Abstract
This study looks
at Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum (1611) as religious poetry that demands recognition of an
essentially feminine spiritual wisdom and a place for women within
Christianity. It argues that Lanyer invokes a type of spiritual foremother
characterised by prophetic dreams, spiritual insight and weeping and that St
Monica of Hippo, represented by St Augustine, is the epitome of this model.
Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, it demonstrates that Augustine and Lanyer locate
this feminine wisdom outside of and in opposition to the patriarchal symbolic
order but show that only by its inclusion can mankind recover the wholeness of
prelapsarian knowledge.
Introduction
And pardon me (faire queene) for I presume
To doe that which so many better can
Not that I Learning to my selfe assume
Or that I would compare with any man
But as they are Scholers and by Art do write
So Nature yeelds my Soule a sad delight.(ll145 – 50 )
In 1974, Sherry.
B. Ortner’s influential paper considered the question: “Is female to male as
nature is to culture?” In her
study, Ortner interrogates the pan-cultural association of men with culture and
women with nature and concludes that the
“universal devaluation of women could be explained by postulating that
women are seen as closer to nature than
men, men being seen as more unequivocally occupying the high ground of culture”
(83-4.) This study will consider the gendered dichotomy of culture and nature
in the Western, Christian tradition and show that in the poems of Aemilia
Lanyer, the hierarchy of masculine ‘culture’ over feminine ‘nature’ is reversed
using Christian tradition itself and specifically the theology of St Augustine of
Hippo. Augustine’s Confessions dwell
at length on the divinely inspired, prophetic, feminine wisdom of his mother,
St Monica, and it is this model of natural, receptive, feminine virtue that, I
will argue, is to be found in Salve Deus
Rex Judaeorum.
Aemilia Lanyer’s
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, written in
1611, explicitly challenged and contested dominant Christian discourses of
post-Reformation England which held that women were morally and spiritually
inferior to men. Consequently, the poem
has received considerable feminist critical attention, mostly in the last two
decades. In 1992, Lynette McGrath
discussed “Amelia Lanyer’s 17th century feminist voice” and a
year later Barbara Lewalski argued that
the poems made “a subversive feminist statement” ( p219) whilst Susanne Woods
described them as ‘uniquely woman-centred throughout’ ( 1993 p301.) Janel
Mueller explored Lanyer’s “feminist poetics” in 1998 and the terms
“feminocentric” and “gynocentric” were applied to Salve Deus by Danielle Clark in 2001(p157) and Theresa Dipasquale
in 2008 (p106.)
There has also
been scholarship around class issues in Salve,
the most influential of these being Lisa Schnell’s ‘So Great a Difference in
Degree’ (1996) but the explicit religious message of the poem has been
comparatively neglected. Erica
Longfellow urges scholars to recognise that early modern “religious discourse
was not just a code for concerns more secular and to our twenty-first century
minds, more real” (2004 p12.) However, it
was Achsah Guibbery who first argued that Salve
Deus Rex Judaeorum “asks to be taken seriously as religious poetry that
adopts Christ’s message to give a special place to women in devotion” and that
it should be regarded as “a significant cultural document expanding our
understanding of women’s religious roles” (1998 p192.) This study intends to look closely at those
roles and the ‘special place’ Lanyer constructs for women within Christianity.
Elizabeth
Hodgson’s analysis of Lanyer’s construction of Christian womanhood is also important
to a reading of Lanyer in relation to women’s religious roles. In ‘Prophecy and Gendered Mourning in
Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’(2003), Hodgson demonstrates that Lanyer ‘invoke(s) a particular type of
spiritual foremother” (p101) and that she uses the ‘weeping woman’ as a central
strategic trope to weave together the prophetic, the feminine and the poetic” (p113.)
However, Hodgeson and others have argued that Lanyer portrays passivity,
ignorance and powerlessness positively, equating them with innocence and
goodness in Eve and Pilate’s wife (Hodgson 111-3.) I will read Lanyer’s
treatment of them differently and argue that, whilst she defends Eve on the
grounds of her naivety and praises her unworldliness, she does not valorise
Eve’s ignorance and passivity.
Furthermore, Lanyer makes it very clear that it is the powerlessness of Pilate’s wife and the
daughters of Jerusalem that makes them unable to prevent men from murdering the
son of God. In addition to Eve’s
unworldliness and Pilate’s wife’s access to divine wisdom, Lanyer presents the
Queen of Sheba’s agency, knowledge- seeking and authority very positively and I
will demonstrate that it is this agency and authority that Lanyer ultimately
advocates for Christian women.
Salve
Deus Rex Judaeorum presents us with weeping women: possessors of ‘natural’
spiritual insight, prophetic dreams and visions who, if not denied agency and
spiritual authority by men, can receive and reveal the divine word of God for
the salvation of both sexes. The epitome
of spiritual foremother this invokes is, I will argue, St Monica of Hippo. Monica, the mother of St Augustine, presented
by him in his Confessions as ever
weeping for his early impiety, receives God’s word through dreams and visions
and sees divine truth he cannot access. Entirely lacking the passivity
traditional in Christian models of feminine virtue, she is presented to us as a
woman with authority and agency, converting Augustine by sheer persistence,
argument and force of will.
Augustine’s
influence on seventeenth century Christianity was immense. Owen Chadwick says “As the colossus among the
early expounders of St Paul, he dominated the Reformation. In 1600 or 1630 he
was still the greatest of the Fathers’ (1964 p 218.) Arnoud Visser’s study Reading Augustine in the Reformation (2011) reveals an explosion of publications of Augustine’s works made
more affordable by new printing technology and identifies the Confessions as particularly popular for
private reading, particularly among women (p106.)
Feminist
scholarship on Augustine has been predominantly critical with considerable
justification. However, more recently, there has been what Judith Stark
describes as a ‘salvage operation’ to ‘uncover and recover the elements in
Augustine’s thinking that are more compatible with feminist approaches than one
might think at first glance’ (2007 p39.) Many of these more positive readings
have focused on Augustine’s treatment of his mother, Monica. Anne- Marie Bowery argues that “Although remarks about the inferiority of women
pervade the Augustinian corpus, Augustine's treatment of Monica suggest that a
woman can attain the same intellectual and spiritual insights about divinity as
men” (2007 p76.) This study will
show that Augustine’s representation of his mother constructs an empowering
role for women within Christianity remarkably similar to that constructed by
Lanyer. Unlike Lanyer, Monica did not
write herself and when I refer to ‘Monica,’ it must be remembered that I am
always referring to Augustine’s
representation of Monica.
Monica’s
central role in Augustine’s conversion is evident in the dialogues at Cassiacum
and discussed more fully in his Confessions.
Virginia Burrus and Catherine
Keller maintain that “Confessions is
a woman's life” (2007 p120) and Felicia McDuffie that “The heart of his story
begins with [Monica’s] nurturing milk and ends with his tears at her death”
(2007 p101.) The increased availability
and popularity of the Confessions for
private reading places Augustine’s very positive depiction of Monica’s feminine
Christian virtue in the homes of gentlemen and women of the early seventeenth
century. The Cassiacum dialogues (c388) known as de Beata Vita and de Ordine,
cited by Calvin in his Institutes,[2]
are philosophical debates in which Monica’s ‘feminine wisdom’ plays a vital
role. I shall read Lanyer’s poem alongside Augustine’s writings which feature
his mother and demonstrate the remarkable similarity of their constructions of
feminine spiritual wisdom which include an unusual degree of agency and
authority for women.
