Saturday, November 25, 2006

Wrenched Out of Their Histories

While we are still keeping "Emile Blauche" in our thoughts [see post just below this one] and trying to determine his actual state of affairs, consider this a brief intermission:

Some may recall that, early in September, under the post "Once More Into the Breach of the Anglo-Saxon Mind," I shared a draft of a paper I presented at the 2006 Kalamazoo Congress, titled "The Old English Seven Sleepers, Eros, and the Incorporable Infinite of the Human Person," which I am now developing into an article for a subsidium volume of the Old English Newsletter, edited by Robin Norris, devoted to the four anonymous Old English saints' lives interpolated into AElfric's Lives of Saints. I would like to share portions of that article as I am writing it, and welcome any critical feedback.

The ultimate aim of the article [and by the way, I am lousy at stating a thesis and prefer to work inductively, but never mind that] is to show how the Old English Seven Sleepers are bodies--sleeping/never martyred bodies, to be literal about it, who are not yet disembodied, rising souls--who carry forward in time a specific cultural memory; their “resurrection” is a resurrection, not of bodies, but of memory and the ability to speak memory, and to bear witness to a certain erotic attachment to the world and feeling subjectivity which is necessary for the development of an individual soul that could incline itself toward god while alive [a somewhat heretical idea, perhaps?]; the Seven Sleepers are mourners of the world, Ephesus, and the the tortured/killed Christians, that make their spiritual subjectivity possible, and they resist at every possible turn their possible torture and execution; by contrast, the traditional hagiographic narrative requires the annihilation of the subjective self or individual who does not necessarily mourn his own “passing,” but rather, eagerly embraces and celebrates it, whereas the story of the Seven Sleepers, conversely, shows the important connection between mind/person/soul and the body that gives those entities expression; in this sense, the Old English version of their story, which contains rich psychological detail not found in any other version, may also be a more explicit expression of what the traditional passiones did convey: the soul desires and needs embodiment/world.

What follows here is the opening/"set-up" for the article [and I thank my friend and novelist Valerie Vogrin for turning me on to Kevin Brockmeier's novel, which could not have landed in my study at a better time]:
I know you want to keep on living. You do not want to die. And you want to pass from this life to another in such a way that you will not rise again as a dead man, but fully alive and transformed. This is what you desire. This is the deepest human feeling; mysteriously, the soul itself wishes and instinctively desires it.
—Augustine
They were mistaking the spirit for the soul. Many people tended to use the words casually, interchangeably, as though there were no difference at all between them, but the spirit and the soul were not the same thing. The body was the material component of a person. The soul was the nonmaterial component. The spirit was simply the connecting line. . . . When you died, the connecting line of the spirit snapped, and what remained of you was simply the body on one side—a heap of clay and minerals—and the soul on the other. The spirit was nothing more than a function of their interaction, like the ripples that formed where the wind blew over the water.
—Kevin Brockmeier
I. Wrenched Out of the Their Histories

In Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Brief History of the Dead, there are only two places. First, there is the City, which is inhabited by the recently departed, mainly victims of a viral pandemic that has wiped out the entire population of the Earth, except for one person, Laura Byrd, who inhabits the other place, Antarctica, where she had been working at a research station when, essentially, the world came to an end. Those who live in the City conduct each day much as they did when they were alive: going to work, eating meals at home and in restaurants, strolling the streets and sitting on park benches, going to the movies, and even engaging in debates over where it is, exactly, they might actually be, and what they are. “Of course we’re bodies,” one of the characters argues with another. “Bodies and nothing but. Have you ever heard of a spirit that ate hamburgers and chili dogs for lunch, a spirit that got leg cramps in the middle of the night?”

Laura Byrd, left alone on earth, has only a vague idea what has happened to everyone and spends most of the novel trudging across the ice shelf looking for other survivors and simply trying to stay alive. At one point, after many days of treacherous hiking in horrifying weather conditions, she falls into a crevasse and dangles for many hours at the end of a rope, unable to muster the strength to climb back out. She briefly contemplates simply letting herself go and considers how peaceful it would be to finally be dead, but through sheer tenacity and a kind of dumb fury and almost mindless will-to-live, she pulls herself up and out.

