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The Church Fathers and Their Opponents

THIS CHAPTER will be concerned mostly with the Apostolic Church Fathers, especially those of the second and third century of the Christian era. But, to understand them, we must look at their opponents, both within the church and without. The Church Fathers’ writings overlap with the latest books of the New Testament and help us fill out the first few centuries of Christian life, already roughly sketched by reviewing popular apocryphal and pseudepigraphical religious literature. They alsogive us a clear example of how the New Testament was read by those leaders of the church who were responsible for forging what we now call the “orthodox” position.

The fathers would have maintained that their opinions were self-evident expressions of the tradition. But they are also significant and tendentious interpreters of the New Testament; in their comments, they reduce ambiguities and reformulate questions for ordinary Christians dealing with their Christian life. And they also produce a fascinating historical record of how Christianity fit its message to the Hellenistic world, while at the same time battling to retain the interpretation of its original kerygma or “proclamation.” It is the Church Fathers who created the Christianity that we recognize. They, and not Paul, are the second founders of Christianity.

Although the Church Fathers offered us major innovations in Christian belief, they always presented it as the most primitive doctrine. We have already seen how the Gospel of John combats the equally ancient traditions in the Gospel of Thomas. The Church Fathers came to terms with resurrection because it stood at the center of their religious life but they did not seem overly concerned with defining resurrection at first. That is not to say that they are not concerned with resurrection; the mission of Christianity was very much helped by focusing on the afterlife in proselytizing.

It is significant that resurrection is the afterlife doctrine that needed to be explained in detail in the Hellenistic context. It is most puzzling and disquieting to the Hellenistic world. If we look at the Letter of Barnabas, for example, an early apostolic writing probably dating from the end of the first century, we see that the promises of Daniel 12, understood as resurrection of the flesh, is prominently displayed in his picture of the coming end, though the Jews are already disowned (e.g., Let. Barn. 4:1-15). The pagan world, on the other hand, was comfortable with immortality of the soul. Christians from that world carried this doctrine into Christianity and set up an opposition between immortality and resurrection inside Christianity. The more intellectual the Christian audience, the more immortality of the soul appealed.

The evidence from Barnabas suggests that the missionaries had to distinguish their message from that of the Jews, who were better known though not as emphatic proselytizers. Not many of the Jews living in diaspora were enthusiastic believers in resurrection. That was more characteristic of revolutionaries and millenarians living in the land of Israel and also of the Pharisees, who had not yet made major inroads in Diaspora Judaism. Instead, the Jews who spoke and thought in Greek were involved in a very significant hermeneutical process, a translation process that allowed them to understand afterlife as continuous with immortality of the soul, thus combining native Jewish ideas with Greek philosophical ones. Resurrection was the product the fathers offered as a prize for remedying sinful, pagan life. They had to explain the need for resurrection when immortality of the soul seemed both rational and satisfying as a universal human attainment. And then they had to distinguish it from Jewish views of resurrection.¹

The continuous growth in interest in resurrection was due principally to three factors. The first was the centrality of the notion of resurrection in the preaching of the Christian faith. As Tertullian said: “The religion of Christianity is the faith in resurrection.” Or again, “The resurrection of the dead is the Christian’s confidence. By believing it we are what we claim to be” (Res., 1). All Christians seemed to acknowledge that their faith depended upon the resurrection event in Jesus’ life, however they judged that to have been possible or interpreted it to have happened.

The second factor is that the New Testament, for all its voices, is relatively unhelpful in explaining exactly what resurrection is. Where it does enter into description, it argues for a physical resurrection which conflicted with Paul, who was much more spiritual and equivocal on the subject. The naiveté of the New Testament narrative and the emphasis on resurrection may just have irritated ordinary gentiles, who quite innocently absorbed far more sophisticated, intellectual notions of the immortality of the soul. Eventually, the question of what exactly resurrection is would have to arise. At a second stage, the church would provide a cogent and comprehensible doctrine which made sense to a sophisticated, philosophical, pagan audience.

Lastly, as we saw in the last chapter, Christianity needed to explain resurrection in just the right way so as to allow for the delay of the parousia; it had to accomplish the explanation without diminishing the motivation for being Christian and firmly remaining within a moral universe in which virtue is rewarded while sin is punished. In Late Antiquity, the immortality of the soul, demonstrated to many philosophers’ satisfaction by Plato, seemed, more and more, to be the self-evident end of earthly existence. Since it validated the life of the mind, it could almost be assumed among many philosophers. Even the Stoics took an interest in immortality, while it was the doctrine that the Cynics and Epicureans liked to dispute. Resurrection was a nonstarter; it was not even a worthy subject for discussion among the philosophers. They did not even understand it properly, thinking it more like resuscitation.

For their part, the Church Fathers took aim at immortality of the soul as the doctrine to defeat. They learned their task from the Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics. Although the earliest fathers did not concentrate on the intellectual cogency of the resurrection, they did preach it steadfastly, fixing on immortality of the soul as a hostile doctrine because immortality of the soul vitiated the special salvation that the cross brought to the faithful alone. If immortality were a natural property of the soul, no one would need a Savior; one would need only an operational manual for the soul as an ethical guide, the right moral instructions to train the body to care properly for the soul.

Gospel of Peter

THE GOSPEL OF PETER offers an early reflection on the resurrection of Jesus. Actually it just supplies the scene that is missing in the Gospels, a description of the resurrection of Jesus.

Now in the night, when the Lord’s day dawned, when the soldiers two by two in every watch, were keeping guard, there rang out a loud voice in the heaven, and they saw the heavens opened and two men come down from there in a great brightness and approach the sepulchre. That stone which had been laid against the entrance to the sepulchre started by itself to roll and gave way to the side, and the sepulchre was opened, and both the young men went in. When now those soldiers saw this, they awakened the centurion and the elders-for they also were there to assist at the watch. And whilst they were relating what they had seen, they saw again three men come out from the sepulchre, and two of them sustaining the other, and a cross following them, and the heads of the two reaching to heaven, but that of the one who being led by the hand reached beyond the heavens. And they heard a voice out of the heavens crying, “Thou hast preached to them that sleep,” and from the cross there was heard the answer, “Yea.” Those men therefore took counsel with one another to go and report this to Pilate. And whilst they were still deliberating, the heavens were again seen to open, and a man decended and entered into the sepulchre. (Gos. Pet. 10:35-43)²

This is a remarkably poignant and visually creative description of the resurrection. Although the exact moment of the resurrection is not described, the physical effects of the saving miracle are portrayed in one long, beautiful arc of motion, like a long camera pan: Jesus emerges from the tomb alive, regaining his exalted nature. Jesus looks as though he were recovering from a long, restful, deep sleep. The angels are depicted as huge in stature, a typical motif from Jewish mysticism and apocalypticism, where the immense size of God and his angels was an object of meditation. The portrayal synthesizes all the various accounts of the Gospels, since it witnesses to the arrival of the man who greets the women in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 16:5). It even attempts to suggest Jesus’ recovery of his logos status, as the Prologue in John implies. Although the mystery is preserved, the narrative adds an enormous amount of information to the Christian master narrative, even while staying true to the Gospel accounts that no one actually saw the resurrection. One can see why this narrative needed to be written.

The cross itself speaks, explaining the ignorance of the world. Perhaps the personification of the cross is just a very vivid way to remove all the doubts that can be expressed about the ability of Jesus to save others when he had died in degradation, so ignominiously and painfully. That was what Paul found transforming and what the Gospels also emphasize. This Gospel wants to defuse the scandal of the cross within its message of exaltation and salvation. The ignorance of the world to the true nature of Christ’s salvation bridges and explains the temporary degradation.

Before this description (Gos. Pet. 4-6), the gospel has already described the day of judgment prophetically, supplementing our knowledge of resurrection with knowledge of the final disposition of sinners and righteous. The resurrection is taken as a demonstration that the day of judgment will follow hard on Jesus’ resurrection. It also demonstrates the importance of Gospel literature for the mission and expansion of Christianity.

In most Early Church writings, as Joanne Dewart shows, resurrection is central but not the focus of the fathers’ discussion, rather assumed as the goal. It is the subject of the argument rather than the terms of it. Where it appears, it is usually ancillary to some other issue in Christian life-for instance, the rejection of docetism, or the coming end. On the other hand, it is like a snowball, gaining momentum as it moves until almost all the third- and fourth-century fathers write extensive separate tractates on the issue.³ The reason for this is not hard to understand. As Christianity moved out of Judea and up the social ladder, Hellenistic philosophical and intellectual conflicts with pagan society became more and more important.

Resurrection started as a liability in the pagan world; the fathers turn it from an irritation to a pearl of theological reflection. Not everyone needs or wants philosophical coherence in religious belief; but those who want it tend to be extraordinarily interested in finding or creating coherence and intellectual adequacy, persevering until they can state it systematically.

In the early period, the eschaton is an important aspect of the church’s proselytizing. The early fathers differed on the order of the events of the end of time. Will all the raised be judged (as Polycarp, 2 Clement, Barnabas) or will only those just who have successfully acquitted judgment be subsequently raised (as the Didache, Papias, and Ignatius)? This discussion evidently reflected not merely the continuous desire for more specificity in religious doctrine but also the community’s lively interest in the coming end-time as well as the signs that should precede it. In the process of depicting the issues in more detail, an unmistakable trend toward a physical and bodily resurrection can be detected in the “orthodox” tradition. As would be expected, the Gospel writers were favored over Paul as sources for discussion in this regard. In the sectarian Christian position, there is just as strongly a trend away from bodily resurrection, with a characteristic emphasis on the Pauline corpus.⁴ The nature of the resurrection is the bell-wether for the presence or absence of heresy. The use of passages from Paul or the Gospels is the wind that propels the boat.

Docetism and Gnosticism

APOSTOLIC CHRISTIANITY shows a distinct tendency towards an explicit description of bodily resurrection, which favors the Gospels’ surety over Paul’s ambiguity, the Gospels’ vivid statements over Paul’s dynamic, internal process of transformation. But most scholars of doctrine begin their histories with an intellectual challenge: the struggle against docetic Christology. Docetism, from the Greek word dokeo-“to appear to be” in the sense of “to seem to be,” with the connotation of “(mistakenly) seeming to be human”—promulgated the notion that Jesus, being divine, only “seemed” to suffer and die. In reality, Christ’s divine nature was never compromised. This is an obvious way out of a deep ambiguity about Jesus’ nature. Docetism is a quick and dirty way to preserve Jesus’ divinity at the moments when he “seems” most tragically human and lacking in divinity. This intellectual move was also characteristic of the “Gnostic” writers. The Gnostics and others suggested that Jesus only seemed to die, although the body was putrid and infected, so Jesus subsequently only seemed to be resurrected. His resurrection was merely the revelation of his true divinity.

As in the Gospel of Thomas, to the Gnostics, what was necessary was for the believer to come to the saving knowledge (gnōsis) that Jesus was divine and could return in his purified spirit (pneuma) to the abode of the divine above this corrupted and unsavable world. We have already discussed the physicality of the resurrection as not only characteristic of Jewish apocalyptic thinking, independent of any contact with Greek notions of the afterlife, and especially inimical to Platonism. Docetism and Gnosticism thus represent a first and most obvious way to connect the narration of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection with the Platonic thought-world of Greece. Mature, anti-Jewish Gnosticism also takes up a great many of the mythological themes of Genesis in the Bible.

“Orthodoxy” is “correct doctrine” but since it is the predominant position in the Church, it always means “the right doctrine” from the perspective of the winners. Though “orthodoxy” is always used by the church to indicate the truth, I mean by it only the position that predominated. The definition of “Gnosticism” has never been easy; at the current moment it is even harder to define than orthodoxy. “Gnostic” refers to someone who thinks that “knowledge” (gnōsis) rather than “faith” (pistis) is the way to salvation and indicates a second-through fourth-century heresy within Christianity, though we also know of pagan Gnostics. In the modern scholarly world, the word “Gnosticism” has evolved into a technical term in comparative religion, identifying a characteristic of any religion-like mysticism, ritual, or ethics-which leads to ambiguities when studying the ancient world.

Interest in Gnosticism has quickened considerably since the discovery in 1947 of the Nag Hammadi collection of thirteen mostly Coptic codices, evidently from a monastic library dating back to the first centuries of the Christian era in Egypt. It contains the Gospel of Thomas which has both “Gnostic” and “orthodox” characteristics. Some of the “Gnostic” texts, especially those having to do with Seth, seem to delight in revaluing the stories of the Bible, most particularly the primeval history, into mythological stories in which the God of the Old Testament figures as a demon, while the Gnostics themselves were those whom the Old Testament treats as enemies, like Cainites. Scholars call these documents Sethian Gnosticism.

This is to be contrasted with another form of Gnosticism-Valentianism, named after the churchman Valentinus. These Gnostic documents, also found within the Nag Hammadi Corpus, emanate from a relatively more moderate wing which existed within the church, asserting that its members were “elected” above ordinary Christians because they understood a higher, more elite revelation. Their Christian worship consisted of normal Christian practices augmented with secret rites. “Gnostic” became an umbrella term used by the “orthodox” to brand whole groups of Christians as heretics, even those who would not themselves have used the term “Gnostic,” much less “heretic,” to describe themselves. The Gospel of Thomas is a good example of this “name-calling” phenomenon because it has been branded as “Gnostic” but could just as arguably be seen as an unusual part of “orthodox” tradition. What is clear is that the Fathers opposed the Christianity we see in the Gospel of Thomas.

A group of scholars meeting at Messina in 1967 decided to call only full-blown, anti-cosmic dualism by the term “Gnosticism.”⁵ The religious phenomenon that existed previously in the first few centuries could either be called proto-gnosticism or pre-Gnosticism. Scholars disagreed about whether particular documents, like the Gospel of John, was pre-Gnostic or proto-Gnostic. Whatever clarity was gained in this discussion was vitiated by the lack of scholarly agreement about the differences between proto-Gnosticism and pre-Gnosticism. Was what preceded second century Gnosticism just an antecedent or already essentially Gnostic? To make matters worse, either of the antecedents to Gnosticism could be described by the term “Gnostic,” making a muddle out of practically every article on the subject.

Hence, scholars have abandoned the attempt to define the term by common agreement. With this retreat from exactitude came the suspicion that the terminology does not always correspond to an actual phenomenon in the ancient world. Are scholars seeing Gnostics where none existed? We know that there were actually some people who called themselves Gnostics but the Church Fathers added wholesale to the characterization and the list. Instead, “Gnosticism” is now viewed more or less as a term of opprobrium in use among the Christian Fathers, as much as a phenomenon in and of itself. That is to say, we think they are Gnostics only because the Church Fathers call them Gnostics. It is probably just as well not to reify the term as a coherent and self-conscious movement; otherwise, we shall wind up taking sides in an ancient, almost forgotten debate instead of relating it.

The “Gnostic” interpretation of salvation can be characterized. It is the belief that there is a specific, divinely-revealed, saving knowledge (gnōsis), which, when received and understood, sets the Gnostic above and in an elect position with regard to the rest of humanity. The “Gnostics” tended to depreciate life in this world as irredeemably corrupt. Matter itself was seen as feminine and not redeemable, in a manner quite similar to Plato and Philo. In Gnosticism the gendered coding of matter becomes part of a mythological pattern. Yet, some Gnostics may have regarded women as eligible for church positions. When the Church Fathers say that women achieved roles of leadership in Gnosticism they meant this report as a vilification of the movement, so one wonders how much they were exaggerating. The Gospel of Thomas allows for equality between women and men through women’s transformation into men, viewed as the common gender. Yet the group that left us the Nag Hammadi corpus seems to be composed mostly of male monks living with little if any church structure, so it is hard to know whether women were actually in leadership positions.

