Uniting the Extremes
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing sick but dead, beyond any possible help. The inability and unworthiness on his side are complete. Anselm cannot even move his will in the right direction; he has not and cannot even begin the journey.
The problems of language in the prayers are not just about addressing God and the saints. Anselm spends a great deal of time in the prayers addressing not just his soul but also his sins and sinful self, which are, like the divine, beyond words, though for a different reason. "Flee, flee, from yourself," he commands, calling his sinful self a "horrible I-know-notwhat substance," language which will be echoed in the Monologion's characterization of the Trinity as "three I-know-not-whats."60 "Sins, sins,"
Anselm cries, "the more horrible, the more considered."61 Sin exerts a downward pull of sin on the mind, just as increased reflection on things divine, and even the saints, pulls the mind upward toward greater and greater perfection, reaching its apex, of course, in the Proslogion's "that than which none greater can be conceived." Recalling Augustine's address to concupiscence in the Confessions, Anselm addresses his sins in the cold morning light after his seduction and deception. When you were attracting me, he reflects ruefully, you made sweet promises; now that you have dragged me down, I am bathed in bitterness. They have, he tells them, left him not just fallen but buried, blinded and imprisoned in insensate despair. In a perfect and literal vicious circle, his sins beget more evil from their evil; they "attract accusers" and "remove excusers," "lead in [adducitis] those who would damn him" and "exclude [excluditis] those who would intercede for him."62 In his prayer to the Evangelist, Anselm portrays sin as a kind of moral quicksand, using, three verbs in quick succession based on "ducto" (abduct, perduct, subduct) to describe their downward pull.63
Uniting the Extremes The last step in creating the impossible rhetorical situation lies in the nature of Anselm's request: intimacy with God. The impossibility of even addressing God, Mary, and the saints, both because of their loftiness and his lowliness, stands in stark contrast with the almost presumptuous way in which Anselm attempts to insinuate himself into their good graces. To St. John Anselm issues a challenge: how can Anselm know that Christ loves John or that John loves Christ if John does not intervene for him, proving his intimacy with Christ by his ability to gain mercy for Anselm?64 He adds only this disclaimer in the second prayer to John: "Ex60. Ora. 8, S III, 27, 46; Mono. 79, S I, 85.
61. Ora. 11, S III, 43, 27.
62. Ora. 10, S III, 35, 56–57; 35, 66–68; 34, 33–36.
63. Ora. 11, S III, 43, 28.
64. Ora. 11, S III, 44, 75–78.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing cuse my excesses, beloved of God. For it is your love that compels me to speak so."65 In a prayer to Mary, Anselm throws himself between mother and son and leaps from one to the other, like a child moving from father to mother to find the one who be more lenient: "So the accused flees from the just God to the pious mother of the merciful God. The accused finds refuge from the mother he has offended in the pious son of the kind mother. He throws himself on both and between both. He casts himself among the pious mother and pious son."66 He addresses St. Paul's using Paul's own words. Paul promised to be weak with the weak, described himself as made to be all things to all men, said that for him God's grace was sufficient; so, Anselm argues, Paul especially ought to take pity on him.
Throughout the prayers, Anselm speaks to his addressees with surprising familiarity. Anselm writes in the prayer to Mary that he desires always to be with her, that his heart is "weak with love for her." For Mary, he writes, "my soul melts, my flesh fails." Paradoxically and unlike physical love, Mary's love, he says, would make his body "dry up" and wither.67
If Mary is addressed in terms of sexual love, Paul is addressed as mother:
"O St. Paul, where is he that was called the nurse of the faithful, tending to his sons? Who is that affectionate mother who declares everywhere that she is in labor giving birth a second time to her sons? Sweet nurse, sweet mother." Christians are born and nursed in the faith by all the apostles but most by Paul, "our great mother," Anselm notes. Jesus is mother as well; he is like a mother hen, Anselm goes on, piling metaphor on metaphor, gathering her baby chicks under her wings. He asks Paul to lay his warm body atop his dead body and warm it back to life.68 The sinner's condition of exile is described in familial terms: he is an orphan, his soul is a widow having lost its one true love.69 What Anselm seeks is not the distant benevolence of a sovereign but the intimate connection with God and the saints as his mother, father, brother, and lover.
