- EURASIAREVIEW.COM - A la une - 30/Jul 00:01

On Defiling The Human Body – OpEd

In light of what one has witnessed in the course of approximately the last five years, most readers would probably not find it difficult to relate the notion of ‘defiling (or desacralising, violating) the human body’ to the time in which we live. Think of the accumulating evidence, that the so-called Covid ‘vaccines’ contain nanoscale items which change the human body into something it was not before the jab was administered (more on this below). However, one may be less inclined to connect this idea with historical events dating back centuries, which may nonetheless be understood as providing a suitable backdrop for a comprehension of what has been happening recently, probably for a number of decades already.  The historical events in question date back to the beginning of the 14th century, when a papal bull (named after the leaden seal or ‘bulla’ which marked it as authentic) was issued (by Pope Boniface the 8th), which decreed that it was prohibited by the Catholic Church to cut the body of a deceased person into pieces, because it was in conflict with the Church’s sacraments. The context in which this happened is interesting, to say the least, and concerns the seven Christian crusades aimed at liberating Jerusalem from Mohammedan occupation. My source is the first of the fascinating two-volume study of the Dutch phenomenologist, J.H. Van den Berg, titled Het Menselijk Lichaam, Part One – Het Geopende Lichaam (The Human Body – The Opened Body; Callenbach Publishers, Nijkerk, 1959). These volumes trace the changing conceptions of the human body from approximately the 14th century until the 20th century, against the backdrop of Hippocrates’s notion of medical treatment in ancient Greece. During the Crusades, it seemed unacceptable to bury important figures among fallen soldiers in the soil of a foreign country, but sending their bodies back to Europe posed the intractable problem of the flesh decomposing in the heat – there were no cooling or freezing facilities like those of today. A ‘solution’ that presented itself was to boil the bodies, remove the flesh from the skeleton, inter the flesh in the foreign land, and return the skeleton to the country where the deceased came from. The papal bull mentioned earlier addressed this state of affairs by rejecting this practice. Here is the explanatory subtitle of the papal bull (I translate from the Dutch in Van den Berg’s book, p. 79): Cutting the corpses into pieces and boiling them, with the aim of separating the bones, through this treatment, from the flesh, to send them for burial in their own country, is in conflict with the sacraments. Van den Berg makes it clear that the papal bull concerned the procedure, during the Crusades, of cutting up and boiling bodies of important figures who had died, with the purpose of returning their bones to their home countries. He quotes from the bull, in which this practice was described as the ‘cruel breaking apart of bodies,’ which was ‘hideous in the eyes of God,’ to emphasise the gravity with which this matter was regarded. The point of elaborating on this rather grisly historical phenomenon is to highlight the intrinsic value, even sacrosanctity, that was attributed to the human body during the late Christian Middle Ages, as manifested in the horror with which what was seen as an act of desacralisation was regarded. As Van den Berg proceeds to demonstrate, this was not limited to the papal bull’s rejection of the dismemberment practice, described above, during the Crusades. In fact, it is apparent from his perspicacious interpretive analysis of the attitude of two of the first anatomists in history, Mundinus (Mondino De’Luzzi) and Vigevano (Guido da Vigavano), that the people of the time – specifically those whose attention was focused on the human body – were, to use Van den Berg’s term, ‘pervaded’ (‘doordrongen’) by this same ‘rejection’ (p. 82). Put differently, all the available evidence suggests that these anatomists perceived the human body, which they studied, as inviolable, sacrosanct – so much so that they recoiled from what they clearly perceived as violating it by certain acts which were required for the productive practice of their science. In the case of Mundinus this amounted to a refusal to boil the basilar bone – a section of the main skull bone, with a critical function regarding the structural integrity of the skull base and cavity – which is so complicated that it requires careful scrutiny, and was impossible to study thoroughly at the time unless all the tissue was removed from it through boiling, which also prevented decomposition. The puzzling thing is that Mundinus’s refusal was not explicitly prescribed by the Church; just like Vigevano after him, he was free to boil bones to facilitate anatomical study, and yet he refrained from doing this, even calling it ‘a sin’ which he ‘omitted’ (p. 81). Van den Berg observes that Mundinus was probably aware of this. Nevertheless, one is struck by the resonance of the latter’s refusal with the papal bull’s decree concerning the boiling and dismemberment of corpses. In the case of Vigevano, Mundino’s student, his refusal to engage in what he evidently understood as the defilement or desanctification of the human body manifests itself differently. Like Mundinus, he must have known that anatomical studies involving opening (or boiling) the bodies of the deceased were not overtly forbidden by the Church, and yet, judging by the introduction to his book on anatomy (1345), he also chose to (mis-)understand the Church’s position on this. Van den Berg quotes Vigevano as follows (I translate from the Dutch; p. 83): Because the practice of anatomical investigation has been prohibited by the Church, and medical knowledge would be imperfect for as long as it is not accompanied by insights gained from dissection, therefore shall I, Guido of Vigevano, demonstrate the anatomy of the human body by means of faithful images [that is, drawings], which makes it possible to study anatomy without being troubled by smells [probably a reference to decomposing flesh]. Van den Berg points out the ostensible contradiction in this statement, which amounts to Vigevano saying that he practices anatomy because the Church forbids it. However, the true intention of the Italian anatomist emerges, he observes, when one reflects on the sense of providing anatomical drawings: by providing these illustrations, Vigevano was intent on preventing future anatomists from ‘sinning’ by cutting and opening up the bodies of the dead. At the same time the Dutch philosopher hastens to point out the conspicuous hypocrisy on the part of Vigevano: for the sake of his successors, and for the sake of his book, Vigevano himself must of necessity have ‘sinned’ by dissecting and observing the structure of the human body. The point of all of this is that both Mundinus and his student, Vigevano, were sufficiently persuaded of the sanctity of the human body (of the deceased), that – notwithstanding the fact that the Church did not prohibit the dissection of cadavers by anatomists – they nevertheless continued believing that it would be a significant sin to defile or violate human corpses by opening them up, even if this was in the interest of science. They displayed nothing less than a blind spot as far as the Church’s affirmative position on anatomical procedures was concerned, evidently motivated by a deep-rooted belief that, as the Paulinian dictum has it, ‘…your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God’ (1 Corinthians 6: 19). From this one can infer that it would equally have been regarded as a sin by them, if the body of a living person had been ‘opened up’ by physicians. How does this 14th-century perspective compare with the attitude towards the human body that one witnesses in today’s world? Does one perceive a similar deference, or perhaps rather reverence, for the...