The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500
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| Format: | Elektronisch E-Book |
| Sprache: | English |
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Philadelphia, Pa
University of Pennsylvania Press
2012
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| Schriftenreihe: | The Middle Ages Series
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| Schlagworte: | |
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| Beschreibung: | Biographical note: Dyan Elliott is Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities in the Department of History at Northwestern University. She is the author of Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press Description for reader: IntroductionVirginity is a spiritual kind of marrying.—OptatusA young woman eschews all mortal ties to unite herself irrevocably with a man who has been dead for centuries, yet has nevertheless managed to lure countless women into this suspect arrangement: a polygamist on a grand scale. Although it may sound like a plot worthy of Bram Stoker, I am, of course, alluding to the traditional understanding of the consecrated virgin as bride of Christ—a concept so intrinsic to female spirituality and so familiar to medievalists that it is difficult to imagine when it was otherwise. But there was a time when the bride was just a metaphor unattached to any particular body—before she tumbled from the symbolic order, became entangled in text, and then finally came to land with a thump upon the body of the virgin who has dedicated her life to God. It is this story of embodiment that is at the heart of the present study.It is important to remember, however, that although the consecrated virgin is preeminent as the human face of the bride, the image was and would remain a veritable calliope of overlapping metaphors. At its root was the mystical marriage between God and the human soul that, from the perspective of ancient and medieval commentators, found its most eloquent and provocative expression in the Song of Songs. Like the enterprising bride of the Canticles, all true believers should pursue the celestial bridegroom in anticipation of an ecstatic consummation in the afterlife. The mystical marriage was also possessed of an incorporated dimension as evident in Christ's marriage with the church of all believers. In addition, it had important institutional applications. By the eleventh century the bishop, standing in loco Christi, was customarily understood to be married to his see. During the papal schism, John Gerson (d. 1429) would raise the fraught question of what to do if the pope, the church's most immediate proxy for the celestial bridegroom, was bewitched and incapable of providing children for the virginal Ecclesia.A mystical marriage with Christ simultaneously invested mundane reality with and divested it of meaning. It enhanced carnal marriage through the association with a higher mystery. Yet the representation of the mystical marriage as the purer and more authentic union simultaneously drained its carnal host of vitality. This book is in many ways a testimony to the mystical marriage's predatory symbolism. It was supposed to be a study about medieval matrimony, in theory and practice. A portion was dedicated to the way in which marriage served as a template, structuring many nonmatrimonial relations, and it is was there that I ran into trouble. As soon as I turned my attention to the sponsa Christi, to my mind the most vivid example of the matrimonial template at work the subject developed a momentum all its own, ultimately derailing the entire project. So the tendency to bypass real marriage in favor of its imaginary counterpart is not just a medieval predilection; there are certain modern scholars inclined to follow suit.The mystical marriage's preemptive claims vividly testify to Christianity's tendency to privilege the spiritual over the carnal. In this world upside down, the despised and derivative institution of marriage is recast as the equivalent of an embodied exemplum or carnal symbol for the higher union. Moreover, mystical marriage was a restless image that seemingly refused to be restricted to the Christian equivalent of the platonic realm of ideas, instead constantly seeking embodiment. The fact that the bride of Christ had a claim on both the abstract and the concrete meant that it could at any moment erupt into people's lives, with tangible consequences. A quodlibet by Peter John Olivi (d. 1298) demonstrates this potential. Olivi asks why someone who had been married to a widow could not be ordained a priest when a widower who had lost his virginity before his marriage could be ordained, provided he had married a virgin. The answer is that marriage is a triple sacrament: the first component, which is the marriage between God and the soul, is designated by the union of souls between flesh-and-blood husband and wife, which occurs when spouses exchange vows in the present; the second is the union of human nature, when the word became flesh in the womb of a