I’m searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I’ve lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else?
– Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
One side of the line is the daily world where we who have appetites must fill our mouths, we who have thoughts must fill our minds. The other side is within the world and beyond it, where appetite isn’t sated, where desire is not to be fulfilled, and where thoughts refuse to lead to knowledge. [To walk the line] risks blasphemy at the same time that it returns reverence to risk.
– Dan Beachy-Quick, Wonderful Investigations
Abstract
The paper explores the author’s continued love for medieval mystical texts that blur the boundaries between the creaturely and the divine ways of thinking a Christianity at odds with itself, undoing itself, arguably annihilating itself at the heart of the Middle Ages.
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Notes
All citations of Hadewijch are to Hadewijch (1980).
Some might associate the insatiability of Hadewijch’s love (both human and divine, insofar as we can distinguish the two) with the rapacity of capitalism. Ceaseless, unquenchable desire for God can be found throughout the Christian tradition, from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa to Hadewijch, challenging easy conflations between the logic of modern Western Christianity and that of capitalism. Moreover, this ceaseless desire is not solely found within Christianity. And yet, one must query the ways in which Christian conceptions of desire play into the hands of capitalism, even as, insofar as that desire is for an immaterial God, it might be the site from which capitalism is challenged.
I was tentative and suspicious because this tradition never felt like it was mine, despite my upbringing. I had no fantasies of ancient blood ties to a medieval past, like those that fueled some early medievalists, nor did I hope to revive a united Christendom in which the past might be brought seamlessly into the present. I knew that past was rebarbative to me on a host of fronts: as a woman, a person of modest means, a descendent of people without a known or usable history. (I also hated The Hobbit.) There was surprise, then, to find in these medieval texts, books I read because my father had read ones like them, things I truly loved.
References
Bynum, C.W. 1987. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Hadewijch. 1980. The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart. New York: Paulist Press.
Mechthild of Magdeburg. 1998. The Flowing Light of the Godhead, trans. F. Tobin. New York: Paulist Press.
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Hollywood, A. Walking the line: Unfaith in the Middle Ages. Postmedieval 11, 180–188 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00175-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00175-8