“WITH WONDROUS HORROR SHE FLED”
Dissimilarity and Sanctity in The Life of Christina the Astonishing
Truly God is wonderful in his saints, and in this one, if I may say so, his wonders pass all admiration. (Vere mirabilis Deus in Sanctis suis, et in ista, ut ita dicam, super omnem admirationem mirabilis.)
—Thomas of Cantimpré
Thomas’s vita of a young virgin of Liège whom he calls mirabilis has continued to surprise and perplex, proving the enduring rhetorical efficacy of a text designed, as its title suggests, to incite astonishment in the face of its wondrous subject.1 The title given to the virgin (1150–1224), not beata but mirabilis, sounds the first note of the text’s eccentricity; the blessed will here become astonishing, a wonder. Despite a concern that his tale will not be believed, Thomas does not back away from the strangeness of his story. Instead, he seeks the assent of his audience in order to turn his protagonist from village curiosity into saint. Insisting he is “certain” (certum) of his facts because of the reliability of his many witnesses, the recent nature of the events described, and the privileged nature of much of the material, which came “from her own mouth” and was sanctioned by James of Vitry,2 Thomas simultaneously foregrounds his text’s ineffability: “I admit—and it is true—that my account surpasses all human understanding (omnem hominis intellectum excedere), inasmuch as these things could by no means have occurred according to the course of nature, yet they are possible to the Creator.”3 While Thomas’s contemporary document, De natura rerum, holds that all saintly virtue is ordered to the realm of grace and as such is unnatural, exceeding the intellect, Christina’s vita, we will see, exaggerates this aspect of sanctity such that the vita becomes a reflection on the implications of saintly supernaturalism.4
In order to show a wonder that exceeds the intellect, the text both recapitulates and deforms hagiographical conventions, reinscribing them by means of an aesthetic of excess. This aesthetic does not, however, clarify the lines of allegiance in the story; Thomas does not construct a stark drama of good and evil. Instead he instigates a crisis of interpretation, the very crisis that the work of a Dominican preacher who is invested in maintaining the clear boundaries of orthodox doctrine would seemingly seek to avoid at all costs.5 Thomas explicitly articulates how wonder effects a crisis of interpretation when he writes that religious men and women among the crowds who gathered to marvel at Christina were “terrified that these supremely amazing marvels might exceed human reason, and that the beastly minds of human beings might convert these divine deeds into demonic activity” (horrentes ne suprema mirabilium admiratio humanum sensum excederet, converterentque bestiales hominum mentes in malignam operationem facta divina).6 Indeed, the crowd’s reaction makes a space for incredulous readers even as it rebukes them. However, Thomas’s representation of Christina can be read as performing just such a conversion, blurring the line between divine and demonic as a key rhetorical strategy for demonstrating a marvelousness “exceeding human reason,” thus itself surpassing human reason.
If Thomas is so concerned with being credible, why does he depict Christina so astonishingly, creating the conditions of her unbelievability?7 While we could attribute to Thomas a documentary impulse, a desire to record faithfully the perceptions of villagers, it remains strange that he allows for such deep ambivalence in a vita that he intends as an authoritative pedagogical tool. Thomas’s text tempts readers to “convert these divine deeds into demonic activity,” to read the saint as having been possessed by a devil, not the Holy Spirit. Thus, we must ask in what way Christina’s excessiveness is essential to the purpose of the text. How, in Cynthia Hahn’s words, does the text stage its own reception?8
Thomas’s awareness of the deliberate and risky nature of his rhetorical decision is made apparent by a curious passage in the Life of Abbot John of Cantimpré. Thomas writes that James left out many things from the Life of Marie of Oignies “lest he tire his readers with excess, or lest the incomprehensible greatness of her miracles (prodigiorum incomprehensibilis magnitudo incredulorum) become an odour of death rather than life in the hearts of unbelievers.” James omits such deeds as Marie’s crossing the River Sambre with dry feet, and passing through closed doors while still in a “solid mortal body.”9 These miraculous acts are deeply reminiscent not only of Christ but also of certain deeds that Thomas attributed to Christina, as when she crosses the River Meuse untouched or when her physical body seems to float “through the middle of the house like a spirit.”10 Unlike his mentor, Thomas does not shrink from including those miraculous excesses that might strain a reader’s credibility, thus turning a text meant to offer an “odour of life” into an occasion for disbelief—and so death—for those who do not believe her and therefore do not repent of their ways.
Scholars have offered multiple readings of this Life, seeking a key to unlock and perhaps reconcile the difficulties posed by her bizarre piety and flesh. Christina has been dubbed a hysteric whose illness was translated into the terms of religious intercession by local clergy.11 She has been called a preacher of memorable bodily “sermons” and a representative of the rise of the doctrine of purgatory and its female prophets.12 Her strange flesh has been interpreted as an example of the bodily (and often grotesque) nature of high medieval women’s spirituality, which proceeded through an identification with the suffering Christ.13 It has also been described as a prime example of the disembodied spirituality of elite clerical culture, which constructs the grotesque female body as one that remains unwounded by affliction and so is radically different from the tortured Christ.14
As the multiplicity of these compelling though often mutually incompatible readings attests, the strangeness of this text makes interpretation difficult. By mixing the fantastical and the mundane, citing and subverting hagiographical conventions, the vita elicits and refuses readers’ attempts to interpret it. Rather than attempt to reconcile or choose among these interpretations, I am interested in the astonishment that the text both represents in the person of Christina and quickens in its readers, the “wondrous horror” it seeks to elicit. By what rhetorical means is this wondrousness represented and performed? What are its effects? If the text is, in Mark Jordan’s phrase, a “scene of instruction,”15 how does such spectacle serve Thomas’s pedagogical and theological interests? What are the functions of wonder in an exemplary text? What is it to look upon the impossible and feel its claim upon you?
This chapter will address the function of horrified wonder through an examination of the doubleness of Christina’s sanctity. On the one hand, Christina horrifies because she is identified with her community, portrayed as a mirror of souls, a substitution who atones on behalf of her audience and reveals the future punishments that many of them will face. Rather than present their future beatified selves, Christina shows to her audience their future torment in purgatorial fire and their nature as sinners who persist in angering God. Although she is a holy person, she is depicted as a demoniac, for she takes on the demonic dimension of the people to whom she ministers, reflecting their sinfulness even as she becomes a substitutionary offering for them. On the other hand, in this taking on of others’ sins, Christina imitates not only her human audience but also Christ’s divine mission of redemption, thereby manifesting God to her community. This manifestation, insofar as she becomes sin, however, subverts her audience’s expectations of how God is manifest in the saints, for she is rendered an unintelligible, demoniacal figure for the divine. She thus shows divinity in a way that remains “in excess of reason.”
In order to understand the didactic and theological complexity of Christina’s figuration—the doubleness of her sanctity in its tension between identification and difference as well as the theology of sanctity that Thomas develops by means of this doubleness—I turn to Pseudo-Dionysius’s theory of dissimilar similarities. In so doing, I build on the work of David Williams, who has argued that the monstrous serves as a critique of rationality in medieval philosophy and theology, in its transgression of the limits of form and intelligibility. Williams argues that medieval grotesques and certain deformed saints are apophatic in the same way that the dissimilar image is: as a signifier, the monstrous (in the sense of monstrare as opposed to repraesantare) “shows forth” transcendence, its distortions pointing to a plenitude of meaning that cannot be captured by the mimetic representation of the natural (or divine) world.16 In a similar fashion, I will argue that Christina, as a sign, is a “dissimilar similarity” whose sanctity possesses apophatic dimensions, for in her monstrosity, Thomas argues that to become like God, to perform a literal imitation of Christ, is to become deformed. In clerical terms, the audacity and extremity of Christina’s sanctity renders her something to be admired (admiranda), not imitated (imitanda). However, the vita further shows that such a distinction is not as simple to maintain as it might first appear, for the very difference (from other saints, from the audience) that is the source of Christina’s wondrous nature is the means by which she is identified with her audience, for she is, in fact, imitating them, and they, in turn, must imitate her penitential life if they are to avoid the pain of purgatory.
The villagers’ misapprehension of Christina as a demoniac is ultimately seen by Thomas as a mark of her persecution by an unbelieving crowd. In other words, it is a further feature of her sanctity. The vita, in this regard, answers part of the problem it poses about the reception of unintelligible saints insofar as it renders the hostility experienced by Christina as yet another element of her similarity to Christ. However, the horrifying excess that remains scandalous in Thomas’s portrayal of Christina arises through his representation of her as another Christ, one who is not only a perfect repetition of the exemplar, Jesus, but who also outdoes Jesus’s feats in many respects. As such, she threatens to erode the singularity of Jesus’s witness. Christina’s sanctity raises the question of how one replicates a particularity without eroding the very uniqueness that renders it exemplary.
