The Resurrection of the body in Western Christianity, 200-1336

by Caroline Walker Bynum

Ebook, 1995

Status

Available

Call number

230

Genres

Religion & Spirituality

Publication

New York : Columbia University Press, c1995.

Description

In The Resurrection of the Body Caroline Bynum forges a new path of historical inquiry by studying the notion of bodily resurrection in the ancient and medieval West against the background of persecution and conversion, social hierarchy, burial practices, and the cult of saints. Examining those periods between the late second and fourteenth centuries in which discussions of the body were central to Western conceptions of death and resurrection, she suggests that the attitudes toward the body emerging from these discussions still undergird our modern conceptions of personal identity and the individual. Bynum describes how Christian thinkers clung to a very literal notion of resurrection, despite repeated attempts by some theologians and philosophers to spiritualize the idea. Focusing on the metaphors and examples used in theological and philosophical discourse and on artistic depictions of saints, death, and resurrection, Bynum connects the Western obsession with bodily return to a deep-seated fear of biological process and a tendency to locate identity and individuality in body. Of particular interest is the imaginative religious imagery, often bizarre to modern eyes, which emerged during medieval times. Bynum has collected here thirty-five examples of such imagery, which illuminate her discussion of bodily resurrection. With this detailed study of theology, piety, and social history, Bynum writes a new chapter in the history of the body and challenges our views on gender, social hierarchy, and difference.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member paradoxosalpha

Bynum seeks to explore antique and medieval ideas about embodiment through the medium of doctrines about resurrection, not vice versa. “[T]he basic conclusion...is that a concern for material and structural continuity showed remarkable persistence even where it seemed almost to require

philosophical incoherence, theological equivocation, or aesthetic offensiveness.” (p. 11)

The title describes the book's scope efficiently, although rather than coverage of a continuous development 200-1336 C.E., the chronological emphases are Late Antiquity (ca. 200 and ca. 400) and the High-to-Late Middle Ages (12th century and ca. 1300). There is a lacuna between Augustine and Peter Lombard. It is “not...a complete survey,” but instead explores particular junctures in which “bodily resurrection...was debated, challenged, reaffirmed and/or redefined.” (p. 22)

While the subject matter is essentially history of theology (a province within intellectual history), Bynum’s method incorporates cultural history, with an emphasis on visual culture and the critical apprehension of root metaphors. The theme and problems of embodiment (much in vogue in the 1990s) are central to the text.

It is an effective problematization of simultaneous distaste and need for the human body in the history of Western Christian culture.

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LibraryThing member stevenschroeder

This book began as a series of lectures examining several “moments” of the Western tradition between the third and fourteenth centuries in which the concept of bodily resurrection was debated and defined. It retains something of the character of lectures, focusing on separate (though not

unrelated) moments rather than constructing a continuous history. Bynum's concern is not doctrine but images and analogies employed by theologians and philosophers in their arguments. There is a tension throughout between “Origenist” emphasis on continuity of identity (in soul) and “materialist” emphasis on preservation of matter (in body). That tension is not yet resolved, though it was redefined in creative ways with the thirteenth century movement of much of what we mean by “body” into “soul.” Bynum's discussion of “formal identity” in Aquinas is of particular relevance not only to Medievalists but also to contemporary theorists of “identity.” She ends with a reflection on the images that betray many of our own deepest hopes and fears about embodiment and survival. Her closing comment on the authors of the arguments and images surveyed in the book is applicable to her contribution as well: whether or not we “find their solutions plausible, . . . it is hard to feel that they got the problem wrong.”

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