This study
focuses on the dichotomy between the masculine and feminine within the Christian
tradition which associates culture, art, patriarchal discourses and
institutions of power with the masculine and nature, sensuality, passivity and
receptiveness with the feminine. It will be shown that the feminine was
regarded as more inherently sinful but that in the Confessions, the Cassiacum dialogues and Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, this hierarchy is reversed. Augustine and Lanyer retain the association
of the feminine with nature but reject its negative connotations presenting a
feminine ‘natural’ wisdom which is intuitive and receptive to God. Most significantly, this feminine wisdom is
placed outside of and in opposition to masculine language, discourse and
learning. To Lanyer, the patriarchal
symbolic order is blind to spiritual truths, callously ambitious, entirely worldly
and fundamentally unchristian. Augustine
too explicitly places Monica outside masculine discourse with its philosophy,
learning and worldly wisdom which he presents as barriers to true Christian
faith. Because of these connections between language and spiritual roles for
men and women, it will be useful to examine them within the context of the
Lacanian symbolic order. Both texts
accept the existence of a patriarchal symbolic order which excludes women and
yet call into question the hierarchies of gender that assume this to be
desirable. Because of this, the theories of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray,
which both rely upon and challenge the idea of a patriarchal symbolic order
will be particularly valuable.
I do
not intend, however, to read the gender dichotomies in either text as entirely
oppositional. In Augustine’s account of the spiritual experience he shared with
his mother at Ostia and in Lanyer’s depiction of the meeting of minds between
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, we also see a focus upon the reconciliation and
union of masculine and feminine knowledge.
It will therefore be argued that Irigaray’s theologised concept of the ‘double
syntax’ in which masculine and feminine language meet, complement each other and
reveal the divine image is apposite in considering the texts’ focus on the
union of masculine and feminine discourse and wisdom.
In the first
chapter, I will justify my use of the writings of Augustine and the concept of
the Lacanian symbolic order in my reading of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. This chapter will look at the construction of
gender roles in political and literary culture in seventeenth century society
and their relation to language.
Augustine’s influence on this will be discussed and his concept of sapientia or masculine intellectual
wisdom and scientia or feminine sense
knowledge considered. The Lacanian
concept of the symbolic order, within which woman does not exist will be shown
to be relevant to a reading of these texts.
Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s
assertions of the need for a feminine oppositional position to the symbolic
order and Irigaray’s desire for a double syntax which includes a feminine and a
masculine language will be discussed.
Chapter two will
compare passages from both texts in which women are situated outside the
symbolic order and masculine discourse is shown to be problematic for Christian
faith. We will see that Augustine presents Monica as utterly rejecting
masculine discourse and Lanyer explicitly distinguishes her ‘natural’ poetry
from masculine ‘art.’ A decidedly negative portrayal of a spiritually blinded
patriarchal symbolic order will be shown to emerge in which ‘masculine’
reasoning and philosophical wisdom is presented in Christian terms as sinful
pride and worldly ambition which prevents men from knowing God.
Chapter three
will look at the construction of an essentially feminine wisdom in both texts.
It will be shown to differ from traditional constructions of feminine Christian
virtue in its agency and authority and lay claim to the vocation of a feminine
priesthood for the salvation of both sexes. Augustine’s theology of the
separation of the sexes and fragmentation of language and knowledge after the Fall
will be related to Irigaray’s double syntax which she argues is required to
restore the divine image. Augustine’s and Monica’s shared spiritual experience
at Ostia and the meeting of minds between Sheba and Solomon in Lanyer’s poem
will be read in these terms and argued to represent the reconstruction of
prelapsarian perfect knowledge which can lead ultimately to the salvation of
both sexes.
CHAPTER ONE
The Gendering
of Language, Knowledge and Sin in a Patriarchal Christian Symbolic Order.
“This have I done to make knowne to the World
that all Women Deserve not to be Blamed” (ll10-11vr)
This chapter will look at the links between
Lanyer’s gendered constructions of wisdom, language and sinfulness and those of
St Augustine particularly in relation to his mother, Monica and the ways in
which these might be explored in the context of a Lacanian symbolic order. I
will first discuss some dominant discourses around gender in political and
literary culture in early seventeenth century society and demonstrate the ways
in which these were expressed in terms of language, knowledge and sin. Augustine’s
influence on the Reformation and his concepts
of a superior masculine, intellectual, reasoning wisdom, Sapientia, and a feminine, instinctive, sensual wisdom, Scientia, will be discussed. Because I will argue in Chapter Two that the
relative moral values of these are reversed in Augustine’s writings which
depict Monica as well as in Lanyer’s poems and that both writers construct a
very similar feminine ‘natural’ wisdom outside of and in opposition to
masculine discourse, I will then spend some time discussing the Lacanian
concept of the symbolic order from which women are excluded as theorised by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Irigaray’s desire for a ‘double syntax’ in
which distinctly masculine and feminine discourses co-exist in an inclusive symbolic
order will be discussed in anticipation of Chapter Three in which I will show
just such a double syntax to exist in both texts.
In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Lanyer’s explicitly stated objective is to
counter claims that women were morally and spiritually inferior to men. When
she says, in her address ‘To the Vertuous Reader,[3]’
that she writes “to make knowne to the world that all women deserve not to be
blamed” (ll10-11) she is referring
specifically to an interpretation of the biblical Fall of man as expressed by
Calvin.
"Woman is more guilty than the man,
because she was seduced by Satan, and so diverted her husband from obedience to
God that she was an instrument of death leading all to perdition. It is necessary
that woman recognize this, and that she learn to what she is subjected... This
is reason enough why today she is placed below and that she bears within her
ignominy and shame (In Potter 1986 p728.)
This
negative depiction of women permeated much of seventeenth century culture. To Theresa
Dipasquale , “Lanyer writes in self-conscious reaction to Stuart court culture
as she sees it – that is, in condemnation of a society that centres itself upon
praise of a male monarch and relegates women to ancillary and subservient
roles” (2008 p105.) Dipasquale shows
that in James I’s poem ‘A Satire against Woemen,’ he makes women subhuman in
relation to men. After detailing the nature of various animals he says “Even so
wemen are of nature vaine”(l 43) and “Fulfilled with talke and clatters but
respect /And often tymes of small or none effect” (ll47-8.) He maintains that
“Sume craft they have yett foolish are indeede “(l53) (in Rhodes et all 2003
pp138-40.) To James, women are bestial, trivial, inconsequential and equipped
with cunning but no real intellect.
Janel Mueller
argues that within literature too, this period had seen the emergence of
negative depictions of women and shows that many of the female historical
figures who appear in Lanyer’s work - Lucrese, Rosamund, Cleopatra and Matilda
had been subjects for critical representations by artists like Shakespeare,
Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton. Mueller argues that “the moment was ripe for
intervening in the discursive construction of women by male authors and
entering a counterclaim for them as gender-specific exemplars of virtue” (1998
p105.) Barbara Lewalski suggests that Robert Southwell’s Peter’s Complaynt is particularly significant (1993 p227.) The poem
represents women as the tempters of men to sin and the lines “Earth’s necessary
Evils, captivating thralls/ Now murdering with your tongues, now with your
glances” (in Lewalsky 1993 p227) imply that women speaking or silent are
dangerous to men.
These very
negative constructions of women in literature will surely have contributed to
Lanyer’s denunciation of ‘male’ art and attribution of her own poetry to
‘nature’ when she says “But as they are Scholers and by Art do write/So Nature
yeelds my Soule a sad delight” (l l149-50 qem.) The gendering of culture as
masculine and nature as feminine was a commonplace in the early modern period.
