Sapphic Visions: the Queer Erotics of Hildegard Von Bingen

"Inside, you’ve got heaven and earth, and all of creation. You’re a world—everything is hidden in you."

Hildegard Von Bingen

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Assignment Overview

In this exercise, the seminar will creative a "vision" that queers (alters, disturbs, widens) Christianity through contemplation on the virtues and circumstances of Hildegard Von Bingen. These visions will take the form of a visionary presenting specific insights on the given topic and the other members of the group representing the students or adepts presenting questions or alternative points of view. The goal is to rehearse and then present discourses that arise from or cut across the life of Hildegard Von Bingen. All of these discourses call on students to offer their own insights and experiences. This means that visions and queries are rooted in the historical figure and context of Hildegard but applied to later and current events. Again, this is not a recitation of facts and dates but rather an invitation to contemplate and discourse around important contributions that arouse of women-center relationships, the erotics of chastity, queer family, convents, the divine feminine, mysticism v. scholasticism, and the body v. the mind.

Each group will be given some time in class to research, script, and rehearse. Because the goal is to incite conversation, the visions and adepts' queries need not be pre-written word for word. The task is to generate a discussion which will conclude with the visionary and the adepts inviting others into the dialogue.

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Sample Groups

Vision 1: The Love Between Women,
Hildegard Von Bingen and Sister Richardis

Convents were attractive to a wide ranger of women for diverse reasons, not least because of either a lack of attraction for reproductive sex with men or a desire for intimacy with women. This intimacy need not always be reduced to sexual intercourse, just as heterosexual relationships should not be. Yet for women who love women, convents were places where same gender community and intimacy could be enjoyed. Numerous cases of overtly sexual or chastely erotic relations between nuns are found across the generations. A famous such pairing existed between Hildegard Von Bingen and Sister Richardis. Some scholars strongly suspect that their relationship was sexual. Others believe their intimacies manifested in other forms. In any case, this love between women was greater than any other relationship either of them possessed, especially with any living man.

Because sexual intercourse, including queer sex, tends to focus on penetrative sex, society has often not been able to define sexual relations between women. This failure to define women's love for other women, especially by men, has led to many queer female relationships to be overlooked or excused. The misogynist question, "what do women want?" has riddled generations of men. The question, "what do women want from other women?" usually never gets asked even if it could be answered. In any case, within the contexts of women exclusive spaces, queer women's relationships are allowed to grow and evolve to include the sexual but also forms of intimacy than are unknown in male-dominated society. What was going on between Hildegard and Richardis? The men of her world may never have been able to properly guess.

Vision 2: Queer Erotics of Chastity
and Non-Reproductive Sexuality

Despite being defined by heterosexuals by their modes of sexual activity, queer people have a wide range of intimacies and erotics that go beyond the normative definitions of sex. As in normative relationships, queer relationships include a great deal that is not explicitly sexual. Yet even when these relationships get heated, they need not always involve traditional sexual contact. Demisexual and asexual relationships may privilege forms of intimacy that are either non-physical or do not involve genital contact, such as handholding, nuzzles, cuddling, and sitting comfortably quiet together. Indeed, with modern kink, BDSM, and queer communities, a wide range of relationships and erotics can be explored that are both non-reproductive and non-penetrative. Toys, impact play, role playing, power exchange, and bondage all offer a variety of ways for people to explore each other and themselves intimately without genital play being involved. These experiences can be not only erotic but spiritual. Many of these practices and instruments are based on medieval faith practices wherein the mortification of the body was meant to excite spiritual growth and discipline.

Then again, heterosexual culture has also defined and condemned queer erotics for being non-reproductive. Yet non-reproduction is itself something that can be erotic, life-giving and even spiritual. Despite this privileging of reproductive futurity, non-reproductive forms of sexuality, gender, and community are central to Christian traditions. The convent is one such place in which non-reproductive life was celebrated as bringing one closer to God. In these contexts, asexuals and demisexuals might rejoice in the freedom from being expected to engage sexually. Lesbians, bisexuals, pansexuals and even heterosexuals might rejoice in being in intimate relations with a community of all women. Again, the freedom from reproductive sex may be viewed as a relief and may orient the person towards other forms of relationship and pleasure. Chastity itself can be one of these queer erotics that bring its own form of excitement. 

