The Hermeneutics of Desire in Medieval English Devotional Literature

Amanda Joan Wetmore

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto

Amanda Joan Wetmore

Doctorate of Philosophy

Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto

2018 Abstract

This dissertation explores the way medieval English devotional writers utilized the hermeneutics of contemporary biblical exegesis, in order to frame their depictions of an erotic and embodied encounter with the divine. The way they manipulate the construction of literal to allegorical realities enables—rather than constrains—the relationship of flesh to spirit, so that the desiring body does not disappear into discourse, but rather, language operates in service of the flesh, articulating a profoundly incarnational devotion, not divested of the body that produced it.

My first chapter explores these themes in Aelred of Rievaulx's (died 1167 CE) De institutione inclusarum and De Iesu puero duodennni, where I examine the way Aelred constructs an economy of affect through his manipulation of readers' desire through the focalization of their gaze on the body of Christ. In my second chapter, I analyze John Whiterig's (died 1371 CE)

Meditacio ad Crucifixum, and notably his erotic semiotics, and erotic interpretation of the

Crucifixion, following a four-fold biblical exegesis. Third, I look at the way the The Cloud of

Unknowing (late 1300s CE), as part of the “negative” or apophatic tradition, deconstructs some of the typical ideas of cataphatic devotion, positing its own way of accessing the indescribable divine, through darkness, silence, binding, and even anal eroticism. In this chapter, I use modern

BDSM (bondage, domination, and sado-masochism) as a comparative context with which to ii compare the Cloud's use of bondage and denial to achieve transcendence. Finally, I analyze the parable of the Lord and Servant in Julian of Norwich's (died 1416 CE) Long Text, in which I argue that Julian constructs her own “exegesis,” which both responds to and critiques the dominant hermeneutical modes of her day. Julian's parable demonstrates a metonymic structure of relations, in which the literal and spiritual levels are not hierarchized, but united.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many people for their support in completing this thesis. First, Grace Desa, you are the guardian angel of the Centre. Only a divine intelligence could know everything you know and do everything that you do. You have been there for me since the first day I got lost handing in my application to the MA program, and I have considered you to be such a kind and guiding force in my life since then. You work so hard and so thanklessly for everyone, and on behalf of us all: thanks, thanks, and ever thanks. The Centre simply wouldn't be the Centre without you.

Second, to my internal and external readers, Audrey Walton and Nicholas Watson, thank you for the time and care put into your insightful reading of this thesis, and for your generous comments and criticism moving forward to publication.

Third, to my committee, I am in awe of and eternally grateful for each of you. In the words of Joe Goering, as he walked past one of our meetings, "Amanda, you are surrounded by glory!" Jill, your courses on rhetoric and the body inspired my topic and quickly whipped me into shape at the graduate level. I still look through my notes from your courses fondly, and they continue to inspire me with new topics and ideas. Thank you for your ever-extensive help and notes on my drafts, which I have always looked forward to reading. Asking you to be on my committee was one of the smartest things I've ever done. Suzanne, I have had the wonderful opportunity to bask in your shadow in multiple ways: as a teacher, as a supervisor, and as Director of the Centre itself. Your hard work and brilliance have inspired and guided me in all three spheres. You are the embodiment of the kind of scholar, teacher, and administrator I want to be, and I am so grateful for your time and help while you positively shone in all three roles. And to the fourth (pseudo-)member of my committee, Will Robins, thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your help and support over the years. It was such a pleasure to TA for you twice! And last, but absolutely not least, David, you are the reason I am here at all. Thank you for your Chaucer class, one of the single greatest experiences of my undergraduate career, which turned me on to medieval studies in the first place. Thank you for taking me on as a student and setting the bar so high. Every single time I have left your office, I have been re-inspired and reinvigorated in my topic. I could not have stuck with it for so many years otherwise. Your wisdom, insight, and most importantly, your wit, have helped me through many an intellectual and emotional knot. You are the best supervisor I could have asked for, and have been a constant inspiration as a

iv thinker and as a human being. I cannot thank you enough for your consistent support and patient guidance. This thesis could never have happened without you.

Fourth, I have eternal gratitude for the wonderful community at the Centre, where I was especially blessed to find not one but four best friends. Madeleine Elson, you're my shining star, thank you so much for reading and commenting on my dissertation. I couldn’t have done it without you! Kasandra Castle, we're buddies for life. Thank you to both of you for reading my work and guiding me along the way! Sasha Gorjeltchan, thank you for keeping me sane and going to the gym with me to work out our stresses. Ben Durham, I cannot express what your incredible emotional support and sense of humour have meant to me. Thanks for getting me out of the bed in the morning and inspiring me with your energy and dedication. Most importantly, thank you for reading my dissertation for typos! A final huge thank you to the entire graduate community, whom I got to know better during the 2015 strike. Solidarity forever! Keep fighting the fight, CUPE 3902.

Fifth, thank you to all of my students throughout these years at U of T. I have had the most wonderful experience as a teacher, and I learned more from all of you than you did from me. Your diversity of ideas, voices, and talents has greatly inspired and challenged me, especially to justify the field and why we do what we do.

Sixth, to my family, Mom, Dad, Emily, I love you all so much and I don't deserve any of you. I will never be out of your debt. Thank you for your support, spiritually, emotionally, financially, psychologically, etc., and especially for putting up with me and my moods. Thank you also to my entire extended family, both Coyles and Wetmores, especially my godparents, Laurie McDonald and Charles Coyle. Your support and interest in my topic have meant the world to me. And, finally, Alison Coyle, I'm lumping you under family. Words cannot express what a great friend you've been to me. Thanks for taking me for walks and drives, listening to my rants, giving me hilarious and real advice, buying me tea and food every time we go out, and helping me through all of the hard times. Thank you for visiting me in the hospital every day when I was stuck there. I love you!

Finally, thank you to the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Medieval Academy of America for their financial support in completing this dissertation. s.d.g. v

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS vi

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER ONE 16

Erotic Tropology: The Semiotics of the Gaze in Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum and De Iesu puero duodenni

CHAPTER TWO 61

Knowledge in the Hands: Carnal Reading in John Whiterig’s Meditacio ad Crucifixum

CHAPTER THREE 112

‘Wrastlyng wiþ þat blynde nou3t’: Binding and Blinding in The Cloud of Unknowing

CHAPTER FOUR 155

‘It were all God’: The Hermeneutic of “Oning” in Julian of Norwich’s Parable of the Lord and Servant

CONCLUSION 192

Eros as Metonym

BIBLIOGRAPHY 199

INTRODUCTION This dissertation explores the way four medieval English devotional writers utilize the hermeneutic tools of medieval biblical exegesis, in order to frame their embodied and erotic affect for the divine, in Latin and Middle English, ranging from the late twelfth to the early fifteenth centuries. These four authors—Aelred of Rievaulx (died 1167 CE), John Whiterig (died 1371 CE), The Cloud of Unknowing author (late 1300s CE), and Julian of Norwich (died 1416 CE)—invite literal understandings of their sensual depictions of devotion to Christ, by manipulating the connection between literal and allegorical (or bodily and spiritual) meanings, in order to craft a relationship with the divine that is not divested of the erotic language that describes it. The carnal imagery that is used to incite desire for the divine, and to describe the connection between humanity and the divine, is not merely a metaphor or vehicle for an abstract or spiritual tenor. The desiring body is not sublimated under a spiritualized or allegorical truth; rather, the truths espoused in and by this erotic language are incarnated, and reach their fullest meaning in the longing bodies of both speaker and reader.

The erotic language of devotional literature is often traced back to the Bible’s own erotic love song, the Song of Songs or Canticum canticorum, and its related commentaries (Turner, Eros and Allegory 32-33). In the Middle Ages, the romantic relationship between the bride and bridegroom was interpreted as a signifier of the mystical connection between God and the collective Church, the individual soul, or the Virgin Mary (starting in the twelfth century) (Matter 28). Devotional writers appropriated not only the language and imagery of the Canticum, but also the interpretive framework of the commentaries, which led to a use of erotic language with spiritual significance in much medieval devotional literature. The exegetical relationship of language or image to meaning that devotional writers borrow constrains but also enables the connection between erotic language and spiritual significance. Some texts police the distance between their carnal language and spiritual significance, often by drawing attention to the nature of the allegory and encoding its required interpretation within the text itself.

For example, some exegetes, beginning with Origen, were quick to dismiss the carnal “literal level” of the Canticum, to explain it away as the useless “husk” containing the spiritual “kernel” (Astell 1-2). In this hierarchical relation of vehicle and meaning, eroticism is merely a signpost,

subordinated to invisible realities that supposedly remain untainted by it. Exegetical reading carefully frames and controls the erotic energies of a text, overlaying it with a spiritual meaning that, once reached, no longer requires its vehicle. However, the mere relation of vehicle to tenor, possible only because of similarities between the two, invites a comparison between the nature of erotic and spiritual loves. Certain devotional writers invited this comparison, by manipulating biblical material in their prescription of desire for God, and their construction of devotional practices for their readers. Such writers record how they wanted the lived body to participate in the real practice of devotion. For example, unlike medieval interpretations of the Canticum canticorum, in my sources a “kiss” between lovers does not represent the “true” spiritual meaning of the peace of the soul (Norris 23-4). Rather, a “kiss” between the speaker or reader and Christ is truly that: an embodied, sensual kiss. For the texts I examine, the sensual language of the Canticum foreshadows the erotic possibilities of an incarnate God, whom readers are asked to touch, caress, kiss, and embrace in loving union.

Christian re-interpretations of the Jewish Bible are as old as Christianity itself, beginning as early as the Pauline letters. Along with the Pauline rejection of circumcision,1 the move from a covenant of the flesh to a covenant of the spirit is reiterated throughout: 2 You are our epistle, written in our hearts, which is known and read by all men: being manifested, that you are the epistle of Christ, ministered by us, and written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the fleshly tables of the heart. And such confidence we have, through Christ, towards God. Not that we are sufficient to think anything of ourselves, as of ourselves: but our sufficiency is from God. Who also hath made us fit ministers of the new testament, not in the letter, but in the spirit. For the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth (2 Corinthians 3:2-6).3

1 In Romans 2: 25-29, Paul argues that circumcision must henceforth be spiritual, not physical.

2 All Bible quotations in this dissertation will be from the Douay-Rheims Bible (DRB), and I will footnote the Latin Vulgate (LV) for comparison. 3 Epistola nostra vos estis, scripta in cordibus nostris, quae scitur, et legitur ab omnibus hominibus: manifestati quod epistola estis Christi, ministrata a nobis, et scripta non atramento, sed Spiritu Dei vivi: non in tabulis lapideis, sed in tabulis cordis carnalibus. Fiduciam autem talem habemus per Christum ad Deum: non quod sufficientes simus cogitare aliquid a nobis, quasi ex nobis: sed sufficientia nostra ex Deo est: qui et idoneos nos fecit ministros novi testamenti: non littera, sed Spiritu: littera enim occidit, Spiritus autem vivificat (2 Corinthians 3:2-6).

In fact, many aspects of the Jewish Bible and Covenant could not be accepted wholesale without being at odds with what early Christians believed to be Christ’s message:4 And not as Moses put a veil upon his face, that the children of Israel might not steadfastly look on the face of that which is made void. But their senses were made dull. For, until this present day, the selfsame veil, in the reading of the old testament, remaineth not taken away (because in Christ it is made void) (2 Corinthians 3:13-14).5

In the view of many medieval theologians, Augustine foremost, humanity’s Fall perpetuated an alienation from divine meaning (Jager 53). Sin occluded humanity from divine truth, so divine revelation was now required. Since language, too, became fallen, the “true” message of scripture was itself “veiled” in allegory, which required the grace of God in order to decipher it (de Lubac I.77). Quickly, Christian systems of interpretation sprang up in order to harmonize the Jewish scripture with the “New” Testament of Christianity. Early Patristic and medieval Christian theologians understood that Scripture had two meanings, the “literal” and the “allegorical” (de Lubac II.1). Some Christian thinkers divided the “allegorical” into two or three separate levels. Early exegetical systems were tripartite (as with Origen and Jerome), and involved the historical, and two “spiritual” levels: the allegorical (the mystical meaning), and the tropological (the moral or pastoral meaning) (de Lubac I.90). Others added an “anagogical” (or eschatological) spiritual layer, to create a four-part system (as with Cassian, Augustine, and Bede) which would eventually dominate in the thirteenth century (de Lubac I.90).

As Rita Copeland points out, this tendency to “interpret” Jewish Scripture is actually a form of rewriting it, according to the “significance that the interpreter discovers for the text” (40). Meaning becomes unstable, hierarchized, and policed, as multiple interpreters posit various “meanings,” and these meanings may even seem to conflict with the literal or historical level of the text. This control on the part of Christian interpreters was a way of managing the Jewish text so that it fit into new Christian ideas.

4 Unfortunately, this was an early sign of what would become centuries of open persecution and intolerance for Jews and the Jewish faith in the Christian tradition. See, for example, Jeremy Cohen's Living Letters of the Law. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

5 ...Et non sicut Moyses ponebat velamen super faciem suam, ut non intenderent filii Israel in faciem ejus, quod evacuatur, sed obtusi sunt sensus eorum. Usque in hodiernum enim diem, idipsum velamen in lectione veteris testamenti manet non revelatum (quoniam in Christo evacuatur) (2 Corinthians 3:13-14).

Jon Whitman sees the tensions more positively, arguing in his opening chapters to Interpretation and Allegory, that “the multivalent figures in such allegorical interpretation imply a multilayered cosmos,” and interpreters “treat the act of explicating ancient texts, ‘uncovering’ their integumenta, as virtually coextensive with the act of discovering the natural world itself” (53). Since God is the “author” of both the “books” of nature and Scripture, there is a medieval parallel between the physical and intellectual worlds, and interpreting both can result in divine truths, which are inherently layered and can even seem to conflict to human eyes.

Hence, literal and historical events of the so-called “Old” Testament signified future “spiritual” realities about the as-yet-unfulfilled Christian faith. As Ambrose states: “there is allegory when one thing is being accomplished, and another is being prefigured” (De Abraham).6 However, as Henri de Lubac argues, “The spirit is not separated from the letter. At first, it is contained and hidden in the letter. The letter is good and necessary, because it leads to the spirit. The letter is its instrument and servant” (I.226). Put more simply, the Old Testament is “elucidated” in the New, just as the New Testament is “foreshadowed” in the Old (I.245). Just as Christ transforms the water into wine at Cana, he also transforms “the letter into spirit, weakness into strength, and man into God” (de Lubac I.254). This exegetical system tends to hierarchize the New over the Old, the spirit over the body, the invisible over the visible, the allegorical over the literal. But the devotional material I examine in this dissertation uses the Incarnation of Christ as a parallel to the way that the spirit is incarnated in the letter,7 the allegorical in the literal.

Besides my focus on these four writers’ use of biblical hermeneutics, a number of interrelated issues present themselves. First, all of my texts attest a fundamental connection between language and desire. Jacques Lacan locates desire as an effect of both language and the unconscious, and it is his definition that I will use throughout this dissertation. While

6 "Allegoria est cum aliud geritur, aliud figuratur," in De Abraham I. c.i, n. 28 (PL, XIV, 432 C). 7 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it" (In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud Deum. Omnia per ipsum facta sunt: et sine ipso factum est nihil, quod factum est. In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum: et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt) (John 1:1-5).

unconscious desire is always sexual, other desires can only be recognized when they are articulated, and therefore created, in language (Evans 36). For Lacan, desire is generated by the first original loss—the recognition that the child is a separate entity than her or his own mother— and thus language “fills the gap” as it attempts to draw the attention of the lost mother, by performing a “demand” (Grosz, Lacan: A Feminist Intro 102). This demand is an articulation of a biological need, but more importantly, a demand for love, for the other’s attention (Evans 37). But while a need can be satisfied, desire is never satisfied, and always seeks after a chain of only “partially satisfactory replacements” (Grosz, Lacan: A Feminist Intro 100).

Liz Herbert McAvoy argues that speech and sex were intimately connected for female medieval writers, and both were vehemently policed (Authority and the Female Body 170). For example, Eve used her voice to seduce Adam to eat of the fruit, resulting in a sexualized understanding of the Fall and the frailty of women, as well as a general mistrust of the sensual and seductive power of language (173). In devotional writing in particular, Karma Lochrie argues that, like Mary Magdalene at the tomb, mystics are always desiring an absent body—Christ’s—which is substituted in the text by language (Translations of the Flesh 73). Mystics seek to fill the void by embodying their desire in their text, which is “a body created by the divine speech of the soul” (74). This text then becomes a “spectacle of desire and affective excess” (69) as it is transmitted to the reader, hopefully to be embodied in them too. Aelred of Rievaulx and John Whiterig both articulate the productive power of language in initiating desire, both offering textual performances of union between humanity and the divine that are borne out of the sensuality of their language. John Whiterig, for example, connects language and desire as he seeks to kindle his audience toward love of God: “a heart on fire must emit burning words, and he who suffers the wound of love in his heart must wound others with his word” (97. 214).

A second issue involves the way that discourse produces the embodied subject, and, in turn, the way that the body taints or incarnates the language it produces. Again, Lacan posits that the “subject” is constituted in and through language—as the effect of discourse, not its cause (Grosz, Lacan: A Feminist Intro 98). For Ann Bartlett, medieval reading theories stress the construction of a subject that is shaped by the internalization of the written word. For example, she quotes William of St. Thierry’s idea that readers are brought into conformity with the texts they

consume (17). According to Jennifer Bryan, the relationship between reader and text has long shaped what it means to be a “self,” especially in private, affective forms of piety, since these texts elicit a subjective response from their readers (4). In fact, in many devotional texts, such as Augustine’s Confessiones, the subject is imagined as a text. Brian Stock argues that for the medieval reader, all human knowledge is really a reading of ourselves, which is continually revised and reinterpreted until the subject reaches the source of all knowing—God (After Augustine 67). Julian of Norwich represents herself as a text and exegete of that same text (Powers of the Holy 173).

But more than this, my sources see the act of speech as fundamentally related to the Incarnation of the Divine Word, Christ-as-Logos. In the same way that the Word takes on flesh and becomes man, the speaking subject “incarnates” his speech. Speech was seen as inherently connected to the body that produced it (Marvin xvii). John Whiterig and the Cloud-author are especially concerned with the frailty of language, and the way that it is tainted by its container. Whiterig opens his text by asking God to cleanse the iniquity of his lips (1.33), and ultimately desires that “desire might leave its letters in the hearts of those that hear” (38.181). The Cloud-author is more anxious about the fallen and imperfect nature of language, and, connecting sins of the flesh with sins of the tongue, forbids fleshly “janglers”8 and all others with linguistic sinners from reading his book (22).

A third key issue speaks to the connection between knowing and loving, or knowledge and desire in these four texts. This “erotics of perception” is theorized by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who states that the thing is wholly inseparable from the one perceiving it, and that perception itself is a “coition…of our body with things” (373). The phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion laments a cultural forgetfulness surrounding the erotic origin of “philo-sophy” (3), while Eve Sedgwick argues for the alignment of sexuality and cognition (73), and the homoerotic melding between identification and desire (62). As Barbara Newman points out, the twelfth-century revival of Neoplatonic thought brought with it the idea that one attends to and therefore becomes what one loves (Newman, “Iam Cor Meum” 281). For example, Meister Eckhart suggests that “in knowing

8 In Middle English, a "jangelere" is an idle or excessive talker (MED “janglere, n.").

I accept God into myself, in loving, I go into God” (Newman, “Indwelling” 198). Richard Rolle, whose Middle English Meditation B forms potential source text for Whiterig’s Meditacio, suggests that imitation is the goal and effect of love (Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh 33).

However, as Sarah Beckwith points out, the total submergence of the subject in its desired object never occurs. In the Meditationes Vitae Christi, for example, the reader shifts between spectatorship of and identification with Christ, but never achieves full identification, which perpetuates the reader’s desire in the face of his or her distance from the desired object (“A Very Material Mysticism” 45). In I Am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology and Art, Karl Morrison calls this hermeneutic gap a form of “play,” in which a person never fully obtains identification with an object of knowledge, in order to perpetuate the desire that seeks union (37). But the German Romantic philosopher of religion, Fredrich Schleiermacher, proposed that this purported distance is only post-linguistic. A true mystical encounter involves no separation between subject and object, until it is rationalized and put into words after the fact (Jantzen, Power, Gender 314). Julian of Norwich likewise sees Christ as the mother from whom we are never truly separated. The split subject allows for one part of humanity to be fallen in sin, and another part to remain in God (Bryan 169).

A fourth, but by no means final, issue involves the complicated negotiation of the boundaries of self/other, boundaries that often erased in the search for union with Christ, who is the “head” of the shared body of humanity. Desire and the erotic in these four texts reveal something fundamental about medieval subjectivity—especially in the relationship of the self to the other. For Lacan, the ego is intersubjective, established by its relations with others, which “incorporate the object” (Grosz, Lacan: A Feminist Intro 29). The ego internalizes otherness as a condition of its possibility (43), and is thus split between self and other, taking itself as both subject and object (47). As Judith Butler argues in Undoing Gender, humans exist “in a trajectory of desire” in which they are taken outside of themselves (25). The human being exceeds its own boundaries in order to establish them, or in other words, the self is shaped by its dependence on and relationship to the other. Because of this dependence, Butler claims, citing Merleau-Ponty, that our desire, our sexuality, becomes not a “dimension of our existence” but rather “coextensive with [our] existence” (33). In the four texts I examine, sexuality and desire are the vehicles by

which an ecstatic experience of self-transcendence occurs, and this divine encounter actually becomes fundamental to the formation of subjectivity.

Barbara Newman models her conception of co-inherence on the Trinity, suggesting that like these three members, humanity lives with and in both other people and God (“Indwelling” 190). And in devotional literature influenced by Neoplatonism, just as the Son and Spirit proceed from the Father, the soul emanates from God into the world, but returns to him in contemplation (195). Aelred of Rievaulx and Julian of Norwich both articulate a devotion in which the boundaries between subject and object are blurred. While Julian envisions the total collapse of all humanity in Christ, represented by the figure of the Servant in her parable, Aelred constructs a complicated drama in which his readers are called to inhabit the place of Gospel characters in order to perform devotion to Christ. However, he himself steps into the role of his reader in the role of his characters, creating a layered subjectivity that seeks to lose itself in Christ, as I will explain further below.

My dissertation thus explores the role that desire has in the various hermeneutic systems of these four English writers, proposing a new way of understanding how medieval devotional writers used erotic language, which is not merely a rhetorical flourish signifying spiritual realities. Rather than reading eros as metaphoric, or in other words, analogous to the connection between humanity and divinity, I will argue that erotic language manifests a metonymic connection between the carnal union of two lovers, and the union of humanity and the divine. More specifically, the connection between the two is a synechdoche: or, in other words, eros is a microcosm of the macrocosmic relations of spirit and flesh, humanity and divinity. And, if and only if properly channeled, eros itself participates in and brings about the ultimate goal of the Christian spiritual life—union with God. The desiring, incarnated body, seeking completion with an earthly lover, is a synechdoche of the relationship between humanity and God. When so many other aspects of medieval Christian life, such as consumption of the Host, involve touch and physical union with the physical body of Christ, I wonder why erotic references to his body must be immediately allegorized. Such discourses made room for bodily realities and practices, and allow us to comprehend more accurately the Christianity of vernacular and even non-monastic

medieval people. I will argue that medieval Christian devotion in England could be a cultivation of erotic energy, not a denial of it.

In the four following texts, Christ’s flesh, and in particular, his physical wounds, allow for the boundaries between humanity and the divine to become “continuous” (Beckwith, Christ’s Body 56). Always, union occurs on and through the contact between real, corporeal bodies. Aelred asks his reader to kiss and caress Christ’s feet, and massage his head with perfumed oil, but, with Mary Magdalene at the tomb, ultimately denies a final touch to the reader. Whiterig reads Christ’s crucified body as Christ’s desire for an embrace and union with the reader, who is asked to penetrate his side. In the Cloud of Unknowing, the only text which does not explicitly focus on Christ, God and the reader penetrate each other, as God reveals his “privity.” For Julian especially, enclosure in Christ, our mother, is not a subjective mystical experience, but a fundamental truth of human reality (Bauerschmidt 154). In her parable of the Lord and Servant, it is Christ’s broken flesh, which is Adam’s ragged tunic, which allows for the union between these two characters, and thus humanity and the divine.

Chapter One My first chapter examines two texts by the English Cistercian abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1110-1167 CE): the De institutione inclusarum and the De Iesu puero duodenni (both c. 1160 CE). These two monastic guides interpret Gospel material tropologically—or, for its moral interpretation—guiding their readers through devotional meditations about the events in Christ’s life. Their tropologies, however, are sensual and radically embodied; for example, both combine Mary Magdalene at the feet of Christ (John 12:3) with Jacob wrestling with the Angel of the Lord (Genesis 32:24-32), as a primary exemplar for readers. Mary, and various other Gospel characters, become empty subject positions that Aelred calls his readers to inhabit, in order to interact directly—and sensually—with Christ.

As the primary focus of my chapter, Mary Magdalene is characterized by imagery of emptiness and hollowness. Mary empties her attention of worldly things, so that she can be penetrated by the words of Christ. More than this, I argue that Mary is hollow so that the reader, who is also called to empty herself, can penetrate and fully blend with her position. This imagery enables a

conceptual eroticism in the blending of self/other. Stepping into the Gospel narrative, the reader’s monastic emotions and actions are crafted and shaped by the hollow positions of these characters. Inversely, the biblical text becomes incarnate in the reader who performs these devotions, fulfilling the spiritual longing allegorized in the Canticum canticorum. Language finally reaches its resting place in the Word made flesh, and the sensual longing between the bride and bridegroom is fulfilled in the relationship between the reader and Christ.

As the feminist film theorist Teresa de Lauretis suggests, narrativity itself involves “the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire” (106). These “positionalities” are especially defined by the way Aelred focalizes the erotic gaze between characters, and my chapter uses feminist film theory in order to explicate this orientation of desire. Aelred manipulates the narrative gaze, “orienting the movement of desire, and positioning the spectator in relation” (de Lauretis 137). Like a spectator of cinema, Aelred’s readers can identify both with the active look of the camera (the narratorial gaze), and with the passive image on the “screen” (the Gospel characters) (de Lauretis 123). Aelred constructs his devotional manual so that as objects, both masculine and feminine readers identify with Mary Magdalene, and feel themselves focalized and examined by Christ. They become penetrated by his words and his gaze, their sins are made manifest and purged away at Christ’s feet with Mary Magdalene’s tears. Then, Aelred has Christ take his gaze away, and block his ears against their protestations. Now, Aelred’s readers become spectators, emboldened and masculinized, and like Jacob wrestling with the Angel, they take Christ as object: grabbing, kissing, and licking his feet and legs, demanding to be heard and seen, demanding again to be focalized. The speaker, Aelred himself, gets so excited that he completely usurps the position of his readers, and through the reader, through Mary, begs and pleads with Christ himself.

The De institutione finishes the meditation at Christ’s empty tomb, with the famous “noli me tangere,” in which Mary’s touch is now denied, or at least delayed. Aelred’s meditations move from a focus on gaze to a focus on touch, from a focus on establishing subjectivities and the relationship of self to other, to a focus on dissolving the self in the other. Christ is depicted as a disembodied voice that fills Mary’s emptiness, the way the Holy Spirit fills the Virgin Mary’s ear

in the Annunciation. This is a secondary incarnation, in which Christ now takes Mary’s flesh as his own, uniting his form or Logos with her emptied flesh.

Chapter Two Focusing on the Meditacio ad Crucifixum (c. 1350) of the English Benedictine hermit John Whiterig (died c. 1371),9 my second chapter shifts from a concern with sight to one of touch— the kind of touch denied to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. Though it begins with a vision of a Crucifix, which our speaker tells us he received as a “sign” from God, the Meditacio explores the carnal eroticism inherent in the act of knowing—particularly in coming to know Christ through physical touch. This embodied knowledge is constructed through Whiterig’s erotic theorization of signification and communication, resulting in the speaker “reading” Christ’s flesh like a manuscript book and coming to “know” him in a carnal and embodied way—which is ultimately signalled by the exchange of his heart for Christ’s.

For the speaker, signs and communication are always already erotic, and involve a union between both the knower and the thing known. In Whiterig’s descriptions of reading and attaining knowledge, there is a conflation between absorbing something abstractly with the mind, and incorporating it into the body—conveyed through images of eating and sensual touch. “Meaning” itself becomes manifest primarily through touch and exchange, rather than sight, hearing, or cognition. For example, the speaker opens his discussion of signs using the example of monastic sign language, basing communication in and on the body. For Whiterig, the act of speech is fundamentally related to the Incarnation. In both, a word or logos is made flesh: the divine takes on the human, the abstract is communicated through a speaking and embodied subject. In fact, the major “sign” that Whiterig discusses and interprets is the body of Christ on the Cross. Whiterig’s three major images—his sign, Christ’s body-as-book, and the exchange of hearts—reveal a concern for the embodiment of truth, and its reception in an embodied reader.

9 Also commonly known as the “Monk of Farne.”

After introducing his erotic theory of signs, Whiterig gives a fourfold exegesis of his vision of the Crucifix, for its literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical meanings. In his reading, the “literal” level of the Crucifixion is not Christ suffering and dying on the Cross. Rather, Christ’s open arms are his longing to embrace humanity, his bowed head is his desire to kiss humanity, and the wound in his side is his desire to unite with humanity. The subsequent levels of interpretation, rather than spiritualizing this message, all circle back to “mean” the erotic union of the speaker (or reader) with Christ. This union is sought by the speaker, who scans Christ’s body with his fingers, as if reading a manuscript. The medieval trope of the crucified Christ as a book or scroll is common, but Whiterig particularly focuses on the openness of Christ’s body— open like the folio leaves of a manuscript—and on reading Christ’s wounds like a form of script. Like the wounds in Christ’s flesh, medieval scripts (ink on vellum) represent a “taking away” from the blank solidness of the page. Both wounds and letters are constructed on absence, an absence which allows for communion. Christ’s wounds are the place he bids the reader to enter into his body, and letters and language communicate meaning. In reading the grooves and wounds on Christ’s flesh with his fingers, the speaker constructs an erotic encounter with Christ in which “meaning” is conveyed. This meaning is nothing other than the coition between Christ and the speaker. This union is completed when Christ and the speaker exchange hearts: at Christ’s bidding, each fills the lack of the other. I argue that Christ desires the desire of humanity, lacks their lack. As God he is complete, and lacks nothing except lack. The epitome of history, then, is for God to complete humanity by filling their lack, and for humanity to “complete” God by offering the only thing they have that he does not, their “lack” to him.

Chapter Three My third chapter moves into the realm of negative theology, examining the late fourteenth- century English contemplative text, The Cloud of Unknowing. Though indebted to the apophatic or negative tradition, which posits that language can express nothing of God’s substance, and that it is best to deny him any attributes, the Cloud nevertheless speaks about divine union in somatic and even erotic language. In particular, the Cloud abounds with imagery of covering and uncovering, tying and freeing, and even sexual penetration, amounting to a dynamic power-play between humanity and the divine. And while the Cloud stresses blinding and restriction, other senses and liberties become heightened. For example, language of touching and “sensing”

replaces sight, and there is a paradoxical freedom in being bound: notably, desire is channelled in a specific way toward God, allowing subjects to transcend themselves. This chapter analyzes the Cloud’s power dynamics analogically through the comparative lens of modern BDSM culture, which also explores “the exercise of power” (Farr 187). In particular, this chapter discusses the way the Cloud constructs the relationship between meaning and language, body and soul, and humanity and divinity—all in a hierarchy of erotic power.

Like Aelred and Whiterig, the Cloud-author depicts language as fallen and embodied. However, desire is constructed in and through language, and so the text itself becomes a linguistic playground for the initiation and fulfilment of desire. For example, the text opens with humanity calling on the name of God, and it closes with God calling humanity back to him, mimicking a Neoplatonic emanation and return. The relationship of language and meaning is also constructed in terms of violence, constriction, and power. For the Cloud, the relations of meaning and language, and body and soul, exhibit tendencies similar to modern BDSM practice: they are hierarchized, involving a power-play between the members, in which the boundaries of self/other and mind/body are transcended.

This imagery extends into the relations of humanity and divinity. For example, God is described as a “blynde nought” (94), punning on the Middle English for “nothing” and “knot.” In line with the negative tradition, God is defined by non-being: not that he does not exist, but that he is beyond even the most basic category of existence. Similarly, he is also an intellectual riddle or knot, that cannot be understood or conceptually “seen.” However, the speaker calls the reader to “wrastle” with this “blynde nought,” evoking the physical struggle of Jacob with the Angel in Genesis (32:22-32). Finally, the knot also ties in with the idea of binding or constriction, as the speaker is “knyt” (33) and “fastenid” to God, particularly with a “lyame” or leash of desire (29). After this binding, humanity and the divine mutually penetrate each other: humanity pierces God with a dart of longing love (36), and God pierces humanity with a beam of ghostly light (58). This penetration results in the complete melding of identities: the spiritual God is pierced by flesh, and the fleshly human is illumined by divine light.

Chapter Four In my final chapter, Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-1416) creates her own hermeneutic system, one that mimics and critiques the separation of literal and spiritual realities often found in contemporary biblical exegesis, in order to contrast human interpretation with divine signification. In her Long Text, Julian’s parable of the Lord and Servant offers a vision of two figures, a Lord and a Servant, which is understood in various ways. The Servant is simultaneously the Servant of the fictional parable, but also Adam, Christ, and all men. This fourfold reading is constructed on the biblical interpretation that Julian would have either read herself, or at least heard preached in sermons at Mass. Her conception offers an alternate relationship of various “interpretations” or meanings. For one, Julian does not allow a partial consideration of the details of her “literal” fictional frame, but all of the details register in the “allegorical” meanings. Second, her meanings are not mutually exclusive, but rather, each participates holistically in the meaning of the other. Finally, Julian’s readings do not offer a hierarchical approach. The literal is not dismissed in favour of the spiritual, but both are united together in what I argue is a metonymic structure of relations, which I discuss in two threads of imagery: her focus on “knitting” and her focus on “oning.” Julian presents typological history as a unified whole, from the perspective of the divine, revealing the gap between a human hermeneutic of fragmentation, and a divine hermeneutic of “collapse” or “oning.”

Lacan’s distinction between the conceptual tropes of metaphor and metonymy offers a way of reading Julian’s exegesis against that of other writers. While metaphor establishes a hierarchy of meanings which are substitutable, for example, the way the opening kiss of the Canticum canticorum can be read allegorically as “peace,” metonymy complements this vertical stratum with a focus on the horizontal relationship between all the figures at play in a given syntax, whether linguistic or narrative. Unlike the “kiss” of the Canticum, an interpretation which does not take into account other literal or allegorical details of the poem, all of the details of Julian’s figure of the Servant adhere between Adam, Christ, and all men, because this figure is all of these characters at once. For example, details about the Servant’s cloak signify both Adam’s Fall and Christ’s Crucifixion, and all of the details can be accounted for in either case. Thus, the meaning does not shift whether the figure is read as Adam, Christ, or all men, because the Servant is instead defined by his relation to the fixed position of the Lord.

In sum, the Servant springs forth from the Lord with love, in order to do his business, but falls and becomes trapped in a ditch. Eventually he is rewarded by the Lord as if he had never fallen. This simple narrative unites and explains huge typological events in history, such as the creation of the material universe, the creation of humanity, the Fall of humanity, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Harrowing of Hell, and the final union of God and humanity in the eschaton. In Julian’s parable, the above moments are compressed into a simple, singular narrative motion, because according to her theology, all of these moments are metonymically collapsed. In other words, Adam's creation, Adam's Fall, his subsequent death and descent into hell, and Christ's Incarnation, death, and descent into hell—all of these are constructed as a singular downward movement. Likewise, her compression illustrates her idea about the providence of the Fall. Also, this horizontal paradigmatic compression ensures that temporally, Adam and Christ are united, not by being placed atop one another in an allegorical stratum, but by being completely superimposed.

Chapter 1 Erotic Tropology: The Semiotics of the Gaze in Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum and De Iesu puero duodenni

1.1 Introduction

There were two medieval systems for classifying the relationship of the three to four levels of biblical exegesis or commentary,10 and “tropology” was the level that resisted classification. Some medieval thinkers divided the levels in half: historical and tropological levels were both literal and practical, dealing with human relations and realities on earth; allegorical and anagogical levels were spiritual and contemplative, addressing divine realities, and the relations of humanity with God (de Lubac II.31). Other thinkers, however, saw the historical level alone as “literal,” and contrasted it with a threefold “spiritual” sense that included allegory, tropology, and anagogy (II.37). As Jon Whitman points out: the application of Aristotelian causality to Christian Scripture thus directs attention not only to the formalities of the text, but also to what lies 'behind' the text (the responsibility of its authors) and 'in front' of the text (the response of its readers). From the perspective of recent studies of allegory, such an appeal to far-reaching 'causal' frameworks may seem no sooner to modify one kind of 'allegory' (the four 'senses') than to prepare the way for other kinds. In the development of scholastic interpretation from the late Middle Ages to the Reformation, for example, the repeated emphasis on an underlying authorial 'intention' and the frequent identification of the 'literal' sense with it tends gradually to blur the very distinction between the 'literal' sense of a text and its divinely 'intended' meaning, its 'spiritual' sense; at times, the 'letter' virtually modulates into the 'spirit.' (56).

We can especially see this tension with the moral sense, or tropology, which tended to fall somewhere between the literal and the spiritual. For one medieval thinker, Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1110-1167), tropology becomes literal and allegorical at once.

10 The four-fold system became dominant starting in the thirteenth-century, replacing the standard three-fold system that originated with the patristic writer Origen. The “anagogical” reading is added (de Lubac I.90).

In Medieval Exegesis, Henri de Lubac argues that medieval thinkers viewed allegory as inherent in the events of biblical history, and not primarily in the language that recorded them (II.86). In Scripture, God speaks “in words” about what he has already spoken “in deeds” (II.88). Scripture is thus already an interpretation, an abstraction from the level of event to the level of language. Biblical commentaries, or interpretations of Scripture, are secondary abstractions, and reveal a parallel “spiritualization” from the level of described event to its allegorical meaning. The historical event becomes narrative, which becomes interpretation, and the acting bodies of biblical figures become text, which becomes meaning or “spirit.”

Tropology, the focus of this chapter, brings this movement full circle. Tropology is that level of exegesis which involves interpreting biblical history for ideas about morality and proper behaviour. Biblical images and words are reinterpreted for their moral sense and then reincarnated by medieval Christians who perform this moral sense; words become again deeds done. In Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600, Ryan McDermott argues that tropology “is never simply an analysis of one text. It is also an invention of another...acted out in the production of life and literature” (2). In other words, biblical history is turned into lived history, performing what McDermott coins as a “vital circulatory function” (2), which “circulates the hermeneutical endeavour out into the reader's life, where the reader's actions can render him or her a fit interpreter” (3). In other words, the event becomes narrative, which becomes interpretation, which becomes event again in the piety enacted by the believer. The body becomes text, which becomes meaning, which becomes again a body performing meaning.

Hence the conflicting classifications above: tropology is both literal and spiritual. It re- allegorizes, but also re-literalizes—becoming re-embodied in the actions of the reader. Tropology is thus a fruitful intersection at which to examine the relationship of spiritual and literal levels, the union of body and spirit, and the use of erotic language that is not entirely devoid of erotic content. In this chapter, I will analyze the tropological interpretation within two texts written contemporaneously by Aelred of Rievaulx: the De institutione inclusarum and the De Iesu puero duodenni (both c. 1160 CE). The De institutione is a short handbook

for anchorites addressed to Aelred’s unnamed sister. It opens in a Benedictine vein, prescribing desirable monastic practices and prohibitions for its female reader(s). Toward the middle of the text, however, Aelred initiates a lengthy contemplative exercise focused on the life of Christ—the section most often ignored by scholars and which forms the focus of this chapter (Freeman 18). In contrast, the De Iesu is a guided meditation on the Gospel of Luke written for Yvo, a young monk in Aelred's care. It divides the events of Christ's childhood into three parts, corresponding to three levels of exegetical interpretation: historialiter, allegorice, and secundum moralem sensum, or, in other words, literal, allegorical, and tropological readings (literally, according to the moral sense).

As a counterexample to Aelred’s reading, the Glossa Ordinaria has this to say tropologically of the Gospel passage (John 12:3) where Mary Magdalene11 washes Christ’s feet:12

By the sinful woman approaching the feet of the Lord is signified whoever is truly offended and sorrowful for her sins...just as she offended God through fault, thus she must serve him through penitence: ‘just as you presented your members to serve uncleanness and iniquity of iniquities, now offer to serve justice in holiness.’13

This straightforward interpretation calls Christians to repay their faults with penitence, justice, and holiness. Christ himself, and devotion to his body, are not an integral part of the tropology; they remain at the level of the historical or literal event.

Aelred’s reading of this same event will be quite different. Both the De Inst. and the De Iesu Puero are sensual: they employ the evocative language of the Canticum canticorum to speak about the reader's relationship with Christ. This sensuality works to pull the historical “then”

11 Like many medieval thinkers, Aelred conflated Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus (Dutton, “The Invented Sexuality” 111).

12 All translations mine.

13 Per mulierem peccatricem ad domini pedes accedentem, significatur quaelibet persona uere de peccatis poenitens & contrita. Ad quod requiritur, quod sicut Deum offendit per culpam ita seruiat ei per poenitentiam. Rom. 6.d: 'Sicut exhibuistis membra vestra servire immunditiae & iniquitati ad iniquitatem ita exhibere nunc servre iustitiae in sanctificationem' (Glossa Vol. 5 799).

of Christ's life into the reader's “now.” Both texts are also affective: Aelred constructs a subject position for his readers to inhabit by guiding them to ventriloquize the words and actions of biblical characters. Jennifer Bryan argues that this sort of affective piety required a subjective response from its readers; indeed, it participated in the construction of their subjectivity in the first place (4). Finally, both texts engage in exegetical—specifically, tropological—readings of these sensual renderings of Christ's life. In this chapter, I will examine how Aelred frames and constructs this desire for Christ, how he connects the literal with the spiritual levels of discourse, and I will suggest that his spiritual “truths” are not evacuated of the erotic longing that provides their vehicle. His reading troubles the conventional mode of exegesis by reconfiguring the relationship of literal to spiritual realities so that the body is actually privileged in the traditional exegetical relationship of body, language, and meaning. In these texts, tropology bridges the literal and spiritual, but in Aelred's hands especially, human relations become the relations of humanity with God. Realities on earth become divine realities.

Aelredian scholarship has rightly placed sexuality and the body at the forefront. Whether scholars argue overtly for or against Aelred's homosexuality (Boswell, McGuire, Dutton),14 relate his sexual past to his monastic spirituality (McGuire, Murray),15 discuss the importance of homosociality within his theories on friendship and love (Johnson, Sommerfeldt),16 or

14 John Boswell argues explicitly for Aelred’s homosexuality in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, while Brian Patrick McGuire is less explicit in his article, “Sexual Awareness and Identity in Aelred of Rievaulx,” positing that it is Aelred’s experience of sex that is more important. Marsha Dutton, on the other hand, vehemently rejects both scholars’ claims in “The Invented Sexual History of Aelred of Rievaulx: A Review Article.”

15 Brian Patrick McGuire considers Aelred’s sexual past to be an important part of his monastic identity. In “Sexual Awareness and Identity in Aelred of Rievaulx” (and, to a lesser extent, in "In Search of the Good Mother: Twelfth Century Celibacy and Affectivity"), he argues that from the twelfth century onward, monastic orders preferred men experienced in sex, who had knowingly chosen a spiritual life instead (187). Jacqueline Murray, in “Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle for Chastity, and Monastic Identity,” concurs that Aelred's sexual history enhanced the value of his chastity in an economy in which battling lust was a way for monks to perform 'masculinity' (35).

16 Patricia Johnson’s Phenomenology of Spiritual Friendship and Discourse About God" examines the role of friendship in Aelred’s spirituality, positing that it is a necessary step in embracing “the other” on the path to divine union (560). John Sommerfeldt, in “The Roots of Aelred's Spirituality: Cosmology and Anthropology,” argues that in a universe ordered by love, all things are “social” and require togetherness (22).

focus on the gendered dynamics of a male monk writing about sexuality for his female readers (for instance, Bartlett, Freeman, Gopa, Diener, Olson, Renna, among others),17 most scholarship engages with gender, sex, and the body, and how these elements participate in Aelred's construction of affect for Christ. Unlike many other medieval writers, for whom erotic language was generic and decorative, this theme of sex and sexuality informed Aelred's sensual prose on the levels of form and content. Brian Patrick McGuire, for example, shows that Aelred borrows the language and thematics of sexual awareness from Augustine's Confessiones (“Sexual Awareness” 192), and I would add that Aelred's sexual awareness and spiritual awareness are tightly intertwined.

A secondary but equally important thread in Aelred scholarship examines the relationship of Aelred's erotic language to his embodied affect. Unlike other thinkers, Aelred's use of erotic language does not signify an intellectual union detached from the body (Stefaniw 76), but, rather, embodied love is primary to his theological doctrine (Smith, “Cistercian and Victorine” 57). The affective relationship that Aelred constructs between reader and Christ is “rooted in the flesh” (58), and his erotic overtones reveal a concern for repurposing desire into devotion to Christ's humanity (59). Aelred’s devotional practice extends the logic of Cistercian devotion to the humanity of Christ. For Bernard of Clairvaux, contemplatives must move beyond Christ if they are to experience the beatific vision (Dutton, “The Face and Feet” 205). For Aelred, seeing Christ is seeing God. Devotion to Christ is not a rung on the ladder of love for God, it is that very thing (205). He “rejects any radical distinction between love in flesh and love in spirit” and argues that “love in the flesh is love in the spirit” (221).18

Scholars have long established Aelred's development of an erotic and embodied piety. However, scholarship has not yet focused on the way that he manipulates exegetical methods to frame this sensual piety. Studying his use of this hermeneutical frame changes the

17 See especially Elizabeth Freeman’s “Aelred of Rievaulx's Pastoral Care of Religious Women with Special Reference to De Institutione inclusarum” for a good historical synopsis.

18 Emphasis mine.

parameters by which we understand his focus on the body and his use of erotic language in constructing a relationship with Christ. Aelred’s method of relating body to spirit and literal to allegorical levels triangulates body, spirit, and sign in a new way: the body becomes primary and the locus for meaning. These hermeneutic parameters will help us understand how biblical interpretation as a mode of thinking influenced medieval devotional literature more widely, outside of the scope of biblical commentaries and the university.

One scholar, Arjo Vanderjact, has touched on Aelred’s hermeneutics in his short article, “Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx on Kissing,” where he compares Aelred's exegetical rendering of the initial kiss in the Canticum canticorum to a reading done by Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard's kiss is ultimately allegorized as a sign of intellective unity between God and the soul of the individual believer (341). Love returns to its source in God the spirit, not in Christ as flesh. Vanderjact reads Bernard's careful spiritual rendering of the moment as a caveat: “Beware! This kissing is a speech act, a textual performance. It does not concern flesh and blood in any real sense” (341). Unlike Bernard, who uses the material world to make sense of the spiritual, Vanderjact argues that Aelred instead tries to make sense of the “experiential material world” through language (342). Vanderjact insists that the kiss of the incarnate Christ is physical, spiritual, and intellectual, and this carnal kiss will be fully consummated within a spiritual marriage in the eschaton (343).

As an example of Aelred’s radically embodied piety, in the passage from the De institutione inclusarum contrasting the situations of Martha and Mary—a standard Gospel moment for comparing the active and contemplative lives in the Middle Ages—Aelred presents a tripartite tropology, involving love of neighbour and two different kinds of love of God. All the material leading up to this point involved Martha's work, either love of neighbour (the performance of charity, etc.), or the first kind of love of God, involving the performance of works (fasting, prayer, etc.). The second half of the De inst. deals with the second kind of love of God, which I will now discuss: the “affectum mentis” (“affect of the mind”). In other words, Aelred articulates an exterior and interior tropology: Having said these things about the love of neighbour, I will enjoin a few things on the love of God. For although both sisters loved God and their neighbour, nevertheless

Martha was especially occupied with service of her neighbours, but Maria drank from the fountain of divine love. Two things pertain to the love of God: affect of the mind and the performance of works. And this work is in the exercise of virtue, and this affect is in the sweetness of spiritual tasting. The exercise of virtue is designated in a certain habit of living, in fasting, in vigils, in work, in reading, in prayer, in silence, in poverty, and in all the things of this sort. Affect is nourished by a healthy meditation. Thus, so that this sweet love of Jesus grows in your affection, you must complete a triple meditation, namely, on the past, on the present, and on the future—that is, on the record of past events, on the experience of the present, and on the consideration of the future.19

This third branch of Aelred's tripartite tropology is no less “real” or physical than the first two. Note the sensual language used to describe it: drank, sweetness, tasting, nourished, sweet, grows. This interior tropology or affect of the mind is further fractalized into a trio, involving a tripartite meditation on the past, present, and future. The “past” includes the entire Gospel meditation that I will discuss in this chapter. The “present” involves a personal address to Aelred's sister and a reminder of how she should act in the present time. The “future” contains a meditation on death and union with Christ. I argue that Aelred's tripartite affect of the mind, or “interior” tropological level, has itself a literal, tropological, and anagogical level. The literal involves the Gospel events of the past that must be read and recalled. The tropological level involves the action of his sister, and thus the reader, in the present—specifically, their call to this tripartite tropological action20. The future involves mystical anagogy or divine union with Christ in death. The interior tropology that I will examine in this chapter, the reflection on the past, is thus literal. It involves historical events and figures in the life of Christ, and it involves physical and sensual interaction with Christ.

19 His de proximi dilectione praemissis, de dilectione Dei pauca subiungam. Nam licet utraque soror Deum proximum que dilexerit, specialiter tamen circa obsequium proximorum occupabatur Martha, ex diuinae uero dilectionis fonte hauriebat Maria. Ad Dei uero dilectionem duo pertinent, affectus mentis, et effectus operis. Et opus hoc in uirtutum exercitatione, affectus in spiritualis gustus dulcedine. Exercitatio uirtutum in certo uiuendi modo, in ieiuniis, in uigiliis, in opere, in lectione, in oratione, in silentio in paupertate, et caeteris huiusmodi commendatur, affectus salutari meditatione nutritur. Itaque ut ille dulcis amor Iesu in tuo crescat affectu, triplici meditatione opus habes, de praeteritis scilicet, praesentibus et futuris, id est de praeteritorum recordatione, de experientia praesentium, de consideratione futurorum (De institutione inclusarum 662).

