Afterlives of the Saints Read online

  Searching himself for the Book-Man, he is not Jerome, sure in the perfection of his work and in the smug knowledge of a library that is so perfect it needs neither our bodies nor our bones. He is instead Blaesilla, willing to pledge himself on faith and willing to annihilate himself in subservience to the secrets that the perfect librarian may hold.

  ·three·

  Silencing the Books: Paula

  The seventeenth-century Christian philosopher Gottfried Leibniz saw the library as something like an analogy for the universe, which he used to explain the presence of evil in the world. Suppose there are two libraries, he tells us. One library consists of a thousand copies of the most perfect book, which for Leibniz was Virgil's Aeneid. The other library consists of a thousand different books— some are great; some are terrible. One of them is the Aeneid, but the other 999 books fail to reach its level of perfection.

  Which of the two libraries is better? Of course, Leibniz knows it's the one with different books, even if not all of them are as great as Virgil's epic. In this way, he argues, we can understand God's plan and the existence of pain and evil. We are all part of an endlessly diverse library of God, and we all participate in the glory of that diversity.

  I first read this analogy in one of Borges's essays, where he calls it "elegant but false." Leibniz, Borges tells us, "seems to forget that it is one thing that there are bad books in the library, and another thing to be those books." And, he concludes, "if we are those books, we are condemned to hell." Borges reminds us that one cannot confuse books with people. This was the difficulty facing Saint Paula, mother of the dead Blaesilla and a constant companion to Jerome— the severe librarian who saw in her the perfect text, who made a book of her.

  For the most part, Jerome thought the only good woman was a virgin. He understood women as belonging to three categories, and he ranked them accordingly: Virgins are " first-fruits," followed by widows and, finally, married women. For Jerome, married women were at best utilitarian, and a far cry from virgins: "We know that in a great house, there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and earthenware," he wrote. Married women are the wood and earthenware— they propagate the species but aren't precious, "for the Church does not condemn marriage, but makes it subordinate."

  Jerome argues through analogies; he takes the supremacy of the virgin for granted and then looks for startling metaphors. What his arguments lack in logic, they make up for with rhetorical flourish— he heaps image upon image, and if you don't like one, he's always ready with another. After gold, silver, and wood, he likens women to bread, barley, and dung: "It is good to feed on wheaten bread, and to eat the finest wheat flour, and yet to prevent a person pressed by hunger from devouring cow-dung, I may allow him to eat barley. Does it follow that the wheat will not have its peculiar purity, because such a one prefers barley to excrement?" The misogyny in this analogy— that married women are no better than cow dung— exemplifies the kind of haranguing bully that Jerome could be. He was capable of profound philosophy, but he was also capable of a kind of vile, histrionic vitriol that wouldn't be out of place on contemporary talk radio. Women should remain virgins, he claimed, and if you didn't agree, well, you could eat shit.

  Jerome may have preferred virgins to widows, but Paula was always the exception, the one widow he preferred above all others. Even after he left Rome, she continued to follow him all over the Middle East; it was her wealth that helped fund much of his study and living expenses.

  "On all sides were the seas, on all the sky," he wrote to a friend after leaving Rome. "I wandered about, uncertain where to go. Thrace, Pontus, Bithynia, the whole of Galatia and Cappadocia, Cilicia also with its burning heat— one after another shattered my energies. At last Syria presented itself to me as a most secure harbor to a shipwrecked man." Wherever he went, waiting for him, always, was faithful Paula, and together they fled into the wild. Whether or not their relationship was (as some have suggested) sexual, they kept close, hip by hip, for the rest of their lives.

  When she died in 404, Jerome wrote that "if all the members of my body were to be converted into tongues, and if each of my limbs was to be gifted with a human voice, I could still do no justice to the virtues of the holy and venerable Paula."

  He did his best. In a long letter to her surviving daughter, Eustochium, Jerome re-created Paula's life, not just for Eustochium but to put Paula's life in writing for all time. "Disregarding her house, her children, her servants, her property, and in a word everything connected with the world, she was eager— alone and unaccompanied (if ever it could be said that she was so)—to go to the desert made famous by its Pauls and by its Anthonies."

  Jerome's depiction of Paula is part Christian saint and part epic traveler, as she wanders, Odysseus-like, toward a reunion with her true husband, Christ. Like Odysseus, she passes through Scylla and Charybdis, and upon reaching Methone

  She stretched her dripping limbs upon the shore;

  Then sailed past Malea and Cythera's isle,

  The scattered Cyclades, and all the lands

  That narrow in the seas on every side.

  Allusions to the great epic wanderer Odysseus came easily to Jerome, as they have to writers from Virgil to James Joyce. Borges remarks that "throughout history, humankind has only told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha." Jerome's account of Paula reads like the merging of these two books. Little of her own writing remains, so Paula is now wholly Jerome's creation: Paula the Odysseus-saint.

