Comments on In the Middle: Bits and pieces on anthropophagous animals

But can we really make such a fine distinction bet...

2006-12-05T17:14:11.063-05:00

But can we really make such a fine distinction between "undoing" and "reconstitution"?

I think so. And I want to preserve the idea of the inability to conceive in images of what the doctrine required. However, I might get more out of what I'm doing if I tweak my terms a bit, since what I'm probably contrasting is undoing and recreation. See below.

One can see, in the desire of the martyr to be physically tormented and broken down, some serious masochism...[and] hatred of the body/human self

Yes, but I'd nuance it a bit too, according to our discussions and your work here on the blog, since that masochism could be construed as an impatience for the perfected body. There's a kind of love of body/self in that, too.

Nonetheless, it's only a kind of body/self. As I've written here before, since the perfected body is a body preserved from all flux, what kind of body is it anyway? It's a body that, in being purged of flux and weight, is not much of a body at all. All that has been preserved of the body is its borders, but that too is a reaction to 'problem' of the body, to wit, the permeability of its borders, where, in eating, evacuation, and, in fact, interacting with the world to form various assemblages, the membrane between inside and outside all too readily gives itself away as illusionary. In other words, a body with sure boundaries isn't much of a body, either.

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Now, the thing with Ignatius that I've never been able to answer satisfactorily is why the change in the story. The end result is the same--except in only one does he actually get to be, as he desires, torn to pieces--but the way there is startlingly different. Why the change? Being unable to answer that is in part what led me to cut that stuff from my diss.

But can we really make such a fine distinction bet...

2006-12-05T12:47:29.996-05:00

But can we really make such a fine distinction between "undoing" and "reconstitution"? And sure, I get the fact that many medieval thinkers/theologians were deeply discomfited by the idea that human flesh could be consumed and broken down and assimilated, as it were, into "animal" flesh, from which position, it might have been feared that "recuperation" from such defilement/contamination was impossible. I think Augustine, finally, was the more realistic commentator on the subject. Your different accounts of Ignatius highlight some very classic elements of the genre of the passio: he desires, fiercely even, to be ripped to shreds and/or consumed, broken down, etc., and the end result is always either: lions can't really tear the flesh or fire can't really burn it, OR, the body is ripped to shreds, disemboweled, burned, etc., and then is miraculously healed and reassembled. One can see, in the desire of the martyr to be physically tormented and broken down, some serious masochism--one of the things I really hate about Christianity is its hated of the body/human self [at least, in some of its more extreme manifestations, devotion-wise].

Per Augustine: they may have been fully digested, ...

2006-12-05T09:01:07.680-05:00

Per Augustine: they may have been fully digested, but they're nevertheless shown coming out the way they came in. It's the exact reversal that interests me, a reversal despite the fact that many theologians knew--not the best verb, here, I know--perfectly well that the flesh of humans eaten by animals would be assimilated into animal flesh. In other words, I'm interested in the fact that what should be understood as a reconstitution is instead portrayed as an undoing, since the undoing strikes me as somewhat less miraculous. There seems to be a failure to imagine in visual form the very imaginative/doctrinal construct so necessary to the conviction of the lived and postmortem and coming Eternal permanence of self, as if the illustrators could not imagine how human flesh, mingled with, assimilated to, whatever, with animal flesh, could emerge, not from the mouth, but from the alien flesh that had become, in a (horrific) way, its own.

Per Ignatius: My notes on this, from the Acta Sanctorum, has the following instances in which Ignatius gets torn to pieces and devoured by the lions:

Simon Metaphraste:
dimissi leones eum statim dilacerarunt & deuorarunt

From Menaeis et Anthologio Graecor

Vnde productus in amphitheatrum a dimissis contra se leonibus discerptus est

Which may be compared to the Bede translation (the significant part quoted above, præfocauerunt eum tantummodo, & non tetigerunt carnes eius) and something the Acta Sanctorum lists only as Ex vetustissimis Mss. Latinis , which, likewise, says, & ex vtraque parte super eum incidentes præfocauerunt eum tantummodo, & non tetigerunt carnes eius.

What interests me is that in some stories--the earlier ones?--Ignatius gets torn to pieces and devoured; in the later ones, he gets killed, sometimes after several other torments(in a typical fashion) fail to kill him, but the lions only smother him (tantummodo is common, as if either to stress the miracle, or to stress the departure from generic expectations, I'm not sure), and, as the passiones make a point of mentioning, the lions do not eat him. This last point is especially interesting because it contradicts Ignatius's wish to be consumed and to have the lions' bodies be his (singular) tomb.* In other words, in the original story, we have a tension between Ignatius's dismemberment and the reunification that the resurrection will effect, a tension given voice, but subtly, by the metaphorical transformation of multiple leonine stomachs into one tomb. In later stories (and I'm pretty sure they're later), what's only latent in the original becomes explicit: Ignatius never gets dismembered at all. On the one hand, he joins the set of saints whom animals refuse to dismember; on the other hand, the change introduces a willful incoherence into the passion that, to my mind, isn't in fact so much introduced as heightened. He wants to be dismembered--as in the Bede passion, frumentum Christi sum, dentibus bestiarum molar, vt panis mundus inueniar--but the lions refuse it.

think that the average medieval person [and even the medieval theologian] knew, for a fact, that animals and even other humans could consume, digest, ground to bits,