If some “Gnostics” seemed to defame women and the Old Testament, so did the “orthodox” in a different way. Among the Church Fathers, death was explicitly connected with sin, particularly with Eve’s sin rather than Adam’s, functioning to define all future human existence without Christ. This interpretation, which is based on Genesis 2-3, as interpreted through a tendentious reading of Paul, especially in Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, can be seen as early as the Epistle of Barnabas 12:5b⁶ It is more characteristic of Latin than Greek fathers.

Vilifying Eve and women as the agents of “sin,” at the same time, is parallel with or even dependent on a Jewish apocalyptic context in which the sinfulness of humanity is stressed. Even in Paul, the theme receives unusual emphasis (Romans 5:12-13). The interpretation that death is a punishment due to the sin of sexuality is massively developed in later church tradition, which we now associate preeminently with Augustine but was present already in the second century.⁷ The progressive identification of sin with sexuality more and more came to define a state that humanity enters at birth and that can only be remedied through the sacraments of the church.

The “feminization of Original Sin” may be related to the equally polemical attempt to show that the Jewish religion has been entirely surpassed in the faith of Christianity. If Jews did not accept Jesus, they could be vilified as Satan’s accomplices.⁸ Thus, the Jews become the symbols for whatever the Gospel is not. Although the patriarchs might escape Original Sin, the Jews remain forever in sin and sexual lust; lack of Jewish interest in asceticism only furthered the stereotype. The need to reverse an Original Sin, so that without Jesus’ sacrifice all humanity is condemned by Eve’s sin, preserves the unique importance of the church’s ritual and sacramental life for Christian life. Original Sin makes for very effective missionizing, especially as the fear of the end of days dissipate once the millenarian context of the Jesus movement and the Gospel period is vitiated. Original Sin replaced the coming eschaton as the guarantor of faith. Both created a world in which only Christians could achieve salvation; thus, all need the ritual sacramants of the church. Under these circumstances not to proselytize is a moral failing because it witholds the gift of salvation from those outside the church.

This development, which we have already seen in abundance in the Christian apocrypha, a result of the combination of notions of resurrection with the Platonic notion of the immortal soul, parallels the demotion of Mary Magdalene in the post-Gospel tradition. Mary Magdalene was already understood as a woman of low repute redeemed, due to her being (dubiously) equated with the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). Peter is normally considered the head of the church not only because he was given the keys to the kingdom in Matthew but because he was the first apostle to view Jesus in the resurrection.⁹ Yet, strictly speaking, it was Mary Magdalene (possibly together with Mary the mother of Jesus and other women of the movement) who first saw Jesus in his resurrection state.

The notion that Christianity was due to the theophanic visions of women was evidently too dangerous to be allowed to stand. Since men had the opportunity to build careers within the church, it was Peter rather than Mary who was given the right of priority. The apostolic succession was founded upon the list of early appearances of the resurrected Jesus, almost unconsciously honed down to the men who first saw the resurrected Jesus. Thus, the apostolic tradition is quintessentially a male tradition while there is good evidence that the religious experience on which the church was founded occurred quite frequently in women as well. One of the characteristics of the Gnostics is that they valued this experience more highly; some Gnostics raised women to the level of priests and even bishops.¹⁰

Bodily Resurrection, Asceticism, and Gender

THE GOSPELS needed to stress the physicality of the resurrection as a way of emphasizing Jesus’ unique importance. This predisposition became a strong characteristic of the “orthodox” tradition. In popular thought anyone could become a spirit or ghost after death, and in Platonism everyone had an immortal soul by nature. To make Jesus unique in his postmortem state he needed to have a resurrected body. The church maintained the uniqueness of Jesus’ sacrifice by claiming Jesus’ bodily resurrection; all Christians (and only Christians) inherit their resurrection body by imitating him. But the very physicality of the resurrection might even prevent women from resurrection or from having a major role in transmitting tradition, since they are physically different from men.

For other Christians, Christian life was also an angelic life, transcending sexuality. This too became a major theme for many varieties of the Early Church.¹¹ For Paul, all genders were equal in the Christian life, just as there was no slave or free or Jew or gentile (Gal 3:28); but this liturgical confession and anticipation of the eschaton did not translate well into ordinary Christian life. For Paul, equality was true and accurate in baptism but would not become fully evident in life until the Parousia, which was to arrive momentarily. However well that may have worked in the baptismal ceremonies, the ordinary facts of Hellenistic life (Jewish life included) prevented the eschatological ideal from being translated effectively into action, except in the monastic movement, where celibacy did transcend gender, essentially by means of autonomy from expected gender-related roles within society. In ordinary life women were subservient to men; Jews and gentiles remained separate; slaves had to be returned to their masters. Baptism could symbolize the coming transformed state of humanity but it did not change the reality of everyday life.

But asceticism could. Asceticism derived originally from the training adopted by Greek athletes which included both athletics and diet regimens. Early Christian writing often actually compared martyrs and ascetics to athletes. Martyrs in the arena were described as entering an agōn or athletic contest, from which our word “agony” is derived.

Agōn could mean a number of different things in early Christianity, everything from dietary restrictions for health to fasting to celibacy and monastic life.¹² Asceticism could prepare a Christian for divine revelation, as in the Gospel of Thomas.¹³ Asceticism was popular everywhere in Christianity, though to different degrees in different places. Its opposite was viewed as so terribly sinful that the “Gnostics” could be tarred with sexual libertinism and licentiousness, though all existing “Gnostic” documents eschew sexuality and embrace asceticism themselves. Indeed, the Nag Hammadi library seems to emanate from the monastic library of Pachomius; Pachomius is a founder of Egyptian Christian monasticism. Asceticism and monasticism were the only ways to manifest angelic life while on earth.¹⁴ That made asceticism and monasticism the preferred Christian lifestyle in a great many Christian communities. Theresa Shaw points out a passage that sums up the issue at the beginning of her work on Christian fasting:

Observe what fasting does: it heals diseases, dries up the bodily humors, casts out demons, chases away wicked thoughts, makes the mind clearer and the heart pure, sanctifies the body and places the person before the throne of God…. For fasting is the life of the angels, and the one who makes use of it has angelic rank.¹⁵

The benefits of asceticism, of which fasting is but one example, are ranked progressively from health to moral education to divine audience, which is clearly linked to visionary experience (“places the person before the throne of God”) and is summarized by the attainment of angelic rank, which we have so often seen is the ultimate felicity of resurrection predicted by Daniel 12.

The Letters of Clement

CLEMENT OF ROME served as bishop at the end of the first century, according to church tradition. First Clement, a letter from Rome to Corinth weakly attributed to Clement, is usually listed with the Apostolic Fathers. It tries to settle the issue of the nature of resurrection by means of an ambiguous phrase, “immortal knowledge”: “Through him the Master has willed that we should taste immmortal knowledge” (1 Clem. 36: 1-2).¹⁶ This terminology is a clever attempt to bridge the growing gap between religious experience and ecclesiastical authority. As an attempt to formulate the nature of Christ’s immortality, the term “immortal knowledge” was shortly to become even more suspect than the problem it was designed to resolve. Here the immortal knowledge is specified as the apostolic tradition:

The apostles have preached the gospel to us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ [has done so] from God. Christ therefore was sent forth by God, and the apostles by Christ. Both these appointments, then, were made in an orderly way, according to the will of God. Having therefore received their orders, and being fully assured by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and established in the word of God, with full assurance of the Holy ghost, they went forth proclaiming that the kingdom of God was at hand. (1 Clem. 42)¹⁷

The resurrection guaranteed the truth of the apostolic tradition as much as the other way around. At the same time, 1 Clement emphasizes the resurrection of believers.

First Clement does not describe the resurrection body; but 2 Clement does:

And let no one of you say that this very flesh shall not be judged nor rise again. Consider ye in what [state] ye were saved, in what ye received sight, if not while ye were in this flesh. We must therefore preserve the flesh as the temple of God. For, as ye were called in the flesh, ye shall also come [to be judged] in the flesh. As Christ, the Lord who saved us, though He was first a Spirit, became flesh, and thus called us, so shall we also receive the reward in this flesh. (2 Clem. 9)¹⁸

Unhappily, 2 Clement is likely written by yet another writer, taking us rather far from the historical Clement. But the progression does clarify issues otherwise left ambiguous in 1 Clement. Christians receive salvation in the flesh just as Christ himself was carnal and was himself resurrected in the flesh. It is therefore appropriate that the future reward shall also be in the flesh. Paul’s pneumatology is combined with the notion of resurrection in such a way as to yield a justification for the continued importance of the church of the faithful and, indeed, the apostolic succession. It is not hard to perceive a real enemy behind this polemic. There were many in the Early Church who denied that the resurrection was fleshly or literal. Foremost among them were the “Gnostics,” but also any other extreme interpreter of Paul, docetist or Platonist.

Ignatius

PHYSICAL RESURRECTION, martyrdom, angelic status, and heavenly exaltation continued to be seen together in orthodox Christian writings.¹⁹ In a church that faced the terrible choice of martyrdom or apostasy, the encouragement to martyrdom shortly became an issue in and of itself.²⁰ To explain this crisis, the church could rely on Luke’s tradition of the martyrdom of Stephen and his subsequent exaltation in Acts 7.

It is Stephen’s role as the first church martyr that Ignatius emulates:

Suffer me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ. Rather entice the wild beasts, that they may become my tomb, and may leave nothing of my body; so that when I have fallen asleep [in death], I may be no trouble to any one. Then shall I truly be a disciple of Christ, when the world shall not see so much as my body. Entreat Christ for me that by these instruments, I may be found a sacrifice [to God.] (I. Rom. 4)²¹

The image of falling asleep, Luke’s phrase used for Stephen’s death, in order to become the true disciple of Christ is in both recensions of the letter. Ignatius is invoking the nascent martyr tradition. In some sense he offers himself as proof of the fleshly resurrection. His patient endurance is, first of all, proof of Christian faith. Next, he wants his body to be totally destroyed so the miracle of his resurrection will be the mightier. In destroying his body, Ignatius also affirms that his reward will be bodily. Like the martyrs in Maccabees, he expects a bodily resurrection, even if no part of his earthly body remains, making his physical disposal no trouble to anyone.

There is also an allusion to the Johannine use of heavenly bread, the bread of life, the basis of the Lord’s Supper, and which specifies the literal flesh of Jesus (John 7) and figures strongly in the argument for Jesus’ postresurrection materiality. Ignatius described the body being ground like flour and transformed into the host itself, made holy, so that it manifested the invisible and material body of Christ. The martyr becomes the host, to be consumed in the hour of his trial but promising salvation to others.

The example that Ignatius gives us was followed to some extent by all subsequent descriptions of martyrdoms. Although Ignatius follows the martyr tradition begun for Christian piety by the narrative of Stephen’s martyrdom, he does not use the term “martyr” (witness) which had not yet become the standard title for the voluntary death of the faithful as an act of faith.²² The specifically Christian interpretation of the tradition-using the metaphor of a legal trial-evolved slowly out of Christian experience. Even without the specific vocabulary of Christian martyrdom, Ignatius’ description is deeply dependent on bodily resurrection. It is no surprise that when he outlines his creed to the Smyrneans, he outlines a very physical resurrection. After having outlined his creed which emphasized the physical pain of the crucifixion, Ignatius talks about the coming resurrection:

Now, He suffered all these things for our sakes, that we might be saved. And He suffered truly, even as also he truly raised up himself, not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that He only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be [Christians]. And as they believe, so shall it happen unto them, when they shall be divested of their bodies, and be mere evil spirits.

For I know that after His resurrection also he was still possessed of flesh, and I believe that He is so now. (I. Smyrn. 2 end and 3 beginning)²³

Ignatius emphasizes the passion of Jesus, his physical suffering, and his physical death on the cross. He especially emphasizes that the resurrection was physical as well, and the resurrection of all believers will be physical and bodily. He then explicitly mentions that there are those who refuse to believe in the physical resurrection, hence will not get it (the Rabbinic notion as well), but that they will be forced to become evil spirits because they will be divested of their bodies.

This is a neat disposition for the Greek notion of the immortality of the soul, that had become known to Christianity by that time. Those who think like the Greeks will get the reward that immortality of the soul promises: they will become as the Greek gods themselves-in reality, nothing but evil spirits. The same is true for those Christians who preach that the resurrection with be spiritual. The true, final disposition is as fully physical bodies on a reconstituted earth. To the Ephesians, Ignatius even wrote that he hoped to be resurrected in his bonds so that he could be in the same lot with the Ephesians (Ignatius to the Ephesians 11.2), who were suffering persecution. There is no doubt that the physicality of the resurrection continues to cohere with issues of martyrdom, as we saw in the very beginning of the tradition in martyrdom.²⁴

The Spirit and the Body: Valentinus

VALENTINUS (CA. 100-175 CE) shows us another side of the battle. He was an intellectual Christian leader, originally from the Egyptian Delta, who based his authority on the claim that he was a student of one of Paul’s students.²⁵ Valentinus was educated in Alexandria, in the great school of Neoplatonism influenced by Philo, Clement, and later Origen. He was a student and colleague of the Hellenized Christian philosopher Basilides. Sometime between 136-140 CE Valentinus emigrated to Rome. By 180, Irenaeus was accusing him of Gnosticism, like others whom he met in both Alexandria and Rome.²⁶

The writings of Valentinus exhibit a lot of Hellenistic and Gnostic characteristics: an interest in Platonic thought, mystic ascent, and narrative use of myth, in this case, often in place of philosophical discourse. But he does not reflect the entire Gnostic myth in its most obvious form. Rather he uses Christian imagery in a Gnostic way. He also wrote one of the earliest Christian mystical documents, the Gospel of Truth. He believed that salvation comes through gnōsis, a saving knowledge of the true purpose of the savior, which is not available through the flesh, since Jesus is not of the flesh. So gnōsis is achieved by spiritual meditation, which was taught in his movement, as it was in Platonism and as Paul can easily be interpreted.

Valentinus surely understood salvation to occur in the “spiritual body” of which Paul spoke, but interpreted so that it meant a spiritual existence, not a fleshly one at all. For Valentinus, the elect were those in the spiritual life, called the pneumatikoi (spiritually realized) by later Gnostics, explicitly referring to Paul’s term soma pneumatikon. If Plato’s word psyche (soul) is antithetical to Christianity, no one could criticize the word pneuma (spirit), the very word that Paul used so effectively. Pneuma could carry the whole significance of the Platonic soul yet also contain the added quantity of God’s prophetic spirit. So it became a kind of augmented soul for Christians.

For Valentinus, no meaningful salvation could be gained through this fallen flesh, though he appears to admit that the lowest and most ignorant grades of Christians do preach this lesser enlightenment. If Irenaeus’ tendentious description of Valentinus is factually correct, most of this is expressed through an elaborate cosmological myth, explaining how we came into this fallen state and therefore, by implication, how salvation can be gained. It was characteristic of Gnostic and Platonic writings to discuss cosmology in detail, from which soteriology could be implied.

From the beginning, you (plural) have been immortal, and you are children of eternal life. And you wanted death to be allocated to yourselves so that you might spend it and use it up, and that death might die in you and through you. For when you nullify the world and are not yourselves annihilated, you are lord over creation and all corruption. (Frag. F)²⁷

In his description of the beginning of the cosmos, we see the implicit soteriology, spelled out afterwards, of escaping from materiality to the immortal realm. Notice how he uses Biblical imagery and the language of Paul to express these truths. In a large sense, Valentinus can be seen as an extreme Hellenistic interpreter of Paul.²⁸ But, however it is derived, his resurrection conception is thoroughly spiritualized.

