LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 18.36 (Fall - Winter / automne - hiver, 2001):417-26

Charles Lock

University of Copenhagen

Of Grammar and Gratitude

Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson & Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, eds., New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and their Impact. [No place:] Brepols, for the Centre for Medieval Studies, AMedieval Women: Texts and Contexts,” no. 2, University of Hull, 1999; xii+350 pp.; ISBN: 02503507689 (hbk.); 50 Euros.

Mysticism’s relation to language has often been described in terms of apophatic discourse, or the via negativa, the contradictory figures of mystical experience rendered thematic in the soul’s night and unknowing’s cloud, the lexicon tending towards oxymoron, the logical procedures striving to be not merely paradoxical but vertiginous. The rational, the discursively coherent, are suspended or occluded in those texts which we name mystical. Most scholarly approaches to mystical literature have stressed either the theological or the psychological aspect, with a declared metaphysical premise as both motive of enquiry and explanation of the phenomenon under analysis. Linguistic specialists have had recourse to such literature for philological purposes. But it is only with the work of Michel de Certeau that we can think of mystical literature as coming into view as text, as a specific literary mode shaped, to whatever extent, by the discursive economy, by the spaces made available or left unoccupied by other discourses. Certeau’s La Fable Mystique, XVIe-XVIIe siècle (1982; English translation, The Mystic Fable, 1992) points to the systematization, in the sixteenth century, of both counter-Reformation theology and the new scientific theory of knowledge as that which, whether by deliberate opposition or indifferent exclusion, confers a definition, circumscribes the boundary of mystical discourse.

In the later Middle Ages there is a threefold constitution of what would later be named mystical discourse: first, as unsanctioned discourse, second, in the unofficial or vernacular tongue, and third, composed by those neither trained nor licensed to write. That women, notably Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, had a large share in the production of mystical texts in Middle English has long been recognized. In recent years we have obtained a far more comprehensive model of the spiritual practices and religious lives of women throughout northern Europe. The modern cult of Hildegard of Bingen, itself worthy of study, is only the most conspicuous element in a considerable modulation of our medieval attention. The [end page 417] Beguines now seem set to hold our fascination for some time. Even their name is obscure, explanations being diverse, the most usefully descriptive (if not the most plausible) being a corruption of “Albigensian,” thus signalling these women’s support for, or likeness to Cathars and other heretical movements. What is of course left unexplained is why the Beguines should be found so concentrated in the Low Countries, far from Cathar or Waldensian influence. In “Satirical Views of the Beguines in Northern French Literature”– one of a number of excellent essays in the volume under review – Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski proffers many other etymologies bandied about at the time, none of them flattering. This volume also provides more straightforward historical background, and some invaluable maps.

That the Beguine “movement” – as it is often designated – should now be a major subject of research is due not only to the present interest in all things “matristic,” but also to the contemporary fascination with the transmission and representation of discourses, not only in the medieval period. It is remarkable that we know about these women largely through the writings of men, notably Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240) and Thomas of Cantimpré (c.1200-c.1270). It is much to the credit of the journal Vox Benedictina and the Peregrina publishing house in Canada which over the past fifteen years have so forcefully promoted the study of women’s religious lives, that the male scribes are now receiving attention in the same measure as the women on whose behalf and at whose dictation they wrote.

One of the most impressive and substantial essays in the present volume is focused on a man: “Devout Women and Demoniacs in the World of Thomas of Cantimpré.” Barbara Newman is among the foremost authorities on Hildegard of Bingen, who was unable to write German and whose Latin was far from perfect – or so she chooses to tell us through a scribe. Yet, as Newman tells us, Hildegard did not deny her learning, and a familiarity with classical Latin literature is evident from her allusions. Displaying such learning, while being able to disclaim literacy, puts Hildegard in a position to offer a provocative explanation: that her learning has been acquired “mystically.” This is the context in which Newman can write, most illuminatingly, about Thomas’ presentation of the Life of Christina the Astonishing. Such a Vita must negotiate the gap between the educated and authorized male and his subject. Thus a Life must also be, or contain, an apology for the fact that its subject’s learning – what makes her life worthy of record – has been acquired by means others than those officially recognized by the Church, or by any other institution. Learning, as we still find today (perhaps today more than ever before) depends for its legitimacy on institutional approval and the institutional conferring of degrees and titles. Outside of that framework it is very difficult to judge the authority of any person’s claim to learning. [end page 418]

It is somewhat strange that this problem should still be with us, given that Christianity was, to coin no phrase, founded on the proposition that it is not necessary to possess a doctorate in order to teach. To the priests and Pharisees the scandal of Jesus’ teachings lay not only in their divergence from the Law; worse, He lacked the proper qualifications. Those who knew Him well, as the son of a carpenter, asked “Whence then hath this man all these things?” (Matthew 13:56). And if one has acquired learning from unofficial sources, the first explanation that proffers itself is that the learning must be diabolical, a parodic double of true learning. Hence Matthew 9: 34: “But the Pharisees said, He casteth out devils through the prince of the devils.” Jesus responds to the charge in Matthew 12: 24-30:

But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils. And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.... And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself....

