Exemplary Teaching, Jewish Carnality, and Christian Doubt in the Bonum Universale de Apibus
It is perhaps Thomas’s final work, Bonum universale de apibus (On the common good as taught by bees), completed in 1263, that most forcefully articulates his “sacramental pastoral.” The text is a collection of exempla—short, vivid stories offered by Thomas in response to a call by Humbert of Romans, minister general of the Dominican order, for brothers to “take note of things worthy for memory.”1 Thomas expresses his hope that the collection will be copied (rescribendum) in many Dominican houses “in order that the holy seed (semen sanctum) might be more abundantly poured into (transfundatur) their descendants.”2 In other words, he hopes the stories will be used in pastoral contexts beyond the Dominican houses, most likely in sermons, in order to build up the faith of those who are not friars.
The broad audience that Thomas aspires to reach is matched by what he observes in the author’s letter is a markedly “diverse” text: its narratives relate a range of deeds and things (diuersa rerum narrata gestarum) performed by people from all states (omni statui) and all conditions of humanity (omni conditioni hominum). Book 1 concerns the lives of prelates (twenty-five chapters) and book 2 the lives of the laity (fifty-seven chapters). The diversity of persons is matched by the text’s diverse judgments (sententias), which is why, he writes, he has titled the book “on the universal good.” Thomas’s project can be understood as an expression of what Jeremy Cohen notes was a high medieval project, driven forcefully by the friars, to create Christian society as the corpus mysticum Christi, a faithful, unified, and universalized organism in which all constituent parts were ordered to their head, Christ, as represented by the ecclesiastical authorities.3 Like a beehive, Christendom, ideally conceived, contains many parts and roles for its inhabitants yet works cooperatively toward a single end. Exemplary teaching produces a social order that can be conceived as God’s own body. Not only saints become living sacraments in this vision but society as a whole. In line with this conception, those who disrupt this dream of earthly consummation, including Jewish doubters and heretics, must be excised from the social order in the name of its preservation.4
Thomas believed the unruly collection of stories contained in this oversize work had the capacity to “transfuse” those exposed to them with the seed of the Holy Spirit, demonstrating his faith in the unmatched rhetorical power of the example. The example is able to “enforce” (roborare) the lesson by connecting teacher and learner in the pedagogical moment and, more stunningly, to act in a sacramental manner.5 For Thomas, exemplary discourse is incarnational and apocalyptic; it discloses what is hidden through the revelatory bodies of particular persons. This revelation “pours into” the listener, a transfusion that persuades and thereby inspires a mimetic response. Saintly exemplars—visible signs of an invisible grace—effect what they signify. United to Christ, the holy figure is able, in turn, to make the listener pregnant with the seed of the Holy Spirit, thereby incorporating him or her into the divine life. The stories are efficacious signs, persuasive and ethically formative in a way that the abstractions of reason are not—a view that Thomas derives from Gregory the Great, who argues that “examples may satisfy our wavering minds, which reason cannot so fully persuade.”6 As Humbert of Romans argues in his elaboration of Gregory’s observation, the example externalizes, embodies, and particularizes the sententia—the lesson or argument—in such a way as to make it comprehensible and, because it is understood, it is able to move (movent) listeners affectively, convincing “hearts to act in accord” with doctrinal norms. Finally, as noted in the introduction, Humbert argues that the example is retained by memory because the corporeality of the story’s figures impresses itself upon the imagination in such a way that it becomes “fixed” within memory. Humbert uses the verb infiguntur, which has the connotation of the piercing or driving function of weapons.7
The power of examples to persuade and reform subjects arises not merely because they illustrate abstract ideas. As Robert Sweetman observes, exempla have a probative function. The materiality of exemplum carries empirical authority that provides proof of what is unseen (for example, purgatory or transubstantiation).8 As Dyan Elliott’s work shows, Thomas deploys female saints as proofs of orthodoxy.9 For Gregory, such proof is required by those who cannot perceive spiritual things due to the impurity of their souls. The example is an external support that compensates for deficiencies of the sensorium and intellect.10 Thomas amplifies the empirical cast of his examples by representing contemporary stories that he collected himself or that he heard from friends during his travels throughout the Low Countries as preacher, confessor, and exorcist. The exempla aptata et appropriata in each chapter contextualize the abstractions of the lessons within “our times.”11 The social body as corpus mysticum Christi is produced through people’s belief in the doctrinal claims of the church, according to which Christian subjects are then to order their lives, claims that are made persuasive in part by means of the proof provided in the stories.
The semiotics of exemplary proof in De apibus is, for the most part, simple: the outer, material reality signifies and manifests the abstract, inner, or immaterial reality, proving through corporealization the existence of an immaterial reality. For much of De apibus, as with the vitae that precede it, bodies are vital sources of evidence for theological claims, and Thomas’s stories portray the virtue or vice of the soul as demonstrable by the body in unambiguous ways. In fact, the desire for proofs of faith drives the text: Thomas represents himself within the collection much like the writer of Acts, someone eagerly seeking to accumulate “many convincing proofs,” assembling testimonies, tales, contemporary evidence, in order to confirm belief.12 The legal language of eyewitnesses, testimonies, and evidence abounds in the text.