Martyrdom and Resurrection: Basilides

IN DIFFERENT ways, Elaine Pagels and William Frend have reported on the orthodox claim that the Gnostics and Docetists, who refuted the physical resurrection, reasoned out a refusal of martyrdom.²⁹ So far as the “orthodox” were concerned, the Gnostics did not see the point of sacrificing the material body in martyrdom and they did not care to be prominent in the ranks of the martyrs. The Gnostics further reject the whole theory of apostolic succession, which began in the narrative of resurrection appearances from Luke down to their own day. In some ways, the Gnostics parody it in their description of the evil archons, bishops in disguise. For the most part, the Gnostics suspect the literal view of the resurrection, some of them calling it “the faith of fools.”³⁰ The “orthodox” fight this denigration of their faith with anything at their disposal and the language of the body is a primary code for conveying their distaste, not just their doctrine of resurrection.

So orthodox criticism of the Gnostics’ reluctance to martyrdom is but one side of thebattle. One can assume that the Gnostic and Docetic Christians underwent martyrdom and even sometimes sought it out, though the phenomenon was rare for both the Orthodox and Gnostics. It is rather the case that the orthodox were not willing to grant their opponents’ asceticism true virtue nor their martyrdom true steadfastness.³¹

For the Gnostics, physical seeing (the disciples physically saw Christ) counted little; only symbolic spiritual vision (through visions brought on by ascetic practice) revealed the truth of his message. We have seen this attitude before in the Gospel of Thomas. The Gnostics observed that many who witnessed Jesus in his life remained totally blind to the significance of Jesus’ mission, death, and resurrection. It was not those who literally carried on the written tradition that counted, but those who truly understood the meaning of the events, especially from visionary insight.

Ignatius of Antioch had already argued against his docetist opponents that one does not die for a ghost or phantom (Ign. Smyrn. 6) but rather for the right to be resurrected in the body and gain the full compensation for one’s sacrifice. This understands resurrection in exactly the way that the Jewish sectarians who promulgated it had originally wanted. But it begins the characterization of Gnostics as those who would refuse to be martyred at all. But most people, both Orthodox and Gnostic, do not evince Ignatius’ willingness to become a martyr, even ignoring chances to avoid martyrdom.

Basilides (fl. ca. 130-160 CE), a teacher, companion, and successor to Valentinus, illustrates the other side of the relationship between bodily resurrection and martyrdom. He explicitly used Platonism to interpret resurrection. For him salvation only belonged to the soul, not the body at all. As Frend says, “His is the earliest known attempt by a Christian to reconcile the Jewish requirement of righteous suffering as an atoning sacrifice with the Platonic view of providence.”³² The result is a major attack on the value of martyrdom. He believed that humanity was originally immortal, as did Valentinus. Death is the result of the demiurge who created the material world and imprisoned our immortal souls in matter.

The saving knowledge (gnōsis) of the redeemed is that humans are truly beyond the world, divorced from flesh, and free from its infection. Salvation was the abolition of death, not its acceptance through martyrdom. In his commentary on 1 Peter, Basilides states that all who suffer, suffer on account of sin, not merely those who committed grave offenses like adulterers and murderers. This did not mean that the sufferer led an evil life-that would be blaming the victim-rather that material life itself was an evil that needed atonement.

This is reminiscent of Plato’s Republic, Book 2: “If our commonwealth is to be well-ordered, we must fight to the last against any member of it being suffered to speak of the divine, which is good, being responsible for evil.” The true Gnostic then needs no martyrdom because the Gnostic has already triumphed over the devil in coming to the saving knowledge (the gnōsis).³³ The “orthodox” therefore used their greater willingness to be martyred as a proof of the truth of their doctrine while the other side used their understanding of the primacy of the human soul to justify their greater reticence to do so. Some of the orthodox, including Ignatius himself, seemed to welcome martyrdom, even where prudence would have dictated an honorable way to avoid it.³⁴ Some of the Gnostics were probably caught in unavoidable events and were martyred as well. But both sides adopted the characterization that they were defending or attacking the doctrine of bodily resurrection and lived by the consequences. The orthodox were training converts with high commitment and highly defined communal boundaries. The Gnostics, on the other hand, developed a tolerant sense of the common enterprise of all intellectual meditation. Though the orthodox may have been “universal” in their purview, the Gnostics were “culturally plural.” There is nothing inevitable about this connection.

The Gnostics

THE GNOSTIC Gospel of Mary suggests that all the resurrection appearances were by means of visions, dreams, and ecstatic trance.³⁵ That is not to say that the Gnostics dismiss the dreams and ecstatic trance; rather the opposite, they value them the more highly. It is that they refuse to believe that Jesus continues to be physically present because the body is not destined for eternal life. Only the spirit has that privilege.

As Pagels points out, the Letter of Peter to Philip, discovered at Nag Hammadi, relates a different kind of appearance of Jesus:

A great light appeared, so that the mountain shone from the sight of him who had appeared. And a voice called out to them saying: “Listen …I am Jesus Christ, who is with you forever. (134.10-18)³⁶

A voice comes out of the light, certainly not a physical body. In The Wisdom of Jesus Christ the disciples are gathered on a mountain after Jesus’ death. Again, Jesus appears as a voice coming out of the light, this time as an invisible spirit who then appears as the great angel of light. Yet another passage appears in the Gospel of Philip where believers are warned against rising in the flesh and even from thinking that any one position is correct:

Certain persons are afraid that they may arise (from the dead) naked: therefore they want to arise in the flesh. And they do not know that those who wear the flesh are the ones who are naked. Those who […] to divest themselves are not naked. Flesh [and blood will not] inherit the kingdom [of God]. What is this flesh that will not inherit it? The one that we are wearing. And what too is this flesh that will inherit it? It is Jesus’ flesh along with his blood.

Therefore he said, “He who does not eat my flesh and drink my blood does not have life within him.” What is meant by that? His “flesh” means the Word, and his “blood” means the Holy Spirit: whoever has received these has food, and has drink and clothing. For my part I condemn (also) those others who say that the flesh will not arise. Accordingly both positions are deficient. (56:20-57: 10)³⁷

Several interesting moves are made in this short passage. The Gospel of Philip argues against ordinary Christians, who believe in fleshly resurrection. It explicitly argues for a spiritual resurrection and offers an allegorical interpretation of the “flesh” and “blood” in the Eucharist. Then, he concludes that both fleshly and spiritual resurrection doctrines are deficient to those who have the full truth.

In like fashion, Jesus appears differently to different disciples. Jesus can appear in whatever form he likes but he is not a body or a physical presence in the ordinary way. He is rather spiritually present and the composition of the resurrection body is adiaphora, a matter of indifference:³⁸

Jesus tricked everyone, for he did not appear as he was, but appeared in such a way that he could be seen. And he appeared to all of them he [appeared] to [the] great as someone great, he appeared to the small as someone small. He [appeared] [to the] angels as an angel and to human beings as a human being. For this reason he hid his discourse from everyone. Some saw him and thought they were seeing their own selves. But when he appeared to his disciples in glory upon the mountain, he was not small (for) he became great: or rather he made the disciples great so that they might be able to see that he was great. (Gos. Phil. 57:28-58:9)³⁹

To those who have seen Christ and therefore seen themselves, these arguments are unnecessary. If one understands Jesus as a human being, one is merely underscoring one’s humanity. But, it stands to reason that if one views Christ as an angel, one has been transformed into an angel. Thus, Gnosticism explicitly connects the nature of the savior with the transcendent value of the self. The way a person envisions the savior connotes the significance of a person’s life. The point is to understand that the highest gnōsis is to get beyond the mere body to a higher conceptualization.

This connection has import not only for individuals but for communities. Mary Douglas has suggested that the body is particularly rich vehicle for expressing the implications of social and political life, the “body politic.” Such is also the case with regard to the early Christians. The “orthodox” valorized martyrdom while the “Gnostics” eschewed it as unnecessary. The orthodox insisted on bodily presence but the “Gnostics” either did not or said it was of no ultimate importance. It is not a casual symbol but one that runs to the heart of their religious life.⁴⁰

The Testimony of Truth suggests that the martyrs have misunderstood Christ’s true nature:

The foolish think in their heart that if they confess, “We are Christians,” in word only [but] not with power, while giving themselves over to ignorance, to a human death, not knowing where they are going, nor who Christ is, thinking that they will live, when they are (really) in error-hasten toward the principalities and authorities. They fall into their churches because of the ignorance that is in them. (31.22-32.8)⁴¹

The author ridicules the notion that martyrdom brings salvation. If that were true, everyone would be martyred, confessing, and being saved. The pretensions of the orthodox, no matter how affecting and brave, are merely illusions:

are [empty] martyrs, since they bear witness only [to] themselves … When they are “perfected” with a (martyr’s) death, this is what they are thinking: “If we deliver ourselves over to death for the sake of the name, we shall be saved.” These matters are not settled in this way…. They do not have the Word which gives [life.] (33.25-34.26)⁴²

The stories of the orthodox martyrdoms are punctuated by complaints from the heresiologists that the Gnostics show no willingness to undergo martyrdom as do the orthodox, therefore their faith is weak. From a sociological perspective, nothing builds up commitment to a specific canon of principles faster than persecution, torture, suffering, and death, provided that the community itself survives. The commitment of the orthodox to the canons of the faith must have been enormous. And so too were the promises of restored bodily existence that awaited them.

The Spirit and Martyrdom

FOR THE GNOSTICS the converse must have been just as true. Anyone who refused martyrdom by sacrificing to the emperor’s genius would have had to develop strong justifications for refusing this ultimate sacrifice. The notion that the body was unimportant, not the essential part of Christian commitment, paralleled the Gnostic stance that martyrdom was not necessary. And so too were the promises of restored spiritual existence that awaited them. The Gnostics likely did not build up the same kind of commitment to a single set of principles as communities suffering martyrdom.

If the body was to be left behind and the spirit (pneuma) was the carrier of identity, why make such a pretense about acknowledging the Christian commitment publicly? Could one not equally advance as far by acknowledging gnōsis, understanding the secret and hidden meaning in the Christian stories understood as allegories? The myths of other religions might as easily contain the truths of Gnosticism. We find many allusions to other religions-classical, mystery, Jewish, Zoroastrian-in the Nag Hammadi library. Then who would need to die for one of them because they are equally understandable in the stories of other religions as well?

Since truth could be found everywhere, Gnostic writers disliked the way the orthodox clergy encouraged ordinary Christians to resign themselves to execution:

These are the ones who oppose their brothers, saying to them, “Through this [martyrdom] our God shows mercy, since salvation comes to us from this.” They do not know the punishment of those who are gladdened by those who have done this deed to the little ones who have been sought out and imprisoned. (Apos. Pet. 79.11-21)⁴³

There were also Gnostic martyrs, as there were Jewish and pagan martyrs, and there were some Gnostics, especially the Valentinians, who adopted the terminology of resurrection in their treatises but who believed in something rather closer to the immortality of the soul and called it resurrection.⁴⁴ The Valentinians in general took a more spiritual perspective on resurrection. The classic Treatise on Resurrection (also known as the Epistle to Rheginus), to cite but the most obvious text, neither accepts the notion that the spirit is capable of death nor that the material body is able to withstand the forces of decay in our life:

So then, as the apostle said of him, we have suffered with him, and arisen with him, and ascended with him.

Now, since we are manifestly present in this world, the world is what we wear (like a garment). From him (the savior) we radiate like rays, and being held fast by him until our sunset-that is, until our death in the present life-we are drawn upward by him as rays are drawn by the sun, restrained by nothing. This is resurrection of the spirit which “swallows” resurrection of the soul along with resurrection of the flesh. (Treat. Res. 45.23-46.1)⁴⁵

Rheginus tried to get to a truth beyond antinomies of flesh and spirit, bodily and spiritual. One might think that he was on the way to the modern view that body and soul both speak to the same unity. But, in the end, Rheginus’s perspective is an attempted synthesis of resurrection and immortality of the soul. He begins with the literal, saying that he has suffered and risen with Christ. But there are three stages of awareness, of which the resurrection of the flesh is the simplest and least interesting. Rheginus uses “resurrection” in a very allegorical way, seemingly to preserve the terminology of early Christianity but actually emphasizing the immortality of the soul or spirit. Resurrection of the soul is closer to the truth but the highest truth involves the resurrection of the spirit. Resurrection is really a symbolic process by which we ascend and, as much from the verb tenses, the ascension is coterminous with salvation in this life. At the end, we merely confirm the promise made in this life. Resurrection and salvation have already happened proleptically.

With this allegorical perspective, Gnostics could not have been uncritical Gospel readers. But even Paul was sometimes a difficulty for them. The famous passage in 1 Corinthians 15 allows for the interpretation that resurrection will be as “a life-giving spirit.” Elaine Pagels has pointed out that in Valentinianism, the strategy was to attribute the different, seemingly conflicting passages in the New Testament to different groups of Christians, ascending in order of election, so that the most spiritual statements of resurrection also designated the most Gnostic Christians. They divided Christians into three types: The hylics (hyle means “matter” in Greek), those who are only material Christians, could be expected to understand flesh literally because that was their material (hylic) nature; it is no wonder they were often called the sarkic (from Greek sarx or flesh) or the fleshly race in other Gnostic documents. An intermediate group, the psychics (the psychikoi, “the ensouled” from psyche, the soul), have evidently understood more about the true nature of salvation but only the pneumatics (the pneumatikoi, the “spiritual” people from pneuma spirit) are fully aware of the real meaning of the Gospel. The pneumatics are in full possession of the gnōsis or saving knowledge.⁴⁶ Those who deny the fully spiritual interpretation of the Gospel are themselves denied the fullest rewards. The theme of the punishment fitting the crime runs throughout the arguments on resurrection. Whatever one believes, that is what one will get in the afterlife; for wrong believers, their beliefs will be the source of their punishment.

The exhortation to leave off the details for the sake of unity represents the most sophisticated Gnostic defense. It does not matter what the outward appearances are; it does not matter what the general church insists upon. These are only outward appearances; the pneumatikoi know better. They know that they are already resurrected and have arisen. They assent to every other belief merely for the sake of church unity. The Gnostics have a secret interpretation of the outward beliefs of Christianity. They neither accept nor reject ordinary church doctrine but transcend it in an allegory of higher salvation. This is as much a statement of intellectual superiority over the common folk in the church as a statement of the nature of the world. As such, it is also a statement of the superiority of an intellectual (“spiritual”) approach to the Gospels as a fleshly one.

