Is Caravaggio a queer theologian? Paul’s conversion on the way to Damascus

Introduction: Theology and experience

Theology has reflected on the parallels between lovemaking—as intimacy among people—and divine love—as intimacy with the divine—but exploration on the practices and experiences of “fucking” is lacking. My contribution explores the theological “meat” in the practices of subcultures that simply fuck, that have sex skipping the heteronormative protocols of intimacy. I argue that certain queer practices of fucking (cruising and barebacking) provide the raw material for a queer theology of sex and for a queer approach to its biblical and artistic underpinnings. “Experience” as a source for theology has been the ground for fertile scholarly debate since the 1970s (Leonard, 1988: 44–61), ¹ a debate fired by the rise (and decline) of all sorts of contextual theologies (Althaus-Reid, 2000) and theologies of the body/flesh (Rivera, 2015). What are then the implications of taking “queer experience” as a theological source? (Hellwig, 1982). With the help of Caravaggio, I explore the theoretical gains of making queer sexual practices a “hotbed” for theology, of imagining how the contemporary interpreter might travel back and forth between biblical art and texts to think of their relationship with the other/Other (Furey, 2012: 7–33).

Such contextual theology needs to address the theoretical challenges posed to a hermeneutics of experience (Owen, 1985). A “theology from this side” is left with no choice but to prioritize “experience” as foundational, reflecting on “how we can accurately and critically use it” (Cooke, 1980: 72). Here I use “experience” as a deliberately unthematized, unspecified notion (Rahner, 1982: 20) ² with the heuristic purpose of opening an epistemological gap where theology occurs at the interstices of queer practices. ³ My argument pays sustained attention to the queer practices of barebacking and cruising to explore certain theological concepts—relationality and otherness—as a way to open up a thematic field in theology where queer sex—not simply the musings of queer theory—substantiates theological reflection. Accordingly, I place queer theology within the theological frameworks developed by contextual theologies, as an instantiation of the call to tackle the religious subject as relational in the flesh, “formed and enacted through sustained affiliations and intense encounters” (Furey, 2012: 9). As such, theology reflects on the practices of cruisers and barebackers and speaks to those who may find their experimenting with new modes of relatedness thought provoking. Queer practices are, ultimately, a theological locus insofar as they instantiate new modes of relationality and subject formation (Talvacchia, 2015: 184–194).

The varied practices of men fucking each other add a surplus of meaning to traditional theological sources (scripture, art, history, experience). More pointedly, my contribution explores how reading biblical texts (Acts 9:1–19) through its artistic interpretation (Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus, Figure 1) read, in turn, in light of the queer practices of cruising and barebacking, offers a queer theology of relationality. Dean’s (2009) account of queer relationality in Unlimited Intimacy allows an inter(con)textual theological exploration of the relationship between the self and the immanent or transcendental other that my argument brings to bear on the biblical text and its artistic rendition (Bal, 1991: 76). Caravaggio, I conclude, is a queer biblical interpreter within a specific model of historiography—erotohistoriography as an inquiry that connects bodily pleasures across times and spaces (Freeman, 2010: 95–136)—and within a particular trajectory in biblical hermeneutics—ideological criticism and cultural history. ⁴

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Caravaggio (1601), The Conversion on the Way to Damascus, Oil on Canvas (230 × 175 cm) Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.

The question, somewhat rhetorical, is formulated in the present tense: “Is Caravaggio a theologian?” not “Was Caravaggio a theologian?” Caravaggio is—present tense—a queer artist because he envisions modes of queer relationality and a queer theologian because such relationality takes place in the context of the biblical narratives of Paul’s conversion, yielding a queer conception of the relationship between the called (Saul) and the caller (the Lord/God), the human and the divine. The claim that Caravaggio is a queer theologian, a theorist of intimate relationships with the Divine develops in four steps. First, in inter(con)textual fashion, I present how practices of barebacking and cruising (Unlimited intimacy) illuminate the notions of relationality and hospitality. Second, I interpret Caravaggio’s artwork precisely through those ideas—relationality as shattering, foregoing or expanding the self, and hospitality as openness to the lover as stranger. Third, I suggest how such an intercontextual hermeneutics offers a queer trajectory of visualization to read Paul’s conversion in Acts 9:1–19. Finally, I suggest how a theological understanding of relationality benefits from a queer notion of subjectivity.

By “queer” I mean first, a hermeneutical approach. Queer criticism, in Warner’s (1999) now classic formulation, defies regimes of the normal. Such defiance, a reading against the grain, yields bizarre yet plausible meanings, a plausibility predicated on the suggestive relationship between different parts of the argumentative moves. Queer criticism introduces to (queer) theology a vocabulary both neglected and rejected in theological discourse, rendering the conceptual field of raw sex open to theological examination. Briefly put, “fuck” acquires theological currency. Second, queer, at the experiential level, refers to ethically significant practices insofar they redefine the theological notions of relationality, subjectivity, otherness, hospitality, immanence, and transcendence. Such redefinitions have recently come under scrutiny for their normalizing effects (Tonstad, 2015), their depoliticizing consequences (Penney, 2014), and their failure to incorporate critical race theory, and disability studies (Hoang, 2014; Musser, 2014; Scott, 2010). An intercontextual approach pitting the queer, the artistic, and the textual sources against each other throws into relief thematic connections that undo the normalizing effects of such sources considered independently. Thus, Caravaggio is a queer theologian because he reflects innovatively on the Christian, biblically inspired, disciple/Lord relationship and because he does so through a display of a queer relationality that mirrors present queer practices in their awkwardness (Lofton, 2014), and the biblical past in its virtual proposal of a discipleship unhinged from autonomous subjectivity. Third, the queer optic offers an intercontextual reading that explores virtual connections across periods of time (erotohistoriography), frustrating the grasp that historical, literary, sociological, and theological models hold on the biblical text (cultural hermeneutics).

Unlimited intimacy and subjectivity

For all Queer Theory’s—and Queer Theology’s—discourse about sex, both disciplines have paid little attention to actual sexual practices, acts, or subcultures, let alone the raw material of sex itself. Tim Dean’s ethnographic study of barebacking and cruising as queer praxes within specific subcultures remedies this void by documenting how queers engage in stigmatized practices and how in doing so they create a relationality that, under certain conditions, embraces a radical ethics of risk, of unlimited hospitality through impersonal intimacy. Unlimited intimacy is a starting point for a trajectory of visualization (Berdini, 1997: 35) that leads the interpreter through Caravaggio’s work and the biblical texts that he brings alive. Erotohistoriography takes the raw material of sex provided by Dean’s ethnography to connect historical dots that delineate an erototheology.

In Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, Tim Dean explores the practices of gay men belonging to a subculture that values barebacking (anal intercourse without condoms in the midst of the HIV health crisis) and cruising (random sexual encounters in public and semipublic spaces) as defining features. Many gay men, as it happens, value “unlimited” sexual intimacy despite the health risks it poses and, paradoxically in some cases, precisely because of its threats. Dean ultimately discusses the ethical valence behind actions such as “bug chasing”—the seemingly irrational action of pursuing contact with strangers to become HIV-positive. His study is remarkable, first, for skipping any a priori moralization of irrational sexual practices, and, second, for offering unique, insightful ethical conclusions on queer relationality, community, transcendence, and spirituality.

Barebacking and cruising, as practices involving “intimacy with strangers without predicating that intimacy on knowledge or understanding of the other” (Dean, 2009: 211), lay the foundations of a subculture with distinctive and valuable insights on the ethics of risk, hospitality, subjectivity, and relationality. Dean’s ethnography contributes to an exploration of the virtual connections that erotohistoriography draws between the present queer experience and its artistic and biblical echoes in the past. Queer practices channel, explore, and surface modes of sociality that reconceptualize subject formation (the relationship of the self to itself and the other), the relation between the native and the stranger, and those between the ego and the symbolic. Ultimately, he suggests, these “exemplify a distinctive ethic of openness to alterity” “focused on the primacy of the other” (176–177).

Cruising, at least when it is not degraded through online hook-up sites protocols or minute regulations of party attendance (192–196), represents a metaphor for contact with otherness, epitomizing the touch of alterity. The intimacy involved in cruising skips the classical epistemological subject/object divide in that “it constitutes a philosophy of living whose ethics depends on whether the openness to strangeness is cultivated or, conversely, curtailed” (xii). Cruising, especially when barebacking is involved, insofar as it represents a disposition of total openness to otherness, is “ethically exemplary.” ⁵

Queers build community through a type of intimacy that transcends sexuality precisely because it relies on the virus. Who in their right mind pursues anonymous barebacking aware of the medical and social consequences of becoming infected? Unlimited Intimacy considers it unethical to decide the morality of a practice without exploring the rationale behind it (3) and advocates a type of promiscuity exemplary for its unlimited hospitality. Barebacking then offers a notion of sex defined beyond the pursuit of pleasure, as a mediation through which the self explores the confusion of boundaries—“distinguishability of bodies” being undone through the shattering of identities. Thus, a queer ethics of sex points at the unstable relationship of the self to itself, presents the problematic dimension of self-identification, and undermines the boundaries that define identity. This is, as the early Bersani put it, the essence of sex, the self-shattering of identity, the sudden removal of the rational bricks that build the self’s identity walls. Barebacking and cruising exemplify sexuality’s inherent queerness, its essential nonrationality, its pervasive phantasmatic nature.

Barebacking, Dean justifies, is more than a good fuck; it crystalizes a transcendent intimacy, a touch of skin to skin that disavows the threat of being killed by crafting an impersonal closeness that barebackers experience as sacred. Barebacking and cruising blur physical, social, psychological boundaries by disavowing autonomy, delinking intimacy from the epistemological imperative to “know” the other. Anonymous intimacy evokes a transcendent touch precisely because it does not match carnal intercourse. It encompasses the set of feelings, experiences, and practices that involve contact with an anonymous and, under certain circumstances, total otherness.

The receptive partner—the bottom guy— is placed within an economy of intimacy where his rectum is made to do the theoretical work that the vagina/womb does in feminist theory (Dean 2009: 78). One of gay male culture’s riddles is, to put it simply, how to disentangle being fucked from femininity. For instance, Dean reports, the bottom lying down there (notice that I am starting to hint at Caravaggio’s sexualized and eroticized presentation of Paul), addressed as “bitch” or “pussy,” is the one who can “take it like a man.” In the case of barebacking, this masculinization of the receptive position keeps the “homo” in place and creates a psychological disposition of practicality and heroism. On the one hand, bareback HIV culture “comes with the territory of being gay and sexually alive” and, on the other, the subculture advances a male prototype able to look death in the face because “HIV infection is imagined as the ultimate sign of strength” (55).

This ethos of hypermasculinity and erotic transgressiveness, akin to working-class, blue-collar, militaristic sexuality, disavows any connection between male homosexuality and gender inversion. When a symbolic system only accepts different degrees of masculinity, a resignification of the submissive position materializes: it takes “a man” to surrender completely to a man, it takes a man to “take it” like a man. The submissive position then embodies an ethics of extreme risk that brackets the normalizing aspects of health (Foucault, 2000: 94). Skipping the indoctrinations of a risk-averse culture, the “bottom guy” advocates a “human finitude that modern life, especially modern medicine, has become expert in disavowing” (Dean, 2009: 66) bringing death close to life, offering an ethics of the future that is no longer grounded in an immanent utopianism but in a literal “carpe diem.”

The desire of barebacking, of submitting oneself to being penetrated as an act of total openness, necessitates the notion of the top as gift giver or gifter. The gifter, religiously put, is the one who does the conversion, the subject who inaugurates a new identity in whoever desires to convert. The gift, as donation and as poison alike (Derrida, 1999: 54–78), establishes social bonds, cohesion, and redefines community through participating in the “bug brotherhood,” a community formation that dispels the stigma of the infected as a pariah. Breeding, the act of a top man ejaculating without protection inside a bottom’s ass, parallels at the unconscious level what in straight sex is reproductive insemination. This symbolic crafting of reproduction promotes a redefinition of kinship roles, friendships, and intergenerational relations. For instance, the stigma of HIV—especially during the epidemic crisis—made queer strangers into relatives, “without the usual intermediary stages of friendship or cohabitation” (Dean, 2009: 91). Stigma associated with the virus and with the idea of maleness giving up its active role creates a life-giving community shaped after an economy of the “gift.” Cruising alters the status of the stranger similarly to how breeding reformulates notions of kinship. If breeding alters the image of the rectum from a grave into a womb where sexual positions skip over the restraints of sexual difference, cruising advances the notion of a stranger as the perfect lover. Cruising is ultimately about how a self-shattering subject welcomes otherness precisely at the point when one is losing the boundaries of identity.

The intimate contact with a stranger who remains as such and whose strangeness is the sine qua non of cruising, estranges one from oneself, posing a relationship with the otherness of the unconscious distinct from domination or self-sacrifice. Nor master, nor slave, the self experiences total openness to the unknown impact of the other which, in turn, results in a dissolution of ones’ identity. If the primacy of subject formation is on otherness, cruising as an ethos of opening to the world is incompatible with identities. The pleasure of risking the self by opening it to alterity undoes the pleasures deduced from securing the self in the familiar. Without a specific goal or a particular object, proceeding aimlessly, cruising embodies an “centrifugal openness to the other” (210), “a form of relationality uncontaminated by desire” (Bersani, 2010: 45), a communality not aimed at having a relationship. In its ideal forms, the cruising subject leaves oneself behind in order for intimacy with an anonymous body to take place, a body without definition, a body defined by unlocatable differences that reflects back on my own body disposed of attributes. Identity-free contact equals unlimited intimacy: in that moment, “we relate to that which transcends all relations” (61). Ultimately, cruising and barebacking embrace, especially when considered from the bottom position, an ethics of openness grounded on the divestment of the self and the priority of the other, a hospitality to the Other not unlike the one Caravaggio attributes to Paul.

Paul’s submission

Queer desires configured through and within networks of queer communities, and queer intimacies shaped by and proponents of an ideal hospitality and relationality, offer a privileged opportunity to explore theological bodies, the bodies emerging from a certain relationship with the Other. In what follows, Dean’s explorations of these modes of relationality frame my views on Caravaggio’s notion of relatedness. This hermeneutical move constitutes the second step in the trajectory of visualization described above insofar Caravaggio’s Conversion on the way to Damascus visualizes queer relationality.

Leo Bersani (2010: 31), exploring Caravaggio’s oeuvre, theorizes gay art as a homo-esthetic “to which homosexual desire is essential, but which, precisely and paradoxically because of this, can dispense with homosexual identity.” Queer art is a mode of representation where queer disowns identitarian claims to offer a “nonspecific resistance to the dominant culture” (32). Such esthetics features eroticism as resistance to heteronormative relationality, queerness promoting eroticism/sex as antisociality (Caserio et al., 2006), as ways of relating to the self and others that risk the normalizing strictures of socially sanctioned ego formation. In Caravaggio’s case, queerness disciplines the spectator’s gaze in a desire not rooted in lack but in the fullness of material existence (Bersani and Dutoit, 1999: 63–34).

Bersani and Dutoit’s Caravaggio is a painter of relationality that transgress “straight” relatedness through compositional and thematic techniques such as blurring boundaries, decentering the gaze while exploring its relationship with desire. Caravaggio’s bodies, they suggest, participate in a playfulness of decentering, disavowal, and disclosure that defines queer eroticism as a relationality not domesticated by sexual or gendered identities (Bersani and Dutoit, 1999: 13). Caravaggio’s theological innovation lies in his turn toward a new relatedness where transcendence is dispensed with, or as Hammill (2000: 66) suggests, Caravaggio “resuscitates the flesh that Paul relinquishes.” With Paul’s prostrate disposition lies a humanity, a “being” with fleshly, material, earthly, this worldly life. Caravaggio performs such materiality, Bersani and Dutoit argue, through the lack of a clear direction in the character’s gaze which, in turn, results in a decentering of the spectator’s gaze. The viewer cannot figure the direction in the characters’ gaze: their eyes inscrutable, sometimes veiled, others obscured.

In The Conversion, Paul’s physicality is detemporalized and dehistoricized; it is thrown physically so that he may be reoriented spiritually (Bersani and Dutoit, 1999: 60). With no sign of the supernatural and Paul’s arms raised as part of the jumble of human and animal arms and legs that occupy the center of the work, “nothing actually touches anything else, no form impinges on any other form, and yet the curious effect of this juxtaposition of discrete but related forms is to put into question the very possibility of an empty space” (61). The conversion suggests an uncongested connectedness where touch requires no contact, and absence of the other does not forfeit relationality. Paul’s metaphysical receptiveness is an “ecstatic passivity” (60), a unique disposition unparalleled in the history of art. Paul’s foreshortened position, face upwards, “looking” in the opposite direction from the spectator, legs open, arms reaching out, undecipherable countenance, relaxed and firm limbs, next to the phallic signifier of the sword, with disheveled hair resembles Bersani’s rectum-as-a-grave bottom and Dean’s ecstatic barebacker.

Caravaggio’s intimacy

Cloaked in red, lying flat on his back, a jockey in shock after being thrown on the floor, semitense muscles, arms yearning upwards, half-open fingers, Paul’s body is exceptional. Is it an open body receiving the Other? Or is it closing itself before or after a un/expected interaction? Is Paul dissolving into thin air or is he holding his body’s boundaries? What is Paul greeting or resisting? Might the sword lying next to him—a phallic symbol—be a signifier for Paul’s defensiveness toward aggression? Or should we consider the subtle orifice formed by his skirt strategically situated instead of his groin to be a signifier for Paul’s receptivity?

In the following trajectory of visualization, I explore, in intercontextual fashion, what elements in Paul’s ecstasy visualize the ethics of hospitality distilled from bareback and cruising subcultures. In other words, I read Caravaggio’s esthetics through Unlimited Intimacy’s ethics or, more specifically, Paul’s blade interpreted though the bottom’s total submission. For starters, Paul is the receptive partner in relationship with the other—masculine or feminine, human or divine. Paul’s closed eyes hint at the anonymity of the event for he cannot, and neither can the spectator, know who is “penetrating him.” Paul’s submissiveness is however ambiguous: agony and pleasure, discomfort and consolation, disconnection and closeness, unsafety and uncertainty, fear and anxiety, aversion and yearning.

Paul’s gaze, eyes shut, addresses no one, human (spectator/companion), animal (horse), or divine (Lord). Bersani and Dutoit describe Caravaggio’s eroticism as a function of the noninterpretable address. The enigmatic body is the condition of the possibility of erotics, a bodily disposition that hints at a secret to which no one has access (9). Paul’s enigmatic nongaze poses dilemmas such as: Do we read his closed eyes as a sign of receptiveness, forgetfulness, denial, or presence? Do we interpret his open arms as reaching out, or as waving in desperation or obliviousness? Whether we read Paul, along with the biblical text, as struck by the Other or, through the queer experience, in sexual submission, queer theology encounters here a fleshly body that experiences ecstatic submission. If the biblical narrative of Acts (9:1–19) foregrounds Saul’s submission to the Lord, the queer practices of “unlimited intimacy” suggest the sexual act of Paul being penetrated. The lack of any supernatural signifier in Caravaggio’s work points to the mystical experience. No compositional feature explicitly hints at the supernatural. Yet, Paul’s disposition refers to its biblical origin which, in turn, disambiguates, if temporarily, what we are seeing. Only the artwork’s title signals the Lord’s conversion of Paul, whose bodily position resembles extraordinarily close the sexual Act of being bred.

Caravaggio’s depiction of Paul’s ecstatic queer and spiritual passivity is not, of course, the most prominent instance where sexual and religious desire coalesce. The carnal dimensions of the religious experience are a well-known trope in Christian mysticism: Santa Teresa de Ávila’s report on her religious experience as much as Bernini’s sculptural version epitomize such a confluence (see Figure 2). The quintessentially baroque Santa Teresa in Ecstasy, which is both an exaltation of the sensuous body and an ode to the mystical rapture, visualizes, like Caravaggio’s Paul, the irruption of the Other in the forms of seduction and assault, blurring the limits of consent and molestation. Whereas Caravaggio visualizes the falling down of Paul (Acts 9:4) as losing himself, Bernini sculpts Teresa of Avila’s strong will at the peak of its weakness, at the rarest moment of losing autonomy, at her “desmembramiento” (Miller, 2006: 251).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1647–52), Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Marble, Santa Maria della Vitoria, Rome.

Thematic differences notwithstanding, a number of common representational and compositional features are salient. The elaborate folding in Teresa’s clothing hiding her flesh resemble, similar to Paul’s orifice, the most intimate surfaces of the body; by fully covering it, Bernini is displaying it (Careri, 1995). Bernini sculpts an ambiguous movement: it is unclear whether the arrow is entering or withdrawing. It is equally uncertain, as in Paul’s case, what we are to make of Teresa’s eyes shut: pain, ecstasy, pleasure, absence or, in S&M terms, all of these at the same time. Although her lips are partly open, like Paul’s, she lacks the words to express her pleasure. Such enjoyment, Irigaray will suggest, a “pleasure without pleasure,” is what allows Teresa to establish a relationship with the divine outside the phallic economy (Hayes, 1999). Lacan notes that Bernini’s Teresa embodies “a transcendental experience of a-sexual jouissance beyond the phallus, from a perspective that is at least as phallic as the one adopted by the baroque sculptor” (Nobus, 2015: 35). The representational problem of visualizing the female orgasm comes to the fore: “if jouissance of the Other is effectively situated beyond the phallus, and therefore the symbolic, then God cannot have anything to do with it” (34).

Whereas scholars have explained Teresa’s (female) jouissance, Paul’s semiecstatic disposition remains unexamined. Paul’s legs open, which are inviting through the signifier of the hole, betray the receptive/female-like disposition that Bersani attributes to receptive anal sex. Paul’s Caravaggio, in other words, is an artistic instantiation of Bersani’s (2010: 18) “seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.” Paul’s submission iconographically illustrates the eroticization of subordination, the indissociable nature of sexual pleasure and power. ⁶ Bernini positions the smiling cupid piercing Teresa as the phallus-bearer, while Caravaggio insinuates that the absent Lord/Other holds a phallus that is dispersed (the sword, the phallus on the back of the horse). Bernini’s cherub’s amused expression suggests a knowledge of what we ignore, whereas Paul’s companion’s undecipherable expression leaves us in deeper ignorance; his concealed countenance provides, unlike in Bernini, no hermeneutical frame. Whereas in Bernini the compositional elements unequivocally hint at Teresa’s jouissance, in Caravaggio Paul’s jouissance remains elusive.

The insights gained from the earlier exploration of queer practices allow us to supplement Caravaggio’s Paul, beyond the comparison with Bernini’s ecstatic representation, with queer notions of submission. Foucault (1996: 322–334), who first theorized submission in S&M as an ascetic practice destined to undo the gender equation male/dominant-female/dominated, predates Bersani’s conceptualization of submissiveness as “metaphysical sociability” (Bersani and Dutoit, 1999: 61), and of subjectivity predicated on the dissolution of the epistemological relationship of subject/object. Dean shall take up this notion of submission as the golden opportunity to explore unlimited hospitality, boundless openness to the other.

The submissive male position that Foucault introduced, Bersani theorized, and Dean documented: the image of a man on his back prostrated on the ground, legs and arms raised in ambiguous ecstasy is the centerpiece of Caravaggio’s “theology of sex.” First, the desexualization/degenitalization of pleasure relocates jouissance away from specific body parts. It is virtually impossible to decipher Paul’s experience as he, defenseless on the ground, partially conceals his countenance from the interpreter. Eyes closed, semiopened mouth, relaxed facial features, disheveled hair, maybe unconscious, maybe sleeping, possibly dreaming, perhaps absorbed in the pleasure/pain of the intense semiorgasm, the extended moment before or after the climax. There are no literal indications of sexual arousal, but Paul’s unreadable disposition together with the subtle references to the phallus (sword) and the orifice (the folding of the strips in his skirt form a gap between his legs) gesture toward male jouissance.

Second, Paul’s ecstasy, notably toned down if compared to Teresa’s, is located at the border of un/consciousness, confusing the threshold between pleasure and pain. What is the enigma behind Paul’s closed eyes? Ecstasy is here the aftermath of a rapture, having been struck by the divinity, Paul’s receptivity in the instant of openness to the Other positions him as the bottom who is “taking it like a man.” O’Hara, a gay activist, shares, in what might be a queer ekphrasis of the Conversion: “feeling a man’s dick inside me, condomless—that’s when the sex becomes spiritual in its intensity. Communion, in the true sense. Integral to that closeness is the knowledge that he intends to leave a piece of himself inside me.”

Third, the most glaring absence in Caravaggio’s composition, unlike in Bernini’s, is the absence of the Other, the tranquility of the companion and the horse accentuating such absence. The biblical interpreter knows this absence points to a presence, one that no other painter has missed. Such representational crisis signals anonymity; the interpreter is left wondering who, how, why, and where. This absence suggests anonymity; if you cannot represent it, you might as well “hide it.” The unknowing Paul is the cruising subject involved in an anonymous scene, his eyes semiclosed as he experiences being penetrated.

Fourth, psychoanalytically, Paul in ecstatic receptiveness visualizes the idea of sex as a self-shattering experience, following Bersani, the essence of sex itself: a nondescribable impulse to pursue the not necessarily pleasurable, an intensity that is averse to the stabilization of the ego coherence. Sex defined as the pleasure obtained from the deterioration of the ego’s stability, a losing of the self resulting in the loss of identity. Paul’s lack of direction, in this reading, his erratic grasping for something is the letting go of the self not knowing when it will be received back again—that letting go of the self that is proper to cruising practices.

Fifth, whereas Bernini literalizes the phallus in the arrow, Caravaggio’s phallus is dispersed. With no point of contact between the sword, carefully disposed of, and Paul’s body, this distance signifies that Paul, in submission to the Other, loses the phallic power that constitutes him as man. The phallus’s proximity could be the source of a jouissance that, in light of our queer explorations, bestows Paul’s masculinity back through the notion that “he is taking it like a man.” The sword has a double edge: abandonment of masculinity or empowerment of its reception, the pleasure of receiving it or the discomfort of letting it go. The helmet however, a metonymy of the military armor, a symbol of Paul’s warrior-like status, lying on the ground separated from Paul’s head, hints at his emasculation, at the loss of his masculinity as he lies prostrate.

Sixth, the sword’s phallic valence is complemented by the horse’s hoof, pointed sideways, oddly contorted so it points at Paul’s groin. The colossal horse looms over the supine body of Paul, dominating him, suggesting a point of origin for Paul’s jouissance: after all, the hairy white pattern on the stallion’s shoulder and right leg, upon closer attention, is the profile of a man and his sexual organ ready to insert itself between Paul’s open legs. Such receptivity takes us back to Paul’s open arms and legs. What, if anything, is Paul receiving?

The undecidability of what counts as erotic, the blurring of the boundaries between pleasure and pain, the anonymity granted by the absence of the Other, the self-shattering experience accompanying intercourse, the anxious and rewarding processes of (de)masculinization, and the demanding openness of the religious and sexual experience throw into relief the similarities between the subjectivity of the barebacker and the mystic. As Bersani (2011: 53) aptly puts it, in both experiences “the subject allows himself to be penetrated, even replaced, by an unknowable otherness,” the barebacker’s openness to anonymity evokes the mystic’s submission “to a divine will without any comfortably recognizable attributes whatsoever.” Bersani (2011: 108) has replaced the notion of the rectum as the burial of subjectivity and anal sex as the repudiation of the ego-coherence and as the grave of phallic power, for a notion of subjectivity where the ego is sacrificed not for the sake of biological and psychic death but for the pleasure of finding itself scattered and replicated everywhere in the world.

This shift from an ethics of self-shattering to one of imperfect self-replication, besides being inadequate to fully account for the submission/bottom position, according to Brintnall (2015), has serious political consequences for an ethics of hospitality grounded on an ontology of subjectivity. Investment on the stability of the self, a defense of its cohesiveness plays in the hand, he further suggests, of dominant theoretical frameworks invested in the defense of the individual (66). Ego-divestment has its risks—self-sacrifice in gay subcultures builds on and advances militaristic, male chauvinistic, and colonizing agendas—but cruising and barebacking without desubjectification fail in displacing “the appropriative, instrumentalizing, goal-oriented relation to the world that Dean and Bersani (and Bataille) decry” (63). The alternative, Brintnall (67) concludes, is embracing dispositions that risk self-dismissal, that promote the habit of “losing sight of the self,” which is precisely, I suggest, the position that Caravaggio’s Paul embodies as he lies prostrated in mystic ecstasy.

Saul’s conversion

It does not take queer theory musings to portray the apostle—the Saul of Acts, the Paul of the Letters or the Paul of the Wirkungsgeschichte—along the psychosocial lines of submission. ⁷ Brittany Wilson has recently argued that the blinding of Paul in Acts 9 destabilizes his masculinity. Wilson views Acts 9 as striking a blow against Paul’s manhood: being “blinded” in the ancient world meant being emasculated, losing self-control implied dropping manliness, and being subjected to God was understood as losing the Greco-Roman status of heroic masculinity. Wilson concludes that the blinding is an emasculating process required to present the apostle as the ideal disciple, that is a man in subordination to the supremely male man, Jesus Christ the Lord (2014: 386).

Acts, traditional Lukan scholarship argues, presents Paul as an exemplary man insofar as he excels at public speaking and at controlling his body. ⁸ According to Greco-Roman ideals, the argument goes, Paul’s control over his own actions warrants his manly status: he no longer commits acts of violence against Jesus’ followers (Acts 8:3, 9:1–2,13–14, 22:4–5, 26:9–11), remains calm when crisis strikes (27:17–36), discusses self-control with Felix (24:25), and counters the accusation of being out of his mind by claiming his use of reason (26:24–25). Against these manly traits, Wilson suggests, the blinding emasculates the apostle by portraying him as a loser in the contest of power with the divinity and by stripping him of sight, one of the main features of masculinity. Masculinity’s reliance on vision in Greco-Roman literature, Wilson (2014: 383) concludes, equates Paul’s loss of sight with loss of manhood, positioning Paul along with other disciples closer to the status of the slave (Luke 1:38; Acts 2:18, 4:29, 16:17, 20:19). By losing sight, Paul’s gains revelation.

