Foundations for an erotic christology: Bernard of Clairvaux on Jesus as "tender lover"

MARK S. BURROWS*

In his recent study The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, Octavio Paz contends that

In the heart of nature, humans have created for themselves a world apart, composed of this entirety of practices, institutions, rites, ideas, and artifacts that we call culture. By origin, eroticism is sex, nature; by its being a human creation and by its functions in society, it is culture. One of the main aims of eroticism is to take sex and make a place for it in society.l

In defining what he means by "eroticism," he goes on to say that it is

essentially desire: a shot fired in the direction of a world beyond . . [E]roticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness.... [Thus] it is only natural that the mystic and the erotic poets should use similar language: there are not many ways to express the inexpressible. But their difference leaps to the eye: in love the object is a mortal being, while in mystical experience it is a timeless being who momentarily assumes a form.... The obverse and reverse sides of the same phenomenon: the lover sees and touches a presence; the mystic contemplates an apparition.2

Paz argues that eroticism as "instinct" is something like "a volcano and any one of its eruptions can bury society under a violent flow of blood and semen."3 "Eros can lead us astray," he concludes, "mak[ing] us fall into the swamp of concupiscence and the pit of the libertine; it can also ennoble and raise us to the loftiest contemplation."4 It is a potent and ambivalent force, and thus eroticism must be channeled, guided by rules that shape its energy, so that some ordered form of "culture" might emerge from the undifferentiated power of "nature."5

The ambivalence of eros has an ancient tradition, anchored as it is at the heart of Plato's dialogues. Eros is the "tyrant" in the Republic,6 but elsewhere stands as the human striving for wholeness, the love of beauty inherent in the soul, "need mitigated by a presentiment of completeness."7 This philosophical ambivalence finds continuing expression in early and medieval theology, particularly in those voices shaped to some extent by the Platonic thought-world as was increasingly the case in the intellectual development of medieval monastic thought. It is this tradition that I here explore, focusing upon one dominant voice in this culture-that of Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153)-and, more specifically, his contribution to the tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs which dominated monastic theology in this period.s

Of course, a modern observer of this particular expression of medieval intellectual life might well wonder, "Why eros?" or, "Why the Song of Songs?" Why should this theme develop in monastic communities devoted to an ascetic ideal? It is understandable but not altogether accurate for us moderni to interpret such writings as the product of sublimation, the stubborn and severe renunciation of sex provoked by the monastic suspicion of the body. Such an approach surely reveals much about modern post-Freudian sensibilities, but offers less help than we might suppose in unraveling the complex milieu of monastic literature. In any event, this is neither my own disposition as a reader of these historical sources nor the focus of this essay. My interest appeals to quite different questions, questions relating above all to how the Song of Songs functioned as the theological matrix for the shaping of a particular form of "culture," a development that centers upon the erotic Christology that emerged at the heart of the monastic reading of this biblical text. Beneath this question lies another of equal significance which can only be touched upon here: What were the cultural movements-the mentality-emerging during the twelfth century that stimulated Cistercian readers of this biblical text, in contrast to earlier monastic readings, to interpret carnality with such positive emphasis?9 Or, in Paz's language, how did the vocabulary and imagery of this text function for Bernard as the stimulus for "the loftiest contemplation" (Paz) which he reached through an articulate grammar of erotic experience?

The substance of this study draws upon Bernard's sermons on the Song, but I do so in conversation with recent feminist contributions to the discussion of Christology.lo As readers of this literature might imagine, this conversation has not been without rough edges and apparently impassible barriers to dialogue. For the central challenge posed by feminist re-readings often allows for little receptivity to texts emerging out of the literary culture of the medieval, European church to which Bernard belonged, particularly those that seem to endorse a movement toward passivity, unknowing, or even "non-experience." Yet recent historical studies of medieval culture in particular have offered a more nuanced appreciation of medieval anthropology, particularly in noticing that this tradition contains individual voices and trajectories that were critical if not subversive of dominant patriarchal trends.ll Latet dolus in generalibus: it no longer seems plausible to suggest that monastic theologians beckon us down a path of unswerving domination of the weak and repression of the body. This tradition is rather itself a complex bundle of contradictions, at least when viewed from a modern vantage point, in which coercion and persuasion, obedience and dissent, exist in deliberate and paradoxical union. Indeed, I shall here argue that one need not simply dismiss this tradition as uniformly repressive, and turn to modern voices in the quest for what one feminist reading has called a "Jesus of erotic power."12