Intensities

Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life

Katharine Sarah Moody, Steven Shakespeare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317114819
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Religion

Is the affirmation or intensification of life a value in itself? Can life itself be thought? This book breaks new ground in religious and philosophical thinking on the concept of life. It captures a moment in which such thinking is regaining its force and attraction for scholars, and the relevance of thought to social, cultural, political and religious dilemmas about how and why to live. Bringing together original contributions by highly distinguished authors in the field of Continental philosophy of religion, including John D. Caputo, Pamela Sue Anderson, Philip Goodchild, Alison Martin and Don Cupitt, this book has a distinctiveness based on its refusal to sit easily within either secular philosophical or theological approaches. The concept of life mobilizes a thinking that crosses narrow disciplinary boundaries, whilst retaining philosophical rigour. Three sections explore the various dimensions of the question of life: The Politics of Life'; 'Life and the Limits of Thinking'; and 'Life and Spirituality'. This book will be of interest to a broad range of readers in the humanities, particularly to philosophers, theologians, cultural theorists and all those interested in philosophical or theological debates on the concept of life.

SECTION TWO
Life and the Limits of Thinking

Chapter 5
Bodies without Flesh: Overcoming the Soft Gnosticism of Incarnational Theology

John D. Caputo

Woody Allen once said that he did not want to live on in his works, nor did he want to live on in his children; he wanted to live on in his apartment. Therein lies a knotted theological conundrum that I will take up here in a more ponderous way, but without any assurance that I will get much further than has this venerable pundit.

For Life

Do you think we’ll still be around in ten years? he says.

Do you think we’ll still be around? Afterwards? he says. He waits for my response.

I, in any case, don’t think so. He says. But I wish it could happen, I wish I could believe differently he says.¹

Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous are talking about death, about the other side. He says that in the end we die too soon, that life will have been so short. She says, not too soon. This is all the more poignant now that death has since overtaken one of them, the one who wonders if we will still be around in ten years. On her side, she takes the side of life. For her there is but this one side, while death in itself, death as such, does not have or constitute a side. For it is mortality, not death, that achieves a kind of uncanny phenomenality, although nothing is more uncanny than death. Not that death is nothing at all. Death, Heidegger says, is not something Ausstehendes, still outstanding, like an unpaid debt, but Bevorstehendes, ‘impending’, or hovering before us, like a spectre. As exposure to the I-know-not-what of death, mortality is a mode of being-in-the-world, of what Heidegger will not condescend to call ‘life’, vita mortalis, mortal life. Mortality belongs on this side and to deal with mortality is to deal with life and to take a stand ‘for life’, pour la vie.

My opening hypothesis is that theology has been spooked by death. In the games played in theology, the card hidden in the deck is death. Death is what the ‘trans-’ in transcendence (or the ‘meta-’ in metaphysics) hopes to get beyond. Transcendence means crossing over to the other side. The distinction between time and eternity, the one with teeth in it, is ultimately about the status not of ideal forms or mathematical objects but of our own hides. We are ourselves the subject matter of this distinction. Eternity means ‘eternal life’, whose reign is among the dead. In high theology, it is the dead who have true life. Philosophy for Plato is practising for death, while, for St Paul, to die is a plus (kerdos, lucrum, lucrative), a profit that can made on death (Phil. 1.21–2). But if eternal life spells death, while only the dying are actually alive, then the love of eternal life, Mary Daly complains, is a kind of necrophilia,² a curious prescription for curing nihilism.³

If mortal life is the life of flesh, then to take a stand for life is to stand for and with flesh. Flesh is always in one way or another the promise/threat of death. Carnal life is life-with-death, life/death, the life of vulnerable flesh, while eternal life is accordingly life without flesh. So my concern throughout will be to flush out the stratagems by which we seek to get beyond flesh, to get to the other side of flesh, which is the other side of life. The ways we find to twist free from our entanglement with flesh is what I mean by ‘Gnosticism’, which I want to counter with a genuinely carnal or incarnational theology,⁴ one that turns on glorious bodies of flesh, one that is for life, for the flesh of life, for the life of flesh.

Consider this primal scene: a celestial being comes down to earth in order to rescue mortals from flesh, to ferry them off to heaven on a cloud from whence the celestial being came, their bodies now re-forged as fleshless fiery things, fit for the heavenly abode.⁵ That may be. No one has authorized me to gainsay it. There are robotologists all over North America and Western Europe furiously at work on such a thing, where scientists conduct heated pursuit of post-biological life, seriously working on fitting us out with bodies fit for survival on the other side. The two great contenders for the crown of ‘post-humanism’ today are contemporary robotologists and Christian eschatologists. Which one will win this race – the Rapture or the Robot (the ‘Singularity’⁶)? Who knows? All I am saying is that to conduct such business under the name of flesh, instead of another round of Gnosticism, is to give a whole new meaning to the word irony.

Taking Christianity at its Word

Let us take Christianity at its word, its Word made flesh, embracing its claim that it is a religion of the flesh, of ‘becoming flesh’, a Deleuzianism that almost perfectly translates John 1.14 (sarke egeneto), like the German Fleischwerden.