Suzanne Woods observes that ‘the role of nature... was the subject of a wide
variety of complex arguments – suspect, untamed, uninformed by law or grace…Yet
nature was God’s creation, filled with examples of the divine purpose, good in
itself… Whatever else she is, nature is always female” (1998 pp77-8.) Lanyer
does not challenge the association of women with nature but emphasises the
primacy of nature and portrays it as closer to God in contrast to a masculine
‘art’ which takes men further from divine truth. She continues “since all Art
at first from Nature came/ that goodly Creature, Mother of Perfection/Whom
Jove’s almighty hand at first did frame” (151-3.)
We see this idea that men can become ‘carried
away’ by their own language in a defence of women written under the name of
“Jane Anger” in 1589 which claims that “The desire that every man hath to shewe his true vaine in writing is
unspeakable, and their mindes are so caried away with the manner, as no care at
all is had of the matter: they run so into Rethorick, as often times they
overrun the boundes of their own wits, and goe they knowe not whether” (upen.edu.)
These gendered notions
of language were part of wider concerns about language in the seventeenth
century. Hilary Hinds argues that whilst we perceive the idea of language
constituting a symbolic order which determines subjectivity as a product of the
late twentieth century, in fact “if we turn to the seventeenth century we find
a parallel concern with issues of language, meaning and representation: a
preoccupation with a perceived ‘crisis’ in language (and)a concern for the ways
in which meanings derive from language” (1996 p117.) A primary cause of this focus on language was
the ethos of the Reformation and the responsibility of each Christian to read
and interpret the bible with the intention of discovering truth. For guidance
on this the Reformers turned to St Augustine.
It is almost impossible
to overemphasise how central the writings of Augustine were to the Reformation.
John Yamamoto-Wilson’s study in which he catalogues and discusses Augustine's
influence in “almost every sphere of Protestant discourse” (2011 p3) is
comprehensive. Yamamoto-Wilson identifies an
‘Age of English Augustinianism’ from the succession of Elizabeth to the Early
Stuart period, surging in mid 1560s and declining by the interregnum (p 34.)
Diarmad MacCulloch describes Protestantism itself as “the outcome of the Augustinian
revolution sparked by Martin Luther in north-eastern Germany’ (2004 p114.)
Luther was a member of the Augustinian Eremites and in ‘Martin Luther;
Augustinian’ (1983), Richard Balge argues that ‘It is not too daring to say
that the story of the gospel’s course in history would not be the same if the
earnest young man had entered one of the others” (1983 p1.) S.J. Han shows that
Calvin too drew heavily upon Augustine saying “There is no one as influential
as Augustine in Calvin’s writings…He regarded Augustine as the Father of the
Church who had comprehensively grasped all the doctrines of the Scriptures”
(2008 p12.)
Augustine
himself was intensely preoccupied with language. Catherine Conybeare describes
him as “textually aware to an extraordinary degree” (2006 p11) whilst
Shildgen’s 1994 study ‘Augustine’s
Answer to Jacques Derrida’ relates Augustine’s thought to Derrida’s in relation to signification,
plurality of meaning and indeterminacy of language. However, it must be
remembered that, for Augustine, there were divine truths to be discovered. For this purpose, he posited two types of
wisdom - sapientia and scientia – and they were gendered. The
influential Christian feminist Rosemary Radford Reuther, explains that before the Fall, “male and female
originally meant the union of mind and soul, sapientia and scientia,
the mind or wisdom being masculine, and the soul, which mediates sense knowledge,
feminine” ( 2007 p52.) These worked in harmony together with the intellectual
and moral sapientia controlling and
regulating the impulsive and sensual scientia.
After the fall, they became separated. Both sexes possessed sapientia and scientia but men were understood to be guided by the mind and women
by the bodily senses (Reuther p52- 63.) We are reminded of the ‘Superego’ and
the ‘Id’ when Augustine speaks of “woman, who
in the mind of her reasonable understanding should have a parity of nature, but
in the sex of her body, should be in like manner subject to the sex of her
husband, as the appetite of doing is fain to conceive the skill of right-doing
from the reason of the mind” (
9:32. con)
Mary Potter describes this gendered
understanding of sin within Calvinism saying “While men may be deceived by
their minds, women are seduced by physical pleasure “(1986 p727-8.) Speaking of
both Augustine’s and Calvin’s thought, Radford Reuther says “In her bodily,
sexual, and social nature woman is not homo,
but femina, and as such represents
the lower, sense perception part of the self and its temptations to sensual
pleasure” (2007 p55.)
Unsurprisingly,
feminists have overwhelmingly viewed this idea very negatively, critiqued it
extensively and demonstrated convincingly the harm it has caused women over the
centuries. However, the hierarchy of this gendered dichotomy of Augustine’s is
not stable and is even reversed in the Confessions
and the Cassiacum dialogues, Beata
Vita and de Ordine. These are the
texts which feature his mother, St Monica of Hippo, and establish her as the
cause of his rejection of a worldly, sensual life in favour of an ascetic,
spiritual one. We will see that in
Monica, an essentially feminine, intuitive, experiential, natural wisdom provides
her with a simple, receptive faith by which worldly, educated Augustine was
guided to Christianity.
In
the Christian tradition then, gendered dichotomies in relation to wisdom,
knowledge and morality were established, related to language and embedded in a
patriarchal society which privileged the masculine. For this reason, it will be useful to
consider the texts within the context of a Lacanian symbolic order. Because the
hierarchy of this dichotomy is brought into question by both writers, the
theories of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray which both acknowledge and
challenge the patriarchal symbolic order will be particularly valuable.
In Lacanian
psychoanalysis, the mother and child are initially locked into a bond of joined
identity known as ‘the real’ which does not allow for language or relations
with others. The father figure breaks into this and represents the authority
and systems of rules the child must enter to become a subject within the order.
'It is the name-of-the-father that we
must recognise as the support of the symbolic function, which, from the dawn of
history has identified his person with the figure of the law' (Lacan 1977 p67).
In this way, as Maggie Berg argues, “the mother is identified with a natural
state that must be overcome for the subject to take up its place in the
cultural realm”(1991 p62.) Lacan’s statements that "There is no such thing
as the woman" and "There is woman only as excluded by the nature of
things which is the nature of-words” ( in Mitchell and Rose 1982 p144) have been critiqued extensively by
Lacanian feminists. Although Lacan’s
assertion that divisions between men and women exist only in language is
valuable to feminist arguments against biological essentialism, the dichotomy
is problematic. Grosz says “As Lacan recognized, the symbolic order is not
simply an abstract or external system of signification whose phallic status is
purely discursive. The symbolic is the field within which our lives and social experiences
are located” (1990 P145.)
For Kristeva and Irigaray too, the symbolic order
is masculine and the feminine is located in a marginalised position outside it
but they see value in taking up a negative function in resistance to it. Kristeva
understands the symbolic as “the language of transparency, power and
conformity, and, as such, (it) is aligned with patriarchal functions in culture
“(in Robbins 2000 p128.) She argues that "If women have a role to play
... it is only in assuming a negative function: reject everything finite,
definite, structured, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society. Such
an attitude places women on the side of the explosion of social codes: with
revolutionary movements" (In Jones 1985 p363.) It is important to remember
that, for Kristeva, it is the position of the individual in relation to language that establishes their
‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’ and not their biological bodies. The masculine
position is one fully integrated into the symbolic order, the feminine anyone
outside it (Jones 1985 p363.)
