Paul, Canon Law and Ecclesiology

The subject of justification by faith has fascinated me ever since I was a young girl, reading Paul and trying to comprehend the lines he draws between grace and works (chiefly in Galatians) and then turning a few books over to find James and his discussion of working faith. Not being of Lutheran background, it is hard for me to imagine the full weight of tension Lutheran students must wrestle with to hear a new perspective of Paul’s regard for Mosaic Law—but as a Catholic now, I can implement such a tension between the liturgical and juridical (canon) law of my church and the grace believed to be communicated through our sacramental theology. Being rather consumed by a fascination with covenants from my own dispensational background, I came to Schnelle’s depiction of justification by faith in Galatians hoping to discover that Paul considered Mosaic Law to be a further-revelation from God to His people, rather than a horrible, death-instilling mechanism which removed people rather from God, thus needed to be done-away with.

Inspecting Schnelle’s careful explanation of the Galatian crisis, I think that Paul uses a heavy hand in dismissing the Law of Moses primarily for rhetorical purposes. Paul’s rhetoric seems very confusing in Galatians: on the one hand he seems to talk about the Law arousing sin and burdening the people of God, while on the other hand, the Law was from God and so could not be sinful in itself. I think the context and Paul’s purpose in writing to the Galatians explains much of why he drove a dichotomy between justification by faith and justification by law. I argue that this was mainly rhetorical dichotomy between the Abrahamic covenant and the Mosaic covenant, which are complementary rather than antithesized. I think Paul ultimately admits the complimentarity of these two covenants, but not until he has first established the point of his dichotomy: that Gentile believers are justified by faith without the prescriptions of Mosaic Law (primacy of Abraham’s covenant).

For me to encounter Schnelle’s interpretation of the Jerusalem church’s resistance to the Torah-free Gentile mission made quite a lot of sense with my own readings of James and Peter’s actions as described by Paul. I can’t claim to understand a typical Lutheran reaction to Schnelle’s perspective, but discussing the Galatian crisis at my Dominican school posed significant conflict: my Catholic counterparts considered it heterodox at best to count Peter and the Jerusalem church as opposed to Paul, on the side of those who were agitating the Galatian acceptance of salvation by faith. Schnelle admits that there is “no direct literary evidence” (Schnelle 275) for the connections that he makes but thinks it is obvious that there must be “some kind of connection between the Jerusalem authorities and Paul’s opponents in Galatia.” (275) While Schnelle’s interpretation of Galatians stands under inquisition by my Catholic classmates, his discussion of the Jerusalem church’s theological and political motivation for supporting Paul’s opponents  makes sense to me.

Since Paul’s rhetorical rejection of the Law is directed at his opponents, I think it fair to evaluate the possibility of interpreting the Jerusalem church as supporting the opponents. Schnelle has established throughout the entirety of his work on Paul thus far that since James, an orthopraxic Jewish Christian, was leader of the church in Jerusalem, it was most likely still entirely integrated into synagogue life and enjoying full privilege under the Jewish religious status. Since this church’s outlook on Christianity maintained its inclusion within the larger religion of Judaism, the issue of Gentile circumcision was quite volatile. Schnelle paints a competitive theological scene depicting a kind of context between Jewish and Gentile Christians over who were “exclusively the true people of God.” (275) Politically, Schnelle suggests that separation from the Jewish identity would put the church at risk for persecution from the government—so alerting the larger Jewish congregation to their divergent theology was to be avoided (275).

Noting these as motivating factors for the opponents, most likely aligning with the agenda of the Jerusalem church, addressing the polemical urging for the Galatian Christians in order to partake in the Abrahamic covenant can be understood as a practical concern. Why was Paul so concerned with refuting the need for circumcision in order to partake of this covenant faith? Schenlle seems to indicate that it was Paul’s Christology which motivated his emphasis of Abraham over Moses. As Schnelle voices it, “the theological heart of the Galatian letter” depicts Paul wrestling “the question of what significance the law/Torah can have for Christians now that circumstances have changed, and with how the status of justification and sonship to God are attained.” (277) As Dr. Balch has suggested in class, Paul seems to be refuting a fundamentalist/literalist approach to Jewish understanding of justification through law. Perhaps the opponents (whom I assume were supported by the Jerusalem congregation) fell back upon a fundamentalist reading of Leviticus in hopes of remaining so Jewish that their divergence from traditional Jewish monotheistic theology would never be suspected.

Schnelle sums up Paul’s basic theology of justification in Galatians as it has developed since the Jerusalem council: “Whereas he still acknowledged the coexistence of faith in Christ and loyalty to the Torah for Jewish Christians, he now maintains that no one can be justified before God by the works of the law/Torah.” (278) I question whether that was indeed the argument of the “Judiazers” (Jewish-Christian evangelists promoting Jesus + Torah gospel), for as we have noted in class, there was a plurality of forms of Judaism in Paul’s day. The perspective I was taught of Jewish thought regarding Mosaic Law never touched on the idea of justification (as a static sort of status one obtained), but rather a sense of dynamically maintaining one’s right standing before God. I wonder if perhaps the reading of Galatians wherein Paul’s opponents are assumed to be arguing justification as originating in the Law is not a modern-day Christian projection in retrospect. Perhaps that was never the point of the Judiazers’ mission—perhaps they were more concerned with the political predicament in Christianity; but also perhaps the message of the Mosaic Law as the justifying basis for their salvation was the misconstruing of the Galatian audience.

