Wounded Meditations: Blood, Prayer and Gender in the Passion Narrative

Wounded Meditations: Blood, Prayer and Gender in the Passion Narrative

Medieval blood-pages and the cult of wound worship in the later Middle Ages

The concern of our last class seemed to center around a question of what I believe was referenced as the ‘virtuous bounds of the imagination’ in regards to the iconographic/pornographic dichotomy created by hyper-fixation with the wounds, blood and body of the body of Christ. While our discussion centered primarily around the Meditations and on contemporary depictions of the Passion in film, I thought it pertinent to introduce a few more historical examples of medieval wound/blood devotion to further enhance our discussion/alarm concerning the imaginative exploitation of the wounded Body.

The pages from the British Library’s Egerton Manuscript 1821 (from Britain, made between 1480-1490) act as a significant and disturbing representation of blood meditation. The pages - red pigment wounds drawn on vellum - remove the figurative nature from the body of Christ, invite the reader to meditate purely on the literal essence of embodiment - blood. The pages exacerbate a medieval frenzy to meditate on the number of wounds or the objects used to wound - they seek to engage with the materiality of vellum as skin, to subsume the viewer in an experience of fluidity of pain. MS 37049, of the same collection, expands on the imagery of 1821, including images of a the heart of Christ a monk kneeling in prayer, along with the requisite blood droplets [2]. The proliferation of these blood-filled images, along with the ‘Passion imagery...virtually everywhere in England and on the continent’ and the occurrence of Passion plays seems to suggest a deep investment in the imaginative material, to relate to Christ not only through his ‘humanity’ but through the literal fluid/flesh of his form.

 London, British Library Manuscript Egerton 1821, England (Sheen?), 1480- 1490, pigment on vellum, 120 x 180 mm. Folios 6v-7r. Photo © The British Library Board

London, British Library Manuscript Egerton 1821, England (Sheen?),

1480-1490, pigment on vellum and inked woodcut, 120 x 90 mm. Folio 7v. Photo ©The British Library Board

As Thebaut discusses in her examination of these blood pages, wound/blood piety may have been particularly significant to medieval women, whose participation in institutional religious practice was more limited: unable to engage with the Body through the blessing of the Host as priests, and with literal images of the dying body being visually separate from their own by virtue of masculinity, they may have found comfort/exploration in blood, a substance shared through all forms [1]. Blood, of course, and the yonic image of the gaping wound provides a space for specifically feminine engagement: women are tied to pain through the curse of Eve and the pain of birth, through the pain and (likely, in the Middle Ages, humiliation) of menstruation, itself a bloody and bodily experience.

In earlier posts and weeks we discussed Hugh of St. Victor’s fear that members of the Church would regard Christ as separate from the experience of pain, would treat ‘likeness’ to humanity as something either too close or too far from the experience of being-in-body. The extent of embodied-ness is for Hugh and for theology broadly a charged issue - to assume that Christ did not feel pain, or felt pain in some way apart from the human experience, is to  devalue the sacrifice made during the Passion, to in some way underestimate the love and strength of God. Here is something deeply far in the opposite direction, something that draws on a desire for a sadomasochistic, pseudo-erotic imaginative contact with flesh, that purposefully breaches the ‘decency’ of the imagination to engage with the utter humiliation experienced by God on the cross. Is this within some ‘virtuous boundary’? In lives that are brutal, short, humiliating - is pain an intentional, vital medium through which to connect with God? The mystery plays are quasi-liturgical, yet they have their moments of levity, the blending of what might be called the ‘profane’ nature of the everyday with the ‘sacred’ of scripture. In a much broader sense, the extreme focus on pain and wounded-ness in the Meditations and the tradition of blood-piety seems to derive from a kind of ‘wounded imagination’, a desire to stimulate empathy for and from Christ through engagement with this most essential substance and experience.

What does  a fixation with the wounds of Christ suggest as a lesson for the medieval Christian? The Meditations, in discussing the morbid humiliation of Christ’s body, speak of ‘loving duty’ and ‘perfect obedience’. The user of the Meditations is instructed to ‘enlarge the scene more fully’ and ‘notice every detail as if [they] were present’ [3]. Here we see that blood pages and the Meditations are engaged in a similar struggle: they seek to engage, on a level of detail beyond scriptural narrative, with the suffering of Christ; yet the language is of ‘enlarging’ the scene even as the focus gets smaller. It is strange to think of blood piety or wound meditation as an ‘enlargement’ of the Passion narrative, given the narrowness of meditative focus, yet it undoubtedly is: it invites a contemplation of the visceral, bodily presence of God far beyond what is offered in original text. Wound-meditation seems to give the opportunity to expand beyond one’s own body and own suffering to engage with the broadly suffering body of God, in the Passion narrative and perhaps, compassionately, in the suffering of the Body of God’s people on Earth.

Is there a danger of lostness in this form of meditation? Is this what causes the nausea of a modern reader? St. Augustine writes of a similar fear concerning theater in his Confessions, saying that his obsession with performance as a young (pre-Christian) man was because the ‘plays reflected [his] own unhappy plight and were tinder to [his] fire’ [4]. In both the context of these forms of bodily meditation and in the examination of mystery plays as a phenomenon of scriptural engagement, this old fear seems especially relevant. We, as humans, are attracted to the observation of suffering for the catharsis that observation offers and, perhaps, for the comparative illumination it offers our own struggles - do the mystery plays do this, do the Meditations? And if so - must this be problematic? Could this not be a way of engaging with God? I return again and again to this dichotomy between iconographic and pornographic, between the openness to the profane that meditation of flesh offers and the same opportunity for empathy/compassion.

Peace & blessings,

Joan

[1] Bleeding Pages, Bleeding Bodies: A Gendered Reading of British Library MS Egerton 1821, Nancy Thebaut

[2] Aspects of Blood Piety in a Late Medieval English Manuscript: London, British Library Additional 37049. Marlene Hennessy. 

[3] Meditations On The Life of Christ, John of Caulibus.

[4] The Confessions of St Augustine, St. Augustine, III.1.2.