The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart

By K. Tsianina Lomawaima

The Soul as Virgin Wife presents the first book-length study to give a detailed account of the theological and mystical teachings written by women themselves, especially by those known as beguines, which have been especially neglected. Hollywood explicates the difference between the erotic and imagistic mysticism, arguing that Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart challenge the sexual ideologies prevalent in their culture and claim a union without distinction between the soul and the divine.

The beguines' emphasis in the later Middle Ages on spiritual poverty has long been recognized as an important influence on subsequent German and Flemish mystical writers, in particular the great German Dominican preacher and apophatic theologian Meister Eckhart. In The Soul as Virgin Wife, Amy Hollywood presents the first book-length study to give a detailed textual account of these debts. Through an analysis of Magdeburg's The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, and the Latin commentaries and vernacular sermons of Eckhart, Hollywood uncovers the intricate web of influence and divergence between the beguinal spiritualities and Eckhart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2000
• ISBN: 9780268081829

K. Tsianina Lomawaima

Amy Hollywood is Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, and is the author and co-author of several books.

Book preview

The Soul as Virgin Wife

STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY AND THEOLOGY 1

Lawrence Cunningham, Bernard McGinn, and David Tracy

SERIES EDITORS

THE SOUL AS VIRGIN WIFE

Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart

AMY HOLLYWOOD

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame and London

Copyright 1995 by

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

All Rights Reserved

http://www.undpress.nd.edu

Manufactured in the United States of America

Paperback printed in 2001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hollywood, Amy M., 1963–.

The soul as virgin wife : Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart / Amy Hollywood

   p. cm. — (Studies in spirituality and theology series : vol. 1)

Revision of author’s thesis (Ph. D.—University of Chicago, 1991).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-268-01769-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Mysticism—History—Middle Ages, 600–1500. 2. Mysticism—Catholic Church—History. 3. Mechthild, of Magdeburg, ca. 1212-ca. 1282. 4. Porete, Marguerite, ca. 1250–1310. 5. Eckhart, Meister, d. 1327. I. Title. II. Series.

BV5075.H64    1995

248.2'2'09022—dc20

94-40479

CIP

ISBN 9780268081829

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail].

TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. VISIONARY IMAGINATION AND APOPHASIS

2. THE RELIGIOSITY OF THE MULIERES SANCTAE

3. THE SOUL AS HAUSFRAU: MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG’S THE FLOWING LIGHT OF THE GODHEAD

4. THE PROBLEM OF THE TEXT: MARGUERITE PORETE’S THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS

5. LANGUAGE AND ONTOLOGY IN MEISTER ECKHART: THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HIS MYSTICISM

6. THE CENTRAL MYSTICAL THEMES OF MEISTER ECKHART’S GERMAN WORKS

7. THE TRANSFORMATION OF SUFFERING IN MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG, MARGUERITE PORETE, AND MEISTER ECKHART

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began as a dissertation, written under the exemplary guidance of Bernard McGinn. Initially, the study focused on detailed analyses of the mystics’ texts. These readings remain central, but I realized that the theoretical and historical grounding for my conclusions needed to be articulated in greater detail; this led me to write chapters 1 and 2 and substantially revise the remainder. Bernie McGinn has been unstinting in his support throughout the process of revision and expansion, providing all of the postdoctoral assistance for which a former student could hope. I am glad to be able to acknowledge my debt to him here.

I would also like to thank others who have read the manuscript, offering suggestions and criticisms, and often saving me from error. David Tracy and Anne Carr read the early version with care, often clarifying for me my own conclusions. Frank Tobin’s comments were invaluable for the final revision of the manuscript. I hope that Stephanie Paulsell will always be my first reader and thank her for the generosity and unflagging enthusiasm with which she greeted this and other projects. Reed Lowrie read the penultimate version with an editor’s eye (and pen), making important suggestions. The book is now, I hope, much more readable. For comments on sections of the text and other forms of assistance, thanks also to Ellen Babinsky, Lawrence Cunningham, Michael Drompp, Liz Feder, Rahel Hahn, Michael McLain, Kevin Madigan, Cynthia Marshall, Charlie Poole, Michael Sells, Walter Simons, Brad Stull, and Mark Winokur.