The wondrous excessiveness of Christina’s sanctity thus speaks to Thomas’s theological invention in two related ways. First, as a saintly sign that confounds intelligibility, the question of how to read Christina as a saintly and thus authoritative figure—how to believe in her and so become devoted to her and her message—is central to Thomas’s concern.17 Second, the reason that the question of belief is so difficult is that the excessiveness of Christina’s sanctity manifests God in God’s ineffability; Christina’s image is one that cannot be recuperated by the reader’s categories, rendering this Life a work of apophatic theology.
CHRISTINA’S LIFE AND MARVELOUS BODY
The Life was completed in 1232, after Thomas had joined the Dominicans in Louvain following his departure from the Victorine community at Cantimpré and after he had cut his hagiographical teeth on the Life of Abbot John of Cantimpré and the Supplement to the Life of Marie d’Oignies. The prologue of Christina’s Life contains James de Vitry’s description from the Life of Marie of Oignies of a woman who is likely Christina. Embedding the witness of the venerable cardinal authorizes Thomas to tell the story of this radically unconventional figure. Christina, James writes, was an example of the “holy virgins in the lily gardens of the Lord who scorned carnal enticements for Christ, despised the riches of this world for the love of the kingdom of heaven, clung to the heavenly Bridegroom in poverty and humility, and with the work of their hands, earned a sparse meal.”18 According to James, some of these women were despised by those who scorn spiritual people, “thinking them to be either insane or idiots.”19 However, despite the astonishing ascetic feats, intense piety, and transgressive way of life of these mulieres religiosae (who undertook suspect behaviors such as begging, living chastely yet uncloistered, and divesting themselves of familial wealth),20 Christina’s actions alone merited the title mirabilis. James writes,
I saw (vidi) another in whom God worked so wondrously (mirabiliter) that after she had lain dead for a long time—but before her body was buried in the ground—her soul returned to her body and she lived again (revixit). She obtained from the Lord that she would endure (sustineret) purgatory, living in this world in her body. It was for this reason that she was afflicted for a long time by the Lord.… But after she had performed penance in so many ways, she lived in peace and merited grace from the Lord and many times, rapt in spirit (rapta in spiritu), she led the souls of the dead as far as purgatory, or through purgatory as far as the kingdom of heaven, without any harm to herself.21
Thomas elaborates on James’s description of Christina’s revivified body, giving it the miraculous ability to suffer impossible pains yet not die or be marked by its tortures. Unlike James, he understands Christina’s sustaining of purgatorial punishment on earth as a penitential act undertaken not on her own behalf but for others, her soul having already achieved perfection.
According to Thomas, Christina, an orphan, lived with her two sisters in Saint Trond (Sint-Truiden) in the diocese of Liège. The sisters decided to construct their family life according to a semimonastic model. The eldest lived in contemplation, and the middle sister became a housekeeper, while Christina, the youngest, took the humblest office of shepherdess. In the isolation of this task, however, Christina was given “the grace of an inward sweetness,” and Christ “often visited her with heavenly secrets.”22 Her contemplative practice was hidden from all, “known to God alone,”23 a privacy that contrasts with the radical exposures of her later life.
This quiet, fairly conventional life changed when, as a result of “excessive contemplation,” she died and ascended to heaven. Along the way, she passed through a realm of such great horror and suffering that she thought it was hell, only to be told it was purgatory, a place of atonement.24 Arriving at the divine throne, she spoke with God, who offered her the choice of remaining in paradise or returning to the flesh in order to
undergo there the punishment of an immortal soul in a mortal body without damage to it, and by these your sufferings to deliver all those souls on whom you had compassion in that place of purgatory, and by the example (exemplo) of your suffering and your way of life to convert living men to me and make them turn aside from their sins, and after you have done all these things to return to me, having accumulated for yourself a reward of such great profit.25
Her return served three functions: an intercessory function, as Christina’s earthly sufferings substituted for the purgatorial efforts of those souls that were already dead; an exemplary—in the sense of didactic—function, as Christina’s enactment of the pains of purgatory taught the living about purgatory and warned of its impending afflictions, thus goading her public to conversion away from their sinful lives; and a self-sanctifying function, as she fulfilled the desire to win for herself a great reward (even though she was already destined for immediate entry into heaven at the time of her first death).
Choosing to return to the flesh, Christina embarked on a program of bodily mortification that included rolling in fire, remaining in icy water, and living among the tombs of the dead.26 Thomas tells us that she “act[ed] the part of her own torturer,” subjecting herself to judicial instruments of punishment like the wheel and the gallows.27 Christina was able to survive these afflictions because of the divine subtlety with which God had endowed her resurrected body. Thus, while these various practices caused her immense pain (necessary for their penitential efficacy in the exchange of agony for forgiveness), her body remained visibly uninjured.28
Other remarkable properties of her flesh included a sparrow-like lightness that enabled it to hang from the slender branches of trees and to endure walking and standing at “dizzy heights,” echoing her initial flight “like a bird” into the rafters of the church following her resurrection.29 She was able to roll her limbs into a formless ball “as if they were hot wax” while praying.30 Her body, “like a phantasm,” entered deep rushing water and came out untouched. She was able to feed herself with oil and milk from her virginal breasts.31
Christina’s deeds, Thomas writes, “were not done in narrow corners (Acts 26:26) but openly among the people.”32 They were not, Christina told her friends, “seen among mortals,” and while performed “for the improvement of human beings,” they were “beyond understanding” (super intellectum). The shocking excesses of her actions as well as the miraculous properties of her body led family, friends, and the community to believe that Christina was possessed by a demon,33 a belief that resulted in her further torment at the hands of her sisters. They locked her up in a dungeon from which she escaped, only to be tied to a yoke and starved.34
The story then quickly turns to an account of the upheavals within the social body and its disgust and astonishment as it responded to Christina with horror. Whereas Lutgard’s vita describes a single priest viewing her body, bloodied by contemplation of the passion,35 in Christina’s case, the “many people” who saw her run through thorns “were astonished (mirati sunt) that there could be so much blood in a single body.”36 As news of this and other deeds spread, “Many people from far and near, even from the farthest regions, clustered around her every day to see the wonders God had wrought” (multi pro videndis mirabilibus).37 Thus, Thomas introduces the semantic and conceptual field of “wonder” and its related terms into the vita, foregrounding wonder’s centrality to the telling of this story and its presence as a key effect that Christina’s life—in particular, her body—had on others.
André Vauchez notes that the ancient notion of saintly virtus, in which a kind of holy energy (virtus) manifested itself in bodily signs after death, such as incorruptibility, healing relics, or a pleasant smell, was increasingly attributed to living saints in the later Middle Ages. From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, the “supernatural aura” previously ascribed to saintly remains was now credited to earthly bodies.38 The saintly human body became identified with the “glorious body,” which included, by the thirteenth century, the body of Christ.39 This glorious body was believed to escape the limitations of human nature, and it was marked by certain signs, such as a beauty that was revelatory of the soul’s inner reality, luminosity,40 and the gift of tears.41 With the inclusion of stigmatization as a sign of sainthood in the thirteenth century, a new lexicon of bodily signs appeared, one in which physiological similarity to the person of Christ became proof of sanctity. This shift, Vauchez argues, increased the marvelous aspect of sainthood and gave rise to a new form of the marvel, namely physiological marvelousness.42
Christina’s body conformed to the trend noted by Vauchez in two ways. Through suffering, her body was identified with Christ’s; it was also an extreme instance of the physiological marvelousness that was characteristic of thirteenth-century hagiography. Christina’s body mimicked Christ’s vulnerability in its capacity to feel pain, but her flesh remained unmarked whereas Christ’s resurrected flesh had borne the marks of the crucifixion. Furthermore, although resurrected, Christina obtained only two of the qualities that Scholastics attributed to resurrected bodies: she had subtilitas and agilitas but neither impassibilitas nor claritas.43
It seems that Thomas was attempting to portray a purgatorial soul by means of Christina’s purgatorial body, describing in an earthly context the strange enfleshment of the soul undergoing physical torment. While theologians debated the precise nature of the soul’s suffering in purgatory, it was generally agreed that the soul suffered by means of a “corporeal fire.” Thus, the Supplement to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (which has incorrectly been attributed to the saint) cites Gregory’s Dialogues and Julian of Toledo as proof for the sensible suffering of the soul in purgatory; both assert that the soul is held in hell by physical flames in the same way it is contained or imprisoned on earth by the body.44 Pseudo-Thomas argues that the pain of purgatory is twofold: psychological, involving both the agony of the divine vision’s delay, and sensible, for although the purgatorial soul is separated from the body, “pain is not hurt, but the sense of hurt.” The bodily sensation of pain is, in fact, of the soul.45
In addition to speculative theological traditions, Thomas may have partly drawn on the highly popular Visions of Tondal (ca. 1149) for his description of Christina’s flesh. This account describes bodies in hell suffering transformation through putrefaction, becoming “food” for fire and worms—an experience foreign to Christina—but it also depicts the soul as a bird and a bubble, reminiscent of Thomas’s multiple references to Christina as a bird and her spherical shape when ecstatic.46 However, Thomas altered these traditions insofar as he attributed the qualities of a purgatorial soul suffering corporeal fire to the body of a living saint on earth. Thus, while the Shades of the Purgatorio, including Virgil, were “aerial bodies,” existing between the states of death and resurrection, Dante, a living man, was differentiated from them by means of the shadow he cast.47 Despite Christina’s purgatorial body, she, too, cast a shadow that horrified.48
This strange body is the primary means by which Christina taught. Robert Sweetman has noted the important pastoral function of the wondrous and horrifying in the Life that is essential to the didactic message of Christina’s postresurrection activities, which become, he argues, an extended exemplum. Unable to preach verbally, Christina preached “by example,” and the grotesqueries of her memorable bodily sermons worked to provoke in her audience the “salubrious shudders that save.”49 Christina preached purgatory by performing the pains that awaited sinners after death in her own flesh on earth.
