The Body of the Cross: Holy Victims and the Invention of the Atonement 9780823298020

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The Body of the Cross

The Body of the Cross Holy Victims and the Invention of the Atonement

travis e. ables

Fordham University Press new york

2022

Copyright © 2022 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22

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First edition

Contents

Preface Introduction

vii 1

1

The Way of Darkness and the Way of Light: The Cross as Boundary Marker in Early Christianity

15

2

The Body of the Martyr and the Body of Christ

37

3

The Politics of Holy Bodies and the Invention of the Cross

57

4

Between Hope and Fear: Monastic Bodies at the Foot of the Cross

75

5

Bodies Pierced by the Cross: Popular Devotion, Popular Heresy

101

6

The Bitter Christ and the Sweet Christ: The Cross and the German Reformations

129

7

Holy Bodies and the Sacrifice of the Self: Divine Wrath, Discipline, and the Cross in the Reformations

156

Conclusion

187

Notes

199

Bibliography

235

Index

251

Preface

The end of 2020 is a perplexing time to finish a book on religious violence. When I first began this project in 2013, I was setting out to answer, for my own satisfaction, a question that the church history students at Eden Theological Seminary kept posing to me: When did Christians start thinking of the death of Jesus Christ as bearing the penalty for our sin? They rightly asked the question this way, after weeks of me relentlessly emphasizing the malleability of the symbol of the cross in Western Christian history. We had just come out of a section on the beguines and medieval mysticism, and Marguerite Porete was giving us particular trouble. The cross was a meaning-making symbol of empowerment for authors like Marguerite or Mechthild of Magdeburg; but that remained difficult to recognize for many of my mainline Protestant students. For them, the symbol still connoted gender-inflected semiotics of violence—even after we focused on naming assumptions and identifying cultural frameworks. Thus the question about the association of the cross and substitutionary violence. At the end of the discussion, I gave my best answer—late sixteenthcentury Puritan covenant theology was where penal substitution emerges systematically—but I couldn’t account for how theology got to that point. The answer turned out to be more complex than I anticipated, but it is what I have tried to narrate in this book. I wasn’t primarily thinking about the nature of holy victims as a social and political problem in contemporary America when I started writing. But the next few years seemed marked with a deluge of public violence: school shootings and other gun massacres as well as police brutality and

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vigilantism against Black Americans. I kept a list of events, for a while, to try to chronicle what was happening. But it proved impossible to keep up. And then COVID-19 hit, and Black Lives Matter was back in the public conversation; and suddenly the debate in American discourse was exactly who was expendable for the sake of the economy. The question of what kind of victims American political theology requires became unavoidable. The book before you chronicles a prehistory of violence that subtends both these issues. It concerns the violence of the cross, sublimated into saints and sinners who died for the Christian body. I call this the logic of vicarity: those victims whose sufferings preserved and transmitted holiness to the church. They were the saints and the reprobate, and Jesus Christ was only one of them. By the end of the historical process, the cross did indeed come to stand for the wrath of God visited upon Christ as the holy substitute, but the real story here is the long tradition of holy victimhood that prepared the way for that conceptual innovation. The social body continues to demand the deaths of victims today; my hope is that this book can encourage Christian theologians to remember that we cannot think about the symbol of the cross without taking this reality into account. We reassure ourselves that we traffic in abstractions, but sometimes theological decisions exact a cost from real bodies. I want to thank friends and fellow travelers for encouragement, conversation, and assistance; in a few cases, some also asked for chapters that helped form the thinking of this book: Patout Burns, Oliver Crisp, Ashley Cocksworth, David Dault, Dan McClain, Kelly Murphy, Kathryn Reklis, Justin Jeffcoat Schedtler, Marquisha Lawrence Scott, Martin Shuster, Matthew Tapie, John Thatamanil, and Ian Zuckerman. The team at the Anglican Theological Review at the time deserve a special thanks: Ashley Broadrick, Jason Fout, Corey Stewart Hassman, Scott MacDougall, Rob MacSwain, Kate Sonderegger, and Jim Turrell. I didn’t get to publish the book with him, but my immense gratitude to Mike Gibson for his early editorial interest and encouragement. John Garza at Fordham has been fantastic to work with: thanks! M. Shawn Copeland and Cynthia Crysdale signed reader reports for Fordham, so I thank them by name as well as the first anonymous reader. Academics like to complain about peer review, and it is true, it’s often broken; but the three reports I received were extraordinary, both for their insight into my thesis and argument and particularly for their incisive critiques. Sometimes the system works. Thank you to them, though I do have to express my regret to Crysdale: I couldn’t get Lonergan or Girard in this book (for different reasons), but they are significant omissions, and I do hope to remedy that in future work. Natalie Wigg-Stevenson

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read this manuscript twice, and there is no way to express how much conversations with her over the years have formed my thinking and my voice. The kinship in our work may very well be apparent only to us, but is real and deep. Without her critical eye, enthusiasm, and generosity, this book would be a much lesser thing. Thank you. I am finishing this book in a cabin above Pine Junction, Colorado, on a weekend retreat. I look out the window at the remains of the 2000 Hi Meadow wildfire; deer keep wandering through the front yard. It was a birthday gift from Holly. That says everything about what I owe her—her unwavering belief in my work, even as my career paths keep shifting and the writing process has stretched on for years longer than it was supposed to. (She’s also very patiently waiting for me to get back to writing my novel!) Hearing her and our daughters Claire and Charlotte laughing at Queer Eye downstairs while I track down some image from a European museum, or puzzle over a bizarre turn of phrase in an ancient text, has been surreal sometimes, but it is the memory I hold in my head for the writing of the last stretch of this book. Holly and I have found that pursuing our independent passions have made us better partners for each other, and the bond of trust and support that makes our marriage what it is has been my strength. Thank you. I wrote this as part of the new cohort we are currently calling independent scholars or alternative academics (#Altac), and getting access to resources was sometimes difficult. Some of the folks named above helped out with that; I won’t incriminate them, but I do owe them a special debt of gratitude. We lost my brother and my father while I was writing this book: Cameron Dane Ables, 1983–2017, and Bruce Evan Ables, 1953–2018. I dedicate it to their memory. Fourth Sunday of Advent 2020 Travis E. Ables

I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. —Colossians 1:24 No one, not even God, can substitute himself for the victim. —Emmanuel Levinas

Introduction

In 1527, the first Anabaptist martyr in Zurich, Felix Mantz, was drowned in the Limmat River by the civil authorities. His mother’s weeping carried across the waters from the fish market, and as the waves closed over his head, he quoted the last words of Jesus: In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum, “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.” In 1583, John Foxe published the fourth and final edition of his Acts and Monuments of These Latter Dayes—better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.1 Over the course of those fifty-six years, a new idea had emerged in Western Christianity: the death of Jesus Christ appeased the wrath of God; but the wrath of God was visited against religious dissidents in acts of state terror first. The backdrop of this new idea may have been based in ancient concepts, but it was reimagined and transformed completely. We take it for granted today, but the idea of penal substitutionary atonement, that Jesus Christ died to bear the anger of God against human sin, emerged relatively recently in Christian history. The belief that human flesh absorbed the divine penalty on behalf of the Christian body is ancient, however. There have always been human beings who bore God’s punishment for the church. Heretics were excluded to preserve the sanctity of the Christian community; saints died so that the church might participate in their holiness. They were holy victims, and their lifeless bodies were the site of a transference: the anger of God passed from the church onto the reprobate, and the merit of the saint passed from the saint to the community. This pattern first sprang from apocalyptic patterns of social differentiation in the first and second centuries, but by

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the fourth century a kind of industry had developed for the production and dissemination of holy victims, with the cult of martyrs. I call this pattern the logic of vicarity: holy victims suffered on behalf of the body, absorbing divine punishment and transferring excess merit. At times this logic of vicarity had grown so complex that it was never entirely clear on which side of the line, saint or heretic, some of the more radical figures should be located. Enmeshed with this complex of ideas was the figure of the savior, Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected, but also instantiated in the body of the church and distributed in its sacramental system. The flesh of Jesus was one of these holy substitutes, of course, but it was surprisingly late in the game that his body took on the function of the paradigmatic holy victim— much less the sole holy victim—whose death merited salvation for human beings. There is a long history of Christians who made meaning of their suffering by imagining it as a kind of participation in Christ, even a repetition (I call this christomorphism); there is also a long undertow to that history by which the unwilling suffering, even death, of certain people was justified by the same logic. But the very idea that Christ’s suffering and death earned something for the Christian community was borrowed— borrowed from the holy victims of the first few Christian centuries. By the Middle Ages this concept had become normalized, but Jesus wasn’t jealous: there were still plenty of holy victims who earned merit for the community, and there were also plenty of reprobate victims who were suffering divine punishment for it. In the Reformation something changed, and in its wake these patterns shifted and congealed in a new idea. Penal substitution had a reductionistic bent that located two concepts—merit transfer and vicarious suffering—in one body, the flesh of Jesus Christ. But it also had a recursive backlash: as the focus of salvation narrowed down to the relationship of the individual believers and Christ via the fragile bridge of faith, the sources of merit contracted. Salvation was solus Christus—by Christ alone. But punishment couldn’t be restricted the same way. The social function of reprobation was too useful; the Christian body depended on it.

The Body of the Cross Colossians 1:24 inspired this book’s title, for it encodes participation in Christ in a complex set of relationships, all surrounding the term body: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” The author did not simply speak of participation in

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Christ, of sharing Christ’s sufferings. He spoke of this participation in terms of bodies. The author suffered in his flesh, his body, the sufferings that Christ bore in his own body, and those sufferings were on behalf of Christ’s metonymic body, the church. For the majority of Christian history, the flashpoint of this participation was yet another body: hoc est corpus meum, the eucharistic body of Christ. The polyvocal and ambiguous nature of the term body is at the heart of how Christians have historically expressed the dynamic between the believer and Christ. The believer’s body is said by most Christian traditions to bear, in some meaningful way, divine purpose. It is created by God and will be raised from death by God. That body can even be elevated in extrahuman ways in many traditions; the phenomenon of the stigmata is only one of these corporal transformations. The Christian’s body is embedded within a nexus of metaphors, images, and subtexts. She is part of a community—the body of Christ—that bears a whole realm of associations with the physical person of Jesus Christ. She participates in a ritual, variously called Eucharist, communion, the Lord’s Supper, or the mass, that the community proclaims is the body and blood of Christ (in whatever sense one understands the copula is). Therefore, these three semantic domains—the physical self, church, Eucharist—are the themes to which this book returns repeatedly. Corporal metaphors give purchase on the otherwise vague idea of participation. When viewed from this perspective, each of these “bodies” becomes the body of the cross. They provide a way of understanding how the symbol of the cross has functioned throughout the centuries of Western Christianity. The heart of this book focuses on this complex of ideas in a very specific way: the question of who bears the suffering of Christ in their flesh. This is not just a question of who assumes that suffering for themselves (the saints), but also a question of those who are made to suffer it (the reprobate). Talking about the body of the cross, in other words, means we also have to ask about those excluded from the communion of Christ’s body. Telling this story therefore means looking at heretics, infidels, and blasphemers— and reexamining their presumed errors and the inherent correctness of “orthodoxy.” Contemporary scholarship treats the idea of heresy as a social category, and not a transhistorical essence. If we attend to the shifting configurations and transformations of the idea of orthodoxy in Western Christian history, then the orthodox-heretic binary becomes difficult to sustain. While it would be reductive to simply read the binary of orthodoxy-heresy in terms of power, it would also be obtuse to ignore that the reprobate body too is the body of the cross, whether that is the Gnostic or Jewish social body, or the literal body of the Waldensian or Cathar or Anabaptist. The process

4 / introduction

by which the church has engaged in strategies of social differentiation and centralization depends on holy victims, for we need the reprobates to tell us who we are, as the elect. Their punishment absorbs divine wrath so that blessing might be given to the elect body. It is the age-old logic of the scapegoat. As Constantine Cavafy knew, barbarians “were, those people, a kind of solution.”2 Discourse about bodies involves discipline and power, and not just in the sense of the reciprocal shaping of heresy and orthodoxy. As Foucault showed, discipline is an inherently political term.3 The cross and the vicarious bodies by which Christians participate in Christ are part of a set of coordinates within political networks of agency and power. To talk about the body of the cross is to talk about bodies being formed in ritual and practice. In other words, participating in the body of the cross is a discipline by which the body of the believer is refashioned. Because the symbol of the cross has generally been mediated by an institution, it comes within a system of disciplinary regimes—the liturgies, the sacraments, the pastoral and ecclesial networks within which Christian practice is disseminated and constructed. Fleshly bodies are formed, even as the social body is formed, and capillaries of power run all sorts of ways in this relationship. Historically, the symbol of the cross both empowered religious subjectivity and dictated how that subjectivity could be articulated—it subjected it. As feminists and womanists have been rightly insisting for decades, the symbol of the cross has been a symbol of brutal oppression and disciplinary terror, especially in the insidious idea that women learn submission and redemptive suffering from it.4 On the other hand, as Michel de Certeau and James Scott replied against Foucault, even in the more stringent regimes of subjection, of disciplinary power and control, subjects find ways to maneuver, to evade, to create spaces of disruption and agency.5 The symbol of the cross underwrites agency; it inspires resistance; it lends prophetic authority.

Reimagining Atonement Theology In modern theology, the symbol of the cross largely belongs to the field of atonement theology. This is a highly codified field of study, with a rigid typology of “theories” of atonement, a standardized historical narrative, and a precise function that it assigns to the cross within the larger field of soteriology.6 At the risk of being reductive, two broad trends in this conversation have emerged in the last few decades. The first is the continuing attempt to reckon with the human cost of Christianity’s system of symbolic

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violence, first by so-called contextual theologians and later by mainstream academic theology; here, theologians have exposed the linkage between a suffering savior and Christianity’s legitimization of human suffering (usually by women, those living in poverty, and people of color); in response, these theologians have offered varying strategies for formulating ideas of nonviolent atonement.7 A second stream continues to produce books offering variations (often quite minor) on the hugely influential 1930 study by Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor. While the nuances of his narrative, with its championing of a neo-orthodox Luther, are not always acknowledged, his typology of atonement positions (Christus victor, satisfaction, moral influence) and cast of characters (Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, and Abelard) has proved enduringly popular.8 But this presents a dilemma, because theologians who take up the first task—exposing, critiquing, and reimagining the relationship of the cross and violence—often bind themselves to the same typology and historical narrative found in the second stream. One effect of this is to fail to reckon with the complexity of Christian intellectual history, and therefore to allow certain ideas and historical subtexts to remain undisturbed. This is the prompt for this book. Another effect is to perpetuate the echo chamber of atonement theology. And here lies a significant problem. Atonement theology’s function is to render meaning out of suffering— senseless suffering, the cruelty of an infamously vicious and oppressive imperial regime against a peasant sage. There is something in the idea that this state violence was part of divine providence—whether God intended this death or simply vindicated the victim in resurrection—that has an abstracting quality: it minimizes or deadens the gratuitous violence, and therefore its shock, by imagining an underlying mythology. The death of the Christ was an elaborate bait-and-switch to disarm the devil; Christ died to shock and alter human moral solipsism; Christ died to appease the appetites of divine retribution; Christ died as an inevitable result of clashing with an oppressive regime. There’s something in that causal link—Christ died so that—that shifts focus from the violence of his execution to its transcendent meaning. And at heart that problem is stated very simply: the impulse of atonement theology drains the cross of its violence by sacralizing it, and in so doing normalizes violence in a broader scope—at least potentially. The phenomenon of religious violence in the Christian idea of the “body of the cross,” with its sainted and reprobate holy victims, is indelibly associated with the symbolic system at the very heart of Christianity’s founding event. When Aulén wrote Christus Victor in 1930 (translated into English in 1931), he helped cement an already well-established pattern in theological

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writing on the atonement. Aulén located a pure doctrine of the atonement in the “fathers” of early Christianity; he assigned the exemplar of this “ruling idea of the Atonement for the first thousand years of Christian history” to Irenaeus’s theory of continuous divine action.9 The doctrine suffered, however, from decline and diminishment when Cyprian and Tertullian introduced legalistic and penitential elements that would be perfected in Anselm’s satisfaction theory. Abelard reacted against Anselm with his “subjective” theory, and the atonement would remain hopelessly garbled until Aulén’s remarkably Barthian Luther came along to restore the patristic doctrine. Aulén himself was reacting to what he called the “traditional” account, according to which patristic atonement theology was inchoate and underdeveloped.10 In this account, Christology and trinitarian theology were the concerns of early Christian thinkers, and atonement would not be systematically theologized until the Middle Ages. For Aulén, instead, a patristic “classic view” was well developed and consistently articulated until the medieval penitential system intruded. His story is a distinctively Protestant narration of early Christian purity in continuity with Scripture, followed by medieval Catholic distortion, and then Reformation restoration: Irenaeus—Anselm/Abelard—Luther. It was a pattern that gained traction because it could easily be imposed on a different narrative of decline and restoration: Reformation—Protestant liberalism—neo-orthodox restoration. The context out of which Aulén was writing is not often noted, but his argument took on a life of its own. The nostalgic pattern of argument is common in theological writing on the cross: patristic origin, medieval nadir, contemporary restoration. It can be expressed across the ideological spectrum, in works as different, and as equally superb, as J. Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker’s Saving Paradise, Darby Ray’s Deceiving the Devil, and Ben Pugh’s Atonement Theories.11 And while Aulén’s typology did not originate with him (objective, subjective, satisfaction, moral influence populate many earlier theology textbooks), this broad narrative pattern of decline and restoration, and the preoccupation with typologies of atonement “theories,” is ubiquitous. This book approaches the cross less as the object of theorization and more as one of participation—of practice and performance. And it does so by tracing how cruciform, or “christomorphic,” practices crafted bodies in relations of both empowerment and repression. We can relearn how to read classic canonical texts in this light (say, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo). The authors I survey tend to theorize the cross far less systematically than

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textbooks would suggest to us and more strategically, as a way of getting at problems of Christology, biopolitics, and liturgical practice. In privileging nonsystematic or vernacular texts here, as well as material artifacts, we find the cross to be semaphore for a larger set of meaning-making practices and imaginative variations. It is not simply a fixed symbol with determinate theological meaning and seeking some of the patterns of this wilder logic allows us to spin a very different story out of the cross, one both more beautiful and terrifying. It is not reducible to traditional atonement categories or tidy typologies: there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamed of in Aulén’s philosophy. This is a study of atonement, but it locates its assumptions outside of the traditional conventions of atonement theology. Three strategies are at play. First, I largely eschew typology and any similar kind of categorization of atonement theories. Atonement theology in particular seems bound to typologization in a way found in few other realms of Christian doctrine: ransom, satisfaction, moral influence, governmental, penal substitution, Christus victor, as if these heuristic models were timeless essences floating through the ether of Christian thinking. Admittedly, we need a book to lay out a different way of structuring the patterns of atonement theology— but this is not that book.12 I want to make the case that when one examines the cross as a theological symbol in Western Christian history apart from the standard typology, a much deeper and more complex set of ideas emerge. And these ideas orbit around a very basic concern: participation in Christ. It is an idea that Western Christianity has had extraordinary discomfort expressing. In fact, one of the primary theses of this book is that very rarely have Western Christians been able to articulate any type of idea of direct participation in Christ. They have traditionally expressed this relationship via a series of proxies—or, to use Delores Williams’s term, surrogates.13 This is the logic of vicarity: the use of substitutes, holy and damned, to imagine participation in Christ and, by extension, participation in Christ’s righteousness. But participation is a vague term, so this book will resort to transactional language to make its meaning as concrete as possible: How are Christ’s merits transferred to the believer? For centuries, the question of merit transfer was one that depended neither on divine punishment nor on a vicarious sacrifice of a savior. Human substitutes were more readily available. Nonetheless, posing the question of merit transfer leads ineluctably toward the idea of penal substitution, and as the book progresses it becomes a kind of reluctant genealogy of the emergence of that doctrine. In truth, this is unavoidable, in part because it is the lens through which so much of contemporary theology engages the theology of the cross; it is, moreover, unavoidable because the discussion

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of substitutes and holy bodies in Christian discourse leads inevitably to Christ’s own vicarious body. But the path is not as direct as we might imagine. The second strategy is the book’s choice of interlocutors. Atonement theology, and much doctrinal theology, works from a rather delimited set of sources. In the older histories of doctrine, and still today in many theological texts (whether traditionalist or revisionist), the norm is doctrinal regularity. Certain sources lend themselves to neat histories of doctrine, sources that have a “canonical” or normative function in theological history: doctrinal treatises that have clearly extractable theological content, written by the learned elites of their era who spoke with varying degrees of authority and on the basis of varying degrees of education, but whose texts were recognized as in some way authoritative by later church elites or bodies. Here we think of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, Gregory of Nyssa’s Catechetical Oration, Augustine’s On the Trinity, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Luther’s three treatises, Calvin’s Institutes, and so on. I don’t need to point out that these elites were, until very recently, males of a majority culture we would now characterize as white European (apart from an occasional outlier like Augustine); what is more difficult for theologians to remember, however, is that these texts reflect much broader concerns, practices, conversations, and cultural patterns beyond the bishop’s study and the theologian’s lecture hall. So what if theologians moved away from our preoccupation with abstract doctrines, with ideas floating through discourse like ahistorical essences (“theories,” “models”), and attended instead to theological production as it was expressed in terms of practices, political contexts, and patterns of popular life? What if devotional treatises, prayer manuals, and psalter illustrations became fair game for theological reflection as much as the systematic treatises that already occupy our canon?14 At the very least, the pool of theological sources would broaden. We would hear from more women and minority voices, fewer bishops and ecclesiastics; the lines between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” would blur; and our theology might become more imaginative. Hence in this book I have focused on sources that don’t typically appear in a study of atonement: devotional and occasional texts, in particular, as well as underrepresented voices, seeking to catch the process of theology “on the ground” in the various historical eras under consideration. Social and cultural history are as relevant to this task as the usual textual work of intellectual history. At times, this means privileging documents not generally admitted to the canons of theological inquiry, like the pseudo-Hippolytan Apostolic Tradition, the writings of the Valentinian Gnostics, Anselm’s Prayers and

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Meditations, Abelard’s and Heloise’s letters, and Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead. Reading such occasional or “noncanonical” texts can capture, with particularly vivid detail, how theological innovations and transformations emerged in complex political and cultural moments. It also means incorporating visual culture—talismans and sarcophagi, manuscript illuminations, paintings, and altar pieces—as legitimate theological sources of their own. The art and devotional images of ancient and medieval Christianity have their own theological story to tell, and the portrayals of the cross and holy victims included in this book are key to understanding the creative applications and transgressions of the symbol in Western Christian history.15 Finally, this book adopts a style of historical narration with a particular telos. Rather than the developments of redemptive theory as such, I trace an entirely different subtheme: how the symbol of the cross became associated with the logic of vicarity in Western Christianity and how that eventually dovetailed with sacramental, ecclesial, devotional, and soteriological concerns to arrive at penal substitution. This is an episodic story, visiting specific moments in a much larger history, in order to trace theological transformations and moments of emergence; I track multiple themes, motifs, and concepts associated with the cross, many of them not obviously related to atonement concerns, to provide context for the ways Christian thought and culture has treated the symbol. Much more can be said about each of the figures and events I discuss (specialists will undoubtedly find things to dispute), but instead of offering another grand, synthesizing “history of doctrine” or an intellectual history of “great men,” the narrative suggests we might tell atonement history in a new way. In truth, this is not so different from what Aulén was after, for his was a narrowly focused study about a particular idea—the unity of the divine action in the atonement, lost after Irenaeus and regained in Luther. I share his commitment to a narrow focus but suggest instead that we have much to learn from the Western Christian invention, construction, and excrescence of holy victims.

The Plan of This Book The book proceeds in a broadly chronological trajectory. Instead of trying to provide the full scope of a particular historical era, though, I look at a particular theme or set of events that provide an angle into the leading idea of the body of the cross: the theologies and politics of holy and cursed victims and how their sufferings were rendered meaningful through the symbol of the cross. Chapter 1 focuses on the first two centuries of early

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Christianity, from the Epistle of Barnabas (ca. 100 ce) to the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons and the Apostolic Tradition (perhaps mid-third century). The theme of this chapter is apocalyptic differentiation: the role of the cross as a boundary marker between elect and reprobate in early Christian discourse, whether that marker be administered in baptism, invented in literary activity, or developed theologically in an account of Jesus’s death and (more commonly) resurrection. The cross formed a boundary between darkness and light, liturgically and socially, and the pressures of identity formation in the first few centuries of Christianity meant that apocalyptic categories were applied to communities excluded from the church. In other words, the cross took on a heresiological function as early Christian writers applied ideas of darkness and the demonic to polemical opponents. The cross preserved the elect and condemned the reprobate. The debate between proto-orthodox Christianity and the various Gnostic groups is especially important for this argument, the payoff of which is to align the cross of Jesus with membership in the elect community. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the evolution of various martyr traditions, largely in North Africa, and primarily in the third to fifth centuries. Chapter 2 discusses the function of the cross in martyr acts and narratives, whereas chapter 3 traces the reception history of these martyr traditions in normative texts that employ martyr tropes for catechesis, polemic, and theological production. These chapters advance a revisionist claim: the very idea that Jesus’s death on the cross procures forgiveness for transgressions originates from these martyr traditions. In other words, the concept of “atonement” as a system for transferring merit from Christ to believers stems from the early church’s traditions of seeking the intercession of martyrs and confessors. For (as is widely acknowledged in studies of the martyrs) the cross symbolized not suffering but triumph, not death but victory in the martyr accounts of early Christianity. As theologians appropriated the martyrs as exemplary figures, and as bishops “bankrolled” their cults by integrating them into the liturgies of the new fourth-century cathedrals, a system of spiritual credit and debit emerged that would eventually be transferred to the work of Christ himself. This shift from the apocalyptic preservation of elect communities to the funding of those communities’ spiritual capital traded on the holy bodies of the victims of empire, the first true bodies of the cross. Chapter 4 jumps ahead to the early Middle Ages and a momentous transition in Western Christian intellectual history: the internalization of the body of the cross in the affective piety of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A triad of writers—Anselm, Abelard, and Heloise—are the key figures of this chapter, but they simply capture a small portion of a broader

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social and theological event, the popularization of the monastic ideal of the Christian life at both lay and clerical levels. A laicized Daily Office helped buttress a new form of spirituality built on sympathy: emotional identification with Christ and his followers, resulting in a fiercely affective and volitional structure to the life of faith. When this occurred, the logic of vicarity began its journey inward, into the soul of the believer. Anselm’s prayers, and indeed his “atonement” treatise, Cur Deus Homo, reflect this development, as in different ways do the texts of his purported opponent, Abelard. Both share an internalized pattern of sympathetic identification with Christ, a longing to be present to him in his agony—but still through the medium of the cult of the saints. This chapter is the most focused on traditional atonement categories and narratives, because the AnselmAbelard opposition tends to be a cornerstone of atonement texts. But when put in the context of affective spirituality, their theologies turn out to be remarkably similar; their atonement “theories” are not nearly as clean-cut as textbook accounts tend to make them. Rather, they both mark the beginning of the internalization of the logic of vicarity, while also maintaining the pattern of projection onto traditional figures of sanctity. With Heloise, however, a minority report enters the narrative of this book: a woman who rejected the logic of vicarity in important ways, recognizing its masculine pretensions and patriarchal machinations, and who sought to carve out a distinctively affective female spirituality. Chapter 5 discusses the deepening of the affective spirituality tradition in the high Middle Ages. It is not until the thirteenth century, and the development of the mendicant orders, that theologies of direct participation in Christ emerge and thereby, theologies of bearing the cross within oneself. Francis of Assisi is the paradigm here, but as the writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg show, the spirituality of identification with Christ’s sufferings runs deeper than a simple acquisition of the stigmata. What these two figures share, instead, is the full inversion of the logic of vicarity: both take on themselves the suffering of Christ not simply to gain a depth of mystical identification, but for the nurture and rebuilding of the church. Later generations imposed this on Francis, to a significant extent, as he became “another Christ” (alter christus); but this does not negate the fact that he took on the apostolic life himself in order to rebuild Christ’s church. Mechthild writes of her travails as bride of Christ and mother of the church as if she were a living word, so identified with Christ is she. Both make themselves holy victims. Culturally, however, this spirituality of suffering on behalf of the church was not entirely innocent; for the status of holy victim was foisted on the outsiders of the medieval era, the hereticized reform movements and the Jews. Someone must suffer,

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must become the body of the cross, to preserve and maintain the political body of Christ. Chapters 6 and 7 close out the argument of the book. Here the elements of penal substitution begin to emerge as a central plank of the Reformed tradition, embedded within the sacramental and political debates of the Reformation era. The idea of the “fragility of faith” becomes especially important in this context: the Reformation eliminated the sacerdotal system that mediated the merits of Christ and the saints to believers. In its place, the faith of the Christian, buttressed by word and sacrament, received the merit of Christ directly. No longer did human substitutes bear the cross and deliver pardon—that power, formerly stored in the church as the treasury of merit, now was delivered in the fragile relationship of Christian and Christ. Chapter 6 focuses on the theological and spiritual chasms that opened up in the wake of this shift, examining a series of debates between Luther and various radical reformers—especially Thomas Müntzer. Luther struggles with participation in Christ, particularly bearing Christ’s suffering, all the while devising a theologia crucis, a theology of the cross. He shied back from the kind of direct participation in the cross found in Mechthild or later northern German mystics like Johannes Tauler, fearful of being presumptuous and diminishing God’s sovereign work of redemption in Christ. Müntzer and other radicals like Hans Hut and Hans Denck had no such qualms. For them, redemption just is undergoing Christ’s cross, dying to self, enduring divine wrath: works of suffering. Most such radicals paid dearly for this aspiration to sharing Christ’s cross. Chapter 7 shifts to the Reformed tradition, moving from Bucer and Calvin to the Puritan tradition embodied in William Perkins. This chapter homes in on the emergence of penal substitutionary atonement, not just as a central Reformed doctrine but as a spiritual discipline of sorts. The background lies in the preoccupation with discipline and punishment in the Reformed churches as they sought to build Christian cities under the sacred canopy of Scripture. Surveying Luther’s and Melanchthon’s justification of state-sponsored persecution of the Anabaptists, moving on to Calvin’s consistory, and dwelling on Bucer’s attempt to build intentional Christian communities, the argument traces the theopolitical discourse of punishment that migrates into the Christian consciousness with Perkins and the Puritans. In what I call recursion, I trace the reliance of the Reformed tradition on the punishment of the victim, and how, as certain trajectories of that tradition became increasingly subjectivist and affective, the victim became the believer herself. By the time we reach Perkins, we find a profound paradox: the greater Christ bears the punishment for the guilty, the greater the believer herself must endure God’s wrath. Rooted in

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the classic Calvinist insecurity over election, the Puritan religious subject is formed in an affective space of the looming threat of damnation, the very threat occupied by the vicarious reprobate throughout Western Christian history. The ultimate holy body, Christ, proved to be vanishingly remote to the Puritan soul. Thus, the body of the cross ends up being the believer himself, in a recursive performance of Christ’s own tortured suffering under divine wrath.

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The Way of Darkness and the Way of Light: The Cross as Boundary Marker in Early Christianity

It is a truism that in the first few centuries of Christianity, the cross signifies not so much the death of Christ but his victory over it. This triumph is on behalf of his people—but this means it has abandoned another people to death uninterrupted. Thus, the cross signifies a strategy of social differentiation through apocalyptic division. The traditional symbol of this victory in early Christian visual culture is the crux invicta, or cross of victory: the chi-rho symbol surrounded by a wreath—the traditional Roman motif of triumph, often with doves—symbolizing resurrection, standing on the arms of the cross. The crux invicta marks a dividing line between the recipient of mercy and the victim of wrath, a dynamic early Christianity often reified in soldiers at the foot of the cross. A mid-fourth-century artifact illustrates these themes (fig. 1).1 It is a sarcophagus adorned, appropriately enough, with the cross as a symbol of triumph over death. The crux invicta dominates this “tree sarcophagus,” which reorients the Hebrew Scriptures and apostolic age through a “broad theme of sacrifice and deliverance.”2 The left panel contrasts the offerings of Cain and Abel with the arrest of Peter; on the right, Paul’s martyrdom (captured in media res, as the soldier is just leaning in to deliver the sword thrust) sits in juxtaposition with Job’s confrontation by his friends. In the center sits the cross, surrounded by trees that symbolize victory and evoke paradise. The cross is a hermeneutical symbol stitching together disparate motifs into a typological whole, rendering scenes of sacrifice, betrayal, and faith from the Hebrew Bible into typological correspondence with the deaths of Peter and Paul. The empty cross elevates the moments of suffering and death

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Figure 1. Sarcophagus “with trees” of the Anástasis type (tree sarcophagus), ca. 350–400. Vatican Museum, Vatican City, cat. 28591. © Genevra Kornbluth.

around it, a center of gravity for the narrative of salvation. The two soldiers sit at the foot of the cross, with instruments of war clearly deployed in juxtaposition—the hopeful soldier on the left, perhaps Longinus, points a spear at the cross, while the despairing soldier on the right leans on his shield. Thus the implements of empire take their place in the bisected universe signified by the cross. The iconography also transforms Roman notions of sovereignty—as I will discuss below, the crux invicta draws from a Roman military standard. Jesus’s cross transposes imperial motifs into a new register. A crucified figure is nowhere portrayed, for death has been swallowed up in victory, appropriate adornment indeed for a container that will receive the faithful dead.3 The sarcophagus shows two operations of the cross: it signifies the anti-imperial politics of much of early Christianity, and it retells the biblical history to differentiate the new Christian community. The symbol of the cross divides a people, identifying those who will be with Christ in paradise—and those who will be damned. In this chapter, I will look at second- and third-century texts that wrestle with the formation of the physical, baptized flesh of believers by the cross, a symbol that also organizes the political body of Christ. My thesis here is that, in this era, the cross functions as an apocalyptic signifier of divine ownership and preservation through liturgical practices, linked with the broader idea of the triumph (not the death) of Jesus Christ. But that apocalyptic signifier also inaugurates a pattern that recurs throughout Western Christian history: the cross forms a boundary marker, a means of social differentiation, carrying along with it the tension of inclusion and exclusion. An elect group defines itself by its relationship over against a reprobate group, and in the apocalyptic overtones of much of the era, the pressures of this social identity production cast that dynamic into the realm of darkness and light,

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demonic and holy. The great controversies of the second century were the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity and the fight over Gnosticism; in these controversies these two ideas—the formation of liturgical flesh and political corpus—deepen through the function of the cross as an apocalyptic boundary marker.

The Cross as Boundary Marker between Judaism and Christianity The cross creates the Christian body, both liturgically and politically, a creation built on a set of complex transformations of the meaning of the crucified body of the Jewish peasant Jesus. The leading idea of the texts discussed in this chapter is the triumph of the Messiah over death and how that reframes the history of God by introducing an apocalyptic rupture that illuminates new meanings in history. This is the same typological function of the cross the tree sarcophagus portrayed. The apocalyptic event of the cross splits the people of God into two figures, divided in hope and despair at its feet. The postapostolic age saw its era as a war of darkness and light, and the various messianic Jesus movements condensed and distinguished themselves around the cross as a marker of that apocalyptic irruption. As these movements began to situate themselves within the Roman Empire and formed their community boundaries, one of the key discourses they employed was demonology: spiritual evil as an enemy that threatened the community. The cross was at the heart of these processes of self-definition, but it wasn’t primarily a theoretical article of faith that explained the reality of redemption in Christ; it was a social signifier with cosmic implications. The cross provided a hermeneutic to navigate and define the fissure widening between two competing narratives of salvation history: those Jewish movements who based themselves on the new idea of Christ as the Messiah, and those who continued to organize around the Mosaic law and the synagogue. It is easy to adopt the language of “Christianity” and “Judaism” here, but as two second-century texts—the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr’s First Apology—show, the relationship of those anachronistic labels is more complicated than we often think.

Who Is the People of God? It is not surprising that a new movement would be preoccupied with group definition, but at the end of the first century the Epistle of Barnabas was particularly keen in its intentions. The author, “Barnabas,” was trying

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to create a rhetorical boundary between the Jesus movement and a superseded group he simply labels as Israel.4 Barnabas’s key idea is that Jesus’s cross enacted a new covenant that the Hebrew Scriptures foreshadowed, a new covenant entailing the rejection of one people in order for the covenant to pass to another: “Their covenant was shattered, in order that the covenant of the beloved Jesus might be sealed in our heart, in hope inspired by faith in him. . . . [They] pile up [their] sins while claiming, ‘Our covenant remains valid.’ ”5 Who can claim to be the genuine Israel and possess the covenant with God—those who identify their covenant keeping with the law, or those who identify it with the cross of the Messiah? Who is “the people”?6 In the Pauline overtones of his argument, the cross reveals the ineffectuality of the Mosaic law, the truth of which is spiritually discerned through faith in Jesus; but in arguing for a transference of covenant between peoples, Barnabas departs from Paul. Barnabas’s strategy is to portray the Mosaic law as a covenant meant to be broken; its only purpose was to condemn and bring judgment on a counterfeit people. The argument has two main threads. The first justifies the “shattering” of the old covenant by making his rabbinic opponents responsible for the death of Christ. The followers of the synagogue are those who rejected and slaughtered the prophets, and the cross seals their judgment: “Therefore the Son of God came in the flesh for this reason, so that he might complete the full measure of the sins of those who persecuted his prophets to death.”7 The very law whose first tables were broken was given to set up Israel’s fall—to fill up its sins, the better for the true covenant to be written within the heart of the people of the new covenant.8 This leads to the second thread of the epistle: the explanation of how a people’s Scriptures can be read against their own traditions and can justify their exclusion from their own covenant. Barnabas develops a typological reading of the Jewish Scriptures, inspired in particular by the now-canonical book of Hebrews, to reframe salvation history.9 Barnabas is creative in his interpretive moves, and he freely riffs on wisdom writings and the prophets to embed the cross of Christ in the fabric of Hebrew Scripture history. For example, exegeting Psalm 1:3–6, he states that the wise one planted by the water is the baptismal candidate, the tree that bears fruit is the cross, and the “ungodly” are his rabbinic opponents judged by that very cross planted by the waters.10 When read alongside his more conventional typological themes, such as the allegorization of the day of atonement, circumcision, and the dietary laws (chaps. 8–10), his strategy becomes clear: displacing rabbinic interpretation of Scripture, trading especially on the present absence of the temple to reinforce the invalidity of the Mosaic law. The cross is essential to this displacement of the rabbinic reading of the Tanakh: the death of the Messiah matches the breaking of Moses’s tablets,

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signifying the dissolution of the false covenant and the realization of the new. The law does not (as Paul had argued) prepare the way of the Lord like a pedagogue but provides the narrative backlight in which the true covenant is revealed to those with eyes to see. Barnabas is conscious of writing within an irrupting apocalyptic break: as history turns around God’s decisive action, two ways emerge that starkly divide the people of light from the people of darkness, ruled by forces of angels ranged against each other, governed by God and Satan.11 The faithful will endure apocalyptic judgment armed with the works of faith (not the law). The Lord suffered on the cross so that his people would be purified by the afflictions of evil for the eschatological cleansing and resurrection; so that their enemies’ judgment would be sealed; and so that the great enemy, death itself, would be destroyed.12 Barnabas employs the cross in two ways. First, the symbol does have sacrificial overtones, but Barnabas primarily employs the cross for polemical ends with an eschatological frame of reference. Christ suffers not so much to conquer a metaphysical enemy, death, as he endures the trials of the end time as a martyr. For his people, the cross functions apocalyptically to ward off the demonic temptation of the way of darkness. Second, Barnabas uses the cross to identify that way of darkness with a specific rejected people. Modern readers, habituated into millennia of Christian supersessionism, will instinctively identify his opponents as the Jews. But this is a term (like Christian) Barnabas never uses—and one I use only provisionally for the moment.13 Barnabas does not bother to differentiate his faithful hearers from the Israel of the Scriptures. In fact, his argument is that the historical Israel of Judea had never really been the covenant people, because the covenant had been with his hearers from the beginning. They were Israel, but “Israel with a difference.”14 He uses ethnic reasoning, adopted from Hellenic culture, to name his hearers as one of the two nations within Rebecca’s womb. He invents a new race, a new people who weren’t so much Israel’s heirs but the ones who had been the chosen people all along.15 We are hearing one side of an intramural debate in Barnabas: it is between two diasporic Jewish groups, one increasingly centered on rabbinic Pharisaism and the synagogues and the other a messianic sect with an unusually large percentage of gentiles. And the cross lies between them, just as the broken tablets lay between historical Israel and YHWH.

The Seed-Bearing Cross With Justin Martyr’s First Apology, written around 150, we encounter a new context. Justin’s audience is elite Romans, and the Apology adopts Hellenistic motifs to portray the cosmic dimension of the cross. The apocalyptic overtones of Barnabas fade into the background, as does the theme

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of Israel. But like Barnabas, Justin’s focus is political: the Apology justifies an apparent novelty, the messianic Jewish-gentile community, by writing it back into history. The symbolic scope of the cross as a boundary marker widens even further, as Justin exports the demonological tropes of Barnabas into a broader, cosmic apologetic. Justin discusses the cross in two contexts: as a Stoic symbol that reveals the cosmic principle of the Logos and as a fulfillment of prophecy demonstrating the veracity of the Hebrew Scriptures (and the failure of the “Jews” to understand them). The text uses the crucifixion of Christ to apologetic ends: Justin’s strategy is to gain political legitimacy for his movement by demonstrating its antiquity—the Roman criterion for the acceptability of a local cult. The worship of a God revealed in a crucified man is no scandal, says Justin, but actually reveals the underlying and unwitting truth of his opponents’ own teachings, whether they be Platonic philosophers, the temple-going masses of the Roman Empire, or the people of Judea. Christianity teaches the deep truths of pagan and Judean religious-philosophical systems, truths that those systems themselves have forgotten or diluted. Justin uses the cross to underwrite an appeal for the universality and ancient nature of the Jesus movement. The worship of Jesus is “rational” to the “pagans”:16 the Hebrew Bible is the source of Platonic philosophy, a claim that then allows him to argue that both the Jewish Scriptures and the Platonic texts foretell Christ. The story of Christ fits neatly into the texts of Jews and Platonists: it is no more fantastic than pagan myth, after all, with its stories of the divine origins of the sons of Zeus; and on the Jewish side, Christ is clearly what the Hebrew prophets foretold—for those who know how to read those prophets right. In fact, the story of the Jesus movement reveals the true depths of the texts of both traditions. This is not because Christ replaces Plato or Moses, but he is prior to them. He is the Logos, the cosmic origin of the philosophy of Plato and the writings of Moses. The Logos has scattered “seeds of truth” among all people (Justin’s well-known teaching of the logos spermatikos).17 This is not supersession but predecession, a “rhetoric of restoration” that establishes the antiquity of Christianity so as to avoid charges of novelty.18 Justin acknowledges that the claim is counterintuitive, so his task becomes establishing that temporal and logical priority. Here is where the cross becomes essential. First, the cross precedes both the pagans and Jews because it is embedded in the very structure of the cosmos. Justin’s use of this theme is an early example of an idea that quickly became a commonplace in early Christian literature—Tertullian, for example, uses a similar apologetic strategy.19 “Consider all the things in the cosmos,” Justin writes, “whether without this form they could be governed or be interrelated.”20 The seed-bearing

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cross (stauros spermatikos) is found disseminated throughout human culture as the token of the Logos. Justin names the cross shape that is found in the sail, the plow, the hammer, and the aquila (standard) and tropaeum (victory memorial) in army banners, even finding the cross in the relationship of the nose to the forehead.21 He is taking advantage of an old Platonic trope here. The Timaeus spoke, rather cryptically, of the “first God” placing the second divine power “like a Chi in the universe.”22 Subsequent Middle Platonist discussion understood this chi (X) to be the schema of the world soul, the Logos that held creation together and mediated between it and the One. But Justin quickly finds in it the shape of the cross stamped in the mold of creation itself. The cosmos is configured “chi-wise”; this cruci-form holds the cosmos together. But what of the people whose writings directly speak of that God? The cross reveals the truth of the Hebrew holy writings, too; in fact, Plato’s fumbling after a cruciform world soul was simply plagiarism from Moses, who “took brass and made the figure of a cross and placed it over the holy tent” (see Num. 21:6–9).23 But both Moses and Plato are in the same predicament—the failure to understand their own greatest truths: “Though [the Jews] read them they do not understand what is said, but consider us enemies and opponents.”24 Justin quotes from a catalogue of prophecies, mostly from Isaiah, in order to make this point repeatedly: “Jesus Christ had His hands stretched out, when He was crucified by the Jews, who spoke against Him, and denied that He was the Christ.”25 The Jews misunderstood their own Scriptures and crucified Christ. If Christ and his cross are so essential to both Middle Platonist and Judean thought, why is this not more apparent to pagans and Jews themselves? The cross is original to creation—to the point of being embedded in matter, bodies, and culture—but invisible to humanity because the delusions of evil beings have corrupted its image. For those with eyes to see, the cross is part of the fabric of the universe, from the speculations of philosophers to the banners of armies to the tools of laborers, and denial of this seed-bearing reality is denial of the God revealed in the Logos, a denial inspired by demonic deception. With demonology, we reconnect to Barnabas’s apocalyptic preoccupations. For both writers, the cross reveals the malevolent power behind the opponents of the Jesus movement. For Justin, the demonic deception peaks in the perversion of the chi-wise nature of the cosmos, for these spiritual forces took this original cruciform revelation of the Logos and twisted it by making the cross an instrument of torture and execution. Here Justin’s anti-Jewish undertone becomes explicit. The link is easy. Demons made the cross an instrument of torture; the Jews (according to Justin) crucified

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Jesus. Thus the Jews were motivated by demons. What of the Romans’ culpability? Justin justifies the Jesus movement in Roman eyes by pinning the blame for the crucifixion on the inhabitants of Judea, thus exonerating the Romans. Shifting responsibility away from the empire allows Justin to portray the Christianity as an anodyne movement, and the followers of the synagogue as politically dangerous. The Bar Kochba rebellion had failed not long before, after all; the insurrection of the Judean people was fresh in the Roman mind. Justin’s deft bit of political spin aligns Christianity with Hellenistic culture and distances it from Judean rabbinism.26 Justin differs from Barnabas in transposing apocalyptic themes into the more placid cosmology of Stoicism, but the angels of light and darkness recur and, like Barnabas, Justin projects the play of election and rejection onto the cross. The soldiers still kneel at its base, divided by the crux invicta. Justin’s fateful move is to lay the blame for the crucifixion on the deceptive imitation of demons, the angels of darkness, who have perverted the teaching of the schools of the Platonists and blinded the Jews to their own Scriptures. In so doing, he differentiates Christianity from both movements; but he also affixes non–Christ-following Judeans a distinct identity (the “Jews”) that serves Christian identity formation.27 Justin was not the only or the first early Christian writer to make these moves, but he does so with tenacity and clarity, and very publicly.28

Warding Off Darkness: The Apotropaic Function of the Cross The politics of Christian identity formation have occupied us thus far, but the cross and demonological discourse also had an important role in developing liturgical traditions. The cross functions here as a ritual boundary marker in the play of light and darkness. The Apostolic Tradition, an early third-century document from the church in Rome (until recently attributed to the schismatic bishop Hippolytus), places the cross squarely in a liturgical fight against spiritual evil. The Tradition gives us a view into the alien world of early Christian writing on the liturgy, and it uses the cross in very unexpected ways. The symbol features prominently in the text, but it is connected not with the Eucharist, the memorial of the passion, but baptism, where the symbol of the cross seals and protects against the forces of darkness. The Tradition rings with the consciousness of spiritual forces and the demonic; it places the cross not in a space of sacrifice but in the domain of exorcisms and warding off the evil eye. It bears an apotropaic function—the protective or prophylactic function of talismans, signs, and rituals to protect the bearer

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against hostile spiritual elements.29 The primary liturgical theme that shows this apotropaic use is the exorcism ritual accompanying baptism: On the Sabbath those who are to be baptized are gathered at the will of the bishop in one place. They shall be instructed to pray and to bend the knee. And when he lays his hand on them he shall exorcise them of every foreign spirit and they shall flee away from them and shall not return to them. And when he has finished exorcizing them he should blow on their faces; and when he has sealed their forehead, their ears and their noses he should make them stand up.30 The “sealing” here is the sign of the cross (the Tradition does not make this explicit, but context and parallel texts make the association almost certain),31 and most likely signifies closing the senses against the demonic.32 The mark signifies ownership, and early Christian writers frequently compared it to the rite of circumcision. Following this exorcistic anointing, the baptizand receives a trinitarian “sealing” on the forehead—likely also in the form of the cross—by the bishop.33 She is then admitted into the Eucharist, which the Tradition speaks of as “milk and honey mixed in fulfillment of the promise which was to the fathers.”34 The Pauline theology of baptism as incorporation into Christ and conformity with his death is certainly known in early Christianity; but that does not seem to be the idea here.35 Instead, the baptism-Eucharist progression is one of temptation and initiation mirroring the exodus and wilderness wandering: it is as if the baptismal candidate is passing through the wilderness of Sinai, naked and exposed to hostile forces (20.4 warns of bringing an “alien spirit” into the water), protected only by the anointing and the sign of the cross as she passes into the promised land.36 Later the Tradition returns to the theme of baptism by instructing its readers on how to place themselves under the sign of the cross by invoking their baptismal sealing: If you are tempted, reverently sign yourself on the forehead. For this sign of the passion is displayed against the Devil, if it is made in faith and not to please people, but through knowledge, putting it forward like a breastplate. For if the Adversary sees the power of the Spirit (from the heart) being outwardly demonstrated in the likeness of baptism, he will flee away trembling. . . . This is what Moses did in a type with the sheep which was sacrificed on Passover. Sprinkling the blood on the lintel and anointing the two doorposts he signified that faith in the perfect sheep which is now in us. By signing our forehead

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and eyes with the hand we shall escape the one who is seeking our destruction.37 Here the sign of the cross signifies the hearer’s faith and knowledge, and it reflects the interior power of the Spirit in an apocalyptic preservation from evil. The destroyer passes by as the symbol of divine ownership marks God’s people. The Tradition evokes the event of Christ’s passion, but the emphasis is not on Christ’s bloody execution. Instead, the sacrificial lamb’s shed blood is likened to the “anointing” that Christians receive in baptism. Thus the sign of the cross, an apotropaic protection from the destroyer, becomes a living symbol, virtually a talisman, to guard from the presence and influence of an active and threatening demonic power; its symbolic power lies in its typological correspondence to the liberatory events of the Hebrew Scriptures. The cross founds a new body, liturgical and political, protected from darkness by the seal of the chosen people. The Tradition does at times speak of the victory of Christ over the devil and death, in what we would now call the Christus victor motif.38 But it does not focus on the death of Christ as the eschatological victory over death and evil; rather, the cross wards off evil now. The Tradition still breathes the apocalyptic language of the New Testament and the Epistle of Barnabas. The cross ushers believers along the passage from darkness to light, and they are shielded from alien spirits as they remain faithful to Christ and practice his sealing. The harrowing of hell takes place as the sealing of the cross becomes a kind of habitus: practiced in prayer, signed on the body, recalled in the Eucharist, the cross is a performance of Christ’s victory.39 The Tradition displays a different aspect of the cross as a boundary marker: it is inscribed on the body to protect it from the forces of darkness, by transporting the bearer into the promised land, marked out by Christ’s taking on of our flesh. But this is not so different from Barnabas refiguring salvation history around the cross as an apocalyptic marker, or Justin’s heresiological practice of carving out a cruciform political body: we are still speaking of boundaries and divisions, angels and demons, the soldier on the right and the soldier on the left. In the final section, Irenaeus and the Valentinians will give both of these ideas theological depth; but first, we need to dig into the logic of identity formation to see how what we now call “Christianity” emerged out of these polemical battles.

Judaism and Gnosticism as Useful Fictions The cross is a rhetorical boundary marker in these texts, delineating the space between the elect and reprobate, the people of light and the people

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of darkness. The Apostolic Tradition embedded the symbol in the boundary between corporal and spiritual realms, a shield from the demonic. Barnabas’s apocalyptic themes and Justin’s apologetic maneuvering leveraged the cross at the intersection of two communities, uniting Jesus followers with the Scriptures of the Hebrew people, but in so doing forming a boundary line between the messianic and nonmessianic Judaisms of the early second century. The cross is a symbol of the Jews’ demonic deception and political sedition in Justin, and it echoes Moses’s broken tablets in Barnabas. Thinking of the cross as a boundary marker highlights the function of ideological divisions in early Christianity. Because the politics of identity formation are so crucial to the history of the body of the cross, it is important to examine heresiological language and the way it creates groups as rhetorical fictions, employing symbols like the cross. Useful fictions: to recall Constantine Cavafy, outsiders are a kind of solution. I have alluded to the anachronistic language of Christianity and Judaism, so it is time to take an aside in this section to briefly lay out the dynamics of group definition in early Christianity as scholars currently understand it, examining “Judaism” as a rhetorical creation of early Christian controversialists. I will also introduce Gnosticism as a second front in the battle of Christian selfdefinition that is similarly contested in meaning, in order to set the stage for the final section of the chapter. Barnabas, Justin, and the author of the Tradition wrote in a context in which “Judaism” and “Christianity” were not nearly as distinct things as two thousand years of supersessionism have made it seem. (It will perhaps be equally difficult to accept the idea that the lines between Irenaeus and the Gnostics were similarly blurry or even arbitrary.) It is easy to lose sight of the fact that Christianity, at least for the first century or two of its existence, was simply one more Jewish offshoot. Christianity was a messianic diasporic Jewish movement, with an unusually high proportion of gentile participation. If Daniel Boyarin is right, we cannot even speak of Judaism and Christianity as distinct religions until the fourth century—in part because the two groups were not distinct and in part because the idea of religion itself was a product of their distinction. Boyarin’s argument is provocative and has been challenged in details, but has largely held up under scrutiny; it is summed up in the following: “ ‘Judaism’ as the name of a ‘religion’ is a product of Christianity in its attempts to establish a separate identity from something else which they call ‘Judaism,’ a project that begins no earlier than the mid-second century and only in certain quarters (notably Asia Minor), gathers strength in the third century, and comes to fruition in the processes around before and following the Council of

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Nicaea.”40 There are a few essential ideas to Boyarin’s argument: first, Christianity (and likely rabbinic Judaism as well41) appropriated methods from the philosophical schools to produce notions of orthodoxy and authority and so to rhetorically brand an “other” by which to distinguish itself; in so doing, second, the modern idea of religion was effectively invented as a philosophy, a belief system, independent of wider cultural systems.42 The significant chronological claim of the thesis is that it is only in the early fourth century, with the Council of Nicaea, that something like Christian orthodoxy is recognizable. It is thus anachronistic to talk about Christian polemic against Judaism in the time of Justin or Barnabas, at least in the modern sense of two opposing religions. If it is true that “orthodoxy” is only really historically assignable to the third or fourth century, this has wider implications. What do we make of early Christian polemics against other seeming outsiders, like heretical groups? What of Justin’s attacks on Marcionism, or Irenaeus’s or Tertullian’s attacks on Gnosticism? Boyarin’s argument suggests that the idea of, say, Marcionism or Gnosticism as Christian heresies might be anachronistic as well; might not the same discourses of identity production be employed against other enemies to construct them as excluded outsiders? In the course of it, wouldn’t “Christianity” be inventing itself in this process as well?43 Christianity, Judaism, Gnosticism: these are all useful fictions, rhetorical inventions we retroject into the second and third centuries. The trick is to realize that what we now call orthodoxy is a label we apply to a number of local movements who eventually prevailed over competing sects and would later congeal together into the Christian mainstream in the empire-wide ideological battles of the early fourth century; David Brakke calls this the “ ‘varieties of early Christianity’ model.”44 In other words, both with the “parting of the ways” of Judaism and Christianity and with the Marcionite, Gnostic, and Montanist battles (among others), we are seeing real struggles to determine what Christianity was, struggles in which history could have gone the other way. There was nothing inevitable about the triumph of what we now call “Christian orthodoxy,” no “essence” of the gospel that prevailed in these battles. It was invented. It isn’t the inherent rectitude of the winners’ teaching, the providential tending of the true root of the gospel, that led to what we now recognize as Christian doctrinal truth. Rather, we should think of writers like Justin, Irenaeus, Barnabas, and so forth as representatives of proto-orthodoxy: orthodoxy, seen only in retrospect, and retrospectively isolated as one stream in what was in reality a hybrid and cross-pollinating social milieu. There’s more at stake here than simply policing language. The battle for orthodoxy is a contest that seems inevitable only because we already know

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the victor. In the lucid image of David Brakke, it is as if we were to watch a horse race on time delay already knowing the winner (say we recorded the Kentucky Derby and had the result spoiled on Facebook before we had a chance to watch).45 Our viewing experience would be fundamentally different than if we were watching the race in real time: the emergence of the winner would have the feel of inevitability, the race would have the sense of moving toward a preordained outcome. We could identify the winner—the key moves, the tactics and strategy—as inherently superior and destined to win. But of course the actual race had no such dynamic to it. Early Christianity’s relationship with Gnosticism followed the broad lines of its relationship to Judaism: the gradual dissociation of a set of parties that would style themselves the “orthodox” against the various Gnostic groups. It is still common to read theologians characterizing Gnosticism as a dualistic religion believing that the Old Testament deity is an evil, malicious demiurge responsible for a corrupt and evil creation, and that salvation is obtained through esoteric knowledge and escape from the prison of the body via a spectral, Docetic Jesus. This is, in large part, the picture handed down by such pioneering heresiologists as Irenaeus and Tertullian, who followed the lead of Justin in portraying their opponents as aberrations and deviations from the Catholic faith—as in Tertullian’s statement: “In all cases truth precedes its copy, the likeness succeeds the reality.”46 This portrayal created two opposing movements, Christianity and Gnosticism, that would not have understood themselves as distinct groups before this heresiological endeavor. That the portraits Irenaeus or Tertullian use of their opponents are so uncritically repeated by modern theology is a testament to the tenacity of the classical model of heretical deviation; but it also suggests that Gnosticism functions as the “archheresy” of Christianity:47 a dark contrast that betrays Christianity’s core truths, whether that be orthodoxy maintained through apostolic succession and the rule of faith, the atoning death of the divine-human Christ, or the affirmation of the body and creation. As Denise Kimber Buell puts it, “ ‘Gnostic’ functions as shorthand for ‘difference’ from ‘standard’ Christianness.”48 So what does all of this discussion of heresiology have to do with the cross? First, in counter-Judaic and counter-Gnostic theology, the cross became a boundary marker, a post on the frontier between sects and a key signifier for the proto-orthodox by which they consolidated their identity and narrative. To be less functionalist, though, it is also evident that the cross became central to how Christians and Gnostics formed their bodies in patterns of practice and ritual in order to express participation in the

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redeemer, and that this was expressed in the consciousness of belonging to a distinct social group that was elect, indeed a new “race.” This is the subject of the next section.

The God Who Devoured the World: The Dualistic Cross In 1945, the Nag Hammadi library was discovered in Egypt, unearthing dozens of heterodox texts. The task of reinterpreting Gnosticism in light of the textual riches in that find became a vital part of early Christian studies. The literature on Gnosticism is massive, and I will not attempt any kind of summary of the debates around Gnosticism, which run deep and are bitterly contested (debate 1: What is Gnosticism, anyway?). The great heresiologist of early Christianity, Irenaeus the bishop of Lyons, in his opus Against Heresies portrays Gnosticism as a collection of heretical schools all emanating from the arch-heretic Simon Magus; but this is unhelpful, as are the broad strokes of older histories of doctrine that lump in other heresies like Docetism, Marcionism, and Manichaeism with Gnosticism. Indeed, as Tuomas Rasimus puts it, the term sometimes seems “to amount to a catchall for any pre-Nicene Christian heresy.”49 There is at least one clearly defined group, however: Valentinianism.50 Whether they qualify as Gnostic as such is contested; they are a complex sect, combining elements from the Sethians and other Gnostic-affiliated groups with more recognizably orthodox Christian tropes and ideas.51 The Valentinians emanate from an influential Roman leader, Valentinus, who came to Rome around 140 and remained there at least fifteen years, teaching alongside other Christian leaders.52 We do not have all the details of Valentinus’s teaching, as the authorship of writings often attributed to him are disputed, and as is nearly always the case with “heretics,” much of our testimony comes from the proto-orthodox. Still, this uncertainty acknowledged, the Valentinians were much closer than other Gnostic groups to the protoorthodox in affirming the goodness of creation and in their generally recognizable incarnational Christology.53 Their divine is utterly transcendent, an unknowable abyss; but they also ascribe important characteristics of immanence to it, through the lens of Stoic pantheism.54 Valentinians even had a developed sacramental economy, which was key to how they constructed a cruciform politics of election.

