Dissatisfaction may lead to nostalgia – regret that modernity no longer allows human beings to experience their world as a cosmos that assigns the individual his or her place on firm ground, regret that with what Nietzsche called the death of God our spiritual world apparently lost both founder and foundation and now is developing all sorts of cracks and fissures, falling into ruin as supposedly stable supports have begun to shift.[1]

The study of the history of Christianity has, in the past century, confronted its own boundary problems. Was there a proto-Christianity predating the life of Jesus? How distinct was early Christianity from its Jewish antecedents? Was Luther far more entrenched in medieval suppositions than our hindsight would have us believe?[2] Was Elizabethan England decidedly Protestant or was 'Protestant' a synecdoche for a myriad differing allegiances?[3] By way of response, twentieth-century scholarship has exhibited a fascination with the manner in which we assert ourselves – as scholars and as human beings – over and against the ineffable richness of cultural history. In particular, figures like Hans Blumenberg and his student, Karsten Harries, have opened up a view of early modernity as a period in which, for the first time, 'place' could no longer be assumed or naturally granted to the individual. It fell, rather, upon that individual to construct a 'place' – a role – for her or him self.[4] As one might suspect, [page 70] the liminal potential of Shakespeare's theatre has since become a ready metaphor for the process of "self-fashioning" from within (and as a consequence of) a boundless environment.[5] We see Hamlet, at times, collapsing in indecision, overwhelmed by the 'shifting' court around him; or the dark Iago, reveling in epistemological uncertainty, having his hand at role after role.[6] Hugh Grady has referred to Falstaff's revelry in Henry IV as an exemplar of "the potential of selves unfixed from traditional roles and world views to imagine and act out new roles and potentialities as an alternative to now outmoded ones."[7] In thinking of the sixteenth-century as a period 'now' unmoored from 'outmoded' or clearly synthetic boundaries, a dialectic between transcendence and deception emerges. That is to say, by recognizing the artificiality of previously-fixed assumptions, do we then transcend these assumptions or do we, like Iago, garner the ability to manipulate already 'shifting' boundaries to our own less-than-admirable designs?[8]

[page 71] Such dialectic finds its corollary in the Puritan distrust of theatre. While Protestants in England had long denounced the 'popish' ceremony of the Corpus Christi plays, they also came to condemn the deception stemming from the proneness of secular drama to a more inward, more epistemologically subversive, form of idolatry.[9] Not surprisingly, the raw power of the stage became, for the London populace, an object of both fascination and fear. However, within the study of the history of Christianity, there is, I think, a comparable context which may help articulate the dialectic in question: that of medieval feminine mysticism. In what is to follow, I will argue that the explosive interiority of such mysticism relies upon an imposed role which holds within its popular expression the seed of its own undoing. The role in question is characterized by the pervasive 'bridegroom' analogy from the Song of Solomon, and posits the 'bride of Christ' as one who is closest to truth and, consequently, removed both from a male-dominated rationality and, more generally, from the fixed boundaries of the social order. Furthermore, I would like to suggest that this truth – what the thirteenth-century mystic Beatrice of Nazareth called the "limitless abyss of Divinity" – proved, in the end, too powerful to be contained within the narrow bounds of feminine limpidness or 'weakness' as proscribed by the prevailing medieval theories of womanhood.[10] Thus, in much the same way as Shakespeare's theater was considered a liminal space – holding within it the potential for either transcendence or manipulation of boundaries – so, too, the woman of medieval mysticism was [page 72] thought to be in close proximity to the 'limitless abyss' and, as such, a liminal figure. As Augustine cautioned in the fourth century, "if … a man were to take in a literal and carnal sense much that is written in the Song of Solomon, he would minister not to the fruit of a luminous charity, but to the feeling of libidinous desire."[11]