Others, without reading or commenting directly on the present study, played important roles in its genesis. I am indebted to the members of various reading groups in feminist theory, both at the University of Chicago and Rhodes College, in particular Cathy Frasier, Susan Hill, Maggie Kim, Susan St. Ville, Susan Simonaitis, and Kathy Waller. Thanks also to my friends Maria Arbusto and Ellen Armour. Ellen listened to me work through many of the ideas presented in the opening chapters. I hope I didn’t bore her too much.

I presented portions of the present work at the International Conference on Medieval Studies, the American Academy of Religion, Rhodes College, Hamilton College, and the Medieval Colloquium of Dartmouth College. These audiences gave me not only an opportunity to try out ideas, but also many helpful comments and suggestions.

For financial support during the writing of this study, I thank the University of Chicago, the Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship Foundation, the Rhodes College Faculty Development Endowment, and the Burke Fund of Dartmouth College.

I am also grateful to everyone who made me talk about something else—especially Ken Fox. And again, thanks to Reed, who has yet to see the last of Mr. Farnear.

1

VISIONARY IMAGINATION AND APOPHASIS

In the middle years of the thirteenth century, Mechthild of Magdeburg described the genesis of her book, a compendium of visions, prayers, dialogues, and mystical accounts entitled The Flowing Light of the Godhead (Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit). From the time she first was greeted by God, through her decision to leave home, family, and friends to live as a solitary beguine, until the moment she was called on by God to write of his glory, her life was one of conflict between body and soul:¹

These were the weapons of my soul [sighs, tears, confession, fasts, vigils, beatings, and constant prayer] with which I so completely overcame the body, that for twenty years there was never a time when I was not tired, sick, or weak, most of all from compunction and sorrow, and also from good desire and spiritual work, and I had many difficult sick days from nature. But powerful love came and occupied me so profoundly with these wonders, that I did not dare remain silent, although in my simplicity this caused me much sorrow.²

Reluctant to undertake the task set for her by love, Mechthild questions God on his choice of one so unworthy as the spokesperson of his glory.

Mechthild describes herself as a fool, a sinful and poor human being in body and in soul. She argues that God should entrust his words to wise people (wisen luten) whose lowliness will not diminish his glory.³ God’s answer, here and elsewhere in the text, is to insist on the precedence of his will over her reservations. He plays on her modesty; Mechthild uses the humility topos of Christian literature to her advantage, for God argues that his glory is more fully displayed through her lowliness than through the wise.⁴ His word and command, moreover, is reinforced by the cleric to whom Mechthild goes to discuss her dilemma. Mechthild inscribes within her text its official approbation by both God and man.⁵

Writing is not only an approved activity for Mechthild, then, but one demanded by the divine. She must write; she cannot be silent about the wonders with which love occupies her. Yet these wonders not only cure but also cause her suffering. As she writes in an earlier passage, God’s wonder wounds the soul: Lord your wonder has wounded me, your grace has oppressed me.⁶ Throughout the text she reflects on the wounds of Christ and refers to the Song of Songs and the wound inflicted on the lover by the beloved; the wounded soul (gewundete sêle) thereby identifies herself with both Christ and the bride who mourns the absence of her beloved.⁷ These wonders and the wounds they inflict are both the source of her writing and its subject matter. Through writing of these wonders, experienced as a wounding intensification of her suffering, she will ultimately be healed:

Then our lord spoke: You shall follow me and trust me in these things, and you will be sick for a long time and I will care for you, and all of those things which you need in body and in soul I will give to you.⁸

Mechthild’s wounds are caused by love, the agony brought about by the apparently intermittent nature of God’s presence to her soul. At first blaming this absence on the body and its physicality, experienced as a barrier to divine bliss, she comes to understand it as rooted in the will and its dispositions. Through obedience to God’s will, Mechthild is eventually able to recognize and experience his continual presence. Reflection on the wounds caused by the wonders of love heals her. Furthermore, in communicating these wonders and wounds through a written text, she is able to make the divine voice present to herself and others.

