Body and Belief : Why the Body of Jesus Cannot Heal 9781935790662, 9781888570557

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Body and Belief

BODY AND BELIEF

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Theresa Sanders

CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins, Series Editors This series publishes original works dealing with cutting-edge theoretical ideas in the field of religious studies and theology. A focused, interdisciplinary approach to religion is encouraged, an approach that will develop concepts and images in transformative ways, through engagement with disciplines and approaches such as Continental philosophy, semiotics, cultural studies, feminism, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, and the media. Manuscript submissions are invited that emphasize originality and creativity, rigorous scholarship, and an ability to communicate complex concepts with clarity and expressiveness. Younger scholars, especially, are encourahged to submit their work to this series. Proposals should be directed to Clayton Crockett, Series Editor, The Davies Group Publishers, PO Box 440140, Aurora, Colorado, 80044-0140. Carl A. Raschke, The End of Theology Theresa Sanders, Body and Belief: Why the body of Jesus cannot heal Gabriel Vahanian, Anonymous God Charles E. Winquist, The Surface of the Deep

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BODY AND BELIEF Why the body of Jesus cannot heal

Theresa Sanders

Contemporary Religious Thought Series Editors — Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins

The Davies Group, Publishers

Aurora, Colorado

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Body and Belief: Why the body of Jesus cannot heal ©2000, Theresa Sanders All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher: The Davies Group, Publishers PO Box 440140 Aurora, CO 80044-0140 USA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sanders, Theresa, 1963Body and belief: why the body of Jesus cannot heal/Theresa Sanders p. cm.—(Series in Philosophical and cultural studies in religion) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-888570-55-5 (alk. paper) 1. Body, Human--Religious aspects--Catholic Church. 2. Catholic Church-Doctrines. 3. Body, Human (Philosophy) 4. Lord’s Supper. 5. Five Sacred Wounds. 6. Sacred Heart, Devotion to. 7. Jesus Christ--Resurrection. 8. Relics. I. Title. II. Series. BT741.2 S35 2000 233’.5--dc21 00-034035

Cover design is by The Davies Group. Image used is By His Wounds We Are Healed by Jean Morman Unsworth and appears by permission. Printed in the United States of America Published August, 2000. The Davies Group, Publishers. Aurora, Colorado 80044-0140 1234567890

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Contents

Preface Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3. Chapter 4. Chapter 5. Chapter 6. Index

iii Introduction The Pierced Body of Jesus The Pierced Heart of Jesus The Pierced Body of the Saint The Dead Body of the Saint The Resurrection of the Body

1 19 47 75 99 127 153

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Preface

It is a curious fact that, according to the Christian gospels, the body of Jesus never recovered from the wounds it received during the crucifixion. I say this fact is curious because it runs counter to all of our popular notions of life after death. In the next life, we tell ourselves, the lame will walk, the blind will see, and sickness and pain will have no power over us. All shall be healed, all shall be restored, and none shall suffer again. And yet, the body of Jesus still has those wounds. There have been a few Catholic thinkers who have imagined them to be temporary; Mechtild of Magdeburg, for example, thought that Jesus’s body would be healed after the Last Judgment (though she believed that his scars would remain). But for the most part, Catholics imagine the wounds to be a permanent part of the risen Jesus. Affirms the New Catholic Encyclopedia, “After the Resurrection Our Lord retained the marks of His wounds as badges of triumph.”1 The wounds of Jesus have been the focal point for innumerable devotions throughout the history of Catholic piety. Jesus’s pierced heart, his head made bloody by the crown of thorns, his hands and feet torn by gaping holes — these are the stuff of sacred art and literature ranging from the inspired to the truly awful. And yet, for all the attention that has been paid to the wounded body of Jesus, there has been very little attempt to read those wounds from a contemporary theological/ philosophical perspective. This book is such an attempt.

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That is, the book explores the wounds of Jesus in light of postmodern concerns regarding body, text, signification, and closure. Postmodern thought has rightly characterized the Christian theological tradition as “logocentric,” or as privileging identity over difference, unity over heterogeneity, and presence over absence. However, within the Christian tradition there have also been countermovements: ideas and strategies and symbols that call into question theology’s preoccupation with identity and presence. The woundedness of Jesus, I argue, is one such symbol. My thesis, as it is fully developed in the final chapter, is that the holes in Jesus’s body articulate a longing for God that is humans’ deepest knowledge of God. This longing, in other words, is not a lack that could ever be filled but is grace itself. In our present life it is the grace that impels us outwards towards others in love, and in the resurrected life it is the very space that love requires in order to be itself.

S.v. “Wounds of Our Lord, Devotion to,” p. 1035.

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Acknowledgments t is doubtful that I will be able to give adequate acknowledgment to the many people whose insights, expertise, and support contributed to this work. Thanks must first be paid to James Wiggins and Charles Winquist, whose teaching and scholarship continue to inspire. I am deeply grateful to call them both mentors and friends. Colleagues in the Theology Department at Georgetown University have created an academic environment that is both intellectually enriching and astoundingly humane. In particular, conversations with Joseph Murphy and Frederick Ruf have contributed greatly to my thinking, and the encouragements of Ariel Glucklich and Elizabeth McKeown have been invaluable. The Georgetown Landegger Fund must be thanked as well. Peter Gardella at Manhattanville College has been an ongoing source of fascinating details from the history of religions. Finally, my gratitude goes to James K. Davies for his kindness and expertise, and to the Society of the Sacred Heart (U.S. Province) who gave me the time to write this book even when I didn’t want it.

Portions of this book were published elsewhere in article form: “The Otherness of God and the Bodies of Others” appeared in the Journal of Religion (October 1996): 572-87, and is used with permission. “The Sacred Heart and the Church of the Poor” appeared in the Journal for Peace and Justice Studies, 7/1 (1996): 1-12, and is used with permission. “Seeking a Minor Sun: Saints After the Death of God” appeared in Horizons, 22/2 (Fall 1995): 183-97, and is used with permission.

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The Publisher wishes to acknowledge the artist who graciously made possible the use of the collage used on the cover. Jean Morman Unsworth (MFA, University of Notre Dame) is an artist and widely published art educator. Her mahogany crosses and fabric hangings grace several churches throughout the US. Her collage (appearing on the cover), By His Wounds We Are Healed, is a response to the increasing gun violence in this country. It was displayed in the Jesus 2000 exhibit at Pace University, and shown at the Catholic Theological Institute, Chicago in July and August, 2000.

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Chapter 1 Introduction

I’m not sure why that particular photograph caught my eye. God knows we’ve all seen hundreds like it, and I might just as easily have flipped past it or missed it altogether. But there it was: “In Bosnia, the Faces of Death” — a dump truck spilling bodies out onto the ground. The caption next to the photo explained, “Once or twice a month, in a bizarre mimicry of live prisoner exchanges, both sides meet on neutral turf to swap corpses that will eventually be returned to their families.”1 The corpses in the photograph are hopelessly entangled among each other so that it is difficult to trace the lines of a single body from foot to hip to shoulder to head. Mixed among them is other debris: a wheelbarrow, a stretcher, sticks, and dirt. One man’s arm, stiffened and bent like a claw, reaches up from beneath another’s body in a parody of embrace. And to the left of the photograph, the driver of the truck glances back from the cab’s open door to see that the entire cargo has been dumped onto the ground. “The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead,” reflects Larry in The Razor’s Edge.2 What distresses most is the sheer intransigence of the dead. They offer no insight, drop no hints, and ask for nothing. Nor do they promise anything. A promise, after all, promises something still to come, and the dead have nothing to offer to the future except their own brute facticity. But the body is not nothing; the exchange itself shows

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that. This man belongs to this son. That man belongs to that woman. The bodies are not interchangeable, nor are they replaceable; one isn’t as good as any other. In some ways, bodies seem more real than the selves and voices that animated them. Once those have fled, we are confronted with the possibility that they were nothing more than ghosts or phantoms, random neuron firings or hormonal eruptions. But the body: well, that can’t be dismissed so easily. In murder mysteries it is always so simple to alter computer records or create false passports or even to fabricate multiple identities in order to cover over the tracks of the killer. However, there is still the matter of how to dispose of the body after the crime has been committed. Whole plots revolve around the fear that somehow this part of the crime will go wrong, and that, like the telltale heart, the body will somehow resurface to witness against its assassin. Bodies seem in fact a fundament of truth. We feel things in our bones, feel things in our gut. Pascal mused that the heart has reasons which reason, no part of the body, is incapable of knowing. We comb through debris searching for accident victims, hoping that somehow their bodies will provide explanations for what our minds refuse to accept. “Why did my little boy drown?” asks a distraught mother. Why? “Because children can’t breathe under water,” the doctor responds. The body’s answers are simple, or at least tangible. No one expects philosophy from a body. Which is why, perhaps, bodies are so eagerly appropriated to lend an aura of truth to claims that might otherwise seem less than credible. Bodies can be trusted; bodies do not lie. “See?” runs the demonstration, “that diseased flesh is proof of God’s displeasure.” “See? Your weakness shows your people’s inferiority.” “See? My beauty proves that I am right.” It is no accident that Nazi Germany, attempting to bolster its claims of superiority, produced charts of the heights, weights, and cranial capacities of different races. How can bodies be disputed? “See?” Elaine Scarry, in her book The Body in Pain, observes that it is this peculiar capacity of bodies to substantiate ideological claims that accounts for the prevalence of warfare. After all, she observes, there is nothing inherent in being the “best injurer” that entitles one to have one’s way in

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a dispute. Why does winning a war give someone the kind of power that being, say, the best chess player does not? The most obvious answer, of course, is that war enforces its own effects. If I have defeated you in war, you are no longer capable of disputing my claims. But this is not always the case. The United States was defeated by North Vietnam, she points out, even though the United States was militarily larger and stronger, and even though it was still capable of retaliating. If it lost due to questions of strategy or intelligence or will, why would not a chess match have served to settle the question equally as well, if not better? The answer, according to Scarry, lies in the body — more specifically, in the injured body. She observes that “the injuring not only provides a means of choosing between disputants but also provides, by its massive opening of human bodies, a way of reconnecting the derealized and disembodied beliefs with the force and power of the material world.”3 In other words, in warfare soldiers may fight for this or that cause, for a principle they believe in or for one they despise, or perhaps for reasons that they do not understand at all or that they misunderstand. But principles and causes, whether deeply held or dimly grasped, simply do not have the force of reality that an opened wound does. Blood really is thicker than beliefs. Because of this, the outcome of a game of chess seems somehow less real than the outcome of a war. Though chess might depend considerably more than warfare on cunning and foresight, it does not authenticate its conclusions with a wound. Why does the body have this power to authenticate claims? Scarry responds that the answer is “unfathomable,” and I suspect that she is correct. But she goes on to speculate that when the human mind is confronted with an open body, it becomes overwhelmed and finds itself unable to flee from the reality of what it perceives. In a sort of panic, it then immediately assigns the body’s reality to something else, to something less troubling and easier to understand. The body itself resists summary by the categories of consciousness; it is never fully thinkable. And so the mind seeks another object, something easier to assimilate and appropriate, and confers the shock of the body’s undeniability to it.

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In this way ideas and ideologies can be instituted or reinforced with a strength that they could never generate on their own. Through sheer juxtaposition, through the power of contiguity, an exchange can take place in which the reality of the body is conferred on its interpretive context. For example, the injured on a battlefield might serve as tangible, irrefutable evidence that “Our cause is truly just,” or that “God is merciful.” The same body can also witness to the claim, “Our government must be stopped,” or, “We have no hope of winning this conflict.” In a sense, the claim is not as important as the evidence offered to support it — the injured body in its stark materiality. Meanwhile, in a kind of counter-motion, the context in which the wounding takes place is ascribed to the bodies at hand. “He died a hero’s death,” we say of the private who was blown up in his foxhole. By invoking the word “hero,” we draw on images of Hercules and Hector and John Wayne and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and thus when we look at the body blown to bits we are no longer confused by its horrible mess. We know what the mess means, and we can add its name to the litany of others that shape our culture. We say of other bodies, “She is a martyr” or, “They were cannon fodder,” and we are able to make some sense of what otherwise appears to us as perfectly, thoroughly sense-ible and yet utterly senseless at the same time. Meanings are applied to bodies in the way that plating is applied to metals. But, like plating, meanings can rub off. And here we see the doublenature of the body’s ineffability. It is true that the body, because it makes no claims or promises of its own, can be appropriated by any number of successive, competing, and even contradictory causes. But, by that very fact, it remains subject to none of them. Asks Scarry, Does this dead boy’s body “belong” to his side, the side “for which” he died, or does it “belong” to the side “for which” someone killed him…? That it belongs to both or neither makes manifest the nonreferential character of the dead body…a non-referentiality that rather than eliminating all referential activity instead gives it a frightening freedom of referential activity….4

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Using the body to substantiate one’s claims is a risky business. There is always the possibility that the evidence will backfire or will betray the cause that it is meant to support. One has only to think of all those Catholic saints tortured and executed and yet, in iconography, holding the very instruments of their torture as badges of triumph. Or think of witnesses in the Truth Commission trials of South Africa displaying their maimed limbs and broken bones, telling stories of midnight interrogations and prison rapes; the injuries were inflicted as an effort to intimidate, but in the end they serve as testimony against the ones who caused them. One can’t really predict what a body will end up saying. So, it must be asked, why choose now to write a book about the body, about the injured body of Jesus, the suffering bodies of the saints, dead bodies, resurrected bodies? If they are so unstable in their meanings, why turn to bodies as a source for theology at this time in the history of Catholic thought? For it must be admitted that Catholic theology is in a time of crisis. The norms and methods that once guided Catholic tradition have all come into question in the past few decades, and it is unclear what, if anything, will come along to replace them. Crisis is, of course, nothing new in the history of Christianity. But whereas earlier movements questioned the orthodoxy of beliefs (giving rise to the categories of heresy and schism), or established new orthodoxies (reformation), or questioned the significance of any orthodoxy at all (modernity), we are now in a position where not just the meaning, but the very possibility of God-talk is under question. It is not what Christians say about God, but the very dynamic of their saying it that is at issue in postmodernity. This situation has come about because of a confluence of various philosophical and linguistic considerations, some of them with deep roots in the history of theology. In the Christian tradition, and indeed in the philosophical tradition succeeding but spawned by Christianity, God is thought of as one, absolute, and absolutely self-identical. There is nothing lacking in God; God needs nothing in order to be fully Godself. Moreover, God’s Word (in Greek: Logos) is perfectly expressive of God, so perfectly

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expressive that God and God’s Word form an inseparable unity. “In the beginning was the Word,” proclaims the opening line of the Gospel of John, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In the Catholic tradition, these ideas about God have been supported by what is called the analogia entis or the analogy of being. According to this way of thinking, everything in the universe has being, but not everything has being in the same way.5 For example, rocks, which are insentient and unmoving, have only a very limited participation in being. Plants and animals have a greater share, and the having-being of humans claims a share that is greater still. In this tradition, “being” is defined as “being present to self,” so it is easy to see why human existence is fuller than is the existence of inanimate objects. The analogy of being also applies to the existence of angels. Angels, according to the tradition, are beings who are perfectly self-present. They have no materiality and so are at the opposite end of the scale from rocks, which are nothing but material. Nevertheless, angels are still creatures, and so they must still rely on God for their being. Only God is both perfectly self-present and wholly uncreated. Only God, in other words, is God. This analogy of being that can be applied between creatures and God is not perfect, however. The tradition insists that an unbridgeable gap exists between the being of God and the being of what God has created. Thomas Aquinas cautions, “Although it may be admitted that creatures are in some sort like God, it must nowise be admitted that God is like creatures….”6 This is because, as the Fourth Lateran Council in the thirteenth century affirmed, “…between the Creator and the creature so great a likeness cannot be noted without the necessity of noting a greater dissimilarity between them.”7 It is one thing to say that people are made in the image of God; it is quite another to enmesh God in the categories and likeness of a human being. Theologians throughout Christian history have wrestled with the problems created by this gulf between people and God. How is it, they have asked, that human beings, with their limited capacities for being

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and knowing, can speak of a God who is unlimited? Attempts to solve the dilemma have often taken an apophatic approach, maintaining that we speak most truly of God when we speak of what God is not. This strategy has given rise to a huge literature of “negative theologies,” works whose titles alone often give an indication of their theme: for example, the fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing (author unknown), and Saint John of the Cross’ work The Dark Night of the Soul, written in the sixteenth century. Other theologians have refused even to attempt to resolve the problem, preferring to lapse into mystical silence rather than risk reducing God to something that could be described using human concepts or images. This problem, as it stands, is nothing new. What is new, however, is the particular twist it has been given in the past few decades as a result of emerging philosophies of language. Because much Christian thought, as I noted earlier, equates God not only with Being but with Word, any critical assessment of language will have implications for Christian theology as well. This is what has taken place in the last few decades under the influence of deconstructive philosophies, and what has led in part to what has been called “the death of God.” The problem as it has emerged as a result of these linguistic philosophies is this: Deconstruction charges that Western philosophy, a tradition steeped in what it calls “Logocentrism,” assumes that behind any system of signs lies the realm of what is signified. If I point and say “bumblebee,” for example, everyone knows that what I am referring to is the live bee that is circling the flower garden. Behind words is thought to lie the full presence of what is signified by the words. Behind imperfect attempts to communicate using limited human sounds and concepts lies a stability of meaning and a plenitude of being. “Bee” is a signifier that points to the full presence of the real bee. But deconstruction points out that to say, to think, or even to experience “bee,” whether the linguistic one or the one in the garden, is to find oneself in a nexus of relations characterized by difference. The bee, in other words, can only be recognized as a bee because it is not a flower

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and is not a ladybug and is not myself or a spot of thin air. There “is” and can be no bee-beyond-language because the moment such a creature is even imagined, or is even begun to be imagined, it already is entangled within a structure of differences. And what is true for the bee is true for God. Thus, some contemporary theologians have proclaimed the death of God as a way of recognizing that the word “God” is one word among others, one signifier among other signifiers that cannot hope to communicate the full presence of an absolute being. Striving to express the aseity of God, the word inevitably turns on itself and reveals its own impossibility. Language cannot signify what is beyond language because what is beyond language can only be thought linguistically.8 “God” cannot be thought outside of the structures of difference and absence and limitation. And if God cannot be thought outside of those structures, then “God” no longer can mean what it is supposed to mean. In that case, theology has lost its foundation. Which is why, in part, it increasingly turns instead to the human person for both its focus and its methodological axis. The “turn to the subject” of contemporary theology has its origin in the writings of René Descartes, who found in an examination of himself a bedrock of philosophical certainty: “I am, I exist, is necessarily true, every time I express it or conceive of it in my mind.”9 But it has more recent manifestations as well. Karl Rahner, the most influential of twentieth-century Catholic theologians, observes that human experience is the only starting place possible for any contemporary theology. According to his methodology, all knowledge of God is in some sense dependent on knowledge of ourselves. Rahner is particularly concerned with the experience of grace that he sees as operative within human subjectivity. He observes, Whenever man in his transcendence experiences himself as questioning, as disquieted by the appearance of being, as open to something ineffable, he cannot understand himself as subject in the sense of an absolute subject, but only in the sense of one who receives being, ultimately only in the sense of grace.10

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Note here that the sense of grace comes as human beings experience themselves, as they experience themselves as questioning, restless, and open to new knowledge. For Rahner, the turn to the subject (albeit the subject who already has been graced by God) is the starting place of theology. Postmodernity calls into question the foundational character of this starting place too. Western philosophy has long made a connection between existence and subjectivity: “I am, I exist, is necessarily true, every time I express it or conceive of it in my mind.” As we have seen, Catholic theology has made the same connection, defining being as being-presentto-self. Thus, if our being is analogous to God’s, our subjectivity must also be analogous in some way to the subjectivity of God. However, postmodernity points out that the self that thinks, and the self that thinks about the self that thinks, are not identical. There is a small but significant breach between the two. We are not perfectly present to ourselves. We are not self-contained subjects. There is always a difference between who we are and who we think we are, between our inaccessible “self ” and subjectivity. Moreover, our subjectivity is intertwined (whether we wish it or not) with the subjectivity of others and with the materiality of the world. We grapple daily with pulsions and forces that we recognize only dimly, and understand even less. Freud called into question our ability even to know our own motivations, much less to be able to control them. The human psyche, it seems, is not a clean, well-lighted place such as Descartes envisioned. It is, rather, a surge of distortions, illusions, and half-formed thoughts. In short, theology’s turn to the subject is problematic at best. If Freud’s excavation of the self revealed the swirling and inaccessible currents of subjectivity, Marx’s analysis showed human history to be no less murky in terms of its drives and its goals. This has prompted postmodernity’s proclamation not only of the death of God and the disappearance of the self, but also of the end of history as well.11 History, of course, has not come to an end. The daily newspaper is still delivered to our doorsteps, and the evening news still connects the events of the moment with the affairs of the past. However, the claim of postmodernity is

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that we have lost the sense of a master story, of one complete, overarching plan that governs the march of history towards its denouement. We are left instead with partial narratives and with isolated anecdotes that may or may not be woven into a larger fabric of meaning. Technology has contributed to this loss of a unified account of history. Technology now enables us to take images of one event and insert them into a new context, so that what seem to be news photos are really montages. We see pictures in magazines of events that never actually occurred, and only sometimes is this fact pointed out to us. Tourists can now have their photographs taken with a cyber-president in front of a hologramWhite House, and Winston Churchill can appear on television hawking flavored ice teas. Moreover, the associative logic of the Internet bypasses linear categories in favor of connotation, metonymy, and homography. Knowledge is fragmented into literally billions of pieces, each with its own genealogy and its own measure of credibility. We are no longer sure whom to believe or what is real. History, it seems, has lost the surety and direction of its sweep. Not just history has been fragmented, but Christian history has come to an end. When Augustine wrote in The City of God that “human kingdoms are established by divine providence,” and that “God can never be believed to have left the kingdoms of men, their dominations and servitudes, outside of the laws of His providence,”12 he was expressing a faith in the workings of events that few of us can share today. Above all, this century’s capacity to annihilate itself in nuclear apocalypse calls into question the governing role of Providence. Christian history has been replaced by a tangle of histories, some beautiful and some despicable, whose outcome is uncertain at best and disastrous at worst. This brings us to yet another casualty of postmodernity, the belief in a stable structure or principle that guides not only history but nature (human nature included).13 A consistent theme throughout Western philosophy and theology is that the will of God may be read in the orderly structure of the universe — in the design of creation and in the superior nature of human beings. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “If the

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natural law had been written only in the human reason, it would be little capable of directing most of our actions. But it is also engraved in the heart of man in ineffaceable characters.”14 This natural law, according to Rousseau, was inscribed not on tablets of stone but on our very being, in our minds and in our hearts. It is eternal and unchanging, and we have only to consult our true selves if we wish to know how to act in ways that are right and proper. With the end of faith in a divine ordering of history, however, the law that once seemed natural now appears as a cultural projection — as an ideological creation rooted in a will to power or in an unthinking desire to dominate. The notion of the Book, of an orderly, stable vision of the True and the Good written into the structure of the world and into its inhabitants, is supplanted by partial literatures that make no claims to completion and confess at the outset their biases and bents. Moreover, as the philosophical Book has been critiqued by postmodernity, the Christian Book (both the Word of God as the Logos and the word of God in the Bible) has been called into question as well. “In the beginning was the Logos,” affirms the Gospel of John, but through an archeology of language, postmodernity digs up what precedes the word, the differences and spaces between words that make words possible. Words, it turns out, are not an unassailable bedrock. They have histories, and those histories are replete with interpretation, misinterpretation, corrosion, misuse, and loss. The Bible itself is subject to these same forces. Catholicism has never taken a fundamentalist approach to reading the Bible. The tradition recognizes four senses of interpretation: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical or mystical meanings of a text. Even the literal sense, which is the most basic, requires interpretation. For example, Aquinas explains, “When Scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely, operative power.”15 Nonetheless, Catholic biblical exegesis has undergone a revolution in the past century, since the time when “the heresy of modernism” was condemned by Pope Pius X in 1907. Bible study now entails analysis

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of textual transmission, ideological critique, etymological excavation, and literary deconstruction. The Book is shown to have such diverse sources and conflicting motivations that attempts to divine its “message” are suspect from the outset. Thus the major sources of Christian theology (God, Self, History, and Word) have undergone death, loss, ending, and closure.16 It is no wonder that Catholic thinking now finds itself in a state of crisis, unsure of its sources, methods, or goal. But it is at just such moments of crisis, according to Elaine Scarry, that cultures find themselves turning to the body. She writes, It will gradually become apparent that at particular moments when there is within a society a crisis of belief—that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population’s belief either because it is manifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation — the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of “realness” and “certainty.”17 When ideas have lost their power, they appropriate the power of materiality. This, I submit, accounts for both the nearly-obsessive interest in the body exhibited by postmodern scholarship, and for my own interest in writing this book. In the past several years, books about the body have proliferated — books about women’s bodies and medieval bodies, about bodies under torture, bodies in society, colonized bodies, and deterritorialized bodies. It is as if, in the wake of postmodernity’s unmooring of texts and meanings, the body appears as something incorrigibly real. In our current crisis of belief, we turn to something material for a measure of truth and solidity. Or, rather, we turn to books about the body. Because it must be noted that I am not proposing that Catholicism solve its theological crisis by initiating a mass flagellation, wherein the bleeding bodies of believers would be offered as evidence of the truth of their faith. Nor do I suggest a revival of the Inquisition or of the Crusades, exhibiting the torn bodies of

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heretics and infidels to substantiate the authority of the Church. Scarry’s point in The Body in Pain is that the ongoing task of civilization is to resist such bodily substantiation; civilization, she says, entails the creation of substitutes for the body in material culture so that the body need not be made subject to torture or warfare. The truth is that, as we have seen, the body is no more stable a source for theology than any of the other possibilities we have considered. Its meanings change over time and across ideological boundaries. Even in itself, the body does not have the kind of integrity that could guarantee the truth or the consistency of its messages. It is constantly in a state of flux, shedding itself and recreating itself, sometimes attacking itself as in autoimmune diseases, and other times supplementing itself with importations like glasses and earrings, hearing aids, tattoos, and respirators. So I am not suggesting that Catholics injure bodies, either their own or others’, because the injured body is no more a guarantor of truth than is the deconstructed Book or an interrogated Self. But I am suggesting that there is, as Scarry noted, something powerfully “unfathom-able” about the injured body, and that by exploring it in its Catholic context, we may uncover some clues towards a renewed contemporary theological vision. As a way towards that vision, I will begin with an exploration of the Eucharist (that is, the broken body of Jesus) as it might be understood in a postmodern context. Catholic theology insists that when the faithful receive Communion, what they receive is not “merely” a symbol of Jesus’ body, but is in fact the very presence of that body. The Baltimore Catechism, memorized by millions of Catholics in days gone by, affirms,“When Our Lord said, ‘This is My body,’ the entire substance of the bread was changed into His body; and when He said, ‘This is My blood,’ the entire substance of the wine was changed into His blood.” And again: “Christ is present whole and entire even under a tiny particle of the Host.”18 But immediately, all of the alarms of postmodernity must go off at once! To speak of presence, particularly to speak of the presence of God in a piece of bread, seems antithetical to all of deconstruction’s most deeply-held convictions. And yet, I will argue that Catholic Eucharistic theology uses the

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language of presence precisely to evoke a sense of otherness: the otherness of God and the otherness of the body. By insisting that in the Eucharist nothing less than God is received, theologies of transubstantiation appeal to an absolute otherness that prevents idolatry of the self. And when this idol is shattered, a way is opened towards compassion. That compassion has historically been symbolized by the pierced heart of Jesus. The Gospel of John in the New Testament describes the mutilation of Jesus’ body after his death on the cross: “…one of the soldiers pierced [Jesus’] side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water” (19:34). As the centuries wore on, “side” came to be interpreted as “heart,” and the heart of Jesus pierced by the soldier’s lance became one of the richest symbols within the Christian tradition. Even today one can find pamphlets of prayers to the Sacred Heart in any Catholic bookstore, or candles to be lit in intercession: “Oh, sacred heart of Jesus who said ‘Ask and you shall receive,” I beg, that by the ardent flames of love that kindle your heart, you hear my prayer.” The Feast of the Sacred Heart continues to be celebrated as a major feast in many Catholic countries, particularly in Latin America. This book will explore three different strands of Sacred Heart symbolism: the pierced heart as the origin of the Church, the heart as symbol of love, and the wounded heart of Jesus in need of reparation/repair. I will suggest that the power of Sacred Heart symbolism is missed if the wounds are read simply as injuries to be healed by the ardent devotion of the faithful. Rather, the perpetual wounds of Jesus make evident the brokenness that unites us as humans. They invite us to become “infected” by others’ longings, sorrows, and loves. Becoming infected in this way is the work of the saints. The saints, I suggest, are those most keenly aware of the absence of God from the world. Always “on the way” towards God, human beings know a restlessness so pressing that at times only pain can soothe its intensities. The pierced body of the saint, I will argue, is a manifestation of the desire for God and at the same time is an attempt to assuage that desire. Pain becomes a kind of anaesthesia that blocks the saint’s knowledge of the distance of God

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from the world. It is precisely when God seems nearest that the saints find themselves in anguish, both because nearness emphasizes the separation from God that still remains, and because physical pain seems preferable to the pain of longing that results from that separation. Pain leaves us speechless and unable to think. The power to understand and to imagine abandons us when we are in agony. And yet the saints willingly surrender these faculties. They offer their losses as gifts to the God whom they love. The final loss is, of course, death, and the deaths of the saints have played an enormous role in Catholic tradition and piety. One of the most difficult practices for non-Catholics to understand is the Catholic veneration of relics — that Catholics insist on preserving and displaying and even praying to the bones and teeth and skulls of their dearly beloved. Looking at medieval reliquaries seldom fails to evoke a kind of visceral response. How primitive! How barbaric! This book will argue that the dead body of the saint is venerated precisely because it has surrendered all claims to signification — because it has risked final meaninglessness. Death is the ultimate kenosis. The dead body has no say in the meanings ascribed to it, opening itself to multiple meanings and to no meaning at all. In a cartoon a man tells his wife over their morning coffee, “What a nightmare! I dreamed I was sacrificed for a worthless cause.”19 What a nightmare indeed! But the possibility of this nightmare is the saint’s last offering, a loss so radical that even interpretation itself is surrendered towards God. In the Christian faith death is not the last word; “If Christ be not risen our faith is in vain,” preached Saint Paul, and Christians have spent no little effort imagining down to the last detail just what resurrection means for our earthly bodies. What we see over and over in theologies of the resurrection is a concern that no part of the body be lost in the transition from death to new life: that the body be raised whole and entire. What I will suggest in this book’s last chapter, however, is that Christians should not envision resurrection as the restoration or even the initiation of a final wholeness. The body of Jesus, after all, still has holes in it. Those holes, like the holes in the body of the saint, articulate a longing for God. Moreover,

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as holes in the raised and glorified body of Jesus, the God-man, they assure us that our deepest knowledge of God is precisely our longing for God. Desire, in other words, is grace itself. In our present life it is the grace that impels us outwards towards others in love, and in the resurrected life it is the very space that love requires in order to be itself.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Photo by Mike Persson, Newsweek, 14 June 1993, p. 41. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1944), p. 50. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 128. Ibid, p. 119. Strictly speaking, the analogy of being is the proportionality that exists in the relation between all things and God, and the analogy of the concept of being is the way of thinking that describes those relations. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Part I, q. 4, art. 3, ad 4, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1920), v. 1, p. 51. Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari from the 30th edition of the Enchiridion Symbolorum (Saint Louis, Missouri: B. Herder Book Co., 1957), p. 171, no. 432. Thus deconstructionist Jacques Derrida’s famous dictum, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”: “There is nothing outside of the text,” or “There is no outside-text.” See Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, 1976), p. 158. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (New York: Penguin Books, 1968; reprinted 1985), p. 103. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1978, 1989), p. 34. See Mark C. Taylor, Erring (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), especially pp. 52-73. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1950), pp. 142, 158. See Taylor, Erring, pp. 74-93. Jean Jacques Rousseau, “L’état de guerre” in Oeuvres complètes, Pléiade edition, vol. III. p. 602. Cited by Derrida, Of Grammatology, 17. Summa Theologica Part I, q. 1, art.10, ad 3, v.1, p. 18. The terms are Taylor’s. Scarry, p. 14. The New Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism, Official Revised Edition, No. 2 (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1962-69), pp. 164, 165. Commonweal, 17 January 1997, p. 23.

