This embrace of death, or relinquishing of subjectivity, might well be part of a specifically religious impulse to “overcome the isolated discon- tinuity of being with a sense of continuity,” but it cannot shake off that supplement of enjoyment, as Damian himself admits:72
When any holy soul is truly joined to its Redeemer by love, then it is united with Him as if on the bridal couch in a bond of intimate delight.73
Where Peter Damian’s queer utopia parts ways with the sexless con- tinuum of Gide or Genet or even Foucault is, finally, in his reliance on institutions. Not for him the pleasure of dissolution he counsels to others. He is not able to give up selfhood (as his hundreds of texts tes- tify) or power, any more than his God is. His pleasure is in seeing and listening, from the exalted position of father/confessor/law giver, thefantasy of embodying the gaze. Damian needs the nameless sodomites he sees through the confessional curtain to secure that fantasy. The corporeal jouissance he preaches – self-flagellation and non-verbal com- munication, in very close quarters – might seem to gesture toward the impossibility of the sexual relation, queer or straight, but it promises an alluring alternative: subjectless bodies, sexless pleasure, a truly mimetic community in which someone is always watching.
Though Peter’s radical views were not accepted by the more moderate Pope Leo, the rabid rhetoric of the Liber Gomorrhianus became a model for moral castigation in the following century. As the Church sought to heighten its influence over the faithful through tighter controls of political and domestic matters, apologists stepped forward to denounce moral laxity and establish the need for Church guidance, using argu- ments forwarded by Peter Damian.
John of Salisbury
John of Salisbury (1115–80) was one of the most learned and critical commentators of his age and one whose experience was considerably broader than most. He studied in France for a dozen or so years (1138–
50), served first as secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, then as advisor to Pope Hadrian IV, and finally as secretary to Thomas Beckett, a part of which time he spent in exile in Reims. After Thomas’s death he served as Bishop of Chartres. He recorded these rich experiences in his prodigious writings, especially in the Policraticus (1159), an account of court life under Henry II, and the Metalogicon,a portrait of the intellec- tual life and curriculum of the late twelfth century. Throughout his life, John wrote on a wide range of topics but returned often to the subject of the Plantagenet court, in one guise or another. While not without its own blind-spots and prejudices, his account is remarkably lucid.
Having studied with the greatest teachers of his day, John was uniquely able to comment on the newly fashionable incorporation of classical material into contemporary literature and to see clearly how the classical past could be used to comment on the Christian present. Though his comments on sexuality are minimal, he returns frequently to that subject under a variety of guises and it is to those passages that I will devote my attention. As proper Freudians, we could argue thatJohn’s own obsessions keep slipping through his sometimes petulant prose, but it might be more accurate to observe that John quite simply sees sexuality not as an independent domain of the human experience but as an integral part of everything else that concerns him. Thus, while discussing almost any issue, one often gets the uncanny impression that John is really talking about gender and sex. The unlikely topic of hunting, a seeming obsession with John, provides an illustration of this Freudian tendency to conflate topics.74
John’s cultural history of the topic attributes to the Thebans the introduction and spread of hunting in Western cultures. It was they who formulated the rules of what he is unsure to label a profession or a vice and it is this association which is said to lie at the root of their tragic history and the tales of Oedipus and Acteon.75 The Thebans then passed their knowledge of hunting on to the Phrygians (Trojans), according to John “an effeminate, spineless people, fickle and utterly lacking in modesty.”76 John writes this, of course, knowing full well that the Plantagenets had claimed to be the direct descendants and crowned successors of the Trojans. Ganymede serves for him as the figure of the Trojan hunter, stolen by Zeus first to serve him as cup-bearer and then “for purposes of illicit and unnatural love” (13). John displays no sympathy for Ganymede’s plight, however; on the contrary, with his declaration that “pleasure, blind to sobriety, blushes not to prostitute itself indiscriminately” (13), he implies that Ganymede is quite content with his station.
Ulysses then takes up the mantle and blame for having brought hunt- ing back from Troy into Greece in the form of “birds equipped with horn and spurs . . . to incite them to attack their kind to the surprise and delight of the spectators” (16). John develops this association between hunting, violence, and sodomy first through the figures of Acteon as stag, attacked by his own, and Ulysses’s birds who “attack their own kind”; and then through the explicit association between Ganymede, hunting, and the illicit pleasure of sodomy.77 Ulysses is a conduit for such practices but is not himself implicated. He claims that it was Circe who taught him all he knows, with her charms and potions, and so, according to John, “the illicit cup of pleasure was passed to the Greeks” (16). Ulysses himself, having resisted Circe’s charms, is free from the degraded and spiritless state of those who are bound to live under aharlot’s sway, i.e. the regime of pleasure into which Ganymede has been introduced, presumably sexual license with whatever sex, and for this reason he forbids his son, Telemachus, to take up hunting. The “infe- rior sex” is particularly well suited to the hunting of birds, we are told, because inferior creatures are always more prone to rapine (17). Both Achilles and Bacchus were taught to hunt in the forest and thus “lost [their] awe of nature and fear of death”:
In truth those who have such inclinations and desires are half-beast. They have shed the desirable element, their humanity, and in the sphere of conduct are made themselves like unto monsters. From levity to lewdness, from lewdness to lust, and finally, when hardened, they are drawn into every type of infamy and lawlessness.
