Dear Friends,
It’s Monday evening and I’ve been putting off writing this because I have had an essay to complete about St. Paul. I’ve struggled all the way through it. At first it was as though I was tackling a rump steak with a plastic knife and spoon. Then, I thought I cracked it. Finally, I read and read and read on the subject I thought I cracked and ended up with thousands upon thousands of words. Around 25,000 words of quotations and my own commentary. So, my essay on resurrection turned out to be an essay on a very specific aspect of resurrection and indeed you wouldn’t think you’d get very much at all out of it. In fact, to focus it I had to frame the title as a question thus:
Have Ideas on Food and Eating Influenced Understanding of the Corporeal Resurrection Body, Particularly in Relation to 1 Corinthians 15:42-44?
And, you know what? I think they bloomin’ well did! Now, I’m not going to reproduce my essay here, rather only some strands of thought that I’ve been toying with and find quite pertinent. Essentially, I set off from the passage in 1 Corinthians 15 and discussed various interpretations under two headings: ‘Food and the Living Body’ and ‘Food and the Dead Body’. In this entry, I’ll only look at the passage itself and food and the living body. Food and the dead body will have to wait for another evening!
The Passage:
‘It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15: 42-44, King James Version)
Of the nineteen other English translations of the bible that I could find to compare with the standard King James Version, there was one that particularly caught my eye. The New Century Version of the New Testament states that the body is ‘planted’ rather than ‘sown’:
It is the same with the dead who are raised to life. The body that is “planted” will ruin and decay, but it is raised to a life that cannot be destroyed. When the body is “planted,” it is without honor [sic], but it is raised in glory. When the body is “planted,” it is weak, but when it is raised, it is powerful. The body that is “planted” is a physical body. When it is raised, it is a spiritual body. (1 Corinthians 15: 42-44, New Century Version)
Also rather striking is the replacement of the word ‘natural’ with ‘physical’. The Wycliffe New Testament Version goes further still, replacing ‘natural’ with ‘beastly’, emphasising the animal and spiritual dichotomy. The natural/ physical/ beastly body always somehow becomes a spiritual one after the seed is ‘sown’ or ‘planted’. Each of these slight differences in interpretation emphasise the existence of two distinct states of body, whatever they are ultimately described as. Logically, therefore, one understands that there is transition between the two states; a passage through the margins of two conditions or bodies of being. This is what I understand to be the bodily resurrection.
The seed metaphor seems to have persisted in many of the examples I have found from later periods. For instance, A Sermon Preached at Whitehall in 1694 by George Stanhope, interprets that man ‘comes up like a flower’ and, when trampled, there is ‘hope that it will sprout again’ (Stanhope 1694, 17). Later still, James Graham in 1783 adopts a similar, yet grander, interpretation. Graham asserts the following is ‘the real and rational meaning of the Scriptures’ and ‘what [he] understand[s] to be meant by the resurrection of the body’ passage from 1 Corinthians 15 (Graham 1783, 17)
That the human body, being originally formed of, and recruited or supported, whilst alive, by continual accessions of certain combinations of the primary, elementary particles of matter, returns, at what we call Death, and crumbling down into its parent earth, is again dispersed, and its component particles of invisible fire, air, water, oil, salts, and earth separate, and each returning to the great original mass or womb, from which nature took it, is assimilated, and re-animated by their kindred particles in their respective great masses of the elements of air, earth, fire, water &c (ibid.)
Further, Graham insists that the ‘flesh, blood, and juices’ that are now mine once belonged to ‘the sheep, to the ox, and to the hog’ (Graham 1783, 5-6). Distributing ownership in this manner seems antithetical to many interpretations, however. Faced with Bynum’s assertion that in the early 200s a ‘crude material continuity’ in resurrection stories prevailed (Bynum 1995, 27) and Graham’s description of dispersing particles, it is amazing how Bynum could well have been describing Graham’s conception (roughly) 1600 years earlier. There seems to be a direct correlation between the seed and that which sprouts from it in each case and the passing from corruptible to incorruptible is one that should be understood by the transition from an inside to an outside.
