Mysticism And/As Love Theory 9789042944350, 9789042944367, 9042944358

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STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY Supplement 36

Titus Brandsma Institute

MYSTICISM AND/AS LOVE THEORY Edited by Marc De Kesel & Ad Poirters

PEETERS

MYSTICISM AND/AS LOVE THEORY

STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY SUPPLEMENTS Edited by Inigo Bocken – Marc De Kesel – Thomas Quartier Titus Brandsma Institute – Nijmegen – The Netherlands

TITUS BRANDSMA INSTITUTE STUDIES IN SPIRITUALITY Supplement 36

MYSTICISM AND/AS LOVE THEORY Edited by Marc De Kesel & Ad Poirters

PEETERS

LEUVEN - PARIS - BRISTOL, CT 2021

© 2021, Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven ISBN 978-90-429-4435-0 eISBN 978-90-429-4436-7 D/2021/0602/56 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction1 Marc De Kesel & Ad Poirters Mysticism, Theory & Beyond: On Mystical Love Theory in General and on Some Passages in Jean de Saint-Samson Marc De Kesel The ‘Not’ of Minne in the Seven Ways of Minne by Beatrice of Nazareth  Jos Huls

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Two Distinct Voices during the Age of Love: Hadewijch and Lutgard of Tongeren61 Sander Vloebergs Words of Fire: Mystical Love in Rumi and Mahadeviyakka81 Michel Dijkstra The Liturgical Embedding of Mystical Love in the Sixteenth-Century Arnhem Mystical Sermons91 Ineke Cornet The Application of Medieval ‘Love Theories’ in the Early Modern ­Spirituality of Maria Petyt Esther van de Vate

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Novalis: Poetry – Love Philosophy – Mysticism Janneke van der Leest121 Kierkegaard’s Works of Love as Mystical Literature with Psychological Consequences137 Edward van ’t Slot Simone Weil’s Mysticism as Corporeal Love Thomas Sojer Love between Two Poems: The Imagination, Love and Literature in Simone Weil Lieven De Maeyer

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Mysticism, Saintliness and Sexuality in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet177 Ruud Welten Michel Foucault on the Mystic’s Body of Pleasures and Desires Herman Westerink

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Marc De Kesel & Ad Poirters INTRODUCTION

Is mysticism not a matter of experience, and exclusively of experience, since all attempts to grasp it theoretically are known to be doomed to fail? Is this not exactly what mystics say themselves? And is love not too subtle a phenomenon to be captured in theoretical schemes and axioms? How, then, could mysticism be considered a ‘love theory’, as the title of this volume obviously does? And yet, this is precisely what it says: mysticism is not as non-theoretical as is commonly thought. Even if it is true that love is, first of all, a matter of experience, the different kinds of mysticism each have their specific theory about it. Mysticism is about love. Christian mysticism certainly is. The mystic follows an inner path to get in touch with God. This path runs through the intimacy of his or her own soul. And the soul’s activity is not theoretical thinking but desiring. Mystics long for God. They love Him. But God is not an easy lover. He is somewhat difficult, to put it mildly. It is far from straightforward to get in touch with Him, let alone to ‘touch’ Him, even in a spiritual way. However, this does not temper the mystic’s love at all. On the contrary, it only intensifies it. God’s physical – and even mental – absence makes the mystic’s love burn all the fiercer. This burning love, however, is far from thoughtless. The many writings in our mystical tradition testify to the authors’ extensive and diversified reflection on their intense mystical love lives. And this reflection always has its theory – an often extremely elaborate, subtle theory, and just as often one that is in discussion with other, different theories. How could it be otherwise? Love is a basic term in the Christian narrative and a central concept in its doctrine. As we can read in the earliest Christian texts, love – agape, as the original Greek has it – stands for the Messianic state in which the Christian finds himself. Jesus’s resurrection, so Christian ‘theory’ explains, has delivered us from sin, mortality and finitude in general. Christ has overcome death, at least ‘in principle’: He rose from the dead, but soon He returned to the Father, and only upon his return at the end of time will He fully complete his Messianic mission for all people and put an end to the finite human condition in order to turn it into that of Eternal Life.

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Meanwhile, Christians live ‘in love’. As the agape-communities mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles show, Christians practised a way of life that testified of the perfect, risen life to come, a life without any need, possession or greed, i.e., a life that fulfilled the Messianic promise of the ‘Kingdom of God’. In later Christian centuries, too, ‘living in love’ continued to mean living a life that testified to this Kingdom. However, while they did indeed testify to a perfect world beyond sin and finitude, it was clear that Christians, in fact, were not yet living in it. The Kingdom still had to come, and their testimony about it went hand in hand with an intense desire for it. The perfect life they preached was the object of a still unfulfilled longing. Here, another kind of love came in – the one for which the Greek word eros was used. Despite its thoroughly different theoretical background, the paradigm of eros would turn out to be as important for Christianity as that of agape. Contrary to agape, which implies a state of fulfilled desire, eros means unfulfilled and even unfulfillable desire. Eros – personified in an irresponsible, unconscionable blind little boy – was the term for erotic love, which, in antiquity, had a theoretical background as well. Not a religious or scientific, but a literary one. There were massive numbers of writings on eros, of which Ovid’s Ars amatoria (The Art of Love) is only the best known. And the Ars amatoria was not unknown to medieval mystics either. Not only was it one of the most frequently copied books of pagan antiquity in the Middle Ages,1 its influence can also be traced in some of the basic texts of medieval mysticism. This is also true, for instance, for the works of the early twelfth-century monk William of Saint Thierry who, together with Bernard of Clairvaux, introduced ‘bridal mysticism’ into Christian devotional culture. In the first line of his famous De natura et dignitate amoris (On the Nature and Dignity of Love, ca 1120) he promotes the ‘art of love’ as the ‘art of arts’. God has ‘implanted’ love in our human nature, he explains. It is a ‘power of the soul, leading her by a kind of natural gravity to her place or destination’, which is with God, her creator. However, William continues, because of Adam’s fall, this ‘power’ has been perverted by all kinds of ‘adulterous affections’, which is why it needs to be educated and purified.2 It is by way of introduction to his theory of love’s purification that the author then introduces Ovid, though as a false ‘teacher in the art of loving’: For foul, fleshly love once had teachers of its foulness: persons so skilful and effective in having been corrupted and corrupting others that that teacher in the art of loving was forced by the lovers and companions of foulness themselves to recant M.A.F. Sabot, ‘Ovid’s Presence in the Twelfth Century: Latin Elegiac Poetry, Provinçal Lyric’, in: William S. Anderson (Ed.), Ovid: The Classical Heritage, New York: Routledge, 2014, 61-83: 64. 2 William of St Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, transl. Thomas X. Davis, introd. David N. Bell, Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981, 47. 1



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what he had praised rather intemperately. And he who had written passionately about the fire of fleshly love, was likewise forced to write about the remedy of love.3

So wrong was Ovid, William claims, that even his followers and companions forced the author of the Ars amatoria to revoke his theses and write the Remedia amoris (The Remedies for Love).4 William is not correct in the way in which he presents the Roman poet, of course, but it is at least clear that he treats Ovid as a theoretician who, like any other theologian, has to face the possibility of being forced to revise his theses. Ovid’s poetry on love is ‘theory’ – a false theory that had to be revoked, even in his pagan times. And William’s treatise is there to redo this revocation in a better, i.e., Christian way. So, The Nature and Dignity of Love presents itself as a correction of Ovid’s incorrect theory. Against Ovid’s perverted idea of love, but in fact adhering to the same erotic paradigm, William proposes a ‘naturally ordered’ love. Love is a matter of ‘nature’, he writes, more precisely, of ‘the order due to nature’. The soul is ‘led upwards by its own natural gravity, by its own love to the God who created it’.5 This is not the place to present a reading of William’s De natura et dignitate amoris. Only a few details suffice, however, to illustrate the profoundly theoretical nature of William’s reflections on love, including mystical love. As has just been noted, to him, love is a matter of ‘nature’, ‘nature’ created by God and having its ‘destination’ in God. This is why all that has been created, is oriented ‘upwards’. This is nature’s ‘order’, its ‘gravity’. Those who do not respect that, reverse the ‘order’, change direction and follow the path of sin. A few lines further on, ­William presents a view on the human body that is based on this insight and, by so doing, provides his love theory with a bodily foundation. It is not a coincidence, he writes, that the ‘heart’, through which the soul rules the body, has its place in about the middle of it, for it has to orient the parts ‘below’ ‘upwards’ to those above. Here, ‘love’ has to keep and enforce its ‘natural affectus’: Yes, the heart naturally has been placed by the Author of nature in the narrow and central part of the body where it may govern and regulate the fortress of the higher senses and [the commonwealth of] the lower body, the common folk, as it were, the whole territory of thought and action round about. Melting at the fire of fleshly concupiscence into some degenerate softness, [the heart] flows into the viscera and into the core of these organs. This is to say, it relishes only the things William of St Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 49. Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, English transl. J.H. Mozley, rev. ed. J.P. Goold, Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard University Press, 1979 (Loeb Classical Library), 11-175; 177-233. 5 William of St Thierry, The Nature and Dignity of Love, 49-50. 3 4

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which are visceral. And from the visceral part, [the heart] sinks even into lower parts; it confuses everything, causes everything to degenerate, adulterates everything and perverts the natural affectus of love.6

Keeping the ‘affectus of love’ ‘natural’, keeping it ordered by truth and oriented to its divine destination: this is the basic mission of a truly Christian life. And William’s treatise presents an elaborate love theory that provides a method to accomplish this mission. This theory, of course, includes all important elements of Christian doctrine. But its underlying theoretical scheme is Platonic. Eros, according to Plato, is rooted in our bodily nature, and that corporeal nature harbours a kernel of incorporeal truth that can be discovered according to whether or not our eros purifies itself. To reach the truth for which it longs, the soul must purify itself, i.e., its desire, its love. William’s treatise on love explains in detail how such a purification of human desire would work and how, if done well, it would be able to end in the ‘beatific vision’ of an unio mystica.7 Here, William sets the tone for a long tradition of mystical love treatises. When, for instance, the twentieth-century philosopher Simone Weil organizes her mystical theory around the distinction between ‘gravity’ and ‘grace’, just like William of Saint Thierry, she retakes the Platonic distinction between unpurified and purified desire, between a desire that drives away from God and one that drives towards Him.8 Love, and certainly mystical love, has never been without theory. The essays collected in this volume were presented at an international conference organized by the Titus Brandsma Institute at Radboud University in Nijmegen (the Netherlands) on 28-29 November 2019. The meeting was entitled Mysticism and/as Love Theory, and this has also become the title of the present volume of proceedings. With one exception to be mentioned below, each of the following articles focuses on an important work, or body of work, in the Christian mystical tradition, in order to examine the specific theoretical schemes and the background behind it. At the same time, the question is also dealt with how the theory and the experience of love relate to one another in these texts. The first article, by Marc De Kesel, serves as a general introduction to the volume, presenting its theme and analysing critically the common-sense idea that puts both love and mysticism intrinsically beyond theory. In fact, the author argues, the ‘beyond’ of theory has always been its very centre. If there is Ibid., 50. Ibid., 107. 8 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, introd. & postscript Gustave Thibon, transl. Emma Crawford & Mario van der Ruhr, London/ New York: Routledge, 2002. 6 7



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a ‘real’ beyond at play in mystical love, it shows itself not so much in the unio mystica, but in what disturbs and hinders this union. To illustrate this thesis, De Kesel reads passages from the Épithalame by the early modern Carmelite mystic Jean de Saint-Samson. All of the following articles are ordered more or less chronologically, although loose thematic clusters also emerge. The second and third contributions, on love in thirteenth-century Brabantine mysticism, introduce some of the main themes that run through the entire collection. Jos Huls’s piece on Beatrice of Nazareth’s Seven Ways of Minne addresses what it means for the mystic to love Someone who is all in all, but who simultaneously remains incomprehensible in all things – a Countenance that demands to be sought without compromise but forever eludes our gaze, and can be found only in the experience of its absence. Sander Vloebergs continues the theme of Love’s incomprehensibility in his comparison of the different theories that underlie the respective ways in which Hadewijch and St Lutgard of Tongeren experience their love of God. The saint knows her beloved well and is therefore in complete control of her relationship with Him, daring to demand his attention to her every wish. Hadewijch, on the other hand, concludes that God is so utterly beyond her understanding that to love Him truly, a gift of self is necessary that entails the confident surrender of her will, and even her reason, in imitation of Christ. To provide a counterpoint of sorts to the exponents of Western Christian mysticism that are the topic of most contributions to this volume, Michel Dijkstra then compares two medieval representatives of different traditions from the East: the Sufi poet Rumi and the twelfth-century Hindu poetess Mahadeviyakka. His essay in comparative philosophy highlights the paradoxical nature of the imagery accompanying bridal mysticism in all its manifestations. Taking the reader closer to home again and into the sixteenth century, Ineke Cornet analyses how the Arnhem Mystical Sermons present the liturgy of the Church as a locus mysticus. On the basis of the sermon on the feast of the dedication of a church, she traces how liturgical language and practice are systematically interpreted as vehicles for the theory and experience of mystical love. The next article, about the Carmelite tertiary Maria Petyt, also inquires after the constitutive elements that make up the theories behind mystical writings. Esther van de Vate describes the paradigmatic shifts that have taken place beneath the medieval exterior of Petyt’s bridal mysticism in order to illustrate seventeenthcentury developments in the genre. Next are two articles on figures who are themselves less central to the mystical tradition, but are known to have been profoundly influenced by it: Novalis and Søren Kierkegaard. Janneke van der Leest’s essay on the German Romantic poet argues that his Hymns to the Night reveal a theory of love that – again – has both a Platonic and a sensual strand. The work casts both Christ and Novalis’s

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deceased fiancée, Sophie von Kühn, in the role of mediator between the poet and the true but imperceptible world of harmony and eternal life. The two intermediaries gradually merge, and their mediation, itself expressed in corporeal terms, is one that results in a synthesis between the physical and the spiritual. Edward van ’t Slot’s essay on Kierkegaard makes a case for the nineteenthcentury philosopher as a genuine mystic, and argues for his relevance to our modern psychological understanding of love precisely on this basis. It is his spiritual point of view that is the source of Kierkegaard’s most profound theoretical insights in the soul’s obstacles to surrendering to love. Simone Weil is the subject of the next two articles. Thomas Sojer explains that, to her, to ‘love’ means to imitate the God who loves precisely by emptying Himself, a movement that is visible, for instance, in his becoming ‘body’ (corps) upon the Incarnation. For us humans, emulating this entails renouncing the egotistical ‘self’ (moi) of the ‘flesh’ (chair) and bodily living kenosis as an actual, eternal ‘I’ (je). Lieven De Maeyer explores another expression of God’s kenotic love as understood by Weil: the way in which He reduced Himself upon creation so that the universe could come into existence. Seen in light of this theory of creation, God’s absence from the world is the greatest expression of his love, and as such should also be emulated by mankind. Weil calls the imitation of God’s loving, creative kenosis décréation, which consists of resisting the natural tendency to choose presence over absence, and instead attempting to leave an emptiness for God to fill. The loveless, satanic opposite would be to expand the self – which, she would say, is exactly what the imagination does. De Maeyer seeks to understand the relationship between Weil’s profoundly negative view of the imagination on the one hand, and her understanding of mystical experience on the other. The topic merits elucidation, because in her own life one such experience was evoked precisely by a work of literature, George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’, and she herself described it creatively in the prose poem known as the Prologue. Two articles that explore the ways in which modern thinkers reflect on the theories of love that are present in traditional Christian mysticism round off the collection. Ruud Welten’s contribution focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet (1952). This study on the French author and small-time criminal Jean Genet is analysed for what it reveals about Sartre’s thinking on martyrdom, saintliness, mysticism and sexuality, but in the process the influence is traced of the Spanish mysticism of John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila. Finally, Herman Westerink writes on Michel Foucault’s early thinking on mysticism, specifically his reflections on the relationship between pleasure and desire, and their relevance for his view on mystical love. The French philosopher identifies as the defining characteristic of mysticism the direct and loving communication between God and the soul, which is more in line with the experience and effusion of pleasure in a presence than it is with the expression of desire for what is absent. It is left to



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the reader to continue the conversation by asking the question what Beatrice of Nazareth would have made of this. The editors wish to express their heartfelt gratitude to the Titus Brandsma Institute for providing the means by which the conference whose proceedings are presented here could be organized. Their colleagues are thanked for the stimulating intellectual environment that is just as indispensable for a project like this. Worthy of particular mention is Wendy Litjens, whose tireless assistance during and supervision of the editing process has been of invaluable help.

Marc De Kesel MYSTICISM, THEORY & BEYOND On Mystical Love Theory in General and on Some Passages in Jean de Saint-Samson

‘Mysticism and/as Love Theory’: what can a title like this mean? What kind of point does it intend to make? Characterizing ‘mysticism as [a matter of] love’ makes sense: a lot of mystical traditions put love forward as the main road to reach the mystical goal. But does ‘mysticism as theory’ make sense? Is the mystical not by definition beyond theory? And does this not count for ‘love’ as well? Is love not precisely something non-theoretical par excellence? Obviously, the problematic issue in the title of this volume is ‘theory’. Both mysticism and love are commonly defined as surpassing the limits of theory. This is indeed the common opinion. But is this opinion correct? Are mysticism and love really beyond theory? It is true that they are said and considered to be so. But can this opinion itself be anything other than theoretical? And what is more, does a theory not always include its ‘beyond’, at least in a formal way? Does it, in some way or another, not inevitably have some ideas about its limits and, consequently, about its beyond? Not at the level of its contents, but formally. Formally, the ‘beyond of theory’ is in fact a highly theoretical notion. In what follows, I defend the thesis that, in our Western tradition, love is a theoretical concept, through and through. Likewise, Western Christian mysticism is supported by an elaborated theory too – a theory in which love is far from absent. If, in this mystical theory, there is a ‘beyond’, this is not situated in the mystical climax of an unio mystica, but rather in its opposite, in what disturbs the aimed union. The first part of this article (I) refers to the platonic love theory that has dominated the major part of our history (1). This theory is in itself already a theory of its own beyond – a topic that, centuries after Plato, became the central point in Neo-Platonism (2). The third section elaborates on the specific way in which Christianity, in its relation to the beyond of theory, introduces ‘love’ (3). All of these aspects together articulate the founding ‘grammar’ of Western mysticism (4).

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And where, then, does the mystical experience go ‘beyond’ the limits of theory? The second part (II) explains that this is not so much in the ecstatic moment of a union with the divine, but rather in the moments when it risks relapsing into the facticity of corporeal love (5-11). I.  Mysticism – A Theory of Love 1. Theory of Love The ancient Greek word for love is eros. It is also the name of the eternally young son of Aphrodite, shooting around arrows with his famous bow. Wounded by one of his golden arrows, one inevitably falls in love and this love will be answered; wounded, on the contrary, by one of his leaden arrows, one’s love remains forever unanswered.1 Why? Do not ask a god why. The reasons why a god does what he does are his. In the eyes of mortal human beings, it is all blind fate. For the ancient Greeks, this was the divine nature of love. Love simply occurs to someone, and the reason for this escapes him or her entirely. Is love absolute? Yes, it is, but in a way similar to the absoluteness of death. ‘Love is strong as death’.2 Is there truth in love? For the ancient Greeks, this would have been a strange, even nonsensical question. Just like the gods and the entire domain of the divine, love does not obey the laws of truth. Just like any other god, love too does not heed the criterion false/true. Love is simply something that occurs; it has not even to be faithful to itself. In love, all depends on the whimsicality of the god, whose interventions we – as mortal humans – can only understand as mere blind fate. This is why speaking of a theory of love in ancient, pre-philosophical Greece simply does not make sense. Theory only emerged when truth – or, what amounts to the same thing, the criterion ‘true versus false’ – was introduced as the paradigm of the way in which humans relate to reality. This introduction took place in the sixth century BC on the Greek-speaking coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, with the emergence of philosophy. That was when people started to

For a detailed study of the origin of the god ‘Eros’, see chapter 7 in: Barbara Breitenberger, Aphrodite and Eros: The Development of Erotic Mythology in Early Greek Poetry and Cult, New York/ London: Routledge, 2007. 2 This is a quote from Song of Songs 8:6. Notice however that the entire biblical – and, more generally, monotheistic – tradition contradicts this statement and rather claims that ‘Love is stronger than death’. I return to this issue further on in this essay. ‘Love is strong as death’ is clearly a remainder of a genuine (pagan) Hellenism within the monotheistic biblical text. 1



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relate to reality on the basis of truth – i.e., the idea that Logos (language),3 gives access to the essence of things. Not the perishable tree we see, but the word ‘tree’ gives access to its unperishable, eternal essence, to the ‘tree’ that will never coincide with a non-tree. Logos – i.e., words used in a proper and purified way – leads to truth, to true knowledge. Such is the power of logical thinking. It introduces the non-contradiction rule, which became the basic rule of Western philosophy and (what amounted to the same thing at the time) science. ‘Being is, not-being is not’, Parmenides said.4 If you stick to the word [logos] ‘being’, you have access to what is and never will not be. Logos reveals being ‘as it is’. The problem, however, is that our eyes and other senses never meet such a world. They meet a world where nothing remains what it is, a world full of transience and mortality. What kind of world is it, then, that we see with our sensible eyes? How to think this world in which nothing ever is (read: remains forever) what it is? How to think the ‘being’ of this non-being? Plato was the first to answer this question. Remember for instance his famous ‘myth of the cave’.5 Indeed, the sensible world we see around us is not ‘being as it is’. And yet it is, Plato says, in the sense that it is the shadow of true, ‘logical’ being. What we see on the cave’s wall is mimesis: representations of the true things, or, as Plato calls them, the ‘Ideas’ – i.e., that which we face in our ‘logical’ thinking. Where is Eros in all of this? It is in this context that love receives its first theory. Plato uses eros as a term for the desire to find a way out of the cave full of untrue representations and to go searching for the truth, for the real ‘logical’ world, where things just are – and remain – what they are. In other words, eros is what makes us think critically; what makes us, in a world of shadows, distinguish what these shadows are shadows of. Thinking is longing for truth; it is loving truth. That longing, that love is ‘erotic’. How then? In dialogues such as the Symposium or the Phaedrus, Plato describes what happens when I am erotically attracted by the beautiful body of the one I love. Why am I in love with beauty? Because in beauty I face something that I wish to remain so. I wish the beloved body not to age, not to change, but to endure ‘Logos’ is language used in a purely ‘logical’ way, i.e. ‘language’ in which words are strictly taken for what they say. Numbers as used in arithmetic and mathematics can be seen as paradigmatic here. ‘One’, taken in its ‘logical’ sense, is ‘one’. It will always be the one its says, it will never be less or more than one. 4 See Fragment 5 (6 DK) in: The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction and Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary by A.H. Coxon, rev & exp. ed., with new transl. Richard McKirahan, pref. Malcolm Schofield, Las Vegas/ Zurich/ Athens: Parmenides, 2009, 58, 59. 5 The Republic 514a-520a; see: The Republic, ed. G.R.F. Ferrari, transl. Tom Griffith, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 220-227. 3

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as it is. Of course, the body will age, and in that sense it is not real being; it is but a ‘shadow’, mimesis. But in the beauty of this ‘shadow’, I am longing for something this shadow is the shadow of. In beauty, I long for the truth of being – of being so far as ‘it is what it is’ and never changes, i.e., never will be what it is not. In the beauty of my beloved’s body, what attracts me is in fact the truth of his being.6 In him, I love the truth. This is why I am still able to love my beloved even when, aged, his body has lost all beauty. I will love the truth he tells me, the truth we both discuss and try to achieve. In the end, I will not simply love the truth that comes out of his mouth, but I will love the truth in general. I will be a ‘philosopher’, someone with a philia [love, friendship] for sophia [wisdom, truth]. As a philosopher, I walk the path of eros. Eros, desire, has its origin – its being – in that what it longs for, which is nothing else than the truth, than being-asit-is. It is the truth of being that makes me long for it. Through the radiance of corporeal beauty, truth itself has seduced me to leave the cave of shadows and has encouraged me to purify myself and my desire in order to deliver myself from all fakeness, falseness and untruth. Thinking, ‘doing theory’, searching for truth all require eros, although eros that needs sublimation and purification to become what it really is and to reach its goal, which is being. 2. Theory of Theory’s Beyond Love is not beyond theory, as common sense likes to state. It is rather the other way around: love is what drives theory. Thus Plato. But what about mysticism? Or, since talking about mysticism is an anachronism in Plato’s case, what about the beyond of theory? Is there not something which radically escapes theory? If Plato’s answer to this question is positive – yes, there is a beyond escaping theory – he nonetheless immediately adds that this beyond is at the same time theory’s very core. Let us turn back to the ‘cave’. Why does Plato come up with this ‘myth’? Not to explain the difference between Ideas and sensible reality – or, what amounts to the same thing, between ‘shadows’ on the wall and real being, between doxa [opinion] and epistèmè [true knowledge]. Explaining such logical differences does Indeed ‘his’: the ‘beloved’ in Plato’s text is always male, more exactly a young male. In ancient Athens, Erotikè was the name for the love between an older man (characterized as having a beard) and a (beardless) young man – a love that is intrinsically temporal, for it is the procedure to introduce a free young man (living in the gynaika, the house ruled by women) to the public world (the agora) where free adults lay down the law. (See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure [The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2] transl. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, 1990.) It is this ‘pederast’ love that Plato reshapes (i.e., sublimates) into the philosopher’s way to Truth.

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not require a myth at all. Only illogical things do. What the myth tries to clarify is the fact that the non-being of the ‘shadows’ on the wall, in some way or another, is. How to explain that not-being nonetheless is? What is the ontological status of things that have no real ontological status? In other words: if real being is the realm of Ideas outside the cave, why then is there such thing as a cave? What is its ontological status? Here the Logos fails, and a ‘myth’ is required. This myth consists of the story of the cave, with Ideas (real beings) behind the people’s back and their shadows on the cave’s wall (sensible phenomena). How, then, are these shadows possible? Thanks to the light beyond the Ideas that shines upon them, the myth answers. Is this light an Idea like the others? Is it being that is (and remains) what it is? Not exactly. The light is not a thing that unchangeably keeps the shape it has (as Ideas do); it is rather the opposite: it is ‘fluid’, insubstantial, constantly changing. It is, according to Plato, something like a source: it does not stop giving its light away, having it shine on Ideas, on real beings. And what is the effect of this shining? It makes shadows on the cave’s wall. Of course, these shadows are not real reality; they are false, non-being. Nonetheless, they do have something in common with the source of being. They are the effect of the light shining on real reality – the light that makes Ideas possible. And it is precisely thanks to the unreal reality of the shadows on the wall that we, locked up in the cave, are put in the position to notice the shadows, more precisely to realize that these shadows are but shadows and, thus, to look at them as if they invite us to go in search for that what they are shadows of. They are the shadows of Ideas, and that shadow-effect is caused by nothing else than the source of being, by the Idea beyond all other Ideas, the Idea beyond being: ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας [epekeinas tès ousias; Politeia 509b]. Plato calls this Idea beyond being the ‘Idea of the Good’. The very ground of being – its source, that which makes being possible – is mere gift-giving; it is abundant goodness. In its abundance, the light-source does not only make the Ideas possible, but also their shadows on the cave’s wall. What is more, the abundant goodness, through the false shadows, enables us to leave those shadows behind and to go searching for the truth. It is goodness – real goodness, a goodness coinciding with the very source of being – that makes us think, that makes us desire for truth and that guarantees that this desire is based in the truth it longs for. Basically, being is excessively good, and this is the ultimate reason why we are able to think being, to touch with our logos the truth of reality. However, to express the foundational goodness of being, Logos – logical thinking – falls short. Similarly, the Logos also falls short to express the goodness that is its own very source. This is why Plato uses a myth to express it. The ground of Logos, the foundation of logical thinking, can only be expressed by a myth.

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So, is the ground of the Logos logical? Is the basis of rational theory rational? It is not. Logos is grounded in its beyond. And so is the basis of theory. Ultimately, Logos is Logos of its beyond; theory is theory of its beyond. The beyond constitutes the very core of logical theory and the entire logical theory is oriented towards this mysterious beyond. This structure, which is drawn up in only a few passages in Plato’s dialogues, becomes the central thesis in the coherently constructed system of Plotinus and of the different kinds of Neoplatonism after him. Being is what it is, it is ‘one’, but in its abundant goodness this one ‘emanates’ into the multiplicity of beings, spiritual and corporeal, in order to ‘return’ at the end – by the force of ‘love’ – to itself. The acts of thinking and loving participate in that process by which the oneness of being gives itself away to being’s multiplicity, and the force that brings this multiplicity to itself is its return to the One. An elaborate theory of the One: this is a first aspect that distinguishes Plotinus’ thinking from Plato’s. A second aspect is Plotinus’ thesis that we humans are able to have a lived experience of the One, the source of being – an experience that by definition is extremely exceptional and that, when it occurs, is so overwhelming that we, instantaneously, lose ourselves in it. Unlike for Plato, for whom the starting point of thinking is the erotic perception of the other’s body, for Plotinus that starting point is the individual’s ecstatic experience of the One. It is this experience that awakens one’s desire to go searching for the truth – which is ultimately unification with the One. Summarizing Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought with respect to our initial question – the relation between mysticism, love and theory – we can state, first, that love is a matter of theory just like theory is a matter of love, and, second, that theory in its core is theory of its beyond. Looking for its ultimate goal, theory ultimately touches its untouchable, mysterious beyond as its very core. Christian mysticism inherits both features. When it comes to love, it is never without theory, and neither are the mystical it aims at, nor the mystical paths it goes. Christian mysticism is a love theory, through and through. 3. Loving Theory’s Beyond… But where, precisely, is Christianity itself in all of this? Does Christianity need Plato to be a religion of love? Indeed, in its origin, Christian love has nothing to do with Plato. This does not, however, prevent this love, too, from being theoretical. In the first centuries of Christianity’s history, ‘love’ was a central concept within the theoretical framework of its narrative. This framework is one of a fulfilled messianism. Since Adam’s fall, man has been marked by sin, death and finitude. In his goodness, God had given his Beloved People the Law (Torah).



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By following its rules, man was supposed to restore his relationship with God. Since this did not really work, the Jewish religious imagination started to dream of a Messiah, a divine messenger who was to take away sin, death and finitude, introduce a new creation delivered from all of this, and restore eternal life. Christianity is based on a fulfilled messianism. In Jesus’ death on the cross, the old creation died, and his resurrection introduced a new creation, the realm of the eternal life. ‘Love’ was the name for this new kind of human condition: a condition without finitude, without sin and death. The word the early Christians used for this love was not eros, since eros means a state of desire, a by definition unfulfilled, finite desire. To name the state of fulfilled desire, they took the word agape. As we read in the Acts of the Apostles, in the first decades, Christians lived in ‘agape-communities’, where no one was in need, since no-one had any possession and all things were possessed in common. Agapeic love was the heart of Christian theory, in the sense that it was the ‘beyond’ of theory, i.e., the place where its theory became reality. And the Christian lived in this state of divine ‘love’. Yet, to understand later Christian mysticism, one must realize that this agapeic love came to be mixed up with erotic love. Claiming to be delivered from sin, death and finitude in a world where these things were all over the place soon became untenable. This is why the idea of resurrection had to be supplemented by the idea of ascension. Christ has risen and delivered us from sin and death, but he has gone back to the Father for a while, and in the meantime, man has to wait for his return. Messianic expectation has been fulfilled and yet, at the same time, that expectation remains unfulfilled since the Messiah still has to come back to finish his messianic job. In this condition of still expecting the Messiah, eros – unfulfilled desire – gained a place within the Christian narrative. The Christian still had to wait and long for God. He lived in God’s love; he lived in agape: in the midst of finitude and death, he already shared the infinity of eternal life. But at the same time, he realized that this realm was not yet fully there, so he still had to wait and to long for it. His love for God – his living in God’s agapeic love – was at the same time a longing for God – and in that sense it was eros as well. It is no surprise that many intellectuals among the Christians were sensitive for Platonism and, later, Neo-Platonism. Both provided an excellent ‘grammar’ for the Christian mix of fulfilled and unfulfilled messianic expectation. Christians were living ‘outside the cave’, in the realm of truth or, what amounted to the same thing for them, in the realm of God’s love, of agape. Yet, this realm was spiritual; it was still in heaven. It had realized itself on earth, in the terrestrial domain, but only in one person, in God’s incarnate Son. Since that Son had joined the heavenly Father, man still had to wait for his return. Christian

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love changed: it became longing. Agape was mixed with eros. This was not the pre-philosophical eros, but the platonic one, the eros that sublimated itself in order to get in line with its genuine source, which was the truth, the source of being-as-it-is – in short: to get in line with God. Around the middle of the third century, Origen was one of the first Christian intellectuals to reshape the Christian narrative on the basis of Platonism. Platonism was by far the most popular philosophy of the time, certainly in the place where Origen lived and taught: Alexandria, the city that had almost become more famous than Athens for the number and the quality of philosophical schools located there. Though Plotinus himself was undoubtedly adverse to Christianity, his NeoPlatonism reinforced the tendency that had started with Origen. It gave the Christian narrative a kind of ontological basis. The One God in heaven, in his limitless love, emanates into terrestrial, material reality. By loving God, the Christian participates in the return of reality to the One, the divine source of all that is: God. In the fourth century, Proclus, one of Antiquity’s last pagan philosophers, reshaped Plotinus’ thinking into a well-ordered system. This restyled Neo-Platonism delivered the ‘grammar’ for the Christian system of Pseudo-Dionysius (beginning of the sixth century). But in the meantime, Neo-Platonism had already shaped the Christian theories of the Great Cappadocians and so many other Church Fathers, as well as the intellectual giant of Latin Christianity, Augustine, in whose vocabulary caritas (his word for agape) and amor (eros) became almost synonyms. In these centuries, the Christian hodos – the ‘way of life’, as Christianity had named itself in the first centuries – turned into an elaborate, highly theoretical doctrine, built around its own beyond, i.e., around the divine source of the One out of which all things emanate and to which all that is, is supposed to return. This movement of reality as well as the way in which humans move in that reality can be defined as ‘love’ – a kind of ‘love’ representing at the same time the state of perfection that the universe is in and our longing for this perfection (realized in the perfect oneness of God). Love is the central concept in the Christian doctrine, representing at the same time the perfect state that the Christian has attained in principle and the attitude of the actually imperfect Christian who loves God in the sense that he is longing for Him – transforming himself and his eros/amor in order to get in line with God. 4. …as the Core of Christian Mysticism Christian mysticism is imbedded in Christian theory. In this sense, it is inherently theoretical. Of course, in mystical practices, the emphasis is not on theory but on experience. But this experience is nothing but the ‘lived’ heart of theory – as is taught by the theory underlying most of Christian mysticism: Neo-­Platonism.



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As Plotinus stresses, the core of this theory – and, according to him, of all theory, of theory as such – is experience. Living in a world full of non-truth, we ourselves are truth and, in a moment of ecstasy, we can fully experience that truth. We can be one with the One, and on the basis of this experience, we know that the core mission of our being is to return to the One. However, Christian mysticism does not owe the primacy of experience to Neo-Platonism only. The mystical experience is not solely the ecstatic moment of unification with the divine. It is also a matter of desire, of longing for such unification. And the experience of this desire, too, is lived theory, theory implemented on the level of practice. Here again, Plato with his ‘erotic’ pathway to truth has provided the paradigm. Remember the ‘cave’. The truth is not in the shadows on the wall before us, but in the real beings (the Ideas) behind us, illuminated by the Idea of the Good. Knowing the truth is not only a matter of mere theory, of merely looking at beings as they are. A treatment and a management of my gaze is needed as well. What is more, I have to change myself. I have to get rid of the self that I am locked up in, the sensitive self, the self of ‘doxas’, of unclear opinions. In order to know the truth, I need a meticulous askèsis [ascetism] to change that self of mine in such a way that it becomes truly what it is. Only then will I be able to properly approach the truth at which I aim. Truth requires a change of the subject searching that truth. Since for Plato knowledge is based in desire/eros, that change is ‘erotic’ as well. Thinking – i.e., longing for truth – requires a sublimation of my eros, my desire. My desire for truth must become true desire, purified desire, desire that coincides with its own true way of being. Only then it is able to know being and truth outside itself. In other words, thinking requires what Foucault calls spiritualité: an exercise of reshaping the self in such a way that it becomes compatible with the truth it longs for.7 Christian mysticism is ‘spirituality’ in this sense. Concerning the end of this ‘spiritual’ way, of the way of reshaping one’s self in order to reach God, two different theoretical models can be distinguished in Christian mysticism, both shaped by the framework of (Neo-)Platonic thought. A first model is that of ‘ecstasy’. My desire for God and the reshaping of the self needed to reach that goal end in the extinction of my desire and the restless absorption within God. I leave behind the earthly self I was and become one with the real Self of all that is: God. A second model is that of the ‘epectasis’: in the moment my burning love for God is satisfied, my desire, instead of ­extinguishing, keeps on burning. God remains the beyond of my desire, even See, for instance, the lesson of January 6, 1982 in: Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982, transl. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2005, 15-30.

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when that desire is entirely satisfied. Here, satisfaction consists in getting lost in the act of permanent desiring itself. It is the way in which Gregory of Nyssa conceptualizes the end of man’s desiring path to God.8 Both the model of ‘ecstasy’ and the one of ‘epectasis’ are present in the history of mysticism, and each particular kind of mysticism embraces a specific combination of both models. Despite the formal difference, both are ways to conceptualize the ‘lived beyond’ which is the centre of Christian theory. In the end, loving God is a matter of disappearing as human self, be it disappearing in God Himself or disappearing in the impossibility to do so and to keep on endlessly desiring Him. Does mystical love go beyond theory? Is mysticism a way to go beyond it? What Christian mysticism shows is rather that the very movement of going beyond belongs to its theory. Neither ‘ecstasis’ nor ‘epectasis’ make any sense without the theory explaining – and so including – them. II.  Where Love Goes beyond Mystical Theory 5. Erastès/Eromenos And yet, Western mysticism can go ‘beyond theory’, in the radical sense that it can go beyond the ‘beyond’ of which it is the theory. In mysticism, a ‘beyond’ can break through, for which it has no tools to incorporate it in its mystical logic. Christian mysticism does not do this on purpose. It happens, so we read in some passages in mystical writings, when the author seems to lose hold over the sublimated treatment of the eros that leads him to God. Then, a kind of non-sublimated eros breaks through, able to deny – or at least disturb – the theoretical construction of his mystical procedure. Then, a non-platonized eros suddenly comes to the surface. A non-platonized eros. Or, even more generally, a kind of eros that is not shaped after the paradigm of truth, that is not thought on the base of a supposed truth that holds its origin and its final goal. It is the kind of eroticism of which, as mentioned above, Aphrodite’s son is known to be the god. Eroticism without truth: a kind of ‘desire’ not leading to – and not considered from the perspective of – its satisfaction. Eroticism as a game of fate, not necessarily leading to a happy end. It is the pre-philosophical eros that persisted in Antiquity, long even ‘This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him’. In: Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, transl., introd. & notes Abraham J. Malherbe & Everett Ferguson, pref. John Meyendorf, New York/ Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1978, 116 (§ 239). For a comment on the notion of ‘epectasis’, see: Jean Danielou (Ed.), From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, transl. & introd. Herbert Musorillo, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995, 56-71.

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after the rise of philosophy and of eros’s change into a matter of truth. How to describe this kind of pre-truth ‘erotology’? Here, the erotic is what occurs in the passionate fight between erastès (ἐρᾰστής) and eromenos (ἐρώμενος), between lover and beloved.9 It is a complex and highly subtle fight. And what is at work between both is not a matter of truth but of desire – of desire only. Both want one another, and the terms erastès and eromenos name positions, not persons. Of course, each of the partners is in one of the two positions, but neither are both in the same position at the same time, and neither of them is ever in one position all the time. In other words: in none of these positions is one ever ‘at home’ or has one ever arrived at one’s final destination. The moment when one of them keeps a particular position and feels ‘at home’ in that position, the erotic unavoidably fades away. Certainly, the lover wants the beloved, but she/he wants the beloved to love him/ her: she/he wants to be his/her beloved. The erastès wants his/her eromenos to be his/her erastès. Or to put it in hunting terms: the hunter wants his quarry, but only in order to become himself her quarry, i.e., the quarry of the quarry, the victim of the victim. And the latter means not the end of the game, but something that, when it occurs, is undone again and again and restarts the game. Eros only works on the basis of the persisting difference between the erastès and the eromenos. Of course, both genuinely want unity and want to become ‘one’ with the other. And yet, the erotic, even when the partners dream of mutual unity, only works if that desire meets its non-satisfaction over and over again and remains unsatisfied in the end. This kind of eros is definitely not what happens between a Christian mystic and the God he loves. At least it is not the way God loves the mystic or any other human being. Does God love us? Of course. This is why He became incarnate and, by doing so, redeemed us. That love of His, however, is by definition not erotic, for it is not motivated by lack, but by abundance, by profusion. In a way, it is because of God’s superabundance of perfection that He shares it with us, imperfect, mortal beings. Such is God’s love, which is radically different from the erotic paradigm at work in our human, all too human way of loving. In Christianity, ‘eros’ only defines man’s love for God. The whole mystical tradition is testimony to that. But how, then, can a love relation be erotic when the love of the beloved partner is not erotic? How to erotically love God when God’s love is not erotic? How can desire bring us closer to God, when God by definition is not desiring? See: Kenneth James Dover, Greek Homosexuality, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1978, 202. Anna Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality, New York/ London: Routledge, 2008, 23.

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Here we meet the basic reason why Plato’s sublimated conceptualization of eros was so useful to Christianity. Platonic eros allows God to be put in the position of eromenos, of the object of love, without making Him part of a whimsical erotic game with an erastès. God is never an erastès like a human lover is, for He is not marked by lack and need. God is perfect in Himself, and his love for man is not a kind of longing (out of lack or need); it is the love of abundance, the love of a never-ending source (as is the case with Plato’s Idea of the Good, or Plotinus’s concept of the One). So, God is non-erotic, agapeic, perfect, abundant, without lack and without desire. We from our side, however, cannot but relate to God on the basis of the lack that marks our human condition. In other words, we cannot but relate to Him in an erotic way. Here we meet the risk of the mystic. In her burning love for God, a mystic often treats God as her perfect Beloved, as the divine Eromenos, and then supposes that He is at the same time the divine Erastès who needs her as a mystical lover, i.e., as a lover who, in love with her, longs for her and is terrified to death when confronted with a non-response from her side. Within the logic of Christianity, all of this is not without risk. For the stronger the emphasis on God as erastès, the more the limits of Christian – and even monotheistic – doctrine are challenged, if not transgressed. If mysticism, within traditional and doctrinal Christianity, was never easily accepted, if most of the time it has been more or less suspicious in the eyes the official religious powers, we find here one of the basic reasons for this. In what follows I briefly discuss a mystical text in which God, approached as eromenos, turns out to be addressed as erastès. Such moments are rather rare even in the mystical tradition. They are but moments, almost ‘slips of the tongue’, imbedded in a context that immediately neutralises the erastès-position – and consequently the radicality of the erotic dimension – of the divine Beloved. 6. ‘Are You not Passionately Mad about Me?’ Let us zoom in on a few pages of Épithalame by Jean de Saint-Samson (15711636), a blind Carmelite and author of a remarkable, still only partly published oeuvre. The title Épithalame originates from the Roman word for a wedding song (epithalamium), used here for a ‘rewriting’ of the Song of Songs, the famous ‘erotic’ Bible book and, since Origenes, a major point of reference in Christian mystical texts.10 As we will see, in this epithalamium, the antique, pre-Christian, pre-Platonic eros, at times worms its way to the surface. 10

For an extensive reading of the Épithalame (though with a different focus than mine), see: Ivan Scicluna, ‘L’Épithalame de Jean de Saint-Samson (1571-1636)’, in: Studies in Spirituality 18 (2008), 289-311.



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After a direct address to the reader in which he warns him of the difficulties and particularities of the book he has opened, the author starts his account of the love story that unites him with God: What is it all about now, my Love and my Life? What? For me it is very clear: I must sing the unique loves [les amours uniques] of the Bridegroom for his bride, and of the bride, become all love, for her Bridegroom. But you, my dear Life and Bridegroom, how are You? Are You not passionately mad about me [passionnement affolé de moi]? Yes, it must be so; I have no doubts about that. If this were not the case, You would never have become flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones. And no, neither would You have let your infinite fullness shrink down to the dust of my human nature in order to take me as your bride, with all that this brings about, which is much.11

‘The bride’, a metaphor for Jean de Saint-Samson’s soul, is in love with God – a love the bride openly declares to her adored Bridegroom. And, like a genuine lover (erastès), she wonders if her Beloved (Eromenos) is in love with her as well. It is rather exceptional, even in mystical texts, but here the question is directly addressed to God: ‘Are You not passionately mad about me?’ Do you not miss me like a lover misses his beloved? Are you not, like any lover, burning with desire? Does God answer the soul’s question? As is often the case in mystical dialogues, God remains silent. Which does not stop the ‘bride’ from being sure: ‘Yes, it must be so; I have no doubts about that’. Why, then, is the bride so sure? Here, her argument leaves, so to speak, the erotological grammar and enters the one of mere doctrine. God’s incarnation in the flesh is what proves that He, the Bridegroom, is in love with his ‘fleshly’ bride. God has created the world and has become incarnate within the realm of sin and death, which certainly are acts of divine love. But is this incarnating love-act motivated by the fact that God misses something and hopes to find it among his beloved creatures? This can be the logical conclusion one could draw from what Jean de Saint-Samson writes. It is not, however, the conclusion drawn by the author. That it is out of erotic love that God has incarnated, as Jean de Saint-Samson seems to try to suggest, can be read as, indeed, just a suggestion. The author has good reasons for not saying it explicitly, at least if he wants to stay within the boundaries of Christian doctrine.12 Nonetheless the conclusion, though not Jean de Saint-Samson, Oeuvres complètes 2: Méditations et Soliloques 1, ed. Hein Blommestijn, Rome: Institutum Carmelitanum, 1993, 336; author’s translation. See also: Jean de SaintSamson, Épithalame: Chant d’amour, transcr. & ed. Jean Perrin, Paris: Seuil, 1997, 55. 12 The most that can be said within the boundaries of Christian doctrine, is that God’s (nonerotic) love has created erotic love, in order to give ‘fleshly’ human beings the opportunity to fall in love with Christ or God and, by so doing, to find his way out of the ream of the flesh. 11

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drawn explicitly, is not entirely absent either. It haunts, as will become clear in the few quotes that follow, the entire text. 7. ‘Did You Think, in Good Faith, that You just Could Possess your Bride Alone?’ It is noticeable on the next page already. The ‘bride’ describes the delight that the Bridegroom has brought her. In the middle of the passage cited below, a ‘What?’ appears. Such ‘Whats?’ are omnipresent in Épithalame and they definitely contribute to the remarkably vivid rhetoric of Jean de Saint-Samson’s text. And, as is the case here, such ‘Whats?’ often introduce in the text precisely a kind of ‘erotic surge’. What is there still to say, since we are together now in our inner residence? Whatever can be said, I know what is different now: I am delighted, O my Bridegroom, by You and in You; and so, You hold me divine by your divinity and in Your divinity. I believe it is no surprise, since I am your bride in love, entirely consumed by your love, entirely divine and entirely lost in You. What? Did You think, in good faith, that You just could possess your bride alone, without your bride possessing You in the force of our love, both impetuous and conjugal, which makes us both just as happy in everything when we enjoy it and dwell in it, and hold one another more and more tight, in incomparable hugs.13

‘What? Did You think, in good faith, that You just could possess your bride alone, without your bride possessing You in the force of our love, both impetuous and conjugal …’. The bride has been absorbed by the Beloved, she has become one with Him, she is in his divine possession. In fact, this implies that she has reached the end of the mystical path. The soul, longing for God, has now reached the state of satisfaction. She has become God. She has lost even her loving ‘self’, her ‘subject’, in her unity with the Beloved. She really disappears in God. Yet, not without objections: ‘It is not because You possess me, that I should not possess You’. She clearly wants reciprocity. Does she want God to lose his divine Self in her? It is not what the text says with so many words. It is not so clear what, the text says about this exactly, but the most plausible reading is that the loving soul, possessed by God – wants God loving/desiring to So, in one of his Sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux writes: ‘I think this is the principal reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh and to converse with men as a man. He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love’. Sermon 20.IV.6; in: Bernard of Clairvaux, The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux. Vol. 2, part 1: Song of Songs, transl. Killian. J. Walsh, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981, 152. 13 Saint-Samson, Méditations et Soliloques 1, 337-338 (author’s translation); Épithalame, 61.



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possess her. The soul does not so much want that God possesses her, as that He loves, desires, to do so. What unites man and God is love, but love as eros, as desire: love marked by the insurmountable difference between the positions of lover (erastès) and beloved (eromenos), of possessor and possessed. Eros implies that neither of the two partners can occupy both positions at the same time, nor one of the positions all the time. Their relationship is based on a permanent change of position, and it is in this very change that the required reciprocity exists. Now possessed, then possessor, never both at the same time, never one of both all the time. In Épithalame, it is due to the erotic character of the soul’s love that God is appealed to occupy the position of the possessed, just as He is experienced as the one who takes possession of the soul. The game of love requires the two. And the constant change of the two. 8. ‘Is It What You Missed in your Beatitude?’ As we saw a few pages earlier, Jean de Saint-Samson neutralised a certain eruption of the erotic paradigm by abandoning the ‘erotological’ narrative in favour of the doctrinal one of incarnation, whose paradigm is definitely ‘agapeic’. Being the result of God’s abundance and profusion, the idea of incarnation does not fit a supposed lack in God, a God considered to be ‘desiring’. And yet, a few pages further on, there is a passage in which the author explicitly eroticizes the idea of incarnation, suggesting it was motivated by God’s erotic desire. There, we first read that the ‘soul’ has expressed her ‘happiness’ and her ‘objective enjoyment’ in God’s ‘solely divine nature’ [mon heur et ma jouissance obiective en votre seule nature divine]. Yet, at the same time, she remembers that God has become incarnate and so, she concludes, the flesh must be loved as much as God’s ‘solely divine nature’. It is then that she addresses the following question directly to her Beloved: But where is it [the flesh]? From whom have You taken it? Has it not been mine? In the sense that You are flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones as well as life of my life and love of my love? And why, then, have You taken it [i.e., the flesh] from me, from my shape? Is it what You missed in your beatitude? Why, I say, did You take it from me, if it is not that You wanted me to love it madly [hopelessly: esperdument], to such an extent that I would take refuge in it, as if [in it, i.e., in the flesh] I were one and the same thing with my Bridegroom and in my Bridegroom that You are?14 14

‘Mais ou est ce, et de qui l’avés vous prise? N’a-ce pas esté de moy? De sorte qu vous estes chair de ma chair, os de mes os, aussi bien que la vie de ma vie, et l’amour de mon amour. Pourquoi aussi la preniés vous ainsi de moi, et ma forme en ma forme? Aviés point de cela en

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Why has God incarnated? Because he lacks something. That is the clear suggestion put forward in these lines. God was lacking the flesh, and He became flesh in order to be able to love the fleshly man and to be loved by him. God is ‘flesh of [man’s] flesh’ and, so the text adds, He is ‘love of [man’s] love’. So, if we understand Saint-Samson correctly, at least in these lines of his Épithalame, the paradigm of God’s love is not agape, not abundance, not a shower of wealth. It is eros, marked by lack, and eager to find with the beloved other something to fill that very lack of his. If love is the desire to possess and to be possessed (which is the erotic paradigm of love), then this does not go for God’s love. This is Christian doctrine. Not because God does not possess and is not possessed. God does possess all that is and He certainly allows mystical and other mortals to try to possess Him, but He is not marked by the unsurmountable difference between possessing and being possessed. This is to say that God is not under the regime of desire. God does not desire to possess; He simply already has everything that is. So, it is us, humans, who want union with Him. He himself always already has that union; He is always already with us. It is not He who longs to make the difference between Him and what is human undone. His love has already made it undone, so He no longer needs to do so. Only we, humans, have such a desire – a desire that is based on difference and, for that very reason, erotic. Yet, in the passage just quoted from Saint-Samson’s Épithalame, something else is going on. In erotic fever, the bride seems not to accept that non-difference of God’s, i.e., God being always already in unity with her. If it is unity with God that she wants (which definitely is the case), she wants it in a mutual longing for one another by God and by her. She wants reciprocity in their mutual desire, i.e., in the fact that, for neither of them, to possess and to be possessed ever coincide, and that both are united in this very non-coincidence, in this insurmountable difference. 9. Vengeance Of course, the author cannot continue his wedding song in merely ‘erotological’ terms. He indeed changes his logic. But the way in which he does so is highly remarkable. Why has God become incarnate? Why did He, in his impeccable beatitude, have the idea to love human mortals? The author no longer holds that it is because of God’s beatitude missing something. God is not missing votre beatitude? Pourquoi, dis-ie, la preniés vous de moi, si vous ne voulies que ie l’aimasse esperdument, et de telle sorte que I’y constituasse mon repos, comme estant une mesme chose avec mon Espoux, et en mon Espoux que vous estes’. Saint-Samson, Méditations et Soliloques 1, 339 (author’s translation); Épithalame, 64-65.



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anything; He is, after all, pure abundance. So why does He love man? Out of vengeance! It is literally what we read a few lines further on. (Notice again that remarkable ‘What?’). But what, my Love? All of us, and first of all the dearest among us, are really surprised about such an unusual vengeance [la tant estrange vengeance] that You have taken upon them for their past infidelity. For, as your divine brides assure, it was out of vengeance that, with your divine majesty and nature, You married them (…).15

God is perfect. He needs nothing. So, why does He love us, imperfect human beings? Why does He not punish us for being imperfect, marked as we are by the sins in which we persist? Do we not simply deserve chastisement? However, instead of punishing us, God does the opposite: He takes ‘revenge’, which in case means that He overwhelms us with the abundance of his love. He marries us out of revenge! A few lines further on, we read (again introduced by ‘What?’): But what, my Love? If this is the way in which You take vengeance upon me for my many insults with respect to You, then this vengeance is not only tolerable, but sweet and delicious as well (…). O my Love, is it allowed [licite] to take revenge in this way? But since love wants me to take revenge on You in this way (…) my revenge will be that I will not stop sinking into my limitless love for You (…).16

Here, the erotology is neutralized, but nothing more than that. The erotic logic is neutralized, since it is out of abundance that God loves the soul. The normal – in this case erotic – logic would be the opposite. If the lover, living in sinful infidelity, has shown no love for the Beloved, why should the Beloved love her? But since the Beloved is beyond the logic of sin and lack, His revenge is a superabundant love. Eros is overwhelmed by agapeic love. And yet, eros is not gone. It is still there, simply because God’s love is said to act out of revenge. For does ‘vengeance’ not imply that God is still acting as if He is feeling some lack of love – which, then, is why He feels resentment and the need for revenge? And is it not because of God’s revenge that man, too, can take revenge and, consequently, love God as abundantly as He loves him? God and man keep on finding one another as lover and Beloved, each of them occupying both positions in the active – read position-changing – way. They find one another in their mutual desire, in the lack they both feel – in the lack of

15 16

Saint-Samson, Méditations et Soliloques 1, 339 (author’s translation); Épithalame, 68. Saint-Samson, Méditations et Soliloques 1, 340-341 (author’s translation); Épithalame, 71-72.

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missing that what constitutes their mutual relationship, their ‘erotic’ intercourse. Only a few lines further on, the ‘erotological’ tone returns already: But my sweet Life, I have still not specified the means by which I want to take revenge on You for your sweet and loving war [douce et amoureuse guerre] that You wage against me in eternal love. Here is what I will do: if You enjoy the acts of your profoundest love that bring You to me incessantly, then I too, doing what I can in the infinite force of my [love], will not cease to come to You, where, in endless encounters, we will fight, spirit against spirit, until one of us will succumb.17

And although, of course, the text immediately adds that it is the soul who will succumb and not God, this passage nonetheless suggests a non-ending fight where they both loose and win their ‘war of love’ – or, what amounts to the same thing, where neither of them loses nor wins that war. The unity that they find one another in, is one of reciprocity – a unity in shared insurmountable difference, revealing the regime of desire in which they both are. 10. ‘Very Simple Love’. ‘But What?’ This is a conclusion that can be drawn from this particular passage in Jean de Saint-Samson’s text. But it is clear that, when push comes to shove, for the author, God’s love is unique, is one, and not two. It is agapeic oneness and not erotic division. Not the doubleness of possessing and being possessed, two positions lovers inevitably occupy but never both at the same time, never one position all the time. At the end of the Christian mystic love story reported in the Épithalame, lover and Beloved become one. The difference between possessing and being possessed has been overcome definitively. And yet, up to the last page the difference can still be felt persisting in many details of the text. Let us read a passage almost at the end of Épithalame. It is now God, the Beloved, who addresses himself to the soul, his lover: You understand Me well on all of this: all these secrets of us both are for you as well as for Me the most profound, the most amorous, the most secret and the most intimate of our mutual loves [de nos reciproques amours], but they are clearly mine, [they are the fruit] of my love for you, in you – [the love] in which, as I have always said, we possess one another in our equal and mutual love, in our equal happiness: equal, I say, as you know and understand it well.18

And to avoid misunderstanding, the author stresses he really has a union in mind that is exclusively based in God. The soul will become one with the flesh 17 18

Saint-Samson, Méditations et Soliloques 1, 341 (author’s translation); Épithalame, 72. Saint-Samson, Méditations et Soliloques 1, 358 (author’s translation); Épithalame, 132.



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God has become Himself, and then the soul will return to God’s ‘simple’ divinity. In the next sentence, we read: And, as I say you, from my humanity that you have possessed very smoothly and in supreme fullness, you will return into our divinity, in order to possess Me, you in Me, in very profound and very simple ardour and very simple love (…).19

The soul has loved God, she has loved the fleshy God, the God who has loved the flesh and has become flesh. The soul has ‘possessed’ the flesh of God, just like God has possessed the flesh of the soul. This mutual game of possessor and possessed was eros, and that is what we read in the love song of Saint-Samson’s Épithalame. But eros is not the end. In the end, it is all God’s work, God’s love. In the end, the love at stake is agape. This is why the passage repeats three times the word ‘simple’: ‘very simple ardour’, ‘very simple love’, and (in the part of the sentence left unquoted) ‘very simple (…) glory’. It is, in sum, ‘love’ that is ‘simple’ because it is divine, because it comes from the One. Agape has overcome eros. The lover and the beloved are not united in their insurmountable difference (eros), but in their indivisible union. And yet, even in these last, concluding pages of the Épithalame, the difference between lover and Beloved nonetheless persists. What persists, at least in a few passages or sentences, is the resistance of the lover – in this case: the human soul. As if the soul is staying in the erotic condition, or ‘in desire’, so to say. She keeps on being motivated by what she misses. On the last page of the text, addressing himself to the soul, God mentions their ‘amorous and mutual enjoyment’ [nostre amoureuse et reciproque jouissance] in which the soul is totally in God, who no longer has any secrets for her, nor she for God. She has full knowledge of God, she has seen Him fully and become equal to Him. And yet, apparently, God unexpectedly has to react to a non-recorded objection made by the soul (notice again the ‘What?’): And you do not doubt, my daughter, my bride, that if you should have been capable of more and better, I would have done it in you and would have shown it in Me. But what? [Mais quoi?] You see Me naked, entirely, you possess Me naked, entirely [Tu me vois tout nud et totallement, tu me possedes tout nud et totallement]. What more could I do for you? What could show you what is better than Me in all of Myself, in the total plenitude and the richness of Myself. Being lost in unity, and become totally rich, you have become Myself in Myself, and you possess Myself in Myself.20

The soul sees God ‘tout nud et totallement’, she has full possession of God, and what does God notice? That she loves His ‘lack’. She loves what escapes His 19 20

Saint-Samson, Méditations et Soliloques 1, 358 (author’s translation); Épithalame, 133. Saint-Samson, Méditations et Soliloques 1, 359 (author’s translation); Épithalame, 136.

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‘nakedness’, his ‘fullness’, his perfection, his revealed truth. In other words: God notices that the soul loves Him erotically. Even in the moment when she is in perfect unity with Him, what she loves is what is lacking in that unity. Eros persists in the culminating experience of the unio mystica. 11. The Question of Love Like so many other mystical texts, Jean de Saint-Samson’s is a love song for God. Is it theoretical? It definitely is. The Christian agapeic love theory underlies the love for God that is expressed in the text. This agapeic love theory is itself a specific theorizing of eros, the antique relation between erastès and eromenos, originally lived without any reference to truth. Platonism – supported in this by the later Christian version of its theory – has reshaped eros into a matter of (and a way to) truth. Platonized eros – together with Christian agape – enabled ‘theory’ to acknowledge the inaccessibility of its own core, its ultimate goal. By doing so, the way to truth acknowledges that its end and goal are beyond the reach of its own theoretical power. As already argued: theory is by definition the theory of its beyond. This is why, unlike common sense states, Christian mysticism is not beyond theory. It is, more accurately, the lived experience of theory’s beyond. The tradition of mystical texts is a treasure trove that bears witness to this lived experience. Yet, the experience shows that what is lived is not only and not simply the theoretical beyond of theory. Focusing on the ‘love’ that leads us to this beyond as the ultimate shape of truth, this ‘love’ at times is visibly haunted by the kind of ‘love’ that it is supposed to have overcome. The Platonized, ‘agapeisized’ love is at times deconstructed by a non-platonized eros, which is agape’s complete opposite. I am reluctant to draw conclusions. It might still be too soon for that. For if all of the above shows one thing, it is that the question of love is not an easy one. If only it asks for the truth of love and ends up making us face the question whether truth fits love at all – or, what amount to the same thing, whether love even fits the format of a question. If love defines our way to truth, then the lived love for truth, par excellence, must bring us this truth. However, as texts such as those of Jean de SaintSamson show, it is precisely love – lived love – that again and again disturbs the truth claimed about love. The mystic asks for truth by loving it, by addressing his love to truth, a truth that he defines as love. But while addressing his love to truth, expressing love as the perfect definition of truth (the truth of truth, so to say), he falls into a lovegame affecting the very truth he claims. The love with which he claims the truth of love again and again supposes both truth and love to be imperfect, not



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­ ithout lack. It supposes truth itself to be desiring – and, consequently, not w being – the truth. It supposes love itself to be desiring – and, consequently, not being – love. The latter kind of love is agape, love defined as both the way to truth and truth itself. The former kind of love, the desiring one, is eros – eros that, even while it desires truth, is never that truth since it never stops desiring it. The question of love confronts us with the possibility of a question that is harmed and affected in the supposition underlying it, namely that there is an answer, i.e., that there is a truth in answer to the question – even if this answer/ truth is beyond the limits of the question’s theoretical powers. Texts like those of Jean de Saint-Samson make us realize that the question of love makes the phenomenon ‘question’ as such highly problematic. And, as said, I am reluctant to draw conclusions from this.

Jos Huls THE ‘NOT’ OF MINNE IN THE SEVEN WAYS OF MINNE BY BEATRICE OF NAZARETH

Introduction One of the songs on the album Give Me That Slow Knowing Smile by the Swedish singer Lisa Ekdahl is called ‘One Life’. The song made an impression on me, not only because of the dreamy, jazzy atmosphere it is written in, but also and mainly because of the lyrics that have stayed with me through the years: There’s just one life coming from that one place There’s just one face and it’s your face There’s just one life going to that one place There’s just one face and it’s God’s face And it’s in Everyone it’s in every place It is everywhere that one face I can see it shining through Can’t you see it shining through Don’t tell me that you don’t Just tell me that you do1

This refrain outlines what I wish to discuss in this article: that intangible reality that pervades our life and that as a divine mystery keeps escaping our objectifying consciousness. Lisa Ekdahl speaks of a ‘face’ in this regard. In the eyes of the other, God imparts himself to us as a mystery, and it is up to us whether we wish to open ourselves to this one Face that shines through the whole of our temporal and spatial reality, or not. But before I get ahead of myself, let me first introduce the wondrous world of Minne, seen through the eyes of Beatrice of Nazareth.

Lisa Ekdahl, One Life on the album Give Me That Slow Knowing Smile (2009).

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1. Minne-mysticism The main theme in the mystical tradition of the thirteenth century is love. This concept can be translated in many different ways. The Dutch mystical tradition has a special word for it: ‘Minne’. It differs from the word ‘love’ because it immediately refers to the essence of God. God is ‘Minne’. In fact, in this literature the word Minne is used as a reference to God. For this reason, I write Minne with a capital M. Minne can be translated as love, but I have chosen to stick to the word as it is, because in Dutch we also have the more common word ‘liefde’ (love). Minne refers to love as a divine reality in our life. By following its desire, we are transformed by Minne from within. This is also the main idea of the school of love that was started by the Cistercians. In fact, the thirteenthcentury Minne-mysticism in the Netherlands is influenced by the founders of this school, Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry.2 The school of love has its roots in our human experience. Therefore, this school has to be understood as phenomenological. It tries to understand the human phenomenon of love from within. Poets write about love. It is fascinating because it is mysterious and unfathomable. In the school of love, love is seen as a divine activity in our human existence. In love we meet God, because God is love in Himself.3 However, we have to make a distinction between our human desires, evoked by this love, and love as a divine activity in itself. When we fall in love with someone, we often fall in love with the images of our own desire. We love the other because we miss something in ourselves, but love in itself is more than that. It goes beyond our own reasons.4 That is why in biblical terms Hein Blommestijn, ‘Progrès – Progressants’, in: M. Viller, F. Cavallera & J. de Guibert (Eds.), Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique. Vol. 12-2, Paris: Beauchesne, 1986, cols 23832405. 3 William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu (The Works of William of St. Thierry, Vol. 4), Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971 (Cistercian Fathers Series 12), 80, n. 201: ‘Now the will is set free when it becomes charity: when the charity of God is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us’. (Liberabitur vero voluntas quando efficitur caritas, cum caritas Deus diffunditur in cordibus nostris per Spiritum sanctum qui datur nobis.) The human will is the open space where divine Minne (caritas Deus) reveals herself in her divine activity. Being transformed into a perfect instrument of divine Minne, the will ‘is set free’ because it ‘becomes charity’ or Minne. This happens to us in passivity, ‘when the charity of God (caritas Deus or Minne God) is poured out in our hearts’. At this very moment our human love becomes real love, i.e. Minne, no longer a slave of the images of our own desire. ‘For when the will has been set free by liberating grace and the spirit begins to be moved by a reason that is free, then it becomes its own master, that is, it makes free use of itself; it becomes spirit and a good spirit’. 4 Therefore, William considers love as a dynamic process. First, he mentions human love that is real love because it is free and corresponds to truth. Ibid., 88 (n. 235): ‘When the will mounts on high, like fire going up to its proper place, that is to say when it unites with truth 2



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love is a commandment and does not depend on our emotions.5 Maybe it starts there as a kind of engine, but the more intimate it becomes, the more we experience it as a ‘must’ that we did not create ourselves. This is where love as a divine reality comes into play.6 To love God does not mean that God is the object of our love, but it refers to a quality in love. Love is a commandment and in order to follow its divine path, we have to become obedient to God’s and tends to higher things, it is “love”’ (Cum sociatur veritati, et movetur ad altiora, amor est). We love the other person in his or her truth and not on the basis of our projections because we miss something in ourselves. The second step is that this human love reaches perfection through the inflow of divine grace. So the human capacity to love (the will) acquires by grace the divine quality to which it is called in the creative Love of God (Ibid.): ‘When it is fed with the milk of grace in order to make progress it is “dilection”’ (Cum, ut promoveatur, lactatur a gratia, dilectio est). The third step is the transformation into divine charity or Minne that uses the human will or capacity to love as a free and passive instrument in the hands of God (Ibid.): ‘When it lays hold of its object and keeps it in its grasp and has enjoyment of it, it is “charity”, it is unity of spirit, it is God. For God is charity’ (Cum apprehendit, cum tenet, cum fruitur, caritas est, unitas spiritus est, Deus est, Deus enim caritas est). In this way, William describes in mystagogic terms the phenomenology of love or Minne. Divine Minne transforms the human capacity to love, which is used by God as a passive instrument, so that the unconditionality of divine Love replaces the inevitably conditional human love. Our love – liberated from all sinfulness and self-concern, all egocentric curving back on ourselves – becomes the free and empty space where divine Minne loves unconditionally in us, but despite and without us. All we notice is the awareness of the working of divine Minne in us, that uses the empty space of our fundamental incapacity to love. 5 Deut 6:5; Mt 22:35-40; Mk 12:28-34; Lk 10:27. William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 94 (n. 256): ‘As to the basic desire, first of all the object of desire should be considered, then the extent to which it is desired and the way in which it is desired. If a man’s basic desire is for God he should examine how much and in what way he desires God, whether to the point of despising self and everything which either exists or can exist, and this not only in accordance with the reason’s judgment but also following the mind’s inclination, so that the will is now something more than will: love, dilection, charity and unity of spirit’. Human desire has to become completely empty of all self-concern. 6 See e.g., Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, 8: 23-25 in: Bernard of Clairvaux, Treatises II (The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux. Vol. 5), Washington, D.C.: Cistercian Publications Consortium Press, 1974 (Cistercian Fathers Series 13), 115-117: ‘Love is one of the four natural passions. There is no need to name them, for they are well known. It would be right, however, for that which is natural to be first of all at the author of nature’s service. That is why the first and greatest commandment is: “You shall love the Lord, your God” (Mt 22:37). Since nature has become more fragile and weak, necessity obliges man to serve it first. This is carnal love by which a man loves himself above all for his own sake. He is only aware of himself; as St Paul says: “What was animal came first, then what was spiritual” (1 Cor 15:46). (…) It is only right to share nature’s gifts with him who shares that nature with you. Nevertheless, in order to love one’s neighbor with perfect justice (Mk 12:30-31), one must have regard to God. In other words, how can one love one’s neighbor with purity, if one does not love him in God? But it is impossible to love in God unless one loves God. It is necessary, therefore, to love God first; then one can love one’s neighbor in God’.

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c­ ommandment in love. This commandment is always there. The moment we love, we are brought into the field of tension between our desire to be satisfied in our love, and the divine beyond that calls us to be obedient to its call.7 Then love loses its reasons in ourselves and becomes divine. It is precisely in this selfeffacement in God’s love that we become God’s love.8 The moment we forget ourselves in the gaze of the other, we become an instrument of God’s creative love. In this sense, we never know who God is. In the school of love, God is not an object at all. He is nothing but the endless movement of love that pours out of Himself into the whole of creation, drawing it unto Himself.9 Ibid., 117 (8: 25): ‘Thus God makes himself lovable and creates whatever else is good. He does it this way. He who made nature protects it, for nature was created in a way that it must have its creator for protector. The world could not subsist without him to whom it owes its very existence. That no rational creature may ignore this fact concerning itself or dare lay claim through pride to benefits due the creator, by a deep and salutary counsel, the same creator wills that man be disciplined by tribulations so that when man fails and God comes to his help, man, saved by God, will render God the honor due him. It is written: “Call to me in the day of sorrow; I will deliver you, and you shall honor me” (Ps 50:15). In this way, man who is animal and carnal (1 Cor 2:14), and knows how to love only himself, yet starts loving God for his own benefit, because he learns from frequent experience that he can do everything that is good for him in God and that without God he can do nothing good’. 8 William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 93 (n. 251): ‘Man’s part is continually to prepare his heart by ridding his will of foreign attachments, his reason or intellect of anxieties, his memory of idle or absorbing, sometimes even of necessary business, so that in the Lord’s good time and when he sees fit, at the sound of the Holy Spirit’s breathing the elements which constitute thought may be free at once to come together and do their work, each contributing its share to the outcome of joy for the soul. The will displays pure affection for the joy which the Lord gives, the memory yields faithful material, the intellect affords the sweetness of experience’. In order to become an open space for the working of divine Minne, a total surrender or self-effacement is necessary, so that all concentration on the self and all self-concern will disappear from our conscious mind. 9 Ibid., 92-93 (nn. 250-251): ‘And then, insofar as it is possible for man, worthy thoughts are entertained of God, if indeed the word “thought” (cogitatio) is correct where there is no impelling principle (cogit) nor anything impelled (cogitur), but only awareness of God’s abundant sweetness leading to exultation, jubilation and a true experience of the Lord in goodness on the part of the man who has sought him in this simplicity of heart. But this way of thinking about God does not lie at the disposal of the thinker. It is a gift of grace, bestowed by the Holy Spirit who breathes where he chooses, when he chooses, how he chooses and upon whom he chooses’ (Et tunc de Deo bene cogitatur, secundum humanum modum  ; si tamen cogitatio dicenda est, ubi nil cogit, nil cogitur, sed tantummodo in memoria abundantiae suavitatis Dei, exsultatur et jubilatur et vere sentitur de Domino in bonitate, ab eo qui in hac simplicitate cordis quaesivit illum. Sed modus hic cogitandi de Deo, non est in arbitrio cogitantis, sed in gratia donantis  ; scilicet cum Spiritus sanctus, qui ubi vult spirat, quando vult et quomodo vult, et quibus vult, in hoc aspirat). All our thinking about ‘God’ is inevitably anthropomorphic and thus mere projection. Beyond all our intelligent thoughts our awareness is transformed by the inflow of the Holy Spirit, so that in complete self-forgetfulness we are only conscious of the working of divine Minne. 7



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2.  The Seven Ways by Beatrice of Nazareth The treatise Det sin seuen maniren van minnen is – as far as I can ascertain – one of the oldest works of spiritual prose in Middle Dutch, or vernacular Diets, to have been preserved in its entirety. The first time this short treatise turns up is in an anthology that was in the possession of the tertiary convent of Maagdendries in Maastricht, up to the end of the eighteenth century. Of the manuscript we only know that it must have been written in south-eastern Limburg (probably in the vicinity of Maastricht or Tongeren). It is a beautiful anthology, consisting mainly of Middle Dutch translations of Eckhart’s sermons. In 1895, Kern published the contents of this manuscript under the title Limburg Sermons.10 Because the treatise on the seven ways of Minne does not bear the name of an author, it, too, was suspected to be a translation of an unknown sermon. This is why the treatise is represented in the ‘Limburg Sermons’ as Sermon 42, written by an unknown author. In 1923, Léonce Reypens – an important scholar at the Ruusbroec Institute in Antwerp – had a look at this sermon and was moved by its mystical depth. He considered it to be, without doubt, a ‘hidden pearl of mysticism’.11 He wondered whether it might have been written by Hadewijch, but had no way to verify this. In the end, he found the answer to the authorship question by way of the Vita Beatricis. This is a Latin hagiography of Beatrice of Nazareth, written in 1350 and containing an abbreviated translation of the Seuen maniren in the chapter: De charitate Dei et de septem eius gradibus.12 3.  The Transformation Process in Minne As noted, the title of Beatrice’s treatise is Det sin seuen maniren van minnen [‘These are seven ways of Minne’]. This title represents the formal contents of the short work that describes seven ways of love. The use of the word manire (‘manner’ or ‘way’) is striking here, because it presupposes rather a random enumeration than a hierarchical ascent. A careful reading of the Seven Ways reveals that for Beatrice this is a field of tension. On the one hand, she does indeed describe a spiritual ascent in the Seven Ways, on the other hand, this does De Limburgsche Sermoenen, ed. J. Kern, Leiden: Sijthoff, 1895. Also: https://www.dbnl.org/ lim003limb01_01/. The treatise ‘Seuen Maniren’ is the anonymous number 42 of these sermons (ibid., 570-582). 11 L. Reypens, ‘Een verdoken parel der mystiek: de “Seven maniren van heileger minnen”’, in: Dietsche Warande en Belfort 23 (1923), 717-730. 12 L. Reypens & J. van Mierlo, ‘Een nieuwe Schrijfster uit de eerste helft der dertiende eeuw’, in: Dietsche Warande en Belfort 25 (1925), 352-367. 10

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not mean that the various ways also describe various stages on the path of Minne. As far as this goes, the treatise is almost a phenomenological description of the workings of Minne, before the term even existed. The first manire or way of Minne is a desire that has to rule in the heart for a long time, before it can overcome all resistance in the human being.13 This is what distinguishes this way from the following four ways, which are all of a more temporary nature and come to the fore every now and then. For this reason, these four ways14 should be considered a particularization of the first way. Minne can work in the human being in different ways, but in each case, it must be characterized as desire or passion. By following this desire, we are transformed or purified in Minne. This is how God breaks into our life or awakens us to His presence. One of the fundamental characteristics of the human being is that he is a desiring or longing being. As each of us knows from experience, this desire may be directed towards many diverse things, and to a great extent, it also determines our life choices. Although we identify ourselves with this desire, as human beings we, in fact, discover ourselves placed in this desire in a passive way. We are not truly aware of what moves us from within and only very slowly penetrate the s­uperficial levels of this desire. For Beatrice, God is at the origin of our Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, I, l. 1-4: ‘Dirste manire es ene begerde / die compt werkende uter minnen, / ende mut lange rengneren intherte, / eerse al die weder saken verwinnen mach, // The first way is a desire / which proceeds from Minne as dynamic activity. / It has to rule in the heart for a long time / before it can overcome all resistance’. The references are to the text of the Seuen maniren van minnen according to the manuscript in The Hague, published in: Jos Huls, The Minne-Journey. Beatrice of Nazareth’s ‘Seven Ways of Minne’: Mystical Process and Mystagogical Implications, Leuven/ Paris/ Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2013, 20-71 (text with English translation); and in idem, ‘Seuen maniren van minnen’ van Beatrijs van Nazareth: Het mystieke proces en mystagogische implicaties. 2 vols., Leuven/ Paris/ Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2002 (Miscellanea Neerlandica 28), vol. 1, 72-119 (text with Dutch translation). 14 Huls, The Minne-Journey, 329-330: ‘The first way formulates the general principle of the Minne-journey, namely, that Minne is the point of departure for the mystical journey. It’s not we who journey to God; rather, the power of the desire of Minne frees us from everything offering resistance. (…) The second and third ways reflect the human perspective in this process. When we place ourselves at the service of Minne, she has room to work effectively in our fundamental passivity. In the phenomenological description of Minne in the second way, the desire to serve Minne arises out of the desire of Minne herself. (…) The third way is becoming conscious of the fact that the pain of a dying life is the revelation of the face of Minne as Other. (…) In the same way, the fourth and fifth ways are two sides of the same coin in their description of the transformative dynamic of Minne. The fourth way shows how Minne, in her boundlessness, wants to unite us with herself, but the bliss of this dynamic activity simultaneously turns out to be the aggressive assault of Minne in the fifth way’. For a more elaborate commentary on the four ways, see The Minne-Journey, 126-242. See also: Huls, ‘Seuen maniren van minnen’ van Beatrijs van Nazareth. Vol. 1, 228-513; vol. 2, 1012-1014.

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desiring.15 He is the hidden countenance that enflames us with the desire for Him again and again. For this reason, we have to place all our trust in this desire and not fear its bottomlessness. It is God’s desire that is stamped on our lives, by way of which He lives inside of us. We have no control over it, we only feel the pain that Somebody wants to live us.16 Our problem, however, is that we find this pain unbearable. It is simply too much. Consequently, in our desire for fulfilment, we are continuously in search of things that are within our reach. Human desire is a shortcut or a bypass around the experience of a longing that is not even ours, but which leaves us wounded. As far as this goes, we ourselves, in our search for gratification and the easing of our pain, are our own worst enemy in this desire of love. Beatrice is aware that the path of Minne is long. We are not able to surrender just like that to a yearning that, in its fathomlessness, ultimately has no resting place in our own existence, because we are too finite for it, too limited for something that has no boundaries. We have great difficulty letting the pain of this longing in to its full extent. The images of our desire are the ‘paper screens’ Beatrice insists on this point. See I, 1. 1-2: ‘Dirste manire es ene begerde / die compt werkende uter minnen // The first way is a desire / which proceeds from Minne as dynamic activity’, I, l.8-9: ‘Dese manire es ene begerde / die sekerlike compt uter minnen // This way is a desire / which certainly proceeds from Minne’, and again in I, l.78-80: ‘Susschedane manire van begerden / van so groter purheit ende edelheit / compt sekerlic vter minnen // Such a way of desire / of such great purity and nobility / certainly proceeds from Minne’, in Jos Huls, The Minne-Journey, 20-25. This is significant because in the Seven Ways there are hardly any repetitions. She wants to convince us that the desire we experience is not ours. It has its origin in God. For a more elaborate commentary, see 81-125 and ‘Seuen maniren van minnen’ van Beatrijs van Nazareth, vol. 1, 150-227. See also William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 80, n. 201. 16 God is the immediacy of our mediate existence. As strong as this assertion may seem, and fearful as well, in that it seems to cancel our freedom of being, we have to understand our life not only as given by God, but also as the invitation to share in the fullness of His life. We only meet God as desire in us. It brings us back to the moment of our creation, in which we become aware of being nothing. God lives us from the beginning of our life and it is our calling to disappear in this love in which we do not exist on our own, but as his breath of life and his possession. See also: William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 94 (n. 257-258): ‘But “unity of spirit” with God for the man who has his heart raised on high is the term of the will’s progress toward God. No longer does it merely desire what God desires, not only does it love him, but it is perfect in its love, so that it can will only what God wills. Now to will what God wills is already to be like God, to be able to will only what God wills is already to be what God is; for him to will and to be are the same thing. Therefore, it is well said that we shall see him fully as he is when we are like him, that is when we are what he is. For those who have been enabled to become sons of God have been enabled to become not indeed God, but what God is: holy, and in the future, fully happy as God is. And the source of their present holiness and their future happiness is none other than God himself who is at once their holiness and their happiness’. 15

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that are to keep us from staring immediately in the face of this dizzying yearning.17 Minne is too much, so we try to make its absoluteness and intensity more bearable, but the moment we do so, it becomes an ‘I-love’; this is again a defence mechanism. We can turn everything into an escape; once we exhaust one thing, we move on to the next. But at the same time, we are searching for more, for something inexhaustible, also something that is a kind of fulfilment, a kind of home for our desire. In this tension, we make desire our own, while desire itself is sacred. As far as this goes, a human being is one big projection machine. Without even realizing it, we are constantly compromising with desire by keeping the dream alive that by gaining possession of its object, it can itself be laid to rest. Because the hunger of our desire is insatiable in us, we will be disappointed in this again and again. This longing will keep evoking new images in us that in turn demand gratification. Beatrice is convinced that the path of Minne can only be followed by remaining true to the absoluteness of its address.18 In our lives in general, we experience this address as a shock that breaks through the matter-of-course nature of our

Cf. Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, transl. Leif Sjöberg & W.H. Auden, New York: Vintage Books, 2006, 51: ‘These wretched attempts to make an experience apprehensible (for my sake? for others?) – the tasks of the morrow – Y’s friendship or X’s appreciation of what I have done: paper screens which I place between myself and the void to prevent my gaze from losing itself in the infinity of time and space. // Small paper screens. Blown to shreds by the first puff of wind, catching fire from the tiniest spark. Lovingly looked after – but frequently changed. // This dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis – only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it’. 18 Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, I, 78-98: ‘Susschedane manire van begerden / van so groter purheit ende edelheit / compt sekerlic vter minnen / ende nit van vresen, / want vrese dut / werken ende doegen, / duen ende laten, / van anxste der abolgen ons heren / ende dis ordels van din geregten rigtere, / ocht dir eweliker wraken / ocht dir tegancliker plagen. / Mar die minne es / allene werkende ende staende / na die purheit / ende die hoegheit / ende na die ouerste edelheit, / als si seluer es / in har seluer wesende, / hebbende ende gebrukende. / Ende susschedaen werc / leertse den genen die hars plegen. // Such a way of desire / of such great purity and nobility / certainly proceeds from Minne / and not from fear, / for fear performs / works and virtues, / actions and omissions, / out of anxiety for Our Lord’s wrath / and the judgment of the righteous judge: / be that eternal vengeance, / be that temporal punishment. / But Minne, in her dynamic activity, / is exclusively oriented towards purity, / loftiness / and the most exalted nobility, / just as she herself is / when she possesses herself and enjoys herself / in her essential being. / She teaches such dynamic activity / to those who dedicate themselves to her’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 24-27. For a more elaborate commentary, see ibid., 120-125 and idem, ‘Seuen maniren van minnen’ van Beatrijs van Nazareth. Vol. 1, 218-227. 17



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existence.19 This shock makes us realize that in what we are looking at, we are gazing in the living countenance of God. He is the treasure in the field that we – without knowing it – have been looking for our entire life.20 At the same time, this divine countenance remains intangible in everything, including ourselves. We cannot reach it. This is why Beatrice refers to it as a wound.21 Minne wounds us deeply. It confronts us with the ‘sacred’ that is the true object of our loving desire, but at the same moment evades our objectifying consciousness. For this reason, it keeps leaving us behind empty-handed in a longing that keeps searching in everything for this living countenance that permeates all of created reality. Minne evokes awe. Because of it, we come to realize that the reality we live in is ‘sacred’ and that this sanctity can only come to light if we learn to fall silent for the voice of our own human desire. In love, we have to make a distinction between the desire of Minne itself and our desire for satisfaction evoked by it, which is silenced. Love does indeed make us free.22 Through this confrontation Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, V, l. 67-97: ‘Ende so dunct hare / dat al har adren ontpluken, / ende har blut verwelt, / har march verswint, / ende har gebeinte vercrenct, / har borst verbert, / ende har kele verdroegt, / soe dat har anschin ende al har lede / gevulen der hitden van binnen / ende dis orvuts vander minnen. / Si gevult oec die wile / dat een gescutte geet / dor har herte totter kelen, / als ochse hars sens gemissen soude. / Ende geliker wis / als een verslindende vier / dat al in hem trect ende vertrect / dat [f 193v d] verweltgen mach, / also gevultse dat die minne / verwudelike es werkende in hare / sonder sparen ende sonder mate, / ende al in hare treckende ende terende. / Hir mede wertse / sere gequelt ende gequetst / ende har hert gecrenct / ende al har march verderft, / hare sile gevut, / har minne gefustert / ende har gest verhangen; / want minne es so hoge / bouen alle begriplicheit van hare magt. // It thinks / that all its blood vessels are bursting, / that its blood surges to a boil, / that its bone marrow melts away, / that its bones grow weak, / that its breast is burning / and that its throat is parched / in such a way that its face and all its members / feel the heat from within / and experience the violent impetuosity of Minne. / At the same time, it also feels / a shooting pain / running from its heart to its throat, / as if it were deprived of its senses. / And just as a devouring fire / draws everything to itself / and takes up everything it can overpower into itself, / so does the soul experience Minne, / passionately raging and dynamically active within it, / sparing nothing and without measure, / drawing everything to herself and consuming it. / This torments the soul / and wounds it intensely, / its heart is broken, / its very marrow is reduced to nothing, / its soul is fed, / its Minne is nourished / and its spirit is raised up and made to adhere, for Minne is so high, / above and beyond all comprehension’. Huls, The Minne-Journey, 42-45. For a more elaborate commentary, see ibid., 233-236, and: idem, ‘Seuen maniren van minnen’ van Beatrijs van Nazareth. Vol. 1, 444-485. 20 Cf. Mt. 13:44. 21 A. Cabassut, ‘Blessure d’amour’, in: Dictionnaire de spiritualité. Vol. 1 (1932), col. 1724-1729. 22 Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, I, l. 89-98: ‘Mar die minne es / allene werkende ende staende / na die purheit / ende die hoegheit / ende na die ouerste edelheit, / als si seluer es / in har seluer wesende, / hebbende ende gebrukende. / Ende susschedaen werc / leertse den genen die hars plegen. // But Minne, in her dynamic activity, / is exclusively o­ riented / towards 19

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with the sacred, we also come to understand that the images of our desire keep us from truly opening up to this hidden foundation of that which we love. The pain of God’s love that we seek to drown in us confronts us with our inability to hold Him in our arms. Our physicality is too fragile for the intensity of His love; we are everything God is not. Love, then, has to happen in the face-to-face contact. In this way, the address of Minne gradually changes our attitude in love. Where initially we were mainly focused on possessing the desired object, we now begin to realize that precisely this need to be satisfied in love ourselves keeps us from truly seeing the divine countenance of the beloved. In this regard, Beatrice speaks of our resistance in Minne.23 To truly complete the school of Minne, we will have to let ourselves be denuded by its address again and again, and keep searching for what truly moves us in it. By remaining in search of the divine countenance and not contenting ourselves with the satisfaction of possession, our resistance in Minne is very slowly broken down. In the school of Minne, the wound that the living countenance of God leaves behind in us is central. It is the compass on the path of Minne and by not avoiding its pain, we come to know the depth of its longing. The paradox in this regard is that it is not absence, but rather presence that causes this longing. It is precisely this effect of God’s countenance in us that makes us aware of the fact that we are trapped in the images of our desire. He is the troublemaker, undermining the matter-of-course nature of our own existence. He is accordingly also the One who sets us aflame in the abyss of this yearning. The realization, however, that the wound of Minne is itself, in its depths, the flip side of the immediacy of this Countenance, only dawns very gradually. As long as we are able to, we want to hold on to the dream that we can be satisfied in our desire. That God reveals himself precisely in the abyss of His longing24 (and therefore as absence) is something that only sinks in with great difficulty. purity, / loftiness / and the most exalted nobility, / just as she herself is / when she possesses herself and enjoys herself / in her essential being. / She teaches such dynamic activity / to those who dedicate themselves to her’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 26-27. See also William of SaintThierry, The Golden Epistle, 80, n. 201. Charity or Minne liberates us from all our curving back on ourselves and the anxiety causing all sorts of projections, so that our will or capacity to love and our reason become free and ‘conform to the truth in all things’. 23 It is in the encounter with Minne that we experience the resistance in Minne. See: Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, I, l. 1-4 (see note 13) and VI, l. 9-11: ‘Si gevult / dat die minne verwonnen heft / al har wedersaken binnen hare, // It experiences / Minne as having overcome / all resistance within it …’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 48-49. 24 In Himself, God is an eternal movement of love lived in perfect mutuality and self-surrender, in which He enjoys Himself, as Beatrice also speaks about towards the end of the first way: ... just as she herself is when she possesses herself and enjoys herself in her essential being, see ibid., 26-27 (I, l. 94-96). It is this very movement of self-surrender in love that Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity seeks to capture visually. See also note 36.



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The first five ways in the Seven Ways describe the process of purification in Minne, with all its emotional highs and lows. Beatrice’s main message in this process is that we should trust this desire of God in us.25 However painful it is, it is at the same time the compass that leads us to union with Minne. In this longing, after all, we gaze at the face of God. For this reason, the path of the desire of Minne is the surest way to become one with this desire in Minne. 4.  Two Higher Ways of Minne Both the sixth and the seventh way are described as higher ways of Minne.26 These two are above the other five ways, because they describe the union with Minne. The question is, however, whether we must then also conclude that these ways indicate a kind of ending, a final destination. Certainly, they are ‘higher’ in the sense that they describe a tipping point on the path of Minne, but this juncture should mainly be seen as the beginning of a new path that the tipping point has opened.27 That God is desire in Himself does not imply lack or shortage in his being but, on the contrary, only sheds more light on the fact that God is love. The dynamism of divine life lies precisely in the movement of his Minne as perfect intra-trinitarian longing and self-surrender that overflows to permeate and bring unto Himself everything that exists in the visible, created world. The Minne journey makes us participate in the intra-trinitarian Love encounter. See William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 95-96 (n. 263): ‘It is called unity of spirit not only because the Holy Spirit brings it about or inclines a man’s spirit to it, but because it is the Holy Spirit himself, the God who is Charity (Deus caritas). He who is the Love of Father and Son, their Unity, Sweetness, Good, Kiss, Embrace and whatever else they can have in common in that supreme unity of truth and truth of unity, becomes for man in regard to God in the manner appropriate to him what he is for the Son in regard to the Father or for the Father in regard to the Son through unity of substance. The soul in its happiness finds itself standing midway in the Embrace and the Kiss of Father and Son. In a manner which exceeds description and thought, the man of God is found worthy to become not God but what God is, that is to say man becomes through grace what God is by nature (homo ex gratia quod Deus ex natura)’. 26 See Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, VI, l. 2-5 (see note 27) and VII, 2-4: ‘Noch heft die salege sile / die seuende manire van hoger minnen, / die har nit luttel wercs en geft van binnen. // In addition, the blessed soul has / a seventh way of higher Minne, / which gives it no little work interiorly’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 54-55. 27 A new dawn is announced in the opening lines of the sixth way; the soul is raised up to share in the intimacy of Minne. Its transformative activity in us silences us to such a degree that we are brought to the threshold of being united with it. Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, VI, l. 2-11: ‘In der sesder maniren, / als die brut ons heren / vorder es comen / ende geclommen in mere vromen, / so gevultse / noch anders wesens van minnen / in narre ende in hoger kinnen. / Si gevult / dat die minne verwonnen heft / al har wedersaken binnen hare … // In the sixth way, / when our Lord’s bride / has progressed / and risen to a more p ­ owerful 25

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Most commentators view the sixth and seventh ways as a final stage that can only be attained by a few mystically gifted people. For this reason, we, as readers, can only admire these last ways. The sixth way apppeals more to the ­imagination than the seventh in this regard because this way describes the absolute dominion of Minne in the human being. Minne has finally overcome the resistance or the ‘ego’ in the human being, so that it can now reign in him untrammelled. Just like in a fairy tale, we want a ‘happy ending’ in Minne. The conclusion of the sixth way seems to give us exactly what we want in this regard, by closing with the words: VI, l. 116-12528 Dits vriheit der conscientien, sutheit dis herten, gutheit der sinne, edelheit der silen, hoegheit dis gest, ende een beginsel dis ewelics leuens. Dits in den vlesche een engelic leuen, ende hir na volget dewelike dat got ons allen geue. Amen.

This is freedom of conscience, sweetness of heart, goodness of the senses, nobility of the soul, exaltedness of spirit, and the beginning of eternal life. This is an angelic life in the flesh, and hereafter follows the eternal – may God give this to all of us. Amen.

5.  The ‘Problem’ of the Seventh Way The final words of the sixth way might just as easily be the close of the whole of the Seven Ways. The question, then, is what the seventh way is to add to this. This is all the more striking because the description of this way, consisting of 267 lines, constitutes about one third of the entire work. For Reypens, standing at the cradle of research into Beatrice, this is a reason to question the order of the various ways. He wonders whether the sixth and seventh ways were not

resoluteness, / it experiences / still another “being” of Minne / in a higher, more intimate knowledge. / It experiences / Minne as having overcome / all resistance within it …’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 47-49. This insight of Beatrice’s, in contrast to modern theories, corresponds to William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 88 (n. 235): ‘But in these matters a man is only beginning when he arrives at the end, for they do not admit of full perfection in this life’. It is an ongoing process without an end point such as ‘union’, because we become ever more lost in God. 28 Huls, The Minne-Journey, 54-55.



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accidentally interpolated29 as they were being copied, so that the seventh way ought, in fact, to come before the sixth. As an academic, however, he remains cautious and goes no further than a hypothesis. Although many researchers30 L. Reypens, ‘De ‘Seven manieren van Minne” geïnterpoleerd?, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 5 (1931), 287-322. Later, a revised version of the same article was included in Appendix IX of the critical edition of the Vita Beatricis: De autobiografie van de Z. Beatrijs van Tienen O.Cist. 1200-1268, ed. & introd. L. Reypens, Antwerpen 1964 (Studiën en Tekstuitgaven van Ons Geestelijk Erf 15), 227-262. 30 K. Heeroma, Spelend met de spelgoden: Middelnederlandse leesavonturen, The Hague: Bakker/ Daamen, 1969, 211-221. Heeroma attempts to solve the problem of the interpolation by assuming that we are dealing with a youthful work that was later revised by the author herself. Thus, the layout of the work as well as the seventh way date from a later period, and he recognizes in this last way ‘the unmistakable lament of an old woman who longs to be “dissolved”’. He advances three arguments for the different dates of composition: 1) The vocabulary of the seventh way is clearly different from that of the rest of the text. 2) The tone of the seventh way is more lyrical. 3) The close of the sixth way is a good conclusion for what precedes. St. Axters, Geschiedenis van de vroomheid in de Nederlanden 1, Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1950, 223-238, posits that, although the last sentence of the sixth way offers a satisfactory closing for the entire treatise and it seems that the possession of God that the soul longs for in the seventh way has in essence already been achieved in the sixth way, L. Reypens’s interpolationhypothesis is not exactly compelling: ‘Even if the Sixth Way subtly refers to the visio Dei, the soul that experiences this only in passing and for short moments may passionately long for the ongoing visio as soon as this unusual grace has passed. It is far from clear to us, though, why certain symptoms, which usually accompany a less perfect state, must obviously disappear once the soul reaches a more perfect state, why the echo of the cupio dissolvi of the mystical engagement can no longer be observed in a soul that has attained the mystical marriage’ (234-235). Herman Vekeman, Beatrijs van Tienen: Seven Manieren van Minne. Lexicografisch Onderzoek, I: Study of the object and the literary structure of the seven ways individually, in the light of the twelfth-century spirituality of Cîteaux. II: Lexicography of the complete verbal material by means of the study of the word in its context, Leuven 1967 (dissertation Catholic University of Leuven). In this study, Vekeman makes the following remarks in response to Reypens’s questions: ‘1) A common introduction to and separation of the fourth and fifth ways makes sense due to the unity of the two ways in both structure and content. 2) Because the Seuen Maniren describes love as a longing or desire, it is normal that only when the human transformation on earth has been completed (the sixth way), the longing for union with Him in the other life gains its full significance. Thus, the completed Divine love fittingly precedes the cupio dissolvi and the seventh way is a necessary ending in Beatrice’s representation of Divine love. 3) The visionary visio Dei did receive a spacious part in the seventh way. In her view, however, the perfect vision is not on earth but in heaven. For this reason, the visio Dei does not weaken the longing for ultimate liberation (cupio dissolvi) and the perfect vision, but intensifies it’ (370-374). P. Wackers, ‘Het interpolatieprobleem in de “Seven manieren van minnen” van Beatrijs van Nazareth’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 45 (1971) no.2, 215-230. P. Wackers believes that Reypens’s method of determining the content of the Seuen Maniren by means of the Vita Beatricis is not possible. The Vita Beatricis may help in forming an idea, but the meaning of the Middle Dutch text has to be sought primarily in that text itself. (Cf. Vekeman, Beatrijs van Tienen, 29

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after him have clearly proven that this hypothesis is invalidated by textual analysis, Reypens’s research question does indicate how difficult it apparently is to give this final way a place within the prevalent theories on mysticism. Most researchers agree that the mystical path finds its fulfilment in union. That union is itself – as the seventh way shows – a path accompanied by much pain and suffering, however, is far less obvious to most scholars. What makes the Seven Ways of Minne so special is the fact that this short treatise does not consider union with Minne as the end of the road, but rather makes this the beginning of an ongoing inner journey. Certainly, the sixth way describes what is a clear break from the perspective of the human being. A time comes when the purification process of Minne has so denuded the human being that a distinction can no longer be made between his own longing and the longing of Minne itself. This causes the centre of our longing to lie in Minne. We desire what Minne desires and are no longer able to desire anything apart from Minne.31 II, 372.) For this reason, Reypens’s starting point in approaching the interpolation question seems to him to be less than sound on various points: ‘1) He [L. Reypens] assumes – without argumentation – that the Middle Dutch text essentially contains a measure of bridal mysticism, whereas this is hardly the case. The object is clearly Beatrice’s minne-mysticism. 2) He isolates – erroneously, as is evident from the structural data – the final two ways from the other five. 3) He forgets that his idea of the essentially unchanging nature of the mystical blessing is merely a hypothesis. 4) He pulls certain words and sentences entirely out of their context. This is especially true of Minne and ewelicheit’ (219). Also, the flaws that K. Heeroma observes in the text are, according to P. Wackers, due to a misinterpretation of the text. ‘The aspect of age, however, is definitely irrelevant here. After all, every mystic has an aversion to the world, after having experienced the Divine. It is part of the order of things that he recalls with longing the blessedness he has once had the privilege of undergoing’ (219-220). Next, Wackers studies the difficult sections of the text that would make the interpolation hypothesis necessary: the ending of the sixth way, the ending of the seventh way, and the beginning of the fourth way. After studying the verbal material, the structure of the work, and the order of the Seven Ways, he comes to the conclusion that the Seven Ways are not the disjointed piece that L. Reypens and K. Heeroma make of it: ‘They rather turn out to be a highly coherent, very well thought-out, and particularly cleverly structured piece of prose. The literary structure of this work is so carefully composed that a refashioned – and therefore incorrect – content becomes highly unlikely. The content, indeed, proves to be equally well thought-out, provided one does not assume in advance that it ought to follow a certain pattern. The arguments for an interpolation are in part data from outside of the text and in part data from the text itself taken out of their context. All intra-textual data, on the other hand, point to the unity and coherence of the text. And from an academic point of view, data from a text itself are of more value than outside data when dealing with the question of a possible interpolation. Therefore, the question of an interpolation of the “Seven Ways of Minne” has to be answered with an unequivocal no’ (229). [The translation of the quotations from the bibliography mentioned here belongs to Rebecca Braun OSC]. 31 In its transformative and purifying work in us, Minne makes us obedient to its desire, transforming us in such a way that desire itself becomes central, rather than pursuing our satisfaction in it. Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, I, l. 8-22: ‘Dese manire es ene



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In the mystical union, we view everything and everyone from the perspective of the wound that Minne has caused in us. Through the purification process of Minne, this wound has ultimately become dearer to us than anything we could acquire in love. In the phase that preceded union, this wound of Minne also played a decisive role already, but only in the field of tension of the longing that it evokes in us and our desire for this longing to be fulfilled. Beatrice speaks of satisfaction in this regard.32 We wish to be satisfied in Minne so that we no longer have to feel the hole it leaves behind in us. At the same time, this wound only seems to deepen over time. Every time Minne gives us the rest of satisfaction, this only lasts for a short time. Its longing goes further and must be characterized as an ever-receding perspective. In this way, Minne keeps leaving us behind empty-handed and we miss our hold at every attempt to consider something in this love as our own possession. For when we want something for ourselves in Minne, we immediately become entangled in the images of our own desire, and ultimately love ourselves rather than the other in his own independence or his givenness in God. The process of dispossession and becoming transparent in Minne very gradually makes us aware that in this love the issue is not ourselves or our own satisfaction, but our hiddenness in the longing of Minne.33 Freed from ourselves begerde / die sekerlike compt uter minnen; / dats, / dat die gude sile / die getruwelike wilt dinen onsen here / ende vromelike wilt volgen / ende gewarlike minnen wilt, / dasse es gerigt in die begerde / te vercrigene ende te wesene / in die purheit / ende in die edelheit / ende in die vriheit, / dar sein gemact es van haren sceppere / na sin bilde ende na sin gelikenisse, / dat sere es te minne ende te hudene. // This way is a desire / which certainly proceeds from Minne: / in other words, / the good soul / who wants to serve Our Lord faithfully, / follow Him zealously, / and love Him genuinely, / is oriented in its desire towards / being-in-purity / beingin-nobility / and being-in-freedom, / and towards acquiring these attributes / in which it has been created by its Creator, / in His image and likeness. / This must be loved and guarded to the utmost’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 20-23. See also William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 94, n. 256; and 94, n. 257-258. 32 Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, IV, l. 20-28: ‘Hir in gevulse / eenre groter naheit te gode, / ende ene gestelike clarheit, / ende wonderlike verwentheit, / ende ene edele vriheit, / ende een groet bedwanc / van starker minnen, / ende ene ouervludege volheit / van groter genugden. // In this state, it experiences / an intense nearness to God, / a spiritual clarity, / a wonderful affirmation, / a noble freedom, / a powerful swell of strong love / and an abundant fullness / of profound satisfaction’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 36-37. 33 See Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, VI, l. 58-87: ‘Ende also gelic als die vesch / die swemt in die witheit vander vlut / ende rast heme in die dipheit, / ende als die vogel / die kunlike vligt / in die hochheit vander logt, / gelikerwis gevulse / haren gest vrilike wandelende / in die witheit / ende in die dipheit / ende in die verwentheit der minnen./ Geweldecheit der minnen / heft die sile / getrect ende geleit, / behut ende bescermt, / ende heft har gegeuen / die vrutheit ende die wisheit, / die sutheit ende die starcheit der minnen./ Nogtan hefse har verborgen geweldecheit / tottismale / dasse in meere hogheit geclommen es / ende dasse hars selfs [f 194v d] geweldech worden es / ende minne geweldeglike rengnert in hare./ Dan mactse

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by the transformative action of Minne in us, Minne is the order out of which we start to live effortlessly from now on, following it in total obedience, stripped of everything that before used to come between us and God. It is in this becoming transparent to and silenced in our earthly chaos that we have to understand our being hidden from ourselves as living in total surrender to Minne that is now the immediacy of our life. In our self-forgetfulness in and because of Minne, we truly become who we are, freed from ourselves to become His image in us.34 Our way with God is one of letting go of what comes between us and God, ourselves included. This is not something that we can do, but something He does in His love. He frees us from under our grip to open us up for Him. It is His way of embracing us, making us His, living in us, while still remaining untouchable. As human beings, we are called to lose ourselves in the infinitude of Minne and so become one with its longing. This unity in longing is also where true enjoyment is to be found. There, we come to know God not as an die sile so kune, / dasse en ontsiet / mensche noch vient / engel noch heilge / noch gode seluer, / in al haren dunne ende latene, / in werken ende in rasten. // Like a fish, / swimming with the current in the tide / and resting in the depths, / like a bird / dauntlessly flying/ in the heights of the sky, / so does the soul experience / its spirit, moving freely/ in the breadth, / the depth / and the affirmation of Minne. / The tremendousness of Minne / has drawn the soul / and led it,/ guarded it and protected / it, has given it / the prudence and the wisdom, / the sweetness and the strength of Minne. / Nevertheless, she’s hidden her tremendousness from the soul / until/ it has risen to greater heights / and has become tremendous itself / and Minne rules tremendously in it. / / Then she makes the soul so dauntless/ that it dreads / neither human person nor demon, / neither angel nor saint, / not even God Himself, / in everything that it does or leaves undone, / in activity and in rest’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 51-53.. 34 See also William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 97-98 (n. 268-271): ‘For the man who is chosen and loved by God is sometimes shown a certain light of God’s countenance, just as light that is enclosed in a man’s hands appears and is hidden at the will of him who holds it. This is in order that what he is allowed to glimpse for a passing moment may set the soul on fire with longing for full possession of eternal light, the inheritance of full vision of God. To make him realize to some extent what he lacks, grace sometimes as if in passing touches the affections of the lover and takes him out of himself, drawing him into the light of true reality, out of the tumult of affairs into the joys of silence, and to the slight extent of which he is capable, showing him for a moment, for an instant, ultimate reality as it is in itself. Sometimes it even transforms the man into a resemblance of ultimate reality, granting him to be, to the slight extent of which he is capable, such as it is. Then when he has learned the difference between the clean and the unclean he is restored to himself and sent back to cleanse his heart for vision, to fit his spirit for likeness, so that if at some future date he should again be admitted to it he may be the more pure for seeing and able to remain for a longer time in the enjoyment of it. For the limits of human imperfection are never better realized than in the light of God’s countenance, in the mirror which is the vision of God. Then in the light of true reality man sees more and more what he lacks and continually corrects by means of likeness whatever sins he has committed through unlikeness, drawing near by means of likeness to him from whom he has been separated by unlikeness. And so clearer vision is always accompanied by a clearer likeness’.



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object outside of ourselves, but from within, as a longing that is constantly being unleashed and forms the foundation of our existence. In everything and everyone, this longing is in search of the hidden face of God that intangibly permeates all of creation – and thus ourselves as well. This is indeed why this longing finds no resting place in something we could appropriate. If we do this anyway, because we cannot handle the infinitude of this longing, we are letting ourselves be led by the images of our desire and are blind to the Countenance that lies hidden behind the pain of this longing. The union with God is itself filled with our projections. We normally envisage it as the end of pain, but this is not necessarily so. To speak of union is to speak of a You and I bound by love, but in this union neither of them is cancelled. They still remain face-to-face, they do not merge or dissolve into each other.35 In this way, Minne teaches us, precisely in the pain of its longing,36 that it is only in falling silent for the voice of our own desire that we can open up to who the other truly is in God, and that it is only in this hiddenness from ourselves that we can be united with Minne. Union takes place the moment we so lose ourselves in Minne’s longing that we are no longer aware of ourselves. Then we have become so ‘dauntless and God is the immediacy of our life, but it remains unreachable and ungraspable. We are a mystery to ourselves and can only meet this immediacy in us, without ever appropriating it. We ourselves live a secret that always recedes and cannot be grasped. In this sense, we live God’s secret. He is the Gaze in which we live. Beatrice renders this as follows: ‘... di al [f 195r b] in alle denc es, / ende onbegriplic blift in allen dengen, // … who is all in all / and who remains incomprehensible in all things’. Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, VII, l. 17-19, in: Huls, The Minne-Journey, 57. See also William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 96 (n. 265-266): ‘In the face-to-face encounter we gaze into our origin and this origin fills us with desire. For he [the Holy Spirit] is the almighty Artificer who creates man’s good will in regard to God, inclines God to be merciful to man, shapes man’s desire, gives strength, ensures the prosperity of undertakings, conducts all things powerfully and disposes everything sweetly. He it is who gives life to man’s spirit and holds it together, just as it gives life to its body and holds it together. Men may teach how to seek God and angels how to adore him, but he alone teaches how to find him, possess him and enjoy him. He himself is the anxious quest of the man who truly seeks, he is the devotion of the man who adores in spirit and truth, he is the wisdom of the man who finds, the love of him who possesses, the gladness of him who enjoys’. 36 Minne evokes pain in us, the pain that we are empty-handed in our own existence and are created out of Another’s love for us that seeks to draw us, too, into the whirl of love at the centre of his divine Being. This love is a must, it is absolute and we can mingle nothing of ourselves in it. Once we give heed to it, it estranges us from our own ways, desires, images, and eventually from our own life. This love is our death in the sense that in order to enter it, it demands that we accept leaving ourselves behind, dying to all the things that are not God, ourselves included, until it makes us transparent to itself and it can fully dwell and work in us. As Beatrice puts it in the seventh way: ‘Minne trectse [die sile] bouen / ende heltse neder, / si geft die doet / ende brenct dat leuen … // Minne pulls it [the soul] up / and holds it down, / she gives death / and brings to life …’. Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, VII, l. 41-44, in: Huls, The Minne-Journey, 56-59. 35

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free’ in Minne that we let ourselves be moved solely by its longing, without resistance. This is why in union the pain of this longing itself is more pleasant and sweet to us than any form of satisfaction, which inevitably makes us revert back to ourselves. In this pain, after all, we participate in God’s own being and come to know Him as the deepest foundation of our own existence. In this sense, God does not exist and is not an object next to other objects. He is Minne and, as Minne, an erupting movement of love that comes into being in the ‘between’ of the face-to-face encounter. This movement of love has no end because nothing on earth exists of its own accord and everything is pervaded with a mystery that can only be expressed by the word ‘God’. In this way, Minne teaches us to love everything in God, by always being in search of the intangible Countenance that gazes at us and moves us in everything. Just as God is masterfully depicted in Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity as being in Himself a movement of love that arises in the face-to-face encounter,37 so also is He in us the wound of love that again and again makes us search for the living countenance of the other that lies hidden behind his physical form, beyond our grasp. Something happens in this eye contact. A mystery of love seems an appropriate name to give to it, the stillness of a love that at the same time never ceases to flow and move from one to the other, while also resting in the Other’s eyes. John of the Cross connects union with the virtue of humility.38 The purification process in Minne makes us humble. It makes us realize that in it, we have to fall silent for the voice of our own desire. How? Perhaps in seeing the desire in ourselves, we are silenced by an ever-growing pain from beyond that leaves us with nothing and burns our paper screens. Only then can love become the house in which we dwell. This does not mean, however, that the longing of Minne itself is satisfied. On the contrary, union rather draws longing beyond all limitations, because the human being is no longer bound to the images of his desire. He can finally gaze into the depths of this abyssal passion with his face uncovered, without being overcome by fear and seeking security for himself. It is through being silenced in oneself out of awe for the divine mystery that Andrei Rublev (ca. 1360/70 – ca. 1430). Rublev’s most famous work, and the only one to be ascribed to him with any certainty, is the icon of the Holy Trinity, dated ca. 1410. For its interpretation, see L.A. Ouspensky & V. Lossky, The Meaning of Icons. 5th ed., New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999 (first publ. 1952). For more, see also Gabriel Bunge’s study, The Rublev Trinity: The Icon of the Trinity by the Monk-painter Andrei Rublev, Santa Fe: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007. 38 See the bottom of John of the Cross’s sketch of the Ascent to Mount Carmel: ‘In this nakedness the spirit / finds its quietude and rest, for in / coveting nothing, nothing tires it / by pulling it up, and nothing oppresses it / by pushing it down, because it is in / the center of its humility’ (The Collected Works of John of the Cross, transl. K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez, Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991, 111). 37



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one sees in the other, the dichotomy that the longing of Minne evokes in the human being is also removed and the pain of this longing can from now on become the intimate space in which God reveals himself. The sixth way describes the union in Minne as the finale of the process of purification that came before. This does not mean, however, that we have then also arrived at the final destination of our inner journey in Minne. Rather, this journey is just now truly getting started. Minne has now, after all, been given an open field. It takes full possession of us now that we are silenced and our resistance to it is defeated. If, before, we could still withdraw behind the safe walls of our self-wilful existence, that is now no longer possible, because Minne has systematically broken these walls down. We no longer have any defence. Whatever might happen to us and whomever we might meet, in everything we are moved by the eyes of that which lies hidden beyond objective reality as a divine mystery or principle of eternity. Just as we can lose ourselves in the eyes of a loved one, this also happens here. The Countenance dispossesses us and draws us into a longing that lies in Minne, beyond all our own reasons.39 The seventh way describes the inner journey which, because of the union with, or the birth in Minne, gains a more intimate character. While before it was mainly the transformation process in Minne that took centre stage, now the emphasis comes to lie on Minne itself, which reveals itself to us as a Not that keeps inflaming us in its longing.40 It is elusive and it attracts unto itself. It makes Minne is without any why, as the second way reveals to us. Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, II, l. 2-9: ‘Ene ander manire / heftse oec [f 191v c] van minnen; / dasse bi wilen ondersteet / onsen here te dinne te verges, / allene met minnen, / sonder enech warumbe / ende sonder eenegen loen / van gratien ochte van glorien. // The soul also has / another way of Minne, / namely: now and then it ventures / to serve our Lord for nothing, / only for Minne, / without any why, / and without any reward / of grace or glory’, Huls, The MinneJourney, 26-27. 40 This not of Minne comes to the fore in the paradox itself of the dynamics of Minne, as described in the seventh way. See: Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, VII, l. 41-49 (see note 35). See also Huls, The Minne-Journey, 284: ‘When we’re taken up in the mutuality of Minne, her enjoyment of us leads to our fall into the abyss of her desire. Minne herself, as encounter, can’t be objectified in any way at all as anything belonging to our created existence. That’s why her possession of us is a perpetual experience of those boundary regions where we “have” Minne by disappearing into her, where we “have” Minne by being possessed by her, where we “have” Minne by being swept along with her. This dynamic can only be described in paradoxical terms since here we’re led, not by something, but by the “not-something” of Minne, showing us the abyss of her being in her immediacy. (…) Minne as encounter lies beyond every human frame of reference. That’s why her dynamic activity can only be referred to as lying within a realm of tension between extremes: heaven-earth, life-death, health-wounding, foolishness-wisdom. These paradoxes make us aware of the fact that Minne doesn’t allow herself to be objectified as something in reality, since she surpasses the limits of all we can imagine or experience. As “not-something”, she leads us into the abyss of her essential being and, there, 39

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sense, therefore, that pain comes back here, the pain that we cannot have enough of, since it is infinite. As Lisa Ekdahl spontaneously indicates in her song ‘One Life’, this Not can best be described as Countenance. There is something in the other which, as Countenance or divine mystery, escapes us. The other is more than just his objectifiable form and it is awe with regard to this intangible, divine face that again and again makes us continue on the path of Minne. The union with Minne causes this Countenance to obtrude on our consciousness more and more. Because of this, all of reality ultimately becomes pure Countenance. Whoever or whatever we love, in everything we are confronted with that which, as divine mystery, cannot be grasped within the reality of time and space.41 Because union causes the Countenance to increasingly become the foreground of our existence, our life is also placed in a different light. It is no longer the temporal, but the eternal that becomes important. Where before we were mainly driven by the material object of our love, now – due to the union with Minne – the focus lies on the Countenance that, in everything, keeps placing us in the flow of Minne. In this way, Minne directs us towards the absolute reality of God in everything. We start to see it everywhere and in everything, where before we took things at face value, and only stumbled on the visible. Minne itself is the Countenance that is loved in everything.42 It is also the she draws us in hoger wesen (that is, in her Minne-dynamic which has its point of rest in eternity) beyond created existence. Here, Beatrice wants us to realize that the paradoxical dynamic of Minne draws us into a state of existence which, in its immediacy, surpasses everything we can still call our life. We ourselves no longer live; Minne has become our life’. 41 See e.g. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, 127 (12: 35): ‘It does not seem absurd for me to say God lives by a law, because it is nothing else than charity. What else maintains that supreme and unutterable unity in the highest and most blessed Trinity, if not charity? Hence it is a law, the law of the Lord, that charity which somehow holds and brings together the Trinity in the bond of peace. All the same, let nobody think I hold charity to be a quality or a kind of accident in God. Otherwise, I would be saying, and be it far from me, that there is something in God which is not God. Charity is the divine substance. I am saying nothing new or unusual, just what St John says: “God is love” (1 Jn 4: 8). Therefore, it is rightly said, charity is God, and the gift of God. Thus charity gives charity; substantial charity produces the quality of charity. Where it signifies the giver, it takes the name of substance; where it means the gift, it is called a quality. Such is the eternal law which creates and governs the universe. All things were made according to this law in weight, measure, and number, and nothing is left without a law. Even the law itself is not without a law, which nevertheless is nothing other than itself. Even if it does not create itself, it governs itself all the same’. 42 This Countenance is the foundation of everything that exists, leaving its imprint within its entire creation and drawing unto itself that which belongs to itself. It is the there of our beginning, and the destination of our life’s journey. It evokes in us the longing for our home that we can never find here on earth. See Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, VII, l. 230-238: ‘Hir ombe wiltse altoes / der minnen volgen, / minne bekinnen / ende minnen gebruken, / ende dan mach har in dit ellende nit geschien. / Dar bi wiltse te land wert tiin, / darse har woninge in heft gestigt / ende al har begerde gerigt / ende met minnen in rast. // That’s why the soul always /



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homeland that we are ultimately searching for in Minne. Despite the familiarity that union brings with it, as a reality of encounter the Countenance always remains beyond the grasp of the human being. It is a familiarity that is experienced as a breakthrough every time; perhaps we know that it captures us in its rhythm, but it is always new, more intense, more revealing. It keeps gazing at us from beyond, as a Not that keeps bringing us back to the eternal dimension of our existence. For this reason, Beatrice will speak of exile at the end of the seventh way. In everything, Minne leaves us behind with a sense of abandonment. In everything, it causes us to feel the pain of yearning for a reality that, as Countenance, lies beyond the bounds of our temporal-spatial existence. 6.  The End of the Seventh Way The close of the seventh way is dominated entirely by the theme of exile. The Middle Dutch speaks of ellende in this regard, a term derived from the Latin ‘alliis landis’. Due to Minne, we become strangers in our own country. We are confronted even more with our finitude and temporality, and therefore we feel estranged from Love in a heightened way. Then death comes to mind as the gateway that frees us from this imprisonment in a body limited in both form and duration. That which used to be part of ‘our’ reality as a matter of course, wants to follow Minne, / to know Minne, / to enjoy Minne, / and it can’t do this in this exile. / That’s why it wants to move on to that land / where it’s established its dwelling, / where it’s focused all its desire, / where it rests with Minne’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 69-71. See also William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 98-99 (n. 274-276): ‘In this regard man is easily led to love God by thinking about or contemplating what is worthy of love in him, which of itself shines upon the affections of the contemplative: his power and strength and glory and majesty and goodness and beatitude. But what especially carries man away in his spiritual love into the object of his love is that God in himself is whatever there is lovable in him; he is in the whole of himself what he is, if one can speak of a whole where there is no part. In his love of this good the devout man who has been so affected centres himself upon it in such a way as not to be distracted from it until he becomes one or one spirit with him. Once arrived at this point he is separated and kept at a distance only by the veil of this mortality from the Holy of Holies and from that supreme beatitude of highest heaven. Yet since he already enjoys it in his soul through his faith and hope in him whom he loves, he is able to bear what is left of this life also with a more ready patience. This is the goal for which the solitary strives, this is the end he has in view, this is his reward, the rest that comes after his labors, the consolation for his pains; and this is the perfection and the true wisdom of man. It embraces within itself and contains all the virtues, and they are not borrowed from another source but as it were naturally implanted in it, so that it resembles God who is himself whatever he is. Just as God is what he is, so the disposition of the good will in regard to the good of virtue is so firmly established in the good mind and impressed on it that in its ardent clinging to unchangeable Good it seems utterly unable to change from what it is’.

