Hymnody and the Blazon

Amy L. Ellison

Dr. Erben

ENGL 6110

30 November 2007

Hymnody and the Blazon:

The Fetishization of Jesus in the Moravian Church

The Moravian movement, like many other Protestant groups, evolved from the desire to achieve a close relationship with God; Moravians believed that no priest should perform as mediator, instead granting each person the ability to obtain a personal connection to Christ.

Settlements built themselves around the idea of community, in that the individual participated in the union of the church as a whole and worked toward the growth of that unity, so much so that missionaries enjoyed great success because of the willingness of the Moravian church to transcend nationality and race. Count Zinzendorf’s attempt to create an all-encompassing, utopian community led to several curious portrayals of the figure of Christ, in part because of the emphasis on emotional spiritualism, an outgrowth of the attempt to connect to God through humanity. Christ’s humanity, for Moravians, became a way of experiencing divinity through the worshipper’s own flesh, and the color of that flesh mattered less than the capacity for empathy.

Because of the emphasis on Christ as both savior and human being, Moravian belief focused greatly upon the state of Christ’s body during the crucifixion and specifically on the miraculous nature of the side-wounds; the wounds are metaphorically described as the womb through which the church was born and the place through which worshippers must enter in order to reach salvation. Yet, Christ himself is portrayed as the husband of the congregation. These Ellison 2 descriptions create multiple gender roles for the figure, as they operate in both feminine and masculine positions, allowing members to connect to whatever version of Christ they needed at the time. Historically, critics make the argument for either the feminization or masculinization of Christ, addressing the state of Jesus as mother or examining his role as the “bridegroom” of the congregation. However, the question of gender actually separates Christ’s teachings from his physical self, and any real definition of gender is avoided within the hymnody, transforming

Christ into a truly great mystical presence: a figure that can function in whatever form of relationship the individual chooses.

Despite the constant birthing and intercourse imagery found within the Moravian hymns, the idea of a sexualized Christ, one who participates in the romantic relationship, is rarely discussed1. The relationship between worshipper and worshipped stemmed from a physical understanding of the pain of the sacrifice and an empathy for the treatment of the body, but the obsession of the wounds themselves often focuses not on the body of Christ as a whole, but rather on the dismemberment of Christ, stressing physicality even over mysticism because it is through the physical embodiment of God that humanity attains redemption2. The emphasis on specific body parts works to both emphasize the corporeality of God and draw parallels between

Christ and those who wish to become Christ-like. In Moravian hymnody, Christ is repeatedly described not as a person, but rather in parts (feet, wounds, eyes, and mouth). By creating a view of Christ that concentrates on body, Moravians accentuate the differences between Christ and

1 Atwood, Fogleman, and Peucker all hint at the potential for sexuality, but either focus mainly on the gender problem or examine sexuality within the congregation as an outgrowth of the portrayal of Christ. The idea of Christ as lover remains rather neglected, but my own attempt at adding to the concept of the sexualized Christ is based on the understanding of gender explored by the critical works of these scholars. 2 The dismemberment of Christ in Renaissance art is not a new idea, but perhaps the two books that most influenced this discussion are Jonathan Sawday’s The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture and Caroline Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. Both write about the fragmented body in Medieval and Renaissance religious artwork, and gave me quite a solid framework that I was able to apply to my reading of the Moravian hymn as blazon. Ellison 3 worshipper in order to examine the potential for human perfection. Their hymns become increasingly romantic and almost overtly sexualized in the attempt to humanize the figure of

Christ; the fetishization of the savior evolves from the attempt to empathy for God, spiritually transforming the worshipper by finding a path through his or her own human physicality. This celebration of Christ’s body and the potential it offers mankind implies the romantic, often resembling the blazon poetry of the Renaissance in which the beauty of a woman was often praised by singling out specific parts of her body and attempting to describe her through metaphor. By comparing a lady’s smile with, say, the sunrise, poets elevated the female out of the body and into the metaphysical, literally disembodying the woman and avoiding any description that did not move outward from the physical figure itself; the blazon moves the body away from the typical physical experience, remaking a probably-imperfect creature into one of perfection. Moravian hymnody operates in much the same way, but because it begins with a form already sublime, the reader, instead of moving outward from the physical form, moves inward. The worshipper can now see the potential for his or her own “disembodiment” through the “embodiment” of God.

