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cannibalism, copulation, Eucharist, excretion, idolatry, John Milton, Maggie Kilgour, On Christian Doctrine, scatophagy, spiritualisation
In a well-known twist, what usually results from the illusory attempt to lead a pure and spiritual existence, free from material baseness, is an obsessive fantasizing about excreting, copulating, and other “lower” bodily functions.
For example, the more puritanical among the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Protestants were carrying on a long tradition of iconoclasm, one found in the biblical books, when they attempted to purify Christian rites of any material significance. The way they saw things, the Eucharist must be viewed as a spiritual remembrance which rendered the material bread and wine merely accidental or it would inevitably descend into gross and base literalism: the cannibalistic eating of the body of Christ. The nuanced Catholic conception of the symbol as something both present and physical, and yet absent and transcendent, got caricatured as gross materialism, via a fervant literalism that itself was responsible for creating the idol which it was criticising.
So John Milton, in On Christian Doctrine, warns that the Eucharist must be no more than an analogy for a spiritual process. The alternative, in Milton’s fantasy (although never conceived as such by his real rather than imaginary Catholic opponents), was idolatry and scatological obsession:
“if we eat his flesh it will not remain in us, but to speak candidly, after being digested in the stomach it will be at length excluded.”
(On Christian Doctine, 1.28; tr. in Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism)
Or, as Milton later caricatures the Catholic view, shuddering (with a secret delight?) to even think about it:
“when [Christ’s body] has been driven through all the stomach’s filthy channels it shoots it out – one shudders even to mention it – into the latrine.”
(On Christian Doctine, 6.560; tr. in Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism)
We’ve got both sides of the debate here, so it’s fairly easy to work out that Milton is misrepresenting the symbolic Catholic view. Perversely, it is Milton himself who is grossly obsessing on the materiality of the Eucharist. As Maggie Kilgour comments:
“in his attack on Catholic materialism he cannot resist the temptation of dwelling obsessively on bodily images, especially those related to the ‘lowest’ functions of eating and excretion. His own dualistic definition of communion enables him to indulge in the materialist fantasies he is suppose to be denouncing by projecting them outside of himself onto another group that he then attacks.”
(From Communion to Cannibalism, 84)
By contrast, in Isaiah 44, we don’t get both sides of the depiction of Babylonian worship, but just the Jewish caricature of the foolishness of idol-worship. But as George Soares-Prabhu questions in his article, “Laughing at Idols”: might there actually have been in Babylonian religion, behind this base caricature of idols, “visual theologies of great depth and power”?
Beautiful irony. The most pure are totally obsessed with lavatories and sex. They fear it but they can’t stop thinking about it (and preaching about it).
Deane,
There is an interesting sort-of-but-but-not-really parallel within some Buddhist monastic circles of meditating on the body in its most impure forms as a way to overcome corporeal desire. Monks are encouraged, if they are troubled by certain desires, to travel to a burial ground – and this being ancient India (as well as other places), the dead are left in the open to decompose – and to meditate on the decaying corpses.
The instructions are wonderfully specific, and tailored to each person’s particular hang-ups. A monk who is especially troubled by the thought and sight of beautiful skin is encouraged to seek out and focus on a corpse whose skin has blackened and putrefied while another who has a penchant for the slender is advised to find a body with a swollen belly inflated by the gasses of decomposition to focus all his awareness on.
It is this mix of the highest religious goals with what our animal instincts tell us should be avoided that brought this to mind when reading about the pooping Jesus. That this form of meditative contemplation exists in a tradition which grew out of the Hindu milieu, which at the time viewed most bodily products, shit included, of course, as ritually impure – even hair removed from a living body is polluting – makes it all the more interesting.
Didn’t you tell me once that someone (and it might have been Augustine) wrote something about Jesus (or maybe it was another holy figure) and farting?
Eric
Um… pehaps this… Augustine believed that those people who had such control over their farts that they could ‘whistle’ a wee tune with them provided models of the pure Adam who had perfect spiritual control over his material functions and passions. The prelapsarian Adam is a type of Jesus, which may indicate one of the latter’s party tricks.
Good parallel. I’ve got a Persian one which I’m going to post later.
Re: Farting Jesus/Adamic man: Wasn’t there a Valentinian fragment discovered in one of the texts “debunking” him, that basically stated point-blank that, quite literally, the christological figure’s “shit didn’t stink”? Take that for what it’s worth, it might be mere posturing on the part of the anti-gnostic Catholics of the Constantinian age…..
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