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Erotic Mysticism in Puritan Eucharistic Spirituality

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Erotic Mysticism in Puritan Eucharistic Spirituality 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 93 Studies in Spirituality 19, 93-112. doi: 10.2143/SIS.19.0.2043675 © 2009 by Studies in Spirituality. All rights reserved. TIMOTHY HESSEL-ROBINSON EROTIC MYSTICISM IN PURITAN EUCHARISTIC SPIRITUALITY SUMMARY — This essay explores how Puritan writers between 1586 and 1729 articulated their experiences of the Lord’s Supper as an eroti- cally charged encounter with Christ. Drawing on the Song of Songs, many Puritan writers appropriated its erotic language and imagery to express their desire for Christ, and their sense that the Lord’s Supper is the most intimate earthly medium by which Christ communes with his people. Three specific themes emerge, each treated in turn: 1) Christ as a seducer of the soul; 2) longing for consummation which is not fully possible in this life; 3) conception and pregnancy likened to bearing spiritual fruit. After a section specifically treating the Lord’s Supper, the essay draws on the work of postmodern theorist Julia Kristeva, whose notion of ‘seman- tic polyvalence’ helps to interpret the phenomenon of erotic mysticism. Rather than seeing such experiences as the result of an unhealthy subli- mation, they are interpreted as representations of an ultimately mysteri- ous encounter with the holy. The essay concludes by suggesting that these historical themes provide resources for rediscovering Christ’s intimate, embodied presence in contemporary Reformed Eucharistic spirituality. INTRODUCTION In Take This Bread Sara Miles describes her mid-life conversion experience which took place when she ‘walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine’.1 She writes that ‘eating Jesus’ changed her entire life as she embraced a faith she previously had scorned. A God whose existence she doubted, a Jesus whose name she had previously used only as ‘a mild expletive’ became real as she heard a priest say words she knew to be untrue or only metaphoric: ‘This is the body of Christ’. As she received Holy Communion Miles knew that Jesus was, as she writes, ‘real and in my mouth’.2 Of her Eucharistic experience at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco Miles goes on to write, ‘Holy Communion knocked me upside down and forced me 1 Sara Miles, Take this bread: A radical conversion, New York: Ballantine Books, 2007, xi. 2 Ibid., 59. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 94 94 TIMOTHY HESSEL-ROBINSON to deal with impossible reality of God’.3 Miles’s experience filled her with a deep desire to become one with the body she was communing. Much of Take This Bread describes Miles’s efforts to make sense of her new found faith through engaged social action, especially through feeding the poor. Her under- standing of the sacraments takes shape through helping to build a network of food pantries among San Francisco’s most economically disadvantaged popula- tions. She describes a Eucharistic spirituality rooted in everyday physical reali- ties: ‘The material world was my ground: bodily experience the context in which I searched for knowledge and love’.4 She describes the outworking of her Eucharistic encounter as ‘a new life centered on feeding strangers: food and bodies, transformed’.5 The bodily experience in which Miles’s spirituality is grounded suggests another dimension of human embodiment, for she writes of her Eucharistic experience in sensual, even erotic terms. As her journey progressed in the early weeks Miles was dazed, she recalls, by the inarticulate mystery of her Eucharis- tic experience, going through her days ‘excited beyond words, frequently on the verge of tears (…) my throat tight as if facing danger or intense sexual excite- ment; I’d be ravenously hungry, then unable to eat, as you are when you’re heart- broken, or newly in love’.6 The way Miles reports her experience is reminiscent of other periods in the history of Christian spirituality. For instance, twelfth and thirteenth century female mystics in the West frequently describe visions and ecstasies centered on the Eucharist. Mechtild of Magdeburg (1210-1285) described mystical union as ‘eating God’, while Hadewijch of Brabant (mid- 13th century) reports a vision at mass in which Christ gives himself to her in the Eucharist as he holds her in an erotic embrace. Other women mystics in this period celebrate the physicality of the incarnate Christ available to them in the Eucharist, their own physicality becoming the locus of spiritual experience. Sometimes their focus is on physical deprivation through fasting, suffering, and illness, while at other times they focus on erotic pleasure or feeding the hungry. Whether experiencing grace as eating, orgasm, or death, according to Caroline Walker Bynum, many medieval women ‘found physicality, as they understood it, redeemed and expressed by a human God’.7 Inclusion of the erotic dimen- sions of human experience in the Eucharistic event ‘suggest a special confidence 3 Ibid., xiv. 4 Ibidem. 