20 Thus, really a tripartite within a tripartite.

Most monastic rules for women21—for example, Grimlaic's, which influenced Aelred's—ask the recluse to imitate Christ by picking up the cross and following him (L'Hermite-Leclerq 190), in what Ann Bartlett calls a "pedagogy of participation" (122).22 Aelred's tropology is more exciting, and pushes this “participation” to the limits. Imitating Christ removes the erotic potential of interacting with him directly, and so Aelred calls his readers to imitate everyone around Christ, thus enabling direct interaction with Christ. Aelred makes his reader a spectator to this action at first, but then “he has her go on to the stage and gives her a role” (L'Hermite-Leclerq 193). The identities of the reader and the Gospel character are made fluid: the character's subject position is made open for the presence of the reader through imagery of emptying and purgation, so that the reader can then adopt something of the persona she wears. For example, the reader puts on Mary Magdalene's sensuality, adopting the stain of her sexual history, in order to repent it at the feet of Christ. Aelred guides the reader into narrative situations with Christ and “emotional identification with the imagined figures” (Smith, “Cistercian and Victorine” 57).23 It is through the amalgamation of the reader's identity with these figures that he or she can unify erotically and mystically with Christ instead of merely imitating his suffering.

This chapter will focus on how Aelred constructs this interaction with Christ. Though at every level, I will be concerned with articulating the sensuality, literality, and embodiment of Aelred's tropology, the main line of my argument will emerge from an examination of how Aelred crafts this tropology through the focalization of the gaze. There is an elaborate devotional masquerade within Aelred's two texts: a movement between various characters who shift positions in relation to one another, characters who try on other subject positions

21 In 1139 C.E., the Second Lateral Council sanctioned only the Benedictine, Augustinian, and Basilian Rules for official use by nuns (Freeman 14). However, monastic institutiones or “guides” were required to complement and help interpret these “official” Rules, before the papacy would officially protect a monastery (Freeman 15).

22 For a good survey of various monastic rules and guides, see: Diem, Albrecht. “New Ideas Expressed in Old Words: The Regula Donati on Female Monastic Life and Monastic Spirituality.” Viator 43.1 (2012): 1-38.

23 For a further study on how such monastic guides aided in constructing a nun’s subjectivity, see: Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

with all of their respective emotions and act them out, until boundaries are blurred and confused between identities, between subjects and objects, and finally between humanity and the divine. In fact, access to the divine seems mediated through a necessary ecstasy, a stepping outside of one's self and into the other. At the heart of Aelred's tropology lies a series of unions and shifting focalizations: Aelred invites his sister to become various Gospel figures, he encourages readers to become his sister in order to become various Gospel characters, and he even steps into both roles himself. All of these are attempts to unify the self with Christ.

1.2 Focalization

Why focalization? As Teresa de Lauretis writes: “subjectivity is engaged in the cogs of narrative and indeed constituted in the relation of narrative, meaning, and desire; so that the very work of narrativity is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire” (106). Aelred's texts program the construction of subjectivity and identity for his monastic readers through the channeling of their desire. Using the monastic environment in which they find themselves situated, Aelred crafts a system that gives his readers meaning in the way that he asks them to identify with certain characters in his texts (to become object, or looked at) and to desire other characters in the text (to take as object, or to look at other characters). As Jocelyn Price argues, monastic guides deliberately evoked the spatial embodiment of their readers, who would employ her vision “within the framing boundary of her cell” (205). Like the spectator of cinema, Aelred’s readers can identify with the active look of the “camera,” in this case, Aelred’s narratorial focus or gaze, and/or with the passive image on the “screen” (De Lauretis 123). This cinematic apparatus “binds affect and meaning to images by establishing terms of identification, orienting the movement of desire, and positioning the spectator in relation to them” (137). The primary identification for his readers, be they male or female, is Mary Magdalene. The primary object of desire is Christ. Examples in both texts of Mary Magdalene washing Christ's feet will illustrate this system. In these moments, Aelred suggests that humanity exists through the divine gaze: God essentially “creates” humanity in focusing his attention on them. Employing focalizations as a means of self-construction and identity formation parallels divine creation.

1.2.1 De Iesu puero duodenni: Mary Washes Christ's Feet The first scene that I will discuss is found within the secundum moralem sensum section of the De Iesu puero duodenni, implying that everything within it is meant to guide the reader's moral behaviour. Again, the De Iesu was written for Yvo, a monk in Aelred's monastery, so we must understand the ostensible and at least immediate reader to be male. Aelred's interpretation of this biblical event differs vastly from the Glossa Ordinaria.24 In the first part of Aelred’s scene, the reader is set up only as an observer and is told to enter the home of Simon the Pharisee in order to watch an interaction between Mary Magdalene and Christ. This rhetorical strategy presents Gospel material in an always accessible, eternal temporality. It begins: Go into the house of Simon the Pharisee, and watch attentively how piously, how sweetly, how delightfully, and how mercifully he looked at the sinner, prostrate with her face to the ground. How patiently he offered his most holy feet to be watered by her penitent tears, to be cleaned by her hair, which until now pride and lasciviousness had claimed for themselves, and to be kissed sweetly by her lips, which were polluted by the foulness of so many crimes.25

The Latin grammar makes Christ the clear actor: Mary does not wipe his feet; he gives her his feet-to-be-wiped. He gazes at her, while the text does not specify where she looks. The gaze of Christ is important, as the speaker repeatedly asks Christ not to turn his gaze away.26 The gaze of Christ brings subjectivity into being, as it stands in for the attention and favour of God in general. Christ's male gaze acts on Mary, the way form shapes matter. She, however, lacks a gaze.

The triangulation of gazes is thus incomplete as the reader looks at Christ, and Christ looks at Mary. Mary is passive, though the reader himself does possess a gaze—he looks at Christ and

24 See page 18. 25 Ingredere quaeso domum Simonis Pharisaei; intuere attentius quam pio, quam suaui, quam iucundo, quam clementi uultu humi prostratam respicit peccatricem, quam compatienter sanctissimos illos pedes paenitentis lacrimis praebeat irrigandos, capillis quos sibi hactenus superbia ac lasciuia uendicauerant detergendos, labiis tot scelerum foeditate pollutis dulciter osculandos (De Iesu puero 273).

26 God hiding and revealing his face to humanity is a motif throughout the Psalms, representing the favour or grace of God (see for example, Psalms 4:6; 13:1; 17:15; 31:16; 39:13, etc).

Mary—which gives him an active identity. Later on in this passage, and even more so in later reworkings of this Gospel scene in the De institutione inclusarum, the divisions between the reader and Mary become less rigid. This triangulation becomes a closed circuit, as Christ gazes at the reader and the reader, acting through Mary, gazes back at Christ. In this case, Mary's position is "activated" through its adoption by the male reader, because it is only when Aelred himself steps into the position of Mary—rather than merely observing Mary act historically—that she is able to return Christ’s gaze, even though Christ, interestingly, might now look away: “auertat oculos; contineat” (De Iesu 273).27 One can only attract Christ's gaze, or be looked at, if one steps into this affective position created by Mary, and Mary can only look back at Christ with a subject position when the male reader enters her.

Mary's position is thus queer, split equally between an active male subject position who takes Christ as object, and a passive female object position who is taken as object by Christ. The authorial management of these focalizations and glances channels the reader's desire, because there is a pleasure inherent both in looking—in taking other people as objects—and in being looked at (Mulvey 835). The latter requires an identification of the ego with the object “on screen,” while the former implies a separation of identity between the self as subject and the object on screen. In theory, the latter is passive and “female” while the former is active and “male,” but, of course, these are abstract categories (Mulvey 837). In this case, the reader can choose to watch Mary and Christ or be watched by Christ by identifying with Mary. The speaker, Aelred, adds another layer of complication, as he also vies for Mary's subject position, and indeed, usurps it totally toward the end of this passage, as I will discuss later. So far, however, this passage could not be more distinct from that of the Glossa. There will not be the same kind of simple moral seed that is neatly extracted from the “shell” of Mary and Christ's affective scene. The scene itself—its drama, sensuality, and complex relationship of subjectivities—is the morality. The tropological is not nested within the literal, they are the same.

27 Christ may look away in this moment to highlight the mystical poles of union and aporia: Christ is sometimes present, sometimes absent to the soul (see footnote above).

1.2.2 De institutione inclusarum: Mary Washes Christ's Feet A similar scene in the De institutione inclusarum occurs directly after the moment where Jesus publicly refuses to condemn Mary Magdalene. This time, however, the text is addressed to female readers, namely, Aelred’s sister, and it employs the feminine pronoun (except when Aelred steps in). The speaker jumps to the private scene of her repentance:

Now enter the house of the Pharisee, and pay attention to your Lord lying there. Approach his feet with that most blessed sinner, and wash them with tears, wipe them with your hair, soothe them with kisses, and warm them with oil. Are you not yet overwhelmed by the scent of that sacred fluid?28

This passage specifies that Jesus is lying down. In contrast to the passage in the De Iesu above, which emphasizes a vertical hierarchy of Christ looking down at Mary, this scene operates on a horizontal plane, and thus the imagery is more reminiscent of the bridal chamber. It also foreshadows the tomb, though death and sex are intricately connected. Logistically, Mary must be lying or sitting at Christ's feet as he lies before her. Also, instead of merely observing Mary, as in the beginning of the De Iesu passage, we are immediately asked to join with her. In fact, the reader so fully adopts the position of Mary that the speaker drops the third person altogether (referring to Mary completing the actions), and uses the second person instead (referring to “you” the reader completing the actions). I suggest that Aelred plays on the initial imperative “accede,” as it can mean both to approach and to “be like” or “resemble.” Not only is the reader asked to do the actions of Mary, the reader is also asked to be like her, to look like her, to take on her role entirely.

The speaker reiterates this idea with a rhetorical question— “are you not filled (literally “flooded”) with the scent of that holy liquid?”—bringing the reader into the event sensually.

28 Iam nunc domum ingredere Pharisaei, et recumbentem ibi Dominum tuum, attende, accede cum illa beatissima peccatrice ad pedes eius, laua lacrymis, terge capillis, demulce osculis, et foue unguentis. Nonne iam sacri illius liquoris odore perfunderis? (DII 665-6).

The self is totally penetrated and becomes fully occupied with the sensuality of the action and the emotion performed. The oil is also explicitly called the “oil of penitence and confession” in the De Iesu, meaning that it is not only scent that fills the reader, but the emotion of repentance and the desire for confession. Here in the De institutione, the reader is filled with Mary's emotions as she takes on her role. Interestingly, then, scent fills the reader, which causes her to confess or pour out her sins. One is exchanged for the other, and the exchange of scent for sins takes place within the reader's body. The imagery of the exchange of fluids and the interpenetration of bodies between the devotee and Christ is key to the De institutione, and therefore key to Aelred's tropology, and I will discuss it in more depth later. Then, the text moves into the realm of the hypothetical, and thus into the realm of the reader, because it opens up a possibility that is not biblical: namely, what to do if Christ denies you his feet: If he still denies you his feet, approach, plead, raise your eyes, pregnant with tears, and with deep sighs and indescribable groans wrench from him what you seek. Wrestle with God as Jacob did, so that he will rejoice in being overcome. It will sometimes seem to you that he averts his eyes, that he shuts his ears, that he conceals his desired feet. Nevertheless, you must pursue opportunely or inopportunely, crying out: 'How long will you turn your face from me? How long will I cry, and you not answer? Return the happiness of your favour to me, good Jesus, because my heart said to you: I sought your face, your face, O Lord, I will seek.' Certainly he will not deny his feet to a virgin, which he offered to be kissed by a sinner.29

If Christ denies the reader, she must take action with a series of imperatives: “insta,” “ora,” “attolle,” “extorque.” These actions depend on an imaginary relationship with Christ: imaginary not because it is counterfactual, but because it plays out in the imagination. Because we have broken out of the biblical frame, the reader now interacts with Christ directly, and Mary's historical exemplar falls into the background. The sequence of events associated with Mary is set in stone and cannot depart from their Gospel source. Mary’s

29 Si tibi adhuc suos negat pedes, insta, ora, et grauidos lacrymis oculos attolle, imis que suspiriis inenarrabilibus que gemitibus extorque quod petis. Luctare cum Deo sicut Iacob, ut ipse se gaudeat superari. Uidebitur tibi aliquando quod auertat oculos, quod aures claudat, quod desideratos pedes abscondat. Tu nihilominus insta opportune, importune, clama: usquequo auertis faciem tuam a me? Usquequo clamabo, et non exaudies? Redde mihi, Iesu bone, laetitiam salutaris tui, quia tibi dixit cor meum: quaesiui faciem tuam, faciem tuam, domine, requiram. Certe non negabit pedes suos uirgini, quos osculandos praebuit peccatrici (DII 665-6).

purpose is solely to initiate the interaction between Christ and the reader, which now takes on a life of its own. The “aliquando” momentarily pulls back the curtain on the masquerade: the reader is not Mary Magdalene interacting with Christ historically, but a devotee, who frequently takes up this role in meditation. Sometimes Christ responds, and sometimes not. The reader does not simply imagine the same scenario with the same results every time. She repeats it often, and Christ reacts differently. The important thing, for the reader, is that he reacts.

If denied, the reader must take an active role, reversing or perhaps queering the gendered model of the two actors in our cinematic model. Because Mary is now active, her actions are no longer a passive result of Christ's gerundival “feet-to-be-touched.” Instead, Christ becomes the passive and “female” figure, and the reader's absolution must be wrenched from him violently, as the reader must “luctare cum deo sicut iacob ut ipse se gaudeat superari” (“wrestle with God as Jacob did so that he may rejoice to be overcome”) (DII 665). In fact, this moment alludes to Procopius' commentary on Jacob's struggle (Genesis 32:22-32) in the Glossa Ordinaria which states that “the kingdom of heaven must be seized violently” (Glossa vol.1 353).30

The feeling of aporia, emptiness, or separation from God is constructed in terms of physical and sensual denial, as Christ's eyes are deliberately turned away, his ears are shut, and his feet are withdrawn. Christ's gaze and ability to listen are removed: his perception of the reader is denied. In other words, the reader's sensual impact on Christ is stopped, as is the reader's ability to touch Christ. The reader's impact on Christ is sensual because she is in essence penetrating his senses (aurally) as he is penetrating her (through vision, as medieval optical theory would attest) (Akbari 24-25).31 Having Christ look away and block his hearing and body from the reader prevents the sensual interpenetration of the two figures. It is a

30 "regnum caelorum violenter rapitur" (Glossa vol.1 353).

31 For a more in-depth discussion of medieval optics and its relation to allegory, see Suzanne Akbari's Seeing Through the Veil. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. See also Smith, A. Mark. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

punishment for the reader to not be sensed by Christ, as well as for the reader to not be able to touch his feet, and this situation involves remarkably physical manifestations of the connection between the two. As I suggested above, it is as if the reader is called into being: the reader's existence is caused or at least made meaningful by the gaze of Christ. The reader must strive and struggle for God's attention, and this struggle and the attention that is sought takes place on the physical plane. In essence, the reader wants to be focalized by Christ, which as Laura Mulvey suggests, gives a kind of pleasure.

In fact, in his writings on the preconditions of the narcissistic ego, Lacan suggests that the ego is created by this kind of attention. The discovered distance between the child and its mother initiates the construction of the ego (Grosz 32), and this lack or gap is the initial motivation for signification (Ruti 119), where language turns biological need into demand (Grosz 61). Demand takes two objects: the thing demanded and the one from which it is demanded. Because demand occurs in language, derived from the mother, demand is always tied to “otherness.” What demand actually seeks is not the requested object, but the affirmation of the ego by the other, which creates an imaginary union between both subjects. The self is now annihilated into the other—just as the prelinguistic child did not distinguish itself from its mother—and it now exists as the other (Grosz 61). When Christ gives Mary— or through Mary, the reader—his gaze, he both affirms their existence and destroys it, as they become one with him, their prelinguistic mother. Existence paradoxically becomes a form of focalization from the divine perspective. Salvation, however, will involve turning that focalization back on the divine, and specifically on the embodied divine: Christ.

1.2 Emptying the Self to Become o/Other Identification with Mary by adopting her perspective is key. But how exactly is this achieved? Aelred makes clear that the monastic life, exemplified by Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus,32 requires an emptying of the self. Imagery of emptiness, absence, and lack

32 Again, conflated with Mary Magdalene.

characterize Aelred's depictions of the contemplative life. Within the De institutione, this purgatio becomes necessary for the reader in order to adopt other focalizations to draw near to Christ, and then to empty herself so that Christ can penetrate her.

1.2.1 De institutione inclusarum: Mary Shatters the Jar Toward the end of the Gospel meditation within the De Institutione, Aelred explains: And behold, they made dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of the guests, but Maria took up a perfume jar of oil, and shattering the jar, she poured it out over the head of Jesus. Rejoice to be present at this banquet, noting the duty of each: Martha served, Lazarus laid down, and Maria poured oil. This final action is for you. Break, therefore, the perfume jar of your heart, and whatever you have of devotion, whatever of love, whatever of desire, whatever of affection, pour it all out over the head of your spouse, adoring the man in God and God in the man.33

Because Aelred adds the detail of Mary shattering the jar of perfume (“alabastrum”) to the Gospel narrative, I believe that it is especially significant. In the Latin, this action is then repeated a second time, highlighted and generalized as being for the reclusive reader: “hoc ultimum tuum est. Frange igitur alabastrum.” Now the reader must break the perfume jar of her heart and pour out its oil. This second repetition of the idea emphasizes the tropological over the literal, to the extent that they can be divided. Now, the pouring of oil means something else entirely—at the same time as, and not instead of, meaning exactly what it states—and it fits in with the running theme of exchanging fluids, and internalizing and externalizing things into and from the self. The shattering of the jar is the shattering of the heart, the fluid effusing from it is the affection being poured out onto Christ.

33 Et ecce faciunt ei coenam ibi, et Martha ministrabat, lazarus autem unus erat ex discumbentibus, Maria autem sumpsit alabastrum unguenti, et fracto alabastro, effudit super caput Iesu. Gaude, quaeso, huic interesse conuiuio; singulorum distingue officia: Martha ministrabat, discumbit Lazarus, ungit Maria. Hoc ultimum tuum est. Frange igitur alabastrum cordis tui, et quidquid habes deuotionis, quicquid amoris, quidquid desiderii, quidquid affectionis, totum effunde super sponsi tui caput, adorans in deo hominem, et in homine deum (DII 667).

There are a number of nuances here. The oil within the perfume jar relates to the common medieval image34 of the soul within the body, often depicted as fluid within a container. Earlier than this, Hesiod established a connection between the ceramic vase and the female body, an analogy Page DuBois connects with the trope of earth/woman (DuBois, Sowing the Body 46). Both the earth and earthen vessels were spaces for placing seeds, producing or storing grain, obtaining nourishment, and burying the dead. This connection is furthered by Minoan/Mycenaean vases with erect nipples depicted on the shoulders (47). Vessels, earth, and women's bodies were seen as “hiding, containing, producing, and giving up substances that permit the continuation of human existence” (49). Aelred's image is a cry for the body— particularly the female body—to be broken through monastic practice or death, so that the soul can at last be united with Christ. The reader’s identity is shattered, dripping down another person's head and body like oil. The reader’s affection, their innermost being, blends with Christ's body, anoints him like chrism.

Like the foreshadowed death of the reader in the shattered jar, the death of Christ is also foreshadowed, in that these oils prepare him for his burial and will be applied to his body sans divinity later on. Though the oil within the jar parallels the soul within the body, the oil on Christ's body does not signify merely the union of spirits. Both body and soul are united between the two figures. Technically, the soul of the reader is united to the flesh of Christ. The oil anoints the flesh: the innermost self of the devotee is poured out onto Christ's body, and no mention is made of Christ's soul. Christ's soul is of course one with his body, not contained inside it, as Thomas Aquinas would argue—except in death, figured here for the reader by the shattering of the jar. Her soul or spirit alone is poured out onto Christ. She takes his flesh for her own. Christ becomes the feminine principle of matter, the reader the male principle of form, and they signify sexual union, or the creation of a new, altogether united self. This is a representation of the eventual resurrection of dead: we will literally be one in Christ, and one with Christ's flesh. The sensuality of the language therefore does not refer to

34 Aelred himself employs this trope in his other treatises, as well as earlier in the De Institutione, when referring to the reader’s virginity (650).

some spiritual reality instead of itself, it refers to a spiritual reality that is also coexisting with the physical. The signification is sacramental, not allegorical.

Death is signified secondarily in a play on words, as the Latin states: “hoc ultimatum tuum est,” meaning both the final action in the sequence (the pouring of oil), and perhaps also the final action or ultimate goal of the reader's life. The final goal is this self-shattering in death, in which the reader can meld with Christ. And why does the giving of affection have to be depicted in such violent terms? I think that the reader is called to shatter herself, to shatter her subjectivity, and pour out what she is onto Christ. She must lose herself entirely, or as an earlier passage argues, she must give Christ everything she has. The self has to be broken if it is to hope for salvation, and be united with Christ.

The breaking of the jar can also be read as sexual, a solidification of a liminal moment that is exactly between the identity of the virgin and the identity of the adulterer, Mary Magdalene, since the breaking of the jar is not unlike the breaking of the hymen. Earlier in the text, Aelred refers to the virgin's flesh as “the earthenware vessel” in which the gold, or virginity, is put to be tested (DII 650).35 The similarity of the ideas is striking: gold within a vessel and oil within a jar. Comparing that scene with this, suddenly the reader is asked to break rather than preserve the vessel of her body. The breaking vessel implies a twofold sexual experience—the female's virginity is finally breached in that the material is broken, and the male reaches orgasm in the overflowing of fluids. This latter idea is important because it suggests the presence of the male author.

The broken vessel also implies a total self-shattering. There is a conflation between orgasm and total annihilation in death: a certain pleasure occurs in the dissolution of the self. This pleasure is not totally feminine in nature, and this is one instance where we can see the fluidity between gender distinctions, and that Aelred participates in the experience as a man, however subtly. Aelred's prior concern for the protection of the vessel and purity of the

35 “Caro virginis, vas luteum est, in quo aurum reconditur, ut probetur” (DII 650).

devotee is merely a sort of foreplay, a building up to the ecstatic moment of self-dissolution (literally, a “stepping outside one's self”). Previously, the reader has been called to step into the position of Gospel characters. Now, she is called to take up the position of an inanimate object. I think this further highlights and indeed prepares the reader for the absolute destruction of their subject position that is required for union with Christ.

1.2.2 De institutione inclusarum: Crucifixion Scene In fact—to compare this scene with a later one—within the passages on the Crucifixion, the text offers an inversion of the above situation. The roles of Christ and the devotee are reversed, and Christ becomes a vessel for the anchoress to enter, perhaps because she is already shattered and depicted as an effusion of fluids: The blood is changed into wine to gladden you, the water into milk to nourish you. From the rock streams have flowed for you, wounds have been made in his limbs, holes in the wall of his body, in which, like a dove, you may hide while you kiss them one by one. Your lips, stained with his blood, will become like a scarlet ribbon and your word sweet.36

This passage reveals that a certain kind of union has taken place. Both Christ and the devotee have now been depicted in terms of fluids, which blend. Also, Christ's body is perforated so that the devotee can actually penetrate him and even internalize him by tasting his blood. The two are intermingled. Aelred goes further, and now, instead of depicting the anchoress as a vessel, depicts Christ as such: “Ipse sit horreum tuum, ipse apotheca, ipse marsupiam, ipse divitiae tuae, ipse deliciae tuae; solus sit tibi omnia in omnibus” (“Let him be your barn, your storecupboard, your purse, your wealth, your delight; let him be all things in all.”) (DII 677). This passage highlights a complete breakdown of the anchoress's identity. Aelred asks her to let Christ be both the container and the contained—the purse, the wealth inside it, and the joy

36 Sanguis tibi in uinum uertitur ut inebrieris, in lac aqua mutatur ut nutriaris. Facta sunt tibi in petra flumina, in membris eius uulnera, et in maceria corporis eius cauerna, in quibus instar columbae latitans et deosculans singula ex sanguine eius fiant sicut uitta coccinea labia tua, et eloquium tuum dulce (DII 671).

surrounding it. Essentially, the anchoress must give over her subject position to be one with Christ, who is "all things inside all things”

The chiastic sentence "adorans in deo hominem et in homine deum" elegantly stresses this complicated union of Christ's humanity and divinity, and calls the reader to love both aspects of his person with no hierarchy between them. However, it also emphasizes another union: the union of humanity and divinity overall, or in other words, the mystical union of all humanity and God through Christ. "Homo" can also refer to humanity collectively, and thus this intertwining of God and all people takes place in Christ. In a secondary sense, Mary can love like Martha because she adores all people through God: loving God, in this model, is to love all people contained within him. Mary surpasses Martha because in loving God, she also performs Martha's role of loving humanity. The individual and the collective are reconciled in Christ.

This passage also implies that Mary can love the humanity in God and the divinity in humanity. Humans are modeled after their maker, as Genesis attests, and so there is something of God to be discovered and adored in people. More than this, Aelred's God is an anthropomorphic God, and there is "humanity" in him. I believe that the salient aspect of human nature that Aelred's God exhibits is actually his desire: Aelred's God is an erotic God, as a number of scholars have attested. He longs for humanity. The intricately knotted relationship of the reader and Mary, each of whom takes the other inside herself, is a microcosm, a preparation for the relationship of humanity and the divine.

The passage continues: 'Without her,' he said, 'this good work was not performed for me. Let Martha labour, serve, and prepare hospitality for the traveller, food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, and clothes for the cold. I am for Maria alone, and she for me. Let her give to me whatever she has, and let her receive from me whatever she desires.' What? Surely you would not counsel Maria to relinquish the feet which she so sweetly kisses? Or to

avert her eyes from that most glorious face which she contemplates? To withdraw her hearing from the sweet speech of his by which she is restored?37

Christ's and Mary's being ("esse") and their having ("habere") are blended, or exchanged, in a second chiastic structure in which identities become fluid. The medieval distinction between having and being centres on the ontology of God: God is being, people can merely "have" being, borrowed from God.38 Here Mary and Christ blend who they are, and what they possess, the kind of blending that occurs between lovers. Boundaries of identity break down. The boundaries between bodies break down also: the actions described place an emphasis on the matter, the physical, the senses, and on a mutual interaction of the two figures' bodies. All of the senses are engaged with each other: Mary kisses his feet with her lips, she contemplates the beauty of his face, again, which would have been both active and passive according to medieval optics. Her gaze would penetrate him like a ray of light, and then bring multiple "copies" or images back into her body. Thus, both bodies are mutually penetrated by the other. That she "contemplates" his beauty suggests that beauty, and thus the literal body of Christ, is good for its own sake.

Within this string of questions, the reader's anticipated doubt splits the previously unified subject positions of Mary and herself. The speaker addresses a series of double negative questions at the reader: “surely you would not counsel Mary to relinquish," etc. This passage is almost a negative image of the one from De Iesu, in which Mary kisses the feet, gazes at the face, and listens to the words of Christ. The negative structure, like the figures of the Pharisee and Judas, adds a subtext of anxiety that Mary's actions will not be understood. I believe Aelred alludes to a specific medieval debate about the Virgin Mary at the Crucifixion. The Virgin Mary chose to kiss Christ's feet and stay with his body, because her human and

37 Sine, inquit, illam, bonum enim opus non operata est in me. Laboret Martha, ministret, paret hospitium peregrino, esurienti cibum, sitienti potum, uestem algenti. Ego solus Mariae, et illa mihi, mihi totum praestet quod habet, a me quidquid optat expectet. Quid enim? Tu ne Mariae consulis relinquendos pedes, quos tam dulciter osculatur! Auertendos oculos ab illa speciosissima facie quam contemplatur, amouendum auditum ab eius suaui sermone quo reficitur? (DII 667).

38 For a discussion of the metaphysical distinction between habere and esse, see Stephen P. Menn’s section “Only One Necessary Being?” (156-57) in “Metaphysics: God and Being.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy. Ed. A. S. McGrade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 147-170.

motherly affection could not transcend the moment to contemplate God in the abstract (Bryan 172).39 For Aelred, there is no abstract contemplation of an invisible God, there is only Christ, and Christ's feet, which you should not relinquish. The body and the humanity of Christ should never be ignored for invisible realities.

1.2.3 De institutione inclusarum: Martha and Mary This emptying of the self is found elsewhere in this text, as Aelred often returns to ideas of fullness and emptiness. Emptiness belongs to the monastic practice of the reader, and is necessary in order to experience the fullness that is granted by God. In the first passage where Aelred compares Martha and Mary, he states: Know your condition, dearest. There were two sisters, Martha and Mary. One laboured, one remained empty. One expended, the other desired. One looked after duty, the other nourished her affection. Then, not walking or running either here or there, not concerned with caring after guests, not occupied with concerns for things of the household, not focused on the cries of the poor, rather, she sat at the feet of Jesus, and heard his word. This is your part, dearest, who are dead and buried to the world, you ought to be deaf to all things which are of the world, and silent of speaking of them. Neither ought you be lessened but increased, you ought to be filled, not emptied out.40

This passage is structured antithetically: "laborat illa, vacabat ista," "illa erogabat, ista petabat," "illa praestabat obsequium, ista nutriebat affectum." Because the role of Mary is designated for the reader, the reader is also asked to be empty of tasks and to be filled with

39 For a lengthier discussion on this, see Sarah McNamer’s chapter “Marian Lament and the Rise of a Vernacular Ethics” in Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010, and Keiser, George R. “The Middle English Planctus Mariae and the Rhetoric of Pathos.” In The Popular Literature of Medieval England. Ed. Thomas J. Heffernan. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. 167–93.

40 Agnosce conditionem tuam, carissima. Duae sorores erant, Martha et Maria. Laborabat illa, uacabat ista. Illa erogabat, ista petebat. Illa praestabat obsequium, ista nutriebat affectum. Denique non ambulans uel discurrens huc atque illuc, non suscipiendis hospitibus sollicita, non cura rei familiaris distenta, non pauperum clamoribus intenta, sedebat ad pedes Iesu, et audiebat uerbum illius. Haec pars tua, carissima, quae saeculo mortua atque sepulta, surda debes esse ad omnia quae saeculi sunt audiendum, et ad loquendum muta, nec debes distendi sed extendi, impleri non exhauriri. (DII 662).

desire or lack. Mary's emptiness fills her. She is able to be filled by Christ only because of her emptiness. The imagery of Mary's emptiness is paralleled by images of her interpenetration with Christ. She is empty of tasks and business so that she can be filled with his word, which penetrates her ear. The speaker then opens this position out for the reader, specifying that this is her role. The reader must be mute, deaf and dead to the world, and buried in the tomb with Christ. The reader must shut up the doors of her anchorhold around her, shut up the doors of perception of her body, and empty herself. She is not to be "stretched out" by others but "increased" by Christ. She is not to be "exhausted" by others but to be "filled up" by Christ. The imagery lends itself to a sexual reading. She must protect her virginity so that Christ can be her lover.

The act of emptying relates both to occupying a space and to creating a space for others to approach Christ. In order for the reader to take up the roles of various subject positions, she must destroy herself. The exemplar she reads about, Mary, must also empty herself in order to become the exemplar, the absent space that can be inhabited by another subjectivity. Emptiness, absence, and lack are other ways of opening herself up so that the reader can enter her and take over her position. Mary becomes a historical cipher, an intermediary through which others can access Christ. While the Virgin Mary brought Christ into the world, the adulterous Mary brought the world into Christ. It seems that this meditation does not merely demand unity with Christ, but necessarily involves the blending of the subject positions of character and reader in order to achieve unity with Christ. In fact, unity with another subject position comes first. Mary is open for the reader, and Christ. The reader is open to Mary and thus Christ. Perhaps it requires an adulterer to take up this sexualized position: she is penetrated by the reader, taken up, inhabited, becomes object.

However, the reader's masculine penetration of the feminized Magdalene is not completely accurate. Both empty themselves in order to penetrate one another. Their relation is queer by its uncomfortable crossings of time, sexual practice, and identity. The reader does not merely step inside the character of Mary; she brings Mary, and her respective emotions, into herself. In the Middle Ages, reading was thought to reform a person inwardly through their internalization of written material (Bartlett 17). Similarly, Foucault’s process of

"subjectification” occurs when people internalize prescriptive discourses about sex, the body, etc (31). Here, the reader penetrates and is penetrated. This crossing allows the reader to prepare to both enter and be entered by Christ. The heteronormative penetration by Christ requires a queer triangulation with Mary first.

1.3 Aelred Steps In

This triangulation of reader, Mary, and Christ, is complicated further by the presence of Aelred, the author and speaker, who orchestrates these relationships and channels desire and meaning between them. His own desire cannot help but make itself known in the text, and it filters the way other desires are managed. Linda Olson argues that Aelred's meditation on the present borrows from Augustine's Confessiones. Both Aelred and Augustine present their personal experiences as biblical or authoritative texts; reading and interpreting the self becomes as important for spiritual growth as reading and interpreting the Bible, and the two reinforce each other (82). Aelred offers himself to his readers as an example, consciously when he speaks about himself in third person about the incident of the lustful monk,41 and perhaps unconsciously when he slips into the subject positions he creates for his readers. I believe he speaks in the third person in this former example in order to take himself as an object of analysis. He turns his hermeneutical system on his own person, another kind of focalization, in which the reader is called to step outside of his or herself to analyze that self in order to take the self as object.

1.3.1 De institutione inclusarum: Mary, Jacob, and Aelred The following description of the lustful monk closely parallels Aelred's description of Mary at the feet of Christ (DII 665) which I discussed above:42

41 Compare the description of Aelred’s own conversion in De speculo caritatis I.28 (46-48), and Walter Daniel’s description in the Vita Aelredi: “In quam Alredus machinam intrans, si quando secretum silencium reperisset, et aqua frigidissima totum corpus humectans calorem in sese omnium extinxit uiciorum” (25).

42 See page 28.

Often he threw himself into freezing waters, shivering while he recited the psalms and prayed…And when all these things did not suffice, but the spirit of fornication pressed him, then that remedy alone remained: kneeling before the feet of Jesus, he pleaded, he cried out, he sighed, he begged, he swore, he implored that either Jesus kill or heal him. He cried out frequently: 'I will not depart, I will not be silenced, I will not leave you unless you bless me.'43

This scene and the scene of Mary washing Christ’s feet both combine spiritual repentance with physical struggle. Aelred finds his natural devotional posture in a combination of Jacob and Mary Magdalene. The overt allusion in this passage, however, is to Jacob, whereas Mary Magdalene is only referenced subtly. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles until morning with an angel of the Lord in order to extract both the name of the angel and a blessing. Knowledge of God (represented by his name) and his blessing are won through physical struggle (Genesis 32:24- 32). It is perfectly clear why such an image might be important for monastic spirituality. Like Jacob, the monk seeks a blessing from God, and he struggles violently to obtain it. Yet, the speaker specifically desires to atone for his sexual transgressions, as Mary did. And, like Mary, and unlike Jacob, he prostrates himself before the feet of Jesus, rather than wrestling with him. In combining the figures of Mary and Jacob, Aelred reads Jacob as a type of Mary. Both figures physically encountered and contended with the divine in order to receive spiritual satisfaction. Jacob wrestled with a figure unaware that he was divine, and did not let up until he received a blessing from him (which came in the form of a new name, 'Israel'). In contrast, Mary alone recognized the divinity in Christ, and perhaps did not explicitly seek the forgiveness of her sins, but received it anyway.

In combining both figures as exemplars, the physicality and latent eroticism of the encounters are emphasized. Aelred also makes sexual desire and sexual transgression essential aspects of the Mary Magdalene scene, as they are obviously important issues to his personal spiritual life. However, given that the women for whom he writes are virgins, it is interesting that

43 Plerumque uero se frigidis aquis iniciens, tremens aliquandiu psallebat et orabat…Et cum haec omnia non sufficerent, et nihilominus eum spiritus fornicationis urgeret, tunc, quod solum superfuit, prostratus ante pedes Iesu orat, plorat, suspirat, rogat, adiurat, obtestatur, ut aut occidat, aut sanet. clamat crebro: non abibo, non quiesco, nec te dimittam nisi benedixeris mihi (DII 653).

Mary Magdalene, and even Jacob, should be the figures he consistently returns to as examples for moral action. The moment also suggests that one form of desire can only be overcome by another form, or, that one object of desire can only be substituted for another. The physical struggle of contending with one's own body and own lust is replaced with wrestling and pleading with Christ. Because the initial sin was physical, the spiritual remedy takes a physical form.

Because of the similarity between these two scenes, I believe that Aelred wrote this passage desiring to enter—or perhaps even having already entered—Mary's position himself. Experientially, he fits better into the space created by Mary Magdalene than his virginal reader, since he, too, has sinned sexually. In the DII, there are subtle hints in the imagery that occupying this place as a man is his true desire, because the imagery does not depict a feminine sexuality, but rather a masculine one. In De Iesu, the subject position created by Mary is passive to the active Christ, and thus the male reader can inhabit the position of the female Mary only by becoming a passive woman. In this scene, however, the subject position becomes the active Jacob, wrestling with a now passive God. Mary is the ostensible figure, but Jacob is superimposed on her, just as behind his virginal sister taking the place of Mary taking the place of Jacob, stands Aelred.

The speaker stresses that if Christ gave his feet to a sinner, he would surely give them to a virgin. This contrast highlights the disparity between the reader and the woman whose subject position she is called to inhabit. Mary is not only a “sinner,” she is specifically not a virgin, and more than this, an adulterer. What does it mean for a virgin to step into the position of an adulterer? The subject position that these readers adopt is a sexualized one even before Aelred heightens the erotic energies of the situations. That a virgin would be asked to step into the subject position of one whose sins are averse to the monastic life of chastity, and whose sins are (ideally) ones with which the reader would have no experience is counterintuitive, especially since the role is designated for the reader's moral sense. The sensuality of the moment almost requires these sins in order to transcend them in this way. As the De Iesu scene makes clear, and I will argue later, Mary reappropriates her desire and her sensual behaviour merely by shifting their object: Christ instead of another man. So why

would Aelred ask a virgin to step into the role of a repentant adulterer? Perhaps the reader can put on the experience of the sinner without putting on her sins. The reader can adopt her sensuality toward Christ without adopting her sinful sensuality. The reader can repent with the desperation of an adulterer without actually being one. Perhaps the reader lowers herself to the humble status of adulterer, in order to raise herself higher than she might otherwise be able to.

The DII thus provides a chiastic structure of possible subject positions: Aelred is male and has sinned sexually, and his addressed reader is a female virgin. He uses the tropes of Mary, an adulterer, and St. John, a virgin.44 No one person fits perfectly into any role without crossing the boundaries of either gender or sexual experience. His sister must either relate to a virginal man, or an adulterous woman. Aelred must relate to an adulterous woman, or a virginal man. His relation to the adulterous woman is even risky, so he steps into her position by slyly inhabiting the position of his virginal sister, and in the De Iesu, by speaking about his feminine "anima," ensuring the relation is still safely heteronormative. Aelred's focalization requires a stepping outside of one's identity, and this occurs along lines of sexuality or sexual experience.

In the De Iesu scene of Mary’s repentence (273), Aelred parallels the sin with the penitence: lips that violated chastity are now kissing Christ's feet.45 This creates an antithetical structure in which the sensual actions and physical traits that caused Mary Magdalene's sin in the first place46 are being repurposed as signs of her salvation, which is given in this moment: Aelred specifies "hactenus," or, until now sin had claimed her. The same sensual affection, the same actions, when given a proper object, result in piety rather than impiety, and even salvation rather than damnation. This parallelism, yoking the two situations together as it does, implies

44 St. John is given as an alternative to Mary Magdalene later in the text (DII 668).

45 See page 25 for the full quotation.

46 The idea comes from Gregory the Great's Homily 25, “Let him look on Mary who purged away the love of her body by the fire of divine love” (198). See Gregory the Great. Forty Gospel Homilies. Trans. Dom David Hurst. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990.

that the erotic energy behind such kisses remains similar. In fact, in his earlier text De speculo caritatis, Aelred argues that sin is merely misdirected love (115-16).47

But here, in an image of absolute submission, the crown of Mary's head touches the base of Christ's feet, and hair that used to ensnare men now wipes away dirt. Her spiritual stain is somehow cleansed by her physical cleansing of Christ. Mary heals herself paradoxically by anointing Christ, showing the interconnectedness of Christ and humanity. This is the heart of Aelred's tropology: the speaker is not asked to repent through fasting, flagellation, or other ascetic means, but rather by showing affection to the body of Christ. Again, Aelred mentions that such asceticism could not stop his lust, but he was able to overcome it only by prostrating himself at the feet of Christ and performing actions identical to Mary. The energies are not beaten out of the body, but redirected, transformed, and the encounter with the divine is physical and sensual.

Reading Jacob as a type of Mary means that Jacob's wrestle with the Angel foreshadows Mary's repentant devotion at Christ's feet. Both involve physical manifestations of the divine, and a human contending with this divine manifestation for blessing or absolution. Aelred's tropological reading of both scenes makes Mary, and in the distance, Jacob, types for us. In other words, typology and focalization are two sides of the same coin. Mary steps into the role of Jacob when she contends with Christ, we step into the role of Mary to do so in our lives.

1.3.2 De Iesu puero duodenni: Mary Washes Christ's Feet Unlike the De institutione the De Iesu explicitly reveals Aelred's desire to step into Mary's position, as he usurps the meditation for himself. The speaker brings the scene to a climax with an apostrophe to his own soul, which now inhabits the space created by Mary for all sinners. He states:

47 “Porro et ipsa electio amor dicitur, et est quidam actus animae; sed cum amor ipse quo eligit semper bonum sit, haec tamen electio, quae et amor nihilominus appellatur, necesse est ut bona uel mala sit, ac per hoc bonus uel malus amor sit” (De speculo caritatis 115).

What do you do, O my soul? O my wretched one, O my sinful one? You have at last a place where you may safely spill your tears, where you may purge your foul stains with holy kisses, where you may pour out the whole oil of your affection safely, without feeling any touch or stirring of vice. Why then do you conceal them [these tears]? Burst forth, O sweet tears, burst forth: no one impedes your course. Moisten the most sacred soles of the feet of my saviour, of my helper. I do not care if the Pharisee murmurs, if he judges that I ought to be kept away from his feet, if he thinks me unworthy to touch the hem of his garment, if he mocks, laughs, and ridicules. Avert your eyes, contain your nostrils, nevertheless, I will cling to your feet, my Jesus, I will hold tightly with my hands, I will press with my lips, nor will I cease from tears or from kisses until I should hear: 'many sins are forgiven you, because you loved much.'48

The soul is feminized (“anima”), and can thus more easily occupy the position of Mary. However, Aelred also capitalizes on the convenience of the Latin gendering. Feminizing his soul is a way of making it appropriate for the male Aelred to take such an erotic position with the male Christ. Aelred specifies "anima mea," or his feminized soul, because it would be risky to put himself in that place as a man. This shows that Aelred is aware of a potential discomfort around Mary's affectivity, and thus around his own—a discomfort that is personified by the figure of the Pharisee, as I will discuss in the next part of this chapter.

The speaker begins by apostrophizing to his soul, which is granted three titles: “anima mea,” “misera mea,” “peccatrix mea.” This “repetition with variation” sets the structure for this whole section of the text, as the speaker often repeats similar concepts in units of three, arranged in parallel syntax. Aelred's tripartite pattern of spilling tears, purging sins, and pouring out oil is mimicked by his outburst of ecstatic and excessive language, as if the speaker is actually spilling his tears here with an overflow of words. There is a release of tension, as it is stated that the speaker struggles against a desire to conceal or contain his

48 Quid agis, O anima mea, o misera mea, O peccatrix mea? Habes certe ubi tute lacrimas tuas libes, ubi foeda tua oscula sacris osculis purges, ubi totum tuae affectionis unguentum secure, sine aliquo tactu uel motu uitii tentantis effundas. quid dissimulas? Erumpite, O dulces lacrimae, erumpite, cursum uestrum nullus impediat. Rigate sacratissimas plantas saluatoris mei, susceptoris mei. Non curo si quis Pharisaeus submurmuret, si me a suis pedibus arcendum censeat, si fimbriae suae tactu indignum me iudicet. Subsannet, rideat et irrideat, auertat oculos; contineat nares, nihilominus uestigiis tuis inhaerebo, Iesu meus, stringam manibus, premam labiis, nec a lacrimis cessabo uel osculis, donec audiam: dimissa sunt ei peccata multa, quoniam dilexit multum (DIP 273).

tears: “quid dissimulas?” It seems that here alone he can finally burst, revealing his feelings and affection for Christ. Somehow his appropriation of Mary Magdalene’s position has made it appropriate to reveal his inner feelings and make a physical display of affection to God. Aelred's affective practices seem biblically justified.

As if to embody the counter-position after the speaker declares such actions to be justified, the figure of the Pharisee appears. Deliberate ambiguity in the grammar, breaking the triple syntax of the sentence, potentially manifests an even greater fear: the figure of an unresponsive Christ. Two sets of three active verbs for which the Pharisee is the subject blend into two more active verbs for which the subject is unclear. The speaker articulates that he does not care if the Pharisee murmurs, thinks he should be kept from Christ's feet, judges him unworthy to touch the hem of his garment like the woman in Luke, and laughs, mocks, and ridicules. After “subsannet, rideat, et irrideat,” the speaker follows with an additional two verbs: “avertat oculos, contineat nares”—which probably refer to the Pharisee but also present his fear that Christ, too, will respond this way. The parallel syntax (two sets of three) is broken by these two verbs, breaking it off syntactically and symmetrically from the Pharisee's earlier actions. Immediately after, the speaker directly addresses Christ, insisting that he will perform these actions “nihilominus.” This strengthens the ambiguity concerning who is the subject of these verbs, since the possible subjects, the Pharisee and Christ, border them on either side in the sentence. Taking Christ as the subject, Aelred implies that even if Christ himself averts his eyes and avoids the scent of the nard oil, Aelred will still persist. This imagery of struggling with an unresponsive Christ is another way that Aelred manifests his anxiety that his affection will be inappropriate and unwanted by Christ.

Rather than merely having Mary offer this attention to the feet of Christ, and Christ then making it clear to the Pharisee that her sins are forgiven, Aelred, in taking up the position of Mary, adds the physical struggle of Jacob extracting this blessing or statement of forgiveness. In the background then, there is another level of eroticism: a depiction of two men wrestling, one placing his hand on the other's thigh rather than his feet. Also, this allusion adds a sense of struggle: Christ might turn away, blessing must be physically wrenched from him, and Christ must, like the Angel, rejoice in being overcome. In contrast to the "active" Christ and

submissive Mary in the earliest part of this scene, then, Aelred adds physical struggle, taking agency into his own hands. Aelred becomes the "male" force, imposing his action on a passive "female" Christ. Finally, pouring out oil without any "tactu vel motu vitii" makes the orgasm imagery I discussed earlier more explicit. Aelred uses "motu" elsewhere in reference to involuntary erections.49 Thus, Mary Magdalene creates a space in which the pouring out of oil, the male "orgasm," can occur without sinful motion of the flesh. The ecstasy and flood of emotion out from the body occurs, but it is not sinful. This hearkens back to the Augustinian conception of Adam and Eve's prelapsarian sexual life, occurring without any lust and therefore without sin. The body and desire were in perfect harmony with the reason and the will. Mary Magdalene recreates this paradisiacal innocence between the legs of Christ.

In fact, all humanity is invited between the legs of Christ. In the fourth part of this scene, this intimate connection between Mary and Christ is universalized, and shown to be representative of all: Thanks to you, O most blessed sinner, you showed to the world a safe place for sinners: the feet of Jesus, which spurn no one, refuse no one, repel no one, undertake all, admit all.50

The sinners are placed physically within the “safe space” in the Latin, as “suis peccatoribus” is wedged between “locum” and “tutum.” Imagistically, perhaps form mimics content and the “locum” and “tutum” serve as the two feet of Christ with the sinner between them, since "locum tutum" is in apposition with “pedes iesu,” which is specified after. In other words, the “locum tutum” is semantically the feet of Christ, so perhaps it is imagistically as well. This makes the image even more intimate and indicates a sensuality even at the level of syntax. Mary—indeed, all sinners—positioned between the spread feet of Christ is a different image

49 For example, where he states: “indignum iudicet quod Christi est tradere Satanae, et virginea eius membra erubescat uel simplici motu maculari” (DII 651).

50 Gratias tibi, O beatissima peccatrix, ostendisti mundo tutum suis peccatoribus locum, pedes Iesu, qui neminem spernunt, neminem reiiciunt, neminem repellunt, suscipiunt omnes, omnes admittunt (DIP 273).

altogether than being positioned before his closed feet. It indicates an openness between them. Like the image of the side wound of Christ on the Cross, which is constantly depicted as being a safe space for sinners to enter and escape the wrath of God, the sinner sits between the two feet, becoming continuous with his body, protected by his legs on both sides.

Aelred is perfectly aware of the erotic aspect of the Gospel passage, and rather than suppressing or allegorizing it, he enhances it. He makes figurative and actual reference to the sex act in his imagery of oil poured out and his allusion to wrestling with the Angel, however, he is careful to qualify that this experience occurs outside of the usual sinful associations of lust, etc. The body does not react in a lustful way, though the resulting metaphorical effusion of fluids is the same.

1.4 Voyeurs This eroticism comes not without a certain anxiety from our author, and his anxiety becomes embodied in the form of two peripheral characters, each of whom focalizes our scene in a different and critical way. Both Simon the Pharisee and Judas interrupt the scenes of Mary's repentance at Christ's feet with negative reactions. Both characters focalize the entire scene negatively, writing Aelred's proposed critics into the narrative frame, and thus heading off their criticisms. These figures could also be read as different exegetical levels that become embodied within the scene itself. In standard exegesis, a single interpreter tills multiple levels of meaning from a series of images. Here, the image remains the same: Mary Magdalene or Jacob or Aelred or the reader weep at the feet of Christ. What changes is the focalization. Contemporary film criticism defines three types of cinematic glance: the camera's, the viewer's, and the characters at each other (Mulvey 843). Aelred's treatises involve his master gaze as author and speaker, like the camera's, which focalizes the scene we "look at" as readers, readers who embody the second gaze, not unlike a cinematic viewer's. Finally, gaze is also carefully constructed among his characters, especially Mary, Christ, and the voyeuristic Simon and Judas. Thus, the identity of the interpreter shifts as it becomes associated with various characters, like so many cameras, around Christ. This multiplicity of gaze allows the reader to identify with various scopic positions in the text, and to take a

critical awareness of what each position entails. Tropology for Aelred, then, becomes about choosing to inhabit a different place or subject position in relation to the text, and through this inhabiting, to occupy differently constructed relationships with Christ.

