Material Mystery
The Flesh of the World in Three Mythic Bodies

Karmen MacKendrick (Author)

9780823294541

Hardback, published 17 August 2021

224 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.496 kg

Material Mystery considers three apparently anthropocentric myths that are central to Abrahamic religions—those of the primal human, the incarnated and possibly divine redeemer, and the resurrected body. At first glance, these stories reinforce a human-centered theology and point to a very anthropomorphic God. Taking them seriously seems to ignore the material turn in the humanities entirely, with the same sort of willful ignorance that some of our politicians show in declaring that their myths count as facts, or that the point of the rest of the world is to further human consumption.
But it is possible, Karmen MacKendrick shows, to read these figures through a particular tradition that emerges from the Hebrew Bible, the tradition of Wisdom as a creative force. Wisdom texts are common across the ancient Near East. As the idea of creative Wisdom develops from antiquity into the middle ages, it gathers philosophical influences from a range of philosophical traditions. This exuberantly promiscuous impurity—intellectual, artistic, and theological—generates new interpretive possibilities. In these interpretations, each human-like figure opens up onto the world''s matter, as an interdependent part of it, and matter is thoroughly mixed with divinity. Such mythic readings complement our factual, scientific understanding of the material world, to engage wider kinds of knowing and affective attention—particularly Wisdom''s combination of care and delight.

Introduction: New Materialism, Old Wisdom 1
1 Complex Truth: Myth, Facts, and Matter 15
2 Adam's Skin: The Strangely Bounded Primal Person 38
3 Limitless Bounding: The Valentinian Body of Christ 59
4 Glorious Return: Resurrected Bodies 92
Afterword 125
Acknowledgments 133
Notes 135
Bibliography 181
Index 199