The relationship between divine absence and the powers of the imagination, as well as the ambivalence of the latter for the medieval Christian author, is made even more explicit in the prologue to The Mirror of Simple Souls (Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desire d’amour) by the solitary, itinerant beguine Marguerite Porete (d. 1310).⁹ In the opening of this allegorical dialogue, Love gives an exemplum explaining its genesis and function. Love tells of a young lady, the daughter of a king, who lives in a foreign country. There she hears of the great courtesie and nobility of King Alexander, with whom she falls in love. Her love, however, causes her only sorrow and unhappiness, for Alexander is inaccessible to her, and she can accept no other love but his.

And when she saw that this faraway love, who was so close to her within herself, was so far outside, she thought that she would comfort her unhappiness by imagining some figure of her love, by whom she was often wounded in her heart. Therefore she had an image painted which represented the semblance of the king whom she loved as close as possible to the presentation of that which she loved and the affection of love by which she was captured, and by means of this image, together with other practices, she dreamed of the king himself.¹⁰

Through the imagination, the princess makes what is absent present, even if only in attenuated form. In doing so, her suffering is partially overcome.

Yet unlike the image of Alexander, which is the product of the princess’s imagination (and the skill of the unspecified painter), the Mirror is said to be given by God to the soul, who caused the book to be written. Porete underlines the givenness of the Mirror, thereby subverting any claim that it is merely the product of her own imagination.¹¹ Ultimately, the relationship between the soul and the divine undercuts the hierarchy and antithesis between created and uncreated by showing the roots of both in each other. The soul’s work, to create a text that is a mirror of God, the soul, and their unity, is achieved only through a fall out of createdness and into her uncreated being. This occurs, as in Mechthild’s Flowing Light, through inscribing textually the wonders/wounds and the one who brings them about, leading to the death of the self and its will. Yet for Porete, as we shall see, the desire to move beyond wonders, the suffering they engender, and the recording of this pain drives and disrupts her narrative and theology. In this nonplace of will-lessness, the soul is transformed into the divine—the gap created by time, multiplicity, and embodiment is overcome.

The German Dominican preacher and theologian Meister Eckhart (d. 1327/29) construes the relationship between pain and the work of the soul in slightly different terms. Equipped with an institutionally sanctioned mode of discourse and authorized to interpret the text of scripture, Eckhart does not need to legitimate his speech through recourse to visionary and mystical identifications. Yet despite this, work is a central term in his German sermons, one through which he deconstructs his own sanctioned authority.¹² Refusing to embrace absence and the suffering it entails, he points to the power of in- or trans-figuration to re-form the soul into justice and the divine; as in Porete’s Mirror, absence is overcome not merely in attenuated form but entirely.

The just person seeks nothing in his works, for those who seek something in their works are hirelings and traders, or those who work something for a wherefore. Therefore, if you will be in- or trans-figured into justice, then intend nothing in your works and in-figure no wherefore in yourself, neither in time nor in eternity, neither reward nor blessedness, neither this nor that; for these works are all truly dead. Yes, and if you image God in yourself, whatever works you perform therefore, these works are all dead, and you will spoil good works; and not only will you spoil good works, but more; you will also sin.¹³

Calling on his hearers to go beyond images (bilde) for the divine and for justice, to work without a why, Eckhart does not deny the power of figuration but rather displaces it, and with it the necessity of both wonders and suffering. One becomes divine, one becomes the Son of Justice to whom the soul gives birth in moments of detachment and imagelessness, therefore becoming the true image of the divine in the world. This is the work that Eckhart calls on the soul to perform. In doing so, the apparent antithesis between creature and creator is overcome and with it the interplay of absence and presence, suffering and ecstasy, that rests on this split.

