Annihilation and Authorship: Three Women Mystics of the 1290s
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/686939
ISSN2040-8072
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Women Writers
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeAnnihilation and Authorship: Three Women Mystics of the 1290sBarbara NewmanBarbara Newman Search for more articles by this author Barbara Newman is Professor of English, Religious Studies, and Classics at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (e-mail: [email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOne of the most startling tenets of late-medieval mysticism is its call for self-annihilation. The human soul, with all its powers of knowing, willing, and loving, must be reduced to nothing and merge into God without remainder, sacrificing its unique identity in indistinct union with the Beloved. On the face of it, the quest for annihilation—a Christian version of nirvana—seems to represent the epitome of disillusionment with the present life. Nothing in this world is worth saving, for salvation merely reverses the gratuitous act of creation. As one fourteenth-century mystic put it, the naked soul must return to the naked Godhead, “where I was before I was created.”1 Yet mystical annihilation proves to be a complex idea, with significant variants across the range of late-medieval spirituality. Although the concept became widespread only in the calamitous fourteenth century, it first emerged in the relatively calm 1290s. More remarkably, it emerged simultaneously in the writings of three women who lived far apart and could not possibly have known of each other. Three great works of women’s mysticism came into being in this decade and all profess the new doctrine, though in different ways and to differing degrees.Mechthild of Hackeborn, Angela of Foligno, and Marguerite Porete were exact contemporaries who differed in language, social status, and modes of religious life; their books diverge no less in genre, modes of production, and posthumous destinies. Thus comparing them can provide a way to contextualize the radical idea of annihilatio, which Bernard McGinn links expressly with women, as it took shape within the varied contexts of their authorship.2 Yet a soul’s desire for annihilation is on some level deeply opposed to a desire for authorship, which can preserve the trace of an individual self for all time. So this article asks two interrelated questions. First, what are the roots of mystical annihilation? Where does this new concept come from, and how does it coalesce in the writings of these very different women? Second, how do they negotiate the conflict, already voiced by Saint Paul, between a pastoral desire to teach and a mystical “desire to be dissolved and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Phil. 1.23)? I focus especially on the scene of writing, which is dramatized in these and other women’s texts because it was so difficult and risky.3 All three express conflict about their literary projects, but they do so in distinctly individual modes, allowing us to ask how the ways they understood annihilation relate to the ways they understood writing.Mechthild of Hackeborn: Annihilation, Ecstasy, and Celestial BlissMechthild of Hackeborn (1241–98) enjoyed as traditional and privileged a religious life as any woman could hope for. Her father, the powerful baron of Hackeborn, was related to the Hohenstaufen; he held lands in northern Thuringia and the Harz mountains.4 Mechthild’s older sister Gertrud (not to be confused with her friend, Gertrud “the Great”) was elected abbess of the recently founded nunnery of Rodarsdorf in 1250. Only nineteen at the time, she soon moved the community to Helfta near Eisleben, close to her family seat.5 During Gertrud’s illustrious forty-year reign, the monastery became revered throughout Saxony as a center of learning and holiness. The abbess was renowned for maintaining a first-class scriptorium, enhancing the library with the purchase and copying of books, promoting education, and encouraging frequent Communion and Eucharistic piety.6 Mechthild, who had entered in 1248 at the age of seven, became chantress, teacher, novice mistress, and effectual second-in-command.7The question of these nuns’ religious order has been much discussed. Though identified in several documents as Benedictine, Helfta followed a Cistercian customary, for its founding sisters in 1229 had come from a Cistercian community near Halberstadt. Only a year earlier, however, the Cistercian General Chapter had firmly rejected the incorporation of any more nunneries, so that status could never become official. Most of the nuns’ confessors were Dominicans (the only order mentioned in Mechthild’s Liber specialis gratiae), but the sisters also maintained close ties with male Benedictines, Franciscans, and Teutonic Knights.8 In fact, Helfta was one of the last great Stifte—wealthy, aristocratic, proudly independent female houses whose tradition dates back to the