Transgressive Saints
1. Hadewijch of Antwerp, from a convent garden, 1233 My mind‘s clacking mill
grinds and grinds.
Words confound, ward off peace. I stack wood, beat, mangle, peg clothes. I moisten dry clay, turn damp earth, tend beet, onion, turnip.
Silence: my true nature,
where nothing confuses your language, holy Mary, Mother of us all.
Plum tree skeletons find green flesh. Spring-time earth, water, sky,
invite surrender: separateness dissolves. I relinquish speech for seven days, rest in oneness
underlying sense, thought and word.
What is worth saying may be said without a tongue; what is worth hearing, may be heard without ears. I walk our north wall‘s length,
dwell within mystery near and far, familiar, yet impossible to understand. Campions, near the pond, beam pink light. Sky turns sword-grey; the sea no longer glints but heaves like a black bruise.
Here in the garden, five nuns, each widowed
to either plague or war. Last night, heavy with child, a farm girl came to our gate. Mary,
Mother of rich earth, fair and dark sky: we see your radiance in all things; we see all things in you.
They say: Divinity is beyond. But I hear of it in a storm‘s howl,
in the boom-boom of a torrent; today, in the rustling of leaves shaken by a breeze. I fear the Bishop‘s censure. Whether I starve, freeze, or burn at the stake,
I declare my trust: all will be well. My ducks nod and waddle in my wake, nuzzle fallow ground.
Here, see us, they say. Look, you earnest Sister, hoping to survive the stake, look at us.
This soil; that worm.
Trust belongs to a duck, a farm child, a robust worker. How can I find real trust? I will go out again, confront the place of my greatest fear and meditate there.
Help me, Mother, to forsake attachments which beguile.
I want to flow with sap of fidelity to all.
Hadewijch of Antwerp was a theopoet of the early thirteenth century. In my poem Transgressive Saints she is placed in a convent, which is not strictly accurate. Hadewijch and her community of Beguines chose an informal structure; they did not pursue the official approval of the Church. But, like a convent, her community was organized to pursue an ascetic and self-sufficient focus. There is no evidence that Julian of Norwich was familiar with the
seemingly sensualistic unitive tone in the writings of Hadewijch.257 But both writers take embodiment seriously, both literally and metaphorically, as a supreme divine gift. Their writings tend to be highly visual, direct, and not over-burdened with abstract concepts. Predictably, we have very little information about either woman. I intend to highlight the way in which Julian‘s themes are imbued with a non-dual tone. Along the way, her work will be reviewed in conjunction with that of Eckhart and Traherne.
Although Julian‘s background seems likely to remain opaque, it is obvious that she was highly educated, especially for a woman in medieval England. We know that wealthy women in Norfolk had access to books, because of the county‘s proximity to Cambridge. It is not known if she had access to La Divina Commedia. Since Dante lived at the same time as Eckhart, this is possible; Julian is thought by medievalists to have been familiar with Eckhart‘s work. Some would hold that she was influenced by it. Much remains unclear. But we might imagine her enthusiasm for such a passage in the Commedia as the following.
And all are blessed even as their sight descends deeper into the truth, wherein rest is
for every mind. Thus happiness hath root in seeing, not in loving, which of sight is aftergrowth.258
257
Cf. Hadewijch‘s spirit which ‗… sinks with frenzy in [the abyss] of Love‘s fruition‘. Quotation from: Hadewijch: The CompleteWorks, trans & intro by Mother Columba Hart, Paulist Press, Mahwah, NJ, 1980, p.244.
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Julian claims that some of the sixteen visions were seen with her physical eyes. Others were strong mental impressions, while a third grouping, which she calls ‗spiritual‘, consisted of silent teachings ‗in the heart‘.
I desired many times to know in what was our Lord‘s meaning.
And fifteen years after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said: What, do you wish to know your Lord‘s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love.
What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love.259
In one of the visions, Julian sees something small and round ‗resembling a hazelnut‘. The small object enlarges her awareness that each item in creation is significant in its own right. But each item might also convey a message. The nut can therefore speak to Julian of womb-like fruitfulness and of the preservation of life through love‘s close attention. As with the nut, so with humanity; Julian states that all of us are enclosed or enfolded in love. I once visited her reconstructed cell: a small enclosure, with openings both to the interior of the church and to the exterior world. I doubt that Julian would have regarded her years of confinement as a retreat from life. More likely, she saw them as an opportunity to be attentive to her many visitors and to hone the different versions of her one extended theoparticipatory communication poem.