The same pattern may be observed in the reaction of priests to those female mystics who evidently had learning, but whose source of learning was unidentified and unsanctioned. Newman gives us a sample of demoniacs represented in the homiletic literature of the Low Countries in the thirteenth century, and especially in the works of Thomas of Cantimpré. These demoniacs are of the familiar kind, in need of exorcism, and among their features is a capacity to parrot or parody knowledge of the Bible. One possessed girl, exorcised in the early twelfth century, mocked the saint who was trying to heal her by reciting the Song of Songs from beginning to end – first in Latin, then in French, finally in German. At any rate St. Norbert assumed that this was a display of mockery, not evidence of a high degree of cultivation.

However, Newman also finds in the lives of women religious written, or written down, by Thomas (and by his teacher Jacques de Vitry) what she calls “demoniacs of a very different stripe.” These are treated with respect, even held in awe by men; they have learning, and are believed to have supernatural authority for their knowledge; occasionally they are even asked to preach. Their knowledge is assumed by the clergy to be genuine, sent from heaven, not to be a diabolical likeness or imitation. Thomas’s Vita Christinae mirabilis (The Life of Christina the Astonishing) tells us of a demoniac who was revered, and who is presented by Thomas as a saint. Newman asks: “What could Thomas’s readers have thought when it dawned on them that in this vita, mirabilis indeed, the demoniac was herself the saint?” Margot King has pointed out various analogies between Christina and the stylites and holy fools of the Byzantine tradition, and remarked on [end page 419] Thomas’ failure to mention these precursors in defence of, or by way of apology for Christina’s sanctity. It is argued by Newman, somewhat astonishingly, that Thomas deliberately omits mention of any precedent that “might have made Christina’s acts more intelligible. It was the novelty, rather than the saintly precedents ... that he wished to stress.” And indeed Christina did take (or allow) her possession (to) unprecedented extremes of contradiction, for she even attempted, more than once, to exorcise herself.

This saint, “possessed” of and by learning, is – so Newman’s argument cogently unfolds – presented by Thomas in a way that deliberately eschews explanation, that leaves our astonishment undiminished and intact. As an authorial or editorial decision on Thomas’ part this is worthy of further investigation: one can hardly refuse the temptation to explain whatever eschews explanation. Institutional learning, logic, interpretation, even grammar itself, all conspire to explain. Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler is a devoted reader of Meister Eckhart, and of the Rhineland mystics, as we may infer from the opening paragraph of Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970):

Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained.

If Barbara Newman’s argument is accepted, Thomas of Cantimpré deserves a very special place in the history of writing: he may have been the first to take on himself the responsibility to write, together with a determination not to explain. This would be a project close to writing without making sense. We regard such an enterprise as distinctively modern if not modernist, for such literary ambitions are associated with surrealism, dada, absurdism. If Thomas achieved this – or even made an approach – he deserves our close attention, and highest admiration. For such a writing about mystics is not merely nonsensical, but only so in so far as the mystical is nonsensical. It may easily be dismissed as nonsense, but Thomas aims to create a form of writing that is true to the miraculous that it describes. One is reminded of Franz Rosenzweig’s pithy and devastating comment on miracles: “Miracles never “came to pass” anyway. The atmosphere of the past blights all miracle.... Every miracle can be explained after the event. Not because the miracle is no miracle, but because explanation is explanation.

Of course it is possible that Thomas was ignorant of analogies and precedents in the tradition of “holy folly,” and was simply unable to make Christina’s actions “intelligible.” However, as he was a practised hagiographer – and a learned doctor of Paris – this hypothesis can be at once rejected. Less easily explained away, though, is Newman’s failure to link the [end page 420] Life of Christina to a precedent that would have needed no explicit evocation on Thomas’ part. For in the Gospel passages already cited we find Christ charged with demonic possession, and his response that Satan cannot cast out Satan. Yet here is Christina attempting to cast out Christina. And we are told that every city or house (or person) divided against itself shall not stand. Yet Christina stands, divided, and is declared a saint.

