SOURCE: Milhaven, John Giles. “Hadewijch and the Mutuality of Love.” In Hadewijch and Her Sisters: Other Ways of Loving and Knowing, pp. 3-72. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Milhaven evaluates Hadewijch as a theologian, comparing her views on divinity and her experience of God with those of Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and others.]

The theologian, Hadewijch, lived in a Beguinage somewhere in the Low Countries during the middle of the thirteenth century.¹ Beguines were devout women largely of noble families, who lived in self-supporting community, and breaking with precedent, chose to live lives of apostolic poverty, contemplation, and care for the sick without taking vows as nuns (Hadewijch 1980b, p. 3). Hadewijch wrote, in the Dutch language of her time, letters, poetry and accounts of her religious, at times mystical, experience. They come to over three hundred pages in Mother Columba Hart's English translation. We know little of Hadewijch or her life. We have no contemporary account of her. Her own writing, though often personal and autobiographical, is vague and reticent on factual detail.

Hadewijch's work was read in some circles and had influence for a century or two. She affected John of Ruusbroec, influential mystical theologian of the fourteenth century, and his disciples. She influenced thus major currents of mystical thought down to the present day. By the sixteenth century we hear no more of her or her works until 1838 when researchers discovered manuscripts of her writings at the Royal Library in Brussels.

Though Jozef Van Mierlo brought out a critical edition of her complete writings between 1924 and 1952, Hadewijch has to the present time received little attention in scholarly literature written in English and not much more in languages other than Dutch. Evelyn Underhill, in her twelfth edition of Mysticism (1930), made no mention of Hadewijch. Yet Paul Mommaers has called Hadewijch “the most important exponent of love mysticism and one of the loftiest figures in the Western mystical tradition” (Hadewijch 1980b, xiii). Listen to “Letter 9” in its entirety:

May God make known to you, dear child, who he is, and how he deals with his servants, and especially with his handmaids—and may he submerge you in him. Where the abyss of his wisdom is, [God] will teach you what he is, and with what wondrous sweetness the loved one and the Beloved dwell one in the other, and how they penetrate each other in a way that neither of the two distinguishes himself from the other. But they abide in one another in fruition, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, and soul in soul, while one sweet divine nature flows through both and they are both one thing through each other, but at the same time remain two different selves—yes, and remain so forever.²

In other passages, to be considered below, Hadewijch describes similarly this supreme human experience of the Divine. It is an experience that God grants some of his servants in their earthly life. It anticipates their eternal life with him. The experience, as Hadewijch describes it, resembles the lived experience of other devout persons of her time and the century before. With the help of Bynum and Ziegler, I will point to some of this resemblance in following pages. But Hadewijch's description is also theological. It is theologically articulated and theologically systematic. The theology arises out of and is true to her distinctive experience and that of other women of her time and place. Hadewijch's theology differs correspondingly from all systematic theological accounts of experience of the Divine with which I am familiar before and during Hadewijch's time.

This theologian breaks, therefore, from establishment theology of past and present to express theologically, as well as personally, widespread lived experience of the time. Such expression is typical of medieval theology, for the theologian is here an integral, interactive part of the public community. The theologian influences the community by, for example, teaching clergy and monks and by the clergy's preaching to other monks, nuns, and laity. The influence is mutual, and Bynum and Ziegler point out parallels of theological development and cultural movements.

The quotation given above illustrates the theological articulation that characterizes Hadewijch's pages. Hadewijch does not speak in uniquely narrative terms. In the quoted passage, Hadewijch describes the union of servant and God. She describes the union in general terms, i.e., as applicable to many a “servant.” She describes it, too, with general concepts such as fruition, distinguishability, different selves, body, soul, divine nature, and so on. This is true even on other pages where she writes explicitly of her own individual experience of God. Hadewich is a competent, sophisticated theologian who interplays her religious experience and her theology throughout her work. She engages in dialogue with Christian thinkers of the past, echoing, for example, Jerome, Pseudo-Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Richard of Saint Victor, while at the same time going beyond and even reversing them.

In the letter quoted above, as throughout her writing, Hadewijch does what all Christian theologians of the West before or during her time did. Their “pagan” forefathers: Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, and Neoplatonists did it too. They all work to identify what in their judgment is the completely good human life possible to humans in their earthly existence. It is a union with the divine. It is a specific kind of union.

For Hadewijch, as for Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and other Christian theologians—not to mention pagan, Jewish, and Muslim Platonists and Neoplatonists—before her time, the supreme experience of God that a human being can attain on earth is normative for appraising all human life and activity. The experience is not only satisfying rapture. It is not only overflowing illumination of mind. It is not only exquisite intimacy with God. The supreme experience of God that all these thinkers describe is, for them, the best human knowing and loving possible to humans on earth. All other human knowing and loving, therefore, is of worth only insofar as it resembles or contributes to this supreme experience.

Some of the thinkers so describe this supreme earthly experience that we of the twentieth century might categorize it as mystical. Others so describe it that we might categorize it rather as contemplative. Some thinkers, too, use one or both terms with differing senses. In all cases, this highest possible experience of God is for them a living, however temporary, of the ideal human life. It satisfies all human aspirations. Nothing better is possible for human beings. This experience “surpasses all that one can have from [the Beloved] and all that he himself can accomplish” (“Vision 14,” 145ff.).³

All this is true because, for Hadewijch as for Christian theologians before her, this supreme earthly union with the Beloved is, by God's gift, a momentary anticipation of the union with God that will constitute the beatitude of the soul after death for all eternity. This is why the experience reveals directly, if imperfectly, the supreme good, the final end of humanity, the norm in terms of which all earthly human life is appraised. Anything that a human being does or is on earth is good only insofar as it shares in or moves toward this union which the theologians describe and identify.

In articulating the nature of this union, therefore, the theologians do not only mystical theology but also fundamental ethics. How one of these Western thinkers describes the experience of the supremely possible earthly union with God is a clue to how he or she judges the intrinsic worth of this or that way of knowing and loving. I belabor the point for, as I have already said more than once, this is a foundational angle of my inquiry: What constitutes what is intrinsically good and worthwhile throughout human life? How does Hadewijch answer this question? How does her answer differ from traditional Christian theologians before and during her time? And at times implicitly or in passing: how does her answer differ from dominant Western thought of the late twentieth century, and how does it resemble or add coherently to contemporary feminist thought?

To my knowledge, no Christian theologian before or during Hadewijch's time describes supreme earthly experience with certain traits with which she does. I say this not only of men writing theologically such as Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, the Victorines, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, etc. I say this of women, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Beatrice of Nazareth, and Margaret of Oingt who like Hadewijch wrote theologically of and out of their individual experience of the divine. On the other hand, I believe, though I have not carefully verified, that some of Hadewijch's new characterization of these earthly heights of experience is voiced by later Western thinkers, such as Mechtild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila.

In any case, the burden … is to bring out in her writing some novel traits with which Hadewijch characterizes her supreme experience of God. I contrast Hadewijch's characterization with earlier theologians as Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Guerric of Igny. My historical searching is exploratory and still very limited. Is Hadewijch's picture of her supreme experience of God as novel as I conclude? I invite other historians of thought to return to further texts and prove or disprove these hypotheses. My main effort in what follows is to record sensitively what Hadewijch tells us that she experienced. I contrast her with certain traditional thinkers, especially Bernard of Clairvaux, mainly in order to bring out more sharply what is this experience she had and describes.

Hadewijch writes about only one thing. She strives to live one thing alone. It is love, and all that love brings with it. Her love, as she believes all human love must be, is to share in Christ's love, God's love. Her love includes, therefore, love for fellow human beings. In this earthly life, love means sacrifice, suffering and service. Hadewijch recounts often her efforts to live this sort of love. She encourages and urges others to do the same (e.g., “Letter 6”; “Vision 1”).

Often, however, Hadewijch makes clear that the foregoing traits of love are not those that she most prizes and seeks. She prizes over all else and seeks most passionately with her whole body and soul the final fulfilment of love, i.e., “the fruition of God.” She speaks over and over and with passion of “the fruition of God.” At times Hadewijch uses the term in a broad sense for the union with God that all who seek and love God can attain on earth, at least to some degree and regularly (e.g., “Letter 6,” 117ff., 120ff.; “Letter 12,” 13ff.). At other times, Hadewijch speaks of a “fruition of God” that is vouchsafed on earth only to the few and infrequently to them (e.g., “Letter 12,” 53ff.; “Letter 14,” 3ff.).

To be united with God in this supreme fruition of love is the one all-dominant goal for Hadewijch as for all humans. It is what they really want. It is what God wants for them (e.g., “Letter 1,” 46ff.; “Letter 2,” 66ff.; “Letter 6,” 227ff.). It is what Hadewijch with the other blest will have for all eternity: “There I had fruition of him as I shall eternally” (“Vision 5,” 59ff.; see also 65ff.; “Letter 12,” 53ff.; “Letter 14,” 19ff.; “Letter 16,” 14ff.). She possesses it temporarily in earthly life, though less “amply” (“Vision 5,” 59ff.; “Vision 6,” 92ff.; more generally, “Letter 12,” 13ff.). What I have attributed to Hadewijch in these three paragraphs can be found in many Christian medieval thinkers of Hadewijch's time or earlier.⁴

In some of her writing Hadewijch laments that she has never yet had this fruition (“Letter 1,” 56 ff.). On other pages, presumably those written later (considered below), she describes her occasional experience of this supreme fruition of God and makes much of its sublime and completely satisfying nature. The fruition consists generally in two stages. First, Hadewijch is taken up “in spirit,” “seeing” and “hearing” God. The fruition then changes sharply and climaxes as she comes “out of the spirit” into a new, more complete union with her Beloved, Christ, who is both man and God and thus whose nature is Divine Love:

But then wonder seized me because of all the riches I had seen in him, and through this wonder I came out of the spirit in which I had seen all that I sought; and as in this situation in all this rich enlightenment I recognized my awe-inspiring, my unspeakably sweet Beloved, I fell out of the spirit—from myself and all I had seen in him—and wholly lost, fell upon the breast, the fruition, of his Nature, which is Love. There I remained, engulfed and lost, without any comprehension of other knowledge, or sight, or spiritual understanding, except to be one with him and to have fruition of this union. I remained in it less than half an hour.

(“Vision 6,” 76ff.)

This experience out of the spirit is the supreme union for which, and for which alone, all humans yearn. What humans want is simply their fruition of Divine Love by becoming one with It.⁵

In other passages, too, Hadewijch, as many Western philosophers and theologians before her, describes moments or hours of earthly experience in which the individual unites supremely with God. “Visions 5,” “7,” and “10” to “14” are instances. Her interpretive descriptions of this experience continue and resemble those of prior Christian thinkers. Her descriptions also differ substantially from theirs.

Take, for example, classical descriptions of this kind of experience by two early Christian theologians, two who influenced greatly theologians of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

Recall in his Confessions Augustine's vision as he and his mother stood alone leaning out a window onto a garden at Ostia, “talking alone together sweetly,” wondering what would be the future eternal life of the blest.

We were opening the mouths of our hearts toward the streams flowing on high from your fountain, the fountain of life that is with you, so that, sprinkled from it according to our capacity, we could somehow think of so great a reality. Then … raising ourselves with more ardent love to the Selfsame, we proceeded step by step through all bodily things up to the heaven itself whence sun and moon and star shine upon earth. We mounted further thinking of and speaking of and marveling at your works and we came into our minds and went beyond them to reach the region of your unfailing abundance. … There … life is the wisdom by which all these things are made that have been and will be. And it is not made, … nor is there in it to have been or to will be, but only to be, for it is eternal. … And while we speak and gape at it with longing, we reach it slightly for a complete beat of our hearts. … And we sighed … and returned to the noise of our mouths where a word is both begun and ended. And what is like your Word, our Lord, which remains in itself without aging and makes all things new?

Augustine goes on to generalize:

If for a human being [all things changeable] become silent and turn his ear up to him who made them and he alone speak, not through them but through himself, so that we hear his word, not by tongue of flesh nor voice of angel nor thunder of cloud nor puzzle of similitude, but himself, whom we love in these things, himself we hear without them, as we now extend ourselves and with quick thought reach eternal wisdom abiding above us, if this be continued and other visions of far unequal kind be taken away and this one seize and absorb and hide its beholder within its inner joys, so that eternal life would be such as was that moment of intelligence for which we sighed, then is this not to “enter into the joy of the Lord”?

(1962, IX, 10, my translation)

In The Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius writes as follows of the supreme union that a human being can attain with God:

The divinest and the highest of the things perceived by the eyes of the body or the mind are but the symbolic language of things subordinate to Him who Himself transcendeth them all. Through these things His incomprehensible presence is shown walking upon those heights of the mind; and then it breaks forth even from the things that are beheld and from those that behold them, and plunges the true initiate into the Darkness of Unknowing wherein he renounces all the apprehensions of his understanding and is enwrapped in that which is wholly intangible and invisible, belonging wholly to Him that is beyond all things and to none else (whether himself or another), and being through the passive stillness of all his reasoning powers united by his highest faculty to Him that is wholly Unknowable, of whom thus by a rejection of all knowledge he possesses a knowledge that exceeds his understanding.

(1940, 194)

We are looking for differences between Hadewijch's account of supreme human union with God and accounts by Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and other Christian theologians preceding or contemporary with Hadewijch. First, however, note the similarities.

