The principal argument of Bynum in "Jesus As Mother and Abbot As Mother" is that medieval clerics used feminine, especially maternal, imagery and metaphor as a means of describing and clarifying their approach to devotion to God and experience in the religious community. Citing numerous writing passages that refer to God, Jesus, or leaders of religious communities as a mother whose love is boundless and from whose breasts the faithful may draw nurturance and strength, Bynum develops the idea that medieval contemplatives were seeking ways of expressing piety and religious values in general. Although she notes that maternal imagery was more typical of Gnostic meditations in the patristic period of the Church (126), Bynum does not adopt the view that the use of maternal imagery to refer to Jesus during the medieval period shows that there was a mystical sensibility of a feminine or androgynous God and that the notion of God the father was somehow not paramount in the emerging Church. Rather, maternal imagery as a feature of devotion and contemplation was part of a deliberate exercise in devotional "affective spirituality" (113) on one hand and a mechanism that contemplatives had for expressing their attitude toward the demands of the cloistered clerical life on the other. The principal focus is on the discourse of the Cistercians, a cloistered order, but writings from other religious communities are cited as well.
Descriptions of Jesus as mother owe much to stereotypes of women that dominated medieval thought: that females are generative in giving birth, sacrificial in experiencing birth pains, tender and loving, and nurturing (Bynum 131). The last-named quality appears to dominate where female imagery is attached to Christ or leaders of religious community. The idea of suckling at Christ's or an abbot's breast is linked to the notion of the soul's absolute union with God and is an extended metaphor for the physical union with Christ t...