virgin, and is signified by the sex act that would consummate the union; the third is the union of Christ and the virginal church. For this application to work, it is inconsequential if the man is a virgin; Christ, after all, had been married to Synagoga before he married Ecclesia. In fact, Christ can be joined to concubines "without any corruption of his deity, or his humanity and love." Besides, the priest represents the church militant, which contains both good and evil, so he need not be pure. But if a priest were at one time married, his wife had to be a virgin, otherwise his union could not signify Christ's union with the church triumphant, upon which there can be no spot. These different levels of meaning demonstrate just how encompassing this metaphor could be. But they also point to a basic implacability at the heart of the image. Only a man was fit to stand in loco Christi, and hence only men could be cast as groom in the different orthodox variants of the mystical marriage. While all Christian souls, women and men, were brides of Christ in a mystical sense, consecrated virgins were brides par excellence. And because the bride herself was ever-virgin, and virginity was a fragile asset, throughout the Middle Ages the consecrated virgin would most often pursue her vocation in a cloister.It would nevertheless be misleading to imply that female religious alone were actively encouraged to identify with the image of the sponsa Christi. The ongoing proliferation of monastic commentaries on the Song of Songs attest to a profound degree of attraction to this imagery among male religious as well. In the high Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) attempted to invoke a still more affective response among his monastic brethren. Yet, as Sarah McNamer has recently argued, the bride was but a "provisional persona" for the monk; in contrast, "female religious—precisely because they were female—could participate in another signifying system, this one historical and cultural." Nor would virginity remain an absolute for the bride. One of the great sea changes in medieval spirituality, and one especially portentous for this study, was when women who were not virgins began to lay claim to this title. Despite these competing claims, however, the female virgin would always take pride of place as Christ's bride. She remained for the Christian community something of a living allegory, inhabiting two realms simultaneously, and was socially construed as such. The bride in Olivi's quodlibet, on the verge of carnal marriage, inhabited this symbolic zone very briefly; for the consecrated virgin, however, it was home.In spite of this undeniably lofty place in the symbolic order, Christianity's deployment of the bride is at one with other religious systems, where the dominant images associated with women originate in their reproductive/sexual status. From this perspective, it is not surprising to learn that the identification of virgins as brides of Christ probably began as a kind of compromise formation. It was first used by Tertullian (d. ca. 220) in an effort to impose some kind of discipline on the independent virgins of Carthage, who perceived themselves as living the genderless angelic life. Tertullian's response was to insist that these virgins were not only women but matrons of a sort, who must wear veils as a sign of their submission to their celestial bridegroom, Christ. Despite constant reiterations that virginity was primarily a state of mind among church authorities, Tertullian's embodied literalism was the wave of the future. As the female religious vocation developed, Christ's bride became ever more embodied, physical integrity jockeying with mental integrity for the prize.If we were to stop here, the tale of the sponsa Christi might seem to resemble the tragedy at the heart of the gnostic understanding of the fall. For as with the spirits who were wrestled down from heaven and stuffed into bodies, women's gradual assumption of the bridal identity could also be construed as an ungentle story of angelic creatures subjected to enforced embodiment. But this perception necessarily changes in the mystical climate of the high and later Middle Ages, when women clearly embraced the bridal persona, making it very much their own. In particular, the increasing number of nonvirgins who appropriated the title of bride frequently sustained these claims through an extremely embodied spirituality, introducing a more exacting, albeit different, kind of literalism than was ever imagined by the church fathers. Many of these women experienced vision .. Main description: Following a long trajectory from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages, Dyan Elliott offers a provocative analysis of the changing religious, emotional, and sexual meanings of the metaphor of the sponsa Christi and of the increasing anxiety surrounding the somatization of female spirituality |
| Beschreibung: | 1 Online-Ressource (480 S.) |
| ISBN: | 9780812206937 |
| DOI: | 10.9783/9780812206937 |
