The Pandemic as an Apocalypse of the Body

This was my entry into the Archbishop’s Annual Essay Contest. It was not selected as one of the winners.

I.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. On March 13, 2020, the U.S. President, Donald Trump, declared a National Emergency. The events, both nationally and globally, that then transpired in the weeks and months which followed issued in something of an apocalypse.

In contemporary pop culture, the term “apocalypse” typically denotes something along the lines of “The End,” sometimes the end of the space-time universe or, as in a “post-apocalyptic” world, the end of the civilized world and the return to a smoldering barbarism. But the biblical idiom of apocalypse is the sense of Saint John’s Apocalypse, which bears semblance to the sense of the apocalypses shown in the Prophets, such as we find in the books of Daniel or Ezekiel. The more literal rendering of “apocalypse” that we find at the close of western Bibles is most instructive: Revelation.

John’s Apocalypse is the account of the revelation of the Son of God. When the Son is finally revealed, in these last days, his advent very much signals an “end of all things.” In the economy of grace, though, the end of all things signals not the destruction of the cosmos, the universe which the Father spoke into existence and judged “very good.” Rather, Scripture regards the “end” of all things less in its terminal sense, and more in its teleological sense. The end of all things – the Apocalypse – is the unveiling of the Father’s Son into the world, the peeling back and unveiling of the mysterious heavenly Logos, through whom all things are held together. And, if the Gospels are to be believed, this apocalypse, the revealing of the Incarnation, happened some two thousand years ago.

The revelation of the Incarnation into the world is a double end. As surely as the history unveiled in the Gospels is the revelation of the central historical mystery of the entire world, it is dually the announcement of a birth and a death. It is a “birth” as Christ’s body is the firstfruits of a New Creation. But Christ’s advent is as well a judgment against wickedness and corruption and thus involves the destruction of an old world in the midst of the creation of a new. This tension is embodied in the double sense of our own liturgical calendar’s season of Advent, which functions simultaneously as a mark of the end of the previous year and the beginning of a new one. So Christ was rightly perceived as a threat to the present world order, perceived as a threat to the state of Israel as well as to the Roman Imperium, which ordered, with relative ease, his Crucifixion. Saint Athanasius points out that Christ’s Resurrection makes a mockery of those people and powers, especially the powers and principalities that reign behind the scenes of history. Through his body, he brought about not only mockery but judgment on his enemies.¹ Later, Saint Augustine would tell the tale of how Christ’s body brought an end to the same Roman order that sought to subject him to its own perverse sense of justice.² Thus, “apocalypse,” insofar as it is biblically comprehended, signals the issuing forth of the judgment and destruction of one world order, but also the purification and restructuring of that order into a new one, a progression “from glory to glory.”

But Christianity, especially as understood by Anglicans, always involves a real coping with the very real and gracious fact that Christ’s body is not an abstraction. The Son of God “took on flesh and dwelt among us,” so consigning himself to the (apparently) arbitrary contingencies – the messiness – of the world historical. In assuming the world into himself, he sanctified it, thus eternally raising it to the dignity of having a Logic, a correspondence to order and purpose. And thus, the Christian can never separate the ongoing movements of history from the ongoing act of the Incarnate God. We therefore bear the burden of interpreting our own experiences, as well as the experiences of others, as not so much a series of random “acts of God,” but instead as iterative intensifications of the unitary movement of Christ’s single body throughout space and time. Which is to say, interpretation of history is interpretation of the ongoing apocalypse of Christ. It follows from this that the COVID-19 pandemic, insofar as it is an historical reality, must be understood in light of Christ’s continual reign, and so as an act of his apocalypse. The question we must ask in interpreting the pandemic is not whether in it we can see God’s act, but rather, “How has God acted in it?”

