Perhaps the Nails Run the Other Way: A Review of The Body of this Death

In the conclusion of his Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, the great nouveaux théologien Henri de Lubac writes:

Wherever a Christian’s meditations may have led him, he is always brought back, as by a natural bias, to the contemplation of the cross. The whole mystery of Christ is a mystery of resurrection, but it is also a mystery of death.

It may not be a surprise, then, that such contemplations form the “natural bias” of The Body of this Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster. Published in 2025 by Word on Fire Academic, this book is perhaps closest in genre to an epistolary novel but defies easy categorization. Its author, Ross McCullough, is an Associate Professor of Theology at George Fox University. Whatever form best describes the fictional elements of this book, it is first and foremost a work of Catholic theology written in defiance of a dystopian near-future closely resembling our present.

That hypothetical (or, perhaps, imminent and assured) near-future is what makes this book so stomach-churning and so vital. I have not experienced such a sustained feeling of dread since Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. These are vastly different books, but they are eerily joined in one respect: confronting the prospect of an inevitable alteration to human being. VanderMeer’s Area X perpetuates irrevocable ontological change in those who enter it. McCullough’s sparsely described and diabolically named “transfiguration,” now the beneficent tool of a “liberal” state, hints at a benign immortality at much the same cost. Naturally, it is reserved for the most recidivistic criminals.

More terrifying still and more prescient is IR (Immersive Reality). The Archbishop describes it as follows:

Most people, most of the time, will choose immersive reality instead. It will be like the transhumanists: having to go through the trouble of the whole thing, with all the uncontrolled side effects and the impossibility of reversing the procedure…We would rather simulate enhancements at our leisure and maintain the option of returning to the familiar world than have to live with them and their consequences.

Hence perpetual digital surveillance, the “resurrection” of the dead, and endless distraction: “Oh brave new world that has such people in it.”

Nevertheless, The Body of this Death is not only concerned with the loss of our humanity to digital simulacra or surgical implant or extraction. The range of its 168 pages is immense and its application wide-ranging. The letters themselves are addressed to a Muslim woman, two close friends, a priest in the diocese, and a kind of agnostic or atheist. For all their brevity, they present a trove of aphorisms encompassing icons and parenthood, Islam and Kierkegaard. A few selections will indicate the quality of the whole:

At times, perhaps, the music can only be heard in moments of intense suffering, as the anesthetized nerve only fires when the stimulus is extreme, but still it is heard, and it sounds of something beyond suffering and anesthetic both. All of our inoculation against the real cannot protect us from it. “Whereas it is in the nature of meaning that not everything has it” –– there is Baudrillard’s basic error. To have meaning is the definition of thingness. Omnis natura rationem parit, Hugh of St. Victor says; all nature is pregnant with meaning, and nothing in the universe is without issue.”

To appreciate Christianity for its contribution to Western civilization is like reading Dostoevsky to increase one’s vocabulary.

Then too God’s word is confusing for not being deformed enough. Perhaps much of the Bible’s literary meaning comes as a report from the unfallen world, and where it fails to correspond to our events, that is less because Scripture is false than because history is. The unfallen world is what our world at bottom is, without the deprivations of sin, and perhaps what Scripture gives us, in places, is a history too true for us to recognize––not because of our blindness, in the first place, but because events themselves are not fully realized. Only in the second place does this present as a kind of blindness in us, as when someone affirms that we are married and we correct him to say that we are divorced, or speaks as if our daughter were alive and we respond that she is dead.

The problem with Catholics is that they are bad Catholics; the problem with Protestants is that they are also bad Catholics.

Every attempt at iconoclasm is only partial–or it is nihilism. For there is no other way to represent God than by things. You can prefer the idea to the image, but where did you get the idea? You can prefer the spirit to the flesh, but both are creatures. You can prefer the word of God to the body of God, his teaching to his touch; you can circumscribe the uncircumscribable within mere prophecy rather than within the full ambit of a human life–still it is a circumscription, and rather more a circumscription than allowing him all those unspoken ways in which one man is present to another and the God-man present to us all. All revelation is a temptation to idolatry, as the iconoclasts knew–and the iconodule knew better. The question is which icons teach us to see them, and so see all else, as icons, and which obscure their own iconicity.

