Corpus: Poems of the body

Today I received the award-winning collection of poems by Michael Symmons Roberts entitled ‘Corpus’.  I heard Roberts do some readings of his poetry recently, and really liked his stuff.  It is, I think, highly theological – but without being esoteric.  In fact, he seems very eager to make sure the heights of theological imagination are firmly grounded in the realities of bodies and earth and flesh and food and smoke and death (and resurrection).  I’ll give a couple of examples, and I encourage you to get this small book and spend time in its world.

Food for Risen Bodies – IV

The men they silenced

- now heads of tables -

slit their stitched lips free

as if to kiss and bless

the dinner knives.

They whisper grace

through open wounds

Jairus

So, God takes your child by the hand

and pulls her from her deathbed.

He says: ‘Feed her, she is ravenous.’

 

You give her fruits with thick hides

- pomegratnate, cantaloupe -

food with weight, to keep her here.

 

You hope that if she eats enough

the light and dust and love

which weave the matrix of her body

 

will not fray, nor wear so thin

that morning sun breaks through her,

shadowless, complete.

 

Somehow this reanimation

has cut sharp the fear of death,

the shock of presence.  Feed her

 

roast lamb, egg, unleavened bread:

forget the herbs, she has an aching

fast to break.  Sit by her side,

 

split skins for her so she can gorge,

and notice how the dawn

draws colour to her just-kissed face.

“I have no need of you”: Are theologians the body’s eyes?

The metaphor of a multi-membered body was used by Plato, Aristotle, and many others, to depict a properly ordered and well-functioning society.  So the image of the church as a body of interdependent members was not entirely Paul’s own invention in 1 Corinthians 12-14.  But it’s interesting to see that for Paul, those parts of the body that appear most important are actually not to be over-valued:

If they were all one member, where would the body be?  But in fact there are many members, but one body.  And the eye is not able to say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” or the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”  (1 Cor 12)

This is worth hearing in contrast to Philo’s use of the same imagery:

Philo: The Special Laws LXII, 340

Thus while each of the other bodily members [sōmatos merōn] is present for a suitable and absolutely necessary use – such as the feet for walking and running and the other activities for which feet are suited, and hands for doing things and giving and receiving – the eyes are, as it were, for the common good, enabling the successful operation of these members and all the others.

In fact, Paul’s point is echoed in a story by Aesop – via Dio Chrysostom:

Dio Chrysostom: Thirty-Third Discourse: The First Tarsic Discourse

But something must have happened to you like that which Aesop says was suffered by the eyes.  For, although they supposed themselves to be the most worthy bodily parts, they observed that the mouth gained pleasure from most things, and especially, honey, which is the sweetest.  So they became angry and blamed the human [of which they were part].  But when that human placed honey on them, they hurt and cried, and found it to be stinging and unpleasant.

So anyway, I’ve been pondering lately: Might Christian theologians be thought of as the “eyes” of the body?  They are certainly “presentable”, to use Paul’s imagery, being in a position to debate and articulate the things that churches hold dear.  And if this is the case - if academic theologians might be thought of as the “eyes” of the body - I wonder if we’re sometimes tempted to get carried away with Philo’s reasoning above (“the eyes are the most important”) rather than Paul’s reasoning (“the eyes are not independent”).  Just a ponderance…

Did Greeks believe in the immortality of the soul?

Although Plato certainly held to the immortality of the soul (as opposed to the body), it seems noteworthy that the two main Greek philosophical schools of the time of Paul - the Epicureans and the Stoics (whom Paul had addressed in Athens) – both believed in the mortality of the soul. 

The Epicureans appear to have believed, following Epicurus himself, that the soul was extinguished with the death of the body.  This is because the soul itself was corporeal, being intermixed with the bodily parts in such a way that post-mortal survival was impossible.  On the corporeality of the soul, Epicurus writes:

So those who say that the soul [psuchēn] is incorporeal [asōmaton] are speaking vainly.[1]

Lucretius, writing in Rome in the first century BCE, similarly argues:

Therefore the soul [animi] is necessarily of a corporeal [corpoream] nature, as it labours under the impact of corporeal spears.[2]

Intermixed with our members and entire body is the power of the soul and of the spirit.[3]

Epicurus consequently reasons about death:

Therefore death [thanatos], the most fearsome of evils, is nothing to us, seeing as when we exist, death is not present; and when death is present, we do not exist.  So death is nothing to those who are living or to those who have died, seeing as for the one, it is nothing, and for the other, they are nothing.[4]

And again, Lucretius concurs:

Death, therefore, is nothing to us – of no concern at all, if we understand that the soul [animi] has a mortal nature.[5]