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Chapter 2 The Pierced Body of Jesus

In his book The Unexpected Universe, anthropologist Loren Eiseley reflects on the strangeness of bodily existence. He recalls that one day he happened to trip on the sidewalk and hit his head: “It was then,” he writes, “that a surprising thing happened.” Looking at the blood running down the sidewalk where he lay, he cried, “Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry, I’ve done for you.” The words were addressed, oddly enough, to his blood cells, to “phagocytes, platelets, all the crawling, living, independent wonder that had been part of me and now, through my folly and lack of care, were dying like beached fish on the hot pavement.” Eiseley recalls, “It seemed to me then, and does now in retrospect, that I had caused to the universe I inhabited as many deaths as the explosion of a supernova in the cosmos.”1 What trickled from his body was himself and yet not himself — his own loss and someone else’s. How do we make sense of our bodies? They seem so familiar; we know them like the back of our hand, as it were. And yet, in a blink of an eye, or in a heartbeat, they can become alien and even threatening. When Eiseley’s head hit the pavement, he was unleashing worlds that were as intimate as his thoughts and as foreign as unexplored planets. And if our own bodies are so problematic for us, how much more so is that other body that millions of Catholics ingest and literally incorporate each week — the body of Christ.

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At first glance, it may seem as if the body of Christ in the Eucharist is far from the concerns of postmodernity. Catholic eucharistic theology insists unabashedly on words such as “substance” and “presence.” It resists the transformation of the significant into the semiotic or of the metaphysical into the rhetorical. Catholics do not speak or read so much as they taste; arguments about book, text, and word seem irrelevant in the nearness of bread and wine. And yet, some meeting between postmodern theology and a theology of the Eucharist appears to be inevitable. In a book published nine years after his landmark study Erring, Mark C. Taylor added another item to his list of the casualties of postmodernity. To the death of God, the disappearance of the self, the end of history, and the closure of the book, he added the deconstruction of the body: “Within the open economy of textuality, the body is no more a unified whole than the self is identical to itself. As a result of its textuality, the body inevitably betrays itself.”2 The body betrays itself in that it always contains the potential to destroy itself. This is shown most starkly in autoimmune disorders, in which the body turns on itself and attacks itself. But such disorders merely enact what is true in all bodies. Citing studies of fetal development, Taylor observes that since every embryo inherits genetic coding from two different sources, it is always possible for antibodies from one source to reject material from the other. Bodies must establish themselves as entities and as different from other entities. A body is an achievement, not a given. Thus our original condition is not wholeness but rather fragmentation. Taylor writes, “Never simply itself, the body is haunted by an altarity with which it cannot identify and yet with which it cannot avoid identifying.... Like every other communications system, the body is riddled with gaps.”3 What seems familiar and self-evidently “present” to us becomes, upon closer scrutiny, something of a stranger and an enigma. But again, if our own bodies are haunted by otherness, how much stranger must the body of Jesus seem to us. That body is not only the body of a man — a body subject to the same cellular malfunctions, immuno-deficiencies, and molecular mysteries as every other human body.

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It is also said to be the body of God — of the almighty one, the Lord, the Messiah, the second person of the Trinity, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It is thus exponentially elusive, exponentially difficult to comprehend or even to approach. How could we possibly understand it? Of course, the body of Jesus has been the source of controversy at least since that body’s death in the first century. More precisely, even the fact of his death was a matter for dispute, as some early followers claimed that Jesus had only appeared to have a body: that he took on flesh in the way one might put on clothes, but that the flesh was in no way a real part of who he was. The Christian Gnostic text called The Second Treatise of the Great Seth depicts Jesus mocking those who thought they were tormenting him in the crucifixion: I visited a bodily dwelling. I cast out the one who was in it first, and I went in…. And I am the one who was in it, not resembling him who was in it first. For he was an earthly man, but I, I am from above the heavens…. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon which they placed the crown of thorns…. And I was laughing at their ignorance.4 If Jesus had never really had a body, the reasoning went, then he could not really have died on the cross. He only appeared to have died. The Gnostic position was declared a heresy by the early Church, as was any belief that Jesus’ body had never risen from the grave. Orthodox Christian thinking as it emerged in the first centuries of the Church professed that Jesus was truly God but also truly human — that his body was as essential to his being as that of any other person. It professed, in addition, that he had been raised from death, and that he had ascended into heaven until he would come again in the last days to judge the living and the dead and to initiate the kingdom of God. But Christians did not stop there. It was not enough to claim that Jesus was in heaven and that the faithful were awaiting his return in glory. Remembering his last meal with his disciples, and reenacting that meal

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among themselves, they came to profess that Jesus was actually present with them whenever they gathered together for the breaking of bread. “Take this bread and eat it,” they remembered Jesus saying. “This is my body. Take this wine and drink it. This is my blood.” Such a strange concept. Such a strange ritual. As if the otherness of their own bodies were not enough, Christians are asked to ingest another’s body into themselves: not, to be sure, in the form of a body, but in the form of bread and wine, which only makes the whole enterprise that much more puzzling. What possible sense can one make of it? By way of an answer, I would like to take up the problem of alterity as it has been expressed in two different but related trends in contemporary theology. The first of these trends focuses on the otherness of God. If God is ineluctably other, it asks, how might it be possible to speak of “God’s presence” in the Eucharist? The second trend takes up the otherness of the body: the strangeness of our own bodies and of the bodies in our world. What I hope to show, through an analysis of these issues as they relate to the sacrament of bread and wine, is that the Catholic Eucharist does not so much satisfy humans’ hungers as multiply them exponentially. That is, in consuming the Eucharist, Christians find their longing for God and for communion with the others in their world becoming deeper, more urgent, and ever more consuming. The Otherness of God The name of God, says French Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion, must be crossed out: “We cross out the name of God…in order to show  ourselves that his unthinkableness saturates our thought — right from the beginning, and forever.”5 Marion’s God Without Being is one of several contemporary texts whose focus is the otherness of God. The book is a critique of the assumption that God, before all else, has to be. This is not to say that Marion believes that God does not exist. He hurries to point out, “God is, exists, and that is the least of things”(xix). It is rather to question whether the determination “being” is the most adequate way of

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conceiving of God, or whether God is wholly other than the structures that characterize our own existence and the existence of everything that we know. Clearly, Marion is not the first to ask this question. What makes his work peculiarly postmodern, however, is that it situates itself after the opening stages of the death of God movement in philosophy and theology. Those who first proclaimed the death of God, Marion says, succeeded only in pointing out the failure of metaphysical concepts of God. Once that was done, the way was cleared for the emergence of a God who, as he says, “is free from onto-theo-logy.” Moreover, Marion’s approach to the question of God’s being has a contemporary relevance in its ongoing dialogue with writers such as Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. His project is not simply to repeat the critiques of Heidegger and Nietzsche against the metaphysical tradition; rather, he explains, “playing against Heidegger and the primacy of the Seinsfrage, I shoot for God according to his most theological name — charity” (xxi). To free God from metaphysics would not be enough. Rather, it is Being itself, Being even as Heidegger wrote of it, from which God must be extricated. Marion begins his project in God Without Being with a meditation on the difference between the icon and the idol. The difference, he says, is not simply a matter of aesthetics; it is not simply a difference in artistic style. Nor does it suffice to say that the icon represents the true God, whereas idols represent false gods. Icon and idol are “two manners of being for beings, not two classes of beings” (8). The same being (for example, a painting) can pass from icon to idol and vice versa. Rather, the difference between icon and idol lies in their relations to the human gaze. The gaze, according to Marion, “strains itself to see the divine.” When the gaze finds a landing place, when it “ceases to overshoot and transpierce itself ” (11), an idol is created. “Thus,” he concludes, “the idol consigns the divine to the measure of a human gaze” (14). In contrast, the icon does not result from a vision but gives rise to one. The icon “summons the gaze to surpass itself by never freezing on a visible,

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since the visible only presents itself here in view of the invisible” (18). The icon, in other words, does not function as a mirror of the human gaze. Instead, it refers always to an infinite horizon; it appears, paradoxically, only when it is overlooked. With this distinction in mind, Marion then explains the relation between the idol and the concept. Idolatry is not confined to the realm of the artistic, he writes, but has philosophical manifestations as well. When philosophy pretends to absolute knowledge, idolatry results. When it concocts a concept of what it calls “God,” idolatry results. Philosophical concepts become idols when they simply mirror human intentions: “In both cases,” insists Marion, “in that of theism as in that of so-called ‘atheism,’ the measure of the concept comes not from God but from the aim of the gaze” (16). Neither theism nor atheism, insofar as they approach God under the rubric of Being, escapes the charge of idolatry. But concepts need not be idols. They can function as icons as well. What distinguishes the icon from the idol is that the icon remembers difference. The icon “obliges the concept to welcome the distance of infinite depth”; it knows that “union increases in the measure of distinction.”6 Always judging itself, the icon is distinguished more by its intention than by its adequacy. Idols are threatened by distance and difference; icons are constituted by them. The remembrance of difference is precisely what has been lost in philosophical conceptions about God, asserts Marion. Metaphysics, onto-theology, and the definition of God as causa sui stop the intentionality of the human gaze towards God. Only metaphysics could think of God as a self-caused cause; only ontotheology (or, in Marion’s terms, onto-theology) could think of God under the rubric of efficiency. Philosophy and theology, says God Without Being, mold God into categories of human making, producing idols. But what is the alternative? Is there any way of thinking “God” without thereby reducing God to an idolatrous concept? Surely Marion is as dependent on the structures of time and space, language and finitude as are all those who have written before him; what can he possibly offer that

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does not fall into the same traps he has so carefully pointed out? As he himself asks, “What name, what concept, and what sign nevertheless yet remain feasible?” His answer? Love. God is love. Charity. Agape. “Love,” writes Marion, “does not suffer from the unthinkable or from the absence of conditions, but is reinforced by them” (47). Since love loves without condition, nothing limits the freedom of God-as-love. Nothing restricts God’s initiative or predetermines God’s actions. God-as-love requires neither welcome nor understanding in order to be who God is. Moreover, Marion reflects, what love does is to give. Concepts comprehend, but love “does not pretend to comprehend, since it does not mean at all to take” (48). Love subverts idolatry by continually offering more than any idol can grasp. Even Being itself is not enough to contain the depths of love: “Only love does not have to be. And God  loves without being” (138). Love submits to no metaphysics, and God-as-love cannot be circumscribed within any ontology. After everything that Marion says about the dangers of metaphysical idolatry, it comes as something of a surprise that he chooses the Eucharist (more: the Catholic Eucharist) as the site where God’s love announces itself most purely. After all, the most persistent charge leveled against Catholic conceptions of the Eucharist since the fourteenth century has been that they turn God into a thing. Consider, for example, Martin Luther’s reaction to the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. Transubstantiation, according to Catholic doctrine, takes place when a priest during the Mass takes bread and utters the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels: “This is my body.” At that moment the substance of the bread offered in sacrifice is replaced by the substance of the body of Jesus, while the accidents of the bread (for example, its taste and color and shape) remain the same. The term has defined Catholic thinking on the issue since the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Luther did not really object to the idea that the body of Christ was present in the Eucharist. He objected rather to the concept of transubstantiation itself, deeming it illogical, unscriptural, and a misun-

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derstanding of Aristotelian philosophy. The idolatry of the doctrine, according to Luther, is its pretension to understanding what is essentially a mystery: “Why do we not put aside such curiosity and cling simply to the words of Christ, willing to remain in ignorance of what takes place here and content that the real body of Christ is present by virtue of the words? Or is it necessary to comprehend the manner of the divine working in every detail?”7 Other reformers had an even lower opinion of the Catholic sacrament. Wycliffe, relying on the thought of Augustine, thought that Catholics had taken words literally that were obviously meant to be understood spiritually. And Zwingli remarked that “to teach that the bodily and sensible flesh of Christ is eaten when we give thanks to God is not only impious but also foolish and monstrous, unless perhaps one is living among the Anthropophagi.”8 To mistake the bodily for the spiritual: what greater opportunity might there be for idolatry? And yet, Marion insists, the Catholic Eucharist is not idolatrous at all. Rather, “The consecrated bread and wine become the ultimate aspect in which charity delivers itself body and soul.”9 The Eucharist is not an idol but rather an iconic expression of love. Marion is well aware of the objections that have been raised against Catholic theologies of the bread and wine, and in God Without Being he considers several of these before developing his own approach to the sacrament. Notably, the objections he considers in the most detail are those raised by Catholic theologians themselves. The most important of these is that the term “transubstantiation” relies too heavily on an outdated metaphysics. Borrowing terminology from Aristotle (and misappropriating it, if Luther is to be believed), transubstantiation mires the good news of Jesus Christ in an antiquated philosophical construct. It risks turning revelation into irrelevance. Moreover, this objection runs, in doing so, transubstantiation turns God into “an available, permanent, handy, and delimited thing.” God is packaged in the tabernacle, exhibited like a museum attraction, and

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“brandished like a banner” in processions.10 Transubstantiation appears to be the worst possible kind of profanation. As Marion notes, this objection has in recent years often been accompanied by proposals that attempt to circumvent transubstantiation’s alleged crude reification of God. He cites French writer L. Charlot: “One must pass from Jesus present in the host to Jesus present to a people whose eucharistic action manifests reality under the sacramental form.”11 American readers may be more familiar with the work of Piet Schoonenberg: “By Christ’s eucharistic presence we do not mean in the first instance his presence under the eucharistic species; we mean his presence in the community that is celebrating the Eucharist.”12 Emphasizing that the Mass is first of all a gathering of the faithful, these models attempt to steer away from “objectivist” accounts of the Eucharist and concentrate instead on the Mass’ meaning in the lives of believers. Regarding such proposals, Marion argues that, oddly, they repeat the very mistake that they criticize. That is, they simply transfer the notion of “presence” from bread to community. Far from escaping the dangers of idolatry, such theologies in fact compound them; in focusing on the human community, they run the risk of creating an idol more sinister than bread or wine, namely, human consciousness. When human consciousness becomes the locus of the divine, God is thought not only in spatial terms, but in temporal terms as well. God is seen as available in a localized “now” — “Eucharistic presence is valid here only as long as the present of consciousness measures it and imparts the present to it starting from the consciousness of the present.”13 As Marion points out, to think of time as starting from the present is characteristic of metaphysics from Aristotle to Hegel. Shifting attention from host to community does not overcome metaphysics but only mires the thought of God more firmly in it. In response to theologies such as these, Marion develops one of the most important insights in God Without Being. Contrary to transubstantiation’s critics, he argues that a theology of transubstantiation is, in fact, the most adequate way of preserving the absolute difference

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between God and humanity: “Now, the theology of transubstantiation alone offers the possibility of distance, since it strictly separates my consciousness from Him who summons it.”14 In other words, the host makes plain the irreducible alterity of God. In the Eucharist, “the believing community does not become conscious of itself, but of another, of the Other par excellence” (168). What we celebrate is not our own small selves but the love of God that comes freely and most certainly without our meriting it. Distance and difference, according to Marion, are the grammar of God. But how is it possible to think of the Eucharist in terms of distance? How can one receive the bread and wine without yielding to idolatry? Marion’s answer begins by rethinking temporality. For a Christian, he writes, time is not determined by the present. Rather, the present is “the gift that is governed by the memorial and epektasis [the present’s straining towards the future]. Each instant of the present must befall us as a gift: the day, the hour, the instant, are imparted by charity” (175). Here and now come to us, unexacted and undeserved, referencing a promise and desiring a fulfillment. The Eucharist is, then, not God packaged for our convenience but a perpetual advent. What critics of transubstantiation see as material idolatry, Marion understands as a gift, giving itself to us without return, coming to us with neither conditions nor explanations. But it is a curious sort of gift. The bread and wine in the Eucharist serve in Marion’s theology more as markers of absence than as guarantors of presence. Or, better put, for Marion “presence” itself is the mark of an absence; it is the dregs, or sediment, of divinity. He writes, At the heart of agape, following its flux as one follows a current that is too violent to go back up, too profound for one to know its source or valley, everything flows along the giving, and, by the wake traced in the water, but without grasping anything of it, everything indicates the direction and meaning of distance (106). The Eucharist is, then, a wake traced in the water. Given in love, for Marion it is, as Catholic dogma maintains, the fullest possible mani-

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festation of God, given freely by God and not subject to human manipulation. But to say that in the Eucharist God is fully given is to say that the Eucharist is the most radical elision of presence. In the Eucharist, metaphysics is overcome; or, better, it is swallowed up. In other words, to say that God is “present” in the Eucharist is to describe God under the auspices of Being, an approach that cannot hope to contain or articulate the absolute freedom of charity. It is not inaccurate; again, “God is, exists,” Marion agrees. But he goes on to insist that “that is the least of things.” The otherness of the Eucharist reminds Christians that love is not fully thinkable in terms of presence. Marion ends God Without Being with a reflection on what he calls “The Last Rigor.” Asking himself what the relation is between faith and charity, he analyzes the statement, “X confesses that ‘Jesus is Lord.’” What, he asks, guarantees the validity of the confession? And what is the connection between confession and charity? His answer is that only a Christian who truly lives in imitation of Christ is qualified to speak the confession authoritatively; love is the criterion by which all statements about God are to be judged. And what guarantees that one is imitating the love of Christ? For Marion, the answer is martyrdom. It is here that a serious weakness in Marion’s text becomes evident. For Marion, martyrdom is the supreme example of taking Christ’s being into one’s own. Martyrs, of course, imitate Jesus by imitating his death, and it is true that Christianity has since its earliest days recounted the deaths of martyrs in ways similar to, if not exactly like, the ways in which Jesus’ death is described. For example, one of the most popular texts circulating in the early Christian world tells of the martyrdom of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna. The account of his execution uses imagery associated with the death of Jesus. The bishop, a man in his eighties at the time of his death, is described as “a noble ram taken out of some great flock for sacrifice: a goodly burnt-offering all ready for God.” He prays to God that he might “share the cup of thine Anointed,” and as he succumbs to the flames of his torturers, a dove flies out from his body. Most significant in terms of a eucharistic theology, while Polycarp is in

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the flames, he is said to resemble not a human being so much as “a loaf baking in the oven.”15 Other martyr tales rely on exactly this same symbolism (Ignatius of Antioch prays that he might be ground like wheat by the teeth of lions, in order that he may become “purest bread for Christ”16) such that there is no mistaking their implicit claim. That claim is that the deaths of the martyrs reenact the death of Jesus, making him present over and over again in much the same way that the Eucharist does. To be a martyr is the closest one may come to being the body of Christ. Thus it is easy to see why Marion would privilege martyrdom in his own thinking. Curiously, however, Marion’s discussion of martyrdom makes no mention of what led to Jesus’ death in the first place. In fact, aside from a few references to the doctrine of the Incarnation, no reference is made at all to the life of Jesus as it was lived — his preaching, teaching, and healing. No clue is given as to why Jesus attracted the following that he did, or why he was seen as a threat by the authorities who engineered his death. This omission is exacerbated by repeated statements like the following: “On what does Christian theology bear? On the event of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ.”17 The life of Jesus is either forgotten by Marion or judged to be insignificant. One gets the impression that the life of Jesus was merely the unfortunate and inconvenient requisite of his death. However, to omit Jesus’ life as it was lived is to weaken the force of Marion’s entire project. His claim is that God is agape, charity. But surely the primary instance of that charity, at least from a Christian perspective, is the whole person of Jesus — Jesus not only in his death but in the life that led to his death, a life lived as a daily struggle to ease the burdens of the sick, the blind, the hungry, the ignorant, and the downtrodden. It is true that accounts of the Passion were most likely the earliest sections of the Gospels to be written and circulated. It is true that images of Jesus’ death have fascinated and moved Christians for nearly two millennia. The death of Jesus has played a central role in Christian theology since its inception.

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But it is also true that at the time of Jesus’ execution, thousands of Jews were being crucified on Roman hillsides. Death, in and of itself, was not what changed the lives of the disciples. It was the death of Jesus, of the one whose words they had treasured and whose touch they had coveted, that turned their world upside-down. It was the death of the prophet, the teacher, the friend, the preacher, the critic and the sign of hope that pierced their hearts. It was the death of Jesus, friend of zealots and enemy of the Roman state, that made them remember the crucifixion with both grief and awe. Viewed apart from this context, Jesus’ arrest and execution are incomprehensible. They appear as historical anomalies divorced from any socio-political context and explicable only by a vague appeal to “the will of God.” But even the will of God cannot play itself out except in real historical events that affect real people’s lives. Despite its emphasis on the Eucharist, in attempting to preserve the otherness of God Marion’s theology becomes curiously disembodied. It neglects the historical person of Jesus and the life Jesus led as flesh and blood. It is to bodies, then, that I would like to turn next. The Bodies of Others Marion’s God Without Being represents one trend within contemporary theology: an emphasis on the otherness of God. Fascination with divine alterity has played a role in Christian thought since the first centuries of the common era and has deep roots in Judaism as well; as we have seen, however, it has taken on a new life under the influence of deconstructive philosophies. Another trend, also ancient but arising anew in a postmodern context, is a wrestling with the otherness of the body. It was Saint Paul who, in his letter to the Romans, gave what is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to bewilderment at the fractious nature of our bodies: “For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law…. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death!” (7: 22-24).

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Paul’s lament reveals not only his struggles with God and with Law, but also genuine perplexity at a body that seems to elude his will and his intentions. Contemporary thinkers have taken up this same bafflement and explored it in depth, mining it for theological and philosophical significance. Out of their reflections has come a valorization of the body, or more precisely, a valorization of the body-as-other — as a manifestation and evocation of otherness. One of the more interesting experiments in a theology of the body can be found in Charles Winquist’s book Desiring Theology. Winquist provides there an intriguing interpretation of Descartes’s Third Meditation. The cogito of the Second Meditation had affirmed Descartes’ consciousness of himself: “I am, I exist, is necessarily true, every time I express it or conceive of it in my mind.”18 In the Third Meditation, Descartes wished to obtain the same assurance of a world that was beyond himself. In this pursuit, he used subjectivity itself as his starting point. Where, he asked himself, do his ideas come from? Do they arise simply from himself, or might they come from elsewhere? And how should he decide? He answered that if there is even one idea whose source he knew to be not from within himself, it would follow necessarily that he was not alone in the world. Since he could not convince himself that he had invented the idea of God, he concluded that the idea must come from God’s own self: “And consequently I must necessarily conclude from all I have said hitherto, that God exists….”19 What is interesting about Winquist’s reading of the Third Meditation is that he takes Descartes’ conclusions, not as a proof for the existence of God, but as an interrogation of the edges of subjectivity. That is, according to Winquist’s reading, the Second Meditation reduced the world to what could be made present to consciousness. This reduction entailed a loss: “Descartes did not seem to be concerned or aware that the world that he produced was a smaller world than the world that he began with,” writes Winquist.20 The world was smaller because it excluded processes underlying, but not articulated

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in, consciousness, processes such as those identified by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. In Winquist’s reading, then, the Third Meditation functions as a critique of subjectivity. The foundational role of consciousness that was affirmed in the Second Meditation is disrupted by the Third; the Third Meditation “is a demonstration that subjectivity cannot contain itself and thereby can witness to what is other than its discourse.”21 Uttering the name of God, according to Winquist’s interpretation, is a way of attesting to what is different from consciousness, even from within consciousness itself. God is thus a cipher for otherness. Winquist himself cannot invoke God’s name in his own desire to break open the dominance of subjectivity. Writing a secular theology for those on the edges of, or without, an institutionalized religious context, he finds that the word “God” has too little meaning; or, on the contrary, the word has too many meanings, meanings that he sees as increasingly problematic. In his search for another formulation for otherness Winquist turns to what he calls “the incorrigibility of the body.” The body, he says, disrupts our consciousness by pushing for its own satisfaction. It demands and betrays. It is caught up in forces of power and libido that are only dimly understood, if understood at all. It resists summary or abstraction by consciousness. It is always more than we think. It is not just the subject’s own body that Winquist appeals to as a figuration of otherness. “Our hunger, sexuality, and sensuality implicate the other of the body with the bodies of others,” he affirms.22 The body’s resistance to appropriation in consciousness is made more complex by our interactions with the materiality of others. Language, economy, architecture, and politics all involve us with bodies outside our own. And this otherness has an ethical dimension, he contends. The ethical dimension of human interaction is given explicit treatment only in the last chapter of Desiring Theology, though an ethical impetus underlies the entire book. In that chapter, entitled “Desiring Community,” Winquist writes of the need to develop what has been called a “paraethics” by Victor Taylor (Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture. Routledge, 1999).

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Winquist uses this term to distinguish his project from one that would seek to ground itself in first principles, principles whose foundational character has been called into question by deconstructive analysis. Paraethics, he says, is instead based in strategies that resist totalization and the reduction of others to the self. It involves a belief that life is less beautiful when diversities are not recognized and explored. More precisely, Winquist believes that it is the very otherness of others’ bodies that is the dynamic on which ethics depends. Desiring Theology investigates what he calls “a desire to know an ‘other’ in and of language that can be valued in the forming of personal and communal identity.”23 Love and community, he says, depend on recognition of otherness. If difference is subsumed by the narrow confines of my own subjectivity, knowledge becomes tyranny, and desire, rapacity. Thus the body as a figuration of otherness serves for Winquist as an opening towards love. In the encounter with what is not myself, my own subjectivity is startled out of its own designs and projects and into new possibilities for communion. In this respect his work is similar to Edith Wyschogrod’s Saints and Postmodernism, another contemporary work focusing on the alterity of the body. Examining postmodern thought’s potential to respond to the needs of a suffering world, Saints and Postmodernism is itself what the author says is necessary in our time; it is “a plea for boldness and risk, for an effort to develop a new altruism in an age grown cynical and hardened to catastrophe….”24 Wyschogrod challenges readers to take personally and seriously the mandate to care for each other. In her attempt to develop a postmodern ethics, Wyschogrod turns, surprisingly, to the lives of saints. Like Winquist, she is suspicious of philosophical appeals to “first principles” and is seeking alternative resources for ethical thinking. Modern ethical systems, she says, have been utterly inadequate in their response to the world’s evils. Unable even to decide where ethical reasoning should begin, they have stood paralyzed in the face of this century’s horrors. By turning to hagiography, Wyschogrod hopes to discover a postmodern thinking that can respond adequately to the challenges of our time.

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In explaining her turn to hagiography, Wyschogrod defines a “saint” as one whose adult life in its entirety is devoted to the alleviation of sorrow (the psychological suffering) and pain (the physical suffering) that afflicts other persons without distinction of rank or group or, alternatively, that afflicts sentient beings, whatever the cost to the saint in pain or sorrow.25 This definition is problematic, as I will discuss in Chapter Four; I do not believe that it is adequate to the Catholic tradition of sainthood or, in fact, to Wyschogrod’s own aims. Nevertheless, it expresses a serious moral urgency. Drawing on a wide variety of sources and traditions, including Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and modern fiction, Saints and Postmodernism argues that saints’ lives point beyond the aporias that have paralyzed the twentieth century and open up sites for moral action. Wyschogrod begins her argument by considering four characteristics, or structural features, of saintly lives: narrativity, textuality, historicality, and corporeality. The last characteristic, corporeality, is of most interest here. Wyschogrod points out that saints, like all human beings, are their bodies. Indeed, in the case of saints, embodiment has a heightened importance. Saints’ bodies express themselves in extremes: ecstasy and distress, martyrdom and mortification. Far from being irrelevant to saintly existence, corporeality is of its essence. True, at times saints have sought to flee their own bodies, sometimes through grotesque measures. But Wyschogrod reads this fact as evidence of the body’s centrality rather than its insignificance. Like Winquist, Wyschogrod is not solely concerned with the body of the self, however; it is the bodies of what she calls the Other, the bodies of “the wretched of the earth,” that motivate her work. Saints, she says, are those who spend their lifetimes attending to those wretched: “The Other…is the Other in her or his corporeal being. The saintly response to the Other entails putting her/his own body and material goods at the disposal of the Other.”26

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But how is this done without making the other person merely an object for the saint’s beneficence? What guarantees the real alterity of the Other? What, in other words, distinguishes the saint’s charity from the tyrant’s subjugation? In a section of the book called “Violence and the Imperative,” Wyschogrod considers this question and answers that, “Instead of making the corporeal vulnerability of the Other a manipulandum so that it is made to speak the language of power, saints issue imperatives only after being affected by the material condition of the Other.”27 The encounter with other bodies comes first, and the desire to aid the other emerges from it. The primary instance of the encounter with others’ corporeal vulnerability is the human face. Diseases that affect the face are more frightening to us than others; they creep more deeply into our psyches and become metaphors for all that is ghastly and horrifying, for what fills us with dread. Literature and film play on this sense of terror; The Man Without a Face, Phantom of the Opera, and The Elephant Man are only a few of the numerous works shaped by it. Other kinds of illnesses may be more tragic or more painful or even more deadly. But diseases that manifest themselves in the face are like a truth erupting — the self as disintegration. Wyschogrod herself contends that the totality of human suffering is concentrated in the face. In the face one sees human mortality — not just the possibility, but the inevitability, of the face’s own negation. “Saints,” she writes, “experience the claim of this negation more radically than others and respond to it with generosity and compassion.”28 Thus, for Wyschogrod as for Winquist, the bodies of others are the location of and the imperative to love. The body serves as a figuration of otherness not only because the self ’s own body is obstinate and elusive, impossible to control by even the most extreme ascetic measures. The alterity of the body is made even more complex by the otherness of others’ bodies, their mortality, their vulnerability, their fragmentation, and their pain.