These implausible and shocking deeds accorded with a Dominican theory of preaching, which held that the fantastical, the hyperbolic, and the grotesque were excellent tools for memory, penetrating the heart and mind more effectively because of their outrageousness. According to thirteenth-century Dominican understanding—to which Sweetman shows that Thomas had recourse—a sermon was not considered persuasive if it merely convinced hearers that what a friar said was true. Rather, it had to lead to repentance and auricular confession. Real conviction was displayed and realized only through behavior, and behavior, in turn, was transformed only if feeling was compellingly aroused and engaged.50 Dominican instructions to preachers thus have many suggestions for techniques to engage the audience’s affective responses in the name of helping listeners translate intense affective arousal into good conduct, most notably vivid examples (exempla) that illustrate theological concepts with dramatized, narrativized flesh. As Sweetman argues, Thomas’s mirabilia are part of this tradition; they are comprehensible as edifying, peculiarly effective memorabilia, engaging the emotions of the audience in such a way that encourages repentance.
Sweetman’s argument is persuasive. However, his explanation does not account for the way in which Thomas’s text is in continual danger of being derailed by the same marvelous horror that gives its subject her divine authorization, of the way that the affects elicited by the exemplar not only buttress the aims of Thomas’s argumentation but undermine it, the way that the horrifying response that Christina inspires could lead to flight from the saint rather than flight toward penance. The horrifying performance that makes Christina’s message memorable and persuasive also calls into question her authority as one who speaks a divine message.51
DISSIMILAR SIMILARITIES
The theory of dissimilar similarities is outlined in Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Celestial Hierarchy, a text which considers the anagogical function of a variety of “sacred veils” that “upliftingly conceal” both the heavenly ranks and God so as to make the soul’s return to its divine source possible.52 This concealment is anagogical, for the material veils—including odors, lights, the Eucharist, biblical images, and examples—simultaneously conceal and reveal divine truths in a form that is apprehensible by embodied humans. Their double nature as revelatory and concealing allows them to act as goads to the soul, which is incited to “interpret” (anagogies) such signs, these “material means capable of guiding us.”53 The soul thereby ascends to the heavenly realm. Return (epistrophe) to the divine source through the activities and objects of ecclesiastical life (and, in fact, through all created things, which are theophanies) is possible because the earthly hierarchy is “modeled on the hierarchies of heaven.”54 By virtue of this similitude, the texts, rituals, and objects of the church’s earthly life have the capacity to lift up and eventually “assimilate” the soul to the simplicity and inexpressibility of divine life. The devout move through the many—those specially placed “means”—to return to the triune One.
However, while material signs are able to lift the soul “from the perceptible to the conceptual” through a chain of similarity such that “appearances of beauty are signs of an invisible loveliness,”55 Pseudo-Dionysius also suggests a very different semiology through which the soul may ascend to God, one that does not operate by means of similitude between the earthly and heavenly but by difference. These signs are “dissimilar similarities.” He argues that while there are many names that seem to represent the divine majesty in a seemingly more appropriate manner due to their obvious connection to intelligible qualities (for example beauty, light, love, and life), the most appropriate names for God are those that are dissimilar to attributes that human beings readily associate with divinity. As God is “far beyond every manifestation of being and of life, … light, … reason or intelligence,”56 the name “worm” is more suitable for God than “being,” for it marks this divine difference. Those names which present a stubborn, intensified materiality “pay [the ranks of heaven] honor by describing them with dissimilar shapes so completely at variance with what they really are that we come to discover how those ranks, so far removed from us, transcend all materiality.”57 In a word, dissimilar similarities perform a kind of apophasis, for they mark a breach in what is otherwise figured by Pseudo-Dionysius as the mimetically constituted chain of being reaching from heaven to earth, a breach which is cognitively apprehended by the person contemplating such dissimilarity.
Despite this breach, the dissimilar image remains anagogical; it is one of the “uplifting veils” that the treatise considers. The dissimilar image, like the similar, participates in a dynamic of revelation and concealment that elevates the soul. As Paul Rorem puts it, while similar images reveal the divine in its similarity and relation to materiality but conceal the distance between the creation and creator, dissimilar images reveal the transcendence of God, a revelation that conceals by “showing” divine ineffability. Thus, every divine name, every sacred veil, is both similar and dissimilar, a bridge and an abyss, an affirmation and a negation. All signs, whether sensible or intelligible, similar or dissimilar, are “relativized vis-à-vis God who infinitely transcends both,”58 although the dissimilar image is “more suitable” because dissimilarity confounds the expectations of the intellect, showing the one who speaks God’s name that human language cannot capture divine essence.59
If we are to read Christina in light of Pseudo-Dionysius’s distinction, we would ask, In relation to what standard was Christina dissimilar? To what was she similar? As an uncloistered woman making claims to divine inspiration and practicing extreme bodily disciplines in public, Christina embodied a novel form of sanctity, one that needed to be framed in terms of older, already-licit models of holiness in order to become legible, acceptable, and thus persuasive. As a kind of citational practice, Christina’s sanctity iterated available models of holiness, both ancient and contemporary. However, this citation was performed in such a way as to emphasize Christina’s departure from these models rather than her participation in them. Thus, her actions, while often continuous with those of saintly women, were either radically exaggerated versions of their behaviors or were fundamentally recast by Thomas so as to be transformed and thus become “dissimilar” to that with which his audience was familiar. The models that Thomas invokes include the virgin martyr, the desert mother, and the high-medieval Beguinal holy woman. I will here examine each of these types, showing Christina’s continuity and discontinuity with them in order to ultimately demonstrate the atopic nature of Thomas’s representation of her sanctity.
THE VIRGIN MARTYR
Virgin martyr tales were highly popular in the Middle Ages and were adapted throughout the period more frequently than those of any other female saints.60 Generally the stories involve a young girl who makes a vow of virginity, which antagonizes her family and the powerful pagan man who is in love with her. When she refuses to retreat from her resolution or will not make a sacrifice to the pagan gods, the girl is persecuted and killed. The stories display explicit, often-sexual violence, as frequently the virgin is stripped naked in the course of her persecution or, like Agatha, has her breast torn off with pincers.
The most significant debt that Christina’s Life owes to the virgin-martyr tradition is the graphic depiction of horrifying violence performed on virgin flesh. Like her predecessors, Christina was a young virgin who underwent tortures and so became a spectacle for her community, her female body becoming distorted and bloodied for the sake of her faith. She was tormented on the wheel made famous by Saint Catherine. She echoed Saint Agatha’s healing by Peter in prison when she refused the ministrations of a human doctor and allowed only Christ to cure her.61 Like Thecla, she baptized herself.62 A key component of Christina’s mortification was that, like the martyrs, she suffered persecution from her community, including her own family.63
However, unlike the virgin martyrs of late antiquity, Christina became her own torturer; her actions were the performance of God’s will because the result of an agreement with him. The virgin-martyr legend is thus reframed within a theology of substitutionary atonement. Rather than submit to martyrdom as a witness to the virtue (in the sense of both power and goodness) of a victimized community and their God, Christina’s agonies made visible the power of God, who was now the persecutor. To those who observed the racked flesh of his “most beloved,” she revealed the depth of his wrath and the promise of further torment. Christina’s sufferings were both pedagogical and substitutionary, teaching those who witnessed her pain of the suffering that awaited them in purgatory even as she decreased purgatorial penance for others.
