The Seduction of Christ: Listening Out for Queerness in the Middle Ages

By Scarlett Croft

“I took hold of he whom my soul loves, I held him, I embraced him, I kissed him lingeringly. I sensed how gratefully he accepted this gesture of love, when between kissing he himself opened his mouth, in order that I kiss more deeply.” ~ Rupert of Deutz, 12th-century theologian

Rupert of Deutz’s shift from seeing an image of the crucified Christ, to fantasizing about kissing him is indicative of how medieval theologians intuitively embraced the sexual as a legitimate means of expressing passion for Christ. Deutz’s account reveals two significant things. Firstly, in adopting a lexical field which focuses on the bodily, physical dimensions of the kiss (how the mouth opens, how deep it is, how long it lasts,) the focus is on the actual physicality of the kiss, rather than its metaphorical possibilities. Secondly, it does not explain away, or even address, the homoerotic elements of his own desire. The use of the adverb ‘lingeringly’ suggests a reciprocal will to draw out the event – his fantasy – and account asks that we do not gloss over sexual desire – but linger over them.

The passage by Rupert of Deutz, who was an influential Benedictine theologian based in northern France, requires further contextualisation. As Robert Mills has pointed out, young men were routinely initiated into Christianity through hugging and kissing – it was not an anomaly. Recent archival work found that in one thirteenth-century missal, images of Christ from the Getty collection had been repeatedly touched for devotional purposes. A fifteenth-century missal even had an osculation plaque beneath The Crucifix, which was designed to be kissed. Tactility was actively encouraged— the Missals’ operated as objects to be held, and embraced, rather than just viewed. This article will follow Deutz’s suggestion to linger over, and pay attention to queer moments, and possibilities within medieval theology. Taking this approach as its point of departure, this article is thoroughly indebted to Robert Mills’s research which has been devoted to creating, and recovering a useable, and accessible queer medieval literature.

The carefulness surrounding attempts to acknowledge historical differences around the ideological construction of homosexuality in the medieval period points in Anna Laskya’s words, to the ‘the power of our own culture’s homophobic resistance.’ Whilst such precision can be useful, it can also be also become paralysing, only reinforcing the heterodoxies attempt to read away from queer narratives. This article will look at four examples of where lust for Christ pushes in two directions: towards a community of suffers emphasising and imitating his pain, and towards a private and personal relationship with Christ.

Wohunge of ure Laured (The Wooing of Our Lord) – 13th-century England

In Wohunge of ure Lauerd’s text, which was written by an unnamed anchorite, the author focuses on imitating Christ’s suffering, in order to share in both his pain and pleasure. They both identify with and inhibit Christ’s hanging body:

Mi bodi henge with thi bodi neiled o rode, spered querfaste with inne fowr wahes. And henge I wile with the and neauer mare of mi rode cume til th[at] I deie. For thenne schal I lepen fra rode in to reste, fra wa to wele and to eche blisse. 

By directly addressing Christ ‘Mi bodi henge with thi bodi’ the author imagines sharing the crucifix with him. The choice of the word ‘rode’ rather than crū̆cifix priorities the physical organisation of their bodies over the conative quality of the crucifixion. Whilst rod is a modern euphemism for penis – the focus on the ‘rod’ here – a place where they mutually dwell, that they bond over, and connects their bodies, can be productively read as a sexual metaphor and as a moment of queer pleasure and possibility. The description of dying as ‘lepen fra rode into rest, fra wa to wele, and to eche blisse’ conceives their present pleasure with Christ as comparable to eternal bliss in heaven. Their construction of Christ’s pain can be placed within a more general anxiety about where Christ’s humanity, and thus his passions, were located. Indeed, depictions of an ithyphallic Christ— like that seen in Mareten Van Heemskercks’ Man of Sorrows (1532)—locate his passion in the metaphorical potentialities of his penis, and the potential for resurrection and climax within genitalia.

In the Wohunge account, the collapse of boundaries between genitalia and crucifix, and the imagined physical proximity between Christ and the author, conceive of Christ’s humanity through his potential for tactility, and sexuality. The ‘inne forw wahes’ which enclose them in a space together render them locked in at that moment, potentially on the precipice of climax, connection, and intimacy. The anchorite is interested and excited by Jesus’s non-normative identity as they position Christ’s body as perpetually on the threshold between masculinity, sexuality, and sacredness.