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now becomes Countenance, and therefore a reference to something that escapes it, because it belongs to eternity. At first glance, this theme of exile seems to be in line with the medieval view in which earthly existence is seen as a transitional period. Against this miserable existence on earth is the eternal life of heaven, which is seen as a place of bliss. The idea that life on earth is temporary is, in many ways, contrary to the modern sense of life, that mainly stresses living here and now and does not care to concern itself with speculation about the gateway of eternity. Nevertheless, this is not the intention of the seventh way. It describes the eternal dimension of Minne, which lies precisely in the structure of the immediacy of the encounter. We do not know what happens in the encounter. It is pure reciprocity. In it, each of the persons involved in the encounter is ‘gone’ in the eyes of the other. This is so intimate that the encounter itself escapes our conscious mind. The moment we realize we are looking at the other, the encounter is already over. Encounter is a way of forgetting about ourselves in the eyes of the Other, while at the same time being entirely present in it. As immediacy, the encounter itself remains hidden beyond the horizon of our consciousness.43 We can only recognize it in the consequences it entails. God sweeps us off our feet. The encounter makes us aware of the Not of the other that, as sanctity, lies beyond the grasp of our objective observation. In Minne, the other can therefore no longer be loved on his own. He is Countenance and, as Countenance, is nothing but reference to the divine mystery that lies hidden in him. When Beatrice speaks of earthy life as exile, she is referring to the tension that the dimension of eternity, as Countenance, evokes in the here and now of our human existence. This causes us to keep searching in Minne for ‘something’ that, as an ever-receding perspective, lies beyond objective reality. Because the Countenance has become absolute in the seventh way, in this phase of the 43

See also William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 100, 103-104 (n. 279, 292-293): ‘For wisdom is indeed piety, that is, the worship of God, the love by which we yearn to see him and, seeing him in a mirror obscurely, believe and hope in him and advance even to see him as he reveals himself’ (…) Just as the spirit has perception of corporeal things through the bodily senses, so it knows things pertaining to the reason or the spirit only through itself. But the things of God it can seek or expect to understand only by God’s gift. Indeed it is lawful and possible for man possessed of reason to think and enquire sometimes of some things which concern God, such as the sweetness of his goodness, the power of his strength and other like matters. But what he is in himself, his essence, can only be grasped by thought at all insofar as the perception of enlightened love reaches out to it. Yet God is to be attained by faith and, to the extent that the Holy Spirit helps our weakness, by thought as Eternal Life living and bestowing life; the Unchangeable and immutably making all changeable things; the Intelligent and creating all understanding and every intellectual being; Wisdom that is the source of all wisdom; fixed Truth that stands fast without any swerving, the Source of all truth and containing from eternity the principles of all things that exist in time’.



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­ ystical process the human being yearns with his entire being44 for this eternal m dimension of reality, which has become his true home.45 The Endless Journey of the Soul VII, l. 230-23846 Hir ombe wiltse altoes der minnen volgen, minne bekinnen ende minnen gebruken, ende dan mach har in dit ellende nit geschien. Dar bi wiltse te land wert tiin, darse har woninge in heft gestigt ende al har begerde gerigt ende met minnen in rast.

That’s why the soul always wants to follow Minne, to know Minne, to enjoy Minne, and it can’t do this in this exile. That’s why it wants to move on to that land47 where it’s established its dwelling, where it’s focused all its desire where it rests with Minne.

In the above quotation, Beatrice describes the alienating or dispossessing effect of the Countenance in Minne. Whoever or whatever we love, it can only be loved in God. God is the pain that makes us go in search of His living Countenance that lies hidden behind everything. This is why in Minne, the soul ultimately does not love anything but Minne itself anymore, and in the end, only one wish remains to the soul: that it may, in self-oblivion, forever disappear in this Countenance gazing at us from beyond, and so become one with Minne. In this regard, Beatrice speaks of her dwelling (l. 236). In the seventh way, this self-oblivion in In the seventh way Beatrice introduces the stronger word ‘verlangenisse’ (yearning) instead of ‘begerde’ (desire). See Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, VII, l. 117-118: ‘har verlancnisse / quelt se jamerlike, // Its yearning / torments it miserably’, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 62-63. See also: Seuen maniren van minnen, VII, l. 123, 149, 165, 184, 202, in: ibid., 62-67. 45 William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 99-100 (n. 277): ‘For when that “taking up by the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, our King”, befalls the man of God, the wise and devout soul, with grace to enlighten and assist it, in the contemplation of supreme Good gazes also upon the laws of unchangeable Truth to the extent that it is found worthy to attain to them by means of the understanding that comes of love. From this it forms for itself a way of life which is heavenly and a model of holiness. For it gazes upon supreme Truth and everything which derives truth from it, upon supreme Good and everything which derives goodness from it, upon supreme Eternity and everything which derives from it. It models itself upon that Truth, that Charity and that Eternity while directing its life here below. It does not fly above those eternal realities in its judgment but gazes up at them in desire or clings to them by love, while it accepts the realities of this created world to adapt and conform itself to them, not without using its judgment to discriminate, its power of reasoning to examine and its mind to appreciate’. 46 Huls, The Minne-Journey, 68-71. 47 Cf. Phil 3:20; Hebr 11:16. 44

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Minne has become her home. There she is truly who she is in God. There she is also taken up in the eternal movement of Minne itself. At the same time, this also causes her exile (l. 234). After all, we remain human, and as humans, bound to our own self-awareness. However conscious we may be that our home is in the immediacy of Minne, in our experience these are never more than moments. We cannot possibly settle there once and for all. The chasm between our existence, which is bound to our ego, and this experience of immediacy, however, does keep getting deeper due to the change of perspective in the seventh way. The more we realize that our home is in the immediacy of Minne, the more we also experience our ego-bound existence as alienation or exile. Consequently, the pain of exile only increases in the course of the seventh way. The Final Objective of Minne The end of the seventh way is characterized by the adverb ‘there’, which is repeated as many as five times. In contrast with the word ‘here’, it refers to a point that is beyond our reach. Because this concerns a final section of the text, the most obvious interpretation is to connect this ‘there’ with eternal life after death. That which is still hidden ‘here’, in our earthly existence, will ‘there’, after our death, be able to come to light in its fullness. For Beatrice, though, eternity also refers to the intangible dimension of God in the here and now of our existence, where He breaks through. However, it is not a continuum, but a collection of moments; we long or He longs in us for permanence. As she writes at the beginning of the seventh way: VII, l. 10-2248 ende es getrect allene met eweliker minnen in die ewelicheit, ende in die onbegriplicheit, in die witheit ende in die ongerinlike hogheit, ende in dien dipen afgront der gotheit, di al [f 192r b] in alle denc es, ende onbegriplic blift in allen dengen, ende es onwandelic

Huls, The Minne-Journey, 54-57. Cf. Eph. 3:18. 50 Cf. Col 3:11. 51 Cf. Eph. 3:19. 48 49

It’s drawn by eternal Minne alone into the eternity, the incomprehensibleness, the breadth, the unapproachable height, and the deep abyss of the Godhead,49 who is all in all50 and who remains incomprehensible in all things,51 who is unchanging,



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al wesende, al mogende, al begripende, ende al geweldelike werkende.

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all-essential, omnipotent, all-encompassing, and who accomplishes everything with tremendous power.

God is the core or the foundation of all that exists. At the same time, as living Countenance of all this, He remains hidden below the horizon of our objectifying consciousness. For this reason, God is always a there. However intensely we may be connected with God, He remains Countenance and cannot reveal Himself to us as anything other than Countenance. For Beatrice, this applies not only to our relationship with God, but also to God in Himself. God in Himself is Countenance or sheer reciprocity that sets the flow of Minne in motion, in the immediacy of seeing and being seen.52 Beatrice here follows the Aristotelian principle that God is the unmoved mover. God is present in everything as the unchanging foundation of all that exists. At the same time, He is Countenance and for us always remains a ‘Not’ that makes us search for Him in everything.53 It is indeed for this reason that Beatrice uses the word there at the end of the seventh way. This there is the divine mystery in everything – and thus also in ourselves – that intangibly permeates all of creation, but as Countenance always remains beyond the reach of our urge to manipulate.54

Cf. the icon of the Holy Trinity by Andrei Rublev. See note 36. See also William of Saint-Thierry, The Golden Epistle, 104-105 (n. 294-297): ‘His life itself is his essence, his very nature. He is his own life by which he lives, and it is divinity, eternity, greatness, goodness and strength existing and subsisting in itself, transcending all place in the power of a nature not bounded by place, by its eternity rising above all time that can be conceived by reason or imagination. It exists in a manner that is far more true and excellent than can be grasped by any kind of perception. Yet humble and enlightened love attains to a more certain perception of it than any effort of the reason to grasp it by thought, and it is always better than it is thought to be. Yet it is better thought than spoken of. It is the supreme Essence, from which all being comes forth. It is the supreme Substance, not confined within the predicaments we formulate but the subsistent causal Principle of all things. In it our being does not die, our understanding makes no mistake, our love meets with no offence. It is always sought in order that it may be found with greater pleasure and is found with utmost pleasure in order that it may be sought the more diligently. Since this ineffable reality can be seen only in an ineffable way, the man who would see it must cleanse his heart, for it cannot be seen or apprehended by means of any bodily likeness in sleep, any bodily form in waking hours, any investigation of the mind, but only by humble love from a clean heart. For this is the face of God which no one can see and live in the world. This is the Beauty for the contemplation of which everyone sighs who would love the Lord his God with his whole heart and his whole soul and his whole mind and his whole strength. Neither does he cease to arouse his neighbor to the same if he loves him as himself’. 54 The adverb ‘dar’ (there) was used before in VII, l. 61 & VII, l. 83. In this context as well, reference is being made to the absolute reality of God, which in its immediacy forms the Countenance of our reality, as created in space and time. 52 53

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VII, l. 239-26755 Want si kint wale, dar wert har al lettenisse af gedaen, ende wert dar liflike van liue ontfaen. Want dar salse begerlike an sien dasse so morwelike heft gemint, ende salne hebben te hare eweliker vromen dinse so getruwelike heft gedint, ende sins gebruken met volre genugden dinse decke met minnen in har sile heft behelst. Dar salse gaen in die bliscap hars heren, als sinte augustijn sprict: ‘Die in geet in di, hi geet in die bliscap sins heren, ende hin sal hem [f 197r b] nit ontsien, mar hi sal hem hebben alre betst in den alre betsten’. Dar wert die sile vereneget met haren brudegome ende wert een geest met heme in onschedeliker minnen ende in eweliker trouwen. Ende dieheme gufent heft in den tide der gratien, hi sal sins gebruken in eweliker glorien, dar mi nit anders en sal plegen dan louen ende minnen. Dar ons allen got hastelic tu bringe.

For the soul knows good and well: there it will be stripped of every impediment and lovingly received by the beloved. There it will contemplate with desire what it has so tenderly loved, it will possess for its own eternal advantage Him whom it has so faithfully served, it will enjoy with full satisfaction Him whom, in its soul, it has so often embraced with Minne. There the soul will enter the joy of its Lord, as St. Augustine says: ‘He who enters into you, enters into the joy of his Lord.56 He won’t fear. Rather, he will possess Him, the most excellent of all excellences’.57 There the soul will be united with its bridegroom, and become one spirit with Him58 in inseverable Minne and eternal fidelity. And the one who has practiced Him in the time of grace shall enjoy Him in eternal glory, where there’s nothing except praise and love. May God bring us there quickly.

amen

amen

As stated, in the conclusion of the seventh way the word there refers to the dialogical nature of the experience of God. God reveals Himself to us as ­Countenance. The word there is accordingly not only an expression of distance, but also of intimacy. It is precisely in the intimacy of the encounter that we become aware of the unapproachability of the other, who is in himself a divine mystery and can, therefore, only reveal himself to us in our silence. This is why we call it sacredness, Huls, The Minne-Journey, 70-71. Cf. Mt. 25:21. 57 Augustine, Confessionvm libri 13, lib.II, 10 (18), l. 5-6 (cccl, 27, 26): ‘Qui intrat in te, intrat in gaudium domini sui et non timebit et habebit se optime in optimo’. 58 Cf. 1 Cor 6:17. 55 56



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because something remains other-worldly in it, untouchable for us, yet directed to us and embracing us. In this sense, the intimacy of Minne only exists by the grace of a there that enduringly gazes at us from beyond, and so keeps drawing us out of ourselves. In Minne, we come to know the other as a divine mystery or as a window to eternity that should be cherished at all times. In this way, Minne teaches us that in the foundation of our existence we are all Countenance. Without this ‘Not’ that keeps making us search for who the other is in God, Minne would cease to exist. God is thus a there in the here and now of our existence that, in everything, keeps placing us in the movement of Minne. The conclusion of the seventh way is of a speculative nature. It attempts to put something into words that we cannot really say anything about, because as immediacy it lies beyond the reality of space and time. For this reason, Beatrice links it to the eternal or eternity. For her, however, eternity is not something separate from created reality. As Countenance, it is inextricably bound up with it and at the origin of it. The final section of the text should accordingly be read first and foremost as a reference to the deeper dimension of our existence. Eternity shines through our existence and Minne opens us to this reality. Due to Minne, we come to realize that God is sheer Countenance, and that by losing ourselves in it, we are taken up in this eternal flow of love. There, in the selfforgetfulness of Minne, we are at home in God and God is at home in us. At the same time, this point of encounter, in its immediacy, always remains a there. For we are invited to step into this space of love, we are transformed in it and by it, we become transparent to it, we are swept into love and forget about ourselves, but there is always the awareness of who we are that remains with us. We live this experience within our boundaries, and although we seem to go over the boundaries in love, we remain confined to them. We bear the stamp of who God created us to be. Once we have returned to our self-awareness, we are merely a spectator of the encounter in Minne. This hiddenness to ourselves, however, does not make it any less real. For Dag Hammarskjöld, this was the reason to call it a dream that is etched into the mind far deeper than the witness of the eyes.59 It is a dream that makes us realize that our ego-bound existence is itself a dream that we have to keep waking up from. In the Seven Ways, Beatrice hardly ever makes use of explicit quotations. An exception to this is the above-mentioned quote from the Confessions of St. Augustine: He who enters into you, enters into the joy of his Lord. He will not fear. 59

Cf. Hammarskjöld, Markings, 74: ‘Where does the frontier lie? Where do we travel to in those dreams of beauty satisfied, laden with significance but without comprehensible meaning? Etched into the mind far deeper than the witness of the eyes. Where all is well – without fear, without desire. Our memories of physical reality, where do they vanish to? While the images of this dream world never grow older. They live – like the memory of a memory’.

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Rather, he will possess Him, the most excellent of all excellences.60 He will possess Him as a container possesses a gift: God offers Himself to us to be lived, so in this sense, we can say we possess Him, but we can never hold Him in our arms. The provocative thing about this quote is that it proceeds from God Himself. He is the great lover who wants to receive us in His joy. In His love, He seeks our countenance and it is in this being sought by God that we go in search of His Countenance. This view fits in well with the first letter of John, which states that we love God because God loved us first.61 This intuition is also at the heart of Beatrice’s work, which assumes that the origin of Minne lies in God’s Countenance. It is God’s eyes that make us set out on the journey with Minne. At the same time, these eyes remain hidden beneath the horizon of our consciousness. The wound of Minne itself, however, that the Countenance leaves behind in us, cannot be denied. Because of this wound, we have an awareness of this Gaze that, in Minne, burns away everything that is not God. God is Minne, and in our existence cannot be experienced as anything other than the desire of Minne. This is why John can say in the same letter that no one has ever seen God (1 Jn 4:12). We cannot see God in any other way than in the pain of the Not He leaves us in, and in which He keeps making us search for His Countenance. This pain makes us nomads going in search of Him, estranged from the familiar world of images we have of Him, which only intensifies the desire or pain for Him. Because of this Not, however, we do slowly become aware that God is a there and as there is the space where we are received. Although the above quote from Augustine only occurs once in the Confessions in its entirety, part of this quote that refers to Matthew 25:21 also occurs in the passage where the author is conversing with his dying mother. In this poignant conversation, both express their desire for that which, as Countenance, lies hidden beneath the horizon of our existence in space and time. Augustine calls this ‘there’ ‘the eternal life of the saints (…), which “neither eye has seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man”’.62 It is also our struggle with God; we have to live this desire as a promise that will be fulfilled, but which seems to evade the confines of this life. The difficulty is that we have to be patient and wait for Him. He has the last word. The desire of Augustine and his mother eventually becomes so strong that it makes the visible and tangible reality disappear into nothingness. The image that Augustine uses here is that Augustine, Confessions, II, x, 18. Cf. Beatrice of Nazareth, Seuen maniren van minnen, VII, l. 250-251. The quote is partially a reference to Mt 25:21. See also Saint Augustine, Confessions, transl. Henry Chadwick, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 80: ‘The person who enters into you ‘enters into the joy of the Lord’ (Mt. 25: 21), and will not be afraid; he will find himself in the supreme Good where it is supremely good to be’. 61 1 Jn 4:19. 62 Augustine, Confessions, IX, x, 23, 260. Cf. 1 Cor 2:9. 60



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of a climb, in which they ultimately leave behind not only all earthly matters, but also all the projections of the human mind. There, above everything that is tangible and imaginable, they come to be alone with that which, as divine Countenance, always remains outside our human sphere of influence. However, this is not all. In the fire of their conversation, they briefly touch on this reality. This ecstatic experience is characterized by an elusive stab to the heart that briefly knocks them out of their ego-bound perspective. Beyond this, Augustine can say little about it, because the experience strikes him dumb. We are indeed totally silenced by this experience. This is what contemplation is about, but it is also more than that. It is only afterwards – once Augustine has returned to himself and can think about this experience – that the conversation can get going again. Next, the perspective of the conversation changes and the emphasis comes to lie on falling silent. Augustine continues: Therefore we said: If to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air are quiescent, if the heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking about itself, if all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language and every sign and everything transitory is silent – for if anyone could hear them, this is what all of them would be saying, ‘We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who abides for eternity’ (Ps 79:3,5) – if after this declaration they were to keep silence, having directed our ears to him that made them, then he alone would speak not through them but through himself. We would hear his word, not through the tongue of the flesh, nor through the voice of an angel, nor through the sound of thunder, nor through the obscurity of a symbolic utterance. Him who in these things we love we would hear in person without their mediation. That is how it was when at that moment we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things. If only it could last, and other visions of a vastly inferior kind could be withdrawn! Then this alone could ravish and absorb and enfold in inward joys the person granted the vision. So too eternal life is of the quality of that moment of understanding after which we sighed. Is not this the meaning of ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord’ (Mt 25:21)?63

With this discourse, Augustine reveals that for him, too, eternity is the depth dimension of our existence as creatures in space and time. In everything and everyone we meet, we gaze in the face of eternity. Eternity is the there in the here and now of our existence, and only by learning to fall silent for everything that binds us to the images of our desire, can we be opened for its hidden activity in our existence. This description also points to the core of Beatrice’s message in the seventh way. This is that in everything, Minne directs us to the Counte63

Augustine, Confessions, IX, x, 25, 261-262.

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nance. In everything we love, there is always a ‘beyond’ gazing at us and it is in this being seen that we are swept up in the movement of love that is in search of this Countenance in everything. This is why Minne asks us to let go of everything that impedes or darkens our view of this Countenance. This also appears to be the deeper meaning of the Judeo-Christian commandment to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind.64 Loving God has to do with nothing but the absoluteness of love. To ‘love God’, then, refers not so much to the object of our love, but to a quality of love. Love will not suffer us to be focused on anything other than the Countenance. Only in this way can we be completely ‘gone’ in love. Minne, then, exists by the grace of the Countenance and without this there that lies hidden in everything, Minne ceases to exist. (Translator: Rebecca Braun OSC)

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Cf. Mt 22:37 & Deut 6:5.

Sander Vloebergs TWO DISTINCT VOICES DURING THE AGE OF LOVE Hadewijch and Lutgard of Tongeren

The thirteenth century can rightfully be called the age of Love. The theme of love dominated both profane and religious literature and allowed for creative writers to explore the possibilities of cross-over imagery and traveling concepts, thereby creating a new genre called ‘mystique courtoise’. Barbara Newman says that ‘mystique courtoise’ is the result of the interaction between courtly love literature and mystical literature, which in turn was the basis for late medieval love mysticism.1 One of the most prominent writers in this genre is the thirteenth-century poet and mystic, Hadewijch. This ‘aristocratic soul’ was a highly schooled female writer who developed a radical love theory, which she shared with a close circle of intelligent mystical apprentices.2 However, Hadewijch’s elitist ‘School of Love’ was not developed in isolation but in connection to the mystical and devotional context of the diocese of Liège. In this context, holy women and their hagiographers wrote and performed variations of this love mysticism. This article focuses on a comparison between Hadewijch and a holy woman called Lutgard of Tongeren to study two distinct love theories. Comparative studies of variations of love mysticism in both hagiographical and mystical writings are rare, despite widespread scholarly interest in female medieval spirituality.3 Methodological difficulties, voiced by scholars such as Amy Hollywood and Dyan Elliot, might have discouraged comparisons between the two

Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, 169. 2 Paul Mommaers, Hadewijch: Writer – Beguine – Love Mystic, Leuven: Peeters, 2004, 45-48. 3 Feminist scholars and historians who aimed to study the particularity of female spirituality during the Middle Ages contributed to the field during the last decades. Carolyn Walker Bynum’s name needs to be mentioned in this regard, as she pioneered this research. For an overview of feminist studies in Christian spirituality, see Amy Hollywood, Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016 (Gender, Theory and Religion), 93-116. 1

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different literary genres.4 These authors were right in calling out the pitfalls of oversimplifications and generalizations such as the indiscriminate use of terms like ‘female spirituality’. Nevertheless, their sharp distinction between mystical and ­hagiographical authors suggested false dichotomies that paralyzed fruitful comparative studies of mystical communities, consisting of mystics, saints, and their admirers.5 I argue in favour of a comparative study of mystical and hagiographical texts that takes into account the methodological questions raised by the secondary literature. I do not focus on the differences between two separate genres, but I presume one shared textual network to study differences in mystical theological ideas. I use the concepts of ‘mystical culture’ and ‘collective memory’ to study different interpretations of typical imagery and practices. Barbara Newman argues that mystical authors are connected to a community, and she discusses the transmission of watered-down mystical ideas across different literary genres, with readerships ranging from mystical circles of educated insiders to broad audience of believers with another socio-cultural background.6 Thom Mertens proposed studying a similar intertextual exchange of Amy Hollywood argues in The Soul as Virgin Wife, and again in Acute Melancholia, that the study of female spirituality should take into account the mediation of the male hagiographer. She only trusts the writings of the women themselves. Nevertheless, she also acknowledges the fallacy of applying the modern concept of ‘female’ to historical texts and states that future research should focus more on differences between women authors and representations of women (and men). See Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995, 25-28; Idem, ‘Acute Melancholia’, 99. Dyan Elliott argues that the hagiographer makes pragmatic choices in order to present his saint as holy for a broad audience. He needs to interpret the female saint’s behaviour and mediates between her and the audience. He presents literary interpretations of mystical imagery. Dylan Elliott, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 181. 5 The social roles of saint and mystic were not mutually exclusive in the Late Middle Ages. Sainthood is a social construct and employs a category of holiness that can be applied to both mystics and saints. Saints, and, by extension, mystics are ‘superlative figures’ that mediate between God and the community. See Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski & Timea Szell, Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, Ithaca/ London: Cornell University Press, 1991, 3, 15-17. Werner Williams-Krapp argues that modern categorizations determined the division into literary genres while these divisions and categorizations were sometimes irrelevant to a medieval audience. Werner Williams-Krapp, ‘Literary Genre and Degrees of Saintliness: The Perception of Holiness by and about Female Mystics’, in: Anneke Mulder-Bakker (Ed.), The Invention of Saintliness, London/ New York: Routledge, 2002, 206-216. Rob Faesen states that the hagiographer’s first concern is to encourage devotion for the saint and to inspire virtuous imitation, and not to discuss the mystic’s mystical growth. However, this does not translate into a complete abnegation of the saint’s own mystical ideas. Hagiographers aimed to faithfully convey these ideas within the hagiographic genre, with its own (broader) audience. Rob Faesen, ‘Mystiek en hagiografie: Hoe behandelt de anonieme auteur van de Vita Beatricis het verschijnsel mystiek?’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 73 (1999), 97-110: 96-105. 6 Newman, God and the Goddesses, 169.

4



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ideas across genres by using the concept of ‘mystical culture’. He argued that the representatives of a mystical culture share a similar worldview and the same ideological framework, where mystical ideals are evaluated, stimulated, or repressed.7 My analysis and methodology take the concept of ‘mystical culture’ one step further. I argue that mystical authors like Hadewijch are not only the catalyst of radical and refined mystical ideas, but that they are influenced by and react to popular mysticism and devotional practices as presented in vitae and performed by saints. There is a mutual exchange between the mystic and the mystical culture. This article refers to the mystical culture of the diocese of Liège, to which both H ­ adewijch and Lutgard belonged.8 I use the common ground of their mystical culture to analyse mutations, transmissions, and rejections of different mystical ideas, employing a hermeneutical methodology.9 Love is the crux of these different ideas traveling through the mystical culture of Liège in the thirteenth century. These ideas on love, expressed in different love theories, are not trivial. On the contrary, they are crucial to a mystical theology that defined and defied God as Love. This article compares the vita of Lutgard of Tongeren, written by Thomas of Cantimpré,10 to the mystical writings of Hadewijch.11 Both texts contributed to Thom Mertens, ‘Mystieke cultuur en literatuur in de late middeleeuwen’, in: F.P. Oostrom (Ed.), Grote Lijnen: Synthese over middeleeuwse letterkunde, Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1995, 118-127. 8 This mystical culture was heavily influenced by Cistercian spirituality and by beguine culture. See Simone Roisin, L’hagiographie cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au xiiie siècle, Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947; Alcantara Mens, Oorsprong en betekenis van de Nederlandse begijnen- en begardenbeweging: Vergelijkende studie: xiide-xiiide eeuw, Antwerpen: Standaard, 1947; Walter Simons, City of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 9 I perform this literary and theological analysis based on the advice of Carolyn Walker Bynum and Joris Reynaert, who argue that literary imagery should be studied as a network of interconnected images and allegories. Focusing on one image entails reflection on interconnected imagery in the same cluster. I study one of these clusters via a close reading of the source material, using a hermeneutical methodology and a historical contextualization of the source text. Carolyn Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 7; Joris Reynaert, De beeldtaal van Hadewijch, Tielt/ Bussum: Lannoo, 1981, 23-30. 10 Lutgard was born in Tongeren in 1182 to a noble and rich family. She was admitted into the Benedictine monastery of St Catherine near Sint-Truiden at the age of twelve. In 1208, she was admitted at Aywières (Awirs), near Liège. Thomas of Cantimpré wrote her vita, which he finished after 1266. He was born around 1200. In his long career as a preacher and confessor he completed three major literary works: an encyclopedia called Liber de natura rerum, a collection of exempla called Bonum universale de apibus, and his saints’ lives. He wrote a Supplement to the life of Marie of Oignies, and the lives of Abbot John of Cantimpré, Margeret of Ypres, Christina the Astonishing and Lutgard of Aywières. 11 Hadewijch’s birthplace and date of birth are unknown. However, there is scholarly consensus that she was born in the region of Brabant in the diocese of Liège. Hadewijch was known in the nearby abbey of Villers as a saint. The lay mystic Jan van Leeuwen refers to her as a holy woman. 7

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a nuanced and complex spectrum of love-mystical theology and articulated love theories that influenced generations of mystics and religious women to come. The texts from and about these women are not transmitted equally widely. This observation reveals which love theory is more plausible to have reached a broad audience. Hadewijch’s corpus survives in only four manuscripts, while Lutgard’s vita was transmitted for centuries and translated into multiple languages. Lutgard’s vita provided several iconographical themes (inspired by key moments in her mystical growth) and she was venerated in communities outside Cistercian circles.12 Hadewijch stayed faceless and anonymous, which I will relate to Hadewijch’s radical love theory and her fierce attacks on moderate theories such as the one presented in Lutgard’s vita. I first give an overview of the collective memory and imagery of the mystical culture of Liège, followed by an analysis of Lutgard’s and Hadewijch’s interpretation of the image of the heart/wound and their practice of saving souls from purgatory, or the rejection thereof. The comparison reveals some interesting differences in interpretation concerning the relations between compassion and divine judgment, grace and sin, pain and love – relations that influenced the thirteenth century of mystical love and its love theories. Collective Memory, (Love) Imagery, and Mary Lutgard and Hadewijch are both heirs to and innovators of the mystical tradition and its imagery. They contributed to the ‘imaginary theologies’ of the mystical culture of Liège.13 Embodied imagery and experiences were a crucial part of their theologies, which were rooted in a lived religion that connected embodiment to textual networks, and oral and visual culture.14 These theologies promoted and presumed a profound connection to the employed imagery in order to be successful in conveying its content and stimulating the reader to B. Spaapen & St. Dirne, ‘De vereering van de h. Lutgardis binnen en buiten de orde van Cîteau’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 20 (1946) 324-368; and more recently Guido Hendrix, Ontmoetingen met Lutgart van Tongeren. Vol. 1: Iconogafie van Portugal tot Polen, Leuven: Bibliotheek van de Faculteit Godgeleerdheid, 1996. 13 Newman, God and the Goddesses, 294-304. 14 (Hadewijch’s) imaginary theology and its focus on embodiment is not contrary to classical written theology, Patricia Dailey argues. This theology incorporates classical categories, performs an embodied exegesis of these texts, and uses the body as a primary source of interpretation. Patricia Dailey, Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, 50, 60. For an analysis of the interaction between theology and visual culture, see Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late-Medieval Germany, New York: Zone Books, 1998. 12



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pursue their own mystical development. The reader needed to be affected by the text and touched in the core of his or her humanity. The mystical ‘imaginative’ theologies of Hadewijch and Lutgard go hand in hand with the development of ‘affective piety’, starting in the twelfth century and culminating in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, incorporating bridal imagery of the Song of Songs interlaced with meditations on the Passion of Christ.15 The imagery aimed to rouse and deepen empathy and to have the reader/audience experience the pains of the passion in their imagination, using their senses and emotions, and to cultivate their own visual experiences.16 I argue that the visionaries Hadewijch and Lutgard are the perfect guides in this imaginative and visual landscape. In a world where the visionary and affective experience became widely accessible to a broad audience,17 visionaries were the right companions. They were specialists in the affect-laden collective memory and imagery; they were imaginary theologians par excellence. Mary and Christ were the central figures in late-medieval mystical and devotional culture. Imaginary theologians encouraged combining meditations on the life and passion of Christ with prayers to and visualizations of the Virgin Mary. In the figure of Mary, they found the example for their affective piety. She was the prototype of the virtuous behavioural response to the cross. This virtuous behaviour was rooted in compassion and empathy. Mary was an example of great compassion because she suffered with Christ for the salvation of souls. Meditations on the (co-)suffering of Christ and Mary emerged around the new millennium as a response to the absence of the Second Coming, Rachel Fulton argues. Devotional and mystical literature represented Christ in his suffering humanity and came to be re-oriented towards the First Coming of Christ. Theologians suggested an inward journey by meditating on the incarnate God, who died on the cross for humanity’s sins. They aroused renewed interest in the centuries-old tradition of imitatio Christi and searched for union with the human Christ. The role of Mary was highlighted to aid unification with Christ in his suffering, via compassion. By imitating Mary’s compassion and suffering,

Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, 82-109. 16 Herman Roodenburg, ‘Empathy in the Making: Crafting the Believer’s Emotions in the Late Medieval Low Countries’, in: Low Countries Historical Review 129 (2014), 42-62: 49. 17 Meditations on the passion resulted in the flowering of visionary activity due to a democratization of the genre. Thirteenth-century artists and mystics expanded and developed a collective memory filled with affect-laden imagery, especially, which was now accessible in popular culture (and not only in a monastic environment). Barbara Newman, ‘What Does It Mean to Say “I Saw”: The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture’, in: Speculum 80 (2005), 1-43: 1-5. 15

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the believer could establish the same close relationship as Christ and his mother, who share their mutual love in co-suffering.18 Mary was not only an example that could be imitated; she was also venerated as an intercessor. Due to her close motherly connection to Christ, Mary could assume the role of mediator between Christ and the soul. Folk theologies and exempla literature, specimens of which were written by Lutgard’s hagiographer, Thomas of Cantimpré, elaborated on the role of Mary as an intercessor. Christ, who was given the role of judge on Judgment Day, was concerned with the rightful allotment of salvation and condemnation. Christ condemned sinners and only rewarded the good with a place in heaven. The idea of divine judgment caused a culture of fear and insecurity, which could explain Mary’s success. A harsh judgment could be overruled by his compassionate Mother. Christ needed to be just and unbiased; his Mother was allowed to be subjective and compassionate. Christ could be persuaded by Mary, who, as woman, was never allowed to judge. Mary represented the empathetic side of the divine when Christ could not.19 Mary’s role as a compassionate intercessor inspired holy women and they employed the imitation of her role to develop their mystical relation to Christ while helping their community with intercessory prayers and pleading for people’s salvation. Inspired by the representation of Mary as a compassionate mother, these women explored the salvific possibilities of their compassion. They distinguished themselves from ordinary believers based on their intimate relationship with Christ through co-suffering with him and with souls who needed their help. Co-redemption became a dominant theme for the representation of female sainthood in the vitae of Cistercian nuns, says Roisin.20 Female co-redemption went hand in hand with the imagery of the suffering Christ and Mary at the cross. However, the representation of the passion and especially the crucifixion was not the only crucial iconographic theme that flourished in thirteenth-century Liège. Jacques Le Goff argues that the thematization and the development of the doctrine of purgatory climaxed during this period and should be connected to the intercessory powers of female saints like Lutgard. Like saints who could aid in avoiding total damnation via compassionate intercession, purgatory offered a third way between heaven and hell and represented a space of hope.21 However, Barbara Newman states that Le Goff failed Rachel Fulton, From Judgement to Passion: Devotion to Christ & the Virgin Mary, 800-1200, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 197-200. 19 W. A. van der Vet, Het Biënboec van Thomas van Cantimpré en zijn exempelen, ‘s Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1902, 111-112. 20 Roisin, L’hagiographie, 171. 21 Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1981, 410-416, with a paragraph on Lutgard as a purgatorial saint, 434-436. Jan Goossens argues that purgatory was perceived to be an interspace between time as well, as a space between death and the second coming. 18



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to see this connection between female spirituality, Marian imagery and purgatory. She says that it were predominantly women who engaged with the doctrine of purgatory and the practice of saving souls by offering their intercession.22 Lutgard and Hadewijch both practiced intercession for purgatorial souls and experienced visions of the suffering Christ. They are prime examples of thirteenth-century Liégeois mystical culture, and they represent the two extremes of the spectrum of interpretations. Their different interpretations of central themes of the collective memory of this culture (purgatory and the passion) can be explained by their different interpretations of love and their love theories. Both women contributed to the expansion of the themes, primarily via their visionary experiences. Lutgard experienced multiple visions, most of which were apparitions according to Dinzelbacher’s definition.23 Lutgard’s vita exemplifies the central images of bridal mysticism in the thirteenth century and connects them to Christ’s wounded body, portrayed in a literal way. Nine of her visions are concerned with purgatory and purgatorial souls.24 Hadewijch wrote a book of fourteen visions. She also wrote 45 poems and 31 letters, where she explores her radical form of love mysticism and elaborates upon classic interpretations of bridal mysticism and Christ’s wounded body. Love(‘s) Wounds Thirteenth-century love mysticism and its bodily imagery draw heavily on Bernardine spirituality and its union of mysticism and asceticism. To Bernard, loving the human Christ will help to transform the body and free it from its sinful tendencies. Christ gave his body and this sacrifice inspired an expulsion He relates the emergence of popular purgatorial imagery to the postponed apocalypse, which also led to the devotion to the human Christ and his Mother. Jan Goossens, ‘De doorbraak van het vagevuur in de Middelnederlandse en Middellatijnse letterkunde van het Luiks-Brabantse gebied’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 78 (2004) 265-291: 266. 22 Newman says: ‘Le Goff’s work and the many articles inspired by it leave half the story untold. For of all Catholic doctrines, none has been more deeply shaped by female piety than the notion of purgatory, which filled an overwhelming place in the visions, devotions, and works of charity undertaken by religious woman’. Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, 109. 23 Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionliteratur im Mittelalter, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1981, 29-36. Reypens observed a growth in mystical maturity with every visionary episode in the life of Lutgard: L Reypens, ‘Sint Lutgarts mystieke opgang’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 20 (1946), 7-49. 24 Emilia Stolfi & Guido Hendrix, Ontmoetingen met Lutgart van Tongeren. Vol. 5: Verschijningen uit het hiernamaals in de Vita Lutgardis, Leuven: Bibliotheek van de Faculteit Godgeleerdheid, 1998, 16, 24.

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of sin. His wounded body represents the annihilation of humanity’s sinful nature. Bernard writes in his commentary on the Song of Songs: I mention several kinds of ointments, so that given a choice, we may select the ones that seem especially appropriate to the breasts of the bride. There is the ointment of contrition, that of devotion and that of piety. The first is pungent, causing some pain; the second mitigates and soothes pain; the third heals the wound and rids the patient of the illness.25

Christ’s suffering, which is revealed by his wounded body, is motivated by his eternal compassion and love for humankind. Believers were encouraged to read Christ’s wounded body as a love poem. It was sometimes copied in a very literal way and written in the parchment of the human body via self-mortification or stigmatization. The thirteenth-century mystical culture of Liège produced a few cases of stigmatization of both female and male saints.26 Lutgard is not considered a stigmatic, although her body started bleeding when she meditated on Christ’s suffering or the suffering of his martyrs, especially the suffering of St Agnes.27 Lutgard’s suffering is rather modest compared to that of some other saints. Instead, her vita focuses on the visualization of the suffering of Christ, and especially the graphic depiction of his side wound, which are essential indicators of her mystical growth. Lutgard’s visions of the side wound should be placed within the context of the popular devotion to the wounds expressed in literature and visual culture. Jeffrey Hamburger contributes the success of the side wound motif to Bernard’s writings and the artistic interpretations thereof. They represent the personification of Caritas, the Love that wounds Christ at the cross. Christ suffered and died because of Love. Therefore, Caritas is shown as the one who inflicts pain by ‘Sermon 10’, in: The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux. Vol. 2: On the Song of Songs 1, transl. Kilian Walsh, introd. M. Corneille Halflants, Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971 (Cistercian Fathers Series 4), 61-68: 63; ‘Et pono diversas species unguentorum, quo ex pluribus ea, quae potissimum sponsae uberibus congruant, eligamus. Est unguentum contritionis, et est unguentum devotionis, est et pietatis. Primum pungitivum, dolorem faciens, secundum temperativum, dolorem Lenies, tertium sanativum, etiam morbum expellens’. Latin text cited in: Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture, London/ Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 265. 26 The stigmata were considered a divine intervention. Such is the case with, for example, Ida of Leuven. Sometimes the wounds were self-inflected, for example in the case of the lay brother of Villers, Petrus Conversus. They both have religious significance to the hagiographer and are theologically valorized. Both times the wounds refer to the wounded body of Christ. 27 ‘The Life of Lutgard of Aywières’, transl. Margot King & Barbara Newman, in: Barbara Newman, Thomas of Cantimpré: The Collected Saints’ Lives, Turnhout: Brepols, 2008, 209-296: 255-256. 25



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wounding Christ’s body. Bernard aligned the personification of Caritas with the bride of the Song of Songs. The sponsa Christi, the biblical bride, and Caritas became one person, allowing for a personal identification by nuns, especially, who were brides of Christ, longing for intimacy with the bridegroom’s body. A stained-glass window in Wienhausen depicts this motif clearly.28 Caritas wounds Christ with a lance in the company of the other virtues. Similarly, in the Rothschild Canticles, a miniature shows the sponsa Christi inflicting the side wound on a feminized Christ.29 Lutgard’s vita shows some striking resemblances to this thirteenth-century iconographic tradition. The text contributed to the latter’s further expansion by adding another narrative layer to the graphic depictions of the wounded body of Christ. The reader encounters the side wound at the beginning of the vita, when the saint is still a little girl. The encounter informs the reader of the nature of the relationship that Lutgard and Christ are going to share. Christ appears and theatrically exposes his side wound to Lutgard for her to observe and adore, while she was in a conversation with a worldly young man. Christ is represented as a jealous lover who wants his bride all to himself. The saint needed to be convinced to pursue a religious life as a sponsa Christi and not a worldly life of sin. Christ says: ‘Do not seek any longer the caresses of unseemly life. Here you may perpetually contemplate what you should love and why you should love it. Here I pleaded that you shall attain the delights of total purity’.30 At this point, the young Lutgard, fascinated and enchanted by the wound, does not yet know its meaning. This passage sets the tone of the vita’s literal use of central themes from the tradition of bridal mysticism. Christ comes across as a jealous lover who needs to prove his worth by revealing his most precious asset, his side wound. The wound is the sign of love that the saint needs in order to understand that no earthly love measures up to this divine Love. The readers need to discover with the saint what is so intriguing and enchanting about the wound. They will discover the vita’s implicit love theory, which is never pronounced explicitly but which is explained in a narrative way using literal interpretations of bridal mysticism. The next passages reveal the growing intimacy between Lutgard and her lover’s wound. The distance between the opening of her mouth and his opened body Crucifixion of Christ with the Virtues, stained-glass window (± 1330), Wienhausen Abbey, Germany. See: Hamburger, Vision and the Visionary, 123. 29 For an analysis of the motif of the side wound in literature and art, see Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 123-124; and Karma Lochrie, ‘Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies’, in: Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken & James A. Schultz (Eds.), Constructing Medieval Sexuality, Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 188-189. 30 ‘The Life of Lutgard of Aywières’, 217-218. 28

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decreases gradually and even allows for more intimacy through the drinking of his blood. At first, Lutgard is still a young nun when she becomes ill and decides to stay in bed during Matins, ignoring her duties to pray for sinners so that she could resume her work after a good rest. The appearance of Christ and the showing of the side wound indicates that this is a critical misstep on the saint’s path to spiritual growth. She needs to be warned again and motivated to choose the right path. Christ’s voice is introduced first, ordering Lutgard to go to church, where he then appears to her at the entrance as the Crucified. He then invites his sponsa to be embraced by him, releasing one arm from the cross to reach towards his beloved, guiding her head to his wound, inviting her to kiss it. The text creates a virtual line from outside to inside and a choreographed movement from Christ’s hand, to Lutgard’s head, to her mouth and the wound. She drinks the blood flowing from his wound, which rejuvenates her: ‘she was stronger and quicker in the service of God’.31 Later in life, the saint (and as a consequence, the reader) gets to know the true meaning of the side wound. She is invited to contemplate Christ’s stigmata: the side wounds and the wounds on the hands and feet. She hears Christ say: ‘Behold and contemplate, dearest, that my wounds are calling out to you, lest in vain I shed my blood, lest in vain I endured death’. Seeing and hearing this, Lutgard was wonderfully alarmed and, with fear and trembling, she asked what the cry of Christ’s wounds might be. She was answered, ‘By your toil and your weeping you will mitigate the enkindled wrath of the Father, so that he may not destroy sinners in death, but rather, through the mercy of God, “they may be converted to live”’.32

The wound intertwines the themes of intimacy with the divine lover, exchange of grace and the outflow of grace through Lutgard as mediator for the sinners of the world. Lutgard is requested to perform the role of a mediator, a role she fulfils in a saintly way by showing excessive compassion. Her intimacy with the divine Bridegroom as expressed in the exchange at the side wound allows her to intervene on behalf of lost souls. Her loving connection to the wounded body of Christ supplies the saint with all the salvific powers she needs to save souls from damnation. Lutgard accepts Christ’s invitation and is guided inwardly via the side wound into more intimacy. The exchange of hearts graphically depicts this intimacy. The opening in Christ’s side exposes his divine heart and allows Lutgard to receive the final step in her literal pursuit of loving intimacy by offering her heart in exchange for his.33 ‘Lutgard’, 228-229. Ibid., 244. 33 Reypens argues that the side wound and the sacred heart imagery are connected. They reveal Christ’s loving sacrifice for humanity. Reypens, ‘Sint Lutgarts mystieke opgang’, 43. 31 32



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The exchange of hearts episode takes place after the first mention of the side wound. At this time, the young nun gained a reputation as a healer. Her bodily secretions allowed for miraculous healing, and the saint was overwhelmed by crowds of people. She was annoyed by her miraculous powers, asking the Lord: ‘Of what use to me is this grace, through which I am so often hindered from dallying with you? Take it away from me, but in such a way that the grace is changed into something better for me’.34 The Lord responded to Lutgard’s request and asked her what she wanted in return for her healing powers. The saint asked for an understanding of the psalter through which she prays. This modest saintly behaviour would increase her intimacy with Christ without the disturbance of the external world. Her request was granted, although it would not have the desired effect. The sponsa then goes on blaming the Beloved because he should have known that the secrets of Scripture are not meant for an ‘unlettered, uncultivated, and uneducated nun’, conveying a false sense of modesty. The theatrical quarrel between the two love birds culminates in the following exchange of words and hearts. Then the Lord said to her: ‘What to do you want?’ ‘I want your heart’. ‘No rather it is I who want your heart’, replied the Lord. ‘So be it, Lord, on condition that you temper your heart’s love to my heart and that I may possess my heart in you. Indeed, with you as my shield, my heart will be secure for all time’.35

The hagiographer then goes on to explain the meaning of the exchange. He says that the exchange of hearts signifies a union of created with uncreated spirit. He says: ‘It was this of which the Apostle says: she “who clings to God is made one spirit with him”’.36 This union is represented using a theatrical dialogue and a literal and graphical interpretation of bridal mysticism and bodily imagery. The vita conveys an implicit love theory that can be analysed via the inherent dynamics of the text and its imagery. The imagery’s graphic and theatrical nature should be taken seriously, and the reader is invited to imagine the scene and read between the lines. I come to the following observation: Christ’s body and his bleeding wounds expose his beating heart. There is open access to a divine union that allows for an exchange of salvific powers. It is striking that Lutgard’s body is never wounded, never opened or exposed. Lutgard’s salvific secretions are never the ‘Lutgard’, 226. ‘Lutgard’, 227. 36 Ibidem. 34 35

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result of a direct wounding of her body. Even the exchange of hearts is sterile, which becomes even more remarkable if one compares it to other passages in vitae and the imagery used in devotional art. The surgical removal of Christ’s heart can be imagined along the line introduced before (hand-mouth-wound). Lutgard’s heart is removed with the words: ‘So be it’. The exchange happens on the saint’s terms and under her conditions. The sponsa Christi is the one holding the lance, penetrating Christ without being wounded herself. The side wound in mystical literature does not always use these graphic depictions and literal meaning – on the contrary. Authors like Bernard of Clairvaux and Richard of Saint Victor opted for a more abstract interpretation of the wound, suggesting that the side wound represents Christ’s existential suffering on the cross. It is not only an invitation to drink the sweet and salvific blood of Christ, which, according to Karma Lochrie, is an image that reveals an erotic desire shared by the nun and the feminized Christ. She says that it also reveals another queerness in the wound’s invitation of the viewer to imitate Christ’s suffering on an existential level. She calls this love noir to indicate the dark side of Love, the side where the lover gets wounded by the beloved (and not the other way around, as in Lutgard’s case).37 Lochrie refers to Hadewijch for a clear thematization of this wounding love. Hadewijch’s poetry is saturated with the trope of love pain. The poet uses a limited register to make endless variations of this trope to convey her message.38 Nevertheless, Hadewijch is not merely repeating the wound imagery of previous authors. Instead, she creatively and artistically reflects on this imagery, connecting it to other key elements of the collective memory – sounds, melodies, allegories, associations, paradoxes – creating new poems that express new theological insights into the nature of love. Hadewijch’s references to sacred and profane traditions are so complex and sophisticated that only a highly trained audience of insiders would have been capable of appreciating the full range of meaning of Hadewijch’s love poetry.39 Hadewijch’s interpretation of the wounded body takes centre stage in her fourteenth poem, called ‘The School of Love’ in the English translation.40 This poem introduces the reader to the key elements of Hadewijch’s love theory. The poet explicitly reflects on the true nature of Love by contrasting it to the general

Lochrie, ‘Mystical Acts’, 180-186. For a detailed analysis of the isotope of pain in the poems of Hadewijch, see Frank Willaert, De poëtica van Hadewijch in de Strofische Gedichten, Utrecht: Hes, 1984. 39 Frank Willaert, ‘Het geheugen van Hadewijch’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 80 (2009) 3-20. 40 Hadewijch, The Complete Works, transl. Colomba Hart, New York: Paulist Press, 1980 (Classics of Western Spirituality), 162-165. 37 38



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assumption made in mystical culture, which would describe Love as a sweet and joyous experience. Hadewijch writes: The most joyous season of the year, When all the birds sing clearly, And the nightingale publicly Makes its joy known to us, Is the time of greatest sadness. For the heart noble Love has wounded. How can the noble soul keep on yes, it is the noblest of all creatures, Which of its nature must love in the highest degree When it does not have its Beloved? As Love’s arrows strike it, It shudders that it lives. At all times when the arrow strikes, It increases the wound and brings torment. All who love know well that these must ever be one: Sweetness or pain, or both together, Tempestuous before the countenance of Love.41

In Hadewijch’s poetic language the lover is wounded by Love’s arrow, penetrated by the terrifying force of Love.42 The lover is overpowered by Love and can only conquer by being conquered and excepting Love’s dominance. Love is pulling the strings while the lover and the beloved are puppets under her control. They have to trust Love and presume that She will sustain them after they pledged their allegiance while performing their complete self-sacrifice. The wound reveals the laws of Love: ‘He who strikes shall himself be struck’. Love is a mutual self-gift of lover and beloved, which allows for Love to rule supreme. Hadewijch’s love theory conveys a harsh message that pain and suffering are also part of the devotion to God, who is Love. This law is hard to understand for ‘aliens’, the audience who is not capable of understanding Hadewijch’s truth about Love. But there are few who, for the sake of all love, love all, And fewer still long for Love with love. All too late, therefore, shall they attain That kingdom and that sublime mystery, And that knowledge Love imparts To those who go to school to her.43 Hadewijch, Complete Works, 162-163. She is not wounded by a person but by the force of love, which is not embodied and more abstract. 43 Hadewijch, Complete Works, 163. 41 42

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Hadewijch rejects ‘aliens’ who do not love Love for the sake of Love but instead pursue their own profit. She argues that this can never be true Love, who demands sacrifice, the wounding of lover and beloved. The wounds are battle scars that show the lovers’ familiarity with the knowledge of Love. These wounds never heal, and they expose a vulnerable soul longing for a Love that is always out of reach. Lutgard’s virgin skin does not show any traces of love’s attacks on the loving soul. Instead, it is she who is in full control over the Beloved and Love. Hadewijch would conclude that Love is not truly present in this relationship because true Love demands mutual self-giving. In Lutgard’s relationship, Love is powerless. The imagery of the wound reveals this fundamental difference in love theories between Lutgard and Hadewijch. Saving Souls (from Purgatory) Female saints imitated Mary and represented the compassionate side of the divine. These compassionate women were willing to suffer for Christ and for the sake of suffering souls. They were willing to accept the pain imposed on purgatorial souls as a punishment and a way to purify them from sin in their own bodies to free these souls or to take away their original sentence. Lutgard is known to have been the purgatorial saint par excellence. Nevertheless, it has not been noticed before how the way in which she helps souls is distinct from that of other women as far as the usual exchange of pain is concerned. Like other saints, Lutgard bargains with God. However, what she offers is not an exchange of pain between her and the soul in purgatory. She offers an exchange of hearts between herself and God. She uses a sterile love, free of pain and suffering to get the job done. She relies on Christ’s love for her to make him change his mind and show mercy to purgatorial souls.44 The next passage is one of the many passages that mention Lutgard’s ability to save souls from purgatory and illustrates her bargaining. After the death of Abbot Simon of Foignie, Lutgard knew her beloved friend would be punished in purgatory. She did not wait for affirmation of the soul in question but started pleading with God. The hagiographer says that: At once performing mortifications and fasts for him, she pleaded with the Lord that he liberates the soul of the dead man. After she had insisted with many prayers, the Lord replied to her, ‘Be consoled because, on account of the favour in which I hold you, I will be good to him for whom you pray’. Yet she insisted 44

The vita borrows from the imagery of Mary who reprimands Christ and demands him to be more compassionate. Lutgard takes over Mary’s position next to Christ, not as his mother but as his spouse.



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the more importunately and received a reply for the second time that the man would soon be set free. And she said, ‘Whatever comfort you are willing to give me, grant to his soul in purgatory’. And she added, ‘By no means will I desist from sobbing, Lord, nor will I ever be consoled by your promises, unless I see that the one for whom I pray has been liberated’. The Lord did not suffer her to be disturbed any longer and appeared to her in person, leading with him the soul which had been liberated from purgatory and saying, ‘Be consoled, beloved, for behold, here is the soul for whom you pray’.45

God’s judgement is overruled without any compensation. There is no exchange of pain. Instead, God is moved by the pain of his beloved sponsa. The passage shows that the saint is in control while God is in distress. God does not want to hurt his bride, longing for his love to be returned and confirmed and not taking any risks to upset her.46 This makes God vulnerable, woundable – a fact Lutgard makes excellent use of. The saint manages to free a soul from purgatory who would have stayed there for forty years without her intercession. The saint manages to overrule Christ’s divine judgement on the pretence of her limitless compassion for lost souls. This pretence guarantees the saint’s orthodoxy; it frames Lutgard’s wishes in the context of an imitatio Mariae, which was an acceptable practice in the mystical culture of Liège. Anke Passeniers argues that Lutgard’s hagiographer Thomas made sure that some theological restrictions were in place to safeguard his text from any unacceptable interpretations. She argues: ‘Justice is not overruled and the boundaries between hell and purgatory, reparable and irreparable sin are not blurred’.47 Passeniers points out the common theological distinction between hell and purgatory and its impact on the practice of saving souls. Damned souls are irredeemable, while souls in purgatory are punished temporarily. Based on this distinction, Lutgard is a model saint.

