Walking the line: Unfaith in the Middle Ages
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Walking the line: Unfaith in the Middle Ages
Amy Hollywood Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Abstract The paper explores the author’s continued love for medieval mystical texts that blur the boundaries between the creaturely and the divine ways of thinking a Christianity at odds with itself, undoing itself, arguably annihilating itself at the heart of the Middle Ages. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 180–188. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00175-8
I’m searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I’ve lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else? – Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. One side of the line is the daily world where we who have appetites must fill our mouths, we who have thoughts must fill our minds. The other side is within the world and beyond it, where appetite isn’t sated, where desire is not to be fulfilled, and where thoughts refuse to lead to knowledge. [To walk the line] risks blasphemy at the same time that it returns reverence to risk. – Dan Beachy-Quick, Wonderful Investigations
In her book, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–1282) uses her native German to describe an elaborate dance between the soul, adorned as a beautiful young woman, and a man of astonishing grace. Ó 2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 180–188
Walking the line: Unfaith in the Middle Ages
The dance climaxes in a scene that draws explicitly on the language of the biblical Song of Songs. Mechthild’s soul, the ‘bride of all delights, goes to the Fairest of lovers in the secret chamber of the invisible Godhead. There she finds the bed and the abode of love prepared by God in a manner beyond what is human (Mechthild, 1998, I.44).’ The lord speaks, words that can still shock in their frankness: ‘Stay, Lady Soul.’ ‘What do you bid me, Lord?’ ‘Take off your clothes.’ ‘Lord, what will happen to me then?’ ‘Lady Soul, you are so utterly unnatured in me That not the slightest thing can be between you and me.’ .................. Then a blessed stillness That both desire comes over them. He surrenders himself to her, And she surrenders herself to him. What happens to her then – she knows – And that is fine with me. (Mechthild, 1998, I.44 and 62) Eventually the soul comes to, for while one lives on earth and in the body, the ecstatic delight of God’s denuded presence can only be tolerated for brief periods of time. Hadewijch, another thirteenth-century woman, this time in the Low Countries and writing in Flemish, has a series of marvelous visions, many of which also end ecstatically. One day at Mass, Christ comes to her, first as a child, then a
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