Hey guys! Sorry about the late post, I had some unexpected commitments all day.
I've done some reading on Julian of Norwich before, and I had the exceptional pleasure of working as a research assistant for a professor who was working on some scholarship on Margery Kempe. As a result, I no longer react to these women with quite the same wonder we all do when we first come into contact with them. However, what struck me as particularly interesting was Caroline Walker Bynum's essay, which took a few much-needed steps towards creating some historical context for our understanding of how medieval scholars approached the body and soul.
In particular, she notes that due to social circumstances, the Church had to take specific theological stances - namely, that in order to combat the heresies of Cathar dualism, the Church had to assert the inherent value of both parts of the dualistic system (195). Cathars reportedly believed that a lesser god had created the physical world as a corruption of the beautiful perfection of spirit, and that the true god would never have inflicted physical existence upon his beloved creatures; as a result, they chastised the flesh, starving themselves at some levels of practice. (The legend goes that when the Cathars were rounded up to be burnt, they walked into the flames singing, because they were overjoyed to cast off their mortal flesh.)
I suppose my question is a somewhat experiential one. What intrigues me is the way that Church scholars attempted to navigate this thorny issue by asserting the value of the body in the formula of dualism. Bynum's article focuses on doctrines like resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment, and indeed on the very idea of the incarnation itself, both of which seem to indicate that the body is part of the whole "self" and that the spiritual can be written and experienced in the physical. However, why does it always seem to be the case that this inscription of the spiritual into the physical is almost always about the degradation of the body? We have seen that both Julian and Margery centered much of their lives of faith on the experience of debilitating illness. Christ's major contribution to human life is his death on the cross. Even in instances where physical processes seem positive, like a mother nursing and nourishing a child, we recall that medieval scholars thought of all processes of excretion as analogous - that even milk was processed blood (214-5), making even maternal relations somehow vampiric in nature. Do we ever feel that these attempts to mingle the physical and spiritual, which appear throughout Julian's and Margery's texts, ever actually elevate the physical? Do we ever really get a successful example of living an embodied spirituality? Julian lives cut off from the world, and even Margery's life is full of tribulation - whether she "succeeds" or "achieves" anything is somewhat dubious.
Thanks for this post Dan, and I look forward to hearing your well-informed impressions of Margery and Julian in class. Your post seems to gesture to the instability of exalting the bodily or the feminine in medieval religious practice (an instability that Bynum is careful to note). This strikes me as being tied up with “the emphasis on reversal that lay at the heart of the Christian tradition” (Bynum 218) – i.e., “the last shall be first, and the first last,” “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,” etc. These ideas were very powerful in the late Middle Ages, but they operated within systems that nonetheless perpetuated hierarchy and patriarchy (as we’ve seen throughout the semester). I’ve done a great deal of research on medieval representations of leprosy, and in some contexts leprosy represents sin and spiritual corruption, and in other contexts it signals holiness and closeness to Christ. In pursuing some of the questions Dan raises here, we might think about the limits of exalting the “lower” or “weaker” term in a binary, as well as the ways in such elevation sometimes happens only in the sphere of symbolic representation and not in everyday social relations. (An analogy with courtly love comes to mind: the Lady is portrayed as being supremely powerful, but most aristocratic women had relatively little agency or mobility vis-à-vis men.) Of course, as Bynum points out, “reversal” or inversion is only one way to look at these dynamics. Messy mixing and muddling and combination is another.
ReplyDeleteArgh I just typed up a whole analysis and response to your post and when I tried to publish it, it disappeared! Here is my second try, but I think I will try to condense my thoughts...and save a copy of them.
ReplyDeleteI like in your post Dan how you discussed the importance for the Church of defining itself against the various heresies of the period by laying out its understanding of doctrine and theology. The Church was extremely careful, particularly in the 14th and 15th centuries to define and codify its doctrine, even if the practices of that faith varied from time to time. It is interesting to note then that a woman like Julian, whose views on the perception of God and of sin differed in rather significant ways from standard Church teaching, was never criticized by the local authorities. They did not raise issue with her beliefs or the authority she exerted over others. In fact there is little contemporary evidence to suggest that the local authorities took a position on her writings and beliefs at all. This leads me to wonder: does this have to do with her sex? Even Julian herself is occupied with the worry that others will not take her seriously because she is female: "But God forbid that you should say or assume that I am a teacher, for that is not what I mean, nor did I ever mean it; for I am a woman, ignorant, weak and frail." (Julian 6-7) She does not seek to gain an authoritative position; rather she desires that she should serve as a catalyst through which the authority and wisdom of God should pass. She does not seek out fame, but attempts to seclude herself and avoid it. I think perhaps it is in this way that she does succeed in embodying spirituality. She elevates the flesh in her denial of it and by walling herself away from the realities of the world, she seeks to emphasize that nothing out there matters. It is one's inner spirituality and connection with God that matters.
Given the nature of mysticism, I don’t think we can have a completely accurate account of that type of experience. The emphasis on the spiritual and physical nature of practicing faith stems from early Christian and Gnostic debates about the complete humanity and the divinity of Christ. Right from the beginnings of Christianity, there is a particular concern with the interrelation between the body and soul as a reflection of their perfected form in the example of Jesus. This theme of religious debates reemerges in Julian's time. To see this example of female piety that involves abandoning the physical but still abiding by the dichotomies that governed medieval theology (and society) was something that I found really interesting. As Julian writes, “Then you must forget me, a paltry creature, you must mot let me hinder you, but look directly at Jesus” (10). In some depictions of Jesus, Bynum writes that he was portrayed nursing other figures with his blood. Julian seems to abandon her physical limitations in order to have a spiritual encounter and then resituate herself socially in order to convey her mystic experience. The figure of Jesus taking on female characteristics apparently didn't raise many questions at the time, but this kind of acceptance of femininity didn’t help to alleviate any constraints of contemporary women and their displays of piety as evidenced by Julian's humbled statements as she asks for an attentive audience.
ReplyDeleteI was also intrigued by the presentation of physical degradation while reading Julian of Norwich. I don't have much experience reading this kind of literature so, unlike Dan, I reacted with some wonder as Julian professed such a strong desire to know physical suffering in the name of a closer connection to god. She portrays herself as an individual able to use her impossibly firm religious consciousness to defeat her most basic human instincts. She reflects on her dying thoughts noting that, "this time I was very sorry and reluctant to die, not because there was anything on earth I wanted to live for, nor because I feared anything" (5). She only desires to live she might strive to know god better. Julian is asserting two important imperatives. The first is complete detachment from physical, worldly pleasure and the second is a triumph over fear. These are the two primary qualities which deliver her to the spiritual revelations offered by God throughout the text. Bynum notes that, "devotional attitudes sometimes compensated for personal deprivation or provided escape from oppression" (197). This reading best explains Julian's ability to consciously disregard her own physical condition in pursuit of spiritual revelation. I think a need for a strong devotional attitude which could overcome equally strong physical suffering is what informs the persona of the writer.
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