For Hadewijch, as for Western thinkers before her, the supreme union with God is or yields a supreme knowing of God (“Vision 14,” 172ff.; “Vision 6,” 76ff.; “Vision 7,” 1ff.; “Vision 9,” 40ff.; “Letter 12,” 53ff.; “Stanzaic Poem 9,” 71-75. For Hadewijch, therefore, and preceding theologians, “perfect knowing” (vollen kins) belongs to the fullness of human life. All human activity and living will be good and worthwhile, to the degree to which it partakes in such knowing. On the other hand, for Hadewijch and earlier theologians, fortunate individuals who achieve to some degree this knowing do so out of love. They know only because they love. Moreover, the knowing leads afterward to greater, stronger, better aimed loving. All human activity and living will be good, worthwhile, to the degree to which it partakes in such knowing and loving.

Hadewijch's fruition of God has, as we saw, two stages. The prior stage, her being taken up “in the spirit,” fits the picture (sketched above) drawn by traditional thought. Hadewijch's experience “in the spirit” resembles Augustine's summit, illustrated by the passage from the Confessions quoted above. It is the height where divine wisdom abides. There the soul shares voluptuously the wisdom of the divine word. It is an experience of “intelligence” fused with love and joy. For Augustine, the “hearing” is metaphor for knowing by intellect. For Augustine as for all Christians, the divine word is a word of intelligence. The Latin verbum continues the Greek logos: both terms mean at the same time the thought and the corresponding word. Hart's “spirit” translates Hadewijch's gheeste. The Medieval Dutch word gheeste, like the modern Dutch geest and German Geist, and more strongly than the modern English “spirit,” connotes usually intelligence, a noetic dimension. In what Hadewijch describes as her being “taken up in the spirit” she continues the Christian Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition of the supreme heights of intelligence.

In describing this prior stage of fruition, Hadewijch may show originality of thought with respect to her predecessors and contemporaries of the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, mystics and theologians, women and men. In my study, however, I pass by this prior stage and focus on Hadewijch's final union with God, when she is taken “out of the spirit.” This is not further “ascent” but, as in “Vision 6” and the passage of Pseudo-Dionysius cited above, a level meeting of God and the individual who has mounted thus far. For Hadewijch, like Pseudo-Dionysius, the uniting on a level is followed by a “falling” onto or “plunge” into the divine. Her “passing away” out of intelligence into an even more intimate union with the divine resembles Neoplatonic ideas, which Augustine and many Augustinians, despite their debt to Plotinus and later Neoplatonists, did not express, but which other Christian theologians did, such as Richard of Saint Victor. This supreme union, though beyond intelligence, is or yields its own unique kind of knowing, as both the Hadewijch and Pseudo-Dionysius passages exemplify.

In describing this second stage of the supreme union with God, this passing “out of the spirit,” beyond intelligence, Hadewijch shows a second similarity with earlier thought. This supreme union with God is not first and foremost a knowing of God but, as we saw in “Vision 6,” a loving of God. It is, above all, a merging of human love with Divine Love. Listen again:

But then wonder seized me because of all the riches I had seen in him, and through this wonder I came out of the spirit in which I had seen all that I sought; and as in this situation in all this rich enlightenment I recognized my awe-inspiring, my unspeakably sweet Beloved, I fell out of the spirit—from myself and all I had seen in him—and wholly lost, fell upon the breast, the fruition, of his Nature, which is Love. There I remained, engulfed and lost, without any comprehension … except to be one with him and to have fruition of this union. I remained in it less than half an hour.

(“Vision 6,” 76ff.)

In Chapter 4 of The Divine Names, Pseudo-Dionysius describes the supreme union with God as a union with divine “love” (eros) (1940, 101-11). So too do twelfth-century thinkers such as Bernard of Clairvaux, who develop the idea more expansively and systematically than Pseudo-Dionysius. Bernard is not so hardily Dionysian as to place this supreme union beyond and “out of intelligence.” Bernard locates on the same highest level of human experience both the soul's affective union with God in love and the soul's contemplative union with God in intelligence. But Bernard, like Hadewijch, follows the lead of Pseudo-Dionysius in seeing love as yielding a unique knowing, different from what mere contemplation reveals (e.g., SBO II, XLIX, 4; LXVII, 8; LXIX, 2).⁶

Bernard, more systematically than any theologian before him, affirms, explains and applies this supreme union of human love with Divine Love as the goal of all human endeavor. In so doing he begins the main currents of twelfth- and thirteenth-century theological thought that flow through Hadewijch's writings.⁷ This makes her differences from Bernard all the more significant historically and philosophically.

Let us compare more precisely Hadewijch and traditional theologians on the supreme union of the human individual with Love. An “equality,” in some sense, with God, as Hadewijch claims for her supreme union with Him, is by her time commonly claimed by theologians; 2 Pet. 1:4, “that you may become sharers of divine nature,” gave them warrant. Like Hadewijch, they affirmed at the same time the radical difference of Creator and creature, though other theologians and later historians dispute whether some theologians making such affirmation escape pantheism and thus heresy.

Christian theologians before Hadewijch have affirmed, as she does, that in the supreme union with God, the human person becomes and “is” God. In this respect, Bernard, Hadewijch, and other medieval theologians go beyond Augustine and follow rather Pseudo-Dionysius and other Neoplatonists. Since for Hadewijch, as for Bernard, God is primarily Love, Hadewijch, like Bernard, affirms that in this supreme experience she comes to be Divine Love and God (“Vision 1,” 138ff.; “Vision 3,” 1ff.).⁸ For Bernard to be God or to be Love is not to lose one's personal identity. It is not to become one with God pantheistically.⁹ Hadewijch, too, maintains a personal identity in the final merging. Thus she epitomizes the union as “to be God with God” (my emphasis; “Vision 7,” 1ff.; see Letter 9 above).

To Bernard, for the soul “to be Love” means two things. First, the soul now loves as God loves. It is to love as similarly to God as a human can. It is to will the same as God does. “It is plainly an embrace where to will the same thing and to not will the same thing makes one spirit out of two” (SBO II, LXXXIII, 3; see also elsewhere in 2 and 3; also SBO II, LXIX, 1; LXXI, 7-10; SBO III, De Diligendo Deo X, 27-28, 142-43). Hadewijch affirms this, too. God tells her that in this final fruition, “You will be love as I am Love” (“Vision 3,” 1ff.; similarly, e.g., “Vision 14,” 145 ff.). She spells it out:

When the soul is brought to nought and with God's will wills all that he wills, and is engulfed in him, and is brought to nought—then he is exalted above the earth, and then he draws all things to him, and so the soul becomes with him all that he himself is.

(“Letter 19,” 46ff.)

For Bernard, a human being “is Love,” secondly, in the sense that he is in the experience unaware of anything else. He is aware no longer of himself, but only of Divine Love (e.g., SBO III, De Diligendo Deo X, 27-28, 142-43; SBO II, LXIX, 1; LXXXIII, 3; LXXXV, 13). Similarly, Hadewijch affirms that in supreme union with God she loses all awareness of oneself. “I wholly melted away in him and nothing any longer remained to me of myself” (“Vision 7,” 94ff.).

