In
the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis,
Queen Aethelthryth’s flight away from her super-sexualized husband leads her to a marshy
desert that is also a sea, a mountain/island/womb, an English countryside that
looks uncannily like Egypt, Canaan, Nazareth, filtered through Bede’s
eighth-century Historia ecclesiastica
gentis Anglorum. Standing within the
protection of a cleft rock, Aethelthryth and her two maiden-companions watch as
a raging sea encircles them, separating them from the maniacal lust of King
Ecgfrith while transforming the desert of their hearts and wombs into flowing,
life-giving fountains. Aethelthryth
flees from her husband, and she flees from earthly desire, not because she has
no desire, but because she has too much.
Like the sea “pouring forth its water in many directions,”
Aethelthryth’s desire is uncontainable, exceeding its boundaries, even
(especially) as she “transferred all her yearnings towards the powers above.”
In her
introduction to Towards a Theology of
Eros, Virginia Burrus develops a metaphor introduced by Anders Nygren, by
which agape compares to a well-defined stream and eros compares to an
always-overflowing river. According to
Burrus (in opposition to Nygren), eros and agape must sometimes mix; the
rivulet of agape must, at times, overflow its banks “in order to reopen its
congested channels” (xv). Aethelthryth’s
agape surges like the sea of eros, rapt from its beach/marriage-bed, and
transferred violently to a marshy wasteland, a damp landscape (not even
meriting the name of a stream) in desperate need of the transformative waters
of (erotic) passion.
Standing in the protective womb of the rock,
surrounded by the waves of her own passion, Aethelthryth becomes a virgin
mother who is also a figure of Moses, God’s vessel and mouthpiece, ready to
lead God’s chosen people to the salvational shores of Paradise, an island very
much like the cleft rock within the constant embrace of the passionate sea—the
island of Ely
*
* *
Are erotic discourses dangerous to the study of
theology? Should we assume that the
author of the Liber Eliensis simply
wrote in a traditional register, or hope that Aethelthryth’s desire for God is
nothing more than a (safely) sublimated desire?
Or could we learn something by allowing ourselves to read the text for
what it actually says, even allowing ourselves to be swept away by its
overwhelming currents, where our embodied reading practices might feel the
erotic presence of a just-beyond-reach, promissorily satiating Godhead? Maybe we first need to surrender ourselves to
a sea of passion in order to explore more fully the nuances of the Passion of
Christ.