Whether or not Christina’s life was astonishing we cannot now tell. But that her Vita is astonishing is clear. Thomas tells us that “She understood all Latin and fully knew the meaning of Holy Scripture,” as we learn from another essay here, by Anneke Mulder-Bakker: the hyperbole of “all” and “fully” is deployed in this passage not to explain, but to confound and astonish. Thomas’ Vita of Christina represents at the level of the text the contradictions unresolved within its subject. Writing that does not explain, that does not make for intelligibility, that makes no sense, is writing divided against itself. And that, we might venture, is one way of describing mystical discourse: a discourse that seeks to unsay as soon as say, to unsay the said.

There are various ways of unsaying. The challenge has, simply and emphatically, nothing to do with maintaining silence. Silence is never given, but is always and only, and that rarely, to be attained. There must be discourse, is always already such, and the unsaying is a remedial discourse, one that comes after the act of saying, picks up the said. All ways of unsaying strive for the effect of diminishing or undermining the authority that inheres in saying itself, and in writing. (We may here, exceptionally, elide saying with writing, given that, first, many mystics are known to us through what they dictate rather than what they write; and, second, few of us have been directly addressed in mystical speech, or would know if we had been. Unsaying is in almost all cases understood to be an effect of writing.) And most of these ways can be comprehended within one of the following three groups: i) to say or write outside of the sanctioned discursive practices; ii) to say or write from an unauthorized position; iii) to say or write in an unofficial language.

i) Mystical texts are hard to classify precisely because a generic label is what first lends authority to any text: read this sonnet, or that homily. Writing within a genre is a discursive practice, and mysticism has succeeded in eluding the establishment of a textual tradition: such a tradition depends on an identified genre. Although we may speak of “the Middle English mystics,” and of other groupings, we remain unable to define a mystical genre or the type of text by which it would be exemplified. Not to belong clearly to any genre is already to begin unsaying.

ii) A mystic can never speak from a position of authority, and certainly not with the approval and sanction of authority. Vocation, ministry and ordination are all to be resisted. The mystic cannot supplicate for a degree [end page 421] nor for a licence to preach, but must be on the outside of the institutions that control and authorize saying. Thus what is said is always liable to unsaying by such a question as: “Whence then hath this man all these things?” Even more effective in “unsaying” is that question when posed of a woman.

iii) The notion of an unofficial language relates to both the foregoing. Latin was the language of official discourse, especially within the church and in theology. To write in a language other than Latin was already to do without the authority that inheres in the mere being of Latin. And, as emerging European vernacular literatures found, the translating of genres from Latin into, for example, French or English, is the obvious way of conferring, or transferring, authority on, or to the vernacular.

It should be evident that mediaeval women, with their limited access to Latin, their exclusion from the priesthood, and their lack of training in literacy, were advantageously placed to satisfy the conditions for mysticism. Being able to write entails not only knowledge of grammar, but also knowledge of genre. One can hardly begin to write until one knows the genre in which one is writing. To be a master of grammar and of genres is also, simultaneously, to have submitted to their authority. In this respect not being able to write carries a particular advantage. For though one cannot write, one is quite able and free to speak without knowing about “speech-genres” (Bakhtin’s term). The obligation to find a genre rests with the male scribe: the task that presents itself to us now, in the light of recent research on Jacques de Vitry, Thomas of Cantimpré and the (mostly unnamed) mediators of the texts ascribed to Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and others, is to investigate how genre might inscribe itself in the very act of transcription, or plain Ascription.”

A most suggestive advance in this line is made by Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen whose essay, “The In-carnation of Beatrice of Nazareth’s Theology,” argues that “many of the assumptions and allegations about holy women as extremely self-abnegating figures can be ascribed to their [male] hagiographers.” Pedersen makes the remarkable claim that vitae were categorized as a literary genre no earlier than 1953. This is unfortunately relegated to a footnote, albeit with references: it certainly merits amplification. In “Undutiful Daughters and Metaphorical Mothers” Alexandra Barratt considers how metaphors drawn from motherhood and domesticity shift in value when they are inscribed in texts written by males. Almost all the contributors to this fascinating volume are alert to the textual problems, and develop a variety of means, conceptual and hermeneutic, for negotiating the complex of textuality and gender. There is refreshingly little appeal here to categories such as “experience” or “spirituality.” And the most suggestive and sophisticated essays seem to converge on the familiar axes of male/female and literate/illiterate in order to bring forth the emerging question of the “inscribed genre.” [end page 422]

Insofar as they were thus triply disadvantaged in the patriarchal society of the Middle Ages, women were, as aspiring mystics, singularly advantaged. Though almost all mediaeval women were by default possessed of all three prerequisites of the means of unsaying, any one of those lacks would have been sufficient. Meister Eckhart appears increasingly impressive in the light of all the “advantages” against which he had discursively to contend: the possessor of a degree, and as frequently encumbered with it as Dr. Johnson; holding a position of authority; a most polished exponent of the genre of the sermon; and with the learning and freedom to write in both Latin and German. Eckhart’s unsaying had therefore to be the most explicit of all, within and inseparable from the saying, because he could count on nothing else, nothing external, to subvert its authority. Only when he was charged with heresy was he free to speak from outside the institution. In some ways Eckhart must be thought of not as a mystic as such, but as one who mediates between mystical and institutionalized discourse. One is tempted to suggest that mediation must involve explanation, and we find ourselves again and forever caught in the dilemma of mystical writing: to write without explaining, to arrange things in classes (minimally, grammatical classes) while affecting to disdain logic.

As we have already noted, one figure seldom mentioned in modern scholarship as model or precursor for mystics is Jesus. Of course Christ is present as the object of devotion, but Newman’s occlusion of the parallels between Christina and Jesus seems symptomatic of a wider prejudice. Yet even the question of the genre of mystical discourse, and of the Vitae of mystics, brings us back to the Gospels. Augustine felt and articulated the tension between his training in Ciceronian elegance and his devotion to scriptural texts of an embarrassing crudity. Erich Auerbach, in his essay “Sermo Humilis,” with reference, not incidentally, to the Vita of an early female saint, the “Acts of Perpetua” (Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965: 64-5) argues that the Gospels exemplify the incompatibility – from a Classical point-of-view – of elevated subject matter and low genre: “the presence of the tragic or sublime in a lowly existence depicted with the utmost realism... has its model, in literature as well as reality, in Christ’s Passion as related in the Gospels.” As we begin to apprehend mediaeval mysticism at the textual level, as a phenomenon of the text, even one produced by and within the text, we can shift the focus from the figure of Christ as object of devotion – a devotion institutionally sanctioned – to the narratives by which we know about the life of Jesus.

Without repeating the investigations and procedures of Biblical Formgeschichte, it might be useful to return to some of the work of Dibelius and Bultmann in the light of our considerably altered perception of the relation between orality and literacy. While Formgeschichte looked for the [end page 423] minimal generic units, paradigms, apophthegms and so forth, we should rather be concerned with the ways in which those who write seem deliberately to avoid the obvious – “classical” – temptations of genre. What is important about the Gospels is not that every element can be traced to some conventional genre, but that the whole is so resistant to a Ciceronian reception, that it makes no accommodation to learned readers. And the same applies to mystical texts, not only the texts dictated by women but also those lives of holy women scripted by men. If the male scribes had simply presented female lives according to classical genres – had, let us say, succumbed to the Ciceronian pressures – then we would know nothing of those women as mystics. The justification for this claim – that more clarity would produce more occlusion – must be that genre, like grammar, already implies and entails explanation. The life of Jesus could not be contained within any classical genre, because it could not be explained in the terms by which those genres are validated. And the lives of holy women in the middle ages present themselves to us as “mystical” precisely to the degree that the male scribes – those who inscribe, describe, circumscribe the women’s lives – resist the temptations of genre.

It is a measure of this volume’s seriousness and sophistication that Ulrike Wiethaus can hold up for our amusement some examples of the commercial exploitation of medieval holy women in the contemporary west. The mass-marketing of devotional literature and a culture of ‘recreational mysticism’ are evident even in serious anthologies published by (for example) S.P.C.K. and Crossroad. In the introduction to an anthology entitled Beguine Spirituality the reader can learn that “the holy saint was also seen as frightening and castrating to men. Underneath the praise of her holiness, it is possible that the man who told her story saw the witch.” Wiethaus is not afraid of explanation, and provides a most refreshing and sharp account of the sentimental polemics to which medieval holy women have so often and so off-puttingly been conscripted (or ‘conscribed’). This is another sort of generic appropriation whereby the mystical is contained, resolved and dissolved within the neo-mediaeval and the Gothic.

