Glorious Return

Both rabbinic and kabbalistic Judaism and gnostic and orthodox Christianities propose some version of resurrection. While these are not always resurrections of the body, bodily resurrection is the focus of this chapter. All versions of bodily resurrection find some evidence for its necessity in the process of creation. Following an overview of this evidence, the chapter lays out three versions of corporeal resurrection: imminent resurrection (as found in gnostic texts), multiple incarnations leading to a final, perfect restoration of the cosmos (particularly in Origen’s apokatastasis and in some Kabbalists), and a single resurrection of body-and-soul (in orthodox Christianity and many rabbinic sources). In different ways, each turns out to make the distinction between the material of an ensouled human body and the material of the world in general an impossible one. A final section turns to the role of beauty, which characterizes risen bodies in all of these versions, and draws on interpretations of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence to suggest that the knowledge of time as well as space has to become very different in order to read the world as the kind of material interchange that creates such beauty.