We cannot know the answer with certainty in the modern sense. There is no syllogism that could lead to the necessary conclusion that “It must be the case that God has done x in the pandemic.” But what use is knowledge, anyway, in the midst of catastrophe? “Knowledge puffs up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.” (I Cor viii, 1-3) The Incarnation, that ecstatic movement of the Trinitarian persons, is the apocalyptic unfolding of Divine Love into human history. Insight into the mysterious working of the Trinity in the midst of the pandemic could not be described as a “knowing,” but as a “being known.” It follows from this that an account of the pandemic would need to be an account of Christ’s Body in order to be in any meaningful way an appropriately theological account.

II.

What can we say, historically speaking, has happened to Christ’s Body in the pandemic? What has been “revealed”? In short, his Body has been ravaged. Such is as we might expect to be the case of our Cruciform Lord. After all, he bears the wounds on his Body, not only for our sake, but for the sake of the whole world.

Numerically speaking, a Church already in decline in the West has had certain disheartening trends in membership and in financial giving augmented that much more greatly. It is simply a reality that the result of this is that actual churches have had to close indefinitely, shutting their doors, laying off their staff, selling their buildings, ending their ministries, and shipping off what members remain to other churches that were able to withstand the burden of prolonged lockdown. The Body has been debilitated.

In America, the bipartisan structure of our political system, no doubt under the guidance of demonic powers and principalities, took hold of our churches, whose existence was already in crisis, and possessed many of its people with a spirit of division. Kenotic acts of accommodation within the Body (wearing masks during worship, social distancing, staying home if sick, etc), actions done to preserve the life of the weak, were judged not as acts of piety but as acts of compliance with tyranny, calling good “evil” and evil “good.” The Body has been demented.

In the same trajectory, when a fundamentally amoral nation, in the throes of neoliberal practicality, sought to examine itself and come to terms, first of all, with the concrete impossibility of “amorality” – one either moves towards or away from the Good – but also considered what it might look like to enact national repentance for pasts sins – such a movement – again, demonically – was taken hold of and exploited, further shipwrecking the faith of an already weakening Body. The protests of Pentecost 2020 were an outbreak of public moral awareness in our nation.³ Rather than the Church stepping forward, as a prophet in Pharaoh’s court, offering a faithful interpretation of a national nightmare, the Church succumbed to the national poles that govern fleshly politics, and allowed their violence to cause dissent and unrest within its own polity. The Body has been dispossessed.

Perhaps chief among the ways in which the Church was flayed before the world was in the collapse of her own sacramental self-awareness that she herself is a body, Christ’s Body. One of the chief properties of a body is the extension of itself into space and time. Just as the Son of God really did take upon himself a physical body, in a physical place, at a physical time, a body measurable like our own, so does Christ’s Body to this day exist in much the same way, if mystically. It matters that a human body was resurrected. It matters that a bodily Christ ascended. And the fact that it matters is an affirmation of the fact that matter matters. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “God likes matter. He invented it.”⁴ Just as the doctrine of the Incarnation is more than the simple fact that the Son took a body, but also that he acted in it, so is it the case that the Church, a holy temple made of the bodies of all its members together, the bodies each mystically conjoined by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, is not reducible to its mere bodily existence, but is the Incarnate Christ’s Body through her act as well. Which is to say, the Church is Christ’s Body in her act of coming together as the Body, through her repeated assembly of the Body, her coming together to consume Christ’s Body together in order to receive his Body into herself and thus to be strengthened and more greatly conformed to the shape of his heavenly body. (Note that “shape” is a spatial form and not a mere abstraction.)

As an act of divine charity, then, the Church’s choosing to abandon her meeting together, if only for a season, was fundamentally an act of giving up her body for the sake of her neighbor. But note that when Christ’s Body was handed over to the powers of evil and death, his body was not dissolved, but lay hidden in the tomb. Even if rendered invisible, the body did not cease its spatio-physical composition. If the pandemic had revealed the Church as a body in hiding, seeing every suburban house, every apartment building, every nursing home dormitory as a holy rest awaiting consummation, where Christ’s body lay dormant, patiently awaiting, with a messianic hope, that what the Father has given over will return to him – if such was the ethos of the universal Church, then the testimony of the Christians, of God’s deliverance of them and all people from the plague, would have filled the world with joy. Instead, though, the apocalypse revealed a Church that has forgotten herself. We know this because the response of the Church, overwhelmingly, should have been the response of the Jewish people in the face of the smoldering wreckage of their temple: tears and anguish. Before the Resurrection, the women knew that the right response to the hiddenness of Christ’s body was lament, and so we see them bringing instruments of burial to a particular place. We see Mary Magdalene weeping, not in private, but instead at a specific site! But lament was not the sense of the Church’s response to its diasporic state. The Body has been disregarded.

