Body & Society

http://bod.sagepub.com Disabling Beliefs? Impaired Embodiment in the Religious Tradition of the West
Nichola Hutchinson Body Society 2006; 12; 1 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06070882 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/4/1

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Disabling Beliefs? Impaired Embodiment in the Religious Tradition of the West

NICHOLA HUTCHINSON

Introduction Since the 1980s, the elds of the sociology of the body and disability studies have burgeoned (Albrecht et al., 2001; Barnes et al., 2002; Shilling, 2005). Emerging as a response to a wealth of contemporary incitements, advancements in the former stimulate claims that the body has been elevated, from its absent presence status in classical sociology, to the site or organizing principle of social theory (Shilling, 1993). Central to this growth are new concepts of embodiment, which unify the dualistically fractured Cartesian mind/body and capture the dynamism of active agency. In stark contrast, disability studies materialized as a rejoinder to disabled activism (e.g. Finklestein, 1980; Hunt, 1966; UPIAS, 1976), and, while triumphant in the political arena, has achieved limited impact on either mainstream sociological (Barnes and Mercer, 2004; Barnes and Oliver, 1993) or humanities perspectives (Mitchell and Synder, 1997). Increasingly, this restricted development is linked to the elds predilection for outmoded materialist perspectives, especially those that endorse bifurcating the individual (impairment or the ontological essence of disability [Hughes, 2002b: 63]) and the social
Body & Society 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 12(4): 123 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X06070882

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Body & Society Vol. 12 No. 4

(disability or the external barriers to inclusion), which, by conferring conceptual priority to the latter, cast[s] physicality out into the discursive shadows (Hughes and Paterson, 1997: 327). This theoretical decit is further exacerbated by a lack of body theorists who consider the reality of embodiment when it isnt good (Scully, 1998). One consequence of this lacuna is that the history of impaired embodiment, especially the religio-cultural dimensions, is largely unexplored. In an attempt to ll this void, this article aims to transcend the connes of the ahistorical, disembodied radical constructionism currently dominating disability discourse, by integrating the concepts of effervescent (Mellor and Shilling, 1997) and emergent (Mellor, 2004) embodiment with humanities perspectives. It is proposed that recovering the interconnections between impairment and the sacred from their absent presence positions in disability discourse will reveal the broader implications of this important dimension of embodiment. Sociology, Disability and Christianity While it is not the purpose of this article to provide an archaeology of disability studies, a brief examination of the key debates in the eld assists in elaborating the rationale for proposing this untypical approach to the study of disability history. From its inception, disability studies, mirroring trends in feminism and ethnicity studies, has sought to falsify the essentialist and determinist foundations of the modern pathological categorization of disability as a biological or psychological decit (Galvin, 2003; Shakespeare and Watson, 1996). Redening disability as a form of social oppression, inequality and exclusion (Thomas, 2004) also challenged the medicalized societal responses of institutionalization, cure and rehabilitation as well as the established sociological perspective (based on Parsons [1951] sick-role analysis that assigned disability as an individual limitation and form of social deviance). Though methodological variance is evident (see Priestley, 1998), in Britain the social model of disability, formalized by Oliver (1990, 2004), dominates debates. In essence, Olivers Neo-Marxist inspired paradigm situates the cause of disability rmly in the socio-political arena through instituting a strict binary distinction between impairment and the socially constructed disabling barriers, which he argues permeate the epistemological and ontological foundations of Western capitalist societies. North American disability studies, comprising pragmatism, symbolic interactionism and social psychological perspectives, while less concerned with maintaining the dichotomy between the individual and the social, tends to sustain a narrow politicized focus (see Albretch, 2002). In spite of the tensions between British and North American approaches (Meekosha, 2004), a common limitation traceable across the eld is an atheoretical
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Disabling Beliefs?

