Fallen Bodies

Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages

Dyan Elliott

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812200737
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Medieval clerics believed that original sin had rendered their "fallen bodies" vulnerable to corrupting impulses—particularly those of a sexual nature. They feared that their corporeal frailty left them susceptible to demonic forces bent on penetrating and polluting their bodies and souls.Drawing on a variety of canonical and other sources, Fallen Bodies examines a wide-ranging set of issues generated by fears of pollution, sexuality, and demonology. To maintain their purity, celibate clerics combated the stain of nocturnal emissions; married clerics expelled their wives onto the streets and out of the historical record; an exemplum depicting a married couple having sex in church was told and retold; and the specter of the demonic lover further stigmatized women's sexuality. Over time, the clergy's conceptions of womanhood became radically polarized: the Virgin Mary was accorded ever greater honor, while real, corporeal women were progressively denigrated. When church doctrine definitively denied the physicality of demons, the female body remained as the prime material presence of sin.Dyan Elliott contends that the Western clergy's efforts to contain sexual instincts—and often the very thought and image of woman—precipitated uncanny returns of the repressed. She shows how this dynamic ultimately resulted in the progressive conflation of the female and the demonic, setting the stage for the future persecution of witches.

1

Pollution, Illusion, and Masculine Disarray

Nocturnal Emissions and the Sexuality of the Clergy

A box full of clothes—if left for long—will putrefy. So it is with our thoughts if we don't perform them corporeally.

—Evagrius of Pontus¹

IN HIS MORALIA Gregory the Great (d. 604) discusses some of the more insidious ways in which the devil afflicts God's holy people. Although making little headway during their waking hours, the devil is nevertheless permitted to fill the minds of the saints with filthy thoughts in sleep. But Gregory also prescribes a remedy, one that precociously anticipates Freud's theory of sublimation. A person must overcome these anxieties by raising the mind to higher things. Thus he glosses the biblical verse “So that my soul rather chooseth hanging and my bones death” (Job 7.15):

What is designated by the soul except intention of the mind, what by the bones except the strength of the flesh? Everything which is hung is beyond a doubt raised from lower things. The soul therefore chooses hanging so that the bones die, because when the intention of the mind raises itself to the heights, all strength of the outer life dies within.²

To stay with Freud for a moment, it is safe to say that Christian ascetics may have longed for sexual sublimation, but they generally had to settle for repression, with the attendant problems suggested in the epigraph. The presence or absence of erotic dreams, especially those culminating in ejaculation or “pollution” (to use the medieval term) represented for the would-be ascetic the sad distance between aspiration and actuality, providing a sensitive gauge for clocking the relative success or failure of disciplinary efforts to gain mastery over the body. The problem of such emissions also provided one of the rare occasions for theologians and pastoral counselors to speak frankly about the male's sexuality and body, by which I mean that these discussions could and did occur divorced from any reproductive telos. Here I should add that despite efforts of doctors and the occasional theologian to make pollution an equal opportunity offense for men and women, the discourse was inescapably framed around masculine embarrassments, particularly those of the would-be celibate ascetics and priests who were preoccupied with the way in which physical impurity impinged on ritual activities.³

Autoeroticism, whether voluntary or involuntary, would seem to frustrate attempts at historicization. Hence, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's article “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” argues that masturbation “seems to have an affinity with amnesia, repetition or the repetition compulsion, and ahistorical or history-rupturing rhetorics of sublimity.”⁴ Likewise with nocturnal emissions; even the external disciplinary ramparts erected against such shadowy occurrences seem to argue for a transhistorical dimension. For example, the unflagging presence of prayers warding off pollution in the compline service is an indication that, at least on the ritualistic level, pollution never ceased to be a concern throughout the Middle Ages. But the level of intellectual and probably emotional engagement with this subject was temporally uneven. Nocturnal emission was a matter of considerable concern until the time of Gregory the Great, received only the most routine treatment (mainly in penitential literature) from the seventh until the twelfth century, and thereafter commanded increased attention until the end of the Middle Ages. The intensification of discourse in pastoral and theological circles in the later period is the primary focus of this chapter. However, the urgency of the later discourse was predicated on the all-too-effective efforts at repression in the early Middle Ages. And to this “first wave” of concern I first briefly turn.