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| 500 | |a Biographical note: Dyan Elliott is Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities in the Department of History at Northwestern University. She is the author of Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press | ||
| 500 | |a Description for reader: IntroductionVirginity is a spiritual kind of marrying.—OptatusA young woman eschews all mortal ties to unite herself irrevocably with a man who has been dead for centuries, yet has nevertheless managed to lure countless women into this suspect arrangement: a polygamist on a grand scale. Although it may sound like a plot worthy of Bram Stoker, I am, of course, alluding to the traditional understanding of the consecrated virgin as bride of Christ—a concept so intrinsic to female spirituality and so familiar to medievalists that it is difficult to imagine when it was otherwise. But there was a time when the bride was just a metaphor unattached to any particular body—before she tumbled from the symbolic order, became entangled in text, and then finally came to land with a thump upon the body of the virgin who has dedicated her life to God. | ||
| 500 | |a It is this story of embodiment that is at the heart of the present study.It is important to remember, however, that although the consecrated virgin is preeminent as the human face of the bride, the image was and would remain a veritable calliope of overlapping metaphors. At its root was the mystical marriage between God and the human soul that, from the perspective of ancient and medieval commentators, found its most eloquent and provocative expression in the Song of Songs. Like the enterprising bride of the Canticles, all true believers should pursue the celestial bridegroom in anticipation of an ecstatic consummation in the afterlife. The mystical marriage was also possessed of an incorporated dimension as evident in Christ's marriage with the church of all believers. In addition, it had important institutional applications. By the eleventh century the bishop, standing in loco Christi, was customarily understood to be married to his see. During the papal schism, John Gerson (d. | ||
| 500 | |a 1429) would raise the fraught question of what to do if the pope, the church's most immediate proxy for the celestial bridegroom, was bewitched and incapable of providing children for the virginal Ecclesia.A mystical marriage with Christ simultaneously invested mundane reality with and divested it of meaning. It enhanced carnal marriage through the association with a higher mystery. Yet the representation of the mystical marriage as the purer and more authentic union simultaneously drained its carnal host of vitality. This book is in many ways a testimony to the mystical marriage's predatory symbolism. It was supposed to be a study about medieval matrimony, in theory and practice. A portion was dedicated to the way in which marriage served as a template, structuring many nonmatrimonial relations, and it is was there that I ran into trouble. | ||
| 500 | |a As soon as I turned my attention to the sponsa Christi, to my mind the most vivid example of the matrimonial template at work the subject developed a momentum all its own, ultimately derailing the entire project. So the tendency to bypass real marriage in favor of its imaginary counterpart is not just a medieval predilection; there are certain modern scholars inclined to follow suit.The mystical marriage's preemptive claims vividly testify to Christianity's tendency to privilege the spiritual over the carnal. In this world upside down, the despised and derivative institution of marriage is recast as the equivalent of an embodied exemplum or carnal symbol for the higher union. Moreover, mystical marriage was a restless image that seemingly refused to be restricted to the Christian equivalent of the platonic realm of ideas, instead constantly seeking embodiment. | ||
| 500 | |a The fact that the bride of Christ had a claim on both the abstract and the concrete meant that it could at any moment erupt into people's lives, with tangible consequences. A quodlibet by Peter John Olivi (d. 1298) demonstrates this potential. Olivi asks why someone who had been married to a widow could not be ordained a priest when a widower who had lost his virginity before his marriage could be ordained, provided he had married a virgin. The answer is that marriage is a triple sacrament: the first component, which is the marriage between God and the soul, is designated by the union of souls between flesh-and-blood husband and wife, which occurs when spouses exchange vows in the present; the second is the union of human nature, when the word became flesh in the womb of a virgin, and is signified by the sex act that would consummate the union; the third is the union of Christ and the virginal church. | ||
