (totus putrefactus).”127
James thus asserts that—whatever the historical events—the good
are intact when divided, while the evil fragment or decay even without
violence. Such assertions are mirrored in those late thirteenth-century
visions in which bodies in heaven are seen as clear and perfect—not the
crystalline spheres in which an Origen or a Caesarius of Heisterbach
described souls but anatomically perfect bodies made translucent by
light. Marguerite of Oingt saw Christ’s body thus. And it was as a trans-
lucent and apparently sleeping figure, complete down to the eyebrows
and eyelashes, that Mechtild of Magdeburg saw John the Evangelist,
who (she believed) had been bodily assumed into heaven.128
Indeed, we should note in this connection that late medieval artists,
when they painted the martyrs outside a narrative context, depicted
these saints carrying body fragments as attributes but themselves shin-
ing and whole. When Lucy or Agatha appears in the timeless context
of eternity, she is placid, restored, and beautiful while carrying her sev-
ered breasts or eyes on a platter (see plates 34 and 35).129 Although
127. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 203–4; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 592. It
is worth noting that Sophia is said to have gathered up the remains of her daughters
and buried them with the help of bystanders; she was then buried with her children.
This chapter, not found in the 1283 manuscript, is probably a later interpolation but
is fully in the spirit of the other chapters; see Boureau, La Légende dorée, pp. 27–28.
In the account of Agatha, the saint’s severed breasts are restored to her by miracle
before burial. But her torturer dies when horses run away with his chariot, and his
body is never recovered for burial; Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 170–73; trans.
Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 157–60; and see n. 66 above. In the story of Juliana, fish and
wild beasts eagerly devour the bodies of her persecutors; Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse,
pp. 177–78; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 167. In contrast, persecutors are unable to
get rid of the dead body of St. Vincent, which is refused by the sea and the fish to
whom it is given for devouring; Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 119–20; trans. Ryan
and Ripperger, pp. 116–17.
128. Marguerite of Oingt, Speculum, chap. 3, in Les Oeuvres de Marguerite
d’Oingt, ed. Antonin Duraffour, Pierre Gardette, and Paulette Durdilly (Paris: “Belles
Lettres,” 1865), p. 99. Mechtild of Magdeburg, Das fliessende Licht, trans. Schmidt,
pp. 205–6, and see below, chapter 8, pp. 334–41.
129. Plate 34, Modena, Biblioteca Estense, Lat. MS 1023, fol. 17v, depicts St. Lucy
with her eyes restored and on a platter; see Domenico Fava and Mario Salmi, I Mano-
scritti miniati della Biblioteca Estense di Modena, vol. 1 (Florence: Electa Editrice,
1950), p. 35 and plate 7, no. 2. Plate 35 shows the Martyrdom of St. Agatha from Paris
MS, Bibliothèque nationale, N.A.FR. 23686 f. 247v; for which see Les manuscrits à
peintures en France du XIIIe au XVIe siècle, pref. by A. Malraux (Paris: Bibliothèque
Nationale, 1955), p. 16 no. 15; and Robert Branner, “Note on the Style of the Kansas
 314 the decades around 1300

executed saints sometimes carry their heads in their hands in narrative

depictions, the heads often return to shoulders when the painted or
sculpted figures are associated with Judgment, resurrection, or heaven
(see plate 36).130
Like artists and female visionaries, James of Voragine goes beyond
stories of reassemblage—either by human effort or by divine power—to
explicit assertions that body, however disfigured or divided, is perfect
and intact.131 Such assertions are sometimes made in metaphors of food
or flowering that seem to echo, at hundreds of years remove, the sub-
lime paradoxes of Irenaeus and Ignatius of Antioch. When he tells the
story of St. Vincent, for example, James quotes Ambrose and Augustine:
“[Vincent] was pulverized that he might become solid, burned that he
might be refined.”132 The account of Andrew the Apostle stresses that

City Leaf,” The Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum Bulletin 5, no. 1 (1971): 31 n.
3. Although art historians have usually spoken of such depictions as if the severed
limbs are attributes (or aids to identification), more is involved. The saint in glory is
reassembled as if in resurrection, but the part or mark she bears is also an aspect of
who she is for all eternity.
This iconographic reassemblage of saints is in interesting contrast to contem-
porary depictions of Christ. In the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Christ’s
body is regularly divided into pieces in representations of the Five Wounds; see
Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 2: The Passion of Jesus Christ,
pp. 184–97 and plates 664–73. We also find increasing visual emphasis on Christ’s
suffering in crucifixion, although depictions of the saints show them impassive and
impassible under torture; see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 231–33,
271, and 278–79. It is as though—at least visually—Christ, because he is God, takes
on all the culture’s obsession with torture and partition, while the saints are guar-
anteed (by their participation in beatific vision and blessedness) to be free of pain
and fragmentation. The point is worth pursuing but would take me beyond the early
fourteenth century.
130. Plate 36 is another miniature series from Paris MS, Bibliothèque nationale,
N.A.FR. 23686 (cited above in n. 129); it shows St. Quentin both beheaded and intact.
Stephen Murray in Notre Dame, Cathedral of Amiens points out not only that the
relics of St. Firmin are sculpted on the St. Firmin portal at Amiens as if they were
rising from the dead but also that the column statues of the saints on the same portal
give a premonition of resurrection; see plate 23 and chapter 5 at n. 40. Two of these
saints are cephalophores but others are decapitated martyrs who have once again
received their heads.
131. Of two self-mutilations carried out by early saints, one is overcome by the
restoration of the severed hand, but in the second case (St. Mark’s severed thumb)
the moral of the story is simply that mutilation does not matter; the Evangelist is
ordained without restoration of the missing part. It is significant, however, that just
after the account of Mark’s self-mutilation we are given a story of how he healed a cob-
bler’s severely mangled hand with a paste made from dust. James, Legenda aurea, ed.
Graesse, pp. 367 (St. Leo) and 266 (St. Mark); trans. Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 331, 239.
132. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 120: “torquetur Vincentius, ut exerceatur,
flagellatur, ut erudiatur, tunditur, ut subsolidetur, exuritur, ut repurgetur . . .” (my
translation). And see above, n. 127.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 315

the saint did not die when crucified, but chose rather to expire three
days later when the crowd wanted to take him down from the cross.
Saying “it is time for Thee [God] to give my body back to the earth, . . .
which may keep it and restore it to me on the day of the resurrection
of the body,” he then disappeared in a cloud of light, and for years after,
manna “in the form of flour” and scented oil issued from his tomb.
This saint, who became food in the grave, supposedly told his persecu-
tor: “To Almighty God I offer daily a Lamb without stain, who, after all
the people have eaten Him, remains alive and whole.”133
In James’s account of Catherine, her fifty converts are thrown into
the fire for their faith, and the language in which their death is described
assimilates execution and resurrection. Asserting an intactness that
begins long before the trumpet sounds, the hagiographer writes: “not
a hair of their heads nor a shred of their garments suffered the least
harm from the fire.”134 In another account that explicitly echoes not
only Luke 21.18 but also 1 Corinthians 15.42–44, the martyr’s words
deny exactly the bodily division he suffers. St. James the Dismembered
speaks to his severed toes:

Go, third toe, to thy companions, and as the grain of wheat bears
much fruit, so shalt thou rest with thy fellows unto the last day. . . .
Be comforted, little toe, because great and small shall have the same
resurrection. A hair of the head shall not perish, and how much less
shalt thou, the least of all, be separated from thy fellows?135

James of Voragine repeatedly attributes fertility to the saints, not

only because of their proselytizing in life but also because of a germina-
tion beyond the grave that combines making disciples by example with
rising whole before God in resurrection. He describes Germanus the
Bishop, in whose story resurrections play an especially prominent role,
as a “sprouting seed” and derives the saint’s name from “seed” [germen]
“above” [ana].136 Of the contemporary saint Peter Martyr, he says:

133. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 12–22; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 9–16.
134. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 789–97, esp, 792; trans. Ryan and Ripperger,
pp. 708–15, especially p. 712.
135. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 799–803; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p. 719.
136. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 448–51, esp. 448; trans. Ryan and Ripperger,
pp. 396–99, especially p. 396. On etymologies, see Roswitha Klinck, Die lateinische
Etymologie des Mittelalters (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1970), especially pp. 57–70, and
Anders Winroth, “The Etymologies in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Varagine”
(M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1992).
 316 the decades around 1300

He was like a grain of wheat that falls to the ground and is picked up
by the hands of unbelievers, and dying rises again in a fertile stalk. He
was the grape that in the press gives forth much juice. He was the spice
that, ground in the mortar by the pestle, gives forth a wondrous odor.
He was the mustard seed that increases in strength when it is ground.137

As Guibert of Nogent had pointed out more than a hundred and fifty
years earlier, the eucharistic host, fragmented by human teeth and diges-
tive processes yet in every minute crumb the whole body of Christ, is
the guarantee that wholeness (impartibility and impassibility) is God’s
ultimate promise to humankind.138 During the thirteenth century, theo-
logians devoted much attention to the doctrine of concomitance—the
teaching, that is, that Christ is fully present in each species and in every
particle of the Eucharist.139 Thus it is not surprising that James’s most
extravagant assertion of pars pro toto is a eucharistic miracle. In his
account of St. Gregory, a woman who doubts the Eucharist sees it as the
body of Christ. But what she sees lying on the altar at the consecration
is a finger! It is hard to imagine a more graphic (and to modern tastes
offensive) assimilation of Eucharist to relic, of communion to cannibal-
ism.140 But the story is also a symbol of the bodiliness of God, the bodili-
ness of us all, and the hope not only of future resurrection but of present
wholeness. If in Christ and in the martyrs part is whole, perhaps we too
shall be—even are—whole in every fragment no matter how threatened
by consumption, death, and decay. James draws on such ideas when he
puts into St. Catherine’s mouth the claim (almost blasphemous in its
eucharistic overtones) “I desire to offer my flesh and blood to Christ,
as He offered Himself for me,” or assimilates the bodies of Andrew and
John the Evangelist to the food that never diminishes by recounting that
their graves filled inexhaustibly with manna.141

137. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, p. 282; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, p, 251.
138. See Bynum, “Bodily Miracles,” pp. 77–78. Eucharistic miracles from the
twelfth to the fourteenth century were characterized by an emphasis on part being
whole; see Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, pp. 15–18.
139. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 51–53 and 255; Gary Macy, The Theol-
ogies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function
of the Sacrament According to the Theologians, ca. 1080–ca. 1220 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984), passim.
140. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 197–98; trans. Ryan and Ripperger, pp. 185–86.
141. Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, pp. 793, 12–22, and 56–62; trans. Ryan and Rip-
perger, pp. 713, 9–16, 58–63. For an example from devotional literature of an empha-
sis on each of the parts of Christ as if it were the whole, see Ancrene Riwle, trans.
M. B. Salu, pt. 2, pp. 49–50.
 Somatomorphic Soul and Visio Dei 317

Both at the level of theological and philosophical discourse, and at

the level of popular devotion, much changed between the second and
the fourteenth centuries. But as James’s tales suggest, deep anxieties
about decay continued to lurk under the surface of theological discus-
sion, miracle story, and preaching. Decay was sometimes redeemed
(and denied) in metaphors of fertility, as it had been in second-century
writing about resurrection; more often it was redeemed (and denied)
in images of reunion or incorruption of parts. Such images, in keeping
with the intensely graphic and somatic quality of late medieval piety,
came increasingly to be enacted in matter. As I pointed out in chapter 5
above, bodies began to perform in the present life and in the tomb (or
so people believed) exactly as preachers said they would in resurrec-
tion. James’s text is filled with miracles at which the early Passions of
the martyrs merely hinted. If anything, therefore, Western piety was
both more somatic and more paradoxical in 1300 than in the days of
Tertullian and Irenaeus. Although philosophical theory could account
for identity of person without material continuity, body—as the locus
of decay, of experience, and of encounter with the divine—was more
important than ever before. It was divided and distributed in order to
disperse its power; but in order to revere and protect that same power,
it was declared whole even when mutilated and partitioned.
I turn in my last chapter to the context of these paradoxical beliefs
and practices, first, in the new ways people treated living and dead bod-
ies in the decades around 1300 and, second, in the emergence of a rheto-
ric (as powerful as it was hesitant) that made body both the location and
the object of desire.
 Eight
Fragmentation and Ecstasy:
The Thirteenth-Century Context

the resurrection body was an important element

in the controversies of the 1270s and 1280s over soul and
immortality; it was centrally at issue in the debate of
the 1330s over the beatific vision. At first glance, these
controversies seem to indicate—as followers of Oscar
Cullmann have sometimes argued—that a modified version of Greek
dualism triumphed in Western Christian theology by the fourteenth
century.1 They suggest, that is, that the immortal soul became the
container and guarantee of what we mean by self.2 The elaboration
of a formal theory of identity (extrapolated from the unicity of form),

1. See the works cited in my introduction, nn. 2, 4, 7, and 9–11 above, especially
Gooch, Partial Knowledge, and Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum.
2. The Middle Ages did not, of course, have a Latin word for “the self”; see John
F. Benton, “Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality,” in Renaissance
and Renewal, ed. Benson and Constable, pp. 263–95, and Bynum, “Did the Twelfth
Century Discover the Individual?” in Jesus as Mother, pp. 82–109. Theologians used
“person,” at least by the thirteenth century, to mean precisely not the soul but the
psychosomatic unit that would exist after the resurrection. By this latter move they
clearly meant to make resurrection philosophically as well as theologically neces-
sary. My point here is that—as many theologians (mostly Protestant) have pointed
out— it is not clear whether labeling the separated soul “not a person” is sufficient
to make resumption of body at resurrection necessary for what we in the twentieth
century mean by “self.”
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 319

followed by the doctrinal pronouncement that blessedness is complete

with soul’s reception of visio Dei, seems to eclipse body philosophically
and theologically. Such positions assert that soul needs some matter
for resurrection; indeed, in the ordinary course of events, the matter
reanimated at the end of time will be the particles that had fragmented
in the grave. But in an emergency, any matter will do. Body adds some-
thing to blessedness, but it is not clear what; soul has already attained
the quiet of eternity.
The study of religious language I have carried out suggests, how-
ever, a different story. Images of the resurrection body in thirteenth-
and fourteenth-century scholastic discourse, hagiography, poetry, and
art seem to make it more crucial and integral to self than ever before.
Body is a beloved bride, rewarded with gifts particular to her because
of her experience and merit on earth; it is a flowering plant or the per-
during container that organizes flux; body is the expression of soul,
its overflow, the gesture that manifests soul’s intention. In quodlibetal
debates as in mystical visions and otherworld journeys, body seems
anything but eclipsed. The exempla of preachers and the stories of
hagiographers make soul unabashedly somatomorphic; tales of the in-
between period of purgatory—the period in which, by definition, soul is
without body— become increasingly tales of souls so labile, expressive,
and particularized that they seem to have pulled their bodies either
forward (so to speak) from this life or backward from the moment of
resurrection. Technical theological discussion stresses the wholeness of
the final person (including the restored person in hell) more than ever
before. It asserts, however inconsistently, some kind of material conti-
nuity between Christ’s body in the triduum and in heaven, elaborates
the theory of Mary’s Bodily Assumption, and strives to account for the
shape and integrity of the cadaver before decay. Despite a certain dis-
trust of physical pleasure, it bestows on the risen body all the organs
and senses— even the scars—of earthly experience. Otherworld images
and stories from the years around 1300 tend (depending on how one
looks at it) either to embody the soul or to enliven the corpse. In many
senses therefore metonymy replaces reassemblage. Whereas twelfth-
century imagery implied that salvation was the reuniting of fragments,
fourteenth-century images implied the part (whether metaphysical or
physical) to be the whole. In vision, in art, and in literary metaphor,
soul was sometimes self. Body was sometimes self. But finger or toe
was also sometimes self.
 320 the decades around 1300

It is time now to turn—as I did in discussing the second, fourth, and

twelfth centuries—to a consideration of the social context of bodily
images.

The Practice of Bodily Partition

Several aspects of the social and religious history of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries shed light on the tendency of theologians to soma-
tize soul or lift the body into heaven.
All descriptions of the period emphasize its greater social stratifica-
tion, the emergence of finer gradations of secular and ecclesiastical hier-
archy, and the manifestation of status and class differences in details of
dress, ritual, and manners.3 It is thus hardly surprising that commen-
tators on 1 Corinthians 15 stressed verse 41 (“star differeth from star
in glory”), underlining the inequality of dowries and crowns, or that
visionaries saw physical characteristics and occupational roles, as well
as moral qualities, stamped on somatomorphic souls in the afterlife.4
Accounts of the period also stress the new scientific curiosity and
sophistication found in universities and among doctors and scholars
outside them; we should not discount such curiosity as a motivation
of theologians. Historians of science John Murdoch, Edith Sylla, and
Joel Kaye have taught us that abstruse and technical theological issues
(such as transubstantiation or the locomotion of angels) became in the
early fourteenth century the site of scientific speculation.5 Albert the

3. For an interesting discussion of this, especially as it affects women, see Diane

Owen Hughes, “Les Modes,” in Histoire des femmes, ed. Duby and Perrot, vol. 2: Le
moyen âge, ed. Klapisch-Zuber, pp. 147–69.
4. Dinzelbacher, “Klassen und Hierarchien im Jenseits”; idem, “Reflexionen
irdischer Sozialstrukturen”; Schotter, “The Paradox of Equality in Pearl”; Ian Bishop,
“Relievers at the Court of Heaven: Contrasted Treatments of an Idea in Piers Plow-
man and Pearl,” in Myra Stokes et al., eds., Medieval Literature and Antiquities:
Studies in Honour of Basil Cottle (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), pp. 111–18; and Jean
Batany, “Une Image en negatif du fonctionnalisme social: Les Danses macabre,” in
Jane M. Taylor, ed., Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 1983
Manchester Conference (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), pp. 15–28.
5. See the essays in The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed. John Mur-
doch and Edith Sylla (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1975) and Joel Kaye, “The
Impact of Money on the Development of Fourteenth-Century Scientific Thought,”
Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988): 251–70, and “Quantification of Quality: The
Impact of Money and Monetization on the Development of Scientific Thought in the
Fourteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1991). Greshake in
Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, p. 237 (citing Theodor Schneider, Die
Einheit des Menschen) suggests that one reason why the Thomistic doctrine of unic-
ity and formal identity does not win out is its incompatibility with a commonsense
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 321

Great and Giles of Rome discussed embryology and generation as par-

allel to resurrection and regeneration; Godfrey of Fontaines and Henry
of Ghent struggled to account for the survival of structure in a corpse
(matter) after form (soul) has departed.6 Such investigations reflected
a not entirely religious interest in human physiology from fetus to
cadaver and groped slowly toward understandings of process that did
not assimilate change to decay.7 Aquinas’s speculation about the resur-
rection of eaten embryos, for example, was inquiry into the nature of
digestion and reproduction as well as of identity.8 Fourteenth-century
discussions of the Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption of
Mary were explorations not only of the nature of sin but also of the
nature of sex and the female body.9 Moreover, an occasional theologian-
physician (or theologian-alchemist) actually attempted to make money
or reputation by developing techniques that offered, if not resurrection,
at least preservation of the corpse until the trumpet sounds.10
But as in the case of earlier polemics against Gnosticism, Origen-
ism, and Catharism, mainstream Christian discussion of the resurrec-
tion body in 1300 does not seem primarily to be a locus of scientific
investigation, social control, or ideological repression. (To say this
is not, of course, to argue that such investigation, control, or repres-
sion did not occur.) Discussion of the resurrection body seems to have
been about body—about the horror and the glory of the physical stuff
in which human beings feel, suffer, experience the world, grow and
give birth, decay and die.11 I turn now finally to consider deep shifts

understanding of matter, and this at a time when materiality and physicality were
newly important to natural philosophical investigation.
6. In addition to the discussion in chapter 6 above, see Luke Demaitre and Anthony
A. Travill, “Human Embryology and Development in the Works of Albertus Mag-
nus,” in James A. Weisheipl, ed., Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemora-
tive Essays, 1980 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), pp. 405–40.
7. See the works cited below in nn. 17, 25, and 26, for Bacon’s ideas about life
prolongation and corpse preservation.
8. Taylor, “Human Generation in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas”; Nolan,
Giles, pp. 114–23.
9. It is striking how much more speculation there was on the conception of Mary
than on the conception of Christ. It seems likely that this is (at least in part) because
Mary, a human being, was conceived as we are; thus, her conception provides an
opportunity to speculate on sexual reproduction generally and on its moral signifi-
cance. Christ’s conception, although uniquely important theologically speaking, did
not provide a locus for discussing sex. See Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 80
and 224–28.
10. See below, n. 25.
11. See Bynum, “Bodily Miracles,” and eadem, review of Michael Camille, The
Gothic Idol, in The Art Bulletin 72, no. 2 (1990): 331–32.
 322 the decades around 1300

in pious practices, attitudes, and emotions that underlay images of the

body as living metonymy, of the body as beloved. Although we should
not expect to find in 1300, anymore than at any other period, a direct
inscribing of funerary practices in theology or a doctrinal dictation of
religious behavior, the insistence on wholeness and on understanding
part as whole that we notice in the telling of saints’ stories, the con-
struction of reliquaries, and the formulation of doctrine has roots in
the new enthusiasm for partition of bodies living and dead. Emphasis
on integrity and identity in resurrection both made it all right to divide
the body in burial and underlined such division as distribution of self.
Historians have paid much attention recently to the emergence of
various forms of bodily partition in the years around 1300. The first
clearly recorded autopsies and postmortems were performed at Bologna
in the 1280s to determine cause of death in legal cases. By the second
decade of the fourteenth century, dissection for the purpose of teach-
ing anatomy had been introduced into the medical school curriculum.
Again our first evidence comes from Bologna.12
The same period saw increased enthusiasm for boiling and dividing
holy bodies in order to produce relics for quick distribution. There is,
for example, some evidence that Thomas Aquinas’s body was boiled
in 1303/04 when a Cistercian monk (fearing appropriation of the body
by a Dominican pope) decapitated the corpse in the hope of retain-
ing part of the remains. An (unboiled) hand given to his sister was,
significantly, found later to be “incorrupt.”13 Holy bodies were also
embalmed because, as witnesses testified at one canonization proceed-
ing, “God took such pleasure in” their bodies and their hearts.14 Out

12. Pouchelle, Corps et Chirurgie, pp. 132–36. She claims that the earliest official
dissections (in 1315) were dissections of female bodies. The dissections to which she
refers were clearly not the first dissections or autopsies of any sort. Dissections aris-
ing out of embalming or for the purpose of determining the cause of death in legal
cases were practiced at least from the early thirteenth century on; dissections of the
human body for teaching purposes were practiced at Bologna about 1300. See Walter
Artelt, Die ältesten Nachrichten über die Sektion menschlicher Leichen im mittel-
alterlichen Abendland (Berlin: Ebering, 1940), pp. 3–25; Mary Niven Alston, “The
Attitude of the Church Towards Dissection Before 1500,” Bulletin of the History of
Medicine 16 (1944): 221–38; Ynez Viole O’Neill, “Innocent III and the Evolution of
Anatomy,” Medical History 20, no. 4 (1976): 429–33; Nancy G. Siraisi, “The Medical
Learning of Albertus Magnus,” in Weisheipl, ed., Albertus Magnus and the Sciences,
p. 395; Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality, p. 40; and Katharine Park, “Opening the
Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Prevasalian Italy” (Paper for the New England
Renaissance Conference, November 2–3, 1990).
13. E. Brown, “Death and the Human Body,” p. 234 n. 48.
14. Enrico Menesto and Silvestro Nessi, eds., Il processo di canonizzazione di
Chiara de Montefalco (Scandicci, Florence: “La Nuova Italia,” 1984), p. 339; Park,
“Opening the Body”; Camporesi, Incorruptible Flesh, pp. 3–11.
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 323

of this practice came the first claims that special marks of sanctity can
be found inside holy persons (e.g., the “wound of love” in the heart) as
well as outside (e.g., stigmata). By the mid-fourteenth century, the bod-
ies of putative saints were sometimes torn open after death to look for
signs of sanctity in the viscera. For example, when the sisters of Clare
of Montefalco decided to embalm her body a few days after her death
in August, 1308, they found in her heart “a cross, or the image of the
crucified Christ.” Three precious stones, inscribed with pictures of the
Holy Family, were found in the heart of the pathetic little blind saint,
Margaret of Città di Castello.15 By the fifteenth century inquisitors at
canonization proceedings looked to autopsy evidence for proof of para-
mystical phenomena such as miraculous abstinence.16
Enthusiastic partition of nonholy bodies was practiced as well. Estab-
lished in Germany in the twelfth century and known as the mos teu-
tonicus, the custom of eviscerating and boiling the corpses of royalty
and aristocrats and burying the resulting body parts in various locali-
ties became common north of the Alps in the later thirteenth century
although it was never popular in Italy.17 As Elizabeth A. R. Brown has
recently demonstrated, the bull Detestande feritatis, issued by Boni-
face VIII in 1299 to forbid the practice, was not enforced in the early
fourteenth century; by 1351 Clement VI decreed that the French rulers
would no longer need any special exemption for division of the body.
By the fifteenth century at least one pope had his own body embalmed.
Indeed, immediately after Boniface’s death, opponents charged that he
was a heretic because his concern to prevent fragmenting or tampering
with cadavers proved, they said, that he did not believe in resurrection.18
As Edward Peters has recently reminded us, the years around 1300
also saw the revival of torture as a judicial procedure.19 And there is

15. See n. 14 above on Clare; for Margaret, see Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 145
and p. 364 n. 212.
16. See, for example, the account of the autopsy of Columba of Rieti; Holy Feast
and Holy Fast, p. 148.
17. E. Brown, “Death and the Human Body; pp. 221–70; Park, “Opening the Body.”
18. E. Brown, “Authority, Family, and the Dead.” If it is true (as Paravicini Bagliani
has argued) that Boniface was influenced by the ideas of Roger Bacon about life pro-
longation, the charge may have meant not that Boniface denied any form of survival
but that his concerns made resurrection natural, not supernatural. In other words,
the old pope’s obsession with preserving his body from decay obscured the dividing
line between life and death and implied that, with sufficient medical or alchemical
manipulation, the body might indeed live forever; a natural process would therefore
be substituted for resurrection via grace. See below nn. 25 and 26.
19. Edward Peters, Torture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). The fact that torturers (who
were permitted to squeeze, twist, and stretch in excruciating ways) were forbidden
 324 the decades around 1300

some evidence, at least for England, that the use of mutilation as punish-
ment for capital crimes increased in frequency in exactly these decades.
Chronicle accounts make it clear that dismemberment was reserved
for the most repulsive crimes and that the populace was expected to be
able to interpret the nature of the offense from the precise way in which
the criminal’s body was cut apart and the pieces displayed. Drawing and
quartering, or burning (that is, reduction to the smallest possible par-
ticles: ashes), were punishments reserved for treason, witchcraft, and
heresy, particularly when practiced by those of lower social status or
inferior gender.20 R. I. Moore and Saul Brody have attributed the scape-
goating of lepers in the same years not only to increased incidence of
the disease but also to changes in its conceptualization. In the general
flaring up of intolerance that many historians have seen to be charac-
teristic of the late thirteenth century, the bodies of lepers came to be
paradigms for sin because they fragmented and putrefied while alive.21
For all the recent study of bodily partition, historians have not
agreed about its significance or about attitudes toward it. Marie-Chris-
tine Pouchelle has claimed that the writings of French surgeons display
an odd combination of reverence and almost prurient curiosity about
what is contained inside (that is, the “secrets” of) cadavers, especially
female cadavers.22 A number of Renaissance historians have taken the
fact that the first dissections were performed on the bodies of criminals

to effect bodily division suggests that it was highly charged. It is also worth noting
that medical practice preferred to cure by adjustment of humors and fluids; physi-
cians, who did not cut or cauterize, had higher status than surgeons, who were in
certain ways assimilated to barbers, a social rank below them. See Faye Marie Getz,
“The Faculty of Medicine Before 1500,” in The History of the University of Oxford,
vol. 2: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J. I. Catto and R. Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), pp. 373–405.
20. J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 9, 13, 20–21, 26, 39, 45–47, 52, and
226–27. As Bellamy points out (ibid., p. 227), historians often know the nature of
the crime only from the type of execution inflicted. We know, for example, that a
homicide had been adjudged petty treason in fourteenth-century England if the male
perpetrator was drawn and hung or the female perpetrator burned. See also Campo-
resi, Incorruptible Flesh, pp. 19–24, and Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion,”
pp. 50–51 (on execution by mutilation and partition), pp. 57–58 (on burning).
21. Saul N. Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 64–66, 79, 85–86. See also R. I. Moore, The
Formation of a Persecuting Society, pp. 58–63; idem, “Heresy as Disease,” in The
Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages (11th–13th Century): Proceedings of the Inter-
national Conference, Louvain, May 13–16, 1973, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst
(Louvain: University Press, 1976), pp. 1–11; and Camporesi, Incorruptible Flesh, pp.
90–96.
22. Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie, especially pt. 1, chap. 4.
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 325

as evidence that surgeons (like executioners) expressed the values of

a newly effective, coercive state.23 Medical historians such as Nancy
Siraisi and Katharine Park have disagreed, arguing that early accounts
of embalming, autopsy, and dissection display no squeamishness or
hesitation about opening the corpse.24 The motives of Boniface VIII in
Detestande feritatis have been much debated; scholars have variously
attributed his position to political maneuvering against the French kings
and the friars, to the influence at the curia of Baconian and possibly
alchemical ideas about balance and decay, and to a personal, obsessive
fear of death on the part of the old pope. The expert on French funerary
practice Elizabeth Brown has herself vacillated about how much horror
of decay there was, emphasizing both the enthusiastic and continuing
practice of the mos teutonicus and the profound discomfort with corpse
tampering expressed in university debates of the 1280s and 1290s.25
What seems clear is that there were real differences among regions
and within status groups, among medical practitioners, and among
theologians and preachers concerning the significance of both decay and
division. These differences were particularly acute around 1300. But
there was deep agreement that what happened in and to the cadaver was
an expression of person. Some among both clergy and laity attempted
to preserve the shape and integrity of corpses (either by embalming
or by consigning them to the earth in a simple wrap); others removed
body parts for burial in scattered sites, opened corpses to search for
23. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London:
Methuen, 1984), pp. 72–112. See also Jonathan Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas: Dis-
secting the Renaissance Body,” in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance
Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, ca. 1540–1660 (London: Reaktion
Books, 1990), pp. 111–35. In their conclusions Barker and Sawday seem to me to
make a rather uncritical use of Foucault.
24. Park, “Opening the Body.” Park’s own account suggests that doctors and
embalmers may have felt some fascination with the secrets inside the body, but she
is certainly right that there is no reason to take cutting and dividing as punitive per
se, at least for the fourteenth century.
25. Pierre Duparc, “Dilaceratio corporis,” Bulletin de la Société Nationale des
Antiquaires de France 1980–1981 (Paris: Boccard, 1981), pp. 360–72; E. Brown,
“Death and the Human Body”; eadem, “Authority, Family, and the Dead”; Agostino
Paravicini Bagliani, “Rajeunir au moyen âge: Roger Bacon et le mythe de la prolon-
gation de la vie,” in Revue médicale de la Suisse romande 106 (1986): 9–23; idem,
“Storia della scienza e storia della mentalità: Ruggero Bacone, Bonifacio VIII e la
teoria della ‘prolongatio vitae’,” in Aspetti della Letteratura latina nel secolo XIII:
Atti del primo Convegno internazionale di studi dell’ Associazione per il Medioevo
e l’Umanesimo latini (AMUL) Perugia 3–5 ottobre 1983, ed. C. Leonardi and G.
Orlandi (Florence and Perugia: “La Nuova Italia,” 1985), pp. 243–80; and Francesco
Santi, “Il cadavre e Bonifacio VIII, tra Stefano Tempier e Avicenna, inforno ad un sag-
gio di Elizabeth Brown,” Studi Medievali, 3d ser., 28, no. 2 (1987): 861–78.
 326 the decades around 1300

secret signs of holiness, or divided cadavers to signal their political or

demonic treachery. No one, however, suggested that the corpse was
merely a husk left behind. Nor did any ritual, exemplum, or liturgical
formula indicate fear of corpse pollution. No practice implied—as rites
often do in other cultures—that hasty destruction of the cadaver would
speed the flight of self to more important climes.26
The assumption that the material body we occupy in this life is inte-
gral to person was reflected in legend, folktale, and even “science” Many
stories that circulated in the later Middle Ages implied that the body
was in some sense alive after death. Moralists told of temporary resur-
rections; hagiographers described dead saints who sat up momentarily to
revere the crucifix or eucharistie host; medical writers spoke of cadavers
that continued to move or grow while on the embalming table or in the
tomb; folk wisdom held that corpses would bleed to accuse their mur-
derers; holy cadavers, especially holy female cadavers, were sometimes
said to exude oil or even milk that cured the sick.27 Down into the sev-
enteenth century, learned treatises were written by doctors on the life of
the body after death—a phenomenon that seemed proved to some by the
apparent growth of fingernails and hair observed in corpses.28 The claim
that all or part of a saint remained incorrupt after burial was an impor-
tant miracle for proving sanctity, particularly the sanctity of women.29
Indeed, in what appears to have some parallels to modern cryonics,
alchemists and physicians in the thirteenth century experimented with
ways of returning the body to its pristine state before the fall, convinced
that they might thus free it, more or less indefinitely, from decay.30

