Reminiscences
exchanging gendered fluidities and bodily differences
Don’t we always already discover ourselves within that condition of bodily dependence and vulnerability that is the inescapable shadow cast by the human flesh on the brightness of the soul, a shadow that men of God and men of reason have spent much of history trying to eliminate? Do ‘I’ (my will, my reason, my moral power), control this messy stuff of which I am made, so that I seek to determine its birthing and its dying, its conceiving and its aborting, its suffering and its delight? Or do I somehow struggle to keep up with where my body leads me, in the strangeness of its affections and desires (and its affectations too), in the rebelliousness of its illnesses and sufferings and slow decline into ageing and death?
This exchange from early 2015 is a continuation of my previous post. It’s an extract from the Syndicate online forum, which published a series of comments and conversations about my book, Theology After Postmodernity.
My response to Marika Rose is a foreshadowing of my current concerns and my experiments in writing theology in a different style. I was saying then what I still say today, that “Lacanian Butleresque parodies of gender run into the buffers of the body”.
You can read the dialogue at this link. It’s a fascinating theological discussion with contributions from Hannah Hofheinz, Gerard Loughlin and Sean Larsen, as well as Marika. Here, I’m copying the last exchange between Marika and myself, though I’d urge you to read the whole conversation if you’re interested. The texts below are copied verbatim, but I’ve inserted some links, references and images.
Marika Rose replying to Tina Beattie
12th January 2015
On Bodily Mortification and Revolutionary Violence
There’s so much in here that I don’t have much hope of making an adequate response. But I want to respond to two things, which seem to me to touch on two key points: first the question of bodily modification, and second the question of revolutionary violence.
In response to the question of bodily modification, I want to strengthen my argument and say that it is not simply fallenness which means that we struggle with and against our bodies to transform them, but something in the nature of material being itself. Nature has never been a static, solid ground on which to build. Everything natural, everything that is, is always in the process of changing, transforming itself. To be human is, by extension, to likewise engage in a process of self-transformation. I don’t deny that some of that transformation is motivated by a hatred for the body, and clearly all of it is entangled in both patriarchy and the capitalistic commodification of human life. But I love my piercings, the most straightforwardly violent thing I have done to my body, in a way that doesn’t seem to me to be reducible to an internalisation of the male gaze or a hatred of my body. There is a curious sort of eroticism to the fresh wound that results from forcing steel through skin (Lacan would have plenty to say about that, no doubt). I find pleasure in the things I do to my body, the things I do with my body, the ways I am able to transform myself. I don’t know that it has much to do with transcendence (but then isn’t transcendence part of the problem, when it comes to bodily hatred?). It doesn’t even have that much to do with the desire to be pleasing to the gaze of others. What do we do, theologically, with the desire to be tattooed, to be pierced, to colour our hair, to paint our faces, to be strong, to acquire physical skills, to work on our bodies to transform them? How much is really new and how much is a reflection of new technological possibilities made available to a very old and very human desire? Is there a way of valuing what is good and beautiful here even when it is not—explicitly—related to the desire for God?
And then, the question of revolutionary violence. What I was trying to say, I think, was that it seems to me that we cannot love what is good and what is beautiful in our lives and in the bodies which constitute the world around us without hating that which would destroy them and committing ourselves to fight for their destruction in the name of something better. I don’t know how helpful the category of violence is here for deciding what tools are appropriate in the fight. We so easily focus on the wrong things and see violence where it is not, and miss it where it is (Angela Davis and Assata Shakur spring to mind here, as women who thought that new life would come forth precisely out of revolutionary transformation, and whose radical opposition to the existing order was seen as physical violence even where there was none). The question is this: do we accept the horizons of the existing order as those we are compelled to work within, so that we believe what we are told, that there is no alternative, that all we can do is work within the constraints of the existing order; or do we enact a more radical refusal in the name of those bodies we love, and insist that another world is possible.
