SOURCE: Murk-Jansen, Saskia. “Hadewijch and Eckhart: Amor intellegere est.” In Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, edited by Bernard McGinn, pp. 17-30. New York: Continuum, 1994.

[In the following essay, Murk-Jansen traces thematic affinities between Hadewijch's works and those of German theologian Meister Eckhart.]

Academics today may be forgiven for wondering why so little attention has been paid to the question of influence between Hadewijch and Eckhart, or at least to the possibility of common themes in their work. Hadewijch, after all, was writing around the middle of the thirteenth century in an area that was geographically and linguistically not very far removed from Eckhart's own, half a century or so later. The manuscripts of her works were known to ecclesiastic scholars in the fourteenth century although not very widely disseminated, certainly not compared for example to those of Marguerite Porete. Like Marguerite Porete, Hadewijch is thought to have been a Beguine, and the Beguines had particularly close links with the Dominicans, so there exists at least the possibility that Eckhart could have heard of her work from others within his order. Nevertheless, this whole field of inquiry has been left lying fallow. Why? Is this lack of attention by eminent Hadewijch scholars earlier this century because the evidence against is so overwhelming that there is no point in pursuing this line of inquiry? In what follows I shall argue that it may in fact be due more to twentieth-century politics than to medieval history or theology. By divorcing the question from the thorny problem of influence, bound up as that is with twentieth-century values such as originality which have little or no significance in the medieval context, another field of inquiry is opened up: namely the existence and distinctive characteristics of theological writing in the vernacular during the thirteenth century. I will argue that Hadewijch and Eckhart were drawing on such a tradition, and that the ideas and expressions which they share formed part of a common heritage of theological thought which they helped both to shape and to define.

It has been said that there is no possibility that Eckhart could have been influenced by the work attributed to Hadewijch because he would have been quite unable to read it. With great respect (as they say in the British House of Commons), and leaving aside the fact that there are more ways of learning of something than by reading alone, that is unlikely to be true. Certainly Eckhart was born in a village in Thuringia, in northern Germany, and probably grew up speaking that dialect. However, in much the same way as dialect speakers today also learn the standard form of the language, Eckhart is almost certain to have been familiar with the Middle High German of northern Germany. Later in his life he traveled widely through Germany as well as to Paris where, of course, he obtained his formal training in theology. He may have communicated with his fellow Dominicans in Latin, but he can scarcely have spoken to the nuns and Beguines in Strasbourg and Cologne in Latin. Nor, if his native Thuringian dialect was unintelligible to German speakers in the south, would he have done so in his dialect. For the purposes of everyday life as he traveled through his province, it is inconceivable that Eckhart would not have been able to understand and to communicate in a form of High German, and very probably also in the dialect of Cologne.

All this is of course rather hypothetical. What is not hypothetical is the extent to which German and Dutch were mutually intelligible in this period. The relationship of Modern German to Modern Dutch is deceptive, although even today the language of the area of Cologne is very close to that on the Dutch side of the border. Modern German developed from the High German of southern Germany and is quite far removed from the Middle High German which was spoken in the north. Dutch, on the other hand, is very much closer to the Middle High German spoken north of the Rhine than to the High German of the south. As a result, Modern Dutch is in many ways closer to much Medieval German than is Modern German.¹ Modern Dutch has developed directly from the Medieval Dutch preserved in the majority of the manuscripts. The language of Eckhart, a native of northern Germany, would therefore have been closer to that of Hadewijch, and indeed even to Modern Dutch, than it would have been to Modern German.

