BJÖRN KRONDORFER Genderless or Hyper-Gendered?

Reading the “Body of Christ” from a Critical Men’s Studies Perspective

In the early phase of Buddhism, the Buddha was represented non-figuratively. Eventually, bodily representations of the seated Buddha emerged.1 One of them is the traditional posture with a concave-shaped torso whose hollowed-inward figure symbolizes psychic energies and inward contemplation. Another is the Chinese bodhisattva in form of a convex, outward extending and bulging figure. This pot-bellied body of Maitreya denotes prosperity and good fortunes. These examples of Buddhist representations of the male religious body contrast sharply with Christian representations. In the West, the male religious body, in normative representations, is muscular, with strong thighs supporting a triangu- larly shaped torso, his genitalia either revealed or veiled. This is an active body that is often caught in dramatic tension. Going back to the Mantiklos bronze (probably a votive offering to Apollo) of the seventh century BCE and reaching perfection in Michelangelo’s David in the early 1500s, Christian male bodies signal externality, whereas Buddhist male bodies denote interiority.2 In early Indian Buddhist texts we find yet another tradition of representing the Buddha. There, he is described as the mahapurusa, the “great man.” He is called a “crusher of enemies,” “victor in battle,” “bull of a man,” “king of kings,” “God above God,” “stallion,” “savage elephant,” etc.—all symbolic of strength and male virility.3 Buddha’s undisputed virility does not need to prove itself through active sexuality. Such symbolically charged hyper-virility is matched only by the serenity of celibate abstinence. Buddha’s manliness is both exuberant and restrained. A total of 32 major physical characteristics are as- cribed to the mahapurusa in the Pali canon, and they include his cranial lump (usnisa) on top of his head, a curl of hair on his forehead, a penis hidden by a

1 Bodily depictions of Buddha appear in an early form in the Gandhara culture, about the first century CE, in the region that today is Pakistan. The style of representing Buddha figures was influenced by Greek art left in the wake of Alexander’s conquest of this region three hundred years earlier. Cf. KUNST- UND AUSSTELLUNGSHALLE DER BUNDESREPUBLIK DEUTSCHLAND (ed.), Gandhara. Das buddhistische Erbe Pakistans. Ausstellungskatalog, Bonn 2008. 2 Cf. K. DUTTON, The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development, New York 1995. 3 Cf. B. FAURE, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, Princeton 1998 and J. POW- ERS, A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism, Cam- bridge 2009.

148 BJÖRN KRONDORFER sheath, eyelashes as long as that of a cow, flat feet, a mouth like a bimba fruit, and a soft and large tongue, etc. The motive of uncurling is strong in early Indian Buddhist literature: the curl of hair on Buddha’s forehead, when loosened, reaches his elbow; the tongue, when uncurled, can reach his ears; the penis, usually retracted and covered by a sheath, can be uncurled when Buddha’s man- liness is challenged. Described as perfect in every respect, Buddha’s penis can emerge from its sheath and wind around a mountain seven times. Without desire for sex, this male body is still hyper-masculinized. And yet, in contrast to West- ern depictions of saintly and divine male figures, the Buddha is almost never depicted as a muscular body. These Buddhist images are startling to a Western and Christian audience, utterly strange to us and devoid of strong emotional and devotional attachment. I am beginning my reflections on the body of Christ with these images because they are culturally so different from the Christian imagination of the Leib Christi—the imagined body of a divine figure, in which Christians have in- vested much spiritual, mystical, theological, devotional, sacramental, and artis- tic attachment. And yet, if we were to step back for a moment from our own religious investment, the body of Christ—from an external perspective—would strike us as no less startling: a God in a human body; a man of divine origin crucified; a half-naked man on the cross vulnerable to pain but above and be- yond sexual lust; a real carnal body (σάρξ) turning into the mystical corpus Christi (σῶμα) that becomes embodied in the Church and consecrated in bread during the sacrament of the Eucharist. As in early Buddhism, where Buddha was represented non-figuratively, early Christians also presented Jesus Christ through symbols. The restraint use of symbolization, however, soon gave away to numerous male models as Christi- anity rose to prominence in the Hellenistic world and Roman Empire: the good shepherd in imitation of the lamb-carrying Hermes; the all-powerful panto- crator of Late Antiquity; the Schmerzensmann (Man of Sorrows) of the late Middle Ages (1300s); the muscular risen Christ of the Renaissance; the effem- inized Herz Jesu (Sacred Heart Jesus) of the nineteenth century; the twentieth century muscular body-in-hyper-pain as portrayed in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ (2004). Fully in a male body, Jesus Christ does not need to succumb to the same laws regulating the bodies of earthly men. Christ’s body is both sexed and sexless, both genderless and hyper-gendered. Pope John Paul II wrote in Theology of the Body that as “the body enters the definition of being a sacrament, [it is] ‘a visible sign of an invisible reality’“4. The question is whether we allow ourselves to really see the body of Christ as a male body. How do we make visible the male body in a historical and cultural environment in which masculinity is the omnipresent norm and yet is not artic- ulated as a body limited by its own genderedness? Asked differently: If Christ’s male body is the visible sign of a highly charged sacramentality and devotion,

4 JOHN PAUL II, Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan, Boston 1997, 153.