I would like to take the opportunity to expand existing arguments concerning the gender and sexuality of Christ by closely examining the physical separation of the parts of the body in the context of blazon poetry—a literary reading of Moravian hymnody that has yet to be attempted. Christ’s body becomes fetishized as the Moravians attempt to understand the relationship they should maintain with their savior, asking, if Christ’s hands are the hands of a person, then could an ordinary person’s hands not become Christ-like? And should Christ not possess both masculine and feminine traits so that both genders may be saved and find their way to perfection? Jesus’ existence, for the Moravians, becomes less important as he is viewed as a Ellison 4 whole being; instead, the parts separated from the body, a physical representation of the soul separated from God, become crucial for Moravian interpretation of spirituality and gender. As the church progressed, worshippers entwined these images of the body so strongly through their daily lives that the body of Christ became almost more important than the spirit, in that, even in some hymns, the miraculous is neglected and only the body seems to warrant mention. Such intensity results in a kind of fetishization of the body of Christ, clearly harnessing the romantic techniques of erotic Renaissance poets. As Pietist poetics moved away from the concept of

Biblical literalism, they had no choice but to turn to secular models in order to continue to avoid the excess they believed existed in Catholicism. This essay will clearly illustrate the emergence of a similar excess within Moravian hymnody as they look to erotic poetry to fetishize—both spiritually and physically—what would be, for them, the ultimate human form.

The fetishized body in poetry would have been familiar to Zinzendorf, as it exists with such great commonality in Renaissance art. Tending towards partialism, blazon poetry works to possess the female as a whole by controlling her image in pieces. For instance, Robert Herrick certainly idolizes the female, as seen particularly in his obsessions concerning Julia; he not only creates poems that display his worship-like feelings for her, but also forms her into a kind of idol. By revising her into small pieces, it becomes more possible to possess the entire person. A strange kind of materialism takes place in “Julia I,” in which the poet catalogues physical features and connects them with material objects:

How rich and pleasing thou, my Julia, art

In each thy dainty and peculiar part!

First, for thy queenship, on thy head is set

Of flowers a sweet commingled coronet: Ellison 5

About thy neck a carcanet is bound,

Made of the ruby, pearl and diamond:

A golden ring that shines upon thy thumb:

About thy wrist, the rich dardanium.

Between thy breasts (than down of swans more white)

There plays the sapphire with the chrysolite.

No part besides must of thyself be known,

But by the topaz, opal, calcedon.

The cataloguing of body parts should sound familiar, as it is part of a tradition enjoyed by

Donne, Petrarch, and parodied by Shakespeare (for instance, Sonnet 130: “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the son/ Coral is far more red than her lips' red”); the head, neck, and breasts sound typical for romantic poetry, but wrists? A single thumb? Herrick clearly obsesses over the particularities of his dear Julia, no matter how small, and enhancing each aspect of the body through its pairing with precious jewels, creating fetishes out of the specific parts of the body and nearly removing the female from the picture. Julia’s presence is less important than the existence of her limbs; for example, the breasts, because of the sapphire, become more important than the whole of the body itself. Ultimately, the female is elevated beyond her initial human form. The fetishization within blazon poetry creates a double role for the female, as her limbs create the impulse for both spiritual and sexual worship.

The word itself, “fetish,” is understandably problematic, in that it holds both religious and sexual connotations, meaning either “an object believed to possess mystical or supernatural powers” or “the sexual attraction for material objects.” Parts of the body may also be subject to sexual fetishization—a phenomenon called partialism—in which a particular body part takes on Ellison 6 more importance than the body itself, or even the owner of that body. Both of these definitions apply to Moravian Christ imagery as well as blazon poetry. Religious fetishes, such as the supposed bones of saints that circulated in the middle ages, are not exempt from the concept of partialism despite their more spiritual connections. In Fragmentation and Redemption, Bynum writes,

Even artists fragmented the body. Liturgical and artistic treatment of relics came

increasingly to underline the fact that they are body parts… By the fourteenth

century, holy bones were owned and worn by the pious as private devotional

objects... Depictions of the suffering associated with the Crucifixion—known as

arma Christi and the Five Wounds—came in the later Middle Ages to show

Christ’s body itself in parts, “put on display for the pious beholder to watch with

myopic closeness” (271).

