Promised Bodies: Time, Language, & Corporeality in Medieval Women’S Mystical Texts

WHETHER OR not we deem Augustine a mystic, Augustine’s writings are critical to Christian mysticism, especially that of the Middle Ages.1 Augustine’s theological framework and reading of Paul—especially in his later works—provide the grounds for the development of medieval mystical experience, its understanding of the role of the body, the inner senses, and the oxymoronic time of mystic experience.² In Confessions, On the Trinity, The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and indeed throughout his work, Augustine strives to provide a theological and textual bridge between a person’s limited status in time and space and the promise of eternal salvation.³ Salvation is linked to a divine essence incommensurate to the outer human senses. How then can a person know of the divine, and, even if he knows of God, how can he know God, given God’s being outside the measure of time and space? Augustine’s work tries to answer these questions, explicitly and implicitly. His writing attempts in ways performative and theological to demonstrate how divinity can become manifest to human beings, despite its hiddenness. I say “attempts” because Augustine does not credit his own thoughts with theological certainty—he is conscious of being as limited as the condition he ascribes to all human beings, and his text bears traces of the boundary between human and divine.

One of the areas in which this is visible is his rhetorical style and conscious use of language. As in his Confessions, throughout his works he hopes to make truth, to confess it, to make what exceeds him transpire through him by means of language: “I am telling the truth, I am telling it to myself, I know what I cannot do” (Trinity 15.50 [435]) he writes at the end of On the Trinity.⁴ Like humilitas formulae common to mystics, Augustine’s acknowledgment of his own limitations may, he hopes, function as the sign of a greater truth operating through him. Hadewijch even makes explicit reference to Augustine’s consciousness of his own linguistic limitations in Letter 22, paralleling them with her own: “‘He who knows little can say little’; so says wise Augustine. This is my case, God knows” (CW, 94).⁵ As Augustine elaborates theologically on how the realm of the eternal aligns with the realm of the temporal, he attempts to demonstrably bridge divine and human realms in ways that are audible, visible, and comprehensible for his readers, even when he is doubtful of the truth of this endeavor. His own work itself is an instance of a promised bridging, in that it seeks to be a bridge between two incommensurate realms, making the divine more palpable to the reader even when it is sustained not by certainty, but by faith.

Like the “life” of a saint, martyr, or the soul of Augustine himself, the text hosts a possible affirmation of divinity. I use the term “hosts” as it cannot claim or assert this affirmation as its own: divinity may operate through something or someone, such as the reader reading Augustine’s work, Augustine himself, or the mystic who receives God’s word. This act of divine “working through” is conceived of as an act of grace, one that complements human nature. In Christian doctrine, the only one who “owns” or is identical to divinity is the Trinity itself, that is, the Father, the Son (Christ), and the Holy Spirit. The human relation to divinity, even in the experience of intimacy with the divine, is therefore closer to hosting than to possessing a quality of the divine itself. Even divine truth eludes the way we perceive it: for Augustine, the truth associated with God resides with language, alongside language, through language, shadowing it, so to speak; however, truth is not substantially of language, as we will see further on in this chapter.

Augustine’s understanding of the Trinity and the trace (vestigium) of the imago Dei, the image of God within all human beings, will provide the theological basis for this hosting, implicitly establishing a correlation between language, the mind, embodiment, and the promise of divinity. The imago Dei, that part of humanity irrevocably linked to its divine creator, is constituted by various trinities that trickle down to leave a trace in the exterior person (homo exterior)—what he will refer to as a means of invoking the Pauline exo anthropos—and its embodied sensible condition. The outer person’s mediation between material entities and the mind will be the first means for locating the Trinitarian reflections of the divine within human beings. For Augustine, the human person and, consequently, the human body and its senses are suspended between multiple addresses, commands, and destinations: the body is part of a corruptible material destined for death, yet in the light of divine truth, through this same body we are promised a glimpse of the image of God and the afterlife of the soul. It is by means of the body, even when claming a negative relation to it, that this ideal imago is traced; even in life, “the ideal is not escape from the body and the world, but reestablishment of inner equilibrium by unification of all one’s levels of being, which includes the body’s spontaneous submission to the soul.”6

Augustine, following Paul, distinguishes inner man (eso anthropos) from outer man (exo anthropos), but in Latin terms, identifying the interior and exterior homo and elaborating a complex regimen of inner and outer senses, building up “a complete anthropology of the inner man.”⁷ As Brian Stock notes, for Augustine, we perceive outer things “through our bodily senses, but we pass judgment on them by means of a far more important sensory capacity, which can be called the sense of the interior man.”⁸ Augustine will thus provide a twofold anthropology for the activities of human beings: as they dwell in the world bodily (the outer person) and as the soul inhabits the body while orienting itself toward God (the inner person). Like Paul, who distinguishes between sarx (flesh) and soma (body), Augustine too thinks of corpus (body) as discernible from, while also comprising, caro (flesh), yet ultimately, like Paul, his interests are in the transformation of the body as a whole when redeemed, a transformation that necessarily includes the flesh. While flesh bears the mark of corruption and decay, signaling the fall into sin, it promises to be transformed into a spiritual body. Like his favorite apostle, Augustine does not discard or deny the outer person, nor does he attempt to discard the flesh and efface its contingency on the outer person; rather, he seeks to reconcile the limits of embodiment with the promise of the divine.⁹

Although the outer person cannot claim the same kind of trinity as the inner, it nevertheless is a lesser form that promises a relation to the Trinity itself.10 Looking to the outer, Augustine notes: “Let us try then if we can to pick out some trace of the Trinity in this outer man too. Not that he is also the image of God in the same way as the inner man; the apostle’s verdict is quite clear which declares that it is the inner man who is being renewed for the recognition of God according to the image of him who created him (Col 3:10); since elsewhere he says, Even if our outer man is decaying the inner man is being renewed from day to day (2 Cor 4:16)” (Trinity 11.1 [303]).¹¹ Since human beings are made in the image of the divine, Augustine attempts to show how a trace of the divine is present in both the inner and outer persons, despite their differences and despite the outer person’s inferior nature. An awareness of the traces of the Trinity in both may, he hopes, ultimately help human beings orient their inner and outer persons toward the divine—if acknowledged, nurtured, and put to use correctly. The first step of this orientation toward the Trinity involves recognizing the difference of how we perceive and how divinity is to be understood. Augustine starts with the outer and is quick to remark on the outer’s negative relation to the Trinity. He elaborates on the partial nature of human understanding, showing how divine substance is incommensurate to our habits of equating things spiritual with substantial bodily entities: “Father and Son together are not more being than Father alone or Son alone, but […] three substances or persons together … are equal to each one singly, which the sensual man does not perceive (1 Cor 2:14). He can only think of masses and spaces, little or great, with images of bodies flitting around in his mind like ghosts” (Trinity 7.11 [230]).¹²

Although Augustine’s sensual man, or animalis homo, bound as he is to time and space, can only think of things according to his outer senses, conjuring ghosts there where an unfathomable substance is promised, something of this sensual man promises more if perceived as incomplete and incommensurate to the divine. If one conceives of the material body perceived by the senses as inadequate for measuring the divine, then one avoids confounding the divine with a material substance—unlike the Manicheans and other (heretical) cults of early Christian culture. For Augustine, through establishing a relation of the outer human body and bodily senses to the mind, and not in their absolute rejection, a person may begin to discern the figure of the Trinity. Orienting the bodily senses to serve the mind will be the first step in finding the Trinity within.¹³ The mind (mens) will bridge the limited body with the promise of the divine. Augustine starts with the body and works inward toward the faculties of the mind, tracing out various trinities with each progressive turn.

In a formulation that will be picked up in an almost literal fashion by the mystics, Augustine explicitly refers to Paul and his evocation of a promised union of knowledge and perception with the divine: “But when that which is perfect is come then that which is in part shall be done away. … For now we see through a glass [mirror] darkly but then face-to-face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as also I am known” (1 Cor 13:10–12). In the present, this face-to-face encounter is only suggested; it is partially glimpsed through faith, and understood through Augustine’s attempt to bridge perception and knowledge by means of his book, De Trinitate. This encounter occurs in a time that—depending on one’s interpretation—can be described as a future Messianic or eschatological time and is therefore not tangibly present. For the visionary mystics, this time “outside” the present moment will be reformulated in the temporality of visions. Visions are “face-to-face” encounters with the divine, which transpire in a time that is not of the outer person or the sensual man, but of the inner person and its promised unity. Reading the embodied nature of visions will require attention to these differences.