Rather than confess the tragic state the Church was in, rather than confessing in no uncertain terms that she was essentially compromised, the Church instead took Peter’s course: denial. Rather than confess, not even before men, but simply to herself, that she was in suffering, she chose instead to reinvent herself, not as Body, not as something that fills space and time, not as an historical anticipation of the eschatological destiny of the world, but instead as a “virtual” reality. The apocalypse shows that this was not a new development, but a revelation of cracks in the Church’s recognition of herself as an actual sacramental reality. Concepts of “presence,” “attendance,” “participation,” “assembly,” “worship,” and even “sacraments” as such were given new definitions and meaning in a relatively short time – almost overnight. The Body has been desacralized.

There is little that we can say we “know” about the pandemic, particularly as we seek to interpret it theologically. But one must seriously consider the extent to which this latter revelation makes clear how and why the Church was vulnerable to the demonic attacks of the political realm in which it has found itself. The loss of its sense of being a unitary heavenly Body seems a consistent theme throughout.

III.

“Behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me. I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
-The Gospel according to Saint John xvi, 32-33

Christ has overcome the world. This is the only apocalypse of any significance to the Christian. It is our blessed hope, our greatest joy. Christ gives this word of encouragement to his disciples, shortly before his betrayal, denial, and Crucifixion. Christ offers himself to us, fully conscious of the wounds he will bear, fully conscious that he takes our sickness into himself. “But by his wounds we are healed.” Christ presents his wounds to us without hesitation.

If we will follow the example of Saint Thomas the Apostle, the shrewdest of the twelve, who stubbornly refused to believe until the resurrected Christ willingly offered his ravaged body, a face he could see and be seen by, showing forth piercings our hands can trace, in the glory of a bodily presence – not a virtual one – in that moment, when the Body presents itself as the Body penetrated, the Body transgressed, the Body suffered for the life of the world, a Body who testifies to its own veracity from the light that pours forth from wounds it freely took on, not as an act of compliance, but as a holy offering, as a holocaust in the form of a sacrifice wrought in mercy, where the sickness of the world was taken into itself – then, in that moment, we will once again perceive the revelation of the Son of God in human history.

Footnotes:

1 St Athanasius. On the Incarnation. Translated by John Behr. (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press: Yonkers, 2011) §25, §31, and §32 are just a handful of passages where it is the body that the Word of God took on which is the instrument of his mission and conquest over the demonic powers. But in §52, he explicitly connects the demonic powers with the violence of nations.

2 St Augustine. City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. (Modern Library: New York, 1993) Augustine spends the first portion of the text diagnosing the sicknesses of the Roman city and juxtaposes it with the heavenly city, the city of God, a story of one political body ultimately displacing another. Lest we be tempted to over-spiritualize the celestial city, aside from the fact that he defines the celestial city in terms of the totus Christus, an entity entered into by the sacrament of baptism (pp. 790-791), not long after the discussion of the necessity of participation in Christ’s body, Augustine dedicates most of the remaining pages to teasing through the nature and details of the resurrected body, both Christ’s and ours.

3 This is not a judgment on the propriety of any particular protest, neither an endorsement nor a dismissal of any particular party’s grievances. I am simply acknowledging that a rash of protest around the nation (and world) is a demonstration of moral awareness and conviction. Implied in every protest is the idea that “things are not as they should be.” Heightened moments of this phenomenon indicate a heightened sense that public entities ought to be directed by a moral compass. The compass may be out of order, but the response of the Church cannot be either “that things actually are as they should be” or “that public realities are immune to such things as moral compasses.”

4 Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. (HarperOne: New York, 2000) p. 64