Schnelle seems to indicate one reason that Paul so staunchly drove a dichotomy between faith and works of the law regarding justification was because of a desire to strengthen and build a distinctly Christian identity (279). It would seem, then, that Paul’s convoluted argument concerning the law and justification is really quite simple: the Mosaic Law does not provide soteriological life to man, not because the Law itself is not perfect, but man is incapable of keeping the Law perfectly. The Law works externally while man is in need of a mode of justification that will align his internal condition to the grace of God. Being unable to act according to the Law because he is “always already conditioned by sin” (281). Since all people are infected by sin, Schnelle’s reading of Galatians indicates that Paul is annulling “the special status of the Jews as righteous, having a righteousness mediated by the Torah” (283). Yet from my understanding of Judaism, the general understanding  of the Mosaic Law was that it never imputed righteousness; I am rather unclear in my own mind how the majority of Jewish people of Paul’s day (if such a unity can be fathomed) viewed righteousness. Indeed the revelation of the Torah to the Jewish people, God’s disclosing of Himself to a people of promise would be privilege enough without finding justification in the Law. Schnelle seems to make a typical Christian assumption of the Law as imputing righteousness for the Jews, though I think Paul himself would recognize the promise which dispensed Law, the promise of Abraham, imputed righteousness. Perhaps Paul was connecting an interpretation of fundamentalism towards the Law which arose within the church in a desperate socio-political situation.

The identity concept Schnelle claims Paul to criticize amongst the Jewish Christians that “one’s relation to God to be ‘out of’ one’s own act, bound up with certain privileges” (282) rather by a faith granted by God. I hardly think that to be the situation of the Mosaic Law in relation to the Abrahamic covenant;  for both Law and promise were given by God. As for justification, how could a promise given by God, but acted upon by man, be summed up as justification by one’s own act? It would seem to me that Paul’s addition to the Jewish concept of justification adds Jesus to the equation, from the perspective that one’s relations with God are granted by Him vs. earned. Maybe it’s the influence of Catholicism on me, but I do believe that humans have “an active role in their relation to God” (283)—but not in the sense of our justification. I think justification is the some sort of spiritual stance which is perceived in the moment of conversion—perhaps of baptism. So to try and compare the Law and promise as means of justification fails, because the law was never meant to justify. Is Paul merely correcting a misinterpretation?

Paul’s rhetorical move is, I think, to amplify  a false dichotomy between justification by Law and justification by promise (an impossible comparison) in order to push his Christological agenda of Jesus and the new means through which one approaches God. He is filling a place theologically which did not exist before the coming of Christ, or even the need for such a redemption realized: that the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise, the present existence of soteriological hope came in the human person of the Divine Jesus Christ. This is in the real-est sense, an innovation theologically (at least from a human point of comprehension) by God the Father. Abraham was justified by a future faith placed in the coming of a promise which had not yet occurred, but once the historical event of Jesus’ Christ’s life had come, Paul felt it to be the keystone to all previous theology—a missing link, if you will: since the promise was opened to all people (Jews and Gentiles) through Paul’s particular vocation of Apostleship, his desire to eradicate privileged status of persons in Christ developed as a rejection of Mosaic distinctives.

This leads me to a line of questioning that resurrects these same issues concerning the justification of Abraham that I am researching for my sacraments class. I am writing a paper that compares the justification of Abraham by faith in a future promise to the justification of Christians through a sacramental understanding of baptism which unites us to the life of this Promise Jesus as members of His Church. Sacramental baptism—at least from a Catholic perspective, I cannot speak to other sacramental traditions because the concept of sacrament is still so new to me—seems to  really be a participation in the death and resurrection of Christ, allowing one to be seated with Him in the heavenlies. What I ponder is the difference between our faith justification and Abraham’s (and if there is one), because his faith was on the coming of a Promised Seed, as Paul seems to interpret Genesis in Galatians, while my sacraments professor explained to me that Catholic theology considers justification of the Christian to occur at baptism, an event post-Promise, acting with Christ. So I wonder, has the nature of justification changed, with the nature of faith? For my context of Catholicism under the jurisdiction of Canon Law, I wonder about the means my church accepts as faith justification: the Catholic Church prescribes seven sacraments as reliable means of obtaining God’s grace and encountering His present, but do sacraments themselves limit the active grace of God to one necessary manifestation, or merely a dogmatic interpretation of the sacraments, as Paul refutes of the Mosaic Law interpreted from the Judaizers’ preaching?

Having used the transition of Abrahamic to Christian justification as a segway into my ecclesiological reflection, I wonder whether Paul would recognize what every denomination calls church as “Church” today. What was in his mind when he wrote to different “churches.” Noting Paul’s interpretation of Jewish and Gentiles Christians as continuing the covenant of Abraham, would the church communities apart from Christological theology, really be any different from the Temple/synagogue communities? I think the discussion of Law in Galatians really highlights a creative theology, perhaps the beginnings of the distinctive Church. Since we see James and the Jerusalem church maintaining a rather low profile with the Christological distinctive of Christianity, Paul’s innovation of Gentiles into the structure of the Christ-communities really forces the issue of ecclesiology. What is Paul’s idea of Church? I’d say it’s nicely summed up in the final four verses of Galatians 3:

²⁶ for all of you are the children of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus, ²⁷ since every one of you that has been baptised has been clothed in Christ. ²⁸ There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female — for you are all one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And simply by being Christ’s, you are that progeny of Abraham, the heirs named in the promise.

While this still doesn’t address the issue of justification, or many of the questions I have raised for my own denomination, I think solidifying a better understanding of what sort of gatherings Paul referred to as “ekklesia” and what leadership and participatory distinctives he foresaw would greatly benefit further analogy of my Canon Law and sacraments exploration of grace. Paul’s theology of continuing the link between Abrahamic and Christological justification would be extremely important towards his theological conception of “church,” however.