Food and the Living Body:
And now we come to the living body. Here I thought about the ideas of ‘inside/ outside’ as they might relate to food. I thought about ancient Jewish ideas about the body and its excreta and the similarities between the descriptions of spittle, semen, tears, excrement, et cetetra, and the ‘corruptible’ human body. In her Purity & Danger, Mary Douglas points out that, amongst the ancient Jews, bodily excreta (spittle, semen, tears, excrement, et cetera) was considered ‘unclean’ (Douglas 1966, 124). Once something had passed through the body, it was not recognised as part of the body. Neyrey supported this assertion by insisting that Paul, as a Pharisee ‘would have been socialised to concern himself with bodily purity and pollution’ (Neyrey 1990, 112). Later in his work, Neyrey refers to the difference between terrestrial and celestial bodies as being congruent with Paul’s Pharisaic sense of ‘an exact purity system: a place for everything and everything in its place’ (Neyrey 1990, 143), hence the construction of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ categories of thought. Dale Martin notes, in his The Corinthian Body, that ‘in the ancient world, notions of the body and pollution were related to concepts of disease’ (Martin 1995, 139) and the difference between inside and outside was central in not only thinking about eating but also the treatment of things passing through the margins of the body. Tears, saliva, semen, urine, and other bodily excrement were considered as ‘outside’ and impure/ dirty/ corrupt. This logic of bodily excreta being unclean can be observed in the notion of a kosher meal, where the blood needs to be drained from the meat entirely before serving.
So, if you were to transpose this logic onto the bodies that Paul concerns himself with in 1 Corinthians 15, that would suggest that human bodies are the excrement of the ‘other side’ or heaven. ‘Paradise’ is like a body that we have been ejected from; humans are the spittle and excrement of the incorruptible, as it were, only we can pass through this margin to become pure and incorruptible after death. There is a chance of redemption. The transition between inside and outside is between the two states. It is present in corruption/ incorruption; perishable/ imperishable; clean/ unclean; and pure/ impure. I suggest that Paul’s understanding of resurrection of the body is that of something coming from outside (earth) to inside (heaven); the body is impure excrement, therefore unclean, hoping to be made a pure and incorruptible heavenly body.
Further, I looked at interpretations of the passage directly from the Greek bible, such as that of W.E. Vine. He points out that the word used for ‘corruption’, Phthora, ‘is used of the condition of creation [...]; of the effect of the withdrawal of life and thus of the condition of the human body in burial’ but he also points out that there is nothing in this word ‘or in the stronger word diapthora to involve or even suggest annihilation’, rather transition (Vine 1951, 219). This would then be congruent with the interpretations supporting transition or movement through margins, such as eating, rather than destruction and re-invention (as in the example of Clement of Rome’s version of the Phoenix myth that I’ll talk about later when I get to food and the dead body).
Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), in his Summa contra Gentiles, recommends that in the resurrection ‘life will be provided by God alone’, whereas our present life has been provided through the ‘co-operation of nature’ (Aquinas 1927, 284) so there will be no need for food or sex. These things are ‘pleasures of the beast’ (ibid, 288) and not required of the incorruptible. An author writing under ‘A. Layman’ echoes this in these sentiments:
‘The body we bury, a natural animal body, resembling the body of the beast in its wants and appetites and passions, shall be raised a spiritual body. We shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more. We shall neither marry, nor be given in marriage, but be as the angels which are in heaven.’ (Layman 1851, 21)
In a spirit of optimism, there seems to be expectation that one can prepare one’s earthly body for resurrection. I recently stumbled upon a volume in the British Library entitled Narratives of two families exposed to The Great Plague of London with Conversations on Religious Preparation for Pestilence by John Scott (1831) who reprinted the pamphlet from some work on recommended preparations for the Great Plague because (he wrote in the introduction) it provided him and his family with many hours of pleasure. In it was discussion on how one might prepare the soul and body for the plague (which was interpreted as being the final judgement or rapture). The brother and sister in the second narrative locked themselves up in a closet every Tuesday and Friday, and kept both days as solemn fasts, ‘neither eating nor drinking till about four o’clock in the afternoon… [they humbled themselves before God] with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.’ (Scott 1831, 114) Abstaining from ‘degenerat[ing] into Flesh and Sense’, as Stanhope (1694, 23) puts it in one of his sermons, is one reason given for this behaviour. Perhaps Karl Olav Sandnes, in his Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles, can provide some context for this belief:
Paul’s critique of belly-worship is [...] rooted in his belief that life must be led in a way which is appropriate to the future destiny of the body. Believers are therefore expected to live with a view towards the resurrection of their body. [...]. A life without the hope of resurrection is marked by eating and drinking, characteristics of earthly existence. Faith in the future resurrection of the body makes the difference; true believers make use of their stomach according to this firm hope. [...]. Heavenly identity or resurrection-faith is assessed by food and drinking habits. (Sandnes 2002, 186)
An early Christian writer from the late second and early third centuries, Tertullian (c160 – c220), has yet another interpretation. In De Ieiunio, he states that ‘the Devil tempts by means of food, so Jesus fasted in order to show the Devil that “the new man” is too strong for the power of hunger.’ (8:2, quoted in Grimm 1996, 131). That this is also how one should behave is implied and confirmed in another piece of his writing, De Resurrectione Carnis, where he states that ‘fasting, deferred and meagre food, and the squalor which accompanies this observance’ pleases God (printed with commentary in Evans 1960, 25) Preparing for the resurrection by fasting does not seem to be a physical requirement, merely one showing faith, yet is another facet derived from Paul’s words that involves food.
To convey his understanding of the relationship between the body and food, Hodgson uses a peculiar metaphor that I think might be attractive to the LitSciMed crowd: an ‘aerial machine’ that is ‘only two-thirds inflated, [...] in a state of partial collapse, from the want of gas. Thus it is with the body, from the want of nourishment’. (Hodgeson 1853, 41-42) The natural body may flag and alter its dimensions with its intake of food and general development but it is able to be inflated again in the resurrection, whatever contours it ends up having in corruption.
So… that’s about the half of it. In a few days I will post about food and the dead body!
I hope that you have enjoyed this little post and my attempt to make it bite-sized and I will look forward to seeing the majority of you here in London at Event 2!
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List of Works Cited:
Aquinas, Thomas (1923), Summa contra Gentiles, Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, London: Burns Oates & Washbourne ltd
Bynum, Caroline Walker (1995), The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, New York: Columbia University Press.
Douglas, Mary (1966), Purity and Danger, London: Routledge
Evans, Ernst (1960), Tertullian’s Treatise on the Resurrection, London: SPCK
Graham, James (1783), A Discourse Delivered on Sunday, August 17th 1783 at Edinburgh, wherein the nature, and manner of the Resurrection of the human Body, and the immortality, or future modes of existence, and progress of the Soul! Are Philosophically, Medically, and Religiously explained, by Doctor James Graham of the Temple of Health, In Pall-Mall, near the King’s Palace, London, Hull: T. Briggs.
Grimm, Veronika E. (1996), From Feasting to Fasting, the Evolution of a Sin, London: Routledge
Hodgson, George (1853), The Human Body at the Resurrection of the Dead, London: R.Boyd
Layman, A (1851), Lecture on the Resurrection of the Body; compiled from the Writings of Paul, Dick, Hall and others, Albany: Joel Munsell
Martin, Dale B (1995), The Corinthian Body, New Haven: Yale University Press)
Neyrey, Jerome H (1990), Paul in Other Words, Westminster: John Knox Press
Sandnes, Karl Olav (2002), Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Scott, John (1831), Narratives of two families exposed to The Great Plague of London with conversations on religious preparation for pestilence, Privately Printed.
Stanhope, George (1693), A Sermon Preached at Whitehall, Private Collection, London: Doctor Williams’ Library
Vine, W.E. (1951), 1 Corinthians, London: Oliphants Limited
Paul William Craddock