Pulling Apart and Piecing Together: Wholeness and Fragmentation in Early Christian Visions of the Afterlife

Abstract

AbstractAfterlife bodies in Christian thought have been successfully analyzed as expressions of cultural ideals, loci in which justice can be administered, and mirrors of societal structures and hierarchies. As hypothetical and constructive as they are, descriptions of heavenly and hellish bodies reinscribe or subvert norms about the gender, status, and appearance of their earthly counterparts. Building upon earlier work about eschatological bodies and drawing upon ancient bodily discourse about health and wholeness, this article places the heavenly and hellish under a single lens. It argues that early Christian thinking about afterlife spaces reproduced and intensified a broader cultural grammar of bodily wholeness and fragmentation in which the integrity of body and self was precarious but highly prized. The production of these afterlife bodies transformed the wholeness/fragmentation binary into eschatological standards and divine poetics.