‘Lutgard’, 242. A similar example also shows how God is afraid of causing distress to his sponsa. These passages concern the soul of Jacques de Vitry, both during his life and after his death. The first time Lutgard saves his soul is during his life, when the cardinal was plagued with very grave temptation. When the Lord does not want to intervene due to Jacques’ resistance, the saint threatens God by saying: ‘either separate me from yourself of liberate that man for whom I pray, even if he is not willing’. God takes this warning seriously and acts immediately. After his death, Jacques is asked to tell Lutgard about his short sentence to purgatory to avoid her distress and her intervention for a second time. God anticipated his sponsa’s reaction. She is happy that her friend is saved and about the way God is treating her. ‘Lutgard’, 241, 278. 47 Anke. E. Passeniers, ‘The Life of Christina Mirabilis: Miracles and the Construction of Marginality’, in: Anne-Marie Korte (Ed.), Women and Miracle Stories: A Multidisciplinary Exploration, Leiden/ Boston/ Köln, Brill, 2001, 145-178: 167-169. 45 46

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Nevertheless, the eschatological distinction between purgatory and hell is not the only restriction that could be raised, according to Hadewijch.48 The mystic condemns the practice of saving souls as performed by women like Lutgard (although she does not explicitly refer to the latter). Hadewijch’s main argument is based on her radical love theory. Her rejection of the practice of saving souls and the underlying love theory is most evident in her fifth vision.49 Hadewijch opens her fifth vision with the liturgical context, staging this vision on the day of the Assumption. She is taken up in the spirit and shown three heavens that are named after the hierarchical groups of angels. Hadewijch meets John the Evangelist, who appears regularly in her visions. Seeing the angels and John in heaven reminds Hadewijch of the feeling of oneness with God. She is then confronted with the idea of exclusion from this loving unity and thinks about earthly reality. She asks John: ‘Holy Friend and true Omnipotence, why do you let those who are ours wander off to alien things, and why do you not flow through them in our oneness?’ Hadewijch questions divine judgment and the dynamics behind this selection and distinction made between heavenly loved ones and the damned others. She thinks about her friends and pupils, whom she cannot protect from God’s seemingly heartless judgment. Hadewijch’s basic question concerning her love theory is: ‘If God is Endless Love, why can his compassion not save everyone? Why can the souls of the damned not be saved?’ In other words – and in contrast with Lutgard’s practice of saving souls from purgatory – ‘why does divine judgment prevail over compassion? If God is Love, what kind of Love are we talking about?’ Hadewijch interrupts her visionary activity by a parenthesis, reflecting on the past – on a time when she did not understand how divine judgement and compassion become one in God. In the past, her knowledge of God – whom she calls Love – was incomplete. During her visionary activity and her life as a mystic, Hadewijch gets to know Love from the inside out. In her visions, Paul Hadewijch problematizes the distinction between heaven, purgatory and hell in her mystical theology. See Mary Suydam, ‘Hadewijch of Antwerp’s Dark Vision of Heaven’, in: Jan S. Emerson & Hugh Feiss (Eds.), Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, New York: Garland, 2000, 119-142. Carolyn Walker Bynum quotes Hadewijch to argue that Hadewijch does transgress theological boundaries by saving souls from hell, but Bynum does nog manage to pinpoint the actual problem with the practice. Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. 49 For a detailed study of Hadewijch’s fifth vision, see Bernard Spaapen, ‘Hadewijch en het vijfde visioen’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 44 (1970), 7-44, 113-141, 353-404; 45 (1971), 113-199. For a further exploration of the relation between Hadewijch and the female practice of saving purgatorial souls, see Sander Vloebergs, ‘Lucifer, Save My Soul! Medieval Female Interpretations of Divine Judgement, Compassion and the Doctrine of Purgatory’, in: Medieval Mystical Theology 27 (2018) 60-78. 48



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Mommaers says, Hadewijch addresses a close friend and talented apprentice, who is capable of understanding some of these intimate truths that Hadewijch experienced mystically.50 This parenthesis should be read as a theological selfexamination that the mistress shares with her apprentice. She addresses the practice of saving souls and the pitfalls and transgressions that are connected with this dangerous enterprise. Hadewijch confesses her mistake to God, to her friend, and to her reader: In one thing I did wrong in the past, to the living and the dead, whom I with desire would have freed from purgatory and from hell as my right. But for this be you blessed: Without anger against me, you gave me four among the living and the dead who then belonged to hell. Your goodness was tolerant of my ignorance, and of my thoughtless desires, and of the unrestrained charity that you gave me in yourself for men. For I did not then know your perfect justice. I fell into this fault and was Lucifer because I did not know this, although on that account I did no evil in your eyes.51

Hadewijch herself admits that she did wrong, she committed a grave sin and could, therefore, be called Lucifer. What is the exact nature of this sin? The mystic hints at confusion of compassion with Love, which led to a wrongful judgment and a sinful act. In her eleventh vision, Hadewijch suggests a distinction between charity (compassion would be an act of charity) and Love.52 Charity partakes in Love and Love cannot be reduced to charity. Love is bigger than charity and is capable of hurting her even more than charity does. Charity drove her to save souls; because she wanted to make up for mistakes of friends and apprentices, their shortcomings in their love towards God. She is disappointed in God because He allows men to become strangers to him. She then goes on by saying: ‘I would gladly have purchased love for them by accepting that he should love them and hate me’.53 If she could, she would have willingly loved those souls and turned her back on God. I argue that she recalls the fact that she saved souls by sharing love with the souls who needed it. She would have overruled God’s judgment because she was mad at him, who does not take care of the lost souls. This behaviour recalls Lutgard’s quarrels with God over the salvation of souls. Veerle Fraeters argues that Hadewijch initiated her friend into her mystagogical theology via her visions: ‘Visioenen als literaire mystagogie: Stand van zaken en nieuwe inzichten over intentie en functie van Hadewijchs Visioenen’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 73 (1999), 111-131. 51 Hadewijch, ‘Visions’, in: The Complete Works, 276. 52 Hadewijch uses the Latin word Caritas to talk about charity and the Middle Dutch word Minne to talk about Love. Caritas reminds me of the artistic personification of Caritas, the sponsa Christi who wounds the lover. Hadewijch does not align with this personification (like Lutgard) but opts for true Love, Minne, who is represented in the act of wounding. 53 Hadewijch, Complete Works, 292. 50

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The crux of the matter is related to the true imitatio Christi and, to a lesser extent, to the true imitatio Mariae. Hadewijch argues that Christ was willing to sacrifice his complete being to save humanity. For the mystic, true Love entails sacrifice and a mutual self-giving, which is only completed when the lover says: ‘Fiat voluntas tua’.54 Hadewijch learned that she is not entitled to any gift, even as a bride of Christ. Instead, she gives herself fully to God, whom she knows is Love, bigger and more complex than human charity. Human reason needs to surrender to Love, who can ‘love and hate in one same being’.55 The human flaw that lovers like Lutgard commit, which leads to an imitation of Lucifer’s hubris, is the idea that human reason can judge based on human charity while only God is Love and only Love can judge rightfully. Humans can only become like God by imitating Christ, and imitate his love, which leads towards the cross. Hadewijch does not save souls based on her saintly intercession and personal achievements but based on her true knowledge of Love, as a reality that wounds and hurts. Hadewijch’s Love is too complex for humans to comprehend. This knowledge can only be perceived by imitating Love, even when this implies hate and condemnation, which would feel counter-intuitive to compassionate holy women (and their followers). For Hadewijch, it is her knowledge of Love that is saving souls – the souls in purgatory, but especially the souls of living.56 Lutgard knows her beloved intimately and uses this knowledge to her advantage. Thomas presents Lutgard as a thaumaturgical, purgatorial saint who should be venerated. He ‘sells’ her services, especially her expert treatment of souls in purgatory. Lutgard’s knowledge about love, her love theory, is expressed in exemplary stories in which she demonstrates her ways to convince Christ to be compassionate. Lutgard is in full control; she controls her relationship with Christ and her relationship with the readers, who are encouraged to acknowledge her as a true saint. Hadewijch would say that Lutgard’s knowledge is incomplete and even dangerous. The mystic saves souls from this danger by conveying what she has learned, and by making her knowledge about Love accessible to her apprentices. Hadewijch’s love theory is often explicit but never abstract. The mystic uses the collective memory and the imagery of her mystical culture to explain how Love is endlessly bigger than the way in which She is often perceived, endlessly more painful than first expected. Only students of the ‘School of Love’ are truly saved, Ibid., 48. ‘In charity men err through injudicious service, for instance when they give out of mere liking where there isno need, or render superfluous service, or weary themselves when there is no need. Often emotional attraction motivates what is called charity’. Hadewijch, Complete Works, 277. 56 See H.W.J. Vekeman, ‘Die ontrouwe maectse so diep… Een nieuwe interpretatie van het vijfde visioen van Hadewijch’, in: De Nieuwe Taalgids 71 (1978), 385-409. 54 55



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the others are ‘aliens’. They are lost causes, Lucifers. Hadewijch’s audience is a limited group of mystical insiders, and her influence did not reach far into the mystical culture of Liège, while Lutgard was recognized as a local saint. Lutgard asked God to help her save souls in purgatory and to offer her complete intimacy and loving union, even if this would hurt her Beloved. She asks God for his heart, his unlimited devotion, and commitment to her wishes. In contrast, Hadewijch asks the power to love. The mystic wants to satisfy Love by giving herself completely to the Beloved. According to her, what is best for Love’s sake is the mutual self-gift of the lovers. Both women, in a way, represent opposites on the spectrum of female voices and offer a nuanced and fascinating perspective on love theories that were explicitly and implicitly pronounced during the age of Love.

Michel Dijkstra WORDS OF FIRE Mystical Love in Rumi and Mahadeviyakka

Lines like these you do not expect to find in a mystical text: ‘We came back drunk from the wine-tavern,/ and we escaped from high and low./ All the drunk ones were cheerful and dancing./ Clap your hands, O idols! Clap, clap!’ This is the beginning of the poem ‘The Wine-Tavern’, otherwise known as Ode 516 from Diwan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, written by the world-famous Sufi poet Mevlana Rumi (1207-1273), who in virtually all his poems sings in an ecstatic tone about letting go of all opposites. The two ‘poles’ mentioned in these lines are ‘high’ and ‘low’, signifying the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane or Allah as the source of all things and His creation. Strikingly enough the anonymous group lets go of this opposition and gains a lofty insight by means of a profane and even forbidden activity, namely drinking wine. Whether you actually need to go to the pub in order to realize this ideal is a matter I leave aside for the moment. However this may be, according to Rumi, he who transcends discursive thought discovers the ultimate freedom. He ‘has escaped from high and low’. Interestingly enough, we find this detached way of dealing with opposites in the Indian culture also. By ‘detachment’ I mean the unification of two poles in the realisation of freedom. Take, for example, the poems of the medieval saintpoet Mahadeviyakka or Akka (‘Elder Sister’). Less alcoholic than Rumi but in a similar intense tone and with the addition of a mysterious lover she states: ‘You’re like milk/ in water: I cannot tell/ what comes before,/ what comes after;/ which the slave;/ what’s big,/ what’s small’.1 At the conclusion of the poem it becomes clear that this lover is none other than the Hindu god Shiva, addressed by Akka as ‘my lord white as jasmine’. In many of his poems, Rumi also speaks to a Beloved, being his teacher Shams or Allah Himself. Both poets seem to have been consumed by a burning desire to be in the intimate presence of their celestial lover all the time. Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, London: Penguin, 1973, 115.

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This crucial similarity between Rumi and Mahadeviyakka can be described in terms of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance. In their poetic works, both authors develop a line of thought on the relation between the human and the divine that belongs to the ‘family’ of bridal mysticism. In other words: an attempt of speaking about the intimacy of God and man with amorous and often very strongly erotic metaphors. This resemblance does not imply that the poems of Rumi and Mahadeviyakka are interchangeable, but it does make clear that there is a grand parallel between their respective thinking and verse-crafting. In this essay, I take the bridal mysticism of the Islamic and Hindu poets as the starting point for an exercise in comparative philosophy. I start with a short introduction of the employed methodology. Next, I make some comments on the three concepts that are crucial for the comparison: ‘bridal mysticism’, ‘nonduality’ and the ‘metaphor of transgression’. These core concepts provide the structure for my analysis of two poems: ‘The Wine-Tavern’ by Rumi and ‘I have Maya for mother-in-law’ by Mahadeviyakka. In conclusion I present one core similarity, one fundamental difference and one illuminating contrast between the bridal mysticism of both authors. How to Compare Rumi and Akka? A philosophical comparison between two authors from different cultural backgrounds only makes sense if they do not diverge too much. There must be enough overlap in order to point out both the similarities and the differences. In Rumi’s and Akka’s case, the notion of bridal mysticism, introduced above, forms a solid point of convergence that justifies the comparison. In making this comparison, however, it is important not to focus solely on the similarities but to have a keen eye for the differences also. In this way, the unique character of both forms of bridal mysticism can shine forth. Possibly, this may be the beginning of a dialogue. The Indian scholar of religious studies and comparative methodology Arvind Sharma illustrates this dialogue with a metaphor which I like a lot, namely two hanging lamps who are set into motion and together produce one light beam of great clarity. This process is called ‘reciprocal illumination’.2 Using this metaphor, one might investigate whether it is possible to illuminate Akka’s bridal mysticism with the ‘light’ of Rumi and the other way round. Sharma’s metaphor reminds me, by the way, of an image in the works of Leibniz (1646-1716). This great German Enlightenment thinker and lover of Chinese culture once wrote Arvind Sharma, Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology, New York: State University of New York Press, 2005, 101.

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that China can learn a lot from Western science and technology. In its turn, the West could be inspired by Confucian political philosophy. In that way ‘we ignite fire with fire’.3 Central concepts – Bridal Mysticism, Non-duality and the Metaphor of Transgression As I mentioned earlier, the thinking and verse crafting of Rumi and Mahadeviyakka belong to the philosophical family of bridal mysticism. In the West, this tradition has as its first highlights the works of Bernard of Clairvaux (10901153) and William of Saint-Thierry (1080-1143); among its later authors are Mechtild von Magdeburg (1207-1282) and Hadewijch (probably thirteenth century). In the works of Meister Eckhart, bridal mysticism is also abundant. A central characteristic of this form of mysticism is that the union of the soul with God is described in terms of a longing lover and his beloved. The soul that unifies itself with the divine source touches His life and light.4 In a sense, she is reborn in a dimension of pure vitality. Rumi’s mysticism fits this line of thought. In Indian mysticism, we find the bhakti-tradition as a very influential form. The word ‘bhakti’ means ‘passionate devotion’ and is derived from the Sanskrit root √bajh, ‘to be a part of’. A devotee of the bhakti-tradition longs to be a part of the divine, a process that, once again, is described in terms of a lover and a beloved. Akka says for example that she wants to turn Shiva into her ‘good husband’. Because of these metaphors bhakti can be seen as a form of bridal mysticism. The opposite, of course, is also possible: Western bridal mysticism can be seen as a form of bhakti, because the soul is taking part in the divine. Strikingly enough, the intimate connection between the soul and God or the divine is described in bridal mysticism being non-dual.5 With this concept, I mean the absence of an opposition between two poles. In this unity, however, both phenomena are not blurred. They keep their identity yet are inseparable. In Akka’s poem which I quoted earlier this non-duality is very beautifully described with the image of ‘milk in water’. The milk is still milk and the water still water, yet nobody is able to separate them. Rumi, in his poem ‘The Winetavern’, speaks about the ‘escape from above and below’. Here the opposition between seemingly fixed opposites is also completely vanished. Rita Widmaier, Die Rolle des chinesischen Schrift in Leibniz’ Zeichentheorie, Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983 (Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 24), 15-16. 4 Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism, New York: Crossroad, 1994, 144-146. 5 Cf. David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy, New York: Humanity Books, 1988, 25-37. 3

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Another striking element of bridal mysticism is what I like to call ‘the metaphor of transgression’. In his poem ‘The Wine-tavern’ Rumi deliberately chooses a subversive image in order to convey his thoughts on the ecstatic soul who finds Allah. Wine-drinking, of course, is forbidden in Islam. Mahadeviyakka’s poem ‘I have Maya for mother-in-law…’ deals with adultery, but of a very special kind, namely with Shiva. In the South-Indian tradition of the so called ‘sayings’ or vacanas to which Akka’s poetry belongs, many of these metaphors can be found. Take, for example, this poem by her contemporary Basavaṇṇa (1106-1167) which compares Shiva’s behaviour with his devotees to a sex worker and her customer: We drink the water we wash your feet with, I eat the food of worship, and say it’s yours, everything, goods, life, honour: he’s really the whore who takes every last bit of her night’s wages, and will take no words for payment he, my lord of the meeting rivers!6

At first glance, Basvaṇṇa’s erotic metaphor seems to be a kind of blasphemy. On closer inspection, the image represents Shiva’s uncompromising character. He demands complete devotion, otherwise his ‘customer’ will not get anything. The Lord cannot be ‘bought’ with nice words. In that way, the metaphor of transgressions points in the direction of a radical because completely pure intimacy between the god and his devotee. In a later phase of Indian bhakti-poetry, the roles of the Lord and his lover are reversed. The following poem by the south Indian poet Ksetrayya (c. 1600-1680) is called The Madam to a Courtesan and depicts the highest deity as a customer who is madly in love with one of the temple girls. She, however, does not know who He is and treats Him in a cruel way, perhaps as a metaphor for worldly delusion: Woman! He’s none other Than Cennud‫ׅ‬u of Palagiri Haven’t you heard? He rules the worlds. When he wanted you, you took his gold – But couldn’t you tell him your address? Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, 81.

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Some lover you are! He’s hooked on you. And he rules the worlds. I found him wandering the alleyways, too shy to ask anyone. I had to bring him home with me (…) Can’t you tell who’s big, who’s small? Who do you think he is? And he rules the worlds.7

In Rumi’s poetry this kind of imagery which is erotic and spiritual at the same time can also be encountered. The word kharabat, for example, can be translated as ‘wine-house’ but also as ‘brothel’ or ‘tavern’ full of female beauties.8 There one can become intoxicated without fear of slander, at least within its walls. Moreover, the brothel is a place where social status is no longer important and heaps of gold and silver can be spent to become enchanted by the presence of a beloved or saki, who is pouring wine constantly. For Rumi, the impurity of the kharabat-metaphor which could, for instance, be interpreted as the secular world itself, indicates precisely the locus where the soul or the heart can connect with Allah or the source of all things. He writes about this convergence of ‘wine, female deity and heart’ in a very eloquent ode:9 A cup of wine in one hand, her curled hair in the other, A stunning whirling dance in the centre I long for. O saki, take this lyrical song, and o refined minstrel, Tune it the way you know I long for. Make your glorified face appear from the east, Shams Tabrizi…10

In these lines, the word saki signifies the unity of the sacred and the secular. ‘Cupbearer’ can refer to the beautiful girl with the ‘curled hair’ in the first line. It can also, however, refer to the spiritual guide who pours the wine of divine love in the heart of his devotees: Shams Tabrizi in the last line. If we examine the metaphor of kharabat from a biographical point of view, we can safely say that Rumi did meet Shams but was not involved in, according to orthodoxy, any ‘impure activities’ with him whatsoever. At least, we are not aware of them. Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan, Velcheru Narayana Rao & David Schulman (Eds. & transl.), When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, 63. 8 Mostafa Vaziri, Rumi and Shams’ Silent Rebellion: Parallels with Vedanta, Buddhism and Shaivism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 167. 9 Ibidem. 10 Ibidem. 7

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In the life of Mahadeviyakka, actual transgression can be found. For example, she rejected the male-dominated world of her times by wearing no clothes at all. With her long hair as her only garment, Akka roamed South-India, an independent bride of Shiva. About this sacred nakedness she wrote: ‘When all the world is the eye of the lord,/ onlooking everywhere, what can you/ cover and conceal?’11 Akka’s poem ‘I have Maya for mother-in-law…’ The poem by Akka which I have chosen for the comparison with Rumi is: I have Maya for mother-in-law; the world for father-in-law; three brothers-in-law, like tigers; and the husband’s thoughts are full of laughing women: no god, this man. And I cannot cross the sister-in-law. But I will give this wrench the slip and go cuckold my husband with Hara, my Lord. My mind is my maid: by her kindness, I join my Lord, my utterly beautiful Lord from the mountain peaks, my Lord white as jasmine And I will make Him my good husband.12

The first thing to draw attention to in this rich poem is Akka’s harsh critique of human marriage: ‘no god, this man’. According to the fictional biographies, Akka was married for a while with the ruler of her country: a king who was, in his turn, ruled by lust. She left him when he tried to get his right as a husband by force. Akka, however, had considered herself as a bride of Shiva since her tenth year. The last sentence of the poem speaks explicitly about this bridal mysticism: ‘And I will make Him/ my good husband’. It is possible to read the 11 12

Ramanujan, Speaking of Śiva, 131. Ibidem.



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whole poem as one grand metaphor of transgression, because adultery with the godhead is presented as liberation from the chains of worldly marriage: in itself a symbol for attachment to worldly existence. What does the rapid succession of images in the first half of ‘I have Maya for mother-in-law…’ mean? The mother- and father-in-law together symbolize the illusion of the material world, which can be transcended by spiritual love. The three brothers-in-law like tigers are an image of the three guna’s, which, according to the very influential Samkhya-philosophy, are the three fundamental components of matter. The ‘bad husband’ is the ego with all his karma, constantly seeking new pleasures (‘the laughing women’) in order to attach himself to a worldly existence. The sister-in-law, finally, symbolizes the memory or ‘perfume’ [Skt. vasana] of past lives and actions that accompanies karma. When we combine them, all of these images form a network of chains that turn the ‘lyrical I’ into a prisoner. In the second half of the poem, this ‘I’ chooses liberation by means of adultery with the divine. A friendly servant helps her, namely: her own mind. Thanks to her the ‘I’ joins ‘the utterly beautiful Lord’, an expression of great spiritual intimacy and non-duality. Shiva’s purity is emphasised by the mountain peak, covered by eternal white snow; simultaneously a phallic symbol or linga in Shaivism. The ‘lord white as jasmine’ is the opposite of the worldly husband. In the moving last sentence Akka orders her mind to turn him into her good husband: man seduces god. `Taken as a whole, ‘I have Maya for mother-in-law…’ can be read as a poem on liberation. The pivotal point is the sentence ‘But I will/ give this wrench the slip’. With these words, the chains of worldly existence are broken and a connection with the divine is discovered, transcending all material things, the ego and karma. This cutting through all connections with the material world is described by Akka as a radical step. All impure worldly relationships are suddenly ended in order to consume perfect union with the ‘Lord white as Jasmin’. Rumi’s Poem ‘The Wine-Tavern’ The poem by Mevlana Rumi I will compare with Mahadeviyakka is ‘The WineTavern’. This poem is a bit longer and has more of a story than Akka’s: Again we have returned from the tavern drunk, again we have escaped from above and below. All of the drunkards are joyful and dancing – clap your hands, oh idols, clap! Clap! The fish and the sea are all intoxicated, for the hooks are the tips of Thy tresses!

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Our Ruins have been turned upside down, the vat has been upset and the jar broken. When the shaykh of the Ruins saw this tumult, he came to the roof and jumped. A wine began to ferment, making existence non-existent and nonexistence existent. The glasses broke and the pieces fell in every direction – how many drinkers wounded their feet! Where is he who cannot discern his head from his feet? He has fallen drunk in the lane of Alast. The wine-worshipers are all busy with revelry – listen to the strumming of the lute, oh body-worshiper.13

Strikingly enough, Rumi chooses to build his poem around one central metaphor referring to a place: the wine-tavern. That he is not referring to the pub next door becomes clear in the mysterious phrase about the ‘Ruins’. At first glance, it seems that Rumi is speaking about a bunch of alcoholics who are destroying themselves by drinking far too much wine. The ‘Tavern of Ruins’ may be a reference to the habits of sneaky drinkers in Rumi’s age to consume alcohol in the shadow of ruined buildings. On closer inspection, the tavern symbolizes the spiritual way, namely: the destruction of the false self or ego. The Sufi-adept follows this painful path in order to find the presence of the divine Beloved or Allah. In this sense, the backbone of the poem is formed by one metaphor of transgression: drinking wine in the tavern, which makes every egocentric thought disappear. The friendly host who pours the wine is the spiritual teacher or shaykh. His liquor is the doctrine which helps letting go of the false self. Though there is a great party going on in all of creation (‘The fish and the sea are all intoxicated…’) the teacher has to know which quantity of the wine of wisdom his pupil can take. The pupil can be ecstatic yet become insane: a procedure that reminds one of the duties of the spiritual master during the whirling dances of the world-famous dervishes. In this activity, the psychological boundaries of the pupils are constantly and closely monitored. The drunkenness, ignited by the shaykh, is described in terms of bridal mysticism right from the start: ‘for the hooks are the tips of Thy tresses!’ Expressions like these signify the non-dual relationship of the soul with her divine Beloved. Climax of the rush is the moment when ‘A wine began to ferment, making existence/ non-existent and nonexistence existent’. This mysterious passage ­suggests a kind of spiritual death of the pupil. He lets go of his false, self-centred 13

William Chittik, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, New York: State University of New York Press, 1984, 332-333. Many thanks to Sipko den Boer for providing me with this translation.



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self (‘making existence non-existent’) in order to be reborn in the divine Beloved. The person who frees himself of every self-centred thought or action, which ultimately lead to isolation and loneliness, gains a pure vitality in Allah’s heart. At least, this is what Rumi suggests. The anonymous drunks in the poem, however, do not think about this. They ‘cannot discern their heads from their feet’ and have fallen drunk in the alley of Alast. The last-mentioned metaphor speaks about the intimate connection between God and man. Taken as a whole, Rumi’s poem is about liberation with the help of ecstasy. Because the shaykh keeps pouring his divine wine, all opposites disappear and the ultimate freedom is realized. Strikingly enough, there is no lyrical ‘I’ but the poet speaks about a group that is being initiated by the spiritual master: ‘Again we have returned from the tavern drunk/ again we have escaped from high and low’. On the Mountain with Shiva, in an Alley with the Beloved – a Comparison between Akka’s and Rumi’s Bridal Mysticism The central similarity between Akka’s ‘I have Maya for mother-in-law…’ and Rumi’s ‘The Wine-Tavern’ is that both poems speak about the liberation of the world of human-made distinctions. The two texts are both one great metaphor of transgression (Akka’s adultery with the godhead and Rumi’s divine winedrinking) and play with bridal mystical and non-dual elements (Akka’s ‘I will make him my good husband’ and Rumi’s ‘the hooks are the tips of Thy tresses’). Both Akka and Rumi seek for a radical leap or transformation: only if we go too far, we can reach the arms of the divine Beloved, the source of all things. The most important difference between the two texts is the way in which they speak about human relations. The lyrical ‘I’ in ‘I have Maya for motherin-law’ is trapped in the chains of suffocating relations from which she wants to be freed. Rumi’s lyrical subject, however, is hidden in the group of wine-lovers and is initiated under the guidance of a master. This difference has its roots, I believe, in the ways in which both authors walked their spiritual paths: Akka as a roaming saint, being her own guru most of the time and Rumi as a student of Shams and later with his own students. The final images of the two poems show a striking contrast. While Akka’s lyrical ‘I’ stands with the ‘Lord white as Jasmin’ on the white mountain peaks, Rumi’s poetical subject is drunk and falls to the ground in an alley full of divine love-glow. If we adopt the vision of reciprocal illumination this contrast indicates the following: ecstasy can be expressed equally well with metaphors of height as with those of depth. In rapture, all opposites vanish and the poet who is in love with the divine can switch between contrary images at will. At least if he, like Rumi and Akka, has words of fire at his disposal.

Ineke Cornet THE LITURGICAL EMBEDDING OF MYSTICAL LOVE IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ARNHEM MYSTICAL SERMONS

The Arnhem Mystical Sermons vividly portray theories of mystical love, often in words that are only found in these Middle Dutch texts. The author builds on a rich mystical tradition as well as on a rich spectrum of liturgical language. Yet, the liturgy is not only a source for words to describe the experience of God’s love, but it also functions as a locus for the experience of mystical love. The sermons thus comment on the mystical meaning of the liturgy, focusing on the readings from the Missal but expanding on the liturgy as a whole. This genre of liturgical mysticism is unique to a number of Middle Dutch texts, such as the Great Evangelical Pearl and the Temple of Our Soul, and the contents of a recently discovered manuscript that, like the Arnhem Mystical Sermons, is from the convent of St Agnes in Arnhem and is now in South Dakota. This article first provides a brief description of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons and the convent where they were copied and most likely also originally written. In the second section, the chapter focuses on the genre of liturgical mysticism and its literary context. The third section analyses the Church Dedication sermon of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons, which highlights the way in which mystical love is theorised and connected to the liturgy. This extremely well-structured sermon also opens a window into the most important concepts of mystical love in the sermon collection. It clearly shows how the Arnhem Mystical Sermons balance mystical enjoyment of love with transformational love. It shows the interconnection between an ongoing ascent and surrender to God and the union in love. The sermon also demonstrates how mystical love is related to the mutual indwelling of God in the soul and the soul in God and the Christological dimension of mystical love. The fourth section delves into the origins of the genre of liturgical mysticism found in the Arnhem Mystical Sermons, the Pearl, and the Temple, by briefly looking at authors who bear witness to striking parallels to these texts, particularly the German mystic Tauler, the female visionaries Hadewijch and Ida of Louvain, and the Cistercian mystic William of St Thierry.

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The Arnhem Mystical Sermons and St Agnes The manuscript with the Arnhem Mystical Sermons contains 162 sermons, making it the largest known Middle Dutch sermon collection.1 Sermons 1-127 were written for Sundays and feasts in the Proper of Time or Temporale, sermon 128 for the occasion of a Church Dedication (belonging to the Communale), and the sermons 129-162 were written for feasts in the Proper of Saints or Sanctorale. The Proper of Time is complete, beginning with the first Sunday of Advent. The Proper of Saints is incomplete and ends abruptly. The sermons use many words that are only found in this collection, so-called hapax legomena. The sermons build on the vast mystical tradition, particularly of fourteenth-century mystics like Ruusbroec, Eckhart, and Tauler, thereby synthesising Brabantine and Rhineland mysticism. The sermons are not translations but were originally written in Dutch. This is also clear from the fact that sermon 111 is an edited version of the Dutch text of Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals.2 The only reference to a contemporaneous author is to the prior of the Cologne Charterhouse, Peter Blomevenna, in sermon 154. Other sources include Pseudo-Augustine’s Liber de spiritu et anima (Book on the Spirit and the Soul), which is quoted extensively in sermon 32.3 The author also mentions Albert the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux. The collection was copied by a scribe at St Agnes in Arnhem. St Agnes was one of the two female communities in Arnhem that had its origin in the Modern Devotion. The community was founded around 1420, and moved to their large monastery in 1428.4 Between that year and 1459, the house joined the Third Order of St Francis. In 1459, Pope Pius II gave permission to the sisters of St Agnes to become canonesses according to the rule of St Augustine.5 The manuscript is currently kept in the Royal Library in The Hague, ms. 133 H 13. See also Maria Sherwood-Smith & Patricia Stoop, Repertorium van Middelnederlandse preken in handschriften tot en met 1550 / Repertorium of Middle Dutch Sermons preserved in manuscripts from before 1550. 3 vols., Leuven: Peeters, 2003 (Miscellanea Neerlandica 29), 1079ff. 2 Ineke Cornet, ‘The Incorporation of Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals into the Sixteenth-Century Arnhem Mystical Sermons: A Comparative Textual Analysis’, in: Church History and Religious Culture 90 (2010) no.4, 547-578. 3 On this parallel, see Ineke Cornet, ‘A Textual Parallel between the Arnhem Mystical Sermons and the Temple of Our Soul: Comparing their Incorporation of the Liber de Spiritu et Anima and Jordanus of Quedlinburg’s sermons’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 84 (2013) no.4, 341-370. 4 This was located in the Beekstraat and Gasthuisstraat. Only the chapel remains in the Gasthuisstraat. See Jan A.E. Kuys, ‘Kerk en religie in de late middeleeuwen’, in: Frank Keverling Buisman (Ed.), Arnhem tot 1700, Utrecht: Matrijs, 2008, 222-253: 245-247; Kees Schepers, ‘Het verborgen leven van de zusters Agnieten: Mystieke cultuur te Arnhem in de zestiende eeuw’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 79 (2008) no.3, 285-316: 287. 5 Kuys, ‘Kerk en religie in de late middeleeuwen’, 248; Schepers, ‘Het verborgen leven’, 287-289. 1



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The move to a stricter enclosure is a phenomenon that can be observed in many other sister houses that sprang from the Modern Devotion.6 Many communities accepting the rule of St Augustine expressed a desire to concentrate more on contemplation.7 Many houses joined the Chapter of Windesheim. St Agnes, however, was not allowed to join the Chapter as it no longer accepted female communities after 1436.8 The Chapter still provided some support, as St Agnes’s confessors came from the St Anthony monastery in Albergen.9 St Agnes flourished and in 1580 approximately 100 sisters lived within its walls.10 In 1581, the Arnhem city council forbade the public exercise of the Catholic faith as well as the entrance of new sisters to St Agnes. This meant a slow death for St Agnes, and it was forced to close in 1634.11 The sisters handed over the library to the Gaesdonck monastery, but after the latter was dissolved in 1802, the manuscript with the Arnhem Mystical Sermons and several other books were taken from the library. Therefore, today we only know of eighteen manuscripts from St Agnes. With the acceptance of the Rule of St Augustine, participation in the liturgy became the most important pillar for the spiritual life of the canonesses at St Agnes. Usually, the daily rhythm was comprised of eight prayer services. The day started with Matins at night, Lauds at dawn, Prime after sunrise, Terce at nine, Sext at noon, None at three, Vespers towards the evening and Compline before bedtime.12 Mass was celebrated after Prime and before Vespers, the exact time depending on the season. The major element of the Office consisted in the Psalms.13 Because the constitutions from St Agnes have not been discovered so Wybren Scheepsma, Deemoed en devotie: De koorvrouwen van Windesheim en hun geschriften, Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1997, 20-23. 7 Hildo van Engen, De derde orde van Sint-Fransciscus in het bisdom Utrecht: Een bijdrage tot de institutionele geschiedenis van de Moderne Devotie, Hilversum: Verloren, 2006, 276-279. 8 Koen Goudriaan, ‘Het Sint-Agnesklooster en de Moderne Devotie’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 81 (2010) no.1, 17-37: 21-24; Idem, ‘The Regular Obersvance of the Women Converts of the Rule of St. Augustine’, in: Anna Dlabačová & Ad Tervoort (Eds.), Piety in Practice and Print: Essays on the Late Medieval Religious Landscape, Hilversum: Verloren, 2016, 157-178. 9 Goudriaan, ‘Het Sint-Agnesklooster en de Moderne Devotie’, 22. 10 Schepers, ‘Het verborgen leven’, 289. 11 Jan de Klerck, ‘Kerk en religie circa 1500-1700’, in: Frank Keverling Buisman (Ed.), Arnhem tot 1700, Utrecht: Matrijs, 2008, 255-275: 257-267. 12 Jonathan Black, ‘The Divine Office and Private Devotion in the Latin West’, in: Thomas J. Heffernan & E. Ann Matter (Eds.), The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2001, 45-72: 57; C.D. Fonseca, ‘Augustiner-Chorfrauen’, in: Robert Auty et al. (Eds.), Lexikon des Mittelalters, München/ Zürich: Artemis, 1980, 1217; Thomas J. Heffernan & E. Ann Matter, ‘Introduction to the Liturgy of the Medieval Church’, in: Hefferman & Matter, The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, 1-12: 2-3. 13 Black, ‘The Divine Office and Private Devotion in the Latin West’, 60-68; Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy, 45-46. 6

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far, it is not known to which extent the sisters adapted this basic scheme. Although the sisters might have used a slightly different version than the Windesheim Constitutions, these constitutions still provide insight into the liturgical life of such an enclosed community. Depending on the day, texts, symbols and gestures in the celebration were all different, ranging from the number of lessons at Matins, to gestures like kneeling or prostration and the use of incense. Every element of the liturgy was highly regulated and sisters knew exactly which role they had on which day.14 Many aspects indicate that the Arnhem Mystical Sermons were not just copied there, but authored in St Agnes in Arnhem as well.15 The sermons follow the Utrecht calendar of the saints after its reformation in 1525, and the collection contains the only known sermon (156) for the feast of St Eusebius, a local saint venerated in Arnhem.16 The sermons refer to the audience as women who live in an enclosed community and follow the Rule of St Augustine. On top of this, the liturgical mysticism of the sermons is shared with a manuscript from St Agnes that was newly discovered at an auction in South Dakota, USA, which also comments on the mystical dimension of, for example, a church’s dedication.17 The Arnhem Mystical Sermons were written to exhort the canonesses to celebrate the liturgy also within themselves. They were to facilitate this by meditating on and contemplating what happens in the liturgy, particularly the readings from the Missal. This is illustrated by references to the process of lectio divina in the sermon collection. By intertwining the celebration of the liturgy with mystical love for God, the sermons tie together two major aspects of the nuns’ life. Their liturgical life was to be imbued with mystical love for God, and their mystical love supported and underpinned by their liturgical life. Rudophus Th.M. van Dijk, De constituties der Windesheimse vrouwenkloosters vóór 1559: Bijdrage tot de institutionele geschiedenis van het Kapittel van Windesheim. Vol. 1, Nijmegen: Centrum voor Middeleeuwse Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1986. 15 The scribe of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons is the same as hand three of the Gaesdonck treatises. See Hans Kienhorst, ‘Meer mystiek uit het Arnhemse Agnietenklooster: De handschriften Den Haag, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 71 H 51 en 133 H 13’, in: Jos Biemans et al. (Eds.), Manuscripten en miniaturen: Studies aangeboden aan Anne S. Korteweg bij haar afscheid van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Zutphen: Walburg, 2007, 201-215: 201-214; Marinus K.A. van den Berg, Het Gaesdonckse-traktatenhandschrift: Olim Hs. Gaesdonck, Collegium Augustinianum, ms. 16, Hilversum: Verloren, 2005 (Middeleeuwse Verzamelhandschriften uit de Nederlanden 9), 37-40. 16 Ineke Cornet, The Arnhem Mystical Sermons: Preaching Liturgical Mysticism in the Context of Catholic Reform, Leiden: Brill, 2018. 17 The South Dakota manuscript was sold on 3 November 2018 by Addison & Sarova Auctioneers, as ‘Manuscript Dutch Prayer Book, ca. 1500’. See https://addisonsauction.hibid.com/ lot/45018750/manuscript-dutch-prayer-book--ca--1500/?q=&ref=catalog. 14



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A Sixteenth-Century Literary Network on Liturgical Mysticism There are a number of sixteenth-century texts from the region of Arnhem that develop the concept of the inner celebration of the liturgy in the Dutch language: the Evangelical Pearl, The Temple of Our Soul, the texts in the South Dakota manuscript, and the Arnhem Mystical Sermons. It is at least remarkable that St Agnes’s library contained a unique witness to the origins of the Pearl in the form of a manuscript with an excerpt from the Evangelical Pearl.18 The Pearl (1537/1539) and the Temple (1543) were likely written before the Arnhem Mystical Sermons. The Pearl author clearly connects the liturgy with an inner, spiritual celebration: I [Christ] was born once in the flesh for your sake, so that I could always be born spiritually in you. All the other great feasts that were outwardly celebrated by me should also be fulfilled spiritually within you, for which reason they are celebrated, since you should constantly have and carry in your heart my whole life (…).19

This passage states that the salvific life and death of Christ, which are celebrated liturgically, are also taking place spiritually in the person. The liturgy recollects Christ’s whole life, which is also present in the person who imitates Him. In this way, every aspect of Christ’s life, from his birth to his death, resurrection, and ascension is taking place within the person: Here, it is always Christmas, for God is always born spiritually in the soul. And it is always Candlemas, for with the Son of God the soul offers herself in the inner temple of her spirit, which God has freed and dedicated to himself. And God’s Son is raised here, when we follow his life and examples. And Christ Jesus celebrates the Last Supper here, and takes himself to himself in the soul, and feeds her spiritually with his holy body and blood, and transforms her completely into him, and unites her with his joyful spirit, his joyful soul, and his joyful, glorified body.20 Ms. KB Den Haag, 71 H 51, fol. 134-141 (ca. 1535-1540). ‘The Evangelical Pearl, Part III’, transl. Helen Rolfson, in: Rik Van Nieuwenhove, Robert Faesen & Helen Rolfson (Eds.), Late Medieval Mysticism of the Low Countries, New York/ Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2008 (The Classics of Western Spirituality), 215-322: 222-223. Quoted with slight adaptations. Die grote evangelische peerle, vol devoter gebeden, godlijcker oeffeninghen ende geesteliker leeringhen, ed. Theodoricus Loer, Antwerp: Henrick Peetersen van Middelburch, 1537, III.3. ‘Ic ben eens lichamelic om uwen wil gheboren, om dat ic altijt geestelic in u geboren soude worden. Ende so voort dat alle andere hoochtijden, dye uutwendelic van my begaen werden, ooc gheestelic in u volbracht mogen worden; daer si al om geviert werden, om dat ghi al mijn leven ende lijden, (…) stadelic in uwer herten sult hebben ende dragen (…)’. 20 Peerle I.46: ‘Hier ist altijt kersdach, want God wort hier altijt inder sielen geestelic geboren. Ende altijt lichtmisse, want dye siele offert haer selven metten Soon Gods inden inwendigen tempel haers geests, die God hem selven gevrijt ende gewijt heeft. Ende hier wort die Sone Gods opghevoet, also wel als wi zijn leven ende zijn exempelen navolgen. Ende hier hielt Christus Jesus zijn avontmael, ende neemt hem selven tot hem selven inder sielen, ende 18 19

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This spiritual liturgy within the person is not bound to the limits of time and space that the liturgy is subject to, but it is a continuous inner celebration. At the heart is the mystical union with Christ who dwells in the soul and transforms it. This theme is present in a number of chapters of the Pearl, but it is not systematically worked out in the whole book, which contains a patchwork of exercises and devotions. The Temple of Our Soul describes the human person as God’s temple, based on Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 3:16: ‘You are the temple of God’. Chapter 8, entitled ‘How the Exterior Liturgy in the Holy Church is Carried out for the Sake of the Interior Liturgy’,21 describes how the dedication of a church is fulfilled within the temple of the human person. A feast day of the Church should not merely be celebrated outwardly, but more importantly, in an inner manner: Therefore, my dearest beloved in Christ, the one who desires a pure consecration of the church should bring the house of God, namely the most inner part of the soul, to freedom for God and unity. Only in unity can the Most High and Unique One, God himself, be united with the soul. (…) Therefore, when the human person is disposed in such a pure way that his heart and soul are anxious about nothing but God, and what his own physical needs demand (…), then such a union between God and the soul comes into being, and they become together as one, as St. Paul says, ‘Whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him’.22

Becoming one spirit with God is a classical way of describing the mystical love between God and the soul. The author of the Temple connects this to an inner celebration of Church Dedication liturgy through dedicating the inner temple to God. Through this, the person becomes one spirit with God. In subsequent chapters, the Temple comments on the mystical dimension of all the feasts of the Temporale. s­pijsdese gheestelic met zijn heylighe vleesche ende bloet, ende verwandeltse gheheel in hem, ende maect si een met sinen vrolijcken gheest, met zijn vrolike siele ende met zijn vrolicke glorificierde lichaem’. 21 ‘The Temple of Our Soul (extracts)’, transl. Robert Faesen, in: Late Medieval Mysticism of the Low Countries, 323-348: 328. See Albert Ampe (Ed.), Den tempel onser sielen: Door de schrijfster der Evangelische Peerle, vol. 18, Antwerpen: Ruusbroecgenootschap, 1968, 278: ‘Hoe die uutwendige oeffeninge der heyliger kercken om die inwendige volbracht wort’. 22 ‘Temple’, 329. See Tempel, 279: ‘Hierom, mijn alderliefste in Christo, die een puer kercwijnghe hebben wil, moet dat huys Gods, dat is dat binnenste der sielen, God alleen vrien ende eenigen. Want sal dat overste eenige één, dat god is, metter sielen vereenicht werden, dan moet dat geschieden met eenicheyt. (…) Ende daerom, wanneer die mensche also puerlic gheoordineert is, dat zijn hert ende siel met gheenen dingen becommert en is dan met God alleen, ende alleen dat hi van lijfs nootdruft hebben moet (…), dan so ghesciet een alsulcken vereeninghe tusschen God ende der sielen, dat si één te samen werden, als sinte Pauwels seyt: “Wie God aenhanget, die wort een gheest met hem”’. Cf. 1 Cor 6:17.



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Though the Pearl and the Temple refer to the inner celebration of the liturgy, the Arnhem Mystical Sermons are the most developed collection of liturgical mysticism. The sermons comment on the mystical dimension of every day of the liturgical year. The sermons exhort the sisters to prepare for the liturgy in such a way that it becomes an inner, love-filled liturgy as well. They are prompted to meditate on that which is celebrated and offer themselves to God. Sermon 85 (Easter) focuses on meditating on and contemplating Christ’s resurrection: ‘Therefore meditate and contemplate how the glory of the Godhead descends to the grave in order to raise and take on the rejected, humble, crucified humanity of Christ, His Son (…)’.23 Sermon 35 (a further reflection on the topic of sermon 34 for Septuagesima Sunday) prompts one to surrender oneself to God in response to the Laus tibi, Domine, which replaces the Alleluia from Septuagesima Sunday till Easter: Then a person shall often renew this sacrifice in this holy time, especially by a short meditation, as often as he says in his Hours: Laus tibi, Domine. Thus he shall sometimes, be it short or long, as God gives it, offer and enclose himself again in God for his highest honour and praise.24

This quote in particular shows that the inner, mystical offering to God can take place during a liturgical celebration. This thought is also worked out in other sermons describing how the soul receives Christ in the sacrament, as sermon 1 illustrates: Then the soul sees with the inner eyes of her rational mind that the Father in the Godhead comes and takes away the meekness and frailty from the body, and wants to possess it with his omnipotence and make it like the body of his clarity, that is, of his Son. And this happens truly each day in the receiving and the transformation of the holy sacrament.25 Arnhem Mystical Sermons (further abbreviated as AMS), Sermon 85, fol. 172rb: ‘Hierom meditiert ende contempliert hoe dat die glorie der godheit nederclymt totten grave om te verwecken ende aen te nemen die verworpen, oetmoedige, gecruyste mensheit Christi sijns soens (…)’. The English translation of the sermons is based on the preliminary translation made by Prof. Dr. Kees Schepers (University of Antwerp), which has been quoted with slight modifications. 24 AMS, Sermon 35, fol. 82ra: ‘Dan sal een mensche dese offerhande in dese heilige tijt god duck vernijen, bysonder mit een corte aendacht, als hi soe duck in sijn getijde seit: Laus tibi, domine. Soe sal hi somwilens cort of lanck, nae dien dattet god geeft, hem selven weder in god tot sijnre hoechster glorien ende lave opofferen ende besluyten’. As the ‘person’ is a male noun in Middle Dutch, the sermons for canonesses refer to ‘he’. 25 AMS, Sermon 1, fol. 1vb: ‘Dan siet die ziel mit die inwendige ogen hoers redelicken gemoets dat die vader inder godheit coemt ende neemt dat licham hoer oetmoedicheit ende crancheit, ende wil dat besitten mit sijnre almoegentheit ende gelijckent den licham sijnre claerheit, dat is sijns soens. Ende dit geschiet waerlick alle dage in dat ontfangen ende verwandelinge des heiligen sacraments’. 23

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Sermon 85 zooms in on this connection between liturgical celebration and the inner, mystical life. In doing so, the sermon first explains the connection between intermediaries and the mystical union with God: When the inner person wants to turn inward into his innermost ground, then first of all the senses with all that the senses produce encounter him, that is everything that the soul has ingested or received or retained in itself, through the senses or with the senses, be it outward or inward; outward [is that which] the person has ingested through seeing, hearing, speaking or reading; or [inner is that] what the inner imagination or mind’s eye has received and remembered of God and spiritual things. These are all senses, and they are produced when the person purely desires to turn inwards to God. Sometimes, they are very necessary and helpful for the person in turning inwards, and sometimes very damaging and hindering if the soul falls, together with reason, with pleasure into imageness and rests in it.26

The sermon describes a process of turning inwards, proceeding from the outward dimension of the senses to the innermost dimension of the spirit. The senses are good in helping the person to turn inwards, but one should not remain stuck on the level of the senses and the imagination, but reach for the innermost.27 The same principle applies to reaching the innermost dimension of the liturgy: But when they [the senses] bring into a person the feasts and solemnities of the church, and the soul turns itself with them or through them purely to God in the spirit, where all solemnities are truly renewed and celebrated by God, then the senses and images are necessary and good until this moment, in so far as they lead the soul into and point to the truth of the solemnities in the spirit. Therefore, one should not enjoy the ingestings of the senses and their imaginations of the feasts more than as an introduction or indication of the truth.28 AMS, Sermon 85, fol. 177ra-rb: ‘Wanneer sich die ynnige mensche tot sijnen binnensten gront inwerts keren wil, soe gemoet hem daer tyerst die synnen mit al die synnemakicheit, dat is al dat die ziel doer die synnen of mit die synnen ingenamen of ontfangen of beholden heeft in hoer, het si uutwendich of inwendich. Uutwendich wat die mensche doert sien, hoeren spreken of lesen ingenamen heeft of wat die inwendige ymaginatie of verbeeldinge ontfangen ende ontholden heeft van god of geestelicke dingen. Dat sijn al synnen, ende die worden voert gebracht wanneer sich die mensche bloet in god begeert te keren. Onderwilen sijn se den mensche zeer noetdorftich ende behulpelick totten inkeer, ende onderwilen zeer schadelick ende hynderlick als wanneer die ziel mit dat vernuft in die beeldelicheit mit genoechten valt ende rust daer in’. 27 About the tension and harmony between contemplation with and without images in Geert Grote, which applies to this discussion in general, see Guido de Baere, ‘Het “ghemeine leven” bij Ruusbroec en Geert Grote’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 52 (1985) no.2, 172-183: 176-177. 28 AMS, Sermon 85, fol. 177rb-va: ‘Mer wanneer se den mensche inbrengen die festen ende hoechtijden der kercken, ende die ziel hoer daer mede of daer doer bloet tot god inden geest keert daer alle hoechtijden van god waerlick in vernyet ende begaen worden, soe sijn die synnen ende verbeeldingen tot dier stont toe noetdorftich ende guet, soe veer si die ziel leyden ende wijsen tot die waerheit der hoechtijden inden geest. Daer om en salmen die innemingen 26



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The author of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons applies detachment from the intermediaries of the senses to the ‘feasts of the Church’. The outward liturgical celebrations point to the dimension of the inner celebration of the liturgy. Though the spiritual celebration of the feasts takes place in the spirit, it is still based on this outer celebration. The intermediary of the liturgy functions as a vehicle to carry the person to the heights of this spiritual celebration, provided she is self-detached and open to God alone. All senses and faculties have to be unified in the person’s centre, the spirit, till the soul is caught by God himself: ‘And to this end the soul must have collected all her faculties (…) and stride with the feet of loving desire and love so far above all created, named things, until the soul is caught above all understanding and thought’.29 This inner celebration of the liturgy reflects the outer celebration. As the Easter liturgy celebrates the resurrection of Christ, so it too celebrates the inner resurrection in the person. Mary is the true example of inner death and resurrection: ‘For with whom she had truly died spiritually, with him she is also truly resurrected and glorious in one brightness’.30 The person is also drawn into an inner resurrection, when God himself transforms the person. This is a mystical experience beyond comprehension: What the spirit of a person experiences there of God and how it is pervaded with the pure eternal truth, that is something no tongue can utter, or heart envisage, nor can it be understood by any of the senses. For just as the very first most glorious and perfect revelation of the God-united, glorified, glorious humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ first happened to his most worthy mother Mary and remained hidden and unknown to the world, similarly the very first, most glorious and perfect revelation happens to the inner spirit of a person, into which clarity the spirit immediately passes, faster than a blink of the eye, and is transformed into the clarity of God and sees the light with the light.31 der synnen ende hoer verbeeldingen vander festen nyet meer gebrucken dan totter inleydinge of aenwijsinge der waerheit’. 29 AMS, Sermon 85, fol. 177va-vb: ‘ Ende daer toe moet die ziel al hoer crachten versamet hebben (…) ende schrijden mit die voeten der mynlicker begeerten ende mynnen soe wijt aver alle geschapen, genaemden dingen, tot dat die ziel baven alle begripinge ende gemerck gegrepen wort’. 30 AMS, Sermon 85, fol. 175ra: ‘Want mit dien sy oeck geestelick inder waerheit was gestorven, mittien is si oec waerlick verresen ende glorioes in een claerheit’. 31 AMS, Sermon 85, fol. 178rb-178vb: ‘Wat den geest des menschen daer bevijndt van god ende hoe hi doergaen wort mit die bloete ewige waerheit, dat en can geen tonge uutspreken, noch hert bedencken, noch van ghenen synnen begrepen werden. Want gelick die alre yerste glorioeste ende volmaectste apenbaeringe der godverenichder, glorificyerder, glorioeser mensheit ons heren Jhesu Christi sijn alre weerdichste moeder Maria yerst geschieden ende der werlt verborgen ende onbekent is gebleven, alsoe geschiet die ynnige geest des menschen hier die alre yerste glorioeste ende volmaectste apenbaeringe, in welcks claerheit die geest terstont avergaet, snelre dan een ogenblick, ende wordt verwandelt in die claerheit gods ende siet mitten licht dat licht’.

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The inner resurrection is reflected in the whole person, who is transformed just as Christ was transformed. The sermon’s conclusion summarises this aptly: ‘Thus we prove to the world that we are truly risen in Jesus Christ and that our sinful life through his death is hidden and annihilated in God’.32 The church dedication sermon fully illustrates this connection between the liturgy and the mystical experience of love. Mystical Love and the Church Dedication Liturgy Sermon 128 (Church Dedication) explains the mystical dimension of the rite of the dedication of a church. It culminates in the celebration of mystical love on the altar of the human spirit, representing the deep intertwining of liturgy and mystical love. This sermon points to a number of key aspects of the sermon collection’s theories on mystical love. It shows how love is mirrored in liturgical language and celebration. It is embedded in an inner ascent that entails the stages of purification, illumination, and union with God. It also shows the link between mystical love as spiritual communion and sacramental communion. The sermon also expands on the concepts of the mutual indwelling of God in the soul and of the soul in God, and elaborates on the Christological dimension of mystical love, and shows that mystical love is related to the deepest dimension of the human person that is capable of receiving this passionate love. The mystical application of the rite is based on the commonly accepted concept of the soul as God’s inner church, which was developed by a number of mystics.33 The sermon outlines three aspects of the rite to represent three stages of the inner ascent towards God. These symbolise the three stages of the via mystica: purification of the body (symbolised by the outer temple), illumination of the faculties (illustrated by the inner temple), and union with God in the spirit (represented by the altar). The sermon opens with designating the yearly celebration of the dedication of a church as an occasion to perform the dedication of the soul: On the solemn day of the church’s dedication, a faithful, inner soul should turn inwards earnestly, and observe the temple of her soul, which the Lord has purified AMS, Sermon 85, fol. 180va: ‘Aldus bewijsen wij dan der werlt dat wij in Christo Jhesu waerlick verresen sijn ende dat onse sundige leven mit sijnen doot in gode verborgen ende te nyet is’. 33 Lee Bowen, ‘The Tropology of Mediaeval Dedication Rites’, in: Speculum 16 (1941) no.4, 469-479: 469-470; Ruth Horie, Perceptions of Ecclesia: Church and Soul in Medieval Dedication Sermons, Turnhout: Brepols, 2006, 92-96. 32



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and adorned with himself: how it is now polluted and vitiated with sins and wicked pleasures.34

The indwelling of God in the temple of the human person requires a response of the human person. God wants the human person to keep the temple holy and pure, instead of ‘polluted and vitiated with sins and wicked pleasures’. Purification is symbolised by the cleaning of the outer temple, which the sermon identifies as the senses, the members, and the heart. The second aspect of the mystical path is illumination. This is symbolised by lighting candles in front of the dedication crosses by the bishop who represents Christ, the true bishop of the soul.35 In this stage, the twelve faculties are illuminated by Christ: And she takes, as twelve candles, the highest and purest mind of Christ and places it against her own impure mind, and she then takes his highest divine intellect and places it against her own darkened intellect, and similarly his most divine and highest love against her worthless, misdirected love.36

The final stage entails the mystical union with God, symbolised by the celebration of the Eucharist. On the altar of love, the highest part of the spirit, union with God takes place. In the Arnhem Mystical Sermons, the spirit is the highest dimension in the human person that has the capacity to love God: After all this she turns to the highest and most interior choir, that is, to the sancta sanctorum of the spirit, where the highest and most delightful altar of love is raised (…). After all these activities, preparations, washing and decorations, praise of organ playing, the raising of the voices, offerings and thanksgiving, which, like in a flash, in a sweet melting, bring together and combine in Christ Jesus the affections and soul’s faculties, a miraculous, divine tranquillity originates immediately in the soul, and she is completely robbed of herself by God. And in this tranquillity, the Personal, Eternal Word comes and performs the high sacrifice in the soul, and offers himself in her, and [offers] her, melted and united in him, to the Father in the Godhead, for the eternal delight and enjoyment of his love.37 AMS, Sermon 128, fol. 286rb: ‘Opten hoegen kerwijngen dach soe sal een getrouwe, ynnige ziel neernstelick in hoer selven gaen ende besien den tempel hoere zielen aen, die die here mit sich selve gereynicht ende vercyert heeft: hoe die nu bevleckt ende ontreynt is mit sunden ende boese genoechten’. 35 AMS, Sermon 128, fol. 287va. 36 AMS, Sermon 128, fol. 287va-vb: ‘ende neemt als tweelf keersen dat hoechste ende lutterste gemoede Christi ende set dat tegen hoers geests onlutter gemoede, ende neemt daer nae sijn hoechste, godlicste verstandenisse ende set dat tegen hoer duyster verstandenisse, ende alsoe sijn godlicste ende hoechste mynne tegen hoer onnutte vreemde mynne’. 37 AMS, Sermon 128, fol. 289ra-vb: Nae al desen kiert se hoer tot dat hoechste ende ynnichste choer, als tot dat sancta sanctorum des geestes, daer dat hoechste ende genoechlicste altaer der mynnen in staet (…). Nae al dese werckelicheiden, bereydingen, wassinge ende vercyeringen, 34

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The Eucharistic celebration on the altar represents mystical love. The climax of the liturgy runs parallel to the apex of mystical love. The mystical union is ultimately given by God himself, which the person can only receive. Divine tranquillity is given by God himself as the person ‘is completely robbed of herself by God’. The inner union with God, which is the climax of this sermon, is described in the Eucharistic language of the Word performing ‘the high sacrifice in the soul’. Christ comes into the soul to dwell there and bring the person into his union with the Father, for the ‘delight and enjoyment of his love’. Mystical love is based on mutual indwelling, as Christ is in the soul, and the soul is in Christ. The union between the person and Christ is the inner liturgy of the sacramental communion with Christ.38 This highlights again the Christological dimension of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons. Mystical union is understood as participation in the divine nature through the mediation of Christ. This experience of love is passionate as well: it is pure enjoyment. Other sermons also use concepts derived from bridal mysticism, such as embracing and loving. This indicates that the tradition of passionate, courtly love is also present in the Arnhem Mystical Sermons. Apart from experiential, mystical love is also transformative: In this sacrifice of the Eternal Word the form of the soul is changed and becomes one in the form of God, and the loving Son of God presents the form in his own unity to his Father and the whole heavenly host. Over this form of the soul in the Son and on the Son in the soul the Father in the Godhead rejoices more and is drawn into it with more love than seems to exist in the entire heavenly host, and all of the heavenly company is renewed and its joy and glory double, and what happens to the pure spirit and inner soul and how it is done, is more to be experienced than to be told.39 orgellavinge, stemmen verheffinge, offeringen ende dancken, die die affectien ende crachten der zielen mit een zuete versmeltinge in enen snellen blick onder een doen ende hebben in Christo Ihesu, soe wort terstont een wonderlicke, godlicke stillinge inder zielen, ende si wort hoers selves als te mael beroeft van God. Ende inder stillinge coemt dat persoenlicke, ewige woert ende doet dat hoege sacrificie inder zielen, ende offert sich selve in hoer, ende hoer in hem versmolten ende geenicht den vader inder godheit, tot een ewich waellust ende gebruck sijnre mynnen’. 38 On the inner dimension of the liturgy, see also Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300-1500), New York: Crossroad, 2005 (The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism 4), 114-115. 39 AMS, Sermon 128, fol. 289vb-290ra: ‘Mittien offeren des ewigen woerts wort die form der zielen verwandelt ende wort een in die form Gods, ende die mynlicke soen Gods presentiert die form in sijns selves eenheit sijnen vader ende alt hemelsche heer, van welcke form der zielen inden soen, ende des soens inder zielen, den vader inder godheit sich meer verwaellusticht ende mit mynnen meer daer in getagen wort dant schijnt in alt hemelsche heer te hebben, ende alt hemelsche geselschap wort daer van hoer blijtschap ende glorie vernijet ende verdubbelt, ende hoe ende wat die reyne geest ende ynnige ziel daer geschiet, dat is meer te bevijnden dan te uutspreken’.