At the very least, worship of a piece of the body calls for a focus on the specific piece, not on the body as a whole. The knuckle of a saint holds more importance than the entirety of the saint for whoever possesses it simply because of the fact that it can be possessed. The process of worship transforms if one believes he owns a part of the person to be worshipped; ownership replaces faith through the fact of the object, the tangible “evidence” of that person’s existence. Even though a leap of faith must take place in order to believe in the mystical properties of the item, that leap remains much more terrestrial because of the materiality of the object. Moravians therefore portray Christ as concretely as possible, materializing him—in both senses of the word

—into a tangible object (the body) as well as something that can be possessed (marriage), all for the purposes of creating stronger bonds of faith within the congregation. The hymns work on Ellison 7 their behalf, creating a very real feeling of presence as the worshipper visualizes and creates a linguistic fetish of different parts of the body.

Because of the similar poetic technique, Moravian hymns often mimic the structure and content of the blazon, especially in the sense of sensuality. As the poet describes the beloved, he spends a great deal of time on erogenous zones, like the breasts, the neck, and the legs. Using similarly erotic language to describe Christ, Moravian hymns attempt to revise the image of God into one that truly impacts every facet of their lives; romantic language not only preserves the image of the perfect human, one who spiritually resides within God even while physically existing outside of God, but also allows the worshipper to participate in an almost-sexual relationship with Christ. Fogleman describes the ritualization of sex in Jesus is Female:

Moravians employed [religious] cards in their explicit, detailed instructions on

how married couples should have sex. The instructions explained that the

husband blessed the wife during ejaculation and suggested that he read aloud an

appropriate verse while this is happening… Thus the Moravians directly linked an

erotic female image of the side wound of Jesus to human male orgasm during

ritualized sex between married couples. (82).

While the woman has sex, at least in fantasy, with Jesus, this does not mean that the man has sex as God, but rather that both partners recognize Jesus as the facilitator of the sexual act. Paring sex with worship can do nothing but fuse spirituality with sexuality. These hymns obviously operate in a similar manner as the blazon, fusing the worship of a being with the sensuality and possession of that being. Moravians certainly never shied from the humanity of Christ, and the concept of Christ-as-lover displays their attempt to redefine the boundaries of their spiritual relationship. However, the entire purpose is actually the attempt to possess this divine humanity. Ellison 8

Jonathan Sawday writes in The Body Emblazoned that “[t]he human body may, in the

Renaissance, have been ‘emblazoned’ or embellished through art and poetry. But to ‘blazon’ a body is also to hack it into pieces, in order to flourish fragments of men and women as trophies”

(ix). In Moravian view, Christ belongs to each member of the congregation through their commitment to him, in the same sense that they would view a husband and wife as “belonging” to each other. Yet it also recalls the fetish as they celebrate these pieces of Christ; possession takes place in the material sense in that so much of the description hinges on the breaking down of the individual.

Ritualized sex in Moravian marriage makes us question how men could accept this kind of relationship with Christ, especially concerning the intrusion of the sexual role. It appears that gender roles easily reversed, again because of the tenuous state of the religious/sensual relationship. Zinzendorf attempted to overcome this issue by effectively feminizing Christ, portraying the church’s birth as originating in the side-wound. Even though he writes that the

Holy Spirit acts as the mother of the Church, he insists on addressing the side-wound as a womb.

Attwood notes in “The Mother of God's People: The Adoration of the Holy Spirit in the

Eighteenth-Century Brüdergemeine” that “The Holy Spirit is also the Mother in a third and most important sense. She is the mother of the church and all those who have been reborn” (894).

