Beguine Mysticism

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Beguine mysticism is the body of vernacular religious writing produced in and around the Beguines — communities of laywomen who, from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, lived a devout common life in the towns of the Low Countries and the Rhineland without taking permanent monastic vows. They were neither nuns nor wives in a world that offered women little else. They could own property, leave to marry, work for their keep, and gather in houses of their own choosing; and out of that half-cloistered, half-secular freedom came some of the boldest mystical literature of the European Middle Ages, written not in the Latin of the schools but in the spoken tongues of Brabant, Saxony, and France.

The anomaly of an unvowed life

The Beguine was a person without a category. She had not married, which placed her outside the household economy that organized nearly every other adult woman’s life; but she had also taken no solemn vow, which placed her outside the cloister and its rule. She kept chastity for as long as she chose to, and could walk away to marry without sin or scandal. She supported herself — spinning, weaving, lacework, tending the sick, teaching children — rather than living on an endowment. She might live alone in her own house, in an informal group of two or three, or in one of the walled begijnhoven that grew into small cities of women on the edges of Bruges, Ghent, Leuven, and Mechelen, with their own chapels, infirmaries, and gates that closed at night. No abbess governed her. No order claimed her. Jacques de Vitry, the Augustinian preacher who wrote the life of the early Beguine Mary of Oignies, secured a measure of papal toleration for the movement around 1216, but toleration is precisely the status of something that has not been given a place.

That ungoverned condition was the precondition of the writing. A woman who owns property, earns her bread, and answers to no superior is a woman who can keep a book — and write one. The Beguines produced what scholars now call vernacular theology: sustained religious thought composed not in the Latin reserved for clerics and university men but in the languages spoken in the street and the market. To write of God in Brabant Dutch or Saxon Low German or the French of Hainaut was itself an act with no precedent and no license. The schools held that theology was a science with a grammar, and that grammar was Latin. The Beguines wrote theology in the grammar of love songs. The two strands of women’s visionary writing in this century must be kept apart: the Beguines were unenclosed laywomen, while the Saxon nuns of Helfta wrote their Latinate, liturgical, Sacred-Heart visions from inside a Benedictine cloister that insulated them from the suspicion the Beguines drew.

Minne — love that wounds

At the center of the Brabantine strand stands a word: minne. The Middle Dutch term means love, but in the Beguine writers it carries the full ferocity of erotic longing turned toward God — love as a power that wounds, demands, withholds, and consumes. The word is feminine in gender, and it is borrowed deliberately from the courtly lyric of the troubadours and trouvères. In the secular fin’amors of the twelfth century the lover serves a lady who is sovereign, distant, and exacting; he suffers for her, is ennobled by the suffering, and is granted her favor rarely and on her own terms. The Beguine writers took that whole architecture of noble service and turned its vector toward God. The soul becomes the knight; minne — divine Love, sometimes God, sometimes Christ, sometimes the dynamic of the soul’s own pursuit — becomes the unattainable beloved who must be served without guarantee of reward.

What courtly poetry treated as a refined ache, the Beguines pushed to a violence that has no analogue in the secular lyric. Orewoet, in Hadewijch’s vocabulary, is the storm or madness of love: the near-bodily surge in which the soul both rages toward union and recoils from its weight, unable to bear the presence and unable to bear the absence. Love is not consolation here. Love is the wound that will not close. To desire God in this register is to be held in a state of exaction that does not relent, because the beloved is infinite and the service can never be complete. This is the courtly paradox raised to a theological pitch: the more faithfully the soul serves, the more it learns how far short its service falls, and the longing deepens rather than resolving.

Hadewijch of Brabant

Hadewijch is the supreme literary representative of this current in Middle Dutch. Almost nothing of her life is documented; what little is known is reconstructed from the writings themselves. She lived in thirteenth-century Brabant, seems to have led a circle of younger religious women whom her letters address and instruct, and appears at some point to have met opposition severe enough to drive her from her community into a wandering or homeless state. Even the epithet of Brabant is an inference from her Brabantine dialect and the Brussels-area provenance of her manuscripts; the alternative epithet of Antwerp rests on a later inscription and is the weaker attribution. That she was a Beguine is itself a scholarly hypothesis — the dominant one, advanced by her modern editor Jozef van Mierlo, but a hypothesis, not a record.

Her oeuvre comes in four parts. The Visioenen are fourteen visions, among the earliest vernacular vision-collections in Europe, composed around the 1240s; the seventh recounts a union with Christ in bridal imagery of frank sensuous intensity. The Strofische Gedichten, forty-five strophic poems, are now understood on musicological grounds to be songs set to existing French melodies — the courtly love-song repurposed as a vehicle of minne. The Brieven are thirty-one letters of spiritual direction. The Mengeldichten are poems in couplets, and it is among them that a block of more abstract, speculative verse led scholars to posit a distinct later author, conventionally called Hadewijch II, whose vocabulary edges toward the language of Meister Eckhart — a hypothesis grounded in style, not documents. Hadewijch’s original autographs are all lost; the works survive in three Middle Dutch manuscripts copied a century or more after her death, and re-entered scholarship only in 1838, when the German philologist Franz Joseph Mone rediscovered them after roughly four centuries of oblivion — though he misread the love-songs as worldly Minnelieder and missed their mystical charge.

