Grotesque Sublimity

In City of God, Augustine asks a rather startling question: at the
resurrection, when this world gives way to a Heaven better still than the
Paradise lost, when bodies rise newly glorious and bring all kinds of
wonderful philosophical puzzles with them, will there still be women, or
will everyone be resurrected male?
In his answer, Augustine parts from the philosophical tradition
declaring the superiority of the male in every respect, declaring:
While all defects will be removed from those bodies, their essential
nature will be preserved. Now a woman's sex is not a defect; it is natural.
… However, the female organs will not subserve their former use; they will
be part of a new beauty, which will not excite the lust of the
beholder—there will be no lust in that life—but will arouse the praises of
god for his wisdom and compassion, that he not only created out of nothing
but freed from corruption that which he had created. (22.17)


All sorts of interesting things are going on in this very full
paragraph, but I would like to draw our attention first to the insistence
upon beauty, and the role of that beauty, which arouses not lust, but
praise; and to suggest that there are some remarkable possibilities in
Augustine's descriptions of these bodies. These possibilities are at once
dissonant with Augustine's more usually classical aesthetic sensibility,
and at the same time oddly hopeful.
To see why the question of beauty is so important, we need first to
see the excessiveness of glorified or resurrected bodies. City of God
describes several modes of what we might call corporeal excess—and in the
passages on bodies, even more than in the rest of the text, Augustine seems
unable to restrain the urge to go on and on, to make extensive lists that
nonetheless cannot be exhaustive, as the bodies spill beyond the order in
which he tries to contain them.
Thus we find pages and pages, chapter after chapter, describing bodies
that go beyond the "normal" boundaries of fallen human nature, whether by
proportion (as in the case of giants), duration (longevity associated with
gigantism), type (the various forms of "monstrosity" Augustine discusses),
or will (unusual abilities to control various parts of the body, or, on the
flipside of this, the capacity of the body to rebel against the will, or
the inadequacy of the will to control the body).

In his discussions and descriptions of body, we are led into
Augustine's (never quite successful) efforts to reincorporate and
reinscribe excess, to reintegrate it into a properly contained text, a
neatly-bounded body, a whole clearly and neatly distinguishable from a
collection of fragments. In particular, the resurrected or glorified
body—the body most closely modeled upon God's own risen flesh—appears
repeatedly as the body restored to order, freed from excess as from
fragmentation, perfect in its size and in its proportions.[1] But this is
only half the story; this freeing, as we shall see, not only fails, it
actually leads at once to a deeper breakage and a more dramatic spilling-
over. Even the beauty and desirability of bodies can be regarded as
exceeding necessity—in this very excess beyond what is necessary lies their
capacity to lead us into temptation.

To understand what I'm talking about in making this claim for
excessiveness, we may begin with the case of bodies that go beyond the
limits apparently set by nature. Antediluvian humanity, Augustine assures
us, was both longer-lived and larger than the present version. Taking his
first evidence from Virgil's Aeneid, he also cites the evidence of "bones
of incredible size" and enormous human molars uncovered in tombs (15.9). He
argues that even when humans in general were larger (as he assumes they
once were), there were exceptions, giants among them, just as there are
humans today who are giant in comparison to most. Similarly, while he is
uncertain about the nature and status of the "sons of God" who are said in
Genesis 6 to have mated with human women, he is not perturbed by claims
about their giant offspring, saying to those who doubt them: "There had
been giants on earth when the sons of God took as wives the daughters of
men… It is true that giants were also born after this happened…Thus there
were giants both before and after that time" (15.23).

These humans who take up an exceptional amount of space are also
credited with taking up an exceptional amount of time. Granting that
material evidence cannot prove duration as it can size, Augustine
nonetheless declares, "we should not for that reason call in question the
reliability of the sacred narrative," adding that "Pliny also states that
there is to this day a nation where men live for two hundred years" (15.9).
He goes on to give numerous examples of long-lived Biblical figures,
noting minor discrepancies in the reporting of their ages but deciding that
these are not significant and do not affect the truth of the claim that
people once lived very long lives.