The exposed female flesh that dominates Thomas’s text is also fundamentally different from that of the ancient tales. The Vita Christinae transplants the virgin martyr into a resurrected body, one that can experience pain yet not die. Thus, unlike the martyr, whose agonies are subsumed in the exaltation of sacrifice (which was often described having an anesthetic effect), or who is dispatched relatively quickly, Christina’s pain takes on a supernatural magnitude, as no mortal wounds interrupt her torments. Pain, not death, is the focus of the tale. The semidivine body, which cannot be wounded or killed, paradoxically becomes the site and spectacle of human vulnerability. Thus the sign of Christina’s supernature—her suffering yet unwounded body—marks her distance and difference from the rest of humanity, but it also most deeply connects her to the human condition.
Conversely, Karen Winstead argues that when passages of explicitly described macabre torture appear in legends, they are often accompanied by constant assurances that the virgin martyr feels no pain; this serves as a distancing technique, mitigating the compassion that readers might feel for the martyr. The mortal flesh of young virgin martyrs displays the armor of faith, the miracle of a body so subsumed by the confidence of the soul that it does not flinch, and in this imperviousness—apatheia—it enters a miraculous space, one unreachable by the astonished crowd, who marvel and are edified but do not pity.64 The alignment of soul and body in Christina, on the other hand, was governed not by an affect of triumph or confidence, but by one of penitential sorrow and empathic suffering. It gave rise to a similar empathy in her community and presumably in the readers of her vita who came to see her as holy.
THE DESERT MOTHERS AND FATHERS
The language of wilderness is prominent in the vita, echoing not only the desert tradition of ascetics like Antony or Syncletica but also the early Cistercian vision.65 Christina is said to flee “into deserted places, to trees, or the tops of castle or church towers, or any lofty structure,” as she “desired to remain alone with God in her hiding place in the desert.”66 Like both Antony and Syncletica, whose vitae were popular in medieval Europe, Christina retreated to the tombs and practiced rigorous renunciation, including giving away all her possessions, fasting, and celibacy.67 She also spent time with the recluse Jutta. Margot King argues that the description of Christina floating up to the tops of trees is a continuation of dendrite and stylite practices of late antiquity.68 However, as we saw with virgin martyrs, the site of repetition is also the place of difference. Withdrawal to the wilderness occupied only one pole of Christina’s movements, contrasting with her wandering through the public square, which exposed her body to the gaze of the crowd, a performative note that is indebted to the virgin-martyr legends.
Desert ascetics taught those who sought them out (often despite their own best efforts to flee). Athanasius depicts Antony returning to Alexandria in order to seek martyrdom and describes his illuminated form emerging from his tomb to amaze crowds of people.69 Similarly, Symeon acts not only as a figure ascending ever closer to heaven but as a savvy political adviser and negotiator.70 Syncletica is depicted teaching women who are interested in the ascetic life.
Yet the ideal articulated by the desert literature is anachoresis, for the flight from worldly interaction is an essential mark of humility. In the Life and Regimen of the Blessed and Holy Teacher, Syncletica, the hagiographer Pseudo-Athanasius emphasizes the relation between humility, withdrawal, and secrecy and the resulting difficulty of his writerly task: “We cannot speak, then, of her actual ascetic life, since she did not allow anyone to be an observer of this. Nor did she wish her associates to be heralds of her heroic virtues. For she did not so much think about doing good as she did about keeping her good works private and secret.”71 Conversely, the very purpose of Christina’s works, according to Thomas, was to display them in all their terror so that they might be a lesson for “the many people who had frequently seen” her acts of mortification. The performance of abjection further served as an occasion for the penance of others, as a wicked man from whom she begged a drink was “moved by an unaccustomed pity” and thus was redeemed.72 Christina’s acts of self-mortification were not so much ascetic practices, then, as simulacra of ascetic practices insofar as she gained nothing and learned nothing for herself but instead acted as a tableau for spectators.
It is not only Christina who was displayed as a bizarre and baffling image. Her public mission entailed her exposure to horrifying sights. This is in dramatic contrast to the behavior prescribed for virgins and ascetics by Syncletica, who argued that it was “imperative” for ascetic women that “sallies out into the marketplace be avoided. If we consider it troublesome and oppressive to see our brothers and parents naked, how much more harmful it will be for us to view on the streets people indecently clad and, even worse, speaking licentious words? For it is from these experiences that disgusting and virulent images arise.”73
As teacher and counselor, however, Christina suffered knowledge of the sins of others: “She always walked about as if she were dying or grieving, for God daily revealed to her whether those who were near death merited salvation or destruction.”74 She saw the “hidden sins” of others whom she admonished.75
Finally, the purpose and end of Christina’s asceticism was radically different from that of desert fathers and mothers. Having been perfectly purified in the solitude of contemplation and then death, Christina underwent self-mortification, not to cleanse her soul and body—as Syncletica “trimmed the thorny offshoots of her thought”—nor to attain God in solitude, but to teach and intercede.76 The agon with the murderous pagans in virgin-martyr legends, which became the agon with the thoughts in the case of the desert mothers (justifying Syncletica’s comparison to Thecla),77 became instead with Christina a struggle with the sins and punishments of others, a struggle that is notable for its explicit passion. Christina’s perfection, then, was not like Antony’s, who, his body having been “worded” (logisesthai) and assimilated (idiopoieon) to the divine, manifested remarkable equanimity when it emerged from the fortress where he had encased himself for twenty years.78 By rendering Christina as a perfect being who exceeded even Christ in the variety and duration of her suffering and by assimilating her deeds to the work of Christic substitution, Christina’s story subverts the logic of asceticism. Thomas’s version of Christina’s life explicitly emphasizes this shift, which contrasts with the version related by James of Vitry, whose description of Christina describes her mortifications as acts of personal penance that only later become intercessory.79
MULIERES SANCTAE
Thirteenth-century male-authored hagiographies of holy women tend to foreground the body of the female saint as the site of divine manifestation. While intense asceticism and physical piety are present in some high-medieval male Lives, a focus on paramystical practices and bodily acts such as trances, levitations, fasting, miraculous exudings, and lactation are more common and play a more central role in models of female sanctity.80 Male hagiographers inscribed the spiritual on the flesh of female saints, making the woman’s body—particularly in states of abjection and pain—a site at which the divine became discernible in the world.81 According to Dyan Elliott, the emphasis on Eucharistic devotion and penitential practices in such hagiographies was an essential part of the Dominican program against heresy in which the saint was “sculpted” to “confound the [Cathar] heretic” who critiqued the Catholic Church’s sacramental system and preached doctrines of dematerialization.82 The incredible acts of Christina’s resurrected body, particularly its tortures, exudings, ecstasies, and rapturous songs, conform to this general trend of emphasizing the bodily nature of women’s piety noted by scholars. Christina’s bodiliness, however, is an extreme instance of this somatizing trend.
Christina’s Life is unimaginable apart from its predecessor, James de Vitry’s Life of Marie of Oignies. James wrote the vita for Fulk of Toulouse, who, fleeing the “Egypt” of his own city taken over by Cathars, found the promised land in Liège, drawn by the “holy women who venerated the Church of Christ and the sacraments of the holy Church.”83 According to James, these devout women practiced celibacy, fasts, prayers, vigils, and poverty and maintained a devotion so intense that some were “wasting away with such an intimate and wondrous state of love” while others were rapt with inebriation, held immobile, possessed by a violent need for the Eucharist, or jumped up and down ecstatically.84 Marie, whose story stands pars pro toto of the somatic feminine piety of the region, was offered as a counterexample to the Cathar perfecti, and the vita was intended to be used as a source for anti-Cathar preaching.85 Thomas’s vita not only borrows James’s authority for the defense of his tale but also intensifies the somatic, dramatic quality of Marie’s ascetic piety. Elements of this piety that Thomas imitates include the marginally unorthodox practice of begging—from which Marie was convinced to desist by her friends, while Christina carried it out—purgatorial piety involving intercession and substitution for others;86 preaching indirectly whether through deeds or, in Marie’s case, through James himself; or remaining in a raptured state for unprecedented lengths of time.87
While the daring representation of women in these vitae was essential to the ecclesiastical fight against Catharism undertaken by James and Thomas, it was not without controversy. Thus, in the prologue to the Life of Marie of Oignies, James, addressing Fulk of Toulouse, writes that there were “shameless men … hostile to all religion, [who] maliciously slandered the religious life of these women and, like mad dogs, railed against customs which were contrary to theirs.”88 In the Vita Lutgardis Thomas writes that James was attacked by a “vile slanderer” who “said and wrote that those who record the fantastic visions of insignificant women ought to be considered profane.” This slander, he continues, was inspired by James’s writing “the blessed life of the blessed woman Mary of Oignies in an elegant style.”89 Thomas thus knowingly risked further opposition from certain quarters, which he invited with his portrait of a woman whose body and behavior foregrounded, without reserve, a controversial piety. Rather than mitigate his rhetoric in the face of maligners and doubters, Thomas placed Christina in a resurrected body, thus removing mortal limits from her practice. The effect of such extremism was to make the already marginal figure of Christina even more of an outlier. She became a figure for alterity that was best represented by Thomas in the terms of the demonic.