The use of imagery drawn from the family for the relationships to God, Paul, and the other saints is a strong theme in Anselm's prayers, becoming common in twelfth century spirituality, partly because of Anselm.70 The image that has received the most attention is the image of 65. Ora. 12, S III, 48, 81.
66. Ora. 6, S III, 16, 45–47.
67. Ora. 7, S III, 24, 158–62.
68. Ora. 10, S III, 39, 177–79; 182–84; 40, 197–98; 38, 137–41.
69. Ora. 2, S III, 9, 81–82.
70. On the influence of Anselm's prayers in the twelfth century, see J. Lewicki, "Anselme et les doctrines des Cistercians du XIIe siècle," Analecta Anselmiana 2 (1970): 209–16; and S. Vanni
Rovighi, "Notes sur l'influence de saint Anselme au XIIe siècle," Cahiers de civilization médiévale 8
(1965): 43–58. On the use of analogies taken from human families to describe the relationship with God in the twelfth century see R. Javelet, Image et resemblance au douzième siècle de saint Anselm à
Alain de Lille, 2 vols. (Paris, University of Strasbourg, 1967).
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing Jesus as mother, especially due to the influential essay of Carolyn Walker
Bynum on the topic.71 Though Bynum's analysis is focused on the twelfth century and the particular use of this image by Cistercians, her cautions about understanding this and other images for Christ applies to Anselm as well. While this sort of feminine imagery was long ignored by scholars, it can be made too much of. Given the much weaker connection between notions of the feminine and women in the Middle Ages, Jesus (or Paul) as mother does not tell us much about the writer's attitude toward women in general or in particular, Bynum cautions. Moreover, it is only one image in a cluster of other intimate and domestic images in both Anselm and in twelfth century writers.72 Anselm's use of the image of Jesus and Paul as mothers is part of a pattern in the prayers of a number of analogies to signify the intimate connection with God he is seeking. The language seeking brotherhood with Jesus in one of the Marian prayers is just as striking as the image of Jesus as mother, as is the language used in the second prayer to John the Evangelist asking to be included in the love between John and Jesus.73 Moreover, Anselm uses the imagery associated with motherhood and the feminine, for example, wanting to drink from Jesus as font of mercy, from whom flowing waters come, without making reference to femininity at all.
It is perhaps significant that the prayer to St. Paul is the longest prayer and that it is the one that dwells on the image of Jesus and Paul as nurse, mother, and mother hen with her chicks. As we will see, the Pauline notion that everything is received from God is very important in Anselm's theology, and Anselm here explores this notion poetically in its greatest depth in the prayer dedicated to its author, Paul, invoking him as nurse and mother of the faithful.74 Though she does not make the Pauline connection, Bynum argues that similar imagery in twelfth century Cistercian writers clearly influenced by Anselm serves exactly this end: "The Cistercian conception of Jesus as mother and abbot as mother reveals not an attitude toward women but a sense (not without ambiva71. Caroline Walker Bynum, "Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in TwelfthCentury Cistercian Writing," in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110–69. For some of the earlier research on the motif of Jesus as mother see André Cabassut, "Une devotion médiévale peu connue: la devotion à
'Jésus Notre Mère,'" Mélanges Marcel Viller, Revue d'ascètique et de mystique 25 (1949): 234–45; Edmund Colledge, OSA and James Walsh, SJ, "Introduction," in A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 vols., edited by Edmund Colledge, OSA and James Walsh, SJ (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978); and Giles Constable, "Twelfth-Century Spirituality and the Late Middle Ages," Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5 (1971): 45–47.