Tina Beattie replying to Marika Rose
24th January 2015
Some Piercing Insights
Marika, now we’re doing theology! Piercings and revolutions—oh yes. After all, piercings once redeemed us (‘he was pierced for our transgressions’), and that was some revolution—though actually, I think the revolution really happened with the virginal conception of God incarnate which involved no piercing at all, though later a sword would pierce her maternal soul. And haven’t we seen, in that golden moment between the near-simultaneous ending of apartheid and communism, and the rise of Marketolatry, that velvet revolutions do not always involve violence? One can after all end opposing regimes defended by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction with nothing more than people holding candles through the night—though many died or were imprisoned to keep those candles of hope alive in the long, long night. Today it seems that we would prefer to curse the darkness than light the candle of hope. If you ask me, it’s better to light a candle than to draw a cartoon.
(I’ve already confessed I do theology by daydreaming and association, which is why I’m not a systematic theologian. So let me get back to the point—piercings—because that set up so many penetrating insights that I don’t know where to begin.)
I do have two piercings—one in each earlobe—but that’s it I’m afraid. However, having once had an episiotomy, I’m familiar with the feeling of ‘the fresh wound that results from forcing steel through skin’. In fact, when I attended my first philosophy lecture at the age of thirty six, I was amazed to find a module on ‘episiotomy’. When I looked more closely, it was ‘epistemology’. My epistemological credentials are better now than they were then (though some people reading this might dispute that), but I still think that people who have had episiotomies have something vital to contribute to epistemologies. So what follows are some episiotomical wanderings in theological epistemologies. This is not very radical—in fact, it’s quite orthodox—but those who don’t know their orthodoxy might think it’s radical.
I realise this is getting a bit near the bone, (bad pun), but this is where Lacanian Butleresque parodies of gender run into the buffers of the body. There are some things one can’t do or be made to endure with the symbolic phallus and the lack thereof. I wonder if the eroticism of slicing through skin is a way of cutting through all those vacuous postmodern parodies to get to the real stuff, in order to feel more real, to reconnect word and flesh, to carve the will’s command into the obstinate resistance of the flesh.
I ask this because the next association I made was to wonder what it would feel like to experience the kind of power over one’s own body that your response implies. Is it a desire to resist the power of nature, to tame the animal flesh by harnessing its eroticism and indeed its violence? Is it about autonomy—this desire to do things to one’s body that are ‘not about the gaze of others’ and ‘not—explicitly related to the desire for God’? (Thomas Aquinas said we shouldn’t get too hung up about these things—sometimes enjoyment is just enjoyment, or words to that effect.)
Is it the ultimate masturbatory experience, with the knife taking the place of the phallus or the vibrator? Does a woman’s self-pleasuring always require penetration? The first academic essay I ever published was about why God created the clitoris. I like to think it’s the laughter of God in the face of the power of the phallus. A virgin can conceive a child and even have an orgasm without penetration in the Kingdom of God. Maybe that’s what Augustine is getting at when he says of the risen female body that
A woman’s sex is not a defect; it is natural. And in the resurrection it will be free of the necessity of intercourse and childbirth. However, the female organs will not subserve their former use; they will be part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder—there will be no lust in that life—but will arouse the praises of God for his wisdom and compassion, in that he not only created out of nothing but freed from corruption that which he had created. (City of God, Book 22, Ch. 17)
The truth is, I never thought to ask questions about autonomy and bodiliness until it was too late. I had bonked away my virginity before I discovered that, like money in the bank, it might have gained interest with keeping. (I had a Presbyterian upbringing so I hadn’t been raised on a spiritual diet of Catholic virginal purity. I’m not sure Presbyterians do virginal purity, figuratively speaking). By the time I began to read feminist theories about embodiment, autonomy, ‘my body my self’ etc., I had been married for close on fifteen years and had four little children, who one way and another were rather dependent on my body. So in some way I’ve always experienced my body as ‘for’ others, and the idea of doing quite radical things to my own body for pleasure—I’m talking out of the ordinary things here, not to go into too much detail—makes me question my assumptions and my boundaries.
