american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR159Where you were tormented eight months and more,Was made of rotting and corrupt excrement ...You came out through a foul passageAnd you fell into the world, poor and naked .. . . Other creatures have some use:Meat and bone, wool and leather;But you, stinking man, you are worse than dung:From you, man, comes only pus .From you comes no virtue,You are a sly and evil traitor;Look in front of you and look behind,For your life is like your shadowWhich quickly comes and quickly goes .32In response to learned and saintly medieval urgings of this sort, theefforts of good Christians to purge themselves of worldly concerns andcarnal impulses became something truly to behold, something that had itsroots in the asceticism of the early Church Fathers of almost a thousandyears earlier and something that would persist among the faithful for centuriesyet to come. Norman Cohn has provided us with one vivid thoughnot untypical example by quoting an account from the fourteenth centurywhen, on a winter's night, a devout friarshut himself up in his cell and stripped himself naked . . . and took hisscourge with the sharp spikes, and beat himself on the body and on the armsand legs, till blood poured off him as from a man who has been cupped.One of the spikes on the scourge was bent crooked, like a hook, and whateverflesh it caught it tore off. He beat himself so hard that the scourge brokeinto three bits and the points flew against the wall. He stood there bleedingand gazed at himself. It was such a wretched sight that he was reminded inmany ways of the appearance of the beloved Christ, when he was fearfullybeaten. Out of pity for himself he began to weep bitterly. And he kneltdown, naked and covered in blood, in the frosty air, and prayed to God towipe out his sin from before his gentle eyes. 33Monks and other males were not the only devout souls of this timewho tried to work their way to heaven with self-flagellation and otherforms of personal abasement. In fact, if anything, women showed moreoriginality than men in their undertakings of humiliation. In addition tothe routine of self-flagellation and the commitment of themselves to cripplingand sometimes fatal bouts of purposeful starvation, would-be femalesaints "drank pus or scabs from lepers' sores, eating and incorporatingdisease," reports a recent student of the subject, "and in the frenzy oftrance or ecstasy, pious women sometimes mutilated themselves with knives."One such holy woman displayed her piety by sleeping on a bed of paving