Inventing the Enemy: Essays (13 page)

Now, I have to say, the story existed and exists in that saint’s biography, but heaven only knows how any human being could have had the idea of searching about among those most saintly pages for some lines on cheese. Perhaps Camporesi never ate cheese (a suggestion I make only out of a love of paradox), but he certainly had a voracious appetite for pages and pages of countless books that had ended up goodness knows where—and this was his heavenly and guilty Camembert.

If this suggestion might appear excessive, see how Camporesi can describe an execrable (or at least execrated) food such as cheese with the same ease that he talks about culinary delights that make our mouths water, or about the practices of penitence that would cause any sensitive soul to feel sick. And when discussing Prince Raimondo di Sangro, rather than going off, like everyone else, on an exploration of his mummified monstrosities and chilling displays of nerves, muscles, and veins laid bare, instead he examines his Arcimboldean fancy for counterfeiting food, so that

being quite excessively self-indulgent in all things, on certain days [he] ordered an entire dinner to be prepared using nothing but vegetables, on other days nothing but fruit, on yet others nothing but sweet and honeyed dishes, and sometimes dishes all made from milk. He had skilled buffet experts so highly trained in the art of manipulating sweetmeats and dairy products that he could produce marvellous imitations, with milk and honey, of all the dishes the cooks normally make with meat, fish, and many other sorts of animals. They also knew how to counterfeit every kind of fruit in a thousand different ways. (
Exotic Brew,
1994, translated by Christopher Woodall)

But likewise, in the same spirit, here he is reading Sebastiano Pauli and his
Prediche quaresimali
(
Lenten Sermons
), making our hair stand on end while he relishes certain pious recommendations when it comes to a peaceful death:

As soon as this well-constituted and well-organized body is closed in its coffin, it changes colour and becomes yellow and sallow, but it is a pallor and sallowness that nauseate and incite fear. It then blackens from the head to the feet, and it is covered by a sombre and dismal colour like spent coal. Then it starts to swell in a strange manner across the face, chest, and stomach, and a fetid and greasy mould starts to grow on this sickening swelling, a filthy indication of imminent corruption. Very soon the yellow and swollen stomach starts to rip here an eruption and there a tear, and out of these there flows a slow lava of decaying material and foulness in which bits of that black and rotting flesh are floating. Here half a maggot-infested eye is carried on a wave, there a cleft lip is putrid and corrupt, and further on there lies a bundle of livid and lacerated bowels. A great quantity of small flies, worms, and other disgusting little animals is generated by this greasy mire, and they swarm and infest the corrupted blood, attach themselves to decomposing flesh, and devour it. One part of these worms rises from the chest, and another from the nostrils, with I don’t know what filth and mucus. Still others, covered by putrid matter, enter and leave by the mouth, and the more satiated come and go, and gurgle continuously down in the throat. (
The Anatomy of the Senses
)

Is there a difference between describing a Trimalchion dinner in a land of plenty (bringing to mind Dario Fo, in
Mistero Buffo,
who froths with pleasure over food he is only dreaming about) or taking delight before the horrid spectacle of the damned in the Lenten sermons of Romolo Marchelli and the descriptions in Padre Segneri’s sermon on the spectacle of the lower realm of the damned, who endure the greatest punishment by seeing the Almighty laugh at their suffering?

And yet when they raise their eyes and turn to the great God who lit the fire, they see that He now appears . . . like Nero to them, not because of His injustice but because of His severity, not only does He not wish to console them, or pity them, but what is more
He claps His hands together,
and with incredible pleasure, He laughs at them. Imagine in what frenzy they are driven, and into what a rage! We are burning and God laughs? Oh most cruel God! . . . We let ourselves be deluded by the man who told us that our greatest torment would have been the sight of God’s scornful face. God’s laughing face, he should have said, God’s laughing face. (
The Fear of Hell,
1990, translated by Lucinda Byatt)