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Through the loving union with God, the person ‘is changed and becomes one in the form of God’. Deification is an important theme in the Arnhem Mystical Sermons. Sermon 26 succinctly states that ‘God has become man, so that you might become divine’.40 This is mostly based on the classical topos of Athanasius, who said that Christ’s incarnation was the basis for the human person’s deification.41 This transformation wrought by God can sometimes be experienced in a special way. The experience of God is beyond human ways of understanding: it ‘is more to be experienced than to be told’. Yet, the sermon describes that some may be aware of this transformative union through experience, whereas others will not be experientially aware of this union: And whatever person does not experience this or to whom it does not happen with clear discernment, he should nevertheless apply himself diligently to the aforesaid activities, that is to cleanse, scrub and adorn his three parts, and pray humbly and faithfully for what he does not experience; if he believes and remains turned inward until that time as much as he can, quiet, serene and empty of all consideration, then it occurs in him through God being just as genuinely in the darkness and unknowing as it ever happened in any God-loving person with divine experience.42

This sermon states that God’s transformative love is present and changing the person, even if it is not experienced. This union between Christ and the soul does not always coincide with an experience: it can happen ‘with divine experience’, or ‘in the darkness and unknowing’, that is, without an awareness of being united with and transformed by God. If one does indeed have an experience, one should continue to turn inwards and surrender to God who accomplishes his will within the person: But a person who did not yet experience this experiential light and the effect of God and yet continually persists in humble detachment, and does not observe and follow God any the less, might well be a thousand times more blessed and perfect, even if he does not know it. That is, depending on the humble, fathomless return from failing to God, and with the profound surrender of the will to the eternal

AMS, Sermon 26, fol. 50va: ‘God is mensche geworden, op dattu godlick werden soldes’. Athanasius, ‘De Incarnatione Verbi’, in: Athanasios Opera Omnia, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, (Paris: Migne, 1857 (Patrologia Graeca 25), 95-196: 192. 42 AMS, Sermon 128, fol. 290ra-290rb: ‘Ende wat mensche dit nyet en bevijnt of inder claerre wetentheit hem nyet en geschiet, die sal nochtans nyet te myn sich neernstelick tot die voerseit werckelicheiden, als om te reynigen, te wasschen ende te vercyeren sijn drie delen, sich geven, ende dat geen dat hi nyet en bevijnt oetmoedelick ende betrouwelick bidden: geloeft hijt ende holt hem tot dier stont nae sijn vermoegen daer toe lutter ingekeert, stil, rustich ende ledich alles gemercks, het geschiet in hem van God soe gewaerichlick inder duysternisse ende onbekentheit alst ye in enich godmynnent mensche geschiet is mit godlicken bevijnden’. 40 41

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will of God; whoever is most equal and pure in that regard, he is the most agreeable to God and the most perfect and holy.43

Thus, the practice of turning inwards and the surrender of the will to God is the most crucial aspect of the inner ascent to God. In this way, the person is one with Christ’s will and thus one with the Father. The experience of God’s working is secondary to the transformation brought about by God in a person who is surrendered to him. Thus, the inner ascent to experiencing God’s love in the spirit is never detached from the ongoing purification and illumination of the person as s/he imitates Christ. This mystical dimension of the Church dedication liturgy is also reflected in other works related to the Arnhem Mystical Sermons. The author of the Temple also mentions how Christ consecrates the altar of the person’s innermost, and how the person sacrifices Christ on her inner altar.44 The South Dakota manuscript from St Agnes likewise describes the mystical dimension of the Church liturgy. This manuscript with prayers for Augustinian nuns that was discovered in 2019 describes three exercises for the occasion of Church Dedication in a chapter entitled ‘The exercises on the day of a church’s dedication’.45 The first exercise is ‘that He may dedicate and adorn the temple of our heart’.46 In this prayer, the nun prays that Christ will completely renew her heart and adorn it with flowers and herbs. The second exercise is ‘that he may come in the temple of our soul and anoint the crosses’.47 This means that Christ will comfort her whilst carrying the crosses of tribulations and that the light of candles, which are his gracious example, will enlighten her. The third exercise is entitled ‘That he may share a feast with us’48 and includes prayers for Christ, who sacrificed himself, to feed the soul with his body. This is the spiritual meaning of Christ sharing a meal with Zacchaeus, the reading from the Missal for this day. It also includes a number of prayers for the nun to sacrifice herself to God, ending with a sacramental prayer to receive the holy body of Christ as a nourishment for the soul. These remarkable ­similarities AMS, Sermon 128, fol. 291ra-291rb: ‘Mer die mensche die dit bevijntelicke licht ende inwercken Gods noch nye bevonden en heeft ende altoes in oetmoediger gelatenheit staet ende Gods te myn nyet waer en neemt noch en volget, mach noch dusent mael seliger ende volmaecter wesen, al en weet hijs niet. Dat is, nae dien oetmoedigen, grondeloesen wederkeer vander gebreken tot God, ende nae dat grondigen avergeven ende laten des willen inden ewigen wil Gods: soe wie daer die gelijcste ende tlutterste in staet, die is God die behaegelicste ende die volmaecste ende heilichste’. 44 Temple, chapters five and seven. 45 Manuscript South Dakota (see footnote 17), fols 25v-27v. 46 Manuscript South Dakota, fol. 25v: ‘Dat hij den tempel ons herten wil wijen ende cyeren’. 47 Manuscript South Dakota, fol. 26r: ‘Dat hij wil comen in den tempel der zielen. Ende salven onse crucen’. 48 Manuscript South Dakota, fol. 26v: ‘Dat hij mit ons warschappen wil’. 43



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between the Arnhem Mystical Sermons and the South Dakota manuscript thus illustrate that in St Agnes, the liturgy of Church dedication, like all other liturgies, was connected to spiritual exercises and mystical experiences of love. Origins of Liturgical Mysticism The genre of liturgical mysticism comes to the surface in a number sixteenthcentury Dutch mystical texts, but it is not limited to this period. Unfortunately, the interconnectedness between liturgy and mysticism has hardly been studied on the level of historical texts. At the moment, we are able to trace some similarities with other authors and texts, though much research still needs to be done to establish more textual and thematic parallels. It is clear, however, that the Arnhem Mystical Sermons use motifs from other authors, including the fourteenth-century mystic Johannes Tauler and William of St Thierry. A very clear parallel is found between the Pearl, the Temple, and the Arnhem Mystical Sermons and the works of Tauler. The latter were widely read in the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries because, in contrast to Eckhart, none of his statements have ever been condemned.49 The St Agnes library possessed at least two manuscripts containing sermons ascribed to Tauler.50 Tauler’s Christmas sermon on the three births of Christ – in eternity, in time, and in the soul – that are reflected in the three Christmas masses, is also used in the Pearl and the Arnhem Mystical Sermons.51 Tauler states in his Christmas sermon (Puer natus est) that the birth of Christ takes places daily in the soul: ‘God is born within a just soul every day and every hour truly and spiritually, by grace and out of love’.52 Tauler systematically applies the theme of the inner celebration of the liturgy. In his commentary on Kurt Ruh, Die niederländische Mystik des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts, München: Beck, 1999 (Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik 4), 251. 50 Ms. Berlin, Staatsbibliotheek zu Berlin – Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, mgf 242 and 243 (1550) contains a Dutch translation in two volumes of Canisius’s Tauler edition of 1543, which encompasses both authentic and non-authentic sermons attributed to Tauler. The now-lost manuscript Olim Gaesdonck, Collegium Augustinianum, ms. 16 (ca. 1550) contained, among other texts, a short version of a Tauler sermon, namely no. 60 in Vetter’s Tauler edition. This sermon is found on fol. 121v-124r. See Berg, Het Gaesdonckse-traktatenhandschrift, 27, 53. On the manuscripts from St Agnes, see Cornet, The Arnhem Mystical Sermons, Appendix II. 51 See for example, Rob Faesen, ‘The Three Births of Christ and the Christmas Liturgy in the Temple of Our Soul, the Evangelical Pearl and the Arnhem Mystical Sermons’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 81 (2010) no.1, 121-137. 52 ‘Ist daz Got alle tage undalle stunde wurt werlichen geistlichen geborn in einre guten dele mit gnoden und mot minnen’. Johannes Tauler, Die Predigten Taulers, ed. Ferdinand Vetter, Berlin: Weidmann, 1910 (Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters 11), 7. Translation from Johannes Tauler, Sermons, transl. Maria Shrady, New York: Paulist Press, 1985 (The Classics of Western Spirituality), 35. 49

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the sermon for Pentecost Sunday, Tauler mentions that the sending of the Holy Spirit ‘takes place on all days spiritually to those who prepare themselves thoroughly for that’.53 The liturgy of the dedication of a church in its true, full sense happens within the human person, without ceasing: ‘all modes and exercises of the Holy Church all point to the inner person, in whom the Church Dedication and renewal should truly take place without ceasing’.54 In another sermon, Tauler mentions that the dedication of the ‘loving temple’ is ‘much more real than in all temples that were ever built or dedicated’.55 Tauler’s sermon on the inner priesthood (Fuit in diebus herodis regus) highly resembles the sixteenth-century Dutch texts.56 His themes are used in the Arnhem Mystical Sermons 128 and 131, and also in the seventh chapter of the Temple.57 In this sermon, Tauler identifies a person’s innermost being with the priest who enters the sancta sanctorum: The divine person, which is an inner person, should be like a priest and should enter into the sancta sanctorum, and the people should remain outside. They [the priests] perform the ministry sacramentally, and in this way nobody is allowed to perform it except men, who consecrate and bless the holy body. But what belongs to the ministry of the priest in a spiritual way, is that she performs the sacrifice, and a woman may perform this just as a man. (…) She should sacrifice to the heavenly Father the offer of his beloved Son with all his words and works and all his suffering and holy life (…).58

The inner person enters the Holy of Holies to perform the sacrifice of the Son to the Father, as much as the priest offers the sacrifice of Christ on the altar. Johannes Tauler, Sermons de J. Tauler et autres écrits mystiques. 2: Le Codex Vindobonensis 2739, Liège: Vaillant-Carmanne, 1929, Sermon 12, p. 118: ‘geschiet alle dagen gesitelichen an den, die sich gruntlichen dar-zu bereident’. 54 Idem, sermon 19, p. 219: ‘alle wise und übunge der heiliger kirchen die wiset allit uf den inwendigen menschen, da in der warheit kirwigen und eyne war virneygunge [editor’s comment: virnyjunge] sulde sin ane underlaz’. 55 Idem, sermon 8, p. 86: ‘vil eygenklicher dan in alle den tempelin, die i gebuwit oder gewigen wurden’. 56 Johannes Tauler, Sermons de J. Tauler et autres écrits mystiques. 1: Le Codex Vindobonensis 2744, Liège: Vaillant-Carmanne, 1924, sermon 4. 57 A textual comparison between these four texts is made by Cornet, The Arnhem Mystical Sermons. 58 Tauler 1, sermon 4, p. 68-70: ‘Diser götlich mensch das ist ain inwenndiger mensch der sol ain priester sein und sol eingeen in sancta sanctorum und das volck alles darausz bleiben. Aber sy tund daz hailig ampt in person und stat der hailigen christelichen kirchen, darumb tund sy das ampt sacramentlich und in der weisze so mage das ampt nimant tun dann mannes person. Und mügen den hailigen leichnam unsers herrn consecreiren und segen und anders nimant. Aber gaistlichen in der weisz das er ain priester ist was zo dem ampt gehöret daz ist das opffer. In der weisz so mage es wol ainer frawen person tun als aines mannes Und das opfer opfferen dem himlischen vatter seinen lieben sun mit allen seinen worten und wercken und allem seinem leuden und hailigen leben (…)’. 53



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This image of offering the Son to the Father is highly similar to the one used in the Church Dedication sermon of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons. The Modern Devotion, which was at the origin of St Agnes, is usually not overtly mystical, but some authors do refer to liturgical mysticism. The fifteenth-century author Thomas à Kempis describes sacramental communion as leading to mystical union between God and the soul. In doing so, he also refers to the mutual indwelling of Christ in the soul and the soul in Christ: Who will allow me to be alone with you, Lord, to open my whole heart to you, and to enjoy you as my soul desires? (…) you alone speak to me and I to you, as a lover speaks to a loved one and as a friend shares a meal with a friend. This I pray for and this I desire: that I may be totally united to you, and that you may fill my entire heart. May I increasingly acquire a taste for heavenly and eternal things by receiving Holy Communion and by frequently celebrating Mass. O Lord God, when will I be wholly united to you, completely absorbed in you, and totally forgetful of myself? You in me, and I in you!59

Particularly his statements on ‘Christ in me and I in Christ’ are rooted in mystical traditions on mutual love between Christ and the soul, as he speaks of a full union and a complete absorption of the one into the other. The embedding of mystical love in the liturgy is also found in the works of a number of female visionaries. The thirteenth-century Hadewijch mentions how, in receiving the Eucharist, Christ himself comes to her. Hadewijch describes in her vision how Christ himself comes to her after receiving the Eucharist: ‘Then he gave himself to me in the shape of the sacrament, in its outward form, as the custom is; and then he gave me to drink from the chalice, in form and taste, as the custom is. After that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him’.60 She compares her mystical union without distinction to sacramental communion: Then it was to me as if we were one without distinction. It was thus: outwardly, to see, taste, and feel, as one can outwardly taste, see, and feel, in the reception of Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ: A New Reading of the 1441 Latin Autograph, transl. William C. Creasy, Macon, GE: Mercer University Press, 2007, Book 4, chapter 13. Cf. Thomas à Kempis, De Imitatione Christi: Liber Quattuor multiplici lingua nunc primo impresso, ed. Johannes B. Weigl, Solisbaci: Seidel, 1837. ‘Quis mihi det, Domine, ut inveniam te solum, ut aperiam tibi totum cor meum, ut fruar te sicut desiderat anima. […] sed tu solus mihi loquaris, et ego tibi, sicut solet dilectus ad dilectum, loqui et amicus cum amico convivari? Hoc oro, hoc desidero, ut tibi totus uniar, et cor meum ab omnibus creatis rebus abstraham; magisque per sacram Communionem, ac frequentem celebrationem cælestia et æterna sapere discam. At, Domine Deus, quando ero tecum totus unitus et absorptus, meique totaliter oblitus? Tu in me et ego in te’. 60 Hadewijch, The Complete Works, transl. Columbia Hart, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980, vision 7, 281. See Hadewijch, Visioenen, ed. J. van Mierlo. Vol. 1: Tekst en commentaar, Leuven etc.: De Vlaemsche Boekenhalle, 1924, 77-78: ‘Doe gaf hi mi hem selven in specien des 59

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the sacrament [of the Eucharist]. So can the Beloved, with the loved one, each wholly receive the other in full satisfaction of the sight, the hearing, and the passing away of the one in the other.61

The feature of Christ coming to the altar in the soul as a priest that is mentioned in the Church dedication sermon is also found in the thirteenth-century Cistercian nun Ida of Louvain. She compares her soul to a temple in which Christ appears during the celebration of the Eucharist. Her biographer writes that One day, the blessed virgin [Ida] had a vision, when she was in rapture. She saw her own soul as a grand temple, which extended more and more so that its wide dimensions (…) resembled that of a splendid church. (…) She looked at the altar because it seemed to be adorned most beautifully and honourably, more than anything else. (…) She could see the priest coming to the altar, dressed in the solemn liturgical garments. (…) This priest was the only and highest Priest […], Jesus Christ.62 After all this had been said, she was at once taken away in rapture to divine contemplation, and being stripped of her human self, she was elevated into the depths of her spirit to admire the supernatural vision. She saw this (…) and (…) the Lord Jesus appeared (…).63

Ida of Louvain describes how Christ himself appears to her. The language of Christ entering the temple of the soul, of the human person being robbed of the self and entering into union with Christ is strikingly similar to the Church dedication sermon of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons. Ida of Louvain also points to a connection between the liturgical celebration and her mystical experiences of Christ in mentioning that Christ appears as a priest in the temple of her soul. She plays with the language of spiritual and sacramental communion, sacraments in figuren alsoe men pleghet; ende daer na gaf hi mi drinken uten kelke ghedane ende smake alsoe men pleghet. Dear na quam hi selve te mi ende nam mi alte male in sine arme ende dwanc mi ane heme’. 61 Hadewijch, The Complete Works, vision 7, 281-282. See Hadewijch, Visioenen, 7, 78-79: ‘Mi was op die ure ochte wi een waren sonder differentie. Dit was al van buten in siene, in smakene, in ghevoelne, alsoe men smaken mach van ontfane inden sacramente van buten, in siene ende ghevoelne van buten, alsoe lief met lieve ontfaen mach in voller ghenoechten van siene ende van hoerne, van vervaerne deen inden anderen’. 62 Ida of Louvain, ‘Vita Idae de Lovanio’, in: Godefroid Henschen & Daniel van Papebroeck (Eds.), Acta Sanctorum. Vol. Aprilis II, Paris/ Rome: Victor Palmé, 1866, 180. ‘tempore quodam in excess mentis erepta virgo beatissima, vidit in spiritu, saum ipisus animam ad instar temple latissimi, per omnes sui partes introrsus extendi. Porrectisque dimensionibus (…) ad eminentis cuiusdam ecclesiae similitudinem aptissi me dilatari.(…) ad ipsum tandem altare direxit intuitum, utopte ceteris omnibus honestius atque decentius adornatum’. Translation by Rob Faesen (unpublished), quoted with slight adaptations. 63 Ibidem. ‘quibus dictis, in excessu mentis ad coelestia contemplanda confestim eripitur, et ab humanis exutus individiis, ad supernae visionis intuitum eius in alta spiritus elevatur. Videbat (…) et (…) Dominus Jesus (…) apparuit’. Author’s translation.



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even though she does not elaborate on the exact nature of the connection and interplay. Many of these female mystics were among the first to employ the visionary genre. Yet, they were building on a vast liturgical and theological tradition in doing so, which is evident from the language they are using. The Cistercian tradition seems rather important in this regard. Tauler was highly influenced by Bernard of Clairvaux, and Hadewijch by William of St Thierry, but the connections in terms of liturgical mysticism, if there are any, are still to be investigated.64 However, there are some striking parallels between the Arnhem Mystical Sermons and William of St Thierry.65 In sermon 97, the author of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons regularly refers to the human person as God’s heaven and God as the heaven of the human person.66 The use of the concept of a mutual heaven might have been influenced by William of St Thierry, who wrote in his Meditationes devotissimae that ‘because you live in us, we are surely your heaven (…). Thus our [heaven], as I see it, is in you, and your indwelling in us is our heaven’.67 Though William of St Thierry does not provide a fully fleshed-out theory on the interaction between liturgy and mysticism, he does provide a basis that other authors could use in the next centuries. He refers to the notion of celebrating the liturgy interiorly, within one’s cell in the monastery, in his Golden Epistle. This concept of the inner liturgy is strikingly similar to the Arnhem Mystical Sermons, the Temple, and the Pearl. In the temple, at certain times the sacraments of the Christian liturgy are celebrated in a visible and symbolic way. But in the cell, the reality of all sacraments of our faith is celebrated without ceasing, just like in heaven, as real and ordered, although not yet with the same pure majesty and the same eternal assurance.68 On Tauler and Bernard of Clairvaux, see Louise Gnädinger, Johannes Tauler: Lebenswelt und mystische Lehre, München: Beck, 1993. On Hadewijch and Willem of St Thierry, see Paul Verdeyen, ‘De invloed van Willem van Saint-Thierry op Hadewijch en Ruusbroec’, in: Ons Geestelijk Erf 51 (1977) no.1, 3-19. 65 Ineke Cornet & Rob Faesen, ‘Christological Aspects of the Mystical Union with God in John of Ruusbroec and the Arnhem mystical sermons’, in: Sacris Erudiri 50 (2011), 505-537: 524-526. 66 AMS, Sermon 97, fol. 211ra-rb. 67 William of Saint Thierry, Meditationes Devotissimae, Turnhout: Brepols, 2005 (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 139), 36. ‘(…) Cum autem nos inhabitas, caelum tuum sumus utique (…). Nostra ergo, ut video, in te, vel tue in nobis habitatio nobis caelum est’. 68 See William of Saint Thierry, ‘Epistola ad Fraters de Monte Dei (Epistola Aurea)’, ed. Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina 184 (1902), 307-354, Par. 36. ‘In templo visibiliter et figurative aliquando christianae pietatis sacramenta dispensantur: in cellis vero, sicut in coelis, ipsa veritate, ipso ordine, etsi nondum ipsa puritatis majestate, vel aeternitatis securitate, res ipsa omnium sacramentorum fidei nostrae assidue celebratur’. 64

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William of St Thierry thus also alludes to the concepts of the inner celebration of the liturgy as the unceasing and spiritual celebration of that which the sacraments point to. This fits well within his notion of the importance of spiritual communion, even in the absence of sacramental communion. The Cistercians William and Bernard enriched the Western mystical tradition with their original elaboration of the mystical dimension of the Song of Songs. They also influenced the bridal mysticism of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons, whose author uses many concepts derived from passionate love: In this incomprehensible working of the Father and the Son – namely in their mutual approach, inclination, and bowing, and in their loving reverence for one another, and in the blessing, embrace and kissing, and in the supernatural becoming one, so that the Father gave the Son all his power in his splendour (…).69

To describe the relationship of love between the persons in the Trinity, the author even uses a few words that have not been found in any other Dutch manuscripts. The persons are described as being each other’s ‘companionship’, and having a ‘shared delight’ in their love.70 The contemplative lover of God shares in this embrace, love, and kiss between the Father and the Son, as the Son takes humanity into this embrace. In conclusion, the Arnhem Mystical Sermons are the apex of liturgical mysticism in their systematic intertwining of theories of mystical love and liturgical language and practice. The sermons integrate the mystical works of Tauler and bear witness to striking resemblances with William of St Thierry, Hadewijch, and Ida of Louvain. Though the sermons are similar to the Pearl and the Temple, yet they rise above these works on the level of their systematic integration of many liturgical elements and comments on the whole liturgical year. What insights do the sermons provide into the nature of love? Since the twelfth century, writers from France to the Low Countries described passionate love, ranging from mundane lyrics to mystics.71 This tradition highly influenced our contemporary concepts of love. In line with the great Cistercian mystics Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St Thierry, who used the Song of Songs to describe the relationship between God and the soul, the Arnhem Mystical AMS, Sermon 97, fol. 213rb: ‘In dese onbegripelicke werckinge des vaders ende des soens – als in die te samen tegentredinge, nijginge ende buyginge, ende in hoer mynlicker reverentie tegen den anderen, ende in die benedijnge, omhelsinge ende cussinge, ende in die avernatuerlicke eenwerdige, soe dat die vader den soen al sijn gewalt in sijnre heerlicheit gaf (…)’. 70 Cf. ‘medegesellicheit’ and ‘medebehagen’. For the complete list of all hapax legomena, see Cornet, The Arnhem Mystical Sermons, 368-375. 71 See, for example, Paul Verdeyen, Willem van Saint-Thierry en de liefde: Eerste mysticus van de Lage Landen, Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2001. 69



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Sermons expand on the passionate nature of mystical love. This mystical love is the deepest possible love that can be experienced. To explore this notion, the sermons describe that only the deepest dimension in the person, the spirit, can fully experience this love, and not the senses or the faculties of intellect and will. As love is beyond comprehension, it can only be experienced by this deepest dimension in the person. This is a passionate experience, but at the same time, it is utterly transformative as well. The sermons state that transformation through God’s love, which happens in the self-detached person, is more important than special experiences of love. The experience of mystical love is described as a gift that is given to persons who have been robbed of the self and are thus open only to love. Though this love is beyond language and understanding, the Arnhem Mystical Sermons nevertheless state that this love flourishes too in the celebration of the liturgy. The sermons illustrate that the liturgy functions as one of pillars of the Western mystical tradition and has provided many words and concepts as well as a locus for mystical experience. For the Arnhem Mystical Sermons, the mystical and liturgical traditions can be mutually enriching. Mystical love infuses the liturgy with a new dimension; and the liturgy provides the context and linguistic concepts for giving words the ineffable experience of love.

Esther van de Vate THE APPLICATION OF MEDIEVAL ‘LOVE THEORIES’ IN THE EARLY MODERN SPIRITUALITY OF MARIA PETYT

The Carmelite tertiary Maria Petyt (1623-1677),1 or by her monastic name, Mary of Saint Theresa, was born on 1 January 1623 in Hazebrouck, a small town in French Flanders, then part of the Southern Netherlands. In search of the pristinus splendor – the original splendour of Carmel – Maria Petyt founded a convent of hermits in Mechelen, Flanders. In writing about her prayer life, she used words from the Tridentine revival of Flemish mysticism, in particular the school of Ruusbroec and Herp. Nevertheless, Maria placed different accents than these medieval mystics. The question of this contribution is therefore: ‘What are these accents and what shifts between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century do they reveal?’ To a large extent this contribution is built on the insights of Michel de Certeau, especially on the framework that he offers to understand the way in which the medieval configuration of mysticism was restructured in early modern times.2 The medieval configuration was based on ‘a stable agreement between speech and the being that was expressed by it’.3 However, this tight connection eroded at the end of the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century, mysticism was dominated by the act of speech. Certeau even goes so far as to claim: ‘the universe (…) is posited in principle as the vocabulary of a dialogical discourse between a you and an I that seek one another through language’.4 Interwoven with this fundamental shift in the mystical configuration, Certeau signals a change in love mysticism: ‘Since the thirteenth century (courtly love etc.) a gradual religious demythification seems to be accompanied by a progressive mythification of love. (…) In place of the divine word (which also had a ­physical A recent biography of Maria Petyt is included in: Joseph Chalmers et al. (Eds.), Maria Petyt: A Carmelite Mystic in Wartime, Leiden: Brill, 2015, 8-21. 2 Michel de Certeau, La Fable mystique: XVIe-XVIIe siècle, Paris: Gallimard, 1982, 222; translated as The Mystic Fable. Vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 162. 3 Certeau, Fable mystique, 221; Mystic Fable, 160. 4 Fable mystique, 224; Mystic Fable, 163. 1

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nature and value) the loved body (which is no less spiritual and symbolic, in erotic practice) is substituted’.5 Carrying out his research along this line of fracture, Certeau describes the impact of the above-mentioned shift in four strategies that developed in seventeenth-century mysticism in order to take up anew the medieval tradition in a different form.6 As a first strategy, Certeau signals the historicity of seventeenthcentury spirituality. Spirituality is rooted in experiences. In this strategy, the validity of abstract knowledge is put into perspective and the existential link with experience is confirmed. The second strategy that Certeau mentions, relates to the prominent role that is assigned to the ‘I’ of the writer and the ‘you’ of the addressee. The content of the faith became related to the speech-act of early modern mysticism. A third strategy that Certeau describes, is a derivative of this dominance and concerns the conventions on which the mystical discourse in the seventeenth century was based. ‘A network of conventions is established, made up of presuppositions and contracts that discourse strengthens, shifts and manipulates’.7 As the fourth and last strategy to recognize the seventeenth-century mystical tradition, De Certeau refers to the prominence of pragmatic and subjective language. This contribution will elaborate upon these strategies in view of four important phases in the heavenly love life of Maria Petyt: the ignition of her heart, her spiritual marriage, her spiritual deliveries and motherhood, and finally her mystical love-death. Maria’s Ignition of the Heart In Maria Petyt’s love story one can clearly see the first strategy that Certeau signals: the emphasis on the historicity of spirituality. In her autobiography and her letters,8 Maria describes the story of her love life as a personal event that overwhelmed her: In this way, the Beloved let me see that (…) he himself wanted to possess me entirely then, and after that, often during several days filling me with such ­heavenly joys and divine enjoyments that I could never be able to express. I felt 7 8 5 6

Fable mystique, 13; Mystic Fable, 4. Fable mystique, 222f; Mystic Fable, 162. Fable mystique, 223; Mystic Fable, 162. Maria Petyt, Het leven van de weerdighe moeder Maria a S.ta Teresia (alias) Petyt, vanden derden reghel vande Orden der Broederen van Onse L. Vrouwe des berghs Carmeli, tot Mechelen overleden den 1. November 1677. Van haer uyt ghehoorsaemheyt, ende goddelijck ingheven, beschreven, ende vermeerderinghe van ‘t selve leven. 4 pts. in 2 vols., Ghent: de hoirs van Jan vanden Kerchove, 1683-1684.



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as if forced to cry out: ‘Oh! You jealous God! Oh! You consuming fire! Truly you are called this; how jealous do you not show yourself to a soul whom you want entirely unto yourself and to have for yourself alone! How is it that you do not consume everything by the fire of your love, the love you make to burn in the heart? Everything that is not purely for you, in you, unto you’.9

Maria got to know her Beloved in an all-consuming fire that leads her to God. The examination of such intense affections played a major role in the Carmelite mystagogy of the seventeenth century. However, the appreciation was ambiguous. Maria was offered a double meaning by her tradition: affect as an emotion and affect more specifically as a desire or passion.10 Within Carmel, both meanings were valued differently. Affect, in the first sense – as emotion or sensation – was received neutrally or even positively. Like Augustine, Maria’s spiritual director considered affections as the feet of the soul that ascends to God.11 In the second sense – affect as desire or passion – affect was seen as an act of the appetitus sensitivus, also called passio.12 Such affects had to be purified and attuned to the will of God.13 These two meanings were at odds with each other. The first supports the movement of the soul to God, the last has to be exercised to be adapted to a God-formed life.14 Petyt, Leven, vol. 1, 94f. I thank Helen Rolfson for the translation of Maria’s autobiography (Petyt, Leven, vol. 1, 1-195). The translation of the other quotes from the writings of Maria Petyt are mine. 10 Cf. Piet Hoornaert, Gij staat mij altijd bij. Een gebedspraktijk van de Karmel: De contemplatieve aspiratie, Ghent: Carmelitana, 1996. 77. Hoornaert quotes John of Jesus Mary: Nota, per voculam Aflectus (sic) in hac materia nostra intelligi & significari quemcumque voluntatis actum qui cum aliquo ejusdem motu, vel calefactione producitur. Intelligi quoque per vocem affectus quemlibet appetitus sensitivi actum, qui alio nomine dicitur Passio, eo quod cum aliqua commotione corporis; (sic) vel immutatione productur. Oratio affectuum voluntaties officina est, qui vel soli, vel cum actibus appetitus sensitivi produci & enasci solent. Johannes à Jesu Maria, Opera omnia, Florence 1772, 511. 11 Cf. Michaël à S. Augustino, In-leydinghe tot het landt van Carmelus, ende beproevinghe van syne vruchten, ofte in-leydinghe tot een waerachtigh carmelitsch, ofte innigh leven (…), in vier deelen verdeylt, Bruxelles 1659, tract. 1, cap XL, 101. 12 Cf. Hoornaert, Gij staat mij altijd bij, 182. 13 Cf. John of the Cross: ‘Upon this road we must ever journey in order to attain our goal; which means that we must ever be mortifying our desires and not indulging them; and if they are not all completely mortified we shall not completely attain’. E. Allison Peers (transl. & ed.), The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church, London: Burns Oates, 1943, vol. 1, 55. The term ‘affection’ is mentioned in the Dutch translation of this passage: ‘als wy onse ongheregelde affectien, ende ghenegentheden altydt verderven, ende af-snyden’. Joannes vanden Cruyce, Verhole wercken vanden salighen (...) Joannes vanden Cruyce eersten ongheschoenden carmeliet, Ghent 1693, 35. 14 We find this double meaning also in the writings of Maria Petyt’s spiritual director, Michael of Saint Augustine. The first meaning: ‘He [a good religious] (…), is actually and affectively conformed to the godly will’. Michael of Saint Augustine, In-leydinghe tot het landt van Carmelus, 9

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Within the given tension, Maria responded with a spirituality that can be considered as dualistic. Her spirit fled to heavenly regions in an amorous love flight, but her body was held in severe mortification. This dualism was substantiated as follows: Did Christ not say: what is born of the Spirit is spirit, and what is born of flesh is flesh. Ergo, what comes from our nature and natural operation, that is natural, what is born of flesh, that is flesh and unable to have spiritual communion with God who is the purest spirit. Therefore, that spirit that will adhere to God with pure love, etc., must be born of the spirit, that is, from a thorough dying, going out, and leaving oneself, dying a love-death to all in us that is sensory, inherent, of course, is meaty in this sense. And thus the spirit is born of the spirit; nature, and all that is natural, cannot give birth to a spirit, but rather destroys and despises.15

From the perspective of this dualistic spirituality, we are confronted with the dual focus of Maria’s spiritual way. Beyond her ecstatic love life, Maria Petyt longed for a complete annulment of her sensory experiences, in order to meet her unseen God. Maria’s Mystical Marriage Certeau pointed to a second strategy that the seventeenth-century mystics developed to adapt their message to a contemporary audience. A space between the ‘I’ of the writer and the ‘you’ of the reader was created and the content of the faith became related to this new pragmatic positioning within the mystic configuration. This referential strategy can be exemplified on the basis of the mystical marriage of Maria Petyt. Maria’s marriage to her Beloved is to be understood in a Teresian perspective.16 The early modern paradigm of her mystical marriage was not marked by tract. 3, cap. XVIII, 332f. The second meaning is found in a letter that Michael of Saint Augustine wrote about Maria’s vocation: ‘No one can rise to such a heavenly, angelic and godly life, unless a perfect death of nature precedes, and a complete death of all uncontrolled affections to something outside or not God-formed’. Boxmeer: Nederlands Carmelitaans Instituut, Arch. II, 39: Maria Petyt; Michael of Saint Augustine, Veele Schoone ende seer geestelijcke leeringen, 137f. 15 Petyt, Leven, vol. 4, 150f. 16 Teresa writes in the Interior Castle: ‘But what passes in the union of the Spiritual Marriage is very different. The Lord appears in the centre of the soul, not through an imaginary, but through an intellectual vision (…) just as He appeared to the Apostles, without entering through the door, when He said to them: “Pax vobis”. This instantaneous communication of God to the soul is so great a secret and so sublime a favour, and such delight is felt by the soul, that I do not know with what to compare it, beyond saying that the Lord is pleased to manifest to the soul at that moment the glory that is in Heaven, in a sublimer manner than



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grafting the earthly ritual of marriage onto Christ as an unearthly being,17 but by the experience of an ever-deeper entrance into the divine mystery.18 This ever-deeper communication between an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ of two lovers colours Maria’s divine love story where she writes: Jesus, my Beloved, often reveals himself in my interior, like an amicable Bridegroom who has wounded his heart with my love, (…) and the Beloved then speaks thus to my soul: ‘It is me, do not be afraid. You see that I am your Beloved, who loves you. It pleases me to converse with you in this way, to show myself to you in this form, to demonstrate my love for you’.19

The in-between of this quotation not only shows a dialogical discourse as a content of faith but also creates a pragmatic space in which the readers of Maria’s writings are challenged to enter into an affective communication with divine reality.20 In comparison with the medieval Flemish school, one can observe a profound shift in Maria’s mystical marriage. Like other mystics since John of the Cross, Maria Petyt refers to her affective union with Christ as a ‘mystical marriage’, whereas in Flemish mysticism the term ‘brulocht’ was only used for the highest stage of mystical life, namely, for the ‘over-formed’ life, in Latin: transformatio.21 is possible through any vision or spiritual consolation. It is impossible to say more than that, as far as one can understand, the soul (I mean the spirit of this soul) is made one with God, Who, being likewise a Spirit, has been pleased to reveal the love that He has for us by showing to certain persons the extent of that love, so that we may praise His greatness. For He has been pleased to unite Himself with His creature in such a way that the have become like two who cannot separated from one another: even so He will not separate Himself from her’. E. Allison Peers (transl. & ed.), The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, 12th ed., London: Sheed & Ward, 1991, vol. 2, 334f. 17 Cf. Carolyn Diskant Muir, Saintly Brides and Bridegrooms: The Mystic Marriage in Northern Renaissance Art, Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2012, 1. 18 P. Mommaers, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience: The Role of the Humanity of Jesus, Louvain: Peeters, 2003, 89f. 19 Petyt, Leven, vol. 2, 144f. 20 Cf. ‘The spirituals intended to set forth the conditions in which speech would “work” or “succeed” in making communication possible. By determining pragmatic presuppositions, they wanted to erect places in which relation could occur’. Mystic Fable, 165; Fable mystique, 226. Four linguistic indications are given in Fable mystique, 249-255; Mystic Fable, 181-187. 21 A. Deblaere, De mystieke schrijfster Maria Petyt (1623-1677), Ghent: Secretarie der Academie, 1962, 66. In the works of John of the Cross an intermediate stage is found that ties in with the spiritual marriage of Maria Petyt: ‘The soul may reach such a transformation of love as to be in the spiritual marriage, which is the highest estate that can be attained in this life’. Complete works. Vol. 2, 249. Cf. this intermediate stage with the highest stage in the works of Ruusbroec: ‘But if we want to behold eternal life and find it in us, then through love and faith we must transcend ourselves above reason to our onefold eye. There we find the resplendence of God born in us. (…) But where we are carried over and transformed in its resplendence,

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Maria’s Spiritual Deliveries According to Certeau, seventeenth-century mysticism was built on conventions. This can be made clear by means of the next phase in Maria’s love story: her spiritual deliveries. Maria’s spiritual motherhood consisted largely of giving birth to souls in Christ. From time to time Maria even experienced this giving birth physically: All this time I have felt myself in pain, as in labour, spiritually and also in the senses, suffering the anxiety, contractions and pains of a labouring mother, and [this pain] was so bitter and painful that I could barely breathe. In the end, the whole person collapsed and all powers failed. I fell as if I have fainted, turning completely pale because this pain seemed to be unbearable, like labour. So I was beset in the presence of the sisters, who thought I had a natural disease.22

It is clearly visible in this quotation that Maria’s heavenly love story is described with the help of human conventions. With this maternal spirituality, Maria also conformed to the apostolic mission of the Tridentine church. Her spiritual motherhood served the apostolate of the Church: Sometimes the spirit of love,23 like a bird, seems to fly all over the world, (…) sometimes with the priors of the Holy Church, then with all pastors and confessors. (…) It seems to me that I am speaking with them, reigning with them, (…) driven by a maternally anxious mind, to make the hearts of the subjects suitable and capable of receiving the seed of good admonition and paternal correction, making this fruitful by the intercessory praying of his beloved bride.24

Maria’s mysticism joined the Tridentine church and accepted its clerical horizon. Love mysticism was no longer as free as it had been in the Middle Ages. Maria complied with the conventions of her time.

we have forgotten ourselves and are one with it. And thus we live in it and it in us. Still we remain always separate in substance and in nature. The resplendence of God that we see in us has neither beginning nor end, time nor place, way nor path, form nor shape, nor color. It has wholly embraced us, encompassed us and gone through us, and opened our onefold sight so wide that our eye must stay open eternally; we cannot close it’. Jan van Ruusbroec, ‘Een spieghel der eeuwigher salicheit’, ed. G. de Baere, in: Opera omnia 8, Tielt/ Turnhout: Brepols 2001, 394, 396. 22 Petyt, Leven, vol. 2, 69. 23 The minne-spirit is an important motive in Maria’s spiritual narrative. About the awakening of the minne-spirit in her spiritual life, she writes: ‘Then the minne-spirit was dug out (…) especially to wash out the sins of others, and to satisfy divine justice by sacrificing the precious blood of Jesus’. Petyt, Leven, vol. 3, 18; Teresa Octave 1670. 24 Petyt, Leven, vol. 3, 32f.



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Maria’s Love-Death De Certeau mentioned the prominence of pragmatic and subjective use of language as a strategic point of seventeenth-century mysticism. The use of subjective words speaks dramatically to the reader. This strategy could already be noted in the quotes above. In her mysticism, Maria Petyt even surpassed this textual strategy and presented herself as a metaphor. This can be illustrated on the basis of Maria’s love-death, which is different from what Ruusbroec described.25 Her love-death breathes the Tridentine spirituality of Christ’s redeeming suffering and death.26 Illustrative is the physical testimony that Maria gave when she ended up in all kinds of tribulation: Looking at all that suffering, my sick nature was so scared, frightened and terrified, and felt such great distress, as if [my nature] had actually felt a death struggle, for my heart and all forces seemed to collapse and faint. I began to sweat in fear, a deathly pallor gripped me, my face darkened, my eyes sunken, in one word, I became like a death-fighting and dying person.27

In this metaphor the double reality can be identified which Maria creates in addressing her reader. In a corporal way she testifies to her love-death and presents herself as a metaphor of Christ’s love. This metaphorization illustrates the ‘body’ that Certeau describes.28 Christ’s redeeming love no longer takes place in heaven but is inscribed in Maria’s own body.

Cf. what Ruusbroec wrote about the ultimate transformation: ‘Now, this active meeting and this loving embrace are, in their ground, enjoyable and without mode. For the unfathomable modelessness of God is so dark and so modeless that it encompasses within itself all divine modes and activity and property of the persons, in the rich embrace of the essential unity, and (that it) produces a divine enjoyment in this abyss of the namelessness. And here is the enjoyable passing-over, an engulfment flowing away into essential bareness’. Jan van Ruusbroec, ‘De gheestelike brulocht’, ed. J. Alaerts, in: Opera Omnia, vol. 3, Tielt/ Turnhout: Brepols 1988, 598. 26 Cf. Quamquam enim nemo possit esse justus, nisi cui merita passionis Domini nostri Jesu Christi communicantur, id tamen in hac impii justificatione fit, dum ejusdem sanctissimae passionis merito per Spiritum Sanctum caritas Dei diffunditur in cordibus (cf Rom 5.5) eorum, qui justificantur, atque ipsis inhaeret (can. 11). Unde in ipsa justificatione cum remissione peccatorum haec omnia simul infusa accipit homo per Jesum Christum, cui inseritur: fidem, spem et caritatem. Heinrich Denzinger, Kompendium der Glaubensbekenntnisse und kirchlichen Lehrentscheidungen, transl. & ed. Peter Hünermann in. coll. with Helmut Hoping, Freiburg i.B. etc.: Herder, 2005, 1530. 27 Petyt, Leven, vol. 1, 246. 28 See p. 114. 25

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Conclusion The four strategies of Certeau as they are visible in the writings of Maria Petyt give an overview of the most important shifts in seventeenth-century love mysticism. In Maria’s ecstatic spirituality the re-framing of Dutch mysticism to early modern times comes to light. Due to a shift in the mystical configuration the focus of Maria’s love life changed to a more experienceable, referential, conventional and subjective narrative. Her life story unfolds as a recognizable love story characterized by a double reality and a metaphorical richness.

Janneke van der Leest NOVALIS Poetry – Love Philosophy – Mysticism

‘Novalis brings to culmination the tradition of German mysticism’, a scholar writes.1 And it is clear that this German Romantic poet (born as Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801) was influenced not only by philosophical mystics like Böhme, but also by philosophers like Fichte, Kant, Hemsterhuis, and by theologians like Schleiermacher. In order to come to grips with his theory of love, which is what this article aims to do, we must shed light on these ‘teachers’. They influenced Novalis’ ideas on imagination and poetry, as will be discussed. An additional, not insignificant influence, was the relationship with his first love, who died very young. The quest for his deceased beloved and eventually the mystical experience of the epiphany at her grave would turn his theory of love into one of love triumphing the fear of death. This is why this search for Novalis’ love theory has to deal with his poetic cycle Hymns to the Night, at which we will have a close look. Novalis’ mystical experience is veined with love, not to be understood in just the platonic or Christian sense of the word, but also in the sensual way. With this article I will argue and demonstrate that Novalis is a Romantic entrance to a better sight on ‘mysticism and/as love theory’. The ‘I’ and ‘Just Being’ Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) is a German idealist who, like Novalis, is involved in the Jena circle. He formulates an absolute ground for Immanuel Kant’s theoretical and practical reason in the Absolute ‘I’ as an absolutely free activity. For Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, 222. Weeks is a scholar of early modern German authors and has published on Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel, and Jacob Böhme, as well as translated their writings. He counts Novalis among the ‘most characteristic representatives’ of German mysticism (9).

1

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Fichte the subject ‘I’ and the object ‘not-I’ are being postulated for the first time in a kind of ‘subjective-philosophical big bang’;2 in the intellectually perceived Tathandlung (fact-act) that is free, a spontaneous act without a preceding external origin or cause. Only thanks to this Tathandlung, the subject and object can be perceived and known in a sensuous and empirical way. But who or what postulates? Only the I itself can postulate this object and subject, but it cannot be the subject ‘I’, because then it would postulate itself. Therefore, Fichte introduces the transcendental I, the Absolute ‘I’, besides the empirical, individual ‘I’. He tells his students to close their eyes and imagine a wall, and afterwards to think the one who imagined the wall. In this way we see that the Absolute ‘I’ unites both thought and thinking in itself; in the Absolute ‘I’ subject and object coincide. Fichte is heavily criticized, not in the least by the early Romantic poets: Hölderlin and Novalis. Both see that the unity of subject and object is broken from the moment the judgment (Ur-teilung) ‘I am I’ is expressed. At the moment of putting it forward, the moment of representation, I step out of ‘I am I’. Therefore, according to Novalis, the Absolute I cannot be postulated except via representation, by presenting it to ourselves in reflection. He speaks of ‘the famous struggle within the I’,3 which starts in the Absolute ‘I’ (grasping ‘I am I’), because this is a ‘necessary deception of a mediated I that is attempting to be absolute – unmediated – and thus comes into conflict with itself’.4 The Kantian unknowability of the thing-in-itself counts also for the self here. Novalis takes the view that something must precede Fichte’s Absolute I, and he thinks of an absolute sphere of existence. Novalis calls it Nur Seyn (just being) or ‘chaos’.5 This original ‘just being’ of I and of the world shall never be known. Where Fichte gives the metaphor of the Absolute ‘I’ the ultimate place, Novalis exchanges its ultimacy for a love philosophy, stressing the union of I and not-I instead of the Fichtean dialectic relation. This love philosophy is namely based on the ‘same-origin principle’ of I and not-I, spirit and nature, subject and object. Nur Seyn is not only a ground on which to keep the struggling I together, it also provides a basis for the union of (all) object(s) and (all) subject(s), a union for which he – in the footsteps of Hemsterhuis – preserves the term ’love’. We will see later how Hemsterhuis thinks love as a striving for unity, and influences Novalis in this. According to Novalis ‘Love is the

Arnold Heumakers, De esthetische revolutie: Hoe Verlichting en Romantiek de Kunst uitvonden, Amsterdam: Boom, 2015, 265. 3 Jane Kneller, ‘Introduction’, in: idem (Ed.) Novalis: Fichte Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, ix-xxxiv: xv. 4 Kneller, ‘Introduction’, xv. 5 Heumakers, De esthetische revolutie, 269. 2



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ultimate purpose of world history – the One the universe aims at’.6 It is the pre-eminent uniting principle. Romantic Theory of Imagination and the Role of Poetry Novalis combines the thinking of Fiche and of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) when he explores the abilities he ascribes to the imagination. According to Kant we are bound by the laws of nature and by the law of practical reason. But none of these laws constrain us as imaginative creatures. Therefore we have creative power. The division between the sensuous and moral aspects of human beings can be overcome by our imaginative freedom. Kant does not elaborate on this, but he only suggests a theory of ‘the transformative power of imagination’.7 Novalis takes this suggestion from him and thinks it further. He combines it with Fichte’s idea of the Absolute I that can have access – via that transformative imagination – to the supersensible world. Towards the end of his Fichte Studies, Novalis formulates a free, creative response to the limitations he has philosophically found in reason: ‘We must seek to create an inner world that is an actual pendant to the outer world’, he writes.8 With the power of imagination we can create an imaginative world where we can ‘approach (…) the pure simple essence of our “I”’.9 From this insight, Novalis concludes that the human being can have consciousness beyond the senses. He states that: ‘Humans may at any moment be supersensible beings.10 (…) The more we are able to become conscious of this state, the livelier, more powerful and enjoyable is the conviction that arises from it; the belief in genuine spiritual revelation’.11 Since the ground for this is not divine, it is a worldly revelation. Herbert Uerlings, ‘Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)’, in: Wolfgang Bunzel (Ed.), Romantik: Epoche – Autoren – Werke, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010, 92-106: 94: ‘Die Liebe ist der Endzweck der Weltgeschichte – das Unum des Universums’. 7 Jane Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 13. 8 Jane Kneller, ‘Novalis’ other way out’, in: Nikolas Kompridis (Ed.), Philosophical Romanticism, London/ New York: Routledge, 2006, 196-213: 204. 9 Kneller, ‘Novalis’ other way out’, 204. 10 This echoes Fichte in his Appellation an das Publikum: ‘The supersensible world is our birthplace and our only firm standpoint; the sensible world is only the reflection of the supersensible world’. Cited from the English translation: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘Appeal to the Public’, in: Yolanda Estes & Curtis Bowman (Eds.), J.G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute 1798-1800, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, 85-125: 105. 11 Kneller, ‘Novalis’ other way out’, 204-205. 6

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Although we are used to understand ‘revelation’ as a religious or mystical happening, in early Romanticism it develops into a capacity for everyone at any moment. As Charles Taylor states, the subjectivism that Novalis stands for, together with his creative imagination, cannot be separated from modern ‘epiphanies’,12 a concept even more exclusively linked to the divine than ‘revelations’. Revelations cannot be forced, according to Novalis: ‘It is this capacity for momentary, everyday transcendence as in reverie and day-dreaming that defines the human: a being to be found “there, where the inner world and the outer world touch”’.13 Here we come to Novalis’ famous motto: ‘The world must be Romanticized’.14 According to him, to romanticize means the poetical rewriting of the world, with the help of imaginative power: Romanticising is nothing other than a qualitative raising to a higher power. The lower self is identified with a better self in this operation. This operation is as yet quite unknown. By giving a higher meaning to the ordinary, a mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unacquainted to that of which we are acquainted, the mere appearance of infinite to the finite, I romanticize them.15

Although it is worldly instead of spiritual, it is important to realize that the Romantic idea of poetry connected to revelation is also influenced by the mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624). According to him, ‘God’s motif for the creation was to know himself. Therefore, the entire creation becomes a revelation’. 16 Poets can decipher the sacred language of nature, wherein God, spirit and matter are one, and translate it into culture in order to communicate it to humanity. Böhme attributes a great role to poets, and so the romantic poets make grateful use of his thought. Novalis is probably also influenced by Böhme in his concept of ‘magic’. There are a few times when Novalis calls his poetical philosophy a ‘magic idealism’ and he himself becomes the chief witness of that kind of idealism.17 For him magic is the ‘Art to use the world of the senses at will’.18 Böhme speaks of: to ‘see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, 428. 13 Kneller, ‘Novalis’ other way out’, 206; or as Novalis defines it in Blütenstaub: ‘The seat of the soul is there, where the inner world and the outer world touch…’ (ibid., 200). 14 Uerlings, ‘Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)’, 93: ‘Die Welt muss romantisiert werden’. 15 Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 147-148. 16 Kristine Hannak, ‘Boehme and German Romanticism’, in: Ariel Hessayon & Sarah Apetrei (Eds.), An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception, New York: Routledge, 2014, 162-179: 169. 17 Walter Jens, ‘“Een groot vredesfeest op de rokende slagvelden”’, in: Hans Küng & Walter Jens (Eds.), Wereldliteratuur en religie, Hilversum: Gooi & Sticht, 1986, 165-181: 170. 18 Heumakers, De esthetische revolutie, 285. 12



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magically’.19 Since his first spiritual experience he has seen the world anew: has seen into the depth of existence. These experiences are like a spiritual rebirth. The one who is spiritually reborn can attune him/herself with the divine spirit that speaks the language of nature, and in that way ‘gain the magical (in)sight into the heart of things’,20 even into his/her own heart. Within the range of poetic magic, fantasy – sustained by the will – has no limits: ‘Once you want, then you can’,21 is one of Novalis’ propositions. If you have such a control over your senses and over your whole mental apparatus, you get (imagine) the world you want. For Novalis, who believes that reality is for a large part – or perhaps even entirely – the result of our imagination, this longing for a world that we create with magic is not impossible. Imagination plays an important role here; the ‘creative imagination’ that magically touches and transforms the world. In the eyes of Novalis, poetry is also an expression of love. He reads the works of the Neo-Platonist Frans Hemsterhuis (1721-1790), who believes in a strict dualism of body and soul. The limitations of the body do not count for the soul. The senses are connected to the body, and a moral organ22 is connected to the soul. That organ makes possible knowledge of the Supreme Being. This knowledge is able to grow as the soul brings itself more and more into accordance with the divine harmony of the universe, which can be experienced solely by the ‘moral organ’ of which the fundamental force is love and of which the expression is poetry, according to Hemsterhuis. Theory of Love – Sophie von Kühn Novalis’ study of Fichte runs almost parallel with his first serious experience of love at the age of 22. He falls in love with the then just twelve years old Sophie von Kühn. They engage in secret. To Friedrich Schlegel he writes that his favourite study basically has the same name as his bride. ‘Sophie she is called – philosophy is the soul of my life and the key to my own self. Since I know the one, I am also completely lost in the study of the other’.23 When Sophie falls seriously ill, Novalis shares this news with one of his brothers and uses the Hannak, ‘Boehme and German Romanticism’, 169. Ibidem. 21 ‘Wenn man erst will, dann kann man auch’: Novalis, Werke, 304. As Heumankers puts it: ‘Magic makes everything possible – it seems – if you just want it’. Heumakers, De esthetische revolutie, 285 (author’s translation). 22 Hemsterhuis’ moral organ resembles Shaftesbury’s ‘moral sense’ and Rousseau’s ‘sens morale’. 23 Hans Küng, ‘De godsdienst in de spiegel van de romantische poëzie’, in: Küng & Jens, Wereldliteratuur en religie, 149-164: 150. Küng cites a letter of 8th July 1796 (author’s translation). 19 20

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metaphor ‘…philosophy is ill’.24 And in a ring engraved after her death, which is probably one of their engagement rings, we read: ‘Sophia is my guardian angel’.25 The Greek name instead of the German is used to ‘emphasize the dual role played by both his bride and philosophy as guiding and protecting spirits’.26 This makes clear that the poet thinks of philosophy and love as entangled and he describes it as follows: ‘To philosophize is basically a kind of love, a testimony to the most inner love for thinking, the absolute desire for wisdom’.27 In his view on love, Novalis is influenced by Hemsterhuis, for whom the human being strives for unity. ‘The soul strives to unite itself in the most profound way with the object onto which its desire is focused, even so profound that it wants to be that which it desires’.28 Love is the tendency to unify with the other. Hemsterhuis thinks of a complete and profound unity of the soul with all that is not its own. Novalis wants to reunite with his most important ‘not-I’. This is probably the strongest example of him practicing his love philosophy. He even denies the limits set by death: he wants to be with her and wants to become her (who is not anymore), as we will see. Sophie is linked to religion as well. Inspired by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Novalis thinks that religions cannot do without mediators: persons who are gifted with a mystical and creative sensitivity with which they can express to others what happened to them ‘after every flight of their spirit to the infinite’.29 Schleiermacher identifies poets and seers as mediators. For Novalis, mediators are sensitive representations of the divine, which itself escapes every direct presentation. Jesus Christ is one of the most successful mediators, but Novalis thinks that people are free to choose their own; it can be anyone. For him, his early deceased Timothy F. Sellner, ‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”: A New Source for Novalis’ “Hymnen an die Nacht”?’, in: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 86 (1987) no.1, 33-57: 49: ‘…die Philosophie [ist] krank’, in a letter of November 1795. 25 Sellner, ‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”’, 49. Sellner derives the title of his article from this citation. 26 Ibidem. 27 Novalis, Werke, ed. & annot. Gerhard Schulz, München: Beck, 2001, 375: ‘Im eigentlichsten Sinn ist Philosophieren – ein Liebkosen – eine Bezeugung der innigsten Liebe zum Nachdenken, der absoluten Lust an der Weisheit’ (author’s translation). 28 J.D. Bierens de Haan, De levende gedachten van Hemsterhuis, Den Haag: Servire, 1941, 33 (author’s translation). 29 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, transl. Richard Crouter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 7; ‘nach jedem Ausfluge seines Geistes ins Unendliche’, Über die Religion, Hamburg: Meiner, 1958, 5. Citations from Schleiermachers Reden are from the first edition of 1899. He made revisions afterwards. I choose this original text, because it represents the atmosphere of early German Romanticism the best and because this is the only edition Novalis could have known: the first revision appeared 5 years after his death. 24