Walter Simons argues that Christina’s raptures are portrayed in such a way as to open themselves to demonic interpretations. He shows that in Beguine Lives of the Southern Low Countries, a corpus that includes Christina’s Life, there is a new “grammar” of movement in the representation of virginal ecstasy. When Marie of Oignies (d. 1213), Ida of Louvain (d. ca. 1300), Elizabeth of Spalbeek (d. 1304), or Christina moved into an enraptured state, proportion was said to be lost as limbs swelled and elongated, or they were described as becoming as wax, molded into a round ball or whirling like a hoop. The gestural palate expanded, and the body departed fundamentally from the ideals of bodily moderation, grace, modesty, and balance, which Ambrose had extolled in his treatise on virginity.90
Simons argues that the vitae place descriptions of rapture alongside conventional deeds and virtues that were indicative of sanctity as well as a woman’s conformity with older ideals of bodily propriety. In other words, however shocking depictions of rapture may have been, they exist discretely within the vitae, contextualized by behaviors that would be recognizably saintly to readers, actions that serve to mark ambivalent acts of rapture as holy.
Such a contextualization is apparent in the Life of Margaret of Ypres. Although Margaret underwent constant and prolonged raptures, she had the comportment and face typical of the ideal virgin: “[She] ordered [her] outward appearance after the example of all the blessed ones. Her eyes were downcast, her head bent, her bearing subdued, her gait light and moderate. Her countenance was so reverent that angelic grace and a hint of majesty glimmered in her face.”91 Situating women like Margaret within the traditional lexicon of sanctity was vital, as Simons notes, for holy ecstasy was indiscernible from that produced by demons. Ecstasies could be deemed divine only by locating the outrageous, bizarre, or offensive behaviors of the putatively holy person within the wider frame of reference that included a person’s behavior, reputation, and spiritual gifts. Thus, charisms (including clairvoyance and the stigmata) and the experience of a person’s virtue by others in the community over an extended period of time were essential to the determination of sanctity. Most important, Simons notes, was the interpretation of the female saint’s hagiographer, who acted as the ultimate arbiter of holiness, investing acts with interpretation and approval by an authoritative source.92
There is, then, a persistent tension in these Lives. The novel bodily evidence of divine presence that was used to forward an antiheretical program—acting as both embodied dogma (of the goodness of creation and therefore the sacramental system governed by the church), and as proof of a woman’s sanctity, authorizing her visionary, prophetic, or theological claims—needed to be accompanied by recognizable virtues to become legible and safe.93 Paramystical practices (such as trances, levitations, stigmata, and alienation from the senses in rapture) and claims of visionary experiences could not, Simons argues, stand alone as signs of divine favor.
In Christina’s Life, however, the disharmony and disruption that Simons ascribes to states of rapture obtain for a great proportion of the vita and occur not only in those states specifically described as rapturous but mark Christina’s habitus. For example, even after God “moderated his miracles” in her in order to make her less scandalous to the community,94 Thomas writes that when Christina lamented the fate of those in hell and purgatory, she “wept and twisted herself and bent herself backwards and bent and re-bent her arms as if they were pliable and had no bones.”95 Similarly, she twisted her limbs and rolled around when asking why the world did not “recognize its Creator.”96 She danced with abandon when saved souls died.97 She wore gowns made of unmatched pieces of cloth sewn together with the bark of a linden tree and went barefoot, becoming a spectacle in direct transgression of the traditional directive to virgins (and women in general) to practice modesty of dress and speech and to avoid the gazes of others.98 Finally, in the last year of her life, the antisocial strangeness that characterized the beginning of her intercessory career returned, and “solitude and the wilderness were frequently her home.” When she did return to human society, “People could scarcely tell whether a spirit or a material body had passed by, since she barely seemed to touch the ground.… The spirit so controlled almost all the parts of her corporeal body that scarcely could human minds or eyes look at the shadow her body cast without horror and a trembling of spirit.”99
This pervasive weirdness means that the scandal of Christina’s body was not confined to discrete moments of rapture, which might trouble but not ultimately capsize the more fundamental value of moderation and proportion that Simons finds in the other vitae he studies. The Vita Christinae does not provide a wider context of normalcy against which Christina’s more bizarre behaviors could be judged or by which their power might be attenuated.100
Thomas thus brings to a point of crisis the covert tensions of contemporary hagiographies of women by foregrounding the ambiguity that is implicit not only in the portrayals of holy women’s ecstasies but also in the representation of female holiness through bodily abjection. He displays the difficulty of reading the body by showing the community’s aggressive reaction to Christina; the first half of the tale is shaped by the dynamic of a spectral Christina entering and again fleeing human community as she, like a dystopian version of the bride of the Song of Songs, was pursued and captured multiple times by her sisters, the community, and a bounty hunter. The unlikeness of ecstatic Beguines is thus radicalized in Christina’s excesses, a central means by which Thomas emphasizes her alterity to her public. She became an abject alien, straining to be elsewhere, a grotesquerie of the anchoritic impulse that was repeatedly performed for crowds of onlookers and skeptics.
While Thomas’s belief in Christina’s sanctity is implied by the very fact of his writing her Life, he does not describe the hostility of the community as directed toward an obvious innocent. Instead, Thomas’s rhetoric in some ways colludes with and justifies the cruelties of Christina’s enemies. Their reading of Christina as possessed is repeated in Thomas’s representation of Christina through the language of the demonic and the horrifying, forcing the reader to undergo the same act of interpretation as the villagers of Liège. She is said to have been “kept in check” (constricta) by the sacrament and “forced” (coacta) to come down from the rafters after her resurrection;101 she ran from dogs like a “fleeing beast” (bestia fugiens),102 paralleling the “beastly minds” (bestiales mentes) of her persecutors. All this behavior is typical of demoniacs, as is the language of being seized (commota), stirred (agitata spiritu), or driven (cogebatur) that Thomas ascribes to her.103 Again, she fled humans because of their stench and ran from the priest after receiving communion,104 which Barbara Newman notes was “reminiscent of an angry demon resisting an exorcist,”105 and crossed the dangerous river, though “in a real body” (in vero copore), as if a “phantasm” (quasi phantastico). Newman further indicates that her distortions of limb and voice and her bodily mortifications were emblematic of demoniacal behavior, as was the horrified response of the townspeople who captured, beat, starved, and later fled from her.106 While Newman conjectures that the description of Christina as a demoniac is indicative of historical realities—arguing that her mental illness was “consecrated” by priestly translation into the terms of intercessory suffering for the debt of sin owed by others—the rhetoric of demonic possession can also be understood as an essential component of Thomas’s construction of Christina as a dissimilar image, a bearer of hyperbolic unlikeness in order to attain particular rhetorical effects with his readers.
Thomas drew on multiple models of female sanctity in order to construct Christina. In each case, however, he fundamentally altered the inherited models, rendering her saintly portrait new. This strategy placed Christina within the tradition in such a way as to ultimately reinforce her difference from it. In each case, the point of contact with and divergence from the paradigm was located in her body. In the case of the virgin martyr, Christina’s resurrected flesh turned the equanimity of the martyr to pathos, adding the essential component of pity to the crowd’s marveling. In the case of the desert mother, the withdrawing ascetic was simultaneously a public spectacle, exposed to the gaze of the crowd even as it was exposed to her gaze, disrupting the equanimity of both. In the case of the mulieres religiosae, Christina’s difference was in the radical exaggeration of somatic piety. This exaggeration rendered Christina the other of an already marginal group and was ultimately best captured by Thomas’s use of demonic discourse.