| 500 | |a For this application to work, it is inconsequential if the man is a virgin; Christ, after all, had been married to Synagoga before he married Ecclesia. In fact, Christ can be joined to concubines "without any corruption of his deity, or his humanity and love." Besides, the priest represents the church militant, which contains both good and evil, so he need not be pure. But if a priest were at one time married, his wife had to be a virgin, otherwise his union could not signify Christ's union with the church triumphant, upon which there can be no spot. These different levels of meaning demonstrate just how encompassing this metaphor could be. But they also point to a basic implacability at the heart of the image. Only a man was fit to stand in loco Christi, and hence only men could be cast as groom in the different orthodox variants of the mystical marriage. | ||
| 500 | |a While all Christian souls, women and men, were brides of Christ in a mystical sense, consecrated virgins were brides par excellence. And because the bride herself was ever-virgin, and virginity was a fragile asset, throughout the Middle Ages the consecrated virgin would most often pursue her vocation in a cloister.It would nevertheless be misleading to imply that female religious alone were actively encouraged to identify with the image of the sponsa Christi. The ongoing proliferation of monastic commentaries on the Song of Songs attest to a profound degree of attraction to this imagery among male religious as well. In the high Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) attempted to invoke a still more affective response among his monastic brethren. | ||
| 500 | |a Yet, as Sarah McNamer has recently argued, the bride was but a "provisional persona" for the monk; in contrast, "female religious—precisely because they were female—could participate in another signifying system, this one historical and cultural." Nor would virginity remain an absolute for the bride. One of the great sea changes in medieval spirituality, and one especially portentous for this study, was when women who were not virgins began to lay claim to this title. Despite these competing claims, however, the female virgin would always take pride of place as Christ's bride. She remained for the Christian community something of a living allegory, inhabiting two realms simultaneously, and was socially construed as such. | ||
| 500 | |a The bride in Olivi's quodlibet, on the verge of carnal marriage, inhabited this symbolic zone very briefly; for the consecrated virgin, however, it was home.In spite of this undeniably lofty place in the symbolic order, Christianity's deployment of the bride is at one with other religious systems, where the dominant images associated with women originate in their reproductive/sexual status. From this perspective, it is not surprising to learn that the identification of virgins as brides of Christ probably began as a kind of compromise formation. It was first used by Tertullian (d. ca. 220) in an effort to impose some kind of discipline on the independent virgins of Carthage, who perceived themselves as living the genderless angelic life. Tertullian's response was to insist that these virgins were not only women but matrons of a sort, who must wear veils as a sign of their submission to their celestial bridegroom, Christ. | ||
| 500 | |a Despite constant reiterations that virginity was primarily a state of mind among church authorities, Tertullian's embodied literalism was the wave of the future. As the female religious vocation developed, Christ's bride became ever more embodied, physical integrity jockeying with mental integrity for the prize.If we were to stop here, the tale of the sponsa Christi might seem to resemble the tragedy at the heart of the gnostic understanding of the fall. For as with the spirits who were wrestled down from heaven and stuffed into bodies, women's gradual assumption of the bridal identity could also be construed as an ungentle story of angelic creatures subjected to enforced embodiment. But this perception necessarily changes in the mystical climate of the high and later Middle Ages, when women clearly embraced the bridal persona, making it very much their own. | ||
| 500 | |a In particular, the increasing number of nonvirgins who appropriated the title of bride frequently sustained these claims through an extremely embodied spirituality, introducing a more exacting, albeit different, kind of literalism than was ever imagined by the church fathers. Many of these women experienced vision .. | ||
| 500 | |a Main description: Following a long trajectory from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages, Dyan Elliott offers a provocative analysis of the changing religious, emotional, and sexual meanings of the metaphor of the sponsa Christi and of the increasing anxiety surrounding the somatization of female spirituality | ||