An example of the ease with which literature crossed what are today linguistic barriers is that of one of the great Dutch courtly-love poets, Hendrick van Veldeke. Veldeke, who was active in the late twelfth century, is claimed by both Dutch and German literary historians. Two of his inarguably German contemporaries, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strassburg, highly praise Veldeke and his contribution to German poetics. Veldeke wrote much of his work for his major patron, Agnes van Loon. The lands of the Van Loons were in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, but Agnes came originally from the court in Thuringia and Veldeke traveled a great deal between the court in Belgium and those in Cleves and Thuringia. This single example could be expanded by a number of others, notably the significant collections of secular poetry in a German/Dutch language mix.²

Another question to be addressed is that of opportunity: how might Eckhart have been exposed to the thought of Hadewijch and other Dutch mystics? We know that a complete manuscript of Hadewijch's work was in a monastery in the vicinity of Diest in modern Belgium, and it may be of interest to note that even today the local dialect of the area around Diest is quite heavily colored with German. Dominicans, however, traveled widely and had close ties with Beguines throughout the Rhineland; indeed there is evidence in Hadewijch's work that she knew and respected the Order.³ It could be argued that Dominican thought developed such a rich vein of speculative theology precisely as a result of the dialogue over many years between the Dominicans and the Beguines and nuns in their care. It is not out of the question that Eckhart could have become acquainted with Hadewijch's thought through discussion with those who had traveled in the areas where she was known. As one whose interest in mystic thought and in women's spirituality must have been as well known to his contemporaries as it is to us, Eckhart would have been a natural recipient of such information and participant in discussions. What more natural way for him to become acquainted with the thought world of vernacular feminine spirituality than from discussions with his brother Dominicans who were so closely involved with the spiritual welfare of the Beguines?

The silence in the Netherlands and Belgium concerning the possible influence of Eckhart's thought on thirteenth-century mystic writing in Dutch and vice versa has been, as they say, deafening. The reasons for this may have less to do with Eckhart than with twentieth-century European history. In 1923 J. Van Mierlo published, in reply to an article by A. C. Bouman which had appeared earlier that same year, an article entitled “Hadewijch en Eckhart” in which he vehemently argues the case against the possible influence of Eckhart on Hadewijch.⁴ In view of the relative dates of Eckhart (1268-1329) and Hadewijch (c. 1240), the controversy now seems somewhat empty, but there was far less unanimity concerning Hadewijch's dates in the first quarter of this century than there is now. This article by Van Mierlo was practically the last time any serious work was done on the question of the possible relationship between the thought of Hadewijch and that of Eckhart.⁵ Attentive readers may recall Van Mierlo's oblique reference to the fact that Bouman's article had appeared in German, but the significance of this remark may have escaped all except those who have a detailed understanding of Belgian history in the first half of this century.

The discovery of the Hadewijch manuscripts in the nineteenth century coincided with the gradual emancipation of the Dutch language in Belgium.⁶ Dutch was traditionally the language of the poorer, agricultural parts of Belgium, while French was spoken in the, until relatively recently, wealthier industrial and coal-mining areas, and was the language of government and officialdom. The discovery, therefore, of a figure of the stature of Hadewijch writing in Middle Dutch was seen as a substantial boost to the morale of Dutch-speaking Belgian academics, many of whom were at the forefront of the movement to get the Dutch language established and recognized as an official language.

The emancipation of the Dutch language made slow progress. Then, in the First World War, Belgium was invaded by Germany and the invaders exploited the linguistic and political conflict to strengthen their own hold on the country by giving greater rights and privileges to the Dutch-speaking community. The establishment of the University of Ghent as a Dutch-speaking university dates from this time. The end of the First World War meant that those who had collaborated with the Germans were seen as traitors, and that almost all Dutch speakers were under suspicion of, at best, passive treason. To distance oneself from the German enemy and from German culture became a first priority for Dutch speakers, and particularly for Dutch-speaking academics. Another factor in Van Mierlo's attack on the German article in which Bouman suggested that Hadewijch had been influenced by Eckhart is that of heresy. In 1329, twenty-eight propositions taken from Eckhart's work were condemned as heretical. In the light of the Jesuit mission against heresy and their suspicion of mysticism, it is scarcely surprising that the Dutch-speaking Belgian Jesuit scholar Van Mierlo should have found explanations which preempted the possibility of any similarity between the theology of Hadewijch and that of Eckhart sufficiently compelling to look no further. The polemical arguments seeking to prove Hadewijch completely orthodox, not only in thirteenth-century terms but also in terms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic theology, have been a significant strand in Hadewijch criticism this century.