The Holy Women of Liège is further and exceptionally enriched by the inclusion of four poems by the Anglo-Swiss writer Anne Blonstein, titled for four of the saints, Juliana of Cornillon, Ida of Leuven, Margaret of Ieper (Ypres) and Yvette of Huy. The first, “Juliana: a mass of dying notes,” cites an unattributed passage on the ruling of the Council of Tours in 813 to the effect that, for the sake of popular comprehension, bishops should preach in French or German. The thirteenth century saw the revival of such cautionary concessions on the part of the Church. Following the Council of Lyons in 1274, Archbishop Pecham convoked the Council of Lambeth in 1281, from which issued “Ignorantia Sacerdotum,” encouraging the hearing of confession, and instruction of the unlearned laity, in the vernacular tongue. Blonstein is an extraordinary poet, as iconic as phonetic, whose read pauses or seen spaces are in this poem of “dying notes” marked by pairs of lunulae enclosing nothing: ( ). The tension between Latin and the vernaculars is enacted in word-play, play between words and [end page 424] between languages, sounds playing off signs; the texture is dazzling, though perhaps quotidian to a resident of Bâle/Basel/Basle. The tenth and last part of this poem is the only one that may be cited here without iconic loss, though its words are “merely” those ascribed by her hagiographer to Juliana, now rendered in English:

x communion

Nor could I express in words what God had granted me to sense

which brings us back to Barbara Newman’s claims for Thomas of Cantimpré: “to sense” might mean only “to feel,” but of course it suggests also the making of sense: a sense that cannot be made with words, or one that can be made using words, though it would not be the sense that those words make.

Blonstein is a poet whose sheer opacity has led some critics to link her with dada and surrealism, to place her work in a lineage drawn from Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball. This, from AIda: o those days of magic,” gives a good idea why:

foretell the future . . .

this question will pitch darkness into the eventual. being kissed by the

shady side of language facing north i will taste the two tongues of perhaps.

i am comes spasmodically. or i will have been unsensed.

These four poems are part of a long sequence inspired by women saints, “the butterflies and the burnings,” whose publication should be not less than an event. Here is a poetry of unsaying, a poetry that explicitly resists sense, aspires to be “unsensed.” Blonstein’s word-patterning is true to the mystics that it celebrates, for in its rich magic is no gesture of explanation, no aesthetic framing of the past as “those days of magic,” no distance at all; rather, a refusal of everything but the present in all its unexplained unresolved contradictoriness. That latter word is familiar, for we know well the confusions of speech, the disorderliness of the tongue that ties us up in contra-dictions. The tongue is unruly, ungovernable; by contrast, thanks to grammar, we are compelled in writing into an orderliness of words, the regimentation of syntax. The pen is an instrument of order, “But the tongue can no man tame” (James 3: 8). We have the word “contradiction,” but not “contra-scription,” or had not, until Blonstein’s poems now summon the word into being, into the lexicon of unsaying. [end page 425]

Nietzsche lamented that we had got rid of God, but that we had not yet got rid of grammar. The aphorism may be taken to indicate that God as a figure of power, as the originating arche of authority, will endure, will not be overthrown merely by an atheist ideology. Grammar is now the authority that we cannot overthrow or challenge, because we are unaware of it as an authority: grammar is the site to which authority has moved, or to which it has been displaced. Mystics, writing or “not-writing” in the vernacular, from unsanctioned positions, have always challenged the idea of “God” as an instituting and authorizing agent, whether as first cause or as apex of an institutional hierarchy. In the Middle Ages, it might be argued, mysticism used the vernacular not only to challenge the authority of Latin but also, or alternatively, to undermine its own claims to authority. And even though he wrote in Latin, Thomas of Cantimpré managed to present Christina the Astonishing without explaining her, that is, without subjecting her to principal and subordinate clauses and causes.

This phenomenon can be named contra-scription, and Anne Blonstein’s work should be acknowledged as its latest manifestation, though “latest” only because, through its happy placing in this volume, a tradition, a pattern of continuity, may be sensed. Franz Rosenzweig has already been cited. That passage continues: “Miracle always occurs in the present and, at most, in the future.... [w]hile the experience is still present, one can feel gratitude. When it no longer seems a thing of the present, all there is left to do is to explain.”

There is much to be grateful for in this volume, as in the lives of the holy women of Liège, and in their Lives, especially for the willingness to suspend explanation, to celebrate that suspension in others, to entertain a discourse that values and honours mysticism, rather than one that succumbs to the temptation of explaining it. Adam, choosing knowledge, refused the gift. The mystic dwells, even textually, in gratitude, in that freedom of the present not before it is represented, but against and despite its representations, its consignment to the past, laid out in syntactic order. The present is not wordless or silent; it is always already said, already past. Gratitude is the first unsaying, an undoing of the representations which constitute that objective reality that is the past, which by explanation and prediction make even the future only another aspect of what has always already come to pass.

The mystical is the mystical not because it is a phenomenon that cannot be explained, but because it is a discourse that actively defies and resists explanation, that refuses the grammatical (and epistemological) consolations of ingratitude. Contra-scription would hold us, not only to texts that work otherwise than towards sense or representation; it would detain us in expectation of the present, as gift, as miracle (as peril, as terror)