A Truly Scrumptious Messiah

Musing to myself about the recent passing away of Dr. Yosef H. Yerushalmi, I found myself flipping through his classic work From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto - Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics and ran into something I thought was worth sharing.


During the messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi in the seventeenth century Abraham Cardoso, a Sabbatian who grew up as a converso in Portugal and Spain, attacks his brother, Isaac Cardoso, and Isaac Orobio de Castro, another former converso, for their failure to accept Sabbatai as their messiah and savior. Abraham mocks them for their unwillingness to accept the notion of a suffering messiah:

Let us return to the aforementioned messiah of Doctor Cardoso and his capricious companions; he is neither Christian nor Jew, but imaginary; he must come casting rays of light … and then, all at once, in a twinkling, he has to ingather the tribes, and the wheat from the chaff; he must come on a cloud of sugar candy, his body of butter paste, his garment of soft bread. And for support they drag in the great Rabbi Moses of Egypt [Maimonides], whom they see but do not understand even in the light … (Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto
pg. 339)


So what have here are three Jewish former renegade Catholics, who never exactly got over the Catholic part. Once again we see how important Maimonides is saving Judaism from false messiahs. Also, now I understand what is wrong with Christianity; their messiah is cheap wine and crackers. We need a messiah who would be truly scrumptious to eat.

Just Say No to Polytheism: Why it is Important to Believe in a Singular Non-Physical Deity (Part II)

Part I

What should be clear from what I said previously is that the struggle between monotheism and polytheism is more than just about how many gods you believe in. This is about whether God is simply some super-powerful being who will punish us if we do not obey his arbitrary commands or whether God is the righteous being whom all ethical beings should seek to align their actions with. Without this, we are left making abstract distinctions that are incomprehensible to anyone not well versed in theology. For example, what is the difference between the pagan who believes in minor gods and the one God who is above all and the monotheist who believes in angels and one God? Particularly when one of the most common Hebrew words for God, “Elohim,” is used in the Bible to refer to both angels and God. Nor is it much help to talk about idolatry. It is hardly obvious what the difference is between Christians kissing a crucifix, Jews kissing a Torah scroll and the ancient Israelites bowing to the Golden Calf. (This issue of the Golden Calf received a modern twist during the recent economic downturn when a group of Christians went to pray at the Wall Street Bronze Bull.)

When judging people or ideologies we need to ask ourselves not just whether they call themselves monotheists or whether they fulfill some abstract theological qualification but whether what they say furthers or hinders the monotheist understanding of God as a righteous being. This creates a third category of people, those who, while they themselves may not be pagans, preach doctrines that only serve to further belief in the pagan model. While such people are not guilty of paganism, they are guilty of lacking the proper zeal for monotheism. Furthermore, this lack of zeal can be taken as grounds to suspect covert pagan belief.

I strongly object to the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity not just because it crosses some highly technical theological line but because it can only serve the interests of the pagan model. Christianity from its own perspective is meant as an improvement of the Old Testament. This means that Christianity should have fewer problematic statements than the Old Testament and get rid of anthropomorphic statements about God’s hand or body. Christianity, as exemplified in the Nicene Creed, takes a step backward by introducing such concepts as God in a human body or there being “three” parts to God. This view of God can only serve to further a pagan model. For example, at a popular level, medieval Catholicism was a magical religion that was supposed to grant power to those who practiced its rituals. Admittedly medieval Judaism had its magical elements too, but it had nothing to compare to the adoration of the Eucharist and tales of Eucharist miracles.

Nothing that I say here should be taken as an attack on non-Trinitarian Christians. So, if any Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons are reading this, you are in the clear. I also have no problem with Christians like C. S. Lewis, for whom the Trinity was a passing issue to be explained when challenged in monotheistic terms. I admit that it is possible to have a monotheist Incarnation and Trinity. One could say that God is one, but that from a human perspective there is sometimes a misapprehension that he is three and that when talking about God it is sometimes useful to play to this human misapprehension and talk about God as if he were, heaven forbid, three persons. From a monotheistic perspective, it is theoretically possible that a human being could reach such an understanding of the divine and be so successful in helping other people to live according to God’s intention that we could say, after a manner of speaking, that people saw God when they looked at this person. Christians believe that Jesus was such a person and I have no theological objections to such a claim.

