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.

At the center of it stands a word: minne. The Middle Dutch and Middle Low German 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. Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century Brabant author of visions, letters, and poems, wrote of minne as a noble service modeled on the courtly love of the troubadours, with the soul as the knight and God as the distant, exacting beloved. Mechthild of Magdeburg, writing her Flowing Light of the Godhead in Middle Low German over several decades, cast the union as a bridal exchange between the soul and God, candid in its intimacy and its desolation alike.

The current’s most radical figure is Marguerite Porete, whose Mirror of Simple Souls describes a soul so emptied of its own will that it becomes “annihilated” — dissolved into the divine so completely that it no longer needs the Church’s ordinary means of grace, and does what it wills because it wills only what God wills. Condemned as heretical, Marguerite refused to recant or withdraw the book, and was burned in Paris in 1310; the Mirror survived anonymously and was long read without knowledge of who had written it. Her fate marks the point where this mysticism collided with ecclesiastical authority, and the suspicion of the “free spirit” that would shadow such language for centuries.

What scholarship establishes is the social fact of the Beguines and the authorship of these texts; what the texts say is harder to systematize, because they are poetry and confession rather than doctrine. The theme of annihilation — the soul undone in love until nothing of the self remains — invites comparison with the fanāʾ of the Sufis and the self-loss of apophatic mystics elsewhere, and the resemblance is real and worth tracing. It is not identity: each is bound to its own theology, and means its own thing. What the Beguine writers added to the longer history of mysticism was a voice — women speaking of God in their own language, on their own authority, before anyone had granted them the right.

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud · Middle Ages