But is any body truly one’s own? Don’t we always already discover ourselves within that condition of bodily dependence and vulnerability that is the inescapable shadow cast by the human flesh on the brightness of the soul, a shadow that men of God and men of reason have spent much of history trying to eliminate? Do ‘I’ (my will, my reason, my moral power), control this messy stuff of which I am made, so that I seek to determine its birthing and its dying, its conceiving and its aborting, its suffering and its delight? Or do I somehow struggle to keep up with where my body leads me, in the strangeness of its affections and desires (and its affectations too), in the rebelliousness of its illnesses and sufferings and slow decline into ageing and death? Am I always embodied with and for others, and must my will always seek to extricate itself from this entanglement of the flesh by doing its own thing, dragging the reluctant body along? Do I need to live and live again the primal alienation of the human condition that severs flesh from word, castrating myself over and over again by cutting myself off from that primordial union that I imagine to have been my first and ultimate place of rest, setting in motion an abysmal desire that I veil with the purpose and meaning of God? Can it be true that all our human longing—all spirituality, all mysticism, all our liturgical grandeur, all art, music and poetry—flow from that wound of separation and the body’s insatiable hunger for return and consolation? In her novel Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson describes this better than any Lacanian theorist:
The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.
Theologians have forgotten how to play with time, but without such playfulness we have nothing much to say. That’s why we must abandon the systematic project and turn to literature, art, music and popular culture if we are to speak of God anew. The story of creation is, after all, far more about finding words to express the play of memory, desire and imagination upon the human soul than it is about scientific or temporal origins or debates about ontology and God. Lacan knows that, but so did Thomas:
The activity by which God maintains things is no new activity, but the continued act of giving them existence, an act which is not a process in time. . . . Before things existed God had the power not to give them existence, and thus not to make them. So, in the same way, after they have been made, he has the power to cut off the inflow of existence, so that they cease existing; that is, he has the power to annihilate them. But there is no point in him doing it. For his goodness and power are shown better by eternally maintaining both spirits and matter in existence. (ST 1, 104).
Cutting off the inflow of existence: is that not what falling and birthing are both about? Are we not always falling forward into that just created moment when curiosity slices us from the raw animality of innocence into the divided condition of human consciousness that recognises good only when it is lost? Do we not meander through time in constant elliptical movements of association, digression, memory, hope and forgetfulness? Isn’t that time-travelling capacity of the human soul what truly separates us from all other animals: not rationality, but freedom from the time-bound moment that we experience as imagination and memory (which is why this response to you comes when our conversation has already been relegated to the backlist).
Does this cutting into the self constitute an act of resistance to that first unavoidable cut that births us into language—and, as I’ve already suggested, the mother’s body too is cut and wounded along with the cutting away of the child (except in the case of Christ, who never wounded any body—which is why the virgin birth is eschatologically significant)? Or is it rather the way in which we women cry out against that continual attempt to merge us, to fuse us back into the maternal so that the erotic yearning of the flesh is tamed to serve the purpose of procreation, the engendering of the human? Is it better to experience the delight of being cut free over and over again, than to feel the dark inward pull of that maternal body who has never learned to let us go, who has taught us never to trust our own erotic desire, for we have only ourselves to blame if we are impregnated, seduced, raped. That’s what mothers used to teach their daughters. Maybe we still do, unwittingly and unknowingly, because we are too eager to protect them. When a woman cuts her own flesh, is she re-enacting over and over again the ecstatic anguish of curse and expulsion from Eden? But then, how are we to return, how are we to imagine that glorious redemption of our bodies when we arouse nobody but God—and how can we arouse God if we are not ourselves aroused from Eve’s long historical slumber of desire beneath the curse of domination and childbirth? Who told us that God would ever ask that we cut ourselves off from ‘the inflow of existence’, when even Thomas tells us that it would be pointless to do so?
There are also those piercings that go beyond the erotic—puncturing through the veils of imagination and desire to the sublime and awesome lure of the tomb—that other womb that is the mortal enemy of every mother’s love, the enemy that makes her want to suck her children back inside and keep them safe. Don’t let anybody tell you that mother earth and human mothers walk hand in hand. We are in constant battle for our children’s lives. A mother is not a force of nature but a force against nature. What freedom, what faith, must a woman have to set her child free along the path to Calvary? What dedication must she have to walk there with him, to watch as mother nature triumphs over the complex fragility of maternal love, as the virgin earth swallows the body of the virgin birth? No wonder Rilke has Mary cry out from the foot of the cross, ‘you suddenly reversed all nature’s course’. (‘Before the Passion’).