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fiancée becomes such a mediator between the perceptible and the imperceptible world. His contact with Sophie – as mediator – convinces Novalis of the existence of an invisible domain of harmony and love. This links Sophie to another one of Schleiermacher’s notions on religion, which is based on intuiting and feeling the universe. One has to surpass human life in order to discover a universe beyond humanity. That state can be reached in death, but can already be experienced in life. For this, a special occurrence is needed which Schleiermacher describes as follows: ‘To be one with the infinite in the midst of the finite and to be eternal in a moment’.30 We will see that Novalis experiences such an occurrence, expresses it through poetry, and places it in the context of death-mysticism. Shortly after Sophie’s death on 19 March 1797 Novalis began keeping a diary. In it we witness how he develops a death cult around her. He is constantly occupied with her: in the form of ‘spiritual exercises’ like ‘reading appropriate literary and philosophical texts, frequent visits to her grave, and the contemplation of mementos of her earthly existence’.31 For this last technique Novalis obtained a lock of Sophie’s hair, the green scarf she wore during her illness, and the grey gown she wore when she died, in order to stage the last hours of her life. In his diary he considers his behaviour an experiment of empirical analysis of his own psychological states to determine whether ‘perceptions of spiritual forces beyond the grave can be induced in the human psyche’.32 In his circle there appears to be some concern for his state of mental health. Nevertheless, Novalis, however, recognizes the risk of losing touch with the real world when escaping into fantasy and imagination.33 He is also conscious of another danger, this one connected to love and receiving revelations: that the ‘ability to ‘get outside oneself’ is capable of becoming pathological when a person’s senses and understanding are out of balance’.34 So, Novalis knows of the pitfalls and he seems to have everything under control in this peculiar mourning process. He wants to follow Sophie in her death, by ignoring the division between the transcendental and empirical ‘I’. In his ecstasy of lovesickness, he seems to be able not only to ‘think’ the transcendental standpoint, but also to go through it, to really ‘experience’ it. It seems that he has got everything in this peculiar mourning process under control. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 54; ‘Mitten in der Endlichkeit Eins werden mit dem Unendlichen und ewig sein in einem Augenblick’, Über die Religion, 73. 31 Sellner, ‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”’, 51. 32 Ibidem. 33 Both Kant and Novalis ‘advocate a certain tough-minded resistance to the urge to take flight in fantasy and to forget the actual world’. Kneller, ‘Novalis’ other way out’, 210. 34 Ibid., 205. 30

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In his project to follow Sophie in death (the Liebestod), Novalis concentrates on both outer and inner phenomena. We saw already that he thinks that with a maximum of control over the senses and the mental apparatus (and he now includes internal organs as well), you can get what you want. And so, he thinks it is possible to even kill himself solely by his will. He links his motto ‘What you really love, you will preserve’35 to his ‘Once you want, then you can’, and is convinced that these devices count for the domain of death as well. He believes in a unity of the domains of life and of death. For him, as for Hemsterhuis, death is a kind of metamorphosis: the transition to a higher life. Novalis writes: ‘We jump, as an electric spark, in the other world (…) Increase of capacity. Death is metamorphosis’.36 As a minus it should not end the plus, but instead strengthen it.37 His occupation with his dead beloved is rewarded in his graveside experiences. The most famous and impressive one is his vision of Sophie on 13 May 1797, which can be regarded as ‘the culmination of a conscious intellectual and spiritual process which Novalis himself had been undergoing from a time even prior to Sophie’s death’.38 We will come to this vision when discussing the Hymns to the Night, in which it finds a poetical counterpart. On 6 June, Novalis has his last ‘vision’ of Sophie.39 From the end of June onwards he is only interested in a passive contemplation of her remembrance and writes: ‘She is the highest – the unique’, and ‘My main task should be to relate everything to the idea of her’.40 It is clear that she must become aim and centre of his life. He starts a ‘transformation of Sophie into the pure spirit of guardianship, guidance, and mediation between the poet and his Creator that finds its expression in the equation [on one of the last pages of the diary] “Xstus and Sophie”’.41 Nothing more. This might be a suggestion of a heavenly marriage or an identification. Hans Küng observes that after her death Sophie makes Novalis experience not only ‘love’ but also ‘religion’.42 With her death, he awakens religiously. Erica Meijers, ‘Hymnen aan de nacht: Romantiek en revolutie bij Novalis’, wetenschappelijk bureau Groen Links, 2007; ‘Was du wirklich liebst, dat bleibt dir’. (Novalis, Werke, 307.) 36 Heumakers, De esthetische revolutie, 286; a citation from Das allgemeine Brouillon. 37 Ibidem. Heumakers refers here to Novalis’ aphorism: ‘Der Tod ist das romantisierende Prinzip unsers Lebens. Der Tod ist -, das Leben +. Durch den Tod wird das Leven verstärkt’. (Novalis, Werke, 523.) 38 Sellner, ‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”’, 40. Novalis had recorded several transcendental experiences in the diary he kept around Sophie’s death:, on 13 and 14 May (31 May is a kind of recreation) and 7 June. 39 As Sellner cites Novalis’ diary that says ‘Erinnerungsstunde’ (remembrance hour),‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”’, 52. 40 Heumakers, De esthetische revolutie, 302. 41 Sellner, ‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”’, 52. 42 Küng, ‘De godsdienst in de spiegel van de romantische poëzie’, 154. 35



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Hymns to the Night In the first hymn of the cycle of six poems Hymns to the Night (Hymnen an die Nacht), Novalis describes the world of Light, a world of apparent objective limitations and of temporal-spacial nature. He contrasts it to the world of Night, a world of dreams and imagination, symbol for the eternal and supernal nature. As the ‘Night’s lovely sun’ (‘liebliche Sonne der Nacht’) the beloved brings about a synthesis between the physical and the spiritual realm. Kathleen Komar recognizes in this synthesis Novalis’ interpretation of Fichte: ‘This dialectical process represents a concretization of Novalis’ reading of Fichte’s theory of the progress of human self-consciousness. The physical world is posited and then doubted on the basis of a descent into consciousness, into the night’.43 What Fichte made possible in theory, Novalis wants to experience in reality: the movement from the sensible world of reflections to the world he sees with the inner eye, to the supersensible world. He practices magic as it were. The Night is the condition by which the I makes the move to the inside – and in the mystical tradition this is not an unknown metaphor for a self-confronting moment. In the Night the I changes and transcends to fulfilment, it is the medium for visionary deepening. In the first hymn preparations are made – by describing, contrasting, and synthesizing – for the third hymn, where the actual ecstatic moment of the synthesis of the two worlds is described. The second hymn describes the state of the soul of the one who is longing for the Night, who is longing to transgress the boundaries of the physical world to the supersensible one. That state is a holy sleep, which is an awakening from the lower consciousness of the worldly routine during daytime to the secrets of the Night. Normal sleep is but a ‘shadow’, a preceding twilight before the ‘true Night’. That Night, as described in Hymn II, is the ‘quiet messenger of infinite mysteries’. This ode to the Night announces a submergence in the transcendental world, but not without referring to drug-induced and sexual experience. The true Night is namely not recognized by those who: don’t feel you [holy sleep] in the grapes’ golden flood – in almond trees’ wonder oil – in poppies’ brown juice. They don’t know it’s you hovering around a tender girl’s breasts making her womb heaven.44 Kathleen Komar, ‘Fichte and the Structure of Novalis’ “Hymnen an die Nacht”’, in: Germanic Review 54 (1979) no.4, 137-144, here 140. 44 English as well as German citations from Hymnen an die Nacht are taken from the bilingual publication Novalis, Hymns to the Night, transl. Dick Higgins, New York: McPherson & Co., 1988; ‘fühlen dich [heiliger Schlaf] nicht in der goldnen Flut der Trauben – in des Mandelbaums Wunderöl, und dem braunen Safte des Mohns. Sie wissen nicht, dass du es bist, der des zarten Mädschens Busen umschwebt und zum Himmel den Schoss macht’. 43

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In the third hymn Novalis shows the union of the world of Light and that of Night. Weeks states that German mysticism is not in the first place focused on a personal union of the human ‘I’ with the divine ‘Thou’, but that it is rather concerned with the union of ‘worlds’.45 ‘Nowhere is the reinterpretation of the mysticism of worlds more poetically fertile than in the Hymns to the Night’, he claims.46 Novalis believes that ‘mystical knowledge not only spans and unites worlds, it also brings them into being and completes them’.47 And he does not only strive to unite worlds, but also its representatives, the ‘I’ and the ‘beloved one’: ‘for I’m yours and mine’ (‘denn ich bin Dein und Mein’), he writes. We see how Novalis mixes and equalizes the I and not-I/you. Here we recognize exactly Hemsterhuis’ definition of love as the tendency to unity with the other. The diary that Novalis keeps around the time Sophie dies, proves that his third hymn partly reflects the project he is undertaking in real life: to follow her in death.48 In the entry of 13 May 1797 (after a note that he had started to read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the translation of A.W. Schlegel), we read about the event of the revelation at her grave: In the evening I went to Sophie. There I was indescribably joyful – lightning-like moments of enthusiasm – I blew the grave away from me like dust – centuries were as moments – her presence was palpable – I believed she would appear at any moment…49

This announces the third hymn, whose words run almost parallel: You, Night-inspiration, heaven’s sleep, came over me – the region lifted gently up; over the region my released and newborn spirit floated. The hill became a cloud of dust – through the cloud I saw the transfigured features of my beloved. In her eyes rested the forever – I took her hands, and my tears were a glittering and unrippable bond. Years by the thousands flew off to the distance, like storms.50

Weeks, German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein, 8; see also footnote 13 for Novalis’ words on this issue. 46 Ibid., 224. 47 Ibid., 31. 48 Komar, ‘Fichte and the Structure of Novalis’ “Hymnen an die Nacht”’, 139: ‘Sophie von Kühn’s death provides the “Stoff”, the necessary empirical experience of feeling which precipitated the “Hymnen”, but Novalis’ interest in Fichte’s philosophical system and its progressive activity of the self provided the “Form”, the structuring principle of the hymns’. 49 English translation by John O’Meara, The Way of Novalis: An Exposition on the Process of His Achievement, Ottawa: Heart’s Core, 2014, 36; in German: ‘Abends gieng ich zu Sophieen. Dort war ich unbeschrieblich freudig – aufblitzende Enthusiasmus Momente – das Grab blies ich wie Staub, vor mir hin – Jahrhunderte waren wie Momente – ihre Nähe war fühlbar – ich glaubte, sie solle immer vortreten’. (Novalis, Werke, 583.) 50 For the complete English and the original German text of Hymn III, see the appendix. 45



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Novalis talks about a ‘newborn spirit’ in relation to this ecstatic experience. He surpasses Böhme, who could see into the depth of existence after rebirth, since he sees into the non-existent. An earlier line in the same hymn also refers to rebirth: ‘and with one stroke my birth’s bond ripped’. Only then was the newborn spirit released, which means that he freed himself from the earthbound realm of Light in order to be able to enter into the realm of Night, to transcend the here and now. How is this possible? Novalis explores the boundaries of the ‘I’ and transcends them. He reaches a way to exceed the boundaries of human life and describes that it is possible for him to intuit eternity and to witness and experience immortality: he saw that ‘In her eyes rested the forever’ and felt that ‘Years by the thousands flew off to the distance’. Which comes close to Schleiermacher’s notion of the immortality of religion: ‘To be one with the infinite in the midst of the finite and to be eternal in a moment’.51 This discovery of the world beyond humanity is like tuning in to the harmony of the whole universe, which the poet experiences with the ‘moral organ’ whose basic force is love – as Novalis had learned from Hemsterhuis. This harmony means: being in touch also with the non-sensible world. There is the striking line about grasping Sophie’s hands and shortly afterwards we read: ‘In her embrace I wept overjoyed tears at the new life’. The newborn spirit is able to behold the features of his beloved and even experiences to touch her. This points to Sophie’s role in the first three hymns as the mediator between the poet and the true world of the Night. In the first hymn it becomes clear that the ‘tender beloved’ (‘zarte Geliebte’) is being sent to him, and that she is a ‘spiritual force with uniquely erotic power’.52 We read there: now, I wake – for I’m yours and mine – called the Night to life for me, – humanized me – consume my body with spirit fire, so I can mix with you more intimately, airily, and then the wedding night will last forever.53

In the next three hymns the mediator Sophie changes into Christ the mediator, but the bodily sensations do not immediately disappear. Hymn IV ends with a poem where an association is developed between, on the one hand, the beloved Sophie as mediator between Novalis and the invisible world, and on the other

See footnote 30. Sellner, ‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”’, 54. 53 ‘Nun wach ich – denn ich bin Dein und Mein – du hast die Nacht mir zum Leben verkündet – mich zum Menschen gemacht – zehre mit Geisterglut meinen Leib, dass ich luftig mit dir inniger mich mische und dann ewig die Brautnacht währt’. 51 52

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hand, the beloved Christ as mediator between all human beings and the realm of eternal life. Christ is entreated here in a striking passage: O! Breathe me, Beloved, Ravish me, So I can pass on to sleep And to love.54

In the fourth hymn, Novalis wants to integrate his experiences of the Nightrevelation into his image of the world of Light. He focuses on both: Light and Night, the senses and the mind, logic and magic. This dialectical approach eventually strives for Aufhebung (sublimation). The Night must be integrated into the world of Light and enrich it. On the final morning ‘the Light will no longer frighten away the Night and love’,55 but it will include both: the Night and its daughter, ‘creative Love’ (‘schaffenden Liebe’). The Light – the earthly, daily here and now – synthesizes with the Night – in which revelations occur – and synthesizes with love – earthly as well as supernatural and Christian love – and this play of fusion is expressed by poetry. Here we see a summary of an early Romantic example of mysticism and love theory, a formula of ‘Romanticizing’ the world, in which a love theory is integrated. Love, namely, is the uniting factor in the synthesizing process and love is present here as a part of the unification: as the fruit of the Night where the mystical experience takes place. Hymn V refers to the coming of a new era starting with the birth of Christ, and exposes the Christian world view. The revelation of Sophie preceding Novalis in death like a Christ, sustains for him the official revelation of Christ. Hymn III prefigures Hymn V where it is no longer the poet standing at the grave of his beloved, but Christian believers standing at the empty grave of Christ. In his personal revelation Novalis experiences that love can triumph the fear of death, and in the hymns he links this experience to the traditional Christian revelation in which one believes in the victory of death through love. He sketches Christian belief according to his own poetic vision, culminating in the last verses of Hymn V, which are highly religious in tone and imagery. The independent Hymn VI, called ‘the resurrection hymn’, closes the cycle in high emotion. In the last strophe a synthesis is achieved between the mediator Sophie – the beloved of the poet – and the mediator Christ – the loved one of believers. And here, at the end, the unifying image ‘bride’ is used, resulting from the fusion of the bride of Novalis and the bridegroom of the church. In the final hymn the poet himself is the mediator and reveals to his readers the union by the act of writing, by Romantic imagination, by magic idealism. Thus, 54 55

‘O! Sauge, Geliebter, Gewaltig mich an, Dass ich entschlummern, Und lieben kann’. ‘Das Licht nicht mehr die Nacht und die Liebe scheucht’.



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he turns literature into religion and religion into literature with the help of ecstatic experiences – with a mystical bias – driven by love. By way of a Bonus – Spiritual Songs The adored dead fiancée whom Novalis celebrates in the Hymns to the Night, also appears in another of his poetic cycles, entitled Spiritual Songs (Geistliche Lieder). In the fourth song he uses existing Christian metaphors for his own/ private ‘religion’, based on his graveside experience. This enables images like that of his diseased bride walking over the grave at Jesus’ side like the Virgin Mary; and that of the mourner’s wound referring to the wounds of the risen Christ. In this way, Novalis makes the Christian tradition his own, and he mixes it with death-mysticism and pansexuality.56 This finds its full expression in the seventh of the Spiritual Songs: Few understand The mystery of Love, Know insatiableness, And thirst eternal. Of the Last Supper The divine meaning Is to the earthly senses a riddle; But he who ever From warm, beloved lips, Drew breath of life; In whom the holy glow Ever melted the heart trembling waves; Whose eye ever opened So as to fathom The mysterious deeps of heaven – Will eat of his body, And drink of his blood, Everlastingly.57

Only the ones who know the secret of love, who know the mysteries of sensual, sexual love, who – more specific – know what orgasm means as a satisfaction of eternal hunger and thirst, only those will understand the analogy between the heavenly and the earthly union of bodies and can understand the meaning of 56 57

Jens, ‘“Een groot vredesfeest op de rokende slagvelden”’, 176. English translation based on: George MacDonald, Exotics: A Translation of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis, the Hymn-Book of Luther, and other Poems from the German and Italian, London: Strahan & Co., 1876, 17.

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Holy Communion as the huge communion between God and man – ‘the act of love at the threshold of death’, as Walter Jens puts it.58 The cycle’s fourth song, like the Hymns to the Night, shows, the ‘visual nature of Novalis’ perception and the linking of the spiritual Sophie to Christ’.59 This song was composed in the period when Novalis kept his diary of Sophie’s death. The following lines suggest that he actually saw Sophie at the hand of Christ:60 While I thus, in silence pining, Ever wept, my life resigning, But to waste and woe was tied: All at once downwards was cloven, From the grave the stone was hoven, And my inner doors thrown wide. Whom I saw, on his hand the other, Ask me not, my friend, my brother, Sight to fill eternal eyes; From all my life’s eves and morrows, This one moment, like my sorrows, Shinning open ever lies.

Novalis uses Protestant songs and traditional Christian faith and combines them with his own philosophy. He vitalizes and eroticizes them and creates poetry out of them. Karl Bath sees, in Novalis’ works, the possible danger of Christianity merging with general religiosity and of the humane merging with love, even with the erotic. But he respects the ‘creed’ of Novalis’ Spiritual Songs, because he reads in them that Novalis must have known serious suffering and agony, and because many believers heard real testimony in the songs.61 Soon after publication in 1802 these songs were incorporated into Lutheran hymn-books. Bibliography Bierens de Haan, J.D., De levende gedachten van Hemsterhuis, Den Haag: Servire, 1941. Fichte, J.G., ‘Appeal to the Public’, in: Y. Estes & C. Bowman (Eds.), J.G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute 1798-1800, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, 85-125.

Jens, ‘“Een groot vredesfeest op de rokende slagvelden”’, 177. Sellner, ‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”’, 54. 60 Sellner bases himself on Ritter who states that these lines can only mean this, see ‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”’, 54. 61 Küng, ‘De godsdienst in de spiegel van de romantische poëzie’, 162-163. 58 59



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Hannak, K., ‘Boehme and German Romanticism’, in: A. Hessayon & S. Apetrei (Eds.), An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception, New York: Routledge, 2014, 162-179. Heumakers, A., De esthetische revolutie: Hoe Verlichting en Romantiek de Kunst uitvonden, Amsterdam: Boom, 2015. Jens, W., ‘“Een groot vredesfeest op de rokende slagvelden”’, in: H. Küng & W. Jens (Eds.), Wereldliteratuur en religie, Hilversum: Gooi & Sticht, 1986, 165-181. Kneller, J., ‘Introduction’, in: J. Kneller (Ed.) Novalis: Fichte Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, ix-xxxiv. Kneller, J., ‘Novalis’ other way out’, in: N. Kompridis (Ed.), Philosophical Romanticism, London/ New York: Routledge, 2006, 196-213. Kneller, J., Kant and the Power of Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Komar, K., ‘Fichte and the Structure of Novalis’ “Hymnen an die Nacht”’, in: Germanic Review 54 (1979) no.4, 137-144. Küng, H., ‘De godsdienst in de spiegel van de romantische poëzie’, in: H. Küng & W. Jens, Wereldliteratuur en religie, Hilversum: Gooi & Sticht 1986, 149-164. MacDonald, G., Exotics: A Translation of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis, the Hymn-Book of Luther, and other Poems from the German and Italian, London: Strahan & Co., 1876. Meijers, E., ‘Hymnen aan de nacht. Romantiek en revolutie bij Novalis’ (Wetenschappelijk bureau Groen Links, 2007: https://wetenschappelijkbureaugroenlinks.nl/artikeltijdschrift/hymnen-aan-de-nacht) Novalis, Hymns to the Night, transl. D. Higgins, New York: McPherson & Co., 1988. Novalis, Werke, ed. & annot. G. Schulz, München: Beck, 2001. O’Meara, J., The Way of Novalis: An Exposition on the Process of His Achievement, Ottawa: Heart’s Core, 2014. Pinkard, T., German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Schleiermacher, F., On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, transl. R. Crouter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Scheiermacher, F., Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, Hamburg: Meiner, 1958. Sellner, T.F., ‘“Sophia sey mein Schuz Geist”: A New Source for Novalis’ “Hymnen an die Nacht”?’, in: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 86 (1987) no.1, 33-57. Taylor, C., Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Uerlings, H., ‘Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)’, in: W. Bunzel (Ed.), Romantik: Epoche – Autoren – Werke, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010, 92-106. Weeks, A., German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

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Appendix – Third Hymn of Novalis’ Hymns to the Night Once, when I poured out bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, scattered, and I was standing alone at the barren mound which hid the figure of my life in its narrow, dark space – alone, as no one could be more alone, driven by unspeakable anxiety – strengthless, with just one thought left of need. – As I looked around for help, could not move forwards and not backwards, and hung onto the fleeting, extinguished life with infinite craving: – then came from blue distances – from the heights of my old blessedness, a twilight shiver – and with one stroke my birth’s bond ripped – Light’s chains. There the earthly splendor fled and my sadness with it – misery flowed into a new, unplumed world – You, Night-inspiration, heaven’s sleep, came over me – the region lifted gently up; over the region my released and newborn spirit floated. The hill became a cloud of dust – through the cloud I saw the transfigured features of my beloved. In her eyes rested the forever – I took her hands, and my tears were a glittering and unrippable bond. Years by the thousands flew off to the distance, like storms. In her embrace I wept overjoyed tears at the new life. – It was the first and the only dream – and only since then I’ve felt an unchangeable, eternal faith in the heaven of Night and its Light, the beloved. [Einst da ich bittre Thränen vergoß, da in Schmerz aufgelöst meine Hoffnung zerrann, und ich einsam stand am dürren Hügel, der in engen, dunkeln Raum die Gestalt meines Lebens barg – einsam, wie noch kein Einsamer war, von unsäglicher Angst getrieben – kraftlos, nur ein Gedanken des Elends noch. – Wie ich da nach Hülfe umherschaute, vorwärts nicht konnte und rückwärts nicht, und am fliehenden, verlöschten Leben mit unendlicher Sehnsucht hing: – da kam aus blauen Fernen – von den Höhen meiner alten Seligkeit ein Dämmerungsschauer – und mit einemmale riß das Band der Geburt – des Lichtes Fessel. Hin floh die irdische Herrlichkeit und meine Trauer mit ihr – zusammen floß die Wehmuth in eine neue, unergründliche Welt – du Nachtbegeisterung, Schlummer des Himmels kamst über mich – die Gegend hob sich sacht empor; über der Gegend schwebte mein entbundner, neugeborner Geist. Zur Staubwolke wurde der Hügel – durch die Wolke sah ich die verklärten Züge der Geliebten. In ihren Augen ruhte die Ewigkeit – ich faßte ihre Hände, und die Thränen wurden ein funkelndes, unzerreißliches Band. Jahrtausende zogen abwärts in die Ferne, wie Ungewitter. An Ihrem Halse weint ich dem neuen Leben entzückende Thränen. – Es war der erste, einzige Traum – und erst seitdem fühl ich ewigen, unwandelbaren Glauben an den Himmel der Nacht und sein Licht, die Geliebte.]

Edward van ’t Slot KIERKEGAARD’S WORKS OF LOVE AS MYSTICAL LITERATURE WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES

1.  The Psychologist as a Mystic The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is quite famous as one of the first really great ‘psychological’ writers. Whatever the precise definition of this term ‘psychological’ might be (I return to that in what follows), in well-known works like Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and The Sickness unto Death (1849, on despair), written under diverse pseudonyms, we meet a philosopher with a sharp awareness of the inner world of the human soul and its hidden motives. The book on anxiety even bears a ‘psychological’ subtitle: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation.1 By now, these works have been the objects of fascinated exegesis for over 150 years, and their author has been celebrated as the writer of ‘the source book of existential psychology and psychoanalysis’.2 Vigilius Haufniensis (Søren Kierkegaard), The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin (1844), transl. & introd. Alistair Hannay, New York: Norton, 2015. The word ‘simple’ is obviously meant ironically, as we are dealing here with one of the most complex works in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. (Below, I deal with the issue of irony in more detail; on simplicity, see Udo Doedens, Het eenvoudige leven volgens Søren Kierkegaard, Baarn: Ten Have, 1999, passim, but esp. 18.) One of the earlier pseudonymous works also bears a psychological subtitle: Constantin Constantius, Repetition. An Essay in Experimental Psychology (1843), transl. M.G. Piety, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2009. – Kierkegaard’s works are available in many editions and translations. For this reason, I will in most occasions refer to page numbers in the newest critical Danish edition of his complete works, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), followed by volume number. This edition has been published by the Danish Foundation for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Copenhagen, and is also easily accessible via www.sks. dk. Both Repetition and The Concept of Anxiety can be found in SKS 4. 2 For instance, Gordon D. Marino, in: The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (CCK), ed. A. Hannay & G.D. Marino, Cambridge: CUP, 1998, 308 (emphasis mine), cf. 320. Cf. CCK, 12: ‘Kierkegaard’s two depth-psychologically oriented pseudonyms, Vigilius Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus…’. Cf. Emanuel Hirsch: ‘Kierkegaard [ist] als erster europäischer Denker in die Bereiche dessen vorgestoßen, was man heute Tiefenpsychologie nennt’. 1

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It is obvious that a nineteenth-century ‘psychological’ writer can by no means be regarded as a psychologist in the same sense as the psychological scholars of our present day, nor do the ‘methods’ and results found in Kierkegaard’s (pseudonymous) works meet the criteria now common in psychological science. Though the author claims to base his insights on dialogues with dozens of people (mainly inhabitants of the Danish capital, to be sure),3 these dialogues were not organized, nor were they archived, in a way that would now render this material methodologically relevant evidence. Wisdom, after all, or experienced knowledge of human minds, is not the same as being a psychologist in our sense of the word. Kierkegaard, moreover, seems to draw his ‘psychological’ wisdom at least as much from his critical insight in his own mind and motivations as from an intense observation of his conversation partners.4 Nevertheless, this essay deals with Kierkegaard (and his aliases) as a psychological author in precisely this sense: that he is this sharp observer and searcher of the human mind, its hidden motives and its concealed paths of rationality and irrationality. And I do think that his ‘psychological’ insights in the phenomenon of (mystical) love have traits that are of interest to those whom we do call psychologists or psychological scholars in our own era. It is the aim of this essay to show Kierkegaard’s relevance as a ‘mystical’ love theorist, both for the understanding of his own more psychological (pseudonymous) works, and, in general, for a psychological understanding of what it means to love, or to be loved. But how about Kierkegaard and mysticism, or spiritual love? This bestselling author – that is, best-selling in our days, not in his own days – is not so likely to be considered as the most obvious person to be called a ‘mystic’ either. Nevertheless, I will. The ‘deliberations’ or ‘reflections’ that K ­ ierkegaard wrote, under his own name, on The Works of Love (1847),5 can ­doubtless be Quoted in Wim. R. Scholtens, Alle gekheid op een stokje: Kierkegaard als psycholoog, Baarn: Ten Have, 1979, 14, also cf. 107-108. 3 For this and the following, see Scholtens, Alle gekheid, 14-20; Andries Visser, De mens is geest: Kierkegaards humanisme, Budel: Damon, 2019, 47-66. They refer to Kierkegaard’s journals, and also to the methods of some of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, which I will not mention in this article anymore ‘A’ in Either/Or (1843, SKS 2); Constantin Constantius in Repetition (1843); and Quidam and Frater Taciturnus in Stages on Life’s Way (1845, SKS 6). 4 See previous footnote; and, e.g., Haufniensis, Concept of Anxiety, 67-69 (SKS 4, 359-360). 5 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love: Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses (1847), Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 16, ed. & transl. Howard & Edna Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 (Works of Love). In their 1962 translation, the Hongs used the word ‘reflection’ instead of ‘deliberation’. Cf. their introduction to this volume, Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, New York: Harper Collins, 2009 (reprint with a new Foreword), xx. I refer to Works of Love by mentioning the page numbers in the Danish critical edition, SKS 9.



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regarded as his ‘coming-out’ as a genuine mystic writer. That is to say, in this work Kierkegaard does not describe some unio mystica, nor does he explicitly aim at such an exalted state for himself or for his readers6 – but the source from which he draws his ‘upbuilding thoughts’7 about love is clearly to be found in his own experience of dwelling intensely in the nearness of the eternal One. According to Kierkegaard, the foundation and source of all true love and of all true description of love can only be the experiential knowledge of God’s love. There are various passages which clearly testify that this knowledge, in this author’s case, is drawn from the sources of a rich spiritual life: How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth, you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you! (…) O Eternal Love, you who are everywhere present and never without witness where you are called upon… (SKS 9, 12; Works of Love, 3-4) Just as the quiet lake originates darkly in the deep spring, so a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love. (SKS 9, 18; Works of Love, 10)

Although the publication of the pseudonymous, more psychological and conceptual works had always been accompanied by the parallel publication of some ‘upbuilding discourses’, a kind of sermons, under Kierkegaard’s own name, his ‘mystic’ side largely remained concealed8 – until the publication of this voluminous work on a subject of such a distinctively and intrinsically mystical nature. Far from writing a new pseudonymous, indirect, ironic work on ‘the concept of love’, Kierkegaard bids farewell to all abstraction and Jos Huls, in his commentary on Kierkegaard’s For Self-Examination (1851, SKS 13), likewise approaches Kierkegaard as a mystic; and he explores the possibly implicit mystical aims of Kierkegaard’s later work: Jos Huls, In God gezien zijn: Kierkegaards oproep zich te spiegelen in het Woord, Leeuwarden: Discovery Books, 2019. See also Christopher Braddock: ‘Silence will Change the World: Kierkegaard, Derrida and Islamic Sufism’, in: H. Salazar & R. Nicholls (Eds.), The Philosophy of Spirituality: Analytic, Continental and Multicultural Approaches to a New Field of Philosophy, Leiden: Brill, 2019 (Value Inquiry Book Series 322), 189-208. Like Huls, Braddock (191-197) regards especially Kierkegaard’s text on self-examination as an exquisite place to look for a philosophy of spirituality (189). 7 Works of Love, 209-224 (SKS 9, 212-226). 8 To be sure, Kierkegaard’s authorship of the pseudonymous works had in a sense been concealed as well: some people might have been only aware of him being the author of some religious (not: mystical) works – until, in 1846, the year before Works of Love, Kierkegaard published Johannes Climacus’ Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs: A Mimic, Pathetic, Dialectic Compilation. An Existential Contribution (I refer to the translation by Alistair Hannay, Cambridge: CUP, 2009). In this magnum opus, Kierkegaard, in ‘A first and last declaration by S. Kierkegaard’, acknowledged his authorship of those pseudonymous works: Postscript, 527 (SKS 7, 569). 6

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comes to the fore as a person who has ‘deliberated’ or ‘reflected’ intensely and involvedly, not on an abstract concept of love-in-itself, but, concretely, on ‘what love yields’ (SKS 9, 11).9 Whereas the pseudonymous works had a rather universal claim of acceptability, here, specifically Christian particularity comes in. For, clearly, the ‘love’ that Kierkegaard examines in this work, ‘Kjerlighed’, is not conceived of as a universally comprehensible phenomenon, in opposition to the more general ‘preferential love’ (‘Elskov’). Kierke­ gaard is convinced that people do not ‘know essentially what love is’, and, for this reason, he thinks that it is necessary that the reflections of this book ‘must first fetch [its readers] up out of the cellar, call to them, turn their comfortable way of thinking topsy-turvy’. An ‘impatient, high-spirited’ tone is required,10 in order that people may start to understand what love really is – that is, in the Christian sense. Precisely for this reason, Kierkegaard stresses that he writes in a ‘reflective’, rather than in a religiously ‘edifying’ mood. With regard to true love, it would be insufficient only to ‘edify’ people, as if they would, in fact, already recognize the direction of the edifying movement as the religiously right direction. No, the author has the – I would say: psychologically more demanding – task of ‘awaken[ing] and provok[ing]’ new insights in the reader:11 the reader has to recognize true love as the unexpected and gracious option for living life with more fulfilment than before. This implies, again, that, according to Kierkegaard, any true knowledge about love cannot directly flow from an inner self-in-itself, not even in its most exalted state. It is by discovering the love of the unseen God that one may begin to sense what love actually is.12 What kind of psychology, then, does this author practise when he wants his readers to discover this ‘unseen’ kind of love? The most recent Dutch translation of Works of Love bears an ‘active’ title, Wat de liefde doet. 2nd ed., transl. Lineke Buijs & Andries Visser, Budel: Damon, 2011, possibly inspired by the Bach aria ‘Seht, was die Liebe tut’, BWV 85/5. This translation of the Danish title, Kjelighedens Gjerninger, expresses and stresses love (‘Kjerlighed’) as the acting subject (rather than stressing the ‘works’ themselves), cf. Wat de liefde doet, 421. 10 Works of Love, 2009 ed. (see footnote 5), xx (Introduction), quoting Pap. VIII 1 A 294. Though Kierkegaard, in one of these discourses, elaborates the idea that love ‘builds up by presupposing that love is present’ ‘in the other person’s heart’, it is clear that for him, this presupposition is capable of something like a creatio ex nihilo: by presupposing love, it calls into existence what had not been there before. Works of Love (1995 ed.), 216-224; SKS 9, 219-226; quotation: 218, 216 (Works of Love); 221, 219 (SKS). 11 Works of Love, 2009 ed. (see footnote 5), xx-xxi; quotations still from Pap. VIII 1 A 294. 12 See, e.g., Works of Love (1995), 107, 114-121, 160-161; SKS 9, 111, 118-124, 161; cf. Doedens, Het eenvoudige leven, 357-362. 9



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2.  The Critical Capacity of Love-Psychology In Kierkegaard’s case, the most obvious answer to this question would be to stress the critical psychological potential of an author who has a sharp insight in the primal human inclinations with regard to their attitude towards man’s fellow humans. A ‘mystic’ enthusiast might be expected to run the risk of willingly forgetting other people because she (or he) is totally caught up in the unity with ‘the wholly Other’ – but Kierkegaard is very suspicious of such a fallacy. If love for the unseen God would lead anyone to reject the people around him (‘the apparently very unpoetic neighbour’),13 then, Kierkegaard states, God is changed into an unreal something, a delusion. Such a thing can occur only either to a hypocrite and a deceiver, in order to find an escape, or to someone who misrepresents God, as if God were envious of himself and of being loved… (Works of Love, 160; SKS 9, 161)

Kierkegaard is a keen and critical observer of ‘escapists’ like those mentioned here. And his critical attitude is clearly informed by theological ideas about the generosity of God’s love – ideas that, I suppose, have ripened in Kierkegaard’s own meditative (or mystical) experience with divine love. A similarly critical and psychologically sharp observation can be found in the passage in which Kierkegaard addresses the claim of those who assure – with an ‘intoxicated expression’ – to love their neighbour even more than they love themselves. ‘[The] love they celebrate is secretly self-love’, Kierkegaard maintains, because it celebrates ‘the beautiful dizziness’ based on preference and unjust contrast.14 Loving another as oneself is sufficiently difficult – it ‘implies the totality of one’s self-dedication and it is impossible to give more’ than precisely one’s beloved self.15 Clearly, Kierkegaard’s ‘mystical’ point of departure in the case of the works of love sharpens his view on the psychology of those who seek to escape from love’s all too demanding claims – probably, it sharpens his insight in the psychology of his very own escapism on this level; and as the self-critical observer he is, Kierkegaard is as willing to share his observations in this respect as he is for those in any other. Love is a great gift – in loving God and loving one’s neighbour one learns to love oneself as well, in the most healthy and unsheltered way – but it is not as widely shared as it could and should be, and Kierkegaard is ready to be love’s minister. The gift of love asks for our surrender to a power so absorbing that it may absorb our own will and plans. Moreover, our own Works of Love, 18-19; SKS 9, 26-27. Works of Love, 18-24; SKS 9, 26-31; quotation from p. 19 (SKS: 27). 15 Doedens, Het eenvoudige leven, 360, referring to the passage quoted from Works of Love. 13 14

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ideas about love and, accordingly, our practical initiatives at loving only achieve that, in the face of this love, ‘you will still be as nothing, at an infinite distance from having achieved something, in infinite debt!’ God’s love will always take ‘everything, everything, everything’ from you – ‘in order to give everything’.16 And Kierkegaard is a sharply involved observer of the human unwillingness to surrender to such an everything-changing love. That is to say: Kierkegaard the psychologist serves as a keen helper for Kierkegaard the mystic in unmasking all kinds of obstacles that people may feign to see as invincible hindrances for surrendering to this love. For Kierkegaard, this task of unmasking is one of the main aims of exercising his psychological skills. ‘Unmasking’ can be called the negative task of psychology,17 although, of course, it is practised for its possibly liberating consequences. But this evokes the question: is there any psychology of love itself? Can love be known ‘psychologically’, in its psychological effects? Does mysticism, for Kierkegaard, lead to a positive love theory? 3.  The ‘Second’ Task of Psychology (Formal) I do think that there is such a positive use of psychology in Kierkegaard’s thoughts about love. Though Kierkegaard states that true love, in its divine excellence, can only be recognized indirectly,18 since it is only knowable through its fruits,19 it still wants to be known, for instance and foremost, precisely in its need to bear fruits.20 But in every single individual this need will find its own, singular, and always different expression. ‘[A] word from one person can convince us that there is love in him, and the opposite word from another can convince us that there is love in him also’.21 Still, the fact that there is love calls for an analysis, an understanding, a positive psychology of this phenomenon, however divine it may be. A psychological understanding of love will help us, if possible, to exercise the works of love more straightforwardly, and it may help us to distinguish critically between true love and untrue love. In this way, a positive psychological understanding of love will even inform the mystical psychologist in his negative, unmasking task – as we have seen in the previous section and its example of Works of Love, 102-103; SKS 9, 107. Cf. Philip G. Ziegler, ‘The Christian Life: A Humble Striving Born of Gratitude’, in: A.P. Edwards & D.J. Gouwens (Eds.), T&T Clark Companion to The Theology of Kierkegaard (CToK), London: T&T Clark, 2020, 391-402: 392. 18 Works of Love, 102 (SKS 9, 107). 19 Works of Love, 8-10 (SKS 9, 16-18). 20 Works of Love, 10-11 (SKS 9, 18-19). 21 Works of Love, 13 (SKS 9, 21). 16

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theologically informed criticism of untrue love (§ 2). This section (§ 3) explores the formal or methodological status that we may ascribe to such an attempt at positive psychological investigations. This may help us evaluate some of the materially psychological insights (or: the ‘love theoretical statements’) that Kierkegaard offers in his more ‘mystical’ output (§ 4). Various commentators have stated that Kierkegaard’s discourses in Works of Love represent what his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis has labelled a ‘second ethics’.22 Second ethics is different from ‘first ethics’ in this respect, that second ethics reckons with the reality – of sin. The first ethics has to take seriously the possibility of the good and it cannot really account for any reason why one would not do what is good and just.23 In Haufniensis’ view, psychology tries to understand the possibility of sin: why is it that people, despite the existence of the good, come to consider other options than the good? Psychology’s only task is to give insight in this possibility. Once it has done its clarifying tasks, it hands the matters over to – dogmatics, to the second (that is, to a more concrete and possibly even more revelation-based) philosophy, and to this second ethics.24 Second ethics ‘is on the spot and follows every step [sin] takes’, as soon as it is ‘actually posited’.25 That means, I would say, that Kierkegaard’s Works of Love forms an essay in second ethics in its critically reckoning with the reality of notlove. But I would say that it exercises this second ethics also in a more positive way: in its reflections on actual love. Kierkegaard the psychologist is centre stage, as a helper of a second ethics, in his analysis of the psychological conditions for this reality of not-love (cf. above, § 2); but an analysis of the reality of love and its need to bear fruits, an analysis of the possibility of love, working always differently in any single individual, requires some psychological handwork as well. I would suggest: it requires a ‘second psychology’. To be sure, ‘second psychology’ is my own term and not Kierkegaard’s (nor, to my knowledge, is it present in the works of one of his pseudonyms). I hope to make clear, below, why I think that it is helpful to think of such a positive psychology as a ‘second’ psychology (and why I would regard the ‘unmasking psychology’ as the first one). For the moment, I may allude to a quotation I gave above (in § 2): whereas love ‘takes everything’, that is: every psychological possibility and every psychological reflection, from us, one could say that it returns psychology to us in one and the same move – differently,26 that is: as second Doedens, Het eenvoudige leven, 357; Andries Visser, Kierkegaard en het begrip angst: Een leesgids, Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn Motief, 2018, 57. 23 Cf. Marino, CCK (see footnote 2), 317: ‘why the deuce would Adam disobey God?’ 24 Concept of Anxiety, 26-30, 196 (SKS 4, 328-331, 460). 25 Concept of Anxiety, 28 (SKS 4, 329-330). 26 Cf. above, footnote 16. 22

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psychology. I would even claim that here we are confronted with a typically Kierkegaardian procedure: psychology in its first appearance is used to bring us to the spot where a second psychology is required. An attempt at such a ‘second’ psychology is, I would maintain, present in Works of Love; and it can be traced in some of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works as well. Those famous, I think more famous, pseudonymous psychological works, like Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, have often been studied in isolation from the ‘edifying discourses’ and Works of Love that Kierkegaard wrote under his own name. But only when taken together do these works shed light on the task of psychology in a Kierkegaardian sense. To illustrate my point, I have to introduce the famous Kierkegaardian expression of ‘the leap’ – an, at first sight, more philosophical than psychological idea, that one of Kierkegaard’s other pseudonyms, namely Johannes Climacus, elaborates upon in his Philosophical Crumbs. One of the main questions that this work raises is how it would be possible to make qualitative evaluations about our observations, that is: whether it is possible to infer from quantity (that we can observe) to quality (which implies the possibility of judgment). When does a quantity of grains amount to a heap, is one of the more humorous questions Climacus considers.27 Put more theologically, the question is whether it is possible, from a number of worldly, timely observations, to come to any conclusions concerning an eternal or divine realm. Climacus shows that any such conclusion amounts to making a leap which, ultimately, is inexplicable. Climacus himself states that he refrains from making leaps in this way; he remains the sceptic – but, implicitly, he has shown that any good philosophy will ultimately border on questions like these, which means that any good philosophy will force thinkers and their readers to the point where they will have to decide: either to make this unfathomable leap, or to refrain from it.28 (Though, whether it is really, existentially, possible to refrain from any leaps at all, remains undecided: it seems ‘absurd’ to leap – but not leaping might be even more absurd: existentially absurd. One would seem to refrain from truly existing at all.) In the more psychological work of Haufniensis,29 The Concept of Anxiety, published only four days after the Philosophical Crumbs, a very similar point is made, in the negative, concerning the issue of sin. Here too, the author shows the possibility that, or the psychological conditions in which, humans may start to act sinfully. But Johannes Climacus, Philosophical Crumbs. Or: A Crumb of Philosophy, transl. M.G. Piety, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 2009 (in the same volume as Repetition, see footnote 1), 116 (SKS 4, 248). 28 This point is made quite explicitly in the ‘Ultimatum’, in: Victor Eremita (Ed.), Søren Kierkegaard: Either / Or. Part 2 (Kierkegaard’s Writings IV, ed. & transl. Howard & Edna Hong), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, 346, 350 (SKS 3, 324, 330). 29 Scholten, Alle gekheid op een stokje, 17. 27



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whether they really do so – or: whether we judge them really to have done so – remains a matter of: leaping.30 Likewise, one year earlier, Johannes de silentio had made it very clear, that, to offer up one’s ethical subjectivity in order to become an obedient believer in the biblical God, is a leap that one can only accomplish on one’s own, and only in ‘fear and trembling’: for only the single individual becomes [a knight of faith], as the single individual, and this is the knight’s greatness, as I can well understand without being party to it, since I lack courage; though also his terror, as I can understand even better.31

So, the task that psychology can complete is to clarify – to analyse, or to recollect – the immanent terror, dread or anxiety that precedes the leaps that life asks (or forces) people to take32 – and Kierkegaard turns out to be a very able executor of this psychological task. But what psychology in this sense cannot explain is – transcendence, or quality. It cannot state that divine love is real or how it could be real (nor, for that sake, how sin could be real). Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous psychological works attempt to prepare their readers for entering the realm of transcendent decisiveness – for the ‘leap’ into meaningfulness. A, what I would call, ‘second’ psychology is the psychology which, without any doubt, will have its own reflective33 appeal and impress its own convincing quality upon the reader, but it does always presuppose this leap – it is, so to say, always beyond the leap. That is why it is a ‘second’ psychology. In Kierkegaard’s ‘upbuilding discourses’, and in Works of Love especially, the deepest concerns of his pseudonymous works – which had been psychological in the sense of a ‘first psychology’ – come out into the open. They reveal the sources and goals for Kierkegaard’s and his pseudonyms’ most profound psychological insights and for his most far-reaching philosophical proposals:34 that is, to uncover the soul’s obstacles for surrendering to true love. Surely one day I will at last succeed in awakening similar thoughts in people by shouting at them or prodding them so that they will stop wasting their lives without ever really considering how loving God is.35 Concept of Anxiety, 37-40 (SKS 4, 337-339). Johannes de silentio (Søren Kierkegaard), Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric (1843), transl. Alistair Hannay, London: Penguin Books (Great Ideas 36), 2005 (first publ. 1985), 85 (SKS 4, 163). The older translation by Walter Lowrie (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954) reads ‘without entering the order’ (82) instead of ‘without being party to it’ – which, to my mind, is a bit clearer. 32 See Concept of Anxiety, 27 (SKS 4, 329). 33 Cf. above, the end of § 1. 34 Cf. Scholtens, Alle gekheid op een stokje, 24. 35 Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. Vol. 4: Journals NB-NB5, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011, 181 (NB2, 105, August 2nd 1847; SKS 20, 183). 30 31

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I would therefore maintain that the ‘mystical’ Works of Love helps us understand what the psychologist Kierkegaard aims at (or, for that sake, what the pseudonyms Johannes de silentio, and Vigilius Haufniensis aim at) in his (their) psychological discussions of our common human longings and anxieties. Now, the question is: does the ‘mystic’ also offer positive insights into a ‘second psychology’, the psychology of surrender and care: of caring and being deeply cared for? How about the psychology of love (‘Kjerlighed’)? 4.  The Mystic as a Psychologist (Material Psychology of Love) In many biographical respects, Works of Love can be considered as a pivotal work in Kierkegaard’s authorship. After, provisionally, finishing his pseudonymous output by the publication of Johannes Climacus’ Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Works of Love takes up and deepens – as I already indicated – various philosophical and psychological points that the pseudonymous works left undecided.36 I would like to sketch out two examples in which Kierkegaard seems to explore, or start to explore, the possibilities of, what I called, a ‘second’ psychology. I hope that my examples may serve as illustrations for the issue that this essay wants to address: that, in order to understand the goals of the pseudonymous authors (and maybe even the goals of their mere existence), and in order to feel the urgency of their achievements in (what I called) ‘first’ psychology, the ‘second’ psychology of Kierkegaard’s more mystical works provides us with invaluable insights. Or, put even more broadly, that, in order to understand what love means, psychologically speaking, it is unwise to ignore the insights produced by ‘mystical’ love theories. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms illustrate precisely this point. The first example is taken from Works of Love itself, and it deals with the question of irony. Irony was the subject on which the young Kierkegaard had written his magisterial dissertation, and irony had been present in all of his works (but especially in his pseudonymous works) ever since. Irony, the young magister had shown, can be used as a superior means for remaining undecided about decisive points37 – just as, for instance, Johannes de silentio tries to, in the quotation that I gave above.38 But the situation in the Works of Love is a radically different one. For someone who refuses really to surrender to love, laughing may See, e.g., the ‘Foreword’ by George Pattison, in: Works of Love (ed. 2009), ix. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates (1841) (Kierkegaard’s Writings II, ed. & transl. Howard & Edna Hong), 2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 279-280, 283-284 (SKS 1, 316, 319). 38 See footnote 31. 36 37



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be an apt and seemingly sympathetic strategy, Kierkegaard states. But the person who loves, is, by this very love, involved in matters, and in the world itself – that is: too much involved to keep the world at a distance with ironical sharpness. This implies that a literary work about this love will have to show what it means to be laughed at, because of one’s unconditional involvement and surrender.39 Love will, therefore, change one’s attitude towards irony. This is not to say, though, that a caring person will refrain from irony for evermore. Irony may even remain a tool for distancing oneself from one’s opponents. In Kierkegaard’s own works, irony and humour remain present. For instance, by portraying Socrates, ironically, as ‘a kind of thinker, although not as profound as the manner of speaking in the modern way of thinking, although not as admirable as that in being able to explain’, Kierkegaard of course distances himself from this ‘modern way of thinking’ – and he does even more so when he goes on: Socrates could be regarded as an inferior thinker ‘because it was impossible for him to explain more than he understood’.40 We know from, for instance, the motto of The Concept of Anxiety, that Vigilius Haufniensis, together with Johann Georg Hamann and probably also with Søren Kierke­ gaard, understood precisely this principle to be decisive for Socrates’s greatness.41 So, irony does not only help in distancing oneself from an unlikely position – it also seems to acquire a positive task here: it seems to become a tool in expressing the inexpressible. By saying, humorously, the opposite thing of the point one wants to make, it becomes possible for the caring person to express the superiority of care and of being involved – more so than ‘direct’ words may achieve. Thus, Kierkegaard actually sketches how profound and ‘self-sacrificing’42 the love of this ‘noble, simple soul of ancient times’ really was.43 ‘It is possible that it is vanity, pride – in short, something bad, but it is also possible that it is love’.44 So, whereas irony can be used as a useful means to give a person the idea that it is justified to refrain from existential surrender (as a ‘first’ psychology can point out with painstaking precision), its capacity to express the inexpressible depth of surrender and care may be the psychologically more

Works of Love, 197, 204 (SKS 9, 196, 202). Works of Love, 276 (SKS 9, 274). 41 Haufniensis, Concept of Anxiety, 3 (SKS 4, 310). 42 Works of Love, 374 (SKS 9, 367). 43 Works of Love, 276 (SKS 9, 274). 44 Works of Love, 374 (SKS 9, 367). It is quite difficult to illustrate the point very clearly, because, in my reading of Works of Love, humour permeates the work in a very implicit way. One of the quoted pages (Works of Love, 276/SKS 9, 274) is the one instance in Works of Love in which Kierkegaard deals with irony – and he does so ironically, by avoiding to use the word ‘irony’ explicitly. 39 40

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­ rofound option (as an author who is sensitive to the possibilities of a ‘second’ p psychology can demonstrate). The second example that I want to mention briefly is the psychological attitude of Kierkegaard’s almost unearthly, devoutly Christian pseudonym AntiClimacus, in The Sickness unto Death (1849), a few years after Works of Love. This famous monograph on being a self, with its ominous title, starts with defining what it means to be a self. It has often been overlooked, though, that the crucial point in being a self, for Anti-Climacus, is precisely: surrender. ‘In relating to itself and in wanting to be itself’, he says, ‘the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it’.45 Despair – the book’s other main topic – intrudes itself upon anyone who refrains from surrendering to this solid ground. This implies that a true understanding of what it means to be a self will reckon with the necessity of surrendering to this loving power – of ‘receiving [one]self as a gift’.46 For Anti-Climacus, this kind of surrender seems a conditio sine qua non for a true psychology of the self. That would imply that psychology, in the end, cannot fulfil its task without making room for a ‘second psychology’; that is to say: without making room for insights which can only be developed after having existentially decided oneself, as the psychological observer one may want to be. True psychology ultimately flourishes beyond the ‘leap’ – at least, in Anti-Climacus’s opinion, and I expect Kierkegaard would subscribe to this as well. The direction of his work, taken as an (astonishing) whole, seems to point in this direction. So, to be sure, Kierkegaard would be an atypical and uncompromising contributor to modern psychological understanding of what it means to love, and to be loved. But I think his contributions would be worthwhile – as worthwhile as the contributions of other ‘love mystics’ would be. Kierkegaard’s example shows that, despite their particularity and their singularly religious point of departure, spiritual, or even mystical, ‘love theories’ are of inestimable worth for insight in the human soul and its psychological intricacies.

Anti-Climacus (Søren Kierkegaard), The Sickness unto Death (1848), transl. Alistair Hannay, London: Penguin Books (Great Ideas 47), 2008 (first ed. 1989), 11 (SKS 11, 130). Remarkably, in this nice English edition, the subtitle that Kierkegaard gave to this work is not even mentioned. For this subtitle, I turn again to the older translation by Walter Lowrie (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954, 141): A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening. Lowrie, by the way, writes ‘Power’, with a capital letter. Cf. Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, 115, 120. 46 Amy Laura Hall, ‘Love: A Holy Caprice’, in CToK (see footnote 17), 403-421: 414. 45

Thomas Sojer SIMONE WEIL’S MYSTICISM AS CORPOREAL LOVE

Many have undertaken the enterprise of specifying the term ‘mystic’ when attributed to Simone Weil, as shortly after her death in August 1943 it has become common, particularly in Catholic circles, to list the Jewish agnostic as one of their mystics. Encouraged by Weil’s Catholic dialogue partners a ‘Catholic camp’ of scholars supplied Weil with the attribution of being a ‘mystic’, even with the tendency of a ‘saint’.1 The basis of such framings was provided by Weil’s alleged emergency baptism in articulo mortis2 by her friend Simone Dietz, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, when Weil was in the Middlesex Hospital.3 Right after her death, the riddle of Weil’s ambiguous ecclesial status began to circulate among her readers until Dietz resolved the matter fifty years later by ultimately confirming that she had personally baptised Weil, though not on her deathbed but several weeks earlier.4 Even before this confirmation the sheer possibility of a ‘Catholic Weil’ summoned theologians5 and Catholic

Cf. Philippe Dujardin, Simone Weil. Idéologie et politique, Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1975, 22-23; cf. Maria Clara Bingemer, ‘Simone Weil et Albert Camus: Sainteté sans Dieu et Mystique sans Église’, in: Cahiers Simone Weil 28 (2005) no.4, 365-386. 2 A regulated exemption in the canon law of the Catholic Church allows any person, regardless of faith, to administer the sacrament of baptism to a person in the face of death. 3 Cf. Eric O. Springsted, ‘The Baptism of Simone Weil’, in: Diogenes Allen & Eric. O. Springsted (Ed.), Spirit, Nature, and Community: Issues in the Thought of Simone Weil, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994, 3-18. 4 Maria Clara Bingemer, Simone Weil: Mystic Passion and Compassion, Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2015, 65, 91. 5 Cf. Donald Nicholl, ‘Simone Weil, God’s Servant’, in: Blackfriars 31 (1950), 364-372; cf. Georges Frénaud, ‘Simone Weil’s Religious Thought in the Light of Catholic Theology’, in: Theological Studies 14 (1953), 349-376; cf. Jean Kaelin, ‘L’expérience mystique de Simone Weil et la foi théologale’, in: Joseph-Marie Perrin (Ed.), Réponses aux questions de Simone Weil, Paris 1964, 80-87; cf. Timothy John Calvert, ‘Simone Weil: Patron Saint of Outsiders’, in: New Blackfriars 81 (2000), 177-183; cf. Ann W. Astell, ‘Saintly Mimesis, Contagion, and Empathy in the Thought of René Girard, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil’, in: Shofar 22 (2004), 116-131. 1

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writers6 from early on to take a stand on Weil’s religious thought, always focused on the records of her unique mystical experiences in the context of various theological traditions and Weil’s ‘status’ in the eyes of the Church. For Weil’s 100th birthday in 2009, Helen Thein examined her German reception history and concluded that Weil’s implicit canonisation process has continued in the 21st century, albeit under new parameters.7 On a visual level, an ‘infantilisation’ and thus a ‘purification’ has taken place by the fact that cover photos have begun to be chosen that depict Weil as a young, innocent, and pious girl. Such allusions to Weil as the Jeanne d’Arc-like vierge rouge contrast to the earlier iconography of the rough, deviant, grown-up woman in uniform equipped with a rifle during the Spanish Civil War. These religious framings tacitly insinuate Weil’s mysticism to be a result of a saint-like lifestyle according to Catholic moral norms or present it as an ‘anonymously Christian’ steering mechanism guiding towards institutionalised sainthood.8 Against such ‘teleologies towards holiness’ a permanent conceptual continuum between the mystic and the agnostic ‘post-Marxist’ must be emphasised.9 Here, I argue that such ideologizing techniques of appropriating and identifying To give only a few examples of the Catholic reception history: in the mid-50s the Catholic writer Ida Friederike Görres reported to the Jewish mysticism scholar Alfons Rosenberg that she witnessed the Italian santo vivo Padre Pio referring to Weil as a ‘saint’. Furthermore, Cardinal Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, while stationed as Nuncio in Paris, asked Weil’s father if he could visit the room that Simone Weil had lived in. Additionally, Albert Camus’ gesture to meditate in this room before going to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature reinforced the Catholic narrative and the veneration of Simone Weil as a saintly mystic. The Catholic intellectual Marie-Magdeleine Davy’s study on Weil’s mysticism applied Weil’s reflections on saints to Weil herself. Davy emphasised in 1951 that the French philosopher ‘has initiated a new form of saintliness’. The Anglo-Catholic T.S. Eliot introduced her to the English readers by saying that she had ‘a kind of genius akin to that of the saints’, again using Weil’s own wording. Pope Paul VI listed Weil among the three most important influences on his world-view; Pope John Paul II called her ‘spellbound by Christ’, not to mention that the Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church builds on Weil discussing the nature of prayer, cf. David McLellan, Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil, New York: Poseidon, 1990, 268; cf. Marie-Magdeleine Davy, The Mysticism of Simone Weil, Boston: Beckon, 1951, 84; cf. T.S. Eliot, ’Preface’, in: Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, London: Routledge, 2010; vi-xiii, vii; thanks to Prof. Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz (University of Dresden) who administers the unpublished personal correspondence of I.F. Görres and A. Rosenberg. 7 Helen Thein, ‘Atemhauch der Heiligkeit? Publikationen über Simone Weil anlässlich ihres 100. Geburtstages’, in: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 61 (2009), 398-402, 401. 8 Regarding the contemporary cult-status of Simone Weil, the accounts of Sylvie Weil, Simone’s nice, are interesting: Sylvie Weil, At Home with André and Simone Weil, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 17-19. 9 Cf. Charles Jacquier, Simone Weil, l’expérience de la vie et le travail de la pensée, Arles: Sulliver, 1998, 162. 6



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Simone Weil as a quasi-Catholic saint are in danger of instrumentalising and reducing her mystical experiences (if not even her entire philosophical oeuvre) to a means to the end. Not to mention that these framings risk naturalising Weil’s anorexia while restaging it under the pretext of the spiritual values attributed to bodily asceticism.10 As this paper aims to demonstrate, all of this fails to encounter the corporeal nature of Weil’s thought that makes it virtually impossible to think her mysticism within the ecclesial categories of ‘institutionalised incarnation’. Simone Weil’s decision to remain ‘on the threshold of the Church’ still causes an insoluble ambiguity to all of her readers. Until her final months of sickness and anorexia, Weil rejected baptism and consequently the admission to the Catholic Church. Her behaviour correlated with the final years of her writing that cumulated in a sort of obsession with the Catholic faith, saints and the Church versus a late modern world.11 In a letter to her spiritual father, Joseph-Marie Perrin OP (1905-2002), Weil describes having experienced a special love for the ‘saints through their writings’.12 However, at the same time, she admits that there were some saints who approved of the Crusades or the Inquisition. I cannot help thinking that they were in the wrong. I cannot go against the light of conscience [lumière de la conscience]. If I think that, on this point, I see more clearly than they did, I who am so far below them, I must admit that in this matter they were blinded by something very powerful. This something was the Church seen as a social structure. If this social structure did them harm, what harm would it not do me, who am particularly susceptible to social influences [particulièrement vulnérable aux influences sociales] and who am almost infinitely more feeble than they were?13

For Weil, it is the internal opposition of sainthood and mimetic violence14 that reveals a particularly powerful mechanism at work in the social structure of the Cf. Jacques Maître, Anorexies religieuses, anorexie mentale: Essai de psychanalyse sociohistorique. De Marie de l’Incarnation à Simone Weil, Paris: Cerf, 2000, 143f.; cf. Neal Oxenhandler, ‘The Bodily Experience of Simone Weil’, L’Esprit Créateur 34 (1994) no.3, 82-91, 88-89. 11 Simone Weil’s personal struggle has become the locus theologicus for contemporary Catholic theology: André Naud, Les dogmes et le respect de l’intelligence: Plaidoyer inspire par Simone Weil, Québec: Fides, 2002. 12 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, New York: Harper & Row, 1951, 49. 13 Weil, Waiting, 12. 14 Here, Weil anticipates René Girard’s post-romantic account of sanctity as antidote to contagious social influence by nurturing ‘pacific mimesis as well as by overcoming the dark side of mimetic desire through a sustained resistance to envy and scapegoating’. Weil considered sainthood to remain the necessary antidote but emphasised – in contrast to Girard’s optimism that sainthood leads to ‘giving up mimetic desire’ – that the majority of saints nonetheless have not been immune to mimetic contagion, because of the power of the Church as a social 10

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Catholic Church that even infects the soul of saints. Conscience and consciousness (in French both conscience) refer to a certain habitus that, for Alain15 and his student, can never be collective.16 Thus, only the individual’s ‘light of conscience’ is able to reveal institutionalised concepts of holiness to be ‘infected’ with symbolic violence and allows us to ‘see more clearly than the saints’. To understand how the ‘light of conscience’ works within us we must consider Weil’s concept of how to gain compassion, that is the embodied knowledge that one is responsible for his fellow humans and the importance of human corporeality in all of this: Compassion does not consider the other as object in the realm of one’s own subjectivity. This is the fruit of renouncing the illusory ‘I’ by paradoxically imitating the inconceivable subjectivity of God: But God is essentially subject, thinking and not thought. His name is ‘I am’ [Je suis]. That is His name as subject, it is also His name as object, it is also His name as contact with the subject and the object. All human thought implies three terms, a subject which thinks, and which is a person, an object thought, and the thought itself, which is the contact between the two (…) it must be recognised that the centre of the world is outside the world, that nothing here below has the right to say I [le droit de dire je]. One must renounce in favour of God, through love for Him and for the truth, this illusory power [pouvoir illusoire] which he has accorded us, to think in the first person. He has accorded it to us that it may be possible for us to renounce it by love. God alone has the right to say ‘I am’; ‘I am’ is His name, and is the name of no other being. But this renunciation does not consist in transporting one’s own position from the centre of the world into God as certain people transport it into another man (…) The ‘I am’ of God, which is real, differs infinitely from the illusory ‘I am’ [«  je suis  » illusoire] of men. God is not a person in the way that a man believes himself to be. Here, doubtless, is the meaning of that profound Hindu saying that God must be conceived of as personal and impersonal at the same time. Only the true renunciation of the power to think of everything in the first person, the renunciation that is not a simple transference [this happens when one renounces the first person singular only to structure, cf. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, London: Continuum, 2003, 431; Randall S. Rosenberg, The Givenness of Desire: Human Subjectivity and the Natural Desire to See God, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017, 156. 15 Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), Weil’s philosophy teacher who influenced her thinking enormously, cf. Jérôme Perrier, Alain ou la démocratie de l’individu, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2017. 16 Athansios Moulakis, Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998, 163; a concept Weil found in Bonaventure cf. Hermann Baum, Das Licht des Gewissens: Zu Denkstrukturen Bonaventuras, Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1990; as well as in the ‘kindly light of conscience’ of Cardinal Newman cf. ‘la lumière et la paix de la conscience’. Floris Delattre, La pensée de J.H. Newman: Extraits les plus caracteristiques de son œuvres, Paris: Payot, 1914, 133.