MIRACLE AS MIRROR: TWO READINGS OF THE DISSIMILAR IMAGE
There are two possible readings of the effect of dissimilar similarities on the viewer. On the one hand, if the distinction between like and unlike remains stable, contemplation of a dissimilar image delivers the intellect up to an experience of its failure. The observer regards the image that is different from his or her expectations of God and apprehends his or her distance from the divine; the inability for the human being to approach the intelligible through material means becomes apparent. Monstrous medieval grotesques and certain deformed saints, David Williams argues, perform this apophatic function, acting as dissimilar images in a properly expansive application of theology: the monstrous reveals or affirms transcendence by concealing or negating similarity to the natural world, thwarting the mind’s ordering and analogical capacities. Monstrous deformations point to the deformation of the intellect that is necessary to the pursuit of understanding God. According to Williams, the “Middle Ages made deformity into a symbolic tool with which it probed the secrets of substance, existence, and form incompletely revealed by the more orthodox rational approach through dialectics.”107
Christina’s body is a monstrous one: it mixes the categories of the living and the dead, of past, present, and apocalyptic future;108 she is both herself and yet another insofar as her actions are the result of being “driven by the spirit”; she is deformed in rapture and lamentation. As an image of the holy, she is a monstrous spectacle that reveals to the observer the limits of his or her understanding of how the divine is manifest. In this confrontation, the saintly, ineffable other remains distinct from the observer.
However, there is a second way to read the effect of dissimilar similarities, one that takes account of the fact that all images are dissimilar to God, as all names mark and instantiate a distance between God and the world. This interpretation would argue that the dissimilarity of all images from God undoes the very particularity of the saint as dissimilar, thereby implicating the observer in the unlikeness of the contemplated image. The spectacular otherness of the saintly figure in this reading cannot be maintained. Christina’s bodily vulnerability becomes the observer’s bodily vulnerability, her monstrousness their monstrousness. The observer not only scrutinizes the strange spectacle but is rendered strange by it. The apophasis of the intellect that obtains in the first explanation for dissimilar similarities is therefore extended, in this second reading, to an apophasis of the subject, an undoing and refiguration of the viewer as he or she is re-placed within a landscape that is newly recognized as a regio dissmilitudinis, a world rendered apocalyptic by Christina’s performances of coming punishment. It is this extended apophasis, I would argue, that drives Thomas’s attempts to turn Christina from the amazing but not impossibly miraculous beata of James’s prologue into a figure who is mirabilis.
Such an understanding of dissimilar similarity can be considered prophetic. Prophets stand over and against the social order and are not to be emulated. Instead, the prophet satirizes the audience by imitating it. Thus, the prophet Hosea performed Israel’s “adulterous” relation to God by marrying a prostitute and naming his daughter “not loved” and his son “not my people” at God’s command.109 The actions of the prophet, though bizarre and seemingly utterly outside of typical social behavior, hold up a mirror to the community. Their seeming unlikeness—their outsider status in relation to the community—is, in fact, a critical likeness. The wonder they inspire has its source in the likeness that lies under the veil of unlikeness, and the horror when this likeness is registered is the impetus for conversion.
Like the Hebraic prophets, Christina’s Life repeatedly shows such a mutual imbrication of saint and community. The vision of the saintly other refracts back onto the observer, who becomes mirror rather than spectacle. Christina’s mission was marked by both her dramatic lamentation for human sin and her embodiment of sin in her enactments of purgatorial pain in which she is both example and substitute.110 Christina took on others’ debts of sin, including the souls she first saw in purgatory and her spiritual child Count Louis, with whom “she suffered torments in turn according to what the soul of the count was suffering,” having taken on half of his purgatorial punishments.111 Her role as substitute was extended in her mendicancy, in which her body became the bodies of the publicans, a becoming figured literally by her ingesting the scraps from their table. The sight of an emaciated woman dressed in white rags sewn together with bark or twigs,112 revealing the torments that the purgatorial body undergoes,113 not only warned viewers of their looming future but revealed to them their present state. Her body became the body and soul of usurers. After eating alms that were wrongly acquired, which tasted as the “bowels of frogs and toads,” she uttered a plea that showed the complex relation of possession, desire, and subjectivity arising from her mission. Crying out first to Christ, she asked, “What are you doing (agis) with me?” reflecting the text’s view that it was God who drove her actions and performed the punishments that she endured. She then addressed her own soul, saying, “O miserable soul! What do you want? Why do you desire (concupiscis) these foul things?” suggesting that it was not only her body’s requirement of food but her soul’s infection, in some sense, by the sinners’ desire for illicitly acquired gains. The confession of her soul’s desire, which was really the desire of the other, ventriloquized the prayer of a penitent publican,114 performing the fulfillment of her mission that such sinners “might … be called to a horror of their sins and a penitent life.” Christina’s proleptic verbal penance paralleled her substitutionary purgatorial penance of the flesh.
Thomas elaborates the notion of Christina’s connection with her audience through the language of contagion. Her performance is shown to be infectious, generating not only fear but also sympathy in those exposed to her. Thus, her wild grief for the damned dead, in which she “wept and twisted herself and bent herself backwards and bent and re-bent her arms and fingers as if they were pliable and had no bones” caused “all who saw her [to find] her sorrow so intolerable that even the hardest-hearted could not endure it without the greatest contrition and compassion.”115 In her bridal ecstasies, in which she sought to “praise Jesus for the great liberality of his miracles,” she called the nuns of Saint Catherine’s to her, and they sang together the “Te Deum Laudamus” and “rejoiced in Christina’s solace.”116 As Christina was “moved” (commota) by the spirit to flee the town,117 her wretched appearance likewise moved (commoto) a “most wicked man” to an “unaccustomed pity,” and he gave her wine.118 The charity of sinners inspired by Christina’s appearance paralleled her possession by the Holy Spirit; the interiority of Christina’s interlocutors was transformed by means of her contagious presence.
The primary response that Christina’s presence inspired, however, was not charity or renunciation but horror. Astonishment, in this text, occurs in the register of the horrifying. Astounded by the horror of the torments of hell, a place that is “dark and terrible” (horridum),119 Christina agreed to be driven by God and thus was horrified (horrebat) by human smell and human sin.120 Her own horror turned Christina into a horrifying sight, terrifying (horrentes) her audiences by means of her horrifying (horrifice) cries, deeds, and voice up until the very end of her life,121 when even the shadow cast by her body caused “horror and trembling of the spirit” (horrore et tremore).122 The contagion of horror moving from Christina to her audience and back again is most apparent in chapter 9, when she is said to flee human presence “with wondrous horror” (miro horrore), the horror here referring to both that which she felt for other humans and that which she inspired in her onlookers.
