The Dialectics of Mystical Love in the Middle Ages

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THE DIALECTICS OF MYSTICAL LOVE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Violence/Pain and Divine Love in the Mystical Visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porète

SUMMARY — As esoteric and incomprehensible as medieval mysticism proves to be, there are numerous ways to gain a critical, almost rational understanding of this phenomenon. One approach, above all, illustrates the deep essence of that phenomenon: mystics realized that the experience of physical pain provided an essential gateway for spiritual vision. Both the Low German mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg and the French mystic Marguerite Porète powerfully experimented with the sensation of pain in order to find a new means to come to terms with the visionary union with the Godhead. For them, mystical love was simply the other side of the same coin, closely matched with the sensation of bodily pain. In close proximity they both endeavored to experiment with physical pain as the catalyst to spiritual epiphany.

I. THE CULTURAL MEANING OF PAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES

No one has ever been able to figure out completely the meaning and significance of mysticism, a realization which in and by itself is probably, though paradoxically, the closest approximation we might achieve in a critical analysis of this phenomenon. The apophatic definition of mysticism might represent the best approach insofar as the phenomena formulated by the visionaries con- stituted a highly individual experience of a deeply religious kind. Mystics stand truly on their own and witness visions that cannot be truly shared with others, if that would require a rational approach. Literary attempts, musical composi- tions, and paintings, for instance, are nothing but faint attempts in this regard and can only hope to convey in human terms what is really apophatic.1 As a

1 Wolfgang Wackernagel, ‘Establishing the being of images: Master Eckhart and the concept of disimagination’, in: Diogenes 162 (1993), 77-98; Michael A. Sells, Mystical language of unsay- ing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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contemporary mystic reports about her loss of the sensation of self, ‘It was a journey through an unknown passageway that led to a life so new and different that, despite forty years of varied contemplative experiences, I never suspected its existence’.2 Some of the medieval mystics, such as Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260- 1328), who again stood in a long tradition extending at least to Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335-after 394), Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth to early sixth century), and John Scotus (Eriugena, 9th century), might have expressed best what they had witnessed when they resorted to negative theology, a philosoph- ical approach to the unfathomable, identifying God really as the absolute Nothing.3 But the true essence of mysticism also finds expression in a variety of other manifestations. Here I would like to focus on one curious dimension of the mystical discourse that has not yet attracted sufficient attention, but which plays a rather significant role as well, providing the visionaries with an important literary instrument to come to terms with their extraordinary experiences: violence and pain, at least in linguistic terms. This violence, manifested through physical pain, at first proves to be of a highly concrete nature, if we consider how the mystical authors at least regularly described it in their extraordinary accounts, although it also seems to have found expression in actual exposure to self- inflicted pain, including fasting, sleep deprivation, exposure to cold tempera- tures, and actual physical wounds. Peter Dinzelbacher has already illustrated in great detail how much the medieval Church struggled with the profound conflict between body and soul, utilizing the body as the platform for essential spiritual struggles.4 The entire world of early Christianity (late antiquity) with its plethora of martyrs and saints was deeply determined by this negative approach to the body which was to be overcome in favor of the spirit. Martha Easton has elucidated how much ‘the use of violence and death as signifiers of sainthood [had been] an established artistic tradition whose roots can be traced back to early Christian and Byzantine iconography’.5 This ‘philopassianism’, a

2 Bernadette Roberts, The experience of no-self: A contemplative journey, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993 (rev. ed.), 9. 3 Bruce Milem, The unspoken word: Negative theology in Meister Eckhart’s German sermons, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002; see also Alois M. Haas, ‘Das Nichts Gottes und seine Sprengmetaphorik’, in: Idem, Mystik im Kontext, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004 (orig. 1999), 89-104; see also Albrecht Classen, ‘Meister Eckhart’s phi- losophy in the twenty-first century’, in: Mystics Quarterly 29 (2003) no. 1-2, 6-23. 4 Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Über die Körperlichkeit der mittelalterlichen Frömmigkeit’, in: Idem, Körper und Frömmigkeit in der mittelalterlichen Mentalitätsgeschichte, Paderborn-Munich et al.: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007, 11-49. 5 Martha Easton, ‘Pain, torture and death in the Huntington Library Legenda aurea’, in: Samantha J.E. Riches & Sarah Salih (Eds.), Gender and holiness: Men, women and saints in late medieval Europe, London-New York: Routledge, 2002 (Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture), 9-64: here 49.