Mechthild of Magdeburg

Mechthild of Magdeburg carried the minne current into Saxon Low German. Born around 1207 to a noble family, she became a Beguine in Magdeburg, lived the unvowed life for decades, and only near the end — around 1270 — entered the cloister at Helfta, where she died about 1282. She is the hinge between the two strands: a Beguine by formation, a nun only at the close. Her great work, Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit — The Flowing Light of the Godhead — was composed over decades, dictated and added to as the visions came. She cast the union of soul and God as a bridal exchange, candid in both its intimacy and its desolation: the soul as the bride drawn into the bedchamber, and the soul abandoned, dry, complaining to a God who has withdrawn. Her German is unguarded and direct, and it records, among the raptures, a sharp awareness of clerical hostility toward a woman who wrote such things.

The textual history is itself a kind of loss-and-survival parable. The original Low German is gone. The work survives complete only in a Middle High German rendering made in the 1340s in the Basel circle of Heinrich von Nördlingen, and in a Latin translation, the Lux divinitatis, produced in the Dominican milieu of Basel a few decades after her death. What is read today as Mechthild is Mechthild at one or two removes of translation — the price, and the proof, of a book that mattered enough to be carried across languages it was not written in.

Marguerite Porete and the annihilated soul

The current’s most radical figure is Marguerite Porete. A clergesse — a lay learned woman — probably born around 1250 in the County of Hainaut, she wrote in the Old French of the Picard-Walloon borderland a book titled Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties — The Mirror of Simple Souls Annihilated. It is not a record of visions but a sustained allegorical dialogue in which personified Love, Reason, and the Soul debate the soul’s progress toward God, with Faith, Hope, Charity, Truth, and Holy Church among the speakers. Reason, in the course of the book, repeatedly dies — scandalized by what Love teaches, unable to follow where Love goes. The literary form is the first doctrinal claim: the matters at hand cannot be settled by the disputation of the schools, because their object is precisely what reasoned argument cannot survive.

The core is the doctrine of adnientement, annihilation. To read it as humility or self-denial is to miss it. The claim is ontological: the soul has its being in God before it has being in itself, and its perfection consists in returning to that uncreated ground by relinquishing the contingent will it acquired in creation. The Mirror maps this as a sevenfold ascent — from keeping the commandments, through the counsels and the mortification of one’s own will, into a contemplative rest that Marguerite warns is mistaken for the summit, and on to the fifth and sixth states, in which the soul sees that it is nothing of itself and God is everything in it, and its will is taken from it and placed wholly in God. The seventh state is glory, reserved for after death. Within this scheme the soul takes leave of the Virtues — not in contempt of them, but because it has become Love itself, and Love does not need to be commanded to its own works: what was duty for the will has become nature. Such a soul, the book says, no longer desires or disdains the ordinary means — neither Mass nor sermon, neither fast nor prayer — because it has passed beyond the will whose office is to desire. The distinction between Holy Church the Little, governed by Reason, and Holy Church the Great, the body of annihilated souls governed by Love directly, places such souls under no ecclesial mediator — and that, more than any single proposition, was what the inquisitor could not allow.

The course of her case is documented in fact. Between 1296 and 1306 the Bishop of Cambrai, Guy II of Colmieu, condemned the Mirror and had it publicly burned in Marguerite’s presence at Valenciennes, warning her not to circulate it. She circulated it anyway, even sending a copy to another bishop for approbation. By 1308 she was in inquisitorial custody in Paris under William Humbert, the Dominican confessor of Philip IV who was at the same time prosecuting the Templars. She refused to swear the inquisitor’s oath, refused to answer his questions, and refused absolution from the excommunication that silence incurred. On 11 April 1310 twenty-one regent masters of theology at the University of Paris, without examining her in person, declared the book heretical on the basis of extracted articles. On 31 May William Humbert pronounced her a relapsed heretic and handed her to the secular arm; she was burned in the Place de Grève on 1 June 1310. The chronicler at Saint-Denis recorded that she met her death with such composure that many of the watching crowd were moved to tears. The Mirror survived her — passing anonymously into Latin, Middle English, and Italian, read for six centuries as the work of an unknown hand. Not until 1946 did the Italian historian Romana Guarnieri, recognizing in a Vatican manuscript the same articles transcribed from the trial dossier, restore the book to its author in a single column of L’Osservatore Romano. Sixteen months after the burning, the Council of Vienne issued the decree Ad nostrum, whose condemned articles on the soul that dismisses the virtues and need not show reverence to the Host are nearly verbatim transcriptions of Marguerite’s propositions — the document Robert Lerner called the birth certificate of the so-called heresy of the Free Spirit — while its companion Cum de quibusdam mulieribus moved to abolish the Beguine status altogether. The chronology is exact and worth holding steady: Hadewijch wrote two generations before Vienne, and Mechthild died a generation before it; the suspicion that fell on the whole movement crystallized around the one writer who would not recant.

