I’m glad that my disability article has been so well-received, but reader after reader has pointed to one unanswered question — actually, two unanswered questions that mean the same thing. (Don’t worry — these questions make sense even if you haven’t read the article.) They are: What is the real difference between self-improvement (good) and becoming a completely different person (bad)? Will my sister Martha be retarded in the Kingdom of Heaven, and, if not, is she still Martha?
The inimitable Joe Carter — one of the most able debaters since, well, you know — has raised just this point:
Jesus had no compunctions about curing disabilities, no matter how “fundamental to a person’s character” they may have been. The reason is that lameness, deafness, blindness, and other maladies are corruptions of God’s good creation. Nowhere in Scripture does it suggest that such afflictions are anything less than the lamentable result of man’s fallen condition.
. . . The reason we privilege physical wholeness is because it is closer to God’s ideal for creation.
Disability might be fundamental to Martha’s idea of herself, but it isn’t any part of God’s idea of her. Given that our bodies belong to Him, we ought to strive for fidelity to His plans and not ours, right?
Nope.
I see the virtues of Joe’s argument, having once made it myself, but, if you click through the link, you’ll see what Dara wrote in response:
But if we take “fidelity” [to God's plan] as an ideal, what do we do with monasticism/asceticism and debauchery? Both of these seem to require seeing the body as an obstacle to purpose–not just disciplining it, but breaking it and breaking through.
Obviously this is a little dualistic, but it’s a perception of dualism that makes fasting or “in vino veritas” work. Can this be integrated into the fidelity ideal? Should it be?
Sometimes we get closer to God by striving for perfection; sometimes we do it by turning our imperfections up to eleven: fasting, asceticism, bodily mortifications, drunkenness, etc. That’s what Dara means by “breaking it and breaking through.” I can agree with Joe or I can get drunk, but I can’t do both.
If the desert saints got closer to God by inflicting physical imperfection upon themselves (i.e. the delirium and physical weakness that come from extended fasting), then surely it makes sense to say that preserving someone’s physical imperfections can be fidelity to God, too. (Especially if those imperfections come with the compensating “fuzzy, intangible benefits” I talked about.)
But that’s just a preliminary point. If I can convince Joe of just one thing, it would be this: Drunkenness is a helpful metaphor for the kingdom of heaven; so helpful, in fact, that it answers the question of whether Martha will be disabled there.
When I read this passage in St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s On Loving God, I nearly dropped the book:
Hear how the Bridegroom in Canticles bids us to this threefold progress: “Eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved” (Cant. 5:1). He offers food to those who are laboring with bodily toil; then He calls the resting souls whose bodies are laid aside, to drink; and finally He urges those who have resumed their bodies to drink abundantly.
. . . When the flesh is laid aside, [the soul] eats no more the bread of carefulness, but is allowed to drink deeply of the wine of love, as if after a repast. But the wine is not yet unmingled; even as the Bridegroom saith in another place, “I have drunk My wine with My milk” (Cant. 5:1). For the soul mixes with the wine of God’s love the milk of natural affection, that is, the desire for her body and its glorification. She glows with the wine of holy love which she has drunk; but she is not yet all on fire, for she has tempered the potency of that wine with milk. The unmingled wine would enrapture the soul and make her wholly unconscious of self; but here is no such transport for she is still desirous of her body. When that desire is appeased, when the one lack is supplied, what should hinder her then from yielding herself utterly to God, losing her own likeness and being made like unto Him? At last she attains to that chalice of the heavenly wisdom, of which it is written, “My cup shall be full.” Now indeed she is refreshed with the abundance of the house of God, where all selfish, carking care is done away, and where, for ever safe, she drinks the fruit of the vine, new and pure, with Christ in the Kingdom of His Father (Matt. 26:29).
It is Wisdom who spreads this threefold supper where all the repast is love; Wisdom who feeds the toilers, who gives drink to those who rest, who floods with rapture those that reign with Christ. Even as at an earthly banquet custom and nature serve meat first and then wine, so here. Before death, while we are still in mortal flesh, we eat the labors of our hands, we swallow with an effort the food so gained; but after death, we shall begin eagerly to drink in the spiritual life and finally, reunited to our bodies, and rejoicing in fullness of delight, we shall be refreshed with immortality. This is what the Bridegroom means when He saith: “Eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.” Eat before death; begin to drink after death; drink abundantly after the resurrection.
I have quoted at length because I don’t want Joe to think I’m cherrypicking passages to make Bernard sound like the lush of Christendom. No, he really is using drunkenness as an extended metaphor for bodily resurrection.
So let’s pick up the ball where Bernard left it. We can say that drink makes a man act like a different person — “X just isn’t himself when he drinks” — but this transformation is regular and predictable; that is, alcohol affects everyone in approximately the same way, so we could extrapolate from a drunken man what his sober self is like. Which means that his sober self isn’t quite there, but it isn’t quite lost either.
