Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom, 200-1336.

This book by a distinguished medievalist is about the iconography of the body within the Christian tradition. Bynum's central argument, vigorously pursued, is that "for most of Western history body was understood primarily as the locus of the biological process." This is a challenge to fellow historians. To us lay people, it seems sound, even if obscure. It is a complicated way of saying that Christians rejected spiritualized interpretations of the person, that soul was firmly embodied, and body emphasized in all its physicality.

Thanks to the fulminations of ancient theologians on the nature of the Trinity and the Incarnation, Christianity worked out a doctrine of one God and one unique savior. For Christians, God is worshiped by human persons constituted of fully embodied souls, expected to bear responsibility for the things their bodies do. Any dissociation of body and person, as is the case in instances of spiritual possession, was strongly discouraged. Hence the importance of the resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment. At death the soul cannot shed the body like a snake shedding its skin. Identity is fully embodied, for plenty of reasons, not the least because permanent moral responsibility is involved. The traditional teaching stresses the wholeness of the person. We are not free spirits casually inhabiting bodies borrowed for our lifetime. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul insists that death is real, bodies are real, and Jesus' act of rising from the dead is real and central to the Christian faith and hope of salvation. Such teachings entitled Christians to conclude that the body of Christ was not an allegory of the corporate unity of the church, but a real body, and the same for our bodies, too.

Bynum deals with the resurrection of the body at two levels: First, the learned disquisitions of theologians arguing about form and substance, spirit and matter, and about the identity of the person; second, the obviously more popular, ingenious, and grisly artistic images of death and resurrection created by Christians. The recurring theme and concern is how the body, when it rises again in glory, can be reassembled entire and identical to the earthly body. Believers wanted to know how a body that had undergone normal disintegration in the grave could be the same one reconstituted in heaven. And in the worst case, how could a body that had suffered violence and mutilation be resurrected whole and unblemished?

Both Bynum's text and illustrations harp on images of the body as it is pulverized, rots in slime, or ends as the carrion of animals and insects only to be triumphantly reconstituted on the Last Day. The dominant metaphors used to depict such transformations are of Death devouring, dismembering, and consuming bodies and finally regurgitating them. Similarly, pictures show animals at the general resurrection restoring to their owners human limbs the animals had consumed, as well as the scattered bones of the dead flying of their own accord to their proper settings. Spectacular in itself, and evidently relished by the craftsmen and artists of the Middle Ages, the theme of biting, gnawing, and swallowing flesh, and vomiting it back, seems to have provided a repetitive decoration to and illustration of the doctrine of bodily resurrection over the millennium from 200 to 1300.

The author admits that this preoccupation with the continuity between the earthly and resurrected body seems bizarre to the modern general reader. Very properly, the main object of the book is not to titillate the general public with tales of the grotesque but to argue with other historians about the meaning of it all. The body has become a respectable, even popular historical subject on its own account in recent years. Michel Foucault started the fashion and in his view the perennial interest in the body and sex is part of an attempt to achieve social control.

Various recent historians of the body (Bynum names Peter Brown, Danielle Jacquart, Lynn Hunt, Thomas Laquer, Roy Porter, Marie-Christine Puchelle, and Claude Thomasset) "all treat body as a locus of sexuality." Bynum's slant is different. Her claim is that, apart from the need to ensure proper burial, the focus on bodily resurrection was due to the medieval view of what she calls the "other." For Bynum, the "other" is not, as the historians mentioned above suppose, a conception based on sex or gender. For the twelfth century, Bynum argues, the real "other" was death itself. She sums up her argument by saying that the focus of interest behind the concern with bodily resurrection was on the difference between being and nonbeing. If this sounds far-fetched, it is because Bynum is making a double challenge to medievalists, arguing with them both about the topic and about historical method.

Caroline Bynum is recognized as a fearless champion of new approaches to history. She is inspired by an intense desire for objectivity. She repudiates old-fashioned intellectual history, promises never to impose a meaning on the text, and eschews social reductionism: "I hope I never reduce an argument to its function or its social context, or treat theology as ideology." This means avoiding bias and not forcing interpretation.

The plan is very like one advocated by contemporary anthropologists for their ethnographic reporting. The idea is to take a defined field, say marriage contracts in a tribal society, and allow the people being studied to speak in an undirected way. For the ethnographer, the field is defined partly by the happenstance of events, and a certain aleatory element is quite welcome. However, transporting the ethnographic model to medieval history inevitably involves some heavy-handed selection of material.

Bynum's declared intention is to situate medieval theology in relation to the contemporary philosophical discussion of the mind/body problem. The context would be what ancient preachers said about dead and dying bodies and what ordinary people said and did in mourning and burying their dead. This itself strikes me as forced. Setting the resurrection of the body as an antique version of the modern mind/body debate is already a strongly selective strategy.

"It is important to the method I employ that I start with the text that is before me and follow its metaphorical connections rather than choosing a modern theoretical construct that predetermines what is the context for what," Bynum writes. But the text that is before the author has already been chosen from among other possible candidates. First, Bynum has selected texts about the body, and strictly in the context of concerns about the resurrection of the body. So it is predetermined that other texts about the body, texts about babies or mothers or about churches designed on the model of the body, for example, are irrelevant. Furthermore, the investigation is limited to only those metaphors and images used by ancient writers. But is such a narrow frame the best way to understand the meaning earlier Christians drew from bodily resurrection? Bynum concedes that that the ideas about resurrected bodies emerged from a background of persecution, conflict, concerns about gender and hierarchical norms being protected and betrayed. But these realities will not be brought in to explain what is going on in the texts and pictures under examination unless they explicitly express metaphors of the body.

The method seems truncated and makes this reviewer uneasy. Other medievalists, we are informed, attribute the meaning of the same texts to interest in sexuality, while Bynum is led by her method to find a focus on biological process and death. But since the texts have been selected for metaphors of biological decay and death, what else would she expect to find? Objectivity seems to have been devoured by methodology. In the end, we may find that the elements Bynum insists on dismembering from their social context belong to one corpus. The conclusion (so strongly predicated in the premise) is shaky.

As an anthropologist of an older generation, I first ask myself why we still exercise our thoughts upon a mind/body problem. Would it figure at all in contemporary philosophy if personal identity, moral responsibility, and justice were not at stake? I still prefer the position taken by Foucault. I am happy to believe that in medieval society the fear of death was a necessary prop in the religious dramas of judgment, hell and heaven, and resurrection. But I am not convinced that fear of physical annihilation was the major player. Even the terrors of death must be filtered through and thus be given a characteristic shape by the social concerns of each particular culture.

This said, Bynum has written a fascinating book. It is a signal merit to have applied wholeheartedly a much-advocated method of research and so displayed its strengths and weaknesses. I have addressed some of the weaknesses. The strengths are how it shines a brilliant light upon a topic that might have seemed too trivial to be worth attention, and, in doing so, to have made accessible a large artistic heritage that formerly seemed very bizarre.

Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols, with a new introduction, has been reissued recently by Routledge.