In addition to these long-lived giants of both past and present, there
is among humans a multiplicity of corporeal types that can only be called
excessive. Ostensibly concerned with the relatively succinct point that
anything human is a descendent of Adam, Augustine here cannot resist the
multiplication of examples, and I cannot resist quoting him:

There are accounts in pagan history of certain monstrous races of
men. … Some of these monsters are said to have only one eye…; others
have the soles of their feet turned backwards behind their legs;
others have the characteristics of both sexes… Then there are men
without mouths, who live only by inhaling through their nostrils;
there are others whose height is only a cubit… We are told in another
place that there are females who conceive at the age of five and do
not live beyond their eighth year. There is also a story of a race who
have a single leg attached to their feet; they cannot bend their knee,
and yet have a remarkable turn of speed. … There are some men without
necks, and with their eyes in their shoulders…

(16.8)



Nor does he stop here,[2] though these examples should suffice to the
point. It is hard not to be drawn into his obsession with the wholly
unnecessary, utterly fascinating variability of human phenotypes, even if
we don't quite share his credulity. Similarly, it is difficult to the point
of impossibility not to be drawn into his enthusiastic descriptions of
peculiar bodily abilities, excessive both in sheer number and in going so
far beyond utility.

Some people can even move their ears, either one at a time or both
together. Others without moving the head can bring the whole
scalp…down toward the forehead and bring it back again at will. Some
can swallow an incredible number of various articles and then with a
slight contraction of the diaphragm, can produce, as if out of a bag,
any article they please, in perfect condition. There are others who
imitate the cries of birds and beasts and the voices of any other men,
reproducing them so accurately as to be quite indistinguishable from
the originals, unless they are seen. A number of people produce at
will such musical sounds from their behind (without any stink) that
they seem to be singing from that region. I know from my own
experience of a man who used to sweat whenever he chose; and it is a
well-known fact that some people can weep at will and shed floods of
tears. (14.24)




And, again, there's more.

Besides proving too much for our words, the flesh also exceeds the
will—both God's will and ours, disobeying our very own commands. This
disobedience, the split of the body from its perfect harmony with will, is
for Augustine the consequence of an original disobedience, better known, of
course, as original sin. In this prototypical and consequential
misbehavior, humans willfully disobey God in a fleshly act (eating) that
manifests the split between human and divine wills. They, tempted by a
subtle serpent, want to eat the fruit; God doesn't want them to. The people
eat, and find in partial consequence that their own flesh, formerly
altogether docile to will, becomes disobedient, not only to God, but even
to their own intentions. Disobedience multiplies: "Who can list all the
multitude of things that man wishes to do and cannot, while he is
disobedient to himself, that is, while his very mind and even his lower
element, his flesh, do not submit to his will?" (14.15) As a result,
humans find themselves driven by contradictory and unsatisfiable desires.
The Augustinian ideal is desire reunified such that it is solely directed
to God. The will thus reintegrated would harmonize not only with itself and
with God's will but with the flesh as well. Such is the ideal of the
glorified body, the body after its resurrection as it returns to, though it
will also exceed, the body before its fall.

In Augustine's attempts at a conceptual reintegration of our not-so-
docile bodies, his attempts to get them to make sense, their excessiveness
actually becomes still more evident. Here too we may begin with the
phenomenon of very large bodies. The effort to reintegrate excessive size
comes about indirectly, in the discussion of a problem that arises for many
thinkers, from Tertullian onward, in considering the resurrection of the
body, to wit: what about the leftover bits?

The problem of the leftover bits is this: if our bodies are raised
whole (as Augustine claims), what becomes of all those parts—he mentions
toenail clippings and cut hair—that once belonged to a given body?[3] Do
they simply disappear? Are we resurrected into our glorified bodies with
yard-long toenails? What happens?

Augustine's solution is, like many of his solutions, weird, but
elegant. He declares:

All that is required is that the whole pot should be re-made out of
the whole lump, that is, that all the clay should go back into the
whole pot, with nothing left over.

Now the hair has been cut, and the nails have been pared, again and
again. And if the restoration of what has been cut would disfigure the
body, then it will not be restored. But that does not mean that
anything will 'perish' from the person at the resurrection. Such
constituents will be returned to the same body, to take their place in
its structure, undergoing a change of substance to make them suitable
for the parts in which they are used. (22.19)

In other words, as long as all the "stuff" that was ever of the body is
gathered, it needn't retain exactly the form it once had. This regathering,
we have to assume, would make all of us enormous—if, not insignificantly,
well-proportioned—though we're going to have to hold on to the question of
just what that last part might mean. In our resurrected, glorified bodies,
with all of the matter of our lifetimes back, we will all be giants.