  More than his obnoxious metaphors, it was Jerome's constant incorporation of Homer and Virgil into his writings that always bothered the orthodox— it was too self-consciously literary, too dependent on pagan sources. But even in his justification for these references, he reverts to his misogynist figures of speech, showing us once again how he views Paula. Jerome explained his use of pagan writing through a passage in Deuteronomy concerning what to do with a captive woman one wishes to marry: "Thou shalt bring her into thy house: and she shall shave her hair, and pare her nails," and after she's had a month to mourn the loss of her parents, "thou shalt go in unto her, and shalt sleep with her, and she shall be thy wife." For Jerome, this is how one deals with the pagan text: as an act of seduction, of abduction and rape. The text must be tamed. "Is it surprising," he says of the pagan text,

  that I too, admiring the fairness of her form and the grace of her eloquence, desire to make that secular wisdom which is my captive and my handmaid, a matron of the true Israel? Or that shaving off and cutting away all in her that is dead whether this be idolatry, pleasure, error, or lust, I take her to myself clean and pure and beget by her servants for the Lord of Sabbath?

  Domesticated, head shorn and nails pared, even the pagan source can be made to speak the truth of Christ.

  No doubt, on some level, Jerome meant well. But it's difficult now to hear Paula beneath his own booming voice. She wrote a few letters that still survive, but it's not much, so it wasn't until almost a thousand years later that a very different kind of writer tried to channel Paula and dared to imagine a response to Jerome's heated rhetoric. Geoffrey Chaucer was a fairly unlikely candidate to take on Jerome, though his writings would slowly wind their way toward an epic confrontation with the great theologian.

  If nothing else, Chaucer was equal to Jerome not just as a writer but also as a reader— but it's how he read that matters. For Chaucer, reading was an occasion not for domination but for dreaming. His early Book of the Duchess begins with the narrator complaining of insomnia; he picks up a book and starts to read, then falls asleep and dreams the story of the poem. A Parliament of Fowles is likewise born of a book-induced dream, as is The House of Fame. Chaucer bragged of his library, of "sixty bokes olde and newe," and self-consciously cited Virgil and Ovid, early church writers, and French romances. But his early poems mix canonical books and dreams readily and often: If Jerome w
as careful and defensive about his literary allusions, Chaucer chose chaos, as though every book blazed some new and unorthodox path through the mind. It was Chaucer who gave us this dream of reading. No one before had thought of a book as such a landscape, the library as a geography. The Inferno opens with Dante lost in a dark wood, but to Chaucer we owe the idea of wandering in a book, the forest of words.

  Chaucer seemed incapable of Jerome's domesticated reading— neither of his last two works was completed. He began, could not finish, and moved on. He did not tame the book, could not domesticate his own story— the story outlasts him, remains wild, uncontained. He was like a reader falling asleep before finishing one book, who in dreaming begins the next.

  After adapting Troilus and Criseyde, in which the fickle Criseyde abandons Troilus, breaking his heart and causing his death, Chaucer translated the French epic The Romance of the Rose, famous for its misogynist monologues and portrayal of women as bitter, conniving, duplicitous. So his next poem begins with the god of love demanding that he atone for these "heresyes" against love, a poem that became The Legende of Good Women. In a series of repetitive narratives, Chaucer tells the stories of Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsiple, Medea, Lucretia, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra. In each, an absolutely faithful woman, a paragon of beauty and purity, is betrayed by the men in her life, which ultimately leads to disgrace, suicide, or mutilation. Sometimes multiple calamities befall the same woman: Philomela is raped and then mutilated by her brother-in-law— her tongue cut out, she weaves a tapestry that names her assailant and then transforms into a nightingale to escape.

  Chaucer wrote this in the years after he himself had been cleared of the charge of raptus of a woman named Cecily Champaign. The legal meaning of the word raptus is unclear; it usually meant "abduction" or "kidnapping." But it could also mean rape. It's not clear which of these Chaucer was accused of, or whether he was guilty. We know only that the charges were eventually dropped. Little is known about Cecily Champaign; in an age when women barely wrote, those who were not written of barely existed. She's just an entry in a legal register, a few lines in the vast corpus of human history. She became only a footnote in a grand writer's story, much as Paula was always in danger of becoming to Jerome's story.

  What happened between Cecily Champaign and Chaucer? I don't know; no one does. That one legal reference is maddeningly ambiguous. It's too easy for apologists to absolve the great literary genius of culpability— after all, he was acquitted. Chaucer lived in a time when women had few rights and were victims of perpetual sexual violence, both physical and cultural. But if there is an argument to be made on Chaucer's behalf, it is in the writing itself, a writing that changed dramatically after he was acquitted of raptus. This was when he wrote both The Legende of Good Women and The Canterbury Tales. As one critic has suggested, it is his attempt to imagine himself in the position of a woman, and to fully imagine himself at the margins of his male-dominated society, that motivates not just his thematic concerns but "the very forms and structures of his poetry." Jerome could never really imagine a woman speaking for him— even so great a woman as Paula— but somewhere around this time, Chaucer began to try to imagine what that might be like.

