tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post8291662911386236816..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Animals and the ResurrectionCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-31856254845041257712020-08-19T16:17:18.202-04:002020-08-19T16:17:18.202-04:00Hi I run the Parkhead history site and was wonderi...Hi I run the Parkhead history site and was wondering if someone can shed some light on a verse that is engraved into the wall at the back of Glasgow Cathedral, This seems to have been done by an individual, At the resurrection of human animals the whole surface of the globe will be all in a movement like a plantation of life, thank you for any help<br />Tam McCann Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06814569992462294026noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-83275087136567330022009-01-14T16:42:00.000-05:002009-01-14T16:42:00.000-05:00Matt, sorry to respond so late. It's been a nutty ...Matt, sorry to respond so late. It's been a nutty couple of weeks. I'll send you an email to make sure I get the stuff, but, first, YES, I would love to see some of the modern commentaries on it: I could find this stuff myself, but as I'm not 'really' a biblical scholar, I wouldn't know how to do in a systematic way. And SECOND, I do know the Agamben, but thanks for reminding me of it. You'll be hearing from me.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-75173748764456507842009-01-01T01:03:00.000-05:002009-01-01T01:03:00.000-05:00Thanks for a fascinating piece Karl (and sorry to ...Thanks for a fascinating piece Karl (and sorry to come in so late). I assume you're also familiar with Agamben's beginning The Open with the C13 biblical miniatures depicting the redeemed with animal heads - the question of messianic redemption and human-animal life are tightly connected in that book. I think I also have somewhere some further (modern) commentaries on the Romans passage that I've collected - I'll pass them on when I find them, if you're interested. It's fascinating how much people try to read into this passage - both to connect and separate the creatureliness of humans and animals. Heidegger referred to Paul in this regard in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics regarding the world-poverty of the animal: it is essentially disrupted by its exposure to something other. Eric Santner has a great discussion of this in his On Creaturely Life, where he ties the question of creaturely redemption to the readings of Paul that have become so prominent (Agamben, Badiou, Zizek etc.): "What is at stake in the Pauline notion of resurrection, of the overcoming of death, is in other words not some phantasmal reanimation of the dead but the possibility of a deanimation of the undeadness that makes creatures of us all." (129)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-49052248255555687582008-12-21T10:43:00.000-05:002008-12-21T10:43:00.000-05:00Very cool compendium Karl, which is buttressable w...Very cool compendium Karl, which is buttressable with Skrbina's Panpsychism book, which has virtually nothing to say about the middle ages, except of course St. Francis, whose panpsychism is always made present in Christian discourse *subjunctively*, with Francis talking to animals and inanimate things "as if . . ."Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-51816828726936904582008-12-18T13:26:00.000-05:002008-12-18T13:26:00.000-05:00Oddly, I know I've read Lingis, at least in the Ca...Oddly, I know I've read Lingis, at least in the Cary Wolfe anthology, but there's nothing in my notes about him. This clearly means I skimmed only for the sake of whatever I was working on at the moment. Time to revisit, so thanks, you two, for the rec. And I'm glad, Jeffrey, that I managed to end up where you'd hope I'd go. Oddly, I had no idea I'd be writing that paragraph until I actually wrote it. Everything else was in place, but I just didn't have the 'so what' moment. Thankfully--guided unconsciously by all the conversations we've had here--I'm stumbled into something that I think is pretty good.<BR/><BR/>===<BR/>Eileen, thanks for that first big graph. You and I are on the same wave here, and thanks for putting that 'on paper.'<BR/><BR/>Here's a larger excerpt from the Acampora that contains my smaller excerpt:<BR/><BR/>"We are not in some abstract, retro-Cartesian positions of species solipsism where our minds seem to just float in a rarified space of pure spectatorship apart from all ecological enmeshment and social connection with other organisms and persons [ME: and here I think of the saved looking down into hell, with self-satisfaction, on the sufferings of the damned], wondering, as it were, if 'there's anybody out there.' That is a portrait borne not of philosophic rigor but of psychological malady or hyperintellectual pretense (or both). Where we begin, quite on the contrary, is always already caught up in the experience of being a live body thoroughly involved in a plethora of ecological and social interrelationships with other living bodies and people. That, I hold, is our native position, and it deserves--existentially, phenomenologically, and indeed (as I shall later argue) scientifically--to be recognized as such and consequently to be taken as our philosophic starting point. The ethical upshot of such a gestalt-shift in the