Friday, February 12, 2010

Celebrating: Saint Jules

Today is the feast day of a saint who shares a name with this blog. He also, curiously enough, never existed.

Those unfamiliar with the cult of saints may think that there is nothing surprising about this but that is wrong. Some saints' stories are utterly fantastic but it is usually possible to find evidence of a true person somewhere at the core to which all of these fantastic accretions have attached. Consider Saint Ursula for example. The legend that grew up around her is probably the most fantastic of all the wild fantasies the medieval find cranked out. And yet we can be pretty sure there really was an Ursula who died a horrible death for her faith, albeit completely different from what was later made up.

This is not true of Saint Jules, there never was such a guy. Jules, or "Julian" in English, is clearly derived from a romance. The romance at the root of the Jules story must go back to pagan times and it has clear family resemblances to the Oedipus story. He is a quite literal example of the person whom it was necessary to invent because he did not exist—something in us that really wants to believe in this type of story.

On the surface, the story of Saint Jules seems to be about Christian redemption but it is not. It's a monster story and, like many monster stories, it's about taking our sexual guilt and projecting it onto a sacrificial figure who will suffer horribly to redeem our real and/or imagined sexual sin. (Which is the opposite of Christian redemption where Christ, not some monster, does the suffering and dying.)

So what happens? The various variations on the story open with Jules married and happy in his home. He is not a commoner but some sort of nobility. While he is out, his mother and father arrive cold, wet and tired. Jules' wife charitably shows them to her own bed. Jules returns, sees a couple in the bed, assumes the worst, goes into a rage and kills them.

The rest of the story is a fantastic pilgrimage in search of redemption. And the different versions seem to have been created by people seeking to outdo one another in the alternating heroism and horror of the sacrifices. Jules does things such as helping people cross a very dangerous stream, a touch familiar to us from other stories such as that of Saint Christopher. Most notably, he ministers to a cold, wet and starving old man with a horrible skin disease. In order to revive the man, Jules strips naked and gets into bed with him to share his body heat. As is pretty obvious, this is sympathetic magic—Jules removes his sexual sin by reversing it. He gets into bed with a repulsive person not an attractive and desirable young woman. And he shares his body not for his pleasure but to nurture and revive a sick person. With his dying words, this man tells Jules that God has forgiven him.

In some versions it is not just Jules but Jules and his wife who must make the incredible sacrifices. This should make no sense because, by any reasonable account, she is not only innocent but exemplary in her behaviour. These are the most troubling versions because they suggest that ordinary married sex (which is actually the exemplar of true chastity) is somehow sinful. But, of course, that is an implicit factor in the versions where just Jules needs redemption. The story grows out of our normal sexual guilt. The fantastic story of Jules killing his parents is just a sort of reverse sublimation of normal married sex.

Not surprisingly for anyone who has being paying attention, I don't think there is anything of moral value in that aspect of the story. It is a travesty of Christianity—perhaps an unintentional travesty created by well-meaning people but a travesty nonetheless. There is something else though and I'll get to it in a later post.

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