Dismemberment,Dualism,and Theology of the Body in the Gospel of Matthew

The Dismemberment Logia

The dismemberment logia include two instances of Jesus telling his followers to rid themselves of offending body parts (right eye and right hand in 5:29–30; hand, foot, or eye in 18:8–9). Moving to a different body part, in 19:12 Jesus praises those “who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Finally, in Matthew 24, Jesus tells a parable about slaves managing themselves in their master's absence. If the slaves are industrious and the master finds them working when he returns, the master will reward them. However, if a slave uses the master's absence as a license for wickedness, the master will return and discover the slave's wickedness with dire results for the slave: “He [i.e. the master] will cut him [i.e. the wicked slave] in pieces and put him with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (24:51).

In all four cases, Jesus talks about dismemberment, the cutting up or cutting off of body parts. However, dismemberment, in the usual sense of cutting off limbs, does not capture the range of disfiguring actions of which Jesus speaks here. An eye is not cut off, but rather plucked out, and becoming a eunuch does not necessarily involve cutting off genitals (it can refer to crushing genitals as well). It might be tempting to borrow the concept of mutilation from Tracy Lemos's study of the Hebrew Bible; she defines mutilation as “a negatively constructed somatic alteration” (226). The actions of which Jesus speaks in these logia certainly would fall within the category of mutilation, but this category is too broad. In these logia Jesus talks about a subset of mutilation, actions involving somatic alterations that are not merely negatively construed, but permanently debilitating or even fatal. Whether the body is cut or not, the result is the functional equivalent of dismemberment. I will therefore use “dismemberment” in an expanded sense to refer to actions in which someone cuts off, or otherwise violently and permanently disables, a body part resulting in a permanent loss of some important bodily function, including even life itself.

I am interested in how Matthew's Jesus talks about dismemberment and the understanding of the body that this rhetoric presupposes. Thus, I will not discuss narratives in the First Gospel when someone is dismembered, such as the beheading of John the Baptist (14:10–11) and the cutting off of the slave's ear at Jesus' arrest (26:51). Rather my focus will remain on the four dismemberment logia. The majority of commentators have taken these logia as hyperbolic or metaphoric (Davies & Allision: 3:23; Luz: 502–03; Keener: 471; Quesnell; Talbott); although some have suggested that Matthew 19:12 refers to literal eunuchs (Hester). I will not attempt to determine which of these sayings Jesus actually said or to interpret what Jesus meant when he said them. Rather, my interest here is to examine the underlying conception of the body—especially control of the body—that these sayings about dismemberment represent, and the roots of this conception in both Jewish and non-Jewish literature.

Dismemberment in the Hebrew Bible

Perhaps the most famous instance of dismemberment in the Hebrew Bible is the lex talionis: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Exod 21:22, parallels in Lev 24:20, Deut 19:21). Despite its notoriety, the lex talionis does not represent the Torah's general penal philosophy. Almost never do the specific Mosaic laws enjoin dismemberment to punish a crime. The rare exception comes in Deuteronomy 25:11–12: “If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his genitals, you shall cut off her hand; show no pity.” Other than this statute, the Mosaic Law does not order dismemberment as punishment, making it unusual among ancient near eastern law codes, which frequently prescribe dismemberment as punishment (Cortez: 445). Perhaps this rare injunction for penal dismemberment stems from a special concern to prevent male genital dismemberment. Deuteronomy makes clear the importance of male genital integrity: “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord” (23:1).

Though dismemberment did not have a significant disciplinary role within Israel, it did serve as a way Israel and its neighbors sought to exert control over each other. After the death of Joshua, Simeon and Judah war against Adoni-bezek: “Adoni-bezek fled; but they pursued him, and caught him, and cut off his thumbs and big toes. Adoni-bezek said, ‘Seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off used to pick up scraps under my table; as I have done, so God has paid me back’” (Judg 1:6–7). This king dismembers his conquered foes, a strategy that the Israelites use on him. Through dismemberment the bodies of the conquered become means of controlling them.