ontological background is profound, because it effectively transfers the burden of proof from what has been denigrated as ethical 'extensionalism' or expansion, to, instead, what we should rightly refer to as ethical isolationism or contraction (i.e., homo-exclusive anthropocentrism). From this perspective, the problem of traction for moral consideration of nonhuman animals dissolves, because the moral motion at stake is no longer felt to be a pull (into the ethical sphere) but is reconceived as a push (out of or away from it). It is the movement toward dissociation and nonaffiliation that needs to be justified against a background of relatedness or interconnectivity." (4-5)<BR/><BR/>So:<BR/><I>I would say that the majority of medieval theologians/biblical exegetes have, by your own account, definitely failed, but isn't it precisely in the world of art [even medieval art: poetry, narrative, painting, etc.] that we see the necessary corrective/resistance to these more "official" viewpoints?</I><BR/><BR/>Exactly! I apologize for my muddled syntax there in the end. My point, which I'll make more directly when I write this 'officially,' is that the various artistic representations of heaven as a world like ours fail the proper doctrinally rigorous expectations for heaven, and that this "failure" is precisely the place for us to think, and for us to recognize medievals thinking, phenomenologically and ecologically about worlded being. We can then flip this, then, and say that Aquinas, &c., <I>fails the world</I> insofar as he expects the perfection of (human) being to be unworlded. Suspending for the moment the question of what counts as 'mainstream' (since it's perhaps better now to see TWO dominant strains: one worlded, and the other not], we can view mainstream medieval resurrection doctrine as a great attempt to justify "dissociation and nonaffiliation." If I want to identify this unworlding as pathological, and I do want to, we can see this work as a great <I>desperate</I> resistance to change and flux, what Bynum called [in seminar, if not in print?] "the ontological scandal." <BR/><BR/>I suppose a Catholic might see me as refusing to abandon the old medieval temptations "the world, the flesh, and the devil" because I'm joining others in arguing--or better, in recognizing or remembering--that the world is the flesh and the flesh is the world. And, gloriously, the Bevis writer, Giovanni di Paolo, and astonishingly, <I>even in a text clogged with hatred of the body,</I> Bernard of Cluny, and so many other medieval artists saw things, and saw themselves, this way too. These are not just bunnies and flowers in heaven; this represented and remembered life--and even mere being, as attested by the presence of rocks--says something profound about human self-conception as it should be properly understood: as worlded being.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-45654863263390191822008-12-18T12:50:00.000-05:002008-12-18T12:50:00.000-05:00Karl: a very thought-provoking piece and I have so...Karl: a very thought-provoking piece and I have some comments and a question--<BR/><BR/>I would say [and partly following the lead of Caroline Walker Bynum's book "The Resurrection of the Body"] that imagining humans in the after-world, hell, purgatory, heaven, whathaveyou, in a state of "un-worldment," has always been, perhaps, *the* chief difficulty of late antique and medieval theology concerned with the afterlife, and pretty much all artistic representations [poetry, painting, sculpture, etc.] of heaven [and hell] have to place within those "un-worlds" worldly features, and also physiologically recognizable human features--otherwise, what would we be looking at/how could we recognize ourselves there? What would a soul, divorced from a body until the Last Judgment, look like [of course, modern artists would have and *have had* more fun with this, but not so much medieval artists]? How would the shape of one soul be different/discernible from the shape of another soul [human or otherwise]? In Dante's "Paradiso," of course, we have those souls that each form a petal of an enormous rose and God as light and concentric circles, and I guess, to a certain extent, I have always seen medieval artists' representations of heaven as trying to be true to certain theological understandings/explications of that site, while also diverging from those explications, almost of necessity, or else this un- or non-place would be like the surface of the moon: cold and inhuman, non-habitable, non-recognizable, alien, incomprehensible as a "living" space, non-desirable, etc. This is why, too, I think so much of the medieval theological writings on resurrection are so paradoxical and f*&k-ed up: how, on the one hand can you spill so much ink condemning the vile/fallen/corruptible/decadent/decaying/useless body, and then on the other hand, insist that it somehow *be there* with the soul in the afterlife: why would God promise such a thing which, implicitly, indicates that for humans to really desire heaven, they have to love their bodies so much as to never want to go anywhere without them [and also, maybe, because individual identity was also loved too much--although, supposed to be reviled--and the body was its best outward manifestation/guarantee]? And the ideas of those theologians, like Origen, who denied the physical aspects of the Resurrection, just did not seize hold of the common and also the artistic imagination in the same way ideas of a more physical/enworlded afterlife obviously did. I think the early Church fathers, especially Augustine, really worked themselves into a sort of bind over an enfleshed afterlife and the somewhat opposing ideas that all flesh is inherently corruptible and fallen [and even acts as a kind of blocking agent to spiritual life/practice] and that if God produced it/enfleshed it, it has to be worthy of resurrection/preservation. Connected to this paradox is also the idea of the whole world itself as both a beautiful creation and a damned/fallen place.