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The mystical marriage was also possessed of an incorporated dimension as evident in Christ's marriage with the church of all believers. In addition, it had important institutional applications. By the eleventh century the bishop, standing in loco Christi, was customarily understood to be married to his see. During the papal schism, John Gerson (d. </subfield></datafield><datafield tag="500" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a">1429) would raise the fraught question of what to do if the pope, the church's most immediate proxy for the celestial bridegroom, was bewitched and incapable of providing children for the virginal Ecclesia.A mystical marriage with Christ simultaneously invested mundane reality with and divested it of meaning. It enhanced carnal marriage through the association with a higher mystery. Yet the representation of the mystical marriage as the purer and more authentic union simultaneously drained its carnal host of vitality. This book is in many ways a testimony to the mystical marriage's predatory symbolism. It was supposed to be a study about medieval matrimony, in theory and practice. A portion was dedicated to the way in which marriage served as a template, structuring many nonmatrimonial relations, and it is was there that I ran into trouble. </subfield></datafield><datafield tag="500" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a">As soon as I turned my attention to the sponsa Christi, to my mind the most vivid example of the matrimonial template at work the subject developed a momentum all its own, ultimately derailing the entire project. So the tendency to bypass real marriage in favor of its imaginary counterpart is not just a medieval predilection; there are certain modern scholars inclined to follow suit.The mystical marriage's preemptive claims vividly testify to Christianity's tendency to privilege the spiritual over the carnal. In this world upside down, the despised and derivative institution of marriage is recast as the equivalent of an embodied exemplum or carnal symbol for the higher union. Moreover, mystical marriage was a restless image that seemingly refused to be restricted to the Christian equivalent of the platonic realm of ideas, instead constantly seeking embodiment. </subfield></datafield><datafield tag="500" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a">The fact that the bride of Christ had a claim on both the abstract and the concrete meant that it could at any moment erupt into people's lives, with tangible consequences. A quodlibet by Peter John Olivi (d. 1298) demonstrates this potential. Olivi asks why someone who had been married to a widow could not be ordained a priest when a widower who had lost his virginity before his marriage could be ordained, provided he had married a virgin. The answer is that marriage is a triple sacrament: the first component, which is the marriage between God and the soul, is designated by the union of souls between flesh-and-blood husband and wife, which occurs when spouses exchange vows in the present; the second is the union of human nature, when the word became flesh in the womb of a virgin, and is signified by the sex act that would consummate the union; the third is the union of Christ and the virginal church. </subfield></datafield><datafield tag="500" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a">For this application to work, it is inconsequential if the man is a virgin; Christ, after all, had been married to Synagoga before he married Ecclesia. In fact, Christ can be joined to concubines "without any corruption of his deity, or his humanity and love." Besides, the priest represents the church militant, which contains both good and evil, so he need not be pure. But if a priest were at one time married, his wife had to be a virgin, otherwise his union could not signify Christ's union with the church triumphant, upon which there can be no spot. These different levels of meaning demonstrate just how encompassing this metaphor could be. But they also point to a basic implacability at the heart of the image. Only a man was fit to stand in loco Christi, and hence only men could be cast as groom in the different orthodox variants of the mystical marriage. </subfield></datafield><datafield tag="500" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a">While all Christian souls, women and men, were brides of Christ in a mystical sense, consecrated virgins were brides par excellence. And because the bride herself was ever-virgin, and virginity was a fragile asset, throughout the Middle Ages the consecrated virgin would most often pursue her vocation in a cloister.It would nevertheless be misleading to imply that female religious alone were actively encouraged to identify with the image of the sponsa Christi. The ongoing proliferation of monastic commentaries on the Song of Songs attest to a profound degree of attraction to this imagery among male religious as well. In the high Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) attempted to invoke a still more affective response among his monastic brethren. </subfield></datafield><datafield tag="500" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a">Yet, as Sarah McNamer has recently argued, the bride was but a "provisional persona" for the monk; in contrast, "female religious—precisely because they were female—could participate in another signifying system, this one historical and cultural." Nor would virginity remain an absolute for the bride. One of the great sea