The patristic age set the stage for later discussions of nocturnal emissions by framing three interlocking problems: the extent to which such emissions inhibited participation in ritual; the way in which pollution could be transformed into an occasion for self-examination; and the determination of the degree of culpability of the individual. Ritualistic interests could be said to constitute the seminal category. Attention to ritual purity raised the question as to whether a person so stained should abstain from the Eucharist—as a recipient, of course, but especially as a celebrant. This was a very real concern in the early church, when pollution taboos ran high. Both the Didascalia and the Apostolic Constitutions, for example, reacted against this level of rigor in the Syrian church.⁵

Although a potential liability from a sacramental standpoint, such emissions had possibilities from the perspective of ascetical training, which developed into a second nexus of concern. Spiritual directors turned to pollution and its attendant circumstances as a possible index to the relative strength of the passions and, conversely, to the progress of the soul's ascent. This stratagem is especially clear in the symptomatologies of John Cassian (d. 435) in the West and John Climacus (d. 649) in the East. Cassian, for example, posited an ascending scale of chastity with six gradations. In the first stage, the monk does not succumb to the assaults of the flesh while waking; in the second, his mind does not linger over voluptuous thoughts; in the third, the sight of a woman no longer inspires lust; in the fourth, the waking body is immune to even the most simple movements of the flesh; in the fifth, the mind is no longer flustered by writings that discuss reproduction. By the sixth and final stage, a monk is impervious to sexual temptation while asleep. To demonstrate the last stage, which is extremely rare, Cassian invokes the exceptional purity of a singularly graced monk with the appropriate name of Serenus. His stable and enduring purity was the result of a visionary evisceration in answer to his earnest prayers for perfect chastity.⁶ Cassian also proffers practical advice against pollution. The diet must be strictly regulated and the intake of water reduced so that the bodily humors become sluggish and slow.⁷ He also recommends that one cover the kidneys with lead, as the touch of metal inhibits the “obscene humors.” If this level of abstemiousness and care is faithfully pursued, the monk should not be troubled by nocturnal emissions more than three times a year.⁸ Occasionally, however, the devil's malice will stimulate gratuitous pollution just prior to communion to forestall the reception of the sacrament, as was the case of one monk. In this instance, the only way to break the vicious cycle was to receive the Host.⁹ But to play it safe, the monk should never go to sleep after evening services because the devil, ever jealous of purity, would almost inevitably sully him with pollution.¹⁰ Similarly, John Climacus, whose Ladder of Divine Ascent outlines the thirty precarious rungs that constitute the ascetic's ascent to God, envisages a program similar to Cassian's:

The beginning of chastity is a refusal to consent to evil thoughts and occasional dreamless emissions; the middle stage is to be free of dreams and emissions even when there are natural movements of the body brought on by eating too much; the completion of chastity comes when mortified thoughts are followed by a mortified body.

To his mind, the best strategy against pollution is to fall asleep while saying the “Jesus Prayer.”¹¹

The third discursive strand that bridges both questions of ritual purity and the impetus to self-examination concerns the degree of culpability inherent in nocturnal emissions. Athanasius (d. 373), hostile to the over-scrupulousness of monastic culture, was the first to argue that such experiences were sinless, since they were involuntary and required by nature, pragmatically enlisting the support of medical authorities to buttress his contention.¹² Clearly, Athanasius was advocating a much more forgiving approach than either the impersonal taboo that had governed many early eucharistic discussions or the ascetic program of self-examination. But Athanasius's resolution only addressed the raw physicality of ejaculation—an occurrence that was, in fact, merely an epiphenomenon of a much more complex process: the dream.¹³ Augustine (d. 430), however, was less willing, or less able, to divorce orgasm from its dream context, thus offering one of the more nuanced contributions to the issue of culpability. Book 10 of the Confessions reviews classical theory regarding the way in which the mind stores in the memory various images that have been abstracted by the senses.¹⁴ This leads to a frank but angst-ridden discussion concerning the problems arising from memories of his sexual past. By pondering the vexed relations between sexual memory, erotic dreams, culpability, and selfhood, Augustine offers an arresting instance of the link between shame and identity formation that has been posited by developmental psychologists:¹⁵

