This book explores religious anthropology and asceticism from its biblical and desert roots and within eastern patristic writers including Ephrem, Pseudo-Macarius and Climacus. Hunt examines the apparent paradox that Jesus' earthly existence and post resurrection appearances are experienced through consummately physical actions and attributes yet some ascetics within the Christian tradition appear to seek to deny the value of the human body, to find it deadening of spiritual life.

Hannah Hunt is an established academic and author working in Eastern Christian spirituality and doctrine, with a monograph, four chapters in other books (Spirituality in Late Byzantium (Cambridge Scholars, 2009), The Westminster Handbook to Origen (Westminster John Knox (2004),The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity (Blackwell, 2007) and The Philokalia: Exploring the Classical Text of Orthodox Spirituality (OUP, 2012)) and a number of papers already published (including in Studia Patristica, The Harp, St Ephrem Theological Journal, Medium Aevum and the on-line journal Hugoye). She is also in demand as a reviewer, for example for Pennsylvania University Press's Divinations series, and was recently invited to comment on a manuscript for Oxford University Press. She has been working on aspects of asceticism and religious anthropology in Klimakos, St Paul, Ephrem and Isaac the Syrian in particular for some time now, presenting work in progress to conferences such as the International Medieval Congress, the International Patristic Conference and the British Patristics Conference as well as the American Society of Church History, and conferences in Durham (2006: on reception of the desert fathers) and Oxford (Postgraduate Medieval Conference 2008). In addition to working on her current book, this year she has been working on papers on Symeon the New Theologian, Sarx and Soma in St Paul, images of harvest and cultivation in biblical and Syrian texts and the co-editing of a book on the reception of the Desert Fathers. In her spare time she is a half-time Senior Lecturer in Theology and Reader in Eastern Christianity at Leeds Trinity University College and also has four jobs for the Open University (teaching two English Literature courses and a Religious Studies course, and Acting Senior Faculty Manager for the Arts in Yorkshire).

Contents: Introduction; Greek insights into the human person; Biblical understandings of flesh, body and soul; Desert teachings on the body and asceticism; 'Virgins of God': manly women and transvestite saints; 'Enemy' or 'friend': Climacus' integration of the body; The Syrian perspective on asceticism; Key Syrian sources: apochrypha and anonymity; Pseudo-Macarius, Messalianism and synaesthesia; 'Clothed in the body' as a metaphor for incarnation; Heterodox Christologies and the heresiarchs; Orthodox patristic formulations; Conclusion; Bibliography; Indexes.