As it turns out, those who live in the City are comprised of only those people whom Laura Byrd remembers from her past and whom she reflects upon often as a way to keep herself from going insane. There are her family members, of course, and past lovers and friends, teachers and fellow workers, but also almost everyone she ever ran into if even only one time and can still remember: mailmen, street beggars, children who played in her neighborhood park, her doorman, a stranger she once gave a book of matches to, and so on and so forth. As long as she can stay alive, so will the inhabitants of the City, all of whom have “died” and are keenly aware that they are in some kind of purgatory or “outer room” that lies adjacent to the place you go when no one is left who remembers you at all. Everyone lives exactly as they exist in Laura’s memory: the religious fanatic paces the streets each day carrying his placards painted with dire warnings, four Korean women can always be found playing an eternal game of mahjongg in the park, and her parents, who in their former lives could barely tolerate each other, discover that they are in love with each other again, which is how Laura remembers them from before she moved away from home.

When Laura finally and tragically succumbs to the elements, lying alone and hallucinating fiercely in her tent in a penguin rookery at the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf, her toes and fingers black and crumbled from frostbite, the streets and buildings and bridges of the City begin to disappear, and the inhabitants all gather at the park in the center of town, waiting “for that power that would pull them like a chain into whatever came next, into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories.” Brockmeier’s novel is a beautiful and arresting meditation on the afterlife, and on the belief, prevalent in many cultures, that without the proper rituals of remembrance, the dead are either condemned to wander perpetually through non-places or do not really exist at all, except as general numeric abstractions. And in its heartbreakingly sad last sentence, quoted above, the novel also speaks to a very human anxiety and dread over the idea of a disembodied afterlife, one in which body and soul must split apart and the all-too-human world which has been loved and has made the journey of the self possible is left behind for good. The novel is also a kind of horror story, for as Laura lies dying, the predominant noise outside of her tent is the incessant chatter of the penguins--a harsh reminder that, even with every single human being, and therefore all of human memory, extinct, the world still continues.

Regardless of Paul’s statements in I Corinthians 15 that the human person “is sown a natural body” but rises as a “spiritual body,” and that “flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God,” and of the efforts of certain theologians, such as Origen and Aquinas, to formulate an understanding of soul as some form of disembodied personal identity, as Caroline Walker Bynum has written, “[f]rom the second to the fourteenth centuries, doctrinal announcements, miracle stories, and popular preaching continued to insist on the resurrection of exactly the material bits that were laid in the tomb.” Further, “a concern for material and structural continuity [after death] showed remarkable persistence even where it seemed to almost require philosophical incoherence, theological equivocation, or aesthetic offensiveness. . . . The idea of person, bequeathed by the Middle Ages to the modern world, was not a concept of soul escaping body or soul using body; it was a concept of self in which physicality was integrally bound to sensation, emotion, reasoning, identity—and therefore finally to whatever one means by salvation.”

There were, of course, endless theological controversies and debates over the question of bodily resurrection, centering mainly on the issue of how a body, which is inherently corruptible, could be incorruptible and still be a body, and whether or not resurrected bodies represented a continuity of the same or some kind of transfiguration. “To put it very simply,” Bynum writes, “if there is change, how can there be continuity and hence identity? If there is continuity, how will there be change and hence glory?” Augustine devoted a good deal of the last book of The City of God to answering the many arguments and worrisome doubts over the reconstitution of material bodies into new spiritual selves (will resurrected bodies have genitals? what about scars? will they be fat? will aborted fetuses rise?), and he even went so far as to address the issue of what happened to human flesh ingested by animals or other humans (answer: consumed flesh evaporates into the air where God collects and reconstitutes it). Ultimately, Augustine answered all concerns this way in Book 22, Chapter 21:
. . . even though the body has been all quite ground to powder by some severe accident, or by the ruthlessness of enemies, and though it has been so diligently scattered to the winds, or into the water, that there is no trace of it left, yet it shall not be beyond the omnipotence of the Creator—no, not a hair of its head shall perish. The flesh shall then be spiritual, and subject to the spirit, but still flesh, not spirit, as the spirit itself, when subject to the flesh, was fleshly, but still spirit and not flesh.
Indeed, Augustine even went so far as to emphasize the yearning of the departed soul for the body, writing in Book 13, Chapter 20 of City of God that the souls of departed saints “do not desire that their bodies be forgotten . . . but rather, because they remember what was promised by Him who deceives no man, and who gave them security for the safe keeping even of the hairs of their head, they with longing patience wait in hope of the resurrection of their bodies, in which they have suffered many hardships, and are now to suffer never again.” We can see here a glimmer of the idea that, for Augustine, the body was somehow a necessary vehicle for the fullest possible expression of an individual spiritual soul, or individual self (which might also stand in for the idea of “person”), for why else would soul desire, or need, a material body? Soul, in fact, in this scenario, remains in an always loving relationship, even through physical suffering, with body, which is, to a certain extent, the only means by which any soul can be distinct from any other soul.

