Arma Christi
This is my exploration of the sapphic form through the religious context of Christ’s wounds, and the importance attributed to his side in medieval beliefs of Christianity. Inspired from personal manuscripts of women in medieval Europe, Christ’s wounds represent divine compassion for his pain and suffering; the key to salvation. The side wound of Christ is a holy trauma that should be indulged in; poked and prodded with instruments of passion and consecrated in the sapphic form. As I explore, ideas of indulgence and loveliness come to be, in a time when discipline and righteousness were iconic within the Catholic religion.
The togetherness that Christ’s body forms to that of the female form is so hidden within, yet so sacred and empowering in an age where the holy was recognized through the feminine. This idea feels perverse for the past, yet too understated for the contemporary, where an air of discord and division are all around. Why does femininity feel like an attack now, when the female body has been long regarded as a divine, spiritual place of piety?
“With that, he tenderly placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her towards the wound in his side. ‘Drink, daughter, from my side,’ he said, ‘and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight that your very body, which for my sake you have denied, shall be inundated with its overflowing goodness.’ Drawn close in this way, … she fastened her lips upon that sacred wound, … and there she slaked her thirst.”*
*Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns, quoted in Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 188.