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brilliantly fitting term coined by Esther Cohen,6 also extended to mysticism where it actually played a considerable, if not critical, role, as I will discuss in the following pages. After all, pain belongs to one of the fundamental sensations in human existence, deeply dreaded, yet basically unavoidable because it serves as the essential medium for the nervous system to communicate with the brain. Specifically, pain constitutes an essential function in our lives because, as medical research has often shown, pain signals danger/s, prepares us to prevent future dangers, and also prevents us from certain activities and actions.7 It would be extremely problematic to claim, as was commonly done in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that people in the Middle Ages suffered less from pain than we do today because they had a less developed sense of physical perception. Nev- ertheless, pain, or rather the approach to pain, is culturally conditioned and codified, hence each society evaluates and deals with pain in different manners, accepting or rejecting it to a varying degree, which allows us to treat pain as an important and meaningful gauge for the cultural-historical evaluation of individual societies at specific moments in time. In Mark Zborowski’s words: The only universal feeling about pain is that no normal human likes it. This feeling of dislike is universal because it is part of the biological heritage of the entire human race (…) Everyone, regardless of his race or culture, will tend to manifest similar reflex reactions to a painful stimulus. However, human societies differ greatly in their attitudes of expectancy and acceptance of a particular pain experience or of its symbol.8 From a medievalist’s perspective, Scott E. Pincikowski observes, The medieval individual ‘read’ and understood pain signs differently from today because the social significance and cultural understanding of pain were also different. Yet, there is a certain affinity between each epoch concerning the process of interpreting pain. What has remained a constant is the communicative nature of pain. One can safely assume that each member of the social body, in any time period, learns through personal experience and socialization to recognize, inter- pret, and then react to pain signs that appear on the body of the sufferer. What separates the two eras is the overwhelming influence of religion on the medieval individual approaching the problem of suffering.9

6 Esther Cohen, ‘Towards a history of European physical sensibility: Pain in the later Middle Ages’, in: Science in Context 8 (1995) no. 2, 47-74: here 51. 7 The complex of pain is well discussed by Scott E. Pincikowski in his Bodies of pain: Suffering in the works of Hartmann von Aue, New York-London: Routledge, 2002 (Studies in Medieval History and Culture 11) 3-7. 8 Mark Zborowski, People in pain, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1969, 32. 9 Pincikowski, Bodies of pain, 8. See also Roselyne Rey, The history of pain, transl. Elliott Wal- lace, J.A. Cadden, & S.W. Cadden, Cambridge, MA-London: Harvard University Press,

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Suffering and pain, by their very nature, transport the individual into another dimension, normally a very unpleasant, if not torturous, one, of course, but it challenges the human creature to come to terms with the very premises of all existence. Once again, we cannot regard this as a timeless phenomenon; instead, pain is always historically grounded in a set of values and concepts. Curiously, heroic poetry and early-medieval literature at large do not seem to know of clear examples of pain, even though we regularly read of individuals who are killed, whose limbs are cut off, whose eyes are gouged, etc. By contrast, the very victims at times only respond to this suffering by laughing about the fragmented bodies.10 Only by the twelfth century, with the rise of courtly literature and a new realization of the emotional dimension reflecting Christ’s Passion which medieval Christians wanted to imitate out of a deep sense of piety, did pain gain a powerful, almost positive value. As Roselyne Rey comments, ‘it seems probable that Christians viewed pain as both a form of Divine retribution, or as a sign of having been especially chosen and, as such, deserving of rewards in the hereafter – an attitude which may have encouraged a stoic indifference to pain’.11 Significantly, thirteenth-century theologians and philosophers at the Univer- sity of Paris and elsewhere also began to focus much on the sensation of pain as an epistemological phenomenon, and the critical discourse centering on it has certainly continued since then well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if not until today (Arthur Schopenhauer and Bertrand Russell).12 Contempora- neously, thirteenth-century mystics, especially female mystics, approached the topic ‘pain’ from their own, very personal, deeply spiritual point of view, but it remains rather elusive whether their comments were even noticed by the acad- emicians.

1995 (2nd ed.; first publ. 1993); Frank T. Vertosick, Why we hurt: The natural history of pain, New York: Harcourt, 2000. 10 See, for instance, the Walthariuslied (9th or 10th century); Waltharius: Lateinisch / Deutsch, transl. & ed. by Gregor Vogt-Spira. With an appendix: Waldere: Englisch / Deutsch, trans. by Ursula Schaefer, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994. For the Latin text, see also http://www.hs-augs- burg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost10/Waltharius/wal_txt0.html; for the English translation, see http://www.northvegr.org/lore/waltharius/index.php; for a good discussion, see Wolfgang Haubrichs, Die Anfänge: Versuche volkssprachiger Schriftlichkeit im frühen Mittelalter (ca. 700-1050/60). Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn der Neuzeit Bd. 1, Tl. 1, Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum, 1988, 167-169. 11 Rey, The history of pain, 48. Frederick Sontag, Love beyond pain: Mysticism within Christian- ity, New York-Ramsey, NJ-Toronto: Paulist Press, 1977, 125, offers the following comment on pain with respect to Christian love of God: ‘On first encounter, the love of God may be destructive due to the terror of its impact on us. However, the Christian believes this loss produces new life once the cord of our fierce attachment to our own interest is cut’. 12 Donald Mowbray, Pain and suffering in medieval theology: Academic debates at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009, 1.

