Saint Elizabeth: What Charles Kingsley was reacting to

Okay, Kingsley publishes The Saint's Tragedy in 1848. Why, I asked last time, did he pick Elizabeth from the wide range of Catholic saints he might have used as the basis of his story?

I think the answer lies in a number of events from around the time he began writing it. First, there was a Romantic reconsideration of Catholicism. Second, there was an immensely popular "biography", really a romance, of Elizabeth that had appeared twelve years before.

Before going on, let's stop and consider the word "Romantic". We read it now and he here the word "rebellion" coming following after just as "Fortnum" seems to demand "Mason" should come after it. It wasn't always so. Originally, the genre that we today call Gothic was called "romance". It was called that because it was like the romance tales of the high middle ages. These stories featured beautiful ladies and brave men pursuing love in a world where the lines between magic and reality and history and legend where very blurred. "Romantic" originally meant something that was romance-like.

And the truth is that there was much more of that sort of thing about the Romantic era than there is of the spirit of rebellion that you get when you study this stuff at university.

Now, one of the problems that romance-like Romanticism brings with it for English writers is Catholicism. There is necessarily a huge dose of it as all the characters of these tales are Catholic. Whether they meant to or not, the early writers of Gothic fiction made the old Catholic world seem appealing.

A sort of reconsideration of Catholicism and of England's Catholic past were triggered by this. In the decade before The Saint's Tragedy appeared, this reconsideration reached its peak with the Tractarian movement leading up to the conversion Newman in 1845.

Long before Kingsley wrote, there was a tradition in England of balancing the thrills of romance writing with rational explanation. This is what Ann Radcliffe did in her novels and, I think, it is what Keats is up to in The Eve of St. Agnes.

Another thing that happened in the years before Kingsley wrote his work is that Charles Forbes René de Montalembert wrote a book about Elizabeth. He didn't hold back on the Romance at all. In fact, his aim was the exact opposite. We was writing in a post-revolutionary France and was part of a movement that was trying to gather the debris that Catholicism had been reduced to in order to restore its former glory.

I'm just learning about this movement now. It looked to the medieval past as the height of Catholic practice but it was modern and liberal (in the sense of believing in individual freedom). It's a weird but attractive mix. The story tells us, I've just started reading it, is as unrestrained a romance as you'll ever find.

And that is all I have to say for now ...

Saint Elizabeth: Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley wrote a play about Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in which she, as she dies, renounces the life of denial that (at least as Kingsley sees it) was foisted on her by Konrad of Marburg and announces that she is looking forward to reunion with her husband in heaven, with all that implies.

Kingsley doesn't seem to have put much weight on Jesus's teaching that in heaven, "neither do they marry nor are they given in marriage."

I should tell you that, even though you have probably never heard of him, Charles Kingsley was a huge figure in his day. As one of the leaders of a movement that united male virtues with Christianity, and known as Muscular Christianity, Kingsley was one of the most influential thinkers of the Victorian era.

He was also what feminists would today call "sex positive". Feminists wouldn't like him much for reasons I'll get to.

I'm rather fond of the guy and the whole notion of Muscular Christianity myself. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I accept the original concept uncritically but I do think that current Christianity could do with some masculinity; actually, I think it could do with a lot of masculinity but that's a subject for another day.

To get back to Kingsley, he wrote the play, which he dedicated to his future wife, shortly before he got married and he was rather looking forward to the big night. Here is a nice little excerpt from one of the letters he wrote her in anticipation of their 'union".

When you go to bed tonight, forget that you ever wore a garment, and open your lips for my kisses and spread out each limb that I may lie between your breasts all night.

He meanwhile, would be having similar thoughts in his bed far away and, he goes on to say, they could achieve a kind of union in prayer even though they could not physically unite just yet,

At a quarter past eleven lie down, clasp your arms and every limb around me, and with me repeat the Te Deum aloud.