By the second half of the 1920s the case against Eckhart, or rather the reasons that any connection between Hadewijch and Eckhart was unacceptable, had developed even further. In the period shortly after Bouman and Van Mierlo published their articles, Eckhart was “adopted” by the National Socialists as a symbol of German superiority; as the father of the German language, he was held also to have been the spiritual father of the German race. While the Nazis claimed Eckhart for their own, however spuriously, it could never be acceptable for Belgian or Dutch academics even to consider whether there might have been some common elements in his thinking and that of Hadewijch, let alone influence. It is really only now as the study of these great figures is being undertaken by scholars less influenced by the events of the two world wars, that the question is becoming academically acceptable once more. The question, possibly, but perhaps not the answer.

In his article Bouman discusses a number of close similarities he perceived between the Hadewijch manuscripts and the work of Eckhart. He dismisses Van Mierlo's opinion that the Mengeldichten 17-29 are not by Hadewijch, and draws much of his Hadewijch material precisely from these poems.⁷ This enabled Van Mierlo in turn to dismiss Bouman's evidence, and closed for many years the question of the authorship of these texts. In his article Van Mierlo does not engage with the substantive points of similarity raised by Bouman, concentrating rather on the question of authorship. This emphasis has tended to divert attention from the main interest of Bouman's observations. The similarities to which he drew attention derserve serious consideration. Analysis shows that they are not confined to texts which can be dismissed as by another author than Hadewijch. Close reading of Hadewijch and of the German sermons (Predigten) of Eckhart confirms Bouman's impression that the two authors had much in common, although this may have been a common tradition of vernacular theology rather than the effect of direct influence.

In his article Bouman discusses in some detail two texts from the Hadewijch manuscripts, Mengeldicht 27 and Mengeldicht 19. He also suggests a possible connection between Veldeke and Hadewijch, posited on her probable familiarity with his work.⁸ In his discussion of Mengeldicht 27, Bouman suggests that it is a paraphrase of the pseudo-Eckhartian piece “von dem überschalle.” In support of this assessment, he reprints Mengeldicht 27 showing in italics all the words which that poem has in common with the Eckhartian text. It is certainly the case that most if not all the significant words in the poem are in italics, as well as a number of less significant ones. However, not all the evidence which he brings forward to argue for the direct dependence of the poem on the text by Eckhart is equally convincing. To show that the similarity between these texts is not merely a matter of vocabulary, but that it extends to the interpretation and presentation of concepts, Bouman presents some quotations from pseudo-Eckhart. One of these quotations, though using similar words, in fact implies the contrary to what is said in the poem. Bouman quotes pseudo-Eckhart as saying: “Daz ist diu dunster stilheit, die nieman kan verstan dan der, in den ez liuchtet” (that is the dark stillness which none can understand save him in whom the light shines). The light of God shining in the darkness is, according to this text, the only means whereby the dark stillness can be comprehended. In the third stanza of Mengeldicht 27 the poet uses the same passage from John differently:

The accident of multiplicity
takes from us our singleness;
as Saint John the Evangelist said:
the light shines in the darkness
and the dark darkness does not understand
the clarity of the light shining in her.(9)

The poet is here doing little more than paraphrasing the passage from John 1:5 “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” Both use the familiar passage from John to speak of the light of God shining into his creature, man. However, the interpretations are different even in terms of grammar, the darkness being subject in one and object in the other. The Eckhartian text implies, drawing perhaps on the Dionysian concept of the “divine dark,” that both the dark stillness and knowledge of it are desirable. The poet of the Mengeldicht, on the other hand, uses the passage to indicate that the darkness is that of our menichfuldicheit (multiplicity) which is not able to comprehend the clarity of the light shining in it. She goes on to say that only by attaining the simplicity or unity of being, empty of all things, will we be able to see that light in the light. For the poet of the Mengeldicht, the darkness is very different from the “divine dark”—it is not something to be understood, but rather an impediment to an understanding of the light.

Bouman then goes on to discuss the possibility that Mengeldicht 19 may have been directly influenced by Eckhart's Predigt 30. There are marked similarities between the two texts, but I would suggest that the evidence, when examined in detail, does not support the thesis of direct influence. There are, for example, salient features of each which are absent in the other. I would therefore suggest that the similarities are more easily explained as evidence for a tradition common to both the texts found in the Hadewijch manuscripts and the vernacular sermons of Eckhart, rather than by positing direct influence. The similarities between the two texts can be reduced to three main points: the concept that reason is a superior way to approach God; the necessity of seeing without intermediary; and the notion derived from Gregory the Great that it is needful to love as one who is dead, without the help of the senses or of the intellect. These three points are all characteristic of Eckhart's thought though not necessarily uniquely his.

In the first lines of the Mengeldicht the poet observes:

Above scripture
and created beings
reason can teach
and clearly perceive
and narrowly spy out
the way of our Lord.

[19: 1-6]

Elsewhere in the Mengeldichten, and in other texts attributed to Hadewijch, love is consistently presented as the best and the highest way to approach God, but here reason is being compared with written authorities and the words of man. The sentiment of this stanza has an almost modern ring to it and could be an indication that the author was familiar with the debate in the universities concerning the application of Aristotelian logic to matters of theology. Eckhart, on the other hand, who most certainly was familiar with the debate, places intellect in relation to the will in a more traditional dichotomy. He writes: “The masters ask whether the kernel of eternal life lies more in the intellect or in the will. Will has two operations: desire and love. The intellect's work is onefold, and therefore it is better.”¹⁰ This consideration of the relative merits of intellect and will in the approach to God was an area of debate between the Franciscans and the Dominicans, and here Eckhart gives a good Dominican point of view. The author of the Mengeldicht addresses not the relationship between reason and love but between reason and recognized “authorities.” As in the case of the passage from John, I would suggest that the differences between the Eckhart text and the Mengeldicht may be more significant than the apparent similarities. It should also be noted that the rest of the Mengeldichten as well as the other texts in the Hadewijch manuscripts are more sympathetic to the Franciscan than to the Dominican point of view, regarding the will as the ultimate way to approach God precisely because it is comprised of desire and love. According to these texts, man's love for God is increased by his constantly unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire for him, and this desire is the locus of union with the love that is God.

The similarity between Eckhart's sermon and Mengeldicht 19 is most marked on the subject of seeing without intermediary. The poet of Mengeldicht 19 writes:

To see [be] simply [naked], without means [intermediary]
that is great
well for him who can do it.

[19: 13-15]

Line 13 is a good example of the way in which the poet capitalizes on the ambiguity of language to create additional levels of meaning in the text. I have argued elsewhere that the use of the same kinds of puns, paradoxes, and ambiguities in texts traditionally ascribed to Hadewijch and in the Mengeldichten 17-24 is an indication of how closely they are related.¹¹ In his sermon Eckhart writes: “If the soul were without means [intermediary], she would see God naked” [vol. 1: 225]. The similarity between these passages could be attributable to direct influence, if not from this specific text at least from Eckhart's other writings. The concept is not unique to Eckhart's thirtieth sermon and occurs in a number of earlier texts as well, although not in this vivid form.

The third marked similarity is that in both texts the authors emphasize the need to be “dead” in order to be able to see God or to approach him. The poet writes:

To desire and to love
without the help of senses/intellect
this is necessary;
and then inwardly and outwardly to be
without knowledge
like a dead man.

