Ascended in the body

Irenaeus, in his resistance to the Gnostic attacks on the human nature of Jesus, insists that Jesus’ ascension follows from his bodily resurrection. The ascension, then, was not an ascent of the soul that left Jesus’ body behind or made Jesus into something other than human. For Irenaeus, this issue is not simply a matter of historical accuracy. Rather, Irenaeus finds in Jesus’ history our own future: our glorification in the body depends both on Jesus’ resurrection and on his ascension. Against those who claim that the human ascent is one of the soul, in which the body will be left behind while their ‘inner man…ascends into the super-celestial place’,Footnote ¹⁹ Irenaeus insists that at the resurrection (by which he means the final resurrection),

Here, Irenaeus ties the future of our bodies to the past of Jesus’ body. In his argument, both the resurrection and the ascension have implications for our bodies.

In Irenaeus, then, we find that the body cannot be left behind. Whatever we say about beauty, it must ultimately involve the body. If Christ's human body has now been glorified, that means that our bodies can expect the same: they will become beautiful. The beauty we expect is not simply a beauty of the soul, in reference to virtue or holiness. That will, of course, be included, but it does not describe the entirety of our beauty. Rather, we will rise in our entirety, to use Irenaeus’ phrase, which entails a future beautification of our bodies. The incorporation of Christ's beautiful body into the divine life thus embraces rather than excludes humanity's physical beauty.

In one modern interpretation, the ascension marks the final stage in a process of transformation in which the physical and gendered body of Christ is displaced. Graham Ward argues that the multi-gendered body of the church displaces Christ's body, which in its absence has created space in which the church can expand. Rather than locating Christ's body in heaven, Ward argues that Christ's body is ‘permeable, transcorporeal, transpositional’.Footnote ²¹

In Ward's argument, Jesus’ body becomes displaced through a continual direction away from its physicality – particularly, its maleness and Jewishness. As Ward recognises, the humanity of the resurrected (and then ascended) Christ appears in a form unrecognisable to the disciples. Mary, the disciples on the road to Emmaus – these close friends of Jesus do not recognise him. And yet, he is still recognisable as human, even if transformed, and however much we may speculate about what this resurrected humanity entails. This continuing humanity grounds our embrace of physical beauty, precluding us from seeing the flesh as a means to the immaterial. What Irenaeus will not allow is the displacement of Jesus’ body such that we look away from it and towards some other spiritual reality. As the image of God, the one who perfectly reveals the Father, Jesus tells us that ‘the one who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9). In other words, there is nowhere else to look.

The ascension does not then minimise the importance of Jesus’ physical body, but suspends our attention between the past and future. ‘By withdrawing himself from our sight, Christ sends us back to the historical Jesus Christ as the covenanted place on earth and in time, which God has appointed for meeting between man and himself’.Footnote ²² Only through the historical, embodied Christ – as opposed to a disembodied Logos – can we meet God. This has implications for our understanding of beauty: we cannot ever get beyond the physical body of Jesus, as Balthasar insists, and we can never get beyond the beauty that appears to our senses.Footnote ²³ This does not mean that there is nothing beyond, but that we only have access to that beyond through and in the beautiful image – an access that is ever and always dependent on what is visible.

From one perspective, the displacement of Christ's body might seem to aid a resistance of beauty's abuse, as it decentres the physical body, reducing its significance and thus the weight which can be given to its ideals. It also decentres the gendered and ethnic body of Christ, two categories of bodies that often find themselves the target of abuse, in a particular gender or ethnicity being declared as representative of ideal beauty, thus marginalising those outside of those particulars. One kind of beauty is postulated as the ideal, and all bodies are expected to either conform or to be relegated to the category of ‘ugly’. Given these problems, we might be inclined to see the displacement of Christ's body as a means of resisting the abuse of beauty.