The present study concerns itself with the oscillation between 'charity' and 'desire' – between transcendence of self and the deceptive substitution of earthly flesh for the ethereal bridegroom. In the process of my analysis, I will have recourse to two primary texts: the correspondence of Peter Abelard with his student, Heloise, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Where the former is embedded in the contexts of medieval scholasticism and mysticism, the latter recalls these contexts in the characters of Angelo and Isabella. In the letters of Abelard and Heloise we witness the creation of a veritable 'fortress' where men are said to guard the castle walls while women reside within the keep (or central 'bridal chamber,' as the Song of Solomon would have it). Men are bound to the "outward works:" to the precision logic and reliability which allows the castle walls (composed of dogma and scholastic theology) to remain intact.[12] Where men are the 'keepers,' woman are the 'kept.' They are said to engage "the very truth itself" – a function which is marked in the letters by an almost uncontrollable interiority.[13] We will see that Heloise fully exploits this feminine trope to effectively tear down the castle walls, thereby achieving a unique agency which had been denied her by Abelard's controlling logic. Turning to Shakespeare's Angelo, we have just such a 'man' as Augustine describes: one bound to the precision logic of the 'literal sense,' and bound, ultimately, to replace another's 'virtue' with his own 'desire.'[14] What is more, Measure for Measure as a whole provides us with the framework of substitution ('a measure for a measure') which sheds light upon this dialectic oscillation in a world of unfixed boundaries. In the subsequent investigation, [page 73] I am not then arguing an influence but, rather, describing a worldview which will hopefully reveal the contours of human assertion in the early-modern period and perhaps, by extension, our modern age.[15]

I. HELOISE & ABELARD

While Abelard has often been considered the greatest scholastic thinker of the twelfth century, we know comparatively less about his partner in correspondence, Heloise. Though Peter the Venerable had praised Heloise for her uncommon "pursuit of secular learning," she was, in her own time, best remembered for her station as abbess in Abelard's Paraclete convent (named for the 'Holy Spirit' or 'comforter').[16] Her role, in Abelard's account of the two lovers, seems to have amounted to little more than that of a diversion along Abelard's path to academic renown.[17] Accordingly, part of my aim in this section is to flesh out the character of Heloise with reference both to her rhetoric in the Letters and to her place within the larger medieval mystical tradition. Even a cursory glance at Heloise reveals her rhetorical skill in appealing to Abelard's interests while, all the time furthering her own agenda. What are, on the surface, letters of adoration and devotion thus reveal themselves to be segments of a sophisticated discourse on the importance of Pauline interiority over and above the "outward show" of Aristotelian rationalism.[18] We will see that the inwardness of love, on this account, is both a [page 74] true 'fulfillment of the law' and the greatest obstacle to that fulfillment.[19] From here, we may look deeper and ask ourselves how and why such interiority is portrayed in the Letters as being intrinsically feminine. At this juncture, I will have recourse to the mysticism of Beatrice of Nazareth in an effort to contextualize and give voice to the aforementioned dialectic between transcendence and deception.[20]

In his confession, Historia Calamitatum (1132), Abelard draws our attention to two evils which marked his early life as a scholastic: his lechery and his pride. Throughout the Historia, he speaks of these sins, not as all-consuming addictions (much as Heloise will in her response to Abelard[21]), but as necessary rungs on the path to spiritual wisdom. "God's grace provided a remedy for both these evils, though not one of my choosing: first for my lechery by depriving me of those organs with which I practiced it, and then for the pride which had grown in me through my learning."[22] It is important to understand that Abelard views his lechery and prideful nature from the objective standpoint of one who has already found asylum by God's providential hand. "I know well," he tells us (quoting Jerome), "that it is through good and evil report that we make our way to the kingdom of heaven."[23] Anguish, for Abelard, is cathartic – it [page 75] comprises a role in his own spiritual drama of salvation. Both the 'remedy' of his sudden castration and the concomitant predilection for Heloise are, in this way, inserted into a worldview. What is more, Heloise herself becomes both antagonist and protagonist in an exhaustive system based upon biblically-appropriated notions of femininity. As the antagonist in Abelard's story, she is first compared to the 'temptress Eve.' "I had done nothing unusual in the eyes of anyone who had known the power of love," Abelard tells us of his 'lecherous' relationship, "[that] since the beginning of the human race women had brought the noblest men to ruin."[24] As 'Mary Magdalene,' Heloise is placed on the pathway of redemption – a path which concludes in the acceptance of the nun's veil as the 'Virgin Mary' (the protagonist of Abelard's story). "It was a fortunate trading of your married state," he consoles Heloise in a subsequent letter: "as you were previously the wife of a poor mortal and now you are raised to the bed of the high king."[25] From the brothel to the Paraclete, Heloise is now Abelard's spiritual 'comforter,' resplendent in her special relationship with the bridegroom.[26]

