THE EUCHARISTIC MATRIX

What happens then is — literally — a wonderful story. More precisely, this is the history of the rise of a “wonderful blood.” I shall be brief in summarizing it, for it has been well researched and depicted from a number of perspectives. Writing of medieval Christianity, Carolyn Walker Bynum concludes Wonderful Blood, her essential contribution to the study of medieval blood, by stating that “rather than interpreting blood as merely one among many objects in a struggle for control or one among many themes in an extravagantly emotional religiosity, we should see in blood the central symbol and central cult object of late medieval devotion — and perhaps the central problem as well.”94 This is to say that blood is not merely a part of medieval Christianity. It is rather its very fabric. Bynum nonetheless isolates part from whole (explicitly and implicitly, synecdoche, pars pro toto, is a significant device in the apparatus she deploys). She differentiates, in other words, between bloods. On the one hand, she writes of blood in “theology and practice in late medieval northern Germany and beyond.” She describes a blood cult and a blood devotion and thereby adds to the growing scholarly understanding of blood in this specific period.95 On the other hand, she also makes clear that she is attending to something much larger, a longer period as it were, and a wider if still contained issue. Bynum clearly says that she is writing about “religion” (“if we are to understand why themes such as bleeding become prominent at a particular moment in the history of a religion, we must (the point is an obvious one!) look at the whole of that religion: pious prayers and practices, local shrines, artistic commissions, theological debates, accounts of visions and miracles, ecclesiastical politics, and the context of all this in regional and national strife”).96 And although it is not the place to debate with Bynum’s understanding of the term religion or to wonder about the viability of the category in that particular historical context,97 I do wish to underscore that blood as fabric covers, in her own descriptions, a much more expansive domain than religion (as Bynum herself defines it). The evidence extends further and suggests, for example, “that blood relics were politically, financially, and religiously desirable” (58). Ultimately, “it was blood to which kings, clergy, and common people voyaged, blood that filled the hearts of penitents and the coffers of merchants, blood over which theologians fought, blood that inspired imitation and competition from churches and monasteries” (32). Blood, in other words, is everywhere. It flows and overflows, and it covers theological, cultic, and devotional matters, but also — and in a novel way — politics and economy, kinship and community. “The behavior of blood is described in these texts as people believed blood was wont to behave. Dividing, it remained forever whole; and its distribution created filiation and community” (72). Parts and wholes at once, blood surges and flows to include and to divide, to determine finally a wider conception of the collective, of the community it singles out, the community of blood. For what Bynum ultimately shows is that medieval debates and practices in Western Christendom did not take place merely “over proper Eucharistic piety or the authenticity and veneration of relics. Rather, it was, on the one hand, a matter of the relation of the body and blood of Christ to each other and to his person, and on the other hand, a question of how Christians gain access to the sanguis Christi that saves” (110). The distinct particles, parts, and bodies found in the fabric of blood would soon be meeting with others. They would collide or be repulsed and communicate with each other. Which body, which blood? Individuals and collectives were being conceived anew, reconceptualized around and within blood (“Aquinas, basing himself on Albertus Magnus, held that blood is the seat of life, and, indeed, of the whole body in potentia” [162]). In the final analysis, the issue turned out to be at once “physiological, philosophical, theological, and finally what we might even call sociological” (121). As well, “the blood is more than sexual and social or marital status; it is more even than the bearer of ethical status, that is purity or impurity. It is as if the body is only a mold into which blood as animating force or soul or self is poured” (163).98 And medieval theologians could thus explain the nature of the collective change Western Christendom was undergoing: “we eat God not so that he changes into us but so that we change into him.”99 Indeed, what “theologians were really debating when they debated the possibility of blood relics and miracle hosts was the nature of identity” (145). And “in all this, what is stressed is the immediacy and physicality of sanguis Christi. Warm and alive itself, it warms and liquefies the blood of sinners who have grown cold, hard, dried, and dead in selfishness and alienation. It restores life to the imago Dei within the self, as liquid warmth softens hard wax. But it goes further. It fuses with—becomes—the blood of the self” (170).100 It is not difficult, therefore, to see that Christians were changing indeed in their very substance, purity, and property, and not only in the north of Europe, not only in the fifteenth century. Christians were becoming a community of blood. Understandably—but also historically—they “equated their own blood with Christ’s” (244). “You will not change me into you, as you do with the food of your body,” Augustine had explained, ventriloquizing Jesus, “Instead you will be changed into me.”101 Henri de Lubac elaborates, pointing out that “the natural symbolism of food is reversed,” and quoting William of St. Thierry, “those eating are transformed into the nature of the food they eat.” Indeed, “this is because the Eucharistic bread is no ordinary bread,” and the eucharistic wine no ordinary wine: “it is the Life in which all living beings participate. ‘When Christ is eaten, Life is eaten.’ He transforms into himself those whom he nourishes with his substance. He himself is the body whose food those who eat it become.”102 That is what made blood into the fabric it became (for what else is transubstantiation?). “In this sort of piety ...the blood is Christ” (180).