Irigaray too
stresses the importance of taking up a negative position to a patriarchal
symbolic order but sees more concrete divisions of gender and does not accept
that a symbolic order needs to be ‘masculine.’ Berg argues
that “Irigaray does not accept women's exclusion from the Symbolic…but
from Lacan's system of the Symbolic.” Because it is patriarchal, ‘it follows that a
feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists" (1992
p61.) For Irigaray, it is essential to
develop a symbolic order that encompasses a male and female language and a male
and female wisdom which remain distinct from each other. She refers to this as
a double syntax. Damien Casey explains that “This double syntax is
grounded upon the incommensurability of men and women, of two nodes of
subjectivity: two logics, two economies, metaphor and metonymy, paternal and
maternal genealogies; each of which is given full recognition” ( 1999 p5.) Irigaray
is hopeful that this union can be achieved and will be productive. She considers
this in explicitly religious terms using the symbolism of Adam and Eve and the
separation of the male and female after the Fall. “Irigaray’s call for a feminine divine needs
to be understood – as a necessary step towards the discovery of the divine
incarnation in the couple as the condition for genuine life giving
community”(Casey p2.)
To summarise,
for Kristeva and Irigaray, women (or the feminine) are outside the symbolic
order in a marginalised position from which they can only affect it by a negative
function of resistance but that Irigaray is hopeful that this can be remedied
and that the symbolic order can include the feminine without subsuming it into
the masculine. I would suggest that this
conception of women’s status, their need for opposition and the hope for a
union between the masculine and feminine is highly useful to a reading of
Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum. Furthermore, the
representation of St Monica by Augustine in his Confessions, so popular at this time, provides a model of feminine,
natural, receptive wisdom remarkably similar to that constructed by Lanyer and
an account of a complementary union as the route to perfect wisdom which can be
related to Lanyer’s portrayal of the meeting of Sheba and Solomon. The next chapter will look at women’s
positions outside the symbolic order and the problem that masculine language
and learning produces for Christian humility and faith.
CHAPTER TWO
Portraying Masculine
Discourse and Learning as Fundamentally Unchristian.
(E)vill disposed men… doe like Vipers deface the wombes
wherein they were bred, onely to give way and utterance to their want of
discretion and goodnesse. Such as these were they that dishonoured Christ, his
Apostles and Prophets putting them to shamefull deaths (VR ll19-26)
“Because women do not occupy the subject-positions
accorded to men in a patriarchal symbolic order…women are not inside the
symbolic in the same way as men” argues Elizabeth Grosz (1990 p166.) The
symbolic order within which “woman” is said not to exist except as excluded
from language, nevertheless defines women and their roles as subordinated and
‘other’ than that of the ideal male subject who represents language, law and
authority. To Julia Kristeva, the social order and the
symbolic order are two dimensions of one large system (McAfee 2004 p96)
and “women
feel rejected from language and the social bond…(T)his can eventually lead to a
rejection of the symbolic that is experienced as a rejection of the paternal
function” (in McAfee p97.) In this chapter, I will look at the
ways in which Augustine and Lanyer disparage masculine language, law and
authority and valorise a feminine position outside the symbolic order in
traditional, Christian terms.
In de Beata Vita and de Ordine dialogues (c388), Augustine will be shown to position Monica
outside the rules of language whilst attributing to her a ‘feminine’ natural,
receptive, intuitive wisdom superior to masculine reasoning and philosophical
wisdom which is presented in Christian terms as sinful pride and worldly ambition.
We will see that Lanyer too presents her own ‘natural’ poetry in contrast to a
masculine art and that her depiction of the trial of Christ by the Jews will be
shown to present a similarly spiritually blinded patriarchal symbolic order.
Lanyer shows Christ himself to be outside the order and his accusers’ inability
to recognise him as the son of God to be directly related to their masculine
learning. For Lanyer, masculine language itself is the murder weapon used
against the son of God.
The Cassiacum dialogues are a series of
philosophical debates which include Augustine’s attempts, with a number of male
students, male friends and his mother, to determine the secret of a happy life
(de Beata Vita) and the order of
things (de Ordine.) Augustine
begins the dialogue known as de Beata
Vita by asking:
““Does it seem to you” I asked “that a man is
happy if he doesn’t have what he wants?” They said, “No.” “So, is everyone
happy who has what he wants?” Then my mother said “If he wants and has good
things, he is happy, but if he wants bad things, even if he has them, he is
unhappy.[4]””(2.10
bv)
Augustine’s
compliment is expansive but qualified:
“Mother, you have captured the very citadel of philosophy. Certainly there
is no doubt that, for you, the words were lacking.”[5]
Monica’s reaction to this is most interesting. “(S)he , at this, cried out that
we were forgetting completely her
sex and believed that some great man was
seated there with us.”[6]
Is this modesty or is Monica distancing herself from the ‘masculine’ school of
philosophical thought? She appears to reject philosophy specifically in de Ordine when Augustine asks for her entrance to be recorded by the scribe. Monica says ‘Surely I've never heard
of women having been brought into this type of debate in those books you read’
( 1.11.31 do) [7] Monica expresses religious views confidently
in these dialogues and so it seems to be ‘this kind of debate’ (hoc genus disputatione)
that she questions women ‘having been being brought into’ (inductas.) It is
significant that she does not use an active verb to say ‘contribute to’ or ‘take
part in’ but the passive participle ‘inductas’ suggesting someone being brought
(unwillingly?) into a realm that is not
her own. We may also suspect that ‘those books you read’ are not held in great
esteem by the speaker.
If we compare Monica’s unwillingness to address
philosophy with her contributions to the subject of religion, we see a marked
difference. Her speech is littered with terms of certainty here.
‘Obviously’ (prorsus) God established order between good and evil (2.7.22. do)
‘Clearly’ (plane) the soul is nourished by understanding ( 2.8 bv.) There is no
doubt (nullo ambigente) that the happy life is one that is lived with ‘firm faith, eager hope, and blazing love’ (4.35 bv.)
Augustine’s chief biographer, Peter Brown,
says of Monica in the dialogues, “She is as awesome as ever, seeming to
draw upon hidden resources of absolute certainty…and her son has established
her, with great intensity, as an oracle of primitive Catholic piety” (1969 p118.)
In
relation to Monica’s statement that happiness comes from wanting what is good,
Augustine says. “I understood, to the extent I could, from what and how divine
a source these words flowed” (2.10bv)[8]
and of a later, similar point of
Monica’s he says, “Do you see how different it is to have various and multiple
disciplines of learning and to have a mind totally focused on God? For where
but from that source did she get these words we admire” ( 2:27.)?[9]
We see here that Augustine credits God with Monica’s words but Monica herself
for her receptivity to God. By beginning her speeches with ‘clearly’ and
‘obviously,’ followed by a statement, Augustine gives the impression that she
is revealing a truth rather than expressing an opinion. Brown critically describes her piety as
‘primitive’ and yet even this evokes the primacy of nature over culture.
Augustine places
this divinely-inspired wisdom in opposition to masculine arts, learning and
language again very specifically in relation to language in their discussion of
divine order “If I were to say that you would
easily reach a level of language which lacks faults of pronunciation and
dialect I would certainly be lying. You despised those things whether as boys' affairs or as things not
relevant to you, yet you know the near‐divine force
and nature of grammar so well, that you seem to have grasped its soul, while
leaving its body to the eloquent” ( 2:17.45 do Conybeare’s translation.)[10]
In this context he is referring to ‘grammar’ as the signs of the divine order.
Monica, he asserts, is one who does not require language to understand it. Conybeare
summarises his meaning: “The details of language—or the ‘grammar’ of
divine organization—don't matter: what matters is simply knowing God.” Augustine makes the
same comparison again in Confessions
and here we see again how useful the Lacanian patriarchal symbolic order is for
reading him. “Behold, O Lord God…how carefully the sons of men observe the
covenanted rules of letters and syllables received from those who spake before
them, neglecting the eternal covenant of everlasting salvation received from
Thee” (1:29.) Whilst
Augustine would always value education and language, he frequently stressed the
danger of valuing any of the liberal arts for their own sake. “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy
and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world,
and not after Christ” (2:8 con.)