The Laughter of Jesus and the Crucifixion of the World The winners of history were frequently tendentious in their portraits of their opponents; this was just good Greco-Roman controversialism, and

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in fairness, the Valentinians and rabbis gave as good as they got when it came to polemic. The proto-orthodox attack against the Valentinians obscures these crucial similarities between them. First, Valentinian texts generally follow the same pattern of thinking that Gustaf Aulén would later characterize as Christus victor: Christ descends, enters enemy territory and is killed, but triumphs through his murder and reveals his power over the enemy. This is essential to a thinker like Irenaeus, but it is equally Valentinian. Second, this reversal effected in the cross deepens and develops the logic of election that emerged earlier in the second century with Barnabas and Justin. The cross stands on the dividing line between the elect and the reprobate for both groups, but how precisely this works out is where the Valentinians and proto-orthodox diverge. For the Valentinians, it is a cosmic division; for Irenaeus, the dualism is found in history. The traditional understanding of Gnosticism is that it sees creation as irredeemably evil, but this is only true of Sethian groups; the Valentinians had a much more nuanced idea of creation as either illusory or immature and incomplete—something they share with many proto-orthodox, like Irenaeus. Indeed, one of the points of contention among early Gnostics, especially between Valentinians and others, is the nature of the metaphysical duality the cross exposes. For example, the third-century Apocalypse of Peter, a non-Valentinian Nag Hammadi text, uses Docetic tropes—the bifurcation of the crucified physical Jesus and the spiritual savior, the incommensurability of mind and corporeality, and the identification of Elohim as the demiurge, the deficient and malevolent creator—to differentiate the enlightened and deceived peoples.55 Christ appears to Peter, warning him how the “people of error” will “hold on to the name of a dead man.” Devotion to the crucified Christ will make such people “more and more defiled,”56 for the true savior was not crucified after all, and appears, laughing, above the crucified Jesus: “The Savior said to me, ‘The one you see smiling and laughing above the cross is the living Jesus. . . . The one they crucified is the firstborn, the abode of demons, the stone vessel in which they live, the man of Elohim, the man of the cross, who is under the law. But the one who is standing near him is the living Savior . . . and he is laughing at their lack of perception.’ ”57 The charges of deviation from original truth ran multiple ways—the narrator is every bit as much a heresiologist as (say) Irenaeus or Justin.58 The cross is the dividing line. The errors of the people who follow the crucified savior, the proto-orthodox, occupy the place of the Jews in proto-orthodox texts: they are ignorant of the true meaning of Scripture, beholden to the dead word and under the law. The cross reveals the proto-orthodox fallacy of devotion to the physical Jesus: the spiritual grasp the distinction between

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the “living Jesus” and the crucified Christ, who is the “abode of demons.” The laughing savior reveals a duality between flesh and spirit that maps very clearly onto the ways of darkness and light someone like Barnabas used to differentiate the Hebrew Scriptures and the writings of the apostles. In the Gospel of Philip, which is a Valentinian text,59 the role of the cross is starker, more dramatic and dualistic. It also has a more pronounced polemical bite: “God is a man-eater, and so humans are sacrificed to him. Before humans were sacrificed, animals were sacrificed, because those to whom they were sacrificed were not gods.”60 In the Valentinian myth, the Elohim of the Hebrew Scriptures is the god who devours the world, the deity of the fallen realm. The sacrifices of the Jewish texts commanded by this evil half-deity are made to the archons, the fallen spiritual orders (“angelic henchmen,” Michael Allen Williams quips61). Thus the way Philip understands the cross is explicitly antisacrificial. The true divine, the unknowable first deity, is not appeased by the flesh of sacrifice; rather, the cross reveals the nature of the true people of gnosis. How this works out is a little complicated, but it bears some similarities to the Apostolic Tradition: the cross operates in a sacramental system to mark the elect and ward off outer darkness. Exactly how the five Valentinian sacraments operated has been a matter of considerable speculation. Valentinians certainly shared rituals with the proto-orthodox, but they had their own liturgical practices as well, just as the Tradition’s exorcism baptismal ritual was specific to Roman communities of the early third century. It is not clear whether the uniquely Valentinian sacraments, like the “bridal chamber,” were physically practiced or if they were spiritual teachings revealing the inner meaning of the proto-orthodox sacraments. What is certain is that they were crucial for revealing the elect—and only the elect were true humans. Philip characterizes the nonelect as animals and slaves.62 True humanity is a result of gnosis; the Valentinians adopted the Pauline language of the “spiritual” regenerate (pneumatikoi; 1 Cor. 2:13–15) to brand themselves as an inner circle within the church.63 Philip spells out this election language in the idea that the sacraments give “true flesh” through the cross. The cross distinguishes two races that ultimately stem from the two trees of the garden. The wood of the cross was taken from the tree of life, while the tree of knowledge, counterintuitively, “produces animals” in Adam’s race. The tree of life “produces people” through the cross: “Joseph the carpenter planted a garden. . . . He is the one who made the cross from the trees he planted, and his own offspring hung on what he planted. His offspring was Jesus and what he planted was the cross.”64 The first tree is one of illusion and false knowledge, but the tree of the cross reveals Jesus, who is true gnosis: “That tree killed Adam,

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but here the tree of knowledge has brought people back to life.”65 At the deepest level, this duality of the trees reveals the nature of creation itself, which Philip bluntly calls “a mistake.”66 The demiurge was shooting for incorruptibility, but he instead produced a simulacrum, a shadowy copy of the true spiritual realm. Only the “offspring,” the generation of true spiritual humans, take on the nature of that spiritual realm.67 However, creation is redeemable. Spiritual human offspring possess true flesh: “The cup of prayer contains wine and water, for it represents the blood for which thanksgiving is offered. It is full of the Holy Spirit, and it belongs to the completely perfect human. When we drink it, we take to ourselves the perfect human. The living water is a body, and we must put on the living human. Thus, when one is about to go down into the water, one strips in order to put on the living human.”68 The general parallel to Pauline themes of putting on Christ is evident; however, Philip directly contradicts Paul’s claim that believers undergo a baptismal death. Jesus “poured death out . . . we go down into the water but not into death.”69 This passage is expressing the ironic idea that a material medium (water as a “body”) is representing a spiritual, gnostic reality, paralleling Christ’s own baptism in which (laughingly!) he exchanged the “rags” of the body for redemption (74.24–75.2).70 The Valentinian sacraments have a real grasp on physical reality; the Gnostic sacramental economy is not denying creation and the body as such but is rooted in a desire to reveal the eternal realm and true gnosis imaged in material realities (but really in them), as simulacra reflect an original; as Williams puts it, “corporeality [is] a mode of revelation.”71 The cross reveals the inner meaning of enfleshment and therefore creation, even as the inner nature of the savior was revealed in his triumph over the crucifixion. Here we see the reversal pattern of the cross emerging in Valentinian theology. The revelation of gnosis takes place in the cross, which is a recapitulation of the Edenic tree of knowledge.72 Jesus came to crucify the world—to destroy evil materiality, but to do so by giving true flesh as the inner, spiritual dimension of creation. The physical act of crucifixion is appropriated in the “divinizing mechanism” of the Eucharist.73 The true humans are birthed by the sacraments and spring from the cross. Philip shares the link between sacramental economy and the logic of election in common—not in contrast—with the proto-orthodox.74

Irenaeus and the Two Peoples of History The cross marks an epochal division revealing true and false humanity by recapitulating the fall in a great reversal that upends the realms of

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creation: this is the secret the Valentinian Gnostics, and the great enemy of Gnosticism, Irenaeus, share. How they work it out is quite distinct, though. The Valentinians understand this to be a cosmic, metaphysical division, whereas Irenaeus takes it to be historical in nature. The Valentinian fleshly discipline that destroys the flesh—a crucified body that divinizes the world—is a paradox. But so is the savior laughing above his own dying body. And so is the enigma of recapitulation and election that we will now see in Irenaeus. These are not such different things: if the Valentinians see the cross at the intersection of a great cosmic bifurcation of true and simulated realms, then Irenaeus inscribes the same division within the history of the covenant peoples. In both of these imaginaries, conflicting traditions are writing the central tension of the cross, the stark clash of brutal execution and eternal life, onto the stage of creation. To see the links between the Gospel of Philip and Irenaeus, this section focuses on the cosmology and mythmaking ingredients the two share. They arrive at sometimes drastically different conclusions, but on the basis of very similar presuppositions and frameworks.75 The fact of the matter is that both are dualists and both are Gnostics of a sort. This becomes clear if we look at two Irenaean replies to Valentinian challenges. The first concerns the nature of God itself and Irenaeus’s efforts to avoid the division of the deity found in Sethian and Valentinian traditions. The Gnostics do this for good reason: to explain the duality of the transcendent holiness of the deity and the fallen mutability of creation. Irenaeus’s counterreasoning is grounded in Christology. His argument begins with the interpretation of Matthew 11:27 (“No one knows the Father except the Son”) in book 4 of Against Heresies. Valentinians used the text to argue for the unknowability of the first God and to differentiate between this unfathomable God of the New Testament and the demiurge of the Old, who is known in creation; after all, they argued, if YHWH and the Father of Jesus were the same deity, why did the revelation of Christ come so late in history? Why did this God who had allegedly been around since Adam suddenly take on a new people after millennia of working with Israel? Irenaeus’s answer is similar to Barnabas’s: he lays the blame on the people of the first covenant, though he has a clearer vision of the rejected as a distinct ethnoreligious group: “The Son reveals the Father to all to whom He wills that He should be known. . . . Therefore have the Jews departed from God, in not receiving His Word, but imagining that they could know the Father [apart] by Himself, without the Word.”76 Thus, for Irenaeus, Christology highlights the theme of elect peoples; affirming the knowability of God means refusing a bifurcation of deity, but at the cost of a bifurcation of God’s people in history. Irenaeus spends

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tremendous energy in books 4 and 5 of Against Heresies to show how the one universal God’s recapitulation of humanity in Christ requires a constriction of the elect to a small number. His premise is a proto-orthodox understanding of gnosis: some recognize the universal revelation of the Word, some do not. The effect is a gradual bottlenecking of redemption. “For this purpose did the Father reveal the Son, that through his instrumentality He might be manifested to all, and might receive the righteous ones who believe in Him. . . . And these things do indeed address all men in the same manner, but all do not in the same way believe.”77 Election identifies a community of initiates for Irenaeus just as much as for the Valentinians. Irenaeus shares with the Valentinians a “maturational understanding of the human condition.”78 All of creation is immature and must develop to reveal its true divine meaning. Infantile humanity is possessed of something eternal, the latent and potential image of God. But humanity is alienated from that image; because the Word was invisible before Christ, humanity lost the similitude of God.79 Thus came the stumblings of immaturity until the Word could manifest, closing the gap between humanity and the divine, by the gift of the Spirit: “We could have learned . . . in no other way than by seeing the Teacher, and hearing his voice with our own ears . . . imparting indeed God to men by means of the Spirit, and, on the other hand, attaching man to God by his own incarnation.”80 The immaturity of humanity is the reason for its rejection of the Word; to cure this infirmity, it must undergo a tutorship of suffering to separate the righteous and the rejected. This is where the cross enters into the picture. “[Christ] redeemed us through his own blood, giving his soul for our souls, and his flesh for our flesh. . . . For it is just that in that very creation in which they toiled or were afflicted, being proved in every way by suffering, they should receive the reward of their suffering.”81 But this winnowing is only effective through the recapitulation of history in Christ’s exemplary obedience and suffering: Christ “commenced afresh the long line of human beings,” and did so by reversing the captivity of sin by exchanging his own death for our life, “through obedience doing away with disobedience.”82 Christ reboots human history by reperforming it in a way humanity did not, taking the lesson correctly, as it were—in obedience, not rebellion—and thus divinizing suffering flesh, rather than submitting to captivity. God is the God of all creation. But not of all humanity. The suffering of history is a remedial purge to narrow the stock of humanity to the elect, those who will believe in Christ. But the cost is the loss of God’s original people, the people of the first covenant. Against the Valentinians, Irenaeus

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argues that the evil of creation is provisional, not ultimate. However, he joins them in seeing creation’s corruption as having an essential role to play in the history of salvation. The Valentinians use the cross to portray flesh transcending itself by crucifying the world—undoing the evil of materiality. Irenaeus relocates evil in history, preserving the soundness of creation, but the cost is that he derails God’s story of salvation thus far— God’s first people are cast off for failing to see the revelation of the second Adam on the cross. The Valentinians situate the locus of evil in the cosmos, and assign election and damnation to two races; Irenaeus locates the fundamental evil in history, and assigns election and damnation to two . . . races. Both splits, both “dualisms,” are spurred by the cross. Immaturity perfected by the manifestation of the eternal in the cross: the problem of the symbol is primarily one of knowledge and initiation. This is still very much a species of Gnosticism. The incarnation reveals God to humanity by manifesting the invisible, that is, granting gnosis, knowledge; contingent upon this knowledge, the cross absorbs humanity into God, transforming human flesh. So we see Irenaeus operating within a similar dualistic sphere as the Gospel of Philip, speaking of the flesh of Jesus as an interchange of the invisible and visible.83 The flesh of Jesus is just as much a “divinizing mechanism” in Philip as it is in Against Heresies, even given the very different assumptions about creation and the demiurge held by the two. But whereas Philip imagines the cross as a sacramental reversal of materiality, Christ “crucifying the world” to drain the poison of corruptibility from immortal spirituality, Irenaeus imagines the cross rebooting history—but at the loss of God’s chosen people. Both schools of thought imagine the cross as the axis of a duality, the cosmos or history, and as the mythological wheel turns, it spits out two races: the elect and the damned, the Gnostic and the fleshly. The soldier looking up in hope, the second doubled over in despair.

The Cross and Outer Darkness The pressure of the cross splits the theologies of both the Valentinians and Irenaeus wide open: the tensions of the crucifixion, of the great reversal by which death and evil produce their own undoing in the passion, point to a much deeper and even more discomfiting question. Behind both the Valentinian and Irenaean theologies of the cross lies the need to explain how the executed God can somehow be the salvation of humanity, while restricting this universal redemption to so few. The Valentinians ease the burden by splitting the divine being into two (actually, many, but the One and the demiurge are the important characters here), corresponding to

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two races descending from the garden. Irenaeus preserves the integrity of the divine being, but he also introduces a split into God’s people to ease that tension: one group is the object of wrath, the other the object of love. The race of Adam is transformed by the flesh of Jesus, and the heirs of Adam are narrowed to the community of the church. The boundary marker of the cross has been reinscribed into the metaphysical realm, marking a fissure through the cosmos and history. This is one of the core dilemmas of Western Christian traditions: the apparent contradiction between theological pretensions to universality and the constricted boundaries of the community elected to it. It’s the inherent contradiction of the logic of election: it requires a reprobate body, a massa damnata, to exist, but such a body challenges the effectiveness of the cross as a saving act. The central problem of the cross is that it draws its power from the generation of bodies elect and reprobate. The issue is not just how the universal efficacy of the crucified proves to be so restricted; the issue is also how the paradox of salvation of flesh purchased by the mangling of flesh, eternal life at the cost of crushing death, produces corresponding acts of violence in and by the elect community. In the first Christian centuries this violence was largely rhetorical, and reciprocal between multiple parties; but in the coming centuries it would become all too literal and unilateral. As the symbol of the cross gained distance from the bloody event of the crucifixion, its shock diminished. This was a process hastened by writers who softened its edges in abstraction. Barnabas buried it in typology, for example, and Justin idealized it with philosophical and cultural associations. Such processes distanced later generations of Christians from the first followers, who understood very well the scandal of this symbol of state terror exercised upon Jesus; but no distance could fully tame the brimming violence of the cross. From the time of Barnabas to the Apostolic Tradition, the logic of the new race reflects (sublimates?) the tension of mercy and murder inherent in the execution of the peasant Galilean who is also the divine Son of God dying for us and for our salvation. That tension is projected outward, politically, onto the reprobate people. It is as if the light of the symbol exposes a particularly dark corner in the history of salvation: the contradiction in the divine mystery (perhaps even the divine character) becomes one socially enacted. The demons who are cast out in the exorcism of baptism and who darkened the chi of the universe are shadows residing in the heart of the plan of redemption. I will revisit this tension throughout the book: in Prudentius’s fetishization of martyr blood, in Anselm’s plea to sit in dereliction with Mary at the foot of the cross, in the instruments of salvation and massacre in the

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hands of the medieval tree of life, in the slaughter of the elect in Thomas Müntzer, and in the holy despair of the Puritans. But before all of these disparities to come sit the soldiers at the foot of the cross, divided by its beam in hope and despair. The cross is a site of triumph over evil, and an elect people issue from it; but that triumph is always at the cost of a reprobate people who bear its excess violence. The emphasis of this chapter has been on the cross as a boundary marker, a line that stands between the righteous and the reprobate. But as the demonological tropes of apocalyptic diffused into Christian discourse, the devils of darkness became the victims of history. To return to the chapter opening: we also shouldn’t forget the hopeful soldier, and the dead body lying in hope within the sarcophagus of the tree of life. The cross represents a boundary marker between the elect and the damned, the repentant and the reprobate, the people of light and darkness. But it also signifies the porousness of the boundary between them, for the line runs through the holes in the flesh of Jesus. In this space of slippage, the paradoxical draw of the victim of Golgotha, a site of meaning making opens up again and again throughout Christian history. The cross continued to form victims throughout the centuries, but it also empowered, bestowed agency, opened up spaces of cosuffering and compassion that marked Christians as participants in the suffering, death, and victory of Jesus. Their flesh became united to his flesh; the cross formed bodies both heretical and holy.

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The Body of the Martyr and the Body of Christ

Participating in Christ’s sufferings is a familiar, if exotic, idea to modern Christians. We think of the saints who follow in Christ’s footsteps, who perfect their holiness in imitatio christi, bearing their cross, who even offer themselves in the ultimate Christomorphic sacrifice. Francis, Ignatius, Catherine of Siena; Bonhoeffer, King, Romero. Thus, we would likely assume that this idea pervades the early martyr narratives and expect to see the symbol of the cross dominating these stories, hallowing the martyrs’ torments, elevating them into something sacred, distilling their pain into transcendence. We would expect to see something that would justify the worthwhileness of such otherwise gratuitous violence, redeem it from its use as an instrument of state terror. But these expectations would be frustrated. The idea of the cross as a lens for making meaning for suffering, something in which spiritual elites participated, a symbol that sanctified their victimhood—this idea occurs only on the margins of many of the martyrdom accounts, and the sense that the martyr was participating in Christ’s sufferings was a minor theme at best. In fact, the idea that the cross represents suffering at all is distant in early Christian literature. This isn’t necessarily something to be surprised at, as the preceding chapter showed that the early Christian imagined the cross as a seal of God’s triumphant ownership and protection for the elect people. It was a symbol of preservation in the midst of darkness, apocalyptic and political, not the sign of an event of divine suffering on the elect’s behalf. The symbol begins to transform in the era of martyrdom—but in unexpected ways.

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The transformation happened when the victims of empire were reimagined into victors—despite, not because, of their suffering. This involved a subversion of Roman imperial motifs. The origins of the crux invicta on the sarcophagus (chapter 1, fig. 1) lay in the Roman tropaeum, a military victory standard. Roman propaganda often drew on a stock composition: the tropaeum was erected as a trophy of conquest, with subjugated captives at its base. The Gemma Augustea is a notable example (fig. 2): the triumphant emperor (probably Augustus) reclines while Oikoumene, the personification of the civilized world, crowns him with a wreath. In the lower register, conquered figures (likely Germans or Celts) are bound and humiliated at the foot of the victory standard, still in the act of being erected. But as Christian visual culture appropriated and reworked this scene, those conquered figures started to transform: the cross replaced the military standard, and the victims of the imperial war machine became the saved faithful at the foot of the cross—or they became Roman soldiers, the victors

figure 2. Gemma Augustea. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Antikensammlung, IXa 79. Photo by Carole Raddato.

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having become the conquered. The soldiers kneeling in hope and despair could also be expressed as liberated captives or overthrown centurions. Felicity Harley-McGowan argues, “The body of the captive (dehumanized, defeated, and held in contempt beneath the victory trophy) had to be transformed into the body of the sacred (humanized, victorious, and celebrated).”1 A new iconography of victory over suffering was becoming available. The reason for this shift? The martyrs. Christian artisans were appropriating Roman depictions of captivity and execution as modes of remembrance of those who died for their faith in Christ and triumphed in that faith. The redemption of suffering through the cross seems an obvious link. But as usual in history, obviousness conceals complexity. The idea that Christian suffering is linked to the passion of Christ, that such suffering gains meaning from being put into Christological perspective, is an ancient one; after all, it seems to appear in the New Testament itself, particularly in Paul and deutero-Paul, who can speak boldly of not only sharing the suffering of Christ, but “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24; see also 2 Cor. 1:5; 4:8; 1 Pet. 4:13), and the evangelists portrayed discipleship to the peasant Messiah as bearing his cross (Matt. 16:24). Hence it seems natural for Christian piety to suggest that suffering can be rendered transcendent from its relationship to the crucifixion and death of Christ. This habit of rendering Christian suffering Christological and cruciform is a deeply engrained one; but it is an echo of medieval, especially Franciscan, piety and iconography (see chapter 5). As chapter 1 shows, secondand third-century portrayals of the cross tended to focus on it as a symbol of victory; the key was Christ’s resurrection and triumph, not his atoning suffering and death. It took the development of a material and textual culture of martyrdom to begin associating the sufferer with Christ’s passion. Chapters 2 and 3 trace the evolution of the cross through this culture in late antiquity. This journey holds some surprises. The idea that the event of the crucifixion signifies suffering divine self-sacrifice for human transgression was a distant one, and even more distant still was the idea that this sacrifice is one in which Christ absorbs the wrath of God on humanity’s behalf. The cross continued to predominantly signify the victory of Christ over death, but as the symbol linked up with the experiences and the iconography of the martyrs, that semiotic link deepened. Two transformations followed: victory became something accomplished over and through extraordinary suffering; and endurance of that suffering became meritorious. This and the next chapter argue that the sacrifice of the martyrs helped inspire that idea of meritorious, redemptive pain, even its relationship to

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the forgiveness of sin. The suffering of the martyrs was applied to the death of Christ on the cross, rather than the inverse. In other words, at least in the stream of early Christian literature that I will be analyzing here, Christ’s death on the cross did not give meaning to the martyrs’ suffering; instead, their suffering gave meaning to Christ’s death. But at the beginning of this series of transformations, the cross seems scarcely present at all.

Introducing the Texts In this chapter, I focus on two martyrdom accounts, or acta, that are representative of trends in the martyrdom literature as a whole. The Martyrs of Lyons and the Martyrdom of Marian and James are highly stylized narratives and are among the texts that most clearly cast the martyrs in terms of imitatio christi (or “Christomorphize” them). However, neither prominently features the cross, and when it does appear, it is a symbol of triumph. Thus, the first foray in the symbol of the cross is one of its near absence. The first story narrates the killing of several leaders of the church in Vienne and Lyons in Gaul in 177, including Pothinus, the bishop who would be succeeded by Irenaeus. Preserved by Eusebius and likely edited in the intervening centuries before it got to him, the narrative represents itself as a letter from the martyrs detailing the events of their persecution. From the beginning, the letter adopts apocalyptic overtones, casting their “afflictions” as an attack from the “Adversary” and “his minions against God’s servants.”2 Portraying the persecution as spurred by mob violence, the narrative focuses on two groups of sufferers: those who enthusiastically embraced martyrdom, and those, foreshadowing the controversial “lapsed” Christians of the third century, who waver in their faith. A few figures feature prominently in the first part of the narrative—Sanctus the deacon, Attalus, Maturus, and the slave Blandina—who nobly endure multiple rounds of torture, becoming witnesses who stir the doubters to faith. This section concludes with the devil realizing the futility of torture; he resorts to a strategy of isolation and deprivation, removing the martyrs from their community and from the opportunity for public witness by throwing them in prison. This backfires, though, as it only separates out the faithful and the faithless; those who denied Christ are punished and are “greatly tormented by their conscience,” while those who admit to being christianoi are spared by the grace of God from further torture. Finally, the martyrs are led to their deaths, the many forms of their judicial murder forming “one crown of many different flowers and colours.”3 Sanctus and Maturus die first, and graphic accounts of the miraculously failed executions of Attalus and Blandina follow: they both survive multiple rounds in the arena

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before being roasted alive and gored by a bull, respectively. The text closes with a return to the madness of the mob, who throw the dead bodies of the imprisoned to the dogs, and a theological coda celebrates the martyrs’ emulation of Christ and their triumph in the “contests which they waged against the Demon.”4 The Martyrdom of Marian and James likewise couches its narrative in terms of a contest against the devil. The supernatural elements are even more heightened, however: a number of divine visitations to the martyrs punctuate the story. The narrative of the martyrdom follows athletic tropes, returning repeatedly to the “crown” earned by the martyrs in the contest with the devil and his earthly minions. Guided providentially to the city of Cirta in Numidia (modern-day Algeria), Marian, a lector, and James, a deacon, encounter the “madness of a blind and bloodthirsty prefect” who has initiated a persecution.5 Marian and James are inspired by two bishops to attain their own “palm of glory” (which the account explains is also a “palm of suffering”). As they suffer, they experience a series of heavenly visions. Marian sees himself before a heavenly tribunal, with the martyred bishop Cyprian intervening and leading him to a refreshing fountain; James follows suit with a vision of a stupendously large young man who prepares them for battle. The narrative is preoccupied with asceticism and clerical hierarchy—the laity are quick to be martyred, but Marian and James are assured that “those whose victory is slower and with greater difficulty . . . receive the more glorious crown.”6 The clergy martyrs are like the ascetics, marked by continence and fasting. Finally, following a vision of a heavenly banquet, resembling the agape feast, Marian and James receive the “fatherly kindness of Jesus Christ our Lord”—they are “crowned,” martyred, alongside a river. Their death is figured in sacramental terms: the river would “drink their blessed blood,” and they are “baptized in their blood and washed in the stream.”7 Before his death Marian prophesies judgment on the executioners. Both Lyons and Marian and James are replete with the athletic imagery ubiquitous in early martyrdom acts, while Marian and James also echoes the well-known account of Perpetua and Felicity, with its description of visions and heavenly refreshments.8 Despite their Christomorphizing tendency, neither narrative is focused on the cross, apart from one prominent exception, the cruciform transfiguration of Blandina, discussed below. But it is exactly this feature, the use of Christological tropes with minimal reference to the cross, that is interesting. For where later Christianity (beginning in the fourth century) will use the symbol of the cross, these accounts style the martyrs’ deaths in Christomorphic terms of triumph. There are three dimensions to this portrayal: the martyrs’ deaths as sacrifices of

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praise; martyrdom as winning a crown in a contest; and the martyrs’ status as imitators of Christ.

A Sacrifice of Praise and Thanksgiving In martyrdom literature, the theme of sacrifice is prominent, but it is a complex idea. In martyrdom acta one might expect some kind of evocation of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, perhaps even some idea of the martyrs as atoning for sin with their sacrifice. Modern studies have certainly suggested that early Christians regarded the martyrs as making such atoning sacrifices. In fact, however, in these martyrdom accounts the ideas of crucifixion and sacrifice are only weakly connected. Disentangling these themes, when we approach sacrifice in the martyrdom accounts on its own merits, we find that the predominant idea is sacrifice as a liturgical offering of praise. There are two distinct, but related interpretive traditions: a political-polemical context and a eucharistic one.

The Sweet Odor of Christ The first tradition sees the martyrs’ deaths as polemics—almost parodies— against the Roman cult.9 In the Lyons account, the death of the slave Blandina is presented in explicitly sacrificial terms; her execution is also one of the very few Christomorphic deaths in the acta (that is, deaths that are portrayed with Christological themes). The scene is set into motion when faithful martyred exhale the “sweet odour of Christ”—they so tangibly give off an incensed aroma that spectators think they are perfumed like a cultic offering.10 This notion takes on deeper meaning when Alexander, Attalus, and Blandina finally meet their fate: They were then subjected to all the instruments devised for torture in the amphitheatre, and after sustaining the most intense conflict were sacrificed in the end. . . . Attalus, burning as he was fastened to the brazen seat, while the sacrificial savour arose from his body, spoke to the crowd in Latin: “Look you, what you are doing is cannibalism.” . . . The blessed Blandina was last of all: like a noble mother encouraging her own children, she sent them before her in triumph to the King, and then, after duplicating in her own body all her children’s sufferings, she hastened to rejoin them, rejoicing and glorying in her death as though she had been invited to a bridal banquet. . . . Thus she too was offered in sacrifice.11

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The account of Marian and James is less overt in its sacrificial language, but the idea resonates in their first series of tortures.12 The narrator graphically describes the acts of the torturers as a demonic cult: “Then they were assailed by the garrison soldiery with many cruel tortures . . . priests indeed of the Devil; as though faith could be broken by the mangling of limbs, whereas the faith has scant concern for the body. . . . You impious pagans, you could do nothing to God’s temple, the coheir with Christ!”13 This polemic against Satanic priestcraft becomes explicit when the “mad prefect” is later “unable to achieve the sacrifice of Marian, James, and the rest of the clergy.”14 The narrative then contrasts this inefficacious demonic offering with the climactic death of the two men, which it stages as a sacramental act: “They were then led to the place where they would be crowned: it was a spot through which a river valley ran with high banks on either side, and the heights on both sides also served as a theatre. The river itself in the hollow would drink their blessed blood. Both forms of the sacrament would be present, since they would be baptized in their blood and washed in the stream.”15 The death of the martyr was often understood as a baptism of blood, a baptism that was actually valid for forgiveness of sins if the martyr was an unbaptized catechumen. Marian and James have the advantage of being doubly baptized, as it were; this offers a guarantee of their sanctity and the validity of their self-sacrifice, while also signifying their sacramental safekeeping from the demonic forces at work around them. Other accounts follow suit. In the act of Pionius, the martyr refuses to sacrifice to the emperor, instead offering himself in eucharistic language: “Looking up to heaven he gave thanks [eucharistēsas] to God . . . then he stretched himself out on the gibbet and allowed the soldier to hammer in the nails.”16 The martyrdom of Irenaeus (not the anti-Gnostic bishop of Lyons) likewise juxtaposes sacrifices to the pagan deities with offering to the Christian God, and is one of the few instances where self-sacrifice is understood as participation in Christ’s suffering: “ ‘Either sacrifice,’ said Probus the prefect, ‘or I shall have you tortured.’ Irenaeus replied: ‘I shall be glad if you force me to share in the passion of my Lord.’ The prefect Probus ordered him to be put to torture. . . . While he was being tormented most intensely, the prefect said to him: ‘Well, what say you, Irenaeus? Offer sacrifice!’ Irenaeus replied: ‘By my confession of faith I am sacrificing to my God, to whom I have always offered sacrifice.’ ”17 The sacrifice of the martyr is a liturgical act, and it has a polemical edge, exposing the cult of the emperor or Roman pantheon as demonic. By opposing Christian sacrifice to pagan offering, the accounts also frequently dramatize the sacred nature of the martyr’s self-act in apocalyptic terms. The sacrifice of

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the martyr occurs in the apocalyptic clash of light and darkness, Christ and devil, once again clarifying just where the lines between the two lie and delimiting the elect Christian body.

Let Me Be Bread The second liturgical martyrdom tradition thinks of the martyrs’ deaths as acts of thanksgiving and praise—eucharistic sacrifices. We see this idea in two of the earliest martyr texts. Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Romans, written about 117 CE while Ignatius was on the way to Rome for trial and (most likely) execution, is the first postbiblical example of martyrological sacrificial language. Most of his letters are written with apostolic intent to the churches in Asia Minor, but as Ignatius looked ahead to Rome, his thoughts clearly went to his impending death. Like many other martyrdom accounts, the letter evinces a sense that being a Christian, or a disciple, was considered an eschatological goal attainable only with the ultimate sacrifice: “Just pray that . . . I may not merely be called a Christian but actually prove to be one. . . . Then I will truly be a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world will no longer see my body.”18 This disappearance to the world is presence to Christ, just as Christ departed from the world and is present with the Father; this transferal is accomplished by self-sacrifice. Thus the oft-quoted passage: Let me be food for the wild beasts, through whom I can reach God. I am God’s wheat, and I am being ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, so that I may prove to be pure bread. Better yet, coax the wild beasts, so that they may become my tomb and leave nothing of my body behind, lest I become a burden to anyone once I have fallen asleep. . . . Grant me nothing more than to be poured out as an offering to God while there is still an altar ready, so that in love you may form a chorus and sing to the Father in Jesus Christ.19 Combat against the beasts of the arena is the agonistic struggle of discipleship. The letter ends with Ignatius developing the masticating imagery of the passage above into full-blown eucharistic resonances: “My passionate love has been crucified and there is no fire of material longing within me, but only water living and speaking in me, saying within me, ‘Come to the Father.’ I take no pleasure in corruptible food or the pleasures of this life. I want the bread of God, which is the flesh of Christ who is the seed of David; and for drink I want his blood, which is incorruptible love.”20 Ignatius does not explicitly identify himself with Christ; he speaks of becoming

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truly human, an imitator of “the suffering of my God,” and being a “freedman in Jesus Christ,” who is “free in him.”21 Primarily, he is focused on being with Christ, not becoming Christlike. The language is imitative, not participatory. As did the martyrs of the previous section, Ignatius envisions himself as a thank offering, a devotion of his body so complete that it is transfigured in praise and thanks. By his death he tastes the flesh and blood of Christ, signifying the eschatological fullness of the sacrament in the same way that his death will be the eschatological consummation of discipleship. He is a sacrifice for the Roman church, an example of faith and a cause of praise. Polycarp of Smyrna’s account lends a different nuance. Whereas Ignatius presents his impending death as the apotheosis of discipleship, a bloodsoaked thank offering, Polycarp’s account depicts him as a Christomorphic offering with wider efficacy for the church. The narrative opens with an apologetic: “Blessed indeed and noble are all the martyrdoms. . . . We must devoutly assign to God a providence over them all.”22 Having the martyrs’ death under God’s control makes them exemplary for other Christians, for they act for the salvation of all. To strengthen the point, when Polycarp is introduced, the narrator quickly fashions him into a type of Christ, the events of his passion paralleling those of Jesus.23 He has “betrayers in his own household” who are explicitly compared to Judas, and he is captured by an official named Herod. He is to “fulfil the lot that was appointed to him, becoming a sharer with Christ [christou koinōnos].”24 He prays for hours, rides a donkey into the city on the Sabbath, is encouraged by a voice from heaven; the “Jews” are portrayed as collaborators with the Roman officials—the Gospel parallels continue until he is brought to the execution pyre. But at this point, the typological correspondences start to retract. Unlike Christ, he is not nailed, but bound like Isaac: They did not nail him down then, but simply bound him; and as he put his hands behind his back, he was bound like a noble ram chosen for an oblation from a great flock, a holocaust prepared and made acceptable to God. Looking up to heaven, he said: “. . . May I be received this day among [the martyrs] before your face as a rich and acceptable sacrifice, as you, the God of truth who cannot deceive, have prepared, revealed, and fulfilled beforehand. Hence, I praise you, I bless you, and I glorify you above all things.” . . . And from [his body] we perceived such a delightful fragrance as though it were smoking incense or some other costly perfume.25 Like Ignatius, the account resonates with eucharistic overtones, echoing the anaphora (se ainō, se eulogo, se doxazo),26 and comparing Polycarp to

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bread: the flames meant to consume his body miraculously divide, “and he was within it not as burning flesh but rather as bread being baked, or like gold and silver being purified.”27 It is only when his body is pierced with a dagger that he dies, with a gushing flow of blood that quenches the flame—another Christomorphic parallel. But just as he dies, the narrator once again draws back from equating Christ and Polycarp too closely. Christ is the redeemer; the martyrs are only echoes: “We could never abandon Christ, for it was he who suffered for the redemption of those who are saved in the entire world, the innocent one dying on behalf of sinners. . . . Him we reverence as the Son of God, whereas we love the martyrs as the disciples and imitators of the Lord.”28 Sacrifice is a theme liberally employed throughout the martyrdom accounts; but few hints of a vicarious dimension to that sacrifice can be descried. The martyrs give their bodies as offerings of worship, not agents of atonement. Transfiguration of the body into an offering of praise and thanksgiving is a clear idea; a eucharistic mold is also frequently pressed upon the martyred body. The sacrifice of the martyrs renders their body into the incense of praise and the bread of an anaphoric offering. They are heroes of faith and disciples, but the martyrological narratives tend to shy away from too direct an identification of the martyr with Christ. When the symbol of the cross appears, it forms the body into sacrificial bread; but any link between the death of the martyr and vicarious suffering is still to come. For the dominant use of the cross as a martyrological signifier, we have to turn to a different theme.

The Cross as Crown The martyrs offer themselves as eucharistic bread, but this sacrifice is not usually linked to the cross in their acta; however, the cross does regularly occur as a symbol of victory. It is a crown and trophy at the consummation of the feat. Its full symbolic power registers not in suffering but in triumph. Here we see the idea of the tropaeum emerging not just as a coded symbol of the cross (Justin, chap. 1), or a subversion of Roman military propaganda, but as a theological statement about participating in Christ’s victory over spiritual evil. As such, the martyr’s death is a gift from God to achieve this crown. The epilogue to the narrative of Marian and James echoes the ambivalence of Polycarp’s narrator in expressing not only a deep identification between Marian and Christ but also a sharp differentiation—an equivocation that balances precisely on the beams of the cross. The coda dwells on Marian’s

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mother cradling his corpse, foreshadowing the medieval pietà, and offers a swift concatenation of typological images: In the body of her son she embraced the glory of her own womb; again and again with religious devotion she pressed her lips to the wounds of his neck. Ah mother, rightly called Mary, blessed are you in your son as well as in your name! Surely no one could believe that in a woman who was honoured by the offspring of her womb the blessed fortune of so great a name would ever go astray! Truly immeasurable is the mercy of the all-powerful God and of his Christ towards his dear ones, since he not only strengthens those who place their trust in his name by the favour of his grace, but also quickens them by the atonement of his blood. . . . The very ransom we believe to be paid by our own blood is granted to us by God.29 The narrator on the one hand brings Marian explicitly into typological relationship with Christ: in his death he is as Christ was in the womb, held and protected by his mother, refracting his glory back on her. But lest the reader draw too strong of a conclusion from this echo, the narrator is careful to emphasize that “atonement” (redemptione) comes only in the blood of Christ. And then follows the final, and most fascinating, statement: “The very ransom we believe to be paid by our own blood is granted to us by God.” The narrator is not intending to correct a misperception that the martyrs have earned their ransom by their blood (as if a proto-Protestant were reading, worried about works righteousness); Ignatius has already been quite clear this is exactly what some of the martyrs hoped for. Rather, the point is that the martyrs earn their bloody ransom by a divine favor. In other words, their martyrdoms are a gift from God. Attributing the martyrdoms to divine agency closes the narrative in something of a tension with the opening paragraphs of the narrative, which describe Marian and James in a struggle “against the distresses of a cruel world,” represented by a bloodthirsty prefect acting at the instigation of the devil.30 But the idea echoes Valentinian-Irenaean reversal: the grace and mercy of God preserve them through the struggle and inverts the persecution into a contest of glory. Divine agency transforms the malice of the devil into salvation; indeed, when the narrator recounts the appearance of Agapius (an earlier martyr) to James, he rhapsodizes of the “fatherly kindness of Jesus Christ,” who grants visions to the martyrs “before bestowing the gifts of his mercy”: the gifts of execution and martyrdom.31 The contemporary reader may recoil at how directly the narrator places the agency of martyrdom in the “kindness” of Christ. But it is simply a way

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of configuring the narrative arc of the martyrdom story so that it ends triumphantly. The axis of victory around which the acta bend is the cross, or its presence implied in language of blood and ransom; for Marian and James, the sanguinis redemptione, the redemption or “atonement” from the blood of Christ, lies not in sacrifice but in the crown of glory of martyrdom. This crown unites them with the saints in heaven, indeed brings the saints down from heaven to visit them; it earns them their redemption and glory; and it preserves them amid the rages of the devil working through the crazed enforcers of imperial power, finally turning the tables of the struggle to the defeat of the devil. It is a “palm of suffering,” but only so that it can become a “palm of glory.”32 The story of Marian and James is far from unique in this emphasis on the cross as a crown to be earned in triumph over the devil. Blandina’s unique cruciform death is key in the Lyons narrative—it calls those who were wavering to faith and makes Blandina a noble mother.33 Trading heavily on Blandina’s social status as a slave, Blandina’s Christomorphism effects a reversal in the contest between the people of God and the devil: She seemed to hang there in the form of a cross, and by her fervent prayer she aroused intense enthusiasm in those who were undergoing their ordeal [agōn], for in their torment with their physical eyes they saw in the person of their sister him who was crucified for them, that he might convince all who believe in him that all who suffer for Christ’s glory will have eternal fellowship in the living God. But none of the animals had touched her . . . thus for her victory in further contests she would make irreversible the condemnation of the crooked serpent, and tiny, weak, and insignificant as she was she would give inspiration to her brothers, for she had put on Christ, that mighty and invincible athlete, and had overcome the Adversary in many contests, and through her conflict had won the crown of immortality.34 Much more directly than Marian’s account, the narrator associates the cross here with the defeat of the devil and the attainment of a crown. The close of the narrative even uses the “fishhook” trope of the later Christus victor when the devil, having devoured the sacrificial victim, vomits up the bait: “The throttled Beast [was] forced to disgorge alive all those whom he at first thought he had devoured.”35 Marian’s sacrifice as linked to the redeeming blood of Christ and Blandina’s overcoming of her social station (the slave becomes a noble mother and wears a crown) through the manifestation of the cross are particularly

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well-developed instances of this theme of the cross as a path to nobility and victory. The imagery draws, as commentators frequently remark, from the tradition of the agōn, the athlete’s “struggle” or “ordeal” that earns him or her a victor’s crown. The agōn runs throughout the martyrdom accounts. The act of Montanus and Lucius portrays them as participating in the royal victory of Christ, symbolized through the cross: “To God’s servants it is easy to be killed; and hence death is nothing when the Lord crushes its sting, conquers its struggle, and triumphs by the trophy of the cross. . . . We receive the reward of our crowns because the battle has already taken place.”36 The martyrdom of Fructuosus likewise links the form of the cross with the defeat of the devil and the attainment of the crown, paralleling the bishop and companions with the biblical friends of Daniel.37 The cross is a crown attained in a struggle that is both a martial victory, a battle against the devil, as well as an athletic victory, a triumph in the game of the amphitheater. The idea of the cross as trophy shows a theological development that linked the cross to resurrection: it is not simply spiritual evil that is averted by the cross but the power of death itself.

Suffering and the Imitation of Christ The final dimension of the cross in the martyrdom acta is the martyr’s body as imitation of Christ. We have already seen that the narratives’ relationship to this concept is complicated: they don’t adhere to any one Christomorphic idea, and at those points where the martyr appears to be most clearly linked with Jesus—say, with Marian’s proto-pietà or with Blandina’s cruciform agony—the narrator tends to take careful steps back to prevent too close of an identification. In Marian’s case, there is a particularly quick corrective move from the Virgin-Christ relationship that Marian’s mother assumes with her progeny, to Christ’s redeeming blood. This is not (necessarily) a failure of nerve on the narrator’s part, as if she or he wandered too close to the theological fire and had to beat a hasty retreat. What appears to modern eyes as an abrupt juxtaposition of imitatio christi and the inimitability of Christ suggests instead that the passage hangs together in ways that answer to a different logic: the martyrs emulate Christ in order to represent the community and to mediate the rewards of their sacrifice back to it. Several of the accounts cite the Pauline Christomorphic kenosis passage from Philippians 2 as they portray the sufferings of the martyrs. For example, in the appendix of Lyons, the passage frames the victims’ reluctance to use the actual term martyr:

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These then were intensely eager to imitate and emulate Christ, who being in the form of God did not think it robbery to be equal with God. Hence, having won such glory and having borne witness [martyrēsantes] . . . they would not proclaim that they were martyrs nor would they allow us to call them by that name. Rather if anyone of us would speak of them as martyrs either by word or letter, they would sharply rebuke him. For it was their joy to yield the title of martyr to Christ alone, who is the true and faithful witness [martyri]. . . . And they would recall the martyrs that had already passed away, saying: “They were indeed martyrs, whom Christ has deigned to take up in the hour of confession, putting his seal on their witness [martyrian] by death: but we are simple, humble confessors.”38 The pious motivation of the Lyons victims to eschew the martyr title sits in direct cross purposes with the narrative. First, the narrator uses terminology blurring the distinction between them and those worthy of the term martyr, which I have indicated by glosses from the Greek. Though the Lyons “confessors” refuse the title out of reverence for Christ the true martyr and for their predecessors, they nonetheless “bear witness,” like “the true and faithful witness” himself. Moreover, the narrator explicitly compares the Lyons victims to the faithful who preceded them, to whom they do grant the title: they “manifested the power of martyrdom in deed, speaking to the pagans with great openness, and showing for their nobility by their perseverance, fearless, and courage.”39 The narrator is memorializing the Lyons martyrs in the same way that they have memorialized the departed faithful; they are caught up in the same production of memory as the earlier martyrs,40 whether they like it or not, and the narrator seems to go to pains to subvert their self-effacement. Thus, the narrative rhetorically works against the modest denial of martyrdom; but it also moves to assimilate the martyrs to Christ thematically. This particularly occurs with Blandina and Sanctus. I have already noted how the narrative uses Blandina’s cruciform torture to portray her as a witness and example that stirs the wavering to faith. She suffers on a kind of cross so that her fellow victims see Christ in her, “him who was crucified for them” in order to defeat the devil.41 The narrative highlights the power of her witness with motherhood metaphors, thus tagging her with gender constraints even as it valorizes her: Blandina’s maternal figure “duplicat[es] in her own body all her children’s sufferings,” bearing witness like Christ, and in so doing produces the church.42 Sanctus is also portrayed in Christomorphic ways so he could be an example to the wavering.43 His

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pain is brutally evident in his body, “being all one bruise and one wound”; but the more he suffers, the more Christ suffers in him, the stronger his body becomes and the more Christ’s presence is a “heavenly fountain of the water of life”: in his second round of torture his body is “unbent and becomes straight . . . the second trial by the grace of Christ proved to be not a torture but rather a cure.”44 Thus Blandina and Sanctus, by the strength of their confession and endurance in suffering, have Christ revealed in them, ensuring thereby the defeat of the devil. The humility of the martyrs, their kenosis, is the conduit of Christ’s appearance in them. This Christomorphism is for the sake of “winning glory” and “bearing witness”; the martyrs’ torments is the way they triumph, and triumph and glory are where they are identified with Christ: Christ’s appearance in them is as “that mighty and invincible athlete.”45 Sanctus is the exception that proves the rule, but even so, “Christ suffering in him achieved great glory.”46 While the narrative uses the terminology of sacrifice in passing, there is no sense that the martyrs suffer in participation with any kind of atoning, propitiating death of Christ on the cross. Instead, they defeat Satan through the power of their confession, which stirs others to faithfulness. In this, they model and mediate Christ, who himself suffered to exhort, “that he might convince all who believe in him that all who suffer for Christ’s glory will have eternal fellowship in the living God.”47 Thus the bodies of Blandina and Sanctus are formed and cultivated in cruciform triumph over suffering, and they mediate Christ in their bodies—but in order to craft and form another body, the body of Christ ecclesial: “In peace they departed to God, leaving no pain for their Mother, no strife or conflict for their brothers, but rather joy, peace, harmony, and love.”48 Blandina’s sufferings are the pangs of motherhood, pangs that echo and evoke the sufferings of mother church; insofar as she mediates Christ’s crucified and resurrected body, she manifests his extended body, the church. The focus of the narratives is not on redemptive suffering, but on triumph within suffering as a witness to the church. This intense link between the capacity of the martyr’s triumphant body to mediate Christ and the communal form of Christ’s body is present throughout the martyrdom accounts in varying degrees of emphasis. Though the idea does not always involve the symbol of the cross directly, as it does with Blandina, this link passes through—this link is—their bodies, which are repositories of their holiness.49 One concrete way this is evident is in the potency of the martyrs’ remains. Many of the narratives are preoccupied with the community reclaiming their executed bodies.50 The martyrs can appear after their death to encourage sufferers, even to exhort

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the faithful to preserve their own ashes!51 This sense of postmortem power and influence led directly into the cult of the saints (see chapter 3). The holiness resident in suffering and triumphant bodies, bodies of the cross, became a key signifier of the social and political constitution of the church in the third and fourth centuries, as the martyrs took up residence in the center of the new basilicas and as their role changed from being representatives of the faithful body, to becoming repositories of pardon and forgiveness of sin. And they would bring the cross along with them on this trajectory. But we are not there yet.

Sacrifice and the Cross What is perhaps most surprising is not how the cross is used in the martyrdom accounts but rather how little it appears. It is conspicuous by its absence, from the perspective of later readers. The notable exceptions, such as Blandina’s first torture in The Martyrs of Lyons, stand out as distinct. In most of the martyrdom accounts the cross is used in ways consonant with the aversion, reversal, and triumph themes of the first two Christian centuries. Later theological traditions will employ the cross to legitimate suffering as participation in the passion of Christ, to suggest that the sufferer in some unique way manifests or recapitulates Christ. But the sacrifices of the martyrs are not sacrifices for sin; they are eucharistic offerings of the self, the body redolent of bread in the oven and blood evoking the wine in the cup. The martyrs offer themselves to participate in the triumph of Christ. However, this reading pushes against a consistent modern interpretive tradition that understands the martyrs’ deaths as vicarious and atoning for the sins of other Christians. In this final section, therefore, I will examine sacrifice in the martyrdom accounts more closely. Candida Moss identifies this scholarly assumption as resting heavily on two isolated but well-known texts: the martyrdom accounts of Ignatius and Polycarp.52 As I have shown, however (following Moss), Ignatius dies as an exemplary witness for the Roman church, longing to become food for the beasts so that he might perfect his discipleship. There is no hint that the sacrifice has any atoning power. Polycarp’s case is somewhat more complicated. He clearly sees himself as dying on behalf of the church, and his recapitulation of the gospel narrative and self-offering would apparently suggest a redemptive force to his blood. But a close reading of the account shows no such intent, as I argue above.53 The narrative does indeed speak of Polycarp’s death as being efficacious for the forgiveness of sins, but the storyteller’s only

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reference to this idea seems to be in apocalyptic, apotropaic terms. The martyr’s death is a seal against the forces of darkness: “Blessed Polycarp . . . put a stop to the persecution by his own martyrdom as though he were putting a seal upon it.”54 Recall that the account goes out of its way to deny any equality between Polycarp and Christ—despite the unambiguously citational approach the narrative initially uses to evoke the Gospels. The language of the martyrdom narrative is far from substitutionary: like the other martyrs above, Polycarp’s death is a sacrificial act of praise and glorification with a polemical edge, separating the damned and saved: “Even the crowd marvelled that there should be such a difference between the unbelievers and the elect. And one of the elect indeed was the most venerable martyr Polycarp.”55 One of the key ideas in this chapter is indeed sacrifice—but the accounts have underlined our need to nuance our understanding of the concept in early Christianity. Sacrifice among the martyrs is sometimes uncritically understood in substitutionary, atoning terms in martyrdom scholarship. Two issues are wrapped up in this interpretive tradition. The first is the reflex to conflate ideas of the cross, suffering, and the sacrificial, atoning passion of Christ. The second is more complicated, as it involves understanding the complicated semantic domain of sacrifice itself. This requires some reframing of the term. When the theme of sacrifice is indeed present in the acta, it is almost exclusively used in the sense of a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. Even Ignatius’s and Polycarp’s accounts used the idea of sacrifice more in this sense of voluntary selfoffering in praise. The fundamental focus of this sacrificial language is worship, not sin. The pierced and seared flesh of the martyr is a sweet smell in the nostrils of God.56 Frances Young characterizes this as a type of communion sacrifice, an offering presented to the deity for that deity’s enjoyment.57 This is one of three categories of sacrifice in the ancient world she discusses in her 1975 study Sacrifice and the Death of Christ. The first, gift sacrifice, is a transactional offering to buy off the deity’s anger, largely found in Greek pagan votive sacrifices (although the apparently primitive idea of bargaining with the gods to placate their wrath is exactly the preoccupation of penal substitution). Also called propitiation, it can frequently be expressed in the sense of a transfer of merit or credit. In the second category, communion offerings express worship and thanksgiving through the surrender of valuable goods. Taken to the extreme, this can become the offering of the self.58 These sacrifices originate in the idea that the deity and the worshiper share the meal that is offered in the altar. This type of sacrifice

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is an homage, not a bribe (like the first). The third category, sin offering, can be understood in two ways. In expiation, the predominant understanding in the Israelite temple cult, the blood offered on the altar purged the pollution of sin and thereby any disruption to the status of the covenant. Sin offerings could also be warding or aversion acts: the pollution to be removed was spiritual evil, and the sacrifice prevented the incursion of the demonic. The martyrdom accounts understand sacrifice largely in the sense of communion and worship, following the Hebraic Scriptures. The idea of a shared meal between the worshiper and the deity had largely died out in the Deuteronomic tradition of the Hebrew Bible, where God no longer shares God’s portion with the worshiper, but the whole offering is consumed in a holocaust.59 The Jewish Passover, and subsequently the Christian Eucharist, however, reoriented the meal to the community, as the offering to God became a communion feast shared with the covenant people. The acta sometimes imbue the martyrs’ deaths with this eucharistic sense, as when Ignatius and Polycarp become bread on the altar. This makes the worship an offering to God that at the same time nourishes the community. The expiatory theme is clearly present as well, largely in the sense of apocalyptic preservation or apotropaic warding. The martyrs’ deaths defeat the devil and signify the triumph of God over the forces of darkness—the death of the saint is not her defeat, for God reverses and upends the executioner’s scheme by making a victory out of her murder. Often this idea is polemical: the sacrifice of the martyr demonstrates the demonic, counterfeit nature of the Roman state cult. The sacrifice shuts out the pollution of demonic presence; the church maintains its purity and covenant relationship. The expiatory function of sacrifice is fundamentally about preserving group identity. It defines a community against an opponent and aligns it with the purposes of the divine. By the time of the martyrs, the pressures of communal self-definition had shifted—the concern was primarily polemic against the Roman Empire, although the Jews are frequently targeted too—but are still well placed in continuity with the ideas of Barnabas and Justin. The two ideas, communion and expiation, are not mutually exclusive, as they both primarily serve the needs of social cohesion and preservation. The community worships in fellowship with the divine and receives nourishment as it celebrates its preservation from the forces of evil. The martyrs offer themselves on behalf of the community, becoming its bread of communion and its seal of apocalyptic preservation. Here is where I differ from Young, who understands the martyrs’ sacrifice as exclusively expiatory:

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“the martyr saw himself as participating in the atoning sacrificial work of Christ.”60 The argument of this chapter suggests her conclusion is too quick, for Young interprets this, following Ignatius, as the atoning suffering of the martyr in imitation of Christ. My claim, however, is that the imitatio christi of the martyr is almost exclusively one of Christ’s triumph over evil; only gradually did triumph over suffering become triumph through suffering. These are very different ideas. The cross signifies their triumph with Christ, not their suffering with him. We have not yet glimpsed the idea that suffering—the martyrs’ or Christ’s—itself is meritorious or “atoning.” This must await the third and fourth centuries, as bishops appropriated and reallocated the martyr traditions, shifting the emphasis to the martyrs’ pain and endurance. As the bishops did so, the association of suffering with the cross deepened and transformed the symbol. Caution is thus warranted when speaking of sacrifice in connection with the cross, because we can too quickly assimilate the use of sacrificial language to the idea of propitiation, the notion that God must be appeased for human sin.61 Sacrificial language in early martyrdom accounts is common, but this idea of propitiation is totally absent. Sacrifice motifs are predominantly of self-offering in praise and with a subversive political intent. In many of the accounts there are competing economies of sacrifice; as Elizabeth Castelli remarks of the story of the Lyons and Vienne martyrs, there was a “conflict between the dominant Roman social order and Christians used the field of ‘sacrifice’ as a staging ground.”62 The self-offering of the martyrs as a sweet incense to God was a direct counter to the practice of offering the sacrifice of incense to the genius of the Roman emperor. This polemic is a key part of Robin Darling Young’s argument that early Christians viewed martyrdom (and were trained for martyrdom) as a public liturgical sacrifice in direct resistance to Roman ceremony, and George Heyman’s argument that sacrificial discourse was a “hidden transcript” of resistance to Rome: “Christian martyr texts also allowed the ‘body’ to become a critical site of power and control.”63 What, then, of the cross itself, so indelibly linked to thematics of sacrifice in later Christian history? When the cross does appear in martyrdom accounts, it predominantly does so to ward off evil, because it marks divine ownership and signifies the defeat of the devil by Christ’s triumph over death. It symbolizes victory by God’s preservation and grace. Even this, however, makes the connection between the martyrs’ protecting cross and Jesus’s own cross stronger than the evidence often presents it. Most of these texts are content to portray the sign of the cross as a sign of protection that averts flames, calls forth rain, and calms wild animals. We are certainly glimpsing the same reversal pattern discussed in chapter 1, the

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simple paradox of spiritual inversion portrayed in political terms. The cross is present, but primarily in the sense of triumph, occasionally connoting a sacrifice of praise, and almost never in the sense of redeeming suffering. The martyrs’ sacrifice primarily is a political act of counterworship that nourishes the community and averts the intentions of spiritual evil. The body of the martyr is, as Heyman suggests, a site of power and control. But does that make it the body of the cross? The outcome of this chapter for the larger thesis of this book is a curious one, for of the three martyrological themes—sacrifice, triumph, and imitation of Christ—only the idea of triumph, the martyr gaining a crown, has a strong correlation to the symbol of the cross. This is significant in light of the interpretive history of the martyrdom accounts that frequently connects these ideas—understandably so, in view of the density of the concept of redemptive suffering in later Christian thought. But at what point do thematics of suffering, sacrifice, and the cross become connected? In what context are they linked and how does suffering become a cruciform experience in Christian intellectual and material culture? And how does the idea of atonement figure into this intellectual history? We are catching traditions in the process of evolution. The Christian tradition had not yet erected the symbol of the cross over the heads of suffering victims who conquered empire, but the symbol was migrating in the Christian symbolic universe. For all the polemical and apocalyptic power of the cross as a symbol of social identity or a cosmic motif, there is something abstract in it, tamed even; but the martyr stories are tales of tortured flesh, of people executed by a police state for spectacle. To say that they triumphed, and to use the cross to proclaim their triumph, is dangerous, a political act of resistance that encodes subversion into the symbolic matrix of the Christian communities. Resistance against empire comes with real costs, costs measured in broken bodies. Like the scent of bread from the oven, the fragrance of their sacrifice pervaded the very symbols the late antique church employed to make their deaths meaningful, transforming them and imbuing them with new meaning.

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The Politics of Holy Bodies and the Invention of the Cross

In 386, Bishop Ambrose was in a double bind. He was in a showdown with the Arian imperial forces and needed spiritual legitimacy for his newly built Basilica Ambrosiana. The new Roman capital of Milan lacked the sacred history of Rome’s many holy sites. Relics were the obvious choice for a material connection to Christian antiquity. Crowds demanded them as a sign of God’s continuing favor, but they were in short supply in the newly promoted city. So Ambrose proclaimed to his new congregation that he would discover the remains of martyrs to consecrate the building; helpfully, he had a dream, and this supernatural inspiration led to the cemetery of martyrs Nabor and Felix. He boldly dug into the sacred ground and found two bodies; when a demon-possessed women started begging the skeletal remains for mercy, naming them as the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius, it was confirmed: Ambrose had discovered (inventio) his relics.1 As miraculous healings continued, confirming the veracity of the relics, Ambrose wrote a hymn and installed the remains under the altar.2 The hymn contained the line, “We might be denied martyrdom for ourselves, but we can find martyrs.” Ambrose’s act is a strikingly literal illustration of the two leading themes of this chapter: first, the martyr traditions were reinterpreted in the later centuries of early Christianity to emphasize their postmortem healing and pardoning efficacy. Second, they were repurposed to serve the bishop’s sacramental and administrative authority. In this new era of the cult of the saints, the bishops physically moved the martyrs into the heart of the church, so the martyrs’ intercessory, pardoning, and miracle-working

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power could be channeled through the sacramental authority of the episkopos. It is a trend that started as early as the mid-third century, but by the time of the post-Theodosian peace (380s ce), the martyr cult had become the living heartbeat of the imperial church. The martyrs and saints (with the ascetics beginning to join the heavenly pool) were regarded as members of a heavenly pantheon available for intercession and the granting of pardon to those still dwelling on earth; their intimacy with God was the “sine qua non of their ability to intercede for and, so, to protect their fellow mortals.”3 The story of this chapter is how elite texts—texts written by catechists, bishops, theologians—adapted the martyr cult to serve the pedagogical, polemical, and jurisdictional needs of the fourth- and fifth-century church. When this happened, the symbol of the cross transformed. The cross was a relatively minor theme in the martyrdom acta of the second and third centuries, and it almost always was associated with the martyrs’ triumph rather than suffering.4 This changed in the fourth and fifth centuries, and something new emerged: the twofold idea that the cross connotes the passion—suffering and death—of Christ and those who imitate him, and that this suffering and death are meritorious, earning credits for those who believe. The martyrdom stories themselves generally did not present the martyrs as forgiving sin; their deaths averted apocalyptic evil, but they did not bankroll merits on which mortal Christians might draw. As popular devotion and episcopal maneuvering alike leaned on the idea of “atonement,” though, the symbol of the cross began to take on a new dimension: it now stood for the transmission of merit, a process we will first see in Cyprian’s North Africa. The logic of vicarity begins to emerge: someone else suffers and earns merit on one’s behalf. The bodies of the martyrs would become the first true holy victims, the bodies of the cross; Jesus would follow suit later.

The Martyrs’ Deaths and the Forgiveness of Sin In the third and fourth centuries, an idea emerged that reshaped how Christians understood the martyrdom accounts: the suffering of the martyrs is an efficacious sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins—and this sacrifice is linked with the cross. The acta of the previous chapter portrayed the sacrifice of the martyrs as a eucharistic offering of praise and thanksgiving, and the efficacy of their death had more to do with the defeat of the devil than remission of sins. But it is a different matter in the elite reception and reinterpretation of the martyrs, which contain strong assertions that the

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martyrs’ deaths atone. In the texts of the following writers (Origen, Cyprian, Augustine, and Prudentius), a pattern emerges of understanding the martyrs’ deaths as sacrificial imitations of Christ; the sufferings of the martyrs gain power for the remission of sins; and, finally, they suffer the cross. The Christomorphic triumph of the martyrs becomes their meritorious suffering. The cross begins to mean the remission of sins in the wake of the developing martyr cult in the late antique church.

The Martyrs’ Priestly Service Origen’s Exhortation to Martyrdom represents an important early stage in the reception and shaping of the martyrological tradition (ca. 235). Origen follows Clement of Alexandria in the tradition of understanding martyrdom as a philosophical training of the self, using the “terminology of Stoic virtue and the Middle Platonic theory of human constitution and knowledge.”5 In contrast to the apocalyptic themes of Gallic and North African martyrdom traditions or the focus on the imperial cult that characterizes many of the acta of Asia Minor, Clement and Origen adopt the Middle Platonist school tradition of Alexandria to reinterpret the martyr as the ideal philosopher who esteems the soul to be superior to the body and controls her passions in temperance and moderation.6 Using this Platonist frame, Origen pushes the martyr toward identification with Christ, who exemplifies these philosophical traits. By freeing herself of the burden of the body and embracing gnosis through suffering, the martyr participates in Christ. Origen introduces the theme of the martyr’s imitation of Christ with Matthew 16:24–25 (“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it”). This standard of discipleship, however, doesn’t simply mean conformity—it means union: “He who bears witness to someone . . . unites and joins himself to him to whom he bears witness. . . . We give ourselves entirely to God and to life with Him and near Him with a view to sharing union with His Only-Begotten Son and those who have a share in Him: then we can say that we have filled up the measure of bearing witness.”7 The martyr unites with Christ to the extent that, separated from the encumbrance of the body, she follows Jesus into heaven itself and receives gnosis, knowledge, that surpasses Paul’s ineffable experience.8 The martyr is accorded a new and singular status because of her fidelity in union with Christ. This special degree of union with Christ exemplifies

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the highest philosophical ideal, making knowledge accessible that is impossible to learn in the embodied state (greater than that of the angels themselves).9 However, in preparation for this state the body must be trained and mastered, overcoming suffering to achieve philosophical equanimity. Martyrdom is the ultimate such training. Invoking the Maccabean mother’s admonition to her sons to endure suffering (2 Macc. 7:20–29), Origen turns to the nub of the imitatio christi theme: the emulation of the passion. As a training for gnosis, martyrdom is to be desired, if not actually actively sought. Creative exegete that he is, Origen reinterprets Jesus’s Gethsemane prayer so that it becomes a plea for greater suffering; the martyrs likewise must seek “that very special death, death for the sake of Christianity, piety, and holiness.”10 The martyr’s exalted status gives him “special confidence [parrhēsia] before God,”11 a boldness given, in part, to perform the priestly service of intercession. Like Jesus the high priest himself, the martyrs fulfill this service by offering themselves, and they “procure for them that pray the remission of sins.” Because the martyrs undergo the ultimate example of self-discipline and piety, their offering is supererogatory and “atones for many.”12 Origen links several themes in novel ways. He draws on a school tradition of self-discipline and philosophical training so that martyrdom is made an act of Middle Platonic care of the self; and he renders that act an edifying, instructive pedagogy for the church. Suffering becomes a technology of Platonic self-mastery, uniting the martyr with the exemplary sufferer, Christ. By explicitly developing an imitatio christi theme, Origen claims a much stronger relationship between the martyr and Christ than the martyrdom acta we have examined. He also strengthens his Christomorphic presentation by describing it as priestly. The martyrs’ deaths are presented as atoning sacrifices—of themselves. His use of sacrificial imagery marks a shift from the martyrdom accounts as well: no longer a eucharistic or laudatory sacrifice to God, here the offering is given for the community. The martyrs’ deaths are efficacious for the sins of Christians who appeal to them. This does not mean their sacrifice is substitutionary; as a text in Contra Celsum suggests, Origen still thinks of atonement in warding or apotropaic terms: “One righteous man dying voluntarily for the community may avert the activities of evil demons by expiation. . . . [He] died to destroy a great demon, in fact the ruler of demons, who held in subjection all the souls of men that have come to earth.”13 The martyrs participate in and enact Jesus’s suffering triumph over evil forces, and they procure the protection and liberation of the community from sin through their priestly intercession. They exemplify patient suffering, and that is their triumph.

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The Martyr and the Bishop While Origen portrays the Christomorphic martyrs as ideal philosophers who are also somehow priestly, Cyprian has a vested interest in walking back the martyrs’ authority, even if he accepts their power of intercession. Cyprians’ concerns are far more pragmatic, writing as he does in the throes of North African schisms—premonitions of the Donatist controversy. His interest in the martyrs is not theologically innovative; rather, his concern with the forgiveness of sins conferred by the martyrs is very literal, with tangible stakes bearing on episcopal power and ecclesial centralization in play. Thus the real significance of Cyprian’s theology of the martyrs lies in his response to his historical circumstances.14 The conflict was a local one, but it signaled important shifts in the relationship of the martyrs and the bishops: the martyrs had acquired the power to forgive sin, and for Cyprian, that power had to be subordinated to the bishop’s authority. In 250, the Decian persecution began: all Romans were to demonstrate their loyalty and faithfulness to the Roman gods by publicly offering a sacrifice of incense. Many Christians complied, particularly since Christian activity was not otherwise forbidden per se. Some sacrificed, and some used proxies or bribes, in order to obtain certification, the legal proof of compliance to the Decian order. Some of these lapsi, or lapsed, later sought readmission to the Eucharist, which occasioned a lively debate in the church about their rehabilitation. Even more controversial was the way some of them procured reconciliation with the community. In Cyprian’s Carthage and throughout North Africa, the confessors, the imprisoned faithful who were often tortured or otherwise suffered deprivation for their refusal to sacrifice, had acquired the status of martyrs avant la lettre, as it were; they preemptively carried the moral authority and the intercessory power of the martyrs because of their certain impending deaths. The repentant lapsed sought out letters from the confessors in which the latter pledged to intercede for them after their martyrdom.15 In fact, some presbyters started treating the letters as valid for immediate forgiveness of sin, inciting something of a black market in the letters among the lapsed. Cyprian (from self-imposed exile) strongly opposed this practice, siding with the Roman bishop’s condemnation of it while differing from Rome in his belief that the martyrs did in fact carry the authority to forgive sins. A schism resulted in Carthage; the dissenting clergy were eventually excommunicated, and they responded by setting up their own churches. In this context of sacramental access and episcopal authority, then, the question of the intercession of the martyrs was crucial. Cyprian’s strategy was to subordinate the reconciling power of the martyrs to the sacramental

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economy and episcopal governance of the Catholic church, and to Christ, in whom the church is united.16 Martyrdom held no salvation if it occurred outside the church. This is why Cyprian’s two best-known treatises, The Lapsed and Unity of the Catholic Church, are inseparable; the original context of his (in)famous statement “There is no salvation out of the Church” lies in this controversy, as the beginning of the sentence makes clear: “But, if the baptism of public confession and of blood cannot avail the heretic anything to salvation.”17 Even if heretics should receive the baptism of blood, they remain outside the church: “Though they should suffer death for the confession of the Name, the guilt of such men is not removed by their blood; the grievous irremissible sin of schism is not purged even by martyrdom.”18 Like Origen, Cyprian understands martyrdom as a sacrifice, but he subtly circumscribes its power by linking it with the sacrifices of Christ and the Eucharist. Why? Because this subordinates it to the bishop, in whom the unity of the church subsides. “The sacred meaning of the Pasch lies essentially in the fact, laid down in Exodus, that the lamb—slain as a type of Christ—should be eaten in one single home. . . . The flesh of Christ and the Lord’s sacred body cannot be cast outside, nor have believers in any other home but the one Church.”19 In order to make the efficacy of martyrdom subject to episcopal authority, Cyprian speaks of the priests as offering both the sacrifice of communion and that of the martyrs: “It is the great honor and glory of our episcopate that we have given peace to the martyrs, that we priests who daily celebrate the Sacrifices of God may prepare sacrifices and victims for God.”20 The martyrs draw their strength from the sacrament and thus, indirectly, from the bishop: “The soldiers of Christ . . . daily drink of the Chalice of the blood of Christ so that they themselves may also be able to shed their blood for Christ.”21 Like Origen, we see with Cyprian an adaptation of the martyrological tradition for a pastoral program. Unlike Origen, though, Cyprian finds himself compelled to bend the martyr tradition in heresiological directions in response to the practice of the reconciliation of the lapsed by the confessors. Both theologians reshape the martyr tradition in a Christomorphic direction. Origen’s motivations are pedagogical, and Cyprian’s logic is sacramental, but the outcome is the same: the martyrs have gained their status because of their fellowship with Christ, and this status invests their deaths with power for the forgiveness of sins of the church. With Cyprian we also link back to the controversialist dimensions of the cross from the second century. The cross is a boundary marker—but now real bodies are being dismembered.