However, if the Holy Spirit exists as the mother of the church, then the image Zinzendorf describes of the souls born through the side-wound of Christ seems confusing at best. If the wound acts as a womb, the hymns worship this particularly feminized opening in much the same manner as the blazon. Many of the Moravian hymns contain overtly romanticized lines; Hymn

381, from the Collection of Hymns of the Children of God, published by the Brethren of the

Moravian Church, is entitled “Hymn Concerning the Wounds of Jesus.” It is a love poem Ellison 9 literally written to the “purple wounds of Jesus,” repeating its address to a very specific area of the body of Christ, directing speech towards the wounds in much the same way that the blazon would address a woman’s eyes or breasts. Although these images of love and physical attractiveness in the hymns are connected with pain and sacrifice, a sense of nourishment through destruction emerges from the text3. The fetishization of the female sacrifice in the context of dismemberment takes the female apart, deconstructing her humanity and rebuilding her into something much more mythic, as if the poet cannot help but make the untouchable even more removed from his grasp. Dismemberment makes the body as a whole unattainable, creating a greater longing for that which cannot truly be possessed, like the faithful who may possess only the knuckle but never the saint. In the blazon, absence generates love.

Feminization of the wounds further dismembers and fetishizes the body of Christ, again because of the focus on the wounds themselves, creating a similar desire for the worshipper to connect to the emotional/spiritual wholeness that takes place in this one area of the body.

However, feminized does not mean female; Bataille points out in Erotism that the womb imagery “no more suggests a ‘gender reversal’ for Christ’s body than Zeus undergoes a sex change when Athena springs from his brow, or Dionysus gestates in his thigh. Zeus [like Christ] arrogates female powers, but as a resourceful god and without forfeiture of virility” (373). The liminal state of Christ’s gender in Moravian hymnody rejects any permanent role-reversal, since

Moravians simply detach and reattach body parts as necessary to the individual worshipper.

Gender eventually becomes less important because of the portrayal of mystical, not literal, genitalia. Part of the miracle of Christ rests within the fact that he possesses multiple roles in

3 This death-into-rebirth cycle reminds me greatly of the Fisher King story from the Grail legends. The wounds of the Fisher King are typically portrayed in the legs or groin, and he is incapable of moving on his own—much like the crucified Christ. The wounds directly affect the health and fertility of his lands, while Christ’s wounds are a symbol of the health and fertility of the Church. While the connection between the images seems tenuous, I think there is certainly a connection between the concept of the fertile Christ and the Grail legends. Ellison 10 order to greater reach each and every follower. Fogleman’s argument for the female Christ, while an excellent examination of one particular aspect of the figure, neglects a thorough exploration of the liminal state of the body. Ultimately, Christ remains male, but retains the capabilities of both genders.

Despite the often-feminized description, Jesus also resides as the husband of the church, which, again, defeats any true gender reversal. In addition, this definitive masculinity holds the potential for overt sexuality for both male and female worshippers. For example, Hymn 67 compares the religious experience to the first evening in a bridal chamber:

Now, thou open Pleura of our Lover!

On thy Bride with brightness shine:

While thy precious Blood’s Dew us

does cover,

The Church-love tears with it join.

Here we cleave; this blood-stream

penetrates us[…]

By placing the church in the role of bride and calling out to Christ as a “Lover,” this hymn sets up the sexual dynamic, especially as the bride is covered in the almost-ejaculatory “Blood’s

Dew” and the female church weeps with love as she is penetrated by Christ’s “blood-stream.”

Certainly, one may read too much into such writings, but the insinuation of the sexual act in this hymn is so overt that it would be naïve to assume that the author had no knowledge of the implications. As a blazon, it opens with the address to the “pleura” or cavity of the wounds. The erotic imagery of the side-hole as vaginal and womb-like, paired with the role of Christ as husband of the church, leads to a bizarre marriage for the devout; it is not so surprising that Ellison 11 congregation members occasionally had a difficult time separating the marriage to Christ from everyday spousal marriage. Of note is the sensuality of the bodily fluids, a strange kind of fetish in that they would not typically be considered an object. However, they operate as a single object, able to cover the worshipper as well as penetrate. By deconstructing the body, pieces can be refitted and operated in any chosen form, and these hymns often force one part of the body to possess multiple functions; just as the wounds often act as wombs, the blood may take on a more solid, phallic form.

While Moravians did not directly advocate a romantic relationship with Christ, they attempted to address issues of sexuality and gender because of Zinzendorf’s definition of their religious relationship. In “’Inspired by Flames of Love’: Homosexuality, Mysticism, and

Moravian Brothers around 1750,” Paul Peucker’s provocative reading of the communities, rituals, and liminal portrayal of Christ highlights how this religious movement impacted

Christianity with its encouragement for building a personal relationship with God, one that was romanticized in its submissive nature. He notes that “central to their ideas was a personal surrender to Christ, whose suffering and death on the Cross was to touch the heart of the believer” (31). The focus on “surrender” reveals the most basic tenet of the Moravians, who wish not only to fall in love with religion and God in such a way that the spiritual marriage would be as present within their lives as any earthly union, but also to take on a truly submissive role in the worshipper/worshipped marriage. Masculine and feminine attributes become important only because of the nature of the personal relationship, the “marriage” to Christ; since

Moravian communities included both genders, it was important to be able to redefine the gender of Christ as needed. The overall importance of gender declines as it applies to the individual and may change as needed, especially when attempting to discuss this relationship in terms of Ellison 12 commitment or “marriage.” It is not so important, then, that Jesus possesses either masculine or feminine qualities, but rather that he possesses aspects of both genders in order to better understand the suffering of all his children.

As the Moravian church, especially in later years, begins to focus more intensely on the belief of God in human form, the blazon is utilized even more frequently within the hymnody.

Zinzendorf taught that the miracle of Christ hinges on the physicality of the savior, and while many other Christian churches celebrated Christ in similar aspects, none do so with the intensity of the Moravians. In a strange return to Catholicism’s emphasis on the suffering of Christ,

Moravians reject what they see as the Lutheran neglect of the sacrificial element of atonement.

For the Moravians, the very least they could do would be to concentrate on that sacrifice, showing their gratitude by throwing the importance of those last moments into relief. Here was a person—a human being, the same in many ways as any of the Brethren—willing to suffer and die for the sake of the individual soul. The hymns therefore study the process of the dying

Christ. Hymn 445 is an excellent example of the cataloguing typically utilized in the blazon:

Mouth by Death’s Foam seized;

Heart, in Death compressed;

Eyes that sink away;

Limbs, thro’ Torment pining;

Hands, which rubies shining

In each palm display;

Head, by right divinely bright,

Bloody, mangled and dishevel’d;

While Death thro’ it reveal’d; Ellison 13

Breast with anguish heaving;

Feet, where pain is leaving

Colour of hot brass;

Forehead raw from Crowning;

Back the scourge sank down in,

And cut Furrows has;

Lips oh! how of pallid hue;

Cheeks so smitten and polluted;

Be ye all saluted!

Each line centers on the horror of the sacrifice and the physical pain of the body, yet the tone of the piece sounds celebratory, even joyful. The wounds in the hands transform into “rubies shining” and the feet change into the “colour of hot brass.” Pain becomes beautiful and romanticized as the hymn describes the act of martyrdom as something to be “saluted.” The overly poeticized “Lips oh! how of pallid hue” certainly recalls Renaissance poetry, as does the idea of “smitten cheeks.” The use of the word “smitten” is curious in itself because of the duality of the word as it operates both as a sign of violence (a blush resulting from a physical strike) and as a synonym of adoration. While the link with “polluted” leads to the first definition, the fact that this word also addresses adoration or devotion cannot be ignored since the hymnody’s purpose is the vocalization of worship. Dismembering the body, as grotesque as it may sound, transforms into an act of celebration for the spirit that would continue beyond those moments of pain. The infliction of pain and suffering on each element therefore makes each part sacred. Ellison 14

Robert Herrick’s poem clearly compares to the description of Christ in Hymn 445. The crowning of both Julia and Christ strongly suggests the worship motif, as does the possession of jewels; even Christ holds rubies in the palms of his hands, a way of beautifying the blood as well as hinting at his position of power as Lord. The pale complexion of each person also seems to be the point of the poems in which the highest, most overtly poetic tone takes place. Julia’s skin is whiter than the “down of swans,” the only point in the poem in which her comparative parallel stems from nature, but even then, she transcends nature by being even “more white.” Similarly,