I distinguish ‘flesh’ (sarx, caro, chair, Fleisch) from ‘body’ (soma, corpus, Leib). The body means the site of agency, action and movement, organic functions, the ‘organon’ of the soul, its right hand, so to speak. The body is the body subject of phenomenology, appearing everywhere but incognito in Being and Time as being-in-the-world, as the user of tools. The body tends to be hale and whole, male and muscular, white and Western. Flesh by contrast is a seat of passivity and affectivity, of feeling, self-feeling, feeling itself felt, of feeling itself alive; flesh is the site of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, glory and misery. We pass our days in able-bodied fascination with the world but it does not take much to be drawn back into the flesh. The ‘reduction’ to the flesh occurs when we are driven to the extremes of pleasure or pain, in sexual ecstasy or torture, pushed to a point where the world itself is suspended and we are reduced to sighing and moaning. Flesh aches with hunger even as flesh is meat (Fleisch) that is eaten (a problem for early Christian martyrs).⁷ When we die it is flesh that rots (first) and stinks. (Who knows when our ceramic hip replacements will rot?) At death, a body, a corpus/corpse, remains to be disposed of, but the flesh has melted away. Dead bodies are bodies without flesh, dead weights.

To be sure, nothing is gained by instituting a new form of dualism between body and flesh. My point is exactly the opposite: living flesh is embodied, and all the living bodies we have ever run into are enfleshed. What I am analysing here is the spectre/dream of a ‘body without flesh’, a living one, not a corpse, and what event is harboured in that figure. If Paul says that on the whole he would rather have a body without flesh (Phil. 1.24), what is the status of this bond with flesh, its ana-status? Is there, as Jean-Luc Nancy suspects, a deep dissatisfaction with carnality concealed in the Incarnation, a ‘real and secret horror of bodies’, of carnal corruption?⁸ Why would a theology of incarnation require flesh to be visited from on high? Is not flesh already high enough? Why a divine advent into flesh instead of the divine event of flesh? Is the force of this prefix ‘in-’ privative, ‘incarnation’, as in in-corporeal, in-valid, in-carnal? Or might incarnational theology admit other figures and resources, other more glorious bodies of flesh?

The Heavenly Body

The glorious body incarnational theology is dreaming of is a heavenly body. In Luke, Jesus appears to the assembled disciples who ‘thought that they were seeing a ghost (pneuma)’, urging them to touch and see the wounds in his risen body, ‘for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have’. Then Jesus took a piece of broiled fish and ate it to allay their doubts (24.36–43), after which he ‘was carried up into heaven’ (24.50). Left to stand as it is, this narrative implies a functioning digestive tract and consequently the production of waste products, to put it rather circumspectly.⁹ Giorgio Agamben is less concerned with being circumspect: what must be excluded from the risen body is defecation.¹⁰ The difference between this side and the other side, immanence and transcendence, is defecation. What is so foolish, ridiculous or amusing about all this? Why not wonder what sort of housing, food supply and waste management system would be required to accommodate Alice’s surprising change of size in Wonderland? Are we doing something wrong?

Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, proposed a devilishly ingenious way out of this heavenly dilemma.¹¹ The earth is ‘thirsty’ for water, so it consumes water by absorbing it from defect or need, while the sun is higher than water, and does not ‘need’ water, and so it consumes water by burning it up or evaporating it. The mortal body is like the earth, it needs food, but the risen body is like the sun, it does not need food, but consumes it by evaporating it. The food is not assimilated by the risen body of Christ (which would create the need for heavenly plumbers) but burnt off. From an historical-critical point of view, Aquinas actually is not all that far off! But with this difference: the resurrected body is not analogous to a heavenly body; it is a heavenly body, of the same astral stuff. Of course, as Dale Martin says, there is ‘no fixed tradition as to the exact nature of the resurrected body of Jesus’ in the New Testament.¹² Luke and John emphasize that resurrection is a resurrection of the flesh; that the hands of Thomas could feel the soft tissues of Jesus’ wounded side; that Jesus could eat broiled fish, have breakfast on the shores of the Lake Tiberias and break bread in the inn at Emmaus; and that he was no ‘ghost’ (pneuma). This flatly contradicts the words of Paul in 1 Cor. 15.50, which expressly disallows ‘flesh and blood’ into the kingdom of God, explicitly precluding the suggestions of the later gospels, verbatim.

Paul distinguished corruptible bodies made of earth and water from heavenly bodies made of the finer materials of fire and air. Paul does not distinguish between body and soul (Plato), or body and mind (Descartes), but a ‘gross natural body’ (soma physikon) and a ‘refined body’ (soma pneumatikon). Human bodies are composed of elements of both: sarx, ‘flesh’, the soft tissues of the body responsible for feeling; psyche, a ‘soul’ (anima) responsible for its animate vegetative and sentient life, which it shares with the animals; pneuma, ‘spirit’, responsible for the higher acts of cognitive and intelligent life, which is made up of finest, ethereal materials, out of which the sun, the moon and the stars are made. The natural place of pneuma is the heavens; these are ‘heavenly bodies’ (somata epourania). Sarx and psyche are earth-bound and belong to the sphere of hyle, which is commonly translated as ‘matter’, but signifies the grosser heavier side of matter, while pneuma means ether, fire and air, finer, lighter materialities. Thus while we today would say that fire and air belong to the ‘material’ world, they were not, in Paul’s vocabulary, hyletic (hyle) or ‘natural’ (physikon, material in the ‘gross’, narrow sense) like wood or dirt.

At death, the shell of this earthly seed is shattered, breaking up its grosser hyletic materiality and animality, in order to come forth as something entirely pneumatic. Death, for Paul, is not the separation of body and soul, but the separation of the body from flesh. The resurrected body is a body (soma), not a gross hyletic animal body but a ‘pneumatic body’, a refined ethereal body exercising higher intelligent life but not lower biological or zoological life. In the gospels, which mean to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Irritating Life
• SECTION ONE: THE POLITICS OF LIFE
• SECTION TWO: LIFE AND THE LIMITS OF THINKING
• SECTION THREE: LIFE AND SPIRITUALITY
• Afterword
• Index