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II. PAIN AND SUFFERING AS REFLECTIONS OF THE DIVINE LOVE

Indifference to pain, or pertaining to violence at large, however, would be an utterly inappropriate term in this context, especially when we consider mystical authors for whom the basic experience with the Godhead was commonly regarded as most painful, whether all by itself or at the closure of a vision when the spirit is forced to return to the mystic’s body. A number of mystical writers made the greatest effort to evoke the mystical experience by self-torture, writing the cross or a stigmata onto their own body (Heinrich Seuse). Many Christians since the time of the Church Fathers aimed at the direct imitatio Christi, and hence of Christ’s Passion, trying to turn into living crucifixes (John Cassian, † 435). Others accepted ascetic practices, some burned their own flesh with a red-hot cross made out of iron, and then others exposed themselves to sleep deprivation. Even long before the time of Saint Francis, a number of mystics and other religiously inspired people document a form of stigmatization, self imposed or granted them by God, not to speak of wounds created by themselves and kept open deliberately to inflict further pain.13 As Carolyn Walker Bynum’s research has shown, late-medieval asceticism and other forms of self-inflicted pain represented a very serious attempt by many medieval mystics to imitate Christ and to gain a form of spiritual holiness already here on earth beyond the limitations of their bodies.14 Disregarding some exceptions, there was, however, a remarkable gender difference. Accord- ing to Pincikowski, ‘whereas male body symbolism and asceticism revolved primarily around the renunciation of wealth and power, two secular spheres mainly occupied by men, holy women, because their bodies were associated with food and nourishment, turned to eating (cult of the Eucharist), food preparation, and the renunciation of food as the basis for their piety’.15 It would be an egre- gious oversight, however, to ignore in this context the great need for saintly women to preserve their chastity, which was regularly discussed by theologians from the time of the Church Fathers.16

13 Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Diesseits der Metapher: Selbstkreuzigung und -stigmatisation als kon- krete Kreuzesnachfolge’, in: Idem, Körper und Frömmigkeit in der mittelalterlichen Mentalitäts- geschichte, 51-77. 14 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy feast and holy fast: The religious significance of food to medieval women, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 294; see also Giles Constable, Atti- tudes toward self-inflicted suffering in the Middle Ages, Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1982; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and redemption: Essays on gender and the human body in medieval religion, New York: Zone Books, 1992; Eadem, Wonderful blood: Theology and practice in late medieval northern Germany and beyond, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007 (The Middle Ages Series), 83ff. 15 Pincikowski, Bodies of pain, 11-12. 16 Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of their sex: Female sanctity and society, ca. 500-1100, Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, 127-175.

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III. MEDIEVAL WOMEN’S PERCEPTION OF PAIN AND VIOLENCE AS COUNTERPOINTS OF MYSTICAL LOVE

In this section I want to examine how medieval women utilized pain, or actually images of violence directed against them in a spiritual sense, for the explicit purpose of intensifying and sentimentalizing their experience of the Godhead in their intimate, yet overpowering revelations, to reach new epistemological levels when trying to come to terms with the apophatic, or ineffable, and to provide innovative images of the unique love between the visionary and the absolute Other as a way to relay what they really witnessed beyond what human language can formulate. Before I turn to our two major sources, however, where the combination of violence and love within the mystical discourse emerges as a significant component, let us quickly reflect on a secular example, Hartmann von Aue’s Middle High German verse novella, Der arme Heinrich (ca. 1190/1200), as a useful segue into the issue to be discussed here. This is certainly not a mystical text, yet the female protagonist’s ardent desire to experience death so she can save her lord from dying, who is probably her secret lover, signals clearly what later mystical writers might have intended. Officially the girl wants to die so she can also meet her true bridegroom, the Godhead, but the entire context reveals how much her willingness to suffer for Heinrich serves an ulterior motive. Moreover, we can also recognize here an important, though very peculiar strand in medieval discourse centered on the tension between the body and the mind which could only be overcome by means of violence and pain directed at the body to liberate the mind and to free it for the love of the Godhead.17 Seen in this light, we might sense a mystic speaking in the farmer’s young daughter who wants to give up her life for her prince, Heinrich, so she herself would not have to go through the arduousness and temptations of this life, that she could free herself from all the sinful seductiveness of this world with all its attractive forces, and could marry, already as a very young, still innocent per- son, Christ Himself (611-628; 663-854). As the surgeon in Salerno later warns her, however, the operation of cutting out her heart while she is still alive would be extremely painful, a scenario which really should horrify her enough to shrink back from the original plan. But the girl only laughs at his own timidity, since she is actually looking forward to her own martyrdom, transforming her, as she seems to hope, into a saint already at a very young age, that is, facing eternal life at the very moment of her bitter death (1111-1170). Of course, the

17 Hartmann von Aue, Der arme Heinrich, ed. Hermann Paul. 16th, newly rev. ed. by Kurt Gärtner, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996 (Altdeutsche Textbibliothek 3).

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narrative ends quite differently because she does not die. Heinrich realizes, when he has secretly espied her beautiful naked body bound on the operation table in preparation of the cutting, that her death would not be justified, so he humbles himself in face of God, which ultimately heals him from his leprosy. And at the closure he realizes that she would be the ideal bride, the cause of his physical and spiritual healing, hence he marries her despite the tremendous social difference between them, which makes all the sacrifice unnecessary – certainly a utopian conclusion. Nevertheless, the idea of her most painful sacrifice stands out as a dramatic concept, which finds, in a way, a continuation in the pan-European narrative motif of the ‘eaten heart’, such as in Konrad von Würz- burg’s Herzmære (ca. 1280).18 But we will also observe this approach to pain replicated and examined to a large extent in the two major sources of our investigation, Mechthild von Magdeburg’s and Marguerite Porète’s revelations.