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substitute the first person plural], grants to a man the knowledge that other man are his fellows [semblables].17

For Weil, in order to renounce the power to think of everything in the first person without transferring the illusionary je to the diabolic nous of the violent collective one has to incarnate thinking and start to think with one’s own vulnerably, biological, organic body. In this context, Weil can claim that ‘philosophy (including problems of cognition, etc) is exclusively an affair of action and practice. That is why it is so difficult to write about it. Difficult in the same way as a treatise on tennis or running, but much more so.’18 Here, the vulnerable, contingent body serves as indispensable intermediary for the soul to ‘really’ act upon itself without outsourcing oneself to an imaginary nous.19 The human body is a metaxu, an in-between and balances the fundamental relationality to the absent and self-emptied God.20 However, every relationality towards the decreated God can only exist as relationality towards the world. Thus, the human body primarily works as metaxu between different readings of the world. In this sense, the precarious vulnerability of the human body is the vehicle of compassion and serves as epistemic discernment of our manifold self-world-relationships as well as debunking of the delusions produced by the false subjectivity of the je illusoire. Concerning this matter, Weil writes that The world is a text with several meanings, and we pass from one meaning to another by a process of work. It must be work in which the body constantly bears a part, as, for example, when we learn the alphabet of a foreign language: this alphabet has to enter into our hand by dint of forming the letters. If this condition is not fulfilled, every change in our way of thinking is illusory.21 Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the ancient Greeks, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, 167; 174-176. 18 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, London: Oxford University Press, 1970, 362. 19 ‘Le corps est un levier par lequel l’âme agit sur l’âme (…) que mon corps soit un instrument de supplice et de mort pour tout ce qui est médiocre dans mon âme’, Simone Weil, Œuvres complètes VI.4, Paris: Gallimard, 2006, 264-265. 20 For Weil’s notion of décréation cf. William Robert, ‘A Mystic Impulse: From Apophatics to Decreation in Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and Simone Weil’, in: Medieval Mystical Theology 21 (2012) no.1, 113-132; cf. Mikos Vetö, ‘Mística y descreación’, in: Emilia Bea Pérez (Ed.), Simone Weil, la conciencia del dolor y de la belleza, Madrid: Trotta, 2010, 137-145; décréation is often interpreted as a variation on the Lurian Kabbalistic tsimtsum, the self-contraction of divine light in order that something other than God could exist, as Hans Jonas revived it in The Concept of God after Auschwitz, however, this superficial parallelism fails to consider the necessary unity of crucifixion, incarnation and creation as the embodied love in Christ in Weil’s thought. 21 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, London: Routledge, 2002; ‘Le monde est un texte à plusieurs significations, et l’on passe d’une signification à une autre par un travail. Un travail où le corps a toujours part, comme lorsqu’on apprend l’alphabet d’une langue étrangère  : cet alphabet 17

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The metaxial role of the human body towards God as well as the world, is ‘not a reproduction of a form of dualism (…) but the potential that body and soul are inseparable so that the physical actions of the body and that which occurs within the body could link or separate from the Divine’22 and thus from the world. To better decipher the ambivalent-paradoxical function of the human body as metaxy we have to consider Weil’s early distinction between the French je and moi: Here, the individuum, that is the je illusoire echoes the real Je of God who is both personal and impersonal. The je illusoire thus experiences being only as lack of being. It finds itself as a divided subject of paradoxically being in the world without being and falsely claims to possess own existence as ‘personal’ moi that however cannot signify.23 Only the je illusoire can signify but in a negative and impersonal, God-echoing manner. In the Lectures on Philosophy Anne Reynaud-Guérithault documented her teacher Simone Weil explaining to the young women in the girls’ lycée at Roanne that ‘all thought implies a relationship, and it is always the “I” [je] which makes the relationship’.24 In fact, ‘the “I” is not part of any feeling [affection], of any action, etc., and nevertheless, every feeling, every action, etc. presupposes it. The pharisee confuses the “I” [je] with the “self” [moi], the sinner does not’.25 However, to debunk the je illusoire , that is ‘to distinguish between the “I” and the “self” would be the final end of all existence (…) Conclusion: in all circumstances, being human [être un homme], is to know to separate the “I” and the “self” [le ‘je’ et le ‘moi’]’.26 For Weil, God has accorded the je illusoire to everyone in order to make it possible to renounce it by love, that is to perform the je’s detachment from the moi performed as actions of radical solidarity, taking on the pain of others, and facing torture while bearing witness to the truth of human dignity.27 Following Alain, doit rentrer dans la main à force de tracer les lettres. En dehors de cela, tout changement dans la manière de penser est illusoire’, Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1988, 147. 22 Charity Hamilton, ‘Troubled Bodies: Metaxu, Suffering and the Encounter with the Divine’, in: Feminist Theology 22 (2013), 88-97, 93. 23 ‘Le moi est un terme sans signification’, Simone Weil, Leçons de Philosophie. Roanne 19331944, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1959, 247. 24 Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, 192; ‘Toute pensée impliqe une liaison, et c’est toujours le «  je  » qui opère la liaison’ Weil, Leçons de Philosophie, 248. 25 Weil, Lectures on Philosophy,192. 26 Weil, Lectures on Philosophy,193. 27 ‘Cela même constitue déjà une connaissance négative de notre être (du sujet). Cela montre que la formule de Socrate a un sens. Pour lui, la coupure entre le «  je  » et le «  moi  » serait le but final de toute l’existence’, Weil, Leçons de Philosophie, 249; n.b. for Weil all forms of suicide, apart from suicide as a matter of conscience, are turning the moi into an absolute cf. Simone Weil, Leçons de Philosophie, 272-274.



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Weil emphasises that, the inability to distinguish between je and moi climaxes into the violence of the diabolic nous characterised best by the ‘crucifying Pharases’, the New Testament role models of scapegoating.28 Weil elaborates this by writing that nothing ever said or written goes so far as the devil’s words to Christ in Saint Luke concerning the kingdoms of the world. ‘All this power will I give thee and the glory of it, for that is delivered unto me and to whomsoever I will I give it’. It follows from this that the Social is irremediably the domain of the devil. The flesh impels us to say me [moi] and the devil impels us to say us [nous]; or else to say like the dictators I [je] with a collective signification. And, in conformity with his particular mission, the devil manufactures a false imitation of what is divine, an ersatz divinity. By social I do not mean everything connected with citizenship, but only collective emotions.29

To oppose the diabolic nous, the act of renouncing the moi demands the power to say ‘I’ [le pouvoir de dire je], although it lacks the divine right to say ‘I’ [le droit de dire je]. For Weil, this contradiction makes every truly loving person a criminal in the realm of the world, as we will see later. So, while Simone Weil demands a dressage of the flesh, i.e. renouncing the tyranny of the egotistic moi over the necessitous body, she resolutely emphasises at the same time the individual must not renounce the power to say ‘I’ as one remains also a vulnerable organism. Only this power to say je of the biological organism prevents contagion with the diabolic nous that is when one is blinded by the ‘Social’ and renounces the first person singular only to substitute the first person plural. This ambivalent-paradoxical power to say ‘I’ marks the capacity to internally renounce the carnal moi that is only possible from inside.30 This is because it is not ‘from outside that the I can be destroyed. Why? In that case, it would really be destroyed in the sense that there would be simply no one left to even start reaching for God. Weil stresses that the I must be destroyed from within’.31 Thus, to care32 about the impersonal, God-echoing part of the soul inseparably linked with the biological ‘fragility of the body’33 is the only way to prevail over Moulakis, Politics of Self-Denial, 168. Weil, Waiting, 54. 30 Marc De Kesel, ‘The Power to Say I: Reflections on the Modernity of Simone Weil’s Mystical Thought’, in: Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society 5 (2019), 165-181. 31 De Kesel, ‘The Power to Say I’, 177. 32 Cf. Francesca Simeoni, ‘Animal e impersonnel: sull’umano in Simone Weil’, in: Etica & Politica 21 (2019) no.2, 155-170. 33 Cf. Fréderic Worms, ‘Le malheur, le soin, l’amour des êtres humains’, in: Nathalie ZaccaiReyners & Martin Dumont (Ed.), Penser le soin avec Simone Weil, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018, 75-89; cf. Sophie Bourgault, ‘ Beyond the Saint and the Red Virgin: Simone Weil as Feminist Theorist of Care’; Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 35 (2014) no.2, 1-27. 28 29

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the personal, egotistic, and carnal part of the soul. Here, compassion as a form of embodied knowledge aids in debunking the egotistic moi of the flesh liquidated in the diabolic nous of mimetic contagion by calling to mind the precarious vulnerability of the impersonal je waiting for God. For Weil, the human body [corps] ‘is more like Hegel’s notion of Äusserung: the outwardness of being’34 than a simple motor or vehicle of the soul as in Descartes. The reports about the three mystical encounters that have been canonised in the quasi-hagiographies – Porto (1935),35 Assisi (1937)36 and Solesmes (1938)37 – do not testify to an external event but rather to Weil’s awareness of an internal embodiment, i.e., deep incarnation, of a new reality within her body. In light of Weil’s criticism of the Church as an earthly institution, and therefore as an imaginary, external ‘body’ of collective emotions, it is surprising that a few years later it is Joseph-Marie Perrin OP and Gustave Thibon (1903-2001), the Catholic intellectual closest to Weil, who commented on her relationship to the Church by saying that we are not required to baptise after death a person who did not want to be baptised when she was alive. The Church itself has nothing to gain by such all too human activities. Simone Weil needed the Church (we know how important meditation on its dogmas, sacraments and liturgy and on the life and work of the saints was in the final evolution of her thought); the Church does not need Simone Weil… (…) Simone Weil never could – or would fully realise the distinction between the body and the soul of the Church, or, in other words, between the visible and invisible Church. The central ideal of Protestantism, that the Church is not the Kingdom but a simple means of access to the Kingdom, seems to us to represent her position fairly accurately.38 Françoise Meltzer, ‘The Hands of Simone Weil’, in: Critical Inquiry 27 (2001), 611-628, 617. See especially: ‘affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul (…) in a wretched condition physically’, Waiting for God, 67; in light of this passage, I argue that the chanting of the Portuguese fisherwomen, as well as Stravinsky’s Chant de Bateliers du Volga, was not something exterior but a key to herself that allowed Weil to attentively sense and thus name her non-verbalisable corporeal experience in the factory year, as she had stopped ‘sensing herself’: ‘oublié mon passé et je n’attendais aucun avenir’, Simone Weil, Attente de Dieu, Paris: Fayard, 1966, 35. 36 Involuntary change of bodily posture in the chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli: ‘something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees’: Weil, Waiting, 67-68. 37 ‘Christ himself came down and took possession of me [est descendu et m’a prise] (…) a real contact, person to person, here below [contact réel, de personne à personne, ici-bas] between a human being and God’, Weil, Waiting, 69; in light of this passage, I suggest to read the ici-bas as a ‘corporeal topology’ of the body as ‘foundation’, something we also find at the end of her poem ‘Prologue’ as ‘fond de moi’ and as ‘un point de moi-même’. 38 Joseph Marie Perrin & Gustave Thibon, As We Knew Her, London: Routledge, 2003, 141-143. 34 35



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In the framework of a naïve dualism of body and soul with reference to the Church, bizarrely labelled as ‘Protestantism’, ignoring Weil’s premonition of the dictatorial je, the diabolic ersatz divinity that is at work in the social structure of the Church, both men fail39 to recognise the danger of not clearly dividing the je from the moi and prefer to artificially construct a dualistic ecclesiology split into body and soul. Weil had anticipated this, explaining to Perrin in 1942 that the image of the Mystical body of Christ is very attractive. But I consider the importance given to this image today as one of the most serious signs of our degeneration. For our true dignity is not to be parts of a body, even though it be that of Christ. It consists in this, that in the state of perfection, which is the vocation of each one of us, we no longer live in ourselves, but Christ lives in us; so that through our perfection Christ in his integrity and in his indivisible unity, becomes in a sense each one of us, as he is completely in each host. The hosts are not a part of his body. This present-day importance of the image of the Mystical Body shows how wretchedly susceptible Christians are to outside influences. Undoubtedly there is real intoxication in being a member of the Mystical Body of Christ. But today a great many other mystical bodies, which have not Christ for their head, produce an intoxication in their members that to my way of thinking is of the same order (…) Social enthusiasms have such power today, they raise people so effectively to the supreme degree of heroism in suffering and death, that I think it is as well that a few sheep should remain outside the fold in order to bear witness that the love of Christ is essentially something different.40

However, Simone Weil does not oppose community life in principle, on the contrary, her biography as well as her thought consistently demonstrate how friendships are the most important aspect of human existence. Weil’s wording concerning the danger of ‘real intoxication’ of the diabolic nous is mirrored and turned over in a positive way when she thinks about the saints of the future. In this passage, later so often referred to Weil herself, she writes that it is therefore not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent (…) almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny (…) the

Thibon is implicitly aware of his disloyalty to Weil’s cause, as he debunks himself as a partisan. ‘We are too apt to forget that every Catholic is by definition the reverse of a partisan. If in reality he often becomes one, it is because he regards his faith as belonging to himself personally, or to a social group, and not as the domain of God. Thus, in serving his God whom he unconsciously transforms into a social leader, he is tempted to employ all the tainted methods which promote the existence and prosperity of parties, and, first and foremost, the great propaganda lever of lying. The mere thought of using such methods in connection with Simone Weil fills us with horror’. Perrin & Thibon, As We Knew Her, 8. 40 Weil, Attente de Dieu, 80. 39

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world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors. Where there is a need there is also an obligation.41

For Weil,42 purity is not an option and there is no right life in the wrong one. The infection with the social inherits the obligation to start a counter-contamination with love.43 For this, Weil imagines a new form of religious life, not a religious order, but a lived culture of true friendship that contaminates society: They have to experience every day, in their soul and in their flesh, the hardship and humiliations of misery. It is not a new Franciscan order that is needed. A brown robe, a convent, are separating. These people belong in the mass and touch it with nothing in between.44

They touch the mass with nothing in between because their metaxial body itself is the in-between par excellence. Their human body negotiates and balances the experienced aporia between the diabolical infection and a contamination with love. For Weil, true Christianity is not a collective or a set of beliefs but a ‘happening’ in which every individual turns out to be a corpo-real eucharistic host containing the full totality of Christ. Acts of love done in the knowledge that Christ lives in everyone of us (Gal 2:20) assume the liturgical (= pubic) function to show the public the possibility of a truly incarnated Christianity [vraiment incarné]. (…) The bronze serpent must be lifted up again so that whoever raises his eyes to it may be saved (…) how could it circulate through the flesh of all the nations of Europe [la chair des nations d’Europe] if it did not contain absolutely everything in itself?45

Christianity is only ‘catholic’ (= universal) if it contains absolutely everything in itself but without the delusive superstructure of the mystical body.46 According to Simone Weil, Christ was not concerned with unifying all people into one Weil, Waiting for God, 81; 99. Here, one can say that Weil is anticipating the negative dialectics of Adorno 43 For an introduction into Weil’s diverse concept of love cf. Gaston Kempfner, La philosophie mystique de Simone Weil, Paris: Colombe, 1960, 41-60. 44 Transl. by the author; orig.: ‘Il faut qu’ils subissent tous les jours, dans leur âme et dans leur chair, les douleurs et les humiliations de la misère. Ce n’est pas un nouvel ordre franciscain qu’il faut. Une robe de bure, un couvent, sont une séparation. Ces gens doivent être dans la masse et la toucher sans que rien s’interpose’. Simone Weil, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, Paris: Gallimard, 1957, 105. 45 Weil, Waiting, 75-76. 46 Her contemporary thinker Alfred N. Whitehead writes analogously about Plato’s World-Soul in the Timaeus that ‘the mediator must be a component in common, and not a transcendent emanation’, Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, New York: Macmillan, 1933, 166. 41 42



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single Church, but rather with a concept of ‘Church’ as the sacramental symbol that ‘signifies and thus effects’ the paradoxical universality of all people within the world while maintaining everyone’s God-given uniqueness. As every human embodies the full totality of Christ, this paradoxical universality devoid of any superstructure forms an icon that visualises how the impersonal, God-echoing je can negatively mark the presence of the absent God within the world. To better understand this paradoxical universality, we now turn to two other close companions of Weil, Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and Colette Peignot (1903-1938). In Bataille’s 1935 novel Le Bleu du Ciel the reader implicitly encounters a radically deviant and somehow ‘saintly’ Simone Weil, at a time when the historical Weil was an agnostic ‘Post-Marxist’ and had not yet had any of her later documented ‘mystical experiences’. In novelistic manner, Bataille attributes his Jeanne d’Arc-like impressions of Weil to the figure of Lazare, a character who ‘casts a spell on people who listen to her’ and inspires devotion among her fellows to the extent that they would die for her.47 He ‘evokes Weil’s personality and physicality (…) to clarify what he views as the enduring power of her performance (…) Weil is the embodiment of what is most valuable in her own doctrines, the saint/symbol of her most potent ideas’.48 In his 1939 essay La Pratique de la Joie devant la Mort Bataille writes analogously to Weil about the inutility of classical sainthood and the need for new forms of real corporeal ‘incarnation’ to overcome the self. As Alex Irwin has demonstrated in his study of the sacred in Weil and Bataille, the latter claims that the ‘timid saintliness’ of the traditional religions, ‘which had first of all to be sheltered from erotic excesses’, has lost its power irrevocably. ‘It is only a shameless, indecent [impudique] saintliness that brings a sufficiently happy loss of self’. Paradoxically, the embrace of death means the end of fear and suspicion of the body, a new and passionate affirmation of life (…) it is the apotheosis of what is perishable, apotheosis of the flesh.49

Narratives of holiness, especially in Catholic, but also in Orthodox Christianity, generally emphasise a motif of the preservation of the pure body of saints, either through a persisting state of virginity and manifold practices of asceticism, sometimes in a supernatural frame, through the phenomena of incorruptibility and stigmatisation. The sacred immaculate bodies are kept as tangible yet cleanable relics, statues, icons and all kinds of devotional artefacts. Christianity lives in Alexander Irwing, Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil and the Politics of the Sacred, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, xvi. 48 Irwing, Saints, 210. 49 Irwing, Saints, 131. 47

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this constant hunger for pure and clean bodies, this longing for an unavailable but nonetheless certainly sterile alterity.50 In Weil, Bataille and Peignot however, we find an indecent inversion, namely a notion of the sacred as sick, defaced body that consists in ‘an embodied passion for contradiction – a perduring, crucifictory desire that seeks not resolution, but a participation in the vicissitudes of corporeal existence’.51 However, such framings must not be read as latent body hostility or (sado-)masochist imprint; on the contrary, all three plea for the preciousness of the continually precarious state52 in which all human bodies exist, permanently exposed to decay, infection and mutilation. Peignot, alias Laure,53 wrote in her Red Notebooks that ‘your body/ that is your law’ [ton corps/c’est ta Loi].54 Here, Laure claims that every act or practice that ‘either invigorates or destroys the body figuratively represents a place of transgression (…) the coincidence of law and crime in this eternally transgressive movement’.55 I argue that this ambiguity of the body also found its way into Weil’s idea of the metaxial function of the body. It climaxes in Weil’s paradoxical-universal ecclesiology that thinks every single human biological body to carry the full totality of Christ. Against this backdrop, Weil calls us to radically oppose and transgress the Social and its law as lovers with our bodies. To embody Christ and to love thus means to become a criminal: To For example, Catholic Liturgy has left Christ’s wounds intact while at the same time portraying them as illuminated by glory; For Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), this becomes visible in the theological, artistic and liturgical reproduction of the radically ambivalent ‘corps manquant’, cf. Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeeth Centuries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 80. 51 Jeremy Biles, Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, 120. 52 Cf. ‘La vulnérabilité des choses précieuse est belle, parce que la vulnérabilité est une marque d’existence. Ainsi la privation de chaleur physique ou de nourriture matérielle soufferte par l’âme célesete à un corps mortel est belle, et le réconfort fourni par l’apport de chaleur physique ou de nourriture matérielle est beau  ; car le réconfort est une marque de vulnérabilité plus irrécusable encore que la souffrance elle-même’. Simone Weil, Œuvres complètes VI.2, Paris: Gallimard, 1998, 492. I read this passage as a parallelism between ‘choses précieuse’ on the one and ‘chaleur physique’ and ‘nourriture matérielle’ on the other hand; contrary to her own ascetic lifestyle, Weil advocates the value of bodily intimacy (sexuality) and food. 53 Michel Leiris with whom Bataille co-founded the Collège de Sociologie attributed Laure with the title ‘saint of the abyss’ [la sainte de l’abîme]. 54 With this, Laure is following in the steps of Mallarmé’s l’Ecclésiastique whose protagonist perceives ‘the immutable texts [=the law] inscribed in his flesh’ [les immuables textes inscrits en sa chair] as well as anticipating Foucault’s Biopolitique. 55 Sean Connolly, ‘Laure’s War: Selfhood and Sacrifice in Colette Peignot’, in: French Forum 35 (2010), 17-37: 29-30; Laure’s ‘coincidence of law and crime’ echoes Robert Hertz’ (18811915) entanglement of the sacré de droite (law) and the sacré de gauche (crime) cf. Richard Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840-1970, London: Cornell University Press, 2004, 152. 50



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oppose the diabolic nous and to renounce the je illusoire within our soul, the bodily act of renouncing the moi demands the power to say ‘I’, although it lacks the divine right to say ‘I’. Weil identifies the personified coincidence of law and crime in the Johannine crucified, who, for her, is both criminal and God.56 She explains the metaxial function of the body as something similar to mental pathologies that ‘uproot readings, changing them, to arrive at non reading’57 of the world [déraciner les lectures, de les changer, pour parvenir à la non-lecture]. This reflects the function of the mystic-biological in Weil’s own political consciousness and emphases the crucial function of physical pain in debunking especially political delusions and ideology: I experience a rupture which is constantly growing bigger, both in my intellect and at the core of my heart, by the failure to think together the misfortune of mankind and the perfection of God and to link these two as one truth. I have an inner certainty that this truth, if it is ever granted to me, will be granted to me only when I myself am physically suffering, and this in one of the extreme forms of present affliction.58

Weil’s plaidoyer59 for a mysticism of bodily transgression towards non-lecture in a world of ideological delusion and war strongly echoes Laure – Weil never refers to Bataille. However, she criticises her/them for mixing up, as Weil puts ‘C’est uniquement à cause de la crucifixion que la foi au Christ peut, comme dit saint Jean, être un critérium. Accepter pour dieu un condamné de droit commun honteusement torturé et mis à mort, c’est vaincre le monde’. Weil, Œuvres VI.4, 188; in context of this counter-collective and political function of mysticism, Weil also alludes to the Dionysian heritage, of the god of transgression, of transgressive (body) fluids in John (from water to wine to blood) and refers to the function of ‘théories mystico-biologiques’, cf. Weil, Œuvres VI.2, 371. 57 ‘Analogie entre la mystique et la pathologie mentale. Il faut compendre cette analogie l’usage méthodique ou non) de diverses forms de folie dans l’ascèse mentale et la mystique répond à l’usage purificateur du scepticism idéalisme absolu solipisme dans le plan philosophique Il s’agit de déraciner les lectures, de les changer, pour parvenir à la non lecture (…) le pouvoir, la part de imagination dans la perception’. Weil, Œuvres VI.2, 435-436. 58 ‘J’éprouve un déchirement qui s’aggrave sans cesse, à la fois dans l’intelligence et au centre du cœur, par l’incapacité où je suis de penser ensemble dans la vérité le malheur des hommes, la perfection de Dieu et le lien entre les deux. J’ai la certitude intérieure que cette vérité, si elle m’est jamais accordée, me le sera seulement au moment où je serai moi-même physiquement dans le malheur, et dans une des formes extrêmes du malheur présent’. Weil, Écrits de Londres, 213. 59 Reprocher à des mystiques d’aimer Dieu avec la faculté d’amour sexuel, c’est comme si on reprochait à un peintre de faire des tableaux avec des couleurs qui sont composées de substances matérielles. Nous n’avons pas autre chose avec quoi aimer’. Simone Weil, Œuvres complètes VI.3, Paris: Gallimard, 2002, 170. 56

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it, reality and imagination,60 creating an ersatz divinity analogous to the fleshly moi/nous: there is an essential difference between mysticism that turns the faculty of love and desire towards God through (bodily) suffering [violemment] whose sexual energy constitutes the physiological foundation [fondement physiologique], and the fictitious imitation of mysticism, which, leaving its natural orientation unchanged, thus giving it an imaginary object, imprinting on this item, as a label, the name of God.61

Weil builds her criticism on Paul and finds in the apostle an ‘overwhelming reality of a kenotic understanding of real bodily incarnation as well as a deeply embodied understanding of Cross as [corporeal] crucifixion’.62 Weil adheres to the Pauline distinction between σάρξ (sarx) and σῶμα (soma) when she differentiates between chair and corps. While Pauline anthropology63 uses σάρξ for the aspect of human corporality in its entanglement with fallen creation and in its distance from God, it uses σῶμα for the aspect of human corporality in its entanglement with creation as made for a relationship with God, making the human body ultimately the form of resurrection. Here, σῶμα denotes a being in the world, whereas σάρξ denotes bondage to the world. On the one hand, Paul’s terminology affirms the more holistic Hebrew understanding of human embodiment with all its inclinations and of the corporeality and corporateness of human existence as integral to being human. At the same time, he recognises a more negatively connotated Greek attitude to human existence as caught up in the mortal hull of flesh that he also wants to affirm. For Paul, however, the inclusion of a negative dimension does not target the σῶμα but the ephemeral character of desires in the decaying σάρξ. Thus, the Pauline notion of resurrection introduces not a resurrection from the body, but of the body, with a ‘Colette. L‘amour a besoin de réalité. Aimer à travers une apparence corporelle un être imaginaire, quoi de plus atroce, le jour où l’on s’en aperçoit  ? Bien plus atroce que la mort, car la mort n’empêche pas l’âimé d’avoir été. C’est la punition du crime d’avoir nourri l’amour avec de l’imagination’, Œuvres VI.2, 381; ‘Il s’agit de la différence entre RÉEL et IMAGINAIRE dans le domaine spirituel (…) Amour imaginaire pour les créatures. Colette. J’aimais quoi, quand je l’aimais? Amour qui meurt’, Weil, Œuvres VI.2, 451. 61 ‘Il y a une différence essentielle entre la mystique que tourne violemment vers Dieu la faculté d’amour et de désir dont l’énergie sexuelle constitue le fondement physiologique, et la fausse imitation de mystique, qui, laissant à cette faculté son orientation naturelle, et lui donnant un objet imaginaire, imprime à cet objet, comme étiquette, le nom de Dieu’, Weil, Œuvres VI.3, 170-171. 62 David Tracy, ‘Simone Weil: The Impossible’, in: Jean E. Doering & Eric O. Springsted (Ed.), The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, 229-242: 232. 63 Cf. Lorenzo Scornaienchi, Sarx Und Soma Bei Paulus: Der Mensch zwischen Destruktivität und Konstruktivität, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008, 66. 60



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f­undamental transformation of fleshly desire. Paul’s dichotomy of σάρξ and σῶμα too constitutes the ambiguous entanglement that requires a permanent process of internal separation of σάρξ and σῶμα and a practice of renunciation close to Weil’s dichotomy of je and moi expressed by the metaxial function of the body. Weil refines this by claiming that in extreme affliction the metaxial function of the body splits the soul into the personal carnal part (moi) and an infinitesimal small, eternal, impersonal, God-echoing part of the debunked je illusoire. Evil is ‘burned away’ when the corporeal suffering also penetrates the impersonal part of the soul, due to the metaxial entanglement of both split up soul parts as one single biological body. A similar economy of salvation is depicted in one of the poets Weil read, Maurice Scève (1501-1560)64. In Scève, the penetration by evil [basilisque]65 into a duplicated soul provides a via purgativa.66 Weil describes these events as ‘passing through the flesh’ [passé à travers la chair].67 In this moment, the human arrives at the centre of a labyrinth, where God is waiting to eat us. After having been eaten and digested by God we will go out again, but we will be changed, we will have become different. For Weil, eating and digesting the Eucharist signifies this hidden truth, however, in fact, in eating the Eucharist we are eaten and digested by God.68 By virtue of the incarnation of Christ and his participation in the Trinity, the infinitesimal small impersonal je then links the soul with the actual divine impersonal-personal Je of the Trinity that unites the abyss of the soul with the abyss in God.69 For Weil, the pivotal New Testament passage that links the soul’s internal economy of salvation with the paradoxical universality of a truly incarnated Christianity is Col 1:22.70 Here, Christ ‘substitutes’ [échanger in Weil] the Scève’s poetry celebrates a love which is more than human, a ‘divine’ love which truly comes from the ‘Deity’. This love cannot be communicated to us through the intellect or rational sense alone but requires the ‘volenté sainctement obstinée’. Scève writes for example concerning his via purgativa in the split-up soul: ‚Mon Basilisque avec sa poignant’ veue/ Perçant Corps, Cœurm & Raison despourueue/ Vint pénétrer en l’Ame de mon Ame‘, Jerry C. Nash, The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Scève: Poetry and Struggle, Cambridge, Cambrige University Press, 1991, 68. 65 It is noteworthy, that ‘in biblical writing the basilisk is associated with evil (…) the mirroring action of the mind is crucial to spiritual cleansing’, Michael Giordano, The Art of Meditation and The French Renaissance Love Lyric: The Poetics of Introspection in Maurice Scève’s Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu (1544), Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010, 266. 66 Giordano, The Art of Meditation, 270. 67 Simone Weil, Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu, Paris: Gallimard, 1962, 135. 68 Cf. Weil, Attente de Dieu, 122; as well as Alexander Irwing, ‘Devoured by God: Cannibalism, Mysticism, and Ethics in Simone Weil’, in: CrossCurrents 51 (2001), 257-272. 69 Here, Weil follows Meister Eckhart and his concept of ‘Seelenfunke’ 70 Cf. Simone Weil, La connaissance surnaturelle, Paris: Gallimard, 1950, 199. 64

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entire cosmos ἐν τῷ σώματι τῆς σαρκὸς [in the body of his flesh].71 The true Christianity that Weil envisions is for us to no longer live in ourselves, but for Christ to live in us (Gal 2:20), so that through our perfection the cosmic Christ becomes each one of us. Paul elaborates on this in Col 1:22-24 that ‘now Christ reconciled you in the body of his flesh through death (…) I am filling up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ for his body, this is the Church’.72 Following Weil, the ὅ [‘this’] in ὅ ἐστιν ἡ ἐκκλησία [‘this is the Church’] cannot refer to σώματος [‘body’], the ideological superstructure of the mystical body, but to ἀνταναπληρῶ τὰ ὑστερήματα τῶν θλίψεων τοῦ χριστοῦ [‘filling up what is missing in the afflictions of Christ’], these are the acts of love in everyday life by imitating God. Correspondingly, for Weil, this God who is Love can only be thought of in terms of radical incarnation. Christ’s single kenotic and transgressive act of suffering crucifixion, incarnation and creation as one madness of love reveals a love that is always embodied.73 Here, ‘the madness of love (…) compels us to abandon all things for compassion and, as St. Paul says of Christ, to empty ourselves’74 while Christ’s ‘total humility is the consent to death, which makes us inert nothingness. The saints are those who while yet alive have actually consented to death’.75 Weil’s decreated, God thus has not withdrawn but once he has entered into the realm of time has become a body, but a body of nothingness, proclaiming his eternal word, je: je ne suis rien, ‘the I is nothing’:76 God is he who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh [chair inerte et saignante]. Yet at the same time he is in some sort the victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body [corps inanimé], incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known [ce malheureux dont nul ne connaît ni le rang ni le nom]. The inanimate body is this created universe. The love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning

‘Christ on the Cross suffered with compassion the suffering of all humanity concentrated in himself’ Weil, First and Last Notebooks, 358; concerning this matter Weil also refers to Tertullian’s famous statement: ‘Caro salutis est cardo’ [‘The flesh is the pivot of salvation’]. 72 ‘νυνὶ δὲ ἀποκατήλλαξεν ἐν τῷ σώματι τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ διὰ τοῦ θανάτου’, Col 1:22; ‘ἀνταναπληρῶ τὰ ὑστερήματα τῶν θλίψεων τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου ὑπὲρ τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ, ὅ ἐστιν ἡ ἐκκλησία’, Col 1:24. 73 Cf. Weil, Attente de Dieu, 84; ‘dé-création. Le term du temps’. Weil, Œuvres VI.2, 434. 74 ‘La folie d’amour (…) contraint à abandonner toute chose pour la compassion, et, comme dit saint Paul du Christ, à se vider’. Weil, Écrits de Londres, 56. 75 ‘L’humilité totale, c’est le consentement à la mort, qui fait de nous du néant inerte. Les saints sont ceux qui encore vivants ont réellement consenti à la mort’. Weil, La connaissance surnaturelle, 325. 76 De Kesel, ‘The Power to Say I’, 178. 71



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­ erfection if we were able to attain to it, is the divine model both of gratitude p and compassion.77

Simone Weil calls us to follow the crucified Christ and to échanger – like Christ – our impersonal je with the impersonal je of the entire cosmos, the inanimate body of the nameless victim who is God78 that loves through the suffering body of our flesh. Weil writes about her own death referring to Col 1:22 that I may die, but the universe goes on. It does not comfort me if I am something other than the universe. But if the universe is another body to my soul, my death ceases to mean anything more to me than the death of a complete stranger.79

At a certain point, Death itself appears as the ultimate epiphany of God for Weil: sharing the same body of the entire universe. Finally she executed on herself the personal radicalisation of what she had taught to her pupils when she was still agnostic: ‘To distinguish between the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ would be the final end of all existence’ [la coupure entre le ‘je’ et le ‘moi’ serait le but final de toute l’existence].80 In his 1992 essay ‘Corpus’ Jean Luc Nancy finishes Weil’s thought: Corps, corpus, corpus hoc est une intraitable folie (…) God no longer has a body. The world is neither the spacing of God nor the spacing in God: it becomes the world of bodies. The other world is dissolved as the body of Death, as Death in Person: a rotting where space is abolished, a pure concentration, crushing, dissolving body into the suave ineffable, crawling with this thing that has no name in any language, this beyond of the cadaver where Tertullian and Bossuet, and so many others, make us see the end of the world. An unnamed God disappears with this unnameable thing: he disappears into it, he’s revealed dead there, as Death in Person, in other words, no body.81

The context of Weil’s anorexic death, once reached the age of Christ, confronts us with a dilemma: desiring to participate and substitute in the extreme afflictions of the world her excessive starving degenerated the metaxial function of her body and its relationality towards the world. It turned the cosmos into a mute, monstrous enemy, making her unable to separate the je from the moi in Weil, Waiting for God, 214. In this thought, Weil anticipates current debates in Process Theology, discussiong a somewhat panentheistic/‘theos-em-panthic’ concept of God who has a body of sorts in the universe itself. 79 Transl. by the author; orig.: ‘J’ai beau mourir, l’univers continue. Cela ne me console pas si je suis autre que l’univers. Mais si l’univers est à mon âme comme un autre corps, ma mort cesse d’avoir pour moi plus d’importance que celle d’un inconnu’, Simone Weil, Œuvres complètes VI.1, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, 290. 80 Weil, Lectures on Philosophy,193. 81 Jean Luc Nancy, Corpus, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, 58-61. 77 78

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the end.82 Secondly, her blind hostility towards her own heritage, Judaism, made her tacitly join the diabolic nous and scapegoat her own roots. At the same time these acridities prevented Weil to be finally ‘digested’ into the mystical body of the Catholic Church as one of its saints. So, what does the term ‘mystic’ mean when attributed to Simone Weil? It means that Weil remains an enigma. However, ambiguously and paradoxically, she is (still) the embodied symbol of her most potent ideas, as Bataille knew her, and pungently reminds Christianity of the corporeal nature at its very heart.

82

Cf. Dominique-Marie Dauzet, ‘Simone Weil (1909-1943), passion anorectique, vision eucharistique’, in: Dominique de Courcelles (Ed.), Les enjeux philosophiques de la mystique, Paris 122-138  ; cf. Blanca Garí, ‘Simone Weil y la mística del descenso. Résponse à DominiqueMarie Dauzet’, in: Dominique de Courcelles (Ed.), Les enjeux philosophiques de la mystique, Paris 139-142  ; cf. Isabelle Meuret, Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2007, 188-197.

Lieven De Maeyer LOVE BETWEEN TWO POEMS The Imagination, Love and Literature in Simone Weil

Introduction In one of the better-known episodes from Simone Weil’s biography, we find her on a retreat in the monastery of Solesmes. The year is 1938 and Weil is seeking relief for the terrible headaches that have plagued her since childhood. In the monastery she meets a devoutly Catholic Englishman who introduces her to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. One poem in particular, George Herbert’s ‘Love III’, was to have a singular impact on Weil. In a long letter to father Perrin, known as her Spiritual Biography, Weil writes that she learned the poem by heart and recited it whenever her headaches became unbearable. One time, this recitation took on ‘the virtue of a prayer’ and ‘Christ himself came down and took possession of [her]’. In this experience, she ‘felt in the midst of [her] suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face’. Nevertheless, Weil stresses that ‘neither [her] senses nor [her] imagination had any part’, in this ‘absolutely unexpected contact between God and a human being’.1 Despite the importance of this experience for Weil’s spiritual and philosophical development, its nature remains quite elusive and the few lines Weil has devoted to it raise more questions than they provide answers to. For instance, what precisely was the role of Herbert’s poem? Did its specific religious content or its form have any particular influence, or could the attentive recitation of any other poem have provoked a similar experience? Another, perhaps more important question is how personal this encounter was, how personal the love whose presence Weil felt, especially given her critique of personhood in the essay La personne et le sacré? I think that any attempt to answer these questions, inconclusive as the answers may be given the lack of evidence, should take into account Weil’s assurance that her imagination did not play any part in her Simone Weil, Waiting for God, New York: Harper Perennial, 1973, 69-70.

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experience. Of course, in the letter to Perrin this remark can easily be read as Weil simply stressing that she did not invent the experience, that it really happened. I will argue, however, that for Weil the absence of imagination constitutes a necessary, if not the defining condition for mystical experience. Thus taking her description of the experience in Solesmes as a starting point, in the following I attempt to elucidate the relation between mystical experience and the imagination for Simone Weil. I will do so in three steps: first, I reconstruct in some detail how Weil understands the imagination; second, I look at how Weil conceives of the relationship between the imagination, (mystical) love and spiritual development; and finally, I raise the question why Weil herself was so invested in literature, both as a reader and a writer, given that literature is a product of the imagination. To this end, I propose a close reading of Weil’s prose poem known as the Prologue which describes a mystical encounter with Christ. The Imagination from Descartes to Satan In the debate among Weil scholars about the continuity or discontinuity between her early non-religious work and the later texts, Weil’s treatment of the imagination provides a strong argument for a claim of discontinuity, as we can find at least two clearly distinct theories of the imagination in her work. Weil develops the first theory in her dissertation Science and Perception in Descartes (1930). Building on Descartes’ Twelfth Rule from the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, Weil stresses the physical, bodily nature of the imagination, which functions as an organ that converts material sense impressions into objects of thought2. As such, the imagination is a vital physical faculty, and Weil refers to it as a ‘bond of action and reaction between the world and my thought’.3 But, however vital it may be, it is not without its flaws. Already in 1925, when she was still a student in Alain’s class, Weil had analysed how the imagination, due to its physical nature, is susceptible to influence by certain bodily states such In Regula XII Descartes develops a geometrical model of sensory perception. He writes: ‘Il faut (...) concevoir que le sens commun joue le rôle du cachet, qui imprime dans l’imagination, comme dans de la cire, ces figures ou idées que les sens externes envoient pures et incorporelles [i.e. as two-dimensional figures]; que cette imagination est une véritable partie du corps et d’une grandeur telle que ses diverses parties peuvent revêtir plusieurs figures distinctes (…)’. Of course for Descartes this is merely a model, which does not necessarily represent sensory perception truthfully, but allows the philosopher to conceive (‘concevoir’) it on the basis of clear and distinct ideas. In her thesis, Weil elaborates this Cartesian model, but stresses more than Descartes the connection between the body and the imagination. 3 Simone Weil, Formative Writings, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987, 69. 2



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as hunger or thirst.4 A man lost in the desert who sees water where there is only shadow, is not being deceived by his senses, but by his imagination. In the dissertation, Weil elaborates on this by distinguishing between ‘uncontrolled’ and ‘docile’ imagination. The uncontrolled imagination infuses our perception of the world with subjectivity. It does so, on the one hand, by immediately classifying experiences into categories of either pleasure or pain, and on the other, by projecting volition onto the world, either opposed to or concurrent with the subject’s will. This explains, for example, why we feel anger towards a table leg when we stub our toe. For Weil, the uncontrolled imagination is at the origin of mythological thinking, as it causes ‘a god to rise up with every thought’.5 I will briefly come back to this later. For Weil, the problem with the uncontrolled imagination is that it absolutizes the subjective realm of experience in such a way that objective knowledge of the world becomes impossible. If the imagination is left uncontrolled, we find ourselves at the mercy of an infinite number of unpredictable and incomprehensible wills. Opposed to the uncontrolled imagination, Weil posits the docile imagination, which yields clear ideas, such as numbers. These ideas ‘alone do not represent the encroachment of the world on me, since they are present to me only by an act of my own attention’.6 Nevertheless, these clear ideas are not a product of my own thought, they are not self-explanatory. ‘Consequently’, Weil writes, ‘they proceed from something external to me, in other words, from the world; and since the imagination is the only intermediary between me and the world, they proceed from the imagination’.7 The clear ideas formed by the imagination kept in check by attentive thought reveal an order in the world, an order that is opposed to the volatility projected by the uncontrolled imagination. As such, rather than leaving us merely passive and receptive to experiences of pleasure and pain, they open ‘a passageway into the world for the mind’;8 they make methodical work possible, which was a central concern for the early Weil. The imagination thus appears as an indispensable tool to acquire knowledge and to act effectively, be it one that has to be handled with care and close attention. From the late thirties on, however, Weil abandons the idea of the imagination as a physical faculty that operates on the border between consciousness and See her short essay on perception and the imagination in Oeuvres Complètes. 1: Premiers écrits philosophiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1988, 297-298. 5 Weil, Formative Writings, 77. 6 Ibid., 72. 7 Ibidem. 8 Ibid., 73. 4

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the outside world.9 As a result, the imagination is no longer the indispensable intermediary that guarantees the usefulness of at least some of its creations, and Weil begins to theorize about an imagination that is entirely and by definition uncontrolled. Naturally, this entails a devaluation of the faculty of imagination, as it can no longer serve as a useful tool for action or learning. Indeed, Weil’s second theory might best be summed up as a series of arguments for a rejection of the imagination. A first argument follows easily from what we have just seen. The ‘passageway for the mind into the world’ has now become an obstacle between the mind and the world. Rather than being the site of interaction with the world, the imagination now only projects images on the world. We should understand ‘images’ in a broad sense; as before, they include the attribution of intention and volition to objects, but also what we would call phantasies – Weil refers to phantasies of revenge, for example. These put us at a distance from present reality, by infusing it with images of a desired future state or result. Basically, the imagination has a derealizing function. Products of the imagination cannot surprise us, and we cannot learn from them. From an epistemological or methodological point of view, this suffices to reject the imagination altogether. This is all very similar to Weil’s analysis of the uncontrolled imagination. But for the later Weil, the imagination poses a much more fundamental problem. A second argument, or series of loosely connected arguments, points to the imagination and its derealizing operation as a source of evil. In fact, in one of her famous notebooks, Weil writes: ‘What comes to us from Satan is the imagination’.10 To fully grasp this, we need to determine what she means by Satan. Clearly there is no room for a supernatural or preternatural force of evil in her thought, but the name should not be dismissed as a slip of Weil’s pen, as it does refer to something that is very real to her. One way to understand this, and how it applies to the imagination, is by looking at the satanic as the opposite of the divine. A short digression into Weil’s metaphysics and her theory of love is needed here before we can return to the imagination.

It was not entirely abandoned, however. Weil’s notion of lecture (‘reading’) is clearly a continuation of her earlier Cartesian understanding of the imagination, with which she tried to further explore the relation between the body and spiritual development. Weil had planned to devote an entire book to the notion of reading, but it never materialized. She did, however, distinguish neatly between reading and the imagination, the latter of which became completely disconnected from the body. (For her most extensive analysis of reading, see her Essay on the Concept of Reading in Late Philosophical Writings, Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 2015.) 10 Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Vol. 1, New York: Putnam, 1956, 218. 9



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Love and the Imagination A defining element of Weil’s philosophy of God is that in creation He commits an act of absolute love by retreating from being so as to leave a space where beings other than Him can exist. We, along with the rest of creation, exist by grace of God’s abdication of being. This leads Weil to embrace the paradoxical idea that God’s absence in the world is the greatest proof of his love.11 This radical idea has far-reaching consequences for Weil’s conception of spiritual development as a way to God. In the Notebooks we read that one should ‘respond to God’s absence, which is love, by means of absence and love’.12 This response is Weil’s often discussed notion of décréation: the movement by which we mimic God’s act of love in creation and resist our soul’s tendency to ‘fill up the entire space it is given, like a gas’.13 The soul, by its very nature, chooses presence over absence. It prefers being over non-being, and it is this preference that, in its contrast to divine creation, we can characterize as ‘satanic’. It is between these two pairs of opposites, presence and absence, the satanic and the divine, that a Weilian theory of love must be situated. Of course, strictly speaking, love is synonymous with God and coincides with absence in the act of creation. Man is not capable of this kind of love, as that would imply creative powers on his part. It could be argued that in a sense, through decreation, man can bring God into being by leaving an emptiness for Him to fill, but this ‘bringing into being’ should not be confused with creation, as the act or process of decreation fundamentally depends on God’s prior creative act and on the workings of grace. Man can only approach love, with a fully decreated state being the highest he can aspire to. If we take love to mean more than this decreated state, it designates every movement from the pole of presence in the direction of absence, although one feels that Weil might be too demanding to consider anything less than total decreation worthy of the name ‘love’. In a sense, Weil’s idea of love radicalizes the Cartesian amour de bienveillance in that it not merely puts the other’s well-being before my own, but realizes that the being of the other is in itself dependent on my self-effacement. This is illustrated beautifully by Weil’s modification of the mystical bridal metaphor: ‘I am not the girl who is waiting for her lover, but the unwelcome third who is with two lovers and ought to go away so that they can really be together’.14 Weil develops this most explicitly in her short text Réflexions sans ordre sur l’amour de Dieu. (Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu, Paris: Gallimard, 1962, 35-43.) 12 Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Vol. 2, New York: Putnam, 1956, 404. (Translation slightly modified.) 13 Weil, Notebooks. Vol. 1, 198. 14 Weil, Notebooks. Vol. 2, 404. (Translation slightly modified.) 11

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But let us return to the imagination and the satanic. The satanic, as the opposite of the divine, can now be characterized as the tendency in man to persevere in presence and refuse to mimic God’s creative abdication. The imagination, as we have seen, posits a screen of delusions between the subject and the world. The satanic and the imagination come together in that Weil understands this screen as a defence mechanism of the ego, as a ‘filler-up of voids’.15 It is through the imagination that the satanic operates: if decreation refers to the operation that leads from presence to absence, the imagination operates in the opposite direction. The imagination immediately fills any void in which God could come to us. The creative powers of the imagination thus stand in direct opposition to God’s creative act. Weil may at some point refer to God as the ‘supreme poet’, but it is clear that this metaphor should not be extended to an understanding of creation as an act of the imagination. The imagination gives rise to an imaginary other that lacks depth and serves only as hallucinatory satisfaction for the ego. I do not think, then, that it is a stretch to say that for Simone Weil, the imagination, in its opposition to decreation, is also the opposite of love. Love is always directed towards the real and the other, while the imagination functions as an illusory expansion of the self. Literature as an Expression of Love? If this is true, it raises interesting questions about the status of art and literature. Can creative writing be an expression of love, understood in the Weilian sense of the word? How can we explain that Weil herself wrote religious poetry? In any case, it is true that most literature can find little grace in Weil’s eyes. The root of the problem is what Weil calls literature’s ‘usurpation of spiritual guidance’.16 Since Romanticism, the artist, and the writer more specifically, has increasingly replaced the priest in mediating between the material world and the transcendent. But whereas the Romantic author – Victor Hugo being the most obvious example – took this mediating task to heart, by the early 20th century, literature and art had become divested of any spiritual and moral ambitions. Writers were now no longer concerned with directing their readers’ minds toward the good and the beautiful, but nevertheless still enjoyed the prestige of their Romantic predecessors. For Weil, this turned literature into a harmful presence in contemporary society, influencing and perverting the minds of the young and the uneducated. 15 16

Weil, Notebooks. Vol. 1, 139. Simone Weil, On Science, Necessity and the Love of God, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968, 161.



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There is a more radical side to Weil’s critique of literature, though. For not only have contemporary writers turned literature into an amoral discipline, but for Weil, fiction itself is inherently immoral. It deprives the good of its appeal and makes evil interesting and seductive. Weil never really develops this idea, but as an observation it holds water. We are, after all, more interested in Dante’s Inferno than in his Paradise, for example. This, for Weil, is sufficient to reject almost all fiction, not just modernism’s amoral experiments. Weil never explicitly evokes the imagination in her texts on literature, but it is clear that her critique of fiction and her rejection of the imagination are very close conceptually: [I]t is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does so in life itself. For the substance of our life is composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future; and unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing.17

It seems then that literature should be rejected on similar grounds as the imagination in general: not only does it not provide a genuine access to reality, it stands in the way of true spiritual development in that it promotes self-centredness at best and immoral behaviour at worst. All of this, however, did not prevent Weil from reading voraciously, nor did it stop her from writing a handful of beautiful, rather narrative poems herself, as well as an unfinished play. How can we make sense of this contradiction? I think Weil offers two solutions. The first consists simply of denying that the works she regards highly are fiction. Genius can create works that are not products of the imagination, but capture a supernatural truth in a symbolic language that makes it accessible to all. For Weil, this is the case for the Iliad, Racine’s Phèdre and a handful of other works. Though interesting, these claims of divine inspiration overly depend on Weil’s strong personal preferences, and therefore are not entirely convincing as a solution to the problem in question. The second solution involves the somewhat enigmatic notion of ‘real metaphors’ [métaphores réelles]. Weil develops this notion as part of her renewed interest in mythology. Where the young Weil was quick to dismiss mythology as a product of the uncontrolled imagination that ‘makes a god rise up with every thought’, from the late thirties on, Weil was eager to find a supernatural truth expressed in a wide variety of religious and philosophical traditions. In the Notebooks she writes: ‘The foundation of mythology is that the universe is a metaphor of divine truths’.18 A ‘real’ metaphor, then, is one expressed in matter or in history, it is a kind of incarnated symbolism. Literature can, in some rare 17 18

Weil, On Science, 162. Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, London: Oxford UP, 1970, 191.

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cases, help to identify and understand these metaphors. The most common examples of this in Weil’s writings are parables from the Gospels, but the Homeric hymns fulfil a similar function, just as many of the sacred scriptures from other religions. It is not entirely clear if literary works composed by individual writers of genius can serve such a purpose, but folklore, songs and fairy tales certainly can for Weil. These two solutions, literary genius and real metaphors, may explain why Weil never completely abandoned reading and studying literature, but they do not answer the question concerning Weil’s own literary output, as her extreme humility would never have allowed her to consider herself a literary genius like Homer or Racine. But Weil’s literary output cannot be ignored, all the less because Weil, at least on one occasion, used a literary form to express a mystical encounter with divine love. I am referring to the mysterious prose poem known as the Prologue,19 the second poem from the title of my article. The main theme of this short and dense text is the possibility of a personal, loving encounter between a human being and God, and thus it is often thought to be a literary account of Weil’s experience in Solesmes. But how can an imaginative, literary text express an experience of love, if we understand love as a process of decreation and thus the opposite of the imagination? The Prologue First, it is important to stress that the Prologue is indeed a work of literature, of fiction even, and not a simple autobiographical account of a lived experience. The text of the Prologue provides at least two arguments for a literary rather than a merely autobiographical reading. The first is Weil’s use of the masculine form of the past participle of ‘baptiser’ to refer to the first-person narrator. If she intended the ‘I’ to be identified with herself, she would have used the feminine form. The second argument is that the Prologue is easily placed within a typically French poetic tradition: that of the prose poem, popularized by Baudelaire in his Petits poèmes en prose. By the late nineteenthirties, when Weil had her experience in Solesmes and wrote the Prologue, the prose poem had become the modernist poetic form par excellence, and was practiced by popular authors such as André Gide, Pierre Jean Jouve and André Breton.

19

The short text was probably intended to function as a poetic preface to a book that would have included, among other texts, the Réflexions sans ordre sur l’amour de Dieu. The book itself was never finished, however.



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Weil’s prose poem starts with the following lines: He entered my room and said: ‘Poor creature, you who understand nothing, who know nothing. Come with me and I will teach you things which you do not suspect’. I followed him.

