Afterlives of the Saints Read online

  Abelard needs to believe that he himself, castrated against his will, can still be saved, even though Origen was not. And so it is Origen's inability to distinguish the hidden symbol from the historical fact that creates a problem in Abelard's eyes. To be castrated is unfortunate but not fatal; rather, the great sin of Origen, like that of the Skoptsy, is taking things too literally, not understanding how metaphor works.

  But Origen's sin is more than just an overly literal reading, just as it is more than a literal castration. Origen's sin is greater and less than metaphor, just as castration is greater and less than sin. Castration, maker of the world and harbinger of its end, the father of those men who have become greater and less than human.

  ·seventeen·

  At the Well of Tears: Margery Kempe

  Tears did not enter the world through the saints; but without them we would have never known that we cry because we long for a lost paradise." So wrote the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran, whose nihilism and atheism didn't stop him from approaching the saints. "As I searched for tears," he tells us, "I thought of the saints." The two are inextricably linked: weeping and sainthood. Despite the various stories and legends, the transcendent artwork and architecture and literary masterpieces, perhaps it is only in tears that we can really hope to understand the saints.

  More than laughter, mourning, or sex, crying (which can encompass all of these things) is the truly excessive gesture, the limit of emotion available to us. If the saint, as I want to believe, is the human who lives poised at the edge of humanity— who might even move beyond humanity— then weeping is the act that most closely corresponds with this position. "Saints cannot be known," Cioran says. "Only when we awaken the tears sleeping in our depths and know through them, do we come to understand how someone could renounce being a man." Only humans, out of all animals, cry, but only in weeping, Cioran seems to be saying, do we transcend our humanity.

  Tears have long fascinated the church. Gregory the Great first coined the term gratia lachrimarum, which can mean either "the tears of grace" or "the gift of tears," as though to be moved to tears is a gift given by God to evidence our own salvation. The fifth-century desert hermit Abbot Isaac tried to make a taxonomy of wordless Christian weeping, classifying four kinds: tears caused by "the pricks of sin smiting our heart," tears "from contemplation of eternal good and desire of that further glory," tears from a fear of the day of Judgment, and tears caused by the knowledge of the sins of others. All of the saints, in one way or another, sought such tears; Saint Francis, it is said, wept so much that he went blind.

  One woman among the saints wept more copiously, more spectacularly, than anyone before her or since. Her name was Margery Kempe, of Lynn, England. She was a middle-class wife and mother of fourteen children who was born sometime in the 1370s and lived until the middle of the next century. Margery had been a brewer and a miller and had held a half-dozen other occupations when, in the middle of her life, Jesus appeared to her fully and radically.

  And then she began to weep, a torrent of tears that never stopped. You cannot open her autobiography anywhere without stumbling on a passage of her weeping; it saturates the text. Most often, it seems that her tears fall into the first of Abbot Isaac's categories: Beholding her own wickedness, Margery "sorrows and weeps and prays for mercy and forgiveness." She wept the third kind of tears at the thought of her own damnation until Jesus appeared to her and assured her of her salvation, and then she wept the second kind of tears instead.

  Margery became a holy pilgrim, traveling among the various communities in rural England and on to Canterbury, then London. In London, she began to build a following as more and more people gathered to hear the weeping woman—"her communication was so much of the love of God that the hearers were oftentimes stirred through it to weep right soberly." From there, she went to Julian of Norwich, the mystic anchoress, and then to Jerusalem and Rome. An endless wanderer, she stayed among monks and in convents, sometimes with her husband, sometimes without. All the while crying.

  She wept copiously, profusely, bitterly, loudly, ecstatically, endlessly. She was a torrent of tears. She wept at sermons, at the mention of Christ's Passion, or whenever the Holy Ghost moved her. In the Church of Saint John Laterne, she "wept bitterly, she sobbed violently, and cried full loudly." There is a struggle for more words to name this phenomenon, words beyond "wept," "sobbed," "cried," words that appear hundreds of times throughout the book. She wept so much while staying in an abbey in Canterbury that the monks would not let her eat in their presence. Her weeping drove away a traveling companion in Germany, and in Rome, she wept so bitterly that the congregants around her thought her possessed. While staying with the priests of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, she wept so much that the head of the order kicked her out, and then she wept the fourth kind of tears at the thought of his callousness and wickedness.

  Weeping was Margery's vocation. "It is a singular and a special gift that God has given you," Jerome told her in a vision, "a well of tears which man shall never take from you." In another vision, Jesus told her it was her lot to weep, unceasingly, for fifteen years.

  When she was not weeping, she performed her share of miracles— her prayers interceding on behalf of those at the edge of death. How many she saved isn't clear—"to write them all should perhaps be a hindrance to more profit," she tells us, cutting herself off. Besides, Margery's real miracle is her tears, the endless torrent of weeping, as though she invented her own language of wordless moaning. Margery's autobiography is a book of tears, and she ends it with a defense of her crying:

  As for my crying, sobbing, and my weeping, Lord God almighty, as surely as you know what scorns, what shames, what despites, and what reproofs I have had for it, and, as surely as it is not in my power to weep either loud or still for any devotion nor for any sweetness but only through the gift of the Holy Ghost, so surely, Lord, excuse me before all this world.

