Love is the force that compels Mechthild to write, and love is what determines the hierarchy of values in her world. Especially in the early books Mechthild's way of describing love is strongly lyrical. Chapters 1 and 2 of Book I are two of her poetically best compositions. They both set the lyrical tone and introduce us to the dominant theme of divine love-both God's love for the soul and the soul's for God. While God's favor cannot be earned or effected by human actions, one can remove the obstacles to God's action in the soul by getting beyond oneself (iuberkommen) and by having become nothing (ze nihte worden, I 2).
In I 1 Mechthild creates a dialogue between Love and the soul to illustrate how the soul is to empty herself. The soul complains that Love has taken everything from her: childhood, youth, wealth, friends, relatives, honor, and even health, consuming her flesh and blood. Love counters by listing what the soul has received in return: heavenly freedom, virtue, spiritual riches, knowledge; and she has been purified and drawn into God. When the soul continues to complain, Love offers itself to her and the soul feels abundantly recompensed.
In Chapter 2 Mechthild presents us with a poetically charged description of the divine "greeting," which she first experienced in her twelfth year and which, at the time of her writing IV 2, had continued for more than thirty-one years. So overwhelming has this experience been that it has made even major venial sins impossible. Here, at the outset of her book, she tries to recreate this defining experience of God's favor in words and to describe the heights to which this greeting lets her soar. These first two chapters set the tone for the lyricism of love that continues intermittently throughout.
Mechthild conceives of God, the object of her love, in various ways. God is the Emperor of the universe and is vitally present in creation, being "all things in all things" (11 19). God is three persons in one nature, with a rich interior life whose intimate conversations Mechthild is allowed to overhear (111 9). Most frequently, however, God appears as the human Lover and divine Bridegroom, passionately seeking spiritual union with the soul. To express the mutual love binding God and the soul, Mechthild often relies on two traditions: the lyric poetry of courtly love and the Song of Solomon. (Bernard of Clairvaux's treatment of this biblical text in his masterpiece on mystical love, the Sermons on the Song of Songs, reached Mechthild at least secondhand and unmistakably influenced her.) If mysticism implies union of the soul with God, then we must recognize that for Mechthild, as for her two principal sources, love's union consists as much or more in the yearning the lovers feel and express for each other as in fulfillment and oneness achieved. For the mystical beloved on earth, separation is as essential to love as union.
For Mechthild, two important qualities of the soul's love for God are that it should be bound and knowing love. Unbound love dwells in the senses and has not climbed to the soul. Unbound love is changeable and can lead to false love, as with David and Solomon. They did not sink beneath all creatures, nor were they wounded by love's power. Bound love transcends the senses and denies the body its will. In it the soul listens for the divine voice, sees the divine light, and seeks the divine will. Whoever is touched by bound love cannot fall into serious sin (11 24).
The soul's love for God must also be based on knowledge, but this seems to be personal knowledge of the divine Lover rather than the knowledge of the schools. Through the divine greeting Mechthild has this knowledge, and upon it her love rests secure. It cannot be taken from her by the "blind holy ones who love and do not know" (I 2). In I 21 Mechthild elaborates on the nature of the love she has sought and found:
Love, knowledge, fruition, and death. We grasp the first three terms easily, but how are we to understand death? Mechthild's medieval audience would have had no difficulty understanding her. Love and death are linked both in religious and courtly traditions, and Mechthild several times exploits the interplay between these concepts already bound together in her cultural and spiritual environment. In a tradition going back to Paul, Christians are exhorted to die to themselves and to the world in order to rise again with and in Christ.22 Certainly such Pauline thoughts would occur to Mechthild's audience when she says: "Nothing tastes good to me but God alone; I am wondrously dead" (IV 12). Later Christian writers, for example Richard of St. Victor, with whose thought Mechthild was familiar, also speak of love of God causing a kind of death in the sou1.23
In courtly literature the closeness of love and death is a frequent theme. It is in the guise of a minnesinger that Mechthild presents herself when she writes:
And again, this time drawing both on spiritual and courtly traditions: "I long to love him to the death, boundlessly and without ceasing. Be happy, my soul, for your Life has died for love of you. Love him so fiercely that you could die for him" (I 28).
Nowhere in medieval literature, however, is the bond between love and death so pivotal as in the story of Tristan and Isolde. In Gottfried of Strassburg's unsurpassed version, the prologue announces it as an underlying motif, using an oxymoron to express the paradox at the center of the lovers' all-enveloping love: "its dear life, its sorrowful death, its dear death, its sorrowful life."24And when Tristan is told that the love potion that is causing his all-consuming love for Isolde will be the death of him, he replies that "it has poisoned me most sweetly.... If my adorable Isolde were to go on being the death of me in this fashion I would woo death everlasting!"25 In their ecstasy of love they die, losing all sense of self, so lost are they in their union. It is this paradoxical meaning of death that Mechthild conjures up when she exclaims: "In this greeting I want to die living" (I 2). And it is again a Liebestod she has in mind when she says: "Love's death, a sweet distress" (1 30). Toward her life's end, longing for physical death and union with her Lover in heaven, she begs that she "might die of love in love" (VII 21).