Vision 3: Queer Family
and the Convent

Queer family often looks different. For many LGBTQIA people who are not accepted by their family of origin, a family of choice is the their primary support. Then for queer couples who elect to have families of their own, the children are often either adopted or mixed. Then there are queer families which are not concerned with reproduction in the normal sense of the word. Rather, family forms informally with elders taking on the parenting role or friends soon becoming like siblings. In special cases, intentional communities such as those women's communes and lesbian communes can form. Some of these collectives are built to last year-round and others are temporary affairs, constituting weekly events, monthly meetings, or yearly festivals. In the case of some lesbian separatists, specific rules and structures form that dictate who can join as well as what the roles of members will be.

Like these queer families and intentional communities, convents form familial structures that use the language of mother, sister, and daughter while not being related by blood. For many of the members, the convent becomes more of a family to them than their family of origin. As in other queer communities, adoption and choice are how the family grows rather than by heterosexual reproduction. These non-normative forms of sexuality, gender roles, and community can themselves be considered queer. Then there are the countless queer people who have joined convents over the generations: lesbians, bisexuals, pansexuals, asexuals, non-binary or gender queer people, as well as both trans men and women. In your group, your task is to consider the ways in which convents may contribute to how we understand queer family as distinct from the traditional heterosexual household.

Vision 4: Nuns
and the Divine Feminine

A result of the co-mingling of faith life and womanhood together in the exclusive spaces of convents was a development in theology of the feminine. While the patriarchy of the Orthodox and the Catholic Church was definitively male, with the advent of convents Christian culture began to transform and nuns increasingly became the on-the-ground workers for the Church. With growing population and relative power, womanhood began to shift in Church discourse from being a primarily secondary and subjugated gender towards being an alternative form of being as well as approaching the divine. As convents developed separately from monasteries and other male influences, a theology of the divine feminine rouse in prominence. The question turned from problematics (how do we deal with the faultiness of women in contrast to a deity characterized as masculine?) to celebration (how might God embody and honor the feminine?)

In your group, consider the ways in which a spirit of femininity may be said to exist? Is it social, natural, super-natural? How does the life of Hildegard Von Bingen and the development of convents illustrate the possibilities and conflicts that arouse when a theology of femininity began to speak back against patriarchal church politics? How might a feminist, a gynophilia, lesbian, or lesbian feminist perspective inform or reform Christian theology?

Vision 5: Theology of the Body:
Women Mystics vs Male Scholastics

In the Middle Ages, scholastic theology celebrated the re-examination of Classic Greco-Roman texts and Reason-centered theology. Yet nearly all of these scholastics were men. Women rarely found their respect as theologians and when they did it tended to be based in mysticism. Mystic approaches to theology were rooted in direct contacts with spirits over the mediation of the written word, the sensuality of the physical body over the mind over matter emphasis of male scholastics. This corresponds to traditions in which men are supposed to be more rationale and ruled by logic while women are supposed to be more emotional and ruled by their bodies. Women mystics followed this patriarchal division in certain ways, yet in other ways demonstrated how the eroticism of female bodies and emotions can allow for different ways of encountering the divine. Consider in what ways that mysticism's defense of devalued gender and embodiment represent a queer turn in theology.

How does the various bodies and emotions of women allow for distinct insights that are might not occur as readily in male dominated theological circles? How does a theology that arises out of the body defy certain limits and ways of knowing which focus on the mind? How does mysticism allow women to work around assumptions that exclude women from reading or writing about the Bible, Classical philosophy or scholastic theology? How have queer women, non-binary folx, and trans people of all sorts developed alternative forms of knowing and speaking that fill in the limits, blanks, and gaps left by heteronormative cisgender men?

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The Praxis of Silence: Teresa de Cartagena and Grove of the Infirm

"Who could hear with the ears of his soul such healthy advice if his physical ears were filled with the noise of human voices?"

Teresa de Cartagena

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Deafness is traditionally defined as a disability but medieval and modern deaf writers have long made the case for the concept of “deaf-gain.” As part of our embodiment narrative exercises, we have been pushing beyond the intellectual assent to disability theory and into the praxis of enacting life and ideas together. Towards that end, each of you will practice the habit of Teresa de Cartagena by engaging silence physically, intellectually, and socially.

By intentionally experiencing silence in a loud, busy, stimulating modern world, you will engage to the writing of Teresa de Cartagena in a way that makes the theory into an embodied lesson and consider the challenges as well as the benefits of silence.

