american-holocaust

HSAMERICAN HOLOCAUSTgons of the faith took to literal extremes the scriptural charge to "love notthe world, neither the things that are in the world," by flinging themselvesinto what Augustine was to call the "daily sport" of suicide and by searchingfor ways to become Ignatius's longed-for "fodder for wild beasts." 29Suicide, like castration, in time was discouraged by the Church as at bestinstitutionally counter-productive, but the idea of flesh as corruption andof the physical pleasures of the world as sin continued to evolve over thecenturies, by the Middle Ages flourishing into a full-fledged ideology thatcame to be known as the contemptus mundi or "contempt for the world"tradition. All of life on earth was properly seen as a "vale of tears," as a"desert," an "exile." As one medieval saint, Jean de Fecamp, exclaimed,human life was and should be viewed as "miserable life, decrepit life, impurelife sullied by humours, exhausted by grief, dried by heat, swollen bymeats, mortified by fasts, dissolved by pranks, consumed by sadness, distressedby worries, blunted by security, bloated by riches, cast down bypoverty." 30 The torment of life lay, therefore, not only in its pains, butequally (if perversely) in its pleasures that systematically had to be bothresisted and condemned. Thus, an anonymous twelfth-century poet confrontedhimself with the riddle-"Evillife of this world then I Why do youplease me so?"-and answered piously with the following litany:Fugitive life,more harmful than any beast.Life which should be called death,Which one should hate, not loveWorldly life, sickly thingMore fragile than the roseWorldly life, source of labors,Anguished, full of sufferingWorldly life, future death,Permanent ruin,Worldly life, evil thingNever worthy of loveWorldly life, foul lifePleasing only to the impiousLife, stupid thingAccepted only by fools,I reject you with all my heartFor you are full of filth.With all my heart I reject youI prefer to undergo death,0 life, rather than serve you. 31A century later the poet and Franciscan monk Giacomino di Verona expressedthe matter of humanity's proper Christian understanding of itselfin similar, if even more pithy terms:In a very dirty and vile workroomYou were made out of slime,So foul and so wretchedThat my lips cannot bring themselves to tell you about it.But if you have a bit of sense, you will knowThat the fragile body in which you lived,