Putting out a conquered enemy's eyes frequently occurs in the Hebrew Bible. When the Philistines captured Samson, they gouged out his eyes (Judg 16:21). Nahash the Ammonite offers the following terms to end his siege of Jabesh-gilead: “On this condition I will make a treaty with you, namely that I gouge out everyone's right eye, and thus put disgrace upon all Israel” (1 Sam 11:2). After Zedekiah's unsuccessful rebellion against Nebuchadnezzar, the victorious Babylonians “slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, then put out the eyes of Zedekiah; they bound him in fetters and took him to Babylon” (2 Kgs 25:7, paralleled in Jer 39:7). In these cases, dismemberment brings not only pain, but also shame, making it an especially potent weapon in degrading one's enemies (Lemos: 230–33, 236–39).

Conquerors also killed their enemies by dismemberment. After Saul defeated the Amalekites but failed to follow the divine command to kill their king Agag, Samuel rebuked him and then “hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal” (1 Sam 15:33). Through dismemberment the God of Israel also exerted supremacy over the gods of Israel's neighbors. When the Philistines captured the Ark and placed it in the temple of their god Dagon, a contest of deities ensued: “Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord, and the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off upon the threshold; only the trunk of Dagon was left to him” (1 Sam 5:4). God threatens Israel itself with a similar punishment: “And those who transgressed my covenant and did not keep the terms of the covenant that they made before me, I will make like the calf when they cut it in two and passed between its parts” (Jer 34:18). The allusion is to Genesis 15, in which Abraham cuts livestock in half and God passes through them to ratify God's covenant with Abraham.

Dismemberment in these cases represents the punishment reserved for the enemies of Israel and its God. However, sometimes dismemberment is unprovoked, as in the case of the Levite's concubine: “he cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel” (Judg 19:29). Dismemberment here represents the moral breakdown that occurred when “there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judg 21:25). The rape and dismemberment of the concubine trigger the orgy of internecine violence that almost destroys the tribe of Benjamin. The rending of the concubine's body symbolizes and causes the disintegration of the covenant community.

For the most part, violent dismemberment controls the hostile other and is reserved almost exclusively for the foreign enemy. Only rarely does it serve to punish an Israelite law-breaker, as in the case of the woman who assaults a man's genitals. When dismemberment occurs within Israel, it represents either God's punishing those who violate the covenant, as in Jeremiah 34:18, or the breakdown of the community, as in the case of the Levite's concubine.

Circumcision notably subverts this pattern in which cutting off a body part is reserved for the outsider; the males here have a part of their bodies cut off in order to be included in the covenant community. However, circumcision does not result in a permanent loss of function the way that cutting off a hand or foot, plucking out an eye, or becoming a eunuch does; it is not dismemberment as I have defined the term. Nor even is it mutilation, for it is not negatively construed within the people of Israel. However, the temporary debilitation of circumcision does become a tool of war, as when Dinah's brothers avenge her rape by convincing all the males in Shechem to be circumcised and then killing them while they recuperated (Gen 34:1–31).

Dismemberment in Greco-Roman Literature

In Greek and, later, Roman literature dismemberment served much the same purpose as it does in the Hebrew Bible: enacting political dominance. Dismemberment may be a tool of warfare, such as when Herodotus describes the Egyptians tearing the men on a Persian ship limb from limb or when Livy describes the Lucanians dismembering the enemy general Alexander of Epirus (Histories 3.13; Ab Urbe Condita 8.24.14). Rulers also use dismemberment to control their vassals and to punish opponents. Arrian tells of Alexander the Great punishing a rebellious governor by having his nose and the tips of his ears cut off (Anabasis Alexandri 4.7.3). When Xerxes' vassal Pythios requested that Pythios' son be excused from military service, Xerxes responded to what he viewed as an insolent request by having the son cut into two (Herodotus, Histories 7.39). Suetonius counts among instances of Caligula's brutality his ordering people be sawed in half because they had criticized his shows (Caligula 27). Masters use dismemberment to discipline slaves (Seneca, On Anger 5.40; Suetonius, Caligula 32). As in the Hebrew Bible, dismemberment serves as a means of domination, something the powerful impose on the powerless.