changes in medieval spirituality, and one especially portentous for this study, was when women who were not virgins began to lay claim to this title. Despite these competing claims, however, the female virgin would always take pride of place as Christ's bride. She remained for the Christian community something of a living allegory, inhabiting two realms simultaneously, and was socially construed as such. </subfield></datafield><datafield tag="500" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a">The bride in Olivi's quodlibet, on the verge of carnal marriage, inhabited this symbolic zone very briefly; for the consecrated virgin, however, it was home.In spite of this undeniably lofty place in the symbolic order, Christianity's deployment of the bride is at one with other religious systems, where the dominant images associated with women originate in their reproductive/sexual status. From this perspective, it is not surprising to learn that the identification of virgins as brides of Christ probably began as a kind of compromise formation. It was first used by Tertullian (d. ca. 220) in an effort to impose some kind of discipline on the independent virgins of Carthage, who perceived themselves as living the genderless angelic life. Tertullian's response was to insist that these virgins were not only women but matrons of a sort, who must wear veils as a sign of their submission to their celestial bridegroom, Christ. </subfield></datafield><datafield tag="500" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a">Despite constant reiterations that virginity was primarily a state of mind among church authorities, Tertullian's embodied literalism was the wave of the future. As the female religious vocation developed, Christ's bride became ever more embodied, physical integrity jockeying with mental integrity for the prize.If we were to stop here, the tale of the sponsa Christi might seem to resemble the tragedy at the heart of the gnostic understanding of the fall. For as with the spirits who were wrestled down from heaven and stuffed into bodies, women's gradual assumption of the bridal identity could also be construed as an ungentle story of angelic creatures subjected to enforced embodiment. But this perception necessarily changes in the mystical climate of the high and later Middle Ages, when women clearly embraced the bridal persona, making it very much their own. </subfield></datafield><datafield tag="500" ind1=" " ind2=" "><subfield code="a">In particular, the increasing number of nonvirgins who appropriated the title of bride frequently sustained these claims through an extremely embodied spirituality, introducing a more exacting, albeit different, kind of literalism than was ever imagined by the church fathers. 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| id | DE-604.BV042521544 |
| illustrated | Not Illustrated |
| indexdate | 2024-07-10T01:23:59Z |
| institution | BVB |
| isbn | 9780812206937 |
| language | English |
| oai_aleph_id | oai:aleph.bib-bvb.de:BVB01-027955883 |
| oclc_num | 794700707 |
| open_access_boolean | |
| owner | DE-859 DE-860 DE-473 DE-BY-UBG DE-Aug4 DE-739 DE-1046 DE-1043 DE-858 |
| owner_facet | DE-859 DE-860 DE-473 DE-BY-UBG DE-Aug4 DE-739 DE-1046 DE-1043 DE-858 |
| physical | 1 Online-Ressource (480 S.) |
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| publishDate | 2012 |
| publishDateSearch | 2012 |
| publishDateSort | 2012 |
| publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| record_format | marc |
| series2 | The Middle Ages Series |
| spelling | Elliott, Dyan Verfasser aut The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 Philadelphia, Pa University of Pennsylvania Press 2012 1 Online-Ressource (480 S.) txt rdacontent c rdamedia cr rdacarrier The Middle Ages Series Biographical note: Dyan Elliott is Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities in the Department of History at Northwestern University. She is the author of Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press Description for reader: IntroductionVirginity is a spiritual kind of marrying.—OptatusA young woman eschews all mortal ties to unite herself irrevocably with a man who has been dead for centuries, yet has nevertheless managed to lure countless women into this suspect arrangement: a polygamist on a grand scale. Although it may sound like a plot worthy of Bram Stoker, I am, of course, alluding to the traditional understanding of the consecrated virgin as bride of Christ—a concept so intrinsic to female spirituality and so familiar to medievalists that it is difficult to imagine when it was otherwise. But there was a time when the bride was just a metaphor unattached to any particular body—before she tumbled from the symbolic order, became entangled in text, and then finally came to land with a thump upon the body of the virgin who has dedicated her life to God. It is this story of embodiment that is at the heart of the present study.It is important to remember, however, that although the consecrated virgin is preeminent as the human face of the bride, the image was and would