Flesh Made Word

Medieval Women Mystics, Writing, and the Incarnation

Emily A. Holmes

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781602587533
• eBook ISBN: 9781481301091
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

For most of Christian history, the incarnation designated Christ as God made man. The obvious connection between God and the male body too often excluded women and the female body. In Flesh Made Word, Emily A. Holmes displays how medieval women writers expanded traditional theology through the incarnational practice of writing. Holmes draws inspiration for feminist theology from the writings of these medieval women mystics as well as French feminist philosophers of écriture féminine . The female body is then prioritized in feminist Christology, rather than circumvented. Flesh Made Word is a fresh, inclusive theology of the incarnation.

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ATTENDING TO WORD AND FLESH

The wisdom recovered and developed by diverse feminist theologians makes it possible to interpret the incarnation inclusively, as extending beyond the historical body of Jesus. Christ is incarnate in a multiplicity of bodies, wherever the hungry are fed, justice is pursued, and love is shared. Careful attention must be given to the particularity of Jesus’ historical body, including his maleness, but this particularity initiates a wider incarnation of Christ wherever liberation, justice, compassion, and Wisdom appear. Christ is present in diverse bodies today, always marked by the particularity of multiple differences. Feminist and womanist theologians have found a remarkable variety of creative ways to make Christology more inclusive of women, indeed, of all persons in their embodied differences.

Still, the poetic and traditional language of the incarnation in the prologue to the Gospel of John beckons: “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Both the language of logos and the language of sarx were shaped and received within a patriarchal and androcentric context, and so they must be handled with caution. That context has distorted Christian anthropology, theology, and especially Christology through an androcentric interpretation of both word and flesh. But instead of rejecting the traditional language of the incarnation, of “Word” and “flesh,” in favor of more innovative gestures of inclusion, new interpretations of these key terms are both possible and necessary. Without careful attention to the evocative symbols of “Word” and “flesh,” to the way they have functioned to exclude women, and to the inclusive possibilities latent within these very terms, we risk leaving a narrow incarnation intact. If we develop our inclusive Christologies too quickly in other directions, we risk conceding traditional language—that the word is indeed consubstantial with “the Father,” for instance; or that Logos is ideally reflected in the perfect rationality and control of a male ruler; or that the male flesh of the historical body of Jesus is “more noble” than other flesh. Without attention to the Johannine language of word and flesh, and the possibilities for locating difference within these very terms, our understanding of the incarnation remains partial and incomplete. This language remains a powerful site for feminist intervention. It is worth contemplating, therefore, the Word who became flesh and lived among us.

Inclusive possibilities emerge from inhabiting the traditional language of Word and flesh. In the writings of the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, logos resonates with the philosophical terms of both Sophia-Wisdom and Nous-Mind, making the logos present to some degree in each person through creation and particularly through reason.¹ When logos is translated as “Word,” it functions as a multivalent and suggestive symbol for Christians. It is the Word of God spoken at creation, incarnate in Jesus, written in scripture, proclaimed in the gospel, preached and interpreted by unfolding traditions. The Christian “Word” is ambiguously both a person and a text, and it encompasses both speech and writing.² As such, it carries a rich range of meaning. Of particular interest is the way in which Word can signify what we frequently name “the written word,” or writing itself: in scripture and in the act and production of writing.

In Paul’s writings, “flesh” (sarx) has the connotation of sinful human nature (Rom 8:4-8, Gal 5:16ff.), which has been the source of much suspicion of the body in Christian history. But in the prologue to John’s gospel, flesh indicates the humanity assumed by the Word and positively connotes the goodness of the human body. Against docetic interpretations of Christ, John insists on the fleshiness of the divine Word. The Word was not transformed into flesh (so that it was no longer divine Word—that is, became mere flesh), but rather became human, in the flesh.³ “Flesh” here functions metonymically to signify the entire human being, but with a particular emphasis on the goodness of Jesus’ body as a fully embodied, fully human divine being. That embodiment included his male sex and sexuality, along with his other particular bodily characteristics of race, ethnicity, size, language, and so on. The message of “flesh” in the incarnation is, in Elizabeth Johnson’s words, the insight of “the transcendent God’s capacity for embodiment, divine passion for liberation, and the constitutive nature of relation.”⁴ The flesh of the incarnation is “not only a concession to our bodily life, but a vindication of it.”⁵ The doctrine of the incarnation resonates with the feminist value of embodiment: God fully participates in human bodiliness. And bodiliness connects the transcendent mystery of God to place, time, history, birth and death, pleasure and pain, joy and suffering.⁶

