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"Who does she think she is?" Christian women's mysticism
Theology Today, Apr 2003 by Hollywood, Amy
IN SEARCH OF CHRISTIAN HUMILITY
When my students read the writings of Hadewijch, Mechthild, and other Christian women mystics from the medieval and early modern period, passages like the ones I have just described routinely spark the question-"but who does she think she is?" The intensity of Hadewijch's and Mechthild's desire, together with their assurance that God will respond to their demands, seem to many students, particularly those raised within Christian traditions, deeply at odds with the requirements of Christian virtue. Lest we dismiss these students' concerns as anachronistic, it should be recalled that humility was much more important to medieval monastic, mendicant, and semi-religious life than it is to most forms of contemporary Christianity-and that it does seem utterly lacking in these moments of Hadewijch's and Mechthild's texts. Even when Hadewijch and Mechthild elsewhere protest their humility before God and other creatures-Mechthild at one point refers to herself as a lame dog-students suspect the sincerity of these assertions, given the clear sense of mission and divine calling that shapes the works in which they appear.
Hadewijch and Mechthild were themselves, of course, keenly aware of the dilemma posed by their work, in which they needed both to exemplify their sanctity through absolute humility before God and other human beings and to make the case for the legitimacy of their writing religiously. The problem was particularly vexed for women of their era, whose teaching authority almost always rested directly on claims to sanctity. Women in the high and later Middle Ages had far fewer educational opportunities than did men, and they were officially barred from preaching or teaching. The medieval church took literally the Pauline injunction against women speaking in church and extended it to ban women from interpreting scripture. Like many of the other women who wrote on religious topics during the Christian Middle Ages, Mechthild and Hadewijch ground their authority on claims to prophetic, visionary, or mystical experiences themselves premised on claims to a privileged relationship to the divine. Their authority depends on their sanctity, crucially marked by humility. Yet at the same time, the very act of writing and asserting an authoritative voice within thirteenth-century Christian culture was, particularly for women, an audacious act. Like many other women who wrote on religious topics in the Christian Middle Ages, Hadewijch and Mechthild resolve this dilemma by portraying their writing as demanded by God. They both portray God as explicitly insisting that they are the chosen ones through whom he speaks to the world.
Mechthild's Flowing Light of the Godhead provides an excellent example. The book opens with the legitimating words of God: "This book I hereby send as a messenger to all religious people, both the bad and the good; for if the pillars fall, the building cannot remain standing; and it signified me alone and proclaims in praiseworthy fashion my intimacy." In this dialogue, Mechthild talks with God about the authorship of her book:
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