remain a veritable calliope of overlapping metaphors. At its root was the mystical marriage between God and the human soul that, from the perspective of ancient and medieval commentators, found its most eloquent and provocative expression in the Song of Songs. Like the enterprising bride of the Canticles, all true believers should pursue the celestial bridegroom in anticipation of an ecstatic consummation in the afterlife. The mystical marriage was also possessed of an incorporated dimension as evident in Christ's marriage with the church of all believers. In addition, it had important institutional applications. By the eleventh century the bishop, standing in loco Christi, was customarily understood to be married to his see. During the papal schism, John Gerson (d. 1429) would raise the fraught question of what to do if the pope, the church's most immediate proxy for the celestial bridegroom, was bewitched and incapable of providing children for the virginal Ecclesia.A mystical marriage with Christ simultaneously invested mundane reality with and divested it of meaning. It enhanced carnal marriage through the association with a higher mystery. Yet the representation of the mystical marriage as the purer and more authentic union simultaneously drained its carnal host of vitality. This book is in many ways a testimony to the mystical marriage's predatory symbolism. It was supposed to be a study about medieval matrimony, in theory and practice. A portion was dedicated to the way in which marriage served as a template, structuring many nonmatrimonial relations, and it is was there that I ran into trouble. As soon as I turned my attention to the sponsa Christi, to my mind the most vivid example of the matrimonial template at work the subject developed a momentum all its own, ultimately derailing the entire project. So the tendency to bypass real marriage in favor of its imaginary counterpart is not just a medieval predilection; there are certain modern scholars inclined to follow suit.The mystical marriage's preemptive claims vividly testify to Christianity's tendency to privilege the spiritual over the carnal. In this world upside down, the despised and derivative institution of marriage is recast as the equivalent of an embodied exemplum or carnal symbol for the higher union. Moreover, mystical marriage was a restless image that seemingly refused to be restricted to the Christian equivalent of the platonic realm of ideas, instead constantly seeking embodiment. The fact that the bride of Christ had a claim on both the abstract and the concrete meant that it could at any moment erupt into people's lives, with tangible consequences. A quodlibet by Peter John Olivi (d. 1298) demonstrates this potential. Olivi asks why someone who had been married to a widow could not be ordained a priest when a widower who had lost his virginity before his marriage could be ordained, provided he had married a virgin. The answer is that marriage is a triple sacrament: the first component, which is the marriage between God and the soul, is designated by the union of souls between flesh-and-blood husband and wife, which occurs when spouses exchange vows in the present; the second is the union of human nature, when the word became flesh in the womb of a virgin, and is signified by the sex act that would consummate the union; the third is the union of Christ and the virginal church. For this application to work, it is inconsequential if the man is a virgin; Christ, after all, had been married to Synagoga before he married Ecclesia. In fact, Christ can be joined to concubines "without any corruption of his deity, or his humanity and love." Besides, the priest represents the church militant, which contains both good and evil, so he need not be pure. But if a priest were at one time married, his wife had to be a virgin, otherwise his union could not signify Christ's union with the church triumphant, upon which there can be no spot. These different levels of meaning demonstrate just how encompassing this metaphor could be. But they also point to a basic implacability at the heart of the image. Only a man was fit to stand in loco Christi, and hence only men could be cast as groom in the different orthodox variants of the mystical marriage. While all Christian souls, women and men, were brides of Christ in a mystical sense, consecrated virgins were brides par excellence. And because the bride herself was ever-virgin, and virginity was a fragile asset, throughout the Middle Ages the consecrated virgin would most often pursue her vocation in a cloister.It would nevertheless be misleading to imply that female religious alone were actively encouraged to identify with the image of the sponsa Christi. The ongoing proliferation of monastic commentaries on the Song of Songs attest to a profound degree of attraction to this imagery among male religious as well. In the high Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) attempted to invoke a still more affective response among his monastic brethren. Yet, as Sarah McNamer has recently argued, the bride was but a "provisional persona" for the monk; in contrast, "female religious—precisely because they were female—could participate in another signifying system, this one historical and cultural." Nor would virginity remain an absolute for the bride. One of the great sea changes in medieval spirituality, and one especially portentous for this study, was when women who were not virgins began to lay claim to this title. Despite these competing claims, however, the female virgin would always take pride of place as Christ's bride. She remained for the Christian community something of a living allegory, inhabiting two realms simultaneously, and was socially construed as such. The bride in Olivi's quodlibet, on the verge of carnal marriage, inhabited this symbolic zone very briefly; for the consecrated virgin, however, it was home.In spite of this undeniably lofty place in the symbolic order, Christianity's deployment of the bride is at one with other religious systems, where the dominant images associated with women originate in their reproductive/sexual status. From this perspective, it is not surprising to learn that the identification of virgins as brides of Christ probably began as a kind of compromise formation. It was first used by Tertullian (d. ca. 220) in an effort to impose some kind of discipline on the independent virgins of Carthage, who perceived themselves as living the genderless angelic life. Tertullian's response was to insist that these virgins were not only women but matrons of a sort, who must wear veils as a sign of their submission to their celestial bridegroom, Christ. Despite constant reiterations that virginity was primarily a state of mind among church authorities, Tertullian's embodied literalism was the wave of the future. As the female religious vocation developed, Christ's bride became ever more embodied, physical integrity jockeying with mental integrity for the prize.If we were to stop here, the tale of the sponsa Christi might seem to resemble the tragedy at the heart of the gnostic understanding of the fall. For as with the spirits who were wrestled down from heaven and stuffed into bodies, women's gradual assumption of the bridal identity could also be construed as an ungentle story of angelic creatures subjected to enforced embodiment. But this perception necessarily changes in the mystical climate of the high and later Middle Ages, when women clearly embraced the bridal persona, making it very much their own. In particular, the increasing number of nonvirgins who appropriated the title of bride frequently sustained these claims through an extremely embodied spirituality, introducing a more exacting, albeit different, kind of literalism than was ever imagined by the church fathers. Many of these women experienced vision .. Main description: Following a long trajectory from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages, Dyan Elliott offers a provocative analysis of the changing religious, emotional, and sexual meanings of the metaphor of the sponsa Christi and of the increasing anxiety surrounding the somatization of female spirituality Geschichte 200-1500 gnd rswk-swf Braut Christi (DE-588)4220697-2 gnd rswk-swf Jungfräulichkeit (DE-588)4029016-5 gnd rswk-swf Spirituelle Theologie (DE-588)4182357-6 gnd rswk-swf Jungfräulichkeit (DE-588)4029016-5 s Braut Christi (DE-588)4220697-2 s Spirituelle Theologie (DE-588)4182357-6 s Geschichte 200-1500 z 1\p DE-604 https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812206937 Verlag Volltext http://www.degruyter.com/search?f_0=isbnissn&q_0=9780812206937&searchTitles=true Verlag Volltext 1\p cgwrk 20201028 DE-101 https://d-nb.info/provenance/plan#cgwrk |
| spellingShingle | Elliott, Dyan The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 Braut Christi (DE-588)4220697-2 gnd Jungfräulichkeit (DE-588)4029016-5 gnd Spirituelle Theologie (DE-588)4182357-6 gnd |
| subject_GND | (DE-588)4220697-2 (DE-588)4029016-5 (DE-588)4182357-6 |
| title | The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 |
| title_auth | The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 |
| title_exact_search | The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 |
| title_full | The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 |
| title_fullStr | The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 |
| title_short | The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell |
| title_sort | the bride of christ goes to hell metaphor and embodiment in the lives of pious women 200 1500 |
| title_sub | Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500 |
| topic | Braut Christi (DE-588)4220697-2 gnd Jungfräulichkeit (DE-588)4029016-5 gnd Spirituelle Theologie (DE-588)4182357-6 gnd |
| topic_facet | Braut Christi Jungfräulichkeit Spirituelle Theologie |
| url | https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812206937 http://www.degruyter.com/search?f_0=isbnissn&q_0=9780812206937&searchTitles=true |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT elliottdyan thebrideofchristgoestohellmetaphorandembodimentinthelivesofpiouswomen2001500 |