Such ideas, even mediated and compromised, as the Valentinian ones were, could not be expected to pass by the Church Fathers without notice. Polycarp, one of the most famous of the Early Church’s martyrs, minces no words on this topic:

For whosoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, is antichrist; and whosoever does not confess the testimony of the Cross is of the devil; and whosoever perverts the oracles of the Lord to his own lusts, and says there is neither a resurrection nor a judgment, he is the firstborn of Satan. (Pol. Phil. 7.1)⁴⁷

Probably the Valentinians could confess to fleshly resurrection and attempt to avoid Polycarp’s creedal test, retracting it by reinterpretation. So Polycarp’s defense against this position is fruitless. So intense was the polemic that W. C. van Unnik declared that the second century was like no other, in the sharpness of its battles over the significance of the resurrection.⁴⁸

The issue was not just the definition of resurrection, it was also symbolic of one’s willingness to be martyred, to encourage others to martyrdom, or, conversely, to perform the acts of piety toward the civil cult. To one group, one could dissemble because it was all a matter of outward appearances, not a matter of inward gnōsis. But to the “orthodox,” the nature of the apostolic succession was at stake-whether church authority should be based on faith (the teaching of the apostles) or knowlege (the seeking of visions) and whether the church would adopt the Greek view of the natural immortality of the soul (at least to those who realized it) or retain the Jewish apocalyptic view of the resurrection of the flesh. All this was represented in the issue of the nature of the resurrection body. In spite of the protestations of “Gnostics” and “Docetists,” the “orthodox” church insisted that that martyrdom was a great good to be encouraged and that the sacrificed and martyred flesh would be redeemed, not just the soul, at the final judgment.⁴⁹

Gender and the Resurrection Body: Mary Magdalene

JUST AS WE can see the important issue of martyrdom reflected in discourse about resurrection of the body, so the issue of gender also is prominently displayed in the discussion of resurrection. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which can be dated approximately to the second half of the second century, describes a discussion between Jesus and the apostles with a follow-up discussion among the apostles after Jesus has ascended to heaven.⁵⁰

In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, prophetic experience is the basis of spiritual authority. Mary saw Jesus in a vision and received instruction from him (Gos. Mary Mag. 7:1-2). This immediately raises the issue of a conflict with apostolic authority, which is based on faith and teaching rather than vision. Mary Magdalene, who is after all, among the first group of women to discover the resurrection of Jesus, plays a central role as visionary and spiritual guide for the other disciples. She replaces the Savior after his ascent, as the source of spiritual comfort and teaching:

Then Mary stood up. She greeted them all and addressed her brothers: “Do not weep or be distressed nor let your hearts be irresolute. For his grace will be with you all and will shelter you. Rather we should praise his greatness, for he has joined us together and made us true human beings.” When Mary said these things, she turned their minds [to]ward the Good, and they began to [as]k about the wor[d]s of the Savi[or]. (Gos. Mary Mag. 10: 1-4)⁵¹

The “Good” appears to be both the Neoplatonic good and their internal spiritual nature. She urges them to find peace within themselves and work towards unity. Mary’s special relationship with Jesus was already an issue when the present text was formulated because we have an apologetic included in the narration itself, significantly placed in the mouth of Peter: “Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than any other woman. Tell us the words of the Savior that you know, but which we have not heard” (Gos. Mary Mag. 6:1-2). Apostolic succession and the authority of respected women were in conflict in this exchange, as was the case in Montanism and Gnosticism. In this case, Mary’s authority comes not from visions but from her relationship with Jesus; probably disqualifying Montanism as a source because Montanism was an ecstatic, prophetic movement.

A problem arises, nonetheless, when Mary explains the “secret” teaching that Jesus has taught her:

Andrew sai[d, “B]rothers, what is your opinion of what was just said? I for one do not believe that the S[a]vior said these things, be[cause] these opinions seem to be so different from h[is th]ought.” After reflecting on these ma[tt]ers, [Peter said], “Has the sav[ior] spoken secretly to a wo[m]an and [not] openly so that [we] would all hear? Surely he did [not wish to indicate] that [she] is more worthy than we are?” (Gos. Mary Mag. 10:1-4)

The passage levels the playing field, suggesting that Mary was the equal but not superior to the other apostles, though her superiority is also implied in several places. The apostles challenge Mary’s status but not her character or teaching. They were suspicious, perhaps, because “private, privileged” meetings would be morally as well as politically suspect. Levi, however, jumps to Mary’s defense: “If the Savior considered her to be worthy, who are you to disregard her? For he knew her completely [and] loved her devotedly” (Gos. Mary Mag. 10:9-10).

Mary Magdalene is found to have an elevated status in other texts, such as the Gospel of Philip, the Dialogue of the Savior, the Gospel of Peter, and the Pistis Sophia. The Gospel of Philip, a Valentinian anthology dating from approximately 350 CE in its present form, describes Mary as one of three women who were companions of the Lord, in addition to his mother and sister. “Three women always used to walk with the Lord-Mary his mother, his sister, and the Magdalene, who is called his companion. For “Mary” is the name of his sister and his mother, and it is the name of his partner” (Gos. Phil. 59:6-10).”⁵² The word “partner” is particularly striking.

The following passage may clarify some of what is implied by the author:

The companion of the […] Mary Magdalene. The [… loved] her more than [all] the disciples, [and he used to] kiss her on her [… more] often than the rest of the [disciples] […]. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The savior answered, saying to them, “Why do I not love you like her? If a blind person and one with sight are both in the darkness, they are not different from one another. When the light comes, then the person with sight will see the light, and the blind person the darkness. (Gos. Phil. 63:32-64:8)

Jesus used to kiss Mary on the mouth. The intimacy between Mary and Jesus in this passage is deliberatively provocative. It is parallel to the love shown between Jesus and Peter, as well as to “the Beloved Disciple” in the Gospel of John. The provocation of a male master showing favor to a female disciple risks implying a sexual relationship; it also clearly states that Jesus favored a woman’s spiritual capabilities over that of a man. Having gotten the reader’s attention, this Gnostic document wants to explain, polemicizing against a fleshly relation and arguing for the special, unique, spiritual acomplishments of Mary Magdalene.

In the Dialogue of the Savior, Jesus takes Judas, Mary, and Matthew to the ends of heaven and earth (dial. 17). On this journey the disciples gain a complete understanding of the savior’s teachings (dial. 20). Jesus then commands the three disciples to teach what they have learned. “Mary said, ‘Tell me, Lord, why have I come to this place-to gain or to lose?’” The Lord said, “[You have come] to reveal the greatness of the revealer” (dial. 24). As a result of this heavenly journey, Mary gained spiritual superiority and the authority to inform her fellow disciples of Christ’s teachings.

The writer is sticking his thumb in the eye of the orthodox. The “Orthodox” church would have found these notions unacceptable. The writer means it to hurt because the purpose is important. The gender of the apostles is connected to the portrayal of the resurrection body. No one in the “orthodox” tradition (or probably anywhere else) would want to be resurrected in a female body at this time, which the culture had denigrated as an imperfect vessel for the intellect, being more easily perverted by lust. It is no surprise that the resurrection preached in these documents is less than full bodily resurrection because the female body was incomplete. Thus, a female can become a male in a material resurrection but not the other way around. Being male is important in a spiritual resurrection because the female gender is keyed to the inferior, material side of the dualist existence.

The spiritual body and immortality of the soul function to equalize the status of the afterlife, just as these documents argue for the equality of women as disciples of Jesus. The inferiority of women in this life was conceded but remedied in the next through various languages of transcendence of the feminine. In this respect, as Elaine Pagels showed in her The Gnostic Gospels, some Gnostics may have stressed the role of women in the church in a way that has not been equalled since.⁵³

Gender and Resurrection: Perpetua

TERTULLIAN said: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” He meant that the martyr’s example of courageous indifference to suffering and death in the arena served as the stimulus for further conversions to Christianity. The spread of Christianity through the reputation of the endurance of martyrs was forcefully defended by Frend in his important work on Christian martyrdom.⁵⁴ Whether or not it is entirely true that martyrdom furthered the cause of Christianity, accounts of martyrdom fueled conversions in at least two additional ways: They inspired later generations of the faithful to asceticism and motivated them to missionize foreign lands. If the martyrs had died for the faith in past generations, lay persons could win battles in ordinary life and the monks could conquer the world for Christianity.

For instance, the Passio Perpetua, also known as the Martyrdom of Perpetua, tells the events of the life of Saint Perpetua, who was martyred in the arena in Carthage on March 7,203. If it is truly her account, and some of it seems safely beyond historical doubt, it is one of the earliest pieces of Christian writing produced by a woman. And she is universally praised as a woman of virtue and valor, who practiced ascetic modesty. Her asceticism transcends sexuality in order to defeat the devil in heavenly battle. Perpetua was a young married woman of about twenty from a well-off family who was arrested with two other prisoners, her brother, her baby, and her slave, Felicitas, who is pregnant. The prisoners were eventually transported to a prison where they awaited their fate-a spectacle with wild beasts. Perpetua and Felicitas were to battle with a mad cow rather than a lion or bear because, as the narrator explains, it corresponded to their feminine nature.

While Perpetua was in prison, she had three visions. The first was of the various beasts that she might meet in the arena. The second was of herself in battle against another warrior in the arena. She recalls, “I was stripped of my clothing, and suddenly I was a man. My assistants began to rub me with oil as was the custom before a contest.”⁵⁵ Perpetua’s identification as a male and participation like a male in the blood sport of the arena shows the effect of Hellenistic ideas of gender roles upon early Christianity.

Perpetua’s vision is related to the famous Logion 114 of the Gospel of Thomas, where Jesus tells Mary that she must become a man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Mary’s gender reversal serves as a key for interpreting Perpetua’s Imitation of Christ. In this respect, Jesus’ passion is viewed as the same kind of agōn (contest) which the martyr must endure in the arena. The purpose and reward of this ordeal is seen in the third vision, where Perpetua experiences a journey to heaven in which she and her companions are carried by four angels and stand before a heavenly throne. This prophetic dream foretells the heavenly reward of martyrs and, by extension, all the faithful. Perpetua’s actual end is unknown, but the story is a great gift, a paradigm of Christian passion, and a martyr narrative for the future edification of the church.⁵⁶

Besides the effect on spectators, the work has had an even greater effect on those who have read it. After martyrdom ceased to be a common experience in the church, it still retained its value to encourage faith, to garner conversions, to concentrate the will of the faithful, and to inspire missionizing. There is a definite relationship between stories of martyrdom and ascetic behavior. The “red” martyr was replaced by the “white” martyr, the person who sacrificed even ordinary pleasures like marriage and procreation to achieve the same immortal state that the martyrs achieved. Perpetua’s example served as encouragement for missionizing as well. The monastics, unencumbered by family or relations, were important vectors in spreading the word of Christianity to new lands.

The Sethians: The Hypostasis of the Archons

THE HYPOSTASIS OF THE ARCHONS, otherwise translated as the Reality of the Rulers, is one of many Gnostic retellings of the creation story. It is from a school of Gnosticism called “Sethian” by scholars. The documents of this school consist of wildly mythological, sometimes dreamlike narratives, based on the Hebrew Bible. The Seth of the scholarly designation is the Biblical Seth, the surviving son of Adam, who carries gnōsis to the present, and not the Egyptian Seth. In this bizarre genre, the Bible’s heroes are seen as villains, while some of the Biblical villains are seen as heroes. The text identifies those who transmitted the gnōsis to the present generations and Seth is a key link.

gnōsis begins in the garden of Eden. The snake is a hero because it passes redeeming gnōsis to Adam and Eve. The God of the Old Testament is seen as an ignorant or evil demiurge (creator) because He thinks that He is the only God. He does not know that there is a God of salvation, who is above him. This is a polemical mythology, reflecting a Gnostic defense against Rabbinic and, especially, Christian opposition.⁵⁷ These texts reveal a radically anti-Jewish and anti-orthodox attitude.

The Hypothesis of the Archons, which will have to serve as a representative of a whole genre of Sethian texts found in the Nag Hammadi Corpus, discusses a conflict between the secondary authorities of the cosmos and the true reigning spirit of “Incorruptibility,” who is gendered as a female power. The hierarchy of the evil ruling powers of the cosmos appears to be an ironic caricature of church hierarchy. We can characterize the Hypostasis of the Archons as a Sethian text, due to the portrayal of Eve and the serpent as salvific characters. Eating from the tree of knowledge is a positive act, which lifts the veil of ignorance deluding Adam and Eve. After the Female Spiritual Principle enters the serpent, it refutes the prohibition given to them by the god called “Samael,”⁵⁸ a depiction of the Hebrew God as an ignorant demiurge.

The serpent explains, “With death you shall not die; for it was out of envy that it said this to you. Rather, your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good” (Hyp. Arch. 90:6-11). This is a perverse retelling of the text of Genesis 3:4-5: “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” In this text the gnōsis that the snake gives to Adam and Eve is saving knowledge, while the God of the Old Testament is an evil demon.

So the Hypostasis of the Archons is using the text of the Old Testament turned around for the purposes of engaging in a mythological polemic. The saving gnōsis turns out to be that we are trapped in this irredeemable world and the Gnostics are the only ones who know it. Because they know it, they know that they must get out of it to communicate again with the God of salvation. Matter and materiality are evil; they prevent us from perceiving the truth.

The salvation (gnōsis) that these Gnostics seek is a variation on the immortality of the soul, which must free itself from the dirty, ignorant, irredeemable universe in which it is trapped. The cosmic conflict between the Archons (Rulers) and Incorruptibility expresses the “battle” between the body and soul (who are the Jews or the ordinary Christians as opposed to the saving remnant the Christians), the body of the church and its soul (the mass of the church as opposed to its Gnostic elite), and most emphatically, the “orthodox” Church Fathers and the “Gnostics.” As myth does everywhere, the moral appears repeated on many levels simultaneously. The Archons are as much the evil rulers of the church as they are the evil rulers of the universe. This is a case of cosmology being used to define soteriology and hence, also, to define the transcendent part of the self.

The Hypostasis of the Archons can be divided into two sections: The first is the creation of the world as a result of the battle between the Archons and Incorruptibility, and the second, the attempted rape of Eve and Norea, resulting in Eleleth’s revelation to Norea. The first section explains that the creation of the world was ascribed to Archons. One of these Archons is the god Ialdabaoth, also known as Samael, the creator god of Genesis. Man was also a creation of these lower powers, but his soul was either a divine spark or breath implanted in the mortal flesh by the Supreme God.

The Archons create Adam in an attempt to trap Incorruptibility, the Female Spiritual Principle. The Archons repeatedly attempt to rape the physical female characters in order to defile the spirit that they embody. The first instance of rape occurs directly after the creation of Eve.

Then the Archons (authorities) came up to their Adam. And when they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became agitated with great agitation; and they became enamored of her. They said to one another, “Come, let us sow our seed in her,” and they pursued her. And she laughed at them for their folly and their blindness; and in their clutches she became a tree, and left before them a shadow of herself resembling herself; and they defiled [it] foully. (Hyp. Arch. 89:17-28)

Eve’s transformation into the tree reflects her position as the embodiment of the Female Spiritual Principle-that is, Wisdom. The story itself is likely a borrowed trope from the story of Apollo and Daphne (Laurel), pulled into the narrative. In the original story, the gods turn Daphne into the beautiful plant to escape being raped by Apollo, so the story is very apt for the context. The implications are Biblical: She becomes the “Tree of Life” described in Genesis 2:9, which is specifically equated with Wisdom in the book of Proverbs, though the text itself has to be forced a bit to come up with the rape: “She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are happy” (Prov 3:18). This mixture of Hellenistic and Hebrew traditions, brought together in a completely new and polemical narrative, is typical of the Sethian tradition.

The second woman who the Archons attempt to rape in the text is Eve’s daughter Norea. Norea is Seth’s (otherwise unknown) sister, who Eve bears after the death of Abel. Seth and Norea are conceived by divine providence. “Again Eve became pregnant, and she bore [Norea]. And she said, ‘He has begotten on [me] a virgin as an assistance [for] many generations of humankind.’ She is the virgin whom the powers did not defile” (Hyp. Arch. 91:34-92:2).

After a short but disagreeable interaction with Noah (now a villain), the remainder of the text describes Norea’s confrontation with the Archons and her subsequent revelation of Eleleth (a Savior figure whose name appears to be a variation or garbling of a name of God in Hebrew) which reveals that she has the knowledge to save humanity. Seth and Norea are singled out as the progenitors of the Gnostic community due to their spiritual superiority. Norea’s incorruptibility, in combination with her material presence, allows her to be the link between the cosmic Female Spiritual Principle and Eve’s physical progeny. With Norea’s help, humanity will eventually be saved. Pearson explains, “Just as the heavenly Eve functions in that text as an agent of salvation to Adam, so also does Norea function as an agent of salvation for Seth and the subsequent generations of the elect.”⁵⁹

As the Archons pursue Norea in an attempt to rape her, Eleleth comes down from the heavens and teaches Norea the truth about the powers of the world and promises salvation for her offspring. With the appearance of Eleleth there is a shift in the narrator’s voice. The narrative is transformed from a dialogue to an eyewitness account by Norea. This personal account has been interpreted by some scholars as an inner psychological withdrawal.

