The word made
fresh New thinkers Theologian links mystics, rape
By ARTHUR JONES
Julie Miller knows when her students at the University of the
Incarnate Word in San Antonio are going to get riled up. Its at the point
when, discussing rape, one of them asks if the Catholic church always
considered rape a sin.
And theology professor Miller, 37, replies, Yes, it was a
sin, but interestingly, if we look at Aquinas natural law theory, rape
wasnt that bad a sin. It was considered something that did violate a
persons integrity in full, but because rape could lead to procreation, it
wasnt as bad a sin as something such as masturbation.
My students -- they just cant believe anybody could
have thought that, said Miller. I have to keep telling them that
Aquinas didnt say rape was OK. It wasnt good. It just wasnt
as bad as masturbation or homosexuality.
As will be seen, Miller is likely to get some students of the
medieval and Counter Reformation female mystics riled up, too. Miller believes
that some women mystics helped to encourage violence against women in the ages
that followed.
The churchs shift in attitude as to how it regarded rape
came only gradually in and following the Middle Ages, explained Miller. The
questions debated were, Was rape violence against the woman? Or was it
theft of male property? Starting with the 11th century, said Miller,
there is a shift in emphasis on what the crime actually was, as
recognition steadily grew that it was sexual violence against the
woman.
In canon law, by the late Middle Ages, the 13th and 14th
centuries, we find the issue of consent becoming important. Prior to
that, said Miller, it didnt really matter if the woman
consented or not because the theft was committed against her father. She was
his property. Even if she consented to elopement, say, the crime was still
committed. She had no voice. Theft was the primary crime being
committed.
Miller, an Illinois native who got her bachelors at Notre
Dame and her doctorate at Harvard, said the changes come once you start
to define rape as a crime against the woman herself. If she consented, if you
can prove consent, then there was no crime committed.
In Catholic teaching today, she said, rape is unacceptable,
is a crime, a violation of a womans body and soul, and in that sense
reprehensible.
Yet rape is a crime thats still being committed. The latest
National Crime Victimization Survery statistics -- and those cover only
reported assaults -- reveal that in the United States a woman or girl is raped
every 72 seconds.
Theologian Miller knows this from volunteering in the Boston area
Rape Crisis Center from 1995 to 1998, and from something else.
Im going to go on the record here. I myself was date
raped.
Miller, with steady voice, said, I was a virgin, thinking I
would save myself for marriage, or at least for a situation where it would mean
something. I was 24. I had been dating for about two months, and the situation
occurred where I was forced to have sex. His response was, Well, I
thought you wanted to.
Interestingly, said Miller, he left his job at
that point, and six months later joined the seminary and is now a Catholic
priest. So he was very much part of the Catholic church and instilled in these
ideas.
The assault made her wonder, she said, what was it about my
Catholic upbringing and his Catholic upbringing that would get us to the point
where he could think that I wanted this, that it would have been pleasurable.
Then there was my own reaction. Was this my fault? Am I guilty? Fundamentally
this has steered my scholastic pursuits, the experience definitely impelled my
thinking on these issues.
Millers 2000 dissertation was Sexuality/Spirituality:
Eroticized Violence and the Limitations of Contemporary Eros Theology.
Her primary question, she said, was how violence within our culture has
been eroticized. In matters of date rape or acquaintance rape, the most common
defense that men have is, Well, I thought she wanted it.
And that, says Miller, demands an answer to the question:
How have we as a culture gotten to the point where we would even think
that a person, particularly a woman, would desire to be forced to have sex? Or
would desire violence in sexuality?
Volunteering at the Boston rape crisis center focused the issues
for Miller in two ways. One was on the work being done for rape victims; the
other on the way current thinking downplays the sex element within the crime of
rape.
In our culture, through pornography and the more general
media where women are objectified, women are still to be submissive, and we
find frequent images of women being violated and liking it. We have to be much
more critical about looking at how sex and violence and power in eroticism are
connected in our culture.
After getting her masters degree in theological studies, and
before getting her doctorate, Miller taught Christian morality courses and
scripture at St. Peters Prep in Jersey City, N.J.
For her doctorate in theology, she theorized and looked at history
to discover what factors have been at play both in the culture but also
within religion and spirituality that gave us this idea that women like violent
sex.
