Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

parts that formed a disproportionate body became “the most perfect and best proportioned body in the world.”³ In 1704, a group of elderly ministers who had refused to conform to Church of England rituals quoted part of Romans in a book-length letter to younger generations of dissenters: “Ye are of one Body and Members one of another: Wherefore like the Members of the Natural Body, ye must have a mutual Care, and be ready to help and serve each other in Love.”⁴ For Cotton Mather, the different members of the body of Christ had to “study to be Serviceable unto the people of God” who were “The Mystical Body of Christ” or they would be “worse than silver Hands, or wooden Legs, in that Body.” Failing to assist other members of the mystical body, which was more expansive than the local gathering of the godly, would make them of less help than lifeless prosthetics, poor substitutes for the living extremities.⁵ But recognizing that “Natural Body” and even those “wooden Legs” was not so simple as the comparison intimated. Unlike recognizing the limbs of one’s own body, it was not easy to determine who belonged and who did not. Defining the true body of Christ was a tricky business for Protestants dissenting from the Church of England. Draw the outline too close, and one might be succumbing to the sin of thinking that mere human reason was enough to determine whom the Christian God had saved. Expand it too broadly, and one might be eternally damaged by the spiritual corruption and disease spread by the irrepentable sin of others.

      It was a complicated matter to determine who was called and united to Christ in the one body of the church, especially in the face of alternate understandings of the workings of spiritual power. English migration to Native homelands and to Bermuda introduced practices of making community that competed for space alongside southern Algonquian, West Central African, Haudenosaunee, indigenous Caribbean, and French configurations, among others. These groups shared the basic human experience of embodiment, but each group—and, indeed, each individual—made particular sense of that experience, making the body and body metaphors a productive vehicle for gaining access to multiple and often competing perspectives.⁶ While the English drew understanding from their physical bodies as much as did anyone else, they operated according to their own particular logics of the body and body-as-community. This chapter examines key ways that those on the puritan spectrum used bodily knowledge to organize their spiritual and political lives and to define the properly faithful body.

      Figure 3.1. This early eighteenth-century French engraving of a Baptist celebration of the Lord’s Supper shows the matched vessels used to distribute the wine in a more egalitarian manner. La Cene des Anabaptistes, Jean Frederic Bernard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, illus. Bernard Picart, vol. 4 (Amsterdam, 1736), after p. 208. For a scholarly digitized edition, see http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/picart/.

      

      Figure 3.2. St. George’s Chalice and cover engraved with the Sea Venture striking a rock in full sail, flying the banner of St. George, and with the Rose and Crown on the transom. (Courtesy of St. Peter’s Church, Their Majesties’ Chappell, Bermuda. Photograph by Ann Spurling.)

      As did other seventeenth-century peoples, English puritans understood the material and spiritual to be inextricably enmeshed. They too could find possibilities for spiritual meaning in everyday substances such as wheat and activities such as baking bread. The performance of the ritual meal of the Lord’s Supper displayed the conflict between hierarchy and equality both in its material and social contexts. The women who prepared the communion bread may not have been permitted to participate in its ritual consumption, and even among those admitted to the meal, customs governing distribution encoded many ranks of social status. Shifts in the relationship between the collectives of the body of Christ and the body politic were embedded in changes in agricultural production, family structures, and imperial law as well as in theological debates and synods of ministers and lay leaders. Puritans turned to their physical or “natural” bodies to guide their understanding of how boundaries between different types of more expansive bodies were meant to function, how parts should relate to the whole, and how to recognize a diseased or polluted body politic or body of Christ. Untangling these multiple meanings of the body of Christ for seventeenth-century English puritans in southern New England and Bermuda highlights the inherent conflict over the proper configuration of the one and the many, and of the balance between hierarchy and equality. They ultimately resolved this conflict by disconnecting the body politic and the body of Christ, even as they defined Indians and Africans as excluded from the former and at best an inferior and contingent part of the latter.

      Figure 3.3. John Hull beaker, ca. 1659, 3⅞”. Made for First Church, Boston. (Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

      Figure 3.4. Roger Wood beaker, bequeathed 1654, Devonshire Christ Church, Bermuda. The floral design links the beaker to its domestic counterparts. (Courtesy of Anglican Christ Church, Bermuda. Photograph by alugophoto.)

      “Till all have eaten”

      The puritan practice of the Lord’s Supper contained countervailing elements of equality and hierarchy as did the nickómmo and other feastings of the common pot, the ritual events examined in the previous chapter. In the Narragansett nickómmo, elites controlled the redistribution of resources by giving away goods and food. Puritan performances of the Lord’s Supper commemorated and enacted God’s gift of grace to a fraction of humanity. Those who had not made a public declaration of how the divine had touched their souls could not partake. They were dismissed from the service so that their presence might not compromise the constitution of the body of Christ. While not all participants in the Lord’s Supper might be actual recipients of God’s grace, they hoped they were. And among recipients of that gift, there were no degrees of salvation. Members of this invisible church of the saved were equal to one another in salvation.

      In the human institution of the visible church, however, rules and customs governing all services expressed many gradations of social status. The practice of assigning seats to members of congregations according to complicated and finely articulated degrees of social rank was a spatial manifestation of the incongruity between the visible and invisible corporate bodies. In its privileging of military rank, age, property, and familial ties but not an individual’s admission to the Lord’s Supper, “seating the congregation” produced a physical expression of the body politic in the organization of the gathered body of Christ. It served as a constant reminder of the tensions between human understandings of the body politic and what was meant to be the divinely infused corporate body. The seats adjacent to the pulpit were the most desirable, reserved for magistrates and other civil dignitaries, while those distant or with views obstructed by columns or stairwells were the least desirable, set aside for English children over the age of thirteen, Natives, Africans, and English servants. Men and women sat separately and men probably predominated; on any given sabbath celebration, many women who lived in the community would have been absent since nursing mothers rarely attended church. Peter Benes has estimated that half of the residents attended an average service.⁷

      Puritan ministers expended much ink and time on individual preparation for the Lord’s Supper and on the theology of the sacrament, particularly in terms of the relationship between the bread and wine of the meal and divine action or presence, but their words are not the only basis for investigating puritan theologies of the body.⁸ In puritan inflections of this experientially central ritual, the actions of passing the bread and wine to one another and their corporate consumption were what created sacred space, not any physical transformation in the substances used.⁹ As scholars of material religion have pointed out, puritans’ performance of ritual and their use of material objects reveals that the feeling, sounding, looking, and tasting of physical bodies