1 8 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 Martyr, Clement of Alexandria). In this ode we read that the Father (because both his breasts were full of milk) was milked by the Holy Spirit, and that the Son is a cup of this divine milk (Ode 19). This image, despite its bizarreness today, did not cause any major controversy in early Christian times. Squeezing milk from the breasts of the God-Mother and giving it to mankind in the cup that is the Son was a typical image of receiving God’s eternal Wisdom through the feeding mankind. Clement of Alexandria devotes extensive passages to this subject in his Paidagogos (Gr. The Instructor). He tells us of mother’s milk, which is an allegorical name for the Word, the sacred doctrine. He speaks of the breasts of mothers and the forming of their milk from blood (a medical idea that persisted deep into the Middle Ages); this blood foamed and turned into milk so that the child would not be afraid of it. Next, Clement refers the Fathers maternal features: “breasts of paternal kindness that give milk to the little ones to drink” (PG VIII, 1, 46, 1). And he adds also that the word “seeking” (seeking of wisdom) has in Greek the meaning of “sucking”. And as Andrew C. Itter (2009, 169–170) [3] suggests: The word ‘κόλπος’ has interesting connotations not readily translated directly into English. It is often translated as ‘bosom’, but can also carry the connotation of a bay, or a gulf or hollow. It can also refer to the womb, the vagina, or the lap, or even the folds of a woman’s garment. Ultimately, however, it appears to signify the sympathetic quality of a woman’s embrace, such as when a child is held within the folds of its mother’s arms and kept close to its place of origin and to what sustains its life. In this passage the Father becomes feminine in order to become known to us as motherly and sympathetic. The maternal image of breasts filled with milk, which is an image of overflowing Wisdom, appears again with St. Augustine when his friend Severus, bishop of Mileve, in a letter to Augustine, writes that he values their friendship and says that he desires to suck all the wisdom from his friend’s breast: “I draw strength by clinging to you and sucking the abundance of your milk” (Augustine 2008, Letter 109). But it is not just Severus who expresses himself this way; Augustine himself often uses this image. Moving forward a few centuries, we find the theme of motherhood masculinized in the milieu of the Carolingian Renaissance. Here, too, the characteristics of women are attributed to men [4]. Alcuin of York speaks in one of his poems about Bishop Bassinus as a nurturing father, pater alme (Alcuin 1881, 57–58). And in a letter to a certain Dodo, his student, Alcuin says: “My dearest child, born too late and abandoned too soon, you were not well weaned from my breast, and the cruel nurse, by the caprice of lust, snatched that tender little body from its father’s bosom” (Alcuin 1975, 3–6). Later, John Scotus Eriugena, in his Periphyseon, calls the teacher nutritor (provider of nourishment) and the pupil alumnus (recipient of nourishment), though this is not Eriugena’s neologism, but something established in Celtic culture at this time (Parkes 2006, 370f). Eriugena, however, is a particularly interesting author here, not only because in his Periphyson he uses the notion of “the secret folds of Nature,” which may remind us of Itter’s interpretation of the Greek term κόλπος, but also because he develops the theme of the original human being, undivided into two different sexes, male and female. Eriugena understands man as the younger brother of the asexual angels (Eriugena 1987, V, 896C), and they were created like their prototypes, angels, even “at least equal to if not greater than angels” (Moran 2012, 156). Due to the Fall, however, man was divided into two sexes (as he often stresses: this differentiation and ways of procreation of humans in their actual state are shameful and thus, man is a risible animal – Eriugena 1987, I, 444B). Nevertheless, the Carolingian Neoplatonist Eriugena believes that in the end, when all things return and will be reunited with God, men on this return journey will also return to their original humanity, stripped of sexual differences. Eriugena is rather ambiguous in his attitude towards women: On the one hand, he defends them from saying that the Fall in Paradise was the fault of women, and he argues that every person (whether male or female) is responsible for their own sins. On the other hand, he repeats several times that man was created in the image of God as undivided, spiritual, and not subject to sensuality, while woman was seduced by the Devil precisely through her corporeal senses (Eriugena 1987, IV, 847C). Eriugena’s original man may be devoid of sexual distinctions, but in the final analysis original human being seems to be rather masculine in his imagination, even if he tried to reserve judgment on this subject in the sense of his “negative anthropology” (Nieuwenhove 2012, 68). And this is precisely the point to which I want to refer: I am convinced that the deep spiritual life that Eriugena most certainly lived is described by the contours of his imaginative world in which Plotinus and his followers, Augustine, Diogenes the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory the Great, Bede the Venerable, and certainly Alcuin of York all played their part.
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