The supreme experience Hadewijch has of God is, therefore, in part not new to Christian thought before her time. In part, it is new. Hadewijch depicts the experience with certain traits that neither Pseudo-Dionysius, Bernard, Hildegard of Bingen, nor any other prior or contemporary Christian systematic theologian whom I know did. I say “systematic theologian,” for these novel traits Hadewijch asserts of her supreme experience of God are found in accounts of visions and devotion, particularly of women, of Hadewijch's time and the century before. Some of the authors of these accounts of “becoming Divine Love” make theological affirmations, but none that I know of articulate and explain the experience in a coherent theological way. This, Bernard does in his abundant writings and Hadewijch does in her letters, poems and accounts of visions. But Hadewijch, I am about to argue, describes this experience as even Bernard does not.

.....

What, then, are novel traits which Hadewijch introduces into her theological account of supreme human experience of God? First, for Hadewijch “to love the humanity in order to come to the Divinity” means that in her supreme “fruition” of God she consciously embraces her Beloved as a man as well as God. In her supremely fulfilling fruition she embraces him as one embodied person embraces another. Her embodied embrace of her Beloved is not, as “embrace” (amplexus) is for Bernard, an image or metaphor for something else, something bodiless and spiritual, that she was aware of happening to her. To read her text, say, “Vision 7” (quoted below), and “Vision 6” and “Letter 9,” permits only one interpretation: Hadewijch experienced herself as physically embracing her Beloved.

Bernard paved a new road for future theologians by endorsing and encouraging a sensible, bodily kind of devotion to the human Christ. But he saw this devotion left behind when Christ comes to the soul for its supreme union with Him. Bernard acknowledged, too, the validity of the kind of experience Hadewijch reports, the bodily visions that pious believers may have of Christ. But he insisted that the supreme union with Christ was not like this. It was in no way bodily. It was far superior (e.g., SBO I, XXXI, XXV, 7; SBO II, LII, 3 and 5; LXXIV, 2, 5-6; LXXXV, 13).

Not so for Hadewijch. Hadewijch does on occasion affirm that she is in her supreme embrace of her Beloved “out of her body” as well as “out of her spirit.” But for her, unlike Mechtild of Magdeburg and Margaret of Oingt, the occasion of noting this is rare (“Vision 13,” 241ff.; “Vision 8,” 123ff.). In “Letter 9,” she tells explicitly “with what wondrous sweetness the loved one and the Beloved dwell one in the other, and how they … abide in one another in fruition, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, and soul in soul.” In any case, it is in bodily wise that she experiences her Beloved. A dream, trance, vision, even devout fantasy can be bodily experienced, though the person's actual body is only partly affected. One can be caught up in a fully sensual fantasy of embracing someone although one's actual arms do not reach out and hold. At the moment one is not imaging or comparing; the sensual experience is all one has. Nor does Hadewijch use it subsequently for imagining or comparing her union wth God. It is a supreme stage of that union.

For Hadewijch, even the desire for the union is physical: “My heart, soul and senses have not a moment's rest” (“Letter 25,” 16ff.). Before “Vision 7,” her heart, veins, and limbs trembled with desire. Her mind was beset so fearfully and so painfully with desirous love that all her separate veins threatened to break and all her separate veins were in travail as she longed to have “full fruition of my Beloved.” He came to her in the form of a man, “sweet [suete] and beautiful.” After he gave Hadewijch the sacrament of the Eucharist, “He came himself to me, and took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full satisfaction, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity” (“Vision 7,” 64ff.).

Hadewijch's supreme experience of her Beloved is thus, as bodily, of a kind not recognized by traditional theologians for this experience. But “bodiliness” can mean—include or exclude—many things. In Part II, we will try to discern what for Hadewijch, as for other women of her time, this supremely worthwhile bodiliness consists of. In addition, her union with Christ has a mutuality unacceptable to theologians of her time and earlier. By force of the New Testament, and indeed the Bible as a whole, Christian theologians differed from Greek and Roman philosophers by attributing considerable mutuality between God and believer. Yet … I want to trace out how the mutuality which Hadewijch affirms of her supreme union with God goes substantially beyond that affirmed by Christian theologians of or before her time. I want to show in Hadewijch's text what this further mutuality consists in. … [Elsewhere] I argue that the “excess” of mutuality in this supreme experience is linked to its bodiliness.

Recall the areligious, ethical concern of the present study. As such, it does not concern our inquiry that Hadewijch breaks from theological tradition in describing a full human relationship with God. What concerns us is that in so describing she breaks from theological tradition in identifying what characterizes the full loving and knowing, the full living possible to humans on earth. For Hadewijch, full human life is preeminently mutual loving and knowing an other.

In this respect, I suggest, and will offer occasional illustration, that Hadewijch affirms something analogous to what women writers—religious, agnostic, or atheist—of the late twentieth century insist on. To the extent that the mutuality which Hadewijch affirms of her fruition of God characterize also fulfilling moments of popular piety of women of her time, Hadewijch also moves with thousands of medieval women, mostly uneducated, in breaking away from the traditional, still dominant Christian ideal that downgrades and subordinates mutuality. She and they by contrast bring out what that dominant ideal was: an ideal of self-sufficiency based on complete dependence.

Some elements of mutuality in Hadewijch's supreme experience are immediately striking. Not only did Hadewijch “wholly melt away” in her Beloved and “nothing any longer remained to me of myself.” But she saw her Beloved, too, “completely come to nought and so fade and all at once dissolve that I could no longer recognize or perceive him outside me, and I could no longer distinguish him within me (“Vision 7,” 64ff., 94ff.). As Hadewijch says in “Letter 9” (4ff.), quoted above, “neither of the two distinguishes himself from the other.”

That both Hadewijch and the God-Man melt into each other and in their union neither of the two distinguishes himself or herself from the other is uncommon—to my knowledge, unprecedented—in mystical report and theological thought before or during Hadewijch's time. In the Neoplatonic tradition, such assertion made of the soul in its supreme union with the Divine is commonplace. Not commonplace, if made at all, is a corresponding assertion of the Divine, the Good, the One, the finally loved one. In “Letter 9” and “Vision 7,” Hadewijch seems in part to echo Plotinus (Enneads VI, 34), but Plotinus does not say that in union with the soul the divine beloved comes to nought, fades and dissolves. Plotinus does not say that the divine beloved does not distinguish itself from the soul. Nor does Bernard of Clairvaux say these things in his otherwise similar statements of De Diligendo Deo, X, 27-28.

