SOURCE: Duclow, Donald F. “The Hungers of Hadewijch and Eckhart.” Journal of Religion 80, no. 3 (July 2000): 421-41.

[In the following essay, Duclow highlights mystical symbolism associated with eating and hunger in the works of Hadewijch and Meister Eckhart.]

“During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances, … but today that is quite impossible.”¹ So begins Kafka's story “The Hunger Artist,” featuring the fictional last of a starving breed. Yet as Kafka and his artist knew, with changing tastes, “fasting would surely come into fashion again at some future date.”² That date arrived some time ago in academe—and nowhere more vigorously than in the study of medieval women's spirituality.

Caroline Bynum's landmark study Holy Feast and Holy Fast considers fasting and hunger within the broader context of the religious and gendered meanings of food and eating. She describes “a threefold pattern” in the lives and writings of medieval women: “Women fast, women feed others, and women eat (but never ordinary food). Women fast—and hunger becomes an image for excruciating, never-satiated love of God. Women feed—and their bodies become an image of suffering poured out for others. Women eat—and whether they devour the filth of sick bodies or the blood and flesh of the eucharist, the foods are Christ's suffering and Christ's humanity with which one must join before approaching triumph, glory, or divinity.”³ Bynum finds this entire pattern in the writings of Hadewijch, the Flemish Beguine of the early thirteenth century.⁴ In a Eucharistic vision, she is fed by the Christ child. She repeatedly urges her Beguine community to service and speaks of her loving in terms of feeding: “I suckle with my blood.” I will first discuss Hadewijch's symbolic use of Eucharistic eating, and then concentrate on how she develops the first element in Bynum's pattern: hunger as the image for an insatiable love of God.

I will then discuss similar imagery in Meister Eckhart's Lecture on Ecclesiasticus 24:29—“They that eat me, shall yet hunger”—which presents an extended commentary on eating and hungering for God. We shall see that Hadewijch and Eckhart develop the cycle of hunger and eating into a dialectic of infinite desire. This comparison enables us to read both Hadewijch and Eckhart in new ways. Hadewijch displays a dialectical rigor that marks her as Eckhart's peer, while his Lecture shows his appropriation of a major theme developed by Hadewijch and other thirteenth-century women. In this comparison Hadewijch need not be a direct “source” for Eckhart, but her writings—and more broadly Bynum's Holy Feast—provide an intriguing context for his gloss on Ecclesiasticus.⁵ Hadewijch and Eckhart write within a common tradition where food and hunger were major practical, religious concerns that took on extraordinary symbolic importance.

I. HADEWIJCH

Hadewijch's writings include letters, stanzaic poems, visions, and poems in couplets (Mengeldichten). Her central theme throughout is Minne, or love. Barbara Newman describes her under the heading of “mystique courtoise” to indicate her fusion of bridal mysticism and the troubadour or courtly poetry of love.⁶ This fusion complicated the established bridal mysticism based on the Song of Songs in several ways. Since Minne is a feminine noun, some gender bending became necessary. Hadewijch sometimes takes the role of the knight pursuing Lady Love; in other texts she identifies Love with Christ as male and herself as the lover/bride; and elsewhere she speaks in exclusively female terms of the soul's or her own relation to Minne.⁷ Courtly themes also complicate Hadewijch's account of love in other ways. In particular, amor de lonh or “love from afar” intensifies the pattern of Love's alternating presence in ecstatic union and devastating withdrawal. As Hadewijch explores this pattern, she exposes the many tensions of loving through a dialectic of opposites: Love's wounding cures all, her concealing reveals, her silence is song, “her withdrawal is approach.”⁸ In nearly every setting, Hadewijch displays the strength and intensity of her desire. In “Vision 7” she declares, “I desired to have full fruition of my Beloved, and to understand and taste him to the full.”⁹ If in “Vision 7” her passion yields an ecstatic, orgasmic union with Christ, she more often speaks of Love's absence and her own frustrated desire. Yet as we shall see, she finds fulfillment even in absence and unending desire.

We know little about Hadewijch's life and, therefore, cannot comment on her practices of eating and fasting. But she develops striking images of food and hunger that express many of her core themes and tensions with clarity and power. Bynum neatly summarizes the paradoxical play between these metaphors: “Her central food images are images of an eating that leaves one hungry, of an unfulfilled craving that is the only food.”¹⁰ Two of her poems express this play concisely and forcefully. “Poem in Couplets 16” concerns the Eucharist and eating, and “Stanzaic Poem 33” unfolds a dialectic of hunger and eating. By reading these poems closely, we can see how Hadewijch develops her key themes and the tensions within them.

A. “POEM IN COUPLETS 16”

“Poem in Couplets 16” describes “Love's Seven Names.” In discussing the first name, “chain,” Hadewijch connects love's binding power with the Eucharist. This section of the poem merits quoting at length:

This is the chain that binds all [in union]	27
So that each knows the other through and through
In the anguish or the repose or the madness [of Love],
And eats his flesh and drinks his blood:	30
The heart of each devours the other's heart,
One soul assaults the other [and invades] it completely,
As he who is Love itself showed us
When he gave us himself to eat,
Disconcerting the thoughts of man.	35
By this he made known to us
That love's most intimate union
Is through eating, tasting, and seeing interiorly.
He eats us; we think we eat him,
And we do eat him, of this we can be certain.	40
But because he remains so undevoured,
And so untouched, and so undesired,
Each [of us] remains uneaten [by him]
And separated so far from each other.
But let him who is held captive by these chains	45
Not cease to eat his fill,
If he wishes to know and taste beyond his dreams
The Godhood and the Manhood!
The chains of Love explain these words;
I to my Beloved, and my beloved to me!11