  After all, while twenty-two pilgrims tell their tales in Chaucer's work, there is one in particular who fascinates him: the Wife of Bath. The other pilgrims' tales celebrate saintly, pure, virginal women, but the Wife of Bath bursts into the poem, gaudy and bawdy, decrying the others' sanctimony, celebrating the carnal aspects of marriage. Her tale is that of a rapist, caught and punished, who learns that the way to happiness is in listening to women. Other characters are named by their occupation— the Knight, the Parson, the Yeoman. She is the Wife; marriage is her job. Married five times, she speaks not from "auctorite" but " experience"— and if she has an antagonist, it is the authority of church fathers like our librarian, Jerome.

  Both the Wife of Bath and Chaucer deal in textus— he in books, she in textiles. The word means "woven," and she weaves texts into her speech, subtly upending the meanings of the writers she quotes. She reworks Jerome's metaphor of gold and wood— a household has both, she notes, and both have "doon hir lord servise." Elsewhere she recycles Jerome's ranking of white bread, barley, and cow dung, leaving the last term out and upgrading married women: Wives may be merely barley bread, but yet with the same bread "Oure Lord Jesu refresshed many a man." Like Jerome, she weaves literary references throughout her monologue, but the Wife of Bath breaks them apart, alters them— she is less a heroic Odysseus than the great weaver Penelope. Again and again, she dismantles Jerome's analogies, unknits and reweaves them.

  Her prologue is long, and even after her tale is told, she doesn't shut up. While most of the other characters recede into the background, she continually interrupts, offers commentary, challenges the others. Her style is endlessly digressive— she opens up the discussions, moves further outward, interrupts others, and contradicts herself. She seems to exist to deny any kind of closure, to push the end of the text ever further away. Even in tight rhyming couplets, her thoughts drift and lose focus. She wanders, and in wandering overtakes the text, unshorn, undomesticated, untamed, and very much alive.

  Jerome's story of Paula has its own digressions, but for different reasons; Jerome draws out the end of Paula's story because he cannot bear to face its conclusion. "What ails you, my soul? Why do you shudder to approach her death?" he writes. He drags himself slowly to his conclusion—"Why do I still linger, and prolong my suffering by postponing it?"—to the day in which the nuns left the convents and the hermits came in from the desert, all gathering around Paula as she died. "No weeping or lamentation followed her death," Jerome writes, because Paula was not of this world, so the death of her mortal body was nothing to weep over. He celebrates her union with Christ joyously, as he asked her to celebrate Blaesilla's death so many years earlier.

  And then, in his closing lines, he slips: "I have spent the labor of two nights in dictating for you this treatise," he tells Eustochium, "and in doing so I have felt a grief as deep as your own. I say in 'dictating' for I have not been able to write it myself. As often as I have taken up my pen and have tried to fulfill my promise; my fingers have stiffened, my hand has fallen, and my power over it has vanished. The rudeness of the diction, devoid as it is of all elegance or charm, bears witness to the feeling of the writer." It is here, more so than in the rest of his writing, that Jerome becomes of this world, human. Here he ceases to be the untouchable doctor of the church and becomes a man distraught by the loss of a friend he'd known for twenty years.

  Apilgrimage is the antithesis of wandering— it is all destination. But Chaucer seemed little interested in the end point. The journey to Canterbury was a convenient device for bringing together such a disparate cast of characters. He hardly mentions it in the text; in fact, the pilgrims never seem to get any closer to Canterbury.

  Chaucer weaves a story of pilgrims endlessly traveling, while Jerome writes of a wanderer with purpose. He doesn't discuss Paula's trip to Phoenicia, saying, "I shall only name such places as are mentioned in the sacred books." Instead, Jerome portrays her visiting holy site after holy site; her other adventures go largely unremarked. Under Jerome's pen, all her actions are purposeful, all have meaning, all have direction, all serve Christ.

  And all serve Jerome. Paula, after all, has always been a secondary saint, subordinate to Jerome in the eyes of the church. In Christian iconography, Jerome can be recognized by a skull, a book, his cardinal's attire, an owl, or a lion. Paula, by contrast, is identified chiefly by the near proximity of Jerome. A bishop of the time, Palladius, wrote of Paula that "Jerome hindered her by his jealousy, having induced her to serve his own plan." Is this true? It's hard to know. Paula is a book written by Jerome, and she is a closed book. Her hair is shaved, her nails pared: She is domesticated. All of Jerome's limbs are tongues to tell her story, but Paula herself is mute.

  ·four·

  Of Lament: Radeg
und

  It is difficult to begin the story of Saint Radegund, difficult to make sense of her life. For some time, I have turned to Euripides, particularly his plays that deal with the women of Troy after the Greeks have finally sacked the city. Hekabe tells the story of the Trojan queen in the days after the war, her city in ruins around her, her family decimated. Hekabe does not yet know that her last surviving son has been murdered or that her last surviving daughter is about to be offered up as a human sacrifice to the ghost of Achilles. Nevertheless, as a messenger approaches, she knows something evil is in the wind, muttering to herself:

  But something new and strange is at hand. Something that smells of lament. Lament has a smell, a stench that precedes it. Before you know anything of Radegund, you smell it— lament and its odor precede her. The smell of unburied corpses, bleached white in the sun, of burning flesh and suppurating wounds, of the warm drink of pus and the scabs of lepers.