In saying what she says, Hadewijch is not pantheistic. Though in their ecstatic awareness, “neither of the two distinguishes himself from the other,” Hadewijch maintains that her Beloved and she remain their distinct selves. In the passage from Letter 9 cited below, Hadewijch affirms explicitly that in the most complete union with the Beloved, though they become indistinguishable, he and she remain their distinct selves. Yet in the texts quoted, it is not only of his human form and person that Hadewijch says that her Beloved becomes as indistinguishable and undistinguishing as she. In “Letter 9” and “Vision 7,” as elsewhere (e.g., “Vision 6,” 76ff.), she speaks explicitly of uniting with and experiencing her Beloved as God as well as Man.

To describe the Divine and Hadewijch as melting into each other so that neither can distinguish the other suggests a temporary equalizing, a relative equalizing of the two persons in experience, novel, I suggest, in Christian mystical thought up through her time. In the relative equality in Bernard's thought noted above, the human person in becoming the Divine person loses all distinct awareness of his or her human self. In the equality Hadewijch affirms, the human person in becoming the Divine loses distinct awareness of both herself and the divine person, and so does the divine person.

Though Plotinus, as I said, does not affirm this equality in the merging, he does note that this supreme oneness of soul and the Divine is imitated by “lovers and beloveds here below wanting to unite” (VI, 7, 34). But Plotinus does not explain further or develop this resemblance of the loftiest human experience to a sexual bodily uniting. Hadewijch goes on to describe her merging with God, in terms reminiscent of sexual uniting, as a yet further experienced equality with God. Hadewijch affirms here a certain mutual awareness and, if we take her literally, a certain mutual dependence. Before the complete merging, says Hadewijch, her Beloved and she receive each other. She concludes her account of “Vision 12”: “In that abyss I saw myself swallowed up. Then I received the certainty of being received [ontfaen], in this form, in my Beloved, and my Beloved also in me” (172f.). This mutual receiving is not with Christ merely as man. It is, for instance, the countenance of the Holy Spirit which says, “You will be love, as I am Love. … In my unity, you have received me [ontfingstu] and I have received you” [ontfaen] (“Vision 3,” 1f.).

The mutual, aware receiving by Hadewijch and God of each other characterizes not only this climactic stage when Hadewijch has been taken out of the spirit and plunged deep into the divine abyss. It characterizes as well the prior stage of the fruition when she was taken up in the spirit. In this earlier union and fruition, Hadewijch does not yet pass away into the other but sees and listens. But in this stage, too, she and the Beloved receive each other. “So can the Beloved, with the loved one [lief met lieue], each wholly receive the other in all full satisfaction of the sight, the hearing, and the passing away of the one in the other (“Vision 7,” 64f.; so, too, “Vision 3,” 1ff., “Stanzaic Poem 34,” 49-54. Cf. “Vision 11,” 37ff.).

Is this mutual receiving a break from mainstream theology up to Hadewijch's time? Again we look to Bernard whose affirmations of mutuality in union with the divine comes close to those of Hadewijch and who influenced her extensively. If Bernard never affirms explicitly a mutual “receiving” by Christ and the soul, he implies it. He repeats often in epitomizing this union John's “Who abides in charity, abides in God and God in him” (e.g., SBO II, LXXI, 7-10). If by love the two come to abide in each other, then they must in some sense receive each other. Hadewijch, who also repeats the Johannine theme of mutual dwelling (e.g., “Letter 9”: dat een lief in dat ander woent) may have been merely more explicit in asserting mutual reception.

On the other hand, what theologian before Hadewijch described as the beginning of supreme human union with God that Christ “came to me humbly as anyone who wholly belongs to another?” (“Vision 7,” 64ff.). That sounds like Christ takes on a certain dependence on the human loved one. To assert that Christ approaches in humility the raptured soul as one who wholly belongs to the soul does not, I suggest, sound like anything theological before Hadewijch or during her time.

Hadewijch reports a more substantial mutuality: she and Christ in some respect affect equally each other. Thus in her supreme union Hadewijch and Christ are “wholly flowing through each other” (“Stanzaic Poem 4,” 47). This mutuality is not merely with her Beloved. He is man as well as God, and the mutuality of Hadewijch and her Beloved, as affirmed in “Stanzaic Poem 4,” might be taken to pertain to him only in his humanity. In “Vision 14” (77ff.), Hadewijch is less ambiguous. She declares herself to be one of those who have lived human and divine love in one single being “so as to have been flowed through by the whole Godhead, and to have become totally one, flowing back through the Godhead itself.” Hadewijch says actually: “flowing through into the Godhead” (dore vloye in die godheit), which reinforces the impression of Hadewijch affecting God. Any suspicion that Hadewijch means that Christ alone does this flowing is removed by later lines (145ff.) where she declares that when she is out of the spirit and in her Beloved she “is not less than he himself is” and “wholly such as he [is] who is our Love.” This mutual flowing with God anticipates what happens between God and his friends who have attained eternal beatitude. God and his friends eternally “in mutual interpenetration [literally, “through-flowing” (dore vloyeke)] enjoy such blissful fruition, and are flowing into his goodness and flowing out again in all good” (“Letter 12,” 53ff.).

In some passages where Hadewijch describes the supreme union of herself with Christ, her single word for the two of them suggests a mutuality of relative equals more strongly than Hart's translation by distinct phrases. Where Hart translates “the Beloved,” i.e., Christ, and “the loved one,” i.e., the human person, Hadewijch wrote usually the same word, lief or, in feminine gender, lieue or a corresponding pronoun (e.g., “Vision 7,” 64ff., “Letter 9,” 1ff. “Stanzaic Poem 4,” 47; cf. Hart 1980, 8). Hart's translation is defensible and useful, and I will at times use it, but a more literal translation brings out further how Hadewijch suggests a relative equality between the human loved one and the divine.

For instance, in “Letter 9,” Hart translates “with what wondrous sweetness the loved one and the Beloved dwell one in the other.” But Hadewijch says: dat een lief in dat ander woent. This is more literally translated: “with what wondrous sweetness the one loved one dwells in the other.” In following assertions of the letter, the one loved one and the other are so referred to, but not distinguished or separately identified. Similarly, Hart translates in “Vision 7,” “So can the Beloved, with the loved one, each wholly receive the other in all full satisfaction of the sight, the hearing, and the passing away of the one in the other.” But “the Beloved, with the loved one” is, in Hadewijch's words. simply lief met lieue. Hadewijch, here as often elsewhere, does not by her words distinguish between Christ and the human lover in describing their relationship as lovers.

On the other hand, Hart's translation at times expresses a more active mutuality than Hadewijch does. Hart by translating in “Letter 9,” “and how they penetrate each other,” expresses a rather active, phallic sense. So too, Van Mierlo in his paraphrasing note, dore het doordringend (1947, 79). But Hadewijch says: Ende soe dore dat ander woent, literally: “and so through the other dwells.”