In the same way, the kingdom of heaven transforms people completely but predictably. I don’t know exactly what this will look like and neither do you (i.e. I don’t know exactly how “cured” Martha will be there), but thinking about heaven this way helps us understand how I might be cleansed of those faults that are fundamental to my character and yet still be me.
June 10th, 2009 | 3:52 pm
A shame, though, that by (for instance) implying you sympathize greatly with deaf parents who feel the need to keep their kids deaf, you suggest that (a) those of us who would usually love to see people transformed for the better by technology are unloving — yet (b) parents _who would love their children less if those children could hear_ are a-OK community-enhancing traditionalists.
If I can love a deaf person and support tech that might give her even greater happiness, but some parents can’t fully love a hearing child, who’s the real monster here?
June 10th, 2009 | 7:46 pm
For a moment I thought that Eve was she but I guess that it was Martha all along.
A man never kisses and tells so I won’t say any more about her.
Years ago God told me that we should enjoy life whether with Saint Bernard or with Martha here on earth which is just but a lost weekend which can last forever. For those DNA CELLS who truly believe that Jesus was who He said He was then we simply go into “Grade ONE” spiritually speaking and enjoy what God Really Prepared for HIS Children.
God Bless,
Peace
June 11th, 2009 | 12:37 am
[...] on Postmodern Conservative, Helen Rittelmeyer provides a reply to my criticisms of her proposal for a bioethics of love. In her original essay I was in agreement [...]
June 11th, 2009 | 4:43 am
“So let’s pick up the ball where Bernard left it. We can say that drink makes a man act like a different person — “X just isn’t himself when he drinks” — but this transformation is regular and predictable; that is, alcohol affects everyone in approximately the same way, so we could extrapolate from a drunken man what his sober self is like”
A short time observing drunken people should disabuse the notion that “alcohol affects everyone in approximately the same way”. Some people get melancholy, some amorous, some become violent, some talkative, some quiet. Even the same person may react differently on different occasions. Wine may indeed make the heart glad and our Lord’s miracle at Cana occurred when the guests had already drunk a lot (and so might not have distinguished mediocre wine from good) but Christians are also enjoined not to drink so as to lose self-control like the “wine-bibbers”.
If drunkenness is a helpful metaphor for the kingdom of heaven then why not cannabis-smoking, as the Rastafarians claim, or taking mesquite, LSD, cocaine, heroin etc or other practices that take people “out of their heads”?
June 11th, 2009 | 10:21 am
Might it be helpful to distinguish between the raising of Lazarus and the raising of Jesus? When Lazarus was raised he was apparently returned to his pre-illness state, and was still mortal. But when Jesus was raised he was the firstborn of the new creation, therefore unrecognizable, able to walk through walls, ascended straight to heaven, etc. To the extent that monasticism is going for the Jesus version of rebirth rather than the Lazarus version, it isn’t a terribly helpful analogue to disability. The fact that Jesus healed all those people even though they would all die and be transfigured eventually indicates that he still ascribed some value to healing on the earthly plane.
June 11th, 2009 | 11:10 am
I have to disagree you. I suspect that when St. Bernard talks about wine, he’s thinking of the Eucharist. That’s not physical drunkenness; that’s being drunk on God, being so full of God and His goodness that you’re hardly in this fleshly world anymore. That’s completely different from being drunk on alcohol, because being drunk on alcohol clouds your mind so that you cannot see God.
Ascetics don’t mortify their flesh because they want to inflict physical imperfections on themselves, because physical imperfections alone do not get anyone closer to God. But God is good, and so by looking for the good that remains in the face of suffering they hope to find Him more easily. They’re studying the spiritual world by looking for what’s left when they take away the physical world.
As for your sister, I have faith that when she is in Heaven, she will be perfected and incorruptible like all the saints. I don’t know what that will be like, but eventually we’ll all find out.
June 11th, 2009 | 1:54 pm
I really can not comment on the reasons why ascetics fast, but I imagine that many Christians today fast not for the sake of physical imperfections in the belief that the body is an impediment to faithfulness (that must be broken through), but because fasting can train us not to idolize food and therefore give us the capacity to worship more faithfully with our bodies, not in spite of our bodies.
The body is not the impediment. Gluttony is.
With regard to the proper use of technology for human healing versus human enhancement, this of course requires a teleology of humanity based on its nature. Or, in other words, it requires one understand what the body is for and therefore what form accomplishes its end, its telos.
Leon Kass writes well about this in his meditations on sports and chemical enhancement.
June 11th, 2009 | 7:52 pm
The obvious and slightly snarky Christian response is that “eye has not seen” &c., and that we therefore have no business speaking about beatitude as a “predictable” thing. Paradise is an improvement on the muddled run of secular experience, to be sure, but just _how_ it’s an improvement is something no mortal is entitled to know. And an obvious and potentially snarky comment like that should preface anything we say about the world to come: we really have no right to talk about these things, and no perspective from which we can judge them well.
