Biblical Interpretation and the Construction of Christian Sexualities.

Clark, Elizabeth A.

The essays in this theme issue of Church History provide rich materials for contemporary scholars exploring the complex and sometimes unexpected intersections of exegesis, sexuality, gender, hierarchy, and authority in the history of Christianity. The five essays here collected, whose subject matter ranges chronologically from the fourth century through the seventeenth, strikingly illustrate how biblical exegesis (in David Hunter's words) can be "mined for evidence of the way in which texts were deployed as rhetorical strategies for creating and maintaining symbolic worlds, which in turn sustained actual social and religious communities" ("The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church," 282).

Not suprisingly, a central biblical text on which Christian writers through the centuries focused was the Song of Songs, sometimes joined with an exegesis of Psalm 45 (the king and his bride) and various passages depicting God's covenant with the Israelites (the latter image, as Belden Lane shows in his essay, "Two Schools of Desire," served as a primary trope for the marriage relation for Puritan writers).

David Hunter ("The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church") explores issues of asceticism and authority in his investigation of the Latin Fathers' exegesis of Psalm 45. Whereas Ambrose of Milan appeals to the image of the king and his bride to reinforce the role of the bishop in the consecration and guarding of young Christian virgins, Jerome deploys it to reinforce his own role as ascetic teacher and premier biblical exegete, in the face of attacks on his authority. Augustine, by contrast, opposing the elitism of ascetic authority in favor of ecclesial unity, reinterprets the image to identify all Christians as the bride, the body of Christ.

Stephen Moore's and Shawn Madison Krahmer's essays take the Christian interpretation of the Song of Songs as their focus. Krahmer's essay ("The Virile Bride of Bernard of Clairvaux") appeals to gender theory to show how Bernard's characterization of the female lover of the Song of Songs as a "virile bride" functions to erase all the negative traits traditionally associated with "femaleness" (lacking "moral vigor," for instance), yet not to relinquish the social authority of the male sex even while troping men as women. As Krahmer and other commentators suggest, medieval (male) exegetes, by appropriating for themselves the image of the "bride" of the Song of Songs, found a way in which "male" rationality could agreeably be linked with "feminine" affectivity. Yet, Krahmer notes, the ambiguities of Bernard's assignment of stereotypical male and female traits to male clerics and monks (do "active" male clerics stand higher or lower in the spiritual hierarchy than "passive" contemplative monks?) caution against a too easy appropriation of gender stereotypes for Bernard's symbolic system. Nonetheless, Krahmer appeals to Barbara Newman's provocative suggestion that in the imagery of the bride we have a "distinctively Christian transvaluation of values by which social liabilities ... become spiritual assets" (quoted in Krahmer, 322).

Stephen Moore's essay, "The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality," takes a broad overview of that text's interpretation in the late ancient and medieval periods, seen through the eyes of "queer theory." The characteristics of queer theory especially helpful to Moore are its work in destabilizing binary oppositions (not just of male/ female, but of heterosexual/homosexual, normal/perverse) and its claim that heterosexuality and homosexuality are "historical formations of relatively recent vintage," not transhistorical essences (328 n.1). In a witty presentation grounded (we may posit) in performance theory, Moore as author "enacts," in effect, through the voices of the commentators and the cast of characters they put on stage in their exegeses of the Song of Songs, the conceptual dilemmas the commentators face as they cast themselves into the role of the woman yearning for her (heavenly) lover. Allegorizing the Song of Songs, Moore argues, did not exempt these commentators from "gender trouble." As he pointedly observes, allegory here "replicates the deadly struggle of male celibacy itself. What must be overcome in either instance is the sexual, the sensual, the fleshly, the female." Yet the repressed returns, "with a wicked sense of humor--the monk, priest, or prelate is deftly transformed into a drag queen as he manfully strives to play the feminine role necessarily thrust upon him by the spiritual reading of the Song" (339). Is this exegetical process, Moore asks, analogous to a Bakhtinian notion of the "carnavalesque," in which "certain of the nonnegotiable moral strictures that structure everyday existence are effortlessly overturned--and what is more, overturned in the name of the absolute moral Authority" (344)? Only with the rise of biblical criticism in recent centuries was the Song of Songs wrested from allegorically inclined exegetes--a process, Moore observes, that coincides chronologically with what contemporary theorists refer to as the "invention of heterosexuality."

Irven Resnick ("Marriage in Medieval Culture") shows how appeal to a different group of biblical texts, passages depicting the relationship of Joseph and Mary, was used to support a "consent" theory of marriage in the Middle Ages (in other words, that it was the consent of the couple alone, quite apart from sexual consummation or the permission of parents, that constituted the "essence" of marriage). Catholic theologians since late antiquity, under the impulse of the ascetic movement, held that Mary was a dedicated virgin and never experienced sexual relations, yet could be deemed "married" to Joseph if the Augustinian "good" of the "sacramental bond" cemented their constitution as a married couple. As Resnick shows, a theory of consent limited the power of heads of families over their children, but nonetheless posed a problem in itself: what could be taken as a manifestation of consent? If a couple claimed that they had not inwardly "consented" to their marriage, would they have the right to dissolve it? What would separate betrothal from marriage, if both were based on "consent"? Advocates of the contrasting "consummation" theory, appealing to medical authorities, argued instead that if both parties felt "delight" in the sexual relation, which then resulted in pregnancy, this was a surer way to judge "consent" than an appeal to a nebulous inward act of will that could not be tested by external evidence. A further problem--if Joseph and Mary's chaste marriage was held up as an ideal for the married laity, what distinction could obtain between celibate clergy and the married? Here, issues of authority and ascetic hierarchy again surface. In the end, centuries of debate on the issue pushed churchmen to a compromise position, in which sexual relations returned as an important marker for the definition of marriage. The chaste marriage of Joseph and Mary, it appears, stood as a symbol that might be theologically difficult and socially dangerous to press too far in marital practice.

Belden Lane, in "Two Schools of Desire," examines the biblical and nature imagery employed by seventeenth-century Puritan writers in their exaltation of the marriage relation in the devotional literature they composed. Here, the biblical images to which authors appealed (in addition to the Song of Songs) were those centered on the Old Testament covenants: God's covenant with his bride, Israel; God's earlier covenant with all of nature at the time of Noah; and the renewal of the broken covenant in the erotic images of the book of Hosea. Human delight and love provided an avenue for comprehending the spiritual "delight" of human-divine love--and vice versa. Yet male Puritan authors, in citing the Song of Songs, appropriated the role of the "bride" in relation to God (like their medieval counterparts discussed by Krahmer and Moore), and perhaps inadvertently dug pitfalls for their "real-life" spouses. The humility and self-effacement required of the Puritan author now cast as "female" in the face of the divine male could serve to reinforce gender hierarchy and male authority on the social level, while the language of spiritual ravishment that appears in the Puritan texts might suggest violence and domination just as easily as love and ecstatic relation. The language of erotic ecstasy, however, shortly became an embarrassment to later Protestant authors, who preferred a language of human-divine relations more characterized by "reasonableness." Lane's conclusion here, in a quite different register, mirrors Moore's notation of the linguistic adjustments needed when social and cultural values dictate new modes of conceptualization.

Thus these interesting essays illustrate well some often unexpected intersections of exegesis, sexuality, authority, and hierarchies of both celibate/lay and male/female. In Stephen Moore's words, the interpretive history of the Song of Songs, in particular, "constitutes yet another fascinating footnote in the infinitely intricate history of sexuality" (349).