Ghost of Student Past

A few weeks ago I read The Meaning of Mary Magdalene by Cynthia Bourgeault: ostensibly a serious take on that scandalous claim of The DaVinci Code—that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had something of a special relationship and maybe human offspring. But Bourgeault’s real work is literary; she argues from the internal evidence of the gospels, both canonical and otherwise, that this plausibly erotic relationship exemplifies the great contribution of Jesus to Western spirituality: the path of kenotic love.

For Bourgeault, kenosis is a voluntary and complete divestment of self that becomes the “tie-rod of Jesus’ entire teaching”. Paul the Apostle first applies the verb kenosin to Jesus in his well-known hymn from Philippians 2:6-11:

Rather, he emptied himself
and assuming the state of a slave
he was born in human likeness.

After moving the sacred cow of Jesus’ supposed celibacy deftly out of the way, Bourgeault pursues an opening to factor Magdalene into the equation. When the friend for whom you’d “lay down your life” (John 15:13) is also your beloved,

kenotic practice takes on a particularly intense and even sacramental character. This is because the root energy it works with is the transformative fire of eros, the energy of desiring. That messy, covetous, passion-ridden quicksilver of all creation is tamed and transformed into a substance of an entirely different order, and the force of the alchemy accounts for both the efficiency of this path and its terrifying intensity. (Bourgeault, 120)

Bourgeault further codifies this alchemy of love: A = E x K. The wilder the eros, and the stronger the kenotic practice, the greater the magnitude of transfigured love, which she identifies as the transcendent agape. Conversely, eros held greedily is not transfigured, as evidenced by the risen Jesus’ words to Mary at the tomb: “do not cling to me” (John 20:17).

While I was rounding up my own sacred cows, I recalled a paper I’d written circa Spring 2008, in HUM 2 at UCSD. I remembered vaguely that it was about morality and love, but in particular that the professor thought I’d missed the deeper point of the work under analysis, which I should re-read at some point. I did some garage spelunking, found the paper, and re-analyzed both Mary de France’s Lais and my own teenage voice in light of Bourgeault’s thought. What follows is the result.

If eros is an element of alchemical reaction, then the Lais are a set of erotic experiments conducted in the laboratory of courtly love. What better place to study this “passion-ridden quicksilver” than from within a most structured sappiness? What my first reading took to be instances of “imposed morality” are in fact initial conditions, precise as in any well-designed experiment. The husband is jealous, the mother is deceitful, the knight is gallant, and the maiden is fair. The eros is strong, and the stage is set for this “transformative fire” to do its work.

And boy, does it work. Lovers are driven across the sea, over cliffs, into swoons, sharpened spikes, tubs of boiling water, through depths of despair and heights of ecstasy. But what matters, as in Bourgeault, is not so much where the players end up, but how they end up. The Two Lovers is a tragic case in point. The knight will win his beloved by carrying her up the mountain if he only drinks the potion of strength ready in his hand. But he refuses, and just steps from the top, they both die. In Equitan, the lovers’ murderous plot backfires and becomes their downfall. Is this love held too closely?, consumed too rabidly? Conversely, Guigemar and Bisclavret stay true to their loves despite the animal indifference of fate, and fate seems to work things out for them. But Laustic’s lovers also maintain fidelity, and their only recompense is the token of a dead nightingale. Perhaps this is love freely given, if not physically to the beloved, then offered back to the universe.

But the Lais occasionally vouch more directly for kenosis as the transformative partner to eros. Le Fresne, the orphaned heiress, welcomes and waits on the bride of the man she loves, clearly setting aside her own feelings while astonishing the court at her generosity. When her true identity is revealed, the mis-marriage is undone like a clerical error. Similarly, upon learning of her husband’s affair, Eliduc’s loving wife Guildelüec fades graciously into a nunnery, clearing the way for his mistress, Guilliadun. Years later, after a happy remarriage and generous philanthropy, Eliduc builds a church and Guilliadun joins the same nunnery, where Guildelüec is now abbess. The three live piously and maintain peaceful correspondence. This is certainly love transfigured.

My own spiritual journey over the past decade is relevant here. I traveled out of the provincial fundamentalism in which I was raised, through the strange and varied suburbs of evangelicalism, into the aging metropolis of Catholicism, and have now descended into the catacombs, as it were, to explore the hidden architecture of Christianity, where the mystics hold vigil and commune with Zen Buddhists, quantum physicists, Carl Jung, and apparently Dan Brown. I like it down here. My 2008 paper, aptly titled “A Weighted Work” is evidence not only of my then-overloaded schedule and handy ability to present an “A-“ out of some selective readings, but of the bias of moralistic religion against what I dismissed as “carnal love”. I would not, or could not see virtue quietly revealing itself in the “mess of all creation”. And I’d yet to fall myself into the crucible of eros. Love—and loss—have been the catalysts and waypoints on this journey into the perennial heart of my faith.

Thus the Lais are in fact proving to constitute a grevose ovre, at least in my case. As the prologue affirms, I am one of “those who were to come after and study them… gloss the letter and supply it’s significance from their own wisdom” (13-16). Weightier still, by preserving a foil of my past self to study and whose letter to gloss, they evince my own (in)significance.