If we turn to a highly unusual late-medieval text, this one with explicit mystical features, the late-fifteenth-century Christus und die Minnende Seele, probably composed in Constance, perhaps even by a female author, we come across a strikingly parallel case, confirming how much violence and love could merge in medieval mystical discourse to establish a literary medium to formulate the most profound statements about the soul’s absolute desire to be unified with the Godhead in body and mind.19 At first sight the text seems to confirm most startling concepts about the relationship between husband and wife in the Middle Ages, with him enjoying total power over her to the point that he can abuse, maltreat, and even injure her at will. The degree of violence as depicted in the manuscript illustrations proves to be horrifying, and it extends even to Christ, as the bridegroom, actively involved, flagellating or hanging his bride from the gallows. But then we also come across images of her committing similar violent acts against Him. Keller initially comments: ‘The wife, in her passive role, has no right to defend herself. Nothing – not resistance, not hum- ble self-effacement, not compliant ingratiation – can alleviate her distress. She

18 Konrad von Würzburg, Kleinere Dichtungen Konrads von Würzburg, ed. Edward Schröder. Vol. I: Der Welt Lohn – Das Herzmaere – Heinrich von Kempten, Dublin-Zürich: Weidmann, 1968 (orig. publ. 1924). For a comprehensive discussion of the leitmotif of ‘death and love’ in Konrad’s work, see Rüdiger Brandt, Konrad von Würzburg: Kleinere epische Werke. 2nd, newly rev. and expanded ed., Berlin: Schmidt, 2009 (orig. publ. 1999; Klassiker-Lektüren 2), 79-91. 19 Romuald Banz, Christus und die minnende Seele: Untersuchungen und Texte, Breslau: Marcus, 1908; rpt. Hildesheim-New York: Olms, 1977 (Germanische Abhandlungen 29); for an excellent discussion of this text, see Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, My secret is mine: Studies on religion and eros in the German Middle Ages, Leuven: Peeters, 2000 (Studies in Spirituality Supplement 4), 185-229.

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cowers in her existence in the shadow of a tyrannical husband who exerts his unilateral law of might and pulls out all the stops of aggression’.20 Then, however, she rightly alerts us to the allegorical message of the text with its deeply spiritual orientation. This does not take away the indication that here specific social-historical conditions are reflected, but this cannot be the concern of the present paper. Instead, to quote Keller again, ‘This profession of belief in the husband’s dominance over the wife, i.e., the soul, simultaneously constitutes evidence of divine omnipotence over humanity’.21 Ultimately, however, I would question Keller’s conclusion since it reads this literary testimony indeed too literally: ‘Thus the struggle for ascetic liberation from earthliness is fought out in earthly categories: gender, in all its historical and social mutability’.22 The issue, by contrast, seems to be the mystic’s struggle to overcome the constraints of the human body by means of pain. Moreo- ver, Christ as lover and bridegroom represents such an overpowering force that the mystic has no other choice but to submit and to accept the enormous suffering and violence as the payment for the revelatory experience.

IV. MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG AND MARGUERITE PORÈTE

Let us now test this observation in light of the accounts by the two famous beguines, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porète (also: Margaret Porette), both of whom have been repeatedly compared already as major voices within the mystical discourse, both actually reflecting fairly similar ideas and drawing on similar imagery focusing on the erotic as the basis for the merging of the desiring soul and the Godhead.23 As recent research has demonstrated, both women appear to have had a direct influence on Meister Eckhart’s think- ing and writing, and all three worked specifically at undermining traditional concepts of gender and subjectivity.24 Mechthild was born around 1208 near Magdeburg and died sometime between 1282 and 1297 in the Cistercian convent of Helfta near Eisleben (which she had joined ca. 1270). Under the guidance of her confessor Heinrich of Halle she began writing down her visions

20 Keller, My secret is mine, 197. 21 Ibid., 207. 22 Ibid., 227. 23 See the contributions to Bernard McGinn (Ed.), Meister Eckhart and the beguine mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, New York: Contin- uum, 1994. 24 Amy Hollywood, The soul as virgin wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, Notre Dame-London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995 (Studies in Spirituality and Theology 1).

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ca. 1250, which garnered her much admiration and great respect among her contemporaries, and her text enjoyed great popularity far into the late Middle Ages and even beyond (at least up to the seventeenth century).25 Marguerite Porète originated from Valenciennes and might have been born around 1260 or 1270. She was condemned for her heretical views expressed in her Mirouer des Simples Ames by the Bishop of Cambrai already before 1306, but she was not daunted by him and resisted all efforts to subjugate and mute her. In 1307 she was put on trial once again and found to be recalcitrant and hence to be a heretic, which led to her execution by being burnt at the stake on June 1, 1310 in Paris. Despite all attempts to subjugate Marguerite’s writing, the Mirouer enjoyed tremendous popularity, irrespective of the sharp attacks by the Church authorities against it, and amazingly it survived at least until the early seventeenth century in a myriad of copies and translations, and from then on has experienced its reception until the present.26 Both mystical accounts are remarkably characterized by a plethora of genres, themes, motifs, styles, strategies, and images. My analysis can thus bring to light only one of many different aspects determining the unique features of their mystical visions.