Or maybe not. Having presented this intriguing solution, Augustine
seems less certain of it in the text's next section, where he writes that

…in the resurrection of the body for eternal life the body will have
the size and dimensions which it had attained, or was to attain, at
maturity, …with its appropriate beauty preserved also in the
proportions of all the parts. If, in order to preserve this beauty,
something has been taken from a part displeasing by excessive size,
and if this is dispersed throughout the whole body, in such a way that
this material is not lost, while the congruence of the parts is kept,
then there is no absurdity in believing that there may be some
addition to the stature of the body as a result of this. … On the
other hand, if it is maintained that every person is to rise again
with the precise stature he had when he departed this life, there is
no occasion for violent opposition to such an opinion…. (22.20)




Faced with the potential excessiveness of risen bodies, Augustine does
not so much backtrack as multiply his options. Perhaps we are all to be
giants. Perhaps we rise the same size as we lived, but better-proportioned
(with the added matter of our too-big bits redistributed—if we were too
large overall, whatever that might mean, would we become unusually dense,
excessive in weight but not in volume?). That we might have the stature we
would have attained at maturity is also startling: evidently a body may
acquire, not merely all the matter it ever had, but matter that it never
got around to incorporating. Resurrected bodies must take account not only
of the material accumulation of the past but of the material potential of
the future. Even if we allow multiple possible answers to the problem of
size, however, a few puzzles remain.

First, while we might prefer to join him in not thinking about it, it
does seem problematic that Augustine gives little consideration to waste
matter. There is an indirect mention of waste in the discussion of
cannibalism, where Augustine writes, "Now surely no one is going to
maintain, with any show of truth or reason, that the whole of a body so
eaten passes straight through the intestinal tract without any change or
conversion into flesh of the eater" (22.20). Presumably waste matter is
what does pass through the body without becoming a part of it as the rest
of one's food does. Are we then to exclude from reassemblage everything
within us that was, or could without harm have been, eliminated from us?
And how would we know just what that would be? After all, it was a part of
us for a while, so which while counts in determining the state of the body
worthy of resurrection? The puzzle of waste raises the puzzle of
boundaries, of what counts as body, of what is properly internal.

The issue of cannibalism raises other puzzles, as bodies overlap,
overflow into each other. Augustine grants eternal "possession" of the
body's meat to the one whose body it first was, rather than to the one who
is nourished by consuming that body (22.20). This leaves unaddressed the
question of the body of the one who ate human flesh and gained mass by so
doing: is such a person resurrected as smaller, thinner, or less dense?
Cannibalism is admittedly rare, but (though Augustine does not mention it
in this context) we do ingest one another, from the time that we are
infants at the breast (cf. Conf. 1.6). Again, the flesh exceeds; our bodies
overflow and forget their bounds. This confusion is not merely spatial but
temporal; his analysis of cannibalism suggests that I get the flesh if it
was mine first, but it is not at all clear whether mothers' milk, safely
exuded, would be resurrected with mother or child.[4] It becomes impossible
to figure out just what can be, or what ought to be, contained "within" the
body. The very insistence on bodily integrity, on re-incorporating
everything that was ever of the body, runs into multiplicity (matter shared
among multiple bodies); the boundaries of interiority and exteriority do
not hold, in space or in time. It becomes difficult to say what is broken
or whole, excessive or insufficient.[5]

Time is a central question in boundary issues, as Augustine struggles
with first possession of matter, matter once possessed and later discarded,
and matter that would at some future point have come into one's possession.
Certainly there is something unusual in the time of resurrected bodies.
They seem to reintegrate extreme longevity by making even longer
everlasting lives the bodily norm. Just as we will all be giants (maybe),
so too we will all live a long time—so long that length of time will cease
to make sense (if we lived forever, would we still keep count?). Time is
more shareable than space: each body can take up all that remains of time
in a way that it can't take up all of space. But the very time of that
heavenly, infinitely-extended "future," the fleshly living-again, is
excessive; again, it takes up the paradisiacal past (before sin earned its
wage of death) yet goes beyond it to a mysteriously greater glory. All of
time's sweep seems to be not merely unfolded here, but infolded,
gathered—as in eternity—not only because that prelapsarian paradise is
taken up and transfigured, but because, as we've seen, the very matter of
the body must be very strangely regathered from its various distributions
across time, when its various pieces were and were not its own.

