Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature
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As a theologian, then, despite his “innovations,” he presents himself as working within a traditional doctrinal mode, i.e., basing his argu- ments on an authoritative framework, and indeed his text is imbuedwith citations from the Old Testament and the Epistles of Saint Paul.46
He nonetheless strays often into the imagistic mode in an attempt to produce a more shocking, and more memorable, effect on the reader.47
Indeed, while setting out biblical injunctions against sodomy, he dips frequently into the semantic field of disease and contagion, so as to appeal to the sensual and visual realms. Sodomy is a “deadly wound reeking in the very body of Holy Church” (14).48 It is equated to gon- orrhea, and leprosy (26, 37), to a “vice that . . . slays modesty, strangles chastity, and slaughters virginity with a knife dipped in the filthiest poi- son.” It “defiles all things, sullies all things, pollutes all things; and . . . it allows nothing to be pure, nothing to be spotless, nothing to be clean.” It does not just “corrupt”; it “pollutes” (27), reeks and sickens.49
The body thus sickened in Peter’s work flits uneasily from col- lective to singular, from institutional to private. The “mother of all churches . . . bathed in the utter brilliance that Truth imparts” (5), is also the polluted body that harbors the deadly and reeking wound of sodomy (14). Thus, in violating the body of the Church, the sodomite violates the collective body, the identity from which he has now been banished, his former self. As in Alain de Lille’s De planctu, written a cen- tury later, the sodomitical act is seen as an attack on a collective body of males which is, nonetheless, referred to as feminine – Mother Nature and Mother Church. This is, in fact, one of the few allusions to women one finds in the Liber Gomorrhianus, other than a brief discussion of the relative wickedness of raping nuns and goddaughters as opposed to animals, or other males. Femininity acts then both as a wall which demarcates the male collective, a sort of womb which gives structure to the community but which has no place within, and as the devouring she-monster which attacks that wall and rapes the men within, the very embodiment of sodomy itself:
This utterly diseased Queen of Sodom renders him who obeys the laws of her tyranny infamous to men and odious to God. She mobilizes him in the militia of the evil spirit and forces him to fight unspeakable wars against God. She detaches the unhappy soul from the company of the angels and, depriving it of its excellence, takes it captive under her domineering yoke. She strips her knights of the armor of virtue, exposing them to be pierced by the spears of every vice. She humiliatesher slave in the church and condemns him in court; she defiles him in secret and dishonors him in public; she gnaws at this conscience like a worm and consumes his flesh like fire.50
We then see the underside of this devouring femininity – sodomy as woman – in the gender-switching imagery used to characterize the sodomite, once he has been infected:
Truly the daughter of my people has suffered a grievous injury, because a soul that had been the daughter of Holy Church has been cruelly wounded by the enemy of the human race with the shaft of impurity. She who had once been mildly and gently nourished on the milk of sacred wisdom at the court of the eternal king, is now viciously infected with the poison of lust and lies rigid and distended in the sulphurous ashes of Gomorrah.51
Peter essentially erases femininity by incorporating it within the mas- culine, as when he alludes to the rigid and distended phallus of the raped, feminine because polluted, victim; but he also “heterosexualizes” the rape. The allegorical figure of Sodomy is not satisfied just to invade the particular subject; she attempts as well to “destroy the walls of our heav- enly fatherland and . . . rebuild the defenses of Sodom that were razed by fire” (30–31). This same phallic female is, however, also equated to the maternal male. Listen to how Peter, in one of his sermons, colonizes the female womb by placing it within the male body of the faithful:
we must consider, dearly beloved, what a dignity is ours, and what a likeness there is between us and Mary. Mary conceived Christ in her bodily womb, and we bear Him about in the womb of our mind. Mary fed Christ when she gave milk from her breasts to His tender lips; and we feed Him with the varied delights of our good works.52
Thus Sodomy disrupts gender, corrupts within a community at the same time that it batters at the walls that enclose it; reminding us that the saintly body is already and always a sexual body. Just as the virtuous hermit (41) is condemned for imagining that corruption can be elim- inated without violence (he mistakenly assumes that “whenever he is excited by passion . . . he should eject semen by handling his organ, just as if he were blowing his nose” [41]),53 so the Church hierarchy iswrong in thinking that it can simply eject the impulses of the sinners through penance – simple blood-letting – without having to cut-off completely, even murder, the offending party. Peter is insistent that if even one member within the collective is corrupted, then “the whole body together with the soul is afterwards tortured forever in a dreadful holocaust” (47).54 Thus the sodomite is an agent of pollution which, contagion-like, drags others along with itself to destruction (6).55 His crime is incestuous, an unnatural offence against the group as well as the individual, as he preys on members of the community who are his own spiritual “sons.”56
Up to this point, we could probably say that Damian thinks of sexual identities entirely in terms of acts: that sodomites are simply those who perform any of the four acts outlined in the first section of the Liber Gomorrhianus. Yet he does imply throughout the rest of his discussion that sodomites are sodomites even after the acts have been completed, during confession, and when they associate with others of their kind. He assumes that such men are recognizable to one another while escaping the notice of most and that they can therefore more easily dissolve within the larger community and infiltrate even the highest echelons of power. They are thus to be feared as unnatural and diabolical because they successfully defy the Law. Like Satan, they seek to insinuate themselves, through illicit entry, into the body of Christ. Because of his spiritual blindness, the sodomite cannot “recognize the entrance that is obviously right before him or even that the door is Christ (as he himself says: ‘I am the door’ [John 10.9, 13]).”57 He must therefore attempt “violently to break in on angels” through “some impassable obstacle of the wall” rather than through “the obvious gateway” (14).58