Christ’s paleness described in the line, “Lips oh! how of pallid hue,” functions as the most melodramatic point of the hymn; the description of Christ’s lips provides a moment almost of feminine swooning through the exclamation, especially considering the topic of the pale skin, an attribute commonly associated with feminine beauty in Renaissance poetry, as are the blushing cheeks and heaving breast. However, the hymn carefully never defines gender, allowing the worshipper to define Christ as appropriate to the individual. The focus on the beauty of death facilitates the connection between the human body of the worshipper and the human form of

God, but this connection becomes so strongly entrenched in physicality that it seems to portray the miraculous only in the context of the body. In Closet Devotions, Rambuss writes, “this

[Renaissance] poetry’s reflection upon Christ’s body in its extreme vulnerability as a body, as a truly human form… offer[s] an early modern discourse of the body and its passions no less than they provide a discourse of the soul” (15, 17). Certainly, Moravian hymns also address the soul, but they primarily focus on the journey of that soul within a body; the soul almost becomes an accessory to the worn flesh, the body about which notations are made and pieces are celebrated. Ellison 15

As the blazon catalogues and creates ownership through a kind of materialism of the body, so too do many of the Moravian hymns4.

The nature of this materialism harkens back to Catholic traditions. Catholicism lost members because of what was seen as an “excess” of ritualization and mysticism; the Protestant movement emphasized doctrine and literal interpretations of the Bible instead of the mystical, in an attempt to clearly separate themselves from the Church. However, Moravians obviously felt that emotionalism and spiritualism were not only missing from the Reformed interpretation, but necessary for individual worship and salvation. In their attempt to reconnect with the loving

God they missed, Moravian hymnody became a ritual of its own, embracing the excess of erotic poetry in order to obtain a similar connection by sensualizing the wounded God. Douglas, in

Purity and Danger, argues that Christianity separates the connection between sacrifice and sex:

I discussed the similarity perceived by man in ancient times between the act of

love and sacrifice… The sacrifice of the mass is a reminder but it only rarely

makes a deep impression on our sensibility. However obsessive we find the

symbol of the Cross, the mass is not readily identified with the bloody sacrifice.

The main difficulty is that Christianity finds law-breaking repugnant in general.

While Catholic mass avoids concentrating on the wounds to the extent of Moravian hymnody, by focusing only on Catholic practices, Douglas neglects the revelation of sacrifice experienced by other sects. Moravians reveled in the sacrifice of Jesus, perhaps not in the same sense as early

4 I have to wonder about the sense of materialism in the Moravian community. For people who chose to possess only the necessities, does the body then become more important because it is the only “object” for which there exists any real sense of ownership or entitlement? Perhaps this need, especially in the case of possessing the body of Christ, ultimately stems from the split between the Catholic and Lutheran churches, as they each begin defining themselves as having the most correctly-practiced form of worship. By “belonging” to Christ as well as having Christ “belong” to them, Moravian congregations were able to lay claim to Jesus in a manner quite different from other denominations. Ellison 16 cultures that practiced sacrifice, but certainly they found the greatest meaning and pleasure within the sacrificial body. Pleasure comes from surrendering to the image of the sacrifice and overcoming the natural repulsion for the wounds; the primary pleasure for Moravians stems from maintaining a close relationship with God, and this closeness requires the ability to love and desire the “damaged” body of that god. Certainly, these methods reinstate aspects of

Catholicism to the Protestant movement. Like so many of their beliefs, Moravians felt that worship resided in a space between these two Christian denominations, embracing what they perceived to be the most important facets of each practice and returning to the excess of the

Church, for how could the all-encompassing celebration of the savior possibly be considered excessive?