There was, perhaps, no better means than hagiography, as well as the cult of saints’ graves and relics, for vividly illustrating to a general medieval populace the importance of, and even desire for, bodily integrity in the resurrection. As Peter Brown has written,
the original death of the martyr, and even the long, drawn-out dying of the confessor and the ascetic, was vibrant with the miraculous suppression of suffering. Memories of it set up an imaginative vortex in the minds of those who thronged to the shrine. . . . The explicit image of the martyr was of a person who enjoyed the repose of Paradise and whose body was even now touched by the final rest of the resurrection. Yet behind the now-tranquil face of the martyr there lay potent memories of a process by which a body shattered by drawn-out pain had once been enabled by God’s power to retain its integrity.
According to Brown, the public reading of passiones in late Antiquity was, “in itself, a psychodrame that mobilized in the hearer those strong fantasies of disintegration and reintegration which lurked in the back of the mind of ancient men.” Michael Lapidge has written that the passiones “form an extensive and distinctive body of early Christian literature.” Further, “[w]ritten in Latin and Greek, as well as Syriac, Coptic, and other languages, passiones survive in large numbers . . . from all parts of the early Christian world, especially those places where persecution was most vigorously pursued: Nicomedia, Antioch, Palestine, Alexandria, and Latin-speaking North Africa.”

The mutilated bodies of martyrs may, in fact, have been the main impetus for much of the early (late second century onwards) Christian treatises on resurrection, and later martyr stories “are filled with examples of saints who do not even notice the most exquisite and extraordinary cruelties,” and whose bodies, while under torture and violent assault, somehow remain beautifully unchanged. The pedagogical import of such stories would not have been lost on early theologians and preachers, who may have been both fearful of assaults on their own bodies and also in need of exempla for the idea of the resurrection in the midst of troubled times. Thus, as Brown tells us, the fourth-century Victricius of Rouen urged his congregation to not let a day pass where they did not reflect on the stories of martyrs: “This martyr did not blanch under the torturer; this martyr hurried up the slow work of the executioner; this one eagerly swallowed the flames; this one was cut about, yet stood up still.” It is important to note, as Lapidge does, that the passiones were written “at least a century, and perhaps several centuries, later than the ending of persecution with the Peace of the Church in 313” and that “there are few reliable (that is, contemporary and impartial) witnesses to the circumstances of persecution.”

Regardless of their historical accuracy, however, the early Christian literature of martyrdom was steeped in the spectacle of bodies tortured, burned, hacked, ripped apart, and then miraculously recomposed, and as Brown points out, “while the body is ‘painted with wash on wash of blood,’ its core, the soul, remains all of one piece.” Fidelity to the past was not what really mattered (although the stories always strove for historical versimilitude), for the performance of passiones at saints’ festivals, for example, “gave a vivid, momentary face to the invisible praesentia of the saint” by laying bare “the fragilities of the body . . . with macabre precision.” The saint, finally, was “really there,” bringing the past into the present and bridging the gap between this world and the next one.

