Christ's Body (Sarah Beckwith)

Beckwith’s project is to “[examine] the image of ‘Christ’s body’ as a symbol shaping and shaped by the social vision of the religious culture of the late Middle Ages in England” (2). She is not interested in theology, but in “cultural anthropology”--what “cultural work” does Christ’s body accomplish in social hierarchy and social interaction? If there are any questions about her perspective on the religious angle, consider an epigraph to the first chapter:

Pure spirit is pure lie.—Friedrich Nietzsche

Huh. But let’s carry on, shall we?

Chapter one seeks to demystify medieval mysticism. While earlier modern studies of mystic texts tended to accept them practically at face value, according them the transcendence the purport to represent, Beckwith argues that this reception is itself profoundly historically conditioned. With modernity came a rejection of established hierarchies--religious, political, philosophical--that left a corresponding emptiness, and mysticism--universal, non-rational, non-dogmatic, immediate, and personal--seemed an authentic replacement for the discarded shells. This embrace of mysticism had the concomitant result of the ahistoricizing of mystical texts, for social and temporal context are meaningless to timeless, universal communication.

This attempt to recover the lost sacred led scholars of mysticism to value the via negativa over the via positiva. The negative way (The Cloud of Unknowing) attempts to realize oneness with God through spiritual contemplation of the absolute divine, which is beyond all sense perception, analogy, symbol, or imagining. The positive way (Margery Kempe, the Franciscans) sought unity with Christ through contemplation and imitation of His bodily corporeality--imagining Christ’s passion, or identifying one’s bodily suffering with Christ’s suffering. This “sensible and personal” way of mysticism has been seen as “feminine” and inferior to the transcendent (and “masculine”) negative way. This bias has led scholars of mysticism to devalue a form of spirituality that was in fact more pervasive in the Middle Ages. Beckwith wants to correct these tendencies and bring the mystics back down to earth where they belong.

Then Beckwith gets down to business. Her claim is simple enough:

[T]he body, and the symbol of Christ’s body in particular, is actually a basic metaphor for pre-modern theorizing about the social order, one nuanced through the specific articulations of that metaphor to consider the urgent question of who was included in that social order and on what terms. (27)

Obviously we can (and Beckwith does) turn to biblical language about the unity of Christians within the body of Christ, which is His church (1 Cor. 12). But also the Eucharist was the body of Christ, literally present among believers in the Mass. This is dramatized in the Corpus Christi procession, in which the whole citizenry (Christ’s corporate body) marches through town behind a monstrance carrying a consecrated host (Christ’s sacramental body). Lollardy figures in here: their views on the Mass threatened the boundaries and conditions of the social order.

At this point Beckwith brings in the positive way of mysticism, referencing the many devotional manuals (often with Franciscan sources) that taught contemplation of Christ’s bodily suffering. Through imaginatively identifying with Christ’s bodily suffering, the contemplative could be united to Christ spiritually. Christ’s wounds were imagined as portals into the Christ’s body: dove cotes, honeycomb, birth canals. This new route into the body was a threat to the sacral norm embodied in the Corpus Christi procession. And this is why Margery Kempe so peeved the churchmen of her day: by virtue of her identification with Christ, manifest in her weeping and pangs and declared in her many visions, Margery Kempe claimed a kind and a degree of unity with Christ’s body unthinkable outside of the institutional norms of the church.