Yet in death, Christ’s body morphs—the tortured corpse becomes the maternal body, reversing nature’s course again. A double reversal, a reuniting of the maternal body with the earth after the wrenching of separation. In John’s Gospel, the wound in Christ’s side gushes blood and water—not something that dead bodies do, but this is a body in childbirth. That’s why medieval artists made the wound look like a bleeding vagina. One of my current intellectual curiosities is whether the phallic torso and the bloodied wound together are a kind of fertility symbol inscribed on the body of the crucified, with Mary at the foot of the cross symbolising the maternal Church—the crucified body metamorphosing into the maternal body of the Church—giving birth to the faithful, healing the wound that cut us off from the umbilical cord, ‘the inflow of existence’? Extra ecclesiam, nulla salis. No salvation outside the body of the mother.
But if we women are to become human, creatures of language set free from the suffocating silence of the maternal womb, must we always follow that crucified body, reversing nature’s course lest our mothers consume us, and resisting the healing that follows lest we too become consuming mothers? Is that what Holy Mother Church does to men—consume them with her voluptuous sensuality, so that the fragile penis must forego its tender pleasures and become instead the phallus that masks the site of castration and erects itself as the sword of banishment before the sacramental priesthood? For what symbolic loss would occur if it ceased to be the sword of division and became instead the organ of fecundity, union and desire? If it became for us ‘the inflow of existence’ rather than the barrier of prohibition? Better to keep cutting and cutting and cutting than to ask such questions.
Ultimately, the mortal mother always loses to mother earth, and our human will loses its fight against nature.We die, whether by an act of wilful defiance—like Antigone or Lucretia, or like every violent revolutionary propelled by the death wish?—or whether we simply surrender our sick and ageing flesh to the voracious earth, in the realization that‘Nature has never been a static, solid ground on which to build. Everything natural, everything that is, is always in the process of changing, transforming itself.’
Whew, Marika, time to come up for air. Yes, you’re right: ‘To be human is, by extension, to likewise engage in a process of self-transformation.’ I dye my hair, I paint my toenails, I even wax my chin (see below), but I don’t willingly do anything that forces steel through skin. But as you can see, I’m trying to imagine why I might. So let me dwell on this for a while by another association, which also has to do with changing and piercing.
I managed to catch the last day of the “Late Rembrandt” exhibition at the National Gallery in London. I had to hang around for four hours for my timed entry, so I went and sat in a nearby café. I overheard a snatch of conversation between two young men sitting nearby. I have no idea what they were talking about, but one said to the other, ‘It was quite an experience. You would have hated it. All those naked women—they were old. It was disgusting.’ They fell about laughing. I wanted to hit him. Not really. I wanted to take all my clothes off and dance on the table, but as I’ve already implied, I’m not that free with my body (yet).
I know all about that mutability of nature you talk about. All that is solid melts into jelly (apologies to Marx). Everything wobbles, sags, droops, flops. Hairy places go sparse and smooth places grow hair (see above). The male body is not resistant to these processes, yet I never hear young women snorting with laughter in cafés, talking about disgusting old men with their dewlaps, farts and pot bellies. Anyway, I’m digressing again. Let’s talk about art.
When I went to the Rembrandt exhibition, I discovered female bodies painted from the inside out, so to speak. Not the male gaze, but a tender, wounded eroticism that saw the vulnerability in beauty and the beauty in vulnerability. Rembrandt was an old man by then. His self-portraits show us how he ages, year on year.
One has to befriend the ageing flesh, in order to depict it in such visionary and translucent detail. And this is where I want to reflect on another question you pose, when you say, “it seems to me that we cannot love what is good and what is beautiful in our lives and in the bodies which constitute the world around us without hating that which would destroy them and committing ourselves to fight for their destruction in the name of something better. I don’t know how helpful the category of violence is here for deciding what tools are appropriate in the fight.”
As I’ve already suggested, to be a mother is to move to the frontline of that primordial battle against all that would destroy the bodies we love, though let’s not romanticise. A mother can fear the voracious need of the child as much as the child resists the voracious love of the mother. Psychoanalysis never has understood that side of things. Sometimes, it’s better to nip it in the bud than to live one’s whole life with the altered ego that comes about when the autonomous self splits by way of a cutting that never goes far enough, a cutting that never manages to sever the umbilical cord that attaches the maternal heart to the wandering child. Better to end it before it begins, in this culture of ours that no longer accepts that suffering is the other side of love, and if one refuses to suffer one must ultimately refuse to love. Even so, maternal love, like martyrdom, must be freely chosen. There is no law in love, no law that can force love, no love that is subject to law. Love is free, or it is not love.
So what god will free us to love, unless that god also reconciles us to death? How can we relinquish our terror, unless we also relinquish our mastery, unless we discover that between the iron chain and the severed cord there is a pulsing channel of life that flows between the placental god and the gestating world, and its name is ‘grace’—the ‘inflow of existence’ that creates us and sustains us in being? This transforms the wilderness of history into the gestation of eternity, the anguish of creation into the groanings of childbirth, the exile from Paradise into the homeward journey. How will we love unless we allow the umbilical cord to reach across the phallic wound? If Christ reconciles us only to death and not to birth, he has capitulated to the phallic god. That is why we must learn how to worship the newborn Christ before we can contemplate the crucified. We must learn how to be born, if we are to learn how to die. We must be reborn.
How would a reborn self recognise the world as the creation of the newborn and crucified God? Might it be a process of learning to recognise that ‘what is good and what is beautiful in our lives and in the bodies which constitute the world around us’ is what others see as bad and ugly? It is easy to hate that which destroys the beautiful and the good, it is harder to protect the bad and the ugly from those who commit themselves to fighting for their destruction in the name of the good. That’s where all crucifixion begins, all genocide. John Gray’s book, Black Mass, argues that every modern utopian revolution has ended in genocide. One cannot destroy the bad and the ugly unless one destroys the people one believes to be ugly and bad. That is why the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered—not by mad men driven to bloodlust by an ancient religion, but by the most rational and sane of modern men who knew, as all modern tyrants know, that the rational end justifies the bloody means. The return to purity entails the elimination of the impure. If you want a transcendent God of beauty, truth and goodness, you must always pierce through and destroy the fleshy body of the incarnate divine.
Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena both said that love of neighbour entails love of self, because I am my own neighbour. That is why Lacan helps us to unmask the formless void that threatens to consume the empty formalism of Kantian ethics. If my capacity to do good entails waging war on my own desire and bodily pleasures, then to love my neighbour as myself is a deadly command. Freud saw this, but Freud remained too much on the near-side of the Kantian horizon. I cannot love all that is bad and ugly and desiring and confusing in my neighbour, unless I learn to love my own desiring, confusing and ugly self. I cannot live at peace with nature, unless I learn to live at peace with all that nature takes away from my beautiful, independent, autonomous self with the passing of time. Enough violent revolutions. When resistance demands violence, it has arrived at its limits—though Girard would remind us that to arrive at such limits entails a choice between becoming a victim or becoming a perpetrator.
The ageing Rembrandt sketched the sagging breasts and wrinkled midriffs of elderly women with the same compassionate eroticism that he used to paint the luscious thighs and rounded belly of Bathsheba.
When we look at his painting of “A Woman Bathing in a Stream”, shift held high, legs apart, looking down at her reflection in the water, he invites us to contemplate the pleasure of a woman lost in the pleasure of watching herself, without a knife or a phallus in sight.
The artist delights in but does not violate that private moment of the self-pleasuring of a woman’s gaze. This is indeed a woman whose “sex is not a defect”, a woman whose female organs are ‘part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the beholder … but will arouse the praises of God for his wisdom and compassion’. This is a gentle self-pleasuring, a love of self that needs no wounding, no piercing. It is, dare I say, a virginal pleasure, which has nothing to do with whether or not the woman has had sex (she was probably one of the artist’s several mistresses, who caused him no end of trouble); it has everything to do with her capacity to surrender herself to a primordial nature in an imagined Eden. The eternal virgin occupies the sphere of liminality and mediation between heaven and earth, the undecidability which constitutes the fullness of grace in that in-between no-time of standing legs apart within the inward flow of grace in order to conceive (of) that which is beyond all human conception.