  And yet, she was not a saint.

  The process of canonization is long, resembling a court proceeding more than an intervention by God. Petitioners may recommend a candidate as a "Servant of God" no sooner than five years after death, and after the local bishop reviews extensive documentation and confirms that the candidate is not the focus of a cult or other heretical worship, the congregation petitions the pope to elevate the candidate to "venerable." The next step beyond venerable is beatified; though this state is easily achieved in the case of martyrdom, nonmartyrs have to perform at least one after-death miracle, which is rigorously investigated by the church. A second miracle is required, ultimately, for full canonization.

  Lengthy, but in its own way fairly straightforward. The reasons Margery has never been canonized are painfully obvious. She was already a married woman, with children, when Christ came to her fully, so she could not be his virgin bride. She could have retired to a convent but chose not to do so, nor did she subordinate herself under a powerful male protector, as many other female saints (including Teresa of Avila) did. She chose instead to remain her own person, to wander, to cause trouble. None of her chil dren worked very hard to keep her name alive or spread tales of her miracles, and certainly the various hospices and monasteries along the road to Jerusalem were glad to be rid of her.

  There was no one to advocate on Margery's behalf, which is what is truly involved in achieving sainthood. More than performing miracles or crying over the Passion of Christ, canonization requires a community to believe in you after your death; it requires that you be kept alive in the minds of those you leave behind.

  The church was wrong to canonize so few women saints," Cioran argues. "Its misogyny and stinginess make me want to be more generous. Any woman who sheds tears for love in loneliness is a saint. The Church has never understood that saintly women are made of God's tears." The church's official position is that it does not "make" saints; it only recognizes and affirms the saints already among us. It falls to God to designate the saints, and so, the church might respond, it is God's stingi
ness, God's misogyny, that has provided for so few women saints.

  Certainly this accords with the long-standing popular belief that men are closer to God than are women—"him to love God, her to love God in him," Milton writes in Paradise Lost, apportioning out the spiritual roles of Adam and Eve. Medieval Christian theologians took justification for their misogyny in part from Aristotle, who argued that semen was "frothy," composed of wa ter and pneuma, hot vapor (this, so he claims, is why semen does not freeze)—it is the hot vapor that contains and transmits the soul. This hierarchy of bodily fluids held throughout the medieval Christian world. Men were closer to God, as evidenced by the hot vapor in their semen, whereas menstrual blood was pure water— no froth there, no air inside the woman, who was far more earthly, somewhat lacking in soul. In 1579, the French physiologist Laurent Joubert noted that "weeping is easier for those weaker and moister." So perhaps Margery's copious tears guaranteed that she would never be a saint— there was too much water in her, too little air.

  Or perhaps she spent too much time weeping in public. Augustine, after all, held back tears at his mother's funeral, fearing that a public display would show him "guilty of too much worldly affection," offering his sincere tears to God only in private. Margery's tears were too public, her emotion indecorously shoved in the faces of the faithful. Her weeping was never the quiet, demure crying of a good lady martyr. She did not yoke herself to a powerful male figure, and she did not die pure. After her death, her body did not lie uncorrupted, proof of her pure negation of the natural world. Margery could not make of herself a symbol.

  Samuel Beckett once wrote, "My words are my tears." Margery Kempe, finally exhausted by tears, turned to words and traded the immortal life of a saint for the immortal life of a writer. It was perhaps because she feared she would never be canonized that she did so. Her autobiography became a substitute for the hagiography that would never be. Hers is as compelling and strange a story as one could hope— and the first autobiography written in English. In it, she never calls herself "I" but always "this creature": "Then this creature thought it was full merry to be reproved for God's love"; "this creature dared not otherwise to do than she was commanded in her soul"; and so on, distancing us from her even while drawing us in.

  This creature turns out to be surprisingly frank about her sexuality, with regard to both her husband and her lovers. After she stopped sleeping with her husband, he began tormenting her with hypothetical questions: If someone threatened to cut off his head unless she slept with him once more, he asked, would she do it? Margery's response was blunt: "I had rather see you be slain than we should turn again to our uncleanness."

  But around the same time, she began an affair with a brute of a man who told her "he would lie by her and have his lust of his body, and she should not withstand him, for, if he might not have his will that time, he said, he should else have it another time, she could not choose." After he'd satisfied himself, this creature returned to him, infatuated and still "labored" with him, only to be told that "he wouldn't for all the good in this world" lie with her again, that "he had rather been hewn as small as meat for the pot." A strange way to begin the autobiography of a holy woman, with infidelity compounded by a fairly pathetic rejection.

