104 book reviews

Yonatan Moss Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2016), xiv + 244 pp. isbn 978-0-520-28999-4 (hbk). £74.00.

Fifty years ago, the work of Severus of was like a known but large- ly unexplored country. There were two absolutely classic early studies, both of which were monumental achievements. The great Belgian scholar Joseph Lebon (who died in 1957) had in 1909 published his doctoral thesis Le Mono- physisme Sévérien: étude historique, littéraire et théologique sur la résistance monophysite au concile de Chalcédoine jusqu’a la constitution de l’église jacobite, and in 1924 René Draguet published his study, Julien d’Halicarnasse et sa con- troverse avec Sévère d’Antioche sur l’incorruptibilité du corps du Christ. Between 1922 and 1977 a gallant series of editors produced editions and French transla- tions of Severus’ homilies. Lebon himself produced the text and a Latin transla- tion of Severus’ treatise against ‘The Impious Grammarian’ (John of Caesarea) between 1929 and 1938, and between 1964 and 1971 Robert Hespel produced the text and a French translation of Severus’ polemic against Julian of Halicarnas- sus. And there were editions of various other works. Following this stage, which established the fundamental texts and made them (reasonably) accessible, the 1980s and 1990s saw a flurry of new edi- tions, revisions, deepening and fresh studies of particular aspects of Severus’ thought, particularly his terminology. Among others, one could think of the work of Pauline Allen, Sebastian Brock, Roberta Chesnut, Aloys Grillmeier, C. T. R. Hayward, André de Halleux, René Roux, I. R. Torrance, Lucas Van Rompay, Lionel Wickham and Youhanna Nessim Youssef. For sheer verve and integrative thinking, much to my pleasure, Yonatan Moss takes our under- standing of Severus of Antioch to a new level. No one who knows Severus, the complexity of his work and the convoluted nature of the Syriac translation in which we encounter it, could fail to be impressed and could come away not seeing this intractable material in a new light. Movingly, it is dedicated to the Christians of Iraq and Syria, ‘who currently walk in the valleys of the shadows of death’. Moss points out that though Severus is famous for his fierce critique of and, prior to his consecration, the Henoticon, actually the bulk of his writings focuses on questions that arise among the non-Chalcedonians. Moss calls this the ‘dissension among the dissenters’. Many of these questions are theological but some are practical and those matters of practice are in- variably grounded in a theological perspective. The main theological ques- tion occupying Severus for the last fifteen years of his life was to do with the

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book reviews 105 incorruptibility of the body of Christ. Did Christ’s body become corruptible only after the crucifixion and resurrection, as Severus thought, or was it in- corruptible from the incarnation as was claimed by Julian of Halicarnassus? The technicalities of the ‘aphthartodocetist’ dispute are well known to us from the work of Draguet (cited above), but Moss – in a most enlightening - ways move – also draws attention to three practical issues: the rebaptism of Chalcedonian ‘converts’ and the re-ordination of their priests; the inclusion or exclusion of Chalcedonian names in the diptychs; and the extent to which the ecclesial canons of the imperial church should be followed by the increasingly distinct miaphysite communities. Moss argues that, in a kind of parallel to the technical issue of the incorruptibility of the physical body of Christ, these are also matters to do with the body of Christ, but now his social/ecclesial and his liturgical/eucharistic body. The heart of his book is about the interconnection between these three bodies of Christ – the physical, the social, and the liturgi- cal. It is common for modern historians to argue (following John of ) that facing persecution after 518, Severus gradually embraced a separatist posi- tion. Contrary to them, Moss argues that though as a follower of Peter the Ibe- rian, Severus initially rejected the ecumenist, henoticist policy of Anastasius, from the time of his consecration he supported the ecumenist approach, even in opposition to anti-Chalcedonian separatists. Much that is interesting fol- lows from this. Moss suggests that Severus’ stance on the separatism issue – an ecclesiological position – is in fact intertwined with other dimensions of his theology. Consequently, he takes what he calls a ‘stereoscopic approach’ to the creation of an independent anti-Chalcedonian church looking at both Severus and his opponents simultaneously through the ‘multiple lenses’ of theology, ecclesiology and liturgy. Moss argues that his stereoscopic approach was shaped by reading the an- cient sources and is very evident in Cyril of Alexandria for whom the physical, social and liturgical bodies of Christ were all intimately interconnected. It was precisely the physical union between God and human person in Christ that made it possible for humankind to become, through participation in the Eu- charist, ‘the same body with one another’ and with Christ. To Cyril, the incarna- tion was a natural, not a synthetic union. As a direct correlate, the communion of Christians was a ‘natural union’. Henry Chadwick gave an adumbration of this in his famous article on ‘Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Con- troversy’ (1951), but Moss prefers to see a ‘correlative’ relation between Eucha- rist and Christology rather than the ‘causality’ that Chadwick suggested. Moss also points, somewhat cautiously, to the attempts by John Gager and Mary Douglas to give an anthropological account of how cultures understand bod- ies more generally. He quotes Gager’s claim that ‘Statements about the body ecclesiology 15 (2019) 91-124