There is no escape from this system. If the Historia was our only extant source, we would have before us a drama in which 'Heloise' is merely a compendium of paradigmatic roles bonded together in a coherent and highly derivative narrative by the able hands of her "barren angel."[27] Far from this, Heloise's letters animate, problematize, and ultimately transcend Abelard's imposed worldview. After reiterating her identity as 'temptress Eve,' the abbess [page 76] confesses to Abelard that she is most certainly a "hypocrite" for loving him more than God and that the Lord, no doubt, "sees in [her] darkness."[28]

God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore.[29]

The language here is nothing short of incendiary. Heloise is, in effect, breathing life into Abelard's paradigms – setting fire to what would otherwise be a rather dry depiction of Mary the harlot. Most importantly, she here reestablishes in a profane form the framework of ascetic denial which had rendered Abelard's anguish meaningful in the Historia. "Consequently," Abelard had written, "the great philosophers of the past have despised the world." Such, he went on, "is the practice today through love of God of those among us who truly deserve the name of monks."[30] In Heloise, we have a denial of both spatial and temporal gifts – the 'whole world,' 'all the earth,' 'for ever' – not for 'love of God' but of Abelard himself. "I can expect no reward for this from God," she laments, "for it is certain that I have done nothing as yet for love of him."[31] Using the building blocks of Abelard's own worldview, Heloise substitutes 'desire' for 'charity' – Abelard for the bridegroom – concluding that she is indeed a temptress.[32]

However, if we were to stop here, Heloise's words would amount to little more than an affirmation of Abelard's warnings in the Historia. To make sense of this substitution, we must instead go on to examine the notion of femininity which is set forth by the Letters. We will discover that the proposed 'weakness' of women to which both Abelard and Heloise ascribe is, in fact, a form of Pauline interiority, being, at one and the same time, transcendent and [page 77] perilously liminal.[33] To begin, such interiority is characterized throughout by an intimacy with the marrow of human experience. To use the popular imagery of the twelfth century, women (as 'brides' of Christ) are thought to be closer to the central chamber where the bridegroom dwells. "What," Abelard asks us, "is this privilege of the weaker sex"? Where "men imprint the sacraments by figures … the woman … worked on the very truth itself, as the Truth actually attests."[34] Christ, the 'Truth,' is said to favor the "humble woman, with no special clothing or ceremonial."[35] Liberated from the 'figures' of worldly authority, the woman is said thus to turn inward to the center of her soul where the 'truth itself' resides.

Abelard's encomium, perhaps unwittingly, opens the door for Heloise to subvert both monastic and scholastic rationality – a task which she zealously takes up in her third letter. Drawing extensively from Paul and Augustine, she here formulates a distinction between the spirit and the letter of the law with a critical eye to those men "who rashly profess monastic observance:"

They all hurry almost equally indiscriminately to enter monastic life: they are received without proper discipline and live with even less, they profess a Rule they do not know and are equally ready to despise it and set up as law the customs they prefer. We must therefore be careful not to impose on a woman a burden under which we see nearly all men stagger and even fall.[36]

There is a suggestive irony behind this passage when we consider that the purpose of Heloise's third letter is to exhort Abelard to amend the Benedictine Rule to better fit a woman's 'weaker' [page 78] nature.[37] Why ask for a rule at all? Based upon the above passage, it would seem that a rule itself is irrelevant; for the rule is a 'custom' which is 'set up' and 'professed' without understanding. What matters most is rather the spirit behind the rule. "For nothing so divides Jew from Christian as the distinction between outward and inner works, especially since between the children of God and those of the devil love alone distinguishes."[38] While maintaining the posture of a 'humble or weak woman,' Heloise unleashes an understanding of inner works which seems to explode the trappings of this same posture. To pose the question: why must a woman seek approval and direction from a man who, by the very nature of his gender, is further from the interior truth which she enjoys?[39]

Andrea Nye, in her discussion of the Letters, suggests that the transcendence of 'outward show' which marks medieval feminine interiority places women in the position of being dangerously liminal. Women, so understood, are 'weak' because they are closer to a truth which renders them irrational. Heloise's "thought," according to Nye, "has no rigid institutional scaffolding."[40] There is no dominant Aristotelian paradigm, no monastic law, and – in the face of the bridegroom – no boundaries. In short, Heloise's interior life is uncontrollable.[41] In a [page 79] striking display of poetic imagery, Beatrice of Nazareth (writing a little less than a century after Heloise) details the soul's progress from the outer-ramparts of reason and reliability to the innermost depths of religious experience.