But perhaps I have been misquoting. Using and abusing the words of the historians, I have taken some parts, at my convenience, and made them stand for the whole. After all, not all Christians have thought or lived along the coordinates I have begun to draw. And besides, blood does not only gather and unify. It also separates and discriminates. Bynum dedicates an entire chapter, in fact, to precisely this, to “Blood as Separated and Shed,” to “blood as separation” (173). Why unify, then, where there is division? Why take the parts for the whole? Surprisingly enough, Bynum herself seems to answer this important question when she deploys the beginnings of an explanation for “why blood?” Why the prominence of blood at this particular (broad but limited) historical juncture. What Bynum calls “natural blood” (as opposed to “symbolic” blood) operates as a crucial part of the explanation. And the explanation is, well, natural enough. “Natural blood is the ultimate synecdoche: the human part that is the human and the social whole” (187). (Later, Bynum will insist that “blood was, moreover, a particular apt image for retribution and satisfaction” — for economy, that is — “for arousal, and for the synecdoche implied in incorporation” [209].) “This late medieval habit of understanding part to be whole, instance to be in exemplar, made it possible to think not only of humans subsumed in the humanitas of Christ but also of relatives, neighbors, even heretics as subsumed into one’s own suffering in a union that was more participation than substitution” (203). Parts for the whole, sociology (along with history, anthropology, and biology to boot) has become, naturally enough, Christology. Or vice versa. And Christology is hematology; it is the fabric of our lives. It raises “new questions about family, society, and politics” (256). For it is indeed a fact that “not all religions give meaning by such stark, simultaneous assertion of life and death as does medieval Christianity” (255). Simply put, not all religions (but what is “religion”? and are there really many within this asymmetric hematology?) give meaning, whether theological, political, anthropological and familial, legal and economic — eventually natural — by way of blood.

The ubiquitous link in the Christian West between blood and community — the Eucharist or the language of “blood ties” spoken through family, tribe, class, nation, or race — which is to say, the notion that blood is the substance, site, and marker of collective identity in its many existential dimensions, is a late and contingent link that binds us still to the “Middle Ages.” Far from universal, this link must be unsettled and de-sedimented, recognized for its processual advent and for its endurance. We have begun to consider that neither the Bible nor the rabbis ever thought of genealogy and kinship as being a matter of blood, that the phrase “flesh and blood” as a descriptive and as a signifier of identity or of genealogical continuity is either absent or, and so only later, at the very least reductive (for much more than blood is involved in identity and in transmission, unless blood is everything),103 and that even the New Testament is remote from “the ideology of consanguinity.” Again, though, nothing is said here to diminish the multiple and heavy symbolic charges often carried by blood (murder and sacrifice, menstruation and birth) or of its multilayered role in collective practices of whatever kind — pure, dangerous, and other.104

