mcginn medieval mysticism

American Society of Church History

The Changing Shape of Late Medieval MysticismAuthor(s): Bernard McGinnSource: Church History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Jun., 1996), pp. 197-219Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3170288Accessed: 22/10/2010 03:33

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

American Society of Church History and Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Church History.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=asch

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3170288?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

The Changing Shape of Late Medieval Mysticism

BERNARD MCGINN

The historical development of explicit forms of Christian mysticism can be sketched according to a model of gradually accumulating and interactive

layers of tradition. The monastic ideal of flight from the world in order to lead a specialized life of penance and prayer, either as a hermit or within a

community, formed the institutional context for most forms of Christian

mysticism down to the end of the twelfth century. This monastic layer of

mysticism was primarily biblical and liturgical in the sense that it sought God in and through personal appropriation of the mystical understanding of the Bible as cultivated within the liturgical life of the monastic community. Most monastic mystics were also "objective" in the sense that they rarely talked about their own experiences of God, but rather sought to express their

understanding of mystical transformation through biblical exegesis and theoretical expositions of a mystagogical character (that is, expositions de-

signed to lead readers into the mystery of the consciousness of God's

presence). The twelfth century in western Europe saw both a summation of tradi-

tional monastic mysticism, especially in Cistercian and Victorine writings, and the appearance of elements hinting at a new layer of Christian mysticism that was to become evident shortly after 1200. The growth of autobiographical accounts of visionary experiences of Christ in that century hinted at the

visionary explosion of the later Middle Ages, especially among women. Even more important was the stress given by the major teacher of the era, Bernard of Clairvaux, to the need for personal experience as a criterion almost

equivalent to the biblical text. At the beginning of his exegesis of the Song of

Songs, Bernard proclaimed: "Today we are reading in the book of experience" (in libro experientiae).1 The proper balance between the book of the Bible and the book of experience was to be a major issue in later Christian

mysticism. Significant new forms of religious life created around the year 1200,

This essay was presented as the presidential address to the American Society of Church History, 6January 1996.

1. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica 3.1, in Jean LeClercq, et al., eds., Sancti Bernardi Opera (Rome, 1957-1977), 1:14: "Hodie legimus in libro experientiae."

Mr. McGinn is Naomi Shenstone Donnelly professor of historical theology and the

history of Christianity in the Divinity School, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

197

CHURCH HISTORY

especially the mendicant orders of Franciscans and Dominicans and the independent groups of women known as Beguines, provided the impetus for what may be called the "new mysticism" of the period from 1200 to 1600 C.E.

Here I will try to summarize the essential characteristics of this new mysticism under three headings: (1) new attitudes toward the relation between world and cloister; (2) a new relationship between men and women in the mystical path; and (3) new forms of language and modes of representation of mystical consciousness.

The first great tradition or layer in the history of Western Christian mysticism, the monastic mysticism that I have studied in The Foundations of Mysticism and The Growth of Mysticism,2 was created for the most part by a

religious elite who fled from the world in order to find in the cloister a model of the Heavenly Jerusalem of contemplation here on earth. The greatest figures in early Latin mysticism, particularly Ambrose and Augustine and later Gregory the Great, were monastics, but they were also bishops engaged in guiding the Christian community: therefore, they encouraged all Chris- tians to aspire to some form of more direct, or mystical, contact with God.3 Nevertheless, up to the end of the twelfth century, their writings were preserved and read largely within monasteries, and hence really served only to guide those who had fled what Gregory called the "shipwreck of the world." Bernard of Clairvaux himself theoretically expressed the view that every soul may find in itself "a source . . . whence it may dare to aspire to the nuptials of the Word."4 However, practically speaking, Bernard's message of loving union with Christ was directed to his fellow monks. Early medieval mysticism was characterized by withdrawal from the world in order to join a spiritual elite.

This emphasis began to change in the early thirteenth century with the first stirrings of a process of democratization and secularization that was to grow over the next five centuries. By democratization, I mean a conviction that it was practically and not just theoretically possible for all Christians, not just the religiosi, to enjoy immediate consciousness of God's presence. By secularization, I mean that flight from the world was not a necessary precon- dition for attaining such divine grace-God could be found in the secular realm and in the midst of everyday experience.5

2. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (New York, 1991); and The Growth of Mysticism: From Gregory the Great to the Twelfth Century (New York, 1994).

3. For Ambrose and Augustine on the universality of the call to mystical contact with God, see The Foundations of Mysticism, pp. 211-213, 255-257; for Gregory's views on the matter, see The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 74-76.

4. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica 83.1 (Sancti Bernardi Opera 2:298): "sed etiam unde audeat adspirare ad nuptias Verbi."

5. Obviously, flight from the world was always a highly ambiguous notion. Many of the great monastic mystics, such as Bernard, were deeply engaged in activities outside the cloister. My point is that they saw such activity as a barrier to the mystical quest.

198

LATE MEDIEVAL MYSTICISM

This shift was neither immediate nor universal. Indeed, an ongoing tension existed between the more democratized and secularized tendency found among some late medieval mystics and others' insistence on the necessity for physical withdrawal into an elite community for real mystical experience. (The latter position is argued in the Middle English Cloud of Unknowing, for example.) This tension fostered debates that continued down to the early-twentieth-century neoscholastic disputes over whether mysticism was open to all Christians.6 But the evangelical movement out into the world represented by the new ways of understanding the vita apostolica made possible a growing conviction that God could be found anywhere and by anyone, if the proper dispositions were present and the grace was given. Let us note here just a few witnesses.

One of the earliest texts about Francis of Assisi, the Sacred Exchange (Sacrum Commercium), which was probably written in 1227, tells the story of the meeting of the saint and his brethren and Lady Poverty. Toward the end of the work, after Lady Poverty has had a sparse banquet with the friars, she goes to sleep. The text continues: "She slept a very peaceful and sober sleep. She quickly arose and asked to be shown the cloister. They took her to a certain hill and showed her the whole world to be seen from there, saying, 'This, Lady, is our cloister.' "7 Here we can see an important inversion of the traditional picture of the relation of world, cloister, and heaven. In monastic mysticism, one fled the world to enter the cloister where, through spiritual exercise, it might become possible to enjoy a foretaste of paradise. In the Sacred Exchange, the Franciscan practice of absolute poverty allows the whole world to be seen as a cloister, and even a paradise! Lady Poverty tells the brethren that "It seemed to me today as though I were with you in God's paradise," because "On earth I am joined with those who represent for me the image of him to whom I am espoused in heaven."8

At the end of the thirteenth century and in the early decades of the fourteenth century, Meister Eckhart repeatedly insisted that God could be found, directly and decisively, anywhere and by anyone. One of the most striking texts comes from a vernacular sermon preached on 1 John 4:9:

Truly, when people think that they are acquiring more of God in inwardness, in devotion, in sweetness and in various approaches than they do by the fireside or in the stable, you are acting just as if you took God and muffled his head up in a

6. For a brief review of this debate, see The Foundations of Mysticism, pp. 277-281, 288-290. 7. Sacrum Commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Paupertate, ed. Stefano Brufani (Assisi,

Italy, 1990), cap. 30 (ed. 173): "Illa vero, quietissimo somno ac sobria dormiens, surrexit festinanter, petens sibi claustrum ostendi. Adducentes earn in quodam colle ostenderunt ei totum orbem quem respicere poterant, dicentes: 'Hoc est claustrum nostrum, domina.'"