The anonymous and Ælfrician corpora of hagiography in Anglo-Saxon England, such as the Cotton-Corpus Legendary, Old English Martyrology, and Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints (which include both passiones and vitas) were certainly the inheritors of an early Latin Christian tradition of stories that emphasized the martyred saints’ ready desire to be killed, as well as the shining imperviousness of their tortured, yet fully intact bodies. In Ælfric’s story of Saint Sebastian, well before his actual torture and execution, Sebastian, and his halig companion Chromatius, beg to be thrown into hot ovens. Ultimately, Sebastian has to be killed twice—first, by arrows, and later, after his body is miraculously healed, by being clubbed to death and left to rot in a sewer. In both instances, widows retrieve his body and heal and preserve it, so that it can be interred in a site that will later serve as a holy shrine and as a locus for the praesentia of the saint’s sacred and bodily powers. Three murder attempts are made on Ælfric’s virgin saint Eugenia—by drowning, burning, and starvation—before she is finally, simply killed (acwealde) by an executioner of the emperor. It is worth noting that when she earlier enters a burning oven, “all the conflagration was extinct at her coming.” In Ælfric’s passio of Saint Julian, when the Roman emperor’s deputy in Antioch, Martianus, orders a group of men to be burned in front of Julian, although the flames “ascended more than thirty fathoms . . . until the pile was burnt up, and all the tuns,” the men who had been bound together on the pyre “stood there uninjured by the fire, glittering like gold.” In these instances, the bodies of saints are not only impervious to fire, but in one case, can even quench it.

But even in cases where the mutilation of the saint’s body is palpably realized, the saint remains unfazed, as in Ælfric’s story of the virgin Agnes, who continues praying, even after she has been disemboweled. In his retelling of the story of “The Forty Soldiers,” set in Armenia, after a group of Roman soldiers who have converted to Christianity have survived, unclothed, in a lake of ice, they are consequently dragged from the freezing water to have their legs broken. While their limbs are literally breaking and cracking in half they sing a song that beautifully captures the trope of the saint’s rejection of the material body that, nevertheless, makes his sanctity visible and whole: “Our soul is escaped out of the snare as a sparrow, the snare is broken, and we are delivered.” Afterwards, they are all burned together in a fire and their bones are disposed of in a stream, where they shine “as brightly as stars.” The gleaming radiance of their disassembled bones in the middle of the night allows them to be found and collected by other Christians who can then enshrine them in a safe place where they can be re-presented over time and endure into the future.

In all of these Old English passiones, just as in their earlier Latin counterparts, we can see the importance to early medieval Christians of the paradoxical idea of the promise of bodily resurrection, where, as Bynum puts it, “the very stuff of change and putrefaction can be lifted to impassibility and immutability while continuing itself,” and for all the supposed illogic of the idea, “it is a concept of sublime courage and optimism,” for it “locates redemption there where ultimate horror also resides—in pain, mutilation, death, and decay.” Indeed, Ælfric’s interest in translating and adapting into Old English the stories of early Christian martyrs may have had something to do, as M.R. Godden points out, with “drawing parallels between the sufferings of the saints in the time of the early persecutions and the resistance of the Anglo-Saxons to the Viking pressures in his own time.” P.A. Stafford has written that at the end of the tenth century, “the most spectacular theme in the history of England was the revival of Viking attacks,” and several of Ælfric’s hagiographical subjects were martyred Anglo-Saxon kings, such as Edmund (939-946), whose head, decapitated by the “seaman” (flot-men) and guarded by a wolf, cried out “here, here, here” continuously so that it could be found and rejoined to its body. Although Edmund is not, strictly speaking, an early Christian martyr, the details of his life, death, and bodily resurrection follow the familiar pattern of the established genre, wherein, as Ælfric writes, “His body showeth us, which lieth undecayed, that he lived without fornication here in this world, and by a pure life passed to Christ.” The very specific, historical, and political details of Edmund’s reign are less important than the ways in which his “life” can be seen to fit the model of a received tradition of sacred fiction.

It could be argued that the texts of these Old English legends, when both read and recited, served as the only possible locus within which to reveal what could not be revealed, or even realized, in the Anglo-Saxon historical present: the palpable and visible spectacle of bodies both wrenched out of and returned to their individual histories. Similar to Brockmeier’s novel, souls and bodies exist together, finally, not in an abstract Heaven, but in a shared, cultural memory—a memory, moreover, that is as fragile as the bodies that contain it and play it continuously like the flickering frames of a zoetrope. These legends might have therefore also functioned to assuage two anxieties—first, that the promised resurrection of bodies with souls might be a fiction, and second, that the material stuff of one’s identity, with all of its imperfections, would have to be given up at the last day. In other words, the legends may have answered to the fear that the world—the too fierce love of which was really a sin, but without which identity wasn't conceivable—would really have to be left behind.

15 comments:

Karl Steel said...