But such basic ignorance notwithstanding, there are still some things we know about paradise: we know that every tear shall be wiped away, that there will be no death nor mourning, and so on. And we know it’s correct to speak about the fullness and perfection of the life of God, to be enjoyed by those who share in that life.
And this does allow us to make some predictions about what will “carry over” into heaven. However much the character of a person such as Teresa of Calcutta may have been formed by her unsated thirsting for God, I think we can state with confidence that in paradise she would not be able to mourn God’s absence. Analogously, the fact that music is beautiful makes it impossible that there could be deafness in heaven (which is not, by the way, a criticism of deaf culture: every culture on earth is missing something, and asceticism and other forms of “missing out” can make us better people).
This kind of argument has precedent, for example, in St. Thomas, who argues (Summ. Theol. IIIa. Q 81. A 2. ad 3) that dwarves and unnaturally large persons will be resurrected with normal stature. His argument has to do with “the truth of human nature”; whatever defects may plague humans in the world, what matters is their _real_ nature (i.e. rational animals that are capaces dei–or something along those lines.
And I think a real “bioethics of love” would have to take some such idea of human nature as its starting point. Last semester a group of Yale law students invited a woman (whose name I unfortunately can’t recall) to speak on the relationship between disability activism and abortion rights. In the course of her talk,he mentioned her own disabled son, and when she opened the floor for questions, one or two people were quick to congratulate her for proving how much joy even disabled children could bring into the world, and so on: to which she responded that, in fact, taking care of her child was actually kind of a miserable and discouraging thing.
It was clear that she loved him nonetheless, and that her love had nothing to do with any question of reciprocity or desert. And I don’t see how we can make sense of such unconditional love (if it’s even okay to try to make sense of love) without recognizing that for her, her son’s defects are merely “accidental,” and “the truth of human nature,” though it may be refracted to the point of obscurity, nevertheless makes him worthy of love.
Kant found the origins of human dignity in human “perfectibility,” which in the aftermath of the Enlightenment is hard to take seriously. But seen in an eschatological light, “perfectibility” offers the best possible justification of human dignity: all persons are to be valued, however small or decrepit or unwanted or debile they may be, because according to “the truth of human nature,” none of those conditions represents them as they really are.
June 12th, 2009 | 12:29 pm
“However much the character of a person such as Teresa of Calcutta may have been formed by her unsated thirsting for God, I think we can state with confidence that in paradise she would not be able to mourn God’s absence.”
No, but Mother Theresa’s character formed in this life by her acute experience of God’s absence will subsist, and that’s the point. She will experience God’s full presence differently than, say, St. Thomas Moore, whose spiritual life on earth was significantly different. This is part of the significance of the Scripture describing how all our works will be tested as by fire. Those works of gold — those prayers and those ascetic practices, etc. — will bear fruit in the enjoyment of beatitude, but we will not continue to do those works.
Just so, even if a blind man will be healed of his blindness in heaven, he will still — in a very real sense — be a blind man in heaven. Whatever subsists of his identity when it is submerged in the Life of the Trinity will have been obtained in the context of his blindness, and it will be different from the character of those persons who bore the Cross in life with sight.
The problem with appealing to “human nature” as an ideal to be striven towards in one’s physical being — i.e. the idea that human being by nature have two working eyes and two working ears, etc. — is that it is an incomplete ideal. The true ideal is union with God. Human nature forms a basic precondition for union insofar as it is human beings that God draws to Himself. But God draws individual human beings to Himself, not human nature as such. Thus, the deviations from human nature that make individuals individuals and not undifferentiated, generic human beings cannot be completely abrogated in beatitude.
As such, we must take a nuanced view of disability. It is not always an evil (even if it be admitted that it is always a burden), and it is not always a good. In some cases, a man’s disability may lead him towards Union. In some cases, it may drag him away, and in that case (even if it is a basic part of his identity) he should work towards its destruction. “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.”
And we who love the disabled must must love them on these same terms.
June 14th, 2009 | 9:38 pm
I have a congenital disability and the way I read it the culture of that time associated disability with sin. In most cases when Christ healed the disabled he stated that their sins were forgiven. The healing was a healing, but it was also maybe something that showed the forgiveness in a clear way people then would understand.
Being born the way I am the idea of being “healed” and made “whole” does feel me with uncertainty. (I have a brittle bone condition called osteogenesis imperfecta) I’d agree I will never fracture my bones if I get to Heaven. I’d also agree my lungs will work and maybe my deformities will be gone.
However will I walk instead of crawl or float? (I dream of floating/flying more than walking at my age) Will I be average height with a normal shaped body and head? I guess Aquinas says yes, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that. The little short taxman in the New Testament that climbed the tree, I can’t remember his name but I think it started with a z, wasn’t made average height. Isn’t that stuff purely cosmetic?
I’m not a theologian, but I guess I think more that you will become the perfect/purified form of whatever you are.
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