Promised Bodies

Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women's Mystical Texts

Patricia Dailey

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231535526
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire médiévale et du début des temps modernes

In the Christian tradition, especially in the works of Paul, Augustine, and the exegetes of the Middle Ages, the body is a twofold entity consisting of inner and outer persons that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come. A potentially transformative vehicle, it is a dynamic mirror that can reflect the work of the divine within and substantially alter its own materiality if receptive to divine grace.

The writings of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine, engage with this tradition in sophisticated ways both singular to her mysticism and indicative of the theological milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Crossing linguistic and historical boundaries, Patricia Dailey connects the embodied poetics of Hadewijch's visions, writings, and letters to the work of Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite of Oingt, and other mystics and visionaries. She establishes new criteria to more consistently understand and assess the singularity of women's mystical texts and, by underscoring the similarities between men's and women's writings of the time, collapses traditional conceptions of gender as they relate to differences in style, language, interpretative practices, forms of literacy, and uses of textuality.

1

CHILDREN OF PROMISE, CHILDREN OF THE FLESH

AUGUSTINE’S TWO BODIES

Now we, my brothers, as Isaac, are the children of promise.

—AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of the announcement.

—PAUL, GALATIANS

We ourselves shall become that seventh day.

–AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

THE PROMISE OF THE BODY

WHETHER OR not we deem Augustine a mystic, Augustine’s writings are critical to Christian mysticism, especially that of the Middle Ages.¹ Augustine’s theological framework and reading of Paul—especially in his later works—provide the grounds for the development of medieval mystical experience, its understanding of the role of the body, the inner senses, and the oxymoronic time of mystic experience.² In Confessions, On the Trinity, The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and indeed throughout his work, Augustine strives to provide a theological and textual bridge between a person’s limited status in time and space and the promise of eternal salvation.³ Salvation is linked to a divine essence incommensurate to the outer human senses. How then can a person know of the divine, and, even if he knows of God, how can he know God, given God’s being outside the measure of time and space? Augustine’s work tries to answer these questions, explicitly and implicitly. His writing attempts in ways performative and theological to demonstrate how divinity can become manifest to human beings, despite its hiddenness. I say “attempts” because Augustine does not credit his own thoughts with theological certainty—he is conscious of being as limited as the condition he ascribes to all human beings, and his text bears traces of the boundary between human and divine.

One of the areas in which this is visible is his rhetorical style and conscious use of language. As in his Confessions, throughout his works he hopes to make truth, to confess it, to make what exceeds him transpire through him by means of language: “I am telling the truth, I am telling it to myself, I know what I cannot do” (Trinity 15.50 [435]) he writes at the end of On the Trinity.⁴ Like humilitas formulae common to mystics, Augustine’s acknowledgment of his own limitations may, he hopes, function as the sign of a greater truth operating through him. Hadewijch even makes explicit reference to Augustine’s consciousness of his own linguistic limitations in Letter 22, paralleling them with her own: “‘He who knows little can say little’; so says wise Augustine. This is my case, God knows” (CW, 94).⁵ As Augustine elaborates theologically on how the realm of the eternal aligns with the realm of the temporal, he attempts to demonstrably bridge divine and human realms in ways that are audible, visible, and comprehensible for his readers, even when he is doubtful of the truth of this endeavor. His own work itself is an instance of a promised bridging, in that it seeks to be a bridge between two incommensurate realms, making the divine more palpable to the reader even when it is sustained not by certainty, but by faith.

Like the “life” of a saint, martyr, or the soul of Augustine himself, the text hosts a possible affirmation of divinity. I use the term “hosts” as it cannot claim or assert this affirmation as its own: divinity may operate through something or someone, such as the reader reading Augustine’s work, Augustine himself, or the mystic who receives God’s word. This act of divine “working through” is conceived of as an act of grace, one that complements human nature. In Christian doctrine, the only one who “owns” or is identical to divinity is the Trinity itself, that is, the Father, the Son (Christ), and the Holy Spirit. The human relation to divinity, even in the experience of intimacy with the divine, is therefore closer to hosting than to possessing a quality of the divine itself. Even divine truth eludes the way we perceive it: for Augustine, the truth associated with God resides with language, alongside language, through language, shadowing it, so to speak; however, truth is not substantially of language, as we will see further on in this chapter.