orientation, especially with regard to impairment (see Hughes and Paterson, 1997; Oliver, 1996; Paterson and Hughes, 2000; Shakespeare and Watson, 1996, 2002). Generally the movements reliance on maintaining a homogeneous politicized group identity is seen to sustain the dominance of a disembodied disability politics (see Hughes and Paterson, 1997; Shakespeare and Watson, 1996). Critics, such as Corker and Shakespeare (2002), argue that this partiality impedes the formulation of a solid theory of disability that is receptive to the pluralistic challenges arising from the cultural turn. Recent attempts to blur the distinction between impairment and disability have attended to individual differences and the psycho-emotional aspects of disablement (see Corker and Shakespeare, 2002; Crow, 1996; de Wolf, 2002; Galvin, 2003; Marks, 1999; Reeve, 2004). By recovering the import of the multiple facets of impaired embodiment, these studies imply that disability remains, for many, a bodily matter (Price and Shildrick, 2002). Shifting the focus back to the body, I propose, is vital, to access the existential and cultural dimensions of attitudes towards impairments, as it appears that perceptions held by both disabled people and non-disabled people are inuenced by a hierarchal classication ingrained with bodily prejudices (Deal, 2003), which continues to resist adjustment (cf Barnes, 1997). Moreover, pejorative disabilist perceptions, manifesting as forms of stigma (Goffmann, 1963), oppression (Abberley, 1987), discrimination (Barnes, 1991) and prejudice (Shakespeare, 1994), are consistently identied as major barriers to disabled peoples meaningful inclusion into mainstream community life (Barnes, 1997: 3). Paradoxically, the ubiquitous acceptance of this reality has stimulated few historiographies of Western value systems from the perspective of disabled people, with even fewer studies thoroughly engaging with the religious components that are deeply imbued in social mores and individual psyches (Mitchell, 1999). The dominance of studying macroscopic political economic relationships not only obfuscates the body in disability discourse. It also accommodates ahistorical leanings, where the relevancy of cultural antecedents prior to the rise of capitalism are often dismissed. History (along with the body) has become the missing piece of the jigsaw in disability studies (Borsay, 2002: 98). The narrow focus of Western approaches is further criticized by cross-cultural studies of disability that stress the ascendancy of cultural as well as political inuences (see Ingstad, 2001; Ingstad and Whyte, 1995; Priestley, 2001). Attentiveness to cultural diversity in the global context, as Miles (1995) and Selway and Ashman (1998) illustrate, also reveals the continuing saliency of the social context formed by religions; a reality often obscured by the Wests Eurocentric secular priority. Comparative scrutiny of Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic historical contexts, Miles suggests, reveals that on a surface level responses to impairment
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are similar to Christianity. For example, the Hindu and Buddhist concepts of bad karma and reincarnation, which promote the belief that disability is caused by an individuals past transgressions, are seen to correspond with Christian doctrines of sin (Miles, 1995). Such conclusions, Miles goes on to argue, are highly suspect because they fail to account for the multiplicity of attitudes endorsed by nonChristian religions. His critical stance towards Western perspectives, however, means that Christianity is not afforded the same moderate treatment. In disability studies, Christian beliefs and institutional practices are commonly reduced to oppressive Gramscian hegemonic ideologies derived largely from the liberalized, individualistic, post-Reformation expression of the tradition. Appealing to this distorted reading, theorists (mis)construe the way heritage contributes towards the formation (and maintenance) of exclusionary, dehumanizing, disabling attitudinal barriers. More specically, Christianity is linked to the problematic medicalized individual model of disability, which casts impairment as a personal tragedy. Oliver, for example, recounts the abhorrent nature of charitable practices, asserting they have kept us [disabled people] oppressed and excluded for more than 150 years (1999: 17). Barnes, in a rare survey of the cultural precursors of Western attitudinal barriers, maintains strands of Judeo-Christian scripture and ideology play a foundational role in the legacy of oppression of disabled people (1997). Pfeiffer (2002), too, claims the philosophical heritage of Western society, instilled with disparaging religious perceptions, is weighted against impairment. Such accounts, however, are liable to various forms of criticism. Gleeson contends that these brief, speculative, microscopic histories often supplant historically cogent evidence with the projection of disabled peoples recent experience of service dependency and marginalization (1997: 188). More damningly, by reducing the complex historicity of disability, these accounts supply the eld with burdensome assumed orthodoxies about the social context of impairment in previous societies (p. 188). The rst erroneous orthodoxy Gleeson identies is the persistent belief that a single Judeo-Christian ethic. . . was directly responsible for the historical oppression of impaired people (p. 188). Bredberg (1999) extends Gleesons critique beyond the connes of historical materialism by raising congruent concerns with institutional histories. Bredberg, like Gleeson, emphasizes the harmful consequences of the fallacy of the prevalent proof that taints disability histories (Bredberg, 1999: 1923, citing HackettFischer, 1970: 512), citing empirical evidence to counteract the popular claim that disabled people have historically experienced exclusion from church rituals. While a small number of disability scholars acknowledge the limitations of glibly viewing antiquity as primarily a source of negative attitudes, rigorous

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Disabling Beliefs?

assessments of religious perceptions towards impairment remain scarce. One important exception is the French cultural anthropologist Stikers (1999) A History of Disability. As the rst detailed survey of the cultural meanings of the body and disability in a Western European context, Stikers penchant for Foucauldian discourse analysis, is moderated with a rebuttal of Foucaults view of history as a set of ruptures or breaks (Turner, 2001: 252). Arguing instead for a continuum of effects, Stiker utilizes history to dissect the modern paradox surrounding disability. On the one hand, Stiker argues, individual proclivity, cultural values and linguistics indicate the presence of a societal xation with attaining sameness or etre comme les autres, which leads to aberration evoking negativity and fear. On the other hand, Stiker, embracing the ethos of the cultural turn, claims that corporeality by its very nature or spiritual intent, embodies difference a reality that renders aggression towards difference futile. Similarly, the metaphorical reconceptualization of Jesus Christ as a disabled God, discussed in the edgling eld of disability theology by theologians such as Cooper (1992), Eiesland (1994) and Rappmann (2003), yields interesting insights into the potency of the symbol for apprehending the intersection between the body, Christianity and impairment. In this respect, the work of Eiesland (1994) is especially useful. In constructing a liberation theology based on the experiences of disabled people, Eiesland restates the uniqueness of the tradition as the only religion founded on the impaired and broken body of its God (see also Hull, 2003; Luke 22:7, 19; Moltmann, 1974). Interpreting this symbol as a survivor rather than a suffering servant, Eiesland argues that the disabled God embodies the ability to see clearly the complexity and the mixed blessing of life and bodies (1994: 102). In exploring the connections between attitudes concerning impaired embodiment and the religious tradition of the West, I suggest that disability studies focus on institutional praxis must be complemented with an appreciation of the historical dynamics of the body in Christianity. To add clarity to this survey, I propose that the infusion of elements of body sociology will assist in compensating disability studies disembodied bias and the resulting incoherency surrounding impairment. Such a synthesis is contentious, as the juxtaposition between the elds tends to result in the proliferation of sociological bodies receiving criticism from disability scholars. Though noteworthy exceptions are evident, such as Hughes and Patersons (1997) assertion that body sociology may furnish disability studies with a much needed bridge into mainstream sociology, the consensus view maintains that the xation with the perfectibility of discursively constructed bodies results in body theorists failing to adequately address disability issues (Abberley, 1997; see also Mitchell and Snyder, 1997; Shakespeare and Watson, 1996).

