No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Self‐Transcendence and the Group: The Attitude to Life of Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Beguines
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
You should love what is not
And flee what is.
You should stand alone
And approach no one.
You should strive always
To be free from all things.
You should free the bound
And bind the free.
You should comfort the sick
And yet possess nothing.
You should drink the water of suffering
And feed the fire of love with the fuel of virtue.
Then you shall live in the true wilderness.
Mechthild of Magdeburg: The Flowing Light of the Godhead. (35 1)This highly poetic, but deeply paradoxical passage from Mechthild of Magdeburg, the thirteenth century beguine and mystic, can stand as a paradigm for the themes of self-transcendence and communality as understood and experienced by religious women in the later middle ages, and in particular those belonging to the beguine movement.
Mechthild advises her readers how to live in ‘the true wilderness’, a place located beyond our ordinary existence and geographical reality. This ‘true wilderness’ is reached by ‘loving what is not’ and ‘flee(ing) what is’. All that binds her to this world must be left behind, if the mystic is to rise above earthly ties and unite herself with God, her transcendent lover; a God who, like the Lady of the Courtly Lover, is a God of absence as well as presence, of pain as well as joy. Although Mechthild chose a communal form of spiritual life as a member of a monastic community, she realised that each of us must travel to God alone.
- Type
- Original Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1992 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Quotations, unless otherwise stated, are from Oliver Davies' translations in Bowie, Fiona, Beguine Spirituality an Anthology (London, 1990)Google Scholar
2 Bell, Rudolph, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar Chapter 1.
3 Bynum, Caroline Walker, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (University of California Press, 1984) p. 109Google Scholar.
4 McDonnell, E., Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New Jersey, 1954) p. 479Google Scholar.
5 Southern, R.W., Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 320Google Scholar.
6 Bowie, Fiona, Hildegard of Bingen: An Anthology (London, 1990) p 12Google Scholar.
7 Quoted in McDonnell, Beguines and Beghards, p 122.
8 See McDonnell, Beguines and Beghards, p 445.
9 E. McLaughlin, ‘Women, Power and the Pursuit of Holiness’ in ed. R. Ruether and E. McLaughlin Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Tradition p 102.
10 Jacques de Vitry, ‘Life of Mary of Oignies’ quoted in ed. Petroff, E.A. Medieval Women's Visionary Literature (Oxford, 1986) p. 7Google Scholar.
11 Quoted in Shahar, Shulamit, The Fourth Estate: a History of Women in the Middle Ages (London and New York, 1990) p 59Google Scholar.
12 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp 161 ff.
13 Causae et Curae 49, 29, quoted in Bowie and Davies p 29.
14 Gies, Frances and Gies, Joseph, Women in the Middle Ages: The Lives of Real Women in a Vibrant Age of Transition (New York, 1980) pp 51–52Google Scholar.
15 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals quoted in Gies and Gies p. 50.
16 Summa Thelogiae Ia Q 92 ad i.
17 Jacquart, D and Thomasset, C, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Polity Press, 1988) pp. 74–75.Google Scholar
18 quoted in Barr, Jane, ‘The Influence of Saint Jerome on Medieval Attitudes to Women’, in ed. Soskice, J Martin After Eve: Women, Theology and the Christian Tradition (London, 1990) pp. 89–102Google Scholar.
19 Gies and Gies, Women in the Middle Ages, p. 46.
20 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp 244–45.