Delicious in Revelation

This post mentions cannibalism and has spoilers for the first series of Dungeon Meshi, though I will try to keep the plot specifics vague.

The question of the relationship of the soul to the body, of what constitutes a living person and the implications of cannibalism within such metaphysics are important to the plot of Dungeon Meshi. In the dungeon souls are anchored to the corpses of the dead, allowing them to be resurrected as long as the body is not destroyed. The more intact the body is the easier this is and even if one has lost a lot of blood or even a whole limb it can all be safely reconstituted back into the body with the right spell as long as it’s nearby. And as long as nothing has eaten it. Consumption and digestion of a body breaks it down, deidentifying it and reconstituting it into the new self. While rewatching the finale of the first series I was reminded of something I once read about Christian theology¹. I do not remember where I read this originally but I will try to share my half-remembered version.

The Book of Revelation speaks of the resurrection of the dead. These days most Christians think of the soul as leaving the body when one dies, of the dead ascending into Heaven (or descending into Hell), of reuniting with your loved ones in the afterlife. Early Christian belief tended to have a much more literal interpretation of resurrection. The dead are dead and it is only in the last days that the faithful will, like Jesus, physically rise from the dead and live in the Kingdom of God, which is to be understood not as an metaphysical afterlife but as an actual kingdom on Earth that will be established by Jesus. As such it becomes important to keep the bodies of the dead intact. Cremation as a burial practise died off in Europe as Christianity rose to primacy, only becoming common again in the last century or two. If a body was destroyed, how could it be revived?

Even if one thought that, like in Dungeon Meshi, the constituent parts of the body, if scattered, could be reassembled and brought back together by the power of God for resurrection, what of cannibalism? If your body becomes part of my body, then, come the end of days, who has claim to the rotted meat that is to be resorted to life? Christian scholars took this idea seriously. To me this is a funny little intellectual exercise, but for many this question was important and existential. Can a body be destroyed in such a way as to sever someone from their flesh, putting themselves outside the reach of God, dooming them to oblivion? Dungeon Meshi ends up asking similar questions, though with the view of saving someone rather than damning them. I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that an author who tries to examine and interrogate fantasy tropes and systems of magic, to take them seriously and think through all that they imply, might come to the same ideas and questions that theologians would when trying to seriously consider miracles and acts of God.

I don’t really have a great source and I didn’t want to spend time researching it, but a quick search turned up an old post on a Catholic blog that I am not going to take too seriously² but at least quotes Augustine of Hippo and Voltaire musings on this question, showing it to be an old one.