V. MECHTHILD’S APPROACH

As Mechthild emphasizes in her The Flowing Light of the Godhead, the mystical experience took place by means of a divine vision which was, however, ham- pered by many difficulties and hardship, and quickly proved to be a severe challenge for the visionary because of the pain involved: ‘God guides his chosen children along strange paths. This is a strange path and a noble path and a holy path that God himself trod: that a human being, though free of sin and guilt, suffer pain. Upon this path the soul that aches for God is joyful, for by nature she is joyful to her Lord, who suffered much pain because of his good deeds’.27

25 Sara S. Poor, Mechthild of Magdeburg and her book: Gender and the making of textual author- ity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004 (The Middle Ages Series). 26 For helpful and concise biographical entries on both women, see Peter Dinzelbacher (Ed.), Wörterbuch der Mystik, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1989 (Kröners Taschenausgabe 456). 27 Mechthild of Magdeburg, The flowing light of the Godhead, transl. & introd. by Frank Tobin, New York-Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1998 (The Classics of Western Spirituality), 52. For the original, in a historical-critical edition, see Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fließende Licht der Gottheit. Nach der Einsiedler Handschrift in kritischem Vergleich mit gesamten Überliefe- rung, ed. Hans Neumann. Vol. I: Text, prepared by Gisela Vollmann-Profe, Munich: Arte- mis, 1990 (Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen 106). Since my analysis does not address philological issues, the English translation will be sufficient here. Page numbers in the text refer to this translation.

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Mechthild experiences a deep sense of love, but this is intimately connected with pain and suffering, particularly because of her sensation in imitating Christ’s Passion: ‘Our dear Lord, the heavenly Father, delivered up his most beloved Son to be tormented by the heathens and martyred by the Jews despite his innocence’ (52). However, the mystic’s soul is granted freedom of pain when it has entered the path toward the Godhead: ‘On this path the soul is free and lives without inner suffering, for she wants nothing but what her Lord wants, who arranges everything for the best’ (53). Not surprisingly, in the following sections, changing in their narrative structure all the time, love gains absolute preponderance and takes the mystic ever closer to the Godhead, the ultimate goal of every soul. The reward for the mystic’s enormous efforts to be lifted out of herself consists of love and pain: ‘You are my lamb in your suffering: / You are my turtle- dove in your sighing; / You are my bride in your waiting’ (55). Even on the metaphorical level we encounter images of pain, though this is also embraced by love in a dialectic fashion, such as when she addresses the Lord by way of referring to a precious stone which represents her ‘heart’s delight’ (57). Here we are confronted with a lyrical composition, antithetically formulating the inner tension of pain and love: Lord, it is called my heart’s delight, Which I have taken back from the world, Retained for myself, And denied to all creatures. But now I can carry it no further. Lord, where shall I put it? (57) Delight thus proves to be intimately tied to pain, and one defines the other, a most elemental feature of mystical visionary experience. Mechthild never tires of underscoring the extent to which the encounter with the Godhead constitutes a profound realization of love, which she coins many times in rather traditional images of courtly love.28 The poem ‘The Sevenfold Path of Love, the Three Garments of the Bride, and the Dance’ (58) impressively confirms this observation and deepens it through the use of further images borrowed from traditional religious teachings, without ignoring, once again, the ever present dimension of pain: ‘When you have passed beyond the need of sorrow / and beyond the pain of confession / and beyond the travail of penance / and beyond the love of the world…’ (58).

28 Albrecht Classen, ‘Worldly love – spiritual love: The dialectics of courtly love in the Middle Ages’, in: Studies in Spirituality 11 (2001), 166-186.

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Mechthild enjoyed creating lists of praises, kinds of love, kinds of perfection, and so also of bitterness, low spirits, sickness, terror, sensitivity, etc. (79). As she clearly recognized, pain and suffering are intimately connected with human existence: ‘Bitterness of heart comes from humanity. / Low spirits of the body come from the flesh alone’ (79). Moreover, as she continues, ‘Terror in the face of punishment comes from guilt. / Sickness of the body comes from nature. / Distress of loneliness comes from fickleness’ (79). However, because of having been graced by the Godhead’s love, she maintains her confidence that all this pain will serve only as a catalyst to liberate her from the prison of her human body since the Godhead is actually wooing her own soul (80-82). And sure enough, at the end we witness the wedding between soul and the divine bridegroom, which then overcomes all previous pain (84). Nevertheless, as we can unmistakably perceive, without that pain and the experience of physical viola- tions she would not have been able to grasp the spiritual love in her revelation. In a later conversation with the apostles, Mechthild also addresses the negative side of the vision, identifying it, however, as a necessary catalyst for herself: ‘Ah, dear Jesus, reward all those lovingly who have here poured out bitterness for me to drink, for they have made me rich in divine favors. I received a chal- ice filled with gall that was so powerful that it utterly permeated my body and soul’ (90). Considering the enormous interest in the body as the carrier of religious meaning, which gained noteworthy new emphasis since the end of the thirteenth century, this focus on pain which affects the body above all in mystical discourse does not really come as a surprise.29 Most noteworthily, the mystics, such as Mechthild, certainly embarked on a unique strategy to find ways to experience the Godhead in a most radical, shocking way, combining love with violence as some of the most dialectic forces in life, which thus provided an important springboard for the exploration of God’s love poured out on the visionary in the revelatory experience. Significantly, in The Flowing Light of the Godhead, once pain and violence had been integrated into the erotic vision, peace and absolute power inspired the mystic, who suddenly found herself strong enough to contain, if not to push away all external threats. As the Godhead is telling her assuringly: ‘“…Lions shall fear you. Bears shall accept your dominion over them. Wolves shall flee you. The lamb shall be your companion”’ (90). The consequences of this approach prove to be quite interesting because the author then has her soul reflect on the impact of violence on the individual when it is ingrained in him or her. Mechthild’s soul comments: ‘“He who has

29 Caroline Walker Bynum, The resurrection of the body in western Christianity, 200-1336, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 14-17, 117-225.

