Our Dark Side (2 page)

For centuries, men believed that the universe was governed by a divine principle and that the gods made them suffer to teach them not to think of themselves as gods. The gods of Ancient Greece therefore punished men who were afflicted with overweening pride (
Hubris
).
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And reading the great stories of the royal dynasties – the Atrides or the Labacides – is the best way to understand how the hero, who is a demi-god, alternates between being a despot who is drunk on power, and a victim who is subject to an implacable destiny.

In such a universe, all men were both themselves and their opposites – heroes and bastards – but neither the gods nor men were perverse. And yet, at the heart of this system of thought, which defined the contours of the Law and its transgression, norms and their inversion, any man who had reached the pinnacle of glory was in constant danger of being forced to discover that he was perverse, or in other words monstrous and abnormal, and to lead the parallel life of an abject humanity. Oedipus is the prototype. Having been the greatest king of his day, he was reduced to living in filth – his face bleeding and his body broken – because he had, without knowing it and through the fault of a ‘lame' genealogy – committed the worst of all crimes: he had married his mother, killed his father, was both the father and the brother of his own children, and was condemned to have his descendants held up to public obloquy. Nothing could be more human than the sufferings of a man who,
despite himself
, is responsible for, and therefore guilty of, a destiny ordained by the gods.

In the medieval world, man belonged body and soul, not to the gods, but to God. Torn between his fall and his redemption and with a guilty conscience, he was destined to suffer as much for his intentions as his acts. For God was his only judge. And so, having become a monster through the fault of the Demon who had tempted him and given him a taste for vice and perversity, he could once more become as human as the saint who accepted the punishments sent by God, if his faith was strong enough or if he was touched by grace. Such was the fate of the man who submitted to the power of God; through his sufferings or martyrdom, he allowed the community to unite and to designate what Georges Bataille (1988–91) calls its ‘accursed share' and what Georges Dumézil, in his analysis of the story of the god Loki, defines as the heterogeneous place that is essential to any social order.
²

If we look at the mystics who gave their bodies to God, or the flagellants who imitated the passion of Christ, or we study the bloody and heroic trajectory of Gilles de Rais – and no doubt many other stories – we find, in different guises, the alternation between the sublime and the abject that characterizes our dark side at its most heretical, but also its the most luminous: voluntary servitude seen as the greatest of freedoms.

In the striking commentary he made, in 1982, on the destiny of a fourth-century idiot-girl, as recorded in the
Lausiac History
,
³
Michel de Certeau sketches the structure of the nocturnal side of our humanity.

In those days, the hagiography tells us, there was a young virgin living in a convent who simulated madness. The other nuns took an aversion to her and dismissed her to the kitchen. Her head covered with a dish cloth, she began to do everything she was asked to do, and ate crumbs and peelings without complaining, even though she was beaten, abused and cursed. Alerted by an angel, a holy man visited the convent and asked to meet all the women, including the one they called ‘the sponge'. When he was introduced to her, he fell at her feet and asked for her blessing, surrounded by the other women, who were now convinced that she was a saint. But ‘the sponge' left the convent and vanished for ever because she could not bear being admitted by her sisters.

‘A woman, then', writes Michel de Certeau […] ‘can survive only when she has reached the point of abjection, of the “nothing” to which they take an aversion. That is what she prefers: being “the sponge” […] She takes upon herself the humblest bodily functions and becomes lost in an intolerable, sub-linguistic realm. But this “disgusting” piece of filth allows the other women to share meals, to partake of the vestimentary and bodily signs of election, and to communicate in words: the woman who is excluded makes a whole circulation possible' (Certeau 1982: 51).

While the term abjection now refers to the worst kinds of pornography,
⁴
to sexual practices bound up with the fetishization of urine, faecal matter, vomit or body fluids, or even to the corruption of all taboos, it cannot, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, be divorced from its other facet: the aspiration to sanctity. There is therefore a strange proximity between wallowing in filth and being elevated to what the alchemists used to call ‘the volatile', or in short between inferior substances – the groin and dung – and higher substances – exaltation, glory and self-transcendence. It is based upon denial, spitting, repulsion and attraction. Immersion in filth, in other words, governs access to something beyond consciousness – the subliminal – and to sublimation in the Freudian sense.
⁵
And suffering and debasement therefore lead to immortality, which is the supreme wisdom of the soul.

‘Let the day perish wherein I was born / And the night in which it was said / There is a man child conceived / Let that day be darkness / Let not God regard it from above /… Why died I not from the womb / Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?' (Job III: 3–4; 11–12). The hero of a Semitic tradition, Job was an upright man who feared the Lord and lived a rich, happy life. But God allowed Satan to test his faith. Suddenly taken ill and having lost his fortune and his children, he lay down on a dung heap, picking at his wounds and bemoaning the injustice of his fate. When three friends came to him as he lay in his filth and told him that his punishment was the inevitable result of his sins, he proclaimed his innocence without understanding that a just God can punish an innocent man. Without giving him an answer, God restored his fortune and his health.

In this story, man must persist in his faith, put up with his sufferings, even if they are unfair, and never expect any answer from God, for God frees him from his fall and reveals to him his transcendence without listening to any of his pleas. The story of Job thus gives the lie to the tradition that teaches that rewards and punishments can sanction the virtues or sins of mortals in this world. Thanks to its literary power and the strength with which the hero, while deploring his sufferings, incorporates the injunction of the divine world. This parable inverts the ancient norm of the sacrificial gift, and replaces it with a new norm that is deemed to be superior: Yahweh, the absolute Being – ‘I am that I am' – never has any debt to honour.

From this perspective, man's salvation lies in the unconditional acceptance of suffering. And that is why Job's experience paved the way for the practices of the Christian martyrs – and even more so the women saints – who transformed the destruction of the physical body into an art of living, and the filthiest practices into an expression of the most perfect heroism.

