Abstract
Karen O’Donnell’s Broken Bodies explores the relatively new field of trauma theology. As she notes in her first chapter, the study of trauma itself is a relatively new discipline, having emerged with psychiatry only towards the end of the nineteenth century. As we are increasingly aware from neuro-psychiatric research into trauma, it can often have as powerful an effect on the body as on the mind. O’Donnell makes a convincing case in this work for Christians – Christianity, after all, being a religion of the body par excellence – to take trauma seriously as a theological question. Starting in good feminist fashion from the highly personal experience of pregnancy loss, O’Donnell moves swiftly to the central mystery of Christian belief: the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God incarnate. It is, as she reminds us, a bloody, fleshly, bodily central mystery. Indeed, reading this book, I was struck by how comfortable a term ‘incarnation’ is: ‘the enfleshed God’ might serve to draw us back to the bodily reality of our faith.
One of the great strengths of this book is O’Donnell’s thoughtful analysis of the writings on the body of a wide range of early Christian authors. Indeed, the early chapters could serve as a wonderful introduction to the thought of some of the great Fathers – Irenaeus of Lyon (somewhat unusually described as ‘of Lugdunum’), Ambrose of Milan, Athanasius, Justin Martyr, John Damascene and Cyril of Alexandria, among others – and the development of Christological doctrines in the early Church.
Chapter 2 offers a powerful and unusual understanding of the Eucharist as breast milk in the early Church, and its derivation from both Scripture and the early Church’s self-understanding as a family as well as the Body of Christ. O’Donnell builds on this groundwork in the following chapter, in which she carefully unpicks the fifth-century debate about whether Mary may be called God-bearer (Theotokos) or only Christ-bearer (Christotokos). The implications of this debate for eucharistic theology and practice are often overlooked, and here O’Donnell has offered an important corrective.
The following chapters deal with the Eucharist in terms of priesthood and sacrifice. Again, there is a helpful account of the different understandings of priesthood among various denominations, as well as the typological readings of Mary as Temple/priest. Turning to the Eucharist as sacrifice, O’Donnell encourages us to move away from Old Testament models of sacrifice towards a more Trinitarian understanding, using Gregory of Nazianzus’s model of the mutual indwelling of the persons, or perichoresis. Certainly, a move away from any interpretation of the Eucharist that encourages an understanding of Christianity as the perfect successor to Judaism is to be welcomed.
An area I would have liked to see further developed is the question of the Passover. While the Passover/Easter celebration is one of joy, the events recounted and remembered in the Exodus narrative central to both festivals are surely the very definition of a traumatic experience, albeit shared by the community rather than individual. I would also have liked more on the Kollyridians, a group of women dedicated to Mary who were active in the Christian East in the fourth and fifth centuries but who have largely disappeared from the record. In a book constructed around the female trauma of reproductive loss, this is an unfortunate omission. These are minor gripes, however, and overall O’Donnell is to be congratulated for her important contribution to this emerging field.