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no peace himself, cannot bestow peace on me”’ (91). And: ‘“He who is himself sick cannot heal anyone”’ (90). By contrast, returning to the significance of violence and pain for the loving soul, we learn that only those who have suffered would be entitled to experience the profound sense of love which only a true mystic would know: ‘Many people have fallen because their soul remained unwounded’ (92). The body itself constitutes a barrier for the soul which cannot gaze clearly enough toward the Godhead, which subsequently requires the encounter of violence to crush down that blinding wall: ‘If the body can still flap its wings, the soul can never reach those heights that are attainable for human beings. In this bound love the wounded soul becomes rich and her external senses very poor because the more riches God finds in her, the deeper she humbly lowers herself because of the true nobility of her love’ (92). Never- theless, at the very bottom of the spiritual experience, we witness, once again, references to the complex of violence and pain because divine love resorts to binding and fetters the soul to the Godhead: ‘for the soul is bound, she has to love. May God thus bind us all’ (92). In her ‘Lament of the Loving Soul’, Mechthild has the soul say:

…I cannot be without you. No matter how far we are apart, We can still never be really separated. No matter how softly I caress you, I inflict immense pain on your poor body. If I were to surrender myself to you continuously, as you desire, I would lose my delightful dwelling place on earth within you, For a thousand bodies cannot fully satisfy the longings of a soul in love. And so, the higher the love, the holier the martyr. (94)

The more the mystic experiences pain and undergoes violent treatment by the Godhead, the more she feels being liberated from the shackles of her physical being and uplifted to the spiritual bridegroom – again a significant parallel to Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich, if not even to Gottfried von Strass- burg’s Tristan (ca. 1210) with its famous Cave of Love scene, although there we do not observe specific mystical features. Bridal imagery gains its full impact in Mechthild’s text because it is so closely associated with the experience of pain, as we hear later in Book III: ‘Let me be pulled through the coals of love and be struck with the firebrands of humiliation, so that might very often enter the blessed wine cellar. This I gladly choose because regarding love I cannot lose’ (109). Even when Mechthild describes her basic mystical transformation, we encounter terms of violence, all suddenly charged positively: ‘What is more, just beholding you I lose all awareness of suffering. Thus, Lord, have you taken me from myself and have stealthily entered into me’ (112). One of the major

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reasons why the mystic almost delighted in dealing with violence and in describ- ing herself as a victim consists of the new awareness that the vision itself represented a gift: ‘“Lord, you said there is no gift on earth that does not have a scourge connected with it…”’ (124). The grace, in other words, shown by the Godhead comes with a hefty price, and love cannot be gained by the mystic unless she accepts also the subsequent pain. We could also include in our examination images of violence associated with Hell (130), but the true emphasis in Mechthild’s entire mystical account rests on the intimate association of violence and love, the creation by itself not being possible without the other in a true dialectical fashion. Undoubtedly, as previous scholarship has convincingly demonstrated, we have always to keep in mind that Mechthild, like most other Christian mystics, heavily drew on the imagery provided by the Bible, where the drastic experience of God’s love was also one of the critical themes.30 But the Middle High German writer emphasized this pairing of love with pain perhaps further than ever before and gained thereby a new position to identify the true nature of the mystical experience, which oth- erwise would have remained incomprehensible.31

VI. MARGUERITE PORÈTE’S APPROACH

Let us next consider how Margaret Porète, or Porette, dealt with that issue in her Mirouer des Simples Ames, ‘the oldest surviving mystical work written in French, and one of few book-length manuscripts authored by women in French before 1300’.32 Although her treatise was already condemned long before her execution in 1310, it has survived in fifteen late-medieval manuscripts, fourteen of which with translations into Latin, Italian, or English, and one in French

30 See the commentary by Gisela Vollmann-Profe in: Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, ed. eadem, Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2003 (Bibliothek des Mittelalters 19), 743. 31 Grace M. Jantzen, Power, gender and Christian mysticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion), 278-290. 32 Marguerite Porète, The mirror of simple souls, transl. & introd. by Edmund College, J.C. Marler & Judith Grant, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999 (Notre Dame Texts in Medieval Culture 6). The page numbers in the text refer to this translation. Citation by Suzanne Kocher, ‘[Review of The Mirror of Simple Souls]’, in: The Medieval Review 00.09.05 (online). See also Jean Orcibal, ‘Le Miroir des simples âme et la “secte” du Libre Esprit’, in: Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 176 (1969), 35-60: here 35. For a good text edition of Marguerite’s treatise, see Le Mirouer des simples âmes / Speculum simplicium anima- rum, ed. Romana Guarnieri & Paul Verdeyen Turnhout: Brepols, 1986 (Corpus Christiano- rum Continuatio Medievalis 69).

