Our Dark Side (3 page)

Mystical discourse therefore requires inversions, conversions, marginality and abnormality. The way it perverts the body is an attempt to grasp something that is unspeakable, but also essential.
¹³

When it comes to inflicting torments on the flesh, some women mystical saints appear to have been able to be even more brutal than their male equivalents because of links they established between the most abject physical activities and the most sublime manifestations of a spirituality that was detached from matter. The hagiographic stories of the Christian imaginary therefore abound in female characters who, having ‘married' Christ, pursue, in the secrecy of their cells, a quest for ecstasy that is all the more refined in that it is nothing more than the other side of a fearful plan to exterminate the body.

Marguerite-Marie Alacoque
¹⁴
said that she was so sensitive to pain that anything dirty made her ill. But after Jesus had called her back to order, the only way she could clean up the vomit of a sick woman was by making it her food. She later absorbed the faecal matter of a woman with dysentery, insisting that this oral contact inspire in her a vision of Christ holding her with her mouth pressed against his wound: ‘If I had a thousand bodies, a thousand loves, a thousand lives, I would sacrifice them to be your slave' (Pellegrin 2004).

Catherine of Siena
¹⁵
stated one day that she had never eaten anything more delicious than the pus from the breasts of a woman with cancer. And she then heard Christ saying to her: ‘My beloved, you have fought great battles for me and, with my help, you are still victorious. You have never been dearer or more agreeable to me […]. Not only have you scorned sensual pleasures; you have defeated nature by drinking a horrible beverage with joy and for the love of me. Well, as you have performed a supernatural act for me, I want to give you a supernatural liquor' (Tétard 2004: 355).

At a time when medicine could neither care for nor cure its patients and when life and death belonged to God, the practices of defilement, self-destruction, flagellation or asceticism – which would later be identified as so many perversions – were no more than different ways that allowed mystics to identify with the passion of Christ.
¹⁶
Those who wished to achieve true sainthood had to undergo a metamorphosis that transformed them into the consensual victims of the torments of the flesh: living without eating, without evacuating, without sleeping, regarding the body as a dung hill, mutilating it, covering it in excrement, and so on. All these practices helped the victims to enjoy sovereignty over themselves, and to dedicate it to God.

We owe the most curious biography of Lydwine of Schiedam to Joris-Karl Huysmans (1901).
¹⁷
Situating the story of the saint in the historical context of the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, the author paints an apocalyptic picture of an era ravaged by the madness and cruelty of European sovereigns and threatened as much by plagues as by the Great Schism and the most extravagant heresies.
¹⁸
Fascinated by this medieval world and convinced that the power of God was superior to the classifications of the medical science of his day, he retraces, using the best sources, the trajectory of the Dutch mystic,
¹⁹
who wanted to save the soul of the Church and its faithful by transforming her body into an a dung hill.

When her father tried to marry her off, Lydwine explained that she would make herself ugly rather than suffer that fate. Horrified from the age of fifteen by the prospect of the sexual act, she suffered a fall on a frozen river and fell ill. Given that God can only become attached to the horrors of the flesh, she wanted, she said, to obey that master and serve his ideal, and replaced the charms of her beautiful face with the horror of a bloated face. For thirty-eight years, she lived the life of a bed-ridden invalid and imposed terrible sufferings on her body: gangrene, ulcers, epilepsy, plague, dislocated limbs.

The more the doctors rushed to her bedside in order to extirpate the evil, examine her organs, and sometimes remove them from her body in order to clean them, the worse the illness became – but it never led to her death. When her mother died, she got rid of all her possessions, including her bed. Like Job, she lived on a plank covered with dung, wearing a hair belt that turned her flesh into purulent wounds.

After having been suspected of heresy because she could not die, Lydwine received the stigmata: her hands smelled of the perfumes of Arabia and the spices of the Levant. Magistrates, priests and the incurably ill flung themselves at her feet to receive her grace. She experienced ecstasies and visions. But at night, she sometimes sobbed, defying her master and then asking him to inflict more suffering on her. At the moment of her death, Jesus visited her and talked to her about the horrors of the times: mad, corrupt kings, looting, witches' Sabbaths and black masses. But just as she was reduced to despair because her sufferings had served no purpose, he showed her the other side of her abject century: the army of saints marching to reconquer salvation.

When she ceased to live, the witnesses wanted to know if, as she had predicted, her hands would be found clasped together. Then there was a joyful cry: the blessed Lydwine had become ‘what she was before her illnesses. She was fresh and blonde, young and plump […] Not a stitch remained of the split forehead that had so disfigured her; the ulcers and wounds had dis-appeared' (Huysmans 2002: 274).
²⁰

Lydwine was canonized in 1890, and then glorified ten years later, at a time when mental medicine categorized the transgressive behaviour of these exalted women as a perversion: delight in filth, pollution, excrement, urine and mud.

No matter whether it involves the use of a whip, a cosh, a stick, nettles, thistles, thorns, bats or various instruments of torture, flagellation has, at all times and in all cultures, always been one of the major components of a specifically human practice that is sometimes designed to punish, and sometimes to obtain sexual satisfaction or to influence procreation (cf. Love 1992). It was frequently used within the Western family, not to mention English public schools, until the various types of corporal punishment that were inflicted on adults and then children were gradually made illegal in the course of the twentieth century.

The point of using the whip as an instrument of flagellation was to establish a quasi-ontological link between the world of men and that of the gods. Shamans used it as a way to achieve ecstasy or self-transcendence, and pagan crowds celebrated it as an essential part of the fertility rites that guaranteed the fertility of the ground, sex and love. From the eleventh century onwards, Christian monks saw it as the instrument of a divine punishment that allowed them to punish moral laxity and to transform what they saw as an abject corps that knew
jouissance
into a mystical body that could achieve immortality.

