Opening: The Isenheim Altarpiece or “The Taking on Board of Suffering” Perhaps one has never suffered, or at least never understood what it is to suffer, unless one has confronted the Christ of the Isenheim altarpiece (1512–16), now in the Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, Alsace (Figure 1). Not that this polyptych altarpiece—or for that matter The Guide to Gethsemane— aims to justify suffering. Rather, it is that Christ the man is held there on the cross in a “suffering,” or in a “pure suffering taken on board” [pâtir pur], to which we shall all be exposed at some time, and from which none of us can fully draw back.1 The ordeal of suffering, from sickness to death, grips humankind, as Emmanuel Levinas says, in an “impossibility of retreat.”2 There are no exemptions; and if we try to claim exemption we risk lying to ourselves about the burden of what is purely and simply our humanity. There are agonies that challenge us to the very limits, that make us see the seriousness of our own decease, even if we share a belief that only God can give us, that we are subsequently to be raised from the dead. A book or a body of work, like life itself, always has to start with some “suffering,” or in any event one has to take on board “suffering” it. Chris- tian ity, which was falsely satisfied with the illusion of purification through suffering, now nourishes itself with a respectable attempt at conciliation (irenicism). In general, it prefers the won der of the newly born to the con- vulsions of someone about to depart this life or the rapture of revelation to the numb stupor caused by a death. Thaumazein [“won der” in ancient Greek] can certainly knock us back in astonishment as a form of awe; but xvii it can be coupled also with stupor as a form of terror or alarm. Thus, we might suggest a double reading of the altarpiece at Isenheim, according to which one can hold to the light of what is hoped for and, on the other hand, see the darkness of what is coming to all of us. The sickpeople who suffered in the Antonine hospice for which the altarpiece was commis- sioned would have known this double reading. Ordinarily the panels of the polyptych are closed, and it displays the Crucifixion. It can be opened first to a layer of panels showing the Annunciation and the Resurrection, but this is done only for the great liturgical feasts— Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension (Figure 2). When the panels are opened, however, there is a halo for the Resurrected One emerging from the tomb in his twisted shroud (the metamorphosis), and this seems like a response to the deep darkness around the Crucifixion that is ordinarily seen, an image whose dramatic intensity has never been equaled. Nobody has expressed better than Matthias Grünewald (c.1470–1528), the artist of the altarpiece,3 what I have made the subject of my research in The Guide to Gethsemane. That is: (a) The body as “exposed” rather than “purified” by suffering; (b) Agony as the usual burden of death before it becomes the way of salvation; (c) Anxiety as an interrogation of meaning, not simply the complaint of the wicked; (d) Life as a “taking on board of suffering [pâtir]” rather than life as passage. It would be a bad mistake to see the Crucifixion by Grünewald (or for that matter my book) as an apology for suffering—or as an inescapable passage from a century that nurtured fear and a doctrine of the utility of pain that we have today left behind us. Rather, it is a question here, quite straightforwardly, of “humankind tout court,” of humankind in pure and simple humanity, where God takes on and transforms all of ourselves that need salvation: our souls certainly, but also our bodies; our sins indeed, and also our ills. In 1516, when Grünewald left the hospice of the Antonines at Isen- heim, he had just finished this altarpiece now exhibited at Colmar. It was a work that aimed to hold the attention, to comfort, but also to “stupefy,” the souls and bodies of the bedridden sick at the hour when they departed this life. In the same period, Martin Luther was preparing to denounce the sale of indulgences, or the aberrations of a Catholicism involved in the commerce of salvation, sending his ninety- five theses to the archbishop of Mainz on October 31, 1517, the eve of All Saints’ Day, and posting them on the door of All Saints’ Church at Wittenberg. And it was in the same period that the “ Great Peasants’ War” broke out in Germany, leading to at least a hundred thousand deaths (1524–25). Grünewald, who was prob- xviii ■ Opening: The Isenheim Altarpiece or “The Taking on Board of Suffering” Figure 1 . Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece (closed view). Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Figure 2. Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece (open view). Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France. Scala / Art Resource, NY. ably involved in the war, suffered exile and was then to die alone, forgot- ten by those who had suffered too much to continue the strug gle. It was also, above all, at this time that ergot poisoning, known as “er- gotism,” “St. Anthony’s fire,” or mal des ardents, decimated the popula- tion. The poisoning was a true “plague of the epoch” that ate into people’s bodies and destroyed their hearts. The sickness, as we know today, derived from alkaloids in a parasitic fungus that grew on rye and that proliferates when there is too much rain. The alkaloids found their way into rye flour and would particularly be consumed by a poor and wretched population: “During centuries the nature of this sickness that seems to strip the skin off the bones, freezes the entrails, burns the flesh, blackens the arms, sepa- rates the feet from the legs, remained inexplicable.”4 But it is this sickness that is depicted in the Crucifixion (Figure 3), as well as in the panel showing the Temptation of St. Anthony (Figure 4), where there are bodies whose repulsive appearance demands simply that we see, or dare look at, what a mutilated body really is, when it is riddled with the disease so far as to be disemboweled. It would be wrong to cate- gorize such depictions simply as that of past evils, as if the pres ent with its Figure 3. Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece (closed view, detail from central panel showing the Crucifixion). Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. xx ■ Opening: The Isenheim Altarpiece or “The Taking on Board of Suffering” Figure 4. Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece (detail from interior panel showing the Temptation of St. Anthony). Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France. © Musée d’Unterlinden, Dist. RMN– Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. development of medicine could make us forget what a mutilated corpse is actually like. One has only to visit our hospices or hospitals today (where there is end- of- life care, for example) to be confronted by the evidence. Camouflaged under carefully adjusted dressings, and despite the care taken to help us bear them, there are still open wounds, along with in- fected pustules, cracked and swollen skin, broken limbs, and horribly dis- torted faces. Our “con temporary cancers” can compete with the “ergotism” of the past, and the vision of the Crucifixion could certainly still say a great deal to those who know how to look at it and do not recoil before what it shows of our common humanity.5 (a) The “spread- out body” on the cross takes then, and takes on itself, the burden of our sins, but also and above all, astonishingly here takes on the scourge of our sicknesses. Christ’s body shows us “exposure” rather than “purification,” visibility of the flesh and not simply catharsis for our transgressions. We have only to compare, or perhaps we should say iden- tify, the Christ on the Cross of the Isenheim altarpiece— his face swollen, neck broken, skin distended, muscles wasted, articulations dislocated, and skin cracked open— with the sick and forsaken man at the left corner Opening: The Isenheim Altarpiece or “The Taking on Board of Suffering” ■ xxi of the panel showing the Temptation of St. Anthony (on the right when a second inner layer of the altarpiece is opened out). In Grünewald’s Cruci- fixion the Word made flesh takes upon himself “ergotism,” just astoday he takes on our “cancers,” our “tumors,” and all of our “sicknesses.” His body is exposed, and exposes to us, our own putrefaction, there on the cross. If it is not for us to see ourselves in the Crucifixion, the very least that could be said is that it helps us know ourselves better. The Guide to Gethsemane attempts to bring to the fore what is evident here in this altarpiece. There is a finitude for humankind—of age, sickness, or death— that does not depend solely upon sin (even though it might come to be connected to it) in the way in which we live through these things and the possibility, or what we may feel to be the impossibility, of letting others dwell in them. Corruption as deviation (anxiety over sin) becomes grafted onto corrup- tion as wasting away (anxiety over death). Here, where we are afflicted by sickness, is also where we must cope with how to live through death agonies. (b) Death agony is then the common burden of death before it be- comes the way of salvation.