Abstract
I began this fascinating book two summers ago, but various exigencies forced me to put it aside before I was into the thick of it. This was fortuitous. Beginning the work afresh as the pandemic waned in this country allowed it to speak all the more potently. If there is any common discovery from the months of lockdown, quarantine, churches closing, and ZOOM virtuality, it might be that we humans are inescapably enfleshed creatures, whose flourishing is tied to the exchange of fleshly caresses.
I thus suspect that readers will find themselves particularly vulnerable to Griffith's speculative theological reflections on the realities of Christian flesh. In an important way, this book takes up a topic raised in Griffiths’ previous publication, Decreation 1 , on the last things. In that intriguing book, he proposes that the beatific vision—the last thing for human creatures—must include (and wait upon) the resurrected flesh, for humans are fundamentally animated flesh. This depiction of resurrected flesh sensorially encountering the flesh of the ascended Jesus remains a central paradigm in this present work. Yet here Griffiths unblinkingly confronts the existential realities of living in “the devastation” (the post-lapsarian world) as baptized flesh. No whisper of a Christian Neoplatonism is permitted in these frank and challenging pages. Griffiths’ cogent examination of the caresses of Christian flesh, given and received, will make some Christian moral theologians uneasy.
The first three chapters of Christian Flesh are a theological tour de force. Chapter 1 (“Flesh Devastated”) is a poignant portrayal of human life as haptic. Human flesh requires the capacity to touch and be touched; but this need also defines the vulnerability of human flesh to injury—both from without (the strike that wounds) and from within (virus, disease). This is true of human flesh in the womb, and it is true of human flesh in a coma. Flesh is not flesh without haptic engagement. Flesh becomes a corpse, a nonliving body, when it can no longer give or receive caresses. Human flesh is likewise bounded by time (it will eventually die and become a corpse) and space (its extension ends at its skin). This spatial isolation causes the existential experience of insignificance and of distance from the world. Yet the imperative remains: flesh must participate in the economy of local, haptic exchange in order to live and thrive.
Because flesh is a gift—it comes to us unbidden and bestows the gift of self—human flesh is inexorably oriented to, and desirous of, fleshly intimacy with the flesh of others. Griffiths understands this desire to be natural, in the sense that flesh must interact with other flesh to remain flesh. He also makes the extraordinary claim that this desire is supernatural, in that the trinitarian economy includes flesh—the incarnate LORD—and thereby also includes caresses (21). Striking theological ramifications follow: Christian caresses can participate in those exchanged by the LORD with creatures; and the insatiable human desire for fleshly exchange, is, in truth, a desire for the caress of Christ, caresses which alone can satisfy and bring one into being fully.
Chapter 2 (“Flesh Transfigured”) attends to the flesh of Jesus, exegeting what can be learned from the gospels about its likeness and dissimilarity to other human flesh. Jesus's flesh is born into the devastation; it touches and is touched by others. Since it is the flesh of a divine-human person, however, it does not experience the effects of sin, and it possesses powers and capacities beyond human limits. Griffiths’ interpretation of gospel passages about the vulnerability or invulnerability of Jesus's natal flesh will delight. Also stimulating, if not entirely convincing, is his suggestion that the gospels portray the resurrected flesh of Christ as prohibitive of touch: it is too dazzling and dangerous and points away from itself to the ascended flesh. Only after the ascension will Jesus's flesh be haptically available—in the Eucharist. The manual and lingual experience of the eucharistic flesh of Jesus is the promise of a fuller and more intimate tactile experience of that flesh in “heaven.” Griffiths closes this chapter with a provocative metaphor of fleshly post-resurrection intimacy being like the comprehensive embrace of the womb. Humans long from birth for this touch-without-remainder.
