Prompt for this essay, led by Professor Tod Swanson at Arizona State University

"Study the assigned reading from Peter Brown carefully. In the quote below he describes the geocentric cosmology of the ancient Mediterranean world.

“One thing can be said with certainty about the religion of the late-antique Mediterranean: while it may not have become more markedly “otherworldly,” it was most emphatically “upper worldly.” Its starting place was the belief in a fault that ran across the face of the universe. Above the moon, the divine quality of the universe was shown in the stability of the stars. The earth lay beneath the moon, in sentina mundi—so many dregs at the bottom of a clear glass. Death could mean the crossing of that fault. At death the soul would separate from a body of compounded earthly dregs, and would gain or regain, a place intimately congruent with its true nature in the palpable, clear light that hung so tantalizingly close above the earth in the heavy clusters of the Milky Way.” (Peter Brown, p1)

To write your 400 word essay use this quote from Peter Brown as a context for examining either the biblical readings (from Genesis + Revelations) or (Plato's allegory of the cave + the video Islamic Patterns and Sacred Geometry). Do the ideas found in these texts depend on the geocentric view of the world described by Peter Brown? How do the ideas found in these ancient texts make a difference for major issues in our contemporary public life."

There were more sources to potentially cite for this discussion essay, however I decided to use the options listed for the books Genesis and Revelations in the Bible. The purpose of this was to foster discussion on how death could be conceptualized and given significance within ancient history, and an introduction to upper and lower world understandings present in multiple religions globally.

How does the biblical scripture of Genesis and Revelations inform perception of death?

Religion broadly provides a basis of navigating morals, scientific concepts, and can provide a comfort to the possibility of what comes after death. In the period of Christian antiquity, the cult of the saints sought to break down metaphysical barriers through concrete physical means, such as the housing of relics and finding cemetery dwellings (Brown, p.5). While reception of this was mixed and largely negative, it can be assumed that the reverence of those dead saints and their relics provided a comfort to what may come; it is in this that the belief that these places – loca sanctorum – were places that bridged the connection of earth to heaven (Brown, p.3). How then, does this tie into Genesis and Revelations?

Genesis 1:26 espouses a kind of ownership related to creation, stating “… fill the earth and subdue it…” This is followed too, by the word of God as warning Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and later the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib (Genesis 2:17 and 2:23). With Adam’s responsibility and implied stewardship of all he’s named, that is then extended to Eve and responsibility is assumed, “Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (Genesis 2:23). A shared responsibility to steward the land, and all of creation as a pair, and a warning to live well so that they might honor God who created them, too. The first sin was committed anyways, and brings to mind Revelations as it ties into death practices.

In this religious context, the hope is to come to dwell with God, where all of life’s previous pains and concerns are swept away (Revelations 21:3-4). In Peter Brown’s work, though, the cult of the saints was not without loud criticism for the social perception of desecrating graves. Though the interpretation of scripture may have led the cult to doing so, it also caused a sense of disquiet and discomfort. What had been separate before – the dead and the living – was now more and more in overlap (Brown, p.4-5). Julian the Apostate had said about this, “You keep adding many corpses newly dead to the corpse of long ago. You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchres (Brown p.7).”

It can be assumed too, that the cult of the saints had seen in scripture that there was this delineation and fault between earth and heaven – the perfect upper world, and the imperfect lower world on which we reside. Taking Revelations 21:6-8 into this context, it is clear that the interpretation differs from what had been the norm. The line “But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for the murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars…” describes those who would not see the kingdom of Heaven. In terms of what is detestable, the boundary had been drawn in different directions during the period of antiquity, and comfort around death rites evolved in many a contentious way.

Citations

Peter Brown's The Cult of the Saints: its rise and function in Latin Christianity, Pages 1-13

Genesis 1-2, Revised Standard Version Accessed via The Bible Gateway

Revelations 21:1-22:4 The New Heaven and the New Earth, ESV, Accessed via The English Standard Version