The final line presents this discussion of love's “chain” as a commentary on the intimacy between the lovers of the Song of Songs (2:16). The Song's bride and bridegroom had long been the focus for mystical commentary on the relation between Christ and the human soul, and here Hadewijch links this theme to the Eucharist. In giving us his body and blood, Christ—“he who is Love itself”—provides the model for intimacy as mutual eating. As Eckhart will also make clear, in the Eucharist not only do we take Love/Christ's flesh and blood into ourselves, but “He eats us” (line 39) as we are assimilated to his “Godhood and Manhood” (line 48). Bynum rightly emphasizes the physicality of this union, “that fusion of fleshly humanness with fleshly humanness that Hadewijch saw as necessary for uniting with a God-who-is-man.”¹² Yet the poem also suggests how complex and tangled Hadewijch finds this union to be. Love brings anguish and madness as well as repose (line 29), and union requires the violence of assault (line 32). Nor is the union complete, as the repeated negatives in lines 41-44 lament: “undesire” on our part leaves Love/Christ “undevoured,” so that both Christ and ourselves are “uneaten” and cut off from one other. The human refusal or failure to love and eat thus thwarts communion. The lines following those shift focus to the lover who desires passionately and “is held captive by these chains” and urge that he “not cease to eat his fill” if he is “to know and taste … / the Godhood and the Manhood” (lines 45-48). Here there is the promise of fullness.

Naming Love as “dew,” Hadewijch later describes the joy of the Song's lover/bride in receiving the Beloved's kiss. She again uses images of eating and drinking. In the kiss,

As soon as Love thus touches the soul,
She eats its flesh and drinks its blood.
Love that thus dissolves the loved soul
Sweetly leads them both
To the invisible kiss—
That same kiss which fully unites
The Three Persons in one sole Being.(13)

The kiss resumes the Eucharistic meal, but with a new twist since here it is Lady Love who eats and drinks the soul's flesh and blood. Having previously been promised union with Christ's humanity and divinity, the soul now enters the divine life of the Trinity itself. This bliss does not last, however, and the lover has more to suffer. In some of her most dramatic lines, Hadewijch describes Love's seventh and final name:

          Hell is the seventh name
Of this Love wherein I suffer. …
In Love nothing else is required
But disquiet and torture without pity; …
To be wholly devoured and engulfed
In her groundless nature,
To founder unceasingly in heat and cold
In the deep, insurmountable darkness of Love.
This outdoes the torments of hell.(14)

Here it is no longer the weakness of human desire that causes the lover to fall short of union. Rather, Hadewijch strikes a more radical and apophatic note in describing the lover's pains. For divine Love herself is such that human desire can never come to rest in her. No matter how thorough the devouring and engulfing, Love's “groundless nature” and “deep, insurmountable darkness” remain inexhaustibly beyond human reach. Moving into this abyss of Love, the lover's only recourse is to yield within unending desire and the storms of Love.¹⁵ Hence, the poem later cautions that “for Love nothing succeeds / But the constant acceptance of caresses and blows.” In the midst of Love's hell, only such fidelity sustains the determination that “if we act thus, we must conquer. / Though we are far off, we shall reach knowledge.”¹⁶

B. “STANZAIC POEM 33”

Hadewijch's “Stanzaic Poem 33,” “Hunger for Love,” proclaims Love's paradoxical ways in terms of hunger and satiety or fullness.¹⁷ The opening stanzas announce a season of renewal and introduce a courtly distinction between lovers who are “base” or lowly and those who are “born of love” or noble. In contemporary terms, the base are conditional lovers who set limits to their commitment and expect returns for their efforts. They find Love's service a heavy burden. In contrast, those “born of love” place no conditions on their love and bear pains so intense that they make the base lovers' hesitancy appear sensible. Yet they find “profit” in their pain and “holy affliction.” From the poem's start, Hadewijch thus notes the stressful tensions involved in noble love—tensions that the rest of the poem develops.

The next two stanzas describe the noble lover's actions and set in motion the dialectic of hunger and fullness.

He whom high Love's nature touches.	17
Always suffers gladly
As in his deeds clearly appears;
He ever thinks them ignoble.	20
For the noble man it would be a pity
If he, by counsel of base-born aliens,
Ceased to perform those high deeds,
Which create hunger in new satisfaction.	24

Touched by Love herself, the noble lover is a chivalric hero who willingly seeks out difficult tasks, yet he is never satisfied with his achievements.¹⁸ Always considering them “ignoble,” he sets out to do more. For this reason, he is engaged in an unending quest where each new accomplishment provokes desire for further action. In this sense his “high deeds … create hunger in new satisfaction.”

The next stanzas form the heart of the poem and expand the dialectic of hunger and fullness.

Inseparable satiety and hunger	25
Are the appanage of lavish Love,
As is well known by those
Whom Love has touched with her nature.
Satiety: for Love comes, and they cannot bear her;
Hunger: for she withdraws, and they complain. …	30
How does Love's coming satiate?
Filled with wonder, one tastes what she is;
She grants possession of her sublime throne;	35
She imparts the great treasure of her riches.
How does Love's refusal create hunger?
They cannot know what they should
Nor enjoy what they desire:
That increases hunger over and over.	40

These stanzas express the paradoxical cycle of fullness and hunger as Love comes and goes. Love's arrival satisfies by bringing wonder and gifts as “one tastes what she is.” Love's absence, as she hides and refuses herself, separates lovers from what they desire and seek to know, and therefore “increases hunger over and over.” Both phases are essential as Hadewijch delights in savoring divine love's presence and hungers in its absence. The theme of love's comings and goings had long been central to Song of Songs exegesis and related spiritual texts. But adapting the courtly theme of loving from afar, Hadewijch finds new and positive meaning in the absence of the beloved—divine Love herself—because it provokes the lover's desire to increase until it matches Love's own intensity. The lover's vehemence and desolation then conquer Love. As Hadewijch says in another poem, “If anyone then dares to fight Love with longing, / … And Love counters this longing with her longing: / That is the force by which we conquer Love.”¹⁹ Hunger readily lends itself to this contest of desires, when Hadewijch praises those “who hunger for Love / And yet lack fruition. … / For they as one cleave wholly to Love.”²⁰

The poem ends with Hadewijch commending her readers to Love, and driving the paradoxes still harder and farther—into eternity:

To holy Love I now recommend
All of you who wish to know Love,	50
And who therefore spare nothing
So as to dwell in her with new ardor.
May new enlightenings give you new ardor;
New works, new delights to the full;
New storms [of Love], new hunger so vast	55
That new [Love] may devour new eternity.