The Shewings of Julian of Norwich – written in England in 1373

Julian of Norwich’s Shewings, which also describes her life as an anchorite, appears to take this focus on Christ’s body one step further, as she imagines her relationship with God as a kind of queer matrimony. Indeed, she speaks ‘His peynes were my peynes,’ and decides to focus on suffering ‘with Him,’ to the point where their distinctiveness almost dissipates. His pain becomes hers, as she suffers not just next to (in the case of Wohunge) but as Christ on the crucifix. Julian examines and imagines his wounds in excessive detail:

In this sodenly I saw the rede blode trekelyn downe fro under the garlande hote
and freisly and ryth plenteously, as it were in the time of His passion that the
garlande of thornys was pressid on His blissid hede. Ryte so, both God and man,
the same that sufferd thus for me, I conceived treuly and mightily that it was Himselfe shewed it me without ony mene.

Julian perceives herself as the exclusive receiver of this image. She leaps between anatomical description and metaphor, reflecting that ‘This shewing was quick and lively and hidouse and dredfull, swete and lovely.’ The excess porosity of Christ’s wounds renders him in excess of both the normal human form, and of the bodily receptable culturally read as man.

Julian’s desire to see all of Christ, as both an ‘opyn example’ and as an open wound, associates him with the genitalia of the female body. Julian lusts after both Jesus’s female other, and after a female Jesus, whilst also conceiving and identifying herself as that very person. Indeed, when Jesus asks ‘Wilt thou see her?’ Julian reflects ‘it was the most pleasing word that He might have given me of her’. Seeing Mary as both a child, in sorrow and in prayer, refocuses her attention on Christ’s open, porous, and accessible femineity. Julian pays substantial attention to Mary throughout her Shewings, situating herself as potentially in matrimony with Jesus and Mary. In Walker Bynum’s words ‘this is one big, queer family.’

The Book of Margery Kempe – 15th-century England

Margery Kempe, an English mystic who travelled around Europe, took a different approach: assuming the posture of a virgin (born again). However, her careful projection, was disrupted by moments of ecstasy, and desire for Christ. Indeed, the moment in which Margery is seen as collapsing into a state somewhere between an orgasm and breakdown is testament to the overwhelming fusion of antithetical, intimate feelings:

These conversations were so sweet, so holy, and so devout, that often this creature could not bear it, but fell down and twisted and made remarkable face and gestures, with vehement sobbing’s and great abundances of tears sometimes saying ‘Jesus, mercy.’ And sometimes ‘I die’.

The twisting of her body, which replicates the paradigmatic posture of Christ on the cross, bears likeness to both pain, and orgasm. Her twisting convulsions lead her to address Jesus directly and intimately. Jesus responds to Margery asking how she should best love him by asking her to imagine being intimate with him. He explains ‘therefore I must be intimate with you and lie in your bed with you . […] kiss my mouth, my head, and my feet as sweetly as you want.’ He asks Margery to embrace the pain he has endured, and the pleasure he could provide. Through reminding her of his own corporeality, he also clarifies that his body is emblematic of the hypostatic union, rather than the exception to it. He directs Margery towards seeing his gender-identity as more unstable and fluid than ‘man’—initiating a reconigtion of their relationship as, in every way, outside of the heterodox. His instructions for Margery are rooted in her embracing the fluidity of their relationship— which is at once queer, familial, loving, equal, hierarchized, and unstable.

Meir ben Elijah of Norwich – 13th-century England

The Meir of Norwich’s poem Who is Like You, concludes this attempt to briefly characterise medieval queer desire, although this example is found in an alternative context. The meir was a Jewish man, living in England prior to the mass expulsion of the Jews in 1290. The poetic speaker imagines God rocking him on the sea, and eventually sees the waves ‘flow away with kisses.’ God’s kisses are only half of the equation. The poetic speaker makes the case for their own reciprocal seduction of God speaking:

 With words I shall arouse you, my Beloved,
[…] Accept my coronal of joyful songs,
And dwell within that palace of their beauty.

For the Meir, worship was comparable to the most arousing, joyous of events. Whilst the poetic speaker’s identity is ambiguous, and cannot be conflated with the Meir himself, the tendency to return to the sexual, and the romantic, as a way of thinking through, with, and in partnership with God, reveal medieval relationships with God as one model of pre-modern queer desire. We must acknowledge, that the notion of a hypostatic union—of a body both Godly and human, at once dead and alive—puts Christ in a queer realm to begin with.

Thus, these writers’ responses do not reflect a rupturing of a theologically gender and hetero-normative literature, but an embracing of the queer elements inherent in its construction.

Scarlett Croft is a first-year MA student, and Andrew Mellon scholar, from the University of Columbia. She is currently studying African America and Diaspora Studies.