[19: 43-48]

In Predigt 30 Eckhart attributes this idea to Gregory: “How should a man be who is to see God? He must be dead … Now St. Gregory says he is dead who is dead to the world … This is the first point: that one must be dead if one would see God” [vol. 1: 224]. It is clear that both authors have a shared perception of the nature of the relationship between God and man, but it is not evident that this is best explained by positing direct influence. The demand to withdraw from sense perceptions and the activity of the intellect as a preparation for drawing close to God is referred to in numerous texts by Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, and others. The idea cannot therefore be said even to be unique to the vernacular spirituality of the thirteenth century, although the articulation of it by the extreme image of death may be.

The evidence for the similarity of thought between Mengeldicht 19 and Eckhart's Predigt 30 is very strong, but there remain differences which do not accord with the theory of immediate influence. For example, Eckhart's sermon revolves around the significance of the three names of Peter, but the apostle is not even mentioned in the Mengeldicht. Similarly, the Mengeldicht refers to the need to look within, to the soul as a mirror of God, in order to gain knowledge. This concept can, of course, be found elsewhere in Eckhart, but it does not occur in Predigt 30. Although the evidence is not sufficient to prove Bouman's suggestion of the direct or indirect influence of Eckhart's Predigt 30 on Mengeldicht 19, he has drawn attention to the notable similarities in thought between the text in the Hadewijch manuscript and Eckhart's Predigten.

In his article Bouman also notes the similarity between Mengeldicht 26 and Eckhart's Predigt 87 on the poor in spirit. For the benefit of his argument with Van Mierlo, it is a shame that Bouman restricted himself to a consideration of the parallels between Eckhart's sermon on poverty and Mengeldicht 26, as this enabled Van Mierlo to dismiss the evidence as referring only to texts which he did not attribute to Hadewijch. Parallels to the salient elements of Eckhart's thought in this sermon are, however, also to be found in numerous texts Van Mierlo did ascribe to Hadewijch. Indeed the correspondence between Mengeldicht 26 and Eckhart's sermon is less striking than that with other Hadewijch texts when the texts are compared in detail.

Mengeldicht 26 is a description of the life and condition of those who are poor in spirit. Divested of similitudes and of all creaturely wisdom, they are simple and live in an eternal expanse of singleness of being, in contrast to the menichfuldicheit which was equated with darkness in Mengeldicht 27. The poem is particularly concerned with defining and describing the place where the poor in spirit are. Eckhart's sermon, on the other hand, concentrates rather on the place (or absence of place) where God is in the poor in spirit. For the author of the Mengeldicht the poor in spirit dwell in God, whereas for Eckhart, in this sermon, the salient point is that God dwells in the poor in spirit. The nature of the mystic experience appears to be such that these two positions are not mutually exclusive.¹² However, it does make it less likely that the one text was written under the direct influence of the other.

Many of the concepts and themes in Eckhart's sermon on poverty, which are perceived as so typical of Eckhart's thought, can also be found within texts that were ascribed to Hadewijch by Van Mierlo. The following will examine one or two in more detail. Both mystics associate union with a total absence of will, indeed an absence of a self to have a will. The advocation of such an absence of personal will and of a self which could have individual desires causes both to advocate an apparent impassivity and indifference to personal fate. Both Hadewijch and Eckhart, however, insist that the mystic continue to do good, simply relinquishing any sense of personal involvement in the outcome. One aspect of union, which both Hadewijch and Eckhart clearly consider potentially and ideally a permanent state rather than a fleeting experience, is that the mystic also loses the awareness of God—being so closely united involves the loss of a consciousness of the other and even of the sweetness of union. To argue for direct influence from Hadewijch to Eckhart would be inappropriate, but the extent of the similarity does suggest that Eckhart was writing in a tradition of spirituality and vernacular theology that had its roots earlier in the thirteenth century.

