Under the Loincloth

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 8 · 24 April 1997

From Christopher Small

Leo Steinberg, so Frank Kermode tells us in his review of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (LRB, 3 April), eschews literary support for his exposition. But Kermode is under no such limitation, and it is odd that he doesn’t mention the most striking 20th-century example, in D.H. Lawrence’s late novella The Escaped Cock, posthumously published under the bowdlerised title of The Man Who Died. This version of the Resurrection is constructed on the presumption of the complete, individual, mortal humanity of Jesus: it assumes that he did not die on the Cross but escaped alive, though badly injured, from the tomb, and after a time of partial recovery, which includes the symbolic episode of a captive gamecock that also escapes, journeys to Lebanon and a temple of Isis with whose priestess he eventually makes full physical love. The approach to this demythologised consummation is a piece of characteristic Lawrentian lyricism. The climax, however, appears directly to echo some of the iconographic examples cited by Steinberg, when the man identified with Jesus

felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.

  ‘I am risen.’

The interest lies not so much in the (unlikely) possibility that Lawrence actually knew of earlier Christian use of such an emblem, but rather in the recognition of a persistent archetypal imagery; and in tracing what happens in the course of history when ‘humanation’ is replaced by the humanisation of our ideas of Jesus; or in taking to logical conclusions the appropriate clauses of the Nicene Creed. It may be asserted that in this story Resurrection is reduced to narrowly personal terms: an individual dying man’s fantasy of restoration to health and sexual potency. But it can also be seen more widely as part of Lawrence’s whole work, ‘an assertion of life in death’.

Christopher Small
Edinburgh

Vol. 19 No. 9 · 8 May 1997

From Barbara Smoker

Frank Kermode (LRB, 3 April) points out that many Renaissance representations of the Holy Child show adults contemplating the baby penis with awe, ‘as if the presence of the infant member was considered a particular miracle’. It would indeed be a particular miracle, supposing the story of the Virgin Birth to be literally true; for the fruit of parthenogenesis could only be a clone of the mother – and therefore female. Otherwise, whence came the human Y chromosome to provide male characteristics? Hardly from a bodyless spirit appearing in the form of a dove.

Barbara Smoker
Bromley, Kent

Vol. 19 No. 10 · 22 May 1997

From Mark Harris

While the Virgin Birth is certainly an extremely unlikely event, it is nonetheless not quite so genetically miraculous as Barbara Smoker thinks (Letters, 8 May). Very nearly, but not quite. She states that if the Virgin Mary had undergone parthenogenesis (a sort of spontaneous self-cloning), then the offspring would always be female, since Mary would not have possessed the Y chromosome which defines maleness. However, there is a very rare mutation which can produce individuals who are chromosomally XY, but look like completely normal females. They are usually sterile, but not necessarily so. Hence, it is not completely impossible to imagine Nature producing a mutant XY virgin with working female sex organs, who also undergoes parthenogenesis and gives birth to a male child. There are several other related possibilities, discussed in a recent article in Science and Christian Belief, but the point is that the Virgin Birth is genetically plausible without calling on the miraculous.

Mark Harris
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Vol. 19 No. 11 · 5 June 1997

From G.B. Phillipson

I was surprised to read in Frank Kermode’s review of Leo Steinberg’s Sexuality of Christ (LRB, 3 April) that the Circumcision of Christ is discussed only in terms of the blood which issued from the wound, and that this is invoked only as a conjunction, or ‘hyphen’, with the spear-wound in Christ’s side. The point is surely that there was great interest in the holy genitalia in iconographic terms, and this goes far beyond establishing the humanity of the historical Jesus. That the child was circumcised according to the rites and practices of the Jews is beyond doubt. This being so, why are we only given images of the uncircumcised penis by Renaissance painters? I would be interested to know if Frank Kermode, Leo Steinberg or any readers can cite an example of a painting that shows the infant Jesus with-out the tell-tale gentile foreskin. It seems the Church has never come to terms with Jesus the Jew.

G.B. Phillipson
gbph@crdi.fr

Vol. 19 No. 14 · 17 July 1997

From Susan Bielstein

Frank Kermode’s excellent review of Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (LRB, 3 April) implies that the images included in the first edition of the work are not included in this, the revised edition. The illustrations are, in fact, all there, in correct order, along with many new ones that expand the visual evidence for Professor Steinberg’s argument concerning the humanation of God.

G.B. Phillipson (Letters, 5 June) requests that Steinberg or Kermode produce for him a Renaissance image of a circumcised Christ. As Steinberg tells us, Renaissance artists ‘willingly paid the price of inaccuracy to spare the revered body the blemish of imperfection’ and mutilation associated with circumcision in the Christian 15th and 16th centuries.

Susan Bielstein
University of Chicago Press