THE SOUL AS VIRGIN WIFE

The great historian of the religious movements of the thirteenth century, Herbert Grundmann, argued that

the theological system and the speculative teaching of the German mystics are precisely not the foundation, point of departure and source, but rather the intellectual justification and the attempt at a theoretical ordering and a theological mastering of that religious experience that first arose in the mystical experience of the religious women’s movement.¹⁴

In this book, I will both substantiate and complicate Grundmann’s thesis. I hope not only to demonstrate the influence of the beguine mysticisms on Eckhart’s thought,¹⁵ but also to show how Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart all work to subvert medieval discourses on, and practices concerned with, gender and subjectivity.¹⁶ Eckhart’s debt to the women beguines and religious of the twelfth and early thirteenth century, its consequences and implications, have been largely ignored in studies of late medieval mysticism, despite the repetition of Grundmann’s assertion that the mysticism of spiritual poverty and detachment characteristic of Eckhart and the later German mystics was grounded in the experience, ideals, and, I would add, texts, of the women’s movement.¹⁷ While general claims are often made that Eckhart’s speculative approach is a reaction to the highly affective and experiential mysticism said to prevail in beguinages and convents,¹⁸ the adequacy of these terms themselves are currently being questioned, and the real similarities and differences between late medieval mystical texts analyzed.¹⁹ Through a more detailed study of Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart on the interrelated themes of body, will, and work and the interplay of pain, visionary imagination, and apophasis, I will assess the reasons for their desomatizing transformation of female spirituality and its implications for modern studies of gender and medieval mysticism.

Evidence for a direct textual relationship between Eckhart’s work and Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls has been established, and it has recently been shown through external evidence that Eckhart may also have known Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead.²⁰ Taken together, moreover, these two texts can be seen as representative of the kinds of spirituality characteristic of the women’s religious movement, although the paucity of women’s writings and multiplicity of meanings within those that survive should not be ignored.²¹ Although much recent work on women’s spirituality in the later Middle Ages has focused on hagiographical and legendary texts,²² the writings of women must be the basis for any account of their self-understanding and the route to God that they saw open for themselves. In making this claim, I do not wish to imply that there are essential, biologically or culturally grounded differences between men and women. In fact, the evidence I will present demonstrates the contrary thesis, in that both Mechthild and Porete, to varying degrees and in different ways, reject the definitions of female sanctity expressed in the hagiographical literature and some female-authored mystical writings.²³ Yet in order to understand sexual and gender differences as they were constructed and construed in the Middle Ages, we must give attention to the ways in which textual production and experience were grounded in a culture marked by sex and gender dualisms and their profound material consequences.²⁴

Furthermore, while The Flowing Light of the Godhead and The Mirror of Simple Souls are different in genre and intention from the biblical commentaries, questions, and sermons of an educated churchman such as Eckhart, they are overtly theological works, with very different aims than hagiography.²⁵ Hagiographical writings are an excellent indication of trends in popular piety and are also able to give insight into the ideals promulgated, predominantly by medieval men, for medieval women. Carefully used, these writings may yield other information about medieval women’s lives.²⁶ Yet to compare the type of piety offered in the hagiographies with Mechthild, Porete, or Eckhart’s theological formulations, without careful attention to genre, ignores central differences in perspectives and skews the modern historian’s understanding of their meanings. Through attention to mystical texts we can avoid the false contrast between experience and theory used by Grundmann and others to describe the relationship between the beguines and Eckhart. We must look at women’s, and particularly the beguines’, own formulations of their theological and mystical teachings in order adequately to assess the relationship between their spirituality and that of Eckhart, despite the recognition that women’s writings themselves internalize and are mediated through male-dominated culture.²⁷

On first reading, traditional contrasts between affective and speculative forms of mysticism may seem legitimate in describing the relationship between the texts of Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart. Eckhart clearly downplays the role of love and of extraordinary experiences of the love of God so central in the writings of Mechthild and, to a lesser extent, Porete. Although love still plays an important role for Eckhart, and is clearly the focus of a number of the vernacular sermons preached to women,²⁸ it is not as central a mystical term for Eckhart as it is for the beguines. In displacing love as a central name of the divine, Eckhart undercuts the possible gender implications and gender play of Mechthild’s and Porete’s language. On the one hand, love is feminine in both Middle High German and Old French, so that in stressing love as God’s primary name, Mechthild and Porete effectively, although intermittently, feminize the divine.²⁹ At the same time, both Mechthild and Porete bring together the understanding of God as love with courtly images and themes in which God is represented as the male lover, in contrast to the female soul.³⁰ In this way, the cultural association of women with eroticism is accepted, spiritualized, and, in part, subverted. This, however, is only one strategy adopted by the beguines, for in downplaying feminine and erotic language Eckhart follows another path initiated within the beguine texts themselves.

