On the Risen Christ

Jesus with Erection - a satrirical image from 

the student newspaper The Insurgent (2006) [1]

 
 

I.

 

For me, the most daring, most beautiful, and most philosophically important of all D. H. Lawrence's tales is The Escaped Cock (1929). In this short novel, he makes a major contribution to the Nietzschean project of a revaluation of all values as advocated in The Anti-Christ (1895).

 

And he does this by insisting upon what Leo Steinberg describes as a long-suppressed matter of fact: that as well as being a Man of Sorrows keen to show us his wounds, the resurrected figure of Christ was also a bringer of joy, proud to sport an erection. 

 

In other words, just like the Renaissance artists who produced a large body of devotional imagery centred on the penis of both the baby Jesus and the 33-year-old crucified Christ, Lawrence obliges us to "recognise an ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostantatio vulnerum" [2]. 

 

Whilst many Christians still prefer to look away, Lawrence emphasises in the phallic second part of his tale that if Christ rose, he did so in the flesh in order to experience the pleasures of the latter, including the pleasure of feeling "the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins" [3]. 

 

This is his glory and triumph over death, not some mad fantasy of ascension that defeats the whole point and purpose of his Passion. All that suffering - including the terrible effort of leaving the tomb - doesn't make sense if he is simply obliged to "lurk obscurely for six weeks on earth" [4] before then being whooshed up to heaven on a cloud and never put down again.      

 

Flesh and blood, as Lawrence says, belong to the earth - and only to the earth. And Jesus was risen flesh and blood: both mortal and sexed. Christ's erect penis signifies his humanation and whilst St. Augustine might find the male member shameful (not least of all in its disobedient nature), the man who died does not.  

 

And those who, like Lawrence or Michelangelo, do what they can to stress this fact are not being sacrilegious; on the contrary, the "rendering of the incarnate Christ ever more unmistakably flesh and blood is a religious enterprise because it testifies to God's greatest achievement" [5].         

 

 

II.         

 

So, where are we now? Are we finally prepared to acknowledge Jesus as a man of flesh and blood, if not, indeed, accord the Son of Man a place alongside Osiris and Dionysus within a pantheon of ithyphallic deities? 

 

Probably not. Jesus with Erection, the satrirical image seen at the top of this post, still caused controversy when it was published in the student newspaper The Insurgent in 2006, with all the usual suspects rising to the bait. 

 

The picture, one of twelve iconoclastic images depicting events in the life of Jesus, was intended to demonstrate that Christians could be just as easily (and deeply) offended as those Muslims who were offended by the Danish cartoons of Muhammad [6]. 

 

However, one suspects that those responsible for the images of Christ published in The Insurgent knew very well that whilst some Christian groups and individuals might vociferously protest, there weren't going to be riots in the streets and no one was likely to be killed [7]. 

 

Their provocation was not, therefore, quite as daring, nor as radical, as it might first appear and the image lacks all the potency, profundity, and piety of those works of Renaissance art discussed by Steinberg, or, indeed, of Lawrence's beautiful novella.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Student Insurgent is a radical political journal published by a collective of students and community members. The paper's coverage shifts periodically, but has covered anti-capitalist, environmentalist, and anti-war topics and expressed solidarity with such groups as the Animal Liberation Front and Earth First! 'The Jesus Issue', featuring images of Jesus - including Jesus with Erection - was produced in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy (see note 6 below). 

 

[2] Leo Steinberg, 'The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion', essay in October, Vol. 25, (Summer, 1983), p. 1. Published by the MIT Press. Available to access on JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/778637   

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Escaped Cock', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 159.  

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Risen Lord', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 270. 

[5] Leo Steinberg, op. cit., p. 10.

      When I mention Michelangelo, I'm thinking of his marble sculpture Cristo della Minerva (1519-21), usually known in English as the Risen Christ. Admittedly, this figure does not have a hard-on, but, nevertheless, the sexual organs are exposed in order to show that Christ's sexuality is uncorrupted by sin and free of shame. It might also be noted that during the Baroque period a bronze loincloth was added and that this has remained in place ever since - an act of sheer barbarism carried out in the name of propriety.     

[6] The Muhammad cartoons controversy began after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve editorial cartoons on 30 September 2005, most of which depicted the founder and prophet of Islam.  This led to violent demonstrations around the world which resulted in a more than 250 reported deaths. 

[7] It's not that Christian fundamentalists are any less fanatic than Islamists, but Christianity doesn't hold to the strong tradition of aniconism that Islam subscribes to and the idea of blasphemy has no legal basis any longer in the West, with most laws relating to it having now been repealed. In the US, of course, the First Amendment protects all forms of free speech and any attempt to draft or enforce blasphemy laws would violate the Constitution. 

On Painting Ceilings

Kazimir Malevich 
Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) 
Oil on canvas (79.5 x 79.5 cm)

I.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, is certainly an impressive piece of interior decorating and design, incorporating over 340 figures, both clothed and nude, allowing the artist to fully demonstrate his skill in creating a huge variety of poses for the human body (poses that have been much imitated ever since). 

Contrary to popular belief, Michelangelo painted in a standing position, not lying flat on his back, and endured great physical discomfort; eye strain, neck ache, muscle cramps, etc. Little wonder then that he bodged certain sections and that it was left unfinished. Nevertheless, according to Goethe, those who haven't seen this work for themselves can have no appreciable idea of what greatness a single man is capable.


II.