In “Letter 9” Hadewijch also affirms a further mutuality of the two loved ones: “they abide in one another in fruition.” By the three English words, “abide … in fruition,” Hart translates one word: ghebrukken. Words with the ghebruk- stem are used by Hadewijch frequently to designate her supreme union with God. They are translated by Hart usually by “fruition” or phrases with that word. “Fruition of God,” as we noted above, is what Hadewijch most prizes and most seeks. It is the single final goal for all humans, what they want, what God wants for them. It is what the blest have for all eternity. God grants it on occasion to chosen souls on earth.

Hart's translating of ghebruk- by “fruition” makes sense. The two words' stems, bruc and fruc, are connected, perhaps originally identical, in old European languages. Hadwewijch's use of ghebruk- words is roughly the same as common medieval theological usage in Latin of frui and fruitio, the meaning of which generally includes pleasure, but not exclusively and often not primarily. When Thomas Aquinas, writing at the same time or a little after Hadewijch, uses frui or fruitio to designate the supreme union of the soul with God, he means something like a “possession” or “use” (possessio, usus) that, at least secondarily, entails or enables enjoyment or pleasure. Thomas's fruitio means (1) a having or using (2) that is pleasureable. It has thus a two-sided meaning though in a given context one side may be in the shadow or even not thought of (e.g., ST I-II, 2, 7; 3, 1-4; 4, 1-5; 5, 2-3; In Joann. c. 17, lect. 1, n. 3, ed. Marietti, p. 442a, quoted in ST I-II, p. 19).

The modern Dutch word stem, geniet-, with which Van Bladel-Spaapen and Mommaers translate ghebruk-, has a similar double meaning. So too, the English word “enjoy.” One can “enjoy” rights or health even at a moment when one does not “take pleasure” in the rights or health. On the other hand, the word “enjoy” generally implies at least, that one will, if one becomes aware of them, take pleasure in the health, rights, or whatever is “enjoyed.” Of ghebruk- words, “enjoy,” “enjoyment,” and so on are at least as faithful a translation as “fruition.” It communicates better to the modern reader what Hadewijch says, for the context makes repeatedly evident that she has pleasurable union very much in mind.

Take the clause in “Letter 9” where Hart translates, “They abide in one another in fruition, mouth in mouth.” A more communicative as well as more literal translation would be, “They enjoy mutually each other, mouth in mouth” (si ghebrukken onderlinghe ende ele anderen Mont in mont). See also, e.g., “Stanzaic Poem 34,” 49ff.

That Hadewijch has pleasuring in mind is evidenced by her affirming the “sweetness” (soeteleke) of the mutual indwelling of the two loved ones as well as “the sweetness of the divine nature” (ene soete godlike nature) flowing through them. A typical passage is: “But how much sweetness is found in the interior feeling [gheuoelne] and fruition of the Beloved [ghebrukene van lieue], all these who were ever born in the human shape could not fully explain to you” (“Letter 27,” 44ff.). Hart does at times use “enjoy” to translate ghebruk-, e.g., in the passage of “Letter 12” (53ff.) cited above concerning the mutual flow of God and creature in eternal beatitude: “God and his friends … enjoy such blissful fruition [weeldeleke ghebrukende].”

Their indwelling is, therefore, mutually sweet to Christ and to Hadewijch. He, as well as she, enjoy each other as they hold each other. “The lief and the lieue embrace each other / And have fruition in giving themselves to each other” (“Stanzaic Poem 34,” 54). They anticipate what God and his friends do in the afterlife. As they give themselves to each other, they affect each other, give each other pleasure. Correspondingly, they are affected by and receive from each other.

Before culling and considering assertions by Hadewijch of an even more substantial mutuality in her supreme union with God, it is worthwhile to pause and ask: In what respect, if any, is the mutuality with God that we have so far heard Hadewijch affirm new to Christianity? Mutuality between God and humans has been a common feature of faith and devotion of Christianity since its origins. It was a common feature of the religion of ancient Israel and even, though less so, of Greek and Roman popular religion. The New Testament continues the Old: not only does God do many things to humans devoted to him. They do many things to him: please, displease, anger, sadden, appease, and so on. True, as we will discuss in the next chapter, the Christian dogma of the complete self-sufficiency of God and his consequent complete immutability—dogma heavily in debt to Greek and Roman philosophy—made it difficult to explain how any creature could affect God. But the dogma did not prevent theologians since the beginning of Christianity from holding that God was pleased by persons faithful to him, displeased by sinners, and so on, while debating, century after century, how this was possible. The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ interacted with his people and, in some sense, showed himself affected by them, as any loving ruler or father is by his subjects or children. To imagine, however, the mutual love of God and creature as two lovers erotically enjoying each other was a revolutionary step in Western religious thought. It pictured an intensely personal mutual interdependence and interaffectivity.

Hadewijch was far from the first to take the step. The pagan Plotinus, creator of the Neoplatonism that flooded Christian thought, while insisting on the inexpressibility of the soul's supreme union with highest divinity and the unqualified dependence of all on the self-sufficient, solitary One, did observe, as we saw, that this union was like that of lovers. But he did not say in what the resemblance consisted; in his writing he stressed the difference (VI, 7, 34; 9, 3, 9). Following Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius affirmed that the One can be called “Desire” (eros), for it “desires all things.” But he explained that what “touches” and “transports” eros outside itself is simply Itself as Love, Desire, and Good (The Divine Names IV, 10-15).

Another erotic influence from a closer source converged on Christian thought about the supreme union of soul with God. Christian theologians from Origen on often interpreted relations between God and the soul after the model of the two “spouses” of the Song of Songs. That book of the Bible, after the Psalms, seems to have received the most commentaries in the medieval Christian West (Origen 1966, 27). It was “the book most read and frequently commented on in the medieval cloister” (Leclercq 1960, 106).

In the early twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux, inspiring many imitators in that century as afterward, wrote numerous sermons on the Song of Songs. He applied at length and in detail the biblical account of the two lovers to the relations between God, especially the Divine Word, and the devout soul. This relationship, in general and not only on its occasional mystical summit, was described by Bernard as in the book of the Bible, as being mutual, transpiring between two persons giving and taking pleasure to and from each other as relative equals. In bringing out the soul's contribution to the embrace, Bernard does not hesitate to say that a human soul can by its love please singularly the Divine Word, prove itself worthy of his loving embrace, contribute to the serenity of the Divine Visitor, give him embraces and kisses which he seeks and takes pleasure in, has drawn God into itself by its returning love (SBO I, VIII, 7; XXIII, 1; XXIII, 15-16; XXXI, 6-7; XXXII, 2; SBO II, LXXI, 10; LXXII, 3).

Commenting on “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth” in the Song of Songs, Bernard says no sweeter words can express “the sweet feelings of Word and soul for each other (Verbi animaeque dulces ad invicem … affectus)” than “bridegroom” and “bride” (SBO I, VII, 1: SBO I, 31-32). Not only does God give the devout soul its holy pleasures and joys. The devout soul gives God pleasure: it sings often festal songs that “stroke pleasingly the ears of God” (divinas mulceat aures) (SBO I, 9; cf. SBO II, LI, 4, beneplacitum sponsi).