And yet this displacement of Christ's gendered and ethnic body also displaces our individual bodies. If Christ's body is replaced by the Church's body, as Ward claims, then rather than union there is identification; the individual is overwhelmed. But if Christ's body remains intact as a human body, then, as Irenaeus understood, the future of our own bodies is secure as well. As Douglas Farrow argues, ‘Irenaeus was safeguarding not only the integrity of Jesus but the integrity of every particular; that is, he was postulating a creaturely unity which does not exclude the plurality of our human personhood or of our bodily existence’.Footnote ²⁴ We are united to Christ, not subsumed into him. This implies that our difference is retained – both our difference from him as creatures, and our difference from each other. This difference does not divide us from one another; instead, when understood as difference given and blessed by God, we can find in Christ's ‘love for his own flesh’, as Emmanuel Falque describes it, the means by which we can cherish and love our own flesh – and the flesh of the other.Footnote ²⁵ Only by a posture of embracing ourselves and each other can we resist the temptation to find either in ourselves or in someone else an ideal beauty that excludes and oppresses.

Christ's beautiful wounds

Part of the stakes here involves the continuity of Jesus’ resurrected body and his ascended body, an issue that can be seen by attending to Jesus’ wounded body. Recent attempts to resist beauty's abuse have turned to Christ crucified and resurrected. Balthasar, for example, insists that the only way to receive the revelation of beauty is to find it in the sign of the cross, which ‘radically puts an end to all worldly aesthetics’.Footnote ²⁶ In light of the crucified, all definitions of beauty must be re-thought. Richard Villadesau agrees: the cross ‘embraces (in a way that is yet to be clarified) even what appears (from a merely inner-worldly perspective) to be irrational, disordered, lacking in attractiveness and goodness’.Footnote ²⁷ Even so, ‘[t]he beauty of the cross is not the contradiction of what we experience through “worldly” beauty, but is the elevation of the latter to its fullest and most complete level, that of interpersonal communion among humans and with God’.Footnote ²⁸

More than re-defining beauty, Natalie Carnes considers the way that Christ crucified changes the way we act. Drawing from imagery in Gregory of Nyssa's commentary on the Song of Songs, she argues that beauty centred on Christ requires an outgoing movement of love towards the poor and afflicted: beauty does not belong to what is safe, rich, sanitised and healthy, because beauty ‘find[s its] final realit[y] in the Word whose flesh was twisted, tortured, and killed – and yet was resurrected in glory’.Footnote ²⁹ His suffering flesh is not erased by resurrection, but his wounds endure as a witness to his outgoing love. Here, Carnes is careful to emphasise that beauty does not entail what is ugly, but that ‘on this side of the eschaton, finding what is beautiful requires attending to what is ugly’. It is worth quoting her here at length:

This understanding of beauty complicates conceptions of physical beauty and beliefs about where it may be found. The claim that Christ's body is beautiful does not allow us to jettison physical beauty in favour of a beauty that is purely immaterial. And yet if this body is also wounded, permanently marked by the scars of his suffering, any ideal of beauty that would exclude such a body is revealed to be wanting.Footnote ³¹ As Carnes argues, seeking a pure beauty and eliminating all that is not beautiful has no place for Christ.

Claiming Christ's wounded body as beautiful also affirms that in the eschaton, the finitude of our bodies will be maintained, not erased. In the present age, creaturely finitude is woven with death and decay.Footnote ³² Yet our eschatological hope is not that our finitude will be absorbed into divine infinitude, but that there will be ‘joyous fellowship between the Creator and creation… Such fellowship with the Creator suggests an ultimate affirmation of finitude but also an emancipation from the anxiety that characterises finitude’.Footnote ³³ Christ's wounded body, a body which has ascended to heaven – to God's space and God's time – affirms that the infinite can embrace the finite without erasing it. Christ's wounds signify that what must be overcome is not the finitude of our creaturely existence, but the corruption and decay that mars creaturely life. As Aquinas argues Christ's wounds are taken up into his incorruptible body and manifest beauty and glory because they are ‘signs of virtue’.Footnote ³⁴

