I'm reading E.P. Thompson's historical account of the English working class. It's a fun book that covers all kinds of issues and phenomena. At the moment I am skimming through his elaboration of the relation of methodism (a religion of exploiters and exploited alike) to ideas about discipline and labour. His point seems to be that the language of methodism was used in order to prop up the horrid working conditions of early industrialism with religious talk about "the virtue of labour". His book includes a section - this guy is a sucker for digressions - in which he discusses the religious imagery of early 19th century methodism. He points out the sexual connotations of "Satan" - a penis - and Jesus - a womb or a vagina in the oblivion of which the wrecked sinner takes comfort. The love affair between the sinner and Jesus is depicted as a very disturbing one. And then there's the blood. Thompson quotes some hymns:
We thirst to drink Thy precious blood,
We languish in Thy wounds to rest,
And hunger for immortal food,
And long on all Thy love to feast.
In one of his priceless concluding remarks, Thompson (who has little sympathy for 'apologetic secularists') writes: "To labour and to sorrow was to find pleasure, and masochism was 'love'." (Thompson 1968, p. 409) - From this point of view, he says, it seems completely natural that the only worthy occupation from a religious point of view should be one that involves pain and repulsion. Grace is to be found in torture and abasement. Mr. Wesley himself praises the beauty of death in the following manner:
Ah, lovely appearance of Death!
No sight upon Earth is so fair,
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead Body compare.
(ibid. p. 410)
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