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The Poetics of the Image in Late Medieval Mysticism

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The Poetics of the Image in Late Medieval Mysticism Chapter 6 The Poetics of the Image in Late Medieval Mysticism Niklaus Largier Incarnation, imagination, and image are key words in late medieval German Dominican theology and mysticism.1 In the writings of the so-called German mystics Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and Heinrich Seuse, the birth of God is the theological notion and concept that brings all three terms into focus. More precisely, it is the birth of God in the soul that is the focus of all creation, of all coming forth as an image, and of the very nature of God’s creativity. Thus, Eckhart writes: ‘God’s chief aim is giving birth. He is never content till He begets His Son in us. And the soul, too, is in no way content until the Son of God is born in her.’ He explains further: This [the birth] cannot be received by creatures in which God’s image is not found, for the soul’s image appertains especially to this eternal birth, which happens truly and especially in the soul, being begotten of the Father in the soul’s ground and innermost recesses, into which no image ever shone or power of the soul was able to look. And, going on with his explanation, Eckhart expresses an overarching ten- sion between image and iconoclasm, imagination (bilde, bildunge) and dis- imagination (entbilden): Therefore you have to be and dwell in the essence and in the ground, and there will God touch you with His simple essence without the interven- tion of any image. No image represents and signifies itself: it always aims and points to that of which it is the image [. .]. And therefore there must be silence and a stillness, and the Father must speak in that, and give birth to his Son, and perform his works free from all images.2 1 For an overview see McGinn B., The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York: 2005). 2 Meister Eckhart, German Sermons and Treatises, ed. M.O’C. Walshe, 3 vols. (London and Dulverton: 1979–1985), II 157–162. German text of this sermon: Meister Eckhart, Werke, ed. N. Largier, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: 1993), I 132–141. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/97890043005�4_008 174 Largier As we can see from these quotes and from many other passages in Eckhart’s works, his understanding of the incarnation is intimately linked to both, the coming forth of and as an image,3 the very creation of all things, and the over- coming of the fallen state of the creation and of man in a form of apophatic dis-imagination (entbilden). According to Eckhart, only the soul that frees itself from all determination through images is open to the birth of God in its very ground. It is in this convergence of a freedom from images and the incarnation that mankind in its saved state moves beyond all representational and signify- ing function of images back into an originary immanence of divine creativ- ity—where both man and creation come forth again as free images. I Building on a range of theological traditions and on the strong influence of the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, this reformulation of the concept of incarnation is not really surprising. It is, in its core, a reinterpretation of the idea that Mary’s soul was ready to give birth to God insofar as she was like an empty, ‘immaculate mirror’ (speculum sine macula, Wisdom 7:26). In this pure and immaculate state Mary is seen as the exemplary figure who was able to receive the divine in her flesh and mirror it back into God and into the world. The figure of Mary became thus one of the paradigms for the convergence of incarnation theology and speculative mysticism.4 On this basis Meister Eckhart puts a strong emphasis on the freedom from representational image and the rebirth as a free image, that is: on the fact that the incarnation—as the birth of God in the soul—is at the same time the apophatic liberation from all ‘alien’ images,5 the creation of mankind and the world in God’s image, and the restoration of the very forthcoming of creation as a ‘free’ image beyond all representation in the pure immanence of the birth of Christ.6 It must be emphasized here, as well, that Eckhart and his followers under- stand the incarnation not primarily as a historical event and as an eschato- logical promise but as something that we could describe as the very structure of the soul in relation to itself, the world, and God. Thus, in their theory of 3 Haas A.M., Sermo mysticus (Freiburg: 1979) 209–237. 4 See Largier N., “Spiegelungen: Fragmente einer Geschichte der Spekulation”, Zeitschrift für Germanistik. New series 3 (1999) 616–636. 5 Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, ed. O. Davies (London: 1994) 158. 6 For Eckhart’s notion of immanence see Dubilet A., Kenosis and Immanence: Self-Emptying in Eckhart, Hegel and Bataille (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2014)..
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