In this chapter, Upson-Saia investigates wound metaphors in the ascetic context. She argues that, because of their ubiquity, “wounds and wounding provided a widely recognizable conceptual frame and an immediately meaningful linguistic device” (87). Upson-Saia draws on various sources to demonstrate how ascetics used wound metaphors to construct “a thoroughly medicalized notion of Christian piety” (87).
Upson-Saia notes that her analysis is indebted to Elizabeth Clark’s discussion of the celibate-bride metaphor in early ascetic discourse. However, Upson-Saia draws on cognitive linguistic theory (especially the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) to strengthen and clarify the relationship between early Christian figurative language and the experiences of everyday life. She suggests that wound metaphors “were not merely linguistic flourishes but that the bodily experience of being wounded structured early Christians’ concepts of sin and heresy” (88). In order to flesh out this connection, Upson-Saia recognizes that one must first define a relatively uniform set of properties and experiences related to wounding which can be “meaningfully exported” to “conceptual categories of sin and heresy” (88).
In Upson-Saia’s analysis, ancient medical typology split wounds into harmful results of accidents, injuries, and diseases on the one hand and the “salutary” wounds caused by the physician on the other. Of course, both types of wounds were painful and greatly feared. Ancient medical writers therefore recognized that the “best physicians” had the “sharp rhetorical skills and easy bedside manner” (90) necessary to deal with even the most truculent patients.
Christian writers and preachers drew on this medical literature when discussing the concepts of sin and heresy. For example, they recognized that sin and heresy – like physical wounds – had a variety of sources. But whatever the origin, the sin corrupted and putrefied the soul just like a gangrenous, septic wound. If left untreated, the sinner will no longer even be able to feel the festering as the wound numbs and the patient becomes oblivious to sin. As Tertullian notes, heretics who suffer delirium and fevers for long will eventually dull their normal senses and lose the ability to perceive orthodoxy. This and other associations were evoked by describing the wounds of sin and heresy “in lurid detail,” including a strong emphasis on the “foul and repellent stench of putrefied flesh” (92).
Christian writers were careful to maintain the dichotomy between salutary and malevolent wounds already established in ancient medical literature. In Upson-Saia’s analysis, “they structured an understanding of beneficent chastisement and ecclesial discipline on the physicians’ rewounding treatments” (93). Spiritual treatments were painful, but the divine physician always “wounds in order that he may heal” (93, echoing Deuteronomy 32:39).[1] Christians must be prepared to follow God’s example in treating “their friends’ wounded souls” (94). For example, John Chrysostom urges his community to imitate the surgeon who heeds not his patients’ cries but cares only for their health (94, quoting Patrologia Graeca 63: 212).[2] At the same time, Chrysostom urges his community to model “Christian reproof on a physician’s gentle persuasion and comforting bedside manner” (94). Thus, treatment of spiritual wounds must be adjusted to the sinner’s temperament.
Ascetics also suffered bodily afflictions because of sin and vice. Melania herself developed an inflammation from her worldly clothes. Upson-Saia reads this as “a corporeal wound inflicted by the Great Physician, a wound that mirrors or manifests the wounding of Melania’s soul” (97). In order to be healed, Melania must adopt a healthier form of life – a more rigorous asceticism. As a good patient, an ascetic must be humble and obedient in order to experience true healing.
In sum, Upson-Saia provides a wide-ranging and lucid demonstration of how embodied experiences of wounding structured early Christian discourse surrounding sin, heresy, and repentance. The polyvalent wound metaphors also structured ascetic piety. In her conclusion, Upson-Saia uses her emphasis on the body “as itself a vehicle for thinking, feeling, and acting” (98, quoting Laurence Kirmayer) to suggest that these metaphors were at the core not only of Christian discourse but also of Christian concepts. This stronger claim seems to link up to Upson-Saia’s initial mention of cognitive linguistic theory, but she should have made this relationship more explicit in order to provide evidence for her stronger claim. Overall, however, this article is an outstanding synthesis of at least three distinct strands of literature – modern, medical, and ecclesiastical – to support a compelling and inventive thesis.
[1] NRSV: “I kill and I make alive; / I wound and I heal; / and no one can deliver from my hand.”
[2] In English translation, available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/240230.htm (see the last two paragraphs).