1.4.1 De Iesu puero duodenni: Mary Washes Christ's Feet After the extremely sensual prose depicting the intimate connection between Mary and Christ, the scene pans out to reveal Simon the Pharisee, looking on in righteous indignation. The speaker addresses a warning to this interloper, who functions as a historical Gospel figure but also becomes a stand-in for all criticizers: Woe to you, O Pharisee, to whom this odour is the odour of death unto death, who fears to be stained by another's sins, when your own swollen foulness stains you worse. Do you not know how sweet the wretched confession of this sinner smelled to the merciful one, how fiery love consumed her sin? Then: 'many sins are forgiven her, since she loved much.'51

The Pharisee is a straw-man, an embodiment of Aelred's imagined detractors, those who will take issue with the sensuality of this tropology. But by writing readerly objections into the scene itself, he actually highlights how problematic it might be. In fact, through the critical lens of the Pharisee, we see that Mary's sin and her resolution to this sin in caressing Christ are perhaps too close together for the Pharisee's comfort. Through him, Aelred's own anxiety emerges: his devotion is too sensual, too caught up in his sexual past. He is concerned that readers will see a problem with his identity as a monk who has committed sexual sins (and even worse, rumour has it that he committed sodomy),52 and his position as one who now offers such a sensual devotion to Christ (and instructs others to do so). Interestingly, the Pharisee embodies and thus collapses two separate objections: in the Gospel's cultural context, the Pharisee fears the physical contagion of Mary's sins, but, in

51 Uae tibi, O Pharisaee, cui odor iste est odor mortis in mortem, qui times alienis maculari peccatis, cum te tumor proprius deterius foedius que commaculet. Nescis quam suaue redoleat misericordiae confessa huius peccatricis miseria, quam dulce sapiat pietati confessio pura peccati, quam gratum sit illi sacrificium cordis contritio, quantum consumat peccatum ardens dilectio. Denique: dimissa sunt ei peccata multa, quoniam dilexit multum (DIP 273).

52 For a summary of Aelred’s allusions to his carnal past, see John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. 221-26.

Aelred's hands, this becomes an implicit objection over the sensual nature of her worship, one that Aelred is personally defending. Historically, the Pharisee objects to keeping company with an adulterer, and so to her sin, but in a figural reading he objects to Mary's ethical response, and thus to her manner of repentance.

What is different about the Pharisee is that he does not pay attention to the reaction of Christ, which is wholly positive in response to Mary's actions. Rather, like most “foil” characters in the Gospel, he is overly concerned with the rules and interprets these actions in a “literal” way. However, this literal-mindedness does not mean that the Pharisee mistakenly reads her actions as carnal and sensual when really they are purely spiritual. There is a level of discomfort around her action because it truly is sensual, and the erotic energies that caused her sins are present in the actions that symbolize her redemption. His “literal” thinking means that he is unnecessarily and falsely concerned with rules of propriety rather than what is actually “right.” He takes the part for the whole, seeing the carnality of her behaviour as the point, and missing the multivalence of meaning stemming out of her actions.

He is a hypocrite, of course. He objects to Mary's sins and her sexual rendering of devotion, but his own “tumor” is “foedius.” Is this the swelling of his pride, or his penis? Most likely, both. This image also contrasts with the general movement of Mary in the text, who empties herself, rather than “puffing herself up.” Simon interprets Mary's actions as purely sexual, and at the same time that Mary disgusts him, he takes her as a sexual object. He does not look at Christ at all: he misses Christ's reaction by focusing on Mary, and therein lies his fault. Simon is thus a textually-encoded example of a bad reader. He should gaze at Christ queerly through Mary, not at Mary for her own sake. This incomplete gaze renders his actions sexual—and heterosexual!—when proper readings take a queer turn.

Were he to pay attention to Christ at all, he would see how “sweet” the actions of Mary were to Christ. Because of his pride, he cannot properly assess the “sweet” smell of the oil, which to him smells like death. Indeed, as I have argued, death is inherently signified by Mary's actions. Christ is being prepared for burial. But this burial is only temporary, and Mary alone realizes this. She is thus the true exegete, reading Christ's actions and understanding them

spiritually. The Pharisee in seeing Christ would not understand. His gaze is thus incomplete, and impotent even in its very phallicness.

1.4.2 De institutione inclusarum: Mary Shatters the Jar The De institutione version of this scene also involves Simon, but adds the angry glare of Judas as well: If the traitor growls, if he complains, if he grows envious, if he calls this devotion a waste, let it not concern you, as he says ‘what is this folly? This oil could have been sold for much, and given to the poor.’ The Pharisee grumbled, envious of her penitence, and Judas grumbled, envious of the oil. But the judge did not pay heed to the accusation, and absolved the one accused.53

Now Judas steps in to criticize. His position is superficially not unlike Martha's: he is concerned with feeding the poor. The Pharisee returns as a parallel figure, and he envies her penitence, as Judas envies the oil. There is a hierarchy here. The Pharisee, perhaps overly concerned with rules of decorum, is at least envious of her penitence, though he quibbles over how she chooses to show it. Judas envies the material good. These are two forms of “literal” thinking. Aelred transplants the literal from the body, and onto the people who misread the body. The erotic is not the “literal” level. The literal level is Judas desiring the intact oil for sale, rather than the shattered oil spilled out onto Christ. The literal level is the Pharisee, desiring purity of behaviour rather than overt displays of love of God. The literal level is not the erotic connection between Mary and Christ: this is the spiritual level, their union.

There are two “literal” levels in medieval thought that must be kept in mind: one is the first level of exegesis, the body that houses spiritual truths, and the other is the “letter” in contradistinction to the “spirit,” à la Paul. The letter kills but the spirit gives life. The first

53 Si fremit, si murmurat, si inuidet proditor, si perditionem uocat deuotionem, non sit tibi curae. Ut quid, ait, perditio haec? Posset hoc unguentum uenumdari multo, et dari pauperibus. Pharisaeus murmurat, inuidens paenitenti; murmurat Iudas, inuidens unguenti. Sed Iudex accusationem non recepit, accusatam absoluit (DII 667).

involves the historical vehicle that is examined for theological truths. The second involves a mistaken obsession with the rules, above and beyond the meaning behind those rules. Judas and the Pharisee represent the latter. Aelred twists medieval expectations of literal versus spiritual around, allowing Mary's erotic affection for Christ to become the spiritual meaning, and Judas and Simon's misinterpretation of it to become the literal level. Rather than starting from the literal level and working up, Judas and Simon step in as anti-exegetes, reading the text of Mary's body touching Christ's body. They observe a moment of almost mystical union, but read it literally, concerning themselves with the cost of the oil, and the rules of propriety. Mary, in contrast, is the true interpreter. She foresees Christ's death and resurrection and acts appropriately.

1.5 The Unification of Gazes Aelred's successive entering of subject positions reveals a radically unfixed notion of subjectivity, which is “an ongoing construction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival from which one then interacts with the world. On the contrary, it is the effect of that interaction” (de Lauretis 159). Aelred enters his sister's position, who enters Mary, who enters Christ. In other words, Aelred usurps the female position with respect to Christ twice over, but then loses himself again in the female space of Christ, entering him like the womb, and being buried with him in the tomb. This is because only Christ can stabilize identity; filled with all of these trailing subjectivities, he enters the tomb in death and emerges from it resurrected. In a reversal of the physical birthing process, it is only in the entry into the womb of Christ that one finds fixed identity or “salvation,” because only Christ has the power to reenter the womb/tomb and emerge reborn from death. This is a Pauline idea: we must all become one body in Christ to be saved.

1.5.1 Mary Magdalene at the Tomb The final moment within the extended Gospel meditation in the De institutione also focuses on the figure of Mary Magdalene, and serves as partner to her repentance scenes: Do not neglect to accompany Mary Magdalene. With prepared spices, remember to visit the tomb of our Lord with her (Luke 24:1). O, if you could be worthy to perceive

in spirit what she saw with her eyes: an angel residing, now above the stone rolled away by the door, now within the monument, one angel at the head, one at the feet, preaching the glory of the resurrection, now Jesus himself, looking with eyes so sweet at Mary crying and sad, with so sweet a voice saying: ‘Maria’ (John 20:16-17).54

This is the final scene in Aelred's Gospel meditation on the past, before he begins a discussion of the present, and it is a fitting close to the entire meditation. This time, Mary seeks to anoint the “empty” corpse of Christ. Instead she finds an empty tomb. The scene also begins with the reader in a divided position from Mary since she must be asked to accompany her, and gaze is divided between Mary's sight in the flesh and her own sight in spirit. Thus we begin the passage with subjects alienated from their former bodies or positions. Mary is emptied of the reader, and the tomb is empty of Christ, who is supposed to be empty of his soul.

The syntax of the passage explicating Mary's discovery is ecstatic, frenzied, and disjointed. The language reflects the frantic actions of Mary, whose senses dart this way and that in a hastened blur. We move instantaneously from the “now” (“nunc”) of observing the tomb with the stone rolled away to the “now” of being inside the tomb and finding it empty of Christ to the “now” of being again outside the tomb and finding him there. As readers are called to remember to accompany Mary to the tomb, we are also in the eternal “now” of the text, accessible through contemplation. Interestingly, Mary's bodily gaze is privileged over this contemplative gaze. The division between bodily and spiritual sight is not the division of literal versus allegorical, but rather between seeing historically and in the flesh and seeing spiritually and in the mind. Again, Aelred subverts our expectations of the relationship between body and spirit.

54 Noli praeterea Magdalenae deserere comitatum, sed paratis aromatibus cum ea Domini tui sepulchrum uisitare memento. O si quod illa oculis, tu in spiritu cernere merearis, nunc super lapidem reuolutum ab ostio angelum residentem, nunc intra monumentum, unum ad caput, alium ad pedes, resurrectionis gloriam praedicantes, nunc ipsum Iesum Mariam flentem et tristem tam dulci reficientem oculo, tam suaui uoce dicentem: 'Maria' (DII 672).

The first word of this passage is “noli,” a foreshadowing of the infamous “noli me tangere” from the Gospel of John that is about to occur (John 20:17). It also sets denial and alienation as the tone of the passage, as the “noli” pairs up with “deserere”: do not desert. The speaker is of course saying not to desert, but why phrase it negatively? Why not say, “remember to accompany”? This command “noli...deserere comitatum” of the speaker inverts the “noli...tangere” of Christ. Do not desert Mary, do not touch Christ. Go with Mary, do not touch Christ. Go with Mary up to Christ, do not touch him. The first command implies a division between Mary, the speaker, and the reader.

The second, however, changes everything. “Noli me tangere” unifies Mary, the reader, and the speaker, who steps into the scene more explicitly later. Christ's words refer to the body; the speaker's refer to the mind. The first command calls the reader to go up to Christ, the second halts her right before she achieves her blissful goal. These two commands serve as a microcosm of the entire meditation, in which the speaker commands the reader to go along with various characters in her or his mind. The second command unifies humanity into a universal and mystical “now,” stopping them short of their ultimate goal. To put it crassly, Aelred makes Jesus into a tease.

Then the already-affective writing erupts in an overflow of rhetorical questions, adjectives, and repetitions, all in parallel structures: ‘Maria’:55 what could be pleasanter than that voice? What could be sweeter? What could be lovelier? 'Maria:' Break the floodgates of the head at this voice, let tears emerge from deep within, let sobs and sighs be drawn out from the innermost self. ‘Maria’: O blessed one, what did you think and feel when you prostrated yourself at this voice, and suddenly returning the greeting, you called out: ‘Rabbi!’ I ask: with what affect, with what desire, with what passion of mind, with what devotion of heart did you cry out ‘Rabbi’? For tears prohibit speaking further, since affect chokes up the voice, and too much love overwhelms all the feelings of the soul and body.56

55 I have repeated the “Maria” that ended the previous passage again here, because the sentence is continuous in the Latin.

56 'Maria': quid hac uoce dulcius? Quid suauius? Quid iucundius? Maria: rumpantur ad hanc uocem omnes capitis cataractae, ab ipsis medullis eliciantur lacrymae, singultus atque suspira ab imis trahantur uisceribus. Maria: O beata, quid tibi mentis fuit, quid animi, cum ad hanc uocem te prosterneres, et reddens uicem salutanti

Form mirrors content, as the speaker mentions sobs, sighs, and tears erupting from the innermost depths of the body. So, too, does this mark a flood of repetition and excess in the prose. I need to arrange the Latin to emphasize the structure:

‘Maria’: Quid hac uoce dulcius? Quid suauius? Quid iucundius? ‘Maria’: rumpantur ad hanc uocem omnes capitis cataractae, ab ipsis medullis eliciantur lacrymae, singultus atque suspira ab imis trahantur uisceribus. ‘Maria’: O beata, quid tibi mentis fuit, quid animi, cum ad hanc uocem te prosterneres, et reddens uicem salutanti inclamares: ‘Rabbi.’ Quo rogo affectu, quo desiderio, quo mentis ardore, qua deuotione cordis clamasti: ‘Rabbi.’

‘Maria’: three rhetorical questions with comparative adjectives. ‘Maria’: three commands. ‘Maria’: quadruple transition sentence: ‘Rabbi.’ Quadruple rhetorical question: ‘Rabbi.’

Four statements: the first two have a triplex structure, the final two are quadruple. The third sentence transitions between Maria/Rabbi. Aelred breaks his usual pattern of threes to bring this moment to excess, or three plus one. The statement “Maria” that opens the dialogue is answered back with “Rabbi,” which closes it. This movement works like back-and-forth of the lovers in the Canticum canticorum. The first triplex statement focuses on the lovely quality of Christ's voice in stating “Maria,” and the final quadruple statement on the emotional turmoil of Mary's mind and heart because of this voice, effecting her return cry: “Rabbi.”

Overall, the emphasis is on Christ's voice, specifically its beauty, and its effect on Mary's body and embodied emotions. Christ's body is absent from this depiction: at first he is only a

inclamares: Rabbi. Quo rogo affectu, quo desiderio, quo mentis ardore, qua deuotione cordis clamasti: Rabbi. Nam plura dicere lacrymae prohibent, cum uocem occludat affectus, omnes que animae corporis que sensus nimius amor absorbeat (DII 672).

bodiless voice. He cannot be focalized. His body is deferred or delayed, just as he later defers or delays Mary's touch of his then-present body. The focus on his voice and words emphasizes his role as Logos, and Mary Magdalene is the embodied receiver of this Logos. This is a deliberate imitation of the Incarnation moment, especially as it is often depicted in medieval art: as a string of words entering the Virgin Mary's ear.57 But the Logos is embodied, the Word made flesh. Why should it be airy and abstract? This moment actually depicts the re-embodiment of the Logos, the reunion of Christ's body and soul, and his hypostatic union of body and soul, humanity and divinity, will step into the picture momentarily. This re-embodiment involves a third member, however. Christ's voice enters Mary's senses, so in a way he is also secondarily re-embodied in her.

For now, we see only Mary's body, and its volatile reaction to the words of Christ. This is a subtle commentary on life on earth for any devotional reader. All readers really have are Christ's words, and the effect of those words on their desiring bodies. Christ cannot be focalized except through language. Christ's body is delayed, accessed only partially, in half- satisfying moments such as the consumption of the host or through the symbolic order in the practice of these contemplative exercises. But the body of the reader is filled with emotion and desire, reacting to the beauty of Christ's words, and indeed, synechdocally, the beauty of Christ. Like the “noli me tangere” command that unites the reader and Mary in its prohibition, this moment, too, compels the reader and Mary alike to react to Christ's voice.

The phrase, “break the floodgates of the head,” reveals the breaking of a mental shell. This image simultaneously refers to the physical bursting of tears from the head, but, more importantly, it suggests that the mental control that held these emotions in check is now broken. Like the earlier image of the shattered perfume jar of the heart, this is a second image of self-shattering in the presence of Christ. Earlier passages involving the interaction of Mary

57 Conceptio per aurem has early attestations, for example, Augustine states: “Deus per angelum loquebatur et Virgo per aurem impregnebatur.” For a synopsis of the history of this idea, see: Steinberg, Leo. “’How Shall This Be?’ Reflections on Filippo Lippi's "Annunciation" in London, Part I.” Artibus et Historiae 8.16 (1987): 25-44.

and Christ mainly depict things going into the head through the senses. Here, finally, the head itself “bursts” and tears and sobs come out of it. The next two commands involve tears, sobs, and sighs essentially “coaxed” and “dragged” out of the depths of the body, again, as if they had been formerly suppressed. The next line again isolates Christ's voice (“vocem”) from the rest of him, as Mary prostrates herself at his “voice” and returns his greeting. This simple utterance is remarkable to the speaker, who implies that a great deal of affect must have compelled Mary to state even this, since her overabundance of emotion “chokes up the voice” and “overwhelms all the feelings of the soul and body.” The flood of tears from the body, and this flood of ecstatic prose are juxtaposed with Mary's inability to say more. Perhaps Aelred balances the Mary’s aphasia by writing such excessive prose. “Tears prohibit speaking further”: the outpouring from the body somehow prevents an outpouring of speech, as though only one could happen at once. Christ's voice and absent body is paired with Mary's body and absent speech. In fact, babbling, stuttering, or blocked up speech is a sign of sexual arousal and orgasm in women, according to Avicenna and his medieval commentators (Bartlett 135). This is a moment of sexual consummation and release.

But now, just for a moment, Aelred wholly absorbs the subject position he has created for his readers, not subtly through allusion to his past, or through an apostrophe to his grammatically feminine soul. He completely steals the scene, shifting to the first person in the middle of this passage: But, O sweet Jesus, why do you thus withhold your most sacred and most desired feet from this lover? ‘Do not,’ he says, ‘touch me’ (John 20:16-17). Oh harsh/hard word, intolerable word: ‘do not touch me.’ How is this, Lord? Why may I not touch you? May I not kiss, may I not touch those desired feet, perforated with nails, perfused with blood for me? Are you rougher than you used to be, because you are more glorious? Behold, I will not let you go, I will not depart from you (Genesis 32:26), I will not cease from crying, my breast will burst with sobs and sighs unless I touch you.58

58 Sed o dulcis Iesu, cur a sacratissimis ac desiderantissimis pedibus tuis sic arces amantem? Noli, inquit, me tangere. O uerbum durum, uerbum intolerabile: noli me tangere. Ut quid, Domine? Quare non tangam? Desiderata illa uestigia tua pro me perforata clauis, perfusa sanguine, non tangam, non deosculabor? An immitior es solito, quia gloriosior? Ecce non dimittam te, non recedam a te, non parcam lacrymis, pectus singultibus suspiriis que rumpetur, nisi tangam (DII 672).

We move from “amantem”(the one who loves) to the “I” included in the verb “tangam,” or, we move from Mary to the “I” of the speaker: “why may not I touch you?” In fact, this scene also closely parallels Aelred's depiction of the monk struggling with Christ. This time, unlike in the De Iesu, Aelred does not use his soul as an intermediary figure, one that is abstract and nominally feminine, to circumlocute homoerotic desire. He addresses Christ as Aelred. Aelred, who has sinned as Mary Magdalene has sinned. Aelred, who desires to touch Christ, because that is the only cure for his lust. This “noli me tangere” is absolutely intolerable to Aelred who challenges it through a series of rhetorical questions.

The speaker specifies that Christ's feet are still perfused with blood, atypical of medieval Resurrection images. Christ is not Bakhtin's “finished, completed man, cleansed, as it were, of all the scoriae of birth and development” (25). He is still coated in the blood of his rebirth. Christ's feet, so powerful and important in the De Iesu moment, are pierced, broken, bloody, and open to the world. Christ resurrected is not closed-off from humanity, but open, bleeding, incomplete—incomplete because he lacks humanity united to him.

The speaker then asks if Christ's refusal indicates if he is more “savage” (“immitior”)—more primal, less civilized—because he is the more glorious. His denial explicitly makes him rougher or harsher. Is he more divine than before, is this an experience of unadulterated divinity and power, in which case Christ is too much for humanity? Is there a suggestion that Christ is somehow more divine in one case and more human in another? Or perhaps, like the Transfiguration, his glory exists beyond the scope of human focalization? It is specifically in terms of touch that Christ is too much. Christ, because he is more glorious and therefore more savage, denies touch to the speaker. Everything prior to this has emphasized gaze, and now the speaker desires more.

Aelred asserts that his chest will not cease bursting with sobs and sighs until he can touch Christ. The bursting chest is like the vessel-to-be-shattered from the previous scene, with one important difference. When Aelred speaks of the vessel, he refers to a single, irreversible moment in time. Here, his chest breaks in an ongoing process between the time that he

recognizes Christ and can touch him. This delay can be read anagogically as the span of one's life. Thus, we also step into eschatological time, or, out of tropology and into anagogy. Life is the bursting forth of sobs and sighs until the moment of touching can occur, which is delayed. This sort of life is depicted not with meaningful utterances, but by the creation of noise and empty, meaningless wind. The speaker desires access to Christ unmediated by the symbolic order. Speech is nothing, touch is everything. Words, interpretation, meaning are meaningless compared to touch. Ultimately, this is a rejection of or a moving beyond exegesis itself. The speaker desires Christ alone. Biblically, the touch is delayed because Christ has “not yet arisen to his Father,” meaning that he has completed the harrowing of hell and reunited with his body, but not yet ascended to heaven. Christ is liminal, savage, beyond the possibility of touch.

For Jean-Luc Nancy, the “noli me tangere” of the Gospel conveys the “brilliance of more than presence” (17). He notes that “noli” really means “do not wish,” as in “do not wish to touch me” because Mary and indeed all believers cannot hold Christ or retain anything of him, and this is what they must recognize (37). Nancy posits that this is the gap between knowledge and love—knowledge is what is assimilated into the self and love is what escapes the self, what is lacking, what is desired (37). Spiritual levels of discourse focus on knowledge, what can be known from the moment, the literal level focuses on love, the body, what can be touched, or more importantly, in this case, what cannot be touched.

1.6 Conclusion I opened this chapter with a reflection on the dually literal and spiritual nature of tropology, which I have illustrated in my analysis of Aelred's tropological readings of Mary Magdalene. Rather than calling the reader to imitatio Christi, Aelred’s texts call his readers to inhabit the positions of Gospel characters surrounding Christ, in order to take Christ as their object, and be taken as object by him in turn. In the latter, subjectivity is constructed for the reader through a focalized divine attention; in the former, the reader destroys herself by annihilating herself in Christ. Aelred's texts therefore construct an economy of desire by channelling the reader's gaze and thus subjectivity through Mary at Christ. Interestingly, Aelred's

focalizations are organized by gender and sex: all require the reader to step outside their identities along lines of gender, sexuality, and sexual experience.

Following this sexual thread, Aelred's tropology is not allegorical or purely spiritual. Rather, it is somatic, sensual—even sexual—and involves repentance with the body that committed sin in the first place. Just as the Virgin brings Christ into the world with her body, Mary Magdalene repents with her body, uses her body to bring the world to Christ, opening up a space for us at his feet. Aelred highlights and enhances the eroticism of this moment in his imagery of sexual consummation and orgasm. He even distorts the normal understanding of what is “literal” and what is “allegorical” by constructing Mary's erotic affect as the “spiritual” meaning, and Judas and Simon's prudish misinterpretation of the same as the literal, “bodily” meaning that misses the point.

Further, the reader's body is called to be broken open so that it can then unite—through the figure of Mary—with Christ's body. Her soul, like the oil, is called to be poured out onto Christ. Her spirit unites with him, and takes his flesh as her own. In the final scene, Christ's voice, as the Logos, penetrates Mary's ear and this time takes her flesh as his own. Christ becomes reincarnate again. When Christ finally steps into the scene, he is still bleeding from the Crucifixion. The openness of his body reveals a lack or incompletion that requires the union of humanity into him. But this touch is delayed. Seeing or focalization, which began this chapter, is the condition of “fragmentation, isolation, and particularity. It foregrounds loss; it inspires language” (Bryan 99). But touch, touch borders on union, where the flesh can “feel nothing without feeling itself, and feeling itself felt…In the flesh, the interior (what feels) no longer is distinguished from the exterior (what is felt); they merge in a unique sentiment—feeling oneself feeling” (Marion 38).

Aelred's tropology moves from a focus on gaze, which constructs the self, to a focus on touch, in which the self is dissolved into the other. But what has this to do with tropology? This is the difference between knowing and loving. Aelred's morality calls us to love Christ and lose ourselves, rather than focalize him and establish ourselves. Again, knowledge is

what is assimilated into the self, aiding its construction, and love is what escapes the self, what is lacking, what is desired. Love requires union at its end goal, and union is flirted with but never completely attained in Aelred's treatises. I will take up this distinction between love and knowledge further in my second chapter, which focuses on this theme in John Whiterig's Meditacio ad Crucifixum.

Chapter 2 Knowledge in the Hands: Carnal Reading in John Whiterig’s Meditacio ad Crucifixum

2.1 Introduction

As Evelyn Underhill writes, “We know a thing only by uniting with it; by assimilating it; by an interpenetration of it and ourselves. It gives itself to us; just insofar as we give ourselves to it” (Underhill 11). This quotation speaks to a parallel between knowing and loving in medieval devotional literature. In many treatises, both knowing and loving involve a union between subject and object, often depicted somatically rather than spiritually or abstractly.59 This connection can be traced back as far as the Neoplatonic theory of the soul, which attends to and then becomes what it loves (Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism” 49). Patristic commentaries on the Canticum canticorum also preserve this idea, interpreting the opening image of the kiss as a gift of divine meaning, and thus “intellection and loving are one and the same” (Astell 4). Finally, this thought finds its way into medieval contemplative literature, in which the contemplative gaze is not “the detached scrutiny of a neutral observer, but the adoration and love which unites the knower with what he knows” (Jantzen 34).

In this chapter, I will examine the connection between knowing and loving in John Whiterig's (died c. 1371) mid-fourteenth-century Meditacio ad Crucifixum. Whiterig offers a vision of the Crucifixion based on allegorical readings of the Canticum canticorum—and specifically Bernard of Clairvaux’s interpretation of it60—wherein the outstretched arms of Christ represent his desire to embrace humanity, his lowered head represents his desire to kiss

59 Scholars often point to the way that the Vulgate Bible uses “cognovere” (“to know”) to denote “to know sexually” as well as to know “intellectually.” See, for example, Genesis 4:1, “Adam vero cognovit Havam uxorem suam quae concepit et peperit Cain” (Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem). For an outline of the connection between love and knowledge in devotional writing, also see Teasdale, Wayne. “The Primacy of Love in Contemplation.” American Benedictine Review 37:3 (1986): 278-303.

60 Whiterig engages heavily with Bernard’s Sermones super canticum canticorum (especially Sermo XX) and his De diligendo Deo in this treatise.

humanity, and the gaping wound in his side manifests his desire to unite with humanity. This erotic presentation of the Crucifixion, rather than manifesting something other than itself, is the “literal” level of Whiterig's exegesis.61 Whiterig proceeds to read this tripartite literal desire following a standard fourfold biblical interpretation: allegorically, tropologically, and anagogically. This chapter will examine how Whiterig's exegesis in the Meditacio ad Crucifixum depicts the attainment of knowledge as an embodied process between his reader and his communicated truth, founded on love and desire.62

John Whiterig63 was an Oxford-educated Benedictine monk from Durham, and he became a hermit on Farne Island (c. 1363) where he would compose the above treatise and eventually die (c. 1371) (Riehle, The Secret Within 66). His seven meditations, including the Meditacio ad Crucifixum,64 survive in a single fifteenth-century copy (Durham, Dean & Chapter Library, MS B.iv.34),65 written in a late-fourteenth-century Anglicana hand,66 and paired with two other treatises—both defences of Benedictine monasticism by the Durham theologian Uthred of Boldon (Whitehead 125). Whiterig's Meditacio itself is divided into three sections: first, an extended catalogue of Old Testament figures interpreted to signify Christ, second, a “sign” of Christ on the Cross exegetically interpreted, and third, a ladder of

61 Certain twelfth-century thinkers, for example, Nicholas of Lyra, posited that the Canticum canticorum had no literal level, because of the sensuality of the text and its seeming lack of a historical referent (Matter 4). That is not the case here, however, because the erotic imagery is infused into the literal level, which clearly has a historical basis.

62 Though a loaded term, I generally refer to the Lacanian concept of desire, which: a) is eternal and can never be satisfied, b) is not a relation to an object, but a relation to a lack, c) is essentially desire of the other’s desire (Evans 35-39).

63 Or so current scholarship suspects the unnamed “Monk of Farne” to be. See especially Christiania Whitehead’s "The Meditaciones of the Monk of Farne" for the most recent articulation of this argument (125).

64 The other, much shorter, meditations include: Meditacio eiusdem ad beatem dei genitricem Mariam, Meditacio eiusdem ad angelos, Meditacio ad Abraham et David, Meditacio eiusdem ad beatem Iohannem Ewangelistam, Alia meditacio eiusdem ad beatissimum Iohannem Apostolum et Ewangelistam, and Meditacio eiusdem ad beatisimum Cuthbertum Lindisfarnensem Episcopum.

65 I viewed the manuscript myself in order to correct multiple transgressions in Farmer’s edition. I will provide his transcription, but mark my corrections.

66 Hugh Farmer argues that it cannot be an autograph hand because there are inconsistencies between the author’s thought and the scribal chapter divisions (Meditacio 156).

the stages of love. W.A. Pantin argues that the significant Cistercian influence on Whiterig's thought is useful as a cognitive link between the devotional and theological schools of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries in England (180), and thus he serves as a fitting conceptual link between the thought of Aelred of Rievaulx and the two Middle English treatises I will examine in my next chapters; namely, The Cloud of Unknowing and Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love.

There has been a dearth of scholarship on John Whiterig’s Meditacio since its rediscovery in 1852 by James Raine (Farmer vii). W. A. Pantin described the manuscript and its contents, including possible sources, with a selection of original quotations in his 1944 article.67 Hugh Farmer published the first and only Latin edition through Studia Anselmiana in 1957,68 which he then translated in a 1961 English edition.69 Leander Hogg wrote an article on the third part of the Meditacio, the ladder of love, in 1982,70 and since then, only three scholars have written on the Meditacio at all: Karma Lochrie, Christiania Whitehead, and Wolfgang Riehle. In her 1991 monograph, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh,71 Lochrie discusses a few quotations outlining Whiterig’s longing to convey his mystical desire to his readers in the context of her second chapter, “The Text as Body.”

More recently, in her 2013 article,72 Christiania Whitehead contextualized the emergence of the Meditacio out of Northeastern Cuthbertine spirituality, and discussed its later Benedictine

67 See: Pantin, W.A. “The Monk-Solitary of Fame: A Fourteenth-Century Mystic.” English Historical Review 59 (1944):162-186.

68 Whiterig, John. “‘Meditaciones Cuisdam Monachi Apud Farneland Quondam litarii.’” Ed. David Hugh Farmer. Studia Anselmiana 41 (1957): 141–245.

69 Farmer, Hugh. The Meditations of the Monk of Farne. London: Dartman, Longman & Todd, 1961.

70 See: Hogg, Leander. “The Degrees of Love in the Writings of the Monk of Farne.” American Benedictine Review 33:2 (1982) 195-203.

71 See: “Chapter Two: Text as Body in Mystical Discourse” in Lochrie, Karma. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. 56-96.

72 See: Whitehead, Christiania. “The Meditaciones of the Monk of Farne.” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium VIII. Ed. E. A. Jones. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013. 125-140.

readership. Whitehead recounts how St. Cuthbert’s incorrupt remains were translated into the high altar of Durham cathedral in 1104 CE, becoming a new centre for his cult (131). In 1122 CE, Durham Priory reestablished a church on Lindisfarne, the original location of Cuthbert’s remains. In 1151 CE, its first Benedictine hermit, St. Bartholomew, extended a hermitage into Inner Farne (132), where John Whiterig became a hermit in 1363 CE, and which became a regular cell of Durham priory until the Reformation (133). Whitehead argues that the Meditacio catered to “Cuthbertine interests,” as it quotes extensively from works of Cuthbertine spirituality,73 embraces the Cuthbertine asceticism of “cheerfulness,” and most importantly, it borrows its main image of Christ’s embracing arms on the cross from a vision of St. Bartholomew’s (135).74

Whitehead also points out the similarity between Whiterig’s Meditacio and Richard Rolle’s oeuvre (137). She does not mention that this connection is especially compelling in Rolle’s Meditation B, as both texts move from the Crucifixion to discourses of Christ’s body-as-a- book. Rolle’s work was composed between the 1320s to 1340s, but Whiterig wrote in the decades following the Black Death (138). There is evidence of Rolle’s writings in Durham Priory by the late fourteenth century,75 but Whitehead posits that both simply shared from a “broader basket of devotional idioms and tropes circulating within the north-eastern region” (138). This “broader basket” especially included Anselm of Canterbury, whose tenth meditation also forms a potential source for Whiterig’s vision of the Crucifixion (Pantin 175).76

73 Namely, several liturgical hymns, as well as Bede’s Vita (135).

74 See Geoffrey of Coldingham’s Vita Batholomaei Farnensis (299).

75 London, British Library, MS Arundel 507 (c. 1396) was compiled by the Master of Farne Richard de Segbrok, and contains extracts from Rolle’s meditations.

76 Anselm’s Meditation begins: “Dulcis Iesus in inclinatione capitis et morte, dulcis in extensione brachiorum, dulcis in apertione lateris, dulcis in confLrione pedum clavo uno…”

In fact, Wolfgang Riehle, the most recent scholar to write on Whiterig,77 posits that the main point of interest in Whiterig's meditation is the way he frames his otherwise highly devotional material with a “learned theology” that is heavily borrowed from Cistercian thought, even though Whiterig wrote in a Benedictine context. Riehle argues that this frame “desensualizes” the text, so that “his kiss images serve as metaphors for speaking of the mystery of the Incarnation” (68). My chapter, pace Riehle, will argue the reverse: that the exegetical parameters of the Meditacio actually invite the connection of the literal and allegorical, the body and spirit. Reading the kiss—the opening image of the Canticum—as a metaphor for the Incarnation originates with Origen, and is preserved in the Glossa ordinaria as a standard interpretation of the image. As the interpretation for the Canticum’s opening line, “osculetur me osculo oris sui” (Canticum 1:1), Origen states: “the kisses are Christ’s, which He bestowed on His Church when at His coming, being present in the flesh, He in His own person spoke to her the words of faith and love and peace” (Dove 60). The Glossa states: “For just as two different bodies are joined in a kiss, so in the Incarnation the two substances of divinity and humanity, utterly different, are united in an inseparable conjunction” (60). Whiterig begins from and transforms this understanding. Far from desensualizing the image, Whiterig reliteralizes it, so that the body signifies spiritual truths only by signifying itself.

In doing so, I will suggest that Whiterig frames the relationship of signifier to signified erotically and carnally, troubling the notion that readers must transcend the body to arrive at abstract truths about God. Though seeming to take flight from the physical plane in his exegetical analysis, Whiterig’s truths remain on the level of the body, always circling back to signify the erotic and embodied union of reader and Christ. Whiterig’s presentation of truth hinges on two key features of his text: this manipulation of the relation of signifier to signified in the medieval exegetical method, and second, an erotic theorization of communication and signification. Whiterig presents a semiotic theory wherein the sign and

77 See: Riele, Wolfgang. The Secret Within: Hermits, Recluses, and Spiritual Outsiders in Medieval England. Trans. Charity Scott Stokes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

communication itself become erotic: a communion between reader, writer, and God. He attempts to convey more than mere knowledge to his readers; he tries to create an experience to inflame them with divine desire.

This connection between desire, language, and the body can also be found in contemporary vernacular literature of the fourteenth century, especially courtly romance and love lyric. A possible source for this new interest in sensual language to describe a beloved object was a twelfth-century revival of interest in ancient Roman love poetry (seen, for example, in the numerous commentaries on Ovid’s Ars amatoria). Whether devotional literature influenced romance or vice versa is difficult to assess: the similarities between, for example, Marian devotion and love lyric are compelling, and likely mutually reinforcing. Both genres dealt with an idealization of the feminine, and a sublimated and thwarted desire for an unattainable beloved. Wherever it originated, however, this discourse was especially appropriated by the Cistercians, especially Aelred and Bernard of Clairvaux (Riehle 2). Whiterig’s Meditacio belongs more naturally among such Cistercian writings, rather than anything Benedictine.

As in many works of Cistercian spirituality,78 in Whiterig's text, the intimate connection between body and signification troubles the binary of knowing and loving: we find here an unmistakeable link between attaining knowledge with the mind and the penetration of the body through corporeal (in images of eating) and erotic (in images of sex) union with Christ. For example, I will argue that since Christ's body is a book that John Whiterig desires to have constantly in his hands or mouth, the flesh is the site where “reading” and “comprehending” occur. Meaning is conveyed through erotic depictions of touch and exchange, and not through abstract conceptions of mental activity. Reading and understanding thus become sacramental and physically—rather than intellectually—focused, even mimicking consumption of the host. This is a reversal of, for example, Origen's commentary on the Canticum, where he argues that the kiss of the Bridegroom represents God's gift of understanding to the seeking exegete. He states: “the lighting up of every obscure meaning is

78 See, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermones super canticum canticorum.

a kiss of the Word of God bestowed on the perfected soul…And let us understand that by the ‘mouth’ of the Bridegroom is meant the power by which He enlightens the mind” (61-62). For Origen, the carnal imagery of the Canticum is an empty shell, gesturing beyond itself to signify a “true” intellectual or spiritual meaning. For Whiterig, a spiritual meaning becomes incarnate in a physical reality so that it can be known by an embodied knower. Knowledge involves an affective encounter predicated on love and desire, which cannot be absorbed merely with the mind, but involves coition with the body as well.

In this chapter, I will discuss Whiterig’s embodied exegesis by first laying some groundwork with an analysis of Whiterig’s erotic semiology. I will then take up three examples of Whiterig’s embodied knowledge: his fourfold exegesis of a sign he receives from God, his version of the medieval trope of seeing Christ's body as a book, where discourse is embodied and from which it is touched, read, and comprehended, and, finally, I will examine his depiction of divine union in the heart of his reader, who must unite his own self with what he comes to know. All three examples—the sign, the book, and the union of hearts—reveal that truth must necessarily be embodied for its reception in an embodied reader.

2.2 The Sign 2.2.1 An Erotic Semiotics Before Whiterig begins explicating his divinely-revealed “sign,” he first articulates what kind of “sign” it is. His sign and its hermeneutic frame stem from an allusion to Psalm 59:6: “thou hast given a warning to them that fear thee: that they may flee from before the bow: That thy beloved may be delivered.”79 He states:

79 "Dedisti metuentibus te significationem ut fugiant a facie arcus” (Psalm 59:6).

But he showed many other signs to us in both the Law and in80 the Prophets, in the Gospel and in what we see daily with our eyes, because it is not long between when he draws the bow and releases the string.81

Whiterig presents a standard typological reading of the Old Testament, in which events in the law and the prophets are “signs” of future events in Christian time: for example, when Moses lifts his staff in the air, it symbolizes Christ being lifted up on the Cross. The Old Testament event has an allegorical meaning that gestures forward into the future, and its full meaning is incomplete until it comes to fulfilment later. However, here Whiterig also mentions the Gospel and “what we see daily with our eyes.” God continues to structure events such that they signify allegorically. Thomas Aquinas argues that since God is the divine auctor, he can signify with things and events, whereas human auctores can merely employ words to signify, though only abstractly and with some trouble (Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship 73). In other words, God continues to signify to humanity by writing the events of history, which happen literally, but signify allegorically. The events of the Gospel, and even of one’s own life, can also be read in this way. In Whiterig's image, history is envisaged as a bow and arrow, in which God builds a tautness or tension that is then released. Time is fourfold: past (God's drawing back of the bow), present (the release of the string), and future (the forward motion of the arrow). Though not explicitly stated, I believe that Whiterig implies that the eschaton (or the fourth and final temporality) occurs when the arrow hits the mark (in full union with God and the completion of history), and all movement ceases. The past represents the literal or historical meaning, the present the tropological or moral meaning, the future the allegorical, and the eschaton, the hitting of the mark, is the anagogical. When God draws back the “bow,” he authors things that will signify into future time, when he finally releases

80 “In” is not present in the manuscript.

81 Multa uero et alia signa nobis ostendit in lege et prophetis, ewangelio et que cotidie uidemus oculis nostris quod non multum citra corde dimissionem arcum traxit (180).

the string. History is a vibration of meanings, like a stringed instrument played by a musician, like an arrow sent forth from an archer.82

For Whiterig, certain events are literal in the “now” of their happening, but become allegorical as they resonate into the future. This temporal distinction already troubles the notion that the literal and the spiritual meanings are ontologically different, because for Whiterig the only difference between a literal and an allegorical meaning is time. The arrow remains the arrow. Time ceases when the arrow hits the mark, when humanity is driven into God. All history is therefore a movement from God, toward God, directed by God.

In the context of this divine trajectory, Whiterig specifies that everyone can see his particular sign, sent forth from God’s bow, but only those who both fear and love God will understand it and come to salvation: O admirable sign, driving Israel to the love of God, whom God lifted above the nations and gathered together! O sign of especial love and most excellent sweetness, filled with the faith of all love, which many see and few understand! All day it is seen in church, but few are stirred by it to love. Why is this? Because he who is of God understands the sign of God, therefore they do not understand because they are not of God, but rather from those of whom it is said: ‘seeing they may not see and hearing they may not understand.’83

82 Bassanio uses a similar image in the Merchant of Venice to discuss his future repayment of Antonio, as part of a larger dialogue between Jewish and Christian interpretation:

In my school days, when I had lost one shaft, I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight The selfsame way with more advisèd watch To find the other forth—and by adventuring both, I oft found both. I urge this childhood proof Because what follows is pure innocence. I owe you much, and, like a willful youth, That which I owe is lost. But if you please To shoot another arrow that self-way Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt, As I will watch the aim, or to find both Or bring your latter hazard back again And thankfully rest debtor for the first (Act 1 Scene 1). 83 O signum admirabile ad diligendum Deum prouocabile, quod leuauit Dominus in nacionibus et congregauit disperos Israel! O signum amoris precipui dulcoris excellentisimi (36.180), omni plenum amoris fiducia, quod multi uident et pauci inteligunt! Tota die in ecclesia cernitur, et pauci tamen ad diligendum illo prouocantur.

Whiterig begins by addressing a series of rhetorical questions to God, apostrophizes the sign itself, and finally enters back into a dialogue with his reader. Immediately, we see that the sign itself (without yet knowing what the sign is) paradoxically unites and divides Whiterig’s audience. The sign gathers together humanity as a whole, on the one hand, and humanity and the divine, on the other. The latent eroticism of his sign is already present, because it drives people to love of God (“ad diligendum Deum provocabile”) and gathers together (“congregavit”). But Whiterig’s sign is also divisive. It veils understanding, makes knowledge inaccessible, and thus distinguishes between those who understand and those who do not: many see and few understand (“multi uident et pauci inteligunt”). In his article “Desire for the Past,” Nicholas Watson articulates the power of the gap between knowing and unknowing, when he argues:84 Only through such tensions—a tension, one might say, between intuition and suspicion, in which understanding is always conscious of the persistence of a “hermeneutic gap” that separates it from its desired object—can empathy aspire to a union that does not involve coercion or solipsism, retaining difference in likeness, acknowledging that the other remains other, however carefully understood (75).

Knowledge, in the very act of grasping its desired object, must establish a “hermeneutic gap” between knower and known to avoid solipsism, and therefore loss of the true object (75). In other words, understanding seeks to unite subject and object empathetically, but must necessarily divide them as well. Knowledge, like Whiterig’s sign, is therefore both unifying and divisive by nature. Whiterig constructs this paradox by dividing humanity into those who understand and those who do not, each group embodying a necessary epistemological reaction to the sign, which becomes meaningless if everyone can interpret it correctly. This divisiveness, at the root of both signification and understanding, is the key epistemological problem that Whiterig acknowledges and will seek to subvert in this treatise, and he does so through Christ’s body, as I will later show.

Quare hoc? Quia reuera qui est ex Deo signum Dei inteligit; propterea non inteligunt quia ex Deo non sunt, sed ex illis pocius de quibus dicitur: 'ut videntes non videant et audientes non inteligant' (36.181).

84 For more on this subject, covering a wider range of genres, see: Morrison, Karl. I am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Whiterig continues by explaining what various signs “do”: A sign is either a demonstration or an indication85 for something to be done. For whoever makes a sign, either silently gestures what he did, or what he wants you to do. I beg you, O Lord, teach me this sign! For I learned many signs among the monks, who, silent for the sake of silence, gesture to each other with their fingers either what they want or what they have done. But all of these are not your sign, because I learned all of these signs in vain if this sign alone remains unfamiliar to me. I beg you, Lord, show it to me, and do not withhold this word from your servant.86

Whiterig tells us that a “significacio” either expresses something that one has done, or something that one desires you to do. A monk might gesture to another monk to pass him some bread, for example. But Whiterig means more than this. Exegetically, a “sign” might be an Old Testament figure interpreted for a reader in the present. For example, Noah is a “sign” that might indicate to a reader to trust in God. Noah’s action has been accomplished in the past, and God, speaking through this sign, tells the reader that he desires faith from them in the present. I suggest that this distinction between “what has been done” and “what is desired” presents a distinctive focus in the context of other medieval hermeneutics, for a number of reasons, which will follow.

First, where other medieval exegetes might interpret an image, a setting, a person, etc., Whiterig’s explanation of signs refers solely to actions: “significacio uel demonstracio seu alicuius rei faciende invicio [indicio].” A sign is a demonstration or an indication that something must be done. There is no mention of nouns, abstract or concrete, save the subjects

85 After examining the manuscript (Durham, Durham Cathedral Library MS B. IV. 34), I believe there to be minum confusion on the part of the scribe, who writes seven minims followed by “-ico”/“-ito” on the next line. Though Farmer supplies “invicio” in his edition (impossible, given the amount of minims), he translates this as “indicio,” which seems to make more sense. Other possibilities include “munito,” or most likely, a form of the verb “innuo, innuere” (such as “innuito”) which is used twice in the following passages.

86 Significacio uel demonstracio seu alicuius rei faciende inuicio. Qui enim signum tibi facit, quis fecit uel quid facere te uellet tacens innuit. Obsecro, Domine, doce me hoc signum! Multa enim inter monachos didici signa, quibus, gracia silencii tacentes, quid uelint uel quid ipsi fecerint mutuo sibi digitis innuunt; sed omnia illa non ut significacio tua, quia omnia illa in uanum didici si hoc solum a me contigerit ignorari. Quod signum est hoc, obsecro Domine, indica michi, nec abscondas uerbum illud a puero tuo (37.181).

“doing” the acting. And these very subject positions—the he who “desires” the action and the you who “does” the action—are established and distinguished solely through their corresponding actions: “quis fecit uel quid facere te uellet tacens innuit.” The he/you subjects are qualified and distinguished by the verbs “facit” (“he has done”) and “quid facere te vellet” (“what he wants you to do”). This distinction between subjects is one of desire: for the purposes of this sentence, the I exists where it lacks something and seeks its accomplishment from another, you, who accomplishes the action. All action here is therefore action for another, a perpetual motion of interpersonal “reaching-toward.” Whiterig’s semiotic theory reveals a cosmology that is based in action, in which the only distinctions between self and other are marked by desire to lose distinction between self and other. In other words, a sign establishes itself in the gap between subjects: between those who know and those who do not, and between those who desire and those who fulfill. In terms of medieval exegesis, then, God completes an action through, for example, Noah, which indicates what he wants pious Christians to do (have faith). God acts and desires, humanity interprets and fulfills. This construction of God as a writer who desires, and humanity as readers who fulfill will become more important when I discuss Christ’s body as a book in a later section of this chapter.87

Second, Whiterig’s distinction is temporal: signs mark either what has been accomplished in the past or what is desired in the present and future. Everything is an action: either an accomplishment or a desired accomplishment—on behalf of God or humanity—making Whiterig’s signs profoundly tropological. Signs signify insofar as they participate in a biblical narrative of events that resonates into present/future time, when readers can interpret them and act accordingly. God acted in the past to show us how he desires us to act now, and to bring us toward eschatological events in which we can be united with him. In the past, God and humanity are one: both Noah and God are agents of the same actions. God acts as auctor through Noah, constructing time as a narrative for future readers, but Noah himself has free will to act as he does. The distinctions between them are complex. In the future, God desires us to become one with him, as this chapter will show. The only division of subjects occurs in

87 Starting on p. 94.

how readers experience the present. This threefold division of time—the biblical past, the “now” of the reader, and future eschatological time—will be essential to Whiterig’s explication of his sign, and it reveals time as an elaborate drama unfolding between God and humanity, where only present time sees humanity divided from him.

Finally, of all things, Whiterig uses monastic sign language88 to exemplify signification. Depicting language as either speech or writing is more common in medieval discussions of signification. But here, Whiterig wants to distinguish his sign from everyday signs. In using the gesturing fingers of monks to embody his idea of what a sign is, he roots his semiotics in and on the body. Signs are not arbitrary linguistic abstractions, but physically depict what they intend, as a monk might in pointing at what he desires. Whiterig wants his symbol to be embodied first and foremost. His discussion of signification is “tacens,” emphasizing the visual and sensual rather than aural or textual. His sign, too, will be manifest in the body, spoken from the body, like monks’ gestures of hands and fingers. As a sign, it embodies what it conveys. As I will show in the next section, Whiterig’s sign will be about the body of Christ, or more properly, it is the body of Christ.89 Using this sign of Christ’s body, Whiterig shows a movement from abstraction to embodiment, a movement that the meaning of his sign will parallel. Whiterig tells us that God speaks through the prophets first: touching them with his hand, gesturing toward himself by embodying truths in other people (42.183). Then, the Second Person of the Trinity becomes incarnate, not a sign of a meaning, but the meaning, the Logos. Humanity, who can represent or signify aspects of God, becomes united with the embodied God, as humanity becomes one body with Christ in eternity.

