"Who does she think she is?" Christian women's mysticism

Theology Today, Apr 2003 by Hollywood, Amy

Teresa and other women like Catherine of Siena and Joan of Arc engage actively with the world, pursuing projects through which they express their transcendent subjectivity. God serves merely as a support for these independently generated projects. Teresa's "minor sisters," on the other hand, have no definite goals other than to affirm themselves as being chosen and inspired by God. Their ineffectual attempts at action serve only to enhance their own narcissism.

Here we come to the crux of Beauvoir's problem with the bulk of Christian women mystics. Although Beauvoir distinguishes three forms of justification for women's existence-eroticism, mysticism, and narcissism-ultimately all dissolve into the last. Thwarted in their desire to engage in meaningful projects in the world, Beauvoir argues, women make themselves their own projects; eroticism and mysticism are not about a woman's love for another, but rather about her attempt to make herself an object of desire. Beauvoir's atheism renders narcissism a particularly poignant problem for the mystics about whom she writes-the other with whom they purport to relate does not even exist. As she argues, women ultimately make "religion a pretext for satisfying [their] own desires."13 The divine, all-encompassing other with whom the mystic relates and who supports her subjectivity is a mirage; what she sees in that mirroring other is only herself. "Who does she think she is?" Despite all of the mystic's claims to the contrary, for Beauvoir, most mystics think that they are God. (The few successful ones, on the other hand, simultaneously recognize and deny their mortality, thereby achieving a God-like ability to engage in meaningful projects in the world. That, however, is a story for another time.)

ALL OR NOTHING

A generation or two after Hadewijch and Mechthild, another beguine, Marguerite Porete, takes the paradoxical interplay of absolute humility and divine power a step further, so identifying the soul with the divine as to render transparent the narcissism imputed to many Christian women mystics by Beauvoir. In an extended dialogue between Love, the Soul, Reason, and a series of other interlocutors, Porete portrays a state of freedom and annihilation to which, she argues, all noble souls should aspire. According to Love, avatar of the divine within Porete's dialogue, the more the soul recognizes its own nothingness, the more it possesses God. Stripped of all creatureliness, including reason, will, and desire, the soul becomes nothing: "And this nothingness of which we speak, gives her the All, and no one can possess it in any other way."14 The soul then "lives without a why" as God does and becomes the place within which God works in the world. The fall into nothingness, in a paradoxical reversal of the biblical language of the fall from Eden, renders the soul so fully united with God that no distinction can be made between them.15

In a dramatic enactment of the soul's annihilation, Porete demonstrates the ways in which her claims about the free and simple soul are premised on an audacious desire like that found in Hadewijch and Mechthild. Porete depicts the Soul imagining a trial of love, in which desire's limits are reached and desire itself annihilated: