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

WHILE BARBARA Newman has underscored that “visionary experience was never supposed to be an end in itself, at least not in principle: it was valued because it could lead the soul into deeper contrition, purer devotion, more perfect knowledge, and greater intimacy with God,” Hadewijch’s visions imply a more concrete outcome for visionary activity: works.¹ This “postscriptum” prescribed by Hadewijch’s visions furthers our understanding of visionary activity in that it shows how concrete the after math of visions could be for some mystics.

In addition, rather than emphasizing intimacy and the contemplation of the divine, works, for Hadewijch, embody spiritual truths in a way that paradoxically distances the mystic from the closeness of God glimpsed in the vision itself. The visions of Hadewijch (and Marguerite d’Oingt, as seen in the previous chapter) bring to light a seldom-addressed pedagogical aspect of visions: how inner envisioned truths can be lived and enacted, and how they are applied to the outer material body, performing what Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch’s contemporary, describes in the Seven Manners of Loving as “the angelic life already here [on earth].”2

Arguing against a strict Neoplatonic interpretation of Hadewijch’s visions that would disassociate the ideal inner person/soul from its material and historical manifestation, this chapter stresses the importance for Hadewijch of werke, through which she can make “all lowness lofty and all loftiness low” (CW, 295).³ Through works, Hadewijch attempts to conform the materie to the inner body, the lichame manifest in the visions. In works, the outer person becomes an effective vessel for the imitation of the divine.

While Hadewijch clearly recognizes spiritual vision as a higher form for approximating divine essence, her spirituality emphasizes the enactment in life of the vision’s lesson so that one may be truly perfected in one’s person, as an example to others. In other words, she stresses embodied humanity and values the degree to which human beings can enact Christlike perfection. Paradoxically, even though visions provide understanding, such experiences grant only a transitive understanding for Hadewijch, like the fleeting nature of Augustine’s ictu cordis.⁴ As Erich Auerbach stresses, for Augustine “true understanding on earth can spring only from a momentary contact (ictu), an illumination, which can be preserved for no more than a brief moment, after which one sinks back into one’s accustomed earthly state.”⁵ As we saw in the previous chapter, the visionary text is a record of what eludes time; it is a guide for the visionary in life, a guide for Hadewijch demonstrating that she should perform works and be virtuous. Since works are based in time and require a faith that must be lived and tested, works demand that the mystic not fall into the complacency of a self-assured “knowing.” Hence the intimacy of vision, for Hadewijch, is a “height” from which she must fall, a loftiness made low. As we will see in this chapter, as the visions progress, the way Hadewijch reads and understands the inner senses’ operation in the vision informs the nature and experience of the outer material body in life. Embodiment is, as we shall see, inextricable from reading, interpreting, and performing textuality, recasting how we conceptualize the role of the body in women’s mystical texts.

In this chapter I look at Hadewijch’s visions as a whole, demonstrating that inner and outer persons, bodies, and senses function together and that her text is patterned by an embodied poetics that culminates in promised spiritual and bodily perfection through works.6 The Middle Dutch “werke” may mean “working” in the sense of laboring, or the working of divine grace within; it also entails “works” in the sense of a written work, invoking at one and the same time the body and the letter. It involves both Pauline senses of “words” and “deeds,” as they are signs of divinity and love working through the mystic. In the last chapter, I highlighted the association of werke with Hadewijch’s materie, or outer body, in the command, “Return again into your materie and let your works blossom forth,” in order to highlight the temporal and material ways in which visions promise unity. Since works (a frequent subject in Hadewijch’s letters and visions) are performed in the service of Minne (the personification of Love)—“He who loves works great works” (Letter 30: CW, 116)—they embody what is larger and greater than the individual yet can be enacted through her, like visions themselves.⁷ Works demonstrate how the outer person manifests the inner, how the outer person hosts the promise of the divine, without necessarily being identical to it.

As a means to host the divine in the time of humanity, werke alters the progressive monastic sequence lectio–meditatio–oratio–operatio and contemplatio, putting work (operatio) as the ultimate term. Werke is the final result of contemplation of the visions, their postscriptum in the materiality of life, and a product of Hadewijch’s general learning that aligns itself with a Christic compassion intended to serve and teach others. Like many other women mystics, Hadewijch’s visions thus model a theology that is primarily focused on the incarnation and the need to live its truths by means of a complex alignment of outer and inner persons with embodiment. The balancing of the contemplative life (contemplatio) with an active live (actio) is a common theme in the spirituality of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially among Victorines, who regard action and contemplation as unified components of spiritual life. This emphasizes a point already made by Augustine, who stresses the unity of action and contemplation in the figure of Christ himself and, as we saw in chapter 1, in the mirroring human response of love.⁸

Hadewijch makes explicit the connection of werke to the promise of what one should be, that is, to a form of deification in becoming Minne: “They could do great works [grote werke] and progress rapidly if they were what they seem to be and what they ought to be, according to the just debt [gherechte scout] of perfect faith and of veritable Minne [gherehter minnen]” (CW, 116).9 The Trinitarian language seen in Augustine, of becoming what one “seems” and “ought” to be, is reiterated by Hadewijch in concrete ways that emphasize the present enactment of the imago Dei in life through becoming like the personified figure of Minne (Love). The language of debt (“the just debt of perfect faith”) echoes Hugh of Saint Victor’s notion that the Holy Spirit has given an arrha (earnest money) to each individual, which, in the language of the Song of Songs, is what Paul Rorem calls “the beginning of the groom’s gift of himself.”¹⁰ Life enacts the repayment of this indebtedness, as it is the means for an affective reciprocity in “returning” love to Minne. What we often loosely call “affective” or “embodied” is therefore part of a complex theological economy of love and requires being understood in this context.

Unlike Bernard—who asserts that “after a good work one rests more securely in contemplation”—Hadewijch proposes no methodological use of works, other than the perfecting of the individual.¹¹ Contrary to Bernard’s view, there is little “rest” for Hadewijch after works, as works are meant to test an individual’s faith, like Job, and produce even more seeking. Hadewijch is in this sense more closely aligned with the Victorines, who read “contemplation” as a transitive term and emphasize the outward signs of virtue for a communal purpose. Richard of Saint Victor’s four stages of love describe the progress: “[The mind] enters into the first [degree] through meditation; it ascends into the second through contemplation; in the third it is introduced into jubilation; and in the fourth it goes forth out of compassion.”¹² “Going forth out of compassion” signals the ultimate focus of love: that it be oriented toward others on earth in Christlike fashion by means of the divinity one hosts within. The active and contemplative nature of beguine spirituality reflects this ongoing engagement with the world, which involves activities as varied as weaving, tutoring in Latin, caring for the sick, agricultural work, the copying of manuscripts, and duties relating to everyday life in beguinages.¹³

The emphasis I am placing here on werke (one of twelve virtues celebrated in Vision 12) does not exclude the other significant virtues portrayed in Hadewijch’s visions; rather, emphasizing the role of werke produces an understanding of the way in which inner and outer bodies are crafted to correlate with visions, text, and virtue in general.¹⁴ It also allows for an illustration of how werke make Minne substantial in a performative and spiritual sense by living as one reads, allowing for the spiritual imago to become enacted in life. The highlighting of werke in Hadewijch’s description makes clearer what kind of perfection she seeks in her visions, and what kind of work visions help her perform in relation to her mysticism as a whole.¹⁵

Vision 1 marks the earliest stage of Hadewijch’s spirituality. Her early desire for fruition (union) with God is, she is told, premature, since she “had not as yet sufficiently suffered for it or lived the number of years required for such exceptional worthiness” (CW, 263).¹⁷ Vision 1 warns Hadewijch to wait for the moment when, in her werke, she fully enacts divine will and sets out a program for how she might reach this promised goal. Her first vision opens in a meadow of perfect virtues, where Hadewijch reads inscriptions on leaves and seeks to understand them as they demonstrate how to progress from virtue to self-knowledge and wisdom.¹⁸ At the end of the vision, she is told to take a leaf from a tree that symbolizes “the knowledge of [God’s] will” (CW, 270), through which she can feel herself within the divine, then access and experience Minne.