However, in contrast to the Hebrew Bible, Greek literature also presents examples of voluntary dismemberment as the lesser of two evils, the most obvious example of which is amputation of a limb for medical reasons (Hippocrates, On Joints 69). Celsus, writing in the 1^st century ce, discusses the treatment of aggressive limb infections in which “there is one sad and solitary remedy to secure the safety of the rest of the body, that is to cut away the limb which is gradually dying” (On Medicine 5.26). In some cases, the physician and patient must subordinate saving a limb to saving a life.

The example of amputation, in which one injures a part for the good of the whole, provided fertile ground for metaphors among rhetoricians. Qunitilian provides a representative example: “As physicians amputate mortified limbs, so must we lop away foul and dangerous criminals, even though they be bound to us by ties of blood” (Institutio Oratoria 8.3.75). Amputation serves as a powerful analogy for taking necessary, but unpleasant, action (Xenophon, Memorobilia 1.54; Plato, Symposium 205e; Boring: 114). Similarly, moralists use dismemberment to describe self-control. Seneca exhorts, “If any vice rend your heart, cast it away from you; and if you cannot be rid of it in any other way, pluck out your heart also” (Moral Epistles 51.13). Likewise, the Sentences of Sextus instruct, “cast away any part of the body that would cause you not to live abstinently. For it is better to live abstinently without this part than ruinously with it” (Sentences of Sextus 13).

While rhetoric and moral instruction could invoke metaphoric dismemberment, war provided a setting for suffering literal dismemberment in the pursuit of higher gains. The Amazons were renowned for cutting off their right breasts so that they could draw bows and throw javelins (Strabo, Geography 11.5.1; Apollodorus, Library 2.5.9). Demosthenes recounts what Philip of Macedon suffered in his conquests:

This description of Philip's wounds served as a source for retellings and elaborations throughout antiquity well into the Common Era (Riginos: 103–19). Plutarch describes how Alexander comforted his father who was annoyed by the disability his leg injury caused him: “Be of good cheer, father, and go on your way rejoicing, that at each step you may recall your valor” (Moralia 331b—De alexandri magni fortuna aut virtute). Philip exemplifies one sacrificing the parts of his body to achieve glory in war (Riginos: 118).

Dismemberment in Second Temple Judaism

Second Temple Jewish literature reflects these wider Hellenistic trends. Dismemberment remains a powerful tool in controlling one's enemies (Jdt 13:8; Josephus, Ant. 10.186, Life 171–73, J.W. 2.642–44). However, as in other Greek literature, people undergo dismemberment voluntarily, or at least as the lesser of two evils. In Philo's gloss of Deuteronomy 25:11–12, the punishment becomes a way of disciplining urges: “Therefore, O soul (psyche) that is obedient to the teacher, you must cut off your own hand and power whenever it begins to grab hold of the genitals, that is of created things or of human pleasures (anthropeion spoudasmaton)” (Dreams 2.68). Genitals symbolize earthly desires, and cutting off the hand then symbolizes the soul's discipline in abstaining from these desires.

Fond of allegory though he is, Philo also recognizes literal dismemberment as a way of subordinating bodily integrity to higher goals. He claims that wise people would prefer to lose their eyes or tongues rather than be forced to see or say something they should not. He goes on to provide an example:

He forcefully concludes, “it is better to be made a eunuch than to be hurried into wickedness by the fury of the illicit passions” (Worse 175–76). Through willingly undergoing dismemberment, the wise person reasserts control by breaking the hold of both torturer and illicit desire.

Philo is not alone in seeing perseverance in the face of torture as a particularly noteworthy example of willing dismemberment. According to the 2^nd century bce Martyrdom of Isaiah, the prophet can avoid the sentence of being sawn in two if he will recant his prophecies against King Manasseh (Knibb: 143–54). Isaiah refuses: “While Isaiah was being sawed in half, he did not cry out, or weep, but his mouth spoke with the Holy Spirit until he was sawed in two” (Mart. Isa. 5.14). Even as he is being completely dismembered, Isaiah does not waver.

Dismemberment also figures prominently in the torture of the Maccabean martyrs, as Antiochus IV Epiphanes has them scalped and their tongues, hands, and feet cut off (2 Macc 7:4). The third brother exemplifies their responses:

The martyr willingly undergoes dismemberment for the higher purpose of obeying God's law.