8. Sacrum Commercium, cap. 31 (ed. 174): "ut visum sit mihi hodie esse vobiscum tamquam in paradiso Dei. ... quoniam illis sum coniuncta in terris, qui mihi imaginem represen- tant eius cui sum desponsata in celis."

199

CHURCH HISTORY

cloak and pushed him under a bench. Whoever is seeking God by ways is finding ways and losing God, who in ways is hidden.9

In another vernacular sermon, Eckhart speaks of the ineffable joy that God takes in any person who leaves or abandons himself and all things in perfect detachment or "separatedness" (abgescheidenheit), concluding:

But I say yet more (do not be afraid for this joy is close to you and is in you): there is not one of you who is so cross-grained, so feeble in understanding or so remote but he may find this joy within himself, in truth, as it is, with joy and understanding, before you leave this church today, indeed before I have finished preaching; he can find this as truly within him, live it and possess it, as that God is God and I am a man.10

Eckhart's view of mysticism, as Reiner Schiirmann and others have argued, is

decidedly an inner-worldly one. 1

Catherine of Siena's mysticism, with its highly visionary and ecstatic

emphasis, is quite different from Eckhart's, but the Dominican tertiary also witnesses to the movement out into the world with a universal message. Karen Scott has shown how Catherine viewed herself as an apostola who combined contemplative union with Christ and a divinely given active

apostolate of preaching and peacemaking.12 Even the Major Life of Catherine written by the Dominican friar Raymond of Capua between 1384 and 1395, which concentrates on the saint's mystical gifts, stresses that these were given to her not only in private but also in the public forum of worldly activity: "From that time on the Lord began openly and familiarly to show himself to his spouse not only in secret, as he had formerly done, but also in public, while she was both on the road and when she reached her goal."13 Obviously, this form of unio mystica in no way contradicts the ancient tradition, insisted on by the monks, of combining action and contemplation as the highest form

9. Meister Eckhart, Predigt 5b, in Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke (Stuttgart, Germany, 1936-), Die deutsche Werke 1:91.10-16. The translation is from Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn (New York, 1981), p. 183.

10. Meister Eckhart, Predigt 66, in Die deutsche Werke 3:113-114. The translation is from Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises, trans. and ed. M. O'C. Walshe (London, 1981), 2:91.

11. Reiner Schiirmann, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), pp. 15,47,109-110.

12. Karen Scott, "St. Catherine of Siena, 'Apostola,' " Church History 61 (1992): 34-46; and "Urban Spaces, Women's Networks, and the Lay Apostolate in the Siena of Catherine Benincasa," in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. E. Anne Matter and John Coakley (Philadelphia, Pa., 1994), pp. 105-119.

13. Raymond of Capua, Legenda Major Sanctae Catherinae 2.6 (Acta Sanctorum Aprilis 3:898 D): "Coepit enim Dominus ex tunc non tantum in locis secretis, ut prius consueverat, sed etiam in patentibus, palam & familiariter se ostendere sponsae suae, tam eunti quam stanti."

200


of spiritual attainment.14 Still, action and contemplation had traditionally been seen as successive aspects of a total life dedicated to God, aspects often in tension with one other; they had not been conceived of, as in Catherine's case, as being capable of fusion within the sphere of public activity.

The second major shift in late medieval mysticism involved gender-only after 1200 did women begin to take a prominent place in the mystical tradition. I emphasize the word "tradition" here (that is, what is handed on in a public way to become accessible to later generations), because we cannot exclude a role for women in the monastic layer of Western mysticism. The

problem is that we have very little evidence that tells us much about it. Outside of a few pieces of hagiography, the writings of one or two remarkable women (like Hildegard of Bingen), and some texts directed primarily to women (like the twelfth-century German A Teaching of the Loving Knowledge of God), there is little in the recorded tradition.15 Nothing is more striking about the new mysticism beginning about 1200 than the important role that women assume, both in terms of hagiographical accounts and texts produced by women themselves. Without denying that there have been important women, and even women writers, in Christianity since its earliest years, it is fair to say that the great age of women's theology begins in 1200.16

This new role for women raises a number of important issues. Perhaps the most prominent, as well as the most difficult to answer, is whether it is

possible to discern a distinctive women's mysticism. Obviously, any remotely satisfactory answer to this question must come as the result of the kind of detailed investigation that cannot be given in the brief compass of a single article. Here I can only attempt to set out some methodological guidelines for such an investigation, particularly those that deal with the dangers to be avoided.17 The first, perhaps obvious, maxim is to avoid undue generaliza- tion and essentialization. The fact that some, or even many, women may tend

14. See the entry "Contemplation (contemplation and action)" in the subject indices in The Foundations of Mysticism and The Growth of Mysticism.

15. See the discussion of Hildegard of Bingen and A Teaching of the Loving Knowledge of God (often called The "Trudperter" Hohelied) in The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 333-336, 347- 352.

16. Many recent studies and anthologies have uncovered much about the role of women writers in the Christian tradition; see especially Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) (Cambridge, U.K., 1984); Elizabeth Alvida Petroff, Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (New York, 1986); and Elizabeth A. Clark, trans., Women in the Early Church (College- ville, Minn., 1990). For a bibliographical survey, see Andrew Kadel, Matrology: A Bibliography of Writings by Christian Women from the First to the Fifteenth Centuries (New York, 1995).

17. The large and constantly growing literature on women's spirituality and mysticism in the later Middle Ages cannot be surveyed here. For the German-language realm, there is a helpful bibliography, though only of works up to 1980: Gertrud Jaron Lewis, Frank Willaert, and Marie-Jose Govers, eds., Bibliographie zur deutschen Frauenmystik des Mittelal- ters: Mit ein Anhang zu Beatrijs van Nazareth und Hadewijch (Berlin, 1989). For Italy, see

201

CHURCH HISTORY

to use language in a certain way, or to adopt distinctive kinds of symbols, or to construct their gender identity and its relation to God according to particular patterns, does not necessarily mean that all women will do so, or that no men can. From this perspective, it is difficult to imagine that there could be one

single form of mysticism characteristic of all women, and only of women, either in the late Middle Ages or in any other period in the history of the tradition. It may be possible, however, to discern patterns of presentation of

mystical consciousness-both of the immediate experience of God, as well as of the path to it and the effects it produces-that are first associated with women, or first found in the writings of women mystics, and that remain more consistently realized in the case of women than in that of men. A number of studies of aspects of late medieval women's mysticism have been successful in pointing to such patterns, such as those relating to food and

eating studied in Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast.i8

Nevertheless, it is misleading to move on to general conclusions about the differences between how men and women use language and symbol on the basis of any one pattern, form of language, symbol, or the like.19

A second helpful maxim is to avoid privileging the present. The rediscov-

ery of medieval women mystics, at least in part, has been fueled by contemporary feminism and feminist theology, which have discovered in these often

forgotten female voices valued predecessors and conversation partners. There is nothing wrong with this-all historical investigation involves a

spiraling dialogue between the historian's questions and concerns and the evidence to be understood and presented. But there are also dangers. Our issues are often widely different from those of the medieval mystics. Forget- ting this can all too easily lead either to neglect of beliefs and practices that were central to the medieval figures but marginal or troubling to us (for example, the role of virginity or certain ascetic practices), or else to reading back contemporary issues into the medieval world through a skewed selec- tion of evidence or a confusion between ambiguous similarities and possible real convergences. All historical reconstruction is selective, but some selec- tions are less misleading than others. The historian of medieval women's spirituality needs to strive for as wide and sensitive a presentation as possible, as Caroline Walker Bynum has noted: "The task for future historians of women's piety is not only to devote more detailed study to texts by women

the bibliography in Scrittrici mistiche italiane, ed. Giovanni Pozzi and Claudio Leonardi (Genoa, Italy, 1988), pp. 701-738. There is no comparable bibliography in English.

18. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Calif., 1987).

19. For all its many merits, Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast seems at times to move from perceptive analysis of particular patterns to questionable generalizations of the differences between male and female spirituality and mysticism. See especially pp. 238-244 and 290-294, as discussed in my review in History of Religions 28 (1988): 90-92.

202


but also to pay attention to the full range of phenomena in these texts, no matter how masochistic or altruistic, unattractive or heroic, peculiar, amus- ing, or charming such phenomena may seem, either by modern standards or by those of medieval men."20

Bynum's point here serves to introduce a third methodological caution needed for investigating the role of women in medieval mysticism-the need to be attentive to the gender perspective of the evidence under investigation. Much of what we know about the medieval women mystics comes from the pens of their male admirers. These sources tell us what men wanted to think about holy women. This is true of almost all the hagiographical accounts, with the exception of the German vitae sororum, and it is also at least partly true in the case of the many important texts in which a male spiritual advisor takes down the account given him by a woman.21 Other texts, of course, have every right to be thought of as the direct product of a woman's literary activity, though even here medieval concepts of authorship were as different from ours in important ways as medieval conceptions of gender. On the one hand, we are constantly and rightly warned against thinking that medieval women merely internalized the mostly misogynist view of their sex that was the cultural given of their time,22 while on the other hand, we should remember that it is a modern prejudice to think that they often may not have agreed with these cultural biases. It is also possible that some male authors came to modify or stretch their inherited views of women's nature-and even of human nature-by what they learned from the mulieres sanctae they so much admired. It is only by a subtle and searching attentiveness to the particularities of presentation in our texts that we will gain more insight into the true role of women in late medieval mysticism.

It is my conviction that the best model for approaching the issue of the relation between men and women in late medieval mysticism is that of an overheard conversation, rather than that of argument or confrontation (though these cannot be excluded from the record either). Just as remarkable as the sudden emergence of women at this time is the evidence that this emergence was characterized by new forms of cooperation between women and men, both in terms of a shared dedication to the pursuit of the vita apostolica, as well as a joint concern for attaining the "loving knowledge of God." Within the context of the medieval Church it was virtually impossible

20. Caroline Walker Bynum, "Religious Women in the Later Middle Ages," Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt in collaboration with Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff(New York, 1987), p. 137.

21. For an overview of thirteenth-century lives of female saints, see Michael Goodich, "The Contours of Female Piety in Later Medieval Hagiography," Church History 50 (1981): 20-32.

22. See, for example, Bynum, "Religious Women," pp. 136-137; and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, U.K., 1991), p. 169.

203

CHURCH HISTORY

for women to create new ways of living the gospel without the cooperation and approval of men.23 So too, the voice of a medieval woman mystic only rarely reaches us in the form of a direct address written "from her own point of view," so to speak. Rather, in so many cases (Mary of Oignies, Beatrice of Nazareth, Angela of Foligno, Mechthild of Magdeburg, to mention only some

thirteenth-century examples) what we hear comes to us in the form of a

dialogue in which the contributions of male and female voices are both

present in varied ways, often in a mutually enriching fashion.24 Such records of a lost dialogue are frequently frustrating and difficult to

decipher. As the historical novelist Marguerite Yourcenar observed, "Too few people are aware of the extent to which human speech is relayed to us from the past in stages-staggering along, infected with miscomprehensions, eaten away by omissions, and encrusted with additions."25 Even when it is

possible to catch hints of these conversations, we cannot deny that dialogue, then as now, was often either a prelude to, or a mask for, the monologic triumph of the authoritative male voice of ecclesiastical authority. But it is not the whole story-and perhaps not even its most lasting part.

Some contemporary feminists may find the investigation of the medieval sources, with the complex interchange they demonstrate between male and female mystics, largely fruitless if it does not lead us closer to the identifica- tion of a "true" women's mysticism. Others, like Danielle Regnier-Bohler, suggest a wider vision when they affirm that "this cooperation between men and women marked an important step in the development of a capacity for

self-analysis and self-expression" among women.26 From the perspective of the history of mysticism, I would argue that the mutual enrichment that came

23. For two overviews of the role of women in thirteenth-century religious movements, see Jean Leclercq, "Women's Monasticism in the 12th and 13th Centuries," Greyfriars Review 7 (1993): 167-192 (a paper first published in Italian in 1980, and one that deliberately excludes the Franciscan women); and Raoul Manselli, "La donna nella vita della chiesa tra duecento e trecento," II movimento religiose femminile in Umbria nei secoli XIII-XIV, ed. Roberto Rusconi (Florence, Italy, 1984), pp. 243-255.

24. Kurt Ruh, Geschichte der abendlandische Mystik, Band 2, Frauenmystik und Franziskanische Mystik der Frihzeit (Munich, Germany, 1993), p. 66, claims that the cooperation between Elizabeth of Schonau and her brother Ekbert in the 1160s provides the earliest example of the interchange between a female visionary and a male theologian that marks the new Frauenmystik. This is certainly true of the mode of interaction, though I do not consider their joint product, the Libri Visionum, to be a mystical text, at least in the same sense as the thirteenth-century examples cited above; see The Growth of Mysticism, p. 337.

25. Marguerite Yourcenar, That Mighty Sculptor, Time (New York, 1992), p. 4. 26. Danielle Regnier-Bohler, "Literary and Mystical Voices," in A History of Women, vol. 2,

Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 447-448. Regnier-Bohler, of course, does not deny the specific character of women's voices. As she puts it, women "aspired not to speak the language of men but a language that was at once less and more" (p. 466).

204


precisely from this unprecedented dialogue was one of the most remarkable characteristics of the new mysticism of the later Middle Ages.27

The issue of the role of women and the complexities of gender are inseparable from the third major area that deserves comment-that of forms of language and modes of representation found in mystical texts. Through- out my ongoing history of Western mysticism, I have insisted that the immediate object of study is not mystical experience as such but the mystical text, both written and (increasingly in the late Middle Ages) visual.28 This conviction about the textual and linguistic foundation of mysticism is even more central in the later Middle Ages, because after 1200 the forms of mystical language became far more diverse with the move into the vernacular languages, a transition which allowed the modes of representation of mystical experience to take on remarkable new configurations.29 The rich, though never static, equilibrium found in the major twelfth-century mystical traditions, especially those of the Cistercians and Victorines, was based in part on the common learned language of a largely male cultural and religious elite. The picture was to grow more diverse, more striking and flamboyant, at times more extreme, and certainly far more controversial in the world of vernacular mystical theology that we find beginning in the thirteenth century.30

I have elsewhere suggested that the course of medieval theology can be

27. A number of recent studies have illustrated aspects of this conversation in diverse linguistic and historical contexts. For France, for example, Nicole Beriou has shown how the sermons that Pierre Limoges gave to the Paris Beguines were worked out together with the magistra of the house; see her "Le predication au beguinage de Paris pendant l'annee liturgique 1272-1273," Recherches augustiniennes 13 (1978): 105-229, esp. 121-122, 194. In the Low Countries, Miri Rubin has given a good description of the roles of women and men in Liege in fostering the feast of Corpus Christi (Corpus Christi, pp. 164-176). With regard to Germany, John Coakley has published two important studies on the cooperation between the friars and the mulieres sanctae: "Friars as Confidants of Holy Women in Medieval Dominican Hagiography," Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), pp. 222-246; and "Gender and the Authority of the Friars: The Signifi- cance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans," Church History 60 (1991): 445-460. For Italy, see Katherine Gill, "Women and the Production of Religious Literature in the Vernacular, 1300-1500," in Creative Women, ed. Matter and Coakley, pp. 64-104.