I'm really enjoying what you've posted of the article. I've a few suggestions/comments now. No doubt I'll post more periodically.

For more on Augustine's resurrection doctrine, see Enchiridion LXXXIV-XCI (pp 99-106 in Thomas S. Hibbs trans published by, gag, Regnery: try to use a translation by a publisher that didn't get its start with postwar apologetics for Nazis and isn't the home for Michelle Malkin and other present-day fascists). There's nothing here that contradicts City of God; it's just of interest that he places this material in a book, unlike City of God, intended for elementary instruction.

I'd supplement Bynum, first, with an article that she cites frequently in her resurrection book, R. M. Grant, "The Resurrection of the Body." Journal of Religion 28 (1948): 120-30; 188-208. He's hostile to the resurrection of the body--which is interesting in itself--but his citations are very thorough and presented in quite a useful form. For chain consumption, I'd suggest, haha, me, but especially--although most of the material postdates your AS hagiography--the formidable, fascinating study by Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology (Brill, 1999).

I also have some kind of idea involving the discussion of the pain souls undergo in Hell before their bodies return, from Ailred De Anima Book III (see Talbot trans.), which cites a lot of material that would have been known in AS England, such as Augustine City XXI.10 and some Gregory. I'm not sure where I want to take this idea, except it is striking to me what difficulties our thinkers enter into when they try to imagine the person without the body. The concoct a notion of the soul suffering from the sight and imagination of flame. The soul suffers because it remembers how flame could torment its body, so there's a kind of body granted to (or inflicted upon) the soul, even before the Last Judgment, by a memory that both preserves the self and is a kind of false consciousness of what the soul is. Somehow this might connect to what you're doing: I think I'll return to this problem later on today.

Karl Steel said...

Some more things that strike me:

If you want to go the doctrinal route a bit, I'm pretty sure that the dominant doctrine on human growth in the period of your hagiography (set out as late as, and perhaps most emphatically by, the Lombard, but also, I think, in Hugh of St V's De sacramentis) was that growth took place miraculously. Food only nurtured "the truth of the human nature," but it added nothing that would alter the self in any substantial way; what would be resurrected was with us, in its entirety, already at our birth. In other words, at the time of your AS hagiography, there's a concept of body that is always already out of flux, that is a. a. the rarefied post-Resurrection body, and it's not until the 13th c. that doctrine on eating and the body allows for substantial corporal change during life (perhaps that's why the De contemptu tradition enters with such force in this later period? Am I right about this?).

My main point, then: what's clear is that the pre-Resurrection body is different--i.e., it's not spiritual--from the post-Resurrection body, but the big question is how much pre-13th c. doctrine allowed for or acknowledged substantial corporal flux (rather than insubstantial corporal damage, for instance), in other words, how much this earlier doctrine allowed the body to have the characteristics of the body as we commonly understand them.

Now, whether any of these concepts could have found expression in the AS hagiography is of course a wholly different matter: it'd be a matter, I guess, of discovering what Augustine, Gregory, Rabanus, Bede, John the Scot, and Alcuin said, if anything, about the flux of the pre-Resurrection body, and determining the interest of the AS hagiography in interacting with either the Fathers or more current currents of doctrine. It'd also be a matter of determining whether or not these doctrinal implications--perhaps only latently expressed in the Fathers and their heirs--have any impact on the concept of the body in the AS hagiography (likely not?).

--
Minor point: have you read Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Romans? I wrote some material on it for a eating and resurrection chapter I cut from my diss. What's interesting--and maybe I'll post that section on the front page in the next few days--is that Ignatius at once describes his coming death as it 'really' will be (being devoured by animals in the arena) and as it should be (being buried, where the multiple stomachs of the animals are figured as a single tomb). The story finds its way from the Greek Elogium ex Martryologiis Adonis into Latin through Bede's translation (if my footnote's right, and I'm suspicious of it this morning), and eventually ends up in the Golden Legend and depicted in the windows of Chartres. This version, notably, eliminates the animal eating altogether: instead, Ignatius gets smothered to death. AS the GL states: "Two savage lions therefore leapt upon him, but they only smothered him, not breaching his flesh in any way." That change is something worth thinking about (although perhaps only for me! Sorry for loading your thread down with so much extraneous material).

More to come later, no doubt.

Karl Steel said...

I'm also reminded, but now we're getting pretty far afield, of a pop song I wrote, back when I used to do such things, that began:

If I had no lips, would you still love me?
What I'm trying to ask here is: how many pieces could I lose and still be me?

Catchy, non? It actually scanned, believe it or not.

Eileen Joy said...

Karl--your comments are most helpful and come at a most opportune time [while I am composing/completing this article!]. I am currently in transit from South Carolina back to St.Louis and won't have much of a chance to post until, likely, Tuesday, but I would be very interested to hear/see more about Antioch's "Epistle to the Romans," so be all means, create a post on that.

As to how the Anglo-Saxon hagiographers may have conceived of the "body-in-flux" prior to the Resurrection, I honestly [as yet] don't know, and would have to look into that further, but my main concern in this article is to show how the anonymously-authored Old English "Seven Sleepers" is unique in its emphasis on the interior psychology of the main characters [including the emperor, Decius, and even the city of Ephesus itself(!), which is depicted as a kind of living body, as well], and how this might have been a response, or even a resistance, to the doctrinal paradoxes inherent in the idea/supposed "fact" of the Resurrection--that soul can exist separately from body, and is even weighed down/hindered by the corruptible body, yet desires to be rejoined with that body [reconstituted, somehow, in a state both of perfection-yet-still-containing-unique-hence-imperfect-bodily markers] as a means of expressing what might be called its most-fully delineated figuration of "personhood." So, I'm less interested in how the body's physiology might have been conceptualized pre-Resurrection than I am in looking at how body [and by extension, "world," and further, "eros"] was seen as indispensable to the fullest possible expression of a "redeemed," yet still very human self.

Thanks, too, for the reference to the R.M. Grant article--that looks to me like an indispensable source on the subject.

Jeffrey Cohen said...

This advertisement in today's New York Times made me think about your post, Eileen, and wonder: what is it with the obsessive Christian self-representation as persecuted?

In a way you answer this question already: if the suffering bodies of the martyrs are the English and the pagan torturers are Vikings, then bodies in peril from the past give corporeal form to historical anxieties about community and continuity. Though you're obviously not satisfied with such an answer: you're asking a tough theological question that isn't necessarily historically conditioned.

I have a meeting to attend and a class to prep, but in closing offer that the closing apssage you quote from Kevin Brockmeier’s novel remidned me so much of "The Wanderer," where the insensate sea birds do little to alleviate the speaker's horror at what it means to be human and to suffer loss in a word literally cold to such deprivation.

Karl Steel said...

the interior psychology of the main characters [including the emperor, Decius, and even the city of Ephesus itself(!), which is depicted as a kind of living body, as well], and how this might have been a response, or even a resistance, to the doctrinal paradoxes inherent in the idea/supposed "fact" of the Resurrection

I'm not sure I quite follow this point yet. I want to take a stab at it, but I want to hold off until I know what I'm getting into. How is the atypicality of the saints' psychology (and even the personified city) a response, resistance, rewriting, or conversation (however you want to frame it, and it probably admits all of these) to resurrection doctrine?


what is it with the obsessive Christian self-representation as persecuted

More to say, tomorrow, when the cold lifts, plus a brand new post on Ignatius of Antioch. Maybe.

Christianity of course begins as a faith of victimhood, what with the Savior himself a victim and his exhortation to take pity on the poor, the sick, prisoners, and scorned Others, whether they were Centurians or Samaritans, even if they had to be gnomically bullied by the Christ a bit (John 4:4-26). A couple of centuries later, it becomes the State religion. The cognitive dissonance involved in adapting the faith to a position of dominance--a dissonance at play in City of God, but perhaps at its strongest in Eusebius--is one from which Christianity doesn't seem to have ever recovered (not that I want to promote some notion of purity in the Church's origins or during the persecutions it suffered (or dealt out, as in the murder of Hypatia)).

And, any desire for a self-sustaining, idealized identity is necessary going to be discover itself under threat, as this failure is, after all, inherent to the fetish and is, in fact, its sustenance; moreover, any fetishized desire is going to want to conceive of itself as under threat to explain the failure of the fetish to ground a stable identity. Our lack of "Christmas spirit" (whatever that is) is the fault of Urban Elites in the Secular Enclaves (read: Jews--O'Reilly, bless his black heart, is back at it again), not the fault of the unattainability of the desired object. And, in fact, the desire of the Urban Elites to destroy Christmas, just as the desire of the Vikings to destroy Christians, or any of the terrifying emperors of hagiography to do the same, is the best proof Christians had of the validity of their belief. To follow Zizek (haha! slipped that one in), the persecutors are being made to believe on behalf of Christians who otherwise can't keep the strength of their desire.