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These accusations of neglect, however, ignore the diversity within body sociology. The eld consists of theorizing that is both responsive to the cultural turn, yet tempered with concerns regarding the plausibility of adhering to strict forms of radical constructionism (typical of post-structural and postmodern philosophies of Foucault and Lyotard), because of the loss of the material reality of bodies. While in-depth discussion of the ranging debates concerning the impact of postisms on social theory (Featherstone, 1991; Smart, 2000), the study of religion (Davie, 1994) and theology (Vanhoozer, 2003) is outside the scope of this article, it is necessary to clarify the orientation of my position. As the subsequent analysis seeks to explore the inuence of the sacred, as the effervescent core of sociality and embodiment (Shilling and Mellor, 2001), theories that presuppose an abandonment of the transcendental aspects, in favour of a secularized, biopolitical view of the body, are rejected. In addition, the abstractionism and cultural relativism characteristic of decorative sociology (see Rojek and Turner, 2000) that views the current state of contingency and fragmentation as precluding the appeal to metanarratives (Lyotard, 1984[1979]: 105), are discarded. Rather, following Mellor (2004), Mellor and Shilling (1997) and Shilling (1993), this article endorses a form of realism grounded in a broadly Durkheimian, anti-reductionist framework. This position assists in validating considering the eshy, emotional, sensorial and spiritual elements of human agency, which in turn uncover elements of mainstream Christianity, outside of the secularist post-Reformation forms. Late-modern Bodies A brief assessment of the late modern paradox of the body, an adverse consequence of the deconstruction of systems built upon Descartes (1970[1954]: 121) cogito ergo sum , aids in contesting the conclusion that sociology of the body has little to offer the study of impairment. According to Featherstones widely accepted theory, a consumer culture, which relies on envisioning the body as a vehicle for pleasure, dominates Western societies. This chimera, through promoting the idealized images of youth, health, tness and beauty (1982: 212) creates an aesthetical prioritization, which orientates individuals toward attaining bodily perfection (see also Featherstone, 1991; Hughes, 1999). The focus on external appearance, Featherstone (1982: 26) propounds, discloses that the secularized body has replaced the traditional purpose of the body in which it was regarded as a transitory vehicle, a means to higher spiritual ends. However, as the hedonistic pursuit relies on depicting the body as the passport to all that is good in life, the reality that bodies are frail and limited is masked. Consequently,

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Disabling Beliefs?

individuals are both more aware of the limitations of their eshiness than ever before, yet increasingly bereft of knowledge that previously enabled them to make sense of the reied entrapment of transhistorical human longings within distorted forms (p. 30). Shilling (1993) and Turner (1996) concur that the late modern paradox of the body results from an absence of meaning arising from the loss of ontological and existential sureties provided by religious systems of belief. Here, understanding the tensions between religion and modernity is important: science, arguably, has increasingly more control over life but it has failed to provide us with values to guide our lives (Weber, 1948[1919]). Individuals in late modern society, therefore, vie with an absurd contradiction they are bombarded by the myth of bodily perfection (Dale Stone, 1995) but cannot escape the fact that immortality is outside bodily control. Whereas social theorists (and theologians, see Isherwood and Stuart [1998]) are increasingly preoccupied with assessing the ramications of the fracturing of the self and society, relatively few are attentive to the possibility that the acuity of corporeality may continue to be differently conceived. Thus, the view that late modernity represents a unique epoch, where secularization has supplanted all forms of tradition, glosses the fact that bodies remain imbued in struggles fostered by the irrefutable ontological certainties of fragility and nitude. Featherstones analysis of the bodily projects engendered by consumer culture provides important insights into the state of ux and contingency resulting from the individualization, commodifation and consumerization of the body. Consideration of Turners evolving socio-cultural theory of the body, however, assists in highlighting the constraints of studying disability solely within a political economic framework. Underpinning the early form of Turners (1991, 1992, 1996[1984]) somatic theorizing is the supposition that as secularization has displaced the classical function of religion the surfaces of the body have become the site for analysing all forms of struggles, conict, and moral dilemmas. Focusing on the Hobbesian and Parsonian problem of order, Turner synthesizes the structural concerns for determining how the production and reproduction of bodies shapes agency, with Merleau-Pontys (2003[1962]) phenomenological concept of the lived body. Oscillating between constructionism and phenomenology, Turner differentiates embodiment, as a term denoting the subjectivity of the lived body from governmentality, which captures the post-structural preoccupation with viewing the body as a product of professional practice (2001: 253). Following the Germanic anthropological tradition of gures such as Gehlen, Turner, essentially, conceives embodiment as ontologically insecure because we are all prone to

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illness, aging, and disability (2001: 262). This notion of an ontology of insecurity, reminiscent of Hobbess (1968[1651]) view of life as poore, nasty, brutish, and short, carries pessimistic overtones. Mellor (2004), for example, criticizes Turners conception for deeming the possibility that our being-in-theworld can be substantively altered by societal inuences as irrelevant. Turner, nonetheless, advances that applying these contractarian and asocial principles to disability is benecial because they expedite the formulation of a social theory based on a triad ontological theory, namely: the frailty (of human beings), the precariousness (of institutions), and the interconnectedness (of social life) (2001: 257). Although complementing the socio-political bias of disability studies, Turners application of the social ontology of human beings as both frail and vulnerable (2001: 253) fails to succeed in enucleating the profundity of impairment beyond the strict economic and political connes. Further extensions, however, are presented by Turner and Rojek in their elaboration of the notion ontology of frailty, which, signicantly, they tentatively link to the metaphorical conceptualization of the crucied Christ. Though considering religious symbolism as now largely obsolete, their intimation that the crucied Christ represents a metaphorical nexus of frailty, precariousness and interconnectedness (2001: 217) implies that the emblem, by encapsulating the core of their social ontology, may continue to provide a useful lens through which to decipher the wider connotations of impairment. Assessing the broader inuence of this connection is restricted by Turners (1996: xiii, xiv) truncated reading of the religious conceptions of the body, evident in his claim that the idea of a carcass is thematically central to Christian theology, with the tradition merely conceiving the body as esh, as a dead animal. Similarly, while Turner accedes with the view that historically Christ represented the sacricial gift who makes society possible, he concludes that the rationalization, privatization and McDonaldization of Western society renders extrapolating the wider connotations of the analogy defunct. Sacred Bodies Whereas Turner, and more recently Varga (2005), intimate that the body now supersedes the sacred, Mellor and Shilling (1997) interpret the late modern obsession with forms of embodiment as reinstating Durkheims (2001[1912]) insistence that the sacred is the organizing principle of social theory. Protagonists of an effervescent (Mellor and Shilling, 1997) or emergent (Mellor, 2004) conception of sociality and embodiment, their expansive theorizing combines an original reading of Durkheimian sociology with a range of disciplines, theoretical

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Disabling Beliefs?

perspectives and empirical studies (Mellor and Shilling, 1997: 4). In assuming this broad approach, Mellor and Shilling confront the determinism and reductionism, typical of constructionist and post-structuralist perspectives. Following Shilling, these approaches are criticized for emulating the deciencies of classical sociologys dual approach to the body; both fail to adequately account for the fact that: [t]he human body has been evolving for thousands of years and forms a very real base for social relations (1993: 10). Mellor claries the orientation of this argumentation, stating that it recognizes the existence of commonalities in human species across different social and cultural contexts (2004: 2832). Central to Mellors thesis is the argument that humans are endowed with embodied capacities for an emotional, cognitive, moral and religious engagement with others and the world (2004: 3). Mindful of the ranging objections levelled against discussing the body as a biological, universal reality, Mellor and Shilling forward a sophisticated interpretation of Durkheims homo duplex model, arguing that it emphasizes both the rational and irrational components of human experience (1997: 3). Recovering the importance of the sensual, sensorial, and emotive aspects of corporeality serves as a reminder that they provide a potentially unstable basis for modern contractual relationships (1997: 3). Addressing the charge that the model connotes a dualistic, static, vision of embodiment, Mellor and Shilling illustrate how the extra-rational dimensions of embodiment are differently structured by social forces over time. Moreover, they maintain, the persistence of these unstable aspects of embodiment emphatically demonstrates the continuing inuence of manifestations of collective effervesces. Consequently, Mellor and Shilling hold that as the sacred remains central to the binding and unbinding of social relationships within modernity, apprehending the implications of both its benecent and virulent inuences is vital. Comparable sentiments are expressed by Bataille (1986[1957]), whose concern for discerning the ambivalent nature of the sacred revealed the necessity of maintaining a strong sense of the sacred and profane polarities, to render reference to either meaningful. Indeed, the foundational vision or sociological ambition, discussed extensively by Shilling and Mellor (2001), charged sociologists with the task of fathoming the dynamic relationships between mundane social life and sacred moral life. Contemporary sociologists, by spurning the original purpose of the discipline in favour of the popular themes of culture, economics and social mobility, therefore, run the risk of rendering their discussions of the secular meaningless, with claims that social theory suffers because of its refusal to think about religion growing (Lemert, 1999: 240; see also Keenan, 2003; Mellor, 2004).

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Rescuing the sacred from its absent presence status in mainstream social theory necessarily entails correcting assumptions regarding secularism and pluralism. The secularization thesis, based largely on Weberian sociology, dictates that the vitality of religions is necessarily diminished by the rationalization, privatization and individualization fostered by the iron cage of capitalism. Pluralism is seen to facilitate the secularization process by fostering a climate of tolerance and relativism, which reduces the necessary tension between the sacred and the profane (Flanagan, 1990: 93). It is commonly alleged that these processes have succeeded in desacralizing Western society; an afrmation that led to the marginalization of the study of religion in sociology (Beckford, 1989). While the popularity, for example, of Beck and Beck-Gernsheims (2001) individualization thesis supports this conclusion, recent research indicates that the halcyon days of the secularist sociology paradigm may be numbered (Keenan, 2002: 281). In addition, phenomena, including the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and 7 September 2005, global trends such as the rise in fundamentalism, statistical data that appear to indicate the prevalence of believing without belonging in the British context (see Davie, 1994: 93116), and the continued popularity of Church attendance in North America (see Lemert, 1999; Mellor, 2004), suggest that religion continues to exert a diffuse inuence on the social. Arguably more persuasive in academia are the shifts incited by the cultural turn, which have released social theory from the strictures of the modern strongholds of Marxism, socialism and Liberal Humanism. One of the benets of postmodernity, as Bauman advances, is that it: can be seen as restoring to the world what modernity, presumptuously, had taken away; as a re-enchantment of the world that modernity tried hard to dis-enchant (1992: x). In an attempt to re-engage with the enchanting aspects of existence, Mellor and Shilling undertake an examination of the interconnections between forms of embodiment, forms of sociality and forms of knowing (1997: 22). Situating the study of forms of embodiment at the heart of their analysis, the concept, under which they umbrella the term re-forming the body, denotes the habits, techniques of the body and types of habitus all of which point to stubborn eneshment of humans in order to elucidate how people know themselves, others, and the world around them through senses. This notion of making sense of the social and the self, comprehensively developed by Mellor (2004), decisively afrms that human beings are not merely disembodied rationalist beings . . . but acquire information through their bodies (Mellor and Shilling, 1997: 5; see also Bynum, 1987). Reclaiming the signicance of the sensorial forms of knowing, concealed by the Cartesian prioritization of sight, the nature of the link between re-formations of the body and cultural change is illuminated,

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Disabling Beliefs?

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which Mellor and Shilling claim can be utilized to decipher the sense of fragmentation and articiality which tends to characterize certain areas of late modern life (1997: 7). Hence, three ideal types of embodiment are delineated according to epochal epistemological shifts, which are deeply intertwined with dominant hegemonic forms and re-formations in Christian thought. First, Mellor and Shilling (1997: 89, 3541, 647) detail the Catholic modern or medieval body, suggesting that it characterized an era when the Church engaged in a highly sensuous way with the volatile bodies of medieval Europe. During this period, body regimes were shaped by the long history of Christian preoccupation with the body: esh was seen as a route to religious experience. The Church, rather than permitting the development of distinctive, individual selves sought to manage the immersion of people within the natural and supernatural world through attempting to harness these somatic experiences by developing a sacred eating community. In contrast, the Protestant modern body, Mellor and Shilling (1997: 1011, 235, 417, 98130) maintain, marks the prioritization of words and symbols . . . and the mind, which culminated in the rationalizing, secularizing and civilizing tendencies [characteristic of] . . . early modern body or modern grotesque bodies. Crucially, this transition from carnal knowing to cognitive apprehension (citing Miles, 1992) by devaluing the esh and divesting the world of immanence of the sacred, led to manifestations of the supernatural being interpreted as evil. Moreover, by compelling people to stand as individual bodies outside those sacred communities that had previously eaten into their bodily identities, Protestantism generated a sense of corporeal ux, which ultimately induced melancholy and despair because of a basic inability to make sense of . . . sensual bodies. Consequently, the sacred was transformed into the disembodied transcendence of the sublime; a shift that resulted in the reconstruction of notions such as charity and sin and more broadly . . . helped bring about the profanation of many areas of social life (citing Bell, 1980; Berger, 1990[1967]; Weber, 1991[19045]). Baroque modern bodies or ambivalent bodies, however, Mellor and Shilling (1997: 12, 47, 4755, 16189) contend, are characteristically Janus-faced; they display a return of the sensualization of experience, which develops hand in hand with an extension of certain aspects of the Protestant modern body. Baroque modern bodies, then, are not simply post modern, but can be seen, metaphorically, as straddling the borders between the past, present and future. Thus, the actuality of contemporary bodies as both internally differentiated, prone to all sorts of doubts and anxieties, and . . . arenas of conict and a conduit for more classically modern forms of embodiment is afrmed.

