Studia Theologica

ISSN: 0039-338X (Print) 1502-7791 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sthe20

How to speak of the body?

Embodiment between phenomenology and theology

Ola Sigurdson

To cite this article: Ola Sigurdson (2008) How to speak of the body?, Studia Theologica, 62:1,
25-43, DOI: 10.1080/00393380802015579

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00393380802015579

Published online: 17 May 2008.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 493

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=sthe20
Studia Theologica 62 (2008), pp. 25
43

How to speak of the body?

Embodiment between phenomenology and theology

Ola Sigurdson

In this article I discuss the question of how to speak of the body in theology after
Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as nihilistic. A purely theoretical
and a-historic approach, such as could be found in much doctrinal theology as
well as philosophy after Descartes, runs the risk of objectifying the body
through its representations of it. The phenomenological approach to embodi-
ment would instead help theology to avoid treating the body as a thing and
instead as a communicative and expressive medium for relationships with
divinity as well as other human beings. A critical theological somatology after
Nietzsche would have to speak of the body through genealogical accounts of
the traces of the body in biblical and theological texts as well as in religious
practices such as prayer, liturgy and hymns with the aim of correlating this
theological tradition with the articulations and configurations of embodiment
today.

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, in his posthumously published book

The Anti-Christ, Christianity is nihilistic.1 Its nihilism consists in
denying this world for the benefit of another, better world. In that
way, such phenomena as desire, embodiment, and even life itself, will
be conceived of as a nothing in the eyes of the Christian church. Echoes
of Nietzsche’s furious critique of the nihilism of Christianity are often
heard today, although in less sophisticated forms, in the accusation that
an inherent contempt for the body haunts Christianity and the Christian
church. Sometimes, this alleged contempt for the body is connected to
‘‘platonic’’ influences. The apostle Paul has so to speak bonded with
Plato in the struggle against the body. ‘‘Christianity’’, ‘‘Platonism’’ and
‘‘Gnosticism’’ are lumped together as different specimens of the same
species, despite their quite different conceptions of the body, and are
thus promptly dismissed.
But these dismissals of a theologically informed conception of
embodiment that I have just alluded to in a short and crude form carry
DOI 10.1080/00393380802015579 # 2008 Taylor & Francis
26 Ola Sigurdson

with them their own difficulties, and should not be taken to be the
popular equivalences of Nietzsche’s critique. What Nietzsche has
taught us is that it is no easy matter to talk of the body, or even to
know what we are doing when we are talking of the body, since the
body has a history, both concerning the representation of the body in
words and pictures and concerning embodiment as such. This means,
for example, that even the perception of the body is influenced by the
different modes of representation of the body in different times. To
understand the body as a philosophical or theological problem, one
needs an insight into the history of embodiment or the historicity of the
body in order to achieve a more differentiated conception of the body.
In short, what is called for is a critical somatology that could do justice
to Nietzsche’s insights, a critical somatology that would avoid the
objectification of the body. The general question I wish to pursue in this
article
How to speak of the body in theology and philosophy?
thus
takes its cue from Nietzsche’s critique of the nihilism of Christianity. My
discussion will deal with the insufficiency of a purely doctrinal
approach to the question of the body
if this is equated with a purely
theoretical and a-historical approach
and how a phenomenologically
informed study of the Christian life-world and its practices could offer a
more fruitful alternative for a theology of embodiment that wishes to
avoid treating the body as an object. The constructive aim of my article
is to suggest how a theological somatology that takes Nietzsche’s
critique into account could be possible. But before I continue with these
more critical and constructive aims, I will first develop further some
historical and philosophical observations on the objectification of
the body in modernity.

The objectification of the body

Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity does not only concern the suppo-
sedly lacking conceptions of the body in Christianity itself, but, as often
with Nietzsche, has wider application. In fact, one could suggest, given
his own insights into the historicity of the body, that Nietzsche’s
critique is not directed against Christianity in all its forms but against
the particular form it took in his protestant, puritan context. For reasons
that I have pursued elsewhere, it could well be asserted that the
Protestant, puritan conceptions of embodiment were close to a modern,
secular view of the body as an object, as something that is the mere tool
of the soul or consciousness, something more like a machine.2
Descartes, Cartesianism, and also the broader intellectual context of
 How to speak of the body? 27

