Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies (review)

In her new book Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies, Jennifer Glancy investigates the central role of bodily habitus in the early Christian theological discourse and in everyday Christian living. By relying on Bourdieu, Alcoff, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault's theories she identifies bodily habitus as a form of embodied knowledge and insists that without first grasping the nature of habitus we cannot adequately understand the specific ways in which early Christians interpreted their bodies. From this perspective, the analysis of purely theological arguments is bracketed in favor of phenomenological observations that yield a picture of body that tells its own story. Since, according to Glancy, the majority of contemporary scholars have concentrated on "the analyses of bodies that tell us nothing about what it means to be a body" (21), she believes that it is valid to eschew discussion of their academic contributions (4) and concentrate instead on the description of "the inevitable cultural habituation of bodies" (4).

To demonstrate the validity of her approach, Glancy culls several examples from a variety of primary Christian sources that span from the first to the fourth centuries. For example, in Chapter Two, she insists that the specific difference between the use of the body scarred in battle to demonstrate one's heroic virtues and the degrading effects of public whipping in the Greco-Roman habitus illumine Paul's appeal to his own lacerated back in 2 Cor 11.23-25. The rhetorical strength of this appeal lies, Glancy argues, not in his demand to admire his heroic character but rather his weakness, which his audience would understand to be identical with the sufferings of Christ and consequently as a legitimate way of exercising apostolic authority. In Chapter Three, Glancy examines the different treatments accorded within the same habitus the bodies of free men and women and the bodies of slaves. In perusing the familiar stories of Perpetua and Blandina, Glancy notices strikingly contrasting ways in which the body of each martyr is treated in her respective hagiography. While Perpetua, a high ranking woman, is depicted as a powerful domina, Blandina, a slave woman, is portrayed by Eusebius as going through her tortures in the amphitheater in a despicable manner of slaves. It is difficult, however, to follow Chapter Four, since Glancy does not always adhere to her book's thesis. In dealing with Protoevangelium of James, Glancy argues that the text's distancing of Mary from her menstrual cycle is directly related to Greco-Roman obsession with purity and association of bodily liquids with a sense of shame. Traces of the same treatment of Mary's body are also found in Tertullian's On the Flesh of Christ, where the African theologian defends against Marcion the necessity of the physical birth of Christ and stresses at the same time how incompatible Christ's essence is with birth's biological matter. On the other hand, it is not clear how Glancy's discussion of the Ascension of Isaiah, as a text that expresses the idea of non-essential character of body in relation to personal identity and as contradicting Merleau-Ponty's views, is related to the rest of her book.

It is to Glancy's credit that she boldly challenges traditional assumptions about early Christian bodies in new and insightful ways. I find especially impressive her extensive and competent treatment of Tertullian's soteriology and his peculiar attention to the grimy details of Mary's delivery of baby Jesus. The main difficulty with Glancy's methodology lies in her effort to ground every aspect of bodily behavior in its habitus, and when a text offers more than a simple reflection of its habitus, she has difficulties. Thus, for example, even though she admits that interpretation of Paul's conduct in 2 Cor 11.23-25 requires taking into account his intention that Christ's body is legible in his own body (47), she does not consider how Paul's theological presentation of himself as imitatio Christi makes him in the eyes...