The differing conceptions of the role of love in the accounts of the return of the soul to God are grounded in diverse views of createdness and in turn lead to diverse ethical implications for the Christian while still in this life. The relationship and tensions between the active and contemplative lives are pivotal issues in the beguine milieu, attested to by the mixed form of life itself, the hagiographical literature, and the beguine writings. Reflecting these concerns, the concepts of the body, the will, and the work of the soul become central in different ways and in different configurations for each of the three mystics. Ultimately, it is in their understandings of the experience and attitude of the mystic in this life that Mechthild and Porete most diverge. While Mechthild attempts to join action and contemplation through the wounded soul’s divinizing identification with Christ’s love, Porete’s desire for spiritual liberty leads her to reject the works of both the active and contemplative lives. Eckhart formulates his dialectic of the soul as both wife and virgin—Martha and Mary, active and contemplative—in an attempt to unify the activity of Mechthild’s loving and suffering soul with the detachment and peacefulness of Porete’s.

Kurt Ruh, in his formulation of what is distinctive in the beguine spirituality, argues that while both Mechthild and Porete stress a love of God that leads to a union without distinction between the loving soul and the divine, for Mechthild this union is always transient as long as one remains in the body.³¹ Both the presence of God in this loving union and the suffering engendered by God’s absence from the soul are taken up as essential parts of the journey, for it is by suffering with the humanity of Christ that one is led to fuller union with his divinity.³² Mechthild writes:

God leads his children, whom he has chosen, in wonderful ways. It is a wonderful way and a noble way and a holy way which God himself went, that a human being might suffer pain without fault and without guilt.… Since he wills that they be like his dear Son, who was tormented in body and soul.³³

Ruh argues that there is a twofold understanding of love in Mechthild. On the one side is the experience of divine love (mystical marriage and union) and on the other the love that the desolate soul must, together with the suffering Christ, express for humanity.³⁴ The two experiences of love have a dialectical relationship to one another. Only as one accepts the desolation of the loss of the experience of divine love and makes it an expression of solidarity with the suffering of Christ and his love for humanity is one returned to the presence of and union with divine love. Evident throughout the writings of Mechthild, then, are what Caroline Walker Bynum calls alternations between alienation and ecstasy,³⁵ experiences grounded in the erotic model itself.

Marguerite Porete, as Ruh points out, goes farther in appearing to claim that a lasting essential union with the divine can be achieved on earth. Love, in fact, ultimately frees the soul from all desire and servitude, allowing her to become fully united with the divinity:

I used to be shut away in the servitude of captivity,

When desire imprisoned me in the will of affection.

There the light of ardor from divine love found me,

Who quickly killed my desire, my will and affection,

Which impeded me in the enterprise of the fullness of divine love.³⁶

For Porete the soul’s experience of the ecstasy of love must be surpassed, and the soul must annihilate her will and affections in order to be fully and permanently united with the divinity of God. Unlike Mechthild, Porete does not assimilate the suffering of the soul in the experience of God’s farnearness to the suffering of Christ in his humanity and thus to the necessity of caritas, or concern for sinful humanity. Important for Porete is that the soul pass beyond its present troubled state to a higher level where desire is lost. Having become absolutely humble, the soul loses her name and experiences the absolute and constant presence of the divinity: I hold him, she said, for he is mine. I will never let him go. He is in my will. Let come whatever might come, since he is with me. It would be a lack in me, if I should be astounded.³⁷

