By and large, Eustathius of Antioch has had poor publicity so far. It is not so much that posterity speaks ill about this theologian of the fourth century – it fails to talk about him at all. Except for his treatise On the Belly-Myther, Against Origen, only fragments of his works survive. Historians of dogma remember him mostly as staunchly anti-Origenist and anti-Arian. In her doctoral dissertation Sophie Cartwright seeks to set the record straight. She offers a summary of what we know about Eustathius’ life, followed by a survey of the preserved fragments of his writings. The book's main argument is divided into four chapters dedicated to ‘Body and soul’, ‘The image of God’, ‘Soteriology’ and ‘Eschatology’ respectively. Cartwright describes at length Eustathius’ idea of the intimate relationship between soul and body which must be seen against the backdrop of his Christology. Eustathius insisted on the full humanity of Christ incarnate: Christ assumed a complete human body and soul; his resurrection likewise included body and soul and thus served as a model for the eschatological resurrection of all humanity which will also be physical. As a consequence, the chasm between this world and Christ's future kingdom will not be as wide as one might expect. Cartwright claims that ‘Eustathius’ anthropology negotiates the legacies of Irenaeus and Origen in the context of the “Arian” controversy and the Constantinian Revolution’ (p. 239) and emphasises the political implications of his thought by detecting millenarian traits in his eschatology. Cartwright's argument deserves more detailed consideration than is possible here. In my view, she has a certain penchant for overstating her case. She does not, for example, distinguish carefully enough between, on the one hand, the bodily resurrection (which may or may not be situated in a millenarian context) and, on the other, the millenarian idea of an eschatological kingdom on earth in continuity with the present world. The idea that Christ's kingdom will be corporeal and as such ‘commensurable’ to the present world (p. 214) is not by itself tantamount to millenarianism, as Cartwright seems to imply. Proof-reading could have been more thorough: there are a number of spelling mistakes in Greek and Latin (for example, pp. 25, 80, 154–5, 221, 231).
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