88 A great source on monastic sign language is: Bruce, Scott G. Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition, c. 900-1200. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

89 The above passage hints at this already, when Whiterig states: “nec abscondas uerbum illud a puero tuo,” or, “do not withhold this word from your servant.” Here Whiterig is gesturing toward Christ as logos, or the Word made flesh.

Again, Whiterig tells us that a sign is either an indication of what one has done or what one wants you to do. The sign Whiterig will eventually reveal to us involves both aspects: the Crucifixion is what was done, and returning Christ’s embrace is what is asked of the reader of the sign. In other words, there is a joint historical and tropological figuration even to the literal level of his sign: what happened historically, and how humans must react to this action. In this context, it is the tropological meaning that is preeminent. God does what has been done, humanity is responsible for what is to be done. All history is a dance between the action of God and the response of humanity, as in the back-and-forth between the lovers in the Canticum.

Later in the text, Whiterig focuses on the prospect of conveying desire through language, which further establishes his erotic semiology: O, if I could have known one of God’s friends, who burned unceasingly with love for him, how happily would I obey his words, and how keenly I would listen to his fiery eloquence! Because a heart on fire must emit burning words, and he who suffers the wound of love in his heart must wound others with his word.90

Christinia Whitehead refers to this kind of rhetoric within the Meditacio as “Anselmian,” describing it as “rhetorical, emotive, and performative, couched in the first person, frequently addressing questions to or imagining conversations with the subjects of the various meditations” (126). Further, she argues that Whiterig successfully balances the interiority of the “Anselmian mode” with a “cenobitic communal awareness” in the way he writes future performance by other members of the community into his text (126). In the above passage, we can see an example of this balance between the interior and the communal: the speaker articulates a desire for knowledge or love of God to be triangulated through another. He wants to know a “friend” of God who burns with love (“ardet amore”), to whom he can

90 O si unum amicorum Dei nossem qui iugiter eius arderet amore, quam libenter dictis eius obtemperarem et ignitum eius eloquium audirem uehementer! Quia reuera non potest igneum pectus nisi ignita prodere uerba, et qui uulnus amoris patitur in corde, hunc necesse alios uerbo uulnerare (97.214).

submit. Or, perhaps, he is articulating his own role as a “friend” of God for his readers, and really desires their subjection to his triangulated love.91

This principle of triangulation is at the heart of medieval monastic identity. God is not known directly, but always through mediation, whether it be text, prayer, priest, sacrament, etc.92 This triangulation is actually a necessary function of desire according to Jacques Lacan, because desire never aims directly at its own true object, or the “Thing.”93 The process of sublimation triangulates desire for this Thing by directing itself instead at various replacement objets petit a. Desire, in other words, inserts a signifier between the desiring subject and the Thing (Ruti 134). In this instance the mediation is a “friend of God”— perhaps even a reference to Whiterig’s favourite Saint, John the Evangelist, the “Beloved of Christ.” In the English tradition, St. Anselm (borrowing the language of John's Gospel) especially “exalts” St. John as the most “beloved” of the disciples, and in his orisons, he triangulates his shame for sin, by imagining St. John's offense at his sins, since he is the special friend of God (Hamburger 167). More specifically, for Whiterig, the speaker seeks God through the speech and teaching of one who is ignited with eloquence: “quam libenter dictis eius obtemperarem et ignitum eius eloquium audirem uehementer.” Access to the divine is mediated through discourse or the symbolic order, and the symbolic is always triadic because all intersubjective relations are governed by the “Other” (Evans 202).

Whiterig mediates this desire for God, the Thing, through his friend. This friend produces “ignitum eloquium” or “fiery eloquence” because “a heart on fire must emit burning words.” In this example, the speech produced resembles its vessel, in that these words cannot remain untainted by their speaker: a fiery heart produces fiery words. This speech becomes

91 As Nicholas Watson shows us of Richard Rolle in The Invention of Authority.

92 The exception to this, is of course, Christ, where God is not mediated by the flesh, he is the flesh. Therefore, the particular sacrament of the Eucharist would also count as an unmediated experience of God.

93 The Thing (la chose/das Ding) was a central idea of Lacan’s 1959-60 seminar. I use the term primarily in the context of Lacan’s idea of jouissance, where the Thing is the object of desire, the “lost object which must be continually refound” (Evans 204).

embodied by the speaker, taking on aspects of its source. In some sense, it can even be said to embody the speaker itself, since it is emitted from the body like a child from the womb. These words are more than mere words: they glow and burn, and convey something more than just the sum of their parts, articulating a contagious sense of desire rather than merely speaking about desire. They convey an experience; more than this, they become what they represent, embodying a prelapsarian fullness of language.94 Something is born of the speaker's emotions and body and remains in the words he speaks, connecting the speaker and receiver through the medium of discourse. Discourse comes from the body, from the deep- seated desires in the body, and this desire can be conveyed through language, or as Lacan would suggest, it is even created in and by language (Grosz 67).

In the second part of the above quotation, the Latin diction clarifies this idea about conveying desire: “quia reuera non potest igneum pectus nisi ignita prodere uerba, et qui uulnus amoris patitur in corde, hunc necesse alios uerbo uulnerare.” A heart wounded by love must wound other hearts. This kind of wound desires to wound others, specifically to wound them through language. Desire is contagious, it seeks to effect itself in others. This passage suggests that it is possible to articulate desire so well through language that the hearer can receive the desire of the speaker. Language is the means through which one heart can touch another. But does language itself participate in this wounding or in this lack? Language is desire. The symbolic order is founded on lack, on the attempt to bridge what is missing. For Lacan, lack is the only motivation for signification (Ruti 127), which begins when the child realizes that something is lost and attempts to make up for this lack in language (Mitchell and Rose 31). More succinctly: “the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing" (Grosz 61). Language and signification take the place of what is lost. Whiterig’s utterance merely conveys what utterance itself is all about: replacing lack and constituting desire.

94 Before the Fall, according to Augustine, humans experienced direct experience of God through an “unmediated intellectual vision” or “inner word” (Jager 52).

There are therefore a number of implications here for language and writing, as well as for desire. Lacanian sexuality is governed by signification and meaning (Grosz 13). What “desire desires” is the “desire of another” to fill this lack, making desire an interpersonal movement (65). Desire is located in orifices and fissures on the body’s surface, where the subject and the world can meet each other (75). This means that the narcissistic Lacanian ego95 comes to understand itself only in relation to the other (46), and that the triangle of subject, other, and Other is the locus of signification (80). Within Whiterig’s articulation, desire is expressed in terms of pain; it creates a wounded heart which implies absence and lack, and it needs to replicate itself by causing this pain, this wound or lack, in others. Desire is a lack because it lacks the thing it desires, and it makes manifest a hole or wound in the body in which it would like to possess the other or make space for the other's entrance.

Another example will make this clearer. Here, rather than accessing God through another, desire itself desires to be triangulated: it cannot simply take its object in Christ. Desire seeks to spread itself in the hearts of others too: If only desire might leave its letters in the hearts of those that hear, just as a hand in writing presents them to the eyes of readers. But this is done only by the Trinity, the farmer/gardener, since neither he who plants nor he who waters does anything, but it is God who gives the increase.96

This time, the speaker wants to convey his own desire through discourse. Since desire is formulated in language, the subject must be forced to “name, to articulate, to bring this [unconscious] desire into existence” (Evans 36). In this example, the speaker describes his desire as having “caracteres,” characters or letters, that he wants impressed or imprinted into his audience’s hearts. His longing is thus conceived as a system of speech, and later in his Meditacio, it will even become a complete system of writing. Unlike the previous passage,

95 Lacan argues that Freud presents two conflicting views of the ego: the narcissistic ego, which is linked with the pleasure principle, and the autonomous ego, which opposes the pleasure principle (Evans 51).

96 Vtinam haberet affectus caracteres suos in cordibus audiencium, quales tradit manus scribens ad oculos hec legencium; sed quia hoc soli conuenit Agricole Trinitati, quoniam neque qui plantat est aliquid, neque qui rigat, sed qui incrementum dat Deus (38.181).

here, the speaker articulates that he cannot successfully convey this longing: “utinam haberet.” If only, the speaker implies, desire could be conveyed as easily to the heart as the characters on the page can be conveyed to those listening.

At first, this seems to be something of a mixed metaphor, as “characters” belong more properly to writing, not hearing. But actually, Whiterig’s image implies that there is a mediating body who reads the letters aloud, as one monk might do to his fellow listeners, allowing these letters to be translated into speech, and internalized through the ear and onto the heart of the listeners. Then, the speaker refers to the “hand that writes” as it presents text to the eyes of readers. The hand is removed in space and time from the reader's eye, who picks up the characters left behind, but this is not the case in a speech act which requires a present audience. This is perhaps why Whiterig usually chooses to articulate his ideas about communication in terms of hearing and speech: because although writing was thought to be more tied to the body than speech given its materiality, speech requires at least two people to be present together. This mixed metaphor reveals an authorial anxiety: Whiterig is aware of the nature of what he is actually producing, which is written text, but he wants it to become an aural performance, to be read, to penetrate the body of the reader in hearing. Invoking the authorial presence is a mechanism for control, attempting to prevent potential misreadings. Of course, in medieval monastic settings especially, texts would usually be read aloud, so the modern distinction between writing and hearing may not be entirely appropriate here.

The relation of desire and signification is Augustinian: in On Christian Doctrine, Augustine, too, theorizes that signs are carnal, and enjoyment of the sign itself is a form of carnal desire (Cowell 122). But Whiterig’s signs are more than this: they are a coitus of meaning and vehicle that seeks to unite the subject and —the writer and reader—who exchange them. For Whiterig, these are the one who desires an action, and the one who completes the action, or God and humanity, respectively. His signs are also radically somatic in nature, which he articulates by comparing his sign with the sign language of monks, rooting his idea of language in the body. Because lack and thus desire are constituted in and by language, Whiterig's semiotics convey lack and thus triangulate desire between reader, writer, and God, as we shall see in Whiterig's reading of his actual sign in the next section.

2.2.2 The Sign Itself: The Embrace and Kiss of Christ In the “sign” Whiterig receives of the Crucifixion, he describes three images in blazon: Christ’s outstretched arms, his lowered head, and the wound in his side. Whiterig’s allegorical, tropological, and anagogical meanings will stem from the first two literal images: Christ’s outstretched arms on the cross, wherein he desires to embrace humanity, and his lowered head, wherein he desires to kiss humanity. Christ’s wound, wherein he desires that humanity unites with him, however, is not interpreted in this fourfold way. The wound and the union it manifests are consistently explained as being the ultimate meaning of the other two images. Thus the allegorical rendering of the event is not very different from its literal incarnation.

Also, Whiterig's “sign” does not stem from the actual Crucifixion of Christ, but it is said to be “present in church” (36.181). In other words, his sign is the Crucifix that hangs before the altar, a physical artefact from medieval ritual, rather than the historical events that it represents. His sign is therefore closer to his audience than the events of Cavalry, because it is physically present in every performance of the Mass—the ritual at which people are expected to see the sign and seek to return Christ's embrace. His sign is then an interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation: an interpretation of the Crucifix, which is a rendering of the Gospel, which is a textual rendering of an event in Christian history. Like Julian's Revelation of Love, a textual interpretation of a vision that was sparked by a Crucifix held up by a priest visiting her (131), Whiterig's sign is based on an item of medieval material culture, something visible, tangible, and ubiquitous in the medieval world.

Finally, nearly forty chapters into the Meditacio, Whiterig details the sign he has already introduced at length: How greatly I believe that you say that this is the sign that I have sought: ‘All day I stretch out my hands to you from the Cross, so that I might embrace you, I tilt my head so that I might kiss you, already in my embrace, I open my side, so that I might bring you, already kissed, into my heart, and we may be two in one flesh. There is no safety for you except in me, when the day of wrath and judgement arrives. See, I have shown to you the sign that you asked, know, therefore, how much I love you, and

come quickly to me.’…He who created the universe by a single word presents embraces and kisses to us!97

The sign that Whiterig receives is a speech act delivered from a Crucifix hanging in a church, where Christ tells the speaker that he stretches out his arms to humanity all day for an embrace, lowers his head to kiss humanity, opens his side to draw humanity into his heart. This sign is an eroticization of the Crucifixion, where the speaker transforms Christ as passive sufferer into Christ as active lover. Christ's arms are nailed open on the Cross, but the speaker renders the image as Christ's arms open for an embrace. Christ's head is bowed in exhaustion and from suffocation, but the speaker transforms this into Christ's desire to kiss the head of the one who enters his embrace. Longinus pierces Christ's side to ensure that he is dead, but this becomes a space that Christ actively opens in his body for the reader to enter and join with his heart. The Latin syntax is especially telling: “manus meas ad te homo ut te amplexer.” In each syntactical unit, the body of Christ and his resulting action98 brackets or embraces the object, “te homo.” The next line adds further complexity, as the man having been embraced, “amplexatum,” becomes the object, again embraced by Christ's body and his action, which now kisses him. Finally, the man having been kissed, “osculatum,” is further embraced, now even blended with Christ (because “osculatum” is between “latus meum” and “cor meum”). The final part of this sentence, “simus duo in carne una,” encapsulates the whole. Now the object and subject have been blended, as both are now the subject of “simus,” a verb that expresses simple being alone: we shall be. The Latin actually states “we shall be two,” but the union of subjects belies this distinction, as does the qualification added after, “we shall be two in one flesh.”99

97 Quantum credo signum quod quesivi hoc dicis esse. ‘Tota die expando in cruce manus meas ad te homo ut te amplexer, capud meum inclino ut amplexatum deosculer, latus meum aperio ut osculatum introducam ad cor meum, et simus duo in carne una. Tutum tibi aliunde nequaquam esse poterit quam in me, dum dies ire iudiciique aduenerit. Ecce demonstraui tibi signum quod petieras; cognosce ergo quantum amo, et ad me cito fugias.’…En profert nobis amplexus et oscula, qui solo sermone creauit uniuersa (39.182).

98 His actions are united with his identity as the subject is united with the verb in Latin grammar. 99 Emphasis mine.

Though the imagery presented here is a standard devotional configuration of the Crucifixion, Whiterig offers it as a literal reading of the historical events of Calvary, and then interprets this moment allegorically, tropologically, and anagogically. Usually, in devotional readings, the eroticization of the suffering Christ is the allegorical rendering of the historical narrative we usually associate with the Crucifixion: Christ pierced with nails, suffering, and dying. In other words, Whiterig presents Christ's outstretched arms on the Cross as the literal incarnation of Christ’s desire to embrace us allegorically. This moment is reworked so that in the very moment of historical suffering, Christ is also literally engaged in an act of romantic love. In common interpretations of the Canticum, something erotic stands in for something spiritual, and refers forward to historical moments in the life of Christ and salvation history in general. In Whiterig’s Meditacio, a historical moment in the life of Christ is erotic and spiritual at once.

Then, the speaker remarks on the unfathomableness of God's desire to kiss us at all. He reiterates the power of God, who made creation with a word, who speaks humanity and creation into being. A speech act, an emanation from the “mouth of God,” (the Wisdom of God, or the Logos, who was “with God in the beginning”) conceived the world, and a sign brings it to fulfillment in the embrace of Christ. Christ’s body hangs open—arms open, head lowered for a kiss, side wounded—for the penetration of the viewer, who must become one with Christ if he or she is to escape the wrath of the final judgement. There is dual movement from the God who speaks humanity into existence out of nothing, and the same God who receives humanity into his existing, tangible body (itself always already a part of humanity). Again, the passage moves from speech acts toward embodiment.

Speech and signification seem to be an alienation from God, and indeed, Eric Jager theorizes that this was the case after the Fall (52).100 However, for Whiterig, all signification has erotic

100 Jager notes that the “notion of the Fall as an exile from the unmediated divine word into a region of semiotic difference, deferral, and displacement—was fundamental to Augustine’s sign theory and to the medieval hermeneutics of the Fall” (The Tempter’s Voice 52).

potential in that it brings things together in a tight embrace. This moment, this sign of all signs, tells us something about communication and signification itself. Whiterig builds from characters on a page, to the digital gesturing of monks, to the embrace of Christ's arms. The sign proceeds in stages: first an embrace, then a kiss, then union through Christ's side. These are also stages in the act of sex: an embrace, a kiss, then union. Whiterig's interpretation will hinge on the progressive embodiment of his sign, mimicking the stages of sexual love.

Aware that there is a potential anxiety or misinterpretation of his reading, Whiterig offers a counterargument for his presentation of the literal level: Perhaps someone says to me: ‘I do not accept that the sign was made for this reason, because he would not have stretched out his hands if he had not been fixed to the Cross with nails, and his head would not have fallen down unless his soul had left his body, and his side would not have been opened unless the lance had pierced it.’ To him I respond: ‘If man lives not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, whose words are spirit and life, very deep and pregnant with many mysteries, so that even if a world of men wished to strive to discuss these things fully, it could never be done. These things, which they bravely wished to undertake, are like the image of the bread with which the Lord satisfied five thousand men, from which there would still remain (if new commentators are added) more than what would fill ten baskets with books. How will the work of our salvation, which the Lord accomplished and revealed to us, be crammed within one mind alone, since his voice is no less pregnant with deeds than with words…Who would ever say that the hands of the Almighty could be fixed to the Cross, that he remained hanging on the Cross only because of the nails, as if he died unwillingly? This is false, since he was offered up because he desired it…101

101 Forsitan dicit michi aliquis: ob hanc causam factum hoc signum non accipio, tum quia manus non aliter expandisset si non clauis cruci confixus fuisset, et non aliter capud deorsum reclinauit nisi quia anima (40.182) de corpore exiuit, atque non aliter latus [suum]101 extitit apertum nisi quia lancea fuerat perforatum. Ad quem sic respondeo: Si non in solo pane uiuit homo sed in omni uerbo procedit de ore Dei, cuius utique101 uerba spiritus et uita sunt, obscura nimium et multiplicibus grauida sacramentis in tantum ut si uniuersitas hominum in eis studere uoluerit ad plenum discutere, numquam illa poterit quin, ad instar panum quibus saciauit Dominus quinque milia hominum, remaneat adhuc de quo, si noui expositores accedant, quod plus quam decem sportas impleat libris ex eo quod superfuerat, hiis qui in eis fortiter prius studere uolerunt quomodo artabitur opus nostre salutis, quod fecit Dominus, et ostendit nobis, ut unico solum subiaceat intelectui, cum non minus pregnans sit uox operis quam sermonis?…Quis unquam dicat manus Omnipotentis ad crucem ita posse configi ut solum racione clauorum pendens cruci sic hereret, quasi inuitus moreretur; quod falsum est, cum fuerit oblatus quia uoluit (41.183).

This counterargument establishes the unity of Whiterig’s two literal levels: the historical events of Calvary and the eroticization of them. Indeed, to divide the levels at all and call one aspect of them an eroticization is to miss the point. They are the same thing. To articulate this idea better, like Aelred, Whiterig writes potential criticisms into his text through the figure of a straw-man. This interloper, like Judas and Simon for Aelred, is overly concerned with literal facts: Christ's arms are outstretched because the nails hold them that way. Perhaps they signify his desire to embrace us, but that is not a literal or historical idea. Whiterig disagrees. Since Christ is a member of the Triune God, and is therefore an auctor who can signify in res, he constructed history such that his arms would be open in his death because he desires to embrace us. His arms do not signify a desire for embrace, and his lowered head do not signify a desire to kiss us, they are that thing.

Whiterig responds to the straw-man position with a biblical quotation: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” This quotation draws two parallels: between God’s words and bread, and between God’s words and the Word, Christ. God’s words in the Bible are substantive, necessary for nourishment, like bread. But further than this, words emitted from the mouth of God allude to the Word emitted from God, the Logos, or Christ. This Word, like bread, is also substantive, and must be eaten for the nourishment of souls. God’s words/Word are also “obscura nimium et multiplicibus grauida sacramentis,” or “very deep and pregnant with many mysteries.” The Latin adjective “obscurus” signifies many things: deep, dark, secretive, obscure, hidden, profound, etc., but the adjective “gravidus” explicitly means “pregnant.” The conjunction of these two images articulates the difference between God-the-Father and God-the-Son. In the first, “nimium obscura,” literally, “excessively obscure,” indicates the Father, whose words are a dark abyss of meaning. God, like his words, is excessive or infinite, transcendent, unfathomable, unreachable. God-the-Son, articulated in “multiplicibus grauida sacramentis,” indicates a sense of fullness or plenty. Literally, in Classical Latin, “sacramentum” meant an oath or an engagement. It later came to mean a secret, something sacred, a mystery, a sign, or a sacrament. So the words are “pregnant” with mysteries, signs, secrets, sacred things. The intangible and abstract secrets and signs are embodied in the words, which are pregnant with

meaning, as the Logos is the Word made flesh. These words are pregnant, productive of meaning, infinitely replicating, and full of life.

The miracle of the loaves that Christ performs is implicitly compared to the abundance of volumes it would take to explicate Christ’s words. Thus bodies, loaves, and words are all paralleled in the image of Christ, who is the “bread of life” and the “Word of God made flesh.” The Father and Son are drawn together when it states that the work of God’s salvation cannot be “unico solum subiaceat intelectui.” The “opus” of God cannot be fit into only one mind. This is an allusion to the paradox that the infinite God could fit into the womb of one woman, but the meaning of this Word and his words cannot. The parallel between the Word made flesh contained in the womb of a virgin, but its meaning, unable to be contained in a mind, draws attention to the gap between knowing and loving. The infinite God can be contained in the body, but not the mind. He can be touched, grasped, and eaten, but never understood.

2.4 The Interpretation of the Sign 2.4.1 The Allegorical Interpretation of the Embrace Then, Whiterig interprets his sign allegorically, starting with the embrace: Allegorically, I can take Christ’s extended arms and hands as the Law and Prophets, because the Law of Moses was written by the hand of God, and Scripture says that the holy hand of the Lord was on the Prophets. In beckoning to the Prophets, he extended his hand to us openly. At many times and in many ways, God spoke obscurely and with gilded words102 to the fathers through the Prophets, by gesturing, rather than saying openly what they ought to do, because the letter kills. Neither does the Law lead anyone to perfection, until he came to give a blessing, who first had given the Law.103

102 See the below footnote for the Latin of this word, which is impossible to capture in any single adverb in English. 103 Allegorice igitur brachia uel manus Christi expansas Legem et Prophetas accipere potero, nec immerito quidem, quia et manu Dei lex Moysi scripta extit, et super Prophetas sanctam fuisse manum Domini Scriptura dicit. Quibus uidelicet coram nobis tunc expandit innuendo tamen, quando multifarie multisque modis olim Deus loquens patribus in prophetis, obscure quidem et imbractice,103 innuendo pocius quid afere debuerant quam palam loquendo, quia et litere occidit nec aliquem ad perfectum lex perduxit, donec ueniret dare benediccionem qui prius donauerat legem (42.183).

Allegorically, Whiterig posits, he can take Christ's outstretched arms on the Cross to represent the Law and the Prophets—because God's hand wrote the Law, and his hand was upon the Prophets. The Law and the Prophets are both early manifestations of communication between humanity and the divine. God wrote the Law on stone tablets for Moses to give to the people, and he spoke to the people through the writings of the Prophets. In the first example, God extends his “manum” from the clouds on Sinai to write the Commandments on the tablets of stone, which Moses delivers to the Israelites—a literal expression of the embodiment of divine communication. In multiple other instances in the Old Testament, God is said to “speak through the hands of the prophets” who pen his utterances.104 As with the image of the monks gesturing with their fingers, Whiterig transforms the act of communication in both cases into an embodied gesture of the hand: God physically writes the law in stone, and God "touches” or inspires the prophets. Each act is quite literally a physical “manifestation” of God, in the Latinate sense of the word: “mani” because something can be grasped in the hand, and rendered in physical, tactile terms (Lewis & Short “manifestus, adj.”).105

God also speaks through the Prophets “obscure quidem et imbractice.” I have already discussed the term “obscurus” above, but, here, the adverb “imbractice” (from the verb “imbracteo, imbractere”) presents another tactile manifestation of God’s words. The term means to “overlay with leaf metal,” which I argue is a reference to medieval luxe manuscripts of the Bible. Whiterig does not refer to God’s words as ephemeral, as simply vibrations of the air that are spoken once and pass away. Rather, these words are incarnate on animal skin, and gilded with gold-leaf. The movement in this chapter is not only a progressive embodiment from touching stone to touching men: it is also a historical movement from stone-carving to manuscript illumination. This, too, is a movement of progressive embodiment, in the shift

104 For biblical precedents, see, for example: 1 Samuel 28:15, Ezekiel 38:17, Jeremiah 37:2, etc.

105 The old form of the word is “manufestus."

from stone to animal flesh. The final moment in this progression is the full Incarnation of God’s Word as flesh in Christ, which is the sign itself.

This secondary stage of speaking through the Prophets is marked by its tactile nature. God touches the prophets, and renders his speech in ornate but highly incarnate words. To be touched by God was to receive something of his power, or of his voice. In fact, an allusion to Jeremiah—where God touches Jeremiah's lips to cleanse his mouth and endow it with the illumination of divine speech106—opens the entire Meditacio: I will speak to my Lord, although I am dust and ashes. I beg you, Lord, do not be angry if I speak once, although I am a man of polluted lips, who is not worthy to tell your justice nor to receive your testament in my mouth, because I spurned your discipline, turning instead to lies, and casting your words behind me. Open my guilty lips, and let your discipline correct me. Open my mouth and give me right and resounding speech today in your presence.107

The text opens with the word “loquar” (“I will speak”), a performative utterance in which the speaker declares that he will speak to his God, and in doing so, accomplishes his very aim. He also transitions from addressing God in the third person to addressing him directly in the second person: you. Immediately, the speaker has divided his audience into two camps: the being to whom he speaks, “Dominum meum,” and his human audience who witnesses the speech act. As with the opening of Augustine’s Confessiones,108 the text is set up as a performance or prayer to be witnessed by the reader: the author is an intermediary figure between the God to whom he speaks, and the audience he hopes to inspire. Or, to use another analogy, I see Whiterig positioning himself as the priest who stands between the Crucifix and

106 "And the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth: and the Lord said to me: Behold I have given my words in thy mouth," “Et misit Dominus manum suam et tetigit os meum et dixit Dominus ad me ecce dedi verba mea in ore tuo” (Jeremiah 1:9).

107 Loquar ad Dominum meum cum sim puluis et cinis; et ne, queso Domine, irascaris si loquar semel, cum uir sim pollutus labiis, qui non sum dignus enarrare iusticiam tuam neque sumere testamentum tuum per os meum, quia repuli disciplinam tuam conuertendo me ad fabulas, et proieci sermones tuos retrorsum. Solue igitur, bone Domine, reatum labii mei, et disciplina tua corrigat me in finem; aperi os meum et da michi sermonem rectum et bene sonantem in conspectu tuo hodie (1.158).

108 Augustine opens his Confessiones with a direct address to God, “Magnus es, domine…” (2).

the parishioners during the performance of Mass. The speaker establishes himself as an authority, a prophet who speaks for the Lord. This passage also functions as an invocation to the Muse, in this case the Holy Spirit, and the speaker offers himself as an impure vessel. Not only does he speak to God for an audience, he expects that God will soon speak back to this audience through him. This marks the first of several passages in which the speaker reflects on his own discourse and status as a creator or facilitator of that discourse. Karma Lochrie has argued for the simultaneity of speaking and writing, for the performativity of mystical texts such as this, in which “the readers are listeners, in effect, endeavouring to hear the mystic’s longing through the written text” (Translations 57). Here, Whiterig's running themes of the immediacy of the body in speaking and in the union of discourse with the one who speaks it, are better exemplified in speech acts than in text.

In drawing attention to his act of speaking, the speaker is first and foremost drawing attention to his body. He claims he will speak although he is but dust and ashes. A visceral connection exists between the speaker and his speech. Something tangible and physical occurs between the body of the speaker and the matter on which he speaks: they are conjoined. The speaker can somehow taint the matter on which he speaks, his mouth can defile it, not by what he says, but by the very fact that his mouth gives it utterance. His discourse is not abstract or separated from his body, but melds with it, takes meaning from its source, and becomes embodied by it. He does not speak in spite of the bodily nature of his communication, his embodied nature is rather a necessary condition of speech. The act of speaking is comparable to the Incarnation itself: the divine Logos was born of a pure vessel, and she had to be pure, because Christ took his flesh from hers, and because sin seems to have physical manifestations.109

109 In the Old Testament, the sins of the Fathers are visited upon the sons: “Dominus patiens et multae misericordiae auferens iniquitatem et scelera nullumque innoxium derelinquens qui visitas peccata patrum in filios in tertiam et quartam generationem” (Numbers 14:18). This, and ideas of original sin, suggest that sin is genetic, and connected with the flesh.

Similarly, according to this model, when someone commits a speech act, they embody the discourse, just as the discourse embodies them. As Judith Butler argues in Excitable Speech, “the speech act is a bodily act” (11), and “language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible” (5). Language is spoken from the body, it takes existence from it in the way Christ takes flesh from his mother. The Incarnation is a speech act from Mary, who was without sin, and who gave birth to the mouthpiece of God. All communication for the speaker is inherently connected to the relationship of humanity and divinity, and to the single most important event in Christian theology (excepting the Crucifixion which will also have resonances for communication).

Because Whiterig’s semiotics are so highly caught up with the Incarnation of Christ through the Virgin Mary, the speaker’s lips and mouth become feminine, and almost vaginal, if we extend the metaphor of speech as Incarnation. In line with medieval theories of conception stemming from Aristotle, Christ took his form or Logos from his Father, and his flesh from his mother. In the above quotation, language takes its form from the Father who must open the speaker’s mouth, “aperi os meum,” and give to him a “sermonem rectum et bene sonantem.” The speech is both right or correct, “rectum,” in content, and well-sounding. In other words, his speech has a spiritual and material aspect. The speaker’s mouth and lips are constructed as a sexualized, feminine, and fertile space from which utterances are conceived and emitted, in tandem with the masculine principle of God the Father. The speaker states that he is unworthy to take the Lord’s testament into his mouth. What is the testament? That of Abraham, a circumcised penis? Or that of Christ, Christ’s body itself? Both are at play. The “Lord’s testament” is sexual in both resonances because it penetrates the mouth of the speaker. He is unworthy to take the testament—or receive utterance—into his mouth, and he is unworthy to speak of Christ’s justice—or emit utterance—from his mouth.

All the above examples of communication—God writing the Law, God touching the Prophets,110 and God opening the speaker’s mouth—are embodied. The first two instances are united and represented by Christ’s outstretched arms on the Cross, which therefore become a symbol of communication. Both examples, however, are instances of imperfect communication, because the “law brought no one to perfection,” and God spoke “enigmatically” to the prophets. Christ, in contrast, becomes an instance of perfect, embodied communication. The erotic nature of the divine message was clouded in these previous instances: for example, Solomon wrote the Canticum as eros representing spiritual allegory. With Christ on the Cross, this eros becomes manifest, explicit, and literal. Christ stretches out his hands, and we know from the speaker’s previous utilization of hands111 that this moment relays something about communication. What does it relay? The idea that God can communicate face-to-face and directly with humanity as Logos, as Christ. Because Christ is the Word made flesh, the allegorical and figural “embrace” of the Canticum comes to be both literal and allegorical, reversing the relationship between type and antitype. The ultimate communication is union, and especially embodied union.

Whiterig's reading therefore presents an evolution of communication. The Law was written by the hand of God, and God's hand touched the Prophets who spoke. Above, the speaker calls these an “innuendo” (183). In other words, the Law and Prophets were a mere “touch” that would foreshadow and eventually lead to the mouth-to-mouth kiss that is the Incarnation. There is an increasing embodiment, and increasing intimacy between the speaker and receiver. First written language, then speech, then the embrace of Christ, the kiss, and humanity drawn into his side. Communication itself moves toward complete bodily union with the divine. Christ's outstretched arms signal written communication and the Law, and as we will see in the next passage, the kiss of Christ signifies his Incarnation. What will happen in the future is signified by humanity, drawn through Christ's side and into his heart. The progressive nature of this sign is important. From embrace to kiss to union, from Law and

110 See page 84.

111 See page 71.

Prophets to Incarnation to integration into the body of Christ at the eschaton, Christian history is a sexual act extended through historical time. In fact, Honorius Augustodunensis interprets the stages of sexual love in the Canticum as a history of Christian salvation. Seeing the beloved signifies God’s covenant with Abraham, speaking with her is God’s conversation with Moses, touching her is Christ’s Incarnation, kissing her is the blessing of peace granted by Christ to the Apostles, and sexual union represents the union with God that will be enjoyed in heaven (Astell 33). Whether or not Whiterig knew Honorius’ theory is beyond the scope of this chapter, but both exegetes posit similar trajectories. Christian history is the history of the bridegroom and his beloved, and their increasingly sexualized interaction. For both thinkers, Christian history culminates in sexual union. For Whiterig, however, this union is much more visceral, as he argues that this moment is our penetration into the open wound of Christ, rather than a merely abstract mystical union with the Father.

2.4.2 The Allegorical Interpretation of the Kiss Then the speaker explains the kiss allegorically: I implore you, reader, attend diligently to what I now say, so that you can recognize the ineffable goodness of God and his unspeakable love toward us. The more dearly the bridegroom loves his bride, the more lingering and tirelessly he is accustomed to imprint her with kisses. And the more ardently he senses that she returns his love, the more passionately he entangles his lips with hers. Attend therefore to the kiss of God, which has not ceased from this one kiss after the lips of Divinity grazed the lips of our flesh, because once he assumed the flesh, he never after relinquished it. Did he not firmly press his mouth to ours in kissing us? He impressed this kiss so firmly, without doubt, that the kisser and the kissed have therefore become one. The Word became flesh so that God could become man, and man could become God.112

112 Obsecro lector, diligenter attende que nunc dico, ut ineffabilem cognoscas Dei bonitatem atque inenarrabilem circa nos eius dilectionem. Solet sponsus, quo sponsam suam carius dilexerit, morosiora seu longiora imprimere sibi oscula, et labia sua suis labiis tanto forcius stringere quo eam se cognouerit ardencius redamare. Attende igitur ad osculum Dei, quod non cessauit ab uno osculo postquam labia sue Deitatis nostre apposuit labiis carnis, quia carnem quam semel assumpsit nunquam postea dereliquit. Strinxitne fortiter os suum ori nostro osculando? Tam fortiter sine dubio impressit hoc osculum, ut osculans et osculatum inde forent unum, quia Verbum caro factum est ut et Deus sit qui et homo, homo qui et Deus (43.184).

Both God’s goodness and his love for humanity are inexpressible, yet the speaker will attempt to express them here. However, knowing full well that language is insufficient in conveying his topic, the speaker turns to somatic imagery instead of theological argument. He begins with metaphor: the more dearly a bridegroom loves his bride, the longer his kisses last. The more passionately his bride returns his love, the more firmly does he press himself on her. The kiss is of course the opening image of the Canticum canticorum: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The Glossa Ordinaria establishes that the “me” is human nature, and the “kisses of his mouth” are the “Incarnation of his Son, which is, as it were, a foretaste of our union with God” (Dove 9). Whiterig’s elaborations, however, are not present in the Canticum canticorum—though they are obviously inspired by it—so we cannot ascribe them to the safe matrix of Biblical interpretation. Whiterig is suggesting more boldly that real, human, sexual love can represent God’s relationship with humanity.

Whiterig articulates two kisses: the kiss of flesh in general to the Godhead, which is Christ in his Incarnation, and then the kiss of Christ Incarnate to humanity. Unlike the Glossa, the secondary kiss does not convey an abstract transformation of human nature into divine nature through Christ’s example. Whiterig is literally saying that humanity will be embraced into the being of God and become Him, and this union takes place through Christ, who is flesh. It is a physical union.

Moreover, one kiss leads to the second. The kiss that represents divinity marrying flesh to the Godhead and becoming human in Christ allows God to physically approach humanity and literally kiss it. This second kiss is the ultimate mystical union of Christ and each individual. However, the speaker talks about these two ideas in tandem, as if they are inseparable or interchangeable. Again, allegory precedes history, not the reverse: the kiss of the Canticum is a literary representation and prophecy of the Incarnation, which is the literal fulfilment. The Incarnation itself also signifies allegorically as it manifests in Christ’s person the physical union of all humanity and divinity at the eschaton.

The length of Christ’s kiss—that he put on flesh at one point in linear history, never to lay it aside—signifies the depth of his love for the flesh, and all of humanity is understood

metonymically by the flesh. God’s union with the flesh in Christ’s hypostatic union of humanity and divinity is an embodied microcosm of all humanity’s eventual union with Christ in the flesh. God is the divinity of Christ just as Christ is the head of humanity, but all form one body. In the passage, these two distinct kisses become confused as though one necessarily leads to the other.

The speaker continues to elaborate on the kiss: O kiss, the worthiest and sweetest of all kisses, embracing with every passion of love! However much people kiss or love each other, they nevertheless always remain separate in number, since they are two or more people. But not so with the kiss of the Lord’s Incarnation, as was said above. O, how after this kiss he brought us into his body! This is not in opposition to the other sacraments, through which we are brought into the mystical body of Christ, which is the Church. We believe that this was done especially in the supper of the Lord, in which this sacrament was entrusted to us.113 The institutor of this same sacrament thus says: ‘Who eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me and I in him.’114

This kiss surpasses all other kisses in value, meaning it is comparable to them, and can be categorized against them. Again, Whiterig takes the Canticum as his inspiration, but extends the value of the imagery within to real sexual encounters, and understands the symbolism of such encounters to be meaningful in explicating his ideas about God. As Whiterig told us previously, a sign tells you both what was done and what one wants you to do. This kiss was acted by God upon humanity, and the proper tropological response is to return the kiss, “omni affectu amoris amplexandum.” A real kiss involves two distinct individuals, but the “first” kiss of Christ’s Incarnation is not so: flesh and spirit, humanity and divinity are numerically

113 The Latin literally says: “In which supper of the Lord especially was entrusted the sacrament through which we believe this to be done.”

114 O osculum omnium osculorum dignissimum, suauissimum et omni affectu amoris amplexandum! Quantumcumque mutuo se osculentur homines, seu inuicem diligant, diuersi tamen semper sunt numero cum sint due persone aut plures, sed sic non est in osculo Dominice Incarnacionis, ut supradictum est. O qualiter post osculum nos introduxerit in corpus suum, non obstantibus aliis sacramentis per que in corpus Christi misticum quod Ecclesia est introducimur, in cena Domini specialiter commendatum est sacramentum per quod hoc fieri credimus, unde eiusdem institutor sacramenti ita dicit: 'Qui manducat meam carnem et bibit meum sanguinem, in me manet et ego in illo' (43.184).

one. This symbolizes for us the “second” kiss of Christ to humanity, in which by returning God’s kiss, we lose our numerical distinction and become one with him. This kiss is said to draw us into God, as some sacraments do, but especially as the Eucharist does. The Eucharist is an example of humanity internalizing Christ or drawing him in, not vice versa. As in many devotional texts, however, here the interpenetration of Christ and humanity is conflated and confused. Humanity consumes Christ in the Eucharist, Christ takes humanity into his side in the Crucifixion.

The Eucharist is an example of taking God’s covenant into one’s mouth, and a foreshadowing of the eventual kiss between Christ and the individual in eschatological time. Both are unions of flesh to flesh, and both involve the mouth. These are communions in the true sense of the word, in which what is communicated is not abstracted language or meaning, but flesh to flesh, the full self to the full self, a perfect union of two members. The embrace is the Law and the Prophets, or pre-Christ, where God “touches” humanity allegorically by communicating indirectly with them, through representatives. The kiss is the Incarnation, or Christ himself, where God literally touches humanity by uniting his flesh with it so that he can speak face-to-face with humanity, as a kiss is face-to-face and flesh-to-flesh. Communication is in the flesh and through God’s embodied mouthpiece, Christ. The Incarnation also begets the Eucharist, in which humanity begins to consume Christ through their mouths. Finally, the drawing up into Christ’s side-wound represents eschatological time, where we will be united with Christ fully as our flesh will become one with his flesh, as lovers.

2.4.3 The Tropological Interpretation of the Embrace Next, Whiterig’s moral interpretation interlaces Christ’s outstretched arms on the Cross with his embrace of humanity: Supported by St. Gregory’s authority, by the right hand of Christ I understand the happiness or prosperity with which God cherishes his elect, lest they fail amidst tribulations. The Psalmist supports me when he says to God, ‘there are pleasures in your right hand until the end,’ and ‘in tribulations you gladden me.’ By the left hand I understand the adversities of this life with which the Lord scourges his elect, so that thoroughly casting aside the love of this world, they hurry as soon as possible to his

embrace, whether they bear adversities in the loss of worldly goods or in bodily sickness.115

Tropology generally interprets biblical events with an eye to moral action. In Whiterig’s own language of signs, tropology interprets “what has been done” historically by biblical figures in light of what God “wants us to do” in the present. Whiterig explains that God’s right hand signifies the joys with which he rewards humanity; God’s left hand signifies the sorrows with which he compels humanity from love of this world to love of himself. All human experience is thus rendered into a duality, of which God is the agent. Therefore, negative experiences are not a result of sin, but a catalyst by which God attempts to draw humanity into himself. More salient to this argument, however: Whiterig closes the temporal gap between figure and allegory by speaking of God’s actions—and humanity’s reactions—in the now. Each of Christ’s outspread arms signifies God’s agency to intervene in, or more than this, to entirely construct human affairs as a dual sequence of tribulation and exaltation. In reaction to this carrot-and-stick environment, humanity ought to hasten to the outspread embrace of Christ. Typically, an exegetical reader must abstract the historical situation of a given biblical figure, and then apply the necessary moral principle to her or his own life situation. Here, Whiterig renders the abstraction physical. The sign of Christ on the Cross tells us that God interacts with us in the present, not merely through ancient signs that have to be interpreted, but through direct experiences. It is not only figures in the Bible that must be interpreted, but contemporary life events. He brings the hand of God out from the biblical text and into the reader’s own life.

2.4.4 The Tropological Interpretation of the Kiss Whiterig’s interpretation of the kiss of Christ operates in a similar way:

115 Qua fultus auctoritate, per dextram Christi115 intelligo leta115 siue prospera, quibus electos suos fouet Dominus ne in tribulacionibus deficiant, suffragante michi psalmista qui ad Deum sic ait: 'delectaciones in dextra tua usque in finem' et 'in trinbulacione letificasti115 me': per sinistram uero inteligo aduersa queque huius mundi quibus electos flagellat Dominus, ut mundi amorem penitus deponentes, ad amplexus eius quamtocius properent siue aduersa patiantur in amissione bonorum temporalium uel in infirmitatibus corporum. Hinc etenim scriptum est: 'Multiplicatae sunt infirmitates eorum et postea accelerauerunt' (44.185).

What should we understand by the mouth of the Father but the Son, and what by the kiss of the mouth but the Holy Spirit? This kiss was solemnly impressed on the mouth of the Church when the Holy Spirit descended over the Apostles in tongues of flame. The Apostles are aptly called the mouth of the Church, because their voice resounded throughout the whole world, and their words reached the ends of the earth. One of whom, speaking on the giving of this same kiss, said: ‘Love of God is diffused in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us,’ and again, ‘God sent the Spirit of his son, crying in our hearts “Abba, Father!”’ and yet again, ‘Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ is not from him.’ Morally, we are introduced into the body of Christ when we are confirmed in his love, and for this reason, John says in the Letter: ‘God is love, and whoever dwells in charity dwells in God.’116

Whiterig breaks apart the opening line of the Canticum, “osculetur me osculo oris sui” (1:1), into the mouth and the kiss of the mouth. He interprets the bridegroom’s kiss of the bride into the relationship of the various members of the Trinity. The Father is the bridegroom, the mouth of the Father is Christ, and the kiss of the mouth is the Holy Spirit. Christ is the physical embodiment of the divine, so it is apt to represent him with an image of the body, and even more appropriate that he be the mouth, since he is the mouthpiece or Word of God. Since Christ states that the Father will send the Holy Spirit “after him” (John 14:26), the Holy Spirit becomes Christ’s kiss, sent from the mouth of the Father. In line with trinitarian theology, all three are one being, so to understand the bridegroom, his mouth, and the subsequent action of his mouth as one being allows us to understand that what we do is part of who we are. We participate in the creation of our existence by acting. This is what makes Whiterig’s tropology so embodied: what we do creates who we are, is part of our body itself—the unlikely alternative is that Whiterig holds the heretical view that the Holy Spirit is not one with the Father and Son. Christ is the liminal space in the bridegroom’s body through which we can access knowledge of the Father (through the communication of the Logos) and

116 Quid per os Patris inteligere debemus nisi Filium, et quid per osculum oris nisi Spiritum Sanctum? Quod ori Ecclesiae solempniter tunc impressum fuit quando super Apostolos in linguis igneis descendit Spiritus Sanctus, qui bene os Ecclesie uocari possunt, quia in omnem terram exiuit sonus eorum et in fines orbis terrae uerba eorum. De huius osculi dono quidam eorum loquitur dicens: 'Caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum qui datus est,' et interum: ‘Misit Deus Spiritum Filii sui in corda nostra clamantem: “Abba, Pater,’’’ et iterum adhuc: 'Qui Spiritum Christi non habet, hic non est eius.' Moraliter in corpus Christi introducimur cum in eius amore solidamur, unde Iohannes in epistola dicit: 'Deus caritas est, et qui manet in caritate in Deo manet' (44.185).

even the Father himself, in physical encounters like the kiss. Christ makes a physical encounter possible, like a kiss, because he is enfleshed. The Holy Spirit is the action of the kiss, the desire to kiss, the performance of the kiss, the agency of God toward us. This is seemingly insubstantial but we must understand the kiss as part of the mouth.

Let us recall that Whiterig is interpreting a sign of Christ on the Cross in which Christ’s head is bowed, both literally in exhaustion and to kiss humanity, who enters into his embrace. In Whiterig’s tropological interpretation the kiss becomes, dually, the arrangement of the three members of the Trinity in relation to each other, and the Trinity’s relation to humanity itself. Thus, Whiterig’s tropological reading of his sign of the Crucifixion imagines two bodies, locked in a kiss: for the bridegroom, the body of God with Christ as the mouth and the Holy Spirit as the kiss enacted by the mouth, and for the bride, the body of Ecclesia, the mouth of whom is the Apostles, who receive the kiss. God is the body, Christ the mouth of the body, the Holy Spirit is the action, and this entity embraces and kisses a parallel body of the Church for whom the Apostles are the mouth. The tropological or “moral” interpretation of the Crucifixion is two bodies, divine and human, coming together, mouth-to-mouth, locked in an embrace.

Whiterig goes on to specify that we are all members of that second body, the bride, if we are “confirmed” in Christ’s love. The Latin text uses the term “solidiamur” (solido, solidare, etc.), which means “to make firm, dense, or solid; to make whole or sound; to strengthen, fasten together; or to confirm” (Lewis & Short “solido, v.”). The term “confirmed” cloaks the full range of meaning of the phrase: “in corpus Christi introducimur cum in eius amore solidamur.” We are drawn into the body of Christ when we are solidified, made firm, made flesh, united, fastened together in his love. A dual trajectory of solidification, embodiment, enfleshment and union is signified by this diction. We, like Christ, are solid, enfleshed, and united with this solid enfleshment. God is a corporation of divinity, which unites with a corporation of humanity.

Not only this, but exegesis itself is given two bodies by Whiterig. Each level of interpretation speaks doubly, usually about God and about humanity. In other words, Whiterig reveals two

levels or kinds of exegesis: one experienced from God’s vantage point, and another from humanity’s. Paradoxically, humanity tries to spiritualize the erotic and embodied things it reads. God, on the other hand, wants to enflesh them. Both embodied spirit and spiritual bodies meet in the middle, in an embrace of spirit and flesh.

2.4.5 The Anagogical Interpretation of the Kiss Then Whiterig reads the kiss anagogically: But now we must discuss the kiss that will be given in heaven, for this kiss signifies something great—no, very great. Do you think it is the marriage of Christ and the Church? For what is a kiss or the act of kissing, which joins the mouth of one to another? What is the significance of this joining unless mutual love? Therefore, a kiss is a gluing or an indestructible seal, in which two lovers are joined. What is this glue, other than the Holy Spirit, who is understood to be the connection between the Father and the Son and the love of each of them? Whence it is written: ‘Eternity remains in the Father, equality in the Son, and the connection of eternity and equality in the Holy Spirit.’ No one can create another kiss, another link between Christ and the Church, besides what which already exists, which is the Holy Spirit. He translates us into the very image after which we are made, after the influence of Image on image, granting Power in memory, Wisdom in intellect, Goodness or Love in will, in which the soul becomes godlike, like to God among the sons of God, causing it to examine the glory of God with unveiled face. As the Apostle says, ‘We will know him as he is, and we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is.’117

Whiterig begins by asking his reader a series of rhetorical questions that touch on the various readings of the kiss that he has already provided. These questions serve both as a reminder of

117Nunc uero de osculo quod in illa erit patria disceptandum est. Aliquod enim magnum significat hoc osculum et ualde magnum; putas num coniunccio Christi et Ecclesie est? Quid enim est osculum uel osculacio, quam aliquorum oris ad os coniunccio? Quid ergo hec coniunccio nisi mutui amoris significacio? Ergo glutinum est osculum siue sigillum indissolubile, quo duo diligentes connectuntur. Quid hoc dicam glutinum aliud quam Spiritum Sanctum qui Patris atque Filii connexio esse constat ac amor utriusque, unde scribitur: 'In Patre manet eternitas, in Filio equalitas, in Spiritu Sancto eternitatis equalitatisque connexio.' Aliud ergo osculum, aliud Christi et Ecclesie uinculum nemo potest ponere preter id quod positum est, quod est Spiritus Sanctus qui nos transferet in eandem ymaginem ad quam facti sumus, secundum influenciam Ymaginis in ymaginem: Potencie in memoriam, Sapiencie in intellectum, Bonitatis uel Amoris in uoluntatem, quibus fit anima deiformis et similis Deo inter filios Dei, causante hoc ipsum quod reuelata facie speculatur gloriam Dei, unde dicit Apostulus: 'Scimus quod cum aparuerit, similes ei erimus, quia uidebimus eum sicuti est' (47.187).

what he has established previously, and as a way of implying what he wants to say without stating it explicitly. He starts his series of questions with “putas,” the second personal plural of “puto, putare,” “do you think?”—indicating that the questions that follow are also addressed at the rhetorical you, the reader. The deferral of responsibility established in the series of interrogatives, and the possibility that you will affirm these things, allows Whiterig to present imagery bordering on the sexually explicit, with some distance. He implies that the “kiss” is a physical union of Christ and the Church, for what is a kiss but a union of mouths? And what is a “coniuncio” or “union” but an expression of love? Whiterig then explains that a kiss is a “glutinum” or “sigillum indissolubile.” Both “glutinum” and “sigillum” are images of fluid connection: one is glue or paste, the other is a seal made from wax. Both images convey the moisture possible from a kiss from the mouth, or perhaps even a more sexual conception, occurring below.