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The Martyrs and the Imperial Church Jumping ahead well over a century, we can see a third transformation in the reception and reinterpretation of the martyrs: the link between the suffering of the martyrs and the cross. Origen emphasized their Christological self-offering and intercessory power; Cyprian linked their sacrifice to the episcopal sacrifice of the Eucharist. Both stress their intercessory power to remit sin. After the Theodosian peace, though, things had changed: there were no more martyrs being produced. The church entered a phase of consolidation, and the cult of the martyrs became an ideological rallying point for its emerging catholic identity. Paradoxically, though, at this moment of triumph, the martyrs truly started to suffer. Augustine pushed back (fruitlessly, as it turned out) against the intercessory power of the martyrs in favor of Christ’s priestly work. The poet Prudentius highlighted their pain in spectacular fashion and linked it to the cross in the service of a political polemic. But both assumed the devotional cult of the martyrs and the Origenistic-Cyprianic theology of redemptive suffering. The Christian cosmology had fully supplanted the Roman one, and it was slowly becoming cruciform in shape. All the themes necessary for the logic of vicarity to coalesce—forgiveness of sin, union with Christ, atoning sacrifice, suffering and the cross—were present by the turn of the fifth century. Holy victims had become the trademark of Christianity’s political theology.

Modeling Justice: Martyrs and the Whole Christ Augustine is a minority report in this chapter, as he stresses believers’ emulation of the martyrs’ virtuous lives but pushes back against their status as sources of grace apart from Christ. Be like the martyrs, Augustine stresses, instead of just liking their benefits. He tried to reintegrate the martyrs into the church, toning down their exalted status a bit. The whole church was capable of their participation in Christ—including his suffering. The whole church could become the body of the cross. At least, that was the argument Augustine offered. As was usually the case for the African bishop, Augustine’s understanding of the martyrs evolved: initially suspicious of the cult, he eventually welcomed the martyrs wholeheartedly, based apparently on the arrival of Stephen’s relics in North Africa (and likely Augustine’s gradual acceptance of local traditions).22 Augustine’s many martyr sermons after the arrival of Stephen’s relics highlight the key role martyrs had come to occupy in the economy of the forgiveness of sins for late antique Catholic theology.

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Sermon 313E is a fascinating example, one of several sermons preached on Cyprian’s birthday (that is, his dies natalis, the day of his martyrdom).23 It is too much to say that Augustine makes Cyprian “another Christ,” an alter christus. But Augustine’s treatment of Cyprian as exemplary runs strikingly close to the way he treats the incarnation itself: a pedagogical training in justice. For Augustine, the martyrs were teaching aids manifesting eternal justice. The martyr makes the body visible—whether that be the divine body of Christ or the social body of the cross, the church. Augustine’s treatment begins with a striking comparison between the “great exchange” of Christ’s two natures and the ministry of the bishop. By a “twin grace,” as bishop and martyr, Cyprian unites two contraries: “As bishop he defended and held onto unity; as martyr he taught and gave an example of the confession of faith.” In the same way Christ unites believers with God, Cyprian effects the unity of believers with each other. He teaches the church to hold steadfastly to God by modeling faith, making the invisible visible, the unseen tangible. Likely gesturing to his congregation, Augustine invokes a paradox: “Faith is something great—and where is it? After all we can see each other’s faces. . . . But where is the faith which I’m talking about now? . . . Look here, faith can’t be seen; and the whole of this crowd, which can be seen here in God’s house, was drawn here by faith” (s. 313E.2). This is more than simply a rhetorical flourish—faith can’t be seen, yet it brought us here. Cyprian, he preaches, preserved the Lord’s peace (against the betrayal of the heretics) through his example: he exemplifies Christ’s passion on the cross in accepting death from his persecutors. This is his confession of faith, and by it he expresses his devotion to the invisible and unseen. The point is not simply one of Neoplatonist epistemology, using vision as a metaphor for temporal and eternal forms of knowledge. Augustine’s obsession with vision has an earthier, more lived urgency behind it as well. Traditionally, the Christian martyrs like Cyprian were heroes of spiritual combat; but Augustine wants his hearer to grasp that the martyrs’ fight is the same one every believer undergoes. In Augustine’s hands, the martyrs become a lesson about the training of desires in the Christian life—directing the unruly, ambiguous, unquenchable yearnings of the human soul toward Christ. Because the martyrs despised the love of the flesh and loved God more than their own lives, they model right love and desire, “the true and perfect lovers of justice” (s. 159.8). They become mediators like Christ: their tortured flesh conveys the same transcendence his does, even if theirs is but a pale reflection of his. Augustine frequently refers to the “spectacle” of the martyrs, an ironic reference to the amphitheater. The spectacle of his sermons is a series of

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rhetorical enactments of the superiority of the invisible over the visible, as he redirects his hearers from the coarse pleasures of the games to the sacred combats of the martyrs.24 Sermon 51, one of his longest extant homilies, is a dilatory speech designed to keep his listeners from running off to the games (s. 51.2: “So you see that in fact you haven’t disdained the show today” by being in church). Speaking of the amphitheater as the site of the martyrs’ “spectacles,” he portrays the audience members divided (like soldiers at the foot of the cross), some seeing justly and others watching the martyrs die carnally: “The materially-minded look on, and think how wretched and unfortunate those martyrs are, thrown to wild beasts, beheaded, burned with fire, and they are filled with detestation and horror. Others, however, look on, as do the holy angels also, and don’t fix their attention on the mangling of bodies, but instead marvel at the completeness of faith. A splendid spectacle offered to the eyes of the mind is a spirit whole and unbroken while the body is torn to pieces.”25 The martyrs are echoes of Christ’s own pedagogical life and death, an example that trains Christians to set their sights on eternity. But there is more to this idea. The martyrs aren’t simply examples; they have this status because of their special union with Christ, who acts in identity with them to such an extent that he suffers with them and in them—because he acts in them. Augustine continues the trend of the early Christian centuries that treats suffering, whether that be of the martyrs or Christ himself, as always transitive to triumph: the martyr is victorious over suffering, and in this she earns the merit of her supererogatory death. Augustine speaks of the suffering of the martyrs, but this is always followed by a rhetorical pivot to their triumph and preservation. What is different about him is his clarity that this triumph occurs via the grace of union with Christ, not the inherent virtue of the martyr—a rare idea in the martyrdom acts themselves. By virtue of his human nature and thus his identity with humanity, Christ can suffer with the persecuted, but in so doing he elevates them above their pain. Moreover, he does not simply suffer with them for their own preservation, but to make them spectacles for the church to witness: “Just as one man laid down his life for us all, so the martyrs too imitated him, and laid down their lives for their brothers and sisters. . . . At least we are all in attendance upon the same Lord, all following the same teacher, accompanying the same leader, joined to the same head, wending our way to the same Jerusalem, pursuing the same charity, and embracing the same unity.”26 Ultimately, their sacrifice is pedagogical—they are followers of Christ the teacher as much as any other Christian, except that they are particularly exemplary followers.

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The martyrs only represent (exceptionally) what the broader body of Christ performs normally. The martyrs act in identity with Christ because the entire church is united with Christ. When they suffer, Christ suffers with the martyrs “in the person of his body,” which is the church. The same sermon continues as follows: “We are members of the same person’s body as [the martyrs] are too, even though we cannot compare with them. Because if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; so too, when one member is glorified, all the members rejoice with it. Glory be to the head, by which consideration is given to the hands above and to the feet below.”27 Christ is present in the church as his body, his incarnation “prolonged,” as it were, and in Scripture (particularly the Psalms) he frequently speaks from the perspective of the church. So it is natural for Augustine to extend this idea of Christ speaking in his body to the martyrs. By kindling the love of justice in other Christians, they demonstrate the unity of the church in its union with its head, Jesus, by love. This is Augustine’s ecclesiology of the “whole Christ” (totus christus) applied to his effort to “throw a bridge across the crevasse that appeared to separate the martyrs from the faithful.”28 J. Patout Burns has carefully traced the development of Augustine’s understanding of redemption in Christ; as Augustine’s thought shifts toward a theology of grace and predestination (prompted, in part, by his understanding of the cult of the saints, something Peter Brown emphasizes), two major transformations take place: the pedagogical function of the incarnation becomes less about persuasion and more about the bestowal of the Spirit in grace, with the result that human mediators—preeminently the martyrs—take on the pedagogical, exemplary role; correlatively, the idea of Christ taking on human sin eclipses the idea that the faithful suffer for the purgation of their sin.29 He detaches the martyrs from their unique role as dispensers of pardon so that they become exemplars of virtue and grace. As he emphasizes a theology of grace more, Augustine effectively undermines the long tradition of Origen and Cyprian that interpreted the deaths of the martyrs as meritorious sacrifices that were efficacious for the forgiveness of sins. The martyrs are reconfigured from being apocalyptic warriors to trainers in the way of justice. But Augustine also transfers this tradition onto Christ: his Christocentrism dictates that it must be God’s grace, not human work, that provides salvation and forgiveness of sin. So Christ takes on the role of dispenser of forgiveness formerly attributed to the martyrs, and the cross becomes key in that transformation, just because it is the cross that links the martyrs and Christ as the ultimate examples of endurance and denying the flesh. Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross

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provides the forgiveness of sins that was formerly attributed to the martyrs’ intercessions. Thus with Augustine the cross begins its migration into the center of the Christian economy of forgiveness of sins. In many ways, though, Augustine’s Christocentric reading of the martyrs constituted a minority report in Western piety. His theology ran directly against the popular devotion Cyprian had to deal with—a transactional attitude seeking to draw from the confessors’ and martyrs’ accounts to remedy one’s moral demerits. Cyprian’s protest wasn’t against this practice as such; he was concerned that it be reined in and subordinated to the office of the bishop. Augustine frequently found Cyprian to be the elephant in the North African theological room, and in this case, Augustine worked around Cyprian by relocating this pardoning authority within the body of the saints as the whole Christ. This kept the martyrs’ power subject to the church, while at the same time making the forgiveness they wielded a power of Christ alone. He helped associate the cross and the merits of Christ in a way that would have a long history. But in his admonition to imitate the martyrs, and to not treat them like a new pantheon of supernatural surplus, Augustine proved something of an outlier to the Catholic theology of the fifth century (in this as in many other things). The crowds in Augustine’s congregation, Brown writes, had come to participate, not imitate30—they were far more interested in partaking in the favors and benefits of the martyrs than in imitating them in a martyrdom of their own desires and sins. This interest remained alive and well into late antiquity, in popular devotion and episcopal practice alike. It would take the emergence of the new spirituality for Anselm to seriously build on Augustine’s advocacy for an imitative spirituality of the cross. By then the discourse of vicarity would be firmly lodged in Western spirituality.

The Martyrs’ Political Theology When Augustine’s older contemporary Prudentius visited Rome at the turn of the fifth century, he toured the shrines of the saints and catacombs and read Pope Damasus’s (366–84) epigrams dedicated to the martyrs. Prudentius wrote a cycle of poems, adding them to a handful of his earlier hymns dedicated to Spanish martyrs, to form a work he called the Peristephanon (The Martyrs’ Crowns).31 By the time of Prudentius’s martyr poems, the situation of the church had completely changed from Cyprian’s era: it was not only legal but, in its pro-Nicene form, legally prescribed. In the wake of the Theodosian peace, a broad movement of cultural consolidation was taking place in the church of the late fourth century. Christian

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material culture was blossoming in art, architecture, and literature; and it also was the period when the martyr cult went mainstream in the church. In Cyprian’s wake (and against Augustine’s protest), bishops now began to build on the martyr traditions to construct an organized liturgical and ecclesial program, so that the martyrs’ intercessory and sin-expiating powers were mediated by the church. The cult of the martyrs was tamed, legitimized, and ritualized—and, in the process, was instrumental in enduing more than one bishop with authority; Damasus, for example, secured popular support against a rival through the creation of his martyr epitaphs and his adornment of the Roman catacombs.32 While Prudentius’s poems share all three of the themes of the martyr acts explored in chapter 2 (sacrifice, triumph over suffering, Christomorphism), his treatment dwells on the bloody tortures of the martyrs in much greater detail; he is also more direct in his description of the martyrs in sacrificial terms, speaking of their self-offering as immolated victims.33 His most sustained attention to the cross occurs in the hymn to the Antiochian martyr Romanus (no. 10), in which the martyr offers a long apologetic for worship of the true God before the prefect Asclepiades. Romanus’s mockery of the Roman pantheon is a device Prudentius uses to reframe pagan sacrifice, thus scoring cultural points by legitimating its obsolescence in the Theodosian peace. Prudentius’s argument through Romanus is that true sacrifice is one of virtue and faith, but for this witness, Romanus is tormented. As the torturers began to cut into him, Romanus, unmoved and placid, describes the carving of his flesh as a surgeon’s work of cutting away disease, freeing him from his body to dwell with Christ. By the end of the first round of torture, Romanus’s mouth is mutilated, but even this does not silence him; indeed, at this climactic point Romanus launches into a meditation on the triumphant reversal of the cross, responding to the prefect’s mockery of the crucified Christ: “That cross is ours, we mount the gibbet; for us Christ was put to death and for us Christ returned as God. . . . He dies and conquers death, and He returns to that which cannot die.”34 The prefect is unmoved, so Romanus taunts him a second time. Not even a child would worship Ascelpiades’s gods. When a child is promptly produced by the prefect (at Romanus’s suggestion), he confesses Christian monotheism and is tortured before his mother and executed (Prudentius cites 4 Macc.). Romanus is supposed to follow, but rain miraculously prevents his execution by burning, and the clearly exasperated prefect calls for his tongue to be cut out to silence his slandering of the gods. Even this, however, does not shut Romanus up. Prompted by the child’s death, he

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launches into a long parody of the taurobolium, the slaughter of Cybele, the mother of the gods. He details the gore-soaked priest who bathes in the bull’s blood, the self-mutilation of Cybele’s devotees, and the cruel sport the devil makes of it all. At last Romanus falls silent and succumbs. Romanus’s death is a much more graphic countersacrifice than that of Polycarp, who only imagined his dismemberment with longing. Prudentius spares the reader no details. His description of bloodshed borders on fetishism, whether of the bull in hymn 10 or of the martyrs Vincent or Hippolytus elsewhere: They cut [the bull’s] breast open with a consecrated hunting-spear and the great wound disgorges a stream of hot blood . . . dripping a foul rain, and the priest in the pit below catches it, holding his filthy head to meet every drop . . . until the whole of him drinks in the dark gore. From the whole town a throng of the faithful might be seen gathering, making a soft bed furnished with supports, and wiping dry the bleeding wounds. One covers with kisses the double cuts made by the claws, another eagerly licks the red gore on the body. Many wet a linen garment with the drops of blood, to lay it up at home as a holy safeguard. One could see the [body] parts torn asunder and lying scattered. . . . Stunned with grief, they were searching with their eyes as they went, and gathering the mangled flesh in their bosoms. . . . With their garments also they wipe dry the soaking sand, so that no blood shall remain to dye the dust; and wherever blood adheres to the spikes on which its warm spray fell, they press a sponge on it and carry it all away.35 Romanus himself contrasts his blood to the sacrifice of the “unhappy pagan”: “This is truly my own blood, not that of an ox.”36 He does not testify to his intercessory powers, though, so Prudentius has an angel, who lovingly inscribes the martyr’s wounds in a book before the throne of God, testifying to his postmortem prowess. At the last judgment, Prudentius himself hopes to hear God say, “Romanus prays for him.”37 Romanus triumphs in offering true sacrifice—himself—and thereby participates in Christ’s victory, parodying pagan sacrifice as he does so. Prudentius still has very little sense that Christ’s death itself is understood as a sacrifice, even at this relatively late date; the removal of sins is accomplished by the virtue of the martyr. This is very Origenist. However, Prudentius gives pride of place to the idea of sacrifice as a political polemic.

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The entire poem (and indeed much of the Peristephanon) is preoccupied with sacrificial imagery, and it demonstrates the reversal of two sacrificial economies, supplanting the Roman system with the Christian one. The pantheon has been colonized by a totally different object of adoration. Replacing the blood of Cybele is the blood of the martyr. The martyrs are now the objects of the people’s entreaties, their blood purer than sacrificial animals because of their triumph. With Prudentius, a number of themes coincide from chapter 2 and this chapter. The martyr acta suggest the link between the martyr’s death and the triumph of Christ, but very rarely do they style the martyr’s death as participation in the cross of Christ. In Prudentius, the reversal-triumph theme has become much more significant, and with it, the connection between the martyrs’ passion and the cross.38 Prudentius frames martyrdom much more clearly as a Christological act, as did Augustine. Second, the uniqueness of Prudentius’s sacrificial imagery highlights the polemical intent of sacrifice in the martyrological tradition. The selfoffering of the martyr is a play in the contest of religious economies. We saw in chapter 2 how the narrator framed the killing of Marian and James as a demonic sacrifice that God reversed in the martyrs’ baptism by blood.39 The rhetorical attack against Rome is much clearer in Prudentius; but in context, there is a real irony to his polemic. We cannot be certain when the martyrdom account of Marian and James was written, but Prudentius writes after Theodosius, in the peace of a legally sanctioned church. Pagan sacrifice was no longer a live issue of major consequence; the Christians had won. They were still carrying out a campaign of legitimation against Roman cultural elites, but the invention of a sacrificial frame for martyrdom was also part of the process of memory production for a church seeking to consolidate its tradition.40 As the church honed its narrative, it framed martyrdom as participation in Christ as part of this process. It was a way of linking the martyrs with Christ as founders of the faith. Third, it is striking how freely blood flows in literature when it has ceased to in the arena. It is as if for Prudentius the sacrifice of the martyrs was a ward, a shield, against the demons of social memory; the war with paganism was largely over, some reactionary Roman elites aside, but in its place a kind of nostalgia arose for the apocalyptic clarity of the martyrological combat. The blood of the martyrs was spread on the lintels of the new cathedrals, that the cultural angel of death might pass by. This was the beginning of the discourse of vicarity in Western Christianity: others had borne the cross, others had suffered, for the good of the

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people of God. The triumph of the martyrs in the cross was on behalf of the people of God; the martyrs earned the power to secure the forgiveness of sin by intercession, a power ratified by the divine voice at the moment of Romanus’s death. This intercessory privilege of the vicariously dying martyrs was a key moment in the transformation of the fourth-century church.

The Cult of the Saints and the Invention of Martyrdom A fresco in the domus (house church) below SS Giovanni e Paolo in Rome illustrates just how exalted the martyr cult had become by the fourth century.41 The viewer is confronted immediately by a figure in an orans pose (standing, arms uplifted in prayer; fig. 3), framed in epiphanic splendor, both inviting the visitor in and coaxing him into penitent devotion. The curtains that frame the orant were appropriated from the emperor cult and indicate his exalted, heavenly patronage.42 “Most remarkable is the clarity of the function of the saint in the icon. . . . His eyes are not lifted to heaven but are directed out to the viewer. The icon is less a unique portrait of an individual saint than an object lesson in the function of a saint as intercessor.”43

Figure 3. Confessio, Case Romano, SS Giovanni e Paolo, Rome, late fourth century. Photo: Emily Shaw © The Trustees of Columbia University, Media Center for Art History, Department of Art History & Archaeology.

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The figure in the fresco has not been identified for certain (Cyprian has been suggested, as has been Christ, sans halo), but whoever this heavenly patron is, there is a very deliberate visual and affective rhetoric into which the viewer must enter to be granted his favor. Two prostrate figures are at the orant’s feet. His uplifted arms draw attention to the grill above him, which would have held the remains of a saint. The saint is now in glory, but the holy body remains, flanked by acclaiming figures, to receive the prayers of the penitent ascending on the arms of the sacred patron. The heavenly figure invites the viewer’s prayers, but to approach him one must join the devotees kneeling at this feet. And this was to enter the company of the martyrs. For the surroundings immerse the viewer in a mythos of sacrifice. On the facing walls are four panels. The upper two depict a narrative of martyrdom: three figures are arrested on the left and kneel, awaiting beheading, on the right. The lower panels portray figures—possibly the owners of the domus, Pammachius and Paulina—showing homage to the martyrs. On the left, a male figure brings a chalice; on the right, two women offer gestures of consolation or sadness. It is clearly a devotional tableau: the orans figure is framed by a narrative of martyrdom above, and iconography of veneration below. As the visitor took her place among the supplicants in the lower registers, she appealed with them to the martyrs, the relics at the focal point of the sacred space. The cross is, once again, remarkable in its absence. But the cult of the martyrs had provided all the ingredients for an economy of holy merit transfer to emerge in the Middle Ages, an economy that would run along the arms of the crucifix once the link was made. The popular traditions of martyr veneration were premised on the availability of the sainted dead for the sharing of merit and triumph, for intercession and pardon of sin, often outside of the official sanction of the bishops.44 This perspective on the martyrs as unique and sui generis made them subjects of adoration and participation, but this cultic context militated against Augustine’s efforts to link them to Christ as exemplars of a common grace available to all in the sacramental economy of the church. If we look at the one strand of the Western tradition that most directly links to the inquiry of this book—how exactly did the cross become a substitutionary punishment effective for the forgiveness of sins?—it at least appears that this popular tradition of holy victims with substitutionary status, and not as much the Augustinian tradition of imitatio martyris, won the day.45 The story of the martyrs is one of radical iconography tamed by social transformations. As the church embraced the Theodosian peace, it looked

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back in nostalgia for a usable history and found there the acts of the martyrs. The politically subversive public liturgy of the martyrs was “accepted, elaborated, domesticated, and bankrolled” by the fourth and fifth centuries in service of episcopal centralization of power;46 at the same time, crowds flocked to saints’ tombs and crept to underground crypts to mark their untamed heavenly power. Acts of resistance and empowerment were gradually theologized, the martyrs becoming avatars of Christ’s apocalyptic triumph, their deaths sacrificial acts of thanksgiving and congregational communion. As theological elites reconstructed the martyrs’ eschatological banquet into a dispensary of intercessory merit, a similar development took place with the cross. Once an apocalyptic ward and a crown of triumph over darkness, it became a signifier of their great, meritorious suffering. This gradual tightening of focus on the idea of the martyrs earning merits for forgiveness of sin included very little emphasis on substitutionary suffering itself; indeed, sacrificial suffering of the martyrs and Christ has been a decidedly secondary or even tertiary theme in the acta and the theological interpreters of the martyr traditions. Suffering was, of course, emphasized, even graphically portrayed; but the point of the bloody suffering of, say, Montanus, Blandina, or Prudentius’s Romanus is not that they took divine punishment for humanity’s sins, nor even that they won merit through their endurance of suffering; the consistent emphasis in these texts is rather their supernatural triumph over such suffering, how the bloody flesh of the tortured body is a sacrifice of praise to God and a parody of pagan worship. The martyrs earn merit by their triumph, not by bearing punishment. Later centuries would paint a very different portrait. Medieval theologians would not hesitate to stress the sufferings of the saints and Christ. So how can we account for the emergence of suffering as, in itself, a theological concern? At least the hint of an answer seems to lie in the reception and transformation of the martyrological tradition this chapter has traced. As Peter Brown notes, “The excruciating torments which had accompanied the deaths of the martyrs . . . surged forward, in the late fourth century, if not earlier, to take centre stage.”47 Prudentius went to extreme, nearly pornographic, lengths to dramatize Romanus’s sufferings—the greater the torment, the greater the victory, after all. The depiction of victory through suffering could then gradually become a focus on suffering itself as redemptive. Just how this shift occurred is unclear (I will suggest one possibility in chapter 4). The fact that the cross was only beginning to figure in fourth- and fifth-century iconography, however, reveals just how

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gradually this process would take place and how difficult it is to pin such iconographic transformation to one political event (such as the conversion of Constantine). Much more important than the prominence of suffering is the logic of vicarity. The great contribution of the martyr traditions to the theology of the cross is the idea that forgiveness of sin is something earned for the Christian by another’s action, and that redemption has to do with the mitigation and remission of specific acts (debits) by merit (credits). The economic language is crass but not so outlandish in an era when Christians regularly postponed baptism until their deathbed so that their account could be wiped clean at death’s door. Christians had always believed that Christ died for humanity’s sin, of course; what was new after the bishops and theologians reinterpreted the martyr traditions was the transactional framing of this idea, and the concept that certain surrogates, Christians who had done supererogatory things and earned a nonpareil intimacy with God, could mediate that transaction. Augustine’s efforts to stress that Christ, not the martyr, was the source of this merit largely fell on deaf ears. It was far easier to appeal to the local martyr’s cult for one’s clarity of conscience than to undergo an interminable process of heroic striving against sin oneself. Over a millennium later, a young German theologian named Martinus would protest against the idea that the church had anything to do with the marketing of these merits. By the time he did, the cross had come to occupy a central place in Christian iconography, and that made all the difference for the substitute the reformers invented to fill the void left by the banishment of the saints. In the meantime, the legacy of the martyr traditions, the politics of holy bodies, would provide the context for an epic reimagining of Western religious subjectivity in the early Middle Ages. The eleventh century would see the emergence of a new form of the body of the cross.

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Between Hope and Fear: Monastic Bodies at the Foot of the Cross

A bishop, seated on his throne, proffers a book to a woman (fig. 4). They are both dressed elegantly. Both are powerful figures. The book is a symbol of the woman’s aristocratic or noble status; the bishop’s stance and confident grasp of his crozier speaks to his authority. Indeed, the woman receives the volume with slight deference, a bow of the head—reverence aimed either toward the text or the man himself. But something is new here. The transmission of a holy text would normally imply that the recipient be a fellow religious. But this woman is no nun; she is a layperson. And while she shows respect, on closer examination she is not so deferential after all. For one, she is the same height as the man, if not slightly taller. Both are positioned in the exact vertical center of an arch, and both occupy the middle of a cleanly bisected space (highlighted by the dark blue window behind the bishop). The visual rhetoric seems to make them equals. The only asymmetrical element of the image is the book itself. She is actively taking it from his hands into her half of the composition. Her hands are as firm on the spine as the bishop’s on his staff.1 The book is a “hinge” between the two figures, their hands resting on its holy words, their eyes meeting as if communing over its message. It is an intimate, familiar gaze. While the woman seems to be an idealized figure, shorn of identifying features, she is portrayed in ways that reverse usual patron relationships. Generally the layperson presents an offering or gift to the superior holy man;2 here, instead, is the reverse. The book seems to be traveling outside of the blue, heavenly realm, into the more monochrome tones of the world

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Figure 4. Anselm offers his Prayers and Meditations to Matilda of Tuscany. Admont, Stiftsbibliothek MS 289, f. 1v. Public domain.

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of the laity. It suggests that the bishop’s teaching is gaining a wider audience. The image is taken from a manuscript of Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations.3 This text originated in a request from Adelaide, daughter of William of Normandy, around 1071 or 1072. Thirty or so years later, Anselm sent an expanded version to Matilda of Tuscany—the woman pictured in the Admont manuscript. The image is a striking representation of the Prayers: they are crafted dialogically, reflecting a new spirituality into which Anselm invites his lay readers to participate.4 The story of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is one of “democratization”: the spirituality of the Benedictines, crafted in the rigors and rhythms of lectio divina and Scripture study, was making its way out into the world.5 In late antique Christianity, the logic of vicarity emerged in the early Christian martyrdom traditions. Holy bodies sacrificed themselves at the altar of empire in a parody of Roman pagan ritual, investing the Christian movement with a new pantheon. The merits of the martyrs and saints were treasured and transmitted within the great new cathedrals of the fourth and fifth centuries. The martyrs’ suffering triumph gave the symbol of the cross new pathos and power, their merit lending a new structure to the transaction of forgiveness and holiness in the church. As they were incorporated into the technologies of episcopal governance, these holy victims also became Christomorphized, conformed to Christ, gradually impressing their intercessory, atoning bodies into his incarnate flesh. Thus, in a sense, Christ was conformed to them. Very gradually, the martyrs began to be the unwitting architects of a theology of the cross. Subsequent centuries reinforced this dynamic, as the cult of saints became indelibly lodged in the heart of Christian spirituality, and with it, the patronage system that transmitted their sanctity. The new spirituality of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was firmly inscribed within this system, but it also inaugurated a new trend, one in which the laity and monks alike were invited to inhabit the saints’ world with them, to become contemporaneous with them, to make themselves witnesses to the events of Scripture. The theological imaginations of Anselm’s prayers, Abelard’s theory of redemption, and Heloise’s letters revolve around this new idea. The logic of vicarity both deepens and expands. The body of the cross was, more than ever, the body of the saint: Anselm’s prayers in particular appeal to the merits of the saints as much as to Christ himself. The mediating function of holy humans was the very basis of the new spirituality, but, on the other hand, a sense of personal participation was beginning to emerge. Anselm and Abelard yearned for a kind of interior martyrdom that identified with the savior, and they positioned themselves and their readers among the

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saints to find it. They found this place of participation at the foot of the cross. And like the soldiers of chapter 1, this was a place of suspension and pathos: between hope and fear.

Anselm between Hope and Fear The Anselm we encounter in atonement theologies, and the Anselm historians know, are two different people. One is the progenitor of satisfaction theory and (indirectly) penal substitution; the other is the inventor of affective devotion, and one of the crucial figures in the processes of papal centralization and the development of the high medieval episcopacy. It is sometimes difficult to reconcile the two.6 Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, and the supposed debate with Abelard that followed, is a touchstone of atonement theology. I will briefly suspend my rule of eschewing canonical atonement texts to reexamine its argument, but my intent is to place Cur Deus Homo in the context of Anselm’s wider authorship—and to understand how his “atonement” theory is in reality a theology of the incarnation. Reading Cur Deus Homo alongside Anselm’s earlier meditative, devotional text, the Prayer and Meditations, also recontextualizes its meaning within a Benedictine habitus of obedience and affection. Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations have been frequently neglected by theologians,7 in significant part because of the bias we tend to have toward normative texts—texts that read like systematic theology, with clearly identifiable statements of doctrine, that present themselves from official or authoritative points of view and have accrued some kind of canonical status. They are the movers and shakers of doctrinal history, the books we wrestle with in monographs and classrooms. But the Prayers and Meditations reveal an Anselm in the midst of a momentous cultural and theological change driven by a new vision of the body of the cross. Anselm places the reader at the foot of the crucified Son of God in sympathetic devotion with Mary and the saints.

Contextualizing Cur Deus Homo Theologians and students read Cur Deus Homo as the exemplar, or at least progenitor, of an objective, substitutionary theory of the atonement; the reception history within which it has become embedded is a major reason why. Theologians often draw on one of two interpretive frameworks to explain Cur Deus Homo’s ideological background. First is a feudalism theory in which Anselm interprets the death of Christ according to the hierarchical political relationship between a lord and vassal. According to

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this account, Anselm conceives the God-humanity relationship following the norms of the warrior aristocracy of northern feudal Europe. Christ’s death pays the penalty for human sin on the model of a vassal making satisfaction—reparation—to the lord’s wounded honor.8 Second is the penitential background, in which Christ merits salvation by his virtuous and obedient acts; but because he has no need of reward, his merit is paid to humanity’s account. Gustaf Aulén dismisses the Germanic feudalism theory (which he calls “flatly incorrect”), locating Anselm’s antecedents in the development of penance and confession in the second and third centuries, in Tertullian and Cyprian. Aulén’s (very Lutheran) worry about this theory is that everything rests on humanity making penance to God for sin. The problem is that it bifurcates the agency in atonement, attributing satisfaction to Christ’s actions as human, not divine; but Aulén, building his narrative toward Luther, finds this ruinous.9 However, if we place Cur Deus Homo back into its context, it reads far more as a “theory” of incarnation than atonement, and we find that its background lies in Benedictine patterns of devotion. Christ exemplifies the monastic vow of obedience; moreover, Anselm has no concept whatsoever of Christ making satisfaction for sin, in terms of paying a penalty. The text was written in the mid-1090s while Anselm was in exile from England after a land holdings dispute with King William II, and it was likely written with Jewish (and perhaps Muslim) objections against the incarnation in mind. Anselm’s goal is not to construct a systematic theory of the atonement per se but rather to situate the life and death of the “Godhuman” within an account of the divine nature and purpose in creation and redemption. In fact, it is remarkable how little of Cur Deus Homo is devoted to the death of Christ on the cross, and it is even more remarkable how little space Anselm gives to the theme that modern readers have seen as his signal contribution (for good or, more often, for ill): God’s “honor.” The crux of the question of honor is Anselm’s overall concern whether the incarnation dishonors divine dignity, which is part of his broader rubric of God always acting to fulfill God’s purpose for creation; human redemption is integral to this, because if God condemned humanity to perish because of sin, this would frustrate God’s own plan for creation. The order and beauty of the created universe would be disrupted.10 Thus, honor is a subtheme of Anselm’s much broader understanding of divine justice, which preoccupies him throughout his earlier work—the Prayers and Meditations, as we will see, as well as his philosophical explorations in Monologion and Proslogion.11 God is just but also merciful, and this must somehow be reconciled; in reality these attributes are aspects of the same divine plan.12 For

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Anselm, justice is the divine intent by which God acts in accordance with God’s own purposes. God’s purposes include righteous humanity living in blessedness; thus God must redeem humanity in mercy. God acts in keeping, or in “fittingness,” with God’s purpose. Another term for this is honor.13 This argument lies at the core of Cur Deus Homo: humans owe obedience to God, because that’s why they were created, but due to original sin, they are incapable of it. It is not fitting for God to forgive sin, as this would disrupt the just governance of creation, but this places humanity in a double bind: only a human should redeem humanity, because only a human can fulfill the uprightness God requires; but no human is capable of doing so. “Nothing could be more just and, equally, nothing could be more impossible.”14 This is the context of the discussion (which is almost an excursus) of satisfaction and divine honor.15 Not only does humanity already owe obedience; it also owes satisfaction for the debt of dishonor, of failing to uphold the uprightness of will that is the linchpin of the divine order. Anselm does concede that divine justice can be satisfied with eternal misery and the torment of the sinner,16 but the burden of the argument shows how God, out of mercy, decides to fulfill that just standard instead. In other words, honor does not denote God punishing, but taking on the duty of obedience on humanity’s behalf. The double debt requires a double payment: Christ becomes incarnate because only God can, but only a human must make satisfaction.17 So this takes us back to Christ’s obedience: he gives of himself what he is not required to give. “He will make a present of himself as an act of obedience to God, in that he will be submitting himself to God’s will by upholding righteousness with perseverance. . . . This is not something which God will demand from him in repayment of debt, given that, since there will be no sin in him, he will be under no obligation to die.” He dies not as substitute, but in order to provide an example of uprightness of will: “When Christ endured with kindly patience the sufferings . . . which were inflicted upon him because of the righteousness which, as we have said earlier, he was obediently maintaining, he set an example to humankind.”18 Christ dies freely to model supererogatory obedience and, because he is divine, is in no need of the reward that he earns because of this “above and beyond” act of obedience. Therefore, the reward—salvation—is given to those who follow his example of righteousness.19 Christ is a substitute—but a substitute of righteous life, not vicarious death. The motif of obedience plays the role of representation in Anselm’s thought that substitution will in later accounts of atonement. Christ’s

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obedience in life, not death, is how humanity is redeemed; while his obedience leads to his crucifixion at the hand of sinners, the death itself is not substitutionary punishment for sin. This is a claim that never occurred to Anselm: “God, therefore, did not force Christ to die, there being no sin in him. Rather, he underwent death of his own accord . . . out of an obedience consisting in his upholding of righteousness so bravely and pertinaciously that as a result he incurred death.”20 The heart of CDH thus revolves around two ideas. First, the incarnation is the most appropriate way of redemption, a beautiful symmetry of Christ’s obedience for humanity’s disobedience, in the ancient logic of the “great exchange”: Christ’s act of obedience is supererogatory because of the magnitude of its accomplishment, so much so that God’s redemption is even more miraculous than God’s creation.21 In a very real sense, God became human so that God’s redemption could top God’s own act of creation. Second, if there is such a thing as a “moral exemplar” theory of the atonement, Anselm merits inclusion as one of its proponents—more, even, than Abelard, whose account of the atonement is closer to a theory of response.22 Christ provides representative obedience, and he does so willingly. Note again that Anselm never claims that God requires a sacrifice of sin, nor that God demands punishment for satisfaction. It is free, willing, and happy obedience that satisfies the divine honor.23 The explanatory power of the feudalism interpretation does little to clarify this basic logic of Anselm’s treatise. As Richard Southern (often cited as a proponent of the interpretation) notes, “Everything of importance in Anselm’s argument can survive the removal of every trace of feudal imagery and the supposed contamination by elements of Germanic law.”24 The point of the feudal imagery of honor and satisfaction is to evoke a picture of order and hierarchy, themes that help Anselm illustrate the order of the universe as God intended it; divine integrity is at stake, not the pique of a heavenly feudal lord.25 Anselm was, after all, in exile while writing Cur Deus Homo, following tensions with King William II (aka William Rufus) over the issue of lay investiture (the right of the king to consecrate bishops). This fact alone should give one pause in assuming that Anselm intends to reify feudal relations as a kind of ideological structure of divine sovereignty. Anselm was not on friendly relations with his own feudal lord at the time.

Driving an Incarnational Bargain in the Prayers and Meditations The theme of obedience is crucial for putting Cur Deus Homo back within Anselm’s monastic context.26 We are not talking about obedience

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to a feudal lord but one of the three pillars of the Benedictine Rule. Anselm’s work sits at a particularly tumultuous moment in European history, one in which the monastic lifestyle was both broadening into a normative spirituality across the church and in which lay patrons of the monasteries were increasingly looking to the monks for guidance in the spiritual life. The virtues of obedience and uprightness of will, which a monk embodied in contemplative and liturgical practice, needed to be translated into a interiorized spirituality without the superstructure of the Daily Office to uphold them. If we look at Cur Deus Homo this way, it helps us to understand how it fits into the broader lived reality of Anselm’s context as a monk and abbot, and it enables us to draw some connections between Cur Deus Homo and his Prayers and Meditations, begun in the 1070s but spanning most of his writing career. After all, Anselm quickly restated the argument of Cur Deus Homo as a prayerful meditation (the Meditation on Human Redemption), putting it back into the devotional context that was the spur of much of his theology.27 He writes as a contemplative monastic, not a theopolitical theorist. Reading the Prayers and Meditations with these concepts of obedience, Benedictine devotion, and moral exemplarity in mind dramatically reframes our understanding of Anselm’s theology. First, though, we have to reckon with the nature of these texts. Anselm’s narrator dwells at length on his own sinfulness; he apparently denigrates the goodness of human nature; and at every conceivable opportunity, he seems to paint a picture in which God’s glory depends on humanity’s abasement. As Southern details, Anselm’s particular style of meditation grew out of the monastic Daily Office, which focused on the Psalter, and the Benedictine Rule’s mandate to rumination on Scripture.28 He designed the Prayers and Meditations for lay readers like Adelaide and Matilda, to stir up in the reader a deep emotional and volitional realization of sin and the need for redemption. Anselm “strains every resource to express and stimulate in his reader both the mental excitation and humiliation necessary for the double activity of self-examination and abasement in the presence of holiness.”29 We should not minimize the strangeness and (to a modern reader) even repulsiveness of the attitude of these prayers, but on the other hand, we should also understand the heightened rhetoric as just that: rhetoric, employing well-established tropes infused with new vigor, and seeking to translate a highly ritualized, codified monastic habitus for the lay reader in which the “horror of self ” opens into “contemplation through meditation.”30 The Prayers are too complex and too plurivocal, and they push too much against any neatly defined boundaries to be reduced to a set of

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themes. But one propulsive force in the Prayers, an agonizing dilemma that drives their meditative dialectic, is the relationship of mercy and justice to the nature of God (a clear anticipation of Cur Deus Homo). To get to the mercy-justice dilemma, we first need to understand Mary’s significance in the Prayers. Mary plays an essential role in helping the reader maneuver the space between those divine attributes. Historians often accord Anselm a central place in the burgeoning literature on devotion to the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages, and it turns out his Mariology helps us understand how his theology of the cross grows out of, and in turn feeds back into, his practice of affective meditation—emotional devotion to the life and passion of Christ. I will take Anselm’s third prayer to Mary as an example.31 Initially this might seem an odd choice, because Anselm does not mention the cross in the prayer. Nor does he talk about satisfaction, per se;32 but what is interesting about the prayer is that it uses atonement language, with reference to Mary, not Christ, as the mediator of salvation. Of course, Mary is the agent of salvation insofar as she is the mother of Christ; salvation occurs through her, that is, because she is the bearer of the incarnation. Still, what is fascinating is that all of the classic atonement “theories” are represented in Mary, with no mention of the cross. First, Anselm uses subjective language of moral influence—Mary stirs up the sinner’s love and reconciles her to God through a transformed subjective disposition: By [your] virginity my soul falls in love with its Lord and is married to its God. . . . I ask you by the love you have for your Son, that, as he truly loves you and you him, you will grant that I may love him truly.33 Second, Anselm portrays Mary as a source of plenitude of merit: For I am sure that since through the Son I could receive grace, I can receive it again through the merits of the mother. . . . Through your fruitfulness, Lady, the sinner is cleansed and justified, the condemned is saved and the exile is restored.34 Third, Christus victor language appears of both Mary and Christ in conjunction, highlighting the deliverance of the sinner from the dominion and captivity of evil:

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Your offspring, Lady, redeemed the world from captivity, made whole the sick, gave life to the dead. The world was wrapped in darkness, surrounded and oppressed by demons under which it lay, but from you alone light was born into it, which broke its bonds and trampled underfoot their power.35 Finally, the language of the “wonderful exchange,” in which the incarnation transformed human nature from within, is applied to Mary: By you the elements are renewed, hell is redeemed, demons are trampled down and men are saved, . . . O woman full and overflowing with grace, plenty flows from you to make all creatures green again.36 The prayer builds as Anselm moves from the monastic themes of compunction (remorseful, penitent desire: “I long to love you . . . I want to praise you,” ll. 5–6), the mourning over sin, to the promise of grace in the Son and in the Virgin as exemplars of purity and of love, and culminates when Anselm lands on the language of Mary’s fruitfulness—an allusion to the paradox of her virginal fertility. In Mary is renewal and re-creation. In all of this the cross is nowhere in sight. Anselm does not view Mary as an agent of salvation apart from Christ. She is never looked at in abstraction from her Son; but on the other hand, Christ is always mentioned in conjunction with her. He, as the Son of the Father, is the ultimate source of salvation, but he is so as the Son born of a woman, a woman who shares our flesh. Their shared flesh propels the prayer toward its climax via a pair of tensions. The first is between the omnipotence of God and the creatureliness of Mary. This is the basic paradox of the incarnation filtered through the feminine flesh of Mary: All nature is created by God and God is born of Mary. God created all things, and Mary gave birth to God. God who made all things made himself out of Mary, and thus he refashioned everything he had made.37 The shocking language of “God making Godself ” expresses how the incarnation is not simply a metaphysical absurdity—it is an embodiment (as it were) of the divine forbearance: “He who was able to make all things out of nothing refused to remake it by force.”38 This is the same idea from Cur Deus Homo of redemption trumping creation. God saves not by violently remaking, but reestablishing through Mary. The deity renews creation not

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in judgment and retribution but in the birth of a mother: “God gave birth to him by whom all things were made and Mary brought forth him by whom all are saved.”39 Anselm draws a creative conclusion from this: if God has condescended to be born (to make Godself) of Mary, then not only is God simultaneously Creator and creation (that’s just good incarnational theology), but God is both our Parent and our kin. So God is the Father of all created things, and Mary is the mother of all re-created things. God is the Father of all that is established, and Mary is the mother of all that is re-established. . . . For he was born of a mother to take our nature, and to make us, by restoring our life, sons of his mother. He invites us to confess ourselves his brethren. So our judge is our brother, and finally our God through Mary is our brother.40 God has taken on our flesh through Mary, giving Godself a family. Thus God has bound Godself to a maternal relationship with creation—to the extent that God is under a kind of obligation: If I am not worthy of the bliss of your love, certainly you are not unworthy of being so greatly loved. So, most kind, do not refuse what I ask, for though I confess I am not worthy of it, you cannot worthily refuse it.41 You cannot worthily refuse it: this is an audacious statement, and its appeal to the immeasurable divine mercy is surpassed only by a fathomless terror. It is as if Anselm accuses himself before the divine justice, only to be swayed by Mary, the embodiment of the divine mercy. And this mercy he pleads against God. He drives an incarnational bargain through the juxtaposition of justice and mercy. Anselm’s “theory” of the atonement seems capable of articulation independently of the death of Christ. Where later historians of doctrine have found distinct theories, Anselm offers a conjunction of images and metaphors that are organized, not theoretically, but in a rhetoric of appeal and negotiation, “between hope and fear.”42

Witnessing Bodies at the Foot of the Cross The tension of justice and mercy in Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations resolves in the obedient, merciful body of Mary. Sympathy with Mary is

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one of Anselm’s crucial devices for articulating the role of the cross in affective devotion. Anselm trains the reader to long for imaginative presence with Christ, in order to provoke the emotional response of mourning for sin and gratitude for mercy. Mary our mother stands at the foot of the cross, and he wants readers to imagine themselves there as well. In the “Prayer to Christ,” he therefore puts the narrator directly at the cross, alongside Mary, and addresses the crucified savior. Anselm encourages the reader to long for the passion, inaugurating a theme that would become ubiquitous in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: Alas for me, that I was not able to see the Lord of Angels humbled to converse with men, when God, the one insulted, willed to die that the sinner might live. . . . Why, O my soul, were you not there?43 Why were you not there? The great agony of the prayer is not one of sin, and not even one of Gregorian torpor or the deficit of desire; it is that the reader cannot participate in the sufferings of the witnesses of the crucifixion, notably that of Mary, the one whose agony was the greatest.44 Although the prayer details the sufferings of Jesus, in language blunt but not graphic (at least relative to some of the blood devotion of the later Middle Ages), it is important to realize how Anselm relates the reader to the passion; while he is fully aware of his sinfulness and moral failing, it is not a lament of guilt, as if he were recognizing that it was his sins that put Jesus on the cross (a mainstay of satisfaction atonement). Rather, the prayer’s agony is that we could not be present at the passion, that we could not experience Mary or John’s pain, that we missed out on the suffering of Jesus at a tactile, immediate, sensuous level. The great problem of the “Prayer to Christ,” in other words, is not one of sin and satisfaction; it is one of affective distance, of a quest for experience and intimacy with Christ that is so close as to seem physical. It is Anselm seeking to overcome the distance of affection through reinhabiting the life of the followers of Jesus. Anselm can even characterize himself as an orphan (“I am like an orphan deprived of the presence of a very kind father,” ll. 58–59) to set this more abstract notion of absence in a relational, familial setting. It grounds the absence of the reader from the events of the crucifixion in a subjective, emotional space; it encodes that absence in personal language of trauma and longing. And it all feeds into a particular rhetorical effect: the prayer ends in suspension between hope and fear, the reader pouring out her

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spirit and, in language that anticipates the later “dark night of the soul,” uncertain of its outcome, cognizant only of the divine absence: Perhaps then my Redeemer will come to me, for he is good; he is kind, he will not tarry, to whom be glory for ever. Amen.45 The prayer states this precisely because the redeemer has tarried. As we are absent from the foot of the cross, where the redeemer died, so the Lord is absent from our pleas. This ambiguous ending highlights the emotional, affective rhetoric of Anselm in these prayers; it is subjective longing, shot through with desire and fear. Redemption is not grounded in an exchange of Christ for the sinner on the cross but in the obedience of the incarnate Christ, by which God’s mercy triumphs over God’s justice. We are saved as we are bound to this Christ in affection and love. The problem, as Anselm realizes so clearly, is that human affection is not equal to the task. It must be trained in imaginative devotion. We are far from the triumphant, death-defying habitus of the martyrs; but the cult of the saints had so normalized agony as Christomorphic that, when Anselm crafts a spirituality of compunction and trains his reader in the longing for the passion, he develops an analogous rhetoric of interiority and affection. To be at the foot of the cross is to feel the terror of a Son orphaned by a Father; it is to lacerate the soul with the hooks of the executioner, and the executioner is the self.

Abelard and Heloise: The Martyrdom of Desire Anselm grapples with the justice of God in impassioned and agonized texts only to discover that the justice of God is in fact God’s mercy. The key to accessing that mercy is the subjective transformation of the self— suspended between hope and fear, the soul finds itself before the wrath of God’s justice only to discover that it is God’s justice to withhold wrath. Something similar happens in Abelard—and Heloise, who is all too often neglected in the Anselm-Abelard tête-à-tête. Both Anselm and Abelard think of proximity to the cross as endurance for Christ—Anselm undergoes emotional agony to tarry at the foot of the cross, witnessing the sufferings of Christ; Abelard heroically endures calamitous providence that transforms desire. Both transport the concept of Christomorphic triumph through suffering out of the pantheon of the cult of the saints and into the realm of interior affect. And both seek to make a pedagogy out of it—though

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Abelard’s pupil is somewhat more recalcitrant than Anselm’s interlocutors. Heloise goes her own way.

Abelard: Martyr for God’s Providence First, we need to reexamine Abelard’s role in traditional atonement narratives. Our understanding of Anselm’s theology of the cross shifts dramatically when we look at Cur Deus Homo from the perspective of his Prayers and Meditations; in fact, elements of Cur Deus Homo and Anselm’s “Third Prayer to Mary” show him to be as much a moral exemplar atonement theorist as Abelard ever was. The long-held antithesis between Anselm and Abelard contracts when we place Anselm’s texts in their historical context of affective devotion. Something similar happens with Abelard, but, again, we have to first step back to situate his writing on the cross within his wider authorship. Abelard’s claim to fame is peculiar in this regard. The understanding of his “theory” of the atonement rests on a brief excerpt (eleven pages), accessible to most Anglophone readers in Eugene Fairweather’s A Scholastic Miscellany; only recently has Abelard’s full commentary on Romans even been translated.46 Moreover, as Constant Mews shows, readers of Abelard encounter him within a hostile reception history that stretches back to his own lifetime, a narrative of polemics beginning with his contemporaries William of St. Thierry and Bernard of Clairvaux that paints him as a rationalist and innovator, and dangerously heterodox. In contemporary theological circles, however, he is often a bold voice of freedom from theological tyranny: a liberal avant la lettre.47 It is a “not insignificant question,” he modestly puts it, that “someone should require the blood of an innocent person as a ransom”; in fact, it seems “cruel and unjust.”48 Modern critics of satisfaction theory are not wrong to see in Abelard a progenitor of their own concerns about divinely sanctioned violence. But the reasons for this objection are much more remote from contemporary anxieties. His excursus on the atonement in book 2 of his Romans commentary is more critique than construction, and his positive statement of the accomplishment of the cross is remarkable in its brevity— and its ambiguity. The bulk of his argument is against the idea of the rights of the devil (a traditional trope whose rejection both he and Anselm fully agreed on) not satisfaction as such.49 Abelard demolishes the traditional motif through a simple question: If a fellow servant were to convince another servant to switch sides—to renounce obedience from his own lord and submit himself in loyalty to the first servant’s—then who would have

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the greater sin, the duped servant or the one who led him astray in the first place? Clearly the second servant, the deceiver, is more culpable; they would certainly enjoy no legal right over the wayward servant. The only way the latter could be under the first’s power is if the abandoned lord allowed it, for the servant’s own punishment: “The Lord . . . handed man over to the devil for punishment as if to a jailer or torturer.”50 So the devil has no rights over humanity, and God has no need to deceive him to redeem humanity. It never occurs to Abelard to reject the idea of a God who demands a sacrifice to appease divine justice—Abelard is arguing with Gregory of Nyssa and Athanasius, not the Anselm of modern textbooks. But then how does God forgive? Abelard’s God is not bound to God’s own justice; Abelard points out that God can forgive anyone’s sin. After all, Jesus did just that for Mary Magdalene, and God likewise forgave the Virgin Mary by fiat.51 The incarnation is not only unnecessary for God to forgive sin justly; it shows how easily God can forgive sin if God wishes: “He who showed such grace to man that he united him to himself in a person, could he not surpass the lesser, namely by forgiving sins for him . . . since his divine compassion could free man from the devil by a command alone?”52 But if this is true, why did the Son of God have to suffer the way he did? “Did the death of the innocent Son please God the Father so greatly?”53 Abelard’s answer is succinct. God forgives freely through grace, which is nothing other than the love by which God joined Godself to our nature in the incarnation. The divine purpose in Christ’s life was not to accomplish a legal transaction transferring rights from the devil, but to teach “us both by word and by example . . . so that when we have been kindled by so great a benefit of divine grace, true charity might fear to endure nothing for his sake.” Our redemption is “that supreme love in us through the Passion of Christ, which not only frees us from slavery to sin, but gains for us the true liberty of the sons of God, so that we may complete all things by his love rather than fear.”54 If Anselm found himself an orphan, Abelard’s portrait of humanity’s plight is something like a victim of abuse, or, using his own metaphor, a torture victim. Like a captive of the torturer, humanity has been subjected to an oppressive power and reduced to an attitude of fear—fear lest its captor punish it for the slightest transgression. In something like a theological Stockholm Syndrome, humanity submits itself to the law, imagining that it can please its abuser thereby, but the law never ceases to demand and humiliate. This is Abelard’s diagnosis of the situation of humanity under the law: crushed by the burden of obedience, humanity no longer

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recognizes the freedom-giving grace of God. Therefore, by the incarnation God the Son has provided an example of free, loving obedience that enkindles the heart. Quoting Augustine’s favorite pneumatologic text, Romans 5:5, Abelard argues that the incarnation teaches the freedom of charity, not the servile obedience of fear. This freedom, however, is one of endurance for Christ—“true charity might fear to endure nothing for his sake.”55 Salvation is found in service and further obedience; it is a type of martyrological language of suffering for Christ’s sake. It is possible to interpret Abelard as a proponent of a moral exemplarism theory of the atonement. But it is perplexing as to where exactly the notorious debate with Anselm lies. True, Abelard opposes the idea of necessary reasons for the incarnation and atonement, arguing that God could accomplish forgiveness of sins by decree alone; but the target of his attack is the patristic idea of the devil’s rights, not Anselm. Moreover, Abelard’s “subjective” theory of the atonement looks a great deal like Anselm’s portrait of the penitent in the Prayers and Meditations: a sinner faced with wrath who comes to understand that the incarnation means the free availability of God’s love; who seeks to access a transformation within, through the example of God’s grace enacted in the humanity of Christ; who travails from fear to hope through grappling with the abyss of alienation from God. Both are internalizing the logic of vicarity, bringing that dialectic of suffering and substitution into affectivity; while there are differences in how they articulate this internalization, the patterns of rhetoric, logic, and appeal are quite close. Despite these congruities, however, it is remarkable that Abelard says what Anselm never does. Christ dies to pay the penalty of human sin: “He is said to have died on account of our transgressions in two ways: at one time because we transgressed, on account of which he died, and we committed sin, the penalty of which he bore; at another, that he might take away our sins by dying, that is, he swept away the penalty for sin by the price of his death.”56 Abelard then goes on to say that paying this penalty “kindled the highest love of himself ” through the “demonstration of so much grace,” which is a classically exemplarist statement, but one that he evidently sees to be in no contradiction with substitution language. He can also speak in sacrificial terms,57 and can use the vocabulary of merit much more literally than Anselm (“He was therefore made man . . . that he might supply from his own merits what was not in our own”).58 I pointed out above, while discussing Anselm, what a mix of atonement “theories” we find in the Prayers and Meditations and how ill-fitted the traditional theories are for understanding Cur Deus Homo. Abelard also draws on language and themes from many of the major textbook themes of the atonement.59

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The modern Anselm-Abelard textbook dispute obscures more than it reveals about the medieval theology of the cross.

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise Abelard’s martyrological language—the language of fearing to endure nothing for Christ—is not unique to the Romans commentary. We must avoid psychologizing historical thinkers; nonetheless, when language and themes overlap in different spheres of their discourse, it would be negligent to avoid some connections. So when Abelard speaks of endurance for Christ through charity, it is reminiscent of the theme of providence and suffering for Christ that dominates his “Story of Calamities” (Historia calamitatum), which is a narrative of providential grace revealed in suffering purgation for one’s faults. He speaks of grace remedying the “diseases” of lust and pride through his castration by Heloise’s uncle, who was enraged by their love affair, and through the burning of Abelard’s controversial work Theologia “Summi boni” at his first condemnation, in Soissons in 1121;60 but he also describes his sufferings as persecution for his witness. He encourages his reader to take comfort in divine providence and love, even as the reader undergoes immense suffering.61 This is also a theme in the famed letters of Abelard and Heloise. Abelard upholds the suffering Christ as an example for Heloise in the fifth letter of their correspondence. Abelard draws back from his desire for Heloise after their separation, gently rebuking her for her continued attachment to him, reminding her that she is Christ’s bride, not Abelard’s. Letter 5 admonishes Heloise to preserve the “whiteness” of her soul through humility and adversity, which Abelard illustrates by allegorizing the racial language of the Canticle (“I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem,” Song of Sol. 1:5).62 Just as the charity of the Holy Spirit frees humanity from the concupiscent bondage to earthly goods (Romans, 3.205), so the “darkness” of bodily tribulations “easily uproots the love of earthly things from the heart of the faithful.”63 After describing how his castration saved him from the shame of his lusts, Abelard urges Heloise to contemplate the “innocent, only-begotten Son of God,” to “move you to tears of compunction. . . . Suffer with him who willingly suffered for your salvation and grieve for him who was crucified for you.”64 Urging her to sorrow and compassion for the savior, Abelard returns to the theme of martyrdom—suffering for the sake of the one who suffered—arguing that his misfortunes free him from eternal punishment, even as this martyrdom reframes the bond between Abelard and Heloise from carnal love to spiritual charity. Abelard concludes with a bluntly masochistic prayer yearning to endure all things

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for the sake of the tormented savior: “Punish the guilty now, I beseech you, that you may spare them in the life to come. Punish us now, so that you may not punish me eternally.”65 Abelard’s meditation on women religious, “The Origin of the Religious Life of Nuns” (Letter 7), is a long series of examples of holy women of Scripture whom Abelard holds up as exemplary of the special gifts of femininity. The letter has similar themes of suffering witness and compassion for Christ.66 “The female sex seems to have acquired merit because . . . it was moved by a certain natural compassion for the Lord.”67 Feminine nature, for Abelard, seems naturally predisposed toward just the kind of martyrological closeness to Christ that Romans advocates, but this happens in weakness made a virtue (Abelard repeatedly comments on the physical frailty of women): the devotion of holy women to chastity and virginity, with which the letter closes.68 The comparison to Abelard’s own experience is telling; as the mutilation of his virility was made a grace, the weakness of his lust made a spiritual strength, so the weakness of femininity is made into the body of Christ through virginity. Abelard begins to sound very Anselmian at times in these two letters, advocating imaginative devotion to Christ’s passion, echoing the martyrological redemption motifs of Romans. Much turns on the power of “calamities” to reorient one’s love toward God, to train desire for heaven. Near the end of letter 5, his tone becomes admonitory, even pleading: Does not the innocent, only-begotten Son of God move you to tears of compunction, he who for you and for all sinners was seized, dragged off, beaten, and with a veil over his face, was mocked and struck, spat upon, crowned with thorns, and then raised up between thieves and that most infamous gibbet of the cross, to die at last such a horrible and execrable life? . . . Suffer with him who willingly suffered for your salvation and grieve for him who was crucified for you.69 He also makes the martyrological idea explicit. He himself, Abelard says, cannot claim a martyr’s crown, because his desire has only been extirpated by his castration; Heloise, however, “might win a martyr’s crown by enduring the constant urgings of the flesh, he left in your heart the much more intense passions of youth.”70 More than once, Abelard reminds Heloise that the Christ of Golgotha is her true bridegroom; his bodily passion is to become her interior passion, his physical suffering her spiritual suffering. In dwelling at the foot of the cross along with the weeping women of Jerusalem, she fulfills her marriage to Christ. Heloise’s forced vow of

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chastity, like Abelard’s own involuntary celibacy, becomes a gift of endurance for the crucified savior. The wounds of the flesh keep them rooted at the foot of the cross.

Heloise’s Corner of Heaven But Heloise is having none of it. The traditional reading of the correspondence is that it ends in something of an anticlimax; after two impassioned, pleading letters, Abelard shuts Heloise down. He wants to hear no more of her longing for him. Her desires staunched, she turns her attention to the Paraclete convent, converted to the spiritual life, the sensual Heloise replaced by a chaste one. Her voice disappears: “While [Heloise] wages impassioned war with Abelard under the guise of submission, she never ceases to fascinate; but when she actually submits, she dwindles into virtue as a heroine of romance might dwindle into marriage.”71 Her replies to Abelard—including her long letter on female monasticism— are similar to his meditations on the exemplary female religious body, but for Heloise this signifies something very different. The female body is unsuitable for the heroic, masochistic male ideal advocated by Abelard. This idea begins in letter 4 with Heloise’s feelings of guilt for their sins of passion; she even holds herself responsible as a temptress (“How unhappy I am, to have been born to be the cause of so great a crime!”).72 But Heloise is not just self-shaming; she is exploring a more complex anthropological point than Abelard. She eschews the idea of perfection he espouses, but she also recognizes that external mortifications will not atone for the desires of the heart: “It is easy for anyone, by confessing, to accuse himself of his sins and even to mortify his body in external atonement. But it is most difficult to uproot from the heart the desire for the most intense pleasures.”73 Indeed, she seems reluctant to do so: “Those delights of lovers that we enjoyed together were so sweet to me that I cannot condemn them.” She recognizes the conflict of her vows and her desire, sounding thoroughly Augustinian as she owns the war within, before finally admitting that she is not seeking “any crown of victory,” only whatever “corner of heaven God places me in.”74 Heloise rejects Abelard’s attempts to narrate their affair in his own terms, as well as his admonitions to heroic, masochistic longing for the crucified Christ.75 He speaks of “our conversion” and “my unbridled lust” that “enslaved our bodies.”76 But Heloise refuses to allow him sole culpability. The lust was not just Abelard’s. And in truth she does not sound very converted. Reprimanded for her longing (“Following your command, I have put a

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rein on the outpouring of my boundless grief ”77), she sets out in her monastic treatise to reshape Abelard’s martyrological spirituality. She does not reply to Abelard’s admonition to take up her station at the foot of the cross; she rejects outer ritual, and seeks instead a simplified rule of life that will correspond to her state: “consolation and guidance for an unruly heart, her own as well as the hearts of others who might fear God’s judgment even they seek his love.”78 The purity of heart Abelard champions eludes her, and she rejects it: “Lacking pure contrition and pure love, Heloise can find no place for herself in the spiritual landscape created for her. Abelard in his letters and Benedict in his Rule describe that landscape in terms of heroic armies, combat, victories and losses, strength and power, weapons and crowns. In fact, Heloise finally rejects this traditional heroic description of her spiritual life.”79 She seeks instead a way of living the gospel centered on prayer and contrition that dwells imperfectly and incrementally, brokenly but genuinely, in “any corner of heaven” left open for her and her nuns at Paraclete. In this little leftover corner of heaven, Heloise also refuses to let Abelard sublimate her motherhood of their son into metaphor. Peggy McCracken identifies Abelard’s gendered categories for the female religious body: “Abelard acknowledges the material body only to call for its abjection.”80 In order to make Heloise a spiritual ideal, he elevates her experience so that her physical motherhood is erased. She is no longer a physical mother but a mother of nuns at Paraclete. Heloise, on the other hand, resists the allegorizing of her body in the letter on the religious life. Using the trope of feminine frailty, she reminds Abelard that the fathers did not intend to impose vows on women deprived of their married state, in part because the unique constitution of the female body make them less susceptible to carnal vice and naturally prone to moderation (“Consider . . . how much more safely and justifiably indulgence in any kind of food or drink can be permitted to our frail nature, since our systems cannot be so easily overcome by gluttony or drunkenness”).81 As Juanita Feros Ruys points out, the undertow to Heloise’s advocacy of monastic moderation is a refusal to disown her own maternal state; she cannot be “crucified to the world” like Abelard: “Clearly the world cannot be crucified for Heloise when it contains her only child still living.”82 Ruys identifies an important tension in the exchange between Heloise and Abelard over the “maternal martyr”: for Abelard, this is the woman who heroically gives up her children to serve Christ, or even consents to their death, like the Maccabean mother or the Virgin Mary herself; but Heloise recalls the martyr tradition in which the mother has her children taken from her without her consent (usually by the husband).83

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By refusing the reduction of her own religious and carnal experience, by silently ignoring Abelard’s attempt to place her at the foot of the cross with the great maternal martyr, Mary, Heloise reshapes the paradigmatic figure of the virgin both Anselm and Abelard idealize.84 Her version of the body of the cross is a very different one. She never speaks of identification with the Lord, never longs to be present at the cross. Not for her is the heroic Christomorphism of the martyrs. She has not been converted as Abelard’s account of the atonement in the Romans commentary suggests she should be: her heart is still unmoved and has not taken on the sorrows of Mary.85 She does not quite fit into this book’s narrative, and that is her importance. She refuses to be the Maccabean or Marian mother, suffering the willing sacrifice of her son; she refuses the heroic suffering of the cross herself; she instead inhabits the intense spirituality of a conflicted, living female body. She is a rare figure who refuses the logic of vicarity altogether, who seeks her redemption not in a holy victim, or in becoming a holy victim, but in her own struggle to find an open seat in heaven. In her proud affirmation of her own desire, in refusal to be any Martha or Mary bowed at the Lord’s feet, in the way she ignores the hypermasculine spiritual heroics of her male contemporaries, Heloise seeks redemption nowhere else but in her own experience; there is no other flesh, apart from that of her lover, in which she looks for transcendence.

The Transformation of Christendom in the Twelfth Century A set of axes converges in the dialogues between Anselm and Adelaide, on one hand, and Abelard and Heloise, on the other hand. At a revisionist doctrinal level, Anselm and Abelard overlap far more than they are distinct; the debate between them is largely a modern scholarly fiction, obscuring more than illuminating the relationship of their theologies of the cross. To modern eyes, there is a striking coincidence of emphases— what we have come to call an objective, or satisfaction, theory of the atonement, and a subjective, or moral influence, theory—sitting side by side in each of these thinkers. This is not even to mention the presence of Christus victor, wonderful exchange, and recapitulatory motifs in both theologians. A systematizing process in high scholasticism would later refine these soteriologies, although from a modern perspective concerned with typologies and systemization, theologies of the cross at the time still seem muddled. In the time of Anselm, Abelard, and Heloise, the cross was still less the motor of salvation, and more part of an inextricable web of sacrament, divine action, Christology, and even more, spirituality and prayer.