In a profound counterpoint to the critique of literalization in Lutgard’s Life, the exemplary texts of De apibus should, then, be understood as part of a drive toward literalization and empiricism that characterizes the high medieval period. Such a drive is apparent in exegesis that affirms the literal meaning of scripture in light of the Aristotelian principle that human knowledge is derived from the senses. It is similarly apparent in theological attempts, like those of Thomas Aquinas, to render mutually supportive the data of revelation, reason, and empirical knowledge—attempts that coincide with the rise of doubts about the unverifiable claims of faith.13 This high-medieval drive marks devotional life as well, as in practices that aim to imitate in as literal a fashion as possible the human life of Christ, including an identification with the suffering of Jesus and his mother.14 As Thomas Bestul argues, one finds in high medieval culture a “pervasive semiology in which the materiality of the sign is insisted upon.” Thus, “In politics, the Jew is literally the slave of the Christian.… In theology, the bread and wine are indeed the physical body of Christ. In economics, the same tendency toward the material may also be expressed in the growing use of money as the basis for social relationships.” Most fundamentally, Bestul continues, this “semiology of the concrete” is found in the understanding of the corpus mysticum as a sacramental and social body, the sacrament substantiated as the body of Christendom, a “body which, at both levels, must be urgently defended against threats to its purity in order for that participation to be completely fulfilling.”15
However, when Thomas attempts to prove the crucial doctrine of Mary’s virginity, he exposes the limitations of material means to persuade of immaterial things, for here the pregnant body speaks of one thing but signifies another. Thomas addresses the question of Mary’s virginity in that part of De apibus that Henri Platelle terms the “Jewish dossier,”16 thereby linking the problematics of proof and doubt, the inner and the outer, with his representation of Jewish women and men.17 Throughout this book, we have explored the opportunities and difficulties found in Thomas’s appeal to the transfigured corporeality of devout women as evidence for the claims of Catholic Christianity—particularly the efficacy of the sacraments and the reality of the Incarnation. I have argued that Thomas’s critique of literalization in the vitae is one that resists the typical hagiographic strategies of his contemporaries. In this chapter, we see the profoundly problematic underbelly of this critique as the chapter extends these arguments about the literal to a different rhetorical context: the anti-Jewish polemic. In what follows, I argue that Thomas took up the challenges of Jewish doubt and Jewish conversion as part of his broader interrogation of the limits and possibilities of material means to teach faith. Adapting an ancient hermeneutic strategy that identifies Jewishness with the literal, in De apibus, Thomas argues that the possibility of Jewish conversion represents nothing less than the potential for the literal to be translated into the spiritual and for the claims of Christendom to extend to the bodies of Jews. Thomas’s project, like that of Origen, must appropriate and convert Jewishness into a spiritualized version of itself. Rather than address the difficulties of converting the Hebrew Bible into the Old Testament, Thomas struggles with the literal conversion of Jews into Christians. This struggle with Judaism is not unrelated to issues of gender: Jewish men represent, for Thomas, the possibility of a literalism gone awry; unconvertible, their recalcitrance and insistent doubt reveal what is for him the danger of his own method of exemplary teaching and the threat of Jewish presence within the body of Christian society. Jewish women, like the gentile Lutgard, in contrast, demonstrate the possibility of the transformation of the carnal into a spiritual corporeality and thus the ability for the material to teach and become the means of faith. Mary’s body becomes the exemplary model in which femininity and Jewishness are transfigured through conversion, enabling the literal to transcend its carnality in order to manifest and teach spiritual truth.
THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT: FIGURING JEWISHNESS IN LATE-ANTIQUE CHRISTIAN EXEGESIS
The foundational metaphor used to figure the distinction between the inner and outer, the spiritual and corporeal, is found in the Pauline corpus, where it marks not sexual difference but that between the spirit and the law—although we will examine below the ways in which the latter distinction was gendered. In 2 Corinthians 3:6, Paul argues that his apostolic authority derives from God himself, making him a minister of a “new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills but the spirit gives life.” Paul then elaborates on this implicit parallelism of letter and old covenant, spirit and new covenant, by introducing the image of the veil in order to distinguish between those who follow the Mosaic covenant (now rendered old by virtue of the new advent of Christ) and those who “turn to the Lord,” meaning Jesus:
Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. But their minds were hardened [made blind]. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.18
The revelation given to Moses, the old covenant of the law “chiseled in stone tablets,”19 is, like the veil with which Moses covered his face in order to obscure its brightness after encountering God, a surface that conceals what lies beneath and within it; the law is another veil, an outer covering that bears and yet hides the true meaning hidden in its depths, namely Christ. In following this law, the Israelites cannot see this truth any more than they can see Moses’s illumined face. Only by seeing in Christ and with Christ is the veil lifted, the blindness of an unseeing eye resolved.
