Session 8: Erotics and Beliefs
5th Global Conference
Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria
‘With Continual Delight’: Early-Modern Erotic Exegesis in Lady Grace Mildmay’s Spiritual Meditations
Gaelan Anton Gilbert
Medieval and Early Modern Culture, San Diego State University, USA
The late-medieval period fostered the collapse of scholasticism, whose theological ruins still colored the terminology and mystic practices of Christians. Manifold conceptions of what Christian ‘faithfulness’ implied engendered an array of early-modern texts, of which the spiritual meditations of Lady Grace Mildmay are one. As a Tudor aristocrat, hers was a time when the active presence of God was no longer considered delineable (via allegoria facti) within the created order. God had been “lost.” I argue that Lady Mildmay’s meditations both embody a unique locution of longing for this “lost” body of God and, by opening a space for desire in the divine-human relation, resist the influential Calvinist doctrine of a ‘closed’ elect. As female-authored, her meditations (needed to) exhibit socially legitimate conventions (an overt reliance on Scripture); her text fulfills and transcends those conventions by hearkening back to an erotic medieval mode of worship: allegorical biblical exegesis.
In her meditations, Lady Grace Mildmay employs allegorical biblical exegesis as an erotic mode of transformative response to Christ, who is revealed as desirously calling her from within the biblical text. The passages she interprets come from the Old Testament sexual epithalamium, Canticum Canticorum. Her adherence to the earlier tradition of reading these passages as an allegory for the intimate love between Christ and the ‘feminine’ Church or soul involves a unique factor: Mildmay, unlike medieval exegetes, is a woman. I explore the implications of this relation between Mildmay, who appropriates the voice of the Beloved, and Christ-as-Lover. Several fruitful questions are posed: what role does desire play in a normative Christian personhood? Is there a distinctively feminine aspect to hermeneutical activity that Mildmay actualizes? What are the social implications of an early modern female authorship which presumes in a later period to reterritorialize distinctively erotic, marginalized practices of Christian worship?
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
A Liturgical Liaison? The Possibilities and Risks of an Eroticized Body in the Annunciation
Jamey Heit
Center for Theology, Literature and the Arts, University of Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion suggests that the erotic encounter constitutes a definitive phenomenological moment, one wherein the two parties’ “pure flesh” can transcend the boundary that death marks around the human condition. Problematically, any such radical embodiment that one experiences in the erotic phenomenon’s climactic moment also introduces the possibility of betrayal. When situated within this framework, the liturgical calculus that Christianity sets forth in Mary’s immaculate conception demands recalibration, a task that I will take up in this paper. Specifically, I will analyze the necessarily erotic moment when Mary conceives immaculately as articulated in Edwin Muir’s “The Annunciation.” Muir emphasizes the erotic contours of this liturgical moment in the Christian narrative, but in a way that announces the irony that Marion recognizes. Muir introduces an unmistakable erotic climax as the necessary enabling moment for any subsequent Christian liturgy. To explore more fully this irony and to examine its implications, I will read Muir’s poem against W. B. Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan.” The narrative similarities between the two poems bring into focus Marion’s suggestive recovery of an eroticized body, particularly in Christian discourse. In order to distinguish between Yeats’ eroticized rape and Muir’s theological possibility, however, this paper will argue that, paradoxically, any hope that emerges in Christian liturgy requires an eroticized immaculate conception in order to defend the narrative from charges that Mary, like Leda, is the victim of sexual assault. Implicit in this analysis is the requirement that—contrary to much of Christian thought—any liturgical possibility must affirm the body’s innate capacity for pleasure. As a coda to this interdisciplinary analysis, I will indicate the underlying ethical implications of an eroticized Christian liturgy, particularly with respect to the power dynamics that inform the community that forms around the possibilities present in Christian liturgy.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Theresa, the Erotic Saint? A Journey to Paz Vega’s acting in Theresa: The Body of Christ
M. Soraya García Sánchez
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, ULPGC, Spain
Theresa: The Body of Christ (2007) is the most recent filmic revision of the historical and feminist writer Saint Theresa of Ávila, performed by the Spanish actress Paz Vega. The real Theresa wanted to learn, write and fight for another life different to that limited to getting married or being a nun. Theresa left the outdoor for the not easier indoor, the human love for the mystical love. Theresa’s true love to Christ, her desires and subsequent ecstasies were presented in her body, but also in her witty mind. Theresa’s body was fulfilled and elevated when she probably had sensual and erotic visions with her mystic husband. Paz Vega’s interpretation of Theresa’s visions and reality portrays this erotic and loving identity of a woman who searched for her realization, even once in the cloister, and who found a way to develop her orgasms with her ever lover: Christ.
Mind, body, individuality and suffering are sensually and cunningly represented in this filmic text. Different sequences and motifs represent the body, the mind and the erotic, followed by the narrative construction of the story that delimits the before and after moments of Theresa’s transformation from a promising beautiful wife to a crazy nun, leader and saint. With all this in mind, I will analyse how this erotic nun-saint had the possibility of a journey to find and fulfil her identity by means of her sensuality and her knowledge. Theresa not only advocated her loving mind and body but they were successfully depicted on paper.
Entries (RSS)