Carolingian era. The nuns, always called dominae, were recruited from the founding families (the counts of Mansfeld and the barons of Hackeborn), the lower nobility, and ministeriales. Their manual labor extended to traditionally upper-class female tasks like spinning, embroidery, and copying and illuminating manuscripts. In the 1290s, while Mechthild’s book was being written, there were probably about sixty choir nuns and perhaps fifty conversi and conversae.9 Mechthild of HackebornAngela of FolignoMarguerite PoreteDates1241–19 Nov. 1298d. 4 Jan. 1309d. 1 June 1310RegionSaxonyUmbriaHainautVernacularLow GermanItalian (Umbrian)French (Picard)Religious statusBenedictine/Cistercian nun, virgin, chantresswife, mother, tertiary, penitentbeguineConfessorDominicanFranciscanunknownSocial statusnoblewealthy bourgeoisunknownEcclesiastical fatebeata, minor cultbeatified 1701, canonized 2013burned as a hereticBook TitleLiber specialis gratiaeLibro: Memorial and InstructionsMirouer des simples ames anientiesDates1291–99Mem. 1292–97, revised 1299–1300; Instr. c. 1296–13101290s–1300s, perhaps revised after 1306Written byGertrud of Helfta and another nunBrother A., confessor (Mem.), and various disciples (Instr.)selfLanguageLatinLatinFrenchExtant MSSc. 300 incl. anthologies28–31c. 17 incl. fragmentsEarly translations (in chron. order)Dutch, German, English, Swedish, Italian, FrenchItalian, Spanish, French, GermanLatin, English, ItalianGenrevisionary recital, liturgical commentary, hagiographyspiritual autobiography and guidanceallegorical dialogueWithin this privileged enclave, Mechthild was a lively, energetic, cheerful presence. As chantress, she had a fine voice and sang with unusual fervor, though she had to resist a habit of slipping into ecstasy in the middle of an antiphon.10 As a teacher she was much admired; the sisters gathered to hear her expound the scriptures “as if she were a preacher.”11 Like other holy people, she attracted disciples who sought what we now call spiritual direction. According to her vita, “people would confidently disclose the secrets of their hearts to her, and she freed a great many from their burdens—not only within the monastery, but also outside. Both religious and laypeople came to her from far away, saying they had never found so much consolation from anyone else. She composed and taught so many prayers that, if they were all written down, they would make a book longer than the Psalter.”12 Mechthild enjoyed a close friendship with her protégée, the younger Gertrud, who shared her mystical as well as her literary gifts.13 But she seems to have been a favorite with all: “Everyone loved her deeply and every sister wanted to be her friend, even to the point of causing her many difficulties.”14Despite her learning and charismatic gifts, Mechthild received no divine call to share her revelations—an omission that sets her apart from many female mystics. So no book would likely have materialized had it not been for two events. The first was the landing of a meteor at Helfta around 1270—a meteor named Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose fire was dimming but far from quenched. Celebrated for visions and prophecies, the aging beguine had been harassed by hostile clergy and now faced encroaching blindness. As she could no longer live alone, Abbess Gertrud generously invited her to join the community at Helfta. It could not have been easy for the fiercely independent, now disabled beguine to adapt to convent life, yet she did so with grace. Mechthild brought her book with her—The Flowing Light of the Godhead, in Low German—and bravely continued to write, even though she had to dictate its seventh and final book to her new sisters. “Lord, I thank you for taking from me my eyesight,” she prayed, “and for now serving me with the eyes of others.”15 We do not know which nuns took the old beguine’s dictation, but Mechthild of Hackeborn could well have been among them. A chantress was normally in charge of the scriptorium, where liturgical books were copied, and Mechthild possessed a high degree of literacy. She would have been in her early thirties at the time. Her older namesake clearly made a deep impression, for the Liber specialis gratiae contains many allusions to Mechthild of Magdeburg’s book, as well as a moving account of her death around 1282.16 More broadly, the excitement of sharing in the older Mechthild’s authorship must have galvanized the community. If a solitary beguine could persevere so courageously in the task of writing, then why not the women of Helfta, with all their resources plus the gift of Latinity? Were they any less graced by God?The second, immediate stimulus for production of the Liber was a sad one. In 1291, Mechthild of Hackeborn fell sick with a painful illness, leaving her intermittently bedridden for long periods and causing her eventual death at fifty-seven. The formerly active nun chafed under the restraint of forced immobility. Not only did she feel useless to the community, but during the first phase of this illness her beloved sister, Abbess Gertrud, died. Deprived at once of the leadership of both sisters, who had dominated Helfta for four decades, the nuns were devastated. But the new abbess, Sophia of Querfurt-Mansfeld, had a brilliant idea. Mechthild had revealed little to date of her inner life, but on her sickbed she began to share some of her copious visions, especially with her prize student Gertrud. Abbess Sophia therefore asked Gertrud and another confidante of the ailing nun to write down her revelations.17 They did so in secret, presumably conversing with her in German, then jotting down notes, which they formalized in Latin.18 The whole process of transcription, translation, revision, and editing took at least eight years—as well it might, given that the Liber fills 421 pages in its nineteenth-century print edition. Only near the end of this process did Mechthild learn what her friends had been doing. At first she felt angry and betrayed, but with the help of several more revelations and a direct command from Christ, she reconciled herself to authorship.19This at any rate is the story the Liber tells about itself. Before examining it in detail, we should ask how plausible it is in its broad outlines. It is certainly no topos, for though God eventually puts his imprimatur on the book, it is not he who sets its writing in motion. Unlike Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schönau, her Latinate predecessors, Mechthild feels no call to preach or write. In fact, she is deeply opposed to the idea—hence the need for secrecy, which again is not typical. Other women who dictated books were keenly aware that they were doing so, sometimes (as in Angela’s case) expressing dissatisfaction with their scribes and seeking more control. Finally, such women virtually always worked with male confessors as amanuenses.20 The only other cases of nuns transcribing their sisters’ revelations took place at Helfta itself: the last book of Mechthild of Magdeburg’s Flowing Light and Gertrud the Great’s Legatus divinae pietatis.21 The latter was completed soon after the Liber specialis gratiae in a similar way, though probably without the secrecy.22 Disseminated in abridged form by the Dominicans, the Liber was surely an inspiration for the fourteenth-century genre of sisterbooks, or communal vitae sororum highlighting visions and other mystical experiences.23 So its account of its own composition cannot be dismissed as typical hagiographic fare. Although the book does not mention Abbess Sophia by name, the commission to write it testifies to her pastoral wisdom. Finding an eager audience for her revelations surely lifted the suffering Mechthild’s spirits. Further, the nuns bereft of their longtime abbess could have found a new sense of purpose in this communal writing project, reviving the thrill the older sisters must have felt when they assisted Mechthild of Magdeburg with her book two decades earlier.It is perhaps surprising that they chose Latin as their medium. The beguine had composed her Flowing Light in the vernacular, and the nuns transcribed its last book in the same tongue. When Mechthild of Hackeborn conversed with her friends, they almost certainly spoke German. It is hard to imagine even highly Latinate nuns using the learned tongue for everyday speech. But, as they well knew, Latin held greater authority. The first book of the Liber, constituting almost a third of the whole seven-part work, is a liturgical commentary in visionary form: the chantress recalls revelations she received while performing such-and-such an antiphon or psalm verse on a given feast throughout the liturgical year. For evocations of the Office, Latin was indispensable. The later books too are suffused with citations of scripture and liturgy. Both the Liber and its companion volume, the Legatus, testify to a level of Latinity that nuns elsewhere in Europe at this time would have been hard pressed to match. The choice of Latin enabled immediate, transregional diffusion, as well as the production of multiple translations—first Dutch and German, then English and Swedish, finally Italian and French. Where mystical texts were concerned, Latin was still the platform of choice for translations.24Seven chapters scattered through the Liber describe its composition and vouch for its authority. Among the most interesting is a dream vouchsafed to an unnamed scribe:The person who wrote this book, taking it partly from [Mechthild’s] own mouth and partly from that of her closest friend [Gertrud], saw this vision in a dream almost three years earlier. It seemed to her that this worthy handmaid of God, about whom we speak, was devoutly receiving Communion. When she returned to her place after Holy Communion, she was holding a large golden vial more than a cubit long, and she began to chant in a loud voice, saying, “Lord, you have delivered to me five talents. See, I have made five talents more” [Matt. 25.20]. After this she asked everyone, “Who wants honey from