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Forum: Reconsidering Early American Sexuality
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Eros and Desire in Early Modern Spirituality
Susan Juster
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THE erotic dimension in early modern religious language no longer
startles us. We have learned from literary scholars and historians
of religion to appreciate the finely calibrated images of sex and
sexuality that suffuse the devotional material (both Protestant
and Catholic) used by early modern believers to stimulate their
own spiritual growth. Images of a ravishing Christ and supine soul
entangled in a cosmic embrace conjure up an uneasy mixture of sacred
and profane desires—indeed, their power as devotional images
lies precisely in their ability to blur the distinction between
modes of desire. The transgressive nature of early modern texts
of spiritual eros makes them deeply appealing to modern scholars
and highly illuminating for the study of sexuality. |
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Take (as historians of religion always do) the Puritans. Puritans wrote some of the most erotic poetry and devotional literature we have, speaking unhesitatingly of marriage to Christ in explicitly sexual terms. The conversion experience—the theological and phenomenological centerpiece of radical Protestantism—was understood as the rapturous union of the female soul with a male Christ, and true believers did not shy away from describing this experience of mystical marriage with all the passion they could muster. As the poet Edward Taylor put it with typical bluntness, "The Soul's the Wombe. Christ is the Spermidote, and Saving Grace the seed cast therein."1 The passion of early modern believers for their God is unmistakable, but was it sexual? When they spoke of being "ravished" by the hand of God, or of meeting Christ in "the bed of love," did they really envision themselves in a physical sexual relationship with God, or were they making a more subtle point about the intensity of desire and the feeling of being overwhelmed by a powerful figure? Were their gender identities as men and women really implicated in the prospect of uniting with a male God, or did saints enter into a zone of polymorphous sexuality where all identities were dissolved? These questions have mattered a great deal to scholars of religion, who have probed the language and devotional imagery of Anglo-American Puritanism and German Pietism for evidence of latent homoeroticism or aberrant sexuality lurking beneath the torrid rhetorical surface. What, scholars have asked, was most at risk for radical Protestants as they prepared to receive God's grace—their gender identity, their sexual identity, the integrity of their physical selves, or their emotional equilibrium? Recognizing that radical Pietists encountered what Walter Hughes has called the "panic of desire" in their spiritual longings, what was the source of this panic—fear of physical dissolution? fear of transgressing gender norms? or a more elemental fear of desiring too much, of having their judgment and their will overruled by a powerful rush of emotion that may have had nothing to do with sex at all? |
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Saints in a variety of sectarian settings from Puritanism to Quakerism to Pietism faced a common dilemma: how to harness the imaginative power of sexual language and even, perhaps (in the case of the Moravians), of sexual practices to enhance the believer's relationship to God without unleashing the disruptive power of sexual desire. Desire was always the unstable element in the Pietist ethos, the wild card that threatened to turn "holy kisses" into "brutish lust," in Jonathan Edwards's words.2By and large, scholars of religion have failed really to confront the destabilizing effect of desire on personal faith or to explain the relationship of sexual desire to other forms of longing that could be just as intense. Too often, we automatically code desire as sexual in origin, if not in expression, and assume that wherever there is an intensity of feeling, wherever there is passion, there is sexual desire. The failure is partly a linguistic one—we just do not have an adequate vocabulary to discern shades of meaning in the concept of desire and to differentiate levels of intensity and purpose—and partly an analytical one: we are conditioned by our post-Freudian culture to believe that sex is the primal human desire, the itch behind all our scratchings. So that wherever we see passion, we read sex. |
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