The following may not be said frequently of modern theological books, but Chapter 3 (“Flesh Cleaved”) needs desperately to be preached from Christian pulpits! Baptism, Griffiths writes, is that caressing action of the LORD which marks and forms human flesh as cleaved to Christ. It brings the baptized “into, inside, of the flesh of the one giving the caress” (73), and that cleaving is more intimate and secure and enduring than any other fleshly relationship: “Jesus's flesh is closer to theirs than anyone else's—closer than spousal flesh, than children's flesh, than lover's flesh, than the flesh of bacteria in the gut—because Christians are, now, in every part and in every fleshly action, his and him” (63). This received baptismal gift, this haptic intimacy with Jesus's flesh, indicates two possibilities for Christian flesh: it can glorify the LORD in its body, acting in ways appropriate to being Jesus-cleaved, or it may fornicate against this cleaving by idolatrous acts—cleaving that, by elevation or domination, treats the other thing or person as apart from God. Or, one can perform cleavings that scandalize others by distancing them from intimacy with Jesus's flesh. Here Griffiths provides examples of wearing KKK garb or partaking in the prostitution market. The “shadow” that hovers over Christian flesh is precisely this: by decision and action, the baptized can sunder their own cleaving (and that of others) from Jesus. Even so, Griffiths desires to focus on the perfect, pure gift of flesh in baptism: Jesus's cleaving of flesh to himself in baptism requires and commands nothing except that it be received, and ever more fully so.
For Griffiths, this means that the task of moral theology is not to form lists of acts prohibited to baptized Christians—for there are no malum in se acts for Christian flesh. Rather, there are acts that militate against being Jesus-cleaved. Moral discernment about such acts always demands the “thick description” of circumstances and local norms. Reminiscent of von Balthasar's insistence that theology focus on the saints, Griffiths writes that far superior to lists of banned fleshly activities is close attention to Christ and the saints. The Christian whose attention is on Jesus cleaves more securely to him. This is what hagiographies perform.
This seminal theme is unpacked practically in the book's last three chapters, one on Clothing, another on Food, and, finally and perhaps most controversially, one on Caresses. Griffiths notes that clothes serve for the protection, badging-identification, and enhancement or ornament of Christian flesh. In baptism, however, Christian flesh “puts on” Christ, by which it is proleptically transfigured and healed of shame. In the end, clothes are adiaphora for the Christian, and the transgressing of sartorial mandates may even point to being Jesus-cleaved. Even though Griffiths acknowledges that recent papal teaching underscores gender complementarity, he questions whether this necessitates particular sartorial differences, and expresses caution whenever mandated attire is sanctioned as belonging to “the order of things.” Intriguingly, he affirms as good the desexing of priestly and religious garb; he is chary about recent anxiety to distinguish more clearly between male and female religious habits. These comments dovetail with his discussion of the baptismal rite (nakedness and garmenting), a section that ought to be required reading for the ordained and liturgists.
The Christian who loves to eat well will find Griffiths’ chapter on food both delightful and admonitory. Griffiths claims that all foods are “kosher” to the Jesus-cleaved. Nonetheless, the ways in which Christian flesh approaches the necessity of eating must turn on thanksgiving, lament, and the recognition that the Eucharist is the only proper Christian diet. Eating which glorifies the LORD will give thanks to the LORD for the pleasing edibles of creation, and it will simultaneously express lament that eating in the devastation participates in an economy of slaughter—plants and animals must be killed to become food. Christian flesh also willingly fasts as preparation for the Eucharist, both to acknowledge the difference between normal eating and this sacred meal, and to point to the reality that the Eucharist alone participates in an “economy of life.”