In this case, the specifically Jewish idea of the resurrection allows the martyr to undergo dismemberment with equanimity, secure in the knowledge that any lost body parts will be restored to him. The idea of restoration in the resurrected body finds expression in Rabbinic literature, as when Resh Lakish claims “They shall rise with their defects and then be healed” (b. Sanh. 91b. See also Ecclesiates Rabbah 1.4.2).

Irony abounds in that the story of the Maccabean martyrs' resistance to Hellenistic enculturation uses the Hellenistic trope of willingly suffering dismemberment. When 4 Maccabees retells this same story, the brothers become exemplars for the very Greek idea of reason's control over emotion (Moore & Anderson: 249–73). While being dismembered, the first brother taunts his torturers:

The Maccabean martyrs, demonstrating that they have enough self-control to obey God's law under duress, thus affirmatively answer the question that opens the treatise: “whether devout reason is sovereign over the emotions” (4 Macc 1:1). Their unflinching willingness to sacrifice their bodies gives them control even over their enemies: “All people, even their torturers, marveled at their courage and endurance, and they became the cause of the downfall of tyranny over their nation. By their endurance they conquered the tyrant” (4 Macc 1:11). In willing dismemberment, one's body becomes the locus for self-control against an outside power.

The Dismemberment Logia in Context

The employment of dismemberment in Jewish and non-Jewish literature provides the context for Matthew's dismemberment logia. In the parable of the wicked slave (Matt 24:45–51), the master's behavior is not beyond the bounds of literary convention. The story of a master punishing his disobedient slave by dismemberment is not unique to Matthew (Beavis: 42–43).

The master in this parable represents God coming in eschatological judgment. As much as a dismembering God might trouble modern sensibilities, such an image often occurs in the Hebrew Bible. The implicit threat of this parable echoes the explicit threat that God makes in Jeremiah to cut in half those who have broken the covenant (Friedrichsen: 258–64). Whether intentionally alluding to Jeremiah or not, the parable fits into the wider tradition of which Jeremiah is a part: dismemberment expresses God's power to punish.

The other dismemberment logia point to a different background. Willingly undergoing dismemberment is not a common theme in the Hebrew texts. However, it does appear in the Hellenistic tradition. Matthew fits into the pattern of Jewish authors, like Philo and the authors of 2 and 4 Maccabbees, who adopted this Greek way of thinking about dismemberment. Many scholars believe that at least some of these dismemberment logia stem from the historical Jesus himself (Meier: 1:343–45; 3:441; Davies & Allision 3:24–25). If these difficult and often embarrassing (to us) sayings do go back to the historical Jesus, then Jesus himself would be another Jew who adopted rhetoric about dismemberment from the wider Hellenistic environment.

Notably absent in these dismemberment logia is any promise that the lost body part will be restored in the resurrection. Jesus says, “it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than to have two hands or two feet and to be thrown into the eternal fire” (Matt 18:8), without voicing any expectation that those who have lost their hands or feet will regain them. The Gospel of John provides a parallel, in which the resurrected body of Jesus bears his pre-mortem wounds (John 20:27). Jesus' dismemberment logia do not share with the Maccabean martyrs or the Rabbis the explicit hope that lost body parts will be restored; rather the follower of Jesus is to be, mutatis mutandis, like Philip of Macedon: ready to sacrifice any and every part of his or her body, if only the life of the shattered remnant should be eternal.

Throughout the literature here reviewed, discourse about dismemberment is discourse about control, a control achieved by means of violence inflicted on the human body. Matthew is no exception. The parable of the wicked servant insists that, despite any apparent absence, God will execute control violently. With this outcome assured, the proper course of action is to practice self-control and to imitate the just servant in the parable. The other dismemberment logia illustrate the rigor of this self-control. The threat of eschatological judgment requires a proper ordering of priorities, and one must exercise sufficient self-control, including control over one's body, to make the necessary and painful sacrifices for the sake of the greater good, or at least of avoiding the greater evil.