Kingsley saw sexual bliss as a foretaste of what was to come in heaven.  Strictly speaking, that view is a lot more orthodox than you might guess. With Kingsley's version, however, we might raise two questions. The more important of which is whether he keeps the priority in the right order. If sexual bliss is only a foretaste then his Saint Elizabeth need not look forward to reunion with her husband in heaven as something even better awaits her there. The second, a little more trivial, question is how it is that Kingsley, an unmarried man at this point, is so absolutely sure that sex is going to be great.

In any case, sex was what he wanted and he believed that Catholic teaching about the value of a life of self-denial was a false and misleading. Okay, but why would he pick Saint Elizabeth as his subject? Why not pick one of those virgin martyrs who renounced marriage? What made Saint Elizabeth such a likely subject? The full answer to that will come next Thursday but, for now, suffice to say that he admired Saint Elizabeth. He both admired and feared Catholicism: he thought that the saints had a lot to offer and worried that by excluding them, his faith didn't risk losing adherents to teh Catholic church.

This was not an unusual sentiment at the time.

Kingsley, by the way, was just as certain that sex was going to be really good for his wife as it would be for him, which contradicts the stereotype we have of Victorian men. The subject of the play was Elizabeth after all and Kingsley saw that sex as liberating for her too. To get at how he might see this, we need to consider something that will seem quite weird to us. For, contrary to what we project onto them, moralists of that era did not think that women did not experience pleasure in sex so much as they worried that they were prone to enjoy it so much that it would put them in danger. The self-image of the Victorian lady of high standing who seems impervious to passion was an image of stability and success. The sexual freedom that Kingsley proposed in his play about Saint Elizabeth was freedom within marriage to a man who would protect her. Presumably, this protection involved the predictable home and hearth but it must also, by implication, have included a promise on the part of the man to fully satiate his wife's desires, which he would be able to do because he was a good Muscular Christian who was healthy in mind and in body.

It's a view that is almost modern. Almost. Most, and probably all, feminists would disagree with his views. There is an old Latin saying to the effect that (I don't have the Latin at hand) , "protection drags subjection in its wake", and that would certainly apply here.

For my purposes, though, the question going ahead is, Does Kingsley understand why a woman like Saint Elizabeth would make her great renunciation? He can only see it as something imposed on her by Konrad. But such renunciations were not unique to her and there are good reasons to think that a woman like Elizabeth would have seen this life as a way to freedom. More on that come Thursday.

Saint Elizabeth: Turning the picture back into words

I will not put the picture up with this post. If you want to see it or see it again, it is here.

Phillip Hermogenes Calderon, the painter, was the son of a man who left the priesthood and the Catholic church to get married. He may have had no choice on the second decision after having made the first. One suspects his son Phillip wasn't taught to view the Catholic Church in a positive light.

He got the inspiration for the painting from a play about Elizabeth of Hungary by Charles Kingsley. The play sticks pretty close to the events of Elizabeth's life, as best as they can be known, but takes liberties with the ending. I'll get back to that ending at the ending of this post.

Okay, so what do we know about the real Elizabeth? I've been calling her a "Queen" but the truth is considerably more complicated than that because European royalty is complicated and weird. To give you a notion of how weird, sometimes a Duke can be more important than a Prince. Suffice to say that her husband, Louis, was the leader of Thuringia for ten years until his death.

At which point, Elizabeth became a terribly inconvenient figure on the local political scene. The widows of deceased rulers always were. The problem is that opposition to the new ruler tended to coalesce around the old Queen.

There was a well-established roles for such women to play in medieval society. In the first place, wives of rulers were encouraged to live lives of piety and generosity while their husbands were still alive. This fitted with accepted notions of womanly behaviour and it helped a positive image of the ruling family in the eyes of the people. Of course, the actions could be and probably usually were absolutely sincere. We still see today wives of powerful men who throw themselves into lives of good works.