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Through charting the vitality of the sacred as the facilitator of key reformations in sociality, ontology and epistemology, the volatility of Christianized conceptions of embodiment is emphasized, a reading that corresponds with the fact there has never been a single universally accepted doctrine of human personhood . . . no formal denitions of human nature or the human body (Ware, 1997: 90). Contrary to secularist assumptions regarding the tradition, the recognition of this dynamism reiterates the need to contextualize statements concerning the body (Ware, 1997: 91). In this regard, studying the effervescent or emergent qualities of sociality and embodiment is advantageous, as these notions demand historical awareness as a prerequisite to postulating late modern continuities. In the nal section of this article I will apply these theoretical insights to a survey of Judeo-Christian scripture and theology in an attempt to reconcile the antithetical view that the tradition casts disabled people as either divinely blessed or damned . . . deled evildoer or the spiritual superhero (Eiesland, 1994: 70). First, Leviticus thinking is discussed as an archetypal example of the common view that the tradition conceives disability as a sign of punishment, evil incarnation, challenge to divine perfection and cause for exemption from religious practice (see Rose, 1997). Aspects of Christian thinking are then explored, with an emphasis on the factious issue of charity. Finally, the symbolic potential of the metaphorical reconceptualization of Jesus Christ as a disabled God, as an indicator of resurgence in more positive associations, is briey discussed. Christian Bodies A number of scriptural passages contain inimical references to disability. For example, Genesis 19:111, Deuteronomy 28:2029, Isaiah 29:912, and Acts 13: 612 all seem to imply that blindness is punishment for sin. The ancient Jewish holiness code of Leviticus (1726, especially 21:1823) is identied by disability scholars, such as Barnes, as consistently fuelling the exclusion of disabled people from any form of religious ritual (1997). While the text is unquestionably problematic, the extent and nature of its historical inuence is debateable. Stiker (1999) appeals to a range of historical evidence to contest the popular inference, arguing instead that the prohibitions Leviticus prescribes were not extended to all forms of religious observances. Indeed, Leviticus 21:22 (which is often omitted from references to the passage) states that physical blemishes do not prevent an individual from sharing the the bread of his God, both of the most holy and of the holy things. The charge of Leviticus 19:14 to not curse the deaf . . . or put a stumbling block before the blind also intimates that the mistreatment of disabled people was divinely admonished (see also Deuteronomy 27:18; Ezekiel 34:116).

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This incertitude has led to scholars, such as Melcher (1998), raising cautions against interpreting the text in terms of stigmatization visa via the contemporary criteria devised by Goffman (1963). According to Avalos the link between purity and entry to the temple may reect economic decisions made by states concerning the care of the ill (1998: 41), rather than deep-seated concerns over impairment. The Hebrew conception of personhood, which, as Ware (1997: 91) points out, is embodied and physical: I do not have a body, I am my body I am esh-animated-by-soul, reveals further appraisals. Within the context of the primacy of the body, the impure associations documented in Leviticus may relate to broader priestly concerns for discerning how the impaired body reects the image of God (see Cooper, 1992; Rose, 1997). Scarry (1985: 181, 183), while advancing that the Bible is a monumental description of the nature of artice, interprets the text as instituting a distinction between the immutability of the creator and the wonderability of his creation. Manifestations of the possible re-forming social expressions of Leviticus thinking are, however, less ambiguous. During the Middle Ages, the appearance of negative associations ascribed to the leper seems to signify the emergence of Leviticus thinking in the form of linking bodily impurity and sin (Louth, 1997; Moore, 1987). The advent of Protestantism appears to have reinforced this concomitance, with the Puritan pursuit of healthy bodies instating the nexus of dirt and sin (Mellor and Shilling, 1997: 44) and the Calvinist doctrine on predestination (see McGrath, 1988; Mellor and Shilling, 1994) stimulating a discourse of othering. Hughess (2002a) reference to Douglass notion of the other as dirt, coupled with his assertion that the primary motivation of the modern anthropoemic response to strangers was a desire to banish impurity, signal the persistence of these Protestant forms of Leviticus thinking. In developing his thesis that disabled people represent the stranger in modern culture (qua Simmelian sociology), Hughes also alludes to a potential Baroque Modern version of these ancient associations, evident in his suggestion that the negativity evoked by an individuals inability to consume (as the new criterion of purity and inclusion) is offset by the late modern valorization of difference. Whereas the inuence of post-Reformation forms of Leviticus thinking on attitudinal responses to impairment appears to be mainly unfavourable, Christian thinking rooted in accounts of Jesus responses to disabled people, is seen to mark a radical departure from the Hebrew tradition (Tan, 1998). Stanton (2002: 238, 265), for example, interprets the healing narratives as demonstrating Jesus full acceptance of those who were socially and religiously marginalized contamination no longer results from physical contact with impure objects or people but from a persons own impure thoughts and desires (Mark 7:2023).

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While Eiesland (1994) and Sudgen (1998) point to inconsistencies in the healing narratives, asserting that in Luke 5:1826 and John 5:516 Jesus intimation that forgiveness is a requisite to healing appears to reinforce the causal link between disability and sin, Grants (1998: 7980) exegesis of John 9:13 explicates Jesus afrmation that congenital blindness is not the result of either the individuals or his parents sin, but [so] that the works of God might be revealed in him as explicitly overturning the notion of divine retribution. Though this interpretation of the Johannine rhetoric of blindness is debated (Koosed and Schumm, 2005), Grant claims that Jesus actions in John 9 have a twofold impact on the understanding of impairment. Not only is the healing unconditional but the disciples concern for determining the past cause of the mans blindness is also replaced with a focus on the future purpose of the impairment. An examination of the use of the rhetorical device of paradox in the Christian Testament, Horne (1998: 88, 89, 98) proposes, further elucidates the meaning of impairments beyond the restricted view that they are simply conditions that Jesus eliminates. For him, paradox is associated with inability in a particular way: within inability is striking capability. This inability imagery, found throughout the Christian Testament, is particularly prominent in the Pauline corpus, where the device is often used in conjunction with the paradox of Christ crucied Gods power made complete in inability (Horne, 1998: 98; see also Hengel, 1977; Moltmann, 1974; Samuel, 1998). Impairment, it would seem, constitutes an integral component of Pauline theology. This inference gains support from the recognition that the cross (and resurrection) of Christ represents the fulcrum point, the central soteriological [or saving] moment in Pauline theology (Dunn, 1998: 20733). Indeed, within this context, discipleship, achievable through becoming the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18), necessarily entails suffering: suffering as a sharing in Christs suffering has a powerfully positive pastoral function. Outside this soteriological context, however, Dunn concedes that the notion of bodily suffering could appear only idealistic and lacking in seriousness (1998: 728). The specic orientation of Pauls theologies of the cross and suffering is communicated through body metaphors, following a tripartite distinction of esh (sarx), body (soma) and spirit (pneuma) (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Contra Turners assertion that the tradition conceived the body merely as esh, the word soma, while important for Pauline anthropology, is never employed to denote corpse (Dunn, 1998; see also Bultmann, 1952). Rather, as Dunn (1998: 56, 61) propounds, soma designates both the physicality of human bodies and the embodiment of the person. The latter, by stressing interaction and cooperation, intimates that for Paul soma articulates the character of created humankind . . . the body corporeal and not just corporate. In this respect, Pauls anthropology

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has a somatic quality that prevents any real dualism between creation and salvation and furnishes Pauline theology with an unavoidably social and ecological dimension. Awareness of the relational and social dimensions of the term soma assists in comprehending the dominant image of the body of Christ, which in Pauline theology connotes both the Eucharist and the Church. As Kummel (1974: 210) suggests, this link implies that the body of Christ specically means the Christian community. The Church and Eucharist, as the Corpus Christi, conjoined with dual commandments to love God and love your neighbour as yourself (Romans 13:810; Galatians 5:14) form the theological foundations for a Christianized notion of charity. Nygren (1982) elaborates the meaning of the command to love through distinguishing between the Christian motif of love as agape and the Hellenistic conception of love as eros. The former, Nygren (1982: 52, 91, 95) asserts: has its roots in the new and specically Christian way of fellowship with God. Moreover, as the command to love has its prototype in the agape manifested by God, it must be spontaneous and unmotivated, uncalculating, unlimited, and unconditional. Expressed outside the context of fellowship with God, neighbourly love loses its specically Christian character and becomes a more general ethical requirement. The loss of the religious framework is, therefore, disastrous for the Christian idea of love as it results in it being identied with the modern ideas of altruism, fellow-feeling . . . and the ethic of sympathy. Medieval Catholic reformations indicate the continued observance of a number of these theological themes. Feminist historians, such as Bynum (1987, 1995), through surveying medieval historiographies and hagiographies (or biographies of the Saints), reveal a resurgence in the bodily aspects of Christological doctrine. These include the Eucharist, the notion of Corpus Christi, the resurrection, and the adoration of the ve wounds. Stiker (1999) too refers to a mystical ethic that he suggested emerged in the 13th century and was stimulated largely by the rise of the Franciscan movement, which following Franciss example, promoted viewing the disabled as Christ. This association conferred a sense of dignity on the poor that penetrated social attitudes with the marginal becoming in their eminently sites and moments for contemplation and adoration; they were like a living sacrament, like the sacred itself (1999: 801). In Stikers opinion these positive changes in attitudes were short lived, as the Christian tradition failed to nd an original answer to the question of physical difference, and ultimately succumbed to social pressures. Stiker supports his claim by arguing that the decline, occurring around the 1400s, correlated with a rise in social disorder and plagues that led to fear taking the upper hand and the ethic of charity becoming largely redundant, a view that is, however, inconsistent with

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an earlier assertion that plagues helped reduce the negativity associated with difference. Indeed, Stikers summation that ethical and theological charity was to a very large extent ineffective is contested. Bossy (1985), in Christianity in the West 14001700, charts a variety of expressions of the social miracle of charity. In Bossys (1985: 37, 579) analysis, the dominance of charity within Western societies on the eve of the Reformation produced a particular complex of moral convictions, with uncharity been dened as a type of the unclean. More specically, the notion of charity, as a vision of social beatitude, denoted social integration, with the fraternity embodying the sentiments of the ethos. The key component of these fellowships, Bossy notes, is expressed through the term charit, which appears to connote the prandium caritatis or love-feast. Nevertheless, Bossy (1985: 144, citing Becker [1974: 19856]) asserts that the notion of caritas, around 1400, was transvalued into a generalized concept of philanthropy. By the 1700s, charity had been reduced to an optimistic judgement about the good intentions of others; an act of benevolence towards the poor and needy; an institution erected as a result of such an act (Bossy, 1985: 168). As with the survey of Leviticus thinking, the emergence the Protestant modern body appears to signify a pivotal point in the history of disability, which, crucially, represents the crystallizing moment for an upsurge in negative associations towards impairment. In their analysis of the Protestant reconstructions of charity, Mellor and Shilling (1997: 11618) extend Bossys insights, arguing that the rejection of the medieval fellowship resulted in charity becoming associational (a more impersonal phenomenon which reduced contacts between benefactors and recipients), and a form of social and corporeal engineering (see also Mellor, 2004: 11619). Protestantism, through abstracting charity from its medieval context, adulterated it to a means through which potential recipients could be categorized into the deserving and the undeserving. Moreover, the Protestant emphasis on the work ethic and the notion of deserving poor further served to individuate the poor. Importantly, Mellor and Shilling (1997: 11819) pinpoint the transferral of emphasis from the membership of a social body of the kingdom of God, fostered by Catholic forms of embodiment, sociality and knowing, to the introspection of the individual as educing the perception of the poor as the Other (citing Simmel, 1971[1908]). Conclusion Contrary to the ahistorical and highly generalized condemnations of Christianity in sociological studies of impairment, then, it is the effects of the shift from