Hadewijch composed the Stanzaic Poems for her Beguine community. Addressing these verses to the noble lovers within this community, she intensifies her rhetoric by calling them to “new ardor” in love. As the poem's opening proclaims renewal, the concluding stanza embodies this ardor in its urgent repetitions of “new/nuwe”²¹—the lengthening days' new light fuses with Love's enlightening; the hero's new deeds bring new joys, and renewed storms provoke new hunger until the rhetoric of ardor finally explodes all boundaries as an infinite hunger drives the new or Love herself to “devour new eternity.” Indeed, Hadewijch's language nearly self-destructs in the poem's final line—“Dat nuwe verslende nuwe ewliken tijt”—which may be translated more literally as “that the new devours new eternal time.”²² On this reading, the mounting pressure of novelty itself consumes eternity. Hart's translation, however, adds the word “love” here and in the previous line and thereby provides another plausible interpretation where Love does the storming and devouring. Perhaps appropriately, the line's ambiguity enacts a fusion of meanings at the poem's final, most intense moment, when hunger—whether of the sisters' ardor, the new, Love, or all of these together—becomes so huge that it breaks into God's own life.²³

At this point hunger and eating coincide. Speaking elsewhere about Love, Hadewijch says that “to die of hunger for her is to feed and taste; / … Her table is hunger.”²⁴ One of the Letters makes a similar point in more straightforward terms. Hadewijch writes that God tells her, “Your soul's hunger disposes me to prepare everything for you, so that I, what I am, shall be yours. Through your striving to satisfy your hunger for me, you grew up to full perfection, and you became like me: … one love shall satisfy the hunger of us both.”²⁵ We have seen how Hadewijch emphasizes physicality in her Eucharistic poetry, but “Stanzaic Poem 33” moves far from the ordinary, bodily experience of hunger and eating. Here and in similar texts, she develops a theology of desire without end where hunger and eating fuse and can no longer be distinguished. As in “Poem in Couplets 16,” fullness comes only in mutual eating when “one love shall satisfy the hunger” of both Hadewijch and God. Infinite desire then coincides with infinite satisfaction as they move into the depths or abyss. Hadewijch asks a correspondent, “O beloved, why has Love not sufficiently overwhelmed you and engulfed you in her abyss [diep]? … And why do you not touch God deeply enough in the abyss [diepheit] of his Nature, which is so unfathomable? Sweet love, give yourself for Love's sake fully to God in love.”²⁶ In calling her correspondent into the abyss, Hadewijch's final sentence elides the meanings of “Minne/love”: the beloved, divine Love, and human desire.²⁷ Once again her language enacts the fusion that occurs in the abyss where the hungers of human and divine love eat and satisfy one another.

II. MEISTER ECKHART

Eckhart shows nothing of the intense physicality that Bynum finds in medieval women's spirituality. Nor does he share Hadewijch's visionary experience of the Eucharist. Yet he takes up the imagery of food and hunger in novel and powerful ways that extend Hadewijch's dynamic of hunger, eating, and satiety.

A. SERMON 20B

We can find a convenient starting point in Eckhart's German sermon on Luke 14:16, “A man had made a great supper and an evening feast.”²⁸ Following exegetical tradition, Eckhart discerns the Eucharist in this feast when he states, “Here in Christendom we celebrate today the evening feast that our Lord prepared for his disciples, his intimate friends, when he gave them his blessed body for food” (pp. 241/342). Eckhart also notes the key difference between ordinary meals and the Eucharist. He cites Augustine who as a young man heard “a voice [that] spoke to him in spirit: ‘I am the food of great people, wax and grow and eat me. You will not transform me into you, but you will be transformed into me.’”²⁹ The Eucharist thus reverses the usual process of digestion and assimilation so that we become the God whom we eat. Eckhart, however, develops this point into a more extreme analogy. He first notes that digestion separates food's base from its subtle elements, which are then transformed into oneself. Speaking of “the food and drink I consumed a fortnight ago,” he says, “one power of my soul took the purest and subtlest part and carried that into my body and united it with everything that is in me.” To emphasize the total, life-giving identity that this change achieves, he adds, “It is as much one with me as what I received in my mother's womb when life was first poured into me” (pp. 242/344). At this point the sermon turns abruptly from biological assimilation to mystical union. Eckhart compares the body's assimilation of food to the Holy Spirit's taking of the soul's “spark/vünklîn,” which it carries “into the primal source” where “it becomes so wholly one with God, and seeks so wholly the One, and is more truly one with God than the food is with my body—indeed far more, inasmuch as it is much more pure and noble” (pp. 242/344-45). Here Eckhart radicalizes Augustine's theme of Christ transforming us into himself. As the terms “spark,” “primal source,” and “wholly one” indicate, the Eucharist effects breakthrough into the Godhead.

Let us briefly note how this sermon differs from much medieval Eucharistic theology and devotional writing. Theological debate concerned the presence of Christ's body in the bread and wine and, by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), came to explain this presence in terms of transubstantiation. Devotional writings, like Hadewijch's “Vision 7,” emphasize Christ's physical presence when they envision Jesus as infant, lover, or bleeding, crucified savior in the bread and wine. Yet Eckhart deliberately turns away from the body of both the Christian communicant and the sacramental elements. When Luke's text speaks of the Lord sending his servants to “the hedges and the main roads,” Eckhart identifies the eyes and senses as the soul's “hedged in” powers, while “the other powers are free, they are unbounded and unhindered by the body” (pp. 245/351-52). Only these higher powers—particularly the spark—respond to the invitation to the Eucharistic feast that takes place eternally within God. As Eckhart summarizes, “Nobody need ask what he is to receive in our Lord's body. The spark, that stands ready to receive our Lord's body, stands evermore in God's essence. God gives himself ever anew in one becoming” (pp. 244/349).

