Christianity is not a religion of the body. Through Jesus’s sacrifice and his resurrection the body loses its spiritual significance. The circumcision of the flesh in Judaism, as a mark of the bond between God and man, is in Christianity internalised — or, rather, spirit-ualised. Acting in the sense of God, or of Jesus, stands foremost; yet this “in-the-sense-of” can also be read as a “just-as,” whereby one passes from representation to imitatio. To imitate — or repeat — the actions of Jesus introduces three different kinds of corporeality into Christianity. Asceticism and martyrdom permit the corpo-real imitatio, in that through repetition they re-live the sufferings of Jesus. In both cases this is, admittedly, an externally imposed burden — one for which, however, a person resolves of their own accord. Ascetics and martyrs choose this torture of their own free will — a torture that, in the case of the martyrs, is made analogous to the crucifixion of Christ and thus constitutes a god-forsaken experience, agonising in both soul and body. At the same time one must ask to what extent this kind of imitatio corresponds to a sound exegesis of Christianity, since humanity has already been redeemed through Christ’s death on the cross, and this feat therefore demands no repetition in the form of martyrdom. That suffering holds a high place in Christianity is surely indisputable; yet the handling of it oscillates always between a nearness to God thereby made possible and the hope — or belief — of having been redeemed from it.
Stigmata are the third possibility of imitatio, one that differs, however, from the first two in that it presupposes no voluntariness. On the contrary, it is rather the unexpected appearance of the stigmata that is, among other things, constitutive of the imitatio. Despite this distinction, the foregoing criticism — whether this kind of suffering requires repetition — seems justified in the case of the stigmata as well. To what extent is the experience of Jesus’s suffering on the cross an affirmation of faith? If Jesus died for the redemption of humanity, then humanity cannot be redeemed once more through renewed suffering. At the same time, it is not only Jesus’s crucifixion that is inscribed in the stigmata as meaning, but also his resurrection, since they serve the Apostle Thomas as proof. Stigmata are thus not only bound up with Jesus’s suffering; they also point to — and thereby prove — his resurrection. The stigmata become the ex/impression of the divine, whereby the fleshly wounds oscillate between the corporeal and the figural. The stigmata are a wound of love from God, which, though they manifest corpo-really, must be read metaphorically. It is an inversion of the Christian transubstantiation, in which the outer shell of God changes — that is, the accidents of bread and wine remain the same while their substance changes. Bread and wine are thereby to be read not metaphorically but as the actual body and blood of Christ. With the stigmata it is the reverse, in so far as the wounds are indeed the physical imitatio of Jesus, yet this corporeality masks its figural meaning. The stigmata are thus a corporeal metaphor: they feign immanence but in fact represent transcendence.
Here an unexpected parallel opens up with the medium of film, which likewise, through its claim to — or effect of — realism, feigns an immanence — presents itself as self-enclosed — in order to prevent any crossing over into transcendence. The imprints of light burned onto the film strip are the physical and physicalist evidence that conceals the transcendent experience. Film generates transcendence not because of but despite its realism. Realism does not seem to be a top priority in Rupert Wainwright’s film Stigmata (1999). The film’s historicity reveals itself not only in an ecstatic storm of cuts — a staccato back-and-forth between shaky close-ups, with action scenes flickering fragmentarily across the screen — but also in its artificial colour palette, whose over-stylised contrasts take their cue from an MTV aesthetic. This hyper-artificiality stands diametrically opposed to the rationality of the priest Andrew Kiernan, played by Gabriel Byrne, who has given up his profession as a scientist and now, on the Church’s behalf, examines miracles for their credibility, or authenticity. Paradoxically, his task is not one of confirmation but merely one of refutation, whereby he is in fact to prove a negative — namely, that the phenomena are not a matter of divine agency. Yet in precisely this respect Stigmata is profoundly religious, for it understands that faith is constituted also through an un-provability, which is why only an “it-is-no-miracle” can be confirmed — one that, however, permits no converse inference. It is much the same with the stigmata, whose corporeality — that is, their positivistic element — can by no means be adduced as revelation or proof of God.
At the same time, the film does not trust its own faith and gives itself over to a postmodern scepticism that needs empirical proof in order to believe. The hairdresser Frankie Paige, played by Patricia Arquette, draws the Vatican’s attention with her stigmata, and the Vatican sends Kiernan to investigate. The marks, however, are not only wounds of love; entirely in keeping with horror convention, it is the fleshly suffering that stands in the foreground. In postmodernity, faith must be externalised, since in the digital age a fundamental scepticism prevails that does not accept an inwardness. Yet here the postmodern snake bites its own tail, since even the bodily proof is now no more than a reference to a further reference. The stigmata from which Frankie suffers are no direct reference to Jesus. Instead she is haunted by the spirit of a dead priest who, by means of an apocryphon, seeks to strip the institution of the Church of its power, and who himself suffered the stigmata. Frankie’s stigmata thus become the reference of a reference to a reference. The citation of Jesus becomes a “floating signifier.”
The film Stigmata opens up a critical perspective on the representation of the transcendent in postmodern culture. It balances on the narrow ridge between immanence and transcendence, between bodily presence and metaphysical meaning. In a world marked by digital scepticism, the body becomes the arena of spiritual proofs; yet even these physical manifestations dissolve into a chain of references. The postmodern condition mirrored in the film thus transforms religious experience into a complex play of signs, in which the direct connection to the divine appears increasingly fragile. This development calls into question not only the representability of the transcendent but also the nature of faith itself in a media-mediated reality.
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