The Christians I would have a problem with would be those who took the Trinity in a pagan direction. Those who operate with the pagan model are pagans and should be treated as such. I would even object, though, to a Christian who insisted on elaborating on the Trinity and making it the focus of his religion even if this Christian, when pressed, would claim that they believed in the monotheist understanding of the Trinity that I suggested. Such a person is clearly lacking in zeal for true monotheism in that, not only does he not try to stamp out ideas that could lead to people following paganism, he actively spreads them. In the end, I would not even be certain that I could believe him; it is possible that he is lying about what he truly believes in order to make himself acceptable in the eyes of monotheists. This would particularly be a concern because if he really was a monotheist in his heart he would have no purpose in pushing Trinitarian ideas in the first place.

Caroline Walker Bynum on Weeping Statues and Bleeding Bread

This past quarter we have had the privilege, here at Ohio State, to be visited by a pair of superstars in the field of history. A few weeks ago Richard Kagan spoke here. Kagan is one of the world’s leading scholars on early modern Spanish empire in general and of the Inquisition in particular. I recommend his book, Lucrecia’s Dreams, as a possible cure for anyone still caught up in the notion that the Spanish Inquisition was simply a group of blood thirsty religious extremists whipping up religious fanaticism and superstition amongst the populace. Yesterday Caroline Walker Bynum came to speak. I have spoken about Bynum on this blog before. She is without question my favorite women’s history person; a model of how to write about women in such a way that is respectful to women on their own terms and does not devolve into handwringing about patriarchal oppression.

Her talk, entitled Weeping Statues, Bleeding Bread: Miracles in the Late Middle Ages, treaded her usual ground of late medieval Christian spirituality and miracle claims, though she did not particularly focus on women, but dealt more with the general context of these matters. Her ability to avoid moralizing and instead present the medieval world as those who lived in it might have experienced it was on full display. She spoke about transformation miracles, such as where statues were seen to weep tears or even blood or the bleeding Eucharist. Such miracles became more important in the later Middle Ages (thirteenth -sixteenth centuries). We have stories of images that come down from the wall and even protect themselves from iconoclasts. We have what are called Dauerwunder – lasting miracles. Not only did the object, such as an Eucharist change but it remained in this changed state. For Bynum these things demonstrate an increased interest in the daily encounter with the material and the struggle to integrate the physical and the spiritual. This is in contrast to the usual picture of the Middle Ages in which body and soul are supposed to be very separate.

While Bynum acknowledges the sinister role that these miracle stories played in anti-Jewish libels, she does not allow herself to sink into generalizing condemnations. She emphasizes the variety of positions as to the nature of the Eucharist. Theologians found themselves in a bind in dealing with popular devotion to the Eucharist and the belief in animated statues. There was the danger of idolatry; that people would come to worship these things. On the other hand there were the doctrines of creation and incarnation which assumed the ability for the divine to descend into physical objects. Some theologians argued that objects were just signs made to remind the believer. Yet these same theologians attacked Hussites and Lollards, who denied the power of relics. Aquinas argued that relics did not retain the form of the saint since the soul of the saint was in heaven. Yet he still believed that the relic was the saint since it would one day be reunited with the saint’s soul. Aquinas argued that bodily remains such as the foreskin of Christ could not exist because all of Christ went up to heaven and to say that he left part of his body behind is to take away part of his perfection.

Bynum integrates the medieval discourse on animated statues and the Eucharist with medieval natural philosophy. She draws a parallel to Giles of Rome’s defense of alchemy. Early medieval theologians were skeptical about alchemy. Giles of Rome argued that alchemy was no different than human beings making glass or the acts of Pharaoh’s magicians. This was all a matter of bodies being generated from other bodies. For the medieval there was no distinction between mechanical and biological reproduction.

This belief in transubstantiation was connected with medieval conceptions of nature, which saw miracles as extensions of the laws of nature. It made perfect sense that people would therefore believe in such things. It made sense that wafers would bleed and statues would walk. The belief in weeping statues and bleeding bread was not just a matter of the incredulity of the masses, but an opportunity for serious intellectual discourse as to the nature of the physical world.

During the question and answer section, after the speech, I got the opportunity to ask a question. I asked her if, by her discussion of these naturalistic conceptions of miracles, she was siding with those who argue for an earlier dating of the Scientific Revolution to the fourteenth century instead of the sixteenth century. She responded with good humor that it seems that no one in the field of history these days seems to believe in revolutions anymore. It is all long term processes. No, she still was sticking to the sixteenth century Scientific Revolution whatever that was supposed to mean.