Stoicism similarly appears to have held to the non-eternality of the soul, although this did not necessarily mean immediate extinguishment upon the death of the body.  Like the Epicureans, they held that the soul could not be usefully thought of as independently incorporeal, given that it was inextricably linked to sensation and activity – characteristics of the corporeal.  Sextus Empiricus reports:

For according to them [the Stoics] the incorporeal [asōmaton] is not such that it can either act or suffer.[6]

Plutarch reports:

And the proof he [the Stoic Chrysippus] uses that the soul [psuchēn] is generated [gegonenai] – and generated after the body – is mainly that the manner and character of the children bears a resemblance to their parents.[7]

Eusebius elucidates a Stoic conception of the afterlife:

They [Stoics] say that the soul [psuchēn] is both generated [genētēn] and mortal [phthartēn].  But it is not immediately destroyed upon being separated from the body.  Rather it remains for some time by itself – that of the diligent remains until the dissolution of all things by fire; and that of the foolish remains only for a limited time.  About the endurance of the soul they say this: That we ourselves remain as souls which have been separated from the body and have been changed into the lesser substance of the soul; whereas the souls of irrational beings are destroyed along with their bodies.[8]

It would certainly be too simplistic, then, to claim that a “Greek” notion of the afterlife in the first century generally involved the liberation of the incorporeal soul into utopian immortality.  It is consequentially unhelpful to say that the resurrection-denial in Corinth simply involved a clash of “Jewish” and “Greek” views about the afterlife – particularly when you throw in the fact that Corinth was a Roman colony.

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[1] Letter to Herodotus, 67

[2] 3.175-6

[3] 3.275

[4] Letter to Menoeceus, 125

[5] 3.830

[6] Against the Professors, 8.263

[7] On Stoic Self-Contradictions 1053d

[8] Evangelical Preparation, 15.20.6

Did early Judaism believe in the bodily resurrection of the dead?

It seems to me that we could say this: Early Judaism did not involve a common orthodoxy concerning the bodily resurrection of the dead.  Alongside beliefs in bodily resurrection (exhibited in 2 Maccabees, for example), was a range of beliefs about the immortality of the soul and the nature of the afterlife.

The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides evidence a Jewish belief in immortality of the soul:

For souls [psuchai] remain unharmed in those who have perished.  For the spirit [pneuma] is God’s loan to mortals [thnētoisi], and his image.  For we have a body from the earth; and then after we are released to earth again, we are dust [konis].  But the air receives the spirit.[1]

The soul [psuchē] is immortal [athanatos] and ageless, living forever.[2]

Likewise, the Wisdom of Solomon envisages the afterlife as involving immortal souls:

They [that is, the immortal souls of the once-persecuted righteous] will judge the nations [krinousin ethnē], and rule over peoples [kratēsousi laōn], and the Lord will rule [basileusei] over them for eternity.[3]

I was a good child, receiving a good soul [psuchēs… agathēs], or rather, being good, I came into an undefiled body [sōma amianton].[4]

The Epistle of Enoch looks ahead to the blessed survival of good souls after death:

I swear to you: I understand this mystery [mustērion]…. That goodness and joy and honour have been prepared and written down for the souls of those who have died [apothanontōn] while godly [eusebōn].[5]

Similarly, Josephus appears to hold to the immortality of the soul, as opposed to the temporality of the body:

For [in the act of sex] the soul [psuchēs] is divided, departing to another place; for it suffers [kakopathei] when being implanted in bodies [sōmasi] and similarly at death when it is divided from them.  Therefore purifications for all of these things are commanded.[6]

According to Josephus, even the Pharisees, like the Essenes, held to a Greek-like idea of an immortal soul for all people.  Unlike the Essenes, they held that good souls would also receive new bodies:

For this is their doctrine [that is, the Essenes]: That bodies [sōmata] are mortal [phtharta], and their material is not permanent; but that souls [psuchas] are immortal [athanatous] and endure forever; and that they come out of thin air, so that they are bound to their bodies as to a prison, drawn in by a certain natural [phusikē] enticement; but being released from their fleshly bonds [tōn kata sarka desmōn], as set free from a long slavery, they then rejoice and rise upwards.  And this is similar to the opinions of the Greeks who hold that good souls have a dwelling beyond the ocean.[7]

[The Pharisees say that] every soul [psuchēn] is immortal [aphtharton], but that only those of good people are removed into another body [sōma]; while those of the simple are subjected to everlasting punishment.[8]

The Psalms of Solomon, arguably representative of Pharisaic thought, only once refer to resurrection, and there the reference is not unambiguously to a bodily experience:

The destruction [apōleia] of the sinner is forever [eis ton aiōna] and such a person will not be remembered when God visits the righteous.  This is the fate of sinners forever; but those who fear the Lord will be raised [anastēsontai] to eternal life [zōēn aiōnion].  And their life will be in the light of the Lord, and it will not go out.[9]

In contrast, Paul appears to hold that even those who belong to Christ lack immortality until they experience bodily resurrection.  The reason seems to be that Paul’s conception of the future/afterlife has become utterly Christocentric: Until Christ’s cosmic vindication is completed with his appearance and judgement of death, it is inconceivable that those who belong to Christ will pre-empt the sharing of his immortal exaltation.  Rather, they must follow in his footsteps and, at his appearing, share his bodily glory:

But each in its own order: Christ the firstfruits, then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ.  (1 Cor 15:23)

And just as we have borne the image of the one of dust, so also we will bear the image of the one of heaven.  (1 Cor 15:49)

For this mortality must be clothed with immortality (1 Cor 15:53)

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[1] Sentences, 105-108

[2] Sentences, 115

[3] Wisdom of Solomon 3:8

[4] Wisdom of Solomon 8:19-20

[5] 1 Enoch 103:1-3

[6] Against Apion, II, 203

[7] Jewish War: BJ II, 154-155.

[8] Jewish War: BJ II, 164.

[9] PsSol 3:11-12.

Ethics… A question of nature???

Over the last couple of days, our TV and internet at home have not been working – they still aren’t…  so we’ve been reduced to going back to the dark ages and reading newspapers and the like.  So today, I read an interesting article in the Sunday Times: Minette Marrin comments on the situation of Gary Glitter, the child abuser who has “done his time” and is now being rejected from country after country.  Her article points to something of a crisis in modern morality/ethics…

Scientific evidence seems to be growing by the month to suggest that people are not equally responsible for what they do.  Individual biology has a large part to play in destiny, as do environment and the complex symbiosis of the two.  Some people’s brain structure and brain chemistry may make them less able to control their impulses, more inclined to aggression, less able to understand their own motives or less able to understand the feelings or even the objective reality of other people.  This may be compounded by bad childhood experiences with damaged parents which themselves alter brain pathways.

If so, the foundation stone of western morality – the idea that we are all equally responsible for what we do and all equally culpable for our crimes – is being eroded by biology.  This process of erosion has begun fairly recently and is gathering speed.  It is profoundly alarming….

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) lists paedophilia as a mental disorder and the US Sypreme Court has upheld the idea of paedophilia as a mental abnormality.  However, there are those – both respectable experts and paedophile apologists – who argue that paedophilia should be removed from this list of mental disorders, hust as homosexuality was removed in the 1970s.  There is, apparently, some evidence that between 20-25% of the supposedly normal male population feel sexually attracted to children, according at least to a discussion in the US Archives of Sexual Behaviour of 2002, and react to “paedophilic” stimuli.  This might suggest that there is nothing so very abnormal about paedophile desires, just as other fantasies of violence and revenge are common….

Some studies using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain suggest that paedophilic men tend to have several differences in brain structure from other men and have one or more neurological characteristics at birth that could increase the likelihood of paedophilia.  However, for every one of these studies there is a crowd of experts to desagree with it….

Whether [Glitter] can’t or won’t control his taste for children, others will have to control it for him.  But it is wrong, given how little we understand about personal responsibility, to treat him harshly and to vilify him, just because we are anxious about that very lack of understanding.

 This raises a bunch of interesting questions for consideration/disagreement/reflection etc… and I’ll just cut to two issues that I think are worth considering:

1) I think some Christians are far too confident when they argue that something is ‘unnatural’ or ‘against nature’.  Whether homosexuality or anything else, I don’t think we adequately understand the post-fall mix that we find ourselves in, in order to be very clear here.  The only place I can think of where Paul talks about something being contrary to nature, it’s the issue of which sex should have which hair-length… and that hardly seems to be an argument that we can comprehend in scientific terms! 

2) The other side of the coin: I don’t think the possibility that something is ‘innate’ means it is excusable.  Again, whether homosexual desire, heterosexual desire, paedophilic desire, polygamy, or whatever else, I don’t think we can confidently say that because I have a ‘leaning’ in that direction, I should have a license to exercise that leaning.

Any thoughts?