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But there is also a broader, contextual landscape within which the theology of the cross was transforming in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Anselm, Abelard, and Heloise wrote in what is typically called the twelfth-century renaissance, Anselm at its beginning stirrings, Abelard and Heloise in the thick of it. While this is far too complex a phenomenon to describe here,86 I do want to draw attention to a few historical trends that are especially significant for our authors. Essential to understand is the laicization of the monastic life. One of the enduring developments of the Gregorian reform was that the expectations of the monastic lifestyle, including but not limited to celibacy, were made normative for all clergy.87 An ironic consequence of this was that the monastic habitus became a public practice—it became more visible, opening up two-way lines of influence with lay circles. Anselm first collected his Prayers when Adelaide, daughter of William the Conqueror, requested a selection of psalms for personal meditation, and he responded with seven prayers adapted from Benedictine monastic private meditations and psalm recitation in the chapterhouse.88 The Prayers and Meditations can be seen as dialogical productions, if not collaborations, with Adelaide, who was living in seclusion near Anselm at Bec, as well as later correspondences with the Empress Agnes and Countess Matilda.89 This lay-monastic relationship was a tricky dynamic; no noble layperson was going to follow the Benedictine Liturgy of the Hours, with the Gregorian practices of lectio divina and liturgical celebration that provided its structure. Instead, in its place emerged what would become the practices of affective devotion: intimate, emotional, imaginative reading of prayers and meditation on devotional artifacts. Anselm’s passionate, tortured narrator was a literary device constructed to enact this spirituality—the reader is encouraged to put herself in his place, his “I,” and cultivate the exemplar of the praying monk.90 This was a new form of piety. The vivid compunction of the religious was becoming available to the laity. And the way Anselm— and Abelard, who similarly adapted this motif—was able to give force and power to this development was to place the reader at the foot of the cross, the better to incur a deep resonance of piety and feeling in those whose affections could not undertake the Benedictine virtue of obedience but needed a more adaptable realization, one both interiorized and ambulatory.91 Their correspondence (and in Abelard’s case, tutoring) with aristocratic laity mark a broadening need for the elite lay faithful to cross over the line between implicit and explicit knowledge of the faith.92 When Heloise became a nun and indeed abbess at Paraclete, it is not difficult to see that the “laicized” secularity of this habitus of faith might have made

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its way back into a simplified religious life, with little patience for the extravagance of Cluny or the rigors of Benedict. Of course, spiritually minded nobility and aristocracy were especially relevant to this development because they had the expendable resources to be so, as well as, often, because their patronage relationships encouraged monasteries to be accommodating to their interests. The laicizing of spirituality and rise of affective devotion emerged, in part, from the cooperative relationship between monasteries and lay patrons, which encouraged the dissemination of monastic-style texts oriented toward lay readership such as Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations.93 The next chapter will show how the lay and ancillary movements attached to the mendicant movements, especially the Franciscans, developed Anselm’s yearning to be present to the passion. Moreover, the fact that the rise in Marian devotion was tied to this new affective devotion illustrates that the influence did not simply travel in one direction, from monastery to the towns and courts; Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations responded to and were driven by the rise in popular Marian devotion as much as they helped promote it. It was a devotion based in positioning the penitent at the foot of the cross, sorrowing with the Virgin mother, burning with a passionate love for God and an even more febrile sorrow for sin. The texts of Anselm, Abelard, and Heloise mark an important development in the history of substitution in Western Christian thought. The logic of vicarity by which holy bodies conveyed merit was firmly in place by Anselm’s writing, and his and Abelard’s reflections on the incarnation and the theology of the cross assumed the process of the transmission of merit inaugurated in the age of the cults of the saints. These were long-dead bodies, safely in heaven; but a new idea was beginning to develop, one in which living bodies could also be such holy substitutes. There were the infidels and Jews (see chapter 5) to serve the function of the reprobate, of course; but the Anselmian-Abelardian longing for physical proximity to Christ, the way they position themselves and their interlocutors at the foot of the cross, marks a transposition of a deeper emotional history of identification with Christ: com-passion, feeling with, enters into the currents of medieval spirituality. Heloise in her own way marks this change, registering as she does in her desiring, maternal, and perhaps unconverted flesh the only means of redemption. She looks to no other surrogate for her corner of heaven. Heloise’s refusal to be subjected to Abelard’s literary mold of the noble martyrological mother, or to assume the heroic ascetic spirituality of the new affective devotion, is significant for understanding Anselm as well. It

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is no accident that affective spirituality emerged in dialogue with aristocratic lay women; to develop this new habitus of the faith, Anselm uses traditionally feminine tropes: affectivity, shame, and passivity. Because this affective rhetoric is developed in conversation with female interlocutors, Sarah McNamer makes a compelling case that we should understand the Prayers as a dialogical text, indeed attribute a form of shared authorship to Adelaide and Matilda.94 Whatever the theory of authorship we apply, the takeaway for this study is that Anselm displaces the violent language of crucifixion and death by internalizing it, and he enters a female discursive sphere to do so. If we remember Valerie Saiving Goldstein’s famous critique, it is notable that he uses shame as a predominant motif.95 A new holy victim was in play, and her flesh would become so Christomorphic in the following centuries she would exemplify the body of the cross, even as she operated under the surveillance of the post-Gregorian sacerdotal church. Indeed, the female body of the cross would become so malleable as to become plastic in the next centuries: Francis would invent the stigmata, but women would perfect it.

The Ramsay Psalter: Between Hope and Fear Anselm’s devotion to Mary is picturesquely captured in his third Marian prayer; Abelard suggests the other Mary, Magdalene, as an object of great devotion to Heloise. Both Marys are witnesses of the passion event. Anselm’s desire is for participation, not in Christ but in the suffering of Mary. Her pathos is the subject of his longing as much as Christ is. This is a moment of transformation in Western iconography of the Virgin. Earlier portrayals of Mary largely followed the type of idealization found in Ambrose of Milan, who said of Mary at the foot of the cross, “I read of her standing, but I read not of her weeping.” She was the ideal of stoic self-possession and piety, the perfect Mother of God.96 But by the end of the eleventh century, Mary starts to lose her self-possession and assume a distinctive posture: the “swoon.” Overcome by grief, she collapses in compassion. Her pose mimics Christ’s on the cross as she participates in his saving work.97 She bends farther and farther forward, eventually having to lean on John’s arm as she grows limp from sorrow. We find Anselm and Abelard speaking of the Marys at the historical moment when this transformation was taking place, when compassio was becoming a dominant category for understanding the cross. But there are antecedents. If we go back to the end of the tenth century, we see the Marian swoon anticipated already in the Ramsay Psalter (fig. 5), which arose out of a reform movement of Benedictine observance in English monasteries.

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Figure 5. The crucifixion, Ramsay Psalter f. 3v. Harley MS 2904, British Library. British Library, London, UK © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.

The Psalter is drawn in what is often known as the “Winchester style,” characterized by lavish, richly decorated, and intensely devotional manuscripts.98 The Ramsay Psalter innovated the use of ink line drawing and decorated initials (especially the letter B, echoing the opening of Psalm 1, Beatus vir), and “displays a lightness of touch and a capacity for depicting emotional interaction, reflected in the animated gestures and active postures

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of its figures, which often seem frozen in motion.”99 It spurred a series of copies that captured its dynamic, energetic drawings,100 making it likely that Anselm encountered something like it at Canterbury. The Psalter’s initial image, which Leslie Webster characterizes as “something [artistically] completely new,” is a drawing of the crucifixion. The dying Christ is flanked by Mary and John. The ink lines are delicate but strong, with hints of color. The garments of John and Mary are blue. They are draped in brown robes, highlighted in red, that echo the rippling loincloth of Christ on the cross. Christ is placid, but with vivid evidence of suffering: a few lines of blood run down from the wounds in his palms and feet. As striking as the dead Christ is Mary: the artist depicts “the Virgin as if she were a heavy flower supported by a slender stem. The Virgin’s stooped shoulders suggest the burden of her pain. . . . The quiet power of her sorrow is expressed in her tight clutching of her agitated cloak.”101 John, in contrast, seems almost exultant in his proclamation: “Hic est discipulus qui testimonium perhibit” (this is the disciple who bears witness).102 Christ is poised between joy and sorrow. This is not so far from Anselm’s terms: between hope and fear. The vision of the cross registers in the very bodies of Anselm and Abelard, with their visions of the exemplary righteousness of the obedient Son and the loveinspiring victim-martyr. When Anselm prays, his greatest fault is that he was not physically present at the execution of his Lord. His cold affections prove unworthy of bridging that gap in empathy and witness. Abelard, somewhat more placidly but also more personally, locates the love of the crucified in a life subject to the vicissitudes of providence, the defeat of pride, and the perduring power of devotion nevertheless. Both are deeply corporal, deeply embodied responses to the cross, not a desire to share the cross but a desire to witness to it and dwell at the side of the slain bridegroom. Disciples who bear witness, but their witness is Marian: for Anselm and Abelard, the body of the cross is one of proximity, intimacy, of a look torn between longing and shame—between hope and fear.

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Bodies Pierced by the Cross: Popular Devotion, Popular Heresy

The cross is an instrument of death that brings life. Western Christianity’s central symbol is inextricable from a paradox of violence and redemption, and this irreducible tension gives that symbol its power and capacity both to wound and to heal. A great deal of atonement theology betrays a desire to relieve that tension—if even momentarily, to tame and domesticate the terror of its central symbol. Rationalizing the cross by folding it into a system, by giving it an explanation, helps take away a bit of its sting, renders its trauma something transitory and transcendent. This awkward reflex is found in its most extreme form in the theology of the Middle Ages. The scholastics built on Anselm and Abelard’s speculations, writing the cross into metaphysical and sacramental systems. But Anselm and Abelard, for all their rational reflection on the atonement, are haunted by recognition of the cross’s power to evoke absence and loss, even as they train their readers’ desires for that loss to wound even deeper. Anselm, Abelard, and in her own way Heloise were representative of the new trend in affective devotion, emotional attachment to the crucified Christ. This chapter further develops the examination of certain streams of affective devotion, as well as opens up a few of the veins in which the terror of the cross continues to dwell, while also continuing to examine how the symbol, sometimes very much against expectations, gave meaning and life (and sometimes took life). Following the work of Anselm in particular, with his literary evocations of the cross’s agony, the mystics and heretics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries cannot be said to shy away from the cross’s terror.

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A distinct shift in piety was occurring. Both Abelard and Anselm wrote of a burning desire to be present to Jesus and to witness to his suffering at an affective and volitional level; in other words, they drove the reader to the foot of the cross to witness Christ’s suffering, intending to stir up new depths of compassion, fidelity, and piety. The example of Jesus spurred them to greater devotion, and to endure suffering on his behalf. That devotion is a way of participating—but the participation of early affective devotion was by surrogacy, via the holy victims of the cult of the saints and the ultimate victim of sorrow, Mary. Anselm laments his sins of lust and pride, but his greatest fault is that he is remote, both historically and emotionally, from the event of Christ’s death. Abelard sees his endurance of the many penalties of his sins as a heroic, martyrological witness to Christ— his point of reference is also joining the witnesses of the cross. He projects the holy suffering of Mary upon Heloise, who rejects this role, even as she expresses her fear that her unconverted affections have removed her from God. While Heloise did not share the desire of Anselm and Abelard to take up station below the cross, her affective register draws from the same emotional resources to express her own search for an open corner of heaven. As affective devotion developed in the high Middle Ages, the question of participation changed. A stronger sense of responsibility for taking on the death of Christ emerged, but there was also a stronger sense of agency in claiming the cross. Anselm and Abelard, for all their emotional pyrotechnics, finally regard the cross in passivity, examining what it stirs within themselves. In this chapter, though, devotion to Christ and yearning for the cross becomes much more active, with two effects: an equally deep (and piercing) moral self-reflexivity and, along with that, a deepened sense of Christomorphism. The mystics enact the cross, take it into themselves. This is particularly true of women devotees to the cross. Following in the tradition of Adelaide, Matilda, and Heloise, they inaugurated a whole new spirituality; but this spirituality again and again brushed up against the theological and ecclesiastical norms of orthodoxy. A tension between lay and clerical devotion shot through the theology of the cross in the high Middle Ages; the cross was situated at the boundary line of the Christian body, and as such, it became a way to craft (with startling physicality) the bodies of mystics and heretics alike. It is no accident that the theology of the cross in the high Middle Ages, an era of corporate consolidation and hierarchy in Christianity, displayed a dynamic similar to the one in late antiquity: a spiritual elite sought to participate in Christ, feeding a social body that consolidated around those saints on the one side and against a heretical element on the other. The political corpus christianum was fully

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enfleshed, with both civil and ecclesiastical arms of state.1 Boundaries were once again essential, and once again the cross stood as a signpost marking the frontier between light and darkness. In this chapter, my primary conversation partners are the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg and the Franciscan Bonaventure, the hagiographer of Francis of Assisi. Both of them are associated with movements that highlight these tensions. The leading idea of this chapter is that the cross became a catalyst for formulating ideas of direct, mystical participation in Christ. These were dangerous spiritualities, always at the very precipice of heterodoxy, overlapping with radical popular movements. Mechthild and Francis (as portrayed by Bonaventure) devoted themselves to the cross at precisely the historical moment in which it was, once again, marking apocalyptic divisions in the social body—divisions that would sear through that body permanently in the Reformation.

The Bride of Christ: Mechthild and Beguine Spirituality Mechthild of Magdeburg’s texts espouse a devotion to the cross that is profoundly corporeal—at times erotic, at times maternal, at times seemingly masochistic. The union with Christ she envisions takes place in her flesh. In medieval idioms, for Mechthild this meant participation was built on eucharistic and nuptial metaphors; if one misses this, it is easy to misconstrue the spirituality of the Flowing Light of the Godhead. One of the most deeply engrained modern assumptions about the spirituality of the Middle Ages is that it was a world-denying dualism, focused on an otherworldly heavenly goal, the body a burden to be tamed at minimum, to be destroyed at best. One envisions Francis of Assisi calling his body “brother ass,” masochistic flagellants in hairshirts, long night vigils, and extreme fasts—all for the purpose of escaping the bounds of carnality. While this assessment can still be found in modern theological discourse, historians of the Middle Ages have been painting a strikingly different picture for decades. Key among such voices has been the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, whose landmark 1987 book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, showed that “medieval efforts to discipline and manipulate the body should be interpreted more as elaborate changes rung upon the possibilities provided by fleshliness than as flights from physicality.”2 This is particularly true of female mystical spiritualities: “what modern eyes see as self-punishment or psychosomatic manipulation was imitatio christi—fusion with Christ’s agony on the cross . . . [these sufferings] were not, at the deepest level, masochism or dualism but, rather, efforts to gain power and to give meaning.”3 Bynum can even

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say that “compared to other periods of Christian history and other world religions, medieval spirituality—especially female spirituality—was peculiarly bodily.”4 Bynum’s arguments have not gone unchallenged, particularly with respect to the power dynamics involved between women and their confessors or clerical mediators; nonetheless, her consistently sympathetic interpretive strategy allows the reader to access the patterns of meaning making in medieval writing.

The Rothschild Canticles: Brides of Christ To ground the beguine spirituality of Mechthild, I first examine two images from the Rothschild Canticles, a Franco-Flemish devotional book produced for nuns in the early fourteenth century. The book illustrates the unique blend of erotic and eucharistic imagery that suffused female affective devotion in the high Middle Ages. The cross was the focus of this devotional script, but at the same time, iconography could not escape the violent, hereticating imagery of the medieval crucifix. The first image (fig. 6) illustrates the ambiguity of the cross strikingly. The cross stands between the wise and foolish virgins of Jesus’s parable (Matt. 25:1–13). The foolish, on the right, are in the act of being swallowed into hell, their lamps falling from their despairing hands; on the left, the wise virgins have their lamps lit by the Christ child, who sits on Mary’s lap. The faces of the foolish virgins are downcast, drawing the viewer’s eye into Satan’s maw. In contrast, the figures on the left margin direct the gaze upward, following three women reaching toward Christ. Answering this upward movement is the crucifix in the upper center: Christ hangs from the cross, looking downward, as a virgin climbs to join him. The visual rhetoric of the composition is clear: to aspire to Christ’s sufferings on the cross is to be united with him. The entire miniature highlights this juxtaposition of the virgins: fruit falls into the lamps of the wise virgins. But the lamps of the foolish virgins plummet out of the frame, as if they could drag the women with them. The iconography of the image goes deeper, however. First, the cross sprouts green branches: it recapitulates the garden of Eden, in which Adam and Eve partook of forbidden fruit.5 Now the instrument of God’s judgment has become the tree of life; Christ himself is the fruit of the tree. Moreover, the cross is situated within the two great motifs of medieval spirituality, the Eucharist and Mary: the Christ child sits on Mary’s lap, and Mary holds him while embracing the cross, but in a markedly different posture than the swooning, sorrowful mother of the Ramsay Psalter (chapter 4, fig. 5).6 The oil that Mary-Christ pours into the virgins’ lamps resembles the eucharistic chalice, the orange flame easily recalling the red of wine. A final

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Figure 6. Crucified Christ surrounded by the wise and foolish virgins. Beinecke MS 404, the Rothschild Canticles, f. 15r. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

iconographic theme is present, as well: the handclasp by which Christ grasps the ascending virgin is the dextrarum iunctio, the “sacred handclasp” of marriage. The Christ child in Mary’s lap offers a floral garland as a token of love. Thus the grasp by which Christ reaches out from the cross is one of betrothal. The spiritual marriage nuns undergo unites them with the passion: the cross becomes a marriage bed.7

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Figure 7. The ostentatio vulnerum: Christ pierced by the virgin’s spear. Beinecke MS 404, the Rothschild Canticles, f. 18v., 19r. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

This idea of the nun as the sponsa or spouse of Christ runs throughout the Rothschild Canticles. Another miniature, a paneled scene across two pages, depicts the words of Christ to his beloved bride: “Thou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse, thou hast wounded my heart with one of thy eyes, and with one hair of thy neck.”8 In the panel (fig. 7), the nun aims a spear toward the wounded Christ on the next page, breaking the border between them. Christ is nude but modest, his thigh positioned strategically at a sharp perpendicular to the spear. He points to the wound in his side, while the nails gouge rubicund marks in his hands and feet. The implements of torture surround him: he carries the whip in his right hand, the nail in his left. His left leg is tied to the pole where he was whipped, and the right is nailed to the cross. The tableau is a classic trope known as the ostentatio vulnerum, the “showing of the wounds.” Typically this was employed in the context of the day of judgment, the torture devices displaying the guilt of the damned. Christ would normally point to his wounds as evidence of the injustice of his suffering—and hence the righteousness of his retribution. In the Rothschild Canticles, however, the motif is used to different effect: the wounding party is not Longinus, the Roman soldier of legend at the foot of the cross, but the bride of Christ, the loving soul.9 Christ pointing

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at the wound in his side, then, is not a demonstration of judgment but an invitation to enter into the wound, an early example of devotion to the Sacred Heart.10 He is triumphant in resurrection, too: the top panel on the left portrays him emerging from the tomb and embracing the sponsa, and the cross once again blooms as the tree of life. The wound of Christ is life bearing, inviting the loving soul to enter into a corporal intimacy with him. The divinity participates in mortal, impassioned, pierced flesh in order to invite the viewer into the agonies of the cross, in hope of its triumph.

The Erotic Body of the Beguine These themes of mutual passionate wounding and the fertility of the cross are central to Mechthild’s writing. Mechthild was a beguine, one of a group of lay women, mostly in the Low Countries and Germany, who lived in a loosely organized community and voluntarily took on traditional monastic vows (chastity, poverty, prayer, and fasting). The beguines were part of the general movement toward apostolic poverty that characterizes the popular spirituality of the thirteenth century: emulation of the life of Christ in renunciation of possessions and in a life of dedication to religious service. The beguines always inhabited a marginal space on the edges of ecclesiastical authorization, though; they had not taken formal vows as nuns but were laity aspiring toward the religious life. Their success in a given location depended on submitting to direct oversight, generally under the Dominicans, which means that virtually all of their writings are mediated through scribes and confessors, who altered their texts to varying degrees to conform them to acceptable patterns of orthodoxy.11 Mechthild is an excellent example of why the church might have imposed such censorship, for she developed the nuptial (bridal) mysticism of Bernard of Clairvaux and the twelfth-century Victorines into startlingly erotic descriptions of union with God.12 Born of nobility, she reported visions and visitations of the Spirit beginning at the age of twelve; she became a beguine in Magdeburg in her twenties, later probably becoming the superior of her collective, before finishing the final period of her life in a Cistercian community. Flowing Light of the Godhead was written over a couple decades, likely with only the first four books circulating in her lifetime.13 It has a complicated textual history—written in a vernacular German dialect with her confessor, it survives only in translation, though unlike many female mystics’ writings, the translations seem to be largely faithful.14 A modern reader might very well express pause with the apparently essentialized gendered roles Mechthild employs—God is invariantly male,

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the soul female; God active, the soul passive; the female soul, whether virgin or mother, is pure insofar as it inhabits idealized femininity. But Mechthild’s rhetoric builds upon and transforms these roles by blending frank eroticism with maternal imagery, often conjoining nurturing and wounding language as well. Here, we are hardly in alien territory in the Middle Ages: the Song of Songs had been a textual storehouse used to express mystical union since Origen, and developments a century before Mechthild (especially the writing of Bernard of Clairvaux) had made the text central to mystical theology.15 In the Rothschild Canticles, probably created not long after her death, we have just seen how seamlessly crucifixion and erotic language from the Song blend together. Mechthild leverages all of these tropes to express union with Christ in her flesh. The way into this complicated nexus of ideas is the overlap between the suffering of Christ and the nurturing of Mary. The milk of Mary and the blood of Jesus are two images that allow the mystic to express the idea that the humanity of God is life-giving precisely in the opening of its flesh on the cross: Mary’s “lovely uncovered breasts . . . full of sweet milk” stand alongside Jesus’s “open wounds bloody and unbandaged” on either side of the throne of God.16 The connection between the two is not so distant as it may appear—in the best biological science of the Middle Ages, breast milk was simply purified blood. It is an idea that allows Mechthild to conceive of the feminine beguine body as simultaneously sharing in the maternal nature of Mary, and in the crucified flesh of Christ. Anselm could use “atonement” language of Mary without any reference to the passion, but Mechthild’s Mariology is intimately connected to her theology of the cross. Mary is the origin of Jesus’s human flesh, his broken body made bread and wine of the Mass. Thus when Mechthild closes the loop between Mary, the cross, and the sacrament, she unites the female mystical body both with Mary and Christ and in so doing renders her own suffering into a eucharistic feast. The following long quote will show how beguine mystical participation is at once maternal, spousal, Marian, and eucharistic, all united in the cross. The speaker is Mary, though at times the first person shades into the third, linking Mary and the reader. The sweet dew of the eternal Trinity gushed forth from the fountain of the everlasting Godhead into the flower of the chosen maid; and the fruit of this flower is an immortal God and a mortal man and a living hope of eternal life. And our Redeemer became a Bridegroom. The Father chose me for his bride . . . the Son chose me to be his mother, and the Holy Spirit received me as his beloved. . . . My breasts

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became so full of the pure, spotless milk of true, generous mercy that I suckled the prophets and sages, even before I was born. Afterward, in my childhood, I suckled Jesus; later, in my youth, I suckled God’s bride, Holy Christianity, under the cross when I was so desolate and wretched, as the sword of the physical suffering of Jesus cut spiritually into my soul. Both his wounds and her breasts were open. The wounds poured forth. The breasts flowed. The soul was invigorated and completely restored As he poured the sparkling red wine Into her red mouth.17 The breasts are the key motif in this passage. The gushing wounds in the chest of Christ on the cross merge with the leaking breasts of Mary, who nurses Jesus and his body, the church. Milk and blood combine in the eucharistic imagery of “sparkling red wine” for the longing, bloodthirsty beguine. The slippage between Mary and Mechthild blurs maternal and bridal images. This draws on a well-established medieval tradition in which Mary, as representative of the church, is both mother and bride of Christ. The passivity of the feminine is common to both sets of imagery (mother and bride); but in one of the most distinctive themes of the Flowing Light of the Godhead, the desire of God for the soul, a desire that drives divine love from heaven, in a very real sense renders it dependent on receptive humanity. This dynamic of vulnerable divine desire and human receptiveness drives the erotic imagery of the text. Mary receives Christ as mother; Mechthild receives Christ as lover. Desire pierces bodies and transforms mother into spouse. god. You are an enhancement of my most sublime love. soul. O you pouring God in your gift! O you flowing God in your love! O you burning God in your desire! O you melting God in the union with your beloved! O you resting God on my breasts! [Song of Sol. 1:13] god. I cannot turn away from you. You are my softest pillow, my most lovely bed, my most intimate repose, my deepest longing, my most sublime glory. You are an allurement to my Godhead, a thirst for my humanity, a stream for my burning. soul. Ah, Lord, love me passionately, love me often, and love me long.

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god. That I love you passionately comes from my nature, for I am love itself. That I love you often comes from my desire, for I desire to be loved passionately.18 Mechthild’s reader becomes the lover that, like Mary, draws divine love from heaven by her desirability. One flesh with Jesus as he journeys from Mary’s womb to the cross, she is united with him to the point of participating in the passion. Through a concatenation of images—eucharistic, maternal, erotic—the beguine takes on the body of the cross.

The Beguine Body as Text The erotic Marian body draws divine love from heaven and directly unites the beguine reader with Christ. This is new. Christians who claimed to participate directly in Christ have been a relative rarity; early martyrs like Ignatius did so, but the story of the Western theology of the cross has been one of vicarity, the willingness of the church communities to receive the flesh of Christ through saintly intermediaries. Mechthild is a mystic who aspired to participate immediately in Christ rather than rest content with such surrogates. She uses a fusillade of motifs—Mary as mother, spouse, and lover; Christ as bridegroom; blood and breast milk—to portray union with Christ as a eucharistic practice of mystical desire. But her use of the cross is where she is truly daring, as she portrays her own erotic suffering as redemptive and prophetic, completing the sufferings of Christ on behalf of the church. Mechthild sees the body as a site of temptation and weakness; but the fragility of the body is also a means of encounter with Christ, and therefore a receptacle of transcendence: “I direct all my gifts to you, as much as your frail body can bear. . . . No matter how softly I caress you, I inflict immense pain on your poor body.”19 The point in a passage like this is not a dualistic view of the body—quite the opposite. The weak body is precisely where the encounter with Christ’s humanity takes place, and just as the life of God passes through Mary into the world, elevating her to near-priestly status in its wake, so Mechthild’s authority comes from the union of her flesh with Christ.20 The secluded life forms Mechthild into the same transfigured flesh as Jesus. In the previous section, Mechthild’s nuptial language expressed the intimacy of nurturing union; here, eroticism signifies a union so close that the female flesh becomes transparent to the authority of the word. Her direct union with Christ on the cross mediates agency and authority. But it comes at a cost.

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Once again divine longing drives the drama. God’s desire for the beauty of the human being is so great that God is effectively at her mercy, with the love of an enraptured groom who sensuously seeks the body of his bride. In a striking vision, Mechthild enters “the secret chamber of the invisible Godhead” and stands nude before her groom: “Stay, Lady Soul.” “What do you bid me, Lord?” “Take off your clothes. . . . You are so utterly formed to my nature That not the slightest thing can be between you and me.” “Lord, now I am a naked soul.”21 Bridal themes have been taken to their logical extreme: as the bride and groom become, in the ancient biblical language, “one flesh,” so the mystic and God are united, interpenetrating in the secret chamber of desire, culminating in a postcoital “blessed stillness” of mutual submission. But the body of the beguine, for all its beguiling sensuality, is still frail. It may encounter transcendence, but not without profound suffering. The body’s capacity to sustain a homology with the passion of Jesus allows it to bear his saving wounds before the world. Just as the maternal Jesus nurses the church at the wound on his breast, so the frail body of the beguine, in imitatio christi, nourishes the church with the prophetic word. In Flowing Light 1.29, the divine bridegroom address the bride (Vide me, sponsa) and bids her to follow him in imitating his passion: “You shall be martyred with me, betrayed in jealousy, haunted in ambush . . . crucified in the hatred of the son, crucified in voluntary withdrawal from all things, nailed to the cross by the holy virtues, wounded by love, dying on the cross in holy constancy, pierced in your heart by constant union.”22 Mechthild spiritualizes the semimonastic beguine life in terms of the trial of Christ: she is “bound by obedience” and “scourged by poverty,” terms linking the beguine with traditional Benedictine vows. This monastic pattern continues as Mechthild characterizes the hours of the Divine Office in bridal terms of love. Mechthild’s union with the humanity of God is not for her own pleasure alone; her flesh shows the exemplary, even epiphanic, pattern of the religious life for the wider church.23 The union of Mechthild with Christ is so total that her words and his words, her flesh and his flesh, blend, so that her body itself becomes a prophetic text:

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You have written me into your book of the Godhead; You have painted me in your humanity; You have buried me in your side, in your hands and feet.24 Mechthild’s union with the wounds of Christ is a writing of the self into the Word made flesh.25 The image is as suggestive as it is obscure; it likely evokes the Logos of the Johannine prologue, but in context, it also serves as a mode of authorization for Mechthild, who is to “write this book out of God’s heart and mouth.”26 Like Hildegard, and so many other female mystics before and after her, Mechthild laments her lack of learning and expresses her trepidation in the face of male clerics and scholastics (“Ah, Lord, if I were a learned religious man . . .”), only to hear God respond that her “unlearned mouth, aided by the Holy Spirit, teaches the learned tongue.”27 The connection between the suffering bodies of Mechthild and Christ, and the consummation of their united passion in nuptial union, authorize the writing of the Flowing Light of the Godhead. The erotic union of her flesh, a crushing, painful union of correspondence to the cross, becomes a mode of authorization against clerical opposition. Her union with Christ is so total that, as she is buried in his side, she is “written” into his humanity: she speaks the words of the Word, whose authority cannot be gainsaid. Mechthild imagines union with Christ with profound carnality. Her suffering is Christomorphic, but like the martyrs of old she envisions the ascetic toils of the flesh not as a personal apotheosis, but as a eucharistic sacrifice for the church. The passion is an organizing point for her evershifting metaphors for the beguine life as a mystical, wounded text given for the church. As Bynum rightly puts it, she seeks to fuse “with a Christ whose suffering saved the world.”28 In the religious life, perhaps exemplarily in the female religious life, the humanity of God becomes visible to the world. Mechthild renders her body the site of an erotic, nurturing union with Christ, a union that is simultaneously ecstatic and agonizing, in order to participate in Christ’s prophetic authority, the living authority of the word of God. Identification with Christ is on behalf of the church, and Mechthild’s body thus becomes a new form of the body of the cross.

The Tree of Life Mechthild’s rhetoric of carnal cruciformity reflects a wider interest in emotional, imaginative union with Christ in the thirteenth century, a development of the affective devotion that emerged in Anselm’s era. In

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Anselm and Abelard, the passion of Christ stirred to greater devotion, and indeed, to a kind of emotive martyrdom; at least for Anselm, the vivid affections of yearning for Christ manifested in the desire to be present at the foot of the cross. These ideas are assumed by Mechthild, but translated into an entirely different script. The cross is semaphore for identification with Christ (and his mother). Neither Anselm nor Abelard would have imagined themselves experiencing Christ’s passion, of so being united with him as to bear his pains in their own body; they suffer for him, not with him. Mechthild does so, filtered through a series of images for union with Christ in eucharistic, bridal, and maternal imagery. Mechthild writes out of the Dominican sphere; this next section takes us into the domain of the other major mendicant order of the period, the Franciscans. The Franciscans are much more direct in their imaginative depictions of mystical crucifixion with Christ. We frequently see the imitatio crucis in the textual traditions that emerged in the wake of Francis of Assisi, particularly in reference to his experience of the stigmata. The most prominent, and likely the most influential, interpreter and hagiographer of Francis’s experience is Bonaventure, who devotes crucifixion imagery and themes drawn from Francis’s stigmata to both theological and pedagogical purposes. Bonaventure’s Tree of Life, an extended meditation on the life and passion of Christ, help set a pattern of imitatio christi in the Middle Ages explicitly oriented to laity, while also consolidating the Franciscan order against heterodox movements on its periphery. This program shares similarities with Mechthild: the mystic’s union with Christ is the source of empowerment, giving him or her an authorized voice to speak to the church; and the pattern of the cross is one that is borne in the flesh, flesh that becomes the body of the cross. What is peripheral to Mechthild, though, in the service of a broader panoply of themes of union, becomes central to Franciscan devotion: the imitation of the cross.

“We Shall Be Driven Out” First, though, it is necessary to situate Francis within a broader social context. The Franciscans were not the only or the first itinerant religious movement dedicated to radical poverty. In the 1130s, if you were to walk into a town in southern France, you stood a decent chance of encountering a new European phenomenon: the wandering reforming preacher. The centralizing Gregorian reforms of the end of the eleventh century, which attacked lay investiture and simony, motivated these preachers to fulminate against worldly priests and a decadent church. But they took their crusade

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to the streets and the court of public opinion. In a pattern that would repeat itself for four centuries until the Reformation (and thereafter), they displayed an atavistic, primitivist reflex to return the church to the New Testament. They tended to reject divorce; the increasingly rigid, centralized character of the sacramental system, especially infant baptism and the Mass; the veneration of saints; and extrabiblical forms of worship and veneration.29 One such reformer, Henry the Monk, reformed marriage and instituted a prostitute rehabilitation program in a city while the bishop was in Rome; another, Peter of Bruys, literally dragged monks to be married, gleefully broke Good Friday fasts, and interpreted the Lord’s Supper so minimalistically it would have given even Zwingli pause. For Peter, the external forms of worship should be destroyed: church buildings should be torn down, and the veneration of the cross was to be banned. It was not an object of adoration but hatred, for it was the instrument of torture and torment, deserving only of destruction and burning. Peter’s broadsides against corrupt priests, or his protest against sacerdotalism and the ubiquity of the sacramental system, seemed to have been welcome among the common people. He appears to have gone too far, however, when he made a spectacle of his iconoclasm in St. Gilles by burning crucifixes in a bonfire. The townspeople, appalled at his blasphemy, pushed him into the flames, making him one of the first heretics burned for his convictions. There is a poetic irony in his death: he destroyed the cross because it was an instrument of torment and execution—but it became the tool of his murder. Peter the Venerable, a notable opponent of heretics of the time, wrote of the symmetry, “This impious man had assuredly made the transit from fire to fire, from brief passing flame to eternal flame.”30 Peter’s death by the cross is a tragic inversion of Jesus’s, for unlike the savior’s, the cross signifies Peter’s defeat, not his victory, and the onlookers are implicated, not in guilt, but in vindication of God’s cause. Even as the cross became central to Christian devotion, it was becoming weaponized, rendering a boundary line between the holy inhabitants of the Christian body politic and the heretical threats to that body. The occasion of Peter’s death is unique; but of course his fate in flames is not. The story of Peter of Bruys suggests a few themes that will be important for the rest of this book. First, it highlights how the cross could stir up powerful and violent reactions at a popular level by the twelfth century, even as it had become a symbol associated with the hierarchy of the church and its management of the sacramental economy. Second, it shows how the cross continued its role as a signifier of the boundaries of the corpus

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christianum—the sociopolitical body of Christ. By the thirteenth century, the mainstream Western church had become the body of the cross— complete with new holy victims. Finally, it suggests how the cross could become a catalyst in struggles for authority: desecration of the crucifix was a way to claim a subject position and agency. The wandering preachers, operating at best in positions of marginal authority, represented the growing resentment against a wealthy and worldly church, and its frequent collusion with monarchs and nobles. The Gregorian reform stoked the fires of this resentment against reformresistant priests and bishops; but populist sentiment is not so easily reined in once it is provoked, and increasingly the church found itself confronting reform movements whose only heterodoxy was their disregard for the authority of the church hierarchy. By the thirteenth century, a kind of pattern had emerged: a wealthy, aristocratic young man would have a spiritual awakening; renounce his wealth, inheritance, and status; and form a band of likeminded followers who emphasized apostolic poverty. They lived itinerantly, shared common property, subsisted on alms, and served the poor or preached a simple message of reform. Two figures exemplify this pattern; one would become one of the most notorious of the medieval heretics and the other one of the greatest saints of the Western tradition. But there is little difference between them, other than the circumstances in which their movements arose and the way they handled their political connections.31 The Waldensians were one of the major heretical sects of the Middle Ages; but their heterodoxy lay not in doctrinal irregularity but in falling afoul of ecclesial hierarchy.32 Peter Valdes was a young merchant who had amassed significant wealth; upon hearing the story of St. Alexis, a fourthcentury ascetic who had renounced wealth for mendicant devotion to God, Valdes sought advice on how to embrace the life of apostolic poverty.33 Following Matthew 19:21 literally (“If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me”), he gave his land holdings to his wife, liquidated the rest of his assets, and distributed them to his daughters and those in need. A group began to collect around him, known as the Poor of Lyons, although they are known to modern readers as the Waldensians. The Waldensians’ vow of poverty was enthusiastically approved by Pope Alexander III. But at Lateran III in 1179, Waldensian leaders were both naive and impolitic when questioned by suspicious clerics, and they were refused the authority to preach. Walter Map, a notorious lampooner of

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heretics, describes the movement in terms that could have been spoken of the Franciscans: “They have no fixed habitations. They go about two by two, barefoot, clad in woolen garments, owning nothing, holding all things in common like the apostles, naked, following a naked Christ.”34 This reflects the gospel pattern to which they conformed themselves as they followed the tradition of apostolic poverty and lay preaching. They were communal successors of the wandering preachers. Worse than the Waldensians’ crime of lay preaching, however, was their translation of parts of the Bible into French, and their later authorization of women to preach. Despite all this, they did not truly fall afoul of the hierarchy proper until the reforming bishop of Lyons died and a hostile bishop replaced him, leading to their expulsion from the city in 1182. Pope Lucius III’s decree Ad abolendam listed the Waldensians alongside the Cathars (whom the Waldensians opposed) and other heretical groups, and ordered the excommunication of such unauthorized preachers.35 However, this did not stop their spread, along with similar groups like the Italian Humiliati and (later) the Hussites. Walter Map’s concluding comment on the Waldensians at Lateran III is a telling hint of their popular support: “If we admit them, we shall be driven out.”36

The Little Man of Assisi Francis of Assisi’s conversion is similar to Peter’s; he began by stripping himself of his possessions and renouncing his status, naked, before his father, after an encounter with lepers.37 Unlike Peter, however, he showed some political savvy, quickly journeying to Rome and swearing total obedience to the pope. Cardinal Hugolino of Ostia (later Pope Gregory IX) was appointed as an overseer; he would safely guide the movement through the hazards of papal policies. The “lesser brothers” grew quickly, and Francis’s reservations about necessary compromises in their apostolic way of life were balanced by his knack of making timely political connections. This ability was not, of course, the reason for his fame; whereas it was common for earlier holy men of apostolic poverty to perform miracles, none conformed themselves to Christ’s poverty and sufferings so closely and spectacularly as Francis. So closely as to become corporeal. The phenomenon of bearing the sign of the cross was well-known in Christian history, primarily as a metaphor for ordination, asceticism, or persecution; for it to appear miraculously in the flesh of Francis was new.38 The stigmata were a sign of Francis’s radical Christomorphism, but it was a sign later Franciscans like Bonaventure had trouble making into something sustainable for the life of the order.

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In legend, Francis received the wounds of Christ in his hands, feet, and side when he experienced a vision of a crucified angelic figure on Mount La Verna near Assisi. The event hardly occurred in a vacuum; it highlights the devotion to the cross that ran throughout Francis’s life, beginning with his vision of a crucifix that spoke to him at San Damiano, telling him to rebuild the church. So conformed was he to Christ that he took on Christ’s wounds; in the fourteenth century, this would lead to him being called “another Christ,” alter christus.39 What precisely happened on La Verna is likely lost (or inaccessible) to historiography, but in Franciscan tradition, Francis’s reception of the stigmata signified the perfection of his evangelical life.40 The first Life of Francis by Thomas of Celano (ca. 1228–29) describes the stigmata not as wounds (except for the one in his side) but as vestigial nails, “with the heads of the nails appearing in the inner side of the hands and on the upper sides of the feet and their pointed ends on the opposite sides. . . . Some small pieces of flesh took on the appearance of the ends of the nails.”41 Celano emphasizes the stigmata appearing spontaneously while Francis puzzled over the vision of the beautiful yet crucified seraph.42 It is a meditative and specular scene, as if Francis were contemplating a painting of the passion. The Assisi Compilation, a later collection of narratives redacted sometime in the late thirteenth century that emphasizes Francis’s poverty and suffering, depicts Francis as so devoted to the “humility and example of the Son of God” that the “sufferings and bitterness of Christ endured for us were a constant subject of affliction to him and a cause for interior and exterior mortification; consequently, he was totally unconcerned with his own sufferings.”43 The travail of meditation on the passion was also a source of “sweetness and consolation” to Francis, according to this document; but the end result is that Francis minimized his own sickness, living instead in meditative absorption in Christ’s suffering, to the extent that he didn’t even need the Scriptures.44 Francis himself wanted to hide the stigmata, in the paradox of his selfeffacement that underlay his publicly flamboyant spirituality.45 It is likely that he did not see the wounds themselves as indicative of his “radical originality”; but his followers did.46 Under the pressure of institutionalizing forces, driven by papal conscription of the mendicant orders for reform and counterheresy purposes, the order quickly developed a hagiographical tradition around Francis in which the stigmata became the ultimate signifier of Francis’s eschatological significance. This institutionalization included the order’s clericalization; Innocent had authorized Francis and his lay companions to preach by special dispensation, but the trend toward ordination and centralization after his death was inexorable. Francis had seen ordination as pretension unworthy of the lesser brothers.

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The institutionalization of the Minorite order included the mythologization of the figure of Francis,47 based on his cruciform conformity to Christ. Francis performed the passion; the Franciscan order developed his improvisation into a script. This task fell to Bonaventure when he became minister general of the order in 1257; over the next few years, he authored a series of treatises (Journey of the Soul into God, the Triple Way, Tree of Life, and Life of St. Francis) that accomplished both tasks. His motif for portraying Francis is always cocrucifixion with Christ; the key moments of Francis’s life are marked by visions of the cross in the Life, for example, including Francis’s (unsuccessful) aspiration for martyrdom: “Jesus Christ crucified always rested like a bundle of myrrh in the bosom of Francis’s soul, and he longed to be totally transformed into him by the fire of ecstatic love . . . [and to] emulate the glorious triumph of the holy martyrs in whom the flame of love could not be extinguished nor courage be weakened.”48 Finally, though, his stigmata united him with Christ “not by the martyrdom of his flesh, but by the fire of his love consuming his soul.”49 Bonaventure’s most famed treatise, the Journey of the Soul into God, is likewise built around Francis’s Christomorphism. The text reinvents the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius by culminating not in divine darkness but in the vision of the crucified Christ; but as Bonaventure states in the prologue, this epiphany occurred to him as he meditated on Francis’s “vision of a winged Seraph in the form of the Crucified,” and understood the “burning love of the Crucified” that transformed Francis so that “he carried in his body the sacred stigmata of the passion.”50 Francis was the norm for Franciscan life, an explicitly Christomorphic norm; but enshrinement in hagiography made him exemplary by rendering him unattainable, an apocalyptic angel, another Christ. The political and ecclesiastical reputation of Francis’s career as an alter christus demonstrates the paradox of Franciscan institutionalization. It recapitulates the invention of the martyrs: Francis’s imitatio christi was embedded in tradition, becoming imitatio francisci. His followers came to participate, not imitate, rendering his own spirituality of performing the cross something experienced at second hand. Francis joined the ranks of the saints of old, a surrogate figure of sanctity, the newest exemplar of the logic of vicarity.

Bonaventure and the Tree of Life As the perception of Francis became increasingly hyperbolic, Bonaventure designed a series of meditation exercises that trained the reader to imitate the Poverello; he never lost sight of the basic dynamic of Francis’s

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life of poverty and service, even as he fused mystical traditions to exalt that life. The pattern was unstable, though, for the Tree of Life, Bonaventure’s meditation on the life and passion of Christ, showed how difficult it was to normativize Francis’s cruciform life for popular devotion. In fact, the treatise retreats from encouraging the reader to emulate Francis’s experience of the cross. Bonaventure articulates volitional, affective union with God through the same tradition of bridal mysticism Mechthild uses; this allows him to systematize the imitatio christi ethos of Francis into a devotional script that operates on mechanisms of imagination, compassion, and pathos. This has populist implications: the Tree of Life helped inaugurate a literary tradition of meditative treatises on the life of Christ intended for imaginative training of the affections, most notably the Meditations on the Life of Christ, attributed to Bonaventure until modern times. The Tree of Life tends to be recognized for its graphic portrayal of the passion of Christ, though Bonaventure’s prose is really quite tame compared to later examples of blood devotion.51 Only a third of the treatise is devoted to “mystery of his passion,” bookended with the “mystery of his origin” and the “mystery of his glorification.” Bonaventure characteristically organizes the treatise in a series of hierarchies to aid memorization; in all, there are forty-eight meditations on the tree of life, spanning not only the life of Christ but the length of salvation history, from the tree in the garden of Eden to the lifegiving trees of Revelation that line the river before the throne of God. At the heart of this history is the cross, “the salvation-bearing tree” whose fruit, germinated in Mary, is the incarnate flesh of Christ received in virtue and meditation.52 Each meditation is built on a two-part narration of the life of Christ: first, there is a narrative section, sometimes in scholastic theological language, but more generally a kind of condensed paraphrase of the Gospels that highlights in imaginative, concrete detail the evangelical incident in question; second, this is usually followed by a poetic section that either responds in prayer, moralizes or instructs the reader, or offers a Gospel character as an object of sympathetic identification. These poetic responses reveal the Anselmian spirit of the Tree of Life, and in fact Bonaventure quotes Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations (or the writer known as PseudoAnselm) several times. These self-involving responses are the key to understanding the Tree of Life as exemplifying Franciscan affective devotion. They are emotive and hortative, and craft the Gospel synopses as narratives to be imitated, internalized, participated in, brought into the daily life of the thirteenth-century

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reader—a script taken from the rhetorical style and modes of address of a Franciscan sermon. Their importance for understanding the Tree of Life goes beyond this, however; for while they vary structurally, they bear an illuminating set of patterns based in the ideal of imitatio christi. Bonaventure positions the reader within the pages of Scripture, contemporaneous with Christ and the people who surrounded him. In the first section, “On the Mystery of His Origin,” the reader is repeatedly asked to imagine themselves experiencing the birth and life of Christ firsthand. Usually, in the treatise’s Anselmian logic, this means focusing on Mary, although the reader also emulates other Gospel characters, such as the magi or Anna and Simeon. Bonaventure also hints at the impending passion and the end of the relationship of Mother and Son in the alienation of death. Even when the Virgin sorrows as she searches for the young boy Jesus in the temple, she is a mirror of devotion infused with desire: “With the beloved mother looking for her beloved Son, do not cease searching until you have found him.”53 When Bonaventure writes of the passion, he turns to eucharistic logic. Sacrament trains the desire of the reader: “He gave . . . his most sacred body and his true blood as food and drink so that what was soon to be a sacrifice pleasing to God and the priceless price of our redemption would be our viaticum and sustenance.”54 With the second major section, “On the Mystery of His Passion,” the focus shifts to Christ’s physical suffering, and with that, Bonaventure begins to depart from his homiletical, hortatory posture and crafts his responses as direct prayer; instead of prompting the emotions of the reader, he models the trained affections himself. Quoting Pseudo-Anselm and echoing Abelard’s martyrological language, he exhorts himself to “endure similar hardship”55 to Christ’s suffering in prayer; he curses the armed mob that arrested Jesus; he execrates Judas. As the passion narrative intensifies, this rhetorical volatility yields the heartbeat of the Tree of Life—a script of compassion for the suffering Christ: “Remember the passion of your beloved Master and go out with Peter to weep most bitterly over yourself. . . . You will be inebriated with the wormwood of a twofold bitterness: remorse for yourself and compassion for Christ, so that having atoned with Peter for the guilt of your crime, with Peter you will be filled with the spirit of holiness.”56 As Jesus is condemned by Pilate and scorned by the crowd, the text admonishes its reader to sympathy—to feeling with Christ—until finally we come to the crucifixion itself. Now Bonaventure reverts to the language of soliloquy, admonishing himself, the reader momentarily forgotten. And here the text ruptures, as Bonaventure shies away from the cross just as he reaches its foot. The inception of the treatise announced the theme of crucifixion with Christ (“With Christ I am nailed to the cross,

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from Galatians, chapter two,” 1.1); but now, having reached Golgotha at last, we are only Anselmian spectators, yearning to participate: “Who will grant me that my request should come about and that God will give me what I long for, that having been totally transpierced in both mind and flesh, I may be fixed with my beloved to the yoke of the cross?”57 Becoming an alter christus and sharing the cross of Christ are, it seems, reserved for Francis alone. He has apparently acquired singularity, inimitability. Whereas the pattern of the stigmatic would lead us to expect a kind of rhetorical stigmatization, a devotional identification so intense as to be a form of cocrucifixion, Bonaventure turns aside from such direct participation. We instead mount the cross with the thief crucified alongside Christ, not Christ himself: “If you do not shrink from following the footsteps of the Lord God who is suffering for you. . . . If only like the repentant thief you would merit to hear at the moment of death: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ ”58 Indeed, after this rhapsodic passage of nearidentification, the text returns to its patterns of Marian sympathy, and the meditation on the passion ends with another Anselmian note, aligning the reader with the Virgin and Magdalene, yearning to be a body not on, but at the foot of the cross: “O my God, good Jesus . . . grant to me, who did not merit to be present at these events in the body, that I may ponder them faithfully in my mind, and experience toward you, my God crucified and put to death for me, that feeling of compassion which your innocent mother and the penitent Magdalene experience at the very hour of your passion.”59 Thus, the Bonaventurean reader oscillates between various proxies—Mary, the disciples, the Gospel characters present to Jesus’s key moments, finds himself crucified alongside Christ with the thief, but then returns to those surrogates. It is true that the rhetoric of the Tree of Life is much more direct than Anselm in viewing the cross itself as life-giving, and in aspiring to bear the wounds of Christ in one’s body. Com-passion, suffering with Christ, is the result of intense, emotional participation to which the reader is habituated through imaginative devotion. But only Francis is crucified with Christ; he has become another holy victim, taking his place in the pantheon; rather than Mechthild’s erotic performance of Christ’s wounds, for Bonaventure the passion remains a specular event, something to be contemplated, not reperformed. Mechthild and Francis can imagine themselves as holy victims recapitulating the sufferings of Christ for the church, but for Bonaventure, at least, that is a spirituality too volatile and dangerous for widespread practice. The cross remains a highly charged, ambivalent symbol. And as had happened a millennium before, in other parts of Christendom the violent

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symbolism of the cross was being sublimated and turned against the enemies of the social body.

Living Cross, Tree of Life In the Rothschild Canticles, the cross divides the wise and the foolish virgins like the soldiers on the sarcophagi of the fourth century: the instrument of execution transforms into the tree of life, but it still feeds the voracious appetite of Satan for wayward souls. This social ambiguity of the cross dates back to the Jewish-Christian and gnostic debates of the second century. In the Middle Ages, the image of the tree of life embodies the paradox strikingly. The cross was the tree of life, bearing fruit inasmuch as the worshiper partook of its fruits via the flesh of Christ. But the tree of life was also capable of inflicting death if one happened to fall outside the boundaries of the body of the cross. It was a symbol of terror when it needed to be. In the later Middle Ages, artists often combined the motif of the tree of life with the opposition of Ecclesia and Synagoga: two female figures distinguished by their responses to Christ or the cross.60 Perhaps most wellknown are the statues framing the entrance to the Strasbourg Cathedral (fig. 8). The Strasbourg figures display all of the tropes typical of the motif: Ecclesia is triumphant and regal, crowned. She bears the cross as if it were a scepter, cradling a chalice in her arm. She looks confidently upon the entrant to the cathedral. In contrast, Synagoga looks away from the entrance in shame; she bears the book of the Mosaic law in a trailing hand (often in this motif the law is slipping from her grasp or already on the ground). Most tellingly, she is blindfolded—always blindfolded: this is the defining attribute of the Ecclesia-Synagoga pairing in the high Middle Ages—symbolizing spiritual blindness and ignorance. Her staff is broken. By the twelfth century, the figure sometimes wore the Jew’s pointed hat, clothed in “orientalized pseudo-Hebrew lettering” signifying the hidden mysteries of the Torah—now revealed in the New Testament and indicting Synagoga’s blindness.61 The motif plays on age-old themes of Christian supersessionism: the replacement of the synagogue by the church as God’s elect community, the rejection of the Jews in favor of the gentiles, and the judgment of blindness and reprobation upon the people of Abraham. It is notable how central the cross is in the opposition: it is the regal staff of Ecclesia, not a symbol of penitence or tragedy, but a sigil of divinely authorized dominion. It is no accident that the staff in Synagoga’s hand is crumbling and broken,

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Figure 8. Ecclesia and Synagoga, formerly at the south entrance, Strasbourg Cathedral. Now at the Musée de l’Oeuvre Notre-Dame, Strasbourg.

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perhaps reminiscent of the reed that pierces the hand that leans upon it (Isa. 36:6). But the Strasbourg Cathedral figures are far from the most graphic examples of this motif. Other portrayals clarify the opposition of election and rejection through concrete symbols of terror. Such a macabre tableau is found in a late fifteenth-century liturgical text in Munich (fig. 9). It is a lively image, based on a motif known as the living cross, which depicts the cross with arms dealing judgment and opening heaven and hell.62 The obvious focal point is the crucifixion, depicting an expiring Christ with blood gushing out of his side. A regal God and triumphant angels overarch the cross, and Ecclesia and Synagoga flank it. Ecclesia bears a cruciform staff in triumph and rides the hybrid beast of the Gospels. She reaches out to capture the blood of Christ in the sacramental chalice. Blindfolded Synagoga appears to the viewer on a donkey and carries a crooked staff and goat’s head (representative of outmoded Levitical sacrifice, but also lust and demonization).63 Once again she is the victim of divine retribution; the cross drives a dagger into her skull with a vivid red of flowing blood, a parody of the flowing eucharistic exsanguination of Christ. The image redoubles its indictment of the Jews by depicting the harrowing of hell as an act of proselytization. At lower right, the tomb of Christ is breaking open. Christ stands at the door, carrying the instrument of his execution, the cross, as a scepter. The wounds are still visible on his body. He greets the righteous of the old covenant as they emerge from the tomb, escaping the flames of Hades that lick the threshold. They are marked with the cross immediately upon emerging from the grave, erasing their Jewish identity. A juxtaposition of trees above this tableau reinforces the JewishChristian binary. The entourage accompanying the triumphant Christ is dominated by a haloed Mary, who holds yet another crucifix surrounded by greenery, a clear evocation of the tree of life; opposite her is a woman picking the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. The Edenic tree is atop the grave, its roots reaching down into hell. The woman’s eyes are opened to know good and evil—an ironic commentary on the blinded Synagoga and the Hebrew righteous who emerge from stygian darkness to see the cross at last. Thus the tree of fallen Eden dominates the old covenant, and the tree of life the new covenant. The passage between the two requires only the mark of the cross. Execution or assimilation are the options available to the Jewish people in medieval Christendom. Tree of life, tree of death: the cross is both.

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Figure 9. Kreuzesallegorie, Graduale de tempore (BSB CLM 23041), f. 3v. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Germany.

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The Medieval Body of the Cross The bulk of this chapter has been devoted to the charged ambiguity of the cross in a few select sectors of medieval theology: the bridal mysticism of the beguines, as represented by the Rothschild Canticles and Mechthild; Francis and the Bonaventurian tradition of mystical, moderate Franciscanism; the iconoclasm of early popular heresies; and the supersessionist iconography of the living cross and the tree of life. The medieval symbol of the cross is too complex a phenomenon to exhaust in a couple of chapters, but within the thematic of holy victims and the logic of vicarity, I can point to three broader, overarching frameworks. First is the thirteenth-century transformation of the Anselmian idea of proximity to the cross through affection. Anselm and Abelard were bystanders to the cross, identifying with witnesses like Mary; the locus of identification has now shifted, for Bonaventure and Mechthild seek to place themselves within Christ himself. Compassion—feeling with—is still relayed in various proxies and mediating structures: Bonaventure’s text constantly approaches and backs away from direct identification with Christ, seeing it as a space reserved for Francis. Mechthild is much more bold, even if her primary set of signifiers are nuptial and erotic metaphors; the soul of the Flowing Light of the Godhead engages in an imitatio christi as spouse and lover. But for both, participation is now premised on sharing in some way in the crucifixion of Christ. This is a new development in the logic of vicarity. In early Christianity, even the martyrs rarely aspired to direct identification with Christ, but were “bankrolled” into that position narratively and liturgically by hagiographers and bishops. Anselm and Abelard put themselves closer, but only as spectators at the foot of the cross. The aspiration of Mechthild and Bonaventure’s version of Francis for identification with Christ is innovative—and both bear that on behalf of the church. They take upon themselves the logic of the merit-bearing holy body, Mechthild as a mother to the church and Francis by reconstructing the crumbling house of God. Their suffering on behalf of the church is performative, prophetic, and symbolically rich. There is no simple transaction of merit happening in their texts, but there is a call to imitation and participation. They are, in a real sense, appropriating the domain previously reserved for the cult of the saints into their own flesh, making themselves holy victims. Second, the question of atonement is still quite underdeveloped as a formal theological apparatus. The death of Jesus, atones, of course, in the participatory, performative spiritualities of the high Middle Ages; there is

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no need to deny this. But Mechthild and Bonaventure demonstrate the reductiveness of considering the cross merely through atonement categories. More so even than in the time of Anselm, in the thirteenth-century mystics explored here the cross is the site of devotion and imitation, the pyre of inflamed desire and the fulcrum of contests of authority and marginality. Anselm and Abelard theologized the cross’s salvific power, but in the midst of a much larger tapestry of affective devotion to the suffering of Christ manifest in monastic obedience. For Mechthild and Bonaventure, the cross operates at the heart of a complex semiotic web, only a small portion of which belongs to the domain of redemption theory. In all of his meditation upon the cross, Bonaventure has scarcely any use for traditional atonement language; he draws upon ancient motifs of reversal and sacrifice but rarely, if ever, approaches satisfaction ideas. Atonement occurs in compassion and affection; in remorse, repentance, and penitence. Mechthild likewise can draw upon pro nobis language, but forgiveness is found in the transparency of the soul to God, in the desire for the divine lover in which sin is extinguished by the purity of bound love. These texts take atonement ideas more for granted than develop them at any length. They are much more interested in how the death of Jesus on the cross makes his body available: it distributes and extends his flesh, through Mary the mother-bride, the vessel who originates that body and links it with all human bodies; through the Eucharist that makes his body food, and renders the mystic’s own broken body nourishment for the wider church; and through the word of Scripture, a text to be inhabited in sympathy and imagination, as both Mechthild and Bonaventure enact the sacred page itself and accompany Christ in the passion narratives. The cross makes the body of Christ available for performance and enactment, particularly to the lay reader who can accompany and imitate his life in the rigors of apostolic poverty. Third, for all that, devotion to the cross is unstable and paradoxical; indeed, its emotional power and rhetorical volatility is driven by this instability. Bonaventure seeks to be crucified with Christ on the cross but finds himself unable to bear such direct identification and seeks solace in companionship with a thief. Mechthild is united with the divine lover in a dialectic of presence and absence, but the fragility of her body is crushed under the weight of transcendence. Anselm’s suspension between hope and fear at the foot of the cross has been further internalized as devotional language has become more intimate and graphic, but this internalization has only heightened the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of the cross. The cross gives life as it wields death, and vice versa; neither moment can be denied, and that is its power.

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For some the death wielded by the cross was more literal. As the corpus christianum coalesced in the twin form of the centralized power of pope and king, the cross could became a point of resistance, granting prophetic authority to Mechthild and the wandering reform preachers; but it also was the boundary line signifying rejection of the Jews and heretics from the political body of Christ—and not a few mystics and beguines as well. The political body of the cross has always been one of exclusion in Christianity, since well before Constantine. The iconography of that exclusion became graphic and bloodthirsty in the Middle Ages in the living cross motif: a literal dividing line between Christians and Jews, dealing glory and power to Ecclesia and brutal execution to Synagoga. This motif illustrates the double function of the cross in medieval devotion, and indeed throughout Western history—it gives life to those who believe in Christ, but deals death to those who reject him. In the piercing of the mystical body and the brutalizing of the reprobate one, the body of the cross is one of both meaning making and political repression. It operates very much in this world to form bodies and to slay them. Its logic is violent—both the violence of desire and the violence of exclusion. In the cases of the mystic and the reformist preachers, it is a site for organizing agency. In the case of the Jews and heretics, the cross galvanizes political marginalization. The Middle Ages suffered the cross as a symbol of the creation of new meaning, meaning not simply recapitulating gospel history but continually extending it; but that came at the cost of victims whose refusal of its benefits could not be tolerated. The cross brings life and deals death. As we move into the Reformation in the final two chapters, all three of these themes develop in unexpected ways. What began as a dispute between Luther and radical theologians over the very question of participation in the cross combined with the boundary-setting cross of the corpus christianum to produce victims new and old. The reprobate became more essential than ever to the sociopolitical body of the cross; and the internal dialectics of hope and fear, the affective crucifixion of the mystical Middle Ages, transmuted into the believer herself becoming a holy victim. With the emergence of the Reformed doctrine of penal substitution, punishment will become a habitus for the damned and the elect alike.

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The Bitter Christ and the Sweet Christ: The Cross and the German Reformations

In 1518 a new altar was installed in the parish church at Herrenberg; it was a spectacular panel of paintings by an artist named Jörg Ratgeb (fig. 10). Ratgeb has suffered double ignominy: the likes of Lucas Cranach the Elder overshadow him in the eyes of moderns, and in his own time he met a violent death for his role in the agrarian revolts now called the Peasants’ War of 1524–25. Ratgeb himself was not a reformer, but whatever he did in the war, he was condemned for treason. His body was pulled to pieces by horses.1 He was one of a number of insubordinate lay artists of the time, and his sympathy with the peasants is evident in the lively figures and period dress in the altarpiece. The altar depicts the Last Supper, cross, and resurrection squarely within the earthy scenes of southern German peasant life, far from the idealized, placid tableaus of Cranach. As Peter Matheson notes, “The Last Supper becomes again the rough and ready meal it once was. The crude manners and features of the disciples remind the onlooker of the kind of company Jesus chose to keep.”2 The Christ of Ratgeb’s painting is quintessentially late medieval: composed and serene in the Last Supper and resurrection, and patiently enduring suffering in the flagellation and crucifixion. But chaos surrounds him at the Last Supper (far left panel). The scene teems with action, more a tavern brawl than a mannerly meal. Christ has announced that his betrayer is at the table, and Judas leaps up indignantly. His chair goes flying, and the sacred wine spills on the ground. His protests ring hollow, however—Satan, in the form of a fly, buzzes in his mouth. The disciples surrounding him react and whisper among themselves. This busy scene,

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Figure 10. Jörg Ratgeb, Herrenberg Altarpiece, 1519. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany. Public domain.

inviting examination and self-scrutiny (“Lord, is it I?”) nonetheless draws the eye upward to Christ, whose luminous face occupies the precise center of the painting. However, the gushing jug of wine signals what will come next: the spilled blood of the savior. Reinforcing this foreshadowing of the passion is the scene behind Christ’s shoulder, to the viewer’s right: Gethsemane, in which an angel proffers the cross. The composition captures “a round-table, struck by a lightning blow calculated to separate the wheat from the chaff,”3 while drawing a sharp contrast between the violence to be visited on Christ and his patience in bearing it. A similar juxtaposition animates the flagellation (middle left), where Jesus serenely suffers twice: hanging from a pillar as he is beaten (center left) and receiving the crown of thorns (lower right quadrant). Again, his equanimity contrasts with the furor of the men surrounding him. Three are prominent, in green, yellow, and brown. They are given rotund bellies, prominent rear ends, unnaturally contorted necks, and grotesque facial expressions. One even lobs a spit globule at Christ, his disgust suspended in the space between them. They are a stark contrast with the smooth lines and naturalistic rendering of Jesus. He is hurt and bloody but not distorted or ruined. In the crucifixion (middle right), the chaos recedes into the background to accentuate the reverent onlookers at the foot of the cross. The painting horizontally divides evenly between the two groups, between

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calm and chaos, faith and rage; it is likewise vividly split on the vertical in the bifurcation of the two thieves. On Christ’s right, the repentant criminal bows his head in quiet submission. The criminal on Christ’s left, however, calls to mind the soldiers of the flagellation in his misshapen proportions. His body is the very picture of agonizing death, contorted in odd angles, his head “cruelly wrenched” from the shoulder and his tongue already hanging out in death.4 A bird waits on the horizontal bar, as if to feast on the thief ’s flesh. Once again, the image has two focal points: the shallow curve of the extended arms of the obedient and composed dead Jesus and the upthrust reach of Mary Magdalene, dressed like court nobility, who has thrown herself at the foot of the cross. The viewer looks upward with her to the quietly expiring man of Nazareth. Ratgeb’s eye for vibrant emotion makes her embrace of the cross in longing or sorrow far more demonstrative than the quiet bowed head of the Virgin Mary. All is calm on the cross; but there is still space for stormy emotion at its foot. Ratgeb plants the evangelical history firmly in the world of southern Germany. Christ lives among crude peasants, violent soldiers, and fashionable aristocracy. He dies as flies and spit fill the air and wine jugs dash on the earth floor. The dead distend, their limbs dislocated, their tongues lolling in their final agonies. Ratgeb’s Jesus is a rustic among rustics, a member of a visual culture in which the peasant was becoming an idealized figure of universal applicability.5 But Ratgeb also uses time-honored medieval conventions. His images are bisected in neat verticals and horizontals, bifurcating darkness and light, goodness and evil; the composition of the cross invites the viewer to commit themselves to the right side. These are the axes that Matheson describes as apocalyptic in nature, showing the world splitting into the elect and damned: “a perpendicular line often ran down the centre of a painting or etching . . . with two rival worlds on either side of the line. Such art illustrated the pervasive sense of strain, of rending apart, a great shattering and shaking of foundations, a world distorted by death agonies.”6 Something was happening among the peasants, a new world was violently birthing, and Ratgeb knew Jesus would be found among them. Lucas Cranach the Elder paints in sharp dramatic verticals, too, but in virtually every way his Wittenberg altarpiece is the opposite of Ratgeb’s. The lower panel (fig. 11) dispassionately portrays a Christ meant for edification. The crucifix stands in the precise center of the picture. Luther is on Christ’s left, his hand on an open Bible and his finger pointed toward Christ. Word coincides with Word, the written and proclaimed with the incarnate and crucified. The gaze of the still congregation seems to pass through the crucified one to the preacher. Jesus patiently endures in the compositions

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Figure 11. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther’s Sermon, detail from a triptych, 1547 (oil on panel). Wittenberg Altarpiece. Stadtkirche Lutherstadt, Wittenberg, Germany. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

of both artists, with clear lines and symmetrical frame, though Cranach’s naturalism arguably omits the beatitude of Ratgeb’s Christ. Here he is instead “the obedient Son of God who has fulfilled His task of atonement . . . [his] emotional remoteness . . . conveyed not only by his limp, spiritless earthly remains but also by the fanciful, smoke-like wafting in either direction of his overlong loincloth.” 7 This emotional reserve is matched by the quiet crowd of spectators to the left, listening attentively to Luther’s proclamation with pious attention. Cranach presents an abstract pedagogy of the blood, a Christ for quiet meditation and edification. His Christ exists in a different world from Luther and his auditors, an epiphanic event bound to the preaching of the word. Ratgeb, on the other hand, portrays a rural scene of boisterous mobs.8 Christ lives among them, a calm presence, yes, but one surrounded by the earthy tumult of agrarian life. It is almost as if the two artists lived through two different reformations.

The Treasury of Merit and the Fragility of Faith There were two reformations, in fact, and stark differences were at play in their worldviews. On the one hand, the magisterial reformation of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Calvin strove to preserve the corpus christianum, their protest against Rome operating in tandem with the nobility and civil rulers (hence magisterial, in cooperation with the magistrate); on the other hand, the radical reformers revolted against the sacred canopy of

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Christendom and sought a return to the primitive New Testament and the way of imitatio christi. These populists were both the revolutionaries and spiritualists, like Thomas Müntzer, Hans Hut, and Hans Denck, and the more mainstream Anabaptists. In the frisson and clash between these two worlds, the function of the cross underwent a series of transformations into the forensic symbol of penal substitution familiar to us today. There were real theological differences, too, and the Ratgeb and Cranach images portray them vividly. Theirs are not simply differences of social context. In one image, Christ walks among the peasantry; in the other, he is a verbal relic. The Cranach meditation on the preached word is a profound expression of a key Lutheran ambiguity—a fault line, really: the mediation of Christ’s merits. In Luther’s theology and Cranach’s painting, the grace of Christ’s righteousness—his merits—is conveyed to the passive recipient in faith, mediated through the preached word and sacraments. But in the populist traditions of many of the radical reformers, active imitation is how one participates in Christ. The radical takes on Christ’s merits as he enters into his passion affectively and sympathetically, like Mary Magdalene clinging to the cross or a peasant sharing a cup of wine around a tavern table. A monumental shift took place with Luther and his allies—a move that swept aside the great medieval structures of vicarity by which the saints and Mary mediated the merits of Christ, conveyed by the sacramental apparatuses of the medieval church. In their place, the Lutherans proffered the relationship of the individual believer with Christ, mediated only by faith, buttressed by word and sacrament. This relationship, which I call the fragility of faith, is the source of many of the great doctrinal, sacramental, and political battles of the Reformation era. The struggle to reinvent the structures that conveyed merit to the believer set the conditions within which penal substitution emerged as the sine qua non of the Reformed tradition. This struggle reduced the cross to a symbol of a divine-human transaction. Only secondarily did it carry on the performative, imaginative resonances of the Middle Ages. The magisterial reformation began as a protest against the late medieval indulgence system—the power of the pope to dispense merit and thereby remit sins and time in purgatory. That system rested on the medieval teaching that the church was the treasury of merit, the storehouse of Christ’s “earnings,” supplemented by the martyrs and saints, that could be applied to the account of believers to satisfy for sin and grant righteousness. The teaching was originally linked to the meritorious act of going on the Crusades and was formally promulgated by Pope Clement VI’s 1343 bull

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Unigenitus.9 By shedding his blood, Clement wrote, Christ “wish[ed] to store up treasure for the sons of His Holy Father, such that there might now be an infinite treasure for men . . . committed to be dispensed to the faithful profitably through St. Peter, the bearer of the keys of heaven, and to his successors on earth, and applied mercifully for right and reasonable causes to the truly penitent and confessed.”10 Luther’s theses 56–66 argued that the purpose of the merits of Christ was not to supplement penance but to apply grace and righteousness. This critique of indulgences eventually led to dismantling the very idea of the treasury of merit in the Reformation; the result was that the treasury would be transferred into Christ himself as the storehouse and dispenser of merit. The entire liturgical economy of the medieval church had been built around the transfer of merit through the sacramental system, funded both by Christ and the cult of saints. This enormous power was put into the hands of the priest, whose role, as formulated at the “pastoral revolution” of Lateran IV in 1215, became the proper celebration of the sacraments.11 But with the sacerdotal system gone after Luther, the transfer of merit now resided in the work of the cross of Christ, received by the individual believer’s faith.12 The church supported that faith by witnessing to the promise of Christ in word and sacrament; but the fragility of faith brought with it both enormous spiritual freedom, and also an inherently unstable, malleable dynamic of subjectivism. This instability played out in the magisterial-radical debates about the role of the interior disposition of the believer as well as the vexed question of what to do about the enduring sacramental system. My claim in this and the next chapter is that the theology of the punished Christ, and the cross as the function of punitive forensic atonement, emerged out of a complex set of relationships in the evangelical churches in the early sixteenth century. Broadly, these were the Christomorphic, the sacramental, and the ecclesial: how (and whether) one imitated Christ, especially the Christ of the cross; how the sacraments conveyed Christ’s merit; and what role the church played in facilitating the faith relationship with Christ—and how that role related to the civil authority. At issue in each was the reality and immediacy of access to Christ. Luther had taken a huge step in his proclamation of justification by faith alone: with seemingly one stroke, an entire sacred economy was rendered irrelevant and the structures of Christendom trembled. What emerged, however, among his compatriots and allies was a sense that Luther’s formulation was unstable and fell short of its own best insight, immediacy of access to Jesus Christ. Many also questioned his unwavering commitment to the two kingdoms

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of church and magistrate to administer the affairs of Christendom. Within a decade after Luther’s first revolutionary writings, the cross stood at the center of communities both reinvented and destroyed, bodies both formed and broken.

Luther and the False Fanatics In 1530, on the eve of the Diet of Augsburg, Luther preached a sermon on the passion of Christ. It was Holy Saturday. It is far from the only time Luther turned to the subject, of course; his writings on the cross date back to the beginning of his literary career, and this was not the only time the cross brought comfort or exhortation in crucial moments in the Wittenberg movement. But the sermon is particularly interesting for (as is so often the case with Luther) the opponents he chooses to attack in it. It reveals the divide over justification by faith and participation in the cross of Christ, a divide between Luther and the radicals that widened over years of furious controversy with Rome—and with each other. In the very first paragraph, Luther names “false fanatics” who criticized him for preaching a domesticated gospel of faith alone, without admonishing his followers to perform good works as necessary to salvation.13 But there’s more going on in the accusation than simply a repetition of the first-century Paul-James argument; the “fanatics” also accuse Luther of neglecting the necessity of participating in Christ’s sufferings.14 The accusation is one Luther had been facing for the better part of a decade from the radical wings of his fellow German dissenters: by ignoring the role of works and suffering, Luther removed the burden of true evangelical discipleship from the followers of Christ. The cross, for Luther’s opponents, was a normative part of Christian existence, the ultimate obedient good work. For Luther, though, this smacks of self-righteousness, for those “who select their own cross” are deluded into thinking that their suffering is meritorious:15 “they flaunt their suffering and make a great merit of it and thus blaspheme God, because it is not a true suffering but a stinking, selfchosen suffering.”16 Human suffering is like any other human work: both insufficient and obdurate in the face of God’s grace, for Christ’s suffering pro nobis “has become so mighty and strong that it fills heaven and earth.”17 In other words, the magnitude of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is so great that no human penitential work, endurance of persecution, or submission to martyrdom could possibly augment it; indeed, to imagine otherwise is to cast blasphemous aspersion on the sufficiency of Christ’s work.

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Luther was walking a fine line here. He, like his radical opponents, inherited a tradition of German cross mysticism, especially the teaching of the fourteenth-century Dominican Eckhartian mystic Johannes Tauler.18 In his early years Luther held that all Christians should adopt the way of life of the mystics and beguines: a way of suffering, the via dolorosa.19 But as early as 1519, Luther was counseling readers away from compassion toward the crucified Christ (the medieval tradition stemming from Anselm) and instead focusing on remorse for one’s sins to receive grace—to participate in the benefits of the cross, not in the cross itself.20 Taking the cross into oneself, for Luther, is an act of arrogation, not participation, because relationship with Christ cannot be born of one’s own agency. Still, Luther, like the radicals, was an evangelical reader, devoted to the plain sense and moral normativity of Scripture. The imperative of suffering with Christ, of accepting the cross of discipleship, was clear in the Gospel narratives. So Luther had to say two things at once: first, suffering the cross is indeed the way one is conformed to Christ; but, second, no one should actually seek out suffering, as this would be works righteousness. Instead one should accept the cross with patience and endurance whenever God lays it on them. This appeal to passivity, taken on a rhetorical level, has a slightly disingenuous feel—embrace suffering, but don’t go looking for it. Regardless, having laid out this distinction, in the rest of the sermon Luther turns to a more characteristic valence of the question: clinging to the promises of Christ. The Christian is to undergo suffering, when called on to do so, trusting in Christ’s word and promise that the suffering “will work for his good.”21 Because it is given by God, comfort within it and ultimate deliverance from it is guaranteed. True faith undergoes suffering clinging in hope to the promises of God. Ever the alert homiletician, at the end of the sermon Luther acknowledges this apparent artificiality. He recalls the link between the Christian’s suffering and that of Christ: Christian suffering is sanctified by Christ’s own sufferings, “it is truly holiness,”22 and he acknowledges the apparent artificiality of his rule against selecting one’s own suffering. But he dismisses it with a non sequitur—“As for those who will not suffer, let them go and be cavaliers. . . . The others [who seek suffering?] wouldn’t carry it out anyhow”—preferring to emphasize once again the disproportion between the sufferings of Christ and of humans. Merit is not to be sought in suffering; suffering is learning the benefits of Christ’s passion.23 As Ronald K. Rittgers states, “Christians must first receive Christ’s Passion as a means of grace [sacramentum] before they can regard it as a model to emulate [exemplum]. . . . They cannot act like Christ until Christ has

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acted upon (and in) them.”24 Suffering is imitative and edifying, but it is not participation in Christ’s own sufferings, as the mystics fancied (say, Francis or Mechthild), and it is certainly not inherent in the process of salvation itself.

The Bitter Christ Thomas Müntzer was one of these “false fanatics.” Several years earlier, in 1523, he had been in the middle of two relatively stable years in Allstedt, where he was consolidating his revolutionary political program. It was a setting Ratgeb would have recognized. The keystone of this radical movement was the necessity of undergoing the sufferings of Christ on the cross in preparation for the apocalyptic inauguration of the kingdom of God in Germany. Three of his most powerful and incendiary writings—Protestation or Proposition, Counterfeit Faith, and Interpretation of the Second Chapter of Daniel—date to this period.25 The Protestation and Counterfeit Faith read particularly well as the kinds of provocations Luther felt compelled to challenge later in the Coburg sermon. For Müntzer, the “revolutionary firebrand of the Reformation,”26 Luther preached a “sweet Christ” who was a “potent poison”: “a man who accepts this wants to be God-formed, but has not the least desire, indeed is totally disinclined, to become Christformed.”27 In Counterfeit Faith, Müntzer begins with a Lutheran-sounding claim, describing Christian faith as an assurance of the promise of Christ, but in the next breath the language becomes distinctively his own: “a man can [not] claim that he is a Christian before his cross has made him receptive to God’s work and word. . . . The elect friend of God who yearns for and endures the word is no counterfeit hearer.”28 The promise of God does not comfort, but is a plague to be endured to purge unbelief; even the apostles (“least of all” the apostles!) could not come to faith easily when confronted with the flesh-and-blood Christ.29 The job of the preacher is to bear and proclaim God’s judgment, rooting up false faith and preparing the hearers not for facile trust in easily obtained divine mercy but for an apocalyptic harrowing: they will be “butchered” just like the slaughtered lamb of God in the coming eschatological upheaval.30 One can imagine Luther making similar statements about desolation and judgment, about the law exposing God’s wrath before the comfort of the promises of the gospel. The two theologians draw from a common dialectical rhetoric. But Luther would never speak of the cross as something to be endured to achieve faith; rather, the believer suffers to prove and refine faith and witness to the promise of God. Just what this promise

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constitutes is strikingly different for the two men, as well; for Luther, the promise is an assurance that one has received God’s mercy in Christ for the forgiveness of sins. Müntzer has something very different in mind: the promise is that the believer will receive divine mercy on the far side of judgment—slaughter, winnowing, plowing—judgment that proves them to be one of the elect, having been conformed to Christ’s sufferings. It is tempting for a reader of Reformation literature to spiritualize this language, to imagine judgment and slaughter and the like as interior, mystical terms, as indeed they were in some of Müntzer’s sources, like the devotio moderna and Tauler.31 But Müntzer’s apocalyptic vision is quite literal.32 As he declaims at the beginning of the Protestation or Proposition, the church is corrupted and lost, “wretched, pitiable, needy, crude,” and only as it undergoes the terrifying judgment of God will the elect be singled out in time for the apocalyptic troubles that are coming. Three times he refers to the parable of the sower and the seeds, admonishing his hearers that “you still must suffer the sharp edge of the plough-share. For you will never have faith unless God himself gives it to you.”33 This is a warning about the end times: false prophets move among God’s elect, for true believers are hidden in a church blinded by counterfeit faith—the false teaching of faith without works. It is time for the hidden elect to emerge and undergo their trial of faith.34 Müntzer utterly rejects the honey-sweet Christ of Lutheranism. Luther’s teaching of the reception of righteousness by faith is not only insipid but dangerous, according to Müntzer: insipid, because Luther’s teaching on justification promotes passivity and indolence—the honey-sweet Christ—but also dangerous because its counterfeit promises fail to truly assure the believer. “Just have simple faith” is insubstantial and cannot equip one to endure the apocalyptic cleansing to come.35 Luther and Müntzer, at their roots, can actually hew quite close to each other at times: Müntzer’s view of faith is nearly identical to the mystical, Anfechtung-laced abyss of Luther’s earliest theology. Müntzer can sound powerfully Lutheran in his talk of waiting on the word, and in his depiction of faith in God’s promise. But what separates them is a fundamental disagreement on what participation in Christ means. For both, salvation rests in direct relationship with Christ, and in this they both break with the medieval clerical-sacramental (“sacerdotal”) system. The question is what mediates that relationship. For Luther, this relationship is a passive reception, a great exchange (to use the traditional language) of promise and faith, righteousness and sin, merit and debt, that God initiates and enacts, and faith receives.36 Müntzer, however, is far closer to the ideology

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of discipleship in earliest Christianity, for this relationship means performance: discipleship is directly participating in Christ’s passion. There is a further level of difference between the two, however, revolving around the idea of forgiveness of sins and merit. For Luther, faith is how humans receive the merit of Christ: sins are forgiven and perfect righteousness is bestowed. These are moral concerns. For Müntzer, the fruit of participation in Christ is indeed the forgiveness of sin, but he does not understand this in terms of merit; it names the experience of preservation for the eschatological cleansing of the elect community. Forgiveness of sin is enduring wrath by divine grace. The cross is not a site of exchange between the righteousness of Christ and the sin of the believer, but it is an eschatological lever separating out and cleansing the elect. We haven’t seen this form of apocalyptic theological imaginary since the first centuries of the Christian era.

The Sign of the Lord’s Body Müntzer and Luther signify a crossing of theological longitudes at whose shifting center lies a problem—the problem of immediate access to Christ. Replacing the sacerdotal structures of the Catholic Middle Ages, the reformers were developing a system built on faith and immediate relationship with God. This was a dynamic and living relationship, but also deeply unstable from an institutional, ecclesial standpoint: the interior disposition of faith is far more labile than the ritual apparatus of the sevenfold sacraments. The tension here is evidenced by Luther’s continuing reliance on a sacramental, clerical system that few reformers outside of his immediate cadre could embrace. The alternate options for the institutional dimension of the transferal of grace varied across the different reforming communities. In the Reformed tradition (see chapter 7), a covenantal-legal system comes into play. In the radical and Anabaptist traditions, it is the practice of discipleship itself, the enactment of Christ’s way of persecution. In Luther, though, it is preeminently the real presence in the Eucharist, which was destined to be the true flashpoint of the sixteenth-century religious reforms. Each of these structures mediates the merit of the cross, but restricts the specific transmission of merit to the faith of the believer. But each wrestles with the subjectivism of faith. The result in the magisterial wings of the Reformation would be various extrinsic, legal frameworks for divine action that would ultimately develop into penal substitution. It is conventional (at least in theology textbooks) to couch the Reformation as a conflict of soteriological narratives: Luther’s radical new

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doctrine of justification by faith dramatically departed from the Roman Catholic system of penance and indulgences. But if one works through the original sources, most of the theological energy was spent in another doctrinal realm altogether: the sacraments. From the perspective of the justification narrative, it’s difficult to understand the bitterness of the break between Luther and the Swiss reformers like Zwingli. But focusing on eucharistic (and baptismal) practice and theology renders the Reformation intramural battles far more intelligible and contextualizes them as a series of reactions to the eucharistic piety and practice of the late Middle Ages. Moreover, the stake sacramental theology held in adjudicating the boundaries of the political state helps explain the ferocity of the persecution of the radical reformers by all parties—Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic (see chapter 7). So many of the middle years of Luther’s career were spent writing enormous, acerbic texts on the Lord’s Supper—far outstripping in length and energy the famed “three treatises” of 1520. These were written not against the Catholics but against “fanatical” Swiss and southern German reformers, particularly Andreas Karlstadt and Huldrych Zwingli.37 The controversy began with Karlstadt’s writings in 1524, but by 1528 the battle had narrowed to Luther and Zwingli as the main antagonists, and Zwingli was the target of Luther’s huge Confession concerning Christ’s Supper.38 I will not attempt to summarize this controversy nor give Zwingli due time. Instead, the question here is why Luther’s energies in the crucial years in the 1520s were spent on this controversy—why he believed the gospel was at stake in the question of the Eucharist, and how his eucharistic theology embodied his ambivalence about the theology of the cross. Müntzer will then get his chance to reply, setting up a concert of radical Anabaptist and spiritualist voices in the next section. The focus here is not directly on the ostensive themes of the controversy, but how the polarity observed in the first section—the cross as a site of reception (passive exchange) versus the cross as a site of participation (or performative enactment)—reoccurs in the great Protestant eucharistic debates.

The First Principle of Christian Doctrine The trajectory of Luther’s writing on the Lord’s Supper describes an arc of emphasis from the faith of the believer to the external objectivity of the divine agency—an emphasis that matches the trajectory of Lutheran soteriology. The subjective theology of the “inner word” of the spiritualists and radicals haunted him; Luther had no trouble seeing a pernicious continuum of subjectivism from radicals like Müntzer to more mainstream

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iconoclasts like Karlstadt and Zwingli. Luther feared a loss of real presence would presage a decline back into works righteousness—human agency in the sacrament—that mirrored his concern about suffering and the cross. He also dreaded what would follow from believers’ churches and the individualist piety of the spiritualists: a fissure in the church-kingdom edifice of the corpus christianum (see chapter 7). The wrath of God awaited those who fell afoul of the sacrament. Luther’s earlier texts on communion, like Adoration of the Sacrament (1523) and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), emphasize the faith of the believer in her response to the pledge in the words of institution. God always deals with humans by promises. In Babylonian Captivity, Luther leverages this idea against the sacrifice of the mass (the third captivity of the sacrament of the bread): If the mass is a promise, as has been said, then access to it is to be gained, not with any works, or powers, or merits of one’s own, but by faith alone. For where there is the Word of the promising God, there must necessarily be the faith of the accepting man. It is plain therefore, that the beginning of our salvation is a faith which clings to the Word of the promising God, who, without any effort on our part, in free and unmerited mercy takes the initiative and offers us the word of his promise.39 The Eucharist is not a work but a divine act demanding trust in the one who gives his very flesh and blood as a promise of eternal inheritance. By 1526, however, Luther’s perspective was shifting on the role of faith. In that year, Luther replied to Zwingli and Karlstadt with the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics. Although it is not his definitive treatise on the Eucharist (that title would be reserved for Confession concerning Christ’s Supper two years later), it marks an important development in Luther’s sacramental theology. This change occurs right at the opening of the text, when Luther differentiates between two modes of faith: the objectum fidei, the external object, and the internal disposition and attitude. He will focus on the first.40 In his early texts, Luther had been keen to emphasize that the mass was not a work: he stressed the living, affective subjectivity of the recipient against the mechanistic objectivity of the Roman sacerdotal system. The Catholic ex opere operato located sacramental power in the human priestly agency; Luther had stressed that the recipient clings to the promise in faith. However, the debate with the radicals was fundamentally different—the problem with them, for Luther, was that the sacrament of communion had been reduced entirely to subjective disposition.

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Luther’s theology of the sacrament depends on Christ being the agent of the ordinance: as in preaching, so in the Eucharist the word acts of its own accord. The celebrant does not sacrifice Christ in the sacrament. That would make it a work. So Luther turns to Christology to hammer home the issue of the objectum fidei: the cogency of real presence in the Lord’s Super rests on a deeper incarnational theology. Christ’s presence is made fully present, indeed incarnate, by divine agency; the only role for human agency is the simple reception of the word by faith. Luther’s analogy is the virgin birth: “Is there not more of a miracle here than in the bread and wine? . . . Christ comes not only into [Mary’s] heart, but also into her womb, as she heard, grasps, and believes it.”41 The word comes to Mary; Mary believes the real presence of the word spoken by divine lips in her own womb. Faith recognizes incarnational reality effected by the divine word; Christology is the ground of the miracle of the sacrament. Luther does not fully develop the Christological point explicitly yet, but the basic idea is present: the real presence rests on the divine agency in the sacrament, by which believers really receive by faith the benefits of the life and death of Christ. The doctrine of the real presence rests on a simple dynamic of divine act and human reception. Luther does eventually turn to the subjective role of faith; he devotes the second half of Against the Fanatics to the “use” and “benefit” of the sacrament.42 The treatise here still reads remarkably like the Freedom of a Christian in its emphasis upon the peculiarly Lutheran paradox of faith. Formerly tortured with anxiety about approaching the sacrament worthily in the same way he was famously tortured about adequately confessing his sins in penance, Luther tells the reader that instead of tormenting himself with “many arduous works,” he learned to simply stand upon the words of promise in the sacrament. For that pledge is identical to the promise of salvation itself: “Those who go to the sacrament, however, should believe and be assured, not only that they are receiving the true body and blood of Christ in it, but also that it is there given to them and it is their own. . . . Now we surely know what forgiveness of sins means. When he forgives, he forgives everything completely and leaves nothing unforgiven. When I am free of sin, I am also free of death, devil, and hell; I am a son of God, a lord of heaven and earth.”43 The Eucharist is the very essence of the gospel, the distillation of its central proclamation into an enacted promise: “Christ has given his body, flesh, and blood on the cross to be our treasure and to help us receive forgiveness of sins. . . . This is the first principle of Christian doctrine. It is presented to us in the words, and his body and blood are given to us to be received corporally as a token and confirmation of this fact.”44 The key to understanding Luther on communion is to grasp that

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the incarnation (and atonement), the divine act of justification of the sinner, and the breaking of the bread are all organically linked—or rather, are one continuous act of divine self-giving and human reception in faith. The word present in the sacrament is the same word present in Christ himself; thus the divine nature present in Christ is the same divine nature present in the bread and wine. But the flip side of this emphasis on unitary divine agency is that its mode of mediation—in faith through the word preached and externalized in the bread and wine—becomes quite constricted. We see a parallel here to Luther’s handling of the cross: human agency has become severely diminished. This restriction sets the conditions for a later need to secure the transmission of Christ’s merit—if the subjective means of appropriation is functionally diminished, then the objective structure by which divine agency operates has to make up the lack. The same stress on divine agency in the cross will lead to a forensic understanding of the cross (see chapter 7).

Bare Flesh and Bovine Flesh The radicals’ eucharistic theology is so different because, in many ways, they have a different gospel—or at least, a very distinct conception of the matrix of the cross, justification, and faith. Luther and Müntzer divide on how the cross figures in the relationship between the believer and Christ. For Luther the cross sits in the nexus of the great exchange between Christ and the sinner, where grace meets sin, and promise meets faith, but under the sole agency of Christ and the passive reception of the believer. Müntzer, in contrast, offers a participationist vision that is closer to reperformance: the cross does not signify the lifting of all sin and the divine promise to bear human suffering; instead, it is an invitation, even a compulsion to enact that suffering in oneself.45 This potent difference reverberates in Müntzer’s and the Anabaptists’ eucharistic theologies as well.46 Among Müntzer’s works is a eucharistic hymn that strikes the key points of his sacramental theology.47 The hymn at many points sounds quite traditionally Lutheran, speaking in ancient Christus victor motifs: In Christ’s dying Wholeness lying From corruption’s grip us prying.48 But two distinctively Müntzerian themes emerge as the hymn progresses: participation in Christ’s suffering, and through that participation,

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divinization. As the faithful undergo Christ’s own suffering in their bodies, they receive his spirit and become divine themselves: Conformed to him upon the hill . . . By our suffering Christ’s completing. Within our hearts true God we know, And godly love begins to glow. On his vine His spirit mine His body given as the sign.49 The identification language (“His spirit mine”) of the last stanza of the hymn is a suggestive example of Müntzer’s theology of deification: the body/bread is a mere sign of the true deity of Christ. That deity is his spirit given to believers who undergo and complete Christ’s sufferings and thereby become divine in their own right.50 The breaking of the bread is the breaking of the elect upon their own unique cross of tribulation. An unpublished treatise on the incarnation serves as a companion piece to the eucharistic hymn. The purpose of the incarnation, for Müntzer, was pneumatological illumination: “Christ, the authentic son of God, became human for this reason alone: that the holy Spirit should become manifest in the hearts of the elect. . . . Christ took upon himself flesh and blood to release us by his heavenly understanding from our rationalistic, sensual, bovine understanding.”51 This paradox—Christ becomes fleshly human to release us from being carnal cows—illuminates Müntzer’s treatment of the Eucharist. The Eucharist signifies the believer’s participation in the Christ who undergoes suffering to conform himself to God’s will; to partake in Christ is therefore to take on mortification of the flesh and thereby, to receive the spirit of Christ. In fact—and here Müntzer stands with Luther and the Catholic tradition against the Anabaptists—this pneumatological exchange depends on the real presence: “His flesh and blood are present in their very being, in a way which enables the spirit of Christ to be passed on from them into the hearts of the elect.”52 In The Exposé of False Faith, Müntzer lays this out very plainly (and polemically, aiming at “Brother Soft Life or Father Pussyfoot,” aka Luther); he first portrays divinization incarnationally, and then links it with his familiar patterns of cruciform discipleship: “We must believe that we fleshly, earthly men are to become gods through Christ’s becoming man, and thus become God’s pupils with him—to be taught by Christ himself, and become divine, yes, and far more—to be totally transfigured into him.”53 This can

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only occur through rejecting “the stinking breath of the devilish biblical scholars” and being “made empty by his suffering and cross.”54 The dynamic of divinization here is the same as the eucharistic relationship: the flesh is mortified in order for the spirit to be released, suffering the “abyss of the souls, where man recognises that he is a son of God.”55 To crush flesh is to release spirit: it is tempting to call Müntzer a gnostic. This mystical aspiration for the release of the spirit seems to evoke interiorist, escapist modes of spirituality. But Müntzer’s gnosis is faith, not knowledge, forged in the fire of temptation and endurance. We should also avoid the temptation of reading his language of “flesh” reductionistically: “Anyone who has not become, like the Easter lamb, a sheep destined for death, will be unable to grasp the mystery of his death in the sacrament. . . . Those who are bovine grasp merely the bare flesh, nothing more. Since the flesh of Christ is a hindrance to the disciples, Christ has to remove it from their eyes, and make them exceedingly sorrowful; otherwise he could not have bestowed the holy Spirit on them.”56 Müntzer’s incarnational exchange does not scan in conventional Pauline terms: the flesh as the realm of pride, of sin- and self-orientation, the spirit the regenerate self that is devoted to God. Flesh in this New Testament meaning has a volitional-ethical connotation. Müntzer is at once more literalist and more spiritualist. For one, he states that a follower of Christ who is not “destined for death” will not understand Christ’s presence in the sacrament. This reaffirms his participatory hermeneutic: Christ’s poverty and passion are to be reperformed by the disciple, and only in such discipleship—in suffering and persecution—will the faithful prove themselves worthy of the judgment of God, and indeed understand the things of God at all. So flesh speaks of actual body that must undergo real experiences of suffering to understand the things of the spirit. In itself, this is not necessarily radical, though it is not Lutheran or Pauline; it is language used by certain medieval penitents and mystics known to Müntzer, like Tauler. But then the language becomes spiritualist as Müntzer contrasts the “bare flesh” and the bestowal of the “holy Spirit.” The opposition of flesh and spirit in Müntzer is ultimately apocalyptic. The death of the flesh connotes an entrance into an eschatological order, a realm in which “bare flesh” has become life-giving spirit as signified by the Eucharist. It is an order designated by the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the kingdom, in which “bovine lusts” have been replaced by a new spiritual life. A new servant will emerge who speaks the spiritual truth of God; the elect will finally be free of the obscurantist scholars and know God directly; and the kingdom will come in the overturning of the tyranny of the

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princes.57 Müntzer is talking about flesh and spirit, death and life, in both apocalyptic and political registers. In this section, we have seen two strikingly different ways of conceiving the eucharistic great exchange of Christ and believer through the real presence. For Luther, the real presence is the manifest reality of the flesh and blood of Christ given pro nobis: it unites the believer to the merits of Christ’s passion. Faith passively receives the divine promise and grace, as Christ actively takes on the believer’s sin. The real presence is one of the exchange of merit, initiated solely by divine agency. Müntzer’s exchange is one of mortified body for life-giving spirit: the broken flesh of Christ releases his spirit, who is given to those believers who recapitulate the bitterness of Christ’s suffering. This is an exchange of mutual participation—Christ’s suffering gifted to human bodies, bodies participating in Christ’s hidden divinizing sonship. The eucharistic theologies of Luther and Müntzer reveal their fundamental disagreement on the role of the cross in discipleship.

The Soul and the Cosmos as the Body of the Cross Müntzer expresses his eucharistic Christology in an apocalyptic cross mysticism that comes full circle to the beginning of the Christian era: it is an atavistic theology of identification with Christ not seen since the days of Ignatius of Antioch, apart perhaps from a detour through the life of Francis of Assisi. Themes from the first centuries of the Christian era reemerge in powerful clarity: apocalyptic expectation, Christomorphic discipleship, and political subversion. And as in the first centuries, Müntzer’s apocalyptic expectations ultimately failed. Parousias ever are delayed, and apocalypses are reimagined. Because of that great disappointment, a shift can be observed in the radical reforming movement, as the cross transformed from an eschatological symbol to a cosmological cipher. Müntzer has been championed as an advocate for the peasants, an early agrarian radical, and perhaps most notoriously, a protocommunist.58 He has also been seen as a self-appointed prophet with delusions of grandeur and a dangerous fanatic. Whether Müntzer is more John Brown or Jim Jones is, to my mind at least, an open question, and the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. Whatever the truth of the matter, his followers and compatriots reimagined his theology in powerful ways. In this section, I trace how compatriots and successors received and transformed the apocalypticism of Müntzer’s theology using the symbol of the cross. In one key strain of this transformation, his participationist theology of the cross became a full-fledge cruciform cosmology.

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The Apocalyptic Context of the 1520s Near the end of Counterfeit Faith, the firebrand of the Reformation waxes apocalyptic again. His target is academics like Luther. He looks ahead to a time when the “wicked scholars” and their inability to “endure the work of God” will fall away, and those who lose their lives and attain poverty of spirit for the slaughtered lamb will be preserved.59 At that apocalyptic moment, the knowledge of God will definitively transcend the book learning and proof-texting of the scholars: the elect will be taught directly by God “person to person, and not by any created being.” He calls this moment the revelation of the “key of David.”60 In this epistemological transformation, the apotheosis of Reformation anticlericalism, the direct knowledge of God becomes available to the elect who have undergone Christ’s death in their own mortified bodies, and thus the end time is made present in history. The promise of this spiritual knowledge was powerful among Müntzer’s followers, but the Müntzerian apocalypse was deferred with his defeat at the battle of Frankenhausen in 1525. Ultimately that delay had the same effect on the radical-spiritualist tradition that it had on firstcentury Pauline communities: it caused a wholesale rethinking of apocalyptic motifs. The one great question for so many of the dissenting ecclesiastical traditions in the 1520s was understanding the plan of God for the end of history as it was irrupting apocalyptically in Germany and Switzerland (to use the modern designations)—and as it was most definitely not being fulfilled in the magisterial reformation. As Müntzer’s words in the previous paragraph show, this apocalyptic fervor had an important epistemological and hermeneutical dimension. This has almost always been the case in Abrahamic apocalypticism: if one is to reveal the hidden meaning of history in its heavenly truth, one needs a means of cracking the code of profane reality, whether that be a conveniently forthcoming angel or a mode of ecstatic translocation or, as in this case, a cipher for the reticent spiritual subtext of the Bible. In the case of Müntzer and followers like Hans Hut and Hans Denck, that cipher was the “key of David.” The symbol began its life as a key for the eschatological timetables of the spiritualist Anabaptists, who, like Müntzer, expected the imminent end of the age and the preservation and vindication of the faithful community. As events built toward the political cataclysm that would come in the form of the peasants’ revolts of 1524–25, the heightened sense of apocalyptic expectation peaked—and then was stilled, at least until the debacle of Münster a decade later.61 The idea of the key of David retained its power, however, by taking on a very different meaning as the spiritualist tradition moderated its apocalyptic

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expectations. The key no longer signified an explicit, literal eschatological time table, but merged with the mysticism of Müntzer, Hans Hut, and Hans Denck into a cruciform cosmology. It is important to remember, too, that a similar eschatological tone shoots through the early works of Luther. His characterization of the pope (or, alternately, the Turk) as the antichrist was not idle rhetoric. As Darrel Reid notes, in the years immediately running up to the peasant revolts he wrote commentaries on several of the biblical prophetic works, betraying an obsession with the end times.62 But this interest contrasts with his increasing tendency to play down the importance of signs and visions, and his reluctance to engage the apocalyptic dreamscapes of Daniel and Revelation. The reasoning for this reticence was, once again, his suspicion of the “fanatics.” He insisted “the time for new revelations was past” and harbored a “suspicion of those who prophesied otherwise.”63 In 1528—after the revolts and Müntzer’s death—this seems to have hardened into outright disdain: he wrote in a preface to the book of Revelation that true apostles “do not deal with visions, but prophesy in clear and plain words.”64 Indeed, it appears Luther’s later distaste for Revelation and reservations about its canonicity might have been due, in part, to his association of its visionary text with Müntzer’s ill-fated revolutionary program.

The Key of David and the Gospel of All Creatures The key of David originally functioned on a twofold axis, naming both a hermeneutical norm and a subjective spiritual disposition: it described how the apocalyptic meaning of the Scriptures was unlocked (first axis) to the reader with the proper eyes to see (second).65 So Müntzer used it, and for him and his immediate contemporaries, that apocalyptic meaning was quite literal. The key of David signified the end of history in which the elect would teach each other person to person. They would completely bypass the preachers and scholars of the magisterial churches, experiencing direct revelation in communion with the Spirit. The meaning of the Scriptures would be clear at last as those elect underwent divine temptation and emerged from death to life by bearing the cross of Christ. But in the immediate wake of Müntzer’s death, further radicals, beginning with Hans Denck, picked up the doctrine of the key of David and shifted its meaning away from the hermeneutical to the anthropological, and from the eschatological to the cosmological. Denck takes his cue from Müntzer’s apocalyptic vision of the direct spiritual knowledge of the elect. His treatise

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“Divine Order and the Work of His Creatures” encourages endurance for the elect as they find “beginning among [them] the work of the eternal and invincible God.”66 Denck contrasts the eternal divine order and the creaturely order. Humanity is to move into the eschatological truth of the divine. Like Müntzer, Denck speaks of hell as a work of God that the elect go through for sanctification and spiritual purification: it is “the deepest damnation we let ourselves and everything we touch be torn apart with unutterable pain . . . the eye of the needle through which no camel can pass . . . so long as the elect deem themselves to be something without knowledge and love of God.”67 This crushing terror, the overwhelming power of the damning God, which Denck compares to a “immeasurably great stone” crushing a “little blade of grass,” is salvation, but it appears to carnality as damnation.68 Denck is already reworking Müntzer’s apocalyptic expectations into an anthropological doctrine of the freedom of the will through purgation. Denck, like many radical reformers, lacks an Augustinian doctrine of the bondage of the will, and thus what for Luther is the conflict of the will, Denck understands as the purifying endurance of divine wrath: “If [God] already takes away the creaturely . . . then he gives man absolute free choice.”69 Taking away the creaturely is the work of the cross that spiritually kills and resurrects by mortifying creatureliness and “selffulness.” Christians are made coheir to Christ, thereby participating in his divine generation—but this divinization only happens insofar as their suffering replicates Jesus’s own sacrifice of self-abnegation in perfect love. This act of love and surrender was complete because it was done in pure passivity (Gelassenheti) to the divine will, making it “sufficient for all guilt even if there had been a thousand times as many worlds.”70 Christians likewise undergo the “sweetness of the bitter cross” and thus prove themselves as the elect.71 They enact their own atonement insofar as they participate in and reperform Christ’s cross in passive resignation to the punishing divine will. As Werner Packull notes, this inner word of the cross is the context in which Denck speaks of the key of David as the necessary means of unlocking the Scriptures.72 It is not simply a hermeneutical key that unlocks the apocalyptic vision of the Scriptures but part of the interior spiritual disposition by which one approaches those Scriptures in the first place. They are simply a witness (Zeugnis, “sign”) to the inner word that is preached by Christ both internally and transhistorically: present to Adam, interpreted by Moses in the law, and now experienced in the bitter cross of the key of David.73 This emphasis on the inner word naturally put Denck

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on a collision course with the magisterial reformers’ doctrine of sola scriptura, as did his doctrine of free will vis-à-vis Lutheran anthropological teaching. But these are simply signs of a deeper presupposition Denck shares with Müntzer: a totally different understanding of the nature of human participation in Christ and the role of the cross than the magisterial reformers. Hans Hut has a very similar programmatic understanding of the key of David, but he works it into a broader cosmological vision: the bitter Christ experienced through his cross becomes a principle of creation itself. The idea of the cross as the basis of the ontological realm is Hut’s “gospel of all creatures.” Hut’s text “On the Mystery of Baptism” situates the reader at the same apocalyptic moment we see in Müntzer and Denck: “The final and most terrible times of the world are upon us. . . . But the world (God have mercy) has absolutely no understanding of this . . . the truth is closed to them sevenfold.”74 While Hut does not speak of the key of David as such here, his apocalyptic hermeneutic is similar to Denck’s in assigning the role of eschatological discernment to the inner word of the Spirit. This discernment is found in the imitation and recapitulation of Christ: “in the footsteps of Christ and his elect in the school of affliction.” This school is found in the “gospel of all creatures,” Hut’s term for the crucified Christ who suffers in all his members throughout creation: “The gospel of all creatures is about nothing other than simply Christ the crucified one. But not only Christ the Head was crucified, but rather Christ in all his members. This Christ is what is preached and taught by all creatures. The whole Christ suffers in all members. It is not as these scholarly Christians preach . . . that as the Head, Christ carried out and fulfilled everything. But what then of the members and the whole body in which the suffering of Christ must be fulfilled?”75 Two ideas are striking in this passage. The first is the cosmological application of the bitter cross: the suffering of Christ is not simply a principle of Christian spirituality but the inner secret of creation itself. All creatures suffer and undergo the experience of mortification to exemplify the true nature of being as committing oneself to God as a living sacrifice. Hut shares Denck’s perspective (based on their common doctrine of free will) that selfsacrifice is the work of justification itself: Christ justifies the one who suffers and becomes worthy of God. Against Luther, faith is simply the preparation for true justification, which is found in participatory discipleship—persecution and martyrdom, with baptism as the entrée into that martyrdom.76

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In this process of justifying mortification, the elect are strengthened for even further cross bearing, which perfects Christ’s body and fulfills his suffering.77 This is the second thread from the passage above. Hut is drawing on Müntzer’s agonist application of the Augustinian totus christus idea: Christ’s suffering is one in which believers participate, the cross of Christ is one believers also bear, because of the total union, even absorption, of Christ the head with his members.78 This has important implications for the spiritualist and Anabaptist doctrine of the atonement, for in Müntzer’s and Hut’s totus christus theology, the work of redemption is not done by Christ alone. His sufferings are completed by his followers: “If one says: ‘Christ has achieved everything on his own,’ that is really quite inadequate. If you do not see the head in relation to its members, how can you hope to follow in his footsteps?”79 Christ’s suffering is not sufficient nor finished but carried on in his body, among those who have been baptized into that body and therefore into that work of ongoing atonement: “the affliction of Christ must be fulfilled in every member until the suffering Christ is brought to completion.”80 The body of the cross is Christ suffering anew in his elect. That is atonement in Müntzer’s movement.

These and Other Crosses It is time to step back and look at the wider picture for a moment. The thesis of this and the next chapter is that the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement—the idea that Christ dies as a function of a legal transaction by which God punishes Christ to satisfy God’s own justice, enacting retribution in order to legitimately transfer legal innocence to humanity—emerges out of a threefold matrix in the Protestant reformations: the Christomorphic, the sacramental, and the ecclesial. This chapter has focused primarily on the relationship of the Christomorphic and sacramental dimensions; chapter 7 will examine how the formal doctrine emerged out of the ecclesial question. To set this up, I have examined the tension between two camps, the “left wing” of the reformation, the radical Anabaptists and spiritualists, over against the magisterial reformation represented by Luther. Between the two is a fundamental divide on the role of the cross as a spiritual practice of discipleship, driven by a divergent sense of the realism by which one participates in Christ’s death and thereby receives his merits. This has sacramental implications: Luther’s theology is driven by participation in Christ via passive reception in faith, mediated in the sacramental channels of the church. He preserves unilateral divine agency at all costs. The Müntzerian wing of the radical reformation, taking

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the Anabaptist polity of believer’s baptism to its logical extension, prioritizes a direct, unmediated spirituality of performative participation in Christ: taking his suffering and death into one’s own life in the experience of persecution and discipleship. The spiritualist body of the cross recapitulates Christ in the practice of atonement. But polarization was not the only option of the day, and there were other avenues for performing the body of the cross than Lutheran passivity and Müntzerian self-martyrdom. The mainstream Anabaptist city of Strasbourg lies somewhere in the middle of the two camps. It was the site of protracted theological and liturgical battles in the 1520s and 1530s. Politically, the city was more strongly influenced by the Swiss iconoclasts, but after the deaths of Zwingli and Oecolampadius and the defeat of Zurich, it fell under Wittenberg’s influence. Martin Bucer led reform efforts in this direction (see chapter 7). But the relatively irenic temper in which he worked was prepared by the preaching of a pastor named Matthew Zell, whose loyalties were more localist. Zell labored with Bucer for decades and died in 1548; afterward, his wife of twenty-five years, Katharina Schütz Zell, carried on his mission—or rather, continued her own work in his absence.81 Schütz Zell maintained active correspondence with religious and civil leaders, wrote devotional and catechetical material, and helped publish a hymnal. She also was forced to negotiate a long-running defense of her (and her husband’s) ministry against two parties. Ludwig Rabus, a family friend, had succeeded Matthew and was pushing Strasbourg toward the Lutheran strictures of the Augsburg Confession. Caspar von Schwenckfeld, head of a radical spiritualist circle in Strasbourg, was friendly with Schütz Zell, and he tried to claim her for his movement. But Schütz Zell feared such a forced division would threaten the decades of reforming work for which she and Matthew had labored. Thus she dissociated herself from Schwenckfeld, whom she clearly liked and respected, while also working to take Rabus down a notch. Both purposes are addressed in a remarkable letter written in 1553, in which Schütz Zell shows a spirituality of the cross that runs a middle line between Luther’s conflicted sacramental realism and Müntzer’s recapitulative spiritualism. She shows none of Luther’s hang-ups about voluntarily selected crosses and seeking out suffering; neither does she exhibit Müntzer’s overeager rush to embrace the cross of persecution. Writing to Schwenckfeld, Schütz Zell speaks of the loss of Matthew as a cross exacerbated by the betrayal of friends.82 She also speaks of her sick (likely disabled) son as a “great marvelous cross.”83 In this talk of the cross of suffering, she echoes the underlying sacramental themes of this chapter: “The one party [the

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preachers] says that I should not shame my good husband by being so ‘Schwenckfeldian’ and withdrawing from and despising the church’s preaching and sacraments. . . . The other [Schwenckfelder] party says that I am not willing to forsake the preachers and move wholly to the truth on the right side.”84 She shows a remarkable equanimity on the very issues that so tortured Lutherans about Anabaptists, evincing a commitment to the visible nature of the church while also retaining a sense of the ultimately interior nature of personal commitment to the faith: “I would never leave the church of Christ. . . . [However,] I will not lay a halter on my neck”85— the “halter” the sacerdotalism of Rabus, whom she rebukes for bringing disrespect on the sacraments for being overly Roman Catholic and for prioritizing doctrine over Christian charity.86 To both Rabus’s doctrinaire Lutheranism and Schwenckfeld’s spiritualist rigorism, Schütz Zell has a simple riposte: the cross as a measure of pastoral faithfulness.87 She contrasts Zell against Rabus’s sacramentalism not on doctrinal grounds but from Matthew’s work as a pastor: he “loved and sheltered pilgrims who had been driven out of their homes, who was a comforter and protector of the innocent—he never practiced the pastoral office as you do!”88 In an atmosphere charged with doctrinal strife, one that reduced the cross to a marker of sacramental faithfulness and ecclesial integrity, Schütz Zell has a simpler test of the cross’s significance: its ability to produce a body—an ecclesial body. She had set out this standard in the extraordinary funeral oration for her husband in 1548. She begins her defense of Zell with evangelical notes: he had proclaimed the sin-bearing death of Christ and the sufficiency of his work for the forgiveness of sin. He wasn’t simply marked by his Protestant orthodoxy, however, because Zell echoed the evangelical story: he was a forerunner of Christ; his zeal for the house of God, akin to that of Christ himself, consumed him in his last hours; and, most importantly, he echoed the good shepherd in faithfully caring for his flock to the point of laying down his life.89 His body was a witness of his faithfulness, an evocation and sign of the sacrificed body of Christ himself: “And so I stand here today by the holy body of my husband and confess with him and all believers the forgiveness of our sins only through the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ the spotless lamb.”90 As the speech goes on, it effectively turns into an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer. But the fact that it leads with such a strong emphasis on the passion and death of Christ, and on Matthew’s correspondence to it, is striking. Why the need for this particular confession at his grave? It is not simply doctrinal—Schütz Zell’s tone is too personal and pastoral to simply be checking dogmatic boxes. As Elsie McKee points out, part of Schütz Zell’s

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concern is undoubtedly to make Matthew’s last hours an exemplum of the ancient ars moriendi, the art of dying a good death, to witness to the happiness of his eternal soul.91 The confession of faith in atonement, for example, replaces extreme unction and Masses for the dead. But at least as important was Matthew’s correspondence to the cross as an index of his pastoral faithfulness. The work of reform in Strasbourg ultimately rested on Zell bearing the passion of Christ in his body for his friends. This was a way of reaffirming her own continuing work, echoed in Schütz Zell’s rhetoric of bearing crosses in her afflictions and persecution: the body of the cross is one borne in love for the community of the faithful. The corpus christianum shattered in the sixteenth century on the question of the sacraments and spirituality. Much of Matthew’s and Katharina’s difficulty had to do with their independence of the party lines dividing the reformers throughout southern Germany. But the Strasbourg couple understood the body of the cross to have a deeper reference. One of Schütz Zell’s final writings—a devotional exegesis of Psalm 51 and the Lord’s Prayer—includes a sacramental meditation on the “daily bread” petition: O dear Father, grant that we may learn to recognize that same Jesus Christ, the living Word and bread who rightly feeds, and that we may grow into full knowledge. Grant also that, with a lively spirit and faith, we may truly eat his flesh, which is the true bread given by You from heaven, which strengthens human hearts, and may truly drink His blood. . . . Grant then that we also may be worthy to come together to celebrate the memorial of Your love and the obedience of Jesus Christ, to break the bread and to drink the cup of thanksgiving, to be fed in remembrance of Him, that it may be the communion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, in the communion of saints. And so we may celebrate a living memorial of His death and proclaim it until He comes again, and in the Supper we may truly confess that His body is there given and broken for us and the record of our sins is wiped out and hung on the cross. So burning love will also be kindled in us, and we will celebrate the living memorial and communion in Jesus Christ with our fellow believers. We will also give ourselves obediently to bear the cross, to suffer with Christ all kinds of abuse, exile, poverty, and death. As Christ gave up Himself on the cross to pay for us and wagered His soul in death for us, so also may we offer ourselves for all people and brothers . . . so we may show that we are all one body.92 Schütz Zell hits virtually every note of the early sixteenth century reformations: she speaks in realist terms of participation in Christ’s flesh and

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blood, and in Zwinglian notes commemorates Christ’s death as a communal pledge of faith. In Anabaptist participationist terms she imagines the Eucharist as a means of reenactment, the passion of Christ lived in the passion of his people. More significant than the strict doctrinal boundaries within which she can be placed, though, is the play of metaphor and image. Zell bore the cross in his body not in persecution but in pastoral faithfulness; Schütz Zell likewise understands the eucharistic power of the cross in the social body it produces. In the final lines of the meditation, recapitulation of the cross unites the church in love and remembrance of Christ’s life, in a community truly eating the body, becoming the body. One of the burdens of this book is to see the theology of the cross played out in the life of Christian communities, to see the cross performed as a meaning-making symbol beyond the strictures of atonement theology. Schütz Zell’s interest lies not in doctrinal originality but in the pastoral setting in which she places the crucifix: as a barometer of the work of the shepherd, as the measure of a life lived in faithfulness with a partner in ministry, in the life of a community that reimagines and reperforms the life of Christ to one another in the Supper. In Schütz Zell’s hands, the body of the church becomes the body of the cross; and the body of the cross ceases to be, for a moment, a body torn asunder in Reformation Europe.

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Holy Bodies and the Sacrifice of the Self: Divine Wrath, Discipline, and the Cross in the Reformations

The early years of the Reformation were an apocalyptic time.1 But apocalypses are delayed and ideology fills the void. The peasant revolts failed, and Anabaptists and radicals turned inward; Luther and the magisterial Reformers, however, had a society to rebuild. But the threat of divine judgment still loomed: that society had not converted as hoped after the preaching of Wittenberg’s gospel, and the Anabaptists and radicals continued to provoke God’s wrath. The threat of their blasphemy hung over Luther during the 1520s, for they rejected the sacred umbrella of God’s dominion over the corpus christianum, the Christian society composed of a cooperating church and kingdom. However, the Anabaptists were not the only blasphemers; Luther saw just as much sacrilege in the continuing practice of the Catholic sacraments. In 1524, for example, Luther wrote a polemic against the secret mass, warning that it should be eliminated by the magistrate, for fear of the wrath of God.2 For Luther and his magisterial contemporaries, “the wrath of God is not just the distant fate of private individuals in eternity but rather the impending historical experience of the land and people whose ruler tolerates idolatry and blasphemy.”3 Catholics returned the favor: Antoine Valet, a French doctor, thought Germany would be a witness, a witness when she opposed Christ with fraudulent Lutheran perjury . . . and felt divine wrath wondrous.4

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Catholic crowds of rioters in France tended to work themselves up to rage at the “pollution” of the Huguenots, who infected the community and incurred divine anger with their iconoclasm.5 The response was holy lynching: impatient crowds stopped waiting for the magistrate and hanged a Huguenot prisoner in front of his own home in 1569 and burned other Protestant “heretics” in the streets; in 1572, a crowd of boys held a mock trial that resulted in the actual death of a Huguenot by strangling.6 Natalie Zemon Davis argues that such crowds were “acting out clerical [or] magisterial rôles,” and that such ritualistic acts of violence purified “the religious community and humiliated[d] the enemy.”7 This populist appropriation of the magisterial sword punished blasphemy and diverted God’s wrath: the heretic became a penal substitute for a wider disease in the body and was killed in spectacular and torturous ways. The devastating story of religious violence in the Reformation is far larger than this chapter’s scope, but these short illustrations highlight how violently the sixteenth century dreaded blasphemy against the social body. The trouble wasn’t just heresy; that had been around for centuries. Christendom itself was threatened, and both Catholics and magisterial Protestants knew the wrath of God would be visited on a polluted social body. The religious outsider—preeminently the Anabaptist—haunted the imagination of the magisterial reformation, but so did the failure of the corpus christianum to live up to the promise of the word preached in the evangelical and Reformed churches.8 Between the Anabaptist outsider threat and the moral failure of Christian Europe, a concern for discipline at the level of ecclesial structures and teaching emerged in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Linked with the looming threat of the wrath of God and the necessity of a punished victim to mitigate that wrath, this ideological backdrop is the matrix in which penal substitutionary atonement emerged. This was not just a doctrinal tenet, but a habitus of the religious subject. Divine wrath became a kind of mysterium tremendum et fascinans that formed the body, both social and individual, and the cross was the symbol of its visitation.

The Time of the Sword Penal substitution became a systematic doctrine that was both the linchpin of the ordo salutis (order of salvation) and a habitus of spiritual life in the Puritan covenant theology of the late sixteenth century. The tradition of holy victims eventually flowed into the perfect union of Christ and believer, mutually submitted to wrath; but this did not emerge out of a vacuum. In formal terms of soteriology, Luther and Calvin both held to

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elements of penal substitution; in Luther, it was one of several motifs by which he imagined an atonement grounded in the free grace of justification. Calvin was more systematic, but even he drew on a number of ideas to express the act of satisfaction in the cross.9 While he is quite clear that Christ took upon the penalty of sin, he can also speak in moral influence and Christus victor language.10 All such motifs unite in a theology of union with Christ ruled by ideas of participation and the impartation of the Spirit—a theology that saw predestination as much more organically linked with Christ’s headship than the legal boundaries of the elect (as the Puritans would imagine the matter).11 So the doctrinal elements were present; but the argument of this chapter is that the theological innovation of the punished divine victim is also deeply rooted in the sociopolitical realities of the Reformation churches in the aftermath of the peasant revolts. The magisterial reformers faced a society tearing itself apart in sectarian strife—a social body seemingly rife with the gangrene of heresy and an ethical and theological purification that was, at best, abortive in the lived realities of the parishes and the city streets. The threat of divine wrath against blasphemy required a structural response, and the result was a series of heresy hunts and the development of moral disciplinary regimes in the Lutheran and Reformed churches. Once these streams merged with the sacramental and Christomorphic debates discussed in chapter 6, a new theological imagining emerged: a God who demanded the punishment of his son and his son’s people. With the covenant theology of William Perkins and the English Puritans, the body of the cross became a cursed body locked in a recursive circle of wrath.

Luther and the Cura Religionis Lutherans worried deeply about blasphemy, and that anxiety fed directly into the persecution of Anabaptists in Germany—as well as the development of soteriologies that directly supported the emerging idea of penal substitution. I begin by examining Luther’s justification for persecution of the revolting peasants and how it draws from the same theological wells as his battles against Müntzer. In the three relevant treatises of 1525 (Admonition to Peace; Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants; An Open Letter on the Harsh Book against the Peasants), it is remarkable how consistently Luther anticipates the very point he would later make in the sermon at Coburg: suffering should be passively accepted but never sought out.

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The immediate occasion was the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants, which sought not only redress for a series of economic grievances but also communal determination of worship and the recipients of the peasants’ tithes. The claims were both modest (access to fish, game, and firewood) and radical: the third article called for an end to serfdom because Christ has delivered and redeemed all humanity. Implicitly, they amounted to a repudiation of feudalism and the economic exploitation at its very base; it “constituted a general crisis of authority in the Holy Roman Empire.”12 But according to Luther, the economically downtrodden peasants are, under no circumstances, to seek out violent reprisal against tyrannical lords, but they are still supposed to endure suffering for the Lord’s sake at all costs: “The Christian law tells us not to strive against injustice, not to grasp the sword, not to protect ourselves, not to avenge ourselves, but to give up life and property, and let whoever takes it have it. . . . Suffering! suffering! Cross! cross! This and nothing else is the Christian law!” In the Open Letter on the Harsh Book against the Peasants, a follow-up, he was more measured, but also clearer: “It is a Christian’s duty not only to be merciful, but also to endure every kind of suffering—robbery, arson, murder, devil, and hell.”13 This admonition to suffer injustice rather than resist presumes that there was some justice in the peasants’ cause. It is a begrudging concession, one Luther swiftly dropped in later treatises. Still, Luther does not hesitate to offer the example of his own experience: “Pope and emperor have opposed me and raged against me. Now what have I done that the more pope and emperor raged, the more my gospel spread? I have never drawn a sword or desired revenge. I began neither conspiracy nor rebellion. . . . For no matter how right you are, it is not right for a Christian to appeal to law, or to fight, but rather to suffer wrong and endure evil.”14 This replicates the line of reasoning in the Coburg sermon in which Luther attacks those radicals who “select their own cross.” Suffering, so long as it is endured passively, is the Christian’s duty and even imitates the passion— “Cross! cross!” There were many radical pastors involved in the rebellion, but Luther employs the same argument here as he did against Müntzer. Striving against injustice is an act of rebellion, indeed sedition. Once translated into terms of class and economic relations, the logic of Coburg becomes much more insidious. The peasants are to passively endure evil instead of embracing Müntzer’s admonition to seek out suffering through revolutionary violence; they are to accept their miserable station of marginalization and oppression and reckon it as God’s gift. It is no accident that Luther’s most heated and vicious rhetoric is found in these tracts, for to him, the integrity of the

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Christian state was at stake: “Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. . . . A prince and lord must remember that according to Romans 13 he is God’s minister and the servant of his wrath. . . . Here, then, there is no time for sleeping; no place for patience or mercy. This is the time of the sword, not the day of grace.”15 At risk in the peasant rebellions was the order and security of the “whole land”—a land that had, apparently, missed out on its window of grace. The doctrine of the two kingdoms (or realms, Reiche) runs throughout the three treatises: Christians serve the kingdom of Christ inwardly, by faith and conscience, and the kingdom of the world outwardly, in conduct and love of the neighbor. The temporal authority bears the sword by divine decree; the magistrate’s power is as ordained as that of the minister of word and sacrament in the church. Luther’s indignation that such a seditious movement could claim the legitimacy of the gospel provides his vitriol, but his political concerns for the Christian social body form the bedrock of the treatises. Luther had set out the two-kingdoms doctrine a few years earlier, in 1523 in the Temporal Authority. The magistrate’s sword exists to restrain evil and punish wrongdoing, lest the world be “reduced to chaos.”16 But (the Anabaptists might have replied), would not chaos be eliminated if the realm were truly Christian? Should not grace and the preaching of the gospel rule society instead? Luther himself had argued in Freedom of a Christian that the baptized were freed from the law to follow the promptings of the Spirit. Sadly, he now lamented, very few people were real Christians, and any gospel freedom was a purely internal affair of the conscience. The “freedom” of the Christian had little to do with political liberty. The sword was indispensable in a Christendom. The difference in logic with the Anabaptists is striking: Luther has no faith that the gospel could realistically rule society or that its freedom would not be abused. A true Christian will submit to the magistrate’s authority of the sword; although he does not need that external moral constraint, he must act in a way that “is needful and useful to his neighbor. Because the sword is most beneficial and necessary for the whole world.”17 Christians, in fact, can serve in government and wield the sword for the good of the neighbor, all the while eschewing its exercise on their own behalf; Luther even claims that the Christian magistrate must passively bear evil privately at the same time that he actively punishes political evil: “at one and the same time you satisfy God’s kingdom inwardly and the kingdom of the world outwardly. You suffer evil and injustice, and yet at the same time you punish evil and injustice; you do not resist evil, and yet

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at the same time, you do resist it.”18 The sword is to be esteemed like any other vocation God has established, and in fact faithfully fulfilling it will mean the cross of suffering for oneself, as would be true for any other legitimate vocation.19 Controversially, Luther could even claim that fulfilling the sword bearer’s office would mean a “blessed death.”20 The doctrine of the two kingdoms rested on strong cooperation of church and realm while maintaining a clear distinction between their roles. This generally mapped onto the traditional division of tables of the Ten Commandments. However, for Luther, one particular violation from the first table—usually the church’s responsibility—crossed the line into the magistrate’s purview: blasphemy. Because knowledge of the one God is part of natural law, blasphemy was a violation of the natural order and a clear and present danger to the social order. It provoked divine wrath and had to be eradicated.21 “A community divided in religion is ungovernable.”22 The private conscience may be free from compulsion, but open blasphemy threatens the order of things and must be curbed by the sword.23 So the magistrate’s responsibility for social welfare included maintaining order in the visible church, lest social chaos ensue. The social proscription of blasphemy also meant that the ruler had responsibility to abolish false religion; but for several years Luther resisted the obvious correlate: the ruler had the duty to establish true religion.24 The peasant uprising tested this resistance in 1524–25, but it wasn’t until Luther’s pastoral visitations to Saxony in 1527, which revealed disorder in church finances and public worship, that his thinking on the civil authorities crystallized. The churches clearly couldn’t govern themselves, and Luther became persuaded that the elector must have a hand in guaranteeing common worship.25 In commentaries on Psalms 82 and 101 (1530, 1534), he finally conceded that this meant something like the traditional cura religionis, the secular administration of true worship. His breaking point? Seditious Anabaptist “corner preachers.”26

Judgments against Anabaptists Luther’s call for vicious suppression of rebels notwithstanding, he tended to be moderate on persecution of radicals. Not so his followers like Philip Melanchthon, who held that the ruler should establish right worship long before Luther did and expressed this idea with characteristic directness.27 Melanchthon’s calls for the cura religionis and for the persecution of the Anabaptists became the norm in the Lutheran territories. Like Luther, Melanchthon’s calls for repression of dissidents were linked to the problem

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of church governance. His response to the 1527 visitation, the Judgment against Anabaptists (Adversus Anabaptistas Iudicium, 1528) sounds his major theological concerns. The treatise is relatively placid in tone, and Melanchthon does not detail the penalties Anabaptists hazarded by their noncompliance.28 Melanchthon’s worries are largely sacramental and social: baptism (of infants); the Lord’s Supper; justification; the authority of Scripture; private possession of goods; and the validity of Christians in civil office and the magistrate’s power of the sword. His main social concern is the “seditious and fanatical” Anabaptist practice of community of goods, which he saw as violating principles of social order and private property.29 This was the same damning rebelliousness that had precipitated the Peasants’ War. Melanchthon’s second writing was far more vociferous, the Refutation of Some Unchristian Articles That the Anabaptists Hold (1536). In between the two texts lies the disaster of the “kingdom of Münster,” when followers of Melchior Hoffman set up a polygamist theocracy that ended in a siegeinduced famine and massacre at the hands of Catholic armies. Moreover, when Melanchthon wrote the Refutation in 1536, he had a full slate of experiences with radical reformers, including a face-to-face interrogation earlier that year of ten suspected Anabaptists led by a local miller. These experiences solidified Melanchthon’s prejudices: all Anabaptists colluded with Müntzer, the Zwickau prophets, and participants in the Peasants’ War, a belief only buttressed by the debacle of Münster.30 Melanchthon had been using the term Schwärmer, “fanatics,” of all Anabaptists since 1528; two years later he was calling them angels of the devil and advocating their execution for sedition and blasphemy.31 The Anabaptists’ steadfastness in the face of impending execution did not sway him; in 1530, six Anabaptists had gone to their execution joyfully, and Melanchthon was unmoved: “Each person should know, as Christians, to judge the great boldness and bravery that is noted in some Anabaptists in danger of death more according to God’s Word rather than by such appearances, and not let themselves err. For as long as the Anabaptists remain so stubborn in such errors and blasphemies in public as they have been, such boldness should be considered as nothing but a horrible obstinacy of the devil.”32 The double standard buried in this statement—joy in the face of death is the mark of a true martyr, unless it isn’t—dates back at least to Augustine; at any rate, the Anabaptists’ equanimity only bolstered Melanchthon’s resolve to persecute. Melanchthon warned the elector of his responsibility to uphold justice and to remain “unalterably harsh toward this spawn of Satan.”33 Unlike his colleague Martin Bucer, who was

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successful in converting Anabaptists back to evangelical churches,34 Melanchthon’s position was consistently one of suppression and execution.35 The Anabaptists and radicals shared the theopolitical assumptions of the age, of course, and had their own mechanisms for guaranteeing the faithfulness of the churches and averting divine wrath, notably the ban. The language of blasphemy and wrath may feel distant from modern sensibilities, but for the Lutherans and the Anabaptists alike it names a real anxiety, and it was a political one about the moral reality of the kingdom of God.36 Of course the Anabaptists were not in a position to exercise state coercion, and so their disciplinary discourse did not link up with justifications for judicial violence. In the cura religionis debate of the magisterial reformation, though, the language of coercion and punishment entered the theological vocabulary—discipline and wrath, in particular, are the words the reformers begin to use. There were worse problems in the doctrinal scaffolding, too. Luther’s visitations of 1527 showed a dramatic failure of evangelical ecclesiology: the preaching of justification by faith was not resulting in faithful, righteous communities. In the absence of the medieval sacerdotal system, there was an inadequate theological-liturgical structure to support the ethos of the Lutheran church. This instability is the fragility of faith recurring: evangelical belief was buttressed by word and sacrament, but it was still mediated solely by individual faith. It’s not much to build a church on, at least if one wants to retain the foundations of Christendom. The Anabaptists resolved this tension by leaning into it, with their ecclesiology of voluntary communities and believers’ baptism. But the poor state of the Lutheran churches in the years following the Diet of Worms, to say nothing of the anarchy loosed by the Anabaptist “threat,” highlighted an underlying weakness in Luther’s reformation. The cura religionis was a final recourse to a problem that word and sacrament had been unable to solve.