In his sermon on poverty, and elsewhere, Eckhart was misunderstood by the Inquisitors and by many later scholars to mean that the perfected soul should shun the doing of good works. A more dispassionate reading of Eckhart than the Inquisitors were able to make suggests that he was in fact urging his auditors to avoid personal involvement in the good works they perform, but to do them impersonally and impartially. In this he was following in the tradition of thirteenth-century lay piety. In Hadewijch's “Tenth Letter” is a passage which echoes the prayer of St. Francis, “Let us labor, not seeking for any reward save that of knowing that we do thy will.” Speaking of the wise who always seek to do good she writes: “They ask love for no other sweetness than that she grants them that in all things they may recognise her dearest will.”¹³ Hadewijch develops this thought and argues for an impassivity, almost an indifference which was to become such a feature of later spirituality, such as that of Marguerite Porete and Eckhart. In her “Second Letter” she writes: “Do good in all things. But do not care about success, neither about blessing nor about cursing, nor about salvation, nor about torment, but do and leave undone all things for the sake of love's honor” [18]. Here she articulates clearly what is largely implicit in Eckhart's work, namely that good must be done, but that it should be done only for the sake of God, without any sense of personal individual involvement. Concerning this indifference to personal fate, Hadewijch writes in her “Third Mengeldicht:”

For the finest life that I know
Although I know myself unprepared for it
That were that one let God ordain
In taking, in giving, in storm, in peace,
were it in loving, were it in hating;
That should all be equal, sufficient,
Whether God wished to come or to go.

[3: 83-89]

Hadewijch here commends not only indifference to one's fate, but even to the presence or absence of God. Whatever is the will of God should be equally acceptable. This impassivity, or total abandonment of personal desire, which Hadewijch commends so highly, is not dissimilar to that condemned in the Papal bull In agro dominico, article 8: “Those who seek nothing, neither honor nor profit nor inwardness nor holiness nor reward nor heaven but who have renounced all this, including what is their own—in such men is God glorified” [Walshe, vol. 1: xlviii]. In “Letter 19” Hadewijch uses the term ongherijnlec to describe this attitude. Ongherijnlec can be translated as unmoved, unmoveable, unaffected, or impassive. Hadewijch writes: “The soul which is most impassive, is most like God. Hold yourself unmoved by all people in heaven and on earth until the day that God is lifted up from the earth and that he draws you (and) all things to him” [126].¹⁴ To be like God the soul must be impassive, without desires, and this state is the means to union with God. This impassivity to earthly events and personal fate does not contradict the emphasis laid elsewhere in these texts on the need for a passionate desire for God. Rather it is comparable with that discussed above in relation to Mengeldicht 19 that only one who is as though dead to the world is able to concentrate his love and desire sufficiently on God to see him.

Eckhart's definition of poverty is similarly radical. In his Predigt 87 Eckhart describes true poverty as having not even a will with which to want to do God's will. He writes: “As long as a man is so disposed that it is his will with which he would do the most beloved will of God, that man has not the poverty we are speaking about: for that man has a will to serve God's will—and that is not true poverty!” [vol. 2: 270]. The absolute loss of individual will as both a necessary condition and a consequence of union is a corollary to the need to be impassive to personal fate in Hadewijch's work also. To quote once more from her “Nineteenth Letter:” “For if nothing exists for her [the impassive soul] but God, and she retains no will but lives only his will, and the soul has come to naught and wills with his will all that he wills, and is swallowed up in him and come to naught, then is he fully raised up from the earth and thus draws all things to himself” [126]. In such union the soul swallowed up in God has returned to her origins, to where and how she was before she was created—without distinction in God, the source of all creation. The soul has become nothing and is conscious of nothing except God whose will is her life. This reference to God being “raised up from the earth” recalls Eckhart's description of the Godhead, of God being raised up to what he was before he had creatures—to God as he was in himself—drawing all things back to their being within him before he spoke and they were created.¹⁵

