Images of Rebirth: Cognitive Poetics and Transformational Soteriology in the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul by Hugo Lundhaug (review)

This book has not received the attention it deserves. Images of Rebirth is of particular value to the study of ascetic Christianities in Egypt, because it interprets hitherto incomprehensible texts from the Nag Hammadi find. The study achieves a coherent and convincing interpretation of The Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul by applying analytical resources from cognitive linguistics.

Scholars have struggled to make sense of the Nag Hammadi texts, and the two discussed in this study are not among the more transparent. By examining the reigning metaphors in each text and the allusions on which they depend, Lundhaug accesses the map of religious life available to the Nag Hammadi readers, tracing out how these texts would be understood given contemporaneous religious pre-occupations and the literary and religious knowledge of the fourth-century readers.

The transformational soteriology marked in the title of the study refers to the reigning metaphors of each source text, which mediate ideas about the development and cultivation of the soul through images of kinship and reproduction. Since metaphors depend on shared human experience, this approach is particularly well-suited to interpret texts whose authors and compilers are unknown to us; it makes apparent what else they were reading or assuming that the audience read.

The book is structured around three primary chapters, the first of which sets out the problem to be treated, and a concluding chapter comparing the two source texts. In chapter 2, Lundhaug discusses Theoretical and Methodological Issues in depth, laying out the cognitive mechanisms of metaphor, drawing especially on the work of Lakoff and Johnson and Eubanks. The theory he uses for the task he has set himself (to find and apply an interpretive tool appropriate to the problems presented by two densely allusive and seemingly incoherent texts) is called blending theory. The difference between blending theory and mere recognition of metaphor or intertextuality is that blending theory attends to the generative aspect of allusive interactions. Blending theory shows how the two domains elicited by a metaphor or allusion (the body of Christ and the eucharistic bread) relate mutually and elicit a third thing. (One is called upon not just to think that this bread is a body and thus different than it seems, but also that bodies in general are different than they seem.) This bilateral and generative aspect of blending theory is what makes it religiously potent: Metaphors centered on reproduction and kinship gain special traction among people who have problematized their physicality and their attachment to family or spouse by pursuing an ascetic life.

Chapter 3 explains how the Exegesis of the Soul is driven by a narrative of the feminization of the soul: “The soul’s fall into matter and attachment to transitory and material things is described in terms of a wife leaving her husband in favor of a life of adultery and prostitution, and in terms of an unnatural masculinization. The salvation of the soul consequently requires her to regain her original femininity and virginity, marry Christ, and stay faithful to him as a subordinate wife” (151). A few key blends bring together the readers’ images of virginity, prostitution, or wedding feasts, as gained from their shared textual experience, with their physical experience of sexuality, marriage, and reproduction. Lundhaug describes this as a pedagogically effective “rhetoric that lets the readers or audience reach the most important insights on their own, in light of shared cognitive models and texts which are already established as authoritative” (124). By thus eliciting assent and response from the reader, such texts also serve to consolidate community identity, because they activate and apply shared knowledge and shared estimations of certain (inter)texts as authoritative. On Lundhaug’s analysis, the ideal reader of the Exegesis of the Soul had internalized knowledge of Scripture and of a Christian...