26. Paravicini Bagliani suggests that there is a newly positive attitude toward the
body implicit in the Baconian ideas; see the works cited in n. 25 above and n. 35
below.
27. Henri Platelle, “La Voix du sang: Le cadavre qui saigné en presence de son
meutrier,” La Piété populaire au moyen âge, Actes du 99e Congrès National des
Sociétés Savantes, Besançon 1974 (Paris, 1977), pp. 161–79; Finucane, Miracles and
Pilgrims, pp. 73–75; Michel Bouvier, “De l’incorruptibilité des corps saints,” in Les
miracles, miroirs, pp. 193–221; Ariès, Hour of Our Death, pp. 261–68 and 353ff.;
Jacques Gélis, “De la mort à la vie: Les ‘sanctuaires à reprit’,” Ethnologie française
11 (1981): 211–24.
28. Ariès, Hour of Our Death, pp. 261–68 and 353ff. Although some people today
still believe such stories, growth of hair and nails does not occur in corpses. Robert
W. Ackerman, “The Debate of the Body and the Soul and Parochial Christianity,”
Speculum 37 (1962): 549, argues that the thirteenth-century Middle English Debate
between the Body and the Soul reflects “popular belief” in its implication that the
cadaver retains for a little while after death the “capacity and will to speak.”
29. Thurston, Physical Phenomena, pp. 246–52; Bynum, Fragmentation and
Redemption, p. 372 n. 32.
30. Paravicini Bagliani, “Rajeunir au moyen âge”; idem, “Ruggero Bacone, Boni-
facio VIII, e la teoria della ‘prolongatio vitae’ ”; and Getz, “Faculty of Medicine.”
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 327

Partition was abhorrent to some, it is true. Torturers were forbidden

to sever; quartering in execution was understood to mirror the evil of
destroying the body politic; the living cadaver of the leper—insensate,
corrupt, shedding fragments—became a walking symbol of sin.31 Canon-
ists were hesitant about private property and trafficking in holy body
parts.32 Even reliquaries that underlined the partial nature of their con-
tents sheathed these parts with incorruptible gold and gems, and some-
times announced in inscription that they foreshadowed the integrity of
heaven.33 Some fourteenth-century French wills instructed executors
that the body not be divided for burial.34 The new emphasis of doctors
on models of internal balance—especially Baconian ideas that one might
achieve an almost “natural immortality” by medical means—tried to
prefigure (possibly even to effect) here on earth the final wholeness and
stasis theologians argued to be the gift of God only in heaven.35 Although
Boniface VIII gave no theological justification for his prohibition of
embalming, boiling, and dividing—merely asserting the practice to be
monstrous—he drew on a considerable body of theological discussion
that agreed with him in preferring quiet sepulchre for whole cadavers.36
Nonetheless, the years around 1300 saw enthusiastic prying into the
body—studying it, severing it, distributing and scattering it. No one
objected to reburial once bones were clean of flesh, although—as we have
seen—even in the charnel house there was sometimes attention to the
dignity and status of skulls. Theologians never forgot that the promise
of resurrection made a variety of burial practices acceptable. Oliver of
Tréguier argued in 1291 that dividing the corpse would conduce to its
spiritual health by garnering more prayers for it and suggested a parallel to
doctors who had sometimes to bring physical health by opening or ampu-
tating the body. God will (insisted Oliver) unite the pieces in resurrection.
31. The leper’s body was a particularly useful image because its disease, and the
disease of original sin, were seen as sexually transmitted; see Brody, Leprosy. The
miracles of leper saints thus inverted decay, fragmentation, and sin. Alpaïs of Cudot,
Alice of Schaerbeek, and Lutgard of Aywières offered up their leprosy for God bit by
bit. Saints such as Lidwina of Schiedam, whose bodies shed fragrant pieces, were an
inversion on a more profound level of what was feared in leprosy. Bynum, Holy Feast
and Holy Fast, pp. 116, 121, 124–28, 196, 211, 234, 273.
32. Hermann-Mascard, Les Reliques des saints, pp. 212–17, 313–19; Duparc,
“Dilaceratio corporis.”
33. See above, chapter 5, pp. 202, 209, 211–12.
34. Hallam, “Royal Burial and the Cult of Kingship,” pp. 359–80.
35. In addition to the works cited in n. 25 above, see Charles Webster, “Alchemi-
cal and Paracelsian Medicine,” in C. Webster, ed., Health, Medicine, and Mortality
in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 302, and
Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 196 and 274, on Baconian notions of bodily
equilibrium as they affected old age, food intake, and excretion.
36. E. Brown, “Authority, Family, and the Dead.”
 328 the decades around 1300

Gervase of Mont St. Eloi and Godfrey of Fontaines, who opposed the mos
teutonicus, had to agree. Like Boniface, they might prefer a scientific and
philosophical theory of the cadaver that emphasized the slow fading of its
form in decay, but they were forced to admit that God would restore that
identical flesh and form when the trumpet sounds.37
Enthusiastic recourse to bodily partition at the very heart of a reli-
gion that denied, on the ontological level, that partition occurred at
all; prurient fascination with torture and division in a culture that not
only articulated opposition to these practices but also found innumer-
able euphemisms for them; efforts to lodge the identity of person in
soul while continuing to assert an inclinatio in matter, a forma cor-
poreitatis, and even an aerial body or somatomorphic expression for
separated soul—these aspects of the late thirteenth century are pro-
foundly contradictory. None however suggests either dualistic rejection
of body or the equation of self with soul.38 If assertion of wholeness
replaced hope of reassemblage in the conception of resurrection in the
early fourteenth century, it was because body had become so crucial to
person that the line between form and matter, death and life, earth and
eternity, fragment and whole, had almost disappeared.
Yet resurrection was not merely the assertion of wholeness. It was
also the object of desire. Even to those schoolmen who imagined heaven
as quiet and order, body was a beloved bride. Solomon told Dante the
pilgrim that we yearn for body, not only for ourselves but also for those
we love, in order that they may enjoy both God and their friends in
the flesh and that we may thus delight in God and in them. By the late
thirteenth century some mystics seemed to lodge desire not only before
the resurrection in a soul that yearns for body as well as for God but
also in a psychosomatic unity whose longing will not be sated for all
eternity. From a yearning for flesh that retards or distracts the spirit to
a hunger that is the deepest expression of a spiritual yet embodied self,
imaginings of desire themselves changed. What had been merely a hint
in Augustine became a deep ambivalence in Bernard and Bonaventure,
a lyrical and sensual vision in Dante and Mechtild of Magdeburg. Great
37. E. Brown, “Death and the Human Body”; see also eadem, “Authority, Family,
and the Dead.”
38. Ackerman, “Debate of Body and Soul,” p. 551, sees in the vernacular litera-
ture of the thirteenth century (more than in the Latin) an “unchristian and dangerous
dualism,” implied in the personification of Body as “an active principle of evil.” But
he also gives a good deal of evidence from the same treatises of love for the body and
suggests, tellingly, that the debate form is adopted because of its “dramatic possibili-
ties.” It seems to me that we do not have here real “dualism” but rather a sense of
self as psychosomatic unity—a self in which part can stand for whole and in which
an imbalance between parts leads to evil.
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 329

religious writing was no less paradoxical in 1300 than it had been in

200, but the embodied self Marguerite of Oingt or Mechtild of Magde-
burg imagined before God’s throne found its deepest expression not (as
Tertullian and Jerome had done) in incorruptible or impartible matter
but in hungry and impassible love.
The body described by scholastic theologians (however tentatively
and ambivalently) as bride, as gesture, as unfolding and overflow, was
the body of mystics and courtly lovers. Behind the changing images
I have described is the flood of affective expression that many of the
greatest medievalists of the twentieth century (André Wilmart, C. S.
Lewis, R. W. Southern, Jean Leclercq) have charted. I therefore turn
in closing to new imaginings of body and desire in the devotional and
mystical literature of the high Middle Ages.

Devotional Literature: Body as Locus of Experience

and as Friend
Desire for God throbbed in religious poetry long before the thirteenth
century.39 Even before Augustine, hunger for a God who seeks the
searcher was voiced in the psalms and the Neoplatonic prayers by
which Augustine’s prose was so deeply influenced.40 However much
the theologians of the thirteenth century might define blessedness as
the stilling of desire, spiritual writers came increasingly to treat love as
a longing that cannot be satiated or filled, magnifying itself forever as
each increase of joy further stimulates need.41 In the twelfth century,
Bernard, stunned with grief for his dead brother, cried out: “Since love
never comes to an end, you will not forget me forever.”42 Of God’s love,
39. On the flowering of affective expression from the eleventh century on, see
André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du moyen âge latin: Études
d’histoire littéraire (Paris: Bloud and Gay, 1932). For scholarship generally on affec-
tive spirituality, see Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 4, 83–85.
40. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, pp. 156–57 and 168–81; on the conception
of desire in Augustine (and in Origen before him), see also McGinn, Foundations of
Mysticism, pp. 144ff. and 310ff.
41. For a fascinating explanation of how the early fourteenth-century enthusiasm
for quantification led to efforts to measure desire, see Joel Kaye, “Quantification of
Quality.” Kaye’s analysis shows that schoolmen thought qualities such as desire or
love could be represented in technical, mathematical terms as infinite and infinitely
expanding. They were thus, in certain technical ways, in agreement with the mys-
tics’ understanding of desire as movement, not stasis. But this development really
comes after the end of the story I am telling here.
42. Bernard of Clairvaux, sermon 26, in Opera, ed. Leclercq, Rochais, and Talbot,
Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, vol. 1 (1957), p. 173; trans. Kilian Walsh, The
Works of Bernard of Clairvaux: On the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian
Publications, 1971–80), vol. 2, p. 63. And see Astell, Song of Songs, pp. 127–35, for a
 330 the decades around 1300

he said: “To those who seek and long for the presence of God, memory
is in the meanwhile and for the moment sweet, but it does not satisfy;
rather it makes more intense the desire for that from which satisfac-
tion comes.”43 A century later Hadewijch, writing of the paradoxes of
divine love in the metaphors and rhythms of the secular love lyric,
spoke of desire as “inseparable satiety and hunger”; “new assaults of
love,” she wrote, “[are] new hunger so vast that new love may devour
new eternity!”44
Such love, however, was lodged in spirit; often it was a yearning
to escape from body and earth. What is significant for the study of
images of resurrection is the slow emergence not only of a yearning for
body, fraught though it was with ambivalence, but also of an (equally
ambivalent) sense of body as the locus of yearning for God. Both are
background to the final cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy; both are par-
ticularly associated with devotional and mystical writings for and by
women;45 both suggest an interpretation of the late Middle Ages very
different from the deeply learned but misguided charges of overwrought

sensitive analysis of desire in Bernard. She comments aptly (p. 133): “What [scholars]
fail to understand is the degree to which both Bernard and the Pearl poet affirm the
necessity of longing in the salvific process.” The complex discussion of desire in Ber-
nard’s sermon De conversione, chap. 14, paragr. 27, argues basically that we should
desire God because such desire (unlike earthly desires) will by definition be fulfilled.
But the passage also states that this desire is more powerful than all other desires and
at least hints, by quoting Ecclesiasticus 24.21, that the filling of such desire leads to
its own increase. See De conversione, in Opera, vol. 4 (1966), pp. 101–2.
43. Bernard, De diligendo Deo, section 4, paragr. 11, in Opera, vol. 3 (1963), p. 127.
44. Hadewijch: The Complete Works, trans. Columba Hart (New York: Paulist
Press, 1980), pp. 222–23.
45. On the embodied quality of women’s spirituality, see my Fragmentation and
Redemption, pp. 181–222 and 365–85; Karen Glente, “Mystikerinnenviten aus män-
nlicher und weiblicher Sicht: Ein Vergleich zwischen Thomas von Cantimpré und
Katherina von Unterlinden,” in Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter Bauer, eds., Religiöse
Frauenbewegung und mystische Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter (Cologne and Vienna:
Böhlau, 1988), pp. 251–64; Elizabeth A. Petroff, “Women’s Bodies and the Experience
of God in the Middle Ages,” Vox Benedictina 8, no. 1 (1991): 91–115; and Danielle
Régnier-Bohler, “Voix littéraires, voix mystiques,” in Histoire des femmes en occi-
dent, ed. Duby and Perrot, vol. 2: Le moyen âge, ed. Klapisch-Zuber, pp. 443–500.
I do not want to suggest that every female mystic located desire in the body (or
stressed desire for body) the way Mechtild and Marguerite did; Hadewijch and Ger-
trude the Great, for example, wrote almost exclusively of the soul desiring God.
Most female writers did, however, employ unusually sensual prose and manifest
spiritual responses somatically; see Régnier-Bohler, “Voix littéraires,” pp. 461, 485–99.
On the tendency of men to associate somatic phenomena and bodily desire with
women, see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 94–149; on the background of
such assumptions in misogyny, see Régnier-Bohler, “Voix littéraires,” pp. 443–51,
464–70, 472–80.
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 331

emotionalism and arid allegorical virtuosity leveled by the great Dutch

historian Johan Huizinga.46
Devotional and mystical writing in the thirteenth century contin-
ued—as did art, hagiography, and miracle story—to associate body with
decay. If not the “dangerous and unchristian dualism” Robert Acker-
man has seen in it, such literature did give full voice to fear of aging
and putrefaction.47 It expressed anger at the drain on joy and courage
humans often experience from hunger, sexual need, disease, pain, and
the terror of death. The popular debates between personifications of
Body and Soul gave detailed and revolting attention to the decay of the
corpse, although, as a number of scholars have pointed out, they were
psychomachias—virulent and polemical debates between components
of a unitary self—in which Body (especially in the Latin versions) often
made telling charges against Soul.48 The Ancrene Wisse, written prob-
ably in the early thirteenth century for female recluses, spoke of the
flesh as a privy hole, slime and stench, clods and mud, a “prison,” a
“torture-chamber,” a “foreign country” for the soul.49 In such texts,
desire for body is often, at best, Augustine’s retardatio—a necessary
drag that distracts both embodied and separated soul from heaven. As
the author of the Ancrene Wisse put it:

This is one of the greatest marvels on earth: that the thing which is
highest under God, that is, man’s soul, as Augustine testifies, should
be so closely united to the flesh, which is mere mud and dirty earth,
and that, because of this union, she should love it so much that . . .

46. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life,
Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XlVth and XVth Centuries,
trans. F. Hopman (1924; reprint Garden City: Doubleday, 1956).
47. See above, n. 38, and chapter 7, n. 9.
48. Heningham, “An Early Latin Debate of the Body and Soul”; Ackerman,
“Debate of Body and Soul”; Marjorie M. Malvern, “An Earnest ‘Monyscyon’ and
‘thinge Delectabyll’ Realized Verbally and Visually in ‘A Disputacion Betwyx the
Body and Wormes,’ A Middle English Poem Inspired by Tomb Art and Northern
Spirituality,” Viator 13 (1982): 415–43; Jacques Le Goff, “Corps et idéologie dans
l’Occident médiéval: La Révolution corporelle,” in L’Imaginaire médiéval: Essais
(Paris: Gallimard, 1985), pp. 123–27; Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, pp. 48–49. For
a general discussion of this debate literature, see Francis Lee Utley, “Dialogues,
Debates, and Catechisms,” in A Manual of Writings in Middle English: vol. 3, ed.
Albert Hartung (1975), pp. 691–96.
49. Ancrene Riwle, trans. M. B. Salu, pt. 3, pp. 62, 75; pt. 4, pp. 122–23; pt. 6, pp.
159–61. These passages, in strongly Pauline language, stress that the same body that
here below is earth, rot, and the breeder of feces and maggots, will be glorious, light,
and beautiful in heaven. In heaven we put off the “old flesh” or “garment” and don
the new, which will shine “sevenfold brighter than the sun.”
 332 the decades around 1300

she . . . angers her Maker. . . . [But God did not want the soul to fall
into pride, and so He has] tied a heavy clod of earth to [it], like a man
hobbling a cow or any other animal that is likely to stray.50

Marveling that we love it so, this author describes body as a cherished

“enemy.”51
Yet even retardatio often receives in such texts a warmer, more affec-
tionate treatment. The Ancrene Wisse speaks approvingly of four kinds
of earthly love: between friends, between man and woman, between
mother and child, between body and soul.

The soul loves the body greatly, and this is clearly seen in their part-
ing, for dear friends are sorry when they must separate. But Our
Lord willingly separated His soul from His body in order to join ours
together, world without end, in the happiness of heaven.

Indeed, we should never say that we love only the soul of another, not
her body. For “the soul and the body are but one person, and ask for
one judgment. Will you divide into two what God has joined together?
[Matt. 29.6] He forbids this.”52 Literature of spiritual advice, like scho-
lastic textbooks, uses marriage imagery to stress that body and spirit
are bound together by tenderness, even passion, into “one flesh”; per-
son is a psychosomatic unity.
Drawing on such ideas, Middle English devotional texts (for exam-
ple, the Castel off Loue and the Cursor Mundi among others) regularly
include descriptions of soul loving the body so tenderly that it lingers at
death until all the senses are lost.53 Such discussion explicitly includes
50. Ibid., pt. 3, p. 62. The author then goes on to read Job 28.25 (“who madest a
weight for the winds”) as if it refers to the body, which he calls here “the heavy flesh
which pulls the soul down.” See also pt. 7, pp. 172–73.
51. Ibid., pt. 3, p. 61.
52. Quoted passages at ibid., pt. 7, pp. 172–75, especially p. 175, and pt. 4, pp. 81–2.
53. Robert Grosseteste (?), Castel off Loue, ed. Richard F. Weymouth (London: The
Philological Society, 1864), p. 57, lines 1169–80; The Pricke of Conscience (Stimulus
Conscientiae): A Northumbrian Poem . . . [formerly attributed to Richard Rolle],
ed. Richard Morris (Berlin: Ascher, 1863), pp. 227–28, lines 8443–68; Cursor Mundi,
ed. Richard Morris, Early English Text Society 59 (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, and
Trübner, 1875), vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 974–75, lines 17009–26 (probably borrowed from
the Castel). On these works, see Robert R. Raymo, “Works of Religious and Philo-
sophical Instruction,” in A Manual of Writings in Middle English, vol. 7, ed. Albert
Hartung (1986), pp. 2268–9, 2276–77 and 2337–38. For a detailed elaboration of the
soul’s love for the body and her reluctance to depart therefrom (expressed often in
nuptial imagery), see The Departing Soul’s Address to the Body: A Fragment of a
Semi-Saxon Poem, ed. and trans. Thomas Phillipps and S. W. Singer (London: Luke
James Hansard, 1845).
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 333

the idea (found also in Bonaventure’s Breviloquium) that the more per-
fect flesh is, the more it experiences. Thus Christ’s every sense was
perfectly acute on the cross, and in its acuity of experience lay our sal-
vation. Nor did his senses fade, gradually relinquishing his soul for its
journey; rather his soul chose to depart from the flesh it loved and in
which it manifested its love for his friends. There is a suggestion here
of wonder that any soul—even God’s—could bear to depart from such
glorious flesh, unweakened and untainted by sin.54
In these descriptions, a new use of synecdoche throbs with enthu-
siasm for body and for all that to which body gives us access. Bodily
part becomes body; body and soul become each other; body manifests
self. The author of the Ancrene Wisse exclaims that, as St. Bernard
tells us, Christ wept with every part of his body, not only his eyes.55
As “people tie knots in their belts to remind them about things,” so
“Our Lord . . . puts marks of piercing in both His hands, to remind
Him of us.”56 Body is no longer a prison (even a loved prison) in which
self is housed until it can escape. It is rather a locus of self-expression:
the marks of stigmata are not the results of torture or pain but the
pledge—the dwelling-place—of friendship. As the thirteenth-century
saint Christina Mirabilis supposedly said, body is our “beloved,” our
“best and sweetest . . . companion in the present sadness.”57
None of this is irrelevant to resurrection; for the body we fear, love,
and discipline on earth is—as Christina said—the body we will regain
in heaven.58 The author of the Ancrene Wisse asserted as confidently
as Tertullian that the fasting and constraint we inflict on the flesh
here will appear in the flesh we receive before the throne of God. The
54. On Bonaventure, see above, pp. 251–52. See also the lines from the Castel off
Loue and the Cursor Mundi cited in n. 53 above, and Ancrene Riwle, pt. 2, p. 49–51,
and pt. 7, p. 173.
55. Ancrene Riwle, pt. 2, p. 49, referring to Bernard, sermon 3 for Palm Sunday,
in Opera, vol. 5 (1968), pp. 54–55: “Ubi quidem non solis oculis, sed quasi membris
omnibus flevisse videtur, ut totum corpus eius, quod est Ecclesia, totius corporis
lacrimis purgaretur.”
56. Ancrene Riwle, pt. 7, p. 175.
57. “Now, O best and sweetest body . . . you will rest in the dust and will sleep
for a little and then, when the trumpet blows, you will rise again purified of all cor-
ruptibility and you will be joined in eternal happiness with the soul you have had as
a companion . . ..” Life of Christina Mirabilis, chap. 5, number 36, paragrs. 47–48,
Acta Sanctorum, July, vol. 5, p. 658–59; trans. Margot H. King, The Life of Christina
Mirabilis (Saskatoon: Peregrina, 1986), pp. 27–28. Elizabeth A. Petroff discusses this
passage briefly but with characteristic insight in Medieval Women’s Visionary Lit-
erature, p. 36. For a twelfth-century reference to body as brother, see Peter of Celle,
De disciplina claustrali, chap. 23, cited above chapter 4, n. 10.
58. See above, n. 57, and Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 236–37.
 334 the decades around 1300

recluses advised in the Ancrene Wisse also expect transfiguration. Like

Tertullian’s martyrs, they will obtain in heaven reversal of the con-
straints of earth.59 Lacerated here, they will be shining and whole in
heaven; aging and putrefying here, they will “flower” before God; hid-
den in the anchorhold or even in the grave on earth, they will be in the
resurrection “brighter than the sun,” “lighter than the wind,” “swift as
a sunbeam.”60
With homier images, warmer and more congenial rhythms, this
prose speaks in entirely correct theological language of the “marriage
gifts,” or dowries, of the risen body.61 As Albert, Thomas, and Robert
Grosseteste agreed, our body will be our body when it rises, but it will
be endowed with precisely the contrasts 1 Corinthians 15.42–44 was
now taken to denote.62 It will be “the same” and not “the same.” Yet
the Ancrene Wisse, and the devotional and mystical prose of the cen-
tury and a half that followed, spoke not, as the schoolmen did, of quies,
but of passionate, unquenchable, and infinite love.

Women Mystics and the Triumph of Desire

Writing in the closing years of the thirteenth century, two women mys-
tics deeply influenced by secular love poetry, devotional literature, and
contemporary theology foreshadowed the understanding of desire that
flowers in the Divine Comedy. When the German beguine Mechtild
of Magdeburg (d. ca. 1282) and the French nun Marguerite of Oingt (d.
1310) spoke of themselves, they spoke over and over again of “soul and
body,” profoundly anxious for the comfort of both.63 When they saw
other selves in visions of eternity, they saw separated soul embodied
in its resurrection body—a body glimpsed (just as Dante glimpsed it)
partly as a crystal reliquary, partly as an agile, yearning, sensual animal
“swimming and flying” in God.

59. See above, chapter 1, pp. 40–43, 45–47.

60. Ancrene Riwle, pt. 2, pp. 41–42; pt. 3, pp. 62–63 and 72–75; pt. 6, pp. 159–61
and 165–66; pt. 7, p. 175. For “flowering” metaphors, see especially pt. 5, p. 150.
61. See, for example, ibid., pt. 2, p. 41.
62. Clear echoes of “de dotibus” exegesis can be found in ibid., pt. 2, pp. 39–42;
pt. 3, pp. 61–63 and 72; pt. 6, pp. 161 and 166.
63. On Marguerite, see Les Oeuvres de Marguerite, ed. Duraffour, Gardette, and
Durdilly; The Writings of Margaret of Oingt: Medieval Prioress and Mystic, trans.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Information Group, 1990);
Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 249, 254, 265–66, 404 n. 31. On Mechtild, see
n. 72 below.
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 335

Marguerite wrote of a vision in which she saw a book “like a beauti-

ful mirror” and in it

appeared a delightful place, which was so large that the whole world
seems only a little thing by comparison. . . .
. . . From there came so great a sweetness and such great com-
fort that the angels and the souls were satisfied by it to the point
that they could not desire anything else . . . such a good odor . . .
such a great embrace of love.64

But Marguerite went on to describe this sweetness not as finite and

filling but as infinite, flowing out from God in thirst-quenching and
thirst-inducing rivers that forever return:

The saints will be completely within their Creator as the fish within
the sea: they will drink to satiety, without getting tired and without
in any way diminishing the water. . . . [T]hey will drink and eat the
great sweetness of God. And the more they eat, the more their hunger
will grow. And this sweetness cannot decrease any more or less than
can the water of the sea.65

In a later passage, which describes Christ, Marguerite returns to the

theme of hunger-inducing love: “He is the sweet electuary in which are
all good savours. He is so good that those who taste him will be more
hungry the more they receive, and they will not dare to desire anything
other than the sweetness they feel flowing from him.”66
When Marguerite received Jesus in a vision, she saw him in his
risen and glorified body, still wounded but with wounds of shimmering
light. It is almost impossible to read her description without thinking
of the crystal reliquaries and monstrances ubiquitous in thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century chapels.67 But for all her imagery of glass and mir-
rors, the body Marguerite sees is not in repose. It flies and plays, tastes
and yearns. Moreover, Marguerite assimilated to Christ’s transparent
and glowing body the bodies of the saints, who are his “members.”
In this vision, even her earthly sisters seem to be endowed with the
64. Marguerite, Speculum, chap. 2, paragrs. 16–17, in Duraffour, Gardette, and
Durdilly ed., Les Oeuvres de Marguerite, pp. 95–96.
65. Ibid., chap. 2, paragr. 19, pp. 96–97.
66. Ibid., chap. 3, paragr. 31, pp. 100–1.
67. One is also reminded of resurrection iconography in which Christ’s wounds
project gold rays; see above, chapter 4, nn. 98 and 99.
 336 the decades around 1300

dowries of agility, clarity, subtlety, and impassibility. Speaking of her-

self in the third person (as is common with mystics), Marguerite writes:

She seemed to see Jesus Christ, so glorious that no human heart could
conceive of him. He was clothed in the glorious garment which he
took from the noble body of Our Lady. . . . From [his] glorious wounds
poured forth a clarity so bright that one was astonished by it. . . .
This glorious body was so noble and so transparent that one saw very
clearly the soul inside of it. This body was so noble that one could
see oneself there more clearly than in a mirror, . . . so beautiful that
one saw the angels and the saints, as if they were painted on it . . ..
Now imagine His great beauty, so great that He has granted to
all the angels and all the saints who are his members, that they
may be as clear [clars] as the sun. . . .
. . . He has given to his friends an agility [legereta] so great that
in an instant they can go wherever they wish. . . .
. . . [H]e has made them so free, subtle and immaterial [frans et
si sustiz et si trapercans] that they can enter and depart through
closed doors, without any impediment, as Jesus Christ did after
the resurrection.
. . . [T]hey can never be sick, nor burdened, nor suffering, nei-
ther in soul nor in body.
. . . He has made his friends of such noble matter that they
can no longer corrupt nor grow old [ne se porrent ja mais corrum-
pre, ne no porrent enveylir], but they will live with him forever
[perdurablement].68

It is not possible to say that such a complex passage refers to heaven

or to earth, to now or to then, to soul and body here, to soul after
death, or to soul embodied after resurrection.69 The reference to passing
through doors or moving in an instant is taken from technical discus-
sions of the dowries of subtilitas and agilitas. The transparent body
may, as Jeffrey Hamburger has suggested, reflect acquaintance with
68. Speculum, chap. 3, paragrs. 24–34, pp. 98–101. It is important to note that in
paragr. 40, pp. 102–03, she speaks of seeing God’s face when our souls leave our bod-
ies. She does thus sometimes use the category of “separated soul,” and she seems
aware that it would be dangerous to claim visio Dei in this life.
69. Danielle Régnier-Bohler’s brilliant discussion of the sense of time in the lan-
guage of female mystics, “Voix littéraires,” p. 499, makes it clear that when language
moves beyond time into eternity, it is not possible to tell whether one is before
or after resurrection. See also Michel de Certeau, La fable mystique: XVIe–XVIIe
siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), pp. 243–45.
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 337

devotional objects such as the Visitation Group as well as with reli-

quary monstrances; it is certainly an accurate use of theological texts
on the claritas and impassibilitas of the body in glory.70 The image of
hungering for God was a commonplace with female mystics and drew
on older Cistercian and Franciscan themes.71 Strands not only of influ-
ence and history but also of meaning are inextricably entangled here.
A schoolman who wanted to know when the beatific vision comes,
what exactly it brings, and what the resurrection adds to blessedness
could, in such words, find no precise answers (although he would find
no heterodoxy either). But surely there shines through these paradoxes
the conviction that self is an embodied self. Desire that is satisfied and
yet never ceases is lodged in a body that God frees from sorrow—here,
and in heaven, and after the resurrection. Indeed resurrection is hardly
necessary to Marguerite, for resurrection is now.
A far greater visionary and spiritual writer than Marguerite, Mechtild
of Magdeburg developed a conception of the resurrection body as glo-
rious as Dante’s. Herself suffering disease, isolation, and suspicion of
heresy, Mechtild was no advocate of pain.72 Pain is born in hell, not
heaven, she argues; body is something that “flaps its wings” and dis-
tracts us, a “post or target at which people throw stones” a “beloved
prison.” Body must be redeemed in resurrection. “Slime” here below,
it must be “remade as a beautiful robe,” “formed and tempered.”73 In