When I am awake [these memories] obtrude themselves upon me, though with little strength. But when I dream, they not only give me pleasure but are very much like acquiescence in the act. The power which these illusory images have over my soul and my body is so great that what is no more than a vision can influence me in sleep in a way that reality cannot do when I am awake. Surely it cannot be that when I am asleep I am not myself, O Lord my God?…And why is it that even in sleep I often resist the attractions of these images, for I remember my chaste resolutions and abide by them and give no consent to temptations of this sort? Yet the difference between waking and sleeping is so great that when, during sleep, it happens otherwise, I return to a clear conscience when I wake and realize that, because of this difference, I was not responsible for the act, although I am sorry that by some means or other it happened to me.¹⁶

Augustine would seem to be at least partially enacting what one theorist describes as the “Thank God, it was only a Dream” syndrome, wherein the awakened dreamer feels authorized to dismiss the content and certainly the outcome of fantasies as an interruption in the regular program rather than an expression of real desire.¹⁷

Augustine's solicitude for his defamiliarized sleeping self (“I am sorry that by some means or other it happened to me”) might, under other circumstances, have encouraged him to develop a theory of personal complicity with aberrant mental images equivalent to what we now term the unconscious. Yet, as becomes clear from his other works, Augustine raises these questions in order to suppress them once and for all.¹⁸ Master of the interior that he was, Augustine mobilized his full theological genius around the problem of disowning the realm of dream-fantasy, thence forestalling the examination of its contents. In so doing, he definitively broke with the classical tradition of oneirocriticism, which subjected every aspect of dreams to painstaking analysis. Indeed, if the dream book of Artemidorus is any indication, erotic dreams elicited particular scrutiny.¹⁹

Augustine first distanced the realm of unconscious fantasy by his invocation of concupiscence—the inevitable and unruly consequence of original sin, operating as an impersonal chaos theory but affecting the individual in a deeply personal manner. Concupiscence created a tragic estrangement between the spirit and the body: “it is because it was to Him [God] that we refused our obedience and our service that our body, which used to be obedient, now troubles us by its insubordination.” Like static interfering with a clear transmission, concupiscence inhibited the body's reception of and ready compliance with the commands of the higher spirit. Not surprisingly, the genitals were the site of greatest affliction: “It is no wonder that everyone feels very much ashamed of this kind of lust; hence, these organs, which lust in its own right, if I may so speak, sways or allays in defiance of the will's decision, are properly called pudenda.”²⁰

Second, Augustine's Literal Meaning of Genesis points to the necessary symbiosis of image, thought, and speech, suggesting the ways in which these could lead to “no-fault arousal” in sleep: “Now if the images of these corporeal things, which I have necessarily thought of in order to say what I have said, were to appear in sleep as vividly as do real bodies to those who are awake, there would follow that which in waking hours could not happen without sin.”²¹ The dreamer is free from sin, however, since the will is immobilized or bound during sleep.