While Eckhart is closer in many ways to Porete in his stress on the annihilation of the will and the role of detachment and spiritual poverty, he also attempts to bring the other moment of the dialectic—the outflowing of the soul in loving works so central for Mechthild—to play in his thought. Breaking through to the absolutely simple and unified ground of the divine nature is always tied to the birth of the Son in the soul and the fruitfulness of the soul in works of justice and goodness. The soul, for Eckhart, must always be both virgin and wife.³⁸ In attaining a state of absolute detachment, moreover, she comes to be truly fruitful. By surpassing all creatureliness, both images of God and the human will, human beings become one with him in the absolute union of the ground of God and the uncreated ground of the soul.³⁹ The metaphysical and theological underpinnings Eckhart gives to these assertions will need to be fully articulated, but I wish here to stress that Eckhart removes the twofold movement of love found in Mechthild from the emphasis on the dialectic of suffering and fulfillment in which it is embedded in her writings.⁴⁰ Where Mechthild interpreted her experiences of suffering as the absence of God and his consoling gifts and the presence of Christ’s wounds on her body and soul, Eckhart attempts a dialectical solution to the problem of the presence and absence of God based on his view of detachment. The soul becomes absolutely indistinct in detaching herself from all creatureliness, and is thereby one with the absolute indistinction that is the unity of the divine. Through this she comes to experience the absolute presence of God. God, who is distinct (i.e., transcendent) due to his lack of distinction (i.e., immanence) is always present to the soul, yet in her attachment to creatureliness she is not aware of this.⁴¹ For Eckhart, the fulfillment of both love of God and of neighbor lies in detachment, which reveals to the soul the presence of God in her ground.

While both beguine mystics stress the loss of the soul’s will and the infusion of the will of God, Mechthild emphasizes the experience of love and of suffering and the absence of the divinity that brings about this loss of self-will. The disinterested love of the soul for God can be brought about only through a radical experience of his absence. For Eckhart, like Porete, the emphasis is placed on attaining a state of disinterested love, or of detachment from self-will, in which the soul recognizes the absolute presence of the divinity. Yet, as I have said, he attempts to stress detachment without doing away with the fruitfulness and work of the soul. This shift explains Porete’s and Eckhart’s distrust of the kind of mystical experiences that serve as the basis for Mechthild’s thought and that of many other religious women. Eckhart, in bringing together action and contemplation, formulates a mysticism of everyday life that is not dependent on extraordinary experiences.⁴² His mysticism—like Porete’s—is not experiential in the traditional sense, but rather initiates a change of consciousness, a new way of viewing the relationship between the self and God in which the self is emptied so that it might become the place in which God works. While these themes can be uncovered in the Mirror, Porete, perhaps because of the greater constraints caused by her sex, consistently downplays action in favor of freedom.

This preliminary sketch of the issues to be discussed in the following pages might suggest that Eckhart has succeeded in combining the radicality of detachment and loss of self-will found in Porete’s writings with the emphasis on continual fruitfulness found in Mechthild. However, from a modern feminist perspective the suspicion is raised that in attempting to resolve apparent conflicts within and between women’s texts, Eckhart dissolves ambiguities intrinsic to their spirituality. Most importantly, we might ask if in minimizing the role of experience and the body in the mystical life he does not denigrate forms of redemptive spirituality central to many medieval women’s writings.

Eckhart displaces Mechthild’s characteristic emphasis on suffering, then, and also the body as intrinsic to human creatureliness. Throughout Mechthild’s work are dialogues between the body and the soul that point to her more ambivalent attitude toward creatureliness. Rather than being a mere nothing from the standpoint of its createdness, as it is for Eckhart, the body is both clung to and fought off as a more substantial entity and adversary. At the same time, through purification of human love and desire one attains unification with divine love. The closing dialogue of Mechthild’s work emphasizes that for her the self is always a composite of body and soul. The soul tells the body, which it will soon depart,

Oh my most beloved prison, within which I am bound, I thank you for all that in which you have followed me. Although I am often troubled by you, yet you have come to my help. All your need will be taken from you on the last day.⁴³

The soul’s joy, she suggests, will not be complete until joined with that of the body.

Mechthild’s hope for the body is based on the Incarnation, just as the necessity of bodily and spiritual suffering is illustrated by the suffering of Christ’s humanity. It is the constant juxtaposition of these two elements, the body and creatureliness on the one hand and suffering on the other, that Eckhart attempts to bypass. Again one may be tempted to argue that Eckhart moves away from the particularity of the female-authored text and the kind of experiences described there, dissolving ambiguities seen by many as essential to women’s writings. This suggests an evaluative critique of the relationship between the beguines and Eckhart, a reversal of that judgment implied in Grundmann’s historical claim that Eckhart had mastered their thought. Evaluation may be unavoidable, but I am more interested in understanding. It is necessary, therefore, to uncover the theological and spiritual issues of concern to Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart. This kind of contextualization illuminates their profound commonality of purpose, despite the obvious divergences within and between their texts. As a result, many contemporary feminist assumptions about embodiedness, imagination, and gender are themselves put into question by these medieval texts.