The latter point seems problematic. Whilst Griffiths allows that Jesus's death is the “backstory” of the Eucharist, he insists that it does not pertain to eucharistic eating per se. What transpires in the Eucharist, he argues, is unbloody. His depiction, however, seems too readily to separate the sacrifice from the commensal banquet—even if we admit that the death of Jesus's flesh was overcome in the resurrection. Griffiths’ logic here does help to make sense of eucharistic eating at communion services and the parking-lot distribution of the Eucharist during COVID: like manna from heaven for the Israelites, these are instances of the gift of Life which seem to escape the economy of death. Still, the normal context for the consuming of the resurrected-ascended flesh of Christ is the eucharistic sacrifice, in which the cost of this Life-giving meal is made clear: the LORD's condescension to participate in the economy of death. The late Ghislain Lafont's work, Eucharist, 2 more persuasively demonstrates the symbolic power of squarely reckoning the Eucharist as food that requires death. Finally, this chapter on food also includes a perspicacious portrayal of the glutton as one who makes an idol of eating, as well as a fascinating eucharistic interpretation of the troubling Ugolino narrative in Dante's Inferno.
The last chapter—on caresses—can leave the reader either burdened with melancholy or, alternatively, guardedly hopeful about the transfiguring power of baptism over the exchanges of human flesh. Griffiths claims that after the Fall all caresses are “wound-inflected” (124). Concupiscence, which is possessive and violently urgent, mars even the capacity to touch lovingly. Only the touches of Jesus's natal flesh could caress purely. Still, the touch of Jesus's flesh in baptism transfigures radically, if not completely: Jesus-cleaved flesh may offer caresses that are less expropriative, solipsistic, and wounding. In fact, the more one is Jesus-cleaved, the greater the possibility of participating in the LORD's power to bring something new into creation—namely, a beloved.
After suggesting that celibacy and virginity are especially appropriate to Christian flesh, since they point to and anticipate resurrected life, Griffiths addresses various sexual caresses—copulation, masturbation, cunnilingus, and sodomy—noting that none of these are entirely free from devastation-damage, or necessarily malum in se. Interestingly, he points to how moral deliberation frequently privileges the caress of married copulation, as if it alone escapes the violence and expropriation of concupiscent sexual touch. Certainly, the caress of copulation may include “sacrificial self-giving” of flesh to another, but Griffiths avers that concupiscent expropriation most often accompanies it. Additionally, he argues that other sexual caresses are too frequently perceived as “damaged” forms of copulation. Griffiths asks, why measure all other sexual caresses against copulation?. The deposit of faith does not require this or does experiential data demonstrate that the caress of copulation is more profound or more intimate than the eye-to-eye gaze and the mouth-to-mouth kiss (144). Griffiths proposes that a more clarifying way to morally adjudicate between caresses would be to pose the question: Which of these caresses speak against being Jesus-cleaved, and which speak for it? Answering this question involves again the task of carefully observing context, formation, and long-term effects. Perhaps most challenging is Griffiths’ final dubium regarding same-sex caresses. Given what he has proffered about Christian flesh, he proposes avenues for further theological-interpretative work on magisterial teaching.
Christian Flesh continues what has become Paul Griffiths’ characteristic writing style, in which he gestures toward the theological tradition from which his speculative work arises without getting lost in the tedious exegeting of particular debates. Footnotes are also eschewed to present a theological sketch that does not forfeit its lucidity in the mesh of treating various voices from the historical tradition. This decision is part of what makes Griffiths’ writing so scintillating. Yet there are points in this sketch that begged for a fuller engagement with the tradition. For instance, Griffiths writes that the “dominant” position in the tradition denies that there was procreative copulation in paradise. Such a conclusion, not inconsequential to his overall argument in the final chapter, deserves fuller exploration—and evidence.
A point that dogged (not unpleasantly) this reader of Christian Flesh is the puzzle of the nature of resurrected flesh. Much of Griffiths’ vision depends on the capacity of human flesh—in this world and the next—to touch and be touched. He seems to assume as axiomatic that resurrected flesh will have this tactile capacity. The pandemic surely has heightened awareness of the human desire for, and the necessity of, haptic interaction. The suggestion that fleshly touch is part of Christian fulfillment might be even more willingly granted. But Griffiths could have aided Christians further by a speculative discussion of resurrected flesh. Instead, he writes that he prefers not to engage this question, admitting only that the “selfsameness” of resurrected flesh remains “deeply obscure.”