Peter has specific recommendations on punishment: public flogging, loss of tonsure, besmirching with spittle, confinement in prison, iron chains, and a diet of barley bread suitable only for a horse or mule. These are to be followed by a less conspicuous regime:
a further six months living in a small segregated courtyard in the custody of a spiritual elder, kept busy with manual labor and prayer, subjected to vigils and prayers, forced to walk at all times in the com- pany of two spiritual brothers, never again allowed to associate with young men for purposes of improper conversation or advice.59 (29)To return to the question of how sodomites are to recognize them- selves in Peter’s characterization: “if sodomites of themselves are unable to discern their own identity, they may at least be enlightened by those with whom they are assigned to a common confinement for prayer” (28).60 Thus it is that the sodomite might only come to know himself as a sodomite once he has been told as much by others facing the same accusation and punishment. Peter’s slip here is not negligible: if the sinner does not recognize himself as a sinner, how can he have sinned? His solution is performative: call the sinner a sinner and he is a sinner. Subject him to ritualistic penance in the form of community ostracism and he will soon embrace the identity and do penance.
With all this talk about metaphorical bodies, how does Damian relate religiosity to corporeality? How do the saintly bodies produced from within the discipline form a community? From a not altogether obvious but nonetheless appropriate source, Leo Bersani sheds some light:
Societies defined by those structures (of dominance and submission) both disguise and reroute the satisfactions, but their superficially self- preser
vative subterfuges can hardly liberate them from the aegis of the death drive. S/M lifts a social repression in laying bare the reality behind the subterfuges, but in its open embrace of the structures themselves and its undisguised appetite for the ecstasy they promise, it is fully complicit with a culture of death.61
Though I am a bit hesitant to relate Peter Damian too explicitly to sadism or masochism, since it subsumes him within a formation that he pre-dates, I do think that “Damianism” has much in common with its later cousins. His open defense and praise of flagellation does lay bare structures of dominance and submission by advocating an explicit identification with the tortured Christ; and his claim that such disci- pline is the best way to purge the passions, take leave of the self, cleave more insistently to the collective and mystical body, resonates quite interestingly with Foucault’s notion of embodied discourse, or “spiritual corporeality.”62 The “discipline,” as Peter called it, refers specifically to the act of self-flagellation, but is only one part of the larger practice of corporal penance which included strict fasting and deprivation, almost total silence, and the isolation of monks, in pairs, within cells, in which one party was designated as superior and the other as submissive. Peter was, of course, criticized for these innovations but he offers a spirited defense:
How blessed, how wonderful a sight! When the celestial Judge looks forth from heaven and man abases himself in atonement for his sins! There the accused, sitting in judgment in the tribunal of his inmost being, holds three-fold office: in his heart he appoints himself as judge, in his body he appears as defendant, while with his hands he rejoices to assume the role of executioner; as though the holy penitent would say to God: Lord, it is not necessary to command your official to punish me, nor is it to your advantage to strike fear into me with the retribu- tion of a just trial. I have laid hands upon myself, have taken revenge and offered myself in place of my sins. . . . The angels . . . delight to announce this event to God, although the unseen Judge has already beheld the selfsame deed with pleasure. This is the victim which is made a living sacrifice, borne aloft by angels and offered to God. And thus the victim of the human body is invisibly joined to that unique sacrifice which was offered on the altar of the cross; thus is every sacrifice gathered into a single treasure, both that which each member and that which the head of all the elect has offered.63
Several features of this amazing citation attract my attention. What looks like a call to masochism, to submission to the Oedipal father, is just as much a celebration of the sadistic, as Peter ecstatically identifies with God’s delight (jouissance) at the narcissistic spectacle of His own sacrifice. The scopophilic identification with the suffering victim constitutes the jouissance of the Godhead, as God’s ultimate pleasure, according to this fantasy, is in seeing himself be seen suffering. The circular and self- enclosed pleasure of God thus seems curiously sodomitical, at least in Damian’s terms, i.e., indifferent to difference. The self-punishing monk is told to make of himself all that he needs, to find within the judge, defendant, victim and executioner and thus to banish lack. This call to find within the self the very persecutors and victim which ensure our subjectivity also resonates with Damian’s similar, albeit ironic, call in the Liber Gomorrhianus to find our sexual other within the self:
Tell us, you unmanly and effeminate man, what do you seek in another male that you do not find in yourself? What difference in sex, what varied features of the body? What tenderness, what softness of sensual charm? What smooth and delightful face? Male virility, I say, shouldterrify you, and you should shudder at the sight of manly limbs. For it is the function of the natural appetite that each should seek outside himself what he cannot find within his own capacity. Therefore if the touch of the masculine flesh delights you, lay your hands upon yourself and be assured that whatever you do not find in yourself, you seek in vain in the body of another.64
What looks in one context like a condemnation of sodomy as imaginary and narcissistic sounds, in light of the previous citation, like a call to masturbation. Make love, as Woody Allen would have it, to the one who truly loves you; or in Peter’s terms, to the one who does not repulse.
