Gertrud of Helfta (1256-1301) was
a Christian nun whose sensitivity to mystical experience can be characterized
as a bridal mysticism within a Christ mysticism. Think of Christ; turn yourself
over to Christ. She brings in the related theme of light, which is salient in
the Gospel of John, with Christ saying, I am the light of the word. Yet
her mystical sensitivity was such that she could transcend even Christ’s
resurrected body, which can be said to have been her favorite mask of eternity
through which love, which, as Paul and Augustine had claimed, is God.
This does not mean that the mask is finally tossed aside as somehow erroneous;
rather, it is to say more generally that people who have an enhanced
sensitivity to the mystical in a religious, or transcendent, sense, are
oriented to going beyond God in our likeness to experience God as wholly other—as
radically transcendent—and thus leave oneself behind.
Gertrud's guide to monastic prayer
includes the following in the imperative form, “pray to the Lord to lead you
into the school of love where you may learn further to recognize and
love Jesus.”[1] Sight
is implicit, if recognizing Jesus includes seeing his body. The theme of Gertrud’s
third spiritual exercise (spiritual dedication) is “spiritual matrimony,
wherein the nun is the bride and Jesus Christ is the bridegroom. Eros is not excluded, the love being of caritas
rather than agape for the nun even though “Christ’s desire is as
great as the bride’s” and “this marriage of love” is rendered an “inseparable
union” of “chaste love” by a “kiss of love.”[2]
Clearly, Descartes’ mind-body dichotomy does not apply, as Christ’s resurrected
body is transformed from being an earthly body.
In short, Gertrud’s language,
which can be likened to Augustine’s erotic pining for God’s scent in The
Confessions, includes even if as an illusion, sexuality and thus bodies
rather than just souls. Although Gertrud
likens the “bond of love between the two spouses”—the nun and Jesus—to “the
glue that unites the Father to the Son,” the “true spouse and wife, made
fertile, brings forth the fruits of life.”[3]
The sexual imagery, in which bodies are salient, simply cannot be ignored.
The likeness to the relation between
the Father and the Son in the Trinity, however, should be taken with a grain of
salt, given Augustine’s claim that likening the relation between the Father and
the Son to that of a human father and son (or daughter) is an instance of
idolatry. Augustine acknowledges that human weakness “can only think of what it
has been accustomed to do or hear.”[4]
And yet he warns that “no carnal thought creep up” when we think of Jesus’
line, “As the Father has taught me,” such as in thinking of how a human father
teaches his son.[5]
Thinking of the relationship in the Trinity as being akin to a human
relationship is to “fashion idols.”[6]
But then is not thinking of approaching Jesus by incorporating sexual language
also idolatrous? Fortunately, Gertrud’s goal goes beyond such imagery, and,
moreover, even Jesus’ resurrected body. Her attitude toward human bodies, no
doubt informed from living in a monastery from the age of 5, would argue
against her resting for eternity with even a transformed yet still corporeal
(rather than gnostic) body (of Jesus).
Even though Gertrud “focuses on
Christ’s glorified human nature, she does not emphasize the belief that human
nature in general is restored through the incarnation of Christ.”[7]
For example, distinguishing the “rotten body” from the spirit (e.g., Spiritual
Exercises, VI, 612f) is consistent with mortification, “dying to oneself in
order to live for God alone (III, 149), which is implied in the “process of
inner liberation.”[8] This
is also consistent with Gertrud’s leitmotif of death of the corporeal body in
its earthly state constituting “a beginning rather than an end, a paradoxical
reversal of death and life, which . . . goes back to the mystery of the Cross.”[9]
Yet Gertrud holds that Christ’s “human nature” is retained “in his heavenly
state.”[10]
Moreover, her mysticism is “typically Christ-centered,” with “Christ in his
humanity” forming “the basis and focus of all of Gertrud’s writing.”[11]
Put another way, It is the “human nature of Christ as one with the Spirit and
as part of the Trinity, while still, Gertrud writes, ‘in the substance of my
flesh,’” that “represents the pivotal point of Gertrud’s mystical life.”[12]
I submit that the likeness of “my flesh” involves, on the devotee’s part, a “rotten
body,” and furthermore that it would be difficult for Gertrud to stay with the
bridal language to characterize her goal of blissful union with God, which for
her includes being in God.
Fortunately, Gertrud transcends
the mind-body dichotomy altogether in writing of God as Goodness (bonitas),
Love (caritas), Cherishing-love (dilectio), Compassion (misericordia),
Peace (pax), and Loving-kindness (pietas).[13]
These words for divinity obviate the pitfall from anthropomorphism in rendering
the transcendent as human, all too human. This is avoided to an extent by
“employing simultaneously both male and female attributes for God.”[14]
The same is done in Hinduism, in depicting
the deity, Shiva, as both male and female—as conjoined bodily with his consort,
Devi, as in (in Christian terms of marriage) made one flesh. Ganesha,
the Hindu god that has an elephant head, goes even further in upsetting the
convenient assumption that a deity resembles our human form externally.
Put in simpler theological terms,
Christ’s transformed (rather than earthly) resurrected body is Gertrud’s
centering pole that she grasps as though with one arm as she leans out yearning
for mysterium divinum; “the mystical experience” being “per se ineffable.”[15]
In Spiritual Exercises, the “desire to reach God sine impedimente (without
any hindrance) is reiterated throughout as direct contact with the Divine
remains her goal,” and of course her summum bonum, which Plato describes
merely as eternal moral verities (truths).[16]
“Ah! O love, may your cherishing-love consummated in me be my end and
consummation.”[17] Although
she adds her hope that she “may appear worthy in the presence of the immortal spouse,
in a wedding dress and with a spousal dowry,” I contend that being in the
divine that is love transcends even a bridal union with Christ’s
resurrected body.[18] So
here Gertrud can be interpreted as describing the means (i.e., being married with
Jesus in his resurrected condition, including bodily) after having depicted the
end, or consummation, with divine love itself. There is a danger, therefore,
that devotees following Gertrud’s spiritual exercises in praxis may focus on
the means too much, without even pondering what divine love is in itself
as a distinct type of love. As distinct, illusions to sexuality and even
bodies can only go so far on the way to divine love saturating the devotee from
within in the end.
Gender, and even anthropomorphism are hindrances from the perspective of experiencing union with the source of the divine, which transcends the limits of human thought and perception, as Dionysius suggests. Relatedly, in Hinduism, the part of Purusa’s primordial body that extends beyond most of that body—that which becomes the world—is transcendent in that it lies beyond our realm. Only once even such basic obstacles as gender-identification and the tendency of the human brain to render radically “other” thoughts into familiar terms are transcended can a person like Gertrud of Helfta have “inner freedom” (Libertas cordis), which is Gertrud’s most “unique characteristic and her most important theme in general.”[19] According to Gertrud, a “mystical rebirth in God” entails “integrity of faith, triumph over the enemy, unyielding perseverance, and freedom of spirit.”[20] Such freedom is needed to see “God face to face for eternity.”[21] Ironically, the light showing God’s true face transcends the light of the world.
1, Gertrud
of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis,
trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Publication, 1989): V. verses 311-12, p. 84, italics added.
2, Ibid.,
p. 14.
3, Ibid.,
p. 14.
4, Augustine, Tractates on John: Books 28-54, 40.4, trans. John W. Rettig,
Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 88 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic
University of America Press, 1993), 126.
5, Ibid.
6, Ibid.
7, Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 8.
8. Ibid.,
p.9.
9, Ibid.,
p. 10.
10. Ibid.,
p. 7.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
The use of the Latin word, caritas, rather than the Greek word, agape,
is, I submit, misplaced in being an appellation for God. For Augustine, caritas
is not selfless love, but is infused with, and thus not cut off from,
garden-variety eros, albeit sublimated to the summum bonum. For
the basis of this idea, see Plato’s Symposium. Calvin was more
idealistic concerning the potential of human love in applying agape,
which is divine selfless love, as evinced in God the Father allowing his Logos
to be incarnated as His Son and even to suffer an excruciating death.
Therefore, I contend that the sort of love that is divine is more accurately
rendered as selfless (agape) rather than including human instinct (caritas).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. “Gertrud’s
text unequivocally defines the summum bonum in terms of the biblical ‘seeing
God face to face.’” Introduction of Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises,
Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 8.
17. Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989): V. verses 216-17, p. 81.
18. Ibid.,
verses 226-28, p. 81.
19. Ibid.,
p. 10.
20. Ibid.,
p.12, italics added.
21. Ibid.