70. Jeffrey Hamburger, “The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medi-
eval Monastic Devotions,” Viator 20 (1989): 161–82, especially p. 168, plate 3.
71. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Régnier-Bohler, “Voix littéraires,” pp.
491–93.
72. For Mechtild’s understanding of pain, see Das fliessende Licht, bk. 4, chap.
12, ed. Neumann, pp. 123–27; Das Licht, trans. Schmidt, pp. 189–90; Revelations,
trans. Menzies, pp. 107–8. On Mechtild, see Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache, Mechtilde de
Magdeburg (1207–1282): Étude de psychologie religieuse (Paris: H. Champion, 1926);
Hans Tillmann, Studien zum Dialog bei Mechtild von Magdeburg (Gelnhausen: F.
W. Kalbfleisch, 1933); Hans Neumann, “Problemata Mechtildiana,” Zeitschrift für
deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 82 (1948/50): 143–72; idem, “Beiträge
zur Textgeschichte des ‘Fliessenden Lichts der Gottheit’ und zur Lebensgeschichte
Mechtilds von Magdeburg,” Altdeutsche und Altniederländische Mystik, ed. Kurt
Ruh (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), pp. 175–239; Kurt
Ruh, “Beginenmystik: Hadewijch, Mechtild von Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete,”
Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 106 (1977): 265–77;
James C. Franklin, Mystical Transformations: The Imagery of Liquids in the Works
of Mechtild von Magdeburg (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1978); Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 228–47. On Mechtild’s death date, see Neumann,
“Beiträge,” p. 229, and Howard, “The German Mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg,” in
Wilson, ed., Women Writers, p. 156.
73. Das fliessende Licht, bk. 2, chap. 24, ed. Neumann, pp. 58–62, trans. Schmidt,
pp. 114–15, trans. Menzies, p. 54; Das Licht, bk. 4, chap. 18, ed. Neumann, pp. 132–35,
 338 the decades around 1300

keeping with the story of John the Evangelist’s bodily assumption in the
Golden Legend and with Bernard’s idea (questioned in the beatific vision
controversy) that separated souls see Christ’s humanity but wait until
the resurrection for his divine face to be revealed, Mechtild thinks even
the bodies of Christ, Mary, and John (although already in heaven) will
be perfected after the Judgment.74 Christ’s wounds will only then heal
into scars like rose petals. In an astonishing vision, Mechtild sees John’s
body in heaven, whole in every detail and unchangeable, like a crystal,
but apparently asleep—“buried” she says—because there is no resurrec-
tion until the end of time.75 We see in the mirror of heaven, she asserts,
that we “have been formed soul and body and remain thus forever.”76
Our resurrection bodies will be “of human form,” bearing in themselves
the “godly flame” of the soul, which will shine through the body “as
luminous gold shines through a clear crystal.” Yet we will “leap and
swim and fly and climb” in heaven, “clear and godly, gay and free.”77

trans. Schmidt, p. 196–99, trans. Menzies, pp. 112–15; Das Licht, bk. 6, chap. 38, ed.
Neumann, p. 248, trans. Schmidt, p. 318, trans. Menzies, p. 201; Das Licht, bk. 7,
chap. 65, ed. Neumann, pp. 310–11, trans. Schmidt, p. 401, trans. Menzies, p. 263.
74. Honorius Augustodunensis, L’Elucidarium, ed. Lefevre, bk. 3, q. 42, p. 455,
speaks of John’s bodily assumption. For the source of the legend and texts relating to
it, see ibid., p. 178 n. 4.
75. Das Licht, bk. 2, chap. 3, ed. Neumann, pp. 39–41, trans. Schmidt, p. 89, trans.
Menzies, p. 32; Das Licht, bk. 4, chap. 23, ed. Neumann, pp. 139–40, trans. Schmidt,
p. 205, trans. Menzies, p. 118.
76. Das Licht, bk. 6, chap. 41, ed. Neumann, p. 250, trans. Schmidt, p. 320, trans.
Menzies, p. 202; Das Licht, bk. 7, chap. 1, ed. Neumann, p. 257, trans. Schmidt, p.
327, trans. Menzies, p. 208. It is worth noting that when a story is told of Mechtild
going to the grave of a friend, she is said to greet him there “both soul and body.” And
we are told that she “was in the habit of doing this.” She then is said to celebrate a
“feast” for him in her soul—a kind of spiritual funerary meal! See Das Licht, bk. 4,
chap. 22, ed. Neumann, p. 138, trans. Schmidt, p. 203. In bk. 6, chap. 15, ed. Neu-
mann, pp. 222–25, Mechtild has a vision of the martyrdom of the friars; she then
speaks of Elias put to death by Antichrist and sees his soul received by God, although
Antichrist prevents his body from receiving burial in order to cause Christians to
abjure their faith. But all who see the body are so moved that they pray, and “the
presence of this holy body so fills them with blessedness that they forget the cruelty
of death and all earthly matters.” These passages, which stress the importance of
even the inanimate body to the “persons” of those we love or admire, make it clear
that Mechtild tends to think of the self as embodied at all times, even when it is
technically a separated soul.
It is also important that Mechtild refers to herself over and over again as “body
and soul.” In bk. 5, chap. 35, ed. Neumann, p. 196, trans. Schmidt, p. 267, where she
thanks God with her “suffering body, outcast soul, sinful heart, sorrowful senses and
whole being,” she pleads that, at the end, she may receive God’s “body” “as food for
body and soul.” She expresses a similar wish, for herself and others, in bk. 6, chap.
37, ed. Neumann, pp. 245–48. Once again the physicality of God and her own physi-
cality as a means of response are emphasized.
77. Das Licht, bk. 7, chap. 1, ed. Neumann, pp. 254–58, trans. Schmidt, pp.
327–28, trans. Menzies, pp. 208–9. Compare the passage cited in n. 81 below, where
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 339

The selves of the resurrection “can go wherever they like—a thousand

miles—as quickly as a man can think, but they will never come to the
end of the golden streets of heaven.”78
Unlike Marguerite, Mechtild separates now from then. A wall, thin
but tough “like the shell of an egg,” stands between earth and heaven,
she says; bodies cannot pass through until the Day of Judgment.79 Yet,
in another sense Mechtild too breaches the wall. The slime and ordure
we inhabit here on earth is a vehicle that carries us to heaven. “If he
takes my body [in ecstasy], my soul belongs to him.”80 Even now, we
lie “in the arms” of God.

. . . and in [His] Triune-ness

Soul and body fly and play,
They romp according to their hearts’ desire more
and more
And drink [there] like the fish of the sea.81

Body is now the access to God. Desire is now. Mechtild often writes
as if both body and desire rise here, before death, into the eternal pres-
ent of heaven. How hard it is then to bear that soul could be even for a
moment in heaven without the body in which desire resides, the body
whose suffering lifts the self to heaven. “When I think of death my soul
rejoices . . . and I would die with great joy to come to the time of seeing
God . . . . Yet I can say: I would like to live to the Last Judgment, and my
longing grows for the time of the martyrs . . . . When I see my pain and
suffering, my soul soars in such sweetness that my body soars too.”82
Thus, when Mechtild says that her soul does not want to leave her
body, she speaks not of fear of death, not of senses lingering around a
corpse, not of the retarding of soul by its need to manage the wits and

exactly the same metaphor is used. The image is also found in Marguerite of Oingt;
see above, n. 65.
78. Das Licht, bk. 7, chap. 1, ed. Neumann, p. 257. In bk. 6, chap. 41, ed. Neu-
mann, p. 250, Mechtild sees a mirror in heaven before the breast of each body and
soul, and the Trinity is reflected in each mirror. Dante is not, therefore, the only
thinker of the period who sees resurrected and glorified bodies in paradise before the
general resurrection.
79. Das Licht, bk. 4, chap. 23, ed. Neumann, p. 140, trans. Schmidt, pp. 205–6,
trans. Menzies, pp. 118–19.
80. Das Licht, bk. 3, chap. 3, ed. Neumann, p. 81, trans. Schmidt, p. 133, trans.
Menzies, p. 70.
81. Das Licht, bk. 5, chap. 25, ed. Neumann, p. 185, trans. Schmidt, p. 253, trans.
Menzies, p. 151.
82. Das Licht, bk. 6, chap. 26, ed. Neumann, pp. 234–35, trans. Schmidt, p. 306,
trans. Menzies, p. 191 (with my changes).
 340 the decades around 1300

organs, not even of the hope that flesh and decay will be redeemed in
resurrection. Mechtild desires her body because desire is its own reward
and body is the locus of desire. Separated soul yearns for body because
it is in body that it yearns most fully for God.
There is something quaint and amusing, of course, in Mechtild’s
images of frolicking crystals, crystals with earthly and individual eye-
brows, crystals that drink like the fish of the sea. Such language is
puzzling as well. But behind, through, and in such images we find the
confident assertion that body must rise. Body must rise because with-
out it, we are not persons; we are not our selves. It is not our agility,
our incorruptibility, or our eyebrows, that make us who we are; it is
our love. We must be bodies as well as souls, because only embodied
souls can fully love. If Mechtild agreed with Augustine that we are our
desire, she nonetheless understood this desire, this weight of the heart,
in a very different way. For Mechtild felt, as Augustine apparently never
did, that desire must lodge in an embodied self.83 Christ’s promise to
Mechtild was not only that she would be united again, soul and body,
in heaven; it was also that “longing can never die.”
At the turn of the fourteenth century, therefore, the fullest affirma-
tion of bodily resurrection comes not in the words of the schoolmen
but in the halting verses of an obscure and persecuted female mystic. I
close my long survey of images of resurrection—images I have studied,
glossed, and situated in so many ways—by quoting without any gloss
at all Mechtild’s powerful words.

The Love of God lies on me. . . . And when I think that my body will
be lost in death and I shall no longer be able to suffer for Jesus or to
praise him, this is so heavy to me that I long, if it were possible, to
live until Judgment Day. My love forces me to this. . . .
And our Lord speaks in answer: “You must die . . .”
Alas, Lord, let my longing not die
Even if I am not able any longer to gain anything
with my body.
Then our Lord replies: “Your longing will live, for it cannot die,
because it is eternal. Let it yearn on until the end of time, when soul

83. There has been much discussion of Augustine’s understanding of the resurrec-
tion body and the nature of desire, but commentators seem agreed that he does not
find embodiment intrinsically necessary in order to experience the joys of visio; see
Dewart, Death and Resurrection, pp. 164–88, and my discussion in chapter 2 above,
nn. 135, 138, and 163.
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 341

and body will unite again. Then I shall establish [you] again, and
you shall praise me forever. . . . You have wished thus to carry out
for me all human suffering and all human service. I say again: your
Being [Wesen] will endure until the Last Humans shall come.”84

Epilogue
The promise of bodily resurrection—the promise, that is, that the very
stuff of change and putrefaction can be lifted to impassibility and immu-
tability while continuing itself—remained an oxymoron through all the
centuries of the Middle Ages. Neither mystics such as Mechtild nor
poets such as Dante, for all their genius, could solve the contradiction,
not even by lifting it into the paradox of satisfied but insatiable desire.
Yet for all its incoherence and self-contradiction, the doctrine of
resurrection has been of enormous consequence in shaping assump-
tions we still hold concerning personhood and survival. Much about
our current Western notions of the individual has taproots in medieval
discussions of the ontological significance of body. If we see the indi-
vidual as unique—valued yet opaque and unknowable because (in the
currently fashionable term) “other”—our assumption is informed by
hundreds of years of puzzlement over embodiment. We in the 1990s—
like medieval theologians, poets, and mystics—find it difficult to think
that any survival that really counts could entail loss of those markers
the body bears: sex, race, personal appearance, and so forth.85 We find it
hard to accept any future as “our own” unless it includes those experi-
ences, whether of suffering or delight, that body makes possible. Like
84. Das Licht, bk. 6, chap. 15, ed. Neumann, p. 222, trans. Schmidt, pp. 290–91,
trans. Menzies, p. 179 (with my changes). The “Last Humans” Mechtild refers to are
Enoch and Elias, who will come at the end of time.
85. In saying this, I do not wish to eclipse the fact that medieval thinkers saw as
“defects” to be erased certain marks such as skin color that would to us be neces-
sary for “our individual personhood.” Medieval theorists insisted that everything
necessary to the perfection of humanitas as species would be reconstituted in each
resurrected body; unfortunate color, such as that of “the Ethiopian,” was to be cured.
Our notions of “person” as “individual” include much more individual difference
than do medieval notions. But even we operate with something like the medieval
notion of the species “human.” We wish for survival (or immortality) for a healed
and “perfected” self; no one dreams of a future life (here or in heaven) in which AIDS,
cancer, thalidomide-induced deformities, etc., remain. And in the medieval idea that
the scars of the martyrs survive in heaven (although cured into “rose petals”), we
find a quite astonishing commitment to self both as bodily and as individual. It was
important to theologians of the thirteenth century that a nose be distinguishable
from an eye in the afterlife and that martyrs retain on their bodies what they had
undergone in life. See above chapter 6, n. 108.
 342 the decades around 1300

Mechtild, we locate desire in a psychosomatic entity, and the personal

survival we hope for is not dissimilar to her notion of a longing that
“can never die.” Our technical arguments about identity—whether car-
ried out by scientists who study artificial intelligence, sociologists who
consider the implications of organ transplants, or philosophers who
conduct thought experiments about what I think “I” really am—have
not a little in common with the abstruse speculations of medieval theo-
logians about what exactly must be reassembled at the end of time in
order to constitute a “person.”
Medieval debates over bodily resurrection involved more than theol-
ogy and philosophy. Mystics, poets, hagiographers, sculptors, and tell-
ers of folktales ruminated about what body could do, wherein lay its
significance, how it might be redeemed. And theologians, like storytell-
ers, expressed their concerns and concepts in images, analogies, and
examples as much as in logic. Such images came not only from a fund
of images inherited from the past; they came as well from daily experi-
ence. Storytellers and theologians alike feared death, buried the dead,
and died themselves.
Today also, our deepest hopes and fears are betrayed in images.
Indeed we may find our obsessions mirrored more vividly in an episode
of Star Trek, Max Headroom, or Quantum Leap than in the philosophi-
cal disquisitions of a Derek Parfit or Bernard Williams.86 Recent philos-
ophy of mind, recognizing this, sometimes uses science fiction novels
and film as the stuff of its investigations.87 The dominant images of
survival found in these products of popular culture are not, of course,
statues and seeds but rather robots, teletransportation, and mind trans-
plants. Much has changed since medieval ideas about embodiment
were elaborated; it would not do to overstate the continuities although
it is worth thinking about the fact that modern images (like medieval
ones) stress reassemblage of parts more than change and flowering. It
is also worth considering how far the stubborn clinging to mechanical
images of body reconstitution, characteristic of the present moment, is
both a reflection of a perduring fear of fertility and the female body that
our current obsession with sexual expressiveness does not obviate and

86. See above, “Introduction,” nn. 27–28; and my Fragmentation and Redemp-
tion, pp. 244–53.
87. Some philosophers debate the advisability of this; see Derek Parfit, Rea-
sons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 200; and Fragmentation and
Redemption, pp. 398–400 nn. 25 and 42.
 Fragmentation and Ecstasy 343

a response to recent changes in medical and computer technology that

threaten longstanding notions of death and self.88
In closing, however, I wish to stress, not the method I have used
in exploring medieval ideas and images nor the relevance of those
ideas and images to specifically modern concerns, but the notion of
bodily resurrection itself. For however absurd it seems—and some of
the greatest theologians of the Western tradition have grappled with
that absurdity—it is a concept of sublime courage and optimism.89 It
locates redemption there where ultimate horror also resides—in pain,
mutilation, death, and decay. Whether or not any of the images and
answers I have surveyed in this long book carries conviction, those who
articulated them faced without flinching the most negative of all the
consequences of embodiment: the fragmentation, slime, and stench of
the grave. It was this stench and fragmentation they saw lifted to glory
in resurrection. To make body crucial to personhood is to court the pos-
sibility that (to misquote Paul) victory is swallowed up in death. But
if there is resurrection, then what is redeemed includes the fragments
that concerned Tertullian and Athenagoras as well as the love for which
Dante and Mechtild strove. We may not find their solutions plausible,
but it is hard to feel that they got the problem wrong.

88. See above, “Introduction,” at n. 24, where I point out how different are current
assumptions and anxieties from those of late nineteenth-century psychologists, theo-
logians, and theosophists, who tended to imagine and explore the afterlife in terms
of disembodied spirits. On the implications of modern technology for conceptions
of body, see Paul Rabinow, “Severing the Ties: Fragmentation and Dignity in Late
Modernity,” Knowledge and Society: The Anthropology of Science and Technology
9 (1992): 169–87.
89. For a contemporary echo, see John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” in Tele-
phone Poles and Other Poems, number 72, cited in Paul Gooch, “Resurrection,” p.
664:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the
molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall . . ..
And see the poems, each entitled “The Resurrection of the Body,” by Linda Greger-
son and Eric Pankey in Poetry 162 (April 1993): 14–15, 26.
 Afterword:
Why All the Fuss about the Body?
A Medievalist’s Perspective
caroline bynum

In the Classroom and the Bookstore

a friend of mine is leaving for eastern Europe where
she has been asked to establish a women’s studies pro-
gram. She is working on the reading list. Her students
will come mostly from a city where a few years ago there
was little to buy in the stores except a large selection of paprikas; now
the stores are full, but many people whose days were formerly occupied
in work are unemployed. The concerns are very different from those
on American campuses where eating-disorder clinics proliferate and
the place of gay studies or Western civilization in the curriculum are
heated topics of debate. “There’s so much written about the body,” she

This essay was first published in Critical Inquiry 22 (1995), pp. 1–33. It has been
republished in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn:
New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1999), pp. 241–280. A somewhat different version
appeared in German translation as “Warum das ganze Theater mit dem Körper? Die
Sicht einer Mediävistin,” Historische Anthropologie: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag 4
(l996), pp. 1–33. For help with the original article, I thank Elaine Combs-Schilling,
Arnold Davidson, Tilman Habermas, Jeffrey Hamburger, Bruce Holsinger, Jean How-
ard, Lynn Hunt, Hans Medick, Hilary Putnam, Guenther Roth, Nancy Leys Stepan,
and Stephen D. White. Although in some cases their suggestions cancelled each
other out, I profited immensely from the diverse readings they provided.
 346 Afterword

groans, “but it all focuses on such a recent period. And in so much of it,
the body dissolves into language. The body that eats, that works, that
dies, that is afraid—that body just isn’t there. Can’t you write some-
thing for my students that would put things in a larger perspective?”
I said I would try.1
In a sense, of course, “the body” is the wrong topic. It is no topic or,
perhaps, almost all topics. As many contemporary theorists point out,
we no longer think there is such a thing as the body—a kind of “flesh
dress” we take up, or put off, or refurbish according to the latest style.2
Whatever our position on “antiessentialism” (and it is certainly true
that many of the recent attacks on “essentialists” have been both intel-
lectually imprecise and cruel), no one in the humanities seems really to
feel comfortable any longer with the idea of an essential “bodiliness.”
We tend to reject both a “bodiliness” that is in some way prior to the
genderings, sexings, colorings, or handicappings particular persons are
subject to and a body that is easily separable from the feelings, con-
sciousness, and thoughts that occur in it.3 Nor does it really help much
to replace the body with my body, as Adrienne Rich and Diana Fuss
have suggested we should do.4 For if my body is not simply a synonym
for me, I must, by using the term, raise questions about some particular

1. My friend’s point is echoed in Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and

Gender-Scepticism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York:
Routledge, 1990), p. 145: “What sort of body is it that is free to change its shape
and location at will, that can become anyone and travel anywhere? If the body is a
metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human
perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.” As I men-
tion in n. 67, medieval debates over the glorified body of the resurrection consider
some of the same issues.
2. Margaret Atwood uses the idea of a flesh dress in her novel The Robber Bride
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993). The idea comes from a poem by James
Reaney called “Doomsday, or the Red Headed Woodpecker,” in James Reaney,
Poems, ed. Germaine Warkentin (Toronto: New Press 1972), pp. 112–13.
3. For recent discussions of essentialism, especially with regard to feminist issues,
see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York:
Routledge, 1989); Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Scepticism,”
pp. 133–56; Ellen Rooney, interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In a Word:
Interview,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), esp.
pp. 14–23; and Jane Roland Martin, “Methodological Essentialism, False Difference,
and Other Dangerous Traps,” Signs 19 (Spring 1994): 630–57. All four authors deplore
recent uses of the charge of essentialism to attack empirical, historical research. All
four show courage in speaking out; I find myself most in sympathy with the specific
formulations of Susan Bordo.
4. See Fuss, Essentially Speaking, pp. 51–53. When I say it doesn’t help much,
I mean precisely this; it does, of course, help some. Focusing on the variety of indi-
vidual experiences, and guarding against generalizing from self to other, produce a
more nuanced understanding of both the present and the past.
 Afterword 347

aspects of the self. Which aspects? And why does the phrase suggest
them? So I am stuck again with my original topic. But it, we are told, is
the wrong category. What, then, is everybody writing about?
Perhaps some help is to be found in the usual scholarly move of
surveying the literature. What does the phrase mean in the rapidly
increasing number of books with the body in the title—an increase
only too apparent to anyone who walks these days into a bookstore?
A survey of recent Anglo-American scholarship turns up only a wel-
ter of confusing and contradictory usages.5 In certain areas of philoso-
phy, attention to the body means attention to the role of the senses in
epistemology or to the so-called mind/body problem; in others it pro-
vides an opportunity to enter into discussion of essence or objectivity.6
The most ambitious recent sociological treatment of the body defines
it as “environment,” “representation,” and “sensuous potentiality”;
it is, however, disease, especially anorexia nervosa, that furnishes
Bryan Turner with his most frequent and telling example.7 Discussing
recent historical writing, Roy Porter and Susan Bordo each enumerate
an amazing range of topics—from biology and demography to artistic
5. In the survey of literature that follows, I deliberately bring together authors
who never read each other. The books and articles I cite often speak with great assur-
ance of what “the body” is and yet display little awareness of each others’ conversa-
tions—conversations in which totally diverse assumptions and definitions figure. It
is thus part of my purpose here to serve as a historian of our present moment, calling
attention both to the ghettoization of contemporary discourses and to their common
emphases. It is not part of my purpose either to provide a complete survey of recent
literature or to recommend as serious and valuable every title I cite.
6. For several recent (and very different) examples, see The Philosophy of the
Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism, ed. Stuart F. Spicker (Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1970); Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning,
Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Bordo, The
Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany, N.Y.: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1987); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Patrick Quinn, “Aquinas’s
Concept of the Body and Out of Body Situations,” Heythrop Journal 34 (Oct. 1993):
387–400; and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus,” trans. Claudette Sartiliot, in Thinking Bod-
ies, ed. Juliet Flower MacCannell and Laura Zakarin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1994), pp. 17–31.
7. See Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory
(London: Sage Publications, 1984). Important recent works that are, properly speak-
ing, part of the new field of cultural studies but have much in common with what
was the enterprise of sociology a generation ago are Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain:
The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985),
and David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991). See also Jakob Tanner, “Körpererfahrung, Schmerz, und die Konstruktion
des Kulturellen,” Historische Anthropologie: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag 2 (1994):
489–502.
 348 Afterword

depiction—under the rubric of body history.8 A large number focus in

some way on issues of reproduction or sexuality, or of the construction
of gender and family roles, especially through medicine.9 The work of
Foucault and the “new historicist” approach of literary critic Stephen
Greenblatt often lie behind the way the questions are posed in this sort
of history, although New Historicism itself has not until recently been
characterized by a focus on gender.10 In a good deal of recent theologi-
cal writing, particularly of the popular variety, the body raises issues of
medical and/or sexual ethics, rather than more conventional questions
of eschatology or soteriology.11 In feminist theory, especially in the lin-
guistic and/or psychoanalytic turn it has taken in the past decade, the
body as “discovered” or “constructed” has been replaced by bodies as
“performative” (as becoming what they are by performing what they

8. See Roy Porter, “History of the Body,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writ-
ing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991),
pp. 206–32, and Bordo, “Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization
of Culture,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Dia-
mond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), pp. 87–90. An
older survey that is still powerful and convincing is Natalie Zemon Davis, “Wom-
en’s History in Transition: The European Case,” Feminist Studies 3 (Spring-Summer
1976): 83–103.
9. See, for example, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in
the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987); Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cul-
tural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon, 1987); Body/Politics: Women and
the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttle-
worth (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images
of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centu-
ries (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989). Martin is an anthropologist, but her
method is similar to that of the historians cited here. An important recent work that
takes a somewhat different approach is Barbara Duden, Geschichte unter der Haut:
Ein Eisenacher Arzt und seine Patientinnen um 1730 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987);
trans. Thomas Dunlap, under the misleading title The Woman beneath the Skin:
A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991).
10. See Martha C. Howell, “A Feminist Historian Looks at the New Historicism:
What’s So Historical about It?” Women’s Studies 19 (Spring 1991): 139–47; and
John E. Toews, “Stories of Difference and Identity: New Historicism in Literature
and History,” Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht, deutsche Sprache und Litera-
tur 84 (Spring 1992): 193–211.
11. See, for example, Lawrence E. Sullivan, “Body Works: Knowledge of the
Body in the Study of Religion,” History of Religions 30 (Aug. 1990): 86–99; Antoine
Vergote, “The Body as Understood in Contemporary Thought and Biblical Catego-
ries,” Philosophy Today 35 (Spring 1991): 93–105; James B. Nelson, Body Theology
(Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992); and James F. Keenan, “Christian
Perspectives on the Human Body,” Theological Studies 55 (June 1994): 330–46.
 Afterword 349

“choose” or must choose).12 In much of this writing, body refers to

speech acts or discourse; this is what my friend meant when she said:
“The lived body seems to disappear.”13 In art history, the proliferation
of recent work on the body refers not so much to the formal qualities
of depicted figures as to the way in which what is seen is constructed
by the viewer’s gaze.14 For literary criticism, philosophy, sociology, his-
tory, and theology, the body is a recent enthusiasm. A full survey would
have to include as well such fields as biology, medicine, and behaviorist
psychology, whose well-established and familiar understandings of the
body as physiology are often the object of intense criticism by the new
literary and historical approaches.15
Thus, despite the enthusiasm for the topic, discussions of the body
are almost completely incommensurate—and often mutually incom-
prehensible—across the disciplines. There is no clear set of structures,
behaviors, events, objects, experiences, words, and moments to which
body currently refers. Rather, it seems to me, the term conjures up two
sharply different groups of phenomena. Sometimes body, my body, or
embodiedness seems to refer to limit or placement, whether biological
or social. That is, it refers to natural, physical structures (such as organ
systems or chromosomes), to environment or locatedness, boundary or
definition, or to role (such as gender, race, class) as constraint. Some-
times—on the other hand—it seems to refer precisely to lack of limits,
that is, to desire, potentiality, fertility, or sensuality/sexuality (whether
“polymorphously perverse,” as Norman O. Brown puts it, or genital), or
to person or identity as malleable representation or construct.16 Thus

12. See Butler, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. Butler is herself aware of
the criticism and takes skillful steps to avoid some of the problems pointed out by
her critics. I return to discussion of this below.
13. See n. 1. The major place where the body that dies receives extensive treat-
ment in contemporary scholarship is in gay studies. See, for example, Randy Shilts,
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1987), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1993).
14. See, for example, Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and
Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
15. See, for example, Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body.
16. See Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966). The
two senses of body—as constraint and as potentiality—are in certain ways two
sides of the same coin. Debate about the extent to which body can be altered, over-
thrown, and so on (or to put it another way, the extent to which we can be liberated
from body) is lodged in debates over authority and freedom, society (or nurture) and
nature, that go back to the Enlightenment. There are also, however, current discus-
sions about bodies (especially but not exclusively around issues of reproduction) that
have roots in pre-Enlightenment concerns.
 350 Afterword

body can refer to the organs on which a physician operates or to the

assumptions about race and gender implicit in a medical textbook, to
the particular trajectory of one person’s desire or to inheritance patterns
and family structures.
Such discussions have, in their details, almost nothing to do with
each other. Three general observations can, however, be made. The
first is that an extraordinarily large amount of this recent discussion of
the body is in fact a discussion of sex and gender. This is in part true
because, as Porter and Ludmilla Jordanova have pointed out, so much
of the good recent work has been done by feminists.17 But the equation
of body with sex and gender is now also found in discussions that are
not really feminist in inspiration. A recent popular work entitled Body
Theology, for example, includes three sections: one on human sexual-
ity; one on “men’s issues” (or gender); and a third entitled “medical
issues,” which deals primarily with reproductive choice. If my count
is correct, the entire book devotes only about seventeen pages to what
was surely, in earlier times, theology’s major preoccupation with bod-
ies: suffering and death.18
The second observation is that both of the current sets of under-
standings of the body seem characterized by discomfort. Some writ-
ers express profound unease with any self-definition, whether based on
biological structures or on cultural and social position; others are made
nervous by potency. Indeed, advances in reproductive medicine and in
contraception seem to have brought in their wake greater agony about
both personal reproductive decisions and worldwide overpopulation;
AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases have darkened the promise
of sexual liberation; subtle analyses of knowledge as perspectival and
situated, devised to defeat the omniscient observer, seem to have left
viewers not free and creative but rather caught in—because constructed
by—their vantage points. For all the contemporary castigation of earlier
concepts of embodiment, present discussion reveals surprisingly often
its own version of body-as-trap.
Third, it is worth noting that many of these current analyses, differ-
ent from each other though they be, share a characterization of earlier

17. See Porter, “History of the Body,” pp. 207, 224–25, and Jordanova, Sexual
Visions, pp. 10–13.
18. See Nelson, Body Theology. Teresa L. Ebert points out that recent work tends
also to leave out the laboring body. See Teresa L. Ebert, “Ludic Feminism, the Body,
Performance, and Labor: Bringing Materialism Back into Feminist Cultural Studies,”
Cultural Critique, no. 23 (Winter 1992–1993): 5–50.
 Afterword 351