the Seventeenth century meant a major revolution in the representation

of the body, since it took the lifeless body as the paradigmatic body, and
no longer, as did much pre-modern philosophy and theology, conceived
of the body as a mirror of the larger cosmos with an inherent telos. The
body consisted of matter in contrast to soul, and matter was per
definition lifeless, governed by the mechanical logic of extension and
movement.3 Of course, it would be silly to suggest that there is a
straight line from Descartes to the Protestantism of Nietzsche’s time and
place. For one thing, it might be a particular effective history of
Descartes’ writings that has disseminated the Cartesian mind-body
dualism through the wider culture, rather than the intention of
Descartes’ own philosophy. Consider that Descartes, besides Discourse
on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy that have hugely
influenced the way the body has become a theme in modern
philosophy, also wrote Passions of the Soul which opens up towards
what we would call a more phenomenological approach to the body.4
This suggests that even the reception of Descartes’ philosophy of the
body is a crooked, rather than a straight history.
But besides a paradigm shift in the philosophical understanding of
the body around the seventeenth century, more institutional changes
probably also influenced the kind of theological conception of the body
that Nietzsche met in his own day. This is also a long story, but let me
just call it the ‘‘individualization of the body’’ and present a short
version of this story. Embodiment, in early Christianity, was not
considered something purely individual. Rather, one could say that
they often shared a ‘‘transcorporeal’’ or ‘‘intercorporeal’’ understanding
of the body. This is the philosopher Gail Weiss’ explanation of
‘‘intercorporeality’’: ‘‘To describe embodiment as intercorporeality is
to emphasize that the experience of being embodied is never a private
affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with
other human and nonhuman bodies.’’5 For the Christian church, the
notion of the individual body as intimately connected with the body of
Christ should not be regarded as just a manner of speaking (even if it, of
course, is that as well) but a description of reality as seen by
Christianity. Your own body does not stop at its finger-tops but extends
into other bodies that let it share in a not only ‘‘intersubjective’’
community, but a community that is ‘‘intercorporeal’’ as well. The body
of Christ, the social body, was originally understood as a visible and
temporal entity, but sometime during the Middle Ages this more
dynamic and intercorporeal conception was replaced by on the one
hand a more institutional and on the other a more invisible under-
standing of the social body.6 When Christianity loses sight of its social
28 Ola Sigurdson

body, embodiment becomes reduced to the body of the individual and,

moreover, this individual body gradually became more and more
insignificant for the understanding of Christianity that was defined as a
‘‘faith’’, i.e. a mental state rather than, as earlier, something like a
practice. When the social body became a colourless sociological or
juridical concept, the relationship between God and human beings was
conceived of as an affair between God and the soul and Christianity lost
sight of the body.7 This is, to be sure, the highly intricate history of
secularization that I am trying to retell, but to keep the long story short,
I wish to conclude by saying that this history of the privatization of faith
also meant the individualization of the body, which, together with the
philosophical and cultural paradigm shift, had as an effect the
objectification of the body. The body became mute.
As might have become clear above, I think that Nietzsche’s critique of
Christianity also is a critique of the objectification of the body. The
objectification of the body means that we conceive of the body as, for
instance, in a crude version of Cartesianism, something like a vehicle in
which I myself am the driver. Or it means that we do not think of the
body as really a part of ourselves. This can result either in a neglect of
the body or in too much attention, or both at the same time. I would
suggest, in passing, that some of the current cultural complaints against
the contempt for the body exhibited by ancient or not-so-ancient history
sounds a bit preposterous, given the severe disciplining of the body that
is suggested by popular culture through diets, physical exercises and so
on. This also leads us into the question of the body and Michel
Foucault’s notion of biopower as a political aspect of the objectification
of the body, that has to do with an ‘‘explosion of numerous and diverse
techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of
populations’’ by modern governments.8 The objectification of the body
is a way to control the body, not only for us as individuals but also for
the powers that be. This objectification is, of course, not always
something negative. For example, if I break my leg and the ambulance
takes me to the hospital, I do not particularly wish the medical doctor to
respect me as an autonomous subject, but rather to ease my pain as fast
as possible. Respect for me as a living person may come later. But at all
times to conceive of the body as an object at your disposal, or perhaps at
the disposal of scientific research, leaves important aspects of what it
means to be an embodied creature out of the picture and also has
political consequences of no small importance.
But if you wish to counter the objectification of the body and instead
speak of the living body, it is not easy to see how this could be done.
One reason for this is that it is hard to establish any unambiguous
 How to speak of the body? 29

definition of the body if you, as Nietzsche, regard the body as a

historical phenomenon. Consider Nietzsche’s insight in On the Geneal-
ogy of Morality, that ‘‘all concepts in which an entire process is
semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no
history is definable.’’9 In a way, the body is a pure example of
something that withdraws from language at the same time that its
only possibility to come up is through language. This means that it is
not easy to know where to begin if you would like to make the body the
theme of your investigation. The philosopher Stephen Crites suggests
that to talk about the body is in a way to talk about an abstraction, since
the body itself is a reification of a particular function of the human self
that cannot be detached from her consciousness: ‘‘Neither disembodied
minds nor mindless bodies can appear in stories. There the self is given
whole, as an activity in time.’’10 These worries, expressed by Nietzsche
and Crites, have to do with the concern for avoiding the objectification
of the body. As a phenomenon that transcends speech, but not
independent of speech, the body is vulnerable to speech, because any
speech, philosophical or theological, may well lead to a reification of the
body. The question, then, is whether there are any strategies that let us
conceptualize the body without reducing it to any static definition. If
we do not speak of the body, we force the body to silence, and if we do
speak of the body, we may as well force the body to silence anyhow,
since this might mean that we reduce the body to an unequivocal entity.
This is, of course, something that the discourse of the body has in
common with other discourses on phenomena that transcend speech:
How can you speak of the other without reducing the alterity of the
other to the same?
Before I turn to theology and phenomenology for their suggestions on
how to speak of the body, I shall finish this section by saying something
about why I think the body hardly is independent of language, or why
nature and culture are intertwined. It might seem counter-intuitive to
suggest that the body is discursively mediated. After all, do I not have
an immediate experience of myself as embodied and of my body as
present to me, or perhaps better, as me? Does not the idea of a ‘‘social
construction of the body’’ dissolve the materiality of the body and
transform it into something more ghostly? But far from wanting to
dissolve the materiality of the body, I regard its materiality, as does the
philosopher Judith Butler, as the object of critical investigation, not its
presupposition. To refer to the materiality of the body should not be
understood as a reference to some fundament given before theory or
language that is just simply there in any unproblematic way. To refer to
the materiality of the body is to invoke what Susan Hekman, in a
30 Ola Sigurdson

