Our human bodies, though always with us, have recently became more conspicuous.
They suffer pandemics and endure violent weather. Artificial images—athletic, commercial, or pornographic—exploit their fragility and claim to measure their worth. Some aspects of our bodies have grown easier to read, like the dignity of our different shapes, hues, and abilities. Other aspects of human sexuality have grown less legible, and what used to seem self-evident no longer appears so. We are realizing, in short, that while our bodies are given to us by God, they require our interpretation. The body speaks its own language that demands to be read and discerned through traditions and practices. When we forget how to read it, the naked flesh can slip toward the animal or the machine, and lose the dignity of human personhood.
What does it mean to be a human body, with its joys, its groans, its endless needs?
What does it mean to be a human body, with its joys, its groans, its endless needs? According to its modern critics, Christianity hates the body, and teaches the pious to wait for heavenly release from its limitations. Yet secular modernity has promoted its own share of myths, which have struggled to hold together the data of human animality and the values of human dignity. In fact, Christianity preserves some of the most sophisticated and persuasive accounts of human embodiment in western thought. The divine humanity of Jesus, neither ghost nor alien, stretched the imagination of ancient and medieval Christians. As Hildegard of Bingen once wrote, the human body is the medium in which God chose to inscribe his eternal deeds. The flesh of Jesus was created inside another human body. The Eucharist is a bodily food that changes our bodies into itself. The sexual union of bodies is a privileged sacrament in Catholic traditions.
If our bodies speak a language, it is because the Word was made flesh. This seminar examines the language of the body as interpreted in Christian traditions. At the center of Christianity are the animal experiences of having a body: birthing and being born, eating and being eaten, and loving and being loved.
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