The horror represented in this scene serves as the preface to a miraculous resolution—when Christ would restore the dismembered, burned, and destroyed bodies of true believers. The images of cannibalism found in both medieval writing and art are an expression "for Orthodox Christian believers ideas of what happened to people's bodies after they died," which were, "cast prominently in the imagery of cannibalism." Resurrection is the opposite of decay and regurgitation; it is a complete restoration of body and soul: "regurgitation, the reassembly of dispersed parts, the restoration of limbs (re-memberment), the returning of flesh to bare bones, the re-covering with skin. . . . The orthodox medieval Christian understood resurrection as involving the step-by-step reversal of cannibalistic destruction, with intact perfection of the body as the end result."

DEFINE: Clarifies how medieval Orthodox theology conceptualized resurrection as a step-by-step reversal of bodily destruction rather than mere spiritual survival.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 177