 

Women as Medieval Symbols: Part III, Women as Self-Redemptive Agents

Notes on: Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, from the Twelfth Century to Dante
by Joan M. Ferrante

I suppose marriage is a natural state of being for women, unless they remain virgins (and then how do they benefit the spirituality of man? Does Bonaventure merely tweak the Aristotelian view of women but retain their value as amount of benefit to man?), and thus marriage itself if not associated with sin. Mysticism allows Bonaventure to view marriage beyond the physical function and assumed sinfulness by other thirteenth century authors like Aquinas, speaking “of marriage as a sacrament that existed before the fall; originally a symbol of the union of God and the soul.” (106) I admire the boldness of Bonaventure in furthering Bernard’s desire to obtain union with God through identification with the women, who were close to Christ, since of course women picture love, being closest to the male Christ. Bonaventure “wishes to become the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, in order to experience the compassion they felt at Christ’s crucifixion.” (107) This must have been almost a romantic compassion, I think, because the women, rather than the men, and exalted as examples… furthered by the fact that it was women who first saw Jesus (It interests me that Bonaventure continues to call our Lord “Christ” in the masculine terminology rather than “Jesus” as we women prefer more personally)… which Bonaventure identifies as “a favour they earned by the greatness of their love.” (107) In calling men to salvation, Bonaventure proclaims that “In order to bear Christ in the soul, man must first become Mary for Mary is not only the glorification of humanity and the mirror of all virtues, she is the gate of heaven essential to man’s salvation.” (108)

While Mary is both positively and negatively upheld in religion, Ferrante states that “the philosopher-moralist tends to be antifeminist in attitude and imagery, the mystic does not.” (108) The prevailing attitude towards women is one of suspicion in which procreation is the only reason for involvement with these sinfully dangerous creatures. Poetry continues the tradition of “the entire impulse to love (coming) from inside the lover—the lady is only a passive rose…” (109) though she seems to act as the vehicle of love’s impulse, manipulating the lover out of his own desire for her. The thirteenth century male poet “has both male and female qualities. It is the effeminate side of his nature that makes him vulnerable to love” (110-11). Women are still lustfully portrayed in literature by a discord, which is resolved in the act of intercourse (satisfying the indwelling lust, I imagine), which “can bring the woman into temporary concord by routing the opposing forces.” (112) Did men really see us as so animal-like in our nature? This seems to be just further projection of man’s self onto woman.

Poetry reveals constant conflict in both the woman and the man: “the lady’s struggle is essentially between fear for her reputation and her desire to indulge the man and herself” (112) and the man struggles to justify his own lust for the woman. These desires defy the ideal of “highest love is charity or friendship…” in essence any sort of selfless love, since “sinful love is for gain” (113). The poet compares the lover’s desire to Narcissus, as in allegory, for the lover’s desire is both to reach another point of satisfaction and better understanding of self through the lady. If the lady were to play the part of Echo, a roll that the lover’s narcissism has denied her, leading to the lover’s spiritual suicide—literal damnation if he gives into the sexual desire for the mere sake of pleasure according to allegory. Comparing the ideal of love and the rejection of sexual desire, “we are left to conclude that sexual love must be rejected.” (116) The rejection of such love involves anti-feminist sentiments from women authors of the period too, espousing marriage as a necessary evil “set up to prevent wars and murders over women” (116) who do attempt to tyrannize men with their lusty appeal, though marriage robs women of their desired freedoms. This points to women as rebellious against marriage, that “one sacrament that antedated the fall” (166), and thus the fall was the woman’s attempts to be free of marital restrictions.

I suppose women are then the embodiments of the seduction of love, according to thirteenth century poetry, though authors agree that man’s susceptibility is that of his own choice: “the woman does little or nothing to set off his emotion, but once he gives himself over to it he is in her power and no good can come of their relationship.” (117) This is the rationale for male dissatisfaction once a relationship is attained, I believe. It puzzles me that men would call women more emotional if it is men who are too weak to withstand the women. In the Arthurian legend, women are revealed as opposite the chivalric tradition that “presents women as object of and inspirations for noble activity,” (118) leading to the disappointment and ruin of those who purse their love. Yet even in the quest for the Holy Grail, women must be condemned as a distraction to the physical and spiritual demands for purity. Again, the theme “the only good women…are virgins” (119) is repeated, for the virgin woman is able to figure the ideal of Mary, guiding men to faith as a Christ figure through self-sacrifice. Yet even the virgins are not independent beings, but rely on the protection of men, as is the responsibility of those within the Round Table, for maintained protection against physical jeopardy, which would ruin their spiritual condition as intermediary for men. Men have an obligation to be “concerned with the protection of the helpless…” to maintain the chivalric ethic “but when their attention shifts to the salvation of their souls, the chivalric code falls apart.” (120) Thus even under the guise of chivalry, women tempt men to betray their hope of union with God, and thus men appear selfish and denying of chivalry to maintain their eternal destinies.

Women’s wiles are often portrayed through magic in thirteenth century literature, for their love is the destruction of men’s purity if he is willing to engage her. Writers portray “man’s willingness (as) the source of the woman’s power… the man must come to her, must let himself be caught, before she can control him.” (121) The sin nature of women from the perspective of attempting to be free of God-ordained male domination in marriage portrays women as craftily utilizing the men’s weakness of desire to exercise their rebellion against God and man. This is evident in the story of Arthur and Guinevere: “Arthur, embodying the weakness as well as the strengths of his worlds” (121) is a typical lusty man, whose succumbing to desire provides a means for his own wife to commit adultery in his absence. For men of the thirteenth century, women were preying sorceresses, seizing every available opportunity to take advantage of man’s weakness to exert their inherently sinful desires of rebellion and domination through magical seduction, thereby obtaining heirs to continue their sin.