28. On "reading" a picture as an essential part of medieval literacy, see Michael Camille, "Seeing and Reading: Some Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy," Art History 8 (1985): 26-49.

29. The importance of vernacularization, and especially the role of women in this, is no new discovery. Among the first to stress its significance was Herbert Grundmann, both in his noted book, Religiose Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1935), chap. 7, and his paper "Die Frauen und die Literatur im Mittelalter," Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte 26 (1936): 129-161.

30. I am happy to acknowledge a debt here to the contrast suggested by Barbara Newman in her review article of The Growth of Mysticism, published as "The Mozartian Moment: Reflections on Medieval Mysticism," Christian Spirituality Bulletin 3 (Spring 1995): 1-5.

205

CHURCH HISTORY

understood according to the model of three interactive modes of appropriat- ing the meaning of faith-the monastic, the scholastic, and the vernacular.31 For the better part of a century, modern investigation of medieval thought recognized only one kind of theology: the professional, scientific, and academic theology of the schoolmen which arose in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The pioneering work of Jean Leclercq and others around the middle of the present century helped medievalists to discern the lineaments of a monastic theology that flourished from the time of Gregory the Great down through the twelfth century, a theology whose contributions to the history of mysticism were studied in The Growth of Mysticism.32 The research of the past two decades, however, has begun to make clear the existence of a third form of medieval theology, equally important, if more diffuse and difficult to describe: vernacular theology. Some might prefer to say vernacular "theologies," in the sense that different linguistic matrices shaped different actualizations of the potential for an understanding of faith that was not bound to the professional school or the cloister. Still, taking a clue from the writings of Erich Auerbach, one could argue that there was an essential unity to vernacular theology, despite the many national tongues in which it came to expression, because of the one spirit that fueled these attempts to appropri- ate the Christian story set forth in the Bible.33 This narrative, as Auerbach showed, had created a new style, that of the sermo humilis, "an entirely new kind of sublimity, in which the everyday and the low were included, not excluded, so that, in style as in content, it directly connected the lowest with the highest."34

All the forms of medieval theology tried to be true to two goals: deepening the understanding of faith (intellectus fidei) and enkindling charity (the experientia caritatis), so that one could arrive at the higher understanding of love (intelligentia amoris). They did so, however, by employing different genres and patterns of presentation, produced by theologians who were authenticated in different ways and who often addressed rather different audiences. The technical genres of Latin scholastic theology, such as the lectio, quaestio, disputatio, and summa, are well known; so too are the monastic genres of biblical commentary, letter-treatise, and written rhetorical ser-

31. Bernard McGinn, "Meister Eckhart and the Beguines in the Context of Vernacular Theology," Meister Eckhart and the Beguines: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magde- burg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York, 1994), pp. 4-14.

32. See esp. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York, 1961).

33. Erich Auerbach, "The Western Public and Its Language," Literary Language & Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (New York, 1965), pp. 312-313.

34. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Garden City, N.J., 1957), p. 134; see also pp. 63-66. On the sermo humilis as characteristic of the Christian Middle Ages, see esp. the essay "Sermo Humilis" in Literary Language and Its Public, pp. 27-81.

206


mons, such as those that make up Bernard's great commentary on the Song of Songs.35

It is more difficult to describe the genres of the new vernacular theology, once again because they are less technically precise and identifiable than those used by scholastic and monastic thinkers. Of course, much vernacular theology was communicated through hagiography, one of the broadest, most investigated, and yet still perhaps misunderstood forms of medieval literature.36 Saints' vitae may perhaps be seen as something like modern film-a protean medium of communication containing many forms, but one in which certain modes of representation remain characteristic of the whole. Some pieces of hagiography, like cinema verite, do their best to imitate the appearance of reality, though the modern reader should not confuse this form of representation with real life, any more than we would do in the case of films that pretend to imitate everyday occurrences. Most saints' lives, however, involve a heightening of the presentation of events according to certain norms that were as well understood by their medieval audience as the conventions that contemporary viewers accept in film. Most of these implicit rules for reading hagiography pertained throughout the Middle Ages, though there were also innovations in the period after 1200, such as the "autohagio- graphies" created by Henry Suso and some other mystics.37

Another genre that stands out, though it too is fluid in expression, is the visionary recital, sometimes standing alone, at other times inserted into saints' lives, or linked with other visions and commentary to form a quasi- genre, the visionary compendium, as illustrated by mystics like Hadewijch of Brabant in the thirteenth century and Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth. At times these visionary collections take the form of spiritual diaries, as we find in Margarite Ebner, Agnes Blannbekin, and perhaps in the lost vernacular account of her visions by Beatrice of Nazareth. A number of mystics also make use of prose or poetic versions of courtly dialogues, as we find in the case of Mechthild, Hadewijch, and Marguerite Porete among the women,

35. For a survey of these genres, see The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 367-374. 36. Of the large literature regarding hagiography, especially in the later Middle Ages, I cite

only a few classic studies. See esp. Andre Vauchez, La sainteti en occident aux derniers siecles du moyen age d'apres les proces de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome, 1981). Also useful are Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 (Chicago, 1982); and Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991). For the investigation of mystical saints, see Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago, 1984); Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago, 1992); and Peter Dinzelbacher, Heilige oder Hexen? Schicksale auffalliger Frauen in mittelalter und Friihneuzeit (Zfirich, 1995).

37. I borrow the term from Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, p. 6. See also Frank Tobin, "Introduction," Henry Suso: The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons (Mahwah, N.J., 1989), pp. 38-50.

207

CHURCH HISTORY

and Henry Suso among the men.38 The presence of mystical poems, such as those of Jacopone da Todi, though not unknown in the earlier tradition, grew in significance and diversity in vernacular theology. Various brief treatises, letters, and, of course, vernacular sermons (often quite different from the logically organized Latin sermons of the scholastic mode) also form

part of the picture. This list is not meant to be exhaustive-it merely suggests that in the world of vernacular theology, genre was important but not easy to characterize.

Even less easy to describe in any general way is the rich variety of linguistic strategies that the vernacular theologians utilized in the presentation of their

message. Though the learned language of Latin possessed distinct advan-

tages in terms of its weight of sacrality,39 its scholastic precision, its homoge- neity, its cultural universality, and its ability to maintain a link between past and present, Latin suffered from important disadvantages as well.40 Latin was at best half-alive in the Middle Ages-never the language of first

acquisition, always bound to a male-dominated cultural elite, and regulated by inherited models of linguistic propriety that made innovation difficult, though never impossible. The vernacular languages that were just beginning to become literate in the full sense around 1200, on the contrary, offered remarkable potential for creative innovation. The mystics were in at the creation. In terms of some literary vernacular traditions, for example, mystical texts are among our earliest witnesses, and in almost every early vernacular literature of western Europe we can point to major monuments that are examples of the new vernacular theology, most often of a mystical character.41

The mode of gaining an authoritative voice, becoming an auctoritas in the medieval sense, was also different in vernacular theology than in scholasti- cism or among the monks. The most obvious difference, of course, is that so

many of the vernacular theologians were women. There was no institution-

ally approved way by which a woman could gain the authority to teach in an

38. For the influence of courtly motifs on the thirteenth-century women, see Julius Schwietering, Mystik und Hofische Dichtung im Mittelalter (Tiibingen, Germany, 1960); Elizabeth Wainwright-deKadt, "Courtly Literature and Mysticism: Some Aspects of Their Interaction," Acta Germanica 12 (1980): 41-60; and the perceptive analysis of Barbara Newman, "La mystique courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love," in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, Pa., 1995), pp. 137-167.

