The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism

Church History, Dec, 1999 by Mona Alice Jean Newman

The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200-1350). Vol. 3 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. By Bernard McGinn. New York: Crossroad, 1998. xv 526 pp. $59.95 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Bernard McGinn's readers will be more pleased than surprised that his projected three volumes on the history of Western mysticism have now metamorphosed into five. The book under review will be the linchpin of the series, for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries mark not only the apogee of Christian mysticism, but also the period most radically reconfigured by the last generation's work in textual and feminist scholarship. The Flowering of Mysticism meets an urgent need for a new synthesis free from the androcentric and Counter Reformation biases of previous histories.

In The Growth of Mysticism (vol. 2) McGinn surveyed the twelfth century, a classical age of sunlit peaks and serenely rolling hills. The terrain of Flowering is more akin to the Romantic sublime: a landscape of vertiginous ascents and deep ravines, electrified by flashes of grace that sear the souls they illumine. McGinn, as always, remains a clear-eyed, sure-footed guide in his most original volume to date. While the mystical canon of his first two installments contained few surprises, the third includes towering figures whom, thirty years ago, nobody read.

Flowering covers two broad strands of mystical tradition, the Franciscan movement and the mulieres religiosae, reserving the great male Dominicans for volume 4. Critics who lamented the absence of women from Growth will rejoice that they fill two-thirds of Flowering. McGinn sets the stage by discussing two pairs of spiritual friends: Mary of Oignies and her biographer, James of Vitry, typify the beguines' "experiments in female mysticism," while Francis and Clare introduce the movement they founded. Chapters 2 and 3 chart the course of Franciscan mysticism, including such figures as Thomas Gallus, Peter John Olivi, Ramon Llull, Douceline of Digne, and Margaret of Cortona, lavishing the fullest treatment on Bonaventure and Angela of Foligno. McGinn represents the volatile Angela as one of "the four female evangelists of thirteenth-century mysticism" (141), the others being Hadewich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete. Aside from these beguines, whose thought receives its most searching analysis to date, McGinn treats a wide range of female mystics in chapters 4 through 6, ranging from well-known saints like Gertrude of Helfta to figures as obscure as Margaret the Cripple, a recluse, and the canoness Christina of Hane. He ends with a discussion of the Dominican sister books.

The "new mysticism" of the subtitle is intimately bound up with the rise of vernacular theology--a third major current of Christian thought that, from 1200, takes its place alongside the older monastic theology and a newly mature scholasticism. McGinn sees the mystical writers of this period as engaged in a complex dialogue between women and men, Latin and the vernaculars, the old ideal of cloistered withdrawal and the new "democratization and secularization" (13) typified by the friars and beguines. His model is explicitly one of conversation rather than confrontation, in part because those who disapproved of the audacious new mysticism tended not to be mystics and therefore do not figure in this history. But McGinn also insists, while rejecting essentialized notions of a mysticism "characteristic of all women, and only of women" (15), that the influence of new developments ran in both directions. Readers who have absorbed his accounts of Hadewijch and Marguerite Porete will find Eckhart and Ruusbroec less novel, if not less profound. The linguistic exchange too is better explained by a bilateral than a "trickle-down" model. Beatrice of Nazareth, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete were among the many mystics translated from their vernaculars into the learned tongue; the Carthusian Marguerite d'Oingt wrote both vernacular and Latin texts, as did Francis of Assisi; while Mechthild of Hackeborn's revelations, compiled in Latin by her sisters, were at least as well known in Middle English translation.

Throughout this series McGinn has maintained that the object of the historian of mysticism is texts, not states of consciousness. But he also distances himself from the polemical positions of certain German scholars (Peter Dinzelbacher, Ursula Peters, Siegfried Ringler) who have exaggerated the polarity between literary convention and authentic experience. The new vernacular theology had its own characteristic genres, such as vision narrative, autohagiography, and courtly or allegorical dialogue. Of course it is hard to escape the impression that writers who demonstrated the most sophisticated mastery of genre (like Hadewijch) or the most dazzling formal creativity (like Mechthild of Magdeburg) were also among the most original thinkers. Nevertheless, McGinn does justice to the more conventional but not demonstrably less "authentic" records of mysticism found in such texts as saints' lives and sister books. Responding to critics of volume 2, he offers a more nuanced account of the role of visions, suggesting that in some cases, "it might be better to speak of them as `visualizations' rather than visions, in order to stress the fact that they are imaginative creations `seen' by the mystic as she strives to appropriate the inner meaning" of a liturgical act, an image, or a sacred text (270).