Human Salvation in Early Christianity: Exploring the Theology of Physicalist Soteriology

Ellen Scully. Human Salvation in Early Christianity: Exploring the Theology of Physicalist Soteriology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Human Salvation in Early Christianity traces a distinct, if short-lived and minority, feature of early Christian thought: “physicalism.” The term is not new, but in this book Ellen Scully aims to regularize (and correct) loose treatments of this feature over the last two centuries of scholarship. She does so both to aid further historical scholarship on late ancient thought and to make that scholarship useful for constructive contemporary appropriation. 

“Physicalism”—or “physicalist soteriology”—describes the view of some early Christian authors who held that the incarnation of the Son of God accomplished a transformation of human nature which is both universal (applying to all humans) and automatic (with no need for human agency, faith, sacraments, etc. to be efficacious). Scully identifies six figures who seem to hold such a view and are thus “physicalists”: Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitier, Marius Victorinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor. The middle six chapters (3—8) treat seriatim these figures and their unique inflections of physicalism. The ninth chapter quickly treats four “almost, but not quite” physicalists to clarify the contours of “physicalism.”

Scully’s book commendably demonstrates the need for renewed and careful attention to a pattern of thought that has been treated poorly, and it does so with sharp analytical clarity. Although I will close with some reservations about the analytical function of the category itself (an “-ism” with a distinct and logically tight existence), any future scholarship will surely build on this important, ground-laying work. 

The opening chapter proposes intellectual conditions explaining the rise and fall of physicalism, which emerged in the fourth century and became defunct around the time of Maximus in the seventh century. Intriguingly, these conditions were rooted in debates over models about human ensoulment and largely unrelated to the logic of physicalism itself. Physicalism emerged as a subset of the ubiquitous Christian acknowledgement that all of humanity is, somehow, united in Adam. It was a corollary commitment of this unity, describing how all humanity is similarly touched by the incarnation and thus automatically transformed by it (pp. 2-5). The chapter traces how developments in ideas about ensoulment explain the rise–and also the fall–of physicalism. Two competing ensoulment options are eventually rejected—pre-existence of souls (which enter subsequently-created bodies) and traducianism (wherein souls, like bodies, are created “through the [human] procreative process,” p. 10). While both had “function[ed] as the mechanism to explain how and why the fall has universal consequences,” they become disfavored for unrelated reasons, tied to “antiascetical polemics” (p. 8). Both models came to be associated with groups deemed heretical for their “theological denigration of marriage, sex, and procreation” (p. 14) (e.g., traducianist “Encratites” and “Messalians” and pre-existence “Origenists”). As a result, the creationist ensoulment model (wherein God creates a new, unfallen soul for each new human) emerges and triumphs as an alternative. 

According to Scully, creationism’s triumph inadvertently triggers the demise of physicalism. For physicalism to have its universal effects, it requires some mechanism of “contact” between the incarnate Christ and all humans. Creationist ensoulment limited the transfer of the effects of the fall to the body, and indeed, conditioned early Christians to theorize human unity only in bodily terms (each soul being created anew for each new human). The universal effects of the incarnation, then, could only extend to what linked humans universally, i.e., bodies. But most early Christian soteriology required the healing of bodies and souls. Bodily resurrection may be necessary for complete salvation, but it is not sufficient! So, continuing to hold to physicalism under such conditions, as Scully suggests, “enforces an awkward theological dichotomy, in which there are two entirely different mechanisms” for salvation (p. 263). 

Chapter 2 looks at how the historiography of “physicalism” has limited our view of the phenomenon. It deals with terminological and methodological challenges and offers a brief schematic of four “stages” of scholarly study on physicalism (the present book aspiring to catalyze the fourth stage). Perhaps most important in this chapter is Scully’s claim that scholarly accounts of physicalism have been problematic, based on overreaching assumptions about the theoretical entailments of this position. For example, nineteenth century German liberal Protestants (the first to “delineate…physicalism as a soteriological category”) correctly perceived physicalism’s “automatic effect on all humanity.” But Scully shows how their normative theological concerns led them to label it a “heterodox logic,” assuming that it “undermin[ed] the role of the individual human will” (p. 38). For related reasons, others have assumed that physicalism necessarily entails universal salvation (pp. 41–44). As Scully demonstrates, these influential early assumptions were simply wrong and did not reflect the nuance of early Christian thought on these issues. Early Christian writers, for example, could hold that the incarnation automatically and universally transforms human nature without seeing that as sufficient for salvation. 