39. On the sacral character of medieval Latin, especially liturgical Latin, see Christian Mohrmann, Liturgical Latin: Its Origins and Character (Washington, D.C., 1957).

40. For the interaction between Latin and the vernacular literatures in the medieval period, a still unsurpassed sketch is Erich Auerbach's "The Western Public and Its Language," in Literary Language and Its Public, pp. 237-338.

41. On the importance of the religious element in the rise of the vernaculars to literary status, see Auerbach, "The Western Public and Its Language," pp. 281-287.

208


official way,42 but, given Christian belief that the Holy Spirit is the true source of all divine truth, women could not be totally excluded from all forms of teaching. About 1290 the Paris master Henry of Ghent, disputing the

question "Whether a woman can be a doctor of theology?" distinguished between teaching ex officio (that is, by ecclesiastical approbation) and teaching ex beneficio (that is, from grace). Women were excluded from the former, but

"speaking about teaching from divine favor and the fervor of charity, it is well allowed for a woman to teach just like anyone else, if she possesses sound doctrine."43 Henry wished to limit such teaching to the private sector and to other women; not all women were to abide by these rules, both among the

suspect, like Marguerite Porete, and among the accepted, like Catherine of Siena. By the early fifteenth century there were even voices raised to claim that teaching ex beneficio in the vernacular was really all that was needed. The Franciscan Giovanni Bonvisi of Lucca gave the sisters of Monteluce this authorization: "Speak in charity and you will speak theologically (per teologia). One may understand the Scriptures without grammatica, namely by a certain

light from God. Grammatica is nothing but language."44 The ways in which women gained such authority within the realm of

vernacular theology were as many and as varied as the women themselves and need to be investigated case-by-case before any generalizations can be

attempted. We also must remember that men who did not qualify as teachers according to the normal ecclesiastical and academic channels also had to create similar new models of authority. While many vernacular theologians, like the German Dominicans, could appeal to their clerical and academic status, other figures, like the unordained fourteenth-century English hermit, Richard Rolle, enjoyed no such position. Rolle, therefore, had to work out a

complex and carefully prepared claim to authority in his writings, as Nicholas Watson has shown.45 Other lay male mystics, like the German merchant Rulman Merswin, were less subtle and less successful in their attempts to claim authorization.

42. This tradition had been given legal force in Gratian's Decretum, dist. 23, can. 29 (edition Friedburg 1:86): "Mulier quamvis docta et sancta, viros in conventu docere non praesumat. Laicus autem praesentibus clericis (nisi ipsis rogantibus) docere non audeat."

43. Henry of Ghent, Summa Quaestionum Ordinarium, vol. 1 (Paris, 1520; repr. St. Bonaven- ture, N.Y., 1953), art. XI, q. 11, fol. 78r: "Loquendo autem de docere ex beneficio et charitatis fervore, bene licet mulierem docere sicut & quemlibet alium si sanam doctrinam habeat."

44. "Parla per caritae parlerai per teologia. Sensa grammatica se intende la Scriptura, cioe per uno certo lume di Dio. La grammatica non e altro se no uno lenguaggio." I cite from the text and translation found in Katherine Gill, "Women and the Production of Religious Literature in the Vernacular, 1300-1500," Creative Women, ed. Matter and Coakley, pp. 77, 100.

45. Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge, U.K., 1991).

209

CHURCH HISTORY

Vernacular theology, then, employed different genres from the scholastic and monastic theologies and was put forth according to new modes of

claiming authority ex beneficio. It also was directed to a different audience- one both wider and narrower than that of the technical scholastic Latin. The vernacular audience was wider, of course, because it addressed any person, male or female, high or low, who was literate in the particular vernacular

employed. But the audience was also narrower because it did not use the learned language which guaranteed texts a universal dissemination across

linguistic barriers. This contrast, however, needs to be qualified by two

important considerations that also help illumine the vitality and variety of the new mysticism.

First of all, a number of mystical texts were produced in a form of Latin that can be said to reflect the new vernacular theology in terms of authorship, style, and content, even though they were communicated in the language of the learned. The writings of Francis of Assisi, for example, are certainly not the product of a scholastic mind, or even of one trained in monastic thought, though they bespeak a deep theological vision set forth in a dramatic new way of using language.46 The same is true for the mystical text of Angela of

Foligno, the Memorial and Instructions taken down in Latin by a Franciscan friar-a fascinating example of a work created by the conversation between a male and a female author.47 Another example is found in Henry Suso, who

produced first a German and then a rather different Latin version of his

longest mystical treatise, The Clock of Wisdom (Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, in the vernacular).48

The second qualification against making too simple a contrast between Latin and the vernacular is that vernacular theological texts that were found

particularly impressive were often translated into Latin in order to give them a more universal and permanent status as a part of high culture. This is true of works often considered dangerous, like Marguerite Porete's Mirror of

46. Francis's works have been edited by Kajetan Esser, Opuscula Sancti Patris Francisci Assisiensis (Grottaferrata, Italy, 1978). See the analysis of Francis's style by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis, pp. 141-151, which concludes: "It would perhaps be rash to maintain that Italian literature owed this freedom of dramatic expression to Saint Francis, for it was doubtless implicit in the character of the people; but it cannot be denied that, a great poet, an instinctive master of the art of acting out his own being, he was the first to awaken the dramatic powers of the Italian feeling and of the Italian language."

47. II Libro della Beata Angela da Foligno (Edizione critica), ed. Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti (Grottaferrata, Italy, 1985). See the discussion by Catherine M. Mooney, "The Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of Angela of Foligno's Revelations," Creative Women, ed. Matter and Coakley, pp. 34-63.

48. The Middle High German text was edited by Karl Bihlmeyer, Heinrich Seuse: Deutsche Schriften (Stuttgart, Germany, 1907); the Latin by Pius Kuinzle, Heinrich Seuses Horologium Sapientiae (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1977).