Another interesting comment arouse out of the question of why there was such a shift in the later Middle Ages. Bynum responded that she had no explanation and that she rejects what is the dominant view that this shift came about due to the Fourth Lateran Council and its establishment of transubstantiation as official church dogma. Bynum argued that this did not reach popular consciousness and that even within the Church itself they were still debating the issue into the Reformation. I am interested to see if Bynum, in any of her books, deals with this issue in more detail. This issue is important for Jewish history because the general view as to the origins of the Host desecration charge is that it arose in the aftermath of the Fourth Lateran Council. The Jew became a stand in for the unbeliever in the power of the Eucharist and the charge of Host desecration an implicit polemic on behalf of transubstantiation; the fact that the Jews would make the effort to steal and torture the Eucharist shows that it really is the body of Christ.

(My discussion here has been based on the notes I took during the lecture. Any mistakes made are mine.)

Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part IV)

Dyan Elliott: Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages.

Dyan Elliott criticizes Bynum’s positive narrative and, in its place, offers a narrative of a downward decline in woman’s spiritual activity from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. In the twelfth century, clerics seized on woman’s Eucharistic visions as proof of the Church’s teachings on Transubstantiation. Thus the female spirituality, which Bynum sees as a mark of the independent voices of women, was really something created by the male Church hierarchy in order to promote their own power at the expense of populist brands of Christianity, which were labeled “heresies.” Many of these “heretical” groups, such as the Guglielmites, granted women a larger role than in traditional Catholicism and allowed women to preach; women even appear as leaders in these groups.

Elliott makes her case by connecting various holy women to the Inquisition. Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) was the founder of the Inquisition. He was also a major sponsor of various holy women. He supported Mary of Oigenes (1177-1213) and the Beguine movement as well as Elisabeth of Hungary (1207-1231). Elisabeth of Hungary’s confessor was Conrad of Marburg (d. 1233), a close associate of Gregory IX. Conrad of Marburg, soon after Elisabeth’s death and after he successfully pushed for her canonization, became an inquisitor. Elliott argues that Conrad gained an aura of sanctity for himself because of his association with Elisabeth. This protected him from any opposition and allowed him to pursue heretics as he wished.

Elliot connects the very practices associated with female spirituality to the Inquisition. The practice of women torturing their bodies and the veneration of women as living relics was part of a shift away from martyrdom as the ideal to a new ideal that one should be dead to the world. The reason for this was that the Church was in a struggle against heresy and was actively executing heretics. As such the Church did not wish to allow these heretics to be turned into martyrs. Instead the Church created a new ideal of living martyrdom and offered up women as useful manifestation of it.

The culture of the Inquisition played a role in gathering evidence for a pious life. The very processes, which were used to canonize women, reflected an inquisitional mode of thinking:

The somatic nature of female spirituality meant that the requisite proofs of holiness were often of a physical nature. Since a holy person frequently received revelations in the course of a rapture, special care was taken to secure satisfying proofs of this condition. …
Women were believed to have a particular propensity to rapture – premised on the fragility, and hence susceptibility, of the female body. If the confessor could furnish evidence that the rapture was genuine, this was an important step toward establishing that the woman in question was in communication with the divine.[1]

The very act of declaring women to be saints and miracle workers reflected medieval misogynist views on women.

In the long run this process and mechanism for examining women, to see if they were under the influence of the Holy Spirit gave way, in the fifteenth century, to the creation of the process and mechanism for examining women to see if they were under the influence of the devil. The same Inquisition culture that promoted the veneration of women in the end turned around and started hunting down women as witches.

Elliott deserves a lot of credit for offering a multilayered analysis of the connection between holy women and the Inquisition, taking into consideration the ways in which the thought processes of the Inquisition related to female spirituality. She could have taken the easy way out and simply contented herself with playing a game of gotcha, pointing out that many of the people involved with the veneration of holy women were also Inquisitors. Her analysis of the thought processes involved is what I find to be credible.

The problem with Elliot’s work is that she is caught up in the narrative of the “black legend” of the Inquisition, which sees the Inquisition as this dark menacing organization, terrorizing all of Europe. The Inquisition persecuted heretics and many prominent heretics were women. For Elliot this means that the Inquisition was an anti-women organization.

