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Self‐Transcendence and the Group: The Attitude to Life of Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Beguines
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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You should love what is not
And flee what is.
You should stand alone
And approach no one.
You should strive always
To be free from all things.
You should free the bound
And bind the free.
You should comfort the sick
And yet possess nothing.
You should drink the water of suffering
And feed the fire of love with the fuel of virtue.
Then you shall live in the true wilderness.
Mechthild of Magdeburg: The Flowing Light of the Godhead. (35 1)This highly poetic, but deeply paradoxical passage from Mechthild of Magdeburg, the thirteenth century beguine and mystic, can stand as a paradigm for the themes of self-transcendence and communality as understood and experienced by religious women in the later middle ages, and in particular those belonging to the beguine movement.
Mechthild advises her readers how to live in ‘the true wilderness’, a place located beyond our ordinary existence and geographical reality. This ‘true wilderness’ is reached by ‘loving what is not’ and ‘flee(ing) what is’. All that binds her to this world must be left behind, if the mystic is to rise above earthly ties and unite herself with God, her transcendent lover; a God who, like the Lady of the Courtly Lover, is a God of absence as well as presence, of pain as well as joy. Although Mechthild chose a communal form of spiritual life as a member of a monastic community, she realised that each of us must travel to God alone.
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- Copyright © 1992 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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