the celestial Jerusalem?” Then all the sisters who were in choir approached her, and she offered each one some honey from the vial. The one who saw this vision also approached, and she gave her a morsel of bread infused with that honey. As she held it in her hands, the morsel with the honey began to increase marvelously in size until it grew into a whole loaf, soft and warm. And the honey, suffusing the bread through and through, trickled through the hands of the one who held it as abundantly as oil. It sprinkled her bosom like dew and flowed all the way to the ground.25Here the chantress appears in the role of a priest, distributing Communion in bread and honey.26 The morsel that grows into a full, delicious loaf is a metaphor for her book, while the honey represents the sweetness of God’s grace flowing “as abundantly as oil” over those who handle it. In retrospect, the scribe’s dream almost three years before writing the book becomes its prophetic authorization.Other visions come to Mechthild herself. In fact, she claims first to learn about the secret book when a divine voice asks her at Mass, “What reward do you think [Gertrud] will receive for what she is writing?”27 Astonished, Mechthild asks her friend if she is in fact transcribing her confidences, but Gertrud is afraid to admit it, so many reassurances must follow. Christ appears with the book in his right hand and kisses it, saying, “Everything that is written in this book flowed out of my divine heart and will flow back into it.”28 Later Mechthild asks Jesus why she still feels distressed, though she knows the book is written by his will; he says her dismay stems from ingratitude. Yet again he assures her that he governs every phase of the project:I am in the hearts of those who desire to listen to you, stirring up that desire in them. I am the understanding in the ears of those who hear you; it is through me that they understand what they hear. I am also in the mouths of those who speak of these things. And I am in the hands of the writers as their helper and collaborator in every way. So all that they compose and write in me and through me is true, for I am Truth itself…. Even if they do not record these things as elegantly as I gave them to you, yet, by the help and cooperation of my grace, their work is approved and confirmed in my truth.29The proliferation of such anecdotes shows how Mechthild struggled to reconcile herself to authorship. Her humility, of course, heightens her saintly aura. But she seems truly to accept the book only when she is persuaded of its benefit to others. In fact, Christ tells her that “those who love the gift of God in other people” will have the same reward as those who first received it. His analogy is telling: if a bride is wearing a lovely necklace and other brides make themselves copies, each will have the same beauty.30 In the last of several thanksgivings for the book, Gertrud sees the deceased Mechthild in glory and asks her how she now feels about it. She responds, “It is my greatest joy.” Therefore, the scribe concludes, “if anyone loves this gift, it belongs to that person just as truly as it does to her who received it from God. When someone receives a royal gift through a messenger, he possesses it just as truly and gets as much value from it as someone else who receives it directly from the king’s hand.”31Like the priest distributing Communion, the royal messenger bearing gifts, or the first bride to wear the necklace, Mechthild is prima inter pares. By resigning herself to a written text, she offers her readers both edification and heavenly rewards, for everyone who reads the book gratefully will be as blessed as she and her scribes. In any case, her authorship is only virtual. Although she is the one through whom the Liber enters the world, its words are substantively God’s and literally her sisters’. In fact, Mechthild nearly achieved the anonymity she craved. Only a single manuscript, copied from a lost exemplar at Helfta, gives her name; others use at most the initial M. Even the hagiographic parts of the Liber (extant in the same manuscript) refer to her not by name but as “this virgin” or “this humble handmaid.”32 Such an attenuated, communal version of authorship is indeed compatible with a doctrine of mystical annihilation.References to annihilating union appear three times in the Liber, twice with the verb annihilare and once without it. In medieval Latin generally, annihilare is a synonym for “destroy”; its specialized mystical sense, the merger or disappearance of a soul in God, is rare before the 1290s.33 The three works examined here—Mechthild’s Liber, Angela’s Libro, and Marguerite’s Mirouer—are among the first to employ it. Mechthild’s book uses the term, as we might expect, in the context of mystical union: “Then Love spoke again to the Soul: ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord’ [Matt. 25.21]. With these words the Soul was totally rapt into God. Just as a drop of water infused into wine is changed wholly into wine, so this blessed soul passed into God and became one spirit with him [1 Cor. 6.17]. In this union the Soul was annihilated in herself.”34 Reinforcing Saint Bernard’s famous metaphor of water infused in wine, annihilatio describes an ecstatic union in which the soul loses all self-awareness, remaining conscious only of God. As Robert Lerner showed long ago, the image from Bernard’s De diligendo Deo enjoyed high favor with thirteenth- and fourteenth-century mystics, despite occasional suspicions of heresy, until Jean Gerson’s disapproval in the fifteenth century finally quashed it.35 The simile is one of several that Bernard used to convey the state of the blessed in heaven:36 “Just as a small drop of water infused into much wine seems to lose itself completely, taking on the taste and color of wine, … so it will be necessary then for all human affection in the saints to melt away from itself in some ineffable way, being poured wholly into the will of God. Otherwise how will God be all in all if anything human remains in man? The substance will indeed remain, but in another form, another glory, and another power.”37Both the simile of mixed liquids and the mystical sense of annihilatio have roots in Eucharistic theology. Bernard was undoubtedly thinking of the moment at Mass when the priest adds a little water to the chalice before consecration. “Grant us,” he prays, “by the mystery of this water and wine to share in the divinity of [Christ], who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”38 The prayer allegorizes the ancient custom of diluting strong wine with water, interpreting the latter as human nature—Christ’s and our own, now mingled inseparably with the wine of his divinity. In Bernard’s metaphor, what happens to the water in the chalice will also happen to the saints in heaven. By extension, it may happen to them even on earth in moments of privileged union. Annihilatio too emerges in a Eucharistic context, in this case a scholastic one. Commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences often pursue his question of what happens to the substance of bread when the body of Christ is confected: is the bread simply annihilated?39 Both Aquinas and Bonaventure, writing in the 1250s, conclude that it is not. For Bonaventure, it would be unfitting if God were to annihilate his own creature in a sacrament designed to enhance life, not destroy it. Though the bread is no longer itself, it does not cease to be, but is “transmuted into a better substance.”40 Thomas similarly defines transubstantiation as the conversion, rather than annihilation, of a substance.41 Nevertheless, in typical scholastic fashion, both theologians first assert the proposition they mean to deny, entertaining at some length the idea that the bread is annihilated when it becomes the body of Christ. It is easy to see how a mystic, describing either ecstatic union or celestial beatitude, could combine Bernard’s analogy of the water in wine with the scholastic concern over transubstantiated bread. If the soul is like water that has now become wine, it is also like the perhaps-annihilated bread that has become the substance of Christ.The nuns of Helfta were steeped in Eucharistic piety, and scholastic thought was not unknown to them.42 For example, the Liber celebrates the reception of Thomas Aquinas into heaven and explores the disputed question of whether certain problematic souls were saved.43 So Mechthild or her scribes could well have borrowed the term annihilatio from contemporary Eucharistic theology, probably through one of their Dominican preachers. It is interesting that in her mystical union, she is not simply annihilata, but annihilata in se. Ceasing to be “in herself,” she passes “into God,” losing herself in the divine substance just like the water or the bread.Annihilatio recurs near the end of the Liber when Mechthild is dying. As her agony is prolonged, the sisters have completed the prayers for the dying five times, yet still she lingers. Gertrud, keeping vigil at her friend’s deathbed, understands the reason: Mechthild “would not be assumed into heaven until all her strength had been utterly consumed and annihilated by divine power, like a drop of water infused into a jug of wine. Then, putting off all the insipidity of human nature, she would be plunged into that abyss of all blessedness and deserve to be made one spirit with God [1 Cor. 6.17].”44 The passage is strikingly close to the earlier text on mystical union; again we see the citation of 1 Cor. 6.17, the use of annihilare, the image of water in wine, and the promise of perfect union with the divine. These parallels reveal that the nuns saw ecstatic moments as a foretaste of union hereafter, when the soul will be “plunged into that abyss of all blessedness.” Metaphors of the abyss, as Bernard McGinn has shown, are often linked in mystical discourse to annihilatio.45The Liber’s fullest account of this celestial, deifying union does not actually use the term, but fleshes out what