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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2016
How does one rightly name and discern imitatio Christi, imitatio crucis, and the relation between them? In one provocative attempt to answer this question, John Howard Yoder identifies Christ-imaging in vulnerable enemy love and rejects all other criteria. This essay reads the iconoclasm of Yoder's approach through poetry of the cross by William Mure and John Donne. It then proceeds to repair Yoder's Mure-like posture with Donne, as well as the writings of Margaret Ebner and Margery Kempe. These texts destabilise the dichotomies that sustain Yoder's iconoclasm and illustrate the inadequacy of a single criterion for imitatio Christi. Yet Kempe and Ebner's texts are also infected with violence such that they, too, need repair. Vulnerable enemy love thus returns as a negative condition for Christ-imaging, and Yoder's strong iconoclasm is moderated to a weaker iconoclasm that breaks images purporting to be Christ-like but are, in fact, violent.
1 For one example of a scholar tracing the multiple iterations an iconoclastic impulse may take, see Simpson, James B., Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (New York: OUP, 2010)Google Scholar.
2 For a compelling account of Reformation Protestants defacing images as a way of exposing their falsity, see Koerner, Joseph Leo, The Reformation of the Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2004)Google Scholar, especially his fourth chapter, ‘Fictions’.
3 Yoder, John Howard, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 95, 131Google Scholar.
4 Ibid., p. 129.
5 Yoder, John Howard, The War of the Lamb: The Ethics of Nonviolence and Peacemaking, ed. Stassen, Glen, Nation, Mark Thiessen and Hamsher, Matt (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009), p. 80Google Scholar.
6 Yoder, John Howard, Revolutionary Christianity: The 1966 South African Lectures, ed. Nation, Mark Thiessen, Martens, Paul, Werntz, Myles and Porter, Matthew (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), p. 42Google Scholar.
7 Yoder, Politics of Jesus, p. 132.
8 Ibid., p. 128, n. 34; p. 127.
9 John Howard Yoder, ‘Politics: Liberating Images of Christ’, in War of the Lamb, p. 172.
10 In this way, Reformation iconoclasm differed interestingly from Byzantine iconoclasm, in which the cross was claimed by iconoclasts as their own symbol that could replace images.
11 For more on the controversies around crosses in Reformation England, see Margaret Aston's article ‘Cross and Crucifix in the English Reformation’, Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte, ns 33, Macht und Ohnmacht der Bilder. Reformatorischer Bildersturm im Kontext der europäischen Geschichte (2002), pp. 253–72. She surveys the phenomenon of cross iconoclasm more extensively in her book England's Iconoclasts (New York: OUP, 1988).
12 ‘The Trve Crvcifixe for True Catholickes’ in The Works of Sir William Mure of Rowallan, ed. Tough, William, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1898), pp. 197–300, ll. 42, 43–4Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., l. 55.
14 Ibid., ll. 279, 284.
15 Ibid., ll. 683–4, 687. Mure does see such resolve as enabling us to ‘beare’ Christ's ‘image in our lyfe’ (l. 33) and so, while taking a hard line against object crucifixes, Mure does open the door to human imaging of the ‘one trve crvcifixe’.
16 Ibid., l. 68.
17 Ibid., l. 22.
18 Ibid., l. 9.
19 Ibid., side note 198.
20 Donne, John, ‘The Cross’, in The Poems of John Donne, ed. Chambers, E. K. (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896; Bartleby.com, 2012)Google Scholar; http://www.bartleby.com/357/107.html (accessed Apr. 2013), ll. 11–12, 14.
21 Donne, ‘The Cross’, ll. 60–64.
22 Kempe, Margery, The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. and ed. Staley, Lynn (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), §41, p. 72Google Scholar.
23 Margery responds not just to the suffering of Christ but also to Christ's humanity, Mary's pity, and Mary's love for Christ. She seems, however, especially focused on Christ's suffering.
24 Certainly the Wycliffites and the Lollards had their own iconoclasms that sometimes led them to attack crosses, but such cross iconoclasm was not widespread nor the cross so politicised during Margery's life. Aston, ‘Cross and Crucifix’, p. 253.
25 Kempe, Book, §57, p.103.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Bernard McGinn explores the extent and nature of the union of outer and inner sensation in five late medieval mystics for his chapter, ‘Late Medieval Mystics’, in Coakley, Sarah and Gavrilyuk, Paul (eds), The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), pp. 190–209Google Scholar. Noting their internal differences, he yet claims, ‘[T]here was an impetus during these times towards presenting an integrated notion of the mystical self that saw outer and inner aspects of sensation – feeling, desiring, perceiving, and knowing – as part of a continuum of conscious and progressive reception of divine gifts’ (p. 209).