I would be inclined to read Elliot’s material in the opposite direction. The promotion of female sanctity in the later part of the Middle Ages led to Fourth Lateran Council, with its emphasis on the Eucharist and the rise of the Inquisition. The male Church hierarchy, influenced by a lay movement, came to put greater emphasis on the Eucharist. The fact that the Fourth Lateran Council also gave greater power to the clergy does not contradict this thesis. On the contrary one could argue that this move to increase the power of the clergy by declaring that only the clergy had the power to turn the bread and the wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ, only became necessary with the establishment of Transubstantiation. If the lay believer can consume the body and blood of Christ then he would have no need for a clergy unless that same body and blood could only be gotten through the intercession of the clergy. One could also argue that the adoration of the priesthood was itself part of this women’s spirituality. As Bynum suggests, women may have seen the act of the priest bringing forth the Eucharist as a woman giving birth.[2]

To take this a step further I would raise the possibility that women may have seen their priests, not as a part of the patriarchal hierarchy, but as emasculated men who were therefore, in a sense, women like themselves. Priests were men defined by their exclusion from the two activities most associated with the male gender, fighting and sex. Women, might have therefore, viewed their priests as men who had been made into women like themselves. I grant Elliott that the priests themselves may not have seen things in this matter. Most likely the clergy understood this female spirituality in ways that closely parallel Elliott. This in no way invalidates how women may have understood it.

The doctrine of Transubstantiation forced the Church into the difficult position of having to defend this doctrine. This led to the creation of the Inquisition and the thirteenth century crackdown on heretical groups such as the Cathars. The fact that such a campaign could succeed indicates that there was wide popular support for it. From this perspective the Inquisition becomes, rather than an attempt by the Church hierarchy to impose its will on society, but a manifestation of the Church hierarchy becoming ensnared by popular beliefs and forced to involve themselves with popular concerns. Since women made up half of the population and none of the Church hierarchy, much of popular medieval Christian beliefs came from them. This process reached a climax, in the fifteenth century with the rise of witch hunts. The charge of witchcraft arouse out of a distinctively women’s culture, which saw women as wielders of religious power, important enough to attract the attention of Satan.

[1] Elliott, Proving Woman pg. 182.
[2] See Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast pg. 268.

Female Spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the Search for a Feminine Christianity (Part III)

Caroline Walker Bynum: Holy Feast and Holy Fast.

In contrast to Bell’s psychoanalytical explanation for the attitude toward food displayed by certain medieval women, Bynum attempts to approach the issue from the perspective of the medieval world view. Clearly the women who starved themselves did not see themselves as merely trying to gain more control over their lives in the face of a patriarchal existence; they saw themselves as good Christians, acting in accordance with Christian theology or at least their understanding of Christian theology. This then becomes an opportunity for Bynum to reconstruct the theology of women in the late Middle Ages; one built around food, fasting and the Eucharist.

Unlike Bell, who views asceticism as being separate from food, Bynum views food and fasting as being intrinsically linked to each other, rejecting the dichotomy between eating and fasting; they are all part of one continual narrative, Christ suffering in order to bring about the salvation of the world. Of course men, during this time period, also identified themselves with Christ’s humanity and enacted his suffering. Women, though, approached the issue differently from men in that women viewed this through the particular lens of their experience as women. Women, unlike men, give birth to children and nurse them. Their bodies bring forth life and sustain it; their very bodies are food. Women in the later Middle Ages saw the narrative of Christ’s birth and death in this light. The human Christ came out of the body of Mary. He is the food which the faithful literally eat. The priest bringing forth the Eucharist could be a woman bringing forth a child. Christ bleeding from the lance in his side could be a woman giving forth milk from her breast.

Since women represent the flesh, women could represent the human side of Christ particularly since Christ’s physical side came from Mary. By doing this women could turn the traditional “misogynistic” paradigm on its head. Women might be carnal, sinful and irrational, but these very attributes could give them a special relationship to God, unattainable even by priests. If women are carnal then so much the better for identifying with Christ’s humanity. If they are sinful then so much the better for identifying with Christ’s redemption. If they are irrational than so much the better for transcending the bounds of reason and comprehending God.