A more extreme form of controlling men’s lust is proposed in the Vulgate Cycle, “discouraging all human bonds—not only sexual attraction, but family love and chivalric fellowship—and exalting virginity and total devotion to God” (122) as a fulfilment of the ideal of love. If one cannot control oneself, why not cut off the temptation altogether? Provencal poets continues to recognize conflicting desires “in themselves, the need for refinement through the adoration of a perfect creature, and at the same time the strong physical desire to go to bed with a receptive woman” (123). Since men selected the Virgin Mary as the embodiment of this ideal creature, I wonder whether men chose a woman rather than a man because of Mary’s dual “union” with God in bearing Jesus within herself and being immaculately impregnated, whether the nature of woman seemed more innocent than men, or because if a woman could achieve purity, she was already considered so base that a man was guaranteed the ability to be pure. Through the consideration of a woman as divine or alien, she is granted autonomy from the man, but is also removed from the sphere of the living (and thus loses her humanity at the expense of angelic consideration).

The ideal woman becomes aloof and beautiful, gazing on as “the man’s faculties cannot sustain the sight of a woman’s beauty and so they are destroyed.” (123) I cannot pretend to understand the male mind or how a man visually engages a woman to stir him up to a place of fainting, but I have witnessed some men become witless at the sight of a stunning woman. It puzzles me greatly; but the thirteenth century men express their feelings through the lady’s actions of capturing the man’s mind, “threatening his heart, the soul tries to flee, but Love holds her back.” (125) Death almost seems inevitable to the man… he will physically perish if he does not look at the lady, and if he succumbs to the temptation to satisfy his eyes, his soul will die under love’s gentle hand. At close proximity then, thirteenth century men found themselves threatened by women, though at a distance, women remained very purely motivating. Of course its harder to access sin when temptation is kept far from you, but was it for the sake of temptation that men preferred space between them and feminine presence. “The removal of the woman’s presence leads the mind back to the essence of her beauty and ultimately to the source of that beauty, God.” (126) If the woman in her absent figure “is compared, directly or indirectly, to God,” (127) then is the woman truly viewed as a tool through which God moves or an obstacle to man’s desire which causes him to stumble in the pursuit of God? What is it that is so threatening about the woman, the possibility of desiring her impurely?

If reflection upon the woman, in the safe distance of remembrance, leads to contemplation of God (for these writers at least), I wonder about the men with whom we interact now. All that has been discussed is in some form archaic compared with current culture; yet as I read, I feel there must be some common thread of humanity displayed throughout the centuries. Thus far from seeing women as the cause of sin to women being the very embodiment of God in male imagery between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a few like aspects have stuck out to me specifically (at least concerning men, from which I feel is the perspective really portrayed, despite the subject being women): almost instinctive, universal male emotional and physical desire for women; tendency to project onto women as connected to self; position of women inter-tangled with man’s spiritual welfare and relate-ability to God. I am still fascinated by how Christ was described as the Bride, creating a type for women even though submission is required too. Concluding the thought patterns of the thirteenth century, women emerge as “separate entities (from man), instruments of greater forces which work on man’s inherent nobility or weakness to save or destroy him.” (127) Somewhere in all the mess of roles and meaning which women were assigned throughout the entire spectrum of medieval literature, man realized that woman has purpose, beyond her sexual function into a spiritual aspiration by the end of the thirteenth century.

In her final chapter, Ferrante delves into the writing of Dante, who sought a revolutionary explanation for love… not merely seeking the internal reasoning but looking for external explanation beyond a mere acknowledgement of “the beneficial effect of the woman” (129) to his own soul. Dante seeks to understand the true selflessness of love by probing “to find a deeper significance in her existence and in his love for her.” (129) Instead of allowing his love for the woman hinder his love for God, but attributes the attraction he feels for the woman because of her beauty to the source of that beauty, God. God is still understood through the use of a woman: “man reaches God through woman” (131) for as the salvation of all mankind is figured in Mary, Dante found his hope of redemption in Beatrice. Ferrante clarifies that women’s participation in the salvation of man is not just limited to the symbolic, but all women “can be intermediaries between God and man through love, moving men with their beauty and God with their prayers.” (131) I find it interesting that male writers figure their own need for God intertwined with their need for women and the influence of women in their lives, even if by mere presence. This places an unrequested responsibility on women, for Dante figures the desire of men to be close to and receive guidance through women.

Dante states that his self-disclosure to women is enacted based on trust formed through their guidance of him “away from the selfish love of the early lyrics to the kind of love that will end in God.” (131) But Dante also “reserves the traditional roles so that man can act as intermediary with God for a women,” (132) making allowance for either gender to be vessel of God’s grace to the other. In seeking a woman to picture the beauty of God to him, Dante seeks after other women once Beatrice has died, though he retains his claim of loving her, attempting to divide his heart and mind “between two ladies with perfect love,” (133) rationalizing their coexistence by loving the beauty of one for delight and the virtue of the other for her action. It is interesting to travel the Divine Comedy with Dante, because while he is conflicted in love after the loss of Beatrice, part of himself is always returning to her memory and devotion to her. Dante views other women, even after Beatrice’s death, as mere replacement figures for the woman who could never be replaced. Because it is through Beatrice that Dante is equipped with “the power to ascend through the heavens,” (135) he can love no other woman because he tends toward the “identification of Beatrice with Christ in the fullest sense, as the Logos, as Theology and Faith.” (135) In this sense it would be idolatry to love another woman.