The beauty of these eternal bodies has already been emphasized in the
necessity that they be well-proportioned and ornamentally-sexed. It plays
another, slightly different, role in Augustine's effort to explain the
monstrous multiplicity of forms that we find in the human bodies of this
world.

For God is the creator of all, and he himself knows where and when any
creature should be created or should have been created. He has the
wisdom to weave the beauty of the whole design out of the constituent
parts, in their likeness and diversity. The observer who cannot view
the whole is offended by what seems the deformity of a part since he
does not know how it fits in. (16.8)

The argument here is of a familiar form, a variant on the argument from the
greater good, which holds that what from a particular perspective seems
evil, wrong, or bad (even aesthetically) turns out to be good or beautiful
if we can take a greater perspective. In this case, Augustine argues, the
apparently monstrous multiplicity of types actually contributes to the
beauty of the world. He does not, to be sure, precisely clarify how—but
perhaps such clarity can only be attained from the perspective of God. Yet
this argument, dependent upon the whole, demands multiplicity, declaring it
necessary to God's design for goodness. The whole, however constructed,
cannot be a totality, nor singular, nor seamless, any more than a body can.

Beauty as an argument continues to appear in Augustine's efforts to
reintegrate bodily excesses. It is not merely the case that beauty is a
characteristic of the resurrected body; it is a characteristic by which
that body is distinguished from, by which it in fact transforms, the mortal
flesh: we will all be well-proportioned. There is a kind of excess to the
very fact of beauty, which goes beyond practical necessity. Augustine is
himself often suspicious of beauty, not least because it provokes an often-
distracting desire—indeed, thinkers from Socrates on have found beauty and
desire inseparable. Even Kant, who Germanically insists upon removing
"interest" from aesthetic sensation, insists equally that the response to
beauty must be a kind of desire.[6] So what happens to desire in the
resurrection?

To consider this, we can return to the discussion regarding the
startling range of human ability. Far from being a difficulty for which
Augustine must account, this range is presented as evidence in favor of the
hope that humanity might someday find its collective will in harmony with
that of God. This hope is presented in a curious parallel to humanity's
Edenic obedience:

We observe then that the body, even under present conditions, is an
obedient servant to some people in a remarkable fashion beyond the
normal limitations of nature; this is shown in many kinds of movements
and feelings, and it happens even in men who are living this present
troubled life in the corruptible flesh. If this is so, is there any
reason why we should not believe that before the sin of disobedience
and its punishment of corruptibility, the members of a man's body
could have been the servants of man's will without any lust, for the
procreation of children? (14.24)




The maximum of bodily control by the will in the present world gestures
back toward the perfect obedience of Eden and forward to the perfect
harmony of the world redeemed. Perhaps, in the kingdom to come, as our
bodies harmonize with our wills as with God's, we shall all be able to
wiggle our ears.

This nostalgically-recalled (or creatively invented) capacity of the
will to control the body is in contrast to the body's current, persistent
capacity to exceed the will—that is, to our hereditary somatic
disobedience, the incapacity of the will and body to harmonize perfectly.
The paradigmatically disobedient flesh of the genitals (that which most
often inconveniences us by countering our good intentions, and where,
presumably, "disturbance" was first felt) is re-integrated, once again by
beauty, into the resurrected and glorified body, becoming only another
source of beauty that draws forth praise.
At this point we should pause to note some curious claims about this
new beauty. The resurrected body is free from necessity as imposed by use-
value (no longer disobedient, the genitals are no longer useful either),
free from distracting desire (that is, any desire that might turn us away
from the divine), and so beautiful that it arouses in the viewer the
praises of God. Contrary to his reputation for hostility to the somatic,
Augustine insists upon the beauty of even mortal bodies, of which he says
that "one would be at a loss to say whether utility or beauty is the major
consideration in their creation." What functions well and harmoniously is
beautiful, but beauty is not itself functional. Some of the body is simply
aesthetic and impractical, he argues, "for example, the nipples on a man's
chest, and the beard on his face…." In resurrected bodies, however, beauty
clearly trumps use value: "For practical needs are, of course, transitory;
and a time will come when we shall enjoy one another's beauty for itself
alone, without any lust. And this above all is a motive for the praise of
the Creator … [Ps. 104.1, LXX]" (22.24). These are the bodies that most
nearly approach the body of God, not only in their form, but in their
speaking, as they praise the world, seeing that it is good. What is
immortal in bodies, startlingly enough, is beauty. (Intriguingly, one of
the few other people I know to've made that claim is Wallace Stevens. But I
digress.)