Third, and finally, Augustine exculpates the sleeping state by pointing to the realm of the demonic, an area that already loomed large in the Sayings of the desert fathers and from this font had made considerable inroads into Cassian's work.²² Augustine provided lurid and compelling descriptions of the body's susceptibility to demonic infiltration through the senses: “This evil thing creeps stealthily through all the entrances of the senses: it gives itself over to forms, it adapts itself to colors, it sticks to sounds, it lurks hidden in anger and in the deception of speech, it appends itself to odors, it infuses taste.” As Augustine emphasizes elsewhere, such besiegement had dire effects on the thought process: “[Demons] persuade [men]…in marvellous and unseen ways, entering by means of that subtlety of their own bodies into the bodies of men who are unaware, and through certain imaginary visions mingling themselves with men's thoughts, whether they are awake or asleep.”²³ On at least one occasion, Augustine even enhanced demonic power considerably by arguing that the devil actually read minds, supplementing the more common view (to which he also subscribed) that the devil's perspicacity was predicated on his grasp of subtle body language that was imperceptible to mere mortals.²⁴ Thus, for Augustine and his successors,²⁵ unwelcome sexual fantasies were the unsolicited and unwilled work of demons who penetrated the human senses, accessed the images stored in the memory, and came up with illusions so potent, so familiar, yet so diabolically vitiated that not only was the dreamer without guilt (provided he did not consent to these images) but the actual content of these dreams did not warrant scrutiny.²⁶

The suppression of the dream landscape was confirmed in the celebrated letter attributed to Gregory the Great written in response to a series of questions posed by the later Augustine of Canterbury. This is a key text for the West, uniting the three strains of inquiry discussed above. Thus “Gregory” uses culpability, determined through careful self-examination, as a touchstone for resolving questions of ritual purity. The ninth and last question is, “Can anyone receive the Body of the Lord after an illusion such as is wont to occur in a dream; and if he is a priest can he celebrate the holy mysteries?” In his response, “Gregory” discerns three types of nocturnal emissions. Two are relatively innocuous: those occurring “through a natural superfluity or weakness” are pronounced guiltless and thus not considered impediments to ritual; those resulting from a superfluity brought on by gluttony do carry a taint, but do not absolutely bar participation in or celebration of the Eucharist if it is an important occasion, such as a feast day—provided that the individual was not entirely overwhelmed by evil imaginings (turpi imaginatione). If a substitute celebrant can be found, however, the author advises the besmirched priest to abstain from celebrating, although not from receiving. However, emissions resulting from evil waking thoughts are more serious and need to be broken into their several stages to be understood adequately:

For all sin is committed in three ways, namely by suggestion, pleasure and consent. The devil makes the suggestion, the flesh delights in it and the spirit consents. It was the serpent who suggested the first sin, Eve representing the flesh was delighted by it, and Adam representing the spirit consented to it: and when the mind sits in judgement on itself it is necessary to make careful distinction between suggestion and delight, between delight and consent.²⁷

It is only the consent of the spirit that constitutes a completed sin, which would be an absolute bar to the sacrament.

The Augustinian-flavored focus on the will reduced dream-imagery to depersonalized figments produced by the devil. Analysis, never leveled at the dream proper, was reserved for determining the degree of the dreamer's complicity or resistance. Significantly, by Gregory the Great's time, the word “illusion,” designating demonic interference in a dream, had become intrinsically linked with erotic subject matter and probable pollution, an association that invariably cast a pall over efforts to analyze any dream.²⁸ This fusion resulted in what Jacques Le Goff has designated a “repression of dreams,” associated with the repression of sexuality.²⁹ We can see this dual repression at work in multiple liturgical contexts. The famous “Ambrosian” prayer at compline beseeches: Let dreams and the fantasies of the enemy recede far away; and suppress our enemy; lest we pollute our bodies.³⁰ E...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Pollution, Illusion, and Masculine Disarray: Nocturnal Emissions and the Sexuality of the Clergy
• 2. From Sexual Fantasy to Demonic Defloration: The Libidinous Female in the Later Middle Ages
• 3. Sex in Holy Places: An Exploration of a Medieval Anxiety
• 4. The Priest's Wife: Female Erasure and the Gregorian Reform
• 5. Avatars of the Priest's Wife: The Return of the Repressed
• 6. On Angelic Disembodiment and the Incredible Purity of Demons
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index