Dante’s connection with Beatrice as a crucial aspect of his salvation ascends even closer to Christ, realizing her significance as a guide for his soul to God only after her death, when she descends “even to Hell, to save the sinner who refused to heed the divine message is another echo of Christ.” (136) Dante sees love as he grows to associate Beatrice with God, revealing that there is more to love, more to God than meets the eye. Love of Beatrice allowed him to encounter Love in its veiled disclosure of God while she was alive, but through her death, Beatrice becomes even more one with the Divine in Dante’s mind. Throughout Divine Comedy, Beatrice acts as Mary’s messenger, beginning and ending the poem “with the Virgin, the mediatrix between man and God, the woman in whom all compassionate women are contained.” (139) What am I as a woman saying by objecting to the place of the Virgin Mary in a man’s perceived need of redemption? Am I denying man a typical, fundamental need for a woman in his life and subsequently in the maintenance of his purity, his existential salvation, by removing the Virgin from her assigned significance in theology? Dante sees Christ in lady Beatrice, who figures Mary as Christ figures Mary through her physical features that he took on (139). Dante invests the power of unifying the person of Christ with souls in Mary, whom he sees as the first to be fully one with God—the archetype of Christianity.

“Mary is, in other words, the counterpart of God the father, but the female side of God, the mercy that can break harsh justice.” (140) While Bonaventure and Bernard infiltrate Mary into their salvation through finding her the most relatable figure to their needs, Dante composes a “concept of a trinity of female figures who affect his salvation, all historical women—the mother of Christ, the third-century martyr (Dante’s patron saint Lucy), and the thirteenth-century Florentine woman (Beatrice).” (141) While glancing through the notes I have compiled on the these medieval writings thus far, I was struck by a notable difference in the male tone used for figures of religious intermediaries: Mary is spoken of more often by her personal name, “Mary” rather than her title, “The Virgin” or “The Virgin Mary.” Contrastingly, however, the male writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries speak of Jesus as “The Christ” rather than His personal name, “Jesus…” indicating a greater feeling of distance with Jesus than Mary. I wonder if men found it easier to love Mary than Jesus, based on their almost exclusive understanding of love through the marriage analogy. While one theologian dares to make Jesus the Bride figure, the marital understanding of love requires a feminine figure, and not many were willing to make Jesus feminine; they would rather sacrifice their own masculinity through identification with Mary.

Since Dante sees love and mercy as feminine traits of God, he sees these same traits in man as good, though in weakness, these same traits are sometimes portrayed in the Comedy as moral instability, attempting to depict “that there is no essential distinction of sex in eternity” (141-2). Only in Hell and Purgatory does Dante evidence gender distinctions, intending to convey shame and the guilt associated with gender sin tendencies, but “in Paradise the confusion of sex contributes to the sense of mankind as one. When I was speaking with a friend conveying my confusion of human nature and conception of Heaven, I expressed an interest in never obtaining the sorts of desires that are specific to gender, but rather while still being woman, being ambiguous in my discernment between man and woman. Unlike Dante, I mentally allow for gender distinctions in my picture of Heaven… for the beauty of thought difference and complement, but in Heaven, I think we will understand a sort of love that transcends human gender. I think Jesus embodied this love, which I say confidently, although His love did not abolish His gender. Man and woman were created before the Fall with gender, in perfect harmony, but without sin. Somehow there must be a divine form of perfect love that will not imply sin to the interaction of the genders, but free men and women to be wholly as they were made through equalizing distinctions.

For men, women’s love binds him “not only through sexual ties but through family ties” (147) as a part of her action in his salvation: from Dante’s perspective, the family continues in Purgatory, but are not active in Hell. In Purgatory, “family ties also connect souls with earth” (147) referring to the Catholic tradition of praying for the repose of the dead, which benefits the soul in purgatory. Women in their childbearing abilities are men’s ties to this redemptive act of prayer, Dante espouses, though men are called to pray for the repose of women’s souls too. Since gender is nonexistent in Dante’s Paradise, family is universal, not bound by the distinctions of specific earthly relations. I find it interesting, if gender is not distinguishable in Heaven, that figures such as Jesus and Mary retain the male/female identity; perhaps then, gender is just distinguished as an active feature rather than a fact. Though Dante’s Paradise eliminates marriage, it is interesting to see the coupling he assigns to the figure of Mary: “she is usually paired with men, seldom with other women” (148) as examples of virtue. I wonder if Dante is playing on his theme of male need of females in salvation, part of the larger theme of mutual dependency for salvation. If one is seeking a practical abstraction of this concept, I think men and woman are not only needed in the universal body of Christ, but also to offer contrasting spiritual benefit. In the end of Earthly Paradise, however, “where man is restored to a state of innocence, they (virtues) appear as women,” (148) images of a restored Eve (whom Dante does blame for sin).

Through Comedy, Dante portrays salvation, the end goal of men and women (though emphasized as of men in medieval literature in general and Dante’s writing specifically) is perfection achieves “by the reunion, in a restored state of innocence, of man and woman.” (150) Is this too not the goal of Christianity, which Paul encourages us can be achieved in our loving of one another here in earth: “There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female—for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3.28, NJB) Because love is central to Dante’s idea of Paradise, he includes “earthly human love (as) a major part of love, which he does not deny even in heaven.” (151) Dante confuses me with his marriage allegory between men and women who are unconcerned with love in the sense of sexual distinction. Thus Dante adds to the picture of unity with God depicted at the end of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, continuing to utilize woman as images through which man achieves salvation, all focused on Mary “through whom Christ brought salvation to all men…Dante says that it is through Mary and through human love for a real woman that he can achieve union with God.” (152) Dante allows men the expression of their emotion in ideals, but forces some sense of realism in acknowledgment of the need to love the woman in whom the man can invest himself. I think out of all perspectives on women espoused through male use of female imagery, I am most appreciative of Dante’s assignment of sacramental meaning to womanhood. By requiring a self-sacrificing love on the part of the man, not just the woman, Dante ends the thirteenth century with redemption of the female image in spite of his continued blame for initial sin. We women remain paradoxical in male thought… he tries to project himself upon us, but the need overwhelms the desire for a scapegoat.