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The Body of Jesus What I hope has become clear at this point is postmodernity’s fascination with otherness. For Marion, remembering otherness preserves one from the horror of idolatry: from the blasphemy of reducing God to the self ’s own consciousness. For Winquist, disrupting subjectivity’s insulation is necessary in the attempt to develop “a thinking that does not disappoint.” Not horror of idolatry, but rather a dread of meaningless triviality and the loss of love’s intensities underlies his work. In Wyschogrod’s Saints and Postmodernism, preserving alterity ensures that love is truly love and not a mask for violence. For all three, otherness is the opening to compassion. But what has any of this to do with the body of Jesus? In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul recounts the story of the Last Supper: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you.’” (11:23-24). “This is my body.” What makes my body mine and not someone else’s? What makes it my body and not something else? Bodies disperse themselves throughout their environments every day: hair is shed, blood is left on the razor, dandruff is brushed from the shoulders with hands whose nails are clipped and thrown away. Organ transplants, frozen sperm, cloning, and donated blood are only a few of the daily wonders that complicate our sense of bodily existence. Even the presence of pain is not a reliable determinant of ownership; my pain may be from the amputated limb that is no longer mine. If the body is in a constant state of dispropriation, we can nevertheless, at times anyway, control its flows. We can turn inevitable loss into a gift; the breast’s milk, saliva to tame a child’s wayward hair, energy spent in antiphonal thrusting of thighs and hips, the hand’s pressure stanching a wound — all of these are ways of spending the body on behalf of someone else.

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Jesus’ adult life consisted of (to paraphrase Wyschogrod) putting his body and material goods, insofar as they were his and were his to give, at the disposal of the Other. Very often, his response to the bodies of others was material. To cure Peter’s mother-in-law, ill with a high fever, he touched her hand. To feed the crowd of five thousand gathered to hear him teach and preach, he gave them bread and fish. He placed his fingers in the ears of the deaf man, and to restore speech he touched that man’s tongue. To the man born blind he offered his spittle mixed with mud while, for the woman with the hemorrhage, just the hem of his garments was enough to bring her relief. In effect, the Last Supper was nothing new; it was the extension of a life that had already spent itself in service to the wretched. Jesus’ body was “for others” long before he surrendered it in death. In the Eucharist, then, what is given is the body that was given from the start. But this body is a body that suffers and dies. Jesus, like the saint and like every human being, carried in himself the inevitability of his own dissolution. An encounter with Jesus’ body thus entails the same imperative to compassion and love as does a meeting with any mortal body. Utterly vulnerable in its materiality, the body of Jesus is a body of the earth’s wretched, torn in violence and literally broken to death. In its fragility, threatened always with its own negation, Jesus’ body issues an urgent demand to love. It does this more eloquently in silence than with words. Christian art tends to focus on two moments in the life of Jesus: his infancy and his death. What these moments share is the absence of a voice. In Jesus’ infancy he has not yet learned to speak, and in his death his voice is silenced. The two moments are joined in the image of the dead Jesus being held in the arms of his grieving mother. Remarks Elaine Scarry, “It is perhaps ... inevitable that the single image people again and again name as the most overwhelming [is] the Pieta…for it at once pictures Jesus crucified and Jesus in the infant world of his mother’s lap.”29 The Jesus of the Pieta is universal: a moment of absolute stillness without any words that might try to explain away the horror of what it depicts.

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Such universality cannot be ascribed to the words of Jesus. Those words can seem strange and alienating. They emerge in incomprehensible parables and outrageous demands, difficult teachings and dire predictions. But his body, absent the voice, appeals on levels inaccessible to words. It affects us in the way that the sleeping body of a lover might evoke a tenderness we had forgotten we ever had, or the tousled head of a child might call up an affection that the events of the day had obscured. It is not simply the dead body of Jesus that has such a hold on our imaginations, however; it is, more specifically, the pierced body that we see over and over in art and literature. Jesus, bleeding from head, hands, side and feet, shows us our own future dissolution. We see in him the inability of the body to contain itself or to be contained. Images of the crucified Jesus evoke compassion in a way that images of the psychological suffering of Gethsemane, a suffering perhaps as great as that of Golgotha, do not. This may be because many (if not most) Christians have unwittingly fallen under the spell of the fourth century thinker Apollinaris, whose ideas were declared by the Church to be heretical at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Apollinaris, seeking to preserve the dignity and majesty of the Christ who became incarnate in Jesus, declared that though Jesus had a human body, his mind was purely divine. A human mind, after all, is subject to change and to what Apollinaris called “filthy imaginations.” A divine mind, on the other hand, is omniscient, changeless, and heavenly. Many Christians are not aware that the ideas espoused by Apollinaris were declared heresy. They believe them to be orthodox Christian belief. It is no wonder, then, that the psychological sufferings of Jesus as he anticipated his death might be written off as insignificant. After all, one might reason, he was God; he knew all along that the story would have a happy ending. No such thinking, however, erases the tortures of the body. The small details offered in the gospels — that he was thirsty, that he cried out with a loud voice, that he prayed to God in despair — these are testimonies to physical agony. Even the early Gnostics, who denied that Jesus had really

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died on the cross, did not deny that some body had died; they simply denied that the somebody was the Christ. The crucifix in its ghastliness remains the single image most often evoked in Western art, literature, and film. Its depiction of the utter loss entailed in the body’s slide into dissemination at once fascinates us and repels us. It also, in ways mysterious and strange, draws us into communion. Christian tradition has extended the domain of Jesus’ body. Catholics recognize at least four senses of the term “body of Christ.” There is, of course, the historical body of Jesus the God-man who lived and walked on earth. There is also the risen body of Jesus, continuous with the earthly body. Then there is the body of Christ made present in the Eucharist. And finally, there is the body of Christ which is the Church, the communion of those who gather in remembrance of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and who are pledged to make his love continuously visible in the world. This fourth sense of the term derives from one of the earliest Christian scriptures written. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes to the newly-established community, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (12:27). Some years after this, the author of the New Testament’s “Letter to the Colossians” (writing in Paul’s name) reassures his fellow Christians that he is glad to endure struggle on their behalf by saying, “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (1:24). Nearly two millennia later, Pope Pius XII would make the identification between Jesus’ body and the Church even clearer. In his encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (“On The Mystical Body of Christ”), the Pope explains that Christ “must be called the Head of His Mystical Body” because “He so sustains the Church, and so in a certain sense lives in the Church, that she is, as it were, another Christ.”30 No mere human institution, the Church, according to the encyclical, actually participates in the ongoing life of the risen Jesus and so is far superior to any other possible assemblage of people.

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Other Catholic thinkers have extended the body of Christ even further, beyond the confines of the institutional Church. Tradition has used the term “mystical body” to refer to all of the just who lived before the coming of Jesus and to all those who are justified even if they are not full members of the visible Church. Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner distinguishes between the Church as an established juridical organization and “‘Church as humanity consecrated by the Incarnation,’” a category which of necessity extends to everyone.31 Though Rahner does not say so explicitly, the direction of his thought implies that since everyone is in the second sense of the term (humanity consecrated by the Incarnation) a member of the Church, the body of Christ in some sense must refer to all people. This inclusion of others in the body of Christ, this extension of Jesus’ materiality beyond the confines of his own corpus, results in two imperatives. The first demands that one offer one’s own body in the service of the wretched: to dispose, like Jesus, of one’s own materiality for others. Being the body of Christ entails, as it did for Jesus, alleviating the sorrow and pain that afflict others without distinction of rank or group, whatever the cost. The second imperative is to extend to every human person the response of compassion that Jesus’ body demands. The otherness of his body becomes the otherness of others’ bodies, others who are, as Winquist says, “thick with specificity that is not me.”32 In the alterity of materiality, true communion becomes possible. The destitution of others’ bodies summons consciousness out of itself and opens a space for compassion. It is easy to forget this. It is easy to forget that the indigence of the wretched results in a moral imperative rather than an opportunity for exploitation. How else to explain what we see in the news each night: terrorized refugees, victims of rape, children blinking in the sunlight after being liberated from filthy sweatshops? One need only turn to recent history to find numerous and gruesome examples of the human body being turned into merchandise or, as in the body exchange in Bosnia, into a form of currency. Surely it is not self-evident that corporeality demands a compassionate response. Conceding this, Wyschogrod contends that saints

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are unique; saints, “like gifted composers or musicians are exceptional individuals, virtuosi of the moral life.”33 They are able to hear the call for compassion above the tumult of violence and power. But what of the rest of us? What reminds us that bodies are the bodies of others, others whose alterity can be assimilated to the self only at the risk of turning the world into something small and vicious and ugly? What is to prevent us, who are not saints and who most likely do not even aspire to be, from using others’ materiality to augment our own? Eucharistic theology offers an answer: the name of God. What is given in the bread is not simply the body of Jesus, not simply the body that was given for others, but the body of God. Invoking the name of God serves as a further and perpetual disruption of the hegemony of the self. As I noted above, Jean-Luc Marion argues that only a theology of transubstantiation that recognizes distance is able to separate human consciousness from the God who summons it. Transubstantiation must insist that in the Eucharist we encounter not our own selves, as some contemporary Eucharistic theologies would have it, but the God who is love. This God can be said to be “present” in the host only as a condescension, as a coagulation of agape: “In the eucharistic present, all presence is deduced from the charity of the gift….”34 What we receive is what is given to us in divine charity, and we are always at the mercy and the disposal of this gift. Concepts such as presence and substance must be understood only as the poorest mumblings of gratitude on the part of needy humans. Thus, in a Catholic theology of the Eucharist, two dynamics may be said to be operating at once. The first draws human consciousness out of itself, shaking it from its complacent insulation and forcing it to confront others’ material destitution. The body of Christ begs for attention in what Mother Teresa has called the appalling disguises of the poor: I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me water, I was naked and you clothed me, I was in prison and you visited me. Receiving the Eucharist is both an encounter with others’ wretchedness and a solemn promise to serve, to mitigate that wretchedness by disposing of our own materiality on behalf of others.

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It is a promise that is easily broken. Alterity degenerates into alienation and then exploitation. Bodies lose their faces. A second dynamic becomes necessary as a caution against the self ’s own projects. By insisting that in the Eucharist nothing less than God is received, a theology of transubstantiation appeals to an absolute otherness. This appeal cautions us against the schemes of even the saint, subjecting them to charity’s scrutiny. Talk of God is a way of invoking the edges of subjectivity, testifying to what is other than ourselves. Talk of God in the Eucharist prevents the idolatry of the self and its desires for the other. Remembering the bodies of others and the otherness of God, the Eucharist beckons those who receive it into the strangeness of both suffering and love.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964-1969), pp. 177, 178. Mark C. Taylor, Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 239. Ibid., p. 253 “The Second Treatise of the Great Seth” in The Other Bible, ed. Willis Barnstone (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), pp. 117, 119. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 46. Ibid., p. 23, emphasis mine. Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” trans. A. T. W. Steinhäuser, rev. Frederick C. Ahrens and Abdel Ross Wentz, in Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1959; reprint, 2nd revised ed., Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970, 1986), p. 149 (page citation is to the reprint edition). Huldreich Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller (Durham, North Carolina: Labyrinth Press, 1929, reprinted 1981), p. 216. Marion, p. 178. Ibid., p. 164. L. Charlot, “Jésus est-il dans las hostie?” in Foi à l’ épreuve, no.5, CRER (Angers, 1977), 20. Cited by Marion, p. 166. Piet Schoonenberg, “Eucharistische tegenwoordigheid,” De Heraut 95: 334. Cited by P. J. Fitzpatrick, In Breaking of Bread (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 63. Marion, p. 170. Marion, p. 177. See “The Martyrdom of Polycarp,” in Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 153-67. Ignatius of Antioch, “The Epistle to the Romans,” in Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, p. 104. Marion, 144, emphasis mine. On p. 146, Marion writes that the referent of theology is “the past death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ.” A similar reference occurs on p. 173. Descartes, p. 103.

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19. Ibid., p. 124. 20. Charles Winquist, Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 14. 21. Ibid., p. 35. 22. Ibid., p. 37. 23. Ibid., p. x. 24. Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 257. 25. Ibid., p. 34. 26. Ibid., p. xxii. 27. Ibid., p. 183. 28. Ibid., p. 229. 29. Scarry, p. 216. 30. Mystici Corporis Christi, par. 53, emphasis mine. 31. Karl Rahner, “Membership of the Church According to the Teaching of Pius XII’s Encyclical ‘Mystici Corporis Christi,’” in Theological Investigations, vol. 2: Man in the Church, trans. Karl-H. Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1963; reprinted 1990), p. 86. 32. Winquist, p. 110. 33. Wyschogrod, p. 150. 34. Marion, p. 178.

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Chapter Three The Pierced Heart of Jesus

The vampire Lestat describes his longing to drink the blood of Jesus: Closer He came! Did He know us? He shuddered in His agony, the blood ran down his face into his shivering lips. …I could smell the blood. I could smell it. The vampire in me smelled it. I could hear my sobs, I threw out my arms. “My God!”1 Lestat, of course, is not alone in his desire to drink the blood of God. In one late medieval painting, Jesus squeezes the wound in his side until his blood spurts into a nearby woman’s cup. In another, blood drips down his shoulders, palms, arms, and belly as he directs the stream from his chest into a chalice. The chalice is placed in the foreground of the artwork, there for the viewer’s taking. The power of these paintings is both disturbing and fascinating. We are drawn in by the sheer abundance of that blood: who’d have thought there would be so much of it? But as our minds turn to what the artist has not depicted, as we see the woman lifting the cup to her lips, we recoil in disgust. The mouth feels suddenly warm and sticky, and we turn our thoughts away. Devotion to the heart of Jesus is not to everybody’s taste. And yet, it is a devotion that has survived millennia. What I wish to do in this chapter is to consider why, to explore the potent symbols of blood, heart, piercing, and drinking. I will propose, after reviewing how the sym-

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bols have functioned at various times throughout Christian history, that they now must be understood in light of one additional concept: contagion. As in the last chapter I examined the permeability and vulnerability of Jesus’ body, so now I will turn to the openness of his wounded heart. The Pierced Heart and the Birth of the Church Though veneration of the pierced heart of Jesus as such appears only around the year 1000 C.E., its roots lie in the patristic understanding of John 7:37-38: On the last and great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying: If any man thirst, let him come to me, And let him drink, who believes in me. As the Scripture says: Fountains of living water Shall flow from his bosom.2 Based on this scriptural passage, some ancient commentators understood the Church itself as springing from the side of Jesus. The waters that flowed from Jesus’ chest, they believed, poured life into the Christian community and gave sustenance to the faithful. This belief was not without political implications. Cyprian, one of the early Church fathers, declared, “We [the Church, as opposed to the heretics] water the thirsting people of God with the divine permission; we guard the boundaries of the life-giving fountains.”3 “We,” the orthodox bishops rather than the heretics against whom Cyprian writes so aggressively, are the keepers of Jesus’ holy streams. What is interesting about Cyprian’s image is not only its sense of the Church as flowing from Jesus’ body, but also the bishop’s immediate claim to authority over that flow. What will become important as we proceed is the fact that fluids are often not easy to channel. In the two paintings mentioned above, for example (the first from fifteenth century Germany, the second entitled “The Man of Sorrows” and painted around 1510 by Jacob Cornelisz),4 though Jesus aims his flow of blood into a vessel, some of it is lost. It trickles down his body and escapes the waiting cup.

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Blood has an uncanny persistence; it can defeat even the best efforts to wipe away its traces. As Paul Elie observes, “Forensics comes to seem a modern counterpart of the medieval obsession with relics….”5 Tiny drops of blood, drops so small so as to be invisible to the naked eye, can profoundly alter the course of a life: “Tests show that you’re the father”; “You carry a gene for cancer”; “Has anyone else used this needle?” Traces of blood can defeat even the cleverest criminal or most scrupulous doctor. Once the body is opened, its issues and flows take on a life of their own. And as we saw in the last chapter, the body is always already opened. Thus Cyprian’s claim to guard the boundaries of the life-giving fountains must be subjected to careful scrutiny. Are those boundaries quite so clear as he would like, or is what issues from Jesus’ body too unstable, invasive, and indeed hazardous to be constrained by such a proclamation? For the moment, allow me simply to note the volatility of the metaphor Cyprian has chosen; the rest will be dealt with as we proceed. The passage from John predicting that waters shall flow from Jesus’ side is fulfilled later in the same gospel. John 19:34 relates that during Jesus’ crucifixion, “one of the soldiers pierced his [Jesus’] side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.” This later passage was, like John 7, taken up by patristic writers, and it, too, was connected with the birth of the Church. For example, Tertullian explains that “Adam’s sleep shadowed out the death of Christ…that from the wound inflicted on His side might, in like manner (as Eve was formed), be typified the church, the true mother of the living.”6 He sets up an analogy: as Adam’s wound gave birth to Eve, so Jesus’ wound brings forth the Church. Centuries later Augustine elaborates on this same theme, interpreting the water and blood that flow from Jesus’ wound as baptism and Eucharist: “As for the blood and water which His side, pierced with the lance, poured forth upon the earth, without a doubt they represent the sacraments by which the Church was formed, as Eve was formed from the side of the sleeping Adam….”7 What must be noted about these images is that they contain an explicit declaration that the Church was born from an act of violence: from the

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blood and water that gushed out of Jesus’ dead and mutilated body. The link between Jesus’ body and the Church has, of course, been part of Christian thinking since the letters of Paul. Church-as-body is actually one of his more developed themes: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body...” (I Cor 12:12-13). And yet, what Augustine and Tertullian are acknowledging is that the “one body” of Jesus is in fact not whole, that it has been torn asunder, and that the Church owes its very life to that tear. It is not only the patristic writers who image the birth of the Church from the body of Jesus. A French Bible from the thirteenth century depicts Jesus on the cross, arms outstretched and eyes open, as a symbol of the Church is pulled from a gaping wound in his side.8 The wound is such that no one could survive it; it rips open nearly half his abdomen. Had he not already been dead, the birth itself would have killed him. But this point is important: it is not from the wounded Jesus that the Church is born, but from the executed Jesus. The Church is founded in someone whose body is no longer his own: whose body has been given away. That a community should be born from a murdered man’s body would come as no surprise to French theorist René Girard, whose work has had an increasing influence on the study of religion over the past twenty-five years. Girard’s book Violence and the Sacred, first published in 1972, has as its thesis the conviction that “Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred.”9 He writes, “I have used the phrase ‘violence and the sacred’; I might as well have said ‘violence or the sacred.’ For the operations of violence and the sacred are ultimately the same process.”10 Indeed, Girard traces all of human culture to what he calls “the surrogate victim,” to a religiously sanctioned and culturally permissible channel for violence. Girard contends that humans always find themselves in a state of desire. At first, the desire is turned toward basic needs like food and shelter. But once those needs are satisfied (Girard: “indeed, sometimes even before”), the subject looks for other sources of gratification. “The

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reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess.”11 Since another person seems to possess what is lacking in the original subject, that person becomes a model for the subject to emulate. What the model does, the subject does; what the model wants, the subject wants. Girard terms this emulative need “mimetic desire.” He is careful to point out the difference between his argument and that of Sigmund Freud, whose famous Oedipal theory attributed rivalry between father and son to the son’s desire for the mother. Notes Girard, “Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it.”12 The son, seeking to be (or to be like) the father, learns to covet what the father covets, and so a rivalry is established. Mimetic desire thus leads to a double-bind, says Girard: imitate, but not too well! The son wishes to be like his father, but he is strictly enjoined not to do what his father does with his mother. The apprentice wishes to be like the teacher, but if he or she steals the teacher’s trade, trouble results. It is easy to see how such an unstable dynamic might carry with it the constant threat of violence. Particularly in small, tightly-knit societies, the urge to strike out in jealousy or revenge can be overwhelming. Rage seems to lurk in every corner. Blood must be spilled. And so societies turn to a victim whose murder can appease the desire to kill, but whose death will not incite further violence. They turn, in other words, to a surrogate victim. It is important in Girard’s scenario that the murder of the surrogate victim be enacted by the whole society, or by people who are authorized to act on behalf of the whole society. Unanimity ensures that all witness the death, all approve of the death, and all are satisfied by the death. A kind of catharsis takes place whereby the entire societal body is rid of its thirst for blood, and peace can be restored. Thus the death of the surrogate victim is actually generative, argues Girard: “…by putting an end to the vicious and destructive cycle of violence, it simultaneously initiates another and constructive cycle…which

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protects the community from that same violence and allows culture to flourish.”13 It generates, he says, a sacrificial rite that memorializes, reenacts, and solemnifies the original murder, thus creating an acceptable and manageable outlet for a society’s violent undercurrent. More precisely, in the sacrificial rite, two different substitutions actually take place. In the first, the victim’s death substitutes for the bloodshed that would occur were violence unrestrained (were it not sanctioned, carried out, and witnessed by the whole community). In the second, and properly ritual substitution, a victim is chosen who can take the place of the original victim. What was spontaneous becomes ceremonial in a reenactment of both the founding murder and of its generative, healing effects. There is nothing in human culture, says Girard, that is not rooted in this dynamic of the surrogate victim; Christianity, too, finds its basis there. Reflecting on Christianity’s propensity towards violence, and in particular its violence towards Jews, Girard comments, “What turns Christianity in on itself, so that it presents a hostile face to all that is not Christian, is inextricably bound up with the sacrificial reading” of the gospel texts.14 Christianity imagines a God who requires the blood of a victim in order to have His anger appeased. Refusing to recognize that the need for this violence is really human and not divine, Christianity releases itself from its own guilt by projecting an image of God who sends his own beloved Son to the slaughter. “That reading cannot possibly be innocent,” Girard observes.15 An institution founded on and sanctioning a violent act can only perpetuate violence, not overcome it. Thus Christians repeat the sacrificial dynamic over and over again by persecuting Jews, blaming them for the death of the original victim, Jesus. It would make sense to Girard, given his convictions regarding violence and the sacred, that the early Church Fathers might imagine the Church being birthed from the side of the murdered Jesus. In a hostile world, murder is oddly soothing, and societies owe whatever peace they have to the continual re-presentation of an original violence. When that violence is not only remembered but is acclaimed as the will of God, death becomes

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both revelatory and self-justifying. It seeks enshrinement. Thus the death of Jesus can come to be seen as the cornerstone of a divinely-ordained institution. Upon this rock I build my Church. If Girard’s theory can help account for the self-understanding of the Church as it remembers its birth, it can also help explain why the ecclesial body of Christ (that is, the Church) has universally been seen by believers as a unified whole. “If the Church is a body, it must be an unbroken unity…”16 affirmed Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis Christi. The recently issued Catechism of the Catholic Church proclaims, “The Church is one because of her source…. The Church is one because of her founder…. The Church is one because of her ‘soul’…. Unity is of the essence of the Church.”17 Any division that does occur within the body is due to heresy, apostasy, or schism — sins which in fact separate one from the true Church. The true Church always remains whole. One can see the same dynamic operating in the ritual of the sacrifice as Girard has described it. As I noted above, for Girard it is crucial that a surrogate victim be murdered by or on behalf of the entire group; only unanimity can trigger the catharsis necessary to restore peace. If the society generated by the murdered victim is not entirely intact, if that society’s consensus is in any way disrupted, the threat of violence becomes real once again. Only an unbroken unity can ensure a lasting peace. The Church, in other words, must not admit any ruptures within itself. If it did, then the calm and stability generated by the death of Jesus might cease. More bloodshed might become necessary. (It is perhaps no accident that some of the most vicious attacks against Jews took place in the late Middle Ages, just as the synthesis known as Christendom was beginning to crumble.) Thus we encounter a rather peculiar phenomenon: though the body of Christ in the gospels is rent, the body of Christ as Church must be scrupulously free of gaps. In addition, we can see why Cyprian was so concerned to control the flow of fluids from Jesus’ body: We water the [blood-] thirsty people of God; we guard the boundaries of the fountains. If the flow of blood were misdirected, who knows what chaos might result? Reflecting on the danger

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of murder and its repercussions, Girard writes, “The role of sacrifice is to stem [the] rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into ‘proper’ channels.”18 Obviously someone has to guard those channels, and by claiming that role for himself, Cyprian becomes the guardian of the potential for violence. Such a Girardian interpretation of the birth of the Church from Jesus’ side has much to recommend it; it provides insight into what is otherwise a rather baffling image. On the other hand, we must be cautious. Surely Girard overstates his case when he claims that all of human culture has its basis in the sacrifice of a surrogate victim. The sheer diversity of the laws, arts, religious practices, literatures, social norms, taboos, methods of production, sciences and family structures that characterize human history would seem to militate against any kind of reduction to a single dynamic. Even applying his theory to the Church’s symbol of its birth may be to oversimplify a complex process. After all, that symbol has flourished across widely diverse cultures. Christians have nurtured it in small tribal groups and in large urban cities, in peaceful communities and in ones troubled by violence, in lands generally sympathetic to the Church and in societies hostile or indifferent to it. To see the same dynamic operative in all of them without exception would be problematic to say the least. But neither do I wish to give the impression that this interpretation is the only one made possible by Girard’s work. On the contrary, Girard himself sees Christianity’s sacrificial reading of the death of Jesus as a tragic misreading, and he provides an alternative explication. Following the thread of that explication will provide us with a second interpretation of the image we have been considering. First, however, we must consider whether or not a sacrificial reading of the death of Jesus is not obligatory for Christians: if it is not the only one sanctioned by Christian tradition and dogma. After all, the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews explicitly compares Jesus’ blood to an animal offering:

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For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been so defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ…purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God! (9:13-14) Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul describes Jesus as the one “whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood” (Romans 3:25), and the synoptic gospels tell of Jesus at the Last Supper equating a cup of wine with his own blood and then offering it as the sign of a new covenant. And yet sacrifice is not the only meaning that has been given to that death. Saint Athanasius in the fourth century believed that the sin of Adam and Eve in itself did not necessitate intervention by Jesus the Savior; their sin could have been compensated for simply by repentance. Rather, Jesus’ incarnation was necessary so as to restore corrupt humanity to its proper state of incorruption: “He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God.”19 While Athanasius does speak of Jesus’ death as a ransom, the ransom was paid not to God but to death itself, and it is described not as an atonement so much as a cleansing and restoration. Moreover, to accomplish this restoration any mode of death would have sufficed. God chose execution on a cross not to mirror the slaughter of a holocaust but simply to show his strength; if he had died in his bed instead, people would have thought him to be just like all other mortals. Through the centuries, Eastern Christianity has favored the type of salvation-by-deification model evident in Athanasius. Western Christianity has for the most part taken the approach of the Letter to the Hebrews and presented Jesus’ death using the language of sacrifice, but not exclusively. Some theologians, like Peter Abelard, thought that God had chosen to be crucified primarily to evoke a response of love in the sinner. Others have seen the crucifixion as having no internal merit but as a model to believers of what it means to be faithful to God. In sum, there is no dogmatically definitive interpretation of the

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death of Jesus, at least for Catholics. While the language of sacrifice can be found throughout Catholic teaching, other models for understanding that death are possible. Indeed, Girard goes so far as to claim, “There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that the death of Jesus is a sacrifice, whatever definition (expiation, substitution, etc.) we may give for that sacrifice.”20 The gospels, he contends, think of the death of Jesus as an outrageous injustice, and they are eager to place the blame for it on human shoulders rather than on God’s. Far from attributing the death to divine will, in Girard’s view the evangelists see it as an abomination. Though they use Passover imagery in their accounts of the Passion, their intent is to show the futility of violence and blood-sacrifice rather than to valorize it. What occasioned the crucifixion, Girard believes, was not divine Providence but rather Jesus’ uncompromising resistance to violence and his undermining of the violent structures on which societies are based. “Religion is organized around a more or less violent disavowal of human violence…. By affirming this point without the least equivocation, Jesus infringes the supreme prohibition that governs all human order, and he must be reduced to silence.”21 By pointing out a culture’s basis in violence, in other words, Jesus made inevitable his own bloody death. Jesus, for Girard, was the one human person who has understood perfectly that God desires love and not sacrifices: “To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind.” Jesus refused to cooperate with violence, and so he became its perfect victim. Writes Girard, “Violence is unable to bear the presence of a being that owes it nothing– that pays it no homage and threatens its kingship in the only way possible.”22 If we were to follow this insight, it would be possible to see the birth of the Church from Jesus’ murdered body as a further refusal to cooperate with death. The presence of the Church would be a claim of victory over the brutality that struck Jesus down. “Yes,” the Church might

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be imagined to acknowledge, “violence seems to have won. But those who understand Jesus’ message remain to proclaim anew that violence cannot serve God.” Or, in the words of Girard, “Violence reveals its own game in such a way that its workings are compromised at their very source; the more it tries to conceal its ridiculous secret from now on…the more it will succeed in revealing itself.”23 This interpretation is, of course, much more attractive than the first, as it encourages Christianity towards a more courageous stance against the bloodshed of the world. It cannot account for Christianity’s nearly constant failure to live up to, or even agree with, what is supposedly its founding message, but it does provide something to aim towards in the future. Even taken as more of a goal than an accomplishment, however, I think that there is still something missing in it. It has not penetrated to the depths of the image we are considering. For one thing, it fails to address the question of why drinking the blood that issues from Jesus’ wounds should be as fascinating a prospect as it has been throughout Christian history. In the first reading of Girard, drinking Jesus’ blood would function as a literal attempt to appease bloodthirstiness: to soothe violent impulses. But in the second reading, drinking blood would be a horror and an anathema. It would be a participation in the very action one is committed to ending. Another way of approaching this point is to reread the passage I quoted above: “To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind.”24 According to Girard, Jesus is the only one capable of “escaping from these structures” of violence;25 he “is capable of talking back to violence while remaining entirely untouched by it.”26 These metaphors suggest that Jesus remains extrinsic to (uninfected by, one might say) the violence that surrounds him. What is missing in Girard’s understanding of Jesus and in my second interpretation (using Girard’s insights) of the Church’s birth is a coming to terms with the permeability of Jesus’ heart. That heart, I will argue, does not rise above or escape or remain untouched by violence but is pierced by, and bears violence within, itself.

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As yet we still have not found a satisfactory explanation for the power of Sacred Heart symbolism. Let us move on to consider other manifestations of the symbolism that might offer more useful clues. To Place My Lips on the Most Sacred Wound: Medieval Readings of the Heart of Jesus The patristic theme of the founding of the Church is continued through medieval interpretations of the Sacred Heart. However, in the Middle Ages a new development took place. Whereas patristic writers focused on the pierced side as fountain of the Church, medieval mystics turned their attentions to the pierced heart as symbol of Jesus’ love. The connection between side and heart was made evident by one medieval writer: “The iron of the lance has penetrated even to his Heart in order to show us that through his Heart the secrets of his Heart are revealed. Through the bodily opening the tender mercy of our God is seen….”27 “Heart” is, of course, a highly-charged symbol, and the transition from a theology of the side to one of the heart carries with it a vast, unwieldy network of associations. Karl Rahner calls heart a “primal word,” one of those words that “bring light to us, not we to them.”28 Another of the primal words, he adds, is “blood.” In its wake, meanings proliferate. Even a quick glance at the devotional writings of the Middle Ages shows a remarkable interest in the bleeding heart of Jesus, and even a quick glance shows how differently different writers perceived it. For some the heart is a refuge — a “cleft in the rock” where they can rest their souls. For others it is a fire that illuminates the darkness, or a well from which to wash with healing balm, or a chalice from which to drink, or a temple, or a breast for nursing. The heart is an orchard, a protective skin, and a gift given to lovers. But above all, it is a violated, mutilated organ, pathetically human and gloriously divine. In order to gain a handle on some of the meanings associated with the pierced heart of Jesus in the Middle Ages, let us turn to the writings of two medieval mystics: Gertrude of Helfta and Angela of Foligno. These

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writings show very different appropriations of the same symbols, and by looking at the two we may get a clearer idea of the power those symbols generate. For Gertrude of Helfta, the heart of Jesus is the source of all delectable delights. Gertrude (b. 1256) was one of a group of remarkable mystics who lived in the monastery at Helfta in the thirteenth century, a group that included Mechthild of Hackeborn and Mechthild of Magdeburg. Gertrude entered the convent at the age of four or five and at the age of twenty-five experienced a conversion while standing in the middle of her dormitory. Approached by an older nun, Gertrude had bowed her head in respect; but looking up, she saw Jesus standing there, “a youth of about sixteen years of age, handsome and gracious.” Jesus spoke to her, telling her not to fear: “Come back to me now, and I will inebriate you with the torrent of my divine pleasure,” he promised.29 This was the first of a series of visions related by Gertrude in the second book of The Herald of Divine Love, or related by her sisters in the other four books of that work. As we read in Book III, one night when Gertrude was ill with a fever, Jesus appeared to her holding sickness in his left hand and health in his right. He asked her to choose between the two, but Gertrude pushed both hands aside, and instead, “making her way in the fervor of her spirit, she passed between the two outstretched hands of the Lord to reach his most sweet heart, where she knew that the plenitude of all good things is hidden.” In response, Jesus embraced her gently and allowed her to rest for a while on his heart; then, so moved by her devotion, he caused two streams to begin flowing from his heart, “two rivulets flooding into her bosom.” “I am sending all the sweetness and delight of my divine heart into you,” Jesus murmured with all the tenderness of a lover.30 It is not difficult to make a connection between the two streams of fluid that pour from Jesus’ chest and the milk that flows from a mother’s body. And indeed, it is not uncommon for devotional literature from the Middle Ages to depict Jesus as a lactating mother. The most famous example, of course, comes from the writings of Julian of Norwich (b. 1342), who observed:

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The human mother will suckle her child with her own milk, but our beloved Mother, Jesus, feeds us with himself…The human mother may put her child tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus simply leads us into his blessed breast through his open side….31 Such descriptions of drinking from the side/ breast of Jesus abound, and occasionally they make their way into art as well. A fifteenth-century painting entitled “The Savior” depicts Jesus seated on a throne, wearing a robe that is drawn in tightly at the waist and that rounds softly over his lower abdomen. With one hand he parts the robe and with his fingers holds open the wound in his chest, a wound positioned exactly where his nipple would be. The gesture mimics that of Mary who, in countless medieval paintings, offers her breast to her son. Caroline Walker Bynum, whose book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, includes a reproduction of “The Savior,”32 observes that images of feeding are a more central motif in the piety of medieval women than in that of medieval men. She offers several explanations for this phenomenon. First, in medieval Europe (as indeed in most cultures), preparing and serving food was done primarily by women. Second, in the Middle Ages, “food most basically meant flesh; flesh meant suffering…; and suffering meant redemption.”33 In much of medieval philosophy, women were more closely associated with flesh, and men with spirit. This has led many commentators to decry the kind of patriarchy that values women only for their bodies and that sees them as little more than animals. And yet, argues Bynum, women did not see themselves as lesser because of their identification with matter. It was, after all, the body of Christ that was sacrificed for the salvation of humanity. Rather than despising their physicality, Bynum contends, women gloried in it, and they used food metaphors to express the flesh’s salvific potential. Images of food merged into images of the Passion, and women identified with both. This identification took place in part because, thirdly, women not only prepare and serve food; they are food. Bynum notes that to medieval

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natural philosophers, breast milk was a form of blood; to die in imitatio Christi, and to breast-feed, were closely linked symbols. Bleeding, feeding — both were seen as acts of love. It is no surprise that women should speak of suckling at Jesus’ side. But it is not merely from the side of Jesus that Gertrude of Helfta drinks. She sucks directly from his heart as well. In one vision, Gertrude sees the heart of Jesus with a golden tube attached “like a drinking straw” through which Jesus “caused to flow into her in a wonderful way all that she could desire.”34 In another, Gertrude is praying for those who have asked her to do so, begging Jesus to flood the petitioners with his grace. Jesus replies that he has given to everyone a golden tube (which Gertrude understands to be free will) so that they can drink from his heart: Then she perceived that the members of the community standing round the Lord were drawing draughts of divine grace for themselves, according to the ability of each, through the tube which had been given them. And some appeared to be drawing directly from the interior of his divine heart, while what others were imbibing came from the hands of the Lord.35 Interestingly, nowhere is it stated that what the faithful are drinking from Jesus’ heart is in fact blood; they drink rather “divine grace,” and “torrents of divine sweetness.” When later in the same vision, Gertrude again speaks with Jesus, she begs him to wash her with “the precious blood of your most sweet heart,” and so presumably the liquid contained in the heart from which the others drink is blood as well. Yet Gertrude seems reluctant to say this explicitly, preferring to speak simply of “what others were imbibing.” Perhaps Gertrude herself finds the notion of drinking Jesus’ blood a bit troubling. In the very same chapter that describes her vision of the faithful drinking through golden tubes, indeed only a few pages later, it is noted that “on the feast of several martyrs, while they were singing ‘The glorious blood…,’ she realized that although blood is in itself an unpleasant thing, it is praised in Scripture because it is shed for Christ….”36

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Blood is an unpleasant fluid for Gertrude. It is discomfiting. In yet another vision which occurred as Gertrude was abasing herself before receiving communion (it is worth noting that many of Gertrude’s visions take place during the Eucharist), Jesus allows her to lie against his chest for a while. “She was so placed,” we are told, “that her left side seemed to be held against the Lord’s blessed right side.” But after some time, “…she perceived that through the contact with the wound of love in the Lord’s most sacred side, her left side had been drawn into a sort of ruddy scar.” The wounds of Jesus, apparently, are contagious; press against them, and they become your own. Remarkably, the vision continues: Then, as she was going to receive the body of Christ, the Lord himself seemed to receive the consecrated host in his divine mouth. It passed through his body and proceeded to issue from the wound in the most sacred side of Christ, and to fix itself almost like a dressing over the life-giving wound. And the Lord said to her: ‘Behold, this host will unite you to me in such a way that on one side it touches your scar and on the other my wound, like a dressing for both of us. You must cleanse it, as it were, and renew it every day by turning over in your mind with devotion the hymn “Jesu nostra redemptio.” [Jesus our redemption.]37 Gertrude was scarred by her contact with Jesus. Her scar required a dressing that was not even intended to heal it; rather, the dressing was to be perpetually renewed by meditations on the saving wounds of Jesus. Another time, Gertrude prayed, “Inscribe with your precious blood, most merciful Lord, your wounds on my heart….” Soon afterward, we are told, she received the stigmata interiorly, “just as though they had been made on the natural places of the body.”38 Clearly, for Gertrude, contact with the blood of Jesus was risky. Perhaps this explains why she is often reluctant to speak of blood itself, using instead such phrases as “fountains of charity,” “fluid of tenderness,” “ointment of gratitude,” “balm against all adversity,” “a wondrous sap,” “all that she could desire,” “the

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spring-like flowering of his divine virtues,” and “the honey sweetness of this draught.”39 Angela of Foligno, another medieval Christian mystic, had no such qualms. Though Angela’s piety is much less centered on the heart of Jesus, it is much more devoted to the actual physical sufferings of the crucified savior. Born in Foligno, Italy in 1248, Angela married at the age of twenty and had several children. At the age of thirty-seven, she began to undergo a conversion, weeping bitterly over her sins and seeking out a confessor. Over the next six years, during which time her husband, children, and mother all died (“Because I…had prayed to God for their death, I felt a great consolation when it happened”),40 Angela embarked on a life of penance, selling her estate and giving the proceeds to the poor. During this time, Jesus began to appear to her, and many of her visions are recorded by her confessor and scribe in the Memorial and the Instructions. In one of Angela’s most striking mystical experiences, she sees Jesus “looking as if he had just then been taken down from the cross. His blood flowed fresh and crimson as if the wounds had just recently been opened.”41 She describes in detail the condition of Jesus’ body: the torn tendons, the disjointed bones, the cruelly stretched limbs. Gone are Gertrude’s flowery metaphors; Angela can barely stand the agony of looking at this tortured body. True, in the vision she experiences “the ineffable radiance of his most sweet divinity’s fathomless splendor,” but at the same time she is pierced with “his cruel death pains which he showed her.”42 This same ambivalence is expressed in an encounter in which Jesus calls her to place her mouth to the wound in his side: “It seemed to me that I saw and drank the blood, which was freshly flowing from his side. His intention was to make me understand that by this blood he would cleanse me. And at this I began to experience a great joy, although when I thought about the passion I was still filled with sadness.”43 Blood in the visions of Angela is always explicitly connected with the bodily sufferings of the crucified Jesus. It is real blood, blood that oozes from wounds, red blood.

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Once, in prayer, Angela saw a multitude of her spiritual sons surrounding the sorrowful Jesus. As Jesus embraced each one, “his hands drew each one’s head close to himself as he made them kiss the wound at his side.” This was no gentle motion: “He thrust some of them into his side more, some less, some more than once, and some he absorbed deep into his body. The redness of his blood colored the lips of some, and the whole faces of others....”44 When Jesus spoke to the friars, he enjoined them to make manifest in their own lives the way of poverty and of the cross. This point is important, as it makes clear the connection Angela perceived between the sufferings of Jesus and the suffering of humanity. One Maundy Thursday, Angela and a companion decided to “go out to find Christ”: “‘Let’s go,’ I told her, ‘to the hospital, and perhaps we will be able to find Christ there among the poor, the suffering, and the afflicted.’” While at the hospital, the two women distributed fish and bread, and they washed the feet of the sick, “especially those of one of the lepers which were festering and in an advanced stage of decomposition. Then we drank the very water with which we had washed him.” The water tasted so sweet that “it was as if we had received Holy Communion,” Angela relates.45 Water from the leper’s body was like the wine of Jesus’ blood. And then, as if the connection were not yet clear enough, a scab from the leper’s sores became stuck in Angela’s throat: Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my body. Once again, we have here an example of how dangerously contagious the blood of Jesus is. The visions of Gertrude and Angela are very unlike each other in tone; Gertrude’s images are sweet and delightful, such that even drinking from Jesus’ opened body is a delectable experience, and Angela’s visions are dark and more tinged with the sufferings of the Passion. Yet both seem aware of the risks entailed in an encounter with Jesus’ blood. You may be wounded or scarred, as Gertrude was, or you may find yourself drinking from the decomposing body of a leper, as Angela did. In any case, you will not be who you were before you drank. Girard also understands the infectious danger of blood, though he equates it with the perils of unchanneled violence: “When violence is

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unloosed…blood appears everywhere — on the ground, underfoot, forming great pools. Its very fluidity gives form to the contagious nature of violence.” Violence is “communicable.” By it one is “contaminated.”46 But it is curious that when discussing Jesus, Girard describes him as entirely uninfected by the violence that surrounded him. Jesus, according to Girard, rose above violence. He escaped it. He was untouched by it. Girard’s claim is all the more strange when one considers the fascination Christianity has shown with the very instruments of torture that pierced Jesus’ body. The thorns that bloodied his head, the nails that drove into his hands and feet, the spear that opened his side — these are items of great significance to Christian piety and devotion. In medieval Germany a Feast of the Holy Lance was celebrated on the Friday after the Octave of Easter. The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is still celebrated by Catholics worldwide every September. Indeed, Angela of Foligno herself desired to see the nails that had joined Christ’s hands to the cross, particularly if they still were covered with bits of the flesh that they had torn through. There is a peculiar dynamic at work here. It would not be enough merely to say that Angela wished to see a relic of Jesus’ body and that any relic would do. Relics of Jesus in the Middle Ages were certainly available: milk teeth, for example, or the holy foreskin. Nor is it enough to say that the hybridization of flesh/ nail and inside/ outside represents an image of the late medieval need to reconfigure the relationship between Church hierarchy and laity, as Sarah Beckwith has argued.47 Certainly the wounds of Jesus are symbols of access into the ecclesial body, though as for that Jesus’ mouth or nose or ears might serve as well. But they are first and most fundamentally images of dissolution and death. It is there, I believe, that their significance lies. Jesus did not escape violence. He was pierced and torn by it and ultimately lost his life because of it. This fact was not lost on Angela. When Jesus departed at the end of one of her visions, Angela began to shout, “‘Love still unknown, why do you leave me?’” She recalls, “As I shouted I wanted to die. It was very painful for me not to die and to go on living. After this experience I felt

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my joints become dislocated.”48 Dislocation, dissolution — these are what Angela craves. She desires not merely to touch or to see the body of Jesus, but to incorporate his body into her own, swallowing his decomposition the way she swallowed the leper’s scabs. After drinking Jesus’ blood in a vision, Angela recalls, “I then prayed to God to enable me to shed all my blood for love of him just as he had done for me.”49 Angela craved wounds. Repairing the Tears? The Heart of Jesus in Modernity Right away we must be cautious. So many alarms go off at once: If Christians crave wounds, is Christianity anything more than a perverse masochism? The wounds of Jesus were caused by a corrupt political regime that tortured and murdered those whom it saw as a threat; to crave wounds would be a collaboration and complicity with this terror. The world already has so much suffering, so many people whose bodies are torn by torture or accident or sickness. Could they see “craving wounds” as anything other than a cheap appropriation or even a mockery of their own suffering? Susan Sontag has cautioned against the use of illness as a literary device. Speculating about a future cure for cancer, she writes, “Then perhaps it will be morally permissible, as it is not now, to use cancer as a metaphor.”50 Perhaps we should wait until men are no longer murdered in dark cells, and women are no longer torn open by savagery, before we speculate about wounds. Perhaps we should wait until no one needs to fear an unjust trial or a summary execution before we appropriate the pierced heart into a theological system. However, we cannot wait until that day if we are seriously committed to understanding the Christian tradition. Christianity has built itself on a foundation of suffering. The suffering may repulse or fascinate, but it has shaped the tradition from one end to the other. There is scarcely a day in the Catholic liturgical calendar that does not memorialize some martyr or another, and the suffering of Jesus remains the single most powerful

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event in the Christian imagination. The question can no longer be, if it ever could, whether or not Christians will theologize about suffering. The question can only be how they will go about it when they do. There are no easy options here. To adopt the position that suffering has significance, that it is not simply a bad joke or a meaningless confluence of luck and circumstance, is to strike out into dangerous territory. We must pursue this issue if we are to come to some understanding of the power of the Sacred Heart symbolism and, ultimately, of the holes in Jesus’ body. We have examined both the Patristic imagery of the birth of the Church and medieval accounts of drinking from Jesus’ heart. The third stage of Sacred Heart symbolism will emphasize the theme of reparation: mending the broken heart of God. By the seventeenth century, the Sacred Heart was interpreted almost exclusively as a symbol of the love of Jesus for humanity. Margaret Mary Alacoque, whose visions of the heart of Jesus engendered a revival of the devotion, prayed, “Place me, O my sweet Saviour, in Thy Sacred Side, and in Thy adorable Heart which is a burning Furnace of pure love, and I shall be in safety.”51 Partly as a response to Enlightenment rationalism, and partly as a reaction to Jansenism, this form of piety became immensely popular. But, at the same time, a new development was taking place. The devotion came to entail a keen sense of the humiliations suffered by Jesus both during his Passion and in the contemporary world, humiliations inflicted by those who refused to show him proper respect. Performance of acts of reparation came to play a key role in Sacred Heart devotions. In a prayer called “Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart,” first published in 1935, believers were called upon to expiate for offenses against Christian modesty in unbecoming dress and behavior, for violations of Sundays and holy days, and for insults against the Pope.52 They were asked to make reparation not only for their own sins, but for the sins of others whose offenses added to the suffering of Jesus. In this form of the devotion, particular attention is paid to the Eucharist and to the outrages committed against it. Some of these outrages

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are self-inflicted: “God consenting to remain shut up in the ciborium day and night, century after century! Christians, are not these marvels convincing proofs of the love which Jesus Christ has for us?”53 But most are committed by ungrateful humans who are insensible or hostile to the love of Jesus. This impiety is explicitly compared to the injuring of Jesus’ body: “How many godless men, how many heretics, treat Him on our altars as a mock divinity and renew all the outrages which He suffered in His Passion because He called Himself the Son of God.”54 And again: “Jesus Christ knew distinctly that, in the future, Christians would be found in great numbers who would renew on His Sacred Body in the Blessed Eucharist all the outrages that the malice of demons could be capable of….”55 As Jesus’ body was once tormented on Good Friday by unbelievers, so now it is ravaged once again by the sins of the hostile and the negligent. But, we are assured, it is possible to atone for such blasphemies, whether one’s own or the blasphemies of others. More specifically, it is possible to make reparation for those sins. Margaret Mary Alacoque relates the words Jesus spoke to her: “‘I ask that reparation of honor be made to My Heart…to repair the indignities which It has received during the time It has been exposed on the altars….”56 If the heart of Jesus has been injured by impiety, it is possible, it seems, to repair it. What does this mean? The answer would seem self-evident. To repair, of course, means to bring together and to fix torn or broken pieces. It means to mend, as broken bones and cuts mend themselves. And yet, in the case of Jesus, we are again confronted with that startling observation: Jesus, even in his glorified body, still has holes in him. Jesus, the first fruits of the resurrection, the one who sits at the right hand of the Father, the one who has conquered sin and death, still has holes. Those holes resist repair. Moreover, Christian devotion does not want them to be repaired. From those holes flow the sacraments. From those holes flows the sweetness of Jesus’ love. Mend them, and from where would we drink? Perhaps it is not the heart itself that is mended, then. “I ask that reparation be made to my heart to repair the indignities it has received,” says

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Jesus. And prays the penitent: “I will begin to give proof of my love ... by my eager desire to repair, as far as is in my power, the outrages that have been offered to Thee….”57 Here we find something curious. Though it is the heart that has been injured, it is not the heart but rather the “indignities and outrages” that require reparation; not the wounds themselves are to be mended, but a relation to those wounds. In other words, it is not that God must be made whole. It is rather that humans’ relation to God’s incompletion requires reparation. This, I submit, is the power of the Sacred Heart symbolism. It makes distressingly plain the fact that Jesus’ heart is permeable, able neither to contain itself nor to keep out the desires and hatreds of others. To drink the blood of Jesus is to make oneself deliberately vulnerable to the very violence that struck Jesus down and tore him apart. It is a promise to love with a love that pours itself out, taking nothing in return. It is apparent that drinking from the heart of Jesus, like any encounter with the body of Christ, is a risk. It might disrupt the plans and schemes of an insulated subjectivity, forcing encounters with the world’s wretched who would otherwise remain invisible to us. It might show us faces we would rather not see. Just as frighteningly, it might show our own bodies to be as torn and vulnerable as the heart we place our lips to. We have already seen how the body in postmodernity is understood to be riddled with gaps. In the words of Mark Taylor, the body is “haunted by an altarity with which it cannot identify and yet with which it cannot avoid identifying.” It is inwardly divided and subject to betrayal. And yet, Taylor maintains, betrayal is not the violation of an original promise. “Rather, betrayal involves something like an originary transgression that discloses the primal discord of a founding wound.”58 A founding wound. What might that mean? Taylor observes that, by and large, we tend to believe that health is our “normal” state and that disease is an aberration. Sickness may befall us, but as an anomaly; we retain the fantasy that once again we will return to the health that is rightfully and regularly ours. “This scheme of unity-loss-recovery,” writes Taylor,

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“has been extraordinarily pervasive and influential throughout history and continues to guide the human imagination in a variety of obvious and not-so-obvious ways.” He continues: “If there ever were a mythicpoetic-epistemic universal, the pattern of health-disease-recovery (or its functional equivalent) might be a likely candidate.”59 The Christian scheme of creation-fall-redemption also fits this pattern, he says, though in a footnote he elaborates: Within the Christian theological tradition, the idea of original sin suggests a possible alternative to this pattern. For most theologians, however, even so-called original sin is, in some sense, secondary to a primal condition in which the self is uncorrupted. To dislocate the unity-loss-recovery model, it would be necessary to radicalize the notion of sin by rendering is “primordial” and, correlatively, to deny the possibility of recovery or salvation.60 This, of course, Christianity cannot do, and so the Christian theological tradition seems complicit in the pattern that Taylor deconstructs. However, let us return for a moment to that “founding wound” mentioned by Taylor: to “the primal discourse of a founding wound.” If we probe that wound, what might we discover? It seems that a slight slippage occurs when Taylor describes the pattern which he sees dominating the myths, stories, and theories of our culture. This mythic-poetic-epistemic universal, he claims, is the pattern of “healthdisease-recovery (or its functional equivalent).” Presumably the phrase “or its functional equivalent” accounts for Taylor’s use of the alternate triad “unity-loss-recovery” on the previous page and in the accompanying footnote, and his invocation of the threesome “creation-fall-redemption” as well. And yet, what Taylor sees as equivalents may in fact not be so. The transition from “creation-fall” to “health-disease” to “unity-loss” is not innocent. Neither is the substitution of “recovery” for “redemption” an insignificant move. Metaphors do not have functional equivalents.

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To read redemption as the equivalent of recovery, or, in other words, to see redemption as the restoration of a unity, is to ignore one simple, crucial, but often overlooked fact: in the Christian story, the resurrected Jesus still has holes in him. In the Christian story, the resurrected Jesus does not recover an initial unity at all. His body still has wounds — wounds that bleed, if the mystics are to be believed, and in any case wounds that are big enough for a man like Thomas to put his hands into. In fact, remarkably, it is probing those wounds, and not simply the sight of the resurrected Jesus, that prompts Saint Thomas’ declaration of faith. Doubting Thomas, in the Gospel of John, does not seem at all impressed that Jesus has just entered the upper room through a locked door. He does not seem impressed that Jesus enters that locked door having been executed some days previously. It is only the wounds, the wounds that still tear Jesus’ resurrected body, that prompt Thomas to exclaim, “My Lord and my God!” Thus redemption does not at all seem to presuppose unity; quite the contrary. Redemption seems better imaged by holes than by wholes. And this, I think, is what the mystics Gertrude and Angela knew. The wounds of Jesus do not ask to be mended. The wounds simply make visible our own fragmentation, putting a choice before us. Do we panic at the sight of our brokenness, scrambling in a frantic horror to stop the leakage of life and love and strength that begins at our birth; or do we invite still more wounds, pressing ourselves against others in the hope that we might become infected by their longings and sorrows and loves as well? As we will see, those who choose the latter risk not only infection but also death. Why does that not seem too high a price to pay?

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Notes 1.

Anne Rice, Memnoch the Devil (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 282. 2. This version of the text is offered by Hugo Rahner, “On the Biblical Basis of the Devotion,” in Heart of the Saviour, ed. Josef Stierli, trans. Paul Andrews (New York: Herder and Herder, 1957), p. 30. I have chosen this version rather than that in the New Revised Standard Version because it retains the patristic understanding that the streams of water flow from Jesus’ chest. The NRSV text is as follows: On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” 3. Cyprian, “To Jubaian,” section no. 11, in The Fathers of the Church, v. 51, Letters (1-81), trans. Rose Bernard Donna, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1964), p. 275. 4. Both of these paintings appear in Caroline Walker Bynum’s book Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), plates 26-27. 5. Paul Elie, “Steven Biko: A Bump on the Head,” in Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith, ed. Susan Bergman (San Francisco: Harper San Freancisco, 1996), p. 93. 6. Tertullian, “A Treatise on the Soul,” chapter 43, trans. Peter Holmes in Ante-Nicene Fathers v. 3, Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1957), p. 222. 7. Augustine, “Sermon #218: Concerning the Passion of the Lord, Delivered on the Parasceve,” section no. 14, in The Fathers of the Church, v. 38, Saint Augustine: Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons, trans. Mary Sarah Muldowney (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1959), p. 169. 8. The drawing is reprinted in Caroline Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 99. 9. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977; reprinted 1993), p. 31. (Page references are to the reprinted edition.) 10. Ibid., p. 258. 11. Ibid., p. 146.

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12. Ibid., p. 145. 13. Ibid., p. 93. 14. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (California: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 225. 15. Ibid. 16. Mystici Corporis Christi, par. 14. 17. Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 233, no. 813. 18. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 10, emphasis mine. 19. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, section 54, trans. Penelope Lawson (New York: Macmillan, 1946; reprinted 1981), p. 86. 20. Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p. 180. 21. Ibid., p. 166. 22. Ibid., p. 209. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., p. 219. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 218. 27. Cited by Jordan Aumann, et. al., Devotion to the Heart of Jesus (Rome: Institute of Spirituality of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1982), p. 59. 28. Karl Rahner, “Priest and Poet,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, The Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 296. 29. Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, trans. and ed. Margaret Winkworth, The Classics of Western Spirituality series (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 95. 30. Ibid., p. 221. 31. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Clifton Wolters (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 170. 32. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, plate 25. 33. Ibid., p. 250. 34. Gertrude of Helfta, p. 190. 35. Ibid., p. 192 36. Ibid., p. 196, emphasis mine. 37. Ibid., p. 184. 38. Ibid., p. 100. 39. Ibid., pp. 102, 177, 190, 215.

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40. Angela of Foligno, Complete Works, trans. Paul Lachance, The Classics of Western Spirituality series (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 126. 41. Ibid., p. 245. 42. Ibid., pp. 245, 246. 43. Ibid., p. 128. 44. Ibid., p. 246. 45. Ibid., pp. 162-63. 46. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, pp. 27, 30, 34. 47. See Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993, 1996), p. 63. 48. Angela of Foligno, p. 142. 49. Ibid., p. 128. 50. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977, 1978), p. 87, emphasis mine. 51. Margaret Mary Alacoque in John Croiset, The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: How to Practice the Sacred Heart Devotion, trans. Patrick O’Connell (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books and Publishers, 1988), p. 313. 52. Daughters of Saint Paul, Little Treasury of the Sacred Heart (Boston: Daughters of Saint Paul, 1935, 1941, 1973), pp. 2-3. 53. Croiset, p. 73. 54. Ibid., p. 264. 55. Ibid., p. 276. 56. Ibid., p. 60. 57. Ibid., p. 284. 58. Taylor, Nots, p. 215, emphasis mine. 59. Ibid., pp. 250, 251. 60. Ibid., p. 268, n.44.