The Praxis of Silence will begin at the usual class-time (5:30 PM) on Monday. After this time, you have 24 hours to find an 1 hour 15 min of silence. The first critically important and integral task is to find somewhere as perfectly silent as possible to sit or stand for an hour and fifteen minutes. This may be a museum, a library, a park (be safe), or even your own empty room. Please do not use music or other audio to cover over the ambient noise. Note: what you will experience is NOT the same as what deaf people necessarily experience. Rather, you will be learning in your own way and with your own embodiment what it means to live in and with silence.

While you sit in silence, you are to limit your activities and distractions. You may walk around, think, and do some light reading from the book of Teresa de Cartagena OR from read the lyrics to some form of music (e.g. as Teresa does the Psalms). However, reading should only consist of less than half (30 min max.).

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Questions

Before 24 hours is up, you must write a four paragraph post that uses two quotes from Teresa de Cartagena’ in order to help you narrative your embodied experience of silence. How does the theory inform your praxis? How did the physical experience inform your theory? Consider attached questions.

How did the experience of silence affect your body and mind?

• Consider whether or not you moved, fidgeted, sat motionless, etc.
• Consider what emotions and sensations came and went
• Consider how your mind and thoughts changed over the hour.

How did the experience of silence make passages of the Grove of Infirm clearer?

• Consider how certain sentences are different to read than to experience
• Consider how words often are short-hand for complex physical events
• Consider how reading changes in quiet versus among noise

How did reading the Grove of the Infirm affect how you experienced silence?

• Consider what things you focused on because of the book
• Consider how you felt about the experience because of the book
• Consider how the book made the experience an intellectual one

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Additional Pedagogical Resources

Additional Disability Studies

Additional Medieval History

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Mad for Margery: Insanity, Creation & the Imago Dei

“Dixit Dominus ad eum: 
Quis fecit os hominis? 
aut quis fabricatus est mutum et surdum, 
videntem et cæcum? nonne ego?”

The Book of Exodus 4:11

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The following is a transcript of "Crip Christianity"

from the Re-Orienting Disability Seminar

at the Nineteenth Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society

in Reykjavik, Iceland 16 July 2014 - 20 July 2014

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In the seventy-fourth chapter of the Book of Margery Kempe, Margery asks God how she might come into His divine presence. In response, Christ “drow hys creatur unto hys lofe and to mynde of hys passyon that sche myth not duryn to beheldyn a lazer er an other seke man, specialy yyf he had any wowndys aperyng on hym. So sche cryid and so sche wept as yyf sche had sen owr Lord Jhesu Crist wyth hys wowndys bledyng” (Staley, 74.4178-4182). She asks to see the Imago Dei, the image of God, and is shown the disabled. Through the “lofe” and “mynde” of Christ, Margery comes to read lepers and the other unreasonable bodies of the Lazar Houses as images of God’s presence.

After the transmission of Aristotle’s texts during the twelfth century, there was renewed interest in Europe for classical philosophy. Evident in the work of scholastic theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, Faith had to make room, as Reason became the measure of all things; including what it meant to be made in the image of God (Imago Dei). By the fifteenth century, the Middle-English word “Mad” had developed into two distinct but not incompatible concepts. The older meaning of “mad” was to be “made,” the state of being a creature in a process of creation with social contexts (OED). The newer meaning of “mad” was to be “uncontrolled by reason” or “carried away by or filled with enthusiasm or desire; wildly excited” (OED). Madness in the latter sense marked differences through exceptions rather than histories, then isolated rather than contextualized these differences from communion with humanity or God.

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Leprosy, Lust & Narcissism

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In Mad for Foucault, Lynne Huffer contends that neither madness nor rationality is a personal state of being but a social product. Huffer credits the development of the Lazar Houses, where lepers specifically and “mad” persons generally were isolated from civilization, propelling the idea of individual subjectivity and sovereignty by inscribing the association of internalized madness and exterior rationality. Reason becomes a byproduct of suppressing private “Unreason” within public thought and government. As such, madness is not the exception but the foundation for Reason. To dwell within the Lazar House or within madness allows for the possible resistance of lying bare the means by which common unreasonableness (e.g. desire, dependency) turns into exceptional thought. In other words, Huffer writes, madness reveals “thought thinking itself.” (103)

While adeptly critiquing the implications of the Lazar House and madness for later human social relations in the Age of Reason, Huffer’s Mad for Foucault does not account for how the workings of “madness” point towards a medieval past with critical, contentious relationships with God. While madness in the fifteenth century not only threatened disability in this life, but damnation in the life to come, with worldly isolation prescribing eternal confinement in Hell, I argue that the self-conscious work of madness in the Book of Margery Kempe not only challenges the rationality of the world but the cosmological order. 

