On October 24, 2024, Pope Francis
released his encyclical, Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us), on the Sacred Heart
of Jesus. In the letter, he recounts “Saint Gertrude of Helfta, a Cisterian
nun, tells of a time in prayer when she reclined her head on the heart of
Christ and heard it beating.”[1]
She wondered why the Gospel of John does not describe a similar spiritual experience,
and concluded that “the sweet sound of those heartbeats has been reserved for
modern times, so that, hearing them, our aging and lukewarm world may be
renewed in the love of Christ.”[2]
The pope concludes in the letter that this might hold for our times too. I
contend that Gertrud’s spirituality can speak to the current modern age, in
which that of Gertrud—the thirteenth century—hardly seems modern, but not in
terms of focusing on Jesus’ resurrected heart; instead, Gertrud can point us
beyond the limits of marital-union imagery with Jesus to experience that
transcends the use of imagery that may say more about us and our world than
that which transcends even the limits of the human imagination. Turning to the
criticisms of Gertrud’s spirituality (and intelligence) by Thomas Merton and William
James, I intend to salvage Gertrud in order to uncover her spiritual maturity.
According to Thomas Merton, Jesus
said to Gertrud of Helfta, a nun in thirteenth century Europe, “I wish your
writings to be an irrefutable testimonial of my Divine Love in these latter
days in which I plan to do good to many souls!”[3]
Jesus even dictated to her the title for her book: Herald of Divine Love.
His rationale was that, as he told the nun, “souls will find in [the book] a
foretaste of the super-abundance of my divine love.”[4]
The inclusion of latter days flags the nun’s claim that it was actually
Jesus who was talking with her, rather than her hallucinating, for in no sense
can we say in hindsight that the thirteenth century could be characterized as
the latter days of Christianity. This objection is only relevant, however, to
the metaphysician (i.e., is Jesus a real entity?), the psychologist (i.e., was
Gertrud hallucinating?), and historian (i.e., was Gertrud speaking to the
resurrected historical Jesus of the Gospels?). The cost in making these
category mistakes—taking religion to reduce to another domain and thus its
criteria—is the missed opportunity (hence opportunity cost) to study the nature
or essence of divine love, for that is the distinctly religious
content in Merton’s report. Although academic study is obviously not necessary
for a person to be religious, I, unlike Merton, applaud Gertrud’s intellectual
forays into “secular” knowledge because intelligence plus knowledge can facilitate
a person’s religious development.
Merton wrote of Gertrud as having
been “an intelligent child with a taste for secular literature. Unfortunately,
however, this taste became too absorbing. Although in itself it was harmless,
or even good, it grew to such proportions and came to occupy such an inordinate
place in her life that it choked the development of grace in her soul. . . .
She was completely devoured by this one passion for the pleasure she found in
reading the literature of the world. Psychologically speaking, what had happened
was a completely unhealthy exteriorization of her whole self. She had developed
a habit of pouring herself out, wasting her energies in the pursuit of her own
satisfaction.”[5]
But after some visions of Jesus, she “passed from tepidity to the closest mystical
intimacy with the Sacred Heart,” which, being Jesus’s “infinitely perfect love
for us,” became “the one big reality of her life.”[6]
Merton’s jejune and petty
characterization of the intellectual life is hardly fair. At Yale’s divinity
school, where I studied theology (while studying philosophy, history, film and
education in the liberal arts college), faith seeking understanding was
the mantra for both the students and the “scholarly priests” on the faculty. Of
course, no Yale student could ever be accused of being an over-achiever,
but this does not necessarily mean that God is thereby slighted by taking
studying seriously, for God can be reckoned as the ultimate source even of the
sliver of potential knowledge that a human being can learn in a lifetime. In
fact, academic study can lead to a more mature religiosity.
William James criticizes Margaret
Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), a European nun and mystic who emphasized the Sacred
Heart of Jesus, as being “so feeble of intellectual outlook that it would be
too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and modern education, to feel
anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship which she embodies.”[7]
So who is right on the religious verdict on intelligence—Merton or James?
Surely it is not necessary to religiosity, and intelligence and accumulated
knowledge can bolster arrogance if devoid of benevolentia universalis,
or simple kindness, as is all too common at Yale and Harvard in New England—far
indeed from the Midwest. Even so, to love ideas is not in itself to hate God or
reckon oneself to be a deity among mere, stupid mortals. It may be said of
intelligence applied to religion that Satan is cleaver and yet God is
omniscient (i.e., all-knowing). For us mere mortals stuck in between, ideas
about the world and especially about God and even religion as a distinct domain
can facilitate our religious development toward maturation. As Paul
wrote, “When I became a man, I put away childish things.”[8]
William James had no patience for
stymied, or jejune spirituality. He contrasts Gertrud’s “proofs of Christ’s
partiality for her undeserving person” through assurances “of his love,
intimacy, and caresses and compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort”
with the capability of the modern religious person to get past the idea of God
as a dispenser of “personal favors.”[9]
I don’t believe James was being fair to the pious nun, for she was very mature
in terms of religious development.
Gertrud’s use of partiality in
describing her relationship with Jesus does not mean that she felt superior or
better off with respect to other people; rather, the favoring she perceived
from Jesus allowing his “visible presence” to show to her has to do with her
own unworthiness, given “such disorder and confusion” within her that “was no
fitting dwelling for [Jesus].[10]
Given her self-knowledge of her “stiff-necked obstinacy” and her “tower of
vanity and worldiness,” favor had to do with the sheer grace that afforded her
the privilege of having visions of Christ.[11]
“I must confess in very truth that this was a grace given freely and in no way
deserve,” she wrote before noting that “severe punishments” were what she
deserved.[12]
Her sense of being favored was that by grace alone such punishments were
obviated and even replaced by visions of Jesus. This had nothing to do with
being favored over other people, and as a self-declared wretch, she surely
would not have presumed to be favored over anyone. James comes off as a cold
and resentful or at least biased member of the faculty at Harvard, and thus
hardly alone there, but very far indeed from Gertrud and other mature religious
folk whose humility warrants partiality.
Secondly, James neglects
Gertrud’s goal being to see God’s face and paradoxically to be in God
and thus in God’s love, understood as agape, or self-emptying (divine)
love, which goes beyond marital connotations associated with her yearning for
Jesus. Circling back to Merton, we can say that Gertrud used her God-given
intellect polished by years of study at the monastery, to transcend the bridal
language she uses to describe the anthropomorphic marital love between her and
Jesus by going on to characterize her goal of blissful union with God, which is
mystically higher than merely being married to a manifestation of God.
Although Gertrud antedates David
Hume’s seventeenth-century warning of the human mind’s inherent susceptibility
to remaking God in our own image by anthropomorphizing familiar ornaments onto
the pure idea of divine simplicity, I suspect Gertrud was able to use her
studies and her innate intelligence to figure out the limitations of human
analogies such as marriage and even erotic language, which compromise God being
wholly other, and thus not even a being in the sense that we think of beings.[13]
Describing the
liturgically-oriented fifth spiritual exercise in Gertrud’s program, two
scholars distinguish Gertrud’s marital (and erotic) analogy wherein a nun “in a
wedding dress [and] with a spousal dowry”[14]
has is spiritually (and liturgically) married to Jesus, “the immortal spouse,”[15]
from the telos, or ultimate goal in the following passage: “Having
concluded the nuptial contract with the Lord, the mystic is burning for the
kiss of her immortal spouse, for the wedding embrace in the innermost
bedchamber of the heart. With the Lord as husband, the offspring of this marital
union will be perfect love; it will mean becoming one spirit with God.”[16]
I contend that the offspring transcends the marriage union as well as the
marital and sexual language.
Gertrud was able to conceptualize
her telos as an indwelling union in the divine, which is a closer
and less humanlike union than is implicit in her vision of Jesus “leaning
towards her like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss.”[17]
It is important not to take even such sensual language too literally. According
to two scholars, “When Gertrud thus 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. She often distinguished between the ‘rotten
body’ and the spirit. The body-soul dichotomy remains unreconciled in the Spiritual
Exercises.”[18]
This is only a relative or temporary problem, however, as Gertrud believed that
at death, a person can flow back into God,”[19]
which obviates even any relationship basis of union by transcending into God
as love. Being in God transcends having a relationship with God,
and it is precisely by one’s intellect and learning that a person can figure
this out. Circling back to James, it can be said that whereas wanting to be
married to Jesus can involve a desire for preferential treatment, though
there is no evidence that Gertrud thought she alone could be Jesus’s spouse, indwelling
in divine, pure (i.e., selfless) love transcends wanting preferential
treatment.
With regard to the domain of
religion as sui generis (i.e., distinct and of its own type of domain),
although God by definition in being omniscient and transcendent is not limited
to human systems of logic, it doesn’t hurt to be able to prune off wayward,
human, all too human branches of even theological ratiocination as incoherent
or really of another domain; otherwise, the human mind’s susceptibility to
superstition and emotional enthusiasm in matters of religion could take over. As
a prime candidate for pruning, Merton insists that the suddenness of Gertrud’s
profound change “only emphasizes the fact that it was utterly beyond her own
powers and was a pure gift of God.”[20]
His assumption that a sudden change in a person cannot happen or has never
happened before in a person without grace, or that sudden, momentous change is
somehow contrary to human nature, is specious reasoning. It is similar to
concluding that because a sick person prayed to John Paul II after his death
and then gotten well without a medical reason (as if medicine were complete),
the former pope must be a saint even though he did not act sufficiently on
reports of child-rapes by priests and coverups by their respective bishops.
Positive correlation is not sufficient to attest to causation. This logical
point is often lost to the fervor of religious ideology.
It is also by intellect that we
can come to realize the need to uproot the exogenous plants from the religious
garden so we can see, understand, and experience the innately religious
fauna that has been quietly growing underneath. Ignorance, superstition, and
enthusiastic fervor can otherwise lead a person to claim to know rather
than believe something that is a matter of faith. This fallacy, which
involves reducing religion to some other domain (e.g., empirical science), involves
an epistemological category mistake regarding what can be known. Subjecting a
faith-claim to the verdict of what can be known from a historical account, or
inferred from the result of an “arm chair” psychological analysis, for example,
can be thwarted by previous study in logic and philosophy in general. Ironically,
such “secular” studies protect the domain of religion from the encroachments of
other domains as well as from overstepping onto other domains with an
overriding arrogance of superiority based on a religious-domain-only belief claim.
From another shore, Merton saw
fit to psychoanalyze Gertrud’s voracious appetite for knowledge, and William
James claimed that “the revelations of Christ’s sacred heart” were Margaret
Mary’s “hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing.”[21]
The modern mind will doubtless give credence to the rendering of religious
experience into psychological terms. In 2023, I attended some lectures of a
class at Yale on the results of empirical studies in psychology on religious
beliefs. Generally speaking, empirical social-science tests can contribute to
philosophy and the subject-matter of religious studies, though it is important
to remember that the faith claims themselves do not suffer a consequent
loss of validity in terms of religious meaning.
In the 1980s, in reaction to the
historical critical method that had emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, Han
Frei, a Yale professor of theology, claimed in his text, Eclipse of the
Biblical Narrative, that historical questions of, and, one could add doing psychologically
analysis on, characters and events in faith narratives such as the four Gospels
comes at the cost of grasping the religious meaning in the stories. In
other words, let the stories speak to you; don’t interrupt them to get behind
the stories.
Just as Donald Trump was deemed
an easy target by American psychologists when he was running for U.S. president
in 2024 even though none of those “educated” psychologists had subjected him to
psychological tests, let alone even met him in person, so too it must be easy
as well as tempting to analyze the religious experiences of people whose
religious sensitivity enables even elaborate descriptions of such experiences. Applying
psychological analyses to nuns who lived many centuries back and claiming that
the results trump their respective religious experiences is not only fraught
with difficulties that could render the results invalid, but also superimposes
another domain onto that of religion without justification. A good education in
the liberal arts and a sharp intellect can critically examine such
unsubstantiated assumptions in what has become known as critical thinking.
Religion, I submit, should be treated as a
distinct domain, and thus with its own sort of meaning, experience, and
criteria. This is not to say that the domain cannot intersect or has never
intersected with other domains, such as history and psychology; James may be
right about the specious ontological basis of visions; Jesus referring to the
thirteen century as “latter days” belies Gertrud’s claim that an entity outside
of Gertrud’s mind was speaking to her in her vision. Even so, for people
interested in the religious domain, whether in regard to faith or a resulting experience
or practice, religious meaning is the gold to be dug up, whether or not
it is attached to a historical event has come out of a psychological state wherein
the contents of a vision are not themselves empirical; the religious meaning
is still real in its own sense, and thus such meaning can be related to religious
creeds, doctrines, and systemic theologies by criteria innate to the religious
domain rather than superimposed by another domain. Not only is it the case that
secular knowledge and an analytical and logical intelligence need not be a
threat to religion; a good liberal-arts and sciences education can actually
facilitate a person’s religious maturation and prune off the dead wood in the
religious domain as well as overhanging branches from trees growing in other
domains.
1. Pope
Francis, Dilexit Nos, October 24, 2024, para. 98.
2. Ibid.
3. Thomas Merton, “Saint Gertrude, Nun of
Helfta, Germany,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2003): 452. Merton
cites Héraut 2.10.5.
4. Ibid.
Merton cites Héraut, Prologue.
5. Ibid.,
p. 453.
6. Ibid.,
pp. 454, 457, 456.
7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human
Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), p. 262.
8. 1 Cor. 13:11. Paul writing about spiritual growth.
9. William
James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 262.
10. Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, Margaret Winkworth, ed.
and trans. (New York: Paulist Press), p. 96.
11. Ibid.,
pp. 95-6.
12. Ibid., p. 97.
13. Pseudo-Dionysius makes this point in his sixth-century writings. Moreover, he
wrote that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and
sensibility (i.e., emotions). God, in other words, goes beyond the erotic
language that Augustine applies to his yearning for God in Confessions.
14. Gertrud
of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud
Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), verse 227.
15. Ibid.
16. Gertrud
Lewis and Jack Lewis, “Introduction,” in Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the
Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis,
trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Publication, 1989), p. 15.
17. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises,
Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 263.
18. Gertrud Lewis and Jack Lewis, “Introduction,” in Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud
the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack
Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Publication, 1989), p. 8.
19. Gertrud
of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud
Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), verse 285.
20. Thomas Merton, “Saint Gertrude, Nun of Helfta, Germany,” Cistercian Studies
Quarterly 38.4 (2003): 454.
21. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 261.