If masculinity, as Wilson argues, requires self-control, power over, and the ability to stay on top, Luke can only remasculinize Paul by presenting him as a superior example, as the one capable of mastering submission. Here Acts’ rhetorical moves resemble Dean’s (2009: 56) study of bareback subcultures where submission equates exemplary masculinity through the “commitment to no-excuses submission and no-limits endurance.” The paradox that Paul can only “see” when he loses his ability to see (Wilson, 2014: 383), parallels the queer notion that a bottom can only be masculine by overcoming his emasculation. Paul’s blinding serves as a turning point where the prosecutor (penetrator) Saul sees his masculinity reconfigured through an act of submission: “in this one-on-one contest of power, Jesus clearly comes out on top, for the light (and presumably voice) comes from heaven (v.3) and Saul falls to the earth (v.4). Saul, the single most persistent persecutor of Jesus, is literally brought down” (Wilson, 2014: 372). Paul’s eventual recovery and subsequent missional performance suggests a temporary recovery of his lost status, ⁹ undermined by being subjected to his persecutor and to the Holy Spirit (e.g. 16:6–10; 20:22). A “slave of God” (16:17; 20:19) Paul is, in terms of the teratogenic grid (Fredrick, 2002; Parker, 1997), a bottom. ¹⁰

Wilson’s argument is, in the end, a historical-critical rehash of the original and more radical view put forth by Stephen Moore in Sex and Single Apostle, where l’enfant terrible of Biblical Studies bases Paul’s identity on his absolute gender and sexual submission to another man. Moore (2001: 165) wryly notes, “it is Paul’s own abjectly submissive role within this all-male threesome as slave of Christ that now defines his radical identity as a Christian.” Paul’s Letters are a Summa Hypermasculinitas, a Christological treatise where the Lord tops every other bottom (169), a queer reformulation of the Augustinian suggestion that Paul’s conversion was a transformation from being an aggressive top into a submissive bottom, “from a marvelous persecutor of the Gospel” to “a more marvelous preacher” (Augustine and Fredriksen, 1982: 9–16). A submission however that, at least in the epistolary corpus, is put to good rhetorical effect, making plain the difference between Caravaggio’s Paul and the Paul from the Letters. ¹¹

The touch of immanence

The transpiring emasculation of Paul in Acts is the required step, biblical scholarship suggests, for a closer relationship between Paul and Jesus, between the apostle and the Lord, between the top and the bottom. Paul’s submission, Caravaggio theologizes, is the condition of a relationship to otherness, a total rendition to the absolute Other, not unlike the radical hospitality that Dean’s ethnography reports in the practices of queer subcultures. Caravaggio’s Paul, in light of these biblical and theoretical reflections on submission, embodies queer eros (Menéndez-Antuña, 2017), an openness to the Other expressed through a carnal hospitality to strangeness that is both ethical, in its openness to the interpersonal unknown, and theological, in its receptiveness to the nonrepresentable Other.

What are the contours, we ought to ask, of Paul’s hospitality? How does his submission inform any attempt to theologize queer relationality? What are Paul’s contributions to a queer theology of raw sex? How does immanent submission to the other aid in theologizing Paul’s submission to the Other? Emmanuel Levinas’s (1969: 254) conception of otherness as a condition of relationality in Totality and Infinity is a fitting starting point because it explores, through the notion of love/eroticism, the process whereby the self returns and transcends itself, “an event situated at the limit of immanence and transcendence.”

Plato’s elaboration of Eros in the Symposium as the quest for the soul mate and the return of the fragmented self toward home informs Levinas’s account of love and hospitality. The problem with platonic eros, Levinas contends, is that it remains “fundamental immanence” (254)—the other understood as a resort to complete oneself. Love is the way of self to come to itself, “the satisfaction of a sublime hunger” (34), where otherness can never be fully assimilated, the paradox being that the need for the other is built on the transcendent exteriority of the beloved (254–255). The other posits itself as a mystery not fully graspable but possible, situating the erotic relationship between need (present) and desire (future). For Levinas, the simultaneity of “concupiscence and transcendence, tangency of the avowable and the unavowable, constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal per excellence” (255).

Levinas thinks about immanence in terms of solipsism and aversion to otherness and conceives of transcendence as openness to alterity, as interrelationality. The Other’s transcendence is the condition for an ethics grounded on the deprioritization of the self, resistant to objectifying the other, and invested in undoing the dichotomy subject/object. Transcendence, as he famously puts it, “designates a relation with a reality infinitely distant from my own reality, yet without this distance destroying this relation and without the relation destroying this distance” (41). Transcendence as infinite otherness manifests itself in the immanent face of the other: “The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face (…) His very epiphany consists in soliciting us by his destitution in the face of the Stranger, the widow, the orphan” (78).

