In this book Hunt sets out to explore what she perceives as a paradox: the development in late antiquity of doctrinal insistence upon the full humanity of Christ alongside what she describes as ‘ascetic unease about the body’ that bordered on a dualistic understanding of the human person. ‘How was it’, she asks (p. 1), ‘that only a complete, holistic humanity was accepted in Christ while in His human counterpart a division between body and soul appeared not only desirable but perhaps the only way to achieve thesosis?’ In these opening statements Hunt not only sets the agenda for the book but also makes explicit her personal interests. In what follows the reader should expect a broadly traced history of theological ideas about the Christian body and divinisation viewed through a very particular lens: not across the entire late antique era (as the subtitle might suggest), but predominantly within Egypt and Syria, as expressed in ‘desert’ spirituality, and read through the lens of contemporary eastern Orthodox interest in the relationship between human anthropology, Christology and theosis.

For such a large subject this is a slim book that gallops through thirteen chapters, often touching only briefly upon one topic before charging on to the next. After setting the agenda in chapter i, in chapters ii (‘Greek insights into the human person’) and iii (‘Biblical understandings of flesh, body and soul’) Hunt turns to what she views as two key bodies of influence: Greek philosophical approaches to human anthropology and the spiritual (notably the Stoics, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus) and Jewish (including Rabbinic) ascetic and anthropological concepts, the two strands synthesised in the writings of Paul. Here Hunt none the less sides with scholarship that views Paul's religious anthropology as predominantly Jewish, leaving the reader with the suggestion that she privileges ‘biblical’ anthropology as integrative (concerned with living a godly life in the body) as opposed to the ‘dualistic’ models of Hellenistic philosophy (requiring that the soul transcend the body). Chapter iv (‘Desert teachings on the body and asceticism’) combines so many different ideas that it is difficult to traverse. It skims rapidly across asceticism as successor to martyrdom; the consequent reduction of focus from the public to the private sphere; the associated concept of anachoresis (withdrawal, initially from society, subsequently from the physical); the teachings of Evagrius that support the latter view; races briefly through the desert Fathers in the same vein, only to conclude that these views were not mainstream; and proceeds to the claim that, in accord with an insistence on the incarnation of Christ as the basis of salvation, the early patristic inheritors of these views (notably Basil and Origen) promoted the body as essentially good, thus requiring not extirpation, but transformation. As if these ideas were not sufficient Hunt races on to introduce the eastern Orthodox theological concept of the natural, contra-natural and supra-natural states of the body, prefiguring the dialectic approach of John Climacus and the notion of ascetic hierarchies. This leads her to evoke Mark the Ascetic on the co-dependence of body and soul to argue for a belief at this period in the full transformation of the human body, from which she then moves on to the perceived danger of sexual activity and the feminine to human (i.e. male) ascetic ascent/unity. The latter issue informs chapter v (‘“Virgins of God”: manly women and transvestite saints’). Here little that is new is offered concerning the counter-cultural emergence of the ascetic woman, discussion largely following without criticism the conclusions of the key Anglo-American scholars (for example Elizabeth Clark, Teresa Shaw and Elizabeth Castelli) who have written on this topic. Chapter vi (‘ “Enemy” or “Friend”: Climacus' integration of the body’) finally makes sense of the disparate ideas introduced in chapter iv. In Climacus' Ladder of divine ascent Hunt finds expressed an integrated view of body, soul and salvation. Body and soul are less in conflict than co-dependent, the indivisible pairing of the two mirroring the humanity and divinity of Christ, with the body capable of achieving perfection through transformation. In chapters vii–x Hunt turns from Egyptian to Syrian desert spirituality. Like chapter iv, chapter vii (‘The Syrian perspective on asceticism’) rapidly covers a vast amount of background, but this time in a series of topics that progress more logically: from what is distinctive geographically, linguistically and culturally, to key modes of asceticism and their views of the body, the incarnation and redemption. Here Hunt situates the roots of ‘a Syrian understanding of the integrity of the human person’ in a Semitic/biblical concept of the centrality of the heart to the latter, anticipating both Pseudo-Macarius and the later Hesychast movement. Chapter viii (‘Key Syrian sources: apocrypha and anonymity’) romps through less mainstream Syrian texts that discuss the place of the body in asceticism or the image of being clothed in the body, leading into chapters ix (‘Pseudo-Macarius, Messalianism and Synaesthesia’), where Pseudo-Macarius’ ideas are presented as analogous to those of John Climacus, and x (‘ “Clothed in the body” as a metaphor for incarnation’), where the theme (the centrality of embodiment to Syrian theology and anthropology) is explored less partially than in other chapters. Chapters xi (‘Heterodox Christologies and the eresiarchs’), xii (‘Orthodox patristic formulations’) and xiii (‘Conclusion’) argue for an intimate link between developments in anthropological thought, Christology and the designation of such ideas as heterodox or orthodox.

Ultimately the rapidity with which Hunt presents and flips past key ideas is unsatisfying, leaving her vulnerable to the charge that she has not successfully proved her case. At the same time, as scholarship from Peter Brown (The body and society, 1988) to Patricia Cox Miller (The corporeal imagination, 2009) and now Andrew Crislip (Thorns in the flesh, 2012) shows, this topic looms large in the late-antique imagination. What we still need is for the ideas that Hunt traces to be carefully contextualised and examined with a finer lens, leading to their situation within what was in reality a more diverse, complex and chaotic evolution geographically and chronologically across late antiquity.