discussion of Butler, calls ‘‘a sedimented history of materiality’’.11 What

confronts us when we try to speak or write of the body is not the
material body in itself, but different human representations of the body.
This does not mean that our discourse creates the body in any absolute
sense, but what the body is to us, in all its materiality, is something we
only have access to through everything we say and write about
the body. The ghostlike quality of the body is rather that it is both
nature and culture, and thus escapes any attempt to one-sidedly claim
the one or the other. I would say that any effort to reduce the body to
nature or culture, to corpse, matter, spirit or discourse, explicitly or
implicitly calls for the aspects that have been left out of the description.
To say the same thing in another way: I do not claim that the biological
body should not be a part of our conception of what the body is or is not
interesting for theology and philosophy, but the longer I have studied
embodiment, the more I have been convinced that it is an abstraction to
separate anatomy from history and discourse.

Doctrinal theology and the body

I shall now turn to the question how theology tries to speak of the body.
The first thing we can establish is that there is no classical locus for any
doctrine of the body. There is no somatology as there is an ecclesiology
or eschatology, but rather, somatology would be a part of anthropology
and/or Christology. One could say that any doctrinal reflection that has
been done on the body in classical dogmatics has taken place in the
margins. But that does not mean that this reflection has been non-
existent. Consider, for instance, how the question of the resurrection of
the body came up towards the end of the second century. Where the
earliest theologians had spoken more generally of the resurrection of the
‘‘dead’’ or of the ‘‘body’’ (soma or corpus), theology at this time started to
talk about the resurrection of the ‘‘flesh’’ (sarx or caro). The term sarx
would then be understood, not as in the apostle Paul, where sarx
denoted human beings in their earthly sphere with its inclination to sin,
but as human beings in their earthly, embodied guise in contrast to the
divine, immortal Spirit. When the Christian church confronted inter-
pretations of the gospel from the side of Docetism (that maintained that
the body of Christ was not a real, physical body) and Gnosticism (that
maintained that salvation meant salvation from the body), one of its
main points against these movements was that the resurrected body

both the resurrected body of Christ and the resurrection that his
disciples look forward to
really was a physical body and not just a
 How to speak of the body? 31

phantom-body. This was a way of defending not just the salvation of the
body in its physical shape, but also the salvation of the whole created
world and the conviction that the individual will find his or her
salvation together with others.12 In the creeds that were formulated
around the year 200
one of which we know in a later development as
the apostolic creed
the believer confessed resurrectio carnis, that is the
‘‘resurrection of the flesh’’, and not the resurrection of mortuorum or
corporum, that is the ‘‘resurrection of the dead’’ or of the ‘‘body’’.13
Or consider, perhaps more importantly, the great debates about the
nature of the incarnation. Incarnation comes from the Latin incarnatio,
derived from the verb incarnare which means, literally, ‘‘transform to
flesh’’, which means ‘‘becoming human’’. The doctrine of the incarna-
tion
the arrival of the divine logos in human flesh
was formulated in
a manner that has become normative (but hardly final) for at least the
so-called Chalcedonian Christian churches through the council of
Chalcedon 451. The complete Christological definition that was agreed
upon at the council shall not be repeated here but a short part of a
sentence that claims that Christ was complete in his divinity as well as
his humanity, he is ‘‘truly God and truly man, composed of rational
soul and body’’, where the Greek word for body is soma. The
Chalcedonian definition does not say anything particular about the
nature of this soma, but the reason for mentioning the definition here is
that centuries of debates and disputes about the divinity and humanity
of Christ preceded it. This means, among other things, that the
development up to (and also after) Chalcedon was the way the
Christian church at that time discussed what it meant to be a human
being. The Christological debates were not Christological in any narrow
sense of the word, but also anthropological in their dispute over what
the humanity of human beings consisted in. If the divine logos had
become a real human being in Christ and not just a ghost, what does the
humanity of human beings that the logos has taken up really consist in?
This brings me back to my question on how to speak of the body,
since these doctrinal disputes and definitions easily could lead to either
an abstract notion of the body or its objectification. This is not
necessarily so, but depends on how you interpret what the Chalcedo-
nian definition (and other creedal definitions) really were after. Should
they be understood as authoritative propositions with the aim of
establishing an unequivocal understanding of the incarnation or,
perhaps, rather as grammatical rules establishing a framework for
talking about Christ and avoiding both what were considered devia-
tions from a proper understanding and a presumptuous claim to know
too much about the unknowable God? In other words, are these
32 Ola Sigurdson

