On Clerical Intertexts and the Subversion of Seduction

Abstract

Intertextuality is a common form of repetition especially ripe for the making of meaning. This chapter explores the relationships between Andreas’s text and some of its less often discussed religious intertexts. The outcome is fourfold. First, it shows that discourses of desire were of central importance in the twelfth century and that Andreas’s text contributes to them uniquely. Second, the chapter shows that perhaps the most prominent discourse of desire focused specifically on conversion or on training the devotee’s will to love or desire God above everything else. Third, the rhetoric employed toward the “seduction” of such converts was most successful where the appeals were specifically erotic. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how Andreas’s text engages, exposes, and deconstructs existing rhetorics of seduction, especially religious ones.

Ea quae dicitis satis ratione nituntur, si cor meum propriae annueret voluntati. Mea namque voluntas esset quae proponitis adimplere, sed cor contradicit omnino et dissuadet per omnia fiere quod plena voluntate desidero. Ergo si cor contradicit amare, quaeso ut mihi asseratis cui potius sit favendum, cordi scilicet an voluntati.

(1.6.310)

The things that you say support themselves with enough reason, if my heart would give closer assent to my will. For my will would be to fulfil that which you propose, but my heart contradicts it and dissuades by all means executing the full desire of my will. Therefore if the heart speaks against loving, I ask you to plainly state for me which is the more favorable, heart or will?

Andreas Capellanus, The Woman, Dialogue 6

I discover this principle then: that when I want to do the right, only the wrong is within my reach. In my inmost self I delight in the law of God, but I perceive that there is in my bodily members a different law, fighting against the law that my reason approves and making me a prisoner under the law that is in my members, the law of sin. Miserable creature that I am, who is there to rescue me out of this body doomed to death? God alone, through Jesus Christ our Lord!

St. Paul, Rom. 7.21–25

Ut a Magistri verbis sermo exordium sumat: “Qui non amat Dominum Jesum, anathema sit.” Valde omnino mihi amandus est, per quem sum, vivo, et sapio. Si ingratus sum, et indignus. Dignus plane est morte, qui tibi, Domine Iesu, recusat vivere….

Bernardus, S.B. Opera, 1:114

I would like to begin with a word from St. Paul: “If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus, let him be anathema.” Truly, I ought to love the one through whom I have my being…. If I am ungrateful, I am unworthy too. Lord Jesus, whoever refuses to live for you is clearly worthy of death….

Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 20 on the Song of Songs