Western history. From Plato to Descartes, the Western tradition was—

in this interpretation—dualist.19 It despised the body (however defined).
Moreover, it in some way identified the body with nature and the
female; dualism was thus by definition misogyny. Sweeping two thou-
sand years of history into what can only be called a vast essentializa-
tion, some scholars—ostensibly in the name of antiessentialism—have
even gone so far as to identify woman with what cannot be said, thus
gagging themselves with their own historical generalization. When my
friend asks for a wider perspective on the body, she is asking, I think,
to be freed not just from a body that “dissolves into language” but also
from a self that reduces to an identity-position and a past that dwindles
into one or two implausible generalizations.
In the rest of this article, I want to put back on the table, so to
speak, some issues relating to bodies and embodiment that have been
eclipsed in present theorizing. I shall do so through a discussion of my
own research on the European Middle Ages. I do this not in order to
denigrate or trivialize the recent scholarly concern with sex and gender
nor to suggest that the Middle Ages had no such concerns.20 Rather,
by giving a much more complex view of the past than is usually pre-
sented, I suggest that the present, whose ancestor it is, may be more
complex as well. “Medieval people” (as vague a notion, by the way, as
“modern people”) did not have “a” concept of “the body” any more
than we do; nor did they “despise” it (although there is reason to think
that they feared childbirth, or having their teeth pulled, or the amputa-
tion of limbs without anaesthesia). Like the modern world, the Middle
Ages was characterized by a cacophony of discourses. Doctors took a
19. The cliché is found in some form in most of the books cited above. Porter, in
his review essay, for example, sees the contemporary interest in body history as a
result of our new freedom from such dualism; Bordo, whose The Flight to Objectiv-
ity brilliantly protests the conventional misreading of medieval thought as Carte-
sian, nonetheless repeats the generalization in her work on anorexia nervosa. For the
standard formulation, see Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Con-
temporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8 (Spring 1982): 109–31, and Jacques Le Goff,
“Corps et idéologie dans l’Occident médiéval,” L’Imaginaire médiéval: Essais (Paris:
Gallimard 1985), pp. 123–27.
20. Among much splendid work on sexuality and gender in the Middle Ages,
I single out Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renun-
ciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Danielle
Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans.
Matthew Adamson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Joan Cad-
den, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For a discussion of gender
and sexuality in rabbinic Judaism, see Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in
Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
 352 Afterword

completely different view of sexuality from theologians, sometimes

prescribing extramarital sex as a cure for disease.21 Secular love poets
and ascetic devotional writers meant something radically different by
passion. Pissing and farting did not have the same valence in the grim
monastic preaching of the years around 1100 and in the cheerfully scat-
ological, although still misogynistic, fabliaux of two centuries later.22
Alchemists studied the properties of minerals and gems in an effort to
precipitate chemical change and prolong life, whereas students of the
Bible saw in these same objects lessons about fortitude and truth.23
Even within what we would call discourse communities, ideas about
matter, body, and person could conflict and contradict. Galenic and
Aristotelian ideas of reproduction disagreed sharply about the impor-
tance of the female seed, and the new attention to the structure of
organs that emerged in the Renaissance was very different from earlier
understandings of the physical body as humors and fluids.24 Dualist
Cathar preachers, and some orthodox monks, disapproved of marriage
and meat eating, whereas hagiographers often praised the obedience
of women who married.25 Eastern and Western theologians disagreed

21. See Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, pp.
83–138; Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, pp. 271–77;
and Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its
Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 68–70, 79,
and 131.
22. See the works cited in nn. 41 and 80, and R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of
the Fabliaux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
23. See Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, “Rajeunir au Moyen Age: Roger Bacon et
le mythe de la prolongation de la vie,” Revue médicale de la Suisse Romande 106,
no. 1 (1986): 9–23 and “Storia della scienza e storia della mentalità: Ruggero Bacone,
Bonifacio VIII e la teoria della ‘prolongatio vitae,’” in Aspetti della Letteratura latina
nel secolo XIII, ed. Claudio Leonardi and Giovanni Orlandi (Florence and Perugia:
“La Nuova Italia,” 1985), pp. 243–80; and Christel Meier, Gemma spiritalis: Meth-
ode und Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorese vom frühen Christentum bis ins 18. Jah-
rhundert (Munich: W. Fink, 1977).
24. See Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, and
Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, esp. pp. 167–227. For
the new emphasis on organ systems found in Renaissance medicine, see Laqueur’s
splendid study, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). The critique by Katharine Park and Robert A.
Nye suggests that Laqueur has not taken sufficient account of earlier Galenic notions
that would make the body more a matter of fluids and humors. See Katharine Park
and Robert A. Nye, “Destiny Is Anatomy,” review of Making Sex, by Laqueur, New
Republic, 18 Feb. 1991, pp. 53–57.
25. For these “mixed messages” to medieval women (and some men as well), see
Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of
Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
pp. 73–99.
 Afterword 353

about whether there was a purgatory for separable souls; and even
within the Western tradition, the pope and his cardinals broke for a
time over whether resumption of body in the afterlife was necessary
before the beatific vision.26 It would be no more correct to say that
medieval doctors, rabbis, alchemists, prostitutes, wet nurses, preachers,
and theologians had “a” concept of “the body” than it would be to say
that Charles Darwin, Beatrix Potter, a poacher, and the village butcher
had “a” concept of “the rabbit.”
Nonetheless I would like to describe three aspects of a widespread
medieval concern about a particular kind of body—the body that dies.
I do so not because the Middle Ages thought the body was corpse, pain,
and death rather than pleasure, sex, and life; not because theologies
and rituals of death were without controversy in the Middle Ages; not
because I think the topics I shall treat are the only proper topics for
a discussion of the many bodies of the Middle Ages; and not because
I think modern attitudes are the direct descendants of medieval ones
(although I shall argue below that there is an important connection).
Rather, I do so to correct certain prevalent generalizations about the
medieval past and thus, by bringing forward a more nuanced under-
standing of that past, to suggest that we in the present would do well to
focus on a wider range of topics in our study of body or bodies.

At the Movies
To introduce my topic, I return for a moment to the late twentieth
century. I have argued in an earlier article that the pulp fiction and
popular movies of the last two decades, as well as formal work in the
philosophy of mind, raise an interesting question about embodiment
through repeated exploration of the problem of body-hopping. Films,
such as Heaven Can Wait, Maxie, All of Me, Freejack, Death Becomes
Her, The Switch, Heart Condition, or Robocop, and TV serials, such
as Max Headroom or Star Trek, explore the problem of identity and
personal survival through asking whether “I” will still be “I” if trans-
planted into a body clearly marked by the personal characteristics (the
race and sex markers, the scars and aging, and so on) of “someone else.”

26. On purgatory, see Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). On the beatific vision controversy, see
Simon Tugwell, Human Immortality and the Redemption of Death (London: Darton
Longman and Todd, 1990), pp. 125–56, and my own The Resurrection of the Body in
Western Christianity, 200–1336, pp. 279–91.
 354 Afterword

Issues of gender have been particularly prominent in this questioning:

can Caroline Bynum still be Caroline Bynum if, having defined her as
her stream of memory or her consciousness, we transplant “her” into
the body (which comes close here to meaning the identity-position) of
Michael Jackson? Or, more simply, do we react as if it is a transplanted
“she”—however we define her—if we see what looks like Michael Jack-
son in front of us? In contrast to the popular literature of the turn of the
century, or even the 1950s, when table tipping, spiritualism, multiple
personalities, and so on, provided the medium for exploring issues of
personal survival, today’s popular culture worries about bodies. Its sto-
ries and images tend to erase the kind of line between mind and body
that would make the transplanting or disembodying of consciousness
or memory a satisfactory conception of personal continuity.27
As Bordo and Robert Nozick have pointed out, a fear of body swap-
ping as destruction of person pervades recent films. In Invasion of the
Body Snatchers, the pods attack “us” by occupying our bodies; it is “we
the bodies” who are afraid. In the remake of The Fly, what was in the
earlier version a mechanical joining of human and fly parts is now the
eruption from within of an alien and uncontrollable “something” that,
by replacing the material of the body, destroys the previous self. Popu-
lar fiction, such as Who Is Julia? or Memories of Amnesia, suggests that
transplant of a body part (and it is not only the brain that is at stake
here) could be transplant of self.28 Moreover, it is in my view significant
not only that religious groups differ in their responses to organ trans-
plants but also that they consider the matter a deeply fraught ethical
issue, not merely a medical matter. To come back to the movies, medi-
eval and modern conceptions find a strange and explicit mirroring in
the recent film Jesus of Montreal, where the modern Christ figure saves
others after his death through heart and cornea transplants. Suggesting
that organ transplantation is the modern translation of resurrection,

27. See my Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human
Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 244–52, and The Res-
urrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, pp. 14–17.
28. See Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1981), pp. 29–70, esp. 41–42 and 58–59, and Bordo, “Reading the
Slender Body,” in Body/Politics, pp. 87–94. For a discussion of the carrying of race
and “racial characteristics” with a body part, see bell hooks [Gloria Watkins], Black
Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), p. 31, who argues
that the theme in the movie Heart Condition is a white fantasy. See also my discus-
sion in Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 245–49, and The Mind’s I: Fantasies and
Reflections on Self and Soul, ed. Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (New
York: Bantam Books, 1982).
 Afterword 355

the film raises complex questions about part and whole, survival and
self, familiar to any student of medieval saints’ lives and reliquaries.
I shall return to them. My point here, however, is less the conclusions
reached by filmmakers and audiences than the fact that we ask the
question this way. For every ghost in a contemporary film or TV series,
one can list dozens of bodily divisions and transplantations that query
the nature of personal survival.
Much of this recent concern does in fact focus on gender or sexual
identity. Almost any episode of Star Trek these days seems to raise in
some form the question whether it is possible to change sex, sexual
orientation, or identity-position by radical change of physical stuff—
questions that much sophisticated feminist philosophy, such as that
of Bordo or Judith Butler, explores on another level. But such films and
stories raise as well other issues of identity and self. They ask not only
to what extent is my identity-position “me” but also how can “I” still
be “me” next week? Can I, if I die? In other words, they deal with death.
It is this aspect of our contemporary concern with body that, I argue,
we academics have tended to overlook.
I turn finally then to Truly, Madly, Deeply, a lovely film that raises
in complex ways the question of death and identity (in both senses of
the word identity—that is, what makes me an individual? and what
accounts for my continuing the same over time and space?). Although
it plays humorously and gently with the thousand-year-old theme of
our fear that the dead may walk again, it is not a ghost story. The plot
of the film is simple: a young woman, grieving passionately for her
dead lover, finds him in the house again. As long as her desire and grief
encounter and relate to her complicated and full memory of him, all is,
in some sense, well. But when he and his buddies return, really playing
the cellos and violins they used in life, he is decidedly in the way. So
much indeed is physical stuff the problem that in a moving early scene,
when the heroine’s sister asks for the dead man’s cello for her son, the
heroine replies in anguish: “It’s as if you asked for his body.”29
I do not have the space here to provide a full analysis of Truly, Madly,
Deeply.30 But I want to use the film to argue that popular culture is

29. Truly, Madly, Deeply, BBC, 1990; Samuel Goldwyn Company, Los Angeles,
1992.
30. For example, the film raises interesting, and unresolved, gender issues: Why
are the returned figures all male? Moreover, although the ending clearly suggests that
the returned Jamie has come back exactly in order to release his lover, nothing in his
character suggests why he might act thus.
 356 Afterword

at the moment asking three profound questions about body that we

academics have not really noticed, or at least not noticed correctly, nor
have we understood how central the fact of death is to their urgency.
I will call them identity, matter, and desire.
By this I mean, first, that questions of the return or transfer of bod-
ies raise for us issues about how we conceptualize identity in both
the sense of individuality and the sense of spatiotemporal continuity.
Unless the person I love is present in body, does the person continue?
Can “she” or “he” really exist in a radically different body (or perhaps
one could say identity-position) or in no body (perhaps one could say as
spirit or consciousness)? How would you know it was “she”?
Moreover, as Jean-Claude Schmitt has reminded us, remembering
someone else after his or her death is at least as much a way of letting
go as of retaining.31 I construct my memory of what I have lost in order
to be at peace with it; before the peace comes, the ghosts walk. But I am
not inclined to think that (either before or after your death) you are in
my mind when I remember what you meant to me. I may remember
you, or not; but if you exist, you are someplace other than in my mind.
Films such as Truly, Madly, Deeply also raise the issue of our bodies
in another sense; and here the cello is crucial. What difference does it
make that we leave behind clothes, papers, a favorite brooch or mixing
bowl, a corpse? In a sense, the dead lover of Truly, Madly, Deeply returns
because the heroine cannot let go of his cello. But do we ever easily
let go of the cello? Do we not need transitional objects to cope with
death as much as with our initial formation of self? And isn’t their very
“stuffness” important? As grief therapists tell us, the relatives of MIAs
and of victims of air crashes in which no bodies survive must travel
a much more complex route in grieving than that travelled by those
who can cremate or bury a body. When medieval thinkers spoke of the
saints as “in the tomb (or reliquary)” and “in heaven,” they understood
(as Giles of Rome tells us) that they used synecdoche in both cases; but
they understood something else as well. Whereas remembering lets the
spirits rest and be forgotten, relics (including what the Middle Ages
called contact relics—physical bits that were not body but touched the
body—clothes, that is, or cellos) keep the person present.32 In our own

31. See Jean-Claude Schmitt, Les Revenants: Les Vivants et les morts dans la
société médiévale (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
32. For a general discussion of relics in the Middle Ages, see Peter Brown, The
Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1981); Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central
 Afterword 357

decade, those who have created the AIDS quilt seem to me to evidence
a sophisticated understanding of the role physical transitional objects
can play in carrying our love and our grief as we mourn.33
Third, Truly, Madly, Deeply raises the question of desire. The hero-
ine falls in love again; the real problem with the physical presence of
the dead lover is that, by the end of the film, he’s one lover too many.
The dead lover is not, in other words, just an identity in the sense
of an individual, particular self, nor just an identity whose continu-
ation seems guaranteed by his physical body; he is also the object of
desire—a straining, expanding, pulling of self toward other that seems
to have something to do with “body” (body in both the senses we find
in contemporary writing, that is, body as “locatedness” and body as
potentiality). For the heroine’s conflicted, troubling, and guilty desire to
disappear, what must disappear is not her memory of the departed but
the particular, embodied self, complete with cello, that is occupying
her house. Bodies are both the subject and the object of desire.
I have certainly not exhausted here either Truly, Madly, Deeply or
modern literature on the body. But I hope I have suggested that, for
all the proliferating number of body books on the shelves of American
bookstores, theorists are not discussing much of what our popular
culture indicates we in fact worry about. For we do worry about sur-
vival, about bodily stuff, about desire. And the films and TV shows we
choose for our entertainment suggest that we often think about these
things in the context of the possibility or impossibility of defeating
death. Gayatri Spivak has said: “Death as such can only be thought
via essence or rupture of essence. . . . I cannot approach death as
Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978) and Living with the
Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 42–44
and 163–218; and Nicole Hermann-Mascard, Les Reliques des saints: Formation cou-
tumière d’un droit (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975). The remark of Giles of Rome is found
in Quodlibeta 4, q. 4, fol. 47va; quoted in Kieran Nolan, The Immortality of the
Soul and the Resurrection of the Body According to Giles of Rome: A Historical
Study of a Thirteenth-Century Theological Problem (Rome: Studium Theologicum
Augustinianum, 1967), p. 60 n. 49. For a fascinating example of medieval contact
relics, see the late sixth-century account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land written by
a traveler from Piacenza: Antonini Placentini Itinerarium, ed. P. Geyer, in Itineraria
et alia geographica, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1965), 1: pp. 129–74. The account
includes such objects as “manna” from the Sinai, dew from Mount Hermon, rocks
from Mount Carmel (supposed to prevent miscarriages), and “measures” of Jesus’s
body (that is, strips of cloth measured and cut to fit what was supposedly the body’s
imprint and then worn around the neck of the pilgrim).
33. For a sensitive discussion of what I am calling here physical transitional
objects, see Sedgwick, “White Glasses,” Tendencies, pp. 252–66. I am grateful to Til-
man Habermas for discussion of these matters at a crucial moment in my thinking.
 358 Afterword

such.”34 This is undoubtedly true, but it is not “death as such” that

is the threat for most of us. Theoretical impossibility neither stills the
need to approach and ask questions nor provides solace for our fears.
What I am proposing, therefore, is that body or embodiment is an
aspect of many conversations we are now having—including conversa-
tions about death—and was part of many such conversations in the
European past. I wish to broaden our awareness and understanding of
both sets of conversations by broadening our awareness of each.

In the Middle Ages

I return then to the stereotype, common in textbooks, of the Middle
Ages as “dualistic”—that is, as despising and fleeing “matter” or “the
body,” which in this interpretation is often understood to be gendered
“female” because it is “passive,” “negative,” and “irrational.”
Medieval thinkers did, of course, speak of “the body” (corpus) or “the
flesh” (caro) in certain contexts, although as I explained earlier, corpus
meant something very different to a doctor looking at a flask of urine and
to a priest consecrating the eucharist. But even if we stay for a moment
within orthodox Christian discourses in which there was some agreed
upon moral and ontological significance for the word corpus, the under-
standing of “medieval attitudes” as “dualistic” in the sense of “despis-
ing” or “recommending flight from” the body is wrong for three reasons.
First, even when discussing soul (anima) and body (corpus) as compo-
nents of person, medieval theologians and philosophers did not discuss
anything at all like the Cartesian mind/body problem (any more, by the
way, than Aristotle did).35 Late medieval philosophy used the Aristote-
lian concept of soul as life principle.36 Thus both in metaphysics and
34. Rooney, “In a Word,” p. 20.
35. See Wallace I. Matson, “Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?” in
Mind, Matter, and Method: Essays in Philosophy and Science in Honor of Herbert
Feigl, ed. Paul K. Feyerabend and Grover Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1966), pp. 92–102; Hilary Putnam, “How Old Is the Mind?” and
(with Martha C. Nussbaum) “Changing Aristotle’s Mind,” Words and Life, ed. James
Conant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 3–21 and 22–61, esp.
pp. 23–28. In certain ways I agree here with the more theologically formulated posi-
tion of Vergote, “The Body,” pp. 93–105.
36. To Aquinas, who made historically accurate use of Aristotle’s ideas, soul is the
substantial form of the organized living body. For Bonaventure and others who held
the doctrine of a multiplicity of forms, the question is more complicated. I discuss
these technical philosophical issues in The Resurrection of the Body in Western
Christianity, 200–1336, pp. 229–78. I give here only citations for quoted primary
sources or material not referred to in the book.
 Afterword 359

in embryology there was argument over whether the person had one
soul or many. Indeed, dualities or binaries were frequently not at stake.
Many discussions of knowing and seeing used a threefold categoriza-
tion of body (corpus), spirit (animus or spiritus), and soul (anima) that
placed experiencing either sense data or even dreams and visions in cor-
pus or spiritus, not anima. Under the influence of the Arab philosopher
Avicenna, psychologists also tried to work out a theory of “powers”
located between anima and corpus to connect the activities of the two.
These discussions often, as I have explained elsewhere, drew a sharper
distinction between levels of soul than between soul and body.37 More-
over, knowing, feeling, and experiencing were located in body. As
David Morris (among others) has pointed out, these thinkers would not
have understood the question (frequent in modern circles): Is pain in
my body or in my mind?38 Even in the late medieval dialogues that
personify two clear components of person as Soul and Body, the Body
character often “wins” the debate by charging that evil is lodged in the
Soul’s willing, not in the Body’s senses.39 As I shall show in a moment,
the debates in high scholasticism over identity involved in some real
sense rejection of soul and body as separable parts of “person.” What
I wish to stress here is that such discussion was embedded in larger
discussions in which trinary or multifold categories were basic ways of
thinking about psychology or anthropology.40

37. See my Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 226–27, for a discussion of ways
in which medieval thinkers blurred the soul/body contrast or used trinary rather
than binary models. On medieval psychology of vision, which made use of trinary
categories, see Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-
Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1965), pp. 15–22,
and Schmitt, Les Revenants, pp. 38–40 and 223–26. On functions shared by body
and soul in Aristotle’s account, see Putnam (with Nussbaum), “Changing Aristotle’s
Mind,” pp. 38–43; on Aquinas, see Putnam, “How Old Is the Mind?” pp. 4–7.
38. See Morris, Culture of Pain, p. 152, although elsewhere he tends to interpret
the Middle Ages more dualistically; see, for example, pp. 131–34. See also Wack, Love-
sickness in the Middle Ages, pp. 7–9; Putnam (with Nussbaum), “Changing Aristotle’s
Mind” and “Aristotle after Wittgenstein,” Words and Life, pp. 38–43, 69–78; and Stan-
ley Cavell, “Natural and Conventional,” The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepti-
cism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 86–125.
39. On the genre, see Robert W. Ackerman, “The Debate of the Body and the Soul
and Parochial Christianity,” Speculum 37 (Oct. 1962): 541–65.
40. I leave aside here for the moment positions—such as the theology of some
thirteenth-century Cathars—that were in a technical sense ontological and cosmic dual-
ism, that is, they argued for two sorts of reality, material and spiritual, created by two
distinct and opposing ultimate powers. In The Resurrection of the Body in Western
Christianity, 200–1336, pp. 214–25, I show how orthodox and Cathar discussions
were in many ways animated by the same fears and argue that orthodox theologians
were working out their own understandings of matter in their polemics against heretics.
 360 Afterword

We must also reject the characterization of most medieval literature

and art as dualistic in a second sense of the word dualism. Even in the
most (to our tastes) macabre of late medieval poems and images—the
Dances of Death or the transi tombs that depict their occupants as
putrefying corpses—one can hardly with accuracy speak of “rejection
of the body.” I do not mean to argue here that modern accounts have
concentrated too much on sensationalist and morbid themes in medi-
eval literature, although that is to some extent true. Historians such as
Jean Delumeau and Robert Bultot, who have chronicled the theme of
contemptus mundi, themselves admit that it was frequently comple-
mented in medieval treatises by discussions of the glory of creation and
of “man.”41 Many historians of funerary practices point out that the
injunction of memento mori was embedded in imagery that promised
resurrection to the same corpse that moldered in the grave.42 My argu-
ment here, however, is different. It is that the extravagant attention to
flesh and decay characteristic of the period is not “flight from” so much
as “submersion in.” The attitudes and practices of religious specialists
in the late Middle Ages, and the reverence they won from a wide spec-
trum of the population, assumed the flesh to be the instrument of sal-
vation (in many senses of the word instrument—musical instrument,
kitchen implement, instrument of torture, etc.). In Holy Feast and Holy
Fast, I cited examples of religious women who spoke of striking music
from their flesh through extravagant asceticisms such as flagellation or
self-mutilation.43 Technical theological tractates and works of popular
piety in the thirteenth century described Christ’s body on the cross
as suffering more exquisite pain than any other body because it was
the most perfect of all bodies.44 One can even interpret the eucharistic

41. See Jean Delumeau, Le Peur en Occident: Une Cité assiégée (Paris: Fayard,
1978) and Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, Thirteenth—
Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990);
and Robert Bultot, Christianisme et valeurs humaines: La Doctrine du mépris du
monde, en Occident, de S. Ambroise à Innocent III, 6 vols. (Paris: Éditions Nauwe-
laerts, 1963–64), vol. 4, pts. 1 and 2.
42. See, for example, Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The
Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973).
43. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). And see Keenan,
“Christian Perspectives on the Human Body.” The radical physicality of medieval
religion provides the context for such genuinely new somatic events as stigmata and
miraculous inedia.
44. For example, see Bonaventure, Breviloquium, in vol. 7 of Opera omnia, ed. A.
C. Peltier (Paris: Ludovicus Vives, 1866), pt. 4, chap. 9, pp. 292–94.
 Afterword 361

theology of the high Middle Ages as a sort of cannibalism—a literal

incorporation of the power of a tortured god.45 My point is simply that,
whatever the technical terms that circulated around such practices, the
cultivation of bodily experience as a place for encounter with meaning,
a locus of redemption, is not “flight from” the body. Nor could it have
been in a religion whose central tenet was that the divine had chosen
to offer redemption by becoming flesh.
Third, it is inaccurate to see medieval notions of corpus, caro, mate-
ria, mundus, tellus, limus, or stercus as gendered feminine. Both Butler
and Luce Irigaray, who have built complex and highly politicized read-
ings around a collapsing of woman and heterosexuality into the recep-
tacle of Plato’s Timaeus (conflated then with Aristotle’s matter), admit
that such collapsing is a deliberate misreading.46 It is not useful for my
purposes to pursue the complicated issues of psychoanalysis, politics,
and philosophy they raise, although (as I shall explain below) I have
sympathy with Butler’s idea of the performative body. But somehow a
misinterpretation of their argument has left, in more journalistic treat-
ments (feminist and nonfeminist), the notion that vast binaries—reduc-
ible to a male/female binary—marched through the medieval past from
Plato to Descartes. (In some accounts, Augustine and an Aristotle in
rather curious seventeenth-century garb play bit parts in the intellec-
tual drama as well.) This generalization is not tenable. Medieval ritual,

45. There is an obvious parallel between the late medieval devotion to the suffer-
ing Christ and the cannibalistic practice of torturing a captured hero before consum-
ing him. In many cannibal cultures, the one to be eaten was seen to gain in power the
longer he held out under torture. See Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Canni-
balism as a Cultural System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Louis-
Vincent Thomas, Le Cadavre: De la biologie à l’anthropologie (Brussels: Éditions
Complexe, 1980), pp. 159–69; Georges Bataille, Consumption, trans. Robert Hur-
ley, vol. 1 of The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (New York: Zone
Books, 1988), pp. 45–61; Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An
Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1990); Gananath Obeyesekere, “’British Cannibals’: Contemplation of an Event in
the Death and Resurrection of James Cook, Explorer,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer
1992): 630–54, trans. Sibylle Brändli, under the title ‘“Britische Kannibalen’: Nach-
denkliches zur Geschichte des Todes und der Auferstehung des Entdeckers James
Cook,” Historische Anthropologie: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag 1 (1993): 273–93; and
Philippe Buc, L’Ambiguïté du livre: Prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires
de la Bible au moyen âge (Paris: Beauchesne, 1994), pp. 206–31 and 406.
46. See Luce Irigaray, “Une Mère de glace,” Speculum of the Other Woman, trans.
Gillian Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 168–79, and Butler,
Bodies That Matter, pp. 32–55, esp. nn. 22, 28, 31, and 34. And see the essays in The
Concept of Matter in Greek and Medieval Philosophy, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre
Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965).
 362 Afterword

practice, story, and belief made use of many binary contrasts, some
of which corresponded with a male/female opposition. In formal theo-
logical and devotional writing, these contrasts often associated women
with body and matter, especially in a number of highly complicated
treatments of the incarnation of Christ and the role of the Virgin in the
economy of salvation. But symbolic patterns do not, of course, fit into
only a single grid. Moreover, in medieval writing, they can be shown
to have undercut as well as undergirded traditional understandings of
gender. Much of the serious work on medieval sources from the past
fifteen years has shown us how polymorphous are medieval uses of
gender categories and images.47
To say this is not to argue that there was no widespread misogyny
in the Middle Ages.48 Within monastic didactic literature and folktales,
there was fear of female sexuality; within medical discourse, there was
curiosity and wonder, tinged with fear, about female anatomy; and of
course legal codes treated female property-holding and economic oppor-
tunities as less than those of males (although with complex differences
of time and place I will not go into here).49 In embryology, the father’s

47. I have touched on these issues in my Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality
of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 110–69,
and Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 151–79. Recent and sensitive examples of
such argument are Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body:
Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993);
Jeffrey M. Hamburger, “The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval
Monastic Devotions,” Viator 20 (1989): 161–82, and Nuns as Artists: The Visual Cul-
ture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
48. See Diane Bornstein, “Antifeminism,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed.
Joseph R. Strayer, 13 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1982–1989), 1: pp. 322–25, and R.
Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). There have been several recent attempts
to read medieval texts against themselves and find women’s voices raised against the
misogyny built into the accounts by both male and female authors; see, for example,
E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). More successful, in my judgment, are
the sophisticated technical studies that actually discover women’s voices in texts
written by male scribes. See, for example, Anne L. Clark, Elisabeth of Schönau: A
Twelfth-Century Visionary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992),
and Catherine M. Mooney, “The Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of
Angela of Foligno’s Revelations,” in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modem
Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 34–63.
49. Especially good, among much good recent work, are Marie-Christine
Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie à l’apogée du moyen âge: Savoir et imaginaire du corps
chez Henri de Mondeville, chirugien de Phillipe le Bel (Paris: Flammarion, 1983);
James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago:
 Afterword 363

seed was associated with form, the mother’s seed (or, in other theories,
her menstrual matter) with potency. Such attitudes did carry over in
complex ways into religious ritual to produce symbolic usages in which
female was seen as below and above reason—as witch or saintly vision-
ary—whereas male was seen as a rather pedestrian middle, incapable
of direct contact either with angelic or with demonic power.50 But soul
(anima) was gendered feminine far more often than corpus (in part of
course because of the grammar itself). The contrast between male and
female was sometimes connected to Genesis 1:7 and 1:21–24, in which
God created Adam from mud but Eve from flesh. Female characteris-
tics (that is, characteristics that our sources suggest were understood
by contemporaries, both male and female, to be feminine) were used to
describe God in his/her ruling as well as nurturing capacity.51 Rarely
in any period has religious poetry provided such androgynous or com-
plexly erotic images of desire.52
Nothing entitles us to say that medieval thinkers essentialized body
as matter or essentialized either body or matter as female. Indeed,
philosophically speaking, body as subsisting was always form as well
as matter. Although it is true that medieval discussions, from natural
philosophy to secular love poetry, often reveal a profound distrust for
fertility and biological process, this is not at all the same thing as essen-
tialized physicality. Medieval visionaries sometimes saw life as a river
filled with muck or hell as eternal digestion.53 Monks such as Hermann

University of Chicago Press, 1987); Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of
Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Dyan
Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1993); and Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy
in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
50. Still useful on this is the older work of Eleanor C. McLaughlin, “Equality of
Souls, Inequality of Sexes: Women in Medieval Theology,” in Religion and Sexism:
Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford
Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 213–66. Buc, L’Ambiguïté du
livre, esp. pp. 323–66 and 401–6, has recently shown that there was a tradition of
questioning hierarchy in medieval exegesis.
51. See Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 110–262, for many citations.
52. See Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh; Beckwith, Christ’s
Body; Hamburger, “The Visual and the Visionary”; and Danielle Régnier-Bohler,
“Voix littéraires, voix mystiques,” in Le Moyen Ââge, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber,
vol. 2 of Histoire des femmes en occident, ed. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot
(Paris: Plon, 1991), pp. 443–500.
53. See, for example, Eadmer’s account of a vision received by Anselm in which
the life of the world is a river full of detritus but the monastery is a vast cloister of
pure silver; see Eadmer, The Life of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury [Latin and
English], trans. and ed. R. W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 35–36.
Anselm returns to the image in his own preaching, where he compares life to a
 364 Afterword

of Reun warned that human beings were in the process of aging, cor-
rupting, and dying from the first moment of birth.54 Innocent III, like
many other moralists, spoke of our origins in “vile sperm.”55 Exegetes
felt it important to underline that the earth God created on the third
day did not contain seeds; rather, God first created the plant life that
then shed seeds into the earth.56 Cathar and Catholic preachers accused
each other of denigrating the world and the flesh and of not caring prop-
erly for the bodies of the dead.57 The profound discomfort with biologi-
cal process betrayed in all this needs more research and elucidation.58
But medieval theorists did not reduce embodiment either to matter or
to female matter. (Peter Damian’s statement about embracing a corpse
when one embraces a female body is notorious, but as the quotation
from Innocent III given above suggests, male sexuality and matter could
also be identified with putrefaction, physical or moral.)59
As I shall try to show in a moment, some antique and medieval
thinkers put forward a technical conception of embodiment that departs

rushing stream; the safety of the monastic life is imaged both as a mill and as a vessel
holding the milled flour; see ibid., pp. 74–76. The idea of life as a river, and safety as a
building by its side, is also found in Peter Damian; see Bultot, La Doctrine du mépris
du monde, 4:2: pp. 84, 90. The contrast of flow and stasis as evil and good is very
clear. On hell as digestion, see my The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christi-
anity, 200–1336, plates 3, 6, 12–16, and 28–32, and Robert M. Durling, “Deceit and
Digestion in the Belly of Hell,” in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J. Green-
blatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 61–93. For medieval
understandings of “matter” as a philosophical concept, see The Concept of Matter in
Greek and Medieval Philosophy and The Concept of Matter in Modem Philosophy,
ed. McMullin (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), pp. 5–14.
54. Hermann of Reun, sermon 67, Sermones festivales, ed. Edmund Mikkers et
al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), chaps. 4–5, pp. 306–10.
55. Innocent III, De contemptu mundi sive de miseria humanae conditionis, in
vol. 217 of Patrologia latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1890), bk. 1, chaps.
1–5, col. 702. Innocent also says, quoting Jeremiah, “[ist] mihi mater mea sepul-
crum” (ibid.). And see the many passages cited in Bultot, La Doctrine du mépris du
monde, and Delumeau, Sin and Fear, pp. 9–34.
56. See Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. and ed. John Hammond
Taylor, 2 vols. (New York: Newman Press, 1982), bk. 5, chap. 4, 1:150–53. The idea
was repeated in later discussions.
57. See my The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336,
pp. 214–20, and M. D. Lambert, “The Motives of the Cathars: Some Reflections,”
in Religious Motivation: Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church
Historian (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1978), pp. 49–59.
58. On this fear of decay, see Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily
Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murray and
Helen Elsom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
59. See Peter Damian, letter 15, Epistolarum libri octo, in Patrologia latina,
vol. 144, bk. 1, cols. 232D–233A. And see Bultot, La Doctrine du mépris du monde,
4:1: p. 25 n. 27.
 Afterword 365

(for better or worse) as radically as do the theories of Judith Butler from

an understanding of body as stuff or physicality. And while it is true
that medieval philosophers sometimes tried to define person (and it is
important that this was their category for thinking about the human,
not essence [esse]), they did not usually in these discussions deal with
gender. Those passages where they do deal with what we would con-
sider identity in the sense of individual (or identity-position) are not
about definition at all and are certainly not essentialist. They are about
death and triumph over it—and, as I shall show, the metaphysical prin-
ciples that are put into play have surprising implications.
I have, however, spent too much time now on characterizations to
be rejected. Hardly a way to broaden the conversation! So I shall turn to
my own recent work on eschatology and funerary practice, not because
I think the topics I shall now treat are the only proper subjects for a con-
versation about the many bodies of the Middle Ages, but because even a
few new topics may begin to expand our rather cramped and limited pic-
ture of the medieval past. I use the somewhat inelegant categories I used
to discuss Truly, Madly, Deeply: identity, stuff or matter, and desire.