How, then, did the community of blood emerge? How were blood ties created? How did “natural blood” become “a particular apt image” and “the ultimate synecdoche” (“the human part that is the human and the social whole”)? How did blood come to trickle and flow within all these? More precisely perhaps, how did family ties, communal ties, come to be called by the name of blood? In a groundbreaking study to which I have already alluded, Gianna Pomata has pointed out that “historians have not asked which ideas about blood shaped the legal notion of consanguinity. What was meant by blood in the legal usage of consanguinitas? How were blood ties created, according to the law? And whose blood are we talking about?”105 Pomata clarifies that the matter is not — was never — primarily physiologic or indeed natural. Medical discourse, at any rate, although intervening and participating in the articulation of the matter, was neither exclusively adjudicating on it nor was it particularly pressing toward a universalization of blood. In Roman law and culture, consanguinitas was a restricted juridical matter and a political one as well. And so blood was never quite what allegedly, or “simply,” runs in the veins, never exclusively so. To the extent that blood did partake of the making of kinship, it did so by way of a radical asymmetry not between families and communities, but within them. Blood was the peculiar site of sexual difference in that it belonged exclusively to the father. “The notion of consanguinitas tells us that the tie between father and children is twofold: part of it derives from the father’s power and part of it derives from the father’s blood.” In other words, “the natural relationship between a father and his children creates consanguinitas; that between a mother and her children does not.”106

We may be beginning to gain a better sense of time — and of contingency — when it comes to blood as the name of kinship (and more precisely, as the juridico-medical name for what relates father to child). For what has been called “the hematogenic theory of semen,” the notion that semen is the father’s blood, only “became dominant, after the fourth century BC, in both philosophical and medical discourse, superseding other ancient theories — still current, for example, in the Hippocratic texts — where semen was seen as derived from the brain (via the spinal marrow) or from all the parts of the body ... [T]he hematogenic view was established as the unchallenged theory of semen in European culture long after antiquity: in fact, surprising as it might seem, the theory persisted into the eighteenth century.”107 But recall that, as Pomata demonstrates, blood is the site of a division — not a constitution — of the community, and that too along gender lines.108 In Roman law, blood (that is, consanguinitas) did not mean that there were different bloods. It was simply a notion that defined the matter of property, “matters of inheritance and succession,” and was thereby favoring a segment of the male progeny.109 Another essential element, then, will have to contribute its part. This is what can be found exemplarily and explicitly in Tertullian, for whom “the blood of Christians is seed [semen est sanguis Christianorum],” an assertion that must be understood simultaneously as medical, political, and theological, the three “domains,” within which it radically intervenes and ultimately transforms.110 Fundamentally, then, the recognizable configuration, “the coinciding dependency” that will come to unite medicine and law, family and politics, along with economics, cannot be understood as merely theological or “religious.”111 It is however and definitely Christian — dividing and linking each of these domains. Indeed, well after Tertullian and Isidore of Seville, it is only with canon law, finally, that the notion of blood is expanded, redistributed, and translated into the realm of marriage.112

From then on, that is, from the Christian Middle Ages on (and recall that “the first liturgical rituals of marriage appeared in northern France around 1100”),113 the notion that the child receives the blood of both father and mother becomes accepted, at first against reigning medical conceptions and around them, in order to determine kinship, in order, that is, for the church to authorize or forbid alliances.114 “Even the naturalistic justifications that sometimes found their way into the legal and political discourse,” in other words, “the justification of the inclusion of affines under incest regulations by the ‘unity of flesh and blood’ supposedly instituted by marriage... were not, as far as we can see, immediately reflected in medical or philosophical accounts of generation.”115 Canon law figures the couple as unitas carnis, the “figure of the non-dissolvable union between Christ and its Church,” thereby including father and mother into what had otherwise become reserved for brothers as “blood brothers.”116 Accordingly, along with the rise of the Eucharist cult and the dissemination of bleeding relics, the very notion of the church as the “mystical body of Christ” also changes. It no longer signifies the invisible body of Christ mysteriously found in the sacrament and distinct from other, material, bodies, but rather embodies the visible members (the flesh and blood) of the community.117 It is within this transformative framework—a generalized hematology that involves a “new notion of consanguinity” and weaves a fabric at once medical and juridical, theological and political — that the nobility too could be invented as a “social category” grounded in blood as genealogy or lineage, along with others.118 Consanguinity, in other words, has a history, and it is briefer, more contained and specific, than commonly supposed. It corresponds to a particular distribution (not yet a circulation) of blood within Western Christendom.119 Which means that we can more or less establish “the coinciding dependency with respect to the ... historical situation,” the dissemination of the notion, at once legal, medical, and political, of the community of blood.120 It is time to relate what we have learned so far — the eucharistic matrix — to the Inquisition.


Notes

94. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 7.

95. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, edited with an introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 102–103; and see how Françoise Héritier, historical anthropologist, opens her important study by stating that “the study of kinship is that of the relations that unite human beings by way of ties grounded in consanguinity and affinity” (F. Héritiér, L’exercice de la parenté [Paris: Seuil, 1981], 13).

96. David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 53. Elsewhere Schneider summarizes the common view: “Kinship is the blood relationship, the fact of shared biogenetic substance” (D. Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 107). The distinction between fact and idea is mapped onto nature and culture and reproduces Lewis Henry Morgan’s separation of blood from language (see note 99).

97. For the classic formulation, see Anderson, Imagined Communities.

98. Schneider, A Critique, 167.

99. It might be important to linger on the remarkable fact that Emile Benveniste, who reviewed the vocabulary of kinship among many Indo-European institutions, never attends to “blood” as a lexical term, an element of the vocabulary he circumscribes to be explored or analyzed. Equally remarkable is Marc Shell, whose work is no less essential, and indeed equally accepting of the notion of “familial consanguinity” as a given, if one that is “ultimately unknowable” (Shell, Children of the Earth, vii and 5). In a similar manner, alerted to the complexity and finitude of kinship classifications and designations by way of philological concerns, Lewis Henry Morgan had affirmed and buttressed the distinction between “blood” and “language.” Morgan defined “systems of consanguinity” as “founded upon a community of blood.” He was concerned with “the classification of nations upon the basis of affinity of blood” and he never interrogated the linguistic or physiologic ground of “consanguinity” (L. H. Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 [1870], 8–10).

100. Marshall Sahlins makes a parallel argument, strangely exonerating anthropologists (“when sociobiologists use the term ‘kinship’ and mean by that ‘blood’ connections”) offering birth as an alternative that must also be reconsidered (“in cultural practice it is birth [and not blood] that serves as the metaphor of kinship, not kinship as the expression of birth” (M. Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976], 58).

101. Meillassoux, Mythes et limites, 49.

102. The problem goes further, as Latour recognizes: it is that the very distinction and distribution between nature and culture, the biological and the social, are not universal, minimally, they follow different mappings and divisions.

103. Daniel Boyarin, “The Bartered Word: Midrash and Symbolic Economy,” in Commentaries—Kommentare [Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte], ed. Glenn W. Most (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 44, commenting on the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Nidda 30a; the passage, and its Galenic parallels, is also mentioned by Joseph Needham, A History of Embryology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 78.

104. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 109.

105. As Elizabeth Povinelli describes the effect of the work of lawyers and anthropologists (among others) on Australian aborigines, “the spiritual and material relationship that Aboriginal men and women had to land, to the dead, and to the unborn was reduced in the last instance to the heterosexual reproduction of blood, symbolically narrowed and demarcated by the patrilineal totem” (E. A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002], 209). Addressing conceptions of kinship (and the different realms it covers when “translated”), the anthropologist acknowledges that this is “what we summarize as blood” (248). One can therefore ask who or what speaks when the historian writes about medieval times that “if a man married a woman of higher station, the blood of his lineage could be irrigated by that of kings, princes, and counts. This periodic infusion of good blood not only rejuvenated the family’s nobility but ensured the cohesion of the dominant class” (Dominique Barthélemy, “Kinship,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby [Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988], 120).

106. As I reiterate a number of times throughout this book, race science, or the medical ground for the establishment of the “bio-political” diagnosed by Foucault and others, is a latecomer among the various conditions that rendered bio-power possible—and real (see, e.g., Jonathan Marks, “Blood Will Tell (Won’t It?): A Century of Molecular Discourse in Anthropological Systematics,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 94 (1994): 59–79.

107. Even an astute historian of race might thus reduce blood to biology rather than recognize biology as a limited moment in a much larger hematology (see Arlette Jouanna, Ordre social. Mythes et hiérarchies dans la France du XVIe siècle [Paris: Hachette, 1977], e.g., 42).

108. As M. Schrenk points out, “hematology is the scientific teachings on blood,” it is a tradition that consists in the study of blood—blood as “empirical fact,” as it were (M. Schrenk, “Blultkulte und Blutsymbolik,” in Einführung in die Geschichte der Hämatologie, ed. K. G. v. Boroviczény et al. [Stuttgart: Georg Thieme Verlag, 1974], 1). I take the term in a wider sense, which would include the history of hematology, everything that would account for the “genesis and development” of blood as a fact—empirical, scientific, and more (see Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Fleck’s book is another essential moment in the history of blood, most particularly of “syphilitic blood.” It describes the simultaneous generalization and specialization that increasingly frames the concept of blood as the operation of “socio-cogitative forces” (23) and enables us to understand hematology as the fabric of which Latour speaks, at the historical development of blood as one among “somewhat hazy proto-ideas” about which Fleck explains that they “existed long before any scientific proofs were available and were supported in different ways throughout the intervening period until they received a modern expression” (24). I thank Mario Biagioli for directing me to Fleck’s work.

109. “The history of words,” Samuel Weber writes, “is rarely simple or transparent.” Indeed, “it is almost always symptomatic, which is to say, significant, though often in a dissimulating mode” (S. Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking [New York: Fordham University Press, 2005], vii). If “blood” is a word, even if it is merely a word, we would have to follow Weber’s advice and ask about the hematologization or perhaps simply about the bloodiness of thinking.

110. Documenting the place of Native Americans in the American imagination, Renée Bergland asks: “Why must America write itself as haunted?” As will become apparent, there are many reasons to borrow her pointed line of interrogation and extend it to blood (R. L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000], 4).

111. Susan E. Lederer, Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xiii; and see Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, D.C.: Civitas, 1998) and Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

112. I quote from J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 7, and see Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); for an excellent review and analysis of the issue with regard to Native Americans, see Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), and see for a comparative approach, Ariella J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). Gross reminds us that “in establishing its dominance over a subject people, the U.S. government introduced the notion of blood quantum to divide those who were considered too incompetent to sell or transfer their land from those who would not receive legal protection; that notion of ‘blood’ then took on a life of its own to separate once united peoples along the lines of white and black, pure and mixed” (179).

113. I return to the “one-drop rule” in more detail later in the chapter.

114. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui discusses the typical manner in which F. James Davis, in his otherwise groundbreaking book on the one-drop rule, “completely neglects to mention the use of blood quantum laws to define Hawaiianness” (Hawaiian Blood, 21). Circe Sturm, for her part, attends to the complex history of black slavery among Native Americans, but mentions the one-drop rule only in passing (Blood Politics, 70 and 105).

115. “The ultimate insignificance of ethnicity and race,” writes Colin Kidd quite representatively, “surfaces in the New Testament. Acts 17:26 sets out a clear statement of the unity of humankind” (Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 20); Kidd elaborates on the possibility of holding profoundly racist positions together with a commitment to that verse (38). Elise Lemire documents the centrality of blood, and blood mixing, in abolitionist discourse. Whether this meant “a physical injection of blood” or other forms of “mixture,” the role and significance of blood was a matter of shared concerns (E. Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002], 129); and see also Kenneth N. Addison, “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident …” An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Roots of Racism and Slavery in America (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2009), 274; Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 46).

116. Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Patterson, Rituals of Blood.

117. Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

118. Paul F. Campos, Jurismania: The Madness of American Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

119. James Q. Whitman, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), see, e.g., 126.

120. And see also William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. Hardcastle Browne (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing, 1897), 195, 287; Colin Dayan expands on the “corruption of blood” and on the significance of blood in relation to property and slavery in The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) 44–53.


By Gil Anidjar in "Blood : A Critique of Christianity", Columbia University Press, New York, 2014, excerpts chapter 2. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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