Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages

1. Pollution, Illusion, and Masculine Disarray: Nocturnal Emissions and the Sexuality of the Clergy

Pollution, Illusion, and Masculine Disarray Nocturnal Emissions and the Sexuality of the Clergy A box full of clothes —if left for long —will putrefy. So it is with our thoughts if we don't perform them corporeally. — Evagrius of Pontus1 IN HISMORALIA Gregory the Great (d. 604) discusses some of the more insidious ways in which the devil afflicts God's holy people. Although making little headway during their waking hours, the devil is nevertheless permitted to fill the minds of the saints with filthy thoughts in sleep. But Gregory also prescribesa remedy,one that precociously anticipates Freud's theory of sublimation. A person must overcome these anxietiesby raising the mind to higher things. Thus he glosses the biblical verse "So that my soul rather chooseth hanging and my bones death" (Job 7.15): What is designated by the soul except intention of the mind, what by the bones except the strength of the flesh? Everything which is hung is beyond a doubt raised from lower things. The soul therefore chooses hanging so that the bones die, because when the intention of the mind raises itself to the heights, all strength of the outer life dies within.2 To stay with Freud for a moment, it is safe to saythat Christian ascetics may have longed for sexualsublimation, but they generally had to settle for repression, with the attendant problems suggested in the epigraph. The presence or absence of erotic dreams, especiallythose culminating in ejaculation or "pollution" (to use the medievalterm) represented for the wouldbe ascetic the sad distance between aspiration and actuality, providing a sensitive gauge for clocking the relative success or failure of disciplinary I Pollution, Illusion, and Masculine Disarray efforts to gain master)' over the body. The problem of such emissions also provided one of the rare occasions for theologians and pastoral counselors to speak frankly about the male's sexualityand body, by which I mean that these discussions could and did occur divorced from any reproductive telos. Here I should add that despite efforts of doctors and the occasional theologian to make pollution an equal opportunity offense for men and women, the discourse was inescapably framed around masculine embarrassments, particularly those of the would-be celibate ascetics and priests who were preoccupied with the way in which physical impurity impinged on ritual activities.3 Autoeroticism, whether voluntary or involuntary, would seem to frustrate attempts at historicization. Hence, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's article "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" argues that masturbation "seems to have an affinity with amnesia, repetition or the repetition compulsion, and ahistorical or history-rupturing rhetorics of sublimity."4 Likewise with nocturnal emissions; even the external disciplinaryramparts erected against such shadowy occurrences seem to argue for a transhistorical dimension. For example, the unflagging presence of prayers warding off pollution in the compline service is an indication that, at least on the ritualistic level, pollution never ceased to be a concern throughout the Middle Ages. But the level of intellectual and probablyemotional engagement with this subject was temporally uneven. Nocturnal emission was a matter of considerable concern until the time of Gregory the Great, received only the most routine treatment (mainly in penitential literature) from the seventh until the twelfth century, and thereafter commanded increased attention until the end of the Middle Ages. The intensification of discourse in pastoral and theological circles in the later period is the primary focus of this chapter. However, the urgency of the later discourse was predicated on the all-tooeffective efforts at repression in the early Middle Ages. And to this "first wave" of concern I first briefly turn. The patristic age set the stage for later discussions of nocturnal emissions by framing three interlocking problems: the extent to which such emissions inhibited participation in ritual; the way in which pollution could be transformed into an occasion for self-examination; and the determination of the degree of culpability of the individual. Ritualistic interests could be said to constitute the seminal category. Attention to ritual purity 15 raised the question as to whether a person so stained should abstain from the Eucharist —as a recipient, of course, but especially as a celebrant. This was a very real concern in the early church, when pollution taboos ran high. Both the Didascalia and the Apostolic Constitutions, for example, reacted against this level of rigor in the Syrian church.5 Although a potential liability from a sacramental standpoint, such emissions had...