The problem for the traditional understanding of the incarnation, however, is that human flesh comes in at least two sexes, male and female.⁷ Sexual dimorphism is what feminist theorists mean by the concept of sexual difference: the human species has evolved in at least two forms of being. When that ontological sexual difference is further marked by differences of race, ability, size, and sexuality, and interpreted through innumerable cultural and social systems, we can see that human flesh is irreducibly diverse, shaped by a multiplicity of differences that are the product of both evolution (sexual selection and genetic variation) and social construction. Our doctrine of incarnation, Word made flesh, ought to reflect the diversity of flesh.

Flesh is never just one thing assumed by the Word once and for all. In Laurel Schneider’s sharp description, it is promiscuous. “Flesh is indiscriminate in its porous interconnection with everything, and it is never, at any level, absolutely unified. To insist upon a solitary incarnate moment is to betray the very fleshiness of flesh, its innate promiscuity, pesky shiftiness, and resilient interruptions of sense. A solitary incarnation is, in other words, not incarnation at all but a disembodiment: a denial of the flesh that in its very cellular structure of integration, disintegration, and passage is always re-forming, dispersing, and returning.”⁸ Jesus’ own body was intermingled with the flesh of his mother in utero and while breastfeeding; he incorporated the flesh of the animals he ate; his flesh mingled with the flesh of the people he touched, shared meals with, and healed, at times through the intimacy of his own spit. Human flesh, including the flesh of Jesus, is indiscriminate; it is inherently promiscuous.⁹ From the perspective of flesh, the incarnation cannot be limited to the unique body of Jesus.

Nor can the Word be limited to the second person of the Trinity. In the histories of Hellenistic Jewish and Christian theologies, “Word” includes connotations of the divine figure of Wisdom-Sophia and Mind-Nous. The Word was with God in the beginning and is the principle of creation. The Word is incarnate in Christ, encountered in scripture, read, proclaimed, preached, and interpreted. It is both spoken and written. The Word is creative and productive; it is multiple, generative of other words. For this reason, Margaret Miles describes the history of Christianity as the story of incarnate words, of unfolding interpretations of the meaning of the incarnation for embodied religious beliefs and practices.¹⁰

Neither Word nor flesh can be contained or limited to the unique person of Jesus Christ. The symbol gives rise to thought: both terms push back against reduction, straining to multiply beyond their borders. The multiplicity contained within “Word” and “flesh”—their plurality and restiveness—hints at inclusive possibilities within the most traditional language of the incarnation. To approach the incarnation from the perspective of women, we have to return to these evocative terms, here where Word and flesh meet.

The biblical connection of divine Word with human flesh raises metaphysical questions, however, in the Greek philosophical system in which early Christian thought took shape. Human and divine, the material and the spiritual, were thought to be opposed and mutually exclusive in ways that make incarnation seem paradoxical and absurd. If God is conceived as an entity that is juxtaposed with another entity, the humanity of Jesus, it is difficult to make sense of the incarnation, which appears only as a scandal to reason. The problem arises from dualistic and essentialist thinking, a mental habit that conceives everything in terms of identity and opposition—subject and object, same and other.¹¹ But this way of thinking is a category mistake when applied to divinity, which is characterized by self-giving love rather than being. Church councils tried to clarify the matter of the incarnation with increasing precision before settling on the hypostatic union described in the Chalcedonian definition. Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, consubstantial with the Father with respect to his divinity and consubstantial with human beings with respect to his humanity, one person “recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” between the two. This technical theological definition hardly conveys the poetic language of the prologue, but it wisely refrains from answering the question of what is meant by divinity or, for that matter, humanity. Nor does it attempt to explain how these two are conjoined in Christ—merely that they must be.¹²

