Encounters with Jesus: The Man in His Place and Time

Chapter 6

6 JESUS AND HIS BODY The Place of Corporality The human body, an essential and inescapable element of life, is at the center of surprising shifts of emphasis and reworkings in the course of history. The cultural meaning of the body is the result of the convergence of a physical-biological system and a project that is generated by the cultural alchemies applied to this system. The body is closely linked to culture, and it becomes the resonance of culture or the place where culture makes its voice heard. It is difficult to recognize this link if we take a naturalistic view as our starting point, regarding the body only as a reproductive biological organism rather than as the subject of inescapable relationships. The fact is that human beings are bodies subject to cultural codifications. Human bodily data offer us one of the first points of access to a culture (understood in the sense of meanings that are transmitted and of instruments used to express these meanings). It is the body that keeps institutions and cultural practices alive. The body is a fundamental, inalienable material for every individual. Every aspect of human existence, whether concrete or abstract, is rooted in corporality. A number of anthropological theories have been formulated in this sense. Marcel Mauss sees the body as the largest “instrument ” of the human being;1 Mary Douglas sees it as a “natural symbol”;2 the studies of Margaret M. Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes see it as a “mindful body.”3 In their study of the various aspects of the body, anthropologists and historians classify attitudes, powers, inclinations, or deficiencies of individual persons. Their work first deconstructs and then reassembles the bodily material. The result of their analysis is the production of “another body” that does not always integrally restore the bodily reality. There is sometimes a considerable distance between the two bodies, the real 128 Jesus and His Body 129 body and the outcome of anthropological analysis. The general rule that every thematization is the fruit of a discourse that is formulated and constructed by an interpreter applies also to the body. Scholars “read” the body on the basis of intellectual motivations that are linked to different personal, political, cultural, and contemporary situations. The hypotheses and theories to which this situation leads may be heterogeneous , or even contradictory,4 but they provide knowledge and insights that can be combined with the outcome of other analyses—and this, after all, is how human knowledge works. The body interacts closely with the systems of meaning and the intellectual processes of the milieu of which it forms a part, and this interaction is even more obvious in the field of religion. The body must be understood, not as a simple reality that is illuminated or ennobled by the religious element but as one of the components to which the religious life owes its consistency. Religions are constructed and perpetuated in the body: they are bodily. In keeping with the structures of meaning that are proper to each culture, the mechanisms of the power of religion become concrete precisely in interventions in the body. Corporality plays an important role in the construction of the relationship between real beings and imaginary or transcendent beings that is expressed in the process whereby life is sacralized. In religious contexts , various characteristics of the body are utilized in order to define centrally important points of human thinking and action. They serve to define duties and tasks, to set limits to these, to impose them, or to withhold them. On both the individual and the collective level, a large number of religious roles are granted or refused on the basis of differences of gender,5 of age, or of membership in one particular ethnic group. Our starting point, therefore, is that religion always needs to express itself in a bodily manner and that the body has the ability to give appropriate expression to religious reality. The body incarnates supremely religious functions in the frontier that it creates between one individual and another, in its power to confer individuality, and in its ability to activate the presence of each person.6 Anthropological research brings to light the differences and the specific characteristics of human corporality in various cultures. It often devotes considerable space to exceptional or extraordinary behavior (such as trances, the consumption of particular substances, mysticalecstatic tremors, songs, exhausting dances, and so on) in the belief that these make it possible to understand more completely the specific...