Spiritual Sunday
Jeannie Babb, director of our church’s Christian Education program, gave a wonderful Adult Forum lecture two weeks ago on St. Thecla’s relationship to the apostle Paul. The talk got into the contentious relationship that many women have had with the establishment church, as well as with two different ways of looking at Paul. I was excited because I gained new insights into Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who has her own battles with church authorities.
According to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Thecla, a young noble virgin, broke with her fiancé and her family after hearing Paul’s discourse on virginity. After surviving various attempts to martyr her (one of them supposedly involving a basin filled with flesh-eating seals!), she went on to become a healer.
Jeannie noted two conflicting views of Paul, the ascetic and the domesticated. Thecla was responding to the ascetic Paul, the one who in 1:7 Corinthians counsels that “it is well for a man not to touch a woman.” The other Paul, however, explicitly condemns anyone who forbids marriage. Jeannie doesn’t believe any theologian has satisfactorily reconciled the two Pauls.
The Wife of Bath is no trained theologian, drawing on her experience rather than church authority as she defends her right to remarry as many husbands as she wants. (She’s been widowed five times and is looking for husband #6.) I imagine her local priest regularly directing his sermons against her, which would explain how an illiterate woman would be so well-versed in the ascetic Paul. How is she to fight back against his injunction?
After hearing Jeannie’s talk, I realized that Chaucer’s Wife pits the domesticated Paul against the ascetic Paul. Her arguments carry a surprising amount of weight.
To be sure, her prologue reads like a spoof of a theological debate, sometimes spinning off in hilarious directions. For instance, she refers to Solomon as an instance of someone else who had multiple partners but then starts fantasizing about all the fun he must have had in bed. Her sensual nature trumps dry theology.
She resorts to theology, however, because she sees the church authorities dictating her life with their pronouncements and believes she must talk like them to hold her own. In fact, she longs to be a member of their power club.
Despite botching the theological debate, she scores some points. Certainly God made the sexual organs for more than urinating and distinguishing the genders, she points out. Furthermore, Paul didn’t command virginity but only recommended it. And as for virgins, how could they be born if it weren’t for non-virgins?
| The apostle when he speaks of maidenhead; He said, commandment of the Lord he’d none. Men may advise a woman to be one, but such advice is not commandment, no; He left the things to our judgment so. For had Lord God commended maidenhood, He’d have condemned all marriage as not good; And certainly, if there were no seed sown, Virginity, where then should it be grown? |
After Jeannie’s talk, I now realize that the Wife is drawing on the domesticated Paul tradition in these latter arguments. She also does so when she quotes him as saying that “it is better than to marry than to burn,” even though Paul probably didn’t have in mind a widow burning with sexual desire at the Wife’s now advanced age. But no matter. The Wife hones in on whatever concessions Paul makes to the world of the flesh, and, for good measure, throws in God’s injunction (in the Book of Genesis) “to be fruitful and multiply.” Her pilgrim auditors are alternately amazed, entertained, and horrified by her performance.
Which brings me to another point that Jeannie made. Chastity, for women, could be a source of autonomy, in that it saved them from answering to a man. St. Thecla, who journeyed all over the Middle East, had much more power than she would have had she married. So does Chaucer’s Prioress, the only other woman amongst the pilgrim storytellers.
The Wife of Bath, however, wants autonomy and sex both, and the way she uses Paul to refute Paul now makes more sense to me. She’s there to show us that Thecla isn’t the only model available to women.
I mentioned last Sunday that Chaucer felt it necessary to recant Canterbury Tales at the end of his life, either to placate the church authorities or to insure his own entry into heaven. As I see it, however, the Wife is more spiritual than those misogynist monks who demonized women. In her longing for a good marriage, she has a vision of spiritual union between a couple, even though the reality so often is sabotaged by patriarchal fears, gender power struggles, and the like.
Her vision gets communicated in her tale, where an old crone argues that a union of souls is more to be valued than wealth, class, or good looks. She doesn’t convince her rapist husband, but she puts the vision out there. I suspect that both Pauls would approve.