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from after 1450, not to forget very late-medieval and early-modern copies of her text created by the Carthusians.33 Again, for the purpose of our investigation I can only touch upon some small aspects in this long text, which certainly would deserve a book-length analysis.34 Much more so than Mechthild, Marguerite Porète utilized the mode of dialogue between Reason and Love for her analysis of the mystical experience, even though she does not truly relate visions. Nevertheless, we can clearly observe remarkable parallels to the Flowing Light of the Godhead insofar as Love is struggling very hard to come to terms with the phenomena of loss, suffering, pain, and, of course, at the end the very spiritual love all mystics desire so much. Marguerite knows only too well of the meaning of violence to the loving soul, yet she emphasizes that there would be nothing to fear because of the infinite love of the Godhead for the mystic: ‘Indeed, there is nothing which she could or should fear or be frightened of, since even if she is in the world, it was possible that the world, the flesh and the devil, the four elements, the birds of the air and the wild beasts might despie and torment her or tear her to shreds, still she can lose nothing if God remains with her’ (15). As much as Marguerite proves to be aware of the endless pain which an individual could suffer in physical, or bodily, terms, her experience of divine love creates a safe haven for it all, or a spiritual refuge, because the body has fallen away and has given room to the pure soul that cannot be affected by any kind of physical violence. Nevertheless, as Love complains to Reason: ‘This Soul, says Love, is no longer able to speak of God, for she has been brought to nothing in all her external longings and inward feelings and all affections of the spirit (…) for the will which prompted longing in her is dead’ (18). But there lurk feelings of fear, even though she insists: ‘what and how would such a Soul fear? Indeed, there is nothing which she could or should fear or be frighted of’ (15). The divine love that inspires and instills Marguerite has decimated and actually eliminated the soul and brought much suffering with it, as an expression of love, which in itself proves to be most painful in its absolute and ethereal nature: ‘If anyone were to ask them what is the greatest torment which any creature can suffer, they would say that it is to dwell in Love, and yet to be subject to the Virtues, for one must yield everything they ask to the Virtues, at whatever cost to Nature’ (19). However, suffering in its traditional meaning has no longer any bearing on the mystic because divine love inspires her and makes all negatives and positives

33 Kent Emery Jr., ‘Foreword’, in: Porète, The mirror of simple souls, xxii-xxv. 34 See now the fine study by Suzanne Kocher, Allegories of love in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls, Turnhout: Brepols, 2008 (Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 17). She focuses, however, primarily on the literary strategies pursued by the mystical author.

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similar in their impact on the soul: ‘these Souls who are guided by Perfect Love value shame as highly as honor, and honor as dearly as shame, poverty as highly as riches, and riches as dearly as poverty, suffering at the hands of God and his creatures as highly as consolation from God and his creatures’ (30-31). In other words, this discourse on violence committed to the Soul begins to foreshadow the basic idea of negative theology, of which Meister Eckhart will talk about later much more in greater depth and in considerably more theological, speculative, terms. Similarly, yet perhaps in a somewhat more abstract fashion, the mystic emphasizes the deep, certainly epistemological meaning of suffering for the visionary experience: ‘these Souls who are guided by Perfect Love value shame as highly as honor, and honor as dearly as shame, poverty as highly as riches, and riches as dearly as poverty, suffering at the hands of God and his creatures as highly as consolation from God and his creatures, being loved as highly as being hated, being hated as dearly as being loved, being in Hell as highly as being in Paradise’ (30-31). Suffering and pain, in other words, are supposed to be equally valuable as love, forming essential aspects of the complete experience as a mystic. More specifically, the violence described here, which also affects other objects and beings assumes a metaphysical character, reflecting the complete loss of individuality and absolute absence of the individual will, since the soul transcends into being an intimate element of the Godhead itself. To deepen her thought, Marguerite emphasizes: ‘this Soul is not her own, and so she can feel no disquiet; for her thought is at rest in a place of peace, that is in the Trin- ity’ (35), which embraces violence and peace at the same time. The full understanding of this almost oxymoronic approach is established only somewhat later when the author turns to the corporeal senses that the divine love destroys: ‘the real kernel of divine Love, which in all men, truly, once tasted, robs the Soul forever of her senses without her knowing it’ (38). Of course, this is not pain or violence as we would usually identify it or as the countless Christian martyrs had reported about, but it addresses the profound tensions and suffering experienced by the physical being when the spiritual entity is lifted out of the material realm, hence also out of the realm of will and longing (39). This dialectical approach to spiritual joy and physical pain finds its further confirmation in the discussion between the Soul and Love when the former asserts: ‘And thus if I am disconsolate for what I lack, nonetheless I am con- soled again because he lacks nothing. For in him is the abundance of all good things, without any lack; and that is the sum of my peace and my thoughts’ true response, for I do not love except for his sake’ (50). Whereas Mechthild addresses the central issue by focusing on the transcendence of the body by way of physical suffering and pain, Marguerite turns to more metaphysical

