#len ment lovers. unite..

[midoribai]

She got her sprinkels

yayayay yippee!!!!!!!!!!

[anna-is-angel]

envisioning sex with god - essay

Images of lying in the bed of the cross, sucking Christ’s blood from his side, necrophillic kissing of Christ’s lifeless lips, and stuffing bodies into the raw cavity of his wound bombard the reader’s imagination in an encounter with the works of Angela of Foligno. The visions of Angela capture this collision between holiness and carnality, presenting the relationship with God as an intimate love affair. Transcribed by her brother Arnaldo, ​Angela of Foligno: Complete Works maps the unprecedented journey of Angela’s ascent that navigates through vacillating states of absence, presence, suffering, ecstasy, eroticism, and asceticism. In a religious milieu dominated by a male clergy, Angela enters the public sphere, among other visionary women, to expand the understanding of piety through the mystical union and identification with Christ. Challenging the limitations of an intellectual mastery of the teachings of the Bible, her conception of religious life centers on an experience characterized by love, suffering, contemplation, and poverty. Employing a series of images and visions that punctuate her spiritual ascent with God, her collection of works lacks the progression of a narrated love story. Instead, her transcriber, at times, clumsily weaves together vignettes of an affair of unparalleled intimacy, extreme suffering, and unattainable truth. These accounts utilize the particularity of the body, the vision, and the image as a gateway to a multidimensional fusion of God and self. Yet, despite these moments of fleeting intimacy, these encounters fail to encompass the incomprehensible experience of complete union with the transcendent God. Within the works of Angela, her encounters with Christ not only submerge her soul in the being of God, but also implicate an uncertainty and distance from an uncreated love that is beyond form. Inscribing these visions, the body, the cross, and language itself with meaning that directly impacts her union with God, the works of Angela of Foligno demonstrate both the interplays between affective and essence mysticism. In this paper, I strive to explore the ways in which this intense visual experience gives way to a multisensory, spiritual ascent and multidimensional union with God that intersects with a transcendental experience untethered by form.

A major component of Angela’s spiritual union with God relies on the affective and physical experiences tied to the particularity of the image and body. The vision itself, a key aspect in her relationship and eventual identification with the Godhead, obscures the lines between visuality and multidimensional experience. As a psychological canvas for the erotic, strange images of Angela’s psyche, the vision further serves as the ​meeting ground for the interactions and unification of her and Christ. A vehicle of not only imagistic projection, but also of bodily and vocal exchange, the vision punctuates Angela’s spiritual ascent. Marking experiences of suffering, unity with Christ, and eroticism, the medium of the vision obscures the boundaries between reality and imagination that mirrors the interplay between the closeness and unattainability of God’s presence. In one of her most memorable encounters, a vision imperceptibly grounds her in the rationalized, physical space of Christ’s tomb. Naturalized by the nonchalance of the transcription, “she found herself in the sepulcher with Christ,”​1 this scene of Angela’s sensual intimacy with the dead body of Christ subsequently naturalizes their love affair. Working her way up from his breast to mouth, she pictures a simultaneously sanctified and erotic foreplay that transcends the boundaries of life and death and human and divine. Accentuated through this vision of unmatched closeness, the relationship between Angela and Christ is one of distinct particularity. Through the specificity of the interaction between the body of Christ and that of Angela’s, the vision opens up the possibilities of engaging in a love affair with God.

It is within this love affair that Angela of Foligno captures the essence of bridal mysticism- a mysticism contingent on the particularity of relationship between the female mystic and Christ. In the blending of this bridal mysticism and passion mysticism, hinging on “imaginative representation” of the crucifixion,2​ the relationship between visuality and the viewing subject takes on a particular resonance. Visible means often inspire Angela’s intense encounters with God- stained-glass windows depicting St. Francis and paintings of the crucifixion litter the collection of her works. In viewing aesthetic depictions of the passion, the image of the cross, in particular, transforms into a core doorway to a relationship with Christ. The ultimate symbol of suffering, the cross and its further signification of shame and excruciating pain defy complete representation. In gazing at paintings of the cross, Angela expresses, “the representation was nothing in comparison with the extraordinary suffering which really took place and had been shown to me and impressed in my heart.”​3 Alone, the flat aesthetic value of the painting cannot stand to even superficially outline the essence of divine love. However, the image serves as an entry point into a multisensory experience between the divine and human. Mere images of the passion elicit such drastic corporeal reactions from Angela that Masazuola, her maid, has to hide their paintings.

Through the entry point of the cross, suffering serves as a major vehicle to the mystic’s identification and union with Christ. Images of the passion, the cross, and freshly flowing blood of Christ’s wound-- “they liked their Christ bleeding”​4-​ - pulsate through the collection. Desperately desiring for the poverty of Jesus, for the experience of the pain of the crucifixion, and for death (specifically a death more excruciating than any former martyr), Angela figures suffering as a passageway into an identification with Christ. In the sixth installment of Arnaldo’s organization of the supplementary steps, Angela experiences a suffering with no other “comparison than that of a man hanged by the neck who . . . remains dangling on the gallows and yet lives.”​5 Through this agonizing “abase[ment],”​6 the body and soul not only undergo a “purging” and purification “for a greater elevation,”​7 but this suffering also aligns the human subject with Christ. A “necessary companion of love,”8 suffering is a key ingredient of the spiritual ascent. A tool of self knowledge and understanding of the experience of Christ, the mimetic quality of Angela’s desire for suffering coalesces with her conception of divine love. The asceticism and welcoming of spiritual and physical discomfort advances the simultaneous rejection of self and the merging of self with the divine. This tenuous relationship characterizes the complexity of Angela’s suffering and ascent, as she oscillates between fleeting moments of God’s saturating love and presence and her extreme guilt and unworthiness. She must grapple with this tension between serving as the “representation of sinful humankind and the figure of the sinless Jesus who sacrificed himself on behalf of humanity.”​9 This tension uniquely centers on the body of the female mystic, whose particularity serves as the crux of this vacillation between causing​ Christ’s suffering and becoming​ Christ.

The body of the female mystic and that of the hyper-humanized God-man serve significant roles through the lens of bridal mysticism. While the cross signifies a mimetic suffering of both beings, it simultaneously signifies their erotic consummation. God presents the cross to Angela as “your bed,”​10 symbolizing an erotic touchstone of bodily interaction, signifying a manifestation and production of love. The theme of lovemaking and the love affair localize the union of the human and the Trinity within the particularized relationship between mystic and Christ. Angela’s body is not only a conduit of expression of her passionate episodes of screams, but it is also directly involved and essential to her spiritual intertwining with God. As described above, her sense of sight often facilitates her encounters with Christ in visions. These visions themselves accentuate the roles of both Angela’s and Christ’s bodies, exemplifying the raw carnality of their corporeal interactions. Relating to the significance of the physicality of the relationship between the Shulamite and lover in the Song of Songs, the love between Angela and Christ involves both the collision of bodies and the spiritual intimacy to which this collision gives way.

In one encounter within a liminal space that obscures the reader’s perception of fantasy and reality, Christ confronts Angela in a form of undeniable corporeality. The vision accents his vulnerable humanity in images of flows of blood pouring out from his body. In an unfathomable act, Angela “saw and drank the blood,”​11 emulating the closeness of an infant drinking from its mother’s breast or the intimacy of oral sex. Mirroring the fluidity of the drops of blood sucked from the wound of Christ into Angela’s throat, these bodily interactions signify a union that not only involves the interactions between bodies but also their merging. A site for the entrance of the mystic into the Trinity, the body plays a major role in the multidimensional “unitive life.”12 The mutual mobility of bodies and souls (in an obscure realm of “reality” meeting “imagination”) relates to a love that confuses the boundaries of normative partitions between human and divine, body and soul. In one experience of ecstasy, Angela’s body and voice are paralyzed in the physical space of the Piazza Santa Maria. However, simultaneously, she “had indeed entered at that moment within the side of Christ.”13 While it is her soul that enters his wound, this focalization point of the bodily wound itself accounts for the necessity of the body within this divine union. These acts of erotic bodily interplay inform mystical transformations of human into God-man. The meshing of bodies mediates the melting of souls in a relationship where love is conflated with continual metamorphosis.

These glimpses of union with Jesus involve the particularity of the image, the suffering of the cross, the body, and even of Jesus within the Trinity. The groundedness of bridal mysticism within the physicality of female experience and the image, however, also blends with a mystical experience that transcends particular form. The conception of essence mysticism, instead of focusing on the localized love affair, centers on the an ascent towards the union, “‘one in spirit’ (sine medio)​ with the divine essence.”14 While both trends of mysticism intersect within Angela’s work, a theme of an uncertain and deep transcendence underlies her journey. As discussed above, fleeting bouts of overwhelming love and presence mark her ascent towards unity with God. However, more suffering follows in periods of absence, evoking her cries, “Love still unknown, why do you leave me?”​15 Though her encounters with God undoubtedly mobilize her towards a loving union with God, a deeper understanding of God’s love remains a mystery- “uncreated love.”​16 Despite her continuously transforming being, she marks her relationship with God with an essential qualifier: “I am in the God-man almost continually.”17 This statement reflects the perpetual distance between her and the complete truth of the Trinity. Even the organization of the works cannot follow a rational sequencing. Both the reader and Arnaldo struggle to follow the oscillations of Angela’s spiritual journey, characterized by fleeting moments of ecstasy and cavernous experiences of absence and abandonment.

Within the uncertainty of this journey emerges the darkness that we once witnessed in the work of Gregory of Nyssa. This uncreated love lies within this darkness that shrouds the sanctity and secrecy of God’s superiority and renders her previous experiences “inferior.”18 Seeing God in this darkness transcends beyond reaction of body and soul, as “neither body or the soul tremble or move as at other times.”​19 This experience within and when she emerges above this darkness resists the limitations of language and human conceivability. The emergence from this darkness propels her into a state of deep union with God. She is now plunged into the great abyss of greater truth- a truth only describable in terms of a barely-elucidating enigma. Within this truth, everything in the universe has a rightful purpose and place, and the “duality of good and evil, heaven and earth, has been overcome.”20 Her soul is recreated in this transcendental state, which is independent of the ties of form, image, and physicality. Through the “truth” of this mystical state, all beings are vested with the essence of the Trinity, and Angela pursues a union with the transcendent God, not simply the particular suffering Christ.

The complete works of Angela of Foligno capture the oscillating and confusing ascent of this female mystic, reflecting the, at times, awkward blending of aspects of both bridal and essence mysticism. Ultimately, this collection of works is pretty shocking. Again, it links vignettes of uncut, carnal passion with strange desires for bloody death to achieve not only a love affair with Christ, but also ​identification with God. Weaving together the essential particularity of the vision with the enigmatic abyss of transcendence, Angela’s work artfully constructs a love union with God that simultaneously mediates a space of eroticism, distance, and love.

Notes

Angela of Foligno: Complete Works,​ trans. Paul Lachance (Paulist Press, 1993), 182.

Angela of Foligno​, 41.

Angela of Foligno​, 162.

Angela of Foligno​, 41.

Angela of Foligno​, 197.

Angela of Foligno​, 202.

Angela of Foligno​, 202.

Angela of Foligno​, 62.

Ellen M. Ross, “Body, Power, and Mimesis” in ​The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England​ (Oxford University Press, 1997), 111.

Angela of Foligno​, 162.

Angela of Foligno​, 128.

Angela of Foligno​, 72.

Angela of Foligno​, 176.

Angela of Foligno​, 40.

Angela of Foligno​, 142.

Angela of Foligno​, 70.

Angela of Foligno​, 205.

Angela of Foligno​, 203.

Angela of Foligno​, 204.

Angela of Foligno​, 74.