In arguing for the beauty of Christ's wounded body, we must be careful of justifying suffering on the basis of future glory.Footnote ³⁵ The image of a crucified Christ can be and has been twisted and used to oppress. To avoid such distortion, we must note that when we move from the image of Christ's body to other bodies, the context shifts. What Gregory of Nyssa describes in the wounding of the bride, as well as the wound his sister Macrina carries, arise not out of a context of oppression and injustice, but out of a context of pursuing solidarity with Christ. What we are speaking of here is a body that is wounded in the sense that Gregory of Nyssa describes the bride's wounds: a wounding of love by the Spirit, one that in Carnes’ interpretation, breaks us open towards and for the other so that we might not be closed in on ourselves.Footnote ³⁶

In contrast, Christ's wounds are inflicted by unjust, oppressive hands. Yet, they break the power of that injustice through Christ's love, as he knowingly subjects himself to oppression in order to overcome it. Andy Johnson argues that Jesus resists a form of humanity that is ‘beastly’, embodied by the Roman emperor, who pursued domination. Jesus’ body thus bears the marks of his resistance to a beastly humanity, and ‘[i]t is that very body that is raised and ascends to heaven’.Footnote ³⁷ In this image, we find our humanity embraced by the divine life – but this is humanity in a certain shape: opened, poured out, wounded. By claiming that body to be beautiful, we resist narrow definitions of beauty that leave no room for the cross.

Affirming the wounded body of Christ ascended has implications both for us and our own beauty, and for others. As both individuals and as the church, we must keep in view Christ's wounded body, even as we celebrate his glorification. Displacing this particular body not only threatens our own particularity in glorification, but it also threatens to overwhelm the image of Christ crucified with the image of Christ glorified. Particularly given the image of the ascended Christ as an image of triumph and victory, attending to the wounded body of Christ becomes crucial for resisting images of beauty that claim glory apart from the cross. In contrast, a christological beauty that attends to Christ's wounds is intermingled with ugliness.Footnote ³⁸ In this image, we find our concept of beauty reshaped, our ideas of wholeness and perfection destabilised; for to remain unmarred, healthy and intact means becoming deformed according to the shape humanity is meant to take.Footnote ³⁹ Christ's wounded body thus subverts any standard of beauty that seeks to eradicate ugliness in the present age.

Christ's veiled beauty

The final characteristic of Christ's ascended body that I want to consider is its hiddenness. Here, in conversation with Balthasar's concept of Christ's veiled beauty and early Christian interpretations of the ascension, I argue that Christ's hidden body should chasten theologies of beauty. Until Christ inaugurates the eschaton at his parousia, beauty will continue to be hidden where we do not expect it, and appearances will continue to distract and deceive.

In Balthasar's theological aesthetics, Christ is the centre of God's revelation as the one whose form perfectly reveals the Father. And yet, even in this perfect revelation, Balthasar considers the phenomenon of hiddenness, of a veiled beauty of Christ, in consequence of which his beauty is not recognised: he is ‘misapprehended’. Balthasar argues that in this misapprehension there is always some implication of guilt, because the failure to apprehend Christ is due to a lack of faith: ‘If one fails to see the form of Jesus it is not because the objective evidence is insufficient, but because the guilt of a “darkness” which does not see, recognise, or receive the Light’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Christ's hiddenness, Balthasar says, judges those who misapprehend, because in the form of Christ they see nothing lovely, only contemptible.Footnote ⁴¹ Building on Balthasar, John de Gruchy argues that ‘The beauty of Jesus Christ is the beauty of God. But it is the beauty of the “suffering servant” (Isa 53:2–3), and as such it is a veiled beauty which is not self-evident’.Footnote ⁴² It is thus Christ's humility that renders his beauty ‘invisible except to the eyes of faith’.Footnote ⁴³ As Augustine comments, it is only when Christ reveals himself in glory that his outward beauty will be manifested, an event proleptically experienced at the transfiguration.Footnote ⁴⁴

Balthasar interprets Christ's hiddenness as a means to subvert Jewish expectations and to make possible the true manifestation of his identity.Footnote ⁴⁵ The purpose, then, of concealment is not to finally conceal, but to reveal. As Balthasar argues, the motif of the Messianic secret in Mark's Gospel has behind it a belief that ‘only the risen Christ could be understood and proclaimed without danger of misunderstanding’.Footnote ⁴⁶

