A Christian Ontology of the Flesh: Word, Symbol, Performance

Maurice Merleau-Ponty responded to the loss of the body in the wake of Western philosophy after Rene Descartes by constructing a phenomenology of perception and an ontology of the flesh. His voice, although decidedly removed from the religious, is constantly brought into theological debate whether it be Judith Butler’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s early lectures on Malebranche’s sensuous theology, or a reading of his phenomenology for theologies of embodiment by contemporary philosophers of religion. Within Christian theology, the body has experienced its own loss, or so contemporary critics of the Christian flesh suggest when they cast it as that which is either negated or riddled with dualism. In this line of critique, Paul and Augustine become figureheads for the loss of the Christian body. A new reading of Paul, Augustine and others at the hand of recent scholarship may, however, provide a different angle from which to approach the problem of the flesh. By defining the self as one who is informed by the senses, and thereby relationally ordered to created other and divine, perception becomes a new mode of approaching the Christian body. Here the focus is less on the absence of the body than the absence of a theological grammar of perception. Reading perception in relation to the life, death and resurrection of Christ, the Spirit’s union of the self to Christ and of God’s grounding persons in the life of the Trinity, sets the stage for a uniquely embodied expression of divine presence. Here an embodied theology advances the simultaneous holding of form and content, and of the embodied expression of the divine through word, symbol and performance. A new grammar of perception arises, in this instance, which places the body central to the Christian story and which refuses any binary, dualism or negation