The Sinews of the Church The combustible rhetorical discourse of persecution was one root of penal substitution; the emergence of ecclesial discipline was a second. Both were linked to state oversight of the church, the cura religionis. This section looks at this subject, as I shift perspective toward the Reformed churches and the friendship and correspondence between a semi-errant Lutheran, Martin Bucer, and a young French pastor in exile, John Calvin. Both held a concern for the Anabaptist threat similar to Luther and Melanchthon.37 Bucer’s focus—and the secret to his (relative) success in reclaiming a

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number of Anabaptists for the Lutheran church in Strasbourg—was the development of an ecclesial system undergirded by discipline and pastoral intervention. He bequeathed this idea to Calvin, who perfected it in Geneva’s consistory. In these systems of church discipline, a program of pastoral surveillance entered into Protestant discourse. Understanding how this came about, and the origin of Bucer’s and Calvin’s relationship, takes us back to the Zells’ Strasbourg.

The Fight for the Corpus Christianum in Strasbourg It is a commonplace in Bucer scholarship to lament how overlooked he is in Reformation studies and how neglected his contribution to the Lutheran tradition has been.38 Part of this is due to Bucer’s relative moderation in an age of shrill and brutal rhetoric.39 His equanimity gave him the ability to get significant numbers of Anabaptists to recant and rejoin the magisterial church, setting him apart from Luther and Melanchthon.40 Bucer started his reforming career in Strasbourg in the mid-1520s, and struggled for decades to bring a predominantly Lutheran reformation to the liturgically eclectic and socially irksome city of Strasbourg. As John S. Oyer notes, Strasbourg’s comparative tolerance and humanist background made for slow reforming and tempestuous, but often innovative and surprising, religious interrelations.41 We have already seen Schütz Zell’s moderation in the previous chapter, and Bucer’s Lutheran colleague Wolfgang Capito joined her in protecting dissidents against persecution.42 Bucer was sympathetic to the Anabaptists on more than one front: he didn’t share Luther’s hard stance on the sacraments, but he also shared the Anabaptists’ concern with moral integrity in the church—it should be a visible body embodying faithfulness.43 Nevertheless, the way he went about achieving this faithfulness puts him on the side of the magisterial reformers. A great part of Bucer’s career—fifteen years or so—was spent developing various strategies for the civil enforcement of a reformed church order. These experiments helped install the dialectic of discipline and wrath at the heart of Protestant ecclesiology, and thereby soteriology; moreover, they influenced the Calvinist tradition in tangible ways. After being shunned by Luther at Marburg over the Eucharist, the newly independent and (somewhat) tolerant Bucer began work in Strasbourg to reconcile the various sides in the eucharistic disputes.44 Bucer emphasized the pneumatological presence of Christ in communion, which made the church a community of the faithful associating on the basis of personal belief—a remarkably Anabaptist-like idea. However, Bucer took this

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pneumatological ecclesiology in a distinctively Lutheran direction, constructing a position on the one reign of Christ in which civil and ecclesial governance, while distinct, cooperated in the moral welfare of society. He shared the medieval view that civil authorities were responsible to God for the blessedness of their subjects’ eternal salvation, and consequently for implementing ecclesial and liturgical reforms. The reign of Christ was based on the believer’s individual relationship with Christ (again, a nudge in an Anabaptist direction), but (magisterially) that individual relationship is inseparable from the communion of the church, which in turn sustains society. There were three nesting spheres of communion: individual fellowship with Christ, the community of saints in the church (corpus christi), and Christian society (corpus christianum). The magistrates did not have direct spiritual authority—that rested with the church’s ministry—but they had a secondary, educational, and supporting role. Both state and church existed under the kingdom of Christ, conferring “legal force on the fundamental doctrine of the church set by the theologians.”45 Bucer’s much stronger emphasis on the visible church than Luther endeared him to the Anabaptists. Church communities should demonstrate concrete evidence of Christian commitment and practice, not simply be the civic institution that was the parish of the baptized. But this meant a more urgent need to see the kingdom of Christ realized tangibly in the parish—believing communities should show evidence of belief. However, in his first Strasbourgian years neither Bucer’s theological vision of visible communities animated by Christ’s Spirit nor the ecclesiastical ordinances passed by the Strasbourg authorities transformed the church and city. Rather than using coercion and punishment, the irenic Bucer committed himself to a program of pastoral discipline and supervision to achieve the welfare of the city under God.46 This came in the form of two experiments emphasizing voluntary ecclesial commitment and lay oversight of congregations. The first arrangement was based on Kirchenpfleger (church wardens), essentially lay elders appointed by the civil authorities.47 The wardens had responsibility both for the oversight of the pastor and for all aspects of church life in doctrine and practice; they monitored worship attendance and the integrity of the daily lives of parishioners, with duties to admonish wayward Christians.48 But this experiment was not a success, as the “censor-citizens” were inconsistent in performing their duties and lacked real coercive power.49 In the mid-1540s he turned to another experiment, the christliche Gemeinschaften (Christian communities), reflecting a turn to stronger pastoral surveillance and stronger congregational structures.

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The communities were small voluntary gatherings of the faithful who committed to a system of moral discipline and conduct. They were organized under lay leadership in consultation with the pastor.50 Families would be interviewed on doctrine, liturgy, and morals and be registered as members, subjecting themselves to examination and admonition, even excommunication, for moral or doctrinal failure. The pastors determined those needing correction, while the magistrate administered penalties. By maintaining a supervisory role for lay elders, and securing voluntary commitment from the members, Bucer hoped to secure a church characterized by holiness and unity; but the Gemeinschaften had neither effect.51 A true Christian city did not result, and Bucer was accused of schism and of forming a spiritual elite.52 The fundamental problem was that the church was supposed to have disciplinary authority to correct its members, but lacked a partnership with the civil authorities that would give that authority real power. Bucer came up against the same problem Luther and Melanchthon did: in the legacy of Christendom, if the state did not exercise the oversight of right worship in the church, the cura religionis, then halfgestures in the direction of believers’ polity would get only half-results. But going any further meant conceding the debate to the Anabaptists. Things got worse for Bucer and the dream of a Lutheran corpus christianum in Strasbourg. On March 21, 1547, the city surrendered to the Catholic Charles V. The defeat of the Protestants, coupled with a resurgence of Anabaptists in Strasbourg, drove Bucer to the conviction that only a city-wide repentance could avert the wrath of God: “we so-called Christians have long deserved even more severe punishment and disciplining than we have already experienced.”53 The city did not repent, and within two years Bucer himself was driven out of Strasbourg by a city council more intent on civil order and political pragmatism than threats of divine visitation. He emigrated to England, where he used the example of evangelical Germany’s catastrophe to warn Thomas Cranmer and the English church about the failure to exercise church discipline.54

The Disciplinary Project in Geneva Bucer’s belief that God was visiting wrath on the church—concretely and visibly enacted in the reimposition of Catholic doctrine by Charles (known as the Interim)—was thoroughly characteristic of the sixteenth century social situation. So was his concern for discipline exercised by the church under a voluntary structure of mutual commitment, an area where he demonstrably learned from his Anabaptist opponents rather than Luther.

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Both concerns reoccur in Calvin, who adopted elements from Bucer’s experiments in disciplinary technology and systematized them into a comprehensive program of pastoral surveillance known as the consistory. Calvin’s first period in the mid-1530s was manifestly unsuccessful in chaotic Geneva, and he fled to Strasbourg for several years, working with Bucer and learning from the latter’s ecclesial experiments—at that point still looking promising and garnering praise even from the Anabaptists. On the very day Calvin reentered Geneva, he appeared before the city council to propose what would become the Ecclesiastical Ordinances.55 The vision of the Ordinances bears some similarities to Bucer’s ideas, but Calvin gives them teeth. Whereas Bucer had envisioned the church-state relation in a series of three concentric rings, Calvin proposed “distinct, yet overlapping, spheres” in mutual cooperation and assistance,56 something of a middle position between Luther’s two kingdoms and Bucer’s threefold communion model. The church was over spiritual matters, the state over temporal ones. But for Calvin, “spiritual matters” meant that the church was responsible for the moral character of the city, even in matters not obviously religious, such as divorce, domestic violence, and public drunkenness, whereas the magistrates protected the church and appointed its officials, collected tithes, and punished offenders identified by the church.57 Cooperation was seamless in promoting Geneva as a Reformed theopolitical paradise. The key to this program was the consistory, led by lay elders responsible “to take care of the life of everyone, to admonish in a friendly manner those whom they see weakening or leading a disorderly life, and, where it may be needful, to make a report to the company which will be deputed to apply brotherly correction.”58 The consistory was a body responsible for “overseeing public morality and doctrine, and admonishing and disciplining people guilty of flagrant sin.”59 Disciplinary penalties included formal rebuke, a temporary ban from communion, and ultimately civil punishment for serious crimes; as had Bucer and the Strasbourg authorities, Calvin and the Genevan magistrates disputed over who had the power of excommunication, but in the main punishment fell to the city.60 Calvin was ultimately successful because he was able to retain significant compulsory power for the church through the consistory’s ability to recommend malingerers, sinners, and heretics for civil punishment, “a dream shared—though never realized—by other churchmen.”61 By the 1550s, other reformers saw Geneva as something of an evangelical moral exemplar; John Knox reported, “Manners and religion so sincerely reformed, I have not yet seen in any other place,” and Valentin Andreae marveled that “all cursing and swearing, gambling, luxury, strife, hatred,

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fraud, etc., are forbidden, while greater sins are hardly ever heard of.”62 Modern readers might not share the enthusiasm of Knox and Andreae, recalling the infamous case of the unitarian Michael Servetus, who was executed for heresy with Calvin’s consent (though Calvin unsuccessfully recommended the sword rather that the stake). Less sensationally, but perhaps more tellingly, Jeffrey Watt reports the consistory’s mixed record in handling domestic abuse: it was treated as a serious offense, but the wife was often subject to the same penalty (suspension from communion attendance) as the abusing husband, and legal separation was forbidden. He speaks of “some modest progress for battered women.”63 Sincerely reformed manners and religion, perhaps, but with the persistence of violence.

From Penance to Discipline The motto of a French version of the consistory is telling: “discipline is the sinews of the church.”64 Bucer and Calvin implemented technologies of moral surveillance as they sought to maintain structures of accountability and probity for their communities. Discipline became a far-reaching tool for monitoring the life and morals of church members by ecclesial and civil rulers working cooperatively. The theopolitical network that emerged in the Reformed tradition bore more than a little resemblance to the old medieval model, though: the Reformed ministry of discipline effectively replaced the Catholic office of priestly confession, “helping to fill an important void left by Protestants’ elimination of the sacrament of penance, and nurturing a strong sense of community.”65 Faced with the fragility of faith at a social level, the Protestants had reinvented penance. The ambivalence, if not outright hostility, of Protestant attitudes toward penance and confession tracks with their strife over the rest of the sacraments.66 The question of penance was wrapped up in Luther’s reform from the beginning: he notoriously waffled on its status in the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, initially including it as one of the three true sacraments, before later pronouncing that it could not be truly considered sacramental because it lacked an accompanying divine promise.67 Luther’s replacement for penance was the practice of daily repentance, announced in the very first of the Ninety-Five Theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance.”68 This was a protest against indulgences, but it is also a rejection of the very notion of the church as a treasury of merit—the sacerdotal mediation of forgiveness and righteousness discussed in the previous chapter. Christ,

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not the priest, is the agent of forgiveness, and that forgiveness is obtained not in works of penance but in faith’s reception of divine grace. Luther granted that confession to a fellow believer might relieve the soul and bring comfort, but because all believers shared the priesthood, a formal confession was not only unnecessary, it subjected them to the “despotism” of Roman sacerdotalism.69 The magisterial reformers generally followed Luther’s lead, but the Anabaptists preserved a stronger vestige of penance by practicing rigorous self-examination and requiring reconciliation and repentance before the Lord’s Supper.70 Those who learned from the Anabaptist commitment to voluntary communities and discipline felt the draw of the marooned sacrament. Bucer’s failed ecclesial experiment made provision for private confession within the communities, but this was never successfully implemented, lost in the noise of jurisdiction disputes with the civil authorities.71 Calvin’s consistory, however, effectively provoked public confession and penance from sinners on pain of exclusion from communion, or from the community itself; moreover, both in Strasbourg and Geneva Calvin visited parish households regularly for instruction, reproving, and consolation. It was a conscious replacement for the practice of penance.72 This reemergence of confessional practices among the Reformed points us back to a fault line in Protestant ecclesiology: the structural fragility of faith. The Reformation, from one angle, was a series of responses to the basic question of how to replace the sacerdotal function of the priest who dispenses the merit of Christ in the sacraments—the mass and baptism preeminently, but also penance. With the sacerdotal system went the policing apparatus of the medieval sacramental regime, with its tight control over the spiritual destiny of the faithful. Without the Roman system, or something equally rigid (say, Anabaptist credobaptism and the ban) to take its place to supervise Christian behavior, the evangelical experiment was either doomed to disappointment (Saxony, Strasbourg) or was subject to the type of voluntarist subjectivism (“fanaticism”) of radical spiritualist reformers that bypassed communal mediation of grace altogether. Berndt Hamm puts it this way: “When the Eucharist is spiritualized and internalized the significance of the external signs and the text of the Words of Institution is diminished; all the emphasis now falls on the trusting recollection of Christ’s redeeming act and the eucharistic gift of brotherly love bestowed therein by the Holy Spirit. The fellowship of those who believe and love becomes the main content of the Eucharist.”73 The magisterial travails with discipline show just how difficult it was to secure that gift of brotherly love.

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The institutional employment of discipline, replacing the medieval system of penance and thereby installing confession and penitence in the power of the community (represented by ministers and lay elders) is a uniquely Protestant way of handling the basic Reformation question: how Christ’s merits are mediated to the people of God. Displaced from the medieval sacerdotal system, where Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is placed in the hands of the priest himself at the mass, the benefits of the cross of Christ are therefore located in the disciplinary power of the church. That power only needed to be internalized by believers for penal substitution to become the habitus of the Protestant soul.

The Alien Work of God The Protestant Reformation produced heretics and backsliders in the course of reinventing Christendom; the contagion in the social body required holy victims to propitiate divine wrath. However, it was not until the Puritans reinterpreted the Genevan intellectual tradition into a covenant framework that penal substitution became the keystone of Reformed theology. It had to be integrated into the golden chain of salvation, the divine schematic enacting redemption, for that to take place. Divine wrath had to be codified and normalized, drawing from the rhetorical roots of Anabaptist persecution and ecclesial discipline. But it wasn’t enough for God’s punishment to be visited on the heretic and the social deviant. The technologies the Reformation developed to replace the sacerdotal system were incomplete without training the self to tarry under the punitive divine eye; faith required an internal, psychological apparatus to compensate for its own fragility. The ever precarious process of divine initiative in merit transfer required the development of highly codified and rigid systems of salvation—forensic justification and prelapsarian predestinarianism—that were designed to isolate human agency; but they drove the invention of cruciform subjectivities. There is a paradox here. The magisterial reformers’ dread of Anabaptist subjectivism (the inner word) and voluntarism (believers’ congregations) led to extrinsicism, locating the divine act of salvation completely in opposition to human agency—but just as human agency was being demanded in disciplinary discourse. The result was deeply recursive, a logic bent in on itself in a vicious circularity—a profound insecurity and loss of the assurance of grace that led to the inscription of internalized discipline, driven by insecurity over the granting of forgiveness. Seeing how this plays out is the story I follow for the rest of this chapter. First, we focus on the

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forms of extrinsicism in the Reformed and Lutheran traditions, predestination and forensic justification. From there, the chapter finally moves to the Puritan William Perkins, who appropriates predestination into a scheme of cruciform redemption premised on the mutual punishment of Christ and elect. This recursive trend especially characterized the Reformed tradition, with its focus on election and predestination. Calvin’s teaching on predestination has deep antecedents in Augustinian theology and medieval nominalism; but the idea had its political dimensions, too. Predestination provided significant explanatory power. It made the halting, patchwork progress of the Reformation intelligible, and relieved the frustration of the work of the consistory trying to curb the moral turbidity of Geneva’s citizenry. The success of the church, and the inscrutable motives of backsliding citizens, were hidden in the mysterious decrees of God. Whether or not Geneva was an evangelical paradise, Europe was certainly not, especially after the Augsburg Interim robbed the Protestants of the hope of further progress for the Reformation. The true gospel was being preached, but a true Christian society was not coming to pass, and the wrath of God seemed imminent. Calvin stresses this less graphically than Luther, lacking the depth of Luther’s apocalyptic imagination; but he also inscribes divine anger into an eternal logic of decrees that renders political problems cosmic in scope. Geneva had the same problems as Luther’s and Melanchthon’s Saxony, despite the success of the consistory. In the Institutes, the tension of the righteous and reprobate that so occupied the Genevan pastors became the tension of creation and redemption itself—a mere glance at the majestic meditation on creation in the opening pages of the Institutes shows the scope of Calvin’s vision. The coexistence of faith and disbelief in the evangelical society was apotheosized into a quandary written across the eternal history of the Godhead. In the ambiguities and setbacks of history lay the hidden eternal purposes of God, whose decrees of election and reprobation ruled the destiny of all humankind, so that all the glory of salvation redounded to God’s praise. The doctrine also cut through the debates with the Roman Catholics regarding the transfer of merit. If salvation is a function of a sovereign decree, then two consequences follow: first, it is entirely God’s work and not that of a priestly mediator; second, the mediation of merit becomes a procedural question, secondary to the decree itself. If salvation is ordered from eternity, prior (logically and temporally) to the act of atonement itself, then the cross (and every other mediating artifact) becomes an instrumental act. This is why the fraught Reformed question of limited atonement arose: if

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the atoning death of Christ is a way of carrying out the eternal decree, its benefits are applied only to the designees of that decree, the elect. So isn’t it logical that the atonement is carried out on their behalf alone? In other words, doesn’t it follow that Jesus Christ died only for the elect? So argued many interpreters of Calvin, particularly his successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, whose supralapsarian position even fixed the electing decree prior to the fall. So also would many of the Puritans, preeminently William Perkins. Of course, to non-Reformed readers, the whole question of limited atonement seems somewhat abstract.74 After all, whether the divine lottery limits the atonement of Christ to the elect or whether God ordains a universal atonement but restricts its benefits to the elect, the end result is the same. Some are elect and some are damned, and in practice it doesn’t much matter once it’s all decided. Especially to the damned. This is not just a theoretical problem, but a practical one endemic to the system. If the election of God lies hidden in eternal mystery, the believer’s assurance of salvation vanishes. The only way to know one’s elect status is to show its fruits in a life of repentance and ethical conduct. But that means the existential, experiential upshot of election—Who, which of us, are actually among the predestined?—lies entirely in the realm of the subjective. And therein lies the dilemma. The bid to displace the transmission of merit from medieval sacerdotalism to the realm of divine agency, to an objective divine ground—the eternal decree of God—ends up pivoting on the subjective reception of the believer. We are back with the fragility of faith.75 Once the ancient actions of the Catholic priest who conveyed merit are translated into the hazy ether of divine action, it becomes increasingly difficult to make the transaction secure in concrete reality. The human recipient is simply too mercurial; one can never really know if one is elect. A doctrine meant (in Calvin) for reassurance performed the opposite: “Christ died for the elect. This makes trusting Christ’s death presumptuous, if not dangerous: we could be putting our trust in One who did not die for us and therefore be damned. . . . We look inside ourselves. We cannot ascend to God’s eternal counsel but we can see whether He is at work in us. . . . Sanctification, or good works, is the infallible proof of saving faith.”76 These worries were not limited to the Reformed tradition. The Lutheran tradition went through a similar process in developing the doctrine of forensic justification—the idea that justification was entirely a legal fiction on the basis of the alien righteousness of Christ, without any reference to regeneration in the believer. It was an austere doctrine, but it had roots in much more vivid concerns about divine inscrutability. Luther’s early preaching was deeply concerned about the anxiety of predestination; he spoke of

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God’s “alien work” (opus alienum) of wrath cloaking God’s “proper work” (opus proprium) of salvation, a dialectic that extended back into the eternal decree. Brian Gerrish has written of the “antithesis between God as revealed, and preached, on the one hand, and God as hidden and unknown, on the other.”77 In De servo arbitrio, Luther spoke of a God whose “secret . . . dreadful hidden will” predestined some to salvation and consigned the rest of humanity to hell, who was gracious and good despite seeming arbitrary and cruel.78 In his later years (after 1525), Luther came to emphasize the mechanics of God’s alien work less and existential crisis more; the hidden predestining will of God receded, and the pastoral problem of saints experiencing the anger of God occupied his sermons and teaching. He described this as “temptation”—in German, Anfechtung—the terrifying struggle with the hidden God’s inscrutable will.79 Luther’s admonition in such straits was to cling to the promises of God in Christ, but as Gerrish notes, this is a pastoral solution to a theological problem.80 A metaphysical paradox—God’s hidden decree behind the overt act of salvation in Christ—points toward a subjective resolution endured within the believer’s soul. Following Luther, the existential quandary quickly reduced to the relationship of divine and human initiative in justification. The alien work of God was entirely on God’s initiative; the human recipient could only wait in passivity, contributing nothing to the process. But did the divine arbitrariness necessarily mean that justification was entirely a judicial, legal decree, or did justification have some basis in regenerating union with Christ? According to David Fink, Melanchthon was the first to develop a “purely forensic conception of justification” in a 1532 commentary on Romans, arguing that only the alien righteousness of Christ, entirely outside any agency of the self, could soothe the troubled conscience and preserve God’s gracious initiative.81 Like Luther, Melanchthon dissented from Augustine’s view that justification was based on indwelling divine love, and the transformative effects of the Spirit’s work within. In search of certitude for the troubled conscience—a Wittenberg concern dating back to Luther’s obsession with confession as a young monk—Melanchthon finally located the source of righteousness entirely outside the self, in Christ’s righteousness imputed as a judicial act.82 “Only the propitiatory work of Christ, conceived and executed entirely extra nos and perpetually imputed through God’s pronouncement of justification could give the conscience peace.”83 There was no human cooperation with God’s act of salvation and no resultant internal transformation of the soul. But this development had an ironic outcome. Realizing this stranded human salvation in a legal fiction, Melanchthon came to emphasize the need for good works as evidence of justification

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(the “third use” of the law); he consequently faced charges of semiPelagianism in the synergistic controversy. As with the dynamic of Calvinism and election, the hunt for assurance in the external agency of God ended up inverting itself: “the more justification was understood as God’s gracious imputation, the more questions of human participation demanded answers.”84 Thus in the magisterial reformation tradition, the divine decree increasingly tends to follow an inverted destiny: alienated from the subjectivity of the believer, the act of salvation retreats into a divine fiat, in the abstraction of a legal court or the abyss of the eternal decree. But this ends up heightening the subjective, affective role of the believer.85 If there is no way to access the assurance of salvation, locked away in a divine mystery box, then the believer’s own works become the only evidence of one’s election. The attempt to fix the transferal of merit entirely in divine agency tends to double back on itself. After a bit of a detour, then, we come back to the atonement. For the way the inheritors of these debates among the Puritans expressed this feedback loop was through the cross. This was in part because the basic question of extrinsicism is merit transfer: whose agency is responsible for conveying the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice to the believer? But there is a second level operative, too. Protestant extrinsicism was driven by the terror of the unknown God, the alien work by which God displayed divine mercy under the guise of wrath—wrath indistinguishable from that visited on heretics and moral reprobates. The cross was a signifier, virtually a totem, of the violence of the hidden God. And so internalizing the cross was a way to endure the alien work of God, in order to show the fruits of one’s election. The divine act of punishment on the cross, enacted every day in the execution of Anabaptist heretics, was also exercised within the believer herself. I use the term recursivity for this: it is an inverted form of the pattern of substitution we have seen repeatedly in this book. Heretofore, substitution has typically taken the form of an investment of soteriological capital in exemplary human subjects: the martyrs and saints. But their mediating effects were eliminated in the Reformation. So the substitutionary effect became fixed in Christ, but it also becomes refracted in the only other human being available in the merit transaction, the believer himself.

The Recursive Logic of Vicarity The quest to replace the medieval sacerdotal structure with a secure sacramental-theological apparatus led in two directions. The first was an increasingly strident emphasis on discipline to avert divine wrath on the

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body politic; from Luther’s cura religionis to Bucer’s Gemeinschaften to Calvin’s consistory, the magisterial reformers saw the need for a faithful ecclesial community that reflected the newfound power of the preached gospel and righteousness of Christ. But this led to exactly what the radicals and Anabaptists had been talking about from the beginning: voluntary fellowship of mutual accountability and strict disciplinary supervision. The second direction was the trajectory of extrinsicist, objective mechanisms of merit transfer like predestination and forensic justification, which ironically produced the very kinds of subjectivism they were supposed to avoid. The specter of the hidden, arbitrary God of two wills, the fixing of that God’s saving act in a mechanical system outside the living relationship of faith, and the resulting turn to various forms of affective response for evidence of election—this dynamic indelibly pierced the Protestant soul in its quest for assurance. When this paradox cross-pollinated with the Reformed disciplinary mandate in the Puritans, it led to a perfect storm: the internalization of the experience of divine punishment as the evidence of salvation.

Atonement and the Experimental Predestinarians Substitutionary atonement was not strictly new in the English “experimental predestinarians”:86 as I discussed earlier, the idea of Christ bearing punishment for human sin was present in Calvin and various threads of Luther’s thought and it moved into a more central place in Beza’s system; but with writers like William Perkins it became more than one in a cluster of images—it transitioned from the semantic realm of metaphor to controlling model. With the Puritans it became fixed as an irreducible element of the order of salvation (ordo salutis), and even more importantly, it installed itself in the piety of the believer. The greater the degree of Christological vicarity, the greater the degree of internalization. Recursion became divine surveillance inscribed into the soul permanently, hardwired into the reflexivity and agency of the self. The ideological context for this transformation was the development of covenant, or federal, theology; it is generally understood to have begun with Dudley Fenner’s 1585 Sacra Theologia and was systematized by Perkins’s 1590/91 “charter document of English federalism,” A Golden Chaine.87 The basic idea is that there are two distinct covenants between God and humanity, the Adamic covenant of works articulated in the Mosaic law and the Christian covenant of grace founded on the atoning death of Christ. This historical succession of covenants forms two distinct peoples, Israel and the church. This is not Luther’s kerygmatic dialectic of law and gospel,

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but the covenants do have a transhistorical function in that they correlate with the decree of double predestination: the covenant of works justifies the condemnation of the reprobate because of their failure to live according to the moral demands of the law, while the covenant of grace legitimizes the justification of the elect, who are freed from the burden of works. The language Perkins uses to describe the covenant is explicitly transactional and contractual: eternal life is predicated on the condition of “mans promise to God.”88 The covenant of works was premised on perfect obedience to the law. In the covenant of grace, however, the condition is simply repentance and reception of the divine promise. The abrogated covenant of works still exposes sin and highlights the sinner’s damned state outside of the gospel: the law loomed over the Christian and exposed revolting “human nature in the raw.”89 The Son is incarnated in order to bear the infinite anger of God against sin, so that humanity’s offense against God could be forgiven.90 By virtue of Christ’s humanity, he becomes the priest who offers propitiation (himself) for human transgression, suffering a double penalty of inward fear of God’s anger, and the outward agony of death, burial, and damnation.91 Within this framework, Perkins developed his ordo salutis. The broad strokes follow Luther’s passive reception of grace, but things change in what Perkins calls the “execution” of God’s electing decree. There are four degrees of this execution: effectual calling, justification, sanctification, and glorification. These are “declarations of God’s love”—they are the outward evidence of the actuation of the decree of election; in other words, they are how God’s eternal acts of predestination are manifested to the elect. In the experience of the human recipient, God declares God’s love by working out God’s decree in them. Justification provides a good example; it is based in union with Christ, as Calvin held, and Perkins describes this union as a marital exchange in which Christ and the elect sinner are bestowed on one another, in a decidedly asymmetrical relationship: “She being fully mine, I may both have her, and governe her,” says the husband/Christ.92 The patriarchal structure of the marital relationship betrays a shift from the marital metaphors of medieval affective devotion, and as the “governe” language shows, for Perkins, this is a transactional relationship. The union is intended for one primary purpose, to exchange merit—to exchange property, invoking the sixteenth-century milieu—and accompanying responsibilities. This is also where the cross enters the picture, in the first step of justification. Forgiveness of sin is via proxy punishment: “Remission of sins, is that part of justification, whereby he that believeth, is freed from the guilt and punishment of sin, by the passion of Christ.” Christ absorbs

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the punishment of sinful humanity, and in union with him sin and guilt are expiated. The imputation of his righteousness is strictly forensic—we are in the exclusive domain of divine initiative. On the believer’s side, however, is the subjective evidence of justification. One aspect of this is repentance, in which Perkins remembers the marriage metaphor: the heart must be mollified, “bruised in pieces” through knowledge of the law and wrath of God, so that a person, aware at last of their lost state, applies the merits of Christ to themselves.93 We will see more of this battering language in a devotional text shortly.94 The “bruising” language is graphic, but Perkins only uses it in passing. In fact he gives little time to any type of link between Christ’s suffering and the experience of the elect. Sanctification is indeed grounded in mortification of the flesh as the believer, “documenting” her faith, experiences the death and burial of Christ in herself. But Perkins’s language is largely passionless when he discusses the cross in Golden Chaine, content with anodyne references to the power of sin being “crucified in the faithful.”95 This in itself is instructive. The cross has become much more strictly fixed in the mechanics of salvation, and as a result, has lost some of its broad rhetorical power. Luther, for all his hedging about the meritorious nature of suffering, could effortlessly describe Christian existence as cruciform and the knowledge of God itself as a theology of the cross, and Calvin spoke eloquently of the union of Christians with Christ on the cross that mortified sin and harrowed hell. Perkins is certainly capable of summoning great terrors about the cross. In the system of covenant theology, however, its function is restricted to the ordo salutis. The cross is a motor driving the outworking of God’s supralapsarian saving fiat. Indeed, the traditional tropes of salvation themselves, the events where the grace of God is bestowed on the sinner—calling, justification, and sanctification—are reduced to manifestations of the arbitrary eternal decree. The great bulk of Golden Chaine is devoted to working out the mechanics of predestination, and the great battle cry of the Wittenberg movement, justification, is a relative blip on the screen (fig. 12).

The Mirror of Our Misery This rigidity of the ordo salutis privileged predestination, a doctrine plagued in the Reformed tradition by anxiety about the indiscernibility of one’s election and personal salvation. The architectonic function of substitutionary atonement exacerbated this uncertainty, because it signified the wrath visited upon those outside the covenant of grace—which might

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Figure 12. William Perkins, “A Survey, or Table declaring the orders of the causes of Salvation and Damnation, according to Gods word.” Page II of William Perkins, A Golden Chaine, 1623 (Workes, vol. 1). Public domain.

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be anyone at all, in the church or not. In the precarious state of human nature in the raw, the result was a fearsome theological psychology. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales write of “intensified tendencies towards an obsessive and psychologically damaging introspection” among those Puritans “seeking to convince themselves that they were saved.”96 Baird Tipson calls this the “terror at the edge of Protestant faith”: uncertainty of election and fear of the arbitrariness of God.97 This unknowability was the subject of much debate after Calvin, but the Puritans made this tension a feature, not a bug, of their theological system.98 The Puritan God had a ruthlessness that was indeed terrifying: Perkins could speak of God culling reprobates as a farmer would a flock of sheep, “some of them to the fatting of the slaughter. . . . Man is nothing to God.”99 Tipson goes on to describe the horrifying rhetoric Thomas Hooker later invoked to convince sinners of their need for God, and to exhaust his hearers’ trust in their own consciences, speaking of God as a king torturing a traitor on a rack, and vividly picturing the sinner’s eternal torment in hell. He even argued that believers should accept damnation if it be God’s will: “Bee thou glorified . . . though I be damned forever.”100 This is the resignatio ad infernum, the holy despair of accepting one’s own damnation despite one’s faith, should the holy and electing God decree it.101 Limited atonement exacerbated the agony of the election quandary: the question of whether Christ in fact died for me, or whether his saving death was refused to me, sharpened the predestination question at a personal level. Perkins openly acknowledges the fissure in the purpose of God: “I deny not,” he writes, “but that Christ died for all men in the sense of Scripture; but the word of God never saith, that on God’s part, and in regard of the purpose of his will, Christ died for every man without exception.”102 Christ will not acknowledge all people as his own, and Scripture is clear on the damnation of the great mass of humanity. His blood could not possibly have been shed for all. Once limited atonement became the sine qua non of Reformed teaching, the problem of assurance of salvation became the center of attention; English divines such as Perkins and the drafters of the Westminster Confession increasingly focused on individual faith and good works as evidence of election. The Reformed emphasis on the hidden decree led the Puritans to develop exercises of the soul that trained the self to despair of its own capabilities and to throw itself on God’s mercy. Perkins most powerfully wields the symbol of the cross in this context: following Melanchthon in advocating its “third use,” Perkins preached the law and its penalty for its admonitory, repentance-inducing function. By observing the work of repentance and

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the urge for good works within his soul, the hearer could obtain some modicum of assurance of his salvation. But the religious subject can never truly be assured of salvation because of its ground in the eternal sovereign mystery of God, and so he can never be truly free of the specter of the law and its curse; he may still be reprobate, condemned by the covenant of works he has failed to fulfill. Preaching the law was supposed to assuage the conscience; but it was also a way of installing an autochthonous surveillance system in the subject’s moral calculus: the two ways, darkness and light, punishment and absolution, in one’s own soul. Perkins employs a mix of retributive language and punitive motifs, drawing from the old covenant and its condemnatory ministration of death. This covenant of works, as McGiffert puts it, “justif[ied] God’s way with the mass of humankind who were slated for spiritual execution.”103 It also justified elect Christians’ wrestling with the horror of spiritual reprobation. Spiritual slaughter was locked into the grammar of the Puritan subjectivity by the moral admonition of the law. Golden Chaine details the cross’s place in a technical calculus of substitution and punitive logic, but the force of its internalization in the Puritan soul is felt more forcefully in Perkins’s short treatise A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified. Written in 1596, the pamphlet urges the reader to know Christ by “an inward and a lively feeling of our sinnes, for which our Redeemer suffered the pangs of hell.”104 Perkins closes his treatise with a rhetorical portrait of identification with Christ that rivals the Franciscan contemplation of the passion in its detail. One is to regard Christ as an “example, to whom thou must conforme thy selfe by regeneration. . . . Thous are dead, and crucified, and buried with Christ. . . . That thou mayest not faile in this thy knowledge, reade the history of Christs passion, observe all the parts and circumstances thereof, and apply them to thy selfe for thy full conversion.”105 Step by step, Perkins uses a recursive logic (and this is where he is so different than the Franciscans, who focused on imitation and union, not primarily attribution of guilt) that walks the reader through the passion, reminding her at each scene to weigh her guilt and observe the agony of Christ on her behalf: the agony of Gethsemane was for “thy sins”; Christ’s bloody sweat shows “an unspeakable measure of Gods wrath” on “thy sins . . . most hainous”; the reader’s iniquities “were the very bonds wherewith he was tied: thinke that thou shouldest have been bound in the very same manner”; the sentence of crucifixion “is the wrath and fury of God against sin . . . look upon thy selfe, and with groanes of heart cry out, and say . . . I, even I have sinned, I am guilty and worthy of damnation”; Christ’s nakedness clothes the reader’s “deformity”; the

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dereliction showed the “pangs and torments of hell as thy pledge and surety.”106 But even this excruciating contemplation of the passion is not sufficient: “when thou hast thus perused and applied to thy self the history of the passion of Christ, go yet further, and labour by faith to see Christ crucified in all the workes of God.” Whether at the dinner table or in affliction and temptation, one is to see only Christ crucified: “If thou wouldest come to God for grace, for comfort, for salvation, for any blessing, come first to Christ hanging, bleeding, dying upon the cross, without whom there is no hearing God, no helping God, no saving God, no God to thee at all.”107 The tortured Christ is the center of the reader’s soul and experience. This fusillade of imagery is not a simple homiletical flourish. It reflects Perkins’s “iconophobic” Reformed imagination.108 Drawing on Calvin’s and Bucer’s iconoclastic theology, but lacking Calvin’s vision of creation, Perkins devoted his work to the meditative practice of reflecting on God to motivate inward moral change. Fearing the potentially idolatrous distortion of images, Perkins continually directs the reader to the moral, not imaginative, dimension of Scripture: what is at stake is one’s eternal destiny and thus one’s moral state, not forming any imaginative vision of Christ or God (as the medieval practice intended). But Perkins wrestled with a tension between evoking a visceral fear of God, and the “popish” danger of being “occupied with the eye.”109 Thus in his recounting of Christ’s sufferings, there is no verbal imagery, no visionary rhetoric of spilled blood, or the twisted body of Christ on the cross, or the wilting posture and spilled tears of Mary and the spectators; the treatise continually redirects the reader to herself, to her “minde,” to meditate on the moral implications of the cross. Blood and agony are signifiers of her sins and turpitude.110 His textual strategy is moral, not imaginative; the treatise doesn’t paint a picture, it renders a verdict. The pamphlet adopts a recursive argumentative strategy from the very beginning. The epigraph cites Galatians 6:14: “God forbid that I should rejoice, but in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”—but as it turns out, Perkins defers rejoicing for some time. His focus is rather on the subjective effect of undergoing the atonement: knowledge of Christ is knowledge of his promises and benefits—salvation—but it is also knowledge of his passion, which should stir up our own sorrow for sin.111 Union with Christ is union with the pain he underwent as the vicarious divine victim—but in the recursive pattern of covenant theology, that divine victimization does not free the Christian from suffering; it heightens the interior experience of Christ’s agony.

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Thou must labour to feel thy selfe to stand in need of Christ crucified; yea to stand in excessive need even of the very least drop of his blood. . . . Christ on the cross was thy pledge and surety in particular, that he stood in the very room and pace, in which you thy selfe in thine owne person, shouldest have stood: that thy very personal and particular sins were imputed and applied to him: that he stood guilty as a malefactour for them, and suffered the very pangs of hell, and that his sufferings are as much in acceptation with God, as if thou hadst borne the curse of the law in thine own person eternally.112 The rhetoric is striking. Perkins strives to fix the reader’s mind on the eternal wrath of God: knowing Christ is knowing that he suffered the hell of damnation. Guilt and judgment are the categories within which the reader is to think. This knowledge should “imply affection”; the reader can then grasp himself as enjoying the divine blessing and benefits of Christ’s merit. Thus when Perkins turns to the question of assurance, he immediately warns that the only assurance of one’s election is found in enduring the same wrath of God that Christ bore: “We must further strive and indeavour . . . put our selves often to the exercises of invocation and true repentance. For in, and by our crying unto heaven to God for our reconciliation, comes the assurance thereof.”113 This is a striking claim: assurance is striving and endeavor, the exercise of undergoing “furious indignation and wrath.” The knowledge that Christ vicariously bore one’s sin highlights the believer’s own corruption. Knowledge of self in Christ is actually knowledge of one’s own sin: Christ’s damnation is one’s own damnation, Christ’s suffering of divine wrath is one’s own suffering of divine wrath, Christ’s misery is one’s own misery. “Therefore Christ crucified must be used of us as a mirror or looking glass, in which we may fully take a view of our wretchedness and misery, and what we are by nature.”114 Substitution is not the knowledge that Christ has suffered and therefore exempted the Christian from divine torment; rather, substitution is an invitation to undergo the same torment. Perkins couches this in explicitly transactional language, true to the substructure of covenant theology: the effect of fully understanding that Christ has paid satisfaction for one’s sin is not just understanding one’s own wretched state, one’s damnable nature, but it is to incur an eternal obligation: “We owe unto Christ an endless debt. . . . So soone as any man begins to know Christ crucified, he knowes his own debt, and thinkes of

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the payment of it.”115 With this talk of debt, the vicious circle of penal substitution comes around fully. The recursive logic of vicarity emerges in its terror: the suffering of Christ is the suffering of the believer, worked out in one’s consciousness of one’s own misery; the satisfaction paid by Christ incurs an even greater debt. Assurance is measured by experiencing the condemnation of God, the realization of one’s own guilt as a sinner who bears direct responsibility for Christ’s tortured dereliction and damnation. The doubling, recursive effect of substitution emerges in all its clarity: it installs a logic of surveillance in the terrorized soul, transacts salvation in a pattern of ballooning debt, crafts subjectivities in memory of tortured flesh.

The Body of the Cross The invention of penal substitution in the Reformed tradition emerges in a very specific twofold context. First is the concern for discipline in the magisterial reformation, as the failure of the sacramental and doctrinal reforms of Wittenberg, Strasbourg, and Geneva led to efforts to produce communities of Christian virtue and a moral society that would stay God’s hand of judgment and wrath. Through Bucer’s christliche Gemeinschaften and Calvin’s consistory, the reformers learned from Anabaptist voluntary believers’ communities but sought to preserve the baptismal civil society of the medieval corpus christianum. In order to do so, discipline—the grammar of surveillance and punishment—worked its way into the Protestant imagination. The holy society depended on punishment and, combined with the Lutheran and Reformed obsessions with unilateral divine action, located that punishment in the work of the cross of Christ. As we saw in chapter 6, that cross had already been made to bear the entire weight of the medieval sacramental system: the tortured Son of God had become the treasury of merits himself. That innovation was paralleled by a profound sea change in religious subjectivity. From the pen of Müntzer and his followers, a habitus of suffering had become the existential center of the radical reformation. Participation in the passion and death of Christ became normative for discipleship—a practice of bearing the cross and dying to self through a form of cocrucifixion that only the mystics had formerly sought out. The magisterial reformers rejected this, fearing a diminution of Christ’s sui generis suffering and death, which anchored the evangelical understanding of the gospel. But the extrinsicist nature of magisterial Protestant theology—the Lutheran efforts to fix divine justifying action in an act of

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legal fiction called “forensic justification,” and the Reformed drive to secure divine sovereignty in the election decree hidden in eternity past—stranded the religious experience of the believer in affective stasis. So when the “experimental predestinarians” came along seeking a more direct and realist version of Calvin’s moral Geneva and minimalist liturgics, combined with a longing for personal holiness, they turned to the fruits of repentance and contrition in the soul as the evidence of one’s election (a similar story could be told about the Luther-inheriting Pietists). Only by genuinely sorrowing for one’s sin that the savior had borne could one know that vicarious sacrifice as one’s own; but because one could never truly—not really—know one’s election for certain, an intensification and reduplication of the punishment migrated into the center of the believer’s religious experience. In what I have called recursion, a curious morbidity emerged: the more central Christ’s vicarious punishment and death were to Reformed theology, the more that punishment and death were reduplicated in one’s own piety. The grammar of penal substitution, laced together with the framework of surveillance and discipline, drove the internalization of the wrath of God into religious experience. The pattern of recursion goes deeper. I will sketch this narrative more fully in the conclusion, but the argument of this book has been that the body of the cross in Western theological tradition has tended to be one of vicarity and substitution. On the one hand, sanctified bodies vicariously earn merit for the believer—saints and martyrs became the mediators of merit and the forgiveness of sins. On the other hand, the perennial function of the cross was to assign the rejected bodies of outsiders the equally vital function of absorbing divine wrath for the social body. This began with apotropaic spells and rites but also with the parting of the ways of Christianity and Judaism and the competing cosmologies of Gnostics and proto-orthodox, leading on to the demonizing of heretics and Jews in the Middle Ages and the drowning and burning of Anabaptists in the Reformation era. This logic of vicarity, this twofold pattern of holy victims, has at heart a basic idea: someone else suffers for my salvation. The Reformation focuses this logic of substitution into the body of Christ himself, so that he is the mediating body of holiness and the suffering body of the reprobate; but through the curious recursion I have just sketched, that pattern of substitution also becomes internalized in the believer herself, particularly the pattern of wrath. Only Christ can mediate merit and be the source of sanctity, but he is an impossible ideal for the daily life of the believer; so the Puritan affectivity developed into a continual endurance of the same wrath the Son of God was supposed

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to bear in one’s place. The rejection marked by the cursed body of the cross projected internally in a kind of inverted panopticon, and so the pattern of discipline and punish became the pattern of evangelical Protestant subjectivity. Seeking assurance and union, the Puritan found wrath and rejection. To love Christ became to love his torture—to live his torture.

Conclusion

Someone has always suffered for my salvation; with the Puritan terror of the hidden God, the ultimate victim was me. The Reformed spiritual exercise of holy terrors neatly collapsed the Western tradition of holy victims into the relationship of God and soul. There were no more saints to earn salvation; the logic of vicarity became recursive, even solipsistic, as the elect struggled to adequate themselves to the body of the tortured Son of God. There were plenty of reprobate victims, however. More than ever, in fact. In this conclusion, I glance toward one final manifestation of the dynamic of reprobation in Western Christianity: the early twentiethcentury American South.

Holy Victims in the American South In 1910 a publishing project began. A series of twelve volumes, The Fundamentals, aspired to be a “new statement of the fundamentals of Christianity,” written by the “best and most loyal Bible teachers in the world.”1 Funded by oil financier Lyman Stewart but published anonymously (“Compliments of Two Christian Laymen”), the books were intended to be circulated among all ministers, students, and Christian workers in the English-speaking world, reaching three million copies in print by the end of the venture.2 Coming shortly after the 1909 publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, an influential dispensationalist touchstone, The Fundamentals helped galvanize American Christian antimodernism into a movement,

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giving it a name—fundamentalism—and much of its intellectual structure. The books themselves are not systematic, but their consideration of what counted as the “fundamentals” of Christianity helped shape the ethos of modern American Christian conservatism. By George Marsden’s count, about one-third of the articles in the volumes concern Scripture and defend its inerrancy against higher criticism; another third are devoted to doctrinal topics; and a final segment range over miscellaneous topics, including personal testimonies and attacks on various ideologies and what an equivalent publication today might call “cults.”3 The Northern Presbyterians (also in 1910) had proclaimed the fundamentals of the Christian faith much more narrowly: (1) the inerrancy of Scripture; (2) the virgin birth; (3) substitutionary atonement; (4) Christ’s bodily resurrection; (5) and the authenticity of miracles.4 Two alterations were often made: (2) the deity of Christ, and (5) his premillennial return.5 The specificity of the original list is striking—the historicity of miracles is a nonnegotiable teaching of the Christian faith?—but the Northern Presbyterian list was trying to accomplish the same object as The Fundamentals: countering higher criticism by insisting on the historicity of the events of the Christian faith. This emphasis has characterized fundamentalistevangelical Christianity ever since. So why focus on substitutionary atonement? This is not a teaching premised on historical veracity in the same sense as the authenticity of miracles or the virgin birth. The article devoted to “The Atonement” in The Fundamentals provides some illumination.6 Written by Franklin Johnson, the article takes the truth of substitutionary atonement for granted: “The Christian world as a whole believes in a substitutionary atonement. This has been its belief ever since it began to think.”7 Johnson takes no real pains to defend the doctrine; he cites biblical texts speaking of propitiation, and offers general theological arguments (the doctrine reflects the moral attributes of God and the purpose of the incarnation), but his argument is largely practical and experiential. Substitutionary atonement reflects Christian experience of God, is verified by the effects of Christianity in history, and “promises an eternity of delightful progress in study. . . . The heart has always been kindled by the preaching of a Christ who bore our sins before God on the cross.”8 This nakedly affective appeal is matched by Johnson’s interest in attacking the moral influence theory, the only alternate paradigm he considers. His arguments against it are similarly emotive and facile: among other things, the theory “would be the end of thought, the end of emotion.”9 Reading the article is an odd experience. Johnson counters moral influence atonement by appealing to . . . moral influence. It is a telling example

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of what Marsden describes as the “overwhelming emphasis on soul-saving, personal experience . . . [and] doctrine’s practical benefits” of the series.10 And of course, Johnson knew his audience. The Fundamentals were a “testimony” to the truth, aimed at those already convinced; they were not serious attempts to engage the faculty at Union Theological Seminary but rather oriented to the perplexed laity in Presbyterian and Baptists churches. The intent of the volumes was not to convert the liberals; it was to contain them. An appeal to historicity of Scripture, with its narratives of miracles and virgin births and the return of Christ, was a front on which fundamentalism was fighting modernism; and so was the doctrine of the atonement. As at the beginning, and throughout the Middle Ages and Reformation, so again the cross was called upon to inscribe a dividing line through the Christian body, separating the elect from the damned. The soldiers kneel at the cross, one looking downward in despair, the other upward in hope. At the same time as the publication of The Fundamentals the symbol of the cross was being put to a strikingly different use in different communities. James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree states baldly, “The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people. . . . Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus.”11 Cone’s work, in many ways the capstone to his career, ranges widely, covering the history of lynching in Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South; the responses of Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr.; the lynching tree in the blues, spirituals, and the Harlem Renaissance; and the critiques of womanist theology to Cone’s own project. The heart of the book, though, is the horrific history of mob killings of Black Americans in the South, and an attempt to grapple with the theological meaning of this reality—a reality largely ignored by white American Christianity, preoccupied with inventing a culture war.12 For Cone, Black Southerners under the lynching regime “found in the cross the spiritual power to resist the violence they so often suffered,” even as they experienced “the profound contradictions that slavery, segregation, and lynching posed for their faith.”13 One of the primary means of empowerment was identification: couching the experience of terror, violence, and suffering as participation in the suffering of Christ, or the suffering of other biblical figures. Especially beloved was “Black Simon,” Simon Cyrene, compelled to carry Christ’s cross to Golgotha in the Synoptic Gospels. Conscripted into cocrucifixion, Simon accompanied the Lord to Golgotha, and God would remember that act: “When, therefore, our Savior shall be crowned and seated upon His Throne of Glory, He will doubtless remember in a peculiar manner the race whose son carried His cross for Him.”14

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The image of Simon was not intended to romanticize suffering, though. The lynching victim’s cry—“Why Me, Oh, Lord!”—reflected the cry of dereliction on the cross.15 A story that transformed mob terror into a different register, the figure of Black Simon was a condemnation of lynching crowds, a transposition of Christ from the pews of white churches to the branches of Southern trees and the trampled lawns around hastily assembled scaffoldings. It expressed the same type of contemporaneity with Christ sought by Francis of Assisi. Simon was a figure of eschatological hope: his suffering unrelieved, he nevertheless hoped for the crown of heaven, where justice would finally be served and history’s victims would be vindicated by the divine victim himself. Identification with him embedded the suffering of Black Americans in the history of Christ, and brought his history into the present. A striking charcoal drawing by E. Simms Campbell shows a Black man bearing a cross on his back and a rope around his neck, making the symmetry complete;16 similarly, the header from the story “Jesus Christ in Georgia,” in the December 1911 edition of the NAACP magazine Crisis, shows a lynched Black body inserted beneath the cross. “Jesus Christ in Georgia” portrays the horrific scenario of being a Black man in the Jim Crow South: accused by a mob of raping a white woman, without recourse or appeal to justice, condemned to a swift and merciless death. In the story, the white woman, belatedly realizing her wrongdoing, goes out to see the body of the lynching victim and, in a theophanic vision, a flaming cross burns across the sky, and she encounters Christ himself witnessing to the horror of the lynching: Her dry lips moved: “Despised and rejected of men.” She knew, and the very horror of it lifted her dull and shrinking eyelids. There, heaven-tall, earth-wide, hung the stranger on the crimson cross, riven and bloodstained with thorn-crowned head and pierced hands. She stretched her arms and shrieked. He did not hear. He did not see. His calm dark eyes all sorrowful were fastened on the writhing, twisting body of the thief, and a voice came out of the winds of the night, saying: “This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise!”17 These examples are only the briefest of summaries of how the symbol of the cross supplied meaning for the Black experience in the lynching era. But they provide a dramatically different symbolic world for the cross than The Fundamentals: it becomes a meaning-making symbol, creatively troped, reapplied, reperformed, its universe expanded to make the believer

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contemporaneous with Christ and a participant in his sufferings—so as to participate in his vindication. There is no hint of vicarity here; lynched bodies do not bear merit for the elect body. They are narrativized and embedded in a sacred tradition, though, and as the recent efforts to document lynchings demonstrate, the ignominy of their suffering is answered only by the effort to keep their memory alive. This is despite the best efforts of white society to erase their experience, or even outnarrate it with a neoConfederate revisionist history.18 For Cone, refusing vicarity, rejecting the temptation to make the suffering of lynching victims redemptive, is an essential dimension of this memory making. Cone is careful to take account of Delores Williams’s critique of surrogacy: “If Jesus were a surrogate, then his gospel encourages black women to accept their surrogacy roles as well.”19 Williams argues that “redemption of humans can have nothing to do with any kind of surrogate or substitute role Jesus was reputed to have played in a bloody act.” The cross was a desecration, she writes, a desecration all too familiar to the defiled bodies of Black woman forced into a history of literal surrogacy for white supremacy.20 But Cone, while conceding the force of Williams’s critique, ultimately follows M. Shawn Copeland in writing of the empty cross as a symbol of the divine victim’s solidarity with the suffering of Black men and women under slavery and Jim Crow.21 Many of the Christomorphic tropes of the spirituals and resistance literature Cone surveys assume some level of substitution; but their deeper, affective logic is one in which the cross exposes the injustice of white supremacy and extrajudicial murder— much like those early martyr texts that mocked the demonic liturgy of imperial Rome. Moreover, there is an important sense in which the cross helps organize a body in the lynching era: the Black church, or Harlem Renaissance community, becomes a community of resistance and endurance, a counterculture, organized around the symbol. The outrage of lynching was exposed by the cross, and that exposure illuminated two communities: the suffering body of Black Americans in Judge Lynch’s South and the sham of white Christians who chose to ignore the terror of lynching, if they did not actively participate in this “instrument by which black bodies were to be purged from the (white) body politic.”22 When we gaze upon the cross, subject position matters.

The Body of the Cross The logic of vicarity haunts Western Christian history, animating the social body with borrowed holiness and sublimated wrath. Holy victims suffer with Christ on another’s behalf. The great problem of this history is

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how to participate in Christ, how to experience his redemption in one’s own body, and what structures mediate or represent that relationship. My argument has been that this participation has historically been mediated through surrogate figures who vicariously undergo Christ’s suffering and passion. But there are two kinds of holy victims: first, the martyrs and saints suffer with Christ on behalf of the church, conveying his merits to the faithful. In fact, the argument of chapters 2 and 3 was that the suffering of the martyrs and the merits they earned helped frame the very idea that Christ’s death earns merit for the church—the opposite of how this relationship is generally conceived. However, there are also the reprobate, the condemned figures outside of the church. These figures (Gnostics, Jews, heretics, radicals, Black Americans) absorb divine punishment and wrath, and by doing so highlight the divine preservation of the elect body. This relationship became increasingly important as Western Christianity entered the medieval era and formed itself into the sociopolitical corpus christianum. In the final two chapters of this book, the twofold logic of vicarity collapses into one, as both the vicarious holy victim and condemned rejected victim are reduced to Christ, mediated to the believer solely by faith. Yet, in the recursive logic of predestination, believers continue to bear divine wrath and punishment within themselves—seemingly in direct proportion to how Christ himself bears it. So the cross’s benefits are mediated through vicarious bodies. The reprobate bodies, however, highlight an additional dimension of the cross’s body-forming function: it becomes a boundary marker delineating the elect body of the faithful from the rejected body of the cursed. Chapter 1 illustrates this through the trope of the hopeful and dejected soldiers divided by the cross in early Christian iconography. The cross is only one of many symbols Christian bodies have used for social self-definition, but when it was linked with ancient practices of warding against evil, its social function deepened. Membership in a social body became an apocalyptic event. And that apocalyptic function was always tied into the much deeper ideological pattern of vicarity, a pattern marked by language of light and darkness for distinct peoples—beginning with the parting of the ways of Jews and Christians. The apocalyptic logic of racial distinction has had a long and disastrous history in Western Christianity.23 The Fundamentals and The Cross and the Lynching Tree illustrate the two layers of symbolic meaning of the cross: its power of social definition and exclusion, and its capacity for empowering meaning making, especially for marginalized or disempowered groups. Both texts are organized around the idea of the holy victim. It is difficult to conceive of two more disparate events in American history than the launching of the fundamentalist

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movement and lynching in the Jim Crow South; yet the texts that bear witness to them, “The Atonement” and “Jesus Christ in Georgia,” are contemporaneous, and indeed it is impossible to avoid the disconcerting awareness that the editors of The Fundamentals were launching their offensive on modernism as the great threat to American culture at the same moment Black men, women, and children were becoming “strange fruit” on Southern trees. It is a stark example of American Christianity’s ability to ignore the suffering of marginalized people while it conducts culture wars in barely coded campaigns to maintain white privilege. I want to be very careful not to erase the distinctiveness of lynched Black Christianity by drawing overly easy parallels with other communities I have discussed in this book. While the Christian literary traditions of the Black church and Harlem Renaissance employ the symbol of the cross in very similar ways to earlier groups—the Gnostics, the martyrs, the popular reformers of the high Middle Ages—to make sense of their suffering, the violence of the lynching regime was unique. The closest parallel might be the persecuted Anabaptists in the Reformation era, though there are further analogues to be found in colonial indigenous literature. But these are just parallels. The cross illuminates the cruelty of oppression in the particularity of each experience, irreducible to the patterns and tropes of system building and ideological reification. After all, the premise of the symbol from the beginning of Christianity has been its subversiveness: an instrument of state terror was co-opted by a counterculture and proclaimed as the unique intervention of the divinity in history. A victim of inexorable political power was made the lord of all and savior of the world. From the beginning the symbol was also domesticated. In being transformed into a cipher for social organization and political self-definition, the cross lost much of its power. It was bankrolled into a transactional logic of debt and surplus, dependent as it was on surrogate holy bodies and excrescent reprobate ones. Still, the power of the symbol to inspire resistance and imbue suffering with transcendence recurs throughout Western Christian history, often at the same time that it was being used to demarcate elect communities dependent on the transactional logic of merit. This tension is the overarching trajectory of this book, and the parallel stories of early twentieth-century American Christianity capture the paradox of the body of the cross well. On the one side, the body of the cross stands for the elect political body, whether that be the orthodox church of early Christianity or the corpus christianum. The cross seals the holy body, marks it off as sacred and chosen, places it on the side of the hopeful soldier and the repentant thief. On the other side is the heretic, the Jew, the fanatic, the Black victim: these are the reprobates whose exclusion from the body

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of the cross only heightens its pretensions to universality. Often that exclusion meant violence, the violence of the powerful against the weak—a curiously recursive evacuation of a symbol originally meant to expose the pretensions of power. This is a striking example of what Jon Pahl calls “blessed brutality”: American Christianity’s “penchant for violence, both symbolic and material, while also cloaking that violence in religious innocence.”24 The body of the cross is semaphore for participation in Christ—what deutero-Paul called “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col 1:24). The great paradox of the symbol of the cross in Western Christianity is how fraught this idea is. Even as the formation of the Christian social body depended on holy bodies taking on Christ’s suffering, few indeed aspired to that privilege themselves. My investigation of the martyrs found that the status of “other Christs” was, by and large, imposed on them by a church needing to incorporate their merits into a sacramental economy; Anselm and the early practitioners of affective devotion were content to witness Christ’s suffering rather than take it into their own bodies; even the mystics of the passion such as Mechthild and Bonaventure tended to mediate Christ’s suffering, Mechthild through Mary and Bonaventure through Francis. It is only with the mystics like Francis and the radicals of the sixteenth century that we find Christians willing to talk plainly about participating in Christ’s passion and death.

On Earth as It Is in Heaven The reformation radicals were able to appropriate language of participation in Christ because, with the evangelical reforms, the medieval sacerdotal apparatus of holiness and merit transfer had been stripped away. This was an essential moment in the emergence of modern atonement thinking. In chapter 7, my vision constricted as I sought to understand how penal substitution became lodged in the heart of the Reformed tradition and, by implication, later in modern American evangelicalism. Correspondingly, the reaction against penal substitution became an essential plank in the platform of modern progressive Christianity. This book ranges both more widely and more contextually than Gustaf Aulén’s influential study, and I eschewed classification of anachronistic “theories” of the atonement. Given a little room to breathe outside of the reductionistic typologies of modern theology, our texts became more diverse and bizarre than is often realized. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo is a theory of the incarnation and the devil’s rights; Abelard is concerned with the rights of the devil and the transformation of affections; Augustine is dealing

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with ecclesiological implications of the martyr cult; Luther was trying to clarify the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist; Müntzer saw the peasants’ revolts as the apocalyptic ravaging of late medieval German theopolitics. As for those Reformed thinkers who inaugurated a covenant theology premised on penal substitution with full self-awareness, atonement theorizing was a moment in a wider project of theological construction. Even Perkins saved the cross primarily for more affective (and brutal) applications of spiritual exercise and religious subjectivation. Penal substitution emerged in a complex set of theological, liturgical, and political dynamics in the late Middle Ages and Reformation, and chapters 6 and 7 focused on only one aspect of these dynamics. Still, the picture that emerged in those chapters was clear. The medieval church was the treasury of merit, and the sacerdotal system administered that merit, but this system was replaced by the fragility of faith of the magisterial reformers, leaving a void in Western Christianity. The Anabaptists filled that vacuum with a performance of Christ’s passion, locating salvation and merit in participation; the magisterial reformers, on the other hand, could not countenance anything but passive reception of that merit, as they sought to preserve Christ’s agency, a move that locked Protestant soteriology into recurring cycles of extrinsicism and subjectivism. When Luther and other magisterial reformers turned to the political task of propping up the remains of the corpus christianum against the sorry moral state of the evangelical churches and the Anabaptist threat, discourses of discipline and punishment entered into Protestant ecclesiology. Surveillance and repression became the sinews of the Protestant churches, especially in the Reformed tradition, and the tension between extrinsic divine action in redemption and the subjective human evidence of that redemption stretched to the breaking point. Within the totalizing concepts of forensic justification and predestination, the old logic of vicarity became lodged within the human subject herself. I called this recursion: the punishment of Christ becomes the internal punishment of the religious subject; Christ relieves guilt, but only by indebting the Christian even further in the divine contract. The introduction spoke of refusing the atonement gesture, a gesture that instrumentalizes the violence of the cross to fulfill divine purpose. Atonement theology is a machine for neutralizing suffering by rendering it transcendent, and the holy victims of this book are the ghosts in the machine, the dangerous memories whose deaths disturb complacent, tidy typologies. But the memory of the crucified, whether that is the Christ, the martyr, or the heretic, is also the paradox that sits at the center of the Christian symbolic universe. What might it mean to honor this memory,

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even to imagine redemption amid the wreckage of these holy bodies, while also allowing the history of violence to stand in all its naked atrocity? Atonement thinking is a machine for generating transcendent meaning out of senseless suffering. It is a failure of nerve that negates the reality of that suffering to do so, by normalizing it, rationalizing it, sanctifying it— rendering sensible the senseless. But as Cone, Williams, and Copeland (and so many others) have been emphasizing for decades, it is a small step, if it is a step at all, from rationalizing holy suffering to legitimizing more prosaic kinds. Jesus had to suffer for our salvation, and the sufferings of this present time have not stopped since. This book began (in conception, at least) as a meditation on Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations, and it only seems appropriate to return to these troubling, ambiguous, tortured texts to conclude. Anselm would have us at the foot of the cross, with Mary between hope and despair. To put ourselves there is to stand in vigil. When Anselm prays with Mary, he is joining a cloud of witnesses of holy victims, the memory of their passion giving him voice to pray to a terrifying void opened up on the cross. In part this is an affective exercise, imaginative reinhabitation of the Gospels—the type of practice later perfected by Francis of Assisi and Mechthild of Magdeburg. But Anselm also develops a language of kinship with the saints and the savior. For example, in his prayer to Paul, Anselm riffs on the apostle’s self-image as a nursemaid in 1 Thessalonians to develop language of divine solidarity. Paul is a mother who has birthed Anselm in the faith, but Jesus is also a mother, a hen who gathers sinners under her wings.25 And so it goes throughout the prayers. Anselm is a witness with the martyred Stephen; he leans on Jesus’s chest with John the Evangelist; John the Baptist cleanses his soul with fire and Spirit. And these saints are not simply biblical figures; Anselm has equally complex and daring prayers to Nicolas of Myra and Benedict. For the Anselm of the prayers, Christ is not unique; he is part of a constellation of figures by which Anselm constructs a community of memory and solidarity. The church for Anselm, as the communion of saints, is not simply a dispenser of merit. It is, instead, a community animated by the memory of the sainted dead. And it is not difficult to imagine him writing new prayers to Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., or Oscar Romero. This doesn’t simply amount to a series of moral exemplars; no, to Anselm it is not just the faith of Jesus Christ one pleads as one’s righteousness; it is the faith of Mary, Paul, and Stephen. The memory of the righteous saints stirs up the lassitude of the theologian. But this community of memory and solidarity can only answer for half of the equation, the elect in the social body. The body of the cross is not simply the just dead but also the unjustly murdered. Here we stand with

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the devastated Mary of the Ramsay Psalter (chapter 4, fig. 5), eyes downcast, mourning the loss of her son, discovering that the death of a loved one is a hole in the world that cannot soon be filled. She swoons in grief. Traditional iconography has hesitated to stay with her at the foot of the cross. In the Ramsay Psalter, the eye follows an arc: downward with Mary’s gaze, up through John’s outstretched hand, in triumphal procession toward the cross. The composition of the cross itself elevates: Jesus’s arms look more like an embrace or an orans pose, arms lifted to heaven, then the sag of dislocated shoulders and collapsed lungs. We’re back in the machinery of atonement. What if we refused to make the suffering of Christ or Mary part of an algorithm and instead let their suffering stand? A community of memory and solidarity would refuse to rationalize the deaths of the unjustly murdered and instead commemorate their bodies, like Delores Williams’s desecration, as the victims of the blessed brutality of empire. Then Anselm would need to write prayers for—to—the unjustly dead: Emmett Till, Matthew Shepard, Breonna Taylor, or George Floyd. What if the foot of the cross were a place of remembrance of the singularity of senseless death—for the work of mourning and the desperate vow that such a death should never happen again? The Ramsay Psalter would have us exult with John, looking to some heavenly horizon where there is rest and an end to all murder. But at the margin of the image, a sword pierces Mary’s heart still. Theology struggles to adequate that to language, all too tempted to render her suffering into the sacred machinery of atonement, writing a history of violence on earth, as it is in heaven.