 

Women as Medieval Imagery: Part I, Sinful Except for Procreation?

Notes on: Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, from the Twelfth Century to Dante
by Joan M. Ferrante

In 12th Century literature, females were utilized as “symbols, aspects of philosophical and physiological problem that trouble the male world” (1) rather than independent, real people. In the male minds of literary inventors, “women personify cosmological forces that govern men’s life… they represent his ideals, his aspirations, the values of his society life.” (1) Women, though considered the least important of people, are invested with the most significance and importance because of men’s considerations of them. This was reflected in literature through women’s domination of the twelfth century hero for good or evil. Even “biblical women, if they are good or potentially redeemable, are said to represent the church; if bad they stand for the lower or weaker parts of “man, for carnal desires, or for inconsistency of mind.” (2) Something about this male desire for women almost seems an inherent (or sinful?) need for women; I would be interested in a man’s perspective on this, as I am only speaking from appearances as a woman. Male justification for this opinion states, “woman, as the most obvious object of male concupiscence, is made to represent lust and is thus held responsible for it; the object of temptation becomes the cause.” (2)

Since women are men’s ways of expressing themselves—their eternal delight or unending sorrow, I think maybe male emotions are tied up with female figures. Women are limited as much as men really limit themselves—maybe to dominate a woman before of a need for her seems equivalent to domination of self. Negative symbolism of women is more prevalent in twelfth century religious writing and positive symbolism of women is more prevalent in philosophical writing. Neo-platonic “marriage of male/female elements requires the cooperation (rather than compulsion) of female elements to preserve and maintain order. This is more positive than the religious consideration of marriage, because the love of women was considered comparable to idolatry or heresy. “In the battle between vices and virtues, which is central to the Christian morality, both groups are female; inner conflict is seen in terms of women pulling in opposite directions towards good or evil.” (2) So man’s highest and lowest impulses gravitate towards women?

Courtly literature uses female imagery to probe men’s emotions; as a lady represents the force of love to a man, “love awakens man to a new sense of himself, to higher aspirations, but sometimes he is drawn away from his love by worldly desires, which in romance, are often other women.” (2) Thus man seeks to embed his highest and lowest impulses in the figure of a woman. I wonder, could man think of himself apart from a woman? He seems to find so much of himself in her… do we women feel we can embody those values as men desire us to? How do we picture and understand our own feelings and virtues? In thirteenth century literature, “the romance quest becomes a religious quest, a personal one, which can be achieved only when the individual alienates himself from his society.” (3) This change, “the rejection of the courtly ethic” causes women as symbols to become “a temptation rather than an inspiration.” (3) Thirteenth century literature evidences the strong influence of two anti-feminist views; the Aristotelian, of women as defective men, creatures lacking in reason and useful only to bear children, and that of the moralist—of woman as a threat to man’s salvation. I wonder how we women were supposed to get salvation, or are we incapable of redemption?

I am sure I never knew more how a man deemed me as un-human than in the two who I most invested myself in and who perhaps thought too much of me, beyond my comprehension: I will call them A and B. A started off telling me all his views on women which my rebellious mind was not OK with: no discussion of spiritual or intellectual matters, no mutual sharing though I was expected to remain open; woman in the home, almost commune-like in its “protectiveness.” I remember the phone call in which that relationship shattered when I heard all these new guidelines for friendship… I remember crying and whispering, “what can I talk to you about then?” My soul would have been starved. B, on the other hand, wanted to keep me all to himself and for me to go nowhere by myself. I was expected not to engage in discussions with other males, witnessing a jealousy that scared me. For a while, I thought of the jealous as a desire to protect, and thus I submitted myself more. But the relationship grew more and more controlling as I submitted more: my sin, my sin, my terrible sin. Was that capable of redemption as I continued to encourage the unhealthy dominance through my behavior?

Women retained positive place in poetic and mystical writings, but now “man’s goal is not union with her, but union with God through her” (3) because she became separate from man, no longer symbolizing something within him. Dante’s writing yearned “for harmony, and the harmony he presents as the ideal for himself and all mankind is possible only through women.” (3) Dante’s writing on union with women in order to reach God is spoken through the perspective of his love for Beatrice, who figures Mary, and thus Christ, in Dante’s Comedy. I speculate on the figure of the Virgin Mary: did men manufacture the ideal associated with her historical personhood in order to identify with Jesus? Back to Dante, he was one of the few (though significant) writers of the thirteenth century who wrote encouraging the female side of human nature. I wonder, Jesus; how can I marry a man when I am married to You? I do not understand, when You are all I need, why would I a woman consider allowing that unity to change to be joined with a man? I suppose this was not so much a question in the medieval ages, where the alternative to marriage was a convent, for women posed the possibility of threat to the male ideals: am I still considered a threat to anyone (I am unmarried)?

