Transcription
Starting at the age of around 12, a 13th-century German girl would begin to experience what she called Divine greetings, invitations, then experiences of being drawn into the inner life of the godhead, into the inner flowing dynamism of the Christian Trinity. Thereafter, she experienced profound raptures, erotic seductions, and eventually the most profound spiritual sorrow, all bathed in a river, a torrent of flowing light.
Pledging herself to religious life, she only haltingly revealed the nature of these greetings to her Confessor. She even wondered, and I think rightly so, if the nature of these greetings should be even committed to writing. I mean, if deemed heretical, her book and her flesh could be consigned to the pyre. Yet, precisely in one of those most intimate greetings, the Divine issued a decree of protection: "The truth cannot be burned," and that her very book represented and was in fact a kind of Reincarnation of the Divine upon the Earth. She was giving birth to a new Incarnation, a new gospel, and thus becoming something of a new Apostle, bearing a new revelation, even becoming a kind of second man, Mary, giving birth onto that parchment to the flowing light of the godhead itself.
Mechtild of Magor is known through her divine revelation, her book, *The Flowing Light of the Godhead*, which she composed over the course of her entire life. A text the church rightly chose to cherish rather than incinerate. In it, we're given access to a powerful spiritual universe, a world of erotic spirituality and prophetic visions, sometimes quite mundane advice, and the mystical arc of a woman's life from youthful passion to helpless senility. Let's explore Mechtild of Magor's mystical revelation captured in her *Flowing Light of the Godhead*.
If you're interested in magic, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, Kabbalah, or the history of mysticism and the Occult, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my other topics on esotericism, including here, playlists. Also, if you want to support my work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics on esotericism here on YouTube, I'd hope you consider supporting my work on my Patreon with a one-time donation, with a Super Thanks option, you can find below the video, or by picking up some of the channel merch over at the store tab. But now, to a mysticism, to a mystic of flowing light, spiritual eroticism, in the most profound depth of religious and mystical anguish and alienation: Mechtild of Magor and her *Flowing Light of the Godhead*. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the Arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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We only know of Mechtild of Magor's life from her work, *Dinda dite*, composed over the course of the latter part of her lifetime, from roughly 1250 to 1280, making her a near contemporary to Thomas Aquinas. Though only at the end of Thomas's life could Mechtild and the Angelic Doctor be compared in any form or fashion. She was probably born into an lesser aristocratic family sometime in the first decade of the 13th century and never seems to have received a formal education. In fact, when her vernacular Middle Low German fails her in her mystical flights, she laments not knowing Latin, perhaps believing that access to that technical language of scholasticism would somehow aid her. I, on the other hand, suspect quite the opposite would have been true. While absolutely fine for highly granular argumentation, medieval Latin would have probably just been a straightjacket for her already heightened spiritual affusion. She's already reaching language that's soaring beyond anything imaginable by language to begin with.
As I mentioned in the introduction, she began to experience these Divine greetings, as she turns them, at the age of 12, and those mystical experiences she would encounter nearly daily for the rest of her life. However, she would flee from her family and friends around 1230 to join the Beguine movement at Magor. Now, I've made a whole episode about the Beguines and their spiritual lives, if you want to check that out up in the card above and the link in the description. But the Beguines were pious women. They had a male counterpart called the Brothers, as well, who took religious vows such as chastity, poverty, and service to the community, but did not enter religious orders or become enclosed as nuns. They supported themselves through begging alms, which did sometimes earn them the eye of the church, but also primarily through cottage industry, often becoming the most frightening thing imaginable to men, medieval or otherwise: an autonomous community of powerfully independent women with a powerful sense of mystical spirituality all their own.
This independence afforded them the ability to write and express their own ideas, their own spiritual journeys, and often their own language. And Beguine spirituality represents some of the most profound mystical experiences and mystical expressions found in all of Christian mystical piety. So much so that the greatest scholar of Christian mysticism of the 20th century and the 21st century, maybe just the best scholar about this topic in general, Bernard McGinn, has suggested that for Beguines of this period and writings, Angela Foligno, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechtild of Magor, and Marguerite Porete represent four novel Apostles bearing four novel gospels, whose experience of the Divine utterly transformed Western mysticism, Christian or otherwise. Frankly, and I'll be honest, I find this argument profoundly compelling. And have so far covered Angela Foligno and Hadewijch of Antwerp, or Hadewijch of Brabant, Hadewijch having a radical impact on me personally. And after this episode on Mechtild of Magor, I'll be coming back to do a final sort of series wrap-up on Marguerite Porete, though that will not be the last episode on Beguine spirituality.
But as I mentioned, the independence of the Beguines also earned them the suspicion of the highly patriarchal church, and they faced near constant accusations of heresy, specifically being associated with the so-called heresy of the Free Spirit, though there's not much evidence that they were ever really involved in that so-called heresy. Indeed, in the generation following Mechtild, the Beguine Marguerite Porete would be burned alive, a potential fate that clearly troubled Mechtild and her writing.
Despite this, Mechtild did ultimately reveal her greetings to her Confessor and eventual editor/scribe, Henry of Halle. Where they were met with enthusiasm. Her book, *The Flowing Light of the Godhead*, actually comes down to us in seven books, reflecting much of the mystical experiences throughout her life. The first five books were probably completed around 1260. The next decade saw the addition of a sixth, and then eventually a seventh was ultimately added and completed sometime around 1272. With Mechtild now an advanced age, in fact, she was at this point blind and nearly paralyzed and in the care of the Cistercian nuns at Halle. We're actually told by those nuns that toward the end of her life, she was treated as a living relic. To give you some idea of the sanctity associated with Mechtild, she was a relic, usually a fragment of a past saint, but still alive, a living relic by those sisters.
In effect, what we have in the text is the mystical travelogue over the course of an entire lifetime in one volume, a true treasure that we are absolutely lucky that it survived down to us. Sadly, however, the original edition of the text, composed in her own native vernacular Middle Low German, it's been lost. However, around 1290, the first six books were translated into Latin by the Dominican Brothers at Halle, thus giving this vernacular work of a woman, a woman, a woman's mystical life, a much wider scholastic audience. It would go on to influence all kinds of people like Master Eckhart. Also, when the Dominicans think that your work is heresy-free enough to translate and distribute, well, you're you're pretty much you're pretty much golden.
Later, in the mid-14th century, Henry of Nördlingen had the complete translation made of *The Flowing Light* from Low German to High German, which does survive in a complete manuscript. Now, while this is of course a different version than the original, there's good reason to believe that one, the Latin translation was pretty faithful to the original Middle Low German, and two, while there is a real difference in dialect between Low and High German, it's less of a translation than a shift in transmission. And thus, we can have some real confidence that the words of Mechtild do come down to us, even if her actual voice is now just a whisper, basically lost to history.
Further, scholars have also resolved that while her editors have done their job to some degree, the text is edited, there's little reason to believe that they have redacted the text in such a way as to mar the original meaning or even the original language as much as possible. And this does make sense for theological reasons. They genuinely believed that she was in communion with the Divine, and as such, her revelation shouldn't be overly edited or redacted, something tantamount to blasphemy, in a way. Thus, all in all, the text of *The Flowing Light of the Godhead* has probably come down to us in both a very worthwhile version and a very reliable form.
Now, that said, that doesn't make the text any less difficult. Simply put, *The Flowing Light* defies any sense of genre. It of course contains mystical visions, often couched in both poetry and prose. Her poetic sensibilities tend from nearly childlike nursery rhymes to a clear aim of mimicking the courtly poetry of her time. The text also abounds in extended dialogues, especially the early sections of the text. These dialogues or passages between her and her soul, her soul and her body, her soul or her body, typically her soul and the Divine or the Virgin Mary, her soul and other people, and sort of vision states, even those confined in purgatory and even in hell. Her dialogues traverse space, time, spiritual dimensions, and even fracture her very being in the process.
Her text also features lists, delineating things like forms of love or forms of patience, how the Divine caresses the soul. These lists are a bit like meditations on various aspects of Christian piety. While some of the sections ascend to the most high of profound spiritual heights and depths, for that matter, others take the form of commonplace advice for those around her. She was probably a leader in her community, and thus we have practical advice for living in that Beguine community, or for things like how a Christian should deal with the Jews, a section that honestly isn't as bad as it could be, you know, given 13th-century Catholic Germany.
Part of what makes *The Flowing Light of the Godhead* such a pleasure to read and meditate upon is that it's a bit like a roller coaster, providing radical spiritual acceleration and whiplash-inducing shifts, but also calmer moments of mental, mental, and mystical rest before plunging you right back in. Further, the text is a world, a cosmos unto itself. We find a herself centered on the medieval woman of Mechtild, but also reaching out into the larger world, passing by other Christians, soaring high above the church and criticism of the church, frankly, viewing the entire world in its sinful state, but also its future glory. And then we're getting a glimpse from time to time of a future period of complete redemption, all smeared through like oil paint into one temporary moment. We are a fly on the wall as Mechtild's soul is caught up into the dynamism of the Trinity, the erotic embrace as her soul and the living Son exchange hearts or lie upon the Lover's spiritual bed. The reader becoming something like a mystical voyeur, both leering but also admiring, cheering them on from the height. We look down from heaven and the tears of angels and saints and the exalted Virgin, the Empress of the cosmos. Then, just another moment, we gaze in horror upon those facing the torments of purgatory, their tortured souls aiming upwards toward final salvation. And of course, it wouldn't be just uh, wouldn't be medieval times without journeys into hell, which even at the lowest station of the abyss, be beneath the very tail of Satan himself, Mechtild learns to delight in the most profound spiritual alienation, that the deeper she sinks, the sweeter she drinks.
Thus, *The Flowing Light of the Godhead* is an entire spiritual cosmos unto itself, centered upon Mechtild, whose visions allow us to travel with her and to experience her mystical experiences through her. But what vouchsafes any of this? Surely, this could all be the demented ravings of just a woman in the Middle Ages, or worse, nonsense spouted by a person demonically possessed. And Mechtild herself worries about just those possibilities, and I think every honest, humble mystic does, and probably should. Any mystic that doesn't think they're crazy at some point, it's probably not worth listening to.
But what ultimate grounds the sanctity of her experiences is, for her, precisely her humble station in this world. By the principle of holy inversion, she's neither in religious order, nor educated, nor a man, for that matter. She thus argues that she is a kind of empty vessel or blank slate through which the Divine Light can shine unimpeded. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2:7, "The weak things of the world, God has chosen to put to shame the strong." Thus, it's precisely because of her weakness that she is in the ideal medieval medium through which the Divine can be made manifest. I mean, God did, according to Christian mythology, take on the flesh of a lowly Galilean peasant. After all, why not an unlearned, pious, but not technically religious medieval German woman?
And thus, it's this alleged diaphanous quality of Mechtild, which means that she isn't just a narrator of her mystical experiences, but that the physical expression of those experiences on that parchment is itself Divine Incarnation. The white parchment, she tells us, being the humanity of the Son, the words being the flowing godhead, the Father flowing into her soul, and the sounds of the words, it's meant to be read out loud at least nine times, we're told by the text, that are the light of the Holy Spirit. *The Flowing Light of the Godhead* as a book is literally itself an incarnation of the Divine. *The Flowing Light of the Godhead* is literally the flowing light of the godhead. And to Bernard McGinn's point, Mechtild is actively cultivating the sense that she's bringing into being, birthing a new kind of gospel, an incarnated revelation of the Divine to all of humanity. So much so that in the preface, the voice of Mechtild and the voice of the Divine are blended into one, urging that *The Flowing Light* as a book is for all people, sinners and saints alike, such that it should be read, as I said, no less than nine times. I'm on like two and a half.
It's this sentiment that I find the most shocking. How did a book on such seemingly blasphemous claims alone not find itself, and its writer, frankly, cast into the fire? I think the answer is, unsurprisingly, the real sanctity that one does find in its pages, a sanctity that not even the Dominican inquisitors could deny as having its origins in heaven. However, that sense of sanctity is highly resistant to summary. The book is a kind of gestalt, and unlike her scholastic peers, the text doesn't build up some systematic argument or have a plot that goes from A to B to C. Like the courtly poetry of that time, rather, Mechtild seems to again return over and over and over again to some central themes. Themes, however, which we should not take to be exhaustive of her mysticism. But one might think of those themes as following the three Fs: flowing, flirting, and falling.
As one can probably tell from the title of the text, Mechtild is a mystic of flow, movement, dynamism, and above all, light. While someone like Angela Foligno often prefers the language of divine darkness, Mechtild revels in blinding, moving, pulsating light. Even that, the idea of the searing landscape of the desert as a place of spiritual affection, is actually a commonplace in her writings. That dynamic flow of light has its origins in, just simply is, the inner life of the Divine Christian Trinity. Now, while it's easy for those of us like me who are more of the cerebral kind, focusing more on the arguments from the Patristic Fathers about the substance and economy of the Trinity, or medieval scholastic debates, it's core to recall that the Christian Trinity is most fundamentally a relationship of and as the godhead. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit exist as an eternal relationship, present not just as substances in their serene equilibrium, but as pulsating radii whose flow is expressed both in the creation, the endurance, and the salvation of the world.
Further, at the seat of the human being, that image of the Divine that we're all created in, according to the Bible, is precisely the Trinity as Divine expression in our soul. Thus, the Trinity is especially for Mechtild, not a distant *Deus Amandus*, a hidden God transcendent in regal glory, but an imminent Divine expression at the foundation of the human soul and of creation itself. For me, the Divine creation as the flow of creative, salvific light is the core of not only existence, but also of all religious phenomenology. So, if the book is called *The Flowing Light of the Godhead*, well, it's for good reason.
But that relation of and with the flowing light is itself anything other than static, as one might imagine. That relationship moves and plunges, it escapes, it overwhelms, and it abandons the capture. This dynamic relationship with the flowing light, Mechtild makes sure to use the language and forms of medieval courtly love poetry to capture this flirting, this seduction, and this consummation with the Divine as spiritual eroticism, or *minnespiel*, literally playing at love. While semi-erotic language taken from the Song of Solomon has been developed previously, about a generation before, 100 years before, by Bernard of Clairvaux, which Mechtild clearly knew, either directly or probably indirectly from the preaching of the time, that's all pretty pretty plain, pretty tame, pretty vanilla compared to Mechtild. While Bernard's eroticism knew the mystical embrace and the mystical kiss, Mechtild goes all in, unabashedly centering sexual intercourse as mystical consummation with Christ, often taking a kind of passive role in her mystical experiences. We read how Mechtild's soul would "take him in my arms, eat him and drink him, and have my way with him, such that she will constantly entwine her limbs with him, such that she could never cool off." So yeah, flowing, flirting, falling. The 44th chapter of Book One is the locus classicus of this flirting, this seduction, and intercourse with all the Divine and with all the trappings of medieval courtly love poetry. And that is a fantastic place to begin studying Mechtild. She's even delightfully coy with her reader, such that in the moment of sexual silence, the "little death," one imagines the lover and the beloved surrender to each other on the bed of love, she winks at us, the reader, saying, "What happened to her then? She knows, and that's fine by me." What in the name of Jesus Christ romance novel is this? With the pulsating, throbbing lights, the bed of love, and the bottomless desire of the truly naked souls? Damn good mysticism is what this is, folks.
While Hadewijch cultivates an ever-heightening sense of desire, and Angela Foligno plunges headlong into ever more fetishistic divine paraphilia, although no kink-shaming here, mystical or regular, Mechtild sees the process truly from start to finish: from the first flirtation, the alluring dance, and the consummation. Yet, unlike Marguerite Porete, a generation after her, it is not for Mechtild, it is not annihilation. And this is actually one of Mechtild's more peculiar theological points. The Trinity is an eternal dynamism existing at all points of space and time. And thus, even as the eternal origins of the Second Person of the Son was always already coming into reality, in being as flesh, as human being, embodied, crucified, and resurrected to glory, for Mechtild, even if Adam had never sinned, even if that never happened, Christ would have still become flesh, having in the eternality of the inner life of the Trinity already having done so.
Thus, the Divine image of the human being, both body and soul, body here having eternally, but also temporally, being in-fleshed by the Second Person of the Trinity, means that redemption must also focus on this very bodily, this very embodied dimension of salvation. And that's why Lucifer, Satan, is forever damned and cannot repent. The angels, and thus the demons, precisely lack the bodily aspect made in the image of God. And thus, when they muck it up, salvation for them is simply impossible. The physical Incarnation, the physical suffering, the physical death, and the physical resurrection provide the human being, given a body made in the Divine image, a means to salvation. Hence, she unabashedly centers sexual intercourse in her spiritual irony. It's just part of who we are, even if we deny ourselves it in form of a higher spiritual vocation. That despite the typical medieval body-bashing we give get from Mechtild, there is no salvation outside of a very deep, a very true theology of embodiment.
And this leads us to her final mystical moment: falling. Part of what's amazing, positively amazing, about *The Flowing Light of the Godhead* is seeing Mechtild's mysticism mature with her as she herself ages. And as she tells us, a youthful seduction, a torrid affair full of blinding passion, even if perfectly and blissfully consummated, that's simply not exhaustive of true love. To know true love, one must be plunged into the depths of rejection, loss, alienation. And in her mature moments, describing the soul becoming naked before the useful Christ, there's a second act, again, no annihilation here, where the soul, following the passion, fills consummation, must become further naked, further naked by becoming dressed in the naked, empty body of the crucified Christ. Thus, in the moment when Christ had fully perished upon the cross, the act of completed *kenosis*, the Divine and the human fully dead and empty, that the soul can come to truly become naked by inhabiting the husk of Christ, thus becoming truly crucified with him. And there, in the blackness of abandonment, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" the soul falls. It plunges into absolute estrangement with the Divine. And as she tells us, "If you want love, you must flee love." Bear the soul sinks into the torments of purgatory before finally come face to face with something of a, a horrible inversion of the Virgin Mary, what Mechtild calls the Lady of Pain. This Clive Barker-esque being reveals to Mechtild the horrifying truth that while she is a demon, the Lady of Pain was the closest garment Christ ever wore on Earth. Just beyond his Divine flesh, his human flesh was a garment of agony. And that if she is to love Christ, to become that near to him, she must bear up the Lady of Pain. And in this agony of alienation from the spring bed of love that she just left, she's now plunged into the depths of hell, to the deepest, darkest region beneath the very tail of Satan, experiencing all of the tortures of hell along the way. But in that falling, in that horrible sinking, her soul knows that it's the agony in the hopes of love. And the more Divine estrangement allows her, the more she's sure of that love. And there, at the very bottom of the pit, in the very abyss of hell itself, she delights in knowing that the deeper she sinks, the sweeter she drinks. Or as she's had elsewhere, "I simply became wonderfully dead, wondrously dead, miraculously dead." Such that in this hell, she reaches the true desert, as she tells us in language bound up with both mysticism and the everyday world of ethical living. Again, part of the power of real mystics, she tells us, "You should love that nothingness, and you should flee somethingness. You should stand alone, and you should go to no one. You should not be excessively busy and be free of all things. You should release captives and subdue the free, and you should restore the sick, and yet you should have nothing to yourself. You should drink the water of suffering and ignite the fire of love with the very kindling of virtue." And then you are living in the true desert.
In the final book of *The Flowing Light of the Godhead*, we find Mechtild now in advanced age. She's blind, she's largely paralyzed, and she's unable to care for herself, something that she laments, knowing that she used to be a powerful leader in her community. Now she's a living relic, something between life and death. Yet, even in her final years of her life, she finds in her very physical objection, precisely in her disability, that she is more than ever clothed in a white wedding dress, such that her now tormented body, which she lovingly refers to as her "dearest prison," can be joined to Christ in his objection. And yet, her soul, clad with more feathers than ever, can soar into the realm of the flowing light, with flesh and spirit at long last married forever within the eternal flowing light of the godhead.
With so many other mystics, we just get glimpses, just snapshots of their spiritual journeys, often highly curated and manicured. With Mechtild, we're allowed to go on the sacred pilgrimage, the privilege of going with her through the life of her mystical experiences. In moments of soaring theological speculation, the youthful flirtation and consummation of spiritual eroticism, but also the abjection and estrangement where the Divine not only goes silent but rejects us, where our very body rejects us. And far from fanciful flights in the world of thought and feeling, the concrete world of an aging body, of the light dimming in our eyes, and our own very human frailty and infirmity, still revealing in her blindness, most visually clearly, the light of the Divine that flows through her.
You can read Mechtild's amazing book in the *Classics of Western Spirituality* series, and find a wonderful analysis of her mysticism in Bernard McGinn's second volume of his *History of Christian Mysticism*. Next time, we're going to turn to Marguerite Porete, who unfortunately was burned alive for her profound mystical insights. Before keep going into this world of women's mysticism in the Middle Ages, to show that by no means have we exhausted the wonderful, powerful women's insights into the Divine and the mystical with just these four women. There's a lot more to cover, like Beatrice of Nazareth and so many others. So stay tuned for those. Until then, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the Arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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