Chapters 3–8 trace inflections of physicalism in the six figures that Scully has identified as meeting the definition. Perhaps most interesting is the variety of ways these early Christians theorized the physicalist effects of the incarnation. 

Athanasius’s physicalism (Chapter 3) manifests in an automatic and universal      transformation of human nature that provides “an inner receptivity to the divine presence of the Holy Spirit” (p. 95). Chapter 4 traces how Hilary’s anti-traducianism manifests in a physicalism that focuses specifically on the body. “Hilary, alone among the physicalists,” Scully suggests, “explicitly posits the actual existence of each individual human in Christ’s incarnate humanity” (p. 104), which causes all humans to rise from the dead in Christ. Only those, however, who add “faithfulness” and can receive the inverse “indwelling” of Christ in themselves experience a salvific resurrection and not a resurrection to judgement (pp. 113–17). 

Marius Victorinus (Chapter 5) provides what should be a “textbook version” of physicalism, as defined by scholars like Adolf von Harnack who scorned physicalism as an inappropriate, corrupted borrowing from Platonism. For Victorinus, as Scully writes, “Christ assumes the Platonic universal form of humanity in the incarnation with the immediate result that all humanity is automatically transformed” (p. 131). Yet Victorinus’s case illustrates how “physicalism” has been poorly treated. For example, Harnack thought physicalism’s automatic transformation necessarily made human faith “superfluous;” yet Victorinus is well-known for insisting on the need for faith (see pp. 140–144). Proper focus on physicalism reveals, too, how Victorinus transforms Platonist categories: his physicalism sees Christ’s crucifixion as purifying the “human universals,” thus automatically affecting all particular instances of the universals, i.e., each human. But at precisely this point he diverges from Platonism by rejecting the idea, “consistently held throughout the Platonic tradition, that universals are fundamentally unchanging” (p. 140).

Gregory of Nyssa’s physicalism (Chapter 6) has several unique features—most prominently that the incarnation’s universal effects on human nature are delayed. Such hiatus leaves room for Gregory’s adamant insistence on the cultivation of virtue and demonstrates another possibility within the theological logic of physicalism—namely, that the transformative effects of the incarnation can be mediated, both “through things like individual faith and action or the sacraments” (p. 203).

In Scully’s larger narrative, Cyril’s physicalism (Chapter 7) illustrates the growing effects of the creationist ensoulment model’s triumph in that Cyril strictly limits the effects of physicalism to the resurrection of the body. The narrowness of his physicalism is evident, she argues, in how Cyril agrees with his Alexandrian predecessor Athanasius on a variety of soteriological features but diverges on where “physicalism enters the picture.” For Athanasius, human nature is universally transformed, so it is receptive of the Holy Spirit. For Cyril, however, physicalist effects only extend to the body (because of the creationist-ensoulment pressures). So, Christ simply anchors a permanent place within humanity for the Spirit, thus making the Spirit now willing to dwell within humanity again but not in a way that depends on a universal transformation of human nature.

When Scully treats the last physicalist, Maximus the Confessor, she highlights his account of the remedy for the two primary effects of the fall (corruptibility and the fallen will). This examination also demonstrates the effects of creationist ensoulment on physicalism. For Maximus, the incarnation heals, both universally and automatically, only the problem of human corruptibility. As Adam’s physical corruptibility automatically extends to all humans, so too does Christ’s accomplishment of incorruptibility. But as Adam’s heirs mar their will through their own agency, says Maximus, the rectification of individual wills also can happen “only when the agency of the individual is combined with that of Christ”—i.e., not automatically, hence not as a physicalist effect (p. 242).