Mayra Rivera (2007: 82) offers a critical supplement to Levinas’ transcendence: “transcendence designates a relation with a reality irreducibly different from my own reality, without the difference destroying this relation and without the relation destroying the difference.” Rivera acknowledges Levinas’ contribution regarding the primordial ontology of the Other that questions the identity of the self, but she is concerned that such a formulation obscures the irreducibility of the other. Rivera (78–82) emphasizes the communal dimension in the formation of the self and in the hospitality to the other as she deconstructs the limiting constraints of Levinas’ eros. Following Irigaray, Anzaldúa, and Moraga, Rivera (125) theorizes the relationship self-other not only through the lover’s face but in the whole body of the other, in the Web of relations that “constitutes each person’s concrete and particular in-finity.” The caress, more than the face, seems to be a more suitable metaphor for transcendence because the touch does not diminish the distance nor does it prevent the relationship. The caress does not disambiguate the tension of immanence/transcendence because, as Perpich (2001: 43) suggests, it includes “the possibility of the self’s return to itself in sensuous enjoyment.” This philosophical drive to ground ontology in the materiality of the flesh and the body leaves unresolved Paul’s openness to Otherness for he, as Bernini’s Teresa, is not being caressed or touched, yet still he is still experiencing the erotic encounter with the Other.

Rivera, inspired by Irigaray, offers a theological framework that situates the Other—womb, planet, cosmos, God—as the origin of the human being and as the marker of subjectivity (129), criticizing theologies that conceive of human participation in the divine as a movement away from creaturality, decoupling divine transcendence from ethics, and abstracting divinity from human history (132). Divine touch, Rivera (136) argues, “reveals the simultaneity of transcendence and intimacy, a divine enveloping through which God may caress creation and feel its joy and suffering.” The touch of the divine is an embrace, “a caressing of the cosmos,” “never pure immanence but the site of transcendence in the flesh” (136). Through a relationship with the flesh of the other we are in touch with the Other, a reminder that we are called to transform our bodies “so that they become capable of embracing without grasping” (138).

If transcendence takes place not only in the contemplation of the face of the other (Levinas) but in the mutual touch, Caravaggio’s elliptic portrayal of the Other could be interpreted as a fitting meditation of Rivera’s reformulation of transcendence: the radical difference suggested by the Lord’s absence and by Paul’s body as it hints at the foundational relationship with the Other, embracing without grasping, almost touching without seizing. Paul’s open arms visualize the vulnerability involved in the desire for the Other, who remains unknowable, cannot be integrated, reduced, or consumed, the Other who disrupts my identity, my sense of self. Paul’s openness, his arms reaching out, is balanced by his carefulness (his limbs are somewhat tense). Paul’s equivocal longing toward otherness—the apostle’s ambiguous desire—seems to embody a “metaphysical desire” as “it desires beyond everything that can simply complete it” (Levinas, 1969: 34).

In this trajectory of visualization, Levinas and Rivera’s account of this transcendental relationship theologizes what Caravaggio visualizes: the ever conceptually elusive relationship between the subject and the Other. Despite their notable differences, both Rivera (2015: 145–146) and Levinas share a notion of the subject as relational, porous, temporary, elusive, open, in-the-world, “intercarnational,” but somewhat cohesive. Queer theory throws here a wedge into the theological investment on the stability of subjectivity by emphasizing the very moment of total dissolution of the subject, by centering the moment where the self dissolves. If Brintnall is right to suggest that barebacking and cruising are ethically significant for the desubjectification they entail, it might be time (queer theory is here winking at Christian theology) “to bring sexy back” to Christian mysticism, that is to put at the center of theology what Bersani (Bersani and Philips, 2008: 52) dismisses precisely for its implausibility: “the awesome abjection of ‘pure love,’” self-annihilation as the precondition for union with the Other or, to put it in iconographic terms, time to read Caravaggio’s dissolution of Paul along Bernini’s Avila’s “vivo sin vivir en mi” (I live without living in myself). In this reading, the theological tradition of changing the apostle’s name from Saul to Paul—rooted in the alleged conversion of Acts 9—attests to the annihilation of identitarian features.

Along with queer practices of utter submission, Caravaggio’s prostrate, receptive, open, quietly ecstatic Paul portrays the apostle’s disposition toward the gift (HIV) or the Gift (grace). Whereas in biblical scholarship, to say it with Moore or Wilson, the gift of faith (grace) given by the Lord is gained through the loss and recovery of manhood, in queer subcultures the gift materializes in sexual fluids shared within the community, almost as an internal bodily tattoo, as a mark of belonging, as a touch (literal) that spreads through the whole body. Consider the following report of a barebacker: “Seed is a gift, it’s love, it’s acceptance. Taking a man’s cum—in your ass, down your throat, rubbed into your skin, whatever—even if you don’t know his name, is closeness. It’s an act of love and trust. Even if yawl just met” (Dean, 2009: 54). This notion of intimacy throws into relief the links between bodily contact, love, the gift (of HIV), anonymity, and hospitality—the almost complete hospitable intimacy, the unlimited familiarity of the stranger, the moment of dissolution previous to reconfiguration, the precise moment of ego evanescence before the reintroduction of mastery. Caravaggio’s Paul is evaporating instead of holding his body’s boundaries, collapsing rather than reshaping himself: a literal barebacker (he is, after all, saddle free, riding a horse) and a queer cruiser.