The crucial move made by Eckhart—to locate sinfulness, temptation, and detachment in the will, a will that must then be overcome—is, then, begun by Mechthild herself and taken further in Porete.⁴⁴ In deemphasizing the body, its sinfulness, temptations, and future glory, Eckhart, like Porete, underlines the fact that true spiritual poverty must be that of the will alone, and that it is the will which creates distance between the human being and God. By moving away from special experiences of God’s presence and absence and showing that love as a human affection must be transcended in absolute detachment, Eckhart expresses a new appreciation of the world as sharing in both creatureliness and God. Hence the possibility that in embracing women’s influence, he also attempts to resolve the tortured sense of life in this world and in the body found in Mechthild and the radical detachment from the world that makes it difficult for Marguerite to explain how the soul acts in time. He does so, moreover, in ways suggested by the beguine texts themselves. In drawing out these aspects of their work and in bringing the two strands of beguine spirituality together, Eckhart provides a new understanding of the world and of the role of the detached soul, an understanding that is—in theory—accessible to both men and women. This is not to posit Eckhart as the winner in a contest created by the historian between the three mystical theologies presented here, but rather marks an attempt to show how Eckhart situated himself in relation to his two predecessors, how his thought was significantly shaped by the mystical concerns and theologies of the women’s movement, and how he might have come to his distinctive resolution of their tensions. Most important, perhaps, in bringing together the different spiritual emphases found among women, particularly in these two beguines, Eckhart sheds light on their thought and arrives at the formulations of it that he preached to women. Nevertheless, the viability of his position, given the material and ideological context of late medieval Europe, is called into question by his condemnation.⁴⁵ The intermittent suspicion to which Mechthild was subject in her more theologically daring moments, the trial, condemnation, and execution of Porete, and the ensuing decrees of the Council of Vienne (1311–12) associating beguines and heresy demonstrate the even greater dangers for women.⁴⁶

The assertion of an uncreated aspect of the soul in which God and the soul are unified in their ground can be found in Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart and is the basis for their move away from the body, suffering, and visionary imagination as central to the spiritual life; it is also a central issue in the suspicions against them. Through the unity of God and the soul in their grounds the suffering of the human being, occasioned by the apparent absence of the divine, is overcome. The interplay between suffering, visionary imagination, and embodiment are complex, however, and laden with tension. For a better understanding of what follows, and to avoid some of the pitfalls of contemporary scholarship on suffering and the body in medieval thought, an elucidation of the theoretical and philosophical issues and a decentering of modern presuppositions with regard to them, are required. Most important, the relationship between pain and the imagination must be clarified, together with my assertion that medieval visionary experience is tied to the work of the imagination. I will then turn in chapter 2 to other important aspects of beguine spirituality and the accounts of female religiosity within and against which Mechthild, Porete, and Eckhart write, before more carefully analyzing and comparing their texts.

THE BODY IN PAIN

Elaine Scarry argues that in the Hebrew biblical tradition the central distinction between God and humans is between one who is disembodied and those who are embodied.⁴⁷ Embodiment marks createdness. Scarry goes on to point to the centrality of scenes of wounding and images of the wounded body in the Hebrew scriptures. These episodes, she argues, identify God as a torturer who asserts his existence and his power through human flesh, himself having no materiality on which to inscribe his presence and inspire belief. In the apparent absence of God, the disbelief of the people is countered by the wounded body. God makes his presence known by painfully inscribing the bodies of disbelievers.