5 Ibid., xv. 6 Ibidem. 7 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and redemption: Essays on gender and the human body in medieval religion, New York: Zone Books, 1992, chapter 4: ‘Women Mystics and Eucharis- tic Devotion in the Middle Ages’, 119-150. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 95 EROTIC MYSTICISM IN PURITAN EUCHARISTIC SPIRITUALITY 95 in the Incarnation’, which in turn affirms that ‘the whole human person was [is] capable of redemption’.8 Much contemporary Protestant Eucharistic theology and spirituality lacks the earthy, amorous, and corporeal implications suggested in Miles’s experience or that of medieval women mystics, suggesting instead that the Eucharist is a kind of mental exercise by which worshippers recall the saving death of Jesus and find personal forgiveness. This raises a question: are there resources within Protestant spiritual or liturgical traditions that inform and sustain the kind of sensual Eucharistic spirituality Miles describes, a Eucharistic spirituality which embraces human embodiment and eroticism, and which attends to the physical needs of others? In fact, from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries the Reformed tradition offers another instance of Eucharistic piety which embraces the physical and erotic dimensions of human experience. In this article I will examine Puritan devotional and Eucharistic writings between 1586 and 1729, focusing specifically on the erotic dimensions of human embodiment they report having experienced while praying, reading Scripture, and observing the Lord’s Supper. For many Puritan preachers and writers, the Lord’s Supper was regarded as a site of erotically charged encounter with Christ, the lover of the soul. Draw- ing upon the language and imagery of the Song of Songs, Puritan writers describe a spirituality in which they encountered Jesus as lover and bridegroom, speak- ing of their encounter with him in highly erotic terms. These writings indicate that the Reformed tradition does indeed possess resources that may inform an earthy, sensual Eucharistic spirituality that affirms human embodiment as a graced reality. EROTICISM AND MYSTICISM Bernard McGinn has observed that the use of erotic language and imagery – i.e. ‘physical descriptions of the beauty of the lover, as well as images of longing and meeting, of burning and swooning, of kisses, embraces, and even of intercourse’ – so thoroughly saturates the literature of Christian spirituality and mysticism 8 Bynum, Fragmentation and redemption, 150. Bynum’s argument focuses on how medieval women inverted an inherited misogynist tradition that essentialized gender traits, asserting the inferiority of femaleness. The women mystics she examines overcame such misogyny by embrac- ing the physical and affective traits considered inferior as, in fact, privileged sites of encounter with the divine. The element of her argument I am drawing on here is that there are witnesses within Christian traditions that embrace physicality, resist body/spirit dualisms so prevalent else- where in Western Christianity, and that these elements of Miles’s memoir have ample prece- dent in Christian history. 92624_SIS_19(2009)_07_Hessel 01-12-2009 13:40 Pagina 96 96 TIMOTHY HESSEL-ROBINSON that any attempt at brief summarization is impossible.9 Likewise, Sarah Coak- ley notes an ‘undeniable interconnection of sexual desire and contemplative desire for God’ that runs through Western Christian contemplative traditions.10 Indeed, sexual union – or the desire for it – has been regarded as a fitting image to express the experience of spiritual union in a variety of religious traditions, and scholars have long been attentive to such expressions.11 Popular caricatures of Puritans, however, suggest they would know little about ‘burning and swooning, kisses, embraces, and even intercourse’, much less draw on such experiences to describe their piety. Given these stereotypes, it may surprise some that erotic imagery is shot through Puritan devotional literature as well. The sacred eroti- cisms of which scholars speak were as much a part of sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth century Puritan literature as they were for Hadewijch of Brabant or Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). One source of erotic devotion among Puritans was the biblical Song of Songs and its history of mystical, alle- gorical interpretation. Early English Puritans were given many labels by friends and foes alike. While most within the movement referred to themselves as ‘the godly’, one pamphleteer dubbed Puritans as ‘a hotter sort of Protestant’. This
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