definitions first- or second-order propositions? Are they ‘‘about Christ’’,

or are they ‘‘about statements about Christ’’?14
I would argue for the latter suggestion, because otherwise these
definitions would in practice be an attempt to replace the statements
and stories about Christ in the New Testament with a more abstract and
philosophical-sounding definition. But that was hardly the intention of
the council fathers. Rather, their understanding of the doctrinal
language was ‘‘apophatic’’ and thus the doctrinal definitions should
in that case be understood as a language that would like to limit what
was considered to be unfruitful understandings of what salvation in
Christ consisted in. Its business was existential rather than speculative.
The purpose of the doctrine of the incarnation in Christian theology is,
generally put, to speak of the alterity of God in a way that is compatible
with the presence of God in our world. It would like to avoid stressing
God’s alterity to the point that it turns God into something sublime,
something radically absent, but on the other hand, also would like to
avoid the other ditch of emphasizing God’s presence to the point were
God becomes identified with the world. The purpose of the doctrine of
the incarnation is to conceive of the relation between transcendence and
immanence in a way that respects the integrity and the solidarity of
both.
The purpose of the doctrinal language was not to replace the
statements and stories about Christ in the New Testament, but to
enhance the understanding of these texts. But not only to enhance their
understanding, as theoretical exercise, but also their understanding as
practice or way of life. ‘‘Doctrine’’ had as its goal life as a disciple both
in the aspect of vita activa and vita contemplativa. Theology was not the
academic and theoretical enterprise it often is today at modern
universities, but something with a more direct existential importance.
This brings us finally to a problem with the way theology tries to speak
of the body today. Since theology has inherited a somewhat abstract
understanding of the historical doctrines from modernity, its anthro-
pology as well as its Christology often seems quite distant from our
daily, existential concerns. And this abstract shimmer, something I think
we can find in one way or another in most modern theology from
Schleiermacher to Barth, reduces important aspects of what it means to
be a human being, such as historicity, subjectivity, creativity
and
embodiment. What is lacking, not least concerning the understanding
of embodiment, is the reception of Christology and anthropology in
tangible, historical practices. One needs to ask as a theologian
and I
think this is being done increasingly in Liberation theology, Feminist
theology, Queer theology and post-modern theology
about the
 How to speak of the body? 33

anthropological implications the doctrine of the incarnation has for the

being-in-the-world of human beings, or the concrete reception of the
incarnation in human practices. Theology needs to recover the sense of
the incarnation not primarily as an intellectual doctrine or problem, but
as an existential problem related to the life-world. If not, I must say that
I cannot see how theology would be able to speak of the body in any
sense that takes into account the historicity of the representations and
the experiences of the body.
If one is interested in how to speak of the body from a theological
perspective, as I am, and also wish to avoid abstraction and objectifica-
tion, it will not do to remain within a purely theoretical understanding
of theology. In fact, the body has been a theme for theology through not
only this doctrinal discourse, but rather also the more important
discourses on the body would be, I suppose, ascetical, liturgical and
mystical discourses. Here the body becomes a central concern in a way
that it has not been in the more doctrinal discourse. Or perhaps it would
be more in line with what I have already claimed above to say that the
connection between the doctrinal discourse and the other discourses
must be retrieved. It might be that the distance between these is more
an invention of modern academic interpretations of history that wish to
distinguish between theory and practice, than something experienced
in history. Be that as it may, theology needs to find a way of seeing the
theological implications of how the body is conceived of in, for instance,
asceticism or mysticism. This can not mean just a repetition of these
discourses, but needs to be a critical interpretation of their versions of
embodiment. I would suggest that theology here could do with some
theoretical help from phenomenology.

Phenomenology and the body

The German philosopher Edmund Husserl founded modern phenom-
enology as a philosophical movement in the beginning of the twentieth
century. Its concern is, in the words of Robert Sokolowski, ‘‘the study of
human experience and of the way things present themselves to us in and
through such experience’’.15 This interest in ‘‘the way things present
themselves to us’’ not according to any pre-conceived theoretical or
dogmatic stance but ‘‘in themselves’’ meant that phenomenological
philosophers turned to the study of the life-world as the pre-scientific
and pre-philosophic horizon for all human theoretical and practical
activities. The life-world is not possible to explain or put into a theoretical
formula, since it is more an open field for the actions and projects of
34 Ola Sigurdson