In the Afterlife
In my recent book, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christi-
anity, I chronicle both technical discussions of what it means for the
body to return at the end of time and the spread of burial practices
that treat the corpse, whether its parts are carefully united or delib-
erately divided, as an object of great cultural significance. From this
complicated story, I wish here to extract three points, which I intend
to place in conversation with certain of the recent theoretical positions
discussed above. The first concerns identity.
Throughout the Middle Ages, theorists who dealt with eschatology
tended to talk of the person not as soul but as soul and body. (As a num-
ber of scholars have established, Platonic definitions of the person as the
soul were explicitly rejected by the middle of the twelfth century.)60 Of
course, theologians and philosophers knew the corpse was in the grave;
they buried corpses, and they revered as relics bits of holy corpses that
remained above ground (a point to which I shall return). Moreover, they

60. See Richard Heinzmann, Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die Auferste-
hung des Leibes: Eine problemgeschichtliche Untersuchung der frühscholastischen
Sentenzen- und Summenliteratur von Anselm von Laon bis Wilhelm von Auxerre
(Münster: Aschendorff, 1965).
 366 Afterword

thought the souls of the dead sometimes walked abroad; and occasionally
they imagined these spirits or ghosts in other than recognizable bodily
form (as lights or doves). But ghost stories and otherworld visions came
increasingly in the course of the Middle Ages to depict the dead—even
immediately after death—as already in their totally particular earthly
bodies (or at least ghostly versions thereof).61 And Catholic theologians
very early rejected the idea of metempsychosis—the idea that we find in
Plato’s Republic, for example, that soul or spirit can inhabit a body other
than “its own.”62 The doctrine that the same body we possess on earth
will rise at the end of time and be united to our soul was part of the
Christian creeds from the early third century on.63 That doctrine almost
immediately forced a good deal of sophisticated speculation about how
the resurrected body can be “the same” as the earthly one.
From the end of the second century, certain theologians felt it nec-
essary to respond to philosophical doubts about the resurrection of
the flesh. Both pagan critics and Christian theorists of a Gnostic and
Docetist persuasion argued that corpses are prey not only to decay in
the earth but also to destruction by wild beasts or even, in the case of
cannibalism, by other human beings; therefore, the same body cannot
come back. Moreover, they argued, we are not even the same body from
one day to the next, certainly not from one decade to another; the mat-
ter turns over. What can it mean therefore to be the same?
I do not intend here to explain all the answers this question elicited.64
What I want to demonstrate, however, is that, through discussion of

61. See Schmitt, Les Revenants; Ronald C. Finucane, Appearances of the Dead:
A Cultural History of Ghosts (London: Junction Books, 1982); Carol Zaleski, Oth-
erworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experiences in Medieval and Modern
Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Peter Dinzelbacher, “Reflex-
ionen irdischer Sozialstrukturen in mittelalterlichen Jenseitsschilderungen,” Archiv
für Kulturgeschichte 61, no. 1 (1979): 16–34.
62. See Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1935), 2: pp. 505–21 (10.15–16.617E–621D). In The Resurrec-
tion of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, I suggest that, in certain ways,
the early Christian fear of being eaten was tantamount to a fear of transmigration of
souls; see pp. 86–91 and 108–14. See also Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism.
63. The profession of faith that became the so-called Apostles’ Creed required
Christians to believe in resurrectio carnis; see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1950). By the high Middle Ages, this was glossed as
meaning: “all rise with their own individual bodies, that is, the bodies which they
now wear”; see Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum, et
declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 11th ed., ed. Clemens Bannwart (Freiburg:
Herder, 1911), pp. 189, 202–3.
64. For a survey, see H. Cornélis, et al., The Resurrection of the Body, trans. M.
Joselyn (Notre Dame, Ind.: Fides, 1964); Joanne E. McWilliam Dewart, Death and
 Afterword 367

eschatology, a number of thinkers grappled with the issue of how iden-

tity, in the sense of spatiotemporal continuity, is maintained; they also
came, in the process, to give an answer to the question of identity as
individuality.
To give two examples: The great third-century theologian Origen
formulated a complex theory of body as an eidos that carried within
itself a potentially unfolding pattern; the idea is not unlike modern
notions of DNA. Origen thought this eidos might unfold into versions
of body very different from those of earth; no particle of the original
body was to him necessary for the body to be the same, and Origen
vacillated a good deal over how much of its earthly structure (organs,
scars, and so on) it would retain.65 In the middle of the thirteenth cen-
tury, Thomas Aquinas adumbrated a theory (which was worked out by
the next generation of scholars) that soul, the single form or principle
of the person, carried all the specificity of that person with it; it then,
at the resurrection, informed or activated matter to be that person’s
body. Thus any matter at all, if informed by the form of Harry, would
be Harry’s body (even particles that had once been in the living body,
or the corpse, of a specific Joe or Jane). That body, restored at the resur-
rection, retained all the specific structures it had in earthly life (organs,
height, even—in certain cases—scars).66 If it was the body of one of the
elect, it was “glorified,” that is, subtle, beautiful, and impassable, in
heaven.67 My point here is not to explain these abstruse theories fully,

Resurrection (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1986); Gisbert Greshake and Jacob
Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum: Zum theologischen Verständnis der leiblichen
Auferstehung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986); and Anto-
nius H. C. van Eijk, La Résurrection des morts chez les pères apostoliques (Paris:
Beauchesne, 1974).
65. See Mark Edwards, “Origen No Gnostic; or, On the Corporeality of Man,”
Journal of Theological Studies, n. s., 43 (Apr. 1992): 23–37, and Elizabeth A. Clark,
“New Perspectives on the Origenist Controversy: Human Embodiment and Ascetic
Strategies,” Church History 59 (June 1990): 145–62.
66. See Vergote, “The Body,” pp. 93–105; Quinn, “Aquinas’s Concept of the Body
and Out of Body Situations,” pp. 387–400; Tugwell, Human Immortality and the
Redemption of Death; and Bernardo C. Bazán, “La Corporalité selon saint Thomas,”
Revue philosophique de Louvain 81, 4th ser., no. 51 (1983): 369–409.
67. Technical theological discussion saw the glorified body as dowered with
four gifts: agility (a sort of weightlessness that enabled it to move with the speed of
light), subtlety (a sort of incorporeality—if one can use such a term for body), clarity
(which seems to have meant beauty), and impassibility (an inability to suffer). These
technical terms are carried over into the mystical descriptions of desire I discuss.
On the four dowries, see Nikolaus Wicki, Die Lehre von der himmlischen Seligkeit
in der mittelalterlichen Scholastik von Petrus Lombardus bis Thomas von Aquin
(Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1954), and Joseph Goering, “The De dotibus of Robert
Grosseteste,” Mediaeval Studies 44 (1982): 83–109.
 368 Afterword

although they are shrewd and complex and should not be caricatured.
Rather, my point is to show that, in any commonsense understand-
ing of the word matter, Origen has eliminated “matter” but retained
“body,” whereas Aquinas appears on some level to have retained “the
same matter” by a philosophical trick (defining “my matter” as any-
thing activated by “my soul”). The bodies they put forward “dissolve
into language” as thoroughly—and in as sophisticated a fashion—as the
recent theories deplored by my friend. And in a not dissimilar way, they
made those who read them uncomfortable. Theologians contemporary
with Origen and Aquinas, drawing in some cases explicitly on popular
practices concerning the care and reverencing of corpses, protested the
idea of such a divorce of self and stuff.
Yet in some ways, early fourteenth-century theological discussion
saw the triumph of Aquinas’s idea of the specificity or “whatness” of
the self as packed into the form, or soul, or principle of identity (in
the sense of continuity). And with a very interesting consequence. The
soul of the person starts to look like what we would call today his or
her identity-position. Soul is not a sort of rational essence to be only
incidentally or accidentally sexed, gendered, colored, handicapped, and
aged in various unequal ways. Soul carries the structure of the “me”
that will rise at the end of time—with all my organs, and even my
acquired characteristics, at least if these wrinkles and scars are the
result of bearing up virtuously under hardship. It is no accident then
that such a soul cannot body-hop! No accident that it is repeatedly said
in the literature to yearn for its “own” body. Nor is it an accident that
Dante, in canto 25 of his Purgatorio, works out a complex analogy to
embryology when he explains that, even in the separated state between
death and resurrection, the soul generates an aerial body with all the
particularities of its earthly condition.68 If there is a sense in which one
can say that soul carries identity in late medieval theories of the person,
one must also note that much of what was traditionally meant by body

68. See Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, in The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S.
Singleton, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), canto 25, 1:1:
pp. 269–77. See also Étienne Gilson, “Dante’s Notion of a Shade: Purgatorio XXV,”
Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967): 124–42; Rachel Jacoff, “Transgression and Transcen-
dence: Figures of Female Desire in Dante’s Commedia,” Romantic Review 29, no.
1 (1988): 129–42, rpt. in The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin
Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 183–200; and Bynum, “Faith
Imagining the Self: Somatomorphic Soul and Resurrection Body in Dante’s Divine
Comedy” in Faithful Imagining: Essays in Honor of Richard R. Niebuhr, ed. Sang
Hyun Lee, Wayne Proudfoot, and Albert Blackwell (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press,
1995), pp. 83–106.
 Afterword 369

has been packed into soul. Soul is not some sort of essential human-
ness to which gender, say, is attached—whether in equal or unequal
varieties. Nor is soul “me,” any more (says Aquinas) than my foot is
me. To Aquinas, “me” is carried in soul when body is absent. (This is
the abnormal situation.) “Me” is expressed in body when things are as
they should be (that is, in life and after the resurrection). But “I” am not
soul or body; I am a person. Moreover, “I” am a person with an identity
in both senses of the term identity.69 We have to do here with a theory
of person not so different really from much late twentieth-century talk
about body.70
My second point about medieval eschatology can be made much
more succinctly. It is simply that certain Christian beliefs and practices
of the late Middle Ages (and there are parallels in Jewish practice and
belief, although I shall not treat them here) pulled radically against any
theoretical position that led to the dissolution of either person or body
into discourse. Not only did a good deal of preaching and storytelling
stress resurrection as the literal reassembling of every bit that went
into the tomb at death; it is also true that dead bodies were extraordi-
narily charged objects—fields of force from which emanated miracles
or the work of demons.
As is well known, holy bodies were revered as relics, as places where
supernatural power was especially present; they were deliberately
divided in order to produce more such objects for veneration. Not only
they, but even objects they had touched (their clothes, utensils, even

69. See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, On First Corinthians, vol. 21 of Opera
omnia, ed. S. E. Fretté (Paris: Ludovicus Vives, 1876), chap. 15, lect. 2, pp. 33–34:
“anima . . . non est totus homo, et anima mea non est ego.” See also Aquinas,
Summa contra Gentiles, vol. 12 of Opera omnia, bk. 4, chap. 79, p. 592, and Summa
theologiae Ia, trans. and ed. Timothy Suttor (New York: Blackfriars/McGraw-Hill,
1970), vol. 11, q. 75, art. 4, reply to obj. 2, pp. 20–21, in both of which Aquinas asserts
that the soul is only a part of the person, like the hand or foot. Hence: “It is more cor-
rect to say that soul contains body [continet corpus] and makes it to be one, than the
converse” (ibid., q. 76, art. 3, pp. 60–61.). By connecting Aristotelianism and sexism,
Prudence Allen has raised a very important issue; it is true that the idea of woman as
defective man had a long and unfortunate history. But my interpretation of Aquinas’s
use of Aristotle differs from hers: see Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The
Aristotelian Revolution, 750 B.C.–A.D. 1250 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1985). And see
Buc, L’Ambiguïté du livre, p. 108.
70. Butler in Gender Trouble, citing Foucault, Discipline and Punish, comments:
“In Foucault’s terms, the soul is not imprisoned by or within the body, as some
Christian imagery would suggest, but ‘the soul is the prison of the body’” (p. 135).
She is of course correct that some Christian imagery suggests that the body is a
prison; what is interesting here, however, is that there is a sense in which Aquinas
makes the same move as Foucault and imprisons body in soul.
 370 Afterword

their bodily effluvia, such as milk, spittle, or wash water) were revered.
From the tenth century on, in certain parts of Europe, bodily partition
was practiced on the dead of high secular status as well. The corpses
of kings and nobles were fragmented in order to be buried in several
places, the practice being accompanied by complex arguments about
the need to garner more prayers and also about the presence of the per-
son’s power where his or her body part resided.71
These practices seem to have assumed a kind of assimilation of res-
urrected body to corpse, for which the texts give confirmation. Pious
Christians sometimes said that the bodies they placed in graves or reli-
quaries “were” the saints, although they said simultaneously (as Simon
Tugwell and Thomas Head have reminded us) that the saints “were”
also in heaven.72 Such usages are found in many cultures. What is more
interesting for my argument is the fact that hagiographers, preachers,
and artists fairly often said that the body in the grave or reliquary “was”
“the resurrection body.”73 Such locutions were used to argue both that
bodies could be divided (that is, their specific treatment in burial did not
matter because God had promised resurrection to all bodies in what-
ever condition they might be found) and that they should be buried
without disturbance (that is, that because exactly this stuff would rise,
it should be kept close to its resurrection condition as long as possible).
These practices and beliefs are very complicated and I cannot deal
with them fully here. It should by now at least be clear how and why
they pulled in a countervailing direction from theories of person to
which material continuity was not necessary. The doctrine of formal
identity could solve technical issues of personhood and survival, it is
true. But to late thirteenth-century theologians, a theory of body had
also to account for continuity between living person and cadaver, both
in order to make relic veneration veneration of the saint and in order
to make Christ’s body in the triduum between his crucifixion and

71. See Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle
Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse,” Viator 12
(1981): 221–70 and “Authority, the Family, and the Dead in Late Medieval France,”
French Historical Studies 16 (Fall 1990): 803–32; and Bynum, The Resurrection of the
Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, pp. 200–25 and 318–29.
72. See Tugwell, Human Immortality and the Redemption of Death, pp. 125–34,
and Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints: The Diocese of Orleans,
800–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 144, 268. And see
Arnold Angenendt, “Corpus incorruptum: Eine Leitidee der mittelalterlichen Reli-
quienverehrung,” Saeculum 42, nos. 3–4 (1991): 320–48.
73. See, for example, Goscelin, Life of St. Ivo, in Acta sanctorum, ed. the Bol-
landists, June: vol. 2 (Paris: V. Palmé, 1867), pp. 286–87.
 Afterword 371

resurrection “really” his body and therefore really the redemption of

our bodiliness.
It should also be clear that there are parallels in all this to modern con-
cerns about disposal of bodies, organ transplants, artificial intelligence,
and so on. As new work in the field of medical ethics and cultural studies
has emphasized, many in the late twentieth century hope (or fear) that
self is transferred with body part (especially but not exclusively with
the brain) in transplants, autopsies, or disposals.74 The body that dies
is also the body that remains; whether, and how, we handle it makes
a difference. Those who have experienced the loss of loved ones in the
violent disappearances of spacecraft explosions, air crashes, drownings,
or war can understand how Jewish and Christian resurrection belief arose
in the context of persecutions that threatened to make it impossible to
reassemble the shattered bodies of the martyrs for burial.75 They can also
understand the power of medieval veneration of remains and the com-
plex insistence of medieval hagiography and eucharistic theology that,
with God, pars not only stands pro toto but is truly totum.
All this is clear. What is perhaps less clear and should therefore be
underlined is that, whether or not the concern for identity and the con-
cern for material continuity were fully compatible, both were deeply
related to the fear of biological change I noted above. The resurrec-
tion body, reassembled from its earlier physical bits and conforming in
every detail to its earthly structure, was a guarantee that change has
limits; process is under control; development stops at death. Butterflies
may come from cocoons and worms from corpses, but we will not be,
in the afterlife, something we cannot recognize.
One does not have to essentialize body as matter to feel that the
spiritualized and glorified body of scholastic theology is something of
an oxymoron. A body that cannot age, corrupt, feel pain, or change
in any way that would involve incurring or filling a lack, is a curious
sort of body—which may be one of the reasons why theorists, espe-
cially in the early modern period, moved as much as they possibly
could of the senses into heaven.76 But this theory of a resurrection body

74. See Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey, The Courage to Fail: A Social View
of Organ Transplants and Dialysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp.
27–32.
75. See Bynum, “Images of the Resurrection Body in the Theology of Late Antiq-
uity,” Catholic Historical Review 80 (Apr. 1994): 215–37, and Lionel Rothkrug,
“German Holiness and Western Sanctity in Medieval and Modern History,” Histori-
cal Reflections/Réflexions historiques 15, no. 1 (1988): 215–29.
76. See Camporesi, Incorruptible Flesh, esp. pp. 46–63 and 179–207.
 372 Afterword

reconstructed from the same physical bits and according to the same
plan it had in life (and it is significant that high medieval thinkers were,
when they dealt with the physical stuff of creation, atomists) implied
that redemption had something to do with stasis.
This leads me to my final point, which concerns desire. For stasis
was not the only image of the afterlife in the late Middle Ages. Espe-
cially in the poetry and visions of mystical women, heaven was ever-
expanding desire. Such a notion was, however, long in coming.
In the visions and tales of the early Middle Ages, heaven was the
realm of gold, gems, and crystal, whereas hell was the place of diges-
tion and excretion, process, metamorphosis, and fluids. Exegetes were
even reluctant to use biblically authorized images of flowers and seeds
to describe either resurrection or reward. According to most scholas-
tic theory (at least before the fourteenth century), heaven was requies
aeterna, where longing was satiated and stilled. After the final Judg-
ment, motion ceased (Apocalypse 10:6); eternity, as Boethius had
said, is life tota simul.77 Indeed, complex arguments, which I will not
describe, circled around the texts in which Peter Lombard, Bernard of
Clairvaux, and Bonaventure (themselves building on Augustine’s Lit-
eral Commentary on Genesis) spoke of the separated soul as “retarded”
by longing for its body after death.78 What is important for my purposes
here is that, in thirteenth-century university discussions, this longing
was lodged in soul and was understood as a distraction from the peace
of salvation. As Tugwell has recently reminded us, Aquinas held that
the beatific vision was “decisive arrival. Once it is attained, there is no
more change. Beatitude is a participation in eternity.”79
And yet there were other ideas. Devotional literature and religious
poetry (which often borrowed rhythms and vocabulary from secular
love lyrics) spoke increasingly of a desire that would never be stilled.80
Cracks appeared in the crystalline heaven of the scholastics.

77. See Tugwell, Human Immortality and the Redemption of Death, pp. 152–54,
and Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, pp.
164–65, 264–71, and 303–5.
78. See Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, bk. 12, chap. 35, 2:228–29;
Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 2 vols. (Grottaferrata: Collegium
S. Bonaventurae, 1971), bk. 4, dist. 49, chap. 4, art. 3, 2:553; Bernard of Clairvaux, De
diligendo Deo, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. J. Leclercq and H. M. Rochais, 8 vols.
(Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977), chaps. 10–11, 3:143–47; and Bonaven-
ture, Commentary on the Sentences, vol. 6 of Opera omnia, dist. 49, pt. 2, p. 578.
79. Tugwell, Human Immortality and the Redemption of Death, p. 153.
80. There has been much debate over the borrowings and mutual influence of secu-
lar and religious literature. On the idea of passion as ecstatic desire and suffering—an
 Afterword 373

In the final lines of the Paradiso, for example, Dante’s heaven is not
a gem but a flower. And at the heart of the heavenly rose is the great
wheeling motion of love.

Thus my mind, all rapt, was gazing . . . ever enkindled by its gazing . . . .
My own wings were not sufficient . . . save that my mind was smit-
ten by a flash wherein its wish came to it. Here power failed . . .; but
already my desire and my will were revolved, like a wheel that is
evenly moved, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.81

Mystical women such as Hadewijch, Mechtild of Magdeburg,

Angela of Foligno, and Marguerite of Oingt spoke of selves (body
and soul together) yearning in heaven with a desire that was piqued
and delighted into ever greater frenzy by encounter with their lover,
God. Angela described Jesus as “love and inestimable satiety, which,
although it satiated, generated at the same time insatiable hunger, so
that all her [that is, Angela’s own] members were unstrung.”82 Mechtild
indeed wrote that she wished to remain in her body forever in order to
suffer and yearn forever toward God.83
My point is not merely that writing about desire becomes more com-
plex and fervent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although this
is true. It is that such desire is not only for bodies; it is lodged in bod-
ies. When Mechtild and Marguerite speak of being lifted into the arms
of God, tasting his goodness, seeing themselves reflected in his shining
surface, they make it explicit that they speak of embodied persons,
not of souls. All their senses are in play. And if certain of the univer-
sity theologians of the thirteenth century would not fully have com-
prehended or accepted their poetry, there were already in the twelfth
century Cistercian monks who wrote of the development of empathy

idea developed by religious writers—see Erich Auerbach, “Excursus: Gloria passio-

nis,” in Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle
Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), pp. 67–81.
81. Dante, Paradiso, in The Divine Comedy, canto 33, 11. 97–99, 139–45, 3:1:
pp. 359–81.
82. Angela of Foligno, Le Livre de l’expérience des vrais fidèles: Texte latin publié
d’après le manuscript d’Assise, ed. M.-J. Ferré and L. Baudry (Paris; E. Droz, 1927),
pp. 156–58.
83. See Mechtild of Magdeburg, Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit: Nach der Ein-
siedler Handschrift in kritischem Vergleich mit der gesamten Überlieferung, ed.
Hans Neumann (Munich: Artemis, 1990), esp. p. 222; and see also Marguerite of
Oingt, Les Oeuvres de Marguerite d’Oingt, ed. Antonin Duraffour, P. Gardette, and
P. Durdilly (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1965).
 374 Afterword

through the encounter of our embodied selves with the body of Christ;
they would have understood.84
It should be clear that this medieval idea of desire is both like and
unlike the notion of desire I discussed when I considered Truly, Madly,
Deeply. I do not wish to strain for parallels. I merely suggest that the
sort of presence we usually mean by body and the sort of tug we usually
mean by desire are radically related to each other in both the medieval
and the modern periods. We do not usually speak of desire for a ghost or
a memory, or think of our desire as in our minds. Truly, Madly, Deeply
is not about ghosts but about persons.
Nor is late medieval discussion of personal survival, whether popu-
lar or learned, mostly about ghosts. In devotional writing, as in medi-
eval love poetry, body and desire are connected. Thus not only do we
see that body (in the sense of particular identity) is packed into soul by
the theories of the scholastics, we also discover in the mystics a hint
that passionate and ever unfolding love of God lodges fully in souls only
when they get their bodies back.
Medieval discussions of the body that desires and the body that dies
must of course be understood in the context of many other ideas. For
a full picture of the many bodies of the Middle Ages we would need
to consider understandings of disease and health, of growth and decay,
of nature, the supernatural, the sacramental and the magical; of repro-
duction, contraception and birthing; of sexuality and rape; of pain and
pleasure; of gender expectations, group affiliations, and social roles; of
lineage and work, mothering and childhood. Moreover, as I have sug-
gested in the discussion above, ideas differed according to who held
them and where and when. The philosophy, the practices, the stories
of late antiquity, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of the age of
Dante and Christine de Pisan, were not the same. Not only did mys-
tical women and scholastic theologians differ; each group varied and
disagreed among themselves. Experiences as basic as birthing and being
born, working and eating, aging and dying were very different in the
fens of England, the forests of Brittany, and the bustling cities of the
Rhineland and the north of Italy.
Nonetheless I hope I have made it clear that medieval theories about
the body that dies addressed philosophical issues of identity and indi-
viduality that still bother us today. I wish now to suggest how these
84. See Karl F. Morrison, “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western
Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), and
Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1992).
 Afterword 375

theories relate to the contemporary debate over essentialism and espe-

cially to the performative feminism of Judith Butler (with which, as
I said above, I have some sympathy). I will not attempt to provide a
full discussion of the emerging field of gender studies (any more than
I have treated fully either medieval scholasticism or the current cin-
ema). Rather, I wish to make two general points about how medieval-
ists should approach the plethora of body theory out of which my friend
in eastern Europe (like many of her contemporaries) is struggling to
build a course syllabus.

In Theory
In current philosophical and historical discussion, “identity” refers to
two related issues: spatiotemporal continuity and identity-position. It
refers, that is, to the question of how a thing survives in time and space
as “the same thing” (for example, Bynum as Bynum), and the question
of what makes two separate things describable by the same grouping
noun (for example, Native American). The recent debate over essential-
ism is really an effort to find understandings that do not assume a com-
mon essence or nature (or, in some theories, even a common definition)
for identity in both senses.85 The effort stems in part from the desire
of certain groups (self-identified as groups) to seize control of descrip-
tions that had been imposed on them by outsiders,86 in part from dis-
satisfaction with the sex/gender distinction (understood as a distinction
between the biologically given and the culturally constructed) so popu-
lar in the early 1980s.87 The antiessentialism of many recent theorists,
and especially the performative feminism of Butler, are impressive
efforts to explain how the categories with which we live are created by
us as we live them. No one, Butler argues, is born “woman” or “black”
or “lesbian,” nor are these categories “cultural interpretations” of bio-
logical “facts.” Yet one does not simply choose an identity-position.

