Andrew Crislip: Passions, embodiment, and resurrection in late antique Egypt

Common cross-culturally is the expectation that passions (or cognitive and emotional capacities) have an afterlife. Bodily continuity is more difficult to explain, as seen among Christians as early as Paul, and later Athenagoras who addresses such challenges by positing the interrelatedness of passions and body to explain the mechanics of resurrection. Late antique Christianity in Egypt offers a rich field for tracing the history of such debates about passions, embodiment, and resurrection. Heir to a society and embedded in a landscape in which belief in the posthumous preservation of the body had unusual prominence, third- and fourth-century Egypt also witnesses to a diversity of belief, as Christian theologians and ascetics continued to struggle with the challenge of reconciling the passions and the body in immortality and the resurrection. For this workshop, my contribution focuses on the later Alexandrian tradition and the range of theological traditions that circulated in Egypt. I focus on the Origenist monk Antony’s discussion of passions and the resurrection body, and controversies over the passions and resurrection in later cenobitic sources from Upper Egypt, along with evidence from the contemporaneous Nag Hammadi Codices, whose relation to ascetic and monastic currents is still debated. While resurrection remains a theological boundary-marker for Christians, passions are useful for tracking historical change and continuity. Even a self-proclaimed opponent of “Origenists” like Shenoute still conceives of post-mortem existence in predominantly emotional terms, as delights of the sinful are changed into sorrows, and sorrowful penitence of the Christians is transformed into joy.