Taking the incarnation out of the context of dualistic and essentialist metaphysics and thinking it through the poetic terms of Word and flesh underscore the message of the Gospels, the good news of the embodiment of God and its salutary effect on human liberation. Looking at the incarnation this way, the story of Jesus is as much about the flesh becoming word as it is the Word made flesh. This perspective coincides with the development of feminist theologies, which emphasize experience and embodiment and see the body as the site of revelation.¹³ Flesh speaks theologically as women’s bodies gain sacramental significance.¹⁴ A feminist interpretation of the incarnation begins by interrogating, not how Word became flesh, but how female flesh becomes divine word.

Practicing the Incarnation

The incarnation is the heart of the Christian good news: God with us, incarnate in our world, our flesh. This good news overturns social hierarchies and founds a community based on love and the recognition of the divine image in each person: “we are all Christ.”¹⁵ Many contemporary feminists and womanists argue as much, but they were not the first women to do so. Looking back within the history of Christian theology, we can find precedent for this broad and inclusive interpretation of the incarnation in the writings of the medieval women mystics. These theologians provide an alternative source for a radically inclusive incarnation from within neglected strands of the Christian tradition. Medieval women mystics use traditional categories of “word” and “flesh” to describe the incarnation but they effortlessly extend it to other bodies, making it inclusive of women’s flesh and boldly claiming their share in it. They thereby provide important resources for constructive feminist theology today.

The theme of incarnation in the writings of medieval women reveals how they interpreted it as authorization for their own spiritual writing practices. In their texts, the incarnation emerges as an inverted paradigm for their theological writing: because the Word of God became flesh for them, their flesh in turn becomes divine word through mystical writing and speech. Women such as Hadewijch of Brabant, Angela of Foligno, and Marguerite Porete extend the significance of the incarnation from Christ’s body to other bodies: Mary’s body, the bodies of poets and mystics, the “annihilated soul,” and even their composed books. Their writings support an inclusive understanding of the incarnation: beginning with the embodiment of God in Jesus Christ, the incarnation extends to other bodies that live into the mystery of the incarnation through spiritual practices in which word and flesh meet.¹⁶ Principal among these is the practice of writing undertaken by the medieval women theologians in which their flesh becomes word through writing and speech.

In what follows, an examination of the writings of three medieval women mystics supports the view that the incarnation is not a once and for all event but an ongoing embodiment of the divine. The incarnation takes place in our bodies, our flesh, through our spiritual and ethical practices. Following the medieval women writers, the way we live into and accomplish our participation in the incarnation is through these practices and, paradigmatically, the practice of writing through which flesh becomes word. Considering the incarnation in terms of practices might help to escape some of the metaphysical difficulties that have made the doctrine so harmful to women’s full representation within the church. More importantly, it returns us to the ethical and spiritual practices of Jesus’ own historical body in his prophetic praxis and ministry. The spiritual practice of writing is a paradigmatic way of participating in the incarnation because of the visible way in which the traditional Johannine terms of “word” and “flesh” function within it. But more broadly conceived, all embodied ethical and spiritual practices that seek justice and the love of God and neighbor are ways of living into the incarnation of Christ. Through our practices we embody Christ in the world; they are the means of our own divinization, of our flesh reaching for its divine word.

The incarnation authorized the writing practices of medieval women mystics through a form of the divine exchange: God became flesh so that their flesh might become embodied divine word. Their texts anticipate the work of contemporary feminists in thinking the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Attending to Word and Flesh
• 2 Hadewijch of Brabant and the Mother of Love
• 3 Angela of Foligno Writing the Body of Christ
• 4 Writing Annihilation with Marguerite Porete
• 5 Transcendence Incarnate
• Bibliography
• Index