Jewish heterosexuality, queer celibacy? Ælfric translates the Old Testament priesthood

This essay argues that Ælfric’s discussion of priestly marriage demonstrates an Anglo-Saxon articulation of the difference between Jews and Christians as sexual difference. Ælfric represents temporally distant Biblical Jews as embodying a kinship-based heterosexuality that has been superseded by and is now opposed by Christian chastity and asexual reproduction. This supersession operates through linguistic as well as temporal translation; Ælfric transmutes ritual Jewish purity into Christian sexual purity by translating the Vulgate’s mundus and immundus, which gloss Old Testament ט הָ ו רֹ and ט מֵָ א [‘ritually pure’ and ‘impure’], into Old English clæne and unclæne [in Ælfric’s context, generally ‘chaste’ and ‘unchaste’]. Terms from the Hebrew Bible that, when translated into Greek and Latin, assume equivalence to New Testament terms for spiritual purity thus undergo a further conversion in the work of Ælfric, who diverges from other Old English writers in linking the word clæne not only with the Old Testament but also, specifically, with Jewish sexuality. Ælfric’s linguistic choices forge a largely fictive continuity between Jewish and Christian sexual purity systems, while also authorizing Christianity’s break from Jewish mores. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2017). 8, 292–306. doi:10.1057/s41280-017-0058-y Christians and Jews have sometimes articulated their difference in sexual terms. As Steven F. Kruger notes of this nexus of identifications, ‘The means for constructing sexual difference and those for defining religious, (quasi-)racial © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, 3, 292–306 www.palgrave.com/journals otherness are [...] often parallel and intertwined’ (Kruger, 2006, 88). Kruger, Daniel Boyarin, and others have traced the use of Jews, especially the figure of the circumcised, nonviolent Jewish man, as abject others in the establishment of Christian heterosexuality, particularly heterosexual masculinity. In these analyses, which examine material from the late antique, late medieval and early modern periods, Jews thus figure as ‘queers’ vis-à-vis Christian heterosexuals. This alignment rests on simple grounds: each religion structures its imaginary community around a sanctified system of sexual regulation that not only overlaps with but also at times proves incommensurate with the other. In this essay, I argue that Anglo-Saxon Benedictine culture demonstrates an early medieval English articulation of the difference between Jews and Christians as a sexual difference. In a nearly inverse dynamic to that traced by Kruger and Boyarin, temporally distant Biblical Jews represent a kinship-based heterosexuality that has been superseded by and is now opposed by Christian chastity and asexual reproduction. In two exhortations that nearly bookend Anglo-Saxon monastic literary culture, Aldhelm of Malmesbury’s late seventh-century De virginitate and Ælfric of Eynsham’s early eleventh-century First Old English Letter for Wulfstan, Benedictine writers use the imaginary temporal difference between Jews and Christians to propose chastity as a desirable alternative to heterosexuality. In culturally and linguistically translating the matter of the Old Testament’s married priesthood for a celibate Anglo-Saxon audience, Ælfric advances a case that is particularly intelligible through the lens of queer theory: heterosexuality is an outmoded form of kinship and affectivity to which the community need no longer be bound. In discussing sexuality, I use Carol Braun Pasternack’s definition of sex as ‘practices related to procreation, whether those practices promote or deny procreation, and sexuality as an identity linked to an array of such practices [...] including those practices that do not further reproduction, such as chastity and homosexuality’ (Pasternack, 2004, 96, 96n15). I use the term ‘heterosexuality’ in premodern contexts to refer to the social institutions and intimate practices (marriage; procreation, defined as legitimate or illegitimate; sexual relations between men and women, defined as marital, premarital, or extramarital) that link (and naturalize the links among) sexuality, binary gender roles, procreation, family and kinship, lineage and legacy, status and value of women, and property transfer. When discussing chastity and celibacy, I use Benjamin Kahan’s concept of celibacy ‘primarily as a coherent sexual identity rather than as a “closeting” screen for another identity,’ both because this more accurately reflects medieval sexual categories and because it is no longer useful or radical to reduce ‘sexuality’ to the gender configurations of sexual pairs (Kahan, 2013, 2). 