I see no difference between the eagerness with which Camporesi savors, in the pages of Giovan Battista Barpo’s
Le delizie e i frutti dell’agricoltura e della villa,
the lists of salted beef and lamb, mutton, pork and veal, and then spring lambs, capons, hens and ducks, and then of parsley roots, which, when boiled, floured, and cooked in oil, are just like lampreys; or pasta made from flour, rosewater, saffron, and sugar, with a little malmsey, cut round, like windowpanes, and stuffed with breadcrumbs, apples, carnation flowers, and ground walnuts, while waiting for Easter to bring kid, veal, lamb, asparagus, and squabs and, over the following months, curd cheeses, fresh ricotta, peas, heads of cabbage, boiled beans floured and fried (
The Anatomy of the Senses
)—between such lists of things dedicated to the palate and other lists dedicated (even though they refer to people) only to the ear—an ear whose eustachian tubes are as voraciously greedy as any throat. Examples of those lists of villains are found in the
Speculum cerretanorum
and other works on villainy: cardsharps, cheats, rascals, villains, wastrels, ne’er-do-wells, tricksters, fraudsters, pimps, fagins, abortionists, sellers of miraculous waters, quacks,
pauperes verecundi,
prayer vendors, fathers begging with their children, fake-saffron vendors, rogues who cheat other rogues, relic sellers, flour beggars, gropers, baptized Jews, fake priests, shivering jimmies, bread beggars, rogues feigning madness from tarantula bites, holy-image bearers, fake miracle-workers, usurers, fake paralytics, dealers, street singers, epileptics, false weepers, charlatans, and so on (
Il libro dei vagabondi
).

Or not very politically correct lists of the defects of women, taken from the pages of
Poetiche dicerie overo vaghissime descrittioni
by Tommaso Caraffa, which might seem to describe the edible virtues of some extremely rare wild animal:

Do you not know that woman was called the portrait of inconstancy, the model of fragility, the mother of cunning, the symbol of variance, the mistress of malice, the minister of frauds, the inventrix of deception, the friend of simulation and of imperfection itself; since her voice is weak, she is voluble in tongue, tardy in action, fast in anger, steadfast in hatred, quick in envy, readily tired, well-versed in evil, easily prone to lying, like a biting asp nesting in an open field, like dead cinders that conceal a burning ember; a false reef concealed among shallow waters; a prickly thorn covered by lilies and roses; a poisonous snake wrapped in herbs and flowers; a light that fades; a flame that burns out; a glory that falls; a sun eclipsed; a moon that wanes; a star that disappears; a sky that darkens; a shadow that vanishes; and a sea that ruffles. (
I balsami di Venere,
1989)

If it is still not clear that Camporesi was a gourmet of lists, see the shameless greed with which he gleefully describes the poor and piteous table of the penitent saints—such as Joseph of Copertino, as found in an eighteenth-century
Life,
whose table was furnished with herbs, dried fruits, and cooked broad beans sprinkled only with bitterest powder, and who on Friday fed on a herb that was so bitter and disgusting that even to lick it with the tip of the tongue nauseated him for several days. Or the description in the
Life
of Carlo Girolamo Severoli of Faenza, servant of God, who sprinkled his bread with ashes, which he secretly carried around with him for the purpose, and dipped it into the water used for washing dishes, and sometimes put it to soak in verminous water. Thus, quite rightly,

such was the manner and number of his self-inflictions and abstinences that his appearance was completely transformed: his countenance was pallid and his bones were barely covered by his bloodless skin, so much had he wasted away; a few meagre hairs sprouted from his chin and his frame was bent and transfigured, so that he had become bare like a skeleton, a living image of penitence. He suffered as a consequence most grievously of languidness, fainting, swooning, and a death-like pallor, so extreme that on journeys he was sometimes obliged to stop and he would sink to the ground to recover some little strength in his flagging limbs; or to relieve the pains of a hernia and other ills, for which he refused to seek any remedy. (
The Incorruptible Flesh,
1988, translated by Tania Croft-Murray)

If we were to read all of Camporesi’s books, one after the other (though they should be savored in small doses), trying to build up a picture of what he is describing, we might become sated and form the suspicion there isn’t much difference between an urge to swim in cream and to swim in excrement, so that his work might serve as a Gospel or a Koran for the characters in Ferreri’s film
La Grande Bouffe,
at the end of which ingurgitation and evacuation go hand in hand. This would be true if we assumed that Camporesi is talking only of things, rather than realizing that he is talking first and foremost about words—the words Paradise and Inferno, after all, are part of one and the same poem.