But of course this is an imagined Eden, a painted Eden. It’s not real. It’s not, and never can be, the “real” for ours is a world of images and representations, or—to shift from that Platonic separation to the more umbilical relationship offered by Aristotle, Thomas and Lacan—ours is a world of graced echoes and intimations pulsing within the materiality of being.
If this painting of the woman in the stream is, as some interpreters suggest, an allusion to Susanna and the elders, then the artist offers us a moment of innocence before the impending threat of rape. The serpent is always already lurking in the shrubbery. The lusting beholder is always already there. The elders are watching. The male gaze is implied even as it is resisted, and the moment of solitary delight will soon become the moment of terror. What revolution must women bring about to change this story with its non-identical repetitions reverberating through our not-yet finished histories? Must it always be a history of violence? Must we always penetrate our own flesh, rob ourselves of our virginity, before it is taken from us?
How do we return to that primordial moment of rapture, lost in the goodness of the gaze that knows eroticism without violence, pleasure without pain? Must we always look back on it from the moment of violation, in order to know what we have lost, in order to recognise the cost of becoming human? And must we continue to slice, to cut, to wound, to separate, lest we begin to slide backwards into that state of nature, where we know neither good nor evil, neither past nor future? The difference between the human and the animal is freedom, they tell us, but is it not also the vocation to fall and fall again into the knowledge that must break us in order to make us? And with such knowledge always comes the memory of what was lost before we knew the pain of remembering and the solace of imagining.
Only when Susanna saw the elders and heard their threat, did she discover the rapture of that timeless moment of virginal pleasure in the river. Only when we have fallen can we recognise Paradise as our past and future imaginings, for imagination is the shuttle by way of which the soul weaves meaning upon the loom of time. Kant and his heirs take a dim view of the imagination, but for Thomas it is the necessary condition within which the dynamics of desire can operate, shuttling backwards and forwards between the object of experience and its conceptual interpretation. Thomas also ontologised memory, for without memory there is no ‘me’, there is no immortal self. But Lacan reminds us that the body too knows and remembers. Indeed, before the soul can know, the body must experience and remember. That’s why Lacan opens the door to a more radical Thomism.
I’m reading Giorgio Agamben’s The Open, and here is a paragraph that has transfixed me:
What is man, if he is always the place—and, at the same time, the result—of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way—within man—has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values. And perhaps even the most luminous sphere of our relationships with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal.
Is that what cutting one’s own flesh amounts to—woman’s desire to be man by slicing away the darkness of the animal flesh, the matter that is always maternal, always ‘she’, the mother whose soul is always pierced by the sword of love, knowing that the child too must be pierced by love, if he or she is to know God?
In ancient Rome, they would stab a virgin before they raped her, for fear of the awesome forces that would be unleashed by the sexual penetration of her virgin flesh. Is that what we do when we slice through our own flesh—master the powers of violence by inflicting upon ourselves what we fear others might inflict upon us, even if at its furthest extreme that is the power of commanding our own moment of death—like Antigone? Lacan is mesmerised by the thunderous silence of Antigone’s entry into the real, that liminal moment of the imaginary when, crossing over from the symbolic to the real, she steps across the threshold of mortality to join Schrodinger’s cat in the in-between. And why is Lacan’s real and Thomas’s God always silent, always separate? Catherine of Siena’s soul knew the union that Thomas would not allow or acknowledge, except in the rare case of rapture. Perhaps that’s because Catherine’s visceral plunging into the body of the risen Christ through the bodies of the poor and the suffering reconnected her to that source of life which flows from God’s body to my own through the body of my suffering neighbour, my hungry child, my desiring lover.
