Heavenly Dust

“The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336”

By Caroline Walker Bynum

Columbia University Press

368 pp.; $29.95, hardcover;

$17.50, paper

I have awaited publication of this volume for some time. Caroline Walker Bynum has for 15 years written about medieval texts–often the same texts that I had just begun to struggle with. Each time, upon the appearance of her book or article, I found she had written about them with compelling insight and fetching good humor. As a result, I have come to think of reading her work as an eerie but pleasant process by which I discover what is in my own mind (at least were it as fecund and acute as hers).

Great expectations, however, can impose a heavy burden upon any human artifact. It was perhaps inevitable that the “Christmas” of finally examining this volume should fall short of the wild imaginings of an “Advent” spent contemplating its promising wrapping. I admit having had such moments of Yuletide ennui, but they were mercifully few. Indeed, on the whole, my reading was dominated by long stretches of delightful discovery.

Bynum proposes to examine several moments in the Christian community’s ongoing reflection upon embodiment, moments in which embodiment had become the subject of debate, of disagreement, and of change (AD. 200, 400, 1100, 1200, 1270, and 1330). The doctrinal issue that served to inspire reflection upon, disagreement about, and change in the West’s experience of embodiment was the central Christian confession of bodily resurrection. Potential readers should be aware that the doctrine of bodily resurrection and what might be termed its pendant theological themes (eschatology, soul, heaven, hell, purgatory, millenarianism, mysticism, time, and self) are treated not so much for their own sake as for what they can tell us about the experience of body and the transformations such experience has undergone through time.

Bynum’s study, then, fits into a new effort being championed by some of North America and Europe’s most creative historians to write a “history of the body.” What Bynum brings to the endeavor is a different and fruitful focus. Other historians tend to underline our experience of body in its sexuality. Bynum, on the other hand, argues “that for most of Western history body was understood primarily as a locus of biological process.”

In other words, “the ‘other’ encountered in body by preachers and theologians, storytellers, philosophers and artists, was not finally the ‘other’ of sex and gender, social position or ethnic group, belief or culture; it was death.” How could it be otherwise in a culture that owed so much to the death-defying work of Christ narrated in the Gospels and given explicit theological thematization by Paul? As obvious as such a point seems once Bynum articulates it, it is a point of view difficult to square with the cultural expectations of a post-Freudian age.

Bynum begins each division of her book with what philosophers and theologians say about bodily resurrection. She labels her commitment to start there as “rather old-fashioned intellectual history.” She moves beyond traditional concern with ideas and the arguments used to justify them, however, to consider the limiting cases, the examples and metaphors used to illustrate and confirm doctrine. It is her view that these materials lead the investigator in two very valuable directions.

In the first place, they often point to problems that philosophers and theologians are incapable of solving (social and psychological as well as intellectual). Second, they point to the social and religious context of intellectual discussion.

Bynum’s aim in following these two leads is to incarnate the doctrine of bodily resurrection, so to speak, by placing its intellectual discussions within the pulsing tissue of the Christian faithful’s lived experience. Bynum sums up her methodological orientation this way: “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.”

Of course, the Christian notion of bodily resurrection presumes that the dead shall rise with bodies that are “the same” as those that underwent death. Bynum distinguishes two senses to this term “the same.” There is “the identical,” which denotes numerical sameness (i.e., spatio-temporal continuity). There is also “the similar,” which denotes perceptual sameness (i.e., the same material bits arranged in the same way).

Bynum sees Christians generating two sets of images used to illustrate and confirm bodily resurrection, sets that correspond roughly to these two senses of “the same.” There is, first and foremost, the central biblical metaphor of seed articulated in 1 Corinthians 15. While this image maintains its canonical status throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, it comes, rather quickly, to be placed alongside, to be overshadowed by, and to be understood in terms of a large number of subsequent images–for example, “the flowering of a dry tree after winter, the donning of new clothes, the rebuilding 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 a 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 were the metaphors that dominated patristic and medieval speculation on the resurrection of the body.

Bynum points out that these are complex images, which can serve different philosophical and theological understandings. Thus, for example, “The growth of seed or semen or an egg implies numerical identity through spatio-temporal 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 particles, whether or not what is reforged has the same form.”