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Chapter Four The Pierced Body of the Saint

“You are lost if saints don’t disgust you,” declares Emile Cioran, writing in 1930’s Romania. Cioran, son of an Orthodox priest, curses what he sees as Christians’, especially Christian saints’, obsession with blood and torment: “Saintliness is a celestial vice,” he charges.1 And yet, saintly suffering fascinates him. “My feeling for it,” he admits, “is hard to describe; it is strange, elusive, and has the mysterious charm of twilight.”2 Cioran’s ambivalence is not unique. Admire the saints but don’t imitate them, holds conventional spiritual wisdom. Often the saints do seem perverse in their persistent pursuit of pain and humiliation. Rose of Lima rubbed hot pepper on her face to scar her beauty. Andrew the Apostle refused to be taken down from his cross even after his friends had persuaded the proconsul to halt the execution: “Leave me now to be put to death in the manner you see, and let no one release me in any way from these bonds,” he ordered.3 How could anyone fail to be disgusted? And yet, like Cioran, we continue to be fascinated: “In vain do we try to cast off the saints. They leave God behind them the way the bee leaves its sting.”4 Of course, not all of the saints are so mired in blood and pain. Some lead ordinary lives of prayer and service, neither flagellating themselves nor being torn by beasts in the arena. Some defy illness, living happy healthy lives until death makes its claim. But it is nevertheless undeniable

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that sainthood and suffering are frequently, if not necessarily, conjoined. In this chapter I will take up some of the themes we have been exploring already: blood, piercing, contagion, permeability. And I will add one more — desire. What leads the saints to torment themselves, or to offer themselves to others’ torment, is an insatiable need to quench holy desire. Cioran writes that the saint’s obsession is “fighting illness with illness.”5 I would put it differently. The saint’s obsession, I would say, is fighting the suffering of desire with a desire for suffering. It may seem odd to be writing about saints in what is supposed to be a book influenced by postmodern thought. After all, what could be more old-fashioned than sainthood? And yet, precisely because the saints are so marked by bodily torment, because their writings are so steeped in longing for a presence who seems to be irretrievably absent, the saints may actually be a surprisingly appropriate place for conversation between postmodernity and Catholic theology. Towards a Definition of Sainthood What exactly is a saint? Edith Wyschogrod, in Saints and Postmodernism, grapples with this question as she attempts to develop an ethic that is responsive to the demands of postmodernity. Her book is, I believe, flawed by its definition of sainthood; the definition is inadequate to some of the very saints that she invokes in her text, as I will show. More importantly, the definition is divorced from the life story of any recognizable religious tradition. It does not grow from saints’ stories but rather reduces saints’ lives to didactic tales, the very opposite of what Wyschogrod intends. Let us look again at her definition: I shall…define the saint — the subject of hagiographical narrative — as one whose adult life in its entirety is devoted to the alleviation of sorrow (the psychological suffering) and pain (the physical suffering) that afflicts other persons without distinction of rank or group or, alternatively, that afflicts sentient beings, whatever the cost to the saint in pain or sorrow.6

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What is unclear in this passage, and remains unclear throughout the text, is where, precisely, this definition comes from. Certainly it is not derived from the Catholic tradition of sainthood, as I will show shortly. Nor does it seem to capture the essence of Buddhism’s bodhisattva, for example, or of Judaism’s tsaddiq. But from where does it arise? This question is crucial, as the definition may prove to have its origins in precisely the same kind of theory from which the book is attempting to disentangle itself. That the definition of a saint that the book proposes is irreconcilable with the Catholic tradition of sanctity is easy to demonstrate; one need only turn, for example, to the life of the fifth-century Catholic saint Mary of Egypt. St. Mary, according to the story,7 lived for seventeen years as a public prostitute: not for money, but simply to gratify her own lust. One day she decided to join a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, paying the passage with her own body. But when she arrived in the Holy Land she was overcome by the enormity of her sins. In penance, she took to the desert. There she lived naked, like a wild animal, for forty-seven years. Only once during those years did she ever even see another living person. St. Mary of Egypt does not alleviate the suffering of anyone at all (unless, of course, you count her years as a public prostitute: even then she is motivated, at least according to the story, by her own lust and depravity rather than by saintly altruism). And yet Mary of Egypt is still considered by the Catholic Church to be a saint. Clearly, when Catholics speak of sainthood, they mean something other than what Wyschogrod proposes. My point is not simply to accuse Saints and Postmodernism of failing to adopt a Catholic definition of sanctity, or to reconcile its conception with that of Buddhism or Judaism, for that matter. My concern is rather that Wyschogrod’s definition, because it is divorced from the life story of a recognizable religious tradition, is an example of precisely what she herself is arguing against. Wyschogrod maintains that it is important that saints’ lives be preserved precisely as stories. Saintly lives are not dioramas, she contends; rather, they emerge in time. She writes, “Narrative does not issue in a didactic

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conclusion in the form of either moral laws or prudential maxims.”8 Saints cannot be merely the fleshing out of a principle, she says. Their saintliness can only be articulated in a story. But, one may ask, on what basis does one choose the stories? Catholicism, for example, has relied on the public acclamation of saints by the faithful. This process is messy and often has uncertain boundaries; still, the conviction is that the faithful know when their lives have been transformed by an encounter with holiness. As Karl Rahner notes, it is often not clear at the outset that the life a saint chooses will turn out to be saintly at all. Saints, he says, “create a new style; they prove that a certain form of life and activity is a really genuine possibility; they show experimentally that one can be a Christian even in ‘this’ way….”9 Precisely this sense of holy adventure, of experiment and daring and risk, is lost in Wyschogrod’s definition. She knows at the outset who will qualify as a saint and which stories will count as hagiography. One may ask, then: if a definition of sainthood is detached from the “timetied events” of a lived religious tradition, does not the definition render those events irrelevant? In other words, why bother to turn to saints’ lives at all if they are merely examples of the already-chosen moral, “Alleviate suffering”? Thus, two issues emerge regarding Wyschogrod’s definition of sainthood. The first is that the definition bears little relation to the Catholic tradition of sanctity from which the word “saint” itself is derived. Second, and more importantly, Wyschogrod insists that we take seriously the narrative structure of hagiography and resist reading saints’ lives as didactic tales. At the same time, however, her definition makes the sequential character of hagiography irrelevant, as it turns saints into mere examples of the imperative to altruism. There is a third issue complicating Wyschogrod’s understanding of sanctity. I have already mentioned the story of Mary of Egypt, a Catholic saint who alleviated no one’s suffering and eased no one’s pain. What is curious, given Wyschogrod’s definition of saint-as-altruist, is that she

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invokes precisely this story in her own text.10 She tells the tale as part of her discussion of narrativity. Her point in doing so is that the life of St. Mary does not illustrate a moral but rather traces a development. But Wyschogrod references the story of Mary without acknowledging that the saint violates the very standard of conduct that she herself has determined to be “saintly.” Yes, indeed, the life of St. Mary emerges through the telling of events: voyage, conversion, flight to the desert. But it is not a life of altruism. Saints and Postmodernism holds the legend of St. Mary up as an example of narrative hagiography but fails to account for the content of that narrative. Wyschogrod’s inclusion and referencing of other Catholic saints poses similar problems. Consider, for example, the life and writings of sixteenth-century Catholic saint Teresa of Avila. Wyschogrod contends that though Teresa was a mystic who claimed to have experienced union with God, those experiences are not constitutive of her sainthood. Teresa is saintly only to the extent that she practices good works. Her union with God is related to her sanctity, says Wyschogrod, only in that because of her good works Teresa had her mystical experiences. Wyschogrod writes that “selflessness is required if the divine Other is to be received.”11 But this runs counter to the entire thrust of Teresa’s own understanding of her life. The Interior Castle makes clear that, for Teresa, it is not that we are selfless so that we can receive God; rather, it is possible for us to be selfless only because we have already received God. God draws us from the center of our souls, says Teresa, from our “interior castle,” and we respond to that call in love for others. For her, mysticism may be distinguishable from saintliness, but it is not detachable. Nor is mysticism an outgrowth of saintliness. It is, rather, its foundation. Certainly, Teresa urges that union with God ought to erupt in charity towards others: “This is the reason for prayer, my daughters, the purpose of this spiritual marriage: the birth always of good works, good works.”12 But acts of charity derive their importance not from their inherent value but from the love for God with which they are performed: “Thus even

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though our works are small they will have the value our love for Him would have merited had they been great.”13 In sum, Wyschogrod’s understanding of sanctity does not account for the very saints to whom she herself makes reference. On the one hand, it does not explain why Mary of Egypt should be called a saint at all, since she alleviates no one’s pain; on the other hand, it underestimates the role of prayer and mystical experience in the life of Teresa of Avila. More than that, it cannot account for itself. Obscure in its origins, Wyschogrod’s definition of sainthood seems more a product of the theoretical speculation against which she herself is writing than of the stories of the saints. However, if I have disagreed with Saints and Postmodernism’s definition of sanctity, I would like now to explore what I see as one of the book’s most tantalizing insights. This is that the human person is constituted by a structure of desire, and that the saint is one who experiences desire most keenly. What I hope to show is that this insight constitutes not only a useful starting-place for a Catholic response to postmodernism, but also a door to understanding the power of saintly bodies. In the fifth chapter of Saints and Postmodernism, Wyschogrod undertakes a critique of philosopher Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, she says, the human is the one who questions. The human is radically free, and, as Wyschogrod points out, in Heidegger, “freedom is asserted to be the root of philosophical thinking itself.”14 And yet, she continues, concealed within this structure of freedom, and in fact constitutive of it, is a pressuring from other beings. That is, it is precisely the desire for what Wyschogrod calls “the Other” (the other person) that constitutes the insatiability of humans’ questioning. The Other is always something more than I myself am; that “more” is what accounts for its otherness. Thus, Wyschogrod notes that Heidegger’s characterization of the person “will have shown itself to be fissured by an alterity it cannot extrude, an otherness or exteriority that is now inside the thinking of the Dasein.”15 Who I am is constituted by both a lack (a desire for the other person) and by an excess (the incorrigibility of that other person).

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Only a recognition of or, if you will, an obsession with this otherness can constitute the basis for sanctity, argues Wyschogrod. Saints are not self-enclosed monads contemplating their navels and polishing their souls. The saint in Wyschogrod’s vision is one who is in a constant state of attention to the needs of others — so much so that those needs become the saint’s needs and, in a way, the saint’s food. According to Wyschogrod, the saint encounters other people as destitute: as always already torn by suffering. At the same time, this destitution is experienced by the saint as an excess, or as more than he or she could ever heal. Wyschogrod notes that “the Other is always already the object of a desire that exceeds any expectation of fulfillment. The saintly desire for the Other is excessive and wild.”16 It is this excess that prevents the Other from simply being a projection of the saint’s own self; an encounter with the incurable suffering of another is precisely an impingement of an Other upon the saint. Wyschogrod is careful to point out that the destitution of which she writes is not something that could be satisfied — something that could be cured simply by providing clothing, for example, or giving medicine. Certainly some saints do clothe the naked and heal the sick. But these needs are inherently satiable. If saintliness were defined in terms of them, then, if they were to disappear, so would sanctity. Likewise, her description of suffering as always exceeding the attempts of the saint to cure it is not meant as a factual assessment of saintly incompetence. It is not that the saint is incompetent, but that the Other is primordially torn. Writes Wyschogrod, “Nothing whatsoever precedes the destitution of the Other…In traditional Christian theological language, the saint desires not only the welfare of the Other…but also the Other’s beatitude; not only to sit at the right hand of God oneself but…the elevation of the Other.”17 The saint, in other words, experiences the agony of incompletion, an incompletion that manifests itself in desire for union with all that is. But the saint finds in others the same gaping wound. Union with others becomes a proliferation of desire. Even literally swallowing the other cannot satisfy saintly hunger.

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Are there any resonances between this postmodern assessment of selfhood and a Catholic tradition of sanctity? I would suggest that there are. We have already seen how Angela of Foligno drank the scabs of the leper she was bathing. Catherine of Genoa swallowed lice that infected the poor so as to overcome the repugnance and nausea she felt when she encountered them. She also rubbed her nose in the pus of the poor’s festering sores so that she would no longer be repulsed by them.18 For the same reason, Catherine of Siena drank the pus from the cancerous sores of a woman she was tending.19 These are not acts of mere altruism. These are extravagant acts of desire. But desire for what? In her own text, Wyschogrod uses Jewish/ Christian terminology when describing the desire that both plagues and delights the saint: “not only to sit at the right hand of God oneself but to desire the elevation of the Other.” How does this understanding of desire find articulation in Catholic theology itself? Saints, Desire, and Catholic Theology The most significant Catholic theological movement of this century has its roots in the thirteenth-century writings of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (or, more often, watered-down versions of it) served as the theological education of countless seminarians up until the Second Vatican Council, after which it was generally replaced by works with less ambition towards comprehensiveness. Though the Scholastic theology of Aquinas was often taught as if it were a manual of settled questions, thoughtful interpreters were able to read it as a dynamic series of issues and arguments to be interrogated in light of the most current philosophical trends. In the middle of this century, these philosopher-theologians, particularly the German Jesuit Karl Rahner and the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan, breathed new life into Thomistic thought and into Catholic theology as a whole. Their starting place was the rather startling claim of Aquinas that whenever humans know an object, from a pencil to a mountain peak,

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they simultaneously know God. How is this possible? It is possible because when we know a thing, for example, a safety pin, we at the same time know that the pin does not exhaust the possibilities of being. We know that there could exist other objects: say, crickets or traffic lights. And when we encounter crickets and traffic lights, we realize that those things do not fill up the possibilities for being either. Our minds go in search of still more being. If we did not have this capacity, this glancing sense of a “more,” then we would not be able to recognize the safety pin as a thing — as one object among others. Knowledge of limitation presupposes knowledge (or at least a kind of pre-knowledge or pre-apprehension) of something beyond what is limited. What is the goal of this pre-apprehension, of this sense of a “more” that takes a knower beyond objects so that the knower can see them as limited things? Rahner, in his foundational text, Spirit in the World, writes that because the being apprehended in our encounters with objects is able to be limited (namely, in those objects), it “shows itself to be non-absolute, since an absolute necessarily excludes the possibility of a limitation.” However, he continues, at the same time the existence of an absolute being (namely, God) is also affirmed. “An Absolute Being would completely fill up the breadth of [the] pre-apprehension. Hence it is simultaneously affirmed as real (since it cannot be grasped as merely possible).”20 Rahner’s thought takes the ordinary experience of knowing an object like a safety pin and uses it to demonstrate God’s existence. But how credible is this jump from beings like safety pins to “being” (what all pins have in common) to God? Can this neo-Scholastic theology really demonstrate the truth of Absolute Being? The methods of both Rahner and Lonergan seek to show that our knowledge of limited beings depends upon a knowledge of unlimited being. However, deconstruction would point out that in an encounter with a limited being, we do not in fact encounter a “more.” We encounter, instead, a play of presence and absence. True, we desire a “more.” But inherent in that desire is knowledge of a lack. The lack is as fundamental to any experience of objects as is the desire for more presence. Knowledge

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of this safety pin, rusty and lying in the bottom of the sewing basket, depends upon knowledge, implicit and perhaps unconscious, that there is still more to know: other objects, other colors, other places. The quest to know what there is, to know all that there is, is still unsatisfied. We passionately desire to rest in the stillness of knowledge’s completion, but this is not our experience as humans. Knowledge is always in some way its own disappointment. So, if the neo-Thomistic method relies on an absence of being in experience it cannot justify privileging being over nothingness, or claiming that what is ultimately real is Absolute Being. It cannot explain how absence is necessary for experience and yet experience can lead us to the very obliteration of absence in God. Still, this does not mean that the philosophical methods of Rahner and Lonergan, or indeed of Catholic thought as a whole, have nothing to say to postmodern theology. On the contrary. Rahner’s thought in particular offers clues towards a conception of God and humanity that echoes the structures of desire we found in Wyschogrod. In his later years, Rahner wrote less about “Absolute Being” and more about what he called “Mystery.” (On this point, Lonergan grumbled, “Rahner emphasizes mystery a lot. I have a few clear things to say.”)21 Absolute Being means absolute self-presence and thus absolute hole-lessness. But “Mystery” is an invitation to penetrate ever further and deeper. It is an opening that never closes. It is an unbridgeable gulf, an unmended tear. Perhaps this will become clearer if I explain in more detail Rahner’s philosophy of human subjectivity. When people encounter other beings in the world, Rahner says, they know those beings to be limited; this much I have already discussed. However, he continues, they at the same time know that it is they who know that object; they know themselves to be knowers. This return to the self Rahner calls “the being-present-to-itself of being, or the luminosity of being to itself as ‘subjectivity.’”22 This return to self (at least in human beings) is not complete; we are not perfectly self-present. I can think of a safety pin, but when I think of myself thinking of that pin, then the self who thought the pin, and

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the self who is thinking the self who thought the pin, are distinct. Our subjectivity, in other words, constantly eludes our grasp. What is crucial to recognize is that, for Rahner, our chasing after ourselves, or, what is the same thing, our transcendence in search of a fullness of being, takes place in God. In the transcendence of the subject toward being, he writes, “the term of this transcendence is present only in the mode of otherness and distance.”23 It is easy to read this statement as saying that there is an Absolute Being, God, who is perpetually unfathomable. This is in fact what Rahner himself concludes in his early work, Spirit in the World. But to say this is, I believe, to say what is beyond the capacity of Rahner’s own method. As I argued above, one cannot speak of Absolute Being when one’s method depends on the interplay of being and non-being. However, the statement can also be read simply as an articulation of a desire for being, and of that desire’s perpetual unfulfillment. Rahner himself says that divinity is present precisely in otherness and distance. Further, he writes, The difference between God and the world is of such a nature that God establishes and is the difference of the world from himself, and for this reason he establishes the closest unity precisely in the differentiation. For if the difference itself comes from God, and, if we can put it this way, is itself identical with God, then the difference between God and the world is to be understood quite differently than the difference between categorical realities.24 God is the difference between God and the world. God is a hole, a space, a difference. God is the difference between meaningfulness (the world as a world of meaningful beings) and whatever is outside the possibility of human meaning (mystery). This does not seem very satisfying. To say that our deepest knowledge of God is knowledge of a lack would seem to doom us to a perpetual frustration. And so it might. Rahner asks of God, “Are You anything more than my own great insufficiency, if all my knowledge leads only to

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Your Incomprehensibility? Are You merely eternal unrest for the restless soul?”25 The desire for God can cut us pitilessly, piercing our hearts and our minds with a longing so fierce that madness seems our only option. We can experience our fragmentary knowledge of God as a privation and try to satisfy our terrible hungers for love and knowledge by devouring each other in a voracious quest for unimpeded sovereignty. We can turn our wounds into weapons, bitterly regretting whatever transcending glimpse first led us to believe that wholeness was possible. Rahner describes this situation with eloquence. He writes, And then our hearts may be so crushed with horror and despair, may feel that their own basic dignity has been dealt a mortal blow to the point where it feels that what little joy and love, faithfulness and blessedness is to be found in this sewer of world-history and human history does not make the sum total of the world and mankind better, but only more terrible still, because there seems to be just enough meaning in the world to make us able to feel the prevailing meaninglessness in all its deathly pain.26 It is precisely this sense of fragmentation, this sense of being poured out in a struggle for joy, love, and faith, that gave credibility to the symbol of the pierced heart. The human heart, and indeed the human being, is not whole. It is wounded, its wounds evidence of our terrible distance from ourselves and from each other. And yet, this brokenness is precisely the site of our redemption. Urges Rahner, “And when we experience all this then let us look to the Sacred Heart pierced by the lance and say to ourselves: ‘The basis of all reality is love.’”27 We have a choice, it seems to me. We can despair over the hole that prevents us from achieving union with a mystery that remains ever elusive. Or, we can experience that hole as the condition of love, as the space that is desire itself. This latter option is the one chosen by the saints. “Love still unknown, why do you leave me? Love still unknown, why? Why? Why?” lamented Angela of Foligno. And yet Angela found strength and resolve precisely in the fierceness of her longing.

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The Cloud of Unknowing, a Christian mystical text from the fourteenth century, advises, “Think only of God, the God who created you, redeemed you, and guided you…Yet even this is too much. A naked intent toward God, the desire for him alone, is enough.”28 Desire alone is enough. Not presence, not unity, but desire. A hole. But do we not risk substituting our own desire for a genuine encounter with others? Indeed, if desire alone is enough, why speak of an-other at all? The answer is that desire is already an encounter with what is other than ourselves. Desire for God is not a product of the self. It is not an intentional act, if by intentional one means that its origin is the human will. Just the opposite: we are constituted by it, not it by us. Far from living in a solipsistic isolation, we have already been invaded, and that invasion forces us outward in love. Subjectivity is a construction made possible only by our going out from ourselves so that we can return to ourselves (imperfectly) as knowers. It cannot exist apart from the rupture that sends it into the world in search of itself, discovering itself only and to the extent that it discovers what is not itself. Longing for God is thus a radicalized form of the longing for the others in our world and for ourselves as an other not yet known. Moreover, longing for God is precisely what the Catholic tradition of sainthood has recognized as the mark of sanctity. Holiness, in Catholic thought, is an ever-deepening entrance into the Mystery of God. It is constituted by the free response of the human person to always-alreadygiven divine grace, a grace that manifests itself as continual immersion in freedom and love. Ideally, holiness will blossom into charity towards other people, but the tradition also recognizes that the saint may live out his or her days apart from society, in prayer and solitude. Thus in Catholicism, “sainthood” can accommodate hermits as well as social reformers, anchorites as well as kings, mendicants, married people, monks, and even occasional lunatics. Desire alone is enough. The saint is the one who experiences most keenly the absence of God, and whose desire towards God is insatiable. Or, to paraphrase Augustine,

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the saint is the one whose heart is restless: the one whose life marks what is missing. Always in search of a “more,” and always aware of the suffering selves of others, the saint is one who lives out what Taylor calls “the sense of irrevocable loss and incurable fault.”29 Yes, saints experience divine grace more deeply than do others. What this means, however, is that they know intensities of longing that most of us cannot even imagine. They are aware of humanity as primordially torn and as searching for something that constantly eludes its grasp. And often this sense of loss finds expression in an injured body. What we shall explore next is the possibility that the suffering body of the saint serves both as an articulation of desire for God, and as a way of assuaging that desire, blotting out at least for a moment or two awareness of the lack that separates us from God. In other words, I will argue that it is no coincidence that saints are so often marked by intense suffering, whether self-inflicted or inflicted by others. Rather, saints’ bodies are visible manifestations of the brokenness that all of us experience, with the difference that saints take up their brokenness in the hope of drawing nearer both to other sufferers and to God. The Pierced Body of the Saint We have already seen that the human body is not a natural integer: that its existence as a whole is the tenuous achievement of complex biochemical systems. However, the body’s gaps are evident not only on the molecular and cellular level. Newspapers recount nearly every day stories of bodies shot, stabbed, or blown apart. On the television news, we watch video clips of young military recruits having their chests punctured by sharpened insignia during an initiation rite. We see all around us pierced ears, noses, lips, eyebrows, tongues, and navels. We are fascinated by these holes: by the body’s vulnerability, by its mutability, by its insides-become-outsides. We are fascinated by its ability to undergo the pain that the holes attest to. Pain is always a challenge to our structures of meaning. Pain is outside of definitions. Pain disrupts order. Holes in the body intrigue and yet

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disturb us because they mark the breakdown of systems. The pain involved in their creation entails a loss, however briefly, of thought, self-presence, and self-control. Holes can be filled with metal rings or silicon gel or transplanted skin. But as holes, they both remind us of and threaten us with dissolution. This disturbance generated by the body’s incompletion is also, however, an invitation. Reflects Richard Sennett, “For without a disturbed sense of ourselves, what will prompt most of us…to turn outward toward each other, to experience the Other?” Sennett’s book Flesh and Stone explores the relationship between a culture’s perception of the body and that culture’s urban design and architecture. His point is that contemporary American society has insulated itself into a kind of bodily passivity; self-enclosed and untroubled by discomfort, we find it difficult to rouse ourselves into sympathy for those who are not ourselves. Pain, however, can free us: “It disorients and makes incomplete the self, defeats the desire for coherence; the body accepting pain is ready to become a civic body, sensible to the pain of another person….”30 It is not, of course, necessary to seek pain out in order to achieve an intense sense of sympathy for others. Sooner or later suffering finds all of us, and Sennett’s point is not that we need to cultivate it but that we ought not to run away from it — that we should allow it to turn us outwards. But what should we make of the vast array of saints who do not merely accept suffering but actually court it either through ascetic practice or by placing themselves in situations of danger? The answer will depend on the saint, on the context in which the saint lives, and on the circumstances of the suffering. But let us explore the two theses I have already proposed. These are that the pierced body of the saint serves as a physical articulation of humans’ inherent longing for God, and that the pain associated with bodily injury can act to numb that longing when it becomes too overwhelming to bear. It is a curious phenomenon that in the annals of Catholic martyrdom, death comes very often in the form of piercing or dismemberment. That is, martyrs/saints are tortured in every horrible way imaginable, but often

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it takes the stroke of an executioner’s blade to finish the job. St. Polycarp was burned at the stake, but the fire did not harm him; his death came only when he was stabbed in the heart. St. Venantius was burnt with torches and hung over a low fire so that he might suffocate to death. When this method failed, he was thrown into a furnace and later thrown into an arena with hungry lions, but still he did not die. Only beheading was able to accomplish his martyrdom. St. Victor was tortured on the rack and put under a grindstone so that he might be crushed to death. When the mill broke down, the emperor ordered that his head be cut off, and thus he perished. Likewise, St. Christina was thrown into a burning furnace and into a pit of vipers, but she remained unharmed. Only when her body was pierced with arrows did she succumb. St. Lucy, St. Reparata, and Sts. Eulampius and Eulampia, among others, evade death until the thrust of a knife or the cut of a sword finally takes their lives. Countless others are beheaded at the outset, as if the executioners wish to spare themselves the trouble of trying other methods. I raise this point first because it strikes me as odd; surely, if God is able to miraculously preserve saints from flames and from the jaws of wild beasts, God is able to redirect a sword or render a sharpened blade harmless. In a few cases, God does seem to intervene in decapitations; both St. Justus and St. Dionysius manage to pick up their own severed heads and offer instructions as to how they should be buried. And in the case of St. Winifred, even dismemberment does not manage to send her to the grave — her head is cut off by her frustrated suitor Caradog, but St. Beuno places it back on her shoulders and thus restores her to life.31 For the most part, however, dismemberment brings an end to the martyr’s sufferings. We can only speculate about the original intent of these martyrs’ stories (which have surely been embroidered over time, if not created out of whole cloth). In any case, it seems clear that they express a deep but troubling insight into a Catholic understanding of sanctity: that the saintly life is marked by the dissolution or scattering of the self and by a radical permeability. Narratives about the martyrs, which continue to fascinate, attract, and repel the imaginations of Catholics even now, give

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expression to the raw and open desire for God that we are. The Cloud of Unknowing observes that “he alone understands the deep universal reason for sorrow who experiences that he is. Every other motive pales beside this one. He alone feels authentic sorrow who realizes not only what he is but that he is.”32 Our deepest sorrow, our destitution as humans, is due not to any particular conditions of our life, but to the mere fact that we are. We are fundamentally constituted by a lack. The pierced/dismembered body of the saint gives witness to this. It is as if the disarticulation of the body’s parts is an enactment of both the martyr’s death and the martyr’s sanctity. In the same gesture it accomplishes the holy person’s end and makes visible the truth of his or her inner life: the gaping distance between humanity and divinity, and the love that transforms that distance into grace itself. When we look at a painting of Saint Sebastian, who was pierced through by dozens of arrows; when we see Saint Lucy with a sword thrust through her throat; when we see Saint Agatha with her breasts cut off and lying on a table beside her, we see more than just the tortures of the faithful. We see, too, the truth about ourselves, that we, too, are incomplete and longing for more, that our deepest life is a life lived in longing for something other than ourselves. When knowledge of the gap between us and God becomes too overwhelming to bear, the saints often seek a kind of self-inflicted martyrdom, turning to ascetic practice rather than death itself to ease the pain of their separation from divinity. After Jesus gives to Angela of Foligno “an even greater awareness of himself than before,” Angela says, “I imagined and desired that if I could find someone who was willing to kill me…that I would beg him to grant me this grace.... I could not imagine a death vile enough to match my desire.”33 After Jesus anoints her with a fragrant ointment and promises to her, “I deposit in you a love of me so great that your soul will be continually burning for me,” Angela recalls, “I desired to die and desired my death to be accompanied by all manner of bodily torment…I wanted and desired to be vilified by the whole world, and wanted my death to be accompanied with every manner of torment. I

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would have been simply delighted to pray to God for those who might make these awful things happen to me.”34 Note that it is not just that Angela desires death so as to become closer to God. She longs rather for “a lingering death” in which her suffering will be prolonged and intensified. That this desire erupts at the very moment when Jesus seems nearest, when he has just given her a pledge of his everlasting love for her, would lead us to the conclusion that pain is a mechanism by which Angela can soothe somehow the spiritual torment she experiences. She explains that when she sees the body of Christ elevated in the Eucharist, “all the members feel a disjointing, and I wish it to be so. Indeed such is the extreme delight that I feel that I would want to always remain in this state.”35 Is it fair to describe Angela as in a perpetual state of longing for God? She is, after all, a mystic, one who achieves a closeness with God that is not even approached by the vast majority of people. In prayer she asks what can separate her from God, and God tells her that nothing can. “‘This world is pregnant with God!’” her soul exclaims.36 What greater intimacy could there be? And yet, what does it mean to say that Angela “experiences union” with God? Significantly, Angela herself writes, “…when I return to myself after perceiving these divine secrets…I speak entirely from outside the experience, and say words that come nowhere near describing the divine workings that are produced in my soul.”37 It would seem that there is a similarity but not an identity between the Angela who is elevated into the secrets of God and the Angela who describes having been so elevated. And the gulf between the two appears to be unbridgeable. Near the end of her Memorial, Angela reveals, “I was and am now drawn out of everything I had previously experienced and had taken such delight in…For in the cross of Christ in which I used to take such delight…I find nothing; in the poverty of the Son of God, I find nothing; and in everything that could be named, I find nothing.”38 It would be wrong to read this “nothing” as if it were a metaphor for “something wonderful.” That is, it would be wrong to assume that what Angela means is that all things seem as nothing in comparison to the profound somethingness of God.

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David Thomson makes a similar point in his interpretation of Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle. Teresa writes that when God unites Godself to the soul, the soul “understands nothing; the faculties are lost.”39 Thomson explains, “It would be a mistake here to imagine ‘nothing’ as a quasi-presence with some measure of syntactical status, as if that originary nothing/ineffable moment is transcribed by the mystics into writing — as if the straining of mystical prose almost recovers the originary moment.”40 If it would be a mistake to imagine that language can close or even bridge the gap between the present and the “originary moment,” it would be equally misguided to posit a subjectivity that is able to do the same. Repeatedly, Angela uses the expression, “when I returned to myself,” when describing the aftermath of one of her revelations. At the very least, this would suggest a disruption of consciousness. It also widens the gap between the Angela who is able to speak and recall and postulate, and the soul who, we are told in retrospect, was caught up into the darkness of God. Angela seems to feel this disjunction keenly. At one point in her Memorial she offers an aside to Brother Arnaldo, the scribe who is recording her reflections. She explains, “And when you asked me if this darkness drew me more than everything I had ever experienced, what I answered seems to me to be blasphemy. That is why I fell very sick when you asked me those questions and I answered them the way I did.”41 She experiences the most intense physical symptoms precisely in those moments when God seems nearest — because near is, in the end, not near enough. The discrepancy between what she is able to say and the divine darkness about which she wishes to speak is too great, and once again pain seems somehow palliative. Angela’s case is not unique. The lives of the saints are filled with stories not only of sickness and paralysis, but also of severe self-inflicted pain. Blessed Clare of Rimini, for example, wore a hair shirt and iron bands next to her skin. On Good Friday, she had herself bound to a pillar and whipped. Saint Hedwig of Silesia wore a belt that cut into her flesh, scourged herself, and wore no stockings so that her feet became blistered and bloodied.

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Blessed Charles of Blois wrapped knotted cords around his chest that dug into his flesh and caused sores into which vermin crawled. On Fridays, he scourged himself, and he often put sand or pebbles in his shoes so that his feet were covered with blood.42 Blessed Christina of Spoleto perforated her own foot with a nail in imitation of the crucifixion of Jesus.43 It is easy to dismiss these stories as evidence of perversion or of a hatred of the body that privileges the spirit over the flesh. It is easy to dismiss them as evidence of mental illness. Indeed, there has been an explosion of literature in recent years on the subject of self mutilation, and the conclusion of many of these authors is that, as Armando Favazza states, “Although therapists should try to utilize powerful religious and shamanic symbols in selected cases, the fact remains that self-mutilators are neither gods nor saints but rather frightened prophets manqué.”44 Favazza does distinguish in his work between “culturally sanctioned” self-mutilation and “deviant” self-mutilation, and he suggests that in a religious context harming oneself may be creative as well as destructive. However, the thrust of his work is to “cure” those who harm themselves of their pathological tendencies. However, we need not read the actions of the saints as indicators of mental illness. One scholar suggests that such ascetic practices are actually “an effort to plumb and to realize all the possibilities of the flesh.”45 Not a desire to flee the body, but a determination to use the body to express spiritual longings is what characterizes these seemingly-bizarre practices. The possibilities that the flesh affords include emulating and sharing in the sufferings of Jesus (that is, living a life in imitatio christi) but they also include enacting the agony of incompletion that humans experience in their desire towards God, and at the same time mitigating that very agony. Angela of Foligno’s loss of self (in mystical experience) and of voice (in the inability to respond to her scribe’s questions) are precursors to her final loss: death. In death, world, voice, and finally subjectivity itself are surrendered, and all that remains is the body. This is a process that Angela looks forward to with great anticipation: “One cannot imagine the delight that is mine when I think of the day of my death.”46

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Similarly, Teresa of Avila describes her longing for God: “The soul doesn’t strive for the pain of this wound caused by the Lord’s absence, but at times an arrow is thrust into the deepest and most living recesses of the heart….”47 In seeking to deaden the pain she felt at her imperfect union with divinity, she inflicted bodily torments upon herself. She reflects, “When this thirst is not too severe, it seems it can be appeased somewhat; at least the soul seeks some remedy — for it doesn’t know what to do — through certain penances…They can relieve it somewhat, and the soul can get along in this way while at the same time begging God to provide a cure for its sickness.” Pain dulls the soul’s overwhelming desire to be united with its God. Nevertheless, pain is not enough. Teresa writes that though the soul can find respite from its sufferings in self-inflicted pain, ultimately “it sees no remedy other than death.”48 As we will see in the next chapter, death involves a radical surrender not only of one’s self, but also of the very meaning of one’s self. The body’s instability as a signifier is so great that the acceptance of death is an acceptance of the possibility of meaninglessness. It is a kenosis of signification, the final gesture of the saints towards the God whose meaning is ever recessive and ever more mysterious. Death relieves the soul’s longings by surrendering them entirely into God, offering everything and willing to risk the possibility that everything is, in the end, nothing at all.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Emile Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 60, 59. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 73 “The Acts of Andrew,” in The Other Bible, ed. Willis Barnstone (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 462. Cioran, Tears and Saints, p. 67. Ibid., p. 36. Wyschogrod, p. 34. See, for example, the “Life of St. Mary of Egypt” by the Jerusalem Bishop Sophronius (d. 638). The text appears in Benedicta Ward’s Harlots of the Desert (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1987), pp. 35-56. Wyschogrod, p. 29. Karl Rahner, “The Church of the Saints,” in Theological Investigations, v.3, p. 100. Wyschogrod, p. 9. Ibid., p. 36. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, The Classics of Western Spirituality series (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), p. 190. Ibid., p. 194. Wyschogrod, p. 139. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid. Catherine of Genoa, Purgation and Purgatory, The Spiritual Dialogue, trans. Serge Hughes, The Classics of Western Spirituality series (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), p. 131. Raymond of Capua, Life of Saint Catharine of Sienna, trans. Ladies of the Sacred Heart (Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham, 1859), p. 102. Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 181 Philip McShane, “An Interview with Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J.,” The Clergy Review 56 (1971), p. 430.

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22. Karl Rahner, Hearers of the Word, trans. Michael Richards (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 44. 23. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 64. 24. Ibid., p. 62, emphasis mine. 25. Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence, trans. James M Demske (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1960; reprinted 1989), p. 8. 26. Karl Rahner, “Unity-Love-Mystery,” in Theological Investigations, v. 8, Further Theology of the Spiritual Life 2, trans. David Bourke (New York: Herder & Herder), 1971), p. 237. 27. Ibid. 28. The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. William Johnston (New York: Image Books, 1973). p. 56. 29. Taylor, Erring, p. 6. 30. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), pp. 374, 376. 31. For the biographies of all of the saints mentioned above, see Alban Butler, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, ed. Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater (Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1990). 32. The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 103. 33. Angela of Foligno, p. 128. 34. Ibid., p. 150. 35. Ibid., p. 158. 36. Ibid., p. 170. 37. Ibid., p. 214. 38. Ibid., pp. 211, 212. 39. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 209. 40. David Thomson, “Deconstruction and Meaning in Medieval Mysticism,” Christianity and Literature 40, 2 (Winter 1991), p. 112. 41. Angela of Foligno, p. 205 42. André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 197, 374, 365. 43. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 391 n. 77. 44. Armando R. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 1996), p. 46. 45. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 294. 46. Angela of Foligno, p. 216.

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47. Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life in Saint Teresa of Avila: Collected Works, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1976), p. 250. 48. Ibid., p. 251.

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Chapter Five The Dead Body of the Saint

The suffering of the saint ends in death. Remarkably, however, in Christianity death is not the end of the saint but in a very real way the saint’s beginning. Catholicism forbids the canonization of any living person; to be a saint one must have passed from this world to the next. Thus to venerate a saint is to venerate the dead, and this Catholics do in ways that strike others not just as peculiar but often as downright disgusting. It is no accident that Christianity has often been accused of being a death-cult. In its early years it was thought by the Romans to be little more than a grotesque fascination with charnel houses. In this chapter we will look at Catholics’ veneration of the dead through the use of relics. We will ask what meaning this practice might possibly still have for a contemporary theological perspective. The Miracle of Decay “The body of the deceased monk-priest Father Zosima was prepared for burial in conformity with the established ritual,” begins Part Three of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, one of the most remarkable literary explorations of the meaning of death and decay. Zosima, the revered and holy teacher of young monk Alyosha Karamazov, died unexpectedly.

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Even five minutes before his death, no one imagined that he would be taken so soon. What were the circumstances of his demise? While suffering from an acute pain in his chest, Zosima “slipped slowly from his armchair to the floor, knelt, bowed his head to the ground, spread his arms, and, apparently in a state of ecstasy, praying and kissing the ground — as he had taught others to do — quietly and joyfully, he gave up his soul to God.”1 The death of the elder was no small event. As the narrator of the book explains, not every Russian monastery had an elder. The institution was fairly new to that part of the world, though elders had been flourishing in the Orthodox East for a thousand years. Having an elder in residence was what distinguished the little monastery in the story from others in the region. After all, we are told, it had no other claim to importance: no saints’ relics or miracle-working icons. Only the elder gave it distinction, and people came from miles around just to speak with him for a minute or two or to fall under the sweep of his gaze as he walked among the crowds. An elder, explains the narrator, is someone “who takes your soul and your will into his soul and his will.” Choosing an elder is choosing someone to whom one can submit completely and without reservation, gambling that in that submission one will attain “complete freedom (that is, freedom from himself ) and thus avoid the fate of those who reach the end of their lives without ever having found themselves within themselves.”2 There is a complex set of both propositions and prepositions in that description: freedom from oneself, finding oneself within oneself, finding oneself within onself precisely because one is free from oneself. The selves seem to multiply! And yet, explains the narrator, the institution of the elder was not a theoretical puzzle to be untangled but a practice to be lived. A thousand years attested to its power and importance, and not a few supernatural events gave credence to its divine origins. So when the elder Zosima died, it was only natural to expect that at least one miracle would occur in his honor. The townsfolk began to gather as soon as they heard the news, bringing their sick children to the dead

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man to be cured. Surely Zosima was a saint, they said to themselves, and it would give honor to God if miraculous works were to be performed through Zosima’s intercession. Not only the townsfolk, but even the monks in the monastery believed that something extraordinary would occur. In the past, at least if tradition was to be believed, two holy men had died and had not succumbed to decay. These two “had lain in their coffins just as though they were alive,” and some of the monks even claimed that the dead men’s bodies had given off a fragrance of flowers. Would God not do the same for the holy Zosima? Apparently not. It did not take long before Zosima began to give off an unbearable stench. It took, we are told, less than a day. Even an ordinary sinner’s body, remarks the narrator, usually takes more than a day to begin decomposing. That Zosima should start to rot so quickly was not only a violation of the laws of nature, but an embarrassment and an insult. And young Alyosha, Zosima’s most cherished pupil, could not bear the affront. His faith shredded, he left the monastery, poured vodka down his throat, and set off for the home of Grushenka, a woman of beauty, cunning, and a history of failed love affairs. But Alyosha returns to the monastery. He returns, and it is then that the miracle he had longed for along with all the other faithful takes place. Zosima’s body is still rotting away. The stench has become so strong in fact that the monks have been forced to open a window in the room. But when Alyosha enters he finds that he is no longer distressed by this fact and instead feels a gladness in both heart and mind. He kneels in a corner and begins to pray, and as he prays he hears the voice of one of the old monks reading from the gospels: a passage from John, the miracle at Cana. The room begins to swirl around Alyosha, and in the mix of vodka and chanting and exhaustion from too many tears and too little sleep, the young monk slowly becomes aware of a wedding party going on in the room, a joyous gathering of merry-makers toasting bride and groom with vessels of new wine. And there in the gathering is the kindly monk Zosima, who takes Alyosha’s hand and invites him to the feast. “Can you see our sun now? Can you see Him?” asks Zosima, and Alyosha feels a

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bright flame burn in his heart. Tears of rapture replace his tears of grief, and he awakens to find himself no longer kneeling but rather standing before the coffin of his rotting teacher. Then the miracle occurs: not the miracle that had been expected, but one far more significant for the young monk’s life. Alyosha rushes from the room out into the vast, still night. He falls to the ground and hugs the earth, kissing it and longing to kiss every inch of it, just as his beloved teacher had in the moment of his death. He longs to water the earth with tears of joy: “to forgive everyone and everything and to beg for forgiveness — oh, not forgiveness just for himself, but for everyone and everything.”3 In the face of death, one’s impulse may be to curse the earth rather than to kiss it: to flail at it or to flee from it rather than to nurture it with tears. But the transformation Alyosha goes through seems to come not, as we might expect, in spite of his teacher’s decay, but rather because of it. His soul, as we know, had been taken into his elder’s soul. His will had been joined to Zosima’s. Death came not just for Zosima but for Alyosha as well, as we see when he falls to the ground with the same gestures that Zosima performed in his last moments. And in this loss of his self, in this “complete freedom” (that is, freedom from himself ), he manages to find a new kind of existence. Writes Dostoevsky, “Something, a kind of idea, had taken over his soul forever and ever.” Alyosha came to a profound sense of compassion through the death and decomposition of his teacher. Three days after this experience, we are told, he left the monastery to “go out into the world.” Of Loss and Fragmentation By and large, we are afraid of falling apart. This is true on the most mundane levels. We take vitamins to prevent bone loss, smear chemicals on our heads to prevent hairlines from receding, listen to lectures from our dentists about the dangers of gingivitis: “Ignore your teeth and they’ll go away!”

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It is also true at the extremes of our experience. What news items have more of a hold on our imaginations than stories that involve beheading, traumatic amputation, cannibalism, the dismemberment of corpses, or the like? When a plane crashed in the Everglades a few years ago, it was not so much the deaths themselves that troubled our headlines as the idea that so many of the dead were irrecoverable because they had been consumed by alligators. When Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband’s penis as he slept, the detail that was repeated over and over in the media coverage was that she had thrown the dismembered member out of a car window, leaving it by the roadside for a police officer to recover later. The vulnerability of our bodies, but even more so their divisibility, is both fascinating and deeply disturbing. It was deeply disturbing to early Christians as well. When, in the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa faced the prospect of opening his parents’ grave so as to inter there the body of his sister Macrina, he trembled: “How, I ask myself, will I be spared…condemnation if I look at the common shame of human nature in the bodies of my parents, which are certainly decomposed, disintegrated, and transformed into an appearance unformed, hideous, and repulsive?”4 As Ham uncovered his father Noah’s nakedness and was cursed by him, Gregory is terrified at the prospect of seeing his parents’ ignominy. This shame comes not, it seems, from the fact of their death itself, but from their decay — from their being “decomposed, disintegrated, and unformed.” It comes from their falling apart. This fear was widespread in the writings of late antiquity. Death was seen as horrible not so much because it ended consciousness, what we in the twentieth century might find most appalling, but because it threatened identity; it loomed as a morass of slime and decay.5 We read in Tertullian’s treatise “On the Resurrection of the Flesh,” for example, why the heretics cannot believe in the resurrection. Is it not, Tertullian asks, because they see that the body is …unclean from its first formation of the dregs of the ground, uncleaner afterwards from the mire of its own seminal transmission;

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worthless, weak, covered with guilt, laden with misery, full of trouble; and after all this record of its degradation, dropping into its original earth and the appellation of a corpse, and destined to dwindle away even from this loathsome name into none henceforth at all — into the very death of all designation?6 What we see in this passage is not only an assessment of the body as impure, feeble, and filled with sorrow; even more alarming is the body’s tendency towards insignification. What seems to cause particular anxiety to Tertullian is the loss of the body’s name. We begin from dust and then, for a short time, as living human beings, we have proper names. To be sure, our selves are heavy-laden and miserable, but they are distinct and recognizable. The fall from person to corpse is a bitter event, but even then we have an identity. What troubles him most of all is the final step, the fall into “the very death of all designation”: into no name at all. This is what is ultimately unbearable. This is what is unspeakable. Of course, the literal loss of one’s identity was not an implausible event for the early Christians. Fifty or sixty years before Tertullian’s birth, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, had been thrown to the wild beasts in a Roman arena. Along the route from Antioch to the place of his execution, Ignatius wrote letters to his fellow Christians, anticipating the nature of his death. Of the ordeal that awaited him he wrote, “Fire, cross, beast-fighting, hacking and quartering, splintering of bone and mangling of limb, even the pulverizing of my entire body — let every horrid and diabolical torment come upon me, provided only that I can win my way to Jesus Christ!” 7 Like Tertullian, what Ignatius seems to fear most is the disintegration of his body. To be sure, he sees martyrdom as a step towards his resurrection in Christ, a point we will take up at greater length in the next chapter. But in describing the most horrible death imaginable, it is to images of dismemberment that he turns. The only form of death mentioned that does not entail disarticulating the body’s parts is crucifixion, in which limbs are pierced rather than torn. All of the other nightmarish possibilities towards which his mind turns involve a loss of physical

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identity or, what is perhaps the same thing, recognizability. Elsewhere in the same letter he imagines that the lions he is about to face will become his sepulcher, and that there will not be a single scrap of his body left for anyone to see. When Tertullian, whose end was not nearly as dramatic as that of Ignatius, writes of the corpse’s slide into namelessness, he is aware of the possibility of Christians’ being chewed up and swallowed by ravenous brutish beasts. But he is also aware that the fate of the martyrs only illuminates the processes that await us all, the slow disintegration of our selves into the slime from which we came. He knows that “the devouring fires, and the waters of the sea, and the maws of beasts, and the crops of birds and the stomachs of fishes,” are ultimately no different from “time’s own great paunch itself.”8 Disintegration, whether in the belly of an animal or in the womb of the earth, is our fate. Which is not to say that Christians accepted it gladly. Burial practices were devised that, it was hoped, would prevent the utter disintegration of the corpse. Christians desired to preserve at least some small fragments of the person who had lived so as to save the beloved from utter dissolution. As we will see, there was considerable concern for those fragments and how they might be transformed or reassembled on the day of resurrection. Christians asked themselves: if bones are mingled together in the grave, how will they be properly sorted out at the sound of the trumpet? Even more puzzling: if bodies are eaten by beasts and then beasts are eaten by people, to whom do the particles of bone and flesh belong— to their original owner, or to the ones who have consumed them? These questions received complex, often inconsistent, and at times bizarre responses from theologians in late antiquity. What both questions and answers show, however, is that early Christians felt considerable anxiety about the dissolution of their bodies. That anxiety persisted. Through the Middle Ages, fear of bodily dissolution continued to haunt both Christian theology and Christian culture. For example, Peter Lombard in his twelfth century Sentences took up the issue of how food functions in the formation of human

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bodies. The danger for Peter was that if food contributes to our being, then what we are one day is not what we are the next. Our identity, in other words, is threatened. And so Peter had to conclude that “foods are not converted into human substance.”9 Allowing that nutrients are added through ingestion and subtracted through excretion was too much of a threat to the bodily consistency that seemed so essential to his vision of human beings. The need for consistency and for impermeability played itself out in another form as well, in Christians’ construction of cities. The late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, for example, saw an increasing tendency among Christians to exclude Jews from their midst — to expel them, as it were, from the Christian body. It is hardly a stretch to imagine parallels between Christian bodies and Christian cities. The ancient image of the Church as the Body of Christ lends credence to the analogy, as does the persistent use of body-metaphors by Christian theologians to describe human society. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, condoned the use of capital punishment because he believed it eliminated an evil from the societal corpus: ...if the health of the whole body demands the excision of a member, through its being decayed or infectious to the other members, it will be both praiseworthy and advantageous to have it cut away. Now every individual person is compared to the whole community, as part to whole. Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump (I Cor. 5:6).10 The community here is imagined as a healthy body threatened by disease; the only way to preserve the body’s integrity is to cut off any unhealthiness. Interestingly, if we follow Aquinas’s logic, such an excision does not truly harm the original healthy body. He continues, “Hence, although it be evil in itself to kill a man so long as he preserve his dignity, yet it may be good to kill a man who has sinned, even as it is to kill a beast. For a bad man is worse than a beast, and is more harmful….”11 Cutting off the infection,

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in other words, involves excising a foreign matter, something no longer proper to the body itself. It is not killing something human but something alien, something even less than bestial. It should not be surprising, then, that Catholic cities felt justified in excising “alien” parts of their citizenry. In 1267 the Synod of Breslau recommended that compulsory ghettos be constructed in order to segregate Jews away from Christian populations. In many places, of course, enforcement of such a plan was simply unfeasible. Cultural and economic ties were too strong to permit so sharp a division. In sixteenth-century Venice, however, geography and social currents conspired to allow Christians more rigorously to enforce what the Synod had demanded. By 1633, three ghettos for Jews had been created, each sealed off either by walls or by waterways.12 One of the social currents leading to the creation of the ghettos was an outbreak of syphilis, a disease that in its initial stages causes skin lesions and rashes and in its most advanced stages causes blindness, dementia, and death. Syphilis had been linked in the popular mind with Jews since 1492, when its spread throughout Europe coincided with the expulsion of Jews from Spain. But there was more to the association than mere coincidence. Judaism had historically been connected, in Christian art and imagery, with prostitution; since syphilis was often spread through contact with prostitutes, fear of the disease became a generalized fear of Jews. The fear was that the societal body, in itself unblemished and virginal, could be contaminated by non-Christian bodies. In other words, the diseased could “corrupt in their act of touching, of seducing, the pure and innocent, creating new polluters.”13 As an illness that manifests itself first on the skin, syphilis seemed to be the outward sign of an inward depravity; sufferers were thought to bear in their bodies the consequences of their own wicked souls. Enclosing Jews behind ghetto walls thus served as a kind of “urban condom” against the threat of evil.14 If the Christian body was thus protected against incursions from without, the Jewish body was seen by Christians as shamefully permeable. In fifteenth-century Italy, Jewish women were required to pierce their

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ears and to wear earrings as a sign of their Jewishness. Earrings were also the mark of prostitutes, and so a connection was forged between Jewish women, whose bodies were opened by the point of an awl, and prostitutes, whose bodies were opened by any man with enough money to pay. Furthermore, earrings were explicitly compared to the mark of circumcision that separated Jewish men from Christian ones.15 Christian bodies remained intact; Jewish bodies were pervious. In contemporary Christian culture, fear of decay can manifest itself as a denial that bodies have any role to play in the afterlife at all. It is astonishing the number of Christians who do not know that their tradition has professed, and continues to profess, belief in a resurrection of the body. Surveys show that nearly all Americans, and virtually all American Christians, believe in life after death; however, when asked if they think that their bodies will have a role to play in the afterlife, respondents overwhelmingly answer no. This is true despite the fact that Christians yearly celebrate the festival of Easter and yearly re-read the story of Jesus’ empty tomb. The prevailing assumption seems to be that science provides all the answers as to what happens to earthly remains and that religion is about questions that are unanswerable, questions like what happens to people’s souls. Many contemporary Christians are willing to accept the claims of science about what will happen to their bodies; indeed, there is even a fascination with mortality as the popular film series Faces of Death shows. However, they do not choose to integrate their materiality into their eschatological visions. This is so, I submit, not because bodily decay is not troubling to them, but precisely because it is so troubling that they would rather suppress it by denying that bodies have any place in Christian thought to begin with. Dissolution is much easier to accept if the body is not worth anything anyway.

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Of Division and Multiplication This desire in Christian theology and culture to maintain the body’s integrity, or, alternatively, to deny the body any role at all, makes the practice of venerating relics all the more puzzling. The practice is strange in any case. It is one of those aspects of Catholicism that causes even the most staunch defenders of the faith to stumble around for explanations and justifications: “There is a sharp and clear-cut distinction between the savage-magic of the pagan fetishes and the veneration of relics in the Catholic faith,” declares one author, though as his explanation develops, the distinction becomes more and more tenuous.16 It is simply hard to rationalize the collection, distribution, enshrinement and veneration of bits of bone and hair. Moreover, given Judaism’s fear of defilement by corpses and Rome’s aversion to the dead, it is difficult to see how Christians came to the practice in the first place. The Emperor Julian, regarding Christians’ delight in the bodies of their deceased, wrote of “...the carrying of the corpses of the dead through a great assembly of people, in the midst of dense crowds, staining the eyesight of all with ill-omened sights of the dead. What day so touched with death could be lucky? How, after being present at such ceremonies, could anyone approach the gods and their temples?”17 Given such distaste, it seems almost absurd that Christians venerated relics not just openly, but with great enthusiasm and devotion. Attempts to account for the origins of relic-veneration have thus far been unsatisfactory. The most common explanation is that it grew out of the ancient practice of hero-worship; both Greeks and Romans, after all, built shrines to their extraordinary dead and engaged in public ceremonies to honor them. It should not be surprising that Christians would do the same for their most spectacularly deceased members, the martyrs. However, parallels between hero-worship and the cult of martyrs’ relics are incomplete. Christians did not merely change the flavor of ancient death rituals, inserting the name of a martyr rather than that of an emperor, for example. Rather, Christians entirely reconfigured the

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relations between the living and dead. Peter Brown explains, “Above all, what appears to be almost totally absent from pagan belief about the role of the heroes is the insistence of all Christian writers that the martyrs, precisely because they had died as human beings, enjoyed close intimacy with God.”18 The martyrs could intercede with God on behalf of the living, something no one expected of the ancient heroes. The saints were like patrons: useful mediators between God and humanity who could be counted on to put in a good word here and there on behalf of their devotees. Which still does not explain why the martyrs’ bodies were so important. Presumably, since the martyrs were with God, they were no longer limited by the constraints of space and time. It should not matter if one prayed to them in, say, Rome or Antioch, at the site of their burial or across the sea from it. And yet, it did matter. Christians went to great lengths to journey to, or to obtain the remains of, their holy dead, sometimes even at the risk of their own lives. When, in the second century, the bishop Polycarp was to be executed, the governor was reluctant to give the martyr’s body to his Christian followers lest it become an object of worship for them. Polycarp’s corpse was burned instead, with the idea that no trace of him would be left; even so, Christians managed to salvage the ashes from the fire and hold on to them as sacred objects.19 Christians very early began celebrating the Eucharist on the tombs of martyrs. They held memorial feasts there and paid great sums in order to be buried near the bones of the saints. Graves of the martyrs became sites of pilgrimage, and miraculous cures were said to occur at these shrines. Evil spirits were exorcised in the presence of the martyrs’ remains, and bishops maneuvered to obtain this bone or that in order to gain more prestige and recognition for their dioceses. Whole communities sprang up around saints’ tombs. The bodies of the martyrs, and later of other saints, were public testaments to the workings of God. Indeed, it continues to matter where the bones of the saints are laid to rest. According to the current version of Catholic Canon Law, large, authentic relics of saints should be placed in the base of all fixed (as op-

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posed to moveable) altars. In this way the Catholic community, the Code notes, should continue the ancient practice of celebrating the Mass over the venerated remains of a holy person.20 Moreover, relics held in great veneration cannot be moved from place to place without the permission of the Apostolic See; it matters where they are.21 And even in our day, proximity to the bones of a saint is seen as a source of blessing, if not power. During the funeral procession of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, scores of mourners risked the ire of the accompanying security detail by running up to the casket and touching cloths and other items to it. Though not formally canonized, Mother Teresa was widely recognized as a saint in her own time. Touching her remains, or merely touching something that touched her remains, seemed worth the trouble. But…. Why does it matter so much? Why does it matter what happens to the bones of the saintly dead? On the one hand, there is a part of the Catholic tradition that holds that honoring a relic is merely honoring the memory of a slain companion-in-the-faith. Indeed, Saint Jerome assured his readers, “We do not worship, we do not adore…the relics of martyrs, but we honor them, that we may better honor Him whose martyrs they are.”22 Rituals at the tombs of the dead would thus be a way of calling to mind a living body by proximity to the dead body it has become. However, Christians did not merely remember their martyrs; they called on the martyrs’ intercessory powers as well. Something more than memory was at stake. Another part of the tradition has held that relics either contain or are conduits for a certain power that can (only?) be transmitted through physical proximity. This seems to have been the position of Augustine, who described a miracle in which a blind man was cured in the presence of the bodies of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius; “By virtue of these remains,” recorded Augustine, “the darkness of that blind man was scattered, and he saw the light of day.”23 The relics of the dead here seem to have been integral to the cure. Their presence actually affected the outcome of events. Moreover, whatever power relics had was apparently transferrable to other

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objects. For example, Augustine relates another miracle in which a dying man refused to become a Christian. The man’s son-in-law went to the oratory of Saint Stephen and prayed with great piety; he then gathered up some flowers from the site and brought them home to lay them on the pillow of his sleeping father-in-law. When the dying man awakened he immediately called for the bishop and was baptized a Christian.24 The flowers apparently were able to transmit the power of Stephen’s bones not only to a faithless man, but even to a faithless man who was unconscious in his slumber. What are we to make of this? There is a certain ambiguity in Augustine’s writing. He claims that “the martyrs do these wonders, or rather God does them while they pray and assist….”25 It is unclear exactly why God requires the assistance of the martyrs. Even more puzzling is why that assistance comes in the form of martyrs’ earthly remains. Augustine concedes that “what is said to be done by the martyrs is done not by their operation, but only by their prayer and request,” but this does not answer the question of why that prayer and request is more efficacious if the person on whose behalf the martyr prays is physically proximate to the martyr’s remains. On the means by which God effects miracles, Augustine only raises the possibility that “some things are done in one way, others in another, and so that man cannot at all comprehend them….”26 Christians did not agree among themselves as to the mechanism by which relics made visible the power of God. For some authors, saintly fragments were proof of the resurrection to come. That is, though they appeared to be bits of bone and dried blood, relics actually contained the whole presence of the resurrected saint. Wrote Vitricius, “We proclaim, with all our faith and authority, that there is nothing in these relics that is not complete. For where healing power is present the members are complete.”27 Relic-veneration thus seems to be a denial of or, a triumph over, the dissolution of death. In the earthly, temporal realm bodies may appear to decay into nothingness; however, in God’s time decay has been overcome. Each tiny bit of the saint contains the whole saint, healed and intact.

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One parallel to such thinking is, of course, the doctrine of concomitance in the Eucharist. According to Catholic thinking, each part of the Communion bread contains the whole body of Christ. Though Jesus’ body is consumed millions of times on thousands of days, it is never exhausted. It reappears in its entirety each time the words of transubstantiation are said, and each crumb is as truly the body of Christ as is an entire host. Likewise, in the thought of some ancient writers, saints’ bodies were miraculously restored in every particle of their dead and decaying remains. Like thousands of tiny mirrors, fragments of the saint faithfully reproduced the whole person, and any one part had as much power as the whole. Into the dust God breathed new life again and again and again. For many in the ancient world, then, relics marked not just the memory but the very praesentia of the saint to whom they once belonged.28 Visiting a shrine was not merely going to a place but going to meet a person — and, perhaps, gaining some small favor for one’s troubles through that person’s intercession. Though surely in heaven, the saint was also somehow here on earth, inhabiting or, at least lingering near, his or her former body. We must also take into consideration, however, the fact that those who visited a saint’s shrine were going to meet a person who was precisely and spectacularly no longer with them. The high point of martyrs’ feasts was the telling of their passios, the stories of their deaths. Indeed, a martyr without a passio was little venerated and soon forgotten. Veneration of relics entailed both a sense of the martyr’s presence and a mourning of the martyr’s departure from the earth: both a being-with and an acute sense of loss. At the very least we can observe that veneration of relics is not so simple a practice as it might seem at first. Clearly relics are more than memorials, and clearly they are something other than the unambiguous presence of the saint whom they represent. How then might we understand them? One clue comes from the origins of the word “relic.” The word derives from the Latin word reliquiae, which means a fragment of a thing lost or destroyed.29 I emphasize the latter part of the definition because it is im-

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portant to note that relics are not merely small parts of a larger whole in the way that a piece of marble broken from the corner of a building may be said to be a part of the White House. The White House still stands, and though it is injured by a piece being taken from it, it is still recognizable and indeed still functions as the president’s residence. Not so with relics. Even when the saint is thought to be somehow present in a relic, there is still a recognition that the saint is also present in heaven and will one day be fitted out with a resurrection body. Thus, relics are pieces of a whole that was and that may be again, but that is not now. What then is the relation between a relic (say, a finger bone) and a saint? If a bone is not related to a saint in the way that a piece of marble is related to the White House, then what relationship do the two things have? Coming to an answer will lead us down a long and tortuous path of signification. Pursuing that path is worth the trouble, however, as a way of complicating the common-sense understanding of relics and of opening up alternative interpretations. Let us consider the relation between a relic and the finger that it once was. It might seem at first as if there is a simple continuity between the two. Indeed, there is a material continuity; the same molecules that made up the finger now make up the relic, at least more or less. But in the semiotic realm, there is a significant difference between a finger and a relic. A finger is a part of a person. A relic, on the other hand, is a fragment of a person who once had fingers but who lives now in some mysterious way without an earthly body. There is a resemblance between the two, but not an identity. The finger had meaning because of its relation to a living material being. The relic has meaning because (that is, precisely because) the material being it once was a part of has left its materiality behind. This point becomes clearer when we consider that not just fragments, but indeed whole bodies of saints, are considered relics. The dead and venerated body of a saint is not a saint. It is the remains of a saint. It is the body of a person who is now bodiless. There is a relationship of similarity between the body and the saint, but again, not an identity. It is true

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that some Christians have believed (and continue to believe) that at the general resurrection a person’s body (that is, exactly the same body — with exactly the same flesh, bones, fingernails and hair) will be re-joined to its former owner. Indeed, Peter the Venerable advised that we should honor the bones of the saints now “as if they were in their future incorruption.”30 But until that day, the saints in heaven and their bodies on earth have but a tenuous relationship. In any analysis we must distinguish among four manifestations of saints, or four ways in which saints may be said to be present. First, there is the saint of Christian tradition and memory, the saint who may or may not bear a resemblance to any historical person. At times scholars are able to verify the accuracy of events depicted in a saint’s passio or in hagiographical literature. At other times such accuracy is dubious at best. Some saints, though perhaps popular and widely venerated, are composed of little more than legend and fancy. They do not live up to Wyschogrod’s criterion that the story of a saint must purport to portray an actual life and thus must exhibit at least some connection to the events of history as we know them. However, even the stories of saints that can be historically verified are shaped and embellished according to Christian ideals. They are not merely told but are rather proclaimed, and the faith that led to their being remembered in the first place also determines the way in which that memory will be passed on. Second, then, there is the earthly, material, historical existence of a person who exuded holiness and who would after his or her death be designated as a saint. That person, it must be said, is fundamentally and irrevocably inaccessible to us. He or she is essentially a remainder-concept, or a projection of what might be left over if one could extract from a saintly narrative all elements of legend, supposition, embellishment, translation and interpretation — in other words, if one could dispense with the very processes of textuality that are the basis of narrative in the first place. Third, there is the saint’s heavenly mode of being, a life that is believed to be bodiless and immaterial until the day of the final resurrection. The

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saint in heaven is the one to whom people pray and from whom they expect favors. The saint in heaven sees the face of God and can enact, or at least participate in the enactment of, great signs and wonders. Heavenly saints are “real” saints, saints who live and who care about the lives of their devotees. Finally saints are present, in a way yet to be determined, in saintly relics: in the material remnants of an historical person who once lived on earth but who now, according to Catholic belief, lives with God and without a material body. Without the belief that the holy person continues to live, though now in an incorporeal state, the relic would be simply a bit of decaying flesh. Its significance as a relic depends on its relation to the person who once was destroyed and yet who somehow continues to live. To return to the question, then: What might be the connection between a relic and a holy person’s finger? The relic is a substitute for something that no longer exists except in the Christian imagination. The relic stirs in the Christian mind a picture of what the saint’s finger might have looked like when it was still attached to its owner. Upon seeing a relic of the finger of Saint Stephen, for example, we might imagine the martyr raising his hands in entreaty towards those who were about to stone him to death. There is no intrinsic connection here. The relic, dark and cold in its glass case, does not really look like the animated finger wagging in the imagined martyrdom. The Christian mind takes what it sees and fills in details gathered from art, liturgy, and the gory tales passed from generation to generation. Nonetheless, the relic serves as a stimulus for recalling those tales and the courage they were meant to instill. However, the finger of Saint Stephen, created in the imagination, functions only as a synecdoche of the whole Saint Stephen, who is also in a significant sense a product of the imagination. Whoever Stephen may actually have been, he exists no longer on this earth and cannot be known by us. The Stephen of the passio, the saintly person who showed calm courage in the face of persecution, is a textual Stephen, a Stephen who exists in Christian tradition and who may or may not resemble anyone who may actually have borne that name. The relic thus directs us to imagine

