Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [330]
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