B. LECTURE ON ECCLESIASTICUS 24:29

Also conspicuously absent from the sermon is hunger—the desire and craving for Eucharistic food that characterizes the spiritual life of many medieval women. Eckhart does discuss hunger in a remarkable Latin lecture on Ecclesiasticus 24:29, “Qui edunt me, adhuc esuriunt” (They that eat me, shall yet hunger [or: shall hunger still more]).³⁰ Yet the hunger he describes is not a yearning for the Eucharist but an intellectual and ontological desire. As the lecture begins, Eckhart broadens his consideration of hunger by noting its metaphoric status: “Hunger and thirst are properly the desire, appetite and natural potency to act” (pp. 174/42). While thus distancing the biblical text from ordinary eating and hunger, he repeatedly invokes their metaphoric power to give urgency and vividness to central issues in his theology and metaphysics.³¹ The lecture presents two clusters of themes: one concerning the differences between bodily hunger and intellectual desire and the other concerning God's being and creatures' nothingness.

Eckhart distinguishes ordinary, bodily hunger and thirst from the kind of desire described in the biblical verse. The relation between desire and fulfillment differs sharply in each. The greater one's hunger and thirst, the more intense the initial satisfaction; as Eckhart notes, “This is why drunks eat salted things to increase their thirst” (pp. 179/55). Yet as we eat and drink, both desire and pleasure diminish until we are satisfied. Eating fills us and drinking quenches our thirst, and to go beyond this point would be gluttony and “disgusting.” Ecclesiasticus, however, describes a very different relation toward “divine and spiritual things”: eating and drinking these increase one's desire.³² For here it is intellect that desires and consumes. Citing Aristotle, Eckhart compares how the senses and intellect relate to their objects. As sight and the other senses attain rest and fullness in their objects, they cease to hunger and thirst; they even suffer harm if they get too much of a good thing.³³ In contrast, “The intelligible object … strengthens the intellect the more sublime it is, and for this reason the intellect hungers and thirsts for it” (pp. 177/51). With God as its highest, purest object, the exercise of intellect in understanding and charity provokes still more desire and activity. Similarly, on a more modest level, we academics know the energizing effect of teaching and research where there is always more to learn and discuss.

If Eckhart's focus on intellectual desire seems arbitrary, he shrewdly reminds us of the context for this verse. Since the whole of Ecclesiasticus 24 is a “praise of wisdom” (Ecclus. 24:1) spoken in Wisdom's own words, the verse's literal sense concerns the feeding on and the hunger for divine wisdom. Therefore, Eckhart remains faithful to the text when he says, “God, under the appearance and form of wisdom pertaining to the intellect, says, ‘They that eat me, shall yet hunger’” (pp. 178/51).

When we eat and drink of God, a continuing circle of desire is set in motion. To clarify this circle, let us consider the Ecclesiasticus verse more closely. We know that when we satisfy our bodily hunger and thirst, they will return soon enough. For the rhythm of hunger, eating, and fullness continually recurs as fullness yields to renewed hunger. So Ecclesiasticus brings little news if “adhuc esuriunt” refers only to this rhythm where those who eat “shall yet hunger”—that is, hunger again in the future. But Eckhart's discussion of intellectual desire here and in a German sermon suggests that he reads “adhuc esuriunt” more paradoxically as “they that eat me, shall hunger still more.”³⁴ On this reading, Eckhart can easily claim that eating divine wisdom increases the hunger of desire. Since God is first and last, beginning and end, the intellect's desire for God as end brings it to the beginning, and its hungry assimilation of the divine occurs without earlier and later phases of hunger and eating. Eckhart therefore describes an on-going reciprocity of hunger and eating: “Thus in corporeal things eating ultimately brings on disgust, but in divine things as such eating causes hunger. The more and the purer the eating, the greater and purer the hunger. Eating and hunger proceed apace.”³⁵ As Eckhart's sermon on the Eucharist affirms an ever present union of the soul's spark and God, his lecture on Ecclesiasticus expresses the dynamic of intellectual desire that continually feeds on God. In this rarified, Eckhartian sense, the lecture may describe a Eucharistic hunger after all.

Eckhart further explains the cycle of hunger and eating by introducing a basic distinction between the finite and infinite. For when desire, appetite, and potency seek something finite, “they eat and drink and no longer hunger and thirst at all. … It is the opposite in things whose goal is infinite, for such things always hunger and thirst, and hunger more ardently and more avidly the more they eat” (pp. 174/42). This hunger for the infinite provides the focus for the lecture's dominant metaphysical themes: “God, as infinite Truth and Goodness and infinite Existence [esse], is the meat of everything that is, that is true and that is good. And he is hungered for. They feed on him because they exist, are true, and are good; they hunger, because he is infinite” (pp. 174/43). The transcendental properties of truth, goodness, and especially being belong properly to the infinite God. All creatures are driven by an insatiable hunger: in themselves nothing, they perpetually “eat” of God, yet always “hunger” because this food is not their own.³⁶ In this parasitic ontology, God's being is the food that creatures continually devour; apart from this eating, they cannot exist.