The female side of human nature seems to find its legitimacy in its ability to embody and personify, that which is within men. 12th Century art and literature fuses male and female characteristics that may be mere gender stereotypicized tendencies, resulting in “a confusion of male and female characteristics in literature and art” (4): heroes and heroines as well as angels are often interchangeable in their gender roles. Jesus, too is not spared from this transgendering tendency, for “Christ is both Logos of the New Testament (masculine) and the Wisdom of the Old Testament (feminine.” (5) “Anima Mundi is another figure of sexual ambiguity; an orthodox concept at best, the Neo-Platonic world soul, always female, was sometimes identified with the Holy Spirit, normally male.” (5) I think figuring the soul as ambiguous gender allows for personal interpretation… maybe our souls mirror or balance our own particular gender: mirroring our own gender or refracting the opposite gender (if any gender at all). “The fact that a human quality or a divine attribute was represented as a woman meant that it must have female characteristics like giving birth or milk, that there was something essentially female.” (6)

Twelfth century men theorized on women in terms of sexual desire (which is a factor far too focused on within all of humanity, I believe)—deeming her more “cold and wet” (signifying a lessened and dampened presence of desire than man) according to Abelard of Bath and Guillame de Conches (6-7). “Since a woman is cold and wet, the fire is hard to start, but burns longer,” (7) Guillame declared, adding to the perceived danger of women to men, trapping him in persistent “sin.” “Guillame insists that the woman produces a seed toward the conception of the child just as a man does,” which seems to me an attempt to redirect the biblical concept of sin traits passed on from the father’s seed. The woman’s “seed is converted blood” (7), whose presence cannot be denied in women, emitted in the onset of desire, but whose presence is supposedly proved through boys’ display of their mother’s traits. This suggests that weakness in women produces sexual desire, even in rape situations, resulting in conception (Guillame makes desire an imperative aspect for conception). Because women were viewed as always giving way to desire, men feared and distrusted them, because desire inevitably resulted in conception.

“Women were often mistrusted by church establishment for their religious fervor as well as seductions, and they were rarely permitted to play important roles after the middle ages.” (8) Thus sects and heresies did appeal to and draw many women by allowing them to have voice, fueling the misconception of women as inherently sinful. Women did, however, have opportunity to play important roles in social life of the middle ages. By the thirteenth century, “a pervasive intellectual constraint” (11) led to decline of positive symbolism of women. “When men cling to orthodoxy and defend the status quo against all attack from outside or from within, they begin to look on all identifiable groups as suspect and dangerous,” (11-12) which I guess targets women and Jesus. Women as a threat were targeted in the late medieval witch-hunt, which “was the product of ‘a world made schizophrenic by masculine anxieties and masculine fears.’” (12) Men already feared the desire of women—because they identified us with lust and sin, but wouldn’t they be some, rather than no, desire? What are men afraid of in us?

The religious shift between 12th and 13th centuries included adopting Gothic rather than Romanesque cathedrals, and changing from symbolism to realistic human figure-representations (12). The figure of Mary and male obsession with her comes to mind. Ferrante says that “it is when men think of desirable qualities as female, even as female impulses within themselves, that they exalt female figures in literature.” (13) Women again picture polar opposites… nuns figuring virtues and townswomen, common women, picturing worldly distractions of men. How can women only be “child-bearers or temptresses” (13)? “In literature before Dante, it is only women writers, as far as I know, who seem to believe that a man can inspire a woman through love in the same way a woman can inspire a man.” (14) Even those who assert “that man and woman can attain divinity through each other’s love” make the female a symbol of and embodiment “for her love the fountain of Wisdom.” (14) From male literary descriptions of females, I am inclined to see more man in men’s presentation of woman than of the woman herself.

Women’s danger “to men’s moral state is introduced into Judeo-Christian tradition with Eve’s temptation of Adam.” (17) Religious writers thought physical beauty allowed women to seduce men from the perfection of thought to the sin of physical matter. Therefore, they viewed women extolled by the Bible as “divested of their human nature by commentators and are made to represent impersonal abstractions like the church.” (17) Male authors found it impossible to deny “the connection of women with the flesh, with matter… partly based on her biological function, her ability to give birth.” (19) I find it interesting that Ferrance compares flesh to the act of circumcision as “a physical feature which denotes a moral state,” (19) the cutting off of which signifies a denial of lust. Salvation was linked to the salvation of men, but women were considered still capable of salvation in spite of being unable to be circumcised. (19) However, eunuchs and virgins were still most highly extolled in religious though because marriage includes “the act of intercourse, which involves the sinful impulse of lust, (and) is morally dangerous to man.” (20) Mary’s perpetual virginity was championed as a glory, enabling her to “be the mother of a living son without intercourse.” (20) Religious literature tended to prefer the idea of immaculate conception because no “sin” was involved propelling to “fleshly” acts.

The common belief of the time, “the mind is the door-keeper of the soul; if it is female, that is given to carnal thoughts, it allows evil to enter,” evidenced male projection of sin tendencies onto women. I wonder when weakness came to mean prone to vice? If women were categorized as such, I would argue that in the weakness, we are more prone to permit solicited vice because it is harder for us to reject sin than sinful tendencies involving men. As base and the fountain of all evil desires, women were viewed as “whores… connected with heresy as well as carnal lust.” (21) As the objects of temptations because of man’s own sinful tendencies, women were made unclean in man’s thoughts because he projected his own weakness upon them. This continues to mystify me, because no matter how purely I have tried to act, how much I have covered myself, the unwanted attention seems inevitable. Being the focus of male attention to my physicality makes me feel unclean. There is no way I can hide from being implicated in fornication within a man’s own thoughts, no matter how much I hide myself; does this mean there is something wrong with me? At list this genre of writing would say so.