Such range is achievable because the incarnation is the theological center of The Body of this Death. I am reminded of one of the great moments in St. John Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine:

I should myself call the Incarnation the central aspect of Christianity, out of which the three main aspects of its teaching take their rise, the sacramental, the hierarchical, and the ascetic… Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical all at once; it is esoteric; it is indulgent and strict; it is light and dark; it is love, and it is fear.

This book may stray too far into the esoteric, dark, and fearful corners of what the Archbishop calls “metamodernity.” Part of me embraces this because things like IR and, God forbid, “transfiguration” seem to be where our civilization is heading. Yet hope remains, and it is the hope of the incarnation, which the Archbishop describes as the “technology of Catholicism.” It is a hope ultimately bound up in the statement “Christ happens to things” rather than the other way round. In a dire moment, he reflects:

Christ is not nailed to the cross; the cross is nailed to Christ. It is not the savior that flees the world but the world that flees its salvation. You think you are here to discipline me, but perhaps the nails run the other way.

Because Christ “happens to things,” the Christian life is one immersed in materiality:

The givenness of the material thing, the fact that we constantly stub our toe against it: we cannot un- or re-purpose it at will. For the great danger of the immersive [the IR mentioned above], which after all is still half-bodied, is how little stubborn in this sense it is.

Just so.

I used “sparsely” a moment ago, and this adverb describes a strength and a weakness. The letters themselves, their arrangement, and sometimes their content remain perhaps too mysterious. In an “Introduction” evocative of Umberto Eco, an editor tells us that the manuscript before us is a kind of critical edition (complete with footnotes, but not, thankfully, an apparatus). This edition is the product of a handwritten copy in English from the diocesan archives of Buenos Aires and a Spanish translation sold in Copenhagen by a bankrupt Spanish bookseller. The editor describes the letters as a labyrinth. The Archbishop himself will use that word with specific reference to Borges. Borges would appreciate the form, and, perhaps, the mystery.

Intriguingly, the latter third of the collection is marked “posthumous letters,” and one can only speculate about why. Our fictional editor offers prosaic reasons, but the dust jacket hints at a hologram, and the title is taken from a translation of Romans 7:24 with an appropriate emphasis given to the near demonstrative pronoun (τοῦ σώματος τοῦ θανάτου τούτου – the body of death, this one).

Well. Which body? Which death? McCullough’s title invites Pauline answers. To the question in Romans 7, the answer is Christ and all that he entails: incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Thus also in 1 Corinthians 15, but there the response to “what kind of body?” is met with: “Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed…But God gives it a body as he has chosen.” In 2 Corinthians 3, we learn more: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same images from one degree of glory to another.” It is telling that we learn very little about the procedure of “transfiguration” beyond the detail that one’s eyes must be removed.

Nevertheless, The Body of This Death might have been still more profound and illuminating had McCullough chosen to give us further plot. Still, he never does us the disservice of watering anything down. I suspect readers in the market for this book will appreciate that.

I finished this book on Easter Sunday after reading it over the course of Holy Week. As de Lubac foretells, I found myself immersed in the mysteries of death and resurrection, in the incarnation and in the sacramental nature of a created existence: this body, this life, but also this body and this life joined to Christ’s (baptized into his death, co-buried, and co-raised as Paul says in Romans 6). By chance, I happened to finish Michael Tobin’s translation of Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest earlier that day. I was left with Bernanos’s “all is grace” in conversation with McCullough’s “Why seek so nearly imitated a presence when you can pass over to the original? Why, unless at bottom you do not want the original?” I cannot get it out of my mind.

Go and do likewise. Be haunted. Buy this book and read it. It makes a kind of devotional companion to Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine and Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making. For its theological mastery and its aphoristic craft, it also belongs with Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Augustine. The comparisons with Screwtape are apt, but McCullough has given us something more Catholic, less accessible, and more timely. If each of those qualities is simultaneously strength and weakness, so be it.

This essay is crossposted to The Enthusiast.

Image Credit: Caravaggio, “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” (1602)