Body of Symbols: The Organicity of the Collective Body
That the Church forms a collective body, which can be like the real body of Christ; that this body, like any particular body, is one by its life and multiple by its parts and by its organs, and thus by its actions, its functions, its operations; that baptism accomplishes the incorporation into this body: none of these statements derive from a particular theological thesis but belong instead to biblical Revelation itself. This thought is expressed in a number of Pauline epistles in the clearest, most decisive, and most foundational way. It constitutes a base for what, over the centuries, will be thought and lived by the Church.
It is not merely a comparison or metaphor, no matter how fecund and rich, as found in political analogies that, present in pagan thought well before Christianity, assimilate the city or the collective to a body and its citizens to its parts. Instead, for those who profess the Christian faith, it is about a reality at once both supernatural and carnal. One does not enter into this body through birth, but through rebirth. One does not belong to it through the possession or the acquisition of rights of citizenship, nor through simple intellectual adherence to a doctrine, as in the case of a housing development or an association, but instead through an incorporation, baptism, which is of another nature.
This collective body draws its reality from a relationship at once both spiritual and corporeal to the individual body of Jesus Christ, and to the events that have happened and are happening, for in various senses they do not cease taking place in and through this body, above all his passion, his death, and his resurrection. It has its food and drink (eucharistic), and its proprioception, and the various other possibilities of a body. Its life maintains, organizes, and reproduces itself. It is visible in the world, although, as with the individual body, neither all of its life nor the whole of its life is given immediately to be seen in the world. And belonging to this body also transforms the manner in which I exist and in which I think about my own individual body and the way I relate to it.
But having recalled briefly these fundamental givens, some difficult, subtle, complex, and controversial questions arise as soon as we seek to think through with any precision its organicity. In the commentaries on the Song of Songs, this collective body of the Church will be that of the Bride, first and foremost. And the various parts of this body, its eyes, its cheeks, its teeth, and so on, will increasingly be identified with some functions or orders in the Church as a differentiated and hierarchical institution (bishops, doctors of the Church, monks, the simple faithful, etc.). The individual interpretation sees in these parts whose beauty the Song of Songs praises the parts of the “inner man” that I am, functions or organs of my soul. We will now study how, and with what sense and by what right, we come to speak of a collective body made up not only of individuals but also of orders which gather a certain number of individuals, a collective body differentiated into classes of individuals, in the widest sense of the term. The aim is not to achieve an impossible exhaustiveness in this genealogy, but to clarify, following certain privileged writings, its most decisive turns and major stages.
St. Paul does not talk of “organs” of the body but of “members” or “parts” (melē). Albeit used rarely in the New Testament, he employs this word on numerous occasions, and in a triple perspective: first of all, in order to speak of the members of our individual body, and of how we must use them (e.g., Col 3:5; Rom 6:13, 6:19); next, to name our belonging to the body of Christ, which makes of us its members (1 Cor 6:15; Eph 5:30); and finally, in order to evoke the bond among Christians, insofar as they are members of one another within the unity of the body of Christ (Eph 4:25; Rom 12:5). This simple finding already allows three important remarks to be made. The first is that our body, which is the unity in action of multiple members, can become a member of a higher body into which it is integrated, yet without ceasing to be what it was, which nevertheless certainly does not mean that its economy remains the same. The second remark is that incorporation into Christ through baptism implies a double corporeal relation, one or the other aspect of which can be more or less accentuated in any respective passage, but both of which are always present and inseparable: the relation of our body that has become a member to Christ as its head, and the relation of our body as member to other bodies as members.
The third remark, finally, is that these members that we have, or these members that we are, are never considered in themselves in a static way, as if they were offered to be looked at. Rather, they are always considered in terms of their usage and their function, in what they operate and the work they do, whether good or bad, free or ser vile, just or unjust. And this usage of the members, moreover, is not the neutral and as it were automatic exercise of their purpose (like seeing for the eye), but results from our decision and from what we make of ourselves, or to speak more rigorously, it is the location of the decision that we make about ourselves. I am what I make of my body, or with it, and the manner in which I use it, just as the end that I make it serve determines who I become. All of me is incarnated, and this is why selfhood (l’ipséité) is a bottomless question, for there are several ways to be incarnated, several ways one can exist one’s incarnation, several meanings of the flesh, which are just so many modes of the self, and of its possible alterations. The human body is the place of my freedom or of my enslavement.
Nevertheless, the epistles, which are always addressed to Christian communities, are neither metaphysical meditations, nor moral treatises, nor autobiographical accounts, nor lessons of exegesis—even if the reader can most certainly, from within these various orders, draw strong lessons. No, they are apostolic speech. It follows that not only what is said of the body, individual or collective, and of its members is always dynamic and uttered within the horizon and in the light of usage, but further that these descriptions themselves are always taken in a context that is itself prescriptive, where the Word of God through the mouth of the apostle invites us to commit ourselves to a certain conduct or divert ourselves from another. In responding to the call which itself inspired it, this speech in turn calls out. It is not only spoken of the body inasmuch as incarnated being requires from us something decisive having to do with freedom and enslavement: this word is itself requiring and instant, calling to us with force as body and as member, calling us to incorporation (conversion). It speaks about the body only in speaking to the body.
If the body is, according to the word of St. Paul, “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 6:19), this temple cannot be deserted or mute: it must allow for a liturgy. This liturgical (affirmative, praying, praising) way of existing one’s body cannot be foreign to the speech that proclaims it. The person who fails to see this fails to see the starting point from which the declarations of St. Paul become intelligible, just as would the person who, while reading Plato, disregards the fact that he writes dialogues and ignores how he does so. Thus it is not a question of comparing, without any further ado, these statements with such and such a philosophical thesis on the body, chosen for its conformity with our purpose.