Augustine’s understanding of the Trinity and the trace (vestigium) of the imago Dei, the image of God within all human beings, will provide the theological basis for this hosting, implicitly establishing a correlation between language, the mind, embodiment, and the promise of divinity. The imago Dei, that part of humanity irrevocably linked to its divine creator, is constituted by various trinities that trickle down to leave a trace in the exterior person (homo exterior)—what he will refer to as a means of invoking the Pauline exo anthropos—and its embodied sensible condition. The outer person’s mediation between material entities and the mind will be the first means for locating the Trinitarian reflections of the divine within human beings. For Augustine, the human person and, consequently, the human body and its senses are suspended between multiple addresses, commands, and destinations: the body is part of a corruptible material destined for death, yet in the light of divine truth, through this same body we are promised a glimpse of the image of God and the afterlife of the soul. It is by means of the body, even when claming a negative relation to it, that this ideal imago is traced; even in life, “the ideal is not escape from the body and the world, but reestablishment of inner equilibrium by unification of all one’s levels of being, which includes the body’s spontaneous submission to the soul.”⁶

Augustine, following Paul, distinguishes inner man (eso anthropos) from outer man (exo anthropos), but in Latin terms, identifying the interior and exterior homo and elaborating a complex regimen of inner and outer senses, building up “a complete anthropology of the inner man.”⁷ As Brian Stock notes, for Augustine, we perceive outer things “through our bodily senses, but we pass judgment on them by means of a far more important sensory capacity, which can be called the sense of the interior man.”⁸ Augustine will thus provide a twofold anthropology for the activities of human beings: as they dwell in the world bodily (the outer person) and as the soul inhabits the body while orienting itself toward God (the inner person). Like Paul, who distinguishes between sarx (flesh) and soma (body), Augustine too thinks of corpus (body) as discernible from, while also comprising, caro (flesh), yet ultimately, like Paul, his interests are in the transformation of the body as a whole when redeemed, a transformation that necessarily includes the flesh. While flesh bears the mark of corruption and decay, signaling the fall into sin, it promises to be transformed into a spiritual body. Like his favorite apostle, Augustine does not discard or deny the outer person, nor does he attempt to discard the flesh and efface its contingency on the outer person; rather, he seeks to reconcile the limits of embodiment with the promise of the divine.⁹

Although the outer person cannot claim the same kind of trinity as the inner, it nevertheless is a lesser form that promises a relation to the Trinity itself.¹⁰ Looking to the outer, Augustine notes: “Let us try then if we can to pick out some trace of the Trinity in this outer man too. Not that he is also the image of God in the same way as the inner man; the apostle’s verdict is quite clear which declares that it is the inner man who is being renewed for the recognition of God according to the image of him who created him (Col 3:10); since elsewhere he says, Even if our outer man is decaying the inner man is being renewed from day to day (2 Cor 4:16)” (Trinity 11.1 [303]).¹¹ Since human beings are made in the image of the divine, Augustine attempts to show how a trace of the divine is present in both the inner and outer persons, despite their differences and despite the outer person’s inferior nature. An awareness of the traces of the Trinity in both may, he hopes, ultimately help human beings orient their inner and outer persons toward the divine—if acknowledged, nurtured, and put to use correctly. The first step of this orientation toward the Trinity involves recognizing the difference of how we perceive and how divinity is to be understood. Augustine starts with the outer and is quick to remark on the outer’s negative relation to the Trinity. He elaborates on the partial nature of human understanding, showing how divine substance is incommensurate to our habits of equating things spiritual with substantial bodily entities: “Father and Son together are not more being than Father alone or Son alone, but […] three substances or persons together … are equal to each one singly, which the sensual man does not perceive (1 Cor 2:14). He can only think of masses and spaces, little or great, with images of bodies flitting around in his mind like ghosts” (Trinity 7.11 [230]).¹²

Although Augustine’s sensual man, or animalis homo, bound as he is to time and space, can only think of things according to his outer senses, conjuring ghosts there where an unfathomable substance is promised, something of this sensual man promises more if perceived as incomplete and incommensurate to the divine. If one conceives of the material body perceived by the senses as inadequate for measuring the divine, then one avoids confounding the divine with a material substance—unlike the Manicheans and other (heretical) cults of early Christian culture. For Augustine, through establishing a relation of the outer human body and bodily senses to the mind, and not in their absolute rejection, a person may begin to discern the figure of the Trinity. Orienting the bodily senses to serve the mind will be the first step in finding the Trinity within.¹³ The mind (mens) will bridge the limited body with the promise of the divine. Augustine starts with the body and works inward toward the faculties of the mind, tracing out various trinities with each progressive turn.