Bernard, however, renders the same philosophical explanation of this mutual love and pleasuring of God and soul as preceding theologians gave generally of the relations between humans and God. Bernard maintains the complete independence and immutability of God. God could in no real sense depend on anyone who is not God. Whatever be the image or phrase used, God could, in fact, receive nothing from or be in no way affected by the soul. He thus indicates a different experience from that of Hadewijch as well as a different ideal for human life.

How then do the Word and the devout soul speak lovingly to each other? Not by their bodily word nor their bodily appearance but by their spiritual speech. The speech of the Word is His gracious favoring of the soul. The speech of the soul is its fervent devotion, brought about by the Word's favoring.

For the Word to say to the soul, “You are beautiful” and to call her “friend” is to infuse the soul that by which she may both love and presume she is loved. For her in turn to call him “beloved” and confess that he is “beautiful” is to ascribe sincerely to him that he loves and is loved and to marvel at his favoring and to be stunned by his grace.

(SBO II, XLV, 7-8; similarly SBO II, LXVII, 8)

The speech of the Word is the infusion of the gift; the response of the soul is grateful admiration. She loves, then, even more because she senses herself conquered in love (XLV, 8).

Generally speaking, therefore, the devout soul interacts with the Word in that the soul experiences love for the Word surging in her. She presumes rightly that her growing love is a gift from her divine lover. She hence loves him all the more. The experience is intimate and profound. It is not truly known except by those who have the experience. But the mutuality thus experienced, as Bernard theologically explains it, is limited, far short of what loving human mutuality would be—all the more if erotic.

First, the soul does not experience directly the Word nor his love itself. She experiences only herself loving more. She knows, by inference from her own love, that the Word loves her greatly. She, therefore, loves him yet more, still without experiencing him. Secondly, throughout this intimate exchange, as Bernard explains it metaphysically, the Word does not love her because she loves him. Rather she loves him because he loves her. The Word's love is purely outgoing, giving, not receiving (XLV, 8-10; LXVII, 8-10). As noted above, Bernard affirms with John that God is in the loving soul and the soul is in God. But Bernard explains both indwellings as God's action on the soul: respectively, creative, continuing conservation of all souls and infusion of love into souls that love God. The soul does not act on God, does not affect God, and gives nothing to God.

What we have just heard Bernard say, he says of the soul's relations in general with God. He says the same specifically of his own mystical experience. Bernard of Clairvaux at times disclaimed humbly that he had had any mystical experience. At other times, he humbly acknowledged and described his mystical experience (LXXIV, 5). He revealed here basic differences from Hadewijch's experiences.

First, as already noted, for Bernard the supreme union with Christ did not take bodily form. Bernard emphatically denied bodiliness here (LXXIV, 5; XLV, 7; LII, 5). He readily imitated Scripture which imparts to us “the incomprehensible and invisible things of God by means of figures drawn from the likenesses of things familiar to us, like precious draughts in vessels of cheap earthenware” (LXXIV, 2). Bernard knew that Christ does appear to select souls in bodily form, visible and audible. God thus through the body communicates truth and wisdom to such souls. But Bernard not only disavowed having such “visions.” He disparaged such experience in contrast to the highest earthly experience of men, the supreme union with God, to which God at blessed moments raised him and other select souls.

This experience was purely spiritual. It had nothing bodily in it. Bernard's description of that union, even his sensuous, passionate evocation of it in sermons on the Song of Songs, has to be intended as only metaphor (XXXI, 6; LII, 5; LII, 3, LXXIV, 5-6, LXXXV, 13). What happened was similar but not the same as what he described. Hadewijch, on the other hand, is, in passages such as visions “6” and “7,” clearly not intending metaphor. She wants to describe directly what happened.

Its disembodied nature, I argue later, is one reason why in describing his own experience of supreme union, Bernard denied, or at least omitted, any direct experience of mutuality between God and him. For one reading Bernard after reading Hadewijch's report of her visions, this omission is striking. It is even more striking and curious in light of the mutuality he attributes to such sublime moments when he preaches on the Song of Songs. Bernard, for instance, did not, as Hadewijch does, report that he was conscious of receiving the Beloved as the Beloved received him. Bernard, on the contrary, acknowledged that he did not know the moment when the Word comes to him (LXXIV, 5; cf. 1). He realized eventually that the Word had indeed come and embraced him. However, Bernard did not experience this embrace directly but inferred it from his own extraordinarily swelling, rapturous love (LXXIV, 5-7). The Word must be present, in that he infused wondrously this divine love into Bernard. This is all happy, certain inference, but he does not experience the Other himself.¹⁰ Bernard does say he experiences the divine nature, i.e., divine love, but he explains this as his experience of his own love growing mightily until it becomes like divine love insofar as it can be and is aware of and loves nothing but love.

What Bernard experiences directly, by this account of his, is his own love, i.e., his mounting desire, pleasure, and satisfaction. What he does not experience directly is the other person. He does not experience the other person being affected by him. He does not experience himself affecting the other person. This analysis of a somewhat masturbatory ecstasy falls well short of the erotic imagery of the Song of Songs, which Bernard applies often elsewhere both to Christian life in general and to his mystical experience. There, as we saw, he declares that both persons relate to each other in mutual seeking, mutual embrace and mutual enjoyment.

By his theological explanation of the soul's general relations with God and of his own mystical experience Bernard not only turns into mere metaphor, or simply contradicts, his account of the supreme mutuality of soul and the Word on earth. He also, all the more, falls short of the kind of mutuality we have heard Hadewijch describe in her own experience. He excludes the possibility that he was, in fact, consciously experiencing: (1) himself and the Word melting indistinguishably into each other, (2) their receiving of each other, (3) their flowing back and forth through each other, or (4) their “sweet” giving themselves to each other. Bernard excludes these possibilities because he does not envisage his soul experiencing the Word in this life. He excludes these possibilities because the Divine Word cannot be affected by or receive from a human being.

It is evident that Hadewijch has come a long way from Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius in affirming mutuality as constitutive of the best loving available to humans on earth. Not so evident to me, despite the differences I have just traced, is how far Hadewijch has come from Bernard of Clairvaux and twelfth-century theologians who follow his lead. I have not combed the works of Bernard thoroughly enough to exclude that in other passages he affirms and explains philosophically a greater mutuality between God and the soul in the soul's supreme loving than I have so far seen. This present [essay] is a report on work in progress and an invitation to coworkers.

Should one make much of what Bernard says speaking as philosopher about God when it contradicts what he says interpreting the Bible. Those of us may make something of it who believe there is truth in Hegel's identification of philosophy as “the mind of the times (Zeitgeist), grasped in concepts. After all, Hadewijch, too, is a philosopher and at times articulates philosophically her supreme union with God. She articulates it differently than Bernard. Perhaps in Bernard we witness a struggle of that Zeitgeist and in Hadewijch a resolution.