human beings than a world that could be objectified. In the words of one
of the most prominent phenomenological philosophers, the French
philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘[t]he world is not what I think,
but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am
in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible’’.16
Rather than understanding philosophy as the ‘‘reflection of a pre-
existing truth’’, its task is ‘‘like art, the act of bringing truth into being’’.17
Given this interest in things as they present themselves as phenomena in
the life-world, it is hardly surprising that phenomenological philoso-
phers soon became interested in the body, among other, in comparison to
philosophy’s classical themes, more ‘‘mundane’’ things.
Fundamental for phenomenology’s approach to the problem of how
to speak of the body is Husserl’s distinction between the body as a
lifeless, physical object (Körper) and the body as living and animated
(Leib).18 In contrast to the philosophical tradition that I mentioned
previously, there is a conscious attempt to avoid reducing embodiment
to lifeless matter in contrast to soul. The experience of being embodied
could not be reduced to having a body, as the French philosopher
Gabriel Marcel would say, but consists rather in being a body. Or to
explain this with the help of another French philosopher, Michel Henry,
who has written several books on the body from a phenomenological
perspective, there is a fundamental distinction between the body (le
corps) and the flesh (la chair). The flesh, in Henry’s terminology, is
something like Husserl’s living body. If it is possible to divide the
body as a lifeless, physical object, or as le corps, into different parts or
reduce it to atoms, this is not possible with the living body, or la chair,
since the living body consists of ‘‘pleasure and pain, hunger and thirst,
desire and fatigue, strength and joy’’.19 This is essential for the
phenomenological understanding of the body: my experience of the
body is not the experience of a swarm of atoms or of an arm connected
to a trunk, for example in throwing a spear, but of different states
determining the whole of my existence. I could, to be sure, experience
how my head or my hands are tired after a day’s work, but this is rather
an experience of how my whole being is tired rather than just some
parts of my body.
What phenomenology offers is the possibility of speaking of the body
in a manner that strives beyond both an instrumental attitude and an
epistemic pessimism. In contrast to a totalizing theoretical attitude
whose consequence is depriving the ‘‘object’’ of its alterity, it allows us
to try to attain an ethically sustainable form of knowledge (in
Emmanuel Lévinas’ sense) that respects the alterity of the object of
inquiry and remains self-critical towards its own claims for knowledge.
 How to speak of the body? 35

It does not put itself in the theoretical position of a spectator as if the

body were a discrete object possible to separate absolutely from the
experience of embodiment. Again, the point is not to deny any
possibility or necessity to treat the body as an object, but this must be
seen as a methodological and ontological reduction of a more funda-
mental experience of embodiment. The body as a physical object subject
to mechanical laws is not some kind of epistemological fundament, but
a particular perspective with a particular purpose, dependent on a
more fundamental and pre-philosophical experience that can be
focused upon from within other theoretical attitudes. Merleau-Ponty
writes that ‘‘[t]o be a body, is to be tied to a certain world . . . our body is
not primarily in space: it is of it.’’20 The body is a part of the world, and
it is not possible to study it independently of the inquiring subject’s
own embodied experience of the world: the ‘‘experience of one’s own
body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject
and object from each other, and which gives us only the thought about
the body, or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the body or
the body in reality’’.21 In other words, the body as well as the experience
of the body always exist situated. That we still tend to regard the body
as an object has to do with our awareness of our own body through the
interaction with other bodies and objects in the world. The experience
of the living body in the world as the prerequisite or horizon for
the objectified body thus easily becomes invisible. Thereby, our
experience of the body turns into a representation of the body.
This is of high significance for the question of how to speak of the
body in theology without falling into abstraction or objectification.
Merleau-Ponty speaks of the body as ‘‘the vehicle of being in the world,
and having a body is, for a living creature, to be involved in a definite
environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continu-
ally committed to them’’.22 This means that the body is an existential
category. Representations of the body in theory or doctrine come later.
The body is, so to speak, the intermediary of the world as the repertoire
of our possibilities, from the simplest gestures to the highest expres-
sions of art. And this goes for religion too. Religion should and could
not be reduced to cognitive or emotive states of mind, a belief, when it
also, as in most traditional religions, is ‘‘a corpus of practical knowl-
edge’’.23 Post-Enlightenment, Protestant theology has more often than
not, as I have claimed already above, turned its eyes from the liturgies,
the gestures and the pictorial symbolism that have characterized earlier
Christian traditions and thus have been an integral part of their
particular mode of being in the world, being embodied. But before I
turn to theological ways of speaking of the body again, I shall conclude
36 Ola Sigurdson