And yet this dialectic of concealment and manifestation does not resolve completely after Christ's resurrection. Only forty days later, Christ ascends into heaven. At this event, his body is truly hidden from view, covered by the clouds, obscured from the disciples’ vision. The early Christian tradition interpreted the ascension as an essential stage in the development of faith: it demonstrated the insufficiency of the body for a life of faith, and the need to have Jesus’ physical body removed so that his people might understand his divinity. In sermons preached on the ascension, Leo the Great, John Chrysostom and Augustine all interpret the ascension as proof of the limitations of physical, earthly sight. Leo speaks of the apostles’ faith pre-ascension as being ‘held back by any use of bodily sight’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Augustine more specifically explains this as a failure to think about Christ as both man and God.Footnote ⁴⁸ He says that while Jesus remained on earth, the apostles continued to think that the Father is greater than Christ; only in his absence can that be corrected. He puts it bluntly: ‘the Body they beheld did not permit them’ to think of Christ in a ‘spiritual manner’.Footnote ⁴⁹ These sermons treat the body, both Christ's and our own, as an instrument that becomes an impediment to a genuine faith that sees Christ for all he is. Initially necessary, the body of Christ is removed in order to facilitate greater faith and understanding of Christ as both human and divine. Thus, we could conclude, the body veils Christ's beauty and prevents us from seeing its fullness. In this view, the hiddenness of Christ's body works against any embrace of Jesus’ physical beauty – and, by extension, of ours.

Yet if what we have so far argued is true, then this conclusion cannot leave us resting easy. I propose we return to Balthasar's concept of hiddenness as a way forward – a way that does not uncritically embrace physical beauty but enfolds it into God's redemption still to be consummated. Balthasar, as I have shown, finds in Christ's concealment a necessity based on time and distorted perception. Because of misconceptions about what the Messiah would come to do, Christ does not proclaim his identity ‘by means of spectacular theophany that dazzles human misery with divine splendour’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This theophany, however, is coming, and it will be a revelation not only of Christ but also of his bride, whom Christ has adorned and beautified.Footnote ⁵¹ This returns us to the eschatological location of beauty that we established earlier. Rather than pitting physical beauty against spiritual beauty as something that conceals, I am arguing that we locate physical beauty in a particular time: the eschaton. This does not mean, of course, that physical beauty is not present now – our experiences would quickly contradict such a claim. Instead, locating physical beauty eschatologically inserts an ‘eschatological pause’ that chastens our pursuit of it.Footnote ⁵²

In the withdrawing of Christ's physical body from our view, the full revelation of Christ's physical beauty has been relocated to the future. Christ's physical beauty is not yet fully manifest, for similar reasons that Balthasar gives for the concealment of Christ's beauty in the incarnation. The danger of misapprehension, of taking preconceptions of what physical beauty is and where it is found, necessitates Christ's physical absence until the Parousia. Here I depart from Balthasar: the resurrected Christ does not, as he claims, preclude misapprehension. In proclaiming a resurrected saviour, the danger has been and continues to be that those who hear will see only the glory without the cross. Without absence, we move towards an aesthetic triumphalism – the misconception that we do know in full what physical beauty looks like – rather than adopting a posture of humility that comes from Jesus’ body being hidden from our view.

If in the resurrection we have an intimation of what is to come, the doctrine of the ascension reminds us that we are not there yet. Through Christ's hidden body, we are precluded from grasping what has not yet been given. Our grasping after physical beauty now is not grasping after something illicit, but grasping impatiently, without understanding what time it is. Here, Irenaeus’ interpretation of the fall is instructive: ‘[Irenaeus] did not scorn the content of Satan's promise to Adam and Eve. Rather, Irenaeus becomes hot under the collar when becoming “gods” is promised too early, that is, to those who were too small to receive it’.Footnote ⁵³ In this human grasping, we can locate oppressive and exclusive standards of beauty as those which fail to understand physical beauty's eschatological nature and instead seek to immanentise it in the present.