Sennett on Christianity

  Beginning in the eleventh century, church builders sought to carve figures at human scale to show, in the words of a modern art historian, the “relationship berween human values and those values immanent in the world.” The carved figures made a direct appeal to the viewer to see him or herself as part of the church, an act of inclusion which began in an earlier age through the preaching of St. Francis of Assisi, who spoke directly to the ordinary Christian in simple language. By the year Jehan de Chelles began to complete Notre-Dame, such a union of flesh and stone had grown ever stronger as Christians began to connect their own bodily suffering to the suffering of Jesus. 

Christ “was, as it were, roasted and slowly baked to save us,” Jean Barthélemy wrote consolingly in Le Livre de Crainte Amoureuse.'° Such an earthy, homey image made the Crucifixion a comprehensible experience in terms of daily life. Rather than Christ the King, people identified with “the suffering Christ, the Christ of the Passion. The Crucifixion was increasingly portrayed, and increasingly realistic.”!! This movement of passionate identification with Christ’s bodily suffering was known as the “Imitation of Christ,” just because Christ’s sorrows seemed imitated by the human body’s sufferings. This was no casual figure of speech. The image of imitation stood directly opposed to Origen’s conviction that Christ’s body is alien to our own. St. Francis of Assisi told his parishioners that if they thought about their everyday experience, their own sensations, the world around them, they would realize what God is. Theologically, St. Francis recovered Nature for Christianity: God is in the world, God is Flesh as well as Light. 

By caring about the sufferings of other people, we imitate our teligious feelings about Jesus on the Cross: St. Francis reaffirmed that identification with the poor and outcast which marked the earliest Christianity. Sociologically, he exploded a bomb. He taught that in our bodies we contain the ethical yardstick for judging rules, rights, and privileges in society: the more these cause pain, the more our bodies know they are unjust. If the Imitation of Christ recovered the flesh for religion, it thus made the flesh the judge of social hierarchy. More, this religious view contrasted the bonds among those who care about one another to societal structures like commercial dealings where love for others may be entirely absent. 

To be sure, the Middle Ages practiced tortures and other bodily Cruelties with an abandon that would have done credit to the Romans who slaughtered Christians in the Colosseum. But this new ethos of compassion introduced at least rudimentary ideas of respecting the pain of others during torture. The public torture in Paris of persons afflicted by devils, for instance, was not quite the casual affair from about 1250 onward that it had earlier been; the torturers sought ecclesiastical assurances that they were causing pain to the devils inside, not to the person in whose body they lodged. 

By its very nature, the Imitation of Christ affirmed the life of the masses against the privileges of the elite. But it drew support, and indeed was articulated, by certain elements of medieval science because it accorded with what educated men and women believed about their own bodies.