Such discourse of control involves an idea of the body as other. Whether the ruler is Nebuchadnezzar, Caligula, or God, the idea is clear: through dismemberment the powerful control others by means of the others' bodies. However, when dismemberment represents self-control, the distinctions become less clear. On the one hand, one's own body is viewed as other, as an object to be disciplined and controlled by the self. On the other hand, the body remains one's own, which is why the sacrifice of a part is so painful and can therefore signify self-control. The self and the body are at the same time identified with each other and alienated from each other. This complicated dynamic is epitomized in Jesus' command in 18:8 to cast away the hand or foot. The hand and the foot have their own agency in causing the person to stumble. Cornell has interpreted this assignment of agency to the body parts as parody: it is so obvious that one's hand or foot does not have its own will that to suggest they might satirizes the idea that the body is somehow separate from the deciding self (Cornell: 270–90). However, I do not detect signs of parody in Jesus' words. Given the affinities of this saying (and the other dismemberment logia) with the literature reviewed above, it is better to view Matthew 18:8 as genuinely expressing a conception of the human body: the body parts are somehow other than, and working to the detriment of, the person. However, they remain “your hand or foot,” so intimately part of oneself that they must be cut off in order for their influence to be tamed. In this way of thinking, one's body is not totally one's own. Parts of a person's body can require extirpation.

These complex ideas about the human body in the dismemberment logia would prove important in later Christian thought. As Ignatius of Antioch describes his eagerness for martyrdom, he exclaims, “Let fire and the cross, let the crowds of wild beasts; let tearings, breakings, and dislocations of bones; let cutting off of members [synkope melon]; let shatterings of the whole body; and let all the dreadful torments of the devil come upon me; only let me attain to Jesus Christ” [Rom. 5:3]. Ignatius subordinates his own bodily integrity to attaining Christ, just as Matthew's Christ instructed his followers to subordinate their bodily integrity to salvation. Even though Matthew does not use dismemberment to talk about martyrdom, the various dismemberment logia are of a piece with later Christian martyrological discourse.

The ideas about the human body implicit in Matthew's dismemberment logia also found expression in later Christian asceticism. While the canonical Jesus does enjoy a good banquet, his dismemberment logia have an affinity for the logic of asceticism: one's body is an object to be disciplined and controlled in pursuit of holiness. Clement of Alexandria could employ the metaphor of becoming a eunuch to discuss the ascetic virtue of enkrateia (self-control or continence): “It is continence (enkrateia) to despise money, softness, property, to hold in small esteem outward appearance, to control one's tongue, to master evil thoughts.… It is good if for the sake of the kingdom of heaven a man emasculates himself from all desire” (Stromata 3.7.59). This is not to assert that these sayings of Jesus were somehow the cause of the Christian ascetic tradition, much as they were not the cause of the Christian martyrological tradition. Nevertheless, the traditions of both the martyrs and ascetics manifest the ideas about the body implicit in the dismemberment logia.

Theological Implications

The Matthean Jesus' distinction between body and self appears outside the dismemberment logia as well. Jesus warns his followers, “Do not fear those who kill the body (soma) but cannot kill the soul (psyche)” (Matt 10:28). Similarly, when the disciples fall asleep in Gethsemane, Jesus laments, “The spirit (pneuma) indeed is willing, but the flesh (sarx) is weak” (Matt 26:41). If introducing body-self dualism into Christianity dangerously perverted the truth of embodied goodness, then Matthew's Jesus is complicit in this perversion. In the dismemberment logia especially we see the dynamic of control and domination within this dualism that many body theologians find so harmful.

The theological objections to dualism have not arisen solely out of ethical concerns about the denigration and domination of bodies. New discoveries in neuroscience have found anatomic locations for various aspects of consciousness and have called forth theological responses seeking to affirm unity of body and mind or soul (Green: 16–35). However, even as neuroscience shows the links between the mind and the body, it also reveals estrangement. In alien hand syndrome, for instance, a brain lesion causes a person to regard one of his or her own limbs as alien, as having a will of its own beyond the person's control (Scepkowski & Cronin-Golomb). Patients with xenomelia regard their bodies as deformed by the presence of a normal limb such that they seek the healthy limb's amputation (Hilti et al.). Perhaps these disorders represent extreme forms of a more pervasive alienation of the body and the self.