Notes

Introduction 1. The traditional account of Mantz’s death is related in Christian Neff and Harold S. Bender, “Manz, Felix (ca. 1498–1527),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Manz,_Felix_(ca._1498-1527)&oldid=145842. 2. Constantine P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in Collected Poems, ed. George Savidis, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=119. 3. I am referring generally to Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power; although his influence is in the background of much of this book, I am not offering a systematic Foucauldian analysis here. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977). 4. For a classic articulation, see Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn, Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1989). The critique is widespread in feminist literature and has its own reception history; it is assumed, for example, in the groundbreaking work of Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2008). 5. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Foucault himself knew this as well: “There are no relations of power without resistances.” Michel Foucault, “Power and Strategies,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 142. 6. The next three paragraphs are taken from Travis E. Ables, “ ‘It’s Only Legal If It Works’: Atonement and Violence,” Anglican Theological Review 102, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 470–71.

200 / notes to pages 5–15 7. I borrow this term from J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). 8. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003). 9. Aulén, 6. For Irenaeus, see 16–35. 10. Aulén, writing out of the Lundensian school of theology, associated the traditional account especially with Ritschl and leveraged early dialectical theology to recapture Luther; Aulén, 2–3. 11. Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement; Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise; Darby Ray, Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse, and Ransom (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1998); Ben Pugh, Atonement Theories: A Way through the Maze (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014). 12. Mine is not the only protest against this tendency; see Frances M. Young, Construing the Cross: Type, Sign, Symbol, Word, Action (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), xv (citing Thomas Noble); and Thomas Andrew Bennett, Labor of God: The Agony of the Cross as the Birth of the Church (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017), who speaks of the “alarming inefficacy of tired recitations of the cross as sacrifice or substitution or ransom” (14). 13. See the powerful analysis of Hagar’s surrogacy in Gen. 16 in Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993). That said, my language is not intended to be technical: I use surrogate, substitute, vicarity, proxies, and other terms interchangeably. 14. This bears some general resemblance to the concerns of ethnographic theology, and I have benefited from many conversations with one of the leading proponents of that discipline, Natalie Wigg-Stevenson. See her Ethnographic Theology: An Inquiry into the Production of Theological Knowledge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Transgressive Devotion: Theology as Performance Art (London: SCM, 2021). I hasten to add that I have not tried to apply the theoretical or methodological norms of that discipline here, and I do not claim that any ethnographic theologian would necessarily recognize this book as kindred to their work. 15. In this regard, I have learned much from Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise; Young, Construing the Cross; and the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, especially Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

1. The Way of Darkness and the Way of Light: The Cross as Boundary Marker in Early Christianity 1. Representations of the cross in material culture are notoriously rare in the preConstantinian era. In this chapter I follow the argument of Robin Jensen that the cross is not literally depicted but is present symbolically in early Christian art, using narrative visual motifs. Robin M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (New York: Routledge, 2000), 133–36. One compelling argument associates the cross and empire: only with the arrival of militant Constantinianism did Christianity become focused upon the world-denying violence of the passion, rather than creation-affirming visions of paradise. See Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise: How

notes to pages 15–19 / 201 Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008). This thesis is not unique to Brock and Parker; see Bruce W. Longenecker’s account of this interpretive tradition in The Cross before Constantine: The Early Life of a Christian Symbol (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 1–20. 2. Felicity Harley-McGowan, “Death Is Swallowed Up in Victory: Scenes of Death in Early Christian Art and the Emergence of Crucifixion Iconography,” Cultural Studies Review 17, no. 1 (March 2011): 27. See also the description by Georg Daltrop in The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982), 220. 3. See Harley-McGowan, “Death Is Swallowed Up,” 101–24. A contemporaneous parallel, the “passion sarcophagus,” embeds the crux invicta within a series of scenes from the Gospel passion narratives, centered on a placid Jesus accused before a shamed Pontius Pilate. The visual rhetoric of this sarcophagus suggests a parallel between Jesus and Pilate and the two soldiers, who are again positioned at the foot of the cross in alternating postures of despair and faith. The sarcophagus can be viewed at http://www.korn bluthphoto.com/images/VaticanMuseums_163-64-65.jpg. See also Jeffrey Spier, “The Life, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ,” in Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art, ed. Jeffrey Spier et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 219. 4. On provenance, see Robert A. Kraft, The Apostolic Fathers: A New Translation and Commentary, vol. 3, Barnabas and the Didache (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 42–48; I will use the translation of Michael W. Holmes, trans. and ed., The Apostolic Fathers in English, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 174–75. Geoffrey Dunn notes the consensus on a late first- or very early second-century dating; “Tertullian and Rebekah: A Re-reading of an ‘Anti-Jewish’ Argument in Early Christian Literature,” Vigiliae Christianae 52 (1998): 126n25. 5. The Epistle of Barnabas, in Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers in English, 4.8, 6. This is not the work of Paul’s companion from the book of Acts, but for purposes of convenience, I will simply call the author Barnabas. 6. Barnabas, 13.2. 7. Barnabas, 5.11. 8. Barnabas, 14.1–5. 9. Barnabas, 10.9. 10. Barnabas, 11.6–8. 11. Barnabas, chap. 18; the textual issues here are complex, as the original epistle evidently ends at chap. 17, and chaps. 18–21 share some degree of a textual basis with the Didache. See Kraft, Barnabas and the Didache, 4–16. However, the apocalyptic “two ways” theme is also present in Barnabas 4. This is a classic way of setting ritual and social differentiations in a charged cosmic-historical setting (Barnabas, 3.6–4.1; 19.2); see Kraft, Barnabas and the Didache, 27–29. 12. Barnabas, 5.1–6; 7.11; 5.11; 5.6, respectively. 13. Dunn, “Tertullian and Rebekah,” 127. See the section “Judaism and Gnosticism as Useful Fictions” below for more. 14. Dunn, “Tertullian and Rebekah,” 128 (quoting William Frend). 15. Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), esp. 94–115, which analyzes Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. See also the quote on 103: “A different interpretation of scripture produces a reading that authorizes a ‘new people,’ but at the same time the competition for shared scriptures is waged as an ethnoracial one.”

202 / notes to pages 20–23 16. Justin Martyr, First Apology, in St. Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies, trans. Leslie William Barnard (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 13. 17. First Apology, 44; see also 46; Second Apology 8, 10, 13. The issues involved in interpretation of this idea are complex; see Barnard’s long discussion in First and Second Apologies, 196n71. 18. Buell, Why This New Race, 70; on Justin, see 79–80. See also pages 87 and 152, where Buell demonstrates that this ethnic reasoning was not unique to Christians but was analogous to cultural (and imperial) production of “Romanness.” As Buell shows, Justin appropriated the genealogical claims of Israel for Christians, making the Jews a fixed people superseded by the fluid boundaries of the new, true Christian race, while at the same time making Christianity the true race (95–96). This reasoning was at the base of Christians’ processes of self-definition, inventing genealogies, expropriating sacred texts, and aligning themselves with the Roman imperium to do so. 19. For example, Apologeticum 16; Ad nationes 12; Adversus Judaeos 13; and, in correspondence with the themes of Apostolic Tradition below, De corona 3. 20. First Apology, 55. 21. The aquila was an eagle carried atop a staff; the tropaeum was the presentation of captured weapons or armor atop a spear. Both were cruciform symbols to early Christians. See First and Second Apologies, 166nn340–41 for discussion. On the plow, which became a christological symbol, see Jean Daniélou, Primitive Christian Symbols, trans. Donald Attwater (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1964), 94–98. 22. First Apology, 60. 23. First Apology, 60. 24. First Apology, 31. 25. First Apology, 35. 26. Rebecca Lyman, “2002 NAPS Presidential Address: Hellenism and Heresy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 11. 27. Buell, Why This New Race, 95; see also Daniel Boyarin, “Justin Martyr Invents Judaism,” Church History 70, no. 3 (September 2001): 427–61. 28. See especially Lyman, “Hellenism and Heresy.” 29. It is notable that some of the earliest portrayals of Jesus’s crucifixion are on magical gems and amulets, such as the Pereire gem, ca. 200, which depicts Christ on the cross and invokes Emmanuel along with the magical deities Badetophoth and Satraperkmeph. See Felicity Harley, “The Crucifixion,” in Spier, Picturing the Bible, 228; for a similar magical intaglio in the British Museum, see https://www.britishmuseum .org/collection/object/H_1986-0501-1. 30. Hippolytus, On the Apostolic Tradition, trans. and commentary Alistair Stewart (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 20.7–9. I will use Stewart for the convenience of his translation, but in general follow the conclusions of Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002) for Apostolic Tradition’s textual history and development. On exorcism in early Christian baptism, see Robin Jensen, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity: Ritual, Visual, and Theological Dimensions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 31–35. 31. Jensen, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity, 86. 32. It is also possible that the sealing should be associated with the ephphatha, the “opening” of the senses. See especially Ambrose’s De sacramentiis 1.1.2–3 and De mysteriis 1.3–4 on this practice, which reenacts the “opening” (ephphatha) of the deaf-mute

notes to pages 23–26 / 203 man’s ears and tongue in Mark 7:33–34; it would thus symbolize the opening of the senses to the gospel—an initiatory movement. My thanks for J. David Belcher for these references. See also Jensen, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity, 36; Bradshaw et al., Apostolic Tradition, 111; and Stewart, Apostolic Tradition, 109. 33. Stewart, Apostolic Tradition, 21.22–23, 27–28; Jensen, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity, 99, and 86–88 for more references to the sign of the cross. For parallels, cf. Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis, 8; Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, 22. 34. Stewart, Apostolic Tradition, 21.27–28. 35. Cf. Jensen, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity, 139–40. 36. Para. 38 similarly warns of an “alien spirit” licking up spilled eucharistic wine. 37. Stewart, Apostolic Tradition, 42A. 38. “When he was handed over to voluntary suffering, in order to dissolve death and break the chains of the devil and harrow hell and illuminate the just and fix a boundary and manifest the resurrection, he took bread.” Stewart, Apostolic Tradition, 4.7–8. 39. This theology of the cross is also found in chap. 41, a horarium marking the hours of prayer in the day by the hours of crucifixion. As the events of the passion unfold in prayer through the day, the believer prepares for the passage through the night, awaiting the resurrection and preserved from temptation. The hour of sleep is the hour of Christ’s death, into which the believer enters in hope of resurrection with all creation: “At that hour all creation is still for a moment to praise the Lord. Stars and trees and waters stop for an instant, and all the host of angels which ministers to him praises God as this hour with the souls of the just” (Stewart, Apostolic Tradition, 41.15). 40. Daniel Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (to Which Is Appended a Correction of My Border Lines),” Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 11. As the title implies, this is a capsule statement of his Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Instead of “Judaism” and “Christianity,” “ ‘JudaeoChristianity’ . . . should be seen as the original cauldron of contentious, dissonant, sometimes friendly, more frequently hostile, and fecund religious productivity out of which ultimately precipitated two institutions at the end of late antiquity, orthodox Christianity and rabbinic Judaism” (“Justin Martyr Invents Judaism,” 461). 41. See Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity,” 33–36. 42. Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity,” 12. Important points of reference: Steven Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38, nos. 4–5 (2007): 457–512, who shows that “Jews” never used the term Ioudaioi of themselves, indeed had no word for Judaism. See also Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1963), which introduced the historical relativization of the very idea of “religion” in Anglophone scholarship. 43. In the background here is a large literature; for a start, in addition to Lyman, “Hellenism and Heresy,” see David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Karen King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), see esp. the work of Averil Cameron, for example, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and “How to Read Heresiology,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 471–92. The classic modern work is Alain le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie dans la littérature grecque IIe–IIIe siècles (Paris: Beauchesne, 2001).

204 / notes to pages 26–29 44. For the watershed articulation of this idea, see Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, ed. Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971 [1934]). Bauer’s argument has been contested in many, if not most, of its historical particulars. The basic premise of his book, however, holds: there is no original “root” of true Christianity from which various heresies split off as so many wayward aberrations. Early Christianity was irreducibly diverse and particular; it was due to the accidents of history, not theological inevitability, that one party emerged dominant. Early Christian claims to the inherent unity of the scattered communities were “idealizing, not descriptive” (Buell, Why This New Race, 145). See Brakke, Gnostics, 6–7. 45. Brakke, Gnostics, 7. See also April DeConick, “Gnostic Spirituality at the Crossroads of Christianity: Transgressing Boundaries and Creating Orthodoxy,” in Beyond the Gnostic Gospels: Studies Building on the Work of Elaine Pagels, ed. Eduard Iricinschi et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 148–84. 46. Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics, 29, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Allan Menzies, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956). 47. The term is borrowed (and reallocated) from Sebastian Moll, The Arch-Heretic Marcion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). 48. Buell, Why This New Race, 211n2. 49. Tuomas Rasimus, “Gnostic Apocalypse Now!,” review of Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism, by Dylan M. Burns, Marginalia: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel, January 20, 2015, http://marginalia .lareviewofbooks.org/gnostic-apocalypse-now-tuomas-rasimus/. 50. See the overview of Brakke in Gnostics, 19–28; Rasimus, “Gnostic Apocalypse Now!” 51. The Sethians were a group who did self-identify as Gnostic and had a demiurgic cosmogony resembling the textbook account I described earlier. Many scholars argue that the Sethians (or Barbelo-Gnostics) are the only group meriting the title, for they developed the mythology familiar to many simplifications of Gnosticism: a divine triad (the unknowable first god, Barbelo, and Christ the Pronoia), a system of aeons (the pleroma), and the demiurge, Elohim/Ialdabaoth, responsible for the creation of fallen creation. This is Brakke’s argument, following Bentley Layton. See Gnostics, 28–51. 52. As Peter Lampe has shown, ecclesial leadership in Rome in the second century was decentralized, with multiple bishops. From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, ed. Marshall D. Johnson, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 359–408. Valentinus was one among many leaders, and it was not until the 180s that the Valentinians began to be ostracized from Roman circles (well after the followers of Marcion split off on their own; Lampe, 390–91). This coincides with the development of the Roman monarchical episcopate under Victor. 53. Although he draws a sharper distinction between the Valentinian Gnostics and the “orthodox” than I will (following Karen King and David Brakke), Christoph Markschies’s summary of Valentinian distinctives is helpful; Gnosis: An Introduction, trans. John Bowden (New York: T&T Clark, 2001), 89–94. 54. Brakke, Gnostics, 101. 55. The Apocalypse of Peter, confusingly enough, is a title of multiple early Christian texts, including one (early second century) that was a minor contender for

notes to pages 29–31 / 205 canonicity and survives in both Greek and Ethiopic; it is not Gnostic, but a kind of ancestor of Dante—a tour of heaven and hell. There is also an independent Arabic Apocalypse of Peter. 56. Apocalypse of Peter, translated as “The Revelation of Peter,” in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, ed. Marvin Meyer (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 74. Cf. the text that immediately precedes it in Nag Hammadi codex 7, The Second Discourse of Great Seth, in Meyer, Nag Hammadi Scriptures: “It is a matter fit for slavery to say, We shall die with Christ” (49). 57. Apocalypse of Peter, 81–83. 58. King, What Is Gnosticism?, 53. Cf. Meyer’s introduction, “Revelation of Peter,” 489. 59. With probable influences from the Thomas tradition. See Madeleine Scopello’s introduction to the Gospel of Philip (Gos. Phil.) in Meyer, Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 158. It is also a composite text; it is impossible to locate any one argument running through it, but in its editing or redaction there are nonetheless clear thematic trends. Layton describes it as an anthology of various Valentinian traditions; The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 325–26. 60. Gos. Phil., 62–63. 61. Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 11. 62. Gos. Phil., 69, 78. 63. Cf. Brakke, Gnostics, 116. 64. Gos. Phil., 71.22–72.4; 73.8–19. On the fluidity of Gos. Phil.’s categories and the logic of progressive transformation driving them, see Buell, Why This New Race, 128–34. 65. Gos. Phil., 74.3–5. 66. Gos. Phil., 75.2. Layton translates this as “through transgression.” 67. Gos. Phil., 75.25–76.6. 68. Gos. Phil., 75.14–25. I have elided a paragraph break. 69. Gos. Phil., 77.7–10; see April D. DeConick, “The True Mysteries: Sacramentalism in the Gospel of Philip,” Vigiliae Christianae 55 (2001): 9. Baptism itself is incomplete, or deficient, without chrism (Gos. Phil., 74.12–24). 70. As DeConick argues, Philip polemicizes against (proto-orthodox?) views on resurrection by associating the Eucharist with the “perfect man,” Jesus’s spiritual body that is cloaked from the archons in its ascent through the heavens (“True Mysteries,” 242–43). 71. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism,” 125, speaking of the Gospel of Truth. As Williams documents, both Gos. Truth and Gos. Phil. can speak of “God’s body” (long before Sallie McFague), and Williams argues strenuously that the stereotype of bodydenying Gnosticism is deeply misleading (116–38). We are not so far from what would become orthodoxy—cf. John Chrysostom: “What we believe is not the same as what we see, but we see one thing and believe another.” Homilies on 1 Corinthians 7.1, quoted in DeConick, “True Mysteries,” 229. 72. The idea of recapitulation is an intriguing area of overlap between Philip and Irenaeus; see, for example, Gos. Phil. 71.18–21: “Christ was born of a virgin to correct the fall that occurred in the beginning.” 73. DeConick, “True Mysteries,” 241; for the crucifixion of the world, see Gos. Phil., 63.21–42.

206 / notes to pages 31–40 74. To say nothing of a text like the Gospel of Truth, which features a reversal passage strikingly similar to the kenotic themes of Philippians 2 and the triumphal imagery of Colossians 2, speaking of a Christ “who humbled himself even unto death, though clothed in eternal life. He stripped off the perishable rags and clothed himself in incorruptibility” (Gospel of Truth, in Meyer, Nag Hammadi Scriptures, 20). 75. See Matthew Steenberg, “The Gospel of Truth and the Truth of the Gospel: Assessing the Scope of Valentinian Influence on the Thought of St. Irenaeus,” Studia Patristica, ed. A. Brent and M. Vinzent (Louvain: Peeters Publishers, 2011), 50:89–103, with detailed textual parallels. 76. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, rev. Cleveland Coxe (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 1:4.7.3–4. Hereafter AH. 77. AH, 4.6.5; italics mine. 78. Steenberg, “Gospel of Truth and the Truth of the Gospel,” 100. 79. Irenaeus, AH, 5.16.2. Emphasis and bracketed insertion in original. 80. AH, 5.1.1. Note also the famous formula of recapitulation: “The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ . . . did, through his transcendent love, become what we are, that he might bring us to be even what he is himself. . . . The Word of God was made man, assimilating himself to man, and man to himself, so that by means of his resemblance to the Son, man might become precious to the Father. For in times past, it was said that man was created after the image of God, but it was not [actually] shown; for the Word was as yet invisible, after whose image man was created. . . . He re-established the similitude after a sure manner, by assimilating man to the invisible Father through means of the visible Word” (AH, 5, preface; 5.16.2). 81. AH, 5.1.1, 5.32.1. 82. AH, 3.18.1, 6. See also 5.1.1: “And since the apostasy tyrannized over us unjustly, and though we were by nature the property of the omnipotent God, alienated us contrary to nature, rendering us its own disciples, the Word of God . . . did righteously turn against that apostasy, and redeem from it his own property.” 83. I owe the language of interchange and am indebted for the direction of much of the argument of this section to M. David Litwa, “The Wondrous Exchange: Irenaeus and Eastern Valentinians on the Soteriology of Interchange,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 22, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 311–41.

2. The Body of the Martyr and the Body of Christ 1. Felicity Harley-McGowan, “From Victim to Victor: Developing an Iconography of Suffering in Early Christian Art,” in The Art of Empire: Christian Art in Its Imperial Context, ed. Lee M. Jefferson and Robin M. Jensen (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 131. Harley-McGowan revives the thesis of André Grabar, arguing Christian art was influenced by, if not dependent on, Roman imperial iconography. This is against Thomas F. Mathews’s The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 2. The Martyrs of Lyons, in Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. Herbert Musurillo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 63. Some acta can be accessed through other sources than Musurillo’s edition, which is out of print. The Lyons letter, for example, is in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History 5.1.3–2.8, which is available in numerous translations; Polycarp’s martyrdom account is also found in editions of the Apostolic

notes to pages 40–4 7 / 207 Fathers, such as Michael W. Holmes, trans. and ed., Apostolic Fathers in English, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 147–56. 3. Lyons, 73. 4. Lyons, 85. 5. Martyrdom of Marian and James, 2, in Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 197. 6. Marian and James, 8. 7. Marian and James, 11. 8. The martyrdoms of Perpetua and Felicity are very well known, so I will not be discussing them here, in lieu of texts less familiar to nonspecialists. Broadly speaking, though, their themes and use of cross imagery cohere with the other acta I discuss. 9. Robin Darling Young, In Procession before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001) argues that Christians deliberately trained for martyrdom as a subversive liturgical act. 10. Lyons, 73. 11. Lyons, 79–81. 12. Marian and James, 4. 13. Marian and James, 5. 14. Marian and James, 10. 15. Marian and James, 11. 16. Martyrdom of Pionius the Presbyter and His Companions, 21, in Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 163. 17. Martyrdom of Saint Irenaeus Bishop of Sermium, 2, in Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 295. 18. Letter of Ignatius to the Romans, 3–4, in Holmes, Apostolic Fathers in English, 113–14. All of the quotes in this paragraph come from these two chapters. On Ignatius’s equation of martyrdom with discipleship, see Candida Moss, Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 42–43. 19. Ignatius, Romans, 4, 2. 20. Ignatius, Romans, 7. 21. Ignatius, Romans, 6.2–3, 4.3. 22. Polycarp, 2, in Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 3. 23. See Young, In Procession before the World, 23; George Heyman, The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 193. 24. Polycarp, 7. 25. Polycarp, 14, 15. 26. There is a large literature on this point; see esp. Enrico Mazza, The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer, trans. Ronald E. Lane (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 154–56. 27. Polycarp, 15. 28. Polycarp, 17. 29. Marian and James, 13. I have put atonement in lower case; Musurillo capitalizes the term without warrant from the Latin. See the brief discussion in J. D. Scott, “An Original Marian Insight in a Third-Century Martyrdom,” Studia Patristica 39, ed. F. Young, M. Edwards, and P. Parvis (Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2006), 435–39.

208 / notes to pages 4 7–5 1 30. Marian and James, 1. 31. Marian and James, 11. 32. Marian and James, 1, 4; see also the “glorious crown” Aemilian hopes for and the favor of martyrdom James prays for (8, 11). 33. On the gender issues here, see note 42 below. 34. Lyons, 75. See also 67 on Blandina as a “noble athlete.” 35. Lyons, 85. See Moss, Other Christs, 94, for the argument that the fishhook metaphor arises from popular martyrdom accounts. 36. Martyrdom of Saints Montanus and Lucius, 4, in Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 217. 37. “The time was drawing near for [Fructuosus] to attain not the final penalty but rather the unfading crown. . . . They were like Ananias, Azarias, and Misael . . . when the bands that tied their hands were burnt through . . . they knelt down in joy assured of the resurrection, and stretching out their arms in memory of the Lord’s cross, they prayed to the Lord.” Martyrdom of Fructuosus and His Deacons, Augurius and Eulogius, 4, in Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 181, 183. In para. 7, Fructuosus and the “blessed martyrs” have “trod underfoot the Devil’s head.” 38. Lyons, 83. 39. Lyons, 83. 40. See Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 41. Lyons, 75. 42. Lyons, 79. The subject of the gender politics of the martyrdom acta is, unfortunately, outside the scope of this chapter, but I note the ambivalence with which women martyrs are treated in the narratives. As L. Stephanie Cobb points out, the martyrologies challenge Roman power structures—but they also depend on Roman cultural norms: “The stories of the martyrs do not reject or even substantially revise common understandings of sex and the virtues and hierarchies accompanying them. On the contrary, the texts are culturally conservative in the sense that they utilize cultural expectations of manliness, justice, and volition in their descriptions of Christians. . . . When female martyrs are described as manly, it is not a liberating description of women per se, but a comment on the transformation (or potential for transformation) of a female to male and is rooted firmly in the ancient world’s correlation of maleness with virtue, strength, and honor.” Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 12–13; see also 115. Heyman (Power of Sacrifice, 199) differs from Cobb, arguing that the martyr texts “impress on an ancient patriarchal society a positive evaluation of weakness, normally described as feminine virtue,” but, while true, this does not negate the normativity of masculinity. See also Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory. 43. Lyons, 69. 44. Lyons, 69. 45. Lyons, 75. 46. Lyons, 69. 47. Lyons, 75. 48. Lyons, 85. 49. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 43–51. 50. Bynum, 49–50: Ignatius, Cyprian, the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, and Polycarp.

notes to pages 52–5 7 / 209 51. Montanus and Lucius, 8; Marian and James, 11, 209; Martyrdom of Potamiaena and Basilides, 6, in Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 135; for the concern for ashes, see Fructuosus 6. 52. Moss, Other Christs, 86–87, and esp. 246n67, 247n68; see also Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 227n96. Moss especially points to Frances Young, who makes this argument, but with important qualifications (see below). It is notable that Robert J. Daly’s magisterial study relies heavily on Blandina and particularly Polycarp as evidence of a “Christ-mysticism” in the acta; Christian Sacrifice: The Judaeo-Christian Background before Origen (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1978), 381–82. 53. See Moss, Other Christs, 247n68. I follow Moss’s line of argument in general, but I am also seeking to nuance the language of sacrifice more than Moss perhaps does on this point. 54. Polycarp, 1. See the discussion of Apostolic Tradition in chapter 1 for more on this idea of the “seal.” 55. Polycarp, 16. 56. Several accounts offer an unsettling variation by portraying the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving as offered to Christ himself. The martyr Euplus declares, “I sacrifice myself now to Christ my God.” Dasius, forced to offer himself as a human sacrifice to Saturn, instead chooses execution as a sacrifice to Christ: “Seeing that you force me to such a despicable act, better is it for me to become a sacrifice to the Lord Christ by my own choice rather than immolate myself to your idol Saturn.” Acts of Euplus, 2 (Latin recension), and Martyrdom of the Saintly Dasius, 5, in Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 317, 275, respectively. 57. Frances Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), 21. For the remainder of the paragraph, see 22–28. 58. Young, 35. 59. Young, 26. 60. Young, 57. Young is not entirely clear on the point, for although she asserts that the martyrs’ deaths were viewed as expiatory (56), she later claims that the martyrs “were popularly believed to offer themselves to God as a holocaust, a gift-sacrifice of praise and worship” (81). 61. Young claims, with justice, that the link between sacrifice and a substitutionary victim whose death appeases the deity is a modern misconception; Sacrifice and the Death of Christ, 11. She is incisive on the basic incoherence of this idea, for it entails a contradiction in the character of God, opposing Christ and God to one another (80, 91–92). She especially credits Origen for seeing this. 62. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 54. 63. Heyman, Power of Sacrifice, 203; Young, In Procession before the World, 9; Moss, Other Christs, 85–86.

3. The Politics of Holy Bodies and the Invention of the Cross 1. For details, see Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 211–12. 2. See the account of Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 36–37; and Lucy Grig, Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2004), 2–3. See

210 / notes to pages 58–62 also Grig’s description of the process on page 86: the martyr cult was no longer simply the passio, the recounting of the martyrdom act; now there was the inventio, the finding of relics for new exigencies, and the translatio, the moving of relics within the churches. 3. Brown, Cult of Saints, 6. 4. An important caveat: my emphasis here is not chronological development or strict causation but the theological differences between two streams of tradition, the martyrdom acta and elite theological textual culture. The acta show heavy editorial theologizing, and their dating is slippery enough that we can assume that some accounts in chapter 2 are actually contemporaneous with the figures I discuss here (Origen, Cyprian, Prudentius, and Augustine). 5. Robin Darling Young, In Procession before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001), 38, speaking of Clement. 6. Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom, 1.3, in Prayer; Exhortation to Martyrdom, trans. John J. O’Meara, ACW 19 (New York: Newman Press, 1954), 1.3 (soul and body); 1.5 (virtues and piety); 2.10 (free will and reason). 7. Origen, 2.10–3.1. 8. Origen, 3.13, 14. 9. Origen, 3.13. 10. Origen, 5.29. Understanding the prayer as showing weakness and faltering of will, while humanizing, would run counter to Origen’s argument that presents the martyr as the exemplar of steadfast reason and stoicism. 11. Origen, 5.28. On parrhēsia, O’Meara (234n155) refers the reader to the note in Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord’s Prayer; The Beatitudes, trans. Hilda C. Graef, ACW 18 (New York: Newman Press, 1954), 183n26: the term descends from the right to political discourse enjoyed by Athenians as a benefit of citizenry; in Christian discourse it is a freedom of speech and boldness born of holiness and forgiveness of sin, expressed in prayer. It is a special privilege of the martyrs in intercession. 12. Origen, 5.30. See also 7.50: the saints are purchased by the blood of Jesus, and ransomed by the blood of the martyrs. Following Pamela Bright, Heyman connects this to the high priestly ideas of the book of Hebrews: “[Origen] applied the sacrificial themes associated with the High Priest in Hebrews to the act of martyrdom itself.” George Heyman, The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 207. 13. Origen, Against Celsus, 1.31, quoted in Darling Young, In Procession before the World, 52. 14. For an overview of the controversy, see J. Patout Burns Jr., Cyprian the Bishop (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–5; Allen Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250–89. 15. See, for example, letter 20.3, in Cyprian, Letters 1–81, trans. Rose Bernard Donna, CSJ (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964). 16. The Lapsed, 17, in Cyprian, The Lapsed; Unity of the Catholic Church, trans. Maurice Bévenot, SJ (New York: Newman Press, 1957). Heyman argues that Cyprian’s “rhetoric of Church order” closely parallels Severan imperial iconography as “an attempt to unify a far-flung, religiously diverse, and politically unwieldy empire [and] an attempt to mystically unite distant churches around the imperial role of each local bishop.”

notes to pages 62–70 / 211 Sacrifice became a “ritual marker for their vision of religio-political identity and loyalty . . . effect[ing] ritual communion as well as atonement” (Power of Sacrifice, 216, 17). 17. Cyprian, letter 73.21, in Letters 1–81. 18. Cyprian, Unity of the Catholic Church, 14; see again letter 73.21. 19. Cyprian, 8. See also letter 63.13: the water and wine in the chalice signifies the unity of the blood of Christ and the people who partake the sacrament. 20. Cyprian (et al.—this letter originates from a meeting of African bishops in 253), letter 57.3, in Letters 1–81. 21. Cyprian, letter 58.1, in Letters 1–81. 22. Carole Straw summarizes this development succinctly in “Martyrdom,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald, OSA (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 538–42. 23. There are twelve sermons on Cyprian’s martyrdom anniversary, September 14 (s. 308A–313F) collected in Augustine, Sermons, vol. 3/9, On the Saints, 306–340A, trans. Edmund Hill, OP (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1994), 55–120; see also Hill’s appendix on 121. Sermon 313E is generally dated to 410, but Hill argues that it should be dated as early as 395 or 396. 24. See Grig, Making Martyrs, 42–47. 25. Sermon 51.2, in Augustine, Sermons, vol. 3/3, On the New Testament, 51–94, trans. Edmund Hill, OP (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991). 26. S. 280.6, in Sermons, vol. 3/8, On the Saints, 273–305A, trans. Edmund Hill, OP (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1994). 27. S. 280.6. I have omitted an editorial parenthetical Scripture reference (1 Cor. 12:26). See also S. 137.1, in the same volume. 28. Peter Brown, “Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity,” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 9. 29. See the meticulous argument in J. Patout Burns, “How Christ Saves: Augustine’s Multiple Explanations,” in Tradition and the Rule of Faith: Essays in Honor of Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, ed. Ronnie J. Rombs and Alexander Y. Hwang (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 193–210. 30. Brown, Cult of Saints, xxvii. “The evidence appears to show [despite Augustine’s efforts] that it was precisely by keeping the saints inimitable—and, above all, inimitable in their physical sufferings—that the Christians of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages kept the saints sacred.” “Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity,” 9. 31. I will cite the translation of H. J. Thomson, Prudentius, Loeb Classic Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 2:98–345. 32. On Damasus, see Grig, Making Martyrs, 127–34; and especially Marianne Sághy, “Martyr Cult and Collective Identity in Fourth-Century Rome,” in Identity and Alterity in Hagiography and the Cult of Saints, ed. A. Marinković and T. Vedriš (Zagreb: Leykam International, 2010), 17–35. 33. For example, Vincent: hymn 5.364, 520; Cyprian: 13.47, 64; Agnes: 14.84. 34. Prudentius, 10.641–45; emphasis original. 35. Prudentius, 10.1026–40; 5.334–44; 11.131–44. 36. Prudentius, 10.1006–8. 37. Prudentius, 10.1136–40. 38. Elsewhere, Prudentius styles the suffering, not just the triumph, of the martyr as a sharing in the cross, though this is a minor theme at best. In the hymn to Vincent, for

212 / notes to pages 70–7 7 example, the angels greet him, acknowledging that he has earned his reward as a “partner of [Christ’s] cross” (Prudentius, 5.300). 39. Candida Moss, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 85–86, of the Lyons narrative. 40. See Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 41. See Grig, Making Martyrs, 120–21; Robin Margaret Jensen, Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 175; Cynthia Hahn, “Seeing and Believing: The Construction of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints’ Shrines,” Speculum 72, no. 4 (Oct. 1997): 1093n102; and for the most complete analysis, see Ana Munk, “Domestic Piety in Fourth Century Rome: A Relic Shrine beneath the Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo,” Hortus Artium Medievalium 15 (2009): 7–20. 42. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 80–82. 43. Hahn, “Seeing and Believing,” 1094–95. 44. As Peter Brown (Cult of the Saints, 26–35) shows, the fact that this is a private shrine is telling: household appropriation of the martyrs’ powers was a key problem for the bishop consolidating his sacramental authority. It meant overturning centuries of extraecclesial veneration of the saints (such as the refrigerium, the cultic meal at the martyr’s grave) and manufacturing controversy about the private “superstitious” use of the saints. Ramsay MacMullen has suggested that the vast majority of Christians attended the feast days of the martyrs rather than the services in the new basilicas—a surprising statistic that, even if exaggerated, highlights the social reality of late antique Christianity. Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200–400 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), quoted in Moss, Other Christs, 278n1. 45. This is too simple, of course, for the imitation of the saints and Christ is enormously important in the Middle Ages. But at least if we are using the endgame of penal substitution as a heuristic, the contrast is revealing. 46. Darling Young, In Procession before the World, 8. 47. Brown, “Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity,” 7.

4. Between Hope and Fear: Monastic Bodies at the Foot of the Cross 1. This point is emphasized by Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 70. 2. Alexa Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation in Late Medieval Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 112. 3. Admont, Stiftsbibliothek MS 289. The MS is not the copy Anselm sent to Matilda but seems to be based on it. See Otto Pächt, “The Illustrations of St. Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19 (1956): 68–83. For further discussion, see Sand, Vision, Devotion, and Self-Representation, 110–12 (the “hinge” comment is on 112). A scan of the codex can be viewed at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Admont, Benediktinerstift, Cod. 289, Anselmus Cantuariensis, http://manuscripta.at/diglit/AT1000-289/0004.

notes to pages 7 7–81 / 213 4. McNamer, Affective Meditation, 69–70; McNamer also draws on Richard Southern’s definitive interpretation of the affectivity of the prayers, while expanding his reading of Anselm’s authorial voice. My “dialogical” portrayal is indebted to her book. 5. This language of democratization is, of course, to be taken with a most generous grain of salt. The laity being invited are elites at the very apex of power—Adelaide, for all her reclusiveness, was the daughter of William the Conqueror, and Matilda was one of the most powerful women in Europe and made vice-queen of Italy in 1111. My claim is not of a democratization in the sense of a populism (we will see how that medieval experiment fares in chapter 5), but rather the expansion of the monastic habitus beyond the walls of the monasteries. 6. See Travis E. Ables, “Anselm on Prayer: Lament of Self and Contemplation of God,” in T&T Clark Companion to Christian Prayer, ed. Ashley Cocksworth and John C. McDowell (London: T&T Clark, 2021). 7. The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, with the Proslogion, trans. Benedicta Ward, SLG (New York: Penguin, 1973); hereafter abbreviated PM. 8. Reinhold Seeberg’s influential history especially popularized this: Text-Book of the History of Doctrine, trans. Charles E. Hay, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lutheran, 1905), 2:69. Seeberg also helped establish the Anselm-Abelard disjunction (2:66–72). 9. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 82–83. 10. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (CDH), 1.23, 15, translated as “Why God Became Man” in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). This question of cosmic order explains a baffling aspect of CDH to modern readers, which is the long discussion (1.18) of redeemed humanity’s replacement of the fallen angels in the heavenly city— Augustine’s theory from City of God. While Anselm concurs with this, he is also careful to point out that humanity was created for its own sake. It is worth pointing out that this chapter is one of the longest in CDH, which underlines the fact that Anselm’s purposes are much larger, and much more theologically exotic, than a simple theory of atonement. 11. For these two texts, see Travis E. Ables, “The Word in Which All Things Are Spoken: Augustine, Anselm, and Bonaventure on Christology and the Metaphysics of Exemplarity,” Theological Studies 76 (2015): 288–92. 12. More precisely, in resolving them in the divine simplicity. See also Richard Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 213–14. 13. Anselm, CDH, 2.1. 14. Anselm, 1.23. 15. Anselm, 1.10–15. 16. Anselm, 1.14, 2.3. Southern, Saint Anselm, 220, notes that CDH 1.14–15 “has probably done more harm to his reputation than any other part of his works.” 17. Anselm, CDH, 2.6. 18. Anselm, 2.11, 18. 19. Anselm, 2.19. 20. Anselm, 1.9. Harnack is clear that Anselm’s is “no theory of penal suffering, for Christ does not suffer penalty . . . [this is] no theory of vicarious representation.”

214 / notes to pages 81–86 Adolph Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan, 7 vols. (New York: Dover, 1961), 6:68. 21. Anselm, CDH, 1.9, 2.16. 22. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Power in the Blood: Sacrifice, Satisfaction, and Substitution in Late Medieval Soteriology,” in The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, SJ, and Gerald O’Collins, SJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 180. Bynum makes a point of arguing that Anselm and Abelard operate from the same basic theological premises. 23. Here I am differing from Seeberg, Text-Book, 2:68. Seeberg argues that “only incidentally does Anselm indicate a connection of Christ with humanity, speaking . . . of the instruction and example which Christ was able and desired to give to men; but the two points of view are not expressly and clearly combined.” I do concur with Seeberg, however, that Anselm is not clear on how the benefit of Christ’s death is applied to humanity. The reward is rhetorically and not logically maintained. 24. Saint Anselm, 221. This does not, as Southern goes on to note, make the influence historically negligible; for a further discussion see 221–27. But it does not theologically control CDH. For more on Anselm’s views of feudal relations, see his Ep. 17 and the prayer to St. Benedict. 25. See on this point Southern, Saint Anselm, 200. 26. Southern calls CDH “a commentary on obedience,” and cites Epp. 73, 156, and 196, where Anselm discusses the idea; Southern, Saint Anselm, 217n17. 27. The obvious parallel here is the Proslogion, both in the sense that what is apparently a work of philosophical theology is better understood in a devotional context, and in the sense that it has become very easy for us to read it in abstraction from that context. 28. Southern, Saint Anselm, 94–95. 29. Southern, 103. 30. Southern, 104. One of Anselm’s more memorable lines concerning the horror of self occurs in his “Prayer to St. John the Baptist”: “For to tolerate yourself is not courage / but the blunt edge of death” (in PM, ll. 111–12). 31. Drafts of the Mary prayers stretch over twenty years, demonstrating how deliberately Anselm applied himself to these centerpieces of the Prayers and Meditations— and showing a continuity of production that stretches into the period in which Cur Deus Homo was being contemplated, if not already written. See Southern, Saint Anselm, 107, 109. 32. Though see the second prayer to Mary, line 126. 33. Anselm, “Third Prayer to Mary,” ll. 56–57, 349–51. 34. Anselm, ll. 80–82. 35. Anselm, ll. 112–17. 36. Anselm, ll. 154–59. 37. Anselm, ll. 184–87. 38. Anselm, ll. 188–89. 39. Anselm, ll. 195–96. 40. Anselm, ll. 194–96, 260–65. 41. Anselm, ll. 307–11. 42. Anselm, “Prayer to the Holy Cross,” in PM, l. 86. 43. Anselm, “Prayer to Christ,” in PM, ll. 73–76, 79.

notes to pages 86–91 / 215 44. Anselm, “Third Prayer to Mary,” ll. 89–108. 45. Anselm, “Prayer to Christ,” ll. 188–91. 46. Peter Abelard, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. Steven R. Cartwright, Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011). References are to the book and chapter number of the commentary, rather than the Romans passage. 47. Mews, Abelard and Heloise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 230–48. Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1995), 46, also points out how the Anselm-Abelard divide originates in part to Bernard’s polemic. 48. Abelard, Romans, 2.117. 49. On Anselm and the rights of the devil, see Southern, Saint Anselm, 207–11; C. W. Marx, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. W. Brewer, 1995), 17–23. 50. Abelard, Romans, 2.115. 51. Abelard, 2.115. These two critiques are really one: Abelard makes the point about God’s ability to forgive sin absolutely in order to argue that God needs no basis to remove humanity from the power of the devil; both can be done by fiat. 52. Abelard, 2.116. 53. Abelard, 2.117. 54. Abelard, 2.117, 118. 55. Abelard, 2.117. 56. Abelard, 2.153. On this, see J. Patout Burns, “The Concept of Satisfaction in Medieval Redemption Theory,” Theological Studies 36 (1975): 285–304; and Thomas Williams, “Sin, Grace, and Redemption,” in The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, ed. Jeffrey E. Brower and Kevin Guilfoy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 265–67. 57. Abelard, Romans, 1.54, 2.164, 2.176. 58. Abelard, 2.163. Christus Victor language is much sparser in Abelard, as he so adamantly rejects the idea of the rights (and by extension, the dominion) of the devil; however, he can speak of Christ the high priest binding the devil through his kingly power (1.54, p. 99). The two motifs are blended in 3.205 (p. 259), where Abelard speaks of humanity selling itself to sin: “We cannot redeem ourselves. Innocent blood was given for us; we can free ourselves from the dominion of sin not by our own strength, but by the grace of the Redeemer.” 59. See references to the divided literature that Cartwright assembles in his “Introduction” to Romans, 44–46. 60. Peter Abelard, “Abelard’s Letter of Consolation to a Friend: A Story of Calamities” (Letter 1), in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise: A Translation of Their Collected Correspondence and Related Writings, trans. and ed. Mary Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23. 61. Abelard, “Letter of Consolation,” 48–49. 62. Abelard, “Letter 5,” in Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 72–73. As Peggy McCracken points out, Abelard is figuring the female body as abject, “defined as black and female,” drawing a parallel between the Ethiopian bride’s black body and the “black monastic habit that [Heloise] wears.” “The Curse of Eve: Female Bodies and Christian Bodies in Heloise’s Third Letter,” in Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 219.

216 / notes to pages 91–95 63. Abelard, “Letter 5,” 73. The concupiscence language is from Abelard, Romans, 3.205. 64. Abelard, “Letter 5,” 80–81. 65. Abelard, 83. 66. Abelard, “The Origin of the Religious Life of Nuns” (Letter 7), in Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 99–131; see Susan Valentine, “‘Inseparable Companions’: Mary Magdalene, Abelard, and Heloise,” in Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe: Gender, Power, Patronage and the Authority of Religion in Latin Christendom, ed. Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells (Boston, MA: Brill, 2009), 151–72. Valentine notes that Abelard’s letter focuses on Mary as devotee to Christ and witness of her resurrection more than her contemplative life or her reformation from sexual sin, more typical of Magdalene tropes at the time (158). 67. Abelard, “Letter 7,” 103, 123. 68. Abelard, 124–31. 69. Abelard, 80–81. 70. Abelard, 82. 71. Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 74, as quoted in Linda Georgianna, “ ‘In Any Corner of Heaven’: Heloise’s Critique of Monastic Life,” in Wheeler, Listening to Heloise, 187. Much of this section is indebted to Georgianna’s superb essay. 72. Heloise, “Letter 4,” in Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 65. 73. Heloise, 67. 74. Heloise, 69. 75. William Levitan puts it this way: “Even in the Calamities . . . she seems merely called into the story to resolve some external impasse to Abelard’s desires and to become the passive object of his interest—his lust in one instance, his charity in the other.” William Levitan, “Introduction,” in Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings, trans. William Levitan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), xix. The key, Levitan continues is this: “But this is not how she remains.” 76. Heloise, “Letter 4,” 76, 78; emphasis in the original. 77. Heloise, “Letter 6,” in Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 85. This is the beginning of what is commonly known as Heloise’s literary “conversion,” about which see Georgianna, “In Any Corner of Heaven,” 190–92; she sees only Heloise’s confession of an inability to be converted. Levitan also sees no conversion: “Introduction,” xxiv. 78. Georgianna, “In Any Corner of Heaven,” 202. 79. Georgianna, 204. 80. McCracken, “Curse of Eve,” 220–21. 81. Heloise, “Letter 6,” 90. 82. Juanita Feros Ruys, “Quae Maternae Immemor Naturae: The Rhetorical Struggle over the Meaning of Motherhood in the Writings of Heloise and Abelard,” in Wheeler, Listening to Heloise, 328. 83. Ruys, “Quae Maternae Immemor Naturae,” 324, drawing on Barbara Newman, “ ‘Crueel Corage’: Child Sacrifice and the Maternal Martyr in Hagiography and Romance,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, 76–107. 84. It is noteworthy that Abelard returns to other feminine figures, this time to the “wife of Clopas” and Magdalene (John 19:25–26), who accompanied the virgin to the

notes to pages 95–99 / 217 foot of the cross, in “Letter 7,” 103. He cannot resist admonishing Heloise to take on the Marian martyr role. 85. Georgianna, “In Any Corner of Heaven,” 203. She notes, following Clanchy, that Abelard’s Romans redemption theory likely postdates the correspondence, which means that it could in part have been a response to Heloise’s letters (215n81). At any rate, Heloise stubbornly refuses to be conformed to Abelard’s spiritualizing categories. 86. For a few helpful overviews, see Abulafia, Christians and Jews, 1–50; Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1, Foundations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995); Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 87. For a powerful account of how this codifying of celibacy meant that priests’ wives were written out of history, see Dyan Elliott, “The Priest’s Wife: Female Erasure and the Gregorian Reform,” in Medieval Religion: New Approaches, ed. Constance Hoffman Berman (New York: Routledge, 2005), 111–40. 88. Southern, Saint Anselm, 92–93. 89. I owe this point particularly to McNamer, Affective Meditation, who goes to some length to argue against the “great man” temptation in ascribing the emergence of affective mediation to Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux; against this, she argues compellingly that their texts reflect “ ‘surfacings’ of affective practices among women,” like Matilda of Tuscany, undetected by conventional intellectual history (84). 90. We should be quite careful to read the Anselmian prayers (and perhaps Abelard’s Historia) as exercises designed to cultivate the imagination and sympathetic identification, not as accessing Anselm’s interiority. McNamer, Affective Meditation, and Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) are invaluable on this point. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for Fordham University Press for pointing out imprecision on this point in an earlier version of this manuscript. 91. On the importance of obedience as a Benedictine virtue, see Southern, Saint Anselm, 216–17. 92. On this distinction, see Norman Tanner and Sethina Watson, “Least of the Laity: The Minimum Requirements for a Medieval Christian,” Journal of Medieval History 32 (2006): 400. 93. See Southern, Saint Anselm, 95. 94. McNamer, Affective Meditation. 95. Valerie Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40, no. 2 (April 1960): 100–112. 96. Ambrose, De obitu Valentiniani consolatio, 39, as quoted in Amy Neff, “The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (June 1998): 254. 97. Neff, “Pain of Compassio,” 254–55. Neff ’s illustrative piece is Rogier van der Weyden’s fifteenth-century Descent from the Cross, but she traces the origins of this motif back into the eleventh century. 98. A short discussion can be found in Melanie Holcomb, “Strokes of Genius: The Draftsman’s Art in the Middle Ages,” in Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 7–15. Oswald is associated with Æthelwold and

218 / notes to pages 100–107 Dunstan and represents a continental influence in a movement that initially emerged from the royal household of Æthelstan in the 930s. For a brief overview, see Leslie Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 173–74. 99. Webster, Anglo-Saxon Art, 175–77, 181. 100. The style originates in the early ninth-century Utrecht Psalter; see William Noel, “The Utrecht Psalter in England: Continuity and Experiment,” in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art, ed. Koert van der Horst, William Noel, and Wilhelmina C. M. Wüstefeld (Tuurdijk, Netherlands: HES 1996), 121–65. 101. Holcomb, “Strokes of Genius,” 14–15. 102. John 21:24 Vulgate.

5. Bodies Pierced by the Cross: Popular Devotion, Popular Heresy 1. See especially R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution: c. 970–1215 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). 2. Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 6. 3. Bynum, 211–12, 208. 4. Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1992), 183. See also Grace M. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 5. The texts on the preceding page are Song of Sol. 1:3 and 7:8 (“I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches”). This specific tree motif, writes Jeffrey Hamburger, is the palma contemplationis, the palm of contemplation, a sermon form directed to monks and nuns for spiritual formation; see The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland Circa 1300 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 41. This illustration reworks the theme to transform it into the tree of life. 6. On the transformations in Marian representations of the passion in the thirteenth century, see Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 243–55. 7. I am indebted to Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 55–57, and to Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 47–50, for several of the details of my interpretation of this image. 8. Song of Sol. 4:9. This is the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate used by the Rothschild Canticles, whose vulnerasti translates libbabtinî, rendered by the NRSV as “ravished.” 9. As Hamburger points out (Rothschild Canticles, 75), the words of the Song of Sol. 4:9, “with a glance of your eyes,” are dramatized by the sponsa pointing to her left eye, which invokes both the biblical text and the legend of Longinus, the lance-bearing Roman solider, whose blindness was cured by Christ’s blood. 10. Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 75. 11. See John W. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); on Mechthild, see

notes to pages 107–15 / 219 Sara S. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 12. See Jantzen’s exposition of what she aptly calls “spiritual love-making” in Hadewijch of Antwerp; Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, 135–46. 13. Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist, 1998); 4.2 is the best source of information we have about Mechthild from her own hand; 4.28 seems to form a conclusion to Flowing Light as a whole. 14. For details, see Tobin’s introduction to Flowing Light, 6–9 (following Hans Neumann), and especially Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book, throughout, but 1–16 for an overview of the issues. 15. See Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1995), and E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 16. Mechthild, Flowing Light, 2.3. 17. Mechthild, 1.22. 18. Mechthild, 1.16–19, 23, 24. I have adapted the versification and omitted ellipses to highlight the dialogue of God and soul. 19. Mechthild, 2.25. 20. Mechthild uses the language of nothingness and the desert, usually associated with Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete, in this context to point to a spiritual transparency to Christ so close that the union is effectively annihilation. See, for example, Flowing Light, 1.35. 21. Mechthild, 1.44. 22. Mechthild, 1.29. 23. Mechthild, 1.30. Mechthild allegorizes the religious life as manifesting the passion in a long passage in 3.10, with every moment of Christ’s passion rendered in terms of the religious life. 24. Mechthild, 3.2. I have again altered Tobin’s versification to clarify the dialogue between God and soul. 25. See also Mechthild, 2.26: “The parchment . . . indicates my pure, white, just humanity that for your sake suffered death.” 26. Mechthild, 4.2. In what was probably the final book of the first version of Flowing Light, this chapter is a long apologetic for Mechthild’s authority, and indexes that authority to the wounds of Christ. See also Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 83. 27. Mechthild, Flowing Light, 2.26. 28. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 218. 29. On Henry, Peter of Bruys, and other ambulatory Gregorian reformers, see Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 3rd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 52–61. 30. Peter the Venerable, Epistola sive tractatus adversus petrobrusianos haereticos, in Heresies of the High Middle Ages, ed. Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 121. 31. The classic work on heresy as a constructed phenomenon is R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250,

220 / notes to pages 115–17 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007); for a short bibliographic overview of the state of the field of medieval heresiology, see 174–77. In consonance with The First European Revolution (see note 1 above), Moore argues that the persecution of select groups of social outliers—heretics, Jews, lepers, and homosexuals—in the early Middle Ages was a result of the rise of tensions between the literary elite and the rustici, the common masses; he notes “the absence of any objective, hard and fast distinction between orthodoxy and heresy in the popular religious movements of the high middle ages” (175). 32. Lambert puts it well: “The Waldensians, the last and the most tenacious of the twelfth-century wandering-preacher movements, are the classic example of the would-be reform movement drawn into heresy by the inadequacies of ecclesiastic authority.” Medieval Heresy, 70. 33. See Chronicon anonymi Laudunensis 26.447, in Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, 200–201. There are doubts about his wealth, since, as the parallel with Francis shows, the renunciation of wealth by an upper-class young man is something of a cliché in medieval histories. Whatever the facts regarding Valdes, the motif illustrates the appeal of wealth renunciation narratives. See Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 59, for a similar take. 34. Walter Map, De nugis curialium, in Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, 204. 35. For details, see Deane, History of Medieval Heresy, 63–68. 36. Map, De nugis curialium, 204. 37. The early accounts differ on the specific occasion of his “conversion,” if there was one, but this event is the common thread; for analysis, see André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, trans. Michael F. Cusato (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 19–25. 38. On the tradition of the stigmata as a reception history of Gal. 6:17, see Carolyn Muessig, “Signs of Salvation: The Evolution of Stigmatic Spirituality before Francis of Assisi,” Church History 82, no. 1 (March 2013): 40–68, and now The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 39. For sources, and for the later history of Francis’s significance as an imitator of Christ, see Lester K. Little, “Imitatio Christi: The Influence of Francis of Assisi on Late Medieval Religious Life,” in Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life: Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming, ed. Michael F. Cusato and G. Geltner (Boston, MA: Brill, 2009), 195– 218; 195n3 identifies the first occurrences of the term. 40. Thus, I will sidestep the “Franciscan question,” the vexed historiographical issue of separating the Francesco of history from the Francis of faith; see Augustine Thompson, OP, Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 154, for an illuminating comparison with the historical quest for Jesus. 41. Thomas of Celano, First Life, in Marion A. Habig, ed., St. Francis: Writing and Early Biographies; English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis, trans. Raphael Brown et al., 3rd ed. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), 3.95. 42. Celano, First Life, 3.94. 43. Translated as the Legend of Perugia, in Habig, St. Francis, 37. On this text, see Vauchez, Francis of Assisi, 192–94; Thompson, Francis of Assisi, 164–66.

notes to pages 117–22 / 221 44. Legend of Perugia, 38, p. 1016. 45. Celano, First Life, 3.95. 46. McNamer argues against “the fiction of Francis’s radical originality” regarding stigmatic spirituality, pointing to Marie d’Oignies, who both inflicted stigmata upon herself and witnessed a vision of a seraph before her death in 1213, eleven years before Francis’s stigmatization in 1224; Affective Meditation, 86–87. See also Muessig, Stigmata, 23–59, for a full history of Francis’s antecedents. 47. For more detail, see Travis E. Ables, “The Apocalyptic Figure of Francis’s Stigmatized Body: The Politics of Scripture in Bonaventure’s Meditative Treatises,” in Reading Scripture as a Political Act: Essays on the Theopolitical Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Matthew A. Tapie and Daniel W. McClain (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 129–50. 48. Bonaventure, Life of St. Francis, 9.2, 9.5, in Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1978). 49. Bonaventure, Life of St. Francis, 13.3. 50. Soul’s Journey into God, 6.5, prol. 2–3, in Cousins, Bonaventure. See further discussion in Travis E. Ables, “The Word in Which All Things Are Spoken: Augustine, Anselm, and Bonaventure on Christology and the Metaphysics of Exemplarity,” Theological Studies 76, no. 2 (June 2015): 293–97. 51. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 52. Bonaventure, Tree of Life, prol. 3, in Cousins, Bonaventure. The Tree of Life is a pedagogical discourse that intends, as Kevin Hughes explains, “to exhort readers to pursue a particular form of life and provides exemplary instances for the practice of that form.” Hughes, “St. Bonaventure’s Collationes in Hexaëmeron: Fractured Sermons and Protreptic Discourse,” Franciscan Studies 63 (2005): 108. 53. Bonaventure, Tree of Life, 8. 54. Bonaventure, 16; versification removed. 55. Bonaventure, 18. 56. Bonaventure, 21, versification removed. The atonement language is notable in that it does not refer to Jesus’s death: Peter atones penitentially, by remorse. 57. Bonaventure, 26. 58. Bonaventure, 27. 59. Bonaventure, 32. 60. For a short historiographical discussion, see Monika Winiarczyk, “The Fallen Woman: Shifting Perceptions of Synagoga,” Monika Winiarczyk: Art Historian (blog), October 28, 2012, http://monikawiniarczyk.wordpress.com/2012/10/28/the-fallen -woman-shifting-perceptions-of-synagoga/; for more detail, see Nina Rowe, The Jew, Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the female representations, and the broader place of Marian devotion in anti-Judaism in the fourteenth century, see Rubin, Mother of God, 228–36. 61. Christine M. Rose, “The Jewish Mother-in-Law: Synagoga and the Man of Law’s Tale,” in Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, ed. Sheila Delany (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11–12.

222 / notes to pages 12 4–36 62. For discussion, see Achim Timmerman, “The Avenging Crucifix: Some Observations on the Iconography of the Living Cross,” Gesta 40, no. 2 (2001): 141–60. 63. Rose, “The Jewish Mother-in-Law,” 10.

6. The Bitter Christ and the Sweet Christ: The Cross and the German Reformations 1. Arthur Burkhard, The Herrenberg Altar of Jörg Ratgeb, in Seven German Altars, by Arthur Burkhard (Cambridge, MA: n.d.); Peter Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 95. The following description is indebted to Burkhard’s meticulous examination of the altarpiece. 2. Matheson, Imaginative World, 71–72. A color image is available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27875376. 3. Burkhard, Herrenberg Altar, 7. 4. Burkhard, 9. 5. Matheson, Imaginative World, 67. 6. Matheson, 17–18. 7. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 71. 8. Karant-Nunn, 249. 9. Brian C. Brewer, Martin Luther and the Seven Sacraments: A Contemporary Protestant Reappraisal (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 45–46, attributes the teaching to Hugh of Saint-Cher in 1230, which is traditional; for a nuanced discussion, however, see Robert W. Shaffern, “The Medieval Theology of Indulgences,” in Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe, ed. R. N. Swanson (Boston: Brill, 2006), 24–27; David Bagchi, “Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and the Contemporary Criticism of Indulgences,” in Swanson, Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits, 344. 10. Shaffern, “Medieval Theology of Indulgences,” 27. 11. Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Medieval and Early Modern Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13–14. 12. On Luther’s “radical assessment of late medieval soteriology,” see Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 57. 13. Luther, “Sermon at Coburg on Cross and Suffering,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 51, Sermons, ed. John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1959), 198. 14. See especially Vincent Evener, Enemies of the Cross: Suffering, Truth, and Mysticism in the Early Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). I regret that Evener’s book was not yet published when I was completing this chapter. 15. Luther, “Sermon at Coburg,” 199. 16. Luther, 199. 17. Luther, 200. 18. For background, see Ronald K. Rittgers, “Martin Luther,” in Protestants and Mysticism in Reformation Europe, ed. Ronald K. Rittgers and Vincent Evener (Boston, MA: Brill, 2019), 36–37, 49. 19. Bagchi, “Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses,” 351. See Berndt Hamm, The Early Luther: Stages in a Reformation Reorientation, trans. Martin Lohrmann (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 100–101; Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, 113.

notes to pages 136–4 1 / 223 20. On the shift in Luther’s preaching toward the didactic and away from the affective response to the passion, such as is found in Staupitz, see Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Feeling, 67, 80–81; see also 245–46. 21. Luther, “Sermon at Coburg,” 200. 22. Luther, 208. 23. Luther, 208. 24. Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, 115, 158. 25. All are in Thomas Müntzer, The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, ed. Peter Matheson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 183–252. Compare Luther’s “three treatises” year, 1520, in which he wrote Address to the German Nobility, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian. On Müntzer, especially his grounding in Tauler, see Hans-Jürgen Goertz, “Thomas Müntzer,” in Rittgers and Evener, Protestants and Mysticism, 56–77. 26. Roland H. Bainton, “Thomas Muntzer: Revolutionary Firebrand of the Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13, no. 2 (Summer, 1982): 3–16. 27. Müntzer, On Counterfeit Faith, 220. These words are not spoken directly of Luther, but fit the tenor of other comments Müntzer directed at him. On false “honeysweet” faith, see also Protestation or Proposition, 189, 191. Note the comment of Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, 158: Müntzer found Luther’s approach to suffering a “completely mistaken and inadequate understanding of faith.” 28. Müntzer, Counterfeit Faith, 214; emphasis mine. See also Protestation or Proposition, 204. 29. Müntzer, Counterfeit Faith, 216–17. 30. Müntzer, 218–19. 31. Gordon Rupp, “Thomas Müntzer, Hans Hut, and the ‘Gospel of All Creatures,’ ” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 43 (1960–61): 494; Walter Klaassen, “Hans Hut and Thomas Muntzer,” Baptist Quarterly 19 (1962): 210; Bainton, “Thomas Muntzer,” 5; Darrel R. Reid, “Luther, Müntzer and the Last Day: Eschatological Hope, Apocalyptic Expectations,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 69, no. 1 (January, 1995): 64. The most comprehensive account is Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Innere und äussere Ordnung in der Theologie Thomas Müntzers (Leiden: Brill, 1967). 32. See Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32–33. 33. Müntzer, Protestation or Proposition, 199; for the other mentions, see 191, 201. 34. Müntzer, 195; for baptism, see 191–200; for faith and works, 201–2. 35. Müntzer, 204; for the head-body dynamic, see 199. 36. On human passivity and divine agency, see Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, 113. 37. See esp. Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 46–93. I owe more to Wandel’s excellent study than is reflected in these two notes. 38. Cf. Wandel, Eucharist in the Reformation, 94–138; for a brief overview, see Robert H. Fischer’s introduction in Luther’s Works, vol. 37, Word and Sacrament III, ed. Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961), xi–xxi. 39. Luther, Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in Luther’s Works, vol. 36, Word and Sacrament II, ed. Abdel Ross Wentz (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1959), 37–39. 40. Luther, Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics, in Luther’s Works, 36:335.

