Hell Hath No Fury by Meghan R. Henning;

Author:Meghan R. Henning;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: Making Hell on Earth

By the fifth century, the Theodosian Code brought the hellscapes of the early Christian apocalypses to earth. In this Christian compilation of Roman law, a nurse who mishandles her charge has molten lead poured down her throat, and the passive partner in a homoerotic coupling suffers burning by “avenging flames,” amputation of his hands and feet, and glossectomy (surgical removal of the tongue).1 In these punishments, as in the early Christian apocalypses, the effeminate and disabled body is on display as the sign of moral, social, and spiritual failing. Through Christian laws, hell’s womb birthed her inhabitants and their promise of bodily compromise is returned to earth.

The damned body was not simply a mirror for ancient ideas about the body or retributive logic. Rather, the body in early Christian visions of hell both reflects and constructs lived reality. The permeable barrier between this life and the afterlife allows these images—of tormented and deviant bodies—to act as both mirror and blueprint; hell’s punishments for evil also construct evil. The body that threatens in hell becomes the threatening body on earth.

This give and take between the damned body and the punished body on earth belongs to early Christian discourses of bodily suffering that have until now been in the background of scholarly investigations into the roots of subjectivity in early Christian thought. For early Christians, however, the suffering object was an integral part of their cultural milieu and their moral universe. Female bodies were “assigned to suffering,” and thereby generated gendered discourses that included suffering as weakness, pain, strength, and propitious sacrifice. As we saw in chapter 1, early Christians drew on this gendered language of bodily suffering to describe the extraordinary bodies in hell. Hell’s punitive landscape in turn reified those bodily norms and associated the female, deformed, dysfunctional body with sin and punishment.

This is one of the chief ways “the dead create and recreate social hierarchy.”2 In early Christian hell, the dead inhabit a heterotopia in which their mutilated and dysfunctional flesh is on display in order to evoke fear and disgust in the audience. This heterotopia in turn exoticized the deviant body, leveraging ancient anxieties about bodily weakness to contain sin. As we saw in chapter 3, through the torment of the damned in hell, the effeminate dysfunctional body becomes the artifact of sin. In this way, the womanly, weak bodies that are punished in hell become a way not just to put off sin, but also to distance themselves from the ways in which their own bodies already were or inevitability would become deformed or dysfunctional in some way. In ancient societies in which only a minority of the population could attain the normative body, the violent spectacle of hell reinforced a social hierarchy by demarcating the banal as the grotesque.

This marks a fundamental difference between the impaired body in antiquity and the way that disability studies theory has thought about the disabled body in modernity. Whereas the disabled body often operates at the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.