(no subject)
Jun. 4th, 2009 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leafVery often I read stuff about the 'feminising' of the body of Christ in mediaeval religion†and suspect that while, yes, there is important stuff going on about wounding, and yes, there are certainly strong parallels between Christ's side wound and its blood and breast-feeding (unsurprising given that med. theory held that milk was a processed form of blood), it's possibly not terribly helpful to read the side wound of Christ as a sort of vagina, and everyone has read too much Freud. Apart from anything else, it doesn't really explain the imagery of hiding in the wound, which isn't obviously or primarily about sex* (it's not as if anyone had particular hang-ups about using erotic metaphors for God and the soul if they wanted to, anyway).
On the other hand, sometimes you see pictures like the one below the cut, from the 14th C Hours of Bonne of Luxemburg, and.... whatever the artist's intention, you can't not see it. (Though actually, I suppose if I put my mind to it, I could see it as the Eye of Sauron. This is, however, not exactly an improvement.
ETA: of course, really, the problem is that moderns, if you describe imagery in those terms, are inclined to think it's about sex, when in fact the significance of the wound imagery is really wound-as-womb, and it comes back to the motherhood of God. It's about redemption as being reborn in the wounds of Christ, and links the passion as the central act of the atonement with baptism as our participation in the death and rising of Christ for our redemption. In a way, it's the same paradigm as you find in "Rock of Ages, cleft for me", except without the physical bits, because in some crucial ways we're more prudish than they were in the fourteenth century.
†Not to be confused with Heinrich Seuse's Crossdressing - or possibly Genderqueer - Jesus, which is quite definitely there in the text and not an invention of scholarship.
* Nobody mention Prince Charles and the tampons, plz.
On the other hand, sometimes you see pictures like the one below the cut, from the 14th C Hours of Bonne of Luxemburg, and.... whatever the artist's intention, you can't not see it. (Though actually, I suppose if I put my mind to it, I could see it as the Eye of Sauron. This is, however, not exactly an improvement.
ETA: of course, really, the problem is that moderns, if you describe imagery in those terms, are inclined to think it's about sex, when in fact the significance of the wound imagery is really wound-as-womb, and it comes back to the motherhood of God. It's about redemption as being reborn in the wounds of Christ, and links the passion as the central act of the atonement with baptism as our participation in the death and rising of Christ for our redemption. In a way, it's the same paradigm as you find in "Rock of Ages, cleft for me", except without the physical bits, because in some crucial ways we're more prudish than they were in the fourteenth century.
†Not to be confused with Heinrich Seuse's Crossdressing - or possibly Genderqueer - Jesus, which is quite definitely there in the text and not an invention of scholarship.
* Nobody mention Prince Charles and the tampons, plz.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-04 04:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-04 07:52 pm (UTC)