This fluid link is the Holy Spirit itself, uniting all the members of the Trinity in love. Thus the connection of bridegroom to bride is not merely indicative of human/divine relations, but divine/divine relations. Christ and the Father are involved in mutual embrace, connected jointly by the third member, the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the connection of humanity with divinity as expressed through the Canticum is already derived from the relationship of God to God. The Father is to Christ what the entire Trinity is to humanity, creating a doubly knit image of Father to Son, and Father and Son to humankind.

The Holy Spirit unites humanity to God specifically by transforming us into God. Humanity will be able to see God for what he is because we will be like him. To see and grasp something intellectually, you must be the same substance as that which you grasp: since humanity is now in the flesh, God comes to us in the flesh. Since humans are now embodied souls, knowledge must be embodied. We are carnal, we know carnally. The Canticum canticorum is not an allegory in the sense that other exegetes have understood it. It reveals to us that here and now, and from our human perspective, knowledge is carnal; carnal things do not gesture toward truth, they embody it. In fact, this truth that Whiterig wishes to stress is none other than the carnal body of Christ, where the act of coming to know involves an affective encounter with Christ, predicated on love and desire and not on mere intellectual

understanding. In Whiterig’s image of Christ's body as a book that must be read, I will suggest below, knowledge is not absorbed with the mind but involves coition with the body, which he imagines as the site of discourse.

2.5 The Book

John Whiterig presents his ideas about reading and understanding by articulating Christ’s body on the Cross as a book open to the reader’s touch and perusal. Christ’s wounds become the letters that the reader reads and touches. Discourse is constantly referred back to the body, and is printed on or in the body of Christ. Whiterig desires to touch and read Christ's body over and over again. Christ's flesh is thus the site where “reading” and “comprehending” occur, and meaning is conveyed through depictions of touch and exchange, not through abstract mental activities. Reading and understanding thus become sacramental and sensually, rather than intellectually, focused.

In medieval cognition theory, Thomas Aquinas’s popular view roughly distinguished two types of cognition: sensory and intellectual (Pasnau 12). Sensory cognition is the product of the physical organs, whereas universals are the property of intellectual cognition. The senses apprehend a particular stone, but the intellect comprehends stone-ness based on the universal idea of “stone.” More technically, the senses apprehend accidents and the intellect conceptualizes and categorizes this information (Pasnau 13). In the following examples, I will argue that this binary between percipient and object of knowledge, or more specifically, between devotee and spiritual knowledge, is triangulated through Christ. Since Christ is the incarnate Logos, he is the hybrid between language and meaning and matter and flesh. As the Logos he bridges the intellectual and the sensual, which allows the senses to grasp metaphysical realities through his person. To know him is to know the invisible God, and to touch his body is to apprehend metaphysical truths.

2.5.1 Christ’s Body-as-Book Whiterig's take on the medieval trope of seeing Christ's crucified body as a book is very likely influenced by the same image in Richard Rolle's Middle English Meditation B.118 Whiterig's version is more detailed and complex, however. He states: Therefore, man, examine Christ, and know your Saviour, for his body hangs on the Cross like a book spread open for your eyes. The words of this volume are the deeds of Christ—his sorrows and his passion—and every action of Christ is for our instruction. The letters or characters of this volume are his wounds, of which the five chief wounds are the five vowels, and the rest are the consonants of your book. Learn therefore to read these lamentations and even the abuses, terrors, insults, and119 disgraces written within! Whatever you know, if you do not know this, I consider what you know to be nothing. Because without universal or particular knowledge of this book, it is impossible for you to be saved. Therefore, eat this volume, which will be sweet in your mouth and in your mind, but will become bitter in your stomach, which represents the memory, because whoever increases in wisdom increases in sorrow. And distress gives intelligence to the one who hears, who by feeling compassion with Christ on the Cross, fills his flesh with the sufferings which are lacking…Do not let this volume part from my hands, but let the law of the Lord be forever in my mouth, so that I may know what is acceptable in your eyes.120

Whiterig imagines Christ's body hanging on the Cross like a manuscript book open to the perusal of both the speaker and the reader. Here, Christ’s wounds become a language that

118 Rolle says: “More yit, swet Ihesu, þy body is lyke a boke written al with red ynke: so is þy body al written with rede woundes. Now, swete Ihesu, graunt me to rede vpon þy boke, and somwhate to vndrestonde þe swetnes of þat writynge, and to haue likynge in studious abydyne of þat redynge, and yeve me grace to conceyue somwhate of þe perles loue of Ihesu Crist, and to lerne by þat ensaumple to loue God agaynward as I shold. And, swete Ihesu, graunt me þis study in euche tyde of þe day, and let me vpon þis boke study at my matyns and hours and euynsonge and complyne, and euyre to be my meditacioun, my speche, and my dalyaunce. Pater noster. Aue Maria” (Prose and Verse Vol. I 75).

119 The edition provides “eciam” but the manuscript gives “et.”

120 Disce ergo homo Christum, cognosce Saluatorem tuum; corpus etenim pendens in cruce uolumen expansum est coram oculis tuis; uerba uoluminis huius sunt actus Christi, dolores et passiones eius. Omnis enim Christi accio nostra est instruccio, litere seu caracteres uoluminis huius wlnera eius sunt, quorum quinque plage quinque sunt uocales, cetere uero consonantes libri tui: disce ergo legere lamentaciones et ve contumelias, et terrores, conuicia, etob probria que in eo scripta sunt! Quicquid scis, si hoc nescis, nichil reputo quod scis; quia sine sciencia (191) huius libri uniuersali uel particulari inpossibile est te saluari. Comede ergo uolumen hoc, quod dulce erit in ore tuo et intelectu, sed amaricabit uentrem tuum, id est memoriam, quia qui addit scenciam addit et dolorem, et uexacio dat intelectum auditui eius, qui compaciendo crucifixo Christo supplet passiones que desunt in carne sua…Non recedat, Domine, liber uoluminis huius de manibus meis, sed ut lex Domini iugiter sit in ore meo, ut sciam quid acceptum sit in oculis tuis (53.192).

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signifies and gives meaning, and the speaker wishes to meditate closely over this script, and thus closely over Christ's body. Knowledge derives from touching and scanning Christ's body, more specifically his gaps, absences and wounds.

The medieval comparison of Christ's body with a manuscript codex is theologically fitting, as the manuscript presents a union of flesh and text.121 The union of animal skin and textual script is itself a symbol for Christ's Incarnation. As Jill Ross suggests, the “enfleshing of the Word is akin to the process of clothing thoughts in corporeal language and affixing them by means of the material elements of parchment, paper, pen, and ink” (Ross 52). Christ, theologically speaking, is the union of a material principle (in this context, a cow or sheep’s skin, symbolized by the vellum or parchment) that dies, and the divine spiritual principle, the Word, that remains forever. This connection adds a further meaningful layer to the actual medieval reading practices of manuscripts, when readers were constantly reminded of the parallels between textuality and Christ's physical body. This motif is therefore self- referential, and draws attention to the reader who would have read Whiterig’s passage in a manuscript—one whose ink was red and deep brown, no less.122 Whiterig’s image causes the manuscript itself to become a devotional object, a site for experiencing the body of Christ. Devotional reading practices take on further erotic overtones as Christ's flesh becomes the site of reading, the site of attaining knowledge, and any manuscript offers this potential resonance.

I wish to focus on two aspects of this motif: that it is the crucified Christ that he compares to the book, and that this book is said to be open. The Crucifixion is the moment at which Christ becomes wounded and covered in red blood, much like a luxe manuscript would be covered in red ink. Christ hangs with his arms open, and his body is broken and stretched across like the paired folios and stretched vellum of a codex. This state—the open Christ, the open

121 See especially Sarah Beckwith’s Christ's Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings, and Sarah Kay’s “Original Skin: Flaying, Reading, and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works.”

122 Durham Cathedral MS. B. IV. 34. has faded brown ink with red capitulums.

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book—is necessary for the reader’s access, who can now penetrate the open body of Christ physically and intellectually like an opened codex and thus know him. This is a moment of pure abjection, or taboo, where Christ’s formerly closed-off body becomes broken open. As Julia Kristeva explains in Powers of Horror, abjection is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4). God himself hangs broken open on the Cross, and his body, his corpse, being open, is feminized: his hidden recesses are made accessible and are no longer secret. The curtain of the temple, veiling the holy of holies from all but the high priest, is torn open as Christ’s body is torn open. The privities of God become accessible, destroying the hierarchical system of religion. More than this, the boundaries of self/other become blurred: Christ’s open corpse destroys distinctions of life/death, humanity/divinity, male/female, etc. The privities of God, and the deconstruction of basic binary systems, are laid bare for humanity's gaze and scrutiny like an open book. This knowledge does not concern abstract spiritual truths signalled by the body, but it is knowledge of truth embodied in the very viscera of God.

Whiterig specifies that the words, actions, and sufferings of Christ form the words of this book. Christ’s body is an embodied Gospel: wounds are recorded in his flesh as they are recorded in the Gospel as narrative events. Rather than comparing Christ's wounds to ink, as Rolle does, Whiterig connects the wounds to the letters or characters on the pages made by the ink: specifically, to vowels and consonants. He specifies that the larger wounds form the vowels,123 and the rest form the consonants. The wounds are the building blocks of language, communication, and thus meaning, in which the larger wounds form the more significant aspects of this language code. Prudentius’ Peristephanon, a poem on early Christian martyrdom, was the earliest text to present the flesh inscribed with wounds like letters “to formulate a specifically Christian conception of writing” (54). Jill Ross argues that for Prudentius, “writing acquires a divine corporeality that physically engenders more language” and therefore the inscribed flesh becomes a site of divine discourse (54). By inscribing

123 There are traditionally five major wounds of Christ: his side, hands and feet, which would correspond with the five vowels: a, e, i o, u.

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Christ’s very flesh with words, Whiterig, too, sanctifies language, making it salvific. More than this, however, he embodies it into the wounds on Christ’s body, making language somatic.

Christ’s wounds are related specifically to written communication. This metaphor is doubly apt: not only does manuscript composition involve scratching into animal skin, ink marks on the folio are already a “taking away” from the uniformity of the vellum, like wounds. The written word conveys and communicates but it is visually constructed on absence. The wounds are grooves or absences on Christ's flesh, and language itself is a kind of absence or lack, a carving out from meaning because it works in the negative: it narrows the possible semantic range and by becoming one thing it denies everything else. As Saussure suggests, the values of the letter are “purely negative and differential” (Saussure 118). The separate elements of language are constructed negatively, and thus absence is also necessary for communion. There needs to be a hole, a gap, a place of openness for two to meet. As Mary Douglas suggests, the skin “which constrains the body's contours and mediates the world outside, functioning then as both an organic and imaginary order, can metaphorize the system which both protects a composite individuality and is the medium for interaction with others.” Therefore, in breaking the borders of the skin, the “very structures of identity are put into psychic play” (4).

I argue that these absences, nodes, and markings in Christ's flesh communicate because they are absences, since they are the very places in which humanity can become joined to Christ. Roland Barthes suggests that there is already an inherent connection between skin and language: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire” (Lover’s Discourse 73). Christ’s skin is a language; his language is like a skin. All language is inherently focused on communion with the other. These wounds-as-letters are the reason for Christ's openness and accessibility, they allow communion or “understanding” with him physically and intellectually. Understanding and knowing imply coitus at their logical end.

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Then, the speaker states that the reader needs to learn how to read these wounds, allowing one to discover the lamentations and humiliations of Christ. I argue that readers learn more than this: they learn about the connection between communication, language, meaning, desire, and union with God. This book is held up as the apotheosis of all knowledge: everything is meaningless without it. The Cross becomes literally a crux of meaning, that must be known in both the general and the particular. Perhaps the general signifies these fundamental truths conveyed, and the particular means knowing Christ personally, the intimate connection required in paying heed to his suffering and adopting it as one’s own.

Then, Whiterig desires that the reader eat this book, connecting the previous images of the mouth and the production of discourse with the consumption of discourse. Reading becomes a parallel method of internalizing Christ in comparison with eating the Eucharist. But reading, as an abstract mental internalization, is not sufficient: knowledge must involve Christ’s flesh and thus he must be eaten. Perhaps this is another way of understanding Whiterig’s distinction between the general and the particular: Christ must be known generally and abstractly in the mind, but also particularly and in the flesh, in actuality. The eating of a book is an allusion to certain Old Testament motifs, but especially John of Patmos' eating of the scrolls in the Book of Revelation.124 This gesture makes physical the act of attaining knowledge, and suggests that knowledge is a tangible thing that must be viscerally incorporated.

However, though this eating will be sweet on the palate, and in the mind, it will be bitter in the stomach. The threefold division of mouth, understanding, and belly is Augustinian,125 since Whiterig interprets the belly to stand for the memory (where the food is stored and digested). The mouth is therefore the desire or will, because it represents the appetite, the

124 Revelation 10:10: “And I took the book from the hand of the angel, and ate it up: and it was in my mouth, sweet as honey: and when I had eaten it, my belly was bitter," "Et accepi librum de manu angeli, et devoravi illum: et erat in ore meo tamquam mel dulce, et cum devorassem eum, amaricatus est venter meus.”

125 Augustine’s tripartite theory of the mind (memory, understanding, and will) stems out of his Trinitarian theology in Book X, Chapter 9 of his De Trinitate. See Stephen McKenna’s translation On the Trinity (53).

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empty pocket that desires the food because it has a sense of taste with which to enjoy it. Whiterig tells us that it is sweet to desire Christ, and to know him in the understanding, but bitter in the memory. Whiterig suggests that a historical understanding of Christ’s life must reflect his suffering. Second, as with the image of letters-as-wounds, Whiterig suggests that all communication and all reception of knowledge is inherently painful (as it is paradoxically pleasurable). Third, if something is in the memory, it is not within the present grasp, it is separated from the self who remembers. Knowing Christ in the memory means one is no longer united to him, recalling again Nicholas Watson’s hermeneutic gap between the knower and the object of knowledge (“Desire for the Past” 75).

The idea is further elaborated by the sentence “he that increases knowledge increases sorrow,” which can refer to either the agent or the recipient of knowledge, Christ who gives the knowledge or the reader who by receiving it “increases” it. The memory is then the storehouse of knowledge, and the increase in knowledge parallels or causes an increase in sorrow. Two possible devotional trends can help us to understand this sentiment. First, the twelfth-century focus on the humanity and suffering of Christ encouraged readers to focus on and even imitate his suffering.126 Second, the filling of the belly is like the filling of the womb with child. In other words, this image alludes to the Virgin Mary’s conception of Christ, which is also depicted as sorrowful because of his eventual Crucifixion.

Whiterig underlines this idea by stating “And distress gives intelligence to the one who hears, who by feeling compassion with Christ on the Cross, fills his flesh with the sufferings which are lacking.” Through the act of hearing, one is able to fill his flesh with suffering. Hearing implies an aural penetration, and in light of medieval oral reading practices, this is a necessary part of the consumption of discourse. The book is spoken aloud so that it can penetrate the body and become one with it through the ear. However, it also becomes one with the mouth in the process of speaking, repeating the form of union that occurs in the above eating of the book.

126 As attested in Caroline Walker Bynum’s Jesus as Mother.

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Next, the speaker states that he also desires to have this book ever in his hands. He does not desire to have the book only in his mind or thoughts, but in his hands, which is sensual. To suggest that the speaker desires the book ever in his hands, from which no abstract passing of knowledge can occur, means that it is only physical union with the item that he desires in this instance. He wants to touch Christ and he wants Christ to be continuous with his body. In multiple passages in the Meditacio, the speaker desires to touch Christ or be touched by him because he will be cleansed by the touching. Touch is important, and touch is somehow equivalent with coming to know.

The reading, understanding, and internalizing of these texts imply a coition, a blurring of subject and object. Knowledge takes place from the body, and through the body, and no longer a one-way process between percipient and object, it involves desire, exchange and union. By filling the mind, hands, and stomach with Christ's body, the subject becomes so filled with the object that the boundaries between them are blurred. Eric Jager theorizes that textuality is a condition of the fallen world—a world where humanity no longer has direct access to conversation with God (Jager 69). I believe that Whiterig’s text ultimately strives to subvert this alienation, by accessing meaning imprinted on Christ’s body, and then, indirectly, by accessing Christ's body itself. Through it the reader can access the divine.

2.6 The Heart Unlike Aelred, who leaves his reader, alongside Mary, reaching for a Christ just out of grasp, Whiterig takes us further. It is not enough even to touch Christ; we must become fully one with him. So far, Whiterig has led us through a discussion of signification in the abstract, followed by an exegetical reading of his revealed sign. Though both involved desire and embodiment, they were still focused on language itself. After reading the Crucifixion of Christ in which everything leads back into the embrace of Christ, Whiterig brings us to the book on which this sign occurs: Christ’s body itself. His discussion has become further embodied, further rooted in the flesh of Christ. We move from language in theory, to language on the page, to the page itself. The final step of his movement involves becoming

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one with the page, one with Christ’s flesh. This is depicted as an exchange of heart for heart and self for self.

2.6.1 Exchanging Hearts: Completing Desire Whiterig provides yet another image that must be interpreted multiple ways, and in completes his image of Christ on the Cross.127 Christ tells him: ‘Behold the fruit of the womb: the generation of the Lord and the payment of the Son. This is what I long for before all else, there is nothing among humanity which I desire more.’ Good Jesus, what is it that you desire so feverishly, and purchase for yourself with your own payment? Are not every man, every womb, every fruit, everything visible and invisible, yours alone? What is this fruit of the womb which you so hungrily claim? Something desirable and inestimably precious is hidden in this, which, because we are still without understanding, remains concealed from our eyes, until the revelation of your words gives wisdom to your children. O good and dearest Lord Jesus, tell us openly what you realize by the fruit of the womb!128

Here the speaker ventriloquizes God, acting as his mouthpiece, when he states that God desires the “fruit of the womb” above all things. The speaker then grapples with the term literally, stating that every womb and every fruit already belong to God, and asking what this could then possibly mean. In this way, he signals to the reader that this is allegorical language by drawing attention to the use of symbol, and highlighting the nonsense of the literal meaning. In the Old Testament, this term simply means “offspring,”129 but then the expression becomes particularly crystallized in reference to the Virgin Mary’s birthing of Christ, in the language that her cousin Elizabeth uses when greeting her (Luke 1:42). In making this allusion, whether explicitly or not, Whiterig makes Mary a type for all readers,

127 Though it in fact opens his exegetical discussion in the Meditacio.

128 Ecce hereditas Domini atque merces filii, fructus uentris. Hoc est quod ante omnia cupio, nec est inter homines quod tantum concupisco. Ihesu bone, quid est hoc quod tam ardenter desideras, atque in specialem mercedem ipse tibi uendicas? Nonne omnis homo, omnis uenter, omnis fructus, omnia postremo uisibilia et inuisibilia tua sunt? Quis est iste fructus uentris quem tam auide postulas? Aliquid in hoc latet desiderabile et inestimabiliter preciosum, quod, quia nos adhuc sine intelectu sumus, absconditum est ab osculis nostris, quoadusque declaracio sermonum tuorum det intelectum paruulis. O bone Domine amabilis Ihesu, dic nobis palam quid inteligas per fructum uentris (17.170).

129 See, for example, Psalm 127:3: "Ecce hereditas Domini filii mercis fructus ventris."

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whose wombs God desires.130 As we will see, the fruit of her womb is Christ and the “fruit of the womb” referenced here is the reader’s heart, and the love stemming from the heart. However, the speaker does not explicitly mention either of these allusions as potential meanings, but instead talks about literal fruits and wombs instead. Again, I argue that the speaker makes himself into a straw-man figure that focuses on overly-literal concerns. Whiterig is constructing the process of exegesis or proper interpretation of symbols as privy to divine revelation, not human reasoning.

Then, Whiterig provides God’s answer: And you say: ‘In your house there is nothing that I desire as much as your heart. 131 Not that lump of flesh, but its love. This therefore is the fruit that I desire, which is more precious to me than all riches, and all desirable things are not comparable. In your body, nothing is more precious than that, and therefore it is aptly called ‘fruit.’ This is what I demand, what I prefer before every offering, and in which it delights me to dwell. I did not suffer for your sake except that you give it to me.’132

The fruit of the womb is the reader’s heart, which God desires above all things. The medieval understanding of the human body was cardiocentric: the heart was the “sovereign of the body and its source of power” (Webb 7), and also a “respiratory organ, open and porous, radically available to the outside world” (8). Finally, and most importantly, the medieval heart was a “gendered and generative organ,” that “must be both receptive…and projective” (8). Medieval notions of circulation involved circulation “beyond the body, to it and from it, with the world,” and “a heart that is not receptive or womblike is a source of spiritual and physical danger” (98). In fact, “The greater the capacity to move spirit through the boundaries of the

130 See especially Barbara Newman’s “Indwelling: A Meditation on Empathy, Pregnancy, and the Virgin Mary," especially pp. 196-197.

131 The edition misses an “et” here, which I have added. 132 Et dicis: ‘In domo tua non est quod tantum cupio sicut cor tum et non massam illam carnis, sed amorem eius. Hoc ergo est fructus quem capio, qui preciosior est michi cunctis opibus, et omnia que desiderantur huic non ualent comparari. In uentre tuo nichil isto est preciosius, merito ergo eius dicitur fructus. Hoc est quod postulo, hoc uotis omnibus antepono, in hoc habitare michi sunt delicie, passus pro te non sum nisi hoc dederis michi’ (17.170).

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body, the more perfect (and more masculine) the individual…The individual that is now defined by containment within the skin was once determined by the ability to push her- or himself beyond that enclosure and into relations with the world” (99-100). The heart is thus both “a passive ‘feminine’ reservoir for blood and spirit and the ‘masculine’ center of the body’s active life force, producing animating spirit and the materials of procreation” (109- 110).

Here, God specifies that he desires not the fleshly heart, but the love that comes from it. By drawing a parallel between the womb and the heart, and the fruit and the heart’s love, Whiterig, too, constructs the heart as a gendered and productive space. Both the womb and the heart are constructed on absence: the womb, in giving birth, empties itself, and the heart, though filled with blood, in desiring and loving something, knows itself to be empty and lacking. Paradoxically, this absence births something positive, love, which is also seemingly an absence in that it desires the other. As Jean-Luc Marion puts it, “I am, therefore I am lacking…I am only assured of myself beginning from elsewhere” (42). Judith Butler also argues that “sexuality establishes us as outside of ourselves” (15) so that “we are, from the start, even prior to individualization itself, and by virtue of our embodiment, given over to an other” (23). Christ desires our desire, or desires our lack so that he can fill it. In other words, he lacks our lack. God as pure actual being lacks nothing except lack; he desires nothing except the desire of his creation.

The speaker responds to this request: Good Jesus, I concede what you ask. I want to give to you what you desire. But You will never have my heart unless you first give me yourself. I will not give you my treasure unless exchanged for something better, because without you I can do nothing.133

133 Ihesu bone, concedo quod postulas, cupio dare quod desideras; sed numquam tamen habebis cor meum, nisi prius michi dederis temetipsum; tum quia tesaurum meum non tribuo nisi propter melius, tum quia sine te nichil possum facere. (17.170)

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The speaker articulates here the impossibility of giving anything to God, from whom all things come. God is pure being, and humanity merely has this being, borrowed from God. This theological distinction, however, is expressed as the desire of a lover, much closer to Augustine’s assertion, “Command what you will, O Lord, but grant what you command” (Confessiones 10.29). The speaker states that he will never give Christ his heart, unless Christ first gives over his whole self. The request is bold. The being of the speaker is dependent on the being of Christ, and each takes up the absence of the other: Christ desires the only thing he lacks, which is lack, and the speaker, lacking everything, desires the everything offered by Christ. In this way, the pair exhibit a mutual dependence on each other, dualities of being and non-being.

This dependence is made clearer as the speaker goes on: I know, Lord, I know you long for all of me when you seek my heart, just as I desire you completely when I ask for you. I even know, Lord, that you wish to have all things completely, so that you can be completely possessed, and you do this on behalf of me, not yourself. For who has everything does not need any of my goods.134

In this passage, the speaker makes the synechdocal nature of the heart image explicit. The heart represents the whole self, body and soul, which is somehow also equivalent to the love of God stemming from the self. The human self, as a heart, is equated with desire and lack. If God is pure being, what is humanity but pure desire, pure lack of being? In desiring Christ's heart as a return, Whiterig describes humanity as a carving out from the being of God. Its lack or desire cannot even exist unless God makes it so. Christ wishes to possess the reader so that he himself can in turn be possessed. The speaker's bold request is reminiscent of Abraham's playful negotiations with God concerning the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:22-33). The speaker withholds the object of Christ's desire until Christ reciprocates, asking of Christ more than Christ originally asked of him. This negotiation

134 Scio Domine, scio, totum me cupis cum cor meum petis, et totum te desidero cum te ipsum postulo. Noui etiam, Domine, quia ideo totum uelles habere, ut totus possis haberi; et hoc propter me facis, non propter te. Qui enim omnia habes, bonorum meorum non eges (18.170).

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secondarily mimics the play of lovers; Christ plays the coy female, seeking assurance of love, and Whiterig plays the bold male, seeking the total object of bliss, the female's body, or “whole self.” In reality, the speaker realizes that he cannot give anything without already having been given. His being is wholly dependent on God, and as such, has nothing to give him except the nothingness of his desire. Ex nihilo, God creates something, carves out of his being the nonbeing of humanity, who must actualize its existence by returning its nothingness to God and receiving him instead.

2.7 Conclusion Overall, then, Whiterig’s Meditacio moves from abstraction to progressive embodiment, and progressive entanglement with Christ. Beginning in an analysis of the erotic nature of signs, he moves from speaking of signs in the abstract, to speaking of the “sign” of Christ’s body, which he goes on to express as a book, covered in letters, open for the reader’s touch and glances. Not only is Christ hung on the Cross as a lover, desiring the reader’s embrace, he himself is the book in which this message is written. The reader must unite himself with Christ, penetrating his open wounds, reading the message that they embody. Finally, the reader is required to penetrate the surface of the skin and the signs, and exchange hearts with Christ, melding their identities as lovers do.

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Chapter 3 ‘Wrastlyng wiþ þat blynde nou3t’: Binding and Blinding in The Cloud of Unknowing

3.1 Introduction

In the De institutione inclusarum and the De Iesu puero duodenni of Chapter One, union with Christ was mediated through an erotic triangulation of gazes, in which touch was delayed or deferred. In the Meditacio ad Crucifixum of Chapter Two, union involved touching Christ’s body-as-book, embracing, and even devouring him. Aelred and Whiterig’s texts participate in what Caroline Walker Bynum in Jesus as Mother calls a twelfth- and thirteenth-century concern with an approachable God (2); they focus on the humanity of Christ and, more importantly, through Christ, the possibility of humanity’s intimate relationship with the divine. In contrast, this third chapter will explore the late fourteenth-century The Cloud of Unknowing (with selections from the Book of Privy Counselling), in which God can neither be seen nor spoken of.

The Cloud is traditionally classified as being a work of negative or “apophatic” theology, in which no language can be predicated of God, and therefore no knowledge about him can be attained in this lifetime.135 The incarnate presence and imitability of an erotic and approachable Christ, figured by Aelred and Whiterig, is replaced with silence, emptiness, darkness, and yearning—all elements which construct an ontological distance between humanity and the divine. However, this distance or gap is also required for erotic longing to exist between two beings, and for there to be any possibility of “union.” In other words, the Cloud presents the flip side of erotic union: longing predicated on absence, the bride of the Canticum lamenting, “all night long on my bed I looked for the one my heart loves; I looked

135 See Rosemary Lees’s The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1983.

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for him but did not find him” (3:1). The divide between literal and spiritual levels of scripture—deconstructed in my other texts—seems secure, since language simply cannot represent divine realities. And yet, this negative text nevertheless speaks about God in figurative and often quite somatic language: the reader is asked to “touch” and “unite” with God. But why this language? This chapter will examine the tension between denying the possibility of attributing linguistic qualities to God, and yet speaking about divine union using evocative and even erotic imagery.

The Cloud of Unknowing is an English contemplative text by an unknown author, and was likely written in the East Midlands136 sometime between the 1370s-90s (Sutherland 83). The author had strong Carthusian connections, not only due to the influence of Guigo II and Hugo of Balma on his works, but also because the Carthusians were largely responsible for the later transmission of his texts (Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics 167). Though Walter Hilton has been proposed as a likely author, most current scholars reject this theory, instead suggesting that Hilton’s Scale of Perfection was greatly influenced by the Cloud-group (Glasscoe 166). The Cloud-group is comprised of seven other texts and translations that are associated with, though not necessarily composed by, this same author, including:137 the Book of Privy Counselling, the Epistle of Prayer, the Epistle of Discretion of Stirrings, Hid Divinity,138 Benjamin,139 the Study of Wisdom, and the Treatise of Discerning Spirits (165).

136 Linguistic analysis places the text in the “north part of the central East Midlands” (Hodgson, "Introduction" xxvii-li).

137 The Cloud-author’s authorship of all of these texts is currently disputed. See, for example, Eric Graff’s 2006 dissertation, The Cloud of Unknowing and the Works of the Cloud-Corpus, and Annie Sutherland’s “The Dating and Authorship of the Cloud-Corpus: A Reassessment of the Evidence,” Medium Aevum, 2002.

138 The Hid Divinity is an adaptation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology, based on John Sarracenus’s Latin version, and the commentary of Thomas Gallus. It marks the first appearance of pseudo-Dionysius in English (Graff 8).

139 The Benjamin is a paraphrased translation of Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor, also called The Twelve Patriarchs (Graff 8).

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This group of texts is part of a “specialized tradition of mystical theology,” stretching from

Pseudo-Dionysius to Hugh and Richard of St. Victor (Nieva 50-52).140

The Cloud-group is primarily influenced by Dionysian141 spirituality, and arguably represents an attempt to translate this tradition into English (Graff 232). Though the Cloud-author is known for avoiding references to authority, he does mention pseudo-Dionysius, revealing how utterly dependant his theology is on this negative tradition (Graff 232). Eric Graff argues for the single-authorship of the Cloud-group, partially based on its fundamental adherence to two main principles borrowed from Dionysian spirituality: first, the denial or negation of anything predicated of God, and second, the desire for union with this unspeakable God (232). Technically, apophasis means “negation,” but the etymology of the word suggests another, more nuanced, meaning of “speaking away” or “unsaying” (Sells 2). As Michael Sells points out, unsaying requires a previous saying, and this unsaying must be, in turn, unsaid. He states: “the effort to affirm transcendence leads to a continuing series of retractions, a propositionally unstable and dynamic discourse in which no single statement can rest on its own as true or false, or even as meaningful” (Sells 3). Texts in the negative tradition are therefore performative, and often deconstruct themselves at the very moment of their own self-construction. They participate in a continual and constant undoing of themselves.

But the Cloud partakes of another important devotional trend, beginning in the thirteenth century, which draws it nearer in genre to Aelred and Whiterig: the possibility that anyone could experience the presence of God (McGinn, “The Changing Shape” 198). This “experience” of God shifts the focus from the body of the divine to the body of the devotee, and like medieval conceptions of the senses, involves contact between receiver and received (Gallacher, “Introduction” 7). God cannot be known, but he can be loved. This kind of

140 In fact, Richard of St. Victor’s Nubes ignorantiae is the source of the Cloud’s title (Glasscoe 173).

141 Pseudo-Dionysius became influential in the west after the twelfth century, and was identified with Dionysius the Areopagite (a disciple of St. Paul’s) and St. Denis up until the fifteenth century (Glasscoe 173). See, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology within The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid. New York, Paulist Press, 1987.

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knowledge, beyond words and concepts, owes something to the carnal “knowledge” existing between Adam and Eve142 (Teasdale 287), which would explain the imagery of desire and the evocation of bodily language. Both texts that I will examine in this chapter suggest that desire transcends reason as an alternate method which “grasps” God holistically, and sensual terminology is employed to convey this: for example, the Book of Privy Counselling tells us that reason dies in the ecstasy of love (BOPC 85.16).

Thus, the Cloud and the Book of Privy Counselling are rare among works of negative theology in their use of erotic and bodily imagery when they purport simultaneously to deny the ability to posit anything about God (Gallacher 9). Though apophatic in its emphasis on moving past any and all attributes of God to his pure being alone, and in its constant anxiety that readers do not take “bodely” what is meant “goostly,” the Cloud undermines its own commitment to this apophaticism. For one, the text employs “an intensely bodily language to point beyond the bodily sphere” (Spearing 76). John Burrow has suggested that to prevent its readers from conflating the bodily with the spiritual, the Cloud uses such carnal images to ensure that, “the inevitable physical imagery should be clearly recognized for what it is: physical” (Burrow 295). Marion Glasscoe also argues that in the Cloud, it is not that “bodily things cannot point to ghostly things, but that too often man fails to properly distinguish one from the other” (Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics 178).

Nicholas Watson connects the text’s anxiety for its readers’ bodily misinterpretations to its vernacularity, stating that both “English and its uneducated readers are prone to error; but at least this is obvious, as the inadequacy of Latin is not” (“The Middle English Mystics” 552- 3). A.C. Spearing also suggests that the Cloud’s “English has a pervasive bodiliness that constantly reminds us of its unfitness to address God’s naked being” (Spearing 79). In other words, a Latinate text, since it was seen as more sacred and precise, might trick readers into believing that language can be a vehicle for truth. But because the Cloud is written in English, it should be clear to its audience that this is not the case. Similarly, using abstract

142 The term da’ath in Hebrew embraces all forms of knowledge, carnal and otherwise (Teasdale 287).

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metaphors might deceive readers into adopting these as proper vehicles for abstract truths, but using bodily metaphors makes it absolutely clear that language and images are imperfect and cannot convey the fullness of divine meaning.

If we accept these arguments, then the Cloud’s choice of English and embodied discourse become ways of highlighting its own insufficiencies and undermining its ability to bridge human and divine knowledge. But how does the choice of erotic and bridal discourse underline this gap between the bodily and spiritual rather than diminishing it? Perhaps, like the colloquial “Abba” of the “Our Father,” the English and bodiliness of the Cloud are ways of highlighting the paradox of God’s immanence-in-transcendence. But at the same time that the Cloud is so anxious to distinguish the transcendent and immanent, and the literal and allegorical, it also collapses these categories, implying that such distinctions are a result of language only. Language then, becomes seemingly insufficient to convey reality, and becomes a means for gesturing toward this reality only poetically and paradoxically.

The Cloud’s focus on the relationships of body to soul, literal to allegorical, and self to God, as well as on imagery of tying, covering, silence, and blindness, makes an interesting comparison with modern “BDSM” (Bondage, Domination, and Sado-Masochism) practice. Thematically, the Cloud also shares with modern BDSM culture a concern for power relations, transcendence (or the destruction of the boundaries of the self and the self/Other), and for “drama,” “game,” or “play” in the working out of the power dynamic between the “dom”/“sub,”143 in this case, divinity and humanity (Faccio, Casini, Cipoletta 758). Andrea Beckmann reminds us of the etymology of “religion,” from the Latin religare, meaning “to tie,” which implies binding, compulsiveness, and obligation between humanity and divinity (Social Construction 177).

In “The Art of Discipline: Creating Erotic Dramas of Play and Power,” Susan Farr argues that BDSM has two primary functions: “One function has to do with play—with play-acting, with

143 The dominant and submissive partners of BDSM play.

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sexual foreplay, with imaginative rituals, with scary dramas of threat and pleading and relief. The other is something about power—about dominance and intimacy, about aggression” (185). She later specifies that what is being dramatized in such pursuits is ultimately “the exercise of power” (187). This power is manifested as power over the other, the other’s power over the self, and the self’s mastery over the self in self-discipline (188). BDSM has been criticized by some feminist scholars for its mimicry of patriarchy hierarchies, however, other scholars and practitioners vehemently defend it against such claims. Susan Farr argues that “power is not an invention of men, to be wished out of existence in a new women’s society. Power is the capacity to make things happen—power is energy—and we would do well to know as much as we can about it” (183-4). Moreover, part of the “game” of BDSM is the deconstruction of such hierarchical power, seen especially in the act of “switching” from dominant to submissive roles, which “implies the swapping of subject/object positions that are usually socio-politically assigned to people without their consent” (Beckmann “Bodily Practices" 101).

The practitioner Juicy Lucy explains the BDSM power dynamic in more detail: The exchange is: sadist/top/dominant/sender flowing into masochist/bottom/ passive/receiver. However, it is an oversimplification to talk about the erotic exchange as though it only flowed one way. Each side has many levels of apparent & actual power. In sexual S/M the exchange is mutual, with both sides giving & receiving erotic intensity. For example, the trust/openness of the bottom is a constant turn-on to the top, even though it’s the bottom who’s being had. The power & erotic exchange always flows full circle. If it doesn’t then it’s not satisfying & the satisfaction of all concerned is a prime goal in S/M. This is one of the differences I find between S/M sex & vanilla sex, because so often in the latter each dyke is concerned primarily with her own satisfaction & the lover’s needs are met as part of a payment or trade-off. In S/M sex each seeks to open as much as possible, to push past the limits, to turn each other on so intensely that there is no possibility but full satisfaction, not just physically but emotionally & psychically as well (31).

In fact, for some practitioners, more is achieved than simply satisfaction: they profess an experience of the transcendence of the self (Beckmann, “Bodily Practices” 99). I propose that BDSM culture provides a comparative context which aids the transition from my earlier chapters’ scopophilic and rhetorically evocative economies, to the Cloud’s apophatic focus on

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restriction as a means to transcendence, specifically in terms of unsaying, blindness, and binding.

As we shall see, imagery of covering and veiling is also key. The Cloud establishes a kind of game or play, as René Tixier has argued in his article “‘Good Gamesumli Pley’: Games of Love in the Cloud of Unknowing.” Clothing, fabric, and veils both physical and conceptual abound. Coverings give the illusion of separation from the divine. Boundaries are drawn so that they can be erased; bodies are covered so that they can be uncovered. Clothing also symbolizes language: language covers God, but teases, initiates desire, the shell produces desire for the kernel within, which can only be grasped when the shell is removed. Language may not signify God, but desire can only happen through signification, and through the proper relation of literal to allegorical meanings. Love and desire draw together the literal and allegorical meanings that are split by mental cognizance. The Cloud of Unknowing admonishes heretics for breaking the “cup” after they have drunk from it, stating that men ought to “kiss” the cup, for there is wine within. In this chapter I will examine the way the Cloud presents the relationship of the literal and allegorical levels, especially how it maintains the literal, rather than transcending it, in attaining a connection with the divine.

3.2 Language and Unsaying This section looks at the Cloud’s complicated understanding of its own medium: language. While the Cloud adopts an apophatic denial of language’s ability to conceive of or express the divine, at the same time it revels in its own linguistic status. Most apophatic texts tend to “minimalize” their use of figurative language by employing “clear” and usually Latinate prose.144 In fact, there was even debate whether God himself could really “speak” to mystics in their own vernacular tongues, such was the hegemony that Latin held over the medieval

144 Of course, all language is inherently figurative, but “apophatic” prose is traditionally as free of obvious images and metaphors as possible. Again, see Rosemary Lees’s The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1983.

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religious world (Beckwith 36). The Cloud, in contrast, speaks as much of the body, carnal desire, and bridal metaphors of union as my cataphatic devotional texts, discussed in my earlier chapters.145 Thus while the Cloud presents itself as an apophatic text, the distinction between “negative” and “positive” theology is not entirely helpful.

The Cloud’s anxieties about language are apparent from its opening lines, where the author warns: “fleschely janglers, opyn preisers and blamers of hemself or of any other, tithing tellers, rouners and tutilers of tales, and all maner of pinchers, kept I never that thei sawe this book” (22). The Cloud highlights its own apprehension around the misuse of speech by specifically prohibiting babblers, flatterers, blamers, news-mongers, gossips, whisperers of tales, and whiners from even reading the text, as if its words could be tainted by something of its reader’s linguistic “sins.” The author criticizes along lines of quality and quantity: “babblers” misuse speech by saying many words when few would do, and flatterers, blamers, etc., use speech deceptively or antagonistically to the detriment of others. In these cases, the readers’ “errour” (22) involves an overabundance of speech, speech that is deceptive, or speech used angrily or uncharitably against another. In all cases, however, the speech does not fit the reality that it ought to describe. Behind this criticism is the belief that language ought to represent reality accurately, but that it can also be used to warp, distort, or misrepresent reality.

As I discussed at length in Chapter Two,146 medieval thinkers saw language as “fallen,” and even a contributor to the Fall itself. In The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature, Eric Jager argues that the medieval Christian distrust of rhetoric stemmed from patristic interpretations of the Fall: Eloquence had played a key role in the temptation leading to the Fall. Eve had been seduced by the Serpent’s crafty words, and she in turn…had imitated her tempter by similarly seducing Adam with some persuasive words…By allegorizing the fig leaves as emblems of the tendency of fallen humans to “cover” their faults with words, as

145 René Tixier points out that the Cloud is the inheritor of both Pseudo-Dionysian negative theology and Victorine and Cistercian bridal mysticism ("Good Gamesumli Pley" 236-44). 146 Starting on p. 78.

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Adam and Eve did in offering excuses to God after their sin, medieval culture extended the Fall even farther as a paradigm for rhetorical artifice. As such, the Fall posed a set of theoretical problems for the whole art of rhetoric inherited from Classical (“pagan”) culture (Jager 4).

Language was somehow paradoxically the cause of the Fall and its result: after the Fall, “meaning” was no longer received directly from God, but had to be cloaked in figures and allegory. Some medieval theologians believed that prelapsarian humans experienced direct, unmediated access to knowledge of God. For example, Augustine, in his commentary, De Genesi contra Manichaeos, shows God speaking directly to Adam’s soul, without language (Jager 53).147 Thus, for Augustine, the Fall became “the genesis of scriptural hermeneutics itself, having made necessary a written supplement to God’s original spoken word, as well as the veiling of God’s truth in scriptural allegory” (3). The Cloud of Unknowing also partakes of this tradition, presenting not only language but also exegesis as fallen and problematic, as we will see in more detail in the next section on the Cloud’s “bodily” versus “ghostly” meanings.

Thus, in a prelapsarian world, meaning would be grasped directly without linguistic abstraction. Language is a necessary evil for postlapsarian humanity, and though it ought to represent reality accurately, it becomes a tool of deception and the veiling of—rather than the explication of—the truth. There is therefore a context of medieval suspicion of language prior to the introduction of the sins of babblers, etc. in the Cloud. But why should readers’ linguistic “errours” prohibit them from reading the Cloud? Speaking and reading are related tasks, because the medieval text would often have been read aloud, and because of speaking and reading’s mutual basis in the body. Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum (OO 637-9) opens with similar prohibitions on gossip, idle chatter, etc., but the criticism is that this draws anchoresses’ attention from their divine spouse, Christ, and can lead to acts of lust with

147 Augustine later revised his theory to indicate that the Fall did not precipitate humanity into corporeal language, but it merely deprived them of the “inner word” required to perfectly comprehend external signs (54).

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earthly partners. In this and other medieval texts,148 the inappropriate use of language becomes associated with sexuality and the body. Language is not only fallen, but carnal.

Medieval thinkers related language to the body and carnality for a number of reasons. In Word Outward: Medieval Perspectives on the Entry into Language, Corey Marvin states: “to the question where is language? the Middle Ages would have answered, in part, along the lips, the tongue, the throat, and in the vocal apparatus and diaphragm” (xvii). Language is produced and therefore tainted by the body. Sin was also thought to have a physical taint on the flesh, which is why metaphors of “washing” were so apt in the Judeo-Christian tradition.149 Anything produced out of this sinful flesh would share its stain, which also explains the medieval rhetoric surrounding the purity of the Virgin Mary.150

For Christ to be pure, he had to come from a pure vessel. Similarly, for language to be pure, it must be produced by a pure vessel. Language that discusses divine things ought to be especially protected. In fact, this is part of the reason why the Fall propagated language in the first place: because humanity disrespected God’s prohibition of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, knowledge—especially knowledge of God—had to be veiled through language and specifically figurative language. God would only instil the grace of understanding on those who were worthy.

Second, as Geoffrey Harpham puts it, “language is meaning with a ‘body,’ and shares in the carnality of the material world…there is a double fall of language, into abstraction and into the body” (Harpham 11). Language itself is a “body” that houses the “spirit” of meaning.

148 See, for example, Ziolkowski, Jan. Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth- Century Intellectual. Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1985.

149 In the Jewish Bible, mostly in connection with the development of the Mosaic covenant, washing was sacramental and spiritual as well as physical (Ryken et al. 927).

150 The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was made doctrine in the 19th Century, but was heavily debated by medieval thinkers before then. Foremost among these was John Duns Scotus’ theory (see Ordinatio III, Distinction 3, Questio 1), which was eventually quoted in the Papal Bull that declared the Immaculate Conception to be dogma, Ineffabilis Deus (1854). Also see Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and The Cult of the Virgin Mary. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson: 1976.

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Misuses of language are specifically female sins because they stem from Eve’s misuse of language to deceive Adam, and because both women and language were considered “bodily” compared to the “spirituality” of men and meaning. As Eric Jager suggests, “with its femme fatale and phallic Serpent, the Fall as a rhetorical scenario raised especially troublesome questions about eloquence and gender, about the feminine allure of masculine thrust of the tempter’s voice in general” (Jager 4). We can see the influence of the connection of language and embodiment on the Cloud, as the author calls babblers “fleschely janglers” (22). A.C Spearing points out that in the Cloud all human language, including spoken language, is contaminated by its bodily origin, and he articulates this in the wonderfully grotesque image of the tongue producing speech “flopping about like a large fish” (Spearing 78). The Cloud states: Beware that thou conceyve not bodely that that is mente goostly, thof al it be spokyn in bodely wordes…For thof al that a thing be never so goostly in itself, nevertheles yit yif it schal be spoken of, sithen it so is that speche is a bodely werk wrought with the tonge, the whiche is an instrument of the body, it behoveth alweis (98) be spoken in bodely wordes (99).

All language is bodily because it is formed from the body, but English even more so than the more spiritual and sacred Latin. As Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson point out in their Introduction to The Vulgar Tongue, the vernacular is associated with “the vulgar, the provincial, the rustic, the rudimentary, the natural, or the carnal…with a social underclass, or with women” (ix). In particular, fourteenth-century English dubs the vernacular the “vulgar,” “lewd,” or “fleshly” tongue (ix). A. C. Spearing suggests that the Cloud author writes in English and not Latin because the earthiness of the English makes it more obvious that language is unfit to address “God’s naked being”—to use the Cloud’s own image (79). And Nicholas Watson argues “most of the Cloud is a self-deconstructing attempt to undo the carnality of the language in which it is written” (Watson, "Middle English Mystics" 552).

But if the Cloud wants us to move beyond language and the body, it begins ironically “in the name of the Fader and of the Sone and of the Holy Goost” (21).151 This is more than simply

151 Emphasis mine.

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an invocation to prayer, or a call to preaching (in the resurrected Christ’s own words in Matthew 28:19). The Cloud begins with the names of the Trinity (also called the Trinitarian invocation), even though it stipulates that God is beyond names, and that no names serve to capture his essence. This opening indicates that “names” or language will be a central focus of the text. More than this, the Cloud’s depiction of God’s call to contemplation occurs in language, as it states: “Oure Lorde hath of His grete mercy clepid thee and ledde thee unto Him bi the desire of thin herte” (29).152 God calls you: desire operates through language. Or perhaps, as with Whiterig, language itself is the cause of the desire that causes one to seek God. There is a deliberate symmetry here: the text opens with humanity calling on the name of God, and God will reciprocate by calling humanity back to him. Indeed, this mimics the celestial movement of the soul in Neoplatonism, where the soul is envisaged as an emanation from and then a return to God (Sells 15). Also, in the above lines, the alliteration of “tithing tellers” and “tutilers of tales,” as well as the assonance of “rouners and tutilers,” and “janglers” and “blamers,” belies the sense that the author desires to move beyond language at its purely aesthetic level. In fact, the entire text is written with this alliterative and melodic inflection,153 which is so pronounced that it has led some scholars to ascertain that the Cloud may have been composed orally, or for oral recitation (Taylor “Paradox” 34).

Yet the Cloud is still aware of the problem of language, since speech—particularly rhetorical speech—is slippery and dangerous, and so the Cloud-author recommends a “minimalist” approach to language: And yif thee list have this entent lappid and foulden in o worde, for thou schuldest have betir holde therapon, take thee bot a litil worde of o silable; for so it is betir then of two, for ever the schorter it is, the betir it acordeth with the werk of the spirite (37). And soche a worde is this worde God or this worde love. Cheese thee whether thou wilt, or another as thee list: whiche that thee liketh best of o silable. And fasten this worde to thin herte, so that it never go thens for thing that bifalleth (38).

152 Emphasis mine.

153 Two textbooks used to educate people into the medieval trivium were Donatus’ Ars minor and Prician’s Institutiones grammaticae, which placed an emphasis on pronunciation and rhythm second only to the alphabet. Grammar, syntax, etc., emerged out of the musical affects of pronunciation and rhythm (Harpham 11).

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This passage implies that shorter words are better because they “acordeth” better with the “werk of the spirite.” A shorter word functions like a Sanskrit mantra, a small utterance of sound that is repeated “in order to fix the mind” (Szász 219).154 By the repetition of breathing and sound, the mind attempts to bridge the gap between signifier and signified, and to focus on love itself, rather than the word love (219).

