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AMY HOLLYWOOD
From: M. Rubin, W. Simons (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, v. 4, Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100 - c. 1500, Cambridge 2009 (Pages 297-307).
Page 11
Community
Arguably medieval Christian mystical traditions in the West diverge most fully from Augustine with regard to the communal nature of union. Whereas Augustine insists that he comes to touch Wisdom with his mother Monica, Hadewijch explicitly rejects union with Augustine. After a vision in which she sees her soul, together with Augustine's, come together to be swallowed by 'the Unity in which the Trinity dwells, wherein both [of them were] lost', Hadewijch found herself 'poor and miserable'. Angry that she must share the fruition of the Godhead with another and that God would wish her to take pleasure in union with another, Hadewijch ingeniously makes her own lowliness the basis for her audaciously high claims:
For I am a free human creature, and also pure as to one part and I can desire freely with my will, and I can will as highly as I wish, and seize and receive from God all that he is, without objection or anger on his part–which no saint can do. For the saints have their will perfectly according to their pleasure; and they can no longer will beyond what they have. I have hated many great wonderful deeds and experiences, because I wished to belong to Love alone, and because I could not believe that any human creature loved him so passionately as I – although I know it is a fact and indubitable still I cannot believe it or feel it, so powerfully am I touched by Love. [24]
Yet despite her insistence that she cannot believe another can love God as she loves God, Hadewijch's work as a whole is directed towards communities of women with whom she wishes to share in this intransigent desire. Writing to fellow beguines (from whom she has been separated), Hadewijch calls on them to pursue the goals she here insists belong to her alone.
Hadewijch's anomalous claims suggest the tensions between the desire for a Christian mystical community and the insistence that human particularity remains within the experience of union with God. Augustine and Monica can – and perhaps inevitably must – touch Wisdom together because they exist as one in the exemplary human being who rests within Wisdom, their creator (for Augustine sees union taking place at the level of our human created nature, thus in and through the figure of Adam). For Porete and Eckhart, the loss of distinction between God and the soul occurs at an even more fundamental level; we are not only united in and through the created exemplar of our humanity, but in the uncreated source (in other words, in Wisdom itself). (It must be remembered, of course, that both Porète and Eckhart were condemned.)Here Hadewijch is much more like Bernard of Clairvaux in her insistence on the substantial nature of the created being who stands in relation to the divine. Yet unlike Bernard, who argues that union occurs only through the adherence of the human to the divine will, Hadewijch argues for a union born of desire. That desire, moreover, feels itself to be singular, even as it recognises its communal nature. Communities may exhort and support such intrepid believers, but at least for Hadewijch, her wilful desire is for Love alone.
24 Ibid. , Vision 11, 290–1.