Consume and ground to bits, yes, but nonetheless, there are some theologians who denied the capacity of animals to assimilate human flesh. Peter of Poitiers declared that neither humans nor animals assimilated anything to the truth of their nature. His argument's a bit more extreme than other people who took similar positions, since in so doing, he preserves a continuity of selves even for nonhuman animals. In the second century, Athenagoras declared that creatures can assimilate only food that's proper to them. Iirc, animals can't assimilate human flesh, because eating people is not proper to animals (and, he added, that anthropophages will eventually starve to death if they subsist on a diet of only human flesh, since people shouldn't eat people: Augustine countered by claiming that he'd seen people grow fat by eating people: I accept that Augustine's making a point, but I don't believe at all his claims of being a witness). William of Auxerre and Alexander of Hales revive Athenagoras's argument (whether directly or not, I don't know) in the 13th century. Quoting Alexander from Reynolds' Food and the Body, 167, "there is an order in nature such that simple substances nourish plants, plants nourish beasts, and plants and beasts nourish human beings. Since human flesh is intended only to convert food and not to be converted as food, it is not appropriate nourishment for human beings [NOR, says I, for beasts, by implication]. But human flesh that has been generated from appropriate nutriment is not in the fullest sense the proper flesh of the one who has generated and possesses it: it has come from proper nutriment, but it is not proper flesh.”

* I'm reminded of the death of the wolf Ysengrimus, his being torn to pieces by the sow Salaura and her brood. Here's my notes in part on that episode, Salaura says, " 'So let there be a change of names in both of us: you can be my Jonah and I'll be your whale'" (537) (. . . . Mutetur nomen utrimque: / Sis michi tu Ionas et tibi Cetus ego. . .'" (ll. 374-5). Speaks of eating him as his ending up in her collection-box. Speaks of him as becoming a kind of relic and her stomach as a reliquary. He is parceled among the herd and "the pigs allowed less to survive that the least portion of a flea that has been cut into eight parts" (541) "parte minus minima porci superesse tulerunt, / Si fuerit partes sectus in octo pulex" (ll. 441-2) (from Mann, Jill. Ysengrimus: Text with Translation, Commentary, and Introduction. Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 12. Brill: Lieden, 1987).

A couple [a few?] things:If you read Augustine's c...

2006-12-05T00:18:18.616-05:00

A couple [a few?] things:

If you read Augustine's comments on the resurrection of consumed humans [whether by animals or other humans] in the last books of "City of God," he does not indicate that, like the "enwhaled Jonah," those human bodies, or parts of bodies, were just resting somehow inside of other bodies. His assumption is that they *were* fully consumed, digested, even passed on, etc., but that God's power is awesome enough to find those particles, wherever they are and reconstitute them. So for me, the image you share is simply a depiction of that miraculous reconstitution. As to the Latin version of the story of Ignatius you share, it's not that the lions don't *try* to eat him--it's just that they "strangle" [Latin verb?] him without "tearing" his flesh? The point being, at least in this instance, not that the lions don't want, or refuse, to eat Ignatius, bit that his body is impervious to their teeth--a typical trope of the martyr's vita. On the other hand, there are plenty of saints' lives where bodily dismemberment is real and visceral, but is followed by a miraculous healing/reconstitution in a location that will later become a shrine. I think that the average medieval person [and even the medieval theologian] knew, for a fact, that animals and even other humans could consume, digest, ground to bits, what-have-you, human flesh, but that God somehow retained the power to find all those bits and gather them back together into a unique human form stamped with its owner's former identity, flaws and all.

...of course, the less interesting, but perhaps mo...

2006-12-03T08:55:15.426-05:00

...of course, the less interesting, but perhaps more accurate explanation, for the 'human bits from animal mouths' bit is that the animal mouth is a variant of the Hell Mouth, and Resurrection of the Flesh is conceived as a kind of Harrowing...

At any rate, that's the kind of CYA I think I'd have to do were I ever to assemble some of the above things into an actual publication.

Oh, Daniel! How could I forget you? I was raised o...

2006-12-01T08:24:44.053-05:00

Oh, Daniel! How could I forget you? I was raised on that story, but I've never thought to check the exegesis (likely because the chapter to which all this material belonged is one I cut from the diss.).

"en-whaled" seemed better than "cetatoported."

Fuller cite for the Actaeon objection, by the way, is Gace de la Buigne, Roman de Déduits, “est bourde, si com je cuide, / que les chiens mengerent leur maistre” (I think it is a lie that dogs ever ate their master). This objection also appears as early as the time of Aristotle, in Palaephatus. On Unbelievable Tales Jacob Stern, trans. Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1996:

"They say that Actaeon was devoured by his own dogs. But the story is false, for a dog is most affectionate toward its master and provider, and hunting dogs in particular fawn on everyone" (38).

This book also has the following marvelous (or disenchantifantastic) passage:

"What is said about the Centaurs is that they were beasts with the overall shape of a horse -- except for the head, which was human. But even if there are some people who believe that such a horse once existed, it is impossible. Horse and human natures are not compatible, nor are their foods the same: what a horse eats could not pass through the mouth and throat of a man. And if there ever was such a shape, it would also exist today" (30).

A lot to think about here.I love the phrase "en-wh...

2006-12-01T06:46:32.953-05:00

A lot to think about here.

I love the phrase "en-whaled Jonah."

Oops -- Kid #2 waking up, but as I leave I type: what about Daniel not being touched by the lions in the den where he was hurled? Seems an early modle for the Latin version of the story.

Karl--your post could not be more timely--bless yo...

2006-11-30T17:18:21.736-05:00

Karl--your post could not be more timely--bless you! I have to run home ahead of this snowstorm, but when I dig myself back out, I'll have more to say. Cheers, Eileen