Granted that form need not follow function, we may nonetheless come to
suspect something odd in the insistence upon the unnecessary beauty of
risen bodies. Without necessity it is hard to figure out what counts as
proportion; it is hard to see where or why anything unnecessary would stop,
how its proper and proportionate place could be defined or determined. This
sense of excess in beauty is intensified by its connection with desire.
Desire is not self-limiting; it may be cut short by satisfaction, but on
its own it often tends to excess, most of all when it desires the
divine—that is, when its object is infinite too.
Desire, suggests Socrates in Plato's Symposium, seeks at once beauty
and immortality, an interaction with beauty that will allow one's
connection to the beautiful, one's enjoyment of the beautiful, to extend
everlastingly. Beauty and desire feed back upon one another, ideally
forever. And beauty does create for Augustine a particular kind of desire:
the desire to praise. But praise itself is excessive speech, already full
to bursting. As any reader of Confessions knows, praise bursts forth
sensuously, repetitively, not always voluntarily, often in fragments rather
than sentences, often in sentences that keep on going. It imparts no
information and performatively accomplishes no deed. If beauty's "function"
is to draw forth praise, it is most excessive of all, as Augustine himself
suggests. In City of God, having finished his recitation of all of the
beauties and utilities of creation, he adds: "I have here made a kind of
compressed pile of blessings. If I decided to take them singly, to unwrap
each one, as it were, and to examine it, with all the detailed blessings
contained within it, what a time it would take! And these are all the
consolations of humanity under condemnation, not the rewards of the
blessed…" (22.24). The praise of God for the blessings of the resurrected
life would surely push language to its limits, and then past them.

The ugly, the grotesque, and the disproportionate are taken up in
resurrection, but they are not made useful: they are made beautiful—purely
enjoyable. But this is a grotesque beauty, refusing all the constraints of
the beautiful; even its obedience to the will becomes not self-restraint
but a marvelously unconstrained and wild multiplication of capability.

The effect of Augustine's discussion is to emphasize the surprisingly
un-classical beauty and glory of multiple and divergent bodies,
uncontainable bodies, bodies in which beauty just might be defined not be
regimented standards but precisely by the joy taken in them: beauty is
known in delight. I find this engaging enough on aesthetic grounds, but the
potential, as O'Connor will show us, may go even further.
For those unfamiliar with O'Connor's "Revelation," the story begins in
a doctor's waiting room, to which Ruby Turpin has accompanied her husband,
Claud, who was kicked by a cow and needs to have his sore leg examined.
Mrs. Turpin talks to people and she prays to Jesus, and most of her prayers
seem to be prayers of gratitude, which you'd think would make us appreciate
her; people who are grateful for their good fortune, or even just aware
that they're fortunate, are often sympathetic and even humble. But her
gratitude has a peculiar character—it's both self-satisfied and
disturbingly comparative. In fact, it depends upon comparison. Here's a
representative instance:
"If there's one thing I am,'" Mrs. Turpin said with feeling,
"it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself
and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition
besides, I just feel like shouting, 'Thank you, Jesus, for making
everything the way it is!' It could have been different." For one
thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she
was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her.
(499)