[The soul] is drawn, above humanity, into love, and above human sense and reason and above all works of the heart, and it is drawn along with love alone into eternity and incomprehensibility, into the vastness and the unattainable exaltation and into the limitless abyss of Divinity, which is in all things, remaining incomprehensible in all things.[42]

While Beatrice and Heloise differ on the proposed object of their devotion, both women express their love with imagery that is at one and the same time, esoteric and visceral. Love is utterly 'incomprehensible' and deeply felt. "Love," Beatrice continues, "seems to be working violently in the soul, relentless, uncontrollable, drawing everything into it and devouring it."[43] In like fashion, Heloise writes to Abelard that her love for him "rose to such heights of madness" and that his words "pierce our hearts with swords of death, so that what comes before us is more painful than death itself."[44] 'Death' and 'devouring,' 'unattainable exaltation' and 'madness' [page 80] mark this extreme form of a devotion which has transcended or, rather, forgone social and epistemological boundaries. As the soul approaches the sun, the vestiges of human ingenuity and contrivance fall away, revealing a 'weakness' which is at once virtuous and wholly 'other.'[45]

As we have seen, Heloise's explosive interiority allowed her to substitute 'desire' for 'virtue' and Abelard for Christ. Such interiority, in turn, was rendered possible by a common trope from the Song of Solomon taken to its furthest extent in the 'incomprehensible abyss of divinity.' What is so striking about Heloise's account is that the rhetoric of her desire for Abelard is so similar to the rhetoric of devotion to God. Of course, in Heloise's mind, the interiority of her love for Abelard was the most important and, ultimately unavoidable, virtue; for "one who loves another has fulfilled the law."[46] This is not to say, however, that this interiority was altogether praised or even accepted in medieval society. In my understanding, the rubric of 'weakness' was a paltry structure superimposed upon a religious force (the mysticism of Beatrice, for example) which was perceived to be epistemologically and thus socially subversive. As Alisdair Macintyre has written of Hamlet, "to be unable to render oneself intelligible is to risk being taken to be mad, is, if carried far enough, to be mad."[47] This 'madness' moreover is best understood as a possible consequence of a state of liminality – a state of existing between boundaries. "Liminal entities," one anthropologist writes, "are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, [page 81] convention, and ceremonial."[48] Because logic and its 'customs' of interpretation have ceased to apply, the spiritual neophyte resists interpretation as a necessary condition of her or his ontology. As suggested above, both Abelard and Heloise struggle with the interpretation of the latter figure's identity and, in so doing, reach for a rule which might provide some stable sanctuary amidst the vertiginous environs of the heart.

II. MEASURE FOR MEASURE

By the late sixteenth century, questions of human perspective and intelligence – the way we interpret our world – had taken center stage in religious and secular culture. John Calvin's insistence that the mind is indeed "a perpetual forge of idols," that Eve's temptation and Adam's fall had a decidedly noetic effect on every succeeding individual, coupled with the 'new philosophy's' awareness of perspectival relativity had, in Shakespeare's England, succeeded in generating a veritable hotbed of epistemological uncertainty.[49] Thus, the celebration of boundary dissolution in the face of Beatrice's 'limitless abyss of divinity' had given way to an abyss of doubt brought on by the mind's idolatry – "a labyrinth," Calvin warns us, "of many woes."[50] In Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage, Huston Diehl argues for a connection between the idol or graven image and the beloved feminine figure as objects of Protestant [page 82] "ambivalence."[51] The fervency of the iconoclastic act, according to Diehl, belies a strange attraction to the icon. The feminine icon, whether virtuous or otherwise, is herself, in the eyes of the poet, a sublime mistress who is both attractive in her idealized virtue and something to be destroyed. Liminality thus becomes a 'labyrinth of many woes.' To use the language of Shakespeare's sonnets, "love is not love:" love is, at one and the same time, "made of truth" and a "false plague."[52] While we can see in Shakespeare's words an oscillation between truth and deception which is similar to that of Heloise; the emphasis, now looking at the early-modern period, falls to a greater degree, not on the woman's self-representation, but rather on the subject's perspective of the sublime woman.[53]