Such horror is essential to her mission, according to Thomas, and a key effect that he seeks by means of his hyperbolic portrait. Begging was intended to call sinners “to a horror (ad horrorem) of their sins and a penitent life,”123 and her exhortations called the dying to a “fear (horrorem) of the destroying fire.” This fear is central to the pastoral aims of the book, for it is the origin of the structure and reformed behaviors of a pious life, including confession, penance, and the “hope of everlasting joy.”124
The audience’s horror is also Thomas’s solution to the conundrum of credibility raised at the beginning of the vita. The wondrous horror that provoked the bewilderment of villagers and readers, leading them to acts of misinterpretation in which they read Christina as demonic or disbelieved the story, seeing it as simply an outlandish fabrication, is also the means by which Thomas attempts to achieve resolution to the problem of the text’s credibility.125 As I have shown, the story revolves around Christina’s body, the site of her fearsome wonder. Although she preached with both words and deeds,126 it was her body that was “example” and her deeds that had substitutionary power. While her body as resurrected was singular, the bodily effects of her acts depended on the common ground between her miraculous flesh and the flesh of her community and her readers. As Amy Hollywood notes, Christina’s suffering not only provided a theological justification for God’s torture of sinful human beings and proof of the capacity of some to bear the sins of others, it is also a “process of validation” that occurs in the bodies of readers. She writes, “The reality of the immaterial divine is made evident through the suffering body of the saint. The reader’s horrified bodily response to her suffering in turn becomes a bodily manifestation of God’s presence and the reader’s belief.”127
Christina’s body, shaped by a vision of horror even as it becomes such a vision, inspires a similarly physical horror in her viewers. Furthermore, Thomas’s portrayal of Christina as an effective presence is predicated on the belief that she shows the audience themselves as they already are. The vision becomes a recognition. Thomas’s melodramatic tale, with its heroine’s excessive materiality, seeks bodily effects in its readers that become the living proof, if not of Christina’s historicity or even sanctity, then of the reality of purgatorial punishments and the wrath of God. The physical piety of women, typically used in order to justify visionary claims or to find kinship with the human Jesus, is here placed in service of proving the threat of damnation and, by that fear, reforming behavior. Belief is thus “inscribed” on the bodies of penitents, as horror and belief are united in Thomas’s penitential theology,128 and the divine bridegroom, who fleetingly appears in the fourth chapter of the vita, is replaced by a vengeful God who is “driven” (cogebatur) to punish sinners.129
However, the text continues to register the difficult circularity of the proving body. This difficulty points to a broader problem of the representation of female sanctity through the suffering body, which is highlighted by the excessiveness of Christina’s Life. Much of Thomas’s work follows the trend of thirteenth-century writing, which often depicts female sanctity in highly somatic terms, as tormented female flesh is pressed into service as the site of God’s visible earthly manifestation. The Life of Margaret of Ypres admiringly cites the extreme asceticism of a woman who died at twenty-one as a result of her practices. Margaret was a teenager when the Dominican friar, Zeger, “cast his eyes on” her as she sat in secular clothing with other women in church. He saw, with his “divine instinct,” that she had been elected as God’s “chosen vessel.”130 Zeger persuaded Margaret to abandon thoughts of marriage and family and pursue a life of virginity. Although she began to “relapse” a day or two following her conversion, she, like Lutgard, was able to turn her stirrings of “affection” (motu animi affectum) for a young man to the “lasting affective knowledge” (perseverantem cognicionis affectum) that began to flow into her at her conversion,131 and she made a private vow, becoming “espoused (sponsata) to Christ,” and “escaped the nuptials of the world.”132 She began to live the life of a tertiary, undertaking an ascetic and contemplative regimen in the confines of her mother’s home but under the watchful eye of her confessor, Zeger. Thomas writes:
She very frequently scourged herself even to the shedding of blood. A child of three could barely have lived on the food she ate.… If any table companion urged her to take a morsel, she seemed quite unaware of the food, and when her mother rebuked her and asked why she paid no attention to it, she would sigh and say, “I have many things to think about which distract my mind elsewhere.” Often she fasted continually for two or three days, eating nothing, and she scarcely ever had anything to drink.133
In addition to her fasting, scourging, and concentration on otherworldly things, Thomas writes that Margaret practiced extensive vigils and perpetual prayer, wore “wretched clothing,” begged for alms on behalf of the lepers, had an intense Eucharistic devotion, and performed scrupulous confession.134 Margaret’s vita also details her multiple paramystical experiences. She experienced ecstatic raptures that persisted for many hours,135 had visions,136 and was “ravished every day by an ardent desire for contemplation” (cum aviditate contemplacionis cotidie raperetur).137
Despite his assurance that her self-mortification “proves that the human body can do and endure many great things without harm to itself, far beyond what carnal people believe, but especially when love endures them all,”138 and that her deeds were endured “without self-destruction” (a principle he takes to miraculous ends in Christina’s Life),139 a dominant note in Thomas’s depiction is Margaret’s persistent weakness and weariness.140 This frailty acts as a foil to the virility of her asceticism and rhetorically serves to shame the complaining “powerful woman” and “strong and bearded man” to whom, along with Friar Zeger, he addresses the vita.141 Although Thomas assures readers that her way of life caused her no harm, Margaret’s weakness culminated in the definitive ascetic act of her life—the extensive illness she endured.142 Through this final illness, Margaret, like Christina, performed the entirety of her purgatorial penance while in the flesh.
Dyan Elliott argues that the identification of female sanctity with the body ultimately served to detract from women’s claims to holiness. The body, acting as proof of sanctity and warrant for certain theological claims, was, in its ecstasy and transformations (as the Life of Christina shows), difficult to interpret. She claims that Thomas had an “intense appetite for supernatural marvels” and remained “optimistic” about the capacity of the body to provide legible marks about its source of inspiration, whether demonic or divine.143 Theologians, however, became increasingly apprehensive about the evidentiary status of the body, and by the end of the fourteenth century, the genre of spiritual discernment was ascendant and typically introduced physical markers of spirituality only to discredit them. This shift left women, still identified with the body, without their prior authority and ultimately, Elliott argues, open to accusations of witchcraft.144 Although Thomas confidently uses topoi of the holy female body and its paramystical feats, his corpus does reveal the difficulties of representations of contemporary female sanctity that rely on external markers of holiness for their warrant as well as his discomfort with such representation.
Thomas’s discomfort is registered in his acknowledgement that the wondrous horror that provides the text’s credibility is also the cause of its unbelievability and thus of the persecution that Christina suffered at the beginning of her new life. Her pain was registered as a threat by witnesses, and despite the rhetorical and bodily force of her suffering, it required an act of interpretation to understand that threat as being in the service of salvation. Thus, the vividly rendered body, which engendered bodily effects in readers, still required interpretation by villagers and by readers. Perhaps out of anxiety concerning the way in which the body is both problem and solution, Thomas repeatedly represents the interpretive moves of the villagers in both their misrecognitions and their recognitions. While the messages of purgatorial punishment, the sinfulness of humanity, and the wrath of God stand forth clearly in the text, their visibility depends on the suffering flesh of a female saint in a way that renders it unstable, as God’s activities could be the devil’s, and the effects of horror inspire a flight not from sin but from the saint. This instability in the Vita Christinae intensifies that which Elliott has found to be broadly present in the use of bodily proof in the lives of holy women.
Margot King argues that the bodiliness of the Vita Christinae must be understood “sacramentally,” its physicality performed ad significandum gratiam (a Scholastic phrase that Thomas uses in Lutgard’s Life to explain why oil flowed from Lutgard’s fingertips),145 and thus is reducible to neither a pure literalism nor spiritualism but rather proof that “through the material universe … God works for the salvation of humanity.”146 King understands Thomas’s tripartite structure of the Life, divided, he says, into stages telling of her nourishment, education, and deeds, to be a version of William of Saint-Thierry’s animal, rational, and spiritual stages in the growth of a soul, mirroring Thomas’s explicit invocation of William in the prologue to Lutgard’s Life.147 King offers her argument as a refutation of what she terms Simone Roisin’s “literal” reading of Christina’s Life, in which Roisin contrasts the bodiliness of the Vita Christinae with the “mature” spirituality of the Vita Lutgardis.148
However, while I have noted that the physicality of thirteenth-century hagiographical depictions of female saints was intended both to make the divine visible and to act as a defense of the sacramental system, King’s reading obscures important differences between the Lives of Christina and Lutgard, differences that indicate not only a shift in the status of the protagonist—from Beguine to Cistercian and from the God who is driven by wrath and justice to one who is a lover obeying the rules of courtly etiquette—but also, perhaps, a discomfort with the externalizing mode of representation that dominated his previous works, including Christina’s Life. Unlike Roisin, however, I would not account for this discomfort in terms of a new maturity arising from exposure to the greater sophistication of the Dominicans or Scholastics, for, as I have argued, it seems that the difficulties with such representation are registered within Christina’s Life itself, particularly around the issues of belief, proof, and interpretation, whose circularity Thomas is ultimately unable to escape.
Therefore, when Thomas does occasionally offer proof of Lutgard’s sanctity by means of the shedding of her blood or of her spectacular ascetic and contemplative feats, he qualifies them with reference to her interior state. For example, when a vein in Lutgard’s heart burst, turning her into a “second Agnes,”149 Thomas transforms the “red” martyrdom of the virgin martyr into the Cistercian’s “white” version, for God told her, “By your desire you have equaled her martyrdom in blood.” This same passage also notes that this miraculous flow of blood was “witnessed” to by the “termination of the nuisance with which God tamed the pride in the sex of Eve,” that is, by her connection to her flesh as a cursed and female body, which is here attenuated. Thus, not only was Lutgard’s blood made efficacious by her “desire,” requiring the participation of the will in order for it to become a “martyrdom,” it also lead to the erasure of that blood that was a vital mark of her femininity. The blood that was central to the representation of the asceticism of female saints—including Christina and Margaret (whose hair, like Lutgard’s, seeped blood, and whose most powerful relic was her bloody headdress)150—is necessarily and causally dependent on Lutgard’s interiority, and Thomas attempts to narratively capture and defend his contention that her “body outwardly drew its likeness” from the “intellectual consideration of her mind” (ex intellectuali enim consideratione mentis, interius, similitudinem traxit corpus exterius) even as he needs to provide external proofs of sanctity.151
MODELING THE IMPOSSIBLE: EXEMPLARITY, ASTONISHMENT, AND THE SINGULAR
Contemporary medievalists and medieval pastoral guides have long had recourse to the distinction between those saintly actions that are ad imitanda and ad admiranda.152 For pastors, the distinction safely bracketed for their flock the transgressive and even dangerous quality of some saintly actions. Scholars follow the clerical lead here, offering the distinction as a way of neatly classifying the acts of certain saints. The “admirable” is read as an edifying spectacle, while its extremism or miraculousness holds it at a safe distance from ordinary people, who are meant to regard it with awe but not see it as not having any purchase on the practice of everyday life. Yet, paradoxically, I have shown that the same wondrousness that makes Christina a horrifying specter draws her closer to her audience, for it is, in fact, she who imitates them, and they who must imitate her abject penance in order to ultimately avoid looking like her. The horror she inspires is possible precisely because of what is shared between the prophetic saint and the sinful community. The Life of Christina thus shows the distinction and relation between what is imitanda and admiranda to be far more complex than the simplicity of the binary would suggest. The need to articulate a separation between admiration and imitation may, in fact, be taken as evidence of a concern that these categories are not easily separable and that saintly ideals are inherently destabilizing and dangerous. In terms of “admiring” Christina, the term can mean, as its etymology suggests, looking into a mirror in which the person reflected is so radically dissimilar from expectations of sanctity, hagiographical traditions, and social order that she reveals a horrifying and yet moving image. Hence, Thomas wrests pathos from the equanimity of the types of the virgin martyr and the desert mother. Christina’s peculiar type of horrifying marvelousness does not distance her but depends on and ultimately reveals her nearness to her audience. Christina’s bizarre unlikeness, so seemingly singular and thus admirable in the sense intended by clerics, in fact, makes a general claim on the social body.
In its unrestricted use of astonishing horror as both a theoretical category and a rhetorical strategy, the exemplarity of Christina’s Life occupies a unique place in Thomas’s corpus. While the exemplars offered by Thomas typically function as models for self-fashioning, Christina performs a warning, becoming not what her viewers aspire to imitate but a manifestation of the human present and its concomitant future. In the Vita Christinae, we have seen an instance where the imago is deformed by exaggeration, monstrosity, and unlikeness in order to imitate the deformity of its audience, who, having renounced their likeness to God, wander in the regio dissimilitudinis. However, while the tale clearly manifests a classic use of the exemplum as warning, Christina is not only a prophetic instance of dissimilar similarity but also saint. In her resurrection and miraculous intercessions, she performs a more literal imitatio Christi than any other saint, including the alter Christus, Francis. What then, of the imitation of her audience?
The literal, complete showing forth of divine goodness is, strictly speaking, impossible. Thus, the first reading of dissimilar similarity that I offered also applies to the vita insofar as divine distance requires that any representation of divinity fail. No verisimilitude is possible in the signification of God; hence the appropriateness of the monstrous figuration of the saint, for whom the saintly vocation always requires, in Edith Wyschogrod’s phrase, to “show unrepresentablity itself,” displaying “how impossible it is to bring divine life into plenary presence.”153
For Wyschogrod, this impossibility is due to the fact that the paradigmatic power of Christ and his saints derives from their transcendent ground, an infinity to which finite beings have no access, thus making the injunction to imitate Christ one that can never be fulfilled in its entirety. Thomas would agree with this view, though the rhetorical form by which it is expressed is radically different: the vita suggests that to perform the literal imitation of Christ is to be formed according to that image and, in some very real sense, deformed, inhuman, monstrous.
While I have examined the way in which Christina’s unlikeness is, in fact, a prophetic, critical likeness, her monstrosity remains. The realization of Christina’s likeness does not dissolve her horrifying difference from her audience, as the description of her spectral body in its last days attests.154 Thomas not only portrays a saint who is admirable in the sense of being a mirror but one who is admirable in the clerical sense of being an inimitable wonder. Thus, in terms of the question of the imitation of Christina, she remains largely singular. In addition to the scandalous nature of much of her practice that I have discussed—including her mendicancy, her itinerancy, and her acting as confessor and preacher—her imitation of Christ is miraculous, miming (and even outdoing) not only his human life but also his resurrection and physical sacrifice, becoming a sin offering for others. Thomas’s text thus participates in the practice of placing a fence around sanctity through the turn to the category of the admirable, explicitly marked in this text by the semantic field of the marvelous (mirabilis) and wonderful (admiranda, mira), as that which is singular and thus inimitable.
However, because Christian sanctity is a mimetic practice based, ultimately, on the imitation of Christ that is enjoined to all Christians, the binary between imitation and admiration is ultimately incoherent. The instability that inheres within this distinction is the cause of the persistent danger and potential radicality of texts such as the Life of Christina. At which point and in what regard is a person to be named admirable, a spectacle, and inimitable? Who defines such limits, particularly at a time like Thomas’s, when the practices of piety were undergoing great change in the wake of Lateran IV, the upsurge of lay piety begun in the Gregorian reforms, and the new demographic and economic realities? Those qualities that render Christina astonishing are the sources of her authority as critic and prophet of purgatory even as they are what most fundamentally marginalize her.
Thomas’s portrayal of Christina is an example of how women were used as powerful signs and proof of orthodoxy, particularly the doctrine of purgatory and the importance of penitential suffering for sin. In order for women like Christina to be effective agents of persuasion and teaching, it was necessary that they have access to an authority that would make their message compelling despite their exclusion from its traditional sources, particularly priestly office. The work of Caroline Walker Bynum and others has shown how women’s bodies in the thirteenth century were enlisted as the site and source of spiritual authority as they identified their flesh with that of Jesus in his suffering humanity. Through this identification, they obtained a power and influence that was otherwise inaccessible to them.155 Thomas follows this trend in his portrayal of Christina. The astonishing qualities and wondrous effects of Christina’s body are exemplary in two opposed but related ways. First, the horror that her monstrosity inspires acts as a mirror, its seeming difference revealing a terrifying similarity between herself and her spectators. The horror of her body solicits belief in purgatorial punishments and the reality of sin. Second, her flesh, in its excessive, again monstrous suffering, is the locus of her imitatio Christi and thus becomes a place to apprehend the divine, but as that which cannot be contained by categories of intelligibility such as form, proportion, and tradition. In order to embody this ineffability, Christina’s flesh not only acts as a mirror but also remains other by virtue of its scandalous particularity, that which cannot be imitated by her audience. That Christina’s imitatio points to divine ineffability thus reveals a limitation to exemplarity, a way in which the mimetic chain by which Christian sanctity is conceived and communicated breaks down.
The Life further emphasizes this tension, which is inherent to the structure of sanctity, by showing Christina’s imitatio as an encroachment upon the dogmatically declared singularity of Christ. While Christ died once, Christina died three times; he was resurrected once, she twice. She suffered supernatural pain for a much greater length of time. Her imitation was based not only on Christ’s human life but also on his supernatural ability to become sin and to be resurrected. Insofar as her monstrous flesh reveals the incommensurability of the divine and human realms, becoming a deformed and singular spectacle of divine presence, it points to divine distance or dissimilarity. This is an apophatic strategy. Insofar as her body is recognized as a mirror of the human condition and a warning of future things, it points to the pedagogy of the incarnation, of a God who, in Origen’s phrase, becomes all things in order to transform them.
The doubleness of Christina’s sanctity can, in part, be attributed to Thomas’s theological views, which are articulated in the contemporary document De natura rerum. That text lays out a pastoral dualism, by virtue of which the saints are held to be humans who live contra naturam, their virtue the result of the ordering of their lives to grace. De natura rerum holds monks, nuns, and other religious persons to this ideal, while the virtuousness of the laity is understood to arise from an alignment with nature.156 In De natura rerum, preaching to the laity thus involves a focus on recognizing sin and doing penance rather than on modeling the cultivation of virtue and the purgations of asceticism, as recognizing and removing sinfulness are understood to enable the natural virtue of the soul and body to arise. By means of her resurrection, Christina enacts the way in which saints are contra naturam, though in a fashion more literal than other saints. The astonishing, unbelievable quality of Christina’s postresurrection existence depicts the invasion of the order of nature by the order of grace and narrativizes the incommensurability of the two spheres. However, in making his exemplar of supernatural virtue a laywoman and addressing the text to a general audience (“whoever reads these things”), Thomas complicates the dualism that Robert Sweetman has identified as essential to this phase of Thomas’s career.
However, the distinction between Christina’s imitability and her admirable wondrousness leaves the reader, again—as with the question of the demonic aspect of her sanctity—with the difficult task of interpretation: How does one determine what to imitate and what to admire? What is shared, and what remains other? As both elements inhere in her body, such discernment is particularly difficult. The binary of imitation and admiration, the similar and dissimilar, contains the constant potential of its own collapse and can be mediated only by the reader’s interpretive act. In giving Christina’s divinely directed deeds demonic lineaments, Thomas shows the ambivalence of the appearance of sanctity, particularly in women, and the fraught nature of the interpretive endeavors that this appearing requires. Furthermore, Christina’s marvelous imitation shows the impossibility of the audience’s own imitation and interpretation. The Life of Christina turns to monstrous figuration and the singularity of its wondrous saint in order to offer an apophatic logic, to show how “impossible it is to bring divine life into plenary presence.”157 Christina’s monstrosity evades ultimate signification, its otherness causing a crisis of response and multiple interpretations that may frame Christina’s strangeness but never exhaust it.