I keep wanting to write Badgerburg. Or Fudgeburg. Mmm. I have to read secondary material for the class that I pick out myself. I struck gold on one, and only got glancing references in the other. I'll let you guess which is which.
Rosalynn Voaden. "All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta." Medieval Women in their Communities. Ed. Diane Wyatt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997: 72-91.
Pretty basic. Helfta is a community of (practicing Cistercian) nuns in the thirteenth and fourteenth century who were a focal point for a few strong mystics, among them Gertrude, Mechthild of Madgeburg, and Mechthild of Hackeborn. Mechthild of Madgeburg features in this historical narrative as the figure that comes to the community late in life (she was a Beguine before), briefly discovers the virtue of community (she was isolated before and more bound to her church fathers), and then dies. Before doing so, however, she does write one book and impart onto Gertrude and Mechthild of Hackeborn the mystic tradition, in which they bind up community and womanness. (The Sacred Heart, the resulting cult, articulated divine authority with an awareness and attention to feminine experience, which is then explored and expanded upon in the repeated feminine and communal images.)
David Neville. "The Bodies of the Bride: The Language of Incarnation, Transcendence, and Time in the Poetic Theology of Mechthild of Madgeburg." Mystics Quarterly 34.1-2: 2008, 1-34.
Daaaamn. I was fairly impressed here.
First there's a brief, polemical, but useful survey of materials that previous scholars have brought to the study of body and sexuality in Mechthild. Neville makes his eventual point clear here, that there is not a simple division of body/low and spirit/high. While those registers are true, there is also a way in which Mechthild appropriates an idea of a more divine body, unified with the spirit, which is at once furthest away from God and closest to God. From the start, the bodily pain is the point of greatest distance (because it reminds one of the immediacy of the body) and of greatest closeness with God (in the metaphor of longing, the intermediary longing that communicates between the spirit and the Trinity) (2).
A lot of medieval authors avoided the association of the sexual and this relation with God, though they did use metaphors of marriage (10-11). Mechthild does not avoid the subject, marking desire - even erotic desire - as a divine characteristic (8). However, this desire must be divine, that is, associated with a renunciation of earthly sexual desire and the strictly earthly postlapsarian body. Instead, through such renunciation, she must attain, not only the prelapsarian body of perfect intactness, but the body of Mary through which all things can pass through without being impurified.
Finally, to justify her point, she distinguishes the appearance of wholeness, which many corrupt people in the church have, from the actual wholeness which she gains through the figure of the bride of Christ.
I would've preferred Neville write more about how Mechthild's desire is not only precipitated on immediate satisfaction, but is also tied to a denial of that satisfaction. That is, in a way, her earthly body also matters, because it is the crude material which must behurt to be healed. Her fallen nature is the very thing that allows God to reconcile her desire, a drink that would not be as sweet if she did not also have the distance from which she would reconcile.
Showing posts with label mystics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mystics. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Mechthild of Madeberg, Part 3
This sounds like a serial.
I wasn't able to take as good of notes on this part, due to riding the bus, so I'm really dredging the memory here.
There is more description here than before. We get descriptions of the Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell. She emphasizes order a lot, that the angels and seraphim are below the levels of the honored humans, the apostles, the saints, the Lady, and so on. The Kingdom of Heaven has an end to its statutes as Hell has an end to its order, but there is no end to its being. There is an ordering of the procession into heaven - first maidens, then widows, then the married couples who dare not take away spiritual grace with bodily indulgence. There is even an ordering to the virtues of the choirs that sing, mercy given to the unbaptized children, and so on.
Also, there are more visions of Hell, like 3.15 and 3.21. It is upside down, and the punishments of the sinful are ordered based on what Lucifer does with them, normally some variation of being ground, gnawed, eaten, or kissed foully. The Jews are lower than the mere ignorant.
There are also a couple of interesting narrative moments. Mary's life story is told, and flowers emphasized again as giving birth to Jesus was like dew through the flowers "so that thy purity was never touched" (3.4). Then in 3.9, she describes the beginning, when the Trinity differentiates, when the Bride is created, when she sins and brings God sorrow, and how Jesus chooses to love her anyhow. Then, as in part 1, the passion of Christ is told again, except this time in terms of what the loving soul would experience, in third person feminine. His suffering is hers, and must be, when a soul is penetrated by the love of God (3.11).
There is more going on here than I can know. More on the Harrowing of Hell by the prophets (3.21)... What love is good to God. The only other thing I recall is how, when describing the loves in this part, they seem a (hah) mirror image of the ones in part one. Now at one point she has a hot desire that God cools, rather than vice versa. Is the switch intentional, a necessary part of union being this sharing of sensation? I'm not sure.
I wasn't able to take as good of notes on this part, due to riding the bus, so I'm really dredging the memory here.
There is more description here than before. We get descriptions of the Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell. She emphasizes order a lot, that the angels and seraphim are below the levels of the honored humans, the apostles, the saints, the Lady, and so on. The Kingdom of Heaven has an end to its statutes as Hell has an end to its order, but there is no end to its being. There is an ordering of the procession into heaven - first maidens, then widows, then the married couples who dare not take away spiritual grace with bodily indulgence. There is even an ordering to the virtues of the choirs that sing, mercy given to the unbaptized children, and so on.
Also, there are more visions of Hell, like 3.15 and 3.21. It is upside down, and the punishments of the sinful are ordered based on what Lucifer does with them, normally some variation of being ground, gnawed, eaten, or kissed foully. The Jews are lower than the mere ignorant.
There are also a couple of interesting narrative moments. Mary's life story is told, and flowers emphasized again as giving birth to Jesus was like dew through the flowers "so that thy purity was never touched" (3.4). Then in 3.9, she describes the beginning, when the Trinity differentiates, when the Bride is created, when she sins and brings God sorrow, and how Jesus chooses to love her anyhow. Then, as in part 1, the passion of Christ is told again, except this time in terms of what the loving soul would experience, in third person feminine. His suffering is hers, and must be, when a soul is penetrated by the love of God (3.11).
There is more going on here than I can know. More on the Harrowing of Hell by the prophets (3.21)... What love is good to God. The only other thing I recall is how, when describing the loves in this part, they seem a (hah) mirror image of the ones in part one. Now at one point she has a hot desire that God cools, rather than vice versa. Is the switch intentional, a necessary part of union being this sharing of sensation? I'm not sure.
Mechthild of Madgeberg
The Flowing Light of the Godhead, tr. Lucy Menzies, Parts 1 and 2
This is not an ideal translation, but I cannot get a hold of a more complete copy before class early Thursday morning. The only evident problem is that of omissions, which the author explains as a cost-saving measure. And of course the scholar in me hates when someone else determines for me that something is unimportant. If I were reading for pleasure alone, then I'd not mind so much.
Anyway, observations! Since there isn't a much better away to approach the text.
It is a combination of prose visions, poetic dialogues between figures like the "Soul" and Godly "Love," seemly epistles between God and Mechthild, and so on. Most of the sections are short, with a few extended ones happening especially near the end of a part.
She is a Catholic mystic from the thirteenth century, writing in a Low/Middle German dialect. It's tough to know exactly what, since her works only come to us in a Latin and High German translation. She was a beguine (and possibly an abbess) for a while, before joining the nuns in Helfla in her old age. The Church often didn't like her for the criticisms she made about its worldliness. Many scholars think Dante was influenced by her imagery of death. She was never canonized, and forgotten for a long time until the late 19th century. So that's the official detail.
Her theology is one that, for the most part, I've seen before. The soul must renounce life and castigate the bodily senses in order to attain oneness with God as personified in the figure of love. The soul is occasionally lifted with God into high contemplation, the body utterly burned away so that the soul remains a mirror to reflect the Father's glory.
After flying high like a dove, though, she must inevitably descend back into the body she abhors. Such separation is necessary. As Jesus describes in part two, there are two cups from which she can drink. The first is red wine, signifying sorrow. The second is white wine, signifying consolation. The white wine is the better wine. However, the soul is best when it drinks from both. The soul best feels the healing and oneness with God when it also knows the solitude of an earthly life, though she is never parted from God, only separated.
