The Masculine Motherhood of Christ

I've been reading Janina Ramirez' Femina. 
It's a fantastic book, giving a voice to and raising awareness of medieval women. It also has a beautiful cover that just happens to look like this: 

Dr Ramirez' book can be purchased(not on Amazon!) here

Well, I say 'just happens'. 

There's nothing coincidental about Hildegard of Bingen's Cosmic Egg. 

(And that is one of The Best Lines I've ever written)

Indeed, many medieval images of Christ's side wound hold a similar shape:

Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg, Wound (Wikimedia Commons)

"Why?" I hear you ask.
"Hehe" I hear you say.

Let's discuss... (but, before we do, do be aware of these content warnings: Crucifixion, anorexia, death) 

But first, Affective Piety.

It's helpful to begin this discussion of Christ and Motherhood with a discussion of Affective Piety: a devotion to Christianity with particular focus on Christ's humanity, manifesting largely in focus on his nativity and death. Through this, there is a natural interest in the Virgin Mary, as Christ's human mother who bears him raises him and watches him die. The images and ideas conjured up by this type of devotion are largely graphic and focus on the feelings that arise at the thought of Christ's dying.

It is important to begin here, because in affective piety, Christ often becomes configured as holding a particular role in an individuals' life, from the ideal lover, willing to give everything to support their happiness*, to mother: and it is here that this post finds its topic. 

*the 14th century hermit, Richard Rolle  developed, from his affective piety 'a model of par armours in which the spouse, Christ, is the most pleasing and fulfilling lover possible.' (1)

The Pietà (Wikimedia Commons)
A topic of Christian art depicting the Virgin Mary, 
holding her crucified son, resemblant of the baby who 
once lay in her arms.

Motherhood, labour and the Saviour

Mystic, anchorite girlboss, Julian of Norwich, writes that: 

'we be doubel of Gods making...Oure substance is the hyer perty which we have in oure fader God almighty. And the seconde person of the trinite is oure moder [mother] in kind in oure substantial making, in whom we be grounded and roted, and he is oure moder of mercy in oure sensualite taking'. (2)

In other words, while God, in the Trinity, configures as Father, the incarnate son is our mother. Such a comparison is sustained by her reasoning:

'in mercy he reformeth us and restoreth, and by the vertu of his passion, his deth and uprising oneth us to oure substance... in oure moder of mercy we have our reforming and oure restoring' (3).

Julian compares the Passion of Christ to the agony of childbirth, saying that our earthly mothers bear us in pain, and often through death. The point of comparison is that both are generative pains: mothers labour, and undergo terrible pain, and the threat of death (very real in Julian's time in a way that many of us probably cannot imagine now), in order that we might have life. Similarly, in agony on the Cross, Jesus dies so that we all might live. 

The human Christ uses his divine body a vessel so that we all might have a chance of life. 

Julian ultimately turns this into the quasi-heretical belief that the Christian Divine is all-forgiving, contrary to what the medieval Catholic church might have you believe. it is not that Christ resembles a mother, but that motherhood resembles the love of Christ. Having created a child out of her own body, the mother cannot help but love it, no matter its mistakes, nor its sins. 

Christ's Side Wound and the Cosmic Egg

No, it isn't a new Indie bandname, but a correlation that takes us back to Hildegard of Bingen.

It is probably (hopefully) becoming clearer now, why Christ's side wound may have been configured in art as it was.

If Christ's Passion was a form of masculinised childbirth, then the side wound is representative of (ahem) the place that we all come from, a physical place where blood and life sprang from. 

Indeed, in some rather on-the-nose, horrifyingly Alien-esque pictures, some medieval artists took it upon themselves to visually explain this metaphor...

Sourced via Medium , a blog post by Emily Swan.

And now, 'why would you say that?'

Having explained where the correlation of Christ, Childbirth and yonic side wounds, I think it's important that I now explain why I care enough about such a topic to sully my google search history for this blog post.

What is the relevance?

The formative work on this topic was done by Caroline Walker Bynum, who in a collection of essays in the 1980s, discussed Jesus as Mother. She is able to paint a picture of how Christianity, and practises therin, are gendered. 

She points to the ways in which affective piety was, in many ways, a feminised form of devotion, whereby women experienced medieval Christianity in a different way to their male counterparts, and this distinction lies in the bodily experience of both Christ, and his devotees:

'women mystics were more likely than men to receive graphically physical visions of God; both men and women were inclined to attribute to women and encourage in them intense asceticisms and ecstasies. Moreover the most bizzare bodily occurences associated with women (e.g. stigmata, incorruptibility of the cadaver in death, mystical lactations and pregnancies, catatonic trances, ecstatic nosebleeds, miraculous anorexia, eating and drinking pus, visions of bleeding hosts).' (4)

We need only return to Julian, whose Christ as Mother theory came from her sickbed visions, or to her Norfolk contemporary, Margery Kempe, who would walk the streets, violently sobbing at the very thought of the dying Christ, and experiencing visions in which she felt Christ sit at the bottom of her bed. 

Man, I feel like a woman

From Caroline Walker-Bynum's work has sprung the theroy that to perform compassion is to feel like a woman. Christ's forgiving nature is compassionate in a way that allegorises a mother. In many ways, the takeaway from the above women, and from the feminisation of affective piety, is to see Christ as having traits of both masculinity and femininity. Importantly, though, neither of these aspects of his character compromises the other. 

The distinction - if indeed there is a specific distinction - between masculinity, femininity and everything in between is of course a topic that is still the basis of much discussion, but Christ as Mother indicates that it has been at the centre of even theology for centuries. 

Christ is able to be typically masculine. Julian never edits the use of he/him pronouns, even as she discusses his motherhood. She never sees him as anything other than a man, only she asserts that it is his ability to adopt the typically feminine attributes of forgiveness, selfless suffering and generative pain, that ultimately saves humanity: it is his gendered fluidity that allows him to encapsulate humanity as a whole. 

He is a hero, he is a man, and he is able to be sensitive, 'feminine' and contain a multitude of allegories. 

And all that from a cosmic egg. 

Reading List

(1) Clare Davidson, ‘Erotic devotion: Richard Rolle’s “The Form of Living”’, Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, 20.3, (University of Western Australia, 2015), 1-13, 1

(2) Julian of Norwich, ‘A Revelation of Love, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 308-9.

(3) Ibid, 309.

(4) Caroline Walker Bynum, "The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages', Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, (New York:Zone Books, 1992), 181-238, 194.