I was thinking of Michelangelo and his High Renaissance masterpiece whilst painting a ceiling in my mother's house over the weekend. Not that I drew inspiration from the Italian; that came rather from the avant-garde Russian artist Kazimir Malevich and his Suprematist composition of 1918 entitled White on White (shown above).  

For that's essentially what I was doing: painting white on white, inch after inch and one polystyrene foam tile after another, using Farrow and Ball's All White Estate emulsion; an expensive but soft and sympathetic paint which provides a chalky, very matt finish, with just a 2% sheen (which is more than enough lustre for any ceiling in my view).      

Whilst most people today probably prefer to use a roller and get the job done as quickly and as conveniently as possible, I like to take my time and prefer to use a small (12 mm) brush, ensuring that individual brush strokes and small imperfections remain evident; the thought of machine-perfect smoothness - or machine-smooth perfection - is anathema to my tastes. 

Having now completed the second coat, I have to confess that I prefer my ceiling in all its infinite and abstract whiteness to Michelangelo's, which - for me - is far too busy and show-offy. It's nice to dispense with illusions of depth and to also rid painting of representation and colour. The foam tiles - that were so popular at one time, but which are now deemed to be a fire hazard - provide a richly textured surface.      

Although I don't much care for his ideal fantasies of purity and spiritual transcendence, I share something of Malevich's exhilaration and know exactly what he means when he claims in his 1919 manifesto to have overcome the lining of the coloured sky and learnt how to swim in the freedom of the white abyss ...

On the Inspiration of Touch

Michelangelo: Detail from Creazione di Adamo (c. 1512) 

What Tommy Dukes refers to as the inspiration of touch is an idea that continues to fascinate and intrigue. For if we must still think of the soul, then let us think of it not as some kind of immortal essence located in a mysterious region of the body, but, rather, as something that exists momentarily in the contacts formed between a body and its external environment.

In other words, the soul is a flash of interchange between objects and not an an intrinsic quality belonging to either. This is illustrated, for example, in Michelangelo's famous fresco, The Creation of Adam (c. 1512) - at least as I interpret it.

For rather than conceive of Adam as a useless lump of clay just waiting to be animated by the all-powerful index finger of God's paternal right hand, I prefer to imagine inspiration is born between the two as entities who unfold into being within a democracy of touch. Unequal as objects perhaps, but equally objects nevertheless upon a flat ontological playing field.

It's often pointed out that, as a matter of fact, the two hands don't actually touch. But that's ok. What counts is the active reaching out of fingertips and that magical space and spark created between them that we might think of as the shimmer of possibility that lies betwixt things and forever beyond the grasp of any single entity.   

And what also counts, as Steven Connor rightly indicates, is the delicacy of the shared touch; it has to have a certain lightness and softeness. People with greedy, heavy hands who believe they must grab life by the throat and tear open the flower bud are essentially soulless. Connor writes:

"Delicate and subtle things have a life of their own, and call, not for grasping or prodding or palpation, but for caress [...] for in the caress, there is an approach or address to another skin capable of sensation, capable of its own experience of the borderline between thought and feeling. To caress an object in the world is to treat it as though it possessed such a sensitive skin."

Arguably, another word for this sensuous, subtle form of touch is tenderness - a term privileged by D. H. Lawrence in his late works and elaborated into a provocative ethic that encapsulates his ideal of blissful bodily interaction that is free from any will to dominance or exploitation. One might hold the other, but, at the same time, one must hold back from holding the other too tightly. 

It is interesting to note how the French philosopher Michel Serres develops this notion of reserve in his work, suggesting that humanity - in the best sense of the word - is defined not by its power to manipulate and destroy, but by its ability to show self-restraint and recognise limits. To exceed limits and to seek to exercise control over others - to refuse either to let them go or let them be - is to fall into a fatal form of ego imperialism (à la Clifford Chatterley).      

See:

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on pp. 262-63. 

 
Michel Serres, The Troubador of Knowledge, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser and William Paulson, (University of Michigan Press, 1997). 

Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley, (Continuum, 2008). 

Note: to read an afterword to this post that develops the idea of delicacy and problematises Lawrence's notions of touch and tenderness, please click here.

D. H. Lawrence and the Grand Perverts

Drawing of D. H. Lawrence by David Levine (1968)

According to D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written to Aldous Huxley, behind all of those whom he identifies as grand perverts, lies "ineffable conceit" and boundless ego.

Figures including St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust, are all guilty of the same thing; namely, "attempting to intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness", says Lawrence.

By this, he seems to mean they get their sex in their heads and barter away the sheer intensity of lived experience for mere representation. In other words, they fall into idealism, into narcissism and into solipsism; "the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being".

But, in as much as phallic consciousness is also "the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean, in the best sense, by common sense", I suppose he's also taking a dig at all those who dare to think differently from those who subscribe to the morality of custom and popular prejudice, or what Lawrence mistakes for an instinctive-intuitive form of folk wisdom. 

 
And this, when you think about it, is not only surprising, but bitterly disappointing. That Lawrence - of all people - should end up defending doxa (that form of truth and goodness which goes without saying and from which we should never deviate) and condemning a host of other writers, artists, and thinkers as perverts (a term used in an admittedly idiosyncratic manner, but still in an essentially negative and pejorative sense), is, if nothing else, an outrageous example of the pot calling the kettle - and every other kitchen utensil - black.   


See: D. H. Lawrence, Letter 4358, to Aldous Huxley, 27 March 1928, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James. T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342.