An example can show this while also advancing our questions. St. Paul writes in the Epistle to the Romans: “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function (praxin), so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another” (Rom 12:4–5). The word translated as “function” would be better translated as “task” or “work”: it has something to do that it alone can do. Reading only this sentence, one could draw forth a concept of the body as the unity of the multiple, and as totally sympathetic with itself, a concept that has nothing truly new about it. But one who continues reading the chapter to the end sees this purely formal concept become filled with meaning, a meaning absolutely new in relation to philosophy, by considering how the nature of the tasks of these parts, and thus their very nature, as well as the manner in which they are parts of one other, and the way in which this collective body behaves toward those who are not its parts, all become clear. For in the analogy between a natural concept of the body and the constitution of the collective body of Christ, the whole question is to know which of the two terms is interpreting and which is interpreted, which is determining and which is determined. Does St. Paul start from a natural concept of the body in order to think about the Church, or does he start from the body of Christ in order to transform and redefine the natural body itself?
The unity in the multiplicity is only an empty structure because what members of the collective body of Christ can do has no counterpart in the natural concept of the body: the members prophesy, serve, teach, give without return, love, exercise mercy with joy, and so on (the passage following the sentence quoted above enumerates these), and they cannot do these things except as parts, just as they would cease being active and living members of this body if they no longer accomplished these tasks. Whether it heals or kills, my hand is no less a hand, and it is my hand. It is not the same in this collective body, which lives by a truth that it receives and does not give to itself, and works only by transmitting this truth and spreading it, and in this way growing.
St. Gregory of Nyssa rightly emphasized the sovereign freedom of St. Paul, who does not cast his speech in already existing molds but forges for himself his own usage of certain words. “The great Paul’s wisdom knows how to use words as they seem best to him, and to add the meaning of the words to the sequence proper to his thought, even if custom leads the faulty usage of the literal meaning toward other ideas.” And after having given some specific examples, he added: “Many other examples may be examined closely in which the apostle’s words are found. They are not in thrall to the common use of speech, but Paul freely brings his own understanding to them, paying no attention to custom.” What is true of the lexicon is also true of the images and the analogies.
The most important page on the “members” or “parts” is the twelfth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. St. Paul insists from the outset on the fact that this collective body is a divine initiative and that its unity, like its internal diversity, is the permanent work of God: “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:12–14a). We must take note of the strength and the strangeness of the end of the first verse, where St. Paul says “Christ” in the place where we would more normally expect to find “the body of Christ,” an expression that he will use a little later (“Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it,” 1 Cor 12:27). That the Christian community could itself be named “Christ,” as he is its perpetual source and origin (the commentators observe that Paul will only call him the “head” of the collective body in later epistles), shows the realism of Pauline thought about the Church. St. Augustine will speak later of the totus Christus, of the “total Christ,” to designate Christ and the Church. This Pauline shortcut already authorizes such bold language.
Present at the threshold and at the end of the second verse, the one Spirit clearly manifests that the unity of this body exceeds and overflows the analogy with the unity of the biological body. This unity of the body is not based on the collaboration between the parts; it exists above them and before them, as an active unification, which makes one of what was irreducibly different even to the point of hostility and contradiction (Jews and Greeks, slaves and free people), not in order to end up with the undifferentiated or the neuter but to establish, on the sole basis of the Spirit, new differences and a new internal plurality not determined by our social or religious provenance, and thus by our past, but by the future of our respective tasks in the unity of the new body, by what the Spirit requires of us, by what it enjoins us to be and to do. The unity of the body nourishes its members so that they become members (“given to drink of the Spirit”); it first gives in order to receive only afterward. It is the diversity of calls or of vocations that differentiates the collective body. The members are sent to their tasks beginning from the creating and recreating Spirit, and thus one becomes a member on the basis of the future, a future that forms the principle of individuation.
Precisely because he has thus firmly opened the spiritual and supernatural dimension of this collective body, St. Paul can, in the rest of the same chapter, adopt in the mode of a parable the language of the natural body, not in order to describe it in itself but to reinterpret it in light of Christ and his body, and make us grasp the latter’s properties. To say with Ernst Käsemann that “the thought of an organism is simply an auxiliary idea” is to go too far. In order to explain the absolutely new advent and event of the collective body of Christ, St. Paul transports us to the more familiar terrain of the biological individual body and its parts, but does so in order to make us take a new look and to reorganize this terrain itself. In a sense, he puts new wine, a wine that he first served, into old skins, but with the purpose of making them burst, so as to renew the old, and not to age the new.
Even the most varied commentators agree on this. Conzelmann writes that “Paul does not construct his vision of the Church on the basis of the idea of an organism, but he can use this idea simply as an illustration,” and Rudolf Bultmann puts forward the same thesis. “Now the body,” continues St. Paul, “is not a single part, but many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand I do not belong to the body,’ it does not for this reason belong any less to the body . . . If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended” (1 Cor 12:14–19). And further: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I do not need you’ ” (1 Cor 12:21).
Here we must have two ears, not just one. For this virtual conflict obviously makes no sense, not only because the parts or members do not speak in the biological body, and God does not “pose” or “place” the members in the individual body as if he were constructing it piece by piece but instead makes the body grow and differentiate as a whole. No, indeed, it is the divine call that convokes the collective body and baptism that incorporates us into it (etymologically, “the Church” means nothing other than convocation). This divine will does not treat us as an inert object: it needs our obedience, our response, our own will, broadened or freed by grace. The prosopopoeia which gives speech to the parts of the individual body is precisely no longer a fabulist’s fiction when we move to the collective body. Every day shows this to be true.
The necessity or the need (chreia) wherein the parts exist in relation to one another is not declared in the silence of a physiological process but in speech that is received, exchanged, given, asked for, expected. This pressing mutual request (explained here by the negative of “I do not need”) and the anxious concern of the members for each other (indicated in 1 Cor 12:25 by the verb merimnaō) form the two sides of the same solidarity. Indeed, in the rest of the chapter, St. Paul, after having recalled that we protect the most fragile parts of our body the most, and honor with clothing the least decent, continues: “But God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to a part that is without it, so that there may be no division (schisma) in the body, but that the parts may have the same concern for one another. If [one] part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy” (1 Cor 12:24b–26). This is the end of the analogy with the individual body, after which St. Paul returns to the Church and draws lessons from this long development.
Two remarks are necessary. First of all, even if all of its parts are not enumerated, the body is considered in its totality from head to foot, and free from false modesty, with an evocation of the less “honorable” parts. That is, this body is not simply a sensorial body, which sees or hears, but it exercises a plurality of actions of all kinds, and all these functions are indispensable. What we cover up out of decency is no less necessary. The second remark concerns the allegedly “metaphorical” character of this page. For in what does the metaphor, or transference, consist, and toward what? If there is a “proper” sense and a “figural” sense, what are they? The “proper” sense, and the one with which St. Paul began, is the one which concerns the Church: indeed, it is only there that the parts speak to one another and share with one another joy and suffering. And the “figural” sense is that which concerns the biological body, and what St. Paul depicts as if it were a church. It is not “metaphorical” to speak of the Church as a body, but it is metaphorical to speak about my body as a community of members or a collectivity of functions (at least pending further information, for certain thinkers were able to speak thus with rigor).
There remains the most important and difficult question for the present subject, and the one toward which all that precedes is ordered: What exactly is meant here by the term “member” or “part,” and what is its economy? To answer, we must continue our reading of this page. St. Paul continues: “Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it (melē ek merous)” (1 Cor 12:27). Does a “part” designate a function in the Church, and thus only those who end up accomplishing it, or a person who, by his unique vocation, would be the foot, hand, or eye of the Church? The end of this verse seems to work in the sense of the second response, as do certain elements in what precedes it. But St. Paul adds immediately:
Some people God has designated in the church to be, first, apostles; second, prophets; third, teachers; then, mighty deeds; then, gifts of healing, assistance, administration, and varieties of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work mighty deeds? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? (1 Cor 12:28–30).
Without entering into the confessional controversies that these lines have aroused concerning the organization of the primitive Church, it is clear that St. Paul enumerates, without any concern for exhaustiveness in one case or the other, first some of the functions or missions, then some of the gifts or charisms. It is under one or the other that we are members of the body, and the differentiation of the members is thought of beginning from their work and their tasks, which proceeds in the sense of the first response.
We can put these lines in parallel with those of the Epistle to the Ephesians: “And he [Christ] gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up (oikodomēn) the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God” (Eph 4:11–13). Whatever the status that we accord it, the interpretation by category or function thus prevails. It is not by exercising a function which would naturally be mine, and mine alone, that I am a member of the body, in which case it would not be the body of Christ; rather, it is by receiving the call to a mission that is one of the needs of this body and responding to it with all my being and the best I can, even if it seems miscast or not matched to my talents.
This is why God sends people who stutter to preach: everything that is Christian is necessarily based on a principle of death and resurrection. This does not mean that this call constitutes an offer of anonymous recruitment, awaiting whoever might want to introduce himself: each time it is absolutely singular, since I only hear it from my own response (which could include the reticence to respond or the struggle not to respond).
For the biblical principle of individuation, which is the divine vocation sent out from the edges of time, from before the creation of the world and toward its end, cannot be confused with the psycho-physiological principle of individuation, which starts from my origins, my familial and individual past. I only belong to the collective body in and through the community, and thus by seeking to discern what my function, small or great, might be. This differentiated organic function does not freeze the community into a machine-like state, even a biological one, with its cogs because, continuing with the First Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul invites his readers to take up the “way” (kath’hyperbolēn), the way of excess, of hyperbole, of excellence, which is the way of charity (1 Cor 12:31).
It is in the famous hymn to charity in chapter 13 where St. Paul says in an unforgettable way that, whatever the greatness of my gifts and my works (and he returns to some examples that he has just underlined), without charity, they are nothing, and “I am nothing.” Charity throbs in each of the members so that it may be a member and animates each work so that it may be a work of the body of Christ—charity is the only measure, the measure without measure, of the life of the body and of its members, and it mobilizes, literally, the order of the missions and the hierarchy of the functions; for a teacher without charity is not only less than an illiterate parasite, but quite simply nothing for the body. Those who, like Fichte, oppose a Church that is Pauline to one that is Johannine forget this fundamental passage, among others.
Regarding the symbolism of the organs, it is striking that St. Paul, after having enumerated parts of the individual body and then functions of the collective body, does not put the individual and the collective body in one-to-one correspondence, as will be the case later in theology. Nor does he exclude the fact that it can be done; the possibility remains open, but such is not his purpose. What is evident is that this symbolism lends itself much more to a categorical development than an individual one. We can speak precisely of the “brain” of a gang of criminals, or of the “right hand” of a great boss, but who would have the pride to call himself the eye or the ear of the body of Christ, or the sycophancy to say it to another?
More important is the question of the plasticity of the parts: Is it conceivable that the same person could be sometimes one part and sometimes another? St. Paul’s turns of phrase, even if they do not necessarily aim at instituted and canonically defined functions, seem to imply a certain fixedness or permanence of the tasks. But one is not born a teacher or a preacher, one becomes one, and can cease to be one, or cease to be it with the same strength one had before. We are not owners of grace, nor are we installed so firmly in our mission that we cannot stray from it, or fail it, or discover another, stronger mission. This possibility of becoming another part or another organ than the one we were remains a notable difference between the individual body and the collective body.
Beginning from this page of First Corinthians, St. Paul’s commentators are able to pursue diverse paths regarding the meaning of this organicity. Two opposing examples are enough to show this, one by St. John Chrysostom and another by St. Thomas Aquinas. In the beautiful homily that the former devoted to this analogy of the body, Chrysostom’s essential goal is to show that membership in the collective body, which is without degree since one cannot be a part only halfway, confers on all the parts an equal dignity and an equal necessity. The baptism that incorporates us into Christ is for each the same baptism, and it takes place in the same Spirit.
He says quite rightly we all, adding also himself. “For not even I, the Apostle, have any more than you in this respect,” says he. “For you are the body even as I, and I even as you, and we have all the same Head and have passed through the same birth-pains. Wherefore we are also the same body.”
The difference among the members is a condition for the existence of the body as such, and far from opposing the members, it gives them an equal honor, precisely that of being members. “As it is, however, because you do not have the same gifts, therefore are you a body; and being a body, you are all one, and differ nothing from one another in this that you are a body. So that this very difference is that which chiefly causes your equality in honor.”
Even though he calls to mind the various orders within the Church, St. John Chrysostom does not develop a precise symbolism of the organs. He emphasizes the importance of what seems minor and the necessity of what seems useless. “For in the body even the little members seem to play an important role, but the great ones themselves are often injured by them, I mean by their removal. Thus, what is humbler in the body than hair? Yet if you remove the hair from the eyebrows and the eyelids, you have destroyed all the beauty of the face, and the eye will no longer appear so beautiful.” St. Augustine pushes to the point of hyperbole this Stoic-inspired image by saying that if one removes “one eyebrow” (unum supercilium) from a man, all the beauty of his face is altered! And St. John Chrysostom arrives at a beautiful meditation on the beggars at the doors of the church:
For no physician stretching out the hand to apply the knife works so effectually to cut out the corruption from our wounds as does a poor man stretching out his right hand and receiving alms, to take away the scars which the wounds have left.
This medical analogy shows that, far from being merely passive, the beggar plays an active role, and far from only receiving, he gives, and gives much more than what he receives. Thus St. John Chrysostom can say of beggars that they “supply [. . .] [to the body] one of its greatest ornaments: and without these, there could be no perfecting the fulness of the Church”—which of course in no way constitutes a justification of pauperism! But how do they assume such a seemingly paradoxical function? As icons of Christ, beggars in their silence and their very effacement are a memorial of the human condition, a living “Behold the man”: they remind us that from one day to the next, all that we have, and that in which we put our pride, indeed that on which we base our arrogance, vigor, beauty, social power, riches, all of it can be taken away by the vicissitudes of existence. In beggars I learn to see something of my own condition.
This cancer that they take away is that of haughtiness and scorn. The internal life of the body does not form a spectacle: it is not immediately given for us to see, but instead we need to learn to discern it. This is why St. John Chrysostom devotes here his longest and most beautiful development to the apparently minor, or even useless and superfluous, parts and concludes with biblical evocations whose thread is that no one can know with certitude the function, small or great, that he occupies within the collective body. The organicity of this collective body does not lead St. John Chrysostom to match such and such part of the body with such and such ecclesial order but to an insistence on the necessity of each member, and opens on to the mystery of the “communion of saints” in which sometimes what is most inapparent plays a role of unforeseen magnificence.
When, many centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas comments on the same Epistle of St. Paul, he puts into practice all of the reflection accumulated during those eight centuries on the collective body, which henceforth is named corpus mysticum, the “mystical body” of Christ. Certain emphases remain the same, while others are new. St. Thomas likewise sees that St. Paul goes from the body of Christ to the natural body, and not the reverse, when he says that “the comparison of the natural body represents” the mystical body. He likewise insists on the mutual necessity of the unit of the body and of the multiplicity of the members. But when he gets to the examples of the members given by St. Paul (the choice of which in no way changes the economy of the Pauline demonstration: it is enough that they simply be different), he matches each of them—foot, hand, ear, the sense of smell, head—to an ecclesial order.
The principle is clearly posed: “in the Church He arranged diverse offices and states (diversa officia, diversos status) according to His will.” “If all the Church were of one state and grade, it would destroy the perfection and beauty of the Church.” For the organicity of the Church requires that it be “composed of diverse orders (ex diversis ordinibus),” and on this subject St. Thomas quotes from the Song of Songs, drawing on the tradition whose study is the object of Body of Symbols. Studying the examples of St. Paul, St. Thomas follows the fundamental opposition of motor power and sensorial power (what he calls virtus apprehensiva), which corresponds to the opposition of the active life to the contemplative life.
Hands and feet come under the former: the feet are the inferior, the hands the superior, the praelati who lead them (and concerning hands, St. Thomas again quotes Song 5:14). Eyes and ears come under the contemplative life: “as eyes, teachers who investigate truth” (and again St. Thomas quotes Song 5:12), and the ears are “the disciples.” Continuing his commentary, he comes to the sense of smell: “By this can be understood those in the Church who, even though they are not capable of words of wisdom, nevertheless perceive some of its indications from afar, as an odor” (again a citation of Song 1:5). Further, the head is compared to the “prelates.”
The details here are not so important: I simply wish to draw two lessons from these examples. The first is the increasing precision of the thinking about the organicity of the body, and likewise about the definition or the figuration of the various orders of the Church by as many parts. The second is the movement of perpetual back-and forth and of mutual enrichment between ecclesiology and thinking about the collective body on the one hand and the hermeneutic of the Song of Songs on the other: they cannot be separated. It is not by an allegoristic fantasy, or out of individual caprice, that the commentaries on the Song of Songs multiply and thicken over the centuries: this deepening measures the depth of the self-reflection of the Church as collective body, and of its meditation on its own organicity.
The interpretation of the Song of Songs is the questioning, heuristic, and abounding place where theologians go for insights, just as new theological developments come to enrich and transform the interpretation of the Song of Songs itself. The proof a contrario is given by the fact that when reflection on the Church as body weakens, the interpretation of the Song of Songs becomes either scarce or marginalized, or moves in completely different directions. But what is at stake in all of this—and this is decisive—are simply responses to the questions raised by the Pauline theology of the body of Christ (for the collective dimension broached here).
Now we must look at how and with what difficulties this correspondence between the orders of the Church and the members of the body was gradually forged in the patristic period, before reaching its point of medieval equilibrium. Again, the purpose is to grasp the logic of this movement, and not to describe it in all its details here. In his commentary on the Song of Songs, which one could call foundational owing to its majestic sublimity and influence, Origen develops at much greater length and more precisely the theme of the senses and of the organs of the soul, studied in the previous chapter, than he does the theme of the organicity of the Church.
This is in no way the sign of an emphasis placed on the individual interpretation at the expense of the collective, for the two are equally important and always present for Origen. But his anthropology and his thought on the acts and powers of the soul are more readily realized in this organic language than his thinking on the collective body was able to accomplish. Origen reflects deeply on both the singular and the multiple character of the Church, for the Church is made of churches. He meditates on the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and in a general way one could draw an entire theology of the Church from what remains of his commentary, but few are the pages dedicated to making the orders correspond to organs.
Which interpretation is the most important? After having quoted St. Paul at length, and in particular, of course, the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Origen writes,
Therefore, we are taught by these words that the Bride of Christ, who is the Church, is also His Body and His members. If, then, you hear mention of the members of the Bridegroom, you must understand by it the members of His Church. Among these, just as there are some who are called eyes, doubtless because they have the light of understanding and of knowledge, and others ears, to hear the word of teaching, and others hands to do good works and to discharge the functions of religion: so also are some who may be called His cheeks.
They are those who “cultivate the nobility of chastity and purity.” A little further, Origen understands “the Bride’s neck” as signifying “those souls who receive the yoke of Christ” voluntarily and are characterized by their “obedience” to his precepts. The beauty of this neck lies in the way in which its obedience becomes as similar as possible to that of Christ himself.
This symbolism is both natural and minimal: it only makes plain the action and function of the organs (the eyes see, the ears hear, the hands handle . . .) and does not identify them with a determined order in the Church, even if the possibility of doing so is clearly open. Origen, who has often been reproached for tracing overly severe separations between Christians according to their degree of spiritual advancement (a reproach that Origen’s better readers have proved wrong), here takes into view the unity of the Bride’s body, acknowledging of course the differentiation of its powers rather than the anatomy of the ecclesial hierarchy. This anatomy is not forgotten in the rest of the commentary, but its indications remain occasional and do not become systematic: the cedar rafters of the spouses’ house symbolize the bishops truly worthy of their charge, the trees which do not yet bear fruit refer to the catechumens.
Another interpretation is meaningful: concerning the Bride’s dovelike eyes, Origen does not ask to whom they refer, but what they do. “Her eyes, moreover, are compared to doves, surely because she understands the Divine Scriptures now, not after the letter, but after the spirit, and perceives in them spiritual mysteries; for the dove is the emblem of the Holy Spirit.” Thus it is clear that the call to read and to see in this way is addressed to all of the members of the body and not only to one among them, even if the capacity of each to do this can assuredly vary.
Notwithstanding the generally rich symbolic inventiveness of Origen, here on this point he hardly goes beyond the affirmations of St. Paul himself and does not engage in a synoptic and recapitulative vision of the body of the Church in its organicity. The verses he is studying occasion Origen’s tackling of this collective symbolism, at least in what remains to us of his works. We are only at the beginning of a long history. Moreover, this is only natural and corresponds to a logical development of the affirmations: thinking about the collective body that is the Church is sufficiently new and disconcerting, in view of former thinking, philosophical or political, about the community and the body, so that the emphasis is put first on the reality, the unity, and the life of this body, and on what is generally signified by belonging to it. In a second phase, after the first point has been understood within a predominantly Christian collectivity, the growing Church, becoming more and more differentiated and hierarchical, producing multiple orders and functions, comes to reflect with greater precision on the meaning of its internal connections and its organicity.
One of the liveliest advances in this sense in the Patristic period is found in the work of St. Gregory of Nyssa. Like Origen, Gregory reads the Song of Songs in light of Pauline theology, but he fills with a rich content what had remained for Origen a methodical framework. Four of the five homilies that he devoted to the Song, the seventh and the last three, apply to the ecclesial body the Bridegroom’s praise of the bride’s beauty and the bride’s praise of the Bridegroom’s. We can legitimately see these praises as intersecting if the body of the Bride-Church is the collective body of Christ and lives to imitate his singular body. From the outset, St. Gregory of Nyssa sets forth the completeness of the correspondence between the Church and the human body. After having recalled the fundamental Pauline theses on this point, he writes:
Since this is so, I say, it is possible to find in the common body of the Church lips as well as teeth and tongue, breasts and womb and neck and, as Paul says, also those members of the body that appear unseemly [and which in fact are not].
He approaches them successively in the course of his commentary, leveraging the biblical symbolism in general and his knowledge of the Greek medical tradition, above all the Galenic, which for good reason is more precise here than among many medieval Latin commentators. But the Bible, of course, remains predominant. The richness of his analyses of detail will be considered later; only his approach is considered here.
It is in this way that the eyes, for example, which Gregory sees corresponding in the Church to prophets and contemplatives, have several functions and do not relate only to theoretical knowledge. They see the light and what appears in it, but they also discern the friend from the enemy, the proper from the improper, the helpful from the threatening, and they guide us on our way. This is why the eye is not enough without the hand. Gregory gives a strong and precise sense to the verse of St. Paul according to which the eye cannot say to the hand that it does not need it, which is not surprising coming from this great thinker of the human hand. “He shows us by this that the body of the Church needs to utilize the two, to combine for better seeing the truth and realizing it, for contemplation does not of itself bring the soul to perfection unless it makes room for works that further the practice of the moral life, any more than the conduct of life is profitable in its own right unless true and reverent belief guides the works.”
The approach of Gregory regarding some members of the body is always functional: it starts from what a member does or can do, and not from its visible appearance or its formal beauty. Thus he does not enter into the difficulties that will be those of subsequent commentators concerning the cheeks. The cheeks perplex many commentators, who tend to see only their beauty, or the fact that they can blush and thus serve as a symbol of modesty (or of the modest).
Luther puts it forcefully: the cheeks are a “splendid ornament. They do nothing special, they just glow and are gazed upon.” “The cheeks do not do anything except appear.” St. Gregory of Nyssa, on the contrary, puts emphasis on their function. Those, he writes, who want the bread of wisdom “stand in further need of that cheek which, with the teeth of its thoughts, grinds such food small. So there must be cheeks too in the body of Christ, for the benefit of those who are no longer attached to the breasts of the word,” according to the Pauline distinction. The function of the cheeks “is to grind small the food by which the body’s nature and power are preserved.” This cooperation of the cheeks in chewing will also be highlighted by other interpreters.
Conversely, the way in which St. Gregory of Nyssa approaches the hair will have little posterity. Most interpreters either collect biblical passages on hair in order to disclose its meaning, or they consider hair as either adorning or disfiguring the head. That the multitude of hairs may be gathered in braids or in locks plays an important role, just as does whether they are clean or dirty. One starts with the hair insofar as it is visible. Gregory for his part starts from the sentient body and transforms the negative property of hair being devoid of sensation into spiritual grandeur:
The body out of which hairs grow suffers pain when they are plucked out; the hair itself, however, has no sensation if it is cut or if it is burned or if it is combed and arranged out of some concern for good looks. Now to have no part in sensation is proper to beings that are dead. So one who has no sensation of the things that are much valued in this world, and is not elated by glory and honor, and is not pained by outrage and dishonor, but maintains herself in the same state with regard to both of the contraries, this one is the hair of the betrothed that is praised—undisguisedly dead and unmoved with regard to the affairs of the world, whether they go this way or that.
To be among the hairs of the collective body is to be dead to the world, to have attained with regard to the world a high form of impassibility, and thus a great spiritual elevation. It is only in this way that we meet up with the more habitual theme of adornment. This attention to the lived body more than to the visible body is characteristic of St. Gregory of Nyssa and corrects certain hasty interpretations that some have been able to place on him.
But with this overview of the organs there also appears an aporia in the thought of the collective body, an aporia that has its foundation in the things themselves. This collective body of the Church is the body of Christ, the Word incarnate. It is thus founded on the Word in person, and its life is that of the word of God received and transmitted, heard and understood. What air, nourishment, and blood are for our biological body, so the word of God is for this collective body. It draws its life from this word, and its various functions unfold beginning from that word and toward it.
Thus, the difficulty lies in thinking this collective body’s differentiation into multiple organs, for ultimately it could seem only to speak by listening, and to listen by speaking, to be only ear and mouth, an ear-mouth. Some have been tempted to see in every one of the members of the body the symbol of the preacher, of the exegete, or of the doctor of the Church, in which case the true diversity of the members would be lost, and most of them would only be various names for the same sole task, considered of course under numerous points of view. Some examples will be provided. Can we think of a body living entirely on the word without its members becoming interchangeable?
And yet we have in our remarkable body an example of the contrary, for its speaking does not take anything away from its complex organicity. This difficulty does not concern the clever device of a made-up symbolism, but the body and the task of conceiving it in its being. Without thematizing this aporia as such, St. Gregory of Nyssa confronted it. Reviewing the various members of the collective body, St. Gregory studies their function and their meaning before seeking to illustrate them with some examples. And in a striking manner the same example returns: that of St. Paul.