85. On the difference between essentialism of words and of things, see Jane
Roland Martin, “Methodological Essentialism, False Difference, and Other Danger-
ous Traps,” and Fuss, Essentially Speaking.
86. For examples of resistance to misuses of identity-positions, images, or ste-
reotypes, see Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of
“Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and Ann
duCille, “The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Femi-
nist Studies,” Signs 19 (Spring 1994): 591–629.
87. For an early expression of dissatisfaction with the distinction, see Davis and
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Call for Papers,” Common Knowledge 1 (Spring 1992): 5.
 376 Afterword

One becomes a lesbian by living as a lesbian, changing the category as

one incorporates and inspires it (the echoes of corpus and spiritus in the
verbs I have chosen here are intentional).
Seen in a slightly longer perspective, the antiessentialist position
is, of course, a reaction to Cartesian and Enlightenment dichotomies:
mind versus body, authority versus liberty, society (or nurture) versus
nature, and so on.88 For all its energy and intelligence, it sometimes
seems to flail in its analysis from one pole to the other—from perfor-
mance to regulation, mind to matter, socialization to physical struc-
ture—as if both were traps from which something (but what?) might
escape. In my own more ludic moments, I find the discussion empower-
ing; in gloomier times, I too (like the theorists themselves) feel trapped
by categories. By and large, as the best of contemporary feminists enjoin
me, I try to listen to the voices of others. But does any of this have any-
thing to do with the Middle Ages?
The debate about essentialism that has so dominated feminist and
gender studies over the past five years is clearly an event in contempo-
rary politics. As Bordo and Jane Martin (among others) have argued, it
has unfortunately sometimes been used to repress empirical historical
research. Historians have been accused of silencing past voices when
they fail to find in them decidedly 1990s sensibilities,89 of essentializ-
ing categories when they have instead (often after long and painstaking
research) discovered an unfamiliar attitude in the past. Such charges are
abusive, both of the historical record and of the contemporary diver-
sity they purport to foster. But does this mean that current feminist
theories, especially the debate over essentialism, have no relevance—or
even destructive implications—for the study of remote periods such
as the European Middle Ages? I suggest on the contrary that there is
something to be learned, but in two quite specific ways.90

88. See Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity.

89. Although I have my own criticisms of Bloch’s recent Medieval Misogyny
and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (chiefly of its failure to take suffi-
cient account of chronological change), I find many of the attacks on it examples
of this second type of fallacious charge. For warnings against such attacks, see Jane
Roland Martin, “Methodological Essentialism, False Difference, and Other Danger-
ous Traps,” and Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Scepticism.”
90. It should be clear that my focus in this article is “body theory,” not gender
theory. For a survey of recent applications of gender theory to the study of the past,
see the important article by Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category for Histori-
cal Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (Dec. 1986): 1053–75. See also note 8
in this afterword.
 Afterword 377

First, if we situate our own categories in the context of our own poli-
tics, we must situate those of the Middle Ages in theirs. The relation-
ship between then and now will thus be analogous and proportional, not
direct. It seems to me, that is, that the fruitful question to explore is not
likely to be, How is Origen (or Christine de Pisan or Aquinas) like or not
like Butler (or Spivak or Foucault)? Posed in this simple way, the answer
(whether we applaud it or condemn it) is almost certain to be, not very
like. It is far more fruitful to think along the following lines: Origen is to
Origen’s context as Butler is to Butler’s. By understanding the relationship
of figures to contexts, and then the relationship of those relationships, we
will often see that there is a large and developing issue with which both
figures struggle, each in his or her own vocabulary and circumstances.
Or, to put it another way, the past is seldom usefully examined by
assuming that its specific questions or their settings are the same as
those of the present. What may, however, be the same is the way in
which a question, understood in its context, struggles with a perduring
issue such as, for example, group affiliation. Origen asked, What of our
bodily self survives into the realm of resurrection? Butler asks, How is
a sexual orientation constituted by a way of being in the world? That
is, Origen dealt with identity in the sense of spatiotemporal continu-
ity; Butler deals with an identity-position. For Origen, the continuing
of body into the afterlife seems to involve the transcending of what we
call gender; for Butler, it is unimaginable that we could be “we” with-
out performing what we call gender. Moreover, Origen’s context was
martyrdom, persecution, and debate over how we know the truth; But-
ler’s is homophobia, the academy, and debate over who has the power
to define. Neither the issues nor their contexts are the same. If we
assume they are, we get only boring results. We learn very little that
is important about the third or the twentieth century if we ask, for
example, What does Origen think about transvestites or Butler about
angels (although it is clear that each would condemn the views of the
other)? Yet I would suggest that Origen, struggling with the categories
he inherited and the traumas of his world, can be seen as “solving” an
issue of identity in a way surprisingly similar to the solution Butler
forges from her inheritance and her experience. Both Butler and Origen
speak of a labile, active, unfolding body that somehow becomes more
what it is by behaving as it does; both have trouble explaining how
what we think of as “physical stuff” fits in.91

91. See Butler, Bodies That Matter, pp. 1–11.

 378 Afterword

Second, we must recognize that we are, at least in part, the heirs

of many earlier discourses.92 The conversation about nature and dif-
ference, about individuality and identity, that is so heated today has
roots in centuries of debate. Our current concerns have not sprung full-
blown from the 1970s. I do not, of course, argue that Origen of Alex-
andria, Aquinas, and Angela of Foligno had twentieth-century notions
of difference and desire, but I do insist that, by the early fourteenth
century, mystical and scholastic understandings of body implied that
both physicality and sensuality lodge squarely in person. If there had
been no sophisticated discussion of identity and survival, of gender and
longing, before The Feminine Mystique, recent discussions would not
be so nuanced and powerful. It is partly because premodern Western
philosophy is not dualistic, not essentialist, that we struggle so hard
today with certain issues of philosophical vocabulary inherited from
the Enlightenment. Much (I did not say all) of what we include in an
identity-position (especially gender) was already in the late Middle
Ages established as intrinsic to self exactly because it was understood
to return at the moment of bodily resurrection. Debates about spatio-
temporal continuity and personal survival came to imply notions of the
individual that foreshadowed the modern concern with identity posi-
tion (although the term has no medieval equivalent).
My friend in eastern Europe asked me to write something for her
students. In the face of arguments that seemed to make the premodern
past irrelevant, irretrievable, and irredeemable, she wanted an example
of what it might mean to relate feminist theory to the Middle Ages.
One of my purposes here has been to provide such an example. I might
indeed suggest that it is impossible not to. For the only past we can
know is one we shape by the questions we ask; yet these questions are
also shaped by the context we come from, and our context includes the
past. Thus my picture of medieval concerns is as influenced by cur-
rent feminist debates as those debates are influenced by the ideas from
which they partly descend.
It is not only possible, it is imperative to use modern concerns when
we confront the past. So long as we reason by analogy rather than merely
rewriting or rejecting, the present will help us see past complexity, and
the past will help us to understand ourselves. Thus we need not succumb
to the despair or solipsism to which modern historians are sometimes
92. Those since the Enlightenment are also, of course, important. See, for exam-
ple, Richard Rorty, “Religion as Conversation-Stopper,” Common Knowledge 3
(Spring 1994): 1–6.
 Afterword 379

reduced by the plethora of new approaches. Nor need we abandon the

study of the Middle Ages in favor of the study of other medievalists.93
We must never forget to watch ourselves knowing the otherness of the
past, but this is not the same as merely watching ourselves.
Indeed, awareness of our individual situations and perspectives can
be freeing rather than limiting, for it removes the burden of trying
to see everything. The enterprise of the historian becomes, of neces-
sity, more cooperative and therefore more fun.94 Recent theorizing has
surely taught us that our knowledge is “situated,” that the effort to
understand “the other” is fraught with danger.95 But any medievalist
who tackles her professional subject matter writes, and must write,
about what is other—radically, terrifyingly, fascinatingly other—from
herself. If we no longer believe that the pars elucidated by any one
historian stands pro toto, we must nonetheless not surrender our deter-
mination to reach outside ourselves in our encounter with the part.
Exactly because we recognize pars for pars, we can have greater confi-
dence—and greater pleasure—in a kaleidoscopic whole that is far larger
than the limited vision of any one of us. The sources are there to be
deciphered, the charnel houses to be excavated, the reliquaries to be
studied in terms of their contents as well as their design. We can, I
think, bring recent theoretical discussion to bear on the Middle Ages
without doing violence to the nuances of medieval texts and images or
to the slow, solid efforts of medievalists to understand them.
In closing, then, I return to medieval ideas and images of the body. I
have considered them (as should now be clear) in the light of a modern
concern with identity and individuality, physicality and desire. What, if
anything, has emerged from this encounter of present and past?

93. That a number of recent authors have turned, in a kind of despair, to studying
medievalism or medievalists rather than the Middle Ages will be obvious to anyone
who reads the journals. A joke going the rounds in anthropological circles makes the
point I make here. It is a joke that has only a punch line. The informant says to the
anthropologist: “Don’t you think it’s time we talked about me?”
94. I made the same point in the introduction to Fragmentation and Redemption,
pp. 11–16. In The Flight to Objectivity, Bordo argues, similarly, that we must be care-
ful lest a rejection of the omniscient observer merely leads feminists to offer arrogant
(and inadvertently universalizing) critiques from the margins.
95. See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Femi-
nism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (Fall 1988):
575–99. A recent and powerful defense of historical research against the extreme
claims of deconstructionism is Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Tell-
ing the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994); see also Lawrence
Stone and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History and Post-Modernism,” Past and Present
135 (May 1992): 189–208.
 380 Afterword

In Conclusion
Certain philosophical theories about the body that developed in late
antiquity and the high Middle Ages answered the question, How can
“I” continue to be “I” through time, both the time of earth and the time
of the eschaton? But they were understood by contemporaries to do this
at the expense of taking lived life very abstractly, at the expense of jetti-
soning the stuffness of “me.” These theories did not essentialize “me”
as a general human abstraction. Even for Origen, the “I” that unfolds
in heaven carries with it some of my particularity. And for thirteenth-
century followers of Aquinas, “my” particularity—not only my sex but
also personal characteristics, such as beauty or size—were understood
to be carried by soul or form. Although Origen’s contemporaries feared
that he opened the way to metempsychosis, by the thirteenth century
no philosophical theory of the person admitted any possibility of trans-
migration of soul. Body was individual and immediately recognizable
as such; for better or worse, one could not shed gender or appearance;
one could not body-hop in this life or in the afterlife.
In such a theory, however, body became an expression of soul;
indeed, body could be expressed in any stuff. As a number of more
conservative thinkers of the late thirteenth century noticed, this raised
questions for religious practice. No less a figure than the Archbishop
of Canterbury pointed out that there would be no reason for revering
the relics of a saint if any stuff could provide his or her body at the end
of time.96 It is remarkable that we find scholastics in the years around
1300 raising questions about relic cult and burial practices as ways of
objecting to technical philosophical theories, since in the Middle Ages
(as today), practice and the discourse of university intellectuals were
seldom explicitly related to each other.
The new philosophical theories did more than threaten specific reli-
gious practices. They tended to make body itself into a concept, to dis-
solve body into theory. And they made salvation repose or stasis. The
goal of human existence became crystalline permanence. Yet the period
that produced such theories saw an explosion of poetry, religious and
secular, in which labile, physical, agile, yearning body received new
articulation. The abstractions of the philosophers and theologians were
not so much defeated as simply and very effectively ignored by the
96. See John Peckham, Registrum epistolarum fratris Johannis Peckham, archi-
episcopi cantuariensis, ed. Charles T. Martin, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1882–1885),
3: pp. 921–23.
 Afterword 381

poets and mystics, preachers and storytellers, of the later Middle Ages.
(Even in the universities, the new theory received remarkably little
attention outside certain circles.) To the singers, preachers, and lovers
of the fourteenth century, the self is a person whose desire rolls and
tumbles from fingertips as well as genitals, whose body is not only
instrument, expression, and locus of self, but in some sense self itself.
My friend suspected that a conversation between medieval ideas
and modern ones might reintroduce into her classroom something of
the stuffness of body that she found missing in contemporary literary
and feminist theory. As I have tried to show, that expectation is only
partly right. Medieval theories, too, could be highly abstract; some, at
least, of the many bodies of the Middle Ages themselves dissolved into
discourse. But there was also resistance to such discourse. And I hope
I have demonstrated that there was as well, in social and religious prac-
tice, a sense of the immediacy of bodies, living and dead, that provides
some of what my friend wanted to show her students.
The roots of modern notions of a particular embodied self that can-
not, we feel, body-hop, despite the intellectual and technical opportuni-
ties presented by organ transplants and artificial intelligence, thus lie
in the later Middle Ages. Hundreds of years of controversy, in which
person was seen as a unity (not a mind/body duality), a particular indi-
vidual (not an essence), and a yearning stuff (not—and here despite the
theologians—a form for which any matter can be its matter), have pro-
foundly shaped the Western tradition. Compared to this, the real mind/
body dualism introduced by early modern philosophers is a small blip
on the long curve of history.97 For better and for worse, we are the
heirs of Aquinas’s notion of a particular self (not an essence) carried
in soul but expressed in body, as we are of those long lines of pilgrims
who kissed relics of fingers and garments, or of Angela’s, Dante’s, and
Mechtild’s dreams of insatiable desire.
Finally, however, I stress not parallels between medieval and modern
understandings—or the roots of present and past in each other—but
the diversity within each period. Medieval writings about corpus or
caro—or even materia or tellus—were as multiple and multivalent as
the varying discourses found in modern writing about the body. If I
have pulled from my own detailed research certain themes concern-
ing death and survival, it is because I think modern treatments of per-
son and body have recently concentrated rather too much on issues of

97. See Putnam, Words and Life, pp. 4–6.

 382 Afterword

gender and sexuality to the detriment of our awareness of other things

(such as death and work) that are also at stake.98
Indeed, if (as I have asserted above) we are all shaped by our many
presents and pasts, I may be merely reflecting the broader understand-
ing of body for which I appear to be calling. Why all the fuss about the
body? Perhaps because I am not, after all, alone in noticing—in Truly,
Madly, Deeply, the AIDS quilt, or the controversy over organ trans-
plants—the complex link between body, death, and the past.

98. For perceptive remarks on our modern fear of death, see Geary, Living with
the Dead in the Middle Ages, pp. 1–5.
 Illustration Credits

1. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green et al.,

Reconstruction (London and Leiden: Warburg Institute/University of London
and Brill, 1979), plate 93, p. 267; from BN Facs. Fol. 8 (xi), pl. 7, Avery Archi-
tectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.
2. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green et al.,
Reconstruction (London and Leiden: Warburg Institute/University of London
and Brill, 1979), plate 141, p. 427; from BN Cabinet des Etampes Ad. 144.a.
Fol., pl. 107a, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.
3. Herrad of Hohenbourg, Hortus deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green et al.,
Reconstruction (London and Leiden: Warburg Institute/University of Lon-
don and Brill, 1979), plate 146, p. 439; from BN Facs. Fol. 8 (xi), pl. 20, Avery
Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New
York.
4. Photo by Brepols.
5. Alinari/Art Resources, New York.
6. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
7. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.
8. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
9. Staats- und Universitätsbibliotek, Hamburg, “Carl von Ossietzky.”
10. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
11. Bodleian Library, Oxford.
12. The British Library.
13. Bodleian Library, Oxford.
14. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.
15. Hirmer Verlag, Munich.
 384 Illustration Credits

16. Courtesy of John J. Yiannias.

17. Stiftsbibliothek, Melk.
18. Universitätsbibliothek, Munich.
19. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917
(17.50.520).
20. Foto Strenger, Osnabrück.
21. Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum, Cologne.
22. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917
(17.190.520).
23. Copyright 1994 ARS, New York/SPADEM, Paris.
24. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
25/26. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
27. Hirmer Verlag, Munich.
28. Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge University.
29. Visions of Tondal, Getty MS 30, fol. 13v, attributed to Simon Marmion
(illuminator) and David Aubert (scribe), 1474; Collection of the J. Paul Getty
Museum, Malibu, California.
30. Visions of Tondal, Getty MS 30, fol. 17, attributed to Simon Marmion
(illuminator) and David Aubert (scribe), 1474; Collection of the J. Paul Getty
Museum, Malibu, California.
31. Alinari/Art Resource, New York.
32. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
33. Hirmer Verlag, Munich.
34. Biblioteca Estense, Modena.
35. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.
36. Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.

Ornaments drawn by Lisa Force

 General Index

If an item is referred to in text and note on the same page, only the page number
is given. Biblical citations are indexed under “Bible” in the order used in the
Vulgate.

Abelard, Peter, 146n94, 180 Amiens, tympanum, 211, 314n130,

Abraham’s bosom, 119n9, plate 33 plate 23
abundantia, see images of Ancrene Wisse, 222, 251n91, 331–34
resurrection body, overflow Andrew the Apostle, 314–15, 316
Achard of St. Victor, 164n29 Angela of Foligno, 373, 378
Adalbert of Prague, 208 Anselm of Canterbury, 131, 146,
Adam, see Garden of Eden; 219n67, 251
iconographic motifs, Adam as bones Anselm of Laon, 8, 127–28
Aelred of Rievaulx, 210 Antigone, xxvi
Aethelwold, 222 Anti-Origenists, 68–70, 86–91, 123n16
Agatha, saint, 296, 313, plate 35 Aphrahat, 72–75, 79, 84
Agnes, saint, 310 Apocalypse, see Apocrypha; Bible,
Alan of Lille, 169n48 Revelation; iconographic motifs,
Albert the Great, 233, 236n26, 237, Apocalypse
238n37, 242n53, 246, 247, 256–57, Apocalypse of Peter, see Apocrypha
261–67, 269, 271, 288n30, 320–21 Apocrypha: Acts of John, 24n7; Acts
Alexander of Hales, 246 of Paul, 29; Apocalypse of Peter,
Alice of Schaerbeek, 221, 224, 327n31 23, 38, 291; 2 Baruch, 23n5;
Alpaïs of Cudot, 221, 327n31 Enoch, 23, 42; Third Letter to the
Amauricians, 153–55 Corinthians, 29
Amaury of Bene, 153, 225 Apostles’ Creed, xvi, 26, 366n63
Ambrose, 61, 71, 107, 110, 135n59, Aquinas, Thomas, see Thomas
142, 144 Aquinas
 386 General Index

Arena chapel at Padua, fresco, 187, autopsy, 322, 324–25

306n102, plate 5 Avicenna, 359
Aristides, 31
Aristotle, 230, 352, 358, 361; on BABEL group, the, xxvii
biological change, 57n144, 241, 258; Babylonian Talmud, 54n135, 98n144
On Generation and Corruption, Bamberg-Eichstätt, psalter from, see
136, 238; on human desire for manuscripts, Melk
happiness, 246; in scholastic Barbara, saint, 208
writing, 135, 136, 231–33, 236 Basil, 61, 83, 84
Arnobius, 53n132, 61 beatific vision: after resurrection,
Arno of Reichersberg, 151 283–86; before resurrection,
asceticism, 11n17; connection to 252, 266–67, 269, 282, 284–89;
martyrdom, 83, 94; fasting, 40, 41, controversy over, 277–78, 279,
94; immutable body as preparation 283–89
for resurrection, 84–85, 92n125, 94, Beatrice of Nazareth, 222
108–12, 201, 210; and women, 84 Bede, 127, 292, 295
Assumption, Bodily: of John the Beinek, Justyna, xiii, xxii
Evangelist, 313, 338; of the Virgin Bellegambe, Jean, 187
Mary, 140, 170n52, 249n77, 304, Benedict XII, 285, 287–88; see also
319, 321 Benedictus Deus
Athanasius, 109 Benedictines, 159n7
Athenagoras, 28, 31–34, 38, 55, 56, Benedictus Deus, 10, 246, 278, 283,
57–58, 69, 71, 102; and the chain 285, 288
consumption argument, 28, 33; De Bernard of Clairvaux, xxi, 135n59,
resurrectione, 28n17, 32; Legatio, 138, 163–66, 183, 252, 283,
28n17, 33 287n25, 303, 304; on beatific
Augustine of Hippo, 8–9, 61–62, vision, 164, 166, 175, 310n116; on
72, 94–105, 283, 361, 364n56; the body, 164–66, 169–70, 172–75;
on cannibalism, 103–4; City of on desire, 164, 329–30, 372; On
God, 8, 95–99, 101–4, 183; De Loving God, 165–66, 172, 250,
cura pro mortuis gerenda, 95, 310n116; Sermons for All Saints,
103, 105; De Trinitate, 101; on 165n34, 173; Sermons on Psalm
desire of the soul for the body, 90, 168, 170
97n138, 100, 248, 340n83, 372; Bernard of Fontcaude, 216n54, 217n59
on eating and growth, 96, 102–4, Bertold of Moosburg, 151
125n24; Enchiridion, 8, 95–98, Bible
103n169, 105, 118; fear of decay, Genesis 1.11, 102n162; 1.20–25,
96–97, 101–3, 105; on hierarchy 73, 363; 2.7, 161; 2.19, 67; 3.7, 67;
after death, 100, 110; image of 3.19, 72; 3.21, 69
reforged statue, 9, 96; on the Exodus 7, 237
immortality of the soul, 96–97; Leviticus, 84
Literal Commentary on Genesis, 4 Kings 4.32, 171; 13.21, 80;
95n133, 97n137, 100n154, 101, Job 12.5, 210; 14.7, 237; 19.23–29,
236, 250, 253n97; on particular 234n17, 258; 19.26, 88, 134; 28.25,
characteristics after death, 96n135, 332n50; 29.27, 235n20
97–100; on relics, 93, 104–6; on Psalms 35.9, 251; 49.14, 148n102;
seminal reasons, 95, 101–102n162, 62.2, 250; 71.19, 173; 84.10, 173;
126, 241; Sermons, 96, 99–102 90.8, 175; 90.10, 172
Augustinus Triumphus of Ancona, Ecclesiastes 2.23, 287; 12.5,
242n53, 245–46, 265n143 54n135
 General Index 387

Song of Songs, 303; 5.14, 171; 8.13, body, between death and resurrection,
169 13–14, 84; and biological change,
Isaiah 57.20, 287 12, 32, 38, 40, 56–58, 64–68,
Wisdom 9.15, 258 69–71, 72, 77–78, 82, 112–13,
Ecclesiasticus 10.11, 133; 19.3, 133; 145, 241, 262, 369–72 (see also
24.21, 330; 34.11, 287 Aristotle; eating and growth);
Jeremiah 18.4, 89 anxiety about, 350; decay of,
Ezekiel 37.1–14, 23, 54, 67, 74, 180, 11–12, 38, 73, 84, 174, 219, 331;
184–85 discourses about as multiple,
Daniel, 13, 25 352–53; female, 12n19, 74n57,
2 Maccabees 7.1–42, 13, 74n54 90–91, 98n141, 111n187, 221–22,
Matthew 5.5, 173; 15.17, 125, 127, 224, 254–55, 321, 324, 342, 351,
128, 262; 17.27, 75; 20, 283; 22.30, 358, 361, 362, 364; glorified,
251; 22.23–33, 38, 64; 23.37, 78; 8, 10, 42, 253–54, 367; history
25, 188n103, 283; 25.31–46, 189, of (as scholarly field), xiii, xvi,
plate 7; 27.52, 118n5, 190n112, xxxii,12n18, 345–53, 375–76;
191, plate 8; 29.6, 332 incorruptible, 45, 47, 206, 210–11;
Mark 2.9–11, 172; 13, 188n103 modern attitudes toward, xiii,
Luke 16.22–26, 123; 20.36, 150; xxvii,15–17, 341–42, 345–53, 371,
21.18, 29, 47, 76, 96n136, 99, 373–79, 381; as performance,
101n162, 108n179, 118, 128, 301, xx-xxi, 348, 361; relation to soul,
315; 22.51, 76; 24.16–36, 5; 24.39– 10–11, 13–14, 36, 45n97, 53n132,
43, 4, 39 57–58, 65, 76, 82, 127–28, 135–36,
John 5.28, 99, 185; 6.26–67, 4n6, 159–60, 166–67, 223n81, 236–47,
62n10; 11.11, 93; 11.25–26, 249–54, 256–71, 273–74, 281–83,
4n6; 12.24, 3n5, 39; 14.2, 286–89, 294–305, 332; of the
143,150n114, 152, 255; 20.14, 5; saints, 113–14, 200–203, 206–14;
20.19, 5; 21.4, 5 as self or identity, 13–14, 32, 34,
Romans 6–8, 4; 7.24, 96n136; 8.28, 35, 37, 46, 64–68, 76–77, 98, 120,
165 205, 213, 220, 225, 231, 233, 243,
1 Corinthians 6.19, 172; 7.31, 181; 247, 254, 255n108, 274, 326, 355–56,
15.12–54, 3–6, 8, 23, 42, 47n104, 365–69; sexuality and, xviii, xxxii,
63n13, 64, 65n18, 73, 95n132, 37–38, 67, 74–75, 90–91; spiritual
96n136, 143–44, 166, 177, 184, (body), 4, 6, 8, 64–68, 140–41,
217n56, 232–38, 258; 15.41, 142–46, 180; survival of particular
153n123, 255, 320; 15.42–44, 8, characteristics after death, xxi, 77,
57, 65, 96n136, 131, 132, 182, 232, 82–83, 90, 96–100, 145, 254–55,
246, 251, 252n94, 315, 334; 15.50, 265–66, 365–69, 381; see also
65, 131, 182; 15.51, 91 burial and funerary practices;
2 Corinthians 5.1–10, 4–6, 63n13, cannibalism; desire, of soul for
64 body; images of the body; mind-
Galatians 3.28, 143 body problem; relics
Ephesians 4.10–16, 98n141, 122n15, Boethius, 372
143; 5.27, 165; 5.30, 39 Bonaventure, 233, 236–37, 240–41,
Revelation (Apocalypse) 6.9–10, 48, 243–44, 245n65, 247–55, 261,
242, 283; 6.11, 172, 287; 14.4, 92; 360n44; on beatific vision, 252;
20, 188n103; 20.4, plate 11; 20.6, Breviloquium, 248–49, 251;
167; 20.13, 23 doctrine of plurality of forms, 248,
Biblia pauperum, 194n124 254n101; on dotes, 252, 255; and
Blanche of Castile, 205 hylomorphism, 248
 388 General Index

Boniface VIII, 323, 325, 327 Castel off Loue, 332

Boniface, Anglo-Saxon missionary, catacombs, 93n129
211n39 Cathars, 215–20, 282, 352, 359, 364;
Book of the Dun Cow, 129 on Eucharist, 218; on preserving
Bordeaux, tympanum, 307 gender difference, 216; on
Bosch, Hieronymus, xxvi resurrection, 154–55, 215–16,
Bourges, tympanum, 307–8, plate 33 218–20
Braulio of Saragossa, 107–108n179, Catherine of Cleves, Book of Hours,
270 plate 32
Breves dies hominis, 133 Catherine of Siena, 315, 316
Buffalmacco, 306n102, 308n108; Celsus, 61
see also Campo Santo chain consumption; see eating and
burial and funerary practices, xiv, growth
51–58, 201–6, 212–13, 216–19, change, fear of, 371; see also body,
275–76, 322–27; burial ad sanctos, anxiety about; decay, fear of
106n174, 203; charnel house, charnel houses; see burial and
203–4, 212–13, 327; cremation, funerary practices, charnel house
48, 51–55; fragmentation in burial Chartres cathedral, xxvi
(see cadaver, partition of; mos Chaucer, xxvi
teutonicus); inhumation, 51–55; Christina Mirabilis (the Astonishing),
Jewish, 52, 54; ossilegium, 52, 54, 221, 224, 333
204; Roman, 51–55, 201; see also Christine de Pisan, 374
cadaver; execution, methods Cistercians, 163–64, 167–70, 176
of; Eucharist, and funerary Clare of Montefalco, 323
practices; martyrs and Classics, the, study of as a scholarly
martyrdom field, xxvi
Byzantine Last Judgment, see Clement VI, 323
iconographic motifs Clement of Alexandria, 67n30
Clement of Rome, 24n8, 25, 30, 36,
cadaver, 12, 27, 35, 91, 103, 105; 72, 79
incorruption of, 206–12, 221–24; Clonmacnois, Cross of the Scriptures,
miracles associated with, 92–93, 191, 198n137
201, 206, 207–11, 220, 222–23, condemnations: of 1210, 153nn127–
224, 315, 317, 326; partition of, 27, 128, 154, 215; of 1225, 153nn127–
49–50, 80, 201–9, 212–14, 310–15, 128, 154–55; of 1270, 230, 271; of
322–27; as pollution, 31, 92; 1277, 230, 271–75, 281n7, 282; of
relation to self, 259, 326 1286, 272, 275; see also Councils
Caesarius of Heisterbach, 148n102, cognitive turn, the, xxiii–xxv
207–8, 222–23, 290, 294–95, 310 Conques, tympanum, 194, 307,
Campo Santo at Pisa, fresco, plate 15
306n102, plate 24 corpse, see cadaver
cannibalism, 27, 28n17, 62, 67, Cosmas and Damian, 208
110n185, 361n45; as libel, 33, Councils: II Constantinople (553),
41–42n38, 55, 112n190, 219; as 67; Diospolis (415), 105; Florence
threat to resurrection, 31, 32, (1439), 280n3; IV Lateran (1215),
41–42, 103–11, 263, 366 154–55, 209, 229; I Lyons (1180–
canonization proceedings, 284, 1181), 215; II Lyons (1274),
322–23 155n136, 230, 280n3, 282
Cartesianism, see Descartes Cursor Mundi, 332
 General Index 389

Cyprian, 45n97, 46, 49 Didascalia Apostolorum, 31, 47–48, 50

Cyril of Jerusalem, 6o, 79–81 dissection, see autopsy
Divine Comedy, xxvi, 277, 298–306,
Daedalus (journal), xxvi 373; desire in, 298, 303–5;
damnation, 265–66; as digestion, iconography of, 306–8, plates
119, 186, 190, 192–96, 291– 24–26; somatomorphic soul in, 11,
93, 307–8, 364n53 (see also 295, 298–303, 368
iconographic motifs, damnation Docetism, 26–7, 88
as digestion and mouth of hell); Docheiariou, Mount Athos, fresco,
as fragmentation, 119, 190, 195n128
291–94, 305; and nudity, 119; as Donne, John, 276n190
putrefaction, 293–94, 313 Dorothy of Montau, 224
Dante, see Divine Comedy dotes (dowries) of glorified body
David of Dinant, 153n128 (claritas, agilitas, subtilitas,
death: etymology of mors, 148, 198; impassibilitas), 100, 131–32,
fear of, 12, 44–46, 84, 112–14, 172n61, 269, 302n89, 334, 367n67;
360; modern concern with, 353, origin of the idea, 100, 235n21;
354–58, 365, 371, 374–75; see as theme in thirteenth-century
also burial and funerary practices; writing, 8, 132, 232, 235–36, 252,
execution, methods of; martyrs 255
and martyrdom Douce Apocalypse, see manuscripts,
Debates between Body and Soul, Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 180
219n67, 281n9, 326n28, 328n38, Douceline of Marseilles, 222
331, 332n53, 359 dowries (of body), see dotes
decay, fear of, xiv, xxv, xxvii, 321–29, dualism, 57–58, 318, 328n38, 331,
360, 364 359n37; alleged to be western
defects (bodily): repaired in hell?, tradition, xiii, xvi, 351, 358, 376;
190n110, 265–66; repaired in see also Cathars
resurrection, 25n9, 29, 36, 98n141, Dublin Apocalypse, 193n122
98–99n144, 123, 124n22, 136, 168, Duchamp, Marcel, xxii
183, 189–90, 254, 255n108, 265–66 Duns Scotus, 261, 270n165
De novissimis (anonymous), 128 Dura-Europos, 197
Descartes, xvi, 358, 361, 376 Durand of St. Pourçain, xxi, 10, 259–
desire, 357, 372–74; as cement of the 61, 277, 282n11, 285, 287
person, 253–54; cessation of, 91,
133, 165, 253, 288; eternal, 251, Eadmer of Canterbury, 131, 363n53
304–5, 328–30, 340–41, 372–73; eating and growth, 102, 124–25; chain
for God, 101n157, 175, 246, 248, consumption argument, 28, 32–33,
251, 288n30, 329–30, 339–40; for 91; in Garden of Eden, 96, 124–25;
happiness, 246, 250; of matter, as threat to identity, 27, 31, 35, 40,
244, 246, 249–51, 264–65, 270; 101, 136; as threat to resurrection,
as retardation, 97n138, 132, 245, 102–4, 128, 148; see also
250, 253, 331–32; of soul for body, asceticism, fasting; cannibalism
10–11, 97n138, 124, 128, 132, Eberwin of Steinfeld, 217
139n67, 164–65, 248, 303–5, 328, Ebrach, Oberfranken, 203
340, 380–81 Edmund, saint, 206
Detestande feritatis, see Boniface VIII Elisabeth of Spalbeek, 221–22
Dialogue on Miracles, see Caesarius Elucidarium, see Honorius
of Heisterbach Augustodunensis
 390 General Index

embryos, 77, 89, 272, 321; debates on fertility, 5, 12, 23, 159–61, 315; fear
resurrection of, 261, 263 of, in Antiquity, 112–13; fear of, in
Ephraim the Syriac, 61–62, 75–79, 84; the Middle Ages, 5, 219, 240–41,
as possible source of Byzantine 317
Last Judgment iconography, First Corinthians, see Bible; images
75n59, 197; use of organic images of resurrection body, Pauline seed
by, 77–78 and seed
Epiphanius, 60, 68, 86, 88 Flatatunga, Iceland, Last Judgment
Epistle to Rheginos, 29 carving, 196
equivocality of body, 271, 273–75; as Flavian, martyr, 46
threat to relic cult, 275; as threat Florence, Baptistry ceiling, plate 31
to resurrection, 276 forma corporeitatis, 66n22, 254n101,
Erigena (Eriugena), see John Scotus 255n108, 263, 274–76
Erigena formal identity, 10, 238–40, 259–63,
Ermengaud of Béziers, 217n59 271, 275, 277, 287, 318–19; see
eschatology: modern interest in, also unicity of form
xvii–xviii, 14–16; recent study fragmentation, see cadaver, partition
of, 5, 7n12, 13–14, 138–39; see of; damnation; mos teutonicus;
also heaven; hell; purgatory; resurrection, as reassemblage
resurrection Francis, saint, 296n61
essentialism, debate over, xviii, Free Spirit, 154
346–47, 363–65, 375–78 Freising, Beast Column in crypt,
Etheldreda, 206, 296 194
Eucharist, xiv, 9n14, 108n179,
140, 149, 221; and the Cathars Galen, 65, 352
(see Cathars); doctrine of Garden of Eden, 96, 102n165, 307;
concomitance, 316; and funerary eating in (see eating and growth);
practices, 55–56; as proof of sex in, 83, 112
incorruption, 39, 41, 47; as relic, gender, in the resurrection, see
316; and resurrection, 27, 56, 80, body, survival of particular
111, 162n22, 316 characteristics after death
Eusebius, 42n83, 46n98, 49, 50 Gerald Odonis, 284
Eustace of Arras, 242n53, 248n74, Gerard of Abbeville, 284, 286
270 Germanus the Bishop, 315
Evagrius, 71, 109 Gertrude of Delft, 224
Evesham, monk of, see Visions of the Gertrude the Great of Helfta, xxi,
otherworld 330n45
Ex voto, 202n6 Gervase of Mont St. Eloi, 328
execution, methods of, xiv, 312, Gilbert of Hoyland, 168–69
323–24, 327 Gilbert of Poitiers (de la Porrée),
135n59, 146n94, 151–52
fabliaux, 352 Giles of Lessines, 271
fantasy literature, modern, xv Giles of Rome, xvii, 175n69, 237–39,
fasting, see asceticism; miracles 242n53, 243, 244n62, 247, 271,
Faust, Drew, xxvii 356; on embryology, 272n177,
Feminine Mystique, The, 378 321; on unicity of form, 256–58,
feminist analysis: of body, xiv, 348; 260–66, 271
of identity, xvii; interpretations of Giotto, see Arena chapel at Padua
resurrection, 109 gladiatorial combat, 41, 44, 48
 General Index 391

global history, xxii–xxiii hell, 131, 266, 291–94, 364n53;