The vehemence of her passion is often expressed in erotic images. In the dance with her Lover the soul hopes to "leap with abandon" before she comes "into the bed of love" where she shall "refresh" herself with her Lover. She wants to drink "undiluted wine" and go to her Lover as a "full-grown bride." When she enters the secret chamber, our Lord bids her: "Take off your clothes." For
We should be well aware, however, that Mechthild is far from confusing or commingling spiritual love with physical love. Such a thought readily occurs to us, steeped as we are in popular psychology. Mechthild makes it quite clear, however, that only the soul that has left everything and gone "beyond the influences of the flesh" is ready for the dance and the bridal bed. And the clothes she is commanded to strip from her are the virtues with which she has adorned herself (I 44). Mechthild's passion is a spiritual passion. The searing images of physical passion are just that: images.
Despite Mechthild's resolute commitment to spiritual love, her attitude toward her body is not simply one of grim opposition. True, she has her soul call her body a murderer (I 2), but one must note carefully the context of her remark. Having left the confines of her physical body to spend an idyllic hour in spiritual bliss within the Trinity, the soul returns, as well she must, to the harsh reality of her uneasy partnership with the body. Mechthild laces her description of their reunion with humor. Both are out of sorts, grumbling and reproaching each other. Humor is possible for Mechthild precisely because body and soul are not pitted against each other as equals in deadly combat. The soul that truly desires to soar in spiritual realms cannot be held captive by the body but is free to go to her Lover.
Ultimately, body and soul will be partners forever, completely reconciled. Later in life, when thoughts of death become more frequent, Mechthild imagines how she will speak to her body on the last day. Addressing it as her beloved, healed of all its woes, she invites it to rise up and receive its reward. In the past the soul depended on the body. In heaven the roles shall be reversed (VI 35).
As the book continues, we notice changes in tone and emphasis. Lyrical effusions of love's yearning and its fulfillment in rapturous greeting grow less frequent. More consideration is given to practic
al rules of a holy life, to criticism of the clergy, and to visions both cosmic and private. But her perception of her relationship to her divine Lover changes as well. The importanceand perhaps the frequency-of the greeting diminishes. In its place we find Mechthild speaking of "sinking humility" and "estrangement," ideas that she now views as essential to this relationship. In two chapters especially (IV 12 and V 4), she articulates the change in her situation and attitude.
If Mechthild had in the past concentrated her lyricism on celebrating the blissful heights of love, sinking humility allows her to explore and value another dimension of divine love. It "chases" the soul "up into heaven and drags her down again into the abyss." Only in experiencing all aspects of God's love can the soul attain maturity: "When she has thus ascended to those heights possible for her while she is still attached to the body and has sunk to the deepest point that she can find, then she is fully grown in virtue and holiness." Not only does the soul accept this "deepest point" as an integral part of her life, but she actively seeks it and "retreats from what God does to her out of love." Sinking humility compels her to compare herself to all other creatures and to conclude that every one of them is better than she. Finally, it brings her to the lowest spot "where she can go no further: under Lucifer's tail." Here she would ever remain to God's honor and be "adorned with the suffering of long waiting" as her only reward (V 4).
Paired with sinking humility is estrangement, which Mechthild describes for us in detail (IV 12). After the soul has rejected all earthly joys and comforts, God answers her wish to forgo spiritual elevation and leaves her among those in purgatory and among the damned. Asked by our Lord how long she wishes to remain there, the soul begs to be allowed to sink further. Soul and body, bereft of God's palpable presence, enter total darkness. Here the soul is assailed by doubts about the divine origin of all the favors previously experienced: If they had been from God, why would he now forsake her? The soul remains steadfast, relying on the memory of these favors. There follows "constant estrangement from God" that completely envelops the soul. Earlier the soul regarded God's absence as "anguish beyond human dying / And beyond the torments of hell" (II 2). Now she accepts and embraces it eagerly: "Welcome, very blessed Estrangement." In a transvaluation of values incomprehensible to reason and categorized as an abnormality by human science, the soul rejoices in its desolation, finding that "gall has become honey for the palate of my soul." When God wishes to cool the ardor of his love in her, the soul consents, but only "in such a way that it is good for you and not for me." To estrangement is added pain, but this only increases the soul's joy: "the deeper I sink, / The sweeter I drink" (IV 12).
This enigmatic disposition of the soul does not, however, seem to be the end of Mechthild's spiritual odyssey. As she continues to write, thoughts of union with God while on earth-even the paradoxical union through estrangement-recede and are replaced by a longing for death with its uninterrupted and everlasting union; and estrangement from God is not the last "divine favor" she is asked to accept. Since she has already renounced the world and God's affection, what, one might ask, remains for her to accomplish?