Again, cosmology is being used to describe and define an ancient understanding of the self. This bizarre use of myth twice to split the saved personality from raped personality seems to many to indicate a “self” in great distress. In her essay, “The Book of Norea, Daughter of Eve,” Karen King characterizes Norea’s vision of Eleleth as a psychic dissociation.⁶⁰ King explains that Norea’s reaction against her aggressors is a painful solution to her predicament. Her search for inner revelation splits the body and soul, therefore separating the body from the self and taking refuge in the spiritual soul. This is a very revealing detail that suggests a radical reaction to a terrible trauma. Severe disassociative responses to traumatic events, such as rape, not uncommonly produce the same reactions. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for example, is a complex consequence of exposure to extreme events, which encompasses trauma-related symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and symptoms otherwise found in depressive disorders.

Perhaps behind these stories are real incidents of sexual abuse. PTSD is also thought to be the pathological outcome of many traumatic events.⁶¹ Reexperiencing the traumatic event occurs spontaneously or in response to reminders that are linked to the traumatic event. A similar “rape trauma syndrome” exists that results in a form of psychological paralysis of the victims. Withdrawal is one psychological defense. Victims have described a sensation of leaving their bodies and looking down from above as their bodies are subjected to rape.⁶² Norea’s inner withdrawal, which resulted in her vision of Eleleth, could be an example of this type of stress-related disorder. If an abuse victim separates herself from her body, her true self emerges from the encounter unscathed.

In his dissertation, Lawrence P. Jones examines the Hypostasis of the Archons and suggests that it is a natural reflection of sexual abuse of slaves in the second and third centuries CE. Although society expected a master to be fair-minded and humane to his slaves, infidelity with servants was just as often overlooked because a master could misuse his slave in whatever ways he wished.⁶³ Jones suggests that slaves motivated by Christian or Jewish religious beliefs were most likely to refuse their masters’ sexual advances, and therefore may have been more likely to be the victims of rape.⁶⁴

For Jones, Norea’s psychic withdrawal in reaction to her aggressors is an example of how a slave could have withdrawn psychologically into a spiritual world beyond the reach of abusive masters. Jones explains that she (Norea) took refuge in an experience of “gnōsis,” “knowledge” of her “true” identity, rooted in a “higher” reality, which she believed superior to the reality of the rulers.”⁶⁵ It is doubtful that Jones’ theory explains the origin of every Gnostic treatise or conversion, rather it supplies a social profile of one kind of person who would be attracted to Sethian Gnosticism and offers an insight into a completely different social reality from the Valentinian communities.

The ascent of the soul in these texts finds a renewed mythological relevance for Late Antiquity. These systems, with their mythologies and rapes, their overturning of the Biblical text and their subjection of the historical Christ to a subservient role amongst a host of redeemer figures, put the Church Fathers’ on edge. But what really made their blood boil is that these texts suggest that faith is a low form of knowledge for those who have never seen the truths of these texts, as revealed in contemplation, meditation, and personal vision.

The Heresiologists

JUSTIN AND IRENAEUS

The Gnostics’ spiritualization of the saving events of Christianity was a threat to the Church Fathers-for their myths of rape and deception and for their bowdlerization of Old Testament passages but especially because they spiritualized the resurrection. The defensive (apologetic) polemic against heresy started, naturally enough, with Justin, who was both martyr and disputant. His heresiological work is lost to us but is incorporated into Irenaeus’ writings. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, a fascinating work in itself, also contains a few interesting issues on this theme. Justin develops a very traditional association between resurrection and judgment. He believes that the Hebrews, at least those who do God’s will before the coming of Christ, are to be saved. Resurrection will take place after Christ’s thousand-year rule. For Justin, the superiority of resurrection is that it grants to each person exactly its due. He criticizes those who believe that the afterlife is only the immortality of the soul (Dial. 80).

Furthermore, Christianity is infinitely superior to pagan philosophers because they only have the vaguest notions about their future afterlife while Christians have sure knowledge that they will regain their bodies and be justly rewarded (1 Apol. 18). So for Justin, Christianity is superior to all because it, like all notions of resurrection before, grants exactly the right rewards and punishments to each and also contains the full truth of the future life. Docetists and Gnostics could hardly have missed the implications of this polemic against their spiritualizing of the Gospel. Though he is respectful of the righteous Jews of the past, he is less patient with his contemporary Jewish opponents. He mentions that the Jews say that the disciples stole the body of Christ from the tomb, the accusation that stimulates the development of the empty tomb tradition (Dial. 108). The story of the empty tomb not only raises these doubts, it also provides the readers with ready-made answers to the question.

Irenaeus follows Justin by two generations, with several intervening fathers to mediate the discussion. With Justin as a guide, he points out that both body and soul are necessary for complete human existence (Adv. Haer. 5.6.1). Irenaeus also brings in the Eucharist as an actual exemplar of the dual nature of Christ, as was implicit in the Gospel descriptions of the event. If it is not possible for God to save both the body and the soul, then he cannot transmit salvation through the Eucharist either (Adv. Haer. 5.2.2-3).⁶⁶ Irenaeus’ opponents are basically the Gnostics, “falsely so-called,” as he characterizes them, to refute their claim to “saving knowledge” (gnōsis). He accuses them of denying God’s power over creation when they deny resurrection:

They refuse to acknowledge the power of God …who dwell upon the weakness of the flesh but do not consider the power of him who raises it from the dead. For, if God does not give life to what is mortal and does not recall the corruptible to incorruptibility, then he is not powerful. But that he is powerful in all these matters, we ought to know from a consideration of our origins, because God took a lump of earth and formed man. For indeed how much more difficult and hard it is to believe that someone made out of previously non-existent bones and nerves and veins and all the other things which pertain to man something which is a living and rational man than that he reconstituted what was made and thereafter dissolved in the earth. (Adv. Haer. 5.3.2)

THEOPHILUS, ATHENAGORAS, AND TATIAN

All these fathers write at the end of the apostolic age, approximately 180-220 CE. Theophilus explains resurrection in the science of his time, as the remaking and perfecting of our earthly vessels. He takes Paul’s metaphor that the seed seems to disappear before the plant appears, suggesting that resurrection is like the organic growth of a plant; it is making the body whole for the first time.⁶⁷

Athenagoras’ treatise On the Resurrection is the earliest surviving treatise specifically on the question, as Justin’s is fragmentary and possibly in-authentic. As with the other early fathers who write on this subject, it is hard to discover its exact audience. The fact that neither Theophilus, nor Athenagoras, nor Tatian make any significant mention of the Christ in their tractates or involve Christology in their demonstrations of resurrection suggests that they were written for a gentile, non-Christian audience to convince them that resurrection per se was neither as unlikely nor as disgusting a possibility as pagans might otherwise have thought.⁶⁸

Athenagoras’ argument is straightforward: Christian teaching about the resurrection is worthy of belief. It is within God’s power to raise the dead and it is appropriate that God should do so. Such an innocent-sounding and sensible stipulation actually involves a considerable contradiction with ordinary Platonism and Aristotelianism. God, in fact, would never know material things in these philosophies. For them, God knows the ideas but not the individual material events, which would entail God knowing change, which would, in turn, suggest that God is mutable. In Philo’s discussion of God’s immutability, he is willing to risk God’s unity rather than give up his immutability. This was typical of the philosophical belief of the day. So Athenagoras actually propounds quite an exceptional view, one not likely to convince a serious Platonist of the day, a polemic rather than an argument. Ordinary people were likely to be the target audience. The argument does have a certain inexorable, pragmatic logic.

The resurrection body is produced by reconstructing the body from its constituent parts, which are reassembled for the purpose. A God who knows everything would know where the bodies of the dead are and, common sense tells us, that a God who knows everything is better than one who knows only some things.

Athenagoras argues that “reincarnating” the soul (clothing it in flesh again) will not wrong it as it did not wrong the soul to be “incarnated” in the first place. Certainly the pagans thought that clothing the soul with flesh was just, though it may not have been a pleasant status. After the body is decomposed, to put it back into an incorruptible body would commit no further harm (Res. 10.5), reasons Athenagoras. The incorruptible part of the equation is important to note because, otherwise, the body would eventually decompose again. It is the incorruptible, valueadded quantity that transforms the resurrected believer into the resurrection body. It is the material reassembled that carries the identity. (This would not satisfy a modern philosopher but it does make the body the clear carrier of the self.)

Yet it would have seemed entirely wrong to Platonists. For them, the soul was the carrier both of life (sensation) and identity (memory and intelligence). They held the notion that souls were incarnated for remedial reasons, to make up for past infractions. But from Athenagoras’ argument we learn that he had no difficulty using the pagan notion of an immortal soul to guarantee the identity between the dead person and his risen body, when necessary. He was speaking to a pagan audience where notions of soul were assumed.

His strongest argument is: Resurrection is, moreover and most important, the will of God:

We have put our confidence in an infallible security, that will of our Creator, according to which he made man of an immortal soul and a body and endowed him with intelligence and an innate law to safeguard and protect the things which he gave that are suitable for intelligent beings with a rational life. We full well know that he would not have formed such an animal and adorned him with all that contributes to permanence if he did not want this creature to be permanent. The creator of our universe made man that he might participate in rational life and, after contemplating God’s majesty and universal contemplation, in accordance with the divine will and the nature alloted to him. The reason then for man’s creation guarantees his eternal survival, and his survival guarantees his resurrection, without which he could not survive as man. (Res. 15.2-4)⁶⁹

For Athenagoras, resurrection is the guarantee that we are what we seem to be-namely, human beings. To be perfected as humanity, we have to retain our bodily humanity; resurrection for him is the guarantee of that bodily perfection as humans. Death is but a temporary state for the faithful, a state in which their identity is temporarily dispersed. To survive forever merely as disembodied souls would be to survive at the expense of the essence of our humanity. The human being cannot be said to survive if the body has decomposed. It is not human survival unless the same body, newly perfected, is restored to the same soul (ch. 25).

The same seems to be true of Tatian, from what little we have of his writings. All that remains of Tatian’s writings is some fragments and his Oration for the Greeks, which serves a quite similar purpose to Athenagoras’ writings. But he argues quite differently to the same conclusions. Tatian, however, does not write systematically on this subject nor does he posit, as Athenagoras does, that we have an immortal soul. He seems to start from Biblical or Stoic rather than Platonic assumptions, believing that we come into existence out of nothing, with the creation of the body, explicitly saying that the soul is not in itself immortal. The soul is dissolved upon death, and so therefore the resurrection is a process of reconstituting both body and soul, as Athenagoras thought as well. Tatian rests with the confidence that no matter what happens to our bodies after death, God will restore the faithful to embodied existence, thus giving the lie to Irenaeus’ contention that Tatian denied bodily resurrection.⁷⁰ What is striking about these writers is their attention not only to bodily resurrection but to fleshly resurrection.

TERTULLIAN

Tertullian continues the tradition, making fleshly resurrection yet more explicit:

If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead. For what dead man is entire…. What body is uninjured, when it is dead? … Thus our flesh shall remain even after the resurrection-so far indeed susceptible of suffering, as it is the flesh, and the same flesh too; but at the same time impassible, inasmuch as has been liberated by the Lord. (Res. 8)⁷¹

As Caroline Bynum reminds us, by the end of the second century the resurrection of the body had become a major topic of controversy among Christians, as well as for the pagan critics of Christianity. The body, and the fleshly body at that, was what guaranteed the Christians that they personally would be resurrected in the end-time. The opposition claimed that resurrection was not something to be desired because it was impure and not logically the continuation of the thinking mind. In some way then, the battle was not just about resurrection but about what kind of persons we essentially are. As a result, the argument necessarily also described the social position of the debaters, their attitudes toward philosophy and citizenship.

Tertullian is the first significant Church Father writing in Latin.⁷² Although Justin and Irenaeus founded the patristic apologetic tradition, it was Tertullian who wrote a treatise directly discussing the resurrection of the flesh. Like Tatian, Tertullian wrote out of the Stoic philosophical tradition. Like Tatian, Tertullian’s resurrection is a re-creation of body and soul with a reassembling of the physical parts, instead of a process of spiritual, dynamic development, as in Paul. Following the Stoics, Tertullian thought that even the soul has a material reality, being made up of very fine matter.

Tertullian wrote On the Resurrection of the Flesh at the beginning of the third century. His opponents were Gnostics and probably Valentinians. He criticized his opponents’ notion that one receives gnōsis at baptism and hence can consider oneself resurrected and saved as well. Those who deny that the flesh is raised are also refusing to recognize that Christ lived in the flesh and that he was raised in the flesh (Res., 2). Following Daniel 7:13, many fathers suggested that Christ had been taken bodily into heaven. Tertullian is cognizant of the conflict that this raises in Scripture. Paul’s statement that “flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God” in 1 Corinthians means for Tertullian not only that the spirit is necessary for humans to enter the kingdom (Res., 50) but also that death will end because corruption cannot enter heaven (Res., 51).

Needless to say, this is a tendentious interpretation of Paul. Tertullian compensates by describing the process of the self’s perception through faith. He even envisions a flesh infused with spirit that is free of every malady, thus re-importing Paul’s pneumatology. Tertullian was evidently aware of Rabbinic Midrash on this point and used it effectively to make his point. As does the Midrash, Tertullian argues that when the children of Israel wandered for forty years in the desert, neither their shoes nor their clothes wore out, neither their hair nor their fingernails grew.⁷³ This Jewish trope is used by Tertullian to demonstrate resurrection: If God could sustain the children of Israel in the desert miraculously, he can certainly preserve the body of the faithful for its future resurrection. So the saved rise with every infirmity, malady, and bodily handicap removed.

The resurrection body will contain all the same organs that we have but they may not all be used. We will have no need for organs of digestion or sex.⁷⁴ For flesh and spirit are as a bridegroom and a bride:

And so the flesh shall rise again, wholly in every man, in its own identity, in its absolute integrity. Wherever it may be, it is in safe keeping in God’s presence, through that most faithful “Mediator between God and man [the man] Jesus Christ, who shall reconcile both God to man, and man to God; the spirit to the flesh and the flesh to the spirit. Both natures has He already united in His own self; He has fitted them together as bride and bridegroom in the reciprocal bond of wedded life. Now, if any should insist on making the soul the bride, then the flesh will follow the soul as her dowry. The soul shall never be an outcast, to be led home by the bridegroom bare and naked. She has her dower, her outfit, her fortune in the flesh, which shall accompany her with the love and fidelity of a foster sister. But suppose the flesh to be the bride, then in Christ Jesus she has in the contract of His blood received His spirit as her spouse. Now, what you take to be her extinction, you may be sure is only her temporary retirement. It is not the soul only which withdraws from view. The flesh, too, has her departures for a while-in waters, in fires, in birds, in beasts; she may seem to be dissolved into these but she is only poured into them, as into vessels. And should the vessels themselves afterwards fail to hold her, escaping from even these, and returning to her mother earth, she is absorbed once more, as it were, by its secret embraces, ultimately to stand forth to view, like Adam when summoned to hear from his Lord the Creator the words, “Behold, the man is become as one of us!” (Res., 63)⁷⁵

Tertullian is able to allegorize the preferred connection between flesh and soul. The bride is the flesh and the bridegroom is the soul, led together by the spirit. Note the gender identification of flesh and spirit; it is based on a social hierarchy of male and female, not the grammatical gender of the two words. The flesh can be summoned again, just as Adam was summoned by God at creation. The body will be complete and perfect, even containing the genitalia, which will have no possible purpose in the resurrection body. They were important for the purposes of excreting in this life, necessary for the health of the body. Same with the teeth, they were necessary in this life for eating and have no future purpose. But they will be retained in the future body, not because the reconstructed world will have sexuality or eating but because the body would look peculiar without them.⁷⁶ Thus, at the end of his life when Tertullian became a Montanist, an apocalyptic movement which expected the end of the world immediately, he took his notions of fleshly resurrection with him into apocalypticism. Indeed, anyone who starts from Stoic principles can end up in apocalypticism because Stoicism itself posited that the world would end in fire, an ekpyrosis. Certainly Tertullian would have interpreted Stoicism as most consonant with the Biblical tradition in this respect.