this section with some critical remarks on phenomenology that will

help me to be more precise in the claims to speak of the body, even from
a theological perspective.
Not surprisingly, several objections to its philosophy of the body have
been put to phenomenology, both from inside of its own tradition and
from the outside. For instance, it has been claimed that Merleau-Ponty
has not incorporated sufficiently the importance of institutions for the
experience of the body. In both his earlier philosophy of the body and in
his later philosophy of the flesh, it is suggested that his concentration on
perception and language made him miss important insights on the
sociality of the body. Anthropologists, philosophers and sociologists
such as Marcel Mauss, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have
turned their attention to how the body is disciplined by the dialectics
between individual bodies and institutions, the latter which to a large
extent sets the conditions of possibility for the experience of the body as
my body. This kind of critique has also been put forward by feminist
theory in its claim that Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology have
naturalized a cultural construction of body, gender and sexuality.24
These points of criticism point to the presence of an insufficient
historization of the body in at least some versions of phenomenology.
Merleau-Ponty has also been criticised for the theological connota-
tions of some central concepts in his phenomenology, such as ‘‘flesh’’
and ‘‘chiasm’’, which supposedly reminds us of the incarnation and the
cross.25 This would mean that Merleau-Ponty is not sufficiently aware of
the cultural context of his philosophy of the body and thus presents as a
universal philosophy of the body what in fact is a decapitated version of
Christian theology. Although such criticisms could be valid, this does
not mean, I think, that they are fatal. The transcendental approach in
early phenomenology, which at least often gives the impression of being
a-historical, has through the internal critique of Heidegger, Gadamer
and Ricoeur been replaced by a hermeneutical awareness of the context-
dependent nature of all phenomenological descriptions. Understanding,
even phenomenological understanding, is always already situated in a
particular life-world or tradition. A phenomenological description of the
experience of embodiment does not, as little as any other discourse,
investigate its field of inquiry from a transcendental perspective that
establishes a foundational ontology for all other theoretical approaches.
The experiences and dispositions that phenomenology describes are
mediated by a socially discursive, historically and religiously contingent
context and should not be regarded as apodictic evidence for all people
at all times and in all places. I do not think that this means the end for all
pretensions to universality, but that is another question that I leave for
 How to speak of the body? 37

now. More importantly for my discussion here: even though phenom-

enology could not be understood as a foundational philosophy that
legitimizes theological claims for knowledge, this does not mean that its
insights should not be regarded as enlightening for a theological study
of how to speak of the body.

Theology and the body revisited

I do not wish to make the distinction between phenomenology and
theology absolute, nor conflate the two. But still, one could perhaps
sense something of a fruitful division of labour. If the task of
phenomenology has been to lay bare the quasi-transcendental struc-
tures of embodiment, the task of theology could be to explore in greater
detail how the body is involved in an existential drama of salvation
where it is not so much ‘‘finite’’ as it is ‘‘fallen’’ and ‘‘redeemed’’.
According to the philosopher Donn Welton, the body in the biblical
texts is placed ‘‘at the intersection of good and evil, life and death,’’
which means that it is involved in all sorts of conflicts.26 The biblical
texts are narratives of the redemption of the body rather than any sort
of phenomenological accounts of the structures of embodiment.
Embodiment is ‘‘dramatized’’ or ‘‘symbolized’’ rather than ‘‘explained’’
or ‘‘described,’’ but it is quite clear from these stories that the conflicts
hardly are religious in any modern and narrow sense of the word, but
concern psychological, ethical and political matters. Even the stories of
Christ in the Gospels are told as a succession of states of embodiment,
according to Luce Irigaray:
conception, birth, growth, fasting in the desert, immersion in the
River Jordan, treks to the mountain or walks along the water’s edge,
meals, festivals, the laying-on of hands, the draining of physical
strength after a healing, transfiguration, trials, suffering, death,
resurrection, ascension . . . 27
In the biblical texts, there is hardly any interest for human embodiment
as a private or discrete phenomenon. But indirectly, through its
soteriological, sacramental and ecclesiological contexts, one can distin-
guish certain qualities of its distinctive understanding of embodiment:
embodiment is an integral part of a human’s existence, given with and
through the creation of human beings by God, and not something
incidental. Human embodiment is, however, not regarded as a finished
and smooth totality, but rather as a communicative and expressive
medium for a person’s relationships with divinity as well as with other
38 Ola Sigurdson

human beings. The personal body of the individual Christian cannot be

divorced from incorporation in the social body, the body of Christ.
Moreover, the body is open to being transformed towards salvation in
communion with Christ. The body with its limbs, functions and actions
shall in the general resurrection be liberated from the quasi-autono-
mous power that has ruled it and finally live a life ruled by the spirit.
What phenomenology could contribute to theological attempts at
talking of the body seems quite clear: it offers a different perspective on
the body. The body is not only or not primarily an entity that can be
objectified and focused upon before, beside or independently of the
particular manner of being-in-the world that could be exemplified by a
particular version of Christianity (or any other religion). Rather,
embodiment is focused upon as a particular mode of relationality
towards both other human beings and God
and even towards the rest
of creation and towards one’s own self. It now becomes clear, I think,
why it is not enough to turn to doctrine if the purpose is to speak of the
body from a theological perspective. Doctrines, if understood as
theoretical propositions, do not capture the embodied nature of
Christian or any other religious practice. What is needed is instead to
look at how embodiment has been played out in a particular habitus
mediated by a certain practice. Indeed, phenomenology could offer a
critical perspective not only on embodiment as such but on Christian
doctrine and doctrinal theology as a whole. In his both insightful and
highly problematic lecture ‘‘Phenomenology and Theology’’ from 1927,
Martin Heidegger suggests that Christianity could be summed up by
the notion of ‘‘faith’’, which is synonymous to ‘‘regeneration’’ (Wieder-
geburt).28 ‘‘Faith’’ should not be understood as an instantaneous event,
but as a historical process that has its beginning in the message of
salvation in Christ and which becomes tangible and visible, that is
embodied in the particular historical existence of the believer. If we
interpret this historical existence not as an individual existence but as a
social existence, religion becomes what the linguist and author John
Swedenmark has termed a ‘‘practice of regeneration’’. Religion,
according to Swedenmark, is ‘‘a conviction of the possibility to
reorganize the self in interplay with ideals and fellow human beings’’,
and I would like to add that as a historical practice, it takes place not on
one’s own but as a social, embodied existence.29
But at the same time, there is perhaps also a contribution that theology
could give to phenomenology in being a reflection on a concrete,
historical mode of being-in-the-world. I would suggest that Jacques
Derrida, in an objection against Heidegger, understands it quite appro-
priately, namely that the abstract and the concrete never could be
 How to speak of the body? 39