Something like that. In other words, Christianity's not unique, at least when read through its identitarian politics. As historically specific as the work might be, even as doctrinally specific as it might be, there's always that little transhistorical ball that psychoanalysis finds for us to kick around.

By the way, that Donahue guy is a real peach, whether he's demanding the right to force a "merry Christmas" on me, or blaming children for being molested by priests, or leaping to Mel Gibson's defense , where he really lets his dogs or war slip about the Jews ("There'll be a small circle of vindictive people who have hated him because of his movie who won't forgive him. And who gives a damn about those people? Most Americans in Hollywood and everyplace else are forgiving people. And the onus is on those people now who say, "I didn't get enough." What kind of blood do they want out of this man?"). Nice man. Just the sort of person I'd want a Merry Christmas from.

Karl Steel said...

And, any desire for a self-sustaining, idealized identity is necessary going to be discover itself under threat,

Blame the cold. "necessarily going to discover itself..."

Jeffrey Cohen said...

A very thoughtful and full comment, Karl. And you've made me believe in Zizek again. Merry Christmas, Slavoj.

Eileen, last night as I waited for my son to be dismissed from Hebrew class I was reading Bruno Latour's Pandora's Hope. This passage jumped out at me and made me think of your project, with its mind and body probing.

[Latour has been asked by a colleague if he believes in reality. He is initially taken aback, and then begins to place the question within the history of the mind/body/perception/reality splits]:I remembered that my colleague's question was not so new. My compatriot Descartes had raised it against himself when asking how an isolated mind could be absolutely as opposed to relatively sure of anything about the outside world. Of course, he framed the question in a way that made it impossible to give the only reasonable answer, which we in science studies have slowly rediscovered three centuries later: that we are relatively sure of many of the things with which we are daily engaged through the practice of laboratories. By Descartes's time this sturdy relativism, based on the number of relations established with the world, was already in the past, a once-passable path now lost in the thicket of brambles. Descartes was asking for absolute certainty from a brain-in-a-vat, a certainty that was not needed when the brain (or the mind) was firmly attached to its body and the body thoroughly involved in its normal ecology ... Only a mind put in the strangest position, looking at a world from the inside out and linked to the outside by nothing but the tenuous connection of the gaze, will throb in the constant fear of losing reality; only such a bodiless observer will desperately look for some absolute life-supporting survival kit"

Karl Steel said...

Nice quote there, JJC. Reading a recent issue of the New Yorker, god help me, on the subway home today (the Nov 20 issue), and read the Descartes piece by Anthony Gottlieb, where he writes (p. 88):

Descartes' dualism is certainly not what it is often taken to be. In the 1994 best-seller 'Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain,' the neurologist Antonio Damasio reports that Descartes believed in an 'abyssal separation between body and mind ... the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism.' This is actually the opposite of what Descartes believed. He held that we 'experience within ourselves certain ... things which must not be referred either to the mind alone or to the body alone,' and that these arise 'from the close and intimate union of our mind with the body.' In his best-known writings, Descartes stressed the differences between matter (which occupies space) and thought (which does not). But he also maintained that, in human beings, mind and body are mysteriously and inextricably combined...He could not explain how it is that mind and body are united, but he was sure that they were.

Jeffrey Cohen said...

I'd never accuse Latour of nuance when it comes to the history of philosophy! And I'm not the only one who feels that way..

I read Damasio's book way back when, and remember thinking that the easy reduction done to Descartes in many ways parallels the easy reduction contemporary scholars practice upon the past in general, and the Middle Ages especially. I was in a reading group with Rosemarie Garland Thomson at the time, and observed to her that I felt that her work on freaks sometimes made those kind of untroubled assumptions about the distant past and preserved complexity for the present.

Eileen Joy said...

Karl & JJC: THANKS so much for your fabulous comments; these are really helping me a lot.