<BR/><BR/>A word or several words in the Acampora quotation is missing, so I didn't quite get the whole sense of that, but I feel it's important.<BR/><BR/>As to failing the philosophical project of imagining ourselves as enworlded (human) creatures, fully enmeshed within networks and socialities (both human and nonhuman)--as live bodies "thoroughly involved in a plethora of ecological and social interrelationships with other living bodies and people"--have we really failed this entirely? I would say that the majority of medieval theologians/biblical exegetes have, by your own account, definitely failed, but isn't it precisely in the world of art [even medieval art: poetry, narrative, painting, etc.] that we see the necessary corrective/resistance to these more "official" viewpoints? And I wonder, then, if your project might not also require a consideration of the function of the aesthetic as a kind of counter-discourse [maybe, even, as a future-directed mode of counter-expression] in relation to the more official discourses on animals and the Resurrection?Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-62624248307428060262008-12-18T11:48:00.000-05:002008-12-18T11:48:00.000-05:00I'm so glad Jeffrey mentioned Lingis, who really d...I'm so glad Jeffrey mentioned Lingis, who really does write beautifully, almost poetically. An essay that would be really apropos here is "Animal Body, Inhuman Face," which was included in Cary Wolfe's "Zoontologies," so something tells me, Karl, that you've likely seen that one already. But a book that is apropos to your project here is Lingis's "The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common."Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-20317545327522387592008-12-18T11:21:00.000-05:002008-12-18T11:21:00.000-05:00Beautiful piece Karl. I wondered throughout most o...Beautiful piece Karl. I wondered throughout most of it about what you attended to in the last paragraph: what about plants, creatures formed of humors just like animals and humans, creatures without which worlding doesn't happen? And then ... what about rocks, and wind, and smell? All those things that you get at so poetically at the end.<BR/><BR/>Have you ever read any Alphonso Lingis? He is one of the least boring and most sensory-obsessed of philosophers/phenomenologists/nomads/anthropologists/translators/ethicists ... actually much of his work holds that ethical imperatives derive from animals, plants, and the nonorganic.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-19756575610888880422008-12-17T12:46:00.000-05:002008-12-17T12:46:00.000-05:00Wow.Wow.Steve Muhlbergerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18136005762428407135noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-63675687859113027702008-12-17T12:04:00.000-05:002008-12-17T12:04:00.000-05:00I do not mean to single out Wright: his work, othe...<I>I do not mean to single out Wright: his work, otherwise excellent, is typical of celestial studies in his non-acknowledgment of animal or other worldly nonhuman life</I><BR/><BR/>For the sake of fairness, I should say that these works <I>acknowledge</I> this life, but they don't do so in a systematically. In other words, although I picked up various pieces from my reading--the Savonarola reference, Bernard of Cluny, the idea to look at the exegesis on Romans 8:19-23, &c.--celestial studies wonder why only humans resurrect, nor do they remark on the <I>strangeness</I> of rabbits &c and plants in heaven.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-67090237271675763662008-12-17T09:53:00.000-05:002008-12-17T09:53:00.000-05:00Trust me Anna: I'll throw more stuff at the blog s...Trust me Anna: I'll throw more stuff at the blog soon enough.<BR/><BR/>And Meli: sounds fascinating. I'd love to see it (or hear it?) when you're finished.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-70907447814149454022008-12-17T04:59:00.000-05:002008-12-17T04:59:00.000-05:00thanks for this!i'm currently working on a radio p...thanks for this!<BR/><BR/>i'm currently working on a radio play by a Catholic Australian poet with medievalist leanings, in which the ghosts of the animals (no bodily resurrection for them) argue with the angels for the chance to enter judgement day.<BR/><BR/>word verification: aminemelihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10026675747253438229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-50503812431339032762008-12-17T00:03:00.000-05:002008-12-17T00:03:00.000-05:00this is fascinating. please do not rein yourself i...this is fascinating. please do not rein yourself inanna klosowskahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09611569607945164280noreply@blogger.com