Of course there are what we'd call sexual tones, since so much is put into the love poem form. Mary is the Bride to the Bridegroom, the Father. She is the Mother to the Son. And she is Friend to the Spirit. Even Mechthild is often called bride, though, and there is a certain tension between the earthly tropes of love, and the spiritual level it attains:
"Lord! Thy blood and mine is one unstained;
Thy love and mine is one and undivided;
Thy robe and mine is one, unspotted,
Thy lips and mine are one, unkissed..." (2.25).
They are so close in union that their lips do not merely touch, as in a kiss soon to be separated, but they are actually one. Fruitful study could be made of other images, such as Mary's overflowing milk to the glory of the Father and the love of man.
There are also other images that demand further study, such as the prolific uses of the color white to designate purity, or the frequent use of flowers, to the point where they seem a pagan appendation upon her worship. "I come to my love / As dew on the flowers" (1.13).
Perhaps to contrast with the abundance of the flower, she is frequently in a desert. It could be a reference to Jesus's trial in the desert (1.29), but appears frequently on its own. It could refer to the ascetic ideal that many saints hold, or perhaps to the sparseness and temptations of this world to a flower grown for God.
Finally, I should pay attention to when she talks to or about other saints, especially women ones, and especially those near her own time. Hildegund of Schonau, for example.
More to come, as I read the third part for Thursday as well.
This is not an ideal translation, but I cannot get a hold of a more complete copy before class early Thursday morning. The only evident problem is that of omissions, which the author explains as a cost-saving measure. And of course the scholar in me hates when someone else determines for me that something is unimportant. If I were reading for pleasure alone, then I'd not mind so much.
Anyway, observations! Since there isn't a much better away to approach the text.
It is a combination of prose visions, poetic dialogues between figures like the "Soul" and Godly "Love," seemly epistles between God and Mechthild, and so on. Most of the sections are short, with a few extended ones happening especially near the end of a part.
She is a Catholic mystic from the thirteenth century, writing in a Low/Middle German dialect. It's tough to know exactly what, since her works only come to us in a Latin and High German translation. She was a beguine (and possibly an abbess) for a while, before joining the nuns in Helfla in her old age. The Church often didn't like her for the criticisms she made about its worldliness. Many scholars think Dante was influenced by her imagery of death. She was never canonized, and forgotten for a long time until the late 19th century. So that's the official detail.
Her theology is one that, for the most part, I've seen before. The soul must renounce life and castigate the bodily senses in order to attain oneness with God as personified in the figure of love. The soul is occasionally lifted with God into high contemplation, the body utterly burned away so that the soul remains a mirror to reflect the Father's glory.
After flying high like a dove, though, she must inevitably descend back into the body she abhors. Such separation is necessary. As Jesus describes in part two, there are two cups from which she can drink. The first is red wine, signifying sorrow. The second is white wine, signifying consolation. The white wine is the better wine. However, the soul is best when it drinks from both. The soul best feels the healing and oneness with God when it also knows the solitude of an earthly life, though she is never parted from God, only separated.
Of course there are what we'd call sexual tones, since so much is put into the love poem form. Mary is the Bride to the Bridegroom, the Father. She is the Mother to the Son. And she is Friend to the Spirit. Even Mechthild is often called bride, though, and there is a certain tension between the earthly tropes of love, and the spiritual level it attains:
"Lord! Thy blood and mine is one unstained;
Thy love and mine is one and undivided;
Thy robe and mine is one, unspotted,
Thy lips and mine are one, unkissed..." (2.25).
They are so close in union that their lips do not merely touch, as in a kiss soon to be separated, but they are actually one. Fruitful study could be made of other images, such as Mary's overflowing milk to the glory of the Father and the love of man.
There are also other images that demand further study, such as the prolific uses of the color white to designate purity, or the frequent use of flowers, to the point where they seem a pagan appendation upon her worship. "I come to my love / As dew on the flowers" (1.13).
Perhaps to contrast with the abundance of the flower, she is frequently in a desert. It could be a reference to Jesus's trial in the desert (1.29), but appears frequently on its own. It could refer to the ascetic ideal that many saints hold, or perhaps to the sparseness and temptations of this world to a flower grown for God.
Finally, I should pay attention to when she talks to or about other saints, especially women ones, and especially those near her own time. Hildegund of Schonau, for example.
More to come, as I read the third part for Thursday as well.
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