Bodily Resurrection

What happens to a dead body? Can what is corrupted be made complete? Paul writes to a congregation in Corinth keen to know the answers, and in this miniature from a thirteenth-century German psalter, the artist takes on such questions directly, illuminating 1 Corinthians 15:51–53 in particular.

The anonymous illuminator shows the angels’ trumpet blasts rousing the dead from their tombs, including the central figure, who rises in his shroud (in the lowest register), disentangles himself (middle register), and puts on the garment of salvation (top register). This sequence literalizes the image of ‘putting on’ that Paul uses in relation to the general resurrection, of salvation as a vesture donned anew (1 Corinthians 15:53–54; cf. 2 Corinthians 5:4; Isaiah 61:10). Tertullian, too, uses clothing metaphors in The Resurrection of the Flesh, writing that we will first be ‘reinvested with the flesh’ we lost to dismemberment and/or putrefaction, then we will receive ‘the supervestment of immortality’ (ch. 42).

This first reclothing (‘with the flesh’) is an implication of Paul’s words that our artist is unabashed in pursuing. The two flanking figures at the bottom receive for reattachment their missing limbs that had been devoured by birds and beasts—an arm here, a leg there—and are helped out of their tombs in the top register by fellow saints.

It is this body, these bones, that will rise. All the material parts of self that have decayed, been cut off, swallowed and digested, and/or scattered in death will be reconstituted in the end. In Tertullian’s words, from ‘the maws of beasts, and the crops of birds, and the stomachs of fishes, and time’s own great paunch itself’, people’s bodies will be ‘rehabilitated from corruption to integrity, from a shattered to a solid state, from an empty to a full condition’ (The Resurrection of the Flesh, 4)—much like the dry bones in Ezekiel 37.

The resurrection is not some disembodied event in which our souls alone rise to God. Salvation is of the body as much as it is of the soul, a victory not only over sin but over mortality (permanent cessation) and corruption (decay). We rise whole.

References

Tertullian. On the Resurrection of the Flesh. 1885. Trans. by Peter Holmes, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing)

Made in the fifth century, this sarcophagus was reused in the seventh as the tomb of Theodore, archbishop of Ravenna from roughly 677–691. The city was a grand one: capital of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. But the Latin inscription on the sarcophagus is simple: ‘Here rests in peace Theodore, v.b. [vir bonus = good man], archbishop’.

Like much early Christian funerary art, this tomb adapts Roman victory emblems to convey a message of triumph over death through Christ, throwing into relief the Isaianic line that Paul quotes: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’ (1 Corinthians 15:54; cf. Isaiah 25:8).

The centrepiece of the tomb’s front face is a monogram made up of the superimposed Greek letters chi (Χ) and rho (Ρ), the first two letters in the title Christos (ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ) and therefore shorthand for ‘Jesus Christ’. Hanging from the arms of the chi are an alpha (Α) and omega (Ω), which allude to Christ as the beginning and the end of all things (cf. Revelation 22:13). This Christogram is repeated on the barrelled lid, encircled by a laurel wreath (a symbol of victory), with cross variations on either side—the cross being the ultimate symbol of death transposed into life.

Flanking the Chi-Rho on the sarcophagus are peacocks, which, because of an ancient belief that their flesh does not decay, came to symbolize incorruptibility, resurrection, renewal. Behind them unfurls a twisting vegetal pattern that recalls Paul’s seed metaphor: buried in the earth, the Christian will one day sprout forth with new life. And these are no generic vine scrolls; they are grapevines, another pagan art motif repurposed by Christians as a symbol of the life-giving blood of Christ, by which the redeemed enter heaven.

These images, carved directly onto a saint’s burial chamber, mark it as a site of future resurrection and therefore preach hope from the side aisle of the church where the tomb has lain since Theodore’s interment. The seed of a body that lies inside will one day be raised ‘imperishable’, ‘in glory’, and ‘in power’ (1 Corinthians 15:42–43). This is the promise that all God’s faithful can claim.

References

Schoolman, Edward M. 2013. ‘Reassessing the Sarcophagi of Ravenna’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 67: 49–74

The Resurrection, Cookham portrays the last day unfolding peacefully in the churchyard of the small Berkshire village that Stanley Spencer called home. No cataclysm here, just ‘the joy of the earth giving birth to joy’, Spencer wrote in a letter to Hilda Carline (1924), as people casually awake from death as if from a night’s sleep.

In the centre, a nude Spencer reclines against his tombstone next to his brother-in-law, Richard Carline, and behind lawyer Henry Slesser, a friend and patron. Two men nearby rise out from under hoods of earth, while a woman in a floral-patterned dress emerges through a parted sea of moon-daisies. To the right, women share notes left on their grave wreaths, while on the far left, the newly risen read their tombstone inscriptions with amusement. Others peek out over the edge of their coffins, or brush dirt clods from each other’s clothes. Spencer’s wife, Hilda, appears three times: clambering onto the deck of a Thames riverboat, sniffing a sunflower (while a prone, tweed-suited Spencer admires her), and lying on a nest of ivy.

The apex of this monumental painting is the rose-bowered porch, under which sits a matronly Christ holding three babies, his hair stroked by God the Father. Their presence is unassuming.

Arising to their new eternal state, the people in The Resurrection, Cookham could well exclaim along with Paul, ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ (1 Corinthians 15:55), and join in his gratitude. The law, whose tablets Moses displays from his open casket adjacent to the church porch, has no power to condemn (v.56), for Christ has fulfilled every jot and tittle, and these ordinary villagers reap the benefits.

The resurrection of the saints is a topic that fascinated Spencer, and he painted it many times, stressing the continuity between this world and the next. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the interwar period, who inclined toward cynicism or despair, Spencer maintained a profoundly hope-filled religiosity, delighting in the promise of salvation that he saw burning like Moses’s bush from every corner of daily life.

References

Spencer, Stanley. 1924. ‘Letter to Hilda Carline’, quoted in Stanley Spencer at War by Richard Carline (London: Faber & Faber, 1978)

http://www.stanleyspencer.co.uk/cookres.htm [accessed 14 October 2018]

Ibbett, Victoria. 2016. ‘The theme of resurrection in Stanley Spencer’s work, 28 March 2016’. Art UK. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-theme-of-resurrection-in-stanley-spencers-work [accessed 14 October 2018]