6
The 2011 Moses Lectures: Instructions for Body & Soul
grieving the loss of her husband. Similarly, Jesus was made incarnate as a human male; he was circumcised, he felt the temptations of the flesh, he would have suffered “night emissions.” His incarnation sanctified male sexuality. He was the eternal Bridegroom of all Moravians, male and female, and single brothers were to look to him as a model of maleness and the object of desire. Married brothers were to conduct marital relations, sexual intercourse, as his viceroy, in his place. The manner in which this sacralization of the sexual was to be experienced was the topic of what were known as the speakings. It should be clear by now that in the Moravian church of the 18th century complete self-enlightenment was not to be achieved alone. This idea is in keeping with Michel Foucault’s description, in The History of Sexuality, of the shape a regimen of self-cultivation might take.4 Here Foucault points out that the care of the self necessitates not only time that is to be taken out of the business of the day and rather become the business of the day; it also requires company. Because, unlike the image of the solitary ascetic, tucked away in the woods or the tower, entering into the realm of self-examination, the modern pupil of the self needs an interlocutor. The examination of the self is a discursive process. “Taking care of oneself is not a rest cure,” argues Foucault. “There is the care of the body to consider, health regimens, physical exercises without overexertion, the carefully measured satisfaction of needs.” There are meditations, readings, and spiritual exercises. And then there are the conversations, “the talks one has with a confidant, with friends, with a guide or director. Add to this the correspondence in which one reveals the state of one’s soul, solicits advice, gives advice to anyone who needs it— which for that matter constitutes a beneficial exercise for the giver, who is called the preceptor, because he thereby reactualizes it for himself. Around the care of the self there developed an entire activity of speaking and writing in which the work of oneself on oneself and communication with others were linked together” (emphasis added). 5 Foucault provides us with the important insight that the care of the self is a “true social practice”6 in that it involves not only a formal structure of “professional” caregivers but also a network of friends, kinship, and mutual obligation or reciprocity. And in this self-relation manifestations of the maladies of the soul and body are intertwined: “in fact the focus of attention in these practices of the self is the point where the ills of the body and those of the soul can communicate with one another and exchange their distresses: where the bad habits of the soul can entail physical miseries, while the excesses of the body manifest and maintain the failings of the soul.”7 Within the 18th century Moravian Church, this social practice of speaking about the self ’s body and soul is fundamental to the creation of both a group and an individual identity. Speaking, investigating, questioning, relating the experiences of the body and the soul to a confidante constitute a central moment in Moravian lives.