In any case, my primary concern in contrasting Hadewijch with Bernard is not to gather evidence of Hadewijch's originality. Much more evidence is needed, e.g., by comparing Hadewijch with other twelfth-century theologians such as William of Saint Thierry or the Victorines. My primary purpose in contrasting Hadewijch with Bernard is to bring out more sharply Hadewijch's own answer to the millennial Western question: What is the best human living possible? …

Notes

1. See the introduction to Hadewijch: The Complete Works, translation and introduction by Mother Columba Hart, O.S.B. (Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 1-42.

2. Unless noted otherwise, the translation I give of Hadewijch's text is Hart's. Where I offer my own translation, it is based on Van Mierlo's critical edition and at times helped by Hart's translation and modern Dutch translations of parts of Hadewijch's work by F. Van Bladel, S.J., and B. Spaapen, S.J. (1954), Paul Mommaers (1979), H. W. J. Vekeman (1980), as well as by the French translation by Jean-Baptiste Porion, O. Cart. (1972). I have at times consulted the critical edition of “Ms. 941 of de Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversitet te Gent” by H. W. J. Vekeman: Het Visioenenboek van Hadewijch (Nijmegen: Dekker& Van De Vegt, 1980).

3. Within a “vision” or letter of Hadewijch, I indicate lines cited by giving the number of the paragraph (Hart's paragraphing) in which the lines are contained. Hart's paragraph number corresponds to Van Mierlo's number for the first line in the paragraph.

4. E.g., Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, 3-5. In life after death, the “beatitude of the blest” (beatitudo beatorum) is their “complete possession or fruition of supreme good” (perfecta possessio vel fruitio summi boni) (5, 2, c.). Conditions of earthly human life render impossible that a human being have here “true and complete human beatitude” (perfecta et vera beatitudo) for it consists of the seeing and consequent loving and enjoying of God's essence (5, 3). Still some in their earthly life are rightly called “blest” (beati) because, though they do not see the divine essence, they have a share of that beatitude by a certain “fruition” (fruitione) of God, supreme good (5, 3, ad 1 and 2, 3, 5). Moreover, God, by a miracle, can grant that individuals see his essence even in this life (I, 12, 11, c. and ad 2; II-II, 175, 3).

5. I follow Hart in capitalizing “Love” when it refers to divine love, and not capitalizing it when it is a creature's love, even when Hadewijch has evidently in mind that this human love is but a participation in Divine Love. The word being translated as “Love” or “love” is usually minne, a noun of feminine gender and the appropriate pronoun for it, as Hart preserves in English and as I follow, is feminine: “she” or “her.” Nevertheless, for Hadewijch, minne is God's nature and being; it is, therefore, neither male nor female.

6. Translations of Bernard's text are, unless otherwise indicated, mine. I follow the critical edition, S. Bernardi Opera (SBO), in which the sermons of Bernard on the Song of Songs are in volumes I (Sermones I-XXXV) and II (Sermones XXXVI-LXXXVI). Various texts and small works are in Vol. III. I have consulted and profited from the English translation of the Cistercian Fathers Series, but it is too free for the present study.

7. In comparing Bernard of Clairvaux with Hadewijch, I have read widely in but not combed all of Bernard's voluminous opera. I have been aided in finding pertinent pages of Bernard, particularly on mystical experience, by work of Robert Linhardt (1923), Étienne Gilson (1940), Michael Casey (1988), John R. Sommerfeldt (1991), and Jean Leclercq (1979, 1982, 1987). On the other hand, I put to Bernard's text questions that these scholars did not. My goal in the present essay is not to render a definitive interpretation of Bernard, no more than of Hadewijch. My goal is to launch scholarly inquiry and discussion in a promising direction.

8. Hadewijch affirms that in her supreme union with the Divine she “is” the Divine in, e.g., Vision 1, 138ff.; Vision 3, 1ff.; Vision 7, 1ff.; Vision 14, 145ff.; and Letter 12, 1ff. Similarly, see Bernard, e.g., De Diligendo Deo X, 27-28 (SBO III, 142-43.

9. Étienne Gilson (1940) defends Bernard lengthily and convincingly of the pantheism of which he has been accused. For evidence of Gilson's thesis, that for Bernard the soul in its supreme union with God is still not God, see, e.g., SBO II, LXXI, 7-10; LXXXIII, 5; De Diligendo Deo, X, 27-28: SBO III, 142-43.

10. Cf. Leclercq (1987, 49) on Bernard's thought: “The soul must receive a special charism, that gift of the Holy Spirit which St. Paul refers to as ‘the discerning of spirits,’ in order to recognize the voice of the Word. … For the thoughts inspired by the Bridegroom are similar to our own, since they call into play the same powers of the mind. Their source, however, is different: They come from God, not from us … [God] reveals himself through the intimacy of love. He is received into the innermost heart, which he fills with his loving presence. He does not appear, he enters the soul. He touches and excites the heart, communicating his love without saying much, for his effects speak of his presence.”

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———. 1979. Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: Psycho-Historical Essays. London: Oxford University Press.

———. 1982. Monks on Marriage: A Twelfth-Century View. New York: Seabury.

———. 1987. Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works. New York: Paulist.

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———. 1985b. “The Virgin or Mary Magdalen? Artistic Choices and Changing Spiritual Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages,” paper presented at the symposium, The Word Becomes Flesh: Radical Physicality in Religious Sculpture of the Later Middle Ages. College of the Holy Cross.

———. 1986a. “Women of the Middle Ages. Some Questions Regarding the Beguines and Devotional Art,” Vox Benedictina 3, 4 (October), 338-57.

———. 1986b. “The Emergence of a Women's Sensibility in Late Medieval Art in Northern Europe,” lecture at Brown University.

———. 1987. “The curtis beguinages in the Southern Low countries and art patronage: interpretation and historiography.” Bulletin de l'Institut Historique Belge de Rome 57:31-70.

———. 1988. The Beguines: Art and the Erotic in Women's Religious Community, lecture at Union Theological Seminary, New York City.

———. 1989. “The Medieval Virgin as Object: Art or Anthropology?” Journal of Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 16, nos. 2 and 3: 251-64.

———. 1990. “Phenomenal Religion in the Thirteenth Century and Its Image: Elisabeth of Spalbeek and the Passion Cult,” with W. Simons. In Women in the Church (Studies in Church History, 27), 117-26. W. J. Sheils and D. Woods. London: Oxford University Press.

———. 1992. “Reality as Imitation: The Dynamics of Imagery Among the Beguines.” In Maps of Flesh and Light: New Perspectives on Religious Experience of Late Medieval Women, ed. U. Wiethaus. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press.

———. 1993. Sculpture of Compassion: The Pietà and the Beguines in the Southern Low Countries. Belgian Historical Institute of Rome.