In her work
entitled Fragmentation and Redemption:
Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Caroline Walker
Bynum discusses the way in which medieval texts separate the concepts of spirit
and flesh. Particularly, she writes, “Ascetic theologians often wrote of spirit
and flesh warring with each other. Both in Latin and in the emerging
vernaculars, the genre of the debate between body and soul became popular.”
(Bynum, 202). More than simply noting the separating of soul from body, though,
Bynum explains that “theological, scientific and folk traditions associated
women with body, lust, weakness and irrationality, men with spirit or reason or
strength” (Bynum, 202). Alas, in many medieval texts, women are corrupt slaves
to bodily impulses and men are the strong masters of reason and spirituality.
Like
Bynum, Julian of Norwich in her Revelations
of Divine Love more subtly makes the distinction between the body and soul
or spirit when describing her various visions and encounters with the divine.
For example, when she describes, “And at the same time that I saw this bodily
sight, our Lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar love. I saw that
for us he is everything that is good and comforting and helpful” (Julian, 7), Julian
illuminates the way in which her bodily and spiritual visions are separate yet
accompany each other. They exist separate, yet simultaneously.
Additionally,
detailing, “All this blessed teaching of our Lord God was shown me in three
parts: that is, by bodily sight, and by words formed in my understanding, and
by spiritual sight” (Julian, 11), Julian groups bodily sight with concrete
words while distinguishing them from spiritual sight. Moreover, the quote, “But
I neither can nor may show you the spiritual vision as openly or as fully as I
would like to” (Julian, 11), recalls the assertions of Bynum’s essay, as Bynum
explains that women are not associated with the spiritual vision and thus
cannot understand it—or communicate it, in Julian’s case—as men can.
Finally,
when Julian writes, “For the first heaven Christ showed me his Father, in no
bodily likeness, but in his nature and his action” (Julian, 18), she associates
the spirit or soul with nature and action, and thus removes the ability to act
from the body. In relief of Bynum’s work, this quote asserts that men are in
control of the action of the body and, as a result, are in control of women.
Yet,
Julian’s attention to the divergent entities of body and soul is directed
particularly to the difference between bodily sight and spiritual sight.
Though bodily sight is obviously the physical ability of her eyes, spiritual
sight is more ambiguous, and Julian has difficulty communicating it herself at
times. Can we come to a conclusion as to what spiritual sight is as opposed to
bodily sight? And if so, is there a difference in the way that Bynum would view
spiritual sight as opposed to the way in which she views the spirit itself?
Thanks for this post, Morgan. The tension between “bodily sight” and “spiritual sight,” to which you draw our attention, foregrounds the problems of representation that arise during experiences of God -- as well as attempts to portray those experiences in language. Julian is drawing on medieval Scholastic distinctions between what is perceived through the senses (bodily sight) and what is apprehended directly through the intellect (spiritual sight). The second is considered a higher and more perfect form of knowledge. However, it is the first one, the mode of sensuous and imagistic perception, that is most literarily and aesthetically powerful. The many visual images of Christ’s Passion, as well as the many devotional writings describing it, rely on sensuous (“bodily”) modes of representation in order to appeal to the audience’s powers of perception and feeling. One of the questions I hope we’ll consider in class tomorrow is how aesthetic responses to literary representation tend to favor “bodily sight,” with all of its imagery and sensory detail, above “spiritual sight”; and Christ, the incarnate son, over “his Father, in no bodily likeness.”
ReplyDeleteThe relationship between body and soul is one of the more illuminating facets not only of Kempe, but female medieval mysticism itself. Last year in Prof. Stanton's Medieval Mystics class my final paper tackled the rampant sexuality found throughout Kempe's writings. They feed off one another, and despite the sensual undertones Kempe's inclusion of her own sexuality doesn't take anything away from her theological message.
DeleteOne of the things I found interesting was the Bynum article. She does an excellent job of discussing how the body and soul were often intertwined, and how the relationship between them was so significant. Bynum holds absolutely nothing back, and goes into graphic detail on Christ's flesh and other female visions. She notes "several Italian saints ate pus or lice from poor or sick bodies, thus incorporating in themselves the illness and misfortune of others. (Bynum, 184). One main point I always take from Kempe's writings is that she always feels inferior. She never feels worthy or acceptable to God. It's almost as if her status as a human being, and not some divine form, inhibit her from forming a true relationship with God. She's constantly willing to change, and laments all throughout her works. Her dynamic relationship with the Lord is an intriguing one, as it is full of sexual connotation and fervent, almost demonic (puns!) worship.
