Noli me tangere in the Bible and in Literature Civilisations and Their Discontent Hedwig Schwall To become or not to become, that is the question of desire and distance, the question of existence. I. Introduction As the title indicates, W. B. Yeats’s play The Resurrection (1931) focuses on the question of the afterlife, which seems to boil down to the ques- tion of how the physical and the spiritual aspect of the human being relate to each other. Interestingly, it is the touch that yields the ultimate piece of ‘evidence’ for a wholly new paradigm of thought which is called Christian. The play stages four representatives, each of a different religion. First, there are the followers of Dionysus. In a wild ritual, they are enacting the god’s rebirth, ‘making it happen’ again. Meanwhile, three individuals are ready to defend the Apostles who are gathered in confusion after the execution of Jesus: one is a Hebrew, the other a Greek, the third is a Syrian. The Hebrew is disillusioned by the events. He has seen Jesus “carried… and the tomb shut upon him” 1 which convinces him that he was mistaken in his hope that Jesus would be the Messiah: one who would overcome the dominance of the bodily aspect: “He was nothing more than a man, the best man who ever lived,” 2 so he lapses back into a system of thought which privileges the body. The Greek positions himself at the other end of the spectrum: he is certain that “Jesus never had a human body; that he is a phantom and can pass through this wall… that he himself will speak to the apostles.” 3 This is indeed what happens later, when Christ walks towards them, unhindered by the wall. 1 William Butler Yeats, “The Resurrection,” The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1977), 584. 2 Ibid., 583. 3 Ibid., 590. 95024_Bieringer_08_Schwall.indd 223 13/02/12 07:33