Embodiment, emotion, death, asceticism . . . an attempt to describe the legacy of medieval faith

What does it mean to propose a godly significance of material realities—the kind of “world-sacramentalism” taught and practiced by Gregory the Great and Francis of Assisi, and almost everyone else from Gregory to the Reformation?

This sense of God at work in the material world and in our own embodied, related experience was (in the West at least) part of the orthodox Christian understanding of the world for the whole period and, in many circles, both before and after this period. This was not pantheism, but rather the sense both of God’s glory reflected in Creation and God’s grace working through ordinary things in Creation.

Since science, in the argument of Lewis’s Discarded Image, sapped the material world—indeed the solar system and beyond—of all life and mystery, including the life of God and the mystery of redemption, humankind found it a dull fact worthy of little interest that the supreme God over all the universe came in the flesh of a human being, entering into the world(s) he had made. All the rich resonances of Incarnation and all the glories and intricacies of human life within Creation were left for oddball romantic poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, in their fringe, irrelevant musings.

The world, of course, did not stop being charged with the grandeur of God. It did not stop flaming out, like shining from shook foil. But only the poets and the mystics noticed anymore.

In the Middle Ages, on the other hand, [quote Lewis, DI, on the vibrancy and wonder of the medieval cosmos].

Did such mystical understanding of the cosmos reduce God to some sort of magician, meddling in material stuff to gain cheap effects among his human audience? Did it encourage rank “superstition”—which is a modern term for attributing to spiritual origins anything we still don’t understand? That’s certainly the anachronistic approach of moderns faced with the “discarded image” of the Middle Ages, as we see in William Manchester’s atrocious book A World Lit Only By Fire: The Middle Ages is now supposed to have been an era blighted by impenetrable ignorance and intractable, dumb superstition; incapable of seeing the obvious truths that, hundreds of years hence, the simple empirical methods of science would make plain [connect with the myth that medievals believed in a flat earth].

It seems if we are to return to the nourishing truths of the Middle Ages, we will have to shuck off our own impenetrable materialist ignorance and intractable scientific superstition.

What this ignorance has looked like among the pious: a super-spiritualizing of faith. Faith deals with the realms of the spiritual and does not involve the realm of the physical (thank you, for example, Mr. Zwingli). The important thing about Christ is that he was divine, not that he was human.

We have not become, as some argue, gnostics. We are far too fond of our creature comforts for the dualism of that heresy, even if we pretend not to be. Rather, we just now pretend that those comforts are spiritually insignificant. In our Christology, we are functionally Apollinarians or Monophysites: the divine nature of Christ has completely absorbed and taken over his human nature. And this leaves us in our anthropology, not ascetically vicious with our own bodies, but rather heedless of their significance as the one and only “place” in which we meet God. We are not, pace modernist anthropology, brains on sticks or (in the evangelical version) spirits hovering around without bodies.

We do not live outside our experience of embodiedness and relatedness with other bodies. We do not live apart from sex. All we know how to do any more as evangelicals is to put up barriers and proscriptions: “NO sex before marriage.” “NO homosexual activity or feelings.” “NO abortion.” We do not know how to use the rich imagery of marriage and sexuality to talk about our own relationship with God, as Bernard of Clairvaux (and Origen long before him) did. We do not know how to see the mother- as well as the father-dimension of God, as Julian of Norwich did.

We do not live apart from the pleasures of the table. All we know how to do any more as evangelicals is to put up barriers and proscriptions: “NO overeating,” “NO laziness and lack of exercise.” We do not know how to use the rich imagery of convivial feasting, including the enjoyment of intoxicating beverages, to talk about our own relationship with God both in heaven and here on earth, as Margery Kempe did, or anyone else in the M.A. talking about the marriage supper of the lamb or savoring the wine of the Eucharist, with its potential for intoxication, as a created good. Or remembering Augustine’s cry: “Intoxicate me, O god!”

We do not live apart from emotion–strong emotion. All we know how to do any more as evangelicals is to channel all of that emotion to God; some quietly, in private devotion or sitting in solemn reverence in the sanctuary, and some more expressively, in charismatic worship. We don’t know what to do with it in our relationships, other than to counsel sober good sense and careful reining-in of the “passions.” And of course, that’s wise. That stuff is dynamite. But if God wants to work in our everyday emotional lives, our relationships and pleasures and temptations and sins, well, we don’t know anything about that. Sounds dangerous. Better keep that stuff to church services and prayer closets.

And because we think these things–sex, food, emotion–have to do only with biological matters of reproduction and sustenance, or with unfortunate physical tendencies that cloud our judgment and confuse our ability to see truth, and that they have no spiritual significance, we live our lives with God as a giant game of pretend. We pretend that the only part of us that matters is our “spiritual” part. We pretend we can sustain relationship with Him by attending only to that part. We pretend that a vertical relationship is enough, and that our horizontal relationships with spouses, children, parents, co-workers will simply sort themselves out if we spend enough time alone in our prayer closets—as if “alone” is the only place God can be met.

And because of all this, we cannot take seriously the power of disciplines such as celibacy (temporary or lifelong) or fasting (brief or protracted) or stability within one church, one monastic community, one town. Since the body is not a place where spirituality gets done, mortifying the body is not part of our spirituality. Fasting is no gift to God, for the material has no significance. Keeping the heart for God by abstaining from sex is no important spiritual discipline, for God does not care about what we do with our bodies in the intimacy of our bedrooms. Keeping fidelity to one community is no way to serve God, because the social dimension lacks spiritual significance. He is a God of the spiritual things, not of the material things. He is a God who came, in Jesus, as a spiritual being, not as a material being. So that bodily realm has no spiritual significance for us. It is not evil, as the gnostics held. It is simply irrelevant.

And because this is in fact not true—rather a giant game of “let’s pretend”—divorce rates are the same for Christians as for non-Christians. We have no lower rate of obesity than do non-Christians (perhaps worse, as a study some time ago of Southern Baptists suggested—because eating is the one vice left to a group hedged around with the “NO” signs). We do not make art worth looking at. We do not write poems worth reading. We do not build churches worth walking into or worshiping in. We do not give council to married people worth hearing. We do not understand how to pass on our faith to our children, the fruit of our loins.

If we think our material existence is irrelevant, then of course we do not study how to live bodily “as unto God.” On the one hand, our devotion is not “full boisterous” and we do not engage in “dalliance” with our Lord, as was the case with Margery Kempe. In our worship, we abstain from kneeling, prostrating ourselves, crossing ourselves, incense, art, vestments, and all that other “medieval” (or “Catholic”) stuff. After all, that stuff would drag us back down into our embodiedness–into the material world that as we scientific moderns know has no spiritual significance.

On the other hand, we do not take seriously the ascetic disciplines that address our pressing, spiritually engaged bodies in ways that turn them always back to our Lord. And, it should be said, we have forgotten “the Art of Dying Well” that was so well understood and lavishly explained in the late M.A. especially. If our bodily lives lack spiritual significance, then so too do our bodily deaths. And again, because we downgrade our horizontal relatedness in the quest for vertical relatedness, we find the idea of mystical communion and fellowship with “saints” who have gone on before us both irrelevant and indeed irreverent.

END CLIP.

Well, there it is. Any quick responses? No doubt others have said such things as these more clearly, more powerfully, more correctly. But as for me and this book, again, how can I refine and add power to this argument? What am I missing? Where am I too negative about the modern church? Too positive about the medieval?