>The gospels don't tell us whether Christ "went to the bathroom",
>as the North Americans say.
>
>pm
>
In scholastic times, the question was discussed whether his human nature
included bodily functions like digestion and secretion (including
defaecation, if the word in English exists), and as I recall it the answer
in Thomas Aquinas was affirmative. It's somewhere in his commentary on Mt,
and I could try to look it up in my files if somebody urgently needs the
reference. Maybe I should add that my own interest to note it was not a
personal penchant to skatological topics, but the necessity to comment upon
Dante's circumscription of Muhammed's stomach as "il tristo sacco / che
merda fa di quel che si trangugia" (If 28,26s.). Commentators have always
had problems to digest this description, and they would probably have had
even greater problems if they had realised that and how the description of
Muhammed's body is related to the body of Christ.
The original question on this list was about laughing, and I think, although
I remember it only very vaguely, that in scholastic authors the answer was
not always negative (I certainly would not trust Eco on this point!). I
believe to have read, maybe even in Thomas, a discussion of his (attested)
weeping where it was argued that Jesus in fact did weep and did laugh.
Otfried Lieberknecht
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