At the same time, the great lady was also the subject of much erotic interest and it was not uncommon for stories with implicit erotic content to surface about them (implicit because telling a story with explicit content could get you dying a horrible death real fast). For example, there is the tale I cited before of the poor woman whom Elizabeth helped decamping with all her clothes and Elizabeth being unable to leave her bed because she was naked. There is also the story of Elizabeth putting a leper in the conjugal bed and her angry husband pulling back the covers to find a crucifix.

If their husbands died, a very likely outcome given medieval violence and medicine, women in Elizabeth's place were often encouraged to enter convents, sometimes quite forcefully encouraged.

Elizabeth is a bit of a rebel in that she becomes a tertiary, which is to say a lay-member, of the newly founded Franciscan order.  The Franciscans, and the Dominicans founded about the same time, did not stay inside convents but ventured out to serve the needs of the poor. That may have been less convenient to the man who replaced her husband as leader.

Another thing that may have been less than convenient to others was that Elizabeth took her considerable dowry with her. This was accumulated wealth her family had spent generations acquiring; her family might well have preferred to set her up in marriage that would consolidate both their wealth and power. Much of the legend about Elizabeth turns on this.

I should note that Elizabeth was far from unusual in not wanting to marry someone arranged by her family. And it's not hard to think why this might be. They would have arranged the marriage for their convenience, not hers, and shown up with this guy she didn't know or like who would then have the right to do to her everything a medieval husband had a right to do. And while her dowry would have given her family considerable incentive to set up such a marriage, it would also have given her more power to evade such a marriage.

And that is where the story gets a little icky. I say "icky" because stories like hers are fun to tell; stories like hers are the basis of fireside legends because they generally feature obvious black and white moral distinctions and brave heroes and heroines who fight for good and truth against tremendous odds. Enter into this otherwise story one Konrad von Marburg. Not matter how you try to spin his tale, Konrad is one nasty piece of work. He is a severe ascetic given to self flagellation. Like a lot of such people, he also seems to have enjoyed inflicting deprivation and pain on others. He was an inquisitor and  perfectly lived up to the worst stereotypes that go with that role. Even the old Catholic Encyclopedia, which did its level best to make Konrad look good reluctantly concluded there were serious problems:

In the exercise of this authority, even according to the sympathetic accounts of contemporary annalists, Conrad proved too severe and harsh. His assistants, Conrad Dorso, a Dominican lay brother, and John, a layman, were ignorant fanatics unqualified for such work. Conrad believed too easily the declarations of persons accused of heresy; on the strength of their statements, and without further investigation, others were arrested and treated as heretics. The accused either confessed their guilt and had their heads shaved for penance, or denied their guilt, were delivered as obstinate heretics to the secular arm, and perished at the stake. How great was the number of victims cannot now be ascertained.

That's a very roundabout way of admitting that Konrad was a ruthless fanatic who killed innocent people.

He could be a stock villain in a story like Elizabeth's. The problem is that he was her friend and confidant and that he owed much of his initial rise to power to her. After her death, which may have been hastened by the severe asceticism that he encouraged her to undertake (although we should not assume he did so against her will as the opposite is more likely), Konrad wrote up the case for Elizabeth being named a saint and the case was successful.

Jump forward to the 19th century. Saint Elizabeth's story is now viewed differently. Ann Radcliffe would have had a field day with the story and ended it with an Elizabeth-type women escaping her Konrad into the hands of the man who really loved her. And that is more or less the trajectory of her novel The Italian. Of course, she couldn't do that with Elizabeth herself as everyone knows Elizabeth dies. But what you could do is have the dying Elizabeth change her mind and renounce her renunciations on her death bed and tell Konrad that she looks forward to an afterlife of erotic bliss in the arms of her husband when she meets him again in heaven. Why am I so sure you could do that? Because that is exactly what Charles Kingsley did with the story.

More next Tuesday.

How do you get to be a sexy saint?