separated entirely but that they depend on each other. When Heidegger
wishes to distinguish phenomenology from theology and claims that the
former is an ontological foundation for the latter’s merely ontic claims, it
seems like he tries to do exactly that. As Derrida puts it in an interview,
Heidegger said . . . that there would be no revelation of Offenbarung
without the prior structure of Offenbarkeit, without the possibility of
revelation and the possibility of manifestation. That is Heidegger’s
position. I am not sure. Perhaps it is through Offenbarung that
Offenbarkeit becomes thinkable, historically.30
Derrida is hesitant whether Offenbarung, as the historical event, gives
rise to the possibility of thinking the structure of Offenbarkeit, or
whether it is the structure of Offenbarkeit that is the prior condition of
possibility for any Offenbarung to occur. I would say that Derrida’s own
position on this question is hesitancy itself; the question is impossible to
answer. Any abstract thought has a concrete historical occasion that it is
dependent on, but this does not mean that you could reduce the
abstract thought to its historical origin.
If it could be shown that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body may
be a decapitated version of Christian theology, as I suggested above, and
that he is not sufficiently aware of the cultural and historical context of his
philosophy, I do not think that this in itself would be fatal for his
philosophy. Once we have accepted that all our thinking is thinking
‘‘downstream’’ in relation to the words, practices and traditions of
previous generations, we become free in a relative sense to maintain a
critical stance towards earlier thought, even though we are never free
from tradition or history in any absolute sense.31 Even if the phenomen-
ology of Merleau-Ponty is not independent of Christian history and
doctrine, I cannot see that this would make his philosophy just a
disguised version of Christian theology, since one could always claim
that Christianity, as a historical and contingent tradition, has given rise to
a particular mode of access to embodiment not necessarily limited to its
historical manifestation. On the other hand, to refuse to see this particular
historical connection, if there is one in this case, would be a mistake in the
sense that we then would be blind to the limitations of any philosophical
or theological conception of the body and of embodiment. The assertion
that there might be a historical religious background to a certain
phenomenology of the body does not in itself display any indifference
towards other religious traditions. As Paul Ricoeur once put it, to be
‘‘content . . . with tracing the broad hermeneutic strands of just
one religion’’ is just to recognize the limits of one’s own claims for
knowledge.32
40 Ola Sigurdson

Phenomenology and theology interpret the body on the same level of

thought
neither can be said to be more primary
but they do it with
different purposes. The purpose of phenomenology is helpful for
theology in that it offers resources for a self-critical, reflexive attitude
for a theological investigation of how to speak of the body. Theology’s
contribution could be said to consist in both supplying a concrete,
historical life-world for phenomenological investigation of embodiment
and also, at the same time, reminding any particular phenomenology of
its limits. My intention in this article has not been to suggest that
Merleau-Ponty has the final phenomenological word on embodiment,
but I have been using his philosophy as both a well-known and highly
influential example of an important conversation partner for theology
in a genealogical research of embodiment as a way of conceiving the
being-in-the world of human beings.

Conclusion
I wish to conclude with a few words on where this all leaves us
concerning the question of how to speak of the body. One of my
conclusions is that there is no possibility for any unequivocal
philosophy or theology of the body. Any such attempt would be a
version of the domestication of the body through its objectification and
abstraction. It is not possible to capture embodiment in any singular
concept, metaphor or model. For theology, it will not do to present a
model of a normative somatology through a detailed and systematic
account of the implications of biblical texts and theological tradition.
What is needed instead is a genealogical account of the traces of the
body in biblical and theological texts as well as in religious practices
such as prayer, liturgy, hymns, ascetism, and so on, with the aim of
correlating this theological tradition, critically interpreted, with the
articulations and configurations of embodiment today. It is also
important to understand that our understanding of embodiment is
primarily of a practical nature; it is an experience of embodiment in and
through all our relations. There is no final account of being embodied.
This would also mean that the understanding of embodiment might
be narrative rather than conceptual. This is not only because the body
has a history in more general sense, but also because my own
individual body and its interactions with other bodies has a history.
Several philosophies and theologies of the body speak as if there were
some kind of ‘‘normal’’ experience of embodiment, an experience, as
feminist theory has been quick to remind us, that is often that of being a
 How to speak of the body? 41