Like many of O'Connor's characters, Mrs. Turpin has a clear sense of
the order of the world and her own high place in it, a sense to which the
world frequently declines to correspond. But I don't want to join many of
the critics I've read in simply and easily condemning her as a woman guilty
of pride and social injustice—not because she isn't, but because, horrid as
she is, she nonetheless attributes what she sees as good to god and not
simply to herself, which means that hers is a religious sense founded in
gratitude as she understands it, even if she doesn't understand it very
well. "Whenever she counted her blessings," we're told, "she felt as
buoyant as if she weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds instead of one
hundred and eighty." (497)
The ugly side of this, of course, is that the world she so gratefully
attributes to God is a rigidly and smugly hierarchical one, and she likes
it that way; O'Connor writes "Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at
night naming the classes of people."(491) It's interesting that her efforts
to sort out these classes get a little bit tangled; she's sure they exist,
but they can be hard to determine. O'Connor is too smart an author to be
setting us up for a simplistic "the last shall be first" reversal; some of
the story's underprivileged characters are just as unlikeable as Mrs.
Turpin. For instance, a woman in the waiting room who's immediately defined
by Mrs. Turpin as white trash reveals herself as a contemptuous racist, and
she too is grateful for her place in the world, not just racially, but when
she remarks, for instance, "I thank Gawd…I ain't a lunatic." (502) Such
characters, who praise the world they enjoy, would seem to dwell in a
glorious state already. But they don't see their worlds very well, and
their praise is, in consequence, both fragile and weirdly constrained.
As is also typical of O'Connor's stories, the lack of correspondence
between Mrs. Turpin's self-satisfaction and a more external perspective on
her is brought to her attention with violent suddenness. An "ugly girl" in
the waiting room—a girl, not incidentally, named Mary Grace—has left off
her reading to stare at Mrs. Turpin, making strange faces while Mrs. Turpin
has an ostensibly pleasant conversation with the girl's mother. Of course,
that conversation has taken a turn to criticism of the girl's surly
disposition. Abruptly, the girl reacts, throwing her book at Mrs. Turpin's
head and leaping forward to attack her. (499) After the ensuing chaos has
been controlled,
"Mrs. Turpin's head cleared and her power of motion returned. She
leaned forward until she was looking directly into the fierce brilliant
eyes. There was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, know her
in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition.
'What you got to say to me?' she asked hoarsely and held her breath,
waiting, as for a revelation.
The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin's. 'Go back
to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,' she whispered." (500)


After all those assembled in the waiting room have agreed that the
girl is insane, Mrs. Turpin goes home with Claud, and she spends most of
the rest of the story in a state of irritable agitation, which finally
gives way to anger that "she had been singled out for the message, though
there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied."
(502) (One of Mrs. Turpin's greatest points of gratitude is that she isn't
trash.) Eventually the tension is too much for her. Standing outside their
hog pen, she lays into God, demanding, "What do you send me a message like
that for? … How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?"
(506) Mrs. Turpin is not so good at complexity. "If you like trash better,"
she snaps, "go get yourself some trash then. …If trash is what you wanted
why didn't you make me trash?...I could quit working and take it easy and
be filthy." (507) Finally,
"Go on," she yelled, "call me a hog! …Call me a wart hog from hell.
Put that bottom rail on top. There'll still be a top and bottom!" [Mrs.
Turpin, we notice, believes very firmly in order. Nothing overflows its
place, nothing shifts, even if it might appear to.]
A garbled echo returned to her.
A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, "Who do you think you
are?"
The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment
with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and
across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an
answer from beyond the wood. (507-8)

The answer is the return of the question: who do you think you are?
What in the world have you been praising; how much of the world have you
had to shut out, in order to praise? After this, Mrs. Turpin looks at the
hogs "as if through the very heart of mystery"; "as if she were absorbing
some abysmal life-giving knowledge." (508) And finally, as she looks at "a
purple streak in the sky," "a visionary light settled in her eyes," and
this is what she sees (I should warn you that the description is as Mrs.
Turpin sees it, and some of its language is offensive):


… a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole
companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and
bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and
lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the
end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as
those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything
and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them
closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity,
accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and
respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their
shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.
She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small
but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but
she remained where she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way
on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible
cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the
souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. (508-
9)

And the story ends here. It's after her stunned and stunning
revelation that we can really start to see, not just that something is
wrong with Mrs. Turpin's form of gratitude and praise, but what is wrong
with it. For Augustine, the proliferation of human types is itself a
delight, cause for praise—for language drawn out so irresistibly that it is
as if it came against one's will, but of course it is precisely so
accordant with will as to meet no barrier at all.
For Mrs.Turpin, the joy of that multiplicity is negative. That is,
much of humanity provides the contrast by which she can be praised—and so
to see such humanity, clean and white-robed, leading, getting into heaven
ahead of her, is just about too much. The freaks and lunatics are scarcely
even human; like the Augustinian multiplicity, they seem half-animal, frog-
like—and utterly, joyously right, fully in accordance with their own wills
as they leap and rumble heavenward. The only discord is in the joyless
dignity—or more exactly, in an important correction, the joylessness
passing for dignity—of Mrs.Turpin's own kind. This kind is characterized by
order, by everything being neat, in its place. Her people are characterized
by the absence of excess, by virtue of that moderation now being burned
away.
Early in the story, while she's still sitting in the doctor's waiting
room, Mrs. Turpin, scanning the other patients, hums along with a gospel
song on the radio:


She had seen from the first that the child belonged with the old woman.
She could tell by the way they sat—kind of vacant and white-trashy, as if
they would sit there until Doomsday if nobody called and told them to get
up. … The gospel hymn playing was "When I looked up and He looked down,"
and Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line mentally, "And wona
these days I know I'll we-eara crown." (490)


In her doomsday vision, it's people like the patient, quiet old woman
and sickly child who do indeed seem to've been called to get up, not so
much transformed into beauty as shown to be beautiful in an
incomprehensible revelation. The revelation undoes Mrs. Turpin's sense of
the beautiful. Hers is a repressive corporeality, its beauties all defined
negatively, closing-off instead of opening-infinitely, such that she is
prevented from seeing beauty at all: in anyone unlike her, in the ugly girl
named Mary Grace, but also in the sudden streaking sunset. Even her love of
Claud is a negative—she isn't joyful that she has Claud; she's glad nobody
else does. Her smug self-satisfaction is finally ripped open by Grace, who
perversely awakens her to the world's beauty by showing her her own
ugliness. Mrs. Turpin is a hog and her both, is saved and from hell too—and
so, O'Connor suggests, are all human beings. She is in a salvific delight
of praise and joy, and a hellish exclusion from their fullness. The problem
is that while she directs her praises up to her God, she's been looking
down on everyone and everything, with no real celebration at all.
The world redeemed, demanding praise, rushing toward heaven is
sublimely, and grotesquely, indiscriminate. It glorifies not by exclusion
and contrast, not by gratitude for what it is not or for who did not get
one's gifts, but by a downright terrifying measure of inclusion.
This is no classical beauty, with its proportions given in advance by
mathematical measure; but this is, at the same time, what beauty is: it is
excessive, it is unnecessary; it is defined by its absence of function, by
serving only enjoyment, motivating and expressing only praise and delight.
It serves neither to order the world nor to secure any place in it, whether
that place is Mrs. Turpin's or that of the top and bottom rails of the hog
pen. To elicit praise is not a function, because praise itself has no
utility.
We can't even claim some overarching beauty by which this chaos is re-
collected into order, into a kind of harmony that makes a oneness out of
difference. The beauty of the resurrected is not that of those who are,
alone, on key—if only one person, or group, or instrument is on key, then
there is no longer a key on which to be; that is, it or they must be as
much in dissonance as everyone else. The song of praise that fills
O'Connor's heaven is not a singular plainchant; it is not even a harmony.
It is a glorious dissonance, the shocking chorus of Gesualdo responsoria,
the bent note of a blues song, a disproportion that shouldn't work, but
does—excessive in the manner of immeasurably-exceeding grace. The song,
like the bodies, is in some mysterious way well-proportioned, even
perfectly proportioned, but that proportionality is governed by no
regularity of recognizable law, and the beauty it offers is not comforting.
Like grace, it exceeds comprehensible law. Overflowing, breaking,
reconfiguring, the bodies and their voices shock us with their perfection
nonetheless, the song of praise stopping us with its disturbing and
grotesque beauty.
Mrs. Turpin's gratitude for the beauty of the world is wrongly
conceived because it takes in too little of the world; she thinks that
everyone must sing in her key. Though he hasn't followed his own line of
thought all the way, Augustine has described for us a glorified world in
which beauty is exemplified by human bodies, while those bodies are marked
by their overflow, their fragmentation, and their uncertain boundaries. If
their song of praise bears any correspondence to the beauty it praises, the
beauty of its proportions is also disproportionate, unpredictable. As I've
said, this seems to me a promising way to think of the beauty of bodies: to
think of taking joy in them, a joy necessarily multiform, and not to see
beauty only in conforming to some current somatic fashion; to link, as
Augustine does, beauty to delight—and Neoplatonically, to the very fact of
being. If beauty is known in taking delight, perhaps we can usefully
reconceive the pleasure of it. "Delight orders the soul," (DM VI.II.29)
Augustine declares, but his own reflections argue against the tidiness he
assigns to this order, and so open up the possibility of a great—an
astonishingly great—range of joys. "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of
terror," says Rilke, but entangled in that terror, in its overwhelming
overabundance, is the beginning of jubilation too.
Given who our writers are here, we must also realize that this beauty
has religious significance—it is a sign of glory and a source of
glorification. Beauty is linked to praise and to desire and to joy, while
disabling our ability to insist upon tidy limits for the praiseworthy, the
desirable, the delightful. Both Augustine, perhaps not-quite-consciously,
and O'Connor, very self-awarely, recognize that Christianity has always had
dissonance in its beauty, the abysmal abandonment of the crucifixion in its
Easter, as well as the sheer astonishing impossible overflow of materiality
in its glorified and resurrected flesh. It is this ineluctable trace of the
grotesque, this overfull and fragmentary delight, that grants it whatever
possibility it may have of being, like its bodies both human and divine,
likewise beautiful. Divinity, too, overflows.

