ABSTRACT
In Lauretti Tommaso's sixteenth-century painting, the Triumph of Christianity, or the Exaltation of the Faith, the focal point is a crucifix raised on a plinth at the foot of which lies a shattered statue of Hermes, the classical god. Christ's bodies include those of the hungry, the naked and the imprisoned. And then, of course, there is the church, that collective body of Christ: writing to the Christians of Corinth St. The church is indeed to be found 'in warfare', warfare of many kinds – the church is militant in more senses than one. For Willy Maley, in his essay on Friedrich Engels, the church might just be found in class war, might just be militant in a political sense. As visible and invisible, seen and unseen, the church leads, in relation to the eye, a curiously double life, or even death.