Chapter 9 offers “a methodological primer on how to distinguish authentic physicalist soteriology” from those who “have been mistakenly labeled as physicalists” (p. 266). Here Scully briefly treats four early Christians (Irenaeus, Methodius, Philoxenus, and John of Damascus) to illustrate how common “physicalist-seeming statements” often do not manifest “physicalist logic, strictly understood” (p. 286). She offers two key criteria for distinguishing the real thing from its simulacra: 1) in the real thing, the “surrounding context” of the relevant language “lack[s] limiting or clarifying statements” (e.g., from Philoxenus, that Christ’s renovation of human nature—which sounds physicalist—is only “if we wish” or “if we seek”); and 2) whether “physicalism provides greater coherence to the author’s theological system” (p. 267). 

The tenth and final chapter shows the explicitly constructive interest of Scully’s work of historical theology. She recommends that contemporary theologians reconsider the logic of physicalism, in part because it functions within a broad supposition that human identity is corporate, a feature that has been of growing desirability to theologians concerned with the individualizing tendencies of modernity.

For those interested in intellectual history and the development of early Christian thought, Scully’s study serves as a helpful guide. One consideration worthy of further discussion is the risks of positing the existence of a strong, discrete “-ism,” an intellectual thing that supposedly existed in the thought-world of early Christians and had its own, defining logic and precise definition. Positing such a heuristic category may risk distortions—especially when the exemplars of the -ism did not themselves articulate a self-understanding of the role of the -ism in their thinking, or systematize and fine-tune their thinking around this precise model. The “logic” can become wound too tight. 

Scully occasionally acknowledges that the physicalist logic is not always carried through or clear: for example, when she notes that “admittedly,” Athanasius does not make relevant distinctions “as clearly as we might hope within his trademark physicalist statements” (p. 78; see p. 227 for a similar concession). So, we might ask what is gained by positing the strong analytical category, with stark definitional lines, of “physicalism,” especially when it is sometimes peripheral to a thinker’s focus? Why not rather think in terms of degrees of sophistication (or even coherence) with which a figure incorporates the idea that the incarnation universally and automatically transforms human nature?

While this sustained focus on “physicalism” produces a clear narrative, some interpretative questions were raised for me. For example, the physicalist focus leads to the strong claim that incorruptibility is not, for Athanasius, a physicalist result (p. 79), which becomes grounds for a fairly strong claim of discontinuity between Athanasius and Cyril (p.230). Athanasius doesn’t seem to me to be addressing the central physicalist question in the relevant passages, but the focus on physicalism drives the interpretation anyway, with the result of emphasizing a supposed distinction between two figures who are otherwise remarkably similar in how they theorize incorruptibility. It's a minor interpretive question, but it illustrates the larger danger wherein the supposed logic of a discrete “-ism” can play a distorting role.

Another point worthy of further discussion is the suggested strong causal relationship between ensoulment models and the rise and fall of “physicalism.” Scully’s explanation of how their implicit “logics” interrelate is intriguing and plausible. But do the thinkers actually demonstrate those logics in their reasoning? For example, Scully suggests that Cyril’s physicalism most resembles Hilary’s in “limiting the physicalist effect of the incarnation to the body” due to “their shared belief in the creationist ensoulment model.” And yet, as she immediately acknowledges, Cyril “never provides an explicit advocation of creationism” (p. 234). He probably was creationist, but to never affirm it—let alone center it in soteriological explanations—suggests that ensoulment models may have been less determinative for his “physicalism” than this book hypothesizes. Predetermined focus on a strong “-ism” may distort even while it undeniably illuminates.

Scully’s book ably criticizes such problems from earlier generations of scholars who assumed too much on behalf of “physicalism.” This book exposes their misinterpretations based on too strong a sense of what physicalism “must” be, combined frequently with only incidental treatment of it in studies focused on other topics. It brings the kind of focused attention that is required to clarify the actual contours of a pattern of thinking, its intellectual conditions and logical entanglements with other topics, and more. Still, further refining will be needed with attention to the impetus to overinterpret an author based on the -ism in question. The fourth stage of physicalist scholarship that Scully calls for will be the place for such refinements. Her book is commendable for setting that stage, as reservations like mine only make sense as a way of building on the groundwork laid by Scully in this important work.   

Brad Boswell is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Classics and Philosophy and teaches in the Core Texts Program at Samford University.