1 SeeBoyarin (1997), esp. 1–13, 208– 216. Jewish heterosexuality, queer celibacy © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, 3, 292–306 293 Mona s t i c i sm a s a Quee r Mode o f L i f e Late twentiethand early twenty-first-century critiques of heterosexuality have posed queer models of affiliation and reproduction as alternatives to the heterosexual model of reproductive kinship. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari aim to ‘conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a becoming that is without filiation or hereditary production,’ which operates through unexpected and multiplying lines of desire akin to the spread of disease (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, 241). They contrast ‘filiation’ through reproduction to stranger, less predictable, and less heterosexual means of multiplication. I appropriate the structure of this distinction in discussing sexualities in early medieval Christianity. Medieval monastic writers do not, of course, share the motives of twenty-first-century critics such as Lee Edelman, who criticizes the ‘reproductive futurism’ in which the valorization of heterosexual reproduction guarantees a cycle in which ‘the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past,’ or of Roderick A. Ferguson, Lauren Berlant, and others who note the role of the heterosexual family in reproducing capitalism and white supremacy in North America (Edelman, 2004, 2, 31; Ferguson, 2004; Berlant, 1997). That is, they do not share these critics’ investment in progressive politics and sexual freedom. But they do share a suspicion of heterosexuality as a worldly practice that reproduces a detrimental fixation on material investments, that inhibits the expansion of care outside the family circle, and that keeps women and men leashed to their gendered bodies. This Christian critique of the heterosexual family dates to Paul, whose rejection of ‘Israel in the flesh’ for ‘Israel in the spirit’ Boyarin persuasively interprets as a statement precisely on the ethnocentric limitations of heterosexual kinship systems. To Paul, argues Boyarin, universality demands a rejection of this form of kinship, even if rejecting ethnocentricity, sex, and sexuality also effectively devalues both the Jewish and the feminine elements it ostensibly subsumes (Boyarin, 1994, esp. 57–85, 180–200). The Benedictine writers further develop Pauline and patristic ideas in order to criticize the theory and practice of heterosexuality and to offer chastity as a preferable alternative orientation. Monastic celibacy offers a robust alternative to heterosexual kinship by providing fraternal, reproductive, and temporal structures that disrupt and attempt to replace those of the sexually reproductive family. Monasticism adopted, as Carol Braun Pasternack observes, a patristic ‘devaluation of procreative sexuality and the related families [...] and the absorption of the individual into the structures of the Church as if into an alternative family’ (Pasternack, 2004, 94). These ‘alternative’ familial structures, in theory, severed and replaced both the generative (‘procreative sexuality’) and affiliative (‘related families’) connections of hetero-patriarchal family life. In practice, familial bonds both competed with and complemented monastic kinship ties; Lisa M. C. Weston’s study of amicitia in Anglo-Saxon nuns’ letters, for instance, Pareles 294 © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, 3, 292–306 demonstrates that Leoba calls upon both spiritual and secular kinship ties to address Boniface, and that Eangyth, mother of many spiritual daughters, shares a privileged bond with Heaburg, who is also her biological child (Weston, 2011). Monastic affiliation also qualifies as a non-heterosexual ‘mode of life’ in the sense that Michel Foucault uses this term. Foucault argues for a ‘homosexual mode of life’ defined neither by identity politics nor by genital sexuality but by the multiplication and intensification of friendships among men. Monasticism is one potential answer to Foucault’s question: ‘how is it possible for men to be together? to live together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their confidences?’ (Foucault, 1996, 309). The Regularis Concordia, which supplemented the Benedictine Rule in rigorously governing the schedule of English monastic life, in fact provides specific and detailed answers to each of these questions, describing how monks are to sleep and eat communally, to avoid the temptations of intimacy with women and youth, to mourn, and to teach one another and avoid gossiping. Sharing time emerges as the rule’s greatest concern: to be, with brethren, ‘united in the fellowship of the monastic life’ [‘unitus in ordinis communione’] (Symons, 1953, §67) – the words with which a monk is eulogized – is to be occupied night and day in highly ritualized communal activity. In monastic life, relations within the fellowship are ethically central and have explicitly taken the place of external relationships. Foucault’s question echoes the debate within early medieval monasticism about the propriety of intense friendships between monks, typified on the one hand by Ælred of Rievaulx, whose work glorifies spiritual love between men, and on the other by the Benedictine Rule, which forbids close relationships on the grounds that they subvert order and equality (Venarde, 2011, see in particular §§2, 22, 69). As Saltzman notes, ‘Kinship – a tie that for the Anglo-Saxons was of utmost importance [...] must be severed upon entering the monastery, forming the monks into a homogeneous community of spiritual brothers, united under a spiritual father. Hence, Benedict foresees one monk defending his blood-kin or friend (though he avoids this word) as a devastating act against the equilibrium of solitude and community’ (Saltzman, 2011, 260, 258–263). As Foucault observes of this tension, ‘The institution is caught in a contradiction; affective intensities traverse it which at one and the same time keep it going and shake it up’ (Foucault, 1996, 309). The most intense, contested, and discussed human affective investments of this life are primarily same-sex, regardless of sexual practice. The resonance of the problems of early medieval European monastic life in twentieth-century queer theory reveals monasticism as a non-heterosexual, ideologically driven ‘mode of life.’ Thus monastic life replaces kinship by providing alternative structures of fraternity and filiation and by occluding the heterosexual. Pasternack and Ruth Mazo Karras have demonstrated that the monastic ideal of chastity is a sexual orientation (Karras, 2017, 38, 57–75). I argue that in monastic texts, 2 See also Jaeger (1999), 31–32. Jewish heterosexuality, queer celibacy © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, 3, 292–306 295 particularly Ælfric’s, there emerges an Old Testament heterosexual orientation; that is, a set of endorsed and tolerated practices, including circumcision, polygamy, priestly marriage, and feminine adornment, specific to the Old Testament and oriented around ensuring the continued survival and distinctive identity of the Jewish people. This orientation is not in itself sinful, but it is superseded by the Christian ideals of monastic chastity and universal membership. As Karma Lochrie has influentially noted, the medieval Christian West was not characterized by a normative heterosexuality. However, the cluster of ‘cultural appurtenances’ (‘the sexual act of intercourse, the social and legal rights of marriage, ideas of domesticity, doctrines of procreation, concepts of parenting and child rearing,’ and so forth) that Lochrie and other queer theorists describe as coalescing into heterosexuality as late as the Victorian era appears in late AngloSaxon writing in the form of Jewish (Old Testament) sexuality (Lochrie, 2005, xiii). The Anglo-Saxons, in other words, although neither heterosexual or homosexual themselves, had already invented a heterosexual Other. A l d he lm : Mona s t i c Rep r o du c t i o n As a committed lifestyle with no equivalent in medieval Judaism or Islam, Christian chastity was an orientation to sexuality with its own pleasures and reproductive practices. As Pasternack has noted, the late seventh-century AngloLatin treatise De virginitate, by Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, portrays chastity as both pleasurable and fertile, qualities embodied in the figure of the bee, a scripturally authorized (according to Aldhelm) type of the Church who ‘produces her sweet family and children, innocent of the lascivious coupling of marriage, by means of a certain generative condensation of a very sweet juice.’ Just so, ‘the Church, striking vitally into the hearts of men with the double-keen sword-edge of the (two) Testaments, fertilizes through the chaste seed of the Word the offspring who are lawful heirs of eternity’ (Aldhelm, 1979, 62). In this form of generation, Ecclesia penetrates the Christian heart with a textual rather than sexual organ of fertilization. Also unlike a traditional phallus, this virginal organ is doubled rather than singular (bringing to mind Luce Irigaray’s connection between doubled genitalia and textual femininity [Irigaray, 1985]); the Word it produces in lieu of semen is, as we well know, part of the masculine godhead. Queer reproduction, like much else in Aldhelm’s extended complex of metaphors, resists a single reading: here the feminine penetrates, here chastity fertilizes, here Christians appear to be their own offspring. All tend not towards a static futurity but towards an excessive eternity. Celibacy, like the queer temporality proposed by José Esteban Muñoz, offers not just the rejection of heterosexual futurity and relationality, but also a potentially fuller and more loving existence than this one, a hopeful although by no means predetermined alternative futurity (Muñoz, 2009). 3 ‘dulcia natorum pignora, nesciens coniugii illecebrosa consortia, fetosa quadam suauissimi suci concretione producit: ecclesia uero bis acuto testamentorum mucrone hominum uitaliter corda transuerberans hereditariam legitimae aeternitatis sobolem casto uerbi fecundat semine’ (Aldhelm, 2001, §V). Pareles 296 © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, 3, 292–306 The fruits of chaste reproduction are sweeter than worldly things: not only is this honey more delicious than ‘all dishes of delicacies’ (cuncta deliciarum) and more fragrant than ‘sweet ambrosia and the odour of fragrant balsam, but [it] also [...] may exceed all delights of worldly sweetness and the exquisite pleasures of sumptuous gourmandising and may leave far beneath it the gulping down of sweet wine’ (Aldhelm, 1979, 63). These delights lie beyond the reach of secular people engaged in reproductive sex. Nuns are the products of this spiritual conception, which is just as fruitful as sexual reproduction: they are ‘adoptive daughters of regenerative grace brought forth from the fecund womb of ecclesiastical conception through the seed of the spiritual Word’ (Aldhelm, 1979, 59–60) [‘adoptiuas regenerantis gratiae filias ex fecundo ecclesiasticae conceptionis utero spiritualis uerbi semine progenitas’] (Aldhelm, 2001, §II). The Church reproduces as easily as, and with more pleasure than, the world of marriage and secular sin. As Weston notes, in portraying the reproductive monastery as a multi-celled honeycomb where bees gather together to joyfully share nectar, Aldhelm creates a ‘sensuous fertility [that] is by definition communal and collective – and effectively homonormative’ (Weston, 2003, 23). Spiritual procreation and filiation are not merely metaphorical. To draw a binary distinction between constructed and biological forms of kinship is to ignore the importance of marriage, a non-biological voluntary relation, in creating heteropatriarchal families; the non-biological kin status of ‘step-father’ or ‘father-in-law,’ relations that enjoy full legal and social recognition, is as socially constructed as monastic fatherhood. Monasteries were in fact sites of child-rearing up to the tenth century, after which time they continued to foster and educate large numbers of adolescents. Indeed, V. A. Kolve has demonstrated twelfth-century monasteries’ self-conception as potential sites of male maternal love for the boys within their care (Kolve, 1998, 1056–1059). Such reproduction can be considered queer in the proper sense, since it arises out of the nonsexual love bonds within the body of the monastery. The idea of the monastery as queer space is hardly new. Kolve, Lochrie, Valerie Traub, and many others have noted the homoaffectivity of monastic communities, an affectivity that includes, in Carolyn Schroeder’s words, both the ‘presence of homoeroticism and anxieties about the homoerotic,’ as well as sanctioned love bonds of various sorts between same-sex pairs (Schroeder, 2009, 333; Lochrie, 2005, 26–70; Traub, 2002, 62–65). Monastic life also allowed for the possibility of cross-sex pair-bonding without sexual expectations, reproduction, or any of the structures of marriage; some such couples were blood siblings like Benedict and Scholastica, but some were solely spiritual kin. The queerness of monastic sexuality and affectivity is thus, in my view, not defined primarily by homoeroticism, however widespread, nor by the 4 ‘flagrantis ambrosiae thimiama ac nardi spirantis olfactum