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.