The other side of the image of Christ as the food that nourishes the world is his suffering on the Cross. According to Christian theology, Christ gave his very flesh to bring nourishment to the world. Women imitated this by giving over their bodies. Bynum argues that, while men also fasted, it is in the vitae of female saints that food becomes a central motif. You see women who become saints because of their fasts or because they live off of the Eucharist. With men fasting is incidental. Francis of Assisi fasted, but his fasting is seen in terms of his embodiment of the poor and naked Christ. For women the issue was food. Saints such as Christina the Astonishing and Lutgard, because of their fasting, exuded oil, in one case from her breasts and in the other case from her fingertips.[1] Catherine of Siena nourished herself by drinking the puss from the body of a sick woman.[2] Bynum makes a big deal out of the fact that the main manifestation of women abstaining from food was their living solely off of the Eucharist. This is crucial to her attack on Bell. Bell does not deal with the issue of the Eucharist. For Bynum the whole issue of fasting is linked to Eucharist devotion and makes no sense without it.

While Bynum criticizes Bell for reading the problem of anorexia nervosa back onto medieval women, she believes that the fasting of medieval women may shed light on how to handle anorexia nervosa. As Bynum sees it, the problem with modern psychological views of anorexia nervosa is that:

… they do not take seriously the symbols used in women’s experience or the ideologies formulated about it, they have cut the phenomenon of refusal to eat off from its context of food-related behavior. Moreover, they have neglected female attitudes toward suffering and generativity. Yet one suspects such attitudes to be part of the context in which modern girls, as well as medieval ones, view both bodies and food.[3]

While Bynum states quite emphatically that she does not wish to return to the Middle Ages or bring back medieval notions of piety, she believes the medieval world as possessed a far richer understanding of symbols:

Medieval people saw food and body as sources of life, repositories of sensation. Thus food and body signified generativity and suffering. Food, which must be destroyed in order to give life, and body, which must be torn in order to give birth, became synonymous; in identifying themselves with both, women managed to give meaning to a physical, human existence in which suffering was unavoidable. …
In contrast, modern people see food and body as resources to be controlled. Thus food and body signify that which threatens human mastery. They signify the untamed, the rebellious, the excessive, the proliferating. … Breasts are not, to modern people, symbols of food. The onset of puberty is not an occasion for rejoicing by an adolescent girl or her parents. Menstruation is less a prelude to creativity and affectivity than a frightening sign of vulnerability. Body and food are thus symbols of the failure of our efforts to control our selves.[4]

Underlying Bynum’s work is a desire to save the Middle Ages, or at least the female part of it, from being dismissed by moderns as a dark pit of patriarchy, misogyny and sexism. In dealing with medieval patriarchy one can all too easily be led into the simplistic assumption that men had power and were viewed as the superior ones while women lacked power and were viewed as inferior. Traditional scholarship has assumed that women in the Middle-Ages, having accepted the misogyny of the patriarchal society around them, hated their bodies and punished them through fasting and self mutilation. In contrast to prevailing views, Bynum argues that women were not aping clerical power; rather they were creating an alternative role for themselves. Inspiration served as a counterweight to clerical ordination. The focus on the suffering of Christ countered Christ the High Priest.

Women’s adoration of the Eucharist could be used as a form of female power. Take the example of Lidwina, who, so her vita claims, could tell that her priest was offering her unconsecrated communion.[5] What we have here is a model for women to be able to challenge the male priesthood from within the paradigm of Christian theology itself.

Bynum’s attempt to rehabilitate medieval women and give them their own voices is dependent on the assumption that these women really were creating their own religious vision and not simply internalizing the views of male theologians. Bynum seeks to accomplish this by arguing that this trend toward fasting found amongst women went against the general trend within the church toward moderation. I find this description of the later Middle Ages to be too simplistic. Furthermore her need to claim that the female spirituality she deals with was something feminine does not allow her to fully explore the context in which this spirituality occurred. While this is a fascinating work, which I find to be completely convincing in its overall argument, I believe that this book would have been even stronger if Bynum had made a serious attempt to integrate the theology of her holy women into general late medieval views on the humanity of Christ. This female spirituality could be seen as another dimension of the veneration of Christ’s humanity, one that cannot be ignored by scholarship.

[1] See Bynum, Holy Feast Holy Fast pg. 122-23.
[2] Ibid pg. 171-72.
[3] Ibid pg. 207.
[4] Ibid pg. 300.
[5] Ibid 127-28.