Karl, as to your question:

"How is the atypicality of the saints' psychology (and even the personified city) a response, resistance, rewriting, or conversation (however you want to frame it, and it probably admits all of these) to resurrection doctrine?"

The resistance comes in the atypical way in which the seven men resist, fear, and run away from their own martydom, as opposed to the usual trope of the martyr-saint actively embracing and even desiring his/her own bodily dismemberment/death.

It's icing/snowing like hell here, so I think I'm going to be out of wireless commission for a few days! But thanks again! When I come back out of hiding [Sunday?], I may have the rest of the essay finished [first draft, anyway].

Cheers, Eileen

Karl Steel said...

I know I'm being super dense here, EJ, but walk me through this a bit. I see the 7 sleepers resisting dismemberment and death, which suggests they don't quite trust the doctrine of bodily resurrection, but there's more going on with your argument, right?

Eileen Joy said...

Karl,

I don't think you're being "super dense," but I don't see the Seven Sleepers as resisting the idea of the bodily resurrection at all. In fact, in the primary story [before they fall asleep] they're not even concerned with that, as it's not necessarily an issue. More to the point is the amount of time and textual space lavished by the anonymous author on their grief at the death of all the anonymous Christians tortured and murdered by the emperor Decius and, we can imagine, at the idea of their own impending torture/death. In the genre of the "passione," the martyr always actively engages his/her own death, and even fervently wishes for it. No tears are shed. In the genre of the "vita," however [the life of the confessor-saint, as opposed to the life of the martyr-saint], who often dies of natural causes [but typically predicts his own death], his followers grieve his passing, while the saint, again, eagerly looks forward to it. Now, the anonymously-authored legend of the Seven Sleepers is interesting because it is very diffcult to say what kind of *saints* are the Seven Sleepers, anyway? They have no followers, and they are not, strictly speaking, martyrs, and they cry a hell of a lot. It may be that AElfric purposefully chose not to include this legend in his "Lives of Saints" [although he does briefly mention them in two separate homilies] precisely because he was discomfited by the story's radical departure[s] from the classic lines of the late antique genre, and also because, I would argue, the story is almost too folk-loric in nature [it has deep roots in pre-Christian folklore in more than one culture, eastern and western, and I wonder if AElfric wasn't well aware of that, while at the same time, he recognized its utility as a story that "proved" the Resurrection; whereas, in reality, I would argue that the story, stripped out of its Christian context, speaks to a long-standing historical anxiety about the transmigration of specific human identities over time].

I'm mainly interested in the ways in which the anonymous author focused upon the physical manifestations of the sleepers' sorrow in their bodily gestures, and in his exploration of Malchus's psychology, especially, when they wake up and he walks through the now-foreign-to-him Ephesus, looking for bread to bring back to his comrades in the cave. I think the Old English version of the story, which greatly expands on its Latin exemplar, points to some of the fault lines that have always existed, I think, in Christian belief in a Resurrection that both wrenches souls out of human bodies and yet also returns those souls to those bodies as the fulfillment of a promise of uniting two entities that were envisioned as separate [and even antithetical to each other], yet clearly existed in a mutual co-dependency, without which any kind of identity, spiritual or otherwise, simply was not thinkable.

Does this make more sense?

Karl Steel said...

I think the Old English version of the story, which greatly expands on its Latin exemplar, points to some of the fault lines

It's this part that I don't yet get, at least not entirely. Is the (a?) point partially that the Sleepers, in desiring their present bodies:

a) on the one hand, demonstrate the love of soul for body;

b) desire too intently, and what looks like a variant of the hope for reunification falls over into resistance to the necessary, albeit temporary, severing of body/soul in death;

c) the intensity of the desire suggests that the temporary severing of self, the abandonment of the self to incompleteness and even nothingness prior to the Resurrection, is something too horrific for contemplation, and yet this severing is key to Xianity (which even goes so far as to say that everyone alive prior to the Resurrection must be killed to ensure that everyone receives his or her perfected body: this is in the Lombard, but I'm not sure where he gets it);

d) and, finally, how can someone desire a self too intently, since having a self, something that merits punishment or reward, is essential to Xianity?

Am I on the right track here?

Eileen Joy said...

Karl--it's mainly (a): soul loves/needs body. But hopefully this will all be more clear when I share rest of essay. Cheers, Eileen