This metaphorical matrix of outer-inner, law-spirit, veiled-unveiled, governed early Christian approaches to the Hebrew Bible in fundamental ways. An exemplary instance of the appeal to and use of this matrix is found in Origen’s third-century articulation of a hermeneutic program. Echoing 2 Corinthians 3, Origen argues in the fourth book of On First Principles that Christ is the hermeneutic key of scripture; only with his advent does the true “spiritual” meaning of the Mosaic law, along with the events and experiences of the Israelites (historia), become intelligible: “The splendour of Christ’s advent has, therefore, by illuminating the law of Moses with the brightness of the truth, withdrawn the veil which had covered the letter of the law and has disclosed, for every one who believes in him, all those ‘good things’ which lay concealed within.”20 To read allegorically or spiritually, finding Christ hidden within the Hebrew Bible enables an interpreter to “show of what heavenly things those who are Jews ‘after the flesh’ serve as a copy and a shadow, and any other matters of this kind which may be found in the holy scriptures.”21
Origen attempts to address different kinds of literal readers. Jews “according the flesh,” he says, read literally and thus do not recognize the prophecies of Christ in the Hebrew Bible as such. On the other end of the continuum, the Marcionites are led by their literalism to reject the Hebrew Bible in its entirety.22
For early Christian exegetes like Origen, allegorical reading of the Hebrew Bible was a way of preserving its canonical status for believers in Jesus and, for gentile Christians, a way of appropriating its promises for themselves to see that, according to Romans 9:6, “not all who are from Israel are Israel.”23 Origen further quotes Romans 2:28–29: “Neither is he a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and in the flesh. He is a Jew who is one in secret, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal.”24 The gentile follower of Christ is grafted into a Jewish lineage, acquiring a “noble birth” through baptism. Conversely, by following Christ, a Jew “according to the flesh” becomes part of the “new” covenant, transcending his or her attachment to what Paul figures as the hard, stony, death-dealing demands of the law.25
The claim that Jews read only the literal meaning of the scripture with no sense of its spiritual meaning, which is Christ, became standard, repeated, Gavin Langmuir notes, “ad nauseam through the centuries.”26 The body of the text—as the literal interpretation was named by Origen—was aligned with Jewish flesh. Moreover, the mode of allegorical reading whereby the Jewish body was remade as a Christian root and “the Jew” was made to exist “in a state characterized by the carnal and the literal, … only reach[ing] fulfillment through conversion, by becoming Christian,” was a supersessionist one that Lisa Lampert has clearly shown “overlaps” with contemporary constructions of women and the gendering of the literal text as feminine.27 The figurations of woman and Jew converged in the Christian hermeneutical program. Lifting the veil of the text in order to disclose its hidden meaning, the exegete was positioned as a male figure who rendered the literal spiritual, the law Christ, and the female male.28 Even as the literal had to be subjected to an interpretive process in order to be transmuted into the spiritual, or to be revelatory of it, so the Jew had to become a follower of Christ, a conversion that paralleled the figuration of the feminine in much early Christian discourse as that which had to be overcome in order for a spiritual state to be attained. The spiritual subject was masculine. Women were not typically understood as being capable of reaching spiritual heights qua their femininity, which was marked as carnal, tied in particular to childbearing. Rather, those who succeeded and became spiritual adepts performed acts of transcendence, “becoming male” through a profound disciplining of body and mind.29 Jews, then, were considered carnal by virtue of their attachment to the letter of the law, and women were carnal by virtue of their greater identification with the weightiness of flesh; both were understood to be “hermeneutically handicapped.”30 The “hermeneutical Woman and the hermeneutical Jew both become associated with veiled knowledge, a clouded seeing, and … with carnality and the body itself. Both become figured as embodied particulars in relation to a universal that transcends embodiment.”31 As a result, both women and Jews were understood as requiring acts of conversion in which their carnal attachments were superseded, giving them access to spiritual truth.
However, as we have seen throughout this study of Thomas’s corpus, female figures are represented as redeemed and redemptive in ways that often emphasize their femininity (particularly their carnality, marked by its porosity and affectivity). Moreover, discursive forms—namely exempla and vitae—that appeal to the empirical and bodily as evidence and tell of events occurring in the present, were ascendant in the thirteenth century. The De apibus continued a long-practiced Christian project of bringing together woman and Jew in a hermeneutic program, but the context in which Thomas undertook this project was radically different from his late-antique predecessors.
How might we understand the Jewish body, depicted still in high medieval Christian writing as carnal, as “living letters” of scripture,32 in an era that valorized literalization and yet saw, too, the terrifying increase of anti-Jewish discourse and practice, an increase that Thomas was both witness of and participant in?33 If the anxiety in late antiquity was that gentiles were not literally written into Hebrew revelation, a problem resolved with allegorical reading, the anxiety of Thomas in his appeal to the literal is, first, that the literal might not convert even as Jews might not convert; the literal might be intractable, its materiality proof of the impossibility of spiritual things. Finally, its capacity to dissimulate might render it untrustworthy. In other words, the ability of the exemplary narrative to “transfuse” readers with the Holy Spirit might not, in fact, be as robust as Thomas hoped.
BOOK 1 OF DE APIBUS: EXEMPLARY PROOF
In book 1, Thomas relates a hagiography-in-miniature of a virgin girl in Brabant who is marked by the stigmata. In “a secret place,” he recalls, was a virgin with a reputation of holiness. Her sanctity was finally verified and established (probatum est) “thanks to the testimony of a Dominican”: during meditation on the wounds of Christ, an immense lesion appeared in her side for several years that continually shed blood. Thomas reveals that he saved some of this blood as “proof of so great a miracle,” (euidentiam tanti miraculi) and that the blood had not changed color or odor despite the passing of time.34 Not only did the girl’s stigmata provide evidence of her sanctity in such a way that it could be verified by a male authority—which was required particularly in cases concerning women who were not officially cloistered even if they might have lived in retreat from the world—her blood continued to testify to her saintly status after leaving her body. Her body, then, provided relics while she still lived. This blood acted as a proof not only of this particular girl’s sanctity but also of the capacity for virginity to render people saintly.
Somatic christomimesis is not only the provenance of women in De apibus. Thomas writes of a Dominican prior by the name of Volvandus from the priory at Strasbourg who constantly drew the sign of the cross on his chest.35 While visiting Mainz, Volvandus fell sick and died and was buried with the Franciscans. After a long argument with the friars minor about exhuming his body, the Dominicans were finally able to retrieve his bones. They then discovered that his chest was marked (insignitum) by a cross as though a shield on the interior of the heart (hoc quasi scutum cordis interius). Thomas writes that he traveled more than forty miles in order to see this wonder for himself, and he attends to the physical details of the cross with great care, describing its “boney substance,” the length of its inferior and superior arms, and the bent structure of the arms that looked like the plumes of a fleur-de-lis. He then tells readers that what they should see in this marvel are, first, the “marks (stigmata) of the passion and the death of Christ, first possessed in mente,” and second, in the flower, a sign (insigne) of pure chastity that Volvandus “bore and fixed (fixum) in the foundations of his flesh” (in carne). Again the story presents physical evidence to prove the value of virginity, a probative function founded on the principle that what lies within will necessarily be revealed, a kind of saintly version of Poe’s telltale heart.
In a third example of this type of signification, Thomas recounts the story of a layman who went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land.36 There he walked in the loca singula of Christ’s earthly life, following the biblical evidence (indicijs) in order to map and repeat Jesus’s travels. When he came to the place of the Passion, he cried out, asking, “What can I give back to you, O Christ, for all the things you have accorded me by loving me first?” In this place of suffering and death, he continued, “You wanted to be crucified by nails, pierced with the lance, to hand over your soul for us” (et animam pro nobis tradere voluisti). For this reason, he said, “I am not able to see and keep a calm soul” (aequo animo). The man then uttered a cry while the “vital veins of his heart broke and he gave up his soul.”
In gazing on the “singular locus” of Christ’s Passion, the pilgrim’s body was assimilated to Christ’s, causing his heart to burst as he died for devotion just as Christ died for the love of humanity. Here, however, Thomas provides no moral for the tale. Moreover, affective devotion, not virginity, is the means of this man’s assimilation to Christ. Like the previous examples of the bleeding virgin and the Dominican Volvandus, however, the story asserts that inner states manifest in the flesh. Inner and outer act in accord even as Christ and the man became transparent to one another in the perfection of the pilgrim’s mimesis.
Thus far, Thomas’s semiotics is clear and unambiguous: the spiritual is revealed in the material. In the devotion of figures depicted, one sees the material perfectly assimilated to the spiritual. This sacramental materiality acts as proof, here, of sanctity, of the power of virginity, and of the possibility of christomimesis through devotion, which Thomas couches in a legal lexicon that includes reference to testimony, the role of eyewitnesses, and “evidence.” Readers can, furthermore, read the signs without being subject to the vicissitudes of ambiguous or obscure language.
There is, however, a crucial problematization of this representational system in De apibus around Mary’s body. The attempt to prove the claims of faith by appeal to externals that mirror the interior and invisible breaks down when Thomas attempts to “prove” Mary’s virginity. Mary’s virginal maternity—as much as the disguises of the devil—undermines the notion that bodies provide evidence in a transparent way and thereby throws into crisis Thomas’s exemplary discourse. Although Mary’s virginal body was a miracle even as the veins bursting in the layman’s heart was a miracle or as the blood of the recluse in the vial that never decomposed was a miracle, the difference is that in the latter two instances, the miracle was seen with bodily eyes, attested to by witnesses who affirmed its occurrence with their senses. When the divine met the corporeal in these cases, the empirical provided verification for the spiritual truth. When the divine met Mary’s body, however, the empirical was insufficient; the senses could not deliver reliable information by means of which faith might be strengthened. Instead, faith must step into a gap that the senses cannot fill. As Thomas Aquinas writes in the Eucharistic hymn, “Adoro te deuote”—in which he addresses the deity “hidden beneath the figure” of the Eucharistic elements (latens Deitas / Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas)—“faith supplements for the defects of the senses” (fides supplementum/sensuum defectui).
THE DE APIBUS IN THE CONTEXT OF THIRTEENTH-CENTURY ANTI-JEWISH DISCOURSE
At Lateran IV in 1215, canons requiring annual confession and communication by the laity were laid out along with a series of laws governing Jewish behavior and dress. As the exempla of De apibus attest, there were multiple lines of communication, conversation, and play among social and religious groups in Western Europe, a fluidity that the council sought to restrain. Canon 68 indicates an anxiety that “Jews and Saracens” in some regions were not differentiated by their clothing, allowing confusion to develop about the community to which a person belonged. The council feared that this disorder would lead to the greater contamination of communal borders through sexual intercourse. “Therefore,” the canon states, “we decree that such Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.”37 The canons sought to consolidate the boundaries between diverse factions within European communities and standardize Christian practice among the laity, normalizing lay piety in order to forge an identifiable, unified Christian community. This had already begun in 1179, with the decree by the third Lateran council that Christian women should not be wet nurses for Jewish or Muslim children.38
Medieval Christian thought concerning Jews built on the views of Augustine, who argued that the Jews were a “witness people” whose existence testified to the superiority and triumph of Christianity. Augustine insisted it was necessary that the Jews survive and continue to worship as Jews, for their very existence proved Christian victory. This revelatory function occurred first in the way that the marginal status of the synagogue demonstrated its displacement by the church. Second, by safeguarding the Hebrew scriptures, the Jews preserved the prophecies that foretold the coming of Christ and showed Christ being honored—unwittingly—by his greatest enemies.39 Thus, like the fratricidal Cain, protected from murder by the mark on his forehead, Jews and their law were to be preserved:
Not by bodily death shall the ungodly race of carnal Jews perish. For whoever destroys them in this way shall suffer sevenfold vengeance, that is, shall bring upon himself the sevenfold penalty under which the Jews lie for the crucifixion of Christ. So to the end of the seven days of time, the continued preservation of the Jews will be proof to believing Christians of the subjection merited by those who, in the pride of their kingdom, put the Lord to death.40
For Thomas, however, the Jewish community and the Jewish law were witnesses of a different kind; they demonstrated the possibility of disbelieving Christian tenets. Jewish disbelief revealed the ambiguity of signs, that faith was not a necessary stance but one that might be denied because proofs of faith were not quite compelling enough. Jews witnessed to the possibility of the denial of doctrine, and this doubt, Thomas argues, was seductive, its “carnality” holding a power to persuade, which convinced, in one exemplum, a Dominican brother.41 For Thomas, then, concern about relationships between Jews and Christians expressed itself less through worries about sexual intercourse articulated at Lateran IV than through concerns about the intercourse of evangelization and conversion, practices which, like sex, create new families and genealogies.42 If, as we will see, Thomas actively sought and celebrated the conversion of Jews, he was likewise anxious about the conversion of Christians to what he termed “the Jewish law,” a conversion that, he feared, arose from doubt about core Christian doctrines, particularly the virgin birth. In terms of his pedagogical method, the question that was at stake in light of these fears was how to teach faith without recourse to his favorite strategy: using the outer to prove the inner reality.
The series of exempla that deal with Mary’s virginity opens with an address to Jews. Thomas appeals to the natural science of the bee, noting the “grand marvel” of the virginity of bees, in which state they nevertheless produce multiple offspring. In this marvel, he argues, one finds proof of the virgin birth. “If one sees this in the tiny animals,” he writes, “why do you oppose it, Oh, Jew, of the pregnant virgin?”43 Thomas here locates the doctrine of Mary’s virginity as the foundational site of Jewish doubt from which the rest of their rejection of Christian claims flowed.
The addressee, of course, is not the Jewish reader but the Christian who, Thomas feared, was skeptical of this fundamental doctrinal claim on which the Incarnation and Christ’s two natures rests; the Jewish addressee is a figure for the doubting Christian, whom Thomas attempts to convince by means of an appeal to the natural proof of the bee. The thinness of such a strategy is obvious within the exemplum itself: Mary’s pregnancy does not follow the laws of nature. Thomas’s strategy of naturalizing what is against nature effectively attempts to render the supernatural natural and therefore does not sufficiently close the gap of doubt. In the following exempla, he considers this gap and attempts to forge alternative means of approaching it: he provides indirect proofs of Mary’s status through her miraculous effects; her ontology is to be deduced from her acts. More importantly, however, he considers the centrality of faith in the absence of “many convincing proofs” and argues that it is such faith that gives the capacity to read ambiguous signs, supplementing the defects of the senses.