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Stephen’s finger as it exists in the martyr’s tale, and the finger stirs us to think of the whole man who is described in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. The finger is an imagined part of an imagined whole. The chain of signification grows more complex. We now must ask, what is the relation between the saint of Christian tradition, on the one hand, and the living saint, the saint who dwells with God in heaven and who can be called upon to intervene on earth when there is a crisis, on the other? The two cannot be precisely the same. The saint whose story is remembered and handed on had a body. That saint breathed and spoke and walked the earth, at least according to the story. But the heavenly saint, the saint of prayer and supplication, has left materiality behind. That saint is incorporeal — if only for a time. And here is exactly where we must be cautious. “Time” is no longer a category that is relevant to the heavenly saint. According to Christian tradition, saints already enjoy a taste of eternal glory. They already have a share in the timeless life of God. They have not merely relocated, abandoning their earthly abodes and taking up residence in the celestial spheres. Instead, they have been transformed beyond the limitations of geography and history and are no longer constrained by them. The tradition expresses this in its belief that petitioners may call upon the saint at any time and in any place and still expect to be heard. True, prayers are more efficacious if they are uttered at the site of a relic, but no saint could be hard-hearted enough to ignore a sincere supplicant simply because he or she was not at the appropriate shrine. Saints, like God, are thought to be accessible everywhere and to all people at once. Moreover, belief in the saints’ transformed status was expressed by the early Church in its conviction that saints, unlike the rest of the faithful dead, did not have to wait until the general resurrection to gain admittance to heaven. The early Christian community believed, for the most part, that their dead were asleep in Christ and would be raised en masse at the sound of the trumpet. Some dead, however, the very holy dead, especially the dead who had endured the rigors of martyrdom, were believed to have already received their promised resurrection. This resurrection was

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incomplete, of course. The saints would still have to wait until the Last Day to be fitted out with their resurrection bodies. However, over and over in the chronicles of the martyrs we see that the victim’s story ends in glory — a crown is placed upon the martyr’s head, or the heavens open up to receive the steadfast one, or the martyr appears in a dream to assure the faithful that he or she has been rewarded by God. If the saint is in heaven, then the categories of time and space are no longer appropriate in discussing his or her being. Language falters in the attempt to explain how it is that an earthly and embodied person is now a heavenly and incorporeal person and yet the two people are still somehow “the same.” As we will see, this was the dilemma faced by Christians as they grappled with the notion of the resurrection of Jesus. How could it be that Jesus had died and was alive, that he was still the same person but could walk through locked doors and pass by his friends unrecognized? What I will argue in the next chapter is that resurrection language is, at the same time, a mapping of the edges of our experience and a testimony to what is not subsumable to that experience. It is a disruption of the schemes and plots and plans that we have for our own lives and for the lives of others in our world. To say that the saints have been raised is thus to tell their stories in a way that makes plain the incompletion of their lives. It is a way of marking the restless longing of human existence, the perpetual desire for something other than ourselves. But we must not get too far ahead of ourselves here. For the moment, we cannot delineate precisely the relation between the earthly saint of Christian tradition and the celestial saint of cultic worship. We can simply say that between the one and the other there is both a continuity and a discontinuity — both an identity and a witness against “more of the same.” However, if we cannot speak with much precision on this point yet, at the very least we can observe that what looked at first like the simple presence of a holy person in a relic is far from simple. The relic is not an unadulterated presence. It is a substitute for a presence that has been lost. It functions only to the extent that it brings to mind both that presence and its loss, and its significance depends on its relation to both bodies

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and bodilessness. What appears to be an unambiguous message written in bone and flesh turns out to incorporate within itself all of the complex issues of presence, absence, identity and difference that characterize any other text. The process by which a relic has meaning becomes even more complicated if we consider not just first-class relics (that is, actual body parts which once were part of a saintly person) but second- and third-class relics as well. In Catholic tradition, second-class relics are objects once used by a holy person (for example, clothing or books), or instruments used to inflict a martyr’s death (for example, nails or a sword). Third-class relics are things which have come into contact with first- or second-class relics.31 A third-class relic might be a bit of cloth touched to the skull of Saint John the Baptist, for example, or a rosary pressed against the hem of the Virgin Mary’s cloak. We should note that, though these distinctions (that is, “first class,” “second class,” “third class”) are in common usage, they are not legal definitions. The Catholic Code of Canon Law recognizes two types of relics — distinguished and non-distinguished. “Distinguished” relics are whole parts of a saint’s body, such as an entire head, heart, arm or leg. “Non-distinguished” relics include body parts which are small or fragmented, as well as objects used by the saint or objects that have been touched to her or his body.32 Thus non-distinguished relics would include small first-class relics, second-class relics, and the third-class relics that are created by their association with first-class relics. Non-distinguished relics are considered in Canon Law to have less “dignity” than the actual body parts of a saint. Though they have only a tenuous association with the saint whom they represent, third-class relics are venerated by the faithful, and they are held in esteem whether they were touched to the actual body of a saint or whether they were merely touched to something touched by the holy person. But we must ask, by what process can they be called “relics”? They are not, obviously, the remains of a saint. They do not even have the status of second-class relics, which were used by the holy person in

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his or her lifetime and so have at least some historical connection to the saint. Third-class relics may not even have existed during the time the person lived. They are constituted simply by being placed in proximity to that person or to his or her effects. In what sense are they “relics”? In the semiotics of cultic worship, both second- and third-class relics function metonymically. They signify saints in that they are or have been physically proximate to them or to something they have touched; they signify, in other words, through contiguity. A third-class relic, then (for example, a cloth touched to a saint’s sandal) would be a metonym of a relic (the sandal) that is a metonym of another relic (the remains of the foot) that calls to mind the foot of the holy person who once lived and died, which is a synecdoche of the whole saint, who has some kind of continuity (mysterious and ambiguous) with a saint in heaven. Fortunately, the chain of signification cannot be extended — there are no fourth-class relics! But it should be clear by now that when we consider the nature of relics and their relation to a saint, we are quite a ways from an uncomplicated praesentia. I have laid out this elaborate chain of tropes not because such a semiotic soup is significant in itself. My point here is simply to show how labyrinthine the associative chain is between relics and saints and to abolish any notion that when we speak of a relic we are speaking about a straightforward relationship between a signifier and its signified. When we hold a tooth or a skull in our hands, the concerns of postmodernity can seem far away. Nothing feels more solid or certain than the heft of bone. Nothing seems to have more of an inherent, undeniable bond than a saint and his or her remains. “Don’t deconstruct the relic,” we might be tempted to say, “Just touch it! Feel its weight! Close your eyes and know the presence of the saint!” But even that presence, even a presence so close that I can hold it to my lips or clutch it to my breast in prayer, is fraught with loss and undecideability. The odd thing is that relics are repeatable. They can be both multiplied and divided, and they can be replicated ad infinitum. The finger of St. Stephen, for example, could be broken into a thousand fragments, and each

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fragment would still be called a relic. If those thousand pieces were each broken into a thousand pieces, we would end up with a million different relics. And if the million relics were too small to be divided any further, we could touch a piece of cloth to each one and create a million new relics, and a million more, and a million more. Divide or multiply, the sum is still the same. Each relic still represents the same Saint Stephen. But as we have seen, this representation is equivocal, relying on a saint’s absence even as it makes the saint present through a complex series of associations. Relics, like words written on a page, can be repeated infinitely. They can be repeated in the language of blood or metal, water or oil, cloth or stone, or all of the above. Their shape doesn’t matter. Their age doesn’t matter. There is no necessary relationship between the material composition of the relic and the saint whom it signifies. Relics can proliferate indefinitely, a vast army of signifiers signifying… what? Vulnerable to decontextualization and recontextualization, the meaning of relics, like the meaning of all signifiers, is fundamentally unstable. In late antiquity relics were traded, donated, transferred, bought, borrowed and stolen as a matter of course. Tracing their paths from one hand or shrine or city gate to another shows the intricate systems of patronage and alliance that spanned the ancient world.33 Relics were not simply representations of saintly power; they were markers for ecclesiastical and temporal power as well. They were tokens of favor, prizes won in political tussles, currency and capital. They were portents of divine mercy and omens of imminent doom. Their meanings were multiple and variable, and, ultimately, detachable. It must be recognized that not every bone or skull held to be the remains of a saint really has or had any physical connection to a holy person. For much of Christian history, relics had so much value and could confer on their possessors so much prestige that fraud was inevitable. The possibility of deception was not lost on believers; Saint Martin of Tours as early as the fourth century declared a set of remains venerated by the faithful near his home to be nothing other than the body of a brigand. He put an end to the cult of the “martyr” by overturning the

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local shrine’s altar.34 No Catholic is obligated to believe that any particular relic is genuine. No Catholic is obligated to venerate any particular relic or indeed to venerate relics at all. The only restriction placed on Catholics in this matter is that they may not deny the value of veneration of authentic relics in principle. Nor do Catholics incur blame if in good faith they honor a relic that later turns out to be fraudulent. The Church’s thinking here is that even if a bone turns out not to have belonged to a saintly person, the faith with which it was venerated still gives honor to that saint and, ultimately, to God. The Church has often allowed votive practices to continue even when the authenticity of a particular relic is doubtful; it is thought more harmful to disrupt a longstanding tradition of piety than to allow the faithful to honor God through a relic that has only a dubious connection to an actual holy person. The relation between a relic and its meaning is thus shown to be ineradicably indeterminate. On the one hand, devotion might evoke the “presence” of a saint even if the relic at the center of the saint’s cultic worship has nothing to do with that holy person. On the other hand, there are no guarantees that the actual remains of a saint have ever found a pious reception among the faithful. The remains might have been lost or stolen or bartered or used as party favors in some imperial court. (Sale of relics at this point is strictly prohibited, a violation of Canon Law. Even the translation or relocation of significant relics is now carefully monitored.) And being dead, those remains were hardly in a position to protest. Which means that the venerated bodies of saints, like all bodies, suffer the “death of designation” that worried Tertullian so much. They suffer the ultimate indignity of having no say as to their own meaning. When Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, was assassinated in 1980, an autopsy was performed on his body. Romero’s viscera were removed but were not discarded, since they were “the organs of a saint.” Instead, according to one reporter, they were stored in a plastic bag, placed in a cardboard box and buried in a garden near the hospital chapel where he had been shot. Two years later workers unearthed the box by accident, and it was taken

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to the local bishop. The bishop advised that the box be re-buried so as not to inflame the anger of the local wealthy elite.35 The elite might have been angry to have the Archbishop’s remains become the focus of pious devotion because in their eyes Romero had been anything but a saint. He was, instead, a trouble-maker who stirred up the Salvadoran people and fanned the fires of an already devastating civil war. A powerful preacher on behalf of the poor, Romero made a host of enemies during his short tenure as Archbishop. As a result, though he has been popularly acclaimed as a saint, though he is featured in liturgical art with a halo behind his head, and though he is remembered every year on the anniversary of his death with special eucharistic celebrations designed to enshrine the values he preached, the official process that was initiated on behalf of his canonization has stalled. Which means that those viscera in the plastic bag in the garden will have to wait for quite some time before they receive an official meaning. In the meantime, they signify liberation to one part of the population and menace to another. For some, they are the remains of a holy person. For others, they are the spoils of war: a trophy and a warning to anyone who might feel tempted to take up the causes for which Romero lived and died. Saint or renegade? Man of the people or communist threat? Shortly before his murder, Romero reflected, “Martyrdom is a grace of God that I do not believe I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality.”36 His words are an attempt to pin down the significance of his own life: to write in his own blood the meaning of his death. But as we have seen, blood is an unstable medium for messages. This is precisely the reason, or at least a part of the reason, that Catholics have continued to be fascinated with, and to venerate the remains of, their holy dead. The cult of relics survives no doubt because the faithful experience in bones and cloth something of the presence of the saint. But at the same time, the cult of relics hides within itself another tradition, one that glories in fragmentation and that revels in a recognition of loss. The saint, whether martyr or ascetic, king or lunatic, is ultimately a wager. Saints can

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guarantee the meaning of their lives no more surely than can anyone else; how much less can they control the meaning of their deaths! For the saints, death is the ultimate kenosis, a radical loss in which interpretation itself is surrendered towards God. In death the body opens itself up to this meaning or to that meaning or, most horrifying, to no meaning at all. One risks being insignificant. One risks the death of designation. This risk the saints take gladly, willing to give up even this in their extravagant passion. It is the risk that caused Dostoevsky’s Zosima to throw his arms out in joy as he let go his last breath. It is the risk that caused the young monk Alyosha to fall to the earth weeping and then to rise to his feet in ecstasy, heading out into the world with an exuberant, improvident love. It is the wager of the holy, and the memory of it is enshrined in their bones. But those bones are not the last word. After receiving numerous death threats, and aware of the rising tensions in his native El Salvador, Romero promised, “If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. I say so without meaning to boast, with the greatest humility.”37 The Catholic tradition teaches that the faithful die only to be raised up. What the resurrection means, and how it is related to the themes of desire, loss and fragmentation I have been developing thus far, is the topic of the next chapter.

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Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Andrew H. MacAndrew (New York: Bantam Books, 1970; reprinted 1981), p. 392. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 439. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Saint Macrina, cited by Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 84. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, p. 113. Tertullian, “On the Resurrection of the Flesh,” chapter 4, trans. Holmes, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, v. 3, p. 548. Ignatius of Antioch, p. 105. Tertullian, “On the Resurrection of the Flesh,” p. 548. Peter Lombard, Sentences, Bk. 2, d. 30, chapter 14, art. 2, vol. 1. Cited by Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, p. 125. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part II, part 2, q. 64, art. 2, v.10 p. 198, emphasis mine. Ibid., Part II, part 2, q. 64, art 2, ad 3, v. 10, p. 199. Sennett, p. 236. Sander L. Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1989), p. 261. Sennett, p. 228. Diane Owen Hughes, “Earrings for Circumcision: Distinction and Purification in the Italian Renaissance City,” in Persons in Groups, ed. Richard C. Trexler (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985), p. 161. Eugene A. Dooley, Church Law on Sacred Relics, Canon Law Studies no. 70 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1931), 6. Dooley argues that pagan practice attributes to mere bones the power and action that a person held in life. However, three pages later he acknowledges that some of the Church Fathers seem to have held that a physical causative force inheres in relics, even while he dismisses their statements as “oratorical imagery or rhetorical endeavors.” Julian, Epistulae et leges, ed. J. Bidez and F. Cumont (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1922), 194-95. Cited by Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 7.

126 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Theresa Sanders Brown, p. 5. See “The Martyrdom of Polycarp,” p. 162. Canon 1237 paragraph 2. Canon 1190 paragraph 2. St. Jerome, Ad Riparium—MPL, XXII, 907. Cited by Dooley, Church Law on Sacred Relics, p. 15. Augustine, The City of God, p. 820, emphasis mine. Ibid., p. 827. Ibid., p. 832, emphasis mine. Ibid. Vitricius, De Laude Sanctorum. Cited by Bynum, On the Resurrection, p. 107. Brown, p. 88. Dooley, Church Law on Sacred Relics, p. 3, emphasis mine. Sermo Petri Venerabilis…in honore sancti illius cuius reliquiae sunt in presenti. Cited by Caroline Walker Bynum, “Bodily Miracles and the Resurrection of the Body in the High Middle Ages,” in Belief in History, ed. Thomas Kselman (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), p. 81. Dooley, p. 4. The current Code of Canon Law does not address the issue of relics in any great detail. These distinctions are found in an older version. See T. Lincoln Bouscaren and Adam C. Ellis, Canon Law: A Text and Commentary (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1946), p. 653. See Canons 1276-1289 of the 1918 Code of Canon Law. Brown, p. 89. Vauchez, p. 19. Kenneth Woodward, Making Saints (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 39. Orientación, April 13, 1980. Cited by James R. Brockman, The Word Remains: A Life of Oscar Romero (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1982), p. 223. Ibid.

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Chapter Six The Resurrection of the Body

“We saw two yellow arms and then a head all green, cracked and full of dirt; finally the skeletonlike body wrapped in the shroud. It put forward one foot, then the other, and came out. It was Lazarus.”1 In Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the raising of Lazarus is a troubling, freakish event. Lazarus, called back from Hades by the command of Jesus, emerges from his burial cave as a monster who no longer belongs to this world, but who has been cast out from the next. After his spectacular return to life, he sits in the darkest corner of his house, his face bloated and oozing pus and his body infested with small earthworms that his sisters have to pull from his skin. Neighbors come to stare at the living corpse, and from time to time the boldest of them venture a question about his experience in the underworld: “Worms, eh? Nothing but worms?” But Lazarus does not reply. In the novel, Lazarus’s return from the dead stirs up trouble among the villagers, trouble both for him and for Jesus who raised him. One of the local politicos warns that the event will rouse the masses to follow Jesus and that then all hope for a free Jerusalem will be lost; the people will cast their eyes heavenward rather than taking a look around them and seeing the Roman oppression that keeps them poor and powerless. A plot is hatched to send Lazarus back to the underworld from which

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he came. The rationale is that if the evidence of Jesus’ extraordinary powers is destroyed, the people might forget about heaven and concentrate on this world instead. The story of Lazarus and other stories like it haunt our imaginations. No matter how much we crave immortality, the prospect of returning from the grave raises ghastly possibilities. Popular movies attest to our discomfort with the idea. In the film Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) a young wife wishes for the return of her dead husband. To her surprise he shows up one day in her living room, but her joy at seeing him is tempered by knowledge that he has changed: “Your lips are a bit cold,” she observes after their first post-grave kiss. Cold lips are the least of their problems, however. When her husband begins hanging around the house all day with several of his dead friends, watching videos and turning up the heat to keep away the chill that never seems to leave his bones, she realizes that his return from the grave is not exactly what she had imagined. By the end of the film both husband and wife come to see the impossibility of their situation, and the decision to separate once more brings a sense of relief to both of them. Similarly, in the campy, silly movie My Boyfriend’s Back (1993), a teenager finds that her dead boyfriend’s return from the grave is more trouble than it’s worth. He has come back from the dead in order to escort her to the high school prom. (True love, it seems, knows no limits.) The problem, however, is that his decaying body parts keep falling off of him throughout the movie; at one point his nose has to be reapplied using superglue. Resurrection, it would seem, is not all that it’s cracked up to be; however, it would be a mistake to imagine that the resurrection of Jesus as depicted in the Christian gospels is of a piece with these portrayals of return from the dead. The Jesus who is resurrected in the gospels is not quite the same as the dead body that was laid in the grave. His resurrection is not the mere resuscitation of a corpse. It is, rather, some kind of transformation or metamorphosis or transfiguration. The trouble comes in trying to imagine exactly what sort of change best

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describes the resurrection. The gospels not only seem to disagree with each other, but they are inconsistent even within themselves. Resurrection: The Gospel Accounts Consider, for example, the resurrected Jesus as he is portrayed in the Gospel of Mark. The first thing to note, of course, is that the original Marcan Gospel actually ended without a resurrection account. It is virtually certain that the original Gospel ended with the story of Mary Magdalene and two other women arriving at the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus. According to this version, when the three women come to the grave they are greeted by a young man dressed in a white robe who enjoins them to go and tell Peter and the disciples that Jesus is going to Galilee to meet them there: “And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid” (16:8). Scholars have disagreed among themselves as to the significance of the rather abrupt ending to Mark’s gospel. Some have speculated that Mark actually wrote a longer gospel but that the ending was somehow lost. Others argue that Mark was interrupted in his writing and did not have time to finish his text. Still others contend that the precipitant ending was a deliberate strategy used by Mark to force the reader out of the text and into the reality of the resurrected Jesus — not in words on a page would the Good News be found, but only in the reader’s relationship to the risen Lord.2 In any case, the gospel as it appears today in the New Testament does contain a depiction of the Easter appearances, an addition having been attached at some point after the original composition. In this longer ending to Mark, Mary Magdalene goes to the disciples and reports that Jesus is alive; they refuse to believe her, however, nor do they believe two others who make a similar claim. Only when Jesus appears to the eleven apostles as they are at table, and upbraids them for their faithlessness, are they convinced that he is risen. After this encounter Jesus is taken from

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their midst up into heaven to the right hand of God, though he continues to aid the disciples by performing signs to accompany their preaching of the good news. In the Gospel of Matthew, which relies heavily on Mark’s text, Mary Magdalene goes with one other woman to the tomb “to see the sepulchre.” In Matthew’s version of the story, a great earthquake then takes place, an angel descends from heaven to roll back the stone at the entrance to the tomb, the guards standing by tremble and fall like dead men, and the angel tells the women that Jesus is no longer in the tomb but will meet the disciples in Galilee. This time, the women depart not only with fear but also with great joy. Jesus himself appears to the women shortly thereafter, repeats what the angel has said, and sends them on their way. At that point the eleven apostles go to Galilee where they do indeed see Jesus, though even at this point some retain doubts that he is who he says he is. Jesus then enjoins them to go out preaching and baptizing, and to be sure that he is with them “to the close of the age.” Luke makes still other changes to Mark’s text. In his version an unspecified number of women go to the tomb and find the stone already rolled away. As they realize that the body has been removed, two men in dazzling clothing (later identified as angels) appear and remind them that Jesus predicted his own resurrection. The women go off to tell the apostles what they have seen, but they are not believed. On the same day, two disciples on their way to Emmaus encounter Jesus on the road, but they do not recognize him. Jesus interprets for them the events of the past few days, and, as they sit down at table and Jesus breaks bread, they realize his true identity, at which point he vanishes. Soon after, Jesus appears to the eleven; they are frightened and believe they see a spirit. Jesus shows them his injured hands and feet, assuring them that he is himself, “for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.” He then eats a piece of fish that the apostles offer him, interprets the scriptures for them, leads them to Bethany and is carried up into heaven.

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John’s gospel has more complex and developed resurrection appearances than the other three. John also has Mary Magdalene approach Jesus’ tomb, and when she peers inside she sees two angels. Then Jesus appears to her, although she does not recognize him at first and mistakes him for a gardener. When she realizes who he is, Jesus tells her not to hold him because he has not yet ascended to the Father. Later that day Jesus makes his way through closed doors to appear to the disciples. After he shows them his hands and his side, he breathes on them saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The apostle Thomas, who was not present at that encounter, refuses to believe that Jesus is risen until eight days later when Jesus appears again and allows Thomas to probe his wounds. Some time after that Jesus appears again, this time by the sea. The disciples do not recognize him at first, but eventually they realize who he is and they share a meal of bread and fish. What strikes the reader in even a cursory examination of these texts is how fragmented, confusing, and peculiar the appearances of Jesus are. He is in one place and then another, sometimes appearing to be himself, sometimes appearing to be someone else, and sometimes appearing to be something different altogether, a ghost or a spirit. He appears and vanishes with little or no warning, and even when he does appear his closest friends and followers are not always convinced that he has truly been raised from the dead. Moreover, the gospels’ depictions of the circumstances surrounding the appearances (the time, the place, and the people involved) vary widely. Literalism, Figuration, and the Catholic Middle How are we to understand these various depictions of the resurrected Jesus? Interpretations of the gospels have been as varied as are the gospels themselves, even among Christian theologians who take for granted that the declaration “Jesus is risen” is at least a meaningful assertion. Several key questions arise: First, should resurrection language be interpreted literally or figuratively? That is, did the resurrection “really” take place, or is it a

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rhetorical device used to convey some deeper or more “spiritual” truth? Second, what, if any, are the implications of the resurrection of Jesus for the future of ordinary human beings? What does his fate have to do with ours? And third, what are the implications of the resurrection for human life as it is lived now? Why bother about the resurrection if it is an event that took place long in the past (in the case of Jesus) or might take place in some far-distant future (in the case of the rest of humanity)? Regarding the first question, whether “resurrection” language should be interpreted literally or figuratively, it may be helpful to begin by describing the range of contemporary opinion regarding this issue. Once the various options have been laid out, it will be easier to pinpoint what is distinct in Catholic thinking. Of course, there is no one “Catholic theology” regarding the resurrection; and yet no Catholic thinker can construct an interpretation of the Easter event apart from certain definitive conciliar statements, creedal formulas, and liturgical practices. What is “Catholic” may not be uniform, but it uniformly makes reference to this body of tradition. At one end of the contemporary theological spectrum might be found the work of German thinker Willi Marxsen, whose writings when they were first published caused something of an uproar in Christian circles. Marxsen discounts the importance of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. That is, for Marxsen, the Easter miracle is not what happened two thousand years ago to the corpse of Jesus but is rather Christians’ ongoing experience of the call to faith. He observes that Jesus’ mission during his lifetime was to draw people to a closer bond with the God in whom they placed their trust. When Jesus died, presumably his mission (insofar as it was his) would have died with him. However, what the Gospels give witness to is the fact that even after Jesus’ death, the apostles continued to experience his invitation to faith. Indeed, they experienced the invitation even more deeply than before, gathering together with renewed energy and commitment to spread the good news of the kingdom. How this deeper faith was touched off after the events of Good Friday is, in Marxsen’s view, unimportant. He is clear, however, that it would be

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a mistake to imagine that the faith came simply as a result of seeing the re-animated body of Jesus. For Marxsen, the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is not an account of the cause of the disciples’ new-found faith; it is, rather, a way of expressing that faith itself. He writes, “If I experience my finding of faith as a miracle and if I express this miraculous character by saying that ‘Jesus is risen,’ I cannot by doing so say any more than the early church said when it used the phrase. It is a legitimate question, however, whether one is therefore bound to express what one means in this way.” He suggests other formulations of the same insight, formulations such as “The cause of Jesus continues,” or “Still he comes today.”3 Both of these phrases are meant to express the disciples’ experience (and indeed the experience of all subsequent Christians) of being offered a challenge and a promise that come from beyond themselves but that are more intimate to them than any of their own projects and desires could ever be. Moreover, contends Marxsen, these articulations have the advantage of avoiding the kind of misinterpretations that the phrase “Jesus is risen” are prone to. They do not lend themselves to an unsophisticated literalism or to an unreflective naïvete. In its separation of the physical resurrection of Jesus from the Easter miracle, Marxsen’s work is similar to that of deconstructionist exegete John Dominic Crossan, whose book Jesus is subtitled “A Revolutionary Biography.” Like Marxsen, Crossan believes that the significance of Easter lay in the fact that the disciples still experienced Jesus’ call to them even after Good Friday: “Those who had originally experienced divine power through his vision and his example continued to do so after his death.”4 Also like Marxsen, Crossan contends that resurrection language was only one way that the disciples used to articulate Jesus’ ongoing presence in their lives. He argues that, though the disciples spoke of “the living Jesus,” and though they looked forward to the future coming of Christ in power and glory, they did not necessarily connect these hopes with a belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus’ corpse. Unlike Marxsen, however, Crossan maintains that it matters very much what happened to the physical body of Jesus after his crucifixion. Crossan

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says this not because he is interested in tracing the corpse’s journey from death to Easter life, but rather because of his conviction that the treatment of Jesus’ body is indicative of the socio-political nature of Jesus’ whole mission. To gloss over the grisly details of his death would be to miss the point of his life. The central message of Jesus, in Crossan’s interpretation, was that of a “brokerless kingdom” in which individuals would relate directly with one another and with God. This kingdom is radically egalitarian and thus disruptive of the ancient systems of family loyalty and political patronage. Crossan explains that by challenging the very structures on which Roman society rested, Jesus virtually assured his own death by crucifixion, a horrible type of execution that the Romans reserved for military enemies and political miscreants. In Crossan’s view, it is important to stress that the body of Jesus most likely underwent the same fate as did the bodies of all other political criminals. It was either left on the cross to be scavenged by birds, or it was buried in a shallow grave to be eaten by dogs. Jesus’ body, then, is significant not because it was raised in a miraculous intervention by God, but because it was subject to the same torture and disgrace that others who challenged the social and political regimes of the time faced. To ignore this fate would be to miss the real historical implications of Jesus’ life and message and to replace the challenge of the kingdom with the comfort of wishful thinking. Despite his emphasis on the importance of Jesus’ body, however, Crossan is clear, like Marxsen, that “Easter” is an event in the lives of the disciples rather than in the life of Jesus. If for these two theologian-exegetes the resurrection event is not defined in terms of Jesus’ bodily reanimation, at the other end of the theological spectrum is the Christian fundamentalist conviction that Easter is precisely that physical restoration. In the fundamentalist view, the resurrection of Jesus was an event that occurred in time and space: at a particular moment that could be measured by a clock, and at a particular site that could be located on a map. It would have been observable by anyone who happened to be passing by, and it could have

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been captured in its entirety by the lens of a video camera if one had been available at that time. For fundamentalist Christians, if the corpse of Jesus did not physically come back to life: if Jesus’ blood did not begin flowing through his veins and his nerve cells wake up and begin tingling again: if his skin did not regain its warmth and his eyes their sight, then the Gospels are a lie and Christianity a travesty. If Jesus’ body was not rescued by God from the grave, then what hope do any other mortals have? Why have faith in Jesus if his fate was merely that of everyone else? If Christ be not literally raised, says fundamentalism, then Christian faith is in vain. An interesting parallel to the Christian fundamentalist position can be found in Frank J. Tipler’s recent work, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. Tipler describes himself as an atheist, and his basic premise is that theology as it stands is nonsense. If theology is to have any meaning at all, he says, it must understand itself as a branch of physics. His thesis is that theological notions of the resurrection of the dead must be read as scientific predictions regarding the course of the physical universe rather than as religious claims about an immortal soul or a “glorified” body. According to Tipler, whose book at times reads more like science fiction than like science, human evolution is driving towards what he calls an Omega Point, or towards the completion of all finite existence. This Omega Point, which he describes as both changing and unchanging, as both immanent and transcendent, and as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, will include all possible knowledge, including knowledge of all possible life forms. Since every human being is slightly different, for the Omega Point’s knowledge to be complete, it must include knowledge of every single individual who has ever existed or will ever exist. Thus, every single person will exist in the future in that knowledge of every person will exist in the Omega Point. More specifically, Tipler writes, “This, then, is the physical mechanism of individual resurrection: we shall be emulated in the computers of the far future.”5 Machines that are now only barely imaginable will re-create