When they were adopted by certain mystics,
⁶
the great sacrificial rituals – from flagellation to the ingestion of unspeakable substances – became proof of their saintly exaltation. The destruction of the physical body or exposure to the sufferings of the flesh: such was the rule that governed this strange desire to undergo a metamorphosis that was, it was said, the only way to effect the transition from the abject to the sublime. While the first duty of male saints was, following the Christian interpretation of the Book of Job, to annihilate any form of desire to fornicate, women saints condemned themselves to a radical sterilization of their wombs, which became putrid, either by eating excrement or by exhibiting their tortured bodies. Be they men or women, the martyrs of the Christian West were therefore able to outdo one another in horror thanks to their physical relationship with Jesus Christ.

This is why
The Golden Legend
(Voragine 1985),
⁷
a work of piety that relates the lives of saints, can be read as prefiguring Sade's perverse inversion of the Law in
The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom
(Sade 1990). We find in both the same tortured bodies that have been stripped naked and covered in filth. There is no difference between these two types of martyrdom. The Marquis adopts the model of monastic confinement, which is full of maceration and pain, removes the presence of God, and invents a sort of sexological zoo given over to the combinatory of a boundless
jouissance
of bodies (Boureau 1984).

Seen as impure because she was born a woman, the martyred saint must purify herself: blood that should have been a sign of fertility undergoes a metamorphosis that turns it into sacrificial blood that is offered to Christ. But, unlike a male saint, she must, if she is to be able to ‘marry' Christ, never have been defiled by the sins of the flesh. It is thanks to her virginity that she becomes a soldier of God, once she has abolished within her the difference between the sexes. ‘How does one go from being a virgin to being a soldier?' asks Jean-Pierre Albert (1997: 101). ‘The marks of both sexes remain, of course. Whereas the young virgins who are sacrificed have usually been Christian from birth, the soldiers are suddenly converted and are immediately martyred. This difference between the precocious vocation of women and the later conversion of men runs through the entire history of sainthood.'

The physical body, either putrefied or tortured, or intact and without any stigmata, therefore fascinated both the female and male saints, who were all excited by abnormality. This peculiar relationship with the flesh presumably has to do with the fact that Christianity is the only religion in which God takes the form of a human body so as to live and die as a human victim (Gélis 2005: 106–7). Hence the status that is accorded to the body. On the one hand, the body is regarded as the tainted part of man, as an ocean of wretchedness or the soul's abominable garment; on the other, it will be purified and resurrected. As Jacques Le Goff writes (2004: 407), ‘The body of the Christian, dead or alive, lives in expectation of the body of glory it will take on if it does not revel in the wretched physical body. The entire funerary ideology of Christianity revolves around the interplay between the wretched body and the glorious body, and is so organized as to wrest one from the other.'

More so than any other, the body of the king was marked by this twofold destiny. And that is why the bodily remains of monarchs were for centuries, like those of saints, the object of a particular fetishism with pagan overtones that appeared to invert the great Christian principle of the metamorphosis of ‘the wretched body' into a ‘glorious body'. When Louis IX died in Tunis on 25 August 1270, at the beginning of the eighth crusade, his companions had his body boiled in wine mixed with water so as to strip the flesh, or in other words ‘the precious part of the body that had to be preserved, from the bones' (Le Goff 2004: 427).
⁸
Once the bones had turned white, his limbs and internal organs were dismembered so that the entrails could be given to the King of Sicily. As for the bones and the heart, they were deposited in the basilica at Saint-Denis. After 1298, when Louis IX was canonized, these relics – true or false – were scattered as the belief that they had miraculous powers began to take shape.

When Philippe le Bel was crowned, the royal head was transferred to the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, while the teeth, chin and jaw were left to the monks. The skeleton continued to be fragmented over the next two hundred years, but the heart was never found. The holy entrails remained in Sicily until 1868, when the last of the Bourbons carried them into exile and entrusted them to the White Fathers of the cathedral in Carthage (Le Goff 1004: 427–38). After many tribulations, the internal organs therefore returned to the place where the king had met with his death at the very time when the secular principle of respect for the integrity of the human body was beginning to emerge in Western society.
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The fetishism of relics is now regarded as a pathology related to necrophilia – and therefore as a sexual perversion. For its part, the law bans the dispersal of and the trade in human remains.
¹⁰

Michel de Certeau (1982: 13) emphasizes that the mystical configuration that prospered from the thirteenth century until the eighteenth, when it came to an end with the Age of Enlightenment, took the confrontation with the fading image of the cosmos to extremes. Based upon a challenge to the idea that the unity of the world could be restored at the expense of the individual, the literature of mysticism therefore displays all the features of what it is fighting and postulates that ‘The mystics were wrestling with the dark angel of mourning.'

Hence the idea that mysticism is an ordeal involving the body, or an ‘experimental science' involving otherness in the form of the absolute: not only the other than exists within us, but the forgotten, repressed part on which religious institutions are built. That unknowable part is bound up with initiation. Its place is therefore an ‘elsewhere', and its sign is an anti-society. To put it another way, we define as mystical ‘that which departs from normal or ordinary paths, that which is not inscribed within the unity of a faith or a religious reference, and which is marginal to a society that is becoming secularized and to an emerging knowledge of scientific objects' (Certeau 1978: 522).

In that sense, the mystical experience was a way of re-establishing spiritual communications that were in danger of disappearing during the oft-heralded transition from the Middle Ages
¹¹
to the modern era. Mysticism therefore became more widespread because its attempt to win back a lost sovereignty could be made visible only by a bodily lexicon or by the creation of an elective language.
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