The flagellation popularized by Pierre Damien
²¹
was a practice of voluntary servitude that united victim and torturer. The flagellant accused himself of being a sinner, so that his sufferings would compensate for the pleasure vice gives men: the pleasure of crime, sex and debauchery. Flagellation thus became a quest for the absolute – and essentially a male practice.
²²
Inflicting punishment on oneself was indicative of a desire to educate and master one's body, but also to mortify it in order to submit it to a divine order. Hence the use of the term ‘discipline' to describe both the visible instrument used in flagellation and the invisible instrument (a hair shirt) worn next to the skin in order to make the flesh suffer continual pain.

Like the saint in the great hagiographic stories, the flagellants indulged in acts of mortification which, although initially inspired by monastic institutions, quickly came to look like acts of transgression.

From the end of the thirteenth century, the flagellants broke away from the Church and formed wandering bands and then brotherhoods that were midway between sectarian organizations and lay guilds: ‘The important thing was', emphasizes Patrick Vandermeersch (2002: 110), ‘to demonstrate and to completely convince oneself that the flesh is wicked, that one's own body is subject to corruption and to ask for a new body. Flagellation therefore gives one the feeling of having a different body.'

A hundred years later, and after a period of eclipse, the flagellant movement acquired a new popularity and completely escaped the control of the church. Flagellation now became a disciplinary rite with semi-pagan overtones, and then a truly diabolic rite. The men who indulged in it had left society and taken an oath to keep on the move for thirty-three days (in remembrance of the number of years Jesus lived). They wore white shirts, covered their heads with hoods and whipped themselves twice a day, brandishing crosses and singing hymns. So as not to be seduced by lust, greed or any of the seven deadly sins,
²³
they ingested no unnecessary food and renounced all sexual relations. Dedicated to the cult of the Immaculate Conception, they tried, thanks to the metamorphosis undergone by their own bodies, to wed the virginal body of Mary, and to replace their male identity with the asexual body of a virgin who had never been sullied by original sin.

As a result of their excesses, shifts of identity and transgressions, the flagellants soon come to be seen as being possessed by the very demoniac passions they claimed to be defeating.
²⁴
At the end of the fourteenth century, they turned against the Church and announced the coming of an Antichrist. Jean de Gerson,
²⁵
then condemned these barbaric practices, contrasting the idolatry of the body with a Christianity of the word based upon love and confession. Recommending that reason should triumph over excess, he proposed that the exuberant punishment of the flesh should be replaced by spiritual self-control.

When it ceased to be an offering to God or a Marian cult, flagellation was regarded as a vice related to sexual inversion or transvestism, especially when King Henri III, who was a notorious homosexual, was suspected of indulging in it because he founded a Congregation of Penitents in 1583. ‘Towards the end of the sixteenth century, King Henri III was seen flagellating himself in public, with a refinement worthy of both him and his court, together with his minions in the processions they followed, dressed in white robes as they worked themselves up for the lustful orgies these devout characters enjoyed in the secret apartments of the Louvre after the ceremony.'
²⁶

Once seen as a rite of mortification designed to transform the hated body into a divine body, flagellation was therefore likened to an act of debauchery, all the more so in that the penitents – who had turned into the adepts of a perverse sexuality – chose not to whip their backs in accordance with the old tradition, but their whole bodies and especially their buttocks, which received a powerful erotic stimulus. What was more, they derived an extreme pleasure from having themselves flagellated and whipping their companions.

In his
Histoire des flagellants
(1700), Boileau insisted that flagellation was ‘sexual' because ‘disciplining below [the buttocks] replaced disciplining above [the back]'. And in order to stigmatize it as a deviation, and not just a vice in the Christian sense of the term, he relied upon a medical text – which was the first of its kind – on ‘the use of blows for sexual purposes' (cited Vandermeersch 2002: 189). More importantly, he denounced its feminization because it was, he said, secretly practised in nunneries.

As it moved from ‘above' to below, and then from Sodom to Gomorrah, flagellation, which had been an act of purification, became no more than a pleasurable practice centred on the exaltation of the ego. And it was in that form that it became widespread among the libertines of the eighteenth century: Sade, who was a very enthusiastic flagellant, associated it with sodomy.

After the publication of Leopold Sacher-Masoch's novel
Venus in Furs
in 1870, the psychiatrists and sexologists of the late nineteenth century classified flagellation as the prototypical sexual perversion based upon a sado-masochistic relationship between a dominated and a submissive partner. A man could, for instance, become the consensual victim of a woman by forcing her to torture him.
²⁷
At a time when the use of corporal punishment for punitive purposes was being abolished in the West, and when medical science was attempting to classify its different practices, the notion of discipline was therefore conceptualized as one of the pillars of a system of thought specific to perversion in both the textbooks written by jurists and psychiatrists and in books written by the perverse in order to popularize their
ars erotica
. Transformed into a sexual game that has nothing to do with an offering to God, ‘discipline' is now used to refer to the constraints of domination and obedience to which consensual and ‘enlightened' enthusiasts willingly submit.

Fascinated by demonology, mysticism and abnormality, Huysmans developed a passionate interest in the fate of the greatest perverse criminal of the medieval period: Gilles de Rais.
²⁸
But it is to Georges Bataille (2004) that we owe the first publication of the transcripts of the trial of this enigmatic Bluebeard, whose acts prefigure Sade's inversion of the Law and seem to give an anthropological content to the notion of crime as a manifestation of an inhumanity that is specific to man: