A contemporary memento mori:
(St Pancras Parish Church, London)
Limbo 13
by Colin Gale
I find myself alone in the space of the crystal gallery, the sudden silence momentarily disconcerting…In front of me is the obstetrics collection. Bay 24, Shelf 3. Jar after jar of tiny infants in various stages of development…Five little girls, their mouths open in unspoken speech, hang suspended in a formula of formaldehyde.
Among the human pathological specimens gathered by surgical museums on both sides of the Atlantic (and doubtless elsewhere) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the bodies of stillborn children. They make for a heart-wrenching display, a contemporary memento mori perhaps.
Their hands are nearly touching, as if about to play a game together. But these hands will never touch. These are lives that were stilled before they began, and their words will remain unspoken..
For they are on open exhibit, not just to the medical students and surgeons in whose professional interests they were first preserved, but to the general public. Not only so, but the human stories behind a range of pathological specimens are highlighted by the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in an installation and accompanying printed catalogue (from which the above quotations are taken1) entitled Narrative Remains; while the face of an stillborn child (admittedly in wax relief) graces the cover of the 2011 calendar produced by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum.
Such displays are the subject of intense debate within the world of museums, and it is easy to see why. In discussions with each other, most curators would probably acknowledge that some things are indeed unexhibitable, but go on to observe that “the designation of much that is unexhibitable lies within us – our exhibition skills, our administrations and our boards – before it lies within the perception of our public”.2 In other words, the curatorial challenge posed by ‘difficult’ specimens or subject matter is twofold: not only whetherto exhibit, but also howto exhibit in an appropriate, sensitive and ultimately meaningful manner.
If there is a theological equivalent to the preservation of infant bodies in formaldehyde, perhaps it is the medieval scholastic speculation that coalesced into the concept of ‘limbo’, understood as the permanent destination of those who die unbaptised in utero or in infancy. The concept was developed in order to solve a problem bequeathed to the Western Church by its most revered doctor, St Augustine of Hippo. Unbaptized infants, Augustine thought, were destined for hell, there to suffer only the “mildest condemnation”, but condemnation nevertheless arising from the taint of original sin passed down through their parents.3
Augustine’s theological successors were fully persuaded of the doctrine of original sin, but recoiled from the harsh logic of his conclusion, and sought a means of avoiding it. Unfortunately, the answer they found proved to be no less problematic a concept for theology and pastoral care as the display of human remains has been for museums and curatorial practice. Like such displays, moreover, the idea of ‘limbo’ has not entirely gone away, despite never quite finding a recognised place within the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church (or being entertained by either Eastern or Protestant orthodoxy).4 It is the subject of a new exhibition at the Crypt Gallery beneath St Pancras Parish Church, opposite London’s Euston Rail Station.
Seventeen artists have contributed works to Limbo 13, which runs until 26 March 2011. The works on display are diverse and, according to the exhibition flyer, are as much concerned to engage “fears and hopes in the third millennium” as they are to represent limbo as it has been historically conceived. They are alternately fantastical and apocalyptic, mundane and disturbing. Conseulo Giorgio’s starkly titled All My Friends are Deadcomprises fifteen oval photographic portraits of haunting intensity. It may be read as a latter-day iteration of memento morino less surely than may the still-born children at the Hunterian Museum. Similarly, three works by Alice Giorgio – Swine Fever, Bird Fluand Crazy Cow– feed off contemporary fears concerning death and disease. These are secular fears, of mortal rather than immortal loss. Perhaps the most conscious debt owed to something approaching a traditional concept of limbo is apparent in an installation by the artist Felma Barbo, in which miniature winged foetuses lie in jars or hang suspended in mid-air. By it, Barbo means to explore “the disturbing dark realities of abortions and miscarriages” (again according to the flyer). Or perhaps the works of Alberto Sordi – Almas Purgantes, L’Autre Mondeand Wonderlandamong them – forge the most explicit links between medieval and modern expressions of futility, placing baroque, apocalyptic imagery alongside evocative text:
“In a Wonderland they lie.
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream –
Lingering in the golden dream –
Life, what is it but a dream?”
It must be admitted that none of these representations have been shaped by an apprehension of original sin and its consequences. Yet arguably the venue in which they are displayed supplies a fuller (and specifically Christian) context within which they may be interpreted. The Crypt Gallery is, after all, a crypt. This fact gives rise to a series of vivid juxtapositions throughout the exhibition. For example, at the end of a row of bright acrylics depicting bored or absent-looking nudes is a wall-mounted memorial to the memory of one Emily Jane Dale, born 23rd March 1803, died 7th April 1849, whose mortal remains were doubtless placed in the crypt in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life. There can be few contemporary memento mori more telling than this.
For his development of the doctrine of original sin, St Augustine has been much maligned through the centuries. The creation theologian Matthew Fox regards the doctrine as the result of “Augustine’s bad scriptural exegesis and translation” of Romans 5:12 “and Augustine’s put-down of women and of sexuality”.5 Scriptural passages such as Romans chapters 7 to 9 and I Corinthians 15 were, however, more influential in Augustine’s thought than Romans 5:12;6 and, as the ethicist Gerald Schlabach argues, his view of sexuality contained more nuance (at least in potential) than has been commonly recognised.
“As the most vivid and mercurial of all social relationships, sexuality [in Augustine’s view] is alternately the most creative and destructive of human encounters…Allhuman relationships, even the noblest of friendships, are capable of transmitting original sin. For if the potential for using the other instrumentally is nowhere clearer than in the sexual act, nowhere is it clearly absent either.”7
Augustinian insistence on sin’s all-pervasiveness (extending even to the greatest of human capacities) does not necessarily entail conviction of the thorough-going depravity of human nature. Nor does it rule out recognition of what theologians like Matthew Fox rightly perceive to be the ‘original blessing’ of creation. The insight that human nature is not perfect in any respect does not, in orthodox Christian thought, lead to the conclusion that it could be no worse.
Given the Enlightenment’s devaluing of the currency of any doctrine of original sin – however nuanced – it is not straightforward to account for the renewed cultural resonance of the concept of ‘limbo’ to which this exhibition is testament. Perhaps its continued attraction might be explained in terms of contemporary preoccupations with cycles of deconstruction, negation and futility which are actually postmodern in character. Herein a fundamental transformation has been effected. Divorced from the concept of original sin, ‘limbo’ has become, in the words of exhibition pre-publicity, nothing other than “a dream-like fantastical or other-worldly spiritual state” or “a literary/ theatrical/ contemporary metaphor”.8 There is no better window into these nihilistic imaginings than the works on display that make up Limbo 13.
Yet the idea of ‘limbo’ itself was the product of a transformation no less significant within Christian theology, brought about by the isolation of the doctrine of original sin from soteriology. Contemporary Catholic theologians have suggested that, in the overall context of Christian revelation, “original sin tells us first and fundamentally that Christ is the end of every human being”, and that “by the notion of the reconciling, merciful God we are given an inexorable insight into the abysses of our own history…The power of sin is finally and totally disclosed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the witness to God who seeks boundless reconciliation with the sinner and is love for him”.9This, finally, is the ground on which the obiter dictaconcerning the fate of the unbaptized variously indulged in by Augustine and the medieval architects of the concept of ‘limbo’ must be judged and found wanting.
The Crypt Gallery at St Pancras: http://www.cryptgallery.org.uk/
The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Suregons of England: http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums
The Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia: http://www.muttermuseum.org
Colin Gale visited the Mütter Museum in the course of conducting research supported by the Francis Clark Wood Institute for the History of Medicine at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and by the Archives and Records Association (UK and Ireland).
Notes
1 Karen Ingham, Narrative Remains(London: Wellcome Trust / Royal College of Surgeons of England, 2009), p. 24, available at http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/exhibitions/images/narrative-remains/NR3.JPG
2 Gretchen Jennings and Maureen McConnell, ‘The Unexhibitable: A Conversation’, Exhibitionistvol. 27, no. 2 (Fall 2008), page 14, available at http://name-aam.org/uploads/downloadables/EXH.fall_08/4%20EXH_fall08_The%20Unexhibitable-A%20Conversation_Jennings_McConnell.pdf
3 As cited in International Theological Commission, The Hope of Salvation for Infants who Die Without Being Baptised (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2007), available online at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html
4 ibid.
5 Matthew Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality(Bear & Co: Santa Fe NM, 1983), page 50, cf. pages 48-49.
6 Paul Rigby, ‘Original Sin’, in Allan D. Fitzgerald et al. (eds.), Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia(Eerdmans: Grand Rapids MI, 1999), page 607.
7 Gerald W. Schlabach, ‘Friendship as Adultery: Social Reality and Sexual Metaphor in Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin’, Augustinian Studies23 (December 1992), page 133, available online at http://personal.stthomas.edu/gwschlabach/docs/1992as.htm.
8 http://www.cryptgallery.org.uk/current_exhibitions.htm
9 Christophe Boreaux and Christoph Theobald (eds.), Original Sin: A Code of Fallibility(London: SCM Press, 2004), pp. 87, 113.