AGNES, SARAH-GERTRUDE, AND JEWISH CONVERSION IN THE DE APIBUS
A crucial example of Thomas’s attempt to figure alternative understandings of faith is the story of Agnes, one of the longest and most complex in the collection.44 The story, Thomas tells us at the outset, is about the “conversion of a Jew,” although it opens with a long tale about Agnes, a nun who was forced to return home after her monastery was destroyed by war. Upon her return, her father raped her, and she became pregnant. The devil, disguised as a monk, came to Agnes in her despair and told her she must drown the baby in a pool in order that she might hide her state. Agnes, “overcome by the extreme weight of her struggle, … allowed shame to vanquish her maternal love” and drowned the baby. The devil-monk then appeared again and told her that only by committing suicide might she “escape the scandal” that threatened her. This time Agnes, overcome by horror, invoked the Virgin, causing the devil to disappear in a repugnant odor. Agnes then returned to the city and became a wet nurse in the home of a Jewish woman (a transgression of the dictates of Lateran III, which Thomas does not comment on),45 Sarah, and for five years lived with her in penitential grief while sometimes speaking to Sarah of her “faith in Christ and the bounty of the mercy of his mother.” Sarah began to invoke Christ and his mother every day, moved by Agnes’s demeanor and words. Eventually, Agnes went to the pope to receive absolution for the infanticide. When she returned, she visited Sarah and was given a bed for the night. Sarah’s husband—“a Jew,” Thomas specifies—saw “the one who had perverted his wife” and said to himself, “Since the traitoress (infidiatrix) is here, I will kill her.” He then stabbed her near the heart three times. Sarah witnessed his actions and locked herself in her bedroom. While she slept, she had a dream that the Virgin, a “glorious woman accompanied by two small girls,” put healing ointment on Agnes’s wounds.
In the morning, Agnes was gone. The husband believed Sarah had buried the body, while Sarah believed her husband had taken it. Neither spoke of what had happened. Fewer than forty days later, a woman brought greetings to Sarah and her husband from Agnes. In the face of her husband’s disbelief that Agnes was still alive, Sarah countered, “Christ the Lord who died has the power to resurrect the dead.” This profession of faith led her husband to lock Sarah in a room for two years, realizing that she was becoming an “apostate.” While he was traveling, Sarah was able to find refuge in a church and was there baptized, taking the Germanic name Gertrude. At the climax of this lengthy story, Sarah-Gertrude met Agnes again and asked her how she had returned to life. Agnes replied, “Why do you say resuscitate, since I was not dead?” Sarah-Gertrude protested that she had seen her husband “pierce and kill [her] with three cuts of a knife.” Agnes responded that Christ made it so that she was seen and touched (vidisse) in a dream so that the murder only seemed (videbar) to occur. Sarah-Gertrude, dissatisfied with this explanation, seized Agnes’s clothes and found in her flesh “most manifest” (manifestissimas) evidence of three wounds in her scars, evidence later revealed to Conrad, archbishop of Cologne, in order that her holiness might be officially recognized. The Jewish convert here demanded recognition of the signs of holiness on Agnes’s body and, in so doing, provided evidence for a miracle, the same proof that would be used by ecclesiastical powers.
Why, if the stated purpose of the exemplum is to prove Mary’s virginity, does Agnes deny that the Virgin revivified her murdered body? This Marian miracle serves as indirect proof of Mary’s virginity insofar as her power to resurrect Agnes demonstrates both Mary’s special status and her devotion to those who love her. The miracle is, moreover, a repetition of Agnes’s earlier salvation by Mary’s hand. Is Agnes’s protest merely a gesture of humility? Or does she not know the truth? Was her healing so effective that the memory of her painful and humiliating death—which was necessary, it would seem, in order to satisfy the demands of justice despite her prior absolution—is also cleared from her memory?
Agnes’s protest against Sarah-Gertrude’s certainty about Agnes’s miraculous resurrection—a certainty derived from knowledge obtained by both witnessing the murder and again meeting Agnes—raises the question of faith and its relationship to the proof provided by the senses. Here, Thomas is again, in Stephen Justice’s words, baring the “devices” of faith and revealing the vicissitudes of teaching it.46 The interaction between Agnes and Sarah-Gertrude raises the specter of the ambiguity of signs. While Sarah-Gertrude asserted that she “saw” the murder with her own eyes and then later saw Agnes standing alive before her and was, therefore, an eyewitness to an empirical reality, her vision was, in fact, different from those miracles that constitute the proofs in book 1 of the treatise, for she witnessed Agnes’s anointing by Mary in her sleep (in somnis vidit), as in a dream vision. Further complicating our understanding of these events, Agnes told Sarah-Gertrude that what she saw was only a phantasm being murdered. Finally, evidence of the healing seen in this dream (Agnes’s living body) was deferred for many years.