Before I begin, let me state the obvious point that "sexy saints" are the work of the fevered imaginations of fans who come along after the saint dies. As with the many homoerotic images of Saint Sebastian and Saint John the Evangelist, the above portrayal has no credible connection to the real Saint Elizabeth. On the other hand, there is no reason a saint cannot be sexy nor is there any reason a sexy person cannot become a saint (although, alas, I must admit I have no personal experience of the challenges of being a good Christian while being a sex object). Perhaps God's grace is at work in these sexy portrayals of his saints?

The key element for a saint being transformed into a sexy icon, as near as I can tell, is for them to be young and plausibly vigorous. Saint Elizabeth was only 24 when she died but was most likely quite sickly in real life. The artist's imagination soon fixed that; people who kick off that early rarely look as strong and healthy as the young woman pictured above, whose image suggests healthy food and regular exercise rather than sickness and fast-approaching death. And this portrayal is far from unique. Check out images of her and you will notice that she is usually presented as young and beautiful. And often with breasts and hips. That's unusual in portrayals of female saints where the breasts and hips tend to be small and hidden behind drapery.

As we will see in coming posts, this also applies to the literary tradition associated with Elizabeth where stories of her hiding secrets under her cloak and in her bed abound.

It is true even in very recent portrayals. Consider A-M Religious gifts who offer a six inch high carved statue of Saint Elizabeth. The carving is the work of Conrad Moroder. Take a moment to go visit the image. Then go to this page and look at the other female saints he has carved. Moroder is not averse to carving the women saints as beautiful women and girls but he gives Saint Elizabeth a little extra sexual oomph that he does not bestow on others. I won't violate his copyright by reproducing the whole image here but I think this little portion of the larger image constitutes fair use:

As they used to say in the 1980s, Is she cold or happy to see us? That is a deliberately erotic image.

Anyway, back to the painting at the top. It is the work of a man named Phillip Hermogenes Calderon who was the son of a former Catholic priest. He was inspired to paint it by an anti-Catholic play by a hugely influential (but now forgotten) figure of the Victorian era named Charles Kingsley. Kingsley feared and hated Catholicism but he revered Saint Elizabeth. The story of how that reverence led to such an overtly sexual portrayal is an interesting one. I'll take it up Thursday.

That is Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. I've left her too big for the frame on purpose.

Or, to put on our Magritte hat, that is not Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. I know, Magritte and his fans are such tedious bores.

So let's take another tack. The men responsible for that picture—there are two, one who painted it and the other who wrote the play that inspired him to paint it—had never actually seen Saint Elizabeth because she had been dead some six hundred years before they came along. The event portrayed is Elizabeth's great renunciation of all her wealth and possessions when she set out to live a new life after the death of her husband.

What we know for sure is that she knelt before an altar and placed her hands on it to make a great renunciation of all she had in this world, and she had a considerable amount to renounce being a queen. Did she actually take all her clothes off? It's possible but not likely; it's almost a certainty that she did not get naked, that part being a Victorian fantasy about her.

That said, getting naked is a recurring theme in the pious tales that are told of Elizabeth. For example, in Charles Forbes René de Montalembert's account of her life there is a tale of Elizabeth bringing home a poor woman she found collapsed from sickness in the street. After Elizabeth has taken care of her and nursed her back to health, the woman decamps stealing all of Elizabeth's clothing. The good Count de Montalembert concludes this anecdote with Elizabeth unable to leave her bed because she has no clothes but praying in gratitude because she got to be naked just like her Lord.

Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that this story sounds suspiciously like the sort of elaborate tale that might be told to cover up some royal hanky-panky except that the count was also writing some six hundred years after the events. The truth is that that Saint Elizabeth, like Saint Sebastian, was one of those saints that sexy stories accumulated around. It's not difficult to imagine the scene above spinning out into some elaborate sexual fantasy. It was, in fact, part of a sexual fantasy of Charles Kingsley's, he is the man who wrote the play that inspired the painting. I thought I'd spend some time writing about this aspect of the memory of Saint Elizabeth this January as this is the month of the Saint Agnes. More to come as the month progresses ...

A picture to ponder (without comment or explanation for the present)