Given this climate of anxiety, one is not surprised to find the character of Elbow in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure a little "out of joint:" "Marry, sir, by my wife, who, if she had been a woman cardinally given, might have been accused in fornication, adultery, and all uncleanliness there."[54] Elbow's confusion of 'carnal' desire with 'cardinal' virtues not only echoes the dialectic we have just now seen with regard to Heloise's interiority but also keys us in to the process of "misplacement" which replays itself throughout the more serious proceedings in Measure for Measure.[55] At the heart of these proceedings lie Angelo and Isabella, [page 83] the outwardly "precise" villain and the internally pious virgin.[56] Each seeks to manipulate the other and, in so doing, to exchange the benefits of one another's ethical systems.[57] "Most dangerous," Angelo exclaims upon meeting Isabella, "is that temptation that doth goad us on | To sin in loving virtue."[58] "Might there not be a charity in sin," he later poses to his muse, assuring her, after her staunch resistance to his lecherous designs, that "my false o'erweighs your true."[59] Surely, Angelo is unrepentant in his pursuit of Isabella. His logic, in equating virtue with desire, is perhaps more horrifying than that of any Viennese libertine precisely because it is logic. He knows well what he does. He effectively ordains a world between himself and Isabella wherein he is subject to an uncontrollable interior urge (to the poet's 'false plague'). Yet, all the while, he retains an objective standpoint from which to view his own moral downfall. Isabella, to the contrary, tries her hand at outward show for the express purpose of maintaining both her brother's life and her own moral integrity. In a cunning bed-trick, Isabella substitutes herself with the once-jilted Mariana who, we are told, suffers from a "violent and unruly" love, thereby satisfying the rational (legal) terms of Angelo's self-imposed irrationality (illegality).[60] In the end, Isabella's machinations provide the deputy with the femininity he is wont to perceive. Her transcendence of 'precise' boundaries is, ultimately, brought about by an intricate campaign of deception.

The relationship between Angelo and Isabella, as it is initially presented to us in the play, holds much in common with that which we have already seen between Abelard and Heloise. Angelo, as mentioned before, sees himself as bound to a 'precision' accuracy in legal [page 84] administration. "It is the law, not I, condemn your bother," he tells a grieving Isabella.[61] In the magistrate's ethics, a gulf exists between the interior self and the law. Abelard's scholastic prudence here reemerges as a reified system – the legal arm of the state as professed by Angelo in its undisputed authority.[62] In an attempt to save her brother from the clutches of such authority, Isabella criticizes Angelo's heartless moralism, the limits of his "ceremony," and, finally, his foolish pride: [63]

…But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Play such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angles weep…[64]

It is helpful here to recall Heloise's forceful words to Abelard: men, she says, 'hurry almost equally indiscriminately to enter monastic life…they profess a Rule they do not know and are equally ready to despise it and set up as law the customs they prefer.' Heloise's sentiments express the danger of 'outward show' if it is to be considered the sole indicator of virtue.[65] The law, she implies, does not find its legitimacy ex opere operato but, rather, from the charitable [page 85] intention of the individual who is, in turn, wise enough to be 'assured' of his 'ignorance.'[66] Both Heloise and Isabella's words here amount to a critique against any attempt to systematize the ineffable complexity and richness of human experience. The 'proud man' is said to be 'most ignorant' of what he 'professes.' He 'plays fantastic tricks' with logic and accepted 'custom' thereby bending the law to fit the designs of his own 'brief' perception.[67]

