Trujillo Master Document

Jubilee of the Heart: How Monastic Song Became Mystical Poetics By Kris Jonathan Trujillo A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Amy Hollywood, Co-Chair Professor Daniel Boyarin, Co-Chair Professor Niklaus Largier Professor James Porter Fall 2017 Abstract Jubilee of the Heart: How Monastic Song Became Mystical Poetics by Kris Jonathan Trujillo Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory University of California, Berkeley Professor Amy Hollywood, Co-Chair Professor Daniel Boyarin, Co-Chair This dissertation describes how the proliferation of “song” as a trope in the vernacular poetic tradition that Michel de Certeau calls “mystic poetics” arises out of the monastic practice of singing the Psalms. Through close readings of John Cassian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hadewijch, and John of the Cross, it reveals that the ethical formation of the “mystic-poet” is as much a product of theological devotion as it is an attempt to craft a figure of literary exemplarity in the vernacular. Against the characterization of mystical poetry as spontaneous, immediate, and singular, this project argues that mystical poetry and the contemplative life to which it is bound are not removed from the world, but rather firmly grounded in the ritual, embodied, and communal practices of devotion that shape monastic and semi-monastic life. Ultimately, I propose a genealogy of mystical poetics that is not opposed to, but indeed contiguous with the repetitive and ritual reading practiced in Christian monasteries. An interdisciplinary endeavor, this project brings together the study of religion, literary studies, queer theory, and critical theory. In addition, it contributes to a growing body of scholarship that bridges premodern and contemporary theory and attends to the growing fascination that humanistic inquiry has with religion and religious traditions. By tying the rhetorical force of “song” to the lived reality of Christian piety, the project espouses a performative theory of metaphor that takes seriously its material conditions and effects. By undoing the conventional distinction between literal and figurative language and by drawing from contemporary queer theory, it also intervenes into the conversation about religion and sexuality, which, I contend, includes the spiritual bodies and erotics of mystical union. Finally, the project traces the translation of Greek theōria into the medieval Christian contemplative life and, as a consequence, complicates any secular narrative of critical theory’s development. 1 Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 From Silence to Song Chapter 1 12 Translating Theory: Musical Labor and the Poetics of Benedictine Monasticism Chapter 2 37 “Only He Who Sings It Hears It”: Bernard of Clairvaux and the Song of Songs Chapter 3 64 Mystic Fables: Hadewijch and the Operativity of Her Songs Chapter 4 78 John of the Cross, the Spiritual Canticle, and “That Abominable Solitary Vice We Call Theory” Cauda 99 Blake and the Benedictines Bibliography 104 i Acknowledgments I would like to thank the various communities that have sustained me throughout the years that it has taken for me to complete this dissertation. First, so many thanks go to my dissertation committee members. I am grateful to Daniel Boyarin and to Niklaus Largier who have supported me from the start of my program; to James Porter whose last-minute assistance was gracious and kind; and, mostly, to Amy Hollywood, for whom my feelings of gratitude go beyond words. Other faculty who have left important marks on my thinking at crucial moments during this project’s development include Judith Butler, Leo Damrosch, Mark Jordan, and Saba Mahmood. Next, I want to thank the peers who have engaged with this project along the way. Especial thanks go to Travis Stevens, Ramsey McGlazer, Alenda Chang, and, my partner in crime, Eleanor Craig for their intellectual and emotional support. I have presented portions of this dissertation at the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). I would like to thank the members of our multi-year ACLA seminar on the practices of devotion and, especially, Eleanor Craig, Robert Davis, Constance Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, Amy Hollywood, Jerilyn Sambrooke, and Rachel Smith, who have been the most challenging and generous interlocutors on the topics of devotion and desire, religion and the arts. My work is all the richer on account of our conversations. I have benefitted from the financial support provided by the Department of Rhetoric, the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality, the Yeary Endowment for Ethics in the Humanities, and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. I would like to thank these bodies for supporting my research and the monks of Cîteaux Abbey for welcoming me briefly into their life of ora et labora in order to execute it. I wrote this project while living as a Resident Proctor and Resident Tutor at Harvard College, so I want to thank the students of Canaday B and Adams House for their questions about Christian mysticism, queer theory, and everything in between. And to my family and friends who have humored my questions and conversations about the Middle Ages: my friends Kate, Kim, Mackenzie, Collins, Jane, Sophia, and Chris especially, and my family Cindy, Ashley, Mara, Joy, and Eloi, who have provided the foundation for my education in devotion, my devotion to education. Lastly, for teaching me about loving critique in the first place, to Joe. This is for you. ii Introduction From Silence to Song Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells; And students with their pensive citadels; Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells, Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found. —William Wordsworth, “Prefatory Sonnet” SILENCE, SONG, AND THE MEDIEVAL SOUNDSCAPE Surrounded on each side by lilac fields, a small wood stands just north of the Cîteaux Abbey, the mother house of the Cistercian order originally founded in 1098 and located in Burgundy, south of Dijon. If you walk down the dirt path running through this wood, you will eventually come upon a ten-feet-tall stack of lumber stretching almost one hundred yards. The product of La Scierie Forey, a sawmill and the only other organization aside from the abbey located in this small French commune, the lumber sits in silence, far enough away from the motor sounds of the mill. Of course, silence is all to be expected in the monastic setting, but the silent lamentation of these pieces of wood bespeaks that silence is not, in fact, a given of nature, but rather a construction, an artifice. The sound of silence is not a monastic default; it is arrived at after much hard work. Wood is important here because of its changing status as a keynote of the European soundscape. As R. Murray Schaffer explains in his seminal book Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977), “Many of the most unique keynote sounds are produced by the materials available in different geographical locales: bamboo, stone, metal or 1 wood, and sources of energy such as water and coal.”1 Keynote sounds, thus, reflect not only the specific environmental conditions of their production, but also a particular historical moment depending on the wealth or scarcity of a resource. The case of wood, according to Schaffer, is exemplary of this change: “Wood had, of course, been an original keynote of Europe also; but the forests were depleted when wood was required for the smelting and forging of metals.”2 The long pile of lumber is a testament to the deforestation of Europe, most often associated with its roots in what is called the “great clearances” of the 10th through 13th centuries—the expansion of agricultural land into the forests on account of the rising population.3 Wood is silent because it is made to be silent—a pile on the ground, rather than a forest through which the wind hums—but also because there is simply less of it. Monastic communities were a significant part of the changing landscape and soundscape of medieval Europe. This latter point may not be immediately evident since monastic silence is often regarded as the background upon which actual sound is made. But as this dissertation will demonstrate the soundscape of the contemplative life, including the abiding silence, required much hard labor. Seen in this way, the contemplative life or what we might call theorizing is not, ultimately, a retreat from the world, but rather performed within and conditioned by its material surroundings. It is conducted as and through the hard work that produces the built environment of monastic space. And while the notion of the medieval soundscape has become a helpful way of thinking about sound, song, and music long lost, scholarship has focused primarily on external sound, thus, following the empirical imperative laid out by Shaffer in the 1970s.4 As the following will argue, sound’s intimate attachment to affect and the theological anthropology of the inner man, especially as it is developed in the Christian West, require an account of the inner sense of sound in order to provide a fuller understanding of the medieval soundscape.

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