Camporesi certainly wanted to be a cultural anthropologist, or historian of everyday life, though he performed this task by probing among long-forgotten works, and in doing so he recounted the vicissitudes of past centuries in relation to the body and food. But not infrequently he highlights parallels between those times and ours—and reflecting on ancient blood rituals and myths he never failed to point out how much blood has been spilled in our own most civilized age, whether it be through holocaust, intifada, genocide, tribal throat-slitting, or massacre, and nor did he ever fail to comment on the perversions of today, from dietary paranoia to mass hedonism, from olfactory decadence to the adulteration of food, as well as the disappearance of the traditional view of hell. He looked back almost nostalgically upon less fastidious and more honest times when you could smell the blood that was spilled, when masochistic mystics kissed leprous ulcers, and excrement was sniffed as part of the sensual panorama of everyday life (I wonder what he would have written about the rubbish piles in Naples).

But this desire to understand the past and the present arose through that form of libido that has been dubbed “librido.” Nor could Camporesi savor the aroma of a well-made pie or the stink of a rotting body except through the whiff of paper made from pulped rags, duly watermarked, slightly foxed, and adorned with worm holes, provided it was, as bibliographers would have once said,
de la plus insigne rareté.

[Lecture given at the international study conference on Piero Camporesi in March 2008 at Forlì. Then published in
Camporesi nel mondo,
edited by E. Casali and M. Soffritti (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2009).

I
T IS NOT MY INTENTION
in this lecture to support philosophical, theological, and bioethical positions on problems relating to abortion, stem cells, embryos, and the so-called right to life. My approach is purely historical and seeks to examine what Saint Thomas Aquinas thought about such matters. At most, the fact that the church of today thinks differently makes my reconstruction particularly curious.

The debate is extremely old, dating back to Origen, who claimed that God created human souls that had existed from the very beginning. His view was immediately challenged, not least in the light of the words of Genesis (2:7) that “the Lord formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” In the Bible, therefore, God creates the body, and then breathes a soul into it, and this doctrine, which became the church’s official doctrine, is called
creationism.
But this position posed problems so far as the transmission of original sin. If the soul is not transmitted by the parents, why are babies not free from original sin, so that they have to be baptized? Thus Tertullian (in
De anima
) claimed that the soul of the parent is “translated” from father to son through his semen. But
traducianism
was immediately judged to be heretical, since it presumed that the soul had a material origin.

The person who found himself in difficulty was Saint Augustine: he had to reckon with the Pelagians, who denied the transmission of original sin. He therefore supported the creationist doctrine (against bodily traducianism) while admitting, at the same time, a sort of spiritual traducianism. But all commentators take the view that his position is rather convoluted. Augustine was tempted to accept traducianism, but finally, in epistle 190, he admits to being uncertain and observes that the holy scriptures support neither traducianism nor creationism. We can also see how he wavers between the two positions in
De genesi ad litteram.

Saint Thomas Aquinas was decidedly creationist, and resolved the question of original guilt in a most elegant way. Original sin is transmitted by semen like a natural infection (
Summa Theologica,
second part of part 1, question 81, article 1, reply to objections 1 and 2), but this has nothing to do with the transmission of the rational soul:

It is said that the child will not carry the iniquity of the father in the sense that he will not be punished for the sin of the father, unless he is a party to the blame. But this is what happens in our case: in fact original sin is transmitted from father to child through procreation, in the same way that actual sin is transmitted by imitation . . . Yet the soul is not transmitted, because the power of the semen is not able to produce a rational soul, nevertheless the semen cooperates as an instrument. Thus, through the power of the semen, human nature is transmitted from parents to children, and the corruption of human nature with it. In fact, he who is born becomes a party to the guilt of his parent; because by force of procreation, he inherits his nature from him.