The work of the teeth, which is to make the food assimilable and digestible by chewing it, is Paul’s work: “What we observe, then, in the case of Paul, namely that he fulfills the work of the Church’s teeth by analyzing the teachings to shed light on them, we say also in the case of everyone who, after his example, clarifies the mysteries for us.” When he later comes to the neck and to its functions, Gregory writes: “Such a neck was Paul, and anyone else who conducts his life rightly in imitation of Paul. He bore up the name of the Lord as the Master’s ‘vessel of election,’” before detailing, through some considerations on the trachea and the larynx, how Paul took up those functions. When next we come to the breasts, the subject is “the person who, after the fashion of the great Paul, becomes a breast for the little ones and feeds the Church’s newborn with milk.”
As for the curls or the locks of the hair of the Bridegroom, which have become like palms even though they are black, it is again St. Paul who through his conversion, becoming an apostle after being a persecutor of the Church, provides the most eloquent example. When the subject is cheeks that are like bowls of spices, “Paul was such a bowl as this. He did not tamper with the word by cunning but commended himself ‘by the open statement of the truth’” (2 Cor 4:2). And the scarlet ribbon to which the lips of the bride are compared are once again illustrated by St. Paul.
With excellent intentions, certainly, the example of Paul is in fact turned against the word of Paul himself, for it is clear that when Paul develops the analogy with the body studied above, about our belonging as a member to the body of Christ, it is in order to show the singularity of our vocation and of our task, as well as its always finite and partial character, and not in order to argue that the same man can play the role of a great variety of members. The aporia appears clearly. In its details, St. Gregory of Nyssa’s set of arguments is convincing, and there seems to be nothing forced about the reasons that he puts forward to give St. Paul as an example of each of the members that he studies. How would it be otherwise, if their role each time is essentially relative to speech? It is clear that in that case only the highest biblical witnesses of the word can come to mind. But this only underscores the difficulty, which is that of the real differentiation of the members.
The Venerable Bede, at the beginning of the third book of his commentary on the Song of Songs, realizes the problem and, albeit briefly, gives his own solution. It is no longer about St. Paul in particular: these are the “doctors” of the church (in the sense of those who teach doctrine, the theologians, and not in the sense that this term took on officially later) who were recognized by him as signifying the various members.
Variously and in many ways are the same mysteries of Christ and the Church repeated (i.e., in the Song), but the repetitions always add something new that either serves to augment (augmentum procuret) the same mysteries or increases the joy (amplius delectet) in the minds of the hearers through its very novelty. Therefore the same teachers who were above designated by the name of “eyes” or “teeth” or “neck” are now expressed by the word “breasts.”
And Bede, in the following lines, explains the difference of aim in these various symbols with regard to the word:
For they can rightly be called eyes, since they perceive the hidden dimensions of divine revelations (sacramentorum); rightly are they called teeth, since in reproving the ungodly it is as though they are chewing them up and transforming them into tender and humble [members] in the body of the Church; rightly are they called a neck, since in preaching eternal joys it is as though they are providing the whole body of the Church with the breath of life (quasi vitalem flatum) and preparing the doctrinal food with which she is nourished unto salvation; and they are also quite aptly referred to as breasts, since they supply the milk of the life-giving word to those who are still infants in Christ.
Bede returns a few pages later to this difference of teeth and breasts, which is at once a difference of function and of object: the word is transmitted according to the nature and the condition of its addressees. That the same men, the doctors, are symbolized by several members translates the multifaceted economy of the word according to the stages of the spiritual journey and the increasing openness of the mind of the reader or hearer. Indeed, the Song of Songs, amidst the numerous questions that it awakens in those who scrutinize it, forms a privileged place for meditating on the meaning or meanings of repetition, by the very fact of all the repetitions that appear in it, notably in the praise of the parts of the body but also by the fact of the profusion of commentaries, which often both inspire one another and differentiate themselves. Bede sees at work in the Song of Songs itself this renewing repetition, which is neither a simple redundancy nor a failure of the organic model.
More than a century later, Haimo of Auxerre, who depends largely upon Bede, whose work he condenses and transforms, resumes these same multiple symbolisms of the doctors by expanding them to preachers. But he removes Bede’s attempted explanation, noting only that “It is no surprise that one and the same thing is figured in various ways,” without saying why we must not be surprised about it. We do not need to appeal to armchair sociology in order to consider that this might be a temptation of exegetes and theologians, who by definition are those who write the treatises on the body of the Church and the biblical commentaries on the symbolism of this body, to overstate their own role to the point of seeing almost nothing else, and at times to risk forgetting the diversity of the gifts and the functions which, while they all depend on God the Word, can be paths of speech in silence, and of intelligence in sapiential simplicity.
Haimo of Auxerre tends in this way toward a questionable “clericalism” when he says of “holy doctors,” who are compared to the neck in the body, that they are “mediators, so to speak, between Christ and the rest of the faithful that they instruct, and unite, so to speak, Christ to his body, that is to say, the Church,” forgetting that if the unique mediator certainly calls forth witnesses, his witnesses, he does not himself have need of mediators, in infinite regression, and that if it is not Christ himself who constructs his body, then it is no longer truly his body that is at issue. But Haimo restores the equilibrium a little later by showing that it is the entire body that is beautiful, and thus it is thanks not simply to “the doctors alone and the perfect ones alone,” but “also [to] all the simple faithful,” that its beauty is complete.