Julian of Norwich establishes a distinction between the female and male form which is then reflected in the manifestation of bodily sight and spiritual sight. Although misogynistic classifications can be associated with this distinction – women fall prey to corporeal appetites whilst men rise above such things – I feel Bynum compels us to find the convergence in these gender classifications as culminating in the Medieval image of Christ.
ReplyDeleteJulian expresses recognition of divine grace in the female form as she describes her revelation of Christ’s choice to be born of what he in fact made – Mary. She states “she is greater in worthiness and fullness of grace than all that God made below her” and that the only thing which resides above her is Christ’s Manhood (8). As we see, Christ manifests physically through Mary’s body; Christ’s Manhood exists through femininity. Bynum remarks “Julian of Norwich spoke of creation as a maternal act because God, in taking on our humanity in the Incarnation, gives himself to us as a mother gives herself to the fetus she bears” (206). Bynum illustrates how Christ, through the artistic portrayal of his nurturing actions towards humanity, embodied female characteristics such as having saints suckle as his breast. We find Christ’s physical actions reflecting explicitly feminine qualities and yet as Julian of Norwich remarks, his divinity was understood in his Manhood. Bynum points out that “medical and folk understandings of body [during this time] saw men and women as variations on a single physiological structure” (183). So both women and men were part of a greater whole of physiology or existence; they simply comprised different parts of the spectrum. Thus women actually embodied Christ’s being whereas men comparatively embodied the spirituality of God. Man and woman function in tandem as the inheritors of Christ’s being, though they play very specific roles.
As such, I think the difference between bodily sight and spiritual sight can be addressed as the distinction between male and female functionality. As the female, Mary, was host to the male, Christ, so does her body host the spirit of Jesus. Bodily experience, or sight, is the externalization of Christ’s divinity whereas spiritual experience was the internalization of divinity. These experiences of God ultimately culminate in the actual being of Christ who, though understood as a “man,” exists in both male and female classifications just as bodily and spiritual visions exist simultaneously.
I believe it’s worth considering why, between the literary representations of the two methods of these “sights”, what is favored here is the bodily sight in its aesthetic descriptions, in all its concrete rigidity. Spiritual sight to Julian usually incorporates some fantastic feature of God yet vaguely described to provide the reader with guidelines to keep in mind as opposed to a map with a clear destination of where you should end up. To not have seen “Christ’s blessed Passion and the plentiful of his precious blood”(Julian 9) could be as easily pictured as it’s described , to one’s spirit. Christ’s blood would be more full and rich with the color red, so much so that they were unmistakably different just because your spirit provided you with a manner of perceiving which is beyond the eyes. However in the quote, onlt the body could be perceived as damaged, but Christ's spirit was saved as we know through the bible.
ReplyDeleteBynum touches on the history of the body and “the female body, has largely equated body with sexuality and understood discipline or control the body as the rejection of sex or of woman.” (Bynum 182) The bridge to what would be considered sin is blocked although the body is susceptible to this sin, as opposed one’s spirit, with it’s pure nature. Here we find that it's still associated with the presence of this pure spirit. “Bodily swelling understood as ‘mystical pregnancies’ was usually a female claim”.
The difference between bodily sight and spiritual sight is something to consider, and in addition to that, I’d like to wonder about why the body is susceptible to these negative connotations being attached to it whereas our spiritual sight is not.
There is a certain amount of emotional toil that Julian puts herself through in describing her visions. I believe Julian's text, especially, can be seen as an account of the mental state of someone who could actually cause herself physical harm because of her psychological and emotional state. Not necessarily by harming herself, but by making herself physically ill by recalling and describing these visions of hers. I believe that this description of hers makes her an incredibly passive figure. She simply sees (whether spiritually or bodily) these visions that are presented to her by God. It is this passivity, however, this willingness to be acted upon by God, that allows Julian to be able to change between both "spiritual" and "bodily" sight, and able to make the distinction between them known to us: "But I neither can nor may show you the spiritual vision as openly or as fully as I would like to." (Julian, 11) Shortly after this, she experiences another "bodily" vision: "...I saw with my bodily sight in the face of Christ on the crucifix which hung before me, which I was looking at continuously, a part of his Passion...and I wished for better bodily light to see it more clearly." (Julian, 12) This understanding of the difference between bodily and spiritual sight by Julian is seen by her inability to describe her spiritual vision openly, as well as in her acknowledgment of her bodily vision as imperfect, even dim.
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