Not only must one be indifferent to the presence or absence of God as Hadewijch points out in “Mengeldicht 3,” but being without God is also directly associated with union for both Hadewijch and Eckhart. Eckhart unambiguously recommends that his audience pray to be free of God: “Therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God that we may gain the truth and enjoy it eternally” [vol. 2: 271]. Hadewijch also speaks of the need to be free of love (God), and of love's satisfaction when this is achieved. Unlike Eckhart, she also speaks of the sense of loss involved in giving up the sweetness of the consciousness of close association. She writes:

That pleases love most of all, that one should be wholly robbed [devoid] of all pleasure of strangers and of friends and of herself. And that is a fearful life that love demands, that one must do without her fulfilment in order to fulfil her. They who are thus drawn into love and removed [received], and whom she binds, they owe so overly much to love to fulfil her on account of the great power of her strong nature.

[86, 88]

For Hadewijch as for Eckhart, the need to do without the consciousness of the presence of love (God) is associated with union, with being drawn into love. It is precisely those received by love, drawn into her, who owe it to love wholly to fulfill her by doing without the fulfillment of union with her. For Hadewijch that union which she is dedicated to achieving and towards which she is urging her audience involves no cloying sweetness. Rather it is a terrifying paradox of experiencing fulfillment only when embracing, welcoming, the reality of eternal lack of fulfillment. Moments such as this enable the modern reader to peer into the abyss and to feel something of the awe described by Hadewijch as she looks at the vortex which is the reality of her experience of union with God: “And in the middle under the disc [the seat of God] was a whirlpool turning so fearfully that heaven and earth might wonder at it and be afraid; … the deep whirlpool that is so fearfully dark that is divine union in its hidden storms.”¹⁶

In conclusion, I hope that this reappraisal of Bouman's article has shown that the similarity which Bouman perceived between the work of Hadewijch and that of Eckhart should not be summarily dismissed. That the explanation which Bouman put forward for this similarity, namely Eckhart's direct influence on Hadewijch, appears flawed does not diminish the value of his observations. There are fashions in scholarship, and currently the fashion is less to identify major individual authors and to measure their greatness in terms of the number of others they influenced, than to see them as the peaks in more general currents of thought, thereby reevaluating the many unnamed voices in the chorus. Following the current fashion, therefore, I am not looking to show direct influence from Hadewijch to Eckhart, although to do so would satisfy another currently fashionable trend, which is to draw attention to the contribution of women. Unless some further evidence should come to light, direct influence will be impossible to prove. Rather, I am interested to establish that many of the themes and ideas which have traditionally been conceived of as typically Eckhartian are also to be found in texts which predate him by at least fifty years and which are evidence for the kind of mystic theology current in the groups of laywomen during the thirteenth century. The similarity is sufficiently great to suggest that both authors, if not influenced directly the one by the other, were at least drawing on common material.

Clearly, one short essay cannot hope to do justice to such a complex subject as the relationship between the theology of Eckhart and that of Hadewijch. It is time the silence imposed by the events of the two world wars was broken and that the question of the relationship between them should be posed once again. On reexamination, the evidence in Bouman's article shows that there are substantial similarities between the theology of Hadewijch and that of Eckhart. The discussion of these similarities may however still arouse hostility, even though they have argued that it should be seen as evidence for the existence of a tradition of vernacular spirituality and theology during the thirteenth century, and not as evidence for direct influence.

Notes

1. I experienced one effect of this while teaching at the University of Aachen where German students wishing to take a course in Medieval German Literature were recommended to learn Modern Dutch first.

2. For a study of the language mixtures in the principal manuscripts during this period, see B. Schludermann, “A Comparison of German/Dutch Language Mixtures in Texts From the Gruuthuse-Ms, the Hague MS 128 E2, and the Berlin MS mgf 922. A Quantitative Analysis” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1980).