210


Simple Souls,49 and mainstream ones, like John Tauler's sermons and John Ruusbroec's treatises. In the case of Meister Eckhart's sequence, "The Mus- tard Seed" (Granum sinapis), we have the unusual example of a vernacular poem being made the subject of a learned Latin commentary, probably by one of Eckhart's Dominican confreres.50 Careful study of the vernacular and Latin versions of the same mystical texts (they are rarely simple translations), as in the case of Beatrice of Nazareth's Seven Ways of Loving God, or Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of Godhead, may help reveal differences between male and female perspectives and cast new light on the relationships between the forms of medieval theology.51

What this suggests is that while Latin was no longer totally adequate, it was still necessary. Just as much of the new mystical vernacular theology was the product of a conversation between men and women which we overhear only in snatches in the records that survive to us, so, too, the new mysticism developed to a large degree through an analogous dialogue between Latin- mostly of the scholastically precise form rather than the protohumanist rhetorical variety52-and the burgeoning vernaculars. Dante, the figure in whom the vernacular first directly challenged Latin for cultural dominance, provides a good illustration of the ongoing complexity of the relationship. In his vernacular treatise The Banquet (II Convivio, about 1304-1308), he ad- vanced an initial argument for the superiority of Latin in a text written in Italian (see Convivio 1.5), though the case was subtly undercut in the succeed- ing chapters of book 1 by his argument for the inappropriateness of writing a Latin commentary on vernacular poems and by his defense of his natural love of his native tongue.53 In his treatise On Vernacular Eloquence (De vulgari eloquentia), he more directly defended the illustrious character of the vernacular, but he did so in Latin, the universal language of culture.54 Although Dante was a forceful proponent of the theological creativity of the vernacular,

49. Marguerite Porete: Le Mirouer des Simples Ames, ed. Romana Guarnieri and Paul Verdeyen (Turnhout, Belgium, 1986).

50. See Maria Bindschedler, Der lateinische Kommentar zum Granum Sinapis (Basel, Switzer- land, 1949). For a discussion of the Granum sinapis, see Alois M. Haas, "Granum sinapis-An den Grenzen der Sprache," Sermo mysticus: Studien zu Theologie und Sprache derdeutschen Mystik (Freiburg, Switzerland, 1979), pp. 301-329.

51. For an example of this form of analysis, see Amy M. Hollywood, Soul as Virgin Wife (Notre Dame, Ind., 1996), chap. 1.

52. On these two forms of Latin and their revival in the twelfth century, see Auerbach, "The Western Public and Its Language," pp. 72-77.

53. Dante Alighieri: II Convivio, ed. Maria Simonelli (Bologna, Italy, 1966). See the English version, Dante's II Convivo (The Banquet), trans. Richard H. Lansing (New York, 1990).

54. De vulgari eloquentia, book 1, especially chaps. xvi-xix. See Warman Welliver, Dante in Hell: The 'De Vulgari Eloquentia': Introduction, Text, Translation, Commentary (Ravenna, Italy, 1981), pp. 78-87. Welliver's "Appendix A: Latin and Italian" (pp. 237-242) discusses the "complementary contradictions" (p. 238) of Dante's view of the relations between Latin and Italian.

211

CHURCH HISTORY

the fact that he chose to present his message in Latin is a sign that the bond between the two forms of expression was still a symbiotic one.55

Finally, I would suggest that the conversation between men and women, and between Latin and the vernacular, undercuts not only simplistic at-

tempts to uncover the feminine voice in all its purity, but also the claims of some students of medieval mysticism that overstate the difference between

mysticism in the vernacular languages and the Latin mysticism of the inherited tradition. I do not believe, for example, that mysticism really first comes into its own in its vernacular expression in the late Middle Ages, if only because this view implies that biographical or autobiographical descriptions of personal visionary experience, whether in Latin or in the vernacular, constitute the real core of mysticism.56 There are differences, to be sure, between texts that reflect more on the theological conditions for the possibil- ity of the direct encounter with God in this life and those that attempt to

present these conditions through descriptions of personal experience.57 There are also, as I have tried to suggest above, significant changes and

developments that become evident when mysticism moves into the vernacular languages. But to define "real" mysticism primarily as the experiential and visionary mysticism found in late medieval vernacular texts is to impov- erish the richness of the Western mystical tradition and to hinder rather than to assist the task of attempting to understand the new mysticism itself, if only because its very novelty is largely constituted through its dialogue with the older tradition.58

If movement out into the world-a democratization and secularization as I

55. Welliver, noting how in the De vulgare eloquentia Dante shades his language toward a "vulgar" Latin, while in the Convivio he adapts a latinizing form of Italian, asks: "Has not Dante balanced his sharp separation of the two languages in the argument and his consistent use of the wrong one by writing in a blend of both? A favorite theme and technique of the stilnuovo poet of love is the subtle combination and reconciliation of opposites" (p. 240).

56. Kurt Ruh's claim that "Mystik ... kommt erst in den Volkssprachen eigentlich zu sich selbst" (Geschichte der abendldndische Mystik 1:17; see also 2:18-20) overemphasizes the role of the vernacular; see my review in Journal of Religion 74 (1994): 94-96. I also question Peter Dinzelbacher's use of the distinction (however attractive in the abstract) between Mystologie, or reflection on mysticism, and the Erlebnismystik that represents the core of mysticism, as set forth in his Christliche Mystik im Abendland: Ihrer Geschichte von den Anfdngen bis zum Ende des Mittelalters (Paderborn, Germany, 1994), pp. 9-22. Dinzelbacher's use of the distinction leads to unnecessary exclusion of key mystics, as well as to confusion about the difference between mystical consciousness and visionary experience in general (see my forthcoming review in Cahiers de civilisation medievale).

57. The dynamics of this second form of mystical text have been studied by Ursula Peters, Religiose Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum: Zur Vorgeschichte und Genese frauenmystischer Texte des 13. und 14.Jahrhunderts (Tiibingen, Germany, 1988).

58. Here we might note Seamus Heaney's remarks about tradition and change in poetry: "Writers have to start out as readers, and before they put pen to paper, even the most disaffected of them will have internalized the norms and forms of the tradition from which they wish to secede" (The Redress of Poetry [New York, 1995], p. 6).

212


have termed it-represents the external and social dimension of the new mysticism, and if gender issues, especially the new role of women in vernacular theology, are crucial to its internal constitution, what is to be said, if only in introductory fashion, about the message conveyed in this new stage in the history of Western mysticism? What are the contours of its teaching about how God may or may not become directly present in this life? How are these related to previous forms of mystical teaching? What do these texts have to tell us about these mystics and their view of God? Tentative answers to these questions will only be possible on the basis of the investigation that I hope to conduct in volumes three and four of The Presence of God, but one issue that raises important questions about the nature of mysticism can be taken up here, if only in preliminary fashion: the significance of the late medieval predilection for biographical and autobiographical accounts of seeing and hearing God.

One of the most striking aspects of the new mysticism is the explosion of accounts of such experiences, what German scholars call Erlebnismystik, or sometimes Erfahrungsmystik.59 Aspects of this stress on experience, especially of a visionary kind, had already appeared in the twelfth century. The Bernardine appeal to the liber experientiae, noted above, was a significant new dimension in Western mysticism, though the Cistercian's emphasis on the necessary mutuality of the biblical book and the experiential one makes his appeal to experience different from that found in the mystical women of the thirteenth century, and not only because they could never be professional scriptural exegetes as Bernard himself or Richard of St. Victor were.60 Similarly, we should note that autobiographical accounts of mystical visions (mystical in the sense that they focus on a direct experience of God's presence, especially the person of Jesus, or even some kind of seeing of the Trinity) are found in the twelfth century, both among men, like Rupert of Deutz and Joachim of Fiore,61 as well as among women. Some of Hildegard of Bingen's descriptions of her unusual states of consciousness fit into this category,62 as do those of a figure like the English recluse, Christina of Markyate (died after 1154).63 These developing trends, however, scarcely prepare us for the flood of visionary recitals, especially by and about women, that begin to appear shortly after 1200. Such visions and visionaries were to

59. For an overview of some recent German discussion, see Peter Dinzelbacher, "Zur Interpretation erlebnismysticher Texte des Mittelalters," Zeitschrift fur Deutsches Alter- tum und Deutsche Literatur 117 (1988): 1-23.

60. See the discussion in The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 166, 185-190, 192-193, 207-210, and so forth.