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suffering, such as loss of divine love, experience of nothingness, loneliness, and the absence of the Godhead. Alternatively, the French mystic emphasizes how much the latter has taken control of her by lifting up her soul: ‘And moreover I would not be able to do this, for he has so taken hold of me with himself that I can wish for nothing without him’ (52). Most painfully, Marguerite underscores that she herself, like all other creatures, originates from nothingness: ‘still you must not forget your nothingness, which in truth is all that you are, when he first created you’ (54), a concept which Meister Eckhart was later to adopt for his own teachings, and a general teaching that greatly appealed to future readers, some of whom, particularly among the Church authorities, expressed deep infuriation and fear of its impact on the ordinary lay Christians of their time.35 However, Marguerite did not linger on such abstract notions, and instead she regularly returns to the previous issue, the conflict between body and soul, predicated on pain and suffering as the basic ingredients of love: ‘…while I remain in my desert, that is, in this wretched body, for endless ages; and still, for all the mercy that is in you, I cannot recover the time past which I have lost, for sweet Love, your justice must be observed’ (57-58). Moreover, even Mar- guerite reflected a tremendous degree of pain in this situation which allowed her to illustrate what this love experience meant for her, or rather her Soul: ‘I who am an abyss of utter poverty! And nonetheless, it is into this abyss of poverty that you are willing to put, if I do not offer any resistance, the gift of that grace which you have described above’ (58). The more the mystic tries to cir- cumscribe the true nature of her vision, the more she brings together images both of love and pain in order to overcome the apophatic dilemma created by these revelations. Considering the outrageous quality of her discourse, para- doxical in many regards, it does not seem surprising that the male authorities at her time were indeed deeply incensed and tried very hard to suppress this some- how dangerous voice.36 Since Marguerite pursues increasingly the theme of nothingness and absence of any will as the precondition for the experience of the unio mystica, which again became the basis for, or at least a significant contribution to Meister Eckhart’s own theology, I break off our discussion concerning her treatment of pain and suffering as the essential complementary aspects of love. Nevertheless, plunging into the absolute nothingness, soon enough being the key notion

35 Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik. Vol. 2: Frauenmystik und Franziskanische Mystik der Frühzeit, Munich: Beck, 1993, 345-346. 36 For a broader approach to this issue in female mysticism, see Rosalynn Voaden, God’s words, women’s voices: The discernment of spirits in the writing of late-medieval women visionaries, Woodbridge-Suffolk-Rochester, NY: Boydell Press-York Medieval Press, 1999, 66-71.

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pursued by Marguerite, still carries with it a profound sense of pain, as her Soul reflects: ‘the meaning of what has now been said has made me nothing, and the nothingness of this alone has placed me in an abyss, below what is immeas- urably less than nothing. And the knowledge of my nothingness, says this Soul, has given me everything and the nothingness of this everything, says this soul, has deprived me of orison and prayer, and I do not pray at all’ (70). Neverthe- less, as the author clearly outlines, the outcome of her entire dialectical discourse proves to be supreme peace, the tranquility of all human desires and the merging with the Godhead as the highest grace bestowed upon the soul (73). Remarkably, Marguerite also distinguishes herself from those people who try to achieve spiritual transcendence by way of bodily martyrdom and suffering, ‘performing works of charity’ (74). However, these very people get lost in their intensive efforts and confuse their actual work with the true need of the soul to distance itself entirely from the material existence. After all, the true mystic would go far beyond all desires and all wishes in order to gain a status of nothingness: ‘Wishing for Nothing, in which the free dwell and from which they never move; for he who is free in his true state of mind could not ask or wish for or propose anything’ (77).

VII. CONCLUSION

So, to conclude, we can observe that pain, violence, and love were, indeed, fundamental concepts for the medieval mystics, but even they differed from each other considerably in their examination of what all these terms meant. By focusing on violence at large, however, we have suddenly in our hands one of the important puzzle pieces that allows us to understand a crucial element of the mystical discourse on a more global level. Marguerite pursued a most amaz- ing process of digesting a multiplicity of images pertaining to pain and violence, then also to love, and increased this dialectical discourse ever more to reach, ultimately, a new concept of divine love where absolute freedom for the soul ruled supreme: ‘This Soul, says Love, is free, and yet more free, and yet very free, and yet supremely free, in root and stems and every branch, and in every fruit of her branches’ (109). Both mystical writers emphasized spiritual love to an extreme measure, and yet both explained it, in a way, by dint of resorting to the experience of pain and suffering, that is, violence, as the dialectical contrast constitutive, indeed, of that very love lifting them up to the Godhead. Little wonder that both Mech- thild and Marguerite enjoyed so much popularity and also had to face considerable criticism by the Church, which was obviously fearful of their radical posi- tions that successfully embraced the totally opposed elements of love and

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violence. By accepting suffering and violence as integral features of the mystical discourse, both female writers powerfully protected themselves against any external threats in physical terms because they had integrated pain already so much in their visionary accounts that even the threat of being burned at the stake, as in the case of Marguerite or Jeanne d’Arc, could not have any impact on them. Curiously, however, a number of thirteenth-century theologians pursued very similar approaches to pain and identified it in their speculative concepts as an essential springboard for divine epistemology.37 Considering how much the female mystics might have been ahead of them in their practical exploration of pain as the basis for spiritual love, we could well imagine that the male academic scholars regarded their female ‘competitors’ not only with dis- dain, but probably also as a disturbing nuisance, if not dangerous challenge.

37 Mowbray, Pain and suffering in medieval theology, 25-42.

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