Tertullian decides that the resurrection body will be like the angels (Res., 62). The importance of this statement is not in the identity between the two but in the immortalizing of the perfected believer. The emphasis on the fleshly nature of the resurrection is a mark of the importance of this early battle between Gnosticism and orthodoxy over the nature of the body. We have seen that this is just as certainly an argument over human identity, gender, and transcendent significance. Behind it, the nature of the believer’s responsibility regarding martyrdom was being expressed as well.

THE ALEXANDRIAN SCHOOL

Clement of Alexandria and Origen, forming an Alexandrian school that was deeply influenced by Philo Judaeus and Hellenistic Jewish philosophy, attempt a very different kind of synthesis between the two cultures. Though Clement preceded Tertullian, it is more convenient to treat him together with Origen for that reason. It is the two seemingly mutually exclusive doctrines of immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body that are the most illuminating battlefield for the Alexandrian fathers. Clement’s treatise on the resurrection is lost and was, no doubt, “heretical” from the perspective of more “orthodox” eyes. But we should see it as an attempt to combine the two doctrines in such a way as to build the truth of one upon the other, instead of seeing in them obvious clash and mutual disconfirmation. That is the dominant strategy of the Alexandrian writers from Philo forward.

Clement attempted to define the good Gnostic as the true Christian who is pious in every respect. The Stromata (carpets or miscellanies) has several depictions of the Christian who can resist pleasure and desire, grief and anger, and in general maintain complete composure through the strengths of the Christian life. Philosophy too purges the soul and prepares it for faith. In this, Clement attempted to reclaim the term gnōsis and “Gnostic” for Christianity-even using the term for saving knowledge to represent the center of the church’s teaching: “For God created man for immortality, and made him an image of his own nature (Wis 2:22), according to which nature of [God] who knows all, he who is a Gnostic, and, righteous and holy with prudence, hastens to reach the measure of perfect manhood” (Strom. 6.12.97). It is not possible to take the full measure of Clement’s thinking on the matter because of the missing document. But it does look as if Clement affirmed resurrection of the body in some form (Strom. 6.13.107.2). The nature of the resurrection body is, however, more ambiguous. He thought that sexual differentiation will disappear, that men and women will be human but they will cease reacting sexually.⁷⁷ In short, they will attain angelic status, as is implicit even in the New Testament.

The perfection of the knowledge of faith occupies Clement’s attention, rather than bodily resurrection. It is the consummation of existence and the possession of eternal life: “For herein lies the perfection of the Gnostic soul, that having transcended all purifications and modes of ritual, it should be with the Lord where he is, in immediate subordination to him” (Strom. 7.10.56-57).⁷⁸

ORIGEN

Origen brings this strand of thinking to perfection. He stakes out his territory between the extremes of the Gnostic and the pagan notions of afterlife and Jewish views of resurrection.⁷⁹ He and Augustine are clearly the most famous theologians of the ante-Nicene and post-Nicene periods respectively. He had help in the sense that he had to counter the anti-Christian polemic of Celsus. But his solution turns out to be too close to that of Celsus his opponent to be readily accepted by the “orthodox” tradition. Celsus apparently believed:

·         The idea that God is going to destroy the world in a great fire that only Christians will survive is absurd.

·         The idea that the dead will rise from the earth in the same bodies in which they were buried is a “hope for worms.”

·         The soul would not want a rotted body. Besides, there are even Christians who do not believe that the body is raised.

·         Christians have no answer to the question: “With what sort of body will they return? They merely retreat behind the power of God the creator. But God cannot do what is shameful or contrary to nature.

·         God can confer immortality on the soul. But to raise the flesh would be contrary to divine reason and character. Nothing could bring God to do something of that sort.⁸⁰

This short summary makes clear the critical attack on Christianity which Celsus mounted based on the absurd Christian notion of resurrection. Like Galen, Celsus attacked the very fiber of Christianity from the unconquerable height of Greek philosophy, an intellectual discipline of impeccable prestige that included both critique and polemic, skills that demanded long training and an expensive higher education. By now, Christians could field their own intellectual debate team. Origen appears to have fully understood the threat that Christianity posed to pagan philosophy and have countered with a more systematic Hellenizing of the Christian position than any previous Father, creating a true gnōsis of Christianity in the same vein as Clement.

Origen essentially builds on the continuity between life and death. He stresses the spiritual nature of the resurrection body. He begins with the traditional notion that the flesh dies as result of Adam’s sin whereas the soul dies as the result of personal sin. In the Dialogue with Heraclides, he addresses the issue of the immortality of the soul. He admits many different kinds of death and immortality. Because there are many kinds of death, from one point of view we are immortal, yet from others we are not. Certainly the soul that sins is giving up its immortal nature. So in this he differs radically from Platonic thinking and agrees with Philo.

As Origen shows in his First Principles, he goes considerably along the way towards the philosophers. Like the Platonists, he viewed material existence itself as a kind of punishment. Human souls descend into the human body from a preexistent purity (Princ.1.4.1). When it comes to the issue of resurrection Origen returns to the Pauline idea of spiritual bodies. This allows him to avoid the issues associated with the resurrection of the flesh. He also states that there will be a continuum of resurrection bodies, each with a glory corresponding to its moral status, which echoes the Pauline formulation in 1 Corinthians 15. But the most important thing is that the resurrection body will not be ordinary flesh:

Because if they believe the apostle [Paul], that a body which arises in glory, and power, and incorruptiblity, has already become spiritual, it appears and contrary to his meaning to say that it can again be entangled with the passions of flesh and blood, seeing that the apostle manifestly declares that “flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God, nor shall corruption inherit incorruption.” But how do they understand the declaration of the apostle [Paul] “We shall be changed?” This transformation certainly is to be looked for, according to the order which we have taught above; and in it, undoubtedly it becomes us to hope for something worthy of divine grace; and this we believe will take place in the order in which the apostle describes the sowing of the ground of a “bare grain of corn, or of any other fruit,” to which “God gives a body as it pleases Him,” as soon as the grain of corn is dead. (Princ. 2.10.3)⁸¹

Origen claims that he is merely restating the Pauline concept of spiritual bodies. But he has traveled, in reality, a great distance from the apocalyptic mysticism of Paul. Origen’s notion of a “spiritual body” has taken its lead from Paul but, like Valentinianism, the concept is the immortal soul of Platonism in disguise. He sees souls as the stuff of the stars and the perfected souls as the heavenly bodies.⁸² Origen allows everything but the natural immortality of the soul. For him, it is the saving work of God which immortalizes the soul, just as it was for Philo. This is certainly a possible and consistent way for Christianity to have moved. As it turned out, it was rejected. However, it was taken up by Gnosticism and later by Manichaeanism.

Evidently one problem with his perception is that it threatened the personal identity of the believer: “Yet the form (eidos) of the earlier body will not be lost, even though a change to a more glorious condition takes place in it.” For this Origen returns yet again to the Pauline term, “spiritual body” but he loads it this time with a different ammunition.⁸³ This time, he fills the term with the implications of the spermatic “Logos” of Stoicism. Thus, he forges yet one more link between Christianity and Greek philosophy. His notion of personal identity is the pagan notion of the soul.

We have come an enormous distance from the apocalypticism of the early Jesus movement, which claimed (as all movements of that type did) that they alone were faithful enough to merit God’s future rewards. Origen’s system is clearly the farthest that one can take the notion of resurrection into Greek philosophy. It represents the cynosure of coexistence or, more exactly, the subsumption of resurrection into the notion of the immortal soul of Plato. But it is a perfect harmonization that future fathers were to view as too radical. Origen was called “heretic” while Augustine’s view returns to Tertullian’s approach.⁸⁴

Gregory of Nyssa and the Cappadocians

JAROSLAV PELIKAN wrote a magisterial study of the Cappadocian fathers, Christianity and Classical Culture, whose theology represents the high point of philosophical thinking after Origen and before Augustine.⁸⁵ As thinkers, the power of their arguments surpasses that of Augustine but does not have the same dogmatic authority. Pelikan sees the major enterprise of these fathers as attempting to resolve the differences between Greek natural philosophy and Christian revelatory explanations of life. This is entirely compatible with the approach I have been taking. So let me resume his development of the chapter on life after death among the Cappadocians-Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzius, and Macrina, in many ways the most sophisticated teacher of them all, who was the older sister of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa.

Gregory of Nyssa made a significant contribution to the synthesis of the doctrines of resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul.⁸⁶ It is unclear how much of his thinking is actually his and how much belongs to his extremely adept sister Macrina; in his most important treatise, On the Soul and the Resurrection, he gives her quite full credit for her sophisticated thinking and saintly life. Perhaps he should have ceded her authorship of the treatise. In lauding Gregory we may actually be praising his sister.

Gregory himself had considerable difficulty with the notion of resurrection and that difficulty is to be evidenced in his treatise On the Dead. There, with the Greeks, he argues that the soul is what constitutes the human person, that the body is an impediment to the realization of personhood, and that death is the fulfillment of this realization.

By the time of his great treatises, On the Creation of Man and On the Soul and Resurrection, Gregory’s positions had matured considerably. In On the Creation of Man, written between 379 and 380, he presents several arguments for the reality of resurrection. The first is that good must triumph over evil so that we must expect an eventual return to the good of Eden that God made for us at the beginning (21.4). Resurrection itself may be best demonstrated from the miracles of Jesus in the Scripture but the final consummation cannot take place until “the … complement of human nature” has been filled.⁸⁷ Since these proofs are as much about revivifications as resurrections, Gregory’s discussion risks describing the resurrection as the revivification of the material body. Hence, he goes out of his way to show that the resurrection bodies in the New Testament, including Jesus’ own, had already corrupted, making the miracle of resurrection clear to all as a proof of the general resurrection to come:

And the disciples were led by the Lord to be initiated at Bethany in the preliminary mysteries of the general resurrection. Four days had already passed since the event; all due rites had been performed for the departed; the body was hidden in the tomb; it was probably already swollen and beginning to dissolve into corruption, as the body mouldered in the dank earth and necessarily decayed: the thing was one to turn from, as the dissolved body under the constraint of nature changed to offensiveness. At this point the doubted fact of the general resurrection is brought to proof by a more manifest miracle; for one is not raised from severe sickness, nor brought back to life when at the last breath-nor is a child just dead brought to life, nor a young man about to be conveyed to the tomb released from his bier; but a man past the prime of life, a corpse, decaying, swollen, yea already in a state of dissolution, so that even his own kinsfolk could not suffer that the Lord should draw near the tomb by reason of the offensiveness of the decayed body there enclosed, brought into life by a single call, confirms the proclamation of the resurrection, that is to say, that expectation of it as universal, which we learn by particular experience to entertain. (On the Creation of Man 25.11)⁸⁸

It is the resurrection of Lazarus and the others, as much as Jesus’, which shows us the truth of the general resurrection. And the contrast with his Origenism in previous writings could not be more complete.

Since then every prediction of the Lord is shown to be true by the testimony of events, and we have not only learned this by his words, but also received the proof of the promise in deed, from those very persons who returned to life by resurrection, what occasion is left to those who disbelieve? Shall we not bid farewell to those who pervert our simple faith by “philosophy and vain deceit,” and hold fast to our confession in its purity, learning briefly through the prophet the mode of the grace, by his words, “Thou shalt take away their breath and they shall fail, and turn to their dust. Thou shalt send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created, and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth” (LXX Ps 104:29-30); at which time also he says that the Lord rejoices in His works, sinners having perished from the earth: for how shall any one be called by the name of sin, when sin itself exists no longer? (On the Creation of Man 25.13)⁸⁹

To Gregory, resurrection, though it may seem at first illogical, is demonstrated in nature too, just as the pagan natural philosophy is demonstrated in nature. He refers to the seed in the ground and the beginning of human life, finding that there is nothing in the doctrine which is beyond our experience. Resurrection is therefore a dynamic, natural process.

Having established the nature of the New Testament doctrine, Gregory begins a more significant attempt at synthesis. He uses the Platonic concept of eidos (form, idea) as the one element of the earthly body to be preserved for the resurrection. This was Origen’s opinion as well; no doubt Gregory learned from him. Gregory explicitly uses this concept as the principle of identity, which allows for the reassembling of the body’s atoms. Gregory uses the eidos, not as the form itself, but as a spiritual organ by which an individual’s soul imprints the individual’s identity on material (27.2-5). This is a complex and sophisticated attempt to combine immortality with resurrection, realized, transcendent humanity with personal identity.

Even Plato was of the opinion that the body affects the soul. Without demonstrating that it is the individual who is resurrected, Gregory had risked proving resurrection by losing the individuality of the resurrected person. This is quite similar to the philosophical problem involved in demonstrating that the soul that survives death is the same as the individual who lived. Is the soul personal enough to be the principle of identity for the living person or is the soul merely a general rational principle that is immortal? In the same way, by combining the soul with resurrection of the body, Gregory risks failing to demonstrate that the person resurrected is the same as the one that died.

This concretization of the eidos is Gregory’s attempt to resolve that problem. In chapter 28, armed with this Origenist argument, Gregory refutes aspects of Origen’s notion of reincarnation. Thus, though the ostensible subject of the treatise is the making of the human body, we find that Gregory uses it as a way to try to synthesize the primitive Christian notion of resurrection with a sophisticated, philosophical notion of the immortality of the soul.

Armed with these arguments, Gregory goes to the main event: His treatise On the Soul and the Resurrection is precisely what the title suggests. It is an attempt to reason with each concept to make a consistent description of the Christian message, both in terms of scriptural background and philosophical acumen. The problem, however, is not just academic. He and his sister Macrina are dealing with the overwhelming loss of their older brother Basil. At the beginning of the treatise, Gregory relates that he has gone to his sister in search of consolation but she brings him clarity on intellectual issues as well.⁹⁰ Gregory expresses his difficulty in demonstrating the immortality of the soul while Macrina explains the relation of the soul to the body and, in doing so, raises the issue of the resurrection of the body. And she immediately raises the issue of the identity of the raised individual:

One hears people … asking how, since the dissolution of the elements according to their kinds is incomplete, the element of heat [the soul] in a person, once it is mingled generally with its own kind, can be withdrawn again for the purpose of reforming a man. For, they would say, unless the very same element returns the result would be a similar being and not the indvidual himself, that is to say, another person would come into being and such a process would not be a resurrection, but the creation of a new man. But, if the original is to be reconstituted, it is necessary for it to be entirely the same, taking up its original nature in all the parts of its elements. (De Anima 230)⁹¹

With this argument, one might easily turn to the resurrection of the body as the principle of identity, admitting that the soul is the life-force but not the individuality of the person. However, that would lead into its own difficulties about the condition of the resurrected:

If our human bodies return to life in the same condition in which they left it, then man is looking forward to endless misfortune in the resurrection [old age, disease, infanticide] (De Anima 261)

Arguing in this way then leads to a different dilemma about the possibility of living eternally in a material body. So it is not to the body that Macrina turns to express the principle of identity, propounding, as Gregory did above, that the soul picks up and retains the individuality of a person’s moral life (260). This is rather like the Philonic solution to the problem and, indeed, one is left with the feeling that the body is denigrated by means of Platonism so as to fit the New Testament’s requirements. Gregory, too, admits Origen’s notion that salvation will eventually be universal, after what punishments are meted out beyond the grave. The philosophical and logical necessity for the resurrection of the body at the final consummation will indeed fall to Augustine to express most fully, though he is even more negative about sexuality and the body’s role in this life.