Perhaps shorter words also occupy less temporal space when uttered: the extension of human existence through time is another sign of the Fall. For example, in his Confessiones, Augustine compares human and divine speech: But how didst thou speak? Was it in the same way that the voice came out of a cloud, saying: This is my beloved Son?155 As for that voice, it was uttered, and passed away, had a beginning and ending; the syllables made a sound, and so passed over, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last came after the rest, and silence after the last (221)…But this latter compared these words thus sounding within a proportion of time, with that eternal Word of thine, which is in the silence, and it said: This Word is far another from that, a very different Word; these words are far beneath me, nay, they are not at all, because they flee and pass away; but the Word of God is far above me and abides forever (223).156

In the above passage, Augustine juxtaposes the language of humanity and divinity in order to contrast their beings: existence and speech are highly caught up with one another. Human language, like human existence, is subject to time: it comes into being, exists, and then passes away. In contrast, the divine Logos “abides forever.” Through the repetition of one small

154 Emphasis mine.

155 Here, the voice out of the cloud refers to the baptism of Christ in the Gospel of Mark (1:9-11). This cloud is one of many sources for the name of The Cloud of Unknowing, also including the pillar of cloud that leads the Israelites in the desert (Exodus 13:21), and the dense cloud in which God appears to Moses so the Israelites can hear him speaking (Exodus 19:9). It is this latter cloud which is referenced in pseudo-Dionysius’ De Mystica Theologia and then Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor and which forms the most direct allusion for the title (Clark 85). As Christiana Whitehead suggests, the titular image is opaque, blinding, shapeless, and formless, and therefore signals a different hermeneutic to that of a more “traditional” kind of allegorical reading (203). 156 “Sed quomodo dixisti? Numquid illo modo, quo facta est vox de nube dicens: Hic est filius meus dilectus? Illa enim vox acta atque transacta est, coepta et finita. Sonuerunt syllabae atque transierunt, secunda post primam, teria post secundam atque inde ex ordine, donec ultima post ceteras silentiumque post (220) ultimam…At illa comparavit haec verba temporaliter sonantia cum aeterno in silentio verbo tuo et dixit: Aliud est longe, longe aliud est. Haec longe infra me sunt nec sunt, quia fugiunt et praetereunt: verbum autem dei mei supra me manet in aeternum” (222).

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word, human language attempts to mimic or participate in the eternality of the divine Word. In Lacanian psychology, this desire is called repetition, or later, insistence: “an internalized social structure which the subject repeatedly and compulsively reenacts” which manifests “the unconscious in every subject” (Evans 164). In his later theories, Lacan associates insistence with jouissance, an “excess of enjoyment which returns again and again to transgress the limits of the pleasure principle and seek death” (164).

Similarly, the Cloud-author makes a distinction between the “word” and the “werk of the spirite” that its repetition instigates. There is a tension between signs and the principles or ideas they represent, and between ritual actions and the grace or transcendence that is conveyed through their performance. This same tension is inherent in medieval theories of the sacraments. For example, Thomas Aquinas indicates a distinction between three acts inherent in the major sacraments: the sacramentum tantum, the material sign of the sacrament, the res tantum, the theological and sacramental reality that occurs, and finally, the res et sacramentum, which is both the physical reality of the sacramentum tantum, and, simultaneously, the sign of another reality, the res tantum. For example, in Baptism, the sacramentum tantum is the water applied with the words spoken by the priest. The res tantum is the justification of the sinner. The res et sacramentum is the physical washing with water that effects the spiritual washing of original sin: “thus, it is both a reality and a sign” (Dulles 18).

This third aspect, the res et sacramentum, bridges the world of signs and meanings. Similarly, the Cloud’s brief prayers do not operate as a large, complex, and symbolic network of meanings overlaid on the “real” that can potentially lead the speaker astray. The lengthier the prayer, the more focused it becomes on its own rhetoric, and the further it devolves from the direct experience of God himself. The Cloud instead holds that “the poetic function operates at the expense of the referential function by accentuating the message, the language itself, rather than the extralinguistic reality that language is modelled on” (Harpham 5). This “minimization” of prayer into one word seems to go along with the apophatic strain of this text. As the Cloud argues for a minimization of language, its form mimics its content: within the word “lappid,” in the quotation above, for example, multiplicities of meaning are

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condensed. In other words, I argue that the Cloud employs a rhetoric of concentrated diction—certain key words in the text resonate with multiple layers of meaning. Even a single word can convey theological arguments that support the Cloud-author’s claims.

For example, the reader is asked to “have this entent lappid and foulden in o worde” so that he or she can have a better “holde” upon the truth. This monosyllabic utterance is an “embodiment of an atom of present will, a temporal moment of ‘nakid entente’” (Johnson, “Feeling Time, Will, and Words” 351). But the Cloud complicates the relationship between kernel and shell, or “entent” and “word,” through its choice of diction. In Middle English, “folden” can mean to bend, turn, or twist; to enclose or surround; to wrap or cover; to embrace or clasp; to give way or grow weak; to defeat or kill; and to gather animals together in a pen (MED “folden, v.2”). As with the traditional image of the kernel and the shell (Akbari 16-7), here, meaning and language are related in terms of interiority and exteriority: meaning is enfolded, wrapped, or covered by language. However, the range of meanings presented through the verb “folden” add a distinct nuance to this phrase. In the first sense of “folden,” meaning is seemingly bent or compressed into language, implying both a necessary force, and an almost-absence of space within language to accommodate meaning. In another sense, language “embraces” meaning, the way a lover might clasp his beloved, again associating language with the carnal, and the production of meaning with the sexual. Meaning can also be gathered into the word the way animals are led into the pen; thus it is domesticated by language, fit to our purposes, constrained from what it was. But most strikingly, meaning is conquered, defeated, or even killed by the word. It is restrained, subdued, bent, twisted, covered, and coerced into place, and thus there is a conceptual violence that occurs to meaning as it undergoes embodiment in language.

In Middle English, “lappen” also has many similar meanings: to wrap, enfold, enclose; to encase in or with a material, to envelop in a substance, such as the body in or with the skin; to clothe or swaddle; to place in a leaden coffin; to clasp, embrace, fondle, caress, kiss; to involve, encompass, beset, become involved in; and to grasp with the mind, perceive, invent, create, or verbalize (MED “lappen, v.”). Again, as with “folden,” “lappen” indicates a relationship of enclosure, with language encasing meaning. Secondarily, meaning becomes

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material, taking physical form in language the way the spirit becomes manifest through the body. Meaning is also potentially “dressed up” by language, the way that clothing decorates a body.

This connotation could be positive (language is like a beautiful garment) or negative (a garment could be a sign of material excess at the expense of more metaphysical wealth), but, either way, it articulates language as aesthetic, as an external covering, in line with the primary meaning. Clothing, like language, is a result of the Fall, and covers up the shame of the naked body. This parallels the way that postlapsarian language “cloaks” meaning: it makes it obscure at the same time that it makes it present. The comparison of language to clothing departs from the more standard metaphor of depicting the relationship of language to meaning as body to soul: in this case meaning itself becomes the body that is covered by the clothing of language. This alters the figurative range of meaning. In Judaeo-Christian concepts of the sacred, something is covered because it is sacred (e.g. the veil in the Temple covering the Holy of Holies in Exodus 26:33, the veil over Moses’ shining face in Exodus 34:35) or because it is shameful (the naked Noah covered by his sons Shem and Japheth in Genesis 9:22-23, and God making clothing for Adam and Eve to hide their shame in the Garden in Genesis 3:21). Language becomes a veil cloaking the mysteries of God, so that the “obdurate sinner” is blinded to the truth (Barasch 86). Both meanings will become important here, as I will discuss below.

The next resonance of “lappen,” to embrace, fondle, or kiss, makes the connection between meaning and language like that of two lovers in a sexual embrace, much as our previous sources have imagined the way knowing and loving join two figures together. This connection is also possible here because of the final meanings of “lappen,” which imply grasping with the mind or coming to know. Thus, in this case, language allows meaning to be grasped, or in line with the definition, it even invents or creates meaning, in a sort of Neoplatonic emanation. Ephemeral meaning becomes material in language; emanating out from the divine unity, it takes physical form. The penultimate resonances of “lappen” above also imply that meaning is not untainted by the container it takes, because it becomes involved in the word that embodies it. This has affective resonances when we consider it in

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light of the romantic and erotic connotations of the previous definitions. However, the range of implied meanings here also suggests a more aggressive image: being bound, constricted, wrapped tightly with fabric, even wrapped in a death shroud. In On Grammatology, Jacques Derrida theorizes that naming, and thus signification itself, implies such a violent (112). As Jack Marsh puts it: “The separation, opacity and exteriority—in a word, space—writing introduces to speech as the proximate and present logos, is understood by tradition as a violence” (Marsh 272).

More than just romantic and erotic, then, in this simple phrase there is a dom/sub-like (dominant/submissive) relationship between meaning and language, in which language holds meaning down in place, prohibits its movement, and limits its range of possibilities. Similarly, bondage practice is thought to “restrict movement” and work “as a focus” for the submissive’s body and energy (Moser 25). Rather than portraying the relationship of meaning to language as the usual kernel to shell, the range of possibilities of the words “folden” and “lappen” present language and meaning interacting as two playful lovers, one pinned into place by the other. Similarly, in Prose Four of Alan of Lille’s De Planctu Naturae, Nature likens sexual relations to grammatical constructions. In the same way that an active verb submits an object to a subject, so too must there be “active” and “passive” sexual partners (133). Nature also implicitly compares the act of writing with a pen and parchment to her own union of matter and form with a hammer and anvil (146). The act of writing parallels the way that form shapes matter: the pen embeds language into the blank space of the animal skin. This is also compared to the active male and passive female sexual partner in medieval depictions of conception. Here, the active partner is language, who creates or shapes meaning by defining it, limiting it, pressing it down into existence. For the Cloud, the medieval creation of meaning exhibits similar tendencies to BDSM: it is hierarchized, it involves the forceful constriction of one’s body to another’s will, which unites both subjects into a full being. Most of all, BDSM practice reveals another context in which we can understand the connection between deferral of satisfaction and denial or apophasis in the transcendence of the self.

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Considering the final resonances of “lappen” in this context, the idea of binding or enshrouding has similarities to the specific BDSM practice of mummification, in which one or more partners are completely enshrouded with plastic or fabric, which induces a state of helplessness and sensory deprivation. The bound partner is completely dependent upon the will of his or her “dom.” More than just restricting movement, the “sub” also faces the potential threat of suffocation since his or her body is so constricted. Often the “sub” is blindfolded as well, signalling a complete mastery over the primary sense of sight (Aggrawal 148).157 Like bondage, blindfolding serves a number of functions. In On the Safe Edge, Trevor Jacques explains that “when the head is ‘cut off’ from the outside world with a hood, the bottom can feel that the head is detached from the body, as though floating on its own, close to the body. Some people like to free their minds of input from the eyes and ears so that they can concentrate on other physical stimuli” (Jacques 202). In Between the Body and the Flesh, Lynda Hart argues that blindfolding, and other sight deprivation techniques, cut off “the most debilitating of our senses that produces self-conciousness” (Hart 117). Similarly, the multiplicity of meaning is bound by language, focused such that it supposedly loses its resonances and signifies univalently. And yet, the very language that supposedly conveys this message of univalence simultaneously subverts its own articulation of the same. The “sub,” in this case, meaning, subverts the supposed restrictions of the “dom” (language), defiantly resonating otherwise.

Finally, both words also evoke the finality of death—“folden” to wrap in a shroud, and “lappen” to place in a coffin—where meaning is to the word what the body is to the death shroud or coffin. In The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, Geoffrey Harpham argues that in Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, and subsequently, much early monastic writing, writing is considered a deformation: “it is secondary, belated, contaminatory, parodic, dead” and that the “corporeal form of writing anchors it to the world of death” (6). In the case of the Cloud, the relation is not one of “corporeal” writing to “spiritual” speech, but corporeal

157 This source has a tendency to pathologize non-heteronormative sexual practices, though it still provides a useful series of definitions. It is also useful for understanding how such practices might be viewed from without by dominant societal structures (psychology, forensics, the law).

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language to spiritual meaning. The parallel still holds: language, in its carnality, delimits and confines meaning, and participates in the “world of death.” For meaning to be accessible to humanity, it must partake of our mortal existence, just as God did in becoming man. However, like Christ, this meaning transcends the parameters of its coffin: it defies the restrictions imposed by language and shimmers multivalently.

Again, the speaker states that one ought to have this “entent lappid and foulden in o worde” so that he or she can have a better “holde” upon the intention. The noun “hold” in Middle English can mean a grasp or grip; a possession; control, rule; a property: a feudal holding, kingdom, the heavenly kingdom, a fortified town or city, a stronghold or a castle; an imprisonment, confinement, captivity; a restraint; support, assistance, or help (MED “hold, n.2”). A “holde” implies a physical grasp on desire or “entent,” and the reader must compress their meaning or desire into one word in order to be able to grasp it tangibly. More than this, it must be concentrated and forcibly confined into a single word. Restricting or putting a “holde” on intention or desire allows that desire to be channelled unilaterally toward God.

Then the author asks the reader to “fasten this worde to thin herte.” Here we see the physicality of the word, that it is like a talisman or accessory, but also that it is fastened to the heart, linked to the body, or perhaps even made continuous with the body. Surely these are the resonances the author would strive to avoid, but he does not. Even in his choice of two words instead of one when he says “lappid and foulden in o worde,” he belies his own allegiance to the simplicity and unity of meaning. His creative use of diction is allowing language to create meaning, allowing each word to exceed its own paradigmatic boundaries and spill over into other meanings. In using English over Latin, in using “earthy” and domestic terms and images rather than abstract and philosophical terminology, he blurs the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between the spiritual and the physical.

3.3 ‘Bodely’ and ‘Goostly’ As we have seen, the Cloud-author articulates the inevitable and inescapable carnality of all language (Whitehead, “Regarding the Ark” 202). However, according to Robert Grosseteste,

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in his commentary on the De Mystica Theologia, the goal of contemplation is to experience God directly, beyond all figuration. He states: We desire with the whole affection of the mind to be in the darkness beyond brightness, that is, in that state above intellect which is brighter than the intellectual, so that through an ecstasy of the mind in which the intellect does not see nor in any way know, we may be able to know God and to see him in a way beyond intellect…And we pray that we may be able to praise the One who is beyond being in a way that is beyond being, that is, God who is beyond every substance and every being, through the taking away of all existent things; as we see in artists, who make a likeness out of some inanimate matter: by sculpting and cutting they remove the outer, rougher parts of the material which hide and cover over, so that that pure image cannot be seen which naturally and potentially is within. And by the simple (33) removal of such encumbrances, without any adding on, the beauty of the image itself is manifested in its own visible comeliness, which up until then was lying hidden (35).158

If we transfer Grosseteste’s metaphor of the sculptor to that of the writer, by what mechanism do such negative theologians hope to convey this experience beyond language? The Cloud itself spends considerable time talking about the relationship of the “bodely” and the “goostly,”159 and articulates the distinctions between them in various ways. According to Marion Glasscoe, it is not that the Cloud suggests that bodily things cannot point to spiritual things, but that humanity too often conflates and confuses the two (English Medieval Mystics 178). J.A. Burrow articulates the point more forcefully in suggesting that in order to avoid confusion, the Cloud author employs markedly physical imagery deliberately (295), and that he strongly contrasts tenor and vehicle in order to keep them distinct: The two realms of the ‘bodily’ and the ‘ghostly’ have been joined by God; but that is no reason for confusing (or interfusing) them one with the other. Physical images are unavoidable in all human language; but we must constantly struggle to keep them distinct from the spiritual realities about which they enable us to speak. And that,

158 Toto mentis affectu exoptamus nos fieri in caligine superlucenti, id est statu superintellectuali, qui lucidior est quam intellectualis, ut per mentis excessum in quo intellectus non videt nec aliquo modo cognoscit, possimus Deum cognoscere et videre superintellectualiter, per remocionem videlicet intellectualis cognoicionis…Et precamur nos laudare posse supersubstancialem supersubstantialiter, id est Deum, qui excedit omnem substantiam et omne ens, per ablacionem omnium existencium; sicut est videre in artificibus qui aliquam fabricant similitudinem de qualibet inanimata materia, qui sculpendo et incidendo removent (32) exteriores partes materie grossiores, que occultant et cooperiunt ne videri possit illa pura ymago quae naturaliter et potencialiter est interius; et per solam talium offendiculorum remociunem sine alio additamento manifestatur in propria specie ipsius ymaginis pulchritudo, que prius latebat in occulto (34).

159 The common way of articulating the literal and the allegorical in fourteenth-century English.

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paradoxically, means keeping them physical. It is dangerous to attempt to 'spiritualize' them (296).

In contrast, as Emile Mâle states in The Gothic Image: in each being is hidden a divine thought; the world is a book written by the hand of God in which every creature is a word charged with meaning…All being holds in its depths the reflection of the sacrifice of Christ, the image of the Church, and of the virtues and vices. The material and the spiritual worlds are one (29).

God has joined the “bodily” and the “ghostly,” and indeed, the two can be interfused, pace Burrow. The Cloud’s understanding of the relationship between bodily speech and ghostly meanings, and even between bodily and ghostly meanings, is much more nuanced, as I will show.

The Cloud-author warns its readers not to confuse the bodily and ghostly: And therfore beware that thou conceyve not bodely that that is mente goostly, thof al it be spokyn in bodely wordes, as ben thees: up or doun, in or oute, behinde, or before, on o side or on other. For thof al that a thing be never so goostly in itself, nevertheles yit yif it schal be spoken of, sithen it so is that speche is a bodely werk wrought with the tonge, the whiche is an instrument of the body, it behoveth alweis (89) be spoken in bodely wordes. Bot what therof? Schal it therfore be taken and conceyvid bodely? Nay, it bot goostly (90).

The author articulates a distinction: though something is spoken “in bodely wordes,” it ought to be conceived “goostly.” All speech is inherently bodily because it is “wrought with the tonge.” The Middle English verb “werken” can, among many things, mean to act; exercise military might; engage in sexual relations; perform physical labour; practice an art, work magic, exercise creative power, bring into existence; produce by craftsmanship, sew, weave, paint, embroider, sculpt, etc.; compose a written work, utter; cook, concoct, mix up; perform physical operations on a material or substance so as to change it in composition; to reduce, smelt, refine, forge, hammer, beat, alloy, manipulate, or transform (MED “werken, v.”). So speech is “wrought” or performed by the tongue, with the possible senses of engaging in sex, physically toiling, performing magic, weaving, concocting, refining, transmuting, and even quite literally composing or uttering. These alternate meanings provide a range of possibilities for linguistic production. The image of the tongue physically toiling in the mouth (like Spearing’s flopping fish) underlines the physicality of the process. Weaving and

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concocting imply deceit, like the snake in the Garden of Eden, or Penelope deceiving her suitors. But transmuting and the other metallurgic references imply an alchemical process, in which base things are turned to spiritual things, the way God spoke creation into existence. Spiritual things are mediated through language into the physical, or vice versa.

In another example, the Cloud-author explains: The devil is a spirit, and of his owne kynde he hath no body more then hath an aungele. Bot yit nevertheles, what tyme that he or an aungele schal take any bodi by leve of God to maak any mynistracion to any man in this liif: al after the werk is that he schal mynistre, therafter in licnes is the qualité of his body in som party. Ensaumple of this we have in Holy Writte. As ofte as any aungele was sente in body in the Olde Testament and in the Newe also, evermore it was schewed, outher by his name or by sum instrument or qualité of his body, what his mater or his message was in spirit. On the same maner it fareth of the feende, for when he apereth in body, he fygureth in som qualité of his body what his servauntes ben in spirit (83).

As this example shows, bodily and spiritual realities are absolutely connected for the Cloud- author, and the former can be interpreted to understand the latter. Bodily realities do not merely symbolize the spiritual, in some sense they are the spiritual. In this example, depending on the type of “werk” that the angel performs, his “name” or the “qualité” of his body will “shew” his “mater” or “message.” Among divine things at least, appearances do reflect reality, the way fallen human language does not. The body or the name are the spirit or the message. This is the difference between simile and metaphor. It is not that bodily realities are like spiritual realities, it is that they are the spiritual realities.

The author also states: And God forbede that I schuld departe that God hath couplid, the body and the spirit; for God wil be servid with body and with soule, bothe togeders, as seemly is, and rewarde man his mede in blis bothe in body and in soule (75).

Body and spirit are coupled together. “Couplen” means to unite in marriage; to have sexual intercourse with; to unite; to match (two knights) for combat; to leash or to yoke two animals together; to link, join, fasten, connect, or conjoin (MED "couplen, v."). Of course, the above passage refers to the long-standing medieval tradition of associating God’s union of Adam

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and Eve in particular (and the marriage of man and woman in general)160 with the idea that the body and soul have been united by God and must not be rent asunder: in other words, it is not for humans to attempt to divide where the body ends and the soul begins, more literally to commit murder, or to commit heresies like Gnosticism in which one aspect of the Godhead is denied and debased. Of course, this passage participates in the tradition of associating the man with the reason or soul, and the woman with the body or flesh (Lochrie, “The Language of Transgression” 116).161

In using the word “couplid,” the relationship of the body and soul is depicted as a series of binary unions: a marital union between man and wife, a sexual union between two lovers, two knights struggling in combat, two beasts of burden yoked together for manual labour, or one object lashed to another. The images of sexual union and marriage imply that the body and spirit are one,162 and that the connection between them is perpetuated by desire. Two knights struggling in combat bring to mind the medieval tradition of body vs. soul allegories,163 in which the two figures contend with each other over virtue and vice, as well as Jacob wrestling with the Angel of the Lord (Genesis 32:22-32).164 The third and fourth unions, two beasts of burden and imagery of bondage in general, imply that the body and soul are lashed together for earthly labour. Of course, in the Cloud, the relationship between the body and soul is some combination of all of the meanings evoked here.

160 Of whom Christ says in Mark 10:9 “quod ergo Deus iunxit homo non separet.”

161 See also Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1987.

162 “Quam ob rem relinquet homo patrem suum, et matrem, et adhærebit uxori suæ: et erunt duo in carne una” (Genesis 2:24)

163 See, for example, Prudentius’ Pyschomachia, or Contra Orationem Symmachi, in Prudentius. Vol. 1. Trans. H. J. Thomson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. 344-401, and Prudentius. Vol. 2. Trans. H. J. Thomson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. 2-97.

164 It would be interesting to compare Aelred's usage of this same quotation in his De Institutione and De Iesu puero, in the context of each author's construction of a contemplative devotion.

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In a later passage, however, the author tries to maintain a distinction between “bodely” and “goostly” meanings, stating: And yif thou sey ought touching the assencion of oure Lorde, for that was done bodely and for a bodely bemenyng as wel as for a goostly, for bothe He assendid verrey God and verrey Man, to this wil I answere thee, that He had ben deed, and was clad with undeedlines, and so schul we be at the Day of Dome. And than we schul be maad so sotyl in body and in soule togeders, that we schul be than as swiftely where us liste bodely, as we ben now in oure thoughte goostly; whether it be up or doune, on o syde or on other, bihinde or before. Alle I hope schal than be iliche good, as clerkes seyne. Bot now thou mayst not come to heven not bodely, bot goostly. And yit it schal be so goostly that it schal not be on bodely maner—nowther upwardes ne donwardes, ne on o side ne on other, behynde ne before (87).

Multiple scholars have pointed to this passage when arguing for the Cloud’s absolute divide between the body and the spirit (Burrow 285, Taylor “Paradox” 36, etc.). This passage does concede that Christ ascended to heaven in body and spirit; we, however, can only ascend to heaven in spirit for the present time. The Cloud author has a tendency toward criticizing overly literal interpretations of spiritual truths, and he wants to prevent understandings that heaven is “upwardes ne downwardes” in any sense. But here, “bodely” seems to refer more to movement in space and not association with the flesh.

More than this, however, the Cloud undermines the idea that the body and spirit can be separated at all. In this passage, we could interpret humanity’s actual spiritual ascent to heaven in death as standing in for our intellectual comprehension of heavenly things in this lifetime, in this example, possible only through the spirit. As the author states, “now thou mayst not come to heven not bodely, bot goostly.” The idea of “coming” to heaven in this lifetime refers to an intellectual grasping of divine things, or an experience of transcendence, but it is articulated in terms of bodily movement. Thus, even in distinguishing the body and spirit, the author uses them as vehicles for one another. The first account, a literal rendering of the separation of body and spirit in death is really only a vehicle for the tenor of the spiritual grasping of divine things in life. By linking the two ideas in a literal/allegorical framework, the author undermines his seeming argument that the “body” and “spirit” or the literal and allegorical can be separated.

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As Robert Pasnau points out in his Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, it was a commonplace of later medieval philosophy that cognition was “brought about through a likeness of the cognized object within the one cognizing” (89). We can only comprehend the spiritual and intellectual because we are in part spiritual and intellectual. But if we follow this logic, to understand Christ we must understand him in the spirit and in the flesh, since the author will not separate what God has joined together. And though now we ascend to heaven only in the spirit, at the eschaton we shall be body and spirit again, united with God in the body of Christ.

The Cloud’s diction here is also subtly undermining: one speaks “touching” the ascension. In Middle English, “touchen” can mean to make physical contact with, to have sexual contact with, or to mention or describe (MED “touchen, v.”). Again, the carnality of language is beautifully encapsulated in one word. In using a less common meaning of “touchen”—to mention or describe—the author places the more obvious meanings in the paradigmatic range of the sentence: to touch the Resurrection. But, like the “noli me tangere” experience of Mary Magdalene in my first chapter,165 the desired object of touch is placed just out of reach. In the future, humanity can comprehend Christ physically and spiritually, but for now they cannot touch him but reach him only in spirit. In some sense, however, to talk about is to touch, as I have illustrated in my discussion of the medieval conception of language above. Given that Christ is the Logos, the divine Word made manifest, his Incarnation reveals the connection between flesh and Word.

Christ’s connection of body and soul is described in terms of clothing: Christ is “clad with undeedlines.” “Clad” is from the Middle English “clothen” which means to cover, wrap, conceal, bind, adorn, disguise, transform, and to endow, assume, or invest one’s self with the authority (e.g. of Christ), etc (MED “clothen, v.”). In the Gospel of John, Christ says, “I am the Resurrection” (11:25).166 But, to be “clad” with immortality is quite a different statement.

165 See pp. 49-56.

166 Emphasis mine.

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The relationship of Christ to his immortality in the Cloud is closer to that of the kernel to the shell. Christ is dressed in immortality, wrapped, covered, concealed, disguised. Christ’s adoption of the regalia of immortality mimics the performative power invested in royal regalia, which both marks the adoption of power, and simultaneously causes it (Barr 81). And yet, this description also marks that there is something of Christ that is beyond access, which is fitting with the “noli me tangere” scene. In fact, in his Sentences, Peter Lombard opens his discussion on the Incarnation with exactly such an image: using the words of John the Baptist, he states that he is unfit to untie Christ’s sandal, an image he explains describes the complex relationship of Christ’s divinity and humanity, of his body and soul (8).167

It is possible that the author is also referencing the term “clod,” which is a clump of dirt—the physical origin of humanity. To “clodden” is to coagulate or clot, to break up clumps of earth, or to cover with earth (MED “clodden, v.”). Of course, these images invert the intended image of Christ’s immortality. A corpse is covered with dirt in death and becomes dirt, but Christ and only Christ becomes covered in immortality, and thus becomes immortal. This is emblematic of the Cloud as a whole: rather than employing standard images of revelation (e.g. seeing the truth), it abounds in paradoxical images of covering, clouding, and hiding in order to truly understand.

In another example, the Cloud-author relates the tale of Martin of Tours. Prior to this passage, the Cloud warns that St. Martin and St. Stephen looked upward at Christ for the sake of their visions, but that does not mean that the “werke of oure spirit” is upward or downward or in any other spatial direction (85). It states: For that that thei sey of Seynte Martyn and of Seinte Steven, thof al thei sie soche thinges with theire bodely ighen, it was schewyd bot in myracle and in certefiing of thing that was goostly. For wite thei ryght wel that Seynte Martyn mantel come never on Crystes owne body substancyaly, for no nede that He had therto to kepe him fro colde; bot by miracle and in licnes for alle us that ben abel to be savid, that ben onyd to the body of Criste goostly. And whoso clotheth a pore man and doth any other good deed for Goddes love, bodily or goostly, to any that hath need, sekir be thei thei do it

167 Sentences Book 3: On the Incarnation of the Word, Distinction 3, Chapter 2.

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unto Criste goostly, and thei schul be rewardid as substancyaly therfore as thei had done it to Cristes owne body (85).

Sulpicius Severus’ hagiography of Saint Martin of Tours relates the tale of how the Roman soldier Martin cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar at the city gates. That night, Martin dreamt that the other half of his cloak was worn by Christ, who told the angels that Martin had clothed him in it (129-160). The Cloud omits such details, assuming that its audience would know them well. Instead, the Cloud relates that though Martin and Stephen saw these visions with their bodily eyes, they were actually showed to them by “goostly” miracle. Martin’s cloak never touched Christ “substancyaly”168 since Christ does not require warmth, but by “miracle and in licnes.” The physical is contrasted not with the spiritual, but with likeness: the difference is between the actual and the appearance of the actual. This miracle is for all of us joined to the body of Christ “goostly,” so that if any of us perform works of charity to anyone, it is as if we have done them to Christ “goostly,” and we will be rewarded as if we had done them “to Cristes owne body.”

On closer look, this passage is much more complex than it appears. The modifiers “bodily” and “goostly” are used seemingly interchangeably—first one, then the other—so that it is hard to make clear distinctions between them. According to J.A. Burrow, this “zig-zag, to- and-fro dialectic between physical and spiritual may be observed in many places throughout The Cloud. It is one of the most characteristic movements of the author's thinking” (Burrow 291). Martin saw Christ in his cloak bodily, but it was really ghostly. His cloak did not touch Christ substantially but by miracle. For those joined to the body of Christ ghostly, the good they do bodily will be as if they had done it to Christ bodily. The body and spirit are connected here even at the same time as their connection is denied. This event was seen by Martin’s bodily eyes, but it was shown in “certefiing of thing that was goostly.” Likewise, Christ did not corporeally or “substancyaly” wear the cloak, but it was shown “in licnes.” In both instances the event is bodily but is shown to be “goostly.” The true spiritual nature of these phenomena must be added or proven after the fact, extraneously. The embodied event

168 In Middle English, this means: tangibly, corporeally, in essence, etc. (MED “substanstialli, adv.”).

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happens first, and as with biblical exegesis, the spiritual meaning is explicated from it. What Martin did to the beggar physically was shown in a vision to be applied spiritually to Christ. Of course, the events are simultaneous in God’s awareness of them, but for Martin the spiritual is shown later, removed in time and space. I believe that this is a representation of the Cloud’s understanding of exegesis: like the relation of physical cloak, seen physically but applied to Christ spiritually.

To add a further layer of complication, Martin divides his cloak in half: the beggar receives one half physically, and Christ the other half in “licnes.” This is like a medieval tally or chirograph, a dual copy of a charter or agreement, which was then split in half so that both members could have a copy. Across the two texts, “cirographum” was inscribed with the sign of the Cross, and the document would be split vertically across this word so that only a true copy of the document would properly match up with its pair (Bedos-Rezak 135). Martin’s cloak is like the medieval Charter of Christ, in this case, a physical manifestation of Christ’s words in the Gospel, “what you did to the least of my brothers, you did to me” (Matthew 25:50).169 The image of the cloak establishes a physical, tangible connection between Martin and Christ, and tropologically, between all people and Christ. Whatever a person physically does to another, is also done to Christ. The gesture also alludes to the motif of Christ as the seamless garment, adopted from the biblical tunic divided among the speaker’s enemies in Psalm 22:18, and fulfilled tropologically when the soldiers removed Christ’s tunic and cast lots over it in the Gospel of John (19:23-24). Because the garment was “seamless,” it refers allegorically to the perfect union of God and man, and body and spirit in Christ. And thus the garment itself represents a union of the physical and the spiritual.

In Martin’s experience, he physically divides his cloak for the beggar, and Christ later shows him how the event simultaneously occurred “spiritually.” In this way, all human events unfold physically and spiritually, and the physical covers the spiritual, like the cloak over the beggar. However, in covering the beggar, Martin paradoxically revealed the truth about the

169 “quamdiu fecistis uni ex his fratribus meis minimis, mihi fecistis.”

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relationship of the beggar and Christ, and physical and spiritual realities: by covering the physical deformity and poverty of the beggar, Martin was uncovering the truth of the beggar’s spiritual connection with Christ.

But the most important discussion of the relationship of “bodily” and “goostly” comes from a passage toward the end of the Cloud: Alle the revelacions that ever sawe any man here in bodely licnes in this liif, thei have goostly bemenynges. And I trowe that and thei unto whome thei were schewid, or we for whome thei were schewid, had ben so goostly, or couthe have conceyvid theire bemenynges goostly, that than thei had never ben schewed bodily. And therfore late us pike of the rough bark, and fede us of the swete kyrnel. Bot how? Not as thees heretikes done, the whiche ben wel licned to wode men havyng this custume, that ever whan thei have dronken of a faire cup, kast it to the walle and breke it.170 Thus schul not we do, yif we wil wel do. For we schul not so fede us of the frute that we schul dispise the tree; ne so drynke that we schul breke the cuppe when we have dronken. The tre and the cuppe I clepe this visible miracle, and alle semely bodely observaunces that is acordyng and not lettyng the werke of the spirite. The frute and the drync I clepe the goostly bemening of thees visible miracles, and of thees semely bodely observaunces, as is liftyng up of oure ighen and oure handes unto heven. Yif they be done by steryng of the spyrit, then ben thei wel done; and elles ben thei ypocrisie, and then ben thei fals. Yif thei ben trewe and contynen in hem goostly frute, whi schuld thei than be dispisid? For men wil kysse the cuppe, for wine is therin (86).

All “bodely” revelations have “goostly bemenynges” because we cannot conceive them otherwise, and therefore we must “pike of the rough bark, and fede us of the swete kyrnel.” This, however, should not be done as heretics do, who, “whan thei have dronken of a faire cup, kast it to the walle and breke it.” When we eat the fruit we should not despise the tree, when we drink from the cup we should not afterwards break it. The tree and the cup are the “visible miracle,” the fruit and the drink are the “goostly bemening.” Men ought to kiss the cup, for there is wine within. As J.A. Burrow explains: The metaphor of nutshell and kernel is a commonplace in exegetical tradition: the nutshell is the literal sense, the kernel the inner spiritual sense. But the author fears that he may be misunderstood. Nutshells, after all, have no value at all; they are simply broken and thrown away. To treat the physical world like that would be

170 Again, it would be interesting to compare this imagery with Aelred's shattered jar in the De institutione inclusarum.

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heresy…The similitudes of tree and cup certainly suggest, what the author later states, that “alle bodely thing is sogette unto goostly thing”; but they also affirm the indispensibility of the physical world, and even its beauty. The cup is a “faire cup,” and it is madness to smash it against the wall (291).

The bodily and spiritual are paired again, in that there is no one without the other. The relation of fruit to tree is one of production. The fruit is a product of the tree, which contains within it the potential for further generation. The fruit is an image of production, nourishment, sweetness, accomplishment, and infinity. The relationship of meaning to language is more dynamic in this vehicle than the typical relation of kernel to shell. The tree- as-shell is not an inert container to be cast away, but is reborn again from within the fruit that it produces. It also exists prior to the fruit, suggesting that language is prior to and actually constructs meaning, as St. Martin’s bodily experience was prior to and embodies his spiritual one. Overall, however, the continual embedding of tree-within-seed and seed-within-fruit makes it impossible to truly separate the literal and allegorical.

The relation of drink to cup is similar to the standard image of kernel to shell, in that both emphasize interiority. However, due to the fluid nature of wine, it is impossible to drink of it—or even produce it—without its container. Within his Introduction to the Cloud, I disagree with Patrick J. Gallacher’s point that the image of the cup shows us that the intellect fails at the mystical stage, but is useful in at least stimulating the reader to divine love (Gallacher, “Introduction” 8). I suggest instead that the cup represents more than an initial prop to instigate desire—hence the prohibition against smashing it against the wall after drinking from it. I believe Cheryl Taylor offers a more insightful interpretation in suggesting that when the author compares heretics to madmen, smashing the “cup of physical signification to the wall after drinking the spiritual contents,” he “reaffirms both the sacramental nature of physical reality as a medium for divine truth and the validity of the Church’s sacraments as vehicles of grace,” in particular, framing these assertions against “Lollard objections” (Taylor, “Paradox” 48-49).171

171 Eric Graff argues that the religious context of the struggle against Lollardy, in particular, their idea of the sacraments as being purely symbolic, is understated in scholarship on the Cloud-corpus (5).

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Further, the Cloud suggests men “kiss” the cup, for there is wine therein (86). In the extensive medieval commentary on the opening line of the Canticum canticorum, as I have discussed in my prior chapters, the “kiss” usually represents union: intellectual, moral, and mystical. Kissing wine that is about to be devoured shows a respect for the wine and its container. The wine is not something merely to be devoured, but a thing of beauty, and the drinker shows bodily allegiance to a bodily, sensual thing, before he begins “taastyng pe softenes of my loue” (BOPC 157).

This is a moment of foreplay, or delay, before the union that occurs in drinking the drought, in which the wine is then separated from its container and united with the drinker. The delay heightens the appreciation of the wine, it suggests that it is not simply utilitarian, but sensual, enjoyable before the fact of its devouring. It is exactly this sort of delay that leads me into my final argument in this chapter: the idea of sensuality and erotic delay in the Cloud.

3.4 Binding and Blinding In the previous sections of this chapter, I examined the ways that language and the bodily are paradoxically denied and affirmed. Though ostensibly apophatic, the Cloud is “charged with Cistercian sensuality” (Riehle, The Secret Within 162). In this section I will focus on the cataphatic, sensual language of the Cloud itself, and the way that the interplay of blindness and touching, binding and piercing, and covering and exposing help to construct divine desire within this text. As I stated in the Introduction to this chapter, aspects of modern BDSM culture can aid us in reading the Cloud’s relationship between these elements. Like the Cloud, BDSM culture uses these juxtapositions to explore the limits of the self/other and mind/body duality in the ultimate pursuit of transcendence.

3.4.1 Blinding I have already articulated the paradox of the Cloud’s apophaticism together with its use of carnal language. The Cloud also emphasizes feeling over visualization and experience over

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conceptualization—or, in other words, physical and cognitive “blindness.” However, rather than leaving readers in the darkness of this blindness, the Cloud substitutes conceptual and physical vision with descriptions of carnal and embodied touch. This replacement is not unique: the ocularcentrism of western thought has been attested by Martin Jay, who argues that there has been a longstanding philosophical bias toward the visual in western epistemology. For example, in De Anima, Aristotle places vision at the apex of the senses (Paterson 21). In light of this, Jay argues for the benefits of touch over sight, something also emphasized by the Cloud: “Touch allows a more benign interaction. Instead of the distance between subject and object congenial to sight, touch restores the proximity of self and other, who then is understood as neighbour. It also entails a more intimate relation to the world” (Jay 517). In emphasizing feeling over seeing, the Cloud idealizes a state similar to Lacan’s pre-mirror-stage unity with the mother. In the early stages of infancy, a child does not know that it has a separate existence from its mother. It is only through viewing itself in the mirror that it comes to recognize both that it is split from the mother, and that it is split from itself. In this latter situation, the child sees the self “out there” in the mirror as distinct from the self “in here.” Sight alone causes the ego to appear independent and split (Evans 115-6). In the dark, however, one can feel the “pre-mirror” unity with the mother/Other. In the Cloud, too, this unity is only felt when the self is utterly transcended.

The following quotation from the Book of Privy Counselling, a partner text to the Cloud, exemplifies the three motifs I will discuss within the Cloud itself: namely, blinding or covering, binding, and baring or exposing. The speaker states: Bere up þi seek self as þou arte & fonde for to touche bi desire good gracious God as he is, þe touching of whome is eendeles helpe by witnes of þe womman in þe Gospel: Si tetigero vel fimbriam vestimenti eius, salua ero. ‘If I touche bot pe hemme of his cloping, I schal be saa[f].’ Miche more schalt þou þan be maad hole of þi seeknes for þis hei3e heuenly touching of his owne beying, him owne dere self. Step up þan stifly & taast of þat triacle; bere up þi seek self as þou arte vnto gracious God as he is, with-outen any corious or special beholdyng to eny of alle þe qualitees þat longyn to þe beyng of þi-self or of God, wheþer þei be clene or wrechid, gracyous or kyndely, godli or manly. It chargeþ not now in þee bot þat þi blynde beholdyng of þi nakid beyng be gladli born up in listines of loue, to be knitted & onid in grace & in spirit to þe precious beying of God in him-self only as he is, with-outen more (BoPC 139).

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One must bear themselves up to God as he is, and “touche” him. This touch engenders a remedy, like the woman in the Gospel who merely grasps the hem of Christ’s garment and is healed (Luke 8:43-48, Matthew 9:18-22). Even touching the veil between Christ and humanity is enough. But one will be healed so much the more if they touch God’s own being and “taast” that “triacle”172 without concern for their own state. The triacle is the Eucharistic wine, a microscopic image of the union of the body and soul: as wine, it satisfies the senses, and as Christ’s blood, it is salvific, so that both the body and soul are healed. A reader must then have a “blynde beholdyng” of their own “nakid being” and be “born up in listines of loue, to be knitted & onid” with God—hardly a statement seeking to deny any form of bridal mysticism.

But what exactly is a “blynde beholdyng”? The author conveys, through an oxymoronic statement, that there is a kind of vision beyond sight, a beatific vision not accessible through the eyes, one that truly grasps its subject matter. And why is “beyng” naked? This nudity is not “beyng” stripped of body, but being naked of all self-conceptions. There is an inherent misrecognition of the true nature of the self and the divine that must be set aside before one can approach God. The Cloud extends its apophaticism to both God and humanity. As we will see with Julian of Norwich in the next chapter, there seem to be two selves, one that is truly mired in sin, and another “naked being” that is untouched and worthy of uniting with God. The Cloud attests a similar reality: forget the distinctions between the divine and human, “clene or wrechid, gracyous or kyndely, godli or manly.” God merely “is that he is,” as in the Exodus encounter with Moses (Exodus 3:14). One must present “þi seek self as þou arte” to “God as he is.” Perhaps then the hem of Christ’s garment, rather than depicting the body as an “external” and unworthy self, represents language, ideas, or conceptualizations. Rather than being the distinction between outer body and inner spirit, this text presents a more Lacanian distinction between the “outer” or cloaking symbolic and the “inner” real. The body is not denied or transcended in the Cloud, the mind is.

172 A medicine or antidote for poison (MED "triacle, n.").

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Further evidence of this is suggested in the action of “touching” God “as he is.” As the Cloud states of God, “He may wel be loved, bot not thought. By love may He be getyn and holden; bot bi thought neither” (36). God can be touched, grasped, and held by love, but not by thought. Later on in the Cloud, the author expresses an idea similar to Aelred, by appropriating Jacob wrestling with the Angel: “For I telle thee trewly that I had lever be so nowhere bodely, wrastlyng with that blynde nought, than to be so grete a lorde that I might when I wolde be everywhere bodely, merily pleiing with al this ought as a lorde with his owne” (94). The adjective “blind” presents a kind of verbal middle voice: God, the supposed tenor of this metaphor, is “blind” because he inflicts blindness, and because he cannot be seen. This also eliminates the distinction between subject and object: “blynde” modifies both God and his seeker. Besides meaning lacking sight, the Middle English “blind” can also mean: not giving out light, dark, dim, pale, and without opening, closed, covered, concealed from sight, hidden, unseen (MED “blind, adj.”). So God’s attributes of being both dark or dim, and covered and hidden, cause humanity’s attributes of blindness. This situation captures the dependence of humanity on God for all its attributes, such that it becomes a mirror-inversion of God.

God is more specifically described as a “blynde nought,” and this second half of the metaphor is also telling. “Nought” is a Middle English noun that obviously means nothingness or non-existence (MED “nought, n.”). However, first and foremost “nought” is a pronoun (MED “nought, pro.”) or adverb (MED “nought, adv.”) attached to a verbial phrase to make it negative. Here, however, it is used as a noun to express purely non-being. A modern English equivalent would be the phrase “this blind not.” God is so beyond categories of being that he cannot be expressed in nouns: he is a “non” or a “not.” This is seemingly in opposition to the statement made by God to Moses, “I am that I am.” Actually, both statements imply that God is beyond all categories, pure being or even beyond pure being.

“Nought” can also be a double-entendre for the Middle English “knotte” (which can also be spelled “nought,” though the two words are not pronounced the same in Middle English). God is a knot, an enigma, something that is struggled with that cannot be untied. This is a longstanding idea, seen for example in the Celtic knots found in Insular manuscripts and

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statuaries. God as a knot makes the verb “wrastlen” even more evocative, and is a longstanding image in twelfth-century philosophy. For example, in his poem, Vix nodosum, Alan of Lille states: “I am scarcely able to unknot a knotty knot” (521).173 “Wrastlen” means to struggle, engage in combat, and twist, writhe, or wriggle (MED “wrestlen, v.”). This is a literal allusion to Jacob wrestling with the Angel of the Lord in Genesis, but it also conveys a kind of impossible struggle to untie or resolve the “knot” that is God.

The Middle English noun “knotte” can refer to a knot in rope, thread; a knot tied in a whip for the purpose of inflicting pain; an ornamental or love knot; a knot used as an aid to the memory; or an intellectual, theological, or philosophical problem or mystery (MED “knotte, n.”). Through this diction, the text not only suggests that the reader is bound to God, but also that God is a kind of bondage or knot himself. He is an intellectual puzzle that cannot be unravelled.

3.4.2 Binding The image of God as a knot is tied up with another motif in the Cloud: language of tying, binding, knots, and leashes. These primarily occur in two forms: imagery of binding or constricting the self, and binding the self to another person or thing. Binding the self, as in BDSM culture, is a way to mute the senses and focus the mind: “Bondage serves to restrict movement so that the submissive’s energy is more where I want it to be. It works as a form of sensory deprivation. If you’re tied up, your entire attention is only on what you feel; you can’t go anywhere else. It works as a focus” (Moser 25). This is an idea the Cloud itself articulates in its focus on sensory deprivation, as we have seen.

More important, however, is the idea of binding the self to another. The Cloud-author tells the reader to “knyt thee therfore to Him bi love and by beleve; and than by vertewe of that knot thou schalt be comoun parcener with Him and with alle that by love so be knittyd unto

173 “Vix nodosum valeo nodum denodare” (520).

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Him” (33). To “knyt” can mean, first, to tie, sew, fasten, or bind with rope, second, to unite or combine, such as in marriage, third, to heal or mend, for example, a broken bone, and finally, to insinuate or interweave (i.e. arcane meanings with one's discourse) (MED “knitten, v.”). In other words, there are three types of union presented by this one verb: uniting through sewing fabrics together, through mending body parts together, and through interweaving meaning and discourse. This word thus fittingly conveys union with an embodied God: union through flesh, union through the logos, and again the idea of woven garments.

In another example of binding, the Cloud-author states: The everlasting love of His Godheed, thorow the whiche He mad thee and wrought thee when thou were nought, and sithen bought thee with the prise of His precious blood when thou were loste in Adam, might not suffre thee be so fer fro Him in forme and degree of levyng. And therfore He kyndelid thi desire ful graciously, and fastnid bi it a lyame of longing, and led thee bi it into a more special state and forme of levying (29).

Through love, then, God “wrought” humanity out of “nought.” In the Cloud, God is usually described in negative terms as “nought” or nothing. But now the author reminds us of humanity’s creatio ex nihilo. This parallels humanity with divinity, in that both are described negatively: both become symptom to the same apophasis. God made humanity out of nothing by the power of his love, and it is love, or more specifically, desire, that allows humanity to approach him again. Humanity’s desire is “kyndelid,” which can mean to kindle, as in a fire (MED “kindelen, v.”), but also to give birth to, and then humanity is fastened to God with a leash or “lyame” of desire (MED "liam, n.").

A “lyame" is a specific kind of leash used in courtly hunting rituals for hunting dogs or hawks. In the Master of Game, a fourteenth-century English translation of the Count Gaston de Foix's Livre de chasse, a leash or “lyame” is: a rope made of silk or leather by which hounds were led…This strap was fastened to the collar by a swivel, and both collar and liams were often very gorgeous…A hound was said to carry his liam well when he just kept it at proper tension, not straining it, for that would show that he was of too eager temperament, and likely to overshoot the line; if he trailed his liam on the ground, it showed that he was slack or unwilling (D'Yauville).

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The leash implies more than mere physical constriction; an entire discipline or lifestyle is suggested. “Limer” dogs were chosen from a young age and made to live with their master, and trained to run mute and staunch on the line. Such dogs were typically used in hunting stags and hinds. The dogs had to run an exact distance from the master, not too close or too far, not too slowly or too swiftly. This, combined with the leash, indicates a blending of free will (having to run exactly staunch) and providence (being bound by the leash). Furthermore, stags were common medieval symbols for Christ (Physiologus 58).

In the Cloud, this leash is specifically described as a leash of “longing.” Longing can mean desire or yearning (MED “longen, v.1”), a prolonging or delay (MED “longen, v.2”), but also ownership or “belonging” (MED “longen, v.3”). By “fastening” humanity’s desire by a leash of “longing,” the author articulates a paradoxical state of binding and distance: pulling toward and keeping at length. At the conclusion of the Cloud, the author relates the idea more explicitly, by quoting Saint Gregory: “Alle holy desires growen bi delaies; and yif thei wanyn bi delaies, then were thei never holy desires” (101). The “lyame of longing” expresses more than a leash of “desire,” but actually articulates a courtly and religious ritual of delay. Just as the leash constrains the dog, and forces it to follow a set path, it also keeps the dog at staunch distance. The animal is forced along the path of the leash, but must also keep itself at the full length of the tether. There is an inexplicable freedom that comes from being bound: the dog is not pulled behind the horse or charger, but runs forward of his own instinct and free will, though his path is restrained or controlled by the leash. The dog is bound but also freed, given controlled distance, given restrained desire.