The implication that the mad were Imago Dei, made in the image of God, and that to go to a Lazar House was to enter into the presence of Christ turns the value system of rational society inside out. Subsequently, I contend that Margery breaks open of madness as being “mad,” i.e. both “made” and “unreasonable,” in the Imago Dei through the making of a spiritual treatise and comforting the poor and marginalized by entering into community, constituting an early form of liberation theology.

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The Brain & Four Humors

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With 135 instances, the creative use of the “mad” is the primary way the word is used in the Book. The story of “the creature” is a story of creation, with a litany of things “mad” for Margery or “mad” by her. A few such works include images of God (Staley, 30.1789), vows and prayers (3.270; 13.656; 27.1472; 33.1918; 41.2333; 43.2587; 52.2927; 54.3092; 66.3834; 76.4253; 76.4255-4256; 83.4754; 85.4962), seats (8.459), abbeys (84.4839), and money (23.1230; 37.2145). If Margery is, as she is called, a “mad woman, crying and roryng,” it is a madness enraptured with its own makings, reflecting the Imago Dei proposed by Thomas Reynolds’s Vulnerable Communion (Staley, 80.4589). The Imago Dei, Reynolds argues, is not the inscription of God’s Reason, but the revelation that the “mad” are also makers: “To be created in the image of God means to be created for contributing to the world” (177). In this way, this image serves as a call for “mad” creatures to imitate God in Creation, “The Imago Dei is a Imitatio Dei” (175).

The power to create may beg the question the Lazar House attempts to answer: what is the goal of creation? The demand for an end is essentially a product of Reason. The end serves as the rational justification for the work of creation. When Reason is the standard measure, assessing all things in terms of reasonability, only the reasonable serve as sufficient tools or products. The Lazar House is one such attempt to determine whether or how one contributes to the world. It then isolates the “mad” as those bodies operating beyond Reason’s ability to understand or govern. The problem with this is that reason becomes what G.K. Chesterton calls a “perfect circle” (21). By rejecting all that does not fit into itself, “what a great deal it leaves it out ! ”  (Chesterton 21). “No conditioned reason exists,” determines Reynolds, “that could justify or account for the fact that we are loved into being” (175). Anything or everything may turn out to be unreasonable.

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Black Bile & Melancholy

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If Reason is not the standard of Creation but the product of denying its “madness,” then the Imago Dei is unreasonable in its totality. Creation’s unreasonableness, argues Bruno Latour, is seen in the surprising existence of all we cannot account for or justify.

"Modernists believe they make the world in their image just as God made them in His. This is a strange and impious description of God. As if God were master of His Creation! As if He were omnipotent and omniscient. If he had these perfections, there would be no Creation... God too, is slightly overtaken by His Creation, that is, by all that is changed and modified and altered in encountering Him. Yes we are indeed made in the image of God, that is, we do not know what we are doing either. We are surprised by what we make." (Latour 287)

As a metaphysical sign, the Imago Dei does not govern but creates and revels in madness. Creation in this sense testifies against Reason. “No Creation” is reasonable because it is a closed loop. A self-sufficient perfection does not need to create. Our surprise in what is mad testifies that the Imago Dei is not Reason alone, but the work of creative community.

If the Imago Dei makes and makes without reason, it is most reflected by co-creative “madness” and not self-governing reason. The Book acts as such a self-conscious Imago Dei, opening and closing with descriptions of its making, proudly proclaiming, “this boke was mad” (Staley, 17.873; 89.4245). This recursion deepens in the only two instants in the Book where madness explicitly means unreason. The Book quotes the Pryke of Life’s author confessing to being “ovyrcome thorw desyr, begynne for to maddyn, for lofe governyth me and not reson… thei seyn 'Lo, yen wood man cryeth in the stretys,' but how meche is the desyr of myn hert thei parceyve not” (Staley, 62.3638). Likewise, Margery admits that “crying and roryng” for God makes her a “mad woman” (80.5489). In both cases, the writers testify that their madness arises from acts of making that exceed reason. The Book is a mad machine, “thought thinking itself” but one that gestures beyond the image of a “mad woman,” through devotional acts mad for the Imago Dei (Huffer 103). The Book, draws us to glimpse God’s “madness” making itself.