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Catholic to Protestant forms of embodiment, sociality and knowing on the Christian conceptions of charity, which supplanted fellowship with philanthropy, that have had a major impact on attitudes towards disabled people. Indeed, within the context of the Protestant modern disassociation of charity from its religious basis, Olivers (1999) damning repudiation of charity from the perspective of disabled people appears justiable. Yet such conclusions fail to acknowledge the presence of emergent Baroque Modern trends surfacing in the form of the religious basis of charity as social integration or solidarity, which expose the tensions between Protestant modern and Catholic medieval attitudes (see Mellor, 2004). The Marxist writer Zizek alludes to the broad application of the agape model of charity as the social and religious medium through which particularity and universality are reconciled (Mellor, 2004: 1767) for making sense of numerous conicts, divisions and problems surrounding Western societies (Mellor, 2004: 1769). Zizeks fragile absolute thesis not only elucidates how pre-Reformation forms of Christian thinking can be seen to persist, but also compellingly demonstrates the instrumental role groups of stigmatized individuals united by a secret bond of solidarity play in Christs uncoupling or radical challenge to the prevailing (economic) social order (2000: 12330). Embodied, socio-theological accounts of impairment, through revealing the potency of Janus faced emergent forms, free disability studies from its burdensome assumed orthodoxies (Gleeson, 1997), and, therefore, constitute an important supplement to the disembodied politics currently dominating disability discourses. Moreover, because these emergent pre-Reformation notions of fellowship reiterate the ontological fact of mutual dependence they radically contest the major barrier to inclusion for disabled people, namely, market driven Welfare State policies (Mellor, 2004: 177; citing Bauman, 2001: 72). The reafrmation that mutual dependence, as opposed to economic, political or contractarian relationships, forms the cornerstone of the Wests moral tradition serves as a valuable counterbalance to the negativity induced by the modern conation of dependency (envisioned as counterproductive to achieving the goal of individualization) with deciency which fuels the pejorative attitude that disability is a personal tragedy (see Finklestein, 1980). Indeed, the religious basis of mutual dependency is arguably already a prominent feature of disability studies in the majority world, with ecumenism playing an integral role in the promotion of international solidarity movements. Constructing an account of impaired embodiment as effervescent or emergent sacred bodies enables both history and physicality to be brought out of the discursive shadows (Hughes and Paterson, 1997: 327), which, in turn, underscores the importance of interdisciplinary analysis for determining the full

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implications of the traditional conuences between impairment, embodiment and the sacred. Such an approach is worth developing as it uncovers a reading of impaired embodiment that possesses the potential to fundamentally transform mainstream debates about inclusion, exclusion, marginality, the meaning and purpose of late modern bodies, the characteristics of somatic society, and the broader connotations of basing social theories on an ontology of frailty, precariousness and interconnectedness (Turner, 2001; Turner and Rojek, 2001). In addition, these insights into the religious basis of charity provide the theological backdrop through which to discern the wider meaning of the metaphorical reconceptualization of Christ as the disabled God. From this perspective, the body of Christ can be seen to symbolize the nature and purpose of being human. Uniquely, this understanding transcends the boundaries of both the narrow rationalistic modern view (Macquarrie, 1995) and the late modern illusion of the perfectibility of the body. The disabled body of Christ, Rappmann asserts, as a critical metaphor for the frailty of the body . . . serves as an effective contrast to the idealized and commercialized images of the body (2003: 25). Turner and Rojek (2001), while avoiding theological elaboration of their cautious linking of the ontology of frailty to the sacricial Christ, evoke similar sentiments. Eiesland, however, succinctly describes the potency of the metaphor, stating: this symbol points not to a utopian vision of hope as the erasure of all human contingency, historically or eternally . . . rather it is a liberatory realism that maintains a clear recognition of the limits of our bodies (1994: 103). Attentiveness to the historical dynamics of sacred bodies emphatically contests the legitimacy of acquiescing with the popular myth of bodily perfection through promoting the view that the universal existential sureties of fragility and nitude are vital components of stable and meaningful theories of embodiment and sociality. For proponents of body sociology and disability studies alike, this liberatory realism opens exciting areas of discussion which the juxtaposition of the disciplines and the secular priority of Western social theory have for too long marginalized. Note
The Revised Standard Version of the Bible was used for this article (1973, London: Collins).

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