ORIENTATIONS

Augustine’s theory of the human body is intimately interwoven with a Trinitarian theology that seeks to unite a perishable, limited human body with the promise of unity and redemption in God. The human body’s materiality is, as I have stressed, indissociable from a future time in which it finds a truer substance and fuller meaning. This promise of unity is articulated in On the Trinity and elsewhere as a “face-to-face” encounter, and, following Paul, becomes actual only in a future moment. At present this unity is not realizable, for now it is only articulable as a hope and a yearning and not yet a sight: “The fact is that the man Christ Jesus, mediator of God and men (1 Tm 2:5), now reigning for all the just who live by faith (Hb 2:4), is going to bring them to direct sight of God, to the face-to-face vision, as the apostle calls it” (Trinity 1.16 [76]).¹⁴

In a formulation that will be picked up in an almost literal fashion by the mystics, Augustine explicitly refers to Paul and his evocation of a promised union of knowledge and perception with the divine: “But when that which is perfect is come then that which is in part shall be done away. … For now we see through a glass [mirror] darkly but then face-to-face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as also I am known” (1 Cor 13:10–12). In the present, this face-to-face encounter is only suggested; it is partially glimpsed through faith, and understood through Augustine’s attempt to bridge perception and knowledge by means of his book, De Trinitate. This encounter occurs in a time that—depending on one’s interpretation—can be described as a future Messianic or eschatological time and is therefore not tangibly present. For the visionary mystics, this time “outside” the present moment will be reformulated in the temporality of visions. Visions are “face-to-face” encounters with the divine, which transpire in a time that is not of the outer person or the sensual man, but of the inner person and its promised unity. Reading the embodied nature of visions will require attention to these differences.

Because the human being is both like and unlike God, made in God’s image but unlike God in its mode of dwelling in time and in space, Augustine is faced with the question of how to reconcile the body’s existence in a temporal and changeable medium with the unchangeable and eternal nature of its creator. It is only through loving and understanding what Augustine calls Christ’s “back,” that is, his being as flesh, comprehending Christ’s death in the flesh, and imagining what his front points to that one may be united as a member of Christ in the symbolic body of the Church.¹⁵ One has to desire and love that which one cannot see fully. Augustine’s language, which merges Pauline theology with an unusual reflection on Christ’s body, draws on the Pauline notion of walking by faith to illustrate the way in which the body and faith perform together, complementing one another:

But while we are away from the Lord and walking by faith and not by sight (2 Cor 5:6), we have to behold Christ’s back, that is his flesh, by this same faith. … All the surer is our love for the face of Christ which we long to see, the more clearly we recognize in his back how much Christ first loved us. … For we look forward in hope to the realization in Christ’s members, which is what we are, of what right-minded faith assures us has already been achieved in him as our head. So this is why he does not wish his back to be seen until he has passed–he wants us to believe in his resurrection.¹⁶

(TRINITY 2.28–29 [118])

This gesture of looking forward and walking by faith does not actualize unity in the present; rather, it orients the future “face-to-face” encounter with God. As I have been emphasizing, this orientation for the face-to-face encounter involves temporal and bodily elements. Read without the temporal futurity of hope and faith, the back of Christ does not signify what it should, namely, the promised unity of Christ’s members after death. Christ’s body thus offers human beings a means to comprehend the partial nature of the body and of the time associated with human life. As with the mystics, it is through Christ’s body that the faithful will be led to a “direct sight” of God; through Christ, unity in eternal time is promised. In finding the “trace of the Trinity” (vestigium Trinitatis) in inner and outer persons, people will thus be able to understand the ultimate meaning of Christ’s bodily existence and his relation to the salvation of each person’s soul and body.

Women mystics will use this figure of the face-to-face to articulate the encounter with the divine in the time of the vision. And while visions seem like an unmediated encounter with the divine, they are eventually related in mediated form as encounters with divine likeness or similitude—through images and words, accessible in time through narrative. In addition, one of the most popular visionary images is o...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Children of Promise, Children of the Flesh: Augustine’s two Bodies
• 2. The Mystic’s two Bodies: The Temporal and Material Poetics of Visionary Texts
• 3. Werke and the Postscriptum of the Soul
• 4. Living Song: Dwelling in Hadewijch’s Liederen
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index