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Blood & Hyper Sexuality

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The difference between the circular logic of Reason and madness’s recursion is critical. Reason functions by maintaining the exclusivity of what is inside and outside its parameters. It is fundamentally conservative. Madness functions by the creation of difference (i.e. that which is not reducible to the terms of what is already known to exist) and so affirms what Huffer calls “co-extension” (29). Madness turns back on itself but always includes more than it had. The encounter of these differences fundamentally breaks open new possibilities for co-creation, how things are mad and what they may make. In this way, madness extends creative opportunities through co-liberation.

Turning again to Margery’s prayer for God’s presence, readers stand witness to how the Imago Dei in the “mad” bodies of the Lazar House inspires acts of liberation. Receiving her revelation, Margery “went to a place wher seke women dwellyd whech wer ryth ful of the sekenes and fel down on hir kneys beforn hem” (Staley, 74.4292-4193). Margery challenges the exclusionary logic of the Lazar House by crossing its threshold with a gesture of community. Seeing madness from the inside, Margery offers no rational answer to the woman’s ills, but remains with her, “Comfortyn hir” (74.4204).

Coming from the Latin, “comfort” means: “to strengthen (morally or spiritually); to encourage, hearten, inspirit, incite” (OED). Comfort is an act of community making, as the pre-fix suggests the strengthening be done “together, together with, in combination or union” with others (OED). “Comfortyn” incites a collective act “To confirm, corroborate” our togetherness (OED). By comfort, Margery confirms that they are “mad” together and “steryd hem to mekenes and pacyens” as corroborators in the Imago Dei (Staley, 74.4196). Comfort heartens madness as community making that defies the limits of reason. “Creative power,” writes Reynolds “is essentially a relational power.” (180).

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Phlegm, Rage & Apathy

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The encounter with the madness of the Imago Dei breaks a barrier for Margery that prevented her, like the walls of the Lazar House, from finding comfort. “In the yerys of werldly prosperité,” Margery regarded “no thyng mor lothful ne mor abhomynabyl …than to seen er beheldyn a lazer” (Staley, 74.4186-4187). The Book uses “abominable,” according to a biblical hermeneutic of pathologized bodies or acts, as in the Book of Leviticus and elsewhere, to mark things excluded from the community. It aligns the logic of exclusion with “worldly prosperite,” suggesting that the Imago Dei could not be present until she accepts her own madness. Only then could she find and give comfort.

Rather than committing an act of charity, where Margery remains fundamentally separate from the leper, the Book emphasizes the likeness of the “seke women” (Staley, 74.4192). The likeness of their sex reveals further likeness in their madness. According to humoral science, the women were already impaired by the inconstancy of their sex. This is compounded by the likeness in their minds. Margery finds herself most drawn to a woman “labowryd wyth many fowle and horibyl thowtys, many mo than sche cowde tellyn” (74.4201-4202). Subject to visions of her own, the woman Margery ministers to mirrors herself in body and action, “a mad woman, crying and roryng” (80.4588-4589). Entering the Lazar House, Margery not only finds comfort for the leper, but for herself.

The drive to comfort does not excuse the violence and isolation governing madness but seeks co-creation and co-liberation by a communal sharing of strength (physical, social, spiritual). Disability, writes Reynolds, marks how all things are mad “contingent in an open universe subject to elements of unpredictability, instability, and conflict” (177-187). As things are formed as disabled, they get pushed to the margins, but the Imago Dei of the Book of Margery Kempe gives a call to seek each other and make a co-creative community. Instead of being mad in isolation, we become mad for each other.

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Yellow Bile & Ego-Centrism

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Works Cited

"com-, prefix." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. 3 June 2014.

"comfort, v." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. 3 June 2014.

Chesterton, G. K. "The Maniac." Orthodoxy. Ed. Sheridan Gilley. South Orange, NJ: Chesterton Institute, 2008. Print.

Huffer, Lynne. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Print.

Latour, Bruno. ""The Slight Surprise of Action"" Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

"mad, adj." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2014. Web. 3 June 2014.

Reynolds, Thomas E. Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008. Print.

Staley, Lynn, ed. The Book of Margery Kempe. Kalamazoo, MI: Published for TEAMS (the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in Association with the U of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan U, 1996. Print.

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