Contemporary phenomenological approaches to health and disease have also recognized this alienation between the self and the body (Burwood; Warsop; Svanaeus: 111; Toombs: 58–62). These thinkers have relied, in part, on Richard Zaner's appropriation of Freud's category of the uncanny in their analyses of the relationship between self and body (Zaner: 49–55). While recognizing the fundamental unity of himself and his body, Zaner also notes, “it is just as fundamental that it [i.e. my body] is experienced as radically other than me” (49). This juxtaposition of familiarity and alienation causes the sensation of the uncanny. This experience of alienation from the familiar body explains the attraction of dualistic anthropology and the resistance to a more integrated account of the body (Burwood). As Zaner puts it, “One wants to say, ‘I am my body,’ yet my body resists this effort to identify myself with it, just as I can distance myself from it, or find myself distanced from it (somethimes pathologically, though by no means only then)” (55). Zaner's analysis here mirrors Bultmann's interpretation of soma in Paul: the soma embodies the self and outwardly expresses intentionality, and yet the person as soma experiences him or herself as subjected to forces beyond his or her intentionality (Bultmann: 194–96). The body both expresses and resists the will; it is simultaneously intimate and alien. The dismemberment logia speak to this alien aspect of the body.

Just as we cannot ignore dualism as a later pagan intrusion into a pristine Judeo-Christian anthropology, neither can we deny this dualism a basis in the experience of our bodies. But if this dualism cannot simply be expunged from Christian theology, then Christianity must face the dangers body theologians have identified in dualism. The theological task becomes incorporating a Jesus who speaks of one's body as something foreign and requiring control into a theology that does not lead to the bodily denigration and domination discussed at the beginning of this essay.

One potentially attractive option is to create a non-hierarchical dualism, one that recognizes the distinction between the bodily and non-bodily self, but that does not subjugate the former to the latter (McCulloch). While such a non-hierarchical dualism presents itself as an attractive option, one must fear that “the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself” (Derrida: 42; Trisk: 119–22). Especially in the case of the dismemberment logia, where control of the body looms so large, it seems that this dualism is ever likely to tilt towards asymmetry and subordination of the body.

The hierarchical dualism of body and self calls for deconstruction, but such a deconstruction need not collapse the two elements into a unity; the dualism can instead collapse into a multiplicity. The body itself is composite; the dismemberment logia call attention to the various parts: hands, feet, eyes, genitals. The non-bodily self is similarly plural. Thoughts come unbidden by the will, emotions conflict, ideas diverge. Furthermore, the relationships we have to other selves and to the physical environment situate and partially constitute the self, and these relationships introduce another level of alterity and multiplicity to the self. Both in our bodily and non-bodily selves, we humans are a multiplex of potentially conflicting elements. To the extent that the centripetal force of our identity pulls these diverse elements together, we experience ourselves as cohesive unities. However, the existence of this plurality implies the possibility of conflict among the various components of our selves and the experience of part of our selves as alien.

Sometimes the conflict of the parts can threaten total disintegration of the self. The gangrenous foot threatens the very existence of the person. Occasionally, the only way to maintain integrity is to exercise the sort of extirpation that fills the dismemberment logia. But it is not only the body that can threaten the person in this way. Some thoughts, emotions, and words must be excised as well, as Matthew's Jesus points out in the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount (5:27–48). Because relationships form a constituent part of our selves, a lack of control of conflicting elements potentially hurts others as well. In the parable of the wicked slave, the slave's wickedness manifests itself when “he begins to beat his fellow slaves” (Matt 24:49). While control can certainly lead to domination, its absence can do just as much harm.

Read in light of this multiplicity, the dismemberment logia need not underwrite a denigration of the body. Rather, they speak to the divisions within the self and the great effort needed to maintain its integrity. As Gerald P. McKenny puts it, “a Christian view of the body … will therefore interpret alterity—the body as it resists or opposes the dominion of will and intentionality–as the separation of the self from and within itself” (221). The uncanniness of the body is just the most obvious manifestation of the multiplicity of the self. The dismemberment logia speak to the difficulty (in that it requires giving up parts of ourselves) and the necessity (in that these parts to be given up threaten our destruction) of becoming integrated multiplexes.