God's Body

Bodies matter, but some ancient bodies have received much more scholarly examination than others. In God’s Body, Christoph Markschies identifies a gap in the field—namely, ancient concepts of divine corporeality—and provides an important resource for examining the matter further. He surveys late antique Christian, Jewish, and pagan ideas about whether and how it was possible for a divine being to have a material form. In the process, he lays out a helpful understanding of Christian, Jewish, and pagan philosophical thought as fundamentally entangled.

In chapter 1, Markschies lays the groundwork for the rest of the volume via a selective intellectual history of divine corporeality, focused on three key moments: Maimonidean Jewish, scholastic Christian, and Enlightenment philosophers. He also identifies that intellectual history alone is not enough. To understand conceptions of God’s body means also to grapple with how bodies worked in social, cultural, and practical contexts. While selective—and other moments could have worked equally well—this chapter does showcase a core virtue of the book: the refusal of oversimplified contrast. For example, Markschies refers to Immanuel Kant as part of the unfurling of Christian theology just as much as he is emblematic of a sort of “secular” Enlightenment. In religious studies, which treats modernity as if it were a meaningful and discrete phase in human thought, this integration of a wide range of thinkers is refreshing and apt.

Chapter 2 begins to trace the development of Christian conceptions of the divine body, grounded in biblical ideas, on the one hand, and Greek philosophy, on the other. Markschies treats evidence serially, with each section tackling one thinker, text, or school of thought. The outline of biblical precedent and Greek philosophy will be of use to scholars of early Christianity, who could find that information elsewhere but will not find such a comprehensive treatment concentrated in one place.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 interrupt Markschies’ developmental approach to focus on a different element of the world within which early Christian thought fit. Chapter 3 provides social and cultural context and focuses on how divine bodies were represented in statues and in Jewish synagogue art. In chapter 5, to undermine the idea that divine corporeality was a popular notion, Markschies tracks its implicit integration in Neoplatonic thought and Christian late antique philosophy in Latin. Then, chapter 5 explains how a Jewish late antique corpus, hekhalot literature, and especially the Shi’ur Qomah texts, fits within similar trends in thought.

In chapter 6, by far the longest chapter of the book, Markschies returns to his primary task, continuing to track how late antique Christians conceptualized divine bodies. In a rich, multicausal explanation, two elements stand out, both related to Egypt. First, the legacy of Origen in the 4^th and 5^th centuries directed Christians towards intensive ecclesiastical and theological speculation on how it was proper to conceive God’s body— a speculation complicated by the fact that Origen was becoming more controversial partly because of questions raised by his firm insistence that God was asomatos, “without body.” Second, he points to Egyptian monasticism as a practical, ritualized form of the analogy between a purified (ascetic) body and a pure (divine) body.

Finally, chapter 7 makes the connection between philosophical speculation on the body of God and theological wrangling over the nature of the body of Christ. It might seem obvious that these considerations would align. But, as Markschies points out, the idea of the disembodiment of Christ—unlike God’s lack of body—was only infrequently entertained. Most discussion revolved instead around how similar or different Jesus’ (material) body was to the material body of other humans, including martyrs. By analogy, then, Christology allows for an unselfconscious identification, in one sense, between human and divine body.

Two aspects of the book left me with questions. First, I wonder if it is to the detriment of the volume that the reader who seeks an engagement with sophisticated theories of materiality current in early Christian studies will need to look somewhere else. Markschies is aware of such theory, but (perhaps too quickly) bundles and dismisses it under the loose label “postmodernism.” This book is about how Christian literary evidence in Greek and Latin, and possible philosophical antecedents, conceptualizes the divine body. Aside from short discussions in chapters 3 and 6, the body remains an abstract, philosophical object of thought. Markschies leaves it to others to consider how this conception of the body might work in practice, in communities or amongst ordinary believers, but it is not clear why more such engagement would have been out of place. Second, God’s Body deals particularly well with Christian texts and with Greek philosophy but its relatively abstracted approach works less well with Jewish material, which has often suffered from treatment as either a precursor or a derivation of Christian literature. Markschies tries to distance himself from “parallelomania,” the idea that similarity must mean influence. But his treatment of the Shi’ur Qomah texts in particular slides from a question of function—what role does divine corporeality play in Jewish late antique texts? —to a question of inheritance—from where do Jewish texts get their idea of divine corporeality? I wonder what his characteristic erudition might have made of the specificities of the corpus if he had avoided chasing the matter of derivation.

Limitations notwithstanding, God’s Body is a successful effort to plug a gap in scholarship: the lack of systematic investigation of how ancient Christians conceived bodies. Markschies’ presentation of each debate is clear and erudite, even if the volume has a somewhat curious elliptical structure with chapters 2, 6, and 7 sandwiching 3, 4, and 5. The volume, and especially its collation of information, will be useful to anyone trying to work through the complicated matter of late antique Christian ideas about materiality and God.

Matthew James Chalmers is an independent scholar.

Matthew Chalmers

Date Of Review:

June 9, 2023