Evil, Sexuality, and Disease in Grünewald’s Body of Christ

This wonderfully readable work by the Jungian analyst Eugene Monick is about an equally wondrous, if difficult, artwork. Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece, now located at Colmar in the Alsatian part of France, contains a strange and troubling image: a portrayal of Jesus’s body, skin yellowed and greened, covered with pus and scabs, thoroughly diseased. This image – what archetypal psychologists Rafael López-Pedraza, Niel Micklem, and Alfred Ziegler, following the poet José Lezama Lima, have called an “intolerable image” – constitutes both the wondrous and difficult dimensions of Monick’s theme. Surprising as it may seem with so distressing a topic, and like the Isenheim altarpiece itself, this book offers relief, a “welcome remedy to incessant blame,” as Monick himself puts it, an antidote to “the huge and fruitless effort of seeking a perfect and stainless way.” The fascination, then, is in seeing how a blemished image of Jesus paradoxically constitutes precisely a Christic sense of self without blemish. (David L. Miller)