Augustine

THOUGH PERHAPS not the intellectual equal of the Cappadocians in philosophical discussion, Augustine was certainly the most influential Christian thinker in the West until Aquinas. He significantly transmuted Christian views of grace and law, determination and free will, love, charity, and sin and Original Sin by gathering them up into a huge synthesis. There is no way to do justice here to the huge corpus of writing left by this towering and maddening figure or the intellectual synthesis that he effected. We have already seen how Origen, in attempting to conquer philosophy, was himself conquered by it, in the opinion of his successors. Seeking a true Christian gnōsis, his successors judged him a Christian Gnostic, as Clement had argued, and condemned him for it as well.

For Augustine, the Christian notion of resurrection might be entirely subsumed into Greek categories but it would only remain resurrection if it was also material. It must be material because the sin of the first man was material. In a real sense, Augustine is returning to the Pauline observation that, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor 15:22). But, in doing so, he redesigns the notion of Original Sin so that it is a much stronger and foregrounded belief than in any other Church Father:

The law of death is that by which it was said to the first man, “You are dust and unto dust you shall return,” for we are all born of him in that state because we are dust and we shall return to dust as a punishment for the sin of the first man. (Fort., 22)⁹²

Augustine denies Origen’s solution to the seeming contradiction between Hebrew and Greek thought, making a brave, seemingly backward move. He returns to the primacy of the body and insists that it is the seat of our fullest identity:

“Spiritual body” does not mean “not a body” any more than “animated body” means “life.” … “Spiritual body” means a body obeying the spirit. (Serm. 242.8.11)⁹³

He returns on many occasions to the issues as Paul defined them. But, while Paul was an apocalypticist throughout his life, Augustine was only one at the beginning of his career. He moves more and more into the notion that humans are preempted from perfecting themselves without God’s special grace. The body is only necessary to guarantee our identity. Therefore, it is to the body that humanity will return. Augustine’s most extensive treatment of the resurrection before his City of God is in Sermon 362, dated to about 410. He tries to explain Paul’s text “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God”:

Your body does not possess anything, but your soul, through the body, possesses that which belongs to the body. If, therefore, the flesh resurrects in order not to possess but to be possessed, not to have but to be had, what wonder then if flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom, since they will certainly be possessed by another…. In so far as we will be resurrected, it is not we whom the flesh carries, it is we who will carry it. If we carry it, we will possess it; if we will possess it, we will not be possessed by it; for we are freed from the judgment of the demon; we are of the kingdom of God. In this sense, this flesh and blood do not possess the kingdom of God. (Serm. 362.33.14)⁹⁴

For Augustine, the vocabulary has to agree with Paul, it is a “spiritual body.” It further will all become clear at the end of history, at the eschaton, when the earthly realm will be perfected. Augustine describes the intermediary realm in which the faithful dead live. At the Second Coming, nature itself will change and be perfected. To have the form of a body, without the flesh of corruption, means for Augustine (as for Macrina before him), that none of the acts of the flesh (eating, drinking, begetting, etc.) will continue in heaven. Human beings will finally achieve the status of angels (stars) in the afterlife and this will become the model for a perfected earth in the eschaton:

[The heavenly body] will be called a body and it can be called a celestial body. The same thing is said by the Apostle when he distinguishes between bodies: “All flesh is not the same flesh: but one is the flesh of men, another of beasts, another of birds, another of fishes. And there are bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial” (1 Cor 15:39-40). However, he certainly would not say celestial flesh; although bodies may be said to be flesh but only earthly bodies. For all flesh is body; but not every body is flesh. (Serm. 362.18.21)⁹⁵

Augustine must explain why, when souls can contemplate God in heaven, it should be necessary for them to have a body at all. For Augustine, the answer is more scriptural than philosophical. The purpose of having a spiritual body in heaven has to do with the identity of the believer and also with its purpose in heaven, to meditate upon God. The spiritual body is both infinitely superior to the soul and, at the same time, only complete when it has become a spiritual body. Augustine analogizes with the incarnation. If God can be incarnate, then the perfected soul can be embodied as a spiritual body.

This solves the question not by reason but by scriptural passage and analogy but it creates a whole slew of other questions. Augustine settles the issue with Scripture but, conveniently, he uses Paul’s writing and not the Gospels to settle the question. He would have had a much harder time demonstrating how body and soul go together without Paul’s notion of the “spiritual body.” It would have been almost impossible to make his point from the Gospels alone. He more or less settles the issue of corporeality by using the word “body” to mean an intelligible rather than a material object, as he interprets Paul. So in some sense, his body is not really a body but rather a garment for the soul, simply an ornament for it.

Augustine does not here resolve all the issues satisfactorily for himself. But he relies on the experience of leaving the body in ecstasy as demonstration that the soul will achieve the intermediary state. He then says that even after we have reached the felicity of bodiless existence there is the further felicity of returning to a perfected body, so that wise and ascetic men in this world live as if they are already in the perfected world to come. It may be correct to say that humans may have the experience of leaving the body. It is a real and quite intense experience. But, it is another thing to say that this demonstrates the immortality of the soul (see ch. 8).

In his most extensive treatment of our final disposition, The City of God, Augustine locates the ultimate good in being reincorporated without the evils of corporeal life. But he also uses that peculiar future state to demonstrate that hellfire and punishment for the damned will be real. How else could the soul be punished except in a body (Civ. 19.1-17)? The saved have precisely the converse issue. They will be souls together in salvation, a community of those saved, just as the church creates a community on earth. They will need an incorruptible body for their reward:

So, in order to be happy, souls need not flee from every kind of body [as they taught], but must receive an incorruptible body. And in what incorruptible body will they more fittingly rejoice than in the one in which they groaned while it was corruptible. (Civ. 12.26)

Augustine is driven to the conclusion from which Paul started: the body that the faithful will enjoy eternally is like a fleshly body but it is not a fleshly body. It is not even a material body. It is perfected flesh:

We shall see the corporeal bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in such a way that, wherever we turn our eyes, we shall, through our bodies that we are wearing and plainly seeing, enjoy with perfect clarity the vision of the sight of God everywhere present and ruling all things, even material things. It will not be as it is now, when the invisible things of God are seen and understood through the things which have been made, in a mirror dimly and in part…. (Civ. 22.29) Either, therefore, God will be seen by means of those eyes because they in their excellence will have something similar to a mind by which even an incorporeal nature is discerned-but that is difficult or impossible to illustrate by an example or testimony of the divine writings-or else, which is easier to understand, God will be so known by us and so present to our eyes that by means of the spirit he will be seen by each of us in each of us, seen by each in his neighbour and in himself, seen in the new heaven and the new earth and in every creature which will then exist. (Civ. 22.29)

For Augustine this means being subsumed into the body of Christ, who is the only member of the trinity to take on human form. Indeed for him, meditating on the trinity is a way to anticipate the last and final consummation, which in The City of God Augustine compares with the Sabbath:

There is no need here to speak in detail of each of these seven “days.” Suffice it to say that this “seventh day” will be our Sabbath and that it will end in no evening but only in the Lord’s day-that eighth and eternal day which dawned when Christ’s resurrection heralded an eternal rest both for the spirit and for the body [emphasis added]. On that day we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise-for this is to be the end without the end of all our living, that Kingdom without end, the real aim and goal of our present life. (Civ. 22, end)

In short, Augustine believes that saved Christians will enjoy eternity as a community of perfected beings, like angels. As opposed to Origen, Augustine sees the final disposition of the soul only at the Parousia, the Second Coming, when all the faithful are resurrected. The living will be transformed but the dead will find their souls reclothed. The soul, rather than hating the body as in Platonism, yearns for the body in order to complete its repentance, just as in late Neoplatonism. The difference, for Augustine, is that repentance must be done in a single lifetime and may only be accomplished by those who believe in the Christ. Augustine himself certainly had plenty of experience with repentance, having been a religious quester himself. Indeed, the interior life of the convert dominates his writings.

The Nicene Creed affirmed that Christians must firmly await the life of the aeon to come. For the Cappadocians, this meant affirming both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead, a formula which was by now the standard way of dealing with the opposing concepts of afterlife in Christian thought. There was certainly a difficulty in affirming both of them simultaneously. But for Augustine, both could be affirmed sequentially. Upon death, the correctly believing and acting soul could attain the immortality of the soul which had originally been the Greek notion. At the end of time, the soul would be returned to a body for the fulfillment that was contemplated by Daniel and the Jewish apocalypticists (of which Christianity was certainly the primary example): Immortality of the soul now; resurrection of the body at the last trumpet.

In Augustine, we find a philosophically sophisticated person who, after being a philosopher, is himself inimical to philosophy. Yet he sides with a doctrine of fallen human nature more than with Christianity’s original apocalyptic past. Augustine uses dualism to balance millenarianism. Augustine had to avoid, to use Paula Fredriksen’s words, “the Scylla of popular millenarianism” and “the Charybdis of Manichaean dualism,” with the soul’s escape from a depraved world.⁹⁶ As she says in another place:

But Augustine’s anthropology takes him even further beyond classical dualism. As he leaves man’s freedom, the soul’s integrity, and traditional education behind, he also leaves behind the cosmic architecture of the late Hellenistic universe and the resonances that culture had established between God’s relation to the physical universe and the soul’s relation to the body. No longer, for Augustine, is the human being a miniature map of the cosmos. That world, with its hairline fractures between orders of being and its twin fault lines dividing man, neatly, between soul and body, could not speak to the infinitely more complicated man of Augustinian anthropology-the man through whose soul ran the ancient fault line arising from the sin of Adam.⁹⁷

With his doctrine of the embodied fulfillment of time, Augustine avoids the Greek philosophical notion that the soul merely discorporates and finds its final fulfillment. There is an immortal soul but it will be punished at death. Augustine never sees a return to the body as a return to bodily pleasures in the apocalyptic end, as would a Zoroastrian or a Jew (or a Muslim). All earthly pleasure is purged away. It is the body of an angel to which the faithful return, to contemplate God more completely.

The result is an interesting synthesis: The soul is immortal but only in the intermediate state. At the last judgment, it shall be judged again. Only the elect shall return to the perfected body at the end of time. There, it is most fully itself for the soul is not fully an individual. The synthesis is, in a way, a systematic description of the pictures of the last judgment in the Christian apocrypha, combining a notion of a soul that survives death with a final judgment.

This synthesis may not be as satisfactory intellectually to us as is the synthesis of Gregory. (If the soul is not fully individual, then it is not fully the same as the original person on earth.) But we live in a different world than Augustine. Augustine represented the forceful partnership of the civil authority with the church and provided the synthesis most in line with the desired, new unification of the Christian Roman Empire. That is part of the importance of Augustine; the church seized upon his thought because it so thoroughly supported the orthodox position. The state seized upon his thought because it gave it the justification to demand higher allegiances from its inhabitants. But minority groups not part of the Christian synthesis, like the Jews, were forced into very subservient roles. Many were forced out, murdered, or converted and eventually left the territory controlled by Roman Christendom. Those who remained were constantly stripped of their rights as individuals and communities.

In her chapter entitled “The Politics of Paradise,” Elaine Pagels summarizes Augustine’s effect on church tradition by the articulation of a strong doctrine of Original Sin:

Instead of the freedom of the will and humanity’s original royal dignity, Augustine emphasizes humanity’s enslavement to sin. Humanity is sick, suffering, and helpless, irreparably damaged by the fall, for that “Original Sin,” Augustine insists, involved nothing else than Adam’s prideful attempt to establish his own autonomous self-government. Astonishingly, Augustine’s radical views prevailed, eclipsing for future generations of western Christians the consensus of more than three centuries of Christian tradition.⁹⁸

Personally, Augustine gave up his longtime mistress, with whom he had fathered children; then he gave up a very promising Christian marriage with a socially prominent woman, who could have assured him a successful public career. It is easy for us to see the harm that this surely caused to his wives and children. What is harder to see is what was gained when either men or women adopted celibacy as a life-commitment. With it, they become autonomous individuals, freed from their roles as wives or husbands or tutors of the young or householders. Celibacy gave the ancients autonomy and freedom to travel, write, and even to rule ecclesiastically.⁹⁹

Theologically, these life-changes also had consequences for Augustine. He gave up the positive and hopeful interpretation of the story of the garden of Eden. For him, the moral of the story of the first humans no longer represented the human achievement of enough wisdom to chose good over evil. Ever after it represented the story of our fall into slavery which had to be compensated by asceticism, self-mastery, and the sacraments of the church, available only to those who adhered to its civil and religious laws. The doctrine of Original Sin provided a justification for staying true to the church when the feeling that the end was near had abated; infant baptism both counteracted the notion and promulgated it. It is not hard to see behind this notion of human deficiency a new Christian justification for imperial and episcopal control of Christendom for the benefit of its adherents.

Augustine and Interior Experience

YET, THERE is another side to Augustine as well. He was also a master at understanding the value and quality of human experience. He was able to relate internal experience to the doctrine of the soul in a way that has been fundamental to Western culture ever since. While his solution to these problems shows that he was a savvy reader of the social position of the church, his solution to the problem of the “self” shows him to be a very accomplished and sensitive philosopher.

Augustine had read the Neoplatonists, especially Plotinus, and was extremely impressed by the Neoplatonic attention to interior experience. Perhaps this was because his own internal experience, his own multiple conversions were such cruces in his life: Augustine went from conventional Christian to pagan orator and philosopher, from philosopher to Manichaean, from Manichaean to Christian, from Christian to priest, and finally from priest to Bishop of Hippo. Not only did Augustine travel a long and self-conscious spiritual odyssey, he wrote about each step and used his own interior feelings and experiences as a model for the progress of the soul towards redemption. He is exquisitely self-conscious of the values of each of these changes.

But Augustine’s unique synthesis also derives from his education. He was taught in a center of Christian Neoplatonism by Ambrose who took Plotinus’ spiritual inwardness seriously. Augustine took the interior consciousness of the Neoplatonists and turned it, even converted it, into a new Christian spiritual inwardness. In so doing, in Phillip Cary’s estimation, he created the internal life of the soul with which we are so familiar today. Because Plotinus had described in detail the interior experiential process by which the intellect carries the soul upward to the divine, even in life, Augustine can take the attention to interiority into the meditations of the Christian life.¹⁰⁰

At first, Augustine simply reproduced the Neoplatonic notion of the immortality of the soul. The soul was divine because it contained the “intelligible world,” the world of the intellect, and thus could be nothing else than immortal itself. But, this argument becomes less possible for a Christian philosopher as time goes on. Augustine needs to deny the natural immortality of the soul when he takes on his role as church spokesperson.¹⁰¹ Augustine does not avail himself of the Philonic argument that the soul is immortal but not indestructible, because he wants to emphasize the saving role of Christ and because it would never have led him to account for the resurrection of the body. So he needs to provide a real and palpable hell to punish sinners.

To be sure, the Platonists were religious, though they remained pagan. The greatest religious rewards came from the meditation and ascent of the soul to the divine realm. But for Augustine, who had tried the religious life of the Platonists, there were yet greater rewards to be had from being a Christian. Now no longer a pagan desiring to understand what seemed like a mechanistic universe, Augustine, the Christian Platonist and churchman, affirmed that the bond of love that the intellect discerns and that carries the soul upward to God is a personal love responding to the grace of God, who is Father, Christ, and Holy Spirit. This means that the soul and the divine are not the same thing. There is a separation between the two, a natural breach that can be healed by grace and the charity of God responding to the human will.

It is a personal relationship with the divinity, a mystical bond, not just an intellectual attempt to convey one’s mind to the world soul. Augustine describes a God who became truly human and so is capable of supporting a human relationship. That relationship takes place totally on the intellectual level. Indeed, the trinitarian godhead itself, three persons in perfect intellectual love relationships with each other, gives the best example of how the soul yearns for its ascent for Augustine.