Annihilation and its neighbors

The proposition at the heart of the Mirror — the soul undone in love until nothing of the self remains — does not stand alone in the history of mysticism. The vocabulary of self-loss and uncreated ground reappears, in a different idiom, in the German sermons of Meister Eckhart, who held his second Paris regency beginning eleven months after Marguerite’s execution, in the same Dominican house from which her prosecution had been directed. His Predigt 52, with its formula that the blessed are those who want nothing, know nothing, and have nothing, runs so close to a passage in the Mirror that scholars including Paul Verdeyen and Bernard McGinn read the influence as flowing from her to him; through Eckhart it reached Johannes Tauler and the Rhineland preachers, and the apophatic theology of the negative way gave it a respectable Latin lineage running back through Pseudo-Dionysius. Eckhart was condemned in turn in 1329, and the two condemnations — his and Ad nostrum — read together as a single ecclesial verdict against one speculative tradition.

Beyond Latin Christendom the structure recurs again. The Sufi doctrine of fanāʾ — passing-away in God — and the unity of being of the Akbarian school descending from Ibn ʿArabī — the unity of being — describe the dissolution of the contingent self in the divine reality on terrain genuinely comparable to adnientement; al-Ḥallāj, who was executed in 922 for an alleged heretical utterance, prefigures the pattern of the mystic whose deepest affirmation reads to the surrounding orthodoxy as negation. The convergence is not borrowing but recurrence: at the edge of what the negative way can say in any tradition, the trained contemplative arrives at a formulation the surrounding orthodoxy hears as the abolition of self and creation, and that the mystic hears as the only true account of what self and creation always were. The comparative study of mysticism traces these recurrences without collapsing them, and each remains bound to its own theology.

Scholarship, editions, and the surviving texts

What scholarship establishes is the social fact of the Beguines and the authorship and transmission of these texts; what the texts themselves say resists systematization, because they are poetry and confession rather than treatise. The recovery of the corpus is a story of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philology. Hadewijch’s three manuscripts — Brussels KBR 2879–80 and 2877–78, and Ghent UB 941 — were brought back into scholarship by Mone in 1838 and given their critical editions by the Flemish Jesuit Jozef van Mierlo (the Visioenen in 1924–25, the Strofische Gedichten in 1942, the Brieven in 1947, the Mengeldichten in 1952); the diplomatic texts are now available openly through the Digital Library for Dutch Literature, the DBNL (dbnl.org). Mechthild’s Flowing Light received its editio princeps from P. Gall Morel in 1869 (Offenbarungen der Schwester Mechthild von Magdeburg), with the Latin Lux divinitatis printed by the monks of Solesmes in the Revelationes Gertrudianae et Mechtildianae of 1875–77.

The Porete documentation is unusually full because it is a trial record as much as a literary one. The surviving Old French Mirror rests on a single fifteenth-century witness, Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 157; a complete Latin witness, Speculum simplicium animarum, is digitized as Vatican Library Vat. lat. 4355, and a second Latin copy survives in the Bodleian as Laud Lat. 46. The trial pieces themselves were transcribed by the Belgian historian Paul Fredericq in his Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae (1889–1906), and the chronicle that records the burning, the Continuatio chronici Guillelmi de Nangiaco, was edited by H. Géraud for the Société de l’Histoire de France in 1843 and is hosted on Gallica (vol. 1). The conciliar condemnation lives in the Corpus Iuris Canonici edited by Emil Friedberg (1879–81), where Ad nostrum sits at book V, title III, chapter 3 of the Clementinae. The modern synthetic accounts are Bernard McGinn’s The Flowering of Mysticism (1998), the standard narrative of the new mysticism of 1200–1350; Barbara Newman’s From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (1995), which framed the study of medieval women’s theology of the feminine; Amy Hollywood’s The Soul as Virgin Wife (1995), which reads Mechthild, Marguerite, and Eckhart together on gender and the apophatic; and Sean L. Field’s The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor (2012), the definitive reconstruction of the trial. These belong to the broader recovery of medieval women’s mysticism and the Christian mystical tradition of which this current is a part.

The three of them wrote at the limit of what their century would let a woman say, and past it. Hadewijch instructed a circle of women in the grammar of orewoet and was driven into homelessness for it. Mechthild dictated her bridal raptures in the German of Magdeburg and noted, between the visions, the men who wished she would stop. Marguerite watched a bishop burn her book to her face and wrote on, and went to the Place de Grève rather than unsay a sentence. None of them had been granted the office of speaking for God, and none waited to be granted it. The language they reached for was the one they already owned — the love-song, the letter, the dialogue in the kitchen tongue — and into it they put a theology of desire and self-loss that the schools could neither answer nor permit. That a laywoman could write of the soul’s union with God, in her own dialect and on her own authority, was the claim; and they made it not as a request but as a thing already done.

→ In the library: Foundational apophatic source — The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

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