224 / notes to pages 142–46 41. Luther, 341. 42. Luther, 346. 43. Luther, 349–50. 44. Luther, 352. 45. Helpful on the distinction between participation and reception of the atonement is Walter Sundberg, Worship as Repentance: Lutheran Liturgical Traditions and Catholic Consensus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 171. 46. The broader argument of this chapter dictates that I lump together Müntzer and the Anabaptists occasionally; but Müntzer’s status even among the “radical reformers” is hotly contested (there are radicals and then there are radicals, after all). I am simply relying on a broad category of “radical reformers.” See, for example, Rupp, “Gospel of All Creatures,” 501; and Klaassen, “Hans Hut and Thomas Muntzer,” 209–10. A good overview building on George Hunston Williams’s classic typology is Werner O. Packull, “An Introduction to Anabaptist Theology,” in Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology, ed. David Bagchi and David C. Steinmetz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 194–219. 47. As Matheson notes, traditional attribution has varied, but in 1529 it was attributed to Müntzer and, even if it is not authentic, it represents his pneumatologicalsacramental theology well. See Müntzer, Collected Works, 399n1. 48. Thomas Müntzer, “Eucharistic Hymn, Attributed to Müntzer,” in Matheson, Collected Works, 399. 49. Müntzer, 399–400. 50. For even more dramatic language of eucharistic identification of the self, see the Swiss Anabaptist Jörg Blaurock: “I too, I too offer my body and life and my soul for my sheep, my body in the tower, my life in the sword or fire, or in the winepress squeeze my blood from my flesh like Christ on the cross.” Quoted in Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 202. 51. Thomas Müntzer, “On the Incarnation of Christ (1524),” in Matheson, Collected Works, 388–89. 52. Müntzer, 390–91. 53. Müntzer, The Testimony of Luke and the Exposé of False Faith, in Matheson, Collected Works, 278. 54. Müntzer, 298. 55. Letter 61, in Matheson, Collected Works, 106. 56. Müntzer, “On the Incarnation,” 389–90. I have elided several Scripture references. 57. See especially the blistering Interpretation of the Second Chapter of Daniel, in Matheson, Collected Works, 240, 244. 58. The oft-quoted lines from the Vindication and Refutation (sometimes titled A Highly Provoked Defense) are an example of the social themes of Müntzer’s apocalyptic preaching: “What is this evil brew from which all usury, theft and robbery springs but the assumption of our lords and princes that all creatures are their property? The fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the face of the earth—it all has to belong to them!” In Matheson, Collected Works, 335. For Engel’s communist reading, see his Peasant War in Germany, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant -war-germany/index.htm.

notes to pages 1 4 7–49 / 225 59. Gordon Rupp observes that Müntzer’s use of Schriftgelehrter (scribe) is the broad term of abuse with which he responds to Luther’s equally vague Schwärmer (fanatic). Rupp, “Gospel of All Creatures,” 492. On the broader background of anticlericalism, see the brief discussions in Matheson, Imaginative World of the Reformation, 19–23, and Hans-Jürgen Goertz, “Radical Religiosity in the German Reformation,” in Companion to the Reformation World, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 73–75. Goertz calls anticlericalism the “vital context” of the Reformation in “Karlstadt, Müntzer and the Reformation of the Commoners, 1521–1525,” in Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700, ed. John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (Boston, MA: Brill, 2007), 3. Müntzer’s apocalyptic application of anticlericalism is discussed in the latter chapter on 31. 60. Müntzer, Counterfeit Faith, 222–24. For an overview of Reformation-era apocalyptic, see Matheson, Imaginative World of the Reformation, 16–19. 61. For example, see Cunningham and Grell, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 33–34, on Hans Hut. Hut predicted the second coming in 1528, but “during an escape attempt in December 1527 Hut died, thus avoiding the disappointment of seeing his apocalyptic visions and timetable failing to materialise in 1528” (34). I discuss the farcical kingdom of Münster briefly in chapter 7. 62. Reid, “Luther, Müntzer and the Last Day,” 60–61. Cunningham and Grell point out that Revelation was the only book of the Bible Luther insisted have illustrations. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 6. 63. Reid, 62–63. 64. Luther, “Preface to the Revelation of St John the Divine,” quoted in Reid, “Luther, Müntzer and the Last Day,” 62. On Luther’s interpretation of Revelation, and the rejection of his allegorical timidity by later followers (Chytraeus and Selnecker), see Irena Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6–11, 113–33. Backus notes a distinct shift in tone between the 1522 and 1530 prefaces to Revelation, the 1530 text “openly question[ing] the authorship of the book” by an apostle, and thereby undermining its authority, as well as its contemporary allegorical relevance. 65. As Werner Packull notes, for Hut and others of the early generation baptism wasn’t sacramental but initiation into the end-time elect; see his “The Sign of Thau: The Changing Conception of the Seal of God’s Elect in Early Anabaptist Thought,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 61 (1987): 374. 66. Hans Denck, “Divine Order and the Work of His Creatures: To Destroy the Artificial and Hypocritical Excuses of Those Falsely and Corruptly Chosen, Giving Room for Truth to Fulfill the Eternal and Unchanging Will of God. Colossians 1; Ephesians 1,” in Early Anabaptist Spirituality: Selected Writings, ed. Daniel Liechty (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), 122. 67. Denck, 128. 68. Denck (as John Denck), “Whether God Is the Cause of Evil,” in Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, ed. George Hunston Williams and Angel M. Mergal (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957), 94–95. 69. Denck, 97, 98–99. 70. Hans Denck, “The Contention That Scriptures Says,” in Anabaptism in Outline: Selected Primary Sources, ed. Walter Klaassen (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1981), 87. For “passivity” (lassen), note the translator’s glosses in “Whether God Is the Cause of Evil,” 95–97.

226 / notes to pages 149–53 71. Denck, “Whether God Is the Cause of Evil,” 105. Denck recasts the traditional Christus victor trope to portray the spiritual death of the bitter cross as a “trophy” and “swallowing up” of creaturely death. 72. Werner O. Packull, Mysticism and the Early South German–Austrian Anabaptist Movement 1525–1531 (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977), 55–56. 73. Packull, Mysticism, 55, 53. 74. Hans Hut, “On the Mystery of Baptism. Baptism as Symbol and as Essence, the Beginning of a True Christian Life. John 5,” in Liechty, Early Anabaptist Spirituality, 64. As Packull notes, Hut understood baptism as the sealing of the elect in the book of Revelation for the apocalypse; “Sign of Thau,” 365. 75. Hut, “On the Mystery of Baptism,” 67–68. 76. See Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 211. 77. Hut, “On the Mystery of Baptism,” 73–74. 78. Rupp, “Gospel of All Creatures,” 506–7, speaking of Hans Hut’s congruity with Müntzer. On linguistic and conceptual parallels between the two, see 504–6. 79. Müntzer, Protestation or Proposition, 199–200. 80. Hut, “On the Mystery of Baptism,” 75. 81. For the following, see Katharina Schütz Zell, Church Mother: The Writings of a Protestant Reformer in Sixteenth-Century Germany, ed. and trans. Elsie McKee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 175–79. 82. Schütz Zell, “To Sir Caspar Schwenckfeld, My Gracious Dear Sir and Old Friend: To His Own Hands,” in McKee, Church Mother, 189. Note also her “Lament and Exhortation of Katharina Zell to the People at the Grave of Master Matthew Zell Minister at the Cathedral in Strasbourg, Her Upright Husband, over His Dead Body, the 11th of January 1548,” 119, and the cross of suffering she bore there. 83. Schütz Zell, “To Sir Caspar Schwenckfeld,” 197. She evokes the cross similarly in her open letter to the bishop of Strasbourg defending her marriage to Zell in 1524; see “Katharina Schütz’s Apologia for Master Matthew Zell, Her Husband, Who Is a Pastor and Servant of the Word of God in Strasbourg, Because of the Great Lies Invented about Him,” in McKee, Church Mother, 80: “I know of no greater honor we could experience than that we should die in disgrace with this world, and on the cross we would speak joyously to each other, he to me and I to him, to strengthen each other.” 84. Schütz Zell, “To Sir Caspar Schwenckfeld,” 192. Schütz Zell’s gender is obviously in the crosshairs: Rabus’s party mocks her as “doctor Katharina” for speaking above her station, while Schwenckfeld accuses her of pride in not submitting to his teaching (191, 192). 85. Schütz Zell, 195, here actually speaking to Rabus. 86. Schütz Zell, 198, 199; she recalls Zell foretelling the Lord’s Supper becoming a work among the Lutherans, opus opperatus [sic], 199. 87. She rebuked Luther himself for his rejection of Zwingli at the Marburg Colloquy, charging Luther with preferring doctrine over love. See McKee, Church Mother, 163n155. 88. Schütz Zell, “To Sir Caspar Schwenckfeld,” 199. 89. Schütz Zell, “Lament,” 108, 109, 113. The echo of Polycarp is notable; see chapter 2. 90. Schütz Zell, 114–15.

notes to pages 154–58 / 227 91. McKee, introduction to Schütz Zell, “Lament,” in Church Mother, 100. 92. Schütz Zell, “The Miserere Psalm Meditated, Prayed, and Paraphrased with King David by Katharina Zell, the Blessed Matthew Zell’s Widow, Together with the Our Father with Its Explanation, Sent to the Christian Man Sir Felix Armbruster for Comfort in His Illness, and Published for the Sake of Afflicted Consciences That Are Troubled by Sins. Some Sayings from the Psalms and Prophets,” in McKee, Church Mother, 164–66.

7. Holy Bodies and the Sacrifice of the Self: Divine Wrath, Discipline, and the Cross in the Reformations 1. See especially Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–18. 2. James M. Estes, “Luther on the Role of Secular Authority in the Reformation,” Lutheran Quarterly 17 (2003): 211, citing Luther’s Abomination of the Secret Mass. 3. Estes, “Luther on the Role of Secular Authority,” 212. 4. R. Po-chia Hsia, “Introduction: The Reformation and Its Worlds,” in Companion to the Reformation World, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), xvi. See also Barbara B. Diefendorf ’s description of Catholic preachers lamenting Huguenots who were spreading the “new faith like gangrene corrupting the social body.” “The Religious Wars in France,” in Hsia, Companion to the Reformation World, 154. 5. See Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in SixteenthCentury France,” Past and Present Society 59 (1973): 57, 59. The essay was later reprinted in Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 152–87. 6. Davis, 63–64. 7. Davis, 65, 82. 8. On the scale of the Anabaptist “threat”: William Monter puts the number of heresy executions in Europe 1520–65 at around 3,000, two-thirds of which were Anabaptists. Monter, “Heresy Executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–1565,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49. 9. Darren Sumner argues that penal substitution is only one of a series of metaphors Calvin employs for the atonement—albeit a prominent one. “Theory and Metaphor in Calvin’s Doctrine of the Atonement,” Princeton Theological Review 13, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 49–60. 10. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 2.16.5: “A form of death had to be chosen in which he might free us . . . by taking our guilt upon himself. . . . The guilt that held us liable for punishment has been transferred to the head of the Son of God.” Moral influence: “Christ was offered to the Father in death as an expiatory sacrifice that . . . we might cease to be afraid of God’s wrath” (2.16.6); Christus victor: “Death held us captive under its yoke; Christ, in our stead, gave himself over to its power to deliver us from it” (2.16.7; note the long discussion of the redemptive effect of Christ’s descent into hell that follows).

228 / notes to pages 158–62 11. Helpful here is J. Todd Billlings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 12. Norman Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400–1536 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 92, citing Peter Blickle’s groundbreaking work. For a general overview, see Tom Scott, “The Peasants’ War,” in Hsia, Companion to the Reformation World, 56–69. 13. Luther, Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia, in Selected Writings of Martin Luther, vol. 3, 1523–1526, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 329; Open Letter on the Harsh Book against the Peasants, in the same volume, 370. 14. Luther, Admonition to Peace, 331. 15. Luther, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes, in Tappert, Selected Writings, 3:350, 352–53; emphasis added. 16. Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, in Luther’s Works, vol. 45, The Christian in Society II, ed. Walther I. Brandt (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962), 91. At this point Luther held that heresy should not be suppressed by the sword. 17. Luther, 94. 18. Luther, 96. 19. Luther, 100, 126. 20. Some took this as a direct contradiction against his teaching of justification by faith—if you can attain heaven by doing your job well, that sounds a lot like being saved by works—but Luther was probably simply referring to God’s blessing on the social role the magistrate was called to fulfill. Luther, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes, 354; see also Open Letter, 382–83. 21. David M. Whitford, “Cura Religionis or Two Kingdoms: The Late Luther on Religion and the State in the Lectures on Genesis,” Church History 73, no. 1 (March 2004): 57–58. 22. Estes, “Luther on the Role of Secular Authority,” 212. 23. Ronald K. Rittgers notes the real tension Luther felt after the visitations: “how to enforce moral discipline without damaging spiritual freedom.” The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 106. 24. Estes, “Luther on the Role of Secular Authority,” 212. 25. “With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the visitation that commenced in 1527 was the beginning of das landesherrliche Kirchenregiment (church government by the territorial prince) in Saxony.” Estes, “Luther on the Role of Secular Authority,” 212. For the discussion of the visitations, see 210–16. 26. I am following Estes here. Whitford, “Cura Religionis or Two Kingdoms,” argues against Estes that intervention by the prince was always an emergency situation and that coercion was limited to cases of blasphemy. I find Estes more compelling, but in any case the Lutheran question was settled with Melanchthon’s clear avowal of the cura religionis, which Whitford concedes (42). 27. Estes, “Luther on the Role of Secular Authority,” 219. 28. John S. Oyer, Lutheran Reformers against Anabaptists: Luther, Melanchthon and Menius and the Anabaptists of Central Germany (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 144. The elector’s decree of 1527 had warned of “severe punishment,” and an imperial

notes to pages 162–64 / 229 decree the following year threatened death. It was not until 1530 that Melanchthon himself advocated capital punishment (154). 29. Oyer, 152. 30. Oyer, 155; see also Oyer, “The Writings of Melanchthon against the Anabaptists,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 26, no. 4 (October 1952): 260, 264, 267. 31. Oyer, Lutheran Reformers against Anabaptists, 155, 157. 32. From a draft of Melanchthon’s Verlegung, quoted in Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 333. 33. Oyer, Lutheran Reformers against Anabaptists, 158. 34. Oyer, 175–76; for more, see Oyer, “Bucer Opposes the Anabaptists,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 68 (January 1994): 24–50; Oyer states that Martin Bucer’s conciliatory approach was far more successful (see below), whereas the normally irenic Melanchthon “cared little for recantation . . . seldom wrote anything that demonstrated sympathy with or even pity for Anabaptists” and was “so biased as to preclude credibility” (49). 35. Monter argues that execution of heretics was a “form of state-building,” and capital punishment only became frequent once ecclesiastical institutions handed over the duty of heresy suppression to the magistrates. If this is true, then it reinforces my point about the corpus christianum and evangelical ecclesiology: the alliance between the two, and the theological motivations of magisterial reformers to safeguard that alliance, underlie the development of punitive motifs in Protestant theology. Monter, “Heresy Executions in Reformation Europe,” 50. 36. See, for example, Luther’s 1530 commentary on Psalm 82, in which he openly claimed that rulers were “duty bound” to punish heretics and blasphemers; in Luther’s Works, vol. 13, Selected Psalms II, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1956), 61–62. See also Estes, “Luther on the Role of Secular Authority,” 216–17. 37. There is considerable debate about the extent Bucer influenced Calvin and, thereby, the Reformed tradition. For a summary, see Willem van’t Spijker, “Bucer’s Influence on Calvin: Church and Community,” in Martin Bucer: Reforming Church and Community, ed. D. F. Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 32–44. 38. See, for example, D. F. Wright, “Introduction,” in Wright, Martin Bucer, 1; Martin Greschat, Martin Bucer: A Reformer and His Times, trans. Stephen E. Buckwalter (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), vii. 39. See, for example, Peter Matheson’s portrait of Bucer as a “situation theologian” who thought with “great variety and flexibility” (“Martin Bucer and the Old Church,” in Wright, Martin Bucer, 6). This earned him the title “bletherer” (Klappermaul) for his trouble (14). 40. Oyer, “Bucer Opposes the Anabaptists.” 41. Cunningham and Grell characterize it as a “virtual hive of apocalyptic expectations”; Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 34; see 34–40 for a detailed discussion of the Anabaptist presence in Strasbourg, focusing on Melchior Hoffman. 42. Oyer, “Bucer Opposes the Anabaptists,” 25–27. For further background, see Lorna Jane Abray, “Confession, Conscience, and Honour: The Limits of Magisterial

230 / notes to pages 164–68 Tolerance in Sixteenth-Century Strassburg,” in Grell and Scribner, Tolerance and Intolerance, 94–107. 43. Oyer, “Bucer Opposes the Anabaptists,” 29. 44. Berndt Hamm, “Tolerance and Heresy: Martin Bucer’s Radical New Definition of Christian Fellowship,” in Politics and Reformations: Histories and Reformations; Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., ed. Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace (Boston, MA: Brill, 2007), 270. 45. See Van’t Spijker, “Bucer’s Influence on Calvin,” 34; Martin Greschat, “The Relation between Church and Civil Community in Bucer’s Reforming Work,” in Wright, Martin Bucer, 17–18; note also Greschat, Martin Bucer, 113–15. 46. On Bucer’s commitment to church discipline, see especially Amy Nelson Burnett, “Church Discipline and Moral Reformation in the Thought of Martin Bucer,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 438–56. 47. The title of Kirchenpfleger was not invented by Bucer; the office was present in early fourteenth-century Nuremberg, for example, though it was mostly honorary. See Rittgers, Reformation of the Keys, 18–19. 48. Jean Rott, “The Strasbourg Kirchenpfleger and Parish Discipline: Theory and Practice,” in Wright, Martin Bucer, 123. 49. Rott, 124. “Censor-citizens” is Rott’s term. 50. On the Gemeinschaften, see Gottfried Hammann, “Ecclesiological Motifs behind the Creation of the ‘Christlichen Gemeinschaften,’ ” in Wright, Martin Bucer, 129–43; Greschat, Martin Bucer, 211–17. Bucer was not the only one behind the Gemeinschaften, but he was the primary drafter of many of the relevant texts. 51. Hammann, “Ecclesiological Motifs,” 141–42. 52. James Kittelson, “Martin Bucer and the Ministry of the Church,” in Wright, Martin Bucer, 90–91; Hammann, “Ecclesiological Motifs,” 140–41. 53. Burnett, “Church Discipline and Moral Reformation,” 455. See also Greschat, Martin Bucer, 211, 212. 54. Burnett, “Church Discipline and Moral Reformation,” 439. 55. I follow here the vivid account of Scott M. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 26. 56. Manetsch, 27. 57. Manetsch, 27. 58. Ecclesiastical Ordinances, 267, as quoted by Manetsch, 29. 59. Manetsch, 29. 60. Manetsch, 184–85. 61. Manetsch, 31. 62. Manetsch, 182. 63. Jeffrey R. Watt, “Settling Quarrels and Nurturing Repentance: The Consistory in Calvin’s Geneva,” in Revisiting Geneva: Robert Kingdon and the Coming of the French Wars of Religion, ed. S. K. Barker, St. Andrews Studies in French History and Culture (St. Andrews, UK: The Centre for French History and Culture of the University of St. Andrews, 2012), 72–73, 78, http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2159. He also suggests that Calvin’s overriding concern was social unrest (72). 64. Disciplina nervus ecclesiae. Watt, “Settling Quarrels,” 71n2. See also Raymond A. Mentzer Jr., “Disciplina Nervus Ecclesiae: The Calvinist Reform of Morals at Nîmes,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 89–116.

notes to pages 168–73 / 231 65. Watt, “Settling Quarrels,” 83–84. 66. See Burnett, “Church Discipline and Moral Reformation,” 441–44, on Luther, Zwingli, Oecolompadius, and Bucer. 67. See Luther, Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in Luther’s Works, vol. 36, Word and Sacrament II, ed. Abdel Ross Wentz (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1959), 18, 124. See also Rittgers, Reformation of the Keys, 216. Luther’s support of private confession as a pastoral (not sacramental) practice, without a strong theological foundation for it, is a major theme of Rittgers’s book. 68. Luther, Ninety-Five Theses: or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, in Luther’s Works, vol. 31, Career of the Reformer I, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957), nos. 1–2, p. 25, referencing Matt. 4:17. Also helpful here has been the chapter on penance in Brian C. Brewer, Martin Luther and the Seven Sacraments: A Contemporary Protestant Reappraisal (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 37–65. 69. Brewer, Luther and the Seven Sacraments, 52; Rittgers, Reformation of the Keys, 81. 70. Brewer, Luther and the Seven Sacraments, 59–60, with reference to Balthasar Hubmaier. 71. Hamann, “Ecclesiological Motifs,” 142. Burnett writes that in the late 1530s Bucer also wanted to reintroduce precommunion confession and private instruction by the pastor; “Church Discipline and Moral Reformation,” 445. 72. Manetsch, Calvin’s Company of Pastors, 281. 73. Hamm, “Tolerance and Heresy,” 270n2. 74. For some background, see Kevin Dixon Kennedy’s excellent study Union with Christ and the Extent of the Atonement in Calvin (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 4–14. 75. Kennedy even makes a sacramental analogy: “particularists” (i.e., Calvinists who hold to limited atonement) “hold to the ex opere operato theory that holds that all those for whom Christ died must necessarily be saved.” Union with Christ, 40. 76. R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 32–33. This section follows Kendall’s controversial thesis on the consequences of the uncertainty of election in Puritan theology. For something of the reception of Kendall’s thesis, see Graham Redding, Prayer and the Priesthood of Christ in the Reformed Tradition (New York: T&T Clark, 2003), 139–48; and G. Michael Thomas, “Calvin and English Calvinism: A Review Article,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1998): 111–27. 77. Brian Gerrish, “ ‘To the Unknown God’: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God,” in The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 136, quoted in Baird Tipson, “Thomas Hooker, Martin Luther, and the Terror at the Edge of Protestant Faith,” Harvard Theological Review 108, no. 4 (October 2015): 535. 78. Tipson, “Terror at the Edge of Protestant Faith,” 533–35. 79. Tipson, 536. 80. Gerrish, “To the Unknown God,” 137, cited in Tipson, 541–42. 81. David C. Fink, “Divided by Faith: The Protestant Doctrine of Justification and the Confessionalization of Biblical Exegesis” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2010), 130–31. Once again, I am skirting the edges of a massive debate here. For more background, see also Timothy J. Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books,

232 / notes to pages 173–79 1997), 179; Wengert, Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness: Philip Melanchthon’s Exegetical Dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 141–45. 82. Fink, “Divided by Faith,” 265, 272–73. “ ‘To be justified’ properly signifies to be reputed righteous, that is, to be reputed accepted. Thus it should be understood relatively, just as in a law court” (273–74, quoting and translating Melanchthon’s 1532 Romans commentary; I have omitted Fink’s Latin glosses). 83. Fink, 277. 84. Wengert, Human Freedom, Christian Righteousness, 146. 85. See again Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, and Redding, Prayer and the Priesthood of Christ for more on this reading of Puritanism. 86. This is the term Kendall uses for the Puritan theorists of election in Calvin and English Calvinism: “experimental” in the early modern English sense—experiential in contemporary parlance. 87. Michael McGiffert, “The Perkinsian Moment of Federal Theology,” Calvin Theological Journal 29 (1994): 118. 88. Perkins, A Golden Chaine: or, the Description of Theologie, in The Workes of That Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, M. W. Perkins, 3 vols. (London: John Haviland, 1626–31), 1:XIX. The omission of the possessive apostrophe here and throughout is original to the edition of Perkins’s Workes I consulted; I have also left his spelling unaltered. McGiffert hints at contemporary legal antecedents for the contractual language in “Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism,” Harvard Theological Review 75, no. 4 (1982): 497. 89. I appropriate language here that McGiffert uses to more general effect in “Perkinsian Moment,” 124. 90. Perkins, Golden Chaine, XV. 91. Perkins, XVIII. 92. Perkins, XXXVI. 93. Perkins, XXXVI. 94. Perkins, XXXVI. The other place Perkins devotes attention to human subjective experience is in what he calls the “document of faith,” which is the believer’s dedication to obey the law (despite being freed from its observance in justification) as evidence of their election. 95. Perkins, XXXVIII. Even a later chapter on “The Patient Bearing of the Cross,” XLIV, is relatively tame, describing how patient bearing of affliction aids spiritual combat. 96. “Introduction: The Puritan Ethos, 1560–1700,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 11, 13. Such self-examination “should be seen as one response to the Protestant abolition of the Catholic sacrament of aurical confession.” 97. Tipson, “Terror at the Edge of Protestant Faith,” 530–51. 98. Perkins distinguishes between the voluntas signi and voluntas beneplaciti: the signifying will of God—revealed to creatures—and the will of God’s good pleasure within God’s own interior counsels. These can appear to be contradictory, as when God willed (signi) the conversion of Jerusalem, but did not decree it (beneplaciti). Tipson, “Terror at the Edge of Protestant Faith,” 543.

notes to pages 179–89 / 233 99. William Perkins, A Godly and Learned Exposition of Christs Sermon in the Mount, in Perkins, Workes, 3:251. See also Tipson, “Terror at the Edge of Protestant Faith,” 543. 100. Tipson, “Terror at the Edge of Protestant Faith,” 547, quoting Hooker, The Soules Preparation for Christ (1632). 101. Tipson, “Terror at the Edge of Protestant Faith,” 548. 102. Perkins, Christs Sermon in the Mount, 250–51. 103. McGiffert, “Grace and Works,” 464. 104. Perkins, A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified, in Perkins, Workes, 1:625. 105. Perkins, 1:632. 106. Perkins, 1:632–33. 107. Perkins, 1:633–34. 108. William A. Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 123. Dyrness, citing Patrick Collinson, is describing the general visual culture of sixteenth-century Puritan England. 109. Dyrness, 147. 110. See Susan C. Karant-Nunn on Calvin’s preaching: “Expatiation on Christ’s suffering is almost nil . . . in order to comprehend Christ’s suffering, we must be aware of our faults and be horrified by our state.” The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 107–8. She also describes the “shaming and condemnation” rhetoric Calvin used, 113. 111. Perkins, Knowing Christ Crucified, 631. 112. Perkins, 626. 113. Perkins, 628. 114. Perkins, 630. 115. Perkins, 631.

Conclusion 1. First quote: The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, 12 vols. (Chicago: Testimony Publishing Company, 1910–15), vol. 1, foreword. Volumes 1–7 are available at https://archive.org/details/fundamentalstest17chic. Second quote: Lyman Stewart, as quoted in George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 118. 2. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 119. 3. Marsden, 119–20. 4. Marsden, 117. 5. Marsden, 292n30, with documentation. 6. Franklin Johnson, “The Atonement,” chap. 4 of The Fundamentals, 6:50–63. 7. Johnson, 50. 8. Johnson, 55. 9. Johnson, 55. 10. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 120, 122; the second half of the quote is speaking of Robert Speer’s article on the deity of Christ, but it is a fair representation of Marsden’s reading of The Fundamentals.

234 / notes to pages 189–96 11. James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 166, 158. 12. Statistics vary widely on lynchings; the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented 4084 cases of “racial terror lynchings” in twelve Southern states 1877–1950; see Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed., 2017, https:// lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/. 13. Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 24, 26. 14. James T. Holly, “The Divine Plan of Human Redemption in Its Ethnological Development” (1884), quoted by Cone, 47; cf. 82, 143–44. 15. Cone, 99. 16. The Library of Congress entry for this illustration can be found at https://www .loc.gov/item/2015650267/; a larger image is currently available at https://www.flickr .com/photos/vieilles_annonces/5045426179. 17. “Jesus Christ in Georgia: A Story,” The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, December, 1911, 74. The image is found on 70. A PDF can be accessed at the Modernist Journals Project, hosted by Brown University: http://www.modjourn.org/render.php ?id=1307978953187377&view=mjp_object. 18. EJI’s Lynching in America, “VI. Trauma and the Legacy of Lynching,” notes, “Of the 4084 Southern lynchings documented in this report, the overwhelming majority took place on sites that remain unmarked and unrecognized. In contrast, the landscape of the South is cluttered with plaques, statues, and monuments that record, celebrate, and lionize generations of American defenders of white supremacy, including countless leaders of the Confederate war effort and white public officials and private citizens who perpetrated violent crimes against black citizens during the era of racial terror.” 19. Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 150. See also 121, 149. 20. Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 165–66. 21. Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 151, discussing Copeland’s “Wading through Many Sorrows: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993); see also JoAnne Marie Terrell’s meditation on the empty cross and intercession in Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005), 125. 22. M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 122. See also Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018). 23. See especially Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), on the way supersessionism and anti-Semitism prepared the ground for the racist social imagination of the colonial era. 24. Jon Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 5. 25. Anselm, “Prayer to St. Paul,” in Prayers and Meditations, trans. Benedicta Ward (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), ll. 358–72, 397–400.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abelard: and affective devotion, 87; and Anselm, 88, 90, 92, 95, 102; and atonement theology, 88–91, 95, 101; charity, 90; Christ, 90, 91, 102, 215n58; Christus victor, 215n58; cross, 87, 92, 95–96, 97, 100, 101; gender, 94, 215n62; God, 89–90, 215n51; and Heloise, 91–95, 97, 216n75, 217n85; humanity, 89–90; and martyrdom, 90, 91, 92; Mary, 102, 216n66; Mary Magdalene, 89, 98; moral influence, 90; nuns, 92; reception history, 88; redemption, 89; rights of devil, 88–89; Romans, letter to the, 88–91; satisfaction, 88; sin, 89, 90, 215n51; spirituality, 77–78, 94; “Story of Calamities,” 91; substitution, 90, 97; suffering, 91–92, 102 Ad abolendam, 116 Adelaide, 77, 82, 96, 213n5 Ambrose, 57, 98 affective devotion: Abelard, 87; Anselm, 86–87, 101, 126–27; and atonement theology, 78; Bonaventure, 119; and Christ, 86–87, 102; cross, 86, 101, 126–27; cult of saints, 77; Franciscans, 119; Heloise, 102; Middle Ages, 10–11, 77, 96, 101–2; and monasticism, 96–97 Anabaptism, 152, 156, 157, 160, 161–64, 166, 169, 170, 224n46, 227n8. See also radicals Andreae, Valentin, 167–68

Anselm: and Abelard, 88, 90, 92, 95; and Adelaide, 77, 82, 96; and affective devotion, 86–87, 112–13, 126–27; and Agnes, 96; and atonement theology, 78, 81, 83, 85, 95, 101; Benedictine, 79, 81–82; Christ, 79, 80–81, 86, 102, 112–13, 214n23; compunction, 84; creation, 79–80; cross, 86–87, 95–96, 97, 100, 101, 126–27, 196; Cur Deus Homo, 78–82, 213n10; Daily Office, 82; feudalism, 78–79, 81; gender, 98; God, 79–80, 83, 85, 87; and Heloise, 97–98; honor, 79–80; humanity, 80, 213n10; incarnation, 79, 81; justice, 79–80, 83, 85, 87; laity, 97; Mary, 83–85, 97, 98, 102, 196, 214n31; and Matilda of Tuscany, 76–77, 76, 82, 96; mercy, 79–80, 83, 85, 87; obedience, 80–81; penitence, 79; Prayers and Meditations, 75–77, 76, 78, 82–87, 96, 97, 196, 214n31, 217n89; Proslogion, 214n27; rhetoric, 82, 86, 217n89; saints, 196; salvation, 83, 84; satisfaction, 80; shame, 98; sin, 80; spirituality, 77–78; substitution, 80–81, 97; and suffering, 86, 102 Apocalypse of Peter, 29, 204n55 apocalyptic, 1, 10, 16–17, 19, 40, 43–44, 53, 60, 138, 145–48, 156 apologetics, 19–20 Apostolic Tradition, The, 22–25, 203n39

252 / index apotropaic, 22–23, 53 aquila, 202n21 ars moriendi, 154 Asclepiades, 68 Assisi Compilation, 117 “Atonement, The” (Johnson), 188–89, 193 Attalus, 40–41, 42 Augustine, 63–67, 72 Aulén, Gustaf, 5–6, 29, 79, 194 Backus, Irena, 225n64 baptism, 22, 23, 43, 225n65 Bauer, Walter, 204n44 beguines, 107 Belcher, J. David, 203n33 Beza, Theodore, 172 bishops, 57–58, 61–62, 68 Black Simon, 189–90 Blandina, 40–41, 42–43, 48, 50–51 blasphemy, 156–57, 158, 161, 163 Blaurock, Jörg, 224n50 blood, 68–69, 70, 108–9 Bonaventure, 113, 118–21, 126–27, 221n52 boundary markers, 10, 16–17, 24, 27, 62, 102–3, 114–15, 128 Boyarin, Daniel, 25–26 Brakke, David, 26–27 Brock, Rita Nakashima, 200n1 Brown, Peter, 67, 73, 212n44 Bucer, Martin, 152, 162–66, 169 Buell, Denise Kimber, 27, 202n18 Burns, J. Patout, 66 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 103–4, 112 Calvin, John: atonement, 227n8, 227nn9–10; and Bucer, 164, 167; Christ, 158, 233n110; consistory, 167–68, 169; discipline, 164, 167, 168; Ecclesiastical Ordinances, 167; God, 171; penal substitution, 158, 227n9; penance, 169; preaching, 233n110; predestination, 171; wrath, 171 Campbell, E. Simms, 190 Capito, Wolfgang, 164 Castelli, Elizabeth, 55 Cavafy, Constantine, 4 Certeau, Michel de, 4 Charles V, 166 Christianity: Boyarin, 25–26; cross, 27–28; Decian persecution, 61; and Hellenism, 22; and Judaism, 17, 25; Justin Martyr, 22; orthodoxy, 26; useful fiction, 26 christliche Gemeinschaften, 165–66 Christology, 32–33, 142. See also Jesus Christ

Christomorphism, 2, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 77, 112, 134, 151, 191 Christus victor, 24, 29, 48, 83–84, 143, 215n58 church: Anabaptists, 164, 170; and Blandina, 51; body of Christ, 3; body of the cross, 115, 153, 155; Bucer, 164–66; discipline, 166; fragility of faith, 134, 163; holy victims, 4; Ignatius of Antioch, 52; Luther, 161, 163, 168; and magistrate, 161, 165–66; martyrs, 51–52, 56, 64, 66, 67; medieval, 134; mystics, 112–13; Polycarp, 52–53; Reformations, 134; reform movements, medieval, 114; sacraments, 134; and sacrifice, 56; Schütz Zell, 153–55; Strasbourg, 164–66; suffering, 3, 51; Theodosian peace, 63; treasury of merit, 133–34, 168; visible, 165; voluntarism, 170, 175; Zell, 154, 155 Clement of Alexandria, 59 Clement VI, Pope, 133–34 Cobb, L. Stephanie, 208n42 Colossians, book of, 2–3 community of memory and solidarity, 196–97 compassion, 97, 98, 120 Cone, James, 189, 191 confession. See penance Copeland, M. Shawn, 191 corpus christianum, 102–3, 114–15, 128, 132, 154, 156, 157, 164–66 cosmos, 20–21, 32, 34, 150 Council of Nicaea, 26 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder, 131–32, 133 Cranmer, Thomas, 166 creation, 29, 31, 33–34, 79–80, 150 Cross and the Lynching Tree, The (Cone), 189, 192, 193 crucifixion, 31, 118, 120, 130–31, 202n29 crux invicta, 15, 16, 38 cura religionis, 161, 163 Cybele, 69 Cyprian, 41, 61–62, 63, 66, 67, 210n16 Daly, Robert J., 209n52 Damasus, Pope, 67, 68 Dasius, 209n56 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 157 Decian persecution, 61 DeConick, April D., 205n70 democratization, 77, 213n5 demonology, 17, 21–22, 43, 60 Denck, Hans, 147–50 devil, 40, 41, 43, 48, 49, 51, 104, 129

index / 253 Diet of Augsburg, 135 discipline: agency, human, 170; Anabaptists, 163; Bucer, 165–66, 168; Calvin, 167, 168; christliche Gemeinschaften, 165–66; consistory, 167; and cross, 170; cura religionis, 166; Geneva, 167–68; internalized, 170; and penal substitution, 183; and penance, 168–70; physical bodies, 4; Reformations, 163, 183; Reformed tradition, 163–70; and sacerdotalism, 174–75; Strasbourg, 165; and wrath, 174–75 “Divine Order and the Work of His Creatures” (Denck), 149 Docetism, 29 dualism, 29–30, 32, 103 Durston, Christopher, 179 Eales, Jacqueline, 179 early Christianity, 9–10, 16, 25, 27 Ecclesia and Synagoga, 122–24, 123 election, 30, 33, 35, 122–24, 148–49, 172, 177, 184, 193 ephphatha, 202n32 Epistle of Barnabas, 17–19, 22 Estes, James M., 228n26 Eucharist: agency, divine, 140, 141; apocalyptic, 145–46; Apostolic Tradition, 23; Bonaventure, 120; Bucer, 164–65; and Christ, 142, 144, 146; and cross, 140; divinizing mechanism, 31; and faith, 140, 141; great exchange, 146; Luther, 139–42, 146; and martyrdom, 43, 44–46, 62, 224n50; merit, 146; Müntzer, 143–46; participation, 3, 144, 146; and passion, 120; radicals, 140–41, 143; real presence, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146; Reformations, 169; sacrifice, 62; Schütz Zell, 154–55; subjectivism, 140–41; Valentinianism, 31 Euplus, 209n56 Eusebius, 40 exorcism, 23 faith: Augustine, 64; church, 163; Eucharist, 140, 141; fragility, 12, 133, 134, 139, 163, 172; internal disposition, 141; Luther, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142; Mary, 142; Müntzer, 137–39; object, 141, 142; reception, 142, 143 Felicity, 41, 207n8 Felix, 57 Fenner, Dudley, 175 figures: figure 1 (tree sarcophagus), 16; figure 2 (Gemma Augustea), 38; figure

3 (Confessio, SS Giovanni e Paolo), 71; figure 4 (Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations), 76; figure 5 (Ramsay Psalter), 99; figures 6–7 (Rothschild Canticles), 105, 106; figure 8 (Ecclesia and Synagoga), 122–24, 123; figure 9 (Kreuzesallegorie), 124, 125; figure 10 (Herrenberg Altarpiece), 129–31, 131; figure 11 (Wittenberg Altarpiece), 131–32, 132; figure 12 (Order of salvation, A Golden Chaine), 178 Fink, David, 173 flesh, 30–31, 32 forensic justification, 172–73. See also justification Foucault, Michel, 4, 199n3 Foxe, John, 1 Francis of Assisi: alter christus, 117, 118, 121; and Bonaventure, 113, 118, 121; and Christ, 117, 121, 146; conversion, 116; cross, 118, 121, 126; and cult of saints, 126; and Franciscans, 117–18; imitation of, 118–19; martyrdom, 118; mythologization, 118; and Peter of Bruys, 116; spirituality, 117; stigmata, 116–17, 121, 221n46; suffering, 117 Franciscans, 113, 117–18, 119 Fructuosus, 49, 208n37 fundamentalism, 187–89, 192–93 Fundamentals, The, 187–89, 192, 193 Gemma Augustea, 38 gender: Abelard, 94, 215n62; Anselm, 98; cross, 102; Heloise, 93–94; martyrs, 50–51, 208n42; Mechthild, 107–8; Middle Ages, 108; mysticism, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 112 ; physical body, 103–4; Schütz Zell, 226n84 Geneva, 167–68, 169, 171 Gerrish, Brian, 173 Gervasius, 57 Giovanni e Paolo, SS, 71, 71–72 Gnosticism: creation, 29; cross, 27–28; defining, 28; demiurge, 30, 31, 32; and early Christianity, 27; and heresiology, 27, 28; and Irenaeus, 28, 32, 34; and Müntzer, 145; physical body, 205n71; Sethians, 204n51; useful fiction, 26. See also Gospel of Philip; Valentinianism God: Abelard, 89–90, 215n51; agency, 142–43, 151, 172, 174; alien work, 173, 174; Anselm, 79–80, 83, 85, 87; Bucer, 166; Calvin, 171; decree, 171, 173, 174, 176; desire, 109–11; and Eucharist, 140, 141;

254 / index God (continued) forgiveness, 89, 215n51; Gnosticism, 32; Gospel of Philip, 30; and history, 33, 171; honor, 79–80; Irenaeus, 32, 33–35; judgment, 137–38, 156; justice, 79–80, 85, 87; Luther, 140, 141, 143, 151, 156, 173; marriage, 111; and martyrdom, 43, 46, 47; Mary, 84–85; Mechthild, 109–11; mercy, 79–80, 85, 87; Müntzer, 137; people of, 32–35; Perkins, 176, 179, 182, 232n98; predestination 171–72; proper work, 173; Puritans, 174, 179, 184–85; sacrifice, 43; and sin, 89, 215n51; Valentinianism, 32; will, 149, 232n98; wrath, 1–2, 156, 157, 166, 171, 174–75, 182, 184–85 Goldstein, Valerie Saiving, 98 gospel of all creatures, 150–51 Gospel of Philip, 30–31, 34, 205n59, 205nn70–71 Gospel of Truth, 205n71, 206n74 grace, 66, 139 Gregorian reform, 96, 113–14 Grig, Lucy, 209n1 group identity. See identity formation Hamburger, Jeffrey, 218n5, 218n7, 218n9 Hamm, Berndt, 169 Harley-McGowan, Felicity, 39 Heloise: and Abelard, 91–95, 97, 102, 216n75, 217n85; affective devotion, 102; and Anselm, 97–98; Christ, 91, 92; conversion, 95, 216n77; corner of heaven, 93, 94, 102; desire, 93–94; gender, 93–94; logic of vicarity, 95; martyrdom, 94–95; motherhood, 94–95; nuns, 93, 94; spirituality, 94; suffering, 91 Henry the Monk, 114 heresy: Anabaptists, 227n8; Apocalypse of Peter, 29; cross, 27–28, 29–30, 193–94; and Franciscans, 113; group definition, 25; Gnosticism, 27, 28; Huguenots, 157; lynching, 157; martyrdom, 62; and mysticism, 128; and orthodoxy, 3, 26; Reformations, 158, 170, 227n8, 229n35; scholarship, 3, 219n31; Waldensians, 115–16, 220n32 Herrenberg Altarpiece, 129–131, 130 Heyman, George, 55, 56, 210n16 Hippolytus (martyr), 69 history, 18, 19, 32, 33–34, 147, 148, 171 Hoffman, Melchior, 162 Hooker, Thomas, 179 Hughes, Kevin, 221n52

Hugolino of Ostia, 116 Huguenots, 157 humanity, 33, 89–90, 143, 149, 170, 173 Hut, Hans, 147, 150–51, 225n61 identity formation, 22, 24, 25, 54. See also social differentiation Ignatius of Antioch, 44–45, 52, 146 Irenaeus (martyr), 43 Irenaeus of Lyons, 28, 31–35 Israel, 18–19. See also Judaism James (martyr), 41, 43 Jensen, Robin, 200n1 Jesus Christ: Abelard, 90, 91, 92, 102, 215n58; access, 134, 139; affective devotion, 86–87, 102; Anselm, 79, 80–81, 86, 102, 112–13, 214n23; Apocalypse of Peter, 29–30; Apostolic Tradition, 24; Augustine, 64, 64, 66–67; Black Southerners, 189–90; body, 3, 127, 151; body of the cross, 194; Bonaventure, 118–21; blood, 108–9; Calvin, 158, 233n110; Clement VI, 134; compassion for, 97, 120; cross, 7, 15, 39, 66–67, 70, 86, 103, 105, 113, 118, 120–21, 126–27, 130–31, 149, 191–92, 194; Cyprian, 64; death, 1, 5, 18, 24, 80; debt to, 182–83; Denck, 150; Epistle of Barnabas, 18; and Eucharist, 142, 146; flagellation, 130; Francis, 117, 121; Franciscans, 113; Heloise, 91, 92; Herrenberg Altarpiece, 129–31, 130; and holy victims, 192; Hut, 150; identification, 97, 146, 180–81, 189–90; Ignatius of Antioch, 45; imitatio, 40, 49–52, 55, 59–60, 113, 119–20, 126; incarnation, 64, 66, 79, 81, 90, 142, 144; Irenaeus, 33; Justin Martyr, 20; Logos, 20–21; Luther, 131–32, 134, 135–37, 138, 142, 146; and lynching, 189–90; Marian, 46–47; marriage, 105–7; and martyrs, 39–40, 41, 45–48, 49–52, 55, 59–60, 62, 64, 65–67, 70, 77, 126, 209n56; Mary, 84, 108–9; Mechthild, 103, 108–12, 126; meditation on life, 119–21; Melanchthon, 173; merits, 67, 133–34; Müntzer, 138–39, 143–44, 146, 150; mystics, 103, 110, 194; nuns, 104–6; obedience, 80–81; participation, 2, 7, 37, 39, 103, 110, 121, 138–39, 144, 146, 150, 152, 191–92, 194; passion, 86, 111, 180–81; pedagogy, 66; Perkins, 176, 180–83; Polycarp, 45–46, 53; proto-orthodoxy, 29–30; Prudentius, 70; punishment, 176–77, 183; Puritans, 176,

index / 255 184–85; radical reformation, 152; Ramsay Psalter, 100; real presence, 142, 146; redemption, 66–67; Reformations, 133, 134; reversal motif, 29, 31–32, 55–56, 70; righteousness, 173; Rothschild Canticles, 104–6; and sacraments, 142; sacrifice, 67, 209n56; satisfaction, 80–81; sins, forgiveness of, 66–67; solus, 2; substitute, 2, 80–81, 101, 191; suffering, 37, 39–40, 51, 55, 60, 65–66, 91, 100, 102, 108, 117, 120, 136–37, 143–44, 150–51, 181–82, 184–85, 233n110; triumph/victory, 15, 17, 24, 55, 60; union with, 59–60, 107–12, 113; Valentinianism, 29; whole Christ (totus christus), 66, 150–51; Williams, 191; Wittenberg Altarpiece, 131–32, 132; wounds, 106–7, 117; Zell, 154. See also Christology “Jesus Christ in Georgia,” 190 John the evangelist, 100, 197 Johnson, Franklin, 188–89 Journey of the Soul into God, 118 Judaism: Boyarin, 25–26; and Christianity, 17, 25; and cross, 19, 124, 125; Ecclesia and Synagoga, 122–23, 123; Epistle of Barnabas, 17–19; Gospel of Philip, 30; Justin Martyr, 20, 21–22; parting of the ways, 26; rejection, 122–24; Scriptures, 21; useful fiction, 26 Judas, 129 Judgment against Anabaptists (Melanchthon), 162 justification, 151, 163, 172–74 Justin Martyr, 19–22 Karant-Nunn, Susan C., 233n110 Karlstadt, Andreas, 140, 141 Kendall, R. T., 231n76, 232n86 key of David, 147–50 Kirchenpfleger, 165, 230n47 Knox, John, 167 laicization, 96–97 lapsed (lapsi), 61 Last Supper, 129 Lateran III, 115 Lateran IV, 134 law of Moses, 18–19 Letter to the Romans (Ignatius), 44–45 Levitan, William, 216n75 liturgy, 22–23. See also Eucharist; sacraments Litwa, M. David, 206n83 living cross, 124, 125, 128

logic of vicarity: Cone, 191; cross, 9, 70–71, 184, 192; Heloise, 95; holy victims, 2, 184, 191–92; lynching, 191; martyrs, 58, 63, 70–71, 74, 77; merit, 58; Middle Ages, 11; outsiders, 184; participation in Christ, 7, 191–92; people of God, 70–71; political theology, 63; suffering, 58; symbol of cross, 9 Lord’s Supper. See Eucharist Lucius, 49 Lucius III, Pope, 116 Luther, Martin: Against the Fanatics, 142; agency, divine, 140, 141, 142–43, 151; agency, human, 143; and Anabaptists, 160, 161; Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 141; blasphemy, 161; and Bucer, 164; Christ, 131–32, 134, 135–37, 138, 142, 146; church, 161, 163, 168; Coburg sermon, 135, 158–59; Confession concerning Christ’s Supper, 140; cross, 135–36, 137, 140, 143; cura religionis, 161; discipleship, 135, 136, 151; eschatology, 148; Eucharist, 139–42, 146; faith, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142; Freedom of a Christian, 142, 160; God, 140, 141, 143, 151, 156, 173; grace, 139; and Karlstadt, 140, 141; magistrate, 160–61, 228n20; Mary, 142; merit, 134, 139, 168; and Müntzer, 137–38, 143, 144, 159; mysticism, 136, 138; passivity, 136, 138; peasants, 158–59; penance, 168–69, 231n67; preaching, 131, 135; predestination, 172–73; promise, 137–38, 142, 173; and radicals, 135, 140–41; real presence, 139, 141, 142; reception, 136, 138, 142; Revelation, book of, 148, 225n64; Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, 141; sacraments, 139–42, 156; Saxony visitations, 161, 163; sin, 169; the state, 159–60; subjectivism, 140–41; suffering, 135–37, 158–59; sword, 160–61; Temporal Authority, 160; temptation, 173; two kingdoms, 160–61; Wittenberg Altarpiece, 131–32, 132; works righteousness, 136; wrath, 156; and Zwingli, 140, 141 lynching, 157, 189–91, 193, 234n12, 234n18 Maccabees, 60, 94–95 MacMullen, Ramsay, 212n44 Manetsch, Scott M., 230n55 Mantz, Felix, 1 Map, Walter, 115–16 Marian, 41, 43, 46–47, 49

256 / index marriage imagery, 105–8, 110–11, 119, 126, 176–77 Marsden, George, 188–89 Martyrdom of Marian and James, 40, 41, 46 martyrs: Abelard, 90, 91, 92; agōn, 49; Anabaptists, 162; apocalyptic, 40, 43–44, 53; apotropaic, 53, 55; athletic imagery, 41, 49; and atonement, 10, 52–53, 54–55, 58–59, 60; Augustine, 63–67, 72; baptism, 43; and bishops, 57–58, 61–62, 68, 73; blood, 68–69, 70; body, 55, 56, 59; and Christ, 39–40, 45–48, 49–52, 55, 59–60, 62, 64, 65–67, 70, 77, 126, 209n56; Christomorphism, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 77; and church, 51–52, 56, 64, 66, 67; and confessors, 61; cross, 10, 40, 41, 46, 48, 49, 55, 56, 58–59, 63, 66–67, 68, 70, 73; crown, 41, 46–49, 50; cult, 2, 57–59, 63, 68, 71, 72, 74, 209n2, 212n44; Cyprian, 41, 61–62, 63, 66, 67; devotion, popular, 67; Eucharist, 44–46, 62; gender, 50–51, 208n42; God, 46, 47; Heloise, 94–95; and heresy, 62; holy victims, 72; imitatio christi, 40, 49–52, 55, 59–60; imitation of, 63, 67; intercession, 61, 63; interior, 77–78; justice, 64; kenosis, 49–50, 51; logic of vicarity, 58, 63, 70–71, 74, 77; memory, 50; merits, 73; Origen, 59–60, 62; parrhēsia, 210n11; pedagogical, 65–66; philosopher, 59–60; Prudentius, 67–71, 73; redemption, 47–48; remains, 51–52, 57, 63; and Rome, 42–44; sacraments, 41, 43, 61–62; sacrifice, 39, 42–46, 52–56, 60, 62, 66, 68, 69–70, 72, 209n56; scholarship, modern, 52, 53; sermons, 63–65; sin, forgiveness, 58, 60, 61–62, 66, 73; spectacle, 64–65; substitution, 72; suffering, 37–38, 39–40, 49–52, 55, 58–59, 60, 63, 65–66, 68, 73; torture, 68–69; traditions, 10, 56, 57–58, 62, 68, 72, 210n4; triumph/victory, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46–49, 51, 55, 56, 60, 65; typology, 47; union with Christ, 59–60; visions, 41 Martyrs of Lyons, The, 40–41, 49–50 Mary, Virgin: Abelard, 102, 216n66; Anselm, 83–86, 97, 98, 102, 196, 214n31; Bonaventure, 120, 121; breasts, 108–9; bride, 109; and Christ, 108–9; faith, 142; Luther, 142; Mechthild, 108–9; mother, 109; Ramsay Psalter, 98–100, 99, 197; Rothschild Canticles, 104–5; Tree of Life, 120 material culture, 68, 200n1. See also visual culture Matheson, Peter, 129

Matilda of Tuscany, 76–77, 76, 96, 213n5 maturation, 33, 34 Maturus, 40 McCracken, Peggy, 94, 215n62 McKee, Elsie, 153–54 McNamer, Sarah, 98, 217n89, 218n7, 221n46 meaning making, 6–7, 36, 37, 128, 190–91, 192 Mechthild of Magdeburg: atonement, 127; authority, prophetic, 111–12; beguine, 107; body of the cross, 112; Christ, 103, 108–12, 126; Christomorphism, 112; cross, 103, 126; cult of saints, 126; desire, 109–11; eroticism, 109–10; God, 109–11; Flowing Light of the Godhead, 107, 112, 219n26; gender, 107–8; marriage imagery, 107–8, 110–12, 119 ; Mary, 108–10; monasticism, 111; mysticism, 107, 110; participation, 103, 110; physical body, 108, 110, 111–12 Meditations on the Life of Christ, 119 Melanchthon, Philip, 161–63, 173 merit: Christ, 67, 133–34; church, medieval, 134; cross, 58; extrinsicism, 175; faith, 133, 139; holy victims, 2; logic of vicarity, 58; and Luther, 134, 139, 168; martyrs, 73; Mary, 83; penal substitution, 7, 195; real presence, 146; Reformations, 133, 170; saint, 1; sin, forgiveness/remission of, 73; transfer, 1, 2, 7, 58; treasury, 133–34, 168 Mews, Constant, 88 Middle Ages: affective devotion, 10–11, 77; church, 134; cross, 122, 126, 128; dualism, 103; Ecclesia and Synagoga, 122, 123; gender, 108; holy victims, 2; logic of vicarity, 11; merit, 134; participation in Christ, 11; reform movements, 113–17; sacraments, 169; saints, 77; Song of Songs, 108; tree of life, 122; violence, 128 Middle Platonism, 59, 60 Milan, 57 monasticism, 79, 81–82, 96–97, 111 Montanus, 49 Montner, William, 227n8, 229n35 Moore, R. I., 219n31 Mosaic law, 18–19 Moss, Candida, 52, 209n53 Münster, kingdom of, 162 Müntzer, Thomas: academics, 147, 225n59; apocalyptic, 138, 145–46, 147; Christ, 138–39, 143–44, 146; Counterfeit Faith, 137, 147; cross, 139, 143; discipleship, 139; divinization, 144–45; eschatology, 137, 138, 145; Eucharist, 143–46; Exposé of

index / 257 False Faith, The, 144; faith, 138; gnosis, 144, 145; God, 137; incarnation, 144, 145; judgment, 137–38; justification, 138; key of David, 147; and Luther, 137–38, 143, 144, 159; mysticism, 138, 145, 146; participation, 138–39, 143–45, 146; and peasants, 159; politics, 145–46; promise, 137–38; Protestation or Proposition, 137, 138; radical reformer, 137, 146, 224n46; real presence, 144; sin, forgiveness of, 139; spiritualism, 145; suffering, 143–44; Vindication and Refutation, 224n58 Musurillo, Herbert, 206n2 mysticism: Bonaventure, 118–19; church, 112–13; cross, 102, 127, 128, 136, 146, 183; Franciscans, 113, 126; and gender, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 112; and heresy, 128; Luther, 136, 138; marriage, 107–8, 110–11, 119, 126; Mechthild, 107–8, 110–12, 119; Müntzer, 138, 145, 146; participation, 103, 110, 194; physical body, 103–4, 127; radical reformers, 148; Tauler, 136, 145 Nabor, 57 Nag Hammadi, 28 North Africa, 61 Northern Presbyterians, 188 nuns, 92, 93, 94, 104–6 old covenant, 18–19, 32 “On the Mystery of Baptism” (Hut), 150 orans pose, 71–72 Origen, 59–60, 62, 66, 210n10 orthodoxy, 3, 26–27, 28, 29–30. See also heresy; proto-orthodoxy Oyer, John S., 164, 229n34 Packull, Werner, 149 Pahl, Jon, 194 parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matt. 25:1–13), 104 Parker, Rebecca Ann, 200n1 participation: body of the cross, 194; Bonaventure, 121; in Christ, 2, 7, 37, 39, 103, 121, 138–39, 144, 146, 152, 183, 191–92, 194; cross, 6, 7, 27–28, 103, 121, 143; Denck, 150; Eucharist, 146; logic of vicarity, 7, 191–92; Luther, 138; Mechthild, 103; Middle Ages, 11, 103; Müntzer, 138–39, 143–45, 146, 150; mysticism, 103, 110, 194; radical reformation, 152, 183; suffering, 2, 37, 39, 143–44; transactional, 7. See also Christomorphism passion sarcophagus, 201n3

patronage, 97 Paul, apostle, 31, 39, 49, 145 peasant wars, 129, 147, 158–59, 161, 162 penal substitution: Calvin, 158, 227n9; Christ, 2; development, 1, 7, 195; discipline, 183; fundamentalism, 188–89; internalization, 183–84; merit transfer, 7, 195; and persecution, 163; Puritanism, 157–58, 170, 175; Reformations, 2, 12, 157, 195; Reformed tradition, 12, 183; salvation, 157–58, 170; wrath of God, 157 penance, 168–70 people of God: apocalyptic, 17; cross, 16–17, 32–33; differentiation, 16–17; Epistle of Barnabas, 18–19; Gnosticism, 29; and God, 32–35; Irenaeus, 32–35; Justin Martyr, 22; logic of vicarity, 70–71 Pereire gem, 202n29 Perkins, William: assurance, 182; atonement, 172, 179, 181; Christ, 176, 180–83; covenant theology, 175–76; cross, 176–77, 179–81; debt, 182–83; A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified, 180; decree, 176; document of faith, 232n94; God, 176, 179, 182, 232n98; A Golden Chaine, 175, 177, 178, 180; iconophobia, 181; law, 179–80; marriage imagery, 176–77; ordo salutis, 176, 177, 178; passion, 180–81; predestination, 177; punishment, 176–77; recursion, 180, 181; salvation, 179–80; sin, 182; substitution, 182; suffering, 181–82; wrath, 182 Perpetua, 41, 207n8 persecution, 161–63 Peter of Bruys, 114 Peter the Venerable, 114 physical body: and cross, 16; discipline, 4; gender, 103–4; Gnosticism, 205n71; Gospel of Philip, 30–31; martyrs, 55, 56, 59; Mechthild, 108, 110, 111–12; mysticism, 103–4, 127; participation in Christ, 3 Pionius, 43 Platonism, 20, 21 polemics, 19, 30, 42–44, 54, 55, 69, 70 politics: Anabaptists, 163; blasphemy, 163; body of the cross, 193; cross, 128; early Christianity, 16; Eucharist, 145–46; holy victims, 63; identity, 25; Justin Martyr, 20; Müntzer, 145–46; radicals, 163; Reformations, 158; repression, 128; theology, 63 Polycarp of Smyrna, 45–46, 52 populism, 114–15, 133 Pothinus, 40

258 / index poverty, 115–16 preaching, 131, 135, 137 predestination, 171–72, 177, 179. See also election prophecy, 20, 21 Protasius, 57 Protestantism. See Reformations proto-orthodoxy, 26, 29–30 Prudentius, 67–71, 73, 211n38 Puritanism: Christ, 176, 184–85; covenant theology, 175–76; cross, 174; decree, 179; election, 184; God, 174, 179, 184–85; order of salvation, 175; penal substitution, 157–58, 170, 174, 175; psychology, 179; spiritual exercises, 179; wrath, 174, 184–85 Rabus, Ludwig, 152–53 race, 19, 30, 35, 192, 202n18 radicals (Reformation): apocalyptic, 146–48; atonement, 152; Christ, 152; cross, 135, 146, 151; discipleship, 151; Eucharist, 140–41, 143; grace, 139; inner word, 149–50; and Luther, 135, 140–41; Müntzer, 137, 146, 224n46; mysticism, 148; participation, 152, 183; politics, 163; spiritualists, 140, 141; subjectivism, 140–41; suffering, 183 Ramsay Psalter, 98–100, 99 Rasimus, Tuomas, 28 Ratgeb, Jörg, 129, 131, 133 recapitulation, 33, 205n72, 206n80 recursion, 12, 170–71, 174, 180, 181, 183, 184, 195 redemption, 66–67, 89 Reformations: anticlericalism, 147; apocalyptic, 147; assurance, 175; blasphemy, 156–57; and Catholics, 156–57; Christ, 133, 134; Christomorphism, 134, 151; church, 134; cross, 133; discipline, 163; Eucharist, 169; extrinsicism, 139, 171, 175, 183–84; heresy, 158, 170; indulgences, 133–34; magisterial, 132, 133, 147, 150, 151, 169, 170, 174–75, 183–84; merit, 133, 170; penal substitution, 2, 12, 157; politics, 158; radical, 132–33, 147, 151–52; sacraments, 134, 151, 168, 169; subjectivism, 169, 170; substitution, 174, 184; wrath, 157 Reformed tradition: anxiety over election, 177; assurance of salvation, 172; Bucer, 164; decree, 179; discipline, 163–70; grace, 139; limited atonement, 171–72;

penal substitution, 12, 183; and penance, 168, 169; recursion, 171 Refutation of Some Unchristian Articles That the Anabaptists Hold (Melanchthon), 162 Reid, Darrel, 148 reprobation, 35, 192. See also heresy resignatio ad infernum, 179 Rittgers, Ronald K., 136–37, 231n67 Roman Empire, 16, 22, 42–44, 54, 55, 61, 68, 69–70 Romanus, 68–69 Rothschild Canticles, 104–7, 105, 106, 122 Rupp, Gordon, 225n59 sacraments: Anabaptists, 162; bishops, 62; blasphemy, 156; Christ, 142; creation, 31; ex opere operato, 141; Gospel of Philip, 30; Luther, 139, 140–42, 156; martyrdom, 41, 43; Melanchthon, 162; priest, 134; promise, 142; reform preachers, medieval, 114; Reformations, 134, 139–40, 151, 168; the state, 140; treasury of merit, 134; Valentinian, 30, 31. See also specific sacraments, e.g., Eucharist sacrifice: atoning, 60; bishops, 62; Christ, 67, 209n56; church, 56; communion, 53–54; cross, 42, 55; Decian persecution, 61; discipleship, 44; eucharistic, 44–46, 52, 54, 62; expiation, 54–55; gift, 53; to God, 43; Gospel of Philip, 30; Hebrew Bible, 54; Ignatius of Antioch, 52; martyrs, 39, 42–46, 52–56, 60, 62, 66, 68–69, 72, 209n56; polemic against Rome, 42–44, 54, 55, 69, 70; Polycarp, 52–53; praise and thanksgiving, 44–46, 53, 209n56; propitiation, 54; Prudentius, 68–70; Roman, 68, 69–70; and sin, 54, 66–67; vicarious, 52; worship, 54, 55, 56 saints, 1, 57, 71–73, 77, 126, 196 salvation: Anselm, 83, 84; assurance, 172, 174, 180; in Christ, 2; decree, 171, 174; election, 172; forensic justification, 173–74; Irenaeus, 35; Justin Martyr, 17, 18; and law, 180; limited, 34; Mary, 83, 84; Melanchthon, 173–74; order of, 175, 176, 177; penal substitution, 157–58, 170; Perkins, 179–80; predestination, 171; Puritans, 175; Valentinians, 34–35; and works, 173–74 Sanctus, 40, 50–51 Satan. See devil satisfaction, 80–81, 88

index / 259 Saxony visitation of 1527, 161–62 schism, 61 Schütz Zell, Katharina, 152–55, 226nn83–84 Schwenckfeld, Caspar von, 152–53 Scofield Reference Bible, 187–88 Scott, James, 4 Scriptures, 18, 21, 148 Seeberg, Reinhold, 214n23 Servetus, Michael, 168 sign of the cross, 23–24 sin: Abelard, 89, 90, 215n51; Anselm, 80; forgiveness, 58, 60, 61–62, 66–67, 73, 89, 139, 169, 215n51; God, 89, 215n51; grace, 169; Luther, 169; martyrs, 58, 60, 61–62, 66, 73; and merit, 73; Müntzer, 139; Perkins, 182; and sacrifice, 54, 66–67; transactional understanding, 74, 182 social differentiation, 15, 16–17, 192. See also boundary markers; identity formation soldier at foot of cross, 16, 36, 39 South, American, 187–91, 193 Southern, Richard, 81 spirituality, 77–78 Stephen (martyr), 63 Stewart, Lyman, 187 Strasbourg, 152–55, 169 subjectivism, 140–41, 169, 170, 172–73, 175 substitution: Abelard, 90, 97; Anselm, 80–81, 97; body of the cross, 184; Christ, 2, 80–81, 101, 191; internalization, 175; martyrs, 72; Perkins, 182; Reformations, 174, 184; recursion, 174; surrogacy, 191; Williams, 191; and wrath, 184. See also logic of vicarity; penal substitution suffering: Abelard, 91, 102; Anselm, 86, 102; atonement, 5, 55, 195–96; Black Southerners, 189–90; Christ, 37, 39–40, 51, 55, 65–66, 91, 100, 102, 108, 136, 150–51, 181–82, 233n110; church, 3, 51; creation, 150; cross, 37, 39, 63, 73, 152–53; Heloise, 91; justification, 2; logic of vicarity, 2, 3, 58; Luther, 135–36, 158–59; lynching, 189–90; martyrs, 37–38, 39–40, 49–52, 55, 58–59, 60, 63, 65–66, 68, 73; Mary, 86, 100; meaning making, 2; mediation, 4; Müntzer, 143; participation, 2–3, 37, 39–40; Pauline theology, 39; peasants, 159; Perkins, 181–82; Prudentius, 68–69, 73; radicals, 183; redemptive, 39–40; Schütz Zell, 152–53; triumph/victory, 38–39, 65; whole Christ (totus christus), 151 Sumner, Darren, 22

supersessionism, 19, 25, 122. See also Judaism surrogacy, 191 swoon, Marian, 98–100 Tauler, Johannes, 136, 145 taurobolium, 69 Theodosian peace, 58, 63, 67–68, 70, 72 theology, atonement: Anselm, 11, 78, 81, 83–84, 85, 95, 101; Abelard, 11, 88–91, 95, 101; Aulén, 5–6; Bonaventure, 127; Calvin, 158; canonical texts, 8–9; Christus victor, 83–84; cross, 4, 101, 127; decree, 171–72; fundamentalism, 188; limited atonement, 171–72, 179; Mary, 83–86; Mechthild, 127; merit, 83; Middle Ages, 126–27; moral influence, 81, 83, 90, 188–89; nostalgia, 6; patristic, 6; Prayers and Meditations (Anselm), 78; predestination 171–72; refusing, 195; retelling, 9; scholarship, 4–5; Schütz Zell, 155; sources, 8; suffering, 5, 195–96; typology, 5, 6, 7; violence, 5; wonderful exchange, 84 Thomas of Celano, 117 Timaeus, 21 Tipson, Baird, 179 tree, cross as, 30–31 tree of knowledge, 30–31 tree of life, 30–31, 104, 122, 124 Tree of Life (Bonaventure), 119–21 tree sarcophagus, 15, 16, 36 triumph: Christ, 15, 17, 24, 55, 60; martyrs, 38–39, 40, 41, 46–49, 51, 55, 56; suffering, 38–39, 65 tropaeum, 38, 46, 202n21 Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants, 159 typology, 5, 6, 7, 15, 18, 47 Unigenitus, 133–34 universality, 35 Valdes, Peter, 115, 220n33 Valentine, Susan, 216n66 Valentinianism, 28, 29, 30–35 Valentinus, 28, 204n52 Valet, Antoine, 156 vicarity. See logic of vicarity victory. See triumph Vincent, 69 violence, 5, 35, 128, 194 visual culture, 9, 38. See also material culture voluntarism. See under church

260 / index Wandel, Lee Palmer, 223n37 Watt, Jeffrey, 168 Webster, Leslie, 100 Whitford, David M., 228n26 Wigg-Stevenson, Natalie, 200n14 will, free, 149–50 William II, King, 79, 81 Williams, Delores, 7, 191 Williams, Michael Allen, 30, 31

Wittenberg Altarpiece, 131–32, 132 women. See gender Young, Frances, 53, 54–55, 209n42, 209nn60–61 Young, Robin Darling, 55 Zell, Matthew, 152, 153–54 Zwingli, Huldrych, 140, 141

Travis E. Ables (PhD, Vanderbilt) is affiliate faculty at Regis University. He has previously taught at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Eden Theological Seminary and has served as managing editor of the Anglican Theological Review. He is also the author of Incarnational Realism: Trinity and the Spirit in Augustine and Barth (2013).