This ‘he’, usually identified with Christ, first leads the narrator into a church, and then into a house and a small garret. There they talk, ‘like old friends’ and share wine and bread, but no teaching takes place. Then, all of a sudden, the narrator is told to leave and the Christ-figure throws him out on the stairs: I went down unconscious of anything, my heart as in shreds. I wandered along the streets. Then I realised I had no idea where this house stood. I have never tried to find it again. I understood that he had come for me by mistake. My place is not in that garret. It can be anywhere – in a prison cell, in one of those middle-class drawing-rooms full of knick-knacks and red plush, in the waiting-room of a station – anywhere, except in that garret. Sometimes I cannot help trying, fearfully and remorsefully, to repeat to myself a part of what he said to me. How am I to know if I remember correctly? He is not there to tell me. I know well that he does not love me. How could he love me? And yet deep down within me something, a particle of myself, cannot help thinking, with fear and trembling, that perhaps, in spite of all, he loves me.20

This ending marks a strong contrast with George Herbert’s poem that inspired Weil’s mystical encounter in Solesmes. In ‘Love III’, the narrator at first resists Christ’s invitation to communion, but ultimately accepts Christ’s will and surrenders completely to divine love.21 In Weil, communion is not the end, however. To Herbert’s concluding verses, Weil adds a tragic epilogue. Her narrator is sent back to the world, where God is absent, but where he feels he belongs more than in the celestial garret. How does all this relate to the imagination? Or more precisely, how can we make sense of Weil’s use of the imagination to evoke an experience which by definition excludes that same faculty? What could be the value, for Weil, of imagining a mystical encounter or reliving it in the imagination? A metapoetic reading of the Prologue can give us some answers. Indeed, a reflection on the importance of eliminating the imagination is at the heart of Weil’s prose poem. The teaching that the narrator claims not to have received, consists precisely in 20 21

Weil, Notebooks. Vol. 2, 638-639. The poem concludes with the following verses: ‘You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat/So I did sit and eat’. (George Herbert, The English Poems of George Herbert, London: Everyman, 1974, 192.)

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his return to the world, in his letting go of a soothing phantasy of a personal, loving, but anthropomorphic God. If we read Weil’s text in this way, in the Prologue the imagination stages its own elimination. The narrator, by leaving the garret, goes through what Weil elsewhere refers to as a ‘purifying atheism’, in which God is stripped of all anthropomorphic images. The lesson seems to be that divine love can be understood as a personal encounter, as Weil suggests in her Spiritual Biography, but only to a certain point; in the end, it is impartial and, by extension, impersonal. Ultimately, the risks of an anthropomorphic understanding of the divine are simply too great, as it keeps the divine within the realm of the imaginary. An imagined personal and loving God is a product of the ego and shields us from the real; true love, by contrast, leads from the self to the other, from the imaginary to the real. It should be stressed, however, that this does not mean that Weil reduces divine love to something so other, so transcendent that it becomes incomprehensible and impossible to relate to. The final line of the Prologue makes this clear: ‘Deep down within me, something cannot help thinking that, in spite of all, he loves me’. The existence and experience of divine love certainly is the conclusion of Weil’s text. But this love is felt, not at the level of the ego, where it would be perverted by the imagination, but by ‘something’ hidden away in the narrator’s soul, ‘a particle of myself’ [un point de moi-même]. It is only at the deep level of this ‘particle’ that you can respond to the love of God without either reducing it to something subjectively pleasant (or painful) or projecting a human-like volition on it. As a final note, it is worth pointing out that this reading of the Prologue presents us with a good example of the pre-modern mystical anthropology that Weil adopts in her later texts, strongly contrasting with her earlier Cartesianism. The narrator’s conviction that he is indeed loved is located on a deeper level than his will or desire (he never tries to find the house again), deeper than memory (he cannot be sure of the words Christ spoke to him), and deeper than his intellect (he cannot understand why Christ would love him). Crucially, it also lies deeper than the imagination, because this love is not satisfying, it is not moulded to the narrator’s desires or preferences in the way we can imagine the food and wine were. Wandering the streets, heart-broken and abandoned, the narrator senses the existence of a love that is unrelated to who he is and what he wants. It is an impersonal love that he receives, not because, but in spite of his personality.

Ruud Welten MYSTICISM, SAINTLINESS AND SEXUALITY IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’S SAINT GENET I cannot believe that the Prison is not a mystic community, for the death cell, in which light burns night and day, is the chapel to which we direct our silent prayers. (…) It was then that I made my way along those winding roads which are, in truth, the very paths of my heart and of saintliness. Jean Genet, The Miracle of the Rose1

I want to propose a philosophical reading of saintliness and mysticism by focusing on a somewhat unexpected source. The source is Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 1952) written by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).2 Saint Genet is a study on the French writer Jean Genet (1910-1986), who was a homosexual, pornographer and small-time thief, and who became the cuddle-criminal of the existentialist generation in post-war Paris. His major works include The Thief’s Journal (1949), Miracle of the Rose (1946/1951), Our Lady of the Flowers (1943) and Querelle of Brest (1947/1949). Genet is still today acknowledged as one of the most important French writers of the last century, recognized as such by, among others, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Susan Sontag, and David Bowie. Sartre’s Saint Genet was initially meant to be just an introduction to the collected works of Genet, to be published by the editing house Gallimard. The edition was planned by a group of French intellectuals, Sartre among them, to Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, transl. from the French Bernard Frechtman, New York: Grove, 1965, 95, 264. 2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, New York: Plume Book/ New American Library, 1971; Original French edition Paris: Gallimard, 1952. References to the French edition of ‘Tel’, Gallimard 2011. 1

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keep Genet out of prison and as a testimony to his genius. The ‘introduction’ became a book of nearly 700 pages, mainly commenting upon Genet’s earlier works. In many ways, the book is rather revealing of the development of Sartre’s thought from his Being and Nothingness onwards. Unlike other studies by Sartre, this one deals extensively with the themes of saintliness and mysticism. Here, ‘mysticism’ is not understood as a consolation or as something for ardent religious believers. Nor should Saint Genet be taken as a hagiography. Instead, Sartre describes Genet in terms of a saint, in the mystical sense of the word. Sartre uses the structure of the language of mysticism to unveil what is at stake in Genet’s writings. After having presented some context, I will first focus on the role of martyrdom and rejection in Saint Genet. Second, I will focus on the dialectics of saintliness. Third, I will show that mysticism in Saint Genet must be understood in line with Sartre’s analysis of consciousness in Being and Nothingness and, fourth, I will elaborate on Sartre’s doctrine of sex as incarnation. Before I start, just a biographical note. It is noteworthy that mysticism is an important topic for both the young Sartre and his life partner in existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre’s thesis (L’image dans la vie psychologique: Rôle et nature, 1927)3 has only very recently been published, and what is striking about it, is the extensive attention to mainly the Spanish mysticism of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. In her autobiographical work La Force de l’âge, Beauvoir remembers their student days and writes ‘Nous étions deux mystiques’ [‘We were two mystics’].4 From the same source, we know that Sartre and Beauvoir discussed the books they read. In most cases, they used the same copy, so that when the one had finished the book, it was passed on to the other. Another practical thing makes the interest in mysticism understandable: Beauvoir wrote her thesis under the supervision of Jean Baruzi (1881-1953), who wrote an impressive study on John of the Cross that is still regarded as a standard work today.5 Sartre wrote his thesis under the supervision of Henri Delacroix (1873-1937), who, like Baruzi, was a scholar on Spanish mysticism. This might be the first reason why it is not very surprising to stumble across mysticism in the writings of two of the fiercest atheists in the history of modern thought. Many years later, Beauvoir Jean-Paul Sartre, L’image dans la vie psychologique: Rôle et nature (Études sartriennes, nr. 22), Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018. 4 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, in: Mémoires. First Volume, Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 2018, 373. 5 Jean Baruzi, Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique, Paris: Salavator, 1999 (orig. publ. 1924). Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, in: Mémoires. First Volume, Paris, Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 2018, 243. 3



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would return to mysticism in a c­ hapter of her The Second Sex, and Sartre did the same in Saint Genet. Actor and Martyr.6 The Original Choice of Jean Genet Sartre’s book is what he calls ‘existential psychoanalysis’.7 According to Being and Nothingness, human reality identifies and defines itself by the ends it pursues, determined by the individual as what Sartre calls the ‘original choice’. The individual shapes itself by its original choice. Jean Genet, who was a friend of Sartre’s at the time, would have seemed to be an excellent redefinition of a human individual, not being shaped by pre-existing norms or values and resisting to be formed by mere resentment. For Sartre, Genet was a greater challenge than Charles Baudelaire, on whom he had initially tried his existential psychoanalysis.8 In the case of Baudelaire, the analysis seemed to be simple, at least in Sartre’s understanding of the poet. The poet of The Flowers of Evil turned against society in bad faith, to make art out of his resentment.9 In the case of Genet, things were more complicated. Genet refused to be a mere victim or perpetrator. He even refused to be understood by his readers, both in his homosexuality and in his criminality. Sartre recognized in this an original choice, a choice not determined by society. Genet’s semiautobiographical novels are nothing less than a stage for his fantasies, in which the reader is always kept at a distance. As a small child, Genet was without parents and lived in boarding schools and youth prisons, especially in the penal colony Mettray, as described in The Miracle of the Rose. He was brought up as a criminal. The norms and values of society were to him nothing but a ruthless exclusion from society. Growing up without natural parents, the little boy had already received the label ‘thief’. But as Sartre painstakingly analyses, Genet chose to not to be the moral Simone de Beauvoir, ‘The Mystic’, in: The Second Sex, New York: Vintage Books Random House, 2011, 709-719. Fr. ‘La mystique’, in: Le deuxième sexe. II, Paris: Gallimard, 1949/1976 (Folio), 574-586. 7 The idea of existential psychoanalysis is introduced in part four, chapter two of Being and Nothingness. Existential psychoanalysis is formulated as an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis. ‘Existential psychoanalysis seeks to determine the original choice’, Sartre writes (Being and Nothingness, London: Philosophical Library, 1956, 570). Sartre tried to give an analysis of human consciousness that does not appeal to an unconscious. Consciousness is, according to Sartre, completely transparent and it is important to trace where original choices have been made in life. Sartre applied his existential psychoanalysis to literary works (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Flaubert, and Genet). 8 Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, New York: New Directions, 1967. 9 ‘Bad Faith’ (mauvaise foi) is one of the key terms of Sartre’s philosophy in Being and Nothingness. It entails the abnegation of one’s freedom. 6

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outcast that needs to be reintegrated, but he internalized the way of life rejected by others, as he writes ‘I decided to be what crime made of me’, which is also the title of one of the chapters of Sartre’s book.10 It seems to be a strange sentence, Sartre writes, since, how can we decide to be something that we already are? Of course, the label ‘thief’ is a punishment, a conviction, an exclusion from society, to show that society is good and that the small Genet is bad. The answer Genet gives is not so much: ‘Well, you call me a thief, I shall be a thief’. As said, it is not resentment that defines his being, nor revenge. The point is that the others have made of me Genet – something, which I am now, a thief, but now it is me, and me alone, who decides who I am. Moreover, this can only be done by the rejection by society, and the rejection of society. Hence, existential psychoanalysis, which is exactly not Freudian psychoanalysis: it is not so much that something is repressed that must be revealed to cure a neurosis. What society, the super-ego, has taken away from me is the decision to be who I am. Still, Freud’s Super-Ego functions as the gaze of the other for Sartre. But to Freud, the secret of release lies in the past, in early childhood, and thus the subject remains imprisoned in the past. Freud’s model is that of Plato’s anamnesis: what matters is to unveil the repressed past. This is in contrast to Sartre for whom salvation lies in the future. ‘From now on, it is my choice to become who I am’. The ‘original choice’ is the redefinition of who I am, this time formulated by myself, not by others. Yet, this original choice is only possible because the ego is already at a distance from itself.11 Therefore, Genet has to reject what others have made of him. If Genet is a criminal, he shall be a criminal, not by mere exclusion but by the appropriation of the exclusion. This appropriation is only possible through freedom, not by unveiling my repressed past as in Freudian psychoanalysis. Thus, the other has made something of me, this is what I am, but it will be my decision, my choice, not theirs. I – Genet – must regain this decision that was taken away from me, that is, this original choice. This decision takes shape in literature, in the rejection of the obligation to write in disapproving terms about murder, rape, betrayal, etc. Yet, the aim of this contribution is not to study Genet’s writing as such, but rather to understand why and how Sartre describes Genet in terms of saintliness and mysticism.12 Sartre, Saint Genet, 59-72 (Eng.); 74-88 (Fr.). Cf. Sartre: ‘In an ethic of praxis, the Ego is not distinguishable from its possibilities and projects. It is therefore defined by the complex body of its decisions, which are supported by an original choice, and is revealed only in and by acts. It can be the subject of investigation and evaluation only afterward. As soon as I wonder, before the theft, whether I should steal, I detach myself from my undertaking’. Sartre, Saint Genet, 187 (Eng.); 212 (Fr.). 12 According to Sartre, we must understand Genet as a modernist revolutionary pre-eminently, not so much, as one might expect, in the tradition of Baudelaire or Marquis De Sade, and certainly not in any ‘political’ context, but in that of Stephane Mallarmé, the ultimate father 10 11



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Martyrdom and the Role of Rejection One property of a saint is easy to recognize in Genet: he is not so much a victim ready to defend himself, but instead portrays himself as a martyr. A martyr is indeed a victim, but in such a way that victimization does not lead to defence or revenge, but to a status of saintliness. To be a martyr, one has to be rejected, persecuted and revered at the same time, such as is the case in the figure of Jesus. In a way, Genet’s work is built on a Christian scheme. The pleasure that a mystic experiences in suffering is perverted in the eyes of society. The same counts for Genet. What is abject to others is enjoyment itself to Genet. To him, crime (theft, betrayal) is an act of enjoyment in itself. Therefore, to him, crime has no external necessity. Theft is not driven by need. It is a rejection that is constitutive for the saint. The ‘original choice’ cannot be motivated by external conditions. The will, so to say, must be pure to be authentic. In other words, one must desire to be rejected. Sartre examines the inherent ambiguity of a desire that exists somewhere between self-affirmation by the original choice and dependence on a society that makes a saint a saint. However, this mechanism is not unique to Genet. Allow me to give an example of this from one of Sartre’s favourite novels, that is seldom quoted explicitly but many times implicitly: Le rouge et le noir [The Red and the Black] by Stendhal (1830). Here we meet Madame de Rênal who is cheating on her husband with Julien Sorel, who is, not by chance, the son of a poor carpenter. After their first secret nightly meetings, her little son becomes very ill. Now, Madame de Rênal, pious as she is, is praying for her son’s healing. She feels that the illness of her son is caused by her infidelity. So, she must be guilty to give her son a chance to heal. In order to achieve that, it is imperative that she be blamed and expelled from society. Everyone must speak about her in terms of disgrace. She is longing for rejection. What is constitutive of her real devotion is not belief, but society. The religious phenomenon is not understood as an inner experience but as an outer verdict. She must be a sinner, not for the sake of love for the sin, but to heal her son. She is radically unselfish and good. It simply does not matter whether the verdict that falls on her is God’s or society’s. Transcendence is at work here. Rejection is not an unfortunate fate to repair, but it is constitutive of saintliness. Now, this example shows the idea of a pure will that wants itself. To elucidate this I will elaborate on a central chapter in Saint Genet, entitled ‘To succeed in being all, strive to be nothing in anything’, which is a line that Sartre attributes without of modernism. Modernism has to be understood here as a revolutionary exertion to take away the entire idiom of society, to rebuild society. To Sartre, a revolution is doomed to fail when its idiom is still governed by the language of the bourgeoisie. Taken as such, the revolt unfolds itself in Genet’s texts, mainly in his first five novels.

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reference to John of the Cross, to whom I will return. Sartre here quotes Saint Teresa (of Avila) at length: ‘It is not sufficient to detach ourselves from those who are close to us if we do not detach ourselves from ourselves. (…) “Lord (…) give me the sincere desire to be scorned by all creatures”’.13 Sartre is not interested in Teresa’s so-called mystical experiences, but in her obsessive desire for rejection. He places Teresa and Genet on one line, in one literary tradition, which Sartre also recognizes in the work of an author contemporary to him and Genet: Marcel Jouhandeau (1888-1979). Jouhandeau, a devout catholic and, like Genet, a homosexual, wrote many novels about the impossible merging of those two ways of life. For Jouhandeau, in conservative France before World War II, it meant simply to live as a sinner. In 1939 Jouhandeau wrote the essay De l’abjection [On Abjection], that is discussed in detail in Saint Genet.14 Abjection here stands for the previously described desire for rejection, as recognized in the behaviour of Stendhal’s overly pious Madame de Rênal. What unites Genet, Jouhandeau and Teresa of Avila is their description of abjection. If we read Jouhandeau as Sartre does, it is not difficult to hear the voice of Genet: ‘[I am] a victim of a lack of understanding, of a spontaneous aversion, which in the end exiles me definitively. Certain people find my presence on earth suspect, and their hostile attitude thrusts me back into my secret. But nothing exalts me more surely than reprobation’.15 An important difference between Teresa of Avila on the one hand and Jouhandeau and Genet on the other, is that the former enters the discourse of mysticism to get higher, while the two others do so to sink lower. Still, in both cases it is abjection that constitutes saintliness. According to Sartre, the real difference is that for mystics (he mentions also Nietzsche and Gide), the movement is ideal, while for Jouhandeau and Genet it is real.16 One might think also of the fate of John of the Cross, who became a reformer and a saint (‘ideal’), but not before he had been humiliated and thrown into the dungeon by his brothers (‘real’). One might say that, forced by his situation, John of the Cross has to integrate his humiliation into his selfunderstanding. Yet, Sartre does not pretend that the mystic and Genet are the same. To Sartre, John of the Cross only develops a mere play of words. This is not reserved to mysticism or religion. Modern society, that is, the bourgeoisie, has declared itself free from any form of religion and mysticism, but it uses the technique, so to say, of mysticism, the sophistique du non [sophistry of the Nay], to

Sartre, Saint Genet, 205 (Eng.); 232 (Fr.). Ibid., 211-249 (Eng.); 237-261 (Fr.). Marcel Jouhandeau, De l’abjection, Paris: Gallimard, 2006 (orig. publ. 1939). 15 Sartre, Saint Genet, 206 (Eng.); 234 (Fr.). 16 Ibid., 207 (Eng.); 235 (Fr.). 13 14



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construct a self-conscious individual.17 Individuality – and this also goes for our contemporary society – is the result of a sophistique du non. (Cf. claims like ‘I am unlike the others’.) One must renounce the world and others to become oneself. This, in the terms of Sartre’s Genet, is the desire for a full revelation of myself to myself, a revelation that is, as we shall see, doomed to fail. This is why mysticism cannot be understood as a strand of Bildung, and certainly not as the formation of a pious soul. In Bildung, we become someone in society. But to be a mystic, as argued, one needs to be rejected by society. This, of course, is why Genet is a saint and a martyr at the same time. It is this dialectics between society and its negation, that, in Genet’s view, constitutes saintliness. In Our Lady of the Flowers, Genet writes: ‘Culafroy and Divine, with their delicate tastes, will always be forced to love what they loathe, and this constitutes something of their saintliness, for that is renunciation’.18 How do these dialectics work? Let us rephrase this question within the framework of mysticism: how does one achieve a pure will? For instance, how does one bring pure love into practice? Answer: by hating hate. So in the end, ‘real’ love is ultimate hate. Love does not only hate hate, but to love somebody ultimately is saying ‘nothing or nobody in the world counts for me, except you’. The more I love you, the more I hate everything else. If I love not only you but also others, my love for you is flawed. In short, there is no such thing as pure love, because pure love proves itself against the horizon of hate.19 In the same way, the saint is not so much a hermit, withdrawn into himself, as he is someone within society to detest it. Sartre writes: ‘The hermit who endeavours to lead a godly existence is familiar with all the refinements of the dialectic of the Nay’.20 The hermit is desperately in need of society to refuse it. This can only be achieved when society rejects him. Hence, the language of sin and crime, which has the very same purpose as the language of the mystic. No Saint without a Consumer Society This dialectical play of rejection by society is first and foremost constitutive of saintliness. The pure will turns out to be negative, rather than affirmative. It is clear by now that saintliness cannot be understood from within, that is to say, Ibid., 201 (Eng.); 228 (Fr.). Jean Genet, Oeuvres completes. Vol. II: Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs and Miracle de la Rose, Paris: Gallimard, 1951, 123. 19 This thought is thoroughly Sartrian: the real constitution of subjectivity always happens through negation, never from a positivity. 20 Sartre, Saint Genet, 204 (Eng.); 231 (Fr.). 17 18

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from interiority, but can only be understood as a relation to exteriority. Moreover, one is never a saint on one’s own. (A saint is a living paradox: one becomes a saint when one’s revelation is ‘real’, ‘authentic’, that is: independent of any external authority whatsoever. However, the saint becomes a saint because the Pope, and the communion of believers, recognize the saint as a saint. They have to accept the claim of the authenticity of experience.) Sartre makes the argument that the phenomenon of saintliness supposes first and foremost a consumer society.21 A consumer society is a society not characterized by need, but by the aristocratic ethos of waste and prodigality. Such a society is a society in which one does not work to consume products that are needed for life, but in which consuming becomes ritual. That is, our subjective tasting of food, for instance, is not so much the fulfilment of a need; rather, it is a sacrifice that constitutes the power of the subject. It is, in terms of Marcel Mauss, ritual destruction.22 Being hungry, the mob is watching the king eat enormous amounts of food like it is attending Mass, Sartre writes. ‘And in like manner with regard to the criminal at the moment of his beheading: an exquisite food which is consumed before our eyes; and with regard to the saint, who is sucked by God like a piece of candy and feels himself deliciously melting into an infinite mouth’.23 Now, only in a society of affluence, poverty and destitution can saintliness be constituted. It does not make any sense to talk about resignation or abstinence if it is not embedded in a society of consumption. The act of consumption, then, is always understood as a sacrifice to God, the ultimate consumer. The saint is the person who refuses to use the world. ‘He dies of hunger amidst riches. But it is necessary that these riches exist’.24 In pursuing saintliness, something must be refused. It is this something, the world, that is annihilated in the mystical move, in what Sartre describes as the sophistique du non mentioned before. Only in the total turning upside down, does the sinner become a saint. Genet is the ultimate product of the sophistique du non of Christianity.25 Sartre’s analysis of mysticism and of becoming a saint is entirely dialectical, in the Ibid., 195-204 (Eng.); 222-231 (Fr.). The work of Mauss/ Lévi-Strauss was read by Sartre, cf. 53n (Eng.); 67n (Fr). ‘The work is merely a preparation: servants dress the bride; consumption is a nuptial union; as a ritual destruction of the “commodity” – instantaneous in the case of food products, slow and progressive in that of clothing and tools – it eternalizes the destroyed object, joins it in its essence and changes it into itself, and, at the same time, incorporates it symbolically into its owner in the form of a quality’. Sartre, Saint Genet, 196 (Eng.; 222 (Fr.). 23 Sartre, Saint Genet, 196 (Eng.); 222 (Fr.). 24 Ibid., 201 (Eng.); 228 (Fr.). 25 ‘Extreme poverty is wealth, refusal is acceptance, the absence of God is the dazzling manifestation of his presence, to live is to die, to die is to live, etc. One step further and we are back at the sophisms of Genet: sin is the yawning chasm of God. In going to the limit of nothingness one finds being, to love is to betray, etc’. Ibid., 201-202 (Eng.); 228 (Fr.).

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­ egelian sense of the word, but without any Aufhebung. What is needed is an H annihilation, that is, a dialectical turn – in other words, a conversion.26 Dialectically speaking, this elucidates why Genet’s project is doomed to fail: as in mysticism, the annihilation of the world ends up being the total affirmation of it. This is already the drift of the argument of Being and Nothingness: the All only exists because of Nothingness. Any ethics of renunciation only affirms what it renounces. If renunciation is carried to the limit, it finds itself in its total opposite. This is why mysticism is not to be understood as a renunciation of consumerism and material possession, but why it is only possible in a society of consumerism and possession. So ultimately mysticism, renouncement, asceticism, imply consumerism precisely in the modern sense of the word. From Being and Nothingness to Saint Genet This dialectics is already described in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.27 At first sight, there seems to be a similarity between the scheme of thought of Being and Nothingness and mysticism, as far as the role of Nothingness is concerned. To Sartre, human consciousness is only possible because its being is nothing. Consciousness is always being conscious of something; in itself it is ‘nothing’ (i.e. lacks being). This nothingness is given negatively, not so much as a lack, but as the negation of its object. There are objects, things that exist, and there is being, but the point is that there is a viewpoint that must be nothing already in itself, otherwise consciousness as a relation would not be possible at all. There is no such thing as an original inner to Sartre. The soul is exactly not itself, it is nothing but intentionality at what it is not; it is nothing else but the relation to everything that is. But for itself, it is nothing. Yet, as becomes clear in Being and Nothingness, this ‘nothing’ turns out to be unbearable, and this is why consciousness escapes into the illusion of being something instead of nothing, famously described by Sartre as the escape of bad faith.28 Man acts as if he is something rather than the nothing, that makes consciousness possible. This act is a lie towards one’s own freedom. It is noteworthy to mention that the reader does not only come across this idea in Being and Nothingness, but already in Sartre’s earlier works as well, works that deal with imagination: the Conversion is a key topic in Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, London/ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (orig. publ. Paris: Gallimard, 1983). 27 The ‘dialectical’ reading of Being and Nothingness is described by Judith Butler in her Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, part 3. 28 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 47-71. 26

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human subject is nothing, indeed, but it is a nothing that imagines being something. Sartre’s mémoire already describes spirituality as a field of imagination.29 Both existentialism and the mysticism of nada teach that the subject is not supported by itself, but by transcendence, something outside of the self. For Sartre, this leads to atheism: the human subject is no longer sustained by the highest being, God, and to be authentic, it must release itself from the longing to be a subject on which reality is built. In other words, like mysticism, existentialism declares the Self, or even the positive subject, to be a mere illusion. But does this imply that mysticism is atheistic either? Even more, does this not lead to an absurd analysis? No, at the heart of modern atheism, we meet mysticism. But the opposite is also true: at the heart of mysticism, we meet atheism. Is existentialism the same kind of discourse as that of – among others – John of the Cross, whose writings were already studied by the young Sartre? After all, The Dark Night of the Soul also teaches that one must free oneself of any longing for God. In an existentialist language, we can say that to John of the Cross, the monks to whom he directs his argument, are creating for themselves an image of God to submit to. They annihilate the nothingness – nada – that makes the relation with God possible in the first place. What John of the Cross destructs is ‘bad faith’, which means to assume that God is the object of the faith of the subject. That we are doomed to be free means that authenticity will never be realized, for this would immediately imply the death of consciousness. That we are in a Night is Sartrian Anxiety, in which we feel that our subjectivity is supported by nothing. And if my subjectivity is supported by nothing, anything is possible. Only from this nothing/ nada, can we make way for an authentic self, which, in the end, turns out to be nothing. In this respect, to Sartre, it is not a night, but rather the blinding daylight of consciousness. Consciousness is an unbearable lucidity, and bad faith is nothing but a strategy to deal with it (precisely as Freudian repression is nothing but a way of dealing with an unbearable reality). So far it is clear that nothing is at the heart of existentialism as it is in mysticism, but the two are not similar. To Sartre, it makes no sense to refrain from any longing/desire since, as nothingness, human consciousness strives after being. Only in the imagination of being does it know itself; it must go out of itself, it must alienate. Therefore, nothingness is constitutive of desire. Nothingness is exactly not the desideratum of consciousness. If one is trying to be nothing, one has already forgotten that this effort originates in nothing in the first place. This is, according to existentialism, the tragic situation of human consciousness. There is no programmatic salvation outside the awareness that being a human being is an échec. 29

In Sartre’s L’image dans la vie psychologique, mysticism is described as one of the attitudes to the image, with references to Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.



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Hence, in Saint Genet, Sartre distances himself explicitly from John of the Cross, to whom he refers as a mere ‘sophistique du Non’.30 As mentioned above, what John of the Cross is doing is a vain play of words, which is the play of the discourse of mysticism.31 What Genet is doing, is exactly the ‘sophistique du Non’, that is, the wordplay of mysticism. But this is not to be taken as a mere reproach of bad faith. ‘Doing’ must be taken literally. Consciousness is doing something. Being implies that there is something, but for something to be, there must be a consciousness to whom it appears. Consciousness, therefore, is understood in Saint Genet in terms of doing (activity, while implying passivity). What, now, is human consciousness? It is the desire (as doing, as an activity) to have an intuition of oneself. That is to say, consciousness – nothingness – strives after the revelation of itself. Not the self as Nothing, but the self as Something. After all, we all want to be at least something. So what is desire? It is to reveal oneself to oneself, which before the death of God, only God was able to achieve; or better yet: it was not an achievement at all. ‘I am who I am’, is the self-revelation of God for the Book of Exodus – for modern man it is the ultimate object of desire. Man wants not only to be, but he wants to be what he ‘really’ is. It is exactly this ‘reality’ that, therefore, is imagined and not given as such. Hence the appeal to mysticism: ‘He [Genet] wants to have an intuition of himself. This subject wants to make himself an absolute object to himself’.32 Love here is ultimately love for oneself, that is, the longing for a revelation of who I am. Love is narcissistic love. It is not so much God who loves his creatures, but God who reveals himself as himself. This self-revelation is the blueprint of consciousness: It is only because consciousness, as understood by Sartre, is nothingness, that it desires to coincide with itself. Because consciousness is never itself (since that would imply death) it is nothing but desire. This is human tragedy. Sex as Incarnation It is here that eroticism comes in. Or more precisely, sex as an activity; it is something we ‘do’. Why sex? As we have seen, consciousness is nothing. It is mere transcendence and freedom. But on the basis of this freedom, it tries to be something. Now, the other is something: he or she is a body, he or she is. The Sartre, Saint Genet, 202n.(Eng.); 229 (Fr.). To Sartre, mysticism and the discourse of saintliness are nothing but bad faith: ‘Saintliness, with its sophisms, rhetoric, and morose delectation repels me. It has only one use at the present time: to enable dishonest men to reason unsoundly’. Ibid., 202 (Eng.); 230 (Fr.). 32 Ibid., 63 (Eng.); 78 (Fr.). 30 31

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other is the object of consciousness, which confirms my subjectivity, that is, my nothingness and thus my freedom, but it is my freedom that I want to escape. I need this embodied being of the other to become someone. Therefore, Sartre’s doctrine of the body is pre-eminently a doctrine of incarnation, not because the subject is incarnated, but because of the fact that the other is the incarnation of the desire of the subject. The other is the necessary mediation of my self-becoming.33 And of course, the other is never only just a dead object. It is an object only because I know that he or she is a subject like me, even if I am fully aware of the fact that there is no way to understand the other from his or her subjectivity. It is his or her subjectivity that is an object to me and it appears to me, so to say, that this subjectivity is embodied. This is why sexual relations, according to the many pages devoted to them in Being and Nothingness, reveal the original sadomasochistic character of human sexuality.34 I am the object of the sexual act, or I am the subject of it. But never at the same time. This is a repetition of the structure of the famous look (le regard): when I see the eyes of the other, the other has become an object, but as soon as the look of the other appears, I am submitted to the subjectivity of the other: I have become an object in the view of the other. And we will never merge. Sex is not love; orgasm is not to the point where we become one. Orgasm as ultimate unification is imaginary: it is the ‘highest purpose’, ‘it will come’, ‘it is over now’, but it never ‘is’.35 Hence, to Sartre, sex is exactly not caused by a certain mysterious Freudian libido that escapes my consciousness and that, by consequence, is unconscious. Sartre is not Freud. What, then is sex? Nothing but penetration, and as we know, penetration comes always from one side. The one body penetrates the other, to become body itself, not, I repeat, to unite with the other. On the contrary, the other is violated, even if the other claims to want it like that. This only proves the impossibility of avoiding the sadomasochistic structure of every This is contrasting to the phenomenologies of incarnation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Michel Henry. 34 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Chapter Three: ‘Concrete Relations With Others, I. First Attitude Toward Others: Love, Language, Masochism’, 361-378. 35 One might say here that Christianity has understood this very well: sex is not love, it is not even supported by it. This is why Abelard’s Heloise says that love is not possible through sex. Every sexual act is prostitution and marriage is nothing but legalized prostitution, Heloise writes to Abelard. ‘The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word friend [amica], or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore’. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (transl., introd. & notes Betty Radice, rev. by M.T. Clanchy), London: Penguin, 2003, 51. Betty Radice in the introduction: ‘If the Emperor Augustus offered marriage she would still choose to be Abelard’s whore; she says this in the context of preferring “love to wedlock and freedom of chains”. She has loved Abelard only for himself, not for anything he could give her, and indeed, in her view, marriage for what either party could get from the other was no better than prostitution’, xxi. 33



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act of sex. This is why the homosexual pornographic scenes in the work of Genet are, for Sartre, in no way different from heterosexual relations. But this does not mean that sexuality is based on equality. On the contrary, sexuality is only possible as submission, as penetration. Nowhere is this as clear as in the work of Genet. Again, as in many places in Sartre’s work, hell is the other, but our entire culture only reveals that we love hell much more than we love heaven. Of course, Michèle Le Doeuff was right in writing that Sartre’s understanding of sex in Being and Nothingness is a thoroughly male, even a macho concept of sexuality.36 But, for now, in trying to understand Sartre’s fascination for Genet, it becomes clear that to Sartre, there is not the slightest sexual difference between heterosexual or male homosexual sex.37 Now, the perverse universe of soul and body, of love and sex, of mysticism and existentialism becomes clear. That is to say, we are right at the heart of Saint Genet.38 Yes you read that right: mystical experience is waiting for penetration. The promised moment of orgasm is the self-fulfilment, the self-satisfaction of the ultimate subject. As a final being, I cannot want anything else but to be taken by God in, like Teresa’s famous ecstasy, a mystical orgasm.39 The problem of modernity – and especially of modern theology – is that the subject needs the other to reveal itself to itself. This is what modern theology calls transcendence. To Sartre, this implies always that my self-revelation is already self-alienation. This is the tragic situation of the modern subject. If it succeeds to reveal itself, it finds itself alienated. What remains? Sartre: ‘The thing for him [Genet] to do, therefore, is to encounter this substance which Michèle Le Doeuff, L’Étude et le rouet. Des femmes, de la philosophie, etc., Paris: Seuil, 1989, 72-78. 37 Cf. ‘The inflexible male homosexual seeks in the girl queen only himself. He wants to coincide with the image he has glimpsed in submissive eyes. And when he thinks he has succeeded, the image dies as a result of being attained, and the desire with it: this is the orgasm’. Sartre, Saint Genet, 109 (Eng.); 128 (Fr.). 38 Sartre: ‘The garrulous and amorous consciousness will passively receive its visitation; it will enter the consciousness as a lover enters his mistress; consciousness will love this being as the woman loves the male, as the faithful love their God. Is not this love precisely the horror which has been overcome? It will be his being by a mystic marriage. The contempt and hatred of the Just will serve to cement the union. To love each other amidst hoots and jeers and to draw from that love the strength to feel invulnerable – that is the aim. We find here the postulation of the mystics which is often defined as the quest of a state in which subject and object, consciousness and being, the eternal and the particular, merge in an absolute undifferentiation. This little scrounger aspires to the sacred moment in which he will be penetrated, torn apart, by the great and terrible essence of the Evildoer and in which he will no longer know whether his consciousness is a simple phosphorescence of this eternal essence or whether the eternal essence is the object of his consciousness’. Saint Genet, 64 (Eng.); 79 (Fr.). 39 Note Cupid’s sparrow in Bernini’s famous statue. The only way we can imagine Teresa’s ecstasy is by a pre-eminent embodied symbol of penetration. 36

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defines him. At the origin of this quest is a kind of passive and contemplative state of mind: one must be open to Being as the mystic is open to his God’.40 Mysticism as such is understood as desire, rather than as immediate revelation. Sartre here uses the language of mysticism to understand modern consciousness. He I using the structure of mysticism, without accepting its contents. Genet wants to experience himself as himself, and therefore, he has to do something, namely, to affirm the verdict that others (transcendence) have made about him. Hence, again, ‘I decided to be what crime made of me’. Genet himself describes this as a mystical experience. As Sartre writes:

Genet, haunted by that Other who is himself, senses the sacred through his own consciousness. The revelation of his Being will have the characteristics of a hierophany; it will wrest him from the human, from everyday life. It will be a religious experience, a communion. Is not the religious moment par excellence that in which subjectivity, ceasing to disperse itself indefinitely in everyday reality, regains its eternal being, becomes a calm totality in full possession of itself? (…) Genet will escape from the trivial world of morality and reach the world of religion through a mystical experience.41 This is why Genet strives to be a saint – exactly as Teresa of Avila does – by the affirmation of his rejection. Rejection is the realization of the escape from the trivial world of morality. But, as Sartre writes, to do so, he has to do something. Mysticism needs the discursive labour of preparation [un travail systématique et discursive de preparation].42 Quietism is not passivity, Sartre writes, but it is an activity aimed at making us passive. This is the trap of mysticism: to want nothing, to be nothing, I have to do something: I will be someone. Yet, this ‘doing’ is not ‘acting’. As the mystic is already determined by God, so Genet is determined by society (which is, by transcendence). Therefore, Genet can ‘do’ something, but he does not ‘act’. Genet’s desire as a mystical revelation of myself to myself is not an act. Sartre: ‘Men do not act: what we call their acts are simple attributes of the substance they embody’.43 The only thing Genet has to do is to encounter this substance which defines him. Again, Sartre compares this experience with an intended mystical experience, because it is the being of subjectivity in is totality itself that is revealed, and precisely not the human experience of daily life, which is always already an experience of something. So Genet wants to encounter himself as what he is and as a de facto necessity.44 Sartre, Saint Genet, 63 (Eng.); 79 (Fr.). Ibid., 63 (Eng.); 79 (Fr.). 42 Ibid., 64 (Eng.); 80 (Fr.). 43 Ibid., 63 (Eng.); 78-79 (Fr.). 44 Ibid., 63 (Eng.); 79 (Fr.). 40 41



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Genet, thus, does like a monk, he describes himself as a monk, his dwelling is his seclusion, his prison cell, exactly like the dungeon of John of the Cross. To Genet, being imprisoned is the highest happiness. So, Genet’s entire existence ‘becomes a ceremony’.45 And in a ceremony we are waiting for the revelation to come. But for Sartre, that is exactly the structure of consciousness: not that much a Husserlian phenomenology in which something appears, but the waiting for the experience to come. Genet, the mystic, makes efforts to feel. There is no such thing as a mystical experience. Moreover, any ‘true’ appearance or experience would immediately dissolve mysticism, because mysticism, as described in the literature, is always a path, a method, a desire. So, there is longing for mystical experience but any appearance would make mysticism undone. If this is true, then what does mysticism reveal? Certainly not direct givenness [Gegebenheit], but the structure in which the self reveals itself to itself. Mysticism is constituted by nothingness, which finally is the lack of a self. Sartre: At the core, so to speak, of this unbearable tension there is always an absence of the heart, a kind of distractedness. The reason is that he is in a state of waiting: both hunter and prey, he sets himself out like bait and lies in wait for the voracious bird to swoop down on him and be caught in the trap. While observing himself, he makes an effort to feel.46

Without a doubt, according to Sartre, this project is doomed to fail. One can never know to what extent one feels and to what extent one plays at feeling, Sartre quotes André Gide. Mysticism is never one or the other, but the ambiguity that constitutes the sentiment.47 This implies that action has to be taken not only by the mystic but also by society (which counts here as ‘transcendence’), as the real act of the mystic is rather a doing, while it is God who is acting. In short, society must reject the mystic in order for him to become a saint. By being a martyr, Genet makes the look of the other powerless and remains an autonomous being, at least so it seems. It is important to notice that for Sartre, this will never work, for the same reason why mysticism never will work. After all, Genet only affirms the verdict of society and thus affirms society. The mystical withdrawal into the self remains nothing but a sham. But still, it is this sham that, in the end, we all are.

Ibid., 64 (Eng.); 80 (Fr.). Ibid., 65 (Eng.); 80 (Fr.). 47 ‘As Gide has said, one can never know to what extent one feels and to what extent one plays at feeling, and this ambiguity constitutes the sentiment’. Ibid., 65 (Eng.); 81 (Fr.). 45 46

Herman Westerink MICHEL FOUCAULT ON THE MYSTIC’S BODY OF PLEASURES AND DESIRES

In his lecture of 26 February 1975 in the course on the topic of ‘the abnormal’ at the Collège de France, Foucault writes the following: Last week I tried to show how the body of pleasure and desire appeared at the heart of the practices of penance and the technique of spiritual direction that we see, if not fully formed, at least developing from the sixteenth century. In a word, we can say carnal disorder corresponds to spiritual direction, that is to say, carnal disorder as a discursive domain, field of intervention, and object of knowledge for this spiritual direction. The complex and floating domain of the flesh as a domain of the exercise of power and objectification begins to stand out from the body, from the corporeal materiality that the penitential theology and practice of Middle Ages merely identified as the origin of sin. The body is now a body in which there exists a series of mechanisms called ‘ticklings’, ‘titillations’, and so on, a body that is the seat of multiple intensities of pleasure and delight, and a body that is driven, sustained, and possibly held back by a will that does or does not consent, that takes pleasure or refuses to take pleasure. In short, it is the sensitive and complex body of concupiscence.1

The central issue in this passage is the question of the relation between the emergence of pastoral power and spiritual direction in early modernity on the one hand, and the appearance of their correlative, namely the body of pleasure and desire as an object that is disorderly and needs to be put under control. The context in which this correlation between pastoral power and its object, i.e. the body of pleasure and desire, is coming to the fore, is that of early modernity. This period, roughly covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is characterized by the fragmentation of Christianity and the related in-depth Christianisation processes through which the various churches will try to ‘tighten their grip on individual existence’.2 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975, New York 2003, 201-202. 2 Foucault, Abnormal, 177. 1

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The emergence of a new pastoral power is at the very heart of the early modern Christianisation processes. In fact, Foucault will argue in his course on ‘security, territory and population’ from 1977-1978 that in fact the religious debates and struggles in the period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation should not be seen as a doctrinal, but first and foremost as a pastoral battle.3 In it, the various churches develop a range of techniques, practices and institutions (including church type) in order to lay ‘claim to the daily government of men in their real life’.4 Indeed, according to Foucault, the field of the pastorate is first of all a field of power, and this pastoral power is aimed at only one thing – the government of human beings. And it is in this field that in the age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation the body of pleasure and desire appears as the object par excellence of this pastoral power, that is, as the object that needs to be put under control, that needs to be governed. The body of pleasure and desire is the object of intervention and disciplining forces. Why is there the sudden concern with this body and not another body? What makes this body appear in the early modern era? Foucault gives few clues to an answer. He merely suggests that in the Middle Ages this body of pleasure and desire as object of intervention does not appear as such. What we find in premodern Christianity is corporeal materiality that is merely identified as the origin of sin, says Foucault. What is Foucault hinting at here? In The Will to Knowledge (published in 1976 as the first volume in History of Sexuality) we read that Foucault dates the origin of modern practices of spiritual direction back to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and its formulation of the rule of the duty of an annual confession of committed sinful acts.5 Confession in the Middle Ages is about an enumeration of sins committed, that is, of concrete and actual trespasses such as adultery and sodomy, drunkenness and murder, robbery and idolatry. The subsequently imposed penitential practice is a so-called tariff penance – the occasional penance compensating for the crime, fault or vice committed. Foucault suggests, however, that the interrogation or analysis of the material body as ‘origin of sin’ is not part of this practice of confession and penance. Confession in the Middle Ages focuses on the actually committed immoral acts, not on the corporeal inclinations or titillations that underlie these sins. What does all of this have to do with mysticism? The passage from the lectures on ‘the abnormal’ I have just quoted at length is in fact the opening

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, New York 2007, 149. 4 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 148. 5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, London 1998, 58 (orig. publ. 1976). 3



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­ assage of a lecture in which Foucault discusses the ‘aftereffects’6 or ‘resistance p effects’7 of the appearance of the body of pleasure and desire in the field of pastoral power. Among these aftereffects or resistance effects two phenomena stand out: mysticism and demonic possession. Hence, it is in this lecture that we find in Foucault’s writings a first sign of interest in mysticism. This paper will explore Foucault’s early intuitions on mysticism. I will focus on the Collège de France lectures on ‘the abnormal’, on those on ‘security, territory and population’, and on the volume The Will to Knowledge. In other words, I will focus on the writings from the mid-1970s when Foucault was starting his last major project of a history of sexuality. So before I will delve into the way Foucault conceptualizes mysticism relative to the appearance of the body of pleasure and desire, I will elaborate a little bit on the first outline of this project of a history of sexuality. My inquiries into his views on mysticism will finally result in some reflections on the relation between pleasure and desire, and its relevance for a view of love in mysticism. The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault’s first book in what eventually would become the four-volume series Histoire de la sexualité, is in the first place an attempt to unmask and deconstruct the contemporary sexual liberation ideologies and narratives. At the centre of these ideologies Foucault finds what he names the repression hypothesis. This hypothesis basically runs as follows. Throughout Western history all the way down to the 1960s we find the repression of man’s sexual desires. What we find in the different historical epochs, are two constant facts, namely the anthropological fact of desire and the cultural fact of its limitation and repression. What comes to the fore in popular narratives of sexual liberation is thus a specific view of the relation between desire and law as anthropological and cultural given facts, or even stronger, as universal phenomena. Man is ‘by nature’ desiring man. Culture is ‘essentially’ limitation and restriction. And now, there is a new narrative of liberation in a fatherless society that no longer defines limitations but claims room for the exploration and above all the articulation of the various sexual desires. Against this narrative, Foucault argues that exactly this ideal of the free articulation of sexual desire is a continuation of a form of submission and discipline rooted in the modern pastoral turn to confession, which was then continued in the human sciences and notably also in the psychiatric and psychoanalytical Foucault, Abnormal, 205. Ibid., 213.

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practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These practices are intrinsically linked to the emergence of a scientia sexualis and its main object, i.e. sexuality.8 In The Will to Knowledge Foucault is not only interested in the emergence of a new field of a science of ‘sexuality’ as it develops from the mid-eighteenth century onwards while focusing on the constellations of power and knowledge and its object of sexuality on the one hand, and the production of a series of sexual identities with specific psychological features. Nor is Foucault’s book only preoccupied with the question of power, or more concretely, with the pastoral power of the government of individuals and groups of people. The productive character of power does of course play an important role in the book – a productive power that Foucault will describe in terms of a religious and later scientific ‘will to knowledge’ about the inner life of individuals, the techniques and practices for making these individuals investigate and articulate their inner life, the various interventions that translate the articulations into identities, and the institutions erected for these procedures. Power does not equal limitation, repression and restriction, but on the contrary is only able to function as a system of control by producing the very subjects it wants to govern through knowledge of these subjects. Nor is the book only about the modern constellations of power, knowledge and sexuality. The fundamental question Foucault wants to raise is whether these modern constellations should not make us reconsider the quasi self-evident paradigm of sexuality as desire, and of power as law. If the sexual liberation ideologies as they evolve around ideas of law and desire are in fact continuations of the religious and secular confession practices that seduce or force individuals to speak freely and truly about their desires, maybe it is time to think liberation differently. If the articulation of desire is always already intrinsically linked to an existing power constellation of submission and control, maybe desire is not the key to understand liberation. If we cannot think desire without law, and law without desire, there is an urgency to think sexuality differently, that is to say, as not being defined in terms of desire. Formulated differently, if desire is intrinsically linked to the law, namely both as its point of origin and as its effect, any ideology that wants to establish sexual liberation through the articulation or acting-out of desire will unavoidably also confirm and legitimate the law as its fixed point of reference. In such a train of thought, thinking liberation through desire can only take the form of thinking liberation as transgression of a law that is at the same time confirmed and legitimated as the law that makes possible the transgression. At this point we can begin to understand in what sense Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge is much more than a critique of the sexual liberation ideologies. It is Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, part 3.

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also a critique of those human sciences that claim desire and law as anthropological and cultural givens. In order to rethink sexual liberation and sexuality as such, one has to break free from the dominant paradigms in the human sciences, most notably the structuralist approaches of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan who gave the law-desire-complex such a central place in their theories.9 It is in this aspect of The Will to Knowledge that we can find the kind of problems and questions that will determine the further development of Foucault’s project of a history of sexuality. The puzzling issue of the paradigm of law and desire made him turn his attention to the question of the origins of the preoccupation with man as a desiring being in the Western tradition. In The Use of Pleasure from 1984, Foucault writes the following on this: While the experience of sexuality, as a singular historical figure, is perhaps quite distinct from the Christian experience of the ‘flesh’, both appear nonetheless to be dominated by the principle of ‘desiring man’. In any case, it seemed to me that one could not very well analyse the formation and development of the experience of sexuality from the eighteenth century onwards, without doing a historical and critical study dealing with desire and the desiring subject.10

It is this intuition that will incite Foucault to turn his attention to antique and early Christian thought on aphrodisia, eros, epithumia and the gradual libidinisation of the flesh that finds its first zenith in Augustine’s views on libido.11 From the Body of Pleasure to the Mystic’s Love We have seen that in the quoted passage from the lectures on the abnormal Foucault speaks of the body of pleasure and desire. A year later, in The Will to Knowledge, Foucault will slightly alter the formula. There, he writes of the body of pleasures – leaving out the notion of desire. We can understand the reason for this from what we have said before on the project of the history of sexuality as defined in The Will to Knowledge. Foucault formulates it himself in the following way when he contemplates the liberation of ‘sex’ from the modern discourse on ‘sexuality’: The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire [sexe-désir], but bodies and pleasures [les corps et les plaisirs].12 See also, Herman Westerink, De lichamen en hun lusten: In het spoor van Foucaults ‘Geschiedenis van de seksualiteit’, Nijmegen 2019. 10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, London 1992, 5 (orig. publ. 1984). 11 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité. IV: Les aveux de la chair, Paris 2018, 325-361. 12 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 157. 9

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It is not in the register of desire that we will find a starting point for a critique of a repressive law or of a productive power. Nor is it an adequate starting point for an efficient ideology of sexual liberation. Moreover, desire is always already intrinsically linked to the affirmation of a repressive power. No, the counterattack starts from bodies and pleasures, or from ‘the body of pleasure’. Foucault will, in his late writings, indeed devote himself to thinking differently the notion of liberation, and more fundamentally the notion of freedom as such, in relation to a spiritual-ascetic philosophical tradition that includes bodily exercises and the search for pleasure. From what we have said so far, let us turn our attention more closely to Foucault’s utterings on mysticism in the texts from the mid-1970s we are dealing with here. As I have already stated, Foucault elaborates on mysticism in the course on ‘the abnormal’. Mysticism is – together with demonic possession – one of the most important resistance effects of the early modern in-depth Christianisation processes, and of the new intensified pastoral power with its penancethrough-confession practice. The appearance of the body as a site of ‘ticklings’ and ‘titillations’, movements and excitations, inclinations and pleasures, and of this body as the new object of the will to knowledge and as the frontier in pastoral attempts at control and discipline, spontaneously goes hand in hand with an anarchistic production of counterforces and the formation of identities that are out of control. Here, Foucault draws heavily upon Michel de Certeau’s La possession de Loudun from 1970 and the remarkable phenomenon of the convulsionists that played such an important role not only in the early modern spiritual movements in France, but also in the emergence and identification of hysteria in the nineteenth century.13 In short, the convulsionists make it possible to associate the emergence of mysticism with the emergence of hysteria as two sites of the production of resistance effects. What does this resistance entail, according to Foucault?14 We should not understand mysticism as a resistance effect in terms of a transgression or perversion of the law. The resistance that manifests spontaneously in the body of pleasure is characterized by the appearance of productive forces and creative differences, and this is possible not because of the implementation of a law and the subsequent reaction against the limitations imposed by the law. No, the body of pleasure is productive because it cannot be reduced to being merely a material object of disciplinary forces, but in fact is an experiential body, i.e. a body that is sensitive to experiences and itself producing experiences. This body is a body of pleasure, because this body can experience and produce pleasure. See also, Herman Westerink, ‘Demonical Possession and the Historical Construction of Melancholy and Hysteria’, in: History of Psychiatry 25 (2014) no.3, 335-349. 14 For the following section see, Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, Cambridge 2005, 124-134. 13



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Why would then this body be anarchistic in its productions? The answer is again not to be formulated in terms of transgression, subversion or perversion of a law, but much more in terms of an absence of law. Whereas the pastoral powers of modern disciplines use the articulation of desire in speech acts to intervene in the inner life and attach individuals to specific sexual identities, the notion of pleasure and the actual pleasurable experiences can in principle never be reduced to a discursive practice. On the contrary, it was the body of pleasures with its convulsions and spasms, its ticklings and movements, that revealed something that could not be translated into words. It is in this direction that we can understand the body of pleasure as a resistance effect. The resistance is there, since this body of pleasure reveals the limits of articulation, of confession in words and hence of control through subjection and submission. Modern mysticism – and for Foucault, like in the writings of Michel de Certeau, that means all mysticism, since the latter is a modern phenomenon inherently linked to the emergence of modern Christianization processes15 – is the resistance effect of a new and modern investment in the body as the body of pleasure. Resistance, as we have said, can be depicted here in terms of a production of sensations, actions, behaviours, et cetera, that remain outside the grip of the disciplining forces that demand the articulation of desire in words. What defines modern mysticism is therefore neither the production or articulation of desire, and nor the experiences and sensations as desire. What defines mysticism is the body’s capacity to experience and produce pleasure – in touching, looking, moving, shaking, trembling, et cetera – vis-à-vis the pastoral forces that demand articulation of desire and its correlative, that is, the subjection to order. What does this mean for a theory of (modern) mysticism? I think one of the main contributions of Foucault’s intuitions from the mid-1970s is that they can be brought to the fore as a critique of Michel de Certeau and his views of the mystic’s subversive desires as articulated in speech acts in an era in which the churches are no longer able to exercise power as they used to be able to, but individual longing for the presence of the divine remains powerful. For Certeau, the uttered desire is the actual locus of the experience of the divine,16 whereas for Foucault desire stands in relation to power regimes and confession. For Foucault, then, what defines mysticism is not so much desire, but pleasure. Is mysticism then first of all and only the domain of the body of pleasure? In his course on ‘security, territory and population’ (1977-1978), Foucault again speaks of mysticism – this time in terms of a counter-conduct that is developed ‘in the form of the permanent use of tactical elements’ available within ‘the Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable. Vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Chicago 1992 (orig. publ. 1982). 16 See also, Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, Minneapolis 1986, 80-100. 15

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general horizon of Christianity’ against the strategic forces of pastoral power.17 Within Christianity, Foucault argues, several of such counter-conducts can be identified, among them mysticism. What is characteristic of these counter-conducts? They can be defined in terms of a fundamental dismissal of the necessity of pastoral intervention and spiritual direction for the transformation processes that the subject has to pass through in order to have access to the truth. More concretely in the case of mysticism, the mystic does not need the church, the sacraments or a priest to mediate between himself and the divine. On the contrary, what defines mysticism is the immediate communication that takes the form of a dialogue between God and soul.18 And this dialogue merely consists, says Foucault, of a mutual declaration of love, i.e. the soul loving God, and God loving the soul. The communication Foucault is speaking about mostly takes the form of an articulation of love. It can also be silent and physical, notably ‘when the mystic feels the presence, the urgent presence of the body of Christ Himself’.19 Alas, Foucault does not give us any more details than these few remarks, but one thing is clear: this immediate dialogue and declaration love is not based on the mystic’s subjection to a law or to the truth. On the contrary, this counter-conduct is to be defined in terms of absence of subjection to a law. What should we make of these few suggestions that are repeated in later writings, for example in Foucault’s course on the courage to truth from 1983-1984, where he argues that mysticism corresponds to ‘the effusion of love’. 20 This mysticism is one pole of Christianity, whose other pole can be described in terms of the mistrustful and suspicious deciphering of one’s inner life, notably of one’s sinful desires. The direction in which Foucault is leading us seems to be the following: the mystic effusions and declarations of love are in continuity with the bodily and pleasurable experiences of Christ’s presence. Love here can probably be defined in terms of the body of pleasures finding an object. The articulation of desire, however, is about something else. It is primarily a confession and as such always situated in the field of the deciphering of inner motives, mistrust of oneself and subjection to the law. If this is indeed the picture Foucault is painting, mystic love cannot be translated in terms of desire, or vice versa. Love instead stands in relation to the body of pleasures. It is exactly for this reason, I think, that Foucault in his late writings will associate mysticism with the cynical tradition of showing the truth of and through the body, and not with the stoic tradition of the problematization of Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 215. Ibid., 213. 19 Ibid. 20 Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984, New York 2011, 337. 17 18



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desire and the deciphering of and struggles with (and against) one’s inner passions and movements. In short, for Foucault, mysticism points towards bodily sensations and declarations of love that concern the immediate presence of and access to another body. Desire is to be situated in the domain of the law and of the lack or loss of that which is prohibited through the law, namely the immediate experience of bodily pleasure.

LIST OF AUTHORS

Ineke Cornet is research fellow at the Titus Brandsma Institute, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and lecturer at the University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. Michel Dijkstra is an independent scholar, specializing in Eastern Philosophy and Western Mysticism. In his PhD Thesis, he compared Meister Eckhart and Zen Master Dogen on the One and the Many. Jos Huls, O.Carm., is member of the research group of the community Ad Montem on the island of Schiermonnikoog (the Netherlands). He is also research fellow at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Marc De Kesel is director Internal and External Affairs at the Titus Brandsma Institute, Nijmegen and extraordinary professor of Theology, Mysticism, and Modernity at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Janneke van der Leest is developer and assistant head at the Institute for Education for Elderly People (Radboud University Nijmegen). She is currently working on a PhD-project entitled ‘The Remembrance of the Moment of Inspiration in English and German Romantic Poetry and its Relevance to Modern Identity’. Lieven De Maeyer is lecturer at the University Colleges of Leuven-Limburg (UCLL) and a PhD candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen. Ad Poirters is research fellow at the Titus Brandsma Institute, Nijmegen. Edward van ’t Slot is professor of Systematic Theology and Twenty-first Century Ecclesiology at the University of Groningen (special chair), and assistant professor for Systematic Theology, Professional Formation and Spirituality at the Protestant Theological University (Amsterdam). Thomas Sojer is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Studies in Erfurt.

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Esther van de Vate, O.Carm., graduated from Radboud University Nijmegen in 2019 with a dissertation entitled ‘In Godt’: Een fraseologisch onderzoek naar de orativiteit van Maria Petyt [In God: A Phraseological Investigation into the Orativity of Maria Petyt]. Sander Vloebergs is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the KU Leuven, and the Ruusbroecgenootschap (Antwerp). Ruud Welten is professor of Contemporary Approaches to Human Subjectivity at the Erasmus School of Philosophy (Rotterdam), and associate professor at Tilburg University. Herman Westerink is research fellow at the Titus Brandsma Institute, Nijmegen, associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen, and extraordinary professor of Psycho­analysis, Spirituality and Mysticism at the KU Leuven.

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