This post starts with a big claim: Good political theology involves doing body theology. To reflect on the theological significance of a polity means reflecting on what makes up a political community; not merely a priori individuals, but needful bodies, in need of care, love and shelter. Politics at its most human concerns the transfer of resources in relation to these frail vessels of blood and bone. The deep question of political order is: which bodies are to be included? And which excluded? Yet in our modern age we are in danger in forgetting this fundamental reality. We are becoming increasingly obsessed with politics as a series of technological fixes to structural problems, rather than politics as relation. We start believing that we don’t need each other; that in some strange way individual human intellects can find ways of guaranteeing individual salvation; through the disembodied world of the internet or in perpetual design and re-design of our identity (as so prevalent among the post-modernists).

Modern state-craft is increasingly driven by abstract measures like economic productivity and quarterly GDP, without considering for a moment the actual conditions in which people live. Politics is stuck in a Platonic realm of Ideas where bodies are left behind. We start believing that somehow, we can live apart from nature and one another; seeking ever more spectacular modes of control over environment; so much so that we begin to forget the bonds of physicality and sentiment which tie us together. What happens when selves are cut off from the deeper commitments of all-embracing love and justice for God-given bodies that Christian theology presupposes? Two compelling manifestos against this body-less cult of the technical and abstract are found in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. At the heart of both texts, we find examples of what happens when the human polis becomes trapped by transgressive Promethean fantasies. Both protagonists are potent symbols of the pursuit of power without responsibility and knowledge without morality. Marlowe’s Faustus revels in magical arts delighting in the prospect of making ‘men live eternally, or being dead, raise them to life again’ or being ‘on earth as Jove is in the sky’ while Frankenstein seeks through the pages of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus the perfection of the human condition. Looking back over his tragic life Frankenstein defines his supreme obsession:

Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death! Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. [CH 2.]

What is so dangerous about these passions is the way in which they defy any suggestion of relation. In Faustus and Frankenstein human beings are set free from obligation, reciprocity and need for empathy, and instead embark on the complete mastery of world and self. Emblematic of this denial of duty and empathy is the rejection of the integrity of the living, breathing body. It is by and through an appreciation of our body, our feelings, and our senses that we learn to appreciate others. In the pain and pleasure of our own bodies we begin to recognise the pleasure and pain of others. In our own finitude we see our need for others to complete us. The finite body is never self-sufficient but is always reaching out for sustenance and companionship. It is no surprise therefore that both Faustus and Frankenstein, in projects stained with megalomania, find relational embodiment distasteful. More important than reciprocity or love are the promulgation of abstract ideas of power and control. It is significant that when Faustus signs the deed to his body and soul one of the clauses reads, ‘that Faustus may be spirit in form and substance’. Later, when the demon Mephistopheles confronts Faustus with the spiritual consequences of his bargain with Lucifer, on losing his body he exclaims ‘but what of that?’ Yet, in Marlowe’s tale it is the act of giving up his body which ultimately damns Faustus to eternal perdition. According to Thomist Theology (with which Marlowe seemed familiar) a spirit without a body is nothing but a demon and by its lack of embodiment is unable to repent. Bodies are not merely vessels which carry the soul; the body is that creature which entices the spirit towards its final rest in God. By making a pact with Satan, Faustus denies the saving potential of the body, to his eternal cost.

Frankenstein’s denial of the body takes the form of what the Feminist Mary Daly has described in terms of a necrophilia fantasy. Frankenstein’s monster, made from the disjointed parts of corpses, turns the human body into an object for Frankenstein’s intellectual pleasures. The body is not a source of relationship, but merely a means to an end of consolidating power. As Daly notes, ’The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation is the mark of necrophiliacs, who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses’. In the passivity of the corpse, Daly sees Frankenstein’s lust for control satisfied, replacing his need for relationship and vulnerability. Yet, Frankenstein’s denial of the centrality of relationships in the creation, but also in the abandonment of the creature comes back to haunt him. Left alone and estranged from human society it becomes hateful and decides to take revenge on Frankenstein by murdering both his brother and his wife. To Shelley, as with Marlowe, to deny one’s own finitude is to bring tragedy upon oneself. To refuse to accept the inevitability of the human condition, marred in death and limitation is to court disaster.

How can we get beyond this deadening quest for power? The answer is in our practice as Christians. The ecclesia begins its deliberation on the meaning of the human, not through an appeal to a technology of perfection and invulnerability, but by taking seriously the lessons we learn in the acts of giving and receiving hospitality. At the core of such acts Christians discern that humans are fundamentally needful creatures, in need of care, consideration, and company. Our bodies cry out for tenderness and relation, our faces call for recognition. This logic of gift (embodied by Eucharistic sharing) exaggerates these bodily realities by stripping us of all our masks, pretensions, and defence mechanisms. What matters at the table of fellowship is not our status, nor our resistance to failure, but our longing for consideration and affirmation. Our presence at the table is not dependent upon our ability to stand immune from the vicissitudes of life, but based on our ability to receive, to meet to understand. For Quakers the embryo of such an embodied politics begins with our worship together. By opening ourselves to the possibility of being powerless in the boundless presence of the Inward Light, we are offered a mirror which attends to our true condition. We are not meant to live apart (struggling for some private paradise) but seek a deep solidarity with each frail person. We live most faithfully (most humanly) when the cry of another shatters our illusions of control and stability. This is the deep meaning of the Query: “Bring the whole of your life under the ordering of the spirit of Christ”. To be ordered thus, is to live in the shadow of the bodily One who suffers alongside, never from above. To be shaped by such a Spirit is to become vulnerable in the service of others.