Religious writing attempted to trace seduction “to the nature of women, to her tendency to lewd movement and the resulting flowing of her robes.” (21) I almost laughed at this: so does every move a girl makes with an element of grace or in a skirt/dress have to be considered lewd and unclean? Alanus obviously thought so in deeming women “the objects of hedonism.” (22) Even stories of biblical women were twisted to point guilt to women, evidencing them as the root of sin—flesh without intellect. Of the twelfth century religious authors, Abelard had an unusually positive view of women, “emphasizing the greatness of their virtue when it asserts itself despite the weakness.” (24) This perspective continued to advocate the origin of sin as female, but indicated more to her personhood than simply failure. Religious opinion was reflected in rationalizations, such as the teaching that “Christ showed that the female sex is essential to salvation when He chose to assume human body through a woman.” (25) Hence the belief that women truly do achieve eternal salvation through childbearing? I continue to wonder why a male couldn’t be involved in Christ’s conception to result in the sinless savior. The biblical women who are chosen as examples of virtue, are either redeemed from lasciviousness or ever-virgin, like the figure of Mary, representing the Church.

In the same line of thinking, the love of women is always viewed as a secondary sort of love, for “woman is imperfect, hence not the safest object for love.” (27) The biblical bride metaphor of a man completely enraptured with the love of a woman, then, represents the Church’s relationship to Christ. Maybe men created the ideal of the Virgin Mary to express emotion and their own selves in a female figure who is strong and constant against perhaps men’s greatest weakness… opposite of other women, whom men saw as “completely languid, soft, feminine.” (28) “Bernard’s devotion to the Virgin is such that he can identify himself, through her, with a woman’s role and speak of himself as a mother to his monks.” (29) Men have never been able to understand the sense of belonging, which exists between a mother and child—doesn’t God express the same womb-love, sense of belonging for us, as a mother to child? In Song of Songs, “the man’s soul is identified with a woman in its love for God.” (30) This creates a contradiction in imagery, as “Eve was the first woman to fall, but she is also the first to be led out of Hell by Christ: she was guilty of original sin, but she is also a symbol of the church.” (30)

Sin is pictured in conception as the destruction of a woman’s virginity both physically and metaphysically. According to Augustine, in pre-fall conception, “male semen would have entered the woman’s womb without destroying her virginity, as the menses come out.” (31) Marriage does have merits beyond procreation, church fathers advocated, because of the human “need for love, and mutual self esteem.” (31) Yet Augustine and others believed this complementary relationship of the genders improved as sexuality decreased. I wonder if men continue to busy their feelings and desires in women; male friends have told me and other young women that if we intend to never marry, we will break hearts. Do male still see aspiring women as potential embodiments of virtue that they themselves with they could embody? Marriage is far too commonly spiritualized as “the sacrament and image of God to the soul,” (34) first seen in Adam and Eve. So “Eve represents a part of Adam that he must learn to control and use properly, not to reject; he is to achieve the reintegration of the human being and he must accomplish that before he can achieve union with God, the reunion with his creator which is his ultimate goal.” (34-5) Thus to blame women alone for sin is to abdicate man’s role of reflecting God to her. Thus religious through viewed woman as both of part of man, an outward embodiment of himself, as well as a tool to benefit his ascent to God.

The difference between exegetic and allegorical tradition is that exegetic contains stories from which meaning must be derived and in allegory the meaning/form is given and must be constructed into the story (38). The meaning of allegorical stories is found in the degree to which a man allows himself to be controlled by a vice and virtue: “the vices and virtues have a real existence for medieval man and the figures that personify these concepts in literature have more than a metaphoric relation to them.” (39) Have we lost a “belief in the extramental reality of universal concepts persists through the middle ages” (39)? Christians use Neo-Platonism to demonstrate that “matter is the mother who receives the species; providence, the sphere of divine ideas, is the father who supplies the image.” (40) Matter as the prime locus is feminine and passive, receiving the formed-given image by the male. “Creation itself is the wedding of opposites, of matter and idea, body and soul.” (41) Figures in allegory/personifications have female gender “because of an inherent femaleness in the concepts they embody,” (42) thus “in allegory, then, women can be forces for good as well as for evil, they can protect and nourish, not just seduce and destroy.” (42)

In allegory, “marriage… (is) a metaphor for the reconciliation of opposites, as well as the means by which God’s plan is carried out within the moral order.” (43) Man’s goal is “the presence of wisdom, of Christ, in the individual mind, which man can achieve by overcoming the evil in his heart.” (44) Prudentius reverses roles expected of the female virtues and vices “to make a moral point about the relative strength and weakness of vices and virtues.” (45) Human vices, it seems, are more vulnerable than expected. Men continue to puzzle me with Mary. What do men envy about women so as to want to imagine to be as her? “After Mary, all flesh is divine which conceives God, which builds the temple to wisdom in the soul. That is, by overcoming vice, man can bear Christ with his soul; he can become Mary and achieve the highest feat—union with God.” (46)

In allegory, Philosophy teaches “that the soul is imprisoned within the body and can only free itself through learning, that is made in the image of God and can only fulfill itself when it is concerned not with things but with causes.” (49-50) Following in this tradition of masculinizing the women, as seen in Athena as “a masculine goddess, born of a father without a mother.” (52) Interesting that wisdom must bear a sword, but be a woman, a fundamental contradiction. “Through Philosophy, we are told, Jupiter permits anyone to ascend into the heavens.” (53) Bernard equates the quests for knowledge and goodness as the same thing, “but his concern is less with this quest and the union that is its goal, than with the union that produces life.” (54) Through the sexual act, man becomes part of the process of creation, reflecting the image he bears of God in the conception of life (54). Man must maintain his involvement with creation, because “all the agencies of creation in this work (of life) except God the Father, are female.” (55) So is how women achieve salvation through the procreation of life, childbearing? If women are to achieve salvation in a male way, are we to become men to get their same salvation? If we can’t bear children, what is our worth, how do we achieve the working part of salvation?