72. Bynum, "Jesus as Mother," 167–68.
73. Ora. 7, S III, 23–24, 137–51; Ora. 12, S III, 47–48, 71–81.
74. See chapter 5, section c.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing lence) of a need and obligation to nurture other men, a need and obligation to achieve intimate dependence on God."75
The prayers not only ask for intimacy in the analogies to intimate human relationships but they also seek an intimate connection with the events of Jesus' life. The prayer to Mary Magdalene imagines at great length her anguish as she searches at the empty tomb for the body of Christ. Anselm chides Jesus for leaving her in uncertainty, for inspiring a love she now feels is ignored; why does Jesus (and then later the angel at the tomb) ask the cause of her weeping when he well knows the answer?76
Anselm portrays her feelings as she seeks Jesus' body in the tomb without success. What was to be her last comfort for the loss of his life is the apex of her grief and the loss of all hope. The theme of the Magdalene in despair is not an ancient theme. Traditionally she was either characterized by her hope and the constancy of her faith or chided (by Gregory the Great) for fleshly character of her love.77 But Anselm has turned her grief, her emotional response to Jesus, into her virtue. He asks Christ to look at her: "see how she anxiously burns with desire for you, searching, questioning, but nowhere does that which she seeks appear. Whatever she sees displeases her since it is you alone she would behold and she sees you not."78 The hope is that Christ, once aware of her grief at his absence will answer her fervent desire with his presence. It is a very realistic picture of the anxious emotions of a woman for the man she loves. The portrait is intimate both in its close-up of Mary and her feelings and in the Christ it addresses and rebukes for playing with her very tender feelings.
Anselm clearly identifies with Mary's anxiety and her longing for Jesus, finding in her an expression of what he himself desires.
This is of a piece with the way in which Anselm attempts to imagine the concrete details of the lives and feelings of the other saints and Christ. He mourns the absence of one kind of intimacy, not having been physically present for the crucifixion of Christ or the martyrdom of St. Stephen, at the same time as he asks for a kind of spiritual but real intimacy in the future. "Why, O my soul," he asks in the prayer to Christ,
"were you not present to be pierced by a sword of keenest sorrow when you could not endure the wounding of the side of your Savior with a lance?" He believes by faith that the crucifixion took place as described but still "weep[s] over the hardship of exile" and "burns with desire for the glorious contemplation of [God's] face." He continues to imagine what it would have been like to experience the sorrows of Mary on that day, to 75. Bynum, "Jesus as Mother," 168.
76. Ora. 16, S III, 65–66, 37–50.
77. Saxer, "Anselme et la Madeleine," 368.
78. Ora. 16, S III, 66, 58–60.
Persuasion and the Narrative of Longing have taken Jesus' body down with Joseph of Arimathea, to have heard the angel's announcement of the resurrection. He concludes, asking Jesus,
"When will you restore me since I did not see the blessed incorruption of your flesh? Since I did not kiss the place of your wounds where the nails were fixed? Since I did not sprinkle tears of joy on the wounds that bear witness to your true body?"79
Anselm's desire for the union the prayers make clear is impossible calls forth the strong emotions of the prayers. These emotions are a response to the infinite distance from the good (grief), the proximity of total loss (fear, anxiety), and the aspiration to reach that good (longing, desire). To Christ he writes, "I thirst for you, I hunger for you, I desire you, I sigh for you, I covet you." "I am," he continues, "like an orphan deprived of the presence of the kindest father, weeping and wailing, incessantly embracing the beloved figure with his whole heart."80
Anselm sees passion as something that focuses and torpor or lack of feeling as something that scatters his thoughts. In fact, the real beginning of Anselm's prayers is lethargy, a kind of non-emotion.81 The worst thing that Anselm can accuse himself of is not of being overcome by passion but rather of not being able to feel anything; his most grievous sins are that he lacks grief over his own sin and lacks a keen desire for and love of God. The bottom of the long fall into sin is to find oneself "frozen fast in despair, silent and insensible, as if lost to God and thrown into forgetfulness of him."82 Anselm asks Nicholas to "stir up his spirit" but notes in frustration that his "tepid soul languishes" and his heart is hardened with "stupor."83
For Anselm, then, the options are not passion for physical things versus the lack of passion that allows detachment from the world. Rather the contrast is between a lack of passion and direction toward good, which he sees as the result of sin, and the desire for and movement toward good: "My perverse heart is dry and petrified in deploring the sins
I have committed; but in resisting occasions of sin it is indeed yielding and soon defiled. My depraved mind is swift and untiring in treating what is useless and vile; but in thinking of what is salubrious it is squeamish and unmoved."84 Lack of feeling is thus the equivalent of a lack of positive motion toward the good; it is the first and most devastating nail in his coffin, that which constitutes the greatest barrier to his own salva79. Ora. 2, S III, 8, 42–43, 36–38, 56–62, 63–65.
80. Ora. 2, S III, 7, 30–32.
81. See, for example, Ora. 9, S III, 30, 12–15.
82. Ora. 10, S III, 35, 61–63.
83. Ora. 14, S III, 57, 75–76.
84. Ora. 15, S III, 62, 20–23.