  All this was before her great conversion, and before all the weeping, but it's still too much information for a would-be saint. Margery's autobiography is too messy, too candid, and it could never guarantee that she would be remembered. Her book was quickly lost and forgotten as this would-be weeping saint faded from sight.

  Then, in 1934, the autobiography was rediscovered and brought to the public eye once more. It should have been the perfect time for Margery's voice to reemerge; Virginia Woolf had opened up new possibilities for writing women's consciousness only a decade before, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood was only two years away. Instead, Margery's writing was met with derision, particularly its representation of so much uncontrolled emotion in a woman. She was denounced as a "terrible hysteric," a "neurotic," "quite mad," an "epileptic," with "a large paranoid trend," and all sorts of other epithets. Margery could have expected this; in one of her earliest visions, she heard Christ tell her, "You shall be eaten and gnawed by the people as any rat gnaws the stockfish." It hardly matters, then, if the rats gnawing at her were fifteenth-century monks or twentieth-century psychoanalysts.

  "Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human," Djuna Barnes writes. In our new century, though, one sees in Margery a beast that is woman becoming saint. Slowly, in the decades since her rediscovery, she has found her admirers. "She replaced existence with the desire to exist," Robert Glück explains in his book Margery Kempe, which weaves her story alongside his narrative of a contemporary love affair. "I kept Margery in mind for twenty-five years," he writes, "but couldn't enter her love until I also loved a young man who was above me." Margery's love is difficult, uncompromising, but readers and writers like Glück keep finding her, finding kinship with that love in an equally impossible contemporary landscape. A community of believers, the wasted and the hopeful, the freaks and the dreamers, gradually grows around her. Perhaps sainthood will find her yet.

  Note on Source

  Prologue

  The Buñuel quotes are from My Last Sigh and An Unspeakable Betrayal; the Michael Wood essay on Buñuel's Simon of the Desert can be found in the Criterion Collection booklet accompanying the film. The Mary Gordon interview aired on Fresh Air with Terry Gross on January 31, 2005. Kenzaburo O¯e's recollections of childhood are discussed in John Nathan's introduction to O¯e's Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. My discussion of plagiarism and hagiography benefits from an aside in Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics.

  Part One

  The translation I used for Gregory of Tours's work is by Lewis Thorpe. Hayden White's thoughts on history are from the essay "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in W. J. T. Mitchell's anthology On Narrative. Frank Kermode's words come from his A Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. The translation of Borges's "The Library of Babel" is Andrew Hurley's; his comment on Leibniz comes from Seven Nights. My understanding of Chaucer and the role of dreaming in his books owes a debt to Piero Boitani's essay in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, and the scholar who suggests that his work is an attempt to imagine himself in the position of a woman is Carolyn Dinshaw. The translation of Hekabe I used is by Anne Carson, from her Grief Lessons. Radegund's "The Thuringian War" and the multiple stories of her life can be found in Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, edited and translated by Jo Ann McNamara, John E. Halborg, and Gordon Whatley. The translation of Teresa of Avila's work I used is by J. M. Cohen. Marie Bonaparte's discussions of Teresa can be found, among other places, in Georges Bataille's Erotism.

  Part Two

  Bataille's comments about the gospels are from Guilty, translated by Bruce Boone. My discussion of Lawrence was also aided by William J. Diebold's Word and Image: The Art of the Early Middle Ages, 600– 1050. My thinking about Bartholomew, early anatomy, and images of the ecorché was helped by Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, by Andrea Carlino; The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, by Jonathan Sawday (who argues that cadavers should participate in their own dissection); and Leo Steinberg's essay "The Line of Fate in Michelangelo's Painting." The historian who remarked that flaying marked "abhorrence of breaches of the fundamental bond of human society" is W. R. J. Barron in his essay "The Penalties for Treason in Medieval Life and Literature," which I found quoted in Sarah Kay's essay, "Original Skin: Flaying, Reading, and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works." The Ovid translation I used is by Mary M. Innes. Much of the history of World War II trophy skulls I first learned about through James J. Weingartner's "Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941– 1945."

  Part Three

  My discussion of early pornography comes largely from two books: Walter Kendrick's The Secr
et Museum and The Invention of Pornography, 1500– 1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, edited by Lynn Hunt, particularly the essay by Paula Findlen. Mishima's Confessions of a Mask is translated by Meredith Weatherby; more on the history of artwork about Sebastian can be found in Franco Mormando's Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque. My copy of Athanasius's life of Anthony is translated by Robert C. Gregg, and Foucault's History of Madness is edited by Jean Khalfa and translated by Jonathan Murphy. Thomas Laqueur's Solitary Sex offers an enormously useful and comprehensive history of masturbation. In addition to Frederick Brown's Flaubert: A Life, biographical details also came from Francis Steegmuller's Flaubert and Madame Bovary. The translation of Madame Bovary I quote is by Geoffrey Wall; W. G. Sebald's After Nature is translated by Michael Hamburger.