Bynum’s researches lead her to a single, descriptive conclusion: “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. This concern responded to and was reflected in pious practices of great oddness; without it, such late medieval curiosities as entrail caskets, finger reliquaries, and miracles of incorrupt cadavers are inexplicable.” Her interpretation of this state of affairs is put with equal starkness: “But the ultimate context for the tradition I study is not a particular historical moment but a longue duree 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.”

In working toward and interpreting her conclusions, Bynum leads her reader on a merry chase through thickets of philosophical and theological argument, medical and other scientific theory, through the maze of contemporary social and political structure and instinct, through remote outcroppings of folklore and iconography, indeed, through an ethnographer’s heaven of odd practices and beliefs. She moves on many fronts simultaneously (seemingly at home with the parochial concerns and methods of many disciplines) and toward a characteristically multitextured narrative that both establishes her conclusions and argues powerfully for her interpretation of them.

This is vintage Bynum, a book that begs to be read more than once. One feels the privilege of being present at the unveiling of some of Christianity’s most arcane secrets and of discovering that they, in turn, shed light on some of the most poignant dilemmas of the human condition.

Bynum does miss one or two opportunities. For example, she does not seem to catch some of the implications of what she has uncovered. The swift association of the biblical term “dust” (as in “from dust to dust”) with units of matter suggests connections up and down the history of philosophy. Christian “dust” seems to be a worthy analogue to Democritean, Epicurean, even of modern atoms. It also lines up with Stoicism’s seminal reasons and Leibnitz’s monads. Indeed, what is common to all of these conceptual developments is the desire to allow for a truly scientific (i.e., epistemically defensible or justifiable) analysis of matter, material reality, and its correlate, individuality. Material realities, these conceptions seem to be designed to affirm, are only apparently labile and friable (Bynum’s terms). These admittedly fluctuating entities are divisible, to be sure, but ultimately into equal units that possess identical properties. As a consequence, material entities can be understood as constellations of such equal units (i.e., as regular patterns of unit density that result from the response of such units to immaterial dynamics, whether such dynamics are conceived as anterior and interior to matter itself) or coeval with and exterior to, though constitutive of, the actuality of matter (e.g., form).

This philosophical context for Christian theological treatment of “dust” can add depth to Bynum’s understanding of the persistence of Christian insistence on the material continuity of resurrection bodies. For, if Christian thinkers are about the business of understanding the faith, and if the faith involves an orientation to materiality, embodiment, and salvation, then a precondition for understanding this orientation is the intelligibility of matter and body, even in the face of a long and powerful philosophical bias against such a possibility. In other words, Christian thinkers of antiquity and the Middle Ages were aware that matter and material realities cannot be thought (be intelligible) in abstraction from quantity (i.e., divisibility). But the history of philosophy suggests that divisibility has a logical conclusion–equal units possessing identical properties. Thus, if the nexus between matter, body, person, and salvation is to be thought at all, material continuity intelligible in terms of an understanding of “dust” as equal units of matter possessing identical properties would seem to belong to an understanding of the salvation of persons who are truly psychosomatic. The contradictions Bynum sees in theologians such as Thomas Aquinas may thus be more apparent than real. Bynum, then, has missed an important factor in the persistence of theories and images of bodily resurrection that assert material continuity. I would love to have seen what she would have done had these philosophical connections occurred to her.

In the end, however, all quibbles pale. In this volume, one learns much about the Christian tradition. In the process, one travels to many of its stranger corners and learns to accept that Christian imagination and practice are far more diffuse than we Christians are wont to recognize.

But the rewards of such travel and acceptance are great. One learns to see in the doctrine of bodily resurrection “a concept of sublime courage and optimism.” One comes to realize again that Christianity truly “locates redemption there where ultimate horror also resides–in pain, mutilation, death, and decay”; that it “face[s] without flinching the most negative of all the consequences of embodiment: the fragmentation, slime, and stench of the grave”; indeed, that it is “this stench and fragmentation” which it sees “lifted to glory in resurrection.”

Let us follow Bynum to her own moving conclusion: “To make body crucial to personhood is to court the possibility 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.”

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 26

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