the nuns meant by annihilatio.When the soul of a righteous person leaves the body, if it is so free of all sin that it deserves to enter the mysteries of heaven at once, God penetrates that blessed soul with his divine power as soon as it departs. He so fills and possesses all its senses that he becomes the eye with which the soul sees, the light by which it sees, and the beauty that it sees. Thus, in a wonderful and joyful way, God beholds himself, the soul, and all the saints in and with that soul. He is also the ear with which the soul hears his dulcet words—words that caress the soul beyond all maternal affection; and the soul hears the harmony of God himself and all the saints. He is the soul’s sense of smell and its breath, breathing into it his own divine, life-giving breath, which surpasses the fragrance of all perfumes and gives life to the soul forever. And he is the soul’s sense of taste, by which it savors his own sweetness within itself. God is also the voice of the soul, and the tongue with which he fully and highly praises himself in and for that soul. He is its heart, delighting the soul and making it glad, enjoying his own delights in and with the soul in the most delicious pleasure. Finally, God is the soul’s very life and the movement of all its limbs: everything the soul does, God himself does within it. In this way that verse is truly fulfilled in the saints: “God shall be all in all” for them [1 Cor. 15.28].46This lyrical passage returns to Bernard’s idea in De diligendo Deo, the nuns’ source for the simile of water in wine. In heaven when “God shall be all in all,” nothing human will remain in man. Every sense and faculty will be totally possessed and transformed by God such that he is not only the object of the soul’s glorified perception, but also the subject who sees, hears, praises, and enjoys himself within that soul. If this is what Mechthild and her friends meant by annihilating union, it recalls Gerson’s famous remark about Marguerite Porete (whom he knew under the name of Marie de Valenciennes). With her “almost incredible subtlety,” he opined in 1401, the beguine could scarcely have written anything loftier about divine fruition in heaven. But, led astray by spiritual pride mingled with passionate love, she erred in making such claims about pilgrims on earth.47 In short, language about annihilating union and divine possession was perfectly orthodox in one context, suspect in the other—though, to return to Lerner’s point, it often flew beneath the radar. No taint of heterodoxy ever touched Mechthild, Gertrud, or their collective writing project.One further aspect of this passage deserves attention. Although the soul’s union with God is complete and deifying, it is not indistinct union because, in their perfect coinherence, God and the soul remain two beings united in love, not “one single One,” as Meister Eckhart would say. Nor does God perceive only himself within the soul: he “beholds himself, the soul, and all the saints in and with that soul.” In fact, the saints are mentioned no fewer than three times. No other mystical book focuses so keenly on the joys of heaven—and here the women of Helfta reveal their Benedictine roots. Mechthild knows her favorite saints by sight and greets them on their feast days; they often appear in visions, engaged in a joyful gift exchange with their friends on earth. Community, so profoundly important at Helfta, becomes even more important hereafter. Thus union with God does not result (as it does for Marguerite and some later mystics) in any loss of name, identity, or remembrance. That, finally, is why “annihilating union” as the nuns conceived it remains compatible with writing. Though Mechthild wants no credit for authorship, she is pleased in the end that the Liber specialis gratiae, a book written by and for her sisters, should bear her name. As she, now herself a saint, tells Gertrud from the other side of death, “I know that this is the will of my God and increases his praise, and it will bring benefit to my neighbors. Indeed, that book will be called a light of the church, because those who read it will be illumined with the light of knowledge.”48The nuns of Helfta had what we might call a house style. They wrote a spacious, unhurried Latin, weighted with superlatives, sweetened with so many iterations of dulcis and suavis as to verge on the sentimental. Within the Liber, it is impossible on stylistic grounds to tell Gertrud’s sections from those of the anonymous scribe or, for that matter, the tiny part by Mechthild’s own hand.49 Further, the Liber is stylistically of a piece with the Legatus, written partly by Gertrud (book 2), partly by anonymous nuns (books 1 and 3–5). Despite Mechthild’s anxiety about authorship, the overall tone of her book is confident, scarcely apologizing (as do many mystical works) for the inadequacy of its language. Only once does a scribe assert that what is written “is very little in compariso
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