In BDSM practice also, delayed gratification is sometimes imposed upon the submissive by the dominant. The dominant will withhold the orgasm of the submissive, to increase their desire and ultimately their pleasure. The delay creates a state of frenzy, as the submissive becomes overwhelmed by their delayed satisfaction, and the delayed pleasure is arguably more powerful than the release in orgasm itself. Orgasm is removed as the goal at the end of a utilitarian process of foreplay; rather, foreplay becomes an end in itself.

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Similar to the pattern of bound freedom offered by the leash, humanity is expressed as a paradoxical state between nothingness and the divine. God made humanity out of nought, but they fell in Adam. Though redeemed by the blood of Christ, God tries by means of the leash to bring humanity from nothingness, and the Fall, to himself. In the Cloud, these ideas are conceptually linked by being rhythmically connected in the rhyme of wrought/nought/bought. God leads humanity into a special state by means of this leash of desire. By delaying the pleasure of uniting with him in this lifetime, one’s desire causes a kind of ecstasy in which it transcends the limits of the self, allowing for the possibility of union in the afterlife. Human life is therefore a divine training in desire, testing and stretching the limits of desire and subjectivity in order to make union possible.

3.4.3 Baring/Piercing This final motif completes the idea of delay, and stands in direct contradiction to the theme of covering: the idea of baring one’s self or God. The image of piercing is often paired together with this image, to erotic effect. For example, the author states: Lette not therfore, bot travayle therin tyl thou fele lyst. For at the first tyme when thou dost it, thou fyndest bot a derknes, and as it were a cloude of unknowyng, thou wost never what, savyng that thou felist in thi wille a nakid entent unto God…Schap thee to bide in this derknes as longe as thou maist, evermore criing after Him that thou lovest; for yif ever schalt thou fele Him or see Him, as it may be here, it behoveth alweis be in this cloude and in this derknes (31).

The reader is asked to feel a “nakid entent” toward God. As in modern English, an “entent” is a purpose or intention; aim or object, will, wish, desire, or demand (MED “entente, n.”). The intention is described as being naked, which can mean unclothed, nude; unadorned, plain; literally worded, literal; exposed to view, unconcealed; mere, bare; unmixed, simple, or pure (MED “naked, adj.”). Thus, the reader is asked to have a naked or bare desire, pure attention, unadorned, plain, literal intention toward God. The carnal associations of the term “naked,” however, evoke the image of an erection and a potentially sexual desire, adorned with no figurative possibilities or veiling garments. Later, the author states: When thou hast forgeten alle other creatures and alle theire werkes, ye, and therto alle thin owne werkes, that ther schal leve yit after, bitwix thee and thi God, a nakid

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weting and a (70) felyng of thin owne beyng, the whiche wetyng and felyng behovith alweis be distroied er the tyme be that thou fele sothfastly the perfeccyon of this werk (71).

Unlike the “nakid entent,” whose impetus is entirely on the reader, the “nakid weting” occurs between God and humanity. The primary definition of “witen” is to know, suggesting a bare knowledge like the carnal knowing between Adam and Eve; Adam “knew” Eve sexually, expressing his complete and total experience of her (MED “witen, v.1”). This idea implies a hierarchy: the subject, in knowing the object, dominates it and possesses it sexually. This nuance is present in the Middle English, as “witen” can also mean to have possession or dominion over something (MED “witien, v.”). But “witen” can also mean to die, perish, wilt, wither, or come to naught, implying a separation of body and soul, or a confusion of the boundaries of the self—and possibly even orgasm (MED “witen, v.4”). This latter reading is possible because in Middle English, as in modern, “weting” can also express the state of being wet, generating another possible image of sexual union (MED “weting, ger.”).

In order to achieve this “weting,” readers are asked to clear their minds and enter the cloud of unknowing, a state called kenosis in Dionysian theology, which suggested liberation from all earthly things in order to prepare oneself for the approach and love of God’s “bare essence” (Riehle 152): And thou schalt step aboven it stalworthly, bot listely, with a devoute and a plesing stering of love, and fonde for to peerse that derknes aboven thee. And smyte apon that thicke cloude of unknowyng with a scharp darte of longing love, and go not thens for thing that befalleth (36).

The reader must step above this cloud of unknowing, with a “stering” of love, and “peerce” through the darkness with a “scharp darte of longing love.” “Stering,” as well as referring to kindling etc, was also a term used for “stirrings” of the flesh—erections (MED “stiring, ger.”). This “scharp darte of longing love” is thus both the fiery arrow of Cupid, and an erection (MED “dart, n.”). With the term “longing,” the idea of delay is reintroduced. However, this could also literally suggest a lengthening of the “dart” by desire, if we take the erection nuance seriously.

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“Fonden” means to test, try, tempt, put to trial; to seek; to suffer; to enjoy or indulge in (sex or pleasure), or to have or enjoy a woman (MED “fonden, v.”), and “peersen” means to penetrate, pierce, puncture, wound; to affect emotionally; to burrow through or excavate; to press into the enemy ranks or invade; to pass through; to forcibly penetrate in sex; to reach or enter the heavens; to achieve communion with God; to see through or look directly at (the sun); or to examine with the reason, scrutinize, comprehend, or perceive (MED “persen, v.”). Thus, “fonde for to peerse” essentially describes the reader, like Jacob, violently struggling with the Angel of the Lord, wrestling to penetrate this nothing-above-the-darkness with his “scharp darte of longing love.”

The reader is asked to penetrate the darkness, and push past it toward the divine. The definitions of piercing that include wounding and pushing through enemy ranks make this an especially violent penetration. The sense of broaching or pushing through darkness is also an image of birthing: the reader breaches through the immaterial darkness into the light in a reverse-birthing into the life-beyond death (whether through actual death or, in this case, merely through contemplation). In the majority of definitions, the meaning supports the idea that the darkness must be moved past to “grasp” the divinity that is beyond it. However, the final definition of looking directly at and examining or comprehending suggests that this darkness is the thing the reader must grasp; God is not beyond it. God is the thing that must be struggled with, transgressed, pierced, etc.

After the reader accomplishes this, the act is turned back upon them later in the text, as God then pierces the reader: Than wil He sumtyme paraventure seend oute a beme of goostly light, peersyng this cloude of unknowing that is bitwix thee and Hym, and schewe thee sum of His priveté, the whiche man may not, ne kan not, speke. Than schalt thou fele thine affeccion enflaumid with the fiire of His love, fer more then I kan telle thee, or may, or wile, at this tyme (58).

God sends out a “beme” of goostly light, piercing through the cloud between humanity and the divine, and shows humanity the “sum of His priveté,” of which man may not and cannot speak. This will inflame the affection of the reader with the fire of God’s love, and the author

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cannot say more than this. A “bem” can refer to: a tree; the Cross; a pillar of cloud; a wooden beam; a deer’s horn; a shaft of light, a ray, a beam of the sun, moon, or star; a tongue of flame; a gleam or sparkle from gold or a precious stone; a ray of light emanating from God; or, a ray sent out from the eye to the object seen (MED “bem, n.”).

Because of the implications of wood and therefore the Cross (the same pun is made in the Dream of the Rood), the beam that God sends down to earth is reminiscent of his sending down of his Son into Mary’s body in the Incarnation, and his sending down of the tongues of flames to Mary and the apostles in the Pentecost (Acts 2:3). It also recalls God appearing as a pillar of cloud to Moses (Exodus 13:21). Most interestingly, however, the “bem” recalls medieval optics, in which the eye sends forth an active ray of light that penetrates and thus “grasps” its object. Thus, God views and therefore penetrates the reader, reversing the direction of the “sharp dart of longing love.”

God then shows humanity the “sum of his priveté,” a term made especially famous in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. It can refer to privacy, secrecy; sexual intimacy; an internal organ (the innermost part of the heart, the womb, a sex organ, the external genital or excretory organs, the penis, testicles, anus, vagina, or vulva); a secret plan, desire, or affair; arcane knowledge; a secret of nature; a sacred mystery, a divine secret or a divine revelation (MED “privete, n.”). But The Miller’s Tale is primarily concerned with juxtaposing “private affairs” and “private parts,” (Hank 7) allowing for a “shocking conjunction of the divine and the profane in one word” (Hank 9).

In The Miller’s Prologue, the miller tells his audience: An housbonde shal nat been inquisityf Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf. So he may fynde Goddes foyson there, Of the remenant nedeth nat enquere (ll. 3163-66).

The Miller’s Tale advises against meddling in God and women’s private affairs and parts, “lest one discovers what one should not (and cannot) know” (Boyd 245). There are two biblical precedents for this thematic conflation: Exodus 33, where God hides Moses in the

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hollow of a rock and Moses witnesses God’s backside, and Genesis 18-19, where the Sodomites seek to molest the two angels visiting Lot. These two scenes focus on male/male desire, sodomy, and forbidden knowledge of the divine174—something David Boyd argues is also at stake in The Miller’s Tale, with its focus on anal imagery, misinterpretation, and “pryvetee” (244).

As Peter Damian says in his Liber Gomorrhianus: Sodomites try to break in violently on the angels when unclean men attempt to approach God through the offices of sacred orders. But these latter are surely struck with blindness because they fall into such interior darkness through a just judgment of God that they are powerless to find the door…'That they were unable to find the doorway', he also clearly expresses when he says, 'to do what is unseemly'. This is as if he were to have said that they try to enter where they ought not (38-9).175

Damian presents the idea of “sodomizing God” to represent both the Sodomites’ attempt to know the angels carnally, and men who enter religious life guilty of sodomy, since they are unworthy of penetrating into the mysteries of God (Boyd 246). There is a connection between anal penetration and pursuit of divine truths. More than this, and as with the situation in the Cloud, “sodomy in late medieval thought is inextricably bound up with issues of power and position—who is actively on top” (Boyd 257). God exposes his secrets, but the nuance suggests that in piercing the reader, he simultaneously exposes his genitalia. This penetration and exposure elicits a response in the reader, who is “enflaumid” with passion (MED "enflaumen, v."). The goal of the Cloud is this dual penetration: the reader of God, and God of the reader. There is a combination of heat, light, sex, and spiritual (ful)filling as the reader comes to know God, and vice versa.

174 Exodus 33 does not explicitly convey these scenes, but Augustine’s commentary on the same does so, articulating a connection between the body and knowledge—specifically, between sexual and divine knowledge (Bishop 231).

175 “Sodomitae ergo ad angelos conantur violenter irrumpere, cum immundi homines ad Deum tentant per sacri ordinis officia propinquare. Sed hi profecto caecitate percutiuntur, quia justo Dei judicio in tenebras interiores cadunt; ita ut nec ostium invenire praevaleant…Ut ostium invenire non possent; hoc etiam patenter exponit, cum ait; Ut faciant quae non conveniunt. Ac si diceret: ut intrare tentent, unde non debent.”

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3.5 Conclusion Unlike the devotional texts typical of fourteenth-century England, which focus on a somatic connection with Christ, The Cloud of Unknowing barely mentions him, focusing instead on the transcendence of an unspeakable and unknowable God. And yet, like its contemporary texts, it nevertheless describes this God with carnal and sometimes erotic language. The Cloud’s focus on blindness, unsaying, and bondage are really about power: specifically, preparing the devotee to encounter the true, unmitigated power of God. In order to reach a state in which humanity can access this reality, they must come to transcend themselves, and this is done through contemplative forgetting, denial, and bondage of the self, until this “self” becomes nothing before the grandeur of God. In its devotional practice, the Cloud constructs a build-up and transfer of energy, in the way that a pressed-down spring will fly up.

This practice—the ascetic denial, blocking up of the senses, and binding of the self—presents a fruitful comparison to modern BDSM practice. Both practices reveal a hierarchy of power, which paradoxically results in a transfer of energy from the dominant to the submissive, from the Godhead to his human subject, so that both can come together in equal, total, and erotic embrace of mind, body, and spirit.

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Chapter 4 ‘It were all God’: The Hermeneutic of “Oning” in Julian of Norwich’s Parable of the Lord and Servant 4.1 Introduction In the afterword to On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches, Vincent Gillespie suggests that medieval biblical allegory programmatises the way readers read, as a sort of “narrative storm drain” seeking to “channel” and “control” the diversity of a reader’s “endlessly subjective and subversive response” (242). As a counterexample, he cites Julian of Norwich’s (c. 1342-1416) parable of the Lord and Servant from her Showings, stating that: The labile and liminal signifiers of her showings refuse her reader escape into anagogy or tropology. She insists on all the layers and inconsistencies of her showing remaining in full play; she resists the instinctive attempt of her trained reader to fashion a comfortable allegory by foregrounding some aspects and minimizing the importance of others (244).

As Gillespie rightly points out, Julian rejects a piecemeal consideration of the literary features of her parable. In fact, the “extraneous” details for which she cannot account become the very hinges upon which her entire parable turns. For example, her failure to account for certain details in the description of Adam176 causes her to reevaluate the meaning of the entire revelation—even to leave it largely absent from the Short Text, until she could receive “inward teaching” to interpret it for the Long (277). Julian does not have an a priori allegorical argument into which she will then yoke her literary features. Instead, God tells her: “It longeth to the to take hede to alle the propertes and the condetions that were shewed in the example, though the thinke that it be misty and indefferent to thy sight” (277). God encourages Julian to reexamine the parable, and to “close-read” it by taking heed of “alle the propertes” holistically, even if they seem insignificant. In contrast, medieval exegesis often glosses over many details of the literal level, making the narrative and its features servile to the overarching argument of the spiritual “meaning” or allegory, and suppressing the

176 “For in the servant that was shewed for Adam, as I shall sey, I sawe many diverse properteys that might by no manner be derecte to singel Adam” (277).

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dynamic possibilities of the literary text. But for Julian, all aspects of the parable register in her interpretation. Frederick Bauerschmidt has even suggested that the term “allegory” does not do justice to her parable, as she never dismisses the “lower” or literal meanings in place of the “higher” (162). There is no hierarchy in Julian’s parable: far from presenting multiple static levels of meaning superimposed upon one another, rather, her parable functions more like a drama in which meanings remain embodied and interact with each other (162).

This final chapter will examine Julian’s hermeneutic, extending the logic of Gillespie's suggestive afterword to Julian’s parable of the Lord and Servant in the 51st chapter of her Long Text. I will argue that Julian’s parable reveals her engagement with medieval biblical exegesis in its rich variety, but also her subversion of the same, in order to contrast human interpretation with divine signification. For example, Julian's hermeneutic collapses Christ, Adam, and "all men" into the vehicle of the Servant. This maneuver inverts the common structure of biblical commentary, which seemingly fragments one literal and historical figure into various tenors: allegorical, typological, anagogical, etc. Of course, this is an oversimplification of medieval exegesis, especially after its flourishing in the twelfth century. In The Medieval Theory of Authorship, A.J. Minnis argues that by the fourteenth century, the literal level received a new pride of place, as medieval biblical scholars focused their attention on the historical and factual aspect of the Bible. Exegetes therefore turned to Jewish exegesis, which they considered to contain an accurate rendering of the literal sense (though a misunderstanding of the allegorical). With this increased focus, the literal level came to be understood as that which encompassed all of the other levels in a unified whole, and which must be properly understood for its own sake before any subsequent allegorical interpretations could take place (86). In this sense, then, Julian is extending the logic of her contemporaries, and this itself is exciting because it proves that she was taking part in a larger intellectual movement, and not merely writing in a vacuum.

Thus, through Julian's vehicle of the Servant, the literal does not take precedence over the allegorical, or vice versa. Adam is Christ: one figure is not so much a type of the other as completely united with that other. As such, no one figure is prioritized over another, and the whole of the parable is greater than the sum of its parts. The unity of all figures is part of her

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argument. Desire is central to this interpretive move: Julian uses imagery of sexual desire and consummation, and “knitting” and “oning” to articulate the relationship between the figures of her parable, and ultimately God's longing to bring humanity into himself. There is a conceptual eroticism in the fertile way that Julian's text unifies subjects—subjects that are permeable, penetrable, superimposed, and open to one another across chronological time. Using Lacan’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy as central tropes structuring thought, I will argue that Julian’s parable employs a structure of metonymy to emphasize relationality rather than difference. I will argue that Julian presents typological history from the perspective of the divine; her paradoxical hermeneutic is a textual performance of divine semiotics, an anti-intellectual foil revealing the gap between a human hermeneutic of fragmentation that alienates, and a divine hermeneutic of "collapse" or “oning” that unifies and harmonizes.

4.1.1 Julian of Norwich Julian of Norwich was born in the fall of 1342, and in May 1373, at the age of thirty, she fell sick and nearly died. During her illness, she experienced the visions which would occupy her for the rest of her life, in both her Short and Long Texts (College and Walsh 33). Subsequent “teachings” or partial visions occurred in 1388 and 1393 (Watson, “Composition” 639). At some point in her life—it is unclear if before or after the composition of her Short Text— Julian became an anchoress at St. Julian’s, Conesford, in Norwich, after which she is named (Watson and Jenkins 4). Whatever the date, it is clear that her enclosure had an impact on the rhetoric and thematics of her texts, as many scholars attest (Krantz 80, Miles 154). Julian’s anchorhold was a gift of the Benedictine Nuns of Carrow (a mile from St. Julian’s), an institution where she was likely educated (Watson and Jenkins 4). We know little else besides her mention in Chapter 18 of Margery Kempe's Book, as well as one late fourteenth-century and three early fifteenth-century testaments that endow her with money: three in Latin and one in Anglo-Norman (Watson and Jenkins 431). Two later testaments (1423 and 1428) give money to an unnamed anchorite at St. Julian’s, but scholars believe this to be Julian’s successor (Watson and Jenkins 432).

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Historically, scholarship has focused on whether or not Julian was literate. Arguments about Julian's literacy have ranged widely, from Colledge and Walsh's early contention in the 1970s that she was fully literate in English and Latin (Colledge and Walsh 196), to other scholars who take Julian at her word that she was a “simple, unlettered creature” (Crampton, “Introduction”). Colledge and Walsh have argued for Julian’s Latinity because of a few instances of what appear to be direct translation from the Vulgate, for example, that of Philippians 2:5 (College and Walsh 45-6). However, Annie Sutherland argues that this translation could have been made orally by another person, which Julian then committed to memory (“Julian of Norwich and the Bible” 6). Julian’s mastery of Latin need not come from her own Latinity, but rather, from her participation in a dynamic community of intellectual exchange centred in the church.

However, Julian’s references to her own illiteracy could be a traditional modesty topos, an important rhetorical move especially for a woman, since women were forbidden to teach in the Pauline letters (1 Timothy 2:12). In fourteenth-century England, “unlettered” could also mean literate in English, but not in Latin or in French (Peters 364).177 “Literacy” was a much more fluid concept in late medieval England—where there was a thriving oral culture and textual community—that at bare minimum would have influenced her work. As Derek Pearsall suggests in his “Introduction” to Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, late medieval scholars are questioning the “habitual distinction” and too-readily- accepted “polarity” between orality and literacy, “in all its multiplicity of senses and valences” (2). In an earlier work, Brian Stock proposes the idea of “textual communities,” as “groups hitherto dependent on oral participation in religion.” He argues that what was essential to a textual community “was not a written version of a text, although that was sometimes present, but an individual, who, having mastered it, then utilized it for reforming a group's thought and action” (Stock, After Augustine 90). It is difficult to determine whether Julian was fully Latinate or not, but her position in the anchorhold would have allowed her to

177 The original meaning of “literate” is “Latinate,” and this is still possibly the meaning in Julian’s time (cite).

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witness Mass daily, and the overall Latinate culture of medieval England would have pervaded her environment.178

I do agree with scholars’ assessment that Julian was literate in Middle English (Baker 9; Sutherland 6). Julian never mentions an amanuensis, unlike Margery Kempe (Peters 364). Moreover, Brad Peters argues for the influence of devotional compilations on Julian’s work, possible if she were fully illiterate, but more likely with literacy in at least English (363). In ‘God is our mother’: Julian of Norwich and the Medieval Image of Christian Feminine Divinity, Jennifer Heimmel suggests multiple possible sources for Julian’s maternal theology, beginning with early patristic writings. While Heimmel is not arguing that Julian knew all of these texts firsthand, she does show that this idea has a history, and that Julian writes as part of this textual community. Denise Baker goes further to suggest that Julian’s maternal image of God comes directly from an already existing twelfth-century tradition, which she likely encountered in Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum or the Ancrene Riwle (150). I argue that Julian’s structuring of the parable of the Lord and Servant serves as a critique of the prevailing medieval exegetical models—meaning that she must have encountered biblical exegesis in order to subvert it. Her knowledge comes, at the very least, through her experience of daily sermons, since fourteenth-century English sermons would often interpret examples or parables.179 However, it is very possible that Julian read the Gloss or vernacular biblical commentaries.

4.1.2 The Manuscript Tradition and Dating180

178 See Katherine Zieman’s Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

179 See, for example, pages 16-22 and 146-49 of: Alan of Lille. The Art of Preaching. Trans. Gillian R. Evans. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1981. Or, for an English Ars Praedicandi, see: Thomas of Cobham. Summa de arte praedicandi. Ed. Franco Morenzoni. Turnhout: Brepols, 1988.

180 All of the Julian manuscripts are written in a northeastern dialect of Middle English (Watson "Composition" 1). The earliest extant manuscript of Julian's Short Text is London British Library MS Additional 37790 (or, "Amherst"), which was recorded at some point after c. 1435 from a 1413 exemplar (Barratt "Children" 13), and was likely of Carthusian origin ("Composition" 638). Only one medieval manuscript preserves the Long Text, and only in excerpts, alongside extracts from Walter Hilton: London Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4

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Along with her Latinity, the relation of Julian’s Short to Long Texts is also important to my argument about her inflection of the exegetical method. Michelle Karnes and Erin Chandler suggest that the relation of the Short to Long Text is one of text to commentary (Karnes 334, Chandler 391). But, in fact, the Short Text is exegetical already: Julian “reads” Christ’s body and the message of love written there, as I will discuss further (Bauerschmidt 36). Scholarly consensus181 posits that the Short Text was written soon after the revelation that it describes, placing it on or shortly after 1373. The Long Text was begun after the revelation of 1388, and revised in light of the revelation of 1393, but is likely before 1400 (Watson, “Composition” 639). Nicholas Watson, however, dates both the Short and Long Texts later than this. He argues that critical consensus is wrong about the dates of both texts, but more importantly, about the amount of time that lapsed between them (“Composition” 641). Watson argues on the basis of contemporary political and religious debates that Julian could not have composed the Short Text any earlier than 1382, and “probably several years later” (664). He suggests that Julian's defense of her own orthodoxy within the Short Text fits in with the later climate of Lollardy and its detractors, and would not have made sense fifteen years earlier in the 1370s, as most scholars claim (664). Watson also argues for a later date of the Long Text: 1393 is the earliest possible date Julian could have begun it, in wake of her 1388 and 1393 experiences (as Chapter 86 of her Long Text implies) (677). Watson posits an even later date, and believes that by 1413 Julian was still composing the Long Text (681). This would mean that the span of revelation to final composition occupied over forty years of Julian's lifetime. David Aers and Lynn Staley disagree with Watson’s intervention, positing that such theology would be difficult to circulate after Arundel’s 1407/9 Constitutions (Aers and Stalely 79n). However, it is likely that “unauthorized” texts still circulated privately.

("Children" 13). The Long Text is, however, fully preserved in two seventeenth-century manuscripts and one printed edition: Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Fonds Anglais no. 40 (c. 1650), and two London British Library Manuscripts, Sloane MS 2499 (c. 1650) and Sloane MS 3705 (printed edition, c. 1670) (Glasscoe "Manuscripts" 104) (Watson "Composition" 638). Of these three, Sloane MS 2499 is the earliest (Barratt 14). It is believed to be later than the Short Text of the Amherst Manuscript because it is longer: scholars generally agree that the longer Sloane indicates later development on the author's part, rather than an abbreviation of Amherst by a scribe (Windeatt 1).

181 See: College and Walsh, “Editing Julian” (404); Frances Beer, Revelations (7); Barry Windeatt, “Julian of Norwich” (17); Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (3); Brant Pelphrey, Love Was His Meaning: The Theology and Mysticism of Julian of Norwich (8), etc.

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Whatever the exact date of their composition, I accept the common argument that the Short text preceded the Long, especially since it seems that Julian acted as her own exegete, expanding, explaining, and interpreting her original vision. More importantly, she finally included the parable of the Lord and Servant, revealed to her in her first vision, but not understood until she dealt with it in her Long Text. Nicholas Watson also argues that in the Long Text Julian becomes interpreter rather than participant (Watson and Jenkins 2), and Barry Windeatt suggests that Julian adds “interlineated expansions and interleaved commentary in the form of interpolation of new passages, of new sentences into existing passages, and of new clauses” (“Julian’s Second Thoughts” 109). Brad Peters recalls the method of lectio divina, in which a person reads and spontaneously interprets a divine text, as another means of understanding Julian’s Short Text (Peters 363).

Like many of the other writers that I have examined, Julian reads and interprets Christ’s flesh, treating it as its own language and semiotic system. Frederick Bauerschmidt draws a parallel between Julian’s “bodily” sight and her own personal experience of Christ’s physical sensations, and the medieval conception of vision (45). Julian “sees” her visions not with her eyes alone, but with her whole body (46). Seeing is participating. The phenomenological dimension of Julian’s sight is suggested by Michael Raby: “Julian does not frame her revelations as the primary datum of experience that must subsequently be conceptualized and interpreted by a subject” (351). In other words, as Raby suggests, Julian does not clinically dissect the data that she receives. Rather, she comes to participate in the visions organically: “enticed by Christ’s ‘swete loking,’ Julian’s mental eye follows the direction of Christ’s eyes into his wound. Their attention has been ‘oned’…Readers too are invited to join their attention with Julian’s” (358).

Vincent Gillespie provides an example of this “oning” when Julian gazes at the crown of thorns and states that in it is “comprehended and specified the blessed Trinity,” and in which “all the shewinges that foloweth be roundide and oned.” He states that she moves:

from image (crown) to abstraction (Trinity); grounding and unifying all that follows in a single metaphor. The linear analytical approach—schematizing, programming, spotting

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theological sources and rhetorical conventions—struggles to respond to this kind of discourse. Her text seems to actively resist this kind of scholastic (192) reading. Instead Julian’s dominant imagery speaks of enfolding, embracing and enclosing, invoking an all-encompassing three-dimensional aesthetic” (193).

An example of this kind of enfolding sight is seen when Julian beholds the Crucifix before her, and God tells her to look up to heaven. She refuses, stating that Christ, bleeding on the Cross, is her heaven (187).182 Julian’s text presents meaning that is consistently embodied, and that does not rise above the level of the literal and then dismiss it. She works against the impulse to rise above the bodily and the material level. For Julian, the body does not dissipate into discourse. She refuses to look beyond the body of Christ for her “transcendent” meanings. It is in this context that I interpret the “allegory” of Julian’s parable, as I will explain below.

4.1.3 Julian’s Parable of the Lord and Servant

Within the 51st Chapter of Julian’s Long Text, Julian begins to narrate a parable that was received in a vision from God. This parable is fashioned from images and archetypes in the Gospels, and is particularly modelled after Christ’s own parables (Bennett 315). In terms of genre, many scholars have classified the parable as a preacher’s exemplum (Nuth, Wisdom's Daughter 29, Watson and Jenkins 270). Starting in the 1250s, such exempla were collected in “example books,” organized alphabetically by subject, and used by preachers to compose a sermon on any topic more easily (Nuth 32). Joan Nuth and Margaret Healy-Varley, among others, point out the parable’s similarity to an episode in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, which was later adapted in Honorarius’ Elucidarium (Healy-Varley 187, Nuth “Two Medieval Soteriologies” 611, Chase 361). While Joan Nuth believes the similarity to be coincidental, Margaret Healy-Varley believes Julian’s parable to be a deliberate response to Anselm’s (which

182 “Than had I a profer in my reason, as it had ben frendely, saide to me: ‘Loke uppe to heven to his father.’ And than sawe I wele, with the faith that I felt, that ther was nothing betwene the crosse and heven that might have dissesede me, and either me behoved to loke uppe or elles to answere. I answered inwardly with alle the might of my soule, and said: ‘Nay, I may not! For thou art my heven’” (187).

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would presuppose her Latinity), considering that she changes one major detail only: she assigns no blame to the Servant, who fell accidentally (Healy-Varley 187). Indeed, the parable occurs within Julian’s text mainly in response to her inquiries about the problem of sin (Van Engen 2).

Many scholars see her interpretation as exegetical, but few agree on how exactly her hermeneutic fits with other biblical allegory of the fourteenth century. Michelle Karnes argues that Julian employs a hermeneutic of “discord” to point out the discontinuities of medieval commentary (333). College and Walsh argue that Julian adopts and perfects medieval exegesis in the Long Text, dividing her parable evenly into dual literal and spiritual meanings (Bauerschmidt 128). For Martin Chase, Julian interprets “both diachronically and synchronically” with a threefold significance, so that the figure of the Servant represents Adam, Christ, and all men, exceeding “traditional typological interpretations that regard Adam as a foreshadowing of Christ and Christ as the fulfilment of Adam, and simply identifies them, as well as identifying Adam/Christ with all humankind” (Chase 361). Joan M. Nuth, in Wisdom’s Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich, sees the parable as a “visual representation of the scriptural story of salvation, understood in terms of the four senses of medieval exegesis” (33): allegorically, Adam is Christ, tropologically, the relationship of the Lord and Servant represents that of God and the human soul, and anagogically, all will come to salvation in Christ (34).

I argue that Julian’s exegesis cannot be mapped onto any other known medieval model. In fact, this is part of her point: her reading destabilizes the strict framework of many common examples of biblical commentary. Rather, I concur with Bauerschmidt in seeing her reading of Christ as an example of her radical embodiment. She gazes at Christ’s body, and “from its surface, Julian reads the depths” (119). In Christ’s body, Julian sees the perfection of God, encompassing extremes of “high and low, circumference and center, cause and effect, and creator and creature.” Christ’s body is an “image in motion” that is constantly “being constituted,” and, like Lacan’s moebius strip, its interior has become “surface” (120). Her reading takes “the signal nature of appearances seriously” (Ryba 94). Appearance is meaning. The literal meaning is the allegorical meaning. Everything becomes one in the body of Christ.

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But Julian’s visions are not only bodily because they focus on the physical and human suffering of Christ: they also “emanate from her body” and produce her own mimetic bodily sufferings (Potkay 169). In Julian’s theology, the division of “substance” and “sensuality,” which occurs in the Fall, makes true knowledge of God impossible (Bauerschmidt 148). However, these terms are united again in Christ’s Incarnation, allowing Julian to perceive the fullness of God in Christ’s very body. The connection between Julian’s experience of Christ’s suffering and medieval conceptions of vision, which is active, and touches, or unites with the object seen (45),183 allows her to unite somatically with Christ. Indeed, for Julian, redemption involves Christ coming to dwell in our senses, as our substance dwells in God (152). I will explicate this “overlapping” of subjectivities using Lacanian theories of metonymy in the next section. Of course, Julian does not articulate the structure of her parable in quite these terms, so afterward, I will focus on two image patterns within her Parable that display her concern for metonymy: “oning” and “knitting.”

4.2 Metonymy: The Syntagmatic Structure of the Parable At the end of her first showing, Julian explains the three manners in which she received her revelations overall: “by bodily sight, and by worde formede in my understonding, and by gostely sight” (157). In Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, Grace Jantzen interprets this threefold distinction hierarchically, as a mystical ascent in which Julian utilizes the body but then dismisses it in favour of “higher” readings (Jantzen 79). Julia Lamm, in contrast, argues that Julian’s ideas represent a “dismantling” of exactly this view, in which Julian discovers that she is already united with God, and no stage or type of vision “ever negates or supersedes another part” (Lamm 56). Lamm argues that Julian’s spiritual visions are not higher, or any less “concrete or physical” than the bodily visions. In fact, her spiritual visions are also often visions of bodies—merely not

183 For a more detailed explanation of the connection between scientific understandings of vision and medieval allegory, see Suzanne Akbari’s Seeing Through the VeilOptical Theory and Medieval Allegory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

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Christ’s body (58). Julian’s “bodily” showings are therefore not “negated or transcended” but only “further explored, further entered into” (57).

Indeed, Julian states that in contradiction to God’s commandment to “Loke uppe to heven to his father” (187), she refuses to take her eyes off of the body of Christ on the Cross, instead saying: “‘Nay, I may not! For thou art my heven.’ This I said for I wolde not. For I had lever have bene in that paine tille domesday, than have come to heven otherwise than by him” (187). As Andrew Sprung argues, Julian constantly “oscillates” between both the bodily and the spiritual, “both keeping in mind.” Each mode of sight is embedded in the other: “perhaps as Christ dwells within the human soul” (Sprung 58). All of her revelations, in turn, remain rooted in the body of Christ, and therefore the literal level of her allegory.

But before her parable of the Lord and Servant itself, Julian articulates a different, albeit similar, way that she received this particular showing: And then our curteyse lorde answered in shewing, full mistely, by a wonderful example of a lorde that hath a servant, and gave me sight to my understanding of both, Which sight was shewed double in the lorde, and the sight was shewed double in the servant. That one perty was shewed gostly in bodely liknesse. That other perty was shewed more gostly withoute bodely liknes (273).

Julian divides this vision, not by allegorical levels, but by characters. She receives “sight” to her “understanding of both.” She sees the Servant both “bodely” and “gostly,” but she only sees the Lord “gostly.” Andrew Sprung argues that the distinction here between “bodely” and “gostly” is interpretive. Julian views the parable “bodely” at one instance in the past, and her “gostly” understanding or interpretation of the parable occupies the rest of her life: “the moment of revelation is like the body of Christ in which Julian's understanding is endlessly born” (Sprung 56). Thus, the embodied vision serves as the basis on which Julian’s “gostly” sight acts as a gloss (57). But such a distinction oversimplifies Julian’s modes of perception. Julian does not see the parable as a double layer of meaning, one “bodely,” and one “gostly.” Instead, she sees two individuals, each of whom she must understand in a different way.

In other words, there is no spiritual or allegorical “meaning” that stratifies or rises above the bodily level. The “bodely” and “ghostly” are not simply literal and allegorical levels: within the

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“literal” fiction of the parable, Julian tells us that the Lord, as God, has no “bodely” level, and what Julian sees “bodely” applies equally to the Servant as Adam and as Christ. Thus, Christ is not the transcendent interpretation of Adam, but both are united equally in the Servant. In other words, Adam does not merely serve as the “shell,” or as the literal and historical foreshadowing of Christ. Instead, Adam and Christ are both equally the “kernel” present in the fictional “shell” of the Servant. One mode is not supplanted by another, but rather Julian says that she has “both keeping in mind.” The hierarchical distinction of literal and allegorical do not apply here: one level is not substituted for another, to be read in place of it. Rather than casting the Old Testament figure of Adam as the literal shell, Julian unifies him and Christ in the fictional figure of the Servant. But is this fictional “shell” itself worthy of being cast aside once the meaningful fruit has been devoured from within? Yes and no. Though the “Servant” does not have the biblical and therefore “historical” status of Adam, it is only through the yoking figure of the Servant that the unity of Adam and Christ can be seen at all.

In fact, in grounding her theological narrative in the fictional narrative of the Lord and Servant, Julian has situated her parable somewhere between the allegory of medieval biblical exegesis, and the integumentum of medieval literary allegory, which was understood as a textual veil of interpretation “covering” the text (within which it was already situated) (Kelley 26). Where biblical allegory roots spiritual or eschatological truths in the literal and historical deeds of the Bible, literary allegory is an artificially constructed narrative that gestures toward “abstract” truths (Stanley 19). However, Julian’s fictional parable combines both of these methods. The artificial narrative of her parable contains literal, historical events (the Creation, Fall, Incarnation, Crucifixion, Harrowing of Hell, etc.) and eschatological truths (the beatific vision, salvation, etc.). By embedding both the literal and the spiritual within the artifice of her parable, rather than the spiritual within the literal, I argue that Julian supplants the normal hierarchy of other biblical exegesis: the literal and spiritual are made equivalent.

There is, however, one medieval text that arguably did not contain a literal level: the Canticum canticorum. A discomfort with its evocative and erotic descriptions caused Nicholas of Lyra, among others, to argue that the Canticum had no historical basis whatsoever, stating that, “the

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Song of Songs commentaries tell a story of the triumph of the allegorical” (Matter 4). Other medieval exegetes argued that it represented the historical desire between Solomon and the Shulamite, the daughter of the Pharaoh (Matter 61). But for Nicholas, the sexual love of Solomon could not serve as the basis for spiritual meanings, because there was something “suspect” about erotic love for him, even within marriage (Turner 83). To subvert this problem, he interpreted the literal level as a metaphor for the history of Israel, and this metaphor instead functions as the literal meaning (Turner 114). Therefore, the sexual desire between Solomon and the daughter of the Pharaoh does not itself signify allegorically, but the history of Israel which is the true literal meaning does (114). This places Julian’s parable in a unique position with respect to the Canticum, as both arguably construe Christological events within a fictional shell.

However, unlike Lyra’s hierarchical distancing from the literal level, Julian constantly embeds everything in the literal. But rather than Lyra’s focus on metaphor, I argue that Julian’s exegesis operates metonymically, in a Lacanian sense. Building on Hjemslev’s and Saussure’s linguistic distinctions between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, Roman Jakobson established an opposition between two axes of language: the metaphorical axis (paradigmatic) and the metonymic axis (syntagmatic) (Evans 111).184 In language, some terms are substitutable because they are similar, and can be used in lieu of each other: this is the metaphorical axis. These terms must be combined into a larger system, say, the sentence: the metonymic axis. Both axes can be seen, for example, in the relationship between the words “I” and “am” and “happy” in the sentence “I am happy.” In the paradigmatic or vertical axis of metaphor, “happy” could be substituted for “sad,” since both words operate similarly within the sentence, as adjectives modifying the subject. For a term to be substituted, it must be replaced with another term that has a functional equivalence: it must play the same role in the sentence as “happy” and “sad” do. On

184 See also: Hjemslev, Louis. Résumé of a Theory of Language. Trans. Francis J. Whitfield. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975., de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011., and Jakobson, Roman. “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles.” Fundamentals of Language. Ed. Roman Jakobson and Morris Hale. The Hague: Mouton, 1956. 76-82.

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the other hand, the metonymic axis is the horizontal interplay of each word, which, when combined, build the “meaning” of the sentence (Evans 113).185

Jacques Lacan, in turn, uses this dichotomy to explain the linguistic nature of desire.186 For Lacan, the metonymic and metaphoric are two processes that generate both desire and meaning: the metaphoric is the process of the “submersion of one term underneath another,” in which the first term becomes repressed and the replacing signifier becomes the “symptom” (Grosz 100). On the other hand, metonymy is a “diachronic movement from one signifier to another along a signifying chain, as one signifier constantly refers to another in a perpetual deferral of meaning” (Evans 114). Just as meaning is perpetually deferred, desire can never be satisfied (38). Desire is characterized by the same “never-ending process of continual deferral, since desire is always desire for something else,” and, therefore, “desire is a metonymy” (114).

Metaphor, then, requires “two hierarchically distinguished orders or levels, generating a signified by replacing it with another that represents it” (Grosz 103). This is similar to the process at work in medieval exegesis, where the literal level becomes repressed or submerged beneath the dominant allegorical “meaning.” For example, Honorius Augustodunensis, the famous twelfth century exegete, interprets the opening “kiss” between the bridegroom and bride, in the Canticum, where it states “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” as the following: allegorically, the peace granted by the presence and words of the Incarnate Christ, himself the Divine Word, who also fulfils the words of the prophets; tropologically, the peace that comes with understanding

185 This is unrelated to the rhetorical meaning of metonymic. Medieval metonymy (denominatio) was distinct from metaphor (translatio), but only by virtue of being more specific. Metaphor occurs when a “word applying to one thing,” was “transferred to another,” whereas metonymy was a subset of this, refer to specific occasions when an object is called by the name of something closely associated with it (Murphy 370).

186 From Lacan’s two formulations of metaphor and metonymy, he theorizes an “inherent resistance to signification in language,” in which meaning is not spontaneously generated, but is the result of a specific operation, called “signification.” Metaphor allows signification to occur, as it is itself the “passage of the signifier into the signified” (Evans 112). However, in metonymy, the “resistance of signification is maintained…no new signified is produced” (114). And yet, signification is metonymic because “signification always refers to another signification,” or, meaning is not located in any individual signifier, but rather in the dynamic play between the signifiers in the signifying chain. Meaning is therefore always unstable (185). The signifying chain is like the “rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings” (188).

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these divine words, and achieving true repentance for one's sins; and anagogically, the peace of finally emerging through the veil into eternity and uniting with the divine (Norris 23-4). In this interpretation, the erotic and carnal “kiss” becomes submerged beneath the articulation of “peace” as this exegetic structure attempts to distance the spiritual “meaning” from its erotic literal incarnation. We can understand not only stratified layers of meaning, but also an implicit hierarchy between them, as the literal kiss is totally supplanted by the much more important divine peace in heaven.

In contrast, metonymy is not a “hierarchical, repressive structure,” since relations are not based on being either “latent” or “manifest,” but rather on the connection between a term and its replacement, and the horizontal structure of all the elements at play (Grosz 100). Similarly, in defining subjectivity, the subject is not defined or established by a deeper “essence,” but by “his position with respect to other subjects and other signifiers” (Evans 193). For Lacan, desire, meaning, and subjectivity are all metonymic, based on a structure of relations. Lacan defines these metonymic structures as “internal representations” of “interpersonal relations,” and not as oppositions between “observable phenomena” and “deeper meanings” which cannot be immediately observed (193). Metonymic structures are not “distant from experience,” but are present “in the field of experience itself.” This is why Lacan prefers the model of the moebius strip, since its two sides are continuous, just as “structure is continuous with phenomena” (194). Analyzing a structure therefore involves the interpretation of “fixed relations” between “loci which are themselves empty.” These loci interact not based on any intrinsic value or properties, but “on the basis of the positions which they occupy in the structure,” and whatever loci may be put into these designated “slots” in a given structure, the relations between these positions remain the same (194).

If we interpret Julian’s parable linguistically, using Jakobson’s model, the Servant, Adam, Christ, and all men are substitutable terms, which function identically within the parable in a grammatical sense, and can be interchanged along the vertical or paradigmatic axis. For example, Julian says, “When Adam felle, Godes sonne fell” (283). Linguistically, “Adam” and “Godes sonne” are

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substitutable: the phrases “Adam fell” and “Godes sonne fell” are parallel in form, and the grammatical subject makes sense whether it is Adam or God’s placed in that position.

However, what distinguishes Julian’s structure from the substitution of other medieval exegesis, as we saw with Honorius, is that her vertical axis of metaphor and substitution is utterly dependent upon her horizontal axis of metonymy and relation, as I will explain. In contrast, Ann Astell argues that the Canticum functions according to a kind of “parataxis,” in which every image is a sign that functions independently, and each individual sign points to the same divine reality. She argues that within Canticum commentaries, images can be interpreted in any order, and the poetry of the Canticum itself contains a “disjunctive quality” so that “stanzas can be omitted or rearranged” without the loss of literal or allegorical meaning (80).

But in Julian’s parable, the paradigmatic or metaphoric figures of the Servant, Adam, Christ, and everyman are substitutable insofar as the syntagmatic or metonymic level allows. Her metaphoric substitutions are not like those of the Canticum commentaries, which can occur haphazardly without regard to all of the literal details of the text. For example, Julian is at first confused by some of the details of the figure of Adam,187 before God tells her to read all of the details. In other words, for the Servant to be substituted with Adam (metaphorically), all of the details about the Servant must be consistent with Adam. And all of the details of Adam must be consistent with Christ. These details are the metonymic system of relations which builds the meaning of her parable the way words build the meaning of the sentence.

In Julian’s parable, for example, the Servant’s cloak must make sense as Adam’s postlapsarian condition of labour and as Christ’s flesh torn on the Cross. All of the details must register for every substitution. In other words, though linguistically we can understand paradigmatic substitution, it is a vertical substitution that is at the same time dependent on a simultaneous horizontal or syntagmatic pressure. Were one to map out her parable visually, it would not

187 “For in the servant that was shewed for Adam, as I shall sey, I sawe many diverse properteys that might by no manner be derecte to singel Adam” (277).

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resemble a series of self-contained linear strata, but a network of vertical and horizontal connections.

The narrative structure of her parable is not the only syntagmatic aspect of her showings, however. The prose with which she narrates the parable is itself syntagmatic. Unlike other exegetes, Julian does not articulate a literal shell, followed by two or three allegorical interpretations, each contained in a linear order. Rather, the syntax of her parable moves syntagmatically back and forth between the different characters and elements of her parable, unevenly and nonlinearly. She refers forward to things she has not yet interpreted, and backward to things she has already said. Again, her parable unfolds like a web or network of information, unfolding both horizontally and vertically at once, and not in a series of even, orderly ideas.

But, if we interpret Julian’s parable psychoanalytically, using Lacan’s model, we cannot read vertical strata at all. Linguistically, a very literal and verbal substitution occurs when Julian puts Adam and Christ in the place of the Servant in various sentences. The substituting term completely usurps the position of the prior term in language: the grammatical subject of any single sentence is either Adam or Christ, not both. But in Lacan’s rendering of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, nothing is ever lost, only repressed, and the connection between the latent term and the manifest term itself generates meaning in the system of signs.

Where other medieval exegesis often suppresses the literal beneath the increasingly important allegorical layers, Julian’s parable does not. Honorius’ “kiss” is the vehicle for the tenor of “peace,” but the meaning of “kiss” is abandoned as soon as it conveys its true meaning. But Julian’s parable functions more like tectonic plates, in which some signs are repressed and others are manifested, and in which latent signs are like magma, always boiling beneath the surface, affecting the movement of the layers on top, and occasionally erupting from below, so that bottom becomes top and top becomes bottom. Every sentence about the Servant—although one term is the focus—is equally applicable to Adam, Christ, or everyman. In the symbolic economy of Julian’s parable, the identity or “meaning” of the Servant does not shift whether we read him as Adam, Christ, or all men, because this identity is defined instead by its relation with the fixed

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position of the Lord. It is the horizontal relation among the figures, not their vertical substitution, that matters. In fact, “substitution” does not properly occur at all, as Julian identifies Adam as Christ, and Christ as all men. Similarly, the body does not become substituted for the soul, desire is not substituted for truth; whatever term is ordained within a given slot, it is the slot itself and its horizontal relation that generates meaning.

For example, as Julian opens the parable, she states: “The lorde sittith solempnely in rest and in pees. The servant stondeth before his lorde reverently, redy to do his lordes will” (273). She tells us later in the parable that: “The lorde that sat solemply in rest and in peas, I understonde that he is God. The servant that stode before him, I understode that he was shewed for Adam” (277). In the “syntax” or “structure” of Julian’s parable, the identity or “meaning” of the Servant does not shift whether we read him as Adam, Christ, or all men (as she later also identifies the Servant) because this identity is defined instead by its relation with the fixed position of the Lord, who is God, and the Servant’s later fall into the “slade”: the mouth of a valley, glade, or stream (MED “slade, n.”).188 It is rather the horizontal relation among the figures, not their vertical substitution, that matters. Whatever term is ordained within a given slot, it is the slot itself and its horizontal relationship with the other terms at play that generates meaning. This functions similarly to a classical “logic structure,” or an empty pattern that is filled with specific contents (e.g. a syllogism). Aristotle, for example, saw topoi as “pigeonholes for locating already existing ideas and as generative patterns of thought or methods of analysis” (Miller 132). However, for Julian, it is not merely the structure that holds true among her various figures: the figures themselves, which she slots within the common structure, are also tied together.

The Servant, as a hollow “slot” or “locus,” is defined by its relation to the Lord: he stands before the Lord, reverently, ready to do his will. Similarly, the Lord’s identity or locus has no inherent “essence” that establishes him as God-the-Father, apart from his situation relative to the Servant, where he sits in rest and peace. The two loci are defined against each other: the Lord, as an

188 Though, in their edition, Watson and Jenkins have interpreted it here to mean a ditch or hole (272).

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unmoved mover, as pure actuality, and the Servant, in contrast, “stondeth…redy,” as an active force, or pure potentiality. Julian attests this later in the parable: “for in the godhede may be no traveyle…The standen of the servant betokeneth traveyle” (285). The subjectivities of these loci are defined relationally, in terms of binary oppositions, which have no meaning except insofar as they define the two against each other. In fact, Julian herself later states that she “sawe no difference betwen God and oure substance, but as it were all God” (287). Substantially, there is nothing distinguishing these two figures. But the syntactical network of her parable establishes temporary relationships that do generate a (constantly deferred and relational) meaning. The figures of the Lord and Servant only exist in historical time, as Julian articulates a Neoplatonic emanation and return, in which “before” and “after” history, there is no distinction between God and humanity or anything else. In the eschaton, humanity will be reunited with God through the liminal figure of Christ, and such distinctions will no longer be meaningful.

Later in the parable, Julian explains the relationship of all the figures more explicitly: In the servant is comprehended the seconde person of the trinite, and in the servant is comprehended Adam: that is to sey, all men. And therfore whan I sey "the sonne," it meneth the godhed, which is even with the fader; and whan I sey "the servant," it meneth Christes manhode, which is rightful Adam. By the nerehed of the servant is understand the sonne, and be the stonding on the left side is understond Adam. The lorde is God the father; the servant is the sonne Jesu Crist; the holy gost is the even love which is in them both. When Adam felle, Godes sonne fell. For the rightful oning which was made in heven, Goddes sonne might not be seperath from Adam, for by Adam I understond alle man (283).

Meaning is constantly shifted and deferred in the pile-up of signifiers: “in” the Servant is “comprehended” Christ, within which is “comprehended” Adam, which is “all men.” But when Julian says “the sonne,” it means the “Godhead,” and when she says “the servant,” it means “Christes manhode.” “Christes manhode” is in turn understood “by the nerehed of the servant,” but by his position on the “left side” of the Lord is “understood” Adam. The Holy Spirit does not even occupy a locus at all, he is himself the relation of love existing between the Servant and Lord. No one term stands alone or generates meaning independently. These figures do not exist as independent nodes that can be interchanged, but as networks of relations that resonate collectively. And perhaps Julian’s weblike approach to meaning is another way that her text counters hierarchical, patriarchial modes of thought.