61. See the treatments of Rupert and Joachim in The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 328-333, 337-341.

62. The Growth of Mysticism, pp. 333-336. 63. See The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Recluse, ed. C. H. Talbot, 2d ed.

(Oxford, 1987), especially the visions of the Christ found on pp. 118, 154, and 168-170.

213

CHURCH HISTORY

remain controversial, both among those mystics who downplayed the importance of such unusual occurences, and also among the clerics who empha- sized the necessity for "testing the spirits" (discretio spirituum). There can be no

question, however, of their impact on the religious life of the time. Of the

many issues that this proliferation of visions raises, two stand out for initial treatment. What are the reasons for this development? Are all these visions to be considered mystical? Let me take them up in reverse order.

As I have already suggested in The Growth of Mysticism and noted above,64 it seems to me incorrect to treat all late medieval visions as mystical, if the term

mysticism is to retain enough specificity to allow it to characterize a coherent tradition in the beliefs and practices of the Christian religion. The visionary and the mystical elements in Christianity are distinct, though often intercon- nected, trajectories. If all experiential accounts of visions and auditions from the celestial realm, no matter who they involve (God, Christ, Mary, angels, saints) and what they teach (messages about church reform or future events or doctrinal disputes, as well as about the path to the experience of God) are to be considered mystical, then the mystical element within Christianity faces a twofold dilemma. Either it is in danger of losing connection with what most mystics themselves have claimed to be essential (that is, a special form of divine presence that by definition exceeds adequate description), or else it risks being reduced to the history of more or less autobiographical claims to have received some visual manifestation of the other world. The latter

position would compel us to view most of what the earlier Christian tradition

taught about contemplatio and theologia mystica as peripheral to true mysticism-at best a theological preparation, a Mystologie or Mystagogie as some German authors call it. I do not think that it is true to the historical record to narrow the history of Christian mysticism in this way, especially because of the dependence of even the visionary mystics on the rich inheritance of ancient teaching about contemplatio. The fundamental error involved lies in

thinking that there is a real division between the experiential and the theological in that aspect of Christianity I have called the mystical tradition. The mystics themselves never thought that this was the case. As Alois M. Haas has put it: "It is not carelessness when Christian mystics do not want to make a distinction between mystical experience and the meaning or the teaching about this experience; it is intentional."65

The mystical element within Christianity involves a form of immediate encounter with God whose essential purpose is to convey a loving knowledge (however negative, or apophatic) that transforms the mystic's consciousness

64. The Growth of Mysticism, esp. pp. 325-328. 65. Alois M. Haas, "Mystik als Theologie," Zeitschrift fur Katholische Theologie 116 (1994): 48,

writes: "Es ist nicht Unsorgfalt, wenn die christlichen Mystiker die Unterscheidung zwischen mystischer Erfahrung und Deutung oder Lehre von dieser Erfahrung nicht machen wollen, sondern Absicht."

214


and whole way of life. I believe that this view provides categories sufficiently specific and yet flexible enough to include both the usually nonvisionary and nonautobiographical tradition of monastic contemplatio and speculative theologia mystica, as well as many aspects (but not all) of the new visionary explosion of the later Middle Ages, into one complex and continuing tradition. The mystical path is characterized by an immediacy of relation to God alone and the transformation this effects in the consciousness of the recipient-not by visions or auditions, which constitute at best, as Antoine Vergote puts it, "the remnants of perceptual experiences or surpassed imaginative productions and premonitions of the union they anticipate and desire."66 Hence, it is not so much the fact that someone has made claims to visionary experience, as the kind of vision presented and the purpose for which it is given that will determine whether or not the vision bears a relation to mysticism. This was a message well known to medieval mystics, even those like Angela of Foligno and Julian of Norwich who experienced such "showings" themselves.67

It is probably impossible to give a completely satisfactory answer to why accounts of visions grew so rapidly in the thirteenth century. Throughout its whole history, of course, medieval culture was intensely visionary. "Visions were," as C.J. Holdsworth puts it, "one aspect of the continuing revelation of God."68 The form of vision that was most popular in the early Middle Ages was the tour of heaven and hell, the genre which was transformed to a new level in Dante's Divine Comedy. As Peter Dinzelbacher has shown, however, a significant new form of vision begins in the twelfth century and grows thoughout the later Middle Ages. This involves manifestations of the supernatural realm within the world of common experience, which tend to be repeatable apparitions consciously prepared for, or at least expected, center- ing on the encounter with a heavenly personality who conveys some kind of celestial message.69 Such visions, whether mystical or not, had many uses. From the recipient's viewpoint, they were especially important for the supernatural authority they provided. From a broader cultural perspective

66. Antoine Vergote, Guilt and Desire: Religious Attitudes and Their Pathological Derivative (New Haven, Conn., 1988), p. 180. Vergote begins his treatment of mystical visions with a reminder (so often forgotten): "It is not an accident that visions, which are properly speaking ecstatic phenomena, and mystical ecstasies are frequently con- fused." He also recognizes the necessity for the transformation of desire as key to the mystical quest (p. 187).

67. See II Libro della Beata Angela da Foligno, for example, Instructiones XIV and XXXI (pp. 564, 660); andJulian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the AnchoressJulian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, 2 vols. (Toronto, Ont., 1978), Long Text, chap. 9 (2:321-322).

68. C. J. Holdsworth, "Visions and Visionaries in the Middle Ages," History 48 (1963): 144. 69. Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, Germany, 1981),

esp. chaps. 12-16. See also Dinzelbacher's helpful list of both types of vision in a chart of "Erlebte Visionen" on pp. 13-23. An updated version of this list appears in Dinzelbacher's handbook "Revelationes" (Turnhout, Belgium, 1991), pp. 88-108.

215

CHURCH HISTORY

they also seem to point to changes in the perception of the relationship between this world and the next, a conviction that in the case of some

specially graced individuals the usual barriers between the earthly and the

heavenly were more permeable than had been previously supposed. The theology that underpins visionary claims to teaching ex beneficio was

well known in the thirteenth century. The clerical hagiographers were aware that many earlier medieval saints had been given various kinds of visions.

They were also acquainted with the theology of visions laid down by August- ine and taken up by twelfth-century theologians like Richard of St. Victor.70 This background helps us to understand why visionary recitals could be

employed as proofs of the authority and sanctity of particular figures, but it does not give us much assistance in discovering why the mode and content of the visionary recital shifted away from a predominance of once-in-a-lifetime extended trips to heaven and hell toward repeatable encounters with a wide

range of heavenly figures. The new type of vision often (but by no means

always) involved a personal, deeply emotional, and even erotic encounter with Jesus, the Divine Lover.7'

Descriptions of such direct encounters with Jesus signal a new form of

mystical experience, or mystical knowing, more direct, more excessive, often more bodily in nature than older forms.72 It is only within the past decade that the extravagant bodily manifestations of the medieval mystics, once

again largely female, have been hailed as indications of a breakthrough beyond the more restrained, "intellectualized" conceptions found in the earlier tradition, rather than as indications of some form of imbalance, or even hysteria, as they were often considered by earlier students of Western

mysticism.73 In assessing the validity of these conflicting interpretations, it is

70. In De genesi ad litteram 12, Augustine had distinguished three forms of visions- corporeal, spiritual (that is, imaginative), and intellectual; see the discussion in The Foundations of Mysticism, pp. 253-256. In his In Apocalypsim 1.1 (PL 196:686B-87C), Richard of St. Victor distinguished four types of visions: two external (corporeal vision and seeing hidden signification in a corporeal object) and two internal (divine interior illuminations in the likeness of visible things, and anagogic visions which raise one to divine contemplation without such likenesses).

71. For a psychological investigation of such mystical visions and their erotic content, see Vergotte, Guilt and Desire, chaps. 7-9.

72. See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), chaps. 3-7, esp. pp. 223-225; and now her The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York, 1995), pp. 182-183. For another form of argument, see John Giles Milhaven, Hadewijch and Her Sisters: Other Ways of Loving and Knowing (Albany, N.Y., 1993).

73. The negative evaluation of the new visionary mysticism associated with women is evident, for example, in Cuthbert Butler's Western Mysticism (New York, 1923), pp. 179-192. For a collection of similar evaluations in German authors, see Dinzelbacher, "Zur Interpretation erlebnismystischer Texte," p. 7. To say that such texts should not be automatically dismissed as an inferior form of mysticism, of course, does not mean that one need refrain from all forms ofjudgment about their theological value. On this

216


important to begin not from a fixed ideological perspective but from textual analysis which recognizes the complexity of the relationship between experience and representation.

While it may be usually true to say, as Peter Dinzelbacher does, that "Without their underlying [mystical] experience these textual expressions would not exist,"74 reflection on what kind of contact with God is possible in this life and how it relates to what may be capable of description is far more involved than any simple contrast between experience and theory allows. We must continue to insist that we have no direct access to the experience of thirteenth-century people. Even if we did, many medieval mystics placed far less value on the significance of "experience" than some modern theories of mysticism do. Furthermore, even in the case of "illiterate" women, the mediation of a written tradition, beginning with the Bible and continuing on through liturgy, other forms of prayer, and iconography, must be considered a significant factor in what kinds of "experiences" Christian mystics may have enjoyed.75 To be sure, the mediation of the prior mystical tradition does not set absolute boundaries for what states of consciousness are possible in the search for God, especially in a religion where God remains ever more than can be conceived or expressed even by what is given in revelation. As Lateran IV put it: "Between Creator and creature one can never affirm as much likeness as there is unlikeness."76 Nor is it necessary to affirm that all linguistic stylization, such as the use of topoi, or of implicit quotations of earlier authoritative texts, for example, indicate that we are dealing with purely literary creations independent of the contemplative and ecstatic states of real individuals. But there are many possibilities between the mutually opposed extremes of conceiving of visionary recitals as literary fictions and taking them for some species of "direct" reporting.77 Every description is

see Ewert Cousins, "The Humanity and Passion of Christ," Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, pp. 386-389.

74. Dinzelbacher, "Zur Interpretation erlebnismysticher Texte," p. 5: "Ohne das ihnen zugrundliegende Erleben aber wurde diese Textsorte nicht existerieren!"

75. This point has been much discussed in the recent debate between so-called "construct- ivists" and "perennialists" on the nature of mysticism. It is also admitted by some of the proponents of Erlebnismystik (for example, Dinzelbacher, "Zur Interpretation," pp. 17-18).

76. Concilium Lateranse IV, Cap. 2: "inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda."

77. Franz H. Bauml, "Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy," Speculum 55 (1980): 261-264, notes how the new "realistic" tendency in post- Romanesque art and written vernacular narrative can be seen as "the creation of a fiction that the fiction is not a fiction" (p. 262). The same is probably true in the case of some visionary mystical texts. In the same vein, note the comments of Roger Chartier in Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988): "It is clear from the outset that no text, even the most apparently documentary, even the most 'objective' ... maintains a transparent relationship with the reality that it appre- hends.... What is real, in fact, is not (or is not only) the reality that the text aims at, but

217

CHURCH HISTORY

rooted in assumptions, both about what is possible and how the possible can be described. Greater attention must be given to the role of genre, the

anticipated audience, the styles of representation, and especially the possibilities and limits of the nascent vernacular languages in comparison with Latin in order to appreciate fully the hermeneutical situation through which medieval mystical consciousness is textually mediated to us.78

Finally, it is also important to remember that the term "experience" itself is

fraught with ambiguity. Of course, everyone has "experiences" and thinks

they know what they mean when they use the word, but there is a consider- able gap between the commonsense view of what we ordinarily call experience and a theoretical understanding, philosophical or theological, of what constitutes experience, especially as presented in ancient texts. This is even more problematic when we are dealing with unusual states of consciousness that many today would dismiss as delusional or hallucinatory and therefore not "real" experiences.79 For a century and more, modern investigators have labored mightily to identify the constituents of what they call "mystical

experience" (a term unknown in medieval texts) without reaching any agreement.80 Those who speak about late medieval Erlebnismystik often appear to identify mystical experience with visions and unusual states of trance and ecstasy; but surely, as Grace Jantzen reminds us, summarizing the

argument of several important Christian mystics, "mystical experience is not reducible to a set of mystical experiences, no matter how intense they may be."81 This is why I prefer to speak of the direct "consciousness" of God, a

category that is broad enough to encompass both visionary and ecstatic states as mystical (as long as they have the character of immediacy to God), without

excluding the more permanent, nonecstatic forms of divine immediacy, such as those which most mystical teachers have insisted are the essential identify- ing note of true contemplatio. Karl Rahner, who has provided us with perhaps the only serious modern theological attempt to deal with the issue of visions,

supports such a position by distinguishing between that contact with God that takes place in the core of the person and the modalities of its sense

reception, insisting that "the imaginative vision ... is only the radiation and

the very manner in which it aims at it in the historic setting of its own production and the strategy used in its writing" (pp. 43-44).

78. There have been many theoretical discussions of this. Here I note only the classic account of Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Concept of Experience and the Essence of the Hermeneutical Experience," Truth and Method (New York, 1975), pp. 310-325.

79. Helpful in this connection is Vergote's concept of the opposition between successful hysteria and hysterical neurosis and between positive and negative hallucination; see Guilt and Desire, pp. 157, 183-184.

80. See The Foundations of Mysticism, esp. pp. 291-326. 81. Grace N. Jantzen, "Mysticism and Experience," Religious Studies 25 (1992): 314.

218


reflex of contemplation in the sphere of the senses, the incarnation of the mystical process of the spirit."82

These observations are not meant to deny the innovative character of the visionary, ecstatic, and excessive aspects of the new mysticism that began about the year 1200, any more than we should ever be blind to the fact that much of the new movement was pioneered by women and came to expression in the new vernacular theology of the later Middle Ages. Recent excitement over these innovations, however, has not always kept them in perspective, especially because of its lack of attention to the many forms of dialogue which were essential to their inner meaning-the dialogue between men and women, the dialogue between Latin and the vernaculars, the dialogue between spirituality and theology, and finally the dialogue between the inherited wisdom of the monastic contemplative tradition and the creative energies of a new era. As Hans-Georg Gadamer put it: "To stand within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible."83

82. Karl Rahner, Visions and Prophecies (London, 1963), p. 57. Rahner goes on to stress how this is rooted not in a neoplatonic tendency to divide spirit and matter, but in the imperative of negative theology: "God is always greater than any image of himself and wishes to communicate himself as thus greater in mystical experience. Here least of all, then, should man cling to his appearance, because it remains true even in the highest theology of union that the God who can no longer be separated from the world of his appearance still remains unconfused with his appearance" (p. 58).

83. Gadamer, "Conception and Experience," p. 324.

219

mcginn medieval mysticism

Documents