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ABSTRACT
There are several noticeably different articulations of the soul's desire for union with God over the course of Mechthild of Magdeburg's The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Written over the course of her life, the text narrates a shift from the highly individual mode of relation with God in her early visions to a more communal view of divine love after her entrance into the community at Helfta. I have chosen three key moments in the text to illustrate this shift and the underlying theology that enables it, a theology that finds union with the divine in both the presence and absence of God.
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Notes
1 Hollywood, ‘Soul as Hausfrau’, 58.
2 As a part of the tradition of courtly love poetry, several terms are allegorized as characters throughout the text, indicated by capitalizing them as they appear. I have preserved this convention within this essay.
3 Duran, ‘Mechthild of Magdeburg’, 47.
4 Ibid., 49.
5 McGinn, ‘Three Great Beguine Mystics’, 230.
6 While it is impossible to attach any particular passage of the text to specific moments in Mechthild’s life, the Books do roughly follow the narrative of her life. In Book I, she is a young woman, Book IV is around the time she entered the convent at Helfta, and in Book VI, she has resided there for some time, though likely at the beginning of the deterioration of her sight at the latest, which is mentioned during Book VII, which is thought to be written later than the first six.
7 Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead, 62.
8 Perintfalvi, ‘Eroticism and Mysticism’, 238.
9 I do not have the space here to fully explore the consequences of the Freudian and Foucauldian analyses of the relationship between prohibition and pleasure for the idea that a desire can ever be ‘fulfilled.’ Suffice to say that Mechthild, at this stage in the text, is constantly oscillating between desire and satisfaction without ever finding equilibrium. Later, the fulfilment of desire will recede thematically as Mechthild reconceptualizes love of God as something other than personal direct pleasure.
10 Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead, 59.
11 It is on this same basis that she goes on to reject the intercession of angels and saints as ‘child’s love’. As the bride, she requires no mediation between herself and God. Ibid., 61.
12 Hollywood, ‘Soul as Hausfrau’, 71.
13 The matter of the nature of the Soul’s union with God after death, without the limits of the Body, is a question best addressed through Mechthild’s visionary tableaux of heaven in later books and is beyond the scope of this essay, which I have limited to discussing Mechthild’s understanding of the desire for and presence of God during life on earth.
14 Hollywood, ‘Soul as Hausfrau’, 71.
15 By referring to God as ‘my Love’ here, Mechthild blends God’s twin roles as both object and source of love. God is not only the one she loves, but also is by nature that love (which is then shared with the Soul as its true nature). Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead, 152.
16 Ibid., 153.
17 As Michelle Roberts describes, the rhetoric of humility is central to women authors’ claims to be able to speak of divine things during this era as they were barred from education and so must present their thoughts as inspired by direct divine intervention, not their own rationality. Roberts, ‘Retrieving Humility’, 51.
18 Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead, 154–5.
19 McGowin, ‘Eroticism and Pain’, 618.
20 For a full demonstration and analysis of this point, see Scarry, The Body in Pain.
21 Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead, 154.
22 McGinn, ‘Three Great Beguine Mystics’, 241.
23 Ibid.
24 I am following Michel de Certeau’s analysis of Nicholas of Cusa, in which mystic knowledge is only possible by a belief in the discourse of the other, creating a social order by belief in a particular object of speech. Speech transforms experience into knowledge. Mysticism is not a solitary activity, but must be spoken and shared if it is to attain its object. Certeau, ‘The Look: Nicholas of Cusa’, 48–50.
25 Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead, 227.
26 As Mechthild puts it at the end of Book IV, Chapter 12: ‘The deeper I sink,/ The sweeter I drink’. Ibid., 156.
27 McGinn, ‘Three Great Beguine Mystics’, 240.
28 Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead, 223.
29 Ibid., 335.
30 Meister Eckhart is only the most prominent case of an individual with views deemed heretical influenced by Mechthild.
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Chloe Anastasia
Chloe Anastasia is a doctoral candidate at Trinity College, Melbourne. Her work explores the connections between Spinoza and certain tendencies in psychoanalysis, political theology, and medieval mysticism to try and think in ways that do not involve a self-sovereign subject. She is particularly interested in how this work touches on questions of representation and how voices are heard.