Gnosticism, 22, 26–27, 43, 88 harrowing of, 148n102; as a
God as mother, xx-xxi, 363n51 mouth, 148, 293; as a place, 181;
Godfrey of Fontaines, 207n22, as a spiritual state, 140, 146; see
242n53, 243n58, 264n139, 271, also damnation; iconographic
275–76, 321, 328 motifs, damnation as digestion
Golden Chamber, in St. Ursula’s, and mouth of hell; Visions of the
Cologne, 203–4 otherworld
Golden Legend, see James of Henry I of England, 205
Voragine Henry of Ghent, 66n22, 243, 261,
Goscelin of St. Bertin, 211 264n139, 270, 271, 275, 321
Gregory Nazianzus, 84 Henry of Ostia, 154
Gregory of Nyssa, 60–63, 81–86, 104; Heraclitus, 61, 113
on asceticism as preparation for heresy, 214–20, 229–30, 282; see
resurrection, 84; on body as relic, also Amauricians; Cathars;
85–86; on death of Macrina, 83–86; condemnations; John Scotus
and fear of decay, 84; Origenist?, Erigena; resurrection, denial of;
81 Waldensians
Gregory the Great, 8, 60n3, 292, 316 Herman of Reun, 167–68, 169, 173–
growth: as miracle, 126, 129; as 74, 201, 363-64
problem (see eating and growth; Herrad of Hohenbourg (or Landsberg),
fertility, fear of) see Hortus deliciarum
Guerric of Igny, 163, 168n45, 169–71, Hilary of Poitiers, 60, 62, 71,
224 79n75
Guibert of Nogent, 138–40, 149n110, Hildegard of Bingen, 157–63; holistic
206n20, 217, 270, 316; on relics, sense of body, 158; on resurrection
140, 207n22; vision of departed as reassemblage, 162–63, plate 4;
souls, 292, 295 use of organic images by, 159–60,
Guiral Ot, see Gerald Odonis 224
Hinduism, attitude toward body,
Hadewijch, xxi, 290, 330, 373 12–13n20
hagiography, 206–8, 209–11, 221–24, historical method, xxvii–xxviii, xxx,
281, 305, 309–17, 319, 326, 341–43, 376–79; see also paradox,
331; see also James of Voragine; as a method of analysis
iconographic motifs, attributes of Holy Land, relics from, xxii
saints Honorius III, 153
Hamilton Psalter, see manuscripts, Honorius Augustodunensis, 8, 118–
Berlin 20, 127, 137–41, 146–52, 192, 225;
heaven, xix, 74, 291, 372–74, plate 25; Clavis physicae, 120, 141, 146–47,
and hierarchy, 38n67, 90–91, 109– 151, 156; Elucidarium, 132, 138,
12, 150, 235, 255, 266, 297n69, 140, 146–52, 204; summary of
305; as jewels, 292, 304; as a place, Erigena’s theories, 146
66; the senses in, 98, 140n71, Hortus deliciarum, 117–20, 186,
253n98, 267; the social joys of, plates 1, 2, 3
150, 255, 303; as a spiritual state, Hostiensis, see Henry of Ostia
140, 146, 181; see also Visions of Hugh de Lacy, 205n17
the otherworld Hugh of St. Victor, 8, 122n15, 126–27,
Heinrich of Melk, 151 129, 130–32, 135, 137, 138, 180,
Helinand of Froidmont, 139n68 183n89, 256, 286
 392 General Index

humanities, the problem of the, xxviii images of the earthly body: bride,
humors, the, 352 8, 10; building, 172; cesspool, 61,
hybridity, xiv 172, 331; dung, 61; dust, 23, 120,
hylomorphism, 66, 248, 256, 273; see 161, 173; field, 159, 161; garden,
also Bonaventure; Thomas Aquinas 159; garment, 4, 172; mud, 29,
161n16; prison, 61, 331; river, 64,
iconoclasm, xxiv 113; seed, 29, 30; semen, 23, 29;
iconographic motifs: Adam as statue, 166–67; tree, 23–24, 159,
bones, 118, 190–91, plates 1, 9; 170–71
Apocalypse, 193, plates 11, 28; images of resurrection body: angel,
attributes of saints, 313–14, plates 63, 67; reassembled bones, 133;
23, 34, 35, 36; Byzantine Last bride, 42, 319; city, 239; crystal,
Judgment, iconographic program, 10, 334, 338; egg, 78; embryo/
75n59, 119n9, 188–90, plates 2, 6, fetus, 6, 66, 74, 78; fire, 127,
7, 16; damnation as digestion, 119, 239, 262n132; flowering plant,
307, plates 3, 6, 16, 30, 31; Divine 8, 23, 302n89, 319; garment, 6,
Comedy, iconography drawn from 36, 40, 76, 120, 134, 171, 286;
(see Divine Comedy, iconography glowworm, 79; gold in a furnace,
of); dry bones of Ezekiel 67, 197; 50; herd of animals, 82; ivory,
Five Wounds of Christ, 308n106, 171; jewel, 8, 24n7, 107, 120,
314n129; harrowing of hell 162, 171, 210; Jonah, 29, 36,
(Anastasis), 148n102, 190n112, 75; mended pot, 6, 8, 30, 36,
193, plate 13; Jonah and the 60n3, 72, 81–82, 89, 119, 134;
whale, 193, 307, plate 14; Last mercury, 81; mosaic, 30; overflow
Judgment, 118–19, 306–8, plates 2, (abundantia) of soul, 232, 236,
4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 16, 24, 27; mouth 243, 245, 250, 287, 289, 319;
of hell, 192–93, 307, plates 10, 12, Pauline seed, 3–6, 8, 10, 24, 38,
13, 15, 27, 28, 32; regurgitation 40, 57, 60n3, 66, 78, 79–80, 82,
and reassemblage of body parts, 102, 120, 129, 143, 176–80, 184–
118–19, 188–90, 194–97, plates 6, 86, 225; phoenix, 6, 23–26, 143;
7, 10, 16, 17, 18, 28; resurrection, rebuilt temple, 6, 8, 36, 72, 120,
general, 118–19, 186–97, plates 2, 134, 286; reforged statue, 6–7, 9,
4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 24, 27, 30, 70, 72, 80n78, 96, 99, 106,
33; resurrection, of Christ, 187 119–20, 123–24, 128, 130, 133–
identity, as modern concern, xiv, 34, 240; reliquary, 334; seasonal
xvi, xvii, xxv, xxvii, 255n108, or diurnal change, 8–9, 23, 35,
318n2, 341n85, 355–56, 365–69, 79, 129, 143; seed, 23–24, 27, 29,
371, 374, 377; as fluid, xiv, xxi; as 30, 36, 76, 315–16; ship, 37, 89;
LGBTQ, xx–xxi; as performance, sphere, 67; tent, 72; water skin,
xx–xxi; two meanings of, 355; as 69, 82, 238–39, 262n132; see also
philosophical problem, see material iconographic motifs
continuity; person, survival of immortality, see soul
Ignatius of Antioch, 27, 28, 44, 49 impassibilitas, see dotes
image as object, xx, xxii–xxv; see also Innocent III, 153n128, 364
objects, study of intellectual history, methodology
images of the body: inorganic, 24n7, of, xxx–xxxi; see also historical
30, 70, 72, 158; metonymic, 312, method
316; organic, 8, 23–24, 29, 30, Irenaeus of Lyon, 13, 44, 46, 56,
77–78, 107, 110n184, 120 57–58, 59, 72, 94; Adversus
 General Index 393

Haereses, 28n16, 34, 38–41; naturae, 120, 142, 156; and heresy,
on the Eucharist as proof of 151–55; on the spiritual body,
incorruption, 39; on resurrection 142–46
as transformation, 38 John the Evangelist, 10, 313, 316, 338
Isenheim altarpiece, 187 Josipos, 29
Isidore of Seville, 198n138 Judaism: Rabbinic discussion of
Islam, 3n4, 12, 54 resurrection, 12n19, 24–25, 54,
Ivo, saint, 211, 370n73 98n144; see also Babylonian
Talmud; burial and funerary
Jacques Fournier, see Benedict XII practices, Jewish
James Capelli, 217–18 Julian of Norwich, xx
James of Metz, 260, 270n166 Julian of Toledo, 8, 121, 122n15, 127,
James of Vitry, 207, 210, 221 129
James of Voragine, 294n56, 295–96, Justin Martyr, 28, 29, 30, 44, 103
309–17; ambivalence about
fragmentation, 311n118, 313n127, Koran, 54; see also Islam
314n131, 315–16; descriptions
of torture, 309n112, 312; on Lactantius, 54n132
incorrupt cadavers, 311n118 Laon, school of, 127, 128n33, 137n63
James the Dismembered, 315 Last Judgment, 75, 78, 118, 122,
Jerome, 8, 30n24, 60, 72, 86–94, 96, 123, 128, 136, 141, 163, 181, 188,
110–11; on bodily integrity, 90; 190, 279, 282–85, 306, 314, 339,
controversy with Origenists, 60, 340–41, 372; see also iconographic
67nn27 and 31, 86–88; encomium motifs, Byzantine Last Judgment
on Paula, 91–92; misogynistic?, and Last Judgment
90; on relics, 92–94, 104; on Lavra, Mount Athos, fresco, 194–95,
sexuality, 90–91 plate 16
Jesus: Ascension of, 168; bodily Lazarus, 42, 84, 118n5, plate 8
resurrection of, 4–5, 26–27, 72, Liber Pancrisis, 127–28
264; capacity for bodily sensation, Lidwina of Schiedam, 224
251–52, 333; crucifixion of, 251, linguistic turn, the, xix
plates 1, 8, 9; three days in grave Lioba, 211n39
(triduum), 270n165, 273, 276, Lombard, the, see Peter Lombard
319, 370; Transfiguration of, 69; love, 97n138, 165–66, 236, 250, 304,
in women’s spiritual writing, 313, 329, 340; of soul for body (see
335–36, 338; see also Eucharist; desire)
iconographic motifs, resurrection Lucy, saint, 313, plate 34
of Christ Lukardis of Oberweimar, 222
John XXII, 282–88 Lumiere as lais, 152n121
John Beleth, 178n73, 198, 201n4, 204, Lutgard of Aywières, 222, 224
212, 213n47 Lyons, persecutions of, 44, 49
John Climacus, 109
John Damascene, 62n9, 237 Macarius Magnes (or of Magnesia),
John of Jerusalem, 86–88, 90 61–63, 71
John Peckham, 275, 380n96 Macrina, 83–86; see also Gregory of
John Quidort of Paris, 10, 239–40, Nyssa
242, 260–61, 270, 275 Magdeburg, 203
John Scotus Erigena (or Eriugena), Magister Martin, 233n15, 246
138–39, 141–47; De divisione Malachy, saint, 173–74
 394 General Index

manuscripts: Bamberg Can. 10, torture, 45–46, 310; bodies of, in

128; Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, altars, 55; fragmentation of, 47, 48,
Hamilton 119 (Beckford 511) 49–50, 105–6; iconography of (see
(Hamilton Psalter), 195n129; iconographic motifs, attributes of
Berlin, Staatsbibliothek MS saints); incorruptible bodies of, 50;
lat. qu. 198, 190–91; Erlangen, and resurrection, 41n80, 43–51,
Cod. lat. Bibl. Univ. Erlangen 58, 77, 105–6
260, 133n55; Hamburg, Mary of Oignies, 207–8, 210, 221,
Stadtbibliothek, In scrinio 85, MS 224; see also James of Vitry
4, plate 9; London, British Library Mary, Virgin, see Virgin Mary
MS 1846 Cott. Nero (Winchester masculinity, as subject of study, xxi, 350
Psalter), 193n120, plate 12; material continuity: as a
Malibu, Calif., J. Paul Getty philosophical problem, 9–10, 24,
Museum MS 30, plates 29, 30; 66–68, 70–71, 112–13, 369; in
Melk, Stiftsbibliothek MS 1903 resurrection (see resurrection, and
(olim 1833) (Bamberg-Eichstätt material continuity)
Psalter), 192n117, 196n132, plate materiality, as scholarly concern
17; Modena, Biblioteca Estense (the material turn; the “new
Lat. MS 1023, 313n129, plate 34; materialism”), xiv, xx, xxii–xxv
Munich, Universitätsbibliothek matter, as topic of analysis, xxii,
MS Cim 15, 193n127, 196n133, xxv, 358, 364n53, 381; see also
plate 18; Munich, Bayerische materiality, as scholarly concern
Staatsbibliothek Clm 3900, Mechtild of Magdeburg, xix, 329,
193n124, plate 14; Oxford, 330n45, 334, 337–41, 373; and
Bodleian MS Douce 180 (Douce vision of otherworld, 10, 292–93,
Apocalypse), 192n117, plate 296–97, 338
11; Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce Medieval Studies, challenge to field,
293, 193n121, plate 13; Oxford, xxv–xxviii
Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 402, medievalism, as subject of study,
308n106; Paris BN Gr. 74, xxvii
189, plate 7; Paris BN Gr. 510, metamorphosis, xiv
197n136; Paris BN Lat. 3170 metempsychosis, 366, 380–81
(De visione beata), 284n19, metaphors for resurrection, see
287n26; Paris BN N.A.Fr. 23686, images of resurrection body
313n129, 314n130, plates 35, Methodius of Olympus, 61, 68–71,
36; Trier, Stadtbibliothek MS 31 81, 88, 103; Aglaophon, 68–71; on
(Trier Apocalypse), 197n134; the natural process, 71; Symposium, 69
Vatican, Cod. Vat. Lat. 10754, mind-body problem, 347, 358
134; Wiesbaden, Hessische millenarianism, 26, 30n22, 74
Landesbibliothek MS 1, plate 4; Minucius Felix, 44, 50; Octavius,
Windsor, Eton College Library MS 34–35, 38, 42n83, 49
177, 193n124 miracles, 105–8, 220–24; associated
Marbod of Rennes, 129 with women, 221–22, 224; food
Marcellus, saint, 178 multiplication, 223; healing
Margaret of Città di Castello, 323 or restoration of body, 208;
Marguerite of Oingt, 313, 329, incorruption of the cadaver,
330n45, 334–37, 373 206–7, 210–11, 221–23, inedia
Martin of Poland, 154 (miraculous fasting), 221–22;
martyrs and martyrdom, 22, 43–51, raising the dead, 105; see also
74n54; absence of pain under resurrection, as supernatural
 General Index 395

misogyny, 216, 219n65, 351, 362; Patrick’s Purgatory, see Visions of

alleged to be western tradition, the otherworld
xvi; see also body, female Paula, see Jerome, encomium on Paula
Moling, saint, 223 Pauline seed metaphor, see Bible,
Moneta of Cremona, 216n54, 217n60, I Corinthians 15; images of
219n66, 220, 282n11 resurrection body
mos teutonicus, 203, 323, 325, 328 Pericopes of Henry II, 191
movies, 353–58; Jesus of Montreal, Perpetua, 48
354; Star Wars, xxvii; Truly, person: Aristotelian conception of,
Madly, Deeply, 355–57, 365, 374 135n59; Platonic conception of,
135; as psychosomatic unity, 5, 11,
Nardo di Cione, 306n102, 308n108; 13, 135, 139n67, 159–60, 256, 282,
see also Santa Maria Novella 284, 318n2, 332, 365–69; survival
New Historicism, 348 of (as philosophical problem), 3n3,
Nicolas Eymeric, 149n107, 152–53 9–10, 24–25, 57–58, 59–63, 67–68,
259, 269–70
object-oriented ontology, xxii–xxv; Peter Comestor, 127n30
see also materiality, as scholarly Peter Damian, 210, 364nn53,59
concern Peter Lombard, 8–9, 118–19, 121–27,
objects, study of, xxii–xxv; agency of, 131–33, 138, 231; on growth and
xxiii, xxiv; anti-Semitic, xxiin16; fear nutrition, 124–26; on resurrection
of, xxv; transitional, 356; see also as reassemblage, 122–24; on
materiality, as scholarly concern resurrection as victory over change,
Oliver of Tréguier, 276, 327–28 126, 132–33; on soul’s desire for
Oresme, Nicholas, xxiii body, 122, 132, 372; on survival
Origenists, 69–70, 86–91, 141–42; of particular characteristics after
see also Anti-Origenists; Jerome death, 122n15, 124n22
Origen of Alexandria, 63–71, 84, Peter of Auvergne, 10, 260–61
120, 139, 140, 141, 143, 152, 155, Peter of Bruys, 217
241, 259, 269, 367–68, 377, 380; Peter of Capua, 128n34
Commentary on Psalm 1, 64–66; Peter of Celle, 148n102, 160n10,
Commentary on Matthew, 67; 198–99, 333n57
condemnation of, 67; eidos, 64, 66, Peter of Poitiers, 128n34
68, 69, 142; on the spiritual body, Peter of Trabes, 240, 242
64–65, 182; use of Pauline seed Peter the Chanter, 310n114
metaphor, 10, 63–64, 233n15, 238; Peter the Martyr, 315–16
see also Origenists Peter the Venerable, 176–80, 185,
Orosius, 105 217, 224
os resectum, 52 Philo, 56n142
ostensoria, see reliquary Pierre d’Alençon, 205
Otto of Freising, 138n66, 139, 141, Platonism, xvi, 66, 83, 361, 365-66
176, 180–86; on beatific vision, Poitiers, tympanum, 307, plate 27
141, 183; on heaven and hell, 181; Polycarp, 44, 50
on the resurrection body, 141, 181– popular culture (modern), xv, xxvi–
83; use of Ezekiel 37, 180, 184–85 xxviii; concern with physical
survival, 15–16, 341–42; films
Papias, 13, 23, 54n135 and TV shows about afterlife,
paradox, as a method of analysis, xxvii, 15–16, 342; see also fantasy
xv–xvi, xix–xx, xxv, xxviii literature, modern; movies;
Paschasius Radbertus, 149n106 medievalism
 396 General Index

postmedieval, see medievalism 136–37, 148, 150, 215–16, 255,

Praepositinus, 133 266; first and second resurrection,
The Pricke of Conscience, 332n53 167–68; as generational
Pseudo-Dionysius, 142 continuity, 29; iconography of (see
purgatory, 135, 186, 217–18, 280–82, iconographic motifs); and identity,
289–91; and change in the 6, 14, 24, 29, 30, 37, 74, 113, 134–
afterlife, 14, 281n5, 282, 290; 36; images of resurrection body
and reward, 266, 270n163, 281; (see images); in the Koran (see
and somatomorphic soul, 289, Koran); and material continuity, 4,
291–302; see also Visions of the 8–11, 13, 27–31, 34–36, 46, 57–58,
otherworld 69–71, 72, 76–77, 80, 99, 126–33,
136, 175, 182, 186, 260, 264,
queer studies, see identity, as fluid; 270, 272,366–71, 380; in modern
identity, as LGBTQ culture (see popular culture);
Quentin, saint, 314n130, plate 36 as natural, 24, 74, 143n79, 145,
323n18; Pauline theory of (see
Raingard of Marcigny, 177 Bible, I Corinthians 15; images of
Rainier Sacconi, 216n54, 217–19 resurrection body, Pauline seed);
Reginald of Piperno, 232–33, 234n18 and proper burial, 48–51, 51–58; in
relics, xiv, xvii, 9n14, 92–94, 104–8, Rabbinic Judaism (see Judaism); as
113–14, 178–79, 200–203, 206–13, reassemblage of body parts, 24, 30,
263, 310–11, 322–23, 356n32, 32, 35, 38, 62n10, 72, 75–76, 89,
369–71; cult of, 106–8, 178, 103–4, 106n174, 118–19, 136, 147,
201; and miracles, 80, 85; as 158, 162–63, 174–76, 213, 220,
resurrected body, 105, 174–75, 263–64, 309, 371; of specific body
211–12, 271, 275, 380; Roman parts, 37, 70, 75, 82–83, 90–91;
imperial legislation on, 106; see as super-natural, 133–35, 233–35,
also Eucharist, as relic 246, 248; as transformation, 4–6,
religion, as a category of analysis, 30, 36, 38, 42–43, 73, 79, 120, 141,
xxn12, xxiii–xxiv; see also 143, 147; as victory over decay,
cognitive turn, the 38, 40, 50, 58, 72, 84, 93–94,
reliquary, 200, 327, 335, plates 19, 22; 96–97, 113, 136, 174, 220, 224,
form of, 202, 209; ostensoria, 202– 380; as victory over desire (see
3, plate 21; “speaking” reliquaries, desire, cessation of; requies); as
202, plates 19, 20 victory over digestion, 27, 31, 33,
re-enactment, of Middle Ages, xxvii; 35, 39–41, 56, 75, 80, 91, 102–4,
see also medievalism 111, 149, 170, 185; of the whole
requies (or quies) aeterna, 236, 242, body, 36–38, 105–8, 118–19; of the
245, 250, 252, 265, 285, 286, 288, whole person, 24–25, 319, 328; see
290, 291, 304, 334; see also desire, also asceticism; body; eating and
cessation of growth; Eucharist; martyrs and
resurrection: of Christ (see Jesus, martyrdom; relics
bodily resurrection of); in retardatio, see desire, as retardation
Cistercian spirituality, 167–76; Richard I of England, 205
and community, 24n8, 26, 152, Richard Fishacre, 242n53, 243, 244
249, 287n25; denial of, 71–72, Richard of Middleton, 240, 242,
154, 215, 217–20, 230 (see also 243n61, 255n105, 263n134, 270,
Cathars); as enforcer of hierarchy, 272n177, 273n181
26, 47n103, 90–91, 109–12, Robert Grosseteste, 207, 233, 246
 General Index 397

Robert of Anjou, 288–89 Stephen the Martyr, 42, 105–6

Robert of Melun, 128n34, 135, 256 Strozzi chapel, see Santa Maria
Robert Pullus, 128n34 Novella
Roger Bacon, 221, 247, 323n18 Suger of St. Denis, 209–10
Roger Marston, 271 survival (personal), see material
Roger of Wendover, 205 continuity; person, survival
Romuald, saint, 210 of (as philosophical problem);
Rufinus, 64, 90–91 resurrection, of the whole person;
soul, as self
Saint Firmin, portal of, at Amiens, Suso, Henry, xxi
see Amiens, tympanum Syon abbey, 308n106
saints, see hagiography; iconographic
motifs, attributes of saints; Tatian, 30n26, 31
martyrs and martyrdom; relics Tertullian of Carthage, 40–43, 44,
Saint Servatius, casket of, 192n117 46, 50, 56, 57, 59–60, 72, 88, 94,
Salonica, wall painting, 188 104; on Aristotelian definition
Salvo Burci, 216, 217–18 of change, 36, 56; on asceticism
San Brizio chapel at Orvieto, 187 as preparation for resurrection,
San Gimignano, fresco, 306n102 37n66, 40–41, 48; on cannibalism,
Santa Croce, Florence, fresco, 41–42; De resurrectione carnis,
306n102 21, 34–38, 40–43; on Eucharist as
Santa Maria del Casale, Brindisi, proof of incorruption, 41; image
fresco, 195n129 of repaired ship, 37; images of
Santa Maria in Piano, fresco, 306n102 regurgitation, 40n77; on material
Santa Maria Novella, Florence, continuity, 36, 40; on martyrdom,
frescoes, 306n102, plates 25, 26 47–48; misogynistic?, 37n64,
scholasticism, 137, 157, 247 43; on proper burial, 48; on
Sheol, 22, 53, 75, 78 resurrection as reward, 36, 47–48
Shepherd of Hermas, 23 Theodore of Echternach, 210–11, 222
Sicard of Cremona, 198, 201n4, Theophilus of Alexandria, 90
204n14, 212 Theophilus of Antioch, 30, 31, 55, 57
Signorelli, see San Brizio chapel Theophrastus, 38
Simon of Tournai, 128n34 Theseus, ship of, as philosophical
Society for Creative Anachronism, problem, xvii
xxvii thing theory, xxii-xxiv; see also
soul: and beatific vision, 266–69, 279 materiality, as scholarly concern
(see also beatific vision); between Thomas Aquinas, xvii, xix, 66n22,
death and resurrection, 13–14, 232–37, 239, 240nn45 and 47, 248,
122, 279–80 (see also Divine 252n39, 256–71, 281, 289, 310,
Comedy; purgatory); desire for 321, 358n36, 368–69, 380; anti-
body (see desire); immortality of, Thomist reaction of the 1270s and
5, 13, 230, 257n113; in otherworld 1280s, 10, 261, 271–76; on desire
visions (see Visions of the of soul for body, 236, 372; doctrine
otherworld); as self, 10–11, 259, of formal identity, 10, 259–63, 271,
262, 302, 305, 318–19 (see also 369; doctrine of unicity of form,
formal identity); somatomorphic, 256–65, 269–70; on I Corinthians,
10–11, 139n67, 291–303, 306, 320; 232–36; and hylomorphism, 256;
see also heaven; hell on Job, 234n17, 258; on matter as
spiritualism, 354 principle of individuation, 264,
 398 General Index

Thomas Aquinas (Continued) of Zosimus, 297n68; Patrick’s

270; Supplementum, 234n18, Purgatory, 292, 294n53; Thurchill,
264; on survival of particular 292, 296, 307; Voyage of Brendan,
characteristics after death, 265–66; 292, 294n53; Wetti, 297; see
see also Aristotle, in scholastic also Apocrypha; Bede; Bernard
writing; condemnations; of Clairvaux; Divine Comedy;
equivocality of body Guibert of Nogent; Honorius
Thomas Becket, reliquary of, 209, Augustodunensis; Mechtild of
plate 22 Magdeburg; Otto of Freising;
Thomas of Cantimpré, 207, 221, 247 Perpetua; Visions of Tondal;
Thomas the Cistercian, 169, 170, 224 William of St. Thierry
Thomas Waleys, 284, 287 Visions of Tondal, 138, 292–94,
Torcello, Last Judgment, 188–90, 299, 304–5, 308, plates 29, 30;
plate 6 images of regurgitation in, 293–94;
transgender, study of, xxi popularity of, 293; as precursor of
Trier Apocalypse, see manuscripts, Dante, 293
Trier
Trinity College Apocalypse, 193n122, Waldensians, 215, 217
308n107, plate 28 Walter Daniel, 210
triduum, see Jesus, three days in Walter Map, 208n28
grave West, Rebecca, xix, 1, 2n1
Two Cities, see Otto of Freising William Durandus, 201n4, 212,
213n47, 238n34
unicity of form, 10, 256–65, 269–70, William of Auxerre, 133, 134–35,
271–76, 277; see also formal 232n9, 233, 235, 246
identity William of Champeaux, 127
Uta of Naumburg (statue of), xxvi William of La Mare, 271, 273–74, 281
Utrecht, reliquary bust, 211 William of Malmesbury, 153
William of Newburgh, 169n48,
veritas humanae naturae, 133, 135, 170n51
231, 262 William of St. Thierry, 138, 163,
Victricius of Rouen, 93, 107 166–67, 183, 222, 224
Vigilantius, 92–94 William of Ware, 242n53
Virgin Mary, 9n14, 362; Bodily Winchester Psalter, see manuscripts,
Assumption of (see Assumption, London, British Library
Bodily, of the Virgin Mary); body women mystics, 330, 334–41, 360,
of, 169–70, 311n118; Immaculate 373, 374
Conception of, 321 Wulfstan of Winchester, 222
Visio Dei, see beatific vision
Visions of the otherworld: Alberic, xenophobia, xv
292n45; Barontus, 295; the
monk of Evesham, 290, 294, 296; Zeno of Verona, 103
Francesca Romana, 297; Narrative Zoroastrianism, 12n20
 Index of Secondary Authors

Editors and translators are not indexed unless they are also cited as authors.

Ackerman, Robert W., 281n9, Barnes, Timothy David, 35n54, 61n6

326n28, 328n38, 331, 359n39 Bartal, Renana, xxiin16
Aigrain, René, 312n120 Barton, Carlin, 44n93, 45n95, 53n128
Allen, Prudence, 255n105, 369n69 Barton, G. A., 47n106
Alston, Mary Niven, 322n12 Bataille, Georges, 45n95, 361n45
Altenburger, Margarete, 63n12 Batany, Jean, 320n4
Amann, E., 68nn34,36, 71n45 Bauer, J., 67n29
Ancelet-Hustache, Jeanne, 337n72 Bazan, Bernardo C., 259n118,
Angenendt, Arnold, 107n178, 370n72 262n129, 367n65
Appleby, Joyce, 379n95 Becker, E. T., 292n45, 293n48
Arens, W., 112n190 Beckwith, Sarah, 362n47, 363n52
Ariès, Philippe, 7n12, 53n132, Beinek, Justyna, xiii, xxii
56n143, 106n175, 201n3, 203n9, Bell, Rudolph M., 352n25
204nn13,15, 206n20, 326nn27–28 Bellamy, J. G., 324n20
Arnheim, Rudolf, 306n101 Belting, Hans, 202n6, 306n102
Artelt, Walter, 322n12 Benton, John F., 140n69, 318n2
Arweck, Elisabeth, xxiin15 Bernard, A., 204n14
Astell, Ann W., 164n27, 303n91, Bernstein, Alan E., 7n12, 280n2
329n42 Bethell, Denis, 207n21
Atwood, Margaret, 346n2 Bett, Henry, 142n75, 146n94,
152n119, 153nn125,127
Barker, Francis, 325n23 Bevington, David, 307nn104–105
Barnard, L. W., 28n17, 30n27, 32n37, Biller, P. P. A., 219n66
56n143, 59n1, 65n17 Billot, Louis, 90n116, 230n2
 400 Index of Secondary Authors

Bishop, Ian, 320n4 Bullough, Donald, 203n9, 204

Bloch, R. Howard, 216n56, 352n22, Bultmann, R., 6n10
362n48, 376n89 Bultot, Robert, 360, 364nn53,55,59
Boase, T. S. R., 118n3, 203n9, 205n16 Burns, E. Jane, 362n48
Bodner, Neta, xxiin16 Butler, Judith, xx, 145n89, 347n6,
Bonnardière, A.-M., 95n131, 96n134, 349n12, 361, 365, 369n70, 375–77
98n144 Butler, Shane, xxvin28
Bonne, Jean-Claude, 194n125 Bynum, Caroline W., xivnn2–3,
Booth, A. D., 93n129 xvin5, xviin6, xixnn9–10, xxiin16,
Bordo, Susan, 346nn1,3, 347, 348n8, xxivn22, xxvn26, 3n3, 5n10,
351n19, 354, 376, 379n94 7, 11nn16–17, 12n18, 16n26,
Bornstein, Diane, 216n56, 362n48 21n1, 56n140, 118n2, 140n69,
Boschers, Walter, 202n6 187nn100–101, 188n105, 191n116,
Boswell, John E., xx, 214n50 196n132, 197n134, 202n6, 205n16,
Bottomley, Frank, 47n106 206n20, 207n24, 209n33, 214n49,
Bouchard, Marie-Noël, 167n40 221nn72–73, 222nn74–77,83,
Bougerol, J. Guy, 248n73 224n86, 242n56, 247n72, 263n136,
Boureau, Alain, 309nn111–12, 270n165, 271n171, 281n8,
310n113, 312n120, 313n127 290nn36–39, 294n54, 297n70,
Bouvier, Michel, 206n20, 326n27 305n98, 309nn109,111–112,
Bowman, James, 14n23 310n117, 312nn119,121, 314n129,
Boyarin, Daniel, 12n19, 351n20 316nn138–139, 318n2, 321nn9–10,
Brandon, Samuel G. F., 22n2 323nn15–16, 326n29, 327nn31,35,
Branner, Robert, 313n129 329n39, 330n45, 333n58, 334n63,
Braun, Joseph, 202n6, 203n7 337n71, 342nn86–87, 354n27,
Bredero, Adrian H., 280n2 358n36, 362n47
Brenk, Beat, 75n59, 188nn104,106,
189n107, 190nn109,112, Cadden, Joan, 136, 231n8, 351n20,
197nn135–136, 198n137 352nn21,24
Brennan, M., 142n75 Callaway, Joseph A., 54n135
Brieger, Peter H., 193n122 Callus, Daniel A., 256n109, 257n112,
Brock, Sebastian, 73n49 262n132
Brody, Saul N., 324, 327n31 Cames, Gérard, 117n1, 189n107
Brown, Bill, xxiin15 Camille, Michael, 214
Brown, C., 3n4 Camporesi, Piero, 7n12, 55n136,
Brown, Elizabeth A. R., 52n121, 112n191, 192n119, 198n138,
202n5, 203n9, 205n18, 207nn22– 220, 225n89, 292n45, 322n14,
23, 275n186, 276n188, 322n13, 324nn20–21, 364n58, 371n76
323, 325, 327n36, 328n37, 370n71 Cannadine, David, 15n24
Brown, Norman O., 349 Capelle, G. C., 153nn127–128,
Brown, Peter, 12n18, 44n93, 53n128, 154nn130–133,135
64n15, 67n31, 86n106, 90, Cappuyns, Maïeul, 142n75, 146n94,
104n171, 105n172, 106n175, 153nn124–127
108n180, 109n182, 135n59, Cardman, Francine Jo, 35n54, 36n60,
329n40, 351n20, 356n32 43n89
Brundage, James A., 362n49 Carnley, Peter, 5n8
Buc, Philippe, xxvin29, 137n61, Carozzi, Claude, 131n47, 138, 141,
217n56, 361n45, 363n50, 369n69 158n2, 291n40, 293n48
Buchet, Luc, 213n45 Carra, Massimo, 187n100
 Index of Secondary Authors 401

Cavell, Stanley, 359n38 Demaitre, Luke, 321n6

Cavendish, Richard, 187n101, 307n104 Dennett, Daniel C., 16n27, 354n28
Cazelles, Brigitte, 208n29, 309n110, Dennis, T. J., 63n12, 81n85
312n120 Denzinger, Heinrich, 155n136, 280n3,
Chadwick, Henry, 56n143, 65n17, 285n22, 366n63
67nn29,32 de Pina-Cabral, João, 224n87
Challet, A., 96n136 Dereine, Charles, 214
Chenu, M.-D., 121n13, 137n63, 214n48, de Ste. Croix, G. E. M., 44n93
231n6, 233n12, 258n117, 264n141 Devun, Leah, xxin14
Christe, Yves, 188n103 Dewart, Joanne E. McWilliam, 2n2,
Christiansen, Keith, 187n98 23n4, 60n2, 63nn12,14, 67n30,
Church, F. Forrester, 37n64 95n132, 96n135, 99n151, 340n83,
Clark, Anne L., 362n48 366n64
Clark, Elizabeth A., 64n15, 86n106, De Vooght, D.-P., 105n171
88n109, 90, 91, 109, 367n65 Dickins, Bruce, 55n136
Coakley, John, xviii Diehl, Charles, 195n128
Cohen, Jeremy, 77n67, 83n92, 302n89 Dietheur, Franz, 194n126
Cohen, Kathleen, 360n44 Dinzelbacher, Peter, 294n54, 296n64,
Cohen, Shaye J. D., 22n2, 25n9 297, 320n4, 366n61
Colish, Marcia, 122n14, 123n16 Dobschütz, E. von, 197
Collon-Gevaert, Suzanne, 192n117 Döllinger, Ign. von, 216n55
Constable, Giles, 178n73, 214 Dondaine, Antoine, 215n52, 217n59
Cornélis, H., 2n2, 3n4, 232n10, Dondaine, H.-F., 153n127, 154n129,
366n64 277n196, 283n16
Corwin, Virginia, 27n14 Doniger, Wendy, 12n19
Courcelle, Pierre, 62n8, 105n171 Douglas, Mary, 110
Crouzel, H., 2n2, 26n11, 28n17, 64, Douie, Decima, 279n1, 283n17,
65nn18–19, 66, 67nn27–28,30,32, 285nn20–21, 287n28
68n34, 69nn37–38, 219n65 Dronke, Peter, 158, 302n89, 303n91
Cullmann, Oscar, 5, 13, 318 duCille, Ann, 375n86
Cumont, Franz, 51n119, 53n130 Dudden, Frederick Holmes, 110n184
Duden, Barbara, 348n9
Dahl, Ellert, 209n34, 210n35, 211n38 Dumézil, G., 280
Dalarun, Jacques, 219n65 Dunn-Lardeau, Brenda, 309n111
d’Alverny, M.-Th., 153n127 Duparc, Pierre, 209n33, 325n25,
Daniel, E. Randolph, 248n73 327n32
Danielou, Jean, 63n12, 81n84, 83n93 Durling, Robert M, 299n77, 364n53
Daston, Lorraine, xxiin15 Dushkes, Laura, 207n24
Davies, Brian, 257n113 Duval, Yves-Marie, 60, 61n5,
Davis, J. G., 26n12, 43n91 86nn106–107, 88, 89n116, 98n142
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 348n8, 375n87 Duval, Yvette, 106n174
de Campos, Deoclecio Redig, Dykmans, Marc, 164n29, 282nn11,12,
188n106, 195n130 15, 283n17, 284nn18–19, 285n20,
de Certeau, Michel, 336n69 286, 287nn25–26
Dechow, Jon F., 64n15, 67n31, 68n34,
69n37 Ebert, Teresa L., 350n18
de Gaiffier, Baudouin, 312n120 Ebrey, Patricia, 52n121
Delehaye, Hippolyte, 312n120 Edwards, Graham R., 280n2
Delumeau, Jean, 360, 364n55 Edwards, Mark, 367n65
 402 Index of Secondary Authors

Ellenbogen, Josh, xxvn25 Geary, Patrick J., 106n175, 356n31,

Elliott, Alison Goddard, 312n120 382n98
Elliott, Dyan, xviiin7, 363n49 Geisler, Norman, 15n23
Elsen, Albert, 194n126 Gélis, Jacques, 326n27
Endres, Joseph A., 140, 141, 146n91, Getz, Faye Marie, 324n19, 326n30
147n95, 151, 152n119 Gillen, Otto, 75n59, 117n1
Enlart, Camille, 203n9 Gilson, Etienne, 223n82, 230n2,
Evans, Austin P., 215nn51–52 248nn73,75, 256n109, 260n121,
Evans, Ernest, 35n54 262n131, 270n166, 271n170, 272,
275n187, 298n75, 368n68
Fava, Domenico, 313n129 Glass, Dorothy, 193n124
Ferrante, Joan, 299n76 Glendinning, Victoria, 2n1
Festugière, A., 67n29 Glente, Karen, 330n45
Fevrier, Paul-Albert, 51n121 Glorieux, Palémon, 231n7
Figueras, Pau, 54n135 Goering, Joseph, 233n13, 367n67
Finucane, Ronald C., 203n9, 205n16, Gooch, Paul, 3nn4–5, 4n7, 6n10,
207n21, 212nn41–42,45, 220n69, 47n106, 318n1, 343n89
291n40, 324n20, 326n27, 366n61 Goodenough, E. R., 56n142
Flanagan, Sabina, 158n4 Goulet, R., 61n6
Flint, Valerie I. J., 137n63, 140n70, Grabar, André, 45n98, 55n138,
146nn92–93, 148n103, 151n118, 106nn174–175, 188n106
157n1 Gracia, Jorge J. E., 255n108
Fodor, Jerry, 16n28 Grant, R. M., 23n4, 28n17,
Ford, J. Massingferd, 36n58 30nn27,28, 31n31, 33n44, 38,
Foster, Frances, 291n40 55n139, 56n143, 65n17, 95n132
Foucault, Michel, 348, 369n70 Graves-Brown, Paul M., xxiin15
Fox, Matthew, 158 Greenblatt, Stephen, 348
Fox, Renée C., 16n26, 371n74 Grégoire, Réginald, 129n37
Fox, Robin Lane, 108n180 Greshake, Gisbert, 2n2, 232n10,
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 375n87 248n74, 249n81, 256nn109–110,
Franklin, James C., 337n72 257n115, 259n119, 260, 261n127,
Freccero, John, 299n76 270nn164–165, 277n195, 287n28,
Fredouille, Jean-Claude, 35n54 318n1, 320n5, 367n64
Fredriksen, Paula, 95n131, 99n151, Grossi, V., 2n2, 26n11, 28n17
135n59 Gundry, Robert, 6
Freedberg, David, xxvn25 Gurevich, Aaron J., 280n2
Freud, Sigmund, 113n193 Guth, Klaus, 140n69, 211n38, 222n79
Frugoni, Chiara, 195n130 Guthrie, Stewart, xxiiin20
Fulton, Rachel, xixn9, 169n48,
170n52 Haase, Wiebke, xxivn24
Fuss, Diana, 346,375n85 Hahn, Cynthia, xxivn24
Hallam, Elizabeth M., 205n17,
Gager, John G., 26nn12–13, 43n91, 327n34
109, 110 Hallinger, Kassius, 97n138
Galey, John, 188n106 Halm, Philipp Maria, 204n10
Galpern, Joyce Ruth, 192n119 Hamburger, Jeffrey, 336, 337n70,
Gardiner, Eileen, 291n40, 362n47, 363n52
292nn41,43,45, 295n60 Haraway,Donna, 379n95
Gatch, Milton McC., 2n2, 24n8 Harris, Marvin, 112n190
 Index of Secondary Authors 403

Harris, Murray J., 15n23 Jacquart, Danielle, 12n18, 322n12,

Haseloff, Arthur, 191n114, 193n121 351n20, 352nn21,24
Head, Thomas, 106n174, 175n69, 370 Jacquet, Judith-Danielle, 208n30
Heesterman, J. C., xix James, Edward, 51n121
Heinzmann, Richard, 128n34, James, M. R., 194n124
130n41, 133nn53–55, 134n56, Johnson, Mark, 16n26, 347n6
135nn57,59, 256n110, 365n60 Jónsdóttir, Selma, 188nn104–106,
Heningham, Eleanor, 219n67, 331n48 196n131
Henquinet, F. M., 121n13, 246n70, Joppich, Godehard, 34n49
257n111 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 348n9, 350
Hermann-Mascard, Nicole, 49n115,
106nn174–175, 201n5, 209n33, Kandel, Eric, xxiiin19
327n32, 357n32 Käppelli, Thomas, 285n20, 287nn27–28
Hertz, Robert, 52n123, 293n48 Kartsonis, Anna, 190n112
Hewson, M. Anthony, 238n35, Kaye, Joel, 320, 329n41
255n105, 261n128, 262n131, Keenan, James F., 348n11, 360n43
272n177 Keenan, William, xxiin15
Heynck, Valens, 273n179 Kelly, J. N. D., 26n11, 43n91, 86n106,
Hillgarth, J. N., 121n12 93n129, 366n63
Himmelfarb, Martha, 291n40 Ker, Neal Ripley, 194n124
Hissette, Roland, 230n3, 231n5, Kilgour, Maggie, 55n136, 110n185,
272nn174–175, 275n184, 281n7 111n189, 112n191, 361n45, 366n62
Hocedez, E., 262n131, Klack-Eitzen, Charlotte, xxivn24
271nn169,172–173 Klinck, Roswitha, 315n136
Hoedl, L., 270n164 Kluxen, Wolfgang, 259n188
Hofstadter, Douglas R., 16n27, Knowles, David, 230n2
354n28 Koch, Joseph, 285n20
Holl, K., 45n98 Koester, Helmut, 45n98
Hollywood, Amy, xviii Kohler, Kaufmann, 47n106
Holsinger, Bruce, xixn9 Kremer, Jacob, 2n2, 232n10, 248n74,
hooks, bell, 354n28 259n119, 367n64
Howard, John, 293n46, 337n72 Kübel, Wilhelm, 233nn14–15, 236n26,
Howell, Martha C., 348n10, 363n49 239n42, 242n53, 243n63, 246nn69–
Huber, Johannes, 153nn124–125,127– 70, 257n111, 264n140
128, 154nn133–134 Kühnel, Bianca, xxiin16
Hughes, Diane Owen, 320n3 Kunze, Konrad, 309n111
Hughes, Robert, 7n12, 192n119,
193nn120–121, 306n102, 307n105 Ladner, Gerhart B., 63n12, 81n84,
Hugueny, E., 261n124 120n11
Huizinga, Johan, 331 Laidlaw, James, xxivn23
Hunt, Lynn, 379n95 Lakoff, George, 16n26
Huot-Girard, Giselle, 309n111 Lambert, M. D., 219, 364n57
Landes, Richard, 14n22
Ingold, Tim, xxivn23 Laqueur, Thomas, 145n89, 348n9,
Irigaray, Luce, 361 352n24
Landsberg, P. L., 98n144
Jacob, Margaret, 379n95 Lang, Bernhard, 7n12, 12n20, 15n23
Jacoff, Rachel, 298n75, 299, 304n95, Langlois, Ch.-V., 152n121
368n68 Latour, Bruno, xvn4, xxvn25
 404 Index of Secondary Authors

Le Bachelet, X., 279n1, 283n17, Matson, Wallace I., 358n35

285nn20,22 Matter, E. Ann, 303n91
Le Boulluec, Alain, 56n143, 57n144, Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 299n76
65n17 McDannell, Colleen, 7n12, 12n20,
Leclercq, Henri, 50nn116–117, 15n23, 291n40, 297n69, 303n92
51n119, 106nn174–175, 164n27, McElwain, H. M., 2n2
203n9 McGinn, Bernard, 24n7, 27n14,
Leclercq, Jean, 157n1, 214, 329 101n157, 110n184, 167n38,
Lefevre, Yves, 139n68, 147n95 303n91, 329n40
Leff, Gordon, 231n7 McGuire, Brian Patrick, 223n85
Legner, Anton, 194n126 McLaughlin, Eleanor C., 216n53,
Le Goff, Jacques, xiiin1, 7n12, 363n50
138, 146n93, 217n59, 264n141, McLaughlin, Megan, 212n42, 290n38
266n148, 270n163, 280, 281nn5,9, McMullin, Ernan, 361n46, 364n53
282nn11,13–14, 288n30, 290, Meier, Christel, 352n23
291n40, 292nn43–45, 294n53, Mellinkoff, Ruth, 187n99
295nn57–58,60, 296n65, 306n102, Mersch, Emile, 232n10
331n48, 351n19, 353n26 Meyer, Erich, 202n6, 203n7
Lehmann-Brockhaus, Otto, 207n21 Meyer, P., 130n40, 152n121
Lerner, Robert, 290n37 Meyers, Eric M., 54n135
Lewis, C. S., 329 Michel, A., 2n2, 23n4, 61n6, 96n135,
Lochrie, Karma, 362n47, 363n52 103n166, 108n179, 232n10,
Loomis, C. Grant, 208n30, 223nn83–84 260n123, 261n126, 264n141
Lorren, Claude, 213n45 Mikkers, Edmund, 167n42
Lottin, Odon, 127nn30–31, 128nn32– Miles, Margaret R., 95n131, 135n59,
35, 257n111 349n14
Luyten, Norbert, 259n118 Milhaven, J. Giles, 259n118, 268n157
Lynch, Charles H., 108n179 Miller, Daniel, xxiin15
Millet, Gabriel, 195n128
MacCormack, Sabine, 106n174 Mireux, Marie-Danielle, 140n69,
MacCulloch, J. A., 2n2 206n20
Macy, Gary, 316n139 Möllers, Hermann, 76n61, 77n67
Maier, Anneliese, 285n20, 286 Mooney, Catherine M., xviii, 362n48
Malafouris, Lambros, xxiiin18 Moore, George Foot, 25n9, 54n135
Malraux, A., 313n129 Moore, R. I., 214, 324
Malvern, Marjorie M., 331n48 Morgan, Alison, 187n100, 193n120,
Manitius, Max, 151n118 291n40, 294n55, 296nn64–65,
Marcovich, Miroslav, 28n17 298n74, 306n102, 307n105
Markus, Robert A., 44n94, 109n183 Morgan, David, xxn12, xxiin15
Marmorstein, Arthur, 22n2 Morgan, Timothy C., 15n23
Marrou, Henri, 61n5, 95n131, Morris, Colin, 164n27
96n134, 98n144 Morris, David B., 347n7, 359
Marti, Kevin, 298n75 Morrison, Karl F., 374n84
Martin, Emily, 348n9, 349n15, 376n89 Moule, C. F. D., 4n7
Martin, Jane Roland, 346n3, 375n85, Mourant, John A., 95n132, 96n136,
376 97n137, 98n140, 102n163
Martin, F. X., 205n17 Mundy, John H., 230n3
Massaut, Jean-Pierre, 280n2 Murdoch, John, 320
Mathieu, Jean-Marie, 51n119, 84, Murray, Robert, 73n49
112n191 Murray, Stephen, 211n40, 314n130
 Index of Secondary Authors 405

Nagel, Alexander, xxiin16, xxvii Paul, Jacques, 53n128

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 347n6 Paxton, Frederick S., 46n101, 51n121,
Nautin, P., 28n17, 29n18, 49n112 53n127, 55n136
Naz, R., 201n3 Payer, Pierre J., 363n49
Neale, J. Mason, 201n4 Peel, Malcolm Lee, 29n18
Nelson, James B., 348n11, 350n18 Peers, Glenn, xxiiin22
Nersessian, Sirarpie der, 189n107, Pelikan, Jaroslav, 2n2, 38n71
194n127 Pelster, Franz, 242n56, 270n165,
Neumann, Hans, 337n72 275n187
Newman, Barbara J., xviiin7, 158n4 Perry, John, 5n10
Nickelsburg, George W. E., Jr., 5n9, Peters, Edward, 205n18, 323
22n2 Petersen, Joan M., 53n129, 104n171,
Nirenberg, David, xxvin29 106n176, 201n5
Nock, Arthur Darby, 49n112, Petroff, Elizabeth Alvida, 211n39,
51nn119–120, 52, 53n129 330n45, 333n57
Nolan, Kieran, 237n34, 258n116, Petrucci, Alfredo, 195n129
262nn130,133, 263nn134–136, Phillippart, G., 309n110
264n142, 266n149, 321n8, 357n32 Pippin, Robert, xxivn23
Nozick, Robert, 354 Platelle, Henri, 326n27
Ntedika, Joseph, 22n2 Polacco, Renato, 188n105
Nussbaum, Martha, 358n35, Porter, Roy, 12n18, 347, 348n8, 350,
359nn37–38 351n19
Nye, Robert A. 352n24 Posse, Hans, 187n101
Potter, David, 44n93, 53n128
Obama, Barack, xxviii Pouchelle, Marie-Christine, 221n71,
Obeyesekere, Gananath, 361n45 309n111, 322n12, 324, 362n49
O’Connell, John P., 86n106, 89 Prigent, Pierre, 28n17, 29n21, 30n22
O’Daly, Gerard, 95n131 Putnam, Hilary, 358n35, 359nn37–38,
O’Hagan, Angelo P., 22n3, 23n5, 381n97
26n10
Ohlmeyer, A., 256n111 Quasten, Johannes, 32n36, 45n98,
O’Meara, John J., 142n75 49n115, 61n6, 79n75
Omont, Henri, 189nn107–108, Quinn, Patrick, 347n6, 367n66
197nn134,136
O’Neill, Ynez Viole, 322n12 Rabinow, Paul, 343n88
Onians, Richard Broxton, 38n69, Ratzinger, Joseph, 248n73
52n126, 54n133 Raymo, Robert R., 332n53
Orbe, A., 34n49 Reames, Sherry L., 309n111
Orpen, Goddard Henry, 205n17 Reaney, James, 346n2
Otter, Monika, 207n21, 208n28 Regalado, Nancy Freeman, 223n82
Régnier-Bohler, Danielle, 224n86,
Paeseler, Wilhelm, 188nn105–106, 330n45, 336n69, 337n71, 363n52
195n130, 197n135 Renfrew, Colin, xxiiin18
Pagels, Elaine, 26n13, 29n18, 109 Reinecke, P., 51n121
Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, Reynolds, Roger E., 212n44
323n18, 325n25, 326n30, 352n23 Rich, Adrienne, 346
Parfit, Derek, 342n87 Riley, Denise, 375n86
Park, Katharine, 322nn12,14, 325, Ringbom, Sixten, 359n37
352n24 Ringgren, Helmer, 2n2, 12n20, 54n133
Parsons, Wilfred, 55n136 Robinson, J. A. T., 6n10
 406 Index of Secondary Authors

Robinson, Marilynne, xxviii Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 349n13,

Rochais, H.-M., 138n65 357n33
Rodwell, Warwick, 203n9 Segarra, Francisco, 260
Rooney, Ellen, 346n3, 358n34 Seidl, H., 257n114, 270n164
Rordorf, W., 44n93 Sejourné, P., 106n175, 201n5
Rorty, Richard, 378 Sheldon-Williams, I. P., 142nn75–76
Rothkrug, Lionel, 48, 202n5, Shilts, Randy, 349n13
371n75 Shoemaker, Sydney, 5n10
Rott, J., 117n2 Shorr, Dorothy C., 187n100, 193n120
Rouche, Michel, 53n128 Sider, R., 35n54
Rousselle, Aline, 42, 44n93 Sigal, Pierre-André, 220n69
Rublack, Ulinka, xxivn24 Silk, Mark, 15n24
Ruh, Kurt, 337n72 Simmons, Thomas, 15n24
Ruis-Campos, J., 28n16 Singleton, Charles S., 295n59,
Rush, Alfred C., 50n115, 51n119, 300n81
52n126 Siniscalco, P., 32n36, 35n54
Siraisi, Nancy G., 322n12, 325
Salisbury, Joyce, 135n59 Smith, Julia M.H., xxivn24
Salzman, Michele R., 111n186 Snyder, James, 197n134
Sanday, Peggy Reeves, 55n140, Sommerfeldt, John R., 164, 165n35,
112n190, 361n45 172n61
Sandler, Lucy Freeman, 283n17 Southern, R. W., 164n27, 329
Sanford, Eva Matthews, 140n70, Spelman, Elizabeth V., 351n19
146n92, 147n95, 151n118 Spicker, Stuart F., 16n28, 347n6
Santi, Francesco, 325n25 Spiegel, Gabrielle, 379n95
Satran, David, 36, 99n146 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 346n3,
Sauerländer, Willibald, 307n104, 357
308n107 Stainton, Anne, 190n109,
Saumagne, Charles, 44n93 193nn120–122
Sawday, Jonathan, 325n23 Stalley, Roger, 192n116
Saxer, Victor, 40n77, 49n114, 53n129, Stammler, Wolfgang, 194n126
55n137, 104n171, 105nn171–173, Stemberger, Günter, 5n9, 22n2, 25n9
106nn174–175 Stone, Lawrence, 379n95
Scarry, Elaine, 347n7 Straw, Carole, 89n112
Schiller, Gertrud, 188n102, Stroumsa, Gedaliahu G., 57n146,
191nn114,116, 314n129 135n59
Schmaus, Michael, 237nn29–30, 248, Struever, Nancy, 16
249n78, 252n96 Suarez, Francisco de, 260
Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 281n6, 356, Sullivan, Lawrence E., 348n11
359n37, 366n61 Swarzenski, Hanns, 191nn114,116,
Schmitz-Valckenberg, Georg, 192n117, 193nn121,124, 196n132
215n51 Swazey, Judith P., 16n26, 371n74
Schneider, Theodor, 257n114, Swete, H. B., 23n3
270n164, 320n5 Swinburne, Richard; 5n10, 259n118
Scott, Joan W., 376n90 Sylla, Edith, 320
Schotter, Anne H., 297n69, 320n4
Schrade, Hubert, 188n102, 198n137 Tanquerey, F. J., 130n40, 152n121
Schweizer, Johannes, 203nn8–9, Tanner, Jakob, 347n7
206n19, 213nn46–47 Taylor, Michael Allyn, 263n136, 321n8
 Index of Secondary Authors 407

Théry, G., 153n127, 154n128 Walsh, Katherine, 283n17,

Thomas, Louis-Vincent, 52n124, 285nn20–21
206n20, 225n89, 293n48, 361n45 Ward, Benedicta, 220n69,
Thomasset, Claude, 12n18, 322n12, 316n138
351n20, 352nn21,24 Watson, G., 95n131
Thurston, Herbert, 206n20, 222n77, Weakland, J. E., 283n17
326n29 Webb, Benjamin, 201n4
Tilley, Maureen, 45n97, 46nn99–100 Weber, Hermann J., 133n53, 135n59,
Tillmann, Hans, 337n72 232n10, 233nn13–14, 236n28,
Toews, John E., xixn10, 348n10 242nn53–56, 243n61, 245n67,
Toynbee, J. M. C, 51nn119–120, 52, 248n74, 254n101, 256n110, 260,
53n129 264nn141–142, 265n144, 268n256,
Trapè, A., 95n131 271n171, 277nn191,193
Travill, Anthony A., 321n6 Webster, Charles, 327n35
Treadgold, Irina, 188n105 Weibel, Peter, xxvn25
Tromp, Nicolas J., 53n131 Weigert, Laura, xxiiin17
Tugendhaft, Aaron, xxvn25 Weinstein, Donald, 352n25
Tugwell, Simon, 353n26, 367n66, Weisheipl, James A., 233n12
370, 372 Weissgraf, Tanja, xxivn24
Turner, Alice, 190n109, 193nn120,122 Weitzmann, Kurt, 188n106
Turner, Bryan S., 347n7 West, Rebecca, xix, 1, 2n1
Twycross, Meg, 190n110 Wicki, Nikolaus, 121nn12–13,
137n61, 155n137, 172n61, 230n2,
Underwood, Paul A., 194n127 233n13, 235n21, 247n71, 266n147,
Updike, John, 343n89 269n160, 279n1, 367n67
Utley, Francis Lee, 331n48 Wieck, Roger S., 293n48
Wilmart, André, 329
Valois, N., 283n17 Wills, Garry, 14n23
Valory-Radot, M. I., 223n82 Wilson, Katharina, 158n3
Valton, E., 52n126 Wilson, Stephen, 174n68, 202nn5–6,
Van Eijk, A. H. C. [Ton H. C], 22n3, 224n87
23n6, 26n10, 27nn14–15, 34n48, Winroth, Anders, 315n136
35n56, 56n141, 62n9, 367n64 Wippel, John F., 242n53, 243n58,
Van Steenberghen, Fernand, 230n3, 259n120, 261n126, 264n139,
241n50 270n165, 271nn168,172,
Van Unnik, W. C., 29n18, 43n91, 60n2 275nn185–186, 276n189
Vauchez, André, 309n111 Wood, Christopher S., xxivn23
Vergote, Antoine, 348n11, 358n36,
367n66 Yarborough, Anne, 111n186
Vicaire, M.-H., 214n48 Young, Bailey, 51n121
von der Gabelentz, Hans, 194n124
Vööbus, Arthur, 31n35, 47n105 Zaleski, Carol, 148n102, 223n80,
Voss, Georg, 75n59,188n104, 197n135 281n8, 291, 294nn53–55,
Vovelle, Michel, 52n121 295nn57,60, 296nn62–63, 297n68,
306n101, 331n48, 366n61
Wack, Mary Frances, 352n21, 359n38 Zavalloni, Roberto, 263n134,
Waghorne, Joanne Punzo, xxiiin22 273n178
Wakefield, Walter L., 215nn51–52, Zoepfl, Friedrich, 203n9,
217n57 204n11