Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin.

Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle. Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin.

(Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 71.) Leiden and New York: Brill, 1998. xiv + 276 pp. n.p. ISBN: 90-04-11175-1.

A strange thing happened on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, when the fingers of God and Adam nearly touched: fingers and fingernails, the structure and movement of hands, the understanding of touch in God and man became charged with new meanings that differed from the past at the same time that they paid homage to that past. For Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle in her new book, Senses of Touch, Michelangelo's ceiling is the hub around which she arachnically spins a web of associations having to do with touch, hands, and the human body; what results is an elaborate hermeneutical structure that sometimes gets thin around the outer realms -- even spiders make an appearance -- but nevertheless brilliantly conveys what it meant to be human in the Renaissance.

According to Boyle, Michelangelo's God neither injects a divine spark into Adam, nor does he animate him to life with some kind of electrical charge. Rather, God on the Sistine ceiling is a good "Renaissance activist" who orders or commands Adam with his finger to "arise" or "raise himself up" to the full uniqueness of his humanity -- meaning "erect bipedality;" representing moral and philosophical dignity (30, 36). With this depiction of "a horizontal man tending toward verticality," Boyle writes in her first chapter, "Adam is divinely charged to stabilize his feet on the clay from which he was formed and to stand erect in dignity and responsibility as thinker and maker" (37, 85). By the same token this upright posture, since it distinguished humans from animals and contained an inherent moral character, could also reverse itself into the opposite, leading to the kind of failure embodied in deformity, limping, monstrosity -- the shame of a bowed head. Boyle is especially interesting in her discussion of the Renaissance concern with abnormality; not only did "strange corporeality" (53) -- no hands, too many hands, missing digits, extra digits -- preoccupy innovators such as Ambroise Pare (the creator of the artificial hand), but so did it take on new meaning according to encounters with peoples of the New World.

Women -- whom Aristotle had considered deformed males -- were also treated in light of these notions of dignity embodied, enjoined as they were to "postural rectitude and rigidity" through whalebone corsets that gave them no other choice except to be distorted into "laced and braced" uprightness (94-95). However, while Michelangelo's Eve -- the subject of Boyle's second section -- is depicted with her palms together and raised before God alone in a gesture of distinct and prayerful submission, "[i]t is the Creator to whom [Eve] relates posturally and gesturally, ignoring Adam who slumbers unconscious in her presence" (107). This changes when hands clasping in prayer become hands grasping for the apple, in an association that contributed to the idea that women were not to touch the consecrated host, just as Magdalen (though not Thomas) was enjoined by a wounded, redemptive Jesus to keep her hands off.

None of these ideas were entirely new, as Boyle demonstrates in tracing the way hands, handshakes and handwashing were interpreted throughout history, with touch itself usually placed on the bottom of the hierarchy of senses. (Augustine, for one, preferred spiritual to tactile touch.) Moreover, while new developments in the field of anatomy opened up understandings about bones and hands, it was still Galen who remained the authority, despite his never having dissected human hands. Among the undeniably new developments, Boyle concludes in her last section, was the contribution of John Calvin to ideas of touch; though human hands for Calvin could never touch God, the hand of God could descend through grace, just as belief in God involved the body as well as the soul, planted as it was "deeply within [the human] marrow" (175). For Calvin the moral fall became a physical fall, just as limping reflected a "sinful humanity pressed ever closer to the ground" (184). Still, the "hand of God" could right crookedness a nd restore the elect to dignity thus elevating touch to a heightened, and profoundly healing, sense. Conveying the power of hands and touch, John of the Cross would capture this when he wrote: "0 soothing hand! 0 touch so fine and light.../ Slaying, you have converted death to life."