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oday is in Christian tradition the Sixth Sunday of Easter. I
can't get enough of Easter because it's about the resurrection of the
body. Years ago I read Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death, in which his last chapter is entitled
"The Resurrection of the Body."[1]
Brown, a rather orthodox Freudian, opened my eyes to see that the thrust of
resurrection is the affirmation of the mortal body. He argued that the
real dynamic going on in humanity's struggle to become conscious (and free of
neurosis) was that between life and death. He further asserted that the only
way humanity would ever get out of the trap of its own neuroses was to stop
sublimating sexual drive and negating, limiting, and repressing pleasure. And
that he said was the treasure that lay buried in Christianity in the form of
the resurrection of the body.
I have literally been unpacking that for almost 50 years.
Today was one of many occasions when I have preached on the theme of
resurrection, hoping to edge people out of the notion that it was an event that
happened to one man ages ago having nothing to do with the way we live our
lives today, and saying for the thousandth time that resurrection of the body
is not about the immortality of the soul nor essentially about an afterlife.
I don't deny the immortality of the soul for a number of reasons, and I
certainly don't assume a know-it-all stance about an afterlife. Yet I do know
that what both notions miss is the radical affirmation of the body--and
specifically the body's mortality. Until we embrace the body and stop
repressing its instinctual and sensual life, not only are we plagued by our own
neuroses but we continue on personal, social, cultural, and global levels to
surrender to the death instinct. When Brown was writing in mid-twentieth
century, it was clear that civilization had finally evolved to the point that
it was capable of incinerating itself through unleashing hydrogen bombs. Now it
is clear that the death instinct, masquerading in the garb of dominating "nature,"
has humans raping the ecosystem on a scale that is hurtling towards the brink
of annihilation of ours and other species.
What to do? In a word, the only way out of the dilemma is to
reconcile both the death and life impulses in the body. Because as long
as we act as if we can deny death through "security,"
"power," accumulation, domination, fame or whatever, we will never
get around to the one and only thing that can save us: profligate love, Eros
rooted in the body, not confined to the sex organs but energizing the entire
human organism, spilling over into erotic embrace of the entire universe.
So many voices are saying similar things today that finally
it seems possible that Brown's vision might finally be realized: the hope that
ultimately Eros would find itself prized and practiced by a humanity reveling
in bodily life. This is not a matter of being "religious" or
"secular." Nor does it mean abrogating morality, though it certainly
moves the needle of the latter away from a prurient fixation with sexual
manners and modalities.
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| Edward Knippers, Second Coming |
That, I think, is the life of resurrection. And it's closer
to us than the air we breathe.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019
[1] Norman O. Brown, Life
Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1959).
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