3. In Mengeldicht 3: 50-56 Hadewijch describes Mary Magdalene, already a favorite and later to become the Patron Saint of the Order of Preachers, as the great example. There are several interesting aspects to this choice of Hadewijch's, not least that she uses the example of Mary, instructed by the risen Christ to go and tell what she had seen, to validate her own teaching activity and those of her circle.

4. A. C. Bouman, “Die literarische Stellung der Dichterin Hadewijch,” Neophilologus 8 (1923): 270-79; and J. Van Mierlo, “Hadewijch en Eckhart,” Dietse Warande en Belfort (1923): 1138-55.

5. Those articles which have appeared concentrate on the later influence of Eckhart in the Netherlands, and the antipathy of Jan Ruusbroec and of his pupil Jan van Leeuwen to Eckhart's thought. For a definitive bibliography of work on Eckhart including an appendix of selected works by National Socialist writers, see N. Largier, Bibliographie zu Meister Eckhart (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1989).

6. I use the word Dutch in preference to Flemish because the term Flemish has been used by the French-speaking Belgians to imply that the language spoken by the Dutch speakers is a dialect form and therefore inferior to the French spoken in Belgium. In fact, the languages on either side of the Dutch-Belgian border are more similar to each other than are British and North American English.

7. For a detailed description of the Hadewijch manuscripts and a discussion of the evidence for and against Hadewijch's authorship of the Mengeldichten, see S. Murk Jansen, The Measure of Mystic Thought: A Study of Hadewijch's Mengeldichten (Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1991).

8. Bouman suggests that the similarities between Hadewijch's Strofische Gedichten, and the courtly lyrics of Veldeke in particular, may be an indication of direct influence. This suggestion is predicated on the fact that Veldeke's work would have been intelligible to Dutch as well as German audiences. That this was so is a further indication of the mutual intelligibility of Dutch and German in this period. The importance of the influence of secular love lyrics on Hadewijch's poetics has subsequently been examined at length in N. de Paepe's Hadewijch's Strofische Gedichten in het kader van de twalfde en dertiende eeuwse Minnelyriek (Ghent: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal en Letterkunde, 1967); and F. Willaert's De Poëtica van Hadewijch in de Strofische Gedichten (Utrecht: n.p., 1984).

9. The only edition of these Mengeldichten is: J. Van Mierlo, Hadewijch Mengeldichten, Leuvense Studiën en Tekstuitgaven (Antwerp: N.V. Standaard Boekhandel, 1952). The translations are mine. A new edition and English translation is currently in preparation.

10. The quotations and numeration of Eckhart's sermons are taken from Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises, 3 vols., ed. and trans. by M. O'C. Walshe (Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1991). This example is taken from vol. 1: 224. Hereafter the volume and page number will be given in the text.

11. Murk-Jansen, The Measure of Mystic Thought, 71-76.

12. Speaking of the experience of mystic union as described by Teresa of Avila, Pike observes: “This is to say that [the soul] has been absorbed into God and that God has also been absorbed into [the soul].” Nelson Pike, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell, 1992), 10.

13. A recent edition of the letters of Hadewijch is that of M. Ortmanns-Cornet, Hadewijch Brieven (Bruges: Uitgeverij Tabor, 1986). The translations are mine. In this edition the passage quoted occurs on p. 66. Hereafter, the page on which the quoted text appears will be given in the text.

14. The biblical source for this concept is John 12:32. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”

15. For example, the following excerpt from his Pr. 22: “The Father always speaks to the Son in unity and pours forth all creatures in him. They all have a call to return whence they flowed forth. All their life and being is a calling and a hurrying back to what they came out of” [vol. 1: 179].

16. Vision 1. A good recent edition is that of Paul Mommaers, De Visioenen van Hadewijch, 2 vols. (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij B. Gottmer, 1979). The translation is mine. In that edition the lines quoted are: 204-7, 214-16.