Moravian hymns often take similar forms to Hymn 445, utilizing the duality of language and the liminality of the death of Christ in order to make positive that which many would not traditionally label as beautiful. In “Understanding Zinzendorf’s Blood and Wounds Theology,”

Craig D. Attwood writes that “Love that cannot love what is repulsive as well as what is attractive about human beings will always be incomplete love. Zinzendorf taught his followers that they only truly loved when they loved the broken and bleeding body of Christ” (43). The hymns create a conversation about Christ’s pain and his willingness to suffer and bear such wounds, and it is not so terribly strange that Moravians would find this particular sacrifice important or even beautiful; certainly they would work diligently to illustrate this cornerstone of faith through art and poetry. Attempting to pay homage to this sacrifice through the cataloging of the death process, the hymns pay careful attention to those areas which bear wounds because these parts of the body in particular reveal the miracle of the god-made-flesh. For instance,

Hymn 660 reads, “Each Wound with open mouth cries out.” In this hymn, the wounds literally Ellison 17 act as the mouthpiece of God. The mystical exists through the suffering of each piece of the body. In addition, the congregation proves their love for Christ through the tolerance and celebration of those images. From the moment Christ enters the world in human form, he must be redefined for that moment of transcendence and the worshipper must overcome the desire to look away from that which causes the greatest amount of discomfort and fear: suffering and death5. Dismemberment allows the opportunity for a rebuilding of the figure into that which transcends physicality, a very literal re-membering of the human into the god (and the worshipper into the saved). The process of disassembly produces the mystical nature of Christ and the spiritual redemption of the believer, as the faithful believes that this single death makes available the continuation of all life after the natural end. Creating fetishes of the parts of the body—dismembering in order to remember—not only constructs a mystical figure from pieces of the physical, but also reminds the worshipper of the humanity of Christ by taking the body apart in order to revise the definition of wholeness. The fetish promotes the worship of a fraction as a representation of the whole.

By studying, almost scientifically, the physical aspects of perfection and ultimate spiritualism, the worshipper understands what makes him or her different from Christ; close examination of something like the hands or eyes forces the observer to notice the differences between the perfect and the imperfect. However, at the same time, the worshipper cannot help but notice the similarities. Dismemberment, then, becomes a mode of reconstruction. Although the hymns concentrate on the worship of each part of Christ’s body, the overall effect serves as a kind of transformation from the human into the spiritual, facilitated by the process of singling out

5 The process of overcoming the natural physical revulsion of such heavy wound and blood imagery sounds like a religious trial or test of the worshipper’s body. One perspective that I have not addressed (nor seen addressed) is the constant exposure to wound imagery as a type of self-flagellation, repulsing the body in order to cleanse it in some way. Surely some of the congregation had a difficult time adjusting to these depictions of the human form, but continued to expose themselves in order to punish and cleanse the self. Ellison 18 each part of his body and examining its perfection. The body as a whole becomes more familiar while the individual parts of the body are defamiliarized. The desire to connect to a physical

God, to truly experience faith in the body, leads to an exploration of the state of the body during suffering—the human condition—became one of the most significant aspects of worship.

Zinzendorf understood that the relationship between worshipped and worshipper would be most meaningful if the individual experienced empathy toward the human Christ, hence the tendency of Moravian hymns and litanies to focus on the wounds themselves and different parts of the body. Especially by taking a stance of non-resistance toward aggression, the congregation was able to feel for Jesus, in the sense of “having feelings toward” as well as literally feeling “in place of”; in other words, they could experience love for their savior because of his sacrifice for them, but they were also able to physically empathize with the experience of suffering.

Concentrating on the human manifestation of God meant an understanding from that God towards human suffering, and the ability of both God and church to maintain a relationship through compassion from one to the other. Ellison 19

Works Cited

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Eighteenth-Century Brüdergemeine.” Church History. 68.4 (1999): 886-909.

---. “Understanding Zinzendorf’s Blood and Wounds Theology.” Journal of Moravian History.

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Bataille, Georges. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights, 1962.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemtion: Essays on Gender and the Human

Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone, 1991.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.

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Fogleman, Aaron Spencer. Jesus is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in

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Herrick, Robert. Works of Robert Herrick. Ed. Alfred Pollard. London, Lawrence & Bullen,

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Moravian Church, The. A Collection of Hymns of the Children of God. London, 1754.

Peucker, Paul. “’Inspired by Flames of Love’: Homosexuality, Mysticism, and

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Rambuss, Richard. Closet Devotions. Durham: Duke Univeristy Press, 1998.

Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Ellison 20

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