That very bond implies a separation between divinity and the human soul that needs to be overcome, not the identity of substance that Plotinus had outlined. Plotinus described a universe starting with the One which in turn is subsumed by the Divine Mind and so on outward and downward to the realm in which we live. The soul, however, is part of the same intelligible world and so is transparently part of the very center of the intellectual universe. For Neoplatonism, there was a mystical identity between the self and the universe. But for Augustine there was the separation of sin. The individual soul is essentially cut off from God and can only reach Him through an act of will. Because of this separation, the inner self, in a sense, becomes a private realm for us because it cannot be automatically subsumed within the intelligible world of the Platonic forms. So, because we are cut off from God, we become truly private human consciousnesses for the first time. At the same time, the soul becomes the place in which humans find God.

Memory played a crucial role in Plato’s proof of the soul’s immortality. With Augustine’s Confessions, personal memory is the quality that accounts for the individuality of the person:

A great power is that of memory, something awesome, my God, a deep and infinite multiplicity. And this is what the mind is, and this is what I myself am. What then am I, my God-of what nature am I? A variegated and multifaceted life, and utterly immeasurable. Behold in my memory the fields and caves and caverns innumerable, and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things…. I scamper and flit through them all, and poke this way and that as far as I am [quantum sum] and there is no end of it-so great is the power of life in a human being living mortally! (Conf. 10:26)¹⁰²

The private space of the soul is made by roofing over our selves in our separation from God. But the house of the self is still furnished by memory. Augustine understood that the soul has to be a singular and newly created being for the ethical system outlined in the Bible to work fully. But at the same time Augustine used our ability to remember distant things in space and time as an example of the soul’s power and divinity. For Augustine, this private space is the place where the battle of the will begins and in which one ascends from separateness to the beatific vision, which he identifies with the Christian God. It might be too much to say that Augustine invented the interior self but he certainly perfected the notion. The concept developed continuously throughout Platonic philosophy. But, for Augustine, philosophically definable individuals truly find God, for the first time, by looking within, as opposed to looking at the design in the universe. In a sense, Augustine breaks down the identity between intellectual cosmology and self which was created by Plato.

Augustine is the primary supporter and essayist of a new inner relationship between God and the soul. He even creates a series of writings, which he calls the Soliloquies. Some of them sound remarkably like the Poimandres, though they are more self-consciously an internal dialogue, and the narrator is not just a Platonist but also a Christian. Augustine professes ignorance about whether the dialogue is with his own self or with an outside voice. The dialogue of God and the soul is the basic internal dialogue over which the Christian life takes shape. Augustine’s is a virtuoso synthesis; he powers his way through the various issues, protected by his powers as a bishop and the growing power of the church to enforce its dictates.

The Social Meaning of Resurrection, Martyrdom, and Asceticism

IMAGES OF THE afterlife-resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul-had enormous consequences within the thought world of early Christianity. They began by defining pagan as against Christian. But they did so much more: Over time, the symbols mediate gender, identity and gender identity. They help distinguish between those who are willing to endure martyrdom and those who feel avoiding martyrdom is better. They help assess those loyal to establishment virtues and those who will rebel against them. They mediate asceticism of various kinds; if one factors in Judaism, they even mediate asceticism over against sexual fulfillment. They help discuss how much Christians have in common with the other humans on the planet.

Uncoding this language has been been going on for centuries but cracking the social message is largely due to scholarship in the last few decades, captained by such people as Elaine Pagels, John Gager, and Elizabeth Clark.¹⁰³ As Caroline Bynum characterizes the scholarship: “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 ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth that carries over, in its every detail, into heaven.”¹⁰⁴

The work of Caroline Bynum and Peter Brown, in some way, stands over against this synthesis, suggesting that the relationships are too complex for easy or predictable results. Bynum suggests, for example, that although Gregory’s solution to the resurrection body problem may have been more satisfactory intellectually, the notion that the body was reassembled, which Augustine among others championed, actually helped the founding of the martyr cults, which were so important to the Middle Ages.¹⁰⁵ The proliferation of the cults depended on the theory that a piece of the martyr’s body had the same efficacy as the whole body.

What we have seen throughout the history of the afterlife is that issues like the identity of the self in the afterlife may not be universal symbols but are historically significant because of the history of the terms and events in a specific culture. Once the code is established, social discourse develops. The symbols definitiely have consequences for how the self is construed within this life at a particular time and place. None of the formulations of self in the ancient world, including Jewish, Christian, or, pagan, or even the Church Father’s extended discussion would pass modern philosophical criteria for cogency. The importance lies in the ways each of the formulations can be made to carry a social message, which the individual church father was promulgating. To study the conflict is to study a society in dialogue and polemic with itself.

Universalism and Posthumous Baptism of the Dead

PAUL SAYS CLEARLY: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body” (2 Cor 5:10). Such a perception appears to preclude any generations previous to Jesus from achieving salvation. But does it absolutely prevent it?

At Corinth there was a peculiar practice in which people were baptized on behalf of the dead: “Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?” (1 Cor 15:29) Paul mentions them to bolster his argument about resurrection but it is not clear whether he objects to the practice or approves of it. It may easily characterize those whom Paul was attempting to defeat.

This strange passage has been the source of an immense number of differing interpretations.¹⁰⁶ The interpretation that makes best sense of the context is to assume that Paul’s statement refers to a vicarious baptism, effecting the salvation of people who died without its benefit while alive. But precisely what the ceremony was or how it was performed is obscure. Equally obscure is whether or not Paul himself was in favor of it. All we know for sure is that the disbelief of some of the Corinthians in the literal resurrection is inconsistent with the Corinthian practice of baptizing on behalf of the dead. The most obvious doctrine which the Corinthian schismatics could have believed in opposition to the resurrection of the dead would have been immortality of the soul. But there is not enough evidence to decide exactly what they believed.¹⁰⁷

Jeffrey Trumbower has outlined a most interesting and important phenomenon in early Christianity.¹⁰⁸ Christianity, being born from sectarian Judaism, most often assumed that salvation was limited to the borders of its movement. There were three major exceptions to that rule: (1) occasional universalist tendencies, which are seen in Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, for example, but also in Hosea Ballou, the nineteenth century founder of the Unitarian-Universalist church; (2) the later doctrine of the natural Christian, where some individuals live lives of such probity and sanctity that they are assumed to be naturally Christian and worthy of the rewards of a Christian; and (3) baptism for the dead, mostly those held dear to the first generation of Christian converts. Being the first Christian in the family, the new convert was often anxious to extend the benefits he had earned to his departed loved ones, who had not had the opportunity to assent to Christian conversions.

It is this last category that most interests Trumbower, as it was a major discussion in the Early Church. Although finally forbidden by Augustine, it has made two major contemporary appearances in American society. The first is in nineteenth-century Shaker communities, where members of the community were possessed by Native American spirits. Once summoned the spirits could be baptized and saved.

The second is in Mormonism. The Mormon Church today makes a maximal interpretation of Paul’s words and does baptize on behalf of the dead. For instance, some 380,000 Holocaust victims have been baptized by the Mormon Church to save them posthumously with a living Latter Day Saint standing in as proxy, though in cases where family members object, the baptism is reversed. One can appreciate the honor offered but one must also appreciate the very unfriendly reaction of the Jewish Holocaust survivors and other relatives of the deceased.

Trumbower is more interested in the ancient phenomenon. Christian converts wanted naturally to save their departed parents and other relatives and so baptism for the dead became popular in the Early Church. To those familiar with the New Testament, the whole question seems out of place. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus seems to seal the fate of the unbaptized (Luke 16:19-31). This story is meant to illustrate the superior virtue of the poor over the rich, the believers over the Jews, and probably should not be used as an example of Christian views of the afterlife. But once life is over, so is all hope of repentance. It furthermore says that Jews can be expected to remain stubborn even in this life.

But the text of 1 Peter 3:16-4:7 describes a harrowing of hell in which Christ is able to atone for the spirits, even those in hell. The Gospel was even preached in hell:¹⁰⁹

But they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God. The end of all things is at hand; therefore keep sane and sober for your prayers. (1 Pet 4:5-7)

This is a very problematic passage. Scholars would like to know who wrote it and what it means. The passage, though unlikely to have been written by Peter, surely gives witness to the notion that Christ can preach to the dead, evidently in the hope of saving them, though exactly which dead-whether the damned or those already saved who are rising to their beatified place at the end of time-is not entirely clear.

In two cases, stories illustrating the problem occur in Christian Apocrypha. In the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, a third-century Latin work, which we have already looked at briefly, Perpetua writes in her diary in prison of a vision of her brother Dinocrates who died at age seven of a facial tumor. He comes to her in a vision, begging relief from his discomfort, which has followed him into the tomb. Perpetua is able to help, as she later sees him playing, with the tumor gone and drinking comfortably again, which was not possible when he was sick.

So martyrs both reveal the truth of the faith and help the faithful perform the miracle of resurrection on others. Similarly the martyr Thecla was able to save the dead daughter of her recently acquired pagan friend Tryphaena. The resurrection of various sinners in the Christian Apocrypha affords them a further chance at salvation. For instance, Callimachus dies while defiling Drusiana’s corpse, but, when raised up by John, he repents his error and becomes a Christian (Acts John 73-78).

In the Ascension of Isaiah, a Christian work based on an earlier Jewish apocryphon, Isaiah sees Abel, Enoch, and the righteous of previous generations. They are wearing their robes; but they may not sit on their thrones or don their crowns until the arrival of Christ.¹¹⁰ These are narrative traditions, which aid in the acceptance of the notion that the dead are able to be saved.

But there are documents that explicitly offer salvation generally to the dead. These may include the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Gospel of Peter, especially 39-42. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa favored the notion that God could not leave any soul unsaved, allowing reincarnation for the purpose of further trial and improvement. Ambrose, Augustine’s mentor, was at least expansive in his estimate of who was saved at Christ’s descent. Ambrose also posited a “baptism of desire” for the deceased emperor Valentinian II, at his funeral oration in 392. Although Valentinian II had been assassinated (or committed suicide) while still a catechumen, Ambrose assured his funeral audience that his intention to be baptized was sufficient for his salvation.¹¹¹

The doctrine is both attractive and dangerous. Many of the earliest descent traditions indicate that only the righteous of the Old Testament were rescued by Christ, so it is not a blanket offer of amnesty. Around the turn of the third century, for example, Hippolytus and Tertullian manifest the same idea: The purpose of the harrowing of hell was to “preach to the souls of the saints” (meaning “the Patriarchs,” Hippolytus, Antichr. 26) or “for the purpose of informing the Patriarchs and prophets that he had appeared” (Tertullian, An. 55:2).

It was Augustine who finally settled the matter. Throughout his career, Augustine articulated a single view on the righteous before the coming of Christ: Their salvation is in accord with the opportunity of their respective eras. They were natural Christians before the incarnation and hence needed no posthumous salvation since they had lived properly during their lifetime.¹¹² But the events of Augustine’s day made him more strict about the unbaptized, even unbaptized infants, after the incarnation. Aware of the views of Pelagius that unbaptized infants were entitled to some kind of eternal life, Augustine unequivocally declares that all without baptism were condemned as inheritors of Original Sin (Pecc. Merit. 1.60).¹¹³

For Augustine, the harrowing of hell was a fact recorded in Scripture. He interpreted that to be the liberation of the righteous from the bosom of Abraham because that is where the righteous dead, like Lazarus, would go. He also admits that Christ must have rescued some in their sorrows from hell. But he is totally pessimistic about the possibility of posthumous salvation from hell after those events. In the Enchiridion, his handbook of theology, Augustine says:

Now in the time intervening between a man’s death and the final resurrection, the soul is held in a hidden retreat, enjoying rest or suffering hardship in accordance with what it merited during its life in the body. There is no gainsaying that the souls of the dead find solace from the piety of their friends who are alive, when the sacrifice of the Mediator is offered for the dead or alms are given in the Church. But these means are of profit for those who, when they lived, earned merit whereby such things could be of profit to them … It is here, then, that is won all merit or demerit whereby a man’s state after this life can either be improved or worstened. But let no one hope to obtain, when he is dead, merit with God which he earlier neglected to acquire. (Enchir. 29)¹¹⁴

Even this does not stop entirely the practice of baptism for the dead. In the East, Orthodox bishops do not accept Augustine’s conclusions. They tend to leave the matter up to God’s mercy. In the West, there are some interesting intermediate cases. Gregory prayed for the soul of the Emperor Trajan and was able to get reassurance that his righteousness had been noted in heaven. Hadewijch of Brabant (fl. 1220-1240) may have claimed in her fifth vision that she saved four souls from hell. Catherine of Siena (1347-80) wished that she herself might be condemned to hell if it meant that all the sinners in it could be saved. Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) and Julian of Norwich (1343-ca.1416) each developed a theology that lead to universal salvation.

Trumbower relates a story from the conquest of Friseland by Charles the Hammer in 692 from the Rise of the Dutch Republic by J. L. Motley. The defeated Frisian chief Radbod was about to accept baptism when he stopped and pondered:

“Where are my dead forefathers at present?” he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran.

“In hell, with all other unbelievers,” was the imprudent answer.

“Mighty well, replied Radbod, removing his leg [from the baptismal font], “Then will I rather feast with my ancestors in the halls of Woden than dwell with your little starving band of Christians in heaven.”¹¹⁵

He remained a pagan until his death. A more prudent answer would have saved another soul. The new Catechism of the Catholic Church, Article 1257, provides a way out of Bishop Wolfran’s dilemma when it states that: “God has bound salvation to the sacrament of baptism, but He himself is not bound by His sacraments.” Furthermore, Article 1261 states:

As regards children who have died without baptism, the church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them” (Mark 10:14; cf. 1 Tim 2:4), allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church’s call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.

Summary

WITH THIS SHORT survey we must leave the fascinating and complicated world of the Church Fathers. The resurrection of the body functioned in the Early Church as it had in Judaism before it-as a consolation and solace to martyrs and their survivors and as the hope of those who remained true to their faith. Christianity differs from other varieties of Hellenistic Judaism at its origin in that it must radically deny immortality of the soul. This is because the immortality of the soul is universal grace, available to all, thus obviating the need of Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross.

The Gospel of Thomas and Gnostic Christianity affirmed it anyway. In so doing, they were voting for the superiority of vision and gnōsis over creeds and statements of faith in the teachings of the apostolic tradition. A person who sought the presence of Jesus in ascetic preparations and visions had little need of the Gospel stories or creeds from the Church hierarchy for the person of Jesus was immediately available through visions. This differing view of the resurrection reflects the “Gnostic” realization that all can be saved provided they seek truth in the correct way, with or without the apostolic sacraments. For their part, “the orthodox” used martyrdom as a test and proof of the truth of their faith as everyone was impressed with the bravery and courage with which Christians went to their deaths.

Intermediary forms, such as Valentinianism, did not deny the authority of the other Christians, only denigrated them as incompletely aware of the power of the dispensation in which they lived. Thus, the Valentinian Christian Gnostics distinguished between levels of salvation. The truly elect realized that a number of issues that the “orthodox” obsessed over were truly adiaphora, of no real concern to the elect and enlightened. One could be ascetic or not ascetic; one could believe in the bodily resurrection or the spiritual resurrection; one could affirm or deny martyrdom. But the truly enlightened Christian knew that either way lay salvation if one had achieved gnōsis.

The Gnostics had more sophistication intellectually and arguably more universality and more of humanity than the “orthodox” but, by all accounts, the “orthodox” built a more committed populace, more willing to undergo death rather than recant. With it came the sectarian notion that salvation adhered only to the converted, not to anyone outside of the church. Such a notion became even more obvious when Augustine denied the practice of baptism on behalf of the dead. By then, Christianity had achieved a normative role and was no longer sectarian in outlook. It also had to face the issue that as an established religion it needed the respect, as well as the support, of the imperial rulers. To do so, it had to synthesize the pagan notion of the immortal soul with the apocalyptic notion of resurrection of the body. It was Augustine who wedded the two together and sealed both with political power. But before he did, the difference between resurrection and immortality had functioned to distinguish Christian from pagan, Jew from Christian, male from female, philosopher from ordinary Christian, and rich from poor.