From the start of her series of visions, Hadewijch is involved in a hermeneutic process that links reading with understanding. Her visions “are not naïve renderings of spontaneous experience,” as Fraeters has emphasized, but reflect an “experiential hermeneutics” that attempts to model how divinity is perceived, felt, and understood.¹⁹ The initiation of love through the will is a common trope in Augustinian and Cistercian spirituality such as that of Hadewijch and William of Saint Thierry, and represents the first step in perfecting love. She demonstrates in her first vision that she has clearly refused the work of miracles—“Exterior miracles and gifts that had indeed begun to be worked in you, you refused to accept from me, as you renounced them and did not want them” (CW, 270)²⁰—and seeks inner works that allow the soul and body to be transformed.

At the end of Vision 1, the angel prophesies the active sense of werke to be carried out by Hadewijch: “With understanding you shall wisely work my will [minen wille werken]. … Never fail anyone up to the day I say to you, “Thy work is all fulfilled” [Dijn werk es al voldaen]. … Thus work my will [Dus werke minen wille] with understanding, my most dearly beloved” (CW, 270; Vis, 52).21 The intermingling of “will,” “work,” “understanding,” and “love” in substantive and verbal senses demonstrates in language how she is expected to transform understanding into doing. From refusing outer miracles to the inner understanding and the performance of divine will through Minne, Hadewijch’s text prefigures how she will grow. She will let werke operate through her in an active sense by aligning her will with God, working his will, and by becoming what she does, or being who she already is, that is, the imago within. In conforming to the divine, Hadewijch correlates the sense of feeling the divine within to the sense of feeling oneself within the divine. The end of the first vision correlates this with the refrain from the Song of Songs, “With love you shall live and persevere and accomplish my hidden will by which you belong to me and I to you” (CW, 270).²² The textuality of the vision not only mediates her understanding of things divine, but prescribes her future in the most literal sense: it pre-scribes the way in which her person will perform a postscriptum (after the visionary text) of dwelling in Minne.

At the opposite end of her body of writings is the List, structured as a coda, which starts with a list of twenty-nine models of perfection ranged in hierarchical order—first Mary, then John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, and Mary Magdalene.²³ Hadewijch’s List offers varying descriptions, justifications, and personal comments on how each individual dwelt in Minne and how each led a virtuous life. The List then continues, citing fifty-six perfected individuals whom she identifies as still living, classifying them geographically, by gender, state, or form of spiritual life.²⁴ Hadewijch refers to the List in Vision 13 and refers the twenty-eight as “full grown” (volwassen) and “godlike now” (nu godlec) in that they are fully conformed to the godhead (CW, 301).²⁵ Surprisingly, Hadewijch lists another twenty-three as unborn, still in the cradle, or not yet of age to start spiritual life.

What is significant with regard to the List is that while she is consistently theological in her reasoning, Hadewijch’s evaluation of each person places more importance on the biographical, that is, how one lives in and through Minne. She is interested in how a person hosts and becomes Minne in life by practicing “just works” (gherechte werke) and by dwelling in what she calls the ways (weghe) of Minne (List, 284).²⁶ Saint Gregory, for example, whom she ranks seventh, “was supremely perfect in all three [modes]” of Love (List, 279).²⁷ Like the Cistercians and the Benedictines, who insist on the experience of the divine, Hadewijch’s most pressing concern is not what each person professed or thought but rather how the person was oriented in life to reflect and be fully engulfed in Minne, displaying a way of dwelling according to the Trinity. Hadewijch makes clearer in her letters what constitutes crowning glory for people on earth: “The greatest glory men can have on earth is in wielding truth in works of justice performed in imitation of the Son, and to practice the truth with regard to all that exists, for the glory of the noble Love that God is” (CW, 47).²⁸ While identification with Christ is certainly emphasized by Hadewijch, Christ is not the only measure of works. Hadewijch’s stress on Minne reflects a way of acting according to a Trinitarian framework that makes manifest spiritual truths.²⁹

As one would expect, werke does not glorify the actor: “Remain humble and unexalted by all the works you can accomplish,” she counsels in Letter 2 (CW, 52).30 Her consistent advice to not desire anything in particular—that is, not to desire any specific types of work, lest the devotee overidentify with a goal and let her “self” be too involved—indicates that the very performance of work is not attributable to the “self” in the conventional sense. If, as contemporary readers, we associate women’s performance of works with a Cartesian subject or ego, we risk thinking anachronistically and missing the main point of selflessness and the exercise of divine will. If we posit identification with Christ as a female attribute because of women’s “embodied nature,” for example, we miss the nonidentification that makes work possible. A mystic like Hadewijch would read and interpret her actions in other ways than as issuing from “her” will and reflecting her “self.” Although clearly not quietist, Hadewijch’s emphasis on werke does, however, imply self-annihilation.³¹ Readings of mystical visions that fail to take this complex of ideas into account project human agency exactly where the mystic is attempting to subvert it.

A list of the most exemplary people is the logical culmination of the visions, because they are meant to forewarn, instruct, challenge, and reward Hadewijch in her spiritual journey to becoming exemplary in her materie and lichame, that is, in spiritual life. Despite the exclusion of the List by the editors of her Complete Works, if one understands the visions in terms of a progression that shows and performs divinity as it is increasingly operating through her, this List of the Perfect looks deeply consequential, a logical articulation of the visions’ progression that identifies those who have reached perfection and whom Hadewijch strives to join. Hadewijch’s interest in how one lives life and embodies the values of the Trinity by loving is clear in the List. Life is the ultimate test of faith and virtue; it is the context for becoming like the divine in one’s humanity through Minne. Like her Cistercian counterparts, who professed an “ordinatio caritatis (cf. Song 2:4), the ordering of all reality to the love that originates in God and must return to God,” Hadewijch privileges Minne and its ways of teaching human beings in their humanity, body and soul.³² As Emero Steigman has underscored for Bernard, “the flesh, then, may be other than that caro which resists spiritus (Rom 8:1).”³³ The List thus provides a transition: from vision to life, from inner perfection to its manifestation in the outer body.

Hadewijch’s elaboration on Augustine’s life in the List makes clearer how generally she envisions living according to Minne, and how works figure in life. Given Hadewijch’s vision of union with Augustine in Vision 11 and their intimacy illustrated therein (he is the first person with whom she experiences unity, she tells us), it may come as a surprise that he comes after saints Gregory, Hilary, and Isidore, with whom she demonstrates far less identification. Nevertheless, Augustine’s placement reflects the high estimation and manifests ways of loving that figure prominently elsewhere in Hadewijch’s work. Hadewijch’s interest in the biographical Augustine illustrates her conception of the biographical fusing with Love. Life is itself a work and a way of loving. Echoing her own despair, she writes,

The motifs of the different ways of loving illustrate the human way of loving and returning to Christ, returning the “debt” the individual owes divinity, to use Hugh’s terms.34 In Letter 22 (and echoed in Vision 9), Hadewijch specifies that there are five ways of entering divinity; she elaborates on four of these (the ways of God, heaven, hell, and purgatory) at greater length. Each way reflects a human approach to the divine and reflects a theology of absolute immanence: “Since we enter within God by all these ways—through himself, through heaven, through hell, and through purgatory—God is uncircumscribed, although he is within all” (CW, 99).³⁵ Hadewijch associates the different ways of loving God with different affective states and with means of making human time unite with divinity so that “his kingdom [will] come in us (Matt 6:9–10)” (CW, 95).³⁶ The highest mode, the most exceptional—through God himself—is not a creaturely temporal mode, as I noted earlier. It happens in God’s eternal time and occurs when he inspirits an individual’s soul directly and “gives all that he has, and is all that he is” (CW, 97).³⁷ She describes this first way as “beyond our being,” when God “lavishes” his eternal time on a person “to be one spirit (1 Cor 6:17) with him” (CW, 97).³⁸ Language falls short in this mode as it does in the nameless ure in Hadewijch’s visions when the soul becomes united with divinity, performing a moment within the text akin to the limit of speech in negative theology. Solitary and all-consuming, it is the most elusive of modes and is most closely aligned with—if not identical to—the visionary moment.

All other ways occur in human time and thus involve a greater effort to orient the inner senses and the faculties of reason, understanding, and will to the divine model. While Hadewijch is graced with the perspective of the divine in the vision when she sees how her humanity unites with God, in life she is allowed no such omniscience; rather, the regio dissimilitudinis (the realm of dissimilarity) prevails. The unity sought by means of human ways is within time and does not surpass or transcend these limits; rather, these ways show how the divine promises to be fulfilled “in us” (Matt 6:10): “What wondrousness takes place when such great unlikeness attains evenness and becomes wholly one without elevation [daer groet onghelijc effene ende al een wert sonder verheffen]” (CW, 96, translation modified; Brieven, 172). No confirmation of unity is ever given within the experience itself for unity can be posited and tested only through an act of faith. As Scheepsma notes of the Limburg Sermons’ Seven Ways of Loving, these ways do not “culminate in a highpoint,” but show “ways in which the experience of Love can manifest itself.”³⁹

The fact of being consumed by Minne affirms itself according to the measure and frailties of human desire (begherte), that is, according to the outer person, as it perfects and transforms itself in divinity.⁴⁰ Attempts to conform to Minne—even those, or especially those, that perceive themselves as failures—therefore show us how becoming like the imago Dei is manifest by means of the outer person, that is, how human beings attest their immersion in the divine, making the divine operate through them in performing works and in loving. The human ways of loving invert what was witnessed in visions when the soul was taken up in the divine, illustrating how the divine is accomplished in the human. The divine manifests itself, as Hadewijch emphasizes in true Pauline form, “yes, with the earthly man (1 Cor 15:47),” so that human beings may have “fruition in nonelevation” (CW, 95).⁴¹ The cognitive and figural properties we saw associated with the inner in the vision are translated into performative, affective, and human modalities of loving: ways of loving enact theological “oughts” in proportions that are specific to human beings. In these ways Hadewijch shows how, like the eagle, the “inner soul [inneghe ziele]” “does not turn its eyes from God,” and how this inner focus becomes manifest according to the outer, earthly human being (CW, 102).⁴² Each temporal way of Minne works according to three gifts from the divine to humans in Trinitarian fashion: “The first is, that he gave us his nature; the second, that he delivered up his substance [substancie] to death; and the third, that he relaxed [neyghede] time” (CW, 97).⁴³

The first temporal way of Minne described in Letter 22—the way of the first person of the Trinity “according to which he gave us his nature”—is that of those who live “here as if in heaven [hier alse inden hemel]” (CW, 97).44 Those who achieve this goal “apply themselves to Love without great woe, and in devotion, and in delight, and in abundance, for they can have all these things without great woe” (CW, 97).⁴⁵ This first way of loving is, Hadewijch tells us, perfectly oriented to human time, for these people are able to enter into divinity in historical time (the time that she deems a gift to creatures) without inhibition and experience fruition in nonelevation. “They who go to God by the way of heaven consume and are fed, for he has given them his Nature, and they accept it freely. They dwell on earth in the land of peace” (CW, 99).⁴⁶ “Feeding” and “consuming” the divine denote the commensurability of divine grace and its reception in the inner person. This mode, in which the inner person sustains the outer, is not one that appears often in Hadewijch‘s work, but it is nevertheless implied in the List and in her letters. One can stipulate that while words and works do not elevate individuals, they are performed with virtues (peace being the highest) that constantly defer to the divine operating through them.

The second temporal way of loving is that “according to which he delivered his substance to death,” that is, imitating the Son, and is by way of Hell, wherein a person is spiritually attuned to the divine yet unable to find any repose in faith, as the instruments of reason work against it. Affect attests the longing for the divine (to being fed by the divine), but the mind undercuts what affect puts forth. The mind is constantly at odds with the grace the inner person receives and therefore the person is not consumed by the divine and does not trust “what she feels” as a sign of the divine. Unlike in the way of heaven, whose beneficiaries are fed and are consumed,

Hadewijch’s Mengeldicht 16 (“rhyming letter” or “poem in couplets”) permits a way of understanding the storminess and suffering in Hadewijch’s “noble unfaith”: the seventh and highest name, “just and sublime, calls Love hell” (CW, 357).47 This mode of loving, a mode of suffering, produces extremes of despair. Hadewijch’s constant references to Job give her a means of relating this predicament biblically. This mode conforms to the second person of the Trinity, who delivered his body to death: “Their spirit understands the grandeur of conformity to the delivering up of the Son, but their reason cannot understand it. This is why they condemn themselves at all hours. All their words, works, and service [Al datsi spreken ende werken ende dienen] seem to them of no account, and their spirit [ghest] cannot believe that they can attain that grandeur [dat grote]” (Letter 22: CW, 98; Brieven, 178). Only despair leads them “into all places where truth is,” as it exhausts reason to find what God is not.

Hadewijch’s Letter 6 elaborates further on this limit of reason. Paraphrasing William of Saint Thierry’s On the Nature and Dignity of Love, she explains the negative limit inscribed in reason: “Reason cannot see God except in what he is not; Love rests not except in what he is” (CW, 86).⁴⁸ While works may enact the divine, what affect attests to is not yet believed because of its conflict with reason. The inner works in accordance with the outer in this mode, but the mind is not yet ordered in a way that will permit full consumption by the divine. Consuming the divine means being consumed by the divine, “becoming” what one is. According to Hadewijch, Augustine starts with Hell, then, after self-surrender (which goes beyond the confines of reason), he is released, so to speak, into the next mode, purgatory.⁴⁹

The third temporal way of Love, that of purgatory, for those who “follow time, which has been relaxed” (CW, 98) differs from the second in that these people experience a more profound sense of the promise of Love and so feel what is lacking. They thus suffer a perpetual teasing by Minne herself in her failure to materialize. Minne is experienced as an affirmation that lacks any material object.50 Hadewijch’s experience of time is described as relaxed, extended, inclined, or protracted (neyghede), like an Augustinian distentio, that is, a distension of the mind. In this temporal way, divine and human approximate one another, because human time is experienced as given by divinity. This temporal mode is not identical to divine time, and so is not elevated as when the divine inspirits individuals; nevertheless, the person understands creaturely time as conditioned by divinity. The time of creation, for Hadewijch, is understood and felt as a gift in which humanity approaches divinity through the inner person, yet it is a gift that promises more than it delivers. Human desire yearns in proportion to what it lacks, but it does so according to the inner person: these individuals “burn with interior desires [innegher begherten] without ceasing, because everything is inclined toward them: the mouth open, the arms outstretched, and the rich heart ready. … The fact that God opens himself up so wide for them invites them at all hours to surpass their faculties” (CW, 98).⁵¹ Reason no longer seems to present a problem in this mode for it is made subject to Minne.

Unlike those who love in the first way and are satisfied, these “live in the land of holy anger” and “what was given them in trust is soon devoured by their deep, anxious longing” (CW, 99).⁵² Hadewijch calls this purgatory; she writes, “Although they burn from being so unburned by the blaze (perfect love is a fire), they burn in order to content him” (CW, 98).⁵³ The time of creation, for Hadewijch, yearns in the measure of what it lacks; thus humanity suffers, but it does so productively, according to the gift of the Holy Spirit. What we witnessed in Vision 9 as the victorious ordering of reason under Love is here performed as a way of living and feeling; what was read and understood in the vision is now lived as an affective and desiring way of being. Even though the way of loving described is found as lacking when the mystic (or saint) evaluates herself, it nevertheless asserts a promise of unity with Minne; it is an unharmonious harmony, that is, a unity that induces the feeling of insufficiency.

Finally, the last way of loving, the fifth (counting the “timeless” way as one way), which receives the least amount of elaboration (and celebration) on Hadewijch’s part, is the path “trodden by ordinary people with simple faith, who go to God by all kinds of outward service” (CW, 98).⁵⁴ The brevity of description concerning this way conveys Hadewijch’s lack of enthusiasm for those who do things outwardly but fail to really come into “his inmost secret” (CW, 98), as do those who follow the other four ways.⁵⁵ It is clear that Hadewijch values the calibration of the inner with the outer and the attempt (especially if perceived as unsuccessful) to come as close to becoming like Minne as possible.

In these three temporal ways of loving (and the one atemporal way of the visions) Hadewijch stresses the promised unity of outer and inner, the human desire to penetrate the mystery of the divine, and the aspiration to live accordingly. The last way she describes shows us that while she values good service, works enact divinity in a human measure and allow a person to “become” the divine, even when a person feels inadequate. Performing werke embodies Minne, as do the attempts to return to God through Love. In the three ways that actually enter into the “inmost secret,” what we saw given to Hadewijch in the vision we now see enacted as ways of loving and ordering inner and outer in time. The inner becomes exteriorized through a way of loving and transforms the outer, making it a means for expressing Minne. Our contemporary way of reading the mystic’s affective state and body therefore requires a recognition of its inner component; we need to read the embodiment proportionately in relation to how and what it enacts. If affect is merely categorized as excessive and irrational, or a sign of “feeling” without any theological connotation, we in turn become “illiterate”: unable to decipher the elaborate theological mechanism at work or to understand the subtle textures invoked in the mystic’s text and life.

Augustine’s ways of loving in noble unfaith and in surrender described in the List are clearly shared by Hadewijch and afford us an insight into the affective component of living and performing works through Love. The way of purgatory is manifest in her Liederen (otherwise known as her “sung” poems, or poems in stanzas), and consequently the poems are perhaps the most potentially misleading for contemporary readers of Hadewijch. The language used in her songs oft en borrows from the Song of Songs in order to enact the ways in which Minne stretches out to promise “the perfect kiss,” the figure of unity witnessed in visions that is felt in the way of purgatory.56 While the sensuality in the songs oft en appears to be an expression of carnality, once again the proximity of the divine reflects the promise of proximity. It is tangible as promise, but not consumed, furtive as it is to the senses. Her songs reflect the desire for unity and the suffering consequent on experiencing the divine as memory or promise in life. Her letters verify the knowledge of this: “Alas … although I speak of excessive sweetness, it is in truth a thing I know nothing of, except in the wish of my heart—that suffering has become sweet to me for the sake of his love” (CW, 48).⁵⁷

In themselves werke enact a different kind of performative promise of unity, in that they allow for the hosting of divine essence in actions. In her description of the fifteenth perfect person, a convert named Sara, Hadewijch stresses that she “had seventy-four beautiful revelations and also the spirit of prophecy, and also that which surpasses all else: just works of Minne [gherechte werke van minnen]” (List, 284).58 The ambivalence of the actual doer of the just works (is it Sara, or is it Minne?) imitates in life the issues of agency we find in visions. Werke reflect the embodiment of divine truth in action coupled with a spirit of righteousness that demonstrates a person’s complete adoption into divine will. Werke and perfection in Love also accomplish a transformation of the outer person into a spiritual body. In a telling linguistic designation, in the two references to the body in the List—one in her description of Sara, and the other in her description of Saint Paul—Hadewijch uses lichame (not as materie), that is, the perfected spiritualized and transformed body, fully given over to the divine. Of Sara she writes, “She had the Holy Spirit in her soul [ziele] and in her body [lichame]”; and of Paul, “He did not care what his body [lichame] suffered in the quickness and fruition of the Love in which he fully dwelt” (List, 158, 156; translation mine). Remarkably consistent and technical in her usage of terms, in the perfect lichame the inner and outer persons become indistinguishable, to the point of already being in life what one hopes to be in the afterlife. While Hadewijch’s lichame is only present in her vision, those who she lists have already perfected their bodies and souls their lives. What she sees in their bodies, that is, as having conformed completely to Minne, she is unable to see in her own because she does not yet see “face-to-face.”

In Vision 4, in which she is escorted by a seraph to see two separate kingdoms (one human and one divine), which reveal themselves to be united, Hadewijch also sees her inner and outer persons represented in both kingdoms. In this vision Hadewijch’s inner and outer persons are pedagogically shown to unite through “great works” (grote werc) she must perform in life. Like Visions 7 and 8, which insist on unity and reenact Romans 8:38–39 (“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is Christ Jesus our Lord”), Vision 4 emphasizes overcoming divisions through Love, yet explicitly mentions the urgency of great works. Initially Hadewijch sees two kingdoms, equal in every way, one of which belongs to her as the loved one—that is, the bride—and the other to her beloved—that is, Christ, the Angel of Great Counsel.⁶⁰ Hadewijch sees how divisions of time are literally overcome (in the union of living and dead, the stopping of time, and the unity of her inner and outer persons) through Christ himself. Just as in both kingdoms Hadewijch sees “saints, all holy men, living and dead, all who are in heaven, and in purgatory, and on earth, each one as he shall be perfect [gheheellec] in all,” she also sees herself tasting just Love [gherechter minnen], being touched by new faith [nuwer trouwen], and made perfect by and in Christ by removing any doubt (CW, 273).⁶¹

Hadewijch—or, more literally, her inner person—is “renewed” in Christ, envisioning the divine kingdom as her inner kingdom, following the Pauline understanding of the inner person as the place in which the divine kingdom is renewed and accomplished (2 Cor 4:16).62 The vision shows, however, that Hadewijch’s outer person has not yet fully matured and conformed to the inner, while “remain[ing] equal” (CW, 274). Hadewijch is in the process of “becoming who she already is,” the imago within. The Christ-figure adopts the first-person plural in referring to Hadewijch’s inner person, including the inner Hadewijch in a community while excluding the outer person, who, he says, is still not fully grown. This use of the first-person plural indicates the inclusion of her inner person—that is, its conformity to the imago Dei—within the larger community of Christ.

This community is, as we have seen, a plural and corporate entity of which Hadewijch is always already a part, but which she must materialize in her person as a corporate body.⁶³ In order to do so, Hadewijch must first experience love, he says, “as all darkness,” that is, without the knowledge (kinnesse) and the taste (smaken) that we have of it doubly (twevoldech) in ourselves. He ends, “This shall be her work [werc], through which tomorrow [margen] she shall bring herself to fullness [volbringhen] in us” (CW, 275).⁶⁴ Not only is Hadewijch promised full growth, but she witnesses divisions of time being literally overcome—in the union of living and dead, in the stopping of time, and in the uniting of her inner and outer persons through Christ himself. Hadewijch sees herself in her outer person, that is, in her humanity, in the figure of a third person (referred to as “she” in the vision) and is told by Christ that what she sees in “our two humanities [onser twier menscheit]” are the two kingdoms “before [their humanities] attained full growth” (CW, 274).⁶⁵

The seraph shows her that both kingdoms are equal and that, despite their lack of synchronicity in historical time, they promise to be and are fundamentally united in nature. In other words, what the seraph or Christ teaches her is that although her outer person might seem separate from him historically and essentially, it is in fact immanently equal. Inner and outer persons are conceived of as two humanities that eventually unite in spiritual fullness. The vision thus performs the unity she must embody and believe in in life. She must understand Christ’s true nature, perform the works that lead her to full growth, and fully embody divine will. The seraph projects a theological understanding into her real life, enabling her to see that how she lives is already part of the spiritual body of Christ, and specifies that it is through four great works that “she shall attain full growth” (CW, 274).⁶⁶

I would be cautious in designating the main addressee in the vision either as the “eternal self or exemplar,” as McGinn describes her, or as her “ideal self” or “her image in God,” following Columba Hart.67 McGinn contrasts this with the “historical self,” arguing that “Hadewijch’s exemplary self and her historical self are growing together in love to attain the fullness of their primordially given equality with the beloved.”⁶⁸ While this description is in part true, the language of “ideal” and “exemplary” is too Platonist in its leaning and fails to emphasize the point of the vision, which is that it will be through werke and life that Hadewijch becomes exemplary and ideal like those who have reached perfection. Hadewijch is not, as Newman claims, “a good Christian Platonist,” for the point is not to dismiss the historical in favor of an ideal form, but to allow the outer person to assume the inner form that it will take on in the afterlife.⁶⁹ Like the List of the Perfect, it is in her life—that is, in the unity of outer and inner—that her perfection is promised, not in isolation from it. In addition, the vision emphasizes that the inner needs historical time in order for Hadewijch to grow in her humanity. The oscillation between past and future tense in the seraph’s (that is, Christ’s) address to her highlights this. He tells her, “You have wished, dear strong heroine and lady, with your doubts, to know from me how it might come to pass, and through what works, that she should attain full growth so as to be like me, so that I should be like her and you like myself” (Vision 4: CW, 274).⁷⁰ This alternation between past doubts—what “might come to pass”—and future goal—so that “she should” grow fully and “should be” like Christ—provides a pattern that is common to mystical texts, showing us an invisible matrix of what is (Christ’s perfection) and the “ought” that the mystic aims to follow in life. The hypothesis of “being” offered by the vision projects persons and their corresponding embodiments figuratively into spiritual truths and spiritual truths back onto the outer person as it should be inhabited and guided by the inner.

Nowhere is this emphasis on historical time more evident than in the latter part of Vision 4, when the seraph (Christ) outlines the four great works “by which she shall attain full growth”—in a future moment (CW, 274). Three great works are to exercise all the virtues, to be miserable and unstable while doing so (so as not to be self-satisfied), and to be visited by discouragement in the process (so as to keep questioning her and God’s intentions). Finally, “Her fourth work and the greatest in which she shall lead forth in us [Haer vierde werc ende dat alremeeste dates in ons volleiden sal]” is to maintain Love in the privation of “our sweet nature [onser soeter naturen]” (CW, 275).⁷¹ This also entails privation of “the knowledge and the taste of [our nature] that we have twofold in ourself [dat wi in ons selven twevolech van hare habben], while she, not full-grown [onvolwassen] must do without him, whom she must love above all, and must consequently have as all darkness” (CW, 275).⁷² What Hadewijch lacks in her outer self is “twofold knowledge and taste,” that is, the ability to see herself fully in the divine (and the divine in her) as one self as she does in the visions; hence the drama that animates much of her poetic work, which languishes in the absence of unity with Minne. The ability to see “doubly” is what visions enable, since they are given in and through Minne and allow Hadewijch to see herself according to divine likeness, with both inner and outer eyes.

As in the allegorical commentaries on divine love of Bernard or Origen, Hadewijch sees herself enact the roles of lover or bride, yet the visions allow for a further concretization of the literary form of allegory. As twelfth- and thirteenth-century commentaries on the Song of Songs provide meticulous means for understanding the meanings of scripture, Hadewijch envisions passages from the Song of Songs as enacted, making them tangible to her inner person but in a stylistically different manner. Hadewijch does not theorize this relation; rather, she alludes to it, performs it, and models it, imagining the vehicle of the allegory (oft en the personified lover or bride) as her own soul or inner person receiving the kiss. Like other mystics, Hadewijch literalizes the vehicle of allegory in a very peculiar way, fusing the allegorical figure with the inner person, joining the literary with the speculatively embodied.73 Again, the vehicle is a promised embodiment, not yet fully actualized, even when performed in life. It is in part enacted in performative ways, but it is not yet completely realized or recognized.

By contrast, historical life must recreate this knowledge of doubleness speculatively through the mind, reflection, contemplation, memory, hope, work, and other exercises that involve a complementary act of reading of life itself. The mystical and contemplative are not separate from one another, as they each form a part of the hermeneutic process leading to a performative enactment. Following William, Hadewijch stresses the “reading” of divine judgments in relation to how she has lived. Life itself is the text: “Read in that most holy countenance all your judgments and all you have done in your life” (CW, 59).⁷⁴ The vision is a prescription for her past and future works and prophesies her ultimate perfection and triumph over the divisions in time with the coming together of both persons. It is through her future, past, and present werke (in her case, loving in privation, that is, in imitation of Christ) that her promised body—her promise of embodied perfection in her person—will begin to materialize.

Hadewijch’s Vision 8, with which this chapter opened, is likewise about the overcoming of temporal and bodily divisions through werke. In this particular vision, Hadewijch again visualizes the five ways of love, but this time does so in spatial terms where spiritual heights are mapped onto a high mountain.75 All five ways culminate in everlasting fruition (eweleker ghebrukenessen) and also lead to the highest being (dat hoechste wesen), divinity himself, poised at the top (CW, 274).⁷⁶ Hadewijch encounters a champion (kimpe) who tells her, “Behold how I am champion and vassal of this true Countenance” (CW, 282; my emphasis), and claims he is able to lead her through four of the ways of love.⁷⁷ He stops short at the fifth, as it will be shown directly by God himself: “The fifth way which is yours, will be made known to you by the just God who sent you this way and sends it to you” (CW, 282).⁷⁸ The fifth way is not the way of timelessness (the first way, described in Letter 22, which works according to God’s eternity); rather, it is a way in time that most closely resembles the way of Hell, as it entails loving with affective compassion (affectien, lines 118, 122), and not only, as the champion did, with “the sharp counsel of the mind [den scerpen rade van den geeste]” (CW, 284).⁷⁹

Her way is, the Christ-figure notes, the way of privation, that is, “the privation [dervene] of what men desire above all, your touching of me the untouchable [mi te gherijnne die ongherijnlec ben]: this is the short hour which wins over all long hours” and is the highest way (den overste wegh) (CW, 283).⁸⁰ This way conforms to the nature of Christ, as is stated explicitly in terms of the theological notion of eternal procession. The voice of God tells her: “This is the way that leads to the nature of myself [mijn selves naturen], therein I came and went forth to myself [daer ic te mi selve mede ghecomen hebbe ende ghegaen]” (CW, 283).⁸¹ This Trinitarian idea of Christ’s proceeding from and returning to the father is common to Augustinian thought (initially developed in response to the heresy that claimed two separate natures) and demonstrates Hadewijch’s understanding of the essential relation of human time and history to the divine and the human role of embodiment.⁸² The Christ-figure affirms a connection between the highest way and a Jobian yet Christlike sense of hiddenness: “I bear to you the true witness with which [met gherechten oerconde] I am the truth [waerheit] of my Father. And my Father bears witness to me that you are the highest way [die overste wech] and have brought with you this way which I have awaited with my hidden way [minen verhoelne weghen]” (CW, 284).⁸³ Hadewijch’s pursuit of this way is not only for her own purification but, as is the case for Christ, is intended to lead others back to divinity in the formation of a corpus mysticum that subsumes the individual body to the community. Hadewijch’s reasoning again shows us the importance of human time and underscores how she differs from a Neoplatonism that would devalue the material of human history in favor of the spirit.

Although unity cannot be “seen” with the outer eye, the inner eye and mind can guide body and soul to the unity promised. Reason, understanding, contemplation, and operatio (work) allow Hadewijch to understand and live accordingly. While this is not exactly a form of Renaissance “self-fashioning,” it is a kind of “self-reading” (or reading-of-divine-in-self) that sees promised unity there where the outer eye cannot and seeks to fashion the inner and outer persons and embodiments in a divine likeness. When, after speaking with the champion-figure, Hadewijch encounters the face (aenscijn) of God, the divine oscillates between speaking in the first and second person of the Trinity, in a way similar to Hadewijch’s use of the first and second person in Vision 4. The face that she sees, however, is not a human face, but “was in appearance like a great fiery flood, wider and deeper than the sea,” out of which a voice commands her to unite with those who are already perfect in this highest way (referring to those in the List). He also tells her to do so not only for her own perfection, but because “I have sent you this hour with myself and you must, with me, send it forth to yours” (CW, 283).84 Hadewijch’s duty is clear: she must share her inspiration with others and lead them into community with Christ.

Again, the individuality we as contemporary readers may want to attribute to her person is overshadowed by the collective and pedagogic nature of Hadewijch’s texts. Hadewijch’s mission is to guide “hers” as much as it is to lead herself to the perfection that unites inner and outer. As the God-figure tells her further on, her knowledge of the union of inner and outer is accomplished; that is, her understanding of the unity of the nature of Christ through the sacrament (which we see in the first part of the vision, Vision 7) is properly united with an understanding of the Trinity: “Now you have tasted me and received me outwardly and inwardly [van buten ende van binnen] and you have understood that the ways of union wholly begin in me” (CW, 284).⁸⁵ Again, knowledge of inner and outer natures of divinity and of self serves to show how one unites with the other and does not separate the materiality (of her outer body) from its divine purpose.

Her thirteenth vision makes this condition explicit. She again sees the divine Face, this time with six symbolic wings and seals, like the six-winged figure in Godfrey of Saint Victor’s “Microcosm,” and interprets it as follows: “The seals that, outside the wings, closed themselves about the Face are the veritable attributes of the mighty Godhead, in the perfection [volcomen] of which no one can himself participate unless he wishes to perform [pleghen] God and Man [mensche]” (CW, 297).⁸⁶ Becoming the Godhead means performing and reflecting divinity in life through inner and outer persons. While the seals figuratively hide the “veritable attributes” of the face and are recognized as doing so in the vision, in life, the attributes of the Godhead are hidden, invisible, and mysterious. What Hadewijch witnesses and interprets in the visions mirrors, albeit in a different and omniscient way, her own challenges and triumphs in life as well as her ability as a reader. Perfection yet again requires the dual nature of both the eternal and the temporal and the ability to read and contemplate the ways in which they are joined, following the progress and uniting role implied in her version of lectio–meditatio–contemplatio–oratio, and the final complement, werke (operatio).⁸⁷ In this penultimate vision, contemplation (beholding an object with the inner eye through understanding) is poetically associated with unity through alliteration, repetition, and echoing, as seen in an address to her by a seraph:

In Hadewijch’s final vision, in which she sees that she has finally reached this perfect state, she envisions herself given a new power by God, “the strength of his own Being, to be God with my sufferings according to his example and in union with him, as he was for me when he lived for me as Man” (CW, 302).88 Hadewijch understands that her works have been lived in God and that her will has been perfected in his, concluding, “I did as God did who delivered back all his works [sine werke] to his Father, from whom he had them; but what I have from him, I received from the transfiguration [transfiguration] and from other showings [siene] in other aspects [manieren] of his Face” (CW, 304).⁸⁹ Hadewijch models herself on a theological premise that interweaves the historical with the eternal and sees the biographical as the stage for performing works that glorify the divine. The inner and outer are not higher and lesser forms; they reflect a doubleness in divinity that humans have inherited as a means of redemption.

It is perhaps paradoxical that of all Hadewijch’s written works, her visions could be characterized as both the most nonlinear or nonsequential narrative—causing a great deal of (justified) confusion among her readers—and the most linear or progress-oriented record of development, if one knows how to decipher how eternal and historical aspects of her spirituality interconnect. In this sense, the visions, as documents of the undocumentable, echo this unifying interaction between inner and outer. In the references to inner and outer times, senses, embodiments, and works, the visions show how the outer may host and enact the divine within. As readers, should we fail to see this promise of the eternal in the temporal and the contingency of the eternal upon the temporal, we fail, right where Hadewijch succeeds, to read and understand.

As we saw in Vision 4, Hadewijch’s lived humanity, associated with her human materie, cannot “taste [the divine nature that] we have twofold in ourself” (CW, 275), as the seraph tells her—hence the performative nature of her reading must rely purely on faith and Love. This is why, the God-figure says, she must operate in darkness. In darkness, then, does Hadewijch begin her werke; to darkness must Hadewijch return from her illuminating visions: “Therefore I must live in night by day” (CW, 228), she writes in Lied 35.90 The visions punctuate life as a true positive, and outer life shows itself as its negative imprint. Returning to Hadewijch’s coda to Vision 8, with which we began this chapter, the materie of Hadewijch becomes a negative that carries the imprint of the vision in its somatic archive. In the last lines, the champion commands her: “‘Return again into your material being [materie] and let your works [werke] blossom forth; great trials are soon destined to you. But you return as victor over all, for you have conquered all.’ Then I came back in myself as someone in new severe pain [nuwe herde sereghe], and so I shall be until the day when I am again recalled there where I then turned away” (CW, 284; Vis, 90).⁹¹ This return to materie is a return to a materiality deprived of the fullness of vision. New pains are the sign and condition of her return to her person—and her materie; they constitute her “highest way” of loving. At the end of Visions 5 and 6, the return to her materie is similarly accompanied by pains that mark the return to herself: “I came back into my pain again with many a great woe” (CW, 277), or “And with this I was brought back, in affliction, in myself” (CW, 280).⁹² Like authentic witnesses, pain and suffering attest the authenticity of the isolation and privation (derven) that she is called upon to embody in life. Her pain signals what it means to unite body and soul in time. The possessive pronoun of “dine materie” (your material being) and the reflexive of “in mi selven” (in myself) signal that the return is also linked to a kind of “mineness” or “self”—to a form of ipseity and finitude that is ontologically part of, yet experientially separate from, the visions. Pains are an existential hyphen, a trait d’union between spiritual vision and embodied humanity, between the unlived experience of the vision and its hieroglyphic translation into human time and materiality.

Pain also marks a difference inscribed within the very materiality of Hadewijch’s person: the difference pain signals is both in and of the outer person, but not entirely in and of the person’s materie. Pain signals what the outer person needs to attain (unity with Christ) in order to experience wholeness. Embodiment is clearly necessary to Hadewijch’s experience of love and textual production, for embodiment hosts the trace of a memory that must be materialized through work both in life and in words. We would be missing quite a bit were we to take pain at face value, or as mere imitative carnality, since it signifies a spiritual truth that is both present and substantially inaccessible to the mystic herself. Given the way in which embodiment necessarily invokes complex associations of presence and absence of the divine, the presence of the suffering body in many women’s mystical writings may require an understanding of suffering’s relation to memory, reading, and the spirit required in embodying the Word. Suffering calls attention to the body, while at the same time it marks the body’s signifying capacity beyond its materiality. Like an inscription, pain (or suffering) therefore requires as much interpretation as does a text.

In Letter 4, Hadewijch explicitly connects one kind of suffering to a form of consolation. She explains: suffering marks the delayed temporal and ontological unity with the “Beloved” but also enables freedom and renewed hope:

When reason [redene] is obscured, the will [wille] grows weak and powerless and feels an aversion to effort [aerbeits], because reason does not enlighten [liechtet] it. Consequently, the memory [memorie] loses its high thoughts [hoghe ghedachte], and the joyous high confidence [yoieleke hoghe toeuerlaet], and the repeated zealous intentions [menisch nauwe keren] by which its confidence taught [leert] it to endure more easily the misery of waiting for its Beloved. All this depresses the noble soul [edele ziele]; but when it reaches this state, hope in God’s goodness consoles it once more. But one must err and suffer [dolen ende doghen] before being thus freed.

(CW, 53, TRANSLATION MODIFIED; BRIEVEN, 32)

The management of suffering by the mind is linked to the production of artful (or courtly) speech and to an ethos that governs works and words, as she indicates in Letter 8, a discussion of the positive attributes of fear:

As Sarah Coakley astutely remarks, in her analysis of Gregory of Nyssa and his Song of Songs commentary, “The persons of the Trinity are always being reconfigured and reconstrued as the soul advances to more dizzying intimacy with the divine. And in this progress the engagement of the self with deep levels of erotic as well as epistemological re-evaluation are [sic] unavoidably predictable.”93 The materialities of history and of life are refashioned according to a spirituality that seeks to remake bodies and souls in the image of the divine, freeing them from a boundedness to the literal in order to perfect their bodies and souls by means of a conversion of the literal. That a heroic, Christic, or masculine motif of suffering in love (witnessed especially in the courtly language of her poems) takes a dominant tone in parts of Hadewijch’s work shows how her embodied person lives its promise and way of loving. Where then does this leave us in relation to gender, as it is represented thematically in her work?

In the broader scope of my argument, I have been suggesting that we should subsume the category of the body, as it is presented in Hadewijch’s text, to a twofold understanding of how embodiment is conceived of within her visions and the greater theological context of her work. Gender is clearly an important theme—and one that many have engaged with at length, especially when analyzing the complexities of gender and gender-reversal in her Songs. Because gender is associated with the lived aspect of humanity while at the same time, the potential identification of humanity with a spiritual body, with gender, or with sexual difference, is a means—a privileged one—for the expression of many promised transformations, from a literally embodied to a spiritually embodied register.94 As a figure for human experience, gender is both preserved and altered: preserved in that humanity’s experience of gender (lived or read) provides for the multivalent expression of engaged human passion and desire, yet altered in that, like the outer person itself, whatever expression invoked must be interpreted and converted toward its truer spiritual reflection, thus making it insubstantial in relation to any human essence. What gender signifies is far more important to Hadewijch than any static relation of gender to an individual. Gender is not neutralized through its plurality of figures; rather, in its association with the expressions of desire it is a powerful vehicle for understanding and living the spiritual, as is the case for many theologians, such as Bernard or William. Gender is not necessarily queered and excessive, because aggression, masochism, and despair are fundamental for a feminine expression of desire—as Karma Lochrie argues for certain women mystics.⁹⁵ It is, paradoxically, because Hadewijch sees herself as partially freed from gender in the literal sense that gender can be used as a vehicle of transformation in a figurative sense.

Like the body, gender is read and interpreted. It promises a degree of perfectability—that of conforming to Christ in a future moment—yet it does not embody that perfection in and of itself just yet. As the process of spiritualization advances, the determinate nature of embodiment is suspended, promising the work of transformation. Part of becoming a spiritual body entails the paradox that lived experience lacks the experience of its divine counterpart; in her way of loving, Hadewijch suffers from the absence of the divine in life. This lack renders any figure of lived experience necessarily incomplete—and thus spiritually productive. One sign of this in Hadewijch’s Liederen is that the object of gendered passion remains elusive and indistinctly embodied. Even though Minne is feminine in gender, meaning love, lover, and beloved—and thereby performing a Trinitarian unity in language and in the promise of its tripartite figures uniting—it is always only present as a promise. The material manifestations of Minne are never absolutely discernible. Desire for Minne is present but must be read with caution. If we mistake the desire for this materialization for an actual one we miss the temporal incommensurability between (1) her expression of desire in her songs, poems, and letters, bound as it is to the temporal and sensible conditions of time, and (2) that desire’s object, which haunts but eludes a firmly delimited material expression. Desire (at times articulated in the language of a knight) for Minne provides a means for aligning inner and outer persons, inner and outer senses, but only insomuch as desire coordinates lived experience with spiritual promise. While Minne operates in the medium of human desire and “touches” on inner and outer senses, it is not an object that fully conforms to human desire, as it remains ever elusive, encouraging the conformity of inner and outer persons in a futural tense. Hadewijch constantly remarks on never having actually “attained” Minne, so whenever we read of the “kiss” of Minne, or the “touch” of Minne, we must hear the double registers that complicate how these experiences are determined.

Hadewijch invokes gender in respect to humanity’s ways of knowing, loving, and approaching the divine, as do many medieval commentators in their attempt to convert the literal sense of scripture to its inner spiritual sense. In this sense, Saskia Murk-Jansen is correct in suggesting that the language of gender reversal witnessed in Hadewijch’s Liederen “illustrate[s] theological points in essentially the same way that Bernard of Clairvaux does” and demonstrates “an awareness of the similarity of the position of men and women before their Creator.”96 The reversal of gender roles in her Liederen follows a well-known tradition, but at the same time her Liederen innovate this tradition from within the Middle Dutch language. That Hadewijch’s works were also read by male monastics tells us something about the translatability and transformability of gender in these contexts. That gender plays various critical functions in her work is evident, yet gender is not limited to one paradigm, nor is it dogmatically uniform in her text. If it is considered in relation to and not in isolation from the literary and theological contexts in which it is articulated, especially in relation to the roles of derven (privation), pine (pain), affectie (affection), or other modes of devotion, it becomes as multivalent as the life it represents.⁹⁷ Hadewijch subsumes every form of “life” in all its complexity to Minne: the (temporally bound) forms of servitude, courtship, academic debate, seasonal change, liturgical rhythms, and gender all are at the service of expressing the diversity in Minne as known through time and historical existence. Minne promises to unite these different and oft en contradictory forms as it enacts the ultimate unity of all things.⁹⁸

In our readings of a mystic like Hadewijch, when we overinvest the theme of gender with a subversive and oppositional nature, we risk missing the even greater impressive complexity that allows her to navigate textually and theologically in an original, and even subversive, understanding of the unity of human and divine nature, of which gendered language is a part.99 By no means am I attempting here to analyze thoroughly the theme of gender in Hadewijch’s work; I have bracketed this discussion within the larger theological issue of embodied human experience and the promise of unity with the divine. In order to make any stipulation about gender as it is lived, I am arguing that one must consider how experience is understood in Hadewijch’s way of loving. As I cautioned in the beginning of this chapter, in focusing on the theme of gender alone, we run the risk of overlooking the very qualities that make Hadewijch a literary and theological force of her time.

I have shown how, from the standpoint of living one’s humanity in conformity with the divine, all figures of experience for Hadewijch are partial and incomplete (materially and ontologically), as they necessitate the complement of the divine and are only promised this futurally. Minne is the figure of this divine complement, and since Minne articulates or performs the proximity between human beings and the divine, it operates in a secretive and immanent fashion, frustrating the desire for concrete manifestation.

I would like to conclude here with a reflection on how the lack of concreteness in Minne in life relates to a person’s transformation from a material to a spiritual body. While suffering—a key component of Hadewijch’s way of loving—seems to highlight a body’s physicality, in fact, for Hadewijch suffering aligns the body with a linguistic referent, highlighting its closeness with and promised conformity to the Word. Hadewijch make this connection explicit. In Letter 2, she connects suffering to the experience of a Jobian “hidden word”: “Suffer gladly the pain God sends you; thus you will hear his mysterious counsel, as Job says of him: You have spoken to me a hidden word” (CW, 51).100 And in Letter 18: “And this is what they do who serve Love in liberty; they rest on that sweet, wise breast and see and hear hidden words—which are ineffable and unheard-of by men—through the sweet whisper of the Holy Spirit” (CW, 88).¹⁰¹ In Lied 4: “To one who gives himself with fidelity in truth / And then with truth lives fidelity, / The hidden word is spoken, / Which no alien can understand / But only he who has had a taste of it / And has experienced silence amid great noise” (CW, 137).¹⁰² Suffering secretly encodes a divine message, connected to the Holy Spirit, that she experiences as silence—or, as she describes it, having “night by day” (CW, 253). It is important to make suffering speak, to interpret suffering as a meaningful word, testimony to her imitation of the Word. In conceiving herself as an addressee of pain sent to her by God—and not as the generator of pain—she is able to conceive of herself as the recipient of a divine message. Like an envelope, the immediacy of the outer person is linked to its signifying capacity: her pains mean something, they constitute a message, they bespeak a hidden word. In theological terms, materie does not presume integrity or unity of its substance, but requires the complement of the divine and of language for redemption. The materie depends upon the hidden word in order for Hadewijch to envision its promised unity, for the word can suggest the promise of substance there where the outer person can only point and show itself as a sign.

While Hadewijch’s materie makes manifest the gap between her temporal being and seeing divinity face-to-face, between suffering and the bliss of promised unity, her lichame demonstrates the opposite. From the perspective of her visions, Hadewijch needs to live her humanity to the fullest, in love and service to others, in order to experience the highest fruition in God. Her lichame, an embodiment associated with her soul that I have linked to the Pauline inner person, dwells in the time of the vision and receives fruition of the divine, yet she promises to be her lichame only when she no longer dwells in history. In Vision 13, Hadewijch is told that she can return to her lichame only after death. In this vision, after the hyperbolic divine Face appears, Mary, “who was the highest [overste] of the twenty-nine” (CW, 301), instructs Hadewijch on the temporal delay associated with her fully inhabiting her lichame.¹⁰³ Returning completely to her inner person means fully dwelling in perfection and no longer inhabiting only the outer transitory vessel, the “earthly man,” Paul’s exo anthropos. Whether Hadewijch will shed her materie entirely is unclear (will she be resurrected with it, as Augustine claimed?), but what is evident is that her lichame is left in the time of the vision for her to rejoin fully after death. In this sense the lichame seems to be filiated to a spiritual body, but nevertheless models how inner and outer persons conform to one another in a Christic model.

In an extraordinarily high evaluation of Hadewijch, Mary praises her for vanquishing Minne (conquering her diversity) and making Minne one by loving her in the three ways (“these three [ways of] being,” of which her way is the highest) (CW, 301).104 Yet despite Mary’s praise and her inclusion among the twenty-nine, Hadewijch must delay unity with God. Mary tells her,

See, if you wish to have ampler fruition [voertmeer ghebruken], as I have, you must leave your sweet body [dinen sueten lichame; my emphasis] here. But for the sake of those whom you have chosen to become full-grown [volwassene] with you in this, but who are not yet full-grown [volwassen], and above all for the sake of those whom you love most, you will yet defer it [soe wiltuut noch versten]. And in the first hour that you wish, we will call you [hale wi di]. And now after you return hither [wedercoms], the world will scarcely let you live [saldi de werelt cume laten leven]; and then, a short time after the fortieth day, you will again resume your body [dinen lichame], which you keep so nobly for Minne [dien du edeleke houts ter minnen].

(CW, 301; VIS, 136)

The temporal delay referred to regarding rejoining her lichame (“you will yet defer [rejoining] it”) is associated with a body that is teleologically destined for a life beyond death, as in of Christ’s ascension. It is, in this sense, a spiritual body, but this does not exclude its humanity. As I mentioned earlier, Hadewijch’s visions enable a twofold sense of how her humanity conforms to Christ, despite her inability to know this in life. The lichame finds its permanent dwelling in the “secret heaven” Hadewijch is permitted to glimpse in visions, yet Hadewijch is unable yet to dwell there if she wants to experience her humanity to its fullest. In a telling sign, Hadewijch must delay her return because of her love for others. In a further Christic imitatio, Hadewijch must take on additional suffering for those she loves before she is called back to her lichame. The concern for the community is again of central importance to Hadewijch’s spirituality. A sense of longing for the abolition of time and for unity permeates Mary’s assessment and will accompany Hadewijch’s return to her materie. Like Augustine’s distentio, time marks the experience of the body and conditions the way the visions frame themselves. The future tense of “you will” that scans Mary’s speech, prophesying Hadewijch’s return to her outer person, is countered by a “now” (nu) that marks the eternal present of Mary’s speech as it resonates in Hadewijch’s inner person. The two will intersect with Hadewijch’s return to herself.

The temporal and ontological limits that are proper to each person (inner and outer) are theologically necessary, yet this thought provides little consolation in life. The promise that is constantly lived as deferral and delay counters any caricature one may have of mystics engaged in a seemingly incessantly direct tête-à-tête with divinity or an immediate Bernini-esque display of union. Nothing could be further from Hadewijch’s experience. Her encounter is necessarily mediated—and not only through the form of its presentation.105 Hadewijch is host to an experience that has no anterior referential reality that she may experience in her own name, no trace other than writing and the affect of suffering and hope. This affective “truth” is what is affirmed in the vision and inherited in life. The dream vision is retained in the body’s differing and deferring, as the memory of a date that has no history, a date that will allow the outer person one day—one perpetually deferred day—to be inhabited by the “I” just as the inner person is inhabited by God.

By contrast, Hadewijch’s vision of Christ allows us to understand this sought-after unity as it hopes to be experienced and as it actively bridges both the historical and the spiritual senses, enacting a joining that can be echoed by interpretation and action. From the perspective of her lichame, humanity is no longer incomplete, but only lacking in the understanding that the soul can attest in visions. In Vision 7, the term lichame is understandably used by Hadewijch to designate Christ’s multiple bodies as man, human being, and sacramental offering, thereby showing the unity of all three. These three show the interrelation between the living historical body, the body that returns after death, and the symbolic body to be consumed in sacramental union. As we know from Trinitarian theology, Christ is already what he is; essence and appearance are undifferentiated in relation to his divinity. His humanity is already perfect. The narrative of Vision 7, a vision of the Eucharist—which, as I noted, is continued by Vision 8—sets up Christ’s humanity in a way that provides Hadewijch with a measure for understanding the role of the sacramental body and its relation to the historical Christ. Hadewijch’s vision performatively fuses the two into one, and, more importantly, she understands and feels unity in Christ, overcoming all differences in time. The essential unity and identity of her lichame with Christ is only felt momentarily as mystical union; nevertheless, it serves as a theological lesson in which she can understand (and feel) the relation of her own humanity and inner body to the Eucharist and the corpus mysticum.

Hadewijch narrates her vision of Christ, allowing herself to witness his developing humanity and its relation to the symbolism of the Mass, uniting what in her earthly time has not been fully felt as one:

As we saw in the visions’ references to Hadewijch’s personal growth (which started with her being not yet full grown, then becoming more perfect, and then oriented toward her community), a teleology appears in Christ’s progression from child, to man, to human being, to figure or symbol that unites the larger collective body in the Eucharist. While Hadewijch’s person represented in the vision feels him in both outer and inner fashions, in bodily and spiritual senses, first as man then as figure, what she comes to understand is the unity of both. This doubleness becomes explicit as Hadewijch describes the union: “It was thus: outwardly, in seeing, in tasting, and in feeling as people taste in the outward reception of the sacrament. And to see and feel outwardly like the beloved with the loved one, each wholly receiving the full satisfaction of seeing, hearing, and merging with the other” (CW, 281–282; translation mine). While the represented experience of the lichame is a metaphor for the experience of the inner body in the eternal time of the vision, it is also a figure for the experience of unity of the outward senses with the inner (which in the vision happily do not suffer privation in the vision since they are graced with that “twofold” knowledge and taste CW, 275).

Materiality, vision, embodiment, memory, language, temporality, textuality, and exegesis: all are intertwined in weblike fashion in these mystical texts. One cannot be articulated without the other, hence the complexity of any articulation of embodiment or materiality, as it moves from the outer eye to sights unseen. Reading, beholding, contemplation, meditation, understanding, and prayer are all integral parts of Hadewijch’s visionary texts and demonstrate the critical role of figuration as a means to combine letter, body, interpretation, act, and the surrounding world. Visions are not expressions of a “freer” self that counters an oppressive social “biological identity”; rather, they are the means to envision and enact literate (and Trinitarian) identities from the sermon, song, or manuscript page, to the affective, religious, and interactive world in which the mystic or visionary lives.106 If the world is conceived of as a book for the Middle Ages, as Ernst Curtius long ago claimed, it is not surprising that its inhabitants are its most animated letters. Visions attest the intersection of religious affect and theological learning. The trace of the vision inhabits embodiment as a secret and a longing, while it survives in the promise and enactment of the text.

Visions are another site of the intersection and confirmation of religious affect and theological or literary learning. They encourage contemplation on life’s relation to its secret and invisible counterparts and command works enacting the affect felt and affirmed in the vision. As I have shown, the cognitive nature of the vision is given substance through both language and the performative nature of werke. Visions unite in more ways than one, that is: not only do they illustrate or perform a union immanent for all humans (namely that of the union with the divine), but they provide a model, a poetics of embodiment, for uniting the outer body with the inner and show how the visionary or mystic can enact perfection in the world of life to create an exemplary vita through works. It may not be by chance that visions and vitae are among the most popular genres for medieval women; they are testimony to the fact that textuality is inseparable from the multifaceted doubleness of bodies and life, and demonstrate how medieval practices of reading and interpretation extend into a performative milieu in which embodiment has its share. Our contemporary readings, which incessantly see flesh whenever corporeality is mentioned, fail to read materiality as part of a hermeneutic practice, that is, they fail to see the Word in the doubled substance of the flesh. If medieval visions are testimony to a form of reading and exegesis that finds its ultimate end both in a performative enactment of works and in the fulfillment of meaning in the inner body, then the poetic work that inhabits the body—which allows it to become the interiorized text—may also be found in mystical language itself. The next chapter looks at the work of poetic language, the garments for the promised body in Hadewijch’s Liederen.