The wounded body is capable of signaling God’s presence because it marks human immanence, limitation, and hence createdness. As Drew Leder has shown, embodiedness, while always constitutive of human being in the world, is not always present to consciousness.⁴⁸ In fact, the lived experience of the body is marked by absence; in moments of perception, concentration, and thought, the bodily organs through which we operate disappear. Other important systems and organs in the body function best and most efficiently as recessive and absent from consciousness, although we cannot live without them. For example, performing actively in the world depends on not having to give attention to every breath drawn. More radically, no amount of conscious attention can aid in the digestive process. Although we can learn to eat substances that are more easily digestible, we cannot will enzymes to work on the food in our stomachs. Consciousness of this process occurs only in its breakdown, as pain and/or illness.

Leder calls this form of bodily presence dys-appearance, pointing to the fact that the body is insistently and compellingly present to lived experience in moments of dysfunction and suffering.⁴⁹ Yet this presence is itself a form of absence, hence his use of the term dys-appearance, which shows that the body as experienced in pain is experienced as the absence of an absence.⁵⁰ Leder and Scarry both emphasize, furthermore, that our ability to experience ourselves as transcendent to the body is not only constitutive of embodied experience but also is necessary to overcoming pain. Although in physical suffering the body is made insistently present to consciousness, human beings attempt to separate themselves from the body that is experiencing pain. In doing so, the human subject is able to maintain its integrity in the face of a destructive experience and may be put in a position to fight against that experience.

Scarry argues, moreover, that pain is marked by its intransitive and nonintentional nature. While I experience my pain with absolute certainty—there is in fact nothing of which I am more certain than that I am in pain—for others, my pain is radically unknowable insofar as it is incommunicable. For Scarry, the mute facts of sentience are isolating; it is only when we generate language, ideas, and cultures around and through the facts of our embodiment that we can talk about shared aspects of human nature.⁵¹ In cutting off lines of communication between human beings, pain is a harbinger of death. Through communicating pain a transcending movement is begun, which marks and brings about its alleviation.⁵² While the wounded body might be seen as communicating pain, it does so only within the terms of culture and its shared meanings. Compassion, according to Scarry, is a function of the imagination.⁵³

The imagination, broadly understood as that creative power constitutive of human culture, therefore enables us to overcome pain in at least two ways. On the one hand, it enables us to deal with some of our physical pain by setting it within the human community and its technologies of alleviation, themselves products of the imagination. In the Middle Ages, such technologies were often powerless in the face of disease and pain, a fact of which we must not lose sight.⁵⁴ In addition, imagination enables human beings to avoid the suffering they inflict on themselves, suffering brought about by crises of faith in the powers of the imagination and human creativity.⁵⁵ For Scarry, this is expressed in the Hebrew scriptures by the crises of belief in the God who is said to be creator of all things, including humanity.

The Hebrew scriptures, therefore, contain not only scenes in which God is shown as the torturer legitimating himself through and on the human body, scenes that in their textual form already mark an imaginative movement away from the wounding of physical bodies, but also accounts of material creation inspired by God’s commands, moments that point to another, nondestructive manner in which the apparent absence of God can be overcome. In building the tabernacle, for example, God’s presence is made known through the use of tools rather than weapons.⁵⁶ The Hebrew Bible, then, begins a process Scarry finds reaching its culmination in the New Testament—the celebration of material culture and the powers of imagination.⁵⁷ Through embodiment in Jesus Christ, God undercuts the absolute distinction between himself and humanity which necessitates scenes of wounding, and instead allows humanity to embrace its own creative potential. The written inscription of wounding marks the first movement in a series of displacements in which human embodiment and its fragility are transcended and the divine is embodied in texts and material artifacts. Through these works, themselves products of human embodiment, the suffering and limitation inherent to corporeality are overcome. In other words, the body is itself the source of human transcendence.⁵⁸

Yet for Christian believers, the problem of God’s absence continues, perhaps especially among those who claim to have experienced the divine presence in extraordinary ways. The popularity of the Song of Songs as an allegory of the relationship between the church or the soul and the divine points to the centrality of the problematic interplay of Christ’s presence and absence.⁵⁹ From Christian thinkers, with apparently unshakable belief in the existence of God and of Christ, come accounts of suffering caused by the dissimilarity between the believer and God, experienced as the absence of the loved object. The products of material culture, moreover, from language to images to political systems, despite their value, are incapable of attaining the perfection the divine demands. All language falls short of naming the divine, all images and concepts are but pale reflections of its glory, and all human