The last book of the FL, coupled with the circumstances in which its author wrote it, furnishes insights into what might be seen as Mechthild's final accomplishment. Her renunciation of God's favor and acceptance of estrangement from him were heroic; and that is, perhaps, precisely why this cannot be seen as the ideal and final disposition intended for the soul. In welcoming estrangement Mechthild is still the great soul whose interior life holds center stage in her own mind. At Helfta she is then required to give up much of what had been special about her and accept being ordinary. She must submit to the usual problems of advanced age and the blows to her basic human dignity this involves. Though she was willing throughout her life to seek and accept advice from those she respected, one can only conclude from her writings that she was fiercely and proudly independent. Yet she seeks admittance to the convent at Helfta and submits to its discipline. Though she feels some uneasiness there, both at being less educated than many of the sisters and at their tendency to regard her as a holy relic," she does her best to fit in and fulfill the community's expectations of her.27 Infirm and close to the death she so longs for, she sees in a vision how the saints and devils gather for her final struggle and triumph. But it is not to be. She recovers and must accept living onweak, blind, and with nothing to look forward to but ordinary banal human suffering (VII 63).
Renouncing God's favors and rejoicing at estrangement from him had been a noble gesture because it was done freely and with full human vigor. Now she has no choice but to accept her demeaning dependence on others. She must renounce herself and "let go," as the mystics urge, but not in some special sense limited to God's special friends. Rather, she, the visionary, the ecstatic, God's special messenger to Holy Christianity, must relinquish control over herself, as those must do who are feeble and helpless.
To the extent that one dare judge in such matters, it seems that she was equal to the challenge of accepting her very ordinary human lot. In the next-to-last chapter she composes a prayer, poignant in its directness and simplicity, which expresses her acknowledgment of her helplessness and her reaction to it. She thanks God that he has taken everything from her-her ability to provide food and clothing for herself, her eyesight, the use of her hands, her strength-thus forcing her to rely on others to take care of her basic needs. She has nothing left to give but her gratitude, as she humbly accepts the help of others. God has even stripped from her the "strength of my heart," and she thanks him for serving her "with the hearts of others" (VII 64). Love, knowledge, fruition, death she had written years before (1 21). It is perhaps a changed and deepened understanding of all that this entails which informs the concluding parts of The Flowing Light of the Godhead.
6. A Note on the Translation
Translations are by nature inferior to the originals. This is especially true concerning texts with such literary richness as the FL possesses. It is incumbent upon the translator both to set priorities and to explain, when possible, what the translation fails to accomplish. In a text such as the FL, which exploits the devices and conventions of literature but which, in fact, is trying to achieve a supra-literary goal, I have felt compelled to make content-the sense of what Mechthild is saying-the primary concern, even when this involves failing to reproduce adequately the form into which Mechthild casts her meaning. I have occasionally added some explanatory notes regarding literary forms and devices to help the reader become aware of what the translation has failed to accomplish. One pervasive aspect of Mechthild's style, however, which I have not been able to approximate in the translation, needs a more elaborate explanation than can be achieved in notes to individual passages. This is her peculiar conception and use of a literary region between prose and verse.
As the critical edition points out, Morel's edition, by how it made the text appear on the page, divided Mechthild's writing sharply into prose and verse, as though she were following the tra dition of prosimetrum, as found, say, in Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy.28 Actually, Mechthild's style is much more differentiated, and she delights especially in transitional forms between prose and verse. The device she employs to create this diversity is colon rhyme; that is, units shorter than a sentence that are bound together by rhyme. Sometimes this device is used loosely and spread out over a section of text in such a way that it is scarcely noticeable. Frequently then, at the close of a chapter, Mechthild will intensify its use, so that it occurs almost without interruption over several lines of text. Before illustrating this through examples, we must also examine Mechthild's concept of rhyme, because it is quite foreign to modern sensibilities. More frequent than rhyme as it is normally understood-as the correspondence of vowel and consonant sounds at the end of a word (can-man; token-broken) - are occurrences of assonance or vowel rhyme, where only the vowels correspond (can-fat; token-over) .29The following examples with their translations are offered to clarify
:
These three examples give the reader some idea of the diverse ways in which Mechthild employs different kinds of rhyme. The first example approximates closely a modern conception of rhyming verse, and the content is appropriate to the lyric form as well. The second example shows a predominance of assonance or vowel rhyme with an occurrence of conventional rhyme and an example of identical rhyme (minnet-minnet) thrown in for good measure. Again the linguistic structure and the content seem closer to verse than prose. In such cases I have, as here, usually cast the passage into verse-like lines without attempting to recreate the rhyme or assonance of the original. In like manner, I have not been overly concerned to reproduce the rhythms of the original, which are, in any case, most often irregular.
The third example contains a type of writing quite frequent in the FL. The passage begins as straight prose with no adornment of rhyme or assonance. The content, too, seems best suited to be expressed in prose. Then assonance sets in, punctuating the text at irregular intervals but in no way providing a verse-like structure for the whole. I have generally translated such passages into English prose. Also, following the practice of the critical edition and Schmidt in her translation, I have rendered several passages arguably more verse-like than prose-like in the original as prose. Hence, in such cases, there is no indication in the translation of this aspect of the original.
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