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This can be seen more clearly at the beginning of the parable, when Julian establishes its general outline or structure: The lorde loketh upon his servant full lovely and swetly, and mekely he sendeth him to a certaine place to do his will. The servant not only he goeth, but sodenly he sterteth and runneth in gret hast for love to do his lordes wille. And anon he falleth in a slade, and taketh ful gret sore. His sterting was the godhede, and the renning was the manhed. For the godhede sterte fro the fader into the maidens wombe, falling into the taking of our kinde. And in this falling he toke grete sore. The sore that he toke was oure flesh, in which as swithe he had feling of dedely paines (273).

Inspired by the loving gaze of the Lord, the Servant moves in haste to do his will. Though there is a hierarchy established between these figures, since the Lord sits regally on a throne, and the Servant stands humbly before him, they still exist on the same allegorical “plane.” So though visually this represents a vertical hierarchy, it is really a metonymy, the establishment of a relationship between the two.

Later, Julian explains the inward state of the Servant: And the servant for love, having no regarde to himselfe nor to nothing that might fall of him, hastely deed sterte and runne at the sending of his lorde to do that thing which was his wille and his wurshippe. For it semed by his outwarde clothing as he had ben a continuant laborer and an hard traveler of long time. And by the inward sight that I had both in the lorde and in the servant, it semed that he was a newed: that is to sey, new beginning for to traveyle, which servant was never sent out before (281).

The Servant is not commanded by the Lord, but sees inwardly that he can help him (Watson and Jenkins 280). His “fall” is not a result of sin, but of eagerness to help the Lord out of love. According to Brant Pelphrey, this relationship between the Lord and Servant is an idealization of medieval chivalry, particularly the economic relationship between the upper and lower classes in medieval Norwich (88). Grace Jantzen extends this line of thought further: typically, the Lord’s courtesy would extend to other members of his class, but not those below him. Similarly, the Servant would be bound to follow the Lord’s commands, but the idea that the Lord treats the Servant as an equal, allowing him to act on his own behalf without direct instructions, subverts medieval hierarchy (132-3). However, this scene simultaneously emphasizes a “relationship of high to low,” since Julian is well aware of the “great and awful sovereignty of God,” making this courtesy and equality all the more radical (Olson 55).

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With this equality established between the Lord and Servant, the parable then moves horizontally: syntagmatically as the narrative progresses, and spatially as the Servant moves from the Lord to do his will. The Middle English verb “sterten” can mean to spring from; to hasten; to awaken abruptly; to fall down; or to gush (blood, tears, etc.) (MED “sterten, v.”). It is the origin of our modern English word, “to start” (OED “to start, v.”). Literally, then, the Servant springs forth from the Lord and runs to do his business. By using “sterteth” rather than merely “runneth,” Julian highlights the initial action of movement and separation from the Lord. The Servant “starts” or begins from the Lord, and moves away from him out of love. “Sterten” also evokes the sense of “falling down,” which foreshadows his upcoming fall into the slade. However, it more than foreshadows it; the entire movement of the parable is already microcosmically embodied in this one phrase. The final resonance of “sterten” depicts a fluid movement or gushing forth from the Lord.

Overall then, this passage evokes a primordial creation story, in which God sends forth his Wisdom or Logos, which unites with the material earth in the slade or ditch. God created the material universe ex nihilo, but because of the second person of the Trinity, humanity stands in paradoxical relation with larger creation. Humanity is and is not created. It is moulded after the Second Person, who is eternal with the Father, and in some sense “emanates” from him. Julian speaks of this paradox in many other places in the revelation,189 and this is a common paradox in medieval negative theology, which was highly influenced by a twelfth-century return to Neoplatonic thought (Bonin 1).

This horizontal forward movement from the Lord is united with a similar vertical movement: the Servant falls into the “slade.” Julian explains the full significance of this fall later:

189 See, for example, when Julian says, “Thus was He the servant aforne His comeing into erth, stondand redy aforne the Fader in purposs till what time He would send him to don that worshipfull dede be which mankynde was browte ageyn into Heven, that is to seyn, notwith-stonding that He is God, evyn with the Fadir as anempts the Godhede” (285).

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Adam fell fro life to deth: into the slade of this wreched worlde, and after that into hell. Goddes son fell with Adam into the slade of the maidens wombe, which was the fairest doughter of Adam…and mightely he feched him out of hell (283).

The Servant, as we learn, is Adam, Christ, and all men, seemingly forming a simple literal, allegorical, and tropological layering. But this is a simplification of the complex structuring of Julian’s parable. The Servant’s fall into the valley or ditch is Adam’s triple fall: into creation—this “valley of tears”—into sin, and into hell. It is also Christ’s dual fall: into Mary’s womb and therefore the flesh, and into death and hell to rescue Adam. This is another reason we cannot read Julian's parable as a strata of allegorical layers. The servant as Adam and as all men is doomed to hell in the “slade,” again representative of his fall from grace, to death and damnation. But the Servant as Christ alone can transcend death, and rescues all from hell.

This moment encapsulates Julian’s creative restructuring of medieval exegesis. The Servant as Adam cannot rise; only in the union of Christ and Adam is Adam saved. It would be like Christ intervening in Moses’ death, raising him from the dead, and bringing him into the Promised Land, which is not the case. Certain aspects of Moses foreshadow Christ, for example, his raising of his staff signifies Christ being lifted on the Cross, but Moses is not Christ. They are two independent real historical figures. And God as the auctor of history writes it such that aspects of Moses' life will signify forward to Christ. But Julian's parable doesn't work this way. Adam is Christ. Her parable is marked by temporal and syntagmatic compression (the Creation is the Fall is the Incarnation), as well as vertical or paradigmatic compression (the Servant is Adam is Christ is all men).

Where we cannot read the character of the Servant in substitutable terms, we can read the “fall” this way. This “fall” represents a series of vertical binaries: life and death, grace and sin, paradise and hell, divine Father and earthly mother, spirit and flesh. In other words, the Servant as Adam and as Christ falls vertically from heaven to earth, from spirit to flesh, from grace into sin, from paradise into hell, and from life into death. But instead of a vertical set of substitutions, each of these vertical binaries can be substituted for one another horizontally or metonymically. Each of these pairs exist along a temporal or horizontal axis: first Adam is created from the earth from the

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breath of God (a movement from heaven to earth), then he falls into sin, then dies, then enters hell, and then Christ is born, and then dies, and then harrows hell.

In Julian’s parable, all of these are horizontally compressed into one single movement, because metonymically, they are the same. The relation that they engender between the Lord and the Servant is always the same. This horizontal paradigmatic compression ensures that temporally, Adam and Christ are united, not by being placed atop one another in a vertical allegorical stratum, but by being completely superimposed. The same vertical movement that indicates a fall from grace into sin is also a movement from life into death, from paradise into hell. All movements are united into a single downward motion, which indicates a “oning” or a causal relationship between them. Adam's creation, his Fall, and his death, beget the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Harrowing of hell. And then Christ alone transcends this system in the Resurrection, and the return from Hell. But since Adam and all men are united in Christ, all transcend with him. And then Christ transcends all in the Resurrection, because he is already all.

4.3 Knitting: Tying, Clothing, and Skin As we have seen, metonymy is the meaning created by the horizontal movement of meaning, by the connections between things rather than their substitution. But Julian does not explicitly articulate her parable as metonymic; rather, she employs patterns of imagery to articulate her sense of total connection. Two of these images include “knitting” or joining together, and “oning” or complete union. Julian uses the verb “knit” and the imagery of knots, sewing, and clothing to emphasize the essential likeness, nearness, and oneness of divinity and humanity. For example, in another passage in the Long Text, Julian states: The noblest thing that ever he made is mankinde, and the fulleste substance and the hyest vertu is the blessed soule of Crist. And ferthermore, he will we wit that this deerwurthy soule was preciously knit to him in the making. Which knot is suttel and so mighty that it is oned into God, in which oning it is made endlesly holy. Farthermore, he will we wit that all the soules that shalle be saved in heven without ende be knit in this knot, and oned in this oning, and made holy in this holyhede (295).

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Here, God is imagined as a kind of primordial weaver, crafting the tapestry of creation that is simultaneously knit to him. He weaves out of himself. The medieval connection between weaving and textuality (seen, for example, in the word “textualis,” used to describe Gothic script) supports this idea, since biblically, God “spoke” creation into existence with his initial “fiat.” God is both weaver and poet. This connection between language and thread also suggests evokes Christ, the Logos, or Divine Word. Christ is the Divine Wisdom or Word, the principle of creation. Here, he is the knot, linking the spiritual and the material, the human and the divine. Eventually, all souls that will be saved will be “knit in this knot.” Julian discusses the connection of all the saved into the body of Christ in the same way, as we shall see. Knots, tying, and binding are common medieval images to depict relationship among the members of the Trinity, and between humanity and divinity. We can find examples on England and the Continent: from the knots of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells, and the Rothschild Canticles to the theology of Peter Lombard in Book Three of his Sentences. Dwelling momentarily on this final example, Peter Lombard offers a reading of John the Baptist’s statement that he is unworthy to untie the thong of Christ’s sandal (Mark 1:7, etc.). For Lombard, “I am not worthy to untie the thong of your sandal” means that John is not worthy to attempt to separate Christ’s humanity from his divinity—a warning to contemporary theologians who attempt to do so intellectually. Within the parable itself, Julian builds to this idea through the physical descriptions of the Lord and the Servant, especially the descriptions of their clothing: The place that the lorde sat on was simply on the erth, bareyn and deserte, alone in wildernesse. His clothing was wide and side, and full semely, as falleth to a lorde. The colour of the clothing was blew as asure, most sad and fair. His chere was merciful. The colour of his face was fair brown, with full semely countenance. His eyen were blake, most fair and semely, shewing full of lovely pitte, and within him an hey ward, long and brode, all full of endlesse hevens. And the lovely loking that he loked on his servant continually—and namely in his falling—methoughte it might melt oure hartes for love and brest them on two for joy (279).

The Lord is situated in space, “alone in wildernesse,” on the earth which is “bareyn” and “deserte.” As Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins suggest in the notes for their edition, wilderness “precedes civilization in the spiritual realm as in the civic,” and is not a “sign of the fall, since the lord is already sitting there before this occurs, but an image of latency” (Watson and Jenkins 278). This scene evokes the desert setting of Genesis, in which the Lord will bring barren

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women and barren landscapes to fruition. More specifically in Julian’s parable, the Servant will bring the landscape to fruition through his role as a gardener. The Lord does not need the Servant, but this relationship is reflected in the landscape anyway.

However, in direct contrast to the barrenness of the landscape is the Lord’s apparel, which is “wide,” “side,” “full semely,” and “blew as asure.” Julian often pairs synonyms together, either to mark the subtle differences between them, or for rhythmic purposes. This is a rhetorical strategy also employed in Old and Middle English vernacular preaching (Bately 119),190 so it is possible that she adopted it from witnessing daily Mass. In this case, “wide” and “side” rhyme while “side” and “semely” alliterate. “Wide” indicates that the clothing is “generously cut” or “excessively broad” (MED “wide, adj.”), and “side” similarly suggests something hanging, such as a garment, that is expansive or vast (MED “side, adj.”). The Lord’s clothing seems to extend over a large area around him. Because of its colour, “blew as asure,” the clothing suggests the expanse of the sea, sky, or the whole world. Within the Book of Psalms in particular, and the Bible in general, the Lord clothes himself with the universe (104:2, etc.). This suggests an immanent relationship between the material universe and the transcendent God, who wears the former like a cloak, a crowning achievement, or as a representation of his majesty. By describing the Lord’s clothing in this particular way, paralleling the universe, the universe and the Lord himself are also paralleled, since the latter wears the former.

The “asure” of the cloak literally refers to lapis lazuli, often conflated with sapphire in the Middle Ages (Watson and Jenkins 280). In most Middle English lapidaries where it appears, sapphire is interpreted as being fit for kings and great lords (Sloane Lapidary, 120).191 More specifically,

190 For a fuller discussion of rhythmic pairs in Anglo Saxon Homilies, see Ogawa, Hiroshi. Language and Style in Old English Composite Homilies. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010.

191 The Peterborough Lapidary adds that it “is clepid gemma gemmarum, as it wer chef of precios stones, for kepeþ þe body & saveþ þe lymes hole & sounde; & he haþe a bry3t ster, by þe bry3tnes of þat sterre & þerby his vertu is knowen” (101). The London Lapidary is most specific, comparing the sapphire to heaven: “saphire is þe colour of heuen, for þe stretcth of þe high sight semeth þat hit is ode” (23) and the waters beneath the heavens: “thei semblen to þe clene colur of heuen, & in the depe water be founde þe saphires þt arne derke & ful of vertures & better then the clene” (22). The sapphire also “comforteþ þe body & þe membres, & helpe men fro enprisonyng” (22), directly positioning it as a remedy to the fall of the Servant into the slade. Finally, the

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however, the term “asure” refers to the powdered form of lapis lazuli used to make blue pigment, used, for example, in manuscript illuminations. This blue pigment was incredibly expensive and luxurious, and in illuminations it was particularly associated with the Virgin Mary. Just as the brilliant blue of the Virgin stands out from the typical red and earth tones of the manuscript page, so the Lord’s cloak sets him apart from the barren landscape of the wilderness. The eastern provenance of lapis lazuli also associates it with the Near East, and thus the origin of the development of the covenant between God and the Israelites. Further, the colour “asure” is also a homophone for the Middle and Modern English word “asure,” denoting a promise or pledge. The blue colour then indicates the Lord’s trustworthiness, stability, and the idea of covenant.

In fact, when Julian later interprets the Lord's clothing, she states: The blewhed of the clothing betokeneth his stedfastnesse. The brownhed of his fair face, with the semely blackhede of the eyen, was most according to shew his holy sobernesse. The larghede of his clothing, which was fair, flamming about, betokeneth that he hath beclosed in him all hevens and all endlesse joy and blisse (281).

The "flamming" or billowing of the cloak comes from the verb “flaumen,” meaning to emit flames, blaze, shine, kindle, or arouse (MED “flaumen, v.”). The “flamming” of the cloak connects it with the colour of lapis lazuli, which is a deep blue flecked with gold. The cloak billows around the Lord, not only with the shape and movement of flame, but also gleams as if set with sparks of light. Both the cloak and the Lord’s eyes reflect the heavens; both present specks of gold set amidst dark blue. This indicates that the Lord paradoxically contains within himself all the heavens and the earth (in the reflection of his eyes), but is also immanent within the heavens and the earth (in his donning of the garment). God is both transcendent and immanent at once.

Julian supports this idea in a passage earlier in the text, when she says: “He is oure clothing, that for love wrappeth us and windeth us, halseth us and all becloseth us, hangeth about us for tender

London Lapidary points out the symbolism of the sapphire in the Book of Revelation: “Seynt Iohn seith in þe appocalipce þat he sawe in the seconde fundament of þe Cite a blisful saphire, & þerfore signifieth þe saphire þe seconde vertue þat is hope, & þerfore hit was punt in þe second corner vppon the breste of Aaron; & who þat saphire beholdeth he shulde be in memoire of þe blisse of heuen, & in gode memoire of hym-selfe” (23).

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love, that he may never leeve us” (139). The Lord, who is cloaked by the material universe, also wraps the universe like a garment: For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skinne, and the bones in the flesh, and the harte in the bowke, so ar we, soule and body, cladde and enclosedde in the goodnes of God. Yee, and more homely! For all these may waste and were away. The godenesse of God is ever hole, and more nere to us without any likenes. For truly oure lover desireth that the soule cleve to him with all the mightes, and that we be evermore cleving to his goodnes (145).

Notice that Julian never says that the spirit is encased in the flesh. Just as the physical elements of cloth and body, flesh and skin, bones and flesh, and heart and chest are embedded, so are we embedded within God’s goodness. There are two parallel, but unrelated relationships here. The soul is not within the flesh, rather, body and soul are metaphorically substitutable, since both occupy the same locus in the metonymy of containment. Like the thongs of Lombard’s proverbial sandal, Julian deliberately confuses the boundaries between body and soul, in order to break down any understood hierarchy between them. Overall, then, the Lord’s cloak manifests a paradox: the unions of immanence and transcendence, and the material and the spiritual.

On the other hand, the Servant wears a “whit kirtel, singel, olde, and all defauted, dyed with swete of his body, straite fitting to him and shorte, as it were an handful beneth the knee, bare, seming as it shuld sone be worne uppe, redy to be ragged and rent.” Julian later tells us that “the whit kirtel is his [Christ’s] fleshe” (285). A “kirtel” can describe a range of garments, but is typically a tunic or cloak (MED “kirtel, n.”). It can also refer to the flesh or body in general, the seamless robe of Christ in the Gospels, “a covering of worms,” or a hymen. The kirtel of Adam does not symbolize the flesh of Christ: it is one and the same. Julian has deliberately chosen a word that means both, because both meanings are inherent. The kirtel is the flesh, which is mortal, which becomes covered in worms in death. The kirtel can also represent the hymen, a fleshly knot that separates inside from outside, purity from impurity. The dual imagery captures Julian's conflation of time: the hymen is an image of future production and life, while the worms are an indication of death and what is past. Also, when Christ took flesh from his mother, he did so without breaking her hymen. Similarly, the term “singel” suggests that the garment exists as a single layer or piece, but specifically evokes Christ’s union of humanity and divinity, an image from the Psalms (22:18) that

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is typologically fulfilled when the soldiers cast lots over Christ’s seamless garment (John 19:23, Matthew 27:35). Julian herself attests this connection later, stating that “the singlehede is that ther was right noght betwen the godhede and manhede” (285). Thus, the singleness of the Servant’s garment reflects the idea that the flesh and kirtel are the same: divinity merges with humanity and is one with it in Christ. The oldness of the fabric “is of Adams wering” (285), but it signifies that Christ was always already human in the Trinity, coeternal with the Father. The kirtel becomes a sort of blueprint of humanity, preexistent in Christ, who then takes on the kirtel as flesh.

Julian later explains that “the defauting is the swete of Adams traveyle” (285), and, as above, that the kirtel is "dyed with the swete of his body.” The kirtel is not “stained” or merely “soaked” with sweat; rather, it is “dyed.” The term puns on “die,” since both labour and death are effects of the Fall. As Watson and Jenkins point out, the Servant is wearing signs of punishment before the Fall even occurs (Watson and Jenkins 280). The reference to artisanal dying also evokes the medieval motif of Christ in the winepress. Christ, like a cluster of grapes, would be put in a vat and crushed for his “blood” or juice. The Servant, too, externalizes his insides.

As the Lord’s cloth is a beautiful and expensive blue, suggesting that he is clothed with the material universe, the Servant’s cloth is “dyed” with his own exudation. But this exudation is sweet, and here Julian puns on “swete”—the “sweat” or perspiration of the Servant, which is “sweet.” Sweating was thought to be medicinal or purgative in the Galenic medical model. But “swete” is also Middle English for “sweet,” indicating a pleasantness of taste or smell, and metonymically, a pleasant or blissful state (MED “swete, n.2”). Again, Julian has punned on opposites: the toil and sweat of the Servant's labour, a seeming result of the Fall, is also sweet. Sin is transformed into salvation.

The garment is also described as “straite fitting to him and shorte, as it were an handful beneth the knee.” In reference to sewing, “straite” can mean that the fabric is tightly pulled or bound, and with reference to fabric, that it is tightly fitting, taut, narrow, or of a single width (MED “straite, adj.”). In general, however, “straite” can also mean inadequate in space, short of time, strict or stern of conscience, stringent in commandment or religious order, admitting no exceptions, severe

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justice or vengeance, a severe reckoning at Judgement Day, strict spies or guards, tight confinement in prison or fetters, a severely austere lifestyle, impoverished, with insufficient necessities, stingy, or avaricious. Besides depicting the poverty of the Servant, whose knees are barely covered by the too-scant fabric, the term “straite” also further contrasts the Servant with the Lord. While the Lord’s cloak is so large that it billows around him, evoking the expanse of the sea or sky, the Servant’s is a single layer of defective clothing, too small and tight, dyed with his sweat. Julian tells us that “the straighthede is poverte” and “the shorthede sheweth the servant laborar” (285). The Servant’s clothing indicates that his being is limited in time and space: he is both mortal and flesh. He is also severe upon himself. The Lord’s cloak reveals his liberality, while the Servant’s indicates a severeness of judgement. Solely through their respective clothing, Julian has inverted the standard conception of God as Judge. In her depiction, humanity is the severe judge of itself, and God is full of pity.

Later, Julian fully interprets imagery of the garment: By that his kertel was at the point to by ragged and rent is understond the sweppes and the scorges, the thornes and the nailes, the drawing and the dragging, his tender flesh renting. As I saw in some party, the flesh was rent fro the headpanne, falling on peces unto the time the bleding failed. And than it beganne to dry againe, cleving to the bone (287).

The raggedness of the “kertel” indicates the “sweppes” and scourges of Christ’s flesh on the Cross (MED “swepe, n.”). Christ’s flesh is rent from the very “headpanne” or “skull” (Watson and Jenkins 286) and falls into pieces. From the supposed unity of Christ’s garment, we now see him literally torn to pieces, in which the “murderous violence done to Christ’s own flesh becomes, in God’s plan of salvation, a tearing-up of the old humanity to make way for the new” (Abbott 97). Again, we see Julian’s penchant for alliterative doubles: the garment is rent by the “the sweppes and the scorges” and “the drawing and the dragging.” This duality is evocative of her general theology, in that she sees everything “double.” She tells us at the beginning that her sight “was shewed double in the lorde, and the sight was shewed double in the servant. That one perty was shewed gostly in bodely liknesse. Thar other perty was shewed more gostly withoute bodely liknes” (273). In contrast, “in the sighte of God alle man is one man, and one man is alle man” (279). The contrast between the unity of God and the duality of humanity is stressed repeatedly.

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Humanity is sensual and substance, the Servant is Adam and Christ (whereas the Lord is simply God). Perhaps part of the duality is because God is pure spirit, but humanity (and Christ as representative of all humanity) are spirit and flesh. However, Julian seems to stress that though we experience this duality, God does not perceive it. Nancy Coiner argues similarly that this is not “a specular relation between two subjects united in suffering yet separated in space (Julian and Christ), but instead locates it within one figure, the Servant, which bears two meanings: Adam (human nature) and the Son” (Coiner 316). She further argues that: The split between God and the soul thus turns out to reflect a split between the two parts of Christ or of human nature. And since this internal split creates a parallel between Christ and human nature, division (the troubling doubleness of the human being) turns out, paradoxically enough, to be a source of likeness and unification between God and the soul (Coiner 316).

For God all man is one man. Arguably, then, this duality is not real, but only a flaw in humanity’s fallen perception. In this case, medieval exegesis with its fourfold perspective is a fallen perspective. For God all things adhere. Julian’s parable, then, seeks to convey this unity.

4.4 “Oning”: Collapse, Superimposition and Union Julian’s articulation of this unity or “oning” is present at the level of both her form and her content. Indeed, distinguishing between them would be contrary to Lacan’s principle of metonymy, in which surface and depth are one. For example, earlier in the Showings, Julian tells us that God “loveth alle that shalle be saved, as it were alle one soule” (237), and “the charite of God maketh in us such a unitye that when it is truly seen, no man can parte themselfe from other” (329). Rhetorically speaking, Julian also employs “oning” by combining multiple meanings into one term or phrase. As metonymy does not supplant one layer for another, so Julian’s concept of “oning” unites surface and depth, seen in the way each of her terms unifies multiple resonances.

For example, Julian finally explains the relationship of all the figures of the Lord and Servant explicitly: In the servant is comprehended the seconde person of the trinite, and in the servant is comprehended Adam: that is to sey, all men. And therfore whan I sey "the sonne," it meneth the godhed, which is even with the fader; and whan I sey "the servant," it meneth

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Christes manhode, which is rightful Adam. By the nerehed of the servant is understand the sonne, and be the stonding on the left side is understond Adam. The lorde is God the father; the servant is the sonne Jesu Crist; the holy gost is the even love which is in them both. When Adam felle, Godes sonne fell. For the rightful oning which was made in heven, Goddes sonne might not be seperath from Adam, for by Adam I understond alle man (283).

In the Servant is Christ, Adam, and as Adam, all men. She further elaborates that the figure of the Servant is dual, when the “sonne,” she means the “godhed” of Christ, which is God, and when the “Servant,” she means “manhode” of Christ, which is Adam. The Servant’s nearness to God signifies his divinity, by his placement on the left side of God signifies his humanity in Adam. When Adam fell, God’s son fell, reiterating an idea found in the first letter to the Corinthians (15:21-22) and Philemon (2:6-8). Because they were “oned” in heaven, Adam and Christ cannot be separated. More specifically, God cannot see them as distinct, and if God cannot “see” it, it does not truly exist. More than this, Adam contains in himself all men. All members of the Trinity are also present in the parable: the Lord is God the Father, the Servant is Christ the Son, the love between them is the Holy Ghost. There are thus two overlapping Trinities, a human and a divine, and Christ is the node that connects both. The first contains Christ, Adam, and all men, the second, Christ, the Father, and the Holy Spirit.

Julian is able to identify the Servant with Christ because of two striking details: the “unsemeliness” of the clothing, and the “newness” of the Servant’s labour. Adam’s garment is the flesh that Christ takes on in the Incarnation, ready to be destroyed in the Passion. As Margaret Healy-Varley points out, “are all organized around this moment of touch, the contact between human and divine in the Incarnation” (207). She relates this moment to the parable of the Good Samaritan: Christ is both the one who fell and the one who pulls the man “from the mud.” However, there are many other biblical precedents, including Joseph’s fall into the pit, etc. This identification of Christ with the Servant means that when Adam fell from grace, God’s Son fell from heaven: Adam fell fro life to deth: into the slade of this wreched worlde, and after that into hell. Goddes son fell with Adam into the slade of the maidens wombe, which was the fairest doughter of Adam—and that for to excuse Adam from blame in heven and in erth—and mightely he feched him out of hell (283).

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Julian’s image of the “slade” concentrates many theological ideas in one image. The slade is the valley, the material earth, sin, hell, and death. It also represents a feminine material principle: the vaginal space or womb. As Diane Krantz suggests, it therefore encompasses multiple images of enclosure: Adam falls into the “wreched world,” and then death, and Christ falls into Mary’s womb, and then hell. And Christ, as man, is descendent from, and therefore contained within, Adam (Krantz 80). The fall into the slade therefore depicts a series of temporal events, also horizontally compressed or “oned.” This moment parallels anatomical conception—since in Aristotelean concepts of procreation, men provided the form and women the matter (Robertson, “Medieval Medieval Views” 142)—with divine creation, where God breathed his spirit into the dust of the earth. Since the Second Person of the Trinity is coeternal with the Father, his form or Logos is the means through which humanity is made: a stamp that imprints itself on the material earth to make humanity. The fall into the slade thus depicts the creation of the universe, the creation of humanity, the fall of humanity, and the salvation of humanity in Christ. This U-shaped narrative structure192 itself even takes the form of the slade, once again demonstrating Julian’s “oning” on the level of form and content.

Once in the slade, the Servant takes full “sore.” Julian’s choice of diction unites two distinct definitions of this adjective, which combine in a theologically profound way. “Sore” has its modern connotations of something “characterized or attended by physical pain,” “causing sorrow,” “sinful, wicked, evil,” “involving great effort or exertion,” etc (MED “sore, adj. 2”). But in Middle English, “sore” can also refer in particular to the colour reddish brown (MED “sore, adj.1”), which is a deliberate reference to Adam—which means “red” in Hebrew. “Adamah,” the feminine form, means “red earth” or “clay” (Ithamar 60). Though it is unlikely that Julian knew any Hebrew, the meaning of Adam’s name was often thrown around in sermons and commentaries, so it is possible that Julian knew its etymology. Julian’s syllepsis unites the

192 In The Great Code, Northrop Frye argues that "The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story...one in which man...loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation" (207).

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Creation and the Fall. Stating that the Servant fell “sore” suggests that he was created in the flesh, that he sinned and thus fell, and that he suffered and died (or returned to the earth) as a result. Rather than using a historical or biblical event to signify future meanings, Julian collapses meanings into each other, uniting them into a fictional frame. In doing so, her parable eliminates causality: Christ does not become incarnate because Adam fell from grace—the two moments are the same.

Then Julian elaborates on the suffering that the Servant—as Adam and Christ—endures: “Lo, my beloved servant, what harme and disses he hath had and taken in my servis for my love—yea, and for his good wille! Is it not skille that I reward him his frey and his drede, his hurt and his maime, and alle his wo? And not only this, but falleth it not to me to geve him a gifte that be better to him and more wurshipful than his owne hele shuld have bene? And els me thinketh I did him no grace” (275).

The Lord testifies that the Servant suffered harm in his service because of his love and good will toward the Lord. It is “skille” or reasonable to reward him for this harm, and to reward him more so than if he had not fallen (MED “skille, adj.”). As Nicholas Watson indicates in his edition, the opening of the Lord’s words “Lo, my beloved servant” reference Isaiah 42:1-7193 (Watson and Jenkins 274). The allusion reiterates that the Lord will “uphold” his Servant, or raise him from the “slade.” The servant in Isaiah will open the eyes of the blind, free captives from prison, and release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. Ironically, in Julian’s parable, it is the Servant himself who is blind, and imprisoned in the darkness of the “slade.” This allusion foreshadows the idea that the Servant is both Christ and Adam. As Christ, the Servant will bring himself, as Adam, out of this situation.

193 “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will bring justice to the nations…I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness,” "Ecce servus meus suscipiam eum electus meus conplacuit sibi in illo anima mea dedi spiritum meum super eum iudicium gentibus proferet...ut aperires oculos caecorum et educeres de conclusione vinctum de domo carceris sedentes in tenebris" (Isaiah 42:1-7).

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In the above passage, Julian puns on the word “frey,” which, in this context, refers to the Servant’s frailty or “frele,” which can be spelled “frey” (MED “frele, adj.”). Because of sin, the Servant has been weakened physically and spiritually. But “frey” is also another spelling of “fre” or “free” (MED "fre, adj.") It was the freedom of the Servant that allowed him to fall. His freedom is paradoxically his strength and his “frele”: he chooses to run and do the will of the Lord, but it causes him to be weakened. This syllepsis suggests that his frailty is necessary, or, as Julian argues later, “sin is behovely.”194 Humanity’s freewill is the cause of its downfall, which indicates that such a fall was expected. Julian also puns on “hele” when the Lord says that he ought to give the Servant a gift better than his “owene hele shuld have bene.” In this case, the Lord means “hele”: a state of sound physical, mental, or spiritual health; fortune, good luck, profit, advantage; preservation, protection, help, safety; or salvation (MED “hele, n.1”). But “hele” also sounds like “hell,” which can also be spelled “hele” in Middle English. In this instance, in blending the two opposites, the Lord shows how he can turn suffering into salvation. The reward according to the “lower dome” is hell, but the reward according to the “higher dome” will be salvation.

Julian’s next use of syllepsis is seen as a result of the Servant taking sore, in which he “groneth and moneth and walloweth and writheth. But he may not rise nor help himself by no manner of weye” (275). Julian is constantly aware of the rhythm of her prose: “groneth” and “moneth” rhyme, while “walloweth” and “writheth” alliterate. And, once again, Julian articulates something theologically profound in her choice of diction. In Middle English, “gronen” can mean to groan, moan; to lament, complain; to groan in childbirth or give birth; to be in confinement; to make animal-like sounds (grunt, growl, roar, coo, etc.); or to become sick and die (MED “gronen, v.”). “Groneth” highlights a number of theological issues through the range of its meanings, and again, it collapses or “ones” events in chronological time. First, the Servant suffers—in this case, quite physically—because of his fall, and he bewails his state. The Servant’s groans are like a woman’s groans in childbirth, which extend the image of conception implied by the previous passage when the Servant “sterts” forth into the slade.

194 “But Jhesu, that in this vision enformed me of alle that me neded, answered by this worde and saide: “Sinne is behovely, but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wel” (209).

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In the Genesis account of the Fall, one of the punishments of Eve, and all women thereafter, is to suffer pains in childbirth (3:16). This image collapses the idea of humanity’s first creation and their subsequent reproduction in pain after the Fall. In other words, the Creation and Fall are again collapsed into one action: an image of birthing and its resultant pain. However, the Servant himself does not give birth, but he represents the process of birthing. He is born and therefore he suffers. “Groneth” can also mean to grunt like an animal, which highlights the Servant’s fall into a lower order of being. “Groneth” can also suggest confinement: the Servant suffers, as we will see, because he cannot look at his Lord, and believes himself to be alone. This confinement also evokes the containment in the womb, and suggests another related containment: in the tomb. Essentially, then, the Servant’s suffering in the slade depicts human creation, existence, and death as a containment, or an extended period of confinement. Humanity is developing like a fetus in the womb, and this process of growth is painful for both divine mother and human child.

Julian employs the same tactic with her next terms, “walloweth” and “writheth,” which offer us even more information about the state of the Servant. The verb “wallowen” can mean to wriggle or squirm on the ground, affected by grief or pain; to turn over in the mind; to roll back and forth in a substance so as to be wrapped or covered with it; to indulge in sin or depravity; to be drenched or immersed (i.e. in the blood of Christ) (MED “wallowen, v.”). The Servant writhes in the slade like the snake in Eden who caused the Fall, again, eliminating causality so that the Servant appears to be the cause of his own falling. He obsesses in his mind about his fall; he is weighed down by guilt. He rolls back and forth in the mud, coating himself in it. This is a gesture of humility: he lowers himself further after his fall by wallowing in the clay from which he is made. Interestingly, to “wallow” can also mean to indulge in depravity. Again, Julian removes the causal connection: depravity is a result of the Fall, not its cause. Then, for the first time, we get an image that suggests the reading Julian will pull out of this passage: the Servant is immersed or drenched, possibly in blood (typically the term “wallow” is used of the blood of Christ). He is covered in the “scoriae of childbirth,” and therefore incomplete and impure (Bakhtin 25). I will not say that the Servant’s situation foreshadows the bleeding of Christ on the Cross, because he is the bleeding of Christ on the Cross—because he is also Christ. Christ’s “containment” in the flesh

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of Adam, and bleeding is the mark of childbirth. Yet, again, Christ is both mother and his own offspring. He is creator but also created. He gives birth to salvation, to new humanity, but as humanity, he is also paradoxically the product of that salvation. As Christ says to John in Revelation, “Behold, I am making all things new” (21:5). And so these two images of blood bookend humanity’s lifecycle, depicting its origins in nature and clay, and birth through a mother, and its completion and redemption in the Crucifixion of Christ.

Julian makes this connection explicitly after the parable, when she says: We wit that alle oure moders bere us to paine and to dying. A, what is that? But oure very moder Jhesu, he alone bereth us to joye and to endlesse leving—blessed mot he be! Thus he sustaineth us within him in love, and traveyled into the full time that he wolde suffer the sharpest throwes and the grevousest paines that ever were or ever shall be, and he died at the last. And whan he had done, and so borne us to blisse, yet might not all this make aseeth to his mervelous love. And that shewd he in theyse hye, overpassing wordes of love: “If I might suffer more, I wold suffer more.” He might no more to die, but he wolde not stinte of werking. Wherfore him behoveth to fede us, for the deerworthy love of moderhed hath made him dettour to us. The moder may geve her childe sucke her milke. But oure precious moder Jhesu, he may fede us with himselfe, and doth full curtesly and full tenderly with the blessed sacrament that is precious fode of very life (313).

Christ’s suffering on the Cross are the birth pains of a mother in labour; he dies that we might live. His blood is the milk that sustains us. As Kathryn Reinhard puts it, “if God is our Father in our first creation, Christ is our Mother in our recreation, and in his Incarnation and Passion he births us into new life and into loving communion within the Trinity” (Reinhard 644).

4.5 Conclusion

Toward the end of her Long Text, Julian imposes a final interpretation on all of the previous showings: And fro the time that it was shewde I desyered oftentimes to witte what was oure lords mening. And fifteen yere after and mor, I was answered in gostly understonding, seyeng thus: "What, woldest thou wit thy lordes mening in this thing? Wit it wele, love was his mening. Who shewed it the? Love. What shewid he the? Love. Wherfore shewed he it the? For love. Holde the therin, thou shalt wit more in the same. But thou shalt never wit therein other withouten ende" (379).

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All things are collapsed into love, through love. Knowing and loving are not divided as separate acts, but knowledge takes love as its object and as its means. In Julian’s showings, everything is an act of love, signifying love. The movement of the Servant from the Lord, his fall into the earth and subsequent rescue, are all acts of love between figures so tightly wrought that we can scarcely divide them. After all, the Lord as God the Father does scarcely anything: all the action is embodied in the Servant, who is both God and man. As man, he runs to accomplish the Lord’s desire, and as man, he falls and suffers for this desire. As God, he redeems himself from his fall. God is a singularity, and resonates univocally. Love is his being, essence, meaning, and message. His interventions in history are acts of love, and human history is itself a macrocosmic act of love between humanity and the divine.

Denis Turner, in his book Eros and Allegory, poses two interrelated questions. First, he asks, “in what way, if any, is human eros describable as a ‘model’ of the divine love?” (131). He argues that the love between humanity and the divine has the same “shape” as a love story, but in the same way that a map has the same formal “shape” as the landscape it covers (132). The relation is purely metaphorical. Second, he asks, “does making carnal love in any way make the salvation history which it maps?” He answers succinctly that, “the answer to that question must be no” (132). I argue that Julian’s hermeneutic of metonymy makes this connection possible. Sexual consummation and conception are at the heart of Julian’s parable. Separation, penetration, reunion: these are the great movements of human history. So does carnal love make the salvation history which it maps? No. But carnal love is a metonymic of salvation history.

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Conclusion Eros as Metonym Charity never falleth away: whether prophecies shall be made void, or tongues shall cease, or knowledge shall be destroyed (1 Corinthians 13:8)

This dissertation has attended to some of the ways that desire, language, and interpretation are interconnected in medieval English devotional literature. Like Whiterig’s Meditacio, which hinges on the progressive embodiment of his sign, this dissertation has moved from a focus on erotic glance, to touch, to penetration, and finally, to a complete, mystical union— not only of people, but of time, matter, and space. The texts I have analyzed are erotic and devotional performances, in which tensions between language/meaning, body/spirit, and human/divine are played out.

My first chapter began with a focus on tropology, the place where textual interpretation and embodied action meet, where language and the body co-mingle. Biblical events are interpreted for their moral and even devotional senses, and become incarnate in the readers who perform these actions. Aelred of Rievaulx constructs an economy of desire for his readers: after purging themselves of earthly desires, and they step into the position of Mary Magdalene, and channel their affection toward Christ. This affection, though imagined or contemplated in the minds of readers, is still focused on Christ’s body—and the touching, caressing, and grasping of his flesh. The sexual desire that caused Mary Magdalene’s sin, one anchorites likely contended with themselves, is repurposed into love of Christ. Readers are called to empty themselves, so that they can be penetrated by Christ-as-Logos, and in imitation of the Virgin Mary, they themselves become bearers of Christ’s Incarnation. Their flesh becomes a receptacle for Christ’s Word. This in itself reflects Aelred’s conception of tropology: the moral inscriptions become embodied in the reader, who performs these devotions, and Christ-the-Logos similarly takes their flesh as his own, resulting in union of humanity and the divine, in the flesh. Aelred articulates an embodiment of knowledge, which must be performed, and seek its object in the flesh. More importantly, however, Aelred articulates human subjectivity as being established through a network of relations. It is in and through the other that one finds God.

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In my second chapter, John Whiterig used desire as the principle of his fourfold reading of the Crucifix: the outstretched arms of Christ manifest his desire to embrace humanity to him, to connect the Old and New Testaments, to connect the body and the spirit, language and meaning, etc. Whiterig’s entire semiotics is based in desire: word and meaning form a coition, which is then replicated in the union of speaker and listener, and finally, all humanity and the divine. Like humanity, discourse itself is founded on lack, and therefore is itself a form of longing. Language becomes the means through which one heart can touch another, igniting the other with this lack or desire for Christ. Whiterig’s textual performance begins in the abstract: speaking of signs and letters, and moves to a reflection on Christ’s body, and how it must be read like an open manuscript. He desires to touch and hold and scan these wounds-as-letters. We move from the world of ideas, abstractions, and representations to the embodied and tangible flesh. And finally, Whiterig articulates his idea of complete union with Christ, through an exchange of one heart for another. The innermost core, the fleshly core, of each being is interchanged, as their identities meld together in a tangible, sensual union. Overall, Whiterig articulates an anthropology of humanity as lack, and as entering through the lack of Christ to divine union.

In the negative language of The Cloud of Unknowing, union is still the goal, but it rejects the Western and heteronormative constructions of desire that are typical of positive theology. God cannot be seen or known, but he can be felt and loved. God is not accessible from the front, representative of sight, direct interaction, and mental cognition. Instead, he is accessed from behind, complete with images of darkness instead of light, touch instead of sight, and forgetting instead of understanding. Images of domination, constriction, and violence also pervade this text, constructing God as something powerful that cannot be accessed in the typical devotional ways, and whose vast transcendence make him a dangerous and incomprehensible force with which to grapple. Though completely beyond humanity, the Cloud asks humanity to strip God, expose him, and penetrate him. At the same time, they are required to forget, cover, and bind themselves, as humanity is defined as negativity or lack. It is this dual movement that perpetuates a violent, sexual union between the two figures: God is penetrated with a “dart of love,” humanity with a “beam of light.” The physical penetration

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of God, and the intangible penetration of humanity reveal the text’s ultimate desire: a complete melding of body and soul, spirit and flesh, human and divine in erotic embrace.

In my final chapter, Julian of Norwich receives a vision in which the interaction between two figures, the Lord and Servant, embody the essential shape of history, and its manifestation of the relationship between humanity and the divine. All the essential events in history are collapsed into one single cycle of movement: the Servant moves away from the Lord, falls, and then is returned to him. Julian tells us that through love, all things are united, including historical events. The superimposition of figures, events, and meanings reveals a conceptual eroticism: beings are interpenetrated, overlapped, and united in the figure of the Servant, who is eventually united with the figure of the Lord. The course of history can be reduced into a simple love story between two men, and all of human history itself becomes a singular act of love between them. Julian’s interpretive strategy is metonymic, in which one narrative level does not merely signify another isolated level, as in some other medieval exegesis, but rather, each layer is interconnected and dependent on a structure of relations with the other.

Moving forward, it would also be useful to consider the much-discussed “literality” of both Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe, and how their interpretive performances of desire fit into the hermeneutic scheme that I have discussed, if at all. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath provides another fruitful comparison, in her sexual and subversive “glossing” of biblical material. But for now, this dissertation has primarily sought to answer the question, what is the role of eros in these devotional texts? Eros (GEL “ἔρως, n.”), one of four Greek terms used for love in the Christian tradition, primarily signifies a passionate or sexual love, which is typically contrasted with agape (GEL “ἀγάπη, n.”), a charitable form of love (Nygren 31). And yet, in Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, it is eros, or desire for another, that allows a thinker to ascend from carnal desire to contemplation of ideal forms (36-56). Is the eros of the four texts I have examined merely a metaphoric flourish, typical of the cross-current between the Canticum canticorum commentaries, courtly love poetry, and devotional literature, starting in the twelfth century (Turner 32-33)? Or is writers’ use of this phenomenon to describe the relationship with the divine indicative of a deeper and more meaningful connection?

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Many scholars have postulated the place of erotic language in medieval devotional literature. William E. Phipps and Marvin Pope, for example, see the manipulation of the erotic language of the Canticum as a release valve for medieval Christianity's repressed sexuality (Phipps 90- 91, Pope 123). Peter Dronke argues that such commentaries were dialectical and would not have used this erotic language in its “foul” human sense, but it exists as pure signifier (Dronke 62). Jean Leclerq understands such imagery to aid monks in recognizing hidden sinful impulses in order to transcend them (Monks and Love 8). Ann Astell also sees erotic language as a symbol of deeper psychological realities, interpreting erotic language as a vehicle for Jungian integration through the union of the feminized subject with the masculine divine. Patricia Cox Miller, on the other hand, views allegory as a way of heightening the erotic tensions of the Canticum, where the text itself becomes an erotic body that performs what it utters. In other words, through the allegorization of the Canticum, text and reader, like bridegroom and bride, become united (Matter 22). E. Ann Matter, building on Miller's argument, suggests that in uniting form and content, body and soul, letter and spirit, the union of reader and divine auctor is also achieved (41).

Susannah Mary Chewning articulates the paradox of many anchoritic texts: that “sensual, bodily” metaphors are used to illustrate “spiritual, devotional” concepts, and that virginal devotees in their “physical nature” become “sexualized” brides of Christ in their “spiritual” nature (183). This occurs, in part, because medieval women were constructed as sexual, physical beings, marked especially by their sexual relations with men: mothers and wives, virgins or whores, etc. (188). Similarly, Grace Jantzen approaches the erotic language in late medieval women's writings as a monument reflecting the perspective of men in control (12,14). Under the constraint of patriarchal associations between women and weakness and the flesh, women used the example of the Virgin Mary to capitalize on the related association between weakness and humility, allowing them to achieve holiness through the very thing that made them sinful in the first place (170). In “The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse,” Karma Lochrie argues that because medieval women were associated with positive theology and the bodily, embodied and carnal language was therefore a discourse that they necessarily ventriloquized when speaking about God (116). In “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” she points out that while Caroline Walker

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Bynum has opened up the field through her work on the importance of the female body in medieval devotional literature, more must be said specifically about its erotic and sexual aspects, which are not at all mutually exclusive with Bynum's maternal themes (183, 187).

Lara Farina sees sexualized language in anchoritic literature as reflecting an anxiety over anchorites’ sexuality, which it attempts to transform into spiritual desire. The anchorite’s body becomes mapped onto her anchorhold, which, in turn, becomes sexualized and an extension of the “open, vulnerable female body.” The anchorhold manifests the problem with policing the female body: it is “open” to contamination, but also “closed” to supervision (60). And, finally, for Denys Turner, erotic language is language in which realities about the relationship of humanity and divinity find their most apt expression (58). With its concern for collapsing the identity of lover and beloved or subject and object, erotic language pushes at the boundaries of signification itself, and it is at language's most ecstatic limits that one can convey the paradoxical relationship of humanity and divinity (62). For Turner, the love of God for humans has the same narrative “shape” as a human love story. But, again, denies that eros has a “constructive” or “participative role” in salvation (132).

In examining the role that desire and the erotic have in the various hermeneutic systems of these four English writers, my dissertation has tried to show that erotic language is more than merely decorative, but rather, it metonymically manifests the connection between humanity and the divine. Rather than Plato’s hierarchy, in which carnal love begins the path to contemplation, but is ultimately dismissed, and rather than scholars’ suggestion that eros is no more than a particularly apt metaphor in describing or imagining the ineffable relationship of God and the individual soul, eros can be a manifestation of divine love. Both of the above theories dismiss the embodiment of the earthly soul. Either the body is transcended (as our Cloud-author would put it, the cup is smashed against the wall once the wine has been drunk), or, language about the body and erotic love is merely metaphoric, representing or substituting for something intangible and completely unconnected.

Instead, I see the real, erotic relations among humanity as a metonym to the relation of the full, embodied person and God. For example, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the word is not a

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“sign” of objects and meaning, but is their “vehicle” (207)—not their clothing, but their “body” (211). The significance of a thing is not beyond its appearances (372), but rather, in it, “significance and existence are one” (377). The medieval relationship of language and meaning, signifier and signified, is always caught up in the relationship between body and soul. Rather than the body “housing” the soul, which is therefore distinct from it, William of St. Thierry suggests that the body was an expression of the soul (Resurrection 166), and similarly, Aquinas argues that the body was a product of the soul’s own unfolding (242). Christ’s status as Logos, the Word of God made flesh, also attests this. He is meaning, truth— all of the resonances of logos—made flesh, and thus body and soul, sign and meaning are interimplicated.

The erotic language of the five texts I have examined does not function beyond appearances, but its “appearance” and “truth” are one. Sarah Beckwith argues that the hypostatic union of humanity and divinity in Christ affirms and “represents” the union of body and soul in humanity (Christ’s Body 45). I think that in its very existence as both body and soul, humanity is a living microcosm of the macrocosmic relationship of humanity and divinity (embodied in Christ). In other words, humanity is related to God metonymically. The relationship of carnal to divine eros is also metonymic, rather than metaphoric. If God can “write” typology into history, and if the “Book of Nature” can signify its divine creator, then surely the relations among humans in some sense participate in the relationship with the divine. Carl Jung saw eros as a mode of “psychic relatedness” (65). Eros is an attraction based on likeness, that seeks to fill a lack. Spiralling between likeness and difference, fullness and emptiness, and longing and possessing: the love between devotional writers and the divine Other is erotic.

Both human identity and the pursuit of knowledge are also connected to and dependent on desire. As Caroline Walker Bynum reiterates of Mechthild of Magdeburg, “we are our desire,” and, “longing can never die” (Resurrection 340). Similarly, Judith Butler argues that in Spinoza’s Ethics, desire is the essence of man (Subjects of Desire 3). But I think that Jean- Luc Marion says it best: “nothing belongs to me more than that which I desire, for that is what I lack; that which I lack defines me more intimately than everything that I possess, for

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what I possess remains exterior to me and what I lack inhabits me; such that I can exchange what I possess, but not the lack that possesses my heart” (108). The desire that I have discussed in these four chapters operates as an anthropology, in which humanity is dependent on others and God for the construction of its subjectivity. Eros is a mode of existence, is the mode of existence: from the highest level of the relations of God to God in the Trinity, to the lowly relations of human to human—but especially between God and human.

Humanity is thus fundamentally outward-oriented, defined not in and of themselves, but through their relations with the other—just as Lacan has argued for metonymy. But the pursuit or satisfaction of this desire is the “transformation of difference into identity” so that ontologically, humanity is a “lack in pursuit of being” (Subjects of Desire 9). Actualization is achieved “to the extent that a subject confronts what is different from itself, and therein discovers a more enhanced version of itself…the negative thus becomes essential to self- actualization” (13). Desire is essential to self-actualization. Stated more simply, defined against a God that is full being and is in need of nothing, humanity is desire. Against the typical conception that God is insubstantial and humanity is solid flesh, an anthropology of desire reverses this completely. In his creatio ex nihilo, God, the divine all, creates a nothing from nothing, and this little nothing yearns and strives to participate in his divine everything. This yearning is the fundamental truth of the cosmos. As Victor Hugo states, “Tout cherche tout, sans but, sans trêve, sans repos”—everything seeks everything, without aim, without rest, without cease (132)

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