Body Politic, Corpus Christi
and the Paradigms of Power
Ultimately their [the jury’s] verdict was
ambiguous: [Mendel] Beilis was acquitted, but it was yet implied that [Andrei]
Yushchinsky had been the victim of a Jewish ritual murder....Despite the mixed
verdict, the Beilis trial remains a poignant example of a conspiracy of power
and hate frustrated by unity and truth.[i]
In the long
millennial history of what we still call the
Middle Ages, rather than national-state unity wjocj ios central for us
in the early 21st century,[ii]
there was at best an ideal of Christian unity, all people—or at least, the
great majority of Western Europeans—being part of the Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ.
As each individual was born into the community of the faithful, baptism
made them part of the Church; but each was not born into a national body
politic. As John Trevisa, for instance,
shows, even in an island like Britain, there were many linguistic and cultural
differences, as well as the hierarchical distinctions between the classes or
estates—the landed gentry, the titled aristocrats and the royal families,
making up the first estate; the priests, monks, nuns, and friars, as well as
bishops and archbishops making up the second estate; and everyone else the
third estate, that is, both the burghers in the towns and cities, including
professionals (physicians, lawyers, and others) the freeborn landowners and
artisans in the hamlets and villages, and the serfs on the great estates, with
a trickle of other folk outside of normal categories and legal controls. And, in an other instance, as Stowe shows in
his descriptions of London at the end of the sixteenth century, there was also
a more vertical set of overlapping categories based on historical developments,
so that people could identify themselves by the places where they were born and
worked, the properties they owned or worked for or in, and the traditional
duties and privileges they inherited. These paradigms leave out more than the
Jews or the Crypto-Jews and Marranos, but all anomalous categories, ad hoc groups, and eccentric individuals
who wander from place to place, from consciousness to consciousness, and from
insiders to outsiders and back again in a never-ending fluidity.
It might
therefore be said that in England and in France in the 14th through
16th centuries, there were several fairly distinct communities which
occasionally overlapped with each other and each of them was situated in a kind
of theatre in which people played their individual, private or family roles,
and their public ceremonial parts. These
are also idealized perspectives which Froissart calls upon when describing the
little cunning world[iii]
of Paris that welcomes Queen Isabelle of Bavaria into its midst during the
ceremonial ritual of 1389. These
perspectives may be set out as follows, recalling always that they are ideals,
mythical images, and specific lenses that Froissart uses as he surveys several
kingdoms, each with their own histories:
Ø
The rural hamlets and villages
based on agricultural and pastoral rhythms and tasks; this is the theatre of
so-called folk plays. These performances
are conducted in the local dialects and languages, but are rooted in more
general archaic customs and systems of knowledge. Not quite in the sense that
the nineteenth-century historians of religion meant by “residue” of savage and
primitive beliefs—using concepts such as totem, taboo, fetish, evolution—but
rather imagining a matrix of isolated, unsophisticated but already
Christianized ideas, images and gestures that continue because of their
efficacy in times of crisis—plague, famine, invasion—to make some sense of the
mysterious meaninglessness of life and provide rationale for the structures of
social relationships, most of all (as we shall argue later) because of the way
in which memories are created and passed on, the way the gestures, masks and
props of the community serve as triggers to these deep reserves of passionate
memory (or Pathosformeln), and thus
form what Aby Warburg calls in a different immediate context the Nachleben (afterlife) of ancient and
archaic imagery.
Ø
The towns and cities based on
commerce, manufacturing, and professional life and aspirations; this is the
theatre of street processions, royal welcomes, and guild displays. These performances are often produced in
mixed dialects and local languages, drawing on learned as well as oral
traditions, and respond to national and international problems, events and personalities. Such productions show more literary, artistic
and philosophical elements, with the professional classes of the urban centres
involved, as well as merchants: doctors, lawyers, musicians, dancers, and so
on.
Ø
The religious houses, the
cathedrals, the parish churches, the schools and universities based on pastoral
duties, regulations of prayer, education and study; this is the theatre of
instruction, pedagogy, liturgical performance, and saintly worship. Usually in Latin, but sometimes in the
vernacular, or in mixed forms, the performances are by members for themselves,
but also for display to their various constituencies in village, town, court
and Europe-wide Christendom. The tendency is for the plays to be allegorical in
characterization and setting, classical in structure, but above all biblical in
theme.
Ø
The royal court and baronial
households, somewhat like small villages unto themselves, but cosmopolitan,
elitist, and imbued with the rituals of power and ceremonial violence; this is
the theatre of masque, ballet, opera, mock battle and chivalric love. These performances are in usually French and
sometimes in English, drawing on continental models, and sophisticated
art-versions of local traditions.
In reality, of course, as so much recent study of the last period of
the medieval age indicates, there were many overlappings and crossovers in
these theatres. Each community performed
for the others both in its home space and as visitors in the space of the
others. For the most part, too, they
shared an essential core of Christianity, though with different degrees of
understanding, different kinds of emphasis, and diverse contexts.
And yet there is another kind of group of spectators and listeners,
as well as participants in the festival, though they do not form part of the
procession as such. These are the vast
crowds who press in on one another, who fill the space of the streets, squares,
and other openings that temporarily appear as the visitors and welcoming hosts
move through their formal actions. As this
crowd of individuals becomes a seething, consolidated or compressed mass of
humanity, their separate identities melt away into a group phenomenon. As with other animals that form into
swarms—flocks of birds or bats, armies of rats, nesting insects, schools of
fish—a number of important changes occur in their way of communicating and
travelling through space and time: through the stimulation of their endocrine
system, the flow of hormones coordinate the collective movement, with some
specialization of function depending on the space they occupy, the relationship
to the surrounding environment, and the passage of time; in other words, these
compressed bodies turn into a complex but single organism. The transient consolidation of the separate
beings into one complex creature further stimulates a kind of collective
consciousness whose knowledge may be articulated in movement, chanting, and
willfulness. Such a dense formation
provides the living envelope through which the profession passes.[iv]
[i] Eli Rubin, “The Beilis Case in 20 P:ictuires: The blood libel of
the century brought to life 100 years later’. Online at
http:www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2340354/jewish/The-Beilis-Case-in-20-Pictures.
Captions to plates 15 and 21.
[ii] This ideal, however,
began to fall apart near the end of the eighteenth century, manifest in Kant’s
notions of a pan-European consciousness, and it has gained renewed traction in
the contemporary theories of post-modernism, and the inability to accept “the
big story”, “the progressive view of evolutionary history:, and the
intellectual prowess of reason; although this break from nationalism, though
also fueled by disgust at the excesses of the Second World War and the Cold
War that followed, is mired in its own contradictions, particularly insofar as
it finds expression through anti-Zionism and support for the (fanatical)
Islamicist ideal of the restored, expanding and triumphalist Caliphate.
[iii] This readers will
recall is John Donne’s definition of the microcosm as opposed to the macrocosm:
yet it leaves out what we shall have to fill in—the intercosmos beyond the horizons of consckousness shared by
traditional wisdom and scholastic intellectualism.
[iv] This rough definition
of the festive crowd is based on Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (Hammondsworth: Penguin,
1973; 1962), Masse und Macht
(Hamburg: Claasen Verlag, 1960).
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