-----------------------
[1] Thus Carolyn Walker Bynum asserts that for Augustine "resurrection is
restoration both of bodily material and of bodily wholeness or integrity,
with incorruption (which includes—for the blessed—beauty, weightlessness,
and impassibility) added on." She charges him with "a profound fear of
development and process" that results in a view of "salvation as the
crystalline hardness not only of stasis but of the impossibility of non-
stasis." Admitting that "Augustine's insistence on keeping minute details
of the heavenly body close to the earthly one" is quite striking, she notes
again that he does so "while adding (a crucial addition of course!) stasis"
(The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 [New York:
Columbia, 1995], 95, 97, 99]. We question, however, whether "add stasis,
and stir" is a formula that adequately captures Augustine's approach, as if
he were thereby seeking a recipe for balance between Neoplatonic
transcendentalism and Christian incarnationalism.

[2] What am I to say of the Cynocephali, whose dog's head and actual
barking prove them to be animals rather than men? The text overflows: "At
Hippo Zaritus there is a man with feet shaped like a crescent, with only
two toes on each, and his hands are similarly shaped. …

As for Androgynes, also called Hermaphrodites, they are certainly very
rare, and yet it is difficult to find periods when there are no examples….

Some years ago, but certainly in my time, a man was born in the East with a
double set of upper parts, but a single set of the lower limbs. … And he
lived long enough for the news of his case to attract many sightseers"
(16.8).

[3] It appears to be Tertullian who first interpolated hair and nails into
Deut. 29:4, when he asserted that "the clothing and shoes of the children
of Israel remained unworn and unwasted during the course of forty years;
and that in their own bodies a just measure of aptness and propriety
arrested the uninhibited growth of nails and hair, lest their unusual
length be considered as some corruption" (Res. 58.6). Jerome reproduces
the reading in his treatise against John of Jerusalem, noting that barbers
(not to mention manicurists) would be out of work in heaven. David Satran
suggests that two factors are at work for Tertullian: first, his awareness
that hair and nails continue to grow after death, a potential problem for
the argument that soul and body are necessarily separated at the moment of
death (Soul 51.2); and, second, his interest in the debased figure of
Nebuchadnezzar who performed penance by living in squalor for seven years,
"his nails wild in the manner of a lion, his hair unkempt like that of an
eagle" (Pen. 12.7-8). Satran concludes: "These simple features of human
anatomy become criteria of 'humanity' itself. Untempered, uncontrolled,
they reduce man to the condition of a beast; held in check, mastered, they
render him angelic" ("Fingernails and Hair: Anatomy and Exegesis in
Tertullian," Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 40 (1989) 116-120,
citation at 120). Clearly Augustine is standing in this tradition when he
asks, "Now, what reply am I to make about the hair and the nails?" Yet he
chooses to cite a different biblical passage, namely Luke 21:18—"not one
hair of your head will perish"—to marshal a rather different argument.
According to Augustine, the excesses of physical growth are not held in
check but incorporated in the resurrection. Note also that he has
dislodged his argument from an exegetical context that might have confined
the issue to hair and nails by his resort to a scriptural passage that
refers only to hair. If he's added nails to the list, why not other bodily
products?

[4] Consider also the puzzle of the eucharist: what becomes of the ingested
bread and wine, particularly if we consider them, as Augustine surely did,
to be the body and blood of Christ? Problems beyond those of cannibalism
are created here by the unusual temporality of the body of Christ and by
its unusual spatiality in eucharistic multi-location.

[5] This may be a case in point: a second problem that occurs to us is
that of oral sex and the ingestion of bodily fluids, even we don't add the
Augustinian notion that the matter for the making of the human body is all
contained within sperm. Like mother's milk, this seems to be a non-damaging
fluid exchange in which it is unclear to whom the matter ultimately
"belongs." [NB: Virginia and I were very proud of this, I'm afraid. We
refer to it as "the soon to be famous oral sex footnote."]

[6] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987).