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us down to the length of our toenails and the memories in our heads. Moreover, such emulations will not be merely copies; Tipler argues that “the essence of identity of two entities which exist at different times lies in the (sufficiently close) identity of their patterns. Physical continuity is irrelevant.”6 As long as we look like ourselves, think and act like ourselves, and experience ourselves like ourselves, we will in fact be ourselves. After all, Tipler notes, even during the normal course of life, a person’s body is not physically the same from one moment to the next. Given that fact, it should not strike us as problematic that we and our computer re-creations will not be physically continuous, as long as those future selves are sufficiently like us so as to be recognizably us. Tipler’s scenario may seem light-years away from fundamentalist notions of the resuscitation of Jesus’ corpse. After all, Tipler does not accept the Christian Gospels as authoritative, and he does not believe their accounts of the resurrection of Jesus to be true. (He explains, “There is an enormous amount of fraud in reports of strange events.”7) However, the two versions actually have much in common. For both, the resurrection is an entirely physical event which could be verified by any observer. It is an objective occurrence whose reality would be manifest to anyone who witnessed it. Whereas for Marxsen and Crossan, “resurrection” is only a meaningful term for those who experience an ongoing call to faith, the fundamentalist approach and Tipler’s as well is to understand resurrection as something accessible in principle to everyone. It is an unusual occurrence to be sure, in that our normal experience does not lead us to expect dead men to come to life again or computers to be so advanced as to be able to achieve exact copies of our selves. Nevertheless, the event is describable in the language that we use to recount other unusual events: this happens, then this, then this, and so on. It is somewhere in between these two poles of the theological spectrum that most Catholic thinkers situate themselves. Like Marxsen and Crossan, most Catholic theologians agree that the Easter stories as they are presented in the Gospels are not literal accounts of an historical event. Like fundamentalist Christians, however, they wish to preserve some con-

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nection between the Easter proclamation that “He is risen” and the body of Jesus that died on the cross. It is not enough for these thinkers to say that the “cause” or the “power” or the “presence” of Jesus continues; this cause and power and presence must be connected in some way to the flesh that was seen and touched by Jesus’ disciples during his lifetime. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, “Christ is raised with his own body,” though it goes on to acknowledge that in the resurrection Jesus “did not return to an earthly life.”8 In answer to the first question, then, which asked whether resurrection language should be interpreted literally or figuratively, Catholic thought runs in both directions simultaneously. Jesus was raised both literally (it was his body that was raised) and figuratively (not in a way that is subject to our usual descriptive categories). It accepts the words of the risen Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself ” (Luke 24:39). At the same time, however, it insists that something more than the simple reanimation of a corpse has taken place. The conviction underlying this apparent contradiction is that the resurrection of Jesus is fundamentally an eschatological event. What happened/ happens to Jesus after his death takes place in a still-to-come dimension of Christian history, in a kingdom that is “not-yet.” It occurs as an irruption into the normal stream of human events, affecting that stream but not being swept into it. Because it takes place in God’s time, as it were, normal temporal categories break down. Normal spatial categories break down as well, and the gospels strain to express the transformed physicality of the risen body. For example, Jesus is recognized as himself by his apostles but is greeted as a stranger by disciples on the road to Emmaus. He eats fish for breakfast and yet can walk through locked doors. The Catholic understanding of “resurrection,” then, is that it is a mapping of the edges of the Easter faith experience and at the same time a deliberate subversion of that map. The eschatological dimension of the resurrection refuses the sameness of history; after Easter, the life of Jesus does not simply go on as it did before. On the other hand, neither is

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Easter the “end” of history if that word is understood as a kind of culmination or completion, like a train that has reached its final destiny. On the contrary, the eschatological dimension of Easter is precisely the opening up of history to itself, that is, to its own indeterminacy. Perhaps something of an explanation here will help. In his book Erring, Mark C. Taylor makes the claim that “The Christian drama consists of five acts: Creation, Fall, Incarnation, Crucifixion/Resurrection, and Redemption.”9 Each of these acts, he says, is plotted along a continuous narrative line that moves from hope to despair and then finally to victory, the happy ending that every story longs for. The problem with such a plotting of events, according to Taylor, is that “the affirmation of the perfection of the end entails the denial of everything that falls short of the telos….”10 Anything less than fulfillment and plenitude is seen as inadequate and insufficient: and, indeed, even as sinful. And yet, Taylor’s inclusion of both crucifixion and resurrection on the same historical continuum is not at all what is understood in a Catholic interpretation of these events. As I noted before, in a Catholic view the resurrection of Jesus has an historical dimension in that, first, it is somehow connected to the historical body of Jesus, and, second, Jesus is able to appear to his disciples at certain times and places. However, it is not merely an historical occurrence: Jesus is not raised into more of the same but into something radically new, something so unimaginable that the gospels themselves can only describe it by using language that is strange and perplexing. In the Easter event, history itself is made strange and perplexing. It is reckoned in paradox and contradiction rather than in plot. There is no “plot” to Easter; there are only appearances and disappearances, disguises and mistaken identities, inconsistencies and overturned expectations. Easter is the disruption of history. It makes history tremble. Similarly, redemption does not simply belong to the order of history. It has an historical dimension in that Catholic tradition claims that all creation will be drawn up into it. But it is not identifiable with any particular set of circumstances or events. It is not as if one could look at a point in history

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and say, “There, there is redemption.” Redemption is always something other than history. It does not promise that the stream of events that make up our histories will have this or that outcome. What it shows is that there is always something other than that stream of events. In other words, redemption opens up what Derrida calls “the tone of the ‘Come.’” “‘Come’” says Derrida, “no more lets itself be arranged [arraisonner] by an onto-theo-eschatology than by a logic of the event, however new they may be and whatever politics they announce.”11 Come (viens) explains John Caputo, “is the order, or disorder, of messianic time…that disturbs the order of presence, that hollows it out, so that what is coming does not, never did, never can correspond to presence and presence cannot close over.”12 Come is “a certain structural wakefulness or openness to an impossible breach of the present, shattering the conditions of possibility, by which we are presently circumscribed.”13 Because it is not simply in the order of history, but shows history to be a construction and a strategy, redemption acts as a perpetual intervention into history’s own ambitions. It is always a promise yet to be fulfilled, or, in Derrida’s words, an “apocalypse without apocalypse.”14 What is revealed in the apocalypse (from the Greek for “disclose”) is that there is always more to come. The problem, of course, is that this basic insight, the insight that resurrection and redemption (and God for that matter) are not and never will be what we think, is lost again and again in Catholic history. Over and over we turn the structurally unimaginable into the merely mundane. One sees this clearly in Christian theologies of the resurrection. Throughout Catholic history there has been a tendency to interpret resurrection not as a way of disrupting the narratives we construct, but rather as one more among those narratives, complete with costumes and scenery. This is particularly true when what is being imagined is not simply the resurrection of Jesus, but the general resurrection of humankind. If Catholic tradition has held to the conviction that the body of Jesus was raised up into glory, it has also insisted that what happened to Jesus will happen to every single person. The resurrection of Jesus, for Catholic

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faith, was not a fluke or an anomaly. In Catholic thinking it is the firstfruits of a collective future: “All the dead will rise, ‘those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.’”15 It must be emphasized that this resurrection is not just of a soul or spirit but of a body: “[W]e believe in the resurrection of the flesh, the fulfillment of both the creation and the redemption of the flesh.”16 I say that this point must be emphasized because, curiously, it does not seem to be the belief of many contemporary Catholics. As I noted in the last chapter, a surprising number of Catholics do not believe that in the afterlife their bodies will have any role to play. Pointing out that, after all, the Gospels do not just talk about the resurrection of a disembodied soul but include stories of Jesus’ empty tomb, strikes many people as an irrelevant consideration. What happened to Jesus, they argue, happened to him because he was God. Ordinary human beings, they maintain, will not have their bodies raised up. Ordinary people will have to make do with just their souls in heaven. Nonetheless, a general resurrection of the dead is precisely what Catholic tradition maintains will occur “at the last day”: and not just a resurrection of the dead, but of these very human bodies of ours. The Second Council of Lyons affirmed, in 1274, “We believe also in the true resurrection of this flesh, which we now bear.”17 This belief, though it seem absurd to contemporary sensibilities, is a basic part of Catholic tradition. It declares that however unimaginable our life in the eschaton may be, it will nonetheless be our life. However, this belief has been interpreted in ways that are highly problematic. For example, we saw earlier how third-century writer Tertullian was sympathetic to heretics’ horror of the flesh. He understood their dread of bodies’ decay into slime and dust, and their anguish at the thought of the body’s identity dissolving into a final “death of designation.” Tertullian could bear such indignities more easily than his heretical counterparts, though, because for him that dissolution was not the final word. In the resurrection to come, he contended, all that was lost would be restored.

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The waters of the ocean, the flames of the pyre, the gullets of birds and the bellies of beasts — these were merely “vessels” in which the particles of the human person were being stored. At the coming of the Lord these vessels would pour forth their contents and the bodies of the dead would be reassembled bit by bit until they were whole and entire. In his treatise “On the Resurrection,” Tertullian considered why it is that God wishes to raise up the bodies of the dead, given that souls are able to subsist without them. His answer was that since both body and soul cooperate in sin while a person is alive, both must stand judgment on the Last Day. Tertullian’s opponents were correct, he conceded, that it was silly to think that in heaven we will have need of bodies to perform the same functions as they do now. In heaven mouths will not eat, and genitals will not propagate children. Nonetheless, new functions will be found for these organs, insisted Tertullian, for in heaven there will be no idleness.18 Thus he in fact acknowledged that the body that will be resurrected in glory will not be exactly identical to the one that died. On this subject, Tertullian labored to explain how it is that our bodies will be altered but will nonetheless be the same bodies. He assured his readers that “changes, conversions, and reformations will necessarily take place to bring about the resurrection, but the substance of the flesh will still be preserved safe.”19 What changes do take place, he said, will not so radically transmute the body that it is no longer itself. In considering the precise nature of these changes, one of Tertullian’s primary concerns was that in the life to come there will be nothing missing from the resurrected body: “If God raises not men entire, He raises not the dead.” God’s honor, in other words, is vouchsafed by the intactness of our heavenly bodies. Again: “If we are changed for glory, how much more for integrity!”20 For God to glorify only part of the body would be to leave the resurrection only half-finished. This is true so much so that when considering the blind, the lame, the palsied, and the scarred, Tertullian declared that these faithful would be raised without any infirmities in their bodies. The natural state of

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human beings, he reasoned, is wholeness; therefore, “Any loss sustained by our bodies is an accident to them, but their entirety is their natural property.”21 Even those who are born with missing organs or limbs are, in their essence, whole. Whatever deformities took place in the womb are losses inflicted upon a more fundamental and essentially unassailable integrity. In the resurrection, then, we will be even more ourselves than we were in earthly life. These sentiments are echoed in the writings of medieval philosopher Peter Lombard. Peter, in his Sentences, considers such questions as whether or not aborted fetuses will be resurrected, what height people will have in the resurrection and what age they will be, and whether or not the body’s bits of matter will be resurrected into the exact same places they held in the earthly body. Of particular interest is his discussion of the processes of eating and excreting: exactly what are our bodies if they are constantly being added to by ingestion and subtracted from by elimination? Behind this discussion is the problem faced by the early Christians: if our bodies were to be eaten by beasts, would we then become the bodies of those beasts? And if so, how then could we be raised at the resurrection? Even more problematic: if I were to be eaten by a cannibal, how could both I and the cannibal be resurrected? If my body has become part of the cannibal’s, and if all people are called forth at the resurrection, then it would seem that either I or my consumer could be raised up, but not both of us at once. The answer Peter Lombard gives to these dilemmas is that each one of us is composed of material that has been passed down from the first human being, Adam: “It can be answered that, materially and causally not formally, everything is said to have been in the first man which is naturally in human bodies.”22 This original material is able miraculously to expand without the aid of external sources, such that even if a child were to die immediately after being born, he or she would be resurrected into a thirty-year-old’s body (thirty being the perfect age). What is at stake here for Lombard is the stability of the complete, intact body. If it were allowed that food added something of substance to our

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bodies, then accounting for all of the various bodies that we have been would be an impossible task. Moreover, the essence of our bodies would be threatened. If bodies are composed of the varieties of nutrients that are consumed by and pass through our bodies, might it not be possible for a single body to undergo such complete transformation throughout its lifetime that the body at death is no longer the body that was born? And if this were true, then which body would be raised up? The problem was so acute that another medieval thinker went so far as to conclude that though food in some sense nourishes the body, it is not converted into the body.23 When it came time to envision the bodies of those resurrected into glory, Peter believed that they would be raised with all of their members to the same height and weight that they were in life. They would also retain the same gender as they had in life. More significantly, like Tertullian, he believed that “the bodies of the saints will rise without any defect, shining like the sun, all deformities they had here being cut off….”24 The problem with this vision, and with the thousands of others like it that have characterized Christian thinking on the resurrection, is that they perpetuate an understanding of perfection as a kind of stasis in which identity folds in upon itself and otherness is excluded. These images of the life to come are nearly suffocating in their longing for wholeness and sameness. They offer a future in which there is nothing still to come. They replace the strangeness of the resurrection with the comfort and security of more of the same. Such a vision of the afterlife does not take into consideration the endurance of the wounds of Jesus. Human bodies, we are told, will be repaired and perfected: “To nature, not to injury, are we restored.”25 But the body of Jesus remains broken. This discrepancy is puzzling. One Medieval thinker who apparently was aware of the inconsistency was thirteenth century German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg. In her book, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Mechthild records a number of visions she was shown by God, beginning in her adolescence and lasting for several decades. In one of her visions she sees the Lord Jesus, standing with his wounds bloody and unbandaged, waiting to enact the justice of

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God. Moved by the sight, Mechthild remarks that the wounds of Jesus will remain unhealed as long as sinning continues on the earth. Only after the Last Judgment will the sores close over, “as though a rose petal had been placed on the spot of the wound.”26 Even then, however, the sores will not disappear completely. They will form bright red scars that will never fade, the red symbolizing Jesus’ eternal love. Mechthild does not envision the total healing of Jesus’ wounds. This is in contrast to the future that she predicts for all others; she rhapsodizes that, after the last judgment, “Whoever enters God’s kingdom/ Is free of all infirmity.”27 The kingdom, she believes, will heal all sickness and injury. Why, then, do Jesus’ wounds, or at least his scars, persist? Resurrection and Exaltation One might argue that, as Mechthild believed, the resurrected Jesus has not yet been fully transformed, that more change awaits him after the Judgment to come. There is evidence in the Gospel of Mark that some early Christians envisioned a two-step process in the transformation of Jesus: his resurrection, and his subsequent exaltation at the Parousia. Explains Jesus in the Gospel, “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened…Then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory” (13:24, 26). However, if this were the expectation of some early Christian communities, it was not the conviction of the developing Christian tradition. It did not take long before the resurrection came to be in some sense identified with the Parousia. That is, the resurrection came to be seen in itself as the definitive revelation of God. History would continue, true, and it would continue to move towards some moment in the future when what happened to Jesus would happen to all of creation. But Christians came to be convinced that in Jesus they had encountered the living God, and in the risen Jesus they had encountered God’s definitive word. “Christ’s body” affirms the Catholic Catechism, “was glorified at the moment of his Resurrection, as proved by the new and supernatural

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properties it subsequently and permanently enjoys.”28 But if the body has already and permanently been glorified, then the question we must address now (at last!) is what those unhealed wounds in the glorified Jesus might mean. What is their significance for theology — and for human lives? On the End of the World Indeed, what can be the significance for human life here and now of any eschatological claims? If, as the Catholic tradition has maintained, Jesus was raised not just in but out from history and into timelessness, mystery and incomprehensibility, then what can language possibly have to say about the risen Lord? What role can language play in accounting for an event that is, from the standpoint of timelessness, un-event-ful? Here we encounter the problem that haunts all of deconstruction, the problem that surrounds Derrida’s famous assertion that “There is nothing outside of the text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte.)”29 If, as Derrida seems to be saying, all we have is language, that is, if all is text, then how can we even imagine what is outside the structures that make language meaningful, most notably, outside of time and history? If language is all there is, then language must be truly dumbfounded when it comes to such concepts as resurrection, redemption, and eschatology. These ideas must be shown to be literally unthinkable. However, the claim of deconstruction is not that language is all there is, but rather that insofar as anything can appear to us (that is, appear in language) it appears already marked (depleted? hollowed out?) by the structures of signification and as other than itself. We never have access to the full presence of what language points to. Such fullness is perpetually inaccessible because, as soon as it is represented to us, it is represented in a chain of signifiers that are not identical to itself. What language does, then, continually and necessarily, is show its own limits. The structure of signification, the structure by which any word both indicates and is not what it means, always enacts the limits of signification.

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No word is what it points to; therefore, we are always on the way towards what we cannot speak about. But this being-on-the-way occurs within language itself. In other words, what is unthinkable appears precisely within the structures of thinking, albeit always in a mode of withdrawal. Writes Derrida, “The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the ‘other’ and the ‘other of language’…Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other.”30 If it is true that language is constantly seeking its other, then words like “resurrection” and “redemption” are language exhibiting this search most clearly and intensely. As words, they, like all words, signify what cannot be represented. As words whose very definition is precisely that which is beyond representation, they are language exposing itself. They are words that intensify the experience of both limitation and longing for something other. They make plain language’s structure. They exhibit its failure to live up to its own aspirations. Both the structure and the failure are necessary for language to perform its act of signification. There is a heterogeneity, that is, in the act of meaning. Words mean both by making reference to other words and by invoking what cannot appear in words — Derrida’s “other of language.” All systems of signification share in this doubled movement of “yes” and “no.” Words whose very definition is that otherness, words like “resurrection” and “redemption” (and “God” for that matter) enact yet another, parallel heterogeneity. They must both find a home among the world of signifiers that make up our language, and simultaneously declare their alien status — that they are in that world but not of it. As language in its clearest manifestation, these “levers of intervention”31 explicitly deny their allegiance to human systems of meaning even as they make manifest those very systems. They enact this double function by using language and images strangely. The Easter Jesus, Catholic theology proclaims, is both identical to his earthly self and glorified by the resurrection. Redemption, the catechism reminds, is both historical and eschatological. The two claims must be made at once. If there is no continuity between the earthly Jesus and the

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resurrected Jesus, then language can only fail. If there is only continuity between them, language can only speak about more of the same. By teaching that Jesus’ human body is raised by God into the eschaton, Catholics both describe how humans live, love, and know (that is, bodily), and point to an “outside” of that structure. It would seem that resurrection/redemption language would be enough to signal this perpetual otherness, to remind its users that the present is never presence fulfilled and that there is always something more to hope for. It would seem that the strangeness of the Gospel accounts would stand as a witness to the fact that to be human is to long for something other than ourselves, and that this is what it means to have faith in the resurrection. The fact is that, again and again, Christianity has managed to enfold resurrection and redemption into the narratives of its own history. Christians use the language of resurrection as if there is no difficulty at all as to its meaning, drawing it into one seamless story-line that can be told from beginning to end without even a change of scenery. What remains, then, to jog the Catholic memory, to call it back to the humility of a love that does not know what it loves? What remains to break open the stories that we tell ourselves and to disturb the identities that we forge for ourselves and then worship? The answer is those wounds in Jesus’ body. Is that enough? We want our wishes to be realized and our ways made straight, our gaps filled up and our identities firmed up. Is it enough to say that what the resurrected body of Jesus offers us is desire and restlessness, the grace of ongoing incompletion? Longing and risk — is that all there is? Whatever happened to the promise of heaven? What ever happened to the beatific vision, in which, according to the Catechism, “Thirst for God is quenched by the water of eternal life”?32 One must of course be careful here, for to say too much about the visio beatifica would be to fall into the same trap to which Tertullian and Peter Lombard fell prey. It would be to ignore the deliberately exotic language of eschatology and to replace it with words that have forgotten their own strangeness. And yet, some reckoning must be made with that final mystery

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that Catholicism has held up as “the goal of our journey here below.”33 In heaven, says Catholic tradition, we shall no longer see as through a glass darkly, but we shall see God face to face. In heaven there will be no more puzzles, or questions or seeming absurdities, the torments of our life here on earth. The promise of heaven is a promise of presence, completion, and final rest. Or is it? For Catholic theology does not claim that in the beatific vision we will be God, but only that “God himself will be the goal of our desires; we shall contemplate him without end, love him without surfeit, praise him without weariness.”34 In other words, what is beatific about this final vision is that nothing will interfere with our longing for and attention to God. Still ourselves (whatever that may come to mean), still marked by finitude or, as Catholic tradition would put it, creatureliness, in the beatific vision we will know ever more intensely those longings that draw us out of ourselves towards that which is other than ourselves. Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, using his characteristic language of Geheimnis (Mystery), maintains that God will remain mysterious to us even in the visio beatifica and that to say otherwise would be to deny that we really and truly experience God in this world. That is, if God appears to us now as Mystery, but will appear in the future as the Mystery “cleared up,” as it were, then we could not say (as Rahner does) that God is in fact a part of our experience now. If what we know now is discontinuous with what we will know then, the claim that in this life what we receive is truly God’s grace is a lie. Rahner argues that it is inappropriate to hold that our knowledge of God now is “of the concealed and hence only vaguely suspected,” and that at our deaths it will be “of the revealed and hence perspicuous.” Rather, he maintains, “The contrast is between immediate sight of the mystery itself and the merely indirect presence of the mystery after the manner of the distant and aloof.”35 The beatific vision, then, is not a stasis in which knowledge and its object finally and fully correspond. It is not the merging of signifier and signified, such that language comes to an end in a combustion of mean-

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ing. It is, rather, an ever-deepening of the desire that we know here and now. Philosopher John Caputo describes that desire this way: When something unforeseeable and unknowable, unpossessable and impossible drives us mad, when the tout autre becomes the goal without goal, the object without object, of a dream and a desire that renounces its own momentum of appropriation, when the impossible is the object of our love and passion, is that not what we mean by “my God”?36 To say “My God” in the beatific vision is to say “yes” to the intensities of love that nearly killed the saints. It is to plunge into the madness that overtook the martyrs when they surrendered not only their lives but the very meaning of those lives towards what they loved but could not ever understand. It is, finally, to be torn open like the body of Jesus, eternally laid bare to whatever comes, and to whoever comes. Prays Rahner, “Slowly a light is beginning to dawn. I’m beginning to understand something I have known for a long time: You are still in the process of Your coming.”37 How could we ask for anything more?

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Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, trans. P. A. Bien (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 369. For a summary and analysis of contemporary thinking regarding the Easter texts in the New Testament, see Robert H. Smith, Easter Gospels: The Resurrection of Jesus According to the Four Evangelists (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1983). Willi Marxsen, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 141. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994), 197. Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality (New York: Doubleday, 1994), p. 220. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 311. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 282, no. 999. Taylor, Erring, p. 65. Ibid., 156 Derrida, “Of An Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John P. Leavy, Jr., in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 65. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 86. Ibid., p. 96. Derrida, “Of An Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” p. 66. Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 282, no. 998. The passage quotes John 5:29. Ibid., p. 287, no. 1015. Denzinger, p. 184, no. 464. Tertullian, “On the Resurrection of the Flesh,” chapter 60, p. 592. Ibid., chapter 55, p. 589. Ibid., chapter 57, p. 589. Ibid. Peter Lombard, Sentences, Bk. 2, d.30, chapter 14, art. 2, vol. 1. Cited by Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, p. 125.

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23. See Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, p. 127. 24. Peter Lombard, Sentences, vol. 2. Cited by Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, p. 123. 25. Tertullian, “On the Resurrection of the Flesh,” chapter 57, p. 590. 26. Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Bk. 2, chapter 3, trans. Frank Tobin, The Classics of Western Spirituality series (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), p. 72. 27. Ibid., Bk. 7, chapter 57, p. 327. 28. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 189, no. 659. 29. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158. 30. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” interview by Richard Kearney in Dialogues With Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 123-24. 31. The phrase is Charles Winquist’s. 32. Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 672, no. 2557. 33. Ibid., 50, no 163. 34. Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 671, no. 2550. The Catechism is citing Augustine, The City of God, Book 22, section 30. 35. Rahner, “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology,” Theological Investigations, v. 4, More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), p. 55. 36. Caputo, p. 332. 37. Rahner, Encounters With Silence, p. 85.

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Index

Adam, 49, 55, 142 Agape, 25, 28, 30, 42 Alacoque, Margaret Mary, 67-68 Altarity, 20, 69 Alterity, 22, 28, 31, 34, 36-37, 41-42, 80 Analogy of being, 6 Angela of Foligno, 58, 63-66, 71, 82, 86, 91-94 Angels, 6, 130-31 Apocalypse, 10, 139 Apollinaris, 39 Athanasius, 55 Augustine, 10, 26, 49-50, 87, 11112 Baptism, 49-50, 112, 130 Beatific Vision, 147-49 Beckwith, Sarah, 65 Being, 6-9, 22-25, 29, 51, 83-85 Blood, 3, 19, 37, 51-54, 58, 65, 75-76, 94, 112, 121, 123 of Jesus, 13-14, 22, 31, 47-50, 55-57, 61-64, 69, 135, 143 Bobbitt, Lorena, 103 Brown, Peter, 110 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 60 Caputo, John, 139, 149 Catherine of Genoa, 82 Catherine of Siena, 82 Charlot, L., 27

Church, 13, 14, 21, 39-40, 48-50, 53-54, 56-58, 65, 67, 77, 106, 117, 122, 133, 137 Cioran, Emile, 75-76 Circumcision, 108 Cloud of Unknowing, 7, 87, 91 Concomitance, 113 Constantinople, Council of, 39 Contagion, 48, 62, 64-65, 76 Creation, 10, 70, 138, 140, 144 Crossan, John Dominic, 133-34, 136 Cyprian, 48-49, 53 Death, 15, 51-52, 75, 90-92, 95, 99-104, 108-09, 122-24 of God, 7-8, 23 of Jesus, 14, 21, 29-30, 38, 40, 50, 53-56, 63, 65 Decay, 99, 101-03, 106, 108, 11213, 116, 128, 140 Deconstruction, 7, 12, 13, 20, 83, 120, 133, 145-46 Derrida, Jacques, 23, 139, 145-46 Descartes, René, 8-9, 32 Desire, 14, 16, 34, 36, 43, 51, 69, 76, 80-82, 84-89, 91-92, 95, 118, 147-49 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 99-102, 124 Eiseley, Loren, 19 Elie, Paul, 49

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Epektasis, 28 Ethics, 33-34, 76 Eucharist, 13, 20, 22, 25-31, 3842, 49, 62, 68, 92, 110, 113, 123 Eve, 49, 55 Faces of Death, 108 Fall, 70, 138 Favazza, Armando, 94 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 33, 51 Fundamentalism, 134-36 Gaze, 23-24 Gertrude of Helfta, 59, 61-64, 71 Girard, René, 50-54, 56-57, 65 Gnostic, 21, 39 Gregory of Nyssa, 103 Heart of Jesus, 14, 47-48, 58-59, 61, 63, 66-69, 86 Hebrews, Letter to, 54-55 Heidegger, Martin, 23, 80 Icon, 5, 23-24, 26, 100 Idolatry, 14, 23-28, 37, 43 Ignatius of Antioch, 30, 104 Incarnation, 30, 41, 55, 138 Infection, 71, 106 Jews, 31, 52-53, 107-108 John, Gospel of, 6, 11, 14, 48-49, 71, 101, 31 John of the Cross, 7 Julian, Emperor, 109 Julian of Norwich, 59-60 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 127-28 Kenosis, 15, 95, 124

Lateran IV, Council of, 6, 25 Lestat, Vampire, 47 Levinas, Emmanuel, 23 Logocentrism, 7, 146 Logos, 5, 11 Lonergan, Bernard, 82, 84 Love, 14-15, 25-26, 28-29, 34, 3638, 40, 42-43, 56, 58, 65, 67-69, 71, 79-80, 86-87, 91-92, 124, 144, 147-49 Luke, Gospel of, 130, 137 Luther, Martin, 25-26 Lyons II, Council of, 140 Marion, Jean-Luc, 22-31, 37, 42 Mark, Gospel of, 129-30, 144 Martyrdom, 4, 29-30, 35, 61, 66, 90-91, 104-5, 109-13, 116-17, 119, 121, 123 Marx, Karl, 9, 33 Marxsen, Willi, 132-34, 136 Mary of Egypt, 77-80 Materiality, 4, 6, 9, 12, 33, 38, 4142, 108, 114-117 Matthew, Gospel of, 130 Mechthild of Magdeburg, vii, 59, 143-44 Milk, 37, 59-61 Miracle, 100-02, 111-12, 132-33 My Boyfriend’s Back, 128 Mystici Corporis Christi, 40, 53 Narrative, 10, 77-79, 90, 115, 13839, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 33 Omega Point, 135 Other, the, 28, 35-36, 38, 79-82, 89

Body and Belief Pain, 14-15, 35-37, 41, 63, 65, 7576, 78-80, 86, 89, 91-95 Paraethics, 33 Parousia, 144 Pascal, Blaise, 2 Passion of Jesus, 30, 56, 60, 64, 67-68 Paul, Saint, 15, 31, 37, 40, 50, 55 Penance, 95 Peter Abelard, 55 Peter Lombard, 105, 142-43, 147 Peter the Venerable, 115 Pieta, 38 Pius X, 11 Pius XII, 40, 53 Polycarp, 29, 90, 110 Postmodernity, 5, 9-13, 20, 37, 69, 76, 120 Praesentia, 113, 120 Rahner, Karl, 8, 41, 58, 78, 82-86, 148-49 Razor’s Edge, 21 Redemption, 60, 70-71, 86, 13840, 146-47 Relics, 15, 49, 65, 99-100, 109-24 Reparation, 14, 67-69 Resurrection, 5, 15, 30, 40, 68, 71, 103-05, 108, 112, 115, 117-18, 124, 127-47 Romero, Oscar, 122-24 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 10-11 Sacrifice, 15, 25, 29, 53-56, 123 Saints, 5, 14-15, 34-36, 38, 42, 75-82, 87-91, 93-95, 99, 101, 110-24 Scarry, Elaine, 2-4, 12-13, 38

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Schoonenberg, Piet, 27 Sennett, Richard, 89 Sontag, Susan, 66 Subjectivity, 8-9, 32-34, 37, 43, 69, 84-85, 87, 93-94 Syphilis, 107 Taylor, Mark C., 20, 69-70, 88, 138 Teresa, Mother, 42, 111 Teresa of Avila, 79-80, 93, 95 Tertullian, 49-50, 103-05, 122, 140-41, 143, 147 Thomas, Apostle, 71, 131 Thomas Aquinas, 6, 82, 106 Thomson, David, 93 Tipler, Frank J., 135-36 Transubstantiation, 14, 25-28, 42, 113 Truly, Madly, Deeply, 128 Vatican II, Council of, 82 Violence, 36-38, 42, 50-54, 56-58, 65, 69 Winquist, Charles, 32-37, 41 Wound, 3-4, 37, 66, 70, 81, 86, 95 Wounds of Jesus, 14, 47-50, 57, 60, 62-65, 69, 71, 131, 143-45, 147 Wycliffe, John, 26 Wyschogrod, Edith, 34-37, 41, 7682, 84, 115 Zwingli, Huldreich, 26