Because the human being is both like and unlike God, made in God’s image but unlike God in its mode of dwelling in time and in space, Augustine is faced with the question of how to reconcile the body’s existence in a temporal and changeable medium with the unchangeable and eternal nature of its creator. It is only through loving and understanding what Augustine calls Christ’s “back,” that is, his being as flesh, comprehending Christ’s death in the flesh, and imagining what his front points to that one may be united as a member of Christ in the symbolic body of the Church.¹⁵ One has to desire and love that which one cannot see fully. Augustine’s language, which merges Pauline theology with an unusual reflection on Christ’s body, draws on the Pauline notion of walking by faith to illustrate the way in which the body and faith perform together, complementing one another:

This gesture of looking forward and walking by faith does not actualize unity in the present; rather, it orients the future “face-to-face” encounter with God. As I have been emphasizing, this orientation for the face-to-face encounter involves temporal and bodily elements. Read without the temporal futurity of hope and faith, the back of Christ does not signify what it should, namely, the promised unity of Christ’s members after death. Christ’s body thus offers human beings a means to comprehend the partial nature of the body and of the time associated with human life. As with the mystics, it is through Christ’s body that the faithful will be led to a “direct sight” of God; through Christ, unity in eternal time is promised. In finding the “trace of the Trinity” (vestigium Trinitatis) in inner and outer persons, people will thus be able to understand the ultimate meaning of Christ’s bodily existence and his relation to the salvation of each person’s soul and body.

Women mystics will use this figure of the face-to-face to articulate the encounter with the divine in the time of the vision. And while visions seem like an unmediated encounter with the divine, they are eventually related in mediated form as encounters with divine likeness or similitude—through images and words, accessible in time through narrative. In addition, one of the most popular visionary images is of Christ, God in his humanity, meaning that the vision of the divine is oft en mediated by this human figure, whom the mystic encounters by means of her inner person. The mystic rarely encounters an absolute “intellectual” vision—the highest in Augustine’s ranking of visions—but rather, a vision abundant in images and sensations.¹⁷ God also provides her with tokens of himself that she must then interpret. The body invoked in the vision has to be read cautiously, keeping in mind how language that appears bodily is not reducible to the body, but rather, is mediated by the mind.

Likewise in reading Augustine, although Augustine’s use of visual language, in passages like the one just cited, relies on its metaphoric property (he is not talking literally about Christ’s back, or about the Church possessing a material body, or about an incorporeal God having a face), his use of bodily language and metaphor serves a critical function. Bodily language enables us to understand how the body and sight are subsumed by thought and the mind, demonstrating how human understanding may eventually grasp divinity. While we begin with the means of the outer, we turn increasingly inward. In On the Trinity, Augustine goes to great lengths to stress that God cannot conform to human measures and attributes, nor can he be presented in the visible register: “In any case, that nature, or substance, or essence, or whatever else you may call that which God is, whatever it may be, cannot be physically seen; but on the other hand we must believe that by means of the creature made subject to him, the Father, as well as the Son and the Holy Spirit, could offer the senses of mortal men a token representation of him in bodily guise or likeness” (Trinity 2.35 [122]).18

Providing a token or a bridge between the body and the promised sight of God becomes essential to Augustine’s theology. Without any means of grasping the divine, humans are bereft of a key element in loving and eventually “seeing” God, for “unless we love him even now, we shall never see him. But who can love what he does not know? Something can be known and not loved; what I am asking is whether something can be loved which is unknown … and what does knowing God mean but beholding him and firmly grasping him with the mind? For he is not a body to be examined with the eyes in your head” (Trinity 8.6 [246]).¹⁹ Augustine is clearly attempting to bring together two seemingly opposed realms: the limiting nature of bodily perception and the urgency to love God. Loving what one cannot know—while approximating it mentally—and loving love itself will be the means for allowing for a bridge. Not only is love the means by which unity will be promised, but language and representation will play decisive roles in promising to bridge this gap via the mind through contemplation.

Understanding the promised “face-to-face” beholding of God must necessarily be mediated by means of the human faculties. Augustine works inward from perception toward the mind through an analysis of the body and the trinities that can be identified within human beings. Unity trickles down to even the lowest. Augustine insists that even divided bodies exist only in relation to the ideal unified nature of the body: “There may of course be some bodies that are quite impossible to cut up or divide; but even so, if they did not consist of their parts they would not be bodies. So even in these the part is so called with reference to the whole, because every part is part of some whole and a whole is whole with all its parts. But as both part and whole are body, these are not only posited relatively to each other, they are also substantially” (Trinity 9.7 [274]).²⁰

Likewise, even though Augustine emphasizes the limited structuring of how we perceive things and experience things in the visual field—wherever you turn to see the whole, “you will see parts”21—the partial, fragmentary nature of vision promises an echo of the greater whole. For Augustine, what one sees in a temporal and material world are objects that perish and never exist in the time of the eternal, so long as we see them with our outer eyes. Since God is eternal and created all things at once, the simul, the all-at-once, is what human beings may only falsely translate by succession, by what Hegel would call a “bad infinity” (infinity derived from succession, that is, from our way of measuring time). It becomes evident then, if one interprets this Augustinian paradigm in a wider context, that the importance of vision, of spiritual vision as mystics imagine it, is to try and glimpse the eternity of things, the unity and participation of the part with the whole, through mental and spiritual focus. The relation of the part to the promise of a whole provides the means by which the body can promise more than itself and highlights the mind’s essential participation in the process. The outer promises a relation to the inner, both inner and outer promise some relation to the imago, and the imago in turn promises unity with its maker in a time to come. This underlying logic that ties embodiment to a future unity by means of the mind is part and parcel of what I term an embodied poetics. The body is inextricably linked to the mind and to the mirroring of a divine origin.

As a material substance, the body defers its materiality to a promised reflection of the imago Dei. In On the Trinity Augustine demonstrates this relation between the material body and its promised union with its divine origin by dramatizing the body’s interaction with what he calls the “thinking gaze,” which, as the combination suggests, brings mind and sight in contact with the physical body. A series of mirroring effects allows Augustine to move from a material and scopic economy to a spiritual one, a human trinity mirroring a divine one. Augustine starts with the act of seeing. At first, sight actually touches the body, for, following Plato’s idea of vision, the eye is not merely a passive object that absorbs light, but is an active body part that emits a ray and requires the mirroring quality of the mind in order for its power to be grasped: “We see bodies with our bodily eyes because the rays which shoot out from them touch whatever we observe, but we cannot snap off these rays and bend them back into our own eyes, except when we look in a mirror. … We certainly cannot see this power with our eyes … and if it can be done we grasp even this matter with our minds” (Trinity 9.3 [273]).²²

Although this model will become outdated in the later Middle Ages, especially with the optics of the Oxford school Franciscans of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Augustinian influence is pertinent in twelfth- and thirteenth-century mysticism as it will demonstrate the way inner vision merges with its object. For William of Saint Thierry, for example, inner vision touches and becomes what it sees through love.23 While mystics will not necessarily conceive of outer vision as touching its object, the influence of Augustine’s Trinitarian views will persist in other ways. Medieval understandings of the Trinity’s relation to the mind or soul will borrow from Augustine’s triangulations of memory, understanding, and love, although the trinities are oft en rephrased in different terms. Understanding, for example, is replaced by reason in William of Saint Thierry. Memory, reason, and will are emphasized in Hadewijch and Margery. And the persons of the Trinity are oft en associated with might, wisdom, and love. In Letter 22, Hadewijch associates the inner trinity of Reason, Memory, and Will with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, respectively.²⁴ Whatever the denomination, trinities abound to mirror how divinity figures within human beings. Arriving at these inner trinities—these truer reflections closer to divine nature—will require several steps.

In order to show “that the mind can know itself as in a mirror” (Trinity 10.5 [290])²⁵ Augustine will subsume one material power to a higher nonmaterial one in a hierarchical fashion. In its initial contact with the body, sight is dissected into several components. The eye’s bestowing of form is regarded as a product of both the body seen and the power of sight. Augustine clarifies this dual engendering: “Sight is begotten of the visible thing but not from it alone; only if there is a seeing subject present. Sight then is the product of the visible object and the seeing subject. … We cannot say that the visible thing begets sense, but it does beget a form as a likeness of itself, which occurs in the sense when we sense anything by seeing it” (Trinity 11.3 [305]).²⁶ The form of the object, its likeness, is thus engendered by a coupling of the senses and the “seeing subject.” In characteristic fashion, Augustine will introduce a third element, in this instance the will, which “is more spiritual than either of them” (11.9 [311])²⁷ and which will form a trinity between the nonspiritual body seen, the semi-spiritual figure, and the will itself. This triangulation among the material and the spiritual is important for understanding how this initial trinity appears: triangulation mediates all materiality, making it copresent with something spiritual. This trinity is therefore not an image that is substantially present, nor is it an object to behold, to echo Augustine.

Augustine makes clear the dangers of taking the trinity of the outer person for a substantial image of God. He warns that “likeness” misguided may motivate sin: “Even in their very sins, you see, souls are pursuing nothing but a kind of likeness to God with a proud and topsy-turvy and … slavish freedom. Thus our first parents could not have been persuaded to sin unless they had been told, You will be like gods (Gn 3:5). It is true that not everything in creation which is like God in some way or other is also to be called his image, but only that which he alone is higher than. That alone receives his direct imprint which has no other nature interposed between him and itself” (Trinity 11.8 [310–311]).28 Part of the underlying project of On the Trinity is to hierarchize various likenesses so that motivation and action become part of the equation—inner and outer affecting one another in tangible ways. In this fashion, Augustine ties the imago to more than just a static imprint—he makes it a means of perfecting human nature, inside and out. In positing the way in which a trinity manifests itself in relation to the body, he will simultaneously articulate an ethos of how one should act and live virtuously, the will aligned with God’s.

The will provides leverage in the first trinitarian triangulation in that it hoists man out of his embeddedness in the sensible world, giving him the means to orient the flesh by means of a higher power, that of the mind. Given that an element other than sight is required to form this first trinity, in order to love the body (and eventually the body’s unity with its creator), a form of alienation is introduced. Because “something else is presented to the visible body for sight to be formed out of it, namely the sense of the one who is seeing. For this reason to love the body seen means being alienated [Quocirca id amare, alienari est]” (Trinity 11.9 [311]).²⁹ Unity with the body begins with estrangement and alienation from its materiality. The body perceived is put aside in favor of a perceiving body, part of the sensory—that is, outer—human being. For Augustine, the body—once understood correctly—is marked by this alienation, for something other than how we perceive it, something that is nonmaterial, must participate in it in order to make sense of it. A poetics of the material and the immaterial ensues, one that will be necessary for the “truth” in embodiment to appear.

Following Augustine’s logic, what seemed to have come first, sight, actually is preceded by the will, for “the will was already there before sight occurred, and it applied the sense to the body to be formed from it by observing it. However, it was not yet pleased” (Trinity 11.9 [311]).³⁰ The body is caught between the “already” and “not yet” of the will, and sight becomes “the end and resting place of the will, at least in this one particular respect” (Trinity 11.10 [311]).³¹ The body is, in this perspective, not a simple materiality to be grasped with the eyes of our head, to repeat Augustine’s phrase. When reading mystical texts, we have to keep in mind that the inner will (or “understanding,” “might,” “wisdom,” or otherwise) mediates the materiality of the body to make it a proper reflection of the divine. If we look at the mystic’s body from a pragmatic perspective governed by the senses, we miss its divine reflection entirely.

The engendering of a trinity is produced yet again according to Augustine, allowing for a second kind of sight to manifest itself: that of thought gazing on internal memory. This second sight is privileged over outer sight, for the exterior person must read the outer material vision in relation to, and only to, the inner. External sight is needed in order to start the chain of engenderings, but it must be read by the inner in order to be put into proper context. Memory becomes the means for substituting the immediacy of sensation with the attention of thought; it becomes the absent body for the gaze of thought. Augustine writes:

Augustine gives the inner body metaphoric properties of the outer one: thoughts become “a kind of utterance of the heart, which also has its mouth” (Trinity 15.18 [408])33 the mind has an “inner gaze,” and the memory digests things as does the stomach.³⁴ In On the Trinity, Augustine even refers to the “eyes of love” that will “see God” (1.31 [90])³⁵ and will find a glimpse of him scattered throughout scripture. If one looks at it properly, that is, as Augustine claims to, the power of physical sight retains within itself the promise of the sight of thought, and the power of the sight of thought promises to unite ontologically fragmented material things with the unity of “nonbodily and everlasting meaning.”³⁶ It is from the memory and from the sight of thought that things will be pieced together to form part of a divine truth, that is, an everlasting truth that is not subject to temporal change. For Augustine, this piecing together is possible because “we do make judgments of bodily things in virtue of the meaning of dimensions and figures which the mind knows is permanent and unchanging” (Trinity 12.2 [323]).³⁷

What becomes significant here is that the possibility of thinking and representing the body is the means by which it is promised unity, for in the move from material sight to the sight of thought it is purged of its material substance and given a “better nature.” The power of sight (a kind of material nature) is subsumed by the power of thought and thought’s ability to represent things through language. The truer materiality of the body, the one that is more true to God’s image (the imago Dei or the imago Trinitatis in man), is in fact the body as image, that is, as representation and part of a linguistic and symbolic economy, for “the image of the body in our consciousness is better than the reality of the body itself insofar as it is in a better nature, that is, in a living substance such as the consciousness. By the same token when we know God we are indeed made better ourselves than we were before we knew him, especially when we like this knowledge and appropriately love it and it becomes a word and a kind of likeness to God” (Trinity 9.16 [280]).³⁸ The “living substance” of consciousness provides the truer materiality for the body, and love the best means for becoming a true likeness.³⁹ The imago Dei and the imago Trinitatis are not static, mesmerizing ends, but are part of a series of dynamic engenderings that lead, Augustine hopes, to action: to loving and becoming like God in one’s body and person.

Augustine’s understanding of love in On the Trinity will play an influential role in mystical texts, making love a trio and trinity of its own, as we will see later, in the form of love, lover, and beloved. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the role of love in uniting lover with beloved will be a central motif in the commentaries and sermons on the Song of Songs, written by Bernard of Clairvaux, among others, to express the ultimate union with the divine. In Hadewijch’s work, Minne means “love” (as noun and verb), “lover,” and “beloved,” and also becomes a multivalent vehicle for expressing the ways in which human beings experience God according to a Trinitarian theology. The Middle Dutch term Minne derives from the Latin mens (related to the English mind) and can also signify thought.40 In Hadewijch’s poetic works, the term enacts a Trinitarian immersion of its subject in the divine, combining an ethos of how one is to approach the divine, how the divine eludes the human, and how the divine is read and perceived by humans in the promise of an encounter.⁴¹

For Augustine, who may not be as poetic here as Hadewijch or Bernard, the systematic progression from one trinity to the next demonstrates the possibility of a theological (and philosophical) truth that one may eventually live. Loving the body as image and, following its transformation into language and reflection, loving the body as an object for consciousness brings the outer person closer to the human likeness of God. Augustine could not be any more explicit about this desired transformation, in which “we are being changed from form to form and are passing from a blurred form to a clear one” (Trinity 15.14 [406]).⁴² when we come closer to the immortal body that is promised to human beings, “conformed in this respect not to the image of the Father or the Holy Spirit but only of the Son” (Trinity 14.24 [390]).⁴³ The image reflects a more originary state, casting humans outside their being-as-flesh and enabling them to glance outside of a material to a “spiritual” self. This truer, promised, “immortal” body is closer to being-as-Word, paralleling Christ’s being as Word-made-flesh.

This promised body is thus hinged in the transformational time between its first appearance as outer material and its later (yet more originary) representation in language, between the time of the temporal and a time that promises an indirect glimpse into the eternal. Like metaphor, it is a body that is caught in passage, in transfer to a promised referential likeness. Granted, Augustine does not want the promised body to be in any way derived from or dependent on the substance of the outer body, but he does want the promised body to be in some way visible (almost already there) in the mirroring effect of the mind. Augustine is subtly proposing that we mediate all things seen with an interpretive “reading” of them through the mind, that is, through the inner person, orienting ourselves toward divinity in the process. This will affect how we read the body, that is, how we discern it and attribute meaning to it, and it will also affect how the body acts. Once oriented by the mind, the outer person will conform more closely to the inner counterpart, acting in accordance with a will aligned with God’s.

What, however, would the materiality of this promised body be, if it is closer in kind to a word or to an image (and, by contrast, not the literal incarnation of either)? This question will be significant for the mystics, for it will alter the way we conceive of how the mystic hosts and embodies divine truth. The sensory language of mystical writings may seem profoundly material to us, drawing attention to the body’s materiality—as when, for example, Hadewijch sees herself embracing Christ in Vision 7, when they are seemingly “one without difference. It was thus: outwardly, to see, taste, and feel, as one can outwardly taste, see, and feel in the reception of the outward Sacrament” (CW, 281). Yet if we read the body in the vision as fleshy and corporeal, as part of the external person, we miss a fundamental element. In the mystic’s vision, an inner body appears that is markedly different from the body-as-flesh. This inner body only becomes visible or tangible with the vision’s entry into language, that is, it only becomes palpable when the mystic places enough faith in her vision to utter what she saw. In this way, the inner body is strangely co-substantial with language and necessitates faith in order to be granted substance. Its materiality is inextricable from these elements.

The message that the inner body hosts—the vision from God—is not identical to the inner body itself; rather, divine grace operates to grant the inner body a glimpse of divine truth and to communicate that truth in mediated fashion through language. Like the materiality of the mystic’s promised body, the “truth” of the promised body will be mirrored in language, that is, it will figure in language. The truth that the body hosts will find its ultimate realization in a time to come, for “at the moment we can bear the same image, not yet in vision but in faith, not yet in fact but in hope” (Trinity 14.24 [390]).44 The promised body hosts this “truth” while never being commensurate to it, always one step away from its metaphorical referent. Inasmuch as the vision is represented in language, language is co-substantial with this promised body, that is, this body as promise, in the time yet to come.⁴⁵ As McGinn notes, lack of achievement is part of the goal: while “the activity of reforming the image by deepening our awareness of the Trinity active within us will never be complete in this life … the process must be begun in this life.”⁴⁶ Like materiality, mystical experience as it figures in Augustine would not be an experience of self-presence, or an experience of the body’s union with God, but an experience of the promise of presence, an experience of the “not yet” that is hosted in oneself and that promises to unite in and with God.⁴⁷

For Augustine, language and the mind provide a means to glimpse the promised truer body within the material body of human beings and, simultaneously, it also allows for human beings to step outside of themselves and glance at an originary state to which they hope to return. Through language, Augustine is able to catch a glimpse of his image in relation to the originary Trinity and orient his being accordingly. Likewise for mystics, the visionary text attests to an originary moment of unity which will orient how she lives, yet it does so in the context of the sensing of the nearness of the divine, that is, through mystical experience. What Augustine hypothesizes with regard to unity, the mystic enacts. Mystical texts, especially visionary ones, provide an illustration of how the mystic’s ideal promised body—that is, her transformed inner person or soul—unites with divinity and informs how she should place faith in this likeness in embodied life. While women’s mystical texts oft en use sensual language to describe unity, patterning their desired union with Christ on the tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs, the unity is that of the soul (or inner person) with Christ (or other divine figures such as the Church or groom). While desire may be articulated in a present tense, the unity is always in a future moment, unaccomplished. The description itself may even reenact, in a performative sense, the unaccomplished unity: it may fall short or dissolve into the ineffable, as we see in the case of Hadewijch, pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, Porete, and many others who work within the tradition of negative theology. In these instances, language fails to unite with its object but also marks its own failure, promising unity beyond itself in a medium that is even closer to divine nature.

This inner person, as I have shown, is linked to the idea of the Word, but also to a way of using words so as to permit human beings to host the promise of a divine reflection. For a seemingly unrelated poet like Dante, who may not be a mystic, but who borrows from the Trinitarian tradition, the capacity to shed the outer person through the medium of a poetics is explicitly stated in the divine meeting ground of the Paradiso. In the first canto of the Paradiso, in a seemingly counterintuitive gesture, Dante invokes Apollo, asking him to make him his vessel for his own “ultimo lavoro” (his ultimate work) of relaying a face-to-face encounter with divine realms which will happen further on in the Paradiso. What is unusual in this plea for divine inspiration is that he asks for a fate like that of Marsyas, that is, he asks to be shed of his skin, not as a punishment, but as a means to accomplish his poetic mission and access a truer promised likeness: “Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue / sí come quando Marsïa traesti / de la vagina de le membre sue” (“Enter into my breast; within me breathe / the very power you made manifest / when you drew Marsyas out from his limbs’ sheath”).48 Even though it may seem odd for any poet to plead for an end like that of Marsyas, it becomes comprehensible in that Dante asks that divine virtue couple with his talents, shedding his outer body, to expose an inscription of the blessed kingdom in his “capo,” his mind.⁴⁹ In other words, this shedding is not an end, but a means to another end in poetic language by means of the mind and the powers of memory. While Dante’s aspired conversion of the body into a poetics may be converting a theology into a poetics, this possibility of poetic language nevertheless borrows from an Augustinian theology that subsumes the vision of material bodies to the future mental representation of the divine.

The interweaving of language and the body will enable the outer body to be undermined in favor of the promised body, not completely human and not completely divine. This second body is constituted by and through a poetic interweaving of several elements: the body as it is known corporeally (the outer body), the body as representation (the inner body), and the promise of this representation in the register of the eternal. Given that so much of this depends, quite literally, on representing and sublating the body—that is, on a linguistic bridging between the perception of the body and its representation in the mind—to what extent do these interrelated bodies reflect or engender the reflexive or mirroring qualities of what one calls “language,” and to what extent is this second body co-extensive with language? Is the promised body the body’s eventual transformation into a word? How does the natural body relate to the linguistic one?

From what we have seen in Augustine’s Trinity, even though “natural” entities seem to embody the promise of a self-fulfilling teleology, positing themselves as themselves in a finite fashion and partaking in their literal end, language can undermine the seemingly stable ground from which the natural object issues forth, by being able to represent nature or material bodies outside of themselves. Language puts into question the intentionality behind an object’s naturalness, positing the object as an object for consciousness. In this sense, the junction between eye and object, in the staging of the mind, allows us to see (that is, understand) a prior encounter from which the other, later exchanges between men are derived. This originary scene both includes and excludes the human, dividing the body between its destination for decay (as organic body) and for resurrection (as the immortal body made in the image of Christ). Language’s expropriation of the human body, its casting man’s gaze outside himself, promises to allow man to glimpse beyond the grave and discern his “inner” and “outer” traits. For Augustine, language thus occupies a strange locus of a promise which can never be fully accomplished in nature or in the material body, but which must necessarily promise something that it cannot give.

But while the mind seems to promise something accessible, to lure with the promise of true meaning and substance, this contact with the spiritual nevertheless rescinds human touch. In other words, this contact with the spiritual is only possible through language, through this mirror which attempts to divest human beings of external traits. The contact between language and embodiment is obviously not to be thought of in purely phenomenological terms, yet it necessitates a phenomenological positing, like Augustine’s outer body, against which it can divide itself. A contact is given between the material and the spiritual so that it can be read and interpreted, but only to the extent that it points to or brings one in contact with that which can never be pointed to directly, that is, the promised body as it would appear when accomplished. Language, in both written and oral forms, promises another materiality (like that of the inner body) that it is ceaselessly in contact with but that it will not realize substantially.50 Language is constitutive of this venture in contact, which casts us both in and out of our human traits.

This dividing trait of language that I have outlined here, making use of Augustine but pushing him to an extreme, will allow us to question the relation between body and language for the women mystics, for, in their mystical text, language will promise to speak for a nonhuman (that is, divine) voice that intervenes in the human one. It will promise to mark contact between the human and the nonhuman, hosting this difference in the medium of the text. The text becomes a host, for it hosts a meeting of incommensurables: it will allow for a bridging of what can never come together before one’s eyes (in the time of temporalized life) except in the sacraments. Language (and its ability to signify beyond things as they appear) promises to enable a quasi-second birth that will graft human beings linguistically, genealogically, and spiritually onto a truer medium. This second birth, this birth into the inner spiritual person, will allow human beings to use language to trace the proximity of the divine and to hear divinity resound in an inner ear.

Through the mediation of the body by language, the finitude of the flesh can be transformed or grafted into a medium that is closer to the Word-made-flesh. This new medium, which, as I have noted, Augustine defines in Pauline terms—Even if our outer man is decaying the inner man is being renewed from day to day—operates in time, yet through its mediating capacity it allows man a divine echo in his contemplation of the eternal.⁵¹ Simply using language does not make for closeness to the divine; as I have noted earlier, one has to align the inner and outer persons according to divine will. Aligning oneself with divine will and making the outer conform to the inner is not only a linguistic operation: it also involves an ethic that will guide how one will live.

This closeness of the divine, the echo of divinity that may be heard by the inner ear, is manifest in the City of God, when Augustine differentiates how God speaks to angels from how he speaks to humans. In a passage that will resound in Hadewijch’s understanding of how God relates to time, Augustine writes:

While God’s way of speaking is clearly different from humans’ and has no phenomenality, not a trace of any bodily remnant, the fact that something like God’s speech might be grasped by the inward ear, and thus by the inner person, shows how language allows for a bridging through bodily senses. The body’s figure extends beyond itself; the figure of the inner enables human beings to go beyond the outer, referring back toward a purer origin.

Human beings have thus inherited a double destination that bears witness to a fundamental material and temporal displacement: Augustine and Paul describe human beings’ dual heritage as both children of Abraham, that is, as “children of promise” (promissionis filii), and as “children of the flesh” (secundum carnem natus est). As the child of Hagar, a human being is the off spring of the natural order, “a demonstration of nature’s way” (demonstrans consuetudo naturam), citizen of the earthly city and hence “the vessel of wrath” (vasa irae). But as the child of Sarah, she who is not enslaved but free, a human being is the child of the promise, born in fulfillment of a promise and hence an embodiment of the “vessel of mercy” (vasa misericordiae).⁵³ Just as the earthly city finds a “double significance: in one respect it displays its own presence, and in the other it serves by its presence to signify the Heavenly City,” so thus does a person’s having a body display two possible directions (not to be confounded with two possible destinies, in the sense of predestination).⁵⁴ The ideal pursuit is that of striving after Christ to return to a sight unseen. If the earthly is oriented toward the spiritual, it too is promised transformation and redemption.

This “double destination” parallels Christ’s two natures and two births into two different temporal orders. In Sermon 214 (repeated in various versions in Sermons 187 and 194, and in his In Iohannis evangelium tractatus), Augustine spells out Christ’s two natures in rhyme, providing an overlap of the eternal with the temporal in a rhythmic fashion: “This one is from the Father without a mother; that one is from a mother without a father; this one is without any time, that one, in an accepted time: this one, eternal, that one, timely; this one without a body, in the heart of the Father; that one with a body without violating the virginity of the mother; this one without sex, that one without a man’s embrace.”55

Given the controversy of the Filioque clause, from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, theologians, preachers, monks, and clergy reiterate this dual nature in a plethora of ways with a varying degree of urgency. In late Anglo-Saxon England, the abbot Ælfric recapitulates this Augustinian and Pauline heritage, again in terms of Christ’s two births: one birth, from God, is without beginning and end; the second, from Mary, marks Christ’s birth into time. Ælfric elaborates this in his sermon on Creation: “That child is twice-born: he is born from the Father in heaven, without any mother, and then when he became man, he was born of the pure maiden Mary, without any earthly father.”⁵⁶ As Hilary of Poitiers explains in his commentary on Matthew, this double birth means that the eternal is enfolded into the temporal: “the idea of his eternal generation is included in his bodily generation.”⁵⁷

This understanding of the Trinity through “double birth” is not limited to Christ, but extends to figure, albeit in a different ontological way, in man’s hosting of the Trinity. In his homily on Saint Paul, drawn in part from Augustinian sources, but possibly also from Origen’s Commentary on Matthew, Ælfric transposes this double heritage in an explicitly Pauline formulation: “We are born twice in this life: the first birth from a father and mother is fleshly, and the other birth is spiritual [gastlic], when we are reborn at holy baptism, in which all of our sins will be forgiven through the gift of the Holy Ghost. The third birth is at the general resurrection, at which our bodies will be reborn into incorruptible bodies.”⁵⁸ Human beings thus anticipate this third birth (or generation) in which the outer person metamorphoses into its promise of eternity, incorruptible and perfected. For some mystics of the later Middle Ages, the idea of a third birth will be more clearly associated with God’s birth in the soul. Johannes Tauler’s Christmas sermons celebrate three births: the first is the begetting of the Son by the father, the second, the maternal fruitfulness of the chaste Virgin, and the third “that God is truly but spiritually born every day and at every hour in a good soul, as a result of grace and love.”⁵⁹ This third birth, which clearly draws on 2 Cor 4:16, is associated with the turn of perception inward to the inner senses, and a rebirth in eternal time of the inner person or soul. Thus, Augustine’s eschatological articulation of the end of time becomes articulated by later writers as inner regeneration and renewal, beyond time, yet hosted in time.

For Bernard of Clairvaux, birth is associated with the famous “spiritual marriage” between the soul and Christ, exemplified in the Song of Songs. In Sermon 85 on the Song of Songs, the ushering of the eternal into time is a form of birth, the birth of the soul:

While Bernard clearly favors the inner person’s communion with the beloved, he nevertheless posits an equally important birth that transpires in time, from mouth to ear or eye as a form of community, allowing the outer to become a vessel for the Word. As Bynum has highlighted, the twelfth-century’s emphasis on the “inner” (and the corresponding use of maternal imagery among Cistercians), is not meant to denote independence, self-determination, and uniqueness; rather, it is meant to highlight “the inner core of human nature” potentially shared by all.⁶¹ In addition, this emphasis on the inner is not at the exclusion of the outer; rather, “if the religious writing, the religious practice, and the religious orders of the twelfth century are characterized by a new concern for the ‘inner man,’ it is because of a new concern for groups, for types, and for the ‘outer man.’”⁶² The renewal of the inner will affect the outer, and will shape the way human beings live, individually and collectively. Although beguines like Hadewijch are not associated with any particular order and dismiss the desire for “outer” rules, beguines nevertheless demonstrate an interest in the outer that gives way to a much less rigidly defined group.

The doubleness of inner and outer human beings finds its source, as I have said, in Pauline texts. In Romans 7:22, Ephesians 3:16, and 2 Corinthians 4:16, Paul makes a distinction between the outer person (o exo anthropos) and the inner person (o eso anthropos). The outer person is a temporary vessel, bound to the time of temporal change and decay. The inner person is that vessel for human beings which, if cultivated, may renew itself and the outer person in the measure of the divine and grant human beings eternal life. When coupled with the mind’s direction, the human being is renewed, for “the more [the mind] reaches out toward what is eternal, the more it is formed thereby to the image of God” (Trinity 12.10 [328]).63 Paul is constantly negotiating between these two spheres, and in doing so attempts to show in a linguistic and temporal medium the superiority of the inner as a measure for human perfection. The inner will only effectively be superior inasmuch as it guides the exterior and transforms it. It may do so by means of language’s ability to mediate, as a temporal host of an atemporal promise. Paul’s own language depends on this quality of language in order to communicate a divine and, as he calls it, a prophetic message. So too will the mystics.

What I am highlighting here is that the medium of language has a special status: as part of the body’s time it is able to work diachronically in narrative. Language works through and in time, it produces and attests to human meaning, yet as part of a representational and symbolic medium, it is also able to show how the synchronic elements promise a glimpse of the eternal. In its exteriority and temporality it partakes in the historical time of humanity, yet in reflecting the outer human being’s truth of the mind’s representation it is also able to promise something beyond it. Language partakes in the temporal-spatial power that the body ultimately strives for and hosts. When mystics seek to become like Christ, the Word made flesh, they too are striving for a likeness that is close to the Word.

In order to understand an Augustinian materiality associated with human beings, and in order to grasp the figural significance and the subsequent traditions that rely upon his conceptualization of the Trinity, one has to take into account the body’s multifaceted constitution and its having been made and potential to be remade in the image of God by way of a linguistic interplay with the Word itself.

Rather than function as an end in itself, the body hosts another end within. It is poised between a materiality that permits legibility and a meaning that it promises to embody in another register. While the outer body cannot be equated with the immemorial substance of the imago or with the trinities within the soul, it is the window, the first reflection of those trinities within. Bodily sight and the awareness of this sight enable the mind to grasp how the imago and the body are eventually interrelated. Material and mental elements combine to form trinities that attest to the workings of the divine. The body hosts the figure of the imago within, like a temporal archive, waiting to be deciphered by the spiritually oriented mind through reading. If one fails to read the body with a spiritual orientation (that is, spiritually, figuratively, or allegorically), one only sees matter and not the reflection of the Trinity that it serves. In our readings of women’s mystical texts, we oft en overlook this essential factor, a factor which actually legitimizes their embodied experience as a sign of the divine. The mystic’s will is oriented toward God, and her inner and outer persons are means to host the imago Dei. This is why inasmuch as women’s mystical texts are steeped in an Augustinian tradition, they are engaged in a poetics of embodiment which asks that the body be read according to these different temporal and material referents.

Part of the task of On the Trinity is to understand in and through language, and thus through time and space, the enigma of the Word of words. For Augustine, the thought of “a word that belongs to no language” is the thought of a pure potentiality, without predication, without any phenomenal appearing, even “before it is spoken aloud.” It is the promise or enigma of a word that would meet the understanding without difference, like God’s Word made flesh. For Augustine, this unity is not human beings’ but God’s—only God is his Word—but the idea of a word without a language permits one to think of this strange unity, belonging to no language, and preceding the idea of a language. For Augustine, language operates in a temporal milieu with an eternal counterpart, like the relation between earthly and heavenly cities: the earthly city, bound to time and space, takes its cue from the heavenly one; the earthly city takes its promised form and function from the truer one.65

The inner and outer persons have a similar relation to one another, as does the word: just as the inner person can be traced through the materiality of outer person, when the word passes from the mind to utterance, it assumes a materiality in which it clothes itself which is manifest to the senses.⁶⁶ Augustine differentiates between inner and outer words:

The word which makes a sound outside is the sign of the word which lights up inside … Our word becomes a bodily sound by assuming that in which it is manifested to the senses of men, just as the Word of God became flesh by assuming that in which it too could be manifested to the senses of men. And just as our word becomes sound without being changed into sound, so the Word of God became flesh, but it is unthinkable that it should have been changed into flesh. It is by assuming [assumendo] it, not by being consumed into it, that both our word becomes sound and that Word became flesh.

(TRINITY 15.20 [409–410])⁶⁷

The word assumes the materiality of bodily sound, but this materiality hosts something other than itself, since the word only assumes this materiality but does not turn into it.⁶⁸ The word assumes or takes on a property that is discernible by the senses while maintaining a difference. Likewise, he argues, Christ does not lose his divinity in becoming flesh: he takes on the flesh, but is not reducible to it. So too for the inner and outer bodies: the materiality of the outer body is the vessel, the earthen house, to quote Paul, while the inner finds its true measure in God. Reading the outer body and its claim to a likeness to the divine requires a consideration of this signifying difference, this outer garment, when looking for a “true” measure. Any reading of the letter must also take into account the atemporal Word that promises to manifest itself through the senses.⁶⁹

What I have attempted to show here is how, according to an Augustinian theology, embodiment is necessarily shaped by how the divine Word becomes manifest to human senses. In order to conceive of the incorporeal word, one must take into account mediation by the materiality of language and the continuum of time. Any consideration of “the body” in mysticism should, therefore, take into account how the promised body is mediated by language, the way in which the body claims to unite with or become like Christ (the Word made flesh), how the two bodies bridge temporal and atemporal elements, and the ways in which the outer body signifies the closeness of the divine as part of its inner likeness.

Additionally, since our means of accessing the mystics’ bodies is through narratives of mystical experience—that is, since language is the medium through which we are given any and all accounts of embodied mystical experience—then there is no “body” that can be absolutely distinct from language. The body presents itself as part of a linguistic medium that requires reading and interpretation—both on our part, and on the part of the medieval mystic or hagiographer. The body which we, contemporary readers, read and interpret is also read and interpreted as signifying a trace of the divine. The mystic is constantly reading and attempting to understand her body according to a Christological orientation that hears the Word reverberate throughout, sensing the body’s proximity to its divine likeness. The mystic seeks salvation and proximity to the divine by means of the inner and outer persons.

As with Paul and Augustine, these two aspects of the human being offer the means to understand Christ’s humanity, the relation of Christ’s life to the message of Scripture, and how the meaning of Scripture can be fulfilled in the promise of conformity to Christ. Christ’s body and life are read according to embodied and spiritual meanings, as is Scripture. Interpretive practices associated with the spiritual senses of scripture are thus intricately connected to how the mystic reads her body, her life, and their relation to Christ and the imago. The outer human being offers a means for discerning and enacting the inner spiritual component; the inner is, ultimately, where the meaning of Christ’s life is accomplished, conforming the outer to its likeness. As Henri de Lubac noted of the tropological meaning of the history and mystery of Christ, the historical past becomes relived every day as a spiritual truth within. Meaning must be incorporated so that “everything is consummated in the inner man. … Everything is done to conduct us to ‘the inner parts,’ to make us observe the Law ‘according to the inner man.’ The soul is ‘the temple of God, in which the divine mysteries are celebrated.’”70 When we try to understand what the mystic’s body means, how it hosts the mystery of the divine, we must take into account the hermeneutic practices that inform exegetic practices. Even though all meaning finds its telos in the inner person, the outer person is or should be conforming to the inner in life before the promised “face-to-face” encounter.

As revitalized forms of spiritual devotion develop in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially among the Cistercians, Victorines, and Carthusians, the turn inward through reading and meditation, lectio and meditatio, becomes associated with the renewal of the inner person. As religious communities of the Middle Ages knew well, in order to find the body’s truer form, in order to find what of the inner person resides and is reflected in the outer, a practice of discernment, that is, of reading and contemplating, is needed. This practice becomes articulated in the progression from lectio to meditatio, oratio, operatio, and finally contemplatio; or (per Hugh) from cogitatio to meditatio and contemplatio.71 Reading always includes a form of reflection, yet the ability to read the body is only one part of finding truth in embodiment. Patterning the body after the mind’s insight is also of the essence, so to speak.

Becoming like Christ in actions and in spirit is not as obviously dominant a theme in Augustine as it is in the later Middle Ages, but, as I have demonstrated, the principle of finding one’s likeness in God presupposes a Christic emphasis, given the interrelation of the three components of the Trinity. For Augustine, in order to “arrive at the likeness of the Word of God, however unlike it we may be in many ways,” one must turn to the likeness of Christ by means of “that word of man through whose likeness of a sort the Word of God may somehow or other be seen in an enigma” (Trinity 15.20 [410]).⁷²

Beckwith has paid significant attention to the role of Christ in the Christian emphasis on the incarnation in the later Middle Ages, noting that “an incarnational aesthetic and practice was implicit in the very earliest stages of Christianity and Christian theology,” and “Christ then, as simultaneous flesh and spirit, God and man, image and exemplar, sign and signified, is the oxymoronic means by which a theologia cordis is licensed and propagated.”73 Incarnation is not solely characterized by an emphasis on the flesh; rather, as a theological concept, reading practice, and liturgical sign, it is part and parcel of the long development of a hermeneutic practice that allows the body to be read and used as an instrument for spiritual devotion. While Christ’s body is both sign and signified, the living human body is never the signified in itself; rather, it is the means for the invisible, that is, the promise of the Trinity, to become legible and enacted in life. In seeking out the trinities within and in understanding and loving them, the body becomes closer to living the likeness of the divine, governed as it is by its spiritual master. The body is not only a means of discerning the spiritual, but is also a means of enacting—and embodying—the spiritual. The outer person is, as Paul emphasizes, meant to conform to the inner and to find eternal life through an identification with Christ, in his crucifixion and resurrection. The outer body is emphasized in Paul’s language, in “crucifying” the flesh and transforming the outer person into its inner likeness, making the life of Christ manifest through the mortal flesh (2 Cor 4:10–12).⁷⁴ While the outer person is an initial means to find the figure of the divine within, the outer also becomes the means for the inner to enact and demonstrate the soul’s likeness to Christ.

What is read and interpreted in the outer by the mind, as we saw in Augustine, is given an afterlife through the outer body. In Pauline terms, as we saw in the introduction, the outer person is crucified and endures death along with Christ in order to find eternal life in Christ and walk in the rhythm of the spirit. The outer person’s afterlife is the new life conformed to the inner person. The outer attempts to reflect the workings of the divine in the soul and does so by becoming like the Word. The flesh is transformed into a likeness of the Word through imitatio, that is, through becoming like Christ mainly by means of the exercise of the will. The same principle is at work in Bernard of Clairvaux, although in a different tenor. In his Sermon 83 on the Song of Songs, Bernard makes clear the rapprochement between (female) soul and (male) Word, emphasizing their union in a language that combines Augustinian and Pauline theology with an exegesis on the Song of Songs:

So the soul returns and is converted to the Word to be reformed by him and conformed to him. In what way? In charity—for he says, “Be imitators of God, like dear children, and walk in love, as Christ also has loved you.” Such conformity weds the soul to the Word, for one who is like the Word by nature shows himself like him too in the exercise of his will, loving as she is loved. When she [the soul] loves perfectly, the soul is wedded to the Word. What is lovelier than this conformity? What is more desirable than charity, by whose operation, O soul, not content with a human master, you approach the Word with confidence, cling to him with constancy, speak to him as to a familiar friend, and refer to him in every matter with an intellectual grasp proportionate to the boldness of your desire? Truly this is a spiritual contract, a holy marriage. It is more than a contract, it is an embrace: an embrace where identity of will makes of two one spirit.⁷⁵

(ON THE SONG OF SONGS IV, 83.2–3.182)

In this passage, all of the Augustinian elements we have been highlighting are present yet framed differently. Augustine’s claim that one needs to love the Trinity becomes the principal tenor for Bernard: love is the stage on which the lover (soul) and beloved (Christ) can unite through aligned wills. What Augustine theorizes, Bernard stages as an anthropomorphized exegetical experience that will transform the soul and enable imitation of Christ, in life.

The Christological focus of much medieval mysticism, such as that of Hadewijch, will likewise use love as the means for enacting the individual’s incarnation of the divine. For Augustine, as for Bernard, William of Saint Thierry, Hugh of Saint Victor, Hadewijch, and many medieval exegetes whose texts and commentaries set the terms for subsequent forms of devotion, love itself becomes a measure and medium for the immeasurable, it becomes a means for turning speculative theological modalities into effective practices. Through an effective articulation of the work of love, flesh can be scripted according to its spiritual antecedent, so as to enable its transformation. William of Saint Thierry states it explicitly: “Love alone fully understands divine things; therefore the love of the flesh must be led along and transformed into the love of the spirit so that it may quickly comprehend things like to itself.”76

What begins with discerning and comprehending the patterning of the divine in human trinities ends with a transformation by means of bringing the pattern to life. As Bernard McGinn reminds us, the interest in patterning and order in the twelfth century is part and parcel of a movement in which theological (or theoretical) aspirations are mapped onto practical and material possibilities: “The theme of the ordering of love (or better, the ‘reordering’ in our present fallen state of the love that should have been ours) took on a heightened importance in the twelfth century. … To set charity in order was both a theoretical task and a practical task, involving knowing both what needed to be done and how to do it. Thus, the ordering of charity depended on grasping the proper relation between love and knowledge.”⁷⁷ Cognitive and performative factors work together to discern and become like the Word. The mental or spiritual must be applied to finite ends: in patterning oneself on Christ, in turning to the resemblance of Christ in the father, in attuning oneself to the resemblance of the Trinity in man, and in resembling Christ by imitatio.

This patterning is found through reading or discerning as I have just outlined, yet is also found in the exegesis and application of mystical experience. A pattern is applied to embodied forms of devotion (especially liturgical), to the constitution of a pious life, and even to the crafting of a text that will resemble and reflect a divine truth. The form of the text and the form of life are intimately interconnected, and necessarily so. Part immanence, part transcendence, the text is poised between both ends of the spectrum of life and mind. Following the Pauline sense of words being accompanied by works, reading a text, a body, or a life serves contemplation of divine truth as much as it serves to identify a pattern for actions and keeps in sight the (unreachable) measure of perfection.

In his text On Contemplation and Its Forms, Hugh of Saint Victor will demonstrate how purity in contemplation in mystical ascent must be directed to life “in action [actu], in affection [affectu], and in understanding [intellectu],”78 and in his Didascalicon he outlines the five stages of ascent: “The first, study, gives understanding; the second, meditation, provides counsel; the third, prayer, makes petition; the fourth, performance, goes seeking; the fifth, contemplation, finds.”⁷⁹ For Hugh, as for many Victorines and other Augustinian canons who emphasize the effect on the larger community, reading and interpretation take part in salvation history as the reader is able to live and effect change among others. Franklin T. Harkins writes, “Taking his cue from Augustine, [Hugh] maintains that the scriptural narrative is not merely to be read, memorized, and meditated on. Rather, the historia that recounts God’s loving works of creation and restoration exhorts the reader to become a participant in this ongoing narrative of salvation history by living a life that imitates the divine love.”⁸⁰ As Ivan Illich has noted, historia first passes through the inner: “Reading is for [Hugh] equivalent to the re-creation of the texture of historia in the ark of the reader’s heart.”⁸¹

The Carthusian Guigo II likewise describes the progress from lectio to contemplatio as an ascent on Jacob’s ladder:

Reading comes first, and is, as it were, the foundation; it provides the subject matter we must use for meditation. Meditation considers more carefully what is to be sought after; it digs, as it were, for treasure which it finds and reveals, but since it is not in meditation’s power to seize upon the treasure, it directs us to prayer. Prayer lifts itself up to God with all its strength, and begs for the treasure it longs for, which is the sweetness of contemplation. Contemplation when it comes rewards the labors of the other three; it inebriates the thirsting soul with the dew of heavenly sweetness.⁸²

(THE LADDER OF MONKS AND TWELVE MEDITATIONS, 82)

Although mystics like Marguerite d’Oingt and Hadewijch are some of the most explicit in making the connection between vision, interpretation, and the body, the emphasis on interpretation serving life is common to the spirituality of the period. Bernard of Clairvaux asks of the readers of the Song of Songs: “Meditate on these things, turn them over in your minds. Refresh those hearts of yours with perfumes such as these. … But all that has been said about the [perfumes] you must retain in your memory and reveal in your way of life.”83 In a temporal twist, the memory of the eternal truth revealed through reading seeks illustration and illumination in and through temporal life. As Jeremy Worthen emphasizes in Hugh of Saint Victor’s De vanitate, in the work of restoration of humanity, the opera restaurationis, “Soul has to understand, with Reason’s help, that escape from the temporal world comes only, paradoxically, through redemption of the world in time.”⁸⁴

Liturgical time is one of the most exemplary forms of this transposition of the eternal into the temporal through cyclical juxtapositions of divine and human orders. Liturgical time promises the means for salvation and eventual deliverance from time, by way of the body and its transformation, and, of course, in the Mass through Christ’s transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Whether as communal or solitary activity, the hours and feasts of the liturgy allow for this grafting of the divine onto the order of human perception and experience.

Again, for Augustine, the attempt to resemble the word itself or Christ in actions points to the divine Word as the ultimate referent and pattern, since “we cannot have a work which is not preceded by a word, just as the Word of God could be, even without creation coming into existence, but there could not be any creation except through that Word through which all things were made” (Trinity 15.20 [411]).⁸⁵ The divine Word is both end and beginning—what all creation comes from and what, if renewed through it, it will ultimately join. As both word and body, Christ occupies this dual destination in the most explicit sense. In his article on rhyme and typology in Adam of Saint Victor, Eugene Cunnar argues for the ontological and theological relevance of poetic patterning, adding that “if God creates Being through language, then it is only through language that man can bring Being into being.”⁸⁶ Wanting a body to return to its wordlike form, the monk and mystic will attempt to transform the body into divine script (through its interpellation by a text, through the participation in the daily hours or the Mass, through works, or through song).

When reading the corporeal nature of women’s spirituality and the identification with Christ, we must therefore be careful not to associate the “abundance” of the flesh too quickly with the nature of women, nor with exclusively feminine forms of devotion. While women may be exemplifying their faith through their bodies in a more visible fashion than male counterparts, as Bynum has emphasized, the notion of making the invisible visible through embodied actions itself is part of a hermeneutic that extends to both sexes. From late antiquity to the later Middle Ages, both women and men are asked to read their own embodied forms of practice according to textual (and exegetical) criteria. What men and women read in their bodies is tied to the power and practice of interpretation, even when women claim to receive visions directly from God. At the moment, therefore, that women seem to be making a reference to their corporeality, we should, rather than assuming it is the flesh, read it as a means for exegetical activity rather than as an overt identification with the flesh, taking care to discern the homo interior or exterior that may be the ultimate referent. That women mystics often privilege embodiment as a means for exegetical practice, is, as I have stressed in my introduction, not a “natural” phenomena arising from their nature as women, but is conditioned by historical and sociological factors that delineate the means for literary and theological experience.

This Augustinian framework I have highlighted ties together the nature of Christ and of human actions through acts of discerning, reading, and reflecting. While reading, broadly conceived, permits a form of understanding, loving (and thus conforming to, if not becoming) the pattern revealed through the mind provides the form for salvation and eternal life. Understanding the form of salvation is not enough: the form must become activated and lived, it must become part of an individual’s life, in actions, in affect, and in his or her soul. Bernard of Clairvaux makes this explicit: “Why store oil in jars and never apply it to your limbs? Or what use to ponder over your books on the name of the holy Savior if you exclude his love from your lives? You have the oil: pour it out and experience its threefold power.”87 The “oil” is extracted through exegesis and is a mixture of divine truth and human understanding, which is then applied to human life.

The important concept here, however, is not just intellectual understanding, but a blend of understanding with love, as we have seen before, when Augustine’s mind had to couple love with the body in order to perceive its object truly. In language that will resonate with Hadewijch and many other mystics in the early and later Middle Ages, love becomes the ultimate vehicle for Trinitarian salvation in Augustine’s theology. Love—as dilectio, Caritas, and ultimately amor—provides the means for transformation by reading, seeing, living truly, to becoming the image of the Trinity. For Augustine, love allows for the soul to be shaped by the Word, it allows the soul and body to host a truth they cannot possess. Merely acting without love cancels out the good in an action; acting with love allows for divinity to work in the soul, and to be an effective agent in actions. The subject, properly speaking, is divinity itself. If the pattern succeeds in producing and reproducing divine truth, the body becomes as close to the Word as it humanly can.

In book 8 of On the Trinity, Augustine closes the link between life and its truth through the love of form. In his exegesis of the Johannine “love thy neighbor,” he notes that one must love not with human vision, but with the “inner vision” so as to perceive “God who is charity” (8.12 [254]).88 What one loves is therefore not the outer, but the inner that is discernible in the outer. Following this, in his reading of Paul 2 Cor 6:2–10, he notes that what allows us to move from the act of reading to love entails a form of recognition of a lived truth, for what “fires us with love [dilectio] for Paul when we read this” is “that we believe that he himself lived like that” and observe it “within ourselves, or rather above ourselves in truth itself” (8.13 [254]).⁸⁹ Reading, recognizing, and loving allow for the persistence of a divine truth that one will ultimately love in itself. This truth “above ourselves” is what Augustine calls form (forma), which we perceive as the eternal, for: “Unless above all we loved this form which we perceive always enduring, never changing, we would not love him merely because we hold on faith that his life when he lived in the flesh was harmoniously adjusted to this form” (8.13 [254]).⁹⁰ Thus love of form and its immutable truth is a supplement to faith, in that it allows us first to ardently love “the form of faith with which we believe that someone lived” and then to hope for it in life.

In this way, Augustine moves from an understanding of love as dilectio and Caritas, to love as the all-inclusive amor. Using a Platonic logic and terminology that nevertheless depends upon, rather than transcends or discards, the contingency of material life and an imperfect human perspective, Augustine asks us to pass from what we read to its content in the world through love of the good. Although Platonism provides a means for perceiving divine truths (as is emphasized in his earlier works), what is most important to the later Augustine is the effectuation of these truths through the heart and love.

At the end of book 8, Augustine’s meditation on form in love and its relation to reading and life takes on a complete Trinitarian articulation in its way of positioning love, lover, and beloved:

What then, after all that, is this love [dilectio] or charity [caritas] which the divine scriptures praise and proclaim so much, but love of the good [amor boni]? Now love [amor] means something loving and something being loved with love. There you are with three, the lover, what is being loved, and love. And what is love but a kind of life coupling or trying to couple together two things, namely lover and what is being loved? This is true even of the most external and fleshy kinds of love. But in order to quaff something purer and more limpid, let us trample on the flesh and rise to the spirit. What does spirit love in a friend but spirit? So here again there are three, lover and what is being loved, and love.⁹¹

(TRINITY 8.14 [255])

What I would like to stress here is that while Augustine may borrow from Platonic and Neoplatonic sources, the realm of a transcendent “ideal form” is nevertheless only promised and transient. While this ideal might model the height of the mind or soul, Augustine’s ultimate emphasis is on how this ideal merges with real experience and love. As we will see with Hadewijch, the Augustinian patterning of love, lover, and beloved will constantly insinuate itself in bridal or love mysticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, yet the body and soul will be complicated by key interactions of inner and outer, divine and human, temporal and atemporal spheres. The body needs the soul, the soul the body in order for one to articulate itself in the language of the other. The voice of the “Bride,” or lover, of the Song of Songs who endures love and seeks to unite with the beloved thus is not as much the voice of a “self” as it is the projected voice of the soul, adopted and scripted into the mystic’s text. Ideally, the text will guide the soul and transform the person in its process.

William of Saint Thierry frames the sense of the work accordingly: after he outlines its historical meaning, he then adds, “The Spiritual sense is this. When the soul has been converted to God and is to be espoused to the Word of God, at first she is taught to understand the riches of prevenient grace and allowed to ‘taste and see how sweet the Lord is’; but after wards she is sent back into the house of her conscience to be instructed, purified in the obedience of charity, perfectly cleansed of vices, richly adorned with virtues, that she may be found worthy of access to the spiritual grace of godliness and affection for virtues which is the bride-chamber of the Bridegroom.”92 The bride is thus the soul “converted to God” and “espoused to the Word”—which, once returned to her conscience, is “instructed” so that she may become worthy. This inner conscience, the domain of the inner person, is the place for contemplation, purification, and transformation.

The “taste” William refers to is both the fruit of understanding and the way in which any future “taste” of the Eucharist should be read and interpreted. The taste in practice echoes the taste in spiritual understanding; however, inversely, the Eucharist itself can provide the occasion for a reflection on its spiritual sense. D. H. Green and others have shown that affective literacy can be just as “literate” without the written, using the visual or the imagined as an occasion for meditation on scripture.⁹³ As Ann Astell notes in her reading of Bernard and Gertrude of Helfta, “Whereas Bernard read and chewed the scriptures as if they were the Eucharist, however, Gertrude ‘read’ the Eucharist as if it were a text, as her reception of the sacrament occasioned vision after vision.”⁹⁴ We will see in the next chapter that visions provide one of the most elaborate exegetical conduits for women, allowing a different figurative relation between time, body, and language than the exegetical commentaries of their male counterparts.