Some scholars, not least those looking at the medieval women
mystics through a feminist prism, may find much to contend in Millers
questioning.
Miller grounded herself in two areas, the writings of medieval
women mystics, and the history of rape law from early Roman days and within
Hebrew culture and the Bible down through Christianity.
Rapture, as rape was legally known, she said, was
basically a theft or abduction of male property. It generally referred to
the abduction of a virgin for the purpose of marriage. There was a kind of
subtext that understood sexual violence would occur in this abduction. At
the same time in the Middle Ages, the shift was occurring from rape as a crime
of theft to rape as a crime of sexual violence, she said. Rapture was
also a spiritual notion being spiritualized and also eroticized.
Miller looked at the medieval women mystics. One was the
12th-century Hadewijch of Antwerp, who used a lot of the courtly love
literature of the time to talk about her relationship -- the souls
relationship -- with God.
In the courtly love literature, she said, we
have the first romanticization of love itself being disseminated in literature
-- and taken up in spiritual literature as well. It became a kind of cultural
standard.
The trouble is and was, said Miller, what people like Hadewijch
and Teresa of Avila did with courtly literature.
Within courtly literature, Hadewijch writes a lot of love
poetry, said Miller, and its always a very combative
relationship between God and the soul. She uses images of violence, combat,
war, destruction and annihilation -- but it is always very exciting and erotic
at the same time, because it is a love relationship.
Teresa of Avilas writings exhibit this same eroticism, she
said. There is violence within this relationship to God -- a violence
that gives Teresa pain not only in her soul, but also physically in her body.
She attempts to resist oftentimes, but ultimately she says, well, you
cant fight against God, might as well just accept it because its
going to happen anyway.
Is Miller stating that women mystics are saying violence is what
women expect? Thats my point. Yes, Miller replied. I
dont want to blame Teresa or Hadewijch and say, Look, youve
done these horrible things, but rather try to understand that within
their context this language and relationship is the only way they can even talk
about eroticism.
One of my main critiques is not critiquing the mystics, per
se, she said, but critiquing contemporary scholars who pick up that
language and valorize it and say, Its OK today because it was
written by a woman. And we have to reclaim womens voices, so that
whatever women said it must be pure as the driven snow and not need to be
critiqued at all.
On the contrary, argues Miller, there is a need to step back and
understand that these mystics lived in a structured and highly patriarchal
context in which women did not have a sense of self. They were trying to make
sense of their lives within a patriarchal box, almost incapable of imagining a
life outside their box, and trying to come to terms with that reality.
Miller said that some are reading women mystics today only for the
eroticism and saying, This is great! Women didnt hate their bodies,
they really werent anti-sex, werent a bunch of prudes.
Meanwhile, she said, some are glossing over the violent aspects of
it.
Im trying to say, Wait a minute. We cant
just uphold these women in what they said and did as models for us today.
They were and are very problematic in some of the ways they presented their
relationship.
Its not so much that I have a conclusion, said
Miller, but what I want people to think about -- and it is very
intriguing to me -- is that at the same time that rapture was shifting from
rape as theft to rape as violation of a womans sexual autonomy, we find
this discourse in romance literature and also spiritual literature, which
suggests that women might actually consent to this violence.
Not only consent, said Miller, but see it as the
pinnacle, the height of the relationship between the soul and God -- violence
against the woman, violence against the soul. Battering the soul, the
annihilation of the soul -- battering the woman. All this, I think, serves an
ideological function.
A thousand years later when you go into court and the
question is, Did she consent to this? we have this cultural
phenomenon of spiritual literature and regular literature that says women would
consent, that its not such a far-fetched idea.
What the mystics gave off, she said, is a sense that
violence is OK -- because this is the way it is. Like saying today that rape is
OK, because thats the way it is.
Taking that same critique to current society, Miller argues,
What we have to realize is that even if we get rid of pornography, get
rid of degrading sexual advertising, were not going to get rid of the
problem. For, one thing Hadewijch and Teresa of Avila do tell us is that this
model or construct of eroticized violence goes so much deeper than we
realize.
Arthur Jones is NCRs editor at large. His e-mail
address is ajones96@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, September 7,
2001
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