Touching God through the poem: the mystical writing of Hadewijch of Brabant (XII) as a gesture
by Maria Pinho
How many of our actions don’t actually begin long before they are performed? The simple gesture of eating an orange implies that you have peeled it first, more or less expensively, so that peeling it is already part of eating it. Reading a book, on the other hand, undoubtedly begins with running your fingers over the pages, in order to uncover their texture and, perhaps, a rougher word. Sometimes, it’s actually through the sense of smell, in that inaugural moment when we open it in the bookstore, that we start reading it. Maria Gabriela Llansol was well aware of this when she told us that “O Começo de um Livro é Precioso”. Precious, then, are all the gestures, although often unnoticeable, that precede the one that will be the final gesture, since without them it would certainly not be able to emerge.
The same is true of mystical writing in general, and that of Hadewijch of Brabant in particular, insofar as it is embodied, as well as motivated, by a set of movements or, if you like, vibrations, without which its loquendis mode would lose its substance.
Before we go any further, it’s important to clarify a few points, the first of which is a brief biographical overview of the female mystic in question.
Hadewijch of Brabant was a beguine and mystic of the 13th century. She is thought to have been born in the territories corresponding to present-day Belgium and she was most likely of aristocratic descent. However, in the absence of biographies left for later times, the so-called Vitae, fertile documents in the Middle Ages that provided an account of the lives of saints or religious figures endowed with moral authority, the data on her biography can only be extracted from the written production she wrote. This work contains thirty-one letters (brieven), fourteen visions (visionen), forty-five strophic poems (liederen), sixteen rhymed poems (mengeldichten), and a list of perfects. It is worth mentioning that Hadewijch wrote mainly in Dutch, something that at the time not only contradicted the hegemony of Latin, but also opened up space for the formulation of mystical and spiritual thought, as well as a written culture, in a vernacular language.
The choice of vehicle for the transmission of a given expression, whatever it may be – we know this very well today through fields such as intermediality – is far from being devoid of intentionality. The fact that Hadewijch chose to express herself in a vernacular language, rather than the usual Latin that she certainly mastered, may have been the same dismantling of the expectations’s horizon that we find today in works such as John Cage’s 4’33 or Duchamp’s Fountain.
Furthermore, couldn’t the use, in this context, of another, and at the time still so modern, language perhaps represent the use of a new and unexpected medium, even though it was also a Verb? The astonishment that Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” brought could not be equivalent to that of the medieval reader when, used to reading – hearing? – religious texts in Latin, came across a work written in what would come to be called a national language?
In any case, the approximations that I have conjured up here only seek to suggest the thread of connections that, like an indelible web, stretches from the past to the future, and which, with less or more vehemence, always end up being insinuated if we pay attention to them. Perhaps it would be appropriate to recall the emblematic verses by T. S. Elliot in The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. /Not with a bang but a whimper”.
The second clarification concerns a purely methodological aspect. The excerpts from Hadewijch that I will present here are taken from the 20th century English translation – and also the most emblematic in hadewijchian studies – by Columba Hart.
The third and final consideration concerns a somewhat problematic area: the concept of mysticism. First, it should be made clear that when I refer to “mysticism” I am following the formulations proposed by Bernard McGinn, who characterizes it as a particular awareness of God, and the subsequent transformation that comes from the intimate contact between the mystical “I” and the transcendence that God is. The poetry referred here comes from a specific spiritual circumstance, implying an intimate contact with God and leading itself to the unio mystica.
In fact, such poetic expression will encourage a certain kind of thaumaturgy, which John Berger has already come close to by proposing the association between the language of poems and that of prayers, since it is addressed to the divine and it is by and through him that it will spring forth (cf. Berger 2008). A poem that is addressed to the ineffable entity par excellence, that is, God, will be open to the most diverse hermeneutics, although its particular strength is very clear. In any case, it is important to bear in mind that the tools for analyzing it cannot be limited to the literary field, since the propositions that such an expression invokes go beyond the realm of the discourse itself. About the mystical literature, Michel de Certeau asserts that it is the proof, through language, of the ambiguous passage from presence to absence (cf. Certeau 1992).
In fact, in the intricacies of mystical discourse, the human word, by revealing the divine Word, which mediates and promotes it, will be configured as a cunning combination of the said and the unsaid. This is just possible because, as Juan Martín Velazco points out, mystical language is at the apex of a concentric circle of languages (cf. Velazco 1999). It should be noted that Hadewijch rightly states that “I wish to write something/ By which we may learn to recognize/ Great marks of spiritual love” (Hadewijch 1980, 322).
There is, therefore, an attempt to articulate “the great marks of spiritual love” in language so that, through writing, they can be recognized and apprehended. In this sense, writing is seen as bringing to light what is palpitating in the shadow of transcendence or, if we like, in that “obscure domain”, in the sense St. John of the Cross gave it. The aim of writing is to make “translucent” – as Ruysbroeck puts it – the obscurity that is characteristic of mystery and, moreover, its fundamental idiosyncrasy.
The word is the way to the Absolute – St. Bonaventure proposes precisely a triptych way for the soul to reach God: meditation, contemplation and prayer, being the latter the way of experiencing God through the word. Rather, in Hadewijch’s works, the word also brings with it a performance which is extremely mystical: the act of writing. The text will thus participate in asceticism, composing itself, despite its inevitable orational component, as a spiritual object. In other words, it will establish the materiality from which divine intangibility will emerge. It should be remembered that Meister Eckhart, referring to the intricacies of the Divine, rightly states that “if I have spoken of it, I have not spoken, for it is ineffable”. In fact, mystical language, being inscribed in the temporality proper to the human domain, will inevitably exceed this limit insofar it is addressed to God, opening doors to a transtemporality that will become its hallmark. The word beyond itself is undoubtedly what we find in the hadewijchian text, whose proposal of Mystical Union will articulate a very unusual written expression – perhaps a very unsubmissive one?
It is this poetic balance between, on the one hand, that which bears fruit in the light and, on the other, that which, hidden in the darkness, already anticipates the light, which we sense in Hadewijch poetry. When Gertrude Stein says “A rose is a rose is a rose”, she doesn’t just evoke the shakespearean problem of naming the world, but also appeals to the succession of agitations that lead to the poem. Which are the poem already?
On the other hand, the relevance of corporeality in mystical-visionary writing has been increasingly highlighted (Dailey 2013). Following Judith Butler’s thesis about the performativity in the field of gender studies, the performative component can also be considered here as a fundamental part of the mystical individual and, above all, of the relationship they establish with the Absolute, without which the mystical-visionary process would be severely compromised.
In this sense, Hadewijch’s text is itself a gesture that will lead her to God, being the hand that writes and its movements a mystical element. The access to the Divine will therefore also be amde through the act of writing and the materiality of the word (“It is because of what God is that it is right to leave him fruition of himself in all the works of his radiance, sicut in caelo et in terra, and never stop saying, both in actions and in words“) (Hadewijch 1980, 47-48; bold mine).
In this poetic architecture, writing is as important as kneeling before an altar or taking the host in the Eucharist. In reality, all of these gestures can themselves participate in the poem, insofar as, sensing it, they initiate it, since the path to the Divine is conjugated precisely by the amalgamation of different substances and circumstances, with the Mystical Union being the precise instant in which all of these, completing each other, harmonize.
Regarding this poetic formulation, one could claim the same María Zambrano said about the sacrifice: “It’s not a word, but above all an action in which the word plays its part. The word functions not with the character it acquired in rationalist times of being the enunciation of something, the saying of a subject – in essence, a judgment. It is a mixture, one might say, of plea and summons” (Zambrano 1995, 37). Let’s look at the following excerpt by the Flemish mystic:
For it seems to me that the commandment of love that God spoke to Moses is the weightiest I know in Scripture: You shall love your Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. When he had said this, he continued: These words you shall never forget, sleeping or waking. If you sleep, you must dream of them; if you are awake, you must think of them, and recite them, and carry them into effect. These words you shall write on the threshold, and on the lintel, and on the wall, and in all the places where you shall be, that you may not forget what you must do there. (Hadewijch 1980, 73).
The word – not just any word, of course, but the word infused by God – as we have already seen, will serve as a spiritual instrument, and it is necessary to return to it continually, evoking it at every step of the spiritual path. In this sense, the approach to this apeiron: “the sacred to be revealed” (Zambrano 1995, 65) will be achieved through it, becoming the driving force of the mystical journey. The process of writing is also very relevant insofar as writing down the Word revealed by the Divine on the paths of the world is a way of not forgetting the spiritual quest and so the core reason for the mystical being.
However, once again, it’s not just the writing itself, but also the gestures it involves. The writing body is a supplicant body, a body that, emptying itself, seeks the Absolute whilst making room for it. The word and the gesture that turns it material come together in a highly mystical ritual. It is precisely for this reason that the divine word must be written on the “threshold, the lintel and the wall”, as well as in every earthly place where there is one. It is not only God who is thus transcribed into the tangible world, but also the body that articulates the movements necessary for the manifestation of the deity in the humanity that overshadows it.
In this regard, the Hadewijch advises us to “watch over all your words as sincerely as if they were spoken in the presence of Christ who is truth itself” (Hadewijch 1980: 81). The word must be kept as if it had been spoken or written in the presence of Christ himself. In other words, it must be embodied in justice and truth, as if trying to recover the perfection of Edenic reality. Umberto Eco rightly asserts that before the blasphemy of Babel, humanity knew only one language, the perfect language, that language spoken by Adam and God (cf. Eco 1996). Who knows if this language wasn’t, after all, the harmonious silence of understanding? The hadewijchian text sets out to recover and achieve precisely that instant of supreme harmony, the instant of the Mystical Union.
Nevertheless, the word has, above all, to be embodied by pure love. Remember that in the Gospel of John we are told that “he who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (cf. 1 John 4). The whole of hadewijch’s doctrinal thought is based on this postulate, establishing a pilgrimage that consists in a return to the heart’s knowledge, which is a mode of remembrance as the Cistercians put it. Basically, if God has poured his substance into his creatures – Simone Weil goes further and says that he can only be present in them, in fact, in the form of absence (cf. Weil 2004) – then his deity can be unveiled. Yet, always and only through love. “Oh, I greet you, dear, with the love that is God himself! And with what I am, which I also somewhat what God is”, Hadewijch declares (Hadewijch 1980, 64).
Moreover, the text is rooted in minne, a Dutch word that has a double meaning in the literary production of Hadewijch, since it can be translated as mystical love and also as Queen Love (Minne). This queen is the character who mediates the relationship between the mystic and God, and for whom Hadewijch suffers – falls in love – and fights. One could say – perhaps abusing hermeneutics – that this figure functions as the feminine manifestation of God, since in one of the Visions she is presented to us as sitting in a space placed in the eyes of the divine face (cf. Hadewijch 1980, 297-303). Queen Love is, in any case, described as the Lady of all virtues, being frequently Hadewijch the knight-errant and Minne the lady for whom she competes.
The poetic word is supremely inspired by love, which in turn is its most fundamental substance: “how love, by Love, sees to the depths of the Beloved, / Perceiving how Love lives freely in all things.” (Hadewijch 1980: 89). Or again: “this word he had beautifully expressed in Love; / Outside of Love one cannot experience its truth.” (Hadewijch 1980, 157).
Writing and loving are entangled and performed in unison, appearing as fundamental gestures in the mystical process. In fact, and returning to the starting point of this essay, love is a kind of a vibration that, together with the other movements, will make writing possible, (re)inaugurating a word that is at the same time an act. In other words, a way of touching God through the poem.
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