The sense that John is always speaking out of both sides of his mouth becomes clearer as he dismisses agriculture, sailing, and industry, in their turn as they all call into question natural boundaries and laws. He is especially troubled that the Church Fathers never paid more attention to hunting for “the inordinate pleasure that it causes impairs the human mind and undermines reason itself ” (23). Pleasure of any kind, it turns out, is the true enemy:
which, devoted to feasting, drinking, banquets, song and dance, sport, over-refinements of luxury, debauchery, and varied types of defile- ment, weakens even robust souls and, by a sort of irony on nature’s part, renders men softer and more corrupt than women.
Both hunting and gambling, it turns out, “tone down the manly voice into dulcet, effeminate strains; to forget their manhood and with vocal and instrumental music to disgrace their birth. It is from such parents that children are infected with their moral diseases” (29). The association of pleasure with vice and the non-natural continues: “the result is that in these times fathers leave degenerate sons who disgrace their manhood with effeminate vices.” Hunting leads to pleasure, which leads to lust, which leads to femininity, which means loss of masculinity, since any trace of the effeminate pollutes definitively the masculine.78 Femininity is like a virus which attaches itself and eats the host from within, similar in this respect to Peter Damian’s notion of sodomy. John returns again and again to this formula.Music is another such ambivalent topic. It has a legitimate aim, according to John and that is to unite and order the universe; but it, too, has been corrupted by the “Phrygian mode and other corrupting types” (32):
[Music] . . . grieves and laments its disfigurement by a vice that is not inherent in it and by the fact that a harlot’s appearance is given to that which was wont to inspire virile minds with manly ideas. The singing of love songs in the presence of men of emi- nence was once considered in bad taste, but now it is considered praiseworthy for me
n of greater eminence to sing and play love songs which they themselves with greater propriety call stulticivia, follies.
John’s fear of sweetness of voice and polyphony emerges in a series of metaphors of gendering and ungendering. Such artifice in music enervates its simple listeners with “effeminate dalliance of wanton tones” (32) and, in a return to his hunting imagery, resembles the songs of the Sirens. The mind loses its power of reason and stirs “lascivious sensations in the loins” (32). He cites as support the Greeks’ banishing of the Phrygian mode from their land and the Thracian women pouring out their indignation upon Orpheus for having rendered their men, through his music, weak and effeminate (33). Like hunting, music turns out to be essentially about pleasure; pleasure is instantly equated with sex; and sexual desire is, by rote definition, feminine. Thus Orpheus, a figure of polyvalent sexual tastes, stands for music and thus for the seduction of sodomy. The performance of music in the sanctuary of the church (“the effeminate dalliance of wanton tones” [32]), with its “excessively caressing melodies of voices beginning, chiming in, carrying the air, dying away, rising again, and dominating” (32) is already figured as a sexual performance. John’s fear of sexual rapture of any type finds expression in this horror of caressing and the rhythms of sensual combat. He applauds those courageous spiritual leaders who have banned it from their religious establishments.79
It is not surprising, therefore, to see John rage at the idea of secular music and entertainments. Church music lures one into transgression of boundaries; secular entertainment breaks these taboos openly. Like hunters and sodomites, court performers are a type of “monster”:80Concerning actors and mimes, buffoons and harlots, panderers and other like human monsters which the prince ought rather to extermi- nate entirely than to foster, there needed to be no mention in the law, which not only excludes all such abominations from the court of the prince but totally banishes them from among the people.
John’s rather extreme call for extermination echoes that of Peter Damian one hundred years earlier and the vehemence of Alain de Lille’s person- ification of Genius in the De planctu naturae, an almost contemporary text. Princes, on whom one should be able to count in maintaining deco- rum, support “the procession of mimes, jumping and leaping priests, buffoons, Aemilian and other gladiators, wrestlers, sorcerers, jugglers, magicians, and a whole army of jesters” (38). What these performers are blamed for is “shamelessly disclos[ing] that which in shame they had concealed” (38). Thus, as in Peter Damian’s condemnation of sodomy, what needs to be held back, excluded from the community, is already there, even when not visible. Though these performers’ shameful secret is never disclosed, John implies that it is by its nature obscene and will inevitably lead the honorable man to disclose as well “the incontinence of his mind..., proclaim his lewdness” (38).