In the Patristic period, it is probably Apponius, the author of a rich and original commentary on the Song of Songs, even if he is a personality about whom we know little, who best avoided the temptation just mentioned. The very constructed character of his commentary gives a completeness to his vision of the collective body that some medieval syntheses will later have. But above all Apponius follows St. Paul in his attentiveness to the extreme variety of the charisms. Without entering into a comprehensive presentation of his work, we must retain the integration by Apponius of types of the faithful that other interpretations do not take into account. The general principle, frequently repeated, is directly Pauline:
And since none other than Christ could accomplish all the great works that build up the body of the Church, each of the saints now fulfills, in the body of the Church, according to his abilities (pro sua possibilitate), the office of one of its members. And each receives his name among the members of the Church according to the activity in which he is most expert (sollertior).
But these works are diverse.
Thus the hair is the rich laity, who contribute by their gifts to the life and to the beauty of the Church. Apponius of course does not depict them as saints.
For such people, because they find their joy in material realities and are unable to follow the arduous road of philosophy, namely the austerity of the apostles, are compared to a flock of goats; and because they make return of their wealth to the one who gave it to them, they have deserved to be the hair of the Church.
But of course he is talking about “that category among the wealthy who are contented with what they have and do not covet the goods of others.” Thus even the rich young man of the Gospel (Matt 19:16–22), who keeps all the commandments but who is not ready to abandon everything to follow Jesus, can, according to Apponius, become a strand of the hair of the Church by showing generosity.
As for the eyes of the Church, if they can be, as they are for many other interpreters, the “bishops” as “guides for the entire body,” they become, when later in the Song of Songs they are compared to pools, those who, “whether for their own faults committed long ago or for those of others, shed fountains of tears, and, having received the blessing of those who weep, transmit to others the example of penance, and guide them.” The failures of others affect them as if they were their own, and their tears bear witness that the members belong to one another and suffer for one another. They also weep for those who are without tears, vicariously, and this is why they are the eyes.
The gift of tears makes them an essential member (because what would a Church be whose tears were dried up?), and yet without matching directly to an institutionally defined structure, nor to an extraordinary intellectual capacity, for every man, whatever he may be, can indeed be brought to weep. This truth of tears is indivisible; it is just as much tears of joy as tears of affliction, as Apponius expressly points out: “They are so filled with this special gift that, whether the joy of the kingdom of heaven is being proclaimed or the sorrow of Gehenna, the flow of tears does not cease among them.”
The belly can serve as the final example of the balance achieved by Apponius. It is the “receptacle of food,” and in the Church, it refers to
Those who, although they do not apply themselves to teaching others by their words, nevertheless consume continually in themselves, enclosed in the silence of peace, thanks to their holy conduct, the food of souls, the Holy Spirit who gives life and whom they receive in their new birth.
Those who in the Church only listen are not reduced to being the pupils of a doctor, or disciples of a master, relationships conceived in a theoretical or pedagogical manner, but they are also those who take and keep in themselves the word they have heard so as to live on it in their action and thus, in a form completely different from teaching, diffuse its nourishing strength and power through the whole body. All of this suffices to show that Apponius, developing the Pauline analogy of the body in a symphonic manner, remains faithful to its spirit, which is to take into account the vital necessity for the body of all the members, no matter how humble, as the unheard-of variety of gifts received, which also measures the vitality of the body.
All this reflection on the organicity of the collective body, of which the preceding observations have shown the origin and genealogy, will find its fulfillment in medieval theology, singularly through meditation on the Song of Songs. The endlessly relaunched and renewed questioning that it assumes about a body’s potential and what it does gives that meditation a philosophical interest as much as one that is spiritual and historical. Before studying this thinking about the body in the fullness and concreteness of its exercise in my Body of Symbols: The Christian Tradition of the Song of Songs, let us make an observation that puts it into perspective and raises a question. In the twentieth century, the Catholic magisterium, in the person of Pius XII, devoted an important document to the collective body of Christ: the encyclical Mystici corporis Christi.
These pages, with the help of the Fathers of the Church, especially SS. Ambrose and Augustine, who are cited often, and of theologians, principally St. Thomas Aquinas, give a thorough exposition of the Pauline theology of the Body of Christ and its repercussions over the centuries. Strong emphasis is placed by Pius XII on the organicity of the Church:
As in nature a body is not formed by any haphazard grouping of members but must be constituted of organs, that is of members, that have not the same function and are arranged in due order; so for this reason above all the Church is called a body, that it is constituted by the coalescence of structurally united parts, and that it has a variety of members reciprocally dependent.
This “ordered or ‘organic’ structure of the body of the Church” is specifically not to be confused with the hierarchy alone. But while this organic differentiation is meditated upon at length, a determined category of the faithful is never named by a part of the natural body. There is no mention of the neck, arms, or nose. The same observation can be made in a theological work enjoying a certain authority, the Theology of the Church by Charles Cardinal Journet. The organic symbolism is left to the side, even as the organicity is strongly foregrounded and the biblical pages at the origin of the symbolism’s development are cited. That of which the growth and fulfillment are to be described has also been obscured. This symbolism has not been canonized in its detail, and the Catholic magisterium has confined itself to the affirmations of St. Paul, speaking of the organs without defining them.
Is this prudence with regard to a symbolic language, the detail of which has never produced unanimity, merely a sober prudence, or does it have a deeper meaning? It does not indicate a crisis of the organic model, which is reaffirmed, but rather a deficit of the realism with which this model is said and is expressed. Is there a change on the side of the natural body, as if its symbolizing capacity were collapsing, as if it no longer offered the basis, in its modern objectification, for such an open symbolization? Let us leave the question for now in suspense but retain it in memory.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from the book Body of Symbols: The Christian Tradition of the Song of Songs (Franciscan University Press, 2026). All rights reserved.