We see a very similar
attitude towards ‘masculine’ language in Salve
Deus Rex Judaeorum in which Lanyer distinguishes her poetry from ‘male art’
in her very first dedication to the queen.
“/Not that I Learning to my selfe assume/Or that I would compare with
any man/But as they are Scholers and by Art do write/So Nature yeelds my Soule
a sad delight”(ll147-50.) Clearly, this is not modesty or self-deprecation but
a decided privileging of nature. We may suspect another comparison to the
disparagement of male art when Lanyer
defines her motivation for writing: “I
seek his (God’s) glory, rather than to get/ the vulgars breath, the seed of
vanitie/ nor fame’s lowd Trumpet care I to admit; / But rather strive in
plainest Words to showe/The Matter which I seek to undergoe (ll309-14.) Men, to
Lanyer, as to ‘Jane Anger’ and to Augustine, employ language for reasons of
pride, glory and worldly ambition and this leads them away from divine truth.
Lanyer presents her poems as no less than
divine truth. When she says “If he pleaseth
t’illuminate my Spirit/And give me Wisdom from his holy Hill/ that I may Write part of
his part of his glorious Merit/ If he vouchsafe to guide my Hand and
Quill,” (ll321-4) she claims divine
authority not only for her argument but seemingly for the very language in
which she writes. Here Lanyer makes the
same claim that Augustine makes on Monica’s behalf; that she is the recipient
and mediator of divine wisdom. The
source of all wisdom is God but Lanyer, writing by nature rather than art, is
receptive to it.
The matter that
Lanyer ‘seeks to undergoe’ centres on a passion narrative and this is a little
unusual at this time. Few passion poems were written after the Reformation. Suzanne
Woods notes that they was more common in Catholic works (1999 p129) and
Longfellow observes that in Calvinist reformed theology, it was regarded as
idolatrous to dwell upon the crucified Christ as it might lead one to neglect
the grace of the risen Christ (2004 p70.) For Lanyer, however, it is Christ as
the victim of powerful patriarchal organisations who is allied with women. She describes as ‘vipers’ both the men who
dishonour women (l22 vr) and the men who crucified Christ (l365.) Lanyer
repeatedly emphasises that Christ himself stood outside the patriarchal symbolic
order of his time. Crucifixion was a punishment for rebellion against
authority. Guibbery argues that ‘using the gospel form she revives the gospel
tradition of subverting worldly authority’ ( 1998 p196.) In Kristeva’s view of
the symbolic order, Christ would be seen as taking up a feminine subject
position. Lanyer explicitly allies Christ
with women throughout the poem. In her prose piece ‘To the Vertuous Reader’ in
which she states her intent to defend women,
she says “It pleased our lord and saviour Jesus Christ without the
assistance of man… to be begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a
woman, obedient to a woman; and that he healed women, pardoned women, comforted
women”(ll40-46.)
In her Passion
of Christ, Lanyer presents the divinity of Christ as an evident fact
perceptible to women but not men. “His name they sought and found yet could not
know (l498,)” Nay though he said unto them ‘I am he’ they could not know him
whom their eyes did see” (ll503-4) and Christ “Presents himself that they might
take a view/ and what they doubted they might cleerely see” (ll515-6.) Lanyer introduces these blinded Jewish
authorities as “The ‘High Priests’ ‘Scribes’ and ‘Elders of the Land’
emphasising the titles that denoted diverse forms of patriarchal learning and
power (l490.) As in the Cassiacum dialogues, the truth is ‘clearly’ visible and
yet missed by men with ‘various and multiple disciplines of learning.’ That
they cannot see the truth, she attributes to a masculine learning in much the
same way as she has distinguished her ‘natural’ poetry from male ‘art.’ “Yet could their learned Ignorance apprehend
No light of Grace to free themselves from blame” (ll546-7.) Although Christ is
able to free himself at any time, “from these unlearned men,” (l553) he allows himself to be taken “to the wicked Caiphas
in Judgement Hall who studies onely how to doe him wrong” (l636.) It is the
studies and learning of men that have led them away from divine wisdom.
Jesus,
significantly, is silent in the presence of his accusers.
And now they all doe give attentive eare
To heare the answere, which he will not make
The people wonder how he can forbeare
And these great wrongs so patiently can take.
But yet he answers not, nor doth he care
Much more he will endure for our sake” (ll665-670.)
Christ’s
persecutors, in contrast, are very vocal.
“With all reprochfull words about him
throng/ False Witnesses are now call'd in apace/ Whose trothlesse tongues must
make pale death imbrace” (ll638-40.) These tongues are ultimately responsible
for Christ’s death. “Their tongues doe serve him as a Passing bell” (l649.
) When Lanyer says “They tell his Words though farre from his intent/ And what
his speeches were, not what he meant” (ll655-6) we may see a parallel between
this and Augustine’s statement that Monica grasped the soul of ‘grammar’ whilst
leaving the body of it to the eloquent. The
men hear only the words whilst the essence of its meaning is clear to women. To
Lanyer, of course, men continue to misinterpret the scriptures in their
attitudes towards women. She concludes her account of the Jewish trial with
“these were the fooles who thought themselves so wise” (l683.)
Danielle Clarke
observes that throughout the poem, Lanyer “stresses male guilt and complicity
and female innocence suggesting women have an innate sympathy with the
oppressed” (2001 p160.) In doing so, she
evokes a feminine intuitive, receptive wisdom which stands outside the symbolic
order. This was by no means a new construction of feminine virtue but for it to
be represented in such strong contrast to a flawed and dangerous male
intellectual, philosophical wisdom is a marked reversal of established
hierarchies in which the ‘natural’ feminine scientia
was regarded as inherently more sinful than the intellectual/philosophical sapientia. Yet by linking the masculine sapientia with worldly ambition, Lanyer
draws on an unexceptionable and well-established, Christian tradition which owes
much to Augustine and by extension, Monica.
It is in the
Cassiacum dialogues that, as Felicia McDuffie argues, “Augustine associates
masculinity with pride and ambition and realizes that it does not lead either
to happiness or to holiness” (2007 p113.) Augustine’s theology regarding the
sin of pride, of course, had great influence on the theology of both Luther and
Calvin. Although “In Augustine's
allegory of creation, he associates the masculine with reason and the feminine
with desire…, it is not through "masculine" reason or pride but
through "feminine" humility and yearning of the heart that Augustine
comes to God” (McDuffie p116.) For Lanyer too, the sins of pride and ambition
are associated with masculine symbolic structures of power, learning and
language and the Christian virtues of humility and compassion with feminine,
receptive, spiritual wisdom. As Janel
Mueller argues, in Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum, “Culture must look to nature for moral refounding” (1998 p118.)
The next chapter will look at what feminine nature has to offer masculine
culture and how, together, they are shown to attain true wisdom.
CHAPTER THREE
Establishing Feminine
‘Natural’ Wisdom as Essential for the Salvation of Mankind.
When
spightfull men with torments did oppresse
Th'afflicted body of this innocent Dove,
Poore women seeing how much they did transgresse,
By teares, by sighes, by cries intreat,
What may be done among the thickest presse,
They labour still these tyrants hearts to move (ll993-9.)
Th'afflicted body of this innocent Dove,
Poore women seeing how much they did transgresse,
By teares, by sighes, by cries intreat,
What may be done among the thickest presse,
They labour still these tyrants hearts to move (ll993-9.)
In the last chapter
we saw that Augustine and Lanyer construct an essentially feminine, natural,
receptive wisdom and privilege it over a masculine, rational, philosophical
wisdom. In this chapter, we will look more
closely at this receptive, instinctive wisdom which will be shown to be
offered for the salvation of both sexes in the vocation of priesthood. Augustine’s
theology of the Fall in which masculine and feminine wisdom was separated and
language fragmented will be related to Irigaray’s concept of the double syntax in
which masculine and feminine language is required to reveal the divine. Augustine’s new willingness to listen to and
value his mother’s guidance will be shown to make possible the spiritual
experience they share at Ostia. It will be argued that this harmonious union is
also Lanyer’s desire and is represented in the meeting of minds between Solomon
and Sheba .
We have seen
that Lanyer claims divine guidance for her writing. In
her appendix ‘To the Doubtfull Reader,’ she also claims divine revelation in a
dream for the name of her poem: “This title, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum …was delivered unto me in sleepe … a
significant token, that I was appointed to perform this Worke.” The dream of
Pilate’s wife that Christ is innocent and divine forms the heart of her
poem. It is Pilate’s failure to listen
to his wife that results in the death of the messiah and forms the basis for
Lanyer’s argument that men are ‘more faultie’ (l78 qem) than women in biblical
history.
Augustine, however, does eventually listen to his
mother and her dreams. When she tells him,
before his conversion, that God has reassured her in a dream that Augustine
would one day ‘be where you are’ he tries to convince her with reasoned
argument that this could mean that she would lose her Catholic faith. He says
“she was not perplexed by the plausibility of my false interpretation, and so
quickly saw what was to be seen, and which I certainly had not perceived before
she spake (3.20 con.)
Monica’s superior spiritual insight
is frequently metaphorically referred to by Augustine in these terms of
“seeing” “eyes” and “sight” and he says of himself “I knew not how to conceive,
except corporeally. And by believing might I have been cured, that so the
eyesight of my soul being cleared, might in some way be directed to Thy truth”(5:6
con.) Lanyer too uses much imagery of
eyes for spiritual insight, speaking of beholding the passion of Christ “With
the eye of faith” (l318) and praising her perfect Christian woman the Duchess of
Cumberland that “Thy eyes are op'ned, and thou seest so cleare”( l1365.) Pilate’s wife significantly implores him to
“Open thine eies, that thou the truth mai'st see ” (l755.)
Feminine eyes are also portrayed very frequently as weeping in both texts and this takes on a sacred connation. For Lanyer, Mary’s “teares did wash away his pretious blood (l1017) and she says of the women of Jerusalem. “Your cries inforced mercie, grace, and love/From him, whom greatest Princes could not move/To speake one word, nor once to lift his eyes/ And yet these poore women, by their piteous cries/ Did move their Lord, their Lover and their King” (ll975-9.) Tears have great power in Salve. Many critics have remarked upon Lanyer’s focus upon weeping women. Jennifer Vaught notes that “Lanyer’s tolerance for immoderate mourning is somewhat unusual in post-Reformation England” (2008 p158.) Elizabeth Hodgson argues that Lanyer’s use of the trope of the grieving woman is central to her invocation of “a particular type of spiritual foremother” (2003 p101.) Augustine’s depiction of Monica’s weeping is deeply entrenched in Catholic tradition. He presents these tears as no less than the cause of his salvation. “(M)y mother's heart's blood, through her tears night and day poured out, was a sacrifice offered for me unto Thee; and Thou didst deal with me by wondrous ways ( 5:8:15 con.)
Feminine eyes are also portrayed very frequently as weeping in both texts and this takes on a sacred connation. For Lanyer, Mary’s “teares did wash away his pretious blood (l1017) and she says of the women of Jerusalem. “Your cries inforced mercie, grace, and love/From him, whom greatest Princes could not move/To speake one word, nor once to lift his eyes/ And yet these poore women, by their piteous cries/ Did move their Lord, their Lover and their King” (ll975-9.) Tears have great power in Salve. Many critics have remarked upon Lanyer’s focus upon weeping women. Jennifer Vaught notes that “Lanyer’s tolerance for immoderate mourning is somewhat unusual in post-Reformation England” (2008 p158.) Elizabeth Hodgson argues that Lanyer’s use of the trope of the grieving woman is central to her invocation of “a particular type of spiritual foremother” (2003 p101.) Augustine’s depiction of Monica’s weeping is deeply entrenched in Catholic tradition. He presents these tears as no less than the cause of his salvation. “(M)y mother's heart's blood, through her tears night and day poured out, was a sacrifice offered for me unto Thee; and Thou didst deal with me by wondrous ways ( 5:8:15 con.)
It is partly this feminine
grief that leads many critics, including Jonathan Goldburg, to argue that “Lanyer’s
reversal, however radically it rereads the bible to wrest it from its
patriarchal bias nonetheless also preserves many of the crucial terms that link
women to suffering and passivity’ (Goldburg 1977 p19.) I would disagree
slightly and argue that for Monica and for Lanyer, passivity is notably absent
amongst their otherwise typically feminine virtues. St Monica of Hippo, although revered for her receptiveness
to God and copious weeping, is not remotely passive. When Augustine deceives
her and travels to Rome, Monica simply follows and tracks down her wayward son
although the dangers for an elderly woman travelling alone were considerable.
Monica, throughout the Confessions,
represents authority to Augustine, particularly in religion. She is portrayed as having very strong views
about the doctrines of her faith and shown to argue for them assertively even
with men. On the one occasion she did
allow a bishop to ‘correct’ a minor practice Augustine records his surprise: “I wondered at how readily she censured her own
practice, rather than discuss his prohibition”(5:2
con.)
I would
argue that Lanyer equally rejects passivity as a desirable female trait
although many critics have regarded her defence of Eve as ‘simply good’(l 765)
and having ‘too much love’ (l801) as praise of the laudable feminine traits of
receptivity and trust. Lanyer certainly sympathises with Eve and argues with
undeniable logic that being deceived into disobedience is less sinful than
torturing to death the saviour of mankind but Eve is not the heroine of Salve.
She has a simple unworldly goodness but no access to God and no authority. Lanyer emphasises that it was Adam who was “Lord and King of all the
earth/ Before poore Eve had either life or breath” (ll783-4) and Adam
who “from Gods mouth
receiv'd that strait command” (l 787.) Acknowledging Eve’s fault as ‘greate’ (l778)
she goes on to mention Eve’s ‘Weaknesse’ three times before saying “If one
weake woman simply did offend/This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end “(ll831-2.)
Lanyer excuses Eve but does not commend her and her specification of ‘one weake woman” seems to imply that
such weakness is not a universal feminine trait.
Pilate’s wife
is a more positive female figure and her dream gives her access to God but she
too lacks authority. The feminine role
model of Salve, I would argue, is the Queen of Sheba. More accurately, the
assertive, active, knowledge-seeking traits of Sheba are valorised and
transferred to the Duchess of Cumberland, Lanyer’s hoped for patron, and thereby
pressed into the service of Christianity.
Sheba possesses agency and authority and uses it to actively seek wisdom
from Solomon. She travels “Not yeelding to the nicenesse and respect/Of
woman-kind; shee past both sea and land/All feare of dangers shee did quite
neglect”(ll1603-5) just as Monica “resolute through piety, follow(ed) me over sea and
land in all perils ”( 5:1 con.) Once at Solomon’s court, Lanyer ensures Sheba
cannot be suspected of credulity. “Yea many strange hard questions did
shee frame/All which were answer'd by this famous King” (ll1581-2.)
Lanyer’s ideal Christian woman then, is one who
combines Eve’s lack of worldliness with Pilate’s wife receptiveness to God and
Sheba’s agency and authority. Women who
are ‘naturally’ receptive to God and who can discern truth through the
spiritual insight this brings, must have the agency to actively seek knowledge
and the authority to evaluate it. All
of these come together in her poem in the person of Margaret, the Duchess of
Cumberland, whom Lanyer addresses when she insists that “much more reason have we [Christian women] to
desire/That heavenly wisdome which salvation brings…No travels ought
th’affected soul to shun…to see/ This
King of Kings to whom we all should runne” (ll1621-7.) Of course, Lanyer is seeking patronage from
Cumberland but whilst this might cast doubt on the sincerity of her regard for
the recipient, it does not detract from the combination of qualities which, to
her, comprise feminine spiritual wisdom.
The addition of authority and agency to spiritual insight, unworldliness
and compassion creates a very specific role for women – that of priesthood.
Monica’s
epitaph written during Augustine’s lifetime describes her in the gender neutral
word for priest – “sacerdos” and reads “As a
priest, serving the heavenly laws of peace, you taught the people entrusted to
you with your character”[11]
(Bassus c400.) By Lanyer’s time, in English, the word “priestess” was no longer
Christian but she makes an identical claim for Cumberland’s character whilst
assigning her a place in the apostolic succession: “These are those
Keyes Saint Peter did possesse,
/Which with a Spirituall powre are giv'n to thee/ To heale the soules of those
that doe transgresse/By thy faire virtues; which, if once they see/Unto the
like they doe their minds addresse” (ll1369-
74.) She claims the same role for herself in her dedication to
Cumberland: “ As Saint Peter gave health to the body so I deliver you the
health of the soul” (9-10.) As Theresa
DiPasquale argues “ Lanyer is not really concerned with defending the idea that
woman is as good or better than man…rather she asserts as female privilege a
sacerdotal vocation” (2008 p105.) This, then, is the ‘special place’ and role
for women Lanyer wishes to claim and, like Monica, it is one of spiritual guide
and it requires women to speak and be heard.
We have seen
that in Augustine’s theology of sexual difference, ‘male’ and ‘female’
originally indicated mind and soul, sapientia
and scientia. After the fall, the sexes
were divided and, at the same time, an imperfect language came into
existence. Augustine believed that
before the fall, there was either no language needed as all information was
communicated directly or that there was a form of perfect language inconceivable
to us with our imperfect systems of verbal signs (Literal meaning of Genesis.
2.5.) As Graham Ward explains, “It is
with the fall from grace that the need arose for syllables and the exchange of
signs…. the thought, will and desire of the primal couple between themselves
and with their God, splintered and pluralised” (1999 p52.)Mankind, therefore,
needed to study the signs in the world and in language and attempt to piece
together the wholeness of prelapsarian knowledge.
Luce Irigaray
too explores the notion of the divine in gendered terms and in relation to
woman’s position outside the symbolic order. Casey summarises her argument in
this way: “Man, in establishing himself as the universal subject, has
diminished himself…(I)n his disavowal of the feminine and the material, man has
obscured the divine image” (1999 p28) “Until the female imaginary is given
expression, we are theologically working from within the realm of a God made in
the image of men, a God that reflects only part of humanity, a monosexual and
therefore stunted humanity” (p34.)
This combination of male and female wisdom, of
masculine and feminine discourse; this dual syntax, is evident in Augustine’s and Monica’s shared
spiritual experience at Ostia in which their voices merge, they speak as one and
briefly touch divine wisdom. We should
note Augustine’s repeated reference to language as essential to the experience.
“We were discoursing then together, alone,
very sweetly…we were enquiring between ourselves in the presence of the Truth…
And when our discourse was brought to that point, that the very highest delight
of the earthly senses…we did by degrees pass through all things bodily…yea, we
were soaring higher yet, by inward musing, and discourse, and admiring of Thy
works; and we came to our own minds, and went beyond them, that we might arrive
at that region of never-failing plenty, And while we were discoursing and
panting after her, we slightly touched on her
[Divine wisdom] with the whole effort of our heart; and we sighed, and
there we leave bound the first fruits of the Spirit; and returned to vocal
expressions of our mouth, where the word spoken has beginning and end” ( Con
9:24.)
Graham Ward
says “This is Augustine’s picture of a
paradise regained , the uncomplicated sociality of Adam, Eve and God before the
fall (1999 p56.) Ragnar Holte argues
that it is the result of “an
ardent wish from either side to be instructed, inspired and elevated by the
other's experiences and insights. Monica and Augustine…have come to a new
harmonious understanding of each other, implying a readiness and ability to
treat each other as equals in intellectual and spiritual discourse” (1994 p 15.)
Lanyer presents
us with a similar meeting of minds between a man and a woman discoursing as
equals in her meeting of Sheba and Solomon.
The repetition of identical qualities establishes power, wisdom and
beauty as belonging to both:
Here Majestie with Majestie did
meete,
Wisdome to Wisdome yeelded true content,
One Beauty did another Beauty greet (ll1585-8)
Wisdome to Wisdome yeelded true content,
One Beauty did another Beauty greet (ll1585-8)
However, after this greeting,
Lanyer begins using masculine and feminine word endings – bounty/bountie,
wisdom/wisdom, beauty/beautie.
Bounty to Bountie never could
repent…(l1588)
In virtuous exercises of the minde,
In which this Queene did much contentment finde
In virtuous exercises of the minde,
In which this Queene did much contentment finde
Spirits affect where they doe
sympathize,
Wisdom desires Wisdome to embrace…
Beauty sometime is pleas'd to feed her eyes,
With viewing Beautie in anothers face:
Both good and bad in this point doe agree,
That each desireth with his like to be (ll1591-8)
Wisdom desires Wisdome to embrace…
Beauty sometime is pleas'd to feed her eyes,
With viewing Beautie in anothers face:
Both good and bad in this point doe agree,
That each desireth with his like to be (ll1591-8)
To Boyd Berry,
these stanzas ‘extensively parallel male and female’(1998 p225) and for
DiPasquale they constitute “a vision of male/female love in which difference
does not imply subjugation, in which sexual differentiation is a font of
pleasure” (2008 p192.) I would argue
that these gendered terms have the effect of
reminding us that this meeting of minds is between two sexes, that their
qualities are subtly different and that each is fulfilled by the other. Their meeting yields true contentment and a
recognition that these differing qualities nevertheless belong together – “each
desireth with his like to be.” This union of language and wisdom in which
sexual differentiation is maintained but combined can be read as the
realisation of a double syntax and an earthly reunion of prelapsarian
knowledge.
This reading is supported by the surprising ending
which many critics have seen as a capitulation to patriarchal Christianity
because for the first time, men demonstrate Christian spiritual insight and
humility. “Faithfull Stephen” is
“humbled and cast downe”(l1751) with
“stedfast eies” (l1762) and Lawrence and Andrew are likened to Christ with
their “holy zeale and love most pure and chaste” (l1797.) It is significant
that this immediately follows the meeting of Sheba and Solomon. Before her Passion, Lanyer presents wicked men
and victimised women. Within the passion we are shown Eve who has not been
given access to God and Pilate’s wife who has received God’s word but has no
authority to implement it. Jesus then, by speaking only to women and appearing
to women first after his resurrection gives them authority to speak for him.
Following this, the authoritative Queen of Sheba is seen to have a meeting of
minds with the equally wise Solomon and immediately after this, we are shown
the first humble, spiritual men with “stedfast eies.” Women have been
identified with Christ throughout the poem. Now, as Longfellow points out,
Lanyer ‘significantly paints martyred men in the same language of beautiful
suffering with which she has presented Christ” (2004 p91.) The readiness of men
to listen to women is also their way to true Christian wisdom and salvation.
Having
established a receptive, intuitive feminine wisdom, the source of which is
beyond language, Augustine and Lanyer present women as speaking with authority
and men acknowledging their wisdom. The
union of masculine wisdom and language with feminine wisdom and language
creates a double syntax by which they regain perfect prelapsarian knowledge and
attain salvation.
CONCLUSION
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum demands
equality for women but the equality Lanyer sought was specifically religious. This study has taken Aschah
Guibbery’s advice to take Lanyer’s religious poetry seriously as a source of
information about women’s roles within Christianity. Drawing on Elizabeth
Hodgson’s argument that Lanyer invokes a certain type of spiritual foremother,
I have argued that St Monica of Hippo, as portrayed by her son, St Augustine,
is the epitome of this type. I have demonstrated that Augustine and Lanyer both construct an essentially feminine
spiritual wisdom outside of and in opposition to masculine discourse and
language and considered this in relation to a Lacanian symbolic order and the
challenges to it offered by Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. We have seen that
the desirability of a patriarchal symbolic order is called into question when
considered in theological terms. In these texts, it is only by embracing a double syntax
which includes feminine spiritual wisdom, largely outside language, that
mankind can recover prelapsarian wisdom and attain salvation.
I have shown
that, in seventeenth century England, the spiritual status of women was
considered inferior to that of men and
that Eve’s role in the Fall of mankind was regarded as evidence of woman’s
tendency to succumb to temptation. The attribution to men of a higher mental
and spiritual wisdom and to women a lower sensual wisdom by the Reformers owes
much to Augustine’s gendering of the two types of knowledge, sapientia and scientia. However, I have
shown that Augustine himself worked a reversal of the hierarchy of ‘masculine’
intellectual knowledge over ‘feminine’ sense knowledge in his representation of
his mother, Monica, and that this was remarkably similar to that depicted by
Lanyer in her poem. Both writers portray
women in whom a ‘natural’ receptive nature does not lead to sensual sinfulness
but to an unworldly receptiveness to God.
These gendered
conceptions of sin, knowledge and learning have been seen to be frequently
expressed in terms of language and I have argued that the Lacanian concept of a
symbolic order and social order which are two dimensions of one large system
from which women are excluded is therefore a useful way to read Lanyer’s poem. In Lacanian theory, the feminine is associated
with a state of nature which needs to be overcome for the subject to enter the
symbolic order which is patriarchal and associated with the-name-of
–the-father, language, authority and law. Woman does not exist in this order
except as excluded by the nature of things which is language. To Julia Kristeva
and Luce Irigaray, there is revolutionary potential in being outside the
symbolic order and challenging its narrow and restrictive perspectives from
that position.
We have seen
this positioning of women outside language and the reversal of the hierarchies
of gendered notions of language, sin and knowledge in both texts. Augustine has been seen to establish Monica’s
spiritual superiority and attribute it specifically to her position outside
masculine discourse and learning. Lanyer’s explicit rejection of masculine
discourse and her representation of it as blinding men to divine truth in her
Passion of Christ lays the same charge upon men. In the Cassiacum dialogues, Augustine
disparages ‘various and multiple disciplines of learning’ in comparison to a
‘mind totally focussed on God.’ Lanyer’s Salve
Deus Rex Judaeorum reminds her readers that Christ positioned himself
outside patriarchal structures of authority and learning and she relates her
accusers’ inability to recognise him as the son of God directly to masculine
power structures, language and learning.
Having
considered this patriarchal symbolic order and shown it to be presented as
fundamentally unchristian, I then examined Augustine’s and Lanyer’s
constructions of a feminine spiritual wisdom located outside that order. We saw that in
both models, the source of wisdom was God himself, accessed by receptive women
in dreams, spiritual insight and mourning.
Women dream and see and feel because they are focused on God
rather than worldly ambition. Augustine comes to place a high valuation on his
mother’s revelations and Lanyer presents the failure of men to respect this
essentially feminine insight as the cause of Christ’s death. If Pilate had listened to his wife, if the
tormentors of Christ had listened to the daughters of Jerusalem, if women had
possessed spiritual authority, Christ need not have died. Far from valorising passivity and
resignation, Augustine’s and Lanyer’s models of feminine virtue possess the
agency and authority needed to make useful feminine unworldliness, spiritual
insight and receptiveness to God.
Lanyer does not
seek equality with men in the spheres of government, art or scholarship but
claims a feminine, sacerdotal role in religion and offers a feminine spiritual
wisdom to complement a masculine intellectual one and so regain the wholeness
of prelapsarian knowledge. We have seen that Augustine imagined the
fragmentation of knowledge that occurred as the result of the Fall of mankind
in terms of the separation of the masculine sapientia
from the feminine scientia and
that this was accompanied by a fragmentation of language. Luce Irigaray’s
notion of a double syntax imagines the co-existence of masculine and
feminine language which remain distinct from each other by which the
wholeness of the divine can be restored in a remarkably similar way. When Augustine learns to listen to and value
his mother’s guidance, he makes possible their spiritual experience at Ostia.
Only by discoursing as equals do they transcend language and touch divine
wisdom. Lanyer too presents this complementary union reached by discourse in
her meeting between Sheba and Solomon in which each values the wisdom of the
other, acknowledging their difference but recognising their shared origin as
two parts of a whole, perfect knowledge. Immediately after this meeting, Lanyer
depicts good Christian men for the first time.
When women have spoken and been heard, when complementary wisdoms and
languages are acknowledged, men and women are united in their common aim to be
Christlike.
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A Note on the Translation of de
Ordine and de Beata Vita
The
translations of de Ordine and de Beata Vita in
this paper are mine unless otherwise stated and the original Latin has been
provided in the footnotes. Because my dissertation focuses closely on language,
it was important to translate every word and translate each word as literally
as possible. My research revealed that
there has been considerable variation in translation of these texts. The
most significant of these in the passages I have used were ‘magnum virum,’ (2:10
bv), translations of which have ranged from ‘powerful man’ to ‘huge man ‘ and ‘multas
variasque doctrinas’ (2:27 bv ) which
have ranged from ‘multifarious bits of knowledge’ to ‘many varied sciences.’
I translated these, using the most common meaning of each word, as ‘great
man’ and ‘many and varied disciplines of learning.’ This retains some ambiguity
but because the variation in translation shows that there is no consensus on
precise meanings, I felt it important not to attempt to resolve this. In this,
my translation is closest to that of Catherine Conybeare whose reading also
focused on close textual analysis and individual word analysis. Where it has
not differed from Conybeare’s at all, I have cited Conybeare.
[1]
‘To the Queenes Most Excellent Majestie’ hereafter referred to as ‘qem’
[2] de Ordine in 1:18.1, 1:7.3 & 1:16.3.
de Beata Vita in 2:7.7 of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.
[3]
Hereafter referred to as VR
[4] Videturne
vobis, inquam, beatus esse. Qui quod vult non habet? – Negaverunt. – Quid?
Omnis, qui quod vult habet, beatus est? – Tum mater: Si bona, inquit, velit et
habeat, beatus est. Si autem mala velit, quamvis habeat, miser est.
[5]
Ipsam, inquam, prorsus, mater, arcem philosophiae tenuisti. Nam tibi procul
dubio verba defuerunt.
[6]
Illa sic exclamabat, ut obliti penitus sexus eius magnum aliquem virum
considere nobiscum crederemus.
[7]Numquidnam
in illis quos legitis libris etiam feminas umquam audiui in hoc genus
disputationis inductas?
[9]
Videtisne, inquam, aliud esse multas variasque doctrinas, aliud animaum
adtentissimum in deum? Nam unde ista, quae miramur, nisi inde procedunt?
[10] Sed tu contemptis istis uel puerilibus
rebus uel ad te non pertinentibus ita grammaticae paene diuinam uim naturamque
cognosces, ut eius animam tenuisse, corpus disertis reliquisse uidearis
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