Oh… another thought: Paul does, of course, talk in Romans 1 about humans ‘giving up’ natural use of their bodies… but I see this as a theological statement rather than a ’scientific’ observation…

Paul’s Ethics

One of the main areas I’m working on at the moment is Pauline ethics: For many months now I’ve been wrestling with the question: How does Paul think Christians should live – and on what basis does he think this?  So I’ve been going through Paul’s letters, reading up on OT ethics, Greco-Roman ethics, early Jewish ethics, Jesus’ ethics, apocryphal ethics… I’ve been reading books on New Testament ethics (Furnish, Horrell, Hays, Burridge, Rosner, Countryman…), and trying to be as attentive as possible to Paul’s thought.

I haven’t yet finished my current paper (I’m up to 50 pages) but I hope to give it to my supervisor in a week.  One thing that has intrigued me is that Paul often seems to use very similar imagery to deal with very similar issues, in a very similar order.  Here is a little snippet from the paper that I’m currently working on:

It would seem that for Paul, fundamental ethical godlessness or idolatry may be encapsulated both with the attitude of bold self-assertion (in terms of greed or passionate desire) and with the bodily practice of impurity/sexual immorality.  Thus the movement that can be described judicially by Paul as being from boastful works to divine justification; and which can be described relationally by Paul as being from heart-hardened enmity to reconciliation, can also be described ethically by Paul as being from passionate covetous impurity to surrendered loving incorporation.

 

The church comes to the Christ of the bodily resurrection, and, being bound to him by faith, crucifies sexual immorality, impurity and greed.  The members of the personal body are offered to God as risen instruments of righteousness, and each individual finds themself to be a member of Christ’s own body, in which mutual love reigns.

In the embrace of the crucified

“For worshippers of a crucified Lord, embracing God requires embracing innocent suffering: the child dying on Peed Onk, the Alzheimer patient abandoned by his adult children, the Sudanese mother unable to feed her family. A visible reminder of this Christian reality can be found in the cathedral in Wurzburg, Germany, where a large crucifix stands in a recessed arch to the side of the nave. The battered body of Christ has gaunt, Gothic features, his eyes fixed upon the viewer, his hands, pulled from the arms of the cross, extended outward in a gesture of embrace, inviting the viewer to enter. In pulling his arms from the arms of the cross, however, this carved Jesus still carries the spikes that nailed him there, embedded in his hands. There is no way to enter that embrace without feeling the iron instruments of Jesus’ torture. The loving embrace of God in the flesh necessarily involves entering the pain of that flesh. for Christians, this is how we become what God intends us to be.” Shuman & Volck, “Reclaiming the Body”, p45.

Fat Jesus

Imagine if we encountered the risen Jesus, and found him to be fat. He was picked on, after all, by being labeled a glutton and a drunkard. I’m not claiming he was fat – just wondering what issues it would raise for us.

I just read a review of a book called “The Fat Jesus” by Lisa Isherwood. It explores body issues from a feminist theological perspective. I found this so intriguing that I have ordered a book by Isherwood – but not the “fat Jesus” one… I’ve ordered her book “Introducing body theology” – because I think that “the body” is a topic surprisingly under-explored in Christian theology, and especially in my own area of Pauline studies. This is becoming more and more surprising to me, given that the body has such a prominent place in Romans, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, etc – the body of Jesus, the bodies of believers, the ecclesial body of Christ.

Have a look through the book of Romans, and you’ll notice that sin, judgement, atonement, sanctification and future glory are all described using bodily terms…

- God gave them up… to the degrading of their bodies (ch 1)
- Their throats… tongues… lips… mouths… feet… eyes (ch3)
- Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies (ch6)
- You have died to the law through the body of Christ (ch7)
- If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. (ch8)
- We groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies (ch8)
- I appeal to you… to present your bodies as a living sacrifice (ch12)
- We who are many are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another (ch12)
etc…

…and don’t get me started on 1 Corinthians!!

exalted in my body

If you come to the postgraduate study room for theology students at the University of Nottingham, you will discover that above the door on the way in, there is a little sign saying “The Ivory Tower” (actually, we are situated just beneath the clocktower in the Trent building)… and as you leave the study room, you will see a little sign above the door announcing your exit to “The Real World”. The little signs were placed there a few weeks back by a particular Australian theology postgrad, as egged on by certain other inhabitants of this room.

Of course, the point is an ironic one… but it does provoke me to think each time I come in and go out. Why didn’t Paul say what I wanted him to say: “It is my eager expectation and hope that… Christ will be exalted now as always in my study”… I’d be much more comfortable with that…

“In the bodily obedience of the Christian, carried out as the service of God in the world of everyday, the lordship of Christ finds visible expression and only when this visible expression takes personal shape in us does the whole thing become credible as Gospel message.” Ernst Kasemann