Godin, Mark Anthony (2010) Discerning the body: a sacramental hermeneutic in literature and liturgy. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1400/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Discerning the Body: A Sacramental Hermeneutic in Literature and Liturgy Mark Anthony Godin, BA, MA, MDiv Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree Doctor of Philosophy University of Glasgow Department of Theology and Religious Studies Faculty of Arts September 2009 © Mark Godin 2009 Abstract This thesis asks the question: what does it mean to ―discern the body‖ (1 Cor. 11:29)? Answering this begins with the question‘s origin in the sacramental context of a particular Christian community‘s attempt to observe what became known as the Eucharist. In their physicality, sacraments act as reminders that theological concepts, while they systematise experience and knowledge, can never be simply abstract; theology must never forget the particular, discrete nature of human beings, the separation of creatures, the otherness that allows true plurality and mutuality. My thesis is divided in three parts, to address bodies and their stories in theory, literary art, and sacramental liturgy. The first part of the thesis offers a critical reading of various theologies of body and story, applying to them insights from feminist epistemology concerning situated knowledge. The critique examines the work of Graham Ward, Stanley Hauerwas, Marcella Althaus-Reid, and Paul Ricoeur, looking at the way that even their attempts to take the body into account tend to downplay the concreteness of particular people and their stories. The second part of the thesis explores the way that literature handles the problems of particularity and universality, looking at specific stories in specific novels, and examining the way they treat bodies and the meeting of bodies. I address five novels. In conversation with Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje, I discuss the importance of touch in defining meaning. With A Map of Glass, by Jane Urquhart, I look at bodies as tactile maps and geographies of memory. Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels, leads me to a discussion of the place of artistic form in the determination of meaning both for the body and for literature. The Man on a Donkey, by H. F. M. Prescott, leads to reflections upon disjunctions in bodies as various narratives make claims upon them. The discussion of Godric, by Frederick Buechner, centres upon personal identity being constructed physically, artistically and relationally through proximity with others. The third part investigates the nature of sacraments and sacramental theology as a place of attending to both the abstract and the particular, to the person—seeking a geography of love. To do this, I begin with a discussion of the search for a normative liturgical pattern as exemplified by Dom Gregory Dix‘s The Shape of the Liturgy, focusing on the consequences for acknowledging the unruliness of the materiality of bodies. I then examine the approach of Gordon W. Lathrop, who uses the image of the map for describing liturgy. But his use of this metaphor construes the liturgical map as a given, turning away from interactive, creative possibilities. As a response, I look to the theologian Charles Winquist, who writes about the particularity of love. Finally, I bring together my reflections from the first two parts of the thesis to make suggestions about the liturgical body: that it is discerned by paying attention to the stories that the body carries, to the relationships in which bodies are implicated and to their locations, and to the vulnerabilities manifested by love and grief, by care. Table of Contents Introduction........................................................................................................ 1 I. Three Stories .............................................................................................. 5 II. Disciplinary Negotiations ......................................................................... 9 Defining Bodies .......................................................................................... 12 Bodies and Texts ......................................................................................... 17 Bodies and This Text: An Overview of This Thesis ................................... 28 Part One Chapter One Keeping the Word Flesh: Attending to Graham Ward and the Problem of the Particularity of the Body ................................ 37 Placing the Displaced Body: The Embodiment of Salvation ...................... 39 A Critique: The Disappearance of Particularities ....................................... 45 Retrieving the Body in the Flesh ................................................................. 51 Chapter Two Keeping the Story Open: Stanley Hauerwas and the Problem of the Plurality of Stories ............................................................ 56 Hauerwas on narrative and stories .............................................................. 58 On Truth and Fiction ................................................................................... 62 On the Church‘s Story-Shaped Bodies ....................................................... 68 Conclusion………………………………………………………………...71 Chapter Three The Indecent Body: Marcella Althaus-Reid and Holding the Fleshly Life before the Theological Mind .............................. 73 Critiquing Theology‘s Edifice of Lost Bodies ............................................ 76 Indecent Theology as a Reconstruction of the Theological Body .............. 80 Where Have All the Bodies Gone Now? .................................................... 83 Retaining Indecency: Althaus-Reid and a Possible Recombination of Bodies ..................................................................................... 86 Chapter Four The Story-Making Body: Paul Ricoeur and the Body‘s Part in the Re-imagination of the World ............................................ 91 Searching for the Body in the Work of Paul Ricoeur ................................. 93 Imagination, Creativity, Reconstruction ................................................... 100 Prospects of Losing the Body in the Work of Paul Ricoeur ..................... 102 The Possibility of the Body in Ricoeur in Spite of Ricoeur ...................... 108 Conclusion to Part One ................................................................................... 110 Part Two Prelude..............................................................................................................122 Chapter Five The Bodies that Remain: Anil’s Ghost and ‗This sweet touch from the world‘ ..................................................................... 124 The Truth of Bodies .................................................................................. 126 The Truth of the Surgeon‘s Scalpel .......................................................... 134 A Truthfulness of Touching Bodies .......................................................... 137 Interlude I.........................................................................................................146 Chapter Six Tracing Bodies: Jane Urquhart‘s A Map of Glass and Intimate Geographies .......................................................................... 148 The Structure of A Map of Glass .............................................................. 151 Tactile Maps .............................................................................................. 153 Bodies and Fracture................................................................................... 156 Maps of Glass, Maps of Flesh ................................................................... 160 Interlude II....................................................................................................... 163 Chapter Seven Learning What to Do with the Body: Form and Meaning in Fugitive Pieces ...................................................................... 165 Fugitive Pieces and The Body in Pain ...................................................... 168 ‗The power of language to destroy‘ .......................................................... 170 ‗The power of language to restore‘ ........................................................... 174 Body, Earth, Memory: A Form of Restorative Language ......................... 179 A Lesson in Form; or, Reading Ben Reading Jakob ................................. 188 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….194 Interlude III......................................................................................................197 Chapter Eight Catching the Body Against the Current: The Disjunctions of Embodiment and The Man on a Donkey ............................... 199 Threading the Path of Time: The Man on a Donkey and Historical Narrative ............................................................................................... 203 A Travel Guide: Walking along the road