Bernard of Clairvaux’s Letters and the Anatomy of a Cloistered Man: Gendered Imagery in Letters from the First Decade as an Abbot (original) (raw)

This study analyzes the structure and meaning of gendered imagery in Bernard of Clairvaux’s letter collection through a selection of letters that have been dated to the first decade of his career as an abbot. The main question to be answered is how Bernard talks about the monastic man living in a monastic community, using gendered imagery in his letters to abbots and monks, and which meanings are given to manhood and womanhood in the context of the collection of letters. The time frame of Bernard’s first years as an abbot leads one to ask how the imagery is used to shape a monastic ideal. During his first decade as an abbot, Bernard had a growing network of influence, which among other things was kept up and expanded through the writing of letters. These letters and their role as an instrument of constructing and promoting a monastic ideal are the point of interest of this dissertation. The focus is on the gendered theology presented in the text and the cultural and historical context in which it was produced. Medieval reality was pronouncedly tied to images, especially in the realm of religion and spirituality. Faith and images were indistinguishable from each other, with salvation being directly linked to the symbolic system of iconography. Bernard exemplifies the blurred lines of image, material reality, text and thought in his works, including the letters. The texts were written in a way meant to provoke a visual experience in the mind’s eye of the reader. These images are accessible through the text, even for a researcher reading it outside of its immediate cultural surroundings. Bernard crafts the gendered imagery of the letters in context: it is built around the situation that the letter concerns, not the other way round. In his usage of gendered imagery, he focuses on influencing the reader in a way that would result in the desired interior sensual experience, which then would convert the reader on the path desired by Bernard. Bernard’s letters represent a fresh take on the meaning of manhood and womanhood. While at points Bernard leans on the tradition of male perfection, he often shows the reader the insecure father or the weak man and at the same time strengthens womanhood’s positive and transcendental connotations through goddess-like figures and the affirmation of the profoundly feminine position of the bridal Body of Christ. At times, Bernard transmits gendered theological views that seem undecided but have been chosen for him by the earlier authors he relies on. This results in self-contradicting views in the letters. Womanhood does not solely stand for worldliness or fleshliness in the negative sense and manhood does not signify only goodness of spiritual heights: womanhood and manhood frequently alternate places between these positions without any definite outcome or fixed position in the reversals of the gender binary. In previous research on Bernard’s other texts, it has been proposed that he envisions salvation as participation in divine masculinized transcendence. Based on the gendered theology in the letters, this is only half of the picture. The road to salvation that the letters propose equally involves participation in the divinized feminine flesh of the incarnated Christ. Masculinized transcendence and divinized feminine flesh both need to be present simultaneously in the right order and without mixing in the ideal monk aiming at eternity with God. Human gendered reality is inherently behind the rhetorical use of gendered imagery. Belief in the incarnation and the resurrection changes the meaning of imperfect and mutable corporality in relation to the supernatural and immutable perfect God into a redemptive affirmation of fleshliness and womanhood. This results in the figures used to express the monastic ideal simultaneously having both masculinity and femininity, forming a differentiated unity of the two. These figures make visible the mystery of the marital union of humanity and divinity in Christ, the unity of the Christ-head and Church-body, which the monk should realize in his life as a monastic man.