But really, Lacan needs to get real. Antigone does not mesmerise me. Somebody needs to tell her, ‘let the dead bury the dead’. What is mesmerising about a young woman forced to choose between law and love, and choosing to die for love of that which the law has already put to death? Better to love life, Antigone. Let go. Don’t cling to him, like some not yet ascended phantasm who might yet morph into a body you can take hold of. The earth has taken him, along with your mother. Go get a life, silly girl. Antigone is a religious fanatic, and we have no need of any more of those. We all have quite enough in our different traditions.
Unlike Susanna, Lucretia is not spared from rape. Rembrandt shows us two different interpretations of Lucretia, painted in 1664 and in 1666—a period during which his own life was spiralling out of control so that in the difference between these two interpretations of Lucretia it is tempting to see the artist’s inner world plunging into despair—though the very last self-portrait is not that of an artist in despair. Despair does not create art. Despair is the abject, the hopeless silence of the abyss. Art is always a reaching out to the other side, the determination to wrest meaning from futility and give it the kiss of eternal life.
In the earlier Lucretia, there is still a moment of defiant possibility. Perhaps she is Kierkegaard’s knight of faith at this point, though the association is, strictly speaking, anachronistic—but, as I’ve said, theologians should not be too bound by the rigours of time. Lucretia gazes into the distance, dagger in her right hand, her left hand raised in a moment of hesitation. Her hand is bruised and her sleeve is torn open. She has fought a mighty struggle against her rapist, and maybe she will still decide that life is worth living. Augustine insisted that it was. Writing about Lucretia, he argues at great length in defence of her innocence. (Anybody who says Christianity is misogynistic should read this passage. Rape trials might be more just today if they were informed by Augustine’s argument about Lucretia). Her suicide is a guilty act because she puts an innocent and chaste woman to death. (I don’t know what he’d say about your piercings, Marika, specially since you say they aren’t about desire for God. But maybe that was true for all those self-piercing, self-starving, self-mutilating medieval mystics too, though they belonged to an interpretative community when God was a more legitimate reason for doing something than the self. Today, they’ve changed places. You say that very lucidly in your doctoral thesis—which was an epiphany for me.)
By the time he painted the second Lucretia, Rembrandt’s life had spiralled out of control. Lucretia has become the knight of resignation. Her body has become her torn and bloodied vagina. A glistening smear of wet blood streaks the front of her virginal white gown. Is this the self-inflicted wound of suicide, or is it the consequence of the rape that has just happened? Her cloak gapes open, and the girdle round her waist draws attention to the wound and suggests the ruptured hymen. Her lips are swollen and bruised, her eyes gaze into the darkness, unfocused and brimming with tears. This Lucretia has been violently pierced, and she is about to slice through her own wounded flesh with the steel of the dagger she holds in her hand. She holds a cord in her other hand—the cord that will open the curtains around the bed when she falls, revealing the site of her violation. Like Susanna, eventually she will be made to succumb to the male gaze.
Penetration. Piercing. Wounding. Killing. Enough, surely? How much more steel must slice through flesh before we learn to inhabit our animality, to relinquish our drive towards mastery, and to be reconciled with the dependent and vulnerable creatures that we are?
So here’s another association—and now we’re getting to the meat of the question. My Presbyterian background didn’t have much to say about virginal birth, but it had a lot to say about the cross and vicarious suffering. Here’s the verse I’ve been thinking of since reading your response: ‘But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.’ (Isaiah 53:5)
What is the nature of this peace and this healing? How can we live ‘as if’ it were true—because surely, the Christian life is nothing more and nothing less than that ‘as if’? We are told that Christ still has the scars of his piercings in heaven. Maybe in heaven there will still be the necessary piercings of love, as part of the mystery of what it means to be made in the image of God. Does God ever stop suffering for love? Do we? Isn’t that more than enough suffering to be getting on with?
No more pierced bodies. Until we make peace with our own bodies, we will never understand the peace and healing that the prophet speaks of.
P.S. I think the foregoing is a response to Hannah Hofheinz, who wonders ‘what theological knowledge will become possible if Beattie’s writing incarnates that about which she writes.’ I wonder if it will catch on. I doubt it somehow.
Wow! Just wow!