We first encounter Isabella, much like we do Heloise, as a soon-to-be "votarist" in a Vienna nunnery.[68] Also like Heloise, Isabella is here engaged in asking her superior for a rule – "a more strict restraint | Upon the sisterhood."[69] Thus, from the outset, Shakespeare establishes Isabella as woman on the threshold of her marriage to the world and her marriage to Christ; one who feels the need for a curb to control the 'weakness' of her nature. As one scholar has argued, Isabella binds herself to a contemplative life by which she maintains her chastity from the safety [page 86] of the cloister to the treachery of the court.[70] She is defined, in other words, by the ethic of her interiority – a trait which becomes most apparent as she stands before the lecherous eyes of Angelo. "Go to your bosom," she insists of Angelo, "knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know."[71] As a 'bride of Christ,' Isabella recognizes that 'God sees in her darkness,' that her own 'heart' lies open to the panoptic vision of the deity. Where Angelo is said to be 'most ignorant of what he's most assured,' Isabella humbly prays: "let me be ignorant and in nothing good | But graciously to know I am no better."[72] Wisdom, then, comes from the painful recognition of inward pollution. In this respect, Isabella is not unlike the pietist divine of Shakespeare's England who, as Peter Kaufman has written, saw "the therapeutic value […] ascribed to self-scourging and to ostensible, provisional self-cancellation."[73] As Shakespeare's conniving Duke proposes to himself upon Isabella's inquiry regarding her brother's welfare, "I will keep her ignorant of her good | To make her heavenly comforts of despair."[74] With these words, I would suggest one last comparison with Heloise: the Duke's control over Isabella's religious identity is, here, reminiscent of Abelard's attempt in the Historia to fix Heloise as a character in his own religious drama.[75] We must remember that, while Isabella is the object of an uncontrollable lust, her virtue itself is, in the minds of the other characters, static throughout the play.

[page 87] As mentioned before, Angelo and Isabella eventually submit themselves to one another's ethical systems. Angelo, like the doting sonneteer, willfully surrenders to the emotional anguish which, in his imagination, attends the experience of love, just as Isabella abuses appearances in an effort to ultimately transcend Angelo's authoritative grasp. In act two, just prior to propositioning Isabella to "yield her body up to shame," our precise villain reclines in his chambers and contemplates his livery.[76] For our purposes, the transformation which takes place in the following soliloquy is worth quoting in full:

…The state whereon I studied
Is like a good thing being often read
Grown sere and tedious. Yea, my gravity,
Wherein – let no man hear me – I take pride,
Could I with boot change for an idle plume
Which the air beats for vain. Oh place, oh form,
How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit,
Wrench awe from fools and tie the wiser souls
To thy false seeming. Blood, thou art blood:
Let's write 'God Angel' on the devil's horn…[77]

Katharine Maus has suggested that the character of Angelo mixes up intentionality with secrecy.[78] While I agree that treachery remains palatable to Angelo only insofar as it remains clandestine; the above soliloquy, I think, represents a form of interiority, borrowed from Isabella, which renders the partition between public and private irrelevant. We begin above with the 'study of the state' – a source, Angelo exclaims, of his own public 'gravity' and surreptitious 'pride.' However, the proposed tedium of the law is to be understood as more than a secret abdication of responsibility. In some ways, Angelo's words echo Hamlet's lament upon [page 88] the ascension of Claudius to his father's throne: "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable | Seem to me all the uses of the world!"[79] In explicating Hamlet, Schreiner has pointed us to the emergence in the play of a dark world which is marked by the "dissolving of boundaries."[80] "From this point forward," writes Schriener, "[Hamlet] can only play a part in the midst of a world he knows to be fundamentally false. […] He becomes the person with a different perspective."[81] In a similar fashion, Angelo alerts us to the mere 'casing' or outward appearance of 'place' and 'form.' He has, in essence, now recognized what the Duke had already stated to be the case in act one: that, in Vienna, "quite athwart | Goes all decorum."[82] In the felt absence of boundaries brought on by the recognition of the 'false seeming' of 'place' and 'form,' Angelo chooses, not to transcend, but to follow the passions of his 'blood.' "I have begun," he later tells Isabella, "and now I give my sensual race the rein."[83] Like Heloise, he chooses the path of temptation – a path which, according to the final line of the above soliloquy, is defined by a knowing self-deception.[84]