One of the themes in Julian‘s work is that of ‗enclosure‘. This interweaves her pastoral concern. She believes she has experienced the enclosure of divine love. In turn, she has desired to enclose that love so that she might encompass it within her whole personhood. She repeatedly writes that divine love is all-encompassing, implying that it is simultaneously
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immanent and transcendent. The ‗object resembling a hazelnut‘ occurs in LT 5 of Showings. Later in the same chapter, Julian states that:
… our good Lord revealed that it is very greatly pleasing to him that a simple soul should come naked, openly and familiarly. For this is the loving yearning of the soul through the touch of the Holy Spirit.260
As with Traherne and Eckhart, Julian emphasizes personal experience. If pressed, they will place spiritual experience ahead of abstract truth. But since their tendency is non-dual, they are not going to create another dualism, in which conceptualization and experience are opposed to each other!261 Traherne‘s non-dualism can be nominated as ‗experiential‘. Relatively speaking, the non-dualism of Julian and Eckhart can be described as ‗more conceptual‘. But such labeling is not always helpful. The tendency to categorize our ‗ways of belief‘ is often a precursory move, along the path to excessive dualism.
As to their understanding of the Trinity, all three writers make use of the traditional tripartite approach. But there are variations. The divine is configured as triune and humankind is assumed to be reflective of this. The Father (maker and knower) and the Son (doer and sufferer) and the Holy Spirit (lover and bliss-giver) are reflected in human nature as body, soul and spirit. Julian puts forward two distinctive versions of the Trinity, in addition to an implied reiteration of the tradition.
260
ibid., p.184.
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Since my own prejudice is in favour of experience over conceptualization, I need to be careful not push the two apart. A fundamental opposition of ‗experience‘ and ‗doctrine‘ is hardly likely to prove coherent for any recognizable spiritual tradition.
First, she says that because we bear the image of God, we have the ability to see truth, contemplate wisdom and delight in love. These three abilities of truth, wisdom and love correspond to the ‗persons‘ of the Trinity. Truth corresponds to the Father, wisdom to the Son, and love‘s manifestation to the Holy Spirit.262
But Julian does not imply that the three abilities are independent of each other. Although God is triune, neither Father, Son nor Spirit is engaged in any activity which is separate from the activity of the other two.
Second, Julian puts forward a version of the Trinity which is even more distinctive, in that it partially subverts the ‗gender‘ of the Trinity. Her preferred Trinity seems to be that of Father, Mother and ‗Good Lord‘. This threesome is nonetheless one divinity. Julian also uses the word ‗Love‘ as an implied synonym for the divine. If ‗Love‘ was absent to any degree, evil would fill the void. But ‗Love‘ is not ultimately distressed by evil. This is because the apparent ‗opposites‘ have been (from ‗before the foundation of the world‘) brought together in Christ. To some degree Julian puts forward a theology of coinherence. The divine is readily ‗available‘ or ‗accessible‘ in Christ. The divine is ‗before us‘ (in front of us, now) and within us, yet beyond us. Here then is Julian‘s non-dual predilection: she brings God and humanity into conjunction.
As mentioned, Julian‘s non-dualism might be regarded as more conceptual than Traherne‘s, despite the graphic nature of Julian‘s imagery. In the first chapter, I cited poems by Traherne in which he objects to an overdrawn subject/object dualism. Eckhart (chapter two, above)
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This is the place to offer the following speculation: my writers regard the Trinity, less as a normative teaching than as a suggestive interpretation. They consider the Trinity, not so much as a theologoumenon but as a theopoem to be experienced.
markedly reduces the subject/object dualism when ‗the birth of the Son takes place in the soul‘. This ‗birth‘ implies a ‗death‘ to the self (small ‗s‘). To put an end to humanity‘s restless suffering, there must be an end to the self (as perceived by itself to be a separate entity). This might paradoxically imply that a personal self did not substantially exist in the first place. But it would seem more likely that Eckhart accepted an initial dualism. Otherwise, how could we freely choose detachment? And, without initial dualism, why would Eckhart be so devoted to the realization of our return to the primordial Oneness of the divine?
Julian is distinctive in her way of imagining God; her extensive use of female imagery for the divine is widely known. Aspects of her imagery are woman-centred and naturalistic. To use a postmodern phrase, she ‗writes womanhood‘. She does so in a limited way, but in a way that is striking for a medieval European. By contrast, Eckhart is cautious of the via positiva, believing that metaphor piled upon metaphor would contribute to distortion. His via negativa is recognition that the ‗Godhead beyond God‘ cannot be described because it is unknowable. But Eckhart‘s intention is far from reducing the divine to a non-personal, abstract symbol. The point for him, in this regard, is that a spiritual life does not consist of knowledge in the head. Julian and Traherne concur with Eckhart here. A ‗consciously-lived‘ life has priority. By this I mean a life that is both aware and ethical. Ideas ‗about‘ God are secondary; they remain important, and they retain an important link to the imagination.