What Sacraments Say About Surgery — Awkward Asian Theologian

In a 2007 interview with The Other Journal, Eugene McCarraher spoke about the importance of avoiding the viewing secular culture as an independent sphere that should be free from the incursion of theology. Following John Milbank and William Cavanaugh (and in some cases further radicalising them), McCarraher argued that what takes place in the secular sphere is actually a distorted theology.

To put it in McCarraher’s words, what secular culture manifests is not its own, completely unique account of the way things are. Rather, it is “a perversion of our desires for a beloved, sacramental community”. McCarraher’s comment should embolden Christians to give more confessionally robust evaluations of the manifestations of contemporary culture, since these accounts should expose cultural dynamics that non-Christian accounts would miss.

Take for instance the issue of plastic surgery, which people more intelligent than myself have suggested was a secular attempt at a bodily theosis or divinisation. In The Coming of the Body, Herve Juvin famously said that the soul is now located on the surface of the skin. If this is true, then augmenting one’s body through plastic surgery can be seen as an attempt at augmenting the soul as well. The perfecting of the body to angelic proportions is thus an attempt to realise the earthly body’s attempt to reach beyond its mortal coil towards more heavenly states (think of Gillette Venus’ equation of shaving with releasing one’s “inner goddess”).

However, the postmodern city only pays lip service to anything truly transcendent, locking all heavenly discourses within a cage of sheer temporality. Plastic surgery is but one example of this locking of the divine within the temporal. This pretense at the heavenly can only end up in disillusionment with all things, including the temporal. Things, including bodies, are thus seen as vile, as the author Evelyn Waugh once observed in his novel Vile Bodies.

Inasmuch as this locking within temporality occurs, it is but a parody of the Christian sacrament. From the standpoint of phenomenlogy, the sacrament presents a temporal sign, but the sign nonetheless has within it the means of saturating the temporal and going beyond it to an invisible universe, but one that infuses the real and deepens it. But as I wrote elsewhere, this invisible universe infuses bodies as well, so that with every move we make in the depths of the earth can also be a movement of the heights of heaven.