29 Kempe, Book, §28, p. 50.
30 Ibid.
31 Within the next couple of pages, Margery describes this event graphically, declaring of herself: ‘She had such very contemplation in the sight of her soul, as if Christ had hung before her bodily eye in his manhood. And, when through dispensation of the high mercy of our sovereign savior Christ Jesus, it was granted this creature to behold so verily his precious tender body, completely rent and torn with scourges, more full of wounds then ever was a dove house of holes, hanging upon the cross with the crown of thorns upon his head, his blissful hands, his tender feet nailed to the hard tree, the rivers of blood flowing out plenteously from every member, the grisly and grievous wound in his precious side shedding out blood and water for her love and her salvation, then she fell down and cried with loud voice, wonderfully turning and twisting her body on every side, spreading her arms abroad, as if she should have died, and could not keep herself from crying of from these bodily movings, for the fire of love that burns so fervently in her soul with pure pity and compassion.’ Ibid., §28, pp. 51–2.
32 Ibid., §28, p.50.
33 Ibid., §28, p. 52.
34 Ibid., §74, p. 129.
35 Donne, in fact, transitions from lamenting attempts to abolish crosses to claiming the impossibility of such a project with the line: ‘Who can deny me power, and liberty / To stretch mine arms, and mine own cross to be?’, ll. 17–18.
36 Ebner, Margaret, ‘Revelations’, in Margaret Ebner: Major Works, ed. and trans. Hindsley, Leonard Patrick, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), p. 185Google Scholar.
37 Ibid., p. 96.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ebner, in fact, also describes perceiving a ‘sweetness’ in drinking from the chalice. (Ibid., p. 91.)
42 Ibid., p. 96.
43 Ibid., p. 95.
44 As Amy Hollywood writes, ‘Ebner explicitly articulates the way in which her intense meditation on Christ's Passion leads to her inability not to see, hear, and feel Christ's Passion and ultimately to experience it in and on her own body. The process begins with a conscious concentration of Ebner's energies on visual representations of Christ's suffering.’ Hollywood, Amy, ‘Practice, Belief, and Feminist Philosophy of Religion’, in Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 62Google Scholar.
45 Ebner, ‘Revelations’, p. 116.
46 Hollywood, Amy, ‘Acute Melancholia’, Harvard Theological Review 99/4 (2006), p. 400CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
47 Ebner, ‘Revelations’, p. 90.
48 Ibid.
49 Kempe, Book, §11, p. 18
50 Ebner, ‘Revelations’, p. 148.
51 Ibid., p. 149.
52 Rowan Williams uses this phrase as he explores the world as cross-saturated, as signa of the res of God, in a classical and brilliant reading of Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana. ‘Language, Reality, and Desire in Augustine's De Doctrina’, Journal of Literature and Theology 3/2 (July 1989), pp. 138–50.
53 Saint stories that turn on the violent restoration of order are unfortunately common in the corpus of female hagiographies. These stories often tell of a vulnerable, beautiful and frequently intelligent or gifted woman (who is usually also socially privileged) who desires to commit to a life of holy virginity. A lascivious man attempts to wrest her from that vocation, is thwarted, kills her, and meets a violent fate himself in the killing. See e.g. the story of St Katherine and her wheel, intended to torture her, but exploding to kill a thousand heathen. There is also the story of St Agnes, a story in which men who tried to touch her were blinded or killed. These and other stories are featured in Osbern Bokenham's 15th-century Legendys of Hooly Wummen and Jacobus Voragine's 13th-century Legenda Aurea.
54 The theological commitments about images expressed by Yoder, Mure, Donne, Ebner and Kempe are webbed together with other (I hesitate to say deeper) theological commitments. Yoder's criterion of vulnerable enemy love is itself the product of criteria about what constitutes a source of authority. The negative valence he attaches to eikon results from surveying scriptural passages; finding all but those referring to the crucified Christ or the whole of humanity use eikon negatively; and deciding that these uses constitute a pattern. For him, the Seventh Ecumenical Council on iconoclasm is not authoritative, nor must he wrestle with beatification of Margaret Ebner, nor understand a church magisterium as a site of God's ongoing revelation. There are different visions of church among Yoder and company as well: a church as imaging Christ by standing over and against the violence of the world or a church as imaging Christ, however imperfectly, despite being caught up in the violence of the world – a church of sheep and goats, wheat and tares. Discussing these larger differences is important, but images of Christ may be discussed by their more proximate criteria as well. It is my hope that such a discussion might move past the familiar impasses and perhaps provide new ways of reapproaching such important topics as church, scripture, tradition and saints.
55 Hart, David Bentley, ‘A Gift Exceeding Every Debt: An Eastern Orthodox's Appreciation of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo’, Pro Ecclesia 7/3 (Fall 1998), p. 343Google Scholar.
56 One of the places that phrase shows up in Yoder's corpus is, ironically, just before his call to renew Mosaic iconoclasm, War of the Lamb, p. 179. There is an ancient Christian tradition beautifully summarised by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI of seeing with Irenaeus that ‘in the form of the Cross, [Christ] is imprinted upon all things’. Quoted in Ratzinger, Joseph, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 182Google Scholar.
57 Yoder, John Howard, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, ed. Koontz, Theodore J. and Alexis-Baker, Andy (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009), p. 134Google Scholar.
58 I am much indebted to Paul Martens, David Cramer and Matthew Whelan for feedback both critical and constructive.