thirty year old, healthy male body. If there is not something abnormal in
being very young or very old, ill, pregnant, disabled or female, we need
to consider our embodiment as something that has an individual
history. Indeed, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body as well as
several ascetic practices remind us of the fact that theology often has
focused upon the transformation of the body, regardless of what we
might want to say about these beliefs and practices.
Finally, besides the need of speaking of several aspects of embodiment,
such as an individual and a social body, a liturgical body, an erotic body
and a grotesque body, what is needed is also a historical, phenomen-
ological and theological account of the body’s senses. As we all know, in
the Christian church, different senses have been regarded as the
theologically most noble sense during different historical periods: vision
in Orthodox Christianity, audition in Protestantism. But this hierarchy
needs to be critically studied, since one could suspect that some of the
theoretical accounts might be quite different from the established
practices in the same historical period. But this is not the only reason
for a theology of the senses. As theology often has realized in passing,
our senses are ways of relating towards each other and towards God, and
as there are different manners of looking, listening, touching and so on,
there is need of a more systematic investigation into the theological and/
or philosophical implications of the different way of sensing.
Speaking of the body is a way of conceiving our embodiment with
practical implications. It matters how we speak of the body. Thus we
need to carefully and critically investigate the implications of both
historical and contemporary ways of being embodied. If we agree with
Nietzsche that the body is not the firm, stable foundation we perhaps
sometimes think it is, we could instead characterize it as an enigmatic
dimension of ourselves that constantly faces the invisible and transcen-
dent. The aim of a philosophy or theology of the body would, in that
case, hardly be to make the unknown more known through the well
known but, rather, to make the well known less well known through
what remains strange.

Ola Sigurdson
University of Gothenburg
Department of Religious Studies
Theology and Classical Philology
P.O. Box 200
405 30 Gothenburg
Sweden
ola.sigurdson@religion.gu.se
42 Ola Sigurdson

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (trans. R. J. Hollingdale;
London: Penguin Books, 1968).
2. See my book Himmelska kroppar: Inkarnation, blick, kroppslighet (Logos/Pathos 6;
Gothenburg: Glänta, 2006).
3. See Dalia Judovitz, The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 2001), 70 and Drew Leder, ’’A Tale of Two Bodies: the
Cartesian Corpse and the Lived Body’’, in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (ed.
Donn Welton; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 119.
4. See Lilli Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 44
77 and 165
207.
5. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment and Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999),
5.
6. Cf. Henri de Lubac, Corpus mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen Âge, étude
historique (2d rev. and enl. ed.; Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1949).
7. See my book that bears the preliminary title Postsekulär politisk teologi: Religion,
modernitet och mänskliga rättigheter (forthcoming).
8. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (vol. 1; London: Penguin, 1990), 140.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J
Hollingdale; New York: Vintage Press, 1989), 45.
10. Stephen Crites, ’’The Narrative Quality of Experience’’, in Why Narrative? Readings in
Narrative Theology (ed. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones; Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1989), 85.
11. Susan Hekman, ’’Material Bodies’’, in Body and Flesh, 67f.
12. Gisberth Greshake, ’’Theologiegeschichtliche und systematische Untersuchungen
zum Verständnis der Auferstehung’’, in Resurrectio mortuorum: Zum theologischen
Verständnis der leiblichen Auferstehung (ed. Gisbert Greshake and Jacob Kremer;
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buschgesellschaft, 1986), 193.
13. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (3d ed.; Harlow: Longman, 1986), 163
166.
14. Donald M. MacKinnon, ’’’Substance’ in christology
a cross-bench view’’, in Christ,
Faith and History (Cambridge Studies in Christology; ed. Stephen W. Sykes and John P.
Clayton; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 291.
15. Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 2.
16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Colin Smith; London:
Routledge, 1992), xvif.
17. Ibid., xx.
18. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen
Philosophie. 2, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution (Husserliana:
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4; ed. Marty Biemel; Haag: Nijhoff, 1969).
19. Michel Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 27.
20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ibid., 148.
21. Ibid., 198 f.
22. Ibid., 82.
23. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and
Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 47.
24. Judith Butler, ’’Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist
Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’’, in The Thinking Muse:
 How to speak of the body? 43

Feminism and Modern French Philosophy (ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young;
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1989), 85
100
25. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 178.
26. Donn Welton, ’’Biblical Bodies’’, in Body and Flesh, 229.
27. Luce Irigaray, ’’Equal to Whom?’’ in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (ed.
Graham Ward; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 203.
28. Martin Heidegger, ’’Phenomenologie und Theologie’’, in Wegmarken (vol. 9; Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 1976), 53.
29. John Swedenmark, ’’Bortom bortträngningen
Kristendomen och dialektiken
oidipus
identifikation’’, Divan: Tidskrift för psykoanalys och kultur, 1
2 (2004): 72.
30. Jacques Derrida, ’’On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc
Marion’’, in God, the Gift and Postmodernism (ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J.
Scanlon; Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), 73.
31. Cf. Mats Rosengren, ’’On Being Downstream’’, in The Past’s Presence: Essays on the
Historicity of Philosophy (ed. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Hans Ruin;
Södertörn Philosophical Studies 3; Huddinge: Södertörns Högskola, 2005), 203
218.
32. Paul Ricoeur, ’’Expérience et langage dans le discours religieux’’, in Phénoménologie et
théologie (ed. Jean-François Courtine; Paris: Criterion, 1992), 20.