There is a tension between seeming and seeing, and Thomas repeats here the play on words that we have already noted he uses to recount the story of the monastic priest who spied on Lutgard while she was covered in blood; there was the phantasm of Sarah’s dream that was seen (vidisset) and the phantasm in which the body only seemed (videor) to be the recipient of knife wounds. In the first instance, the vision occurred within the liminal space of the dream (which, legally, would not be sufficient for proving a criminal case),47 and in the second, the events may have been understood as miraculous due to the eye being misinformed, the body’s wounds, in fact, illusory.
At the end of the story, Sarah-Gertrude’s revelation of the scars on her former wet nurse’s body trumps Agnes’s explanation, providing certain proof of the reality of the husband’s knife, the scars’ physicality standing in direct contrast to the ambiguous phantasms of the dream and the illusion. The evidence of the scars, however, does not remove the fact that Agnes—an exemplar of redemption in the tale—either lied or was ignorant of events that occurred. The scars confirm Sarah-Gertrude’s dream and Mary’s miraculous powers but not Agnes’s account of events. Moreover, the definitive evidence that proves the proper understanding of the events that occurred (the scars), is revealed only after Sarah-Gertrude acts on phantasmal indicators of her dream, first by believing the word of the pilgrim who arrives with Agnes’s greeting and then in her baptism, both of which happen before she again encounters Agnes. Sarah-Gertrude, in other words, believes the questionable proof of the dream vision and uses her discretion to understand and act on what she has seen as phantasm.
Thomas, here, I would argue, is probing the limits of rationalism by showing the diverse ways in which signs might appear, not only as clearly evident empirical proofs but as dreams, illusions, and as the devil-monk shows, lies. Proof of Mary’s power (and therefore her virginity) could only be believed through an act of discretion that interpreted a dream vision. Through discernment of the ambiguous signs of her dream, Sarah-Gertrude is able to move through obscurity and ambivalence in order to uncover Christian truth. She thus demonstrates the possibility of the convertibility of the literal into the spiritual in her conversion from “carnal” Judaism to “spiritual” Christianity, a conversion based on the proper interpretation of signs.
In this example of conversion, Thomas provides a textual instance of what Sarah Lipton has found to be a common mode of pictorially figuring Jewish women from the late eleventh century. She notes that “Gothic” art typically depicts Jewish women as “visually indeterminate,” able to be recognized as Jewish only by the context of the painting.48 In contrast, in works from this same period, male Jews are “endowed with increasingly graphic marks of identity,” a caricature that includes the long-lived hooked nose.49 The contrast between the representation of Jewish men and women, Lipton argues, is a manifestation of the dual attitude toward Jewishness and the ambivalence aroused by the doctrine of Jewish witness. On the one hand, male Jews represent a blind adherence to the old faith, epitomizing “crucial aspects of Jewish ‘testimony’ as articulated by high medieval theologians: its rigid obsolescence, its blind literalism, and the intractability of its law.”50 The “ugliness” of the male Jew is proof that he lacks understanding of the law and is subject to a “consequent carnality and perfidy.”51 The Jewess, on the other hand, signifies the potential for Jewish conversion, and her “face and body encode receptivity to dominance and potential for change.”52 Her carnality, according to medieval gender theory, already assumed by virtue of her sex, is not that of a legalistic literalism but of “pliability and passion.” Thus, Jewish women are often portrayed, as is Sarah by Thomas, in classically female roles, including giving birth, being a “helpless and resigned victim of fate and her husband’s will,” and loving children. Jewish women also, Lipton argues—again with great resonance for Thomas’s portrayal of Sarah—exercise “the ultimate female prerogative,” namely, change.53 Because they bear witness to the possibility that Christian doctrine will persuade even its most long-lived detractors and that, at the end of days, all Jews will convert, Jewish women are often portrayed in markedly sympathetic ways in many Marian miracle collections.
Both Sarah and her spouse are carnal, but differently so. Sarah-Gertrude’s carnality bears witness to and supports that which exceeds it. Her unnamed husband, in his refusal to believe Agnes’s witness and in his murderous actions, signifies the danger of a stubborn literalism, bearing witness to an intransigent Jewish carnality that refuses conversion. Like Origen, Thomas transfigures (female) Jewishness that it might serve his project of Christian teaching. Sarah-Gertrude’s empiricism supports Agnes’s dematerialized, improbable account. Through Sarah-Gertrude, Thomas affirms the salience of the literal as proof while, through Agnes, he affirms the irreducibility of the claims of faith.
The male Jew here figures the danger and contamination of difference, of the possibility of a carnal doubt that undoes genealogical lines and communal integrity. The husband embodies the doubt of Christians that would, were it to spread, disintegrate the unity of the social order.
It is not surprising that a series of exempla concerning Jewish conversion address the problem of Mary’s virginity, for it is her flesh—its purity guaranteed by its virginal status—that gives flesh to the Word, that supplies the corpus Christi. Mary’s virginity structurally parallels the problem of Transubstantiation, the doctrine that was officially declared at Lateran IV, the council that simultaneously formulated official strictures against Jews along with other key canons aimed at forging Christianitas, a community united by conformity of belief and practice. The problem in both doctrines is how to understand the production of God’s body in a period when that body is identified with the social body in increasingly literal ways, an identification that leaves little room for those who do not find their proper place within such an organism.54 The possibility of the social body of Christendom rests on the counterfactual event of the virginal maternal.
To state the problem another way, in the Annunciation, Christ is conceived under odd metaphysical circumstances, just as in the Eucharist the elements are transubstantiated under odd metaphysical circumstances. In both cases, the material is transformed, becoming a bearer of invisible divinity, even as this divinity is also bodily. Mary, a woman whose Jewishness continued to be marked in medieval Christian texts and yet whose pure flesh was the very flesh given to God,55 thus becomes the “site [at] which cultural tensions are negotiated,”56 significantly, tensions between Jew and Christian, the material and spiritual, engendered by the thirteenth-century dream of universalism.57 Mary’s body not only reweaves the material and spiritual in the Christian imaginary—having been sundered by that same imaginary—but in the Incarnation: “that moment that the Word becomes flesh in Mary’s womb” marks “the movement of supersession, that shift from Jewish to Christian.”58
With faith, the reader who believes in Mary’s virginity will be, Thomas assumes, transfused with the seed of the Holy Spirit and will become, like Mary, a bearer of Christ, producing again the body of God, and producing in turn a social body of Christians loyal to the church, partakers in the same sacrament, defined over and against the unfaith and literalism of doubting Jews.59 Belief in Mary’s virginity undergirds the doctrine of the Incarnation, which holds that the Logos took up pure flesh while remaining fully divine. Such beliefs informed and infused practices, including acts of Eucharistic reception and confession, both of which were required of the laity annually after 1215 and both of which necessitated priestly mediation. In other words, belief in Mary’s virginity and the Incarnation were crucial for the reinforcement of social hierarchies that were organized around ecclesiastical structures. The subjects of Christendom were formed in relation to church power, and this power aimed to have the body of Christianitas unified around a head, Christ; his vicar, the pope; and the ecclesiastical hierarchy that flowed from it.
The peculiar rhetorical power of exempla as material witnesses to immaterial truths is not, however, enough to guarantee faith in maternal virginity and the doctrines based upon it. Readers must also learn the skill and virtue of discretion along with a belief that arises in the absence of proofs, a discretion that adjudicates and spiritualizes surfaces to reveal what is hidden beneath them. The problem with teaching by exempla, then, is that it does not escape the fundamental difficulty of believing in the doctrine of the virgin birth, namely that surfaces do not necessarily reveal depths.
In book 1, Thomas appeals, without ambivalence, to bodily evidence of supernatural realities, holding that the material can manifest the immaterial and invisible in a straightforward and easily interpretable way. The materiality of the example is a means of proving certain claims of faith, rendering belief within the terms of empirical reality. However, in book 2, Thomas calls into question such a rhetorical strategy, suggesting that proofs must, in certain crucial instances, be supplemented by a faith that makes up for a defect in the senses. The supplementation of faith is not an easy path, and Thomas seems aware of the vulnerability of a claim that one must learn faith in order to compensate for a sensible deficiency. Although he seeks the certainty of his audience by appealing to the “many divine proofs” of miracle, using nature to reveal and verify what is against nature, thereby easing the fears and doubts of his readers and consolidating communal boundaries through the loyalties of faith, in the end he suggests that faith rests on the much more vulnerable act of the discretion of the individual (not the cleric, who, in the Agnes exemplum, relied on lay testimony), and that the miracle is not always an unambiguous sign but rather rests on rationally inexplicable ground. The solution ultimately offered to the problem of the strange surface is to hold up as exemplars of the faith those who practice discretion rather than recourse to clerical fiat.
The “technologies of visibility” that Thomas’s hagiographical theology uses in order to defend improbable doctrinal claims are a part of a larger Christian project of creating what Michel de Certeau has called substitutionary bodies, which replace the lost body of Christ. These substitutions arise, he argues, from the need to render corporeal what is physically absent through a series of annunciations in which words become flesh.60 Hagiographical figuration of holy persons occurs within the nexus of these substitutionary bodies, including the church as the corpus mysticum christi, doctrine, and sacraments. However, Thomas shows in De apibus the ways in which the borders of visible and invisible, the probative and impossible, are unstable and how passage between them is not guaranteed by the rhetorical strategies of vivid figuration of particular lives. This instability leaves the friar’s thirteenth-century dream of universal conversion primarily in the hands of a didactic method whose force is indeterminate and ambiguous, if nevertheless profoundly dangerous in its effects on Jewish lives.61 Thomas, as a Dominican at the forefront of executing such a dream by means of such hagiographical teaching, writes from a deep sense of threat in the face of Jewish disbelief and Cathar heresy. His works, negotiating the uncertain terrain of the movement from the visible to the invisible, the literal to the figural, address crucial theological issues of his day, issues that are implicated in the relationship between Jews and Christians, women and men.