The Christianism has the appearance of an apocalyptical religion that advances the concept of a final Judgment Day for the resurrected bodies. But some of the authors from the patristic period notice that the idea of the bodily resurrection poses some logical and practical difficulties. From this perspective, the treatises on resurrection from this period identify an entirely unusual difficulty: the situation of a body that has been devoured by an anthropophagus. It represents an important issue for the Christian theologians, from Athenagoras and St. Augustine to St. Thomas. Theories of the early modern science, with their emphasis on the circulation of the particles of matter, intersect with the patristic substantiation on the relevance of Christianity. During the Enlightenment, the contention of Christianity, lead by the partisans of the philosophy, recycles the concepts used by the opponents of the resurrection theory and determines a reorientation towards such ideas as the theory of the spiritual body. Consequently, the cannibal character influences an important episode of the debates on the personal identity, redemption and divine omnipotence.

Catalin Avramescu (b. 1967) is a Doctor of Philosophy and a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Political Sciences (Bucharest University), where he teaches classes of History of Ideas and of Political Philosophy. He is also a docent of the Helsinki University. He worked as a researcher at the History Institute from Vienna University, and he was granted a Marie Curie fellowship at the Faculty of Philosophy, Ferrara University. He has recently published An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton University Press, 2009).