Citing Scipio Africanus, John deplores the popularity of vernacu- lar, secular song at the courts and among the Anglo-Norman nobility in general: “Our freeborn maidens and youths are taught dishonor- able conduct; they go accompanied by pimps, the harp and the lute to the school of dancing, surrounded by pimps . . .” (368–369). He cites approvingly Macrobius’ caustic description of Hortensius as the type of man who affects the vices of the actor even off stage:81
In times such as these, wanton seduction walked abroad with impunity, and sodomitic lust foully corrupted effeminates destined to the fires of Hell, adultery openly defiled the marriage bed. . . . In those days effeminates ruled the world, unrestrainedly pursued their revels, and foul catamites, doomed to burn in Hell, subjected themselves to the filth of sodomy... they ridiculed the exhortations of priests, and persisted in their barbarous behavior and dress.15 Hortensius . . . after whom those males who used powder on their faces are called Hortensiani, not because he was the first to indulge in the practice, but because he was the most conspicuous. . . . He was, and intentionally, very soft-spoken, and a man who displayed great elegance in dress. He clothed himself with a care that verged upon indecency. . . . Gazing at himself, he would so drape the toga upon his person that the ingenious knot would hold the pleats.... All this is reminiscent of the deceptive artificiality of the harlot.... What has a man to do with a mirror except to see by the lines of his face [. . . the effects of study, foreign travel, wider experience, and advancing age]. (371)
Once again, the final danger of theatre is feminization of males, and in John’s lexicon feminization is a term so broad as to include almost all of what exists beneath that veneer of control and resistance to the seductions of pleasure that he calls virility. Like sodomy, femininity, usually seen as a form of artifice, lurks just beneath the surface, ready to take hold of the thoughtless sinner.
Narcissus joins Ganymede, Orpheus, and other figures of sexual ambiguity in John’s digression about self-love. Men who “endeavor to grasp unsubstantial clouds . . . striv[e] to seize something solid in vacuity, are forgetful of themselves, though at the same time . . . with their partial eyes, have only themselves in view . . . [they] run after visionary shadows of mere opinion ... aspire to the impossible, making assumptions on the basis of the deceptive image of things” (311–312). Such men resemble Narcissus. Unlike the figure in the courtly reading developed in the Roman de la rose, John’s Narcissus dies simply because he is captivated by the object of his gaze. The idolatrous gaze is always dangerous, nowhere more so than at court, so John finally condemns, at least potentially, all looking, all hearing, all attraction:
Death does indeed enter through the windows of the eye when one takes delight in the exhibitions of the circus, the contest of athletes, the adaptability of actors, the shapely forms of women, the sparkle of gems, gorgeous raiment, precious metals, and all else by which the liberty of the mind is enslaved. Again, if the ear be charmed by the organ’s tones and the notes of the human voice, the mind’s virility becomes effeminate as the result of the poet’s verse, the acts of comedy and tragedy, the humor and wile of mimics, and all sort of stuff that enters the mind by the ear. (314)
His condemnation of poets and romance is particularly interesting since he was serving at the very court that is so often credited with having given vernacular literature the vital support it needed and which used that literature to promote its interests. While John denounces the effect of “romances and similar folly” on the listener, it is in terms of “our age” that he speaks, not of “our court”:
But our own age, descending to romances and similar folly, prostitutes not only the ear and heart to vanity but also delights its idleness with the pleasures of eye and ear. It inflames our wantonness, seekingeverywhere incentives to vice. Does not the shiftless man direct his idleness and court slumber with the sweet tones of instruments and vocal melody, with gaiety inspired by musicians, and with the pleasure he finds in the narrator of tales... (36)
When finally he arrives officially at the topic of sodomy, after having circumvented it in all of the above discussions, John is curiously reticent. Instead of attacking with full force, outlining acts in detail like Peter Damian, John says simply: “I had intended to pass perverts by in silence who, being dishonorable, are and are seen to be worthy of dishonor. Respect for morals imposes silence, and modesty by natural instinct diverts its gaze from them. Need more be said?” (199). The answer is apparently “yes”; though by this point John has somewhat exhausted his arsenal. When everything leads to effeminacy, it is difficult to stig- matize sodomy any more than, say, polyphonic singing. John therefore treats “perverts” as panderers and prostitutes: “Their profession is that of prostituting their own chastity and of assaulting and violating that of others” (199).82 They sell not only themselves, but their wives and daughters as well, and though they suffer for it, “resentment is assuaged by the money made in the transaction, or at least it mitigates their suf- fering” (199). Men such as these “rise against nature herself like a new set of giants waging a new war against heaven” (200) though John never addresses why Nature puts up with it. They sell their sons at m
aturity, their daughters whenever another’s lust can be assuaged.83 Worst of all are older men who continue to be racked with desire: “they sink down into the weaker sex, effeminate as the result of vice and corruption of morals, though thanks to nature they have not the power to lose their sex completely” (200). Returning to his horror of the performer, the old and “rich lascivious wanton” is likened to an actor: “his hair elaborately frizzled and curled, he puts to shame a courtesan’s make-up, an actor’s costume, the dress of a noble, the jewels of a maiden, and even the triumphal robes of a prince” (200). He then lingers over the details of this person caught up in sensual pleasure. Citing Juvenal at length, he contemplates how the artificially softened hand explores the entire body of the other “with lecherous caress” (200).
Thus far we have seen John allude to and condemn, but largely avoid any direct confrontation or description of, same-sex relations.This changes in a sort of parenthetical aside in which he explains his reluctance to disclose his real topic:
Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature Page 9