Bersani theorizes in Homos, that effacement of lack, that keystone of Peter’s program, lies at the heart of same-sex desire and the foundation of a queer community:
Lack . . . may not be inherent in desire; desire in homo-ness is desire to repeat, to expand, to intensify the same, a desire that Freud, with a courageously confused perplexity, proposes as the distinctive charac- teristic of the sexual in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The aim of desire grounded in lack is the filling of the lack through the in- corporation of difference. The desire in others of what we already are is, on the contrary, a self-effacing narcissism, a narcissism constitutive of community in that it tolerates psychological difference because of its very indifference to psychological difference. This narcissistic subject seeks a self-replicating reflection in which s/he is neither known nor not known; here individual selves are points along a transversal net- work of being in which otherness is tolerated as the non-threatening margin of, or supplement to, a seductive sameness.65
If we can accept for just a moment Bersani’s notion of homo-ness as a “self-effacing narcissism,” then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a God who seeks a “self-replicating reflection” of his own suffering is sort of the ultimate homo. And this narcissism, which supposedly constitutes a community indifferent to psychological difference and otherness, sounds very much like the prototype of Damian’s eremitical collective, or for that matter, Foucault’s S/M utopia, in which identities are abandoned in favor of a truly egalitarian and reversible regime of bodily pleasures. Sex, especially when understood as a relation of power, may be banished from such a community, but surely not pleasure. And to what is that pleasure allied if not difference, as written into any relation ofpower? The notion that lack and difference might be effaced or rendered insignificant looks like part of the utopian thinking that characterized monastic theorists like Aelred of Rievaulx and Peter Damian and formed the bedrock of early queer theory.
Georges Bataille saw the sexual as a form of “self-shattering” self- debasement, in which “the melancholy of the post-Oedipal superego’s moral masochism is wholly alien, and in which, so to speak, the self is exuberantly discarded.”66 Peter Damian would probably subscribe to the letter of that argument, if not the context.67 He too discusses the sexual as a form of “self-shattering” but one which depends completely upon the moral masochism of the post-Oedipal superego. Peter is all for self-shattering but there is “good” shattering that comes from ade- quate penitential practice, especially flagellation and silence, and “bad” shattering, which results from sexual debasement, humiliation, and the scorn of the community. We might see the two routes as parallel, even leading to the same end, in the same way that Gide or Genet do, in Bersani’s readings. And, indeed, we might see the Liber Gomorrhianus as simply another type of flagellation, a verbal laceration meant to pro- duce the same sort of elimination of the subject through (pleasurable) abjection. What most galls Peter, however, and it comes out repeatedly in his characterization of the imaginary sodomites around him, is that they do not play along with his script. Even as they efface lack, they uphold difference (and eroticize it); they do not disintegrate through debasement but instead take refuge undercover; they do not even feel the need to confess, unless it be to one another. They do not merge into an identity-less mystical body; instead they form an alternative body within the community from within which to defy the master’s Law. These sub- jects militate, converse, and conspire, aim at high Church offices and get them; in essence, operate a ring of successful double agents who get on with it, forming what today might be referred to dismissively as a “gay mafia.”
Peter, of course, had in mind a very much “queerer” community, in which denunciation and scapegoating of sodomites is essential since, in Judith Butler’s words, “the act of renouncing homosexuality
. . . paradoxically strengthens homosexuality, but it strengthens [it] . . . as the power of renunciation.”68 It is Peter’s personal renunciation of sodomy that allows for what I would call a “same-sexual” frame of mind, onethat exalts sameness and loss of subjectivity rather than difference and lack. But in doing so it celebrates as well what Bersani called “a culture of death.” Like Gide, in Bersani’s reading, Peter celebrates unidentifi- able and unlocatable same-sex relations, which eliminate from “sex” the necessity of any relation whatsoever, a “gliding into an impersonal same- ness ontologically incompatible with analyzable egos,” a “self-divestiture enacted as a willful pursuit of abjection, a casting away not only of pos- sessions but also of the attributes that constitute the self as a valuable property.”69
This pursuit of abjection is key to Peter Damian’s radical penitential mode. As he says in regard to his own spirituality:
I often beheld, by an immediate perception of my mind, Christ hang- ing from the Cross, fastened with nails, and thirstily received His dripping blood in my mouth.70
And it is again not entirely clear how ironic he is being when he counsels his charges to:
begin an unremitting struggle against the flesh, always standing armed against the dangerous disease of passion . . . ; if the sly tempter puts before your eyes an enticing vision of the flesh, address your thoughts at once to the tombs of the dead and take careful note of what you find there that pleases the touch or delights the eye.71