Eckhart therefore wraps the Ecclesiasticus verse around a familiar passage from Exodus: “This is the meaning of ‘They that eat me’ (who am existence: ‘I am who I am,’ and ‘Who is has sent me’ [Exod. 3:14]), ‘shall yet hunger,’ in that they are empty in themselves and in potency to existence. This potency is a desire and thirst for Existence Itself.”³⁷ Like many medieval thinkers, especially his fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart considers Exodus to reveal God's name as existence or being (esse). But unlike Thomas, Eckhart so emphasizes creatures' emptiness or nothingness that they have no being that they can call their own.³⁸ Just as light shines in air but takes no “root” in it, divine being gives itself to creatures but takes no root in them. Rather, creatures themselves remain rooted in God: “Every created being radically and positively possesses existence, life and wisdom from and in God, not in itself as a created being.”³⁹ In Neoplatonic fashion, Eckhart here locates creatures' true existence not in their manifest, “formal” state as creatures, but in their enduring, “virtual” state within divine being as their creative source.⁴⁰

However, in other works Eckhart attributes being to creatures and denies it to God whom he describes as intellect, unity, or the Godhead above being. While we cannot sort out all Eckhart's positions on this question here, we may note that he considers God and creatures to be so radically distinct that no concept can apply to both.⁴¹ Hence, if we view God as pure being, creatures—precisely as creatures—are nonbeing; and if we view creatures as beings, God is beyond being and “nothing.” On this issue Lossky says that “in Eckhart the analogy of being gives way to a dialectic of being and non-being.”⁴² Hence, in the Ecclesiasticus verse the very fullness of God's being requires that creatures be nothing in themselves; and their nothingness in turn requires God's immediate, sustaining presence.

The image of perpetual hunger and eating gives powerful expression to this dialectic of divine being and creatures' nothingness. Indeed, with his knack for paradox, Eckhart fuses hunger and eating in his summary: “They still hunger not because they are not satiated …, but they are not satiated because they hunger and because eating and hungering are the same. He who eats gets hungry by eating, because he consumes hunger; the more he eats the more hungry he gets. There is no greater and less, prior and posterior in these things. This is the meaning of ‘They that eat me, shall hunger still more.’ By eating he gets hungry and by getting hungry he eats, and he hungers to get hungry for hunger.”⁴³ Amid this dizzying spiral of eating and hungering for hunger, we should note that no one starves. For Eckhart's parasitic ontology transforms the economy of desire. No one wastes away because Eckhart places us not in a world of limited food supply, hunger artists, and anorexics but before the fullness of God whose infinite being feeds all creatures and cannot be exhausted. Indeed, indigestion—if not starvation—occurs only if one seeks something other than God; for then “bitterness, labor, penalty, and disgust enter because God as such is not eaten” (pp. 180/57). Hadewijch defines gluttony in similar terms when she writes, “Whatever anyone takes pleasure in, other than God, is all gluttony.”⁴⁴

Here the moral and mystical features of Eckhart's parasitic ontology become clearer. Eckhart highlights these features in German Sermon 41 when he again cites Ecclus. 24:29 but now focuses on the “hunger for God's will.” Just persons are so eager to please God that they embrace whatever befalls them. Living without why, the just's “hunger” for God's will leaves them “satisfied” with their lives, however poor and full of suffering they may be.⁴⁵ A hunger for the infinite God transforms one's other desires; as the former opens to infinity, the latter fall away. Indeed, to desire “anything other than God's will” brings on “sorrow and distress.”⁴⁶ Eckhart thus recasts conventional language about God's will to evoke detachment and thorough equanimity in the face of grief and suffering.⁴⁷ And once again he does so through the image of hunger and its satisfaction.

In Sermon 41 Eckhart also links the just's single-minded hunger for God's will with God's self-giving and uses the same metaphors that underlie his parasitic ontology. As the “light” of divine being shines in created beings but takes no root in them, God's fullness and joy shine in the souls of the just but remain “rooted” in the divine.⁴⁸ This sermon also hits a strong affective note that recalls Hadewijch. For here God is a jealous lover who gives all and “wishes to please the soul, and will brook no rival. God … does not wish us to strive for or desire anything but Himself.”⁴⁹ Eckhart then confidently affirms God's self-giving to those who strive for himself alone: “God will not fail to give us everything. Even if He had sworn it, He still could not refrain from giving to us. It is far more necessary for Him to give than for us to receive, but we should not seek it—for the less we seek and desire it, the more God gives.”⁵⁰ If Eckhart's Lecture on Ecclesiasticus echoes Hadewijch's restless, unceasing desire, this sermon approaches her descriptions of satisfaction and repose in Love. Yet his path to that satisfaction differs sharply from hers. Whereas Hadewijch consistently presses desire to and beyond its limits, Eckhart here counsels a restraint or pulling back from desire. From the devouring hunger of the Ecclesiasticus lecture, he turns to a release or detachment that opens to receive God's self-giving. This detachment is one of Eckhart's major themes and cannot be developed here, except to note two points. First, in Eckhart's dialectical fashion, detachment is the opposite to the devouring hunger of unending desire and therefore its predictable foil; infinite desire and no desire, but nothing in between, carry one into the Godhead. Second, although Eckhart's detachment may resemble Hadewijch's surrender to Love, it makes the whole mystical enterprise sound much easier than she found it to be.

III. NOTES TOWARD CONCLUSIONS

Hadewijch and Eckhart explore the symbolics of food and hunger in similar ways. The hungers that they describe differ sharply from the fasting of Kafka's hunger artist. With his dying words the artist explained why he fasted: “Because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”⁵¹ Revulsion, not desire, drives his professional fasting. Finding no food to his taste, he fasts unto death. In contrast, Hadewijch and Eckhart speak of hungering for an infinitely tasty God who feeds them eternally and of whom they can never get enough. For there can be no end to hunger or eating when God as divine food cannot be exhausted.

Their hungers express an endless desire for an infinite God. As commentators have noted, hunger becomes Hadewijch's image for what Gregory of Nyssa calls “epectasis”: the human soul ceaselessly “stretching forth to what is before” (Phil. 3:13) as it moves ever more deeply into God.⁵² In epectasis the object or goal of human desire is infinite. Hadewijch therefore speaks of Love's “abyss,” her “unfathomable essence” and “deep, insurmountable darkness.” Eckhart explicitly appeals to divine infinity in his parasitic ontology, which underlies the intellect's ever growing yearning toward its object. Epectasis, however, speaks not only of God as the infinite object of desire, but also of desire and the soul itself as infinite in stretching toward this God. Hadewijch therefore envisions the soul's depths as “a bottomless abyss in which God suffices to himself: and his own self-sufficiency ever finds fruition to the full in this soul, as the soul, for its part, ever does in him.”⁵³ God and soul thus attain mutual fullness in this abyss. Eckhart spoke in similar terms of his and God's “ground” as being one and the same, and of the birth of the divine Word in the soul.

The desiring human subject thus discovers its own infinity in seeking God. Hunger and eating powerfully express this dynamic mutuality of epectasis. Both Hadewijch and Eckhart find this mutuality in the Eucharist's reciprocal eating. But at this point Hadewijch's dialectic is more rigorous than the Meister's. Whereas he limits hunger to the human and creaturely side, she stresses that an insatiable hunger leads divine Love to eat us.⁵⁴ For Hadewijch, Love's mutual hunger and eating then set off treatises place him among the early makers of Middle High German, Hadewijch's writings signal the emergence of Middle Dutch as a literary language. And her theological insight and dialectical imagination clearly mark her as Eckhart's peer in developing vernacular theology.

As a Dominican friar, teacher, and administrator, Eckhart was an academic who could scarcely avoid religious women's concerns. For the Dominicans were charged with the spiritual direction of nuns, members of third orders, and Beguines.⁵⁵ Eckhart's academic qualifications cannot be questioned and even became part of his name—he was a Parisian Master, or “Meister.” Yet his preaching and administrative roles brought him into close contact with women, especially during his years in Strasbourg (1314-23).⁵⁶ While his Latin works address male colleagues in the university and Dominican order, many of his German sermons were preached before mixed congregations or within convents for exclusively female audiences. Women's communities also seem to have preserved many of the German sermons. Summarizing the outcome of this interaction, Michael Sells writes that “Eckhart, as a Dominican ‘Meister,’ was placed in a position of administrative and theological control over nuns and other women, but rather than controlling the powerful currents of thirteenth-century women's spirituality, he joined them.”⁵⁷ Like his Dominican heirs Suso and Tauler, Eckhart may therefore be numbered among those who “cultivated or were influenced by female followers.”⁵⁸

The similarities between Eckhart's lecture on Ecclus. 24:29 and Hadewijch's texts offer clear evidence for the convergence between their theologies. If Hadewijch's work owes much to the ecstatic and tortured world of eros, sexual desire, and frustration, she exposes this world's paradoxes with dialectical rigor. Yes, her theology is “affective,” but it also displays magisterial intelligence and announces a theme that is often thought to be Eckhart's innovation: mystical union “without difference.”⁵⁹ And while Eckhart's approach may be predominantly “speculative,” he nevertheless takes up affective themes—for example, Sermon 41's description of God as a jealous lover. As his Latin Ecclesiasticus lecture probes the dialectic of desire, Eckhart transforms late medieval women's concern with hunger and food into a powerful vehicle for his own metaphysical vision. In doing so, he also carries a central theme of women's vernacular theology into the male cloister and academic theology. In Hadewijch and Eckhart, we thus witness the remarkable conversation that emerged between men and women and between Latin and the vernacular languages in medieval theology.

Notes

1. Franz Kafka, “The Hunger Artist,” in The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, trans. W. Muir and E. Muir (New York: Schocken, 1948), p. 243.

2. Ibid., pp. 250-51.

3. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 186.

4. Ibid., pp. 153-60.

5. This article shares the approach of the comparative studies in Bernard McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete (New York: Continuum, 1994): “These papers are not really interested in what Meister Eckhart may have learned from the Beguine authors, but rather to grasp what Eckhart shared with them, that is, the community of discourse and joint concerns in which his thought and theirs developed and enriched each other” (Bernard McGinn, “Introduction,” p. 4). See the contributions of Saskia Murk-Jansen, “Hadewijch and Eckhart: Amor intelligere est” (pp. 17-30); and Paul A. Dietrich, “The Wilderness of God in Hadewijch II and Meister Eckhart and His Circle” (pp. 31-43). For a related, sustained study, see Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).

6. Barbara Newman, “La mystique courtoise: Thirteenth-Century Beguines and the Art of Love,” in her From Virile Woman to WomanChrist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 137-67; on the characteristics of the genre, see esp. pp. 137-43. Newman also discusses Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete.

7. See ibid., pp. 143-48; Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, “Gender, Knowledge and Power in Hadewijch's Strofische Gedichten,” in her Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 182-203; Ulrike Wiethaus, “Female Homoerotic Discourse and Religion in Medieval German Culture,” in Difference and Genders in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, in press); and Saskia M. Murk-Jansen, “The Use of Gender and Gender-Related Imagery in Hadewijch,” in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), pp. 52-68.

8. Quotations of Hadewijch will be from Hadewijch: The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart (New York: Paulist, 1980). The following editions of Hadewijch's work will also be cited: Brieven (Letters), ed. J. Van Mierlo, 2 vols. (Antwerp: Standaard, 1947), vol. 1; Strofische Gedichten (Poems in stanzas), edited and modern Dutch translation by E. Rombauts and N. De Paepe (Zwolle: Willink, 1961); De visioenen van Hadewijch (The visions of Hadewijch), edited, modern Dutch translation, and commentary by Paul Mommaers (Nijmegen: Gottmer, 1979)—citations to line numbers differ from Hart's because she follows Jozef Van Mierlo, ed., Hadewijch: Visioenen, 2 vols. (Louvain: Vlaamsch Bookenhalle, 1924-25); Mengeldichten (Poems in couplets), ed. J. Van Mierlo (Antwerp: Standaard, 1952). Citations will give the title of the Dutch editions just listed—with number of the poem, letter, or vision and line number(s)—as well as the page in The Complete Works/page in Dutch edition, as here: Mengeldichten 13, lines 6-17, pp. 344/61. Referring to Porion, Hart notes that Mengeldichten 13 uses Alan of Lille, De planctu 6, Patrologia Latina (hereafter PL), 210:455-56. Hart's translations are highly readable, but sometimes, esp. in the poems, less literal than they could be for academic purposes. I have therefore occasionally modified her translations toward more literal readings; these modifications will be identified in the notes.

9. Hadewijch, De visioenen van Hadewijch 7, lines 19-21, pp. 280/VII. See Paul Mommaers, “Hadewijch: A Feminist in Conflict,” Louvain Studies 13 (1988): 59.

10. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 158. See also Tanis M. Guest, Some Aspects of Hadewijch's Poetic Form in the “Strofische Gedichten” (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 160-62.

11. Hadewijch, Mengeldichten 16, lines 27-50, pp. 353/79. Bracketed phrases are Hart's additions to the text; “of us” and “by him” (line 43) narrow the line's range and obscure its broader point that no one—neither Christ nor we ourselves—gets eaten. On this poem and its relation to Richard of St. Victor's De IV gradibus violentae caritatis, see Esther Heszler, “Die sieben Namen der unnennbaren Minne: Das XVI. Mengeldicht Hadewijchs,” in Religiöse Erfahrung, ed. Walter Haug and Dietmar Mieth (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1992), pp. 172-88.

12. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (n. 3 above), p. 156.

13. Hadewijch, Mengeldichten 16, lines 118-24, pp. 355/82.

14. Ibid., lines 149-64, pp. 356/83; substituting “groundless nature” for Hart's “unfathomable essence” in line 161, “grondelose natuere.”

15. See Bernard McGinn, “The Abyss of Love,” in The Joy of Learning and the Love of God, ed. E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1995), pp. 95-120.

16. Hadewijch, Mengeldichten 16, lines 207-8, 211-12, pp. 358/85.

17. Hadewijch, Strofische Gedichten (n. 8 above) 33, pp. 221-23/234-39. I have modified Hart's translation of this poem following Gordön Rudy's more literal rendering. I thank Gordön Rudy for his helpful comments and use of his translation.

18. In “Vision 14,” a divine voice addresses Hadewijch as a female version of this chivalric hero: “O strongest of all warriors! You have conquered everything. … Since you never yield, you are called the greatest heroine” (De Visioenen van Hadewijch [n. 8 above] 14, lines 150-56, pp. 305/V).

19. Hadewijch Strofische Gedichten 38, lines 53-56, pp. 239/272.

20. Ibid., 15, lines 25-28, pp. 166/118.

21. See the more frequent and insistent repetitions of nuw in Strofische Gedichten 7, pp. 144-47/70-76; and Guest, pp. 102-3.

22. Because “verslende/devouring” is a gerund, this subordinate clause lacks a verb. In this reading, the adjective “nuwe/new” provides the subject, and the gerund “verslende” becomes the verb. For still other translations, see Rombauts and DePaepe's modern Dutch version in Strofische Gedichten, p. 239; and Guest, pp. 229, 249.

23. Hadewijch links “eternal time” with the highest form of mystical union. Describing how God “pours forth his Unity in Persons” and gives this to the soul, she writes, “He lavishes eternal time, which he himself is (ewliken tijt, dat hi selue es) … so totally that he inspirits souls with his Spirit and gives all that he has, and all that he is” (Brieven [n. 8 above] 22, lines 119-24, pp. 96-97/192-93).

24. Hadewijch, Mengeldichten (n. 8 above) 13, lines 4, 29, pp. 344/61-62.

25. Hadewijch, Brieven 31, lines 14-20, pp. 121/263; my emphasis.

26. Ibid., 5, lines 28-35, pp. 56/44. Hart's translation of “diepheit/depth” as “abyss” reflects Hadewijch's interchangeable use of “diepheit” and “afgront/abyss”; see Brieven 18, lines 63-79, pp. 86/154-55, and esp. Brieven 27, lines 1-18, pp. 107/220-21. See Bernard McGinn, “The Abyss of Love” (n. 15 above), pp. 106-8, and The Flowering of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998), pp. 211-19.

27. For a more elaborate example of this elision, see Hadewijch, Mengeldichten 15, lines 45-52, pp. 352/74. See also Saskia Murk-Jansen, “The Mystic Theology of the Thirteenth-Century Mystic Hadewijch, and Its Literary Expression,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1992), pp. 122-24.

28. Meister Eckhart, Sermon 20b, in Die deutschen Werke, ed. Josef Quint, in Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke (Stuttgart and Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1936-), 1:342-52. The translation is from Meister Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises, trans. M. O'C. Walshe, 3 vols. (Dulverton: Watkins, 1979-81), 1:241-46. This is one of two nearly identical sermons on Luke 14:16; in vol. 1 of Die deutschen Werke, Quint, ed., prints them as Predigten 20a and 20b; Walshe, trans., numbers them 32a and 32b. Critical texts of Eckhart's writings appear in Die deutschen Werke and Die lateinischen Werke, ed. Josef Koch, in Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke. References to Walshe's translation of Sermon 20b, followed by the page number from Quint's ed., will be given in parentheses in the text. Citations to these texts in notes will be by name of editor or translator. See also Eckhart's Latin Sermon 8 on the same biblical text (Koch, ed., 4:80-91).

29. Sermon 20b, pp. 242/344, citing Augustine, Confessions 7.10.16, where Augustine, however, does not speak of the Eucharist.

30. The verse continues, “et qui bibunt me, adhuc sitiunt” (They that drink me, shall yet thirst [or: thirst still more]) Eckhart, Sermones et lectiones super Ecclesiastici cap. 24, in Koch, ed., 2:270-90, nn. 42-61; the translation is from B. McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher [New York: Paulist, 1986], pp. 174-81). Page references to this translation, followed by the section numbers in Koch, ed., vol. 2, will be given in parentheses within the text. Eckhart's texts on Ecclesiasticus reflect his interest in the Wisdom books; see Expositio libri Sapientiae, in Koch, ed., 2:303-634; and Donald F. Duclow, “Meister Eckhart on the Book of Wisdom,” Traditio 43 (1987): 215-35.

31. This lecture expresses Eckhart's teaching on being and analogy with exceptional clarity. See Vladimir Lossky, Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart (Paris: Vrin, 1973), pp. 320-32; Bernard McGinn, “Introduction,” in McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, p. 5; and Frank Tobin, Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 43-46.

32. Eckhart makes the same point concerning Ecclus. 24:29 in Sermon 41 (Quint, ed., 2:289; Walshe, trans., 2:3). This theme goes back at least to Gregory the Great, Homilarium in Evangelia 36.1, PL, 76:1266B; see also Rabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Ecclesiasticum 2, PL, 109:940B.

33. Eckhart, Sermones et lectiones super Ecclesiastici, pp. 177/51, referring to Aristotle, De anima 3.4.429a.

34. In Sermon 41, Eckhart renders “adhuc esuriunt” (Ecclus. 24:29) into German as “sol noch mê hungern” and then rephrases the entire verse: “sie sol noch mê dürstende werden, die mich trinkent, und hungernde, die mich ezzent / they shall become more thirsty who drink me, and more hungry who eat me (Quint, ed., 2:289; Walshe, trans., 2:3).

35. Eckhart, Sermones et lectiones super Ecclesiastici, pp. 180/57, my emphasis.

36. See ibid., pp. 178/53: “Every created being radically and positively possesses existence, life, and wisdom from and in God, not in itself as a created being. And thus it always ‘eats’ as something produced and created, but it always hungers because it is always from another and not from itself.”

37. Ibid., pp. 175/45. For Eckhart's gloss on Exod. 3:14, see his Expositio libri Exodi, in Koch, ed., vol. 2, nn. 14-25; translated in McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, pp. 45-49.

38. See Tobin, pp. 45, 42, 58-59.

39. Eckhart, Sermones and lectiones super Ecclesiastici, pp. 178/53. See also Eckhart, Sermon 19 in Koch, ed. (n. 28 above), 4:175-79. Augustine uses the light/air analogy in De Genesis as litteram 8.12.26, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 28:249-50.

40. See Bernard McGinn, “Theological Summary,” in Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, ed. B. McGinn and E. Colledge (New York: Paulist, 1981), pp. 32-33; and Tobin, pp. 58-62.

41. See Tobin (n. 31 above), p. 53: “The essential feature of this doctrine of analogy is that it is not legitimate to join God and creature in any single concept.”

42. Lossky (n. 31 above), p. 322. McGinn extends the term “dialectic” to describe Eckhart's method of shifting between opposites that require one another—e.g., transcendence/immanence, unity/Trinity, etc. (“Theological Summary,” pp. 32-35). This dialectic characterizes what Michael Sells calls “apophasis” or “unsaying” in his Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), see esp. chaps. 6 and 7 on Eckhart and his relation to Marguerite Porete.

43. Eckhart, Sermones and lectiones super Ecclesiastici (n. 30 above), pp. 180/58, translation modified and my emphasis. McGinn describes the final sentence as “a tour de force of Eckhart's wordplay” (Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher [n. 30 above], p. 201): “Edendo enim esurit et esuriendo edit et esurire sive esuriem esurit” (Koch, ed., 2:287).

44. Hadewijch, Brieven (n. 8 above) 15, lines 75-81, pp. 79/127; she cites Psalm 33:9: “Taste and see how sweet the Lord is.”

45. Eckhart, Sermon 41 in Quint, ed. (n. 28 above), 2:289-91; and in Walshe, trans. (n. 28 above), 2:3.

46. Eckhart, Sermon 41, in Quint, ed., 2:291; and in Walshe, trans., 2:4.

47. See Donald F. Duclow, “‘My Suffering Is God’: Meister Eckhart's Book of Divine Consolation,” Theological Studies 44 (1983): 570-85.

48. Eckhart, Sermon 41, in Quint, ed., 2:294; and in Walshe, trans., 2:5.

49. Eckhart, Sermon 41, in Quint, ed., 2:295; and in Walshe, trans., 2:5-6.

50. Eckhart, Sermon 41, in Quint, ed., 2:297; and in Walshe, trans., 2:6-7.

51. Kafka (n. 1 above), p. 255.

52. Hart refers to Gregory's epectasis in her “Introduction” and notes to Hadewijch, The Complete Works, pp. 7, 367, 373, 375. See Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, trans. E. Ferguson and A. Malherbe (New York: Paulist, 1978), p. 113.

53. Hadewijch, Brieven 18, lines 69-71, pp. 86/154-55. Hart's phrase “bottomless abyss” translates “grondeloesheit/groundlessness,” another synonym for “afgront/abyss.”

54. Elsewhere Eckhart develops a more consistent dialectic where the divine must give itself (see Sermon 41, in Quint, ed., 2:295).

55. Kurt Ruh, Meister Eckhart: Theologe, Prediger, Mystiker (Munich: Beck, 1985), pp. 113-14. See Grundmann, pp. 124-30, 195-97, 239.

56. See Kurt Ruh, “Meister Eckhart und die Spiritualität der Beginen,” in Kleine Schriften, ed. V. Mertens (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984), 2:328-30; Otto Langer, Mystische Erfahrung und spirituelle Theologie (Munich: Artemis, 1987), pp. 41-46; and Grundmann, pp. 148-49, concerning the rule for three Beguine “gatherings” in Strassbourg and their ties to the Dominicans.

57. Michael Sells, “The Pseudo-Woman and the Meister: ‘Unsaying’ and Essentialism,” in McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, p. 143; see also Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (n. 42 above), p. 204. In both works, Sells focuses on Eckhart and Marguerite Porete.

58. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 157. Bynum admits Tauler for comparison under this heading, and Suso under that of “affective” spirituality, but she does not note their ties to Eckhart. The complexity and inversions of these male/female relationships can be seen in the dialogue Schwester Katrei, which dramatizes the relation between a master/confessor—identified in some manuscripts as Eckhart—and a spiritual “daughter” who becomes his instructor (“The ‘Sister Catherine’ Treatise